A Meeting at Corvallis (11 page)

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “No…no, I'm not really sorry. The old world was dead the instant the machines stopped working. The new one needs a strong belief, a hearth-faith to strengthen folk through hard times. That's helped us make as good a life here as humankind can live nowadays, I think. Or it would be if there weren't robbers and hostile neighbors, sure.”

“It's certainly taken on your, ah, coloration, your Clan Mackenzie.” He nodded at her pleated kilt and the plaid pinned at her shoulder with a silver brooch. “Symbols become important at a time like that.”

“That was Dennis!” Juniper protested, laughing; then she grew grave. “Do you remember that flash of light and the spike of pain, when the Change came?”

“Indeed I do,” he said. “It was the middle of the night in England and I was asleep, but—”

Inwardly, he shivered a little at the memory. He'd woken shouting, with Maude's scream in his ears. The pain had been over in an instant, but it was as intense as anything he'd ever felt, even when the RPG drove grit into his eyes in the wadi back in Oman, and he'd thought he was blind for life.

Every human being on Earth—and every other creature with a spinal cord—had felt the pain and seen the wash of silver fire. Half London had been screaming. The sound had come clearly through the window, in a place where the throb of machines was absent for the first time in centuries. Then the beginning of the city-consuming fires had broken the utter darkness…. The failure of everything electrical and of all combustion motors had been obvious within an hour. It hadn't been until troops under his command tried to put down rioters and looters next day that it had become apparent that explosives didn't work either, starting with CS gas and baton rounds and moving up to live ammunition.

Juniper shook herself, casting off dark memories of her own; anyone who'd survived had them. “I've wondered whether that moment, the white light and the pain, didn't do something to us. To our minds, you see.”

“Hmmm,” he said. “That's an interesting thought, though. My wife—Maude—said something similar to me once…”

Her fingers touched the back of his hand, lightly, for an instant. “I wish I could have met her,” Juniper said gently. “From the shape of her man and her son, she must have been a very special lady.”

He drank the last of the mead to cover his flush. “She wouldn't want me to brood.”

Juniper made a
tsk!
sound. “Nigel, grief's nothing to be ashamed of. It's the tribute we pay our dead, but they don't ask more than we can give.”

He looked up and met her eyes, and felt an unwilling thaw at the concern he saw there. “That sounds…familiar somehow. Is it a quote?”

She smiled. “Something Mother said to me once.” A shake of the head. “I do think that moment at the Change may have changed us, too, though. There was so much madness afterwards, and so swiftly.”

“I'm afraid there's no way to test it. And while Johnson did say that the prospect of being hanged concentrates a man's mind, the prospect of imminent inescapable death can certainly drive people mad, especially if the laws of nature are mucked about with at the same time.”

They were both somber for a moment; nine in ten of humankind had perished in the year that followed. Then they shook it off; those who couldn't had joined that majority long years ago. Despair could kill you just as surely as hunger or plague.

Instead they chatted of small, recent things, the new artificial-swamp waste system he'd help install here at Dun Juniper, Rudi's progress with the sword—which Nigel privately thought was alarmingly swift for a boy his age—and then fell into a companionable silence until the trestle tables were set up for dinner.

There aren't many women I've felt comfortable just sitting by, except Maude, of course,
he thought; then he caught that disconcerting twinkle again.
Or ones who could read me that quickly.

Dun Fairfax, Willamette Valley, Oregon December 15th, 2007/Change Year 9

“T
here,” Sam Aylward—Sam Aylward Mackenzie, these days—said, as he finished smoothing the spot where he'd tooled his maker's initials into the deerhide covering of the bow's riser.

He wiped down the length of the longbow with an oiled linen rag and held it up to the lantern slung from the roof of his workshop before tossing it to the man on the other stool.

“Ah, now there's a proper job of work,” John Hordle said, putting down his beer mug to slide the weapon between great spade-shaped hands whose backs were dense with reddish furze. “You could do a bit of shooting with this!”

