The Protector's War (49 page)

Aylward nodded.
And smart enough to figure things wouldn't change back,
he thought.
And hard enough to see what had to be done. If they hadn't defended those islands, they'd have been overrun and eaten out, which is what I thought had happened.

“Blair was supposed to follow along when the civilians finally started taking it serious-like, by the last message we got out of London, but he never did—the riots were bad by then, and the food had run out.”

“Bet it had. Small loss with Blair, is what I think. I never did like the bugger's greasy great smile—you could wring the man out and do a proper fry-up with the oil.”

“No argument then or now, Samkin. And that's probably exactly what happened to 'im.”

They laughed grimly, and Aylward went on: “What about the prince?”

“Sir Nigel took an SAS team to Sandringham to fetch him; we used the back roads and rejoined at the coast—quite a gypsy caravan by then, the prince'd been thinking, like, and he had us sweep up all the horses and livestock we could; seed grain from Highgrove too, and tools, and some farmers he knew. And we
towed
a bloody great grain ship out of Southampton on the tide, with sodding rowboats…Christ, talk about hard graft!”

He shuddered at the memory and tilted his mug back.

“Isle o' Wight, eh? Might have guessed that. How many lived?” Aylward said.

“Of our folk? Three hundred fifty thousand; Jocks, Taffies an' all. Two-thirds of that on Wight.”

“I'm not surprised,” Aylward said, wincing a little despite himself; that was one in two hundred of the British population. Better than he'd expected, in fact. Still…

“Six hundred thousand by now, though.”

“That's fast work with the dollies even for you, John!”

Hordle snorted laughter and shook his head: “We brought in a lot of foreigners from Iceland and the Faeroes, you see. They lasted out the first year at home on sheep and fish, but they were up against it by then, and proper glad of a place to go, and we needed the hands something fierce by then to get the cropin…”

“Sir Nigel said something about the prince getting eccentric.”

Hordle grinned, without much mirth. “He did good work at first, mind you, but then…eccentric? I think
went bloody barking mad
was more what he had in mind. Sir Nigel and some others were going to do something about it, only Charlie decided to do something about them first—or rather Queen Hallgerda did. Those Tasmanians had a ship in, they agreed to give asylum—Charlie had put their backs up something frightful—so young Mr. Loring and Major Buttesthorn and a few of the lads and I broke Sir Nigel out of Woburn, and got him down to the ship—just like Robin Hood and Bad King John, it was—and here we are.”

“Gotten short-spoken in your dotage,” Aylward said. “What happened once you got here, then?”

“Ah, well, Sir Nigel would be the one to tell about that.”

 

“Now,” Havel said an hour later, “we have time to talk, by Christ Jesus.”

The Englishmen were around the table, Juniper Mackenzie with them; the Bearkiller leaders flanked Havel; everyone was slightly damp from the baths. The room was private—Arvand Sarian's people had laid it, lit the lanterns and brought the food: lentil soup, fresh bread, butter, spring salads, kebabs of chicken and lamb and garlic-rich yogurt on the side, platters of smoking pork ribs with a hot red sauce, French fries, roast vegetables. They'd also set out jugs of wine and water, cider and beer.

Will Hutton spoke as he reached for a rib: “I don't think Arminger's men were pushin' hard, Mike, not once they realized these English folks was past 'em for good. We may have killed a couple; had about half a dozen wounded ourselves. Susanna Clarke got a lance point on her shield and went over the crupper: broken thighbone and half a dozen ribs stove and a nasty cut on her face, but she'll pull through.”

Nigel Loring stirred. Michael Havel held up a hand: “Everything in its place, Sir Nigel. Let's hear Lady Juniper first.”

Juniper took a pull at her beer.
“Is túisce deoch ná scéal.
A story begins with a drink.”

To her surprise, Sir Nigel answered in the same tongue: “But
Nuair a bhionn an fion istigh, bionn an ciall amuigh.
When the wine is in, the sense is out!”

Juniper chuckled and inclined her head. “Ah, but beer, now…Well, it all started a little before Beltane—May Eve to you cowans,” she went on, her storyteller's voice clear without loudness, the words smoothly knit. “We'd gotten word that the Protector and most of his household troops were out away past the Columbia Gorge.”

Signe nodded; so did Sir Nigel.

“We were with him, worse luck,” the Englishman said. “Pretty country, but deplorable company.”

Juniper chuckled. “And it struck us that since Witches are
not
obliged to turn the other cheek, a good ringing slap across his was due for the breaking of our border. I was killing half a flock of birds with one stone…”

Dun Juniper/Sutterdown, Willamette Valley, Oregon

April 29th–May 3rd, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

J
uniper yawned as she set the big basket of eggs down on the wooden counter, then went to one of the smaller sinks to wash her hands—getting their potential offspring out from under sitting free-range hens wasn't the most sanitary procedure in the world. Besides which, the birds pecked even when you thanked them politely and explained your need, which was understandable but annoying. A cook grabbed the basket and bore the hundred or so eggs off to be washed, cracked into bowls, mixed with cream and chopped scallions and cooked into fluffy scrambled form.

