On the Oceans of Eternity (44 page)

“Good-looking horses,” Eddie breathed from his position a little southward.

Giernas nodded, for two truths; the horses were handsome though small—dapple-skinned Barb-types, less hairy and stocky than their own Alban-Morgan crossbreeds—and it was just like Eddie to go judging horseflesh at a time like this.

“What’s the woman doing here?” he asked in turn. Tartessians weren’t as unreasonable about females as some locals, but they weren’t what you could call enlightened either, and fighting was strictly man’s work to them.

“She is a healer,” Jaditwara said. “Among her people, only women do that work.”

Giernas grunted. That made sense. If the enemy were using vaccination to get obedience, they’d need someone skilled in the technique. Which meant ...

“Sue. The Tartessian woman, we need her alive, and the cow—get Tidtaway to pass the word.”
For what it’s worth.
Probably not much; the mountain tribesman was just as much a foreigner as the Islanders to this bunch, and had a good deal less
keuthes.
Now to get to work.

“Steady,” he said, thumbing back the hammer of his rifle. Beside him Perks tensed, all taut alertness where he crouched belly-down to the ground, his nose pointed in an unwavering line to the front. No sound escaped the dog’s deep chest, but the black lips were drawn back from long yellow-white teeth and his ears lay flat. “Wait for the locals.”

The slough where most of the Indians were hiding formed a right angle with the river. There were seventy-three of them there, and another twenty-four near here in the riverside jungle. Their plan wasn’t complex; it couldn’t be, with the language barrier, and the fact that the locals had no concept of discipline. A war-leader here was anyone with a good reputation, and warriors followed him or not just as they individually pleased or their Spirit Friends whispered in their ears. It was a tribute to how monumentally terrified and pissed off the tribelets were that so many had showed up to fight. As near as he could calculate from what he’d been told by his allies, there couldn’t be more than thirty thousand people in the whole of California in this era; half of them in the Central Valley, and half of that in the northern portion near enough for runners to reach. A fair number of those had been killed by the Tartessians over the last couple of years, or had died—some sort of imported lung fever had struck here long before the smallpox, and what sounded like typhus. Many of the rest were hiding in terror of the new plague that was spreading like a prairie fire.

Ninety-seven men was a big chunk of the healthy adult males left after you worked those numbers. And pretty soon they would have to scatter, as summer dried out the valley and they had to move up into the mountains or south into the delta marshes to feed themselves. Meanwhile half the Tartessians in the settlement were full-time fighting-men with horses and modern weapons, and they had a year’s supply of stored food even if they lost this harvest.

God, listen up. I could use some help here, You know,
he thought/prayed. “Right, here we go,” he said aloud, as shouting broke out to the northward.

Despite the tension that dried his mouth, he grinned a little at the show the Indians were making. It would have annoyed him, if he’d been on the receiving end. He turned the binoculars. The Iberian commander was a young man, younger than Giernas, with a proud dark hawklike face. The ranger could see his lips curling back from very white teeth. Despite that anger, he detached a file of six troopers to screen the wagon from the river side.

All right,
Giernas thought. So
he’s not quite as headstrong as I hoped.
The local name for him was Bull Elk, because he liked to butt heads and yell, evidently.

“Wait for it,” he said again, a little louder, looking at what he could see of his firing line. Eddie, with a grin that was a half snarl; a glimpse of Jaditwara beyond him, frowning in concentration. Sue on his right hand, relaxed and calm.

“Did you see this?” she murmured.

“See what?” he said.

“Wild oat grass,” she said, pulling up a strand. “And fescue—neither should be here. They’re European, Mediterranean. Must have come in in fodder or bedding, and now they’re spreading, the way they did in the old history pre-Event.” She nodded out to the field of waist-high native needlegrass and bunchgrass. “Come back when Jared’s your age, and this’ll all be gone-it’ll all be these imported perennials instead. Up to your ass in feral cattle and horses, too.”

Giernas blinked. There was such a thing as being too calm. “Let’s worry about the ecology later, hey?” he half snapped.

“Waiting’s hard,” she said. The blue eyes were kind. “Don’t worry, Pete, it’ll be a cinch. Indigo and the kid will be safe as houses in a couple of hours.”

