Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  Grab an armful-sized bundle of stalks as the cradle had left them, move them forward, grab and move, grab and move, until you had enough for a sheaf—a bundle as thick as you could comfortably span with both arms. Then you held it in front of you, grabbed a handful just below the grain ears, bent the straw around the whole bundle at the middle, twisted and tucked the end underneath to hold it … and then you did it all over again, and again.

  So this was what the phrase mind-numbing toil was invented for, she thought. I wonder how many others are making that discovery!

  At that, most of them were doing about half what the books said an experienced worker could finish in a day. She tried not to think again, mentally humming a song instead. It was easier if you could get into a semitrance state, where time ceased to flow minute-by-minute. Gradually her hands and legs and back seemed to move of their own volition.

  A heartbreaking share of the grain in the valley wasn't being harvested at all, going to waste from plague and fear and lawlessness, something that made her stomach twist to think of.

  Then someone called out; she stopped in midreach and looked up, shocked to see the sun past the noon mark.

  "Blessed be!" she said, and many more voices took it up; there were shouts of sheer joy, and some of the younger harvesters managed an impromptu bit of dancing.

  They weren't nearly finished anymore; they were finished. Everyone grouped around her in a circle; she wiped a sleeve over her face and gathered up the last of the wheat. First she tied it off as she had the others; then she went to work shaping it, with legs and arms and a twist of straw for a mouth.

  "Hail to the Goddess of the ripened corn!" she said, laughing and exhausted, bowing before the sheaf. "We thank You, Mother-of-All, and the Harvest King who is Your consort."

  Later they'd take the dolly back to the Hall; and then there were the rites of Lughnassadh next week, when the Oak King gave way to the Holly. But for now they all admired the Queen Sheaf as it was carried across the field towards the southeast corner and shade on the end of a scythe-shaft.

  "Go us!" someone yelled, and everyone took it up for a moment, pumping their fists in the air. "Go us! Mackenzies rule!"

  "Do you realize," someone else said reverently, when the chant had died down, "That from now on we can eat bread every day?"

  "In the sweat of our brows," Juniper said, grinning and wiping hers.

  That got a chorus of groans. But it's true, she thought. And the bread is very, very welcome.

  They all picked up their tools and weapons and followed the Sheaf to the southeast corner of the field where an oak and a group of Douglas firs cast a grateful shade. There were four big aluminum or plastic kegs of water on two-by-four X-trestles as well; she drank, washed face and hands, peeled off bandana and shirt, poured several cupfuls over her head, drank again . Heat seemed to radiate away from her, like a red-hot poker cooling, as if her hair was flame in truth.

  "Dinner!" someone cried.

  Eilir drove the delivery cart, which was one of her chores; two-wheeled, with a single ex-cow-pony between the shafts. The soup came in two cauldrons, one double-walled aluminum, the other thick pottery; both types held the heat well. After they ate, they could help the loaders get as much of the cut wheat as possible out of the fields today.

  Congratulations! Eilir signed, as eager hands unloaded. What a beautiful Queen Sheaf! Now we can get back to work on the palisade!

  Bits of straw and grass and twigs flew in her direction; she giggled and held her buckler up in front of her face to protect herself from the mock attack before she turned the cart with a deft twitch of the reins and trotted off.

  Juniper ambled over and raised the lid on the pottery container, full of Eternal Soup—but a considerably richer variety than spring's.

  "Well, blessed be," she said. "Onions, carrots, peas, all still recognizable. Wild mushrooms. Turnips. Potatoes."

  There were chunks of mutton, too, not yet boiled down to stock; she addressed them in a tone dripping with sympathy: "Blessed be—is that the G-L-L I see? Greetings, Goddamn Little Lamb! You've gone completely to pieces. I'm so sorry … actually, I'm sort of happy to see you like this!"

  Everyone laughed at that; even Sam Aylward smiled, though it looked as if it hurt.

