"Maybe he's decided to just defend what he has?" the elder Larsson said hopefully. "After all, he's got most of western Washington, and the Columbia Valley nearly to the Dalles. Going on for a couple of hundred thousand people, too. That's the biggest, well, country anyone's put together on the whole west coast between Acapulco and Alaska, as far as we know. Biggest single political unit this side of New Deseret, probably."
Havel shook his head; everyone else except the elder Larsson echoed him.
"Nah, Ken. Wishing don't make it so. That string of cas-ties are meant as a base for attack—they're a lot more than he needs for defense, or even holding down the countryside, and like Eric said, it's costing him a lot. It's the shield to his sword, it lets him use small garrisons for cover and put the maximum numbers into a field army. He's got more full-time troopers than anyone else but he doesn't have a big militia he can call out when the balloon goes up."
Signe nodded. "Plus he's just not the type to stop; and besides, the Willamette's the best farmland around and he hasn't got more than a third of it. Plus we're the only real opposition this side of Pendleton and the Yakima; the rest, it's just odds and ends, little villages and a few towns that made it through, and the ranchers over in the Bend country. If it weren't for us at his back, he could snap it all up as far as Idaho and south to California—that's empty, but a lot of it would be worth resettling eventually. He's gobbled up everything he can without taking us on directly, so now he's going to do that."
"And he's bigger but we're growing faster these last few years, which is likely to make him sort of impatient," Ken acknowledged. "Not least because we keep getting escap-ers from his territories."
"I'd want to run away too, the way he squeezes his people." Eric scowled. "I saw more of that than I like to remember, up McMinnville way."
"Which is how he can do all that building," Havel said. "You can build big without machinery; that's how the pyramids got made. But it costs." He contemplated the map in his mind's eye for a moment longer and went on: "Not to mention keeping all those soldiers drilling year-round. Hmm… There's still a gap in that chain of forts. Just east of the river—-the French Prairie."
"Foundations," Ken said. "The subsoil there's like jelly, and getting worse. I wouldn't want to put in anything with a forty-foot curtain wall and towers. Chancy."
In a fake-British accent he went on: "But the fourth time, it stood!"
Pamela snickered, but the younger Bearkillers gave him blank looks.
He threw up his hands: "Christ, didn't any of you people watch Monty… oh, never mind. Anyway, that area was half swamp in the old days and it's going back that way."
"Damn it, if he put as much effort into keeping up the levees and drains as he does into soldiers and forts, he wouldn't need to try and take away our land!" Eric Larsson snapped.
"To be fair, I don't think there are enough people left in the Valley to keep the old drainage system up with no power tools, and even without it there's more land than we can cultivate anyway," Signe said. "Not that I want to be fair to Arminger. I doubt any of the people on our side do."
Havel growled with exasperation. "That's the problem. We don't have a 'side.' Arminger has a side. What we've got is an alliance of four major and twelve smaller… university-run city-states, theocracies, clans, village republics, whatever-we-ares… trying to fight a single dictatorship. A damned loose alliance, at that. The only way we can do anything collectively is for all sixteen of us to sit and argue until it's unanimous. You know the definition of a committee? The only life-form with more than four legs and no brain."
"Makes you miss the good old US of A," Kenneth Lars-son said. "Gridlock and all."
"I always did," Havel replied seriously.
"How come you never pushed to start it up again, then?" Eric Larsson said curiously. "I mean, you never let us use the Stars and Stripes or anything when anyone suggested it."
"Because that country's dead," Havel said, an edge in his voice. "It died the night of the Change. I met a guy in Europe once who said the basic thing about Americans was that we'd never had a Dark Ages, just the Enlightenment. I've got news for you: the Dark Ages arrived, in spades, March seventeenth, nine years ago. Flying Old Glory would be… disrespectful. Like someone digging up their mother and using the old girl's skin for shoe leather. I may have lost my country but I'm not going to desecrate its grave."
Eric winced. His mother, Mary, had been injured when their Piper Chieftain crashed in Idaho the day of the
Change, and then was killed by bandits in a rather gruesome fashion not long after. The other Larssons glared at Havel.
