Dies the Fire dtf-1

by S. M. Stirling

  A laugh went around the table; it was a title of the High Priest of a coven, and Chuck had been the only candidate for that post, as well as farm manager. It also meant the Great Rite would be symbolic rather than actual from now on, with the High Priest not Juniper’s man.

  Rudy…

  She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then forced a smile.

  He took up the story, with a pad of his own. “OK, we’ve got all the acreage we need turned and fitted, and most of the potatoes planted-we’ll keep the rest to put in between now and June, to stretch the harvesting season out, same with the veggies. Seven acres so far all up, here and down by the Fairfax place, counting what Frank Fairfax had in before the Change.”

  He paused to glare at Dorothy and Diana and Andy, who were organic-produce fanatics… or had been, before direct personal experience of hunger, which tended to make one less finicky.

  “I presume nobody’s going to object to using fungicides if we have to? ‘Cause those potatoes are the margin between living and dying, and anyway, they came treated.”

  “If we have to, Chuck,” Juniper said soothingly. “If we have to. We’ve got them on hand, haven’t we?”

  He nodded, and the three made unwilling gestures of assent as well.

  I’m Chief Soother, that’s what I am! Juniper thought. Unruffler of Feathers! Dennis should have taken to calling me the Clan Facilitator, not the Chief.

  “The Fairfaxes had four and a half acres of fall-planted oats, which should come ripe in June; English hulled variety, good stuff. And I think we got that barley Alex found for us sown in time for some sort of yield. We’ve got a deal with the Carsons to help harvest some of their wheat on half-shares come summer; enough to really help and for seed grain of our own this autumn too. We might do the same elsewhere, but I’m not counting on it… “

  He took a deep breath. “Let’s put it this way, Mackenzies; it’ll be tight until June, and after that we’re going to get awful sick of potatoes boiled and mashed and oatmeal and carrots and turnips and cabbage and beans and barley soup and whatnot, but we’ll have enough to last through until the next crop year. More than enough, if we’re reasonably lucky. In fact, we may not have enough people to harvest it all!

  “Of course,” he went on, amid the cheers, “that brings up the question of storage. Potatoes take a lot of space, and we’ll be storing by the ton, and we’re going to have a fair amount of grain as well. I think more root cellars should be the first priority now that we’ve got some time to spare-”

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Judy said. “We need a better bathhouse and laundry system for heath reasons-”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Dennis cut in. “There’s that old gristmill east of Lebanon, we could put it in below the waterfall with only a short sluice gate to build. Nobody’s claimed it yet, and we could charge to grind other people’s grain come summer-”

  “And on second thought,” Chuck said, glaring a little, “we ought to do a regular daily training schedule with archery and sword-and-buckler. The bandit gangs are getting-”

  Juniper sighed and put her hands to her forehead. The threat of starvation had kept this collection of strong-willed individualists moving in one direction. Now she was going to have to earn her corn.

  She looked around the table and caught several pairs of eyes-Dennis, Sally, Alex and his three friends. Let’s see, how many votes… Sam wasn’t comfortable enough with them to take much part yet, but she had hopes there, which was for the best.

  Because some weren’t going to like what she would suggest they do now that the most of the potatoes were planted, but the will of the Lady and Lord were plain.

  At least to me it is, she thought.

  She reached back and picked up her fiddle and bow from a table beside the couch. The first long strong note brought silence.

  Then she improvised; a pompous boom for Chuck’s voice, a piercing commanding shrill for Judy’s, short anxious tremulos for Diana and Andy, a querulous rising inflection for Dennis’s Californian accent…

  Chuck was the first to snort. After a minute they were all laughing, and she wove the discords into a tune, one they all knew; the rollicking “Stable Boy,” and moving on to “Harvest Season” and “Beltane Morning.”

  People missed music, with a craving almost as strong as that for food; there just wasn’t any, in the Changed world, unless you made it yourself or persuaded someone in the room with you to do it. Soon everyone was singing. Eilir’s head poked down through the stairs to the loft; she couldn’t hear the tunes, but she loved watching the audience. Smaller heads peeked around hers.