  Goddamn Little Lamb was—had been, until day before yesterday—the stupidest of the ewes in the clan's painfully acquired little flock; which was saying something, since they'd discovered that the hardest part of raising sheep was keeping them from killing themselves. They might be near-as-no-matter brainless in every other respect, too stupid to walk through an open gate, but in self-immolation they showed boundless ingenuity.

  GLL had come close to taking several inexperienced shepherds with her while she threw herself off high places, nearly hung herself on low-lying branch forks, tried to poison herself on unsuitable vegetation, and finally succeeded in drowning herself as she attempted to reach some floating weeds in the millpond, got bogged in the mud, and sank nearly out of sight. Eilir had gone in with a rope to pull the carcass out …

  The good part in herding sheep was that you usually didn't have to slaughter them yourself; all you had to worry about was getting to the body before the coyotes did.

  Besides the soup there were baskets of—

  "Oh, smell that smell!" Chuck said, reaching in for the bread under the towel.

  The loaves were round, mushroom-shaped as if they'd been raised and baked in flowerpots—mostly because Diana and Andy had found that clay flowerpots did make excellent containers for baking, and there were a lot of them available. The loaves had an eight-spoked pattern cut into their dark-brown tops; the sides and bottoms were honey-brown, with just the right hollow sound when flicked, and the coarse bread made from stone-ground flour was fresh enough that it steamed gently when torn open by eager fingers.

  Every bit as good as they baked at MoonDance, Juniper thought happily. A bit crumbly—they were using soft white t winter wheat—but very, very tasty!

  There was butter too, now that they'd gotten more milkers; creamy yellow butter in Tupperware containers, strong-tasting and rich—the mill turned a big barrel-churn as well as grindstones. The first cheeses were already curing in the damp chill of the springhouse beside it. Juniper anointed her chunk of loaf with a lavish hand, watching it melt into the coarse brown bread.

  People settled down to concentrated munching; it seemed like a long time since this morning's oatmeal and fruit. Juniper felt an inner glow when she went back for a second bowl and realized that there was enough for everyone to eat until they were full, at an ordinary field supper rather than a special occasion.

  That hadn't happened much until the last few weeks.

  How many times did I get up from a meal with my stomach still clenching, and have to go right back to work? she thought. Far too many. Being that hungry hurts. Goddess Mother-of-All, Lord of the ripened grain, thank You for the gifts of Your bounty!

  There was even a basket of fruit, Elberta peaches, their skins blushing red amid the deeper crimson of Bing cherries. She snaffled two of the peaches and a double handful of the cherries; most of the fruit crop was being dried and pressed into blocks or turned into jam or otherwise preserved, but they were so good fresh from the tree. The juice dripped from her chin onto her throat and breasts, but there was no point in being dainty; the bathhouse awaited anyway, and the harvesting crews got first turn.

  Chuck looked over at her. "Got one of those deep-wisdom Celtic sayings to lay on us, your Ladyship?" he grinned.

  She threw a peach pit back at him. "Indeed and I do.' Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin."

  "There's no hearth like your own hearth?" he said. "Hey, no fair, that's not relevant!"

  "Close but no cigar," she said, waggling her eyebrows and leering. "This one sounds a lot like that, but it actually means: There's no sore ass like your own sore ass."

  That got a universal, rueful chuckle. "Hey, what about a song?" Judy asked.

&
nbsp; "Well, I'm not playing today," Juniper said, with a pang. "Not until my hands are in better shape." That brought groans of disappointment, and they sounded heartfelt.

  It's different, in a world where all music has to be live, she thought. I'm good, but am I as good as everyone says, these days? Or is it just that there's no competition?

  Although Chuck and a few others were gifted amateurs, come to that.

  Surprisingly, Sam Aylward produced a wooden flute and began to pipe; Chuck grinned and started to tap a stone on the back of his scythe-blade for accompaniment; someone else beat a little tambourine-shaped hand drum they'd brought along this morning—songs were a lot more usual on the way to work than afterward.

  She recognized the tune at once, cleared her throat and began, her strong alto ringing out in the slow, cadenced measure of the song's first verse:

  "Let me tell the tale of my father's kin

  For his blood runs through my veins—

  No man's been born

  Who could best John Barleycorn

  For he's suffered many pains!"

