He could hear the rough jeers and laughter from the ones who’d stayed conscious. They’ll rib their mates for days, he thought. It will keep them all alert.
Someone shoved a canteen of improved river water into his hand; he drank, coughed liquid out through his nose, spat and drank again despite the savage pain as the diluted alcohol struck the damaged membranes, and passed it along. They pedaled onward into the setting sun, bloodred sunset to the fore; bloodred fire to the rear.
Huon Liu frowned. “So… so he didn’t really do anything bad there?”
“Not there,” Dmwoski said grimly. “Your uncle was no coward and not a bad soldier. It was his bad judgment that gave the enemy their opening; his refusal to let go of hatred and the desire for revenge. We learned the details of that later; from his deeds, and his words.”
CHAPTER THREE
DUN JUNIPER TO DUN FAIRFAX DUTHCHAS OF THE CLAN MACKENZIE (FORMERLY THE EAST-CENTRAL WILLAMETTE VALLEY, OREGON) HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA) JULY 31, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
“I t’s by you my place is, Chief,” Edain Aylward Mackenzie said.
Rudi Mackenzie cocked an eyebrow. The commander of his guard regiment continued stolidly, his feet planted apart and hands on his sword belt, his gray eyes steady in his square young face: “I’m Bow-Captain of the High King’s Archers. You can dismiss me if you’ve a mind to; but until you do, I’ll do my job whether you find it suits your whim or not. Your Majesty.”
“You never call me that save when you’re going to defy me,” Rudi laughed.
“With all due respect-”
“And you never say that unless you’re going to be disrespectful, either. I’ve a sufficiency of armed men to guard me here in Dun Juniper, don’t you think? And this.”
He slapped a hand to the Sword of the Lady, and went on: “And I’ll have you remember I put your face in the midden more than once when we were boys together. I can do it again if I must.”
Despite himself, Edain laughed. At the High King’s inquiring glance he admitted: “That is most exactly what I said to me little brother Dickie when we got home, word for word, midden and all. And him grown so tall and roynish while we were gone.”
“Then be off. We’ll have our fill of risk this year, and you can throw yourself between it and me. This day I’m going to spend with my mother and stepfather and my sisters in the place I was born. You and your bride the sword-maiden go down to Dun Fairfax and do likewise!”
Edain chuckled as he set foot on the steep path that led down from the plateau of Dun Juniper to Dun Fairfax, where it was tucked away in the valley of Artemis Creek. The quiet of the hillside forest swallowed it, greenumber distances between the tall candle-straight trunks of the Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine, red cedar and hemlock, with the odd big-leaf maple or garry oak, and black walnut thickly planted long ago for variety. A jay went sheunk-sheunk-sheunk, squirrels ran chattering like gray streaks, and a hedgehog scuttled off into the underbrush.
Asgerd Karlsdottir looked at him and raised one yellow brow. She was only a finger shorter than his five-nine, but with a slender strength in contrast to his broad-shouldered, thick-armed, barrel-chested build; she wore breeks and tunic rather than the kilt, a seax-knife and Norrheimer broadsword at her belt but a Mackenzie-style quiver on her back. They both took the steep way effortlessly, ducking and twisting now and then when tree branches or undergrowth nearly caught at the arrows in their quivers, their feet making little sound despite the boots they wore. Now and then one would bend a fern gently aside with the tip of the longbows they both carried in their left hands, leaving no trace of their passing.
Neither was conscious of taking care not to make noise or leave trail. It was a manner you learned when you hunted for food’s sake, not to mention scouting and tracking and skirmishing across a continent with life and death for the table stakes.
“What’s the jest?” she asked.
“No jest; just thinking that I’m a lucky man.”
“Lucky in your lord, or your wife?”
He grinned at her; freed from the helmet his oak-colored curls tossed around his tanned face, and she restrained an impulse to smooth them back.
“The both, which is as much luck as a man can decently ask of the Powers, eh?”
They both made protective signs, though different ones; he the Invoking Pentagram, she Thor’s Hammer.
“And I was happy that the Sword gave Rudi a happy vision for once, those children he told us of. It’ll be a fine rare thing to have a little princess and prince about.”
