Dies the Fire (41 page)

Must get a wagon down here to haul some of it off,
she thought with some corner of her mind.
We can use it.

There were so many people here, and they were so loud—but it still seemed quiet, quiet and empty: The noises were all of human voices and feet and hands, no drone or roar of engines. You noticed more without that burr of background noise. The sound of grass and twigs under feet, the smell of angry unwashed men . . .

The foragers stopped, and the shouting chorus grumbled away into a buzz of voices. That sank into near-silence as a man walked forward waving a white flag on the end of a pole. He wore a policeman's uniform, much the worse for hard use; a mousey-looking woman accompanied him, with a clipboard in her hands. He carried a much more practical hunting crossbow, with a knife and hatchet at his belt, and wore an army-style helmet.

“Listen!” he called, when he'd come close. “We're here by order of Acting Governor Johnson to requisition a quota of supplies for emergency redistribution—”

Juniper gripped her bow and bared her teeth; that was the second Acting Governor since the Change, which made an average of one about every two weeks and a bit, and nobody knew what had happened to the incumbent. In practice, what was left of the state government had no power more than two days from Salem by bicycle.

The chorus of
NO!
erupted again; she could see Reverend Dixon of Sutterdown a ways to her left, leading the beat. Odd to be chanting at
his
direction; the man had ignored her friendly clergy-to-clergy letter before the Change, and been openly hostile since—evidently he thought Jehovah had sent the disaster as a punishment for tolerating the wrong people, of which Juniper and her friends were most certainly an example.

“Suffer not a witch to live” was a favorite of his.

The chorus died down again, and unexpectedly the mousy-looking woman shouted into the quiet: “How can you be so
selfish?
Half the people in Portland are sitting in camps around Salem and Albany now—gangsters have taken over Portland and driven them out—people are
dying
! Dying of hunger, hunger and disease—little children are starving to death!”

Sweet Goddess gentle and strong, aid me now.
Her hand traced the Invoking sign.
Great Ogma, Lord of Eloquence, lend me your golden tongue to calm these troubled waters.

Dixon was about to speak. Juniper opened her mouth to forestall him—the minister was definitely of the tribe who saw all problems as nails and themselves as a hammer. Or the Fist of God, in his case.

“No!” she said, and held up her bow to stop the chant when it threatened to start again. She continued into the ringing silence: “No, we will not give you our food. Not because we grudge help, but because we have little ones of our own to think of. If we gave you all that we have, you'd be starving again in a week—and so would we! Starving to
death,
before the crops came in! And we need our stock to pull plows and carts, and breed more for the years to come. You've already taken more than we can spare.”

“You're as bad as those people in Corvallis,” the woman said bitterly.

Juniper's ears pricked up at that, but she made her voice stern: “If you want to do something for those poor city people, get them moving,” she went on, pointing over her shoulder at the distant snowpeaks of the Cascades floating against heaven. “East of the mountains, to where there's more. Or set them to work planting, find them seeds and tools. Or both. We'll help all we can with either. Don't keep them sitting until they die!”

Something's wrong,
Juniper thought suddenly, as the woman opened her mouth again—most likely to plead for anything they could spare.

A harsh voice spoke from the ranks of the local folk; not one of her clan, probably a farmer: “Not as easy as beating people up when you outnumber them, or robbing us one by one, is it, you useless thieving bastards?”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” Juniper said under her breath, her eyes flickering over the foragers as they bristled with anger, feeling the future shifting like tumbling rocks. “Watch out—”

Sam Aylward's thick-muscled arm brushed her aside. She staggered back, turning and waving her arms to recover balance. That let her see the crossbow bolt hit his shoulder with a flat hard
smack
sound, and a ringing under it, and to know it would have hit
her
if she hadn't moved—or been moved.

The short thick bolt hit glancingly and bounced away, because the Englishman was wearing the first of Dennie's brigandine jacks—a sleeveless shirt made from two layers of canvas with little thumb-sized metal plates riveted between. One of them peeped out through the ripped fabric now, the metal bright where the head of the bolt had scored it, then going dull red as blood leaked through.

Everything moved very slowly after that. She let the stagger turn her back westward. The Salem folk were looking at one of their own; he stood by their cart and frantically spanned his crossbow to reload. On both sides people shifted their grips on improvised weapons, some edging backward, others leaning forward like dogs against a leash.

Somehow she could hear the
whirr
of the crank as the man who'd shot at her spun it; even louder was the creak of Aylward's great yellow bow as he drew to the ear.

Snap-wuffft!
String against bracer; whistle of cloven air.

The distance was only thirty feet; the arrow was traveling two hundred feet a second when it left the string, and to the human eye it was nothing but a bright blur in the sunlight. Then
tock
as it struck bone, smashing into the crossbowman's face and slamming him brutally back against the cart.

Two more of the cloth-yard shafts hit the man, bare inches apart in his chest, the gray-goose fletching bobbing as he slumped, held up by the deep-driven heads punched through him and into the boards. Aylward had a fourth shaft on his string, half-drawn, the point shifting back and forth in deadly menace.

“Don't try it!” he roared as blood poured down the dying man's body, trickled down his own side. “Don't you bloody try it!”

Juniper felt the crystalline balance of the moment that followed, silent enough that she could hear the wind that cuffed at her hair and the scrabble of the dead man's heels as they drummed on the asphalt. She slung her bow and stepped forward into that quiet, between the two forces. The thought of hands clenching on ax hafts, fingers trembling on bowstrings and crossbow triggers was distant, remote.

“Stop!”
she shouted, filling her lungs and pitching it to carry.
“Stop right now!”

