A Meeting At Corvallis Page 6
Havel grinned like a happy wolf. Alleyne was also young, only a few years older than Astrid, and six feet tall, blondly handsome, dashing, charming, from a far-off foreign place and in the process of saying—
"Sinome maruvan ar Hildinyar, vanimalion noastari … "
"Onen i-Estel Edain—" Astrid replied in the same liquidly pretty tongue, which sounded Celtic but wasn't; Havel understood not a word of it.
My languages being limited to English, a bit of Ojibwa, rudimentary Finnish and some Arabic cusswords I picked up in the Gulf, he thought. None of the Tongues of Middle-earth included in the package.
"You're looking like the coyote that met the rabbit coming 'round the rock," Signe said.
"Thanks to those Tasmanians—poor bastards—and their world survey voyage I think we may finally have gotten your little sister hooked up," Havel said. "And out of our hair."
"Hey!" She punched him on the shoulder. Since he was wearing a hauberk with padded gambeson beneath, that was mostly symbolic, but her voice was only a little defensive as she went on: "Astrid's been … useful."
"And a lot less trouble since she started up that Ranger outfit out in the woods. But she's still trying to trick us all out in costumes from those books she likes. She makes Norman Arminger sound as everyday as a dental hygienist."
"Granted she's a flapping wingnut, but a handy wingnut to have around. A lot of stuff we've done wouldn't have been nearly as popular if we hadn't had her to slap some cool, antique name on it and give it some style. It kept those Society types we recruited happy too, they love fancy titles and playing dress-up. Useful … and if they're here being useful to us they're not up north being useful to Lord Protector Arminger, who was one of their own after all. Besides, this lords-and-ladies stuff … once it stops sounding so silly it sort of grows on you."
"And fungus grows on your toenails if you aren't careful. Yeah, she's useful, and also a goddamned pain in the ass. For a while I thought she'd probably settle down with Eilir, who's sensible, sort of—"
His wife shot him a look; the sisters had quarreled all their lives, but he liked the way they closed ranks. "Astrid isn't gay."
"Nothing so convenient or conventional. She's an elf instead," he said dryly.
Signe grinned. "I think she's settled on being a, what's the word, Numenorean instead of an elf."
"I thought it was Dunadan … or is it Dunedain? I forget which."
"Dunedain is the plural … " She smiled wickedly as he mimed clutching at his head. "Dunadan is the word for Numenorean … in another language."
"Another invented language? Christ Jesus, didn't the man have anything else to do with his time? Trimming the shrubbery, visiting the pub? How many of them are there?"
"Let's see … the Common Speech, the Black Speech, the tongue of the Ro-hirrim, Halfling dialects, Quenya elvish, Sindarin elvish … "
"Stop! Stop! Anyway, why … whatever … instead of an elf? Hell, I've got to admit, she looks like one."
"But elves don't get cooties on campaign, or smell. Or have monthly cramps, which she does, bad. Anyway, Eilir's just her best friend."
"Alleyne there will do even better, nothing like kids to calm you down. Someone who shares her interests—"
"Is nutbar about the same stuff?" Signe clarified helpfully.
"Nah, he just likes the books; he's not goofy over living it all out. He's a pretty regular guy, once you get past that Jeeves-old-chap-fetch-me-a-biscuit accent. But liking the books'll help him keep her from doing a swan dive into the deep end. Christ Jesus knows nobody else ever had much luck at that! Foreign prince—well, son of a baronet—exotic, great warrior. It's a natural! And I get a first-rate fighting man on my side, too; he can king it off in the woods with her in between wars. Win-win situation."
"You haven't said anything about it to her."
"Christ, no! That'd be the best way to spoil things."
"Well, maybe you're learning after all," Signe said, and touched an ear when he started to reply.
They were leaning together and speaking quietly, and the rumbling clatter of hooves, the crash of boots and the thrrrrip-thrrrrip-thrrrrip of the marching drum covered it. Still, she was right. Another time would be better for chewing over family matters.
