Free The Family Trade by Charles Stross Page A

sound of hooves was now audible, along with a creaking of leather and the occasional clatter or jingle of metalwork. Miriam crouched against the tree, very still, sweat freezing in the small of her back, trying not to breathe. She couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like a single set of hooves. With her camouflage-patterned jacket, knitted black face mask, and a snub-nosed pistol clutched in her right hand, she was a sight to terrify innocent eyes—but she was frightened half out of her own wits.
    She held perfectly still as a peculiarly dressed man led a mule past, not ten yards away from her. The animal was heavily overloaded, bulging wicker baskets towering over its swaying back. Its owner wore leggings of some kind, but was swathed from head to knees in what looked like an ancient and moth-eaten blanket. He didn’t look furtive; he just looked dirt-poor, his face lined and tanned from exposure to the weather.
    The mule paused. Almost absently, its owner reached out and whacked it across the hindquarters with his rod. He grunted something in what sounded like German, only softer, less sibilant.
    Miriam watched, fear melting into fascination. That was a knife at his belt, under the blanket—a great big pigsticker of a knife, almost a short sword. The mule made an odd sort of complaining noise and began moving again. What’s in the baskets? she wondered. And where’s he taking it?
    There were clearly people living in these woods. Better be careful, she told herself, taking deep breaths to calm down as she waited for him to pass out of sight. She pondered again whether or not she shouldn’t go straight back to her campsite. In the end curiosity won out—but it was curiosity tempered by edgy caution.
    An hour later, Miriam found a path wandering among the trees. It wasn’t a paved road by any stretch of the imagination, but the shrubbery to either side had been trampled down and the path itself was muddy and flat: Fresh road-apples told her which way the man with the mule had gone. She slashed a marker on the tree where her path intersected the road, crudely scratching in a bearing and distance as digits. If her growing suspicion was true, these people wouldn’t be able to make anything of it. She picked her way through the trees along one side of the path, keeping it just in sight. Within another half-mile the trees ended in a profusion of deadfalls and stumps, some of which sprouted amazing growths of honey fungus. Miriam picked her way farther away from the path, then hunkered down, brought out binoculars and dictaphone, and gave voice to her fascination.
    “This is incredible! It’s like a museum diorama of a medieval village in England, only—Eww, I sure wouldn’t drink from that stream. The stockade is about two hundred yards away and they’ve cleared the woods all around it.
    There are low stone walls, with no cement, around the field. It’s weird, all these rows running across it like a patchwork quilt made from pin-stripe fabric.”
    She paused, focusing her binoculars in on a couple of figures walking in the near distance. They were close enough to see her if they looked at the treeline, so she instinctively hunched lower, but they weren’t paying attention to the forest. One of them was leading a cow—a swaybacked beast like something from a documentary about India. The buildings were grayish, the walls made of stacked bundles of something or other, and the roofs were thatched—not the picturesque golden colour of the rural English tourist trap she’d once stayed in outside Oxford, but the real thing, gray and sagging. “There are about twelve buildings; none of them have windows. The road is unpaved, a mud track. There are chickens or some kind of fowl there, pecking in the dirt. It looks sleazy and tumbledown.”
    She tracked after the human figures, focused on the stockade. ‘There’s a gate in the stockade and a platform or tower behind it. Something big’s in there, behind the wall, but I