A Meeting At Corvallis

Chapter Twenty-One

Near Larsdalen, Willamette Valley, Oregon

August 22nd, 2008/Change Year 10

"L ast one!" Michael Havel yelled through a mouth dry and gummy and far too full of chaff.

He turned with the wheat sheaf on the long, slender tines of the pitchfork and did what had given the implement its name originally, pitching the thirty-pound weight of grain and straw up onto the canvas conveyer belt, heads-first. The air around the machine was full of dust and powdered chaff, the harsh dry smell of it, and of the canola oil used to grease the metal parts.

Then he stepped back and stretched, feeling the good-tired sensation of hard-worked muscles, leaning on the six-foot shaft of the fork, blinking at the sun-it was still six hours to sunset, and they'd gotten a lot done today.

And it's a relief to do something besides another round of practice with the saddle-how or that goddamned lance.

Off twenty feet to his right six hitch of horses walked in a circle, pulling a long bar behind them. That turned the upright driveshaft on its deep-driven socket base, and the big flywheel attached to it; a great leather belt stretched off to another on the side of the threshing machine in front of him. Six yards of engine rattled and clanked and groaned on its truck-wheel mounting, giving off a mealy scent of grain and hot metal. The sheaves disappeared up the conveyor belt. Chaff and straw came out one long spout pitched high towards the top of the great golden mound of it already there. Threshed grain poured out of another, into coarse burlap sacks that turned plump and tight as they filled. Teams labored there in disciplined unison; some dragged the full sacks aside, some sewed them shut with curved six-inch needles and heavy hemp twine; others shouldered the sixty-pound bags and ran to heave them into wagons for the horses to haul away towards the granaries.

One month's bread for an adult in every sack, Havel thought with satisfaction, scraping sweat off his forehead with a thumb and flicking it at the yellow stubble underfoot. All nicely stowed away where nobody but us can get at it.

Signe was working there, the needle flashing as she fastened a sack with a neat, tight stitch, and the muscles moving like flat straps in her arms. Threshing was dirty work; bits of chaff and awn flew through the air like thick dust. There were two currents of thought on how to handle it, besides the kerchiefs most kept over their mouths. Some bundled up, and endured what got beneath layers of clothes and chafed; that also made the heat worse, of course, and it was near ninety today-very hot for the Willamette Valley, though he could swear the weather had warmed up a bit since the Change. Havel's wife followed the minimal-clothing-frequent-washing-down school, and was wearing an ancient pair of faded cutoffs and a halter, her skin tanned honey-brown, the curve of her full breasts and her strong shoulders liberally specked with chaff and bits of straw sticking to the sweat, her eyes turquoise gems in the sweat-streaked mask of her face. She caught his eye on her and looked up, grinned, touched the tip of her tongue to her upper lip in promise, then darted forward to claim the last sack.

I'm not the only one looking, he thought happily; the male who didn't give Signe Havel a second glace was either very gay, or nearly dead. But I am the one who gets to sleep with her tonight.

A cheer went up all across the great sloping field as the threshing machine's tone changed, and the last grain slid out of the spout in a dying trickle. This was the Larsdalen home-farm-he could see the vineyards start where the land rolled upward a bit west and, just barely, the towers of the gate over some trees in the distance; hills swelled upward on either side, and the Coast Range showed along the edge of sight. Most of the people working this stretch of land dwelt behind the wall there; they'd just harvested a good bit of what they'd eat over the next year as bread and biscuits and pie crusts and beer. There were dozens of them, too, even Aaron Rothman and a helper over there under the infirmary tent, dealing with the cuts and bruises and sprains that went with farming.

Sorta complimentary that his boyfriends always look like me, Havel thought, watching a black-haired young man carefully opening an autoclave that sat over a small, hot fire and handing the instruments within to the doctor. Weird, but complimentary.

The Family was out in force well: Ken Larsson here with a couple of his apprentices, keeping the machinery in working order; Eric over there keeping the horses going:

His daughter Ritva came up with a ladle of water. Havel rinsed out his mouth, spat, coughed, spat again, then drank three dippers-full and poured one over his head.

