On the Oceans of Eternity (7 page)

Alston saw Erica Stark put an affectionate hand on the engineer’s arm.
Well, well, perhaps the inveterate bachelor has met
his match. Or at least someone who could stop one of his lectures in its tracks. When Leaton said “if you want to get technical,” strong men blanched.

“You don’t have to convince
me,
Ron,” the Guard commander said. “Save it for the Council sessions, or the Town Meetin’. Just tell me about what I ordered.”

“Oh.” Leaton cleared his throat. “Well, yes, it’s about ready. All the plating, three-point-five inch and ready for assembly, edges milled and holes for bolts drilled. That”—he nodded northwards, toward the faint muffled sound of the forging hammer—“ is the crankshaft being finished off; we turned the propeller shaft last week. Erica did, rather.”

“The lathing-shed team did rather,” she said. “For once, everything was on schedule.”

A Fiernan in Nantucketer clothes that didn’t hide six months of pregnancy came with thick clay steins and a small glass on a tray: three beers, a mead, and a whiskey. Alston sipped at the liquor; wheat-mash bourbon, not quite Maker’s Mark, but smoothly drinkable. Then she blew froth and took a mouthful of the beer, crisp hop-bitter coolness to follow the love-bite of the spirits.

“Not bad,” she said.

Particularly compared to the flat, spoiled-barley bilgewater she’d tasted on her first trip to Alba. Someone who’d worked at Cisco Breweries on-Island had come back here with a bag of hop seed and a head full of tricks.

“Scheduling trouble?” she went on.

“Mostly Alban workforce,” Stark said, in a tone that was half groan. “Back on Nantucket they’re the minority and work our way. Here ... There’s a festival, they stop working to dance for the Moon. Their second cousin twice removed visits, they get drunk, then stop working. The salmon are running, they stop working to fish. They feel like going off and hunting wild pigs for a while, they stop working and hunt. It’s haying time on their sister’s farm, they stop working here and work there. A swan flies over the plant, they stop working and pray all day—”

Swindapa set down her mead, scowling. “Swans are sacred,” she said, her tone unusually clipped.

Marian Alston-Kurlelo winced slightly; not only that, but they carried the souls of the dead to the afterlife and back to be reborn, in the faith of Moon Woman—she’d wondered sometimes if that was the far faint source of the legends about babies and storks. One of the few things that could get Fiernans into the mood for a really murderous riot was harm done to one of the big white birds. They were as bad that way as Hindus were with cows.

Would have been with cows,
she reminded herself. Right now, the Aryan ancestors of the Hindus were beef-eating, boozeswilling charioteer barbarians not much different from their remote cousins here in Alba.

“And people aren’t machines, Ms. Stark,” Swindapa went on. “Fiernan aren’t
zorr‘HOt’po,
either.” The word meant something like “maniacs” or “obsessive-compulsives.” “Who in their right mind would spend all their days in a coal mine, or a factory full of heat and stink? You’ve told them that working for pay isn’t like being a slave, and that’s how they behave—like free people.”

“Oh, no offense meant,” Stark said soothingly. “But it is inconvenient, sometimes. Machinery costs the same whether it’s working or not. We’re having trouble just getting enough people, too; we’re importing labor from as far away as the Baltic—got two hundred in from Jutland just last week, they’re having a famine or war or something over there.”

Alston nodded and took another mouthful of the beer. It wasn’t that these Bronze Age peoples were lazy. They went after seasonal jobs like planting and reaping at a pace that would kill most people from the twentieth. The problem was that they were burst workers; much of the year they loafed, or worked a long day at a slow pace with frequent breaks as whim took them. The sort of steady, methodical, clock-driven effort that post-industrial Western urbanites put in was alien to them, and usually profoundly distasteful. That prompted a thought.

“How did those, mmmm, ‘Silicon Valley’ types you mentioned deal with the problem?” she asked. “They must have been getting their miners and forge-workers straight off the farm, too.”

Leaton and Stark glanced at each other, and she caught similar looks of distaste. “Unpleasant ways,” the man said. “Nearly as bad as the ones Walker uses.”

