On the Oceans of Eternity (28 page)

“How many—”

“Two hundred sixty-three horses, with one hundred seven two years old or older. Four hundred sixty-two cattle. I couldn’t get all the sheep or swine, they’re too small at this range. Lots of them, though.”

“Ah.”

Jaditwara hadn’t had the full Grandmother training, but she’d done enough that her ability instantly to
count
things at a distance never failed to startle him. For that matter, she’d memorized his journal and Sue’s, sort of a living backup system, and she had a couple of reference books stored in that long shapely skull.

“Pete,” the Fiernan’s soft singsong voice went on. “You notice the flagpole?”

“Hard to miss,” Giernas said. “Two hundred feet if it’s an inch.”

“One hundred ninety-eight,” Jaditwara said absently, touching her fingers together briefly in the Counting Chant. “Why so large?”

“‘Mine’s bigger than yours,’ ” he guessed.

Tartessians thought that way, from what he’d heard of them and the few he’d met. The flagpole was made out of a whole old-growth Ponderosa pine, and the flag with the Tartessian mountain in silver on green looked absurdly small at its top. He didn’t envy anyone who had to climb up the ladder of crosspieces to fix a jammed pulley. There was a platform around the top just below the flag, too.
Hmmmm.
It
would
make a crackerjack lookout post.

They dropped down the sloping trunk. Perks rose from concealment and came over, serious with the emotions he smelled on the humans. Peter Giernas took his rifle in his right hand and began to trot, careful to keep tree trunks between him and the river, although his buckskins would fade into the vegetation and all the metal on him was carefully browned. Once there was a swell of ground between him and the enemy he picked up the pace—lope a hundred yards, walk a hundred. The horses and the rest of their party were with the locals they’d met ten miles away; two hours’ travel, without pushing it harder than was sensible.

Then he’d have to figure out what the hell to do.

 

“This is frustrating as
hell,”
Sue Chau said.

Giernas nodded. The dark somber face of the chief stared back at him out of the night, from across the low embers of the oak fire. The local leader was short and lean and walnut-colored, with silver in the black hair gathered up on the top of his head through a rawhide circle; he was either called Chief Antelope, or was chief of the Antelope clan. Or “big man,” “important person” might be more accurate than chief.... Tattoo marks streaked his cheeks beneath a thin, wispy black beard; four more bars marked his chin; bear teeth were stuck through pierced ears, and a half-moon ornament of polished abalone shell hung from his nose. He was quite naked save for a rabbitskin cloak thrown around his shoulders, a belt, a charm that looked like a double-headed penis on a thong, and several necklaces of beautifully made shell beads. An atlatl and bundle of obsidian-headed darts lay at his feet.

Tidtaway spoke a little of the chief’s language; about as much as he did English. He’d been exposed to it far more often, but only in brief spells years apart, as opposed to the continuous months with the expedition. And the chief spoke Tartessian, a little; so did Jaditwara ... also a little. Sue had made the most progress over the winter with Tidtaway’s dialect, which by happenstance was a tonal language like the Cantonese she half remembered from her father’s efforts to teach. Nobody was talking their native tongue, and sometimes they had to go from one badly learned foreign language through another to a third. That meant mistakes, painful misunderstandings, endless patient repetition, and no chance of conveying anything subtle or abstract.

“I think he understands that we’re not Tartessians,” Sue said.

Giernas sighed and worked his fingers into the deep ruff around Perks’s neck. The dog was content enough, or as content as he could be around strange-smelling outsiders; he gnawed at a rack of grilled elk ribs that his master had finished, crunching the hard bones like candy cane in his massive jaws but keeping a sharp ear cocked for the start of trouble. Sparks from three campfires drifted up toward the branches of trees whose leaves were a flickering ruddiness above. Through them the stars burned many and bright in the clear dry air, like a frosted band across the sky.

“Okay, then does he understand that we can protect him from the smallpox?” Giernas said.
I hope,
he added to himself.

