"Dies the Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M.)

"NO!"

Juniper Mackenzie added her voice to the chorus of a hundred others; all the adults within walking distance of this spot, in fact. The foragers approaching from the west slowed uncertainly as they heard it, a few of them ringing the bells on their bicycles as if that would clear the road. There weren't as many of them-forty or fifty, she estimated-but they all had some sort of weapon, and they had a bicycle-drawn cart behind.

The face-off was taking place well away from her cabin-what they'd taken to calling the Hall-down in the flatlands to the west. She could see the outskirts of the little town of Sutterdown to the north, over the tops of the pines lining a creek. Her twenty clansfolk, the neighborhood farmers and the townsmen were a collection of clumps making a rough line north and south through the shaggy overgrown pasture of the fields on either side of the road. The roadway itself was a two-lane county blacktop, and quite thoroughly blocked with a semi that had skidded across it on the day of the Change; nobody was going to move it anytime soon, since the cargo had been sacks of cement.

Must get a wagon down here to haul some of it off, she thought with some corner of her mind. We can use it.

There were so many people here, and they were so loud-but it still seemed quiet, quiet and empty: The noises were all of human voices and feet and hands, no drone or roar of engines. You noticed more without that burr of background noise. The sound of grass and twigs under feet, the smell of angry unwashed men…

The foragers stopped, and the shouting chorus grumbled away into a buzz of voices. That sank into near-silence as a man walked forward waving a white flag on the end of a pole. He wore a policeman's uniform, much the worse for hard use; a mousey-looking woman accompanied him, with a clipboard in her hands. He carried a much more practical hunting crossbow, with a knife and hatchet at his belt, and wore an army-style helmet.

"Listen!" he called, when he'd come close. "We're here by order of Acting Governor Johnson to requisition a quota of supplies for emergency redistribution-"

Juniper gripped her bow and bared her teeth; that was the second Acting Governor since the Change, which made an average of one about every two weeks and a bit, and nobody knew what had happened to the incumbent. In practice, what was left of the state government had no power more than two days from Salem by bicycle.

Which unfortunately includes our land, just.

The chorus of NO! erupted again; she could see Reverend Dixon of Sutterdown a ways to her left, leading the beat. Odd to be chanting at his direction; the man had ignored her friendly clergy-to-clergy letter before the Change, and been openly hostile since-evidently he thought Jehovah had sent the disaster as a punishment for tolerating the wrong people, of which Juniper and her friends were most certainly an example.

"Suffer not a witch to live" was a favorite of his.

The chorus died down again, and unexpectedly the mousy-looking woman shouted into the quiet: "How can you be so selfish? Half the people in Portland are sitting in camps around Salem and Albany now-gangsters have taken over Portland and driven them out-people are dying! Dying of hunger, hunger and disease-little children are starving to death!"

Sweet Goddess gentle and strong, aid me now. Her hand traced the Invoking sign. Great Ogma, Lord of Eloquence, lend me your golden tongue to calm these troubled waters.

Dixon was about to speak. Juniper opened her mouth to forestall him-the minister was definitely of the tribe who saw all problems as nails and themselves as a hammer. Or the Fist of God, in his case.

"No!" she said, and held up her bow to stop the chant when it threatened to start again. She continued into the ringing silence: "No, we will not give you our food. Not because we grudge help, but because we have little ones of our own to think of. If we gave you all that we have, you'd be starving again in a week-and so would we! Starving to death, before the crops came in! And we need our stock to pull plows and carts, and breed more for the years to come. You've already taken more than we can spare."

"You're as bad as those people in Corvallis," the woman said bitterly.

Juniper's ears pricked up at that, but she made her voice stern: "If you want to do something for those poor city people, get them moving," she went on, pointing over her shoulder at the distant snowpeaks of the Cascades floating against heaven. "East of the mountains, to where there's more. Or set them to work planting, find them seeds and tools. Or both. We'll help all we can with either. Don't keep them sitting until they die!"

Something's wrong, Juniper thought suddenly, as the woman opened her mouth again-most likely to plead for anything they could spare.

A harsh voice spoke from the ranks of the local folk; not one of her clan, probably a farmer: "Not as easy as beating people up when you outnumber them, or robbing us one by one, is it, you useless thieving bastards?"

"Wrong, wrong, wrong," Juniper said under her breath, her eyes flickering over the foragers as they bristled with anger, feeling the future shifting like tumbling rocks. "Watch out-"

Sam Aylward's thick-muscled arm brushed her aside. She staggered back, turning and waving her arms to recover balance. That let her see the crossbow bolt hit his shoulder with a flat hard smack sound, and a ringing under it, and to know it would have hit her if she hadn't moved- or been moved.

The short thick bolt hit glancingly and bounced away, because the Englishman was wearing the first of Dennie's brigandine jacks-a sleeveless shirt made from two layers of canvas with little thumb-sized metal plates riveted between. One of them peeped out through the ripped fabric now, the metal bright where the head of the bolt had scored it, then going dull red as blood leaked through.

Everything moved very slowly after that. She let the stagger turn her back westward. The Salem folk were looking at one of their own; he stood by their cart and frantically spanned his crossbow to reload. On both sides people shifted their grips on improvised weapons, some edging backward, others leaning forward like dogs against a leash.

Somehow she could hear the whirr of the crank as the man who'd shot at her spun it; even louder was the creak of Aylward's great yellow bow as he drew to the ear.

Snap-wuffft! String against bracer; whistle of cloven air.

The distance was only thirty feet; the arrow was traveling two hundred feet a second when it left the string, and to the human eye it was nothing but a bright blur in the sunlight. Then tock as it struck bone, smashing into the cross-bowman's face and slamming him brutally back against the cart.

Snap-wuffft! Snap-wuffft!

Two more of the cloth-yard shafts hit the man, bare inches apart in his chest, the gray-goose fletching bobbing as he slumped, held up by the deep-driven heads punched through him and into the boards. Aylward had a fourth shaft on his string, half-drawn, the point shifting back and forth in deadly menace.

"Don't try it!" he roared as blood poured down the dying man's body, trickled down his own side. "Don't you bloody try it!"

Juniper felt the crystalline balance of the moment that followed, silent enough that she could hear the wind that cuffed at her hair and the scrabble of the dead man's heels as they drummed on the asphalt. She slung her bow and stepped forward into that quiet, between the two forces. The thought of hands clenching on ax hafts, fingers trembling on bowstrings and crossbow triggers was distant, remote.

"Stop!" she shouted, filling her lungs and pitching it to carry. "Stop right now!"

The moment sighed away, and people were looking at her. The trained singer's voice let her reach them all.

"There's been enough blood shed today." She spread her arms wide and up, palms towards the west. "Go back. There's nothing for you here. We don't want to hurt you, but we'll fight for our homes and our children if we must. Go! Get out!"

"Out!" Other voices took it up. "OUT! OUT!"

Aylward's eyes were gray and bleak and level as he waited. One by one the foragers turned and mounted their bicycles and left; Juniper let out a sigh.

"You felt it too, then?" Aylward said, as she passed a shaky hand over her face.

"Felt what?" she asked.

"The flux. We might have pulled it off without killing, if that loudmouth bugger hadn't up and told them to sod off. Nice work, Lady, the way you turned it around after that. I wasn't looking forward to a massacre."

She nodded absently, swallowing against a quick nausea-He went on: "It's a gift, feeling the flux-situational awareness, the officers call it. Maybe you've the makings of a soldier."

"And maybe you've the makings of a Witch," she answered.

Then her giddy relief drained away, remembering the savage maul-on-wood sound of the arrowhead striking bone.

"I know you saved my life, Sam, but… Goddess Mother-of-All, can't we stop killing each other even now?"

Aylward shrugged. "Never," he said with conviction. "And especially not now. You said it-there just isn't enough to go 'round, not if it were shared ever so fair."

Juniper nodded bleakly. "Then you and Chuck have the right of it," she said.

At his questioning look, she touched her bow: "I thought they'd think we could all shoot like you, but that was a bluff, and bluffs get called if you go on long enough. Na nocht d'fhiacla go bhfeadair an greim do bhreith!"

"Which means?"

She shook herself. "Sorry. Don't bare your teeth until you can bite!"

"You'll push for more practice, then?"

"Starting tomorrow."

"Watch that!" Chuck Barstow shouted, striding over to where the older children were whacking with wooden swords at poles set in the dirt-and occasionally at each other.

"You can hurt someone with those things! Do it the way I showed you or I'll take them away."

It was an excuse to stop for a while. Juniper lowered her bow gratefully and rubbed at her left shoulder. The bright spring day caressed her face with a soft pine-scented breeze down from the mountains. It cut the haze, too, perfect for militia practice in the flower-starred meadows below her cabin.

Militia was what it was, even if a few were set on calling it the war band or the spear levy.

You know, I thought it was just a harmless bit of speechifying to call this a clan, she thought. A bit of playacting to distract people from how close to death we all were-are.

Wiccans were given to romantic archaisms and usually it was harmless enough; she'd been known to indulge in them herself, and not just for professional reasons. Now, though…

I may have let a genie out of the bag. Words have power!

Sally Quinn was in charge of the children and absolute beginners, most of them using what they'd scavenged from sporting-goods stores; she had the same fiberglass target bow she'd carried the day Juniper met her. She patiently went through the basics of stance and draw, and occasionally let them shoot a practice shaft at the board-and-dirt targets. Fortunately modern bows with their stiff risers and centerline arrow-shelves were a lot easier to learn than the ancient models.

Sam Alyward had the more advanced pupils; he'd turned out enough longbows for all, courtesy of her woodpile.

Thank You, she thought to the Lord of the Forest, and stepped back to watch Aylward demonstrate.

His stave had a hundred-pound draw. When he shot, the snap of the string against the bracer seemed to trip on the smack of the arrowhead hitting the deer-shaped target fifty yards away, and the malignant quiver of the shaft that followed. Between was only a blurred streak; she forced herself not to dwell on the hard tock of an arrowhead sledging into bone.

He sent three more arrows on the way at five-second intervals, all of them landing in a space a palm could have covered, then turned to her. The Englishman was sweating, but then everyone was. Sweating as hard as they had during the planting, which she almost remembered with nostalgia. The cheerful noise made it plain everyone thought this was more fun, though.

"Shoulder sore, Lady?" he said gravely.

"Just a bit," Juniper replied; in fact, it ached.

"Then you should knock off," he said. "Watch for a while instead. Push too hard too soon, and you're courting a long-term injury. You may be over-bowed for a beginner."

"I don't think so. Forty pounds isn't so much when you've fiddled for hours straight! But I will take a break."

She braced the lower tip of her bow against the outside of her left foot, stepped through with her right and bent it against her thigh to unstring it. She called the weapon Artemis, after the Greek archer-goddess, and although getting the trick of it was harder, she'd discovered she actually liked using it, far more than the crossbow.

When she glanced up from the task, she saw Aylward looking over at the children, and smiling with a gentle fondness you wouldn't suspect from his usual gruff manner.

Or from the feel of his hands when he's teaching unarmed combat! she thought, grinning. Chucking folk about, as he calls it.

The important thing was that with Aylward around, they had someone who really understood this business; for starters, he could make the bows, and their strings, and the arrows. In the long run, that would be very important. The machine-made fiberglass sporting toys hadn't stopped working the way guns had, but the prying roots of vine and tree had already begun their reconquest of factories and cities. In a generation those wastelands of concrete and asphalt would be home to owl and fox and badger, not men.

Dennis had made them all quivers, and waterproof waxed-leather cases for the bows that clipped alongside them; she reached back and slid hers home. She was wearing a brigandine now as well, like the one that had saved Sam Aylward from the crossbow bolt meant for her; the jack was hot even in the mild April air, and weighed twenty-five pounds. When you added in the sword and dagger and buckler-the latter was a little steel shield about the size and shape of a soup plate-it took a good deal of getting used to.

Which is why I'm wearing it, she thought glumly. To get used to moving in it.

Unlike most of the Mackenzies, she didn't see all this as a combination RenFaire and holiday, despite the moon-and-antlers design on the breast of all the jacks.

It's not like Society gear. It's real and I hate the necessity. Fate throws us all into the soup, and we're still killing each other.

She watched the shooting for a while; Aylward was a good teacher, firm but calm and endlessly patient. At last he looked up at the sun and spoke: "Break for dinner!"

Juniper suppressed a smile; the man had some old-fashioned turns of phrase. A clatter continued when all else fell quiet. Chuck Barstow was sparring with the two young men who'd come in with his brother, Vince Torelli and Steve Matucheck. Sword-and-buckler work was an active style, and they were leaping and foining in a pattern as acrobatic and pleasing to the eye as a dance. She'd never felt a desire to join in when she was busking at Society events, but it looked pretty; now that she'd done a fair bit with the other neophytes, she could even say it was fun in an active sort of way.

If you can forget what happens when it's done with edged metal rather than padded sticks.

Chuck jerked back from the waist to dodge a strike, then leapt to let the other sword pass beneath his boots. His buckler banged down on Vince's helmet; the blow was pulled, but it still gave a solid bonging thump that sent the younger man down clutching at his head. In the same instant he caught Steve's sword-blow with his own, locked the guards, put a foot behind his opponent's leg and threw him staggering backward with a twist of shoulder and hips. A lizard-swift thrust followed, leaving Steve white with shock as the blunt wooden point tapped him on the base of the throat.

Cheers burst out; Mary and Sanjay and Daniel rushed over and nearly knocked Chuck over himself in their enthusiasm.

"Dad's the best!" they chorused. "Dad's the best!"

Little Tamsin stumped around crowing and waving her arms, happy because her father was the center of attention. He scooped her up onto his shoulder, tucked Mary and Daniel each under an arm and let Sanjay proudly rack his equipment as he staggered over towards the trestle tables.

Quick work, Juniper thought.

It hadn't been long before the rescued children realized they weren't going home, or at least before most stopped talking about it; shared hunger and fear and unaccustomed hard work had probably sped up the process, and the sheer strangeness of everything.

Now, is it a good, sign of healthy resilience that some of them have started calling their foster parents Mom and Dad, or is it unhealthy denial and transference? I don't think those three in particular had parents before, not really, just people who paid the bills.

"Lad knows his business as far as the moves go," Ayl-ward said thoughtfully. "Hope he doesn't freeze up when the red wine's served for true, though."

Juniper shivered slightly and changed the subject. "You've settled in better than most, Sam," she said. "I'd have thought it would be harder for you, being so far from home."

For a moment the square, good-humored Saxon face went bleak. "It'll be worse back there," he said. "Sixty million people in one little island? It doesn't bear thinking of, and at least I don't have to watch it."

Juniper winced slightly and swallowed. Any more than I do Los Angeles or New York, she thought. Or Mexico City or Tokyo or…

He shook his shoulders. "Besides, I've no near kin to home, no wife or child, and even before the Change… it's not really the place I grew up in, not anymore it isn't- wasn't. Full of commuters, bought all the old cottages up and gussified them, they did. And the local farmers were all for ripping out hedges and trees and getting rid of their livestock and making the place look like bloody Canada; fat lot of good their combines and thousand-acre fields of hybrid barley will be to them now, eh?"

He shook his head. "I'd just been playing, fossicking about with this and that, since I mustered out of the SAS. Traveling, making bows, doing a little hunting."

"They must have a generous pension plan," Juniper said teasingly.

"Not bloody likely!" he said with a grin. "But my da had a bit put by-from selling the farm about the time my mother died and I went for a soldier, you see. Left it to me; fair knackered I was, when I found out, since he'd done naught but live in a cheap flat in Portsmouth and haunt the pubs. Thought he'd drunk it up years ago… "

Then he looked at her with his head slightly to one side: "You've a gift for getting people talking, don't you, Lady?"

Juniper grinned. "What can I say? I'm a Witch, a singer, and a storyteller-all three. So… the Change interrupted your life as a gentleman of leisure?"

"That it did." A shrug. "Play's all very well, but a man's life is his work; I've got a real job of work to do here."

Well, that's more than Mr. Strong and Silent's said before, she thought, giving him a genial slap on the shoulder; it was like hitting an oak beam. Lord and Lady be thanked for sending him our way!

Everyone headed for the trestle-tables and the fires with the soup cauldrons; on a day like this, it was a relief to do things out-of-doors. Juniper shed her battle gear-they had two-by-four racks set up for it-and got in line. Diana grinned at her as she ladled the Eternal Soup into bowls.

"You know, Juney, one of the things I enjoyed most about running MoonDance was looking up recipes and planning the menu?"

Juniper laughed out loud, despite the rumbling of her stomach. "And what's on the menu today, Di?"

"Eternal Soup, Eternal Soup, or today's extra-special dish: delicious zuppa di eterno."

"Eternal Soup!" Juniper made her eyes go wide. "What a surprise! Still, I think I'll have something from the dessert tray instead, and some nice organic hazelnut coffee."

Diana gave a sour laugh and plopped her ladle into Juniper's bowl. Her husband, Andy, gave her a platter of wild-greens salad, half a hard-boiled egg, and one precious baking-powder biscuit.

There was also a great jug of rich Jersey milk fresh from their-single-milking cow. But that was for the children and Dorothy Rose, who was pregnant; birth control was already getting more difficult, and there would be a couple of babies before Yule.

Juniper's nose twitched as she carried the big bowl of soup over to her table. It actually smelled pretty good today, probably because they'd been getting in a little game and wild herbs-dandelion roots, fireweed shoots-plus Andy had thrown in some more of the soup barley and miso stock from their restaurant-store's inventory, plus a little pasta from the Fairfax storehouse.

They were always talking about butchering one of the steers or sheep, and always kept putting it off until absolutely necessary-everyone was worried about the gap between the preserved foods and the first harvest, with the way their numbers had grown. They had plenty of grass to keep the beasts hale, courtesy of the Willamette's mild climate and the way foragers had swept it bare of livestock.

"Mmmm," she said appreciatively as she hunted down the last barleycorn in her bowl with an eager spoon.

I crave starch. In fact, I crave starch and fat and meat and sugar….

Then she went for the salad; dandelion greens and henbit shoots and various other crunchy green things from the meadows and woods, about half of which she recognized; and some canned beets from the Fairfax stores, with the juice making do for salad dressing. It wasn't bad if you liked eating bitter lawn clippings drizzled with diluted vinegar. She saved the half-egg for last; it had a little paprika on the yolk, and a strong free-range taste. The biscuit had a chewy crust; she alternated bites with the egg, tiny nibbles to stretch out the flavor.

In fact, I crave everything except dandelion greens.

Judy Barstow licked her spoon: "You know, if there were a few more calories, this would be an ideal, healthy diet."

"Oh, shut up, you she-quack," Juniper grumbled, seconded by a few others.

Their nurse-midwife grinned unrepentantly; she'd gone from plump to merely opulent. For people doing hard physical labor every day, it was all about two-thirds of just barely enough, or at least that was what Juniper's stomach told her. Filling up on herbal tea was supposed to take away the empty feeling. It didn't; you just had to pee more often.

For a while there was only the clinking of spoons and the crunch of greenery between busy jaws. Then-

"Hamburgers," Diana said hollowly, looking at her own empty bowl.

"Shut up, Di," her husband said. "Please."

"Cheeseburgers with sauteed onions and maple-cured bacon. French fries-big, greasy home-fries with lots of salt. Pork chops, with the fat brown and crispy at the edge and collard greens on the side. Thai shrimp curry with bas-mati rice. Steamed snow peas. Fried eggplant with grated cheese. Barbecued ribs. Pasta with homemade tomato sauce and Parmesan melting on top. Mashed garlic potatoes with butter and chives. Bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches, the tomatoes just out of the garden and still sun-warm, dripping with mayo."

"Shut up!" It was several voices together now.

"Slabs of MoonDance fresh whole-wheat bread, brown and crusty, still steaming when you cut it, with organic butter melting into the surface. And jam, wild blueberry jam, and honey. German chocolate cake with coconut sprinkles on the frosting. Good Costa Rican coffee in a big mug with thick cream, while you eat a cinnamon-apple Danish and-"

"Shut up!" they all screamed in chorus; the children giggled, but nobody else was laughing.

Someone broke down and started that sort of drooling food-porn every second meal on average. It drove everyone else crazy; they would have thrown food if there had been any to spare.

Juniper used a dandelion leaf to wipe out the inside of her soup bowl, then sighed as her inner circle headed her way with rolled-up plans in their hands; Dennis had what looked like a big cake covered in a cloth…

… and there I go thinking about food again!

It turned out to be a scale model. Juniper looked at it in bemusement as Dennis whipped away the towel; then she looked at him and raised a brow as her glance dropped downward.

"Is that a kilt you're wearing, Dennie?"

He grinned at her. It was; the sewn, pleated skirtlike variety invented in the eighteenth century, not the true wraparound Great Kilt of the ancient Gaels. The cloth was even tartan, of a sort, mostly green and brown with stripes of very dark blue.

"Isn't that made from one of that load of blankets we salvaged?" she said, pursing her lips as she struggled not to laugh.

The ribbing does pass the time.

"There's plenty," he said. "Nice strong wool, too. And it's quick and easy to make-Andy's got that sewing machine working off a treadle-and it wears longer than jeans."

"It's not even the Mackenzie tartan!"

"It is now," he said cheerfully. "Didn't you say the Victorians made up that stuff about clans having special tartans after the fact anyway? This is what we've got-we're the Mackenzies around here-it's the Mackenzie tartan if we say it is. QED."

She threw up her hands. "Cuir sioa ar ghabhar agus is gabhar I gconai й.

"You calling me a goat?" he said, mock-frowning.

"No, just a Sassenach. A goat's a goat even in a silk coat, if you want a translation. But I suppose if you want to wear a pleated skirt, you can wear a pleated skirt. It's a harmless eccentricity."

She pointed at the wooden model his cunning woodworker's fingers had put together. It showed the Hall built up to two stories, a duplicate not far away, more barns and sheds, and a high log wall around the whole irregular oblong of high ground on which the buildings rested.

"Now that-that is a menace! We've a limited amount of time and work, in case you hadn't noticed, and an infinity of things to do with both."

He grinned, but it was Alex Barstow who spoke up: "Actually, Juney, it's not crazy-we wouldn't build it all at once, of course, but we do need more room and we do need a defensive wall."

That put her brows up again. Alex was a housebuilder by trade, and he knew his business-she'd hired him for repairs before the Change, and knew others he'd done more ambitious work for.

Dennis spoke: "It's courtesy of Cascade Timber Inc. I remembered how you bitched and moaned back in 'ninety-six about having to sell them trees to pay taxes on this place, and then again when they went bankrupt and left it all on your hands. So I've been checking while I was out hunting-"

She heard a subdued snort, possibly from Sam Aylward; the only use Dennis had on a hunt was to scare the game into an ambush set by someone else.

"- and yeah, you have a lot of stacked logs in the woods here. Nicely seasoned by now, too. More than enough."

Alex nodded. "Log construction is fast and simple, and strong and warm if you do it right-square the top and bottom so they fit snug, deep-notch the ends-it just needs lots and lots of big high-quality logs. Back before the Change that was expensive, but we've got the logs, great big thirty-foot monsters."

He pointed to the middle of the model: "See, we've already started on the bathhouse. Now, the next thing we do is double the space in the Hall-your cabin. It's just a log box; the foundation's the difficult part, and that's already done. All we have to do is take off the roof, put on an extra story of log wall minus cutouts for windows, then put the same roof back on. This lean-to extension out back is the new kitchen, with those woodstoves we salvaged."

Diana nodded. "That'll save a lot of cooking time."

"And bingo, we have another three thousand square feet of living space," Alex enthused; his blond ponytail bobbed as he spoke.

"All right," Juniper said dubiously. "Much as I love every darling one of you, my treasures, I've grown fair weary of hearing you all snore, and that's the truth. But this Fort Apache arrangement-"

She pointed at the palisade that surrounded the buildings.

"Nah, that's not all that hard either," Alex said. "Actually, Chuck gave me the idea, something about how the ancient Gauls did it, plus some bits I remembered from a book on the frontier stations, you know, Kentucky in Daniel Boone's day. Look, the Hall's on an oblong rise, right? The sides slope back at about forty-five degrees and then it's flat on top, pretty well, except where the spring bubbles up and flows off the edge."

He pointed to the north. "Twenty-five, thirty feet above the level of the meadow here. So what we do is just dig a ditch halfway up the slope, say seven or eight feet deep. We stand a log upright, pour concrete around the base, then use that and some block and tackle to set the next log upright-next four or five-spiking them together and then pouring the base-and eventually we have a complete oblong log palisade. Really not too complicated, good and strong, and it'll last if we do the drainage right."

"Hmmm."

Those poles are thirty feet tall. Fifteen feet of steep hill, then twenty feet of yard-thick logs above the surface. We would sleep better of a night.

"Why not at the top of the slope, where it would be that much taller?" she said. "If we start the wall further down the slope, here will be a big notch between the inside of the wall and the flat top of the rise the Hall's on."

Alex's smile had a crackling enthusiasm that was hard to resist. "That's the good part! We do a little cutting and filling, and we've got a twelve-foot-deep ditch all around on the inside. Or a fieldstone-and-concrete-lined cellar, with a little more work. Good drainage, too."

"More than enough storage space for all our crops," Chuck cut in.

His brother burbled on: "Then we run more logs out from the flat to the wall, and plank 'em over, and we've got the floors above the cellars, and we plant the cabins-or workshops or whatever-overtop of that. Fighting platform for the wall goes above the roofs; and we pipe all the rainwater to cisterns, to help out the spring. We can get windows, doors, roofing shingle and plumbing fixtures from half a dozen abandoned places not far away, and sawn timber from that mill south of Lebanon-there's a couple of hundred thousand finished board feet sitting in their covered yard."

"Floors? Roofs?" Juniper said; she didn't have a painter's imagination, or a draughtsman's. Then: "Oh, of course!"

Alex nodded. "We use the palisade as the outside wall for the cabins, give every family their own bedroom and hearth. Sort of like log row housing-"

"And we can spare the people and horse teams, until harvest and fall plowing, so-"

Juniper sat back, smiling and nodding as the enthusiasm spread and the clan convinced itself.

This will get a majority vote, no matter that it'll keep everyone working, she thought. It's good to have the Chief overridden now and then. And it's no bad thing to be busy, and tired at night. It keeps you from thinking about what you've lost, and who you've lost, and what the world is like right now outside our little enclave.

She let herself cry for Rudy now and then, mostly at night. Sleep came quickly, a gift of the Mother-of-All, and her dreams of him had been good.

After a while most of the adults and half the children were crowded around the table, adding suggestions. Judy gave her own:

"And that'll give us a regular place to hold school lessons."

A subdued groan, but not much of one-after pulling weeds all day, even a ten-year-old could contemplate sitting still at a desk for a while.

"And a place for Esbats and Sabbats when it's too wet to use the nemed. The barn's smelly and it leaks."

Juniper nodded; her Sacred Wood with its eerie circle of oaks and stone-slab altar had made the Singing Moon Coven the envy of pagan Oregon, but when it settled into rain, come September or October here in the foothills, it rained. Sometimes the sky wept chill drizzle for weeks at a time.

"We'll have space for a Moon School as well," Judy said. "And for private Craft workings."

As Maiden, she was responsible for training; the children enjoyed it, too, a lot more than the conventional schoolwork.

"Right," Judy said, looking around. "All in favor?"

For a wonder, the vote was unanimous; that saved the effort of talking a holdout around. She preferred to work by consensus…

Which the next bit will not be getting, she thought. Not without a lot of work.

"Two more things we should be doing," she said. "And that's sending out scouts. Emissaries, perhaps." A few frowns, more wonder.

She pointed eastward; the peaks of the Cascades stood there, long dark-green ridges rising to saw-toothed silhouettes against the afternoon sky.

"There's that old trail, the foot trail-it should be open by now. The main roads over the passes are far too dangerous, but nobody lives up there. You could ride over to the Bend country."

Andy and Diana both perked up. They'd owned a store-cum-restaurant before the Change, of the type that was always looking for a new source of fresh produce, and they'd gone on trips combing the backcountry for sources.

"Lot of ranching country over there," Andy said. "No big cities. They're probably in better shape than we are, at least for food."

Chuck mused thoughtfully, scratching in his new orange-yellow beard: "I remember from the museum-that exhibition, 'Cowboys in Legend and Reality'? Ranchers sell off about a third of their herds every year, the yearlings. They just keep the breeding heifers and some replacements. Bet they'd be willing to trade; cattle, sheep, maybe even horses. We could really use more horses and most of the livestock around here got eaten, so we've got lots of pasture that's going to waste. And if we had more cattle than we could use ourselves, the Horned Lord knows there are people who'd be glad to trade with us for them."

"What would we trade for cattle?" someone said; visions of barbecue danced in everyone's head at the thought- and a stomach rumbled, loudly, bringing a general chuckle.

"Oh, Sam's bows. Arrows," Juniper said.

She pointed to another table. It held boxes of stainless steel spoons, plus hammers and files and a section of railroad iron to use as an anvil. Spoons turned out to be the best possible starting-blank for a broadhead. Sam's outdoor workbench under its tarpaulin held stacks of wood- walnut blocks for the risers of new bows, and roughly shaped yew limbs amid a litter of shavings, and chisels and gouges and clamps. Dennis and a few others were learning the art of the bowyer from him.

"Maybe lessons from Chuck and Sam as well. And… oh, you know that hopfield just this side of Lebanon? I bet we could scavenge or swap a lot of hops there. Over the mountains, they'll be wanting to make beer, come later this year when there's never a six-pack to be found. Hops don't grow well there."

"I could make beer, come to that," Dennis said. "I worked in a microbrewery once; there's a good one at Brannigan's, over in Sutterdown, at that." He smacked his lips. "Or we could make mead, if we had honey; don't the Carsons have some hives?"

Voices babbled, ideas treading on each other's toes. "That's the happy part," Juniper said. Into the silence that fell: "We've also got to find out what's going on in the Willamette. Before it rises up and hits us unawares. And from what that forager said, Corvallis is still holding out. I've connections there, friends, and they could be a help to us all."

The babble was a lot less happy this time; all they had were rumors, but they were ghastly. Juniper settled down to argue with a sigh; it was a perfect spring afternoon for a walk with Cuchulain, or maybe getting out her fiddle…

Well, by the Lord and the Lady, if you want to call me Chief, you'll listen to me. And if I make it a point to show you that you can do without me for a while, you'll listen to that too!

Sixteen

"Whoa," Michael Havel said, lowering his binoculars. Then: "Someone's been a busy little bee."

The roadway along the south bank of the Columbia Gorge was blocked; cinderblock to chest height, making a retaining wall to hold the dirt and rocks heaped above, with a palisade that looked like it was made of utility poles atop the massive earthwork. Working parties were driving in long angle-iron fence-posts in a checkerboard pattern over the earth berm and fastening barbed wire to them.

Sunlight winked off spearheads along the palisade; in the center was a solid blockhouse-like structure, with a gate whose lower edge ran on truck wheels.

A tall flagpost rose from the blockhouse, and high above it floated a hot air balloon, tethered by a cable that stretched up in an arc like a mathematical diagram. As he watched a bright light flickered from the basket, a Morse-coded heliograph signal.

The rest hadn't changed, not the bones of the earth and its growth. It was hot down here near the Columbia even this early in the year, and a constant gusty wind made the horses stamp and toss their heads. Basalt cliffs reared southward, black or red where stands of pine hadn't hidden the rock with green; and beyond that loomed the cone of Mt. Hood, dreaming blue and white and perfect against heaven.

"Not much like the last time my family drove out the Banfield," Eric Larsson said.

Dry understatement hid an edge of nervousness; probably shock at seeing what the Change had done to something familiar.

"And he picked a pretty spot-most places the south-bank hills hide Mount Hood from the road."

"Most places the south-bank hills would overlook that berm and blockhouse," Havel said.

Closer were thickets of willow tender green with new growth, and the shimmer of black-cottonwood leaves, green above and silver below, trembling in the wind; beneath them were sheets of yellow bells, maroon-colored clusters of prairie stars, grass widows and blue penstemon.

The great river stretched lake-broad to their north, glimmering silver under the noonday sun, mostly empty all the way to the steep northern shore. It was quiet, save for the huge murmur of the water, birdsong, the distant sound of voices, oars and footfalls.

The river's mostly empty, he thought, turning his glasses that way.

There were sailboats on it, and what looked like cut-down yachts with wooden superstructures holding rowers pulling on great sweeps. Some of those were hauling barges, and other barges had been fitted with basic lug-sail rigs.

The older men's silence gnawed Eric's nerves, and he waved towards the wall and burst out: "Fuck, how did anyone get all this done so fast? There aren't any bulldozers or backhoes working! Even if this Protector guy started right away-"

Josh Sanders clicked his tongue against the top of his mouth. "Oh, you could do the berm, no problem. Material from that hill over there. Say a thousand people with hand tools and wheelbarrows; eight cubic yards a day each, that's no big deal; take you about a week, less if you used more labor andworked shifts around the clock. Put it on in layers, ram it down, repeat."

"It's not just a heap of dirt," Havel pointed out. "There's the cinderblock work, and the palisade, and the gate."

Josh nodded: "I couldn't say about the gate, but the retaining wall, that's easy, and the palisade? Just utility poles. Shiftfire, give me the materials, the tools, ten guys who know what they're doing and'a whole big bunch of people to do the gruntwork, and I could have put this up my own self in a couple-three days. You could bring the materials in on the railroad."

Can I pick them, or can I pick them? Havel thought proudly. That was the biggest part of leadership.

Eric was frowning. "But the railroad isn't working," he said.

Keep talking; you're helping me organize my thoughts. And that balloon is a good idea. I should have thought of that. We'll have to get one. Christ Jesus, hang gliders and sailplanes would still fly too, wouldn't they? Maybe I was a little premature, hanging up my wings.

"Sure, the railroad's working," the ex-Seabee said to Eric. "It's the locomotives aren't working, bro. You can pull a hell of a lot more on welded rail than you can on a road, with a horse or with men. Fifteen, twenty times as much. So you get some work gangs out levering the dead locos off to clear the tracks. Use a hand-cranked windlass for that, off a boat, maybe… "

"Even this time of year, you'd have a couple of big lines of grain hopper-cars between here and Portland," Havel put in. "Probably they hauled those in, then got the idea of using the rails long-term."

Josh nodded. "From the look of the dirt, that berm's just finished. Last couple of days. I'd put topsoil on and then turf, to keep it from melting away in the winter rains."

"Yeah," Havel said, then pointed as the wind fluttered a banner out over the gatehouse. It was black. He peered a little closer: black, with a red catpupiled eye in the center.

"That tells us something too," Havel said. "The folks back at Hood River weren't shitting us; this Protector guy really is a maniac. Loopy. He's not for real; he's playing games."

"Why?" Eric asked curiously, shifting in a creak of leather and chime of ringmail. "Astrid's always using stuff out of those books. So, I grant you she's a flake- a big-time, fresh- from- the- flake- box flake- but not a maniac."

"She uses the good-guy stuff, Eric," Havel said. "If I were running Portland and surroundings, I'd be using the Stars and Stripes-no matter how much of a dictator I was, and how much of a lie the flag was. You don't put up a sign that reads 'HEY, I'M EVIL! GEN-U-WINE SADISTIC LOONEY! REALLY, REALLY BAD!' Particularly not if you are evil."

"Why not?" Eric said curiously. "If you're a bad guy, that is."

"'Cause most people don't think that way, even if they are rotten. How many are going to stick with you when things go wrong, if you advertise you're a shit?"

"Hey, it's cool to be baaaad."

"Not the same thing." Havel grinned for an instant. "Hell, I'm bad, in that sense. This jerkoff s coming right out and saying he'll screw you over in a minute; guys like that have a short half-life. Maybe you can run a cocaine cartel that way, but not a country or an army-or if you do, the results are what a lieutenant I knew used to call suboptimal.

Probably the only reason he got any traction at all was that Portland was a complete madhouse right after the Change."

"He's a fruitloop with a lot of troops, right now," Josh said. "That makes me nervous, Mike. You see the heads over the gateway? Those look too fucking real for this ol' boy's taste."

"Well, we are here to find things out. If Mr. Me So Bad has a lock on the Willamette, our people need to know so we can pick another destination. And they did say he didn't usually molest travelers who toed his line. Let's go. And mouths shut, ears open. This isn't risk-free, either."

Havel rode in at an easy fast walk; there wasn't much traffic, mostly improvised wagons drawn by men, or people on foot-thin and frightened-looking and mostly very, very dirty. He wrinkled his nose; the three Bearkillers were fairly ripe in their armor and gambesons, but they tried to keep the bodies underneath as clean as possible.

The guards were another story; all equipped in scale-mail, and all looking reasonably well fed. The heads spiked to the timber of the gate above their spearheads were all fairly fresh too. Above them, some sort of machine moved to cover them behind a slit in a sheet-metal shield; he'd have bet that was some sort of giant crossbow or dart-caster… or possibly a flamethrower.

"Hi," Havel said to their leader. "I'm here to see your Protector."

"Not just nails-twelve-inch spikes!" Alex Barstow crowed from inside the truck. "Crates of nice big bolts. And half-inch cable, by God, a whole hundred-yard spool. Fan-fucking-tastic!"

Outside his brother Chuck quirked a smile. "That's Alex. Do you know, even when we were little kids he could build the most fantastic castles out of matchsticks?"