“Thanks, Juney,” Diana Trethar said absently, sitting at a table and making notes. “I'm trying to come up with something
different
for this Beltane feast coming.”

“Diana, it's going to be a potluck anyway! Do a pig or two, roast venison if Cernunnos sends us a deer, Bacchus pudding and wreath cake, and leave the rest to people's imagination!”

The slim dark woman returned to her lists, obviously not having heard a word. Unlike most people, her current job wasn't all that different from what she'd done before the Change—in her case, running MoonDance restaurant, where she'd been in charge of the kitchens and researching recipes.

“I just want something
new,
” she said after a moment of pure focus, eyes blank as she tapped the feather of her quill pen against her lips.

Juniper gave a peal of laughter. “Remember when the problem was making food for twenty feed thirty-five?”

Diana flashed her a quick grin. “That's what the Eternal Soup was for,” she said. “Most efficient way of feeding a big group ever invented.”

“Most boring, you mean.”

“That too. But we were usually too hungry and too scared to be bored back then, if I remember it right.” Her eyes went back to the paper. “Hmmm…custards for dessert, maybe…”

The rest of the long kitchen set against the rear of the Hall was bustling; ancient Mackenzie tradition, hallowed by all the years since their very first harvest, was that the Chief kept open house and a free table—for clansfolk, visitors, and even for gangrels and tramps. Bakers reached into the arched brick ovens with long wooden paddles, bringing out rolls and fruit tarts and round arched loaves of bread with an eight-spoked Wheel cut into their brown crusts; the ovens and the bank of woodstoves made it warm even early in the morning with doors and windows all open, and pleasantly full of a medley of good scents that made the saliva rush into her mouth: the sharp odor of brewing herbal tea, bread and biscuits baking, pancakes in butter-greased skillets bubbling and developing lacy crusts around their edges, porridge giving off smooth thick
pooofh…pooofh
sounds, and then there were bacon and ham and sausages sizzling and popping…

Dishes were already coming back on trolleys. At one of the large sinks salvaged from the kitchens of a hotel, a team of “corks”—individuals who could be stuffed into any empty chore that needed doing—were scrubbing briskly and setting the plates and saucers and mugs to drain. One of them had a braid of white-blond hair down her back and a slightly mutinous look on her long sculpted face.

Juniper grinned inwardly.
Sorry, Astrid dear,
she thought.
Chores are for everyone, and this isn't Larsdalen. You're an adopted Mackenzie in Dun Juniper, not a princess!

She let the washing continue until the current stack was done, then called her name, jerking her chin towards the main Hall. Astrid tapped Eilir on the shoulder, and they took off their bib-aprons and dodged out into the great room, tossing them at two others who were on the duty roster and looking reasonably finished. There were more folk at the long tables than was usual, making a cheerful clatter of cutlery and of voices as they called back and forth; most of those who were going to Sutterdown for the ceremonies had chosen to eat here rather than in their own homes. Juniper went to the sideboard where food and crockery waited, filled a big bowl with oatmeal porridge—it was studded with dried fruit, cherries and chunks of apple and pear and crumbled hazelnuts—poured on thick yellow cream, put a mug of the tea on her tray, and made her way to the head table. That was raised on a low dais, and her chair was a thronelike affair carved from oak and maple and walnut by Dennis himself, the pillars behind ending in stylized raven's-heads for Thought and Memory and arching to support a Triple Moon.

That and a view over the room were privileges of rank. The sun was just up, and the verandas outside made it a little dim here without artificial light; god-faces and colored symbols loomed out of the tall dimness above. Racked spears and swords glittered near the big side doors; men, women, children and dogs wandered in and out, along with a damp, chilly spring morning air.

She threw
hellos
and
good mornings
left and right as she walked up to the head table; eating there had come to seem normal, albeit a little like living forever in a hotel. Sometimes it was a relief to sneak down to the kitchens late at night and have a muffin with just Eilir, or make something herself with a few old friends.

“At least when I was a singer, I wasn't on display
all
the time,” she muttered, after she'd set her tray down and made the blessing and Invocation over the food and began to ply her spoon.

“Getting nostalgic again?” Chuck Barstow said.

He set down a tray heaped with eggs and fried ham and potatoes and biscuits beside her and started stoking his leanly muscular frame; Second Armsman and Lord of the Harvest were both jobs that kept you sweating. In the seat beyond him Judy yawned and blinked over a bowl like Juniper's. It was just six o'clock and she'd never been a morning person, one of the few serious incompatibilities she and Juniper had; it was also one reason she and Chuck lived in the Hall, where you didn't have to get your own breakfast. Her black cat clambered painfully onto her lap, curled up and went to sleep, not even waking up for the cream-pouring, but then Pywackett was fourteen and a bit decrepit, which made it natural. Cuchulain thumped his tail on the floorboards behind her chair and then went back to sleep himself, despite determined attempts at dog-bothering by a couple of young Hall cats just out of kittenhood.

“Noooo,” Juniper said uncertainly. “Not nostalgic in general, if you know what I mean. Just nostalgic for, well, being just
myself
. I'd undo the Change if I could, of course, but otherwise…I like this better. It's more the way human beings were meant to live.”