  Then a little faster:

  "They've buried him well beneath the ground

  And covered over his head

  And these men from the West

  Did solemnly attest

  That John Barleycorn was dead!

  John Barleycorn was dead!

  But the warm spring rains

  Came a'pouring down

  And John Barleycorn arose—"

  It was a very old tune, and popular:

  "And upon that ground he stood without a sound

  Until he began to grow!

  And they've hired a man with a knife so sharp

  For to cut him through the knees—"

  More and more joined her, but then the voices jarred to a sudden halt.

  A haunting huu-huu-huu from the west brought heads around; that was the alarm from the mounted sentries, blowing on horns donated by slaughtered cattle. Everyone felt uncomfortably exposed here; the valley floor was dead flat and the road net was still in good shape; with bicycles raiders could strike from anywhere. Horses were faster in a sprint, but men on bicycles could run horses to death over a day or two.

  Aylward laid down his flute and rose as smoothly as if he hadn't spent the hours since dawn swinging a twenty-pound cradle scythe, usually with half a sheaf of wheat on it. He picked up his great yellow longbow and strung it the quick, dirty and dangerous medieval way—right foot between string and stave, the horn tip braced against the instep from behind the anklebone, hip against the riser, flex the body back and push the right arm forward and slide the cord up into the nock at the upper tip.

  Juniper used the more conservative thigh-over-riser method for her lighter weapon, and then relaxed slightly at the next horn call.

  All around her people paused as they reached for jacks and bucklers and spears and quivers.

  Huu-huu-huu, huuuuu-huuuuu, repeated twice. Three short and two long meant friendly visitors, not attacking bandits, in the current code.

  The sentry rode over the ditch and into the field from the western edge, raising Juniper's brows again; it was Cynthia Carson Mackenzie, with ends of blond hair leaking past the metal-and-leather cheekpieces of her bowl helmet. She was in jack and full fig—longbow and quiver across her back, buckler hooked over the scabbard of the shortsword at her belt, and spear in her right hand. That also held the reins of a second horse.

  "Where's Ray?" Juniper asked as she pulled up.

  Sentries never operated in groups of less than two, and it was her brother's mount the blond girl was leading, with the stirrups tied up to the saddle. The usual patrol was three, and three threes to make a squad; mystically appropriate, and solidly practical.

  "He's with the others," Cynthia said. "We thought you'd better come quick, Lady Juniper. It's Sutterdown—they're here, by our … by the old Carson place."

  "Someone from Sutterdown?" she replied.

  She took a moment to put her shirt back on; Sutterdown was a straitlaced community these days. Then she slung her quiver over her back on its baldric and thrust her strung bow through the carrying loops beside it before she buckled on her sword and dirk.

  "We told them no visitors until the sickness passes out there."

  "No, not just visitors. The whole town, and a lot of others. Lady, you'd better come."

  "Coming, coming," Juniper said, alarmed. "Sam, get the word out."

  Anything out of the ordinary was likely to be a threat. Not while we're getting the grain in, please! she thought, as she put a foot in the stirrup, swung aboard, and took the reins.

  Have they gotten hit by the plague, Goddess forfend?

  That wouldn't make them up stakes and head for Mackenzie land, though. Nobody let in anyone who might be infected; and anyway, from what she'd heard, Sutter-down had been singularly fortunate—which in turn was fortunate for Clan Mackenzie, since Sutterdown and its associated area neatly blocked off the rest of the Willamette and made a buffer against the Death.

  They cut across the laneway opposite, through a field in shaggy pasture with a couple of dozen recently acquired and painfully thin ranch-country Herefords gorging themselves in it, and then along a dirt-surfaced, tree-lined farm lane in grateful shade to the old Carson place.

  The laneway from that gave out onto a paved local road; the house was on a slight rise, brick-built, a hundred and twenty years old, and until recently it had been bowered in century-old maples and oaks and ash trees.