Not that there's much difference between family stuff and politics anymore, he thought. Or between either and the military side of things.
"Aaron wants to visit Corvallis and see if he can get more medical supplies," Signe went on.
"Aaron just wants to find a cute young thing," Havel answered. Aaron Roth-man was chief physician of Larsdalen; he was very competent, but had his quirks. "He's been itching for some social life since his last boyfriend left him."
"That's because you're the unrequited love of his life, darling. You did save him from the cannibals."
Havel laughed. "Saved all of him but his left foot," he said, which was literally true; that band of Eaters had gone in for slow-motion butchery to keep the meat from spoiling.
The road curved westward towards the distant Coast Range, dark green slopes whose tops were covered in gray mist that merged into the low clouds. The broad, shallow valley on either side was a patchwork of dormant bare-fingered orchards, peach and apple and cherry, with fleecy white sheep grazing beneath the trees, grainfields showing wet red-brown dirt between the blue-green shoots of the winter wheat, and pasture dotted with Garry oaks and grazing cattle. Workers and herdsmen waved at the troops as they passed, but this close to Larsdalen there weren't any of the usual walled hamlets or fortified A-Lister steadings that dotted the other settled parts of the Outfit's lands; the folk who tilled these lands dwelt inside the Bearkiller citadel. Horsemen and plodding wagons and bicyclists swerved to the side of the road to let the troops pass, and gave cheerful greetings to their friends and relatives as they did.
He took a deep, satisfied breath; he was fairly happy with the way the exercise had gone, and happier still with the way the half-dormant farmlands promised good crops next year. And the way that his folk all looked well fed and warmly clad in new homespun, drab wadmal, or wool and linen and linsey-woolsey colored in yellows and browns, greens and blues, by the dyes they'd learned to make from bark and herbs and leaves. The air was heavy with the musty smell of damp earth and vegetable decay; this season in the Willamette Valley was more like a prolonged autumn with an occasional cold snap than the brutal Siberian winters of the Lake Superior country where he'd been raised. He'd always liked autumn best of the four seasons, although he missed the dry, cold, white snow-months that followed. Sometimes he'd gone on week-long trips then, cutting school and setting off through the birch woods on skis, with a bedroll and rifle on his back …
The valley narrowed as it rose towards the crest of the Eola Hills, where they broke in a steep slope towards the lowlands around the little town of Rickreall. Orchards gave way to vineyards spindly and bare, with a few red-gold leaves still clinging, and more littering the ground. The vines had been there before the Change, when this area was the Larsson family's country estate; great-grandpa Larsson had bought it back a century ago, when he made his pile out of wheat and timber. The big pillared brick house beyond would have been visible then …
Now the narrowing V was blocked by a steep-sided earthwork bank covered in turf, with a moat at its base full of sharpened angle iron. They'd started on that late in the first Change Year, right after the core of the Bearkillers arrived on their long trek from Idaho; he'd been flying the Larssons to their ranch in Idaho on that memorable March seventeenth, and ended up crash-landing in a half-frozen mountain creek in the Selway-Bitterroot National Wilderness. Which had been a stroke of luck, nerve-wracking though it had been at the time to have the engine cut out over those granite steeps.
"What's that saying Juney uses?" Havel asked. With a grin: "Pardon me, Lady Juniper, herself herself."
"Something pretentiously Gaelic which boils down to saying a man's home is his castle," Signe said, a very slight waspish note i
n her voice.
"Yeah, but it's true in English too," Havel pointed out, looking pridefully ahead. "We've got a hell of a lot done in a decade, considering we can't use powered machinery."
A wall topped the mound, thirty feet high and built like a hydro dam; rocks the size of a man's head and bigger in a concrete matrix, around a hidden framework of welded steel I-beams salvaged from construction sites in Salem, the old state capital thirty miles northeastward. Round towers half as high again studded it at hundred-yard intervals as it curved away on either side to encompass the whole of the little plateau that held Larsdalen.
