The Protector's War Page 22

  The tables had been taken out with the last of supper, but the doors to the kitchens were still pulled back, and trays came out laden with pastries shaped like rabbits with raisins for eyes, dried-fruit confection and slices of cake, along with mugs of herb-flavored mead and Dennie's foaming beer and glasses of wine. Hands sought hands…

  I'd be guessing we're going to have a fine crop of new Mackenzies come Yule… Well, it is a fertility festival, is it not? she thought with a wide grin. The young God rises ready and randy to wed the Maiden!

  "Well, come on, you cowards!" she called to them all. "The music's for dancing to, isn't it? We're tapping our feet on the earth to waken Her from sleep!"

  Happy shouts came through the wide-open front doors as someone leapt over one of the fires for luck; the night was cool, but the body heat and the blaze on the hearth and the lanterns kept it warm enough in the hall that the breeze from outdoors was welcome. She heard the stepping of feet in time to the music, scuffing on the ground and tapping up the stairs and over the floorboards of the veranda, and cried greeting with the rest as Astrid and Eilir burst through the door and out into the open space, making someone taking a shortcut to the jakes dodge aside.

  They were both in kilts and singlets and light dancing shoes with jeweled buckles, their hair done up in braids under the feathered Scots bonnets, and long staffs in their hands. Eilir loved dancing, taking her cues from the movements of the musicians and her partners and from vibration felt through the soles of her feet; and Whoever had presided over Astrid's cradle had filled with extra physical grace the portion of her that should have contained common sense.

  Ah, the Dance of the Spears, Juniper thought as they went across the floor in file, their feet flashing in unison, twirling the long poles like batons in blurring arcs, left hand on hip…

  Sweet Goddess! she realized, almost but not quite startled enough to lose the beat; then she didn't dare alter a note.

  Those weren't props; they were real battle spears, seven feet of stout ashwood and sharp-edged steel, as deadly in reality as the legendary Gae Bulg of the Sedanta was in story. One slip—or even one bad stroke of her own fiddle bow throwing the dancers off their stride—

  The tune went faster and faster, and they switched to a face-to-face posture; mock-combat, synched to the rhythm, and a ting! as steel met steel and crack! as wood met wood, leaping, whirling, feet blurring as fast as the silver arcs of the spearheads. Across the room her eyes met the wide, appalled and unbelieving gaze of Chuck Barstow, who'd practiced with edged weapons for years before the Change and every day after it. The crowd gasped; now the two were whirling the spears wrist-over-wrist like quarterstaves as they danced, moving them in huge figure eights and then leaping into the air and letting the momentum pirouette them completely around one last time, kilts flying up to show the strong slender thighs. The spears slowed as they each went down on one knee facing Juniper, the polished heads out and nearly touching the floor as the music crashed to its finish.

  The two young faces grinned up at her, sweat-slick and happy, and the crowd was up and cheering and stamping. Astrid and Eilir handed the spears off to their friends—

  Accomplices! Juniper thought, torn between pride and fury.

  —and stood, arms around each other's shoulders, free arms waving as they turned to take the applause. Rudi dashed out to hug his sister, and the two of them grabbed him and tossed him up between them, throwing him nearly to the ceiling.

  A sudden pang took her heart as she looked at them; could life offer them better than this moment? Eilir her heart, and Astrid who she loved nearly as well.

  Certainly there's more and better; they're at the springtide

  of their lives, she thought. Loves and children of their own, and the wisdom of age, and then the Summerlands…

  Though there were likely to be problems there. They weren't lovers, as many assumed—in fact, they found the thought inexpressibly funny, and Eilir had been dragging the odd boy into the bushes these four years past.

  It would be easier if they were, Juniper thought. They're everything but that to each other, which leaves little enough room for a man—or at least a man you'd want.

