And he had taught her how to survive in a world that had been insane for a century. Her mother would never have taught her how to use a firearm. Uncle Tyas had taught her just that.

She could see him now, outside the large, airy, seven-roomed cabin, holding a squat and ugly-looking metallic shape in both hands — she realized now that it must have been the Detonics Pocket 9; it was the smallest handgun Uncle Tyas had in a wide-ranging collection gathered over the years — and saying, "This is a bad thing, little one, but you have to know about it and you have to be able to use it one day, because there are worse things waiting out beyond the Forest, and you have to sometimes use bad things to deal with worse things, worse situations." Krysty was fourteen when she'd heard this.

Almost as soon as she had come to stay with him he had begun his instruction, not only in the use of all kinds of weaponry, but in unarmed combat, as well.

There had been two of them, she and young Carl Lanning, at fifteen the eldest son of Herb Lanning, Harmony's ironsmith. Herb was a big, potbellied, gruff man who had taken over the forge and ironsmith's shop built by his father forty or so years back. He did odd jobs for Uncle Tyas, made strange-looking metal artifacts that Uncle Tyas created on his drawing board from books in his vast library, objects that sometimes worked as Uncle Tyas said they would, and sometimes didn't. And when they didn't, Uncle Tyas would rant and cuss and call Herb the biggest blockhead in the entire Deathlands, say that he couldn't construct a simple metal object when it was handed to him on a set of detailed and meticulously finished drawings. And Big Herb would grin good-naturedly and point out that everything he'd done was from the drawings, and if the thing didn't work it was because the guy who drew it up hadn't got it right in the first place. They used to argue for hours, Uncle Tyas raging, Big Herb smiling complacently, filling a rocking chair with his bulk, both hands clasped across his gut. It had to be said that more often than not Big Herb was right. More often than not, there had been a slight error in transcription from book example to drawing board, because Uncle Tyas worked fast, too fast, often in a white heat of creation, his eager brain far ahead of his fingers, nimble though the latter were. The trouble was, Uncle Tyas invariably wanted things done about half an hour before he thought of them.

Big Herb's eldest boy, Carl, helped him in the ironsmith's shop. He was a tall, lanky kid with a shock of black hair, an explosion of freckles on his face, an inquiring mind, but a gentle nature. That was why Uncle Tyas had chosen him to partner Krysty in his unarmed combat lessons. Krysty remembered overhearing Uncle Tyas talking enthusiastically to Peter Maritza — not "old" Peter Maritza then; by no means "old," even though he was a good ten years ahead of Uncle Tyas — out on the porch one night when she'd been preparing dinner, his voice an excited hiss, a new idea clamoring in his brain.

"You get it, Peter? There's Krysty — she's a girl."

"Tyas, I'm not an imbecile. I know she's a blasted girl."

"Okay, okay. But she's a girl, right? Weaker sex, right?"

"Not around here, buddy. Not in Harmony. Talk like that'll get you strung up from the..."

"All right! In general, Peter! Generally speaking! Weaker sex in quotes, right? Then there's young Carl..."

"You saying he's weak? You saying he's some kind of milksop? Why, I've seen him at the forge..."

"Peter, will you listen to me! Okay, he beats the shit out of all that red-hot metal in his daddy's ironshop, but he's no great shakes when it comes to anything else, right? Sure he's no weakling, but he's not what you or I'd call positive, you get me? Got no drive in him. Just like his father. He's faced with a raving canny, y'know what would happen? He'd just let himself get eaten up, sure as hell. Well, I aim to change all that. Change 'em both. Damn right."

And he had. Changed them both. Especially Krysty. At the age of fourteen she'd learned how to throw a guy to the ground in one second flat, how to disable an adversary with a single one-handed squeeze, how to cripple a man for life with one well-directed punch.

She found that wrestling with Carl in a rough-and-tumble scrimmage was sexually arousing. That in close-quarters proximity to him, in a situation in which both were trying their damnedest to conquer the other, in a fierce and breathless and sweaty scuffle on the ground, rolling over and over each other, first one on top, then the other, each desperate to out-tussle the other, she experienced a sudden and overpowering awareness of his maleness, a sharply felt urge to surrender to him yet also a scary and delicious sense of power over him that had nothing at all to do with winning the bout. And the knowledge came to her as, for a split second, they ceased their struggle and stared half fearfully, half defiantly into each other's eyes, that he felt the same. It was partly emotional, she recognized, partly physical. She had never experienced such feelings before.

At fourteen Krysty Wroth knew all there was to know about physical sex — the full details from ovulation to conception through pregnancy and into childbirth itself. But Sonja had also taught her from an early age that sex was not merely an act of procreation but a powerful experience, an expression of heady passion. It could also, if you were lucky enough to find the right partner, be fun. But you had to look after yourself because if you didn't have the luck to find the right partner, you could land yourself in all kinds of unnecessary trouble.

Sonja had also told her that years ago, before the Nuke, there had been religions that preached childbirth almost as a necessity, despite the fact that the world was overloaded with people, a good proportion of whom lived in abject misery and squalor. Those old religions had largely disappeared. Only in the Baronies was religion, in one form or another, used as it had been in the bad old days, as a means of keeping the populace quiet and as a means of keeping the populace growing in number. Down there, you bred for the Barons. Boy children were sent by God; girl children were a damned nuisance, fit only to skivvy and breed — breed more and more boy children: the warrior syndrome.

Contraception was actually banned in certain of the Baronies where the old, ugly Islamic and Judeo-Christian fundamentalist creeds were strong — that women were basically cattle; that they were not only created solely for man's benefit and pleasure but were also inherently sly, lewd and evil creatures and must be kept in a state of subjugation. Although that was not to say that contraception wasn't available. On the contrary, the rich and the powerful could afford the secret and highly expensive prophylactics that did a roaring trade on the various black markets. The poor, as usual, were not so lucky. They had to rely on ill-understood natural methods, altogether a chancy business.

Those who followed the wisdom of the Earth Mother, which was more a free celebration of natural forces than a sharply defined and disciplined religion — an understanding, brought about to a great degree by the often strange effects of genetic and physical mutation over the years, that the power of the mind and the power of nature had rarely been used to their fullest extent — were more fortunate. They had the benefit of knowledge passed down from mother to daughter of medicaments that had been known to a few long before the Nuke — natural specifics, natural ointments, natural oils and unguents, all derived from a variety of roots, tree barks, mashed-up leaves and berries. Now, three generations after the disaster, this information could be said to have become the solid bedrock upon which the slowly expanding worship of the Earth Mother rested.