“We’ll go with the original plan,” Peter Giernas said.
The four log canoes were gathered stern to stern so that the Islanders could confer. All of them were looking serious, except for Eddie, who was sharpening the blade of his tomahawk and whistling cheerfully. He tested the edge by shaving off one of the fringes on his hunting shirt, flipped the war-hatchet into the air in a blurring circle and caught it by the end of the two-foot handle, and slipped it onto the loop at the back of his belt.
“Sounded good to me the first time,” he said. “They aren’t expecting us—just go in and knock on the front door. You should let me go first, though—I’d be less of a loss to the expedition.”
Giernas shook his head, slapped a mosquito and continued:
“It’s not a sure thing, but it’s the best chance we’ll have, I think. They’re not looking all that alert, from what I saw—just dull duty in a goddamn swamp. Question is, do the locals understand what we’re trying to do?”
The Nantucketers exchanged looks. “I think they undersand they’re not supposed to fight until we tell them to,” Sue said doubtfully. “Think that’ll do?”
“It’ll have to.” Giernas sighed. “All right, let’s go. If we push it a little, we should get there for what the locals tell us is their dinnertime.”
It was cooling in the branch where the canoes had lain up, as the sun set westward over an expanse like the sea. That was welcome; the swarms of mosquitoes that thickened as the sun went down were not.
I hope to hell the Tartessians haven’t exposed anyone with malaria to these bloodsuckers,
Giernas thought, as his paddlers bent to their work. Birds flitted by overhead, half-visible streaks in the growing darkness, vanishing into the reeds and rank tree growth on either side. A lantern on a pole stood behind him, with the Rock-of-Gibraltar enemy flag flying beneath it. More insects bumped up against the thick pebbled glass that shielded a dim kerosene flame.
The crew of the
Mother of Invention
looked quite different now, dressed in the uniforms of the slain Tartessian soldiers, heads helmeted or wrapped in bandannas, rifles propped beside them, each with a band of hide to protect the lock from stray splashes.
God, I hope this fools them long enough,
Giernas thought, surprised by the strength of the emotion.
It’s always the worst part, before the fight starts.
The enemy would
probably
be deceived. The enemy just didn’t have any
reason
to be wary. Not after six years of successful concealment. It was
easy
to hide things in the world of the Year 11. There was just so much space and communications were so slow.
They turned out into the main stream and southwest; he pushed on the tiller, keeping them close to the northeastern bank of the channel and dipping his head to let the broad-brimmed hat shade his eyes. The rest of him was partly concealed by a poncholike enemy blanket-cloak. It wasn’t impossible to find a six-foot-two blond Tartessian with gray eyes and a reddish beard, he supposed; it was just so unlikely that he’d stand out like a seven-foot Chinese in America before the Event.
Just long enough, God, just for long enough.
They wouldn’t recognize the canoes, either. But they obviously weren’t local Indian craft, and the assumption would be they were something the enemy base had run up, especially with Tartessian soldiers crewing the first one.
“Should fool ’em long enough,” he muttered under his breath. “People see what they expect to see . . .”
Out again, into the broad reach of the main channel where the Tartessian ship was moored.
“Slow!”
Giernas said, one of the words in the local language he’d memorized. He put up a hand and squinted; there were the mastheads, black against the huge red globe of the sunset notched by the distant peak of Mount Diablo.
Silence, except for the grunting exhalation of breath and the drip of the paddles, the chuckle of water along the canoe and the beat of blood in his own ears.
Christ
,
if I
liked fighting,
I’d have joined the Marines. I like to travel and hunt and see new
places.
The black length of the ship showing yellow through the ports as her own lanterns were lit, a faerie glow that turned her rigging into traceries of spidersilk in the gathering darkness. A voice called sharply in the clotted tongue of ancient Iberia, all “u” and “z” sounds.
He stood carefully, gripping the tiller with one hand and waving his rifle with the other.
There. You’re the only ones in this part of the world with rifles
, he willed at the sentinel who must be examining him.
Be terminally reassured, you son of a bitch.
The ranger shouted aloud the only Tartessian phrases he knew, picked up over the years on visits dockside in Nantucket Town and Providence Base and Fogarty’s Cove:
“I do not understand your language!”
garbling it as much as he dared. The words wouldn’t carry, it was still beyond conversational distance but the sounds would be familiar. “
I am not interested in buying your goods! Behave yourself or I will call
the guards! Strike
sail or
we open fire! Fuck your sow of a mother and your ten fathers, too!”
