Dies the Fire (57 page)

Tell the truth,
Havel told himself.

“Beautiful? Nah,” he said. “Cute, in a . . . cute sort of way, sort of like a scruffy hobo pixie. About five-three, redheaded, thirtyish—looked like she'd been spending a lot of time out of doors. Skinny. Nice singing voice, though.”

Astrid finished up: “And to Larsdalen and home, he showed the way!”

There was a moment of silence, and then a burst of whooping cheers; he wasn't quite sure whether they were for him, as the subject of the epic, or for Astrid's treatment of it. It certainly came out more colorful than the dirty, boring, often nauseating reality. Eventually they dispersed towards the open space in front of the wagons; there had been talk of dancing. Of course, that meant the Bearkiller analogue of music . . .

“Got the storyteller's gift, that girl,” Will Hutton said. “Tells things the way they
should
have been.” He popped one of the pastries into his mouth.

“Married this woman for her cookin',” he went on contentedly.

Havel grinned at the smoldering look Angelica gave her husband; the fire that slipped down his throat as he sipped the bourbon was no more pungent-sweet.

“My cooking?
De veras?
And here I thought it was because my brothers were going to kill me
and
the worthless
mallate
cowboy I'd taken up with!”

“Now, honeybunch, you know it was your momma I was frightened of,” he said, mock-penitent.

Then he looked over at the cleared area, brightly lit with half a dozen big lanterns. “Oh, sweet Jesus, no, no! Spare us, Lord!”

Havel glanced that way himself, and snorted. Eric Larsson had a feed-store cap on backward, and a broomstick in his hand, evidently meant to be a mike stand; he was prancing around—

“Christ,” his father said. “A capella karaoke rap! How could it come to this? How did I fail him?”

“That boy may be able to jump some,” Hutton said dourly. “But Lord, Lord, please don't let him try to sing!”

Luanne Hutton leaned against the wagon behind Eric, holding her ribs and gasping feebly with laughter. A few of the other young Bearkillers were making stabs at dancing hip-hop style, and doing about as well as you'd expect of Idaho farm kids with no musical assist.

Hutton surged upright. “C'mon, Angel. We got to put things right; let's find Zeppelt and his squeeze-box.”

Havel looked at Ken Larsson. “What gives with you gettting your vineyard guy from
Oz
of all places?”

“Australia has a lot of fine winemakers,” Larsson said defensively. “Hugo Zeppelt is first-rate. Smart enough to hide out in that old fallout shelter my father built, too,
and
get our horses into the woods when the foragers from Salem came by.”

The chubby little Australian and his tall gangling blond wife had pushed Eric out of position with the Huttons' help, and they were warming up on their instruments—accordion and tuba.
Oom-pa-oom-pa
split the night, already familiar from the trip back; Josh and Anne Sanders started organizing the dance—they had no musical talent to speak of, but she'd helped at Church socials a good deal in her very rural Montana neighborhood.

“Do-si-do, turn your partner,” Havel said. “Not only an Aussie with an accordion, but an Aussie who's obsessed with
polkas
?”

“He's from the Barossa valley in South Australia, and it was settled by Germans,” Larsson said defensively. “And Angelica likes it.”

“She's Tejano,” Havel said. “San Antonio and the Hill Country used to be lousy with krauts. The oom-pa-pa beat spread like the clap. Put Zeppelt and Astrid together, and in a generation we'll all be wearing lederhosen to go with the pointed ears . . . the Tubas of Elfland, going oom-pa, oom-pa.”

“C'mon,” Pamela said; she'd been quiet that evening. “Let's dance, oh fiancé. Mike's in one of his grumbling moods. Signe and the dog have to listen but we don't.”

They wandered over to where couples were prancing to the lively beat. Signe sipped at her own whiskey; her cheeks were a little flushed. For a moment they leaned shoulder-to-shoulder; then Louhi crawled between them, licking at hands and faces.

“All right, that settles it. I christen thee
Louhi,
and you can start learning manners. Been ten years since I had a dog.”