“If nobody shoots the damned cow by accident,” he said. “And right about now—”

Crack. Crack.
The first two rifles went off, out where the Tartessians were closing on the locals’ skirmish line. A chorus of whipcracking reports, followed, a long stuttering rattle. He trained his binoculars, hoping ...
yes!
The Indians had remembered his advice; they were dropping flat as soon as the Iberians raised their weapons.

That had taken a little doing. The locals were fine hunters and trackers, but when they fought in any numbers they lined up by mutual consent and threw spears until someone was hurt. Then everyone went home and told lies about how brave they’d been while blood flowed like floodwaters. He’d harangued them about this being a hunt, not a game, but he hadn’t been sure how it took.

Yes.
The locals vanished in the chest-high grass. The Tartessians shouted in anger, reloading and pushing closer. Then they shouted again, in alarm; Indians bobbed up out of the tall grass, threw their darts, ran half a dozen paces and threw themselves down again. None of the soldiers had been hit yet, but one horse had a dart through its haunch and went kicking and bucking and squealing off across the prairie with the rider hauling on the reins one-handed and trying frantically to lose neither seat nor rifle. One Indian went down while he watched, punched backward with a hole in his chest and an exit wound the size of a fist blossoming out of his back in a spray of blood and bone fragments.

Puffs of smoke were blossoming out of the muzzles of the rifles, drifting northward with the wind toward the dry slough. Noise, confusion, men running and horses wheeling. Perfect.

Here we go,
he thought, giving a last check that the sights of his rifle were adjusted to the right range. Breathe out. Lift the muzzle up, up, until the bead of the foresight filled the U-notch of the rear.
Squeeze
the trigger, gently, gently ...

Crack. The butt punched his shoulder. A perceptible fraction of a second later the lead ox drawing the Tartessian wagon bellowed, half reared and then slumped, blood pouring from nose and mouth as it kicked on the ground. The woman on the seat glanced around toward it just before the cry of animal agony; she must have heard the flat smack of the bullet slapping into the ox’s body behind the shoulder.

The other three Islanders fired within a second of each other.
Crackcrackcrack,
and a deep ratcheting snarl from Perks as he made little shifting motions with his haunches.

One of the Tartessian file went right back over his horse’s rump, helmet flying and trailing red—a clean head shot, right through the bridge of his nose. Another cursed, jerked, then was upright again, raising his own weapon; a grazing hit on the left arm. The third shot missed clean. All in all, very good shooting, Giernas decided, as his hands moved of themselves in the reloading drill.

Sue shouted something in the local tongue, and the Indians waiting in the riverside jungle charged forward whooping and screaming; they were also dodging and jinking, making themselves as difficult a target as they could. The Tartessians did exactly what the rangers had hoped, firing by reflex at the men running toward them. Two men went down dead or wounded, but that left the enemy with no time to reload. Giernas raised his own rifle again, standing this time for a better shot.
Crack,
and the waft of burned-sulfur stink. A distant comer of his mind noted that the sulfur had come all the way from the Caribbean to Nantucket and then on horseback all across the continent; doubtless that in the Tartessians’ ammunition was from Sicily, and here it was being used up in California ...

A Tartessian screamed, dropped his rifle, and clutched at his thigh, then slid out of the saddle. Another went down as his horse did, its scream far louder than the wounded man’s but equally full of bewildered agony. The three remaining dropped two Indians before they turned to gallop away; but they had left it far too late. Without the rifles firing on them from the riverbank they might have stopped the Indian charge; without the Indians they might have answered the rifles in kind ... but now they had lost half their numbers, and a horse makes a bad firing platform.

It is also a far larger target than a man, and unlike a man it cannot hit the dirt when shot at. A shower of atlatl darts fell around the riders, hurled by experienced, muscular arms whose power was magnified by the long leverage of the throwing-sticks. One of the Iberians took a dart through the throat and slumped off his saddle in a slow-motion collapse. Another went down choking and pawing at three of the short spears sunk half their length in his chest. The third managed to get his horse around and bounding toward the main fight.

“Get him!” Giernas shouted. It was needless. All four of the Islander rifles sounded, so close together that the sound was one thick brakk. Horse and rider folded together and tumbled.

