A Meeting at Corvallis (32 page)

“Mae govannen,”
he said, which cleared up which lot he ran with, if the white tree and seven stars and crown on the shield hadn't been enough. It made young Húrin prick up his non-pointed ears. “I'm looking for the First Armsman of Clan Mackenzie. Aylward the Archer.”

“That's me,” Sam Aylward said, and got the
expecting someone taller
look he often did from those who knew him by reputation only. “Sorry if I don't live up to the stories. And who are you?”

“I'm called Pilimór, sir.”

Or Pillock for short,
Aylward didn't say aloud. The young man didn't smile as he leaned over and took Aylward's hand; he looked tired and a little frightened.

“I've got a message for the First Armsman from the
Hiril
Astrid.”

He pulled an envelope out of one saddlebag. It was a brown office type, with the little folding split tin thing for closing it through a hole in the flap, in this case covered with a blob of off-white candle-wax stamped with the Dúnedain seal. That was a starry thing of ancient majesty dreamed up by Eilir about six months ago and set in rings for her and Astrid by a metalworker in Corvallis.

He flicked the wax off with his thumb and carefully bent back the metal wings rather than ripping the paper; nobody was going to make any more of these anytime soon. Inside was a hand-drawn map of the Waldo Hills just east and north of the ruins of Salem; he recognized it at once, mainly because he'd been studying the Willamette Valley with professional thoroughness since that vacation in the Cascades just before the Change, and also because he'd taught Astrid and Eilir and many another how to sketch a field map. Arrows and notes were drawn across it in a close, neat hand. The message with it was short and to the point, despite the opening flourishes:

From Astrid
Hiril
Dúnedain, suilannad mehellyn în and well-met to Aylward the Archer, Aran Gweth Nô Mackenzie: Given by my hand at Mithrilwood, 4th March in the Ninth Year of the Fifth Age, in the Old Reckoning 2008 AD.

Three columns of Protectorate troops have crossed the border into the Waldo Hills. Troops crossing border observed number approximately two thousand five hundred of which three hundred and fifty are light cavalry, scouts and mercenary horse-archers from the Pendleton area, and the remainder regulars, one-quarter knights and men-at-arms, the remainder bicycle-and horse-mounted infantry spearmen and crossbowmen, with heavy wagon trains including siege machinery and field engineering supplies following. Another force of roughly equal size is investing Mount Angel and its outposts. Labor gangs numbering at least five hundred accompany the supply trains, under guard, but we have made contact with anti-Protectorate elements among them and they inform me further force of indeterminate size is preparing to embark river transports escorted by turtle boats Oregon City last night, intended to seize the bridges at Salem. Locations, composition and directions of travel of all identified enemy forces marked on attached map. The Dúnedain Rangers have kept contact with the enemy forces and will endeavor to slow them as much as possible while interdicting their supplies. A copy of this message has been dispatched to the Bear Lord at Larsdalen.

Aylward stood thinking for a moment, lips tight, looked at the state of the messenger's horse—tired but not blown—and nodded.

“Get this to Dun Juniper,” he said, slipping message and map back into the envelope. “Tell the Chief and Chuck Barstow I'll be by directly, and that I advise calling up the First Levy immediately by mirror and smoke signal, with Sutterdown as the rally-point. Evacuation as per the war plan.”

The First Levy was the younger and better-trained portion of the Clan's militia, and the town of Sutterdown was the most convenient place near the border.

“Roit, Tamar. Get up behind the gentleman, drop off home, and tell your mum to have my kit and 'enry ready.”

Henry was his best riding horse; he could pick up a couple of remounts elsewhere. She looked at him with a worry-frown between her brows and then made it go away, and gave him a grin and a thumbs-up as she vaulted easily up behind the Dunadan.

Good girl!
he thought, with a momentary flash of warmth through chill focus as the horse went out the gate and down the laneway at a trot. This wasn't the first time he'd ridden away quickly, and she was getting old enough to know the possible consequences, but she didn't let it daunt her.

“Miguel, you see to the beasts,” he went on.

Harry-no-I'm-Húrin was already following the messenger's horse at a tireless loping trot, the kilt swirling around his knees; he was in the First Levy, of course, and was off to get his gear and bicycle.

“
Patrón
—” Miguel began.

Aylward sighed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Nobody doubts your guts, Miguel. But you're not a good enough bowman yet for the levy, and that's a fact. If worst comes to worst, you'll be on the walls with an ax. In the meantime…look after the beasts and the home-place for me, would you, mate?”

Miguel put his own hand on Aylward's shoulder, to match the Englishman's gesture; the First Armsman of the Mackenzies reflected that, training or no, this was a man Arminger would find it expensive to kill.

“Sí,”
he said. “I do not forget how you rescue us from the baron's dogs, take us into your house, treat us like your own. I won't let any harm come to your home or wife or little ones while I live, Sam. I swear it by God and the Virgin.”

Larsdalen, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 4th, 2008/Change Year 9

“Yeah, the letter said potatoes. Yeah, everyone's supposed to plant an extra fifth of an acre per adult. And yeah, I
know
it'll screw up the rotations. It's insurance because potatoes are a lot harder to burn in the field than ripe wheat. With the spuds, we can count on not starving this coming winter, at least. You
do
remember what it's like to starve, don't you?”

The delegate from the town of Rickreall looked at the Bear Lord with horror in his eyes. “You mean…there's really going to be war, my lord?”

Havel curbed his impatience. “Yeah, just like I've been warning everyone for months,” he said.

