Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (68 page)

The first harvest was small, but the dusty-golden grain heads nodding heavily on their stalks raised everyone's spirits. At summer solstice, the Valentines proudly served barley bread, baked with sodium bitartrate gleaned from the skins of their wine grapes as a leavening. The loaves were broken up and shared with the gods, then devoured. The rest of the barley had gone to soups and morning porridge, with a precious tenth set aside for the next crop, but bread was a sign of normalcy returning.

At all the festivals and esbats, Rebecca, with Ben acting as her high priest, gave thanks for the gifts of food and survival. Come the fall, they made a thin, sour wine from the wild grapevines that twined everywhere up the sturdy, shaggy trunks of the oaks, and shared it at the rituals. Every other crumb or drop was hoarded against the winter, which they spent in a longhouse constructed from wooden fences ripped from the back gardens of every housing estate within half a day's trot and insulated with blocks of polystyrene. The longhouse was not a pretty sight, made as it was to blend with the undergrowth, but Ben warned them against using any of the surviving houses or inns until this third year, when they moved into the old red-brick pub, still with its
FULLER'S ALE
sign on the crumbling facade. They all slept in the great room, warmed by a log fire burning in the huge hearth they now used for cooking. Rebecca still missed her three-bar fire and her comfortable sitting room and the cryptic crossword in the newspaper of an evening and knew the others did, too, but she was impressed that everyone had adapted so well to living in primitive conditions. On the other hand, not one of them was more than three generations from an outdoor toilet in the back garden, nor five from cooking over a wood or peat fire.

Starvation, of course, was not their only enemy. As a doctor, she oversaw the construction of reasonably hygienic pit toilets to prevent the group from suffering cholera, but they passed influenza and colds around to one another like a favorite book. Everyone broke a bone or so, or gashed themselves doing chores. Or were injured by raiders or worse, like this poor lad here. Rebecca made sure the bleeding had stopped, then cleaned out the wound with saline from a squeeze bottle that had once held malt vinegar.

At the first thrust of the needle, Martin woke up. His dark brown eyes opened, staring at her in terror.

“Aaagh!” he cried. It was clear he didn't recognize her. The assistants leaped to hold him down. They had had a great deal of practice. Rebecca murmured to him, trying to keep from hurting him, or vice versa.

“It's Dr. Saltford, Martin. I'm sewing up the wound on your forehead. Now, hold still, there's a good lad. Brigid is with you.”

The young man squeezed his eyes shut and held on to the edge of the steel prep table with both hands. Rebecca murmured to him soothingly throughout the rest of the operation. He'd have a scar worthy of Harry Potter, but if that was the worst that ever happened to him, he'd do fine.

She laid dressings over the wound and tied them in place with strips of sterilized cotton cloth. The bandages were printed with a cheerful pattern of flowers and butterflies. They had come from a hoard of quilting fabrics taken from a house on the edge of Dibden. The men scoffed when she insisted they bring it all back to the longhouse, but they'd ended up wearing a good deal of it over their many injuries since then.

And some of them had been sewn into shrouds made from that same wildly colorful cloth. Even with modern medical techniques, she couldn't have saved some of the wounded, not with what humans' inhumanity to others had become. She had had to learn to give mercy as well as healing. As one who took her Hippocratic oath seriously, it had been hard to learn to let patients die. She had no choice now.

Wearily, she washed herself and helped clean the operating room.

Ben was waiting for her in the garden at a rough table and bench hewed from whole logs. She studied him fondly. With the broad-brimmed hat to shield his eyes from the sun and the shaggy cloak he wore, he could have been a seventeenth century highwayman or Odin with both eyes intact. He wore a beard now, which he kept trimmed neatly to a point. It suited him. He studied her, too, then reached for the straw-lined basket in the center of the table and poured steaming liquid into a cup. She drank the tea gratefully.

“Will he live?” Ben asked. “Martin's my second-best man after Tim.”

“I think so,” Rebecca said. She finished the tea and held out a hand against a refill. Ben put the pot back into its protective basket. He stood up and helped her to her feet.

