The Protector's War
Page 38
"When we arrive at the village faire Banners and ribbons bright fill the air Crofter, blacksmith and tinker are there Magic and music extraordinaire!"
Dennis flourished the massive weapon in sheer exuberance. "I swear, this place gets even more drizzle over the winter than Corvallis does," he said. "Isn't it grand to have some bright sunny weather for a change?"
"Speak for yourself," Juniper said, touching a finger to her cheek and the fair freckled redhead's skin that made her vulnerable to even the mild sun of western Oregon. "Come summer, I roast, even here. I like rainy days, I'll have you know, you… you… Californian."
"Now you're getting nasty," Dennis chuckled. "And I like a rainy day too. Or even three, maybe. But not thirty in a row, with just a stray sunbeam to separate it from the next month-long set of rains."
"Better damp than frying."
Though it was a splendid day for a long walk, with Artemis Creek bawling and leaping in spray over rocks to their left, and the low forested mountains rearing green on either side, scenting the air with fir sap. Ahead the long reaches of the Willamette faded into blue-green haze, the Coast Range barely visible as a line at the western edge of sight.
The sky was clear save for a few fleecy white clouds drifting through blue heaven, and it was just cool enough to make walking pleasant, with recent rain ensuring they raised only a little dust even from this graveled road. The young peach and cherry orchards on the hillsides to her right were past the peak of blossom, but the apples and pears were sending drifts of white petals over the road and the wayfarers, cuffed free by the wind that bore their scent.
The spring wildflowers of the lowlands were at their best these last days of April. The thick grass along the roadside verges was bright with blue violet, the deeper blue of camas, yellow iris and Engelman aster; along the stream pink-and-white flowers waved over the big round leaves of umbrella plant, and red monkeyflower gave nourishment to hummingbirds and sphinx moths. More flowers were scattered through the pastures and orchards on either side, along with the red clover blossoms, and some spotted the fields of grain and roots as well. You couldn't weed them all out by hand, and chemical herbicides were a memory fading into legend. Juniper was profoundly grateful for both despite the calluses on her fingers and palms from hoe handles and weed-pulling.
And now that we know what we're doing and have enough tools and stock, this isn't a land where you really need to squeeze an acre until it squeaks, she thought. If you have to farm, the Willamette is about the best place in the world to do it. We've got the gifts of the Lord and Lady in abundance. Blessed be!
Dennis cast an interested eye at the bees buzzing amongst the flowers and smacked his lips absently; he ran Dun Juniper's honey-wine operation as well as its brewery, and his mead was sought after throughout the clan's territory and beyond. They halted briefly at the turnoff for Dun Fairfax; the Aylwards were there, and a few others. Sam Aylward nodded gravely to her, touching his bowstaff to his flat bonnet, as if a pleasant trip to Sutterdown was all he had to think of in the world.
Which is precisely what you should be thinking, woman! Juniper scolded herself. Keep it out of your mind, if you want it secret!
Young Rudi Mackenzie and Terry Martin yelled to the Aylwards' Tamar—Rudi's friends were usually a few years older than he was. Grip and Garm dashed out to meet them; each boy hooked a hand in one dog's collar as they ran to meet her.
"Ice cream!" Terry shouted. "Sutterdown says they've got their ice machine working, and we're all going to have ice cream! Lots of it!"
Tamar whooped and tossed her light bow in the air and caught it, then did an impromptu jig. Juniper grinned to see it; one of the things she liked about the ninth Change Year was that kids could spend their childhoods unselfconsciously being children. The Aylward toddler, young Richard, wasn't with the rest of the family, and Juniper looked a question at Melissa when the greetings were over.
"We left Dickie with Kate," she said, and mimed fainting with exhaustion. "This is supposed to be a holiday. Tamar and Edain and the little stranger"—she patted her stomach—"are enough."
"Oh, I know exactly what you mean," Juniper said.