  “Out in the wood

  There’s a band of small faeries

  If you walk unwary at night;

  They’re laughing and drinking

  And soon you’ll be thinking-”

  When she stopped the tension had gone out of the gathering. Everyone was ready to move the furniture aside and unroll their bedding; Andy and Diana were sleeping in the loft with the kids tonight, and they went up the stairs with a candle in its holder.

  And tomorrow I’ll tell them about doing some outreach.

  Twelve

  “Spear, spear, where’s the goddamned spear!” Havel shouted, setting himself for a last-second dodge.

  There wasn’t time to be afraid. He didn’t bother to draw his knife-with a bear this size, you might as well try to tickle it to death-or pay attention to the shouts and the wild neighing of the hobbled horses or to Signe dashing away.

  He did when she came back seconds later, tossing the shaft of the spear in his direction. Grabbing it and whirling back to the bear gave him just enough time to set himself, with a fractional second more to be thankful he and Will had spent some time reshafting the blade firmly.

  The animal would have run right over him if it hadn’t paused, but bears liked to attack from an upright rear. It towered over him like a wall of cinnamon-black fur as he crouched with the spear poised; it was roaring, clawed paws raised like organic trip-hammers to smash his spine and spatter his brains across the ground.

  He knew how to kill bears. You shot them from a hundred and fifty yards with a scope-sighted rifle firing hollow-point game rounds…

  “Yaaaaaah!” he shouted, lunging.

  The impact was like ramming a pole into an oncoming truck, and it jarred every bone and tendon in his arms and shoulders and back. He shouted again, this time in alarm, as the onrushing weight drove him backward, his heels skidding in the damp grass of the meadow. The foot-long knife blade sank into the bear’s middle, and part of the spear shaft after it, and the growling roar of pain and anger that followed it sprayed into his face along with saliva and a fan of blood.

  The butt of the spear slid along the ground until it jammed in a root, carrying him with it like a bundle. Then the bear screamed again as the weapon was driven deeper by its own strength and weight. It twisted frantically, trying to escape the thing that hurt it, and Havel clung with all his strength as the animal pounded him against the ground in its writhing.

  Then his elbow hit ground with a jarring thump that made his hand open by sheer reflex as white agony flowed up the arm and down into his torso. The bear twisted again, and Havel felt himself thrown through the air with no more effort than a child’s doll. Long training made him relax as he flew, curling loosely.

  Whump.

  The hard, hard ground still knocked the air out of his lungs and rattled his brain; he fought to breathe and collect his wits.

  “Jesus!” he wheezed, scrambling backward on his butt and pushing himself with his heels.

  The bear was heading for him. More slowly-the spear shaft stuck out of its middle at an angle; he’d seen before with the plump bandit that the shape of the knife blade made it difficult to withdraw once it was deep in a body. Now the long shaft kept catching on the ground and making the animal wince and stumble, and every time that happened the sharp steel was waggled about in the bear’s body cavity.

  But it
moved, at a hunching, lurching amble, and it was coming straight for him. Blood poured from the wound in its belly, but it didn’t spout with the pulsing arterial torrent that would have killed it quickly.

  And he couldn’t get up fast enough.

  He tried and fell over backward; his left leg wasn’t working properly yet, where he’d landed on it. The bear hunched closer, snarling in a basso growl, spit and blood drooling from its long yellow teeth. Havel fumbled at his belt for his puukko, snarling back at the approaching animal with an expression not much different from its own.

  If I die, you die with me, brother bear-and my people will eat you and wear your hide!

  Then it stopped and reared. Eric was there, shouting and jabbing at its face with his naginata.

  Nothing wrong with that boy’s guts, Havel thought. His common sense, yes; guts, no.

  The sharp curved edge of the blade scored along the bear’s shoulder. That angered it enough that it ignored everything else and swatted; it also gave Havel time to push himself backward far enough that he could lever himself erect with his hands and good leg. The other one didn’t seem broken, or the joints torn; it just hurt like fire to put his weight on it. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t, but he’d be slowed.