Gotta get the inner keep finished before spring, he reminded himself. Work on fortifications was another thing that they did in wintertime … Although there's always fifteen different things we should be doing with every spare moment. Everything done meant something else nearly as urgent sidelined; one thing that seemed universally true in the Changed world was that all work took a lot longer or cost more or both.
The gate where road met wall was four towers grouped together on the corners of a blockhouse, with his flag flying high above each. The drawbridge was down, but the outer gates were closed. They were steel as well, a solid mass of welded beams faced on either side with quarter-inch plate and probably impossible to duplicate now that the hoarded oxyacetylene tanks were empty. The surface was dark brown paint, but this year for swank they'd added a great snarling bear's head in ruddy copper covered in clear varnish, face-on to the roadway with half on either leaf. The Mackenzies had something similar on the gates of Dun Juniper, though they used the Triple Moon and the head of the Horned Man.
Trumpets blared from above. Astrid brought her Arab forward on dancing hooves, throwing up one hand in greeting.
"Who comes to Larsdalen gate?" the officer of the guard called down formally.
"The Bear Lord returns to the citadel of the Bearkillers! Open!"
"Open for Lord Bear!"
"Oh, Christ Jesus, how did we let her get away with this bad-movie crap?" Havel said—but under his breath. "And now everyone's used to it and they'd be upset if we insisted on a plain countersign."
"She's the only theatrical impresario in the family," Signe said, also sotto voce. "Every time we did something new, she was there to tell us how to manage the PR. Don't sweat it. After all, she's not home much anymore."
"Ah, well, names are funny things," he said with resignation. "Someone has an impulse and then you're stuck with them. That's why I've got a Karelian pedigree and a Bohunk moniker."
They both chuckled at the old family joke; back in the 1890s one Arvo Myllyharju had arrived in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, fresh off an Aland Island square-rigger and looking for a job in the Iron Range. The Czech pay-clerk at the mine had taken one look at the string of Finnish consonants and said: From now on, your name is Havel!
His great-grandson remembered. Though will it make any sense to our kids? he wondered. Finland might as well be Barsoom, to them, and Michigan about the same.
There was a solid chunk … chunk … sound as the heavy beams that secured the gates were pulled back, and a squeal of steel on steel as the great metal portals swung out, salvaged wheels from railcars running along track set into the concrete of the roadway. Winches grated as the portcullis was raised, and the dark tunnel behind suddenly showed gray light at the other end as the identical inner portals went through the same procedure, to reveal a cheering crowd lining the way. The gates were normally kept open anyway in daylight, during peacetime; this was for show. Signe and Havel reined in beside the gate, saluting as the infantry company went by, followed by the lancers. Feet and hooves boomed drumlike on the boards of the drawbridge and echoed through the passage.
Havel looked up as he followed; there were flickers of lantern light through the gratings in the murder-holes above, and a scent of hot oil bubbling in great pivot-mounted tubs.
"Always thought we could save some effort with those," he said. "Sort of wasteful, all that cooking oil, and burning all that fuel, when all it does is sit there and simmer."
"They've got to be kept hot," Signe said.
"Yeah, but we could do French-fries in 'em. Maybe onion rings too … "
Dun Juniper, Willamette Valley, Oregon
December 15th, 2007/Change Year 9
There was a chorus of giggles from the sixteen-year-olds preparing their choir at the other end of the great Hall. One of them sang in a high, clear tenor:
"It's the end of the world as we know it!
"It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine!"
The rest of them took it up for a moment. Sir Nigel Loring put down his book and looked up with mild interest from his armchair beside the big fireplace on the north wall, sipping at the last of his honey-sweetened chamomile tea. It wasn't quite as vile when you got used to it, and the dried-blueberry muffins that stood on the side table were quite good. Flames played over the glowing coals, red and gold flickering in an endless dance.
