Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  While he spoke he sorted through the knives; he knocked the handle off a good-sized pointed kitchen blade, and bound it into the second shaft as he had the machete. Now he had a spear as well, about seven feet long in all.

  By the time the weapons were ready the horses were as well; they both had bags of food thrown across their withers.

  Eric gave him a boost to mount, then sprang on with rather more agility himself; Havel was a good practical horseman, and he'd enjoyed wilderness trips in the saddle, but he hadn't grown up in a family who had a stable at a country property.

  "Wait, and keep out of sight," Havel said to the two women. They ought to be OK. Plenty of food for a week or two. "If we're not back in seven days … well, do what you think best."

  "God go with you," Angelica said, crossing herself.

  They both pressed their thighs to their mounts and the well-trained animals moved, taking the steep section of the trail that joined Highway 12.

  Havel looked up. It was about an hour to the early spring sunset; the sky was already darkening in the east, and the temperature was dropping—it might go below freezing in the dark, and they probably wouldn't dare light a fire, but the horses should help keep them warm.

  "We've got problems," he said to Eric, drawing level with him. The trail was broad enough for that, and soft enough that he could read the tracks fairly easily: one horse galloping first, and then three more strung out after it. Call it twenty miles an hour over this terrain, but they can't keep that up for long, even though these horses are pretty fresh and well-fed.

  "Tell me about it," Eric said.

  The answer was probably rhetorical, but Havel took it literally: "We've got a set of problems, assuming we don't get lucky and find the Three Demon Stooges lying with their necks broken 'cause they couldn't stay on. OK, first, there's the kid with the bow."

  "He didn't hit anything," Eric observed. "And we were pretty close."

  "Not from a horse he didn't, no. But he might be a lot better on foot. Those hunting bows are no joke—look what your kid sister did with one, and neither of us is as tough a target as a bull elk! That means we have to get real close before he sees us. Next, there's tall skinny tattoo-man. You noticed him?"

  "He's worse than the others?"

  "He's a real killer, not a wannabe or a blowhard; I recognize the type. I don't know if he's got any hunting experience, or whether he's got any brains, but he won't panic or freeze up—which the other two might. That's the difference between life and death when it's for real."

  Eric swallowed; he was coming down from the adrenaline high of the brief chaotic fight, and looking a bit pale. But he was a sharp kid, and he probably took the point about freezing up better than he would if Havel had stated it openly.

  "What's the third problem?"

  "They're heading right towards your folks … stop right there!"

  The young man reined in at the snap of command.

  "We come barreling down after them, they're likely to hear us coming and ambush us. Right now they're going hell for leather after Hutton—the black guy. They'll catch him, he can't get off the trail tied to his horse like that, but they won't worry about us if we're real careful."

  "Why not?" Eric said.

  "Because to their way of thinking, we've got the women and the stuff; plus they don't know about your family. They may know about the old cabin, though. Three on two is bad odds. This is going to be real tricky."

  He paused a moment. "You realize we're going to have to kill them all?"

  Eric nodded abruptly, swallowing again; he started to speak, cleared his throat, and then went on: "Yeah, Mike, I do. They'll kill my folks if we don't, won't they? And rape my sisters. And they'll torture that black guy."

  "For starters," Havel said.

  The sun was setting on the mountains behind them, and the beauty of it made him shiver a little as the great trees threw spears of shadow before them. He'd told Signe that the forest wasn't hostile; and that was still true. But men, now … men had been suddenly thrown back each on himself. The cake of law and custom had been broken; now they were all on their own, and their true natures could come out, for good or ill.

  "They're fucking monsters!" Eric burst out.

  Havel shook his head. "No, they're just evil," he replied. "But that's close enough for government work."

  Chapter

  Eight

  "What the hell is going on?" the store owner said, under the sign that read DABLE GARDEN AND LAWN SUPPLY.

