Wine of the Gods 1: Exiles and Gods

by Pam Uphoff

  The first glass he produced was awful, but he made thick blocks he could fill his high windows with, and with three times the trouble, a bunch of small panes for his big window. The distortion was bad, but the window was weather tight. He finally unpacked all of his books and turned the old crate wood into rough shelving so all his books were out and he could find them.

  This winter he would be studying magic.

  And improving his glass.

  Chapter Two

  15 October 2450

  Scoone, East Coast of North America

  They called it High Top Road, and 'his' family, the Turners and the Hastings were the only families living there as the winter slowly set in. It was not very cold, and the dun and the wild heifer kept grazing, as they enlarged the pastures and the gardens produced an abundance of squash and tomatoes.

  Hunting had gotten a lot more difficult, as the local cattle migrated south and the deer learned about the new predator. The mounted hunters he had encountered on his first hunt lived down the Scarlet River, a mesh of siblings and cousins and in-laws that were all horse mad and had brought lots of brood stock, both bovine and equine.

  By heading due west, or even north-west he could avoid the ranchers and stalk the slowly migrating cattle under his unnoticeable spell. He practiced stun and sleep, but didn't want to feed more cattle through the winter. He'd just see about catching some yearling heifers next spring. In the mean time, they had plenty of meat, and had preserved a whole lot of it. In late December he managed to get some wild birds, for the holidays, and they got together with the Turners and Hastings around a bonfire and sang the old carols.

  None of them ventured as far as town. The big church that had gone up was, according to who you believed, a revival of the True Religion or the New Religion.

  None of them felt good about the fiery denouements of the Old Gods, in favor of some disembodied Creator that the Preacher was fond of. What was there to denounce? Nobody actually worshiped the old gods, did they? Mikey was even less comfortable when the human users of magic were added to the denunciations. So they celebrated at home and settled down to a nice quiet winter, with a little snow, frequent rains, and an early spring.

  The electric tractor got a workout then, as Mikey plowed his flattest stretch and planted his perennial wheat amongst the rocks. They all helped each other, and at some point Mikey was astonished to realize that not only was he working hard and completely honestly, he was enjoying it.

  Well, not the rock picking, perhaps. He gradually assembled long, contour following heaps of rock, and with some more digging and piling, the start of something that might eventually be some hybrid of terracing and stone walls.

  Vera produced a little brother for the Kipper and Mikey and Igor tried to pick up the slack in the garden for a bit, but were chased out of her kitchen when they tried to relieve her of that burden.

  The wild cattle migrated back northward as the grass sprouted, and he stunned and then charmed two heifers. They never calmed down like Wild Thing had, and he regretfully ate them both. He'd have to start with fairly young calves, and handle them regularly or it just wasn't going to work.

  Kipper was riding, a little, the dun yearling, just bareback with a loop of rope from one side of his halter to the other for reins. Dan rigged up a pair of leather hoppers to lay across his back, and the pair of them were given the chore of hauling ripe veggies from their extensive gardens to her mother's kitchen.

  Wolves raided a few outlying farms, and Mikey joined the hunt for them. Fifty miles to the west he found a boy living with wolves, and suggested that if the boy didn’t want his four legged family killed they should move further and never raid farms again.

  The boy scowled. "You shouldn’t have been able to see me."

  "I’m a Mage. You glow like one, too. If you send the wolves away, you could come and live in the town."

  The boy growled. "My father would find me, come and claim me. Never. Never again."

  "What’s your name?"

  But the boy slipped into the brush and disappeared.

  The wolves weren't seen again.

  The hunting party had to be satisfied with driving the wolves off.

  "Teach them to fear man," a sheep rancher growled.

  Mikey made lots of glass jars and glass stoppers that minimized the amount of bees wax they needed for canning. He was quite proud of them, and sold as many as he had time to make.

  In the late spring the second shipload of colonists arrived. And the accumulated news from the Old World.

  The political maneuvering sounded pointless and unimportant.

  The crime reports barely touched the apparent feud between Organized Crime and an old god.

  The burnings of magic users alarmed only a few.

  The society news was completely meaningless.

  The rumors of looming war with any of four other polities seemed empty.

  The colony turned back to important things, like the three widows and their six daughters who had bought nine shares, every single one on or just north of High Top. The rumors whispered that they were witches. The matchmakers, delighted at such a balancing of the majority male colony statistics, got right to work.

  Mikey rather hoped they weren't going to build their house on the very top. He didn't like the idea of anyone looking down on him, like they were sneaking around behind him.

  But he really didn't have time to worry. He was too busy looking through his father's books for something to deal with the bugs that were all over the garden, and eating his wheat sprouts.

  He and Igor did go around the hill and introduce themselves, neighborly-like, but got a bit of a cold shoulder.

  "If they are witches that means they won't ever marry. Anyway, we're introduced and all. I hope they're friendly. We lucked out with the Turners and Hastings, I hope our back neighbors are half the friends the front ones are." Mikey shrugged.

  They rode the tractor back to the Bennys' houses and reported in.

