The Protector's War (72 page)

“Did your mom and dad let you eat anything you want between meals?” Rudi said; he knew that was wrong, but it sounded like fun too.

“Well…no. I mean, my mom didn't.”

Her face crumpled for an instant, then firmed; she shrugged off the sympathetic arm he put around her shoulder.

“She didn't like me hanging around low places and peons, you know.”

“Lady bless, hanging around the kitchens is
fun,
” Rudi said. “It's a lot better than arithmetic lessons, that's for sure.”

“Yeah, but they make you
do
stuff. Chores. And that's not what lords and ladies are supposed to do.”

“My mom's a Lady,” Rudi pointed out reasonably. “And she does chores. That's fun sometimes too. Anyway, it's got to be done.”

Mathilda considered this and nodded, looking a little uneasy. “I suppose so. I don't think my mom would like it, though.”

“Look—” He glanced around. “Want to know a secret?”

“Yeah!”

“My mom got a letter from your dad.” He smiled as her face glowed. “He's going to send someone to talk to my mom about you at the Sutterdown Horse Fair, after Lughnassadh. And you can write a letter back. So why don't we go hit the kitchens, like I said?”

After a moment, Mathilda replied, “Maybe they'll have some of those sweet buns with the nuts?”

“And there's some new kittens there,” he said.

“I miss my cat Saladin,” she said. “But kittens are always fun.”

They trotted off through the dispersing crowd. As they went, Mathilda caught sight of the stars-and-tree sigil on Astrid Larsson's tunic.

“Oh,
that
stuff again,” she said. “Doesn't she ever get
tired
of it? She's a grown-up.”

“Don't you like the story?” Rudi asked. “I liked
The Hobbit
best, but Astrid says that's 'cause I'm still a kid.”

“I think I'll
still
think it's way too long and full of boring stuff when I'm old, even if Dad got the idea for the flag out of it,” Mathilda said. She giggled and dropped her voice to a whisper: “Have you heard about the other Ring story?”

“Other story?”

“The one where the hero's called Dildo Bugger?”

Rudi's face twisted in an expression halfway between fascination and disgust. “You've
got
to be kidding, Matti.”

“No, really—”

 

Dun Fairfax, Willamette Valley, Oregon

July 22nd, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

 

“It took me two Harvests to really get the trick of this, even though I already knew how to drive a team,” Juniper called over her shoulder; then as she came to the end of the row: “Whoa! Dobbin! Maggie!”

There were two horses pulling the reaper, big platter-hoofed draft beasts with dark brown hides, sweating after a long day working in the hot July sun. They stopped as she called and leaned back against the reins; then she rose and rubbed at her backside for a moment; the metal bicycle-seat of the machine was hard, and muscling the big horses around was real work. Her hands and forearms were sore with day after day of doing it from
can
to
can't,
and the long sinews of her legs ached as well.

Eilir waved from the seat of the other reaper, pausing a second.
I'll take the last of it!
she signed, and Juniper bowed from the waist and waved a hand.

“Be my guest, daughter mine! Too much like hard work for us crones!”

They'd been working their way in from the edges of the field since the dew lifted with no more rest than the horse teams required, and only one ten-foot-wide band of standing grain remained, stretching from east to west along the contour of the hillside. It still wasn't nearly as hard as cutting wheat with twenty pounds of cradle-scythe the way they had their first two harvests, though; she didn't have the height or heft to use one of those. And a reaper could harvest many times the amount a cradler did in a single day, which was a blessing. Summer rainstorms were vanishingly rare in the Willamette's reliable climate, but you still had to get the wheat and barley and oats in as fast as you could. Too much delay and the grain would start to shatter, drop out of the head and be lost on the ground.

“It took you a while to learn the trick because of the slope?” Nigel Loring asked, straightening as he bound the last sheaf of a row and rubbing at the small of his back for a moment.

“Yes,” she said. “You have to be careful on a thirty-degree slant like this, or you keep heading down and the horses get into the wheat—and you only get to practice two weeks in the year. It's a lot easier out on the flat, say over at Dun Carson west of here. More difficult on a hillside for the team, too, but Dobbin and Maggie are good-hearted and willing for all they're young.”

She glanced over at him as he stacked a brace of sheaves, heaving one in each hand—and they weighed sixty pounds each. Loring handled the task with an easy economy of motion, bare to the waist and tanned nut-brown. He was only a few inches taller than she, but broad-shouldered and built like a greyhound; deep chest, flat belly and narrow waist. His tanned skin was scarred here and there, a little loosened with middle age, and his sparse blond chest hair was as grizzled as the thinning yellow thatch on his pate, yet his slender body was nearly as tight and compact as a boy's. Farmwork would keep you fit, but she knew that the hint of dancer's grace in his movements came from martial arts in his youth and sparring with the sword since—one had to be cat-agile for both.

The hillside field they were cutting was one of Sam Aylward's, the last of the Dun Fairfax crop. Eilir's reaper wheeled away as her mother reined in and started to cut the last strip down the center, the long boards of the creel whirling and bending the yellow-gold grain back as the teeth of the cutter-bar snipped it, amid a smell of dust and meal and green juices. Poppies fell as well, like bloodred drops among the gold of the wheat—they were traditional English corn poppies, which seemed to have mysteriously naturalized themselves around here, starting with the Dun Fairfax fields. Juniper suspected Sam's clandestine homesick hand with a few packets of seed salvaged from a garden-supply store rather than natural spread from garden plots, but either way they were pretty.

