Dangerous Women Part 57

Juniper filled her lungs and let the flash of temper out with the breath, a technique mastered long ago.

She signed: Do you feel it? There's an anger in the air. In the ground, in the feel of things, like a louring threat.

Eilir's pale blue eyes narrowed, then went a little distant.

I think so, Spooky-Mom, she replied after a moment. Yes, a bit.

They both looked at Judy, who shook her head and shrugged.

"Not me. You're the mystical one. I just made sure we had clean robes and plenty of candles for the Sabbats."

The Earth is the Mother's, Eilir signed, her face utterly stark for once. Maybe it's Her anger we're feeling.

They halted in the center where the roads met. Juniper handed down her nine-month-old son, Rudi, to Melissa Aylward Mackenzie, swelling with her own pregnancy.

"I feel it too," the younger woman said seriously.

She was new-come to the Old Religion, like so many others, but already High Priestess of Dun Fairfax, and here to help with organizing the rite.

"Let's hope we're doing the right thing in Her eyes, then," Juniper said. "Get the littles in order, would you, Mellie? This is going to be hard on them."

She nodded soberly, then smiled a little as she hefted Rudi expertly. Juniper shook her head and stretched in a creak of saddle leather; riding made your back ache. Some distant part of her noticed how casual people had already become about standing in the middle of roads, now that cars and trucks were a fading memory.

We've better things to do than this, she went on to her daughter. Her fingers and hands danced, as fluent as speaking aloud: It's the harvest and n.o.body has time to spare. Spending most of yesterday and last night hammering out the ritual and the guidelines for this was hard, even with ten minds pooled together. I hate having to do things on the fly, especially when it's setting a precedent ... but what else can we do?

Eilir shrugged. Lock him up like they used to, until it's convenient?

Juniper didn't bother to dignify that with an answer; it wasn't meant to be taken seriously. Nor could they spare anyone to supervise a criminal's labor, even if they were willing to go down that road, which they weren't.

Sam Aylward, her chief armsman, held her stirrup as she dismounted. She stretched again as her boots touched the asphalt, settling the plaid pinned across her shoulder with a twitch. The Dun Juniper contingent were all wearing the same Highland costume, one that had started as half a joke and spread because it was so convenient. All in a sort of dark greenlight browndull orange tartan that owed everything to a warehouse full of salvaged blankets and nothing whatsoever to Scotland.

About a third of the Dun Fairfax folk wore the kilt too, and the clothing of the rest showed in tears and patches and tatters why the pre-Change clothes were running out so shockingly fast. They just weren't designed to stand up under the sort of daily grind of hard outdoor labor that nearly everyone did these days. And salvaging more from the unburned parts of the cities was getting to be impossibly dangerous and labor-intensive now that the nearby towns had been stripped. Only big well-armed parties could do it at all, what with bandits and pint-sized warlords popping up everywhere and the crawling terror of the Eater bands lurking in the ruins amid their hideous game of stalking and feasting.

A note popped up from the vast sprawling mental file cabinet she had to lug around these days: Check on the flax and wool and spinning-wheel projects after we've got the harvest out of the way. We don't need to make our own cloth yet, but we have to have the seeds and tools and skills built up for when we do.

She'd been a skilled amateur weaver herself before the Change, and they'd organized cla.s.ses in it over the winter. Fortunately it was something you could put down and pick up later.

Melissa left her group and walked over to the stretched tarp shelter to the southwest of the crossroads where the children and nursing mothers sat. Rudi gurgled and waved chubby arms, his eyes and delighted toothless smile fixed on her face.

Thank the Lord and Lady he's a good baby. Eilir was a lot more trouble. Of course, I had less knowledge then, and a great deal less help. It really does take a village, or at least that makes it a lot easier.

"They're doing flags for all the Duns," Juniper observed to Chuck Barstow. "It's a good idea, sure. People need symbols."

"Dennie had it right when he insisted on the green flag, though," Chuck said. "We need a symbol for the whole Clan as well. Where do you want it?"