"Sorry. Tact not my strong suit." He sighed and rose. "OK, we'll get the reports circulated and have a staff council meeting day after tomorrow. Christ Jesus, but I hate annotating reports and holding meetings!"
Ken Larsson relaxed and chuckled. He'd been a businessman, and the son and grandson of wealthy magnates, while the Havels had all been miners since they arrived from Finland in the 1890s—and got their unpronounceable Myllyharju changed to something the Czech pay clerk found easier to write. When they weren't feeding the steel mills they enlisted in the marines, or went logging, or worked a hardscrabble farm they'd bought around 1900. All very worthy and salt-of-the-earth, but…
"Welcome to the executive suite, my proletarian son-in-law," he said. "Ain't it grand?"
Havel snorted. "C'mon, Signe. I need a bath."
And now I need a shower, he thought several hours later, lazing with his hands behind his head and feeling the same vague longing for a cigarette he'd had at times like this since he quit in 1992.
The master bedroom of Larsdalen still showed the influence of poor Mary Larsson, Ken's Boston-Brahmin first wife; the pale wood of the window frames and the furniture, the light graceful lines and perhaps a lingering odor of patchouli. They'd made changes: Signe's collection of stuffed animals and horse prints, a few of her own paintings, bookshelves, and the stands holding their armor and weapons. He didn't like sleeping with the hilt more than arm's-reach away.
He watched as Signe went through into the nursery to check on Mike Jr., who was napping, then watched appreciatively as she walked back in, honey-pale curves dappled by the evening light through the west-facing windows, sleek as a leopardess. The big house was comfortable enough for walking around in the buff; Ken Larsson had rerigged the central heating system to work on wood fuel.
"So, how's the big fellah?" he asked.
"Sleeping like a baby, which is sort of appropriate."
Havel chuckled. She went on: "Got to get his rest, if he's going to be Lord Bear Two. Or even just help one of his sisters be Lady Bear… that sort of sounds funny, you know? Like Goldilocks."
It wasn't anything he said in the silence that followed…
"One of them is going to be Lord Bear Two, right, Mike?"
He stretched. "A little early to be thinking about that, isn't it, alskling?" he said casually. "I'm not planning on retiring anytime soon. And the Outfit will have some input too, hey?"
"And what about your bastard?" she suddenly hissed.
I would really have preferred this subject not come up when I was naked, Havel thought. It's sort of a psychological disadvantage.
With the thought, he swung out of the rumpled bed, belted on a bathrobe and went over to the sideboard—another innovation—to pour himself a stiff bourbon. Then he turned, leaning back with his arms crossed.
"OK, Signe, you want the lowdown on it, yeah, he is my kid. At least, it's possible—I can't swear who Juney was seeing about then, but his looks do make it highly probable, you bet. I'm not denying it. I was willing to let it pass, but I'm not denying it. Not here in private, not to you. I won't make it public unless you insist."
Two spots of red had appeared on Signe's cheeks; the flush spread downward in a way he found distracting even now, as her chest heaved.
"Is that all you've got to say?"
"No. In the whole time since the Change, I'
ve been with exactly two women, you and her—and with her, it was exactly once. Run the timing, alskling. That was in goddamned April of Year Zero. We weren't married. We weren't involved."
"That was because—"
"Yeah, I know. I was there when we came back and killed the Three Stooges from hell, right? But the fact remains that we weren't involved. Yes, if I'd been screwing around, you'd have a right to want to carve my liver out.
But I haven't been; not by any reasonable definition. You're the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with."
"But little Rudi makes it a bit awkward, doesn't he?"
"Yes. Kids have a habit of doing that."
He tossed off the drink, considered getting another, and decided not to—he'd had relatives who tried to solve problems that way.
"But I can't exactly have him killed, now can I?"
Signe opened her mouth, closed it, then stalked to her clothes, pulled them on and walked to the hall doorway.
"Fixing things is your problem," she snapped, then slammed the door behind her.
Well, shit, Havel thought, looking after her. Guess I didn't grovel hard enough.
She'd be all right in a while.
