November, 10 A.E.-Western Anatolia
October, 10 A.E.-Long Island, Republic of Nantucket
October, 10 A.E.-Coast of northwestern Iberia
October, 10 A.E.-Long Island, Republic of Nantucket
November, 10 A.E.-Western Anatolia
"I don't think retreating blisters hurt any worse than advancing blisters," Private Vaukel Telukuo said seriously, glancing down at his moving boots. "About the same, they are."
"That's supposed to be a joke, Vauk, you great Fiernan gowk," Johanna Gwenhaskieths growled.
When she glanced aside and saw his grin she gave him a halfhearted elbow in the ribs.
"Could be worse," he said. "Could be raining."
"It was raining half the morning," she replied.
That was obvious enough; the track they followed to the southeast was deep in mud. That clung to boots, adding a half pound to every step, and a constant squelching undertone. Her company was near the end of the front section, two hundred and fifty helmeted heads ahead of her, then the baggage and sick-carts, then about as many more behind that. It looked a formidable host to her eyes; ten times as many fighting men as her clan had, about as many as her whole teuatha.
Former tribe, she reminded herself. Some might go back to Alba after their hitch, but she certainly couldn't. The Corps is my clan and the Republic my tribe now. And this is a piss-poor excuse for a road.
Especially compared to the watertight ones in Nantucket. It was pretty obvious that someone had driven a big herd of cattle this way not long ago; Johanna looked at the cowpats and hoof-prints with envy. Driving off cattle was fun; besides, it meant beef.
Somebody ahead stumbled, and she cursed as she checked and nearly stumbled herself in the slippery mud. She cursed again, silently, as she tried to get her legs back into the automatic rhythm that would carry her along without much thinking on how they hurt. It was well past the stop for the noon meal, but not nearly time to break off the day's march and make camp.
Helmet, rifle, bayonet, entrenching tool, two grenades, canteen, a hundred rounds in her bandolier and another hundred in the haversack, four pounds of dog biscuit and jerky with a couple of onions and some salt, bedroll, her share of her eight-Marine section's unit equipment, starting with a section of canvas boiled in linseed oil… At the beginning of a day, it didn't seem like much. When you'd been marching or righting or both every day for a week, it began to feel like you were carrying a chief's chariot on your back.
"What I don't understand," she said, scratching, "is why we keep retreating. We beat the Ringapi at O'Rourke's Ford, we handled Walker's handfast men pretty rough seven days later at Fork Mountain-and every time, as soon as they break off we back off. All we've really done is burn farms and forage. What's the point?"
A voice from two ranks back snarled: "The point is the officers figure out what to do. We just do it."
"Yes, Corporal Hook," she said. He was a bad one to cross, doubly so now he'd been promoted. Granted he deserved it, but…
"We're luring them into a trap," a cheerful voice said.
She looked up, started, and almost stumbled again. Colonel O'Rourke was leading his horse back down the column.
"If you say so, sir… When they catch us, they try to make us run; when we run, they try to catch us. Maybe they'll be so tired from chasing us they'll be easy meat?"
O'Rourke chuckled. "Not quite, Private. Tell me, how have the rations been?"
"Fine, sir, can't complain, haven't touched my iron rations… oh."
She looked over her shoulder at the desolation that was in their wake. And this miserable road to haul supplies on, she thought.
"Oh, indeed," O'Rourke said, and led his horse on down toward the end of the column.
"And what did he mean, then?" Vaukel asked.
"That the enemy are going to get hungry before we do."
Johanna chuckled. "Now that we've eaten the land bare, or burned it."
The weight of rifle and pack seemed lighter than they had a minute ago. She scratched again, hoping it was just sweat and that she hadn't come down with lice. Besides the medics' warnings about how they carried disease, one of the pleasures of Camp Grant-after the shock of having her head hair cropped to a quarter inch and the rest shaved-had been not itching for the first time in her life. You couldn't always avoid them in the field, but the knowledge that you didn't have to have nits all your life had been inexpressibly wonderful.
Nantucket was wonderful itself. She hoped she'd live to see it again.
"This is it, then," Jared Cofflin said aloud.
They were about a mile off the shore of the North Fork; it was a low line in the distance, lime-green of marsh and the green-gold-scarlet colors of autumn trees. He leveled a pair of binoculars.
