The Protector's War (77 page)

Alleyne grinned at him. “Thought they were too given to playing dress-up here, like me, eh?”

Hordle shrugged his massive shoulders. “I deny everything!”

That evening was pleasantly cool, enough for the fire they lit in the big fireplace to be welcome for more than the leaping flames. Dinner was a whole young pig just past weaning, butterflied and grilled with a hot sauce, potatoes roasted in the ashes, and a heaping salad of wild greens. The interior of the lodge was big enough for the full score of Rangers; everyone lay around on cushions after the meal, facing the fire and sipping at wine or cider, singing and talking as the flames illuminated the corners of the room with flickering ruddy light. The warmth of the flames brought out the spicy scent of the heavy myrtlewood furniture.

A chorus ended:

“Hey, people,” Astrid said when the tune died down. “Business for a minute. Look, we've been using this place for years, but only on and off. What the Dunedain need is a base. Someplace we can train new members, store our goods, an armory, have a few people always on hand. I've talked to Lord Bear about it…”

And I've spoken to Lady Juniper,
Eilir added.
She thinks it's a good idea.

“We could claim this whole area—the old state park, and say another ten thousand acres around it, and manage the woods. Nobody's using it much and we did run those bandits out of here; Mark got killed doing it. And it's such a good hideout more would be sure to come here if we didn't patrol.”

The Rangers looked at each other. The redhead—
Kevin,
Alleyne thought.
The one with the medical training
—raised a hand. “How would we live?” he said.

Partly by hunting,
Eilir said.
That's good here even in winter—animals come down from the high country. We could swap the surplus for things, and eventually sell some timber, and things like nuts. And we wouldn't be here
all
the time, not all of us. Plus we could contract for
special jobs. We already get paid for tracking down man-eaters, and we could do more guarding caravans south past Eugene, or out east over-mountain. We already get top rate for road-guard work, a lot better than the scruffy thugs who usually get hired. They'd know we wouldn't rob them.

“And since what we do here in the Valley helps everyone, I think we can get a contribution from the Mackenzies and the Bearkillers both,” Astrid said. “Maybe from Corvallis and Mt. Angel, too. You know, flour and cloth and spuds, horses, some cash, too, that's only fair. There's enough meadow near here for our horses, and we could have a few milch cows and a garden, if there were someone here to keep an eye on things. Shall we try it?”

The youngsters looked at each other. “Beats spending all your time farming,” one said meditatively. “Beats it all to hell and gone.”

“Rangering's the most fun I've ever done,” another said, winding a braid around her finger. “It would be nice not to have to give it up. But what about kids and stuff?”

“Well, the original Dunedain were Rangers for generation after generation,” Astrid pointed out. “It ran in families…I mean, most jobs do, these days, don't they? There's plenty of places like this we could have bases—call them Ranger-steadings, say. Like the hidden city of Gondolin, or Thingol's hidden kingdom, but on a smaller scale.”

Like Imladris,
Eilir signed.

The discussion went on into the night. The proposal passed on a show of hands; then Astrid went and stood by the mantelpiece with its load of books.

“What'll it be tonight?” she went on brightly.
“Silmarillion, Book of Lost Tales, History of Middle-Earth,
the
Bestiary,
or the trilogy itself?”

And here I was going to suggest a walk in the moonlight,
Alleyne thought. Then he saw Eilir glancing at him.
Of course, I hadn't quite decided whom to ask.

 

Dun Laurel, Willamette Valley, Oregon

August 14th, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

 

“Eilir!” Juniper Mackenzie called, waving broadly. “Astrid! Over here!”

The site of Dun-Laurel-to-be was swarming with workers under the bright August sun, filled with wagons, teams of oxen and horses, heaps of logs, timber, cement, and wheelbarrows, and loud with the sounds of saws and axes, shovels and hammers and ratcheting winches. Laurel Wilson's people were there, all eighty-nine of them, plus another forty who'd decided to join the new settlement, and a good three hundred from elsewhere in the Clan's territory, plus quite a few wanderers and gangrels come in to earn a little by casual labor. Three sides of the palisade were up, with blockhouses at the corners—a new refinement—and the rest of the great logs were ready, left down to make access easier for the work going on apace within. One old farmhouse was already there, now repaired and made weathertight again, and other buildings were already frames or sheathed in planks; houses, a meeting-hall-cum-bad-weather-covenstead, barns and sheds and smithy, weaving shops and granary. Enough space was left for small gardens, herbs and flowers; outside, below where the little creek broadened out into a pool, pegs marked out truck allotments.

Most of the fields about were shaggy-overgrown, or grew nothing but tents and temporary paddocks, but a start had been made on clearing a few, and they showed as neat squares of brown tilth, plowed and harrowed.

Near Juniper, Laurel Wilson, Alex Barstow and Nigel Loring bent over a table crowded with drawings, and weighted down with slide rules, compasses and set squares. Laurel frowned and hitched at her plaid as Nigel traced a line with one finger.

“And once the windmill has pumped the well water there, Ms. Wilson, you can lead it by gravity to all the houses and to your livestock as well. Then waste drains into this artificial-swamp system; first these covered pits full of chopped bark and sawdust—or straw and leaves, anything like that will do—to take the raw waste, then through the reed-bed, into the pond with willows around it, and at the downstream end of that you've got clean potable water you can use for stock, or irrigating your truck gardens. The reeds are very useful, the composting pits give you fertilizer when you dig them out every few months, and you can raise fish in the pond, as well.”

