Dies The Fire

Chapter Nineteen

J uniper kissed the vine leaf and dropped the thanks-offering into Rickreall Creek, chanting softly:

"Water departing

Sky endless blue

Both forever;

Lord and Lady

My love to you always flowing

As rain and river to the sea

Blessed be."

Water took it and whirled it downstream, quick with the cold mountain waters of spring, past the pilings of the bridge and on towards the Willamette River to their east. Highway 99 stretched southward through open fields.

Then she and Judy leaned in to the pedals of their bicycles. They were on point today; she'd decided that the freed prisoners needed Steve and Vince by them, being unarmed save for belt knives and still feeling shaky, for which she couldn't blame them. They could haul the cargo carriers; she hoped some food would be available in Corvallis. The rabbits wouldn't last long.

"Well, you're looking like the cat that got the canary," Judy said after a while when the singing humm of tires on asphalt was the only sound to rival the birds.

"Mmmmmm," Juniper said wordlessly, and laughed at Judy's scowl.

"It's not like you to do the whirlwind romance thing and get swept off your feet," her friend said.

"Other way 'round," she said. "He's a nice guy, but I sort of had to prod him into action." A giggle. "If you'll pardon the expression."

"Not your usual style," Judy repeated.

She frowned. "It wasn't, though, was it?" A shrug. "Things have, you may have noticed, changed. We didn't have all that much time."

Judy's thoughts had moved on. "I wonder why they didn't want to come on to Corvallis?"

"I think I can guess that. When I asked him about it, he just smiled and said that it was usually easier to get forgiveness than permission. Which I take to mean the Bearkillers don't want to attract attention to the place they're thinking of settling until they are settled and it's a done deal. And pre-Change title deeds don't mean much anymore. It's a lot closer to Corvallis than it is to our land, of course."

"To the Mackenzie clachan," Judy said, smiling; it lit up her full dark features.

"Oh, don't you start in on that stuff! Leave it to Dennie and his mispronounced bits of Gaelic."

Judy gave a broad shrug and flipped up one hand: "Nu, I should know from Gaelic? I'm just a simple Jewitch girl, after all."

They both laughed, and Juniper said more seriously: "Giorraionn beirt bothar; two people shorten a road. Glad you're along, Judy."

She smiled back. "You do have one for every occasion!"

"Mom was fond of 'em." She frowned. "I'm not sure it's a good idea now."

"What's the harm? For that matter, all this clan-Celtic business is more suited to the world we're living in now."

"That's what worries me," Juniper said. At her friend's glance, she went on: "Look, we know all this high-Celtic Deirdre-of-the-Sorrows sort of thing is a bit of a joke, and we don't take the old-country stories too literally either. But now we're pushing on an open door-there's no TV, no: no world to push back. What about our children's children? It was my father's people who gave the words 'blood feud' to the English language; not to mention 'blackmail' and 'reiver' and 'unhallowed hand.' "

Judy shrugged again, normally this time. "Right now, shouldn't we be more concerned about getting through to harvest? And whatever works."

"I suppose so," Juniper said with a sigh.

Her eyes had been moving as they spoke. "Look!" she said suddenly.

"It's a microwave relay tower," Judy said.

"But there's someone in it. Right up near the top, that looks like a platform added recently. Perfect spot for a lookout. Sort of ironic, isn't it?"

She halted and got out her own birding glasses. "And he's signaling someone, using a mirror. Clever." She paused to take a deep breath. "I can smell turned earth, not too far away."

It hadn't been a main road before the Change, but someone since had taken the trouble to push the occasional cars aside and bury the bodies-she could see fresh graves in the fields to either side. And that wasn't all:

"Bunch up," she called back over her shoulder. "We're getting closer to town and I think they've got a lookout system set up."

This part of the Willamette was fairly flat. That cut visibility, but:

"We weren't the only ones to scare up some seed potatoes," Juniper said, looking left and right. "And is that barley?"

"Barley in this field, oats in the next, I think," Judy said. "Hard to tell when it's just showing. Spring planted-not too late, I hope."

Every day past the optimum cut the yield and increased the chances of running into the fall rains at harvest time.

Then:"Oooops!"

They cleared a slight rise; someone was waiting beyond. Everyone grabbed the brake levers, and the Mackenzies halted.

About sixty someones, Juniper thought.

Most of them were puffing and blowing, as if they'd arrived quickly: which the rows of bicycles hinted at, too. All the people waiting for them were in chain mail shirts that came to their thighs, like metallic extra-large T-shirts, with shortswords and bucklers hung from heavy belts.

Half of them carried long spears, made up of two sections that fitted together; a few were still getting the joint locked.

That was quick, Juniper thought, looking at the armor; she had a vague memory that chain mail was expensive in the old days. I'll have to ask Chuck. The SCA had gone in for re-creating that sort of thing.

At a guess, someone from the Society had been advising this bunch as well.

"Pikes actually, not spears," she murmured. "Sixteen-foot pikes."

While she watched, they hurried into a four-deep line. Someone called out: "Pikepoints- down!"

The great spears came down with a shout, presenting a quadruple rank of sharp blades. The rest of the welcoming party were on either side, aiming crossbows. They all looked the more intimidating because their helmets came down in a triangular mask over the eyes, and flared out behind.

Their leader had a different weapon: a five-foot shaft with a head like a giant single-edged knife, curved on the cutting edge and thick and straight on the back, tapering to a murderous point. A glaive, she thought-the word came to her from some Society get-together where she'd played.

"Halt where you are!" the man with the glaive called when they were about twenty feet from the line of points. "In the name of the University Council!"

And the Continental Congress and the Great Jehovah, she thought irreverently, but she obeyed.

Those pikes looked unpleasantly, seriously sharp; so did the heads of the crossbow bolts.

"This area is under quarantine," the young man with the glaive went on. "I'm Lieutenant Peter Jones, Committee militia. Anyone found to be infectious will be put in isolation; turn back now if you are."

He pushed up on the mask. That turned out to be a jointed visor, and the face below was disconcertingly young; he also wore sports glasses with an elastic strap at the rear.

"We're peaceful travelers from a community on the east side of the valley," Juniper said, and gave their names. "Just out scouting, trying to find out what's going on. We have a registered nurse with us, and as far as we know we're healthy."

The word "registered" brought a bristling. "Not working for the state government, I hope," Jones snapped.

"They tried to take away our livestock! Until we taught them better."

"Our area had the same problem, but I don't think there is a state government anymore," she said, jerking a thumb northeast in the direction of Salem.

"Why not?"

"Plague. We got near enough to see the pits where they tried to burn the bodies, but from the looks of it the last survivors just lit out for everywhere else."

Jones cleared his throat and barked an order with self-conscious sternness; she put him down as a teaching assistant before the Change, possibly in one of the more practical departments, like agriculture or engineering. The pikemen-or in a few cases, pikewomen-swung their weapons upright again, and the crossbows went to port arms.

"We'd heard about that," Jones said. "The plague, that is."

His eyes flicked to Carmen, Muriel and Jack, all of who still had ripening bruises from their brief captivity.

"These are friends of ours," Juniper said in haste, and they nodded enthusiastically. "We rescued them from a nest of Eaters north of Salem, then looped around west of the river and came down Highway