  For a moment a thought moved in her, formless as roiling cloud, and she closed her eyes—then her will gave it words and purpose. She murmured beneath her breath, moving her hands in certain symbols:

  "Sweet foam-born Cyprian, send them each the love that will be best for them. As the Young God rises to wed You in this season, to each send him, send him on the wings of Your wind, send him on the tides of Your sea." Then, surprising herself: "And for me also. By Your Cauldron, by the spear of the Horned Lord, by the joining of the two that brings all creation, so mote it be!"

  She could feel the spell prayer leave her like a dart cast into a tempest; feel it borne up by winds that smelled of apple blossom and fresh-cut hay and somehow also of musk and heat. Laughter sounded in her ears, proud and fond.

  The thought barely had time to bring unease when there was a buzz of comment from outside, and the sound of the gate horn. Seconds later a youngster ran into the Hall, panting and disheveled and slightly damp; she stopped to take a deep breath and smooth down her kilt and plaid before she came to Juniper in the high seat and shyly dipped knee and head, pulling off her bonnet.

  Why, it's Melissa's Tamar! Juniper thought. Must have run all the way up from Dun Fairfax.

  It wasn't that far, even counting the way the hidden direct path wound back and forth up the hillside, but it was steep and awkward in the dark.

  "Lady Juniper," she said. "My Dad, he's sent me with a message. Private message."

  The girl was fairly bursting with the importance of her mission, and Juniper smiled indulgently.

  "Is i an eorna nua tu a fheicidil, Tamar. You're as welcome as the first shoots of barley, and every Mackenzie has a right to speak to the Chief."

  She signaled the other musicians to keep going, laid down her fiddle and bent a little to let the girl whisper in her ear. More dancers moved out onto the floor, and the bustle built back.

  "He says you should come. Come with Chuck, he said, and no more others than you must. He's found something you need to see."

  Chapter Eight

  North Sea/Grand Canaria

  August 21st-30th, 2006 AD—Change Year Eight

  The captain's cabin of the Pride of St. Helens held a bunk, a desk, several chairs, and a curved couch running under a set of large portholes in the stern; drawers and cabinets were built into the walls and under the seats. It was an efficient use of space, giving an impression of room without actually being very large. Three shelves held books; a cutlass, crossbow, helmet and leather tunic with metal inserts were clipped to the bulkhead by the door. On the desk was a photograph—post-Change from the slightly blurry black-and-white look of it—of a handsome middle-aged woman with an eight-year-old boy and a girl a few years younger standing beside her, and an infant in her arms. The other picture on the wall was an oil painting, a landscape with sheep and rolling green hills and a long masonry bridge with a village of stone-built Georgian houses in the background, all looking English but somehow not quite.

  "Thank you very much," Sir Nigel said to Captain Nobbes, fighting down a slight pang of envy at the family portrait. Alleyne's alive; that's what really matters.

  The Tasmanian was a slim man only a few inches over Loring's five-foot-five, snub-nosed, with graying brown hair and close-cropped beard and dark blue eyes, his face tanned dark and lined from years spent at sea. He poured brandy into two glasses, then handed Nigel one before seating himself behind the desk.

  "To your escape, Sir Nigel," he said.

  Nigel lifted his glass, sniffed and sipped; the brandy was excellent, with a complex fruity aftertaste beneath the bite.

  "A Tasmanian brand?" he asked.

  "Kiwi. Nelson, South Island," Nobbes said. "I've Bund-aberg rum, if you'd rather, six months old and fit to grow hair on yer chest."

  He lau
ghed at the flitting expression of distaste on Nigel's face, and went on: "The Kiwis helped finance this expedition—New Zealand's a sort of federation centered on Christchurch, nowadays. I'm afraid the North Island got knackered, with Auckland at one end and Wellington at the other, but the South Island took surprisingly little damage—about like Tasmania, in fact."

  "Tasmania sounds rather paradisical."

  Nobbes chuckled. "Maybe, compared to the rest of the world. It was tight, but we brought ourselves through with no famine or plague or warlords. Though you should hear how the folk from Hobart and Launceston complained at having to move out to the country and do some real hard graft."

  Sixty million dead here would have been thankful for the opportunity, Nigel mused grimly, hiding his thoughts with a sip of the brandy.

