That was why Juniper Mackenzie's son and tanist had agreed to speak for the wagon train's owners. Edain and his three friends had come along for the fun of the thing, this being after Mabon and slack time on their parents' crofts. There were casks of Brannigan's Spe cial and carved horn cups from Bend and raw turquoise and such packed in the wagons, and blankets and cloaks woven on Mackenzie looms-his own mother's and sister's among them.
He let the conversation blur into the background noise of hooves and wheels on gravel and looked around instead; he'd come along on this trip with Rudi to see new things.
That I have! he thought.
The ruins of Salem, the steel gates of Larsdalen, great empty-eyed skyscrapers in Portland staring like lost spir its of the past at the present-day pomp of tournament and court, the majesty of the Columbia gorge and hang gliders dancing through it like autumn leaves, Astoria and its tall ships and crews from as far away as Chile and Hawaii, Tasmania and New Singapore and Hinduraj…
And the sea, the Mother's sea. And whales! And sea lions!
His eyes went left, towards the ocean about a mile away. The great gray vastness of the Pacific was out of sight now-fog still clung in drifts and banks over the flat green fields of the Tillamook plain.
It gave them glimpses as if curtains were drawn aside for an instant and then dropped back. They rode past drainage ditches and levees and rows of poplars with leaves gone brown-gold and the skeletal shape of a windmill that pumped water to dry out the soggy land. Cows with red and yellow and brown coats grazed between rose hedges, mostly on the rich grass of the common pastures; now and then there were fields that looked like reaped oats, and potatoes; others bore ranks of rosebushes, an odd looking thing to be grown like a crop, and he wished he could see them in summer's glory.
He could smell the sea, though, the wild deep salt of it, and the rich silty scent of the vast salt marshes on the seaward edge of the plain. They were full of wildfowl at this time of year too, and the gobbling and honking and thrashing of their wings came clear.
A village passed, stirring to the morning's work and giving off a mouthwatering scent of cooking and baking; there was a roadside calvary; then a manor's sprawling outbuildings, and ahead the gray concrete of a castle's tower on a hill, with the town walls of Tillamook glimpsed at the edge of sight when a gust parted the fog for a mo ment. A fisherman had told them there would likely be an onshore breeze most mornings. The view would be better from the castle where they'd be guesting…
And I'm sharp set for breakfast.
They did an excellently good veal and potato pie here, and fine things with seafood you couldn't get in the Clan's home territory.
The baron's young son dropped his pony back from where the talk had turned boringly to trade. His father's men at-arms and crossbowmen rode on the left side of the road, and the four Mackenzies who'd come with Rudi on the right, and behind it all the wagons and the clansfolk from Sutterdown who were wrangling them. He angled back towards the fascinating strangers and gave a would-be regal nod.
"The best of the morning to you, young sir," Edain said.
That was polite enough, and Mackenzies didn't call anyone lord -even the Chief herself herself, the Mac kenzie, much less some foreign kid in strange clothes.
The boy was dressed in a miniature version of his father's green leather and wool hunting garb, down to the arms in the heraldic shield on the chest of his jerkin-a round cheese one-half sinister, with a Holstein head dexter, a crossed sword and crossbow below. He also had a real if boy sized sword; otherwise he looked like any tow-haired and freckled seven-year-old.
"You guys sure talk funny," the lad said seriously.
"And sure, we think you northerners are the ones who talk funny," Edain replied, exaggerating his lilt and winking.
The youngster laughed, but Edain did think that; the Portlanders' accent was flat and a little grating to an ear accustomed to the musical rise and fall the younger clansfolk put into English, and the nobles here sprinkled their talk with words from some foreign language in an absurd, affected fashion.
The boy threw a look at their kilts and plaids and bon nets; Rinn Smith and Otter Carson had painted up too, with designs on their faces in black and scarlet and green and gold-designs of Fox and Dragon, for their sept to tems. Not from serious expectation of a fight, but to play to the Clan's image and look fierce for the outlanders. Rinn thought it impressed outlander girls no end, often onto their backs in a haystack, to hear him tell it, but then he was a boaster who'd have worn himself away to a shadow in the past couple of weeks if everything he claimed was true.
And he's not traveling with his girlfriend.
"And you wear weird clothes, too," the nobleman's son went on. "Even weirder than Bearkillers or the people from Corvallis."
"They are strange there," Edain agreed gravely. Though not so strange as you Portlanders.
"You've been to all those places?"
"To most of them. The wagons have come direct from the Clan's land, but the young Mackenzie and we have been wandering with our feet free and our fancy our only master for weeks now, and only joined them these last days."
Pure sea-green envy informed the look he got. "Cool! I'm going to go to be a page at the Lady Regent's court in a couple of years, in Portland and Castle Todenangst and places. So I can learn to be a squire and then a knight and stuff. That'll be cool too."
Edain found himself grinning; he'd come into the wide world himself now and seen some of the wonders of it, but to the lad this little pocket of farm and forest by the sea was the world, just as Dun Fairfax had been to him at that age. More so, because he'd had Dun Juniper just an hour's walk away, with all its comings and goings, and the Mackenzie herself dropping by to talk with his father. This place was a backwater.
The boy drew himself up then, consciously remembering his manners.
"I'm Gaston Strangeways," he said, left hand on the pommel of his miniature sword. "Son and heir of Baron Juhel Strangeways-Lord Juhel de Netarts, guardian of County Tillamook, with the right of the high justice, the middle and the low."
"It's an impressive array of titles, that it is," Edain said, and they shook hands solemnly, leaning over in their saddles.
"And his father was a knight, too. Even before the Change. He died a year ago, the same time the count did."
Edain had suffered through hour after hour of tedium in the Dun Fairfax school from his unwilling sixth summer to glad escape at twelve, and some of the pre-Change history lessons had rubbed off.
"I don't think they had knights or barons or counts before the Change, the old Americans," he said. "They had lobbyists and presidents and consultants instead."
"In the Society," young Gaston said. "Granddad told me about the tournaments and things." Then he cleared his throat and went on formally: "Welcome to our lands."
Edain grinned again; toploftiness like that was irritating from a grown man, but funny when it was a kid.
"And I'm Edain Aylward Mackenzie," he said. "My sept's totem is Wolf."
The boy's eyes went a little wider. "You're Aylward the Archer?" he said breathlessly.
Then an accusation: "You're not old enough! The Archer fought in the Protector's War, and my dad wasn't old enough for that. Granddad fought in that war and he got his limp then."
"That's my dad you'd be thinking of," Edain said, a little sourly. "Sam Aylward, first armsman of the Clan. Well, he was until a couple of years ago."
Hecate of the Crossroads and Him called the Wan derer, hear me; now wouldn't it be a braw thing to travel far enough that people think of me when I say my name's Aylward! I love my dad, but it's like being a mushroom growing on an old oak, sometimes.