"Oh, to hell with it," he said, and took the bucket from her sister Mary and upended it over himself, glorying in the way the wash of coolness spread across his bare torso; he was stripped to the waist save for the checked neckerchief.

On the whole, life is pretty damn good.

The girls laughed and ran back towards the water cart. Other children helped with that, or keeping birds off the grain; ones a bit younger just ran around shouting with the dogs, or minded the toddlers and infants lying on blankets in the shade of the trees along the road. A mist of dust lay above the road's gravel, as more loaded wagons headed up the gentle slope towards Lars-dalen. Still more folk busied themselves with cooking over open fires and portable grills, and setting up the long trestle tables; as Eric shouted whoa and the big draught-horses stopped a waft came from there, smelling of roasting meat and French fries in oil, and loaves and pies brought down hot from the Larsdalen ovens and cooling on racks covered in muslin. There were big tubs of sweet corn boiling, too. That was one of his favorite foods and a rare seasonal treat, hard to grow to seed in this land of mild summers, and his mouth watered at the thought of it. Someone tossed him a peach, and he bit into it, letting the juice run down his corded neck. There was a creek across the road and the field there, too. They'd all go and splash themselves clean before they sat down to dinner.

Hello, Grandpa, he thought; his grandfather Vaino had bummed around as a teenager back just before Pearl Harbor, working harvest gangs in the Dakotas and Minnesota, a few years before combines completely replaced older methods. This is a lot like the stories you used to tell – except no steam traction engine to run the thresher, of course.

A ripple went through the crowd. Havel's head came up as well, and his eyes flicked towards where the weapons were stacked. But it was a single rider coming down the road from the east, the white road smoking behind the galloping hooves. He swerved and took the fence, a young man in mail vest and helmet, a Bearkiller scout-courier.

"Lord Bear!" he said, pulling up in a spurt of clods and dust. "Dispatch!"

Havel sighed, reversed the pitchfork and stuck it in the dirt, and took the envelope. When he looked up from reading it he saw three dozen sets of eyes on him, amid an echoing silence where the Chi-KA-go! of a flock of quail was the loudest sound.

"All right, folks," he said. "We're in for a fight, but we knew that was coming.

Arminger has called up his men, ban and arrire-ban, with the rally-point as Castle Todenangst, for no later than two weeks from now. So there's no reason at all not to enjoy the supper: but first, I'm going for a swim."

Dun Laurel, Willamette Valley, Oregon

August 23rd, 2008/Change Year 10

Dun Laurel was the newest of the Clan's duns, a village of a hundred and twenty souls surrounded by a ditch and palisade, northwest of Sutterdown and established only last year. The Hall at the center of it was a smaller copy of Dun Juniper's, done in frame and plank rather than logs, but it also had a conference-room-cum-office on the loft floor, with a hearth and altar on the northern wall. It still smelled of sap from new-cut wood, as well as the bunches of rosemary and lavender and sweetgrass hanging from the rafters overhead, and the alcohol lanterns showed only a beginning made on the carved and painted decorations Mackenzies loved. The location near the northwestern edge of the Clan's settled lands, and the relative newness, made it the best place for Lady Juniper to meet the delegates from the Protector's territory. The sun had set, and they would leave before it rose, slipping back into the tangled scrub and tall grass with Mackenzie or Ranger guides.

The dozen men and women sitting across from her and her allies were all free-tenants or itinerants back home; it was simply too difficult for bond-tenants or peons to move around. Several were High Priests and Priestesses of clandestine covens; medieval Europe might not have had an underground cult of witches except in the perverted imaginations of the witch-finders, but the Protector's realm most certainly did. Others were simply those who were willing to take risks to get out from under the Association's gang-boss feudalism. All of the farmer majority were from the eastern side of the Valley, Molalla and Gervais and the others; the baronies north of the Columbia or west of the Willamette were simply too far away, and had had too little contact with the Clan.

