Cheers burst out; Mary and Sanjay and Daniel rushed over and nearly knocked Chuck over himself in their enthusiasm.
“Dad’s the best!” they chorused. “Dad’s the best!”
Little Tamsin stumped around crowing and waving her arms, happy because her father was the center of attention. He scooped her up onto his shoulder, tucked Mary and Daniel each under an arm and let Sanjay proudly rack his equipment as he staggered over towards the trestle tables.
Quick work, Juniper thought.
It hadn’t been long before the rescued children realized they weren’t going home, or at least before most stopped talking about it; shared hunger and fear and unaccustomed hard work had probably sped up the process, and the sheer strangeness of everything.
Now, is it a good, sign of healthy resilience that some of them have started calling their foster parents Mom and Dad, or is it unhealthy denial and transference? I don’t think those three in particular had parents before, not really, just people who paid the bills.
“Lad knows his business as far as the moves go,” Aylward said thoughtfully. “Hope he doesn’t freeze up when the red wine’s served for true, though.”
Juniper shivered slightly and changed the subject. “You’ve settled in better than most, Sam,” she said. “I’d have thought it would be harder for you, being so far from home.”
For a moment the square, good-humored Saxon face went bleak. “It’ll be worse back there,” he said. “Sixty million people in one little island? It doesn’t bear thinking of, and at least I don’t have to watch it.”
Juniper winced slightly and swallowed. Any more than I do Los Angeles or New York, she thought. Or Mexico City or Tokyo or…
He shook his shoulders. “Besides, I’ve no near kin to home, no wife or child, and even before the Change… it’s not really the place I grew up in, not anymore it isn’t-wasn’t. Full of commuters, bought all the old cottages up and gussified them, they did. And the local farmers were all for ripping out hedges and trees and getting rid of their livestock and making the place look like bloody Canada; fat lot of good their combines and thousand-acre fields of hybrid barley will be to them now, eh?”
He shook his head. “I’d just been playing, fossicking about with this and that, since I mustered out of the SAS. Traveling, making bows, doing a little hunting.”
“They must have a generous pension plan,” Juniper said teasingly.
“Not bloody likely!” he said with a grin. “But my da had a bit put by-from selling the farm about the time my mother died and I went for a soldier, you see. Left it to me; fair knackered I was, when I found out, since he’d done naught but live in a cheap flat in Portsmouth and haunt the pubs. Thought he’d drunk it up years ago… “
Then he looked at her with his head slightly to one side: “You’ve a gift for getting people talking, don’t you, Lady?”
Juniper grinned. “What can I say? I’m a Witch, a singer, and a storyteller-all three. So… the Change interrupted your life as a gentleman of leisure?”
“That it did.” A shrug. “Play’s all very well, but a man’s life is his work; I’ve got a real job of work to do here.”
Well, that’s more than Mr. Strong and Silent’s said before, she thought, giving him a genial slap on the shoulder; it was like hitting an oak beam. Lord and Lady be thanked for sending him our way!
Everyone headed for the trestle-tables and the fires with the soup cauldrons; on a day like this, it was a relief to do things out-of-doors. Juniper shed her battle gear-they had two-by-four racks set up for it-and got in line. Diana grinned at her as she ladled the Eternal Soup into bowls.
“You know, Juney, one of the things I enjoyed most about running MoonDance was looking up recipes and planning the menu?”
Juniper laughed out loud, despite the rumbling of her stomach. “And what’s on the menu today, Di?”
“Eternal Soup, Eternal Soup, or today’s extra-special dish: delicious zuppa di eterno.”
“Eternal Soup!” Juniper made her eyes go wide. “What a surprise! Still, I think I’ll have something from the dessert tray instead, and some nice organic hazelnut coffee.”
Diana gave a sour laugh and plopped her ladle into Juniper’s bowl. Her husband, Andy, gave her a platter of wild-greens salad, half a hardboiled egg, and one precious baking-powder biscuit.
There was also a great jug of rich Jersey milk fresh from their-single-milking cow. But that was for the children and Dorothy Rose, who was pregnant; birth control was already getting more difficult, and there would be a couple of babies before Yule.
