A Meeting at Corvallis (80 page)

“You're not angry? You don't want to punish me?” Delia said doubtfully.

Tiphaine grinned, tired and triumphant.
And most of all, I'm still alive.

“Well, if you
insist,
I could spank you a little,” she said.

And administered a gunshot slap to the appropriate location. Delia yelped and leapt, startled back into functionality.

“Come on. Get that cloak and start cutting it into strips.”

Near Larsdalen, Willamette Valley, Oregon
August 22nd, 2008/Change Year 10

“L
ast one!” Michael Havel yelled through a mouth dry and gummy and far too full of chaff.

He turned with the wheat sheaf on the long, slender tines of the pitchfork and did what had given the implement its name originally, pitching the thirty-pound weight of grain and straw up onto the canvas conveyor belt, heads-first. The air around the machine was full of dust and powdered chaff, the harsh dry smell of it, and of the canola oil used to grease the metal parts.

Then he stepped back and stretched, feeling the good-tired sensation of hard-worked muscles, leaning on the six-foot shaft of the fork, blinking at the sun—it was still six hours to sunset, and they'd gotten a lot done today.

And it's a relief to do something besides
another
round of practice with the saddle-bow or that goddamned lance.

Off twenty feet to his right six hitch of horses walked in a circle, pulling a long bar behind them. That turned the upright driveshaft on its deep-driven socket base, and the big flywheel attached to it; a great leather belt stretched off to another on the side of the threshing machine in front of him. Six yards of engine rattled and clanked and groaned on its truck-wheel mounting, giving off a mealy scent of grain and hot metal. The sheaves disappeared up the conveyor belt. Chaff and straw came out one long spout pitched high towards the top of the great golden mound of it already there. Threshed grain poured out of another, into coarse burlap sacks that turned plump and tight as they filled. Teams labored there in disciplined unison; some dragged the full sacks aside, some sewed them shut with curved six-inch needles and heavy hemp twine; others shouldered the sixty-pound bags and ran to heave them into wagons for the horses to haul away towards the granaries.

One month's bread for an adult in every sack,
Havel thought with satisfaction, scraping sweat off his forehead with a thumb and flicking it at the yellow stubble underfoot.
All nicely stowed away where nobody but us can get at it.

Signe was working there, the needle flashing as she fastened a sack with a neat, tight stitch, and the muscles moving like flat straps in her arms. Threshing was dirty work; bits of chaff and awn flew through the air like thick dust. There were two currents of thought on how to handle it, besides the kerchiefs most kept over their mouths. Some bundled up, and endured what got beneath layers of clothes and chafed; that also made the heat worse, of course, and it was near ninety today—very hot for the Willamette Valley, though he could swear the weather had warmed up a bit since the Change. Havel's wife followed the minimal-clothing-frequent-washing-down school, and was wearing an ancient pair of faded cutoffs and a halter, her skin tanned honey-brown, the curve of her full breasts and her strong shoulders liberally specked with chaff and bits of straw sticking to the sweat, her eyes turquoise gems in the sweat-streaked mask of her face. She caught his eye on her and looked up, grinned, touched the tip of her tongue to her upper lip in promise, then darted forward to claim the last sack.

I'm not the only one looking,
he thought happily; the male who didn't give Signe Havel a second glace was either very gay, or nearly dead.
But I
am
the one who gets to sleep with her tonight.

A cheer went up all across the great sloping field as the threshing machine's tone changed, and the last grain slid out of the spout in a dying trickle. This was the Larsdalen home-farm—he could see the vineyards start where the land rolled upward a bit west and, just barely, the towers of the gate over some trees in the distance; hills swelled upward on either side, and the Coast Range showed along the edge of sight. Most of the people working this stretch of land dwelt behind the wall there; they'd just harvested a good bit of what they'd eat over the next year as bread and biscuits and pie crusts and beer. There were dozens of them, too, even Aaron Rothman and a helper over there under the infirmary tent, dealing with the cuts and bruises and sprains that went with farming.

