The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (44 page)

“Nothing else she gave me will last out three days. There’s loaves of risen bread, a crock of butter, tomatoes, eggplant, six pork-chops—”

The youngsters all nodded; the Lopez family’s sharing-circle had just killed a pig. The households in a circle took turns furnishing a beast, which was the most economical way of doing it. There was at least a hundred and fifty pounds of butcher’s meat best eaten fresh on a good fat summer hog, far more than even a big household could consume easily. Fall and winter were the seasons for preserving hams and bacon and salting down pigmeat in general.

“—and a head of
lettuce
from the back garden, by the Lady’s eyes . . . the onions will keep, but nothing else. She tried to tuck in a dozen eggs, for all love, but I put me foot down there.”

Mathun groaned in sympathy; the rest of them had things like dried smoked sausage and twice-baked crackerbread and hard cheese and sacks of nuts and dried fruit.

“How did your mother ken what we were up to?”

“
Your
mother told her, how else? Just last night, I will grant, which was shrewd. She’d have been a puddle by now, else.”

“She packed you
lettuce
? Didn’t she know we’ll be gone months?” Mathun said. “Lettuce won’t even last until we’re past the last place we can buy garden truck.”

At which Boudicca just snorted and rolled her eyes, and everyone shrugged agreement.

All the world or at least all Dun Fairfax also knew that despite her skills Una had trouble remembering to pin her plaid in the morning, or realizing that her children weren’t kittens, and was in general a blithering flibbertigibbet. Her man had been even worse, until he tripped over his own feet one dark and muddy October afternoon while looking at a bird flying south. That wouldn’t have been so bad, except that he fell right under the hooves and then the blades of a four-horse team dragging a disk harrow across a field due to be put in winter wheat. The pyre had been lit as soon afterwards as the wood could be got together, and the body on it had been tightly wrapped in old sheets from head to toe and then waxed canvas.

The next crop was very good in that field, which only stands to reason,
Karl thought.
Earth must be fed.

He’d sniggered with a fourteen-year-old’s lack of mercy as the mourners tried to find something beside
not fit to be let out without a keeper
to say about the deceased.

Earth must be fed . . . still, a pity.
Looking back he could say that Calbhach had been a fine shepherd at least, and a good-natured neighbor.

“We’ll eat from yours the first couple of days and then you can share ours,” Ruan said briskly.

Perhaps by way of reaction to her parents Boudicca was hard-headed and sensible, like the rest of her four younger sibs. She’d been applying the hatchet to feathered necks when her family needed a chicken since she was nine, for example, because whacking off a bird’s head always made Una start to blubber. Even before she’d finished the prayer of thanks and apology, with the steel wavering dangerously in her hand before she struck. Legend in the dun said that sometimes she’d
closed her eyes
while she swung.

Folk were stirring and lamps lit behind windows as they passed; this
wasn’t the busiest season of the year—that was just ahead—but a farming Dun never lacked for work and rose with the early summer dawn. The air was taking on a tinge of woodsmoke and more than a tinge of the mouthwatering scent of baking bread—not every household had bread ovens, but the others swapped each morn with those who did. Other scents were present, livestock among them, but nothing very rank; Mackenzies were a cleanly folk, something enforced with Clan-wide
geasa
. And almost as bad, songs from the bards at festivals if you fell below acceptable standards. Nobody wanted a mock-epic about
Dun Stinkard
sticking to you like dung to a boot.

Even the ducks and geese were stirring on the pond at the center of the green, and a cat gave them a blue-eyed stare from a fencepost, hissed half-heartedly at the dogs and leapt up to the turf of a roof to send pigeons fluttering away.

Fairfax held a little less than four hundred souls all told, and was the oldest of all the Clan’s farming settlements—Dun Juniper, up the hillside to the northward, was something else again; the portal to the Otherworld, some said. That number was about as many as you could have and still keep all the fields within reach without wasting too much time going back and forth on foot. When a Clan settlement got too big for comfort it split and founded another, often in league with two or three more Duns with the same problem, and that newly established settlement took fresh Clan common-land under the plow. There was no lack of space at all, even here in the Willamette.