Asgerd sighed. “I wish we had such a foretelling,” she said.
“Well, as a general rule folk don’t need a vision from a magic sword to produce children, you see. The usual way suffices,” he said solemnly.
A glint came into Edain’s gray eyes as he deliberately looked her up and down. “We’ll just have to keep practicing over and over until we get it right, so to say…”
He dodged as she pretended to clout him along the head with her bow, then said more seriously: “Though we’ve plenty of time; we’re both of us younger than Rudi and his lady. Why, look at me ma and da; I come back after only two years away, and I’ve a new brother and sister tumbling about the place like puppies. Twins, I admit, and born no more than nine months after I left almost to a day, but it’s scarce daycent, at their ages. Da’ll be seventy, come Samhain and a bit!”
Asgerd snorted. “Your mother is younger, and that’s what counts.”
“Aye, eighteen year younger, near nineteen; she lost her first man in the Change, my half sister Tamar’s father, he was some place far away. And Tamar was nobbut a wee one then. Not that I’m not glad to have little Nigel and Nola, of course. The more Aylwards the better for the Clan and the world-”
“They do set an example of modesty,” Asgerd said in a pawky tone.
“Modesty is a vice I leave to Christians, as the Chief likes to say. But it’s odd to think they’re younger than Tamar’s children, my nieces and nephews. It’s taken a good deal out of Ma, too. Fifty is old to be brought to bed of a hard labor, and they say it was painful hard. Thank Brigid we have fine midwives and healers.”
Asgerd shivered a little inwardly; her people did too, but you went to the mouth of Hela’s realm to bring forth life, nonetheless. Then her mouth quirked. “And she’s not all that happy you’ve brought a foreign wife home, and one who follows other Gods than hers.”
Edain shrugged. “Could be worse, darlin’; you’re not of the Old Religion, but you’re not quite a cowan either. Now if you’d been a Christian, one of the ones who scorns all other Gods and won’t so much as set aside a bowl of milk for the house-hob… that would have put the manure-fork in the soup kettle, right and proper it would.”
Asgerd wore the triple interlinked triangles of Odin on a thong around her neck, the Valknut; she was Asatru, like most of the folk in her distant homeland of Norrheim, what had once been northernmost Maine.
Her man went on: “ And she’s not overhappy her grown children are near all off to the war-Tamar’s man Eochu, and me, and Dickie, and even young Fand as an eoghann. Tamar would be too, except that she has a babe at the breast. We’d best remember that there’s been war here, with battles and all, while we made our way to Nantucket and back, tricking and twisting and fighting. Not to mention runnin’ like buggery when we could, though the bards will leave that out, I’m thinking.”
“Only from Norrheim to Nantucket and all the way back here, for me, but that was long enough! Three thousand miles, is it?”
A chill ran down her back as she remembered what had happened on Nantucket. The details were hazy, as if in a fever-dream that slipped away when you woke; but she knew she had stepped out of the light of Midgard’s common day there. And the Sword… she could hear the seeress’ voice, deepened and roughened as the All-Father took hold of her on the high seat of seidh in the hall at Eriksgarth: More potent than Tyrfing, forged for the hand of a King!
&nbs
p; They came out of the deep woods, onto a spot where the trail turned downward in a switchback; it had been roughly reinforced with logs and rocks to prevent the soil from washing in the winter rains, and those in turn worn by boots and the odd hoof. From here you were a hundred feet above the funnel shape of the little valley running out into the broader stretches of the Willamette and could see it all with a sweep of the eyes.
A winding strip of forest followed Artemis Creek; the rest of the vale was divided into small fields by neatly trimmed hawthorn hedges studded with lines of poplars and oaks, well grown but usually no older than Edain. Some of the fields were the pale brown-blond of reaped wheat, or the gold-shot green of standing barley a month or two from harvest. The vivid grass of cropped pasture lay dreaming beneath the warmth of a sun that brought out the rich smell of earth and sap; white-coated sheep and red cattle grazed there, and beneath orchards. Plots of potatoes and vegetables were grouped closer to the walls of the Dun. Beeches lined the white-surfaced dirt road that followed the tumbling water, and dust smoked away behind an oxwagon that moved there, small as a child’s toy with distance.
