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"Why I liked that little ditty the youngsters were singing a moment ago," Nigel said. "About the end of the world. I was convalescing then, too. In a hospital: a rather, ah, private one: and someone kept playing that tune. It was the sort of place where you had armed guards outside the sickroom door."
"That made you like the song?"
"Well, I didn't die, you see," the Englishman said, with a charming smile. "And after having a Provo shoot me with an ArmaLite and blow me up to boot, that put me in rather a good mood. The tune brings back that feeling of sweet relief."
"What happened to the Provo?" Martin asked curiously.
"Nothing good, I'm afraid, poor fellow," Nigel replied.
His accent was English, in an old-fashioned upper-class ma
Just now the smooth, mellow voice had a sardonic note as well.
"You killed him, I suppose? Or what do the SAS call it, slotting?"
It wasn't a question De
"Killed him? I wouldn't go that far. I simply stabbed him in the spine and kicked him out through the window. It was either the knife, the broken glass or the fifteen-foot fall headfirst onto concrete which actually killed him, I should think."
Most of the time Nigel Loring's face bore an expression of mild, polite amiability. Just then something different showed for an instant, in the closed curve of his slight smile. It reminded you that this was a good friend, but a very bad- as in "lethally dangerous"-enemy, who'd been a fighting man long before the world was broken and remade that March afternoon in 1998.
Since De
"Nach brea an la e?" Nigel replied.
"I suppose that means 'I deny everything'?" De
"More on the order of: Isn't it a lovely day?"
"And aren't the walls vertical," De
Nigel chuckled. "Though in fact Ms. Mackenzie still despises the Provos with a passion, despite her Irish mother. Or because of her. It's Ireland's misfortune that the sensible people never quite manage to dispose of all the different varieties of lunatic. Even the Change hasn't changed that, I'm afraid; it must be something in the water, and it affects the English too, when they travel there. Celts do much better here-appearances sometimes to the contrary."
He touched his knee as he spoke. He'd arrived last spring as a refugee with the armor on his back and one change of clothing in his saddlebags. These days he dressed in a kilt like nearly everyone else in the Mackenzie territories-the knee-length pleated feile-beag, the Little Kilt, not the ancient wraparound blanket style-and a homespun shirt of linsey-woolsey. The tartan was like nothing that the Highlands had ever seen, mostly dark green and brown with occasional slivers of a very dull orange. Handsome enough, if subdued, and excellent camouflage in this lush, wet land of forest and field; quite comfortable as well, but you had to remember to keep it arranged properly. His legs were well proportioned and muscled, particularly for a man his age, but he didn't think his graying shins were the most aesthetically pleasing part of him, not to mention the scars.
"You could at least have used the real Mackenzie tartan, if you were going to put everyone in pleated skirts," Nigel grumbled.
The other man gri
"Why would the kilts a
"Yeah, but I was always teasing her about the Celtic stuff she put on to go with her music before the Change," De
He looked around. "I didn't expect it to catch on this: emphatically."
"It certainly has," Nigel observed, matching his glance.
The Englishman had heard the building's story from Juniper. Her great-uncle the banker had been the single wealthy exception to the modest middle-class rule of the Mackenzies, and he'd bought the site of the ancestral homestead and the forest around it as a country hunting-lodge; her parents had visited every July as far back as she could remember and, later, more than once she'd spent a whole summer here, just she and the old man, walking the woods and learning the plants and the beasts. It had been the last of the childless bachelor's many eccentricities to leave the house and land to the teenage single mother she'd been, more than a decade before the Change.
The lodge had been built in the 1920s of immense Douglas fir logs on a knee-high foundation of mortared fieldstone; originally it had been plain on the interior, and divided into several rooms as well. The budding Clan Mackenzie had ripped out the partitions when they put on a second story late in the first Change Year, leaving a great wooden box a hundred feet by forty; on the north side a huge stone hearth was flanked by two doors leading to the new lean-to kitchens, and on the other three walls windows looked out onto verandas roofed by the second-story balconies.
And it certainly isn't plain anymore, he thought.
Over the years since, the great logs that made up the walls had been smoothed and carved, stained and inlaid and painted, until they were a sinuous riot of colored ru
Beneath the high ceiling were carved the symbols of the Quarters; over the hearth comfrey and ivy and sheaves of grain for North and the Earth; vervain and yarrow for Air and the East; red poppies and nettles for the South and Fire; ferns and rushes and water lilies for West and the Waters.