Against the Tide of Years (10 page)

“Stay, Perks. Guard.”

The dog curled up on his favorite bearskin and settled his head on his paws, watchful and alert. Girenas picked up the papers and took a deep breath, then carefully closed the door behind him and trotted down to the taproom of the inn.

It was quiet now, on a weekday afternoon, spears of sunlight through the windows catching drifting flecks of dust, sand rutching under his boots against the flagstone floor. Sally Randon was idly polishing the single-plank bar at one end with its ranks of bottles and big barrels with taps, and the chairs were empty around the long tables. Except for one. Girenas scowled at the sight of the three seated there.

He recognized them all. Emma Carson and her husband, Dick; they were big in the Indian trade. And Hardcase. He was a big man among the Lekkansu, one of the first traders with the Americans—and he’d been pulling together the shattered clans after the epidemics, trying to get them back on their feet after the chaos and despair of losing more than half their numbers for two years running. The Ranger didn’t particularly like him, not like some of the Lekkansu warriors he’d hunted with or the girls he’d known, but Hardcase was an important man.

Or would be, if he could stay off the booze. The Carsons had no business encouraging him like this.

“I greet you, elder brother,” he said in the Lekkansu tongue, walking over to them. “Have you come to trade?”

“Trade pretty good,” the Indian said, in fair if accented English. “Lots of deer hides, maple sugar, hickory nuts, ginseng.”

The two Nantucketer traders were glaring at the ranger, and the man made a motion as if to hide the bottle of white lightning the three were sharing. Dick Carson didn’t bother Girenas, a beefy blowhard. But Emma . . .
heard a snake bit her once. The snake died.

“Emma, Dick,” he said, nodding. Then in the other tongue: “Will you get many knives, hatchets, fishhooks, fire-makers, blankets?”

“Hardcase trades smart,” the Indian said, his grin a bit slack. “Other families will pay well for break-the-head water. Easier to carry than lots of heavy things.”

“But when the water is gone, you will have nothing—not tools, or weapons, or blankets.”

Hardcase’s eyes narrowed. “Rifles even better than break-the-head water,” he said. “You’re such a friend to us, why don’t you get us some rifles? Friends do that.”

Dick Carson’s eyes were flickering back and forth between the Indian and the Ranger in frustrated anger. Emma’s were cold; he suspected that she talked more of the local tongue than she let on.

Girenas’ eyes were equally chill, and his lips showed teeth in what was only technically a smile.

“You know, Ms. Carson,” he said softly, “there are fines for exceeding quota on distilled liquor sales to the locals. And, of course, selling firearms is treason.” Or the ratchet-cocked steel crossbows that Seahaven had turned out for the Nantucketers’ armed forces before gunpowder production got under way.

“Hardcase must go. His brothers are always welcome in his camp,” the Indian said abruptly, staggering a little as he collected his bundles and headed for the door.

“Goddammit, you punk bastard!” Dick Carson hissed. “What’d you have to go and queer our deal for?”

“After you’ve given him the third drink it isn’t dealing, Carson. It’s stealing, and that isn’t the sort of reputation we need with the locals. I’m a Ranger, I’m supposed to keep the peace . . . and it works both ways.”

“You’d better remember who you’re working for, boy,” Emma Carson said. There was no theatrical menace in her voice, not even a conspicuous flatness. She pulled a worn, greasy-looking pack out of a pocket in her khaki bush jacket and began to flip cards onto the board for a solitaire game. “Or the Town Meeting might remind you.”

“Let’s leave that to the Meeting, shall we?” he said pleasantly. “Have a nice day.”

He forced his fists to unknot as he walked out onto the stone sidewalk of Providence Base, blinking in the bright gold sunlight. You couldn’t cure everything in life, and that was a fact. All you could do was your best.

He was on First Street. The name was not a number. It was literally the first the Nantucketers had built when they made this their initial outpost on the mainland, not long after the Event. A street broad enough for two wagons sloped down the hill, bound in asphalt at enormous expense and trouble, lined on either side with buildings of huge squared logs. Down by the water and the wharves were warehouses, plank over timber frames; off to the northeast a little was the water-furrow and a row of the sawmills it powered.