A deep breath: "Do you really have to do this, Judy?"

"Chuck, I need to know what's going on out there epidemic-wise if I'm going to do my job helping keep this bunch healthy. We've been over this. I love you."

"I love you too," he said; they embraced. "Merry meet, and merry part."

"And merry meet again," Judy said; they both had tears in their eyes. "See you before Beltane."

Juniper had made her good-byes back at the Hall; she looked away, swallowing, as her friends made theirs, letting her fingers busy themselves checking her gear.

Then she waved and put her foot to the bicycle's pedal as Judy broke free. They were well past the Carson place, due west of Mackenzie territory; everyone around here knew them by now, and more to the point was familiar with their wagons and the way they sent them out to scavenge supplies from stranded trucks and abandoned stores.

Plus farms that looked to Sutterdown for guidance tended to shun the Mackenzies-Reverend Dixon's influence, she supposed. The Carsons and a few other cowan friends passed on news from there. Nobody would notice four Mackenzies on bicycles heading out from the wagon.

Steve scooted ahead of her, taking point as Sam Aylward called it; Vince dropped behind, and Judy pedaled beside her. The spring sun beat down on a world of green around them as their wheels scrunched, and on the quiet dirt country lane it might almost have been before the Change… save for the occasional car or tractor they passed, frozen since that evening; save for a farmhouse abandoned, or crowded with refugees.

And save for the ever-present faint acrid tang of smoke from cities burning.

"Keep your eyes open," she told herself.

They were going to loop up north, then cross the river and see what was going on near Corvallis.

"Time to come out of the cocoon and learn."

"You do yourself nicely here," Havel said.

He sipped at the single malt, savoring the smoky, peaty taste as he looked around the big high-ceilinged room and the glowing Oriental rugs on the floor; evidently if you had unlimited labor, it didn't take long to turn a library built in 1903 into a fair approximation of a palace. The wall that cut off this corner of the former Government Documents Room looked like professional work; the faint smell of fresh plaster confirmed it. Shelves had vanished, replaced by hangings and pictures that had the indefinable something that screamed money even to an art-infidel like Havel, or at least hinted at foraging parties with handcarts and sledgehammers backed up by swords and spearheads.

Dinner smells lingered a little too; skillet-roasted mussels in a coconut curry broth, a salad of pickled vegetables, garlic-crusted rack of lamb and fresh bread, finished off with a noble Dutch-style apple pie and cheeses, and accompanied by wines finer than Havel knew he had the palette or experience to appreciate.

Portland might be just getting by, uncounted millions were starving to death around the world, but the Protector and his friends certainly weren't on a ration book. There wasn't any point in not enjoying the dinner, either.

The smell of the kerosene lamps was a little incongruous- but the light was welcome. You missed electricity after dark.

Norman Arminger and his wife lounged on a black-leather sofa; Havel was surprised she was with him. The scantily clad servants had given him the impression of a man with serious harem fantasies. The Protector leaned back with a shot of the whiskey in his hand; his dark-haired wife had a glass of white wine.

Then Arminger spoke; he had a deep voice with an edge of humor to it. He'd been doing most of the talking, at that, but he was never boring.

"Well, it is the City that Works," Arminger said. "I'm doing my best to transform it into the Kingdom that Works. If people are to survive above the level of cannibal bands or isolated farms, there has to be organization, leadership… and it has to be based on realistic principles. Post-industrial democracy was wonderful, but it's not possible now. The foundations of that way of life have been knocked out from beneath us. We have to turn to older models."

"That sounds reasonable," Havel said. "Similar things had occurred to me, actually."

Arminger lifted his glass with a smile. "Meanwhile, I'm impressed with the equipment you had," he said. "Much, much better than the usual improvisations. Did you have any SCA people in your group?"

"No," Havel said. "A lot of people expert around horses, good handymen, some books on cavalry warfare and gear, and someone who was involved with a Renaissance fencing club. HACA, I think it used to be called, or ARMA-not sure which."

"Ah, surprising and very fortunate for you-the Association of Those Who Like Hitting Things with Sharp Pointy Things," Arminger said. "I attended a few of their gatherings. Very focused, very practical-in the sense of recreating effective sword styles, which in those days wasn't of much practical use at all. The Society was deplorably eclectic, although the Pensic War was always entertaining. And a surprising number of its members proved to be excessively sentimental and had to be… removed from the equation."

"Things have Changed," Havel said. "We also found a bowmaker, and we had one very good and one pretty good archer to teach the rest of us. That wasn't so odd; hell, there were a couple million bow-hunting licenses issued last year."

Sandra Arminger snorted. "We prefer crossbows. Easier to make, and easier to learn."

"And in the long run, less problem to armored horsemen," the Protector said. "Wouldn't want the tenants to get too uppity."

"Less useful than a bow from horseback, though," Havel pointed out.

"You're aiming at doing things Mongol-style?" Arminger said, raising his brows. "Ambitious!"

"I always liked that saying of Genghis Khan's that a year after he sacked a city you could gallop a horse across the site without stumbling. Say what you like about Genghis, he got things done," Havel observed.

Arminger grinned, a charming expression. "I think you may be a man after my own heart, Lord Bear."

Christ Jesus, I hope not, Havel thought, with an imperturbable shrug.

"I understand you came through Pendleton," Arminger said. That was a logical deduction; it was the major city of northeastern Oregon. "Have they started their civil war yet?"

"There was some tension between the reservation and the city, but on the whole they seemed to be doing pretty well," Havel said. "They've moved most of their urban population out to the ranches and farms. In fact, they're wondering why they didn't see a lot more refugees from Portland than they got. They've got a lot more wheat than they can harvest with the hands available; it'll all go to waste, since they can't transport it-or plant nearly as much this fall."

"Pendleton only had, what, eighteen thousand people in the city limits?" the Protector observed. "Seattle tried moving people east en masse, and it didn't work very well, even before the final collapse there. Mostly it just overburdened the rural areas close by. I, ah, encouraged the surplus population here to move out southward. Mainly by setting more fires and cutting off the water supply. It's gravity-flow here, and should last for generations with some upkeep. We've had some success with using water-power to run machinery; for stamping out armor scales, for instance."

Havel sipped at his whiskey, keeping his face neutral. "I noticed a lot of damage to the city," he said.

"The big jets coming down hard set most of the area east of the Willamette on fire," the Protector replied. "Giant bombs full of fuel, you see-surprisingly effective. And we did more around the fringes. Nothing essential lost, though."

He snorted. "And in this climate, the ruins will all be overgrown in a single summer-we have to cut back vines on the roads that grow two inches a day! The burned-out areas will be scrub in a year and forest in ten."

He paused, considering. "Why did you decide to come this far west? I've had scouts of my own as far east as Montana and as far upriver as Lewiston, and the situation is a bit less dire out there. So far."

"So far, like you say. I'm just in charge of this scouting party," Havel said. He'd been careful to give that impression here. He wasn't altogether sure how much Arminger had been taken in. "Like when I was back in Force Recon."

Surprising how many educated people think a Marine noncom must be a no-neck dullard. Useful misconception, though.

"The consensus is that the land's better here, and that by the time our whole party reaches the area it'll be near-enough empty, more so than anything good east of the Cascades where the initial die-off isn't so bad. There's a lot of people on the move there, and not just townsfolk; places that depended on pump-irrigation, for instance. The best spots are already held and the farmers and ranchers have most of the labor they need and all they can feed until the harvest. We didn't want to settle for being sharecroppers or hired hands anyway."

"Logical," Arminger said. "I think this generation's sharecroppers and hired hands will be the serfs and slaves of the next. And you're not sentimental; I like that. But by the end of this year, or next at most, I intend to control the Willamette. It's the natural core for a… kingdom, state, whatever… ruling the Northwest; nearly ten thousand square miles of the best rain-fed farmland in the world. You… Bear-killers… would be well-advised not to try to fight me for it."

Now we get down to it, Havel thought.

"We didn't intend on making a bid for the whole thing. You'd prefer we go somewhere else?"

"Oh, on the contrary. I can always use a group of… sensible fighting men. Centralized government isn't possible anymore, without powered machinery or fast communications. Or without cannon for that matter. I would grant you lands, and authority over those living on them-provide you with labor, if necessary, farm tools, seed, livestock. In return, you acknowledge me as ultimate overlord, furnish armed men when I call for them, plus labor for public works like roads, and give me a reasonable share of the yearly profits from your… demesne, shall we call it. In return, you get the help of the whole Portland Protective Association when you need it."

The word demesne tickled Havel's memory, a vague recollection of something Ken Larsson and Pamela had mentioned in one of their campfire conversations. So did the whole setup Arminger was outlining.

"Exactly what period of history were you a professor of, Lord Protector?"

Arminger looked at him with narrowed eyes; the expression on Sandra's face was identical. Havel cursed himself behind an impassive mask.

You should be consistent when you try and get someone to underestimate you. Bad Lord Bear. No biscuit for you!

"Ninth through twelfth centuries," the Protector said. "Early feudal Europe, specializing in Normandy and the Norman principalities-England, Wales, Ireland, Sicily."

"Sicily?" Havel said, trying to sound idly curious.

"Indeed, Sicily and southern Italy; conquered by Norman religious pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. They went to do good, and in fact did very well. rather as I plan to do."

Havel raised a brow and smiled crookedly. He didn't want Arminger to think he was a patsy, either.

"But you don't, as of now, control the Willamette? Sir."

"No," the Protector said. "Right now, it's Portland, and part of the lower Columbia. Our current southern and western border is roughly a semicircle from Oregon City to Tualtin. Does that mean your group won't consider my offer?"

"No, sir. We will most definitely consider it-when and if we get here."

Leaving you to assume that here means Portland, and that we'll come up I-84. Assume makes an ass of you and me.

Aloud he went on: "And depending on our appreciation of the situation then in the light of our own interests. I'll certainly recommend that we take your offer under advisement and send further scouts later in the year, when we're closer. The Pendleton committee offered us land; it just wasn't very good land when you don't have modern equipment to work it. Plus the politics there look unstable, as you said."

Slowly, Arminger nodded; then he made a gesture of dismissal, with grudging respect in it.

"You can start on your way back tomorrow then. Ask the steward for anything you need in the way of amusements tonight, or supplies tomorrow."

"Thank you kindly, sir."

Havel stood, nodded his head in an almost-bow, and led his companions out the carved-teak door, moving easily, but conscious of the sweat that trickled down his flanks despite the coolness of the air. They were billeted in a yellow-brick apartment building half a block away, and he'd be very glad to get there.

"Mike!" Eric hissed, after they passed the guards with their halberds and crossbows. "What the hell were you-"

He gave a muffled oofff! as Josh took his arm and elbowed him in the ribs as he did it. Havel draped a comradely arm around his shoulders for an instant, and said loudly: "Yeah, sounded like a pretty reasonable proposition."

Josh nodded. "Certainly the best offer we've had so far."

Eric missed a step and then nodded vigorously; he was young and still had a bit of the sense of entitlement produced by being brought up rich, but he wasn't stupid. They passed through the corridor, then into a vast open area where the reconstruction work was still under way. From the looks of it, this was going to be a barracks or ready-room.

Havel stopped, looked around, and went on: "Thank God we don't have to worry about electronic bugs anymore… anyway, didn't it occur to you that he has a vigorous zero-fault tolerance program for those who tell him 'no' to his face? Like, nailing their heads up over the door?"

Eric nodded. Havel thought for a moment: "You ever do any of that role-playing stuff?"

"D and D? A little. I wouldn't have figured you for the type, Mike."

Havel gave a rare grin. Eric wore a lot better now than he had when they'd first met; he suspected it was mostly a matter of having real work and real responsibilities.

When you're in it, you grow up fast. Aloud he went on: "I wasn't into D and D; working on my Harley and deer hunting and track and field were more my style, when I could duck out of chores at home. I even read the odd book."

Eric mimed staggering in surprise, and Havel gave him a playful punch on the shoulder.

"But there was this girl I knew in high school in 'eighty-seven who was a fanatic about it; Shirley, real cute, and by rumor a demented mink in the sack-"

"- and you thought you could make a saving-roll into her pants?"

"Hey, I was a teenager, all dick and no brains, like some people around here right now. Thing is, she liked the Chaotic Evil types and I couldn't compete." Seriously: "The Protector and the way he operates remind me of the guy she dumped me for-dressed in black a lot, had this little scraggly peach-fuzz goatee like a landing strip on his chin, lot of attitude, thought he was seriously bad. And he was smart, but not as smart as he thought he was-for example, he thought all those little needling jabs were going right over my thick jock head. And he thought he could fight 'cause he'd pranced around a dojo a little, in a black gi, of course."

A reminiscent smile, and he rubbed the knuckles of his right fist into his left palm. "About the time I finally gave up on Shirley, I broke the little pissant's nose out behind the school gym-caught hell from the principal, but it was worth it, and I planned on enlisting anyway."

Soberly: "Anyway, give you odds the Protector was his clone when he was a kid and always played a, what the hell was the name… yeah, a dwerg or a draug or a Dark Elf or magical assassin or something."

"Now he's trying to do it for real?"

"Yeah, and it won't work in the end, I'd bet. We may have had a change in the laws of nature, but I don't think even the Change could make the world that much like a D and D game. Plus I think he's got this thing about the history he used to study, the feudalism thing, and that won't work either, at least not right away, although it's a better bet long-term than the Evil Overlord stuff. We may have had all our toys taken away, but the people he's dealing with weren't born back then."

"I don't know, Mike," Eric said. "He has taken over around here, and he looks like he's getting things organized. People will put up with a lot, for that and for food."

"Yeah," Josh said. "And he's also operating on a pretty big scale. What was that Russian saying Eric's dad quoted?"

"Quantity has a quality all its own," Havel said. "Yup. I'm not saying the Protector would be a pushover. Even if he goes down, he could do a lot of damage first; in fact, he certainly will do a lot of damage whether he wins or loses."

A glance over his shoulder, and he continued meditatively: "If he weren't such a looney-tooner, I'd actually give that proposition of his serious consideration. Even though he is… "

Eric made a disgusted noise. Havel went on: "I said if, kid. The other problem is that he's got big eyes. I think it's going to be a join-him-or-fight-him thing everywhere in the Columbia basin, eventually. Damn."

Eric nodded. "We're still not committed," he pointed out. "I mean, we could head southeast, try the Snake River country, or even get out across the Rockies over the summer. Try the High Plains, or find somewhere to winter and then a chunk of good farming country we could claim."

Josh tapped the fingers of his left hand on his sword hilt; the brass strips of the guard rang a little.

"Problem with that is, first, good country isn't going to be all that easy to find without we drive off someone else. And second, we could walk straight into something just as bad as this Protector guy. I got this ugly feelin' ambitious men are going to be right common for a good long while now."

"We'll see," Havel said. A grin: "I mean, hell, I'm ambitious. And tomorrow, we ride out of here-south. He admitted he doesn't control the Willamette. I'd like to see if anyone does, and what the prospects are, before we go back and start making decisions."

Kenneth Larsson wept with the jerking sobs of a man unaccustomed to tears.

"Shhh," Pamela said, holding his head against her shoulder in the cool canvas-smelling dimness of the tent. "Shhh. It's all right, Ken."

The tears subsided. "I'm so fucking useless," he said. "I'm sorry, Pam."

"For what?" she said. "Hey, Ken, I've been having a fine old time tonight. Young men don't make love to a woman; they use the woman to make love to Mr. Dickie. Give it time."

He relaxed, probably amazed she didn't want to kick him out of her bedroll and never see him again. Pamela's lips quirked in the darkness.

I meant what I said, she thought. And besides, Ken-we can't walk out on each other, not anymore. We're all stuck with each other unless we want to leave the outfit.

Ken took a shuddering breath. "I haven't been much use to any woman, since Mary… died. I couldn't protect her or my daughters-yeeeeow!"

Pamela poised her fingers to give his chest hair another painful tweak.

"What was that for?" he gasped.

"For being stupid, is what. It isn't like you. Will Hutton couldn't protect his family, and he's as tough as anyone in the outfit. And Mike couldn't have alone, either-what's the old saying, even Hercules can't fight two?"

"He rescued us."

"With Eric and Will helping! We protect each other. You didn't protect your family before the Change, either: the law did, and the police did, and the military did, and the State of Oregon did, and the U-S of A did. Now the outfit does. And you're our engineer, and you know a hell of a lot of history. You're at least as useful to everyone as I am, or Will is."

Softly: "I played at Renaissance fencing because it was fun, Ken; I'm a middle-class Jewish veterinarian from southern California! I never thought I'd have to kill with it. Hold me, will you?"

A few minutes later: "Yeeeow! What was that for!"

"To drive the lesson home." Her hand strayed.

"Thanks, but-"

"Hey, I'm doing that 'cause I like it, buddy! Doesn't feel bad, does it?"

"No, but-"

"There's no prize for making the finish line here," she said. "Just two codgers having fun… "

A moment later: "Well, well!" She rolled over and straddled him. "That does feel nice!"

Seventeen

"Lord and Lady, I don't think I can stand this much longer," Judy Barstow said, her olive Mediterranean skin gray.

Juniper nodded. They were ten miles north of Salem, and…

She wiped at the flies crawling over her face, spat, and pulled the bandana up over her face again, which let her breathe through her mouth without inhaling any of them- even after many days' exposure, she hadn't gotten used to the stink. Her eyes skipped over the bodies lying by the road, and the rats that crawled bloated and insolent among them. Rags and tatters of flesh were left; the crows were at them too, but the rats were so numerous that they could drive the birds off in chittering hordes. Inside an SUV windows pullulated with heaving gray bodies…

"It's almost as bad here as it was along I-5," she said. "I don't think we should try to get any closer to Portland."

"No," Judy said. "I don't either. My grandfather got out of Lithuania in World War Two… I never really understood what he was talking about before."

Almost compulsively she opened the economy-sized bottle of sanitizer again, and handed it around. Juniper's face and hands were already raw and chapped from the desiccating effect of the alcohol-based solution, but she obediently scrubbed down all the exposed parts of her body. Steve and Vince followed suit.

None of them had much skin exposed, despite the mild heat. When you thought of where the flies had been…

"No, we shouldn't be here," the nurse-midwife went on. "We're endangering the whole clan as well as ourselves. I never thought it could be as bad as this! If someone designed an environment to spread disease, this would be it."

She swallowed and went on: "How… how can They let this happen?"

Juniper pushed her bicycle over beside her friend's and put her arm around her shoulders; that was more symbolic than anything, when the person you hugged was wearing an armored jack, but symbols counted.

"How could They let the Holocaust happen, or the Black Death, or the Burning Times? We're not People of the Book; everything's connected, but we don't have to imagine that everything happens according to a Divine Plan. It could be our fault, something humans did through carelessness or malice. It could be aliens doing the same. Or… it could be something the Otherworld did for our own good."

"Our good?" Judy asked, looking around.

"We might have killed the planet, if this hadn't happened. Killed the whole human race, and the plants and the animals too. I don't know, but it's possible."

Judy drew a breath, coughed, and nodded. "All right. Thanks. But let's get out of here!"

Juniper nodded and pulled out the map. "All right," she said. "We had to know… but oh, how I wish we didn't!" Her finger traced a road west and then south. "We'll cross here, near Wheatland, and turn south towards Corvallis, then slant across to home the way I did right after the Change."

Vince Torelli had put an arrow to his bow as soon as they stopped. He left it there as he put the weapon back in its frame across the handlebars, held by the nock's grip on the string and the angle of the arrow-shelf. Then he stepped on the pedals and darted out ahead of them, keeping a careful hundred yards in advance. The two women followed; it took them a little more time to build up speed, as their bicycles were towing little baggage carts that held their modest supplies. Steve Matucheck followed behind, looking over his shoulder regularly.

The stink died down as they moved west-away from the produce truck that had probably attracted the group of people who stayed around it and died, and into open country. They wove down the two-lane blacktop, eyes busy keeping watch on the empty fields to either side-and not ignoring the abandoned cars and trucks that sat as they had since 6:15 p.m., March 17th.

Back at her cabin, she could go hours without thinking about the Change; days, sometimes, in the scramble to get the fields planted. Out here, not a minute went by when you could forget.

Once they were out from strip-mall development the fields were eerily silent; grass tall and shaggy, but not a cow to be seen; now and then a field of beets gone tangled with weeds, or wheat beginning to head out, or an orchard with fruits or nuts starting to swell. There were still occasional bodies by the road-people had stuck to those lines of travel, mostly trudging back and forth until they dropped, as far as she could see. The sun was cruelly bright, and she swallowed as a brace of crows launched themselves off a telephone wire.

Another hour, and they stopped for a drink from their canteens; Judy restrained herself from checking the water, since she'd made sure they brought it to a rolling boil for twenty minutes that morning.

"Anyone seen those dogs?" Juniper asked; a feral pack had shadowed them.

"Not since about ten," Steve Matucheck said.

"Odd. We haven't seen a living soul since yesterday, and yet so many stayed by the roads until they died," Juniper said.

Surprisingly, Vince Torelli spoke up. "Lady Juniper, I think it's part of the same thing. The ones that stayed at home, or walked back and forth on the roads, they died. The ones with sense enough to get away, they stood a better chance-but we won't be seeing them, much. Not around here."

Juniper nodded, trying not to let the young man see how much being called Lady Juniper annoyed her. Yes, you called a High Priestess Lady in the Circle, but it didn't apply in day-to-day life and Vince wasn't even a member of the coven. Dennis had started doing it, and she suspected it was as much to irritate her as anything else; his sense of humor had been easier to take when she only had to do it occasionally, instead of 24/7.

But I'll be glad to get back to it; and Eilir; and the others… even Cuchulain.

A little of that eagerness was sheer hunger. There hadn't been much to spare for them to take along on this trip; the Eternal Soup was a fond memory.

Judy nodded. "Just being away from a big city is the biggest survival factor," she said. "But a close second would be sense enough to realize that the Change was here to stay, and not sit around waiting for rescue or go wandering aimlessly. Chuck and I managed to talk our people into getting right out. You made for the hills right away too."

Some truth in that, Juniper thought, bending to massage a kink out of one calf. Judy had a core of hard common sense, probably from her years as a nurse.

On the other hand, how could anyone know that the Change was here to stay, or that it was everywhere?

For that matter, she still didn't know that the Change was worldwide. She was morally certain, but that wasn't proof. If you were a garden-variety common-sense sort of person, staying put probably looked better… until it was too late.

"Plus we're just too close to Salem," she said, looking back a little east of south. "The requisitioning parties probably got everything around here."

They could still see the black columns of smoke around the city as a smudge on the horizon; luckily the wind was from the west, and bent them towards the distant line of the Cascades-she could still see the peaks of the Three Sisters from here.

"Are you sure?" she asked Judy.

The other woman nodded. "I'd never seen it before, but the black patches of skin and the swellings in the armpits and groin are unmistakable."

A long breath. "It's been three days now. We'd be showing symptoms, if we'd caught it, but my skin still crawls."

And mine, at the memory, Juniper thought. Those pits, where the bodies still smouldered…

The truck stop a little way up the road had a gas station with attached convenience store, and a long low-slung board building advertising the fact that Bill's BBQ had the best dry ribs in the Willamette; a graveled country lane crossed the blacktop there, and the parking lot was dirt. They swerved in, coming to rest in a rough line and looking the windows over.

Quite often there was something useful in places like that. Not food, of course, but aspirin, sterile bandages, condoms, toilet paper-newspaper left stains, they'd-discovered, and twists of grass could leave you itching for days. Sometimes there was even instant coffee or diet sweetener, occasionally salt. Nothing with any calories, but it made bland boring food taste better, and they were all worth the effort of lugging along. Sometimes they spotted something useful enough and bulky enough that it was worth marking down for a foraging party to come fetch with a wagon and escort, although they were getting too far from home for that.

"Wait a second," Juniper said, as she heeled down the kickstand of her bicycle. "I smell something cooking!"

It's meat, too. Her mouth watered and her swallow was painful. Meat and a trace of woodsmoke, or charcoal. Could someone have found a last strayed cow in this wilderness of death? Could they be talked or traded out of some?

Something moved behind a Subaru a few yards away. Juniper tensed slightly, then relaxed as she saw it was a girl in a stained white dress; about twelve, she thought, with stringy brown hair.

The girl waved and walked over towards them, smiling; a couple of her teeth were missing. As she got closer, Juniper wrinkled her nose.

I'm not a blooming rose myself, but that's awful, she thought.

The girl looked bad, too. Not emaciated like so many they'd seen; if anything, a little overweight, which was something she hadn't seen much lately. But her hair was thin on top, showing patches of scalp, and there were odd-looking lumps on her arms; she walked like someone much younger, holding her hands behind her back and half skipping. There was a small sore beside her left eye, trailing yellow matter.

"You're sick!" Juniper said, and looked over at her friend.

"Not the plague," Judy muttered. "Where have I seen- must have been a textbook-"

"It's all right!" Juniper called. "We don't want any of your food. Maybe we can help, if you're ill."

The girl giggled, coming closer. "It's all right," she said back, her tone singsong. "We've got plenty to eat. You can come for dinner!"

We? Juniper thought.

Perhaps that was what made Juniper start to jerk backward as the hand came out from behind the girl's back with a glint of steel. The long kitchen knife missed her throat; it would still have killed her as it stabbed into her chest, but the plates of her jack turned it, breaking the point.

"Oooof!" Juniper said, struggling for wind.

The girl screeched, puffing the smell of rotten meat in Juniper's face, stabbing again and again with the sharp broken stump of the knife. She'd probably never met body armor before. Long detested hours of instruction from Chuck and Aylward took over; made Juniper duck a shoulder forward to body-check and knock the enemy back on her heels, reach down and grab the hilt with the right hand, rip it out and swing with the same motion.

The point scored across the girl's body, and the cloth parted-skin beneath, too, blood leaking as she turned and fled clutching at herself and screaming in shrill squeals.

Juniper fought shock. I just cut at a child! she thought.

More figures popped up from among the cars and trucks and poured out of the buildings. One burst right out of the rear doors of a van not fifteen feet away, roaring and holding an ax above his head in both hands. He was naked to the waist, his torso covered in boils. Vince drew to the ear and waited until the axman was five feet away before shooting; the arrow struck full in the throat, splitting the neckbone with an audible crack. The shouting cut off with knife finality, and the man toppled backward like a cut-through tree.

A woman with a butcher's cleaver ran at Matucheck. "Night of the fucking living dead!" he screamed, eyes wild.

He punched the blow aside with his buckler in an iron clang of metal on metal and stabbed, as much in revulsion as anger. The point slid home.

Judy was grappling with a teenage boy who tried to gnaw at her face as they danced in clumsy circles. Juniper bared her own teeth and struck with her buckler, using it like a two-pound set of brass knuckles. The crumbling feeling as the steel disk struck just below the base of his skull made the hair bristle up along her spine even then.

"It's a nest of Eaters!" Juniper shouted.

Most people would rather die than turn cannibal, but when you were talking about millions, a small minority was far too large. And they were starting to get hungry, as their food became scarce in turn.

"Get back in here!" she called. "Stand them off!"

Three cars made a loose triangle; too loose, but the Eaters were all around them. The Mackenzies retreated, Vince shooting as fast as he could knock and draw, then turned at bay. But the gaps between the cars were too big, and the Eaters swarmed over the hoods and trunks as well. For a minute the four of them pushed and shoved, hit and stabbed and chopped; their jacks were a huge advantage, and health and sanity and real weapons they had some idea of how to use.

But there were too many; it was like trying to fight in a nightmare where nothing worked and more and more came at you. Juniper knew with some dim distant part of her mind that the horror would come back to her if she lived, but most of her was a reflex that shouted and swung and struck.

Then something hit her across the shoulders, sending her reeling forward into the press. Two Eaters grabbed at her buckler and dragged it down. Another hugged her sword arm, and a third raised a baseball bat in both hands-

Thock!

A broad arrowhead stuck out from the Eater's chest, barely to the left of the breastbone. Blood gouted from his mouth, and he had just enough time to took surprised before he collapsed, kicking.

Behind him was a mounted giant with the head of a bear.

Juniper had only the blurred glimpse; then she was too busy getting her right arm free from the momentarily slackened grip. She hadn't lost her sword-the sword Dennie's gentle brother had made for show and play and the beauty of it, before the Change.

It was still the weapon of Rome's legions, the most dreadfully efficient tool of slaughter humankind had invented until Hiram Maxim's time. A short punching stab in the throat sent the Eater backward gobbling and clutching his throat.

"Let me go!" she shouted, chopping at the other two as if she were jointing a chicken. "Let me go!"

They did, running in squalling panic, grabbing at terrible slash-wounds, and then there were no more of their kind left within the space marked out with the three cars; none living, at least. Juniper gasped and leaned her fists on her knees as she tried to suck air in through a mouth gone paper-dry.

All the rest of her people seemed to be on their feet too, with nothing worse than cuts and scrapes and bruises; she squeezed out a brief, heartfelt wordless thanks. Outside the Eaters were running about the graveled parking lot, squealing and screaming. Three mounted men loped their horses after them, shooting methodically at close range with short powerful recurve bows, turning their mounts as nimbly as rodeo cowboys.

It's a headdress on top of a helmet, not a bear's head, Juniper thought. Gave me a start there!

Animal-headed god-men were very much a part of her faith, but she hadn't expected to run into one in the light of common day. It was almost as frightening as the prospect he'd rescued her from, of grisly death and dreadful feasting.

After a moment the cannibals gathered, clustering around a leader-one with a louder voice, at least. The three armored men dismounted, tied their horses to the chain-link fence, drew long swords. The round shields on their left arms bore a uniform mark, the stylized outline of a snarling bear's head, red on dark brown.

The noon sun blazed on the edged metal of their swords, and the man with the bear helmet shouted: "You in there! The party's not over and the mosh pit is sort of crowded. Pitch in if you can!"

The shout carried easily across the twenty yards, through the brabble of the Eaters' lunatic malice; a voice trained to carry, but not a musician's like hers-more of a crashing bark. Juniper looked with disgust at the blood on her blade and arm and side.

"Let's go," she said. "Come on, Mackenzies!"

The three strangers formed up with their leader as the point of a blunt wedge and charged in a pounding rush with the skirts of their mail hauberks flapping around their knees, armored from shin to helmet. Their great straight-bladed sabers went up in glittering menace.

"Haakkaa paalle!" they shouted in unison; the words weren't English or any language she knew, but they prompted a flicker of memory. "Haakkaa paalle!"

Then they struck the loose crowd of their foemen, and the mass seemed to explode in a spray of blood and screams and swords swinging in arcs that slung trails of red droplets yards into the air. Juniper gritted her teeth and made herself move forward with blade and buckler.

The Eaters stood and fought-mostly, just died-for a brief moment, then spattered screaming across the parking lot and out into the fields around, running for the shelter of the woods. Steve and Vince retrieved their longbows and shot while any targets were still in range; Juniper stood shuddering and blinking as the tall strangers made sure of the enemy dead.

Then there was no sound except their own panting and a series of quick are you all right queries. And the sickening knowledge that a single minute's delay would have seen them all dead and dismembered.

"Oh, Goddess gentle and strong, I want to go home," Judy whispered, then straightened. "We ought to check out the buildings. There might be things that… need doing."

"Damn right," one of the strangers said.

Juniper looked around. She had been controlling the churning in her stomach by main force of will; the movement distracted her, and she swayed backward against a car, sliding sideways. The world swam, narrowing and graying at the edges, and her mouth filled with spit.

Judy reached for her, but the stranger was quicker, holding her upright until she recovered a little. His grip was firm but not painful, although she could feel the remorseless strength in it, but she swallowed again at the sight and smell of the blood and matter that clotted the mail on the back of his leather gauntlet.

"Easy," he said. "Your first sight of combat?"

He held a water bottle to her lips. She filled her mouth and turned her head to spit, then drank.

"Not… not quite," she said, looking around at the bodies.

And every one of these a child of the Goddess and the God. Hard to remember that, but she must. May they find rest and peace in the Summerlands, and come to forgive themselves!

Aloud she continued: "But nothing before the Change, and nothing since like… like this."

He nodded and stepped back as he felt her strengthen; his friends came up behind him and followed his lead as he took off his helmet.

Their eyes met. For an instant that stretched green gaze locked with gray; Juniper felt a sudden shock, like a bucket of cold water and a jolt of electricity and all the chakras- power points-of her body flaring at once. She could see very clearly; clearly enough to notice the sudden widening of his pupils as he stared at her with the same fierce focus.

Then the moment passed, so quickly she wasn't sure if it had been more than her wooziness; it did blow the horror out of her for a while. Instead she was chiefly conscious of another reaction: My, but he's pretty.

Almost beautiful, in a hard masculine way: square-chinned, with high cheekbones and short straight nose and slanted gray eyes, the long chiseled line of his jaw emphasized by the close-cropped black beard. Only a scar running across his forehead and up into the bowl-cut raven hair marred it.

Oh, my, yes, Juniper thought, surprised she could notice at a moment like this; and even then she thought she caught a flicker of kindred interest on his face.

Then: They're not giants, either.

She'd had a confused impression that they were all huge men; but on second glance the leader, the one with the bear's head… let's mentally subtract all that gear… was tall but not towering, and not even thick-built; broad-shouldered and long-limbed, rather, narrow in the waist and hips. He moved easily under the weight of cloth and leather and metal, light and graceful as a leopard.

The youngest was an inch or two over six feet, a fresh-faced freckled blond no more than twenty at the most, already heavy in the shoulders- and thick-armed. The other was about halfway between his two companions in build.

"No disgrace to feel a bit woozy after something like this," the gray-eyed leader said. "I was, first time. You get used to it."

"Goddess, I hope not," she said.

He raised a brow at that-observant of him-and looked at the four Mackenzies, quickly taking note of their gear and the antlers-and-moon blazon on the breast of their jacks.

"Well, your Goddess must have been looking after you; we've met bunches like this before and decided to pile in and help on general principles. Ah… I'm-"

The blond boy grinned. "Lord Bear, war chief of the Bearkillers! At least according to my sister, Princess Astrid Legolamb."

The older man-about my age, give or take a year- grimaced at him, and the other one smiled.

"I'm Mike Havel." He jerked a thumb at the youngster. "This is Eric Larsson, and his family are all humorists-in their own opinion, if nobody else's. The sensible one here is named Josh Sanders."

The other man had brown hair and blue eyes and a narrow planes-and-angles Scots-Irish face that reminded Juniper of her own father; he pulled off a gauntlet and extended his hand.

"Pleased to meet you, ma'am," he said. "Mike is the bossman of our outfit, right enough."

Eric went on: "The rest of us are a long ways east of here; we're scouting," and the other two scowled at him.

She noticed with amusement how Vince and Steve bristled just a little as she made her own introductions; and her trained ears pricked up at the strangers' accents. The mix was odd, and she could usually tag someone within a hundred miles of their birthplace.

The blond boy, Eric, he's a native Oregonian, she thought. From west of the Cascades, at that, like me, but probably raised in metro Portland rather than the valley. Hmmm. is that just a wee tinge of New England? Mr. Sanders. Midwestern flat vowels for sure; but there's something harsher there too, hill-country Southern; born not far north of the Ohio and on a farm, or some little crossroads town. Our Lord Bear is interesting; Midwestern too, I'd say, but from a lot farther north. And there's just a hint underneath of something else, not English. Singsong, but very faint.

"Your friend was right," Havel said. "We should check out those buildings-together, and cautiously."

"You think there might be more Eaters?" she said.

"Eaters? That's what you call them around here? Possibly, or more likely prisoners, alive so they'd stay fresh. Like I said, we've done this before."

He looked down at one of the dead; his expression was clinical, and the other two looked matter-of-fact as well; the youngest was a little green around the gills, but only slightly.

Havel and Sanders were calmer still; not exhilarated or excited either, their breath slowing gradually from the brutal exertion of fighting in armor far heavier than hers, but calm. The bodies seemed to disturb them no more than the blood that clotted on their mail, the way a farmer would ignore muck-covered boots when he shoveled out a stall.

Hard men, she thought, with a tinge of distaste and then a rush of shame; they'd saved her life and that of her friends at the risk of their own, doing the deeds for nothing but the deeds' own sake.

Not wicked, I don't think they're bad, but hard. This Havel, he probably was that way before the Change, too.

She'd always trusted her first impressions of people, and had rarely been disappointed. Havel would make an excellent friend and a very bad enemy; provoke or threaten him or his and you could look for a sudden frightful blow, without warning, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky.

"A lot of this bunch look sick, too," he said. "I've noticed that before as well."

Judy spoke: "They were probably undercooking their… food," she said. "You can safely eat fish or even beef rare, most times. Pork you have to cook thoroughly. Human flesh… "

"Right. Josh, cover us. You two"-he nodded to Vince and Steve-"keep an arrow on the string and an eye out behind us. One of you stay at the entrance when we go in, and watch the horses. Don't want them creeping back to corncob us. Ms. Mackenzie, if you and Ms. Barstow could back me and Eric up directly?"

They all moved towards the BBQ place; that was where the smoke came from, trickling out of a sheet-metal chimney. The big picture window was unbroken; the lower half was frosted as well. Nobody felt like trapping themselves in the revolving door.

Havel looked at Eric; they nodded without words, laid their swords down carefully, and picked up a big motorcycle between them; then they pivoted and threw it-six feet and through the glass. The crash and tinkle sounded loud across the corpse-littered parking lot.

