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Hello, Grandpa, he thought; his grandfather Vaino had bummed around as a teenager back just before Pearl Harbor, working harvest gangs in the Dakotas and Mi
A ripple went through the crowd. Havel's head came up as well, and his eyes flicked towards where the weapons were stacked. But it was a single rider coming down the road from the east, the white road smoking behind the galloping hooves. He swerved and took the fence, a young man in mail vest and helmet, a Bearkiller scout-courier.
"Lord Bear!" he said, pulling up in a spurt of clods and dust. "Dispatch!"
Havel sighed, reversed the pitchfork and stuck it in the dirt, and took the envelope. When he looked up from reading it he saw three dozen sets of eyes on him, amid an echoing silence where the Chi-KA-go! of a flock of quail was the loudest sound.
"All right, folks," he said. "We're in for a fight, but we knew that was coming.
Arminger has called up his men, ban and arrire-ban, with the rally-point as Castle Todenangst, for no later than two weeks from now. So there's no reason at all not to enjoy the supper: but first, I'm going for a swim."
Dun Laurel, Willamette Valley, Oregon
August 23rd, 2008/Change Year 10
Dun Laurel was the newest of the Clan's duns, a village of a hundred and twenty souls surrounded by a ditch and palisade, northwest of Sutterdown and established only last year. The Hall at the center of it was a smaller copy of Dun Juniper's, done in frame and plank rather than logs, but it also had a conference-room-cum-office on the loft floor, with a hearth and altar on the northern wall. It still smelled of sap from new-cut wood, as well as the bunches of rosemary and lavender and sweetgrass hanging from the rafters overhead, and the alcohol lanterns showed only a begi
The dozen men and women sitting across from her and her allies were all free-tenants or itinerants back home; it was simply too difficult for bond-tenants or peons to move around. Several were High Priests and Priestesses of clandestine covens; medieval Europe might not have had an underground cult of witches except in the perverted imaginations of the witch-finders, but the Protector's realm most certainly did. Others were simply those who were willing to take risks to get out from under the Association's gang-boss feudalism. All of the farmer majority were from the eastern side of the Valley, Molalla and Gervais and the others; the baronies north of the Columbia or west of the Willamette were simply too far away, and had had too little contact with the Clan.
They were serious people; eight men, four women, all fairly well clad and well fed, but roughened and weatherworn by lives of hard outdoor work, and all over thirty though few were much older than her; the terrible years hadn't been kind to the elderly, or even the middle-aged. Juniper looked from face to face before she spoke: "Our sympathy you have-but sympathy is worth its weight in gold. I'm troubled, to be frank. On the one hand, now we face the full weight of the Portland Protective Association. Corvallis is with us this time, as well as the Bearkillers and Mount Angel, and we can match their numbers, but that is mostly ordinary folk against professional killers. If you were to rise behind them, our chances of victory would be greatly increased, but I must tell you frankly that there is not much hope of our defeating the Protectorate so thoroughly that they will be overthrown at home, at least not most of them. That could happen, but it is not likely. Our realistic hope is to beat them so badly that they will leave us alone."
The underground leaders looked at each other. Their spokesman was an itinerant, one Rogelio Maldonado, a dark man with a red bandana tied around his hair and the raggedy-gaudy clothes that folk in his trade affected. His English held only a slight Hispanic lilt.
"Lady Juniper, for what other reason than wi
Juniper inclined her head. What reason indeed? she thought. There were times when the things she had to do as Chief troubled her sleep, but her responsibility was to her Clan: though also to right, and the Threefold Law.
"If this is not a wonderful or a certain chance of overthrowing the Association, it is still the best you are likely to have. They have stripped the garrisons of every castle to the bone."
Maldonado nodded in his turn; his thick-fingered hands, calloused and marked with burn scars, spread on the polished wood of a tabletop salvaged from a government office in Salem, the hands of a man who handled reins and rope, awl and waxed thread and solder. The frieze of carved ravens around the edge of the table was new, not very well carved but done with naive forceful-ness.
"There is the word, Lady Juniper: castles. We might drive the soldiers and men-at-arms left behind after the arriere-ban back into the castles, they are few and not the best fighters, but we ca
"Some of it," Juniper said. "Even if we break them."
"We thank you for smuggling us weapons, but still, we ca
Juniper nodded. "No. But if you control the ground outside the castles, even for only a short time, many of you could flee. We are willing to take in thousands, the Bearkillers likewise and Corvallis even more. Our harvest was good, and there is land here-and more southward, towards Eugene-fine land lying empty and waiting to be tilled."
Another of the would-be rebels spoke, a thickset farmer with a gray beard: "That's wild land, grown up in bush. And if we run, we can't bring much in the way of seed or stock or tools with us, damn-all but what's on our backs. It would take us years to make farms, and more years to earn what we'd need to start, and we'd be laborers until then, maybe all our lives. Like peons."
"No," Juniper said. "You would be free-a man can be poor, and yet free. Or possibly, if we damage them badly, you can force the Association members to give you better terms at home."
She lifted a hand. "I am not saying this is very likely, or that fleeing your homes is not a counsel of desperation."
Those old enough to remember the times before the Change also remember the dying times just after it, she thought. She did herself, and the early Clan had been far more fortunate than most. They remember the bandits and the Eaters, and the raw terror of starvation. On the other hand:
"In another ten years, or twenty, doing anything will be much harder," she said.
They nodded. The farmer stroked his beard. "Yeah. My own grown kids hate the castle-folk, right enough. But they don't: the old world isn't real to them; they get bits from movies or TV confused with what really happened, Captain Kirk with President Clinton, and things like elections aren't even fairy tales. They don't hate them the way I do. And the bastards don't let us have schools. I try to teach the kids in the evenings, but it isn't the same."