  He remembered driving refugees back into the waters of the Solent at pike point, and improvised galleys ramming boats where gaunt women held up their children just before the steel-plated bows struck.

  And towing rafts of bodies out to sea, with the fish and gulls at them. You fellows had an easy time of it with the Bass Strait and distance between you and the worst.

  The ship heeled a little more as a gust of wind struck her sails; Nobbes cocked his head at a volley of orders and rush of feet, and nodded absently in approval at the "Heave-hoV of a deck team hauling on a rope.

  "Taking you in wasn't pure good nature," Nobbes admitted. A smile: "And not just that King Charles gets my royal Aussie hackles up. You've got knowledge and skills that'll be useful on the other part of my mission."

  Nigel nodded. "What do you actually do with the nuclear weapons?"

  "Put them in big steel boxes, fill the boxes with molten lead—the Pride's ballast is lead ingots in stainless-steel boxes—then dump them in subduction zones off the edges of the continental shelves," Nobbes said.

  "Hardly seems worth the trouble," Nigel said. It will work—thank God for plate tectonics—but… He went on aloud: "Seeing that even if the explosive triggers would function, which they will not, chain reactions are inhibited somehow. Certainly the power reactors just sit and glow, even without the cooling systems. The boffins in Winchester think they'll keep doing that until the isotopes decay."

  Nobbes shrugged. "Prime Minister Brown is a raving Green with a bee in his bonnet, and he's popular enough that even those who disagree humor him. Certainly the plutonium is still just as toxic as it was before the Change, and radiation will still kill you just as dead. We did have problems with oil tankers, bulk carriers loaded with toxic chemicals, and so forth."

  "British ships have orders to scuttle them too," Nigel said. And how nice it must be to have the chance to worry about environmental issues, rather than starving or having cannibal savages climb down the chimney. "We've more or less cleared the Atlantic as far south as Gibraltar, come to that."

  Nobbes finished his brandy. "Another? No? And then there are the war gasses. We certainly don't want those to fall in to the wrong hands. We can't do anything about the ones stored in places like Kazakhstan, but those nearer the coastlines—"

  Nigel smiled. "My dear fellow, you don't have to convince me. You've saved my life, and my son's, and Hor-dle's—and Hordle left everything behind and risked his life to save ours, which is a debt I can only repay through your generosity. You're offering us asylum in what appears to be the last outpost of civilization. I'm perfectly willing to work my passage, and I'm well used to implementing plans I consider total codswallop, simply because I'm told to do it. Dealing with the war gasses isn't even that dangerous, if you're careful. The organophosphate nerve agents can be neutralized with running water in quantity—it takes out the chlorine atom, and you can burn the others—though granted, you'd best be a good bit upwind when you do it. And you'd best be very careful about containers that have become leaky, what?"

  "Beaut!" Nobbes said decisively. "I can't tell you how comforting it is to have a bloke who really understands this garbage."

  Nigel went on: "And more concretely, Alleyne and I have both had experience at sea. Small-boat training before the Change, and on sail since; we can both shoot the sun and lay a course. Sergeant Hordle… well, he can hand, reef and steer, and if you're in the habit of sending shore parties into danger, then you could travel about the globe twice before finding as good a man of his hands as Little John Hordle. Crack shot, too; he's been rated Archer Instructor for the Guard these three years now."

  Nobbes's eyes lit. "Now, all that will be immediately useful. I lost my second and third lieutenants in a job-up with pirates off Diego Garcia this spring, and it's been a bloody nightmare with only myself and the XO as watchkeepers. Let's do a tour, shall we?"

  The deck of the Pride was a long clear sweep, fore and aft, one hundred eighty feet of decking with only a slight raised coaming before the wheel, and another forward of the mainmast that led down to the forecastle. Two launches lay keel-up on either side of the mainmast, and another hung in its davits over the stern. Under tarpaulins five catapults crouched with shrouded menace, two on either side and one abaft the wheel. Nigel strolled forward to the mainmast, returning cheerful smiles and nods—the crew had evidently taken to them after that little brush at the Wash.

