Dies the Fire (72 page)

“Hey, wait!” Rodger McFarlane said.

“Well, if you
don't
want to join and put the land at the clan's disposal . . .”

Maisie McFarlane stamped on her husband's foot under the table; at least that was what Juniper assumed, from the way her shoulders moved slightly and her tight smile and the way he smothered a yelp. She'd probably heard the sudden hope Juniper tried to conceal.

The farmer went on: “We certainly do want to join, Lady Juniper. It's not that everyone in Sutterdown doesn't do their best, but we're scared spitless out on the edge the way we are, never getting a good night's sleep. And we want school for our kids and stuff—we're just too far out and on our own we can't spare them from work. It's just . . . it's good land, two hundred and eighty acres.”

“I thought we'd be moving in here,” Maisie McFarlane said.

I would really like to find that tree and my fiddle,
Juniper thought. Instead she made her voice kind and went on: “The palisade around Dun Carson is going up very quickly, and it'll be as safe as this.”

Or nearly. Maybe I
am
turning into a politician,
she thought, and made a sign of aversion under the table.

And the McFarlanes had brought in a good harvest—the fighting hadn't touched them much, though it had scared them green when the Protector's men marched past.

I
must
not just see them as a nuisance, or an opportunity,
she told herself sternly.
They're people and terrified. For their children and kin and the people they've taken in, as well as themselves. And they're right to be terrified. Mother-of-All, help me be wise!

“There's still a problem,” Laughton said. “Look, we're all grateful for the help you gave us, in the fight and afterward. But the fact is the people who've joined you since—the Hunters, the Dowlingtons, the Johnsons, now the McFarlanes—they're not only putting islands of your territory in ours, they're the ones with the biggest grain reserves—and everyone in town pitched in to help get that grain harvested. We've got a system for sharing things around, but it's . . . Lady Juniper, it's all just falling apart without Reverend Dixon. Reverend Jennings . . . it's just not the same.”

“I can't say that I liked Dixon,” Juniper conceded. “But he was a strong man and he could get people to do the needful.”

She sighed. “Sheriff, you can tell your townspeople that nobody's going to starve this coming winter because someone else has joined us. We'll see about the . . . swapping.”

Laughton smiled as he rose and shook her hand, but he had that odd look in his eyes again—the one she'd seen on the day of the battle.

“Lady Juniper, you may find that there's a simple solution to that problem; everyone in Sutterdown joining up. Barring the Reverend Jennings and a few dozen others.”

Urk!
She hoped she didn't look as sandbagged as she felt.

 

 

 

When Laughton and the McFarlanes were gone, Juniper did drop her head into her hands and groan. Chuck let her alone as a few others filtered in: his wife Judy, Dennis and Sally, Andy and Diana, and Sam Aylward.

Eilir went out and came back with lunch—bread and butter, cheese and fruit; the Sunrise apples on the old Fairfax place were ripe, and the dairy's output was going up fast.

Eat, Mom,
she signed.

One of the advantages of using Sign was that you could talk with your mouth full. She had a crisp red-yellow Sunrise held in her mouth while she spoke.

I'm not hungry,
Juniper replied.

And I envy you that,
Juniper signed.
It's that mall place today, right?

Right. A lot of useful handicraft stuff there, and I'm hoping for a copy of
Arrows of the Queen
or
Somewhere to Be Flying.

Juniper watched her bounce out of the room with boundless fourteen-year-old energy, and lifted a slice of the bread without enthusiasm. Her stomach was knotted with tension, but the smell of the fresh bread and the half-melted butter on it made the organ in question rumble instead and she bit in. After that, the digestive system quit complaining and started to do its job.

“There are just too many people here now.”

Judy shrugged. “What we've been doing is working. Everyone loves a—what's that saying?”

“
An té atá thuas óltar deoch air; an té atá thios buailter cos air.
He who succeeds is toasted, who fails gets kicked. I feel toasted, all right—over an open fire!”

“You've done a wonderful job,” Chuck said soothingly. “We're alive, aren't we? Everyone's got enough to eat, don't they? That's
why
we're flooded with people. After what's happened, they're desperate for something that looks secure.”

Juniper sighed. “When we started, it was like a big family and everyone agreed on most things, but you can't do that when there are . . .”

Someone handed her a list.

“. . . Goddess gentle and strong, a hundred and fifty not counting kids!”

She waved the paper over her head. “I can't keep people straight without a
list,
for sweet Brigid's sake; I'm turning into a
bureaucrat.
Even when I was sleeping in my car, I didn't sink that low! And we're spending more and more time talking. What are we going to do about it? I want everyone to have their say, but it takes forever!”

Chuck rubbed at his sun-faded sandy beard. “Well, let's stick with the model we picked—it's worked so far. Scottish clans got a lot bigger than this,” he said. “How did they manage it?”

“By bashing heads, a good deal,” Juniper said. “If the songs are to be trusted. And the Chief, the head of the Name and Ilk, what he said went, unless he got so crazy they arranged for him to accidentally get shot in the back while out hunting. Of course, he didn't have everyone living at his Hall, either, though he kept open house and any clansfolk could come sit at his table.”