They were serious people; eight men, four women, all fairly well clad and well fed, but roughened and weatherworn by lives of hard outdoor work, and all over thirty though few were much older than her; the terrible years hadn't been kind to the elderly, or even the middle-aged. Juniper looked from face to face before she spoke: "Our sympathy you have-but sympathy is worth its weight in gold. I'm troubled, to be frank. On the one hand, now we face the full weight of the Portland Protective Association. Corvallis is with us this time, as well as the Bearkillers and Mount Angel, and we can match their numbers, but that is mostly ordinary folk against professional killers. If you were to rise behind them, our chances of victory would be greatly increased, but I must tell you frankly that there is not much hope of our defeating the Protectorate so thoroughly that they will be overthrown at home, at least not most of them. That could happen, but it is not likely. Our realistic hope is to beat them so badly that they will leave us alone."

The underground leaders looked at each other. Their spokesman was an itinerant, one Rogelio Maldonado, a dark man with a red bandana tied around his hair and the raggedy-gaudy clothes that folk in his trade affected. His English held only a slight Hispanic lilt.

"Lady Juniper, for what other reason than winning our freedom would we rise? We wish you well, we hope you win, but if we fight, it will be for ourselves and our families. I speak for all of us, not just those who follow the Old Religion, who have a special tie to you. But even they: "

Juniper inclined her head. What reason indeed? she thought. There were times when the things she had to do as Chief troubled her sleep, but her responsibility was to her Clan: though also to right, and the Threefold Law.

"If this is not a wonderful or a certain chance of overthrowing the Association, it is still the best you are likely to have. They have stripped the garrisons of every castle to the bone."

Maldonado nodded in his turn; his thick-fingered hands, calloused and marked with burn scars, spread on the polished wood of a tabletop salvaged from a government office in Salem, the hands of a man who handled reins and rope, awl and waxed thread and solder. The frieze of carved ravens around the edge of the table was new, not very well carved but done with naive forceful-ness.

"There is the word, Lady Juniper: castles. We might drive the soldiers and men-at-arms left behind after the arriere-ban back into the castles, they are few and not the best fighters, but we cannot take the castles. In the castle granaries is the harvest, and the seed grain. We will starve before they do, as it was in the days right after the Change, when Arminger held the grain elevators and cargo ships, and used the food as a whip to force submission. That is what made us obey him in the first place, as much as his fighting men. And that is without the field army ever returning: which you say it will?"

"Some of it," Juniper said. "Even if we break them."

"We thank you for smuggling us weapons, but still, we cannot face armored men-at-arms in open country as you can."

Juniper nodded. "No. But if you control the ground outside the castles, even for only a short time, many of you could flee. We are willing to take in thousands, the Bearkillers likewise and Corvallis even more. Our harvest was good, and there is land here-and more southward, towards Eugene-fine land lying empty and waiting to be tilled."

Another of the would-be rebels spoke, a thickset farmer with a gray beard: "That's wild land, grown up in bush. And if we run, we can't bring much in the way of seed or stock or tools with us, damn-all but what's on our backs. It would take us years to make farms, and more years to earn what we'd need to start, and we'd be laborers until then, maybe all our lives. Like peons."

"No," Juniper said. "You would be free-a man can be poor, and yet free. Or possibly, if we damage them badly, you can force the Association members to give you better terms at home."

She lifted a hand. "I am not saying this is very likely, or that fleeing your homes is not a counsel of desperation."

Those old enough to remember the times before the Change also remember the dying times just after it, she thought. She did herself, and the early Clan had been far more fortunate than most. They remember the bandits and the Eaters, and the raw terror of starvation. On the other hand:

"In another ten years, or twenty, doing anything will be much harder," she said.

They nodded. The farmer stroked his beard. "Yeah. My own grown kids hate the castle-folk, right enough. But they don't: the old world isn't real to them; they get bits from movies or TV confused with what really happened, Captain Kirk with President Clinton, and things like elections aren't even fairy tales. They don't hate them the way I do. And the bastards don't let us have schools. I try to teach the kids in the evenings, but it isn't the same."

Juniper sighed. "I can only ask for your help, not require it," she said. "You must consult your hearts and each other."

A woman with burning eyes spoke: "My village will rise, as soon as we hear the knightboys've marched. We're just not going to put up with it any more! Rapes, beatings, never enough to eat, working every day until we drop down with exhaustion! They don't even obey their own laws, and those are bad enough!"