“Come and see the crops,” he said. “I have a surprise for you.”

Though she was tired from her surgery and the morning antenatal class with the two girls who had fallen pregnant over the last few months, curiosity stirred her enough to put on her Wellington boots and follow him. His hunting hounds, an assortment of sight hounds of all varieties, trotted obediently at their heels.

How strangely silent the Forest had become. In the old days, the susurrus of distant traffic had been a constant undertone. Now the song of larks and cuckoos rang out clear in the bright sky. They passed the longhouse, now used as storage for food. It was constantly patrolled by their young scouts and by a troupe of cats who traded their rat-assassin skills for fish and the remains from the evening meals. Close by was the grove of beeches that had given the coven its name, surrounding the stump of an ancient tree that acted as their altar. The woods were full of bluebells from April to mid-May. Their perfume was her favorite scent on Earth.

Ben held her hand firm in his, helping her over the uneven ground. Rockford Common stood almost chest-deep in grass and gorse after three years without cattle grazing. The sheer height of the greenery concealed their cultivation from easy observation. They waded across the small, brown forest stream with stickleback fry hovering in the clear water. Up the hill and over it, past an enormous blackberry bramble that was their landmark, Ben parted the grasses to let her see. She gasped with wonder. The barley was easily double or triple the previous year's crop.

“‘England's green and pleasant land,' indeed,” she said, with pleasure. “We won't run out this winter, not even with more mouths to feed.”

“I have a mind to use it for more than bread and soup,” Ben said. He swept up a punnet that sat on the ground at the corner of the field and presented it to her. “My wedding gift to you at the solstice next week, my lady dear.”

A wave of heady perfume rose from the mass of tight little white blossoms nestled within it.

“Hops?” she asked, hardly daring to believe it.

“Aye,” he said, thickening his natural lilt to a countryman's drawl, and matching her delighted grin with his own. “We'll have beer to drink to the longest day and our future together.”

“So mote it be,” Rebecca said.

Brewing was a messy and smelly job that was impossible to conceal. Ben and Rebecca had to resort to all the tools in their power to prevent anyone tapping the tanks in the microbrewery before the beer was ready. At the crack of dawn on the solstice, almost before the birds were up and singing, all twenty-three surviving souls put on the best clothes they had left. Julie wore a new dress she had made herself entirely out of scavenged T-shirts. The entire coven assembled in the Alice Lisle's microbrewery and waited avidly around the enormous copper tank. With solemn ceremony, Ben opened the cock and let the golden beer pour into a waiting keg. Rebecca thrust a huge tankard under the stream, poured a little on the stone floor for the gods and took a sip, and sighed with pleasure. The heady, yeasty scent tickled her nose, and the flavor made her tongue dance. It was good! Though she longed to drain the whole mug, she passed it to Ben. The first taste was only ceremonial. He held the beaker high.

“To a new day, my friends! Let the festivities begin.”

The others cheered. He drank and handed the tankard to Mary Valentine with a bow and a flourish.

Beer,
Rebecca thought in delight, watching him.
Beer, celebration, and love.
The latter thought made her heart twist with regret. She glanced at her children, each taking their sips from the big pewter mug and making faces at the strong flavor.
Ah, Noel, you'd be so proud of them.
But, as always, Ben was watching her, too. He reached out to touch her chin with his calloused fingertips.

“Now, now, my dear,” he said. “This is the new normal. It'll be good. You'll see. We can live with this.”

The day started out with a surprise for the adults. The children had been very secretive, whispering to one another in the shadowed corner of the sleeping room. Nora came around with wreaths of climbing roses and ivy for everyone's head. Rebecca shook down her hair under the fragrant circlet, feeling quite like a girl again. Ben wrapped his right arm around her, squeezing her tight. Then, to the strains of Tim's acoustic guitar, the children sang the ancient lay, “Sumer is A-Cumen In,” with acrobatic dancing that would have done credit to Cirque du Soleil. The adults battered their palms with applause. The children bowed, gratified, but were even more delighted when Rebecca rewarded them with a rare treat of barley sugar candy.