The tall wheels turned, water splashed bright; steam chuffed and a whistle blew from others, for the need had outgrown the first creek that the Nantucketers dammed. Men and women skipped over the bloating tree trunks with hooked poles, steering a steady train of them to the ramps where chains hauled them upward. Vertical saws went through wood with a rhythmic
ruhhh . . . ruhhh,
while newer circular ones whirred with earsplitting howls—
errrrraaaaah,
over and over. The air was full of woodsmoke, the scent of fresh-cut wood, horses, and whale-oil grease, and the overwhelming smell of the sea.

Little of the surrounding woods had been logged off. The Meeting had decreed that, saying that only mature timber might be harvested and only a portion of that in any square mile. Even in town enough had been left to give welcome shade; the leaves were beginning to turn, but the afternoon was hot enough to bring a prickle of sweat. He walked uphill, past wagons and folk and a shouting crowd of children just out of school.

The public buildings of the little town stood around a green with a bandstand in the center; school, church, meetinghouse, and a three-story blockhouse of oak logs with the Republic’s Stars and Stripes flying from its peak.

Peter Girenas took a deep breath, nodded to the guard—the town’s main arsenal was inside—and walked in. The first floor was racked rifles, crates of gear, barrels of powder in a special room with a thick, all-wood door. It was also dim and shady, smelling faintly of brimstone. He trotted up the ladder-staircase, through to the third story. Broad windows there let in enough light to make him squint. It wasn’t until he stood to attention that he saw who waited.

Not just Ranger Captain Bickford behind the table. Chief Cofflin, and Martha Cofflin, the Secretary of the Council. His eyes flicked back to his own commander. Bickford was smiling, so things couldn’t be
too
bad.

“No, son,” Cofflin said. “You’re not in trouble over that fight. As a matter of fact . . .”

Martha Cofflin slid a paper out of a folder. “Had Judge Gardner expedite the papers a bit. On the deposition of Sue Chau and your own statement, there’s no grounds for any proceedings. Self-defense.”

“And why don’t you sit down, Ranger?” Cofflin said.

Girenas juggled the sheaf of papers awkwardly for a second, then brought up a chair and sat with them in his lap.

Older than I thought,
he decided, meeting Cofflin’s level gaze; he’d never happened to see the Chief at close range before. The long, lumpy Yankee face had deep wrinkles around the eyes, and there was a lot of gray in the thinning sandy hair.

“How did you feel about it?” Cofflin asked.

Surprised, Girenas paused for a minute to marshal his thoughts. “Well, at the time, there wasn’t time to feel much of anything, sir,” he said. “They started it, so I’m not tearing myself up over it. But I’m sorry it happened. Usually I like the locals, get on well with ’em.”

Bickford nodded. “Speaks Lekkansu like a tribesman,” he said. “Lived in one of their camps for six months a couple of years back, done useful go-between work. Trade supervision, that sort of thing. About my best scout, and I’m grooming him for a lieutenant.”

“Sir?” Cofflin looked up. “Speaking of trade, I saw something today you’d better know about.”

Cofflin’s face took on a frown as Girenas described what he’d seen in the taproom of the Loon, and Bickford’s fist clenched on the table before he spoke.

“Chief, we
need
some sort of an executive order about this sort of thing. Better still, we need a law rammed through the Town Meeting.”

Cofflin leaned back. “That’s one opinion. What’s yours, son?”

Girenas said, “The Captain’s right, Chief. The Carsons are the worst, but not the only ones. The locals, they just can’t handle hard liquor, even worse than Albans that way. But they know right from wrong well enough, when they sober up and realize they’ve been diddled. Just wrong one, and see what happens! We could stumble into a war if we’re not careful. Already would have, I think, if it weren’t for the plagues. A lot of them, they don’t like us Nantucketers much, sir.”

“Ayup. Can’t say as I blame ’em.”

Martha Cofflin spoke. “Problem, though. First—are we entitled to tell the Indians they can’t buy liquor? They’re adults, and not citizens of the Republic, either. Second, could we enforce a law like that if we did pass it?”

Cofflin smiled; Girenas had rarely seen a more bleak expression. “There was a little thing called Prohibition. Before your time, Ranger; even before mine. Disaster. Showed the costs of passing a law just to make yourself feel righteous.