"Well, not a bad job of navigation, if I say so myself," he said. And it wasn't, not with only a compass and logline to find his way on the map.
The wind was out of the north now, and he squinted beneath the brim of his cap as they scudded a little south of westward before it, the sun low enough on the horizon to be a nuisance. Good boat, he thought with a burst of affection. She answers sweet.
"Ready to come about," he said, busying himself with the line that ran through pulleys on the boom to a sliding track behind him along the stern. "Prepare to gybe."
Oddly enough, running before the wind was the most difficult sort of small-boat sailing. He pulled the tiller toward him, and hauled in the line with his left, to get the boom amidships; you didn't want it crashing back and forth across the cockpit.
"Gybe ho! 'Ware boom!"
The catboat was pointing due south now, and the boom swung out to starboard from the midships position. The sail thuttered as its unstayed edge caught the wind for a second, then cracked as it moved out, filled, and settled down. Time to build up just enough way on her, then-
"Lower away," he said. "Reef her."
Martinelli and Martha were on the rope, lowering the gaff and the sail with it. The children stood to the inboard edge of the boom and fastened the loose folds down with the ties sewn into the sail; they made a creditable job of it, too, if not Guard-neat.
The channel in was marked by poles with string pennants; there was a creek flowing into a shallow inlet, with salt marsh full of osprey nests perched in dead trees on the port and a spit of dry land to starboard. One of the big fish hawks punched the water not far away in a fist of spray, flogged itself back into the air with a foot of thrashing silver in its talons. He could see the mad lemon-yellow ferocity of its eye as it went by the Boojum, intent on its own business and ignoring him. The dock poked out into the water, a board surface on hemlock piles, with rope fenders along the sides.
He let the feel of the water and wind flow through his hands on line and tiller, up from his feet on the deck. He could smell the land now, silt and brackish water and growing things with an autumnal muskiness under it, strong even against the breeze.
"Lower away all… now!" he said.
The gaff came down the rest of the way with a run, and the two adults leaped to secure it. Martha and the petty officer took up the oars and fended off, the Boojum coming to rest against the wharf behind another boat that might have been its twin. There were plenty of hands on the dock to grab the lines thrown to them and make fast, not to mention a brace of excited dogs that looked to be mostly collie. They barked and dashed about until called to heel, then lay with their eyes bright and ears cocked forward.
"Afternoon, Chief," Thomas Hollard said.
The Marine commander's elder brother was in his late thirties, Cofflin knew, a little shorter and darker than Ken. He looked older than his years to pre-Event eyes, the way most people over twenty or so did nowadays; solid and troll-strong, his skin weathered and roughened by outdoor work in all weathers. The hand that shook Cofflin's was hard with callus, with knuckles like walnuts.
What Dad would have called workingman's hands, Jared thought as he shook the offered palm.
The elder Hollard's long straight nose had been broken at some time-during the Alban War, he remembered from the file he'd read yesterday-and reset a little crooked. The farmer sported a short-cropped beard, and wore dark woolen pants, white linen shirt, anorak-style jacket and high, laced boots. Probably his company clothes, and most of the rest of the farm's folk-eight adults, a dozen kids-were in clean, coarse linsey-woolsey bib overalls. Some of the kids barefoot-not surprising on a dry autumn day, seeing that a shirt cost a week's wages for a laborer, and a pair of shoes took a month's pay. One of the definitions of affluent in this Year 10 was having more clothes than a set to wear and a set to wash and a set for church or Meeting. Beside Hollard was his auburn-haired Fiernan wife Tanaswada, carrying their ten-month-old youngest; she was in her late twenties, had been a young widow with a baby at the breast in the aftermath of the Battle of the Downs when she met and married the Nantucketer. That boy must be the oldest child, now a red-haired, straw-hatted youngster giving the chief bashful glances, and admiring ones at Martinelli's Coast Guard uniform.
Let's see, three of their own, and another adoptee, five all up, and they're young yet-Tom here must be trying to raise himself a labor force from scratch, to be ready when his immigrants set up on their own.
"Bill, Mary, why don't you give a hand with the Cofflins' stuff?" Hollard said with an easy authority. "Chief, Ms. Cofflin, you want to see the old Alonski place now, or tomorrow?"
