Dies the Fire (50 page)

“Yours too, Mike,” Eric said.

Hero worship's natural at his age,
Havel thought indulgently.

They moved along smoothly, keeping the horses to a fast walk and occasional canter. From what Juniper had told him, this area had been swept clear by those idiots in Salem, and they were well south and west of the refugee hordes along the main roads now. There was still no sense in taking chances—a flood tide that big would throw spray and wrack a long way.

“Might be some people left further up and in,” Havel said. “More places to hide.”

Ahead the broad meadow narrowed, rising to low, forested heights coast-ward, shaggy with Douglas fir and oak. Once past the place where the hills almost pinched together the land opened out again in a wedge with its narrow part to the west. The rolling lands were silent, grass waist-high in the pastures, shaggy in the blocks of orchard and vineyard too—the south-facing side of the valley was all in vines—and the neglect was a disquieting contrast with the still-neat fences of white painted board. Willows dropped their tresses into ponds, and ducks swam.

The big house on its hill was yellowish-red brick, mellow with ivy growing up the south-facing wall, bowered in its trees and in gardens that looked lovely even at this distance. Barns and stables stood off at a little distance, and a smaller cottage-style house.

“Don't get your hopes up,” Havel warned as he unshipped his binoculars for a brief scan. “I can't see any movement.”

“Well, it didn't burn down, either,” Eric said, smiling. “That's something.”

They rode up the graveled road, hooves crunching in the loose rock; that turned to white crushed shell as they entered the gardens and lawns proper, in a long looping curve leading up to the white-pillared entrance to the main house. Velvety grass dreamed amid banks of early flowers—the Willamette was prime gardening country—clipped hedges, huge copper beeches, oaks, walnuts, espaliered fruit trees blossoming against a brick ha-ha.

Old money indeed,
Havel thought.

He scanned the windows carefully; some of the dormers that broke the hipped roofline were open, and he saw a gauzy curtain flutter free.

Just the thing to hide someone looking down at us,
he thought.

Aloud: “Eric.” The younger man looked at him. “This place has good memories for you. You're probably feeling happy and relaxed to be here, down deep. Bad idea. Keep alert.”

Josh Sanders was looking around, fingering his bowstring.

“Someone's been doing maintenance here since the Change,” he said. “The grass isn't as long as it would be otherwise, and there's been some weeding. And that's horse dung, there, and hoofprints. Not more than a day old.”

“Throw down the weapons!”
a voice barked from an upper window.
“Give it the flick, yer bastards, or come a guster!”

The thunking twang of a crossbow followed on the heels of the command; a shaft whipped by and went
tock
into the smooth gray trunk of a beech, quivering with a malignant wasp-whine.

J
uniper kissed the vine leaf and dropped the thanks-offering into Rickreall Creek, chanting softly:

Water took it and whirled it downstream, quick with the cold mountain waters of spring, past the pilings of the bridge and on towards the Willamette River to their east. Highway 99 stretched southward through open fields.

Then she and Judy leaned in to the pedals of their bicycles. They were on point today; she'd decided that the freed prisoners needed Steve and Vince by them, being unarmed save for belt knives and still feeling shaky, for which she couldn't blame them. They
could
haul the cargo carriers; she hoped some food would be available in Corvallis. The rabbits wouldn't last long.

“Well, you're looking like the cat that got the canary,” Judy said after a while when the singing humm of tires on asphalt was the only sound to rival the birds.

“Mmmmmm,” Juniper said wordlessly, and laughed at Judy's scowl.

“It's not like you to do the whirlwind romance thing and get swept off your feet,” her friend said.

“Other way 'round,” she said. “He's a nice guy, but I sort of had to prod him into action.” A giggle. “If you'll pardon the expression.”

“Not your usual style,” Judy repeated.

She frowned. “It wasn't, though, was it?” A shrug. “Things have, you may have noticed, changed. We didn't have all that much time.”

Judy's thoughts had moved on. “I wonder why they didn't want to come on to Corvallis?”

“I think I can guess that. When I asked him about it, he just smiled and said that it was usually easier to get forgiveness than permission. Which I take to mean the Bearkillers don't want to attract attention to the place they're thinking of settling until they
are
settled and it's a done deal. And pre-Change title deeds don't mean much anymore. It's a lot closer to Corvallis than it is to our land, of course.”

“To the Mackenzie clachan,” Judy said, smiling; it lit up her full dark features.

“Oh, don't
you
start in on that stuff! Leave it to Dennie and his mispronouced nounced bits of Gaelic.”

Judy gave a broad shrug and flipped up one hand: “
Nu,
I should know from Gaelic? I'm just a simple Jewitch girl, after all.”

They both laughed, and Juniper said more seriously: “
Giorraionn beirt bothar;
two people shorten a road. Glad you're along, Judy.”

She smiled back. “You do have one for every occasion!”

“Mom was fond of 'em.” She frowned. “I'm not sure it's a good idea now.”

“What's the harm? For that matter, all this clan-Celtic business
is
more suited to the world we're living in now.”

