Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (45 page)

“Yus, we’ve still the folk from the Bend country,” Sam said; every Mackenzie Dun and most households within each had taken in some of the refugees. “Champing to get their own back, they are. And a lot of their so’jers ’ave come to see the families settled here, what with things slowing down fur now.”

“I don’t blame them! And they fought well at the Horse Heaven Hills.
Fine riders and good shots in their way with those short bows from horseback.”

“There’s something to be said fur recurves,” his father’s slow, sonorous voice said. “They’re ’andy in tight places. Though a longbow is the best at the last, in moi opinion.”

He jerked his head back a little at the racked bows and bundles of staves behind him; he still had his hair, but kept it closer-cropped than most Mackenzie males, and the oak-brown had all faded to steel-gray or white now. Edain was painfully conscious of how he’d aged in the years his son had been away on the Quest, the gauntness of the flesh on the heavy bones and the way his work-worn hands had begun to twist. The resemblance was strong in them otherwise, gray eyes and square faces, medium height and barrel-chested, thick-armed builds. Edain was perhaps a thumb’s-width taller and the merest touch slimmer than Sam Aylward had been in his prime, with a shade more yellow in his brown hair, his mother’s legacy.

“We did some good shooting with them at the battle,” Edain said proudly. “And it was an Aylward who taught the Clan to shoot and how to make them, sure, eh?”

Sam grinned and slapped the table beside him with a clunk of callus on oak. The workspace behind was set up to do any type of fine cabinetry, but mostly as a bowyer’s bench and table, with a tillering rack and the gouges, chisel and tools of the trade. That and farming had always been his crafts, when he wasn’t busy as First Armsman of the Clan Mackenzie.

Though it’s been years since he was that,
Edain thought with a little shock; somewhere in his mind his father was still the figure of stocky ageless strength he’d been in his middle years.

“Lucky thing it were, my ’aving an hobby that turned out useful-loik,” Sam said. “Lucky it ran in the fam’ly.”

Edain had learned the bowyer’s craft from him through the pores of his skin, as he’d learned shooting; one of his earliest memories was sitting on his heels in this room, watching his father taking tiny curls from a bowstave with a curved spoke-shave blade, working with infinite patience and by eye alone.

Edain’s own favorite war-bow was in the clamps right now. Mackenzie longbows were made of two D-profiled lengths of yew, bent into a shallow reflex-deflex curve that went out and in and then curled out again at the nocks, both pegged and glued into a central riser—a grip—of hardwood shaped to fit a hand and with a cutout that let the arrow shoot through the centerline of the weapon. Yew was a natural composite and didn’t need horn or sinew to give it strength, but Edain did glue a strip of deerhide to the back to keep splinters from starting—that was how failure began with a wooden stave, and you did
not
want a hundred-and-twenty pound bow suddenly snapping at full draw. Despite the coat of varnish over all, the hide had come loose in spots during hard use, and he’d been laying a new one on while the bow would have time to dry.

“Lucky we had the right wood for it,” Edain said; yew grew abundantly as an understory tree in the Cascades and the Coast Range both. “Or that’s the favor of the Powers.”

“Lady Juniper’s Luck.”

A reminiscent look came into his father’s eyes. “There Oi was, lying laid up in Lady Juniper’s house after she rescued me from that bloody ravine where I’d been watching the coyotes watching
me
and waiting for me to come ripe, and she were puttin’ fine seasoned yew on the sodding fire! Fair shrieked, Oi did. And again, when Oi saw she ’ad a ton or two stacked out back.”

“Asgerd and the mother seem to be getting on better,” Edain observed; he’d heard
that
story repeated all his life, though it was a good one. “It would be better still if she had her own hearth. Her folk out east in Norrheim don’t live so tight-packed as we, and forbye we’re tighter-packed than we like ourselves. It’s fortunate indeed she can follow me to battle.”

Sam chuckled slightly to himself. “She’s a good ’un, your Asgerd,” he said. “And not just for her looks—though at your age, Oi put more on that than Oi should ’ave. Or that she’s better than fair as an archer. Funny to think of Vikings and all that out there. But then Blighty’s a right odd old place too now, from all accounts.”

“Viking’s more in the nature of a job,” Edain said. “It’s what they call
dangerous work, like going to the ruined cities for salvage work. Mostly they’re farmers in Norrheim, like us, and no more quarrelsome. Slower to anger, sure; but also slower to let it go, I’d say.”

