Lord of Mountains

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

DUN FAIRFAX

DÙTHCHAS OF THE CLAN MACKENZIE

(FORMERLY THE EAST-CENTRAL WILLAMETTE VALLEY, OREGON)

HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

DECEMBER 18TH, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

“Well, ’ave it out heare, then, son,” Sam Aylward said, in his slow drawl. “Bit on the cold soid tu go fur a walk.”

It was cozy enough in the workroom, by the standards of Edain’s generation; the little airtight stove made it so, and the inner walls of thick boards and battens that had been added in the years after the Change. He wore only his kilt and a light green-dyed linen shirt with wide sleeves, fastened at the neck and wrists with drawstrings. His father had on a wool shirt and a baggy knit sweater in its natural off-white as well, and his sock-hose and brogans.

“Don’t rightly know what I want to say, you might say,” his son said.

Edain sat on a stool and braced one foot against the wall. The space had been what the old world called a two-car garage attached to the farmhouse that had formed the original core of Dun Fairfax. That meant it was large enough to hold his mother’s big loom and his father’s woodworking bench and tools. The windows at the south end overlooking the herb garden had been added later, to give her more light for the delicate task, and the original sliding doors at the front had been replaced by a more conventional arrangement. The big chamber had a clean smell of glue and shavings and varnish and linseed oil, as well as the skeins of wool and linen yarn that shared the rafters above with billets of yew and cedarwood, plus hunks of rock-hard root-wood from curly maple or black walnut.

“’appen you ’aven’t settled since you came home from the fight,” Sam said. “The war isn’t over yet either, of course.”

His voice didn’t have the usual Mackenzie burble and lilt; he’d been past forty at the Change and had never lost the deep slow burr he’d grown up with in rural Hampshire.

“All well with you and Asgerd?” he continued.

Garbh heaved her massive grey form up from beside Edain and padded over to his father’s side, politely nosing at one of his hands and thumping her tail. The two younger hounds stayed by Edain’s feet, great shaggy barrel-shaped heads questing after burrs and tangles in their fur. They were a mongrel breed but mainly mastiff and Great Dane with a tinge of wolf, a new strain coming together since the Change. One that Mackenzies took on the hunt for dangerous game-bear, say, or tiger-and sometimes to war as scouts and guards.

“Never a problem, save that we’ve less privacy than is convenient,” Edain said with a quick grin. “Less here than in the field with the host, to tell the absolute and unpleasant truth.”

The old man grinned himself, his teeth still strong but slightly yellowed.

“And it’s not the season for hay-lofts and swimming in ponds and ducking into the woods,” he said. “You and she being wed only a year, Oi call that an ’ardship.”

“Well, I’m just back for the Yule feast,” Edain said awkwardly; he’d never been a fluent man. “Fair crowded it is!”

“Yus, we’ve still the folk from the Bend country,” Sam said; every Mackenzie Dun and most households within each had taken in some of the refugees. “Champing to get their own back, they are. And a lot of their so’jers ’ave come to see the families settled here, what with things slowing down fur now.”

“I don’t blame them! And they fought well at the Horse Heaven Hills. Fine riders and good shots in their way with those short bows from horseback.”

“There’s something to be said fur recurves,” his father’s slow, sonorous voice said. “They’re ’andy in tight places. Though a longbow is the best at the last, in moi opinion.”

He jerked his head back a little at the racked bows and bundles of staves behind him; he still had his hair, but kept it closer-cropped than most Mackenzie males, and the oak-brown had all faded to steel-gray or white now. Edain was painfully conscious of how he’d aged in the years his son had been away on the Quest, the gauntness of the flesh on the heavy bones and the way his work-worn hands had begun to twist. The resemblance was strong in them otherwise, gray eyes and square faces, medium height and barrel-chested, thick-armed builds. Edain was perhaps a thumb’s-width taller and the merest touch slimmer than Sam Aylward had been in his prime, with a shade more yellow in his brown hair, his mother’s legacy.

“We did some good shooting with them at the battle,” Edain said proudly. “And it was an Aylward who taught the Clan to shoot and how to make them, sure, eh?”

Sam grinned and slapped the table beside him with a clunk of callus on oak. The workspace behind was set up to do any type of fine cabinetry, but mostly as a bowyer’s bench and table, with a tillering rack and the gouges, chisel and tools of the trade. That and farming had always been his crafts, when he wasn’t busy as First Armsman of the Clan Mackenzie.

Though it’s been years since he was that, Edain thought with a little shock; somewhere in his mind his father was still the figure of stocky ageless strength he’d been in his middle years.

“Lucky thing it were, my ’aving an hobby that turned out useful-loik,” Sam said. “Lucky it ran in the fam’ly.”

Edain had learned the bowyer’s craft from him through the pores of his skin, as he’d learned shooting; one of his earliest memories was sitting on his heels in this room, watching his father taking tiny curls from a bowstave with a curved spoke-shave blade, working with infinite patience and by eye alone.

