Only a scattering of the warriors were old enough to have fought in the War of the Eye, mostly the bow-captains, and they were quieter. The two couples passed another fire where the youngsters were kneeling in pairs, touching up the savage patterns swirling across their faces and bodies and limbs in soot black and leaf green, henna crimson and saffron gold.
" That's a bit early," Chuck said dryly. "They're going to run out of war-paint before there's any fighting, if they keep that up every day."
One tall girl among them suddenly sprang up and snatched a sword free, whirling naked into a battle dance around the fire with the sharp steel flashing. Her painted face contorted as she leapt and lunged, her eyes blank and exalted as they stared beyond the Veil, graceful and deadly as the cougar whose catamount shriek she gave. Her blade-mates joined her, screaming out the calls of their totem beasts, their bare feet stamping the measure as they invited those spirits to take possession on the road to battle.
Juniper shivered slightly, watching the snarling faces and the steel that flashed bloodred in the light of the dying sun.
"Oh Powers of Earth and Sky, what is it that you've brought back, to run wild once more upon the ridge of the world?" she said softly. "You know, I don't understand the younger generation. I love them, but even Rudi… we were never as strange to our parents."
"I don't think so," Judy said dryly; her old friend had always had that gift of bringing her back to earth. "But they and we didn't have the Change between us. You'd have to skip back quite a few more generations to get that, eh? Go far enough back, and we'd be the odd ones, not the Changelings."
"They… they accept things in a way we didn't," Juniper said.
Her companions all nodded.
"They speak English, but they don't speak our language. When they say 'time' or 'death' or 'rebirth,' it means something different from the way we used the words," Judy said.
Death… how many of these happy youngsters will lie stark and dead in a month's time, all their fierceness and beauty gone too soon? Juniper thought. And rebirth, yes, but death comes first, and we are right to fear it, for it is dreadful to pass through the dark gate, even if you know what waits beyond.
They walked beyond the fires and the encampment, into the woods that lay along the river, parkland kept as a pleasaunce for the castle-dwellers of noble rank, a pretty amendment of nature. Far eastward the tiny perfect white cone of Mt. Hood caught the dying sun for an instant, flushing pink and then fading away as the first stars appeared.
A few birds sang, and the river ran slow beneath the willows, glimpsed through the big oaks of the old parkland, some tangled with green English ivy. They came to a clearing where green grass was starred with red paintbrush, green-sweet beneath the cooler forest smell; a bank of poison oak had been turned fire-red by last week's early frost. A doe and two fawns were grazing there, half a hundred yards away; the mother raised her head sharply, then bent again as she saw no movement. There was an added stillness as the humans withdrew their presence, a trick they all knew well.
Judy nudged Juniper softly and leaned close to say quietly:
"Left," she whispered, and Chuck and Nigel froze as well, with the smooth alertness of warriors and hunters.
Juniper turned her head in that direction and almost started in surprise. Not far along the forest edge was Chuck and Judy's son Oak, and his wife, Devorgill, and their children, who'd come along to see him off. One was a baby at the breast, and there was his daughter Lutra and his son Laere. Oak was looking at his parents and grinning. As far as looks went he might have been Chuck's blood-child, a big rangy-muscular man a little past thirty, with long tawny mustaches that dropped past his shaven chin and a shaggy shoulder-length mane bleached by the harvest suns that had tanned his body to the color of his name-wood.
That showed because he and Devorgill were wearing only their kilts and sandals and a little body paint-his was a badger's head on his chest-while the children went naked and barefoot, as young Mackenzies often did in warm weather. They had a basket on the ancient but well-maintained rustic picnic table and the remains of a meal set out on it, a chance to take one last supper together without the bustle of the camp or the strained formalities of the castle. The adults' longbows and quivers and sword belts leaned against an alder behind them, and a long-headed battle spear, though it would be a mad bandit indeed who dared to come here. Still, habits learned in the years of the great dying stuck hard and got passed down.
Juniper nodded back. The children's gaze stayed fixed on the spotted coats of the June-born fawns, who peered about at the world big-eyed. She could hear the low whisper of Laere's five-year-old voice as he asked:
"Are you going to hunt them, Dad? There are an awful lot of people here the now, they must need an awful lot of food too."
"No, boyo, that I will not, and for two reasons," Oak said.
Devorgill moved, laying a gentle finger on Lutra's mouth as the girl started to burst forth with the answer before her younger brother. Oak went on, in the same low voice:
"When's it lawful to hunt, my little Laere?"
The boy was his father in miniature and minus twenty-odd years; his hair was a mop of white tow and his eyes brilliant blue in his freckled, summer-darkened face as he frowned in thought.
"For food… an'… an' when they try to eat our gardens?"
His mother spoke: "That's true; but you must also never hunt a doe in fawn, or any deer less than a year old. That brings a curse, unless you're starving and make a special rite. The Mother's hand is over them."
Young Lutra nodded, making the dark brown hair that fell in a thong-bound horsetail to the small of her back bounce. She spoke quietly:
"And this is a place that's never hunted, like a Nemed, so they're not man-wary and it's geasa to kill here, sure and it is."
Laere stuck his tongue out at her, and she replied in kind, being all of five years older herself.
"But we can go and visit them in peace today," Oak said, smiling down at them with a warm delight on his rugged face. "The wind's from them to us. Come, and let's see if you can walk very quietly. Step when I do, and be as careful as mice!"
He took each by the hand, winking at his wife-and at Juniper and Sir Nigel and his own parents.
Father, son and daughter walked out into the dappled, darkening shade of the clearing, still lit by a few beams of the setting sun slanting like orange fire though the tall trees. Both children walked softly, but no more so than their woods-wise father's hundred-and-eighty pounds of bone and hard muscle. He kept the deer in focus but without meeting their eyes when their heads turned, avoiding a predator's fixed gaze. Each step flowed like slow water, and whenever their heads came up and scanned he stopped smoothly without the least betraying jerk, as natural as grass swaying in the wind. The children followed his movements intently.
The doe walked a little away from the fawns, her tail quivering, her reddish brown coat fading to darkness as the light failed. Closer
…
Lutra dropped her father's hand and reached out. A fawn sniffed her fingers, began to dodge, then stopped as she gently ran her hand down its neck. It tilted its head and looked at her oddly as if wondering what she was. Laere tried to do the same with the other, but he moved a little too sharply. It shied, and a stick crackled beneath its hooves; the doe brought her head up and made a sharp bleating sound.
Juniper chuckled a little then as the deer bounded away, in arcs that made them seem like weightless shadows that vanished under the trees. The two children stood waving and calling farewells for a moment, then came back to their blankets.
"That's her saying- Great Goddess, foolish child, it's a human!" Juniper said, and the others laughed as her singer's voice made it sound very like the doe's bleat. " They'll eat you! Will you be friends with a wolf next?"