On the Oceans of Eternity (82 page)

The three of them jumped up and ran down the trail for a quarter hour; even through thigh-high grass you could follow it, once you knew roughly what and where to look for. Peter brought himself to a halt and scratched his head.

“She stopped and changed off here,” he said.

“Awe,”
Eddie said, and Jaditwara nodded.

“And she’s pushing the horses hard,” the ex-Fiernan ranger said, tossing her head in puzzlement. “Trot and gallop.”

You could do that, if you had two mounts, especially if you sat light in the saddle. It was a good way to cover ground quickly, as well—better than a hundred miles in a day’s journey.

Uh-oh,
Peter Giernas thought, looking south.

“I think I know what she was doing,” he said slowly. “She didn’t know when we’d be back—everything went real quick, quicker than we thought—and she knew, the Tartessians were out in force. Thirty or more, and with native trackers. Where would
you
go?”

Eddie leaned on his rifle and frowned, turning his head in a wide sweep. The fringe on the sleeve of his buckskins wobbled as he scratched his head.

“Over the river to the east?” he said tentatively. “Hide in the hills?”

“Cross two big rivers with a baby?” Jaditwara said. “And no more gear than in her saddlebags? No. She has to get shelter and food, and quickly, for her child’s sake.”

My son,
Giernas thought, with a brief burst of fury, as quickly suppressed.
You need a clear head now, goddammit.

“No,” he agreed. “And she can’t hole up with any of the locals, too much danger they’d turn her in.”

“Well, she can’t go west,” Eddie said, waving. The land in that direction was even flatter and more open, millions of acres of grass to the foothills of the Coast Range. “So where
would
she go?”

“South,” Giernas said grimly. “To the only place around here with crowds of people coming and going, strangers, where one more Indian woman with a kid wouldn’t be noticed.”

“Oh,” Eddie said. Then: “Oh,
shit.”

Silent, they turned and ran back along their own trail, back to the camp. The locals were setting up, looking around for evidence of what had happened to their kin, building fires. Sue had Perks beside one of the fires on a section of hide, with water boiling and gear set out beside her. She nodded at their news.

“What do we do?” she said.

Pete forced words out. “What we planned.” He waved north. “There are about half the soldiers they’ve got left, out of touch. We’ve got to act before they get their act together.”

“Indigo?” Sue said gently.

“The longer she’s in there, the more likely she and Jared are to get caught.” He took a deep breath. “We’ll have to make a few changes, though.”

Sue nodded, then looked down. “I’ve given him a shot, but I had to short it—not sure of the dose,” she said. “And this is going to hurt. A little further and that pistol ball would have lamed him for life. I think it’s pressing on a nerve; he snapped at me when I touched it.”

Peter Giernas knelt beside Perks’s head: since Sue still had both hands, the snap would have been a warning only. The dog’s eyes were wandering with the drug, but the black nose wrinkled and a long pink tongue flapped feebly at his hands. He took the heavy-boned shaggy head in his arms, remembering the puppy that had looked so sheepish when it piddled at the foot of his bed....

“It’s okay, big fellah,” he said quietly, taking the great scarred muzzle in one hand and clamping it closed, cradling the head against him firmly. “I know you did your best. You held them off while she got away. I’m sorry about your pups.”

“Eddie, Jaddi, hold his paws.” Sue said, washing off her hands and taking up the probe. “God, I wish I had more training for this—Henry should be here ... All right.”

She took a long breath and began. Perks whimpered, then gave a muffled howl and heaved against the hands confining him.

“Quiet, Perks!” Giernas said. “Quiet!”

The body in his arms went quivering-rigid. Sue’s long-fingered hands moved; she swore, moved again ...

“Got it!” she said triumphantly. The slightly flattened lead sphere thumped on the ground; Perks gave a long muffled whimper as she cleansed the incision and began to sew.

“He’ll be all right in a couple of weeks, I think,” she said, looking up and meeting Giernas’s eyes.

“Thanks, Sue,” he said. “And
everything’s
going to be okay in a couple of days, if I have anything to do with it.”