The workshop had been a two-car garage and storage area attached to the farmhouse of the Fairfax family before the Change; they hadn't survived it long, being elderly and extremely diabetic. Now Aylward's wife Melissa had her loom over by the rear wall with a big new window cut for light, and the forward end held a bowyer's needs. There was a pleasant smell of seasoning cut wood from the lengths of yew and Port Orford cedar lying on the roof-joists overhead, and of paint and glue, leather and varnish and oiled metal from the benches with their vises, clamps and rows of tools. Everything was painstakingly neat, even the shavings carefully swept up into a box—that chore was mostly done by his son Edain and stepdaughter Tamar, who accounted it a privilege to wield a broom after he let them watch and occasionally hand him a tool.

They weren't here at the moment, since their mother had them corralled to help with dinner; Aylward was alone with Hordle and Chuck Barstow. Aylward was a stocky man going on fifty, with thick, curly brown hair a little grizzled at the temples, no more than medium height but thick-armed and broad-shouldered and even stronger than he looked; Barstow was a decade younger, lean and wiry and near six feet, with a sandy beard trimmed to a point and thinning hair of the same color. Hordle was the youngest in his late twenties, towering over both the others at six-foot-seven, three hundred and ten pounds of bone and muscle with a ruddy face like a cured ham and a thatch of dark red-brown hair and little hazel eyes, built massively enough that you didn't realize his full height until he stood close. When he strung the heavy longbow, it was with an effortless flex of arm and hip.

Aylward and Hordle had the same accent, a slow thick south-English yokel drawl out of deepest rural Hampshire; Barstow's was General American, what you'd expect from someone born in Eugene in 1967 and raised there. But they all had something in common, something beyond the Mackenzie kilt and the weathered skin of men who spent much time out of doors in all weathers, an indefinable quality of coiled wariness even at rest, a readiness for sudden violent action that only another practitioner of their deadly trade might have caught.

“There's a few improvements over the old plain crooked stick, y'might say,” Aylward said. “The reflex out at the tips makes it throw faster, and the deflex in on either side of the riser keeps it stable. More accurate, less hand-shock. A strip of raw deerhide glued on the back, to keep splinters from starting.”

He grinned with mock modesty as his giant countryman examined the bow. It had a central grip of rigid black walnut root, carved to fit the hand and covered in suede-finished leather that would drink sweat and prevent slipping; just above that was a ledge for the arrow-rest, cut in so that it ran through the centerline of the bow and lined with two tufts of rabbit-skin. The tapering limbs with their subtle double curve were Pacific yew, mountain-grown for a dense hard grain, the orange heartwood on the belly of the bow and the paler sapwood on the back. He'd made it the traditional length, as tall as the user when unstrung plus a bit, and it took a hundred and fifty pounds to draw it the full thirty-two inches. Few men could manage a draw-weight that heavy; Aylward's own war bow took a hundred and ten, and Chuck's was a hundred. Hordle managed this one easily enough…

“What's this then?” Hordle said, flicking a sausage-thick finger at the inside of the stave just above the riser. “I thought you didn't hold wi' laminations?”

“I don't,” Aylward said, using the rag to wipe his hands clean of the linseed oil he'd used on the yew; it rasped a little as threads caught on the heavy callus on his hands. “Those fillets of horn are pegged into the riser and working free against strips of hardwood glued on the stave, ten inches either way of the grip. It gives it just that extra bit of”—he snapped his fingers out and back—“flick.”

Chuck Barstow grinned. “And you'll be the envy of the whole Willamette, with a bow from the hands of Aylward the Archer, himself himself,” he said.

Aylward snorted. “Bollocks,” he said. “There's many I've trained who make bows as good as mine, and plenty more who're good as needs be, and I weren't the only bowyer around here to start with. Bowmaking isn't a master-craftsman's trade, you can learn it well enough in a few months if you're handy and have the knack, and God knows we've plenty of good yew in this part of the world. For that matter there's better shots than me among the Mackenzies, and no doubt more elsewhere.”

