The laneway between the cottages within was graveled too; chickens pecked about in it until a couple of children shooed them off towards their coop for the night, and ducks and geese came up from the pond for their evening feed—they had a good strong perennial spring here. Dun Fairfax was a well-to-do settlement, with much of its draft-work done by horses rather than oxen; one nickered off in the stable sheds built up against the inside of the palisade; there were eight of the beasts, including two mounts of his that doubled for riding and light farmwork. Keeping riding horses was a bit of a luxury, but necessary for his other job as Armsman; the rest of the families all had at least one bicycle, and it was going to be yet another pain in the arse when those started to unfixably break down.
He passed various neighbors with a smile and a nod; Katherine Doors came by from the big pre-Change barn where all the households kept their milch cows along with the communal straining tub, and barrel churn and cream separator; two big plastic buckets of milk rode at either end of a yoke over her shoulders. Several interested cats followed her, noses and tails up as they traced the swaying of the pails and hoped for a spill.
"This is working a treat, Sam, just like you said it would," she called, tapping the fingers of her steadying hand on the smooth garry-oak stave he'd carved for her. "Saves a lot of work."
"You're welcome, Kate," he said.
Everything's relative, he thought silently. Those buckets must weigh eighty pounds, together. But it was saving a good many trips back and forth. At least Dun Fairfax had piped water to everyone's kitchen.
He circled the old two-car garage of the Fairfax house, now a bowyer's workshop and spinning-and-weaving room with the sliding door replaced by salvaged windows for light. What had been the backyard of the house was his wife's herb garden, with roses trained up against trellises on the walls, and a bordering edge of dahlias and peonies; Edain waited with the dogs, suddenly a little apprehensive as he looked down at the state of his shoes and kilt.
"Can't have that," Aylward said, and gave the dogs a bucket of water each and a brush with an old burlap sack; they laid back ears but submitted to the rough cleaning.
"Dad? What about me?"
"Talk to your mother about that."
Man and girl walked down the brick pathway to the kitchen door, savoring the good cooking odors that came out the opened window, and stamping to get the mud off their soles. The leather went splat on the wet brick and Tamar suddenly started kangaroo-hopping down the path, giggling as she landed, her bow held over her head in both hands, and her brother joined her.
"Boots! Boots, all of you!" his wife Melissa cried, sticking her head out a window; she was a comfortable-looking woman in her late thirties, with a halo of yellow-brown curls just touched with the first gray strands. "I cleaned the floors for Ostara while you were gone and I'm not doing it again!"
Aylward snorted. Wipe yer web feet, ninny! he heard, re-membering his mother's voice when he came in from the fields with his father.
"And watch out for the hob's milk!"
His mother had put out a bowl too, come to think of it—ostensibly for the barn cats, though, rather than the house hob, but the moggies around here wouldn't mind who got the credit for emptying it.
"Edam! That kilt was clean this morning! You were supposed to be with your father, not rolling with the pigs! Get to the bathroom and clean up this instant. And don't you 'aw, Mom' me, you little hooligan!"
Melissa's own mother was speaking in the background; Aylward groaned a little inwardly at that. Eleanor was…
Not quite stark raving bonkers, but not quite normal, either, since the Change.
"Why potatoes with the meat again, dear?" she asked Aylward's wife. "Wouldn't some nice steamed rice be pleasant for a change?"
Melissa growled, and he heard something heavy slammed down on a counter.
"Mother! Yes, I'd like to use rice. And coffee and chocolate. But we don't have any! We don't grow any. We don't know anyone who grows any!"
Eleanor's voice went on as if she hadn't spoken: "And all this butter with the vegetables, and cooking with all this cream, it's a little heavy, isn't it? You've got to watch your figure, with the baby coming. It's so difficult to lose weight again afterward."
Tamar glanced at him and rolled her eyes as he waited for a second with his hand on the latch, mouthing silently: Grandma's nutsoid today and it's making Mom nutsoid.