Edain’s own favorite war-bow was in the clamps right now. Mackenzie longbows were made of two D-profiled lengths of yew, bent into a shallow reflex-deflex curve that went out and in and then curled out again at the nocks, both pegged and glued into a central riser-a grip-of hardwood shaped to fit a hand and with a cutout that let the arrow shoot through the centerline of the weapon. Yew was a natural composite and didn’t need horn or sinew to give it strength, but Edain did glue a strip of deerhide to the back to keep splinters from starting-that was how failure began with a wooden stave, and you did not want a hundred-and-twenty pound bow suddenly snapping at full draw. Despite the coat of varnish over all, the hide had come loose in spots during hard use, and he’d been laying a new one on while the bow would have time to dry.

“Lucky we had the right wood for it,” Edain said; yew grew abundantly as an understory tree in the Cascades and the Coast Range both. “Or that’s the favor of the Powers.”

“Lady Juniper’s Luck.”

A reminiscent look came into his father’s eyes. “There Oi was, lying laid up in Lady Juniper’s house after she rescued me from that bloody ravine where I’d been watching the coyotes watching me and waiting for me to come ripe, and she were puttin’ fine seasoned yew on the sodding fire! Fair shrieked, Oi did. And again, when Oi saw she ’ad a ton or two stacked out back.”

“Asgerd and the mother seem to be getting on better,” Edain observed; he’d heard that story repeated all his life, though it was a good one. “It would be better still if she had her own hearth. Her folk out east in Norrheim don’t live so tight-packed as we, and forbye we’re tighter-packed than we like ourselves. It’s fortunate indeed she can follow me to battle.”

Sam chuckled slightly to himself. “She’s a good ’un, your Asgerd,” he said. “And not just for her looks-though at your age, Oi put more on that than Oi should ’ave. Or that she’s better than fair as an archer. Funny to think of Vikings and all that out there. But then Blighty’s a right odd old place too now, from all accounts.”

“Viking’s more in the nature of a job,” Edain said. “It’s what they call dangerous work, like going to the ruined cities for salvage work. Mostly they’re farmers in Norrheim, like us, and no more quarrelsome. Slower to anger, sure; but also slower to let it go, I’d say.”

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “It’s…Da, I didn’t think I’d be so restless, so to say, when I got a chance to stop at home. Asgerd’s happy as a horse in clover here compared to me.”

“Oi did notice you spending a lot of time out hunting, or watching the sheep, which is youngster’s work.”

Edain nodded: “All that time away on the Quest-and then the battle-and it was thinking of this place I was, seeing meself stepping in and taking up a hay-fork as if I’d just left, so to speak. Now I’ve a bit of peace before the next campaign and I can’t seem to…just take my rest. And I’m a peaceable man, but I’ve been getting these flashes of temper the which is not my nature when I’m not provoked. Everything’s fine, and then the least little thing…not been sleeping well, either. Asgerd’s a bit worried.”

“Ah,” his father said, and took Garbh’s great man-killing head between his hands, rubbing her jowls until the dog whimpered and slitted her eyes in ecstasy and beat a rear foot on the floor in time to her tail. “Come on you lately?”

“Since the Horse Heaven Hills. Comes and goes, and the less I have to do, the more it bothers me. Can’t rest when I’m resting, only when I’m busy, if you take my meaning.”

The faded gray eyes of his father looked through him. “Ah,” he repeated. “Oi’ve seen the loik. Felt it moiself, after Mt. Tumbledown. And toims since, here. Stepping back ’ome’s not so simple, often. Battle takes you loik that. They have…used to have…fancy names for it, but Oi think it’s loik getting hit, only inside the head. You keep on going because that’s what you ’ave to do. But you pay for it later. Like a poison working its way out, or the ache where a bone healed.”

“I’ve been in fights before, Da!”

Sam Aylward nodded. “They add up, though, son. Big ’uns, especial, and that one you just finished was bloody big and just plain bloody, too, from all reports.”

“That it was,” Edain said softly, blinking.

“Seen that look, before, boy. Seen it in the mirror. And you’ve had a long time with nothing but hard graft, never knowing at sunrise if you’d be alive by sunset.”

Edain ran a hand through his hair. “What’s to be done, then? I know enough not to look for the answer at the bottom of a mug of hard cider; that doesn’t seem to help at all, at all.”

“No, it don’t, not past next day’s headache. Toim, that’s the answer, toim and lots and lots of it. They used to have folk who attended to it special.”

“Heart-healers, we’d say today.”

“We’re great ones for fancy names around here, aren’t we? Mostly it was talking about it, s’far as Oi could see. Talk it over with Asgerd, too, then…or Lady Juniper, p’raps.”

“I’d not bother the Chief.” Edain grinned wearily. “If we ever get a room all to ourselves for more than an hour at a time, sure and I will talk to Asgerd, though!”