Nearly everyone had a turn at the impromptu cabaret. Tim knew every word of every skit ever performed by Monty Python, and chanted Eric Idle's scurrilous “Philosopher's Song,” to the cheers and whoops of his audience. Frank Valentine had been practicing in secret with a whip, and took a mug off his very trusting wife's head without hitting her.

A feast was laid out upon the pitted, elderly wooden tables. Sweet young peas still in the shell went down like candy as an appetizer. Roasted haunch of venison surrounded by tasty browned parsnips and carrots put everyone in a good mood. Rebecca had permitted a drain on the larder that she would never allow at other times, but this was a doubly joyous occasion. Ben went from person to person filling their mugs from a pitcher refreshed often from the first of the wooden kegs.

“Drink up, friends! There's five barrels to get through!” he announced. The others cheered.

“Two for today only,” Rebecca corrected him. “Ethanol poisoning is no joke, and you have all lost your tolerance. Don't be silly. Today's an important festival.”

“Enjoy yourself, love,” Ben said, stooping to kiss the serious look off her face. “It's our wedding day. Remember the Goddess' charge. Reverence and mirth, both. Don't be a doctor for once. Be the priestess and my bride.”

She put in the effort to let go of her most serious self, and found it was easier than she had thought. As Tim played tune after tune, she danced in a circle with her children and Ben.

“Are you happy to let him be your step-papa?” she had asked them again and again after Ben had proposed. “You know he will never replace your father, but Ben loves you.”

“We're fine, Mum,” David had assured her. Julie and James added their assent. “He's pretty great, you know.”

“Yes,” Rebecca remembered saying, and meaning it from the depths of her heart. “He is.”

So it was no trouble, in the midst of the evening's rite after sunset, following the prayers for the midsummer, to stand before the candle- and flower-laden altar in the greenwood, hands bound together with a silk scarf, to repeat the words of the ancient vow. Fragrant resin gathered from fir trees that had come to substitute for the frankincense they could no longer obtain wafted its sacred scent upon the air. They took the aspects of God and Goddess into themselves, but also remained priest and priestess, man and woman.

“I, Rebecca, plight thee, Ben, my troth . . .” He repeated the vow, with their names reversed. No one needed to marry them to each other. They were priest and priestess, and the gods were eminently present, in tree, root and leaf, in bird and beast, in water and sky, and in the hearts of their loved ones around them. Her heart welling with joy, Rebecca kissed him. Ben wrapped her in his arms and picked her right up off the ground, squeezing her so tightly her ribs squeaked. She couldn't wait until the evening was over, so they could sneak away and consummate their marriage. By the light shining in his eyes, neither could he. Everyone cheered. Tim whistled and stamped.

A wind blew up suddenly, bringing with it a foul odor. The flames of the point candles danced, and two of them went out.

“Pretty, very pretty,” said a man's voice. “What's this, a Renaissance fair?”

Rebecca spun. Everyone reached for their weapons, which were never far away. James slipped an arrow onto his bow.

Three men in canvas trousers and heavy leather jackets stumped toward them, hunting bows stretched in their hands with razor-pointed arrows nocked. Rebecca's heart pounded in her chest. They didn't look like the crazed cannibals that had stalked them before. They certainly weren't king's men. They were too filthy, and none of them had a badge on his sleeve. The weapons in their belts looked well used and well handled.

“Smelled your fires and thought we'd join you,” said the leader, a stocky man of middle height. His brown hair was going gray at the temples, and he was missing two teeth in the front.

Rebecca glanced at Ben. Normally, two or more of the scouts would have been on watch outside the grove, probably up one of the enormous trees. It had been days since anyone had tried to attack their home, so he had taken a chance on allowing everyone to be in the circle for the festival.

More fool us,
Rebecca thought. She trembled, but to her surprise, she stretched out her hand to the men.

“Welcome,” she said. “We're celebrating the summer solstice.”

“Witches?” the man at the leader's left shoulder asked.

“Nature worshippers,” Rebecca said.

“We never put spells on people who don't deserve it,” Mary Valentine said, her little dried walnut of a face set. All three arrows came around to point at her.