Melissa's voice rose and something slammed on a counter, even harder this time. "I got up at five o'clock this morning to milk the cows, including Kathy's cows because she carried the milk for me. Then I helped make breakfast for eleven people. Then I spent the morning working in a five-acre garden. And collecting eggs and feeding our chickens. Then because I'm pregnant, I got to sit down all afternoon in the garage, weaving so we'd have clothes next winter, and in the intervals I can look after Richie and help get dinner for twelve ready, and if I weren't pregnant I'd have been out planting potatoesl And this is the easy part of the year! I need every calorie I eat! And if you can't help, get out of the way!"
He heard the sound of feet rushing off, and Melissa's half-guilty sigh. Tamar and Aylward obediently used the scrapers and brush kept beside the door, then went in and let the spring bang it closed, blinking a little at the bright lamplight and buffing their soles one last time on the interior rug mat. His wife waved from the direction of the stove where she was stirring the soup, and he turned to put his spear in brackets above head-height. His bows hung there too, and the belt with his sword and dirk and buckler, and the rest of the household's weapons—you had to be careful with your killing tools when there were toddlers about.
"Sorry," Melissa said to him over her shoulder from the huge cast-iron woodstove with its attached bread oven and water heater.
It was the envy of Dun Fairfax. Compared to an electric range, it was primitive. Compared to cooking over an open hearth…
"Not your fault she's barmy, luv. She forget the Change 'appened again?" Aylward said.
"She remembers, when she wants to," Melissa said, then made herself relax, with a visible effort. "Sorry if I was sniveling about things. But if I can adjust to this, why can't she? And when she gets like this, it makes me remember, and I don't want to."
"It's all what you're used to. Easier for me, considering the way I was raised."
Melissa laughed. "I should count my blessings, then. Dinner's nearly ready. Everyone should be down in a moment."
He'd knocked down some partitions to make the kitchen larger; it had plenty of room for a table that seated twelve, with benches on either side, a seat at each end for him and his wife and a lantern slung from the roof above. Right now a braided equal-armed straw cross hung not far from it, for the Ostara blessing—the images of the Lord and
Lady over the hearth were year-round. A high chair stood beside one of the seats; Richard Aylward came stumping across the floor, chubby arms outstretched.
"Daaaada!" he caroled. His father swept him up; he wiggled "delightedly, then stretched his arms out to his half sister. "Tama-tamaaar!" Then to the dogs, who stood looking up at him, giving tongue-lolling grins full of the mild benevolence of canines faced with puppies or infants, wagging their tails: "Gri-gri-gri!" which might do for either of their names.
"Well, I can see who you prefer, Dickie," Aywlard said, setting the boy down. "Romp away, then." The two-year-old said his favorite word—No!—and then fell to with a will.
"How did the last lambing go?" Melissa asked.
Tamar played with her brother and the dogs on the floor. Edain came back in, his light hair sticking up in three or four directions, despite last-minute attempts to slick it down with his fingers, then joined them.
"The delivery went well enough, love," he said, wandering over. "After I turned the lamb. Fair bollixed up to start with, it was, and no mistake."
A small wooden keg rested in an X-trestle of boards on the counter, with mugs on shelves above; he took one down and tapped himself some be
er. He'd paid Dennis up at Dun Juniper for it with hops and barley, since the man had the true brewer's knack and Aylward didn't.
"Want one, love?"
"Later, thanks, when I can sit still and enjoy it. The ewe's OK?"
"Dolly's fine, and the lamb should live. Larry shouldn't have had to deal with the whole flock, not this time of year, not the way it's grown. He's well enough with a birthing ewe, but Tamar will learn the way of it better, I think. We might put her and, mmm, young Hickock to work helping him when school's out for summer."
She grinned over her shoulder and whispered. "Not matchmaking, are you?"
"Lord and Lady forbid!" he answered, equally quiet. "Though she and Billy Hickock get on well enough. Give it six or seven years, though."
The rest of the household came in, from the other rooms or from work outside, and busied themselves setting out the cutlery and butter and bread and beer amid a cheerful crackle of conversation about the day's work and gossip and the Ostara dance that would be held in the big threshing-barn after supper. There was Eleanor, over her temper now, Aunt Joan—a nice enough old bird, and unlike her older sister, fully functional, thank God—and the aunt's two children, a boy named Harry about eighteen and a girl called Jeanette a little younger; also two unrelated young men from Sutterdown and their wives. Both couples were working for him to get experience while they saved up to start and stock their own crofts; one of the wives had a new baby and the other was expecting, but not as far along as Melissa.
