Dies the Fire dtf-1

by S. M. Stirling

  Unexpectedly she threw herself at him and hugged him hard; even through the mail and padding it made him give back half a pace and go ooof! Usually she hated touching anyone.

  “Hey, kid, watch it-you’re still holding that knife! And Eric did a lot of the looking too.”

  And the original owner is dead, he thought, with a touch of inner grimness. Suicide.

  She gave her brother a perfunctory nod of thanks; he rolled his eyes. Then there was a flurry of handshakes and slaps on the back. Thankfully, nobody else tried to hug him.

  Signe was the last. “It’s my birthday soon too,” she said.

  “Ah. didn’t have anything to give,” he replied awkwardly.

  “Yes you do,” she said, and threw her arms around his neck.

  The kiss went on for a long time, and grew hungry. He was dimly aware of whoops and laughter in the background; this time both Astrid and Eric were rolling their eyes, and Astrid made a theatrical gagging sound. Her brother might have made the same finger-down-throat gesture if Luanne Hutton hadn’t decided to emulate her friend and caught him in a clinch; Astrid’s nausea redoubled.

  “I’ll be waiting,” Signe said, when she drew back.

  “So will I,” Havel answered; he had to catch his breath and clear his throat before he could finish the brief phrase.

  He put his foot in the stirrup and swung into the saddle with a grunt and a rustling clink and clatter. Josh Sanders finished his good-byes to wife and child and mounted likewise.

  “Eric!” Havel barked. “Tear yourself away from the ton-sillectomy and get on the goddamned horse!”

  The other two men fell in behind him; Eric was leading their packhorse-and-remount string. Havel took a deep breath and looked west. Running the outfit was a challenge, and worthwhile work. Getting away for a while, though…

  “Thataway!” he said, and brought his horse up to a canter.

  The crowd parted, cheering; Eric and Josh turned to wave as the hooves crunched and clattered.

  Havel kept his eyes on the gravel road that stretched like a silver-gray ribbon into the green hills.

  All I’ve seen so far is a worm’s-eye view of wilderness and a few little towns, he thought. It’s time and past time to find out how other people are dealing with this new world we’ve been handed.

  “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.

  “NO! NO! NO!”

  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 crossbowman’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 sli
d 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.