Juniper noted that the two young Mackenzies looked impressed; she snorted slightly to herself.

A horse is even stronger, but those two don't get that me-am-awestruck-junior-dog look when one hauls a ton of logs out of the woods. Men!

Havel looked through the shattered glass, blade and shield up. Then he turned his head aside, grimacing slightly.

"Christ Jesus!" he said, spat, then turned back to whatever was within.

Judy looked as well, then turned and began vomiting. When Juniper stepped forward in alarm, Judy waved her back as she spat to clear her mouth. Mike Havel held up a palm to stop his own men likewise.

"No point in letting this inside your heads unless you have to."

"They were… cooking," Judy said. "They had a-" Another heave took her. "I wish I hadn't seen it."

Havel nodded, sheathed his sword and drew the long broad-bladed knife he wore across the small of his back.

"I'll handle this," he said with calm, flat authority.

He went inside; they could hear wood scraping and crunching, and then his voice, speaking loudly as if to someone deaf or ill:

"Do… you… want… to… die?"

A rasping mumble, suddenly cut off; Juniper made the Invoking sign, as did Judy-and to her surprise, so did the two young men. Then Havel called an all-clear, and they stepped cautiously into the big dining area; the stench was stunning, even to hoses grown far less squeamish since the Change. Even with the front window smashed in it was dim, which she was thankful for, and she let her eyes slide a little out of focus as well. Havel had spread some of the filthy crusted tablecloths over… things… lying beside the big fireplace hearth that stood in the center of the room, radiating heat from a bed of coals.

That had a copper hood, and firewood heaped nearby; the Eaters had been burning bits of planking and broken-up furniture… complete with the varnishes and stains in the wood.

No wonder they were all mad! From the chemicals, as well as guilt and horror.

The table beside it was scored with cuts, soaked with old blood and littered with knives, saws and choppers, a moving coat of flies buzzing around them.

"I… don't think there's anything here," Juniper said, lifting her eyes and focusing on the please wait to be seated sign still standing near the door. "If they're holding prisoners, it'll be out back. We ought to shout and then listen first; it might save poking around."

They did; in the ringing silence that followed she heard a muffled calling and pounding. She led the way back through the kitchen-empty, save for a few boxes of spices and salt and a severed blackened hand kicked into a corner and lying with its fingers clawed up as if reaching for something.

She moved on grimly, down a near-lightless corridor, to a metal door that had probably been a cold-store for meats. Even in the dimness she could see long scratches in the paint on the walls, as if someone had tried to cling to the smooth surface while being dragged. Voices and thumping came from behind the metal door, muffled by the insulation.

"We've come to get you out safe!" she called."Hold on!"

The voices redoubled, but the door looked strong, and the padlock was a heavy model with a stainless-steel loop as thick as her middle finger. Her heart revolted at the thought of rooting through the clothes of the dead Eaters outside, or among the grotesque filth in the room around the hearth of abominations; both would be dangerous. And the one with the key might have been among those who fled, anyway. She began to look around for a tool.

"Just a second," Mike Havel spoke, surprising her. "Josh, check the packtrain. I don't think any of those maniacs would stop running that close, but no need to take a chance. And get some torches ready, we'll want to burn the place down when we've checked things over. Ms. Mackenzie, I'll be right back."

They squeezed past the knot of people in the corridor; Havel was back in a few seconds. Oddly, he was carrying a rifle.

"Thought I saw this on a rack in the main room," he said. "Over by the cash register."

"But… that won't work," Juniper said.

Havel grinned, a flash of white teeth in the darkness. "It won't shoot, but it'll work fine as a pry bar," he said. "An ax or a sledge would be awkward, the way the door jamb is right against the end wall. This is a Schultz amp; Larsen 68DL hunting rifle, of all unlikely things, always wanted one myself. Hell of a thing to do with a fine piece of gunsmith's work… Stand back, please."

He slid the barrel through the padlock between hasp and body, tested the position once or twice, set his hands on the underside of the stock and put a booted foot against the further wall. That made the skirt of his hauberk and gambeson fall back; he wore copper-riveted Levi's beneath, and the incongruity of it made her blink for a second. Then he took a deep breath, emptied his lungs, filled them again…

"Issssaaaaa!" he shouted, teeth bared in a rictus of effort.

The lock parted and flew apart with a sharp ping of steel striking concrete. Havel threw the gun aside too, panting; the barrel had a perceptible kink in it now.

"Show-off," the blond youth said, but he smiled as he did.

Juniper ignored them, pulling the latch open and then working the handle of the door; she had to dodge as the heavy portal swung open.

A woman with matted hair and a face covered in bruises and crusted scabs ran out, bounced off Havel's armored form with a shriek, then stopped and stared at Juniper's face. The dim light in the corridor must seem bright to her; the inside of the cold-storage locker would have been stygian-black. And Juniper's molten-copper hair was hard to miss.

"Juney?" the prisoner said. "Juney?"

"You know me-Carmen?" Her eyes went to the other captives. "Muriel? Jack?"

The slight dark woman threw her arms around the High Priestess of the Coven of the Singing Moon; then the others were around her as well.

"Juney, they wuh, wuh, were going to-"

"Shhh, I know. You're safe now. We cast the Circle and made the rite, and She brought us to you."

Eighteen

"Oh, ladies bring your flowers fair

Fresh as the morning dew

In virgin white and through the night

I will make sweet love to you;

Your petals soon grow soft and fall

Upon which we may rest;

With gentle sigh I'll softly lie

My head upon your breast… "

Juniper finished the tune, and laid her guitar aside. Their campfires were in a hollow where the hills began west of Salem, cut off from the flatlands, overlooked by little except the Coast Range forests. A huge oak leaned above the little hollow, and the low coals of the fires lit its great gnarled branches and the delicate new leaves, turning them brown-gold and green-gold. The sky above was clear, frosted with stars and a waxing moon that hung huge and yellow above the mountains; sparks drifted up to join them now and then, when a stick broke with a sharp snap amid the coals.

She was feeling pleasantly not-quite-full, although closer to it than she had been in weeks. The kettle had held three big rabbits, as well as some wild onion, arrowhead tubers, herbs, and bits and pieces from both parties' stores; noodles and sun-dried tomatoes and two cans of lima beans they'd found in an abandoned camper.

The smell of it still scented the air, along with the fresh green grass and camas lilies. She'd contributed the makings for herbal tea, and she picked up a cup of it now.

"Good of you to slow down and keep us company for a while," she said across the coals. "It's been a nice couple of days; a chance to let clean air blow the grue out."

It was a joy to be able to chat with someone new, as well, the pleasant meandering talk you had when people struck a spark of friendship and got to know each other. Beyond essentials, they'd mostly talked about times before the Change, as if to raise a barrier against the grisliness of their meeting. He'd found her ex-surburban, only-child, class of life as a wandering minstrel intriguing; just as she had his hard-grit blue-collar rural upbringing with swarms of siblings and relatives; and they shared a love of the woods and mountains, the trees and beasts.

"No problem, we were heading this way anyhow," Mike Havel said. "It's been fun, and fun's thin on the ground these days."

They were a quarter-circle away from each other; Judy was a little farther from the fire, and the second hearth held most of the rest-she could hear Muriel's voice. A dear lady, but given to babbling at the best of times, and more so now; Eric and Josh were going to get an earful of Wiccan herbalism, whether they wanted to or not; at least that was happier than the bursts of tears in the first day and night.

They've been surprisingly patient and gentle with the captives, that they have, with strangers they owe nothing, Juniper thought. Good hearts under those iron shirts.

Mike Havel sat with his back against his saddle; his hands worked on a rabbit trap without needing to look at the task, long fingers fashioning the bent willow-withe and nylon cord with effortless strength. In boots and jeans and T-shirt under a battered-looking sheepskin jacket he appeared a good deal less exotic than he had in hauberk and bear-crowned helmet, but just as good.

I'm not one to need a Big Strong Man at every moment, she thought. But I'm fair thankful this one came along when he did. Nor is he hard on the eyes, by Macha! Not stupid either, and strong of will without being a macho jerk; the women of the Bearkillers must be fair blind! Nice pawky sense of humor, too.

Tactful questions had revealed he was single so far. There was wistfulness in the thought; they must part, and soon.

"Figured your friends needed some recovery time," he said. "Cutting our way through that hell-on-earth south of Portland wasn't any fun for us three, either, and hard on our horses-we took it as quick as we could and not founder them. Slowing up for a bit makes sense."

He grinned: "And besides, while your style isn't what I usually put on the CD player, it's good-and Lord, but I've missed music! The only people in our outfit who can sing at all do cowboy songs. Mind you, it could be worse-one of my father's sisters was always trying to make me and my brothers listen to Sibelius."

"Cowboy songs? You don't like country?" she said, surprised.

"Oh, I like country a lot. I meant real cowboy songs: cows, dust, horses-the old stuff actual trail riders sang to the dogies. Not bad, but sort of monotonous. My tastes run to Fred Eaglesmith, say, or Kevin Welch."

"Kevin Welch, is it?" Juniper said with a smile; she picked up her guitar and struck the strings, whistling for a second to establish the beat, tapping her foot and then putting a down-home rasp into her voice:

"My woman's a fire-eater,

My woman's 'bout six feet tall… "

Havel exclaimed in delight when she'd finished, leading a round of applause.

"'Hill Country Girl'! My favorite tune-never thought I'd hear it done right again!"

Juniper laughed. "We have ceilidh all the time; well, all the time we're not working or too cursed tired."

"Kailies?" Havel said, which was roughly the way it was pronounced.

"Singsongs, really; the word's Gaelic. Music and dancing; I was a professional, of course, and I can handle several instruments-not badly, either, if I say so myself-but Chuck's a good hand on the mandolin and Judy can do wonders with a bodhran drum, and Dorothy is a piper, and plays a mean tenor banjo as well, and most of my old coveners can carry a tune. There's a lot of sheet music at my cabin, of course; it was my base and as much of a home as I had. I specialized in Celtic music and folk and my own stuff, but it's not all we do."

Havel whistled. "Sounds better than a CD player!"

"More fun, truly. What do your people like to entertain themselves with of an evening, then?"

"Well, we try to sing something else, now and then," Havel said. "Angelica knows some Spanish folk songs. Astrid-Eric's younger sister-does readings from her favorite books, or just tells stories; she and Signe both draw and sketch, and they've been teaching some others; and we have games, play cards… I do wish we'd had a good musician, though. Maybe we'll get one."

"You don't have a bad voice, Mike," she said. "It just needs training."

"Haven't had the time," Havel replied. He hesitated, and went on: "Is Juniper your real name?"

"It is now," she said cheerfully, putting the tea down and strumming a little to accompany her words. "And has been these fourteen years; it's my outer Craft name. I was sort of militant about it then; put it down to being sweet sixteen and at outs with my parents."

"Er… " Havel said. "I'm sort of a lapsed Lutheran myself. I haven't known many Wiccans."

Juniper laughed: "And the ones you did see tended to the impractical? Endless discussions of anything under the sun? A preoccupation with dressing up? Sort of flaky, overall?"

She watched his embarrassment with a slight smile; he was about the most relentlessly practical man she'd ever met, on first impressions. He was probably trying desperately to avoid saying words on the order of some of my best friends are flakes.

"Well, that's not entirely mistaken," she said, taking pity on him. "But there are all types in the Craft, from herbalists to dental hygienists, some varieties more flamboyant than others; not to mention the different traditions, which are as distinct as Baptists and Catholics. My coven, the Singing Moon. well, we're a straightforward bunch. A musician-myself-a city gardener, a nurse, a couple who owned a restaurant… "

"Certainly sounds like you've been doing well," he said with relief. "Anyone who's alive and not starving and has a crop planted is!"

They looked at each other for a moment while she let a tune trickle out through her fingers. Then Havel cleared his throat and gestured at the piled rabbit-traps he'd wrapped in a blanket for carrying.

"Guess I should get these set," he said, then coughed into one hand. "Ah… care to come along?"

"I'd be delighted," Juniper said gravely, suppressing her smile-men had fragile egos and big clumsy emotional feet. "It's a useful skill, setting snares for rabbits. Learned it from your grandmother, did you say?"

"Her younger brother, Ben."

They both picked up their sword belts and buckled them on. As she rose and turned to slide her guitar into its battered case she saw Judy smiling at her from across the flame-lit darkness, raising her hand in the gesture of blessing.

Juniper stuck out her tongue briefly, and turned to follow Havel into the darkness. They both stopped for an instant beyond the reach of the firelight, staring outward to let their eyes adjust; she noticed Havel noticing what she'd done, and his nod of respect.

The moon was a week past full, still huge and yellow, shining ghostly through tatters of cloud, and the stars were very bright-even now she wasn't quite used to seeing them so many and so clear in this part of the country. Together they made it easy enough to find your way, if you were accustomed to nighted wilderness.

After a moment they moved off the trail, through long grass thick with weeds, where a spiderweb shone like silver with beads of dew. Havel moved quietly-very quietly for a big man, and in unfamiliar country. Juniper followed him up the slope, through overgrown pasture towards a line of brush and trees behind a wire fence.

"Good spot,'' she said in an almost-whisper, when she saw where he was heading.

She pointed, and they could both see the tracks and the slight beaten trail. "Creature of habit, your average rabbit, likely to come through here again."

"You a hunter?" he asked softly with a chuckle in the tone.

"No," she said. "I didn't hunt, not until the Change. But I liked watching the birds and animals, when I got the chance."

They both ducked through the wires of the fence, holding it for each other-his long saber was more of a nuisance than her gladius-and moved to where a fallen tree trunk made good shelter for a small animal low on the food chain to scan the meadow before venturing out. He rubbed grass and herbs between his hands before he planted the trap, and baited it with a handful of evening primrose roots. The next few went further up along the brush-grown verge, natural stopping-places for an animal attracted to the varied food that grew in edge habitats.

They moved into the woods; mixed fir and oak, old enough to have a canopy over their heads. The cool green smell was different from the open meadow, more spicy and varied. It was much darker here, just enough to see their way.

"There," she said, pointing.

The spot showed close-cropped grass, beneath a high bank that cut off the wind; it also broke the roof of branches above, and let in a little starlight and moonlight.

"Good spot," he repeated. "Wouldn't be surprised if there were some burrows there."

"You men are unromantic beasts," she said, laughing. "I had a bit of a stop in mind, Mike."

He had a crooked smile, but an oddly charming one. "You know, I was hoping you'd say something like that." He hesitated. "I can't stay. I've got my people to look after-commitments elsewhere."

"Me too, but you're a gentleman to say so." She put her arms around his neck. "Now shut up, will you?"

My, my, my, Juniper thought.

She stretched luxuriously and then hugged the sheepskin jacket around her shoulders against the chill, watching as Mike Havel lit a fire a yard away. He had an old-fashioned liquid-fueled cigarette lighter to do it with, and the wick caught the second time his thumb worked the wheel in a little shower of sparks. The light showed for a moment through the teepee of twigs and duff he'd laid as tinder.

"It's not that cold," she said. "Besides, it's fun to cuddle, and we've got this blanket you so accidentally wrapped those traps in."

He looked over his shoulder. Squatting naked wasn't usually a flattering position for a man, but he was as un-selfconscious about his body as a wolf. Odd that he got a bear-name dropped on him. He wasn't furry, less body hair than most, but a wolf was what he reminded her of, or a cat; something lean and perfectly shaped.

Except for the scars, she thought, with a quick surge of compassion; she'd noticed, of course, but things had been too… urgent… to ask before.

"How did that happen?" she asked gently.

He glanced down at the white seamed mark on his leg as he carefully added deadwood to the little blaze.

"Slipped cutting down a dead pine," he said. "Christ Jesus, did my dad give me hell about it!"

She nodded, but went on: "No, I meant that."

That was a curious radial pattern on his ribs; the muscle and tendon moved easily beneath it, but the flickering un-derlight of the fire brought out the tracery of damaged skin.

He glanced up at her quickly, his eyes cold and withdrawn for a moment, then thawing.

"No," he said. "You're not the sort of girl who'd get off on scars, hey?"

"I'm not any sort of a girl," she said tartly. "And not that sort of woman, either. I like you, Mike. I just wanted to know about you."

He grinned and finished building the fire. "OK, point taken, and I like you too, Juney. It was an RPG."

"Role-playing game?" she asked, bewildered, and saw him laugh aloud, his head thrown back-for the first time since they met, she realized.

"Rocket Propelled Grenade," he said. "Freak thing- should have killed me, it hit the rocks just to my left and then shit was flying everywhere."

He looked down at his hands; they slowly closed. "Next thing I knew I was crawling and pulling what was left of Ronnie Thibodeaux out and yelling for a corpsman. You would have liked Ronnie-Cajun kid from the bayous, turned me on to zydeco music."

The flames cast shadows on the bank of earth behind, moving like ruddy ghost-shapes in the darkness.

"I may be a beast, but not an unromantic one; a fire always makes things nicer, right?"

Juniper threw back the coat and opened her arms.

Mike Havel always found partings awkward; he'd expected this to be worse than most, after the holiday feeling-like three days spent out of time, without the sensation of knotted tension he'd had most days since the Change and every day since he saw the Protector's outposts. He'd always gotten good-byes over with as fast as he could, keeping his eyes fixed ahead.

Oddly enough, this good-bye was easier than most; not less for regrets, but…

But then, she's… comfortable to be around. Cuter than hell, but not at all the pixie you'd think from her looks. There's steel underneath. Damn, I wish life wasn't so complicated.

At that he had to chuckle; since the Change, it had gotten complicated beyond belief-but apparently the personal stuff didn't stop. Juniper looked up at him from her bicycle, smiling in her turn. The young sun flamed on her hair, falling in loose curls to the shoulders of her jack; she had her bow over her shoulder, and her bowl helmet slung from the handlebars-as if this was a carefree day before the Change, and she someone heading out on a mountain bike. The air had a cool bite to it, a wind out of the west that hinted at rain, but for now the clouds were white billows sailing through haze-blue sky.

"What's the joke, Mike?" she asked; her voice still had that hint of a lilt and burble to it.

"That this doesn't really feel like good-bye," he said.

"Well, maybe it isn't, then?" she said, grinning at him. "I have a strong premonition we'll all meet again-and I'm a Witch, you know."

She looked past him to Eric. "I've a present for your sister," she said.

"Signe?" he blurted, then looked as if he wished his lips would seal shut.

"No, Astrid," she said; then glanced at Havel.

He could read that glance: I'm already sending Signe something.

"From what I heard, your Astrid and my Eilir would get on like a house on fire-tell her that from me."

She unsnapped the dagger from her belt. It was a Scottish-style dirk, ten inches of tapering double-edged blade, guardless, with a hilt of bone carved in interwoven Celtic ribbon-work, and a pommel in the form of the Green Man's face. More of the swirling patterns worked their way down the sheath, tooled into the dark leather.

She tossed it up to him, and then turned her bicycle; the rest of her people were straddling their machines in a clump-the nest of Eaters had had half a dozen workable trail bikes.

"Merry meet and merry part," she said, waving to the three Bearkillers; her eyes met Havel's, and he felt a little of that shock again. "And merry meet again!"

Havel waved, then leaned his hands on the pommel of his saddle as the knot of… Well, "Mackenzies," he thought. Makes as much sense as "Bearkillers," doesn 't it?… coasted off southward, freewheeling down the slope that took the two-lane road weaving among trees and fields.

"Damn. That is quite a woman," he said quietly to himself. "One hell of a woman, in fact."

Eric was looking over the dagger; he drew it and whistled at the damascene blade. "Legolamb will love it," he said. "Looks Elvish to a fault."

"Scottish," Havel corrected.

"Whatever." Then his glance turned sly: "Shall I tell Signe about the circumstances?"

Havel shook himself slightly, touching the rein to his horse's neck and turning the big gelding westward, up the gravel road that intersected the county highway.

"No, I'll tell her."

"Why shouldn't I do it first?" Eric said, grinning.

"You over that constipation, kid?" he said.

"Well… yeah," Eric replied, frowning in puzzlement.

Josh Sanders was chuckling on Havel's other side as the three horses moved off, the pack-string following.

"Then if your bowels are moving regular, you really shouldn't tell Signe a word," Havel went on seriously.

"What's that got to do with it?" Eric said.

"It's real difficult to wipe your ass when you've got two broken arms," Havel said.

Sanders barked laughter; Eric followed after a moment.

"Want me to take point?" he said.

"Let Josh do it first," Havel said.

Sanders nodded and brought his horse up to a canter, pulling ahead of the other two riders and the remount string. The road they followed wound west into the Eola Hills; the slope was gently downward through a peach orchard for a long bowshot, and Havel lost himself in it for a moment as petals drifted downward and settled in pink drifts on the shoulders of his hauberk and Gustav's mane. There had been enough ugly moments since the Change that it was a good idea to make the most of the other kind.

The thought made him smile. Morning's chill and dew brought out the scent; it reminded him of the smell of Juniper's hair for some reason, and the almost translucent paleness of her skin where the sun hadn't reached.

The road broke out of the little manicured trees and crossed a stretch of green grassland that rose and fell like a smooth swell at sea; from here they could just see how it turned a little north of east to head for a notch between two low hills shaggy with forest; there were more clumps of trees across it, and along the line of the roadway. Beyond all rose the steep heights of the Coast Range, lower than the Cascades behind them and forested to their crests.

Beyond that…

The coast, about which nobody seems to know much. Beyond that, ocean and Asia…

Would ships sail there in his lifetime? Perhaps not, but maybe in his son's, or grandson's; windjammers, like the Aland Island square-rigger that had brought his greatgrandfather to America. He shook his head, and Gustav snorted, sensing that his attention was elsewhere.

Back to practicalities.

Salem lay to their rear across the Willamette; Corvallis was two days' walk southward. The closest town was the tiny hamlet of Rickreall, miles off to the left and over ridges. The hills ahead were an island in the flat Willamette, steep on their western faces, open and inviting when you came in from the east.

The only human habitation in sight was a farmhouse and barn off to the right about half a mile away, and it felt abandoned-probably cleaned out by foraging parties from the state capital right after the Change.

"Mike… " Eric began.

Havel turned his head. "Thought you had something to say."

"Are you and Signe… well, together?"

"Yes and no," Havel said. A corner of his mouth turned up. "Or yes, but not really, not quite yet. Want to have another go about the way I look at your sister? Or did you think I was cheating on her?"

"Well… "

"You and Luanne have a commitment, right?" Eric nodded. "Well, Signe and I don't, yet."

Eric flushed, and went on: "Just wanted to know. I mean… are you two going to get married, or something?"

"Probably," Havel said. "Very probably; depends on what she decides. But I haven't made any promises, yet."

Although that's probably not the way a woman would look at it, he acknowledged to himself.

Eric nodded; he was a male, after all, and a teenager at that.

"She'd have to be pretty dumb to pass you up, Mike," he said. Then he went on, in a lower tone: "Thing is, if you two get married, that'll sort of make us brothers, won't it? I've never had a brother."

Havel gave one of his rare laughs and leaned over in the saddle to thump his gauntleted hand on the younger man's armored shoulder.

"I could do worse. What's that old saying? 'Bare is back without brother to guard it'? We've watched each other's backs in enough fights by now that we're sort of brothers already. Now let's see this home of yours."

"Yours too, Mike," Eric said.

Hero worship's natural at his age, Havel thought indulgently.

They moved along smoothly, keeping the horses to a fast walk and occasional canter. From what Juniper had told him, this area had been swept clear by those idiots in Salem, and they were well south and west of the refugee hordes along the main roads now. There was still no sense in taking chances-a flood tide that big would throw spray and wrack a long way.

"Might be some people left further up and in," Havel said. "More places to hide."

Ahead the broad meadow narrowed, rising to low, forested heights coastward, shaggy with Douglas fir and oak. Once past the place where the hills almost pinched together the land opened out again in a wedge with its narrow part to the west. The rolling lands were silent, grass waist-high in the pastures, shaggy in the blocks of orchard and vineyard too-the south-facing side of the valley was all in vines-and the neglect was a disquieting contrast with the still-neat fences of white painted board. Willows dropped their tresses into ponds, and ducks swam.

The big house on its hill was yellowish-red brick, mellow with ivy growing up the south-facing wall, bowered in its trees and in gardens that looked lovely even at this distance. Barns and stables stood off at a little distance, and a smaller cottage-style house.

"Don't get your hopes up," Havel warned as he unshipped his binoculars for a brief scan. "I can't see any movement."

"Well, it didn't burn down, either," Eric said, smiling. "That's something."

They rode up the graveled road, hooves crunching in the loose rock; that turned to white crushed shell as they entered the gardens and lawns proper, in a long looping curve leading up to the white-pillared entrance to the main house. Velvety grass dreamed amid banks of early flowers- the Willamette was prime gardening country-clipped hedges, huge copper beeches, oaks, walnuts, espaliered fruit trees blossoming against a brick ha-ha.

Old money indeed, Havel thought.

He scanned the windows carefully; some of the dormers that broke the hipped roofline were open, and he saw a gauzy curtain flutter free.

Just the thing to hide someone looking down at us, he thought.

Aloud: "Eric." The younger'man looked at him. "This place has good memories for you. You're probably feeling happy and relaxed to be here, down deep. Bad idea. Keep alert."

Josh Sanders was looking around, fingering his bowstring.

"Someone's been doing maintenance here since the Change," he said. "The grass isn't as long as it would be otherwise, and there's been some weeding. And that's horse dung, there, and hoofprints. Not more than a day old."

"Throw down the weapons!" a voice barked from an upper window. "Give it the flick, yer bastards, or come a guster!"

The thunking twang of a crossbow followed on the heels of the command; a shaft whipped by and went tock into the smooth gray trunk of a beech, quivering with a malignant wasp-whine.

Nineteen

Juniper kissed the vine leaf and dropped the thanks-offering into Rickreall Creek, chanting softly:

"Water departing

Sky endless blue

Both forever;

Lord and Lady

My love to you always flowing

As rain and river to the sea

Blessed be."

Water took it and whirled it downstream, quick with the cold mountain waters of spring, past the pilings of the bridge and on towards the Willamette River to their east. Highway 99 stretched southward through open fields.

Then she and Judy leaned in to the pedals of their bicycles. They were on point today; she'd decided that the freed prisoners needed Steve and Vince by them, being unarmed save for belt knives and still feeling shaky, for which she couldn't blame them. They could haul the cargo carriers; she hoped some food would be available in Corvallis. The rabbits wouldn't last long.

"Well, you're looking like the cat that got the canary," Judy said after a while when the singing humm of tires on asphalt was the only sound to rival the birds.

"Mmmmmm," Juniper said wordlessly, and laughed at Judy's scowl.

"It's not like you to do the whirlwind romance thing and get swept off your feet," her friend said.

"Other way 'round," she said. "He's a nice guy, but I sort of had to prod him into action." A giggle. "If you'll pardon the expression."

"Not your usual style," Judy repeated.

She frowned. "It wasn't, though, was it?" A shrug. "Things have, you may have noticed, changed. We didn't have all that much time."

Judy's thoughts had moved on. "I wonder why they didn't want to come on to Corvallis?"

"I think I can guess that. When I asked him about it, he just smiled and said that it was usually easier to get forgiveness than permission. Which I take to mean the Bearkillers don't want to attract attention to the place they're thinking of settling until they are settled and it's a done deal. And pre-Change title deeds don't mean much anymore. It's a lot closer to Corvallis than it is to our land, of course."

"To the Mackenzie clachan," Judy said, smiling; it lit up her full dark features.

"Oh, don't you start in on that stuff! Leave it to Dennie and his mispronounced bits of Gaelic."

Judy gave a broad shrug and flipped up one hand: "Nu, I should know from Gaelic? I'm just a simple Jewitch girl, after all."

They both laughed, and Juniper said more seriously: "Giorraionn beirt bothar; two people shorten a road. Glad you're along, Judy."

She smiled back. "You do have one for every occasion!"

"Mom was fond of 'em." She frowned. "I'm not sure it's a good idea now."

"What's the harm? For that matter, all this clan-Celtic business is more suited to the world we're living in now."

"That's what worries me," Juniper said. At her friend's glance, she went on: "Look, we know all this high-Celtic Deirdre-of-the-Sorrows sort of thing is a bit of a joke, and we don't take the old-country stories too literally either. But now we're pushing on an open door-there's no TV, no… no world to push back. What about our children's children? It was my father's people who gave the words 'blood feud' to the English language; not to mention 'blackmail' and 'reiver' and 'unhallowed hand.' "

Judy shrugged again, normally this time. "Right now, shouldn't we be more concerned about getting through to harvest? And whatever works."

"I suppose so," Juniper said with a sigh.

Her eyes had been moving as they spoke. "Look!" she said suddenly.

"It's a microwave relay tower," Judy said.

"But there's someone in it. Right up near the top, that looks like a platform added recently. Perfect spot for a lookout. Sort of ironic, isn't it?"

She halted and got out her own birding glasses. "And he's signaling someone, using a mirror. Clever." She paused to take a deep breath. "I can smell turned earth, not too far away."

It hadn't been a main road before the Change, but someone since had taken the trouble to push the occasional cars aside and bury the bodies-she could see fresh graves in the fields to either side. And that wasn't all…

"Bunch up," she called back over her shoulder. "We're getting closer to town and I think they've got a lookout system set up."

This part of the Willamette was fairly flat. That cut visibility, but…

"We weren't the only ones to scare up some seed potatoes," Juniper said, looking left and right. "And is that barley?"

"Barley in this field, oats in the next, I think," Judy said. "Hard to tell when it's just showing. Spring planted-not too late, I hope."

Every day past the optimum cut the yield and increased the chances of running into the fall rains at harvest time.

Then: "Oooops!"

They cleared a slight rise; someone was waiting beyond. Everyone grabbed the brake levers, and the Mackenzies halted.

About sixty someones, Juniper thought.

Most of them were puffing and blowing, as if they'd arrived quickly… which the rows of bicycles hinted at, too. All the people waiting for them were in chain mail shirts that came to their thighs, like metallic extra-large T-shirts, with shortswords and bucklers hung from heavy belts.

Half of them carried long spears, made up of two sections that fitted together; a few were still getting the joint locked.

That was quick, Juniper thought, looking at the armor; she had a vague memory that chain mail was expensive in the old days. I'll have to ask Chuck. The SCA had gone in for re-creating that sort of thing.

At a guess, someone from the Society had been advising this bunch as well.

"Pikes actually, not spears," she murmured. "Sixteen-foot pikes."

While she watched, they hurried into a four-deep line. Someone called out: "Pikepoints-down!"

The great spears came down with a shout, presenting a quadruple rank of sharp blades. The rest of the welcoming party were on either side, aiming crossbows. They all looked the more intimidating because their helmets came down in a triangular mask over the eyes, and flared out behind.

Their leader had a different weapon: a five-foot shaft with a head like a giant single-edged knife, curved on the cutting edge and thick and straight on the back, tapering to a murderous point. A glaive, she thought-the word came to her from some Society get-together where she'd played.

"Halt where you are!" the man with the glaive called when they were about twenty feet from the line of points. "In the name of the University Council!"

And the Continental Congress and the Great Jehovah, she thought irreverently, but she obeyed.

Those pikes looked unpleasantly, seriously sharp; so did the heads of the crossbow bolts.

"This area is under quarantine," the young man with the glaive went on. "I'm Lieutenant Peter Jones, Committee militia. Anyone found to be infectious will be put in isolation; turn back now if you are."

He pushed up on the mask. That turned out to be a jointed visor, and the face below was disconcertingly young; he also wore sports glasses with an elastic strap at the rear.

"We're peaceful travelers from a community on the east side of the valley," Juniper said, and gave their names. "Just out scouting, trying to find out what's going on. We have a registered nurse with us, and as far as we know we're healthy."

The word "registered" brought a bristling. "Not working for the state government, I hope," Jones snapped.

"They tried to take away our livestock! Until we taught them better."

"Our area had the same problem, but I don't think there is a state government anymore," she said, jerking a thumb northeast in the direction of Salem.

"Why not?"

"Plague. We got near enough to see the pits where they tried to burn the bodies, but from the looks of it the last survivors just lit out for everywhere else."

Jones cleared his throat and barked an order with self-conscious sternness; she put him down as a teaching assistant before the Change, possibly in one of the more practical departments, like agriculture or engineering. The pikemen-or in a few cases, pikewomen-swung their weapons upright again, and the crossbows went to port arms.

"We'd heard about that," Jones said. "The plague, that is."

His eyes flicked to Carmen, Muriel and Jack, all of who still had ripening bruises from their brief captivity.

"These are friends of ours," Juniper said in haste, and they nodded enthusiastically. "We rescued them from a nest of Eaters north of Salem, then looped around west of the river and came down Highway 99."

"You see we have to be careful about checking… ah, good."

More bicyclists had come up, from the direction of town. Two of them had white boxes marked with the Red Cross strapped to the carriers of their bikes, and they immediately came forward.

"Blood samples," one said.

"And customs inspection," the other added.

Juniper bristled slightly-she'd thought the Change had eliminated bureaucracy, at least-but the pikes and crossbows were a powerful argument. Plus they needed to contact any surviving nuclei of civilization out here. She'd been beginning to doubt there were any, beyond the three-families-and-some-friends level…'

It would be truly alarming if Clan Mackenzie and Reverend Dixon's flock were it as far as rebuilding goes!

Judy chatted in medspeak with the doctor taking the blood samples; he had an optical microscope ready on a table by the side of the road, and could evidently identify most diseases from the shape of the bacteria in their blood. She recognized about one word in eight; and Yersinid pestis only because Judy had been using the technical term for bubonic plague rather frequently of late.

Jones examined their weapons. He sniffed at the jacks- "kludge" was the expression he used-and the swords were much like the ones the Corvallan militia carried, cut and ground out of leaf springs. The longbows brought his eyebrows up, and the dozen staves they had in the baggage carriers made him lick his lips, an expression she doubted he was conscious of. The bundled arrows brought nearly the same light of lust to his eyes.

"Wait a minute!" the customs inspector said. "They've got meat here!"

Everyone bristled at that, and some of the weapons started to swing in her direction.

"Venison jerky!" Juniper exclaimed, keeping her voice from panic. "Just venison jerky. There are a lot of deer up in the Cascades."

The doctor took a moment to confirm her claim, and everyone relaxed. Jones had the grace to look apologetic.

"You understand… " he said.

"Yes." Juniper winced slightly at her memories, and Judy put a hand to her mouth. "We've had… experience with… Eaters."

"Eaters. I suppose we needed a euphemism," Jones said. "You can follow me. The Committee will want to speak to you."

He had a bicycle of his own, waiting; if it was one thing every town between Eugene and Portland was plentifully equipped with, it was bikes-Corvallis had had scores of miles of bike path. Jones was full of pride as they cruised down Highway 99, pointing out the signs of recovery; they were still some ways out of town.

"… and after the riots, we-"

"We meaning who, precisely?" Juniper asked.

She was impressed by the scale of planting on either side of the road; everything including former suburban lawns right up to the big Hewlett-Packard plant was in potatoes or vegetables, or spring grain. People stopped working for a moment to wave, or shout question to Peter Jones, then went back to weeding and hoeing.

And I'm almost as impressed by the lack of stink, she thought; there was a heavy scent of manure and turned earth, but none of the sickly smell of sewage or decay. Although she did catch the heavy ashy taint of burnt-out buildings as an undertone.

"Well, the agriculture faculty, mostly, and then the engineers and the history department, and some others. We were the ones who realized what had to be done-the ones who saw that letting Salem take all our food wouldn't mean anything but everyone starving. We got things organized. West to the Coast Range, now, and we're expanding."

Judy and Juniper looked at each other. This is promising, ran through her.

"Do you know Luther Finney?" she said. "Is he… still there?"

"The farmer?" Jones asked in surprise. "Why, yes-he's a member of the Committee, and not the least important one, either. He and his family helped get their neighborhood organized."

Juniper smiled, heart-glad to hear her friend was still alive, and only somewhat surprised; Luther was a tough old bird, and nobody's fool. And… it never hurts to have references.

A good deal of that happiness evaporated when they stopped at 99W and Polk. Someone had gone to the trouble of knocking down the ruins that stretched along the riverfront-she saw a wagon of cleaned-up bricks go by, pulled by a dozen sweating townsfolk-but the sheer extent of it shocked her. She could see all the way to the waterfront from here. A sour ashy smell clung to the fallen buildings. Broad streaks of destruction reached north and westward, too, looking more recent. There were a fair number of people about, but nothing like the numbers before the Change; about a tenth as many, at a quick estimate, but probably a lot more had moved out of town to work the land.

"I was here the night of the Change… presumably a lot of other people had the same idea, and headed out?"

Jones cleared his throat. "A lot happened that first week-the fires burned for days, and we had to tear down firebreaks to stop them. Then there were the food riots… we had outbreaks of cholera and typhus… a fair number of people moved off to Salem when the state government said they should… We've got about six thousand in the area the Committee controls."

She nodded, but suspected that "food riots" covered a lot of internal conflict; better to blame everything on outsiders, once order was restored once more.

She took a deep breath. It had been silly, expecting anything but devastation here, too. This was a hopeful sight.

I should be glad so much was saved, she thought. It's a good sign that they're already salvaging building materials.