  “No!” he shouted, hobbling forward as he saw Eric coming back for more. “Don’t get close! Just back off and let it die!”

  Signe was back again too, gone no longer than it took her to run and fetch the bow. She had an arrow to the string, but her brother was far too close for her to fire. And he was too far gone in a fine fighting rage to listen, as well; he stepped in, chopping at the bear’s paw as it flashed at him. Perhaps that was his way of showing the strain of the terrible things he’d seen and done, or maybe it was just teenage-male hormone poisoning turning off his brain’s risk-management centers.

  The pole gave the machete blow terrible leverage, and so did the bear’s own strength. The scream it gave when the steel split its paw to the wrist was the loudest yet, and the speed of its other paw’s sledgehammer blow turned the whole of that forelimb into a blur. It landed on the haft of the naginata rather than the man who held it, and the tough hickory snapped like a straw. That and the glancing touch of the paw was enough to send Eric’s two hundred pounds spinning away like a top; he hit the ground ten feet away and bounced. He moved, but he didn’t get up; his arms and legs were making vague swimming motions.

  The moment he was clear Signe shot. The flat snap of the compound’s bowstring sounded clear, and she was less than twenty feet away; the smack of the arrowhead into flesh was almost simultaneous. The eighty-pound hunting bow sent the arrow almost to its feathers under the bear’s armpit. It shuddered, and the sound it made was as much a whimper as a growl, but it kept going-and straight towards Eric’s fallen form.

  This time nothing but death was going to stop it. In the abstract, Havel sympathized: it was doing exactly what he’d do in its place, trying to die fighting and take someone with it. In the here and now, it was trying to kill someone Michael Havel had promised to protect.

  One of his people.

  “Christ Jesus save us from heroes!” he snarled, and limped forward to seize the pole of the spear planted in the bear’s gut.

  Several things happened very quickly then. The bear screamed and reared as he grabbed the ash wood and hauled sideways.

  Signe shot, twice, from only a few feet behind him and just to one side; two spots of bright yellow-and-green feathers blossomed against the bear’s dark fur, one at the base of its throat and another just above the spear. Her sister was on his other side suddenly, panting-she must have run from as close as she could get her horse to come to the sound and smell of wounded bear. The string of Astrid’s lighter bow snapped against her bracer, and an arrow sprouted from the bear’s inner thigh.

  Havel twisted desperately at the spear, conscious of how his bruised leg slowed him-and how the spear had sunk deeper in the bear’s body, putting him close to it.

  He saw Will Hutton running towards the animal from the rear, legs pounding in desperate haste, the double-bitted felling ax swinging up.

  And the bear’s wounded paw flashed towards him. He threw himself backward, releasing the spear, just as the tips of the claws struck.

  When Havel came fully back to himself, he was chiefly conscious of a stabbing pain in his neck. Shortly after that he became aware that blood was pouring down his face, but he ignored that until he checked that he had movement in all his fingers and toes.

  Then, slowly, he put a hand to his face. Light came back when he pushed back a flap of skin that was hanging over his left eye; when he had it in place, he knew there was a bad cut running from the upper peak of his left cheekbone, then beside his eye on that side-close enough to the corner to give him a cold chill-and across his forehead and into his scalp. Like all scalp wounds, it ran blood like a butchered pig hung up to drain, but he scrubbed his other arm across his eyes and the world cleared up.

  The bear lay about seven feet away, very thoroughly dead; only a vet with time to do a dissection could have told what killed it, between the spear and the arrows and the ax that stood up like an italicized exclamation mark from its back, with the heavy blade buried in its spine. Blood still trickled; he couldn’t have been out for more than a few seconds.

  Will Hutton knelt on one side of him, Signe on the other. He let his head fall back; which was a mistake, since lights swam across his eyes.

  “Eric?” he croaked.

