Dies the Fire dtf-1

by S. M. Stirling

It hadn’t been a main road before the Change, but someone since had taken the trouble to push the occasional cars aside and bury the bodies-she could see fresh graves in the fields to either side. And that wasn’t all…

  “Bunch up,” she called back over her shoulder. “We’re getting closer to town and I think they’ve got a lookout system set up.”

  This part of the Willamette was fairly flat. That cut visibility, but…

  “We weren’t the only ones to scare up some seed potatoes,” Juniper said, looking left and right. “And is that barley?”

  “Barley in this field, oats in the next, I think,” Judy said. “Hard to tell when it’s just showing. Spring planted-not too late, I hope.”

  Every day past the optimum cut the yield and increased the chances of running into the fall rains at harvest time.

  Then: “Oooops!”

  They cleared a slight rise; someone was waiting beyond. Everyone grabbed the brake levers, and the Mackenzies halted.

  About sixty someones, Juniper thought.

  Most of them were puffing and blowing, as if they’d arrived quickly… which the rows of bicycles hinted at, too. All the people waiting for them were in chain mail shirts that came to their thighs, like metallic extra-large T-shirts, with shortswords and bucklers hung from heavy belts.

  Half of them carried long spears, made up of two sections that fitted together; a few were still getting the joint locked.

  That was quick, Juniper thought, looking at the armor; she had a vague memory that chain mail was expensive in the old days. I’ll have to ask Chuck. The SCA had gone in for recreating that sort of thing.

  At a guess, someone from the Society had been advising this bunch as well.

  “Pikes actually, not spears,” she murmured. “Sixteen-foot pikes.”

  While she watched, they hurried into a four-deep line. Someone called out: “Pikepoints-down!”

  The great spears came down with a shout, presenting a quadruple rank of sharp blades. The rest of the welcoming party were on either side, aiming crossbows. They all looked the more intimidating because their helmets came down in a triangular mask over the eyes, and flared out behind.

  Their leader had a different weapon: a five-foot shaft with a head like a giant single-edged knife, curved on the cutting edge and thick and straight on the back, tapering to a murderous point. A glaive, she thought-the word came to her from some Society get-together where she’d played.

  “Halt where you are!” the man with the glaive called when they were about twenty feet from the line of points. “In the name of the University Council!”

  And the Continental Congress and the Great Jehovah, she thought irreverently, but she obeyed.

  Those pikes looked unpleasantly, seriously sharp; so did the heads of the crossbow bolts.

  “This area is under quarantine,” the young man with the glaive went on. “I’m Lieutenant Peter Jones, Committee militia. Anyone found to be infectious will be put in isolation; turn back now if you are.”

  He pushed up on the mask. That turned out to be a jointed visor, and the face below was disconcertingly young; he also wore sports glasses with an elastic strap at the rear.

  “We’re peaceful travelers from a community on the east side of the valley,” Juniper said, and gave their names. “Just out scouting, trying to find out what’s going on. We have a registered nurse with us, and as far as we know we’re healthy.”

  The word “registered” brought a bristling. “Not working for the state government, I hope,” Jones snapped.

  “They tried to take away our livestock! Until we taught them better.”

  “Our area had the same problem, but I don’t think there is a state government anymore,” she said, jerking a thumb northeast in the direction of Salem.

  “Why not?”

  “Plague. We got near enough to see the pits where they tried to burn the bodies, but from the looks of it the last survivors just lit out for everywhere else.”

  Jones cleared his throat and barked an order with selfconscious sternness; she put him down as a teaching assistant before the Change, possibly in one of the more practical departments, like agriculture or engineering. The pikemen-or in a few cases, pikewomen-swung their weapons upright again, and the crossbows went to port arms.

  “We’d heard about that,” Jones said. “The plague, that is.”

  His eyes flicked to Carmen, Muriel and Jack, all of who still had ripening bruises from their brief captivity.

  “These are friends of ours,” Juniper said in haste, and they nodded enthusiastically. “We rescued them from a nest of Eaters north of Salem, then looped around west of the river and came down Highway 99.”