The moment sighed away, and people were looking at her. The trained singer's voice let her reach them all.

“There's been enough blood shed today.” She spread her arms wide and up, palms towards the west. “Go back. There's nothing for you here. We don't want to hurt you, but we'll fight for our homes and our children if we must. Go! Get out!”

“Out!” Other voices took it up. “
OUT! OUT!
”

Aylward's eyes were gray and bleak and level as he waited. One by one the foragers turned and mounted their bicycles and left; Juniper let out a sigh.

“You felt it too, then?” Aylward said, as she passed a shaky hand over her face.

“Felt what?” she asked.

“The flux. We might have pulled it off without killing, if that loudmouth bugger hadn't up and told them to sod off. Nice work, Lady, the way you turned it around after that. I wasn't looking forward to a massacre.”

She nodded absently, swallowing against a quick nausea.

He went on: “It's a gift, feeling the flux—situational awareness, the officers call it. Maybe you've the makings of a soldier.”

“And maybe you've the makings of a Witch,” she answered.

Then her giddy relief drained away, remembering the savage maul-on-wood sound of the arrowhead striking bone.

“I know you saved my life, Sam, but . . . Goddess Mother-of-All, can't we stop killing each other even
now
?”

Aylward shrugged. “Never,” he said with conviction. “And especially not now. You said it—there just isn't enough to go 'round, not if it were shared ever so fair.”

Juniper nodded bleakly. “Then you and Chuck have the right of it,” she said.

At his questioning look, she touched her bow: “
I
thought
they'd
think we could all shoot like you, but that was a bluff, and bluffs get called if you go on long enough.
Ná nocht d'fhiacla go bhféadair an greim do bhreith!”

“Which means?”

She shook herself. “Sorry.
Don't bare your teeth until you can bite!
”

“You'll push for more practice, then?”

“Starting tomorrow.”

 

 

 

“Watch that!” Chuck Barstow shouted, striding over to where the older children were whacking with wooden swords at poles set in the dirt—and occasionally at each other.

“You can hurt someone with those things! Do it the way I showed you or I'll take them away.”

It was an excuse to stop for a while. Juniper lowered her bow gratefully and rubbed at her left shoulder. The bright spring day caressed her face with a soft pine-scented breeze down from the mountains. It cut the haze, too, perfect for militia practice in the flower-starred meadows below her cabin.

Militia was what it was, even if a few were set on calling it the
war band
or the
spear levy.

You know, I thought it was just a harmless bit of speechifying to call this a clan,
she thought.
A bit of play-acting to distract people from how close to death we all were—are.

Wiccans were given to romantic archaisms and usually it was harmless enough; she'd been known to indulge in them herself, and not just for professional reasons. Now, though . . .

Sally Quinn was in charge of the children and absolute beginners, most of them using what they'd scavenged from sporting-goods stores; she had the same fiberglass target bow she'd carried the day Juniper met her. She patiently went through the basics of stance and draw, and occasionally let them shoot a practice shaft at the board-and-dirt targets. Fortunately modern bows with their stiff risers and centerline arrow-shelves were a lot easier to learn than the ancient models.

Sam Alyward had the more advanced pupils; he'd turned out enough longbows for all, courtesy of her woodpile.

Thank You,
she thought to the Lord of the Forest, and stepped back to watch Aylward demonstrate.

His
stave had a hundred-pound draw. When he shot, the
snap
of the string against the bracer seemed to trip on the
smack
of the arrowhead hitting the deer-shaped target fifty yards away, and the malignant quiver of the shaft that followed. Between was only a blurred streak; she forced herself not to dwell on the hard
tock
of an arrowhead sledging into bone.

He sent three more arrows on the way at five-second intervals, all of them landing in a space a palm could have covered, then turned to her. The Englishman was sweating, but then everyone was. Sweating as hard as they had during the planting, which she almost remembered with nostalgia. The cheerful noise made it plain everyone
thought
this was more fun, though.

“Shoulder sore, Lady?” he said gravely.

“Just a bit,” Juniper replied; in fact, it ached.

“Then you should knock off,” he said. “Watch for a while instead. Push too hard too soon, and you're courting a long-term injury. You may be over-bowed for a beginner.”

“I don't think so. Forty pounds isn't so much when you've fiddled for hours straight! But I will take a break.”

She braced the lower tip of her bow against the outside of her left foot, stepped through with her right and bent it against her thigh to unstring it. She called the weapon Artemis, after the Greek archer-goddess, and although getting the trick of it was harder, she'd discovered she actually liked using it, far more than the crossbow.

When she glanced up from the task, she saw Aylward looking over at the children, and smiling with a gentle fondness you wouldn't suspect from his usual gruff manner.

Or from the feel of his hands when he's teaching unarmed combat!
she thought, grinning.
Chucking folk about, as he calls it.

The important thing was that with Aylward around, they had someone who really understood this business; for starters, he could
make
the bows, and their strings, and the arrows. In the long run, that would be
very
important. The machine-made fiberglass sporting toys hadn't stopped working the way guns had, but the prying roots of vine and tree had already begun their reconquest of factories and cities. In a generation those wastelands of concrete and asphalt would be home to owl and fox and badger, not men.

Dennis had made them all quivers, and waterproof waxed-leather cases for the bows that clipped alongside them; she reached back and slid hers home. She was wearing a brigandine now as well, like the one that had saved Sam Aylward from the crossbow bolt meant for her; the jack was hot even in the mild April air, and weighed twenty-five pounds. When you added in the sword and dagger and buckler—the latter was a little steel shield about the size and shape of a soup plate—it took a good deal of getting used to.

Which is why I'm wearing it,
she thought glumly.
To get used to moving in it.