Dies the Fire dtf-1

by S. M. Stirling

  “Wait a minute! You got it, Dennie? As in, actually shot it yourself?”

  “I found a much better method than sneaking around in the woods. I just waited up late by the gardens.” He smiled smugly. “If you grow it, they will come.”

  A groan went around the tub.

  “There aren’t all that many veggies, I’m afraid, but eat, eat-it’s a special occasion, after all! Oh, and Di is sacrificing some of her flour to make buns to go with the pork-and-sage sausages… “

  The two younger members of the traveling party excused themselves with exquisite good manners, grabbed towels and bolted…

  Or perhaps they’ve just got enough energy to pester the cooks, she thought. She felt her friend’s description right in her stomach, but the hot water was soothing away her aches so pleasantly that she could wait. Particularly with each piece of garden truck a sweet explosion of pleasure in her mouth.

  Or maybe the youngsters are off to their girlfriends. Certainly Chuck and Judy are devouring each other with their eyes, and perhaps playing touch-toes.

  The brief meeting with Mike Havel already seemed like a dream; an ache went through her…

  Ah, Rudy, Rudy, I miss you! You’d bless me from the Summerlands if I found a man, but who could take your place?

  “So,” Chuck Barstow said, tearing his gaze away from his wife’s eyes, and other parts of her. “Obviously you did have luck. I couldn’t believe you got Jack and the others back!”

  “We had help, and until then it was a very sticky situation indeed… ” Juniper began, and gave a quick rundown.

  A murmur of blessed be ran through the coveners.

  “Who says the Lord and Lady don’t look after Their folk?” Chuck said.

  He was always keen, but we’re all turning more to the Goddess and the God, Juniper thought. Perhaps because there’s so little else to hold on to.

  When she mentioned that Luther Finney had survived, Dennis swore in delight, and Eilir clapped her hands.

  “Who says you don’t have the Goddess looking out for you, special?” Dennis grinned. “Little stuff and big? There were those yew logs seasoning at the bottom of your woodpile that you never got around to burning, just waiting to be made into bows… “

  “That would be the God looking out for me, as Cernunnos Lord of the Forest, Dennie. But I make allowances for the ignorance of a mere cowan.”

  He splashed water back at her; “cowan” was Wiccaspeak for a non-Witch, and not entirely polite.

  “Hey, you’re playing confuse-the-unbeliever again. I have never been able to get a straight answer on whether you guys have two deities or dozens, taken from any pantheon you feel like mugging in a theological dark alley. Which is it? Number one or number two?”

  “Yes,” Juniper said, with all the other coven members joining in to make a ragged chorus; Eilir concurred in Sign.

  Dennis groaned, and there was a minute of chaotic water-fighting. Juniper rescued the bowl and held it over her head to keep it from sinking until things quieted down again. That exposed more of her, but if everybody felt like throwing hot water at her aching, overworked, underfed body, she wasn’t going to object.

  “Or maybe it’s just that somebody had to be lucky,” he went on. “Anthropic principle-anyone still around to talk about it nowadays has to have had a string of lucky coincidences helping them, and more so every day that passes. If someone’s breathing, they’re a lottery winner. You, Juney, you’re the Powerball grand-prizer.”

  Juniper’s chuckle was a bit harsh; after her trip through the valley that bit a little closer to the bone than she liked. But when gallows humor was the only kind available… well, that was when you needed to laugh more than ever.

  “Scoffer,” she said, and continued: “Anyway, I spent time with the Committee running things in what’s left of Corvallis; mostly the aggie and engineering faculties and some other folk-Luther’s on it himself. They’re talking about a meeting of the honest communities sometime this autumn or early winter to discuss mutual aid-especially about the bandit problem.”

  “Well, blessed be Moo U,” Chuck said. “That could be really useful.”

  Juniper nodded. “Good people, though a bit suspicious. They can offer a lot of varieties of seeds and grafts, and stud services from their rams and bulls and stallions, and farming and building help in general. They’ve got real experts there; I’ve got forty pages of notes, advice they gave me on our problems. The difficulty is that what they want most besides bowstaves is livestock; heifers and mares and ewes particularly, to breed upgrade herds from their pedigree stock.”