The rangers dashed forward toward the enemy’s wagon and the precious cow, Perks running at his master’s side. One of the unhorsed Tartessians rose in front of Giernas, drawing his chopping blade and raising it for a swing. Giernas ignored him. The great gray-brown shape of the wolf-dog went from an easy bounding run to a soaring leap without even breaking stride, a hundred and twenty pounds of hairy torpedo with fangs. The wide-stretched jaws snapped closed on the man’s raised arm as the dog’s weight crashed into his chest. The teeth clamped like hydraulic shears, and Perks savaged the arm with a twisting back-and-forth jerk of head and neck and shoulders. Bone parted with a splintering crunch as both went tumbling to the ground. Giernas jinked around the thrashing bodies and dashed on, cursing the clinging friction of the grasses. At the wagon the ragged slaves were gone, probably running for the hills at full speed. All except for one; he was wrestling with the Tartessian woman, holding her right hand by the wrist and trying to make her drop the flintlock pistol in it. Two of the locals were helping him, and/or trying to rip the woman’s clothes off.

Well, just because they’re being fucked over by the Tartessians doesn’t make them angels,
Giernas thought, and rang the steel-shod butt of his rifle off the back of the ex-slave’s head. The man went down like a marionette with its wires cut; the ranger whipped the rifle butt around and slammed it under the short ribs of one local, then turned to put the muzzle under the chin of the second. It was empty, but
he
couldn’t know that.

“Go! Fight!” Giernas barked, jerking his head toward the main action.

The Indians did, shrugging, one grinning and the other nursing his side and whooping to get air back into his lungs. Giernas slapped the pistol out of the Iberian woman’s hand and chopped the edge of his palm into her temple with precisely calculated force. She sagged backward with her eyes rolling up, caught at the wagon wheel, and slumped to the ground.

God willing, all she’ll have is a bad headache for a couple of days.
She certainly wouldn’t be doing anything very energetic for a couple of hours. As he reloaded he looked over her into the body of the wagon.
Ayup, hot damn-more rockets and a mortar. They must have that along for holdouts who try to hide in the hills when they come calling.

“Four rounds,” he muttered aloud. This part hadn’t taken long—wouldn’t have worked if it did.
Four minutes, more or less.
Time always went like that in a fight, stretching like a thread of thickening maple syrup while you waited for it to start, then blurring past once it got started.

The Tartessians’ main body were just noticing what was going on behind them—as he’d thought, the noise and confusion and the sound of their own shots had concealed it from them for crucial seconds, until there was nothing they could do about it.

Plus they’re
overconfident,
he thought with a shark grin, as he licked sweat off his lips. They’d gotten used to thinking of themselves as the Lords of Creation facing dumb nekkid savages. Underestimating the opposition always left you sorry and sore in the end.

Eddie Vergeraxsson came up, riding on one Tartessian horse and leading three more; that was a bonus, the beasts were well-enough trained to stand and be caught, and he wouldn’t have to go back for theirs. Sue and Jaditwara arrived seconds later, panting but running easily with their rifles in their right hands, then throwing themselves into the saddles. Giernas took a second to lengthen the stirrup leathers on one of the horses, a gelding that wouldn’t be impossibly small for a man his size.

“Perks!” he said.

The dog trotted up, head low and tongue unreeled and lapping at his muzzle. None of the blood looked to be his. He sniffed at the slumped figure of the Tartessian healer, visibly wondering if he was supposed to bite her too.

“Stay! Guard!”

The wolf-dog trotted around the wagon, then crouched in the long grass, nose and ears and eyes busy. That took care of anyone without a gun who tried to approach the wagon, and if they did have a gun they’d have to be fast and very lucky.

“What next, Pete?” Eddie said.

“Next, we make sure the ends get tied up,” he said.

Over northward near the slough, the Tartessians were in trouble. He tossed his rifle into his left hand and got out his binoculars again, stepping up onto the box seat of the ox-wagon to see better. The enemy had stayed tangled up with the first group of attacking Indians far too long. Now, just as they were turning to disengage and pepper them from a distance, the twenty-odd who’d been with the Islanders were racing to take them in the rear. Sixteen of the enemy left ... no, make that fourteen, one took a dart in the back, and he saw two Indians leap up and tear another from the saddle like wolves at an elk, bearing him down to the ground, hands and heads and bare brown backs rising and falling above the tall grass as they hit and stabbed.