Juniper pursed her lips. She'd made the old sigil of the Singing Moon Coven into a flag: dark antlers and crescent silver moon on green silk. Embroidery was another skill that had turned from hobby to cherished lifeline. The still air of the late summer made it and all the others planted around the tarp shelters hang limp, as if waiting with indrawn breath. Fortunately hers was suspended from a crossbar on the staff, which meant you could see what was on it.

"Next to Dun Carson's, please."

Dun Carson's silver labrys on blood red was planted right in front of the northwest tarp, where the crossroads made a vaguely northsouth, eastwest cross. Chuck planted the point on the bottom of the Clan's into the earth with a shove and twist. Brian Carson stood with his brother's widow and his orphaned niece and nephew, next to the two tables she'd requested at the center. His wife, Rebekah, stood on his other side, looking a little stiff.

Melissa and her helpers took over the job of looking after the littles. The southeast quadrant held representatives from other duns within a fifteen-mile radius; volunteers came forward to take the horses, unsaddling and hobbling and watering them before turning them loose in a pasture.

How the Change has limited us, thought Juniper. Fifteen miles is a long way again! This will be recorded and sent out in the Sun Circle. Some witnessing is a good idea, but turning it into a circus is not.

There were better than fifty adults under the judgment tarp, probably ten or fifteen teenagers- -eghann, thought Juniper. We'll call them eghann.

That meant youth or helper in her mother's language.

We need a name for the teenagers who are ready to begin to learn the adult needs and responsibilities, but not yet given a vote. Eoghann will do, since everyone seems determined to play at being Celts.

Juniper shook herself slightly. The profound silence was broken only by the occasional wail from one of the babies, the hoof-clop of a horse shifting its weight or a cough coming through clearly. No trace of the whine and murmur of machine noise in the background anymore, and that still startled her sometimes with a quietness unlike anything she'd ever experienced unless on a hiking trip in wilderness. It made familiar places unfamiliar.

She stood behind the large folding table. There was a tall chair for her ...

A bar stool! she thought. That's funny on more levels than I can cope with today.

Most people were sitting on st.u.r.dy boxes and baskets in neat rows, very unlike the Clan's usual laissez-faire order. Front and center sat the man who was the focus of this day's process, set apart from them by the white tarp under him and a clear circle of aversion.

On either side of him stood men from the Dun. They had knives in their belts, but that was simply the tool everyone carried now. One also had a pickax handle in his hand, though, and the other a baseball bat.

And they're needed, Juniper thought as she took him in with a grimace. Yes, with this one.

He was a strong man, of medium height and well muscled, with striking chiseled features and curly black hair he wore fairly short. The sort who quivered with suppressed anger at the world, to whom everything that thwarted his will was an elemental affront.

He's not afraid, really, she thought; she'd always been good at reading people. Which means he's not only wicked, he's very arrogant, very stupid, or both.

As she watched, he shot a sudden glance over his shoulder, a flicker of something triumphant on his face, which he schooled at once as he looked forward again.

"Armsmen, take custody of the prisoner," she said coolly, and saw a moment's doubt on his face.

The men of the Dun moved aside for Sam and Chuck and went to sit with the rest. From their expressions, they were thankful to turn the task over to a uniformed authority, and they weren't the only ones.

Besides their kilts, the two men wore what had been chosen as the Mackenzie war kit, though there hadn't been time to craft enough for everyone yet: a brigandine of two layers of green leather (salvaged from upholstery) with little steel plates riveted between, quivers and yew longbows slung across their backs, shortswords and long dirks and soup-plate bucklers at their belts, a small wicked sgian dub knife tucked into one boot-top. The plain bowl helmets with the spray of raven feathers at the brow made them somehow seem less human and more like walking symbols.

Chuck Barstow had a spear as well as the war-harness. The prisoner would have been less surly if he knew what it portended, or that Chuck was High Priest of the Singing Moon Coven as well as second-in-command of their militia. The spear's polished six-foot shaft was rudha-an, the same sacred rowan wood used for wands. The head was a foot-long section cut from a car's leaf spring, ground down to a murderous double-edged blade and socketed onto the wood white-hot before it was plunged into a bath of brine and blood and certain herbs.

It had also been graven with ogham runes, the ones that had come again and again when she tossed the yew sticks of divination on the symbol-marked cloth of the Briatharogam. Just two: uath, terror.

