A Meeting at Corvallis by S. M. Stirling Page A

clinging, and more littering the ground. The vines had been there before the Change, when this area was the Larsson family’s country estate; great-grandpa Larsson had bought it back a century ago, when he made his pile out of wheat and timber. The big pillared brick house beyond would have been visible then…
    Now the narrowing V was blocked by a steep-sided earth-work bank covered in turf, with a moat at its base full of sharpened angle iron. They’d started on that late in the first Change Year, right after the core of the Bearkillers arrived on their long trek from Idaho; he’d been flying the Larssons to their ranch in Idaho on that memorable March seventeenth, and ended up crash-landing in a half-frozen mountain creek in the Selway-Bitterroot National Wilderness. Which had been a stroke of luck, nerve-wracking though it had been at the time to have the engine cut out over those granite steeps.
    â€œWhat’s that saying Juney uses?” Havel asked. With a grin: “Pardon me, Lady Juniper, herself herself.”
    â€œSomething pretentiously Gaelic which boils down to saying a man’s home is his castle,” Signe said, a very slight waspish note in her voice.
    â€œYeah, but it’s true in English too,” Havel pointed out, looking pridefully ahead. “We’ve got a hell of a lot done in a decade, considering we can’t use powered machinery.”
    A wall topped the mound, thirty feet high and built like a hydro dam; rocks the size of a man’s head and bigger in a concrete matrix, around a hidden framework of welded steel I-beams salvaged from construction sites in Salem, the old state capital thirty miles northeastward. Round towers half as high again studded it at hundred-yard intervals as it curved away on either side to encompass the whole of the little plateau that held Larsdalen.
    Gotta get the inner keep finished before spring, he reminded himself. Work on fortifications was another thing that they did in wintertime… Although there’s always fifteen different things we should be doing with every spare moment. Everything done meant something else nearly as urgent sidelined; one thing that seemed universally true in the Changed world was that all work took a lot longer or cost more or both.
    The gate where road met wall was four towers grouped together on the corners of a blockhouse, with his flag flying high above each. The drawbridge was down, but the outer gates were closed. They were steel as well, a solid mass of welded beams faced on either side with quarter-inch plate and probably impossible to duplicate now that the hoarded oxyacetylene tanks were empty. The surface was dark brown paint, but this year for swank they’d added a great snarling bear’s head in ruddy copper covered in clear varnish, face-on to the roadway with half on either leaf. The Mackenzies had something similar on the gates of Dun Juniper, though they used the Triple Moon and the head of the Horned Man.
    Trumpets blared from above. Astrid brought her Arab forward on dancing hooves, throwing up one hand in greeting.
    â€œWho comes to Larsdalen gate?” the officer of the guard called down formally.
    â€œThe Bear Lord returns to the citadel of the Bearkillers! Open!”
    â€œOpen for Lord Bear!”
    â€œOh, Christ Jesus, how did we let her get away with this bad-movie crap?” Havel said—but under his breath. “And now everyone’s used to it and they’d be upset if we insisted on a plain countersign.”
    â€œShe’s the only theatrical impresario in the family,” Signe said, also sotto voce. “Every time we did something new, she was there to tell us how to manage the PR. Don’t sweat it. After all, she’s not home much anymore.”
    â€œAh, well, names are funny things,” he said with resignation. “Someone has an impulse and then you’re stuck with them. That’s why I’ve got a Karelian