Shrill voices sounded through the doorway to the rest of the house, and two children came running through. They were a boy and a girl each about two years, clad in kilts and nothing else besides blue luck-beads engraved with a pentagram around their necks on thongs…except that the girl was clutching a honey-glazed pastry with a bite taken out of it. There was a look of wary determination on her face as well as a good deal of stickiness, and she turned and backed away from her brother. They were the same age to a day, with white-silk mops of hair cut bowl-fashion and blue eyes; their skins were still slightly golden with summer’s tan. Children their age among the Clan didn’t usually wear either shirt or shoes unless weather or ceremony demanded.

Edain’s grin turned genuine. He’d been surprised to find he had two new siblings when he came home, apparently conceived not long after he left with Rudi and the others, and it had probably startled his parents too, being fifteen years after their next youngest. The pregnancy had been hard on his mother, who hadn’t been expecting it in her fiftieth year, but though the marks were still visible he thought she considered it worthwhile. It was enough to make him wistful for some of his own, too, though that would have to wait a while yet.

“Nola,” Sam Aylward said, warning in his tone. “Are you going to share that with your brother?”

“No, Da!” she said, backing away a little further. “No!”

Edain had noticed she was already well familiar with that one word, and used it often. Her brother Nigel didn’t say a thing, but there was a dangerous gleam in his wide blue eyes as he advanced on her.

She also cast a wary look on Edain, holding the jam-filled pastry behind her lest he treacherously steal some of it; they hadn’t had time to really get used to him yet.

“The roit answer, moi gurl, is yes Oi will share it with ’im, Dad,” his father said.

The gnarled hand moved with surprising deftness and twitched it out of her chubby paw. Before her lip had time to pout, he’d ripped it neatly in half, popped the piece with the bite in it back into the mouth she’d opened to give a wail of protest and then handed half to her brother.

“’ere you go, Nigel-moi-lad,” he said.

The dogs all rose and padded over to the children, taller at the shoulder than their tow heads, and carefully sniffed them head-to-foot with their gruesome muzzles, provoking squeals of laughter as the cold wet noses touched skin. One of the younger dogs showed an interest in the disappearing remnants of pastry, and Garbh nipped the offender on the ear to remind him of his manners. Then faces were licked, and children and dogs collapsed into a mingled sprawl not far from the stove.

“Garbh, stay,” Edain said. Her head came up. “Guard.”

She laid it down again on her paws but cocked an eye at him in response as if to say: They’re the pack’s puppies, of course I’ll guard them!

Then they sat in companionable silence for a fair time as the light faded, listening to the feather-tick of wet snowflakes against the windows and the occasional deep sigh from one of the dogs; the children had fallen asleep with the abrupt suddenness of their age, eyes shut and mouths open. It was full dark outside now, and nothing showed but the occasional yellow glimmer from someone else’s lanterns and candles and once the clop of someone leading a horse pulling a light cart down the village street. The smell of cooking came stronger.

“Time to go in, Da,” Edain said, feeling obscurely better.

The elder Aylward levered himself up with a grunt and they walked down a hallway past rooms currently full of knocked-together bunk-beds into a big open space that held a score of people of all ages and wasn’t impossibly crowded.

Mackenzies didn’t make as much of rank as many other peoples; a few specialists in Dun Juniper and Sutterdown aside, everyone worked on the land and at their crafts, and even the Chief had a loom in her bedroom over the Hall and took her turn doing dishes in the kitchens there. At need everyone who could fought, and nobody went hungry in a Dun unless everyone did, which was rare.

Such rank as there was, though, the Aylwards had. This was a big farmhouse, a two-story frame structure that had been old but well-kept before the Change and had served as the initial nucleus for Dun Fairfax-the name came from the former owners. They had been elderly and very diabetic, but their supplies and stock and tools had helped the nascent Clan survive, and the folk of the Dun and passers-by still made small offerings on their grave out by the gate.

One of the changes made over the years since had been to open out most of the first floor, joining the kitchen and the dining and living rooms into one space big enough for the cooking, preserving, pickling and other endless indoor work that kept the household provided for. There was a long table and chairs and trestle-benches that could be moved around to suit, and walls hung with everything from polished pots and pans near the stoves to sickles, scythes and shearing-shears. Just now several sets of bedding and futons were rolled up and strapped to tie-pegs as well, for their share of the folk from enemy-occupied lands they were sheltering.

A stairway and a trap door led down to the cellars, with their bins and barrels and racks of glass jars. Net sacks of onions, strings of garlic, bags of drying herbs and burlap-wrapped hams and flitches of bacon hung in convenient spots from the ceiling beams up here; there was a big icebox for fresh produce. Sinks and counters showed that Dun Fairfax had running water from an internal spring, and two big iron stoves with copper boilers attached for hot water shed heat as his mother and several of the refugee women worked on dinner. Rag rugs covered much of the plank floor, and a wooden border colored and carved with the symbols of the Quarters ran around beneath the eaves. Stained and painted knotwork and twining vines covered the rest of the broad band, and whimsical faces from story and legend peeked out from carved leaves.

