Her thoughts went homeward, and she imagined Rudi and Mathilda reading by the hearth with old Cuchulain wheezing in sleep on the rag rug, cider mulling in thick mugs:
And oh, Mother-of-All witness, I'd rather he there than here! she thought ruefully, taking another bite from a dried, salted sausage.
It wasn't exactly eating in the usual sense: more like worrying a bit off an old tire, and then chewing until your jaws were tired and you gave up and swallowed the whole barely touched lump the way a snake did a dead rat. She gave journeybread to her horse, and the animal gratefully crunched the hard biscuit in sideways-moving jaws.
"And you don't have to worry about the sorry state of our dentistry, sure," she said. Then when it lipped at her fingers for more, smearing them with slobber: "Niorbh a fhiu a dhath ariamh a bhfuarthas in aisgidh!"
A hundred or so of the First Levy were in the cutting too; most were squatting by their bicycles, eating or looking to their gear or just patiently waiting despite the general, damp misery. Two near her were even chuckling softly about something. Ten times that number were scattered through the woods within a quarter mile of her, but they made little noise and gave less sight of their location. That and the wretched weather ought to hide them from the Protector's aerial scouts, even though they were far north, near his bases.
A clop of hooves brought her head up. Sam Aylward was riding towards her from the path to the east, his horse's hooves throwing up spatters of mud as it came. That coated his boots and stockings and kilt with gray-brown muck. The man with him had started out that way, clothed in leather pants and jacket of similar hue, his round helmet and steel breastplate painted dull brown, and his face and hair and eyes were all shades of the same color as well; he wore a long, hooded duster over the armor and carried a short pre-Change compound bow in a case at his left knee, with a long, slightly curved saber at his waist. Juniper grinned and moved away from her horse, extending a hand as the two men pulled up and swung down from the saddle; two young Mackenzies took their mounts.
"Sam!" she said happily. "And John!"
John Brown was most of a decade older than her; it had been a year or so since she saw him, and she was slightly shocked at how much more gray there was in his close-trimmed beard. As usual, he looked worried, the deep squint lines of a plainsman graven further into the skin at the corners of his eyes.
But perhaps with more reason than usual, she thought.
"Well, we're here, Juney," he said, and she sighed slightly with relief. "All of us as could make it. Less than I hoped, more than it might have been."
"Four hundred twenty-five combatants," Aylward amplified. "Plus twenty-five youngsters along to help with the horses and gear. That's all they could spare. Raids from the Pendleton country on the CORA territories are keeping them hopping."
"Bastards," Brown said. He'd been one of the movers of CORA since the Change, and they'd fought the Protector's men together more than once. They've been goin' downhill these whole ten years. Bunch of murderin' hillbilly bastards, the ones that came out on top there, and then they got into bed with Arminger. Might have been as bad with us, if we hadn't had that help from you the first couple of years."
Juniper nodded, smiling and acknowledging the compliment; the help had been mutual. Even then her fine ear noticed that his accent sounded a little stronger; speech was changing faster than it had in the old days, without national media or recorded sound to stabilize it. Highway 20 connected the Mackenzie territories with the CORA lands around Bend and Sisters, and the two communities were friendly and traded a good deal, but by pre-Change standards they had less contact than America had had with Bolivia back then.
"Four hundred riders's about all we could bring anyways," Brown went on. "Sneakin' over the mountains, that is. Not much fodder. Still snow lying up there. As it is, we don't have near as many remounts as I'd like."
He jerked a thumb behind him, at the invisible peaks of the Cascades. She nodded again, respecting his reticence. One of her Mackenzies would likely be boasting of the feat, unless it was Sam; the Clan was a talkative bunch. To get here from Bend you'd have to leave the route of old US 26 in the Warm Springs reservation-tribal country once more, but friendly to the Clan and CORA- and use old logging trails through the mountains. Hard work with hundreds of horses, and with the season too early for much grass. If they didn't get the mounts down into the low country soon, they'd start to take sick and die.
She said so, and added: "The which would apply to the people as well, so."
That included her folk as well. Most Mackenzies had some woodcraft but only a few from each dun were real hunters who spent much time away from the tilled lands; the rest were crofters and craftsfolk, used to sleeping under their own good roofs within tight log walls every night. Plus they were traveling light in a season still cold and wet-no tents, not much gear and most of what they had brought was extra arrows. In summer these cutover hills growing back towards forest were rich in game-deer, elk, rabbit, birds, boar and feral cattle-but it was early in the season for foraging, and there were far too many of them to live off the land without scattering recklessly. She'd been getting anxious about supplies.
"Where are your folks?" Brown asked. "You got more than this out before they reached Sutterdown, didn't you?"
Behind his back, Sam Aylward grinned. Juniper did too, and waved a hand around. "All within horn call. Just over a thousand, my friend."
"One thousand ninety-seven as of this morning's call," Aylward said. "Got a few more in from the southern duns day before yesterday."
Brown's eyes went a little wider; he'd ridden through their position. "Sneaky," he said. "They won't be expectin' this at all, hey?"
"Hopefully," Juniper said, not joining in the smiles of the men this time.
She'd taken nearly half the Clan's fighting strength right out of their territory while the Protector was invading it, and the best half at that, leaving only enough to hold the walls of Sutterdown and Dun Juniper and the southern steadings. It was a calculated risk, but her stomach still clenched and pained her at the thought of the enemy loose among her folk and their fields.
"I see your people all have those funny-looking shovel things," the rancher went on. "Somethin' new?"
"Eilir's idea," she said, turning to her First Armsman.
"Eilir's idea, and I hope they work," Aylward said, shaking his head. "Otherwise I'm the latest in a long line of inventive buggers who dreamed up something extra for the poor bloody infantry to lug about."
"Any word from the south?"
"Last news from the Rangers is that the enemy 'ave crossed the North San-tiam, united their columns and invested Sutterdown. The Rangers slowed them down, though."
Brown slapped his hands together; there was a jingling from the stainless-steel washers riveted to the backs of his steerhide gloves, and water dripped off the hood of his oiled-linen duster.
"You mentioned a plan," he said. "What sort?"
"Well," Juniper Mackenzie said, "first my fiance is paying a social call. There are advantages to marrying into the SAS: "
Sam Aylward's chuckle matched her own, but he shook his head as he spoke: "Well, strictly speaking, Lady Juniper, Eilir gets the SAS, and you'll be marrying into the Blues and Royals. Officers don't make a career of the regiment. Didn't, you know what I mean."