"Might as well take a first look now," he said. "If it's not too much trouble."
"No trouble at all," Hollard said genially. "Hey, what's that?"
"Tuna," Martha said. "We ran into a catcher boat on our way over, thought you might like some."
"Thanks; we can find some room on the grill," Hollard said. His wife gave a frank cry of delight; fish was a staple nowadays, but that meant salt cod, not this. "Neighborly of you."
Cofflin nodded acknowledgment. They'd met fairly often, since the farmer was something of a leader among the Long Island settlers and acted as delegate to cast their votes in the Meeting, but not often enough to be more than friendly acquaintances.
"Chuck, you finished the chores, didn't you?" Hollard said.
"Ayup, Dad. Checked the water troughs, an' everything."
"Why don't you show these youngsters around, then," he said.
His wife cut in: "Make sure your sister isn't left out." A slight scowl went with the boy's nod; the natural reaction of a ten-year-old burdened with someone half his age. "And don't turn up for dinner covered in mud, either!"
"Thanks, Dad-sure, Mom-you guys want to see the place?"
The children dashed off up the dirt track that led up the low slope inland, followed by barking dogs and more sedately by most of the adults. The farmer and his wife walked more slowly still with the Cofflins.
"Just through here," Hollard said. "It's a pretty enough place."
Cofflin nodded silently when they passed through the belt of trees along the shoreline. A big field had been cleared from the forest, forty acres or so, even most of the stumps gone. Shin-high autumn grass waved green-gold in the afternoon light, starred with late wildflowers, tall orange-yellow butter-and-egg plants, red-purple deer grass and hound's-tongue. A few black-coated steers raised their muzzles to glance at the newcomers, then returned to their cropping, their jaws making wet tearing sounds; only a slight ranginess in the legs and the wicked look of their horns broke the Angus look of the three-quarter-bred cattle. Across the pasture lay a house made of squared logs weathered brownish-gray, sixty feet by thirty, with a shingled roof and a fieldstone chimney in the middle of it. Several long clapboard sheds stood nearby, and a scatter of big trees left when the land was cleared, their leaves turning maple-scarlet, oak-yellow, and beech-red with autumn. They walked up to it through a neglected lawn and peered into the windows, seeing darkness and bulky shapes.
"That's the Alonski place," Hollard said redundantly. "We were partners, when he started. He wanted to do some serious fishing here, hence the drying sheds-there are oyster beds, right enough, good lobstering, and God knows plenty of fish out there in the Sound; and he thought he could start a bit of a town here eventually, inn for travelers, smithy and suchlike."
He jerked a thumb southward over his shoulder toward the Great West Road. "It's not that he wasn't a hard worker. It was the transport costs killed him-couldn't compete with the boats working out of Fogarty's Cove, and it ate his mustering-out grant and everything he could scrape together, beg, or borrow. I liked him, he was a man you'd want to have at your back. But stubborn?"
"Stubborn as a whole sounder of pigs," Tanaswanda said. "With a mule thrown in."
Her husband nodded. "His cousin Pulakis has the farm two sections east toward the Cove. When Alonski drowned in the storm of '07, his wife and kids moved in with them."
Hollard shook his head. "He was a good man."
"Indeed he was," Martha said quietly.
That's right, Cofflin thought, glancing aside at her. He was in Marian's commando group, when they got Martha out of the Olmecs' hands.
Hollard nodded at her. "Right you are, Madam Councilor," he said formally. Then he went on: "The parcel's one hundred sixty acres, not counting the salt marsh-it was exempted from the Coastal Reserve on the off-chance that it might actually become a town. I think in another five, mebbe ten years that might have worked, but not now. There's this clearing, I've been turning my cattle in for summer pasture, and the house- I've kept it weathertight, used it for storage-good tube well, no trouble to fit up a water system with a wind pump, and run it out to the drying sheds, they'd do fine for stables. Another thirty or forty acres fit for clearing, the rest good woodlot, and there's the dock. Nice sheltered little inlet, this here is actually sort of a peninsula between the creek and a marsh."
"Looks good," Cofflin said. "For the buyer's needs."