  “You see we have to be careful about checking… ah, good.”

  More bicyclists had come up, from the direction of town. Two of them had white boxes marked with the Red Cross strapped to the carriers of their bikes, and they immediately came forward.

  “Blood samples,” one said.

  “And customs inspection,” the other added.

  Juniper bristled slightly-she’d thought the Change had eliminated bureaucracy, at least-but the pikes and crossbows were a powerful argument. Plus they needed to contact any surviving nuclei of civilization out here. She’d been beginning to doubt there were any, beyond the three-families-andsome-friends level…’

  It would be truly alarming if Clan Mackenzie and Reverend Dixon’s flock were it as far as rebuilding goes!

  Judy chatted in medspeak with the doctor taking the blood samples; he had an optical microscope ready on a table by the side of the road, and could evidently identify most diseases from the shape of the bacteria in their blood. She recognized about one word in eight; and Yersinid pestis only because Judy had been using the technical term for bubonic plague rather frequently of late.

  Jones examined their weapons. He sniffed at the jacks- “kludge” was the expression he used-and the swords were much like the ones the Corvallan militia carried, cut and ground out of leaf springs. The longbows brought his eyebrows up, and the dozen staves they had in the baggage carriers made him lick his lips, an expression she doubted he was conscious of. The bundled arrows brought nearly the same light of lust to his eyes.

  “Wait a minute!” the customs inspector said. “They’ve got meat here!”

  Everyone bristled at that, and some of the weapons started to swing in her direction.

  “Venison jerky!” Juniper exclaimed, keeping her voice from panic. “Just venison jerky. There are a lot of deer up in the Cascades.”

  The doctor took a moment to confirm her claim, and everyone relaxed. Jones had the grace to look apologetic.

  “You understand… ” he said.

  “Yes.” Juniper winced slightly at her memories, and Judy put a hand to her mouth. “We’ve had… experience with… Eaters.”

  “Eaters. I suppose we needed a euphemism,” Jones said. “You can follow me. The Committee will want to speak to you.”

  He had a bicycle of his own, waiting; if it was one thing every town between Eugene and Portland was plentifully equipped with, it was bikes-Corvallis had had scores of miles of bike path. Jones was full of pride as they cruised down Highway 99, pointing out the signs of recovery; they were still some ways out of town.

  “… and after the riots, we-”

  “We meaning who, precisely?” Juniper asked.

  She was impressed by the scale of planting on either side of the road; everything including former suburban lawns right up to the big Hewlett-Packard plant was in potatoes or vegetables, or spring grain. People stopped working for a moment to wave, or shout question to Peter Jones, then went back to weeding and hoeing.

  And I’m almost as impressed by the lack of stink, she thought; there was a heavy scent of manure and turned earth, but none of the sickly smell of sewage or decay. Although she did catch the heavy ashy taint of burnt-out buildings as an undertone.

  “Well, the agriculture faculty, mostly, and then the engineers a
nd the history department, and some others. We were the ones who realized what had to be done-the ones who saw that letting Salem take all our food wouldn’t mean anything but everyone starving. We got things organized. West to the Coast Range, now, and we’re expanding.”

  Judy and Juniper looked at each other. This is promising, ran through her.

  “Do you know Luther Finney?” she said. “Is he… still there?”

  “The farmer?” Jones asked in surprise. “Why, yes-he’s a member of the Committee, and not the least important one, either. He and his family helped get their neighborhood organized.”

  Juniper smiled, heart-glad to hear her friend was still alive, and only somewhat surprised; Luther was a tough old bird, and nobody’s fool. And… it never hurts to have references.

  A good deal of that happiness evaporated when they stopped at 99W and Polk. Someone had gone to the trouble of knocking down the ruins that stretched along the riverfront-she saw a wagon of cleaned-up bricks go by, pulled by a dozen sweating townsfolk-but the sheer extent of it shocked her. She could see all the way to the waterfront from here. A sour ashy smell clung to the fallen buildings. Broad streaks of destruction reached north and westward, too, looking more recent. There were a fair number of people about, but nothing like the numbers before the Change; about a tenth as many, at a quick estimate, but probably a lot more had moved out of town to work the land.