Jones made another throat-clearing noise: "So you'll realize. well, probably you can't stay very long. We're still extremely short of food, just barely enough to get ourselves through to harvest, and except in special circumstances we just can't feed outsiders."

Juniper looked at the rubble that covered the site of the Hopping Toad. Odds were nobody had tried to search the basement.

"Oh, I think we may have some things that would interest your Committee," she said with a smile. "Besides our trade goods, that is."

Luther Finney nodded. "Figure you made a good choice, Juney," he said. "Most places, it was just as bad as you thought it would be, from what I hear. Salem and Albany, for sure, and there aren't any words for what we've heard of Portland. H- heck, it was bad here! If it hadn't been for you and your friend warning me, I might not have done near as well myself."

The big farmhouse kitchen was a lot more crowded than it had been that night of the Change; brighter, too, with three gasoline lanterns hanging from the ceiling. Juniper's presence required a lot of shuffling and pushing about of tables and chairs; and the meal wasn't anything like the fried-chicken feast she remembered so fondly, either. There were a round dozen sitting down to dinner, counting children, and more out in what had been the rarely used formal dining room.

She got a bowl of porridge, some anonymous mixture of grains with husks in it, and the dried beans she'd contributed from the basement cache of the Hopping Toad were served with obvious reverence. Everyone got one hardboiled egg, as well. For the main meal of the day among people doing horse-heavy manual labor, it wasn't much.

At least the porridge is fairly good. Smells nice, too, like fresh-baked bread, and it tastes a little sweet. Maybe molasses-and-rolled-oats livestock feed?

"We got to work right away, because of that. And we were lucky," Finney said, after they'd bowed their heads for grace. "Real lucky," he went on, beaming at his son and daughter and their spouses and his grandchildren and one wiggling pink great-grandchild.

Edward Finney shrugged; he was a square-built man in his forties, a compromise between his mother's stocky frame and his father's lean height. The erect brace of his shoulders showed the legacy of twenty years in the Air Force.

"We were lucky to get out of Salem before everything went completely to hell," he said. A grin. "Looks like I'm going to be a farmer after all, like Dad wanted. And my kids after me."

"Not just farming," Luther said grimly.

His eyes went to the door. Outside in the hallway chain mail shirts hung on the wall, with swords and crossbows racked near them, and pikes slung from brackets screwed into the ceiling.

"Well," he went on to Juniper. "Things are looking up, provided we can keep this sickness away; the doctors have some medicine left, but not much. The first of the garden truck looks set to yield well-I give those people at the University that, they busted their… butts getting seed out to everyone and into the ground, and we've laid claim to a fair piece of fall-seeded wheat. Lord, though, doing everything by hand is hard work! If we could get some more harness stock, that would be grand-that team of yours would have been real useful around here."

"Cagney and Lacey are useful around our place too, Luther."

He nodded. "I expect they were, but if you can spare any… We stopped using horses when I was about twelve, but I remember how."

"We could use more stock too," she said happily. "But my people were going to try scouting east for them." Then: "About this committee running things here, Luther-"

"Back!" Havel shouted as the crossbow bolt buzzed past his ears.

All three men spun their mounts and went crashing through greenery and lawn until they were out of range- a hundred yards was plenty, unless the crossbowman was a crack shot. He blessed Will Hutton's liking for nimble quarter horses and his training of man and beast; and the wide sweep of Larsdalen's lawn made it next to impossible for anyone to sneak up on them.

One nice thing about horses was that for the first ten miles or so they were a lot faster than men on foot.

"Christ Jesus, what the fuck do you people think you’re doing? " Havel shouted, rising in his stirrups to shake a fist at the window.

"They weren't trying to kill us, Boss," Josh said.

"I know that, or I wouldn't be trying to talk," Havel snarled. "But anyone who got in the way of that bolt would be just as dead, accidentally or not. What sort of idiot fires a warning shot that close without a parlay?"

Eric was flushed with anger too. He pushed his helmet back by the nasal and called out: "What are you doing in my family's house?"

A voice came from the same upper window, thin and faint with distance: "Who the hell are you, mate?"

Havel blinked at the harsh almost-British accent… An Aussie, by God. What in the hell?

"Mr. Zeppelt?" Eric said, still loud but with the anger running out of his voice. "What are you doing here?"

"Eric? Your pa bloody well hired me, didn't he, sport? I've been looking after the place and the staff."

"Wait a minute," Havel said, baffled. "You know him?"

"Well, bloody hell," the voice from the house said, dying away.

A few moments later the doors opened and a short stout man with a crossbow in his arms came out; he was balding, with a big glossy-brown beard falling down the front of his stained khakis. A tall horse-faced blond woman with an ax followed him. Several other figures crowded behind her.

"That you in the Ned Kelly suit, Eric-me-lad?" the man called. "Who're your cobbers? S'truth, it's good to see yer! C'mon in and have a heart starter-we're a bit short of tucker, but there's some neck oil left."

Twenty

"For the road is wide-

and the sky is tall

And before I die, I will see it all!"

Juniper Mackenzie broke off at the chorus as three armed figures stepped into the roadway. She stopped her bicycle and leaned one foot on the dirt road and called a greeting, putting a hand up to shade her eyes against the bright spring sun. Judy Barstow stopped likewise, and Vince and Steve waved hellos of their own; the rest of their party stopped as well, uncertain.

They'd all relaxed now that they were well into the clan's land-past the Fairfax place, and just where the county road turned north along Artemis Butte Creek-and they'd been singing from sheer thankfulness, despite the bone-deep ache of exhaustion.

Homecoming was sweet almost beyond bearing.

"Hi, Alex, Sam," Juniper shouted, returning their waves of greeting as she swung her other foot down and started pushing the bicycle towards them. "Merry meet again!"

Alex had his bow over his back, a buckler in one hand and a spear in the other; six feet of ashwood, with a foot-long head made from a piece of automobile leaf spring. He leaned the spear against a tree to put a horn to his lips-it was the genuine article, formerly gracing the head of a cow-and blew one long blast and three short ones, a blat-ting huuuu noise not like any sound metal had ever made.

Then he grinned and waved it overhead as the bicyclists approached. The other two slipped their arrows back into their quivers-which meant poking a razor blade on a stick past your ear, so you had to be careful-and tapped their longbows on their helmets in salute. One was stocky and broad-shouldered, unmistakable even in green jack and helmet and…

And a kilt, by Cernunnos! Dennie's got them all doing it, the black-hearted spalpeen!

"Glad to see you've got them alert, Sam," she said to the Englishman. "That's the second time I've been stopped!"

Because one guard post at the border isn't enough, curse the expense and lost work of it!

The other archer was a lanky blond girl in her late teens, and definitely not a member of coven or clan that Juniper remembered, despite the Mackenzie sigil on her jack-the crescent moon between elk antlers.

"Cynthia?" Juniper said. What's a Carson doing on sentry-go for us? "Does your family know you're here?"

"My folks are up at the Hall, Lady Juniper; it's Cynthia Carson Mackenzie now," the girl replied with self-conscious dignity.

Juniper felt herself flush slightly, and Alex gave her a wink as he leaned on his spear, grinning.

Goddess, it's embarrassing when people call me that!

So was the growing practice of calling her cabin the Chief's Hall. Dennie's fault again, she thought. And he's enjoying doing it to me!

"Dennie and Chuck can give you the whole story about the Carsons and the Smiths," Alex said. "Hey, fancy armor-where'd you get it? Who are the new folks?"

Juniper wasn't in a jack herself. She wore a thigh-length, short-sleeved tunic of gray-brown chain mail.

"Corvallis; and these are three of my coveners-made it out of Eugene after the Change and were on their way here, and a couple of-but you'll all get the full tale of our travels at dinner in the Hall," she said, retaliating a little for frustrated curiosity.

"Pass then, Lady Juniper," Alex said formally, rapping his spear on his buckler and stepping aside; Cynthia and Aylward tapped their helmets again.

The travelers pushed their bicycles upslope. Judy Barstow leaned over and whispered in her ear: "Maybe you should have taken a horse anyway, Lady Juniper," she said. "More dignified, for the exalted chieftain of the Clan Mackenzie… "

"Oh, go soak your head, you she-quack," Juniper grumbled, sweating as they pushed their bicycles up the slope.

"Just what I was hoping to do," Judy said. "I hope they're stoking the boiler in the bathhouse right now." Then her smile faded. "And we need to do it, just in case. I'm pretty sure we're all still clean of infection and that the fleabane worked and that we scrubbed down enough, but… "

Juniper shrugged, lightening her mood with an effort of will: "And horses are far too conspicuous and edible to take into the valley. And too valuable."

The creekside road wasn't very steep, but the chain mail shirt and the padding beneath were hot on the fine late-spring afternoon, besides weighing a good quarter of her body weight. She had her quiver, buckler, helmet and other gear slung to racks behind the seat, and the bow across her handlebars, but she still had to push the weight uphill; and none of them had eaten much for the past full day, or very well over the last ten.

She could smell her own sweat, strong under the green growing scents; the faint cool spray from the stream tumbling down the hillside in its bed of polished rocks was very welcome. They were deep in shade now too, big oaks meeting overhead, and flowers showing white and crimson and blue through the grass and reeds and shoulder-high sword ferns. The other side of the water was a steep hillside, covered in tall Douglas fir.

"It's the Mackenzie!" someone shouted as they came out of the woods into the meadowland. "The Mackenzie herself!"

A crowd of adults and more children were waving and running onto the rough dirt road ahead of her, alerted by the horn or by a runner from the outer sentries. Dennis's bulky form led them.

And yes… every third adult was in a kilt now, and half the children.

"It's herself herself!" he caroled, waving on the cheers as more people ran in from the fields.

"Will you stop doing that, you loon!" Juniper called, laughing. "You'll have them all clog dancing and painting their faces blue next!"

"There can be only One," he said, making his voice solemn and portentous.

"How about the One throttles you with your fake kilt?" she said. Then louder to the crowd, holding up her hands: "Slainte chulg na fir agus go maire na mna’ go deo!" she said, laughing: "Health to the men and may the women live forever! I said I'd be back by Beltane, didn't I?"

That was the spring quarter-day festival, not long off now, a time of new beginnings.

And my, things have been happening here, too!

There was more than one face she didn't recognize; evidently her lectures about sharing when you could had born fruit. She did know Dorothy Rose, who was not only in a kilt but wore a plaid improvised out of one of the same batch of blankets and a flat Scots bonnet with a feather on the side.

She pumped up the bellows of her bagpipes and then lead off the procession, stepping out with a fine swirl and squeal, not spoiled in the least by half a dozen dogs going into hysterics around her-Cuchulain was throwing himself into the air like a hairy porpoise breaching, wiggling in ecstasy. The rest of the people crowded around her and her companions, taking their baggage. and then suddenly seizing her and carrying her along behind the pipes, whooping and laughing as they tossed her overhead on a sea of hands.

"Put me down!" she cried, laughing herself. "Is this how you treat your Chief, returned from a quest?"

"Damn right it is!" Dennis bellowed.

She felt a huge load lift from her chest at the cheerful expressions; obviously nothing too dreadful could have happened while she was gone-dreadful by the standards of the first year of the Change, that was. Dennis was looking good himself; the kilt flattered him, and it was perfectly practical in this climate, and he had the additional excuse that none of his old clothes came close to fitting anymore.

But mostly it's playacting. Well, people need play and dreams. In bad times more than good, and there are no bad-der times than these, surely?

Jack and Muriel and Carmen were weeping openly as their fellow coveners danced them around in circles; Juniper finally struggled back to her feet and called Diana aside and gave instructions; the three were still too weak for her taste, and it would be better to get them fed and rested before the stress of meetings and explanations.

Dennis was tanned dark and wet with sweat from whatever work he'd been at; carpentry, going by the sawdust and wood shavings in the curly, grizzled brown hair on his barrel chest. With just barely enough food and more hard work than they'd ever dreamed of doing every adult in the clan had lost weight, but it looked much better on him than most. The sagging paunch had shrunk away, and the heavy muscle stood out on his tanned arms and shoulders like cables. He'd gone for a close-trimmed beard rather than the distinctly unflattering muttonchops, and overall he looked ten years younger than he had that night in Corvallis.

Sally Quinn evidently thought he was good enough to eat; she was beside him, hanging on to one arm, unconsciously curving towards him as they walked despite her mud-stained working clothes. Her delicate amber-skinned looks made a vivid contrast to his hairy massiveness; her son, Terry, walked on the other side, with Dennis's arm around his shoulders.

Now, that's only a surprise in that it took so long, Juniper thought happily. I saw that coming the day they met, I did.

She finally persuaded the mob to set her down, and even reclaimed her bicycle.

"Good thing we cleaned up yesterday," Judy grumbled. "This bunch have no idea what it's like out there."

"That's why we went on our journey," Juniper said. "To find out. But I would like a hot-water bath very, very much."

She raised her voice: "Is the bathhouse finished? And if something to eat could be arranged, that would be very welcome. We're tired and dirty and hungry, Mackenzies."

Most of the crowd went back to their work, save for Dorothy marching before; everyone had gotten used to the fact that there were never enough hours in the day to get everything done that needed doing.

And everyone's been very busy, Juniper thought, as she pushed her bicycle back westward along the dirt track that led to the Hall; the dust and ruts were worse than they'd been, with the wagon and sledge traffic.

Mental note three thousand and sixty-three: Get someone to run a scraper over the bumps and maybe pitch gravel in the holes, in our copious spare time. Or this will turn to a river of mud come autumn.

She'd left on the meet-and-survey trip because the main crop was planted. It all looked much neater now, turned earth showing green shoots and tips in orderly rows. Adults and children were at work, hoeing or kneeling to weed with trowels; Juniper almost drooled at the thought of harvest.

I crave fresh greens in an astonishing way, she thought. Not to mention food in general.

Others were laboring with pick and shovel, horse-drawn cart and wheelbarrow on the contour ditch that Chuck Barstow had laid out from the pool below the waterfall to water the garden. It was another blessing that they had a year-round stream tumbling down from the steeper hills northeastward.

Which reminds me…

She craned her head over her right shoulder for a second. The twenty-foot wheel of the mill was actually turning now; they'd been arguing over how to mount it when she departed. Dennis deserved a lot of credit for it, even if they had simply carried off most of the works from a tourist trap near Lebanon.

Nobody had been around to object-another opportunity that had been worth the risk and effort to get done before someone else had the same idea.

Ahead to westward the open land had been left in grass, a rippling green expanse starred with hyacinth-blue cam-mas flowers, better than knee-high already; grass never really stopped growing in the Willamette, and in spring it took off as if someone was pushing hard from below. Some of it was being mown by a team swinging their scythes together in a staggered row, followed by another with rakes gathering it into rows. The wild sweet smell lifted her spirits further as they passed the swaths of drying hay.

Not to mention the fact that nobody's digging the point into the ground every second stroke, or the blade into their neighbors' ankles. I nearly cut off my own foot on my first try, she remembered. Chuck's lessons have sunk in, at last.

The haymakers stopped to wave and shout greetings, and the travelers replied in kind; so did a brace of archers practicing at the butts. Improvised rail-and-wire fences made corrals for the precious horses and the livestock on the rest of the open land; there were moveable pens for the poultry and pigs. They had about twenty sheep now, with a ram among them, along with half a dozen lambs; and as many cattle.

Or more, she thought with keen interest; there were white-faced, red-coated Herefords among the cows that she didn't recognize, skinny yearling beasts that grazed with concentrated zeal as if they'd been on short rations. New horses, too…

Aha! The other emissaries' trip bore fruit as well.

The higher plateau that held the old cabin stuck out into the benchland like a steep-sided U; she was surprised at the amount the clan had gotten done there while she was away. The roof was off the main cabin, and poles stretched down to ground level to make ramps for the logs of the second story. What was really surprising was the progress on the palisade; the first log hadn't yet gone in when she left. Now a hundred feet of the defensive wall was complete.

Thank You, Goddess Mother-of-All, and You, Lord Cer-nunnos of the Forest, she thought. We take these trees from Your woods that our clan may live.

The better her group did at feeding itself, the more likely it was that some gang of killers would come and try to take it all away.

She puffed a bit as they went up the last section. The area around her half-dismantled cabin was nearly unrecognizable; half a dozen other structures in stages of construction ranging from sticks and string outlining their foundations to cellars nearly complete; dirt and rocks and ruts and horse dung in the open spaces between, sawhorses and frames and people cutting with everything from hatchets to two-man whipsaws, the clatter of hammers…

Nothing of the serenity she'd known here before the Change when it was her refuge from the world, a well of deep peace broken only when her coven arrived for the Sabbats and Esbats or by a rare guest. And yet-

And yet I don't feel the least saddened at how it's changed, she thought, waving and shouting greetings as Eilir came out of the cabin door with a book in one hand-she was helping teach school, with younger children crowding behind her.

Perhaps because now it's my home-a refuge from horror and death. Home isn't a place. Home is people.

From the rear of the cabin there came an intoxicating odor along with the woodsmoke. Juniper's nose twitched involuntarily at the unmistakable smell of barbecue; if they had meat enough to actually roast and grill, rather than throwing it into the Eternal Soup cauldrons, then things were looking up. She felt slightly guilty at the waste, but her stomach rumbled disagreement. Soup got boring.

"Now give me some peace!" she called, putting her hands on her hips and facing those who'd followed her all the way to the bathhouse door, grinning. "Let me wash, at least, and put on some clean clothes!"

They stripped to the skin before the door of the bathhouse; smoke was pouring out of its sheet-metal chimney, and Juniper's skin itched in pleased anticipation. Stripping took a little doing, when you were wearing a mail shirt; first taking off the sword belt, then bunching up the skirts as much as you could, then bending over with your hands on the ground and wriggling until it fell in a rustling, clinking heap.

"What a relief!" she wheezed-the contortions required were rather active. Like a rich armor worn in the heat of day, that scalds with safety.

The padded tunic underneath came off more easily, and soon the clean wind was telling her exactly how much rancid sweat had stuck to her skin.

It's like wearing winter clothes in summer, and then lifting weights, and not being able to change into clean. How Mike and his friends bore those hauberks, I can't imagine.

She hopped on one foot and then the other to get the hiking boots off, and scrambled out of jeans and T-shirt and underwear even faster.

"Take all the cloth and boil it in the laundry," Judy said, dumping the party's clothing in a hamper. "Boil it for fifteen minutes at least, with the special soap. Move!"

The helpers moved. Despite being tired to the bone, Juniper practically skipped up the steps and into the washing room with its flagstone floor. They'd set things up Japanese-style, that being simplest. The boiler they'd made from a big propane tank was hissing; water from that and the cold taps got splashed everywhere in glorious abandon, as the returned travelers sluiced each other down with bucketsful, soaped, rinsed again, massaged suds into their hair. The gray water ran out a drain and down a pipe into the orchard and herb garden below the plateau, so nothing was wasted.

Juniper groaned with pleasure even when her loofa hit spots that had chafed raw and the strong soap stung her eyes and the blistered bits. Eventually Judy was satisfied, and they trooped through into the next room to sink into the tub-that was a big sheet-steel grain bin, one of a series lined with planks and sunk halfway into the ground, separated by board partitions. They settled into the water, scented by herbs and the sauna smell of hot damp pinewood.

"Hey, you folks noninfectious now?" came a deep voice from the doorway. "Mind if we join you?"

"Yeah, Dennie," she said. "But don't get between me and the kitchen, or I may trample you!"

He stood dripping in the doorway; Sally was with him, and Eilir, and Chuck Barstow. Everyone tried to speak at once, and Eilir's hands flew, her slim coltish body dancing accompaniment to the signing.

Thanks to the Lady you're back, Mom. I was so worried, I've got pages of new protective spells in my Book of Shadows!

And the same back to you, my child of spring, she replied. I could feel your well-wishes every moment of night and day.

Meanwhile Dennis brought one thick hand out from behind his back. He had a bowl, a huge turned-wood thing; her eyes went wide as she saw it was heaped with vegetables: snow peas, green peas, carrots, deep-green broccoli florets, pieces of snow-white cauliflower…

Her mouth actually cramped in longing for a moment.

"Blessed be the fruits of the Lady's womb, and hand 'em over, Dennie! Don't tell me you've found some way to make veggies grow that fast!",

"Nah, we came across a big winter garden, well-mulched," he said, complying.

You could grow hardy vegetables over the Willamette's mild winters, with luck and a lot of work. Few had bothered, back when you could just drive down to the supermarket.

"Where?" she cried. "Frank Fairfax didn't have one!"

"Believe it or not, it's from the Smiths."

Juniper made a wordless sound as she popped pieces into her mouth, trying to decide whether the carrots really were as sweet as apricots, or if it just felt that way because they were the first fresh food she'd had since the Change.

And here I thought the Smiths disliked us, she thought; they were strong followers of the Evangelical minister in Sutterdown. Maybe Dixon's mellowed!

"You won't believe what dinner is," he said, as the four sank into the tub.

Eilir crowded under her mother's arm and laid her sleek dark head on her shoulder. The bowl was thick wood and floated easily, which let them push it around the circle like a food-bearing boat.

"We're having something besides Eternal Soup, from the blessed smell of it?" Juniper said, lying back with a sigh of contentment. "And fresh veggies… "

He nodded, smiling smugly. "Our hunters must be in right with Herne, or Sam the Silent's finally learning how to teach as well as he stalks. We've been getting a mule deer or whitetail every couple of days for the last ten, and then yesterday I got a young boar. All two hundred pounds of whom is over the coals as we speak. Ribs, loin, crackling, gravy, liver… "

She threw a splash of water at him as her stomach rumbled and saliva spurted into her mouth. There were plenty of feral swine in the Cascades, crossed with European wild boar introduced by hunters; they'd been regarded as pests before the Change. A lot of them hung around this section, because the hardwoods her great-uncle planted left mast for them to eat, and there was camas-root in the mountain meadows. The problem was that they were fierce and wary, and hard for mostly inexperienced hunters to take without guns. Which prompted a thought…

"Wait a minute! You got it, Dennie? As in, actually shot it yourself?"

"I found a much better method than sneaking around in the woods. I just waited up late by the gardens." He smiled smugly. "If you grow it, they will come."

A groan went around the tub.

"There aren't all that many veggies, I'm afraid, but eat, eat-it's a special occasion, after all! Oh, and Di is sacrificing some of her flour to make buns to go with the pork-and-sage sausages… "

The two younger members of the traveling party excused themselves with exquisite good manners, grabbed towels and bolted…

Or perhaps they've just got enough energy to pester the cooks, she thought. She felt her friend's description right in her stomach, but the hot water was soothing away her aches so pleasantly that she could wait. Particularly with each piece of garden truck a sweet explosion of pleasure in her mouth.

Or maybe the youngsters are off to their girlfriends. Certainly Chuck and Judy are devouring each other with their eyes, and perhaps playing touch-toes.

The brief meeting with Mike Havel already seemed like a dream; an ache went through her…

Ah, Rudy, Rudy, I miss you! You'd bless me from the Summerlands if I found a man, but who could take your place?

"So," Chuck Barstow said, tearing his gaze away from his wife's eyes, and other parts of her. "Obviously you did have luck. I couldn't believe you got Jack and the others back!"

"We had help, and until then it was a very sticky situation indeed… " Juniper began, and gave a quick rundown.

A murmur of blessed be ran through the coveners.

"Who says the Lord and Lady don't look after Their folk?" Chuck said.

He was always keen, but we're all turning more to the Goddess and the God, Juniper thought. Perhaps because there's so little else to hold on to.

When she mentioned that Luther Finney had survived, Dennis swore in delight, and Eilir clapped her hands.

"Who says you don't have the Goddess looking out for you, special?" Dennis grinned. "Little stuff and big? There were those yew logs seasoning at the bottom of your woodpile that you never got around to burning, just waiting to be made into bows… "

"That would be the God looking out for me, as Cernunnos Lord of the Forest, Dennie. But I make allowances for the ignorance of a mere cowan."

He splashed water back at her; "cowan" was Wiccaspeak for a non-Witch, and not entirely polite.

"Hey, you're playing confuse-the-unbeliever again. I have never been able to get a straight answer on whether you guys have two deities or dozens, taken from any pantheon you feel like mugging in a theological dark alley. Which is it? Number one or number two?"

"Yes," Juniper said, with all the other coven members joining in to make a ragged chorus; Eilir concurred in Sign.

Dennis groaned, and there was a minute of chaotic water-fighting. Juniper rescued the bowl and held it over her head to keep it from sinking until things quieted down again. That exposed more of her, but if everybody felt like throwing hot water at her aching, overworked, underfed body, she wasn't going to object.

"Or maybe it's just that somebody had to be lucky," he went on. "Anthropic principle-anyone still around to talk about it nowadays has to have had a string of lucky coincidences helping them, and more so every day that passes. If someone's breathing, they're a lottery winner. You, Juney, you're the Powerball grand-prizer."

Juniper's chuckle was a bit harsh; after her trip through the valley that bit a little closer to the bone than she liked. But when gallows humor was the only kind available… well, that was when you needed to laugh more than ever.

"Scoffer," she said, and continued: "Anyway, I spent time with the Committee running things in what's left of Cor-vallis; mostly the aggie and engineering faculties and some other folk-Luther's on it himself. They're talking about a meeting of the honest communities sometime this autumn or early winter to discuss mutual aid-especially about the bandit problem."

"Well, blessed be Moo U," Chuck said. "That could be really useful."

Juniper nodded. "Good people, though a bit suspicious. They can offer a lot of varieties of seeds and grafts, and stud services from their rams and bulls and stallions, and farming and building help in general. They've got real experts there; I've got forty pages of notes, advice they gave me on our problems. The difficulty is that what they want most besides bowstaves is livestock; heifers and mares and ewes particularly, to breed upgrade herds from their pedigree stock."

Chuck Barstow breathed on his nails and polished them on an imaginary lapel; Dennis grinned like a happy bear.

"Those Herefords?" Juniper asked.

"Yup. We got a small party through there about five days after you left. They got back day before yesterday, driving their flocks before them-twenty-five head of cattle, twenty sheep, six horses. Mostly breeding females."

Juniper made a delighted tip-of-the-hat gesture to the two grinning men. That solved their unused-pasture problem, with a vengeance! They could get a good crop of calves, lambs and foals too. And they could slaughter a steer every couple of weeks…

Or if we can trade for more, maybe we can spare some for Corvallis. have to arrange escorts across the valley, though… if only Highway 20 were open…

It wasn't; by all they could tell, it was a gauntlet of horrors, everything from plain old-style robbers to Eaters. Aloud she went on: "What's it like over there in the Bend country?"

Chuck went on: "The Change hit them about like us, just not so much. Bend and Madras and the other bigger towns have pretty well collapsed, but a lot of their people got out to the farms and ranches, since there weren't millions of them to start with; if anything, they're short of working hands."

That sounded familiar. It just took so much effort to get anything done without machinery, particularly since nobody really knew how to do a lot of the necessary things by hand. There were descriptions in books, but they always turned out to be maddeningly incomplete and/or no substitute for the knowledge experience built into your muscles and nerves.

"And they've got local governments functioning in a shadowy sort of way-they're calling it the Central Oregon Ranchers' Association. They've got more livestock than they can feed, too, without the irrigated pastures. this year, at least; next year's going to be tighter for them too. We traded them bows and shafts and jacks for the stock, and for jerky and rawhides. They've got bandits of their own and the ranchers who're running things over there want weapons bad. They really miss their rifles."

"Congratulations," Juniper said sincerely.

The night when she'd nearly had a fit over hitting a man in the head seemed a long way away, except when the bad dreams came. She wasn't happy about becoming case-hardened, but it was part of the price of personal sanity and collective survival.

"Congratulations!" she said again. "It sounds like the eastern slope is a lot better off, at least for now."

"What was it like out there in the valley?" Dennis said. "I still say it was a crazy risk, you going out."

"Worth it," Juniper said. "Rumor isn't reliable and we have to know what to expect. The way the world's closed down to walking distance, you don't know until you go there and see or it comes to you. I'm not absolutely indispensable, either."

"The hell you aren't," Dennis and Chuck said together.

"I may be the High Priestess, but I'm not the Lady come in human form, you know, except symbolically and in the Circle."

Chuck snorted; he tended to pessimism, as befitted a gardener-turned-farmer.

"You're here and you're Chief. We're alive where most aren't," he pointed out. "And we're doing much better than most who are still alive. The two things are probably connected. Anyway, to repeat the question… "

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 or 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…

Of course, traditionally we were a self-selected microscopic minority. All of a sudden we're an Established Church in this little hilltop world, with people beating at the door, and I'm not sure I altogether like it.

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

Which means just a large majority of us have died, rather than an overwhelming majority. Still…

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 hand-fastings 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."

She turned back to Judy: "As my Maiden, I expect you to run a turbocharged Training Circle to the max-fast but nothing skipped; I don't care how tired people are in the evenings. Let them show whether they're committed or not. That includes you, Dennie."

She paused to glare at Dennis and Sally. "We'll have a bunch of Giant Monster Combined Sabbats, OK? Initiations, handfastings, square dancing, bobbing for bloody apples. There. Is everyone satisfied?"

It was good to laugh with friends; good to have some problems that looked solvable, as well. And sometimes the Goddess just gave you a bonus. Keening over the Smiths wouldn't bring them back before their next rebirth-that was between them and the Guardians. And in the meantime…

She looked at Chuck: "I presume we're taking over the Smith place?"

The Carson farm went without saying, and the others who were coming in; if you joined the clan, you pooled everything but your most personal belongings and you pitched in as the clan decided. Life alone post-Change was nasty and brutish and for most, short; particularly for a single household isolated in a violence-ridden countryside where once again a mile was a long way to call for help.

Chuck shrugged and raised his hands in a what-can-you-do gesture he'd picked up from Judy. The Smith farm and the others were good alluvial terrace land as well, much of it planted before the Change and needing only tending and harvest this year.

She went on, musing aloud: "On the one hand, I hate to profit from the misfortunes of neighbors; on the other, the Smiths were a bunch of paranoid bigots, and the Carsons and the others will be a real asset; on the third hand, that land is going to be a gift of the Goddess … if we can hang on to it, and work it properly."

"Hell, the Smiths even had beehives," Dennis said, smacking his lips. "Which means we now have beehives. Mead… And the Georges planted a vineyard three years back."

"We can work all those farms from here, with bicycles, or sending people out in a wagon," Chuck said, giving him a quelling glance. "Thank the Lord and Lady you can't run off with a field of wheat!"

"But," Juniper said.

"But," Chuck answered. "Guarding that land's going to be the hard part. If we pull everyone back here every night. and you thought we were shorthanded before? Get ready for everyone to make like an electron-we'll all have to be in two places at once from now to Samhain! Not to mention housing; Dennie's crew are running up bunk beds for here and the Fairfax place."

Juniper made a mental tally: "With the Carsons and the others that gives us… what, sixty adults sworn to the clan, now? Blessed be, but we've been growing!"

"Fifty-nine, counting Cynthia Carson but not her brother Ray-he's seventeen come Lughnassadh. Forty-two children, half of them old enough to do useful chores or mind the toddlers. We've got more people, but a lot more land to work. It wouldn't be so bad, if we didn't have to spend so much time on guarding and sentry-go and battle training, but we do."

"Truly, by the Morrigu Herself," Juniper said, closing her eyes and juggling factors. They'd taken in as many as they could, from the beginning…

Just one year, she thought, and prayed at the same time. Just one year and one good harvest and enough seed corn, Lady Gaia, Mother-of-All. Then we can start the spiral of energy going up instead of down.

Chuck went on, as if echoing her thought: "But the food we got from the Smith place put us ahead of the game in reserves; they had a lot of oats and root vegetables in store, and all the farms had quite a bit of truck planted and some just coming ripe, besides the fruit. John Carson's a first-rate livestock man, too, which is something I'm no expert at and Sam doesn't have the time for. John was wasted without a herd to look after, I've been working off his advice since the start."

"How much grain?"

"Between the new farms and what we planted in spring, counting wheat and barley and oats together-call it eight thousand bushels all up, less fifteen percent for wastage and seed if we want to double the acreage for the fall planting, yields will be way down next year without brought-in seed…We were counting on exchanging the labor of our people and the use of our hauling teams for some of the crops anyway, but this way we get it all."

Juniper nodded. "Enough to put our diet this winter from 'just barely' to 'rude plenty,' with more to come next year, despite the way we've grown."

She did a piece of quick mental arithmetic: sixty pounds to a bushel, so… "That's multiple tons of grain; we'll need to start thinking bulk storage."

"If we can harvest it all," Dennis said. "The grain's going to come ripe real soon now-the first oats in a month, the rest from mid-July on."

"Maybe we could take in a few more refugees, then," Juniper said. "Since we're going to have a surplus. That group at the schoolhouse near Tallmar? We know they're healthy, they were grateful enough for the rose hips"-which had halted a nasty case of scurvy. "A couple of them know useful stuff like cooperage, and they'll not make it through till winter by themselves. And we could loan some seed-grain later to… Hmmm. Maybe we could throw up a mound and palisade around one of the farmhouses too, and settle some of our people there at least part-time? That way-"

The water had cooled from hot to lukewarm before they thrashed out the details to put to the clan as a whole, and it was nearly sunset outside; they all heaved themselves out, pulled the plug and began to towel down. Diana and Andy Trethar stuck their heads in.

"That pig is incredibly ready, and we're putting the sausages on, so anyone who feels like dinner had better come," she said. "The only leftovers are going to be bones for the Eternal Soup Stock."

"Yum," Juniper said, pulling a robe over her head from the stock kept ready for bathers. "Yummy yum-"

Then a disquieting thought struck her, and she turned to the others as she knotted her belt.

"Wait a minute, though-I suppose all the cowan within a day's walk of the Smiths are hopping around frothing about our taking over their land? Not to mention the sheriff! And Reverend Dixon. The Wicked Witches strike again? It's all a Satanic plot?"

"Right," Chuck and Dennis said, in chorus, as they sidled towards the door.

Dennis went on in a reasonable tone: "But we told them Lady Juniper could explain it all when she got back."

Juniper gave a wordless howl of wrath as they both ducked out-you had to be careful about spoken curses, when you knew they could stick.

She dashed after them with the skirts of the robe hiked up in her hands so she could kick both backsides; symbolically, but with feeling.

A cheer went up as she appeared in the door, and she dropped the fabric hastily; flashing the crowd wasn't exactly appropriate behavior for the head of the clan. Nearly everyone was gathered, minus the first watch of the night guard and some of those doing kitchen duty-and those were loading the trestle tables in the Hall and on the veranda and the scrap of lawn preserved before it.

Someone came up and put a wreath of wildflowers on her head, red and yellow columbine laced with lavender vetch and white daisies; everyone else was wearing one too.

I'm home, she thought. And I'm going to see my people safe; I can't save the world, but what I can save, I will.

She set her hands on her hips. "All right, then-let's eat!"

That could always be relied on to get a positive reaction, these days.

"Come away, human child

To the woods and waters wild

Weaving olden dances

Mingling hands and mingling glances

Till the Moon has taken flight… "

The voices and the strings of the small harp went plangent through the soft cool spring night, full of the green sap-scent of trees, and of the flowers along the way; there was a hint of woodsmoke and cooking from the Hall below, a breath of cooler air from the great forests of the mountains whose snowpeaks were lit by moonlight far above. The quiet rustle of many feet and the hems of their robes through the grass blended with the creaking of the forest and the night sounds of its dwellers.

Juniper had always loved this part of her great-uncle's land, even on brief visits as a little girl, frightened of the intimidating, solitary old man but bewitched by the place. Having it for her own had brought incredulous joy, and so had sharing it. The path wound up eastward from the cabin, through stands of huge Douglas firs and groves of pine and big-leaf maple, past openings and glades; sometimes the candles and lanterns of the coveners caught the eyes of an animal for a fleeting moment of green-yellow communion.

She led the procession, the hood of her robe thrown back, the silver moon on her brows, her belt woven from cords white and red and black and carrying her scabbarded athame. Behind her walked Chuck-Dragonstar in the Craft-with the elk mask and horns of the High Priest on his head, and Judy-Evenstar, the coven's Maiden-at his side; then the rest, two by two, cradling their candles and the tools of the ceremony.

The dew-wet stems of the grass seemed to caress her ankles. At last they came to the place, high on the mountain's slope, where a knee of its bones made a level space jutting. out into emptiness.

Why her great-uncle had planted a circle of trees here she'd never known; but that had been nearly ninety years ago, and the oaks rose straight and tall all about it. Their boughs creaked over her, a patient sound, waiting as they had through all those decades for their destined use.

Just outside the circle to the west was the spring that was the source of Artemis Creek-how fitting the name! It flowed clear and pure among rocks and reeds, trickling away down the slope and making a constant plashing murmur between banks glowing with the pale golds of glacier lilies and stream violets. She could feel the care and trouble melting away as they approached, the gentle familiarity of the ritual and the place soothing like cool fingers on a hot brow.

Within the enclosure was close-cropped grass, soft as a lawn but shot through with the small purple flowers of wild ginger; in its very center a shallow fire pit lined with stones. At the four quarters, brackets of wrought iron reached out from the trees. Against the northern side of the ring was a roughly shaped altar, made from a single boulder.