  Chuck Barstow breathed on his nails and polished them on an imaginary lapel; Dennis grinned like a happy bear.

  “Those Herefords?” Juniper asked.

  “Yup. We got a small party through there about five days after you left. They got back day before yesterday, driving their flocks before them-twenty-five head of cattle, twenty sheep, six horses. Mostly breeding females.”

  Juniper made a delighted tip-of-the-hat gesture to the two grinning men. That solved their unused-pasture problem, with a vengeance! They could get a good crop of calves, lambs and foals too. And they could slaughter a steer every couple of weeks…

  Or if we can trade for more, maybe we can spare some for Corvallis. have to arrange escorts across the valley, though… if only Highway 20 were open…

  It wasn’t; by all they could tell, it was a gauntlet of horrors, everything from plain old-style robbers to Eaters. Aloud she went on: “What’s it like over there in the Bend country?”

  Chuck went on: “The Change hit them about like us, just not so much. Bend and Madras and the other bigger towns have pretty well collapsed, but a lot of their people got out to the farms and ranches, since there weren’t millions of them to start with; if anything, they’re short of working hands.”

  That sounded familiar. It just took so much effort to get anything done without machinery, particularly since nobody really knew how to do a lot of the necessary things by hand. There were descriptions in books, but they always turned out to be maddeningly incomplete and/or no substitute for the knowledge experience built into your muscles and nerves.

  “And they’ve got local governments functioning in a shadowy sort of way-they’re calling it the Central Oregon Ranchers’ Association. They’ve got more livestock than they can feed, too, without the irrigated pastures. this year, at least; next year’s going to be tighter for them too. We traded them bows and shafts and jacks for the stock, and for jerky and rawhides. They’ve got bandits of their own and the ranchers who’re running things over there want weapons bad. They really miss their rifles.”

  “Congratulations,” Juniper said sincerely.

  The night when she’d nearly had a fit over hitting a man in the head seemed a long way away, except when the bad dreams came. She wasn’t happy about becoming case-hardened, but it was part of the price of personal sanity and collective survival.

  “Congratulations!” she said again. “It sounds like the eastern slope is a lot better off, at least for now.”

  “What was it like out there in the valley?” Dennis said. “I still say it was a crazy risk, you going out.”

  “Worth it,” Juniper said. “Rumor isn’t reliable and we have to know what to expect. The way the world’s closed down to walking distance, you don’t know until you go there and see or it comes to you. I’m not absolutely indispensable, either.”

  “The hell you aren’t,” Dennis and Chuck said together.

  “I may be the High Priestess, but I’m not the Lady come in human form, you know, except symbolically and in the Circle.”

  Chuck snorted; he tended to pessimism, as befitted a gardener-turned-farmer.

  “You’re here and you’re Chief. We’re alive where most aren’t,” he pointed out. “And we’re doing much better than most who are still alive. The two things are probably connected. Anyway, to repeat the question… “

  Juniper shrugged, stroking her
daughter’s hair. “As to what it was like… some of it was very bad. Most of it was worse. And a few things like Corvallis were encouraging, which is what I’ll make the most of when we have everyone together.”

  “You’re turning into a politician, Juney,” Dennis said, grinning.

  “Now you’re getting nasty,” she said.

  Then her smile died. “Hope is as essential as food. We have some here, of both. Out there… “

  Judy went on grimly: “The bad news there is what broke up those refugee camps around Salem and Albany, apart from plain old-fashioned starvation.”

  She looked around the circle of faces; Juniper put her hand over Eilir’s eyes; the girl stirred restively, and she sighed and removed the fingers. This wasn’t a world where you could shelter children much; not anymore.

  “Plague.”

  There were murmured invocations, and some old-fashioned blaspheming of the Christian deity.

  “What sort of plague?” Dennis asked.

  Judy snorted, and her husband chuckled, being more accustomed to the fact that she said exactly what she meant when medical matters came up. She scowled at him as she replied: “I’m not joking and it’s not funny at all.”

