The Protector's War (73 page)

“Can we take Dobbin and Maggie?” her son said. His eyes sparkled like green-gray gems in his tanned face, and he was still full of energy despite being allowed to work with the binders for the first time this year. “Please?”

“All right,” she said. “But remember; get them cooled down a bit before you let them drink.”

“I know, Mom,” he said, politely not adding an
of course,
though he'd grown up with horses in general and these two in particular—they were half his age.

Juniper and Nigel unharnessed the animals; Rudi and Mathilda sprang onto their massive backs, sitting as proudly as knights on their destriers. The horses accepted it calmly, moving off at an ambling walk towards the pond in the far southwestern corner of the field, where a willow-grown earthen bank held back the creek and made a watering point when this field was in the pasture-lea part of its rotation. Of course, they'd have done that without any guidance at all. Horses were not mental giants, but they usually had enough sense to betake themselves to water when they were thirsty; the problem was keeping them from drinking too much and doing themselves an injury.

“Good-natured beasts,” Loring said, as they straightened the harness and draped it over the seat of the reaper. The bells on the great collars jingled one last time. “Mostly Suffolk punch, aren't they?”

“About three-quarters,” Juniper agreed. “Chuck, ummm,
found
eight Suffolk mares right after the Change, and I like the breed. Strong as elephants and friendly as dogs, mostly. The stallion we put them to was a Percheron but we've been breeding back.”

He cocked an expert's eye. “Your son has a way with horses; I've noticed it before. He reminds me of Alleyne at that age. Maude taught him mostly, of course. She had the better seat, in any case—far better than mine, then.”

For a moment a bleak misery of grief settled over his usual mild cheerfulness, and then he shook it off with a scarcely visible effort, turning instead to the scene before them. Melissa Aylward came down from the gate at the top of the field, where a brace of wagons had drawn up half an hour ago. Quiet fell as she halted by Eilir's reaper and took the last grain cut in her hands, plaiting and shaping it into the form of the Queen Sheaf; she was the High Priestess of Dun Fairfax, and it was her right to make the Corn Mother and give Her the first blessing.

Juniper had been a little surprised at how good Nigel Loring was at binding a sheaf—or any other of a countryman's tasks, from handling a plow team to plashing a hedge. When she said so he smiled at her.

“My dear Ms. Mackenzie—”

“Nigel, Nigel! You've been living under the same roof as me all summer! You're being Stiff, Reserved and Proper again, like an old central-casting Englishman! And Dennie accuses
me
of putting it on!”

“Very well, my dear
Lady Juniper
. I grew up in farming country.”

“Aristocrats though, I thought? Landed gentry of Hampshire?”

He laughed aloud at that. “Well, we were saddled with an ancient, leaky, slowly subsiding stone barn of a house and a large, very shaggy garden, which we were too stubborn to hand over to the National Trust, yes. Plus a few weedy fields around the mausoleum that raised a regular crop of debt every year.”

“I resemble that remark,” she said, laughing in turn. “When I inherited my great-uncle's house and land”—she inclined her head northward towards the hills and what was now the Mackenzie clachan—“right up until the Change the real legacy was a continual threat of having it sold from under me for back taxes, with a minor key in unaffordable roof repairs. I had more disposable income when I was living in a trailer and busking for meals than I did with a fortune in real estate.”

“And the taxes appertaining thereunto. As the saying goes, Land gives one a station in society and then prevents one from keeping it up.”

“
Oh,
yes. Though I'm surprised to hear you going Wilde like that, Nigel.”

“In deadly Earnest, I assure you.” Loring chuckled. Then he went on with a wealth of experience in his tone: “There are few so poor as the land-poor.”

“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 mischief 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 reminiscently. “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.

“And 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
clothes
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.”