Dies the Fire (53 page)

They stripped to the skin before the door of the bathhouse; smoke was pouring out of its sheet-metal chimney, and Juniper's skin itched in pleased anticipation. Stripping took a little doing, when you were wearing a mail shirt; first taking off the sword belt, then bunching up the skirts as much as you could, then bending over with your hands on the ground and wriggling until it fell in a rustling, clinking heap.

“What a relief!” she wheezed—the contortions required were rather active.
Like a rich armor worn in the heat of day, that scalds with safety.

The padded tunic underneath came off more easily, and soon the clean wind was telling her exactly how much rancid sweat had stuck to her skin.

She hopped on one foot and then the other to get the hiking boots off, and scrambled out of jeans and T-shirt and underwear even faster.

“Take all the cloth and boil it in the laundry,” Judy said, dumping the party's clothing in a hamper. “Boil it for fifteen minutes at least, with the special soap. Move!”

The helpers moved. Despite being tired to the bone, Juniper practically skipped up the steps and into the washing room with its flagstone floor. They'd set things up Japanese-style, that being simplest. The boiler they'd made from a big propane tank was hissing; water from that and the cold taps got splashed everywhere in glorious abandon, as the returned travelers sluiced each other down with bucketsful, soaped, rinsed again, massaged suds into their hair. The gray water ran out a drain and down a pipe into the orchard and herb garden below the plateau, so nothing was wasted.

Juniper groaned with pleasure even when her loofa hit spots that had chafed raw and the strong soap stung her eyes and the blistered bits. Eventually Judy was satisfied, and they trooped through into the next room to sink into the tub—
that
was a big sheet-steel grain bin, one of a series lined with planks and sunk halfway into the ground, separated by board partitions. They settled into the water, scented by herbs and the sauna smell of hot damp pinewood.

“Hey, you folks noninfectious now?” came a deep voice from the doorway. “Mind if we join you?”

“Yeah, Dennie,” she said. “But don't get between me and the kitchen, or I may trample you!”

He stood dripping in the doorway; Sally was with him, and Eilir, and Chuck Barstow. Everyone tried to speak at once, and Eilir's hands flew, her slim coltish body dancing accompaniment to the signing.

Thanks to the Lady you're back, Mom. I was so worried, I've got
pages
of new protective spells in my Book of Shadows!

And the same back to you, my child of spring,
she replied.
I could feel your well-wishes every moment of night and day.

Meanwhile Dennis brought one thick hand out from behind his back. He had a bowl, a huge turned-wood thing; her eyes went wide as she saw it was heaped with vegetables: snow peas, green peas, carrots, deep-green broccoli florets, pieces of snow-white cauliflower . . .

Her mouth actually cramped in longing for a moment.

“Blessed be the fruits of the Lady's womb, and hand 'em over, Dennie! Don't tell me you've found some way to make veggies grow
that
fast!”

“Nah, we came across a big winter garden, well-mulched,” he said, complying.

You could grow hardy vegetables over the Willamette's mild winters, with luck and a lot of work. Few had bothered, back when you could just drive down to the supermarket.

“Where?” she cried. “Frank Fairfax didn't have one!”

“Believe it or not, it's from the Smiths.”

Juniper made a wordless sound as she popped pieces into her mouth, trying to decide whether the carrots really were as sweet as apricots, or if it just felt that way because they were the first fresh food she'd had since the Change.

And here I thought the Smiths disliked us,
she thought; they were strong followers of the Evangelical minister in Sutterdown.
Maybe Dixon's mellowed!

“You won't believe what dinner is,” he said, as the four sank into the tub.

Eilir crowded under her mother's arm and laid her sleek dark head on her shoulder. The bowl was thick wood and floated easily, which let them push it around the circle like a food-bearing boat.

“We're having something besides Eternal Soup, from the blessed smell of it?” Juniper said, lying back with a sigh of contentment. “And fresh veggies . . .”

He nodded, smiling smugly. “Our hunters must be in right with Herne, or Sam the Silent's finally learning how to teach as well as he stalks. We've been getting a mule deer or whitetail every couple of days for the last ten, and then yesterday I got a young boar. All two hundred pounds of whom is over the coals as we speak. Ribs, loin, crackling, gravy, liver . . .”

She threw a splash of water at him as her stomach rumbled and saliva spurted into her mouth. There were plenty of feral swine in the Cascades, crossed with European wild boar introduced by hunters; they'd been regarded as pests before the Change. A lot of them hung around this section, because the hardwoods her great-uncle planted left mast for them to eat, and there was camas-root in the mountain meadows. The problem was that they were fierce and wary, and hard for mostly inexperienced hunters to take without guns. Which prompted a thought . . .

“Wait a minute!
You
got it, Dennie? As in, actually shot it yourself?”

“I found a
much
better method than sneaking around in the woods. I just waited up late by the gardens.” He smiled smugly. “If you grow it, they will come.”

A groan went around the tub.

“There aren't all that many veggies, I'm afraid, but eat, eat—It's a special occasion, after all! Oh, and Di is sacrificing some of her flour to make buns to go with the pork-and-sage sausages. . . .”

The two younger members of the traveling party excused themselves with exquisite good manners, grabbed towels and bolted . . .

Or perhaps they've just got enough energy to pester the cooks,
she thought. She felt her friend's description right in her stomach, but the hot water was soothing away her aches so pleasantly that she could wait. Particularly with each piece of garden truck a sweet explosion of pleasure in her mouth.

The brief meeting with Mike Havel already seemed like a dream; an ache went through her. . . .

