Dies the Fire (54 page)

Juniper shrugged, stroking her daughter's hair. “As to what it was like . . . some of it was very bad. Most of it was worse. And a few things like Corvallis were encouraging, which is what I'll make the most of when we have everyone together.”

“You're turning into a politician, Juney,” Dennis said, grinning.

“Now you're getting
nasty,
” she said.

Then her smile died. “Hope is as essential as food. We have some here, of both. Out there . . .”

Judy went on grimly: “The bad news there is what broke up those refugee camps around Salem and Albany, apart from plain old-fashioned starvation.”

She looked around the circle of faces; Juniper put her hand over Eilir's eyes; the girl stirred restively, and she sighed and removed the fingers. This wasn't a world where you could shelter children much; not anymore.

“Plague.”

There were murmured invocations, and some old-fashioned blaspheming of the Christian deity.

“What sort of plague?” Dennis asked.

Judy snorted, and her husband chuckled, being more accustomed to the fact that she said exactly what she meant when medical matters came up. She scowled at him as she replied: “I'm not joking and it's
not
funny at all.”

“Sorry—”

“It's
Yersinia pestis. The
Plague. The Black Death. Those camps were filthy and swarming with rats, and plague's a species-jumper endemic among ground squirrels here in the West. Then it got into someone's lungs and changed to the pneumonic form—which is standard in a big outbreak—and
that
spreads from person to person, no fleas needed. Spreads very easily. Plus pneumonic plague'll kill you
fast,
sometimes in a day. It's been a long time since our ancestors were exposed, much. Mortality rate of over ninety percent, like a virgin-field epidemic, and they ran out of antibiotics quickly.”

That shocked Dennis into silence, not something easy to accomplish.

“I identified cholera morbus and typhus, too . . . and half a dozen other diseases . . . but the plague's worst of all. They tried to burn the bodies, but that broke down. We could see the smoke from the death-pits still rising around Salem.”

“And we could smell it,” Juniper said quietly. “We might think of setting out parties to burn down abandoned sections and clear out the rats.”

Judy shook her head. “We're going to have to pull in our horns—set up a quarantine. And we shouldn't send anyone into the valley until the first hard frost unless it's life or death for the clan. With the plague and the cholera and typhus piled on top of sheer hunger . . . this time next year . . . a hundred thousand left between Eugene and Portland? Fifty thousand? Less?”

A cry from the heart: “If only we had some antibiotics! There probably
are
some left, but we can't find or ship them.”

“Shit,” her husband said quietly.

“Yes.”

“And you haven't heard about what's happening
in
Portland,” Juniper said. “We met a group that had come through the city—come all the way from Idaho—and . . .”

When she'd finished the silence went on until Juniper reached out and took the last of the cauliflower.

“Well, we don't have to think about this Protector person for a while. The sickness will shut the valley down until autumn.”

There were some things you simply
couldn't
think about too much, or you'd lose the will to live. She suspected that many had sat down and died for just that reason.

“What did we trade the Smiths for this stuff?” she said in a lighter tone. “I'd have said they wouldn't spit on us if we were dying of thirst, for fear it would give us the strength to crawl to water.”

The stay-at-homes looked at each other before turning back to her; she recognized the gesture as one showing more bad news was on the way. There had been an awful lot of that, since the Change.

“Bandits hit the Smith farm,” Dennis said. “Took them by surprise. No survivors except for Mark.”

That was the Smith's youngest, about seven. She winced; she hadn't liked the family, they'd been rude to her and Eilir before the Change and downright nasty to the Mackenzies since, but . . . And their children had been just children, and they'd taken in as many relatives from town and plain refugees as they could and not starve right away.
And
treated them fairly, which was more than you could say for some.

“Mark got out and ran to the Carsons', and they got a message to us; Cynthia galloped up on their horse. We called out everyone and trapped the bandits, there were about a dozen of them—took them by surprise, nobody on our side hurt much. None got away.”

“Blessed be,” Juniper said sadly. “I wondered what Cynthia Carson was doing, on guard duty here and calling herself a Mackenzie. Her whole family moved in, then?”

“Joined the clan formally the next day, them and all their dependents,” Chuck Barstow said. “Not to mention the Georges, the Mercers, and the Brogies. They weren't happy with the way the Sutterdown militia showed up a day late and a dollar short, as usual.”

She blinked, a snow pea pod halfway to her lips. That was an
awful
lot of people. He went on:

“The whole thing scared them all several different shades of green, and I don't blame them; it was damned ugly at the Smith place, and they saw it—the bandits had the whole bunch hung up by their heels and . . . well, I don't know if they were Eaters or just vicious. The problem is . . .”

“Oh,” Juniper said. “Let me guess. Cynthia wants to join the coven, not just the clan—I remember her asking questions—and her folks aren't enthusiastic about it?”

“Worse. She
and
her mother
and
her brother want to join, and her
father
isn't too enthusiastic. Not that he's a bigot, he just thinks we're weird.”

“We're Witches, Chuck,” she said reasonably. “We
are
weird.”

“Could be worse, from his point of view,” he said. “We could be strict Gardnerians, and do
everything
nekkid.”

“Wait a minute,” Sally said, looking down at herself as the Wiccans laughed. “I hadn't noticed you guys got upset about skin, much. For example, right now we
are
naked.”

“Well, yeah,” Chuck replied. “But that's because right now we're in a
bathtub.
”

That time everyone laughed; Sally joined in, then went on: “Who's Gardner? I've heard you coveners mention him.”

Chuck grinned. He'd always enjoyed the early history of the modern Craft.