Edain made a reverence to the images of the Lord and Lady standing on either side of the hearth’s crackling fire-blue-mantled Brigit with her flame and wheat-sheaf, and stag-antlered Cernunnos. His father did the same, and then lowered himself into his special chair by the fire with a sigh.

“Pull me one too,” he called to Edain. “A point o’ the Special from the Boar’s ’ead barrel, in ’onor of you comin’ ’ome safe.”

The room was brightly lit by alcohol lanterns behind glass mantles, and they gave off a slightly fruity scent that mixed with the smells of burning fir, cooking and-rather faintly-dog. Edain ambled over to a small barrel that rested in an X of plank frame on one counter near the door to the outside vestibule; that kept the draughts at bay and left a place for boots and overshoes and outer gear to hang and drip in the wet weather with which the dùthchas was abundantly supplied in the Black Months. The household’s weapons were racked on the wall next to it, brigandines and helms, sword belts and bucklers, war-bows and hunting bows and quivers and a brace of seven-foot long-bladed battle spears, all high enough to keep them out of easy reach of children too young to know better.

His mother Melissa, came in through the vestibule with a draft of cold wet air and a jug in her hand; she’d just poured the evening dish of milk for the house-hob, one of a householder’s duties. She gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“And one for me, too, love. Since you’re by the barrel,” she said.

His elder half sister Tamar was sitting at the table nursing her latest, while instructing her other boy and girl as they plaited mats out of barley straw; her man Eochu was beside them, his hands busy with awl and waxed thread on a piece of harness whose seam had come loose, and Edain’s younger brother Dick was helping him when he wasn’t trying to use a stick to scratch inside the plaster cast that marked where a war-horse had trod on his right shin. Symbols stood on it, from healing spells to a bawdy promise from his latest girlfriend as to what they’d do when it came off.

Their sister Fand was sitting cross-legged on the rug before the fire, cracking walnuts from a big plastic bowl with the pommel of a dirk and using the stone of the hearth as an anvil. She dropped the nut-meats into a glass jar, the ones she didn’t absently eat, and ignored the younger children nearby reading aloud from a big modern leather-bound and lavishly illustrated version of the Táin Bó Cúailnge. That from the lofty height of her fifteen years and experience as an Eoghan-helper on the latest campaign, which was, Edain thought, doubtless why she was wearing her rust-red hair warrior-style in a queue down her back bound with a bowstring. Though strictly speaking she shouldn’t, not until and unless she took valor and could stand in the First Levy’s bowline.

As he watched she stood, carefully holding up the front of her kilt to contain the empty shells, then tossed them into the hearth before taking the full jar to their mother.

“Good work,” Melissa said to Fand. “Now whip this. Get it stiff but not churned, mind, we want whipped cream and not butter.”

The teenager uttered a silent sigh and took the bowl of thick cream skimmed from the day’s milk. A machine carefully carved and turned from hard cherry-wood by Sam Aylward stood on one part of the counter, strongly clamped. She inserted the bowl and turned a crank, and beaters whirred within the thick liquid; she dropped in a little heated honey as they did.

The barrel Edain headed for held his da’s prized Special Ale, and he tapped three pints into mugs turned from maple wood. The clear, coppery-coloured liquid flowed from the tap, a thin head forming on top.

“My first taste of grown man’s beer was this,” he said.

He handed one to his father, set the second by the stove near his mother’s hand to her absent cheers, love and took a first swallow from his own. He sighed at the subtle overtones of fruit and caramel, with a bittersweet aftertaste like whiskey. Stronger than it tasted too-a beer to treat with respect.

“Now, that is beer, by the blessin’,” he said with a contented sigh. “Even better than I remember and sure, I remembered it as very good indeed.”

“It is better!” his father said. “Oi’ve been workin’ with young Timmy Martins-”

“Who’s been a man grown and a master-brewer with children of his own a good many years now,” Melissa pointed out, taking a mouthful of her own. “And if by working you mean drinking.”

Sam nodded. “When Oi came’ere I knew bowyerin’ well enough, but me brewin’ was from the point o’view of the consumer rather than the producer, as yer moight say. It took years but now Oi reckon as Oi’ve got as good a drop of Old Thumper as ever came out o’Ringwood in ’ampshoire. As best Oi can with these Willamette ’ops anyway. Which Oi reckon weren’t the same as they ’opped with back ’ome, but bitter it up noicely all the same.”

As Edain turned away he nodded to the boar’s head carved above the tap to mark the Special Ale barrel. A boar’s head clearly not on a plate, but very much attached to the rest of the beast and a very much alive and bellicose beast at that.

