The Protector's War (51 page)

After dinner was past and the first stars appearing over the hills to the east Juniper found herself sitting on the tail of a wagon, looking over a small low fire at a circle of children's faces, huddled with their plaids or sleeping bags across their shoulders—night could still be chill, towards the end of April. They nibbled at cookies or pastries, with a little prodding and whispering and giggling towards the back; the moon shone silvery through a whisp of cloud, turning it into a glowing mist, and the stars were scattered thickly across the sky. Noise died away as she asked: “Well, which shall it be, then?”

While the little ones clamored, she checked that her mug was easy to her hand on the boards of the wagon bed, and nicely full of Dennie's home-brewed ale, a large crock of which had been standing in the cold creek waters since they camped. Talking was thirsty work, and she'd be at it until the parents carted off the last protesting tot. She blew foam off the top and took a swallow as they cried out:

“Toad and the gypsies!”

“Bilbo and the trolls!”

“Treasure Island!”

“Rob Roy and the Duke!”

“Pinocchio!”

“Robin Hood and the Sheriff!” her own son cried; Rudi had a weakness for hero-tales of derring-do.

That last one had special relevance. Motor cars and talking toads were equally the stuff of misty legend now, but oppressive kings and wicked sheriffs were unfortunately all too real—the word “sheriff” had already become a synonym for “lord” or “ruler” in many places. Especially so east of the Cascades, where deliberate archaisms of the sort favored by most of the Willamette communities weren't so common. Not all of them were that much of an improvement on Arminger or his new-made barons; you could be just as thorough a weasel-souled bastard of a man as John Lackland or the Sheriff of Nottingham without picking a fancy title out of a book.

“None of those!” Juniper said, dropping into her storyteller's voice—it had a bit more of the brogue in it—and laughed at the groans. Children wanting a favorite story over and over hadn't changed, either.

“No, it's a tale of Toad I'll be telling you, but a new one; how Toad and his friends fought off the wicked weasels who tried to seize Toad Hall. Now, you know Toad had a good heart, but he could be a foolish fellow when the mood took him—perhaps Robin Goodfellow had been about his cradle, eh? Like a little person I could name but won't, the one with the sunset-colored hair there.”

Rudi grinned and ducked his head. Juniper put her guitar across her lap, and strummed a cord; she'd be speaking mostly, but an occasional tune didn't hurt, nor a little background music to help out the magic of the words.

“Difficult Mr. Toad found it to remember that
is minic a bhris beál duine a shrón,
it is often that a person's mouth broke their nose.”

She could see lips moving as they memorized that. A few didn't get it, and their friends filled them in, miming a punch in the face.

“So long ago, when Toad and Mole and Ratty and Badger lived along the river in a land much like ours, and the people of feather and fur and stream spoke everyday with our heavy-footed kind…”

There was a mass sigh from the children, and they leaned forward, their eyes bright in the firelight.

Beneath the happiness, a small cold voice spoke at the back of Juniper's mind:
Enjoy yourself while you can, Chief of the Mackenzies. Storm clouds fly, and ravens gather.

 

“Heave-
ho!
”

The cry rang out again, and a dozen hands hauled at the rope. The Lady's pillar swung erect, the base thumping down into its bedding, and more Sutter-downers with padded poles held it erect while the braces were fixed that would keep it so until the concrete dried. The tackle and pulleys were taken down from the arch above, and the ceremonial gate at the northeast quadrant of the circle was complete.

Juniper had to admit the folk of Sutterdown had spared nothing to make their covenstead splendid; in fact, seeing such a thing openly put the town's heart left her a little uneasy, after long years of discretion before the Change. She knew consciously that in the Mackenzie territories the Craft was the faith of the majority these days, had been for years in fact, and of a
large
and ever-growing majority at that. Unconsciously…

Two hills anchored the western edge of Sutterdown, each a hundred and forty feet above the general level of the town. The covenstead was on the summit of the southern hill, with a magnificent view of the curling Sutter River glinting in the noonday sun—town and stream had been named after the same pioneer who'd built a ferry here in 1846—and the farmlands beyond to west, south and north, the low shaggy hills rising towards the mountains to the northeast. Downslope were the crenellations of the new town wall and its low towers with their witches'-hat roofs; beyond that was a great green park in the U-shaped bend of the river, an expanse of trees and flower-starred spring meadow speckled now with the tents of visitors come for the festival. The new-planted Sutterdown
nemed
—Sacred Wood—was in the park too, a broad circle of oaks and beeches that would be majestic in a generation or two.

The top of the hill was so already. It had been planed flat, then replanted with grass, flower banks red and blue and white and purple, bright bushes and young trees. The center held the big open-sided circular building itself; great pillarlike Douglas fir trunks supporting a truss roof covered in wooden strakes, the ends of the rafters carved into the animal-head shapes of the Mackenzie totems. Inside was a brick pavement with the symbols of the Quarters at their stations and swirling patterns elsewhere; the altar at the north was a block of blue-green nephrite acid-etched in curling knotwork. Today the four Quarters held gifts; images of the God and Goddess as Apollo and Aphrodite in the north, done in some hard white stone; a ritual sword in the south; great straw-wound glass firkins of wine in the west—that had been Astrid—and Dun Juniper's contribution, covered with a cloth marked with the pentagram in the east.

The bowl-shaped hearth in the very center of the pavement was full of split oak, stacked ready to light. That would be the Sutterdown
teine eigin,
the needfire; all the community's hearths and the Beltane bonfires would be kindled from it.