 

“Oh, now you sorry bastards are
fucked!”
Marine rifleman Otto Verger whispered in his birth-tongue. He grinned through the burned cork on his face; he had been born Ohteleraur son of Vargerax, far from this river in Tartessos. The inflatable craft waited where it had grounded among the reeds that swayed in the hissing rain, and he crouched on the slick wet fabric of it.

In harshly accented English: “It’s me who’s here the now.
and I’ve got my rocket launcher
!
”

This little piece of Iberia was a bit like the east-country fens of Alba where he’d been born nineteen summers gone . . . except that here he had this fine piece of battlecraft in his hands, from the hands of the wizard-smith Leaton and his helpers. Verger loved the stubby weapon; his hands caressed it as he waited in the grounded rubber raft. A cammo-painted steel tube four inches around and four feet long, with flared padded ends, a shoulder stock and handgrips on the tube, a circular shield for the user’s face on the left side and a simple optical sight. It was a lot heavier than a rifle, true. But with this you had the Fist of Tauntutonnarax the Homed Man itself at your command....

I mean, the Fist of God the Father and Son and His Mother,
he corrected himself, freeing a hand for a second to sketch a cross on his chest.

Otto Verger intended to make the Republic his home; his last leave at his father’s steading had settled that in his mind, watching his kin sit on a clay floor around an open hearth, cracking fleas while the stock grunted and squealed and baaaa’ed and mooed from the other end of the longhouse. So he must make his peace with Jesus and His sky-clan.

It was always well to be in good with the particular Gods of the folk you dwelt among, even if they were so strange you couldn’t understand a thing about them. They were strong; that was enough.

Their sergeant had crawled off to find the others; then he raised his head over the edge of the boat from where he lay on the reeds.

“Path’s marked,” he said softly. “Follow me.”

Verger rolled out of the boat and wiggled forward, stopping for an instant to make sure that his loader was following them; Private Sheila Rueteklo was Fiernan, and they’d stop to look at the pretty flowers in the middle of a death-duel. A slap on his boot told him she was there, and he snake-crawled forward. Mud and cold water soaked into his already saturated uniform. There were secrets to moving through swamp. If you went flat on your belly, spread your weight, you could move across quaking ground that would suck you down to your waist if you tried to go on two feet.

The toboggans following with their gear used the same principle—the Eagle People ...

That’s
we
Eagle People, fool,
he corrected himself.

... were marvelously clever about that, finding new ways to use old knowledge.

If you pushed reeds flat to make a mat beneath you it was even better. The sharp green smell of bruised vegetation rose up around him, mingling with the yeasty scent of the mud, the occasional earth-fart of marsh gas, and the odors of gun oil and metal. He sniffed with a hunter’s caution. Yes. There was the smoke of many banked hearths from the shore of the river to westward. The smell could come from a town, or large village, or war camp . . . but almost certainly from the fort the briefings had described. For a while he’d been convinced they were lost on this endless river.

Dark as arm’s length up a hog’s ass,
he thought cheerfully.
But we got here. Hard Corps!

The rocket teams and their protecting riflemen moved in across the darkened swamp with patient stealth; every once in a while an officer or noncom would pause to look at a compass and correct their passage. At last the swamp proper gave way to mere mud, liquid beneath his body with firm ground close enough below for him to crouch and duckwalk, then come half-erect. An officer came down and led them forward along a string the scouts—those picked ones like Clarkson—had put in. A lot of fen-men in this unit . . . Verger walked silently, despite the wet ground beneath his boots and the stumps of trees. At last he came to a tangle of fallen trunks that would make a good position, and the rain lifted a little. Light, yes, there was faint yellow light from ahead. He squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them wide again. A row of squares, in a line three times the height of his head—gunport covers made from slabs of iron, with light leaking around them.

“Seventy-five yards,” the officer whispered. “You start on the right gun position. Remember not to look at the flares.”

She moved off into the night. Yes,
Mother,
Verger thought. He didn’t mind having a woman as platoon commander . . . much, anymore. They tended to take better care of their units, less likely to get you killed to prove how long their dongs were.