Birds and insects and small beasts fled the advancing machine as the straw fell onto the moving canvas belt behind the cutting teeth, and an endless belt of wooden tines raked it into a smooth windrow that fell onto the ground behind. Juniper groaned slightly as she stretched again, then jumped down and bent and put her palms against the ground; the wheat stubble was prickly beneath her hands, but shot through with soft young shoots of the clover sown among it. When the small of her back felt relaxed she straightened and twisted until something went
click
! in her spine, and then bent backward with her hands linked over her head.

And were you watching, good Sir Nigel?
she thought with amusement as she opened her eyes.
Hard to tell, with that polite poker face of yours. And of course, would I be pleased or annoyed if you did?

The reaper left a long row of cut wheat in a snakelike trail over the ground for the workers who bound the grain, a score or better for each machine. Bend and grab a handful, bend and grab a handful, and keep on until you had a bundle as thick as your arms could span. Then take a swatch in each hand, twist it around to hold it, tuck it in, and you had a bound sheaf; eight leaning together in a pyramid made a stook, and they could wait overnight with their heads up out of the dew, ready to be pitched onto a wagon and carted back to Dun Fairfax for threshing. The air was warm and still as they bent to the rhythmic effort, the tips of the trees motionless; it was a relief to have a good excuse simply to watch. She could feel the westering sun beating on her like warm pillows, as the thin homespun linsey-woolsey shirt clung to her body.

Sam's daughter Tamar led up a two-wheeled cart pulled by a pair of little yearling oxen, her own hand-reared pets. It held a big plastic barrel of water and a motley collection of mugs; she filled one for each of them. All Sam's household were here in the field, and most of the able-bodied from the other families who held land in Dun Fairfax. None of the farms were big enough to justify a reaping machine of their own, so the dun kept two owned in common to share around, and everyone worked together getting in the harvest, turn and turn about as fields came ready—the usual arrangement in a Mackenzie settlement. People had come down from Dun Juniper as well, trading working time for future barrels of flour, or simply pitching in for neighborliness' sake since they planted little grain themselves; altogether there were about enough to bind and stook the wheat as fast as the two machines cut it.

“Thank you, sweetling,” Juniper said to the girl. “And the horses are thirstier than we, sure. They should have something before they're taken to the pond or they'll overdo.”

Juniper took off her straw hat and fanned herself as she drank; most of the scores of people in the field were in kilt and singlet or less, but she wore a long-sleeved shirt against the sun, and kneesocks, and tied a scarf around her coppery hair beneath the hat; even so her freckles had spread and multiplied, as they did every summer. The lukewarm water tasted wonderful in her gummy, dusty mouth, and she wished she could plunge her head into the barrel. Instead she handed back the mug for a refill, with a murmur of thanks; it was plastic too, with the beginning of a crack on the rim. Nigel's was clay and made after the Change, a reddish brown ware plain except for a stylized feather drawn on the side, but skillfully thrown and fired.

“My ninth harvest since the Change,” Nigel said meditatively. “And every one seems—”

“Like a reprieve?” Juniper suggested.

He raised the mug of water in salute. “Just so.”

“Is this very different from a harvest in England?” Juniper asked; the first year had been hard here, and she suspected much worse in the British Isles, even on the islands.

“The harvest? Surprisingly similar; a bit earlier, and if this weather is typical—”

“It is that.”

“—then the climate's more reliable here. In England it can rain any day of the week in any month of the year, and nowadays with no warning at all. It makes getting in the corn a trifle nerve-racking.”

He looked north and east towards the towering peaks of the Cascades and the green slopes that were like a wall along the edge of the world.

“We've nothing like
that
in England, of course. I won't say this is the single most beautiful spot I've ever seen, but it's wonderfully varied. I like the contrast, the fields and orchards here—which
are
very much like parts of southern England—and then the tall mountains and wildwood so close, and the changing patterns of sun and shadow…beauty on very different scales, but complementary.”

Juniper looked at him. “Well, well,” she said. “It's hidden depths you have, Nigel.”

His slightly watery blue eyes twinkled. “Sandra Arminger said much the same thing. But it was far more alarming, coming from her.”

Juniper snorted and threw a twist of straw at him. “I should hope so!”

Her eyes went across the crowded field; Mathilda Arminger was there, running around with the other children, and helping, as they did.

“I'm surprised she's not a total horror, with parents like that,” she said quietly. “And she's just a child, when you get to know her. Spoiled more than a little, and with some odd notions, but not spoiled to the point of being really rotten, if you know what I mean.”

“Is minic ubh bhán ag cearc dhubh,
as the Gaels say,” Loring replied, and winked at her.

“A black hen may often have a white egg, yes,” she agreed. “But it's what hatches that counts.”

“She's young, yet, very young. It takes a good deal to spoil a child that age, and I'd venture that the Armingers would shield her from the worst of the world they've made, for a while at least. Even complete rotters often love their children, in my experience.”

He stared a moment, as if lost in memory. Tamar had gone around to fill buckets for the horses; they lowered their massive square heads and drank with slobbering enthusiasm. Down at the other end of the field the second reaper cut the last of the wheat, and there was an explosion of cheers from the folk at work. A half-dozen of them lifted the driver out of the seat and began tossing her in the air amid whoops and screams; she recognized Astrid, and the massive form of Little John Hordle, and the bright head of Alleyne Loring.

And all three of them pitched in to help as if there were no question of it being otherwise,
Juniper thought.
Which is a good sign, in
my
experience.

Rudi Mackenzie was around the edges there as well; then he and Mathilda Arminger came sprinting up to where Juniper waited.