He looked up and met her eyes, and felt an unwilling thaw at the concern he saw there. "That sounds: familiar somehow. Is it a quote?"
She smiled. "Something Mother said to me once." A shake of the head. "I do think that moment at the Change may have changed us, too, though. There was so much madness afterwards, and so swiftly."
"I'm afraid there's no way to test it. And while Johnson did say that the prospect of being hanged concentrates a man's mind, the prospect of imminent inescapable death can certainly drive people mad, especially if the laws of nature are mucked about with at the same time."
They were both somber for a moment; nine in ten of humankind had perished in the year that followed. Then they shook it off; those who couldn't had joined that majority long years ago. Despair could kill you just as surely as hunger or plague.
Instead they chatted of small, recent things, the new artificial-swamp waste system he'd help install here at Dun Juniper, Rudi's progress with the sword- which Nigel privately thought was alarmingly swift for a boy his age-and then fell into a companionable silence until the trestle tables were set up for dinner.
There aren't many women I've felt comfortable just sitting by, except Maude, of course, he thought; then he caught that disconcerting twinkle again. Or ones who could read me that quickly.
Chapter Three
Dun Fairfax, Willamette Valley, Oregon
December 15th, 2007/Change Year 9
"T here," Sam Aylward-Sam Aylward Mackenzie, these days-said, as he finished smoothing the spot where he'd tooled his maker's initials into the deer-hide covering of the bow's riser.
He wiped down the length of the longbow with an oiled linen rag and held it up to the lantern slung from the roof of his workshop before tossing it to the man on the other stool.
"Ah, now there's a proper job of work," John Hordle said, putting down his beer mug to slide the weapon between great spade-shaped hands whose backs were dense with reddish furze. "You could do a bit of shooting with this!"
The workshop had been a two-car garage and storage area attached to the farmhouse of the Fairfax family before the Change; they hadn't survived it long, being elderly and extremely diabetic. Now Aylward's wife Melissa had her loom over by the rear wall with a big new window cut for light, and the forward end held a bowyer's needs. There was a pleasant smell of seasoning cut wood from the lengths of yew and Port Orford cedar lying on the roof-joists overhead, and of paint and glue, leather and varnish and oiled metal from the benches with their vises, clamps and rows of tools. Everything was painstakingly neat, even the shavings carefully swept up into a box-that chore was mostly done by his son Edain and stepdaughter Tamar, who accounted it a privilege to wield a broom after he let them watch and occasionally hand him a tool.
They weren't here at the moment, since their mother had them corralled to help with dinner; Aylward was alone with Hordle and Chuck Barstow. Aylward was a stocky man going on fifty, with thick, curly brown hair a little grizzled at the temples, no more than medium height but thick-armed and broad-shouldered and even stronger than he looked; Barstow was a decade younger, lean and wiry and near six feet, with a sandy beard trimmed to a point and thinning hair of the same color. Hordle was the youngest in his late twenties, towering over both the others at six-foot-seven, three hundred and ten pounds of bone and muscle with a ruddy face like a cured ham and a thatch of dark red-brown hair and little hazel eyes, built massively enough that you didn't realize his full height until he stood close. When he strung the heavy longbow, it was with an effortless flex of arm and hip.
Aylward and Hordle had the same accent, a slow thick south-English yokel drawl out of deepest rural Hampshire; Barstow's was General American, what you'd expect from someone born in Eugene in 1967 and raised there. But they all had something in common, something beyond the Mackenzie kilt and the weathered skin of men who spent much time out of doors in all weathers, an indefinable quality of coiled wariness even at rest, a readiness for sudden violent action that only another practitioner of their deadly trade might have caught.
"There's a few improvements over the old plain crooked stick, y'might say," Aylward said. "The reflex out at the tips makes it throw faster, and the deflex in on either side of the riser keeps it stable. More accurate, less hand-shock. A strip of raw deerhide glued on the back, to keep splinters from starting."
He grinned with mock modesty as his giant countryman examined the bow. It had a central grip of rigid black walnut root, carved to fit the hand and covered in suede-finished leather that would drink sweat and prevent slipping; just above that was a ledge for the arrow-rest, cut in so that it ran through the cen-terline of the bow and lined with two tufts of rabbit-skin. The tapering limbs with their subtle double curve were Pacific yew, mountain-grown for a dense hard grain, the orange heartwood on the belly of the bow and the paler sap-wood on the back. He'd made it the traditional length, as tall as the user when unstrung plus a bit, and it took a hundred and fifty pounds to draw it the full thirty-two inches. Few men could manage a draw-weight that heavy; Aylward's own war bow took a hundred and ten, and Chuck's was a hundred. Hordle managed this one easily enough:
"What's this then?" Hordle said, flicking a sausage-thick finger at the inside of the stave just above the riser. "I thought you didn't hold wi' laminations?"
"I don't," Aylward said, using the rag to wipe his hands clean of the linseed oil he'd used on the yew; it rasped a little as threads caught on the heavy callus on his hands. "Those fillets of horn are pegged into the riser and working free against strips of hardwood glued on the stave, ten inches either way of the grip. It gives it just that extra bit of"-he snapped his fingers out and back- "flick."
Chuck Barstow grinned. "And you'll be the envy of the whole Willamette, with a bow from the hands of Aylward the Archer, himself himself," he said.
Aylward snorted. "Bollocks," he said. "There's many I've trained who make bows as good as mine, and plenty more who're good as needs be, and I weren't the only bowyer around here to start with. Bowmaking isn't a master-craftsman's trade, you can learn it well enough in a few months if you're handy and have the knack, and God knows we've plenty of good yew in this part of the world. For that matter there's better shots than me among the Mackenzies, and no doubt more elsewhere."
"You could still make a good living selling your bows," Barstow said. "Those two you taught do it in Sutterdown, full-time. They've had clients come from as far away as Idaho."
"I like getting my hands into the dirt, when I'm not off on Lady Juniper's business," Aylward said stoutly. "And growing what I eat. Reminds me of growing up on the farm with Mum and Dad back in the old country." He jerked a thumb at Hordle. "Not far from where this great gallybagger idled his youth away."
John Hordle gave a theatrical shudder. "Now, my dad owned a pub," he said to Chuck. "That's a man's life, I tell you. Chatting up the totty and tossing back the Real Ale, and none of that shoveling muck into the spreader on a cold winter's day."
"Then why didn't you stay on at the Pied Merlin instead of going for a soldier?" Aylward asked.
"Because of all the ruddy lies you told me about being in the SAS while I was still a nipper," Hordle said good-humoredly. "Ended up humping a full pack over every sodding mountain in Wales doing the regimental selection, I did. Which probably saved me life come the Change. Otherwise I'd have starved or got et, like most, instead of getting out to the Isle of Wight with the colonel."
"Oh, I don't know," Aylward replied. "Sir Nigel always looked after 'is own. You told me he got my sisters and their kids out, didn't you? And he'd not seen hair nor hide o' me in years. From what you said, he had them set up with their men on their own farms afterwards, too, when things settled down a bit. He'd have seen you right."