  "That went rather well," Nigel said, after the captain had left, as his son and John Hordle joined him.

  Hordle still had a chunk of bread in one hand and a chicken leg in the other, not being afflicted with seasickness, and his hazel eyes shone with contentment. They leaned on the railing and watched the dark blue-green waters of the North Sea rushing past in a long foam-tipped curve down the gray steel hull of the schooner; the wind was out of the west where the low coast of East Anglia showed in the distance, and the deck's smooth yellow huon pine planking was canted like a low-pitched roof as the ship leaned away with her sails swelling in taut beige curves. Bursts of spray sped back along the deck as the bowsprit pitched up at the top of every swell, tasting cold and salt on the lips.

  "Positions on the Pride, and asylum and probably land if we want it at the other end," Nigel went on. "Tasmania's well beyond the king's reach—or the queen's, more to the point."

  Just then a voice rang out from the masthead a hundred and twenty feet above their heads: "Sail ho!"

  The three Englishmen tensed. Beside the wheel the vessel's executive officer turned her head up and raised the speaking-trumpet in her hand; long strands of black hair flew out from under her billed officer's cap as she called, "Where away? What rig?"

  "Nor' nor'east, ma'am! Barque-rigged, three-master."

  "What colors?"

  "I can't see… wait a bit! Well, fuck me! It's a jumbuck holding a flag, on their flag!"

  The three relaxed. Nigel frowned as well; the Australian concept of discipline had never appealed to him, and this troop of merry-andrews made the pre-Change Australian military look like the Grenadier Guards. Still, they got things done… And he knew who used a sheep holding a banner as their blazon.

  "Lieutenant Flandry!" Nigel called. "That's the Visby arms. She'll be a Norlander, a Swede out of the island of Gotland, probably heading for Dover with paper salvaged from their mills."

  Dominique Flandry nodded. "Thank you, Sir Nigel. I remember that briefing paper you had done up for us when we made Southampton."

  That had been back before his arrest; he'd done up an appreciation from the survey reports—some of them from survey parties he'd led in person. The Tasmanians had naturally wanted to know the state of Europe. That was extremely simple for most areas west of the Vistula:

  Everyone died. There were exceptions, of course. Born-holm and some of the other Baltic islands like Gotland and Oland and the Alands were among them, analogous to the Isle of Wight as opposed to mainland Britain. And a fair-sized clump of towns in northern Norway had made it through the Change, courtesy of isolation and a huge NATO ration dump they'd discovered, along with villages in the more remote parts of Sweden. That came to a quarter million in total, and lately they'd cobbled together a l
oose federation called Norland under a scion of the Norwegian royal house, to resettle the empty death zones of southern Scandinavia. They claimed adjacent Germany as well, and there wasn't anyone to say them no, except for a few thousand neo-savages.

  "Nothing to worry about this time," Alleyne said. "But."

  Hordle tossed the fleshless chicken bone over the side and wiped the dark red furze on the back of one of his hands across his mouth.

  "Right you are, sir. But. Twenty people knew what we were planning to get you out; there wasn't time to set it up bit by bit. What're the odds on a secret staying secret when that many know it?"

  "Somewhere between twenty to one against and zero, Sergeant," Nigel said crisply. "For that matter, the Pride's course will look dashed odd, given that she was supposed to be heading for the Americas."

  They looked at each other. "It depends on what the king decides to do," Hordle said. "He could just decide to forget about us, I suppose. Even though we've made him look a right burke."

  "And the queen. You'd be closer to the truth if you said it depends on what she talks him around to doing," Alleyne replied. "Having met the woman, I'd say that's pretty well anything, given time. And she's spiteful."

  "Perhaps I shouldn't have lost my temper with her in public," Nigel admitted, remembering eyes gray as a glacier. "And I should have remembered her namesake, and that her people's literature is entirely concerned with blood feuds and revenge."

  They all looked at each other again, and then out to the

  English coast. "Not time to relax just yet," Hordle said with a sigh.