A Meeting at Corvallis (12 page)

That was blocked by a flood of off-white sheep for a moment, parting around the men like river water around rocks; the heavy, slightly greasy scent of them was strong, and their breath steamed in the damp, chill air. The man who watched the combined flocks of the Dun Fairfax families waved to Aylward, who made an exasperated sound and then waited as he came up, his collie at his heels. He wore sword and dirk as well, had his bow in the loops beside his quiver and a heavy ashwood shepherd's crook in his hands.

“Anything, Larry?” Aylward said to the man who'd once owned a bookstore.

“Took a shot at a coyote skulking around, but I missed,” he said. His face was irregular and shrewd, with a tuft of chin-beard, what people meant when they said
full of character
.

Then the crook darted out and fell around the neck of a ewe who'd decided to head down towards Artemis Creek.

“
Back
there, unless you want to hit the stewpot early, you brainless lump of fuzzy suet!” he said wearily, then went on to the men: “Otherwise, just another day with the damned sheep. Lord and Lady, but they're boring! It could be worse; I could be herding turkeys. Anyway, I wanted to talk about the Yule rites, if you had a minute, Sam.”

“I'm a bit busy just now, Larry,” Aylward said. “Later. And I'm only a Dedicant, any rate.”

As they walked on past the sheep Chuck grinned. “And there's a sore point,” he said to Hordle. Aylward snorted as the lean man went on: “Melissa's High Priestess of the coven here. She thinks Samkin should be an Initiate—High Priest eventually, too. Everyone else in the dun does, too; he's their landfather.”

“Larry does a perfectly good job of it,” Aylward said stolidly. “Better than I could, any rate.”

“And you can't see yourself with antlers on your head dancing beneath the moon, eh, Samkin?” Hordle teased.

“Chuck's High Priest at Dun Juniper when he's not Lord of the Harvest and Second Armsman,” Aylward pointed out with satisfaction. “Antlers, robe, dancing and all.”

“Ooops! Sorry, mate, I forgot—no offense.”

“None taken,” Chuck Barstow said, laughing aloud. “I just like getting a rise out of Sam about it now and then.”

“It's being raised Church of England,” Hordle said, entering into the spirit. “Actually believing in anything isn't allowed.”

Aylward chuckled himself, then shook his head. “When you're around Lady Juniper for a while, you can believe anything, straight up. I just embarrass easily…well, I'm still English, so it's only natural, innit? But when you think about it, how likely was it I'd be in the Cascades in March, back in ninety-eight? Or get trapped in a gully and have Herself find me before I died?”

Chuck Barstow nodded. “Juney's right about you being a gift from Cernunnos, Sam. Having you around may or may not have saved us; I think it did, starting with seeing off those foragers from Salem. We certainly wouldn't be nearly as strong without you.”

He elbowed the tall form of John Hordle. “And figure the odds on you and Sir Nigel and Alleyne ending up here, too, nine years later, you scoffing cowan. The Lord and Lady look after Their own.”

“He's got a point there, John,” Aylward said. “It's turned into Old Boys Day here for the 'ampshire 'ogs. Must be the Gods, mucking about with the numbers.”

Hordle snorted. “Mate, everyone still alive is lucky enough to have won the bloody National Lottery twice over back before the Change. For that matter, the sodding Change burned out my habit of asking why things turn out the way they do. If that can happen, what's impossible?”

They came to the pasture Dun Fairfax was using for target practice and vaulted the gate. It was ten acres, surrounded by decaying board and wire fences that were lined with young hawthorn plants in the process of becoming hedges, and studded with a dozen huge Oregon oaks. They checked carefully—they didn't want someone's cow, or worse still a child, wandering about—and threw back their cloaks to free their right arms.

“Dropping shots over the third oak suit you two for a start?” Aylward said, indicating a tree a hundred and fifty yards off.

When the others nodded he brought up his bow and shot three times in eight seconds, the flat snap of the string on his bracer like a crackle of fingers; two more shafts were in the air when the first one went
thunk
into the board outline of a man with a shield. All three struck; the first two within a handspan of each other in the target's chest, but the last was pushed a little aside and down at the last instant by a gust of wind.

“Well, even if you didn't kill him outright,
he's
not going to breed again,” Hordle said, drawing the new bow to the ear and raising it at a fifty-degree angle towards the sky. Then: “Bugger!”

His shaft cleared the crown of the oak, and the target as well, by about twenty yards.

“Told you you'd overshoot with that, Little John,” Aylward said smugly. “You're getting another dozen feet per second with the same draw.”