Juniper’s nose twitched as she carried the big bowl of soup over to her table. It actually smelled pretty good today, probably because they’d been getting in a little game and wild herbs-dandelion roots, fireweed shoots-plus Andy had thrown in some more of the soup barley and miso stock from their restaurant-store’s inventory, plus a little pasta from the Fairfax storehouse.
They were always talking about butchering one of the steers or sheep, and always kept putting it off until absolutely necessary-everyone was worried about the gap between the preserved foods and the first harvest, with the way their numbers had grown. They had plenty of grass to keep the beasts hale, courtesy of the Willamette’s mild climate and the way foragers had swept it bare of livestock.
“Mmmm,” she said appreciatively as she hunted down the last barleycorn in her bowl with an eager spoon.
I crave starch. In fact, I crave starch and fat and meat and sugar….
Then she went for the salad; dandelion greens and henbit shoots and various other crunchy green things from the meadows and woods, about half of which she recognized; and some canned beets from the Fairfax stores, with the juice making do for salad dressing. It wasn’t bad if you liked eating bitter lawn clippings drizzled with diluted vinegar. She saved the half-egg for last; it had a little paprika on the yolk, and a strong free-range taste. The biscuit had a chewy crust; she alternated bites with the egg, tiny nibbles to stretch out the flavor.
In fact, I crave everything except dandelion greens.
Judy Barstow licked her spoon: “You know, if there were a few more calories, this would be an ideal, healthy diet.”
“Oh, shut up, you she-quack,” Juniper grumbled, seconded by a few others.
Their nurse-midwife grinned unrepentantly; she’d gone from plump to merely opulent. For people doing hard physical labor every day, it was all about two-thirds of just barely enough, or at least that was what Juniper’s stomach told her. Filling up on herbal tea was supposed to take away the empty feeling. It didn’t; you just had to pee more often.
For a while there was only the clinking of spoons and the crunch of greenery between busy jaws. Then-
“Hamburgers,” Diana said hollowly, looking at her own empty bowl.
“Shut up, Di,” her husband said. “Please.”
“Cheeseburgers with sauteed onions and maple-cured bacon. French fries-big, greasy home-fries with lots of salt. Pork chops, with the fat brown and crispy at the edge and collard greens on the side. Thai shrimp curry with bas-mati rice. Steamed snow peas. Fried eggplant with grated cheese. Barbecued ribs. Pasta with homemade tomato sauce and Parmesan melting on top. Mashed garlic potatoes with butter and chives. Bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches, the tomatoes just out of the garden and still sun-warm, dripping with mayo.”
“Shut up!” It was several voices together now.
“Slabs of MoonDance fresh whole-wheat bread, brown and crusty, still steaming when you cut it, with organic butter melting into the surface. And jam, wild blueberry jam, and honey. German chocolate cake with coconut sprinkles on the frosting. Good Costa Rican coffee in a big mug with thick cream, while you eat a cinnamon-apple Danish and-”
“Shut up!” they all screamed in chorus; the children giggled, but nobody else was laughing.
Someone broke down and started that sort of drooling food-porn every second meal on average. It drove everyone else crazy; they would have thrown food
if there had been any to spare.
Juniper used a dandelion leaf to wipe out the inside of her soup bowl, then sighed as her inner circle headed her way with rolled-up plans in their hands; Dennis had what looked like a big cake covered in a cloth…
… and there I go thinking about food again!
It turned out to be a scale model. Juniper looked at it in bemusement as Dennis whipped away the towel; then she looked at him and raised a brow as her glance dropped downward.
“Is that a kilt you’re wearing, Dennie?”
He grinned at her. It was; the sewn, pleated skirtlike variety invented in the eighteenth century, not the true wraparound Great Kilt of the ancient Gaels. The cloth was even tartan, of a sort, mostly green and brown with stripes of very dark blue.
“Isn’t that made from one of that load of blankets we salvaged?” she said, pursing her lips as she struggled not to laugh.
The ribbing does pass the time.