“So,” Chuck Barstow said, tearing his gaze away from his wife's eyes, and other parts of her. “Obviously you
did
have luck. I couldn't believe you got Jack and the others back!”

“We had help, and until then it was a very sticky situation indeed. . . .” Juniper began, and gave a quick rundown. A murmur of
Blessed be
ran through the coveners.

“Who says the Lord and Lady don't look after Their folk?” Chuck said.

He was always keen, but we're all turning more to the Goddess and the God,
Juniper thought.
Perhaps because there's so little else to hold on to.

When she mentioned that Luther Finney had survived, Dennis swore in delight, and Eilir clapped her hands.

“Who says you don't have the Goddess looking out for
you,
special?” Dennis grinned. “Little stuff
and
big? There were those yew logs seasoning at the bottom of your woodpile that you never got around to burning, just waiting to be made into bows. . . .”

“That would be the God looking out for me, as Cernunnos Lord of the Forest, Dennie. But I make allowances for the ignorance of a mere cowan.”

He splashed water back at her; “cowan” was wiccaspeak for a non-Witch, and not entirely polite.

“Hey, you're playing confuse-the-unbeliever again. I have
never
been able to get a straight answer on whether you guys have two deities or dozens, taken from any pantheon you feel like mugging in a theological dark alley. Which is it? Number one or number two?”

“Yes,” Juniper said, with all the other coven members joining in to make a ragged chorus; Eilir concurred in Sign.

Dennis groaned, and there was a minute of chaotic water-fighting. Juniper rescued the bowl and held it over her head to keep it from sinking until things quieted down again. That exposed more of her, but if everybody felt like throwing hot water at her aching, overworked, underfed body, she wasn't going to object.

“Or maybe it's just that
somebody
had to be lucky,” he went on. “Anthropic principle—anyone still around to talk about it nowadays
has
to have had a string of lucky coincidences helping them, and more so every day that passes. If someone's breathing, they're a lottery winner. You, Juney, you're the Powerball grand-prizer.”

Juniper's chuckle was a bit harsh; after her trip through the valley that bit a little closer to the bone than she liked. But when gallows humor was the only kind available . . . well, that was when you needed to laugh more than ever.

“Scoffer,” she said, and continued: “Anyway, I spent time with the Committee running things in what's left of Corvallis; mostly the aggie and engineering faculties and some other folk—Luther's on it himself. They're talking about a meeting of the honest communities sometime this autumn or early winter to discuss mutual aid—especially about the bandit problem.”

“Well, blessed be Moo U,” Chuck said. “That could be
really
useful.”

Juniper nodded. “Good people, though a bit suspicious. They can offer a lot of varieties of seeds and grafts, and stud services from their rams and bulls and stallions, and farming and building help in general. They've got real experts there; I've got forty pages of notes, advice they gave me on our problems. The difficulty is that what they want most besides bowstaves is livestock; heifers and mares and ewes particularly, to breed upgrade herds from their pedigree stock.”

Chuck Barstow breathed on his nails and polished them on an imaginary lapel; Dennis grinned like a happy bear.

“Those Herefords?” Juniper asked.

“Yup. We got a small party through there about five days after you left. They got back day before yesterday, driving their flocks before them—twenty-five head of cattle, twenty sheep, six horses. Mostly breeding females.”

Juniper made a delighted tip-of-the-hat gesture to the two grinning men. That solved their unused-pasture problem, with a vengeance! They could get a good crop of calves, lambs and foals too. And they could slaughter a steer every couple of weeks . . .

It wasn't; by all they could tell, it was a gauntlet of horrors, everything from plain old-style robbers to Eaters. Aloud she went on: “What's it like over there in the Bend country?”

Chuck went on: “The Change hit them about like us, just not so much. Bend and Madras and the other bigger towns have pretty well collapsed, but a lot of their people got out to the farms and ranches, since there weren't millions of them to start with; if anything, they're short of working hands.”

That
sounded familiar. It just took so much effort to get anything done without machinery, particularly since nobody really knew
how
to do a lot of the necessary things by hand. There were descriptions in books, but they always turned out to be maddeningly incomplete and/or no substitute for the knowledge experience built into your muscles and nerves.

“And they've got local governments functioning in a shadowy sort of way—they're calling it the Central Oregon Rancher's Association. They've got more livestock than they can feed, too, without the irrigated pastures . . . this year, at least; next year's going to be tighter for them too. We traded them bows and shafts and jacks for the stock, and for jerky and rawhides. They've got bandits of their own and the ranchers who're running things over there want weapons bad. They
really
miss their rifles.”

“Congratulations,” Juniper said sincerely.

The night when she'd nearly had a fit over hitting a man in the head seemed a long way away, except when the bad dreams came. She wasn't happy about becoming case-hardened, but it was part of the price of personal sanity and collective survival.

“Congratulations!” she said again. “It sounds like the eastern slope is a lot better off, at least for now.”

“What was it like out there in the valley?” Dennis said. “I
still
say it was a crazy risk, you going out.”

“Worth it,” Juniper said. “Rumor isn't reliable and we have to know what to expect. The way the world's closed down to walking distance, you don't know until you go there and see or it comes to you. I'm not absolutely indispensable, either.”

“The hell you aren't,” Dennis and Chuck said together.

“I may be the High Priestess, but I'm not the Lady come in human form, you know, except symbolically and in the Circle.”

Chuck snorted; he tended to pessimism, as befitted a gardener-turned-farmer.

“You're here and you're Chief. We're alive where most aren't,” he pointed out. “
And
we're doing much better than most who
are
still alive. The two things are probably connected. Anyway, to repeat the question . . .”