  “I was here the night of the Change… presumably a lot of other people had the same idea, and headed out?”

  Jones cleared his throat. “A lot happened that first week-the fires burned for days, and we had to tear down firebreaks to stop them. Then there were the food riots… we had outbreaks of cholera and typhus… a fair number of people moved off to Salem when the state government said they should… We’ve got about six thousand in the area the Committee controls.”

  She nodded, but suspected that “food riots” covered a lot of internal conflict; better to blame everything on outsiders, once order was restored once more.

  She took a deep breath. It had been silly, expecting anything but devastation here, too. This was a hopeful sight.

  I should be glad so much was saved, she thought. It’s a good sign that they’re already salvaging building materials.

  Jones made another throat-clearing noise: “So you’ll realize. well, probably you can’t stay very long. We’re still extremely short of food, just barely enough to get ourselves through to harvest, and except in special circumstances we just can’t feed outsiders.”

  Juniper looked at the rubble that covered the site of the Hopping Toad. Odds were nobody had tried to search the basement.

  “Oh, I think we may have some things that would interest your Committee,” she said with a smile. “Besides our trade goods, that is.”

  Luther Finney nodded. “Figure you made a good choice, Juney,” he said. “Most places, it was just as bad as you thought it would be, from what I hear. Salem and Albany, for sure, and there aren’t any words for what we’ve heard of Portland. H-heck, it was bad here! If it hadn’t been for you and your friend warning me, I might not have done near as well myself.”

  The big farmhouse kitchen was a lot more crowded than it had been that night of the Change; brighter, too, with three gasoline lanterns hanging from the ceiling. Juniper’s presence required a lot of shuffling and pushing about of tables and chairs; and the meal wasn’t anything like the fried-chicken feast she remembered so fondly, either. There were a round dozen sitting down to dinner, counting children, and more out in what had been the rarely used formal dining room.

  She got a bowl of porridge, some anonymous mixture of grains with husks in it, and the dried beans she’d contributed from the basement cache of the Hopping Toad were served with obvious reverence. Everyone got one hardboiled egg, as well. For the main meal of the day among people doing horse-heavy manual labor, it wasn’t much.

  At least the porridge is fairly good. Smells nice, too, like fresh-baked bread, and it tastes a little sweet. Maybe molasses-and-rolled-oats livestock feed?

  “We got to work right away, because of that. And we were lucky,” Finney said, after they’d bowed their heads for grace. “Real lucky,” he went on, beaming at his son and daughter and their spouses and his grandchildren and one wiggling pink great-grandchild.

  Edward Finney shrugged; he was a square-built man in his forties, a compromise between his mother’s stocky frame and his father’s lean height. The erect brace of his shoulders showed the legacy of twenty years in the Air Force.

  “We were lucky to get out of Salem before everything went completely to hell,” he said. A grin. “Looks like I’m going to be a farmer after all, like Dad wanted. And my kids after me.”

  “Not just farming,” Luther said grimly.

  His eyes went to the door. Outside in the hallway chain mail shirts hung on the wall, with swords and crossbows racked near them, and pikes slung from brackets screwed into the ceiling.

  “Well,” he went on to Juniper. “Things are looking up, provided we can keep this sickness away; the doctors have some medicine left, but not much. The first of the garden truck looks set to yield well-I give those people at the University that, they busted their… butts getting seed out to everyone and into the ground, and we’ve laid claim to a fair piece of fall-seeded wheat. Lord, though, doing everything by hand is hard work! If we could get some more harness stock, that would be grand-that team of yours would have been real useful around here.”

  “Cagney and Lacey are useful around our place too, Luther.”

  He nodded. “I expect they were, but if you can spare any… We stopped using horses when I was about twelve, but I remember how.”

