"Although come the Change…"
He nodded. "But what with one thing and another, I learned my way around the Home Farm. And Sam's family were neighbors of the Lorings. In fact, until we sold off everything apart from the manor house and one farm in 1921, they rented land from us, and had for generations. My father died when I was an infant, and my mother when I was about three. My grandmother raised me, bless her, and turned me into the Edwardian fossil that I am. Her world stopped changing about the time my grandfather Eustace stood too close to a German howitzer shell near Mons in 1914."
"What was she like?" Juniper asked; her mind conjured up a hawk-faced old dame in a high-collared bombazine dress. Though that's probably my hyperactive storyteller's imagination at work.
Nigel shook his head. "She was what is politely called 'formidable'—which meant she terrified everyone, including myself—a memsahib right out of Kipling. Which is one reason I spent a good deal of time over at Crooksbury when I was a lad; Sam and I were always getting into mis-chief together, and later I used to help out there when I was down from school, until Sam's father gave up the struggle."
"Your grandmother didn't make a fuss? If she was that stiff and old-fashioned—"
"Oh, no, she didn't object at all." He smiled reminis-cently. "Grandmamma was of the old breed; it was quite the thing for me to have a friend like Sam while I was young, as long as he didn't, as she would put it, 'presume.' And since Sam would rather have spent a week shoveling muck onto a spreader than one afternoon taking tea with Grandmamma, it all turned out for the best. Though God knows it would have been different if I'd been a girl… In any event, I learned a good deal that was extremely useful after the Change; not that anyone could have anticipated it would happen, nor that I would then spend the better part of a decade teaching ex-urbanites how to farm in a very old style."
"I resemble that remark too, except that I was learning with them while I taught," Juniper said. "Although I did have a nice little half-acre vegetable garden before the Change, and an orchard, and Cagney and Lacey—my Percherons—and I took up weaving as a winter hobby in my teens. Thank the God and Goddess we had some real farmers around here, and Chuck, and Sam most of all."
Now the rest of the folk were coming towards her. Juniper and Nigel Loring spent a moment unbolting the cutter bar, folding the creel and raising it and the bar to the traveling position.
"This is a good piece of work," he said as they worked with wrench and pliers from the toolbox beneath the seat. "We've… they've been making some much like it in England, these last few years. After salvaging the better-preserved working models from exhibits, of course."
"Only the last few?" Juniper said, raising a brow.
'There weren't enough horses left in England before that, or even oxen. We had to breed up our herds from what few we could bring through the first year on the offshore islands, plus a very scanty trickle from Ireland. Mainland Britain was eaten bare, except of animals that could hide well, which mostly turned out to mean noxious vermin of various sorts. It was strictly spades and hoes and sickles for quite some time, and we're… they're… still shorter than you are here."
Juniper shuddered in sympathy. Farming was sweating-hard work with plenty of oxen and horses to help and the tools and machines for them to pull and power. Doing without that help meant brutal killing toil, and you got a lot less out of it. Unaided humans just couldn't cultivate enough ground to do more than live hand-to-mouth.
"We were lucky—the ranching country over the mountains had stock we could trade for, though getting the working equipment was another story."
She patted the reaper affectionately. "We were certainly glad to buy these and retire the cradle scythes! Change Year Three it was; a stiff price, but worth it."
"They're not local?"
"No, from Corvallis," she said. "We could make them"—there was nothing in the simple machine that couldn't be duplicated by any good carpenter and a smith-^"but they have machines worked by waterwheels for their little factories, so it's cheaper. Most of the Valley buys from them."
Loring nodded. Just then the others came up in what would have been a procession if it weren't so casual and hadn't included so many children and dogs running around; Miguel Lopez and his family stood a little aside, looking awkward, although his friend Jeff Dawson was an enthusiastic Dedicant now.
Melissa Aylward led, walking before the corn dolly she'd just plaited, impressively solemn. Sam Aylward and Chuck Barstow carried it behind her, held high on crossed spears. This Queen Sheaf would belong to Clan Mackenzie as a whole, as well as Dun Fairfax, which was an honor for the smaller settlement. The wheat-straw figure she'd plaited was four feet from splayed feet past swelling belly to rough-featured head, and crowned with poppies. Melissa herself had shed most of the extra weight she'd put on before the birth of her new daughter, but hadn't gone back to full fieldwork yet and looked solidly matronly and deep-bosomed in her airsaid, a fit vessel for the Mother. The more so as she held a handful of wheat as a scepter in her right hand and red-haired little Fand in the crook of her left arm.
