He looked north and east towards the towering peaks of the Cascades and the green slopes that were like a wall along the edge of the world.
"We've nothing like that in England, of course. I won't say this is the single most beautiful spot I've ever seen, but it's wonderfully varied. I like the contrast, the fields and orchards here-which are very much like parts of southern England-and then the tall mountains and wildwood so close, and the changing patterns of sun and shadow: beauty on very different scales, but complementary."
Juniper looked at him. "Well, well," she said. "It's hidden depths you have, Nigel."
His slightly watery blue eyes twinkled. "Sandra Arminger said much the same thing. But it was far more alarming, coming from her."
Juniper snorted and threw a twist of straw at him. "I should hope so!"
Her eyes went across the crowded field; Mathilda Arminger was there, running around with the other children, and helping, as they did.
"I'm surprised she's not a total horror, with parents like that," she said quietly. "And she's just a child, when you get to know her. Spoiled more than a little, and with some odd notions, but not spoiled to the point of being really rotten, if you know what I mean."
"Is minic ubh bhan ag cearc dhubh, as the Gaels say," Loring replied, and winked at her.
"A black hen may often have a white egg, yes," she agreed. "But it's what hatches that counts."
"She's young, yet, very young. It takes a good deal to spoil a child that age, and I'd venture that the Armingers would shield her from the worst of the world they've made, for a while at least. Even complete rotters often love their children, in my experience."
He stared a moment, as if lost in memory. Tamar had gone around to fill buckets for the horses; they lowered their massive square heads and drank with slobbering enthusiasm. Down at the other end of the field the second reaper cut the last of the wheat, and there was an explosion of cheers from the folk at work. A half-dozen of them lifted the driver out of the seat and began tossing her in the air amid whoops and screams; she recognized Astrid, and the massive form of Little John Hordle, and the bright head of Alleyne Loring.
And all three of them pitched in to help as if there were no question of it being otherwise, Juniper thought. Which is a good sign, in my experience.
Rudi Mackenzie was around the edges there as well; then he and Mathilda Arminger came sprinting up to where Juniper waited.
"Can we take Dobbin and Maggie?" her son said. His eyes sparkled like green-gray gems in his tanned face, and he was still full of energy despite being allowed to work with the binders for the first time this year. "Please?"
"All right," she said. "But remember; get them cooled down a bit before you let them drink."
"I know, Mom," he said, politely not adding an of course, though he'd grown up with horses in general and these two in particular-they were half his age.
Juniper and Nigel unharnessed the animals; Rudi and Mathilda sprang onto their massive backs, sitting as proudly as knights on their destriers. The horses accepted it calmly, moving off at an ambling walk towards the pond in the far southwestern corner of the field, where a willow-grown earthen bank held back the creek and made a watering point when this field was in the pasture-lea part of its rotation. Of course, they'd have done that without any guidance at all. Horses were not mental giants, but they usually had enough sense to betake themselves to water when they were thirsty; the problem was keeping them from drinking too much and doing themselves an injury.
"Good-natured beasts," Loring said, as they straightened the harness and draped it over the seat of the reaper. The bells on the great collars jingled one last time. "Mostly Suffolk punch, aren't they?"
"About three-quarters," Juniper agreed. "Chuck, ummm, found eight Suffolk mares right after the Change, and I like the breed. Strong as elephants and friendly as dogs, mostly. The stallion we put them to was a Percheron but we've been breeding back."
He cocked an expert's eye. "Your son has a way with horses; I've noticed it before. He reminds me of Alleyne at that age. Maude taught him mostly, of course. She had the better seat, in any case-far better than mine, then."
For a moment a bleak misery of grief settled over his usual mild cheerfulness, and then he shook it off with a scarcely visible effort, turning instead to the scene before them. Melissa Aylward came down from the gate at the top of the field, where a brace of wagons had drawn up half an hour ago. Quiet fell as she halted by Eilir's reaper and took the last grain cut in her hands, plaiting and shaping it into the form of the Queen Sheaf; she was the High Priestess of Dun Fairfax, and it was her right to make the Corn Mother and give Her the first blessing.
Juniper had been a little surprised at how good Nigel Loring was at binding a sheaf-or any other of a countryman's tasks, from handling a plow team to plashing a hedge. When she said so he smiled at her.
"My dear Ms. Mackenzie-"
"Nigel, Nigel! You've been living under the same roof as me all summer! You're being Stiff, Reserved and Proper again, like an old central-casting Englishman! And Dennie accuses me of putting it on!"
"Very well, my dear Lady Juniper. I grew up in farming country."
"Aristocrats though, I thought? Landed gentry of Hampshire?"
He laughed aloud at that. "Well, we were saddled with an ancient, leaky, slowly subsiding stone barn of a house and a large, very shaggy garden, which we were too stubborn to hand over to the National Trust, yes. Plus a few weedy fields around the mausoleum that raised a regular crop of debt every year."
"I resemble that remark," she said, laughing in turn. "When I inherited my great-uncle's house and land"-she inclined her head northward towards the hills and what was now the Mackenzie clachan-"right up until the Change the real legacy was a continual threat of having it sold from under me for back taxes, with a minor key in unaffordable roof repairs. I had more disposable income when I was living in a trailer and busking for meals than I did with a fortune in real estate."
"And the taxes appertaining thereunto. As the saying goes, Land gives one a station in society and then prevents one from keeping it up."
"Oh, yes. Though I'm surprised to hear you going Wilde like that, Nigel."
"In deadly Earnest, I assure you." Loring chuckled. Then he went on with a wealth of experience in his tone: "There are few so poor as the land-poor."
"Although come the Change: "
He nodded. "But what with one thing and another, I learned my way around the Home Farm. And Sam's family were neighbors of the Lorings. In fact, until we sold off everything apart from the manor house and one farm in 1921, they rented land from us, and had for generations. My father died when I was an infant, and my mother when. I was about three. My grandmother raised me, bless her, and turned me into the Edwardian fossil that I am. Her world stopped changing about the time my grandfather Eustace stood too close to a German howitzer shell near Mons in 1914."
"What was she like?" Juniper asked; her mind conjured up a hawk-faced old dame in a high-collared bombazine dress. Though that's probably my hyperactive storyteller's imagination at work.
Nigel shook his head. "She was what is politely called 'formidable'-which meant she terrified everyone, including myself-a memsahib right out of Kipling. Which is one reason I spent a good deal of time over at Crooksbury when I was a lad; Sam and I were always getting into mischief together, and later I used to help out there when I was down from school, until Sam's father gave up the struggle."
"Your grandmother didn't make a fuss? If she was that stiff and old-fashioned-"
"Oh, no, she didn't object at all." He smiled reminis-cently. "Grandmamma was of the old breed; it was quite the thing for me to have a friend like Sam while I was young, as long as he didn't, as she would put it, 'presume.' And since Sam would rather have spent a week shoveling muck onto a spreader than one afternoon taking tea with Grandmamma, it all turned out for the best. Though God knows it would have been different if I'd been a girclass="underline" In any event, I learned a good deal that was extremely useful after the Change; not that anyone could have anticipated it would happen, nor that I would then spend the better part of a decade teaching ex-urbanites how to farm in a very old style."