The voice came again; a lantern was moving on the deck, down the accommodation ladder, across the raft. Closer now, and he could see the shape of a man behind it, an armed man holding up the lantern in his left hand. He called out again, but the tone was more curious than anything else. He could smell the ship now, the gingery scents of baled cargo, a hint of sulfur, the stale-ditchwater waft of the bilges. Tar and seasoned wood and hemp from the hull and rigging themselves. And a whiff of something gaggingly foul, an oily sewer-and-old-socks reek that he’d never smelled before... but one he recognized from descriptions. The sound that came from his deep chest was one that would have done credit to Perks.
“Diskeletal?” the man with the lamp asked.
Giernas could see it was a sailor, in tunic and bare feet, with a cutlass at his waist and a bandolier slung over one shoulder. “Is that you?”
“Nietzatwaz,”
he replied—roughly
sure, that’s it, correctamundo
—with a cough in the middle to hide his attempt at pronouncing the thick sounds.
He could see the man’s face now, halo-lit by the lamp, framed against the ship and the dying scarlet of the sunset. He could see the exact instant when a wondering glance at the dugout turned to horror, but by then they were less than ten feet from the dock and coming in fast. The sentry juggled the loads in his hands, instinctively bending to put the lantern down—that had to be a drilled reflex for a sailor, not to spill flame. By that time Giernas had the rifle up and to his shoulder.
Crack.
The man’s head jerked backward as if a mule had kicked him in the face and landed full-length on his back with an audible thump. Giernas knew a moment’s dismay. He’d been aiming for the gut, but the motion of the canoe had thrown him off. Shouts rose from the deck of the ship, and heads poked out of the gunports—he could see one man clearly, with a pointed black beard and waxed mustaches curling up like buffalo horns, a hunk of bread in one hand and a drumstick in the other, shouting through a full mouth. Probably asking what idiot had fired off a rifle by mistake, and was he trying to kill somebody...
The canoe bumped against the raft. A dozen eager hands grabbed at the roughness of the oak logs; Giernas rolled to the surface, keeping himself flat, his hands scrabbling in a wicker basket. The firepot came out; he tore off the lid, blew on the coals, and dipped in the fuses of two improvised grenades, mortar shells from the wagon that had accompanied the ambushed patrol. The nitrated cord took with a sputter of sparks and harsh-smelling blue smoke.
Just then the captured rifles went off in a ragged volley as the canoe’s crew fired. From the angle of some of the muzzle flashes nothing was in danger but innocent birds passing by; but other slugs whined overhead far too close to his own precious person and he could see white flecks appear where chunks of splinter were knocked loose around the lighted gunports. While he was down he kicked the fallen lamp off into the water, but half a dozen others were being turned up on the ship, including the big sternquarter lanterns over the quarterdeck. Then he was on his feet again and rushing for the accommodation ladder, yelling
Geronimo!
in the hope that his allies would follow him. God-damn this business of fighting with people you couldn’t even talk to ...
The gunports were still open. An underarm toss sent one mortar shell into the nearest; he flipped the other into his right hand and gave it the old Providence High School Baseball Devils speedball to the next gunport ten yards further down. The oblong form of the cut-down mortar shell didn’t have the same aerodynamics as one of Coach Huneck’s hand-wrapped cork-rubber-and-pigskin specials, or even a rock, and it wobbled a little as it flew. His gut clenched as it hit the lip and teetered, then relaxed as it fell inside.
“
Down!
” he screamed. Not that it would do much good. He followed his own advice, though, with his arms crossed in front of his face.
... three, two, one—
WHUMP.