“Gardner was this early Wiccan dude over in England, back in the forties, fifties,” he said. “In our particular Tradition, we sort of save skyclad work for special ceremonies or solitary rituals and use robes most of the time, but he thought you should do pretty well
all
the rituals skyclad, which is Wiccaspeak for bare-assed.”

Juniper popped another piece of carrot into her mouth, savoring the earthy sweetness.

“There are two schools of thought on that,” she said around it. “One is that the Goddess revealed to Gardner that you ought to always be skyclad in the Circle so you could conduct energy better, and it had nothing to do with sex. Then there's the other school, to which I subscribe.”

“What's that?” Dennis asked.

“That's the school which says that Gardner was a lecherous, voyeuristic, horny old he-goat who loved to prance through the woods with nekkid women, but since he was also an Englishman born in 1884, he had to come up with a religious justification for it.”

She sighed. “Of course, he
did
do a lot for the Craft; he's one of our modern founders. He just had . . . problems. And mind you, Gardnerians
don't
have his problems; they simply end up taking off their clothes an awful lot, even in
really
cold weather . . . chilblains, head colds . . .”

“Purists,” Chuck said, and grinned. “Say, how many Gardnerians does it take to change a light bulb? Twelve: consisting of evenly matched male-female pairs to balance the Divine energy with a leader as number thirteen to—”

The Wiccans all chuckled, and then Juniper went on: “Back to business: I'll talk to John Carson and his family. Cynthia's a bit young for such a major decision. . . .”

Older than you were, Mom,
Eilir signed.
I've talked to her too, she signs a bit, and she's real sincere about it. I think the Goddess has spoken to her heart.

“We can't very well turn clan members away, but all these new candidates, and then the Carsons . . .”

Dennis and Sally were looking at her with odd smiles. “Oh, no, not you two as well! I thought life was all a dance of atoms, Dennie!”

“Let's say my faithless faith was shaken by the Change, OK?” Dennis said. “I'm not the only one to have that experience. And if I started believing in Jehovah, I'd have to blame
Him
for all this since there's only one address for complaints in that system.”

“And Sally, you're a Buddhist!”

Sally shrugged. “
Was
a Buddhist,” she said quietly. “I
already
believed in karma-dharma and reincarnation and multiple spiritual guides—the difference is more in the terminology than the theology. Plus Terry wants to go to Moon School with his friends; it's important to belong at that age. Plus Dennie and me want you to handfast us, too. And soon. I'm pregnant, and—” She raised a hand out of the water, all fingers folded except the index, which she trained on Dennis. “—guess who's daddy?”

Juniper stared at her for a moment.
Oh, Lady and Lord, I wish we had more contraceptives.
Condoms were already scarce, and pills worth their weight in . . . not gold, in
food,
even with the way the low-fat diet cut down on fertility.

“Congratulations,” she said weakly.

Then she turned her head to Chuck and Judy: “Do you two feel the truly bizarre irony of someone wanting to become a Witch so they can
fit in
?”

Judy nodded; then, uncharacteristically, she giggled—it
was
funny, if you'd spent time in that subculture of misfits.

“When can you swear us in?” Dennis said. “Sooner the better; I've talked with some of the others, and they think so too.”

“Now, wait a minute, Dennie,” Juniper said warningly. “This isn't something to rush into. You can become a Dedicant right away, but Initiation isn't like Christian baptism; it's more like finding a vocation to the priesthood. You have to study a year and a day, and you have to really
mean
it.”

Chuck cupped his hand full of steaming water and scrubbed it across his bearded face.

“Well, yeah,” he said, hesitation in his voice. “But Juney . . . there has to be some reason why the Lord and Lady have set things up this way.”

She conceded the point with a gesture—there were no coincidences—and turned back to Dennis and Sally: “Look, this is no joke. This is our faith you're talking about. It's a serious commitment; people have died for the Craft.”

More soberly they linked hands and nodded. Juniper sighed again, troubled. Covens in her Tradition were quite picky about who they accepted as Dedicants, and how many . . .

Things were a little different outside, too: Wiccans were doing a bit better than the general populace, from what Carmen and the others said.

After a moment's thought she threw up her hands: “Oh, all right, let's assume the Lady and the Lord
are
telling us something; we can see what our coveners think over the next couple of days.”

She raised a brow at Chuck, who was High Priest; traditionally somewhat secondary to the High Priestess, but to be consulted on any important manner. Rudy had been her High Priest before the Change . . . she put the thought out of her mind. Chuck was nodding reluctantly; he shared her reservations, but there really didn't seem to be any alternative that wouldn't leave people feeling hurt and excluded.

“I think it'll be good for the clan,” he said. “We can't have resentments and factions and quarrels—Goddess spare us!”

Judy nodded in her turn. One thing they'd all learned, living in each other's laps like this, depending on each other in matters of life and death, with no escape—not even any music that they didn't make together—was that you
had
to keep consensus. Public opinion had a frightening power in a community this small and tight-knit; and divisions were likewise a deadly threat.

Juniper threw up her hands in surrender and went on: “Then we can do the Dedications at Beltane, which is to say, right now; so Dennie and Sally, you can start spinning a white cord, if you're serious—pass the word. The handfastings we'll have at Lughnassadh, after the First Harvest, you certainly don't have to be Initiates for that and we'll be able to afford decent feasts then, and the Initiations we'll have at Yule, at the turning of the year.”

“Not Samhain?” Dennis asked.

“
No!
First, it's too soon even if we're going to hurry things; second, that's the festival for the
dead,
Dennie. We have an awful lot of people to remember, this year. Not appropriate. By then, I expect you to know
why
it's inappropriate, too.”