  “Sorry-”

  “It’s Yersinia pestis. The Plague. The Black Death. Those camps were filthy and swarming with rats, and plague’s a species-jumper endemic among ground squirrels here in the West. Then it got into someone’s lungs and changed to the pneumonic form-which is standard in a big outbreak-and that spreads from person to person, no fleas needed. Spreads very easily. Plus pneumonic plague’ll kill you fast, sometimes in a day. It’s been a long time since our ancestors were exposed, much. Mortality rate of over ninety percent, like a virgin-field epidemic, and they ran out of antibiotics quickly.”

  That shocked Dennis into silence, not something easy to accomplish.

  “I identified cholera morbus and typhus, too… and half a dozen other diseases. but the plague’s worst of all. They tried to burn the bodies, but that broke down. We could see the smoke from the death-pits still rising around Salem.”

  “And we could smell it,” Juniper said quietly. “We might think of setting out parties to burn down abandoned sections and clear out the rats.”

  Judy shook her head. “We’re going to have to pull in our horns-set up a quarantine. And we shouldn’t send anyone into the valley until the first hard frost unless it’s life or death for the clan. With the plague and the cholera and typhus piled on top of sheer hunger… this time next year… a hundred thousand left between Eugene and Portland? Fifty thousand? Less?”

  A cry from the heart: “If only we had some antibiotics! There probably are some left, but we can’t find or ship them.”

  “Shit,” her husband said quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “And you haven’t heard about what’s happening in Portland,” Juniper said. “We met a group that had come through the city-come all the way from Idaho-and… “

  When she’d finished the silence went on until Juniper reached out and took the last of the cauliflower.

  “Well, we don’t have to think about this Protector person for a while. The sickness will shut the valley down until autumn.”

  There were some things you simply couldn’t think about too much, or you’d lose the will to live. She suspected that many had sat down and died for just that reason.

  “What did we trade the Smiths for this stuff?” she said in a lighter tone. “I’d have said they wouldn’t spit on us if we were dying of thirst, for fear it would give us the strength to crawl to water.”

  The stay-at-homes looked at each other before turning back to her; she recognized the gesture as one showing more bad news was on the way. There had been an awful lot of that, since the Change.

  “Bandits hit the Smith farm,” Dennis said. “Took them by surprise. No survivors except for Mark.”

  That was the Smith’s youngest, about seven. She winced; she hadn’t liked the family, they’d been rude to her and Eilir before the Change and downright nasty to the Mackenzies since, but… And their children had been just children, and they’d taken in as many relatives from town and plain refugees as they could and not starve right away. And treated them fairly, which was more than you could say for some.

  “Mark got out and ran to the Carsons’, and they got a message to us; Cynthia galloped up on their horse. We called out everyone and trapped the bandits, there were about a dozen of them-took them by surprise, nobody on our side hurt much. None got away.”

  “Blessed be,” Juniper said sadly. “I wondered what Cynthia Carson was doing, on guard duty here and calling herself a Mackenzie. Her whole family moved in, then?”

  “Joined the clan formally the next day, them and all their dependents,” Chuck Barstow said. “Not to mention the Georges, the Mercers, and the Brogies.They weren’t happy with the way the Sutterdown militia showed up a day late and a dollar short, as usual.”

  She blinked, a snow pea pod halfway to her lips. That was an awful lot of people. He went on:

  “The whole thing scared them all several different shades of green, and I don’t blame them; it was damned ugly at the Smith place, and they saw it-the bandits had the whole bunch hung up by their heels and… well, I don’t know if they were Eaters or just vicious. The problem is… “

  “Oh,” Juniper said. “Let me guess. Cynthia wants to join the coven, not just the clan-I remember her asking questions-and her folks aren’t enthusiastic about it?”

  “Worse. She and her mother and her brother want to join, and her father isn’t too enthusiastic. Not that he’s a bigot, he just thinks we’re weird.”

  “We’re Witches, Chuck,” she said reasonably. “We are weird.”