Martha gave a slight dry chuckle at the younger man's startlement. "It's not for us," she said. "Commodore Alston and her partner want it. For vacations, at first, and then as a retirement place. And to raise horses."
Hollard blinked; then his face split in a grin that took years off his age. "The skipper for a neighbor?" he said in delight, then wiped away the smile with an effort. "Well, you realize I do have to see that Betty-Alonski's widow-gets what she can…"
"Indeed you do," Martha said, touching him on the arm. "But we can discuss that tomorrow."
They walked up the dirt lane with its wagon-wheel ruts, through a broad belt of uncleared timber where leaves lay in drifts like old gold and scraps of crimson velvet-some still floating from the passage of children and dogs. Squirrels went up the trunks in streaks of fire, or hung from branches ratchet-chattering anger at being disturbed; a raccoon eyed them dubiously and waddled off, fat with autumn bounty. Beyond the wood lay the imperfectly graveled surface of the Great West Road that ran along the northern shore of Long Island, finishing as a forest trail opposite the lonely little outpost on Manhattan. Right now it was far from empty.
Been a while since I heard that sound, Cofflin thought. Booted feet moving in unison, crunching on gravel; his mind filled in the arms swinging, the whole like a great centipede built up of human beings. 'Bout a hundred, hundred-odd. Camp Grant, the Nantucket Marine Corps training enclave, was five miles or so west of here. They halted; the rest of their party had, too, on the other side of the road, probably at the children's insistence.
They do love a parade, Jared thought grimly. Wish it was the Shriners or the Fourth of July.
A mounted standard-bearer walked his horse around the curve to the eastward, Old Glory streaming out from the staff socketed in his right stirrup with a flutter and snap. Jared Cofflin removed his hat, holding it over his heart; the others did likewise, Hollard's wife and a few of the others making the Fiernan triple-touch gesture of respect to the Republic's banner first. The fifty states the stars represented might be far away on the oceans of eternity, but the ideas it stood symbol for were very much alive. Behind the mounted man came another leading a horse, the company commander.
Walks where his troops do, Cofflin thought with an inward nod of approval.
Behind him came the hundred and thirty-two Marines, in a khaki-clad column of fours with their Werder rifles slung over their shoulders and Fritz-style helmets strapped to their heavy marching packs. The faces under the floppy canvas campaign hats were young, sweating, and tired with the day's route-march out to Fogarty's Cove and back, the bodies hard and fit with good feeding and constant exercise. Shorter by a couple of inches than a corresponding group in the twentieth would have been, because nearly everyone except the officers and senior NCOs were native to this century, but all in all a good-looking group of young men and women. The Republic could do far worse for a source of future citizens.
The company commander gave the group by the roadside a casual glance; then his eyes whipped back to Jared Cofflin's face. The chief felt himself flushing slightly, and made a slight gesture with his head, a wordless carry on. His: God, but I hate this sort of thing, he kept to himself.
"Company!" the young Marine captain barked. "Eyes"-it ran down the chain of command-"right!" He saluted.
The faces snapped toward the Republic's head of state, a few sets of eyes growing wide, and one luckless newly minted graduate of Camp Grant missed a step and had to skip-hop to get the rhythm back. Cofflin kept his face grave as he returned the gesture of respect, but there was a wry grin at the back of his eyes, remembering what one of his instructors would have done if he'd screwed up on parade when the president happened to be passing by. That rifleman was going to get one awesome ass-chewing, probably. Not that he hadn't hated square-bashing and close-order drill himself, but it had some relevance to actual fighting, here, and it maintained its immemorial usefulness in teaching solidarity.
"Fine-looking bunch," Hollard said judiciously, when they'd passed and the last pack mule was turning small with distance. "And hungry, thank God."
Cofflin raised a brow, and the farmer continued:
"Amazing how much a couple of battalions of recruits can eat. The Coast Guard here feeds its Marines a lot better than the Navy ever did back up in the twentieth, if my father's stories are anything to go on. What with taxes and all, it's at least some help when they go shopping, Chief."
"I'm not amazed," Martha said in her dry business voice. "I have to draw up the budget statements."
"We can talk about that later, too," her husband said neutrally, exchanging a glance with Hollard and seeing no surprise.
Well, the man is a leader in the Meeting here, and a delegate.