“The insignia o’Ringwood Brewery used ter be on the Old Thumper beer taps,” his Da said, “and if I ever got a letter from the Brewery in ’ampshoire tellin’ me ter stop infringin’ their trademark, Oi’d be deloighted!”

“Sure, we had some fine beer on the Quest, if not up to this or Brannigan’s Special,” Edain said. “I mind in Readstown…what did Ingolf’s sister-in-law the brewmistress call it…hefeweizen…”

“Bavarian style, then,” Sam said. “Wheat beer, top-fermented. They could do good brew, if a bit chewy. And a bit loit on the ’ops for my taste.”

Just then Edain’s wife Asgerd came up the stairs from the cellar with a basket of apples in her hands.

“My, and aren’t you fine, darlin’,” he said admiringly.

She pirouetted, grinning with an uncharacteristic openness. Edain had seen Norrheimer women’s garb before in her homeland, but he hadn’t seen her wearing it much. When they met she’d been about to swear vengeance on the killers of her intended husband and pledge her God ten lives for his, which to her folk’s way of thinking required breeks and jerkin. And she’d been a maiden then, while this was the married woman’s version. The basis was a long sleeveless hanging dress of blue wool over a sleeved shift of saffron-yellow linen, with her hair done up in braids and mostly covered by an embroidered kerchief, and a long white apron in front held by two silver brooches at the shoulders. It wasn’t fancy exactly, but the cloth was finely made, tight-woven of excellent yarn and colored with good fast dyes, and there were touches of embroidery here and there in patterns of gripping beasts with interlaced tails. It showed off her sweetly-curved athletic height well.

Though she looks even better in nothing at all but the Goddess’ sweet skin, he thought with satisfaction.

Melissa smiled from near the stove, a tasting spoon in one hand and her mug in the other; there was more gray than dark-blond in her hair now, but the light eyes in her tired, lined face were kindly on Asgerd’s pleasure. And proud, since it was her work.

“I was going to give it as a Yule gift, but sure, then I thought why not let my daughter-in-law enjoy it for the whole of the season? It’ll be back to the war-trail for you two soon enough, and folded up and back in the chest that dress will go, where it does little good.”

“It’s lovely,” Asgerd said, extending a foot and looking admiringly at the embroidered hem. “Fine weaving and fine sewing too-better than mine; my seams are always just a little crooked somewhere. It lacks nothing but my own set of keys at the belt.”

“I helped sew!” Fand called from over by the fire. “And I went up to Dun Juniper and looked through the books for the patterns and drew them!”

“And I thank you for it,” Asgerd said to her solemnly. “They are a touch of home.”

Asgerd and Melissa exchanged a glance and the older woman half-winked. Edain nodded and raised a silent mug to his mother. They hadn’t gotten on all that well when he first brought Asgerd home that summer, and he was glad to see the final peace-offering made and accepted.

It wasn’t a small gift, either; there was a reason most common folk, even prosperous ones like his Clan, had only three sets of clothing-one to wear, one to wash, and one for festival days. Turning out a bolt of cloth needed a good loom, a skilled worker, and many long days of labor, besides the raw materials. His mother was a weaver of note, too, who didn’t waste her time on ordinary rough homespun or blankets, which was all a young girl like Fand could aspire to as yet. The household sold or swapped most of his mother’s cloth and used that to get plainer stuff for everyday.

Softly Asgerd went on: “I only wish my mother could see me so, to know I was settled, and the rest of my family.”

“Tell you what, acushla,” Edain said, drawing another mug and setting it by her. “We’ll have one of the limners up to Dun Juniper draw you so and send it back with King Bjarni. He can hand it on to your family with your letters when he returns. Things will travel more easily after the war, and it’s not at all unlikely or beyond hope that they’ll be able to reply someday. The more so as the High King and your folk’s Bjarni are guest-friends and blood-brothers, and sure, neither will deny you a letter or two among any bundle he sends.”

Asgerd nodded silently as she set down her apples and peeled and cored them with swift dexterity, dumping the refuse in the bin that would go to the pigs. Then she arranged them in a pan with their centers full of butter and honey, broke in some of the walnuts, and added a coating of spiced crumbs over all.

“That’s a wonderful idea,” she said a little wistfully after the task was begun. “And maybe…drawings of your family and the house and the farm? That would be a comfort to them.”

Edain nodded. His mother tasted the stew again, picked up another thumb-and-two-fingers’ pinch of salt mixed with dried herbs from the bowl beside the stove, dropped it in, stirred, and nodded.

“This is ready; that it is. Where are the twins?”

“Bedded down with Garbh and Drudwyn and Cochnibar in the workshed by the stove there,” Edain said. “Garbh won’t let them wander.”

Melissa snorted. “And she won’t wash or dress them either,” she said. “A grandmother I may be, as well as a mother again unexpected, but I remember how to do that well enough. And that men are like bears with houses for dens, when it comes to remembering such details. Rather than like human beings.”