“Lucky him,” Diana said, looking as frazzled as Juniper felt. “Do you have any idea how cumbersome it's getting to be, cooking three meals a day for a hundred and fifty people at three locations? I mean, when Andy and me ran MoonDance back before the Change at least people had a choice. Now everyone eats the same thing—I'd be complaining about it myself, if I didn't know I couldn't do anything about it. But whenever anyone else bitches about the food, I feel like throwing a cleaver at them! At least there's
enough
now.”

“Crime,” Dennis said. They all looked at him, and he went on: “Eventually, someone's going to commit a crime—I don't expect it ever to be a big deal, but eventually we're going to have to have some equivalent of judges and courts.”

Juniper groaned again and buried her hands in her hair, suppressing another urge—this time, it was pulling out handfuls.

“I kept wishing we weren't in a desperate scramble to grow enough food to get us through the winter,” she said. “Ah, how fine things will be, I thought, when the grain's in and we have a few months before the fall plowing when we only have to work hard, and not fall into bed like a cut tree every evening. And now, I'm almost nostalgic for the fear of starving. At least it kept people focused!”

A sigh. “And Laughton was hinting that everyone in Sutterdown wants to join
us
—Judy, you do it for me!”

“Gevalt!” she said.

Everyone else made sympathetic noises. It was the songs that gave her the idea eventually; she ran through a half-dozen ballads in her head, searching the lyrics for clues.

“Look, as I remember it, the way the old Gaels did it, the Chief of the Name handled the big things—perpetual feuding, large-scale cattle theft, and how to keep others from stealing
their
cattle, and which doomed rebellion to support and get everyone killed in—and the . . . hmmm, I think they were called septs—sub-clans, I'm not sure whether it was an Irish word or Scottish—did the local work. Under a tacksman—usually a relative of the Chief. Probably it wasn't as neat as that, and the Victorians tidied it all up the way they did the tartans, but that's the bones of it.”

Chuck rubbed his beard again. “You know, splitting up the land we've got—and are getting—into a bunch more separate farms would save a lot of time and effort.
My
time and effort, to start with. We've got enough farmers, and they've all had experience in the new methods—well, old methods—by now. There's no real need for me to go around saying ‘hoe this row' anymore. We could draw up a general plan and let each . . . well, call it each sept . . . manage the day-to-day stuff on their own. We could still get together for big jobs.”

Aylward nodded. “No reason our militia couldn't work that way too,” he said. “Easy enough for someone like me”—he grinned a sergeant's grin—“to go around checking that nobody's slacking off or playing silly buggers. Say ten to twenty families in each settlement, and a palisade like we're putting in at the Carson place. That would be enough to stand off a gang of bandits or Eaters long enough for help to gather.”

Sally had been quiet. Now she spoke up: “We could have the library and high school here, and an all-grades primary at each dun.”

“Hey, and we could call the septs after a totem animal,” Andy Trethar said; he'd always liked shamanistic stuff like that. “You know, wolf, raven—”

Juniper sat back with relief and let them go at it.
Of course, I'll have to persuade people in general, and get their ideas, and . . .

“
C
onfirm . . . enemy . . . position,” Havel read, binoculars to his eyes.

The Bearkiller column and Woburn's posse were down at the bottom of a swale. That cut visibility to a thousand yards in any direction, but it meant nobody could see them either, except from a height.

A height like that of the hot-air balloon floating over the Bearkiller camp in Craigswood, for example; the three Bearkillers in the basket hanging two thousand feet above ground level had an excellent view. He could make out the semaphore signal quite clearly through the field glasses, and they'd be able to pick up his mirror-flash of light even more easily.

“Damn, I wish I'd thought of that,” Woburn muttered awkwardly. “We might not be in this mess, if we'd had a balloon.”

“Everyone tends to think engines when they think aircraft,” Havel said. “I certainly did; but the Protector over in Portland didn't.”

Woburn rubbed his lantern jaw. “Sort of hard to think of Portland having much to do with our problems. These days, it seems a long ways off.”

“Believe it,” Havel said grimly. “I doubt Iron Rod would have been more than a major nuisance without someone giving him help and ideas. Hell, the Protector gave
me
ideas, unintentionally.”

He looked at the balloon again. It had taken a bit of finding . . . but there were a surprising number of hot-air balloon enthusiasts in Idaho—had been, before the Change.

It was still an hour before noon, and the sun wouldn't be getting into anyone's eyes for a couple of hours, no matter which way the fight turned.

God, I hope this isn't too expensive when the butcher's bill is totaled up,
he thought.

Partly that was the simple desire to keep his people from harm; he'd selected every one, and a lot of them were friends by now, and all of them were
his.
Partly it was a desire to conserve the Bearkillers' capital assets.

Condottieri,
he thought. The word simply meant “contractor” in Renaissance Italian.
That's what we've ended up as.

It turned out that Pam and Rothman and Ken all knew a lot of stories about Renaissance Italy, and they were a lot less dull that what he remembered of high school history classes; if Woburn had heard some of them, he might have been more cautious about hiring his fighting done.

Particularly the ones about condottieri leaders deciding they'd rather be Duke of Milan or something of that order. Havel intended to keep scrupulously to the terms, but how could the sheriff know that?

On the other hand, Florence got taken over by a family of
bankers,
of all things,
he thought with a taut grin.
Now, there's a real gang of mercenary pirates for you.