On the Oceans of Eternity (79 page)

His hazel eyes bored into Arnstein’s. “For if you are all such as Walker, then we must cherish Walker as our rightful lord, for at least he rules from the Achaean lands, and his followers of the Wolf Folk are too few to govern without many of our men at their sides in positions of honor. But if not ...”

Ian felt his spine prickle. “You speak boldly,” he said.

“I speak as I must.” A grim smile. “For one thing, your mouth can be stopped. For another, you would not be believed if you accused me—a condemned man seeking safety. For a third, time snaps at my heels like a wolf indeed. In another ten years—especially with victory in this war—the King of Men will be strong beyond assailing. He will rule so many lands that we Achaeans will be but a minor part of his domains, of his followers.”

His expression grew altogether harsh. Arnstein felt a trickle of fear, more immediate than the low-grade dread that had been with him constantly since Troy. This was not a man you could anger safely ...

“I have spoken. Now
you
will speak. And you are not my only spring of knowledge in this matter. I will know if you lie; Athana Potnia is my patron Goddess, and she has given me the gift of plumbing the truth in men’s words.”

All right, Ian,
Arnstein thought, licking his lips and running a hand over his balding head.
Now’s the time to talk for your life.

War was beginning to look like something simple and straightforward.

 

“You liked him,” Swindapa said quietly, as the Islander truce party rode south once more.

“I’ll still kill him if I can,” Alston said meditatively, looking up.

The ultralight had turned southward to base, after checking that the Tartessians were headed back northwest. The first stars were out, bright light against racing scuds of cloud, clouds white-outlined by the waning moon; the wind had cooled notably.

“That’s not what I meant,” her partner said, cocking her head to one side slightly. “I’m surprised.”

“So am I,” Alston said.

One of the good things about riding a horse was that it wouldn’t fall over or run into a tree if you lost yourself in thought for a few moments.

“I think he’s changed,” she said at last. “He’s still pretty loathsome to our way of thinking—” which would apply from a Fiernan’s point of view as well, although not for exactly the same reasons “... but being a King, I’d say it’s changed him. Responsibility can do that.”

“To some, maybe,” Swindapa said. “I don’t think so, for Walker.”

Marian’s face went hard. “No. Not him.”

Ritter’s bicycle came rapidly up from behind them. “Ma’am!” she said. “The scouts confirm the enemy delegation are withdrawing as agreed.”

For an instant a flicker of regret went through Alston’s mind: someone with a telescope-sighted rifle, or a long burst from the Gatling, and the enemy would be headless.... No. Victories won that way were poisoned fruit. If nothing else, they didn’t convince the other side they were beaten the way a real fight did, and getting the other side to admit defeat was the whole reason you made war in the first place. There was no point in winning one war at the cost of laying the seeds of defeat in the next; that way lay destruction.

“We’ll camp on the site we picked out on the way up here, then, Lieutenant,” Alston said.

“Aye, aye, ma’am!”

Swindapa chuckled softly as the young Marine officer pedaled industriously off and spoke even more quietly: “How she jumps to please you,” she teased—in Fiernan, which the standard-bearer did not speak, which gave them complete privacy.

At least she’s learned some discretion,
Marian thought with affectionate exasperation; she understood the Earth Folk language, although she couldn’t speak it beyond the pass-the-salt level.

“She’d jump even more eagerly if you took a pheasant feather and tickled her on her—” Swindapa went on.

“‘Dapa!” Alston snorted, as her partner went into imaginative details, with gestures. One of the few drawbacks of having a Fiernan for a partner was her idea of a bawdy joke ...

“... then imagine her bursting like a ripe berry on your lips when you threw your arms about her arse and ran your—”

“
’Dapa! Stop it!”

... because in a perfectly good-natured way the Fiernan idea of bawdy tended to be luridly, awesomely explicit, even by late-twentieth-century-American standards. The Earth Folk had plenty of taboos and aversions, but few about that.

“But that would be against regulations,” she finished, with a sly grin, rolling her eyes piously skyward, and making a brief steepling of fingers in the Christian manner.