  “We could use more stock too,” she said happily. “But my people were going to try scouting east for them.” Then: “About this committee running things here, Luther-”

  “Back!” Havel shouted as the crossbow bolt buzzed past his ears.

  All three men spun their mounts and went crashing through greenery and lawn until they were out of range-a hundred yards was plenty, unless the crossbowman was a crack shot. He blessed Will Hutton’s liking for nimble quarter horses and his training of man and beast; and the wide sweep of Larsdalen’s lawn made it next to impossible for anyone to sneak up on them.

  One nice thing about horses was that for the first ten miles or so they were a lot faster than men on foot.

  “Christ Jesus, what the fuck do you people think you’re doing? ” Havel shouted, rising in his stirrups to shake a fist at the window.

  “They weren’t trying to kill us, Boss,” Josh said.

  “I know that, or I wouldn’t be trying to talk,” Havel snarled. “But anyone who got in the way of that bolt would be just as dead, accidentally or not. What sort of idiot fires a warning shot that close without a parlay?”

  Eric was flushed with anger too. He pushed his helmet back by the nasal and called out: “What are you doing in my family’s house?”

  A voice came from the same upper window, thin and faint with distance: “Who the hell are you, mate?”

  Havel blinked at the harsh almost-British accent… An Aussie, by God. What in the hell?

  “Mr. Zeppelt?” Eric said, still loud but with the anger running out of his voice. “What are you doing here?”

  “Eric? Your pa bloody well hired me, didn’t he, sport? I’ve been looking after the place and the staff.”

  “Wait a minute,” Havel said, baffled. “You know him?”

  “Well, bloody hell,” the voice from the house said, dying away.

  A few moments later the doors opened and a short stout man with a crossbow in his arms came out; he was balding, with a big glossy-brown beard falling down the front of his stained khakis. A tall horse-faced blond woman with an ax followed him. Several other figures crowded behind her.

  “That you in the Ned Kelly suit, Eric-me-lad?” the man called. “Who’re your cobbers? S’truth, it’s good to see yer! C’mon in and have a heart starter-w
e’re a bit short of tucker, but there’s some neck oil left.”

  Twenty

  “For the road is wide—

  and the sky is tall

  And before I die, I will see it all!”

  Juniper Mackenzie broke off at the chorus as three armed figures stepped into the roadway. She stopped her bicycle and leaned one foot on the dirt road and called a greeting, putting a hand up to shade her eyes against the bright spring sun. Judy Barstow stopped likewise, and Vince and Steve waved hellos of their own; the rest of their party stopped as well, uncertain.

  They’d all relaxed now that they were well into the clan’s land-past the Fairfax place, and just where the county road turned north along Artemis Butte Creek-and they’d been singing from sheer thankfulness, despite the bone-deep ache of exhaustion.

  Homecoming was sweet almost beyond bearing.

  “Hi, Alex, Sam,” Juniper shouted, returning their waves of greeting as she swung her other foot down and started pushing the bicycle towards them. “Merry meet again!”

  Alex had his bow over his back, a buckler in one hand and a spear in the other; six feet of ashwood, with a foot-long head made from a piece of automobile leaf spring. He leaned the spear against a tree to put a horn to his lips-it was the genuine article, formerly gracing the head of a cow-and blew one long blast and three short ones, a blatting huuuu noise not like any sound metal had ever made.

  Then he grinned and waved it overhead as the bicyclists approached. The other two slipped their arrows back into their quivers-which meant poking a razor blade on a stick past your ear, so you had to be careful-and tapped their longbows on their helmets in salute. One was stocky and broad-shouldered, unmistakable even in green jack and helmet and…

  And a kilt, by Cernunnos! Dennie’s got them all doing it, the black-hearted spalpeen!

  “Glad to see you’ve got them alert, Sam,” she said to the Englishman. “That’s the second time I’ve been stopped!”

  Because one guard post at the border isn’t enough, curse the expense and lost work of it!

  The other archer was a lanky blond girl in her late teens, and definitely not a member of coven or clan that Juniper remembered, despite the Mackenzie sigil on her jack-the crescent moon between elk antlers.