"Mine won't rise," another said. "We: I remember my youngest dying in the first Change Year, and sneaking away to bury her so nobody would dig the body up to eat it. Things are bad but my children are alive: and I have a grandkid born this year."

"We've got to work together!"

"We can't work together, not when we've got to sneak around, and: well, you know as well as I do. Some people tell the Associates things-or the priests, it's the same thing."

"Please!" Juniper said, and the budding argument died. "As I said, it's your decision. We will try to give as much help as we can, whatever you decide to do."

Astrid exchanged a few words with Eilir in Sign, then spoke herself: "We Dunedain Rangers will help smuggle more arms to those who wish them. We moved much captured equipment from Mount Angel up into the hills after the battle there this spring. If you want it, talk to us afterwards-individually, to reduce risks. And we're too few to be of much use in the great battles, so we'll be able to send small parties north to guide fugitives, and do as much as we can to protect them. We've done that before, on a small scale. Perhaps we can do it now on a greater one."

Juniper leaned back and let the talk proceed. Her gaze stole to the altar, and the figures there; the Mother was a simple, stylized shape in a blue robe, but the Lord was shown with Coyote's grinning face. She closed her eyes a moment in prayer; wishing for the cunning of the one, and the compassion of the other.

Because I must lead all my people out to war, she thought. Help me!

Somewhere out in the burgeoning wilderness beyond Dun Laurel's walls and fields, a coyote howled in truth: or was it a wolf?

Castle Todenangst, Willamette Valley, Oregon

August 30th, 2008/Change Year 10

Norman Arminger looked down from the Dark Tower and smiled with pride at the iron might his word had called into being. He knew he must be doll-tiny on the balcony to the vast host stretching along the east-west roadway to the north of the castle, but the roar of sound that greeted his upraised fist was stunning even at this distance. Blocks of gray-mailed troops stretched to either side across the rolling countryside, a long glitter of summer morning sun on their spears and lanceheads, flashing from the colors of banners and painted shields, blinking as bright on the river behind them as it did on edged metal. The surging wash of voices gradually focused into a chant rippling across miles: "War! War! WAR! WAR!"

The smile was still on his face as he turned from the little balcony and into the War Council's chamber. Armored nobles and officers waited around the great teak map table, helms under their arms or on the wood as they looked down, memorizing the last details of their tasks. The black-mailed knights of his personal guard stood around the walls of the big semicircular room, motionless as ever. And the Grand Constable was stuffing some papers into a leather pouch.

All but the guards turned towards him and bowed; he waved a hand in permission, and the groups began to break up and file out. Renfrew waited for the last.

"We're about as ready as we could be," he said when they were alone except for the guards. "Ninety-two hundred of our own men, twelve hundred from the Duchy of Pendleton, and a siege train that'll make any wall sit up and take notice: except Mount Angel, of course; we'll have to starve that out."

"Glad to see you happy about it, Conrad," Arminger said jovially.

"I'm not, my lord Protector; any victory will be at heavy cost. But if we're going to do it, this is the way to do it. They'll have about our numbers, with the contingent Corvallis sent, but our men are superior in a stand-up fight, in my opinion. If we break their main army, it'll split up-it's a coalition, an alliance. Then we can reduce them one by one."

"Exactly," Arminger said, thumping him on one mail-clad shoulder; it was like whacking a balk of seasoned hardwood.

"There is one thing," Renfrew went on, and Arminger felt his smile die a little. 'We've been receiving reports of internal disorder. Attacks on supply wagons, even a few cases of arson-tithe barns and manors torched in the night. Perhaps some of the light cavalry-"

"Conrad, Conrad, that's why we build all those castles-even if they're ferroconcrete instead of real stone. Nothing a few farmers or Rangers can do can really hurt us. You were the one talking about concentration of force. I'm not going to detach any troops until we've beaten the main enemy army and laid Mount Angel under tight siege."

"Yes, my lord Protector. That was the strategy I called for this spring."

