He sipped at the mug in his fist with evident pleasure; he was a man of studied self-control and moderation, but saw no reason to pretend he wasn?t enjoying a beer if he was going to drink it at all.

One reason I like him, Rudi thought. He?s not like some Christian clerics I?ve met, who act as if they thought the world and all its pleasures were an evil produced by that bad spirit of theirs, rather than the Maker of Stars. ?Yah,? Mark said, obviously happy to enlighten the foreigners. ?You simmer the brats… that?s a sausage-? ?My baptismal name was Bergfried, my son,? the priest said gently, his slightly tilted dark eyes crinkling in amusement.?I?ve heard of bratwurst. My mother and sisters make very good ones, in fact.? ?Oh, sorry, Father. Well, you simmer the brats in beer broth with onions, and then you grill?em. We?ll be starting with that, though.?

He nodded to a much larger pot, which Wanda Vogeler was stirring, occasionally taking a sip from the ladle. ?Onion, cheese and beer soup,? Ingolf said reverently.?God, that smells just like the recipe Mom used, the one she?d never let anyone write down.? ?Yah, Grandma taught Mom, all right. Said she was getting too old to do it herself.?

Ingolf nodded, his face somber again for a moment; the news of his mother?s death was fresh for him, but his nephew was too young to sustain grief for years. Rudi took a deep sniff: under the cooking smells were others that made him suspect the feasting hall doubled as storage most of the time; he could detect strong hints of something sweet. ?Maple sugar,? Ingolf said in reply to his question, as they stood waiting for the trestles to be set up.?We get a lot of that and we used to put the barrels and tubs here. That and beer, usually, or that?s what we used it for when I was a kid.? ?Ingolf,? Fred asked thoughtfully as he watched the crowd trickle in; his father had been a general, after all, and besides formal training as an officer he?d grown up around recruitment and logistics. ?Just how many people are there in Readstown??

Ingolf looked at him in mild surprise.?When I left? A bit more than a hundred farms that came through; call it, oh, twenty-five hundred people, Farmers and refugees together. That?s in the whole Sheriffry of Readstown, not just?-his gesture took in the settlement-?the homeplace here; say a hundred-odd here counting kids. Probably more now all up.? ?Three thousand six hundred in the Sheriffry,? Mark Vogeler said. ?We took a count last year. The Bossman wanted to know.? ?Is that typical?? the Boisean continued. ?Oh, some are a bit bigger, some a bit smaller,? Mark put in, obviously proud of his knowledge-and his country.?We don?t have big cities like Iowa, but there are some pretty large towns-Richland Center has three thousand people all by itself. I?ve been there. God, it?s more crowded than I thought any place could be. Half a million in the whole of the Free Republic, if you can imagine that many people.? ?Hmmmm,? Fred said.

Mathilda shaped a soundless whistle. Rudi was impressed himself. Not nearly as many inhabitants as great Iowa, but it was still as many as the PPA had, and half what the United States of Boise or the Cutters could boast; seven or eight times as many as the Clan Mackenzie. And Richland wasn?t even the only such bossmandom in what had been Wisconsin; there was Ellsworth, to the north, and a spattering of independent little villages and counties farther northeast. ?And it seems this land breeds many strong young men,? Rudi said thoughtfully.?No doubt it?s formidable they would be, should foemen or reivers come this way.? ?Right!? Mark said, his chest puffing out slightly.?We Readstowners can muster a battalion of three hundred now for the Free Republic?s National Guard.?

Or should their Sheriff have a quarrel with the neighbors, Rudi thought. From what Ingolf says there was a fair bit of that, at least in his father?s time, before things found their balance here.

Mark went on:?A quarter of them are cavalry. A lot of our guys fought in the Sioux War, or in the trouble we had with Ellsworth, or against outlaws and stuff. Our team won third place in the Guard muster competition at Richland Center this June.?

The tables were set up now, and covered with checked cloths; a group with drums and instruments-he recognized a tuba and an accordion-began playing cheerful music with an oom-pah, oom-pah beat for a minute or two. That was apparently a signal for everyone to seek their seats; the farm workers and laborers at the lower tables had a guest or two to each family group, and Mark and those of his siblings old enough led Rudi and his immediate followers to the master?s table.

The hall was filled with chatter and smiles; even the Southsiders were only mildly nervous despite the strangeness of place, folk and even food-many of them still thought of buttered bread as an exotic treat. The Mackenzie judged the Readstown folk were showing the pleasure to be expected at a break in routine, plus anticipation of the feast and the happiness anyone who lived close to the land felt when the main harvest was in and safely stored.

And local pride that they can afford to guest so many strangers so well, he thought.

Which was pardonable. It did show that this was a prosperous community and well run. ?I?m glad it?s not Samhain itself,? Edain murmured to him as they took their chairs.

Those seemed to be something of a luxury; most of the seating lower down was benches. More benches ran around the outer walls. On them were hollowed pumpkins with candlelight flickering through carved gap-toothed faces, between cooling rows of pies, some pumpkin, others apple, peach, cherry or rhubarb, all grouped around bowls of thick whipped cream sweetened with maple sugar or honey.

A Clan dun might show exactly the same jack-o?-lantern display around this mark on the Wheel of the Year… but they both suspected that Readstown didn?t take them nearly as seriously as their own folk. ?So am I also glad it?s not quite Samhain yet,? Rudi said dryly. ?Inauspicious it would be, sure and it would.?

Every Mackenzie household set an empty place at the Samhain feasts, but that was a symbol of the welcome they extended to the beloved dead who might visit on the day when the Veil was thinnest. The problem was that other things might stray into the world of men on such a day; if someone actually came through the door and seated himself he had to be fed and entertained with everything of the best, but matters could get very tense indeed. Such an outsider might be anything-or possessed of such. The world held many beings who were not of humankind, some friendly, some playful in ways heedless of men and their lives and loves and needs, some not friendly at all.

Ingolf Vogeler had come into Sutterdown as just such a stranger on Samhain eve, and deeds bloody and terrible had followed; they were here now because of them.

The head table held the Sheriff and his immediate family, and his chief officers and their families-they included the head of his deputies, the field boss and stock boss who managed the Sheriff?s own farmland and beasts, the old Ojibwa Indian-Pierre Walks Quiet-who was chief forester and game warden, the fair-haired woman named Samantha who was housekeeper under the Sheriff?s wife, and a few others. Wanda Vogeler hung her apron over the back of her chair and wiped her hands on it before she sat down and beamed at them. ?Everything ready-at last!? she said.?Und Jenny sleeping-at last. Woof! Children! No wonder people get old!? ?There?s nothing you ever enjoyed more than laying on a big feed, Wanda,? Ingolf said teasingly.?Unless you?ve changed more than I think.? ?Nothing I enjoy more except eating it myself,? she said.?And talking while I eat. And dancing afterwards. Both with people who aren?t the same ones I see every day, and I know everything they?re going to say before they say it.?