He heard a series of soft grunts as Rueteklo unhitched the carrying frame from her webbing harness, and knew the feel of her hands as she lifted his free of his back. Together that was eight rockets; another eight came up from the rear, brought over the marsh on toboggans.

“Feed me,” he said; it would be a while, but best to be ready. “Incendiary.”

Metal touched the rear padding of the launcher, and the rocket slid home with a low
clunk-click.
The trigger on the first handgrip went taut as the tension came on the spring striker. He could imagine the round sliding in, the egg-shaped head, the narrower body, the circle of fins at the rear with a solid rim the same diameter as the warhead. Unseen in the darkness his teeth showed. Incendiary warheads were
fun.

Well,
all
of them were fun, but incendiaries most of all. The bursting charge scattered fire like the Christian Hell, and it burned inextinguishably, some wonderful art making it impossible to put out with water. He’d put one of those—maybe more—right through those ports.

“Up,” Rueteklo said when her work was through.

“Ready,” he replied, bringing his eye to the sight.

With that, he could see the clear pattern of light leaking out around the portlid of the gun emplacement; the careless bastards there didn’t have any fitting to keep it light-tight. He shook his head in contempt. With a soft snort of equal scorn he remembered older men back home, saying that you had to obey like a dog to serve the Eagle People in war ... Fools. Let them sit in their moldering dung-floored huts, wagging their gray beards and picking lice from each other’s hair.

Hard Corps!
he thought.

In the Corps you learned how to do things
right.
With the Empty Hand art alone he’d paid off many an old score, going back to his father’s steading on leave—he was not a big man, though broad-shouldered and strong for his size. And as a Marine you could rely on the people beside you to do things the
right
way, the
Corps
way, not go off in a sulk, or rush away to grab a cow or grandstand and leave
your
arse swinging in the wind.

Oath-brothers like that gave you the strength of a
God.
More, they had the Midnight Mare and Golden Roan to lead them—
keuthes
enough to make victory sure. Just this evening before they all set off upriver he’d watched her doing some rite or other, laying a black thread and a white side by side on her sleeve and waiting until you couldn’t tell one from the other. Powerful rites to put
keuthes
on your side, in the Corps.

Plus the Corps gave you weapons, finer than the
miruthas
used in the halls of Sky Father, and gold—fourteen dollars on the drumhead when you enlisted, the price of a good ox, and a dollar a day thereafter—and there was fine food like an endless feast in a chieftain’s hall, healing magic like something from a tale of wizards for your hurts, the splendid uniform that all men feared, the promise of land after your hitch, the travel, the women to sport with ...

He grinned at the memory of night before last, stealing away behind a pile of ammunition boxes with a frisky sailor-wench off one of the Guard frigates—sleep well lost. At home in the Alban lands of Sky Father’s children, if you didn’t have bridewealth to offer . . . well, a girl’s brothers might kick your bollocks off if you so much as caught her by the braids and asked for a kiss. And what young man his age had bridewealth, with the price of a wife going up all the time and no cattle raids to make a poor young warrior rich?

No wife for one born like him to a common
wirtowonnax,
that he knew, not for many years. No slave women any more either for a youth to ease himself with, or captives taken on raids, not like the days before the Battle of the Downs that his uncles spoke of.

The old men got all the girls now—unless the girls ran off themselves. A young man who stayed home had nothing to look forward to except another day walking behind the arse-end of a plow ox. Watching the turnips grow and banging sheep, while the great wild world swept by on the Islanders’ tall white ships.

Yes, it’s good to be in the Corps,
he thought, working himself into the damp earth and keeping his eyes on the target with lynx patience, ignoring the cold rain that trickled down his helmet and fell into his sopping clothes. Good for his warrior years, and then one day he would have hall and land and herds of his own. Unless he died in battle first, of course, but all men were born doomed to meet their fate at the hour appointed. A sluggard sleeping in the straw and a hero on a bloody field reaping foemen, each died just as dead, and nobody remembered the sluggard’s name after he was burned on his pyre.