Dun Fairfax was named after the couple who’d owned the land here before the Change. They’d been very old, and besides that sick with some chronic illness which needed medicines that wouldn’t keep. Modern healers could identify it, though not help enough to mention. But their supplies and tools had aided that first band of Clansfolk to survive, and their graves were honored yet.

Most of the little settlement was houses along graveled streets bordered by nut or fruit trees; the newer ones were of deep-notched squared logs fitted together on stone foundations below, the older often frame like the Aylwards’, salvaged from the abandoned dwellings that had been
common two generations ago before fire and weather finished their work. All had flower-starred turf roofs, and all had carving and paint on shutter and rafter-end and around doors and windows, in the sinuous curling style Mackenzies liked; all had small gardens of flowers and herbs on their lots too. Highest reared the covenstead, with the beam-ends of its rafters wrought into the shape of the totem beasts, home to ceremony and ritual and used for the Moon School and in bad weather for meetings of the Dun’s
óenach
, the assembly of all adults whose vote settled serious matters and selected those charged with office and delegates to the
Óenach Mór
of the whole Clan.

That side of the village also held smithy and leatherworker’s workshop, the bathhouse, granary, communal barn and storehouses for the gear that was used in common, like the threshing machine and reapers and mowers and the separator. He could hear its droning whine picking up as someone worked the crank and poured their first milking through it; the cream would be splashing out into a bucket, ready to be poured into the buttermaking barrel-churn, and the skim milk into another to feed the pigs being fattened for slaughter.

And Aunt Tamar was right. I
am
looking at it all with new eyes. Who knows when—if—I’ll be seeing it again?

The thought didn’t oppress him; no more than to any healthy youngster did his own death seem real to him.

Around the whole dun was a clear graveled street edged with a rectangular wall of great upright logs, thirty feet high, thick as a man’s body and cut to points at the top, the smooth wood lightly carved and varnished against rot. They were set in stone and concrete at their bases, and beyond was a dry moat grown in short-cropped grass. The huge tree-trunks were bound together midway and just beneath the points with bands of stainless-steel cable set in grooves; wooden blockhouses rose at the corners and over the gate. A fighting platform ran around the inside, with wooden staircases stretching up so that each household’s fighters could run straight to their posts if the drum and horn-call came.

Outside the gate was the little shrine to the Fairfaxes over their graves, and the god-posts, black-walnut logs carved and inlaid with the forms of
Brigit holding Her flame and sheaf, Lug with His long spear and hand raised in benediction. Unlike most Clan settlements, Dun Fairfax didn’t have its own Sacred Wood; it used the same mountain
nemed
as Dun Juniper for the great ceremonies of the Wheel of the Year, which was a source of envy throughout the dùthchas.

“We’re off, Henwas,” Karl said shortly, as they came to the gate. “Merry meet, merry part, and merry meet again—after you open the gate, if you would.”

“Off on your greatly secret quest!” the man taking his turn at gate-guard said, leaning on his long-headed spear and laughing in his gray-streaked brown beard. “It’s invisible you lads and lasses . . . and lass . . . are!”

He mimed surprise, looking about with wide eyes and putting a hand to his ear before speaking awestruck tones:

“Aye, there’s a bootless voice coming from the clear air asking me to open! Now, is that a good sprite or the Fair Folk about their tricks?”

Laughing and twitching like a pack of dogs with a tickle up the arse, him and his,
Karl thought sourly but did not say, as the gate-crew composed of Henwas’ household and neighbors winked and nudged behind the older man.
But the toe of me boot would do better.

Boudicca had her glaive’s lower three feet in a scabbard on the rear of her bicycle. That left her a hand to express her feelings, middle finger raised from a clenched fist. The guard laughed again.

“Any time you wish to serve the Goddess so, just proclaim the victory,” he said, whipping off his Scots bonnet and bowing, and making a bad pun on the meaning of her name.

