A Meeting At Corvallis

pounds of bone and muscle with a ruddy face like a cured ham and a thatch of dark red-brown hair and
little hazel eyes, built massively enough that you didn't realize his full height until he stood close. When he
strung the heavy longbow, it was with an effortless flex of arm and hip.
Aylward and Hordle had the same accent, a slow thick south-English yokel drawl out of deepest
rural Hampshire; Barstow's was General American, what you'd expect from someone born in Eugene in
1967 and raised there. But they all had something in common, something beyond the Mackenzie kilt and
the weathered skin of men who spent much time out of doors in all weathers, an indefinable quality of
coiled wariness even at rest, a readiness for sudden violent action that only another practitioner of their
deadly trade might have caught.
"There's a few improvements over the old plain crooked stick, y'might say," Aylward said. "The
reflex out at the tips makes it throw faster, and the deflex in on either side of the riser keeps it stable.
More accurate, less hand-shock. A strip of raw deerhide glued on the back, to keep splinters from
starting."
He grinned with mock modesty as his giant countryman examined the bow. It had a central grip of
rigid black walnut root, carved to fit the hand and covered in suede-finished leather that would drink
sweat and prevent slipping; just above that was a ledge for the arrow-rest, cut in so that it ran through the
cen-terline of the bow and lined with two tufts of rabbit-skin. The tapering limbs with their subtle double
curve were Pacific yew, mountain-grown for a dense hard grain, the orange heartwood on the belly of
the bow and the paler sap-wood on the back. He'd made it the traditional length, as tall as the user when
unstrung plus a bit, and it took a hundred and fifty pounds to draw it the full thirty-two inches. Few men
could manage a draw-weight that heavy; Aylward's own war bow took a hundred and ten, and Chuck's
was a hundred. Hordle managed this one easily enough …
"What's this then?" Hordle said, flicking a sausage-thick finger at the inside of the stave just above the
riser. "I thought you didn't hold wi' laminations?"
"I don't," Aylward said, using the rag to wipe his hands clean of the linseed oil he'd used on the yew;
it rasped a little as threads caught on the heavy callus on his hands. "Those fillets of horn are pegged into
the riser and working free against strips of hardwood glued on the stave, ten inches either way of the grip.
It gives it just that extra bit of"—he snapped his fingers out and back— "flick."
Chuck Barstow grinned. "And you'll be the envy of the whole Willamette, with a bow from the hands
of Aylward the Archer, himself himself," he said.
Aylward snorted. "Bollocks," he said. "There's many I've trained who make bows as good as mine,
and plenty more who're good as needs be, and I weren't the only bowyer around here to start with.
Bowmaking isn't a master-craftsman's trade, you can learn it well enough in a few months if you're handy
and have the knack, and God knows we've plenty of good yew in this part of the world. For that matter
there's better shots than me among the Mackenzies, and no doubt more elsewhere."
"You could still make a good living selling your bows," Barstow said. "Those two you taught do it in
Sutterdown, full-time. They've had clients come from as far away as Idaho."
"I like getting my hands into the dirt, when I'm not off on Lady Juniper's business," Aylward said
stoutly. "And growing what I eat. Reminds me of growing up on the farm with Mum and Dad back in the
old country." He jerked a thumb at Hordle. "Not far from where this great gallybagger idled his youth
away."
John Hordle gave a theatrical shudder. "Now, my dad owned a pub," he said to Chuck. "That's a
man's life, I tell you. Chatting up the totty and tossing back the Real Ale, and none of that shoveling muck
into the spreader on a cold winter's day."
"Then why didn't you stay on at the Pied Merlin instead of going for a soldier?" Aylward asked.
"Because of all the ruddy lies you told me about being in the SAS while I was still a nipper," Hordle
said good-humoredly. "Ended up humping a full pack over every sodding mountain in Wales doing the
regimental selection, I did. Which probably saved me life come the Change. Otherwise I'd have starved
or got et, like most, instead of getting out to the Isle of Wight with the colonel."
"Oh, I don't know," Aylward replied. "Sir Nigel always looked after 'is own. You told me he got my
sisters and their kids out, didn't you? And he'd not seen hair nor hide o' me in years. From what you said,