The Protector's War (75 page)

He looked up and smiled at her, blinking in the darkness. Suddenly the thought rammed home in her:
I want this man.

Less a thought than knowledge, felt with heart and belly and loins as much as brain, but that too.
I have been too long alone; and this man is the one I want—the one She sent to me. Fierce and tender, terrible and gentle. And I will bring out that quiet laughter, and make him whole again.

He rose and bowed slightly. After his footsteps had faded on the treads of the stairs, her smile remained.

I
will
have him. So mote it be!

Mithrilwood, Willamette Valley, Oregon

August 10th, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

T
hese foothills the Dunedain Rangers had christened Mithrilwood were a day's journey north and a little east of Dun Juniper; the area was a mix of tall Douglas fir and overgrown fields and abandoned clear-cuts, ideal for game; more steep rugged hills than true mountains and surrounded by empty ex-farmland on three sides. Outside this canyon you could see the snow peaks eastward—Mount Washington best of all, and sometimes Mount Hood tiny to the north—but down here where the stream had cut its way into walls of basalt the world closed in, with rock walls, falling water, and dense growth. The light filtered through conifer needles and big-leaf maple into a thick umbrous green shadow, like being underwater; moss dripped from tree limbs, and mushrooms grew thick beneath them. Behind him the stream chuckled over polished water-rounded rocks and poured down a basalt ledge in a torrent of spray.

Alleyne Loring waited, alert, the boar spear gripped in his hands. The scrub ahead of him shook, amid an enraged squealing. He smelled a new scent under the green sappiness of bruised vegetation; something hard and rank with musk. They hadn't seen anyone in a week save one pair of Mackenzie hunters. Nothing human, at least…

Astrid's weapon came up to his right; the head was broader than a war spear's blade, and had a steel crossbar welded to the base. Dogs barked farther into the brush that crowded from the cliff face up to the edge of the old trail, and the beaters made noise of their own; the wind was from the north, in his face. Fairly soon those pigs would discover they'd been tricked…There was a series of deep snuffling grunts, then an enraged squeal, loud and shrill.

“Jesus!” he shouted as he saw what came out of the woods, on the heels of Hordle's
“Bugger me!”

Wild boar were increasingly common in England; they'd been reintroduced just before the Change in game parks, and enough had hidden successfully from the clumsy attentions of urban refugees. The survivors bred fast afterward, spreading through the burgeoning wilderness. He knew from experience they could be dangerous, but most of the people here had talked about feral swine, and he'd been expecting something more like a barnyard pig gone wrong.

This one was five hundred pounds if it was an ounce, a black low-slung torpedo of muscle and bone and little clever hating eyes, tusks like daggers on either side of its bristling snout, heavy shoulders and hump armoring its vitals.
Someone
had brought the real wild-boar article from Europe in days long past, and those genes had been doing very well indeed.

The boar hesitated when it saw the line of humans, its hindquarters switching from side to side in a rush of fallen leaves and duff while its heavier forequarters pivoted in place. Other shapes were moving beneath the trees, but he ignored them as he crouched and flourished the spear, drawing the beast's attention. He could see it taking him in as it turned its head to get a view from either eye as slobber drooled from its champing jaws and every coarse needle-like hair bristled erect; then the hindquarters hunched and it sprang. For an instant he could swear it was off the earth, and then all four split hooves were churning the forest floor like tank treads, throwing twigs and leaves head-high as it hurtled at him as fast as a good horse.

The boar's shoulders were sheathed in gristle, and it held its massive dished head low to protect its neck and set itself for the upward rip with its tusks. Alleyne skipped a half pace to the side just before it struck, going down on one knee and ramming the butt of the spear into the earth. The broad sharp head knifed in, and then there was a shock like being thrown headfirst into a stone wall. He skidded backward as the spear butt dug a trough through the earth, and the crossbar below the blade fulfilled its ancient function: keeping the self-impaled boar from shoving itself up the shaft of the spear to savage him in a dying frenzy.

