Dies the Fire

Shadows flickered over them from tall roadside trees; between them were vistas of fields on either side, and growing patches of tall conifer forest ru

Juniper kept an eye cocked on Cagney and Lacey as her fingers moved on the strings of the guitar and she sang:

"Fly free your good gray hawk

To gather the golden rod

And face your horse unto the clouds

Above yon gay green wood.

Oh, it's weary by the Ullswater

And the misty breakfern way

Till through the crutch of the Kirkstane pass-"

The slow staccato clop and crunch of the hooves beat a rhythm below the rumbling wheels, and the rattle and creak of the wagon's wooden framework. She could smell dust from the road, the strong grassy smell of the big platter-footed gray horses, and gree

Underneath the country smells was a tang of burning, something they hardly noticed anymore-it had been constant since the Change. The Willamette was a giant trough, and the smoke from the vast city fires would linger for a long time-until the fall rains came to clean the air, most likely.

Not surprising. With no power, what's the first thing people will do? Make fires, for heat and light and cooking, and when one gets out of control…

The music made the thoughts go away, at least for a while. When she'd finished the song, Juniper put the guitar behind her-there was a padded rack for it on her traveling wagon-and took the reins back. The road wasn't as straight and level now, as they wound up the creekside towards the mountains.

"That was nice," Sally said. "I didn't go in much for that sort of music, but… I've missed music. Any sort of music."

She'd started talking more since she'd stopped being so fearful of the strangers-a fear for which Juniper couldn't blame her, considering the circumstances of their meeting. She could blame her for her soft-pop tastes, but didn't, not aloud.

There were types of music Juniper liked but didn't play herself-she had a weakness for old-time blues, Americana and even some types of hip-hop-and she'd probably never hear them again.

My entire CD collection is useless, except as coasters, she thought. And all the old vinyl too. No music but the live kind, from now on. Maybe I should expand my repertoire.

"I was thinking," Sally said. "About those songs you do… I mean, the knights and swords and horses… I mean, is all that coming back?"

"All that never existed, not the way the ballads paint it," Juniper said. "I don't think what's coming will be exactly like the real past, either-but it's certainly going to have more in common with it than with the way things were right before the Change. Which is a pity; things were real rough back in the old days."

Sally smiled. "I suspect it's going to be a weird old world, when things settle down."

"That it will," Juniper said, musing; it was easier than thinking about the immediate future. "Well… buffalo on the Plains, again, perhaps?"

Sally nodded. "And not just buffalo. I took wildlife biology and ecology courses before I met Peter, and I did volunteer work at the zoo before Terry was born. Guess which country in the world has the most tigers?"

Juniper blinked in surprise. "Ah… India? China?"

Sally shook her head. "The United States of America. Over twenty thousand of them, mostly privately owned."

"Like that Tiger Lady in New Jersey, who turned out to have a whole pack of them?"

"Right. A lot of them are in enclosures they could get out of, with some determined effort-places out in the country. Tigers are really adaptable and smart and they breed fast, and without guns shooting at them they're very hard to kill. I'd be surprised if a lot of them didn't get loose… "

"And there are those exotic-wildlife ranches," Juniper said thoughtfully. "Many of them well out in remote places, to be sure. And ostriches and emus and… why, I saw llamas in plenty the last time I was out Bend way."

Sally agreed. "If I know them, the volunteers at the zoo in Portland will probably turn the animals there loose when they can't feed them. It'll make for some interesting ecological swings, when people are… rare… again."

Something else to worry about, Juniper thought; it made a change from obsessively not thinking about what was happening to all the people right now.

The hills pushed closer to the creekside road, and fresh-painted board fences appeared to their left. She pulled in slightly on the reins, calling out a soft whoa! to the team, and the wagon slowed to an ambling walk as they came level with a tall log-framed gate on the north side of the road.

"Is this your place?" Sally asked.

"No, it's the Fairfax farm," Juniper said, pointing with her left hand. "They're the last house below me. It's not really a working farm, more of a hobby place for the Fairfaxes- they're retired potato-growers from Idaho."

She stood, resting one hand on the brake lever beside her and shading her eyes with the other; it was a warm day for March, and su

The gravel-and-dirt road they were on ran east up the narrowing valley of Artemis Butte Creek; half a mile ahead it turned north to her land. It was all infinitely familiar to her, even the deep quiet, but somehow strange… perhaps too quiet, without even the distant mutter of a single engine. The Ponderosa-style gate Mr. Fairfax had put up when he bought the fifty-acre property three years ago was to her left, northward; the little stream flowed bright over the rocky bed to her right.

Hills rose ever more steeply to either side, turning into low forested mountains as they hemmed the valley in north and south; behind them the road snaked west like a yellow-brown ribbon, off towards the invisible flats of the Willamette. A cool breath came from the ridges, shaggy with Douglas fir, vine maple and Oregon oak.

"You can't see my cabin from here, but it's that way," Juniper went on, shifting her pointing arm a little east of north, up the side of the mountain.

"It's in the forest on the slope?" Sally asked.

From here, there didn't look to be any other alternative; the ground reared up from the back of the Fairfax place to the summit three thousand feet above; most of it at forty-five degrees or better, with no sign of habitation. Eastward ridges rose higher to the Cascades proper, snow peaks floating against heaven.

"No," Juniper said. "You can't see it, not from here, but there's a break in the slope-the side of the hill levels off into sort of a bench along the south side about four hundred feet up. There's a long strip more or less level, a meadow a mile long and a quarter wide. The creek crosses it from higher up, then turns west when it hits the head of this valley where the hills pinch together, and the road follows it. Right after the Civil War my ancestors arrived and spent two futile lifetimes trying to make a decent living off that patch up there. Maybe it reminded them of East Te

"Not very good land?"

"Middling, what there is of it that isn't straight up and down, but Lady and Lord, it's pretty! There's two creeks and a nice strong spring right by the cabin. All but the bench is in trees, near eight hundred acres of our woods, and more forest all around and behind it. We Mackenzies got to Oregon just a wee bit late for the share-out, you might say-story of our line since we left County Antrim for Pe