The Protector's War (43 page)

“Juney!” she called, waving.

“Judy!” Juniper replied, reading the other's pursed-lip expression with the ease of long experience as meaning roughly:

For
this
piece of limp celery I missed the Sabbat?

She had a passenger, a woman Juniper knew only by correspondence since the Change, though they'd run into each other a few times at RenFaires and Pagan gatherings before that. Laurel Wilson wasn't any older than Juniper's late-thirties, but from her looks could have given her a decade or more; those were the lines of privation and strain, and there were streaks of gray in her long dark hair. Bright sunlight brought out the wrinkles and weathering. She was looking around at the bustling scene with open awe, and even more so as the real size of Dun Juniper's walls became apparent—the shining white of the stucco coating and the painted roundels of flower and vine under the battlements gave an appearance of grace that belied the sheer massiveness of it.

“Merry met, the both of you!” Juniper said, as Judy pulled on the reins and the horses halted, bending their heads to graze. “We'll be through in just a second.”

Judy's children—Tamsin, a girl of twelve, Chuck Junior, still toddling, and the three adoptees, who were nineteen or twenty now—abandoned their father's scorekeeping station and came trotting over; or the teenagers did, with Tamsin running at their heels and Chuck the Small toddling in their wake and setting up a howl as he tripped and fell on the close-cropped turf. Judy tied off the reins, jumped down and comforted the two-year-old with brisk efficiency.

“This is worth watching,” she said over her shoulder to the visitor; Laurel stood, and shielded her eyes with a hand.

Westward down the meadow men and women were following loaded carts, taking out scores of target outlines shaped like a man with a shield, made of a double layer of thick planks. The targets were propped up against successive fence lines at fifty-yard intervals out to three hundred yards, with each figure a few feet from its neighbors to left and right—the same formation as armored footmen would have in battle. This was a harder test than battle in some respects, because the real thing would involve shooting at a formation many yards deep; a little over or under usually didn't matter much.

Of course, nobody's shooting
back
at you,
Juniper thought, settling the baldric that carried her quiver with a shrug of her shoulders. Not far away, a signaler raised a silver-mounted horn to his mouth and blew
Assemble in line,
a long modulated dunting howl.

Those of her clan with pre-Change battle experience had told her the hardest thing to unlearn had been the instinct to spread out and take cover. You couldn't do that in a big battle these days. Longbows were deadly, but they weren't machine guns. To stop a mass of armored men charging with bladed weapons you had to pack your archers together, which meant you had to stand upright and just take whatever came back at you.

The shooters drifted over from the other clout rings and the butts, chatting as they did. She heard Aylward sigh, and hid a smile; he'd taught them all a great deal, but they weren't the Guards, or the SAS.

“Line up by squads, you horrible lot!” he barked, and scowled harder at the genial remarks he got back. “Sod this for a game of soldiers, you idle, useless maggots—move it!”

The nonshooting spectators had a high proportion of nursing mothers and the visibly pregnant, including Melissa Aylward.

“Watch your tongue, Samkin!” she called, and laughed at his scowl along with more than a few of her friends and fellow onlookers. “I know where you sleep!”

The squads each had nine bows, with subgroups of three—mystically appropriate and solidly practical as well; there were three squads here from Dun Fairfax and eleven from Dun Juniper's larger population. A hundred and twenty-six archers in all, not counting the juveniles, overage and hopelessly shortsighted who helped hustle more arrows up to the shooters. The arrangement had the added advantage of keeping everything friends-and-neighbors, which put heart into ordinary folk if they had to fight.

Juniper stepped into her place beside Chuck and the Dun Juniper banner, looking to either side with fond pride. They might not have quite the guards snap that Sam remembered nostalgically, or the Bearkiller habit of doing everything at a run, but they got where they were going—a staggered triple line formed, with a yard between each of the Mackenzie warriors.

“Nock shafts!” Aylward barked.

There was no chatter or nonsense now. A hundred and twenty-six hands brought a nock to the cord and a shaft to the cutout arrow shelf that ran through the middle of their bows. The first target was the line of shields three hundred yards distant. Each was about man-sized—or thumb-sized, at this distance.

“Let the gray geese fly!”
Sam shouted, his own bow ready: “Wholly together—”

The yellow-limbed yew bows came up, pointing at the same angle—they would begin with dropping shots at extreme range. Juniper drew until the kiss-ring on the cord touched her lip.

“—shoot!”

The slap of strings on bracers sounded so close together that it was like a lightning crack. Beneath that came the deep whining
humm
of the cords, and the whickering massed
ssssssst
of the shafts as they rose in a dense cloud, louder than sleet in a bad storm. She emptied her mind and became one with the rhythm of it: breath out as you drew, open the chest, close the back, throw the left arm forward and twist with hip and gut until you reached full draw, sense the right angle for release, let the string fall off the three draw fingers of the right hand, follow through, reach back for another, and another…

“Second target!”

They adjusted their aim; now the arrows flew on a shallower arc.

“Third! Fourth!”

“Point-blank, maximum speed!”

The muscles of her shoulders and arms were burning in truth now, but that was a distant background to the dance, her hand darting down now where the helper had stuck the next bundle of shafts point-down in the turf and ready to grasp. Arrows blurred out from the Mackenzie line, scores every second for one last long burst, slashing across the meadow in a ripple of sleek destruction. The heads struck the plank shields with a hard
tock
repeated so fast it sounded like a whole flock of mad woodpeckers; they were using broadheads, not greased bodkins, but many were hammering through the double layer of tough wood anyway, and the rest bristled out thicker than a porcupine's spines.