“First try with a new bow,” Hordle said defensively. “Only natural I'm off the once.” The second landed a little short; the third…

“Did he miss?” Chuck Barstow asked, peering.

“Not from the sound,” Aylward replied. “Punched right through. Extra point.”

“It does have that little extra flick. I'll get used to it.”

“Over by the tree, this time,” Chuck said.

Those targets were rigged to resemble men leaning out from behind the trunk, and they were hung on hinges so that they swung in and out of sight when there was any wind. Barstow shot three times with the smooth action of a metronome, and the shafts flicked hissing through the gray gloaming to land with a hard, swift
tock-tock-tock
rhythm.

Hordle looked at the chewed-up surface of the targets. “Does everyone here practice like your kilties, Sam? It's the law back in Blighty these days everyone has to keep a bow and use it, but most just put in an hour or two on Sunday and take the odd rabbit.”

Chuck Barstow grinned. “That's one of my jobs as Second Armsman, going around from dun to dun and checking that they do practice every day. I threaten them with Sam if I find out they've been goofing off. And testing to see who meets the levy standards, of course.”

“Which are?”

“Fifty-pound draw at least, twelve aimed shafts a minute, and able to hit a man-sized target at a hundred yards eight times in ten.”

“Fifty's a bit light for a war bow,” Hordle said.

Sam Aylward shrugged. “A heavier draw's a better draw, but fifty's useful enough—I've seen a bow that weight put an arrow all the way through a bull elk at a hundred paces, and break ribs going in and going out. Which wouldn't do a man any good, eh?”

Chuck nodded. “And that's the minimum, of course; the average is around eighty. Nearly everyone hunts for the pot these days, what with the way deer and wild pigs have gotten to be pests, and absolutely everyone knows there's times your life is going to depend on shooting fast and straight.”

Hordle grunted, drawing and loosing. The arrow whacked home, and a chunk of the fir target weakened by multiple impacts broke off and went out of sight.

“Well, you've more fighting to do here than folk back in England,” he said. “There's the Brushwood men, but they're not much more than a bloody nuisance unless you're up on the edge of cultivation north of London.”

Aylward sighed and shook his head; he'd been here in Oregon at the time of the Change, and there hadn't been any news from the Old World until the Lorings and Hordle arrived on a Tasmanian ship before this last Beltane. It was still a wrench, visualizing southern England as a pioneer zone, a frontier wilderness where a bare six hundred thousand survivors fought encroaching brambles, hippo roamed the Fens, wolves howled in the streets of Manchester, and tigers gone feral from safari parks took sheep even on the outskirts of Winchester, the new capital.

“And of course there's the odd dust-up with the Moors, or the wild Irish when we have to help out Ian's Rump over in Ulster,” Hordle said slyly, in the next interval in their shooting. “There's a joke for you—the Change and all, and we're
still
having problems with the Provos.”

“Better not mention that too often among Mackenzies,” Aylward said. “Half the folk in our territory here have hypnotized themselves into believing they're cousins of Finn Mac Cool. For all that they're Ulstermen by descent as much as anything, a lot of them. Scots-Irish, they call it here.”

“Not me,” Chuck Barstow said. “English and German in my family tree, plus a couple of Bohunks, a trace of Canadian French and a little Indian way back. And Judy's Jewish—or Jewitch, as she likes to put it.”

“At least you don't try putting on a brogue, Chuck. Every second kiltie these days does, or tries to rrrrrroll their r's as if they were from Ayrrrrshire.”

He went on to Hordle: “We still get a fair count of plain old-fashioned bandits now and then, too, which keeps everyone on their toes. Plenty of places aren't doing as well as us, just scraping by, and east of the mountains there's always fighting, all of which gets us a yearly crop of broken men too angry to beg but hungry enough to steal.”

“And you've got Arminger waiting up in Portland,” Hordle said. “After Sir Nigel and I had the pleasure of his hospitality for weeks, I'd have to agree you've got a roit nasty old piece of work there.”

Chuck Barstow nodded grimly. He'd lost an adopted son in a skirmish with the Protector's men only the summer past. Then his face lightened.

“Look!”

The dogs had strayed off a little while the men moved around the pasture shooting; the beasts were far too well trained to get in front of an archer without permission. Now the three archers could hear a frenzy of barking from across the road to the south, down in the alder and fir woods that lined Artemis Creek. An explosion of wings came seconds later, and a gabbling, honking sound as a quartet of Canada geese came out of the willows, thrashing themselves into the air on their broad wings with long necks stretched out in terror. The birds had bred beyond belief in recent years; they were a standing menace to the crops…and very tasty, done right.

“You first, Chuck!” Aylward called jovially.