“There’s plenty,” he said. “Nice strong wool, too. And it’s quick and easy to make-Andy’s got that sewing machine working off a treadle-and it wears longer than jeans.”
“It’s not even the Mackenzie tartan!”
“It is now,” he said cheerfully. “Didn’t you say the Victorians made up that stuff about clans having special tartans after the fact anyway? This is what we’ve got-we’re the Mackenzies around here-it’s the Mackenzie tartan if we say it is. QED.”
She threw up her hands. “Cuir sioa ar ghabhar agus is gabhar I gconai й.
“You calling me a goat?” he said, mock-frowning.
“No, just a Sassenach. A goat’s a goat even in a silk coat, if you want a translation. But I suppose if you want to wear a pleated skirt, you can wear a pleated skirt. It’s a harmless eccentricity.”
She pointed at the wooden model his cunning woodworker’s fingers had put together. It showed the Hall built up to two stories, a duplicate not far away, more barns and sheds, and a high log wall around the whole irregular oblong of high ground on which the buildings rested.
“Now that-that is a menace! We’ve a limited amount of time and work, in case you hadn’t noticed, and an infinity of things to do with both.”
He grinned, but it was Alex Barstow who spoke up: “Actually, Juney, it’s not crazy-we wouldn’t build it all at once, of course, but we do need more room and we do need a defensive wall.”
That put her brows up again. Alex was a housebuilder by trade, and he knew his business-she’d hired him for repairs before the Change, and knew others he’d done more ambitious work for.
Dennis spoke: “It’s courtesy of Cascade Timber Inc. I remembered how you bitched and moaned back in ‘ninety-six about having to sell them trees to pay taxes on this place, and then again when they went bankrupt and left it all on your hands. So I’ve been checking while I was out hunting-”
She heard a subdued snort, possibly from Sam Aylward; the only use Dennis had on a hunt was to scare the game into an ambush set by someone else.
“- and yeah, you have a lot of stacked logs in the woods here. Nicely seasoned by now, too. More than enough.”
Alex nodded. “Log construction is fast and simple, and strong and warm if you do it right-square the top and bottom so they fit snug, deep-notch the ends-it just needs lots and lots of big high-quality logs. Back before the Change that was expensive, but we’ve got the logs, great big thirty-foot monsters.”
He pointed to the middle of the model: “See, we’ve already started on the bathhouse. Now, the next thing we do is double the space in the Hall-your cabin. It’s just a log box; the foundation’s the difficult part, and that’s already done. All we have to do is take off the roof, put on an extra story of log wall minus cutouts for windows, then put the same roof back on. This lean-to extension out back is the new kitchen, with those woodstoves we salvaged.”
Diana nodded. “That’ll save a lot of cooking time.”
“And bingo, we have another three thousand square feet of living space,” Alex enthused; his blond ponytail bobbed as he spoke.
“All right,” Juniper said dubiously. “Much as I love every darling one of you, my treasures, I’ve grown fair weary of hearing you all snore, and that’s the truth. But this Fort Apache arrangement-”
She pointed at the palisade that surrounded the buildings.
“Nah, that’s not all that hard either,” Alex said. “Actually, Chuck gave me the idea, something about how the ancient Gauls did it, plus some bits I remembered from a book on the frontier stations, you know, Kentucky in Daniel Boone’s day. Look, the Hall’s on an oblong rise, right? The sides slope back at about forty-five degrees and then it’s flat on top, pretty well, except where the spring bubbles up and flows off the edge.”
He pointed to the north. “Twenty-five, thirty feet above the level of the meadow here. So what we do is just dig a ditch halfway up the slope, say seven or eight feet deep. We stand a log upright, pour concrete around the base, then use that and some block and tackle to set the next log upright-next four or five-spiking them together and then pouring the base-and eventually we have a complete oblong log palisade. Really not too complicated, good and strong, and it’ll last if we do the drainage right.”
“Hmmm.”
Those poles are thirty feet tall. Fifteen feet of steep hill, then twenty feet of yard-thick logs above the surface. We would sleep better of a night.
“Why not at the top of the slope, where it would be that much taller?” she said. “If we start the wall further down the slope, here will be a big notch between the inside of the wall and the flat top of the rise the Hall’s on.”