“That's what worries me,” Juniper said. At her friend's glance, she went on: “Look,
we
know all this high-Celtic Deirdre-of-the-Sorrows sort of thing is a bit of a joke, and we don't take the old-country stories too literally either. But now we're pushing on an open door—there's no TV, no . . . no
world
to push back. What about our children's children? It was my father's people who gave the words ‘blood feud' to the English language; not to mention ‘blackmail' and ‘reiver' and ‘unhallowed hand.' ”

Judy shrugged again, normally this time. “Right now, shouldn't we be more concerned about getting through to harvest? And whatever works.”

“I suppose so,” Juniper said with a sigh.

Her eyes had been moving as they spoke. “Look!” she said suddenly.

“It's a microwave relay tower,” Judy said.

“But there's someone
in
it. Right up near the top, that looks like a platform added recently. Perfect spot for a lookout. Sort of ironic, isn't it?”

She halted and got out her own birding glasses. “And he's signaling someone, using a mirror. Clever.” She paused to take a deep breath. “I can smell turned earth, not too far away.”

It hadn't been a main road before the Change, but someone since had taken the trouble to push the occasional cars aside and bury the bodies—she could see fresh graves in the fields to either side. And that wasn't all. . . .

“Bunch up,” she called back over her shoulder. “We're getting closer to town and I think they've got a lookout system set up.”

This part of the Willamette was fairly flat. That cut visibility, but . . .

“We weren't the only ones to scare up some seed potatoes,” Juniper said, looking left and right. “And is that barley?”

“Barley in this field, oats in the next, I think,” Judy said. “Hard to tell when it's just showing. Spring planted—not too late, I hope.”

Every day past the optimum cut the yield and increased the chances of running into the fall rains at harvest time.

Then: “Oooops!”

They cleared a slight rise; someone was waiting beyond. Everyone grabbed the brake levers, and the Mackenzies halted.

About sixty someones,
Juniper thought.

Most of them were puffing and blowing, as if they'd arrived quickly . . . which the rows of bicycles hinted at, too. All the people waiting for them were in chain mail shirts that came to their thighs, like metallic extra-large T-shirts, with shortswords and bucklers hung from heavy belts.

Half of them carried long spears, made up of two sections that fitted together; a few were still getting the joint locked.

That was quick,
Juniper thought, looking at the armor; she had a vague memory that chain mail was expensive in the old days.
I'll have to ask Chuck.
The SCA had gone in for re-creating that sort of thing.

At a guess, someone from the Society had been advising this bunch as well.

“Pikes actually, not spears,” she murmured. “Sixteen-foot pikes.”

While she watched, they hurried into a four-deep line. Someone called out: “Pikepoints—
down!
”

The great spears came down with a shout, presenting a quadruple rank of sharp blades. The rest of the welcoming party were on either side, aiming crossbows. They all looked the more intimidating because their helmets came down in a triangular mask over the eyes, and flared out behind.

Their leader had a different weapon: a five-foot shaft with a head like a giant single-edged knife, curved on the cutting edge and thick and straight on the back, tapering to a murderous point.
A glaive,
she thought—the word came to her from some Society get-together where she'd played.

“Halt where you are!” the man with the glaive called when they were about twenty feet from the line of points. “In the name of the University Council!”

And the Continental Congress and the Great Jehovah,
she thought irreverently, but she obeyed.

Those pikes looked unpleasantly, seriously sharp; so did the heads of the crossbow bolts.

“This area is under quarantine,” the young man with the glaive went on. “I'm Lieutenant Peter Jones, Committee militia. Anyone found to be infectious will be put in isolation; turn back now if you are.”

He pushed up on the mask. That turned out to be a jointed visor, and the face below was disconcertingly young; he also wore sports glasses with an elastic strap at the rear.

“We're peaceful travelers from a community on the east side of the valley,” Juniper said, and gave their names. “Just out scouting, trying to find out what's going on. We have a registered nurse with us, and as far as we know we're healthy.”

The word “registered” brought a bristling. “Not working for the state government, I hope,” Jones snapped. “They tried to take away our
livestock
! Until we taught them better.”

“Our area had the same problem, but I don't think there
is
a state government anymore,” she said, jerking a thumb northeast in the direction of Salem.

“Why not?”

“Plague. We got near enough to see the pits where they tried to burn the bodies, but from the looks of it the last survivors just lit out for everywhere else.”

Jones cleared his throat and barked an order with self-conscious sternness; she put him down as a teaching assistant before the Change, possibly in one of the more practical departments, like agriculture or engineering. The pike-men—or in a few cases, pikewomen—swung their weapons upright again, and the crossbows went to port arms.

“We'd heard about that,” Jones said. “The plague, that is.”

His eyes flicked to Carmen, Muriel and Jack, all of who still had ripening bruises from their brief captivity.

“These are friends of ours,” Juniper said in haste, and they nodded enthusiastically. “We rescued them from a nest of Eaters north of Salem, then looped around west of the river and came down Highway 99.”

“You see we have to be careful about checking . . . ah, good.”

More bicyclists had come up, from the direction of town. Two of them had white boxes marked with the Red Cross strapped to the carriers of their bikes, and they immediately came forward.

“Blood samples,” one said.

“And customs inspection,” the other added.

Juniper bristled slightly—she'd thought the Change had eliminated bureaucracy, at least—but the pikes and crossbows were a powerful argument. Plus they
needed
to contact any surviving nuclei of civilization out here. She'd been beginning to doubt there were any, beyond the three-families-and-some-friends level.