Dies the Fire (42 page)

Unlike most of the Mackenzies, she didn't see all this as a combination RenFaire and holiday, despite the Moon-and-antlers design on the breast of all the jacks.

It's not like Society gear. It's
real
and I hate the necessity. Fate throws us all into the soup, and we're
still
killing each other.

She watched the shooting for a while; Aylward was a good teacher, firm but calm and endlessly patient. At last he looked up at the sun and spoke: “Break for dinner!”

Juniper suppressed a smile; the man had some old-fashioned turns of phrase. A clatter continued when all else fell quiet. Chuck Barstow was sparring with the two young men who'd come in with his brother, Vince Torelli and Steve Matucheck. Sword-and-buckler work was an active style, and they were leaping and foining in a pattern as acrobatic and pleasing to the eye as a dance. She'd never felt a desire to join in when she was busking at Society events, but it looked pretty; now that she'd done a fair bit with the other neophytes, she could even say it was fun in an active sort of way.

Chuck jerked back from the waist to dodge a strike, then leapt to let the other sword pass beneath his boots. His buckler banged down on Vince's helmet; the blow was pulled, but it still gave a solid bonging thump that sent the younger man down clutching at his head. In the same instant he caught Steve's sword-blow with his own, locked the guards, put a foot behind his opponent's leg and threw him staggering backward with a twist of shoulder and hips. A lizard-swift thrust followed, leaving Steve white with shock as the blunt wooden point tapped him on the base of the throat.

Cheers burst out; Mary and Sanjay and Daniel rushed over and nearly knocked Chuck over himself in their enthusiasm.

“Dad's the best!” they chorused. “Dad's the best!”

Little Tamsin stumped around crowing and waving her arms, happy because her father was the center of attention. He scooped her up onto his shoulder, tucked Mary and Daniel each under an arm and let Sanjay proudly rack his equipment as he staggered over towards the trestle tables.

Quick work,
Juniper thought.

It hadn't been long before the rescued children realized they weren't going home, or at least before most stopped talking about it; shared hunger and fear and unaccustomed hard work had probably sped up the process, and the sheer strangeness of everything.

Now, is it a good sign of healthy resilience that some of them have started calling their foster parents Mom and Dad, or is it unhealthy denial and transference? I don't think those three in particular
had
parents before, not really, just people who paid the bills.

“Lad knows his business as far as the moves go,” Alyward said thoughtfully. “Hope he doesn't freeze up when the red wine's served for true, though.”

Juniper shivered slightly and changed the subject. “You've settled in better than most, Sam,” she said. “I'd have thought it would be harder for you, being so far from home.”

For a moment the square, good-humored Saxon face went bleak. “It'll be worse back there,” he said. “Sixty million people in one little island? It doesn't bear thinking of, and at least I don't have to watch it.”

Juniper winced slightly and swallowed.
Any more than I do Los Angeles or New York,
she thought.
Or Mexico City or Tokyo or . . .

He shook his shoulders. “Besides, I've no near kin to home, no wife or child, and even before the Change . . . it's not really the place I grew up in, not anymore it isn't—wasn't. Full of commuters, bought all the old cottages up and gussified them, they did.
And
the local farmers were all for ripping out hedges and trees and getting rid of their livestock and making the place look like bloody Canada; fat lot of good their combines and thousand-acre fields of hybrid barley will be to them now, eh?”

He shook his head. “I'd just been playing, fossicking about with this and that, since I mustered out of the SAS. Traveling, making bows, doing a little hunting.”

“They must have a generous pension plan,” Juniper said teasingly.

“Not bloody likely!” he said with a grin. “But my da had a bit put by—from selling the farm about the time my mother died and I went for a soldier, you see. Left it to me; fair knackered I was, when I found out, since he'd done naught but live in a cheap flat in Portsmouth and haunt the pubs. Thought he'd drunk it up years ago…”

Then he looked at her with his head slightly to one side: “You've a gift for getting people talking, don't you, Lady?”