Signe smiled, tousling the young hound's ears. “I'd have figured you for a dog sort of guy, Mike.”

He shrugged. “I was, when I was a kid. Had this German shepherd called Max—very original, hey? From the time I was eight until just before I graduated high school.”

He smiled, looking into the flames: “He used to sleep on the foot of my bed, bad breath and gas and all, and I even took him hunting.”

“It's odd to take a dog hunting?”

“Max? Yeah, sort of like taking along a brass band. He saved a
lot
of deer from death. My dad couldn't stand it—the mines were always laying people off with about a week's warning, and there were four of us kids, so a lot of the time we
needed
that venison. But Max, he'd howl something awful if you tied him up when you got in the canoe.”

“Canoe?”

“Yeah, we had this creek that went by our place, and ran through some marshland—man, when I remember what my mom could do with wild rice and duck—then into a little lake with some pretty good hunting woods. Even better if you took a day or two and portaged a bit. White pine country before the loggers got there; lots of silver birch, and maple. We had a good sugarbush on our land, in the back of the woodlot.”

“It sounds lovely,” she said. “In fact, it sounds like Sweden—we visited there a couple of times, Smaland, where our family came from originally.”

Havel's mouth turned up. “Yeah, the Iron Range country is the grimmer parts of Scandahoofia come again—it's even more like Finland. Makes you wonder if our ancestors had any brains at all—those of present company excepted, of course.”

“Que?”
Signe said.

That was one of Angelica's verbal ticks, and a lot of people had picked it up while he was gone.

Havel mimed wonder: “Like, did they say to themselves:
Ooooh, rocks and swamps, crappy soil, mosquitoes bigger than pigeons, blackflies like crows, and nine months of frozen winter blackness! Just like what we left. To hell with pushing on to golden, mellow California—let's settle here!
”

Signe laughed and wrinkled her nose: “I saw the Larsson home in Smaland, and you could grow a
great
crop of rocks around it. Oregon probably looked
really
good by comparison. I mean, Sweden's a pretty nice place to live now—or was before the Change, you know what I mean—but back in the old days, you could starve to
death
there.”

“And in 1895 the Upper Peninsula of Michigan
didn't
have a lot of Russians trying to draft you into fighting for the Czar, yeah, point taken. Anyway, Max, he would have starved to death if he'd had to hunt on his own—what the shrinks call poor impulse control. He got his nose frostbit a couple of times trying to track down field mice in winter; he'd go galloping across the fields with his muzzle making like a snowplow. I was too young myself to train him properly when he was a pup.”

Louhi crawled further up, stuck her nose into Mike's armpit and promptly went to sleep.

“I'll do better with Louhi here. Hounds scent-hunt anyway.”

Signe considered him for a while, head on one side: “What happened to Max?”

“Besides scaring the bejayzus out of deer and squirrel, getting into pissing matches with skunks, and shoving his face into a porcupine's quills once a year? He used to get into the maple-sap buckets in the spring, too, pretty regular. Ever tried to get that stuff out of the fur of a hundred and ten pounds of reluctant Alsatian?”

“In the end, I meant.”

“In the end? Got run over a little while before I graduated high school,” Havel said. “Broke his back; I found him trying to crawl home. I had to put him down.”

And he kept expecting me to make it better,
Havel remembered.
Right up to the second I pulled the trigger.

“That must have been terrible,” Signe said, laying a hand on his.

He turned his over, and they linked fingers. “Yeah, I missed him.”

To himself:
I couldn't have proven in a court who did it, but then, I didn't have to.

A flicker of grim pleasure at a memory of cartilage crumbling under his knuckles:
Beating me out with Shirley was one thing, but killing my dog . . .

“Is that why you didn't get another dog?”

“Nah, didn't have the time, and it's not fair on the animal if you don't—they're not like cats,” Havel said. “Now things are different.”

Signe nodded, and looked over to the open space; it was square-dancing now.