  He looked at the two great horse-drawn wagons; curious children freed by the lack of school buses gathered around as well. Chuck Barstow glanced up and down the one street of the little town of Dable; houses faded into farmland not two hundred yards from where he stood, and new leaves were budding on the trees that arched overhead.

  It was only nine o'clock, but there was a line outside the bakery and the little grocery store. A group of men were pushing the dead cars out of the middle of the street, clearing the way. Several of them looked speculatively at the wagons, which made him nervous.

  The strong smell of the horses' sweat filled the air; getting out of Eugene had been a nightmare—if you could call this out of it, since a ribbon of suburb and strip mall extended nearly this far. Nobody had attacked them— quite—or seemed to guess what was under the canvas tilts. He still shuddered and swallowed acid at the back of his throat, thinking of the things he'd seen in the dying city.

  "What do you think has happened?" Chuck said.

  "Don't know," the storekeeper admitted. "Figure it's some sort of big power-out."

  "What about the cars? Radios? The batteries?" Chuck said.

  "Well, that could be one of those government projects— I read about it in Popular Mechanics, a bomb aimed at frying electronic gear. That's what must have happened; a test got out of hand."

  If that was all, I might have believed something like that myself. Aloud he went on: "What about the guns?"

  "Guns aren't working?" the man said, his face going fluid with shock for a second.

  Then he chuckled: "I suppose that's why you folks are carrying the swords and such."

  Chuck had his own Society long sword at his belt and a buckler—a little shield like a steel soup-plate—hooked over it, along with his dagger on his right hip; he'd had those over at Andy and Diana's for coven work. He shoved down a wistful thought about the gear at home in his garage; they'd decided it was too risky to go all the way south through the city for them, and that was that. The rest of the coveners had shovels, or axes, or at least long kitchen knives and baseball bats.

  "What do you think really happened?" the storekeeper said.

  "Well, we figure it's a global catastrophe," Chuck said. "All our technology—anything involving engines or electricity or guns—has suddenly stopped working. Planes fell out of the air. Most of humanity is going to die in the next six months, except for peasant farmers, and a lot of them are going to die too unless they're real lucky. It's the end of the world as we knew it, and of civilization. So we'd like to buy some things from you, if you're still foolish enough to accept money. We're running for our lives and honestly, I advise you to do the same damned thing."

  The storekeeper was a thin balding man with thick glasses. Chuck could see his words being processed and rejected behind them.

  Weirdos, the man thought, almost audibly. Suckers. But well-heeled suckers.

  Chuck shivered internally. He knew he was talking to a man who would die, soon and horribly, simply because he couldn't really believe in what had happened.

  It was all he could do to make himself believe in what had happened, despite the way everything had simply stopped working.

  Too big, he thought. It's just too big. For most people, at least. I'm used to believing in things everyone else doesn't, and I think it's an advantage … and I did try to tell this guy the truth.

  From what he'd seen, the vast majority of people were going to wait awhile for things to return to normal,
or for the Army or the National Guard to show up. Then when they started to get hungry, or the water didn't run anymore, probably a lot of them would panic and go looking for a place where things were normal. The idea that the whole planet had … Changed … was simply too big to grasp; and accepting it meant looking death in the face, the death of a world.

  He shivered and swallowed a bubble of nausea; it was too big to grasp thoroughly, down in the gut, and all at once. By the time most really got it into their heads, it would be too late.

  I'm among the living dead, he thought.

  There were advantages to being one of a collection of misfits who believed in magic.

  "So, what would you folks like?" the thin man said.

  When the world turns weird, the weird get going, Chuck thought. Aloud he went on, suppressing laughter—hysterical laughter that he probably couldn't stop once it started: "Do you accept personal checks?"

  * * * *

  Sally sat beside Juniper on the driver's seat of the Traveler wagon; it was comfortable enough as they rumbled eastward along the dirt road, with a piece of artfully arranged board to support her injured leg.The Portland woman handled the reins quite well for an amateur, but the horses were experienced and knew the way as hills rose on either side.