I hope, he thought, with an unfamiliar hollow feeling under his breastbone.
Chapter Seven
Dun Juniper/Dun Fairfax
Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 21st, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine
Carefully now, Dennis Martin Mackenzie told himself.
Even these days, it wasn't often he got a chance to carve a whole twenty-foot section of black walnut log in a mixture of low and high relief; he grinned, feeling himself drooling metaphorically as he prepared to take out another chip, savoring the strong, slightly oily-bitter scent of the cut wood.
This sucker would have been worth thousands before the Change, but I'm doing something better with it than turning it into veneer.
The trees weren't even native to Oregon, although they did well in the Willamette, like nearly everything else except tropical stuff. Juniper Mackenzie's great-uncle the banker had planted thousands of them in the cut-over Cascade foothills around his hunting cabin starting back around 1920, fancying himself a practitioner of scientific forestry and having the period's innocent calm about introducing alien species into an ecosystem. This one had been harvested a year before the Change, along with a lot of other mature timber, something Juniper had done as the only alternative to losing the land she'd inherited from him for back taxes. Then the timber company had gone belly-up and left the logs stacked to season while the lawyers sharpened their knives…
Dennis's stepson Terry stopped working on a prentice-piece clamped in a vise on a nearby bench and came to look. It was getting dark, and Dennis's workpiece was surrounded by lamps; the wall of the dun to the west meant that sunset came a few minutes early. The shadowless light was pretty good, but you had to be careful about judging depth. He took the gouge and laid the sharp V against a section, tapped with the wooden hammer…
Tock. A large chip flipped away to join those littering the gravel beneath the X-shaped wooden rests that held the great baulk of hardwood.
"And that's it for today," he said in satisfaction, caressing the dark wood with its dense hard grain, feeling the strength of it through his fingertips, the gloss it would take when it was oiled and polished and varnished just right, and set up with its twin…
"It's gonna look great, Dad," the twelve-year-old said. "Maybe even better than the gateposts here."
"As good, at least, if I do say so myself, Terry," Dennis said happily.
Even after nine years he was a little self-conscious about calling the boy son, although "blended" families like his were more common than not these days, given the accidents of survival in the Dying Time, and Terry hardly remembered his birth father. Certainly he had the love of the wood in him, and he wasn't half bad at leatherworking, either, which was Dennis's other trade, and had been his second hobby before the Change.
Terry was half Vietnamese, slender and fine-featured, and he made Dennis Martin Mackenzie feel almost as much of a hairy troll as his mother Sally's slight-boned prettiness did. She seldom talked about her first husband, who'd been working late at Hewlett-Packard in Portland that March seventeenth, and had simply never made it home.
She had the guts and sense to take Terry and get out of Dodge before things went absolutely to hell. She is one fine lady.
He smiled as he caressed the wood with a broad hand, callused from his work and scarred by the accidents in-evitable when you used chisel and gouge, knife and awl and waxed thread. The dividing channels for the knotwork were finished, running in sinuous interlocking curves and angles up three-quarters of the log's smooth surface; that left rounding the serpents and the delicate work of putting in the scales. The interlacing patterns and gripping stylized beasts' mouths had their inspiration from the Book of Kells, but he'd made changes of his own—elongating the pattern, and changing the animals to coyotes and black bear…
With wood this beautiful, I'm almost sorry to do any inlay work. Just a little to pick out the mouths and eyes of the dragons and wolves. More up top, of course.
He touched the rougher wood at the log's end. That was where the face of the Goddess would go—and that was the real challenge for this piece of work. He'd spent nights and days thinking of it, while he worked on other things or just stood looking. Sutterdown wasn't using the Celtic pantheon to represent some aspect of the twin divinities of the Old Religion, the way most Mackenzies did. They-wanted to be different…
Hmmmm. Yeah, the outer form is Aphrodite. But I want elements of all three Aspects here. Sally for the Mother-of-All this time. Eilirfor the Maiden? Maybe Astrid, if I can get her to sit for it. Or Luanne Larsson, if I could get her over here for a couple of days. I like the way the bones of her face go—that Spanish-Indio-African-Anglo blend would be just right for the Goddess in this aspect—
"How much is Sutterdown paying you for this?"