The sound was slightly muffled by the six inches of oak timber and planking, but fire and smoke belched out of four of the gunports. He winced slightly at the thought of what the grooved cast-iron casings would do in those confined quarters. Someone was screaming in there, an inhuman volume of sound. Giernas rolled, rocked back on his shoulders, brought his legs up and flicked himself back onto his feet, charging for the accommodation ladder with bowie and tomahawk in his hands. Up, up, before they recovered—
A figure at the top of the ladder, raising a gun. The tomahawk went back over Giernas’s shoulder, then forward in a hard precise arc, his fingers releasing at the moment a decade’s practice prompted. He would have been as astonished at missing as if his own body had disobeyed him when he told it to take a step or pick a shoe up from the floor. The tomahawk whirred through the twelve feet separating the two men in a circular blurr, flashing as the honed edge caught lamplight. It landed with a dull
thock,
and the sailor stood, swaying, looking down wide-eyed at the steel splitting his breastbone. The ranger charged in the wake of its flight. Three long bounding strides and he rammed the bowie in his left hand up under the wounded man’s ribs, wrenched the war-hatchet free, and pushed the corpse aside with ruthless speed. The Indians were pounding after him, already at the bottom of the stairway, their shrill war cries overriding the bewildered shouts of the Tartessians. The other three canoes were plunging for the raft with paddles flying, and he heard Eddie’s baying
hau-hau-hau
under the hawk-shrieks of the women.
Onto the deck, past a sailor who slashed at him with a cutlass and then screamed with shock as he saw what was coming behind. A hatchway in the deck was open, with wifts of powder smoke coming out of it; he had to get down there before someone touched off one of the guns.
A man was coming out of the hatchway, up the steep ladderlike stair with a cutlass in his right hand. He cut at the ranger, his blade sweeping like a scythe at thigh level. Giernas shouted and turned his run into a leap head-high. The sword whistled beneath him, and his coiled legs lashed out to strike the man in the face with a thump that jarred up into the small of his back. They both fell tumbling to the maindeck below, the Tartessian dead with a shattered neck and his jaw half torn off. The ranger lay stunned for an instant, and in that instant something heavy landed on his stomach.
“
Uffff!
” he grunted, as the breath exploded out of his lungs.
The weight was behind a knee. Giernas caught the flash of steel in the dimness, dropped his bowie, and grabbed. His fingers closed on a thick wrist and stopped the dagger six inches from his face; the Tartessian soldier’s other hand pinned his tomahawk-wrist to the planks. It was the man who’d looked out through a gunport, but now there were bleeding lines across the spike-mustached face, and on the hairy torso that showed through rents in his ripped, scorched tunic. The soldier was shorter than Giemas by five inches, but he was built like a bull, barrel chest and thick, knotted shoulders and arms; and the ranger’s lungs were empty, burning as he tried to suck in a single breath, leaching the strength from his arms. The wrist beneath his hand felt like living gutta-percha, and slick and wet with sweat besides. Blood and breath stinking of garlic swept across his face, and the point of the dagger came closer, closer ...
A loop of chain dropped around the soldier’s neck and snapped taut. The chain was between the wrists of a manacled Indian, naked and thin and filthy, his eyes glaring madness in a face marked with the knotted tissue of badly healed wounds. Choking, the Tartessian kept the presence of mind to grab the chain before it could crush his larynx and to stab backward, but he had to take his attention from the Nantucketer. Giernas brought his right knee nearly back to his chest and lashed out, a heel kick that smashed into the soldier’s groin with enough force to crack the pelvis. He could feel the sickening sensation of bone crumbling all the way up his leg, and there was a certain mercy in the stroke that backhanded the hammer of his tomahawk into the man’s temple. Soldier and slave tumbled together on the red-wet planks of the deck as he rolled to his feet, gasping and wheezing as he forced his paralyzed diaphragm to draw in air.
Movement at the gunport turned out to be Eddie. “Sorry,” the younger man said, and jerked the muzzle of his rifle upward to the beams and planks above. “More of them up there, had to deal with ’em. Sue’s mopping up.”
He turned and reached down, drawing Jaditwara upward with an easy wiry stength. She had Giernas’s rifle across her back and tossed it to him. He took the weapon and reloaded; knife and tomahawk were more useful at extreme close quarters, but the Westley-Richards was ... reassuring. With a moment to look around he saw that the gun deck ran most of the length of the ship, although the central half of the floor was mostly gratings that could be taken up to give access to the hold beneath. The cannon were in their bowsed-up storage position, and hanging tables had been let down for the soldiers and sailors to eat their dinner. Tables lay splintered and broken where the grenades had exploded, bodies motionless or still whimpering and twitching, food and wine and oil flowing on the deck, mingling their smells with the dung stink of death.