Ring of Fire II(228)

After a while, Denise shrugged. "Sure, why not? You've got my fucking word I'll be a good little girl."



He stroked his mustache. "Qualifiers, indeed," he said mildly. "Do I need to insist on qualifying the terms? No attempt to escape. No attempt to overwhelm us by force."



He even said that last with a straight face. "That sort of thing?"



Denise thought about it. "Nah," she said. "I hate all that legal dotting-the-I's and crossing-the-T's bullshit. But I'm okay with the spirit of stuff."



He studied her for a bit longer. Denise was primed to strip his hide if he started nattering about her potty mouth. Or asked her if her father knew the sort of language she used, when who the hell did he think she'd learned it from in the first place?



But all he said was, "I believe that will do quite nicely."





By nightfall, they were well into the Fichtelgebirge. They made camp just before nightfall.



Three camps, really, separated by a few yards from each other. One for the defectors, one for Drugeth and his two cohorts, one for Denise, Noelle, Eddie, Lannie and Keenan.



After they ate, Lannie and Eddie fell asleep. Between their injuries and the rigors of walking or riding a wagon along mountain trails for several hours, they were exhausted.



Denise and Noelle and Keenan stayed awake a while longer, mostly just staring into the little fire they'd made. All three of the camps had fires going. Drugeth had given permission to make them. He didn't seem too concerned they'd be spotted, given the thick woods around them.



And who'd spot them anyway? The ever-vigilant and non-existing USE park rangers? Overflying aircraft, when they'd already crashed the only one in Grantville that could get off the ground, and Jesse Wood only let even the air force guys fly at night in extreme emergencies?



But Denise's sarcastic thoughts were just her way of coming to a decision.



"I've decided," she finally pronounced. "Drugeth's okay."



"Scary son-of-a-bitch," Keenan grunted. "But. Yeah. He's okay, I guess. What do you think, Noelle?"



But Noelle said nothing. Denise wasn't even sure she'd heard them talking. She seemed completely preoccupied by the sight of the flames.





Chapter 11. The Prayer



Two days later, after they'd made camp for the evening, Janos was approached by the Barclay couple and Allen O'Connor. They were the leaders of the up-time defectors, insofar as such a group could be said to have leaders.



The day before, Janos had heard Denise Beasley refer to them sarcastically as a "motley crew." The term being new to him, he'd asked for a translation. He'd found her explanation quite charming, especially the qualifiers that seemed to be inseparable from the girl's vocabulary. Even more amusing had been her pugnacious attitude. Clearly, she seemed to be expecting him at any moment to begin chastising her for her language.



Indeed, he was sometimes tempted to do so, when she lapsed into blasphemy. But he'd already learned from his weeks in Grantville that Americans had a casual attitude toward blasphemy, just as the rumors said they did. And despite his piety, Janos was skeptical—had been since he was a boy—that the way so many priests lumped all sins into unvarying categories was actually a reflection of God's will. Janos did not presume to understand the Lord's purpose in all things, and blasphemy was certainly listed as a transgression in the Ten Commandments. Still, he doubted that the Creator who had forged the sun and the moon made no distinction at all between blasphemy and murder.



As for the girl's profanity, he simply found it artful. Growing up as the scion of a Hungarian noble family in the countryside, he'd learned profanity from high-born father and low-born milkmaid alike. His were not a prissy folk. Janos himself avoided profanity, as a rule, but that was simply an expression of his austere personality. He didn't paint or write poetry, either. But he could still appreciate the skill and talent involved in all three of the arts.



Had Janos' father still been alive and been there, he might have had caustic remarks to say about the girl's language. But the old man would have criticized her for the sloppiness of the form, not the nature of the content. When it came to profanity, Janos' father had been a devotee of formal structure; Denise Beasley, of what the up-timers called free verse.



Jarring stuff, free verse, at first glance. But in the hands of a skilled poet, it could be effective. Janos had read some poems by an up-timer named e. e. cummings—he'd refused to capitalize even his name—and found them quite good. He'd even had a copy made of some of them to give to his uncle, Pal Nadasdy.



"We just wanted to tell you that Billie Jean's settling down," said Barclay. "We were a little worried there, for a while."