“You could still make a good living selling your bows,” Barstow said. “Those two you taught do it in Sutterdown, full-time. They've had clients come from as far away as Idaho.”

“I like getting my hands into the dirt, when I'm not off on Lady Juniper's business,” Aylward said stoutly. “And growing what I eat. Reminds me of growing up on the farm with Mum and Dad back in the old country.” He jerked a thumb at Hordle. “Not far from where this great gallybagger idled his youth away.”

John Hordle gave a theatrical shudder. “Now,
my
dad owned a pub,” he said to Chuck. “That's a man's life, I tell you. Chatting up the totty and tossing back the Real Ale, and none of that shoveling muck into the spreader on a cold winter's day.”

“Then why didn't you stay on at the Pied Merlin instead of going for a soldier?” Aylward asked.

“Because of all the ruddy lies you told me about being in the SAS while I was still a nipper,” Hordle said good-humoredly. “Ended up humping a full pack over every sodding mountain in Wales doing the regimental selection, I did. Which probably saved me life come the Change. Otherwise I'd have starved or got et, like most, instead of getting out to the Isle of Wight with the colonel.”

“Oh, I don't know,” Aylward replied. “Sir Nigel always looked after 'is own. You told me he got my sisters and their kids out, didn't you? And he'd not seen hair nor hide o' me in years. From what you said, he had them set up with their men on their own farms afterwards, too, when things settled down a bit. He'd have seen you right.”

Hordle nodded. “Might be, though things were just a bit hairy right then. Want to go and have a try with this?” he asked, flourishing the bow.

“Always a pleasure to watch you overshoot and miss, mate. You still pluck on the release, after all these years.”

The men already wore their homespun wool jackets; the workshop wasn't exactly cold, but it wasn't shirtsleeve-comfortable either. Over those the two clansmen draped and pinned their plaids, and they all put on hooded winter cloaks, woven of undyed gray wool with the grease still in it to shed water. They also slung quivers over their backs, took their own bows from where they hung on pegs, and buckled on sword belts; Barstow and Aylward wore Clan-style shortswords, twenty-inch cut-and-thrust blades modeled on the old Roman gladius, with bone-hilted dirks on the right for balance. Hordle's was more suited to his height, though not quite a full-fledged greatsword: a broad forty-two-inch blade with a long ring-and-bar crossguard and a hilt that could be used in one hand or both, what the Middle Ages had called a bastard longsword. Aylward whistled sharply as they left.

“Heel, Garm, Grip,” he said, and two big shaggy dogs rose from curled-up sleep to follow them.

Dun Fairfax was busy outside, in a relaxed winter way. There were a dozen homes inside the earth berm and log palisade, besides the century-old original Fairfax farmhouse and barn, along with a fair collection of lesser buildings: hen-houses and storage and pens. A chanting came from the Dun's covenstead, where the coven and the year's crop of Dedicants practiced a Yule ritual; a half dozen more stood and admired the big, carved wooden mask of the Green Man they'd just fastened over the doorway. From homes and sheds there was a clatter of tools: the rising-falling moan of spinning wheels, less commonly the rhythmic thump of a loom, a cracking as a sharp steel froe split cedar shingles from a log under the tapping of a wooden mallet. The air held farmyard smells, though nothing too rank, and woodsmoke, the smells of baking bread and cooking meat as kitchens prepared for the evening meal.

A hammer rang on steel as well in a brick-built smithy with the face of Goibniu painted on the door, and Sam Aylward grunted satisfaction.

“Glad we finally got our own smith,” he said. “Pain in the arse, it was, always going up to Dun Juniper or sending for someone when something needed fixing. I tried me hand at it, but it's fair tricky.”

Melissa Aylward stuck her head out of a second-story window before the three were out of hailing distance: “Sam!”

“Yes, love?” he said, pausing and looking upward.

