Dies the Fire (80 page)

“
A
re you sure you're up to this?” Judy asked, turning and needlessly arranging some instruments in one of the clinic's cupboards.

“No,” Juniper said frankly to her tense back. “But I think I've got a better chance of bringing it off than anyone else. What's your medical advice?”

Her friend swallowed. “Well, you're a day or two short of eight months,” she said. “But it's been as smooth a pregnancy as I've seen, right out of a textbook. As long as you don't try leaping about or riding a horse—”

“Come on, Judy, we've known each other since we were teenagers.”

“That's why I specified,” she said dourly. “It's a wonder you're not east over the mountains with Sam and the others, waving your sword and waddling into battle like a pregnant duck.”

“
Is maith an scáthán súil charad!
” Juniper replied ruefully. “A friend's eye is a good mirror!”

“Then delegate,” Judy said.

“I can't. There are others to fight for us, but this I honestly think I'm best for—and I
don't
need to be all that mobile, just able to talk.”

Judy shook her head and bit her lip; Juniper gave her an impulsive hug and left the little clinic. The corridor of the Hall's second story was dark, lit only by the windows at either end that gave out on a cloudy, foggy morning; the staircase was in the center of the hallway, and it was steep.

And I
am
waddling,
she thought.
You two should
not
make me come up and get you.

She sighed and waddled up the steps; it didn't occur to her to call instead until she was nearly at the top—you lost the habit, when your daughter was deaf.

“You two were supposed to be packed by now and—what
are
you doing?”

She choked the words off. Eilir and Astrid were kneeling on the floor facing each other, across three taper candles with a chalice and two cups, and a pinch of incense burning in that, and ritual tools scattered about. Eilir's Book of Shadows was open on a folding rest nearby, and they had the backs of their right wrists pressed together as they chanted.

You didn't interrupt a ritual.

“... all my wisdom and all my secrets I share with you for as long as this life endures. Until we meet in
Tir na m Ban,
” they finished. “So mote it be!”

Juniper frowned as they put down their wrists, and a bright bead of blood showed on each—the loft office-bedroom got a lot more light, which was one reason she'd snaffled it off for her own.

“Now,
what
on earth are you two doing?”

“Swearing blood-br—well, blood-sisterhood!” Astrid said brightly. “Like, we're going to be friends and comrades forever! And be Paladins who fight evil and right wrongs and, oh, all that sort of stuff.”

Eilir wiped off the bead of blood with a piece of cotton swab and handed Astrid another.

Like she said, Mom,
she signed.
You know, like Roland and Oliver. Anamchara.

“Or Gimli and Legolas,” Astrid said helpfully. “Only we're both . . . well, Eilir's not a dwarf.”

Tolkein and the others have a great deal to answer for,
Juniper thought.
Do they think those white horses are magical totems, somehow? As I recall, at their age my best friend and I were mostly concerned with music and TV shows and talking about boys. Of course, things
have
Changed . . .

Silently, she held out her hand and looked a question. She didn't order. Eilir's Book was her own; she generally didn't mind her mother reading it, but Juniper never did so without permission.

Oh, my,
she thought, looking through the ritual that her daughter had come up with.

The girl had a natural gift for it, probably someday she'd be a great High Priestess and leave a lasting mark on the coven's own Book of Shadows, but . . .

Oh, my. No sense of proportion at all. Well, neither did I at that age—but I wasn't
raised
in the Craft, with magic sung over my cradle.

She spoke, signing at the same time: “And on the strength of a two-week acquaintance, you're promising to . . . let's see. Defend each other to the death and always answer the other's call. Be guardians of the weak and helpless. Be Goddess-mothers to each other's kids; that's all right . . . Goddess gentle and
strong,
you've each given the other a veto on choice of boyfriends and spouses!”

“That's something you have to get
right.
” Astrid said forcefully.

Juniper stifled a small moan. “
Ni thagann ciall roimh aois,
” she said, and didn't translate:
Sense does not come before age.

Eilir recognized it anyway, and gave her a stare and a sniff.

Juniper held on to silence with both hands:
Oh, won't that turn adolescence into a total paradise! Did your best friend
ever
think a boyfriend was worthy of you, any more than a father did? Unless your best friend wants him herself . . .

Aloud, she went on: “At least you didn't make vows of celibacy or promise to always to wear the same outfits and do each other's hair and eternally help each other with dishes and homework!”

Both gave her hurt looks. She sighed. “Eilir, Astrid is cowan . . .”

... though I suspect not for long,
she added to herself, as she continued aloud with voice and hands: “. . . but I suppose
you
did remember that a ceremony like this is a promise to the Mighty Ones? That you've
asked
Them to bind you to a purpose? And that They are likely to hold you to it?”

Her daughter nodded solemnly, and so did Astrid.

Juniper sighed. “Parenthood! All right, done is done. If you're coming, come along, Oh Blood-sworn fourteen-year-old Paladins.”

The girls picked up their saddlebags, shouldered their bows and followed as Juniper turned and walked cautiously down the stairs.

The open space before the Hall was crowded, horses milling, kilted archers saying good-bye to children and spouses and friends; Dennis and Sally were in a desperate clinch made awkward by a stomach the size of Juniper's, with Tommy sobbing and clutching at their legs. The climb down the stairs to the ground floor left Juniper puffing a bit, and lagging behind the youngsters who tumbled out the door and sprang into the saddles of their Arabs.

Before she stepped into the waiting buggy—another bit of useful museum plunder, well-sprung comfort for her currently cumbersome self—she turned and looked at the Hall. The great house loomed dark above her in the morning gloom, hints of color and shape and drifting fog. Then a break in the lowering sky let the morning sunlight in, and the shapes blazed out at her, curling up out of the mist that lay along the ground and drifted amid the tall wet forest that rose north and east, breaking like surf over the teeth of the palisade.

