After a moment he moved forward again. Stories to the contrary, you couldn't move through brush or forest without making noise. The saving grace was that the forest made noise of its own all the time, and if you froze when you put a foot wrong the sound would vanish into the background, especially when there was a nice lively wind like this. A head might come around when they heard a crackle, but if they didn't see movement or hear anything else right away, they tended to let it go. You couldn't investigate every noise that might be someone.
Slow and careful, that's the ticket.
He made another careful sound as he eeled into the slightly higher ground that bore the trees, one that would announce that he was where he'd intended to go. The surface here wasn't exactly dry, but at least it wasn't outright bog. A fallen alder gave shelter to the west, thick with young seedlings growing about the nurse-tree's rotting trunk.
Well, well, he thought as he slowly raised the binoculars to his eyes and moved his thumb on the focusing screw, isn't that interesting? The colonel was right.
A half-dozen large canoes were drawn up in a slough that gave off the Willamette. Willows trailed drooping branches on them, but the camouflage netting on the frames that spanned their hulls would have made them hard to see in any case; otherwise they were voyageur- style boats, aluminum versions of the type Canadian fur traders had used in the old days. He'd used similar craft on wilderness trips before the Change, and in training with the SAS-though apart from the Falklands and a spell in Ulster his active service had mostly involved extremely dry deserts full of homicidal lunatics.
Still, you never know when training will come in handy. You can get better than a ton in one of those things. Paddle slow and at night, lie up by day and you could get from here to Portland without anyone the wiser, or at least to the falls at Oregon City, which is much of a muchness. Not many folk living right by the river these days.
Ragged men unloaded wicker baskets and poplar-wood boxes from the canoes. Others loaded cargo, mostly in sacks; part of it was prisoners, bound and with bags over their heads, which was an excellent way of keeping captives disoriented and passive. Aylward whistled silently through his teeth, then handed the binoculars to the man who'd crawled up beside him.
As he did so he kept counting the number of fighting men down there. Two dozen at least, all up, he decided regretfully. Not a chance.
It was with even more regret that he grabbed Major Peter Jones by the collar of his camouflage jacket and touched the point of a dirk to the inner angle of his jaw when he showed signs of leaping up and advancing on the canoes with drawn sword. The Corvallan wasn't quite angry enough to try and fight him, and they moved backward with commendable stealth.
"Those were Protectorate soldiers!" Jones snarled quietly, when they were back where they'd left the horses.
Aylward nodded as he tightened a girth and bundled up his ghillie cloak to strap behind the saddle. "Right you are, mate," he said. "Some of them. The rest were your common-or-garden bandit shites."
"And you've known about this?" Jones said.
"More or less suspected," Aylward said.
"We've got to do something!"
"We're not going to go charging in with four archers and you against that lot," Aylward said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. "They've got six to our one, and about half of them looked like they had hauberks on. Mother Aylward didn't raise any of her kids to be bloody fools."
"Why didn't you tell us before?"
"We tried to, didn't we? It was always 'no proof, no proof, no bloody proof, you kilties are just trying to get us fighting Portland, oh dear, oh dear.' Colonel Loring was the one suggested we stake out this location-he's had the time to think about it, you see, and he always did have a fine eye for ground, and for putting bits of this and that together to get a picture."
"They're stealing people," Jones said, incandescent with anger.
Aylward nodded. "Stands to reason, short of labor as everyone is, and the Protectorate's not going to get many volunteers. At a guess, the border barons started hiring bandits to catch runaway peons and bond-tenants. Not a big step from there to buying replacements, and who's going to listen to one more poor, unfortunate bugger in a labor gang?"
"The Faculty Senate is going to hear about this!"
A grin split Aylward's square Saxon face. "That's the point of this little walk in the woods, innit? Hopefully they'll listen to you."
Corvallis, Willamette Valley, Oregon
January 14th, 2008/Change Year 9
"It's indecent," Juniper said.
"What, the kilt?" Nigel Loring asked, glancing down as they strolled arm-inarm between the booths. "I admit that my knobby knees aren't much to look at, but I wouldn't say they were actually obscene -"
"That so much is going wrong, and I'm still so happy," Juniper replied, prodding him in the ribs with a finger.
He laughed. "My dear, if I were any happier, I'd be dead and in heaven-and on a related topic, I soon may be, at this rate. I'm not a young man any more."
"Da mbeadh cuinneog ag an gcat, ba mhinic a pus fein inti, "Juniper said with a wicked grin. "If the cat had a churn, it's often her own face would be in it. And you know what they say about Witch girls: "
Eilir snorted and freed her arm from John Hordle's for a moment to sign: Oh, get a room, you two! It is indecent, at your age!
Juniper stuck her tongue out at her daughter. "Ni bean nios sine na airionn si. A woman's no older than she feels. I'm feeling sixteen again, so why shouldn't I act it? Or Nigel, who can put many a sixteen-year-old boy to shame, let me tell you."
Nigel flushed and grinned at the same time. Astrid, Alleyne and John Hordle developed an intense interest in the plank-and-plywood booths that filled what had once been a parking lot, beneath old broadleaf trees. With so many in town for the meeting of the Faculty Senate business was brisk; the sheds sold winter crops in this season-kale, Asian greens, turnips, endives, chicories dried beans, fennel, carrots, parsnips, strings of garlic and onions. And plucked and gutted chickens, eggs, tubs of butter, big round cheeses:
"Hi, Juney!"
"Bob!" Juniper said to the stall-keeper, where he stood amid his produce. "Merry met! In from the farm, I see. Where are Karen and Danny and Karl?"
"The family's all hard at work, since we got a dairy herd and a barrel churn," the man said; he was middle-aged, with a graying beard. "You don't own cows, cows own you. Here, try this."
He smeared butter from an opened bucket on a heel of bread before handing it to her. Before the Change she'd have been astonished at the rich, intense taste of it; now that was normal, and she mostly noted that it was perfectly fresh and only lightly salted.
"That's good, as good as any we make at Dun Juniper. If I lived here and didn't have cows of my own, I'd certainly buy from you."
He looked at the golden tore around her neck. "New Mackenzie fashion: or just ring around the collar?"
"I'll have you know this torc is an engagement torc! Meet Nigel Loring, my fianc."
"Congratulations!" Bob said, enthusiastically pumping their hands. "I heard about Sir Nigel getting in: when's the happy day?"
"Beltane's best for a handfasting, but we may not be able to wait past Imbolc."
"Here, all of you have one of Karen's rolls, and a slice of ham to go with it. Mr. Pig smoked up pretty well this year, if I do say so myself."
Juniper savored a bite; the salty brown taste of the cured meat complemented the crusty bread and fresh butter wonderfully, and somehow it was even better on a raw January day with rain threatening from a low iron sky.
"Nigel, this is Bob Norton. He and his family actually moved back from Silicon Valley and started a little farm up in the Coast Range foothills southwest of here two years before the Change. I used to buy eggs from him at the old Farmer's Market when I passed through Corvallis." With a sly smile: "Back then, they were something special."