Juniper grinned. “What can I say? I'm a Witch, a singer, and a storyteller—all three. So . . . the Change interrupted your life as a gentleman of leisure?”

“That it did.” A shrug. “Play's all very well, but a man's life is his work; I've got a real job of work to do here.”

Well, that's more than Mr. Strong and Silent's said before,
she thought, giving him a genial slap on the shoulder; it was like hitting an oak beam.
Lord and Lady be thanked for sending him our way!

Everyone headed for the trestle-tables and the fires with the soup cauldrons; on a day like this, it was a relief to do things out-of-doors. Juniper shed her battle gear—they had two-by-four racks set up for it—and got in line. Diana grinned at her as she ladled the Eternal Soup into bowls.

“You know, Juney, one of the things I enjoyed most about running MoonDance was looking up recipes and planning the menu?”

Juniper laughed out loud, despite the rumbling of her stomach. “And what's on the menu today, Di?”

“Eternal Soup, Eternal Soup, or today's extra-special dish: delicious
zuppa di eterno.
”

“Eternal Soup!” Juniper made her eyes go wide. “What a surprise! Still, I think I'll have something from the dessert tray instead, and some nice organic hazelnut coffee.”

Diana gave a sour laugh and plopped her ladle into Juniper's bowl. Her husband Andy gave her a platter of wild-greens salad, half a hard-boiled egg, and one precious baking-powder biscuit.

There was also a great jug of rich Jersey milk fresh from their—single—milking cow. But that was for the children and Dorothy Rose, who was pregnant; birth control was already getting more difficult, and there would be a couple of babies before Yule.

Juniper's nose twitched as she carried the big bowl of soup over to her table. It actually smelled pretty good today, probably because they'd been getting in a little game and wild herbs—dandelion roots, fireweed shoots—plus Andy had thrown in some more of the soup barley and miso stock from their restaurant-store's inventory, plus a little pasta from the Fairfax storehouse.

They were always talking about butchering one of the steers or sheep, and always kept putting it off until absolutely necessary—everyone was worried about the gap between the preserved foods and the first harvest, with the way their numbers had grown. They had plenty of grass to keep the beasts hale, courtesy of the Willamette's mild climate and the way foragers had swept it bare of livestock.

“Mmmm,” she said appreciatively as she hunted down the last barleycorn in her bowl with an eager spoon.

Then she went for the salad; dandelion greens and henbit shoots and various other crunchy green things from the meadows and woods, about half of which she recognized; and some canned beets from the Fairfax stores, with the juice making do for salad dressing. It wasn't bad if you liked eating bitter lawn clippings drizzled with diluted vinegar. She saved the half-egg for last; it had a little paprika on the yolk, and a strong free-range taste. The biscuit had a chewy crust; she alternated bites with the egg, tiny nibbles to stretch out the flavor.

In fact, I crave everything
except
dandelion greens.

Judy Barstow licked her spoon: “You know, if there were a few more calories, this would be an ideal, healthy diet.”

“Oh, shut up, you she-quack,” Juniper grumbled, seconded by a few others.

Their nurse-midwife grinned unrepentantly; she'd gone from plump to merely opulent. For people doing hard physical labor every day, it was all about two-thirds of just barely enough, or at least that was what Juniper's stomach told her. Filling up on herbal tea was supposed to take away the empty feeling. It didn't; you just had to pee more often.

For a while there was only the clinking of spoons and the crunch of greenery between busy jaws. Then—

“Hamburgers,” Diana said hollowly, looking at her own empty bowl.

“Shut up, Di,” her husband said.
“Please.”

“Cheeseburgers with sautéed onions and maple-cured bacon. French fries—big, greasy home-fries with lots of salt. Pork chops, with the fat brown and crispy at the edge and collard greens on the side. Thai shrimp curry with basmati rice. Steamed snow peas. Fried eggplant with grated cheese. Barbecued ribs. Pasta with homemade tomato sauce and Parmesan melting on top. Mashed garlic potatoes with butter and chives. Bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches, the tomatoes just out of the garden and still sun-warm, dripping with mayo.”