The Armsman held the draw for an instant, still as a statue except for the minute movement of his left arm, then let the string roll off the gloved fingers of his right hand.
Snap
as it struck the bracer, and then one of the geese seemed to stagger in midair, folding around itself and dropping like a rock.

That only took an instant, but the birds were rising fast. Aylward shot twice, the arrows disappearing in the murk as they rose, and another two of the big birds fell as if the air beneath their wings had turned to vacuum.

“Too late, Little John,” Aylward taunted; the last was nearly out of sight. “Too late!”

Hordle made a wordless sound, then shot. The dusk was falling, but they could see that the goose stumbled as if it had hit a bump in the air, before circling down with a broken-winged flutter.

“Not so late as all that, Samkin,” Hordle said smugly.

“Tsk, Little John. Nobody taught you to finish 'em off?” He shot as he spoke, and the bird fell limp the last hundred feet to hit the grass with an audible thump.

“Aylward the Archer!” Chuck Barstow said with good-natured mockery. “Showoff!”

A dog ran up, wagging its tail and dropping a goose at Aylward's feet. Collecting the others took a few minutes, and finding all the arrows they could.

“Sorry, little brothers,” Chuck said, making a sign over the birds when they had the bodies laid out in a row. “But we need to keep our gardens and grain safe, and we have to eat. Cernunnos, Lord of all wildwood dwellers, witness that we take in need, not wantonness, knowing that for us too the hour of the Hunter shall come. Guide them flying on winds of golden light to the Summerlands. Mother-of-All, let them be reborn through You.”

Aylward murmured polite assent, and then they trimmed a sapling from the hedgerow and headed back towards the walls of Dun Fairfax with the stick thrust between the birds' trussed feet; four big geese came to a considerable weight.

“Good eating, these,” Hordle said, smacking his lips. “Hang them for a bit, roast them with bread-and-nut stuffing, some mushrooms in it, and some bacon grease on the outside—”

“Andy and Diana would like a couple for the celebration dinner up at Dun Juniper,” Chuck said. “We're having a competition next week—bagpipers from half a dozen duns.”

At Aylward's shudder, he went on: “Come on, Sam, that many pipers…it'll be a sight and sound to behold!”

“So's a pig with its arse on fire,” the older man said dourly, and Hordle's laughter boomed out like artillery.

Mithrilwood, Willamette Valley, Oregon
December 17th, 2007/Change Year 9

P
erfect, Eilir Mackenzie said in Sign.

There were a dozen others here in the woods with Juniper Mackenzie's daughter; her
anamchara
—soul-sister—Astrid Larsson, and half a score of their Dúnedain Rangers. Those were youngsters who'd joined them in what was first more than half play, a chance to ramble and hunt, and then turned serious over the years. She and Astrid were the eldest of those at twenty-three; the youngest here was sixteen-year-old Crystal, a refugee from the Protectorate. They'd saved her and her family from a baron's hunters and hounds this last spring, just as their original oath demanded, the one they'd sworn back at the beginning, to protect the helpless and succor the weak. It had seemed like a great idea when they were fourteen; since then it had turned out to be a lot of work, though satisfying.

The other two with them were Alleyne Loring and Little John Hordle, both a few years older than the Dúnedain leaders, but still young men.

This will make a perfect Yule Log,
Eilir went on.
If we can get it through the door.

The log had been bigleaf maple, growing on the side of the canyon; it had fallen whole as it came down, pulled out of the rocky soil by its own weight and falling across a basalt boulder a few feet above the root-ball. Bigleaf maple was like stone itself, useful for furniture or tool handles or fancy carving and yielding a pleasant, sweet sap in spring. This one had fallen about a year ago, to judge by the state of the wood; it was grown with moss and shelflike fungi and the bark had peeled away, but the feel was still solid when she stamped her boot on it. That meant it would be hard to kindle but would burn long and slow, unlike the fierce, swift heat of Douglas fir or hemlock or the spark-spitting enthusiasm of Ponderosa pine.

Astrid nodded solemnly, setting her long white-blond braids bobbing in the shadowed gloom, the overcast winter sky shedding only a silvery-gray shadowed light through the branches and needles above them. Then she looked up at Eilir, a twinkle in her strange silver-shot eyes; not many could have seen it there, but they'd been inseparable since they'd met in the fall of the first Change Year, when the Bearkillers came west over the High Cascades. Eilir's hair was raven black and her eyes green, nose shorter and mouth fuller, cheekbones not so chiseled; apart from that they were similar in looks as well, both tall at five-eight or so, moving with whipcord grace.

