A Meeting at Corvallis (39 page)

Smells good,
Rudi thought, and took a handful of dried plums from his pouch, offering them to the others. Mathilda took one; the two warriors shook their heads.

Early flowers bloomed in the narrow strip of garden that each house had on either side of the path leading up to the doorways, mostly crocus in lavender-blue and gold. Many householders were touching up the paint on the carvings that rioted over the little houses as well, making them bright for Ostara with proud defiance. The northern foe might be at the doorstep, their sons and daughters and brothers out with the First Levy, but he wasn't going to stop anyone from showing their best for the Lord and Lady!

Rudi waved at friends as they went by. You didn't ride inside the walls without good reason, since anything from a chicken to a toddler might dart mindlessly under the hooves, even now with Dun Juniper a lot less busy than usual; nearly a hundred people had gone with the levy, and there was a subdued, waiting feel to the rest, even as they went about the day's work. He could hear a ritual going on in the covenstead, even though it was still only a few hours past noon, and feel the pulse of power in the air as folk called on the Mighty Ones to aid their kin.

“Just going out for some exercise,” Aoife called up to the guards on the gate-tower; Uncle Dennis was in charge there today, one of the older folk filling in with so many of the youngest and strongest gone.

“Well, that should be OK,” he said, leaning on his great ax. “Be careful, though. We don't have as many scouts out as usual. Don't go past the lookout station.”

The tunnel through the gatehouse was dark; that made Rudi blink as they came through into sunlight once more. Dun Juniper faced southward, and lay at the midpoint of a sloping ledge that ran east and west on the mountainside, an island of rolling meadow amid the steep forests; it was half a mile wide here in the middle, and tapered in either direction to make a rough lens shape. The little plateau that held the dun gave him a view of it, the rolling green and the occasional warm brown of plowed earth, the fences and hedges and the white dots of sheep, the red-coated white-faced cattle, then the tips of the fir trees downslope, and the hills in the blue distance beyond. You couldn't see the valley below that held Dun Fairfax, or the road leading out westward into the Willamette. North and east peaks floated white and perfect against the dusky blue of the sky; it was full of birds as the spring migration got under way, great white pelicans, ducks, geese, snow swans…and then a burst of panic sent wings in every direction as a bald eagle wheeled above.

The day was mild for March—just warm enough to sweat if you were working yourself hard, just on the cool side of comfortable if you were standing still. The sky was canyons of blue and white as they halted on the small paved square outside the gate, broken, fluffy white shapes hanging like cloud castles in the infinite blue over the low green mountains southward. The first camas were out in the meadows, small blue eyes blinking at him from among the fresh green, and the first tiny white blossoms of the hawthorn on the young hedges; the cool, sweet scent was in the spring air, along with new grass and the intense fir sap of the stirring trees in the woods around. Rudi waved back at the gate guards, and called out another greeting to some clansfolk planting gladiolas and dahlias in the flower-gardens down at the base of the plateau. More were pruning and grafting in the orchards that would soon froth in pink and white billows.

They mounted and walked their horses down the slope to the level, then cantered eastward; Epona whickered, and a stallion paced along beside them behind a board fence for a while. Cattle and sheep in the next paddock raised incurious heads for an instant, then went back to cropping at the fresh grass. They drew rein at the eastern head of the benchland meadow, by the pool and waterfall. The graveled, graded dirt road stretched west behind them the full mile of open country; ahead of them it turned sharply right—southward—running down through the woods with the flow of Artemis Creek. That was the main wagon road to Dun Fairfax, turning in a U to head west again on the lower level, and out into the Willamette Valley proper.

Liath and Aoife were singing as they rode. He recognized the tune, a hymn to the Goddess in Her Aspect as the Lady of the Blossom-time:

The four of them drew rein where the road entered the streamside trees, then turned to face the sun sinking ahead of them.

People were working in the gardens to their left, an acre for each household and everyone taking turns on the extra Chief's Fifth, mostly plowing and disking in rotted manure and last year's old mulch and compost and fermented waste from the sewage pits, turning the soil to a smooth, even brown surface ready for planting. Others were marking beds with string and stakes, and getting in the first cold-season vegetables: peas, lettuce, chard, onions and cabbage. Tomorrow was a school day; he might help with the gardens after class. It was fun, getting your hands into the dirt and making things grow. Up by the waterfall others spread sawdust and wood chips from the sawmill around the berry bushes.

But today…Rudi could feel the mare's great muscles quivering between his legs, and she tossed her head, begging for the run. Nobody was ahead of them right now on the long white ribbon of road—

“Go!”
he cried, and leaned forward, tightening the grip of his thighs.

The horse exploded into motion beneath him, launching herself forward off her haunches and leaving the mounts of the other three behind as if their hooves had been sunk in concrete. The clansfolk working in the gardens laughed as he went past, Epona's great legs throwing gravel head-high. He laughed himself as his bonnet flew off and his red-gold hair streamed out behind him in the cool spring wind, fluttering like the edge of his plaid. Behind him the song cut off as the others followed.

I don't want to get too far ahead,
he thought.
This isn't any sort of real work for Epona, either.

He turned left—all he had to do was think about it and shift a little, and Epona swerved and then they were airborne as she cleared the roadside ditch and fence. Rudi shouted in delight, and then the horse touched down and pivoted to the right in the same motion, seeming to land lightly as dandelion fluff but scoring the thick turf and sending a spatter of it flying leftward. Mathilda and the two warriors kept to the road, galloping up on his right as horse and boy thundered across the meadow in a scatter of sheep and took the next hedge in another soaring leap, landing without breaking stride.