She and Aylward handed the heavily pregnant woman up into the carriage; then the man went to throw their dunnage on the Conestoga. Melissa was wearing a loose linsey-woolsey shift with an airsaid over it. That was a heel-length tartan cloak, pinned at the breast with a brooch like a plaid, and wrapped and fastened lightly around the waist with a belt; they were increasingly popular with Mackenzie women as a maternity dress, being less awkward than the "little kilt" when you were huge. It was also a way to show off your weaving skills, something of which Sam Aylward's wife was rightly proud.
Juniper went on: "To be sure, though, having raised one child before the Change and one after, I'd say it's easier now if you're lucky with the illnesses, which Brigid grant."
"Certainly it's easier to get someone reliable to fill in for you when you need it," Melissa said out the window of the carriage, settling herself and taking her knitting out of the basket she carried. "And vice versa, of course."
Sally Martin had dropped off the Conestoga, and walked up with Jilly's small hand in hers; Dennis took the child up piggyback, after checking that the leather blade guard was tight on his ax. Her round face and slanted blue eyes looked over his shoulder, and then she went to sleep with limp finality and her cheek resting on the shoulder pad of his brigandine. .' - ■
"Right," Sally said. "And Jennie didn't mind wet-nursing Maeve while I was gone. Try finding someone to do that before the Change."
Melissa nodded. "Though oh, do I miss formula and disposables! Sometimes it seems like it takes a whole dun to raise a child nowadays."
"That it does," Juniper said. "Better for the mother, better for the child, and better for the dun, come to that."
They walked on as the valley of Artemis Creek opened out into the broader Willamette: hilly fields gradually turned to rolling plain laid out in squares of cropland and pasture and small woods as the road gradually curved north of west, with the heights always on their right hand. They stopped at Dun Carson and Dun McFarlane and others along the way, each yielding its party bound for Sutter-down and the festival until there were scores and then hundreds straggling along. They could see dust plumes from other parties converging on the same destination.
Juniper cast a satisfied Chiefs eye on the tight strong log walls of the duns, and a countrywoman's on the well-kept fences and hedges of the crofts and small farms into which the land was divided, and the well-managed wood-lots. On the grainfields as well, spring-planted oats and barley just showing against the dark brown-black plow land, winter wheat already calf-high, flax up to her middle and blooming blue; and on the neatly pruned orchards of apple and cherry, peach and plum, wine grapes and filberts and walnuts, with the wild mustard blooming yellow beneath. Sheep grazed, looking as if they were wearing longjohns as they recovered from shearing, and red-coated cattle stood up to their hocks in thick grass and clover, while horses drowsed beneath trees or trotted along field verges, whickering to their kin on the road. Folk busy with hoe and spade and animal-drawn cultivator paused and waved and called as they went past; this wasn't the busiest season of the year, but farm work never entirely went away.
Deanann spardn from croi eadrom, she thought. Possession makes for satisfaction!
Particularly when it's the things you and your kin need for your very lives. I never see a well-tilled field now without a nice little glow, mostly in my stomach.
This was the heartland of the Clan Mackenzie, the terri-tory she and her friends and the ones who'd joined them put together in the first Change Year, working against time to get a crop in and salvage what they could from farms round about. Bellies empty save for the thin nourishment of the Eternal Soup; the terror of the plagues spreading from the refugee camps, fighting off Eaters and bandits and the collapsing remnants of the state government, the Protector's first probes this way…
She shook off the thought, taking deep breaths and calming her mind. Ground and center, she told herself. Live in the moment, for only the moment is real.
Someone had lent Laurel a kilt, though it was entirely too short—the hem was supposed to brush the upper edge of your kneecap when you were standing. Sally Martin was walking near and talking theology with her—which was a charitable way to describe it; Judy would have called it "Starting with the basics of Wicca 101."
