On the Oceans of Eternity (91 page)

“The bad news?”

“Ma’am, there are a
lot
of medium and small things wrong—we’re going to have to replace all the blades on the port paddle, retrue the cams and rods, patch a quarter of the hull ... a week.”

“Fast as you can,” Alston said. “I want that cannon and ram to discourage any adventurous thoughts they have over in Tartessos City. And we’ll need that slipway as soon as the
Merrimac
gets here.”

She looked at her watch. “Now I’ve got to get on to those maroons.”

“Maroons, ma’am?” Trudeau asked curiously.

She smiled, a slight baring of teeth. “Common phenomenon in slave societies, Mr. Trudeau. People who run away and form communities in swamps and forests and mountains, usually striking back at their former masters in raids.”

“Ah,” Trudeau said, his blue eyes lighting up in the long face, the Huron tinge in his ancestry showing in swarthy skin and high cheekbones. “Sort of instant, ready-mix, prefabricated guerillas, from our point of view.”

“Exactly. And they can be very useful. Our good friend King Isketerol has been making himself a lot of enemies in his haste to build. An illustration of why slow and careful is better, sometimes.”

 

Hetkdar, Zaumin’s son, crouched behind a rock. It was cold, and he wore only a tunic of goatskin and rough hide shoes of the same material. He ignored the chill, as he ignored the lice in his bush of stiff black hair and the hunger that gnawed at his middle. If what the returned captive said was true—it sounded wild, but so many impossible things had happened in the years since he was a youngling. All of them had been bad, that was the problem....

The open grassy valley below was on the northern side of the Dark Mountains, near the fringe of his tribe’s traditional ranges, though not those of his own Ridge Runner clan. Now it was all that they had. The mountains directly to the south were high, with no passes that any but a Real Man could walk; that had kept the
Taratuz
away, for they were creatures of the flatlands. But one of their cursed-of-the-Bull roads was not far away to the east, with one of their twice-cursed stinking forts to guard it. The
Taratuz
could not find the Real Men in the hills, but the thrice-cursed
Adirak
to the north, who licked their piss, could, and would if bribed with weapons and meat.

I will eat the heart and testicles of their chief, the Bull hear me,
he swore to himself.

Hetktdar looked around. Even he could see few of his men, which meant that no outlander could see any of them. Twenty-two, from the Ridge Runners, the Boulder Leapers, and one from the dead clan of the Spear Tossers-they had all been caught in a
Taratuz
ambush three years ago, and those who did not die went for slaves.

He shifted his grip on the Taratuz rifle that was his proudest possession—only three other men in the clan had one—and turned to glare at the ex-captive. The man was still dressed in a ragged
Taratuz
tunic of cloth, although he no longer had the fine curved steel sword he’d carried, of course; that rested safely at Hetktdar’s side. He looked indecently well fed, too.

“Soon, my chief,” the man said. “By the Bull I swear it.”

Man?
Hetkdar thought.
Eunuch. Woman.
No
real
man would let the
Taratuz
lead him away captive, to work in their fields and mines.

Then the captive pointed. “There!
There!
Did I not swear it?”

A buzzing drone came from the south, over the snowcapped tops of the mountains, echoing down the great slopes. The sun flashed on something there, bird-tiny. But it grew, and grew, until it was a fish-shape floating through the air, like a log in water. Hetkdar bared his teeth in hatred. So many new things, and all of them hurt the Real Men.

The great fish-shape came to a halt, hovering still. No wings beat about it. His eyes went wide as he saw men moving behind openings below the long hull; it was longer than long spearcast! The balloons of the
Taratuz
were nothing compared to this, for it moved like a boat in water, obedient to command. As he watched, ropes fell from its belly and men slid down those ropes. They knelt, in a posture he recognized from
Taratuz
war bands, their rifles ready. Hetkdar’s eyes narrowed as he saw something protruding from the long house that ran beneath the belly of the airboat.

