S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

"Well, Lugh love me, it's a pig!" she said to herself. A big sow, to be exact, with some half-grown piglets near it.

The cabin stood on a U-shaped rise in the center of the plateau's northern side, separated from the wooded ridge behind by a gully. It was a long low structure of Douglas fir logs squared on top and bottom, all resting on a knee-high foundation of mortared fieldstone and topped by a steep shingled roof that covered a veranda around three sides. Smoke trickled from the big central stone chimney; there were sheds and a barn of similar construction, and a gnarled and decrepit orchard on the south-facing slope below.

"That's all yours?" Sally said; she sounded impressed.

Not unreasonably, since there were three thousand square feet on the ground floor, plus the attic loft where she'd set up her loom and had a space for private Craft working.

"It is mine, and a monster that's swallowed every penny I could earn in upkeep these last ten years," Juniper answered absently. "Great-uncle Earl built it to impress his cronies in Calvin Coolidge's time. And he may have been trying to bankrupt me with his will! At least I won't have to sell off the timber to pay the taxes and keep the roof tight anymore: "

She felt a huge grin break free as her coveners came closer, and she stood up on the seat of the wagon despite the lurching and jolting, holding to the curving roof with one hand.

"Welcome!" she shouted. "Oh, Cead mile failte! A hundred thousand welcomes!"

Hands reached up to catch her as she dove down from the seat; for a long ten minutes there was only hugging and babbling and shouts of glee.

When that died down enough, she looked around. There were Chuck and Judy Barstow, he a gardener for the city of Eugene, she a registered nurse and midwife; Diana and Andy, who ran a health food store and restaurant there: eight of them in all.

"Where's the others? Where's Rudy?" she said.

Her friends looked at each other, and their smiles died.

Chuck Barstow finally spoke, his voice gentle: "We couldn't find Jack or Carmen or Muriel; we left a message at MoonDance. I hope they show up later. Rudy: Rudy's flight was a hundred feet up at six fifteen. Andy and I were at the airport to see him off. He's dead, Juney."

She gave a sound somewhere between a moan and a grunt, feeling winded, as if something had punched her under the short ribs and made it physically impossible to breathe; somehow she'd known, but pushed the knowledge away. Dennis gave her an awkward pat on the back, and Eilir snaked through the crowd to embrace her; she'd liked the funny, skinny little man as well, even after he'd become her mother's lover.

"Blessed be," Juniper murmured after a moment. "May he rest in the Summerlands, and return to us in joy."

"So mote it be," everyone replied.

Then she took a deep breath, and wiped her hand across her eyes.

I'll grieve later, she thought. Right now there's work to be done.

"Where did you get all this stuff? " she said, waving at the wagons and the livestock; there were chickens and ducks and geese, as well as the quadrupeds.

"At the museum's exhibit-Living Pioneer History, where else?" Chuck grinned.

The plumed hat looked a little incongruous over the workaday denim and flannel; he usually wore it with a troubadour's costume at the RenFaires, or his knight's festival garb for Society events. He was wearing his buckler slung from his belt over his parade sword, too:

Which is perfectly good steel, she remembered with a shiver. Like the one I'm wearing.

He went on: "The exhibit was mostly abandoned when we got there, right after the Change: all gone off to try and find their families, I suppose, poor bastards. It was chaos and old night in Eugene by then. So we just: liberated it, you might say, having as good a claim as anyone else. The rest of the livestock the same-some we bought, from people still taking money."

"You saved lives by doing that," Juniper said. "Ours to start with; we'll use the tools and do it in time. It'll come back to you threefold, remember. And the children? Not that I'm objecting: but it's going to be very tight for food before harvest."

She made a quick calculation. The Fairfaxes ' stores would easily have been eighteen months' eating for three, without stinting; for:

Good Goddess gentle and strong, twenty-eight including those children! : it would be about three months, carefully rationed.

Of course, they could eat the livestock if they had to, even the horses: the chickens would yield something:

"They were on a school bus," Andy Trethar said. "All the way from Seattle to Ashland, and returning when the Change hit. And: well, we just couldn't leave them."

Chuck cut in: "Juney, Diana and Andy had just taken a delivery for their store, which we brought along, and we picked up everything we could along the way, and we cleaned out a garden-supply place that had a lot of seeds: We only got here a couple of hours ago ourselves, you understand."

"Well, every mouth comes with a pair of hands," she said stoutly.

Though many aren't very large or strong hands, in this case, she thought. But we'll make do – for a start.

Rudy had always been on at Andy and Diana for carrying too much inventory at the MoonDance, tying up their scanty capital. That looked as if it was going to be a very fortunate mistake.

Lord and Lady, we're probably better off than anyone else within a hundred miles!

Chuck bent close: "And you don't know how glad I am to see you here," he half whispered. "I'd just about run out of charisma by this point. People are getting really scared. You're the High Priestess; give 'em some oomph, Goddess-on-Earth."

Juniper swallowed, then planted her hands on her hips and raised her voice to address them all. At least she had a good voice, experience with crowds, and had long ago lost all tendency to stage fright.

"Another hundred thousand welcomes, my darlings," she said. "But listen to your High Priestess now. We've got a lot of work to be done, and not much time to do it in. Here's what I think-that it's a clan we'll have to be, as it was in the old days, if we're going to live at all: "

M en on foot were a lot quieter than galloping horses. That was the only way Havel could justify this last-minute dash through the night to himself; he prayed with every footfall that they were going to be in time.

Idiots, he thought. They're acting like idiots and it's making my job harder. Doesn't seem fair.

The bandits had flogged their horses on all through the night, even after they'd caught up with Will Hutton, halting only when they'd run into the ranger cabin half an hour ago.

Which meant that he had to stop too, to let them have enough time to lose fear of pursuit. Fortunately he'd been able to follow them through the open patches with the telescopic sight from his old rifle. He hoped it was the right thing to do, but he could feel sand grinding in the gears of his brain; it had been nearly thirty hours of hard effort since he last slept.

"Stop!" he hissed to Eric, sinking to one knee.

He'd blackened the heads of their weapons with mud, and now he held the spear low and level to the ground. From the edge of the pines that fringed the area around the old ranger station he gave the cabin a quick once-over, looking for the men on guard. There was light from the windows, firelight and lamplight, enough to endanger his night vision; he squinted and looked aside. Four horses were hobbled in the clearing near the cabin, looking tired and discouraged and nosing at the rock and pine duff in a futile search for something to eat.

He could see two human figures there: one slumped near the steps that led to the broad front veranda, and another standing on it-a stout figure carrying a bow, but looking through the front window, with his back to the outside world.