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “It’s…Da, I didn’t think I’d be so restless, so to say, when I got a chance to stop at home. Asgerd’s happy as a horse in clover here compared to me.”

“Oi did notice you spending a lot of time out hunting, or watching the sheep, which is youngster’s work.”

Edain nodded: “All that time away on the Quest—and then the battle—and it was thinking of this place I was, seeing meself stepping in and taking up a hay-fork as if I’d just left, so to speak. Now I’ve a bit of peace before the next campaign and I can’t seem to…just take my rest. And I’m a peaceable man, but I’ve been getting these flashes of temper the which is not my nature when I’m not provoked. Everything’s fine, and then the least little thing…not been sleeping well, either. Asgerd’s a bit worried.”

“Ah,” his father said, and took Garbh’s great man-killing head between his hands, rubbing her jowls until the dog whimpered and slitted her eyes in ecstasy and beat a rear foot on the floor in time to her tail. “Come on you lately?”

“Since the Horse Heaven Hills. Comes and goes, and the less I have to do, the more it bothers me. Can’t rest when I’m resting, only when I’m busy, if you take my meaning.”

The faded gray eyes of his father looked through him. “Ah,” he repeated. “Oi’ve seen the loik. Felt it moiself, after Mt. Tumbledown. And toims since, here. Stepping back ’ome’s not so simple, often. Battle takes you loik that. They have…used to have…fancy names for it, but Oi think it’s loik getting hit, only inside the head. You keep on going because that’s what you ’ave to do. But you pay for it later. Like a poison working its way out, or the ache where a bone healed.”

“I’ve been in fights before, Da!”

Sam Aylward nodded. “They add up, though, son. Big ’uns, especial, and that one you just finished was bloody big and just plain bloody, too, from all reports.”

“That it was,” Edain said softly, blinking.

“Seen that look, before, boy. Seen it in the mirror. And you’ve had a long time with nothing but hard graft, never knowing at sunrise if you’d be alive by sunset.”

Edain ran a hand through his hair. “What’s to be done, then? I know enough not to look for the answer at the bottom of a mug of hard cider; that doesn’t seem to help at all, at all.”

“No, it don’t, not past next day’s headache. Toim, that’s the answer, toim and lots and lots of it. They used to have folk who attended to it special.”

“Heart-healers, we’d say today.”

“We’re great ones for fancy names around here, aren’t we? Mostly it was talking about it, s’far as Oi could see. Talk it over with Asgerd, too, then…or Lady Juniper, p’raps.”

“I’d not bother the Chief.” Edain grinned wearily. “If we ever get a room all to ourselves for more than an hour at a time, sure and I will talk to Asgerd, though!”

Shrill voices sounded through the doorway to the rest of the house, and two children came running through. They were a boy and a girl each about two years, clad in kilts and nothing else besides blue luck-beads engraved with a pentagram around their necks on thongs…except that the girl was clutching a honey-glazed pastry with a bite taken out of it. There was a look of wary determination on her face as well as a good deal of stickiness, and she turned and backed away from her brother. They were the same age to a day, with white-silk mops of hair cut bowl-fashion and blue eyes; their skins were still slightly golden with summer’s tan. Children their age among the Clan didn’t usually wear either shirt or shoes unless weather or ceremony demanded.

Edain’s grin turned genuine. He’d been surprised to find he had two new siblings when he came home, apparently conceived not long after he left with Rudi and the others, and it had probably startled his parents too, being fifteen years after their next youngest. The pregnancy had been hard on his mother, who hadn’t been expecting it in her fiftieth year, but though the marks were still visible he thought she considered it worthwhile.
It was enough to make him wistful for some of his own, too, though that would have to wait a while yet.

“Nola,” Sam Aylward said, warning in his tone. “Are you going to share that with your brother?”

“No, Da!” she said, backing away a little further. “No!”

Edain had noticed she was already well familiar with that one word, and used it often. Her brother Nigel didn’t say a thing, but there was a dangerous gleam in his wide blue eyes as he advanced on her.

She also cast a wary look on Edain, holding the jam-filled pastry behind her lest he treacherously steal some of it; they hadn’t had time to really get used to him yet.

“The roit answer, moi gurl, is
yes Oi will share it with ’im, Dad
,” his father said.

The gnarled hand moved with surprising deftness and twitched it out of her chubby paw. Before her lip had time to pout, he’d ripped it neatly in half, popped the piece with the bite in it back into the mouth she’d opened to give a wail of protest and then handed half to her brother.