Matti grinned at him across the rushing distance, hunched forward on her cob—and that stolid gelding looked as if it was starting to enjoy itself too. They passed the Dun again with faint cheers ringing from the gate-towers. Now the two children had drawn ahead, Epona's sheer speed as she took one hedge after another and the girl's lighter seat on her gelding leaving Liath and Aoife trailing; the women had their war-gear on too, of course, adding thirty pounds or better to their riding weight. Ulf and Fenra were between the guards and the children, dashing at their best pace and sparing a little breath for a bark now and then. A big lean dog—or a wolf—could keep up with a horse in a short sprint, if not longer.

The meadows narrowed around them as they thundered westward, trees drawing in on either side and the ground getting steeper. They went past the tannery with its smelly vats and the bark-mill, where an ox walked in a circle pulling a great, toothed wheel that crushed tanbark from hemlocks; soap was made there too, an equally stinky trade. Now Dun Juniper was tiny in the distance, walls bright as the afternoon sun tinted the stucco that coated the walls. Epona cleared a last hedge, but Mathilda's cob was ahead of them—even Epona couldn't travel as fast jumping fences as the other horse could gallop down a nice straight road. The roadway didn't end, not right away; it went on through the forest for a couple of miles to the lookout station at the westernmost tip of this ridge of hill, where it gave a wonderful view over the valley below. That had been just a foot trail in the old days, but since then it had been widened and leveled to take carts.

“Catch me if you can!” she taunted, and vanished under the trees.

Rudi grinned and followed, ducking his head reflexively as the first of the branches flashed by overhead, even though it was far too high to hit him. There were big Douglas firs on either side, and Garry oak, silver fir, and hemlocks. They kept the undergrowth down, save for some thickets of berry bushes, so he could see the hoof-churned surface of the dirt track as it twisted this way and that ahead, and the ruts of the oxcart that took supplies out to the lookout station. He was gaining on Mathilda; the girl was very nearly as good a rider as he was and a bit lighter, but Epona wasn't just faster, she was more surefooted and confident on the narrow, winding path, and he leaned into the turns as effortlessly as the mare made them. The trees flashing by made the speed even more fun than it had been in the open meadow; glimpses through the forest like a world of green-brown pillars with sunlight filtered through the canopy into a soft translucent glow, but touched by beams of fire where there were breaks in the roof of boughs. The air was full of the deep, cool scent of fir sap and moist earth, the first yellow blossoms of twinberry catching the light and the green tips of the new ferns pushing up through last year's litter. They'd made more than a mile since they entered the woods, and soon they'd come out together on the little clearing there at the end; there they could lead the horses back and forth to cool them, and give them a drink from the spring.

Then something pricked at him.
Matti's stopped,
he thought, feeling an interior sensation like an ear cocking. Epona's hooves made a muffled drumbeat in the cathedral silence, and the two warriors were coming up fast behind him, but…
I can't hear her horse at all.

“Whoa,” he said, and shifted his weight back in the light saddle. “We don't want to run into her.”

Epona slowed as they approached the next twist in the road, but the dogs belted on past, tongues lolling out of their smiling jaws. There was a huge black walnut there, planted by his mother's great-uncle all those years ago and with a spreading crown a hundred feet high, just leafing out now for the new year; it had rolled its nuts downhill through lifetimes, and there was a teardrop of smaller trees and then saplings down the slope. A little shrine to Herne stood near its man-thick trunk.

An explosion of birds went up from the huge hardwood's branches as he turned the corner, and Ulf and Fenra were barking furiously. Then they fell silent—not before he heard one of the dogs give a howling whine of pain, and he heard Mathilda's voice shouting protest.

“Wait—” he began, alarmed now, and tried to halt the horse.

It was too late. Around the tree he had just time enough to see Mathilda sitting her horse, white-faced and shaking with armed strangers in mottled green-brown clothes about her, before a rope snapped up in front of the mare's feet. Even Epona couldn't stop
that
quickly, but she managed to leap it, with a hopping crow-jump nothing like her usual grace. Rudi lost a stirrup, and then a branch hit him painfully in the chest just as Epona hopped again, half in protest and half to get her feet back under her.

He felt himself toppling, knew he couldn't recover in time, and kicked his other foot out of the stirrup as he came off, tucking himself into a ball as he flew, landing loose and rolling. His brooch burst; his plaid came loose and wrapped itself around his legs, and his bow flipped him onto his face. Something rapped him painfully as he slid to a stop in the wet, loose leaves and fir needles, knocking the wind out of him. He smelled blood as he landed, the thick copper-iron scent of it heavy and rank like butchering-time, when a carcass was hung up to drain into the oatmeal-filled tubs below.

And as he fell, a crossbow bolt whined through the space he'd occupied an instant before, hammering into the hard, dense wood of the walnut with a sharp crisp
tock!
sound.

Just beyond him, behind a bush, Fenra lay dead with a great slash in her neck and the red still ebbing out of it, her lips curled back from her fangs in a last snarl. The shaggy leaf-strewn shape beyond with the stiff plastic flight feathers of a crossbow bolt showing against its flank must be Ulf. Epona reared and bugled as she stood over him, milling her forefeet in the air like steel war-hammers, her nostrils flaring as she took in the scents of death. And men in camouflage clothing were running towards them. One stopped and bent to span his crossbow so that he could reload; others were raising theirs.