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Chapter Twenty
Near Dallas, Willamette Valley, Oregon
April 2nd, 2008/Change Year 10
"T hanks," Michael Havel said, gripping Alleyne Loring's hand. "Christ Jesus, but I wish I was going with you!"
The little party of Dunedain and Bearkillers waited in the gathering shadows beneath the edge of the trees, some already mounted, some holding their mounts' reins. Westward the sun sank over the Coast Range, casting their shadows towards the croplands. Eastward a strategic hamlet stood a mile away, behind its ditch and mound and stone-and-concrete wall, with an A-lister's fortified steading not far off, within mutual supporting distance. As he shook hands with the Bearkiller lord Alleyne saw a bright blink of light from those walls as a militiaman's steel caught the dying light. The rich smell of plowed earth came on the wind, mingling with the fresh fir-sap scent of the great forests westward, and the horse-leather-wool-oiled-metal scent that meant action.
"We'll get him back, sir," Alleyne said, giving a squeeze back.
The word came naturally; this was a man you had to respect, even if he was a bit of a rough diamond. His wife, on the other hand, was a stu
"I pray to God you do," Signe Havel said sincerely. "And take care of my little sister, too." She looked at the others. "All of you take care."
Havel went on: "I wish you could take more supplies, but you're right to limit the load. Still, it's better than a hundred and fifty miles by the paths you're going to be following, and the mountains can be cold and wet this time of year."
There were a dozen of them, and only half as many pack horses, beside the riding animals. Alleyne smiled. "By now I've spent enough time in your Ore-gonian forests to feel quite at home, I assure you."
"Yeah, well, the Coast Range isn't quite the same as Silver Falls," he said.
Astrid stirred where she stood contemplating the sunset. "That's Taur-i-Mithril, or in the Common Speech-"
"-Silver Falls State Park," Havel said, smiling his crooked smile. "You take care too, Sis. Get the kid, and get out."
"We will," she said, and Eilir and John Hordle nodded. "And it's time to go. We want to get as far as we can before moonset."
Havel nodded. Alleyne swung into the saddle and turned his mount westward, touching it into a fast walk and bending his head as they passed beneath the branches of the oak at the head of the trail. A last look showed him Michael Havel staring after him, and pounding his right fist into the hollow of his other palm.
Village of Montinore, Tualatin Valley, Oregon
April 8th, 2008/Change Year 10
"Come and hear!" Estella Maldonado said. "Come and buy! Come and laugh!" She circled the wagon dancing and rattled the tambourine in the air as her mother played her fiddle from the driver's seat, and her brothers juggled cups and eggs and daggers, flinging them high to catch the evening sun. They were slender, dark-haired, olive-ski
"Come and buy! Come and laugh! Come one, come all, people of Montinore Manor!"
The tinerant wagon-the legal term for its owners was licensed itinerant -was a simple box with a curved sheet-metal roof, but gaudily painted. Light trucks had furnished the wheels and springs; four red-and-white oxen drew it. Right now they were lying down and chewing their cuds unconcernedly while her father walked around the vehicle and unfolded the sides. Another much like it followed; that was their sleeping quarters and for baggage, with the family's one horse hitched behind the door in the rear, and a tin chimney through the roof.
Rogelio Maldonado opened the cargo wagon up in cleverly arranged stepped metal trays on both sides, a staircaselike arrangement that reached almost down to the muddy surface of the village green. There was a tempting smell from bottles of perfume, and from trays of spices-curry powder, dried chilies, ground sage and sesame seeds; there were rock candy and crystallized ginger; toys and picture books and tops; cloth in bolts and little cakes of wild-indigo essence and saffron and madder. Ribbons and precious cotton sewing thread (and the newer, distinctly inferior linen variety for those who could not afford it) shared space with buttons and vied with tools and pans and pots and a few luxury foods like potted shrimp and pickled peppers and jams. There were also the miniature anvil and hammers and punches, last and awls, that proclaimed the travelers to be tinkers and shoemakers and repairers of leather goods as well. Bundles of wildflowers hung from twine set along the sides of both wagons, in the first stages of drying to make sachets.
A crowd was already gathering from the homes and cottages along the single patched asphalt street of the settlement below Montinore Manor, drawn from wheel and loom and garden hoe and workbench by the noise and the gear and the prospect of a break in the dull round of days. There were three hundred souls in the village, a little more than average, most of them here on the Saturday half-holiday: holiday meaning for most it was time to do for themselves and their families instead of the landholder. A few in the crowd were probably servants from the manor or castle from the embroidered tabards, and a pair were off-duty soldiers in the padded gambesons usually worn below armor for protection, and now keeping their owners warm against the spring evening. She looked around, deliberately waking her memories; when you moved every couple of days that was necessary, or you could get lost because your mind used its map of some other familiar place.
Yes, there was a glimpse of white off to the north and west, over low, rolling hills covered in leafy rows of vines-the manor house, a pre-Change mansion that had been the center of a vineyard estate. A little more west of north, and the brutal exclamation point of the tower of Castle Ath reared over a low hill, flying the black-and-red of the Lord Protector and the more complex heraldry of the new baronet; mountains green and forested rose beyond, and to the west. That was all demesne land. South more vineyards, east the old railroad tracks and the five open fields where the tenants had their strips of land, looking more settled every time they visited as the trees planted along their edges grew.
Hmmm, Estella thought, considering as she danced. They're better-dressed than last time. Especially the peons. More shoes, too. And the place looks tidier, the church has been painted. As we heard, there's a new broom here:
The fiddle squealed on as Papa unrolled the awnings above the slanted steplike trays of their goods. He claimed to have a little gitano blood, but it was probably not true, though she and her brothers looked the part-which in his rare moments of candor he admitted was what you got when you crossed Sonoran mestizo with small-town Arizona Anglo. The half-believed claim had gotten them help that let them live through the Change-she remembered little of that, since she had been barely ten-and nowadays some of the other tinerants were the genuine article, and it was the fashion among the rest to imitate it. Hiding in plain sight; if you were suspect and despised because you were a tinerant and a gypsy, you'd be less likely to be suspected of witchcraft.