“It's gotten so I feel that way most of the time, when I forget what we had to go through to get this far,” Chuck said. He used his point-trimmed beard to indicate the table at the other end of the great room. “But I doubt those poor bastards do.”

That was where the gangrels and beggars sat; they had to be washed first, of course, since lice and fleas carried disease, but they still looked shaggy-ragged and unkempt, their faces weathered and often scarred or gnarled. Some twitched or spoke to nothing; others cowered on their benches; more hunched over their food, snarling at anyone who came too near. Juniper looked at them with pity, even though most of them chose a wandering life, depending on casual work now and then, eked out with charity and petty theft. Certainly anyone willing to
really
work was welcome to stay past the hour-and-a-day granted mendicants, here or at one or another of the clan's duns. Food was abundant now, but producing that or anything else just took so much sweating-hard effort!

I think most of them are mad, poor souls, probably since the Dying Time. Just functional enough to survive…for a while. Or too haunted by what they
did
to survive to settle among ordinary folk again.

Chuck sighed and shrugged: “Well, they're not much worse off than homeless people before the Change.”

“There are a lot more of them, relatively speaking,” Juniper said.

“And I suspect some of them are spies, you know. It'd be a perfect way for Arminger to slip his men through here.”

“You're probably right,” Juniper said soberly; it was part of Chuck's job to worry about that.

Then she flashed him a grin: “But some may be the Lord or Lady in disguise, or some other spirit you wouldn't want to offend. Remember why we leave an empty place at Samhain!”

He nodded—joking aside, they both knew that was entirely possible—and changed the subject. “Judy and I should be coming with you,” he said.

“No, you shouldn't,” Juniper said, firmly but with a smile. “I have to be at Sutterdown for Beltane”—the reasons were essentially political; the Clan Mackenzie's only town thought
it
should be the Chief's residence—” but Dun Juniper's folk need a High Priest and High Priestess for the rites too, don't they?”

Unspoken, her eyes added:
And if you
and
Sam Aylward
and
myself myself disappeared afterward, there wouldn't be much doubt as to what we were up to, would there? Plus an Armsman's needed here, in case quick decisions have to be made.

Judy was coming back to consciousness halfway through her breakfast. She stretched, yawned, poured on more cream and returned to her latest hobbyhorse: “This sept thing isn't working out the way we planned.”

“No, it isn't,” Juniper said cheerfully, enjoying the intense flavor the dried Bing cherries cooked into it gave the porridge under the smooth richness of the cream; the clan's milking herds leaned heavily to the Jersey breed. “So they're spread between the settlements, instead of each being concentrated at one. So what? Sure, and it'd be dull if things always went as planned. It's actually better that way. You can always look up another Wolf or Raven if you're away from home; it ties all the Duns together.”

“Well, yes, but how do we know people are picking the
right
totem?”

Juniper looked at her, blinking. “Well, how do we know they're
not?
Meditation and dreams seems a pretty good way to me. I suppose we could…”

She paused to think of methods, the loopier the better.
Flip coins? Throw dice? Do the I Ching? No, that would
work.
Blindfold people and spin them around until they point at a totem sign?

“I've got it! We'll make a
magic hat,
and put a really powerful spell on it so it can
talk,
and let that sort people when we put it on their heads!”

Judy snorted, then laughed; she didn't do it all that often, but the deep rich chuckling was worth waiting for. “Time you were off, then,” she said, as Juniper scraped her bowl. “Merry met, and merry part…”

“…and merry meet again!”

 

The party from Dun Juniper relaxed when they reached the base of the stream-side road that sloped southward down from their hillside bench; they had the Sutterdown god-posts with them, and together the two carved black-walnut trunks weighed enough to make anyone cautious with a horse-drawn wagon and its elementary brakes.

Everyone halted and gave a cheer, where the road and Artemis Creek reached the head of the valley and both turned westward. From here you could look down the long swale, where the rolling patchwork of field and wood opened out towards the valley proper. Behind them the sun was just up over the low green mountains and the higher Cascade peaks behind, throwing their shadows before them. Dennis started a song—his deep voice could carry one a lot better than it once had, with nine years' practice:

Juniper laughed at the familiar tune and reached for her guitar, joining in:

Four great brown-coated Suffolks drew the wagon, which was a much-repaired Conestoga that Chuck Barstow had…liberated…from a living history exhibit the night of the Change, along with the mares who'd borne the present team. On level ground and smooth roads the massive ton-weight beasts moved it along easily enough, with a thudding clop of plate-sized hooves and a crunching pop of ironshod wheels on gravel, though the personal baggage of twenty-five people was piled over the tarpaulin-covered pillars. A few rode horses or bicycles, but most were on foot; the wagon wasn't moving very fast, nor were the smaller children riding on it part-time, and the whole party had to go at the pace of the slowest. The only other wheels in their group were on a replica carriage that had carried tourists through Salem before the Change and was along to give a lift to those who couldn't walk the distance and needed the comfort of springs and cushioned seats. Swords rested at belts, bow and quiver over shoulders, here and there a spear or ax or bill, but that was only because nobody went far from their doors without, these days.