They halted at the northeast quadrant of the great circle. With the sword in her hand she traced the perimeter de-osil, sunwise, past the great candles flickering at the quarters in their iron-and-glass holders:

"I conjure you, O Circle of Power, that you may be a meeting-place of love and joy and truth; a shield against all wickedness and evil; a boundary between the world of humankind and the realms of the Mighty Ones… "

Stars arched above, like the glowing hearths of an endless village; the moon hung over the mountaintops, white splendor, bright enough to dazzle her eyes. When she was finished she admitted the coven and sealed the circle behind them; the Maiden lit the censer and took it up, casting a blue trail of incense and sweetness behind her to mingle with the spicy smell of the wild-ginger leaves bruised beneath their feet. Two more followed with their bowls of salt and water…

"I bless you, oh creature of Water; I bless you, oh creature of Earth; come together you power of Water, power of Earth. Cleanse all that must be clean, that this space be made sacred for our rites."

The words and movements flowed on:

"Guardians of the Watchtowers of the East, ye Lords of Air… "

Her athame's blade traced the Invoking pentagram in the air; in the eye of the mind it hung there, blue and glowing against the yellow flicker of candle flame.

"Guardians of the Watchtowers of the South, ye Lords of Fire… "

"Guardians of the Watchtowers of the West, ye Lords of Water and of Sunset… "

Facing the altar at last:

"Ye Guardians of the Watchtowers of the North! Oh, Lady of Earth, Gaia! Boreas, North Wind and Khione of the Snows, Guardians of the Northern Portals, you powerful God, you strong and gentle Goddess… "

At last all had been cleansed and purified: with Water and Earth, Air and Fire. She stood with the Wand and Scourge in her hands, facing the coven as the High Priest called:

"Hear you the words of the Star Goddess, the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven, and whose body encircles the universe!"

Juniper's eyes rose, beyond the heads of the coven and the rustling dark secrecy of the trees, to where the stars made the Belt of the Goddess across the night sky, frosted silver against velvet black. Her lips moved, but she was hardly conscious of the words that rang out:

"I who am the beauty of the green earth and the white moon among the stars and the mysteries of the waters, I call upon your soul to arise and come unto Me. From Me all things come and unto Me all must return Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you. And you who seek to know Me, know that your seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without."

Her voice rose triumphantly:

"For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire!"

The stars seemed to open above Juniper, rushing towards her as if she were falling upward or they into her, through galaxies and the veils of nebulae whose cloak was worlds beyond counting. But that infinity was not cold or black, not empty or indifferent. Instead it was filled from edge to edge with a singing light, from unknown Beginning to unimaginable End radiant with an awareness vast beyond all understanding. So great, yet that greatness looked on her, at her, into her, the atom of being that was Juniper Mackenzie.

As if all that was lifted her in warm strong arms, and smiled down at her with an infinite tenderness.

Sight and sound returned; she was conscious of tears streaming down her cheeks, and of the High Priest's tenor singing:

"We all come from the Dark Lord

And to Him we shall return

Like a leaf unfolding

Opening to new life… "

And the Maiden's alto weaving through it, the words mingling without clashing:

"We all come from the Goddess

And to Her we shall return

Like a drop of rain

Flowing to the ocean… "

Higher and higher until the song became one note and broke on the last great shout of power like a wave thundering on a beach…

With that she was herself once more, among her own in the Circle; yet still glowing with thankfulness. Only a handful of times had she felt this so utterly, but that too was good-some joys could only be had rarely, or you would break beneath them…

When the working was done and the Circle unmade, the coven making its way down the nighted trace, Chuck drew her aside.

"Something special happened, didn't it? I could feel it. I think most of us did."

She nodded solemnly. "I think… I think the Goddess promised me something, Chuck. I just don't know what."

Twenty-one

Michael Havel leaned back against his saddle and gnawed a last bite off the rib; he took a quick drink of water afterward, and a mouthful of bread as well. Angelica's homemade BBQ sauce had real authority, as well as lots of garlic.

I can just about handle it now, he thought. After years of pouring Tabasco over MREs to hide the taste. It would have killed me when I was Eric's age.

Most of the people in his neck of the woods clung to Old Country cooking habits, and Finns thought highly seasoned meant putting dill in the sour cream.

The eating part of the Bearkillers' homecoming celebration was about over; mainly variations on meat and bread, but well done; the grateful smell lingered, along with woodsmoke and livestock. It was full dark now, with a bit of a chill in the air and only an enormous darkness around their fires. Somewhere in the distance a song-dog howled at the stars, and he could hear horses shifting their weight and snorting in the corral behind the wagons.

He flipped the bone into the fire, watching as it crackled and hissed and then burned when the marrow caught. Not far away a hound pup followed the arc with wistful eyes, but she was lying on a pile of them already, stomach stretched out like a drum. Havel was thinking of naming her Louhi, after the Old Country sorceress who could eat anything.

And Christ Jesus, it's good to be home.

Will Hutton wailed a note or two on his new harmonica and set it down again.

"You really ready to get back on the road?" he said.

"You haven't been back but half a week, and busy as hell that whole damned time."

Havel nodded. "We've about outstayed our welcome in the Kooskia area if we aren't here for good," he said. "We'll start south tomorrow. Josh and Eric and I were doing fifty, sixty miles a day most of the way back."

A smile. "Tiring him out was the only way to keep Zep-pelt from playing that goddamned accordion. Christ Jesus, if you knew the hours I'd suffered listening to those things as a kid, and watching the old farts lumber around dancing to it! And the kraut version is even worse."

"He 'n' his lady did seem a mite sore when they got in," Hutton grinned. "Fact is, though, he's not bad on that squeeze-box at all."

Havel shrugged; he didn't want to argue a point of musical tastes. "So five or six miles a day with the whole outfit will be a rest-cure."

"That slow?" the Bearkillers' trail boss said.

Havel nodded: "I don't want to travel too fast; Pendleton or the Walla Walla country by July or August-we can hire out to help with the harvest, or just pick some out-of-the-way wheatfields nobody's working on and help ourselves- and Larsdalen in say October, November. By then the sickness ought to be burned out, and until then we don't go near cities."

"Bit late for plantin' surely?"

"Not in the Willamette. You only get occasional winter frosts there; you can put in fall grains right into December, and graze stock outside all year 'round."

Will frowned, turning the mouth organ over in his battered, callused hands. "Don't like what you told about this Protector mofo," he said. "Don't much like it at all."

Havel grinned like a wolf. "The guy seriously torqued me off, yeah, I admit it, but I'm not just looking for a fight. The Willamette's still the best place going, and I don't think Mr. Protector is going to stay satisfied with what's west of the Columbia Gorge, either. From what he said, he already had his eye on the waterways inland, too-and you can sail all the way up to Lewiston, if you hold the locks. That's cheap transport nowadays."

Hutton's lips pursed in thought. "Bit far to reach, things bein' the way they are."

"Not him directly. But remember that deal I told you he offered me? One gets you five that's his boilerplate-and every would-be little warlord within reach of Portland gets the offer. No shortage of them; they're like cockroaches already. Give them some organization and backup, and things will get nasty all over this neck of the woods."

Ken Larsson nodded. He and Pamela Arnstein were sitting close with their hands linked; that had surprised Havel and flabbergasted Eric when he got back, but even Signe and Astrid seemed to be taking it in stride.

Ken spoke slowly, deep in thought: "Not surprising, given what you told me about his academic background. I think he's jumping the gun a little-it's a bit early to try for full-blown feudalism. But it's certainly more workable than trying to keep the old ways going."

"Like, we've got to learn how to crawl before we walk," Havel said; a corner of his mouth turned up. "Get tribes and chiefs right, before we can have barons and emperors."

"More or less."

Hutton had been thinking as well: "Mike," he said after a moment, "Does it strike you as a mite strange that the plague, the Death, got as far as Lewiston so fast?"

"Hmmm. The Columbia-Snake-Clearwater is an easy travel route, and refugees from the coast did get that far… You suggesting Professor Arminger helped it along? Let's not make him the universal boogeyman."

"Could be; or not," Hutton said. "For sure it's helpful to him that way, keeping the interior all messed up while he gets himself set. Anyway, I see what you're drivin' at. Stay here, go there, we're still gonna end up fightin' the man. Unless we move far south or east, and that's damn risky too. Could be worse there and we'd be committed. Only so many months in the year and we need to find somewhere we can put in a crop. The Willamette… "

Havel nodded. "It's best because things are worse; no organized groups to stop us settling… well, not in parts of it, at least. There's that bunch of monks around Mt. Angel, and Juniper Mackenzie and her neighbors, and Corvallis, and a bunch of small holdouts around Eugene, but that chunk around Larsdalen's clear. Most of the central valley is empty."

"Thought you said there were families holdin' out 'round the Larsson spread."

"By hiding. Nothing organized-and if they don't get someone to organize them, none of them will last out this winter. You need some security to farm. I think we could provide it."

Just then Signe came back to their campfire with a basket, followed by Angelica with a bottle and tray of glasses, and Astrid staggering under a collection of wooden struts and a large rectangular object. The basket held little chewy pastries done with honey and nuts; the bottle was part of the town's gratitude, good Kentucky bourbon-priceless now, and usually jealously hoarded. Havel poured himself a finger of it, and splashed in some water.

"What've you got there, kid?" he asked the younger Larsson girl indulgently; she had that epic-seriousness expression on her huge-eyed face.

He'd noticed some smudges on her fingers lately, Magic Marker and paints. Signe had real talent when it came to drawing, but Astrid was better-than-competent herself. Apparently Mary Larsson had thought it was something suitable for her girls to learn.

She gave him a smile, and went to work. The struts turned out to be an artist's tripod and easel; the strange object she put on it was about the size and shape of a painting, or a very large coffee-table book.

"Dad helped me find the paper," she said, one hand on the cloth that wrapped it. "At the Office Max where we got all that stuff, you remember? Art supply section-non-acid-pulp drawing paper. And Will did the covers."

"We weren't doin' anything with that piece of elk hide," Hutton said, a little defensively. "I like to keep my hand in at tooling and tanning leather. It'll be right useful, one day."

"Signe helped with the drawings. And I took notes from everyone about everything!"

Havel felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach; Astrid's pale eyes had taken on that dangerous, joyous glint they had when she came up with something truly horrifying.

She used her new dagger-which she wore every waking moment-to slit the string binding, then whipped off the cloth. Beneath lay a book-leatherbound board covers, rather, with an extensible steel-post clamp at the hinge for holding the paper. Across the front, tooled into the elk hide, was: the CHRONICLES OF LORD BEAR AND HIS FOLK: THE RED BOOK OF LARSDALEN.

The letters were archaic-looking in a sloping, graceful fashion, carefully picked out in gold paint.

Havel felt his throat squeeze shut and his eyes narrow. Signe sank down beside him, elaborately casual, and leaned towards him on one elbow.

"She needs to do this, Mike. It's like therapy. Go with it? Please?"

He forced himself to relax. A crowd had gathered, standing behind him. It was the usual suspects-everyone who didn't have something urgent to do. There wasn't much in the way of entertainment on a typical evening, and this made a delicious change.

Astrid threw back the cover. The pages inside were large in proportion, big sketch-pad size. Across the top something was written in spiky letters; between the odd shapes and the flickering firelight it took him a moment to read:

The Change came upon us like a sword of light!

The Change came upon us like a monumental pain in the ass, Havel thought; but the drawing below was interesting enough-complete with him wrestling with the Piper Chieftain's controls and Biltis yeowling inside her carrier box-the actual cat was sniffing around people's feet and hissing at the hound pup.

Astrid began to read the text. It was written in the Roman alphabet, cunningly disguised to look runic. Her high clear voice made the mock-archaic diction sound less ridiculous; absolute faith could do that. He almost rebelled when he got to the appearance of the Three Aryan Brotherhood Stooges, and she faltered a little.

"You said they were like orcs, Mike!"

"Ahh… Yeah, kid, I did say that. Go on, you're doing great!"

I didn't say they had fucking fangs, girl, or arms that reached down to their knees, or little squinty yellow eyes and scimitars!

Signe murmured in his ear again: "It's sort of metaphorical. Showing them outwardly the way they were inwardly."

Havel smiled and nodded. It probably was theraputic for Astrid to do this; and looking around he found amusement and fondness on a lot of the adults' faces. The problem was that the youngsters were just plain fascinated, and God alone knew what stories they'd be repeating when they were parents themselves. He kept smiling and nodding when the Eaters became a nest of goblins, his meeting with Arminger turned out to be a confrontation before a huge iron throne, with the Protector ten feet high and graced with a single slit-pupiled red eye in the center of his forehead…

And Juniper Mackenzie was evidently a sorceress Amazon with a glowing nimbus of power around her, a wand trailing sparks, and guarded by Scottish-elf longbowmen.

"More whiskey," Havel said hoarsely, holding his glass out without looking around. "Please."

"Was she really like that?" Signe said. "Beautiful and mysterious?" A smile: "I sort of resent it when you go fighting cannibals with anyone but me, you know."

Tell the truth, Havel told himself.

"Beautiful? Nah," he said. "Cute, in a… cute sort of way, sort of like a scruffy hobo pixie. About five-three, redheaded, thirtyish-looked like she'd been spending a lot of time out of doors. Skinny. Nice singing voice, though."

Astrid finished up: "And to Larsdalen and home, he showed the way!"

There was a moment of silence, and then a burst of whooping cheers; he wasn't quite sure whether they were for him, as the subject of the epic, or for Astrid's treatment of it. It certainly came out more colorful than the dirty, boring, often nauseating reality. Eventually they dispersed towards the open space in front of the wagons; there had been talk of dancing. Of course, that meant the Bearkiller analogue of music…

"Got the storyteller's gift, that girl," Will Hutton said. "Tells things the way they should have been." He popped one of the pastries into his mouth.

"Married this woman for her cookin'," he went on contentedly.

Havel grinned at the smoldering look Angelica gave her husband; the fire that slipped down his throat as he sipped the bourbon was no more pungent-sweet.

"My cooking? De veras? And here I thought it was because my brothers were going to kill me and the worthless mallate cowboy I'd taken up with!"

"Now, honeybunch, you know it was your momma I was frightened of," he said, mock-penitent.

Then he looked over at the cleared area, brightly lit with half a dozen big lanterns. "Oh, sweet Jesus, no, no! Spare us, Lord!"

Havel glanced that way himself, and snorted. Eric Lars-son had a feed-store cap on backward, and a broomstick in his hand, evidently meant to be a mike stand; he was prancing around-

"Christ," his father said. "A capella karaoke rap! How could it come to this? How did I fail him?"

"That boy may be able to jump some," Hutton said dourly. "But Lord, Lord, please don't let him try to sing!"

Luanne Hutton leaned against the wagon behind Eric, holding her ribs and gasping feebly with laughter. A few of the other young Bearkillers were making stabs at dancing hip-hop style, and doing about as well as you'd expect of Idaho farm kids with no musical assist.

Hutton surged upright. "C'mon, Angel. We got to put things right; let's find Zeppelt and his squeeze-box."

Havel looked at Ken Larsson. "What gives with you getting your vineyard guy from Oz of all places?"

"Australia has a lot of fine winemakers," Larsson said defensively. "Hugo Zeppelt is first-rate. Smart enough to hide out in that old fallout shelter my father built, too, and get our horses into the woods when the foragers from Salem came by."

The chubby little Australian and his tall gangling blond wife had pushed Eric out of position with the Huttons' help, and they were warming up on their instruments- accordion and tuba. Oom-pa-oom-pa split the night, already familiar from the trip back; Josh and Annie Sanders started organizing the dance-they had no musical talent to speak of, but she'd helped at church socials a good deal in her very rural Montana neighborhood.

"Do-si-do, turn your partner," Havel said. "Not only an Aussie with an accordion, but an Aussie who's obsessed with polkas!"

"He's from the Barossa valley in South Australia, and it was settled by Germans," Larsson said defensively. "And Angelica likes it."

"She's Tejano," Havel said. "San Antonio and the Hill Country used to be lousy with krauts. The oom-pa-pa beat spread like the clap. Put Zeppelt and Astrid together, and in a generation we'll all be wearing lederhosen to go with the pointed ears. the Tubas of Elfland, going oom-pa, oom-pa."

"C'mon," Pamela said; she'd been quiet that evening. "Let's dance, oh fianc?Mike's in one of his grumbling moods. Signe and the dog have to listen but we don't."

They wandered over to where couples were prancing to the lively beat. Signe sipped at her own whiskey; her cheeks were a little flushed. For a moment they leaned shoulder-to-shoulder; then Louhi crawled between them, licking at hands and faces.

"All right, that settles it. I christen thee Louhi, and you can start learning manners. Been ten years since I had a dog."

Signe smiled, tousling the young hound's ears. "I'd have figured you for a dog sort of guy, Mike."

He shrugged. "I was, when I was a kid. Had this German shepherd called Max-very original, hey? From the time I was eight until just before I graduated high school."

He smiled, looking into the flames: "He used to sleep on the foot of my bed, bad breath and gas and all, and I even took him hunting."

"It's odd to take a dog hunting?"

"Max? Yeah, sort of like taking along a brass band. He saved a lot of deer from death. My dad couldn't stand it- the mines were always laying people off with about a week's warning, and there were four of us kids, so a lot of the time we needed that venison. But Max, he'd howl something awful if you tied him up when you got in the canoe."

"Canoe?"

"Yeah, we had this creek that went by our place, and ran through some marshland-man, when I remember what my mom could do with wild rice and duck-then into a little lake with some pretty good hunting woods. Even better if you took a day or two and portaged a bit. White pine country before the loggers got there; lots of silver birch, and maple. We had a good sugarbush on our land, in the back of the woodlot."

"It sounds lovely," she said. "In fact, it sounds like Sweden-we visited there a couple of times, Smaland, where our family came from originally."

Havel's mouth turned up. "Yeah, the Iron Range country is the grimmer parts of Scandahoofia come again-it's even more like Finland. Makes you wonder if our ancestors had any brains at all-those of present company excepted, of course."

"Que?" Signe said.

That was one of Angelica's verbal ticks, and a lot of people had picked it up while he was gone.

Havel mimed wonder: "Like, did they say to themselves: Ooooh, rocks and swamps, crappy soil, mosquitoes bigger than pigeons, blackflies like crows, and nine months of frozen winter blackness! Just like what we left. To hell with pushing on to golden, mellow California-let's settle here!"

Signe laughed and wrinkled her nose: "I saw the Larsson home in Smaland, and you could grow a great crop of rocks around it. Oregon probably looked really good by comparison. I mean, Sweden's a pretty nice place to live now-or was before the Change, you know what I mean-but back in the old days, you could starve to death there."

"And in 1895 the Upper Peninsula of Michigan didn't have a lot of Russians trying to draft you into fighting for the Czar, yeah, point taken. Anyway, Max, he would have starved to death if he'd had to hunt on his own-what the shrinks call poor impulse control. He got his nose frostbit a couple of times trying to track down field mice in winter; he'd go galloping across the fields with his muzzle making like a snowplow. I was too young myself to train him properly when he was a pup."

Louhi crawled further up, stuck her nose into Mike's armpit and promptly went to sleep.

"I'll do better with Louhi here. Hounds scent-hunt anyway."

Signe considered him for a while, head on one side: "What happened to Max?"

"Besides scaring the bejayzus out of deer and squirrel, getting into pissing matches with skunks, and shoving his face into a porcupine's quills once a year? He used to get into the maple-sap buckets in the spring, too, pretty regular. Ever tried to get that stuff out of the fur of a hundred and ten pounds of reluctant Alsatian?"

"In the end, I meant."

"In the end? Got run over a little while before I graduated high school," Havel said. "Broke his back; I found him trying to crawl home. I had to put him down."

And he kept expecting me to make it better, Havel remembered. Right up to the second I pulled the trigger.

"That must have been terrible," Signe said, laying a hand on his.

He turned his over, and they linked fingers. "Yeah, I missed him."

To himself: I couldn 't have proven in a court who did it, but then, I didn’t have to.

A flicker of grim pleasure at a memory of cartilage crumbling under his knuckles: Beating me out with Shirley was one thing, but killing my dog…

"Is that why you didn't get another dog?"

"Nan, didn't have the time, and it's not fair on the animal if you don't-they're not like cats," Havel said. "Now things are different."

Signe nodded, and looked over to the open space; it was square-dancing now.

"That fiance thing seems to be breaking out all over," she said. A pause: "You… you've been sort of quiet since you got back, Mike. I… there wasn't anything with this Juniper woman, was there? Eric won't talk about it at all."

"Just giving things a rest," he said, sitting up and resting his free arm on his knees. "And yeah, I won't deny there was a sort of mutual attraction, pretty strong for short acquaintance. She had a lot of character."

Signe froze, her hand clenching on his, and he went on: "But we decided we both had commitments elsewhere; she had her kid to look after, and her people. I do have commitments here, don't I?"

Signe nodded, flushing redder. "Ummm… I hope so. Nice night for a walk out?"

Havel uncoiled to his feet, pulling her up. "Walking's nice, but we can do that any night. Right now, why don't we dance?"

She smiled, a brilliant grin that made her eyes like turquoise in the firelight.

"I'll dance your feet right off, mister!" she said.

A room on the new second floor of the Chief's Hall held the clinic. Juniper Mackenzie swung her feet down from the stirrups and over the edge of the table; her voice was almost a squeak: "I'm what?" she said.

"Pregnant."

"Are you sure?"

The room was still a bit bare; glass-fronted cabinets, rows of medicines and instruments and herbal simples, anatomical diagrams, and a well-laden bookshelf. It smelled of antiseptic and musky dried wildflowers and fresh sappy pine. Judy finished washing her hands-the stainless-steel sinks had come from the kitchen of a Howard Johnson's ten miles northwest-and turned, leaning back against the counter as she dried her hands on a towel and spoke tartly: "Look, Juney, I'm not a doctor and I've felt inadequate often enough trying to do a doctor's job here, but I am a trained midwife and I can recognize a pregnancy when I see one!"

"I simply can't believe I'm… " Juniper said, letting the sentence trail off weakly.

"Pregnant," Judy said with sardonic patience. "Preggers. Knocked up. Expecting. Enceinte. In the family way. Have a bun in the oven. Providing a home for someone back from the Summerlands-"

"I'm familiar with the concept! I thought I was just missing a period because I'd lost weight-how could this have happened?"

Judy's voice dropped into a sugary singsong she never actually used with children: "Sometimes, little girl, when the Goddess and the God fill a man and woman's hearts, so that they love each other very much, they show their love by-"

"Oh, shut up, you she-quack! What am I going to do about it?"

"You want a D and C? Pretty straightforward at this stage."

"No," she said, firmly and at once, surprising herself a little; her mind had apparently made itself up without telling her. "No, I'm definitely keeping it."

She looked around the room. It was bright and cheery, morning sun bright on fresh-sawn wood and paint, but the only personal touch so far was a watercolor Eilir had done for Judy back before the Change. It showed the Goddess as the Maiden of Stars; the features were done in a naif schoolgirl style, but held an enormous benevolence.

I never thought there would be any child but Eilir, she thought. But it seems You had other ideas…

"Not much doubt about who the father is," Judy said. "Not unless there's been a miracle-and you're not a virgin, not Jewish, and that legend's from the wrong mythos anyway."

"No," Juniper said. "No doubt at all. But let's not be spreading the parentage abroad, shall we? It could be… awkward down the line."

"Well," Judy said, briskly practical, starting a new page in the file on the table. "It isn't your first time; that's good. How did Eilir go-apart from the measles, that is?"

"She was premature, eight months and a bit, but otherwise fine; seven pounds and no problems, no anesthesia and no epidural, three hour delivery. No morning sickness, even. I was just sixteen, and didn't realize what was happening until about three months in."

Judy's brows went up. "Well, that's an old-fashioned Catholic upbringing for you."

"Speaking of my mother, now that I think back on it, I remember her saying that I was easy, but a bit early, too."

"Likely to be a genetic factor with the premature birth, then," she said. "Have to check carefully later."

"I'll just have to make him feel welcome, I suppose," Juniper said, smiling a little and putting a hand on her stomach.

"He?"

"Suddenly… I've got a feeling."

Judy wrote again: "Now, we'll put you on the special diet and the supplements-thank the Mother-of-All and the Harvest Lord we aren't quite as short of food as we were! Apart from that, pregnancy isn't an illness and a first-trimester fetus is extremely well cushioned, so there probably won't be any problems; you won't have to start being really careful until the fourth, fifth month unless something unusual happens. Report any spotting, excessive nausea-"

Juniper nodded, listening… but half her mind was drifting over the mountains eastward.

Mike, Mike, we didn't plan on this! How are you faring?

Twenty-two

"Something's happened here," Michael Havel said thoughtfully, lowering the binoculars and looking at the rising smoke in the distance.

The June wind stroked his face; it was that perfect early-summer temperature that caresses the skin the way a newly laundered pillowcase does at night.

Even better if I didn’t have to wear this damned ironmongery and padding, he mused absently-in truth, he'd gotten so used to it that he only noticed it when he consciously thought about it.

"Pretty country otherwise," Signe said. "Lovely colors."

He nodded. Acres of blue flowers nodded among the rippling tall grass along the fringe where hills gave way to flatland, sprinkled with yellow field-daisies; this area of upland plain in western Idaho had been called the Camas Prairie once, when it was the hunting ground of the Nez Perce bands.

His horse shifted its weight from hoof to hoof, tossing its head and jingling the metal bits of its bridle, eager to be off and doing.

"Quiet, Gustav," he murmured, stroking a gauntlet down the arch of muscle that made its neck.

Most of the rolling lands southwestward were green with wheat or barley rippling in the breeze, with field peas or clover, save where a patch of fallow showed the rich black soil. Distant blue mountains surrounded the plain on all sides, giving it the feel of a valley; small blue lakes and little farm reservoirs added to the impression, but there were occasional gullies or creekbeds below the general level. He couldn't see any cattle from here, but a herd of pronghorns ran through a wheatfield, bounding along at better than fifty miles an hour with their white rumps fluffed-something had spooked them.

He handed the glasses to Signe and leaned his hands on the saddle horn, cocking his head slightly to one side. There was a rustling chink of chain mail as his helmet's rear aventail slid across the shoulders of his hauberk. He had good distance sight, but hers was about the best he'd ever run across. To the naked eye the pillar of smoke was distant, and the cluster of buildings at its base barely visible where they nestled under a south-facing hill.

"I can't see anyone moving either," Signe said at last. "I'm not sure I can see people at all. They should be out fighting the fire, if there's anyone there at all. But… I don't like those crows and buzzards. See the clumps?"

That could mean plague, he thought. Trying to burn the bodies, and then the last survivors crawling away to die… but I doubt it. That's a farm, not a town; they wouldn't have enough people for that.

"We'd better scout it, cautiously," Havel said.

With people so afraid of sickness, news spread even more slowly than it had right after the Change. It was doubly difficult to keep informed, and doubly needful.

"Luanne and Astrid?" he asked.

They were still the best riders, bar Will, and they rode light; it was unlikely anyone could catch them. Plus Astrid was still their nearest approach to a good mounted archer… and it was his observation that when girls were told to go take a look at something and come back, they were less likely to get themselves into unnecessary trouble by pushing on regardless.

"I wouldn't send them together," Signe said.

There was a smile in her voice. Havel looked over at her, and there it was, framed by the round helmet with its bar-nasal in front and curtain of chain mail to the rear.

"I thought Astrid thought Luanne was, ah, radical cool," he said.

"She did," Signe said; now she was grinning. "But not anymore."

"Que?"

"Astrid caught her making out with Eric behind the chuckwagon two nights ago, which was disgusting-and I see her point, you know? The thought of someone making out with Eric… that is disgusting. Anyway, then Luanne told her how she'd understand when she was older and her figure developed-a real low blow. So now Astrid's not talking to her anymore."

Havel made a strangled sound. "I don't know if she's worse when she's pretending to be an elf, or when she's relapsed into being a real human teenager. I do know-"

The young woman finished his sentence for him: "-that Gunney Winters never had to face this sort of problem in the Corps. They wouldn't have taken Astrid at Parris Island, though, Mike."

"We'll do the scout ourselves, then. Get Will."

"You're the bossman."

She reined around and cantered off. Havel looked after her briefly; the rest of the outfit were waiting a quarter mile back, wagons-there were a lot more of them now- stopped on alternate sides of the narrow ribbon of road, with outriders on the edge of sight, others working at the horse and cattle herds to keep them bunched, and some folk on foot by the vehicles.

Half old-style cattle drive, half gypsy caravan, half small-scale Mongol migration, he thought wryly.

Then he turned back to look at the long country ahead, thinking. He was uneasy, and he'd never liked that when he didn't know precisely why. Presently hooves thudded behind him, and he nodded over his shoulder.

"Will."

"Mike?" Will Hutton said. "You called?"

"Well, first thing, Luanne and Astrid have decided to spend the afternoon together making armor links, to teach them to enjoy each other's company more."

Hutton grinned. Making the rings was about the most unpopular chore in the Bearkillers: not particularly hard, just tedious, frustrating, finicky detail work with dowel and pliers, wire cutters, a little hammer and punch, and roll after roll of galvanized fence wire.

"What do you think of that place just behind the ridge-line for a camp?" Havel went on, pointing.

"Fine, if you want to stop this early."

They all looked up to estimate the time; it was about two o'clock. Pre-digital mechanical watches had become a valuable type of trade goods, along with tobacco and binoculars and bows.

Hutton went on: "Flat enough, good water and firewood, good grass, good view. You don't want to try and make Craigswood today?"

Havel shook his head. "I'm not easy about what I can see from here," he said. "I want to find out more before we're committed."

"Nice if we could do some trading here, at Craigswood or Grangeville, or just pick up stuff," Hutton observed. "There's a lot of things we could use, or are gettin' short of, not to mention more remounts. Some training we could do easier if we stopped for a week or two, as well."

"That all depends," Havel said. "See that line of smoke there? Looks like a farm or a ranch house where something got torched, and nobody's moving, but you can see it's been worked since the Change-fresh-plowed land, and spring plantings. We're going down to check. Have Josh and a squad keep an eye out from here, out of sight on the reverse slope. If things have gone completely to hell in this neighborhood, we may have to take another detour."

Will nodded and reined his horse about, gliding away at a smooth trot.

Christ Jesus, I was lucky there, Havel thought; he didn't think he could be as good a chief-of-staff and strong-right-arm, if their positions were reversed.

"Equipment check," he said to Signe, and each gave the other's gear a quick once-over.

They were both in full armor. That was Bearkiller practice anywhere not guaranteed safe, now that they had enough chain hauberks for the whole A-list. He looked at the bear's head mounted on his helmet for an instant before he put it back on and buckled the chin cup.

Well, it doesn 't smell, and it makes good shade on a sunny day, he thought.

He'd gotten used to the way the nasal bar bisected his vision, too.

Plus bear fur won't make the helmet work any worse if someone tries to hit me on the head.

He told himself that fairly often; it beat admitting that he just didn't want to deal with one of Astrid's sulks. They both pulled their bows out of the leather cases and fitted arrow to string.

We're mounted infantry with cavalry tastes, he thought to himself. But if we keep working at it harder than anyone else, then we're going to have a real advantage.

They put their horses down the slope, slowly until they were in the flat, then up to a walk-canter-trot-reverse rhythm, their eyes busy to all sides. The horses were fresh, and the day was pretty; at least until they came to the dead cattle.

"Very dead," Havel muttered.

Hacked apart, and the bodies rubbed with filth, and a chemical smell under the stink made him suspect poison, which a couple of dead crows confirmed. He looked beyond them to the fields. The wheat was a little over knee-high on a horse, with the heads showing-harvest would be in another five weeks or so-but great swaths of it were wilted and dying.

"Roundup," he said. Signe looked a question at him.

"See how the wheat's wilted in strips? Someone went through spraying weed killer on it, Roundup or something like it. The stuffs available in bulk anywhere there's much farming and it acts fast."

Her face had gotten leaner and acquired a darker honey-tan, but it still went a little pale. Havel nodded. Wasting food like this was the next thing to blasphemy.

The dirt road joined a larger one, and they slowed down as the drifts of dirty-brown smoke rose ahead. From the clumps of squabbling crows, he knew there were bodies of men or beasts in the fields to his right. Men probably, given what had been done to the cattle; the way they didn't fly away also told him that the feast hadn't been disturbed.

So did the coyote that sat looking at him with insolent familiarity, and then trotted off unconcerned. Havel suppressed an impulse to shoot an arrow at the beast. It had already learned that men weren't to be feared as much as formerly…

But if men are less the wolves will be back soon, you clever little son of a bitch, he thought grimly. Try pulling tricks like that with them, trickster, and you'll regret it.

When they came to the sign and gate they were coughing occasionally whenever the wind blew a gust their way, but the smoke smelled rankly of ash, not the hot stink of a new fire.

"Clarke Century Farms," Havel read. "Homesteaded 1898."

The first body close enough to identify was just inside, tumbled in the undignified sprawl of violent death; a fan of black blood sprayed out from the great fly-swarming wound hacked into his back with a broad-bladed ax, where the stubs of ribs showed in the drying flesh. There was already a faint but definite smell of spoiled meat.

Someone had taken his boots, and there was a hole in the heel of one sock.

A dog lay not far beyond him, head hanging by a shred of flesh, its teeth still fixed in a snarl. The bodies hadn't bloated much, although lips and eyes were shrunken, but that could mean one day or two, in this weather; the ravens had been at them, too. In the field to the left was a three-furrow plow that looked as if it came from a museum and probably did. A stretch of turned earth ended where it stood.

One dead horse was still in the traces before it, and a dead man about four paces beyond, lying curled around a belly-wound that might have taken half a day to kill him. Two of the big black birds kaw-kawed and jumped heavily off the corpse when Havel turned his horse to take a closer look.

"Crossbow bolt," he said, when he'd returned to his companion. "Looks like it was made after the Change, but well done."

They passed another pair of bodies as they rode at a walk up the farm lane to the steading, near tumbled wheelbarrows.

The main house hadn't been burned; it stood intact in its oasis of lawn and flower bed and tree; a tractor-tire swing still swayed in the wind beneath a big oak, and a body next to it by the neck. There was laundry on a line out behind it. The smoldering came from the farmyard proper, from the ashes of a long series of old hay-rolls, the giant grass cylinders of modern fanning, and from where grain had been roughly scattered out of sheet-metal storage sheds, doused in gasoline and set on fire.

The oily canola seed still flickered and gave off a dense acrid smoke. There was a wooden barn as well, gray and weathered; a naked man had been nailed to the door by spikes through wrist and ankle. He was dead, but much more recently than the rest, and he was older as well, with sparse white hair.

Written above his head in blood was: Bow to the Iron Rod! There was a stylized image underneath it, of a penis and testes.

Signe was hair-trigger tense as they rode up to the veranda; she started when the windmill pump clattered into the breeze. Water spilled from the tank underneath it, which looked to be recent-probably the windmill was an heirloom, only brought back into use since the Change.

"Wait here," he said, returning bow to case and arrow to quiver.

He swung down and looped his reins over the railing of the veranda. His horse bent its head to crop at the longer grass near the foundation.

"From the look, whoever did it is long gone. But stay alert."

Havel drew his backsword and lifted his shield off the saddlebow, sliding his left forearm into the loops. There was a scrawled paper pinned to the door with a knife-inside the screen, so it hadn't blown free. Printed on it in big block letters with a felt-tip pen was: FOR REBELLION AGAINST DUKE IRON ROD!

Underneath it was a logo, a winged skull, human but with long fangs.

"And I suppose the Lord Humungous rules the desert, too," he muttered; it didn't seem like simple banditry. "What the hell is going on here?"

Then he nudged the door open with his toe-it was swinging free, banging occasionally against the frame, and went through with blade ready and shield up.

There was no need for it. He blinked at what he saw on the floor of the living room, glad he hadn't sent Signe in- she'd toughened up amazingly, but he just didn't want this inside the head of someone he liked. He made himself do a quick count as he went through the rooms of the big frame farmhouse; there was no way to be precise, without reassembling everyone. Nothing moved but some rats, although he saw coyote tracks; probably one of the scavengers had gotten in through a window.

"That's where the women and children were," he said grimly as he came out.

Signe swallowed and nodded; she didn't bother to ask what had happened to them.

Havel went on: "I make it at least twelve adults, and quite a few kids. Say six families, give or take."

He looked around at the steading. This had been a large, prosperous mixed farm; probably the owners had called it a ranch, Western-fashion. Judging from the stock corrals and massive equipment that stood forelorn and silent in its sheds, it was something on the order of three square-mile sections or more-six hundred and forty acres each. That was typical for this area, which grew winter wheat and barley and canola and other field crops and ran cattle.

Before the Change, that would have meant one family and occasional hired contract work, but…

"Probably the farmer's family took in a lot of townspeople," Signe observed. "Relatives, and refugees."

They'd seen that pattern elsewhere, once the nature of the Change had sunk in.

"Yesterday?" Signe went on. "Day before?"

"Dawn yesterday," Havel agreed, narrowing it down a little more. "They had food cooking on a wood range and the kids were mostly in PJs."

Signe winced. "The bandits ran off most of the stock, looks like. I suppose we should look for anything useful, but-"

"But I'm not going into the buzzard business, until these folks are buried," Havel said for both of them.

Signe's head came up, looking back the way they'd come. A light blinked from the ridgeline there, angled from a hand mirror. They both read the Morse message. Not for the first time, Havel blessed the fact that Eric had been an Eagle Scout; he'd been full of useful tricks like that. He even knew how to do smoke signals.