"—so it's just as much a matter of becoming the God or Goddess as worshipping them; or both and neither; remember, they're not sitting outside the universe on a mountain looking at us in a magic mirror. They are the universe, that tree, that horse, me, you—"
She'd trained to be a schoolteacher before the Change, and was one these days; Mistress of Schools for the Clan now and Lore-Mistress of the Moon Schools as well, and she made as good a Maiden as Judy had, or better. Her knowledge was as broad, now; she loved the Craft as much; and she had endless kindly patience, which was a thing Judy's best friend—
Which I am, Juniper thought.
—wouldn't claim for her. Judy had been born to be a High Priestess. Melissa Aylward leaned out the window of the carriage, listening and offering her own observations now and then; some of her advice was more relevant, since Laurel was going to be living in a little farming dun like hers.
Someone in the straggling collection of Mackenzies began singing again, and everyone took it up. "Sweet Betsy from Pike" to start with, then "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," then—in honor of their destination—Juniper's own "Brannigan's Special Ale"; under the racket she could hear Dennis adding his own obscenely scurrilous verses to the tune, and gave him a glare. His rivalry with Brannigan was a joke, most of the time, but the festival to dedicate the town wasn't the right time. Sutterdown took a good deal of soothing, particularly when the Mackenzies' biggest settlement remembered how much it would like to be the Mackenzies' capital too.
Many of the teenagers and younger adults walked with arrows on their bowstrings, and shouts of Dropping shaft over the oak and into the stump! or The patch of poppies! told of impromptu games of rovers, punctuated by mothers calling shrilly for children to stick to the road and not wander into someone's field of fire. Astrid and Eilir and their Rangers played games of their own; mounted catch-me-who-can across the countryside, and hair-raising wrestling in the saddle at a gallop.
Which shows the strength of their arms and the strength of my character, Juniper thought. That I don't scream Stop before you break your necks to the young idiots!
Lunch was a huge chaotic picnic prolonged by an inter-sept softball game, and they made camp for the night in an open field near a tree-lined creek an hour before sunset. The distance from Dun Juniper to Sutterdown was about an hour in her old rattle-trap pickup; these days, three hours by bicycle, four on horseback pushing hard, one long serious day's walk, or one and a bit at the leisurely holiday pace. The nearest dun had contributed fresh milk and greens and an oxcart full of firewood to the camp; families and groups of friends or totem-brothers swapped things back and forth from their campfires; folk set up tents or just put their bedrolls in a likely looking spot, since it didn't seem likely to rain; everyone pitched in to dig slit trenches well away from the water, deal with the working stock and set the night watch.
After dinner was past and the first stars appearing over the hills to the east Juniper found herself sitting on the tail of a wagon, looking over a small low fire at a circle of children's faces, huddled with their plaids or sleeping bags across their shoulders—night could still be chill, towards the end of April. They nibbled at cookies or pastries, with a little prodding and whispering and giggling towards the back; the moon shone silvery through a whisp of cloud, turning it into a glowing mist, and the stars were scattered thickly across the sky. Noise died away as she asked: "Well, which shall it be, then?"
While the little ones clamored, she checked that her mug was easy to her hand on the boards of the wagon bed, and nicely full of Dennie's home-brewed ale, a large crock of which had been standing in the cold creek waters since they camped. Talking was thirsty work, and she'd be at it until the parents carted off the last protesting tot. She blew foam off the top and took a swallow as they cried out:
"Toad and the gypsies!"
"Bilbo and the trolls!"
"Treasure Island!"
"Rob Roy and the Duke!"
"Pinocchio!"
"Robin Hood and the Sheriff!" her own son cried; Rudi had a weakness for hero-tales of derring-do.
That last one had special relevance. Motor cars and talking toads were equally the stuff of misty legend now, but oppressive kings and wicked sheriffs were unfortunately all too real—the word "sheriff had already become a synonym for "lord" or "ruler" in many places. Especially so east of the Cascades, where deliberate archaisms of the sort favored by most of the Willamette communities weren't so common. Not all of them were that much of an improvement on Arminger or his new-made barons; you could be just as thorough a weasel-souled bastard of a man as John Lackland or the Sheriff of Nottingham without picking a fancy title out of a book.