Juniper bent her head and Melissa touched it with the stalks; then both High Priestesses fell in behind the Queen Sheaf, leading the harvesters walking two and two to the north end of the field where a great oak stood beside the laneway and the field gate and a young hawthorn hedge. Most of the rest of the settlement's people waited there, the ones who hadn't been in the fields today by reason of age or infirmity or very pressing business.
The two men knelt and lowered the plaited figure before Juniper; she made the Invoking pentagram above it. "All hail to Brigid, Goddess of the Ripened Corn, who accepts the given sacrifice!" she called aloud, smiling. "And to the Corn King, Lugh of the Sun, who dies in this season so that the harvest may be reaped!"
Her voice became a little more solemn for a moment as she turned to her people: "With the work of our hands we help the Lord and Lady make this place the fruitful garden that it is—not wilderness nor iron desert paved and bound, but instead our rightful home. For though we here shall die, as die men and trees and beasts and ripened corn each in their appointed season, yet the blood, the house, the field, the woods endure; and every babe and lamb and new-sprouted leaf proves the immortality we share."
Chuck and Sam braced their spears against the gnarled trunk of the oak, so that the Corn Mother could oversee the festivities; the spears stood for the Lord of the Harvest as well. Melissa broke the loaf made from the first sheaf they'd cut and set it before Her, standing for an instant with a fold of her airsaid drawn over her head.
"Arid She says… eat!" she said, turning and dropping the shawl back on her shoulders.
The harvest workers stood in a circle around her; they gave three cheers, flinging up their joined hands'. After that everyone pitched in, helping set the trestle tables and benches and unload the harvest supper, taking turns to run down to the pond in the lower corner of the field and shed their kilts and dive in to slough off the dust and sweat. One of the wagons carried soap and towels, clothes for the Dun Fairfax folk and robes for the guests who'd be walking back to Dun Juniper later. This wasn't the harvest feast proper—that would come on Lughnassadh, next week, when everyone had had a chance to rest a bit, and be a lot more elaborate—but it was the beginning of it. In most duns there was considerable good-natured rivalry between households to outdo each other at a harvest potluck.
Juniper shook out her water-darkened hair, then pinned her plaid with a jeweled brooch done in swirling knotwork of sinuous gripping beasts; she'd brought along a clean set of gear that included silver-buckled shoes and an embroidered shirt with a ruffled front as well as clean kilt and plaid. Someone handed her a wreath of poppies and oxeye daisies, and she set that on her head as well.
Since the Chief must look spiffy where possible, she thought, with a wry inward shrug. Well, I was used to dressing up in costume like this for a performance before the Change! Now it's different, though. Now these are my clo
thes and the performance is my life.
Sir Nigel, on the other hand, wore one of the coarse, gray, hooded guest robes with casually regal authority, as if it were his everyday garb, despite the way the hem trailed on the ground. He bowed slightly as she reappeared.
"My word, but you look dramatic," he said. "And quite authentically Celtic, if not quite Scottish."
Juniper turned up her hands. "What can I say? I was just now thinking that I wore stuff like this before the Change to look exotic—and today, it's just what I wear."
"Quite. I felt… a proper burke wearing plate armor, as Sam would say, for the longest time after I'd learned to use it well. As if I were trapped in one of Alleyne's tourneys and couldn't get out, or in one of my childhood daydreams. Now it's quite natural, except when I think about it."
He offered her an arm with a courtly gesture, and she tucked a hand through it; the forearm under her hand felt as if it had been molded out of hard living rubber.
"Ahhh!" Sam Aylward said, seating himself and taking a first swallow of beer from a crock kept cool in an old plas-tic trash barrel full of cold springwater. "Dennis Martin Mackenzie, my thanks!"
The big bearded man doffed his bonnet and showed his bald spot in a bow. "Hell, they're your hops and barley, Samuel Aylward Mackenzie. Plus the mountains contributed the water free of charge."
