The Protectors war

Right now Judy looked a bit travel-worn; it wasn't an easy journey past the ruins of Eugene, especially if you were taking the overgrown back roads and dodging bandit gangs often dozens strong.

"Juney!" she called, waving.

"Judy!" Juniper replied, reading the other's pursed-lip expression with the ease of long experience as meaning roughly:

For this piece of limp celery I missed the Sabbat?

She had a passenger, a woman Juniper knew only by correspondence since the Change, though they'd run into each other a few times at RenFaires and Pagan gatherings before that. Laurel Wilson wasn't any older than Juniper's late-thirties, but from her looks could have given her a decade or more; those were the lines of privation and strain, and there were streaks of gray in her long dark hair. Bright sunlight brought out the wrinkles and weathering. She was looking around at the bustling scene with open awe, and even more so as the real size of Dun Juniper's walls became apparent-the shining white of the stucco coating and the painted roundels of flower and vine under the battlements gave an appearance of grace that belied the sheer massiveness of it.

"Merry met, the both of you!" Juniper said, as Judy pulled on the reins and the horses halted, bending their heads to graze. "We'll be through in just a second."

Judy's children-Tamsin, a girl of twelve, Chuck Junior, still toddling, and the three adoptees, who were nineteen or twenty now-abandoned their father's scorekeeping station and came trotting over; or the teenagers did, with Tamsin ru

"This is worth watching," she said over her shoulder to the visitor; Laurel stood, and shielded her eyes with a hand.

Westward down the meadow men and women were following loaded carts, taking out scores of target outlines shaped like a man with a shield, made of a double layer of thick planks. The targets were propped up against successive fence lines at fifty-yard intervals out to three hundred yards, with each figure a few feet from its neighbors to left and right-the same formation as armored footmen would have in battle. This was a harder test than battle in some respects, because the real thing would involve shooting at a formation many yards deep; a little over or under usually didn't matter much.

Of course, nobody's shooting back at you, Juniper thought, settling the baldric that carried her quiver with a shrug of her shoulders. Not far away, a signaler raised a silver-mounted horn to his mouth and blew Assemble in line, a long modulated dunting howl.

Those of her clan with pre-Change battle experience had told her the hardest thing to unlearn had been the instinct to spread out and take cover. You couldn't do that in a big battle these days. Longbows were deadly, but they weren't machine guns. To stop a mass of armored men charging with bladed weapons you had to pack your archers together, which meant you had to stand upright and just take whatever came back at you.

The shooters drifted over from the other clout rings and the butts, chatting as they did. She heard Aylward sigh, and hid a smile; he'd taught them all a great deal, but they weren't the Guards, or the

SAS.

"Line up by squads, you horrible lot!" he barked, and scowled harder at the genial remarks he got back. "Sod this for a game of soldiers, you idle, useless maggots-move it!"

The nonshooting spectators had a high proportion of nursing mothers and the visibly pregnant, including Melissa Aylward.

"Watch your tongue, Samkin!" she called, and laughed at his scowl along with more than a few of her friends and fellow onlookers. "I know where you sleep!"

The squads each had nine bows, with subgroups of three-mystically appropriate and solidly practical as well; there were three squads here from Dun Fairfax and eleven from Dun Juniper's larger population. A hundred and twenty-six archers in all, not counting the juveniles, overage and hopelessly shortsighted who helped hustle more arrows up to the shooters. The arrangement had the added advantage of keeping everything friends-and-neighbors, which put heart into ordinary folk if they had to fight.

Juniper stepped into her place beside Chuck and the Dun Juniper ba

"Nock shafts!" Aylward barked.

There was no chatter or nonsense now. A hundred and twenty-six hands brought a nock to the cord and a shaft to the cutout arrow shelf that ran through the middle of their bows. The first target was the line of shields three hundred yards distant. Each was about man-sized-or thumb-sized, at this distance.

"Let the gray geese fly!" Sam shouted, his own bow ready: "Wholly together-"

The yellow-limbed yew bows came up, pointing at the same angle-they would begin with dropping shots at extreme range. Juniper drew until the kiss-ring on the cord touched her lip.

"-shoot!"

The slap of strings on bracers sounded so close together that it was like a lightning crack. Beneath that came the deep whining humm of the cords, and the whickering massed ssssssst of the shafts as they rose in a dense cloud, louder than sleet in a bad storm. She emptied her mind and became one with the rhythm of it: breath out as you drew, open the chest, close the back, throw the left arm forward and twist with hip and gut until you reached full draw, sense the right angle for release, let the string fall off the three draw fingers of the right hand, follow through, reach back for another, and another:

"Second target!"

They adjusted their aim; now the arrows flew on a shallower arc.

"Third! Fourth!"

"Point-blank, maximum speed!"

The muscles of her shoulders and arms were burning in truth now, but that was a distant background to the dance, her hand darting down now where the helper had stuck the next bundle of shafts point-down in the turf and ready to grasp. Arrows blurred out from the Mackenzie line, scores every second for one last long burst, slashing across the meadow in a ripple of sleek destruction. The heads struck the plank shields with a hard lock repeated so fast it sounded like a whole flock of mad woodpeckers; they were using broadheads, not greased bodkins, but many were hammering through the double layer of tough wood anyway, and the rest bristled out thicker than a porcupine's spines.

"Halt!"

They did, suddenly aware that they were puffing and blowing. Juniper blinked a little as she looked at the long oval where the arrows stood in ground and shield-thousands upon thousands of them, fired in the time it would take armored foemen to cross the killing ground. She couldn't help but think what it would be like, trying to keep your shield up and march through that. Much less ride a horse into it; the poor beasts didn't wear much armor, and had even less reason to let themselves be hurt and killed in the quarrels of men.

Well, shit, as Mike likes to say. I'm proud we can do it, but Goddess gentle and strong, I wish we didn't have to!

The line broke up; people started helping each other out of their brigandines for shoulder-rubs-you had to be careful about repetitive motion injuries-or went off to practice sword-and-buckler or battle-spear work for a change of pace, or just to socialize, gossip, dicker and swap.

"So, what do you think, Sam First Armsman Aylward Mackenzie?"