"None of those!" Juniper said, dropping into her story-teller's voice—it had a bit more of the brogue in it—and laughed at the groans. Children wanting a favorite story over and over hadn't changed, either.
"No, it's a tale of Toad I'll be telling you, but a new one; how Toad and his friends fought off the wicked weasels who tried to seize Toad Hall. Now, you know Toad had a good heart, but he could be a foolish fellow when the mood took him—perhaps Robin Goodfellow had been about his cradle, eh? Like a little person I could name but won't, the one with the sunset-colored hair there."
Rudi grinned and ducked his head. Juniper put her guitar across her lap, and strummed a cord; she'd be speaking mostly, but an occasional tune didn't hurt, nor a little background music to help out the magic of the words.
"Difficult Mr. Toad found it to remember that is mink a bhris bed! duine a shron, it is often that a person's mouth broke their nose."
She could see lips moving as they memorized that. A few didn't get it, and their friends filled them in, miming a punch in the face.
"So long ago, when Toad and Mole and Ratty and Badger lived along the river in a land much like ours, and the people of feather and fur and stream spoke everyday with our heavy-footed kind…"
There was a mass sigh from the children, and they leaned forward, their eyes bright in the firelight.
Beneath the happiness, a small cold voice spoke at the back of Juniper's mind: Enjoy yourself while you can, Chief of the Mackenzies. Storm clouds fly, and ravens gather.
"Heave-Ao/"
The cry rang out again, and a dozen hands hauled at the rope. The Lady's pillar swung erect, the base thumping down into its bedding, and more Sutterdowners with padded poles held it erect while the braces were fixed that would keep it so until the concrete dried. The tackle and pulleys were taken down from the arch above, and the ceremonial gate at the northeast quadrant of the circle was complete.
Juniper had to admit the folk of Sutterdown had spared nothing to make their covenstead splendid; in fact, seeing such a thing openly put the town's heart left her a little uneasy, after long years of discretion before the Change. She knew consciously that in the Mackenzie territories the Craft was the faith of the majority these days, had been for years in fact, and of a large and ever-growing majority at that. Unconsciously…
Two hills anchored the western edge of Sutterdown, each a hundred and forty feet above the general level of the town. The covenstead was on the summit of the southern hill, with a magnificent view of the curl
ing Sut-ter River glinting in the noonday sun—town and stream had been named after the same pioneer who'd built a ferry here in 1846—and the farmlands beyond to west, south and north, the low shaggy hills rising towards the mountains to the northeast. Downslope were the crenel-lations of the new town wall and its low towers with their witches'-hat roofs; beyond that was a great green park in the U-shaped bend of the river, an expanse of trees and flower-starred spring meadow speckled now with the tents of visitors come for the festival. The new-planted Sutterdown itemed—Sacred Wood—was in the park too, a broad circle of oaks and beeches that would be majestic in a generation or two.
The top of the hill was so already. It had been planed flat, then replanted with grass, flower banks red and blue and white and purple, bright bushes and young trees. The center held the big open-sided circular building itself; great pillarlike Douglas fir trunks supporting a truss roof covered in wooden strakes, the ends of the rafters carved into the animal-head shapes of the Mackenzie totems. Inside was a brick pavement with the symbols of the Quarters at their stations and swirling patterns elsewhere; the altar at the north was a block of blue-green nephrite acid-etched in curling knotwork. Today the four Quarters held gifts; images of the God and Goddess as Apollo and Aphrodite in the north, done in some hard white stone; a ritual sword in the south; great straw-wound glass, firkins of wine in the west—that had been Astrid—and Dun Juniper's contribution, covered with a cloth marked with the pentagram in the east.