Dies the Fire dtf-1

by S. M. Stirling

  They turned to the others, their smiles fading a little when they saw the raised eyebrows on Ken Larsson and Pamela and Aaron Rothman.

  Ken cleared his throat. “You could call the square mile grants fiefs, for starters,” he said. “That was the traditional term. Or a knight’s fee. And you could call the apprentices pages and then squires… .”

  Havel frowned. “Well, so much for my brilliant originality. Someone’s come up with this before?” he said. “I was thinking of strategic hamlet for the Alister grants, actually.”

  Pamela coughed into her hand, and Rothman giggled. The swordmistress spoke: “Ah… yeah, Boss. Something a little like it has happened before. You might want to make a few modifications… “

  “Welcome to Dun Juniper, Lord Bear, you and yours,” Dennis Martin Mackenzie said formally.

  He was heading up the ceremonial guard of archers and spearmen, down at the base of the plateau that held the Hall. Juniper could just barely hear him up here on the flat roof of the gatehouse tower; there was a murmur from the crowd waiting inside the gate, and it was a fair distance-they’d run the new approach road up the side of the slope below the palisade, so that you had to come up with your right hand towards the wall and your shield arm uselessly away.

  She could see the Bearkillers all look up for a moment, and grinned to herself. The little plateau looked a lot more imposing now that the palisade was all in place; twenty-five feet of steep hillside, and then the thirty-foot rampart of thick logs, sharpened on top. Sunset light sparkled on the spearheads of the guards on the fighting platform behind the parapet, and hearth smoke drifted up in near-perfect pillars; it was a still, chilly early-winter evening. Snow had fallen last night; it wouldn’t last long, and things would be dismally muddy when it went, but for now the thick blanket gave field and branch and roof a fairyland splendor.

  While they talked with Dennis, she hurried down the interior stairway, arriving in time to be composed and dignified as they walked up the roadway, leading their mounts.

  They’d come unarmored; all wore broad-brimmed dark hats with silver medallions on their bands, and they were all dressed alike in what wasn’t quite a uniform. Boots, loose dark trousers and lapover jackets secured by sashes and broad leather belts, with a bear’s head embroidered in red over the left breast…

  She felt something of that first shock again, like an echo from distant cliffs. Her body remembered the way he moved, light and quick and easy, with a relaxed alertness…

  Mom, Eilir signed discreetly. Stop it with the lascivious drooling! You’re practically ripping his clothes off with your eyes!

  I am not! she signed, and then thought silently to herself: Not quite. Still, if this one were a movie star in the old days… as the saying goes, there wouldn’t have been a dry seat in the house.

  The tall young woman beside him. Her looks were Nordic perfection, in an outdoorsy way, down to the long butter-blond braids that framed her face. Except for a small scar across the bridge of her nose, almost a nick, leaving a slight dent, and a continuation on one cheek; her coat hung loose, and her left arm was in a sling. That didn’t seem to dampen her spirits, though; she smiled as she walked, curving in instinctively towards the Bearkiller leader.

  Ah, well, Juniper thought wistfully. I have my Rudi. and the best of the bargain, perhaps. Lord Bear’s luck is hard on those close to him, I think.

  As the Bearkillers walked up the roadway, Dorothy cut loose with her pipes, pacing formally back and forth along the battlement of the gatehouse. That was three stories of squared logs up, but it was still loud. Juniper and her Advisors-it was becoming a title, somehow-stood to meet the Bearkiller leaders. She was in full fig; jacket, ruffled shirt, kilt, plaid fastened over her shoulder with a brooch, down to the flat Scots bonnet with antlers-and-moon clasp and raven feather and the little sgian dhu knife tucked into her right stocking. Most of the others were in kilts as well, and as much of the rest as could be hastily cobbled up-some of it had served as costumes, at Samhain.

  The blond woman leaned closer to Lord Bear. Juniper had a great deal of experience at picking voices out from background noise; it went with being a musician. She fought to keep her lips from quirking upward as she heard:

  “Help, Mike! I’ve fallen into Brigadoon and I can’t get out!”