  Those had been cut down and a square was pegged out about the farmstead, where the ditch, mound and palisade would go when they had time after the harvest. Juniper regretted the trees—they'd been beautiful, and had stood so long—but you couldn't leave cover near someplace you intended to live. In the meantime it was their border post and base for the frontier patrols.

  Juniper's eyes widened as she saw the crowd filling the road beyond the house. There were at least a hundred people there, both sexes and all ages, and a round dozen vehicles, horse- or hand-drawn; all of the men and a lot of the women were armed, mostly with improvised weapons of various sorts, spears made from fitting knives to the ends of poles, pruning hooks, axes, machetes, a scattering of bows and crossbows—and Aylward-style longbows they'd bought in the past few months. Few had any body armor, or worthwhile shields.

  They also looked thinner and dirtier and more ragged than her clan on average, and a few were bandaged; some of the bandages seeped blood. She recognized individuals from Sutterdown, and the farms about that centered on it.

  If they've run into a bandit attack they can't handle, that's bad. That's very bad.

  The area between her lands and Sutterdown had been tranquil—by post-Change standards—not least because both communities were fairly well organized, and acted together against reivers and Eaters.

  Most of them rested quietly, except for the crying of children. There were five armed Mackenzies strung across the road, spears or bows in their hands. Three of the Sutterdown folk stood arguing with the guards, trying to come closer and then flinching back at shouts of warning. It didn't look like a fight brewing—they wouldn't have brought their families along if they were going to try and run the clan off the disputed Smith land—but she didn't like it at all. They knew about the quarantine regulations; and had their own, for that matter.

  "Stand back there, and we'll talk," she called as she reined in; the horse's hooves rang hollow on the asphalt.

  Juniper dismounted; no sense in towering over the men waiting for her and putting their backs up even more. Men were strange about things like that, even the best of them—which these weren't.

  "Sheriff Laughton," she said, nodding in greeting as polite as you could make without coming close enough to shake hands; he was a middling man of about her own age, in a long leather coat covered with links of light chain sewn on with steel wire.

  "Dr. Gianelli." Slight and dark and balding, glaring at her.

  "Reverend Dixon." H
eavyset before the Change, sagging now, and glaring twice as hard as the doctor, in a black business suit and tie that fit him like a flopping sack. There was a mottled purple look to his face that might be anger, or might be ill health, or both. Judy would have prescribed a regimen of herbs and meditation to control choler, and willow bark to thin the blood.

  "We need to talk to you, privately," the preacher said abruptly, stepping forward; he had a Bible in his hand, with a golden cross gleaming on the cover and his finger inside it marking a place.

  One of the Mackenzies leveled his spear and prodded the air six feet in front of the Sutterdown man with a growl. The bright whetted steel and the tone stopped the cleric as if the point had been at his chest. The spearman spoke: "That's Lady Juniper, to you! The Mackenzie gave you your titles! Show some manners, cowan. You're on our land."

  Juniper held out her hand soothingly, making a patting motion at the air. "Ray, let's be tactful. Manners work both ways."

  Then she turned back to the Sutterdown leadership; as she did so she stripped the glove off her right hand. One of the flaps from a burst blister had been bothering her. She bit it off and spat it aside, then caught the odd looks directed at her.

  "We're just finishing up our harvest?" she explained, puzzled. The Sutterdown folk would be too.

  "You're harvesting, personally?" Sheriff Laughton said. "Lady Juniper," he added hastily as the guards scowled.

  "I'm the clan's leader by the clan's choice," she said shortly. And to Anwyn with your stupid rumors about the Witch Queen.

  Aloud she went on: "I'm not their master. Everyone takes a turn at the hard work here. And what brings you here on this fine day, with all your people?"

  Dixon took a deep breath. From what she'd heard, he was the driving force who'd held Sutterdown together, persuaded and shamed and tongue-lashed and sometimes outright forced people into cooperating and doing what was necessary; a strong man, if not a good one, and very shrewd. The fact that he was here asking for help showed that.