Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  Woburn nodded, mouth drawn in a bitter line. "What I need is a big win," he said. "Beating the crap out of a bunch of them. I could get the support I need after that."

  His hand—the one not holding a sandwich—clenched into a fist and came down on his knee. "And then there'd be some changes around here! We're not doing half the things we should. Too much talk, not enough action."

  I detect a certain amount of bitterness, Havel thought.

  It occurred to him that if Woburn did come out on top, things might get quite uncomfortable for temporizers and those who'd tried to play both sides against the middle.

  Hereditary Sheriff Woburn the First? Not my business how things turn out here, he thought. I'm just passing through … and they could do worse. Duke Iron Rod is a chancre that needs cauterizing. Not unlike his big-city patron.

  "What we need," he said aloud, "is to cut up a couple of their raiding parties. For that we need recon. How big a gang do they send out?"

  "Two dozen on a serious raid, give or take," Woburn said. "Enough to swarm any resistance on a single farm and get away fast. Usually they set out around dawn. They probably won't try again for a while after the most recent lot. But I don't see how you can intercept them any better than we can. It's not as if we could sneak someone up onto Cotton wood Butte with a radio!"

  "What we need," Havel went on, "is aerial recon."

  Woburn snorted. "That's not funny. Why not wish for a couple of working tanks?"

  Havel grinned, and saw a frown of puzzlement growing on Woburn's face.

  He went on: "You're forgetting something, Sheriff; truth is, I hadn't thought of it until my last trip down the Columbia Gorge. Electricity doesn't work anymore, and guns neither. But hot air still rises. Got much propane left around here?"

  * * * *

  Billy Waters sat on the curb and watched men and a few women going in and out of the tavern. It had been one before the Change, one of three in Craigswood; it was the only one left now. A sort of sour half-spoiled smell came from the buildings to its rear, and he recognized the scent—mash getting ready for the still, with an undertone of beer fermenting. The thought made him smile a bit, and he hummed a few bars of "Copperhead Road"; then the pain in his lips brought reality crashing back.

  The day was bright and warm, but he shivered. Memories tormented him; the smooth heat of the whiskey going down his throat, and the sweet hiss of the cap coming off the beer bottle, the first cool draught chasing the fire all the way to his belly …

  Just one, he thought. Havel wouldn't mind if it was just one. He never told anyone not to take one drink. Hellfire, he likes his beer, and a whiskey now and-then.

  A horse-drawn wagon made from a cut-down truck went past while he was thinking, and nursing the bruises. He touched his face gingerly, trying to summon up enough anger to get him across the street and into the tavern.

  The problem was that he couldn't; all he could feel was fear.

  He could feel anger at Jane, for making him hit her, and at that deceitful little bitch Nancy, and at Reuben for trying to hit his own father, but when he thought about Havel it was as if a white light filled his head, like it had the day of the Change.

  All he could feel was the pain and the fear.

  I can stand up to him! he thought. I can—

  "Excuse me," someone said.

  Waters looked up. The man standing over him on the sidewalk looked nondescript; not young, not middle-aged, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, cowboy boots and Budweiser billed cap.

  "Yeah?" he said.

  "You're the guy who can make bows, aren't you? Name of Billy Waters?"

  "Yeah," Waters said.

  "I heard how you got beat up just because you spanked your kid. That doesn't sound right."

  Waters levered himself stiffly to his feet, squinting at the unremarkable man. That also wasn't how he'd heard that people in Craigswood had gotten the story, either. Most of them who'd heard anything at all had been treating him like something nasty they scraped off their shoes on a hot day. And Craigswood was small, about a thousand people before the Change, half that now. He knew how news spread in a setting like that, having spent most of his life in one small town or another; the largest place he'd ever lived was Little Rock, and that only for a few months.

  "Smith," the man said, offering his hand. "Jeb Smith. Thought I might like to talk to you about bows, and other things. Care for a beer?"

  Waters's eyes flicked to the tavern, with its neon sign that probably hadn't worked before the Change and certainly didn't now. He shook the man's hand, but the white explosion of light seemed.to fill his head again. Someone would talk …

  "Ah … " he began.