Alston’s lips pressed together.
Flogging and terror,
she thought. The reports from the Councilor for Foreign Affairs’ agents were gruesome. Stark took up the story:

“And Britain had millions of people then, most of them day laborers. It was take any work they could get or starve, for a lot of them.”

Good point,
the Guard commander thought. It would take generations for Alba to get crowded, even with the medical missionaries at work. By then birth control might have caught on.

She shrugged. “The factories exist for us, not us for the factories,” she said.

Specialists tended to forget that.
Just as I occasionally need Jared to remind me that the Guard exists for the Republic, not vice versa.
“You got what I needed done, and in time—just.”

“Right,” Leaton said. “It’ll all be aboard the
Merrimac
by the end of the week along with the technicians, and she ready to sail from Westhaven to join the fleet at Portsmouth Base.”

“Most excellent,” Marian said. “Isketerol of Tartessos is making far too much progress for my taste. I want to have an ace up my sleeve besides the
Farragut.
’Dapa and I will ride downriver with the cargo and around Cornwall with the ship. Faster, and I want another look at the
Merrimac
anyway.”

Swindapa sighed. “I don’t understand how Isketerol’s done so much so quickly,” she said. “Walker had twenty helpers from Nantucket.”

“My fault,” Alston-Kurlelo said with bitter self-accusation. “It was my idea to bring him back to Nantucket, when we came here right after the Event to trade for seed corn. I wanted him to teach the languages he knew, and about conditions in the Mediterranean. He
learned
far too much, far too fast.”

“He got half of all the stuff that Walker stole,” Leaton pointed out gently. “Which was a cargo
intended
to set up a self-sufficient base and included a pretty complete technical library. Plus what Walker made here, and training for his crew from Walker’s gang while they were in Alba, and the ship they took as a model. Plus he’s snookered us more than once since then—remember when he bought all those treadle-powered sewing machines, and we found out he was taking them apart and using the gearing for machine tools? Plus he had a whole kingdom to draw on once he got back to Iberia. Southern Spain’s a rich area—coal, minerals, timber.”

Marian Alston-Kurlelo shook her head; there were no excuses for failure. “Well, have to do the best we can with what we’ve got.”

Swindapa touched her arm. “Moon Woman will send us a fortunate star,” she said, smiling gently. “Heather and Lucy are depending on it.”

“Everybody is,” Marian said, putting down a slight twinge of pain at the thought of their daughters. They grew and changed so quickly at that age ... “And a lot of them are going do die before we set it all right.”

C
olonel Patrick James O’Rourke (Republic of Nantucket Marine Corps) threw up his hand to halt the column and reined in his horse. The little dapple-gray tossed its head and snorted; he soothed it with a hand down the neck.

“Steady there, Fancy,” he said, bringing out his binoculars.

The horse was one of the Oriental chariot ponies they’d bought locally and broken to the saddle. Some laughed at him for riding an entire male, but there were times when you wanted a mount with some aggression, though. The animal was small, barely thirteen hands, but O’Rourke wasn’t a large man himself; a stocky carrot-haired five-foot-eight, which he’d been pleased to find put him well above average in most of the Bronze Age world.

“There they are,” he went on, pointing to the smoke of cookfires.

The little outpost below stood in the middle of a valley flanked on either side by rough hills—shrubby maquis of dwarf oak and juniper and tree heather below, real oaks and then tall pines further up their sides, rising to naked rock. Further south loomed Mount Ida; southwestward the rumpled valley dropped down toward the not-quite-visible Aegean Sea, and the plain of Troy beyond. The valley floor was farmland, richer than the rocky plateau to the eastward; it was tawny-colored now at the end of the summer dry season, dust smoking off stubblefields, between drystone walls, turning the flickering leaves of the olive groves a drabber green and coating the purple grapes that hung on the goblet-trained vines. A scatter of stone and mud-brick huts dotted it, clumping around the line of a stream and the rutted track of dry mud road that wound down toward Troy. The sheepfolds and pens near them were empty, and the smokeholes in the flat roofs were cold; like sensible peasants anywhere or when, the locals had headed up into the hills when the armies came near, driving their livestock ahead of them.