A
cannon?
he thought. No, for it seemed to be made up of smaller barrels, like a rifle—six of them, in a circle.
A weapon, though.

He stood and walked toward the foreigners on the ground, the captive dogging his heels. The thing in the airboat moved a little.
A weapon,
he thought again. The strangers were properly wary; that was good. And if they had powers greater than the
Taratuz
...

He smiled broadly as the foreign chief squatted and held out a piece of smoked meat—proper manners, at least. The foreigner looked strange, with close-cut hair of a peculiar reddish-brown color; he was dressed all over in clothes the color of dry earth. That was good—perhaps the strangers had some notion of how to hide.

The stranger spoke. “He asks, do you fight the
Taratuz
?” the captive translated.

Hetkdar squatted in his turn, leaning on his grounded rifle as he would have on a spear.

“We fight the
Taratuz
?
”
he said scornfully. “As a hunter fights deer. They are blind; they are clumsy; they are deaf and fat and slow. Before they got the
rifles
we took their sheep, their cattle, their grain-food and bronze, their women, raiding almost to the walls of Tartessos City.”

The foreigner nodded. “We have heard of this,” he said. “We fight the
Taratuz
also. We have a gift for the Real Men.”

Hetktdar leaned forward, quiveringly eager. The stranger smelled odd—almost like flowers. But ...

“Rifles?” he said.

“Rifles,” the stranger replied; Hetkdar needed no interpreter for that, since the word was much like the
Taratuz
one. “Rifles for all the warriors of your tribe. Plenty of ammunition, too.”

“And in payment?” Hetkdar said, holding himself in.

“We want you to kill
Taratuz.”

A net came down from the airboat this time. In it were many long narrow boxes, and many small square ones. The chief of the Real Men leaped to his feet and howled, dancing and brandishing his rifle aloft. On the hillside his warriors stood likewise; the stranger blinked, and Hetkdar smiled at his astonishment.

The Real Men, with rifles, would kill
many Taratuz.

C
heers were coming from the riverside wall of the Hidden Fort. Dermentol son of Allakenal craned his neck to see what the fuss was about, over on the other side of town. He was bored with watch on the wall, and wished the regulars were back to do it.

All the men of the Hidden Fort were supposed to be fighting-men as well, but his work was with the engine of steam. He loved the machine, loved the smooth power of it, and the way it was
predictable.
With the eyes of his mind he could see the steam traveling through the pipes and
pushing.
None of the others understood it the way he did, and he was anxious for it. It was so powerful, but so vulnerable if the wrong thing was done.

Sometimes his wife complained that he loved it more than his children of flesh.

“I wonder what that is?” he said, and leaned over the parapet of the tower on which he stood.

“It’s the ship from Homeland,” someone shouted up from below. “It’s come up the river, right up to us!”

Dermentol’s eyes went wide. That would be tricky navigation for a keel so deep. He shook his head and peered eastward again.

An arm went around his throat, reaching from behind and to the right. For a moment he was too shocked to do anything, and in that moment the arm clamped his larynx in the crook of an elbow and squeezed it shut with brutal, unbearable force. Another hand came from the left and gripped his skull.

A voice hissed in his ear, in the Eagle People tongue:
“You shouldn’t have hurt my dog, motherfucker.”

The arms scissored across. He heard a crackling sound like a green stick breaking, and then heard nothing, ever again.

Peter Giernas lowered the body to the ground, ignoring the death stink, and looked casually behind him as a bored sentry might. Eddie Vergeraxsson climbed over the wall, then pulled up the long rope and unhitched the lariat-loop from the point of the palisade log. He was also in Tartessian military garb, and made a marginally more convincing Iberian than Giernas. Peter had shaved off his bright orange-yellow beard, but he couldn’t do anything about his height, or the color of his eyes, or the short straight nose and general Baltic cast of his features.