“’ere you go, Nigel-moi-lad,” he said.

The dogs all rose and padded over to the children, taller at the shoulder than their tow heads, and carefully sniffed them head-to-foot with their gruesome muzzles, provoking squeals of laughter as the cold wet noses touched skin. One of the younger dogs showed an interest in the disappearing remnants of pastry, and Garbh nipped the offender on the ear to remind him of his manners. Then faces were licked, and children and dogs collapsed into a mingled sprawl not far from the stove.

“Garbh, stay,” Edain said. Her head came up. “Guard.”

She laid it down again on her paws but cocked an eye at him in response as if to say:
They’re the pack’s puppies, of
course
I’ll guard them!

Then they sat in companionable silence for a fair time as the light faded, listening to the feather-tick of wet snowflakes against the windows and the occasional deep sigh from one of the dogs; the children had fallen asleep with the abrupt suddenness of their age, eyes shut and mouths open. It was full dark outside now, and nothing showed but the occasional yellow glimmer from someone else’s lanterns and candles and
once the clop of someone leading a horse pulling a light cart down the village street. The smell of cooking came stronger.

“Time to go in, Da,” Edain said, feeling obscurely better.

The elder Aylward levered himself up with a grunt and they walked down a hallway past rooms currently full of knocked-together bunk-beds into a big open space that held a score of people of all ages and wasn’t impossibly crowded.

Mackenzies didn’t make as much of rank as many other peoples; a few specialists in Dun Juniper and Sutterdown aside, everyone worked on the land and at their crafts, and even the Chief had a loom in her bedroom over the Hall and took her turn doing dishes in the kitchens there. At need everyone who could fought, and nobody went hungry in a Dun unless everyone did, which was rare.

Such rank as there was, though, the Aylwards had. This was a big farmhouse, a two-story frame structure that had been old but well-kept before the Change and had served as the initial nucleus for Dun Fairfax—the name came from the former owners. They had been elderly and very diabetic, but their supplies and stock and tools had helped the nascent Clan survive, and the folk of the Dun and passers-by still made small offerings on their grave out by the gate.

One of the changes made over the years since had been to open out most of the first floor, joining the kitchen and the dining and living rooms into one space big enough for the cooking, preserving, pickling and other endless indoor work that kept the household provided for. There was a long table and chairs and trestle-benches that could be moved around to suit, and walls hung with everything from polished pots and pans near the stoves to sickles, scythes and shearing-shears. Just now several sets of bedding and futons were rolled up and strapped to tie-pegs as well, for their share of the folk from enemy-occupied lands they were sheltering.

A stairway and a trap door led down to the cellars, with their bins and barrels and racks of glass jars. Net sacks of onions, strings of garlic, bags of drying herbs and burlap-wrapped hams and flitches of bacon hung in convenient spots from the ceiling beams up here; there was a big icebox for fresh produce. Sinks and counters showed that Dun Fairfax had running
water from an internal spring, and two big iron stoves with copper boilers attached for hot water shed heat as his mother and several of the refugee women worked on dinner. Rag rugs covered much of the plank floor, and a wooden border colored and carved with the symbols of the Quarters ran around beneath the eaves. Stained and painted knotwork and twining vines covered the rest of the broad band, and whimsical faces from story and legend peeked out from carved leaves.

Edain made a reverence to the images of the Lord and Lady standing on either side of the hearth’s crackling fire—blue-mantled Brigit with her flame and wheat-sheaf, and stag-antlered Cernunnos. His father did the same, and then lowered himself into his special chair by the fire with a sigh.

“Pull me one too,” he called to Edain. “A point o’ the Special from the Boar’s ’ead barrel, in ’onor of you comin’ ’ome safe.”

The room was brightly lit by alcohol lanterns behind glass mantles, and they gave off a slightly fruity scent that mixed with the smells of burning fir, cooking and—rather faintly—dog. Edain ambled over to a small barrel that rested in an X of plank frame on one counter near the door to the outside vestibule; that kept the draughts at bay and left a place for boots and overshoes and outer gear to hang and drip in the wet weather with which the
dùthchas
was abundantly supplied in the Black Months. The household’s weapons were racked on the wall next to it, brigandines and helms, sword belts and bucklers, war-bows and hunting bows and quivers and a brace of seven-foot long-bladed battle spears, all high enough to keep them out of easy reach of children too young to know better.