Not a bad crew, he thought. And very helpful around the farm.
As the First Armsman he could call on the other households to fill in for him when he was called off on duty by the Chief, and they could deduct it from their dues to the Clan in turn. It wouldn't even cause much resentment, given how the rest of them had leaned on him for teach-and-show in the early years, when they were learning the farmer's trade and mistakes could mean empty bellies. Still, he preferred to manage from his own resources as much as he could—nobody liked having to neglect their own land. The last of the spring plowing was still to do, barley and potatoes to plant…
Though all the youthful energy makes me feel me own age now and then, right enough.
He snaffled off a roll from a pan Melissa had just taken out, tossing it in one callused hand until it was cool enough to eat; it had been a long time since bread and cheese in the saddle at noon, and the steaming-fresh wholemeal was good enough to eat without butter. She smiled sideways at him while she held the oven door open and prodded the meat, then stood and gave him a kiss; a little awkwardly, since she was six months along.
"That's ready… make yourself useful then, Sam," she said. "We're supposed to eat it at the table, you know."
The main dish was a roast of pork; the Smiths had slaughtered recently, and everyone swapped around to even out the fresh meat. He lifted the pan out and set it aside to stand for a few minutes before he carved, while Melissa made the gravy; the side dishes were potatoes roasted in the juices, and winter vegetables—boiled parsnips and carrots in a butter sauce, sauerkraut from the crocks in the cellar, and a dried-apple pie with whipped cream for dessert, which latter they'd been having more often since he managed to track down a hand-cranked beater whose owner felt like swapping for a bow.
He brought the great pot of soup to the table first, nose twitching, and ladled it into the bowls handed up. It was potato-and-cream, with bits of onion and densely flavored chunks of bacon that had been cured over applewood in an old Aylward family recipe.
Melissa seated herself at the other end of the table, and said the blessing—another advantage of Wicca, he'd found, was that you could shove off things like that on the lady of the household. He put his spoon to the soup, and lifted it—
"Sam! Sam!"
"Oh, bugger," Aylward said, at the shout and the sound of a fist pounding at the door; then he blew on the soup and swallowed hastily.
Larry Smith stuck his head in, the fog beads in his chin beard glistening. "Sorry, but something took one of the sheep, one of yours—a wether. I didn't hear anything, but Lurp"—the collie—"started barking. There's blood-sign but I couldn't pick up any tracks. It's down in the corner of the field, by the road."
"Bloody hell," Aylward sighed. Then: "You did the right thing."
Larry had been a bookseller before, but he was a fair tracker; he'd actually hunted deer a fair bit even then, and more since. Surprising to an English way of thinking, but the Yanks had had a lot more woodland than old Blighty even before the Change. If he hadn't seen anything, that meant there probably weren't any really obvious tracks.
"It could be anything, dogs or a big cat or some human dinlo," Aylward said.
Men were least likely; it would be bold bandits who went this deep into Mackenzie territory, and such wouldn't settle for one sheep. They'd go for horses and cattle—more valuable and easier to drive off—and for bicycles, tools, cloth, stored food.
Or it might be a trap meant to draw us off and then raid the dun.
"Get—" He thought, mentally crossing off the stumble-footed, feeble and incompetent, women pregnant or nursing, and a few steady types to keep an eye on things here. "—yourself, Bob, Alice, Steve, Jerry, and Carl. Full kit, but spears, not bows. It's going to be too dark to shoot worth shite and I wouldn't want to tangle with a cat in the dark without a nice big cat-sticker. Double guard on the wall and everyone else can kit up too, just in case. Meet me at the gate."
Larry nodded, turned and dashed back out. Aylward turned."Wally, you come with me. Shane, Deirdre, Allison, Nancy, you kit up but head for the walls with the others—it might be a trick. Lively!
"Probably just a hungry dog gone wild," he said to the rest at the table. "But we have to check."
A few of the youngsters on the verge of adulthood looked mutinous about being left out of the search party, but they knew better than to complain openly—this was something that came under his authority as an Armsman, and he didn't tolerate indiscipline.