Twenty-plus riders bound your way approaching from southeast on section road.

Signe took a mirror out of a pouch on her sword belt and replied, then looked a question at Havel.

"We'll meet them out by the gate," he said. "If they look hostile, we can run-tell Will to have everyone ready. I don't think we'll have to fight; whoever did this wasn't planning on coming back anytime soon, in my opinion."

When they halted at the junction of lane and dirt road, she said quietly: "I hate this kind of thing, Mike. I hate seeing it and I hate smelling it and I hate having to think about it later."

He leaned over in the saddle and gave her mailed shoulders a brief squeeze; like hugging a statue, but as so often with human beings it was the symbolism that counted.

"Me too," he said. "But I hate something else worse- the sort of people who do this shit."

"Yes!"

He glared around. There was no reason why people here had to die. It was far away from the cities and their hopeless hordes, and for the first year or so there would be more food than people could handle-plenty of cattle, more grain than they could harvest by hand from last year's planting. They weren't short of horses, either, and with some thought and effort they'd be able to get in hay and sow a good grain crop come fall; nothing like as much as they usually planted by tractor, but more than enough to feed themselves and a fair number of livestock.

It was security that was the problem: without swift transport, or more than improvised hand weapons, without phones and radios to call for help…

Light winked off metal in the distance where the road came over a rise, revealing movement.

Which is why I had all our gear done in brown or matte green, he thought, with pardonable pride.

He unshipped his binoculars and focused; two dozen, all right, all men and riding as if they knew how. The one in the forefront had a U.S. Army Fritz helmet, and a couple of the others did as well, or crash-helmet types. Several wore swords, Civil War sabers probably out of the same sort of museum that had yielded the three-furrow plow; the others had axes or baseball bats, and two had hunting bows.

Mr. Fritz also had a county sheriff's uniform, and a badge… as they drew closer, he saw that several others had badges as well, probably new-minted deputies. The sheriff was in his thirties, the other men mostly older-no surprise there, either. The average American farmer had been fifty-three before the Change.

"They look righteous," Havel said. "Signe, take your helmet off, but keep alert."

She did, and shook back her long wheat-colored braids; that tended to make people less suspicious, for some reason. He turned his horse's head slightly to the left, and kept his bow down on that side with an arrow on the string, not trying to hide it but not drawing attention to it, either.

"Afternoon," he said, holding up his empty right hand when the riders came near.

The sheriff looked at them, giving their horses and gear and faces a quick, thorough once-over; he was a lean hard man with tired blue eyes and light-brown hair going gray at the temples.

"You're no bikers," he said; his men relaxed a little too.

"Jesus Christ!" one of the riders muttered to a companion. "It's King Arthur and Xena the Warrior Princess."

"Shut the hell up, Burt," the sheriff said. "What's going on here?"

Havel pointed up the laneway, then back over his shoulder.

"Our outfit's passing through. We saw the smoke from that ridge back there, and thought we'd take a look. Someone killed everyone at this farm, burned their grain stores and canola and hay, killed some of their stock and ran off the rest, and I think sprayed Roundup on their standing grain. It's real ugly in there. Signed by Duke Iron Rod, whoever or whatever he is."

Several of the men cursed; one turned aside, hiding tears. The sheriffs long face seemed to acquire some more lines.

"We're too late," he said. "Henry, you go check."

A fist hit the pommel of the sheriffs saddle, making the horse sidestep. "They hit three farms this time, and led us by the nose from one to the other! Now they're headed back."

He shook himself and looked at Havel. "You're passing through? You look a lot better fed and armed than most of the road people we see."

"Thought we might stop and feed our beasts up a bit, if you can spare the grazing. And we can trade," Havel said. "We've got a farrier and smith, a first-class horse man, an engineer, couple of construction experts, a leatherworker, a doctor and a really good vet. Plus some weapons- swords, arrows, shields, armor."

He held up his recurve, twanging the string after he dropped the arrow back in its quiver.

"Plus the ones who made this, and our armor." That raised some eyebrows. "So we won't be begging."

"Say!" one of the posse said, nodding towards the image on their shields. "Aren't you the Bearkillers?"

As Havel nodded, he turned to the sheriff. "Bob Twofeather told me about 'em, remember? They were up on the Nez Perce rez for a bit. They helped with those guys who'd gone crazy and started cutting people up."

Havel nodded. "That was us. We went over to Lewiston, nearly. Once we heard what was happening there we decided to turn back and try crossing into Oregon a little further south."

Everyone flinched a little at that; the Black Death scared even the bravest. Havel took off his own helmet.

"Yeah, you're the Bearkiller jefe," the man said. "They call you Lord Bear, right? Got the scar killing a bear with your knife, was what I heard."

Havel shrugged, mouth twisting a bit in irritation at the fruits of Astrid's imagination. And it was worse than futile to go around correcting every urban legend, like the one about the bear…

It's a rural legend, actually, he thought with mordant humor. Amazing how they spread with no TV. And anyway, it's helpful psyops.

Aloud he went on to the sheriff: "I could bring down some of my people, help you with cleaning up. We don't have the sickness. And you're welcome to share our fire tonight. We should talk."

The sheriff thought for a moment and then nodded decisively. The man he'd sent to the house returned, pale-faced and scrubbing at his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Kate Clarke's missing," he said, which brought more curses and clenched fists. "The rest of them are all there."

"Right," their leader said. "Louie, you go get the doc and tell him I need a bunch of people checked over to make sure they're clean."

He turned to Havel as his rider galloped off southwest-ward. "No offense."

"None taken. We're careful too."

"I'm Robert Woburn, county sheriff. Since the Change."

"Mike Havel," he replied. "Boss of the Bearkillers."

They moved their horses shoulder-to-shoulder, and he stripped off his right-hand glove for a quick hard shake. The back of the glove was covered with more ringmail, leaving only the palm and the inner surface of the fingers plain leather.

The sheriff turned to his men: "We'll get these people buried, and then the rest of you can get back to town and tell everyone what's happened. No use in trying to catch them now. I'll stay here and bring these folks in tomorrow; it'll take all day with wagons and a herd. Henry, you tell Martha I'll be late, but I'll have some guests tomorrow. Jump!"

Twenty-three

Duke Iron Rod-even he seldom thought of himself as Dave Mondarian anymore-rolled off the woman. She was the new one, taken in the latest raid, but she'd stopped screaming and fighting by now. Pretty, though, and young-eighteen or thereabouts, healthy farm-girl type.

"Get out," he said, yawning and stretching and scratching. "Go do some work."

She'd rolled over onto her side; his broad hand gave a gunshot slap on her butt and she rose obediently, stepping into the briefs and belting on the short bathrobe that was standard wear for the new captures. It made them feel more fearful and obedient; and besides, it was convenient.

"Wait," he said, and stood to piss in the chamber pot. "Take that, too."

"Yes, Duke Iron Rod," she said, and scurried out.

I don't care what the Protector says, Iron Rod thought. Duke's fine, but nobody is going to call me grace.

He heard a smack and yelp from the next room; that was Martha, his old lady from before the Change. She liked to keep the new bitches in line.

"Don't make her spill it!" he shouted, pulling on his black leather pants. "You'll clean it up yourself if she does!"

Gotta get the plumbing working, he thought, as he stamped his feet into the heavy steel-shod boots. Pots smell and they're a pain in the ass.

The problem there was that this place was on top of a hill-it was a lot easier to defend from a height, but without power-driven pumps it was also hard to get water up here. The hand pumps on the first floor worked well enough for drinking and washing water, but not to run the toilets on the upper stories, according to the plumbers. Since they didn't change their tune after he hung one of them off the walls, they were probably telling the truth.

The rooms he'd chosen for his own were in the west corner of St. Hilda's, on the fourth floor; this one still had a window, although there was a pair of heavy steel shutters ready to swing across it and leave only a narrow slit. One of the new crossbows was racked beside it, and bundles of bolts, and a half-dozen short spears for throwing.

He liked standing there, or even better up in one of the bell towers, and looking out over the land that he was making his. A white grin split his face as he thought of that: Even fucking wheat-country looks better when it's your very own private Idaho!

Today he went out into the outer room of this suite; it was fixed up with tables and sofas, as well as more weapons racked on the walls and his armor on a stand. It was full of the good smells of food, too, and his stomach rumbled. Martha had breakfast waiting; a big beefsteak with fried eggs on top, and hash browns and coffee. It all still tasted a little funny, except for the coffee, and the cream in that was different too. He supposed it was because it was all fresh country stuff, right from the farms or the cows.

When he'd wiped his mouth he looked at Martha; she was a tall rawboned woman with faded bleach-blond hair, a couple of years younger than his thirty-eight.

"You gotta get the girls working on keeping this place cleaned up. The doc says we'll all get sick, otherwise, especially the kids."

"Then stop the boys crapping and pissing in corners 'cause they're too lazy to go downstairs or look for a pot!" she said. "Or tell 'em to go live in the stable with the fucking horses!"

He liked the way she stood up to him-had in the old days, too, even after a beating; she'd stabbed him in the foot, once, when he knocked her down, put him on crutches for weeks.

"Yeah, I'll work on that," he said mildly.

It was a warm day, and he didn't bother with a shirt. He did pick up his great sword in its silver-chased leather sheath, buckling it across his back on a harness that left the hilt jutting over his right shoulder ready to his hand. The weapon was a favorite of his, a present from the Protector like a lot of their new gear; it had a winged skull as a pommel, and the two-handed grip and long double-edged blade suited his style. The knife he tucked into its sheath along his boot was an old friend from before the Change, though.

Then he went out into the corridor. "Moose, Hitter," he said to the men on guard, slapping their armored shoulders in passing. "Go get some eats, bros."

They were old-timers from the Devil Dogs; not too bright, but loyal as dogs. Pleased grins lit their faces as they clanked away.

The place did smell a little gamy as he walked down to the staircase. On the floor below, big arched windows looked down from the corridor onto the courtyard. Iron Rod threw one of them open-the air outside was fresher.

The block off to the east had been the church; it had the two towers, and big doors gave in onto it. From the rear, two wings ran back to enclose the court, ending in a smooth curtain wall.

They used the church as the main dining hall these days; his followers were spilling out of it right now, except the ones nursing hangovers. The big hairy men were loud and happy this morning, after a successful raid; he'd have to give them a couple of days off, before he got them working on weapons practice again, and riding. They were good guys, tough and reliable, but most of them weren't what you'd call long on planning.

Iron Rod was; he'd made the Devil Dogs a force to be reckoned with in Seattle's underworld over the last ten years, made those washed-up old geezers in the Angels back off, and the gooks and greasers and niggers respect him. The drug trade was competitive; you didn't stay in business long-or stay breathing-if you couldn't think ahead and figure the angles. He'd come through the automatic-weapons anarchy of the crack epidemic still standing because he thought with something else besides his fists and his balls.

Another man approached along the gallery, and Iron Rod watched him with the same instinctive wariness he would have a brightly patterned snake.

Baron Eddie Liu wasn't one of Duke Iron Rod's gangers. Neither was the huge figure that followed him, dressed in rippling armor made from stainless steel washers on leather, faceless behind a helmet with only a T-slit for vision and carrying a heavy war-hammer over his shoulder. Even among the Devil Dogs he was impressive.

Those two were the ambassadors from Portland, the Protector's men… from what he'd heard, Liu was one of the Protector's roving troubleshooters.

And he's smart, too, he thought, watching the slender figure in the dark silk shirt, black pants and polished boots and fancy chain belt.

But this ain't Portland, Iron Rod thought. This is my turf now.

Then he turned to the archway, raised his fists and bellowed, a guttural lion roar of dominance and aggression. All eyes in the court turned to him. He knew he cut a striking figure; as huge as any of his followers, with thick curly black hair falling down on massive shaggy shoulders and a dense beard spilling down the pelt of his chest.

Unlike most of his men he was flat-bellied, though-had been before the Change, too. Muscle ran over his shoulders and arms like great snakes wrestling with each other; every thick finger bore a heavy gold ring, and two gold hoops dangled from his ears. The face between was high-cheeked, hook-nosed, the eyes brooding and dark.

"Devil Dogs!" he shouted. "Dog-brothers!" That brought a chorus of howls and barks and yipping.

"Devil Dogs rule! We beat these sorry-ass farmers again! We took their food and their cattle and their horses, we burned their barns, we fucked their bitches!"

A roaring cheer went up and echoed off the high stone walls of the courtyard.

"Pretty soon, we'll have Sheriff Woburn hanging from a hook!"

There were half a dozen set in the walls now, between the towers and over the old church doors, taken from a slaughterhouse and mounted in the stone. All were occupied at present, but he'd clear one for Woburn, when they caught him. A wordless howl of hate went up at the sheriff's name, hoarse and strong.

I got a serious jones for Woburn, the Devil Dog chieftain thought. Worst I've had since those pissants ran us out of the Sturgis meet back in '94.

"The prairie is mine! All bow to the Iron Rod!"

A chant went up, falling into a pattern: "Iron Rod! Iron Rod! Duke! Duke! Duke!"

Most of them hadn't known a Duke from a Duchess and thought both were country and western stars, back before the Change. He'd been fuzzy on it himself until the Protector's people explained, but he liked the sound now.

When he turned from the window, Liu and his troll were there, which he liked rather less; so was Feitman, the Devil Dogs' own numbers man, a skinny little dude in black leathers with a shaven head and receding chin. He also carried two knives, and he was as fast with them as anyone Iron Rod had ever seen. The boys respected him, despite the time he spent with ledgers and books, and with computers before the Change.

"We just wanted to say good-bye," Liu said.

He was skinny too; some sort of gook, although he had bright blue eyes. You didn't want to underestimate him, though.

"The Protector's going to be real pleased with the progress you guys are making," he said. "And with the horses, provided we can get them down the river and past the locks."

Iron Rod grunted. Then he spoke: "Something I've been wanting to ask."

Liu made a graceful gesture.

Fag, Iron Rod thought, then shook his head. Nah. He'd made quite an impression on the girls here. And even if he was a fag, he'd still be dangerous as a snake. Watch him careful.

"What I'd like to know is why the Protector is giving us all this help over the past couple of months," Iron Rod went on.

And it had been a lot of help; weapons, armor, some skilled workers and a couple of instructors. Surprisingly, those had been even more useful than the swords and scale shirts; disconcertingly, they'd stayed more afraid of the Protector than of Iron Rod, even behind his walls and among his men.

Most useful of all had been the advice on how to take over this turf, and how to run it afterward.

"He's not exactly giving it all away," Liu said, his left hand on the hilt of his long curved sword-a bao, he'd called it.

"We're getting the cattle and horses-those'll be real useful, and they're sort of scarce west of the Cascades right now. When you're set up here, you'll send men to fight for the Protector on call, like we agreed. And you'll want to buy lots of stuff from Portland; we'll take a rake-off on that."

Iron Rod nodded. "Yeah, yeah, but that's all sort of, what's, the word, theoretical. And does the Protector trust me that much?"

The blue eyes went chilly. "Nobody stiffs the Protector, man," he said, in a flat voice the more menacing for the absence of bluster. "Nobody. Not twice, you hear what I'm saying?"

Iron Rod wasn't afraid of Liu, or his master; he wasn't afraid of much. He was good at calculating the odds, and he blinked as he thought.

"Maybe," he said. "My word's good on a deal, anyway. It's the Protector's angle I'm trying to figure."

Liu looked at him with respect-he'd always been polite, but Iron Rod knew that his appearance made people underestimate his brains. That was useful, but it was still pleasant to see the gook's opinion of him revise itself.

"It's what the Protector calls strategy," he said. "We want to get rid of all the old farts anywhere we can-the sheriffs, the mayors, army commanders, all the types who think they can run things like they did before the Change. Those wussies in Pendleton, they look like they might cause us a lot of trouble in times to come. With you strong here, and you being the Protector's man, we'll have their balls in a vise."

Iron Rod nodded somberly, looking westward. He wasn't worried about Lewiston or Boise; the plague was finishing off what the Change had left. Craigswood and Grangeville he could take care of himself; if he left anything standing there, it would be because it was useful to him. Pendleton-the main center of eastern Oregon's farming and ranching country-hadn't been hit nearly so hard; they were getting their shit together, and it might be a real problem later.

"Yeah," he said. "I can see that. Tell the Protector, anytime he wants to take them on, once we've settled our accounts here-"

He put out a massive hand and slowly clenched it into a fist, as if squeezing a throat.

"First things first," Liu said. "You gotta take care of Woburn, and then build the rest of those little forts, like the Protector said, and get men to put in 'em and keep the farmers working. You know what the Protector says. There are only two ways to live now; farming, and running the farmers. We're working on that back west of the mountains right now."

"Yeah, yeah," Iron Rod said; it was a good idea and he was going to do it, but he didn't like being hectored. "Don't get your balls in a twist, bro. Woburn'll be hanging from a hook pretty soon, and I'll pickle his deputies' heads in vodka before the snow flies."

Liu shuddered. "One good thing about Portland, it doesn't snow much," he said.

The great steel-clad figure behind him rumbled agreement.

"Pansies," Iron Rod said, grinning. He'd been from upstate New York, back when. "Say, one thing-you're Chinese, right?"

"Right. Born in New York, father from Guangzhou- Canton to you round-eyes."

"How come the blue eyes, then?"

Liu grinned back. "Hey, my momma was a Polack. Ain't you never seen West Side Story?"

Oooof, Juniper thought, straightening up for a second and rubbing at her back. Then: "Oooof!" as it twinged her, reminding her she was thirty-thirty-one at next Yule-not eighteen, and that she'd been working from before dawn to after sunup since the grain started coming ripe two weeks ago.

Harvest would come just before I'd be off the heavy-labor list, she thought.

So far all pregnancy had done for her was give her a glow and an extra half-inch on the bust.

It was a hot day; July was turning out to be warm and dry this year in the Willamette, a trial for the gardens but perfect for harvesting fruit and grain. The cool of dawn seemed a long time ago, although they were still two hours short of noon.

Ahead of her the wheat rippled bronze-gold to the fence and its line of trees. Cutting into it was a staggered line of harvesters, each swinging a cradle-a scythe with a set of curving wooden fingers parallel to the blade.

Skriiitch as the steel went forward, and the cut wheat stalks toppled back onto the fingers, four or five times repeated until the cradle was full; shhhhkkkk as the harvester tipped it back and spilled them in a neat bunch on the ground; then over and over again… A dry dusty smell, the sharp rankness of weeds cut along with the stalks, sweat, the slightly mealy scent that was the wheat itself.

Birds burst out of the grain as the blades cut, and insects, and now and then a rabbit or some other small scuttling animal. Cuchulain and a couple of other dogs went for them with a ferocity so intent they didn't even bark; they'd all grasped the fact that they had to supply more of their own food by now, as well as working to guard or hunt.

Each of the dozen harvesters had a gatherer behind him; Chuck Barstow was the first, over on the left-hand end of the line, with Judy following behind him, and Juniper was binding for Sam Aylward at the far right-hand position; those were their two best scythesmen, and it helped to pace the others.

Not to mention pacing the binders, she thought, wheezing a little; the thick-bodied ex-soldier cut like a machine, muscle rippling like living metal beneath skin tanned to the same old-oak color as his hair.

Planted by tractors, cut by hand. The last wheat planted with a tractor this world will see in a long, long time.

The thought went through idly as she scratched and stretched again, feeling the sweat running down her face and flanks and legs.

Aylward also worked in hat, boots, a kilt and nothing else, and looked disgustingly comfortable, relatively speaking. Juniper was running with sweat too, but she wore loose pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a bandana under her broad-brimmed hat; the sun would flay a redhead like her alive if she didn't. Every bit of cloth in contact with her skin was sodden, and it chafed. Unlike some, she didn't find the Willamette's rainy, cloudy winters a trial.

So I bundle up, Lord Sun, despite the heat and the awns sticking to me and itching in every place imaginable including some I'm still shy about scratching in public, she thought. It's very unreasonable of You.

The damned little bits that broke off the heads and floated to stick on your wet skin and work their way under your clothes were called awns, according to Chuck. They were a confounded nuisance any way you took it.

She rubbed at her back again, and looked over her shoulder, mostly to stretch-something went click in her spine, with a slight feeling of relief. Much more of this twenty-acre stretch was reaped than wasn't, and it was the last field-two ox-drawn carts were already traveling across it, with workers pitching up sheaves. The Willamette had surprisingly rainless summers, and you didn't have to leave the sheaves stooked in the field to dry except for the seed grain.

The sight was a little bizarre; the carts themselves were flatbeds, each with two wheels taken from cars and vans, drawn by converted steers under hand-whittled wood yokes.

Juniper shook her head; you had to get used to that sort of contrast, in the first year of the Change. She took a swig of lukewarm water from her canteen, moved her bow and quiver and sword belt forward a dozen paces and Ayl-ward's likewise, and bent to work again.

Grab an armful-sized bundle of stalks as the cradle had left them, move them forward, grab and move, grab and move, until you had enough for a sheaf-a bundle as thick as you could comfortably span with both arms. Then you held it in front of you, grabbed a handful just below the grain ears, bent the straw around the whole bundle at the middle, twisted and tucked the end underneath to hold it… and then you did it all over again, and again.

So this was what the phrase mind-numbing toil was invented for, she thought. I wonder how many others are making that discovery!

At that, most of them were doing about half what the books said an experienced worker could finish in a day. She tried not to think again, mentally humming a song instead. It was easier if you could get into a semitrance state, where time ceased to flow minute-by-minute. Gradually her hands and legs and back seemed to move of their own volition.

A heartbreaking share of the grain in the valley wasn't being harvested at all, going to waste from plague and fear and lawlessness, something that made her stomach twist to think of.

Then someone called out; she stopped in midreach and looked up, shocked to see the sun past the noon mark.

"Blessed be!" she said, and many more voices took it up; there were shouts of sheer joy, and some of the younger harvesters managed an impromptu bit of dancing.

They weren't nearly finished anymore; they were finished. Everyone grouped around her in a circle; she wiped a sleeve over her face and gathered up the last of the wheat. First she tied it off as she had the others; then she went to work shaping it, with legs and arms and a twist of straw for a mouth.

"Hail to the Goddess of the ripened corn!" she said, laughing and exhausted, bowing before the sheaf. "We thank You, Mother-of-All, and the Harvest King who is Your consort."

Later they'd take the dolly back to the Hall; and then there were the rites of Lughnassadh next week, when the Oak King gave way to the Holly. But for now they all admired the Queen Sheaf as it was carried across the field towards the southeast corner and shade on the end of a scythe-shaft.

"Go us!" someone yelled, and everyone took it up for a moment, pumping their fists in the air. "Go us! Mackenzies rule!"

"Do you realize," someone else said reverently, when the chant had died down, "That from now on we can eat bread every day?"

"In the sweat of our brows," Juniper said, grinning and wiping hers.

That got a chorus of groans. But it's true, she thought. And the bread is very, very welcome.

They all picked up their tools and weapons and followed the Sheaf to the southeast corner of the field where an oak and a group of Douglas firs cast a grateful shade. There were four big aluminum or plastic kegs of water on two-by-four X-trestles as well; she drank, washed face and hands, peeled off bandana and shirt, poured several cupfuls over her head, drank again. Heat seemed to radiate away from her, like a red-hot poker cooling, as if her hair was flame in truth.

"Dinner!" someone cried.

Eilir drove the delivery cart, which was one of her chores; two-wheeled, with a single ex-cow-pony between the shafts. The soup came in two cauldrons, one double-walled aluminum, the other thick pottery; both types held the heat well. After they ate, they could help the loaders get as much of the cut wheat as possible out of the fields today.

Congratulations! Eilir signed, as eager hands unloaded. What a beautiful Queen Sheaf! Now we can get back to work on the palisade!

Bits of straw and grass and twigs flew in her direction; she giggled and held her buckler up in front of her face to protect herself from the mock attack before she turned the cart with a deft twitch of the reins and trotted off.

Juniper ambled over and raised the lid on the pottery container, full of Eternal Soup-but a considerably richer variety than spring's.

"Well, blessed be," she said. "Onions, carrots, peas, all still recognizable. Wild mushrooms. Turnips. Potatoes."

There were chunks of mutton, too, not yet boiled down to stock; she addressed them in a tone dripping with sympathy: "Blessed be-is that the G-L-L I see? Greetings, Goddamn Little Lamb! You've gone completely to pieces. I'm so sorry… actually, I'm sort of happy to see you like this!"

Everyone laughed at that; even Sam Aylward smiled, though it looked as if it hurt.

Goddamn Little Lamb was-had been, until day before yesterday-the stupidest of the ewes in the clan's painfully acquired little flock; which was saying something, since they'd discovered that the hardest part of raising sheep was keeping them from killing themselves. They might be near-as-no-matter brainless in every other respect, too stupid to walk through an open gate, but in self-immolation they showed boundless ingenuity.

GLL had come close to taking several inexperienced shepherds with her while she threw herself off high places, nearly hung herself on low-lying branch forks, tried to poison herself on unsuitable vegetation, and finally succeeded in drowning herself as she attempted to reach some floating weeds in the millpond, got bogged in the mud, and sank nearly out of sight. Eilir had gone in with a rope to pull the carcass out…

The good part in herding sheep was that you usually didn't have to slaughter them yourself; all you had to worry about was getting to the body before the coyotes did.

Besides the soup there were baskets of-

"Oh, smell that smell!" Chuck said, reaching in for the bread under the towel.

The loaves were round, mushroom-shaped as if they'd been raised and baked in flowerpots-mostly because Diana and Andy had found that clay flowerpots did make excellent containers for baking, and there were a lot of them available. The loaves had an eight-spoked pattern cut into their dark-brown tops; the sides and bottoms were honey-brown, with just the right hollow sound when flicked, and the coarse bread made from stone-ground flour was fresh enough that it steamed gently when torn open by eager fingers.

Every bit as good as they baked at MoonDance, Juniper thought happily. A bit crumbly-they were using soft white t winter wheat-but very, very tasty!

There was butter too, now that they'd gotten more milkers; creamy yellow butter in Tupperware containers, strong-tasting and rich-the mill turned a big barrel-churn as well as grindstones. The first cheeses were already curing in the damp chill of the springhouse beside it. Juniper anointed her chunk of loaf with a lavish hand, watching it melt into the coarse brown bread.

People settled down to concentrated munching; it seemed like a long time since this morning's oatmeal and fruit. Juniper felt an inner glow when she went back for a second bowl and realized that there was enough for everyone to eat until they were full, at an ordinary field supper rather than a special occasion.

That hadn't happened much until the last few weeks.

How many times did I get up from a meal with my stomach still clenching, and have to go right back to work? she thought. Far too many. Being that hungry hurts. Goddess Mother-of-All, Lord of the ripened grain, thank You for the gifts of Your bounty!

There was even a basket of fruit, Elberta peaches, their skins blushing red amid the deeper crimson of Bing cherries. She snaffled two of the peaches and a double handful of the cherries; most of the fruit crop was being dried and pressed into blocks or turned into jam or otherwise preserved, but they were so good fresh from the tree. The juice dripped from her chin onto her throat and breasts, but there was no point in being dainty; the bathhouse awaited anyway, and the harvesting crews got first turn.

Chuck looked over at her. "Got one of those deep-wisdom Celtic sayings to lay on us, your Ladyship?" he grinned.

She threw a peach pit back at him. "Indeed and I do.' Nнl aon tinteбn mar do thinteбn fйin."

"There's no hearth like your own hearth?" he said. "Hey, no fair, that's not relevant!"

"Close but no cigar," she said, waggling her eyebrows and leering. "This one sounds a lot like that, but it actually means: There's no sore ass like your own sore ass."

That got a universal, rueful chuckle. "Hey, what about a song?" Judy asked.

"Well, I'm not playing today," Juniper said, with a pang. "Not until my hands are in better shape." That brought groans of disappointment, and they sounded heartfelt.

It's different, in a world where all music has to be live, she thought. I'm good, but am I as good as everyone says, these days? Or is it just that there's no competition?

Although Chuck and a few others were gifted amateurs, come to that.

Surprisingly, Sam Aylward produced a wooden flute and began to pipe; Chuck grinned and started to tap a stone on the back of his scythe-blade for accompaniment; someone else beat a little tambourine-shaped hand drum they'd brought along this morning-songs were a lot more usual on the way to work than afterward.

She recognized the tune at once, cleared her throat and began, her strong alto ringing out in the slow, cadenced measure of the song's first verse:

"Let me tell the tale of my father's kin

For his blood runs through my veins-

No man's been born

Who could best John Barleycorn

For he's suffered many pains!"

Then a little faster:

"They've buried him well beneath the ground

And covered over his head

And these men from the West

Did solemnly attest

That John Barleycorn was dead!

John Barleycorn was dead!

But the warm spring rains

Came a'pouring down

And John Barleycorn arose-"

It was a very old tune, and popular:

"And upon that ground he stood without a sound

Until he began to grow!

And they've hired a man with a knife so sharp

For to cut him through the knees-"

More and more joined her, but then the voices jarred to a sudden halt.

A haunting huu-huu-huu from the west brought heads around; that was the alarm from the mounted sentries, blowing on horns donated by slaughtered cattle. Everyone felt uncomfortably exposed here; the valley floor was dead flat and the road net was still in good shape; with bicycles raiders could strike from anywhere. Horses were faster in a sprint, but men on bicycles could run horses to death over a day or two.

Aylward laid down his flute and rose as smoothly as if he hadn't spent the hours since dawn swinging a twenty-pound cradle scythe, usually with half a sheaf of wheat on it. He picked up his great yellow longbow and strung it the quick, dirty and dangerous medieval way-right foot between string and stave, the horn tip braced against the instep from behind the anklebone, hip against the riser, flex the body back and push the right arm forward and slide the cord up into the nock at the upper tip.

Juniper used the more conservative thigh-over-riser method for her lighter weapon, and then relaxed slightly at the next horn call.

All around her people paused as they reached for jacks and bucklers and spears and quivers.

Huu-huu-huu, huuuuu-huuuuu, repeated twice. Three short and two long meant friendly visitors, not attacking bandits, in the current code.

The sentry rode over the ditch and into the field from the western edge, raising Juniper's brows again; it was Cynthia Carson Mackenzie, with ends of blond hair leaking past the metal-and-leather cheekpieces of her bowl helmet. She was in jack and full fig-longbow and quiver across her back, buckler hooked over the scabbard of the shortsword at her belt, and spear in her right hand. That also held the reins of a second horse.

"Where's Ray?" Juniper asked as she pulled up.

Sentries never operated in groups of less than two, and it was her brother's mount the blond girl was leading, with the stirrups tied up to the saddle. The usual patrol was three, and three threes to make a squad; mystically appropriate, and solidly practical.

"He's with the others," Cynthia said. "We thought you'd better come quick, Lady Juniper. It's Sutterdown-they're here, by our… by the old Carson place."

"Someone from Sutterdown?" she replied.

She took a moment to put her shirt back on; Sutterdown was a straitlaced community these days. Then she slung her quiver over her back on its baldric and thrust her strung bow through the carrying loops beside it before she buckled on her sword and dirk.

"We told them no visitors until the sickness passes out there."

"No, not just visitors. The whole town, and a lot of others. Lady, you'd better come."

"Coming, coming," Juniper said, alarmed. "Sam, get the word out."

Anything out of the ordinary was likely to be a threat. Not while we're getting the grain in, please! she thought, as she put a foot in the stirrup, swung aboard, and took the reins.

Have they gotten hit by the plague, Goddess forfend?

That wouldn't make them up stakes and head for Mackenzie land, though. Nobody let in anyone who might be infected; and anyway, from what she'd heard, Sutter-down had been singularly fortunate-which in turn was fortunate for Clan Mackenzie, since Sutterdown and its associated area neatly blocked off the rest of the Willamette and made a buffer against the Death.

They cut across the laneway opposite, through a field in shaggy pasture with a couple of dozen recently acquired and painfully thin ranch-country Herefords gorging themselves in it, and then along a dirt-surfaced, tree-lined farm lane in grateful shade to the old Carson place.

The laneway from that gave out onto a paved local road; the house was on a slight rise, brick-built, a hundred and twenty years old, and until recently it had been bowered in century-old maples and oaks and ash trees.

Those had been cut down and a square was pegged out about the farmstead, where the ditch, mound and palisade would go when they had time after the harvest. Juniper regretted the trees-they'd been beautiful, and had stood so long-but you couldn't leave cover near someplace you intended to live. In the meantime it was their border post and base for the frontier patrols.

Juniper's eyes widened as she saw the crowd filling the road beyond the house. There were at least a hundred people there, both sexes and all ages, and a round dozen vehicles, horse- or hand-drawn; all of the men and a lot of the women were armed, mostly with improvised weapons of various sorts, spears made from fitting knives to the ends of poles, pruning hooks, axes, machetes, a scattering of bows and crossbows-and Aylward-style longbows they'd bought in the past few months. Few had any body armor, or worthwhile shields.

They also looked thinner and dirtier and more ragged than her clan on average, and a few were bandaged; some of the bandages seeped blood. She recognized individuals from Sutterdown, and the farms about that centered on it.

If they've run into a bandit attack they can't handle, that's bad. That's very bad.

The area between her lands and Sutterdown had been tranquil-by post-Change standards-not least because both communities were fairly well organized, and acted together against reivers and Eaters.

Most of them rested quietly, except for the crying of children. There were five armed Mackenzies strung across the road, spears or bows in their hands. Three of the Sutterdown folk stood arguing with the guards, trying to come closer and then flinching back at shouts of warning. It didn't look like a fight brewing-they wouldn't have brought their families along if they were going to try and run the clan off the disputed Smith land-but she didn't like it at all. They knew about the quarantine regulations; and had their own, for that matter.

"Stand back there, and we'll talk," she called as she reined in; the horse's hooves rang hollow on the asphalt.

Juniper dismounted; no sense in towering over the men waiting for her and putting their backs up even more. Men were strange about things like that, even the best of them-which these weren't.

"Sheriff Laughton," she said, nodding in greeting as polite as you could make without coming close enough to shake hands; he was a middling man of about her own age, in a long leather coat covered with links of light chain sewn on with steel wire.

"Dr. Gianelli." Slight and dark and balding, glaring at her.

"Reverend Dixon." Heavyset before the Change, sagging now, and glaring twice as hard as the doctor, in a black business suit and tie that fit him like a flopping sack. There was a mottled purple look to his face that might be anger, or might be ill health, or both. Judy would have prescribed a regimen of herbs and meditation to control choler, and willow bark to thin the blood.

"We need to talk to you, privately," the preacher said abruptly, stepping forward; he had a Bible in his hand, with a golden cross gleaming on the cover and his finger inside it marking a place.

One of the Mackenzies leveled his spear and prodded the air six feet in front of the Sutterdown man with a growl. The bright whetted steel and the tone stopped the cleric as if the point had been at his chest. The spearman spoke: "That's Lady Juniper, to you! The Mackenzie gave you your titles! Show some manners, cowan. You're on our land."

Juniper held out her hand soothingly, making a patting motion at the air. "Ray, let's be tactful. Manners work both ways."

Then she turned back to the Sutterdown leadership; as she did so she stripped the glove off her right hand. One of the flaps from a burst blister had been bothering her. She bit it off and spat it aside, then caught the odd looks directed at her.

"We're just finishing up our harvest?" she explained, puzzled. The Sutterdown folk would be too.

"You're harvesting, personally?" Sheriff Laughton said. "Lady Juniper," he added hastily as the guards scowled.

"I'm the clan's leader by the clan's choice," she said shortly. And to Anwyn with your stupid rumors about the Witch Queen.

Aloud she went on: "I'm not their master. Everyone takes a turn at the hard work here. And what brings you here on this fine day, with all your people?"

Dixon took a deep breath. From what she'd heard, he was the driving force who'd held Sutterdown together, persuaded and shamed and tongue-lashed and sometimes outright forced people into cooperating and doing what was necessary; a strong man, if not a good one, and very shrewd. The fact that he was here asking for help showed that.

"We were attacked," he said bluntly. "Not by the ordinary sort of trash, road people and Eaters-we could deal with them. By about a hundred men, organized, with good weapons-much better than ours."

All three flicked their eyes to the improvised militia among the crowd on the road, and then to the near-uniform, purpose-made equipment the Mackenzie warriors carried.

Dixon cleared his throat and continued: "They hit us just before dawn, killed six of our people who tried to resist, ran us out of town. They claim-their leaders claim-to be from Portland and say they've come to settle and govern the area, and they made demands."

"Demanded that we give them a third of our crops, and every family send someone to work for them one day in three!" Sheriff Laughton said indignantly.

The doctor took up the tale: "Said they'll burn the town and all the farms if we don't obey! They say they work for… what was it, the Portland Protective Association? And said their leader is the baron of this area."

"The Protector, that was who they talked about mostly," Dixon said. "Perhaps. ah, we should have taken your warnings about this Protector more seriously. But we didn't expect anything this early in the year."

Neither did I, Juniper thought, feeling an inner chill. But farmers are most vulnerable when the crops are ripe. A band of Eaters would be less of a threat.

Eaters tended to be self-destructive and usually more than half mad, and they also died of disease faster than anyone else, naturally enough-a case of catching whatever you ate had. They were like wildfire: hideously dangerous, but inclined to burn itself out quickly.

"We need your help… Lady Juniper," Dixon said.

