Dies The Fire

"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.

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 cross-bowman'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. N? ocht d'fhiacla go bhf? air 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 slid 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.

Cheers burst out; Mary and Sanjay and Daniel rushed over and nearly knocked Chuck over himself in their enthusiasm.

"Dad's the best!" they chorused. "Dad's the best!"

Little Tamsin stumped around crowing and waving her arms, happy because her father was the center of attention. He scooped her up onto his shoulder, tucked Mary and Daniel each under an arm and let Sanjay proudly rack his equipment as he staggered over towards the trestle tables.

Quick work, Juniper thought.

It hadn't been long before the rescued children realized they weren't going home, or at least before most stopped talking about it; shared hunger and fear and unaccustomed hard work had probably sped up the process, and the sheer strangeness of everything.

Now, is it a good, sign of healthy resilience that some of them have started calling their foster parents Mom and Dad, or is it unhealthy denial and transference? I don't think those three in particular had parents before, not really, just people who paid the bills.

"Lad knows his business as far as the moves go," Ayl-ward said thoughtfully. "Hope he doesn't freeze up when the red wine's served for true, though."

Juniper shivered slightly and changed the subject. "You've settled in better than most, Sam," she said. "I'd have thought it would be harder for you, being so far from home."

For a moment the square, good-humored Saxon face went bleak. "It'll be worse back there," he said. "Sixty million people in one little island? It doesn't bear thinking of, and at least I don't have to watch it."

Juniper winced slightly and swallowed. Any more than I do Los Angeles or New York, she thought. Or Mexico City or Tokyo or:

He shook his shoulders. "Besides, I've no near kin to home, no wife or child, and even before the Change: it's not really the place I grew up in, not anymore it isn't- wasn't. Full of commuters, bought all the old cottages up and gussified them, they did. And the local farmers were all for ripping out hedges and trees and getting rid of their livestock and making the place look like bloody Canada; fat lot of good their combines and thousand-acre fields of hybrid barley will be to them now, eh?"

He shook his head. "I'd just been playing, fossicking about with this and that, since I mustered out of the SAS. Traveling, making bows, doing a little hunting."

"They must have a generous pension plan," Juniper said teasingly.

"Not bloody likely!" he said with a grin. "But my da had a bit put by-from selling the farm about the time my mother died and I went for a soldier, you see. Left it to me; fair knackered I was, when I found out, since he'd done naught but live in a cheap flat in Portsmouth and haunt the pubs. Thought he'd drunk it up years ago: "

Then he looked at her with his head slightly to one side: "You've a gift for getting people talking, don't you, Lady?"

Juniper grinned. "What can I say? I'm a Witch, a singer, and a storyteller-all three. So: the Change interrupted your life as a gentleman of leisure?"

"That it did." A shrug. "Play's all very well, but a man's life is his work; I've got a real job of work to do here."

Well, that's more than Mr. Strong and Silent's said before, she thought, giving him a genial slap on the shoulder; it was like hitting an oak beam. Lord and Lady be thanked for sending him our way!

Everyone headed for the trestle-tables and the fires with the soup cauldrons; on a day like this, it was a relief to do things out-of-doors. Juniper shed her battle gear-they had two-by-four racks set up for it-and got in line. Diana grinned at her as she ladled the Eternal Soup into bowls.

"You know, Juney, one of the things I enjoyed most about running MoonDance was looking up recipes and planning the menu?"

Juniper laughed out loud, despite the rumbling of her stomach. "And what's on the menu today, Di?"

"Eternal Soup, Eternal Soup, or today's extra-special dish: delicious zuppa di eterno."

"Eternal Soup!" Juniper made her eyes go wide. "What a surprise! Still, I think I'll have something from the dessert tray instead, and some nice organic hazelnut coffee."

Diana gave a sour laugh and plopped her ladle into Juniper's bowl. Her husband, Andy, gave her a platter of wild-greens salad, half a hard-boiled egg, and one precious baking-powder biscuit.

There was also a great jug of rich Jersey milk fresh from their-single-milking cow. But that was for the children and Dorothy Rose, who was pregnant; birth control was already getting more difficult, and there would be a couple of babies before Yule.

Juniper's nose twitched as she carried the big bowl of soup over to her table. It actually smelled pretty good today, probably because they'd been getting in a little game and wild herbs-dandelion roots, fireweed shoots-plus Andy had thrown in some more of the soup barley and miso stock from their restaurant-store's inventory, plus a little pasta from the Fairfax storehouse.

They were always talking about butchering one of the steers or sheep, and always kept putting it off until absolutely necessary-everyone was worried about the gap between the preserved foods and the first harvest, with the way their numbers had grown. They had plenty of grass to keep the beasts hale, courtesy of the Willamette 's mild climate and the way foragers had swept it bare of livestock.

"Mmmm," she said appreciatively as she hunted down the last barleycorn in her bowl with an eager spoon.

I crave starch. In fact, I crave starch and fat and meat and sugar…

Then she went for the salad; dandelion greens and henbit shoots and various other crunchy green things from the meadows and woods, about half of which she recognized; and some canned beets from the Fairfax stores, with the juice making do for salad dressing. It wasn't bad if you liked eating bitter lawn clippings drizzled with diluted vinegar. She saved the half-egg for last; it had a little paprika on the yolk, and a strong free-range taste. The biscuit had a chewy crust; she alternated bites with the egg, tiny nibbles to stretch out the flavor.

In fact, I crave everything except dandelion greens.

Judy Barstow licked her spoon: "You know, if there were a few more calories, this would be an ideal, healthy diet."

"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 gc???

"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 places 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!