The great tree-trunk pillars that ran from veranda to second-story gallery and supported the roof above had been shaped smooth, then carved with intertwined running designs like something out of the Book of Kells, stained and painted in rich browns and greens with gold hints and then covered with varnish. Where the support beams for the gallery crossed the pillars their ends jutted a yard further out, worked into the shapes of beasts real and mythical, the newly chosen totems of the Mackenzie septs—snarling wolf and horned elk, hawk and raven, dragon and tiger.

At each end of the house the two timbers of the roof had been extended up past the peak, curling around into spirals—one deosil, the other widdershins—and between them the antlers and crescent moon.

“It's like Edoras, and the Golden Hall of Medusel!” Astrid said behind her, her voice soft with awe.

It's like a cross between an Irish museum and a very gaudy backwoods Chinese restaurant,
Juniper jibed to herself.
Dennie and his apprentices went bloody well
berserk.

All the same, she shivered a little. If she'd seen something like this before the Change, she would have laughed until she cried. Now . . .

We need myths,
she thought.
We live
by
them. But can we live
in
them?

 

 

 

“Now, when this pin has been pulled free, Mr. Trebuchet is
no longer our friend.
Understand?” Ken Larsson said.

He ignored an impulse to beat his hands together against the chill of the mountain valley and the cold wind that blew down from the heights. That really wasn't very productive when one hand was off at the wrist, and you had a leather sheath tipped with a hand-sized steel hook strapped over the forearm. It still hurt a little too, even a quarter-year after Iron Rod's sword hacked through, and he could still wake up remembering the ugly grinding sensation of steel cracking through bones. Rothman and Pam had done a good job with it.

She never said it didn't make any difference to her; just showed it by the way she acted,
he thought, with a brief stab of amazed pleasure even now.
Christ, I'm lucky.

Aloud he went on genially: “Mr. Trebuchet is ready to go and anything you get in the way of the parts—like your hand, for instance—is going to go with it.”

He waggled the steel hook at them and grinned. The squad of young Bearkillers and ranchers' kids nodded back at him eagerly, looking up at the great machine. None of them seemed to notice the late-afternoon chill or overcast that made his bones ache a little, and the stump where his left wrist used to be ache a lot. Their enthusiasm did make him feel better . . . and the trebuchet was something to be proud of, as well.

It was basically an application of the lever principle; a long beam between two tall A-frames, pivoted about a third of the way down its length. Swinging from the end of the shorter arm was a huge basket of welded steel rods full of rocks; fastened to the other end was a sling of chains and flexible metal mesh. You hauled down that, fastened it to the release mechanism, and loaded a rock or whatever else you wanted to throw into the sling—dead horses or plague victims pitched over a city wall had been a medieval favorite.

Then you hit the trigger, and the huge weight of the basket full of rocks swung that end of the lever down,
hard.
The longer section on the other side of the pivot went up, and turned that force into speed, with the sling adding more leverage. Your projectile went hurtling downrange, as far and fast as anything before cannon. Or after cannon stopped working. It was that simple.

Simple. Simple until you get down to the details,
Larsson thought.

He was quite proud of his version. The basic idea was seven centuries old; like so much else, it originally came from China. But he'd thought of improvements—from the base resting on wheel bogies from heavy trucks, to the geared winches that hauled the weight up, to the neat grapnel mechanism that gripped the lever. The medieval models had been built by rule of thumb; precise calculation of mechanical advantage and stronger, lighter materials made this one considerably more efficient.

And now it was ready . . .

“Stand back, kiddies,” Larsson said, remembering Fourth of July celebrations past. Fireworks didn't work, not anymore, but . . .

“Daddy's going to give the Protector a boot in the ass!”

They cheered, but obeyed. Larsson squinted at the outline of the Protector's Echo Creek castle—at least the sky was cloudy, so he wasn't looking into the sun—ran his hook through the loop at the end of the lanyard cord, and gave a sharp tug.

Chang
-whack!

The claws holding the beam snapped back. Cable unspooled with a rumbling whirr. The great basket of rock seemed to drop slowly at first, then faster and faster, and the steel beam of the throwing arm whirred upward so swiftly that inertia bent it like a bow.

At the very top of its arc the chain-and-mesh sling swung upward as well. Another hook was cunningly shaped to let the upper chain of the sling go free at precisely the right moment, and the big boulder flew westward—tumbling as it went, slowing as it reached the height of its arc and then dropping down towards the fort like an anvil from orbit. Dust puffed up around the trebuchet, from under its wheels and the four screw jacks that stabilized it for firing.

“Hit!” shouted a Bearkiller trooper, looking through a pair of heavy tripod-mounted binoculars they'd reclaimed from a tourist lookout point. “Hit!”

Larsson had his own monocular out and put to his good eye—the castle was about half a mile away, and he wanted to know just how his baby functioned. He could see where the quarter-ton rock had struck; in the middle of the earth wall of the fort, halfway between ditch and the palisade. A cloud of dirt drifted away, and he saw the boulder three-quarters buried in the heaped soil.

Well, so far we're just helping build the castle wall,
Larsson thought.
No damage except to the barbed wire. But next time . . .

“Incoming!” the woman at the binoculars shouted. Then: “Short!”

Larsson looked, tensed to dive for the slit trench. A rock rose over the gate of the castle, arching up—in a reverse of his own shot, it seemed to get faster and faster as it approached.

It landed in the roadway, cracking and cratering the asphalt, then rolling along until it came to a halt about a hundred yards in front of his own trebuchet. More than enough to hammer anything trying to sneak by the castle on either side, but less range than his, with a lighter load. Probably mounted on some sort of turntable.