  Shadows flickered over them from tall roadside trees; between them were vistas of fields on either side, and growing patches of tall conifer forest running up creek-sides and gullies towards the heights on either hand.

  Juniper kept an eye cocked on Cagney and Lacey as her fingers moved on the strings of the guitar and she sang:

  "Fly free your good gray hawk

  To gather the golden rod

  And face your horse unto the clouds

  Above yon gay green wood.

  Oh, it's weary by the Ullswater

  And the misty breakfern way

  Till through the crutch of the Kirkstane pass—"

  The slow staccato clop and crunch of the hooves beat a rhythm below the rumbling wheels, and the rattle and creak of the wagon's wooden framework. She could smell dust from the road, the strong grassy smell of the big platter-footed gray horses, and greenness from forest and field beyond; a wet breath of coolness from Artemis Butte Creek as it swung closer to the south side of the roadway.

  Underneath the country smells was a tang of burning, something they hardly noticed anymore—it had been constant since the Change. The Willamette was a giant trough, and the smoke from the vast city fires would linger for a long time—until the fall rains came to clean the air, most likely.

  Not surprising. With no power, what's the first thing people will do? Make fires, for heat and light and cooking, and when one gets out of control …

  The music made the thoughts go away, at least for a while. When she'd finished the song, Juniper put the guitar behind her—there was a padded rack for it on her traveling wagon—and took the reins back. The road wasn't as straight and level now, as they wound up the creekside towards the mountains.

  "That was nice," Sally said. "I didn't go in much for that sort of music, but … I've missed music. Any sort of music."

  She'd started talking more since she'd stopped being so fearful of the strangers—a fear for which Juniper couldn't blame her, considering the circumstances of their meeting. She could blame her for her soft-pop tastes, but didn't, not aloud.

  There were types of music Juniper liked but didn't play herself—she had a weakness for old-time blues, Americana and even some types of hip-hop—and she'd probably never hear them again.

  My entire CD collection is useless, except as coasters, she thought. And all the old vinyl too. No music but the live kind, from now on. Maybe I should expand my repertoire.

  "I was thinking," Sally said. "About those songs you do … I mean, the knights and swords and horses … I mean, is all that coming back?"

  "All that never existed, not the way the ballads paint it," Juniper said. "I don't think what's coming will be exactly like the real past, either—but it's certainly going to have more in common with it than with the way things were right before the Change. Which is a pity; things were real rough back in the old days."

  Sally smiled. "I suspect it's going to be a weird old world, when things settle down."

  "That it will," Juniper said, musing; it was easier than thinking about the immediate future. "Well … buffalo on the Plains, again, perhaps?"

  Sally nodded. "And not just buffalo. I took wildlife biology and ecology courses before I met Peter, and I did volunteer work at the zoo before Terry was born. Guess which country in the world has the most tigers?"

  Juniper blinked in surprise. "Ah … India? China?"

  Sally shook her head. "The United States of America. Over twenty thousand of them, mostly privately owned."

  "Like that Tiger Lady in New Jersey, who turned out to have a whole pack of them?"

  "Right. A lot of them are in enclosures they could get out of, with some determined effort—places out in the country. Tigers are really adaptable and smart and they breed fast, and without guns shooting at them they're very hard to kill. I'd be surprised if a lot of them didn't get loose … "

  "And there are those exotic-wildlife ranches," Juniper said thoughtfully. "Many of them well out in remote places, to be sure. And ostriches and emus and … why, I saw llamas in plenty the last time I was out Bend way."

  Sally agreed. "If I know them, the volunteers at the zoo in Portland will probably turn the animals there loose when they can't feed them. It'll make for some interesting ecological swings, when people are … rare … again."

  Something else to worry about, Juniper thought; it made a change from obsessively not thinking about what was happening to all the people right now.

  The hills pushed closer to the creekside road, and fresh-painted board fences appeared to their left. She pulled in slightly on the reins, calling out a soft whoa! to the team, and the wagon slowed to an ambling walk as they came level with a tall log-framed gate on the north side of the road.

