Dies the Fire

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, De

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.

You'll be hungry once you start eating. Then all you reverend elders can yell at each other and wave your arms in the air. I'm going off with the book scavenging detail.

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.

Be careful.

Always. Bye, everyone!

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.

Would that everyone else did the same!

"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 te ata thuas oltar deoch air; an te ata thios buailter. 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," De

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 Sut-terdown 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 gri

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…

At least we're not fighting a war anymore.

Twenty-eight

"Confirm… 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."