S. Stirling - The Protectors war

Chuck and Sam braced their spears against the gnarled trunk of the oak, so that the Corn Mother could oversee the festivities; the spears stood for the Lord of the Harvest as well. Melissa broke the loaf made from the first sheaf they'd cut and set it before Her, standing for an instant with a fold of her airsaid drawn over her head.

"And She says: eat!" she said, turning and dropping the shawl back on her shoulders.

The harvest workers stood in a circle around her; they gave three cheers, flinging up their joined hands. After that everyone pitched in, helping set the trestle tables and benches and unload the harvest supper, taking turns to run down to the pond in the lower corner of the field and shed their kilts and dive in to slough off the dust and sweat. One of the wagons carried soap and towels, clothes for the Dun Fairfax folk and robes for the guests who'd be walking back to Dun Juniper later. This wasn't the harvest feast proper-that would come on Lughnassadh, next week, when everyone had had a chance to rest a bit, and be a lot more elaborate-but it was the beginning of it. In most duns there was considerable good-natured rivalry between households to outdo each other at a harvest potluck.

Juniper shook out her water-darkened hair, then pinned her plaid with a jeweled brooch done in swirling knotwork of sinuous gripping beasts; she'd brought along a clean set of gear that included silver-buckled shoes and an embroidered shirt with a ruffled front as well as clean kilt and plaid. Someone handed her a wreath of poppies and oxeye daisies, and she set that on her head as well.

Since the Chief must look spiffy where possible, she thought, with a wry inward shrug. Well, I was used to dressing up in costume like this for a performance before the Change! Now it's different, though. Now these are my clothes and the performance is my life.

Sir Nigel, on the other hand, wore one of the coarse, gray, hooded guest robes with casually regal authority, as if it were his everyday garb, despite the way the hem trailed on the ground. He bowed slightly as she reappeared.

"My word, but you look dramatic," he said. "And quite authentically Celtic, if not quite Scottish."

Juniper turned up her hands. "What can I say? I was just now thinking that I wore stuff like this before the Change to look exotic-and today, it's just what I wear."

"Quite. I felt: a proper burke wearing plate armor, as Sam would say, for the longest time after I'd learned to use it well. As if I were trapped in one of Alleyne's tourneys and couldn't get out, or in one of my childhood daydreams. Now it's quite natural, except when I think about it."

He offered her an arm with a courtly gesture, and she tucked a hand through it; the forearm under her hand felt as if it had been molded out of hard living rubber.

"Ahhh!" Sam Aylward said, seating himself and taking a first swallow of beer from a crock kept cool in an old plastic trash barrel full of cold springwater. "Dennis Martin Mackenzie, my thanks!"

The big bearded man doffed his bonnet and showed his bald spot in a bow. "Hell, they're your hops and barley, Samuel Aylward Mackenzie. Plus the mountains contributed the water free of charge."

"But you did the brewing, mate."

"Pity we don't have any ice, to get it really cold," Dennis replied, with a malicious twinkle.

Aylward shuddered dramatically. "Bite your tongue, Yank! If I didn't like to taste the beer, I could drink ice water cut with vodka."

Then he looked out at the field of stooked sheaves. "Well, that's done and now we can all relax and lie about eating chockies till next spring."

He was smiling as he said it, and there were groans from most within earshot; the work of the harvest wouldn't really be over until Mabon, still months away-at which time the fall plowing started anyway. Late-planted winter gardens under mulch would yield a bit through most of the cold season. But at least the main crop was in, the breadstuff that was the literal staff of life. Plenty of it was on the long plank tables, in the form of biscuits tapped still hot out of thick clay traveling ovens, and of baskets full of warm round loaves marked with the eight-spoked Wheel of the Year on their crusts.

They went with butter, cheese, fresh salads-everyone gorged on greens this time of year-glazed hams, a great cold roast beef, fried chicken, a noble dish of Sam's apple-cured bacon with wild chanterelle mushrooms, steamed vegetables, a huge pot of baked beans with bits of fat pork standing amid the crumbling brown crust, and for dessert, cream with the first peaches and berries and bowls of dark red Mona cherries, and honey for dipping. Jugs of cold water, milk, Dennie's home brew, cider and wine and chilled herbal tea went down on the planks.

Juniper was suddenly conscious of how ravenous she was, and how good the salty brown smell of the ham was, and that the first new potatoes were waiting, steaming gently as the lids of the pots were removed, beside deep royal purple baby beets:

And I'm aware of the fact that I intend to not worry about anything for the rest of the day, starting with letters from the Protector and the negotiations. Work drives out care, but so does sheer willpower.

Everyone waited politely while the Lopez family said their grace, then started passing plates. Juniper took a sampling of side dishes around a slab of the ham, added a dab of the strong homemade mustard before she began to eat, and noticed Nigel Loring dipping a spoon into a crock of equally strong homemade creamy horseradish to put beside thin-sliced rare roast beef.

"Careful," she said. "It's good, but Melissa makes it hot enough to jump over for luck like a Beltane bonfire."

"All the better," he said, nodding up the table.

Melissa sat at the head of the trestle table, with Sam Ayl-ward at her right and an improvised cradle of sheaves and blankets on her left. There was a tender fondness in Loring's face as he saw the other man raising his infant daughter in both hands, chuckling when she grabbed at his face and tiny pink fingers closed on one nostril.

"I always thought Aylward would be a good father," he said; the buzz of conversation was loud enough that privacy was possible, even in the open air, if you leaned close. "I'm very glad to see him settled. He claimed he was married to the SAS, of course, and that 'roots are for ruddy turnips, sir.' "

"That's hard to imagine, after all these years. Sam seems like a butte or some other natural feature-anything solid and strong-and about as rooted as a man can be and not sprout leaves like the Jack-in-the-Green," Juniper said.

Then she paused to cut one of the new potatoes across, add a pat of butter and chew blissfully. When she had swallowed: "Of course, the time before the Change seems: unreal a good part of the time."

"Except when you wake and everything since the Change seems like a fading dream, and in a minute you'll hear autos and aircraft and the television," Loring said quietly.

Juniper nodded. "Less and less often, but it still happens," she said. "And will until the last of us who were old enough to remember the time before pass on."

Then she shrugged and smiled. "As for Sam, not a day's gone by since I found him in April of the first Change Year that I haven't thanked Cernunnos for him."

Loring coughed slightly. Juniper grinned at his blush and went on: "Yes, I'm quite serious about it," she said. "Really I am, all the way through. Though I'm told I can be surprisingly rational most of the time: "

It's true that most stereotypes have a core of fact in 'em, she thought with amusement. So some Englishmen really do dread embarrassment more than they do fire and sword! I think before the Change the Lorings were very, very old-fashioned. Now they may be back in fashion: who knows? He doesn't talk much about his past, or hasn 't until just recently.