The Protector's War by S. M. Stirling Page A

and purple around the tall oaks—he caught faint wafts of their scent, and the smell of crushed grass was strong and sweet, stronger than that of massed, indifferently clean humans or the occasional tang of livestock and their by-products. You could see clear across the Valley from up here in the Eola Hills, right over to the snow-peaks of the Cascades floating blue-and-white against the horizon, but the sunlight still had a trace of winter’s pale glaze. If you distilled spring and poured it over a landscape like spray from a mountain river, this would be it.
    All the same he was already sweating under the armor. Over the last nine years he’d gotten so used to its heat and constriction and weight he scarcely noticed it anymore unless something called it to his attention; the gear he’d carried as a marine back in the early nineties had been much heavier, and awkward to boot.
    Trouble is, I’m being reminded.
    Juniper Mackenzie looked indecently comfortable in her tartan kilt and saffron-dyed shirt of homespun linsey-woolsey, a brooch holding her plaid at the shoulder, a flat Scots bonnet on her head with a raven feather in a clasp shaped into the antlers-and-crescent-moon sigil of the clan. The Chief of the Mackenzies was eight inches shorter than his five-eleven, a slender woman, perhaps a year or two older than Havel’s midthirties. She had the long, sharp-boned, triangular face that often went with Scots-Irish ancestry, softened by an expression that seemed to bubble laughter even at rest. She’d told him once that the pale freckled complexion, green eyes and fox red mane were from her mother, who’d been Irish plain and simple—born and raised on Achill Island off the west coast at that.
    She smells better than I do, too, he thought: soap, clean female flesh, an herbal hair wash of some sort and a hint of woodsmoke. Better than Signe right now too, for that matter.
    Even with the leader’s luxury of more than one gambeson—so that they could be switched off and washed occasionally—you never really got the old-socks-and-locker-room smell out of the thick quilting you wore under armor. Mingled with horse sweat soaked into leather and the oil you rubbed on the metal of the armor to keep it free of rust, it was the smell of a trade: the trade of war in the Changed world.
    He walked to the center of the stretch of grass; sheep kept it cropped now, not so neatly as it had been when this was a rich man’s toy, Ken Larsson’s summer place. The others dropped back; the troopers who stood to keep a circle cleared here were from the Bearkiller A-lister elite, armored as he was, their long single-edged swords drawn and points touching the grass before them. Sunlight flashed and glittered and broke from the honed edges as they flourished them upright in salute.
    He approached the brass bowl that stood on a stone plinth; it was heaped with a gritty gray-black powder. A hush fell over the crowd, broken by the susurrus of breath, the voices of children running around on the fringes, somewhere the neigh of a horse. Birds went loud overhead—honking geese, tundra swans, V’s of ducks heading north—and a red-tailed hawk’s voice sounded an arrogant skree-skree-skree.
    Signe offered her tray of pine splints. Havel took one and waved it through the air until flame crackled, sending a scent of burning resin into the air along with a trail of black smoke.
    Then he tossed it neatly into the bowl of gunpowder.
    Fumphsssssss…
    The powder burned slowly, black smoke drifting downwind with a stink of scorched sulfur. The flame flickered sullen red; an occasional burst of sparks made people skip back when clumps were tossed out of the bowl like spatters from hot cooking oil. There was none of the volcanic woosh it would have produced before the Change; the sharp fireworks smell was about the only familiar thing involved. When the sullen fire died, nothing was left but a