The Protector's War (24 page)

“Welcome to the executive suite, my proletarian son-in-law,” he said. “Ain't it grand?”

Havel snorted. “C'mon, Signe. I need a bath.”

 

And now I need a shower,
he thought several hours later, lazing with his hands behind his head and feeling the same vague longing for a cigarette he'd had at times like this since he quit in 1992.

The master bedroom of Larsdalen still showed the influence of poor Mary Larsson, Ken's Boston-Brahmin first wife; the pale wood of the window frames and the furniture, the light graceful lines and perhaps a lingering odor of patchouli. They'd made changes: Signe's collection of stuffed animals and horse prints, a few of her own paintings, bookshelves, and the stands holding their armor and weapons. He didn't like sleeping with the hilt more than arm's-reach away.

He watched as Signe went through into the nursery to check on Mike Jr., who was napping, then watched appreciatively as she walked back in, honey-pale curves dappled by the evening light through the west-facing windows, sleek as a leopardess. The big house was comfortable enough for walking around in the buff; Ken Larsson had rerigged the central heating system to work on wood fuel.

“So, how's the big fellah?” he asked.

“Sleeping like a baby, which is sort of appropriate.”

Havel chuckled. She went on: “Got to get his rest, if he's going to be Lord Bear Two. Or even just help one of his sisters be
Lady
Bear…that sort of sounds funny, you know? Like Goldilocks.”

It wasn't anything he said in the silence that followed…

“One of them
is
going to be Lord Bear Two, right, Mike?”

He stretched. “A little early to be thinking about that, isn't it,
alskling
?” he said casually. “I'm not planning on retiring anytime soon. And the Outfit will have some input too, hey?”

“And what about your
bastard
?” she suddenly hissed.

I would
really
have preferred this subject not come up when I was naked,
Havel thought.
It's sort of a psychological disadvantage.

With the thought, he swung out of the rumpled bed, belted on a bathrobe and went over to the sideboard—another innovation—to pour himself a stiff bourbon. Then he turned, leaning back with his arms crossed.

“OK, Signe, you want the lowdown on it, yeah, he
is
my kid. At least, it's possible—I can't swear who Juney was seeing about then, but his looks do make it highly
probable,
you bet. I'm not denying it. I was willing to let it pass, but I'm not denying it. Not here in private, not to you. I won't make it public unless you insist.”

Two spots of red had appeared on Signe's cheeks; the flush spread downward in a way he found distracting even now, as her chest heaved.

“Is that all you've got to say?”

“No. In the whole time since the Change, I've been with exactly two women, you and her—and with her, it was exactly once. Run the timing,
alskling
. That was in goddamned
April
of Year Zero. We weren't married. We weren't
involved.
”

“That was because—”

“Yeah, I know. I was there when we came back and killed the Three Stooges from hell, right? But the fact remains that we
weren't
involved. Yes, if I'd been screwing around, you'd have a right to want to carve my liver out. But I haven't been; not by any reasonable definition. You're the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with.”

“But little Rudi makes it a bit awkward, doesn't he?”

“Yes. Kids have a habit of doing that.”

He tossed off the drink, considered getting another, and decided not to—he'd had relatives who tried to solve problems that way.

“But I can't exactly have him killed, now can I?”

Signe opened her mouth, closed it, then stalked to her clothes, pulled them on and walked to the hall doorway.

“Fixing things is
your
problem,” she snapped, then slammed the door behind her.

Well, shit,
Havel thought, looking after her.
Guess I didn't grovel
hard
enough.

She'd be all right in a while.

I hope,
he thought, with an unfamiliar hollow feeling under his breastbone.

Dun Juniper/Dun Fairfax

Willamette Valley, Oregon

March 21st, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

C
arefully now,
Dennis Martin Mackenzie told himself.

Even these days, it wasn't often he got a chance to carve a whole twenty-foot section of black walnut log in a mixture of low and high relief; he grinned, feeling himself drooling metaphorically as he prepared to take out another chip, savoring the strong, slightly oily-bitter scent of the cut wood.

This sucker would have been worth
thousands
before the Change, but I'm doing something better with it than turning it into veneer.

The trees weren't even native to Oregon, although they did well in the Willamette, like nearly everything else except tropical stuff. Juniper Mackenzie's great-uncle the banker had planted thousands of them in the cut-over Cascade foothills around his hunting cabin starting back around 1920, fancying himself a practitioner of scientific forestry and having the period's innocent calm about introducing alien species into an ecosystem. This one had been harvested a year before the Change, along with a lot of other mature timber, something Juniper had done as the only alternative to losing the land she'd inherited from him for back taxes. Then the timber company had gone belly-up and left the logs stacked to season while the lawyers sharpened their knives…

Dennis's stepson Terry stopped working on a prentice-piece clamped in a vise on a nearby bench and came to look. It was getting dark, and Dennis's workpiece was surrounded by lamps; the wall of the dun to the west meant that sunset came a few minutes early. The shadowless light was pretty good, but you had to be careful about judging depth. He took the gouge and laid the sharp V against a section, tapped with the wooden hammer…

Tock.
A large chip flipped away to join those littering the gravel beneath the X-shaped wooden rests that held the great baulk of hardwood.

