A Meeting At Corvallis

hinges so that they swung in and out of sight when there was any wind. Barstow shot three times with the
smooth action of a metronome, and the shafts flicked hissing through the gray gloaming to land with a
hard, swift tock-tock-tock rhythm.
Hordle looked at the chewed-up surface of the targets. "Does everyone here practice like your
kilties, Sam? It's the law back in Blighty these days everyone has to keep a bow and use it, but most just
put in an hour or two on Sunday and take the odd rabbit."
Chuck Barstow grinned. "That's one of my jobs as Second Armsman, going around from dun to dun
and checking that they do practice every day. I threaten them with Sam if I find out they've been goofing
off. And testing to see who meets the levy standards, of course."
"Which are?"
"Fifty-pound draw at least, twelve aimed shafts a minute, and able to hit a man-sized target at a
hundred yards eight times in ten."
"Fifty's a bit light for a war bow," Hordle said.
Sam Aylward shrugged. "A heavier draw's a better draw, but fifty's useful enough—I've seen a bow
that weight put an arrow all the way through a bull elk at a hundred paces, and break ribs going in and
going out. Which wouldn't do a man any good, eh?"
Chuck nodded. "And that's the minimum, of course; the average is around eighty. Nearly everyone
hunts for the pot these days, what with the way deer and wild pigs have gotten to be pests, and
absolutely everyone knows there's times your life is going to depend on shooting fast and straight."
Hordle grunted, drawing and loosing. The arrow whacked home, and a chunk of the fir target
weakened by multiple impacts broke off and went out of sight.
"Well, you've more fighting to do here than folk back in England," he said. "There's the Brushwood
men, but they're not much more than a bloody nuisance unless you're up on the edge of cultivation north
of London."
Aylward sighed and shook his head; he'd been here in Oregon at the time of the Change, and there
hadn't been any news from the Old World until the Lorings and Hordle arrived on a Tasmanian ship
before this last Beltane. It was still a wrench, visualizing southern England as a pioneer zone, a frontier
wilderness where a bare six hundred thousand survivors fought encroaching brambles, hippo roamed the
Fens, wolves howled in the streets of Manchester, and tigers gone feral from safari parks took sheep
even on the outskirts of Winchester, the new capital.
"And of course there's the odd dust-up with the Moors, or the wild Irish when we have to help out
Ian's Rump over in Ulster," Hordle said slyly, in the next interval in their shooting. "There's a joke for
you—the Change and all, and we're still having problems with the Provos."
"Better not mention that too often among Mackenzies," Aylward said. "Half the folk in our territory
here have hypnotized themselves into believing they're cousins of Finn Mac Cool. For all that they're
Ulstermen by descent as much as anything, a lot of them. Scots-Irish, they call it here."
"Not me," Chuck Barstow said. "English and German in my family tree, plus a couple of Bohunks, a
trace of Canadian French and a little Indian way back. And Judy's Jewish—or Jewitch, as she likes to
put it."
"At least you don't try putting on a brogue, Chuck. Every second kiltie these days does, or tries to
rrrrrroll their r's as if they were from Ayrrrrshire."
He went on to Hordle: "We still get a fair count of plain old-fashioned bandits now and then, too,
which keeps everyone on their toes. Plenty of places aren't doing as well as us, just scraping by, and east
of the mountains there's always fighting, all of which gets us a yearly crop of broken men too angry to beg
but hungry enough to steal."
"And you've got Arminger waiting up in Portland," Hordle said. "After Sir Nigel and I had the
pleasure of his hospitality for weeks, I'd have to agree you've got a roit nasty old piece of work there."
Chuck Barstow nodded grimly. He'd lost an adopted son in a skirmish with the Protector's men only
the summer past. Then his face lightened.
"Look!"
The dogs had strayed off a little while the men moved around the pasture shooting; the beasts were