The shaven head bent and the hideously scarred face was hidden for a moment. One thing he'd always found a little irritating was how the white keloid masses made it hard to read the Grand Constable's expressions, and his voice was very controlled. They were silent save for the rustle and clink of their armor as they walked over to the elevators.

Arminger grinned to himself as the operator cranked the doors closed and pulled the cord that ran through floor and ceiling, ringing bells far below where convicts waited in a giant circular treadmill. The lurch and then the smooth counterweighted descent were like something out of the old world. His amusement was at a memory; the first time he'd ridden the elevator, Sandra had concealed a couple of musicians on the roof over his head and had them do a creditable imitation of elevator music from pre-Change days, Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman." He'd nearly jumped out of his skin:

Renfrew snorted laughter when he mentioned it, though of course he'd been in on the joke beforehand.

"It's the look on your face I'm remembering, Norman," he said.

The exit was in the ground-floor chamber, a great circular space used for dances and speeches, cocktail parties and meetings of the House of Peers, with the Eye set into the floor in mosaic. Today it echoed to the tramp of the guards as they fell in and followed him out onto the broad semicircle of steps facing the inner courtyard. The castle staff drawn up there cheered him; Pope Leo and the clergy were down at the castle's main gate, waiting for their moment, smells and bells at the ready. What halted him was Sandra in her light cart, and the closed four-horse carriage that would take Mathilda away for the duration.

She left her mother's side and began to run to him, then stopped and came on at a pace of stately dignity. Arminger composed his face to the same solemnity, hiding the burst of pride he felt. My little girl's growing up, he thought. Soon she'll be a great lady, another Eleanor: or Mathilda. That thought was prideful itself, but a little painful as well; soon she wouldn't be a little girl, either, and that perfect trust would be gone.

Mathilda went down formally on one knee for an instant, taking his hand and kissing it. "God give you victory, my lord father," she said; but she kept hold of the hand as she rose, and walked at his side as he came over to her mother.

Who may be a little irrational wanting to send Mathilda farther from the fighting than Castle Todenangst, this is the strongest hold in the realm, he thought. He looked into the brown eyes of his wife, as always seeming secretly amused. On the other hand, maybe she isn't. Best to trust Sandra's instincts.

He shoved aside the memory of a time a few months ago when he hadn't trusted her instincts. That had been a screw-up: and the sight of the Baronet d'Ath heading the escort that would take his daughter west brought those memories forcibly back. Perhaps Sandra had made that appointment to rub his face in it: but he'd earned a little of that. And Ath was sufficiently distant to be away from the main action in this war, which would be on the eastern side of the Valley, and its seigneur could be trusted not to take too much advantage of having the heir to the Protectorate behind her drawbridge.

Unlike, for example, Alexi. Or Jabar, who still cherishes hopes for his son I've decided to frustrate.

"Lady d'Ath," he said, as she too knelt and kissed his hand. Like all her gestures, it was impeccably smooth. "We give you a great trust. It is good of you to volunteer for it, sacrificing glory and advancement in this war for the benefit of the Association."

Her smile surprised him a little. "Caring for the princess is a pleasure, not a duty, my lord Protector," she said; her voice wasn't quite the cool falling-water sound he remembered from past years; it had more resonance in it, somehow. "And I'm content with the good estate you've given me. Let others have their chance at glory and reward now. I've taken a new motto for my House of Ath: What I have, I hold."

He nodded, beginning to turn away.

Conrad spoke: "I wish we had your menie with us, d'Ath. They've improved drastically since you took the fief."

"Despite the losses," Sandra cut in yes, she was needling him a bit.

"Dad, Mom, why can't I come along too?" Mathilda said suddenly. "Mom's going. With Lady Tiphaine to guard me, I'd be safe behind the army. If I'm going to: I'm going to have to go to war, someday, right?"

Arminger laughed aloud, and repressed an impulse to tousle the reddish-brown hair above the fearless hazel eyes.

"Yes, you will, Mathilda, but not quite yet. For now, you have to do as your mother and I say. And when I win this war, I'll bring you back the world for a toy!"

Her stiff decorum broke for a moment, and she threw her arms around his armored chest. "Just bring yourself back, Daddy!"