Sue, Jaditwara, and Tidtaway went to work again, hands moving, sometimes looking as if they were trying to throttle or pound comprehension out of the air.

“I’m not sure,” Sue said at last. The others seconded her. “I’m
really
not sure that I got the idea of the percentage risk of the inoculation process across. I do know he’s disappointed that we can’t cure the ones already sick.”

He nodded wearily. You
couldn’t
get the idea of probabilities over, sometimes—some peoples just didn’t have the concept, because they didn’t believe anything happened by chance; if someone got sick it was the will of malignant spirits, or witchcraft, or the Evil Eye. Eddie’d thought that way as a kid; he knew better consciously these days, but deep down his gut didn’t think that there was such a thing as coincidence.

The chief broke in with an impassioned speech, switching from his own language to Tartessian now and then. Tidtaway and Jaditwara translated, sometimes overstepping each other; Jaditwara’s singsong Fiernan accent grew much stronger as she drew on words learned long before she came to the Island. Giernas sighed and settled in to a job of mental cut-and-paste.

“The Taratusus came seven summers ago this spring.”

God, Year 4, they got an early start,
Giernas thought.
Give that bastard Isketerol his due. he’s a planner.
It took malignant forethought, to start up something like this when Tartessos was just getting its first home-built three-masters and using its new guns to settle old scores with the neighbors. Or maybe he thought of it as long-term insurance....
And mebbe Walker gave him the idea.

“At first they were very few. They gave wonderful things”—he touched an iron knife at his belt—“and they helped my people in their feud with the
Sairotse
folk who dwell downstream. All they asked in return was help with hunting, some food, and a few basketfuls of the heavy rock from the streams that they showed us how to find.”

He touched his necklace, which had rough-shaped gold nuggets between the abalone beads, and continued: “They killed many of the
Sairotse
men with their death-sticks and thunder-making logs. They took all the others and made them dig their ditch and build their wall, cut timber, haul earth and wood to build their great houses, or took them downriver to dig the red rock from the hills near the sea. They took the women of the
Sairotse,
but few as wives—instead they make them work like their Big Dogs.”

Horses, Giernas translated to himself. It wasn’t the first time they’d run into that name, among peoples whose only domestic animal was canine.

“We didn’t like all that. We fought the
Sairotse
sometimes, yes, but also they were our marriage-kin. It’s a bad thing that they are all gone, a whole tribe, a very bad thing. And so the spirits became angry, we knew that because there were fevers and sickness around the big houses. More and more of the strangers came—now they are more than all the people of my
Nargenturuk
clan. They rip up the ground to plant their eating grass without asking our leave. They trade like misers, making us bring more and more heavy rock for less and less; they make us bring captives of other tribes, to dig the red rock and burn it—those get the shaking sickness and die. Last year they told all the peoples here that we must bring the heavy rock, and young men and women, and furs, many other things, for nothing, or they would destroy us!”

“Red rock?” Giernas asked.

“Cinnabar,” Jaditwara said, after searching her memory for a moment. “Mercury ore.” She frowned. “The Tartessians had their own mine for that, we bought it from them before the war, but I think I heard it was damaged in a revolt just after they got it going—I know the price they asked for it went, how do you say, sky-high. The people who live near it are very fierce. The
Inquirer & Mirror
had an article about it. They thought Walker was also buying it from Isketerol.”

“What’s mercury good for?”

“Thermometers, barometers. Antifouling paint for the hulls of ships. Tanning furs. Medicines. For refining many ores, silver especially. Some chemical things I don’t understand. And ... explosives. Blasting caps, percussion caps for guns.”

“There’s a deposit near ... San Jose, I think was the name,” Sue put in. “Just south of the big bay.”

Giernas grunted.
Ok. That’s why they came this far. And the gold. Lots of silver in Iberia, but not much gold.
The chieftain waited out their interchange, and continued:

“And now they have brought this sickness on us. They boast that only they can halt it, by a magic of their cows.” He used the Tartessian word for the unfamiliar animal. “They say it shows their spirit-allies are stronger than ours, their—
Gods
is the word?”