The air was hot and buzzed with the sound of cicadas; sweat trickled down his flanks under the khaki uniform jacket as he scanned the bright openness of the great landscape. There was a strong smell of rosemary and thyme crushed under the hooves of the animals. There were two dozen of those; his staff gallopers, trumpeter, a radio tech with her equipment on pack mules, and two sections of mounted rifles.

The Nantucketers and their allies were camped around a larger building on a slight rise, a bigger version of the huts; he could see where the poles that held the thick earth-and-brushwood roof poked through the peeling brown mud-plaster of the wall. A few tall poplars near it hinted at a water source; a row of wagons and herd of oxen with a few hobbled horses grazing nearby marked the transport they’d brought with them. Another rectangular building stood some distance away, a storehouse by the look of it, and there were a couple of rough stone paddocks.

O’Rourke’s eyes caught a flickering brightness on one of the high hills to the south of the valley.
Heliograph,
he thought.
Good that they’re keeping on their toes.

He chopped his hand forward again. The group rocked into motion, a column of twos threading its way downward at a trot. The wind was from the east, blowing their own hot dust onto their backs; even at the head of the column O’Rourke could feel it seeping gritty down his collar and getting between his teeth. There were a lot of birds in the sky. This was the season northern Europe’s flocks left for their winter quarters, crossing over from Thrace via the Dardanelles; eagles, herons, storks, in clumps and drifts and singly.

For a moment he wished they’d bring some of their weather with them, then crossed himself to avert the omen. The fall rains would start soon enough. Dust was bad. Mud was worse when you had to move, especially if you had to move in a hurry. Nobody in this part of the world built all-weather roads. Nobody except William Walker ...

A line of Marines covered the eastern approach to the Nantucketer base, waiting with their rifles ready behind low
sangars
of stone. O’Rourke nodded approval. Beyond that the little base was bustling; several Conestoga wagons and native two-wheel oxcarts, pyramids of boxed supplies, of barley in sacks and wicker baskets and big pottery storage
pithoi.
Working parties bustled about. Marines in khaki trousers and boots and T-shirts, Hittite auxiliaries in kilts and callused bare feet.

A wiry twentysomething woman with a brown crew cut came up and saluted; he’d have thought her indecently young for the rank, if he hadn’t rocketed up from captain to colonel in about two years himself. Between the breakneck expansion of the Corps in the last couple of years, casualties, and officers getting siphoned off for everything from training local allied troops to running crude-oil stills, promotions were rapid if you had what it took. He was a little short of thirty himself, and Brigadier Hollard only a few years his senior, and this baby captain wouldn’t have been twelve when the Event hit—he couldn’t remember if she was Island-born or an adoptee.

“Captain Cecilie Barnes, Colonel. First Combat Engineers,” she said; the bare skin of arms and neck glistened with sweat, her cotton T-shirt stuck to what it covered, and she was as dirt-streaked as her command. “Is the battalion close behind? We’re about ready to start on the bridge, the river’s nearly breast-deep already, and once the rains get going ...”

He returned the salute, then swung down from the saddle and stripped off his gloves. A Marine from the escort came up to take the bridle; before the man led the horse away O’Rourke stroked Fancy’s nose and fed him a couple of candied dates to keep him out of a snapping-and-kicking mood.

“There’ll be no battalion, Captain,” he said. “And no bridge.”

“Sir, we were told to get ready for—”

“I know. The enemy got frisky a little north of here, and we had to put the battalion in to stop them—quite a shindy. The siege of Troy isn’t going well. Not enough weapons or supplies in the city. That’s freeing up enemy forces to probe inland. If the city falls, the fertilizer hits the winnowing fan for true.”

Barnes frowned. “Sir?” she said hopefully. “We’ve seen the
Emancipator
taking in equipment for Troy ...”

“Only a few tons at a time, and we can’t risk any more nights—too much else for it to do and too hard to replace. Walker’s been bringing in more of his troops, and more of those Ringapi devils. Giving them more guns, as well, which is how he’s getting them here. I dropped by to—”