Whose kenning was banad gnuise, the blanching of faces. For horror and fear and the Hounds of Anwyn.

Getal, death.

Whose meaning was tosach n-echto, called the beginning of slaying. For the taking of life and for sacrifice.

Juniper took a deep breath, and closed her eyes for an instant to make herself believe she was truly here and not imagining it. The dull heat she had felt before came back, manyfold, as if the soil beneath her feet was throbbing with rage.

"Bring him before me."

Her own voice startled her, though casting her trained soprano to carry was second nature for a professional singer. Now it was somehow like the metal on the edge of a knife.

"You heard Lady Juniper, gobs.h.i.te," Sam said, just barely loud enough for her to catch.

The hand he rested on the man's shoulder to move him forward might have looked friendly, from any distance. Juniper could see the wrist and scarred, corded forearm flex, and the prisoner's eyes went wide for an instant as it clamped with crushing precision. Sam had been born and raised on a small English farm; his trade had been a peculiar type of soldiering for half his forty-two years, before chance or the Weavers left him trapped and injured in the woods near her home just after the Change.

His hobby had been making and using the longbow of his ancestors. He was stocky and of middle height, but those thick spade-shaped hands could crack walnuts between thumb and two fingers. And she happened to know that he hated men like this with a pure and deadly pa.s.sion.

Chuck Barstow looked grimmer; he'd been a Society fighter and a gardener besides a member of the Singing Moon, not a real warrior by trade, though everyone had seen death and battle in the last eighteen months. But he was equally determined as he paced forward to keep the prisoner bracketed. From the way his eyes were fixed and showed white around the blue, he was feeling something too, besides the gravity of the moment, and not enjoying it.

Judy Barstow was at the far right of the table next to a woman who sat tensely upright; her white face frightened and her eyes carefully not focused.

Our prime exhibit, thought Juniper. Even if I just nursed Rudy, my b.r.e.a.s.t.s ache. But why is it so hard to breathe?

Eilir had moved to sit at the smaller, shorter table, set in an L to the larger one. She turned and her fingers flew. Shall I find some cold tea for you?

Yes, thanks.

She drank the lukewarm chamomile thirstily as her daughter pulled a fresh book out of her saddlebags. Ice in summer was a memory, and a possibility someday when they had time for icehouses, but you could get a little coolness by using coa.r.s.e porcelain.

The book was covered in black leather, carefully tooled with the words: The Legal Proceedings of Clan Mackenzie, Second Year of the Change.

And below that: Capital Crimes.

Eilir opened it to a fresh page, pulled out an ink bottle and a steel-nibbed pen that had come out of retirement in an antiques store in Sutterdown. n.o.body thought it odd that a fourteen-year-old was acting as court clerk. Standards had changed.

The first pages of the book contained the rituals they had come up with last night, after they had hashed out the legal and moral basis for judging the case. The first pages of the book covered all that, written in Eilir's neat print.

Juniper looked over to the Dun Carson witnesses sitting in the southeast quadrant. Everybody was still, the sensation of their focused attention like and unlike a performance.

"I have been called here to listen to the Dun's judgment against Billy Peers Mackenzie ..."

"Hey!" the man yelled. "I ain't never said nothing about Mackenzie. That was you-all. I'm William Robert Peers."

Juniper hesitated and then turned her head.

"I will only say this once, Mr. Peers. You will keep your mouth closed until I give you leave to speak. If you speak out of turn again, your guards will gag you. Gags are very uncomfortable. I advise you to be quiet."

"But you can't do that! It isn't legal!"

Sam's hand moved once, and the man stopped with his mouth gaping open. He reached into his sporran, pulled out the gag and shoved it into the man's mouth with matter-of-fact competence, checking carefully to make sure that his tongue lay flat and that it wasn't so large as to stop him from swallowing. The rags wrapped around the wooden core had been steeped in chamomile and fennel seed tea and dried so that it wouldn't taste too foul. Straps around the head held it in place without cutting at the corners of his mouth. He struggled, though it was as ineffectual as a puppy in a man's hands.

"I said I would speak only once. All of you, take heed. If I state a consequence will follow, it will follow. Second chances belong to the times before the Change, when we were rich enough to waste time arguing. You have one minute to stand quiet."