“Oh, but she did wash them, and that thoroughly and well.” Edain grinned, and his father snorted a laugh as well. “Holding them down with a paw the while.”

“I’ll attend to it,” Asgerd said, as she took a fold of her apron around her hand to swing open the cast-iron door of the stove and slide the tray of baking apples inside. “They are not puppies, nor kittens nor colts nor yet bear-cubs, to be licked clean.”

“But sometimes I’m thinking they’re part all of those,” Melissa said. “And if there were an Óenach Mór of dogs, Garbh’s vote would be for puppy, for sometimes she forgets she didn’t bear them herself, and that’s a fact. Now shout out the others, someone, and we’ll eat.”

Asgerd brought Nola and Nigel in looking even cleaner than Garbh had left them, and wearing their shifts as well as their kilts; the dogs followed and flopped down in a corner each on their favorite bit of rug, and several of the household moggies picked higher spots to watch the intensely interesting sport of humans eating, with an especially keen eye on the bowl of whipped cream. None of the two-footed dwellers had to be called twice. His mother did the blessing, as hearthmistress-

Edain joined in, signing his plate and in setting aside a crumb and a drop; he noted that their guests from the CORA lands mostly did too, though a few murmured Christian graces instead or just waited respectfully. He suspected that there would be a fair number of new covensteads founded east of the mountains when the war was over and the folk who’d taken refuge with the Clan went back to rebuild their homes. Asgerd hammer-signed her plate and added:

“Hail, all-giving Earth, and hail and thanks to Frey of the rain and Freya of the harvest.”

Nobody objected. The Old Religion didn’t have a problem with anyone’s names for the Powers, and he knew a few Mackenzies over towards Sutterdown who preferred to thank Demeter and Adonis.

There was a clatter as plates were passed and serving-spoons wielded with a will, while loaves were torn open. The food was plain enough; the stew was notionally venison, and had enough of it to give more than a mere taste, but it was mainly winter vegetables like carrots and parsnips and kale by weight, though the thick gravy was savory with onion and sage and thyme and paprika. The other main dishes were crocks of potatoes sliced and simmered with layers of onions and pats of butter and bits of bacon and topped with grated cheese and bowls of steamed cabbage. Harvest had been good enough the year that had ended this Samhain, but the Mackenzie dùthchas was feeding more mouths than there had been hands to work lately. The war had gone on for years, with levies at all seasons, and it wore things down and used them up.

Still, there’s enough, Edain thought. And enough bread and butter, come to that; for there’s strength and life in good bread, and nothing tastes better than a hunk of it still steaming.

There was a special satisfaction in eating the loaf baked from grain you’d reaped yourself and putting your own feet under your own table on your own kindred’s land to eat it; it was something he’d missed on the Quest. For that matter, he’d taken the buck whose meat and marrow-bones had gone into the stew with one sweet painless angled shot that drove a broadhead through lungs and heart.

“How do you get the crust so firm on this bread while the crumb is so soft, good mother?” Asgerd asked Melissa. “We don’t make much bread all from wheat flour in Norrheim. More barley and rye, and oatcakes, and mixed grain, save at the great feasts.”

“Ah, the secret’s to brush a little water on the skin of the dough when you set the loaves to start the second rising, and then a little egg-white across the top just before you bake. Then a dish of water set in the oven with it,” his mother replied. “Sealing the top makes it strike high in the oven’s heat, and the water keeps the crust firm.”

Edain mopped at his plate with a heel of it and crunched it down, remembering innumerable tasteless flat-cakes cooked on griddles by countless camp-fires. The youngsters stared eagerly and clutched their spoons as the plates were cleared and the baked apples were brought out and topped with dollops of the sweet cream. Tamar’s man Eochu was laughing at a joke of hers, and brushing a little of the cream across the babe’s lips with the tip of a finger; she licked her lips and looked dubious, then brightened. Edain laughed himself as he looked down the table at his kin and his father yawning and nodding a little over his second mug of beer.

“What’s funny?” Asgerd asked, leaning close to speak beneath the hum of conversation.

“That all of it…the fighting and the faring, the stark dealings with the Powers and the fearsome magic swords and all the rest of it…was for this. Just this.”

DUN JUNIPER

DÙTHCHAS OF THE CLAN MACKENZIE

(FORMERLY THE EAST-CENTRAL WILLAMETTE VALLEY, OREGON)

HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

DECEMBER 18TH, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

The High King had given out that he would spend the Yule season with his Mackenzie kindred. There had been grumbling from the great lords of the Association, all of which he’d politely ignored.

“Let them complain,” Rudi said, looking up towards the lantern-glow at the gates of Dun Juniper and laughing. “If I have to dance another pavane or eat another pastry shaped like a ship or filbert ice cream carved like a knight or listen to another troubadour dead-set on seeing how many obscure kennings and references he can boot-heel into a single song, it’s gibbering mad I’d go.”

