Epona tossed her head up and snorted. Rudi inhaled deeply; that was the smell of fires and cooking, and the sweetish-rank smell of a camp not strictly kept, wastes and old food and raw hides curing with brains and piss. Evidently nobody had told these folk about using oak tanbark, despite it being all about them. Garbh growled at a chorus of yelping, barking mongrels, until Edain called her sharply to heel. Three more of the Southsider men stepped out from behind trees…

No, Rudi thought, looking at the faces and naked torsos behind the spearheads. One of them is a Southsider woman…

… and leveled their weapons, before crying greetings to Jake, and wailing at the sight of dead Murdy. More came swarming out to pelt them with questions and beat the curs off with sticks and feet; about three score of all ages, and they walked in a crowd around the horses until they passed a tiger?s skull on a pole and reached the fires and the rough corral.

Say a hundred of them in all, half children. Three more-or-less grown women for every two men, or thereabouts, Rudi thought, making a warrior?s quick estimate.

Nobody was much older than his new friend Jake; he doubted more than a handful had been born at the time of the Change.

High casualties?

The mob gazed gape-jawed at Rudi and Edain in their strange gear, pointing and gabbling in a way Mackenzies would think rude. Rudi sat his great black horse with long-limbed grace, the bright red-gold hair falling to his shoulders and his sharp-cut high-cheeked face smiling. Edain was less easy, his strong square face blank; he wouldn?t ask Rudi are you sure? with strangers about…

None of the Southsiders matched Rudi?s height, and none had his companion?s breadth of shoulder or barrel chest. Not a prepossessing lot, but truly friendly, I think.