A glance at her watch.

She gazed dispa.s.sionately at the struggling man trying to spit the carefully constructed gag out of his mouth. Then she began to count the measured seconds out loud. After the tenth second pa.s.sed, it caught Peers' attention. At the twentieth second, he stopped struggling.

"Better. If you cause any further disruption, you will be knocked unconscious. I have no time to waste now, in the midst of harvest."

Peers jerked, started to struggle again, saw a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye as Sam raised a hand stiffened into a blade, flinched and subsided. Juniper waited and then turned again to the north leg of the crossroads. She lifted her arms, and Judy placed her staff in her hands; it had the Triple Moon-waxing and full and waning-above two raven heads of silver, and the shaft was also of mountain rowan.

"I have been called here by the oenach of Dun Carson and by the Ollam of Dun Carson; Sharon Carson, Hearthmistress, Cynthia Carson, Priestess and First Armsman of Dun Carson, Ray Carson, Second Armsman and Herd Lord in Training, and Brian Carson, Herd and Harvest Lord, pro-tem, and his wife, Rebekah Carson, the tanner.

"I am Juniper Mackenzie, Chief of the Clan Mackenzie. I am Ollam Brithem, high judge over our people."

Juniper winced at the power she was claiming. But I am needed as chief, and so I must take this burden on. Threes; everything in threes. Continue, woman, get this over.

"I am called here, by oenach, Ollam, and the G.o.ds to hear, to judge, and to speak. Does any deny my right, my obligation, or my calling? Speak now or hold your tongue thereafter, for this place and time is consecrated by our gathering. All we do here is holy-and legal."

Distantly, she was aware that Peers tried to struggle again and quickly subsided as Sam gripped the back of his neck.

A long silence and she continued, face raised to the sun, eyes closed against its burning light: "Let us be blessed!"

"Manawyddan-Restless Sea, wash over me."

A green branch sprinkled salt water over her. She tasted the salt on her lips like tears. Four Priestesses came with green branches, each trailed by a child holding a bowl of salt water. Each cleansed the people in one of the quarters; the last pair a.s.siduously cleansed the empty northeastern quarter.

"Manawyddan-Restless Sea! Cleanse and purify me! I make myself a vessel; to listen and to hear."

"Rhiannon-White Mare, stand by me, run with me, carry me! That the land and I can be one, with Earth's wisdom."

She bent and took a pinch of the dry dust from the road and sprinkled it in front of her. There was a long ripple as the Dun Carson people did the same, and the witnesses.

"Rhiannon-White Mare, ground me."

"Arianrhod-Star-tressed Lady; dance through our hearts, our minds, and through our eyes, bring Your light to us."

She took a torch from Eilir and lit it; the resinous wood flared up. Eilir took it to the four corners of the crossroads and lit each torch.

"Arianrhod-Star-tressed Lady; Bring Your light to me, to us, to the world.

"Sea and Land and Sky, I call on you: "Hear and hold and witness thus, "All that we say "All that we agree "All that we together do.

"Honor to our G.o.ds! May they hold "Our oaths "Our truths."

Then she spoke formally: "Let all here act with truth, with honor and with duty, that justice, safety and protection all be served for this our Clan, and may Ogma of the Honey Tongue lend us His eloquence in pursuit of Truth."

"This Dun's oenach is begun! By what we decide, we are bound, each soul and our people together."

She turned in place, looking at all the people a.s.sembled, and rapped the b.u.t.t of her staff on the ground.

"I am here, we are here, the G.o.ds are here. So mote it be!"

"So mote it be!" the ma.s.sed voices replied.

She noticed that Rebekah said the words and was glad. They weren't actually religious and it meant she was partic.i.p.ating in the Clan's work, rather than standing back, claiming religious exemption. She moved over to the chair and hoisted herself up on it. She could feel Chuck move into place behind her, still holding the spear upright as a symbol of her justice.

The morning sun was pouring down on the tarps and she could feel the heat and sweat that started to trickle down her back and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The kilt had been comfortable while riding down to the crossroads through the forest ... now the soft wool was sticking to her legs and her kneesocks made her legs itch.