“And that's it for today,” he said in satisfaction, caressing the dark wood with its dense hard grain, feeling the strength of it through his fingertips, the gloss it would take when it was oiled and polished and varnished just right, and set up with its twin…

“It's gonna look
great,
Dad,” the twelve-year-old said. “Maybe even better than the gateposts here.”

“As good, at least, if I do say so myself, Terry,” Dennis said happily.

Even after nine years he was a little self-conscious about calling the boy
son,
although “blended” families like his were more common than not these days, given the accidents of survival in the Dying Time, and Terry hardly remembered his birth father. Certainly he had the love of the wood in him, and he wasn't half bad at leatherworking, either, which was Dennis's other trade, and had been his second hobby before the Change.

Terry was half Vietnamese, slender and fine-featured, and he made Dennis Martin Mackenzie feel almost as much of a hairy troll as his mother Sally's slight-boned prettiness did. She seldom talked about her first husband, who'd been working late at Hewlett-Packard in Portland that March seventeenth, and had simply never made it home.

She had the guts and sense to take Terry and get out of Dodge before things went absolutely to hell. She is one
fine
lady.

He smiled as he caressed the wood with a broad hand, callused from his work and scarred by the accidents inevitable when you used chisel and gouge, knife and awl and waxed thread. The dividing channels for the knotwork were finished, running in sinuous interlocking curves and angles up three-quarters of the log's smooth surface; that left rounding the serpents and the delicate work of putting in the scales. The interlacing patterns and gripping stylized beasts' mouths had their inspiration from the Book of Kells, but he'd made changes of his own—elongating the pattern, and changing the animals to coyotes and black bear…

With wood this beautiful, I'm almost sorry to do any inlay work. Just a little to pick out the mouths and eyes of the dragons and wolves. More up top, of course.

He touched the rougher wood at the log's end. That was where the face of the Goddess would go—and that was the real challenge for this piece of work. He'd spent nights and days thinking of it, while he worked on other things or just stood looking. Sutterdown wasn't using the Celtic pantheon to represent some aspect of the twin divinities of the Old Religion, the way most Mackenzies did. They wanted to be different…

Hmmmm. Yeah, the outer form is Aphrodite. But I want elements of all three Aspects here. Sally for the Mother-of-All this time. Eilir for the Maiden? Maybe Astrid, if I can get her to sit for it. Or Luanne Larsson, if I could get her over here for a couple of days. I like the way the bones of her face go—that Spanish-Indio-African-Anglo blend would be just right for the Goddess in this aspect—

“How much is Sutterdown paying you for this?”

He started out of his trance, suppressing a flash of irritation. “Hey, Chuck. Is it that time already?”

Chuck Barstow was in his brigandine and sword belt, with twin sprays of raven feathers on either side of his round bowl helmet for ceremonial swank; privately Dennis thought he was given to wearing headgear all the time because his sandy hair was getting real thin on top, and he wore his beard trimmed to a rakish point. He was also taller and younger than the wood-worker—forty to his fifty-odd, lean whipcord and gristle to the other man's broad muscular hairiness.

He
wasn't fat before the Change,
Dennis thought, with a trace of satisfaction at his own waistline—not exactly narrow, but without the rolls of surplus tissue he'd worn there from his late twenties until the aftermath of the Change.
But then, he was a gardener by trade, not a pub manager like me, and he did all that knightly SCA shit in his spare time, too.

“Yup. The Dun Fairfax people sent a horn-call up when the party went past and the road sentry relayed it. Sam's stopped off home there, by the way.”

“Damn,” Dennis said mildly. “I wanted to talk to him about the latest batch of cedar for the arrow-making shop before he got all caught up in farmwork. Oh, well, it ain't a long walk and Melissa's a hell of a good cook; I'll drop by tomorrow…no, that's Ostara, everyone'll be busy. Day or two after.”

He brushed chips out of his beard and off his carpenter's apron, laying down his tools. Terry hurried to help put them away in the workshop that huddled against the inside of Dun Juniper's wall beside the family cabin. Dennis grinned: Terry was a good kid, if a little serious. He grinned wider as he put on a clean white shirt with biblike ruffle, tucked it into his kilt, wrapped his plaid and belted and pinned it, and arranged the flat Scots bonnet on his head with the tuft of coyote fur at the clasp.

He'd teased Juney for years before the Change about the way she put on the Celtic thing, however much it went with her style of music, and about how her coveners were always pulling some sort of myth out of the Irish twilight—of course he'd been a cowan then, an unbeliever, and hadn't understood the symbolism. Juniper Mackenzie might have been the one who told the band gathered at her cabin that to survive they would have to live like a clan, as it was in the old days—but he didn't think she had meant to be taken quite so literally. It had been Dennis who christened it the Clan Mackenzie, and started the kilt-wearing fashion when they salvaged that warehouse-full of tartan blankets. He'd come up with a good deal else that caught on too, in the years since, and mostly she'd had to go along with it.

