The Protectors war

She also strongly suspected that the Protector slipped the reiver bands help to distract the southern valley while he prepared for war; it was just the sort of thing Arminger and the Portland Protective Association would do. Some of the outlaw gangs used the taller buildings in Salem as bases for bicycle-borne raids, with their binocular-equipped lookouts lurking about the top-floor windows like maggots hiding behind the empty eye sockets of a skull. It was a lot harder for pursuers to run them to earth here in this stone-and-steel wilderness, too, so that noose and blade could put an end to them.

And to think I was once strong against capital punishment: to be sure, I'd never seen people killed by bandits, then. Plus Salem plain gives me the willies.

The physical stink of death was long gone, but surely Earth herself bore the memory of despair and terror, in the place where so many had passed untimely to the Other-world. She thought Eilir felt it too, and Rudi more strongly than either-though he simply set his lips and endured it, with composure beyond his years.

"So, Sam," she called to the First Armsman of the Mackenzies, and nodded towards the ruins. He'd picked her escort, and ridden with it. "Fast and loud or slow and cautious?"

"About equal risk, Lady Juniper," he said.

Sam Aylward's voice had a slow south-country accent from deepest rural Hampshire, a yokel burr as thick and English as clotted cream. An adventurous life in the SAS and sheer chance had landed him in Oregon when the Change came, hiking the mountain paths. She'd stumbled across him while she was hunting for meat for the pot, lying trapped and injured after a tumble into a ravine in the Cascades above her cabin.

Cernu

"I'd say go for loud and fast," he concluded, ru

The square Saxon face was calm as hie waited for her answer, the thick-armed, barrel-chested body utterly at ease. He looked slow, to someone who hadn't seen him move when speed was called for.

"Fast and loud, then," she said. "We'll go down Center, turn south out of town on Twenty-fourth, go past Turner and Marion: We can make Lebanon before nightfall, if the horses all hold up. But lunch first."

A packhorse carried food in two large baskets strapped to its cargo saddle; round loaves of good brown bread still slightly warm from Larsdalen's kitchens, butter, hard cheese and sausage salted and dried and smoked until eating it was like chewing rather tasty steel-belted radial tires. Plain food, but riding long hours was hungry work, and most of them remembered times when this would have been better than a feast.

She drew the little sgian dubh knife from its sheath in her right boot top-eating with a ten-inch fighting dirk like the one at her belt was not advisable, unless you really disliked the shape of your nose-and sketched a figure on the surface of a loaf, chanting:

"Harvest Lord who dies for the ripened grain Corn Mother who births the fertile field Blessed be those who share this bounty;

And blessed the mortals who toiled with You

Their hands helping Earth to bring forth life."

Everyone present was a Dedicant at least; many echoed her, and they all joined in the final "Blessed be" before pitching in.

Mom? Eilir signed, with her mouth full. Remember when you used to busk at the state fair in Salem before the Change, and we'd go to that Jaliscan place on Silverton Road? Lord and Lady, but those shrimp in garlic butter!

Ah, that was fine indeed, mo chroi! Juniper replied.

Carefully, she did not wonder what had happened to Jose and Carlita. If you didn't know someone's fate by Change Year Nine, the probabilities ranged from a quick death to something really bad.

Eilir's face fell a little, probably at a similar thought. She got up to join the other youngsters but stopped for a second to say: Mostly that all seems like a dream – the old days – as if it was just a story someone told me. Other times just for a moment, it's this that doesn't seem real.

Juniper smiled and ate in friendly silence, listening to the water's roar and the wind's whisper, watching Eilir and Astrid and their friends chaffing at each other; watching a young man take the time to groom his horse, and a girl pick wildflowers growing in cracked pavement, weaving some into the mane of her horse and tucking one behind her ear.

Aylward munched stolidly, his eyes never leaving the road they'd take, sca

At last he dusted crumbs off his hands and raised a brow at her. She nodded at his unspoken query.

"Right, you lot." He turned to the rest of their party, who'd repacked the pa

Gearing up meant stuffing the flat beret-like bo

But you didn't string a yew longbow until you had some prospect of using it. Wooden bows tended to "follow"-to develop a permanent weakening bend-if left strung too long. Even the reflex-deflex models Sam had taught them to make, with their subtle, shallow double curve heat-treated into the staves. Archery and hunting had been his hobbies for decades before the Change.

Juniper watched with fond pride as Eilir pulled her longbow from the carrying loops beside the quiver slung over her back. Then she put the lower tip's nock-piece of polished antler against the outside of her left boot and stepped through between string and stave. That let her brace the riser handle against her right buttock; she pulled down sharply with both hands as she flexed her body against the heavy resistance of the seasoned wood, using one hand to slide the cord's loop up into the grooves of the polished elkhorn tip. The movements had the easy, practiced grace of an otter sliding down a riverbank.

That left her with a smooth shallow curve just under six feet long, D-section limbs of oiled and polished yellow yew on either side of a black-walnut riser grip; forty-five arrows jutted over her right shoulder, fletched with gray goose feathers and armed with a mixture of delta-shaped broad-heads and narrow six-sided bodkins designed to punch through armor. Juniper bent her own bow as well; it had a fifty-pound draw, which was the lightest in the group. Ayl-ward's was more than twice that; she'd seen him put a shaft right through a bull elk's ribs and have it come out the other still going fast-and once knock an armored man off a galloping horse at two hundred paces.

Lord and Lady, it doesn't even disturb me to think about that anymore, she thought with a slight mental shudder. Not that I was ever really a pacifist, but: