Snap-wuffft! Snap-wuffft!
Two more of the cloth-yard shafts hit the man, bare inches apart in his chest, the gray-goose fletching bobbing as he slumped, held up by the deep-driven heads punched through him and into the boards. Aylward had a fourth shaft on his string, half-drawn, the point shifting back and forth in deadly menace.
"Don't try it!" he roared as blood poured down the dying man's body, trickled down his own side. "Don't you bloody try it!"
Juniper felt the crystalline balance of the moment that followed, silent enough that she could hear the wind that cuffed at her hair and the scrabble of the dead man's heels as they drummed on the asphalt. She slung her bow and stepped forward into that quiet, between the two forces. The thought of hands clenching on ax hafts, fingers trembling on bowstrings and crossbow triggers was distant, remote.
"Stop!" she shouted, filling her lungs and pitching it to carry. "Stop right now!"
The moment sighed away, and people were looking at her. The trained singer's voice let her reach them all.
"There's been enough blood shed today." She spread her arms wide and up, palms towards the west. "Go back. There's nothing for you here. We don't want to hurt you, but we'll fight for our homes and our children if we must. Go! Get out!"
"Out!" Other voices took it up. "OUT! OUT!"
Aylward's eyes were gray and bleak and level as he waited. One by one the foragers turned and mounted their bicycles and left; Juniper let out a sigh.
"You felt it too, then?" Aylward said, as she passed a shaky hand over her face.
"Felt what?" she asked.
"The flux. We might have pulled it off without killing, if that loudmouth bugger hadn't up and told them to sod off. Nice work, Lady, the way you turned it around after that. I wasn't looking forward to a massacre."
She nodded absently, swallowing against a quick nausea-He went on: "It's a gift, feeling the flux-situational awareness, the officers call it. Maybe you've the makings of a soldier."
"And maybe you've the makings of a Witch," she answered.
Then her giddy relief drained away, remembering the savage maul-on-wood sound of the arrowhead striking bone.
"I know you saved my life, Sam, but: Goddess Mother-of-All, can't we stop killing each other even now?"
Aylward shrugged. "Never," he said with conviction. "And especially not now. You said it-there just isn't enough to go 'round, not if it were shared ever so fair."
Juniper nodded bleakly. "Then you and Chuck have the right of it," she said.
At his questioning look, she touched her bow:" I thought they'd think we could all shoot like you, but that was a bluff, and bluffs get called if you go on long enough. N? ocht d'fhiacla go bhf? air an greim do bhreith!"
"Which means?"
She shook herself. "Sorry. Don't bare your teeth until you can bite!"
"You'll push for more practice, then?"
"Starting tomorrow."
"Watch that!" Chuck Barstow shouted, striding over to where the older children were whacking with wooden swords at poles set in the dirt-and occasionally at each other.
"You can hurt someone with those things! Do it the way I showed you or I'll take them away."
It was an excuse to stop for a while. Juniper lowered her bow gratefully and rubbed at her left shoulder. The bright spring day caressed her face with a soft pine-scented breeze down from the mountains. It cut the haze, too, perfect for militia practice in the flower-starred meadows below her cabin.
Militia was what it was, even if a few were set on calling it the war band or the spear levy.
You know, I thought it was just a harmless bit of speechifying to call this a clan, she thought. A bit of playacting to distract people from how close to death we all were – are.
Wiccans were given to romantic archaisms and usually it was harmless enough; she'd been known to indulge in them herself, and not just for professional reasons. Now, though:
I may have let a genie out of the bag. Words have power!
Sally Quinn was in charge of the children and absolute beginners, most of them using what they'd scavenged from sporting-goods stores; she had the same fiberglass target bow she'd carried the day Juniper met her. She patiently went through the basics of stance and draw, and occasionally let them shoot a practice shaft at the board-and-dirt targets. Fortunately modern bows with their stiff risers and centerline arrow-shelves were a lot easier to learn than the ancient models.
Sam Alyward had the more advanced pupils; he'd turned out enough longbows for all, courtesy of her woodpile.
Thank You, she thought to the Lord of the Forest, and stepped back to watch Aylward demonstrate.
His stave had a hundred-pound draw. When he shot, the snap of the string against the bracer seemed to trip on the smack of the arrowhead hitting the deer-shaped target fifty yards away, and the malignant quiver of the shaft that followed. Between was only a blurred streak; she forced herself not to dwell on the hard tock of an arrowhead sledging into bone.
He sent three more arrows on the way at five-second intervals, all of them landing in a space a palm could have covered, then turned to her. The Englishman was sweating, but then everyone was. Sweating as hard as they had during the planting, which she almost remembered with nostalgia. The cheerful noise made it plain everyone thought this was more fun, though.
"Shoulder sore, Lady?" he said gravely.
"Just a bit," Juniper replied; in fact, it ached.
"Then you should knock off," he said. "Watch for a while instead. Push too hard too soon, and you're courting a long-term injury. You may be over-bowed for a beginner."
"I don't think so. Forty pounds isn't so much when you've fiddled for hours straight! But I will take a break."
She braced the lower tip of her bow against the outside of her left foot, stepped through with her right and bent it against her thigh to unstring it. She called the weapon Artemis, after the Greek archer-goddess, and although getting the trick of it was harder, she'd discovered she actually liked using it, far more than the crossbow.
When she glanced up from the task, she saw Aylward looking over at the children, and smiling with a gentle fondness you wouldn't suspect from his usual gruff manner.
Or from the feel of his hands when he's teaching unarmed combat! she thought, grinning. Chucking folk about, as he calls it.
The important thing was that with Aylward around, they had someone who really understood this business; for starters, he could make the bows, and their strings, and the arrows. In the long run, that would be very important. The machine-made fiberglass sporting toys hadn't stopped working the way guns had, but the prying roots of vine and tree had already begun their reconquest of factories and cities. In a generation those wastelands of concrete and asphalt would be home to owl and fox and badger, not men.
Dennis had made them all quivers, and waterproof waxed-leather cases for the bows that clipped alongside them; she reached back and slid hers home. She was wearing a brigandine now as well, like the one that had saved Sam Aylward from the crossbow bolt meant for her; the jack was hot even in the mild April air, and weighed twenty-five pounds. When you added in the sword and dagger and buckler-the latter was a little steel shield about the size and shape of a soup plate-it took a good deal of getting used to.
Which is why I'm wearing it, she thought glumly. To get used to moving in it.
Unlike most of the Mackenzies, she didn't see all this as a combination RenFaire and holiday, despite the moon-and-antlers design on the breast of all the jacks.
It's not like Society gear. It's real and I hate the necessity. Fate throws us all into the soup, and we're still killing each other.
She watched the shooting for a while; Aylward was a good teacher, firm but calm and endlessly patient. At last he looked up at the sun and spoke: "Break for dinner!"
Juniper suppressed a smile; the man had some old-fashioned turns of phrase. A clatter continued when all else fell quiet. Chuck Barstow was sparring with the two young men who'd come in with his brother, Vince Torelli and Steve Matucheck. Sword-and-buckler work was an active style, and they were leaping and foining in a pattern as acrobatic and pleasing to the eye as a dance. She'd never felt a desire to join in when she was busking at Society events, but it looked pretty; now that she'd done a fair bit with the other neophytes, she could even say it was fun in an active sort of way.