“That fiancé thing seems to be breaking out all over,” she said. A pause: “You . . . you've been sort of quiet since you got back, Mike. I . . . there wasn't anything with this Juniper woman, was there? Eric won't talk about it at all.”

“Just giving things a rest,” he said, sitting up and resting his free arm on his knees. “And yeah, I won't deny there was a sort of mutual attraction, pretty strong for short acquaintance. She had a lot of character.”

Signe froze, her hand clenching on his, and he went on: “But we decided we both had commitments elsewhere; she had her kid to look after, and her people. I do have commitments here, don't I?”

Signe nodded, flushing redder. “Ummm . . . I hope so. Nice night for a walk out?”

Havel uncoiled to his feet, pulling her up. “Walking's nice, but we can do that any night. Right now, why don't we dance?”

She smiled, a brilliant grin that made her eyes like turquoise in the firelight.

“I'll dance your feet right off, mister!” she said.

 

 

 

A room on the new second floor of the Chief's Hall held the clinic. Juniper Mackenzie swung her feet down from the stirrups and over the edge of the table; her voice was almost a squeak: “I'm
what
?” she said.

“Pregnant.”

“Are you sure?”

The room was still a bit bare; glass-fronted cabinets, rows of medicines and instruments and herbal simples, anatomical diagrams, and a well-laden bookshelf. It smelled of antiseptic and musky dried wildflowers and fresh sappy pine. Judy finished washing her hands—the stainless-steel sinks had come from the kitchen of a Howard Johnson's ten miles northwest—and turned, leaning back against the counter as she dried her hands on a towel and spoke tartly: “Look, Juney, I'm not a doctor and I've felt inadequate often enough trying to do a doctor's job here, but I
am
a trained midwife and I can recognize a pregnancy when I see one!”

“I simply can't believe I'm . . .” Juniper said, letting the sentence trail off weakly.

“Pregnant,” Judy said with sardonic patience. “Preggers. Knocked up. Expecting.
Enceinte.
In the family way. Have a bun in the oven. Providing a home for someone back from the Summerlands—”

“I'm familiar with the concept! I thought I was just missing a period because I'd lost weight—how could this have happened?”

Judy's voice dropped into a sugary singsong she never actually used with children: “Sometimes, little girl, when the Goddess and the God fill a man and woman's hearts, so that they love each other very much, they show their love by—”

“Oh, shut up, you she-quack! What am I going to
do
about it?”

“You want a D and C? Pretty straightforward at this stage.”

“No,” she said, firmly and at once, surprising herself a little; her mind had apparently made itself up without telling her. “No, I'm definitely keeping it.”

She looked around the room. It was bright and cheery, morning sun bright on fresh-sawn wood and paint, but the only personal touch so far was a water-color Eilir had done for Judy back before the Change. It showed the Goddess as the Maiden of Stars; the features were done in a naïf schoolgirl style, but held an enormous benevolence.

I never thought there would be any child but Eilir,
she thought.
But it seems You had other ideas. . . .

“Not much doubt about who the father is,” Judy said. “Not unless there's been a miracle—and you're not a virgin, not Jewish, and that legend's from the wrong mythos anyway.”

“No,” Juniper said. “No doubt at all. But let's not be spreading the parentage abroad, shall we? It could be . . . awkward down the line.”

“Well,” Judy said, briskly practical, starting a new page in the file on the table. “It isn't your first time; that's good. How did Eilir go—apart from the measles, that is?”

“She was premature, eight months and a bit, but otherwise fine; seven pounds and no problems, no anesthesia and no epidural, three hour delivery. No morning sickness, even. I was just sixteen, and didn't realize what was happening until about three months in.”

Judy's brows went up. “Well, that's an old-fashioned Catholic upbringing for you.”

“Speaking of my mother, now that I think back on it, I remember her saying that I was easy, but a bit early, too.”

“Likely to be a genetic factor with the premature birth, then,” she said. “Have to check carefully later.”

“I'll just have to make him feel welcome, I suppose,” Juniper said, smiling a little and putting a hand on her stomach.

“He?”

“Suddenly . . . I've got a feeling.”