He'd know there was more to this visit than a favor for Marian Alston. Under the Republic's constitution, the outports handled local affairs with Town Meetings of their own. They also elected representatives to the central House of Delegates, entitled to debate and vote for those who couldn't make it to Nantucket Town. The chief had to keep close track of those their neighbors looked to for guidance, perhaps especially those in the outports.
Tom Hollard was among the more successful of the farming settlers here on Long Island; if Jared hadn't read the files, it would still have been obvious as they crossed the road. Cultivated fields stretched to either side and southward to the crimson-yellow line of the woods, apples glowed red in the green of young orchards, and copper-leafed vineyards trained on T-shaped wooden stakes showed grapes in purple bunches.
It showed too as they walked up the long tree-lined graveled drive to the farmhouse. Like most, that had started as a log box on a fieldstone cellar and foundation, sixty feet by thirty, the type built by the Agriculture Department's contractors as part of the initial settlement scheme. The thick scatter of tall trees left standing around it showed what the material had been like, white oaks and shagbark hickories and tulip poplars, chestnuts and maples, beeches and elms, most of them sixty feet to the lowest branch and showing the straight vertical growth of mature closed-canopy forest. For building they need only be squared by a portable steam-driven circular saw and deeply notched at the ends to be assembled into a thick strong structure; the Department's specialized teams could throw one up in an afternoon. Over the last decade Tom had added an upper story to his, clapboards of white-painted oak plank to the outside, and an extension to one end that turned the box into an L-shape; he could just see laundry flapping on a line in the kitchen yard. A two-story verandah spanned the long southwest face.
Woodsmoke wafted from the two stone chimneys, and the mouth-watering smell of bread baking. Sheep kept the big fenced lawn smooth. A baseball diamond had been marked out in one corner of the enclosure-Tom Hollard was a founder of the local Little League, too-and there were swings and a sandbox and soccer goalposts. Quick-growing Babylonica willows drooped their branches into a pond where ducks and geese floated.
The business side hadn't been neglected either. There was a large truck garden, green rows with wheat-straw mulch between them. Off a little to the eastward-hence usually downwind- were two big hip-roofed barns, one with twin wooden silos. More besides that: piggery, chicken coops, turkey house, dairy. A thick-timbered icehouse sank nearly to its eaves in the ground, corncribs with their slatted sides bulging yellow, sheds for equipment, a small winery, a carpenter's and a farrier's workshed, two big windmills filling a water tank and bored-log pipes leading about from that. Fenced paddocks held several score of black-coated cattle, plus a couple of Jersey crossbreeds, a flock of four-foot moas who pranced in agitated alarm, and six horses. Two were half-Morgans for riding and general work. Four were the precious offspring coaxed from the seed of the single elderly Clydesdale stallion who'd been on-Island at the time of the Event, big and hairy-footed and strong.
"Two hundred twenty-five acres cleared," Hollard said with quiet satisfaction, noting the direction of his guests' gaze. His hands opened and closed in unconscious reflex, the thick callus scritching. "We could get another twenty-five this winter, and pull the stumps on fifteen in the spring-more if I can get a steam-hauler and a winch in for a couple of weeks. Costs like blazes, and powder for blowing stumps isn't cheap either."
Better than two hundred acres, with axes and two-man saws, Cofflin thought. That was reason enough for genuine pride. Cleared fields this size meant thousands of tons of hardwood removed.
They walked up a flagged path from the roadway and onto the verandah; there were roses to either side, lilac bushes, and a wisteria was making a determined effort to climb a trellis along the south wall. The ends of the rafter-beams overhead had been carved into snarling wolf-heads in the primitive, vigorous style of the charioteer tribes of Alba. Fangs from the real article grinned white in their mouths; the pelts doing rug-duty on the floor showed where they'd come from. The pillars that upheld the balcony and sloping roof above that were man-thick trunks of black walnut, polished and carved in abstract geometric designs like Fiernan spirit-poles. The work was about half-done; a basket of shavings stood by one, with a toolbox of mallets, chisels, and gouges beside it.
"That's Tanaswada and Jane," Hollard said, running a hand over the dark beauty of the wood. "They've got a knack for it. Saucarn here did the wolf-heads."