  “Could be worse, from his point of view,” he said. “We could be strict Gardnerians, and do everything nekkid.”

  “Wait a minute,” Sally said, looking down at herself as the Wiccans laughed. “I hadn’t noticed you guys got upset about skin, much. For example, right now we are naked.”

  “Well, yeah,” Chuck replied. “But that’s because right now we’re in a bathtub.”

  That time everyone laughed; Sally joined in, then went on: “Who’s Gardner? I’ve heard you coveners mention him.”

  Chuck grinned. He’d always enjoyed the early history of the modern Craft.

  “Gardner was this early Wiccan dude over in England, back in the forties, fifties,” he said. “In our particular Tradition, we sort of save skyclad work for special ceremonies or solitary rituals and use robes most or the time, but he thought you should do pretty well all the rituals skyclad, which is Wiccaspeak for bare-assed.”

  Juniper popped another piece of carrot into her mouth, savoring the earthy sweetness.

  “There are two schools of thought on that,” she said around it. “One is that the Goddess revealed to Gardner that you ought to always be skyclad in the Circle so you could conduct energy better, and it had nothing to do with sex. Then there’s the other school, to which I subscribe.”

  “What’s that?” Dennis asked.

  “That’s the school which says that Gardner was a lecherous, voyeuristic, horny old he-goat who loved to prance through the woods with nekkid women, but since he was also an Englishman born in 1884, he had to come up with a religious justification for it.”

  She sighed. “Of course, he did do a lot for the Craft; he’s one of our modern founders. He just had… problems. And mind you, Gardnerians don’t have his problems; they simply end up taking off their clothes an awful lot, even in really cold weather… chilblains, head colds… “

  “Purists,” Chuck said, and grinned. “Say, how many Gardnerians does it take to change a light bulb? Twelve: consisting of evenly matched male-female pairs to balance the Divine energy with a leader as number thirteen to-”

  The Wiccans all chuckled, and then Juniper went on: “Back to business: I’ll talk to John Carson and his family. Cynthia’s a bit young for such a major decision… “r />
  Older than you were, Mom, Eilir signed. I’ve talked to her too, she signs a bit, and she’s real sincere about it. I think the Goddess has spoken to her heart.

  “We can’t very well turn clan members away, but all these new candidates, and then the Carsons… “

  Dennis and Sally were looking at her with odd smiles. “Oh, no, not you two as well! I thought life was all a dance of atoms, Dennie!”

  “Let’s say my faithless faith was shaken by the Change, OK?” Dennis said. “I’m not the only one to have that experience. And if I started believing in Jehovah, I’d have to blame Him for all this since there’s only one address for complaints in that system.”

  “And Sally, you’re a Buddhist!”

  Sally shrugged. “Was a Buddhist,” she said quietly. “I already believed in karma-dharma and reincarnation and multiple spiritual guides-the difference is more in the terminology than the theology. Plus Terry wants to go to Moon School with his friends; it’s important to belong at that age. Plus Dennie and me want you to handfast us, too. And soon. I’m pregnant, and”-she raised a hand out of the water, all fingers folded except the index, which she trained on Dennis-“guess who’s daddy.”

  Juniper stared at her for a moment. Oh, Lady and Lord, I wish we had more contraceptives. Condoms were already scarce, and pills worth their weight in… not gold, in food, even with the way the low-fat diet cut down on fertility.

  “Congratulations,” she said weakly.

  Then she turned her head to Chuck and Judy: “Do you two feel the truly bizarre irony of someone wanting to become a Witch so they can fit in?”

  Judy nodded; then, uncharacteristically, she giggled-it was funny, if you’d spent time in that subculture of misfits.

  “When can you swear us in?” Dennis said. “Sooner the better; I’ve talked with some of the others, and they think so too.”

  “Now, wait a minute, Dennie,” Juniper said warningly. “This isn’t something to rush into. You can become a Dedicant right away, but Initiation isn’t like Christian baptism; it’s more like finding a vocation to the priesthood. You have to study a year and a day, and you have to really mean it.”