"But you did the brewing, mate."
"Pity we don't have any ice, to get it really cold," Dennis replied, with a malicious twinkle.
Aylward shuddered dramatically. "Bite your tongue, Yank! If I didn't like to taste the beer, I could drink ice water cut with vodka."
Then he looked out at the field of stooked sheaves. "Well, that's done and now we can all relax and lie about eating chockies till next spring."
He was smiling as he said it, and there were groans from most within earshot; the work of the harvest wouldn't really be over until Mabon, still months away—at which time the fall plowing started anyway. Late-planted winter gardens under mulch would yield a bit through most of the cold season. But at least the main crop was in, the breadstuff that was the literal staff of life. Plenty of it was on the long plank tables, in the form of biscuits tapped still hot out of thick clay traveling ovens, and of baskets full of warm round loaves marked with the eight-spoked Wheel of the Year on their crusts.
They went with butter, cheese, fresh salads—everyone gorged on greens this time of year—glazed hams, a great cold roast beef, fried chicken, a noble dish of Sam's apple-cured bacon with wild chanterelle mushrooms, steamed vegetables, a huge pot of baked beans with bits of fat pork standing amid the crumbling brown crust, and for dessert, cream with the first peaches and berries and bowls of dark red Mona cherries, and honey for dipping. Jugs of cold water, milk, Denrüe's home brew, cider and wirie and chilled herbal tea went down on the planks.
Juniper was suddenly conscious of how ravenous she was, and how good the salty brown smell of the ham was, and that the first new potatoes were waiting, steaming gently as the lids of the pots were removed, beside deep royal purple baby beets…
And I'm aware of the fact that I intend to not worry about anything for the rest of the day, starting with letters from the Protector and the negotiations. Work drives out care, but so does sheer willpower.
Everyone waited politely while the Lopez family said their grace, then started passing plates. Juniper took a sampling of side dishes around a slab of the ham, added a dab of the strong homemade mustard before she began to eat, and noticed Nigel Loring dipping a spoon into a crock of equally strong homemade creamy horseradish to put beside thin-sliced rare roast beef.
"Careful," she said. "It's good, but Melissa makes it hot enough to jump over for luck like a Beltane bonfire."
"All the better," he said, nodding up the table.
Melissa sat at the head of the trestle table, with Sam Ayl-ward at her right and an improvised cradle of sheaves and blankets on her left. There was a tender fondness in Lor-ing's face as he saw the other man raising his infant daughter in both hands, chuckling when she grabbed at his face and tiny pink fingers closed on one nostril.
"I always thought Aylward would be a good father," he said; the buzz of conversation was loud enough that privacy was possible, even in the open air, if you leaned close. "I'm very glad to see him settled. He claimed he was married to the SAS, of course, and that 'roots are for ruddy turnips, sir.' "
"That's hard to imagine, after all these years. Sam seems like a butte or some other natural feature—anything solid and strong—and about as rooted as a man can be and not sprout leaves like the Jack-in-the-Green," Juniper said.
Then she paused to cut one of the new potatoes across, add a pat of butter and chew blissfully. When she had swallowed: "Of course, the time before the Change seems… unreal a good part of the time."
"Except when you wake and everything since the Change seems like a fading dream, and in a minute you'll hear autos and aircraft and the television," Loring said quietly.
Juniper nodded. "Less and less often, but it still happens," she said. "And will until the last of us who were old enough to remember the time before pass on."
Then she shrugged and smiled. "As for Sam, not a day's gone by since I found trim in April of the first Change Year that I haven't thanked Cernunnos for him."
Loring coughed slightly. Juniper grinned at his blush and went on: "Yes, I'm quite serious about it," she said. "Really I am, all the way through. Though I'm told I can be surprisingly rational most of the time…"
It's true that most stereotypes have a core of fact in 'em, she thought with amusement. So some Englishmen really do dread embarrassment more than they do fire and sword! I think before the Change the Lorings were very, very old-fashioned. Now they may be back in fashion… who knows? He doesn't talk much about his past, or hasn't until just recently.
