The Protector's War (50 page)

More and more voices joined in:

Dennis Martin Mackenzie laid a proprietary hand on the tarpaulin-clad wood while he sang and strode along beside the fruit of his labors; his wife and daughter rested atop it, and the eight-year-old kicked her heels in time to the tune. He carried a four-foot Danish bearded war ax over his shoulder, one his brother John had made for the collector trade before the Change, along with the Roman-style short sword that now swung at Juniper's hip. Both had been widely copied since, but not by John Martin; he'd been on Nantucket when the Change hit. Rumor born of the last radio broadcasts had it that the Change had
started
there.

The song ran on to its conclusion:

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 bow-staff 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 Sutterdown 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 Chief's 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 woodlots. 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 farmwork never entirely went away.

Déanann sparán trom croi éadrom,
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 territory 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…

And finding out how to live in this new-old world. Odd how we elder folk can't stop thinking about the times before no matter how hard we try to forget,
she thought.
Maybe that's why so many have taken up the old ways or what they think were such; we Mackenzies, the Bearkillers, the monks at Mt. Angel—even Arminger, in his twisted dreams of a dark past.

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.