“It'd be hard work cutting this to a useful length,” Lord Bear's sister-in-law said casually in the Sindarin her Dúnedain used among themselves, as if addressing the air. “We need about, oh, ten feet.” The thick bottom section of the trunk was fifty feet long before it frayed out into a tangle of crown, lying half on the old state park trail and half off it. “We'll have to break out a whipsaw…too tough for ax-work.”

“Hordle and I can handle it,” Alleyne said. “Shouldn't take long if we spell each other.”

Eilir cocked one leaf-colored eye at Hordle, whose great hamlike countenance assumed a woebegone grimace; that turned into a grin at her as she giggled silently.

I'm glad Astrid finally found a fellah,
she thought, and pushed down wistful thoughts about Alleyne's handsome countenance.
Though it must be sort of frustrating for the poor guy, stuck on first base while he's courting a skittish virgin. I'm pretty sure she still is, too, from the signs. I love you dearly,
anamchara,
but that's sort of slow off the mark and he won't wait forever! Get your legs locked around him before he escapes!

The two men stripped to the waist; it was cold, just around freezing with the ground a mixture of melting snow and mud, but working hard in jacket and shirt just got you sweaty and then chilled. They were down at the bottom of a cleft in the basalt rock, anyway, and well out of the wind; you could see the banded layers in the steep slope to the north, and the creek ran behind them with clumps of ice around the rocks in it. Streamside and slope and the rolling hills higher up were densely grown with big trees; fir and hemlock on the upland, maple and cottonwood and alder lower, yew and chinquapin, with the blackened stems of ferns sticking up out of the leaf litter and duff. The smell of decaying leaves and needles was pungent as boots disturbed them, suddenly intensely aromatic as someone crushed the branch of an incense-cedar sapling.

Eilir smiled at her friend as they moved the two-horse team they'd brought along and wrapped a chain around the thicker base of the tree.

Got Alleyne to show off, hey?
she signed.

You betcha,
Astrid replied, with a smile of smug satisfaction.
He's a wonderful guy, but he's still a guy, you know? Which means he's sort of stupid at times. Besides, he looks good with his shirt off.

Little John's smarter,
Eilir signed. He
saw through it
.

He is not!
Astrid's hands moved emphatically.
Alleyne just has too noble a nature to suspect anyone!

Yeah, blond, beautiful and dumb, like someone else I could name but won't—like for example you,
Eilir taunted. Astrid stuck her tongue out in reply.

The friends finished their task, jumped free, checked that nobody else was in the way and waved to Crystal, who stood at the horses' heads. The girl urged them forward, and the beasts leaned into their harness. The big log swiveled across rocks, then came down onto the bike path with a thud that echoed up through the soles of her feet. It was far too heavy for the team to drag back while it remained whole, even though they had a two-wheeled lift to put under the forward end to ease the work. There was a good ton of weight involved.

We'll save the upper part, there's some useful wood there,
Eilir signed.

The tree being dead already, they didn't have to do more than sketch a sign over it; you had to apologize and explain the need when you cut living wood, the way you did when you killed a beast. They were all children of the Mother and part of Lord Cernunnos' domain, after all.

The men got busy, standing on either side of the log and chopping, while a few of the Dúnedain trimmed the branches further up with hatchets and saws. Eilir cradled her longbow in her arms and watched appreciatively. Alleyne was a bit over six feet, and built like an Apollo in one of Mom's books, broad-shouldered and narrow in the waist, long in the arms and legs; the muscle moved like living metal under his winter-pale skin as he swung the felling ax and chips of the rock-hard maple flew, startling yellow-white against the dark ground. Beside him Hordle looked like a related but distinct species, arms like the tree trunk itself, and a thick pelt of dark auburn hair running down his chest onto a belly corded like ship's cable; the log shook under the impact of the heavy double-bitted ax he used.

It was still seasoned hardwood, and the work went slowly. Eilir grinned.

Ah, hard honest work,
she signed.
It does me good just to watch it.

Alleyne's ears burned a little redder. The wood yielded, but slowly; it took only a little more to finish trimming the branches and roll the upper section of the trunk off the path for later attention.

Eilir had been deaf from birth; before it, in fact, when a teenaged Juniper Mackenzie contracted German measles in the fourth month of her pregnancy. That didn't make her other senses more acute, the way many believed; what it did do was encourage her to use and pay attention to them. She'd also spent much of her life in the countryside and amongst its wildlife, around Dun Juniper when it was just her and her mother before the Change; and in mountains and woods, hills and fields all over western Oregon in the years since, hunting, Rangering, or wandering and observing for their own sake. And she had been trained by experts, Sam Aylward not least.

