The beef cattle in the fields give some hint that times have changed. They are undersized compared with the big steers of better times. A few cough; others have the strained look ¡ãfan animal who has picked up a bit of wire or a piece of a can.
It's the architecture that's changed most, the roads and bridges and little towns in between. A well-traveled or imaginative Iowan might think himself in some quiet stretch of French or English countryside.
Instead of four-lane towns surrounded by farms with frame homes, barns, and silos rising nearby, or sometimes the newer Wal-Mart blisters girdled by paring lots and fast food stops and sprawling exurb, the new centers of public life are the Great Homes.
Like the French villas and English manses of old, the Kurian Order Great Homes are built to impress. Some are vaguely Alpine, with high-peaked roofs, elaborate woodwork on the overhangs, and two or three stories of glass window broken only by balconies; others mimic the heavy beams and plasters of Tudor dignity; a few seem to be almost brick-by-brick recreations out of a Jane Austen movie. But the most popular style might be called French modern.
Weathercut Manse is an example of the last style. A big, bold front of limestone and picture windows, shielded from the elements by a tall slate roof, grows a stablelike garage looking out over the gravel turnaround to the right, and a turret like a miniature castle keep to the left. The off-balance arrangement is pleasing in the daylight, when the sun lights the flower bed in the center of the turnaround, so that the manse seems to be reaching out to embrace visitors and present a bouquet in the day. However, at night the lanes resemble the arms of a boxer dropping into a defensive stance.
Around behind is a smallish patio, reached by French doors, flanked by the glassy refuge of the marbled indoor spa, and topped by a private balcony outside the master's bedroom, and the aviary-greenhouse locally famous for its lemons and year-round supply of plum tomatoes.
Gardens, wilder woods, and a nine-hole golf course surround the house. It is only once you get beyond the thick hedge to the east, the three rails of white fencing to the west, or the stone wall with iron gate running the road to the south that you reach the working part of the estate, a seventy-acre horse farm. There's housing on the grounds for the pigs and chickens, and a New Universal Church parsonage. A thick wood separates the Kurian churchman from a little square of prefabricated trailer homes, a repair garage, and a gas pump.
The Mansion is the pleasant face of the estate, the parsonage its conscience, and the barns and tenant homes its muscle. But next to the gate, built into that dignified wall, are a small stone house and garage that are the lizard brain of the estate, the security center. The workers cheeky in here each day and pick up a radiolocator watch that can be fixed to a beltloop; all traffic into or out of the estate must first pass through security, a sodium-vapor-lit double-basketball-court-sized stretch of pavement surrounded by chain-link fencing, where vehicles can be parked while their contents are searched and inspected.
The guards walk with a bit of a swagger in their camouflage and winter fur hats (in the summer they wear blacky pith helmets), carbines with telescopic sights and bayonets mounted as if to warn visitors that they are ready to deal with trouble, either at a distance or up close and personal.
They defer only to the master with his brass ring, and the parson with his white clerical collar, as they patrol the grounds on ATVs or, for the romantically minded security chief an ox-eyed Arab gelding and a silver-tipped riding crop that he uses as a pointer.
Not that there's much trouble in this quiet corner of northeastern Iowa,. far from the troublesome Grogs of the Missouri valley or the noisome guerrilla band that has recently sprung up in the Indian-head territory of Wisconsin. The security guards can joust on their ATVs with cattle prods - also used as nonlethal inducements for the tramps and "mexicretins" to move on down the road without applying for work or largesse at the manse.
Just that morning, as a new wind came along to kick up the remains of the previous night's snow, the security team rousted a tramp from his shelter in the rusted, weed-grown hulk of a sport utility, tire-less remains in the woods where it had broken down in 2022. They woke him with a cattle prod and sent him on his way, after a cursory search of the grubby little odds and ends he shouldered in edge-worn bags. He carried a Wisconsin work card indicating that he'd last been employed a year ago, and swore he planned to return to his home province of Eau Claire. A request for food brought the cattle prod up again and instructions on how to reach the nearest New Universal Church hostel eighteen miles away - the manse parsonage serving only the Weathercut grounds and its tenants.
Now the tramp hobbles down the road in that toe-in, footsore fashion of a man who has gone too far on bad shoes. He wears a buttonless shirt held shut with stock twine wound round his waist crisscrossing his chest. His face, under a greasy thatch of tangled black hair, has a thick layer of dirt in permanent residence, and little can be read in his brown eyes, permanently downcast. It's a face that has seen its share of hardship; an old scar runs down from the right eye, and the jaw is a little off-kilter, though it gives his face a humorous set, as though he's turning up the corner of his mouth at a private joke.
The only piece of gear on him that might attract interest is his short walking stick, used to help mitigate the effects of his obvious limp. The twisting wood has a good steel cap where it strikes the road, a leather wrist loop, and a short handle projecting out of the knobby top.
One of the guards who questioned him looked like he was thinking of confiscating it, but the tramp told a convincing story of it being awarded to him after he was wounded fighting for the TMCC in Little Rock during Solon's brief tenure. The back his ID card did have a half-peeled old shining service star - the sort of thing elementary school teachers used to put on spelling tests - and a discharge stamp, and at a glare from the senior guard, himself a TMCC veteran, the stick was returned.
The road wanders up a little treelined hill - only a technically minded surveyor would call it a ridge - as it reaches the edge of Weathercut's lands, then down and over a stream.
The tramp checks a litter-filled hole in the bridge's armpit - the bundle is still there, and the little piece of paper set to dislodge if it's moved is still pinned to the bridges concrete by the pack - and then takes a long drink from the stream, lowering his face to the water as though he were one of the manse's horses, before settling down for a nap.
Had one of the guards followed to observe the tramp until he was off the grounds, he would have thought the last very strange. Travelers, especially vagrants, take care to travel only during daylight and hide deep and dark once the sun sets. Kurian Towers are few and far between in this part of Iowa, but their avatar Reapers use the roads as they go about their affairs, and are only too happy to remove a human mote like the tramp from the picturesque dells of this corner of Iowa.
* * *
David Valentine didn't rest under the bridge long. He got to his feet again well before dark, but not before he exchanged the flap-heeled road shoes for a pair of soft buckskin moccasins.
He was tempted to take one or two of the weapons from the cache under the bridge, but there was still a chance that he'd be observed sneaking through the estate's orchards. He could talk his way around a few pilfered late apples, but not a pistol.
Valentine carefully cut upstream toward the manse.
This was not his first visit to Weathercut Manse; he'd been on and off the lands a dozen or more times that November, getting a feel for
the rhythms of the estate and its personnel. Taking your time with this sort of thing made the results exponentially surer.
This being a Wednesday, F. A. James, late of the TMCC but now enjoying a comfortable sinecure courtesy of Crossfire Security and the Ringwearer of Weathercut, would be on the east side of the grounds from eight to twelve, after which he'd put in four more hours at the gatehouse, then sixteen in ready reserve in the security apartments next to the utility garage.
Not that Valentine intended for him to finish the shift.
Sometimes the captain or one of the older hands would accompany F. A. James on the field patrols, but tonight would be cold. He'd probably be alone, driving his ATV from point to point, possibly with a dog riding in the back, as he checked the fields and fencing, warming his hands over the engine whenever he paused.
Valentine had picked out the spot a week ago, spent two long cold nights, one watching it to get the lie of the ground and the guard routine down, especially where the headlights of the ATV would shine.
The east side of the estate ran down into a soggy streambed, rough and dimpled and thick with birches and poplars and a drowned oak that had fallen. The estate fence ran down into the bottom, probably to protect the pheasants that nested there.
The fence wasn't very formidable at this point: a chain-link barrier with razor wire strung atop in a Slinky-like tangle, a final fence for the estate's livestock and a serious warning to anyone else. But whoever had built it didn't account for smaller-animal activity, or simply didn't care. Prowling raccoons had dug under it and a dog or two might have expanded it, chasing the raccoons, for all Valentine knew. He'd opened it still farther on one of his scouts.