Alex’s smile had a crackling enthusiasm that was hard to resist. “That’s the good part! We do a little cutting and filling, and we’ve got a twelve-foot-deep ditch all around on the inside. Or a fieldstone-and-concrete-lined cellar, with a little more work. Good drainage, too.”
“More than enough storage space for all our crops,” Chuck cut in.
His brother burbled on: “Then we run more logs out from the flat to the wall, and plank ‘em over, and we’ve got the floors above the cellars, and we plant the cabins-or workshops or whatever-overtop of that. Fighting platform for the wall goes above the roofs; and we pipe all the rainwater to cisterns, to help out the spring. We can get windows, doors, roofing shingle and plumbing fixtures from half a dozen abandoned places not far away, and sawn timber from that mill south of Lebanon-there’s a couple of hundred thousand finished board feet sitting in their covered yard.”
“Floors? Roofs?” Juniper said; she didn’t have a painter’s imagination, or a draughtsman’s. Then: “Oh, of course!”
Alex nodded. “We use the palisade as the outside wall for the cabins, give every family their own bedroom and hearth. Sort of like log row housing-”
“And we can spare the people and horse teams, until harvest and fall plowing, so-”
Juniper sat back, smiling and nodding as the enthusiasm spread and the clan convinced itself.
This will get a majority vote, no matter that it’ll keep everyone working, she thought. It’s good to have the Chief overridden now and then. And it’s no bad thing to be busy, and tired at night. It keeps you from thinking about what you’ve lost, and who you’ve lost, and what the world is like right now outside our little enclave.
She let herself cry for Rudy now and then, mostly at night. Sleep came quickly, a gift of the Mother-of-All, and her dreams of him had been good.
After a while most of the adults and half the children were crowded around the table, adding suggestions. Judy gave her own:
“And that’ll give us a regular place to hold school lessons.”
A subdued groan, but not much of one-after pulling weeds all day, even a ten-year-old could contemplate sitting still at a desk for a while.
“And a place for Esbats and Sabbats when it’s too wet to use the nemed. The barn’s smelly and it leaks.”
Juniper nodded; her Sacred Wood with its eerie circle of oaks and sto
ne-slab altar had made the Singing Moon Coven the envy of pagan Oregon, but when it settled into rain, come September or October here in the foothills, it rained. Sometimes the sky wept chill drizzle for weeks at a time.
“We’ll have space for a Moon School as well,” Judy said. “And for private Craft workings.”
As Maiden, she was responsible for training; the children enjoyed it, too, a lot more than the conventional schoolwork.
“Right,” Judy said, looking around. “All in favor?”
For a wonder, the vote was unanimous; that saved the effort of talking a holdout around. She preferred to work by consensus…
Which the next bit will not be getting, she thought. Not without a lot of work.
“Two more things we should be doing,” she said. “And that’s sending out scouts. Emissaries, perhaps.” A few frowns, more wonder.
She pointed eastward; the peaks of the Cascades stood there, long dark-green ridges rising to saw-toothed silhouettes against the afternoon sky.
“There’s that old trail, the foot trail-it should be open by now. The main roads over the passes are far too dangerous, but nobody lives up there. You could ride over to the Bend country.”
Andy and Diana both perked up. They’d owned a store-cum-restaurant before the Change, of the type that was always looking for a new source of fresh produce, and they’d gone on trips combing the backcountry for sources.
“Lot of ranching country over there,” Andy said. “No big cities. They’re probably in better shape than we are, at least for food.”
Chuck mused thoughtfully, scratching in his new orange-yellow beard: “I remember from the museum-that exhibition, ‘Cowboys in Legend and Reality’? Ranchers sell off about a third of their herds every year, the yearlings. They just keep the breeding heifers and some replacements. Bet they’d be willing to trade; cattle, sheep, maybe even horses. We could really use more horses and most of the livestock around here got eaten, so we’ve got lots of pasture that’s going to waste. And if we had more cattle than we could use ourselves, the Horned Lord knows there are people who’d be glad to trade with us for them.”
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