That
was another thing that could be annoying. The Sun People either rebelled against discipline or embraced it; Fiernans were likely to think of it as faintly silly. It was like trying to pull on a rope made of water, sometimes.

Scholarly types like the Arnsteins said it was because of their diffuse family setup, where paternity was often anyone’s guess and kids were raised catch-as-catch-can, like a litter of puppies by mothers, aunts, uncles, and a score of other relatives.

Whatever, Marian thought, laughing unwillingly along with Swindapa’s wholehearted mirth.

The spot the embassy had picked for its encampment was on a slight hill, where the chalky subsoil came nearer the surface as the land rose out of the alluvial lowlands to the north. It reminded her of pictures she’d seen of the Serengeti, weirdly combined with California. A scattering of cork-oak trees gave shelter, their thick, gnarled bark with its deep scorch marks showing why it had evolved in the first place; the grass fires in a dry summer here must be something to see.

The Marines set to efficiently; bicycles resting in a row, clearing the long grass—the green undergrowth was unlikely to burn but you didn’t want to take chances—cutting circles of sod to make space for campfires, pitching tents, both their own eight-person squad models and smaller types for the officers. A stamping, bayonet-prodding inspection of the undergrowth produced a yelling, dodging chaos when a six-foot Montpelier snake rose and fanged the forestock of a rifle only inches from a Marine’s left hand, then thrashed about hissing and striking in warning before it whipped off downhill; that set the little group of tailless Barbary apes in the trees shrieking and bolting as well.

Marian’s
katana
had leaped into her hand without the intervention of her conscious mind. She ran it back into the scabbard behind her left shoulder with a hiss of steel on leather greased with neatsfoot oil.

“Damn, but I hate snakes,” she muttered. “Especially poisonous ones you can’t see in the grass.” Her partner snorted, and Alston went on: “‘Dapa, do I mention you and spiders?”

They led their horses to the little stream at the base of the hill, watered and unsaddled and rubbed them down, checking their feet and hobbling them before setting them to graze. That would keep them happier than being tethered with a feedbag, and they wouldn’t go far from the campfires with the predators about. While she tended the horses the black woman watched the Marines at work, saw Swindapa doing the same.

The officer and her noncoms paced the area around the camp carefully; she saw Ritter take a sight on a bush twenty yards off, walk a few paces, do the same, note it to the sergeant and corporals and repeat the process all around. The black woman nodded; it was a trick the Marines had gotten from the Fiernan Spear Chosen, through her—a way to identify what should and shouldn’t be there. After it got dark, a creeping enemy could look far too much like a bush. They put equal care into picking a good spot for the Gatling, and a detail was already at work digging a sanitary slit trench off behind a tree. An ax rang counterpoint to the
shunk
of spade and pick, breaking fallen wood into convenient sizes.

“Squads to wash in rotation,” Ritter said, when the basic work was done and deadwood fires crackled in the fire pits. “Clarkson, what do you say? Can we get some variety tonight?”

“Piece of cake, or duck, ma’am, the young Marine answered, grinning. He’d been looking over the stream that ran by the hill and into the marshes to their west.

The accent was Fiernan, Marion thought—from the west-coast area. At her slightly lifted brows Ritter went on: “You might want to see this, Commodore. He’s from the Level Fens, south of Westhaven.”

Swindapa nodded, then smiled and shook her head silently at Marian’s inquiring look. Clarkson’s section of the platoon trooped down to the river. They all stripped—soap and towels were along—but the brown-haired young man with the Immigration Office name also quickly plaited himself a headdress of grasses and reeds before slipping into the water. Even looking at him Marian had trouble following his passage down the darkened surface of the river. A minute later came a sharp gooselike
squak
—abruptly cut off. Another followed it, a minute of silence, then two more, and a thunder of wings in the darkness. Geese went by overhead, dandy-dog close, like whizzing projectiles with thrashing wings and outstretched panic-taut necks, honking in alarm. Clarkson came wading back holding four of the big birds high; Alston realized he must have swum close enough unnoticed to grab them by the feet and yank them under, one after another.