Girenas frowned. “Is that a fancy way of saying we can’t do anything, sir?”

The Cofflins smiled dryly, an eerily similar expression. The man spoke. “Not at all, son. We might have trouble enforcing a law; the Carsons or someone like ’em would find a way to wiggle around it. I
can
lean on them, though, until they cry uncle. Nobody can get much done businesswise if the Town’s hostile—and that sort of thing operates by more . . . flexible rules.”

His wife nodded. “We do need to establish a tradition of dealing decently with the locals. It’s going to be more and more of a problem, anyway. Looks like our numbers are going to double every fifteen or twenty years, probably for the next century or two at least, between immigration and this enthusiasm for reproduction that everyone’s showing.”

Girenas nodded slowly. “Thank you, sir, ma’am,” he said.

Bickford cleared his throat. Cofflin lifted one knobby paw slightly. “Ayup,” he said. “Time to get to the main business we came for.”

Martha Cofflin produced a sheaf of papers from a knit carryall lying on the table. Girenas swallowed; it was a copy of the document resting on his knee.

“I, ah, hadn’t expected it to go so high so fast, Captain.”

Bickford shrugged. “Advantage of having a small government, Ranger.”

Chief Cofflin tapped the papers. “Had a tirade all set up,” he said, his mouth quirking slightly. “About reckless young fools, and how we can’t afford to divert effort, and how anyone hankering after adventure—which Marian rightly says is somebody else in deep shit far away—can ship out on a trader or join the Expeditionary Force. Then I realized I was starting to sound like the old farts I hated when
I
was twenty-one, and I took another look. Ayup, it
is
about time we got at least a survey knowledge of what’s going on in the interiors of the continents, something like what the
Eagle
did for the coastlands in ‘02. And it is logical to start with this continent here.”

Girenas felt a wave run through him, like a wash of warm water from his chest down to knees grown weak.
Glad I’m sitting down,
he thought.

“Two problems,” Martha Cofflin’s dry, precise voice went on. “First, are you the man to lead it? No offense, Ranger Girenas, but you’re extremely young. Second, costs.”

“He may be young, but he’s not reckless,” Bickford said. “Got as much experience as any of us post-Event, too; been in the Rangers since we branched off from the Eagle Scouts. If I were putting together an expedition like this, I’d pick him.”

Cofflin was glancing through another file, as if to remind himself. “Hmmm. Your family’s working in the mills here . . . immigrants before the Event, eh?”

Girenas nodded. “Three years before, Chief, from Riga.”

“Let’s see, a brother and sister, and your parents adopted two. Too young to go with the expeditionary force to Alba, but plenty of time in the woods here. Looks like you prefer camping out, mebbe?”

Girenas answered slowly, cautiously. “Yes sir. I . . . I’m good at it. Like to stick with what I’m good at, seems more . . . efficient that way.”

“No argument. You’ve done a good proposal here, too, well organized, everything justified and costed out. I’ve talked with people who know, and they think you’ve got some chance of pulling it off. Let’s see . . . six of you in all.”

Suddenly he grinned. “Christ, I’d like to go with you myself, if I were twenty and single.”

“Costs, Jared,” the Secretary of the Council said.

“Ayup.”

“I included an itemized list of necessities, sir,” Girenas said.

Cofflin chuckled. “Son, they say I’m cheap. And I am, with the Republic’s money. I
could
pay for this out of the discretionary funds, but I won’t.” He held up a hand. “Yes, it’ll be useful, if you pull it off. Not essential, though, and certainly not an emergency. Remember, every penny I give you comes out of someone’s pocket, will they-nill they.”

“Sir, this expedition will pay for itself and more, and not just with information. The gold—”

“Would be mighty useful.
If
you survive. Meantime you’re asking for horses, weapons, trade goods, the services of six strong young people, even a radio. And yes, we do have ships in the Pacific now and then”—trading for cotton textiles with the Chavin peoples of Peru— “but running up to the California coast to pick you up is still a big risk. So, son,” he went on, “it’s up to you.”

The ranger gaped at him. “Sir?”

“You’re a free citizen of the Republic of Nantucket. Circulate a petition, then get up on your hind legs at the Town Meeting and persuade the other citizens. I’ll even say I’m in favor . . . personally, not officially.”