Sorta complimentary that his boyfriends always look like me,
Havel thought, watching a black-haired young man carefully opening an autoclave that sat over a small, hot fire and handing the instruments within to the doctor.
Weird, but complimentary.

The Family was out in force well: Ken Larsson here with a couple of his apprentices, keeping the machinery in working order; Eric over there keeping the horses going…

His daughter Ritva came up with a ladle of water. Havel rinsed out his mouth, spat, coughed, spat again, then drank three dippers-full and poured one over his head.

“Oh, to hell with it,” he said, and took the bucket from her sister Mary and upended it over himself, glorying in the way the wash of coolness spread across his bare torso; he was stripped to the waist save for the checked neckerchief.

On the whole, life is pretty damn good.

The girls laughed and ran back towards the water cart. Other children helped with that, or keeping birds off the grain; ones a bit younger just ran around shouting with the dogs, or minded the toddlers and infants lying on blankets in the shade of the trees along the road. A mist of dust lay above the road's gravel, as more loaded wagons headed up the gentle slope towards Larsdalen. Still more folk busied themselves with cooking over open fires and portable grills, and setting up the long trestle tables; as Eric shouted
whoa
and the big draught-horses stopped a waft came from there, smelling of roasting meat and French fries in oil, and loaves and pies brought down hot from the Larsdalen ovens and cooling on racks covered in muslin. There were big tubs of sweet corn boiling, too. That was one of his favorite foods and a rare seasonal treat, hard to grow to seed in this land of mild summers, and his mouth watered at the thought of it. Someone tossed him a peach, and he bit into it, letting the juice run down his corded neck. There was a creek across the road and the field there, too. They'd all go and splash themselves clean before they sat down to dinner.

Hello, Grandpa,
he thought; his grandfather Väinö had bummed around as a teenager back just before Pearl Harbor, working harvest gangs in the Dakotas and Minnesota, a few years before combines completely replaced older methods.
This is a lot like the stories you used to tell—except no steam traction engine to run the thresher, of course.

A ripple went through the crowd. Havel's head came up as well, and his eyes flicked towards where the weapons were stacked. But it was a single rider coming down the road from the east, the white road smoking behind the galloping hooves. He swerved and took the fence, a young man in mail vest and helmet, a Bearkiller scout-courier.

“Lord Bear!” he said, pulling up in a spurt of clods and dust. “Dispatch!”

Havel sighed, reversed the pitchfork and stuck it in the dirt, and took the envelope. When he looked up from reading it he saw three dozen sets of eyes on him, amid an echoing silence where the
Chi-KA-go!
of a flock of quail was the loudest sound.

“All right, folks,” he said. “We're in for a fight, but we knew that was coming. Arminger has called up his men,
ban
and
arrière-ban,
with the rally-point as Castle Todenangst, for no later than two weeks from now. So there's no reason at all not to enjoy the supper…but first, I'm going for a swim.”

Dun Laurel, Willamette Valley, Oregon
August 23rd, 2008/Change Year 10

Dun Laurel was the newest of the Clan's duns, a village of a hundred and twenty souls surrounded by a ditch and palisade, northwest of Sutterdown and established only last year. The Hall at the center of it was a smaller copy of Dun Juniper's, done in frame and plank rather than logs, but it also had a conference-room-cum-office on the loft floor, with a hearth and altar on the northern wall. It still smelled of sap from new-cut wood, as well as the bunches of rosemary and lavender and sweetgrass hanging from the rafters overhead, and the alcohol lanterns showed only a beginning made on the carved and painted decorations Mackenzies loved. The location near the northwestern edge of the Clan's settled lands, and the relative newness, made it the best place for Lady Juniper to meet the delegates from the Protector's territory. The sun had set, and they would leave before it rose, slipping back into the tangled scrub and tall grass with Mackenzie or Ranger guides.