  “It’s like. it’s like Edoras, and the Golden Hall of Medusel!” Astrid said, waving an arm through the open gates at the carved and painted wood of the Hall. “Didn’t I say so?”

  “Oh, great, Hobbiton-in-the-Cascades,” Eric grumbled.

  He had new scars since she’d seen him that spring; long white ones on the backs of his hands, and several the same on his face; he’d also shaved his head, save for a yellow scalp lock on top. It all made him look older and grimmer, and there was a hard light in his eyes now, but his grin was still charming and reminded her of the boy he’d been.

  The Bearkiller leader made a slight shushing sound, and his eyes met Juniper’s. That gave her a slight jolt; it also made her sure as they narrowed slightly that he knew she’d overheard the remark, and met her suppressed grin with an equally discrete one of his own.

  I like this man, she thought, and went on aloud:

  “Lord Bear.”

  She glanced down the laneway; that was where they’d set their rampant-bear flag with with the polished bear skull on the top of its pole.

  “Point taken,” he said, acknowledging the flamboyant standard and his own title. Then he did grin. “My fianc? Signe Larsson.”

  “I’m Juniper Mackenzie, chief of Clan Mackenzie,” Juniper said, shaking hands and smiling. “And a musician before the Change. I’ll play at your wedding, I hope!”

  He went on with introductions for the rest of his party: “Angelica Hutton; our camp boss and quartermaster. My prospective brother-in-law, you’ve met. Only since then he’s become Taras Bulba.”

  Eric snorted as he shook her hand; a strikingly pretty dark-skinned girl stood next to him. “Glad to see you again, Lady Juniper. And Mike has no sense of style. Besides which, I nearly got killed when my hair was caught in some barbed wire. My wife, Luanne. Nйe Hutton.”

  Lord Bear-Mike Havel, let’s not keep the show going all the time, she thought-took up the thread smoothly:

  “My father-in-law to be, Kenneth Larsson, engineer.”

  He looked to be nearly sixty, though fit: with another small shock Juniper realized he was the oldest person she’d seen in weeks; the first year of the Change hadn’t been easy on the elderly. It took an instant before she realized that his left forearm ended at a cup and steel hook where his wrist and hand should be.

  The woman beside him was in her thirties, tall and wire-slender, olive-skinned, with a narrow hawk-nosed face and russet-brown hair.

  “Pamela Arnstein, our swordmistress-fencing instructor-and historian.”

  “Also the vet and horse doctor,” she said. Her accent was Californian, like Dennis’s.

  Juniper let herself smile as she introduced her people in turn.

  “This way,” she said when the introductions were done. “Doubtless you’ve seen our wall-”

  “Very impressive,” Havel said, sounding like he meant it.

  She nodded, proud, and even more proud of the cabins built against its inner surface; that meant every family living here had its own hearth at last. The rest of the four-acre plateau held the two-story Hall, flanked by two near-identical structures, an armory on one side and a school-library-guesthouse on the other. And sheds, workshops and storehouses, log-built on stone foundations.

  It all looked a lot neater now that they’d had time to clean up the litter and lay flagstone paths to connect the buildings. Open space lay at the rear of the U, used for everything from soccer matches to public meetings, with another blockhouse tower to watch over the gully that separated the plateau from the hillside behind.

  “This is where we started,” she said. “There was nothing here but my cabin and some sheds, back before the Cha
nge.”

  Havel’s brows rose; she could see that he was impressed again. “Log construction goes fast, but that’s a hell of a lot of timber to cut, considering everything else you had to do.”

  Dennis cut in: “Lady Juniper’s luck-Cascade Timber Inc. felled a couple of thousand trees before the Change, and hadn’t gotten around to hauling the timber out. We just dragged it out and set it up.”

  Juniper nodded. “We’ve got other sites fortified pretty much like this, except that they’re down in the flats,” she said. “Dun Carson, Dun McFarlane and Dun Laughton-where the other septs of the clan are based.”