Warm spring wind cuffed at Juniper's robe; the hood was back, and a garland of lilies and verbena covered the headband that held the silver crescent moon on her brows, with green ribbons fluttering. The air held a scent of incense and flowers; and of damp coolness from the river, of fresh timber and mortar and brick. Most of the other robed participants about her wore garlands as well, and many carried thyrsi, long willow wands decorated with bells and ribbons and cowslips; their slight silvery music made a pleasant undertone to the murmur of voices from the crowd on the slope below. Then a great cheer came from the eastern gate, and roars from the others; the winners of the race about the town's outer boundaries were coming.

Soon Juniper could see the first of them running up the steep way from the town square and city hall to the hilltop, the leader with the yellow banner of the East and of Air waving it aloft. Grinning and panting the others followed, spreading out around the pillar circle to place their banners at the Quarters.

Dennis Martin Mackenzie, High Priest of the Singing Moon, was beside her as she moved forward then; he had a solid dignity to him in the robe and antlered headdress, a gravity that his smile did nothing to dispel. The High Priest and Priestess of Sutterdown—Tom Brannigan and his wife Mora—fol-lowed, as Juniper took up the bowl of May wine and poured a libation to the new-set pillars.

“Aphrodite, Foam-born Goddess, Bringer of joy, Lady of our hearts' delight! Apollo of the Sun, Lord of Light, God who loves justice and due proportion in men and cities! Sutterdown today dedicates itself to the God and Goddess in Your shapes. Bring Your gifts within its walls, and within our hearts!”

She sipped from the bowl; strawberries and cool wine, flowers and ground woodruff. Another cheer rose from below, and a sudden thudding of drums; drums and chanting to drive the power outward, out to the markers beyond the walls where the banners had been. She looked up to meet the carven eyes, and blinked a little; Dennie had been at her all winter to advise him on the work, but she'd told him to go meditate and ask the deities how
they
wanted to be shown. Evidently, he'd done just that, but you could only see the full fruit of it when the pillars were in their appointed place.

At first glance the face of Apollo was purely the Olympian, balanced and clear, the ever-victorious Light that dispels darkness. But if you looked a little longer the eyes seemed dark themselves, fathomless with incommunicable wisdom…

Apollo Loxias, the voice from the fissure in the navel of Earth. Pythian Apollo.
The words of the ancient poet rang in her heart:
He came down the mountain like the shadow of falling night…
and the words became a vision in her heart, of a tall striding darkness edged with fire.

The delicate beauty of the Cyprian was more than it seemed as well; one minute a woman in the full flush of beauty whose parted lips promised, next a shy girl, then someone older, stern and wise…

Dennie, you are wiser than you know or will admit. These will remind anyone who sees them that the forms the God and Goddess take are true—but that They are also more than any form can contain.

Juniper took up the sword and made the first ritual cut in the space between the carved pillars, closing the Circle to create the sacred space; then paced around it sunwise:

“I conjure you, O Circle of Power, that you may be a meeting place of love and joy and truth; a shield against all wickedness and evil; a boundary between the world of human kind and the realms of the Mighty Ones…”

Sutterdown Dedicants tossed and twirled the banners as she called the Quarters. The Sutterdown High Priest and Priestess knelt to receive the gifts on the Eastern table; wands, crowns of silver leaves and moon opal, of antlers and gold; and the trifold woven cords that Juniper and Dennis bent to tie around their waists, white and black and red.

“Priest and Priestess are you, as are we,” Juniper said, raising them and exchanging the ritual kiss. “Free are you, and your folk, as are we.”

She'd known Tom Brannigan for a decade and a half now, since she first drove herself through Sutterdown to visit the land she'd inherited from her great-uncle and stopped for a beer and to try to set up a gig playing her brand of music. Most of that time he'd seemed a slightly stolid sort like his wife Mora, people whose imagination came out in his brewing and a mutual gift for making others feel at home in their tavern. She had no doubt he'd taken up the Craft because everyone else in Sutterdown seemed to be converting after the Reverend Dixon dropped dead, which made it a likely looking thing to do, and had risen in it because he was shrewd and popular, ambitious for his town and himself as well.

Together, Juniper and Dennis chanted; and now there was a look on Brannigan's face that she had never seen there before, but recognized without a moment's hesitation—recognized from the inside. A wild torrent that was joy and terror and neither, a communion with something utterly Other and yet as familiar as a parent's touch in the night; vast beyond knowing and woven into every atom of your being.

When he rose the Dun Juniper pair stepped back and bowed low and listened as he called the Goddess into his High Priestess, and tears of happiness poured down her cheeks.

For Juniper the feeling was different this time; more like warm hands pressed on her shoulder, and the shadow of an infinite smile:
Well done, daughter of our hearts.

 

Speeches,
Juniper thought.
Do I
never
get away from them?

Brannigan and Mora were still shaken; joyful, but not all that coherent. And it took a
lot
to leave Tom Brannigan speechless…

There were about a thousand people living in Sutterdown, and double that here for the festival; more than one in eight Mackenzies, and a rather higher proportion of the teenagers and adults. All of them seemed to be looking up at her, grouped in a big semicircle on the eastern slopes of the hill that held Sutterdown's great covenstead. Behind her the needfire crackled in the new covenstead's hearth, and torchbearers stood ready to race out with the
teine eigin
blaze to kindle festival bonfires and household stoves.

“Mackenzies!” she said. “Ostara is the promise of spring, and Beltane is the promise fulfilled as summer comes back to us. We've pruned and we've planted, plowed and sown, sheared and doctored our stock and seen to the lambing, swept winter out of our houses and our hearts. I think we've earned a little celebration on this night when the veil between the worlds is thin, don't you?”

A roaring cheer spread up the hillside; the bagpipers were at it again, and the massed drums at the foot of the hill thundered, until she raised her hands once more.