The dozen men and women sitting across from her and her allies were all free-tenants or itinerants back home; it was simply too difficult for bond-tenants or peons to move around. Several were High Priests and Priestesses of clandestine covens; medieval Europe might not have had an underground cult of witches except in the perverted imaginations of the witch-finders, but the Protector's realm most certainly
did
. Others were simply those who were willing to take risks to get out from under the Association's gang-boss feudalism. All of the farmer majority were from the eastern side of the Valley, Molalla and Gervais and the others; the baronies north of the Columbia or west of the Willamette were simply too far away, and had had too little contact with the Clan.

They were serious people; eight men, four women, all fairly well clad and well fed, but roughened and weatherworn by lives of hard outdoor work, and all over thirty though few were much older than her; the terrible years hadn't been kind to the elderly, or even the middle-aged. Juniper looked from face to face before she spoke: “Our sympathy you have—but sympathy is worth its weight in gold. I'm troubled, to be frank. On the one hand, now we face the full weight of the Portland Protective Association. Corvallis is with us this time, as well as the Bearkillers and Mount Angel, and we can match their numbers, but that is mostly ordinary folk against professional killers. If you were to rise behind them, our chances of victory would be greatly increased, but I must tell you frankly that there is not much hope of our defeating the Protectorate so thoroughly that they will be overthrown at home, at least not most of them. That
could
happen, but it is not likely. Our realistic hope is to beat them so badly that they will leave us alone.”

The underground leaders looked at each other. Their spokesman was an itinerant, one Rogelio Maldonado, a dark man with a red bandana tied around his hair and the raggedy-gaudy clothes that folk in his trade affected. His English held only a slight Hispanic lilt.

“Lady Juniper, for what other reason than winning our freedom would we rise? We wish you well, we hope you win, but if we fight, it will be for ourselves and our families. I speak for all of us, not just those who follow the Old Religion, who have a special tie to you. But even they…”

Juniper inclined her head.
What reason indeed?
she thought. There were times when the things she had to do as Chief troubled her sleep, but her responsibility was to her Clan…though also to right, and the Threefold Law.

“If this is not a wonderful or a certain chance of overthrowing the Association, it is still the best you are likely to have. They have stripped the garrisons of every castle to the bone.”

Maldonado nodded in his turn; his thick-fingered hands, calloused and marked with burn scars, spread on the polished wood of a tabletop salvaged from a government office in Salem, the hands of a man who handled reins and rope, awl and waxed thread and solder. The frieze of carved ravens around the edge of the table was new, not very well carved but done with naive forcefulness.

“There is the word, Lady Juniper: castles. We might drive the soldiers and men-at-arms left behind after the
arrière-ban
back into the castles, they are few and not the best fighters, but we cannot
take
the castles. In the castle granaries is the harvest, and the seed grain. We will starve before they do, as it was in the days right after the Change, when Arminger held the grain elevators and cargo ships, and used the food as a whip to force submission. That is what made us obey him in the first place, as much as his fighting men. And that is without the field army ever returning…which you say it will?”

“Some of it,” Juniper said. “Even if we break them.”

“We thank you for smuggling us weapons, but still, we cannot face armored men-at-arms in open country as you can.”

Juniper nodded. “No. But if you control the ground
outside
the castles, even for only a short time, many of you could flee. We are willing to take in thousands, the Bearkillers likewise and Corvallis even more. Our harvest was good, and there is land here—and more southward, towards Eugene—fine land lying empty and waiting to be tilled.”

Another of the would-be rebels spoke, a thickset farmer with a gray beard: “That's wild land, grown up in bush. And if we run, we can't bring much in the way of seed or stock or tools with us, damn-all but what's on our backs. It would take us years to make farms, and more years to earn what we'd need to
start,
and we'd be laborers until then, maybe all our lives. Like peons.”

“No,” Juniper said. “You would be free—a man can be poor, and yet free. Or possibly, if we damage them badly, you can force the Association members to give you better terms at home.”