“Impressive,” she said.
And possibly useful,
the filing system in her mind noted.

“Now, let me take a look at that bullet wound,” Swindapa said.

 

Her own bruises and nicks had faded, but there was still a red healing weal where the slug had gouged Marian’s flank. This platoon of Marines hadn’t been involved in the boarding fight; in fact, most of its members hadn’t seen combat yet—Ritter and the sergeant and one of the corporals being the exceptions.

In fact, Sergeant Daudrax has more scars than I do,
Alston thought, looking over at him.

Although mine show more.
Scar tissue came in dusty-white, standing out against the black of her skin. She looked down; spearthrust in the shoulder, boarding pike along the ribs, sword scar on the left forearm, and this would be the second bullet mark, after the one that took off most of the lobe of her left ear. Nothing too disfiguring yet; in fact, the Marines were casting occasional awed glances as the two senior officers soaped up and rinsed off.

And they all hurt like hell, infants.
It mystified her sometimes why you got prestige from evidence of failure, and if letting someone cut you wasn’t failing, what was?

By the time the squad had finished washing in the river—with much whooping and horseplay among the troops; at times like this you remembered that many of them would be considered kids up in the twentieth—the geese had been plucked, gutted, washed, rubbed with salt and some of the unit’s precious, hoarded joint ration of Nantucket Secret Spice, and slapped on green-stick grills over the fires. By the time the other squads had taken their turn with the soap, the goose was about ready, enough to give everyone a mouthful or two of the flavorful fat-rich meat. Water was boiling for sassafras tea; that had the added advantage that you didn’t have to add the purification powder with its unpleasant metallic tang.

Two big kettles were simmering with Jesus Stew—cubes of bouillon for stock, dried beans and peas, parched barley, chopped-up lengths of desiccated sausage and similarly “desecrated” vegetables, garlic powder, and sage, that service legend claimed not only proved the doctrine of the Resurrection, but was the Life. Together with bread baked that morning at the base camp and hard crumbly Alban cheese it made a pleasant enough dinner; the Marines tore into it with the thoughtless, wolfish enthusiasm of hardworking youngsters who’d mostly been raised on Bronze Age farms where this would be feast-day food.

Despite the day’s work a flute came out; the song that set them swaying and clapping was half-new, a mutation of something dug out of a book during the dark, hungry winter of the Year 1, and crossbred since with things native to this era:

Marian Alston watched them with amused affection as she gnawed a goose drumstick, back a little around a separate fire as befitted senior officers.
There’s a big part of our future,
she thought with satisfaction.

Some would go back to their birth-countries after their hitch. Most would settle down in the Republic as new-minted citizens, already English-speaking and literate, used to brushing their teeth and keeping clock-time and
not
attributing anything unusual to black magic, not to mention the males having something approaching civilized attitudes toward women beaten into their thick skulls. Then they’d become farmers or factory workers, clerks or sailors or shopkeepers, and
their
children ...

After an hour the fires had burned low, only a few sparks drifting upward to the darkened, overcast sky; Ritter looked at her watch, nodded slightly to the platoon sergeant, and he called
lights-out
in a fine seagoing bellow:

“And this isn’t a hunting trip, either. You useless bastards have work to do tomorrow, and I’m going to see that you do it! Clarkson, bank the fires. Standard watches, and keep your eyes open and your ears, too. If any of you get your throats cut I’ll find a wizard to raise you from the mound and kill you again myself. Jump, you slackers!”

The sassafras tea woke her a little past midnight. She slipped on her boots—remembering that snake, and the reptiles’ liking for warmth—and looped her pistol-belt over one shoulder before heading out to the sanitary trench. The air was much colder outside, but despite that she spent a long instant looking at the play of lightning to the westward, lighting up castles and palaces of cloud ... and beyond them were the stars ...

Someday,
she thought fiercely.
For Heather’s and Lucy’s great-great-great-grandchildren.