  “Fine,” Hutton said, resting his hand on Havel’s and moving it gently away from the younger man’s wound. “Banged up. Bump on his head. this of yours goin’ to need some stitches, though. Angelica, she kin handle it.”

  “Don’t forget the aspirin,” Havel croaked, and Hutton laughed.

  “You are one tough mother, got to admit it,” he said. “Cojones too. Ain’t never seen a man move so fast.”

  “Ask the bear,” Havel said. He rolled his eyes towards Signe. “Good shooting.”

  “It was closer than a target and bigger,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “Hell, no,” he said honestly. “This hurts like grim death and I’m seeing double and I’d puke if I had the strength. I’ll live.”

  She blinked at him, frowning, then trotted away. He looked past her at Astrid, who stood beside her father and Hutton’s wife and daughter, wringing her hands on her bow as if she were trying to strangle it.

  “Come here,” he said to her. “I can’t shout-if I try, my head will fall off.”

  She obeyed, kneeling close to him. Signe came back on the other side with a bucket of water and a cloth; she had pills with her too, and he took them as Hutton raised his head with one strong hand. Then she began to sponge at the blood on his face. It felt so good he was reluctant to tell her to stop, but there was something to be done first.

  “OK, kid,” he said to Astrid, touching Signe’s wrist gently for an instant to halt her.

  He found he could move his arms, but only if he concentrated on it and didn’t try anything difficult.

  “Did that bear just light out after you, or did you shoot it unprovoked?” he asked the younger girl.

  Astrid blinked, looked away, and then looked back. “I shot it,” she whispered.

  “What did I say?”

  “Shoot anything but bears and cougars, Mike.”

  “Right.” He put out his hand; she didn’t resist when he took her bow. “This was a toy, back before things Changed. It isn’t anymore. It’s a weapon. You don’t play with weapons. Understood?”

  She nodded.

  “And that was a dangerous wild animal. You don’t play with them either. Understood?”

  “Y-yes, Mike.”

  He went on: “Two inches closer and that thing would have ripped my face off. You understand that? And your brother and sister could have been dead too, easy. You understand that?”

  She was crying now, but she nodded again.

  “OK, you don’t touch this again
until I think you can use it responsibly. You want to be treated like a grownup, you gotta earn it. A hunter doesn’t take stupid chances, or shoot at all unless it’s a clean kill.”

  He handed the bow to Hutton. “And don’t let her on a horse again until I say so, either.”

  He let his head fall back. Signe leaned over him, sponging at the blood again; vaguely, he could see Angelica Hut-ton coming up with some sort of kit under her arm. The pills couldn’t have been aspirin, either, or the concussion was worse than he’d thought, because he was beginning to drift away.

  “This ain’t fucking Middle-earth,” he said-or thought he did.

  Blackness.

  Will Hutton looked at the electric grinding wheel, pursing his lips. It was normally bolted to a long plank; he put it on sawhorses and secured it with C-clamps when he had that kind of work to do. The motor was useless, of course, and he’d disassembled it, leaving the wheel and the driveshaft. It might not work, but he didn’t have anything better to do right now; they couldn’t move until Havel recovered.

  “Needs a flywheel,” Ken Larsson said, beating his gloved hands together-the early mornings were still chilly, and his breath showed in white puffs as he squinted at the remains of the machine.

  For a high-and-mighty executive, he makes a pretty good hands-on man, the Texan thought.

  “Right,” he said. “Truck wheel, I think. Drill and mount through the hub?”

  “Yup. And the fan belt from your semi would do for the drive-we take the wrecked bicycle-”

  His face went blank for a moment; the bicycle had been ridden by one of the bandits who killed his wife. He swallowed, while Will looked aside to allow him a moment’s privacy.

  “- mount it backward-fan belt around the rear wheel once we get the tire off. Then someone pedals, and you got yourself a grinding wheel.”

  They both turned and looked at Eric Larsson where he sat throwing stones into the Lochsa. Not far away Astrid and Luanne were working on the bearskin staked out on the ground, scraping the last shreds of fat and flesh off the inside. Eric, on the other hand, had been starting to brood.