Eeeeeeeeeeee–

The squealing was loud enough to hurt his ears, and the spear shaft jerked like a monstrous fishing rod in his hands with Leviathan on the hook as the boar twisted and heaved against the palm-wide foot of steel, trying to thrash him against the unyielding ground. Blood sprayed out over Alleyne's boots as he jerked his feet aside and tried to set them, and a four-inch spike of ivory missed the soles by a fractional inch.

“A Elbereth Gilthoniel!”

The words were a hawk screech as a spear lunged at the boar's flank, with Astrid's white-blond mane trailing behind. Eilir's struck an instant later from the other side, and the boar went to its knees with blood pouring down from its mouth mixed with slaver. Then it surged erect again, impossibly moving against the weight of three strong humans bearing down on the shafts that impaled it, its long grisly head tossed high in agony and rage. Alleyne went down again, kicking a heel against its snout as the beast lunged to try to grab his foot in its jaws.

“Out of my bloody way!”
Hordle bellowed.

All three of them rolled aside. The big man's sword swung, a yard and a half of steel with both hands on the long hilt. It struck the boar's neck just before the shoulder hump with a hard
crack
as if the edge had hammered into an oak. The squealing was cut off instantly, and the great beast slumped to the ground. Alleyne lay panting for an instant before he climbed to his feet. The four of them stood looking at each other, the sweat of fear and utmost effort running down their faces, and then they began to grin. Arms went about shoulders in a momentary grip, and then they broke apart, laughing.

“Anyone hurt?” Astrid called.

Voices answered; Alleyne saw that the others had made kills as well, mostly beasts
much
smaller and younger. One young man loosed a shaft from his longbow as he watched, and a retreating squeal was abruptly cut off.

Eilir's hands moved. Alleyne followed it without difficulty: the Rangers used sign as much as speech, and the summer had been an education in it—the last fortnight a lesson by total immersion. The main alternative was Sindarin, not English.

Julie's sept totem is Boar,
she signed.
She should do the honors.

Astrid nodded and called. A girl in her late teens with black braids under her Scots bonnet came up.

“Wow!” she said, looking at the boar while she stabbed her spear into the earth to clean the blade. “I just got a little yearling! Man, that one looks mean! Must be ten feet long.”

That yearling will taste a lot better,
Eilir signed.
But this was their chief.

The girl nodded and went down on one knee, leaning on her spear shaft as she touched a finger to the blood and marked her forehead.

“Go in peace to the Summerlands, brother boar,” she said solemnly. “You fought well for your kin. We honor your courage, and we thank you for your gift of life.”

Eilir raised her hands to the forest, then signed in a way that was half a dance:

Take this warrior's spirit home to rest, Lord Cernunnos of the Woods, Horned Master of the Beasts. Our thanks to You for Your bounty to us, who are Your people. We take in need, not wantonness, knowing we too shall walk with You the shadowed road, in our appointed hour. Let this brave boar be reborn through the Cauldron of the Goddess, the source of all things. So mote it be!

“OK, let's get to work,” Astrid added. “The meat won't keep at all if we don't drain them fast. Hey, Crystal!”

A girl in her midteens brought up the packhorses; she was the Rangers' junior probationary member, and beaming with pride at being able to help with the chores. The beaters came down through the last of the brush, making a lot less noise than they had when they were driving the sounder of swine, and the dogs with them set up a joyful wuffing and leaping, roughly translatable from canine as:
We killed something, hot damn, boss, that smells good, let's eat!

“Can I have the tusks?” black-haired Julie asked Alleyne. “I know that they're yours, you're the first spear, but seeing as it's my totem and all…”

Alleyne nodded, a bit bemused.
It would all seem a bit put-on, if I hadn't spent the past decade playing at knights-in-armor,
he thought. Then:
Well, no. I
played
at it before the Change, with lath swords and careful rules. With edged steel, it's all too real…and these Rangers are all younger than I.