The last came out as if he had to force it; for herself, she didn't care, but she couldn't let an outsider scorn or disrespect the clan. Reputation mattered these days; it might be the margin between being left in peace and attacked.

"I'll need to talk this over with my advisors, and put it to the clan's vote," she said. "I'd be inclined to help you, gentlemen; it's what neighbors do, and these people are likely to be a threat to us, too. But the plague… you understand why we've been very isolated since the outbreak."

The doctor spoke: "None of our people have the plague," he said, and the others nodded vigorously. "I swear it."

He looked around. "I can… I can reassure you on that, Lady Juniper. If we could talk privately."

Decision firmed. "That's as it may be. I'll have to ask you to scrub down and change clothing at least, before we can go up to the Hall. Ray, show them where."

They'd got the bathrooms in the old Carson place functioning, if you didn't mind hand-pumping and toting wood for heating.

"It shouldn't take long."

"Yes, Lady Juniper," he said, scowling and signaling them towards the farmhouse with the point of his spear.

"And Ray?"

He looked at her, then flushed and hung his head when she shook an admonishing finger; his face looked very young then.

"Be polite. And see that drinking water's brought out for all these folk and their beasts; they're our neighbors and friends, not our enemies. Aithnitear car?cruat? a friend is known in hardship. Threefold, remember?"

When the Sutterdown men had gone, Juniper turned to her escort; Cynthia had the best horse and was the best rider besides.

"I want… Judy, Chuck, Dennis, Diana, your father, and Sam, ready for a private conference at the Hall, and fast," she said.

She looked out at the fresh refugees. Curse it, these are people who were doing all right until today! They had crops harvested, they were going to make it!

"And tell Diana to throw together what ready food we can spare, load a wagon and have it brought down here- we can push it out to them. Eternal Soup ought to do, and maybe some bread and dried fruit. Git, girl!"

Cynthia left in a thunder of hooves. Juniper spent the time pacing and thinking, and once sent out a rider with more orders. Other members of the clan trickled in to take over making sure that the people of Sutterdown didn't surge past the notional line that marked the boundary, and the scouts went back about their business. One emergency didn't mean that another might not pop up.

When the three Sutterdown leaders came out they were in plain dark sweatsuits, though Dixon still grasped his Bible. The wagon arrived promptly at about the same time; Diana had probably diverted something meant for the harvesters, or a party of herd-watchers.

Juniper turned to the men: "We'd like to leave the food on the road, and then have your people share it out. It's not much, but… "

"Thank you very kindly," Laughton said, sincerely.

After the spring and summer past, giving away food was something people took seriously. Even Dixon nodded. He'd been accused of many things, but never of taking more than his share, or letting anyone under his authority do so either.

"And if you'll follow me?"

They perched in the buckboard, one of the ones her clansfolk had liberated from a tourist attraction; it was odd how long that idea had taken to spread. Juniper took the reins and flicked them on the backs of the team. She took the long way round-the fewer people who knew about the other way up from the back of the old Fairfax place, the better.

She could feel them gawking as she drove past the mill, working now and roofed, although the walls were still going up; past the truck plots and potato fields and watering furrow; past haystacks, past archers practicing on deer-shaped targets and others who used sword and buckler on posts or wooden blades on each other; past a hunter, coming in with a brace of deer slung across the packhorse that walked behind her jaunty bow-crossed shoulder.

The Mackenzie clachan, she thought wryly. I wonder what Great-uncle Earl would think of it now-that respectable small-town banker, who left the place to me, of all people? Or any of the other Mackenzies?

Such a trail of their generations, in the Old Country and the long drift westward over mountain and forest, prairie and river. Bad and wicked, a few, feud-carriers and cattle-lifters. Some heroes-her favorites were the two sisters who'd been lynched in North Carolina for helping the Underground Railroad. A scattering of backwoods granny-witches and cunning-men, as well. Plain dirt farmers, the most of them, down all their patient plowing centuries- living in the homes they built and eating from the fields they tilled, until they laid their toil-worn bodies to rest in earth's embrace.

She glanced over her shoulder at the three men from Sutterdown, and felt all those ancestors behind her.

They didn't often walk away from a neighbor's need- and never backed down from bullies!

When they came to the Hall with its half-completed palisade, Laughton burst out:

"How did you get all this done? There aren't that many of you, and I swear nobody could have worked harder than we have!"

The curiosity seemed genuine. Because of that, Juniper answered frankly: "Apart from the favor of Brigid and Cernunnos? Well, mutual help. You people are trying to live mostly with each family on its own, like they did before the Change, but without the machinery and exchange that made that possible."

"We get by," Laughton growled, then flushed and waved a hand around. "Sorry. You obviously do better than 'getting by.'"

Juniper nodded. "Our clan work together and live close, so we can take turns on sentry-go, or support people doing one thing most of the time… or throw nearly everybody at a job that needs doing, like the harvest, with only a few to cook or keep an eye on the children."

"Sounds like communism," Dixon growled.

"It's more like tribalism, Reverend, with a bit of kibbutz thrown in," she said, keeping her voice neutral. "Call it common sense, for now. Things may be different in a few years… or not. And if you'll excuse me a moment, I need to freshen up while my advisors arrive."

She pulled in before the Hall, finished just before the wheat came ripe; Dennis had already started stenciling the designs he wanted to carve into a lot of it, particularly the tall pillars that supported the wraparound second-story gallery and the new roof.

Eilir came out and took the horses.

It's all ready, Mom, she signed, looking at the three men in the wagon with a mixture of curiosity and distaste. Want me to lay out some ceremonial stuff for you? Scare them green, that would!

Thanks, but I'm trying to get them in a mood to cooperate! she replied. A plain brown around-the-house robe… oh, and just for swank, that moon pendant Dennie and Sally made for me.

She dropped to the ground, and winced a little as that jarred into the small of her abused back. It was almost a pity in some ways that they'd reverted to peasant attitudes about early pregnancy. There wouldn't be time for anything but a quick sluice-down, either.

And they're going to make me miss my soak, too, she signed. We old ladies are wont to get irritable and cranky when we miss our soak… Show them up to the room and get 'em the refreshments, my child of spring.

The loft bedroom-office-sanctum was one luxury she'd allowed herself when the Hall was put back together. It still brought her a surge of slightly guilty pleasure as she climbed up the steep staircase from the second-story corridor to join the waiting Sutterdown men.

The attic space under the steep-pitched roof was brightly lit by the dormer windows on two sides and the bigger one in the eaves. Dennis had pitched in to furnish it; there were hanging bookcases, a long trestle table for conferences or paperwork that could be folded out of the way, shelves for her Craft tools and for the neatly rolled futons and bedding that she and Eilir used, and a little iron wood-stove for winter. Her old loom was set up at the far end.

A big desk held a mechanical adding machine they'd salvaged, and a manual typewriter. There were filing cabinets as well, map boards, all the necessities of administration, which she loathed even as she did her share. And a cradle Dennis had made for her, ready for later in the year, carved all over with knotwork and intertwining beasts.

She was amused to see that the Reverend had a reflex Juniper shared, whenever she went into a new house: checking the bookshelves. You could tell from the slight tilt of his head.

The bulging eyes were probably because of the selection, though. Here, besides books like Langer's Grow It! Livingston's Guide to Edible Plants and Animals, Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living and of course Seymour's Forgotten Arts and Crafts-their most valuable single work-the shelves held references useful to a High Priestess.

Eight Sabbats for Witches-a slightly outdated classic- and the more modern Spellworking for Covens, just for starters. Dixon's face was getting mottled again.

She tried to see the room through the eyes of the Sutterdown men. Judy's cat had managed to get in, for one thing. It was a big black beast with yellow eyes, and it was glaring at Reverend Dixon, who stared back in what he probably didn't know a cat would regard as an insult and challenge.

"Out, Pywackett!" she said, and slung the protesting beast down the stairs, closing the doorway after her.

Then there was a lectern, the top covered with a black cloth that had a golden pentacle-and-circle on it; Dixon would probably guess, rightly, that the square shape beneath was her Book of Shadows. Her personal altar stood below the north-facing window in the eaves, with candlesticks and chalice and ritual tools and small statues of the Lady and Lord. A few prints were pinned up on the log walls, and a ceramic tile she'd bought back in 1986 that showed elk-headed Cernunnos playing on a flute as he skipped through an oakwood surrounded by skyclad dancers…

Well, by the Cauldron and the Wand, if they want to beg our help they're just going to have to take us as we are, she thought, and sat at the head of the table.

Eilir had set out plates of fresh-cut bread, butter, cherry jam and small glasses of mead-they didn't have much yet-along with a big pot of rose-hip tea; she was glad to see that even Dixon had sampled the refreshments.

Because now he's a guest and I can't lose my temper with him.

The food scents went well with the beeswax-paint-and-fresh-wood smell of the building; rather less well with the sweat-and-cows aroma of several of the clansfolk, who'd come straight from the fields without bothering to hit the bathhouse. She hoped they'd remembered to use the wooden boot-scraper at the front door. Keeping clean was hard work these days.

"Let's get going," she said when the last person was seated and the strained attempt at chat ended. "This is one of those no-time-to-waste things, so we'll have to put aside our cherished tradition of talking everything to rags. You're all up to speed on what our neighbors have told me?"

She looked around, checking the nods. "Subject to the voice of the clan assembled, is everyone agreed that if the information proves to be true, we can't tolerate a big bandit gang making its headquarters next to us? Worse, one that tries to set itself up as overlords, and has ties to the Protector in Portland."

Another chorus of nods; everyone had heard a little of what was happening there, and even by the standards of the fifth month after the Change, the stories were gruesome.

"Then the first order of business is what Dr. Gianelli said about guaranteeing against exposure to the plague."

Everyone's ears perked up at that; the silence grew taut.

Gianelli licked his lips. "I said that would have to be in private, Lady Juniper."

She looked at him, her green eyes level under the hood of her robe, which she'd drawn up to cover her damp hair.

"This is private," she said. "These are my advisors. And I'm not a dictator here, unlike some places I could name. Something that important can't stay between the two of us; my people expect to be informed, and listened to, when decisions are made. And I'm not going to expose my clan to the Death on just a hint from you, Doctor."

Gianelli looked down at his hands, then clenched them into fists. He was an olive-skinned man in his thirties; when he went pale the blue-black stubble stood out vividly.

"Streptomycin," he said, still staring at his hands and spitting the word out as if it were a blow.

Judy Barstow gasped. The other Mackenzies looked at each other uncertainly.

"That's an antibiotic, isn't it?" Juniper said.

Judy nodded, a quick hard jerk of the chin. "It's a specific against Yersinia pestis, if it's administered early," she said. "A good prophylactic at low doses, if you take it a couple of days before possible exposure, but it can damage your kidneys if you continue for more than a month. It's also valuable against a lot of other bacteria, and it keeps indefinitely in powdered form at room temperature. We ran out of it two months ago-I could never locate more than a couple of doses."

Her calm broke. "How much have you got!"

Gianelli went on in a monotone: "Bulk powder from my hospital in Albany in sealed packages. Twelve thousand adult doses."

Crack!

Her palm slammed the doctor's head to one side; the arm rose again for a backhand as she leaned far across the table. Sam Aylward had Judy by the shoulders before the second blow could fall, forcing her back into the chair.

"Bastard!" she spat at the Sutterdown doctor, fighting against the great callused hands; there were two red spots on her cheeks, as bright as the print of her palm on his.

"Bastard! I lost one of my patients, one of our children, and you had-you weren't even using it!"

Gianelli looked up again, ignoring the imprint of the hand on his cheek. "It was all I had! It's like food-I can't give it to everyone who needs it, or it'll all be gone in a week, and then everyone will be as bad off as before! The other antibiotics, most of them need refrigeration. I had to save it!"

He buried his head in his hands, and the rigid brace went out of his shoulders. "The hospital… there were so many… so many, and I couldn't do anything, we didn't have any food, and the head of administration killed himself and I took the box and I ran, I ran… "

"Quiet," Juniper said.

She heard what Judy was muttering under her breath- in this context, there was only one reason for calling on Three-Fold Hecate-and reached aside to lay a finger across her lips.

"Don't say that, Maiden," she said, in her High Priestess voice.

That seemed to startle Judy out of her anger somewhat, or at least back to control. "Don't think it, either. Not if you want to stay under my rooftree."

Her eyes flicked across the three men. "As I said, neighbors help each other. We'd all be better off now if we'd cooperated more before. It has to be mutual, though. So if we're going to help you, you have to help us."

"We're willing to share the medicine," Dixon put in.

"Excellent. We'll want enough to protect any of our people who go out to fight, and then half the remainder." Her tone made it clear that the statement wasn't a question or a request.

All three of them nodded; not that they had much choice. Inwardly, she felt a single cold knot relax for the first time since she smelled the death pits outside Salem; with five or six thousand doses, they could stop any plague outbreak among the Mackenzies cold-and possibly protect some other communities she knew of, combined with preventative measures.

"And if we're going to fight and win where you lost, we insist on being in command of our joint muster," she said.

More nods, a bit slower this time, and glances at Aylward and Chuck.

"And good neighbors don't preach hatred against each other."

Now Dixon sat rigid, glaring at her, and the doctor and the sheriff exchanged worried glances. Juniper went on: "We don't cast spells of bane and ruin against you. I'd appreciate it if you'd stop doing so against us, Reverend. Times are difficult enough as it is without wasting effort on counterspells."

Dixon's face went still more blotchy. "I cast no spells!" he spat. "I pray to the living God!"

Juniper took a deep breath. "Let's put it another way: We both believe in the power of prayer. If a group of people get together to chant and ill-wish someone, it has a way of working regardless of the details of the ritual and then of bouncing back on the ill-wishers, which has already happened to your town, no?"

She raised a hand. "Or let's discuss it in purely secular terms. You're an influential man, ruler as well as priest- and believe me, I've come to understand what that means, however much I didn't want to. If you go on inciting people to regard us as evil Satanists worthy of death, and quoting Exodus 22:18 or Galatians 5:19 as if they applied to us-"

"It is the Word of God-"

Judy slapped the table with a crack like timber breaking and barked: "They're mistranslations, you nitwit, as anyone who knew more Hebrew or Greek than King James's so-called scholars could have told you. M'khasephah means someone who malevolently uses spoken curses to hurt people, which we're specifically forbidden to do by the Wiccan Rede, and pharmakia means a poisoner. If you want to preach against suffering a poisoner to live, go right ahead!"

"Spiritual poison-"

"Shut up!" Juniper said. Then, more calmly: "Whatever the origins of the phrases, keep repeating them and eventually you'll produce a community which hates us and attacks us physically. In which case, why should we fight for one enemy against another?"

Laughton cut in: "We have freedom of religion in Sutterdown, Ms… Lady Juniper."

"And we Mackenzies do too," she said, nodding towards John Carson. "Our livestock boss here is a Presbyterian. Some of our clan are Witches, some are unbelievers, some are Christians of various sorts."

The latter two a rapidly diminishing proportion, I admit, she didn't say aloud. That would diminish the force of my point.

"We don't call anyone evil because of their faith. There are many roads to the Divine. We'd just like you to promise to reciprocate, as a demonstration of goodwill."

Dixon looked out the windows, then back at her.

"You'll take my promise?" he said, sounding surprised.

"I don't like you," Juniper said bluntly, meeting his eyes. "But I've never heard that your word isn't good."

The silence stretched; then he nodded. Juniper returned the gesture with an inclination of her head.

"Chuck, rumors are probably flying. Tell everyone we'll have a clan meeting after supper to thrash things out, and an Esbat tomorrow night to call for the Lord and Lady's aid, and would welcome any other variety of prayers as well. We'll need all the help we can get."

The moon wouldn't be full or dark for the Esbat, but that wasn't absolutely required, just customary and preferred.

"We'll also send out scouts to get our own information. Sam, handle it, and get us ready." He nodded silently. "John, we'll need pretty well all the saddle-broke horses."

"Not bicycles?" he said.

"No. Horses are faster over the distances we're talking. And a wagon team at least. Diana, Andy, supplies. And whatever we can spare for the Sutterdown folk, until this is over; slaughter some stock if you have to. Judy, as far as getting our people protected against the plague, and for casualty care… "

When she was finished, she leaned over the table to shake hands with the town's three leaders. Dr. Gianelli looked drained, as if he'd had some noxious cyst lanced; Sheriff Laughton was relieved, like a man drowning who'd been thrown a spar. And Dixon, as usual, looked full of suppressed fury.

You did help neighbors. It wasn't necessary to like all of them.

Twenty-four

"Lord Jesus, Mike, these were a bad bunch did this," Will Hutton said quietly; his face was grayish.

They bore the last of the bodies out of the Clarke farmhouse wrapped in blankets. They could each carry one easily; neither corpse weighed more than fifty pounds. They'd found these in an upstairs bedroom. It looked as if they'd tried to hide under a bed, and been dragged out by the ankles-a small leg had been severed at the knee.

One still had a stuffed toy bear in a cowboy outfit in his hands when they found him; Havel had wrapped it with the body.

"Bad as I've ever seen," the Texan went on as they carried them out to where the gravediggers labored. "Bad as those crazy men north of Kooskia."

"Worse, Will," Havel said. "More of them, and better organized."

He didn't add: And dead is dead; it doesn't matter much what happens to the body. Hutton was a more conventional man than he, and Havel wouldn't willingly offend him.

And the skin between his shoulders crawled a little at the memory, anyway. It reminded him a little too much of stories he'd heard Grannie Lauder tell, stories of wendigo and mischepesu. Only those had been stories, something for a kid to shiver over while he sat on the floor in front of the fire. This had been unpleasantly real… and in the Changed world, who could tell what was real, anyway? Maybe there were man-eating spirits in the winter woods, now.

He didn't want to talk about that, either.

"Glad it's still coolish weather," he said instead.

The Clarkes had a family graveyard, in a patch bordered by pines and willows near the crest of the low hill to the west of the homestead. The first headstones marked Clarke were dated before 1914, but these would be the last of that line, he supposed.

More than twenty fresh graves doubled its size, and spadefuls of the wet black earth were still flying up; two Bearkillers helped stand guard, and another six helped Sheriff Woburn's posse dig, their armor and weapons draped across their saddles. The horses all grazed nearby, hobbled, rolling now and then. There was no point in keeping them out of the wheat.

Woburn called one of his men over, turning his back when he drew up a corner of each blanket so that only the two of them need see the faces.

"That's little Mort Williams, all right," the man said. "And Judy Clarke, old man Clarke's great-granddaughter, her parents came back from Lewiston right after the Change. Jesus wept."

"I don't doubt Mary did," Hutton said quietly, crossing himself; he'd become a Catholic to make peace with his wife's relatives, but it had taken.

"This the Devil Dogs' work, all right," Woburn said with frustrated anger leaking through the iron calm of his voice. "Worse than ever."

"Devil Dogs?" Havel said.

They stood back from the graves. He'd kept the gruesome work of wrapping the bodies for himself and Hutton while the younger Bearkillers dug. Sheriff Woburn had done the same, pitching in with the disgusting task, which put him up a notch in Havel's view. He'd always respected an officer who was willing to share the unpleasant bits.

"Devil Dogs, the bikers," the lawman went on. "It's the gang's name. They broke away from the Hell's Angels years ago-thought the Angels had gone soft. Bunch of them were holding a meet at a motel south of Lewiston when the Change came. Iron Rod's their leader, I don't know his real name."

"Duke Iron Rod?" Havel enquired.

Woburn's face went crimson. "That's new the last little while. He's trying to extort protection money, I mean payments in food and supplies, from the ranchers and towns. Bastard's claiming to be Duke of the Camas Prairie!"

Havel's brows went up. Have to get the details on this, he thought. Doesn't sound right. Or… if it's our good friend Arminger prompting, it does sound right.

They'd seen plenty of petty theft and one-on-one violence in the first weeks after the Change, and hit-and-run banditry on an increasing scale since, plus what Ken Lars-son and Pam Arnstein and Aaron Rothman called incipient feudalism-strong-arm rule. That was mostly by local bossmen, though, and the more unscrupulous ranchers taking advantage of homeless, desperate city-dwellers and travelers as cheap labor.

This didn't quite make sense, not on a purely local basis.

He stood back respectfully and bowed his head with his followers when Woburn pulled a Bible from his saddlebags and began reading a service. He'd fallen away from the Lutheran faith of his ancestors himself, but he'd been raised among believers.

When the rest of Sheriff Woburn's little posse had ridden off towards their homes, Havel gave a short sharp. whistle.

The two Bearkillers who'd been riding sentry turned and moved the horses back towards the others. Those got each other into their gear-you could wiggle into a hauberk alone, but it went faster with help-saddled their mounts, and formed up in a column of twos. One at the rear led a packhorse with their picks and shovels.

"Got 'em well trained," Woburn remarked. "How many men-"

Signe Larsson looked at him in the act of putting on her helmet, then settled it and clipped on the chin cup. Gloria Stevens, the other woman present, snickered.

"- well, troopers, do you have?"

"We've got around a hundred adults now," Havel said. "Carefully picked. Not all of them have the heft or the inclination for a stand-up fight or to go along when we ride out like this, but things being the way they are, I try to give everyone some weapons training."

Including even utterly hopeless cases like Jane Waters and Rothman, he thought. But let's not talk about that now. Aloud he went on: "You may not plan on having the fight at home, but… "

Woburn nodded. "Yeah, the other guy sometimes has plans of his own, the dirty dog. I can see why you'd want all your people to know how."

"Your Kate Clarke would probably have wanted to know how, yesterday morning, for example," Signe said, then dropped back into the column.

Woburn winced a little and looked at the horses, changing the subject: "All well-mounted, too."

"We've done this and that here and there, helping people out with jobs or problems," Havel said neutrally.

And liberated some stock left wandering, or plain looted it from people who tried to attack or cheat us. Plus there's no better judge of horseflesh in the world than Will, with Angelica a close second.

"We take payment in tools, food and animals, mostly. Lucky this part of the country isn't short of livestock. And as I said, we've got a really good horse trainer."

Woburn didn't seem concerned to be alone among armed strangers; that made him stupid, suicidal or brave, and Havel thought he was probably the last. He was also keeping his eyes open.

"All this weird old-time knights-in-armor gear still looks funny to me," he said. "I mean, I have problems taking it seriously."

Havel shrugged and drew his puukko. He handed it to Woburn, who tested the edge automatically, raised his brows in respect, and handed it back. Havel pressed the blade to his mail-clad body and then ripped it down from shoulder to waist, just beside the diagonal line of the bandolier that held his quiver. The steel cut a bright line along the little interlinked rings with a rattling click.

"Point taken," Woburn said.

On a man in cloth, that would have worked like a chain saw on wood. Not for the first time, Havel thought how much of a survival advantage it was to be mentally flexible in this Changed world.

Woburn sighed. "I know up in my head that guns don't work anymore, but there are times when"-he patted the vintage saber at his saddlebow-"this doesn't seem real. Plus there's no time to learn how to use it properly. Some of our people have been sewing washers or pieces of metal on coats and dusters. Or making jackets of boiled steer-hide."

A scowl: "A lot of Iron Rod's men use scales fastened to canvas backing, too, recently."

"I've seen gear like that," Havel said. A lot of it in Portland, to be precise. "It's heavier and less flexible than chain mail, though. We can sell you some armor, and more importantly we can take some of your people through the whole process of making it."

It was past four o'clock when they passed the Bearkiller sentries; some of them were carrying lances as well as swords and bows, which impressed Woburn. Havel hid a smile as he returned their fist-to-chest salutes; so far, only the unanimous verdict of Will's cavalry manuals kept him trying with the damned bargepoles. They were as hard to manage on horseback as archery!

The Bearkillers' camp was in a clearing just back of the ridge where the lane led down to the prairie; the grassland there covered several acres, interrupted by scraggly lodge-pole pines and some aspens. The afternoon sun gilded the tall grass, and cast blue shadows towards the east. A scent of woodsmoke and cooking came from the hearths, and the cheerful sound of children playing, the tink… tink … of metal on metal, the rhythmic lock of axes splitting firewood.

More of the wagons' loads had been taken down than was usual for a one-night stopover; Havel wanted Sheriff Woburn impressed, and it had been easy enough to send orders back from the sacked farmstead.

The tents were pitched in neat rows, one per family with more for the single men, single women and outfit purposes; each had a fire in front of it and a Coleman lantern hung from the peak. A latrine trench was behind a grove of aspens, and a canvas enclosure for bathing stood beside a wheeled metal water-tank, another Ken-and-Will joint project; it was built so that a heating fire could be kindled in a hearth at one end. A woman was tossing chunks of pine into the fire, and a valve hissed on top as the water came to a boil.

"Helps avoid giardia," Havel said.

Woburn nodded; the nasty little parasites were endemic in Idaho streams, including the "purest" mountain brooks.

"Pretty piece of work," he said.

Havel nodded gravely, grinning to himself. He wasn't quite running a Potomekin village setup for the good sheriff, but he was putting the best foot forward.

"Lord Bear," one of their more recent recruits said, taking the reins as Havel and his guest swung down out of the saddle.

Havel felt his teeth gritting. Breaking people of calling him that was probably more trouble than it was worth, and most seemed to like it better than "Boss." Giving Astrid a sound spanking for coming up with the idea was almost certainly more trouble than it would be worth… but it was so tempting, sometimes!

He steered Woburn past the portable smithy-they had a real blacksmith now, freeing up a lot of Will's time-the arrow-making operation, the armor-assembly area from which Astrid and Luanne had been reprieved for awe-the-locals purposes, and on to the bowmaking benches.

Interesting, Havel thought. When he's actually working, our Bill looks almost trustworthy. The problem is you have to stand over him to keep him working.

Right now he was opening the insulated hotbox and checking a bow-limb curing there, the half-S shape secured between plywood forms with metal screw-clamps; the box reduced the time needed for the glue to set hard from a year to weeks, at the cost of a slight loss in durability. An assistant had a hardwood block clamped in a vise; he was shaping the riser into which the limbs would be pegged and glued, roughing out the shape of the pistol grip and arrow-shelf with a chisel. Shavings of pale myrtlewood curled away from the tap-tap-tap.

Havel nodded towards the pots of glue, planks of osage-orange wood, bundles of dried sinew, pieces of antler, and a box of translucent lozenges sawn from cow horns.

"We'll always have those materials."

"You've been thinking ahead," Woburn said respectfully.

They passed the school, taught open-air by Annie Sanders when there was time, with a folding blackboard and students from six to twelve. Reuben Waters, Billy's eldest, made his typical entry-Annie dragged him in by one ear, with occasional swats to his backside along the way. She thought the Waters kids were salvageable, and they did seem a bit brighter than their parents.

Astrid galloped her horse past a deer-shaped target- and the arrow flickered out to go thump behind the shoulder. Others were on foot, shooting at Frisbee-sized wooden disks rolled downhill, or at stationary man-shapes; the shooters were crouched, kneeling, walking, as well as standing in the classic archer's T.

Luanne was on horseback too, picking wooden tent pegs out of the ground with a lance as she galloped. It made a dramatic backdrop for Will's horsemanship class with its jumps and obstacles.

Hope she doesn't dig in and knock herself out of the saddle while our guest is watching, Havel thought. She's the only one we've got yet who doesn't do that all the time!

Those just starting with the sword were hacking at pells-posts set in the ground, or convenient trees-or slicing pinecones tossed at them. He didn't have anyone riding the wooden hobbyhorse just now, learning to swing a blade from the saddle without decapitating his mount-it was essential, but he had to admit it looked so…

Dorky, he thought. There's no other word that fits.

Except for Astrid and a few other fast-growing teenagers, all those at weapons practice were working in chain mail, to get used to the weight and constriction and sweat-sodden heat of it. That was only marginally more popular than the regular exercise sessions wearing the stuff, jumping and running and tumbling and climbing ladders.

My sympathy is underwhelming, you poor little darlings, Havel thought. Try humping an eighty-pound pack through fucking Iraq.

Pam Arnstein had one of her fencing classes going for the better students, with Signe as her assistant.

"The targe"-she insisted on using the fancy term for small round shield-"is not there for you to wave in the air! Keep it in front of you. Remember it's a weapon like your sword-weapons are kept face to the enemy. Pivot the rear foot as you move-heel down, Johnson! Passing thrust-passing thrust-cut-cut-forehand-backhand- at the man, not at the shield! Stay in line, in line!"

Impatiently, she called Josh Sanders out from the double line of pupils. Havel watched with interest as she drove the brawny young man down the field in a clatter and bang of mock combat.

"Right, try it again… better. Now free-form! I deflect your cut with my blade sloped behind my back, and make a crossing attack, stepping forward to cut in turn to the hamstring… so."

"Ouch!" He stumbled and recovered.

"I knock your shield out of line… so. The body follows the sword, remember. Swords first, foot just a fraction of a second behind. Then I thrust to the face… cut to the neck-no, don't block with the edge of your targe, you'll get it sliced off. With the surface-that's why it's covered in rawhide. Good parry, now I'm vulnerable, hit me with it-"

Crack! as leather met leather.

"Sorry!" he blurted, as he knocked her off her feet and onto her back.

The sixteenth-century European blade styles featured a lot of bodychecking, throws, kicks and short punching blows with the pommel of the sword or the edge of the shield, too. The brutal whatever-works pragmatism was precisely to Havel's taste.

"That's the first completely correct move you've made today," Pamela said as she rolled erect again. "You've got the advantage of weight-so use it. There aren't any bronze or silver medals in this sort of fencing. Win or die!"

Havel inclined his helmeted head towards the practice field. "Like you said, Sheriff, it's not just finding or making the weapons, it's learning how to use them."

"Doesn't look like what I remember of fencing," he said, shading his eyes. "Watched the Olympics once."

Havel nodded. The motions were much broader and fuller, with all the body's coordinated strength and weight behind them. He went on aloud: "One of these cut-and-thrust swords will blast right through an epee parry and skewer you front to back, or gut you like a trout. We were real lucky to find Pam Arnstein-that's our instructor there."

Ken Larsson was working on a drawing pinned to a folding draughtsman's table nearby, looking up occasionally at the sword practice; Aaron Rothman rested his peg leg in a canvas recliner nearby.

Havel introduced them, and the elder Larsson went on: "Pam was a stroke of luck. She's our vet too, and doubled as our medico until we found Aaron here."

He grinned and jerked a thumb at the doctor, who was starting to look just skinny again.

"Lord Bear's Luck, some call it," Rothman said. "And believe me, I was glad to get a share of it!"

I really wish people wouldn't say that, Havel thought. The dice have no memory. You've got to earn your luck again every morning.

Four Bearkillers were passing by with a quartered beef carcass in wheelbarrows, heading for the cooking fires and the chuck wagon. Arnstein looked at Havel, who nodded. She halted them, and had the hindquarters hung on hooks hoof-up beneath a tree while she laid down the practice lath, unhooked the wire-mesh screen from the front of her helmet and took up her battle sword.

A whistle brought the novices' practice to a halt; Signe flashed Havel a smile as she helped chivvy them into place, sheepdog style.

"This part's popular, for some reason," Havel said, as they walked over; Sheriff Woburn was looking puzzled. "But it has to wait for a butchering day. I've got to admit, it's sort of cool to do."

He raised his voice. "Gather 'round, those who haven't seen this demonstration. And those who want to see it again."

A few of the neophytes looked as puzzled as Woburn. The rest grinned and nudged each other as they shoved the others closer to the hanging meat.

"Now, watch closely. And keep in mind that this"- Havel drew his sword, and tapped one of the hanging quarters lightly-"is the ass-end of a nice big cow. Range heifer, about seven hundred pounds. Bone and muscle and tendon, just like us, except thicker and more of it. Pam, do the honors on Cheek Number One."

Pamela poised motionless, then attacked with a running thrust, right foot skimming forward and knee bending into a long lunge. The point of her saber hardly appeared to move; it was presented at the beginning of the motion, and then six inches of it were out the other side of the haunch of beef. She withdrew, twisting the blade.

"Examine that, please," she said.

The novices did, one of them gulping audibly as he put a finger in the long tunnel-like wound. The tall wiry woman grinned as she went on:

"While not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, it's more than sufficient to let out a lot of blood. And now if you'll back off slightly-"

She reversed to her original left-foot-forward stance, poised for a second with targe and point advanced, then attacked again; this time she cut backhand with a high wordless shout, foot and edge slamming down together as if connected by invisible rods and hips twisting to put a whipping snap into the strike.

The blade slanted into the meat with a wet thwack! and a great slab of flesh slumped down; they could all see where her saber had cut a deep pinkish-white nick into the surface of the butchered steer's legbone. Flecks of meat spattered into the faces of the closest onlookers.

"And that, ladies and gentlemen, could be you," she said, panting slightly. "Which is why there's no prize for second place." There were a few more shocked faces among the grins.

Pamela went on: "Lord Bear will now demonstrate what happens when someone hits you hard with a backsword, instead of a light cut like that."

Havel slipped the shield off his back and onto his arm, standing with left foot and arm advanced. Then he screamed and pounced and struck in the same motion, steel whirling in a blur of speed, long blade at the end of a long arm in a looping overarm cut.

"Haakkaa paalle!"

A wet cleaving sound sounded under the shout, and a crackling beneath that. When the beef haunch swayed back, they could all see that the steel had sliced through eight inches of hide and meat to make a canyon gape several feet long, and split the heavy legbone beneath- lengthwise. Chips and dust lay in the marrow at the bottom of the cut, shattered out of the bone by the violence of the impact.

A chorus of whistles and murmurs went through the ranks of the novices, along with a dabbing at faces.

Havel spoke: "And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we don't bitch and moan about how hot and heavy and uncomfortable the armor is."

I may have to grind away to get good at archery, but it seems I've got a natural talent for this.

"Supper's at seven," Havel said; Woburn was looking suitably impressed. "Why don't you look around for a little while? Ken can answer any questions you have. I've got to get out of this ironmongery and there's some business to attend to."

As he turned away, a thought struck him: If this Duke Iron Rod really is in with Arminger, how many other people are fighting the Protector right now?

Angelica Hutton was just putting a Dutch oven full of biscuits into the embers in one of the fires behind the chuck wagon when Havel arrived, his hair still damp from the bath. There were a dozen working there, amid a cheerful clatter and chatter that didn't disguise the size of the task or the efficiency with which it got done.

"Jane, remember to get the tortillas into that warmer the minute they're done," she said, her voice friendly but a little loud and slow; then she wiped her hands on the apron she wore over her Levi's and shirt.

The smile died as she and the Bearkiller leader walked aside: "Mike, that woman!" she continued; speaking under her breath, but clenching her fists beneath her chin and making a throttled sound of wordless exasperation.

"Specific problem?" he said.

"She is… no, she is good-hearted, and not even lazy if you tell her everything she is to do, but I have met mesquite stumps with more brains! She speaks of nothing but TV shows and the days when she was a cheerleader."

You could believe that more easily these days; Jane Waters didn't look shapeless anymore-she was even pretty, in a blowsy, faded-rose way.

"And she is a natural… what is the old English word.I saw it in a schoolbook of Luanne's. no, not slut, that means puta, right?"

Havel nodded, and the Tejano woman went on: "Slattern, that is the word. She cannot even cook; not at all, I do not mean fancy things. Before the Change her children ate from McDonald's and Taco Bell every day! Or from cans and frozen pizza."

"Not everyone can meet your high standards, Angelica," Havel said, grinning. And oh, for the days when even poor people could get too much of the wrong sort of food! "I wanted to check on supplies."

"Y bien," she said, pulling a list out of a pocket. "We've got enough meat, I ordered a steer butchered this afternoon-it arrived a little worn, no?"

He smiled and made a placating gesture.

"If we stop anytime soon, I want to try to make dried and smoked sausage; there is plenty of jerky, but it is boring even in a stew. So we must have spices-sage, garlic. For the rest, we need some sacks of salt, badly. We are short of flour, and potatoes, and down to the last of our beans, rice, and oatmeal. We need vegetables very badly, dried or canned, also fruit-it is not healthy, to live so much on meat and bread, even with the vitamin pills. Shortly we will need clothing, particularly boots and shoes, and especially for the little ones… "

Angelica went through her list; then she darted back to make sure her assistants weren't spoiling anything.

After a quick check she began beating on a triangle. Everyone gathered 'round their mess hearths by squads and families, as youngsters carried the food around; tables were too much of a bother to drag along on the move, but they had good groundsheets so you could sit down dry and reasonably comfortable around a fire-most were leaning against their saddles, cowboy fashion. Shadows closed in around the fires and the first stars appeared in the east.

Woburn bit into his burrito, then looked down at it with surprised pleasure as the tangy carne asada hit his palate, cooled with sour cream.

"All right," he said to the Bearkillers' leader. "You've got a real slick operation here, Mr. Havel. Now, you were hinting that you could do something about the Devil Dogs."

"That depends," he said. "They've got some sort of base, right? A hideout you can't come at, or more likely they've forted up someplace you can't take."

"They're at St. Hilda's," Woburn said, respect in his voice.

Havel's ears perked up at that; he saw that Ken Lars-son's did, too. It was one of the big Idaho tourist attractions; you couldn't live in the state and not know about it.

He held up a hand for a moment, and turned his head to Will Hutton; the various bosses-of-sections were eating around Havel's fire tonight, as usual when there was serious business to discuss.

"Will, St. Hilda's is a Benedictine abbey over by that butte. Near the top of it, in fact."