The Bearkiller ruler was dressed in a loose white linen shirt and the closest approach the handlooms could come to blue jeans and he had his two-year-old son on his lap. He looked almost as intimidating as he did in armor, with the bear's head on his helmet…

“I'm sorry, Lord Bear, we just didn't understand—”

“It's OK. My fault. I've got to learn to explain things more when I'm not giving orders on a battlefield. In the meantime, why don't you go around to the kitchens and get something to eat before you head home? Or you can bunk here for the night.”

When the farmer had gone, Mike Havel stretched back in his recliner. His son sighed and stretched out on top of him, tucked his yellow-thatched head under his father's chin and went to sleep with the limp finality small children shared with kittens and puppies. Havel put an arm around him, enjoying the solidity of the small body, the sense of absolute trust, even the smell of cut grass and clean hair.

He'd never felt much urge to be a father before the Change…in fact, he'd been a loner to the core, happiest in the air flying, or in the wilderness. He hadn't even been able to keep a long-term girlfriend, despite being extremely handsome in a rugged Scandinavian-Indian fashion—as more than one
ex
-girlfriend had informed him, often popping it in the middle of a long list of his personality faults expressed at the top of their lungs, things like “cold” and “not giving.” Now he was not only married, but the father of three…well, four if you counted Rudi Mackenzie, which around Signe was best left unspoken even if she'd come to terms with it last year after that monumental cluster-fuck at the Sutterdown Horse Fair. Remembering that small figure standing before the killer horse still gave him the willies, too, so he banished it by hugging his son.

Got to admit, family life has its points. Hope I can do as good a job of being a father as my dad did.

He smiled his crooked smile. Their sole dinner guest tonight was Peter Jones of Corvallis. The rest of the extended family was gathered on the veranda of the pillared yellow-brick except for the kids.
They
were all out there on the lawn, running and shouting as they threw Frisbees for dogs that leapt like furry porpoises breaching for a fish at vanished Marine World. Or in the case of the younger children, just tumbling like puppies themselves. It was a fine spring afternoon, the first three-day stretch of clear weather they'd had since last October, and the grass had just been cut; the sweet, strong scent gave promise to the swelling buds of the lilacs and ornamental cherries.

Good-looking bunch of kids,
he thought with pride.

There were his own twin girls, with their long golden braids swinging as they tried to bodycheck their cousin Billy, Eric and Luanne's eldest, from either side. The boy was a few months younger than them; he had the same hair color, but his skin was a sort of warm wheat-toast shade, which made his yellow thatch and turquoise eyes look brighter. His reflexes were something unusual too; that wicked double play generally worked for the twins, but he dropped flat and rolled away with the Frisbee in his hand, laughing as they cannoned into each other and collapsed in a squalling tangle. Not far away, his younger brother Ken was grimly trying to climb a tree, with a nurse looking a little anxious underneath—four was a bit young to get that high. Pamela's eldest played hopscotch….

No more of that oh-dear-beanbag-is-too-aggressive-for-kids horseshit, at least,
he thought, holding back the belly laugh to avoid waking the child sleeping against him.

Out beyond the gardens columns of smoke rose from the buildings along the road to the gate, people getting ready for supper, finishing up work in the smithies and the forge, kids coming home from chores or school; sound came faint, metal on metal, a long dragonish hiss of something hot going into the quenching bath, the bugling call of a startled horse, a faint rumble from the overshot waterwheel he could see turning in a white torrent. The sun was heading for the horizon, and the crenellations of the gate-towers showed like black square teeth bared at heaven. Soon they'd be playing taps and lowering the Outfit's flag for the night, and it would be time for the family to go in and eat as well—eight adults counting the Huttons, and twelve kids counting their adoptees.

He made a beckoning gesture with his free hand. The nanny came forward smiling and lifted Mike Jr. off his chest; she was a comfortable-looking middle-aged person with short, graying hair. They'd found her living in a culvert on the trip west from Idaho; she'd been caught on the road by the Change, miles from the arse-end of nowhere in the desert, and managed to keep her own two kids alive on what she could scavenge, mostly rabbits but at least one dog. Both her boys worked in the machine shop here.

“I'll get him cleaned up and ready for supper, Mike,” she said.

“Let him sleep for an hour or so, Lucy,” Havel said. “Little fellah was going at it hard today.”

I'm finally getting used to having all this household help,
he thought.
It does simplify things considerably.

It was no novelty for the Larssons, of course; they'd been richer than God for three long generations before the Change, and Ken's first wife had been a Boston Brahmin who looked down on them—and the Rockefellers—as parvenus. She'd probably looked on Mike Havel as a monkey from the outback. Even when he was busting his ass trying to get her badly injured self back to a civilization neither of them knew had crashed and sunk like that Piper Chieftain he'd piloted over the Selway-Bitterroot. Though even when dying she'd been too genteel to show it.

OK, gentility not my strong point,
he thought.
I'll leave that for my descendants. They'll
have
ancestors. I
am
an ancestor.

When the nanny had gone he turned his head in the lounger and sighed. “OK, Ken, you're goddamned right. We've got to get that House of Commons thing we talked about going. As soon as this war's over—”

His father-in-law snorted and turned his single bright blue eye on him, across the table with its plate of cookies. He was a big man in his early sixties with a short-cropped white beard, a patch over his left eye and a hook in place of the hand on that side, both the fruit of an encounter between the Bearkillers and a would-be warlord and friend of Arminger's in the first Change Year, out east up the Snake River. The kettle belly he'd had before the Change was gone, and he looked tougher and fitter than he had when he climbed into the Piper Chieftain in Boise, but he'd never pretended to be a fighting man. His mind made him far more valuable; an experienced administrator and engineer had been beyond price a dozen times. Plus he asked disturbing questions…