He started out of his trance, suppressing a flash of irritation. "Hey, Chuck. Is it that time already?"
Chuck Barstow was in his brigandine and sword belt, with twin sprays of raven feathers on either side of his round bowl helmet for ceremonial swank; privately Dennis thought he was given to wearing headgear all the time because his sandy hair was getting real thin on top, and he wore his beard trimmed to a rakish point. He was also taller and younger than the woodworker—forty to his fifty-odd, lean whipcord and gristle to the other man's broad muscular hairiness.
He wasn't fat before the Change, Dennis thought, with a trace of satisfaction at his own waistline—not exactly narrow, but without the rolls of surplus tissue he'd worn there from his late twenties until the aftermath of the Change. But then, he was a gardener by trade, not a pub manager like me, and he did all that knightly SCA shit in his spare time, too.
"Yup. The Dun Fairfax people sent a horn-call up when the party went past and the road sentry relayed it. Sam's stopped off home there, by the way."
"Damn," Dennis said mildly. "I wanted to talk to him about the latest batch of cedar for the arrow-making shop before he got all caught up in farmwork. Oh, well, it ain't a long walk and Melissa's a hell of a good cook; I'll drop by tomorrow… no, that's Ostara, everyone'll be busy. Day or two after."
He brushed chips out of his beard and off his carpenter's apron, laying down his tools. Terry hurried to help put them away in the workshop that huddled against the inside of Dun Juniper's wall beside the family cabin. Dennis grinned: Terry was a good kid, if a little serious. He grinned wider as he put on a clean white shirt with biblike ruffle, tucked it into his kilt, wrapped his plaid and belted and pinned it, and arranged the flat Scots bonnet on his head with the tuft of coyote fur at the clasp.
He'd teased Juney for years before the Change about the way she put on the Celtic thing, however much it went with her style of music, and about how her coveners were always pulling some sort of myth out of the Irish twilight�
��of course he'd been a cowan then, an unbeliever, and hadn't understood the symbolism. Juniper Mackenzie might have been the one who told the band gathered at her cabin that to survive they would have to live like a clan, as it was in the old days—but he didn't think she had meant to be taken quite so literally. It had been Dennis who christened it the Clan Mackenzie, and started the kilt-wearing fashion when they salvaged that warehouseTfuH of tartan blankets. He'd come up with a good deal else that caught on too, in the years since, and mostly she'd had to go along with it.
It drives her bananas, Dennis thought with a smug grin, and only a slight pang at the metaphor—he hadn't tasted a banana in nine years.
Chuck raised an eyebrow, obviously following the thought: "Dennis Martin Mackenzie, the Clan's very own Astrid Larsson."
"Oh, now you're getting nasty," he protested. "Astrid's a compulsive fantasist. I just have a well-informed sense of humor."
The other man grinned. "It may be a joke to you, Den-nie, but have you noticed how the younger generation takes it? Like they really mean it?"
Urk, he thought. You've got a point there. He glared at the Armsman.
Chuck spread his free hand and replied, "No offense. It's done us good, I think—looking different helped people believe things were different." A sly smile. "And speaking of Celtic motifs, how much is the covenstead at Sutterdown paying you to carve this tree? And in what?"
"Pain in the ass not having money anymore, isn't it?" Dennis said with a wink. "I mean there's only so much wheat or bacon you can use and keeping fifty bushels and a sow around until you can swap for something you really want is clumsy. They offered gold, originally, but I took it in wine, instead. Lot of our people still leery about gold."
Chuck raised a brow: "Not payment in Brannigan's special ale? Juney made a song about it, after all."
Dennis mimed taking an arrow in the ribs. "Traitor! I think that blowhard Brannigan spikes his with magic mushrooms, and mine's all natural ingredients—barley malt, hops and mountain spring water. But I will admit Sutter-down's got the best vineyards in our territory, even if they're not as good as the Bearkillers'. They agreed to store it for me."
The Protector's War Page 18