  Jeb laughed. "Not that horse piss. It's overpriced anyway, you have to trade half an hour's work for a glass, or something pretty fancy in the way of hard goods. No, I've got some home brew that isn't doing anything but filling up a crock."

  He released Waters's hand, but steered him along for a moment by the elbow. "Seems to me a man who knows how to make bows should have a better position," he said. "And be able to sit down and have a beer when he feels like it."

  "Damned right," Waters said. "Damned right. It's like being in the fucking Marines!"

  They entered a nondescript ranch-style bungalow; the two on either side were abandoned; all the lawns had been plowed up for vegetables.

  Jeb waved a hand at the houses on either side: "Stupid bastards are out somewhere shoveling cowshit for a rancher," he said. "There are easier ways of making a liv-ing, even these days."

  "Yeah," Billy Waters said again.

  "Me, I swap things and, ummm, sort of arrange deals," Smith said as they seated themselves in the dim coolness of the living room. "You need something, like say an old hand pump, or parts for a windmill, and you come to Jeb. Jeb can find it, or put you in touch with someone who has it or can make it. All for a very reasonable commission."

  A woman came out with a pitcher of beer; it wasn't refrigerated, but drops of condensation slid down the sides of the glass, and Billy licked his lips. He had time to notice how good-looking she was before she handed him the tumbler.

  "Ahhh," he said as the first glorious swallow slid down.

  It wasn't like anything he'd tasted before the Change, but it was undoubtedly beer. For a wonder, he didn't feel like gulping it and going right for another, either. Maybe it was because, for the first time in months, he wasn't bored.

  "Your daughter, Jeb?"

  "Naw, girlfriend," the other man said, giving her a casual slap on the butt as she went past. "Sort of. A man with connections has got more, oh, call it bargaining power, these days."

  Waters looked around. The house was well furnished; it had an iron heating-stove in one corner of the living room, with its sheet-metal chimney already installed, and he could see through an archway that the kitchen had a wood cooking range. That was wealth, these days. Waters grinned; it reminded him of the one his mother had had, and she'd grown up no-doubt-about-it poor.

  There was also a good hunting crossbow racked beside the door, and a belt with a bowie and hatchet scabbarded on it, with a steel helmet—an old pre-Kevlar Army model—and a plywood shield faced in sheet metal.

  "So, you one of the sheriffs posse?" he asked.

  "Nope. Not interested in getting myself killed for Woburn's benefit," Smith said. "Any more than busting my ass playing farmer."

  He smiled and leaned forward. "Let's talk."

  * * * *

  And I thought that things would get easier after the harvest, Juniper thought bitterly. And surely after we beat the Protector's men back from Sutterdown.

  Aloud she spoke to Laughton with patient gentleness: "Sheriff, I really can't turn the McFarlanes down if they want to join us. Even though it's inconvenient for all concerned."

  He was looking mulish again. Juniper fought an impulse to bury her face in her hands, and an even stronger one to grab her fiddle and head out into the woods with Cuchulain and lean agains
t a tree and play until her nerves un-knotted and she floated away on a tide of music.

  Instead she took another sip of chilled herbal tea and looked out the north-facing window of her loft-bedroom-office for an instant and sighed. August was hot this year and there was a little smoke haze in the air over the mountains from the big burn further northeast, towards the Three Sisters; she worried about it spreading, too.

  At least I'm not huge yet. Showing, but not huge. That will be later, when it's cool and there's nothing much to do.

  She turned back to Laughton, looking over his shoulder through the west-facing dormer. She could see a squared timber swinging up on its rope, running from the two-horse team through the big block-and-tackle on the ground to the log tripod at the top of the half-completed gatehouse tower. Dennis's voice rang out, calling to Sally at the horses' heads; she halted the team and then backed them step by careful step, and hands on the scaffolding around the gatehouse guided the timber down.

  "I know it makes things awkward, Sheriff," she said.

  The gatehouse and nearly finished palisade were reassuring. So was Sally, with her tummy starting to bulge out over her chinos. Life went on; children got born, crops got planted, things got built. They'd get through somehow, Lady and Lord helping.

