Страница 43 из 146
He'd teased Juney for years before the Change about the way she put on the Celtic thing, however much it went with her style of music, and about how her coveners were always pulling some sort of myth out of the Irish twilight- of course he'd been a cowan then, an unbeliever, and hadn't understood the symbolism. Juniper Mackenzie might have been the one who told the band gathered at her cabin that to survive they would have to live like a clan, as it was in the old days-but he didn't think she had meant to be taken quite so literally. It had been De
It drives her bananas, De
Chuck raised an eyebrow, obviously following the thought: "De
"Oh, now you're getting nasty," he protested. "Astrid's a compulsive fantasist. I just have a well-informed sense of humor."
The other man gri
Urk, he thought. You've got a point there. He glared at the Armsman.
Chuck spread his free hand and replied, "No offense. It's done us good, I think- looking different helped people believe things were different." A sly smile. "And speaking of Celtic motifs, how much is the covenstead at Sutterdown paying you to carve this tree? And in what?"
"Pain in the ass not having money anymore, isn't it?" De
Chuck raised a brow: "Not payment in Bra
De
Chuck's grin was honestly admiring. "Lost none of your i
"Since it's a red blend that's mostly pinot noir and less than a year in the wood, yeah, pretty much. And ru
He looked down at the wood, smiling, and touched it lightly with his fingertips again. "It's all go
"Sutterdown ought to be concentrating on getting their damn town wall finished," Chuck grumbled.
He wore two hats in the clan: Lord of the Harvest, which translated as Minister of Agriculture, and Second Armsman, which in peacetime meant going around chivvying people to keep their training and defensive works up to scratch.
"No rest for the Wiccan," he went on with a sigh, settling his helmet and heading for the gates.
And he puns, too, De
Dun Juniper was bustling with preparations for the Chiefs homecoming and the big pre-Ostara dance by the time he and Terry had swept up the chips for the kindling box and dragged a tarpaulin up to cover the workpiece. Terry's mother Sally was over in the Hall, helping with the decorations and cooking-her usual jobs were principal of the Dun Juniper high school and Lore-Mistress for the Clan as a whole, overseeing the schools and Moon Schools, but the kids were off for the day.
De
Higher outside than inside, of course; Juney's cabin-the core of the Hall-had stood on a little oblong plateau jutting southward into a larger hillside bench. The steep slope around its edge gave the walls fifteen feet more height on their outer surface.
In the summer of Change Year One the growing clan of the Mackenzies had put up a log palisade around Dun Juniper. Then they'd had a couple of practical examples of how well that style of fort could burn, and nobody had grudged the work of renovations next year-much. They'd used the Murus Gallicus as a model-the Gallic Wall of the old continental Celts. It was a crib-cage of horizontal squared logs, each layer at right-angles to the one below; the gaps between the logs were filled with fitted rock and rubble before the next layer of timbers was spiked down, until the wall was as high as you wanted-thirty feet, here-and an outer layer of mortared fieldstone concealed the ends of the horizontal logs. There were U-shaped towers half again as tall at the corners, plus a pair facing each way to bracket the gate, and they'd improved on the Celtic original by working cement and rebar into the rubble as the wall went up.
Add a solid coating of waterproof stucco from an abandoned building-supply warehouse over the outside, give the fighting platform a pavement of remelted road asphalt six inches thick and it was weathertight and low-maintenance, too.
Hell of a lot faster and easier than building a real stone wall, he thought, putting an elbow on one of the waist-high embrasures that alternated with the seven-foot merlons along the platform; the merlons each had an arrow slit in the middle. And remembering how much sweat it cost us, that's saying something. Stronger than stone alone if someone comes calling with a battering ram, too.
"Which the Lord and Lady forbid," he murmured, and made a gesture as Sally and Terry came up the ladder he'd climbed; she had infant Maeve on her back in a carrier, and eight-year-old Jill scampered up behind her, confident as a squirrel on ground she'd climbed over all her life.
The girl pointed upward with a cry of delight. A flight of swans went by overhead, their V headed westward towards the distant river.
Juniper Mackenzie looked up at the swans as they went overhead, flying down from the mountains to the river; here at the top of the road she was near level with them for an instant, close enough to see their snowy feathers turned ruddy by the light of sunset. Their voices floated down, majestic as the slow beating of their great white wings, sad as the sunset. Then they were past, shadows against the greater shadows in the west, where crimson and gold castles towered above the trees and slowly faded towards blue-black as the first stars shone.
She felt a song moving, a stirring behind the breastbone, the music weaving with the words; not the fiddle or guitar for this, but the harp De
"Where does the wild swan wander?