It was lucky that no one fired from either side. The villagers scattered when the fireballs boomed in the air, while the mage's companions huddled together and pointed their weapons at their enemies, but they didn't hurry to pull the triggers.
So they parted.
Before dark, the outsiders had time to make camp, to pull up poles and twigs from the forest and build shelters and towers, with the dawn continued arrangement, as if deciding to create their own settlement in half a kilometer from the Cossack ambush.
At night a car rolled past them, which turned out to be a jeep, in which Brown's and his partner arrived. From their words it appeared that everyone else had driven into the territory of the warehouses and disappeared. Only the sounds of gunfire reached the diversionary team, and that quickly died down. After waiting until dusk at the rendezvous point for the column, the men decided to return to the settlement. The darkness was in the way, but the old trail in the grass was a guiding thread that led them to the house. They had seen the fires on the hill, but had not given it much thought.
- I say again, what are you going to do next? - I said, when I had received the full account of yesterday's event.
- Send the strangers away. Let them go anywhere, but this is no place for them," - said Jack, rolling a jaw on his face. I have never seen him so angry in all the time I have known him. Indeed! He was always trying to smile, putting an "American smile" on his face.
- I won't do that," I shook my head. - We're all caught up in an alien world here. Every man on earth is worth more than gold, and a wizard more than that. So you don't like him, and he's threatened you. I have already reminded you how they tried to treat me when I was in the settlement. And what about now? Maybe I haven't become my own yet, but you are considered, you even invited me to a meeting. And with the newcomers sooner or later the same will happen.
- That's what I mean," the lean, tall, pole-like man with a gray, sickly complexion backed me up. He looked about forty-five years old, wore a light T-shirt, thin pants of washed blue jeans cloth, a gauze vest, and a long narrow hunting knife with a rubber grip in a plastic black sheath on his belt. - There's no such thing as being nice all at once. And we need a mage, especially a combat one.
- We can manage on our own, without mages," another man, unfamiliar to me and dressed in an old camouflage with a pattern of reeds, told him stiffly. - We don't need that kid, either. Only scares people with his golems.
- You don't? - I jumped up and down in a jiffy. - You didn't?
- Whoa, whoa," - the head spoke hurriedly, - "don't get nervous, people. We're here to find a solution to an alien problem, not to shake other people's linen.
- Who's shoveling his own linen here? - The camouflage man pretended to be surprised. - He's as much an outsider here as the ones on the hill, and he started by attacking our people, and he's got the nerve to move in here and take a building you can fit fifty refugees in. Weren't the ones we took in before, acting so defiant, threatening...
- Well, s... here's one for you, motherfuckers! - I put out my right arm with my clenched fist in his direction, and slammed my left hand on his bicep. - I'm leaving your village, you can be happy and not be afraid anymore. I'm leaving your dumpster, clean and swept, and you can put fifty refugees in it.
Rising from my chair, I quickly went to the gate.
- Alex, wait, stop playing nursery school here! - Shouted Jack in the back.
- Alex, do not go, I want to talk to you! - And this is the "pillar" in the vest.
I gave them all the same answer: without turning around to face me, I held up my right hand, with my middle finger pulled out.
I did not calm down until I reached my house... my former home. I was shaking inside with resentment, indignation, shame, and anger. A childish thing to do? Well, compared to most of the people around the table at the gazebo, I was a child. Except that I felt like an eleventh grader, who had been sent to the seventh or eighth grade to teach a class, and they didn't take me seriously there, even tried not so much to probe me "weakly", but to stupidly ignore me and do the opposite. That is exactly how all the attempts and desires of the leadership of the village looked to me. What kind of chumps are gathered here, egoists and bastards who want their own shirt closer to the body, and that it was today, and tomorrow, like, have to live?
- Assholes! Assholes! - I spat and kicked some branch that got in my way.