“Vaccination,” Sue murmured.

“And they say they will sweep aside any who will not be their dogs. Our people who go to the big houses to trade now are beaten sometimes, kicked aside like dirt. They give us the water-of-dreams, then laugh when we drink it and act foolishly, when we give all our trade goods for another flask. When they think we do not hear, the outlanders boast that one day they will sweep aside all the peoples of this land, take it for their own! And they have some magic, that their women bear many children and all live, so they grow fast even without new ones landing from their great canoes with clouds to push them.” He shook his head. “I do not understand this magic. But I can see that soon they will be too strong for us, even if all the peoples united against them.”

Giernas nodded sympathetically. Hunter-gatherers like these usually had ways of keeping their birthrates low—low by the standards of the ancient world, of course. They had to, since a woman couldn’t handle more than one child too young to walk; not when she had to hunt edible plants every day, and move camp, too, and carry gear besides. So they made sure she had three or four years between kids; via a low-fat diet that lowered fertility, prolonged breast-feeding that did the same, taboos on sex for nursing mothers, sometimes abortion or infanticide, or a lot of kids just plain died of one thing or another in the hungry parts of the year.

The Tartessians had been peasant farmers for thousands of years. They bred a lot faster, since they lived in settled villages. Before the Event they’d also
died
a lot faster than hunters, particularly their children. Now they had lots of food, and pretty good preventative medicine, thanks to Isketerol and Queen Rosita, who’d been Registered Nurse Rosita Menendez before the Event. Not many of their women died of childbed fever any more, and ninety percent of their kids were going to live to have kids of their own. When the average woman had eight or nine, that added up pretty damned fast. The same thing was happening in Alba, and in the Republic. Even if they didn’t get any more people from their homeland, the Tartessian settlement here in California could double in numbers every twenty years, while the locals declined.

“Tell him again that we can do something about the smallpox,” Giemas said.

The chief grunted, thought for several minutes in stony silence, absently scratching at his head. Giernas sighed mentally; there would be another long siege against lice. What was the old joke?
At least our fleas and nits will mourn the passing of the human race....

“Will you fight for us?” the chief asked.

“Pete, I don’t think we’ve got any choice,” Sue said. “Unless we’re going to turn around and run like hell, right now.”

Giernas swallowed.
Leaving most of the people in this part of the continent to die off, and a nest of Tartessians here where nobody suspects. We might not make it back to tell anyone, either.
He looked over to where his wife and child sat.

“Honey?” he said softly. “What do you want to do?”

Spring Indigo gripped her son tightly, but her voice was steady. “The Tartessians are Eagle People enemies. How could I not stand beside my man, as my sister says?” A smile: “I know you will fight with a strong heart, Pete.”

Giernas nodded. A Cloud Shadow woman adopted her husband’s feuds as her own; and Spring Indigo was just plain brave besides. Throw that into the scale, then.
He
just plain didn’t want to look into those dark lioness eyes and say he was going to skedaddle.

“Eddie?” he asked; no doubt there.

“I say fight, if there’s anything we can do.” A shrug and a grin: “They’ve got to have more gold in that fort than we can carry. You’re the boss here, though.”

Hmmm. Eddie’s shed a lot of that bull-at-a-gate berserker stuff.
Prudence
rubbed off,
evidently.

“Jaddi?”

The Fiernan-born girl nodded crisply. “Fight,” she said. “It is evil, what they do here. I don’t want Moon Woman to turn away from me when I ride the Swan.”

Giernas sighed. “Okay, let’s see what we can do. For starters, we have to make Spring Indigo and young Jared safe.”
As safe as we can,
gnawed at him.

The chief spoke. Sue and Jaditwara and Tidtaway consulted.

“He says the Tartessians come to collect their tribute soon, so we have to make up our minds, or some tribes at least will be their dogs for the sake of the cow-medicine they bring with them.”

Giernas started to nod, then froze. A thought struck him, like the sun rising early over the low distant line of the Sierras to the east. Slowly, he began to grin.