  "Lady Best and her daughters, Muddy and Salty. Lady Driven and her daughters, Last, Puddle, and Rippled. Lady Motivated and her daughter, Vapor."

  Vera giggled. "I'll bet those aren't the actual names on their birth certificates. They're just playing at being old fashioned witches with their silly names."

  "How old are they?" Kipper asked, looking a bit hopeful. The Turners' and Hastings' kids were a bit heavy on males in her age range.

  "Umm, Last looked about sixteen, and Vapor was maybe two. The other four are in between. Maybe you and your mother should go over, you can borrow the tractor if you want."

  "I should take over some fresh vegetables." Vera handed the baby to Dan and started assembling lunch. "You two men might have looked a bit scary." She smiled up at her brother-in-law and shook her head. "I remember thinking I was in trouble the first time I saw you, poor Igor. And Mikey, all you need is a knife clenched between your teeth to look like a vicious pirate."

  "Me?" Mikey tried to look hurt instead of complimented. Pirate? Me?

  Kipper liked the idea too and called him Captain Black, despite his brown hair.

  His regular hunting trips continued, and he started bringing home calves as they started looking old enough to wean. He bought milk from the Hastings regularly for them, but there simply wasn't enough grain to supplement the grazing. Petting and taming the calves was added to Kipper's chores, and by mid-summer she had six of them following her around like puppies.

  The day before the Summer Solstice, a rather uncertain Lady Best walked around the hill to inform him that the Pyramid of High Top would be holding a meeting on the crest that night, and that they would appreciate not being disturbed.

  He nodded. "I'll bunk with Igor for the night. No problem."

  She blinked a bit in surprise. "Err, because we . . . umm, sorry. I had my arguments all lined up."

  Mikey grinned, hesitated. "Well, I mean, I understand the importance of a Solstice to you, and tonight the mountain belongs to you."
<
br />   She opened her mouth and hesitated. "Umm. Thank you. Both for your honesty and your understanding. For your respect."

  Mikey shrugged. "Hey, it costs nothing, is very valuable, and tends to get returned. Happy Solstice, Sister Best."

  Of course he and Igor wound up at Dan and Vera's for dinner, and after planning the enlargement of their house and admiring Kipper's training Foggy to pulling things – the yearling was clearly a draft horse – they slept in the barn and started the foundations the next morning.

  Lady Motivated came by in the afternoon. "I wanted to thank you for not, well, either laughing at us or being deliberately disruptive. We moved here because we couldn't seem to ever be left alone for a single night. We were tired of hiding."

  Mikey nodded, and walked back down the road a bit with her. "Look I know the various magic users haven't always gotten along. I don't see any point to it. I'm a mage."

  Motivated looked startled. "Oh. Goodness, I hadn't even realized. I'm afraid I don't know much about mages."

  "I'm not a very strong one. My father, err, well, there were problems and I never had a Compass. About all I do is glass, and a bit of hunting magic. And charge batteries."

  She giggled at that. "Oh dear, and we spent so much time wondering how you kept it charged with no windmill in sight. Did you leave the Old World because of persecution?"

  "No. I wasn't really afraid of exposure, I don't have any rites, no Compass, no Orgies. So no job either, mind you. Moving here has been wonderful, I can use magic and just not mention that that was how I did something, and everything is fine. Mind you, I could do without that Church of the Creator. I refuse to believe the Creator of all this beauty is so vindictive and cruel."

  And it was beautiful. The lush green grasslands were dotted with groves of trees, and wildflowers were blooming and to the west it seemed like he could see forever. The slim brunette walking with him helped improve the view as well.

  They chatted about various of their different magical traditions, finding a large amount of overlap, and it just seemed natural to invite her up to see his library, and somehow they wound up in bed instead of reading.

  "I like this. Sleeping surrounded by books." She nestled up against him, content.

  He nestled right back, grinning like a loon, most likely. He hoped he hadn't been too obviously amateurish.

  She finally got up, and books were read, and the construction of the house admired. He volunteered himself and Igor to help with their own house raising in a few weeks; they were apparently still living in tents.

  In fact, all the neighbors came, and three houses and a barn were built around the meeting corners of four of their parcels. Other neighbors from further north drifted in and were recruited, and food appeared and was consumed during a break, and polished off after the roofs went on.

  As the youngest of the 'widows', Motivated garnered a lot of masculine attention. Last and Muddy, the oldest girls, both claiming to be seventeen, scooped up a lot of the remaining ogles. Heck, Lady Best and Lady Driven were fine looking women too.

  Igor was getting a fair number of return ogles, Mikey hauled him aside and informed him of the known dangers of deflowering a virgin witch. Igor laughed, and nearly flattened him with a friendly swat on the shoulder.

  It seemed like every family that had emigrated had brought at least one unmarried brother along, and there were plenty of single men who had emigrated alone as well. A group of them were sizing up the witches.

  Mikey caught Motivated's eye and grinned. "Don't hurt them too badly."

  She snickered, but glanced toward Last and Muddy. "I hope they don't try anything with those two, they know they aren't trained well enough yet."

  Mikey nodded, contemplating another piece of chicken. However good, he simply didn't have the room for it.

