"That would be the God looking out for me, as Cernunnos Lord of the Forest, Dennie. But I make allowances for the ignorance of a mere cowan."
He splashed water back at her; "cowan" was Wiccaspeak for a non-Witch, and not entirely polite.
"Hey, you're playing confuse-the-unbeliever again. I have never been able to get a straight answer on whether you guys have two deities or dozens, taken from any pantheon you feel like mugging in a theological dark alley. Which is it? Number one or number two?"
"Yes," Juniper said, with all the other coven members joining in to make a ragged chorus; Eilir concurred in Sign.
Dennis groaned, and there was a minute of chaotic water-fighting. Juniper rescued the bowl and held it over her head to keep it from sinking until things quieted down again. That exposed more of her, but if everybody felt like throwing hot water at her aching, overworked, underfed body, she wasn't going to object.
"Or maybe it's just that somebody had to be lucky," he went on. "Anthropic principle-anyone still around to talk about it nowadays has to have had a string of lucky coincidences helping them, and more so every day that passes. If someone's breathing, they're a lottery winner. You, Juney, you're the Powerball grand-prizer."
Juniper's chuckle was a bit harsh; after her trip through the valley that bit a little closer to the bone than she liked. But when gallows humor was the only kind available… well, that was when you needed to laugh more than ever.
"Scoffer," she said, and continued: "Anyway, I spent time with the Committee running things in what's left of Cor-vallis; mostly the aggie and engineering faculties and some other folk-Luther's on it himself. They're talking about a meeting of the honest communities sometime this autumn or early winter to discuss mutual aid-especially about the bandit problem."
"Well, blessed be Moo U," Chuck said. "That could be really useful."
Juniper nodded. "Good people, though a bit suspicious. They can offer a lot of varieties of seeds and grafts, and stud services from their rams and bulls and stallions, and farming and building help in general. They've got real experts there; I've got forty pages of notes, advice they gave me on our problems. The difficulty is that what they want most besides bowstaves is livestock; heifers and mares and ewes particularly, to breed upgrade herds from their pedigree stock."
Chuck Barstow breathed on his nails and polished them on an imaginary lapel; Dennis grinned like a happy bear.
"Those Herefords?" Juniper asked.
"Yup. We got a small party through there about five days after you left. They got back day before yesterday, driving their flocks before them-twenty-five head of cattle, twenty sheep, six horses. Mostly breeding females."
Juniper made a delighted tip-of-the-hat gesture to the two grinning men. That solved their unused-pasture problem, with a vengeance! They could get a good crop of calves, lambs and foals too. And they could slaughter a steer every couple of weeks…
Or if we can trade for more, maybe we can spare some for Corvallis. have to arrange escorts across the valley, though… if only Highway 20 were open…
It wasn't; by all they could tell, it was a gauntlet of horrors, everything from plain old-style robbers to Eaters. Aloud she went on: "What's it like over there in the Bend country?"
Chuck went on: "The Change hit them about like us, just not so much. Bend and Madras and the other bigger towns have pretty well collapsed, but a lot of their people got out to the farms and ranches, since there weren't millions of them to start with; if anything, they're short of working hands."
That sounded familiar. It just took so much effort to get anything done without machinery, particularly since nobody really knew how to do a lot of the necessary things by hand. There were descriptions in books, but they always turned out to be maddeningly incomplete and/or no substitute for the knowledge experience built into your muscles and nerves.
"And they've got local governments functioning in a shadowy sort of way-they're calling it the Central Oregon Ranchers' Association. They've got more livestock than they can feed, too, without the irrigated pastures. this year, at least; next year's going to be tighter for them too. We traded them bows and shafts and jacks for the stock, and for jerky and rawhides. They've got bandits of their own and the ranchers who're running things over there want weapons bad. They really miss their rifles."
"Congratulations," Juniper said sincerely.
The night when she'd nearly had a fit over hitting a man in the head seemed a long way away, except when the bad dreams came. She wasn't happy about becoming case-hardened, but it was part of the price of personal sanity and collective survival.
"Congratulations!" she said again. "It sounds like the eastern slope is a lot better off, at least for now."
"What was it like out there in the valley?" Dennis said. "I still say it was a crazy risk, you going out."
"Worth it," Juniper said. "Rumor isn't reliable and we have to know what to expect. The way the world's closed down to walking distance, you don't know until you go there and see or it comes to you. I'm not absolutely indispensable, either."
"The hell you aren't," Dennis and Chuck said together.
"I may be the High Priestess, but I'm not the Lady come in human form, you know, except symbolically and in the Circle."
Chuck snorted; he tended to pessimism, as befitted a gardener-turned-farmer.
"You're here and you're Chief. We're alive where most aren't," he pointed out. "And we're doing much better than most who are still alive. The two things are probably connected. Anyway, to repeat the question… "
Juniper shrugged, stroking her daughter's hair. "As to what it was like… some of it was very bad. Most of it was worse. And a few things like Corvallis were encouraging, which is what I'll make the most of when we have everyone together."
"You're turning into a politician, Juney," Dennis said, grinning.
"Now you're getting nasty," she said.
Then her smile died. "Hope is as essential as food. We have some here, of both. Out there… "
Judy went on grimly: "The bad news there is what broke up those refugee camps around Salem and Albany, apart from plain old-fashioned starvation."
She looked around the circle of faces; Juniper put her hand over Eilir's eyes; the girl stirred restively, and she sighed and removed the fingers. This wasn't a world where you could shelter children much; not anymore.
"Plague."
There were murmured invocations, and some old-fashioned blaspheming of the Christian deity.
"What sort of plague?" Dennis asked.
Judy snorted, and her husband chuckled, being more accustomed to the fact that she said exactly what she meant when medical matters came up. She scowled at him as she replied: "I'm not joking and it's not funny at all."
"Sorry-"
"It's Yersinia pestis. The Plague. The Black Death. Those camps were filthy and swarming with rats, and plague's a species-jumper endemic among ground squirrels here in the West. Then it got into someone's lungs and changed to the pneumonic form-which is standard in a big outbreak-and that spreads from person to person, no fleas needed. Spreads very easily. Plus pneumonic plague'll kill you fast, sometimes in a day. It's been a long time since our ancestors were exposed, much. Mortality rate of over ninety percent, like a virgin-field epidemic, and they ran out of antibiotics quickly."