Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  "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 é.

  "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 pla
ces 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!

  Chapter

  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 rowe
rs 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."