“I hope Mom won’t be too lonely,” Mathilda said as they drew rein. “Christmas by herself.”

“Your mother would rather intrigue than eat her dinner,” Juniper Mackenzie said dryly. “And since when did Todenangst or Portland lack for that? Throngs of people, and when she wants sympathy she has her cats, and Lady Jehane to tutor.”

“She can always visit Castle Odell and sit by Conrad’s bedside and talk about old times,” Mathilda acknowledged. “Valentine and her girls are back from Montinore.”

“With hearty thanks and strong hints from d’Ath.” Rudi grinned.

He was fairly certain the Grand Constable wanted some privacy for herself and her Châtelaine for reasons not entirely unlike his own desire to get Matti to himself, or as close an approximation as was possible for a ruler. More seriously, he went on:

“And likely she’ll have you to herself when Órlaith is born. If I’m to be over the mountains then, hammering at the gates of Boise or Corwin, I’ll not stint myself of your company the now, love. And if any don’t like it, they can do the other thing, that they can.”

“All to herself? As if I wouldn’t be there too!” Juniper said. “Grandchildren give most of the joys of parenthood and only a tenth the labor and pain.”

“I’m sure we will all bear up bravely through the birth, speaking of labor and pain,” Mathilda said, with a raised eyebrow under the white ermine fur of her hat.

He reached over and squeezed her hand. He was relatively certain she and the child would both come through healthy; visions aside, she was fit and well-built for the business, and would have the best midwives and healers half a continent could provide on hand. It still wasn’t an easy thing, any more than heeling your horse into a gallop towards a line of points and battle-cries. And unlike that, it was one sort of fight they couldn’t really share, though he would have given much to be there to hold her.

It was only a few hours past noon, but it was already gray fading to dark; there was a reason this time of year was called the Black Months. Snow was falling, steady and wet, on the long lens-shaped piece of sloping hillside benchland that Jeb Mackenzie had homesteaded more than a century and a half ago. The clouds had come rolling down from the Middle Cascades before they left Sutterdown, and by now the grass and hedges and bare-limbed oaks and walnuts all bore a thick covering; more still turned the tall Douglas fir and hemlocks upslope into a vision of green and brown crowned in white, with a strong mealy-damp smell that brought memory strong as thick honey back to him.

It had never been more than a middling-prosperous stock farm, despite being well over a square mile. Mackenzie family legend said the man had chosen it because it reminded him of Tennessee, though Rudi suspected it was also because the best bottom-land had either been taken up already or was swampy and required draining-certainly there was enough renascent wetland in the dùthchas farther west towards the river.

Later the family had moved to town-Eugene and Salem, mostly-and the land had fallen out of use save for timber; later still his mother’s great-uncle had grown wealthy and bought it back and much more of the forest beside, as a hunting-ground. The childless man had doted on the young Juniper, and when he died had left it to her, though she’d been an aspiring bard (and sometime High Priestess of the Singing Moon coven) with no handfasted man, a young daughter, and a burning determination to make her way with her music.

“It still seems a little unreal, sometimes,” he heard her murmur, her voice falling into old patterns. “It all changed so fast, after the Change…”

“Ah, well, it’s just the place I grew to me,” Rudi replied gently. “And very dear it is. You’d done it proud.”

They clattered up the sloping road that turned right to the gates. Dun Juniper wasn’t exactly a town, but nor yet was it an ordinary farming Dun with a palisade of logs if that; the wall was thrice man-height and solid, crenellated, the outer stucco white. Beneath the ramparts was a band of painting, god-faces and sprites and eerily manlike beasts or beastlike men. Towers flanked the gates, and from them bagpipes keened, Lambeg drums rattled thunder, and flared trumpets whose mouths were shaped like howling wolves boomed beneath.

“And not altogether unlike radongs in sound,” another member of their party said.

Rimpoche Tsewang Dorje had made some concessions to the weather, including a sheepskin coat and hat. He looked up at the images, then pressed his palms together and bowed.

“You have done well indeed,” he said to Juniper. Then an impish grin that turned his face into a mass of wrinkles. “Even if some of the tools were…borrowed.”

“Stolen,” she replied cheerfully. “Rampantly stolen by Gardner not least, myself among the others.”

“Only something we owned could be stolen!” he answered, and the Buddhist monk and the Witch-Queen of the Old Faith laughed together.

The gates were double leaves of solid yard-thick timber baulks fastened together with bolts and sandwiched between two sheets of quarter-inch steel painted deep brown. On those were outlined images made of thousands of copper rivets, suggested more than seen until you let the focus of your eyes blur a bit and then vanishing again if you stared too hard. Above was the Triple Moon, waxing and full and waning; below was the wild bearded face of a man with curling ram’s-horns on his head. To either side of the gates were tall forms colored and carved; Lugh of the Long Spear, the Many-Skilled, and Brigit of the flame and sheaf and harp, She whose music bound the hearts of men like golden chains.