“And isn’t this a brave bright sight,” Edain said, his voice soft with love. “I can remember the time my father took me to this spot, after the first harvest I recall clear, and pointed out our fields and our neighbors’, where I’d worked carrying water to the binders and myself so proud to be part of it. Often and often I thought of this on the journey there and back again.”
Asgerd tried to see it as he did; tried and failed.
Oh, it’s was beautiful enough, she thought; beautiful with an alien comeliness. And rich, richer than Norrheim.
Some of the crops were the same; her folk grew wheat and barley and oats and spuds too. But here they planted wheat in the fall and harvested it in the summer, instead of putting seed down in spring and making prayer and blot to Frey and Freya and Thor that the weather held long enough to get it in come fall. Norrheimers reaped with one eye on the sky, dreading clouds and cold driving rain to make the grain sprout and rot in the stack, hail that could beat it flat, and even early snow. Here it was one fine warm day after another for the ripening.
So in the Mackenzie duthchas barley went mostly to beer and oats to horses and they didn’t bother with rye. Everyone ate fine feast-time white bread made from wheat flour every day if they pleased, like a great chief. There were fruits here she’d only heard about in tales, apricots and cherries, pears and peaches and nectarines, even grapes for wine. You could graze stock outside ten or eleven months of the year, too; she’d never seen such a wealth of strong fat beasts. Winters here were chilly and wet, not the endless gray iron cold and driving blizzards she’d grown up with, and there were near a hundred days more between the last killing frost and the first.
Rich land well farmed and plenty of it, she thought. The only wealth that’s really real. Never a hungry spring for my children, when they come; a place for them to grow straight and strong and carry our blood down the years in our children’s children.
But for a moment she was possessed by a bitter longing for the hard pine scent of the homeland winds, the pale light of the short midsummer nights gleaming on the silver bark of the birches, and even the bright chill of a winter morning when the land seemed crusted with diamond and the air crackled in your nose. There was no point in talking of any of that. She had made her decision, for reasons which still seemed good, and she would abide what came of it. Edain best of all, and where he was she would make her home.
“The harvest was fine,” she said instead, the surefire conversational gambit; she couldn’t imagine anyone not being interested in that. “The heads in the sheaves were thick and heavy.”
“Fifty bushels the acre if it’s one, despite pushing it just a wee bit early for the war’s sake and letting the grain dry in the stooks,” Edain agreed. “Nor any sign of the rust. As good as any can remember since the Change.”
He cocked an eye at her. “And you pitched in very well, with not a word said. Everyone was pleased, and more than one told me so.”
Asgerd flushed, happy and a little angry at the same time that anyone could have doubted her. She’d seen lands where a few rich lorded it over all others and despised toil and sweat, but she was glad that among Mackenzies everyone worked, and fought when needful. Back in Norrheim she’d often seen King Bjarni with his hands on the handles of a plow or the haft of an ax, and Queen Harberga busy with loom and churn or helping get in the hay.
“Who but a nithing would do otherwise?” she said. “When there’s real work to be done, you do it with all you have. The wights give no luck to the lazy, nor would Frey and Freya if I lacked respect for Their gifts.”
Edain chuckled. “I know you, acushla, and have for a year now; and I know your folk a little, so I know why your back’s up and bristling like an angry cat. There’s no harm making a good impression on those who don’t know you or them, though, eh? We Mackenzies think well of a hard worker too, and you’re the new wolf in the pack here.”
She nodded. I haven’t met many Norrheimer men who are as good at following a woman’s thoughts, she mused. He’s a troll-killing terror in a fight, my Edain, and a stallion in the blankets, and he can hunt anything that flies or runs, but in some ways he’s as sensitive as another girl.