I quite liked that little tune the first time around, for some reason, he thought, relaxing in the grateful warmth and the scent of burning fir as firelight and lamplight played on the colored, carven walls. But that changed with the Change. And these … infants! They were six-year-olds then. All they know is that it scandalizes their elders.
Juniper Mackenzie—since the Change the Lady Juniper, Chief of the Clan Mackenzie, which nowadays meant ruler secular and sacred through most of the southeastern Willamette—hopped up onto the dais to put her head above the youngsters. Loring smiled at the sight. There was a crackling energy to the slight figure; she was a short, slim woman just turned forty, with a little gray starting in her vivid fox red hair, pale-skinned and freckled with bright, leaf green eyes; the fine lines around them were mostly from laughter. Besides the tartan kilt and saffron-dyed shirt of homespun linsey-woolsey she wore a belted plaid pinned at the shoulder with a gilt knotwork brooch, a flat Scots bonnet with three raven feathers in the silver clasp, and a little sgian dubh knife tucked into one kneesock. She gave a mock-scowl as she stared at the youngsters with her hands on her hips, and they shuffled their feet and looked abashed.
Behind her loomed the Chief's chair, a thronelike affair carved from oak and maple and walnut, the pillars behind ending in stylized ravens heads for Thought and Memory, and arching to support a Triple Moon. Juniper went on to her crowd of kilted adolescents:
"Perhaps you'd rather not do a Choosing at all, then? Or is it that you don't want it to go perfectly?" That got her appalled looks and a babble of apologies. "Maireann na daoine ar scail a cheile, remember. People live in one another's shadows. This comes only once in your life; don't spoil it for your sept-siblings or your friends. Now, we'll be starting with the opening song."
The man in the chair beside Loring's chuckled quietly. "That got their attention, the little bastards," Dennis Martin Mackenzie said. "At sixteen you're wild to stop being a kid, which is one thing that hasn't changed since the Change."
"This is practice for some rite of passage?" Loring guessed.
"Yeah, choosing a sept. We divvied up the Clan into septs when it got too big for just a bunch of us hanging out at Dun Juniper here, and it's become sort of important. You figure out what your totem animal is, and that means you're in one of the septs. Fox, Wolf, Raven, Tiger, Bear, Eagle, whatever."
He chuckled again. "We had this guy insisted his totem was the Tyrannosaurus rex. Saw it in his dream-quest, he said. Took quite a while to talk him out of it."
Nigel choked off a snort of laughter; he didn't want to be caught mocking the customs or religion of his hosts. Dennis cocked an eyebrow nonetheless, and there was a dry note to his voice:
"Yeah, I thought the whole thing was sort of loopy myself. It's not part of the Craft, strictly speaking. Andy Trethar came up with the idea; he and Diana always did like that shamanistic stuff and they were part of Juney's original Singing Moon coven before the Change. The rest of us just went along, mostly, but these days the youngste
rs … well, they take it real serious."
"Far be it from me to object," Nigel said. "Just before I left England—"
"Escaped from Mad King Charles, you mean," Dennis said.
Loring shrugged; that was a fair enough description. "By then King Charles was doing some rather eccentric things … making Morris dancing, thatched roofs and smock frocks compulsory, for example."
Juniper signaled to the musicians; a bodhran and a flute, a set of uilleann pipes and a fiddle. The tune began softly, a rhythmic stutter with the wild sweetness of the pipes in the background. Then the music swelled and she raised her voice in an effortless soprano that filled the Hall without straining; she'd been a professional singer before the Change, of course. One hand went up as she sang, and the teenagers followed suit, first with the fingers spread and then held together.
"What is the difference 'tween feathers and hair?
The handprint of a human or the paw of a bear?
We all roar with laughter, we all howl with tears,
Show our teeth if we're angry, and lay back our ears!"
The youngsters came in on the chorus:
"A passion within you
Whispering what you want to be
Take a look in the mirror
What animal do you wish to see?"
Then louder, as they all joined in:
"We each meet our animal … in its time and place
And gazing into those eyes … we see our own face