Someone did mutter plaintively, "Does this mean the dance is off?"
He pulled on his arming doublet with its short sleeves and stiff leather-backed collar of chain mail, the fabric still wet and smelly, and swung his brigandine down from its hook on the wall; the accordion pleat in the leather along the left side let you put it on over your head like a jersey, and then tighten it and strap the catches. Then his sword belt, a bow—he took down and strung his hunting weapon, an eighty-pound popper, better suited to this work than the great war bow—plus quiver and spear; he left the cheek-pieces of the helmet pushed back for a moment.
Melissa and a few of the others had been busy cutting and buttering bread and slicing meat while those he'd named armed themselves. She wrapped the bundle in a cloth and put it into the haversack, then clipped that to the rings on the back of his brigandine and handed him a piece of the pork—the outer cut of the roast with some of the crackling, his favorite.
"You be careful, Sam," she said.
Wally and he knelt and bent their heads briefly as she made a sign over them and went on:
"Through darkened wood and shadowed path Hunter of the Forest, by your side Lady of the Stars, fold you in her wings So mote it be!"
Then: "I'll put the soup back on to keep hot."
"Thanks, luv," he said.
He gave her another kiss, longer this time, nodded to his children, then stuffed the meat into his mouth as he turned to the door, dogs eager at his heels.
There were tendrils of mist outside, thickening even as he watched. Which would combine with the darkness to make tracking through the woods a total joy…
Could be worse, he thought, chewing on the savory slice. Could be raining.
Juniper perched on her carved oak and walnut chair cross-legged and made the fiddle sing, swinging into the quick jaunty beat of "Mi ni Nollage," with the bodhran and the flute accompanying her, and a guitar backing up her flourishes, and the sweet wild tones of the uilleann pipes behind it all.
L
anterns and candles lit the ground floor of what had been her great-uncle's lodge and her home, before they rebuilt it and added the upper story and loft; now it was one great high-ceilinged chamber a hundred and twenty-five feet by thirty, surrounded by verandas on three sides and with doors to the new kitchens flanking the hearth in the middle of the north face. The walls were packed with people in their festival best, and more hung through the windows, leaving an oval clear in the middle of the room; all the adults and adolescents who lived in Dun Juniper were making merry tonight, plus many guests from other parts of the Clan's holdings, and a few from outside it. Cedar-wood logs crackled in the big stone fireplace, scenting the air.
The last set had been youngsters doing a lively jig—Chuck and Judy Barstow's adoptees, Aoife and Daniel and Sanjay, plus their friends, all in their late teens and enthusiastic. This beat was faster and more complex, though; she looked around the room as she fiddled, to see who'd attempt it.
It's changed a good deal and no mistake.
The logs of the walls had been smoothed and carved in colored running knotwork and faces over the years since the Change—the Green Man peering out through a riot of branches, stag-antlered Cernunnos, goat-horned Pan; Brigid and Cerwidden and Arianrhod and more. In the wood around the upper band and over the hearth were set the symbols of the Quarters; comfrey and ivy and sheaves of grain for North and the Earth; vervain and yarrow for Air and the East; red poppies and nettles for the South and Fire; ferns and rushes and water lilies for West and the Waters.
Eyes shone in the light of pastel candles and lamps set in wrought-iron brackets, hung tonight with ribbons in the same colors, plus baskets of colored eggs. Wreaths of flowers were on many heads, and woven-straw crosses hung from the ceiling—equal-armed, Brigid's crosses, for the Wheel of the Sun. A shout of laughter rose as the Jack-in-the-Green came prancing through. That was young Dave Trent, although you weren't supposed to remember his name tonight; he wore a tight green body stocking sewn all over with vines and leaves, a snub-nosed grinning wooden mask with gilded carved leaves for hair, and flourished a vine-stock wand. The way he handled it made phallic symbol entirely plain to the slowest perceptions, and so did his early-Elvis pelvic gyrations. Then a mob of girls and young women tried to grab him—or touch the wand, which was lucky, especially if you wanted to conceive—and he bounded out with comically exaggerated terror and a goat-bleat that Juniper matched with a long note on her fiddle before swinging back into the tune.
The Protector's War Page 21