  "Is this your place?" Sally asked.

  "No, it's the Fairfax farm," Juniper said, pointing with her left hand. "They're the last house below me. It's not really a working farm, more of a hobby place for the Fairfaxes— they're retired potato-growers from Idaho."

  She stood, resting one hand on the brake lever beside her and shading her eyes with the other; it was a warm day for March, and sunny, full of fresh sweet odors; they were traveling by daylight, now that they were so close to home.

  The gravel-and-dirt road they were on ran east up the narrowing valley of Artemis Butte Creek; half a mile ahead it turned north to her land. It was all infinitely familiar to her, even the deep quiet, but somehow strange … perhaps too quiet, without even the distant mutter of a single engine. The Ponderosa-style gate Mr. Fairfax had put up when he bought the fifty-acre property three years ago was to her left, northward; the little stream flowed bright over the rocky bed to her right.

  Hills rose ever more steeply to either side, turning into low forested mountains as they hemmed the valley in north and south; behind them the road snaked west like a yellow-brown ribbon, off towards the invisible flats of the Willamette. A cool breath came from the ridges, shaggy with Douglas fir, vine maple and Oregon oak.

  "You can't see my cabin from here, but it's that way," Juniper went on, shifting her pointing arm a little east of north, up the side of the mountain.

  "It's in the forest on the slope?" Sally asked.

  From here, there didn't look to be any other alternative; the ground reared up from the back of the Fairfax place to the summit three thousand feet above; most of it at forty-five degrees or better, with no sign of habitation. Eastward ridges rose higher to the Cascades proper, snow peaks floating against heaven.

  "No," Juniper said. "You can't see it, not from here, but there's a break in the slope—the side of the hill levels off into sort of a bench along the south side about four hundred feet up. There's a long strip more or less level, a meadow a
mile long and a quarter wide. The creek crosses it from higher up, then turns west when it hits the head of this valley where the hills pinch together, and the road follows it. Right after the Civil War my ancestors arrived and spent two futile lifetimes trying to make a decent living off that patch up there. Maybe it reminded them of East Tennessee! But it stayed in the family when we moved into town in my great-granddad's time."

  "Not very good land?"

  "Middling, what there is of it that isn't straight up and down, but Lady and Lord, it's pretty! There's two creeks and a nice strong spring right by the cabin. All but the bench is in trees, near eight hundred acres of our woods, and more forest all around and behind it. We Mackenzies got to Oregon just a wee bit late for the share-out, you might say—story of our line since we left County Antrim for Pennsylvania in 1730, always just a little behindhand for the pickings."

  "Eight hundred acres sounds fairly substantial."

  "Not if you're a farmer, and the most of it's hillside! My great-uncle Earl the banker kept the farm as a summer place, and bought more of the hills about; he was a hunter, and dabbled in what they called scientific forestry. Then the good man left it to me, the unwed teenage mother, the family's shame, the sorrow and black disgrace of it; everyone said he was senile. Mind you, I'd been spending summers there all my life, and was a bit of a favorite of his, and he adored little Eilir. Well, who wouldn't?"

  Sally seemed to hesitate, then spoke: "Your family has been here a long time then? I thought you sounded . well, a little different." She smiled. "I'm sort of sensitive to accents; I spent my teenage years trying to shed mine."

  "Ah, different I am," Juniper said, grinning and dropping further into a stage-Irish brogue for an instant. "Me sainted mither was a fair Irish rose, d'ye see? From the Gaeltacht, at that—Achill Island."

  In her normal voice: "She met Dad while he was in the Air Force, over in England; his side of the family are Scots-Irish with a very faint touch of Cherokee. Mom had a genuine brogue, bless her, and spoke the Gaelic to me in my cradle; and for my type of music, a hint of the Celt does no harm professionally, so I make a habit of keeping it up. Did make a habit."