“You'll be the envy of the Clan with that,” Juniper put in. “We're putting one in at Dun Juniper ourselves, and it's a lot better than what we had. Sir Nigel gave us the idea.”

“Not mine, not mine,” he said modestly, smoothing his mustache with one finger. “His Majesty has a system like this at his country estate, Highgrove. I've overseen building dozens of them in England. All you need is a head of water for the flow.”

Tom Brannigan of Sutterdown was there as well; a large contingent of the volunteers was from his settlement, with the experience of putting up their own town wall fresh in their minds and hands.

“Could we hire you to put one in for us?” he said hopefully. “Our present system is expensive as hell, and we're running out of those treatment chemicals.”

“Possibly,” Nigel Loring said, starting a little as Juniper trod on his foot.

“Don't do it for free!”
she whispered in his ear.
“Laurel needs all the help she can get without adding to her folk's debts, but Brannigan can afford to pay.”

“Ah, perhaps we could discuss it later,” he said. “At this horse fair you were telling me about, perhaps?”

The mayor of Sutterdown nodded. Just then Eilir and Astrid pushed through the crowd, blinking at the worksite, followed by the two young Englishmen.

Aha,
thought Juniper, reading the signs.
You could tune a harp to the tension there. No resolution to
that
little problem, yet.

Astrid whistled. “Lady bless, but you've made a
lot
of progress on that!”

Eilir nodded emphatically.
What's with, excellent Mom? You've got twice as much up as I thought you would! At this rate, we'll be able to break a lot of land for the Dun Laurel folks before everyone has to go home to get their own crop in.

“Nigel here has been a wonderful help,” Juniper said, squeezing his arm. “With tricks of the trade, and organizing.”

Nigel Loring shrugged. “Experience, don't you know. Glad to be a bit of help. And I had basic engineering training.”

“Speaking of helping,” Astrid said, and pointed.

The Rangers were coming down the road, striding out beside a long train of horses with packsaddles loaded high.

We've got half a ton of meat,
Eilir amplified.
Wild hog, mostly, and some deer, and a feral cow. I don't suppose you could use any of it, Tom?

Tom Brannigan grinned; he was in charge of feeding the workforce. In theory it went towards the debts Dun Juniper would owe the Clan as a whole, but it would be years before those tallies were paid in full. Even if the first draft was Dun Laurel folk helping harvest his vineyard that Mabon season, and prune it over the winter.

“I'll say!” he said, enthusiastically. “Thanks for the contribution, Rangers.”

Eilir put a hand on Astrid's sleeve and raised an eyebrow at Sutterdown's Mayor, High Priest and wealthiest resident.

Brannigan sighed and nodded. “OK, I'll throw in one hundred-gallon barrel…OK,
two
hundred-gallon barrels of the Special for your Rangers.” A silence dragged. “OK, some wine too, and two hundred pounds of barreled salt pork this Yule, and sixty bushels of flour when you want to draw on the town mill. That enough?”

“We're both making goodwill gifts,” Astrid said sweetly. “You'll have to be the judge of that.”

 

Sutterdown, Willamette Valley, Oregon

August 21st, 2007 AD—Change Year Nine

 

“I can't
tell
you how much help this has been, Nigel,” Juniper said.

“Oh, you've got some very capable chappies,” the elder Loring said, self-depreciatingly. “You've accomplished a great deal. I've just given them a few ideas.”

They sat their horses just east of Sutterdown; he nodded towards the tall walls that surrounded the town, shining in their white stucco.

“Those are quite remarkable. I'd never have thought of using the old
Murus Gallicus,
and me with the remnants of a classical education, at that.”

“We've got a fair number of craftsmen and builders,” she said. “And we've done larger projects mostly by brute force and rule of thumb. I never suspected how useful it would be to have someone who could
calculate
things.”

She nodded towards the water-race before them. “This, for example,” she said, and grinned. “I'd have missed some of the implications, if you hadn't pointed them out.”

Sutterdown had tall hills just north of it, outliers of the Cascade foothills. The Sutter River ran south of town, but the pioneers who'd founded the settlement had dug a mile-long canal to take water from the river higher up. Now it provided power again; besides the tannery half a mile away—that was a smelly business—a big four-stone gristmill stood by the canal just outside the town, wood-built on a stone foundation, with its twenty-foot overshot wheel turning briskly and water pouring off it in white foam. A wagon left as she watched, piled high with sacks and barrels of whole meal, and another sent bags of wheat up a rope hoist to the second story; under the creak of wood and rush of water went a burring rumble as the granite millstones worked.

The men walking towards the Mackenzie chieftain had more uses for the water in mind: Tom Brannigan, and two others in the brown jean trousers and four-pocket wool jackets common among the well-to-do in Corvallis, with businesslike short swords by their sides and broad-brimmed hats on their heads. One was a short, stocky dark man, and the other a tall lanky woman with her barley-colored hair gathered in a ponytail. They were sweating a little in the warm late-August sun; Juniper nodded politely, but kept to her saddle.

Height as a psychological advantage is not to be despised,
she thought.
And as one shorter than most for most of my life, don't I know it!

“You don't like them, do you?” Loring murmured.

She shot him a glance.
Perceptive of you, Nigel,
she thought.
I'm not an easy person to read, when I don't wish to be.
Aloud: “Not much, but we can do business with them, perhaps. Tom Brannigan likes to do well out of a bargain, which I don't grudge him. Those two might as well be adding machines in human form, and that I do not like. Besides which, they're also leaders of the faction in Corvallis that thinks it can do business with the Portland Protective Association. The which I do not like or sympathize with or agree with at all, so.”