The Protectors war

The less advanced pupils were shooting at circles on tripods or deer-shaped outlines propped up against fence posts; many of those archers were as young as six or seven. They included Rudi Mackenzie, just now getting grabbed and rolled in the grass by a gang of friends, most of them a year or two older, after he sank another bull's-eye with his light child's bow.

It's proud I am of him: but: It was a little disturbing just how good he was at such things. And him so young!

It was Clan law that everyone between six and sixty had to practice at arms unless they were medically unfit, but a budding custom already stronger than law meant archery had become the Mackenzies' favorite leisure-time sport as well. There were practical advantages, but shooting skillfully with the longbow had also become part of being a Mackenzie-a badge of identity like the kilt back in the first Change Year. And group identity had a fearsome power, in this new-old world where you worked and lived with the same faces every day and a mile was a long way.

I understand what "clan" actually meant in those times a lot better than I used to, she thought. I understand the old songs with my bones now, don't I just?

"Score of forty-five, forty, twenty-eight, eight," a boy said, trotting up breathlessly with Juniper's arrows; he'd had to clamber over a board fence on the way.

All her arrows had landed within the twelve-foot circle around the post, forty within the six-foot, twenty-eight had hit the post, and eight had been in the vertical white strip-"splitting the wand," to use the ancient term.

"Seventy-eight out of a possible one hundred," Aylward said. "Congratulations, Lady Juniper."

She gri

Astrid Larsson was up next in this group, the only one on the field not using a longbow. Another thought struck Juniper. "Just how many archers do we have, exactly, now?" she said.

She leaned on her bowstave to watch Astrid, with the lower antler-horn tip resting on the toe of her boot. "A little over two thousand, isn't it?"

"In a full levy?" Sam Aylward said. "Twenty-two hundred and seventy-three as of the muster this last Imbolc. That's everyone who passed the minimum standards test for field service, of course. I'd rather the qualification test was tougher, but quantity has a certain quality too. You don't need to split the wand when you're shooting at men packed in shoulder to shoulder and sixteen deep, or cavalry moving boot-to-boot."

She shook her head. "And we had, what, forty-five for that first brush with the Protector's men? How we've grown!"

Though the big rush of accessions was over now; most survivors in western Oregon had gravitated to one of the larger groups or another, depending on where they'd ridden out the early years and what they thought of its leadership and customs. To be sure, people were also breeding about twice the pre-Change rate, but it would be a long time before the children stepped into their parents' shoes: or took up their bows.

"Start!"

That was Chuck Barstow's voice; he was using a wind-up kitchen timer. Astrid had a slight smile on her face as she emptied her quiver. She did it with a smooth efficiency that raised eyebrows even among those who'd seen her feed the bow before, regular as a machine but infinitely more graceful. The snap of the hornbow's string on the young woman's bracer and the thunk of arrows punching into wood sounded crisply as she walked a line of shafts down the length of the "wand." A few arrows were pushed aside by unpredictable gusts of wind, but they plunged down point-first not far away-at better than six hundred feet you had to drop the shaft onto the target, not shoot level.

She'd been an archery enthusiast before the Change, of course.

Astrid bowed and waved to the applause with studied graciousness, unconsciously assuming what Juniper thought of as a Tolkien-cover pose; the noise covered Eilir as she approached from the rear with an evil grin on her face and prodded her friend with the tip of her longbow.

Astrid squealed and leapt and whirled.

Show-off! Eilir signed, and gri

Juniper lowered her voice. There was enough background noise to let her speak privately with the stocky brown-haired man next to her.

"Any progress?" she said.

"Judy's pretty sure I was right about it being a Altendorf code," Aylward said. "But for what, we don't know. My guess: "

She raised a brow, and he went on: "My guess would be it's an updated operational plan-a contingency order, so he only has to give a codeword and set things in motion. But that's just a bloody guess. Maybe they could work it out over to Corvallis. Judy's a bright lass, but: "

Juniper frowned. Judy Barstow Mackenzie-nee Lefkowitz- was bright. She was head of the Clan's healers, and had been a registered nurse and midwife before the Change, with three languages under her belt to boot, not counting English.

Not to mention a good grasp of Yiddish and Russian profanity. She'd gotten that from her grandfather, who'd fought from Moscow to Berlin with Zhukov and then taken off his uniform and kept right on westward until he reached New Jersey. But she isn't a cryptographer, either.

The university people would be far more likely to have someone with relevant skills. An Altendorf code was based on correlations with a book or other document, and it was infernally hard to break-you had to have not only the book it referred to, but the right edition so the page and line numbers corresponded. Or you could break it by sheer number-crunching, but that really required computers.

On the other hand:

"We have some chance of keeping a secret. Corvallis does everything by 'committees of the whole' and leaks like a sieve," she said. "The Bearkillers can keep their mouths shut, but I don't want to get Mike in more trouble at home: And I really don't want the Protector knowing that we've got a hold of a copy of his little scheme."

"You think his faithful marchwarden the good Baron Gervais hasn't told him?" Aylward said with a grin.

"Is a bear Buddhist? Does the Dalai Lama defecate in the shrubbery?" Juniper said.

"Tsk! Why-ever-for shouldn't he tell his old gaffer that he had a folder of plans stolen?"

Aylward spoke with a wolfs grim amusement; he was enjoying Marchwarden Liu's possible discomfiture a lot more than she was. Not that she could blame him, but:

"Arminger: Goddess, I don't like imagining what he'd do to the man if he found out-even Eddie Liu wouldn't deserve that."

"I'd say it's poetic justice, Lady Juniper. Hmmm. I don't suppose we could blackmail Liu by threatening to grass him up?"

"Now isn't that the interesting thought, now!" Juniper said. "I always did prefer being sneaky to straightforward bashing: tricky, though. Perhaps we could blackmail him into giving us more information about the Protector's schemes? By the Threefold Shadow, I don't think he'd hesitate out of loyalty."

"And speaking of the Threefold Hecate: " Aylward said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

Which means Judy's back from her mission of mercy.

Juniper gave him a reproving thump on the shoulder-her friend wasn't that terrifying-and turned to look. A buckboard wagon drawn by two horses was bumping along the gravel road westward from the watermill, with six Mackenzie archers on bicycles following along behind as escort. They peeled off for the gates of Dun Juniper as the wagon turned towards the Chief's party, whooping and increasing their speed as they pumped the pedals towards home and baths and beer. Judy Barstow was driving the buckboard-she and Juniper had been classmates in high school in Albany back when the other's name was Judy Lefkowitz, and they had discovered the Craft together in their seventeenth year.