He might be fond of his own wit, but he and the others worked the crank to slide the bar out of its brackets and then pushed the gate open. Nobody here except Karl himself understood just how much High Queen Mathilda would be upset when her daughter decamped; and in any case, though the High Queen was well-liked—she’d been a captive/hostage up in Dun Juniper during the opening days of the Protector’s War—in any dispute ninety-nine in a hundred Mackenzies would take Princess Órlaith’s side by reflex.

They’d have been opening the gate about now anyway. The rim of the sun was just clearing the Low Cascades to the east, and the Lambeg drum roared from the platform above as the pipes skirled. Karl and his brother had already made the Greeting at home, but most folk waited for the signal.

“At least we don’t have to sweet-talk Henwas, that laughing jackass, into opening without telling him where we’re off to, or why,” Karl said resignedly as they pushed their bicycles over the gate’s threshold, pausing to make reverence to the god-posts.

In peacetime there was no rule against leaving the Dun whenever you wished, say for night-hunting or just a stroll. Generally through the small postern after the main gates had been shut, but it was a little irregular not to tell the gate-guards why. The conversation necessary might have given them away.

If everyone and his second cousin hadn’t already kenned it without our knowing,
Karl thought.

Then he laughed himself. When the others looked at him: “Well, to be sure it’s not quite as we planned it, but we’re away, are we not? Nothing hurt but our vanity, as me ma said. To tell the truth, I’m just as glad to have my kin sending me off with the blessing.”

The others gave grudging nods as they mounted their bicycles and pedaled off with gravel crunching and popping beneath the solid rubber wheels. The dogs trotted after them in a clump, heads turning to watch the occasional bird or butterfly—but these were well-disciplined beasts, and they’d ignore even rabbits or deer.

“And it’s a fair summer’s day, and we’re off for adventure!”

He put out of his mind some sour things his father had said on the subject of
adventure
; it was the way of nature for an old man to be a bit like a plaid on a wet day in the Black Months, soaked and flat and clinging and heavy. It
was
a fine day, and the valley of the little tree-fringed creek ran westward before them, opening out like a triangle with its broad base the edge of the wide Willamette.

The first little bit outside the walls was in strips of low-growing vegetable garden mulched with sawdust and walnut shavings. It was law to
keep nothing above knee height within bowshot of the defenses. The days when folk feared the lurking, crawling terror of Eaters were gone and had been before his father’s beard came in, and it would be a very bold and very stupid bandit chief indeed who led a band right into the innermost heart of the Mackenzie dùthchas. For that matter invading armies hadn’t come this way in a long time either; the heartlands of the realm had been at peace since the end of the Prophet’s War just before he was born, and that had mostly been fought in the eastern marches anyway. Though here south of the Columbia the foe had come as far as the passes through the High Cascades, and met the Mackenzie arrowstorm. But the rule about keeping the space before the walls clear remained, and was kept.

Beyond the garden strip the gently rolling land was in smallish square fields, edged about with close-trimmed hawthorn hedges or lines of trees or both, in pasture or grain, flax or row-crops like potatoes, with an orchard of apples or peaches or cherries or other fruit now and then, those mostly set with beehives as well. In a few hop-vines climbed tall arrangements of poles and ropes; Dun Fairfax didn’t have a brewmaster, but Dun Juniper had a very fine one indeed, who swapped for hops and barrel-staves and such if they met her standards.

Karl recognized each plot with knowledge he’d acquired through skin and hands and feet, and knew who held it. The folk of a Dun did a fair bit in common and helped each other at need, but each family had its own croft. Even specialists like the smith or the potter had a field or so. Sheep and cattle grazed, the watchers who stayed out with them overnight waving to the party, and then they were out into the Willamette itself, with only the low distant blue line of the Coast Range to break the westward horizon as the last stars faded.

He turned and looked at the edge of the Cascades beneath the dawn, the Low Cascades blue-green, the snowpeaks of the High catching the morning sun that tinged their whiteness pink, and laughed for the sheer joy of youth and strength and a fair prospect stretching ahead.

A little after noon they were near Sutterdown, cycling past the water-powered mills along the canal from the Sutter River that sawed timber,
ground grain and spun linen and wool into thread to sell to weavers and turned hemp into rope; they were mostly shut down in this season when water was low and folk busy getting ready for the grain harvest.