"I'm a bit busy just now, Larry," Aylward said. "Later. And I'm only a Dedi-cant, any rate."
As they walked on past the sheep Chuck grinned. "And there's a sore point," he said to Hordle. Aylward snorted as the lean man went on: "Melissa's High Priestess of the coven here. She thinks Samkin should be an Initiate-High Priest eventually, too. Everyone else in the dun does, too; he's their landfather."
"Larry does a perfectly good job of it," Aylward said stolidly. "Better than I could, any rate."
"And you can't see yourself with antlers on your head dancing beneath the moon, eh, Samkin?" Hordle teased.
"Chuck's High Priest at Dun Juniper when he's not Lord of the Harvest and Second Armsman," Aylward pointed out with satisfaction. "Antlers, robe, dancing and all."
"Ooops! Sorry, mate, I forgot-no offense."
"None taken," Chuck Barstow said, laughing aloud. "I just like getting a rise out of Sam about it now and then."
"It's being raised Church of England," Hordle said, entering into the spirit. "Actually believing in anything isn't allowed."
Aylward chuckled himself, then shook his head. "When you're around Lady Juniper for a while, you can believe anything, straight up. I just embarrass easily: well, I'm still English, so it's only natural, innit? But when you think about it, how likely was it I'd be in the Cascades in March, back in ninety-eight? Or get trapped in a gully and have Herself find me before I died?"
Chuck Barstow nodded. "Juney's right about you being a gift from Cernunnos, Sam. Having you around may or may not have saved us; I think it did, starting with seeing off those foragers from Salem. We certainly wouldn't be nearly as strong without you."
He elbowed the tall form of John Hordle. "And figure the odds on you and Sir Nigel and Alleyne ending up here, too, nine years later, you scoffing cowan. The Lord and Lady look after Their own."
"He's got a point there, John," Aylward said. "It's turned into Old Boys Day here for the 'ampshire 'ogs. Must be the Gods, mucking about with the numbers."
Hordle snorted. "Mate, everyone still alive is lucky enough to have won the bloody National Lottery twice over back before the Change. For that matter, the sodding Change burned out my habit of asking why things turn out the way they do. If that can happen, what's impossible?"
They came to the pasture Dun Fairfax was using for target practice and vaulted the gate. It was ten acres, surrounded by decaying board and wire fences that were lined with young hawthorn plants in the process of becoming hedges, and studded with a dozen huge Oregon oaks. They checked carefully-they didn't want someone's cow, or worse still a child, wandering about-and threw back their cloaks to free their right arms.
"Dropping shots over the third oak suit you two for a start?" Aylward said, indicating a tree a hundred and fifty yards off.
When the others nodded he brought up his bow and shot three times in eight seconds, the flat snap of the string on his bracer like a crackle of fingers; two more shafts were in the air when the first one went thunk into the board outline of a man with a shield. All three struck; the first two within a handspan of each other in the target's chest, but the last was pushed a little aside and down at the last instant by a gust of wind.
"Well, even if you didn't kill him outright, foe's not going to breed again," Hordle said, drawing the new bow to the ear and raising it at a fifty-degree angle towards the sky. Then: "Bugger!"
His shaft cleared the crown of the oak, and the target as well, by about twenty yards.
"Told you you'd overshoot with that, Little John," Aylward said smugly. "You're getting another dozen feet per second with the same draw."
"First try with a new bow," Hordle said defensively. "Only natural I'm off the once." The second landed a little short; the third:
"Did he miss?" Chuck Barstow asked, peering.
"Not from the sound," Aylward replied. "Punched right through. Extra point."
"It does have that little extra flick. I'll get used to it."
"Over by the tree, this time," Chuck said.
Those targets were rigged to resemble men leaning out from behind the trunk, and they were hung on hinges so that they swung in and out of sight when there was any wind. Barstow shot three times with the smooth action of a metronome, and the shafts flicked hissing through the gray gloaming to land with a hard, swift tock-tock-tock rhythm.
Hordle looked at the chewed-up surface of the targets. "Does everyone here practice like your kilties, Sam? It's the law back in Blighty these days everyone has to keep a bow and use it, but most just put in an hour or two on Sunday and take the odd rabbit."
Chuck Barstow grinned. "That's one of my jobs as Second Armsman, going around from dun to dun and checking that they do practice every day. I threaten them with Sam if I find out they've been goofing off. And testing to see who meets the levy standards, of course."
"Which are?"
"Fifty-pound draw at least, twelve aimed shafts a minute, and able to hit a man-sized target at a hundred yards eight times in ten."
"Fifty's a bit light for a war bow," Hordle said.
Sam Aylward shrugged. "A heavier draw's a better draw, but fifty's useful enough-I've seen a bow that weight put an arrow all the way through a bull elk at a hundred paces, and break ribs going in and going out. Which wouldn't do a man any good, eh?"
Chuck nodded. "And that's the minimum, of course; the average is around eighty. Nearly everyone hunts for the pot these days, what with the way deer and wild pigs have gotten to be pests, and absolutely everyone knows there's times your life is going to depend on shooting fast and straight."
Hordle grunted, drawing and loosing. The arrow whacked home, and a chunk of the fir target weakened by multiple impacts broke off and went out of sight.
"Well, you've more fighting to do here than folk back in England," he said. "There's the Brushwood men, but they're not much more than a bloody nuisance unless you're up on the edge of cultivation north of London."
Aylward sighed and shook his head; he'd been here in Oregon at the time of the Change, and there hadn't been any news from the Old World until the Lorings and Hordle arrived on a Tasmanian ship before this last Beltane. It was still a wrench, visualizing southern England as a pioneer zone, a frontier wilderness where a bare six hundred thousand survivors fought encroaching brambles, hippo roamed the Fens, wolves howled in the streets of Manchester, and tigers gone feral from safari parks took sheep even on the outskirts of Winchester, the new capital.
"And of course there's the odd dust-up with the Moors, or the wild Irish when we have to help out Ian's Rump over in Ulster," Hordle said slyly, in the next interval in their shooting. "There's a joke for you-the Change and all, and we're still having problems with the Provos."
"Better not mention that too often among Mackenzies," Aylward said. "Half the folk in our territory here have hypnotized themselves into believing they're cousins of Finn Mac Cool. For all that they're Ulstermen by descent as much as anything, a lot of them. Scots-Irish, they call it here."
"Not me," Chuck Barstow said. "English and German in my family tree, plus a couple of Bohunks, a trace of Canadian French and a little Indian way back. And Judy's Jewish-or Jewitch, as she likes to put it."
"At least you don't try putting on a brogue, Chuck. Every second kiltie these days does, or tries to rrrrrroll their r's as if they were from Ayrrrrshire."
He went on to Hordle: "We still get a fair count of plain old-fashioned bandits now and then, too, which keeps everyone on their toes. Plenty of places aren't doing as well as us, just scraping by, and east of the mountains there's always fighting, all of which gets us a yearly crop of broken men too angry to beg but hungry enough to steal."
"And you've got Arminger waiting up in Portland," Hordle said. "After Sir Nigel and I had the pleasure of his hospitality for weeks, I'd have to agree you've got a roit nasty old piece of work there."