He pointed southwest. A wide cone with gentle slopes dominated the rolling plain, visible many miles away; right now it was silhouetted against the westering sun as the long July evening drew to a close.

"Built like a fort," he added. "I saw it a couple of times before the Change."

"Me too," Ken said. "Literally like a fort, Romanesque Revival. Nineteen-twenties construction; ashlar stone blocks, a hard blue porphyry, and walls over three feet thick at the base. Four stories in a block around a courtyard, with two towers on the front-both nearly a hundred feet high. Interior water source, too. Not surprised some bandits took it over. It's the closest thing to a castle in the state, after the old penitentiary in Boise."

Woburn nodded. "When the Change hit, the Devil Dogs stole real bikes, mountain bikes, and then horses, and looted a bunch of wilderness outfitters; after that they started raiding for supplies. That was bad enough. Then in May, they changed their operations. Got a lot of good weapons from somewhere, and then they hit St. Hilda's."

"What happened to the Sisters?" Hutton said, concern in his voice.

"They killed some of them and threw out most of the rest; Mother Superior Gertrude is staying with me. And since then they've been using it as a base. They've been giving us hell-well, you saw it."

Havel looked at Signe, and she opened a plastic Office Max filing box. It was filled with neatly labeled maps in hanging files; she pulled out the west-central Idaho one, tacked it to a corkboard, and propped it up where the command staff could see it.

"How many?" Havel said. "Organization? Leaders? What's Iron Rod like? What weapons, and what's their objective, if it isn't just loot?"

Woburn looked at the map. "There were about fifty to start with," he said. "Twice that now-they've been recruiting from the-no offense-road people."

Havel smiled thinly; road people was what settled folk around here had taken to calling the wanderers, those stranded on highways by the Change and others who scoured about looking for food. They were a natural breeding-ground for brigandage, not to mention for transmitting disease, and neither well-regarded nor very welcome.

"None taken. We're going somewhere, not just wandering around aimlessly looking for a handout or what we can steal."

"I can see that," Woburn said, looking at the map, and then the purposeful activity about him.

He tapped his finger on the map: "Anyway, there's near a hundred fighting men, plus. well, they had some women with them to start with. There are more now- some kidnapped. Some men they've taken and are using as slave labor, too."

Havel nodded; he'd seen similar things in embryo elsewhere, but not on this scale… yet.

"I presume you've tried smoking them out," Havel said. It wasn't a question.

Woburn flushed in embarrassment. "Yeah. You understand, things were total chaos right after the Change, and then we were all working as hard as we could to salvage bits and pieces. People around here are real spread out, and without trucks or phones it took us weeks to get any organization going at all. First we knew was when they started hitting farms-or hitting them up for tribute and ransom."

"Then you got a big posse together, and they handed you your heads," Havel guesstimated.

Woburn looked aside a bit. "Yeah. Two hundred men, and we had an I-beam for a battering ram, and some extension ladders."

Havel winced slightly, picturing how he'd have managed the defense.

Woburn nodded: "Thing is, they've made the place into a real fort. They filled all the windows on the lower two stories with rebar grates and then bolted steel plates over the inside and outside and filled the holes with concrete-the Sisters were doing a construction project and there was plenty of material. Steel shutters with arrow-slits in the upper windows. They'd cut down all the trees around, so there wasn't any cover for us, and they poured boiling canola oil down on us from the top… we lost twenty dead, and six times that number injured, a lot of them real bad."

"And that was the last time you could get that many together," Havel said.

"Well… yeah."

This time Woburn's look had an element of a glare in it. Havel looked at Ken Larsson, and the older man spoke thoughtfully, tugging at his short silvery beard.

"Either they've got someone very shrewd in charge, or they have an implausible number of construction workers in their ranks. Something odd there. Starving them out, perhaps? Or catching parties of them on the move?"

Woburn snorted. "There's no communications! What men I can scrape together end up running from one place that's been raided to another. If we get a big bunch together, they just retreat into the fort and laugh at us until we go away-we can't keep up a siege, everyone's needed on the farms. That place is stuffed with stolen food."

Havel nodded. "And they can see you coming, since they hold the high ground. And they probably hit the farms of your supporters, and probably some farmers and ranchers are already paying them off or slipping them information and don't get attacked."

"I don't blame them," Ken Larsson said, wincing at the memory of what he'd helped bury.

"I do!" Woburn said; his face flushed with anger. "The Devil Dog honcho, Iron Rod-he's started calling himself Duke of the Camas Prairie, the bastard! You saw what his scum did!"

Havel nodded politely. Behind the mask of his face he thought: And they're getting stronger, while you get weaker. If things go on the way they are, you'll all be on your knees to Duke Iron Rod by this time next year. Or on your backs, depending on your gender and his tastes.

"I suppose you tried to get some help from Boise," Havel said.

He didn't bother making it a question. Woburn spat into the fire.

"There's plague in Boise, too. Really bad, and typhus; we haven't had but one outbreak here, thank God. That was in Grangeville, and we managed to damp it down quick with quarantine. Iron Rod's been careful not to attack the Nez Perce… yet. He'll be their business if he finishes us off!"

"That's too bad about Boise," Havel said. "There's a lot of good land west of the city with gravity-flow irrigation; they might have made it."

And I've got friends there, he thought. I hope Eileen's OK, even if she did dump me, and the folks at Steelhead.

The thought was oddly abstract. Things had closed in since the Change; people and places beyond a day's ride were… remote. The world felt a whole lot bigger.

"Could be worse," Signe said unexpectedly. "It could be like the coast… or like St. Louis."

Everyone shivered slightly. A spray of bicycle-borne fugitives had made it from the big cities of the Midwest, and from the Pacific coast. A lot of people didn't believe the stories. Nobody wanted to believe them.

"OK," Havel said. "Here's your problem. They've got an impregnable base. You've got more men"-although not a lot more; there were probably only about five thousand people left within three or four days travel-"but yours have to stay split up most of the time, and his are concentrated. He can strike any ranch or farm with superior numbers, then retreat behind his walls if you get together. And he doesn't have to worry about getting a crop in. It'll be worse at harvest time, which is soon. It's always easier to stop other people doing something than it is to do it. The grain'll be dry enough to burn then, too. If you don't get rid of them in the next month or so, they'll wreck you. You'll have to surrender, or move far enough away he can't reach you."

"The filth destroy what they can't steal," Woburn said bitterly. "We can't farm if we have to stand guard twenty-four hours a day! But if we leave, get out of range, we're homeless, we're road people ourselves."

Ken Larsson nodded. "You're spread out too much," he said. "Even resettling townsfolk on the farms, the properties are too big and too widely scattered, which means every household's on its own and impossibly far away from help. What you should do is group together, village-style, with settlements of… oh, say fifty to a hundred people, minimum, in places with good water and land. Then they could defend themselves-run up earth walls and palisades, too, maybe. And have specialists where they need them. We're all going to run out of pre-Change tools and clothing eventually."

"I can't make people give up their land!" Woburn said, scandalized.

Ken shrugged. "They don't need most of it," he pointed out. "This area"-his hand took in the Camas Prairie- "produced wheat and canola and beef for hundreds of thousands of people. Now it only has to feed the few thousand people who live on it; and that's going to take only a fraction of the area, which is lucky since you won't have the labor to work more anyway. What would be the point in growing more when you can't ship it out? To watch it rot?"

Woburn looked sandbagged. "Hadn't thought about it in quite that way," he said. "Haven't had time, I suppose."

Havel cut in: "Essentially, what Iron Rod's trying to do is charge you rent for living here, by making life impossible for people who won't knuckle under. You have to winkle him out of his fort. And you also need a standing force; full-time fighters, well equipped and trained."

Woburn's eyes narrowed. "You asking for the job?" he said softly.

The obvious drawback was that a standing force would be functionally equivalent to Iron Rod and his merry band, and might well end up with similar ambitions.

Havel laughed and shook his head. "Emphatically, no!" he said. "We've got a destination further west. But you ought to think about raising some rangers or soldiers or whatever you want to call them. And if you can't afford it… well, think about whether you can afford Duke Iron Rod."

Woburn took a deep breath; he looked relieved. "Thing is, Mr. Havel, I was wondering-"

"Whether we could get rid of Iron Rod for you," Havel said. He looked at Ken Larsson, who nodded imperceptibly.

"I'd heard that you did some work like that elsewhere," Woburn said.

"Not on this scale, we didn't. I've got forty people I'd be willing to put into a fight," Havel said. "Forty-five if I stretch it and include some damned young teenagers. Getting into a stand-up toe-to-toe slugging match with the Devil Dogs by ourselves isn't on. I'd like to see the people who did that"-he pointed towards the sacked farmstead, invisible in the gathering dusk-"in hell where they belong, but I'm not going to get half my people killed to do it. And frankly, Sheriff, this is your fight and not ours."

Woburn's face dropped. Larsson went on: "There are things we could do, though, as… ah, contractors."

Condottieri, Havel thought silently. Which means, literally, "contractors."

He nodded, as if reluctant. Ken Larsson took up the thread smoothly: "When I was studying engineering, back in the 1960s, I had a professor who taught us the history of the field. And until a couple of hundred years ago, what engineers mainly did was build forts and engines to knock 'em down. Now… "

Twenty-five

The warriors of Clan Mackenzie arrived on horseback for the joint muster with Sutterdown in the cool just after dawn, with a horse-drawn wagon behind them. Each wore jack and helmet, had spear in hand, bow and quiver slung across their back, sword and buckler and long knife at their waists; each carried three days' worth of jerky and crackerlike waybread and cakes of dried fruit in their saddlebags.

The birds were waking as the stars faded, and the stubble-fields to either side were silvered for a moment with dew. Many flew up from tree and field at the rumbling clatter of hooves.

At their head Juniper Mackenzie rode, in her rippling shirt of mail. Her helmet had a silver crescent on the brows, and the standard-bearer beside her carried a green banner with the horns-and-moon.

The refugees from Sutterdown and its farms looked on-the ragged fighters grouped together, listening to a sermon from Reverend Dixon, and the families camped on either side of the road; she could smell the woodsmoke of their cooking fires and the boiling porridge-one thing the Mackenzies had in reasonable quantity right now and could spare for gifts was oatmeal.

A loud Amen came from the Sutterdown men as the Mackenzies reached the encampment-and it was all men in the armed ranks, she noticed.

Well, we had our ritual, Juniper thought. They have a right to theirs. People need faith in a time like this; if not one Way, then another. There are many roads to the same goal.

She felt far calmer than she'd feared; increasingly so, with every hoofbeat that carried her away from home. Calm in an almost trancelike way, but her mind was keenly alert, and she felt as nimble as a cat. That was one thing she'd asked for at the ceremony last night, but she'd never led a war-Esbat before-against whaling and nuclear power stations, yes; for help in battle, no. She wasn't sure how it worked. There were certainly enough crows around today, bird of the Morrigan.

The Sutterdown leaders waited to greet her, beside a table set by the side of the road. She threw up her hand and the column clattered to a halt; then she dismounted and walked towards them, leading her horse. Cuchulain padded beside her.

"Whoa!" she said suddenly.

She pushed back on the bridle to halt the animal as a small form darted out from the crowd; the mare snorted and danced in place, hooves ringing on the asphalt, trying to toss its head and failing as her grip on the reins just below the jaw calmed it.

The child was a girl, about six, her face smudged and long tow-colored hair falling over her grubby T-shirt. She wore jeans and sneakers, and she stood belligerently in Juniper's path with her chubby arms crossed on her chest; there was a shocked gasp from the onlookers as she spoke up in a clear carrying treble: "Are you the Wicked Witch?"

Juniper laughed, and went down on one knee. That brought her head about level with the girl's; she'd long ago found that children generally didn't like being loomed over. Particularly by mysterious strangers, she supposed.

"You're half right, little one," she said, looking into the cerulean blue gaze.

It was like and unlike Eilir's at the same age; just as fearless but solid and direct, without the fey quality she remembered.

"What's your name?"

"Tamar."

"That's an ancient and wonderful name, Tamar; a princess of long ago was called that. My name's Juniper, like the tree," she replied.

Her other hand went out for a moment to calm the mother who was hovering, waiting to snatch her daughter back.

"And I am a Witch, yes. But I'm a good Witch."

"Then will you make the bad men go away?"

"Yes, darling, I will do that. I promise."

Tamar glanced to either side, then leaned closer.

"Can you really do magic?" she whispered.

"Why, yes I can!" Juniper replied, keeping her face serious. "In fact-"

She'd been palming the half-eaten Snickers bar while she spoke; not without a pang, because they really didn't have many left. Now she produced it with a flourish, and the girl's eyes went wide.

"- I can make chocolate appear."

Tamar's eyes went wide as she recognized the silver-foil wrapping; she probably hadn't had any candy since right after the Change. But she restrained herself nobly; Juniper held the bar forward.

"For you."

Tamar took it eagerly. "Thank you," she said politely. Then her face fell a little: "But that wasn't real magic, was it?"

"No," Juniper said, laughing. "That was just a trick. But I can do real magic, too. Real magic doesn't make rabbits disappear in hats or chocolate bars appear out of pockets. It does great and wonderful things, but they're secret."

Tamar nodded gravely. "I hope you make those bad men disappear," she said. "They're really really bad. They chased us out of our house and they took my Mr. Rabbit and they hurt people and scared my mom and made her cry."

"Then by spell and sword we'll make them go away, and get you back Mr. Rabbit, and your house," she said. "And none of them will make your mom cry again."

Then she looked to either side as the child had, and lowered her voice: "Do you want to know a secret?"

Tamar nodded eagerly, leaning forward herself and turning her head so that Juniper could whisper in her ear.

"I can do real magic. And so can you."

Tamar gave a squeal of delight, and Juniper rose, putting a hand on the small hard head to steer her back to her waiting mother; the woman snatched her up, but Tamar waved gleefully with the hand that held the chocolate bar.

Juniper was still smiling slightly when she reached the Sutterdown triumvirate.

"Sorry," she said. "But I couldn't resist."

Sheriff Laughton nodded. "Tamar's my sister's daughter," he said. "Her dad was in Washington-D.C.-on the day of the Change. Thanks."

Then he took a deep breath. "We're ready," he went on. "But an awful lot depends on you."

"And I'm laying the life of my people on the line," she said. "This is all of us, bar the children, the very pregnant, the nursing mothers and the sick. Our lives are riding on this, and the lives of our children."

He nodded jerkily, and traced two roads on the map. "We'll draw them back to here." His face went distant for an instant, as if at some memory, and not a good one. "It's not easy, getting men to stop running-even if they know they're supposed to run in the first place."

"As agreed, here," Juniper said, taking the meaning if not the reference, tapping the map in her turn. "And it's our best chance, Sheriff. We'll just have to hope the enemy are as arrogant and overconfident as they seem."

There was a grassy hill not far east of Craigswood. As the sun set, Michael Havel and Signe Larsson walked to the crest. The lights of the town showed below them, soft with firelight and lantern light; the smaller cluster of the Bear-killers' camp was directly below, distant enough that the sound of voices singing in chorus was faded to a blur. Within their own scouts' perimeter, they could dress as they pleased; Havel found himself reveling in the light feel of the T-shirt, Levi's, and Stetson.

Signe was dressed similarly, except that she wore a flannel shirt over her "No Whaling" T-shirt, with the tails tied at her midriff.

They both carried their backswords and shields, of course; by now that was as instinctive as putting on shoes. They leaned them against a lone pine that marked the crest, spread their blanket and sat, elbows on knees, watching the sky change from salmon pink and hot gold to green shading into blue as the sun dropped below the jagged horizon.

"Pretty," he said.

Signe turned her head and grinned at him; at close range, he noticed how the down-fine gold hairs on her skin stood out against the golden brown of her tan, like very faint peach fuzz.

"You're supposed to say but not as pretty as you," she said.

"I suppose that's one reason I'm still single, not saying silly stuff like that," Havel said, smiling back. "I mean, you are pretty; you're beautiful, in fact. But you aren't a sunset."

"So, is this our first date?"

"Well, if you don't count fighting cannibals together-"

They shared a chuckle, then sat in companionable silence for a while.

"They seem like nice people," Signe said. "The Woburns, I mean."

Havel nodded; dinner had been pleasant. "Nice to eat at a table again, too."

"Yeah!" A pause. "You know, this is a very pretty area, too. Looks like very good land, as well."

He turned and looked at her; she'd laid her head on her knees, and the last sunlight gilded her hair. He replied to her unspoken question.

"No, I don't think settling down here after"-he nodded towards the outline of Cottonwood Butte where Duke Iron Rod laired in his monastery-cum-fortress-"we take care of him would be a good idea. Doable, perhaps… but not a good idea."

"There's a lot of vacant land, good land, with good houses and fencing already in place. And they'll be grateful; we could help them set up their defenses."

He nodded. "Gratitude is worth its weight in gold."

She thought about that for a moment and then made a growling sound and hit him on the shoulder.

"You are the most cynical man I've ever met!"

"I was a blue-collar kid," he grinned. "And then a grunt. Dirty end of the stick all the way. Cynical I can do in my sleep. No, the main reason is up there."

He nodded north. "This was all Nez Perce land once. They haven't forgotten-Running Horse told me more than he intended, I think. What's more, you're right, it's good land and well watered, about the best farming country in Idaho that doesn't need to be irrigated. Much better than anything the tribe have left. Give it a generation or so… well, I wouldn't want to leave my kids that sort of war as an inheritance."

"Oh," she said. "And I suppose the Protector would be after us too, if we knocked off his local boy. And Sheriff Woburn might cause problems."

"Bingo, askling," Havel said. "You're not just a pretty face, you know?"

She hesitated. "Mike, do you like me?" At his raised brow, she went on: "I mean, I think you do-we get on better than I ever have with a guy… but then… "

He leaned back on his elbows, plucking a grass stem and chewing on the end; it was sweet as honey.

"Didn't think you'd want to be bothered with men hitting on you for a while, judging by our last try."

She looked down at his face. "Better not let anyone else hear that," she teased. "It might spoil the great, ruthless Lord Bear's reputation."

"Hmmphf." He hesitated in his turn. "Well, if you want to know the absolute truth… The other problem's been that while I do like you, I'm in charge here. Had to be really sure you reciprocated, you know?"

"You're a gentleman, and a gentle man, in your way, Mike."

"Within limits," he grinned; his arms came up and encircled her.

"Lord Bear! Lord Bear! Lord-oh, shit, I'm sorry!"

The messenger turned and dashed back down the hill, standing looking ostentatiously away thirty feet down-slope.

Mike Havel looked down into Signe's face. A little of the glaze went out of her eyes; then she wrapped arms and legs around him.

"If you stop now, I'll… I'll make sure you never can again!"

"Come back in ten minutes!" Havel shouted.

Signe giggled again and bit him on the shoulder; Havel gave an involuntary yelp, loud enough for the messenger to hear. They could hear his floundering retreat.

"Ten minutes! You unromantic beast!" Signe said, running her heels up the backs of his thighs. "Where were we?"

Signe paused as she began to tie her bootlaces, looking at Havel out of the corners of her eyes.

"Well, that sort of rushed things, didn't it?"

"Yeah, it did sort of rush things. Goddamned embarrassing interruption, too."

"You're an old-fashioned guy in some ways, Mike."

"Backwoods upbringing," he said, buckling on his sword and jamming the hat on his head. "This had better be important."

"Wait a minute," Signe said, fingers plucking. "Grass in your beard… there, got it."

"Your hair is full of the stuff… hey, kid! The message!"

She was running a comb through the dense yellow mane when the adolescent returned.

"Mr. Hutton says to tell you there's a bad discipline problem with Waters, and you're needed pronto," the boy said, still facing away.

"Tell him I'll be right there," Havel said.

And in no very good mood. Billy boy, you have the worst timing of any man I've ever met.

The crowd parted at the sound of hooves; Havel reined in, hearing murmurs of "the bossman" and "Lord Bear." He slid from the saddle and someone took the reins; possibly Signe, but he wasn't looking around right now.

Several of the lanterns that hung before the family tents were lit; that and the fires gave plenty of light, but the people crowding around were flickers at the edge of sight, their faces uneasy.

Billy Waters stood, looking sullen and flushed, two men holding him by the arms-both his neighbors. Jane Waters sat by the front flap of their tent in a boneless slump, her face covered with the red flush of incipient bruises, tears leaking down her face; her two younger children huddled near her, torn between fear and need for their mother's closeness.

Reuben Waters was not far away, lying on his back while Pamela Arnstein worked on him. Her hawk-featured face was incandescent with fury; Havel felt it through his own anger as he knelt beside Waters's twelve-year-old son.

"He was just woozy," she said. "I gave him something to make him sleep."

She touched the boy's face gently, turning it towards the brightest firelight. Relaxation made the narrow foxy hillbilly-Scots-Irish face look younger than its twelve years.

"See here? He's going to have a shiner, and this tooth is loose. Punched twice, I'd say. Those are a grown man's knuckle marks. All he needs now is cold compresses and rest. And a different father!"

Havel nodded, walked over to Jane Waters, and crouched on his heels so that their eyes were level. He touched her chin with a finger, turning her left cheek to the light and studied the swelling marks of a man's hand.

"Jane," he said. "Why don't you help Pam get your son to the infirmary tent?" She looked at him with dumb fear. "Jane, whatever happens, you've still got a place here-and your kids. Understand?"

He helped her rise, and composed his face when he realized it was frightening some of the onlookers. The stretcher-bearers took Reuben off, with his mother walking beside him.

"Angelica," he went on. "You've got some of those cookies left, don't you?" At her nod, he went on: "I think it would be a good idea if you and Annie took the kids- everyone younger than Astrid-and fed them some cookies over by the chuck wagon, and tell 'em stories. Tell 'em about Larsdalen."

Their destination was assuming mythic proportions; he hoped the reality didn't disappoint too much.

She nodded: "I'll get Sam to check Rueben over just in case and help with the kids."

Rounding up the children wasn't hard; they all thought cookies and a tale by the camp's best storytellers was far more interesting than a frightening confrontation among the grownups.

"Get all the adults here, except the sentries," Havel went on.

That took a few minutes. He ducked into the Waterses' tent-normally something never done without invitation- and rummaged. The bottle he'd expected was still three-quarters full. It was Maker's Mark, first-class Kentucky bourbon, expensive as hell even before the. Change. There was another just like it, empty.

"All right," he went on, when he brought the bottles out and held them up for the company to see. "Everyone here? Good. Now you, Fred Naysmith, you give me the details."

The man holding Waters's left arm gulped, and stuttered. The Bearkillers' judicial proceedings were refreshingly simple, so far; a trial by a quorum of the adults, presided over by Lord Bear. Punishments were simple too. With fines and imprisonment impractical, they went quickly from "extra duties" through a mass kicking around that Pam called "the gauntlet" to "expulsion," which was equivalent to a death sentence.

Naysmith licked his lips and spoke out: "I heard the Wa-terses arguing-sounded like Billy was yelling at Nancy." That was the bowyer's eight-year-old. "Then she started crying and screaming at him to stop, and… well, we hadn't been listening too hard before, you know, Boss?"

He nodded understanding. There wasn't much privacy in camp; the tents were set far enough apart that ordinary conversation didn't carry, but shouts certainly did. A convention had grown up of pretending you didn't hear family arguments-one of the little forbearances that made the tight-knit group's life tolerable.

"But it got sort of scary. And I could hear Jane screaming at him to stop, too. Then he started hitting her-hitting Jane, that is-and then Reuben tried to make him leave her alone, and he started hitting the kid, real hard, yelling bad stuff, really bad. So Jake and I went over and dragged him out. He tried to slug us too, and he smelled and acted drunk, and we sent someone for you, Lord Bear."

Havel looked around the circle of firelit faces; most of the men had close-cropped beards like his, and most of the women braids. Underlit from the flames, they all had a hard feral look, new since the Change. He held up the whiskey bottles again. There were resentful murmurs; pre-Change liquor was already extremely valuable as trade goods, like tobacco.

"This isn't from our stores. I think we can all guess how Billy got it from the townies over there."

He uncorked it and took a slug, baring his teeth and exhaling as the smooth fire burned its way down his gullet.

"That's the real goods, and no mistake. The man who took Bearkiller equipment for this didn't cheat Billy the way Billy did the rest of us."

More formally: "Anyone want to speak for this man? Anyone have a different version of what came down here tonight? Anyone know another way he could have gotten this liquor?"

There was an echoing silence; Waters didn't have many friends, and since he was obviously guilty as sin the few he did have weren't going to court unpopularity by swimming upstream. Being severely unpopular in a small community like this was unpleasant to the point of being dangerous, when you had to rely on your fellows for your life in a world turned hostile and strange.

Havel tossed the empty aside and handed the full bottle to someone, and it passed from hand to hand, with a little pawing and cursing and elbowing if anyone kept it tilted up too long-there was just enough for a sip for everyone who wanted one.

"One last time, does anyone want to speak for Billy Waters? It's any member's right to speak freely at a trial."

More silence, and Havel nodded. "Hands up for not guilty. Hands up for guilty. anyone want to propose a punishment? Or shall I handle it?"

There was a rumble of you're the boss and let Lord Bear decide.

He sighed. "Let him go," he said. The two men stepped aside, and Havel moved forward.

"Waters, you sad and sorry sack of shit," he said in a conversational tone, and then his open hand moved with blurring speed.

Crack!

Waters went down as if he'd been hit across the face with the flat side of an oak board, but nothing was broken; Havel had calculated the blow with precision.

Waters cringed and tried to scramble back as the Bear-killers' leader stepped forward, moving with the delicate ease of a great cat.

"On your feet! Christ, you're getting the beating whatever you do. Take it like a man, Waters, not a yellow dog!"

Havel raised his voice a little after the older man crawled upright, holding a hand to the side of his face.

"Do you remember what I said to you when you joined the Bearkillers, Billy?"

The man nodded quickly. "Said I shouldn't go on no benders, Lord Bear. Look, Boss, I've been making the bows good, haven't I? I'm real sorry and it won't-"

"What I said was that if you went on a bender and slapped your wife and kids around, I would beat the living shit out of you the first time, and beat the living shit out of you and throw you out on your worthless ass the second time. Didn't I?"

Waters's mouth moved. The second time he got the yes out audibly. Then he licked his lips and spoke:

"I was just giving Nancy a spanking, Lord Bear-she back-talked me. A man's got a right to do that."

Havel nodded. "Yeah, sometimes you have to give a kid a swat on the butt to get their attention, like using a rolled-up newspaper when you're housebreaking a puppy."

He held up his right hand; his index finger rose to make a point. Billy Waters watched it with fascinated dread as it approached his face.

"Since you are such a stupid sack of shit, I will now demonstrate, using visual aids, that there is a big fat fucking difference in kind between a spanking and a punch in the face."

Then he closed the hand into a fist and struck with a short chopping overarm blow. This time the sound was more like a maul striking wood.

Havel rubbed his right fist into the palm of his left as Waters rolled on the ground, moaning and clutching his face. Havel's knuckles hurt-the move wasn't one he'd have used in a fight, but the purpose here was punishment… and education, if possible.

Waters staggered up without an order this time, for example, which showed some capacity to learn.

"That's what it's like to be punched in the face by someone a lot stronger than you are, Billy. Did you like it?"

Waters swallowed and lowered a hand from his right eye; the flesh around it was already puffing up. He shook his head wordlessly.

"I'll bet punching Reuben out made you feel like a real man, didn't it, Billy?"

Crack.

Havel struck again, with his left palm this time. The man spun to the ground and hugged it, rising only when Havel encouraged him with the toe of his boot.

"Now, where were we?" Havel said, when the bowmaker was back on his feet, swaying a little. He went on, his voice flatly cold: "Yeah, we were talking about how a real man acts. Reuben, now, he tried to defend his mother against long odds, which is a pretty good example. God knows where he learned it, since he didn't get the idea from you! I think we've established that a real man doesn't punch little kids in the face, though. Haven't we? I'm waiting for an answer, Billy."

"Yes, Lord Bear."

"Now let's move on to the subject of how a real man treats his wife. A real man doesn't slap even a ten-dollar hooker around, if he's got any self-respect, much less hurt his own woman. Much less ten times over the mother of his kids. A real man busts his ass to feed his family, fights for them if he has to, dies for them if he has to. And he treats his wife with respect every day of his life, treats her like a queen-the queen of the home she makes for their children."

Crack. Crack.

Havel struck again with both sides of his open hand, forehand and back. Waters slumped to his knees, blood pouring from his nose and the corners of his mouth where the lips had cut on his teeth.

"Chuck that bucket of water on him," Havel said, without looking around.

Someone did, and awareness came into Waters's eyes once more. Havel bent, forearm on thigh, so that he could speak close to the man's face, more quietly this time.

"By now, you probably feel a bit hard-done-by, Billy. Just remember this: anytime you want, you can be treated with respect by me and everyone in the outfit. All you have to do is earn it! Now get out of my sight. Go puke out the booze and clean yourself up. I'm giving you this one last chance, for your kids' sake."

Havel turned to the assembly as Waters scuttled away. His voice was hard and pitched to carry, but calm: "I cannot abide trash behavior. I will not tolerate it in the Bear-killers. Remember, we're supposed to look out for each other; so don't let this sort of thing get started. Lights-out in an hour, people. We'd all better get ready to turn in."

The crowd dispersed, murmuring, as he walked back towards the command tent; most of the murmurs were approval. More than a few slapped him on the back; he answered with polite nods, but stayed wordless. Signe followed, leading their horses.

"Mike-" she said.

He turned with a wry smile. "Sorry, askling, but I'm not fit company for man or beast right now."

The smile turned into a grimace. "I feel like I need a bath-and a strong drink, to get the taste of that out of my mouth."

She smiled and leaned forward, kissing him with brief gentleness. "Well," she said, "It's not as if either of us is going to fly off to the Cote d'Azur tomorrow, right? What say we make a date for the next nice sunset?"

He grinned suddenly. "I'll look forward to it."

"And you'll treat me like a queen, hey?" she asked, smiling impishly.

He swept an elaborate courtly bow. "And so will everyone else," he said. "If I have anything to say about it."

When she'd left, he stood smiling his crooked smile for a moment.

"And maybe, just maybe, I will," he murmured to himself.

For Ken Larsson was right; he had been very damned lucky indeed, so far. And…

"How did your dad put it, Signe? Yeah. People live by myths, but myths change… the Change threw 'em all up for grabs. And the first king was a lucky soldier."

Twenty-six

"Complicated plan," Sam Aylward whispered. "Depends on the enemy doing what we want."

Juniper nodded. "It also allows a good chance for us to run away if things go bad," she replied softly, concentrating on the view through her binoculars.

"It also depends on the Sutterdown folk doing what they promised."

"Ni neart go cur le cheie," she said. "There's no strength without unity. We can't do this by ourselves."

She lay at the edge of a patch of woods that covered a low rise in the valley floor. Beyond that was a narrow strip of plowed land grown with weeds, earth turned before the Change but never seeded. Beyond that was a wire fence, now down and derelict, and a narrow two-lane road; beyond that was a fair-sized wheatfield, reaped but with the grain still lying in windrows, and beyond that a line of trees along the irregular course of a small creek.

The sight of the grain lying out disturbed her, even though the land was well beyond the clan's borders and into Sutterdown territory. Every night it lay out was one more for the birds and animals to eat more, and the risk of it spoiling was unbearable. In fact, she could see jays at it now, and crows, and a rabbit hopping through looking for good bits.

The waste of war, she thought. Bad enough before the Change. Worse now.

She laid the glasses down and turned her head, looking through a fringe of cloth. The long hooded poncho they'd christened a war cloak was light fabric, splotched in gray-green-brown, and sewn over with loops that held twigs or served to break her outline; Sam called it a ghillie suit. All the Mackenzie fighters wore one, and even though she knew where they were, she could see no more than a few- Dennis, lying with the ax blade beside his head, and John Carson beyond him.

The Englishman had taught them that trick; he was willing to give advice, or train, or fight, or even lead a small group, but not to command overall, though they'd offered him that. What had he said?

Hasn't been an Aylward ranked higher than sergeant in seven centuries, Lady. I wouldn't want to break the tradition.

She didn't look behind herself.The horses were safely on the other, eastern side of the woodlot; Eilir and half a dozen other kids too young to fight but old enough to be trusted held them, ready for retreat. If worse came to worst, most of her people could probably flee… but she didn't expect that.

I've never felt like this outside the Circle, she thought, but the musing was distant. It wasn't that she was brimming with confidence; she just… waited.

The first Sutterdown men to come by were running, and for real; weaponless, some leaking blood, but not too badly to keep them from making good speed. They came down the road and vanished around the corner as it curved eastward, to her left. The rest came in a clump; many more wounded or limping, some lying in a cart drawn by a single horse. She knew that meant others were dead; that a rear guard was spending their lives buying time for the rest to retreat and make their stand.

Even wondering if they'd stop didn't make her feel anxious-just a slight tension, like a tight string on a guitar.

They did stop. Reverend Dixon was there, the only man on horseback, but sharing his parishioners' danger. She could hear his voice, though not make out the words: harsh, hectoring, shaming the men into halting and turning to face the foe once more. But she could feel the power in it, as he gestured with the Bible in his hand.

I'll never like him, and we may be enemies someday, but respect him I must, however reluctantly. He's no hypocrite.

There were a hundred or so of the Sutterdown militia, working with frantic speed to make an improvised barricade where the road turned east, hauling fence posts with a tangle of wire and shoving a couple of abandoned cars into place before rocking them over on their sides; forty of her Mackenzies waited along the edge of the woods. Silence fell again, more or less; birds sang with cruel indifference, and insects burrowed and bit.

And the braying sound of a trumpet came from the northwest, towards Sutterdown, faint but menacing. A man on a bicycle came from that direction too, stopped on a straight section of the road just beyond bowshot of the militia's barricade and looked about with binoculars of his own.

She lowered her own lest the reflection give her away and waited; he seemed to give only perfunctory attention to the side of the road. The barricade got a close going-over, and the scout wrote in a spiral-bound notebook. Then he extended a fist with all but one finger clenched into a fist, pumped it in an unmistakable gesture, and pedaled off towards Sutterdown again.

When he returned, the whole band was with him. Only two of them were on horseback, one who seemed to be the leader-he had a tall feather plume on his helmet-and a standard-bearer beside him. The flag that hung from the crossbar on the pole was black, with a cat-pupiled red eye on it; her mouth quirked slightly, at the evidence that someone-perhaps this Protector-had a nasty sense of humor.

Or as Mike said, a weak grasp on reality; possibly both.

The rest were on bicycles. Her lips moved again, in a silent curse. With bicycles and good roads, raiders could travel fifty miles in a day and strike without warning; and in the short run bicycles required neither the skilled care nor the expensive feeding of horses. That alone made things different-and worse-than in any of the history everyone was mining for clues on how to live in the Changed world.

Take bandits, add bicycles and shake, and what do you get? Instant Mongol!

Now someone seemed to have figured out how to apply the same advantage on a large scale. You couldn't fight from the saddle of a bicycle, but then, nobody around here could fight from the back of a horse either. Not yet.

Sixty-three, she counted; that didn't include the banner man. Thirty with crossbows.

Pre-Change crossbows, or made well since; they also wore short sleeveless tunics covered with metal scales, helmets, and had small shields slung across their backs; and they all seemed to have long knives or shortswords at their belts. Many carried hatchets as well.

The remaining dozen had knee-length hauberks of rings or scales; their armor had sleeves, and they wore steel-splint protection on their forearms and shins. Their shields were thick and broad, strapped with metal, and they were armed with heavy spears, long swords or axes. The mounted commander halted them along the eastern side of the road, and Juniper felt a stab of anxiety-had they seen her folk?

No, she decided. He's just holding them there ready to charge.

She could see them laughing as they dismounted from their bicycles, leaving them on their kickstands, forming up in a column shield to shield; a few paused to piss by the side of the road, holding the skirts of their armor aside.

The invaders had a supply wagon with them as well. It wasn't horse drawn, though: men powered it, seated on six bicycles bolted into a frame. Scrawny men clothed in rags, whose feet were chained to the pedals of their machines.

Now, are these the Good Guys, or the Bad Guys? she thought grimly. Nice to know your first impression isn 't mistaken. Cernunnos, Lord of the Gates of the Underworld, make ready!

The crossbowmen formed up in a double line and began walking towards the Sutterdown position; they moved in open order, leaving gaps for the second rank to shoot through. Archers and crossbows opened up on them as they came within a hundred yards, but they ignored them- and ignored the man of theirs who fell kicking with a bolt in his thigh, except that they shuffled their ranks to close up the empty space.

At eighty yards they stopped with a single long shout. The first rank leveled their crossbows and fired, a harsh unmusical snapping of strings and whistle of bolts; then they dropped the forward ends of their weapons to the ground, unshipped the cranks at their belt, hooked them to cord and butt and rewound.

The second rank fired as they reloaded; then the first raised their weapons again, steady and methodical…

They'll keep shooting until the militia are badly shaken, she thought.

Behind them the full-armored fighters were shouting and slapping their weapons on their shields, waiting their turn.

Then the heavies will go in. Morrigan witness, nobody really knows how to fight this way. A hundred Romans or Normans could wipe the floor with the lot of us. But the Protector's bunch are a little less ignorant than most.

"But perhaps not so wise as they supposed," she murmured to herself, and whistled softly in signal.