S. Stirling - A Meeting At Corvallis

"I'm off," Dennis said to the Englishman as the practice group around the dais broke up, rising and giving a nod to Juniper Mackenzie as she approached-and a wink to Nigel. "I've got apprentices doing practice-pieces to check on and then Sally'll have dinner ready. 'Night, Juney."

"Tell Sally we need to talk about the Moon School schedule tomorrow, Den-nie," Juniper said, then: "And how are you today, Nigel?" She sat and stretched out in a leather armchair, feet towards the fire on a settee.

Sir Nigel Loring picked up his thick, white ceramic mug with his left hand. His fingers tightened on it until the knuckles whitened and cords stood out in his forearm, and then relaxed.

"Your healer seems to be correct," he said. "Full function is returning."

Slowly and painjully, he added silently to himself; he'd never been a whiner. Old bones didn't mend as fast as young, and that was all there was to it. And he was fifty-three now, even if a very fit fifty-three.

"Judy Barstow knows her business," Juniper said, and nodded. Then she smiled: "Or Judy Barstow Mackenzie, to use the modern form."

He could see sympathy in the bright green eyes; her voice held a hint of her mother's birthplace, Achill Island off the west coast of Eire, running like a burbling stream beneath her usual General American. Her father's heritage had been mostly what Americans called Scots-Irish, and it showed in the straight nose, pointed chin and high cheekbones; so did the very slight trace of Cherokee that side of her family had picked up in the mountains of Carolina and Tennessee before they made the long trek over the Oregon Trail.

"And the headaches?" she went on.

"Fewer as the weeks go by, and not as bad; the herbal infusion works wonders. Ye gods, but that man was strong! What was his name?"

In two strokes the greatsword had buckled the tough alloy steel of his helm, ripped the chin-protecting bevoir right off his breastplate, and cut through the sheet metal and strong laminated wood of his shield to break his arm while he lay semiconscious on the ground, trying to protect Rudi Mackenzie from a death as unstoppable as a falling boulder.

"Mack," she said. "Although I've heard that was a nickname-for the truck."

Juniper Mackenzie's usual expression was friendly; more sincerely so than his own, he thought. Just then it changed for an instant, and you could see the fangs of the she-fox behind her smile. She glanced over to another corner, where a nine-year-old with copper-gold locks to his shoulders was playing chess with a black-haired young woman in her early twenties. They looked up for an instant from their game and waved at their mother and the Englishman. He felt himself give an answering grin; young Rudi was irresistible, and his sister Eilir charming in her slightly eerie way.

"Mack wasn't so strong as you and your son Alleyne and John Hordle put together," Juniper said. "Since he was trying to kill my son, I would consider that a fortunate thing, so. I won't forget whose shield it was covered Rudi."

Her hand tightened on his shoulder for an instant, and he covered it with his as briefly before she leaned back, arranging her kilt and plaid gracefully and then taking one of the muffins from the plate beside Nigel's chair. They were made from stone-ground flour, rich with eggs and thick with dried blueberries and hazelnuts; one steamed gently as she broke it open and buttered it.

"And if one has to convalesce from a broken arm and a cracked head, this is as good a spot as any," he went on with a smile, waving his mug. "And as good a season of the year."

With the summer's wealth stored and the next year's wheat and barley in the ground, supporting a guest too weak to work or fight was no hardship. The Great Hall of Dun Juniper was comfortably warm in the chill, rainy gloom of the west-Oregon winter, too, not something you could count on in a large building after the Change in a place like the Cascade foothills.

Or in a large British building even before the Change, he thought mordantly. But the Yanks always were better at heating. Snow beat at the windows with feathery paws amid December's early dark, but the great room was bright with firelight and the lanterns that hung from the carved rafters.

"The winters weren't the Willamette's strongest selling points," Juniper said. "Though with my complexion, I find them soothing. At least I don't turn into a giant freckle!"

"I like your climate. The tropics wear after a while"-she knew he'd had plenty of hot-country experience in his years with the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment before the Change-"but this is homelike enough for comfort and just the right bit milder."

Juniper laughed, and waved a hand around the great room and its flamboyant decoration. "Now, this I don't think you'll find homelike."

He found himself laughing with her, although he'd been a rather solemn person most of his life. "I grant it isn't what you'd find in Hampshire, even after the Change."

He recognized the symbolism of her faith and he could interpret most of it, partly from his readings in ancient history, partly from occasional contact with practitioners of the Craft-some had been on the Isle of Wight, the main enclave of British survivors, and a few had even managed to hide out in the New Forest to be discovered by his scouts in the second Change Year. And his son Alleyne had been a re-creationist before the Change, one of those who played at medieval combat, and the odd Wiccan had overlapped with that set.

Extremely odd, some of them, he thought with a smile.

Then he raised his gaze to the brooding, feral face of Pan, and the smile died. The heavy-lidded eyes were shadowed as they stared into his, given life by the flickering firelight. They brought with them a hint of green growth and damp, moldering leaves; the dark scented breath of the wildwood, and the fear that waits to take the souls of men who wander too far beyond the edge of the tilled, tamed fields.

That isn't just good carving, he thought.

It reminded him of medieval art in ancient churches; not the style or the imagery, but the raw power of bone-deep belief. The Wiccans he'd known in England before the Change had mostly seemed at least slightly barmy to him, when they weren't playacting. He didn't know what Juniper and her friends had been like before the modern world perished, but they weren't putting it on now. Not in the slightest.

Juniper's green eyes twinkled, following his thoughts with disconcerting ease; she linked her fingers around one knee and considered him with her head tilted to one side.

"It wasn't like this when I inherited it from my great-uncle, that good gray Methodist," she said, her tone mock-defensive. "We didn't have much to do but carve, those first winters after the Change, and it was useful with so many new Dedicants, sort of a visual training aid. At first it was just me and my coveners and a few friends like Dennie. Then we had to help other people, get the farms started again and make tools and save the livestock, fight off the bandits and Eaters and: It all just sort of: snowballed."

"I had the same feeling of riding the tiger in directions unpredictable over in England, my dear," Nigel said. "I've seen it elsewhere. While things were in flux, one strong personality with luck and, hmmm, baraka, could set the tone for a whole region, like a seed-crystal in a saturated solution. As Charles and I did in England, until I fell out with His Majesty."

Juniper shivered very slightly as she looked around. "And as I appear to have done hereabouts."

"I should think you'd be glad to see more come around to your way of thinking?" he probed gently.

"The Craft never did hunt for converts the way the religions of the Book do; we waited for those who were interested to seek us out. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. Then suddenly there were so many: "