  "I didn't believe any number of people could build three houses, even small ones, in a day." Lady Driven walked over and sat on an unused log.

  "Well, you ladies had the foundations ready, and the logs cut." Gerald Gibson, a married man from a knot of farms a few kilometers north, eyed the three cabins. "I guess with those straight cuts, I'll have to take your being witches seriously."

  Mikey started to open his mouth and take credit, but Motivated elbowed him.

  "Oh yes, and after we magically felled them, we went around magically putting saw marks on half of them." Lady Driven chuckled. "It's taken us four months of off and on work to get to the point of being ready to raise the walls."

  "They did go up nice and fast." Igor said. "We've got lots of practice now."

  Mikey nodded. "How are the rest of you doing?"

  They all had houses up already, and there was some chatter about needing barns, expanding plowed fields and pastures. They were all interesting in Mikey's wild cattle.

  "The oldest is just a yearling. I figure to breed her this fall to Harvy's beef bull and see what the result is. I suspect that they'll just be a stop gap, until the domesticated herds are big enough that we don't need the wild ones."

  That got a fair amount of nods.

  "I suppose I could catch more calves, if anyone's interested?"

  They all were, and Mikey was kept busy, between harvesting, haying and cutting firewood, and putting in the fall crops again.

  With more children around, they petitioned for and got a small parcel to build a school on. Several others went up as well, but the witch children came across the hill and attended theirs. Sally Turner taught the littler children, and Lady Best the older, and except for the most stormy days, the school was open for nearly all winter, and the kids were expected to read a little bit every week the rest of the year.

  Chapter Three

  10 May 2451

  Scoone, North America

  The town proper was growing. The city hall was finished, a polished granite edifice imported in pieces, faced the Church of the Creator across a pretty green square, and shops filled the other two sides.

  The wear and tear of a year and a half's use was catching up to much of the first colonists' machinery, and Dan was kept busy. And spent too much time too close to sources of liquor. Mikey was appalled the first time he had to hunt the man down and drag him home. This whole new life, all this wonder and beauty, and Dan was still crawling into a bottle.

  His own life was wonderful, apart from Motivated living two miles away. She was expecting a baby, and despite her firm warnings that baby witches didn't have fathers, he was determined to be at least a frequent visitor. Heck Vapor was a cute kid, and liked him. Motivated laughed at him when he tried to dodge Last and Muddy's attempts to corner him for kissing practice.

  "They have to learn to flirt, and sorry, my pirate, you are a safe person to kiss. Most of the other men here are either married to women who wouldn't understand, or who would want to do a lot more than the girls are ready for."

  So he got lots of kisses, and then Motivated hauled him off to harvest his sexual arousal.

  "Umm, but you're always so . . . energetic." she laughed at him. "I think the three of us are almost giving my mage the orgies he desires."

  Indeed. And in fact he was finding that he could do a lot more, magically, then he'd ever expected. Charging the tractor batteries went much faster, and after a long day on the crest of the mountain the large storm off the coast turned away and went out to sea.

  But perhaps it would have, anyway.

  His daughter was beautiful, and in the witches' way, named Whirlpool.

  The third colony ship brought a whole lot of rich people.

  The news was all about the unrest in the southern colonies, the Forre's colonies clashing with the Al Guerros's Colonies.

  Rumors about the stratified Al Guerros society having trouble digesting the New Lords from the colonies, and the Forre Colonies had outlawed magic and accused the Al Guerros of supporting it.

  The new rich people were acting like they were Lords in fact rather than in title, come to that. When they started using the titles as verbal
weapons, rather than the courtesy that, for instance the witches were afforded, Mikey really got pissed.

  "Are you sure you don't want to plow on the contour, Franklin?" Turner had his biggest tractor out and would break ground, with Mikey coming after to further condition the soil.

  "That's Lord Franklin to you." The man stared down at Turner like he was an insect in need of swatting.

  Mikey snorted. "Well, I'm the Duke of High Top, and I don't need to put other people down, Frankie. Now do you want this field plowed straight or on contour?"

  Not at all apparently.

  Mikey apologized to his neighbor for losing the job, but Turner laughed and the story about just how far Lord Franklin's eye had bugged out when a mere peasant called him Frankie was all over the colony the next week, and the Duke of High Top was greeted by title all the time. Rather a lot of titles popped up over the summer, and the new people gritted their teeth and their attempts to regulate titles was voted down, firmly. So firmly that one rather suspected their own hired laborers must have voted against it.

  In the rare slack time, Mikey and Igor worked on building a wagon. It was a bit trial and error, but in the end they produced a nice working rig that the huge Foggy could pull. It helped immensely with the grain harvest. His perennial wheat's second year harvest was impressive, and he built a small silo.

  It was the scent that caught his attention.

  West northwest of the town proper the flats got a bit too flat for good drainage, and people had skipped the muddy areas and settled a bit further on. But one little hut was there, absolutely surrounded by lush herbs. He let the tractor coast to a stop and just sat and inhaled all the wonderful smells for several long moments. Then shaking himself, he reached for the switch when he noticed the little old lady in the garden, watching him.

  "Good morning. Your garden smells wonderful."