He'd noticed that in England, too. Alleyne had been twenty when the Change struck; a young adult, but adult. Those who'd been in their early teens when the world went mad were different; almost as different as men his age or Hordle's were from his father's generation.

And I suppose children born since will be more different still.

He was working as he thought. They lashed the hogs' hind legs to sticks, tied ropes to those and then over convenient branches, hoisting the carcasses to drain and for ease of access. Besides the monster boar there was another of about two hundred pounds, a young sow of the same age, and half a dozen others down to near suckling size. Gutting and skinning were messy and smelly tasks, but familiar enough. The way the Rangers stripped to the buff to avoid getting blood on their clothes wasn't, but he had to admit it was practical—if a bit distracting at times. People in Britain had gotten a little more straitlaced since the Change; evidently things had gone the other way in this particular part of Oregon.

“I hate to lose the heads and guts,” a red-haired boy said. “Wasting all that headcheese and sausage casing, it's not right.”

“Be thankful we can salvage most of the meat, this time of year,” Astrid said. It was mildly warm, in the seventies, Alleyne estimated. “Lucky none of them are wormy. Besides, the coyotes and crows and ants have to eat, too. It'll cool well in the springhouse, though, and be all the better for hanging a little when we get it to Dun Laurel.”

“Do you get many boar that size?” Alleyne asked, whetting a curve-bladed skinning knife on a pocket hone; the others were using their
sgian dubh,
and there were hatchets and saws with the packhorses.

“Christ, I hope not,” Hordle added, as he slung the animal's head—minus the tusks—aside; half a dozen hounds squabbled a little over precedence; then the victors settled in for concentrated gnawing while the others went for lesser prizes. “This one was more excitement than I like when I'm standing up.”

There are more and more of them every year,
Eilir signed, pausing with the hilt of the knife in her teeth before she made the first anus-to-throat cut on one of the sows.
And the big ones get bigger and bigger. There were so many hunters in the old days, with guns, that they could keep them down. We can't.

“Pigs like brushy country, right enough, after oak or beechwood,” Hordle said, hauling the boar up hand-over-hand without perceptible strain; the huge muscles bunched and coiled under the pale skin of his shoulders and back. “Lots of roots and such. They're a bloody menace back in Blighty these days and getting worse. Not enough people to keep them down there either.”

Eilir nodded; this time she stuck the knife into the tree trunk to speak for an instant—you had to be careful about the uncooked blood and flesh of pigs.

The things are getting to be a real pest here in the Valley too, and there's all the camas root and abandoned farmland for them. Nothing short of a tiger will tackle a grown boar, or a sounder of sows with piglets, and what they do to a garden or vineyard is just enough to make you cry, not to mention the way they rip up the woods. And they breed like rabbits.

“They might as well be people,” Astrid said dryly, to general laughter; Eilir laughed too, a silent mirth with a toss of her head that made Alleyne chuckle himself.

They loaded the carcasses on the packhorses—the boar was quartered first, since it would be unfair to make any one horse carry quite that much. The canyon path ran beside a waterfall; then
behind
the falling water. A deep pool lay below; they all slid down a rope secured to a steel piton driven into the living rock and dove and swam in it, or stood under the fringes—but only the fringes, since the stream was narrow but the water fell from nearly two hundred feet above. After a moment—it was
cold
water—they hauled themselves out on the rocks and spread towels to dry off.

And I'm just as glad that it's cold water,
Alleyne thought.
Given the scenery, one doesn't wish to make one's interest
too
clear, eh? Free and easy is one thing, rampant another.

Astrid leaned back on her palms and looked up at the water falling down the green-mantled black rock, seeming to drift as it launched itself free from the cliff and then turning to swift-plunging silver lace farther down. She signed instead of speaking, clearer under the toning roar of the falls:
That's why we call this area Mithrilwood. In the winter, when the mist freezes on everything it's like a world of silver.