The music ceased and a voice called down ceremoniously; solemn, but with laughter in it. Rudi recognized Oak Barstow Mackenzie, the First Armsman. This was his home as well, of course.

“Who comes to Dun Juniper near the holy season?” he said. “Do you claim entry by blood-kinship as Mackenzies yourselves, or by guest-right, or do you offer tale or goods or skill?”

“The chief of the Clan comes, the Mackenzie Herself,” Rudi replied.

His mother took it up: “And the Ard Rí, the High King himself, the Lady’s Sword, comes to guest his kinfolk.”

There was a story of how Lugh had come visiting in disguise in ancient times, and had proven His worth by listing the skills He commanded. Mackenzie ritual always paid some slight homage to that.

The weight of the gates would have dragged if only the hinges had supported them, massive though those were. He could hear the clunk and chung as the locking bars were winched out of the way, and then teams pushed the gates open. The inner corners rested on salvaged railway wheels, and those ran on sections of track set into the entryway. Rudi dismounted and lifted his wife down; the others joined him, and the formality dissolved in a shouting mob as the dwellers in the home of his childhood surged around him.

That ended with Mathilda and himself and Juniper and his foster father Nigel Loring being carried shoulder-high behind a pair of strutting pipers playing “Rudi’s Tain,” through the streets of the settlement. It was a welcome relief from the elaborate deference of the north-realm, and they were suitably careful of Mathilda while he and the others were tossed about like chips of driftwood in a Pacific storm.

Most of the homes in Dun Juniper were built against the inside of the wall, knee-high fieldstone foundations and close-fitting squared logs above to the shingled roofs. The woodwork was colorfully carved in sinuous running designs, but none so much so as the Hall that had started as a rich man’s hunting lodge built over the old foundations of Jeb’s farmhouse, and it blazed with lamp-light and firelight through the big windows, a blur of gold and glittering color through the white fog of the snow.

It had been a long low building to start with; the early Mackenzies had doubled its size by lifting the roof and putting on another layer of huge squared logs. That roof loomed above them through the snow now, the end-rafters at east and west extending upward to spirals that faced each other deosil and tuathal, sunwise and its opposite, to balance the energies. Pillars ringed it on three sides, with the beam-ends of the second story gallery extended out over the court that surrounded it; they were carved into the heads of the Mackenzie totems, Tiger and Bear and Elk, Coyote and Fox and Wolf and more, with great wrought lanterns of iron and glass hanging from their jaws.

Somehow nobody had thought of lifting the Rimpoche; he looked about with keen interest as the others were set on their feet.

“Not altogether unlike some things in Tibet,” he said. “We share a liking for bright colors and symbolic carving, at least.”

“We had a lot of time in the winter and needed to practice woodworking, at any rate,” Juniper said.

Nigel Loring chuckled. “It was already mostly like this when I arrived, and I thought everyone here must be either barking mad, or fallen into a book,” he said.

“Or that it was the biggest, gaudiest Celtic-Chinese restaurant in the world,” Juniper said, leaning aside to give him a quick kiss. “Sweet-and-sour corned beef and deep-fried cabbage, perhaps.”

The oldsters do love their jargon, Rudi thought tolerantly as all three of them laughed.

The crowd went solemn again as they were set down; Rudi straightened his bonnet and plaid. The pipers put aside their drones; harp-music came as the doors of the Hall with their silver cat-head bosses swung wide. He recognized his younger half sister Fiorbhinn’s touch on the strings, and voices were raised-the pure sweet ones of preadolescents, mostly her gang of musical mischief-makers. For once they were solemn, and there was an ethereal loveliness as they sang:

“Who will go down to the holy groves

To summon the Shadows there

And tie a garland on the sheltering leaves-”

Maud Mackenzie brought the guest-cup, a horn of hot cider with spices; now that she was Tanist and acknowledged successor to their mother as Chief of the Clan that duty fell to her. Rudi felt a pang as he took it; this wasn’t his home anymore, not really. That feeling was redoubled when Juniper guided him to the High Seat with its carved ravens. He smiled at her grin and wink and took it, hanging the Sword from one of the carved bosses.

Aunt Judy-Oak’s mother, and his mother’s oldest friend-plunked a piece of her carrot cake down on the arm of his chair; she was an herbalist and healer of note, the founder and manager of the Clan’s medical tradition, and also a very fine cook.

“What’s a king for, if not to enjoy a piece of cake?” she said.

Rudi leaned back with a sigh and took a forkful. The Hall smelled of the dinner cooking, and of the great fir-tree in one corner-the decoration had just started. There would be music and dancing beforehand; it was a very grave situation indeed that Mackenzies didn’t consider improvable by some song and dance. And storytelling, and riddles, and…

“What’s a king for indeed?”