  Signe Larsson chuckled. When Juniper looked over at her, the younger woman said:

  “It reminds me of a story I heard once, about some Scottish pirates who retired and settled down. They built three towns-Dunrobbin’, Dunrovin’, Dunleavin’.”

  “God, Mike, they have a salad bar!” Signe Larsson said, licking her lips. “Come on, Pam, give me a hand! That’ll make three between us.”

  “Get me some too, would you, askling?” Havel said. “I won’t say I’d kill for a green salad, but I’d certainly maim.”

  She bounced up eagerly. “And this is the man who said a Finnish salad started with a dozen sausages,” she cast over her shoulder.

  “Impressive spread,” Havel went on to his hostess.

  Juniper nodded with what she thought was a pardonable smile of pride at the setting as well as the meal. During the rebuilding they’d taken all the interior partitions out of the first floor of her old cabin, save for the cubicle around the bathrooms; the kitchens were gone too, replaced by a long lean-to structure along the rear of the building with salvaged woodstoves and clan-built brick hearths.

  That made it easier to use the ground floor of the Hall for public occasions; tonight tables along the rear wall held the food, and clansfolk and guests sat along the outer perimeter elsewhere; the old fireplace was freestanding now, crackling and adding a reddish glow to the butter-yellow of the kerosene lamps. Holly and ivy festooned the walls, to invite the Good Folk in and bring luck; there were baskets of apples and hazelnuts laid in evergreen boughs, twined with wheat stalks and dusted with flour. Above the hearth where the huge Yule log burned were candles: red, green, white for the season; green and gold and black for the Sun God; and white, red and black for the Great Goddess.

  And a big barrel had been set up, full of water and thick with apples.

  “Bobbing for apples?” Havel said.

  Juniper grinned. “Symbolizing the apples of eternal life,” she said. More gravely: “After the past year, we need reminders.”

  Two roast wild pigs and a haunch of venison held pride of place on either side of it, and roast chicken and barons of beef. But there were heaps of greens as well, the last of the winter gardens: tomatoes, onions, peppers, steamed cauliflower and broccoli, boiled carrots, mashed turnips, potato salad with scallions and homemade mayonnaise, and potatoes grilled with pepper and garlic, mashed and whipped…

  For dessert there were fresh fruit and dozens of pies, apple and blueberry and strawberry with rhubarb-honey sweetener instead of sugar, although next year they might be able to cultivate some sugar beets. There was even whipped cream, now that they had a decent dairy herd.

  Dennis had the product of his brewery-it was getting a bit large to call it a micro-set up in barrels, along with the mead and wine and applejack.

  Juniper waved a hand. “Yule is a major holiday, of course, and… well, right after the Change, we-my original bunch-just planted every garden seed we could get, regardless. So did most of the people around here, the ones who joined us later. Things were very tight until about June, and we’re storing all we can, but you can’t keep lettuce or green peppers, and we might as well eat the last of them while they’re here. Things will be a lot more monotonous again come January and February.”

  Monotonous, but ample, she thought with profound satisfaction.

  The thought of the storehouses and cellars full of wheat and barley and oats, of potatoes and cabbages and dried tomatoes and dried fruit and onions and parsnips and turnips and beets, of the herds and flocks in paddock and byre and pigpen, the full chicken coops, gave her a warm glow she’d never known before the Change. She’d never cared much about money, but hunger and hard work had taught her what real wealth was; it was being full and knowing you could eat well every coming day to next harvest-and that the seed for that harvest was safely in the ground.

  Havel nodded. “You’re certainly doing very well,” he said.

  The buzz of conversation rose to a happy roar as people filled their plates and made their way back to the seats. There were a hundred adults here, and many of the older children-the youngsters were over in the schoolhouse building, having their own dinner.

  Dorothy Rose, their piper, strode up and down the open space within the tables, making what the charitable or extremely Scottish would consider music.

  “You know why pipers walk up and down like that while they play?” Juniper asked.

  Havel shook his head; so did Signe, back with a heaped plate, followed by Pam with two more.

  “To get away from the music, of course,” Juniper said.