It drives her bananas,
Dennis thought with a smug grin, and only a slight pang at the metaphor—he hadn't tasted a banana in nine years.

Chuck raised an eyebrow, obviously following the thought: “Dennis Martin Mackenzie, the Clan's very own Astrid Larsson.”

“Oh, now you're getting
nasty
,” he protested. “Astrid's a compulsive fantasist. I just have a well-informed sense of humor.”

The other man grinned. “It may be a joke to you, Dennie, but have you noticed how the younger generation takes it? Like they really
mean
it?”

Urk
, he thought.
You've got a point there.
He glared at the Armsman.

Chuck spread his free hand and replied, “No offense. It's done us good, I think—
looking
different helped people believe things
were
different.” A sly smile. “And speaking of Celtic motifs, how much
is
the covenstead at Sutterdown paying you to carve this tree? And in what?”

“Pain in the ass not having money anymore, isn't it?” Dennis said with a wink. “I mean there's only so much wheat or bacon you can use and keeping fifty bushels and a sow around until you can swap for something you really want is clumsy. They offered gold, originally, but I took it in wine, instead. Lot of our people still leery about gold.”

Chuck raised a brow: “Not payment in Brannigan's special ale? Juney made a song about it, after all.”

Dennis mimed taking an arrow in the ribs. “Traitor! I think that blowhard Brannigan spikes his with magic mushrooms, and mine's all natural ingredients—barley malt, hops and mountain spring water. But I will admit Sutterdown's got the best vineyards in our territory, even if they're not as good as the Bearkillers'. They agreed to store it for me.”

Chuck's grin was honestly admiring. “Lost none of your innkeeper's instincts, I see,” he said, laughing and leaning on his spear. “The longer
they
keep it, at their expense, the better it gets.”

“Since it's a red blend that's mostly pinot noir and less than a year in the wood, yeah, pretty much. And running the Hopping Toad was fun, sorta, but it was just my eating job. Wood and leather, that was where I got my kicks. Well, I like brewing, too. Anyway, it ain't strictly Celtic like the ones here; some of the knotwork, yeah, but the faces are classical as much as anything. Everything's an aspect of the God and Goddess, right?”

He looked down at the wood, smiling, and touched it lightly with his fingertips again. “It's all gonna look damn good, if I say so myself.”

“Sutterdown
ought
to be concentrating on getting their damn town wall finished,” Chuck grumbled.

He wore two hats in the clan: Lord of the Harvest, which translated as Minister of Agriculture, and Second Armsman, which in peacetime meant going around chivvying people to keep their training and defensive works up to scratch.

“No rest for the Wiccan,” he went on with a sigh, settling his helmet and heading for the gates.

And he puns, too,
Dennis thought with a wince, and set about closing up shop.

Dun Juniper was bustling with preparations for the Chief's homecoming and the big pre-Ostara dance by the time he and Terry had swept up the chips for the kindling box and dragged a tarpaulin up to cover the workpiece. Terry's mother Sally was over in the Hall, helping with the decorations and cooking—her usual jobs were principal of the Dun Juniper high school and Lore-Mistress for the Clan as a whole, overseeing the schools and Moon Schools, but the kids were off for the day.

Dennis decided that the best contribution
he
could make was to go up and lean on the battlements and watch the sun set and Juniper and her party arrive; if he didn't someone would find him real work to do. There were ladders at intervals between the cabins built up against the wall. He went up one with the ease of long practice and emerged puffing on the fighting platform, surprised as always at how
high
things looked from there.

Higher outside than inside, of course; Juney's cabin—the core of the Hall—had stood on a little oblong plateau jutting southward into a larger hillside bench. The steep slope around its edge gave the walls fifteen feet more height on their outer surface.

In the summer of Change Year One the growing clan of the Mackenzies had put up a log palisade around Dun Juniper. Then they'd had a couple of practical examples of how well that style of fort could burn, and nobody had grudged the work of renovations next year—much. They'd used the
Murus Gallicus
as a model—the Gallic Wall of the old continental Celts. It was a crib-cage of horizontal squared logs, each layer at right-angles to the one below; the gaps between the logs were filled with fitted rock and rubble before the next layer of timbers was spiked down, until the wall was as high as you wanted—thirty feet, here—and an outer layer of mortared fieldstone concealed the ends of the horizontal logs. There were U-shaped towers half again as tall at the corners, plus a pair facing each way to bracket the gate, and they'd improved on the Celtic original by working cement and rebar into the rubble as the wall went up.

Add a solid coating of waterproof stucco from an abandoned building-supply warehouse over the outside, give the fighting platform a pavement of remelted road asphalt six inches thick and it was weathertight and low-maintenance, too.