Boom. Boom. Boom-boom-boom-boom:
The hammer of the huge Lambegs massed behind them was soul-shattering, which had been precisely the intent of her ancestors, when they made them echo over moors and down the glens; to break the heart of an enemy and then charge home with claymore and Lochaber ax to break his head. Juniper Mackenzie let them echo in hers, until they were like the beating of her own heart; even the green-and-silver silk fabric of the Clan's flag shivered in rhythm with the sound, like the tympanum of an ear.
The bagpipes skirled beneath and around the huge sound, "MacNeil's Kin," jaunty and jeering and full of a swaggering threat as the pipers paced and turned along the road before the line of the Clan's warriors. Here and there a few of the younger fighters couldn't wait standing still, and began to do an impromptu war dance of their own, left hands on hips and bows aloft as their feet stamped and flashed, screeching out the ritual cries of their totems, hawk screech, dragon roar, wolf howl. The music spoke to something in her as well, something that bristled the fur along her spine and the fox red mane on her head, and peeled lips back from teeth.
Nigel Loring chuckled, squinting beneath the raised visor of his sallet; she laughed at the same instant.
"What's the joke, my love?" Juniper asked; you could speak privately in this din.
He leaned over. "That this must have been what Scotland sounded like to a great many of my ancestors, riding north to Bannockburn or Dupplin Moss or Flodden," Nigel said.
"You're such a fine human being that sometimes I forget you're a Sassenach, sure," Juniper replied, restraining a nervous impulse to check the arrows in her quiver one more time.
"You're only half Irish, and no more Scottish than I am."
"Scots on my father's side."
"And German, French-Canadian, Swiss, Cherokee: even English, from what you've said."
"I try to remember that they're human beings too, sure."
"And what was our good Chief laughing at?"
She nodded towards the leaping figures and their painted, snarling faces. "That if the Change hadn't happened, they'd be thinking about the senior prom, or what courses to take next semester, or a new fad diet to shed a few pounds, and watching TV ads for mouthwash and personal computers. That they'd be entirely different people, not even looking very similar." A deep breath. "Will you stand with the axmen and spears again this time?"
"I'll stay with you, if you please, my: Lady Juniper."
"You're a romantic at heart, my darling Englishman," she said softly.
"I'm repellently practical," he said stoutly. "It's just that my exiled existence would have little point without you, my dear."
She smiled and touched the cool braided gold and silver of the torque, now stretched a little to fit around the chain-mail collar of her arming doublet. The silver moon on the brow of her helmet reflected the gray of the sky as she turned to look northeast. Open fields stretched beyond the four-lane highway up to the road where the enemy would come. Off to their right were a few of the CORA riders, with the whole of their reserve horse-herd.
"Nonsense," she said crisply, with a twinkle in her green eyes. "We're not a boy and girl, Nigel. We're middle-aged, and we have grown sons and daughters and soon we'll have grandchildren to see to as well. I love you well and I'd grieve all my life if you died, but I would go on living, and do my best to find joy and work in it. So would you."
He blinked at her, then reached up a steel-clad finger to brush his mustache, laughing softly. "Perhaps I am an incorrigible romantic. My dear, you never cease to amaze me. And that, I think, will make life together very enjoyable indeed."
She nodded; the little exchange had helped her disperse the last knot in her stomach, leaving her grounded and centered for what must come. They stood by the banner, at the center of the Mackenzie formation. That stood along the southeast side of the old Cascade Highway, strung out behind the shallow roadside ditch and a post-and-board fence in a field of rippling blue-green winter wheat, waiting patiently in their three-deep staggered harrow formation. Even then she felt a pang of regret at trampling someone's crop; it would have been a good one, the stems thick and stiff and close-placed, already well over ankle-high four months before the harvest. Trampled, it smelled sweet, like grass cut for haying, but with a strong mealy undertone, mixing with the damp earth beneath.
A gesture to the signaler, and the wild music died away into a ringing silence. She took a deep breath and shouted: "Plant the swine-feathers!"
She turned to look as the order was relayed to either side of her. There were a few whoops and yips from the grinning, gaudy-painted faces of her clansfolk; these of the First Levy were mostly young men and women, few past their mid-twenties, and they could appreciate Eilir's idea-the more so since they were her generation, and eager to show what they could do. Each reached back into a leather bag slung beside their quiver, on the opposite side from the loops that held their bows. Each brought out two poles bound together with twine; one was like a shovel with a narrow, flat blade and a yard-long handle, the other like a short spear of the same length. Each stubby pole had a steel collar and locking device on its rear, where the handle or butt-cap would usually be.
Shovel and spear fitted together with a push and twist, a click and snick! and suddenly every archer held a seven-foot length of ashwood with a spade on one end and a knife-edged spearhead on the other. They turned in place and rammed the shovel blades into the dirt, stamping them home with the heels of their boots as if they were digging a ditch. Then each turned back, but now they stood amid a forest of long spears, pointing forward in a bristling block a thousand yards long and three deep, and each was slanted forward with the point a bit above chest-high on a man: or precisely chest-high on a horse. The whole process had taken barely twenty seconds.
Sam Aylward came trotting up the road, inspecting it from the front. "Lady," he said, with a quick nod. "It certainly looks bloody frightening."
"We already knew that, Sam," she said. "We'll just have to see if it works, won't we?"
The swine-feathers weren't a line of spearmen or a pike-hedge. They weren't much impediment at all to men on foot. Experiment had shown that a horse could get through them too: if it slowed down, and chose its way at a careful walking pace, and didn't have anything to spook or frighten it out of what limited concentration the little herbivore minds could muster.
Aylward looked at her. She nodded, and he signed to the signaler. The low dunting snarl of the cow-horn trumpet- huu, huu, huuuuuu. Helpers were running forward, setting out bundles of spare arrows in the ground behind the swine-feathers, pushing them down until the points stood in the dirt deep enough to support the shafts, then undoing the slipknots. The archers trotted forward, vaulting the board fence, then across the pavement and over the fence on the other side and into the pasture there. On their left was a school-built before the Change, but still in use, though she could see from the signs that it had a different name from the one on the maps, Queen of Angels rather than Butte Creek.
Huuuuuuu – hu-hu!
The horn droned and blatted, and they halted as one, still in the harrow formation; the helpers rushed forward behind them, hurrying to get three or four bundles of arrows within reach of every string hand.
She looked northward. A column appeared on the road there; not the enemy, but two-score riders led by the tree-and-stars banner of the Dunedain. They peeled off and galloped over the half mile of open pasture towards the Macken-zies and their friends; midway Astrid and Alleyne turned towards the CORA position with most of the Rangers, and Eilir and John Hordle led the rest to the Clan's banner. Juniper checked anxiously; neither was hurt, though both were splashed with mud. Her daughter gave her a wink and a thumbs-up gesture.