  They both laughed, although that didn’t slow down their eating; roast pork with applesauce, she noticed, as well as the salads and steamed vegetables. She’d scattered the other Bearkillers among the people at the high table; Astrid was deep in conversation with Eilir again, catching up on all they’d missed in two weeks’ separation.

  When the plates were cleared, the children filed out.

  “This is our… well, sort of a school play,” she said.

  The leads were Mary, Sanjay and Daniel. Mary got to play the Goddess with tinsel woven into her mahogany hair, as the Crone, while Sanjay was the Holly King, slain by the Oak King in a dramatic duel with wooden swords; the Goddess held a wand out over them during it, then made a speech about the Wheel of the Year. A chorus sang in the background, skipping around each other in a dance that looked quite pretty between the collisions.

  It gave the kids a chance to show off what they learned in Moon School, and it didn’t have to compete against TV.

  “Errr… you’re all pagans here now?” Havel said. “Not that I objectI’m a lapsed Lutheran myself-”

  Juniper nodded: “Well, we call ourselves Witches. To be technical, we’re rather old-fashioned Wiccans, at least my original group were, and something like two-thirds of those who’ve joined us since have signed up-as fast as we can run the Training Circle, with some corners cut. It’s a new situation for us, having actual congregations!”

  A little way down the table, Ken Larsson leaned forward to talk to her:

  “Founder effect,” he said. “First bunch in a community tend to have a disproportionate influence on what comes after.”

  He waved around the room with his fork. “I suspect this is happening all over the world-some leader or small group is lucky and smart and attracts individuals to join, and then they take on the same coloration, grabbing at anything that seems to work in a world of death. It certainly happened with us. I bet there will be some pretty weird results in a couple of generations.”

  Havel nodded. “Although-” He cut himself off and nodded again.

  Juniper grinned. “Although we don’t remind you much of pagans you met before the Change?” she said helpfully. “Although you might think the obsession with dressing up in costumes has survived?”

  Havel coughed into his hand, then looked around as if he was contemplating something on the order of: My, aren’t the walls vertical today?

  Signe smiled slyly and nudged him with an elbow. “Gotcha, Lord Bear. Roll over and show your tummy, boy! You’re whipped! I told you to leave all the diplomatic stuff to Dad.”

  Juniper took pity on him: “Types like that did get lot of attention before the Change,” she said. “They weren’t the whole story even then.” She smiled. “Do I believe magic works since the Change? Of course!
But I believe it worked before the Change, too, remember, and I never took”-she gestured at the decorations- ” ‘My other car is a broomstick’ bumper stickers literally.”

  “Err… thanks,” he said. “It’s nice to know we’ll have sensible neighbors.”

  “Good save,” Signe muttered in a stage whisper.

  “If only we didn’t have the Protector as a neighbor,” Juniper said. “We’ve been fighting him most of the year-”

  “Us too,” Havel said, and smiled grimly. “Oh, yes, the castles on Route 20 weren’t our first encounter.”

  She frowned. “I think you mentioned… well, tale-telling is a Yule tradition too. We’d be very interested to hear it. If you wouldn’t mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  Juniper smiled and nodded. Havel looked as if he’d rather gouge out his own liver than talk in public, so…

  She caught Signe Larsson’s eye, and got a wink.

  “In fact… “

  She used a fork to ring a small iron triangle before her, tapping out a simple tune. The pleasant buzz of conversation died away.

  “Our guest, Lord of the Bearkillers, has a tale to relate.”

  The buzz warmed up again for a second; hearing a story like that was entertainment now, and of high practical value as well. Everyone was eager for news from outside their strait local horizon.

  “He and his had to fight earlier in the year-even before the Protector’s men attacked Sutterdown. He’d like to tell us about it.”

  Havel gave her a stricken look. Signe gave him a nudge in the ribs, and he sighed and cleared his throat.

  “We were around Craigswood, in Idaho,” he said. “A bunch of bandits-they called themselves the Devil Dogs; a lot of them were in a biker gang before the Change-were trying to-”

  Juniper leaned back with a cup of the mead and listened, smiling slightly to herself. Havel gave the story baldly, in what she imagined was the style of a military report.