  "You think it doesn't make it awkward for us, too?" she asked, tapping the map on the table between them.

  That was of the Artemis Creek area, from the high hills north and east of Dun Juniper, down through the spreading V-shaped swale that held the old Fairfax place and out into the flats around Sutterdown, with the Butte beyond.

  "Even out of Dun Carson"—the old Carson homestead, now well on its way to being a fortified steading—"getting our people up to work this farm will be a nightmare of time wasted traveling back and forth. What we'rhight talk about is a swap for something closer, if any of your folk are interested."

  "Hey, wait!" Rodger McFarlane said.

  "Well, if you don't want to join and put the land at the clan's disposal … "

  Maisie McFarlane stamped on her husband's foot under the table; at least that was what Juniper assumed, from the way her shoulders moved slightly and her tight smile and the way he smothered a yelp. She'd probably heard the sudden hope Juniper tried to conceal.

  The farmer went on: "We certainly do want to join, Lady Juniper. It's not that everyone in Sutterdown doesn't do their best, but we're scared spitless out on the edge the way we are, never getting a good night's sleep. And we want school for our kids and stuff—we're just too far out and on our own we can't spare them from work. It's just . it's good land, two hundred and eighty acres."

  "I thought we'd be moving in here," Maisie McFarlane said.

  I would really like to find that tree and my fiddle, Juniper thought. Instead she made her voice kind and went on: "The palisade around Dun Carson is going up very quickly, and it'll be as safe as this."

  Or nearly. Maybe I am turning into a politician, she thought, and made a sign of aversion under the table.

  And the McFarlanes had brought in a good harvest—the fighting hadn't touched them much, though it had scared them green when the Protector's men marched past.

  I must not just see them as a nuisance, or an opportunity, she told herself sternly. They're people and terrified. For their children and kin and the people they've taken in, as well as themselves. And they're right to be terrified. Mother-of-All, help me be wise!

  "There's still a problem," Laughton said. "Look, we're all grateful for the help you gave us, in the fight and afterward. But the fact is the people who've joined you since— the Hunters, the Dowlingtons, the Johnsons, now the McFarlanes—they're not only putting islands of your territory in ours, they're the ones with the biggest grain reserves— and everyone in town pitched in to help get that grain harvested. We've got a system for sharing things around, but it's … Lady Juniper, it's all just falling apart without Reverend Dixon. Reverend Jennings . it's just not the same."

  "I can't say that I liked Dixon," Juniper conceded. "But he was a strong man and he could get people to do the needful."

  She sighed. "Sheriff, you can tell your townspeople that nobody's going to starve this coming winter because someone else has joined us. We'll see about the … swapping."

  Laughton smiled as he rose and shook her hand, but he had that odd look in his eyes again—the one she'd seen on the day of the battle.

  "Lady Juniper, you may find that there's a simple solution to that problem; everyone in Sutterdown joining up. Barring the Reverend Jennings and a few dozen others."

  Urk! She hoped she didn't look as sandbagged as she felt.

  * * * *

  When Laughton and the McFarlanes were gone, Juniper did drop her head into her hands and groan. Chuck let her alone as a few others filtered in: his wife, Judy, Dennis and Sally, Andy and Diana, and Sam Aylward.

  Eilir went out and came back with lunch—bread and butter, cheese and fruit; the Sunrise apples on the old Fairfax place were ripe, and the dairy's output was going up fast.

  Eat, Mom, she signed.

  One of the advantages of using Sign was that you could talk with your mouth full. She had a crisp red-yellow Sunrise held in her mouth while she spoke.

  I'm not hungry, Juniper replied.

  You'll be hungry once you start eating. Then all you reverend elders can yell at each other and wave your arms in the air. I'm going off with the book scavenging detail.

  And I envy you that, Juniper signed. It's that mall place today, right?

  Right. A lot of useful handicraft stuff there, and I'm hoping for a copy of Arrows of the Queen or Somewhere to Be Flying.

  Be careful.

  Always. Bye, everyone!