They both went to the doorway on the top of the gate-tower. The sentry on the other side of the gateway had noticed them; he shouted something and waved. Giernas shouted something back and waved himself; it was just a little too far to see a man’s face clearly if you looked down a bit.

“By the Blood Hag, I hope this works,” Eddie said. “We’d never get away with it if their real fighting-men weren’t mostly away chasing moonbeams.”

Peter picked up the cloth satchel his fellow ranger handed him, and reached inside until he felt the toggle of the friction-primer. “I just hope Sue and Jaddi are okay.”

 

The green winter landscape of the Guadalquivir Valley rolled by at twenty-five miles an hour; north and ahead lay the forested slopes of the Sierra Morena, the Black Mountains—white with snow on the summits, looking like shaggy white fur where it rested on the trees. Down here in the rolling plains it was much like a spring day back on Nantucket, just cold enough to make their sweaters—military pullovers with leather patches at the shoulders and elbows-comfortable.

It had been nearly a year since Marian Alston-Kurlelo had ridden in a motor-driven vehicle; more than ten years since she’d done so very often. She’d remembered how convenient and fast they were. The scent of burned hydrocarbons wasn’t too bad when you’d grown accustomed to bilgewater at sea and streets that smelled of horse piss and dung by land, no matter how often they were swept and cleaned.

What she found she’d subliminally forgotten was how
loud
internal combustion engines could be, in a way that even iron horseshoes on granite cobbles didn’t quite match.

This one was louder than a car, of course. Most of it had started out as a gravel-hauling truck working for a Nantucket contractor. Leaton and his people had been working on it off and on as time allowed ever since; often as not adding wonderful gadgets and ingenious weapons that Marian then told them to strip off.

It had been like whacking puppies ... but she’d yet to meet a Seahaven R&D type who really understood down in his gut why
KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid,
was a governing principle.

Marian rode with her head and shoulders out of a hatch. The inch or so of camouflage-painted steel armor around the machine didn’t make her feel invulnerable. It would stop rifle bullets or shrapnel. Cannonballs maybe; rocket warheads probably not. And if it went up, it would burn.

Swindapa’s head came out of a nearby hatch, long hair blowing between the straps of a radio headset. “The ultralight reports—”

The little craft buzzed overhead, a plywood teardrop below a Rogallo fabric wing, with a tricycle of wire-spoked wheels beneath and a pusher-prop behind. Stub wings on either side held six-tube pods for light rockets; they were empty, and had a scorched look. The pilot waved, sunlight glinting on his goggles and crash helmet, scarf fluttering in the wind.

“—that they took out four more heliograph towers. The line’s definitely broken in half a dozen places between here and Crossing, and between there and Tartessos.”

Marian nodded. The chain of wooden towers flashing Morse-code light signals were almost as fast as telegraphs. Luckily, they were about as easy to cut, too.

“My congratulations, and then orders to refuel and keep company,” she said.

The pilot didn’t need to come here to report; that was reflex of a life where the only way to talk to someone was to get within shouting distance. And it was a valuable reminder that giving someone a uniform and a haircut, or even a lot of training, didn’t make them over into a twentieth-century American.

“Halt,” she said aloud.

The armored car slowed and came to a stop by the side of the road, engine ticking. The popping whine of heavy tires on the crushed rock of the roadway died out and left a silence loud by comparison. The two smaller Jeep Cherokees that’d been ranging ahead rolled to a stop as well, each to an opposite side of the road; they had armor panels, and Gatlings mounted on pintles. The gunners scanned outward, across rolling fields of grass and young wheat and dry corn stalks and occasional orchards or olive groves or copses of holm oak. Ahead—northward—there was a hamlet and a scatter of isolated houses with farm compounds around them.

The houses and village ahead had the dead quiet air of abandonment. Behind them, columns of smoke stained the sky, and scores of the huge black-winged Iberian vultures made circles that marked herds of slaughtered livestock. Swindapa winced slightly as her eyes followed Marian’s.