All that told her that
something
was not quite right….

Mithrilwood had been a state park before the Change, and since then the area all about it had been mostly unpeopled, young forests and abandoned fields growing lush fodder for beast and bird. It normally swarmed with life, even in winter when many of the birds went south; upland game migrated down here from the High Cascades in this season, and everything from beaver and rabbits to deer, elk, coyote, wild boar, bear, cougar and feral tiger were common. The bigger animals would avoid the noise and clatter of humans, though not as widely as they did before the Change. The smaller would be cautious, but…

She turned and clicked her tongue at Astrid. The other woman was already frowning.

“Hsssst!” Astrid Larsson said as she turned, to attract everyone's eyes, and moved her hands in Sign as well:
Someone's near. Watching. Don't let them know they've been seen, but be ready.

Nobody froze; the dozen Dúnedain continued to muscle the big log towards the waiting horses and the two-wheeled drag that would support its forward end. The forest floor was mostly clear of undergrowth, and the trees had closed their canopy long ago.

Then they casually reached for their bows; you had to know Sign as well as Sindarin to be a Ranger. Astrid's silver-veined eyes flicked about. They were in a canyon, one of the many that laced the old state park. Rock stretched up on either hand, layers of basalt cut through by millennia of rushing water. Much of that was frozen this day, on the stone and on the moss-grown limbs of the great trees. In the middle distance a waterfall toned, out of sight around the dogleg to the west, but rumbling through the cold, wet air. That white noise covered conversation, and many of the ordinary sounds of movement.

“Who?” Alleyne Loring said quietly as he donned his mail shirt and buttoned the jacket over it again.

Six heads were close together as they bent to lift the end of the long timber into the clamp and fasten the chain across it. Astrid spoke smiling, as if chatting casually among friends out to find a Yule Log.

“Yrch,”
she said; to the Dúnedain that meant
enemies
. “Could be bandits, could be servants of the Lidless Eye. I saw only two that I'm sure of, so they've got some woodcraft.”

Eilir Mackenzie nodded and casually stretched with her arms above her head, which gave her an excuse to look about.

I spotted him—the fir over from the boulder with the point, snow knocked off the branch,
she signed.
The other's behind the boulder?

Astrid nodded as she mentally tallied their strength here. Herself and Eilir, her
anamchara
. Alleyne Loring and John Hordle; first-class warriors, though not exactly Dúnedain themselves, not quite. Young Crystal, but she didn't really count for a fight. Only sixteen, and not fully trained; brave, but the weak link, the more so as she was slight-built. Another ten Dúnedain, in their late teens or early twenties, six of them Mackenzies and the other four Bearkillers. Everyone had bow and quiver, sword and knife and targe or buckler; you didn't go outdoors without, any more than you'd walk out naked. The two Englishmen had light mail shirts under their jackets; under her own she wore a black leather tunic lined with mesh-mail and nylon; Eilir had on a Clan-style brigandine, a double-ply canvas affair with small metal plates riveted between the layers. Most of the others had something similar, but none was wearing a helmet.

“We don't know how many or why,” Astrid said. “So we'll all just walk around the corner of the trail up ahead, and then wait for them—double linear ambush upslope. That way we can shoot without hitting each other. They won't follow close.”

Send Crystal on to the Lodge with the horses from there?
Eilir signed.

Crystal's face was a little pale, but she glared at Eilir; besides being offended at the implication that she couldn't hold her own with the rest, she also had a furious crush on Astrid at the moment…which was
so
embarrassing. Though she was beginning to show signs of transferring it to Alleyne, which would be
infuriating
.

Astrid signed back:
No. Too risky—they might have an ambush along the trail already. We'll go around the corner, drop the log, and…wait a minute!

The word
drop
triggered something in her mind. “Here's what we'll do,” she began. “Remember that trick we practiced? Like the old story about how the little furry Halfling men fought the wicked Emperor's troopers?”

Eilir's eyes went from the log to the coils of rope draped around it. Her smile grew, and the faces of her companions went from grave to grinning. They were all young.

We'll have to hurry,
she signed.

Twenty minutes later Astrid waited behind a tree, wishing for a war cloak, what Sam Aylward called a ghillie suit, of camouflage cloth sewn all over with loops for twigs and leaves. The wool of her jacket would do, it was woven from natural beige fiber; she breathed shallowly and slowly, lest the puff of vapor give her away, and ignored the drip of melting snow from the branches of the big hemlock. She couldn't see any of her Dúnedain, though, except for Alleyne, and that was from the rear where he crouched behind a big basalt rock.