“Shut up!”
It was several voices together now.

“Slabs of MoonDance fresh whole-wheat bread, brown and crusty, still steaming when you cut it, with organic butter melting into the surface. And jam, wild blueberry jam, and honey. German chocolate cake with coconut sprinkles on the frosting. Good Costa Rican coffee in a big mug with thick cream, while you eat a cinnamon-apple Danish and—”

“
Shut up!”
they all screamed in chorus; the children giggled, but nobody else was laughing.

Someone broke down and started that sort of drooling food-porn every second meal on average. It drove everyone else crazy; they would have thrown food if there had been any to spare.

Juniper used a dandelion leaf to wipe out the inside of her soup bowl, then sighed as her inner circle headed her way with rolled-up plans in their hands; Dennis had what looked like a big cake covered in a cloth . . .

It turned out to be a scale model. Juniper looked at it in bemusement as Dennis whipped away the towel; then she looked at
him
and raised a brow as her glance dropped downward.

“Is that a
kilt
you're wearing, Dennie?”

He grinned at her. It was; the sewn, pleated skirtlike variety invented in the eighteenth century, not the true wraparound Great Kilt of the ancient Gaels. The cloth was even tartan, of a sort, mostly green and brown with stripes of very dark blue.

“Isn't that made from one of that load of blankets we salvaged?” she said, pursing her lips as she struggled not to laugh.

The ribbing
does
pass the time.

“There's plenty,” he said. “Nice strong wool, too. And it's quick and easy to make—Andy's got that sewing machine working off a treadle—and it wears longer than jeans.”

“It's not even the Mackenzie tartan!”

“It is now,” he said cheerfully. “Didn't you say the Victorians made up that stuff about clans having special tartans after the fact anyway? This is what we've got—we're the Mackenzies around here—it's the Mackenzie tartan if we say it is. QED.”

She threw up her hands. “
Cuir sioa ar ghabhar agus is gabhar I gcónai é.”

“You calling me a goat?” he said, mock-frowning.

“No, just a Sassenach.
A goat's a goat even in a silk coat,
if you want a translation. But I suppose if you want to wear a pleated skirt, you can wear a pleated skirt. It's a harmless eccentricity.”

She pointed at the wooden model his cunning woodworker's fingers had put together. It showed the Hall built up to two stories, a duplicate not far away, more barns and sheds, and a high log wall around the whole irregular oblong of high ground on which the buildings rested.

“Now that—
that
is a menace! We've a limited amount of time and work, in case you hadn't noticed, and an infinity of things to do with both.”

He grinned, but it was Alex Barstow who spoke up: “Actually, Juney, it's not crazy—we wouldn't build it all at once, of course, but we
do
need more room and we
do
need a defensive wall.”

That put her brows up again. Alex was a housebuilder by trade, and he knew his business—she'd hired him for repairs before the Change, and knew others he'd done more ambitious work for.

Dennis spoke: “It's courtesy of Cascade Timber Inc. I remembered how you bitched and moaned back in 'ninety-six about having to sell them trees to pay taxes on this place, and then again when they went bankrupt and left it all on your hands. So I've been checking while I was out hunting—”

She heard a subdued snort, possibly from Sam Aylward; the only use Dennis had on a hunt was to scare the game into an ambush set by someone else.

“—and yeah, you have a
lot
of stacked logs in the woods here. Nicely seasoned by now, too. More than enough.”

Alex nodded. “Log construction is fast and simple, and strong and warm if you do it right—square the top and bottom so they fit snug, deep-notch the ends—it just needs lots and lots of big high-quality logs. Back before the Change that was expensive, but we've
got
the logs, great big thirty-foot monsters.”

He pointed to the middle of the model: “See, we've already started on the bathhouse. Now, the next thing we do is double the space in the Hall—your cabin. It's just a log box; the foundation's the difficult part, and that's already done. All we have to do is take off the roof, put on an extra story of log wall minus cutouts for windows, then put the same roof back on. This lean-to extension out back is the new kitchen, with those woodstoves we salvaged.”