  Juniper watched her bounce out of the room with boundless fourteen-year-old energy, and lifted a slice of the bread without enthusiasm. Her stomach was knotted with tension, but the smell of the fresh bread and the half-melted butter on it made the organ in question rumble instead and she bit in. After that, the digestive system quit complaining and started to do its job.

  Would that everyone else did the same!

  "There are just too many people here now."

  Judy shrugged. "What we've been doing is working. Everyone loves a—what's that saying?"

  "An te ata thuas oltar deoch air; an te ata thios buailter. He who succeeds is toasted, who fails gets kicked. I feel toasted, all right—over an open fire!"

  "You've done a wonderful job," Chuck said soothingly. "We're alive, aren't we? Everyone's got enough to eat, don't they? That's why we're flooded with people. After what's happened, they're desperate for something that looks secure."

  Juniper sighed. "When we started, it was like a big family and everyone agreed on most things, but you can't do that when there are … "

  Someone handed her a list.

  " … Goddess gentle and strong, a hundred and fifty not counting kids!"

  She waved the paper over her head. "I can't keep people straight without a list, for sweet Brigid's sake; I'm turning into a bureaucrat. Even when I was sleeping in my car, I didn't sink that low! And we're spending more and more time talking. What are we going to do about it? I want everyone to have their say, but it takes forever!"

  Chuck rubbed at his sun-faded sandy beard. "Well, let's stick with the model we picked—it's worked so far. Scottish clans got a lot bigger than this," he said. "How did they manage it?"

  "By bashing heads, a good deal," Juniper said. "If the songs are to be trusted. And the Chief, the head of the Name and Ilk, what he said went, unless he got so crazy they arranged for him to accidentally get shot in the back while out hunting. Of course, he didn't have everyone living at his Hall, either, though he kept open house and any clansfolk could come sit at his table."

  "Lucky him," Diana said, looking as frazzled as Juniper felt. "Do you have any idea how cumbersome it's getting to be, cooking three meals a day for a hundred and fifty people at three locations? I mean, when Andy and me ran MoonDance back before th
e Change at least people had a choice. Now everyone eats the same thing—I'd be complaining about it myself, if I didn't know I couldn't do anything about it. But whenever anyone else bitches about the food, I feel like throwing a cleaver at them! At least there's enough now."

  "Crime," Dennis said. They all looked at him, and he went on: "Eventually, someone's going to commit a crime—I don't expect it ever to be a big deal, but eventually we're going to have to have some equivalent of judges and courts."

  Juniper groaned again and buried her hands in her hair, suppressing another urge—this time, it was pulling out handfuls.

  "I kept wishing we weren't in a desperate scramble to grow enough food to get us through the winter," she said. "Ah, how fine things will be, I thought, when the grain's in and we have a few months before the fall plowing when we only have to work hard, and not fall into bed like a cut tree every evening. And now, I'm almost nostalgic for the fear of starving. At least it kept people focused!"

  A sigh. "And Laughton was hinting that everyone in Sut-terdown wants to join us—Judy, you do it for me!"

  "Gevalt!" she said.

  Everyone else made sympathetic noises. It was the songs that gave her the idea eventually; she ran through a half-dozen ballads in her head, searching the lyrics for clues.

  "Look, as I remember it, the way the old Gaels did it, the Chief of the Name handled the big things—perpetual feuding, large-scale cattle theft, and how to keep others from stealing their cattle, and which doomed rebellion to support and get everyone killed in—and the … hmmm, I think they were called septs—sub-clans, I'm not sure whether it was an Irish word or Scottish—did the local work. Under a tacksman—usually a relative of the Chief. Probably it wasn't as neat as that, and the Victorians tidied it all up the way they did the tartans, but that's the bones of it."

  Chuck rubbed his beard again. "You know, splitting up the land we've got—and are getting—into a bunch more separate farms would save a lot of time and effort. My time and effort, to start with. We've got enough farmers, and they've all had experience in the new methods—well, old methods—by now. There's no real need for me to go around saying 'hoe this row' anymore. We could draw up a general plan and let each … well, call it each sept … manage the day-to-day stuff on their own. We could still get together for big jobs."