“Halt!”

They did, suddenly aware that they were puffing and blowing. Juniper blinked a little as she looked at the long oval where the arrows stood in ground and shield—thousands upon thousands of them, fired in the time it would take armored foemen to cross the killing ground. She couldn't help but think what it would be like, trying to keep your shield up and march through
that
. Much less ride a horse into it; the poor beasts didn't wear much armor, and had even less reason to let themselves be hurt and killed in the quarrels of men.

Well,
shit,
as Mike likes to say. I'm proud we can do it, but Goddess gentle and strong, I wish we didn't have to!

The line broke up; people started helping each other out of their brigandines for shoulder-rubs—you had to be careful about repetitive motion injuries—or went off to practice sword-and-buckler or battle-spear work for a change of pace, or just to socialize, gossip, dicker and swap.

“So, what do you think, Sam First Armsman Aylward Mackenzie?”

“I'm…not quite satisfied, but not unhappy either,” Aylward said. “Or rather, we'd have nothing to be un'appy about if every dun in our territory were up to this standard. They're still not real soldiers…”

“But they aren't any kind of soldiers at all,” Juniper said gently. “They're farmers, and blacksmiths and carpenters and schoolteachers and weavers, who fight when they have to.”

The Englishman nodded. “I grant you that, Lady Juniper. And for that, they're bloody good.”

Tamar ran up, with a smile at Juniper, and her stepfather put an arm around her shoulders. “And I'm a farmer who fights when he has to meself, these days.”

Juniper ruffled the girl's hair, unstrung her own bow—something you had to be careful with; it could take your nose off if you slipped, or poke out an eye—and walked over to the wagon.

“Long time no see, Laurel,” she said, extending a hand.

You look
terrible, she didn't add. The other woman was wearing patched jeans—patched with a piece of badly cured hide across the seat, for starters. She didn't quite look like a homeless gangrel, but she wasn't all that far from it either.

“I'm glad to see you, Lady Juniper,” Laurel said humbly.

Juniper sighed inwardly at that, and at the tone more than the words. She'd gotten used to people calling her that, or Chief, or
the
Mackenzie—from some of them, like Aylward or Dennis or her old covener friends, it was just a half-teasing gesture of affection. Hearing it
this
way from someone she'd known back in the old days drove home how irrevocably lost those days were, and the weight of the responsibility on her shoulders. She didn't challenge Laurel's choice of words, either. People wouldn't understand.

Ah, here I am the great Chief, Herself Herself, and I can't so much as tell someone to knock it off and call me Juney.

“Come on, let's get you settled, and then we'll talk.”

 

“So, you were a self-initiated solitary back before the Change?” Juniper said gently.

The four Mackenzies and Laurel Wilson were in the attic loft of the Hall, Juniper's bedchamber when she unrolled the futon now neatly stored beside Rudi's on a shelf, and also her office and workroom, and the place she kept her fiddles and guitars and the big harp. There was a desk, typewriter and adding machine, racks of ring-binders and filing cabinets; being head of even a very decentralized state turned out to involve a lot of paperwork, something she loathed with every fiber of her being. It was also the place where she kept her Craft tools and books, and the site of her private altar, over on the middle of the north wall beneath one of the dormer windows and beside the lectern that had her Book of Shadows under a black cloth. The smell of incense still clung, although the tiny brazier between the figures of the Lord and Lady was empty and clean; around it stood the black-handled athame, a white-handled knife with a curved blade, vials of oils, candles…

The woman sitting across the table from her made a reverent gesture towards it. “I hadn't actually got that far,” she said. “We'd just started our Circle but…well, I'd read a
lot
of the books, though.”

“Which books, if I might ask?”

“
The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.
And Silver Ravenwolf…”

Behind her back Judy Barstow grimaced with clenched teeth and pummeled her temples with the heels of her hands.

“I tried Starhawk, but it was sort of hard to get into.”

Judy went pale and made gagging motions, then mimed tearing out hanks of her hair.

Judy!
Juniper thought, hard.
Be nice!

The Tradition that the Singing Moon belonged to had always insisted on a year-and-a-day of intense instruction before Initiation, and an unbroken line of descent from Initiate to Initiate; in fact, for Wiccans they were traditionalists. They'd bent their rules—they'd had to, after the Change and the huge influx of new believers—but no more than they must. Particularly for those who went on from simple Dedicant status to full Initiation. Still, this wasn't the time to get all sniffy.

The Lord and Lady don't check your ID at the door, if you come with love and trust in your heart.

She managed a flicker of a quelling glare at her former Maiden; Sally Martin did rather better, and covertly nudged her with an elbow. Chuck Barstow kept his face carefully blank.

Be kind, Judy,
Juniper thought, projecting a soothing calm.
They've managed to survive this long.

“Well, let's stick to the immediate practicalities, Laurel,” she said. “You've got…what, eighty people in your group these days?”

The long room had three dormers on either side, and more windows at either end; down at the east end was her big eight-harness loom with its treadles and shuttles, an old friend from before the Change, surrounded by baskets full of skeins of dyed wool yarn. Duplicates of it were working in half the Clan's households, used by her own pupils and the ones
they
had instructed. A bolt of finished tartan cloth four feet across stood nearby, ready to be taken for fulling. Laurel's clothes weren't all that ragged, and they were clean, but the leather on the seat of her jeans was the only thing she wore that hadn't been made before the Change.