Nigel cleared his throat, "We have… they have traditions much like this back in England," he said. "The harvest supper and even the corn-straw figurines. Done with an Anglican emphasis, of course. The king encouraged it; for that matter, so did I, before we had our little falling-out."
"You mean before he tried to kill you?" Juniper chuckled and filled her mug with Dennie's brew, then held the tall pitcher over his. "More? Here you go then. I'm not surprised some of it's familiar: Who do you think you Christians stole it all from originally? Or to put it another way, we modern Witches reconstructed—plundered, stole and copied, some say—from the same sources."
"Pass those creamed potatoes, would you? Ah, reconstruction is one thing, but I don't doubt the whole affair feels a little different since the Change, eh? More serious for most? And we're none of us really modern anymore, are we?"
Juniper gave him a considering look. "Well, you're not just a pretty face, are you then?" she said, and enjoyed his blush again. "Or just a strong sword arm. Yes, it's… different now. I suppose you were always Church of England yourself?"
"Nominally, for tradition's sake." He smiled at himself. "I was a choirboy, if you can believe it."
They chatted and ate as the sky darkened and the last of sunset's gold faded from the stooked grain and turned ruddy on the mountaintops eastward. Lamps were hung from the branches of the oak tree, and eventually the youngsters down at the foot of the table began a round of songs. Someone brought Juniper her fiddle case; she spent a moment tuning, then joined in as one tune after another was called.
At last something unfamiliar came, and she cocked her head, listening:
"We'll run the course From Stonehenge up to Uffington! On a white chalk horse we'll ride…"
Hordle's deep bass and Alleyne's firm baritone sounded through the warm darkness, as everyone listened to catch the unfamiliar words. Sir Nigel unexpectedly joined in, his voice a little rougher than his son's:
"Within the wood where Robin Hood once made his secret den We'll play a song and sing along with all his merry men And tell a tale with fine-brewed ale and friends from long ago And tread the miles of Robin's cr
oss—"
She caught the lilt and whistled softly, nodding her head to the beat as she memorized the words, then struck up her fiddle to follow along. Not long after yawns said it was time to go, after a long day of heavy work and a full meal; a good many of the children were already asleep on blankets, and scarcely stirred as they were lifted into the wagons for the short trip home. Their older siblings helped the adults stow the rest of the gear and the remains of the feast, and hitch the reapers for towing. Juniper walked alongside one cart where Tamar and Rudi, Mathilda and young Edain Aylward all lay tumbled amid blankets and straw like exhausted puppies, stirring a little when the vehicle jounced.
The farm lane twisted away eastward like silk ribbon in the night, field and forest murmurous on either side. Ahead she could see the outline of Dun Fairfax's walls, and lights behind them; a few hundred yards to her right Artemis Creek chuckled over its bed, and the roadway beside it was white beneath stars and moon, next to the dark riverside trees.
Nigel Loring was not far away, she noticed, and he'd slung on the heater-shaped shield with the five roses, and his sword. Along with the loose robe, it gave him an oddly Biblical look, or perhaps that of some warrior monk of the Crusades.
Although I doubt he'd do well at Mt. Angel, she thought whimsically. Abbot Dmowski is a good enough man, but sadly lacking in a sense of humor, I think. There's a good deal of quiet humor in this man, when he isn't sad.
Alleyne Loring was on the other side of the wagon, also armed and unobtrusively alert. Near him were Astrid Lars-son and Eilir, both looking as if they were trying to crowd next to him without making it too obvious.
Not obvious to anyone who's blind, perhaps, she thought, and suppressed a grin. It wasn't that she didn't sympathize with both girls, but… The Foam-Born will have their little jokes, and oh, how the young suffer! What storms and stress and follies! And how they hate it when anyone laughs!
John Hordle was not far away, whistling the old tune softly in the mild summer night. He didn't have the same air of hidden tension as the others; more one of alert patience, if she read him aright—and she had some confidence in her skill at that. They bid farewell to the Dun Fairfax folk at their own gate and turned north through the winding track that climbed the densely wooded hillside. Within it light vanished save for a few lanterns hooked over spearheads, casting flickering illumination upward into the branches, and once glinting suddenly from eyes beside the trail—a fox or coyote, from their green flash and the swift flight.
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