The thought gave her a flush of pleasure. She hid it by cocking her head to one side and considering Dun Fairfax itself, seen as a bird or a God might view it and away from the confusing thronging closeness that had blurred her vision of it before. There was nothing quite like a Dun of Clan Mackenzie in Norrheim. The thorp of a godhi, the home-place of a ring-giving drighten chief, would come closest; but that would be dominated by the Hall, and none held quite so many dwellers. Most Norrheimers lived each family of yeoman bondar by itself in the center of its allodal family land, the way her own parents and siblings did, with perhaps a few dependents’ homes to make a hamlet for the most prosperous.
Dun Fairfax was a rectangle surrounded by a palisade of logs set in concrete and bound together with steel cable. There were blockhouses at the corners and flanking the gate made from squared baulks of timber; the whole was built from big logs, as thick as her body and many man-lengths high, for the trees grew tall and great here. They’d been stripped of bark, too, and varnished and oiled and polished, and bands across them had been carved with low-relief patterns of twining leaves and vines and serpents and elongated beasts, colorfully painted and inlaid with glass and stone from which whimsical faces peered, human and demi-human, bestial and divine.
Mackenzies were fond of that effect, but it always made her feel as if something was looking at her, just out of sight at the corners of her eyes. Here you always felt that the Otherworld was only a half step away.
A clear space of close-cropped pasture was kept outside the walls. Within were the homes and workshops along cobbled lanes, the tall steep-pitched covenstead that served for ceremony and gatherings and school for the children, and a communal barn and grain elevator and warehouse where things like the reaping machines were kept; there was a pond like a blue eye near the center where ducks and geese swam, surrounded by willows and oaks and a stretch of grass. Smoke drifted blue from brick chimneys in roofs that might be mossy shingle or flower-starred green turf, and very faintly she could hear the tink-tank-clang of a smith at work. The largest house was a pre-Change frame structure not at all unlike some she’d seen as a girl, but it was much altered and painted in a pale blue. The corners and windows and door lintels had all been set with bands of carved planking picked out in gold-yellow and scarlet and green.
Beautiful, but different… very strange… witchy, she thought.
“Too crowded,” she said aloud, and then again had that disconcerting feeling that Edain was following her real thoughts. “All those households within one wall.”
“Ah, well, it was bad in Norrheim after the Change but worse for us,” he said blandly. “For ten years war hung over us like a thundercloud of thre
ats and raids before it burst; I remember the wars against the Association, though I was naught but a nipper when Rudi was taken prisoner, and the northerners besieged Sutterdown, and I recall Da leading our archers out to the Field of Gold. And bad bandit troubles before and after and during that, gangs of the spalpeens, so it wasn’t safe for families to live apart on their own as your folk do. We got into the habit of dwelling close, so.”
“It’s still as packed with folk as an egg is with meat,” she grumbled.
“Forbye it’s a bit crowded now, yes, what with the easterners we’ve given refuge and our own numbers growing. Perhaps after the war, we’ll get together with Dun Carson and some others and found a new settlement.”
Unspoken went: if too many don’t die in the battles to come.
There was quiet pride in his voice: “We’ve done it before and more than twice; this is the oldest Dun in the Clan’s territory, after Dun Juniper. And Dun Juniper’s… different. This was the first of our farming Duns, and the pattern for the others, so.”
The bigger house was the Aylward household, where her man’s family dwelt. Her marriage-kin now. She took a deep breath. No task grew easier and no danger grew less because you flinched from it. Just as she did they both heard soft quiet steps coming from below. Hands went to weapons, and Edain made a brzzzzzllll sound between his teeth, the buzzing trill of some local bird she didn’t know. The like answered it, and they relaxed; then a man and three dogs came into sight.
“Dickie,” Edain said, slipping the arrow back into his quiver.
His younger brother was just eighteen and hence a little younger than Asgerd herself, in a kilt but barefoot, with only a sleeveless shirt below his quiver and a bow in his hand and a dirk at his belt. He had a kin-look of Edain, but his long queue of hair was a brown ruddy with the tint of old rust, his face half-covered with freckles where it wasn’t pale, and his build more lanky. Two of the dogs were just out of pup-hood, two years or so with heads and feet still a little large for their frames; the other was a gray-brown bitch of six or seven. All three were enormous, mastiff-Dane crosses with a strong trace of timber wolf.
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