Melissa was a comfortable-looking woman in her late thirties, with a frizz of yellow hair surrounding a round blue-eyed face; she held their youngest in the crook of one arm, and Fand kicked her arms and legs with a determination that had increased notably as she neared ten months. Her other hand held toddler Richard Aylward back from the windowsill with practiced ease. Melissa's first husband had been on the East Coast at the time of the Change, and Aylward had met her in the summer of the first Change Year.

“If you're off to shoot, remember the chicken stew will be ready by dark, and the dumplings won't keep,” she warned. “If you want to eat them, not shoot them at a castle with a catapult.”

“We'll be there,” Sam said, waving.

“Not me, sorry, Melissa,” Chuck called up. “Judy's expecting me back at Dun Juniper.”

He waved northward up the slope of the low mountain that overhung Dun Fairfax; the Mackenzie headquarters was a mile in that direction, on a broad ledge that nature had cut back into the hillside.

“The two of you, then,” she said. “Full dark and not later!”

“I should say we will be there,” Hordle said, smacking his lips as they turned away. “Your missus can cook a treat, Samkin.”

He winked at Barstow. “Sam, he could burn water, himself, unless he's changed over here.”

Chuck shuddered. “Tell me. I've been on hunting trips with him these ten years past, not to mention campaigning. We learned to put him on woodchopping detail fast enough.”

Hordle shook his head. “Hard to remember Sam's had a life since the Change. Back in England we thought he'd be dead somewhere, and then seeing him here, a father three times over no less—gave me a turn, it did.”

“Which is why you've been hanging about down here at Dun Fairfax, catching up with your old mate,” Aylward said with heavy sarcasm. “And not doing your best to chat up Lady Juniper's daughter, eh?”

“And studying Sign until the brains ran out of his ears to do it,” Chuck Barstow added. “Eilir's charmed. Though not as charmed as she was with young Alleyne.”

“Don't know what the 'ell you grizzled old farts are talking about,” Hordle said. “I was just being friendly, like.”

“Hullo, Sam.” A woman nodded to the men as she drove half a dozen Jersey milkers towards the old Fairfax barn, which held the cream separator and barrel-churn and the precious galvanized milk-tins all the households used.

“Kate,” he replied.

A man did likewise as he pushed a wheelbarrow of straw and manure, steaming slightly in the damp chill, in the other direction. More greetings came from children who played whooping running games until their parents collared them for chores, and a couple called from where they made repairs to a roof, tapping home nails to hold on fresh shingles.

“Quite the squire, eh, Samkin?” Hordle asked, a teasing note in his voice, and Barstow laughed.

“No, I'm not,” Aylward said shortly. “I've got a good farm and some help with it, like more than one here. If you want squires, you'll have to go and apply at the Bearkillers. Bad enough I ended up running the ruddy army, after swearing I'd die a sergeant.”

“Running the ruddy war-levy of the Clan Mackenzie,” Chuck said, and smiled at Sam's snort.

Men and dogs walked in companionable silence out through the blockhouse and narrow gate, waving answer to the sentry's hail, then down the farm road that ran southward from Dun Fairfax; Aylward and Chuck made a gesture of reverence at the grave of the Fairfaxes not far distant, and Hordle nodded respectfully. A pair of ravens flew up from the gravestone, probably attracted by the offerings of milk and bread that some left there—which was ironic, since the old farmer and his wife had been Mormons, who'd bought the farm not long before the Change as a retirement place.

The settlement was in a valley that thrust into the foothills of the mountains and opened out westward towards the plain of the southern Willamette. The snowpeaks of the High Cascades were hidden by cloud, but the lower slopes rose north and south and east, shaggy with Douglas fir and western hemlock and the odd broadleaf oak or maple; drifts of mist trailed from the tops of the tall trees. There was a scent of damp earth as they walked past rolling fields, plowland and pasture and orchard, until they reached the road that followed Artemis Creek west out towards the plain.