S. Stirling - A Meeting At Corvallis

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?"