The farmworker shrugged. "It brings luck," he said, scuffing one foot against the flagstone floor. "Frightens off the gowalun. Easy enough, with good steel tools." Then he ducked inside and returned with a double-barreled shotgun and a leather bandolier of brass-and-cardboard shells across his chest. "Thought I'd better keep an eye on the grapes until sundown, Tom," he said, in an accent that mixed Yankee twang with Sun People choppiness.
Several of the dogs walked over to him with waving tails and canine grins and a general air of: Hey, that's a great idea, let's go kill something, right this way, boss.
"Yup," Hollard said. "If it has feathers or fur and comes near the vines, shoot it. Bill, you take a rifle and go with Saucarn. See the rest of you at suppertime."
The farmworkers scattered to their tasks. The head of the household and his guests seated themselves around an outdoor table made from a single yard-wide plank of curly maple, waxed and polished. The verandah had a pleasant lived-in look, with balls of wool and knitting needles dropped in a willow-withe basket, a leather-bound book on a side table with a maple leaf to mark someone's place, and a yellow brindled cat napping on a cushion. It opened an eye to study the strangers, stretched, yawned, circled, and went back to sleep with its tail tucked over its black nose. One of the dogs who hadn't gone with the armed men came over to butt its head under Hollard's palm as he sat, thumping its tail on the flagstones. Tanaswada came out with a tray of cookies and a pot of coffee, then sat and opened her blouse, unselfconsciously setting her baby to nursing. That still took Cofflin a little aback-Martha had always insisted on privacy-but the Alban custom seemed to be winning out all over the Republic.
Hollard poured, added Jersey cream and maple sugar for those who asked for it, and nodded in the direction of his vineyard. "Birds love ripe grapes," he said. "So do foxes and black bears and wolves, that's why I had Bill take the rifle." His foot nudged one of the wolf pelts that were scattered across the verandah's floor. "I don't really mind the bears, they're just a nuisance, but I'm going to by-God see every wolf on Long Island shot out, and Dane Sweet can lump it if he doesn't like it."
"I don't understand why he gets so upset," Tanaswada said. "Back in Alba, we always killed every wolf we could, and they're still there and still eating our sheep. Sometimes in a really bad winter they eat humans-or did before we had guns. Children or old people caught alone, especially."
"Mmmm, it's not that simple," Cofflin said. He held up a hand to forestall the farmer's answer: "Mind you, you're right about Long Island. Sheep and wolves don't go all that well together in a place this size. He's right about the continent overall-room for everybody, even the wolves."
"As long as they aren't near my stock. I suppose you have to keep everyone happy," Hollard said, satisfied in a grumbling fashion. "Sweet repairs bicycles for a living. He doesn't have to worry about losing beasts he needs to make his loan payments to the Town."
"Thought you'd paid out?" Martha said.
Hollard nodded. "I have," he said. "Lots are still working on it. And I could use another loan myself-there're things the place needs, say a little steam compressor for some power tools and a chaff-cutter, and… There's the tax increases, too, just when most of us were starting to see the end of our settlement loans. It's frustrating."
Cofflin nodded in turn. Land wasn't worth much to a homesteader without tools and stock, and it took a good long while to make a farm a paying proposition, the more so when you were learning by doing with only books and Angelica Brand's extension officers to fall back on. Some of the settlers had failed completely, some were flourishing like the Hollards, and many more were struggling along somewhere in between.
"Good harvest this year?" he said.
Hollard and his wife looked at each other and grinned.
"Well, the wheat, rye, barley, and oats came in all right," he said. "We're finally getting a clue. Lord, the mistakes we made the first couple of years! Come Monday we're getting some seasonal people in to start on the apples, then the grape harvest. Corn's been good, so far, and the canola. We didn't get the apples all in last year, and had to let the pigs eat the windfalls, and you heard about the birds, bears, and grapes-every God-damned bird in creation passes this way twice a year, all hungry from their travels. Bloody migratory welfare fowl-and what those…" he stopped and left out a word "passenger pigeons do to a grainfield doesn't bear thinking about, thank God the kids're getting old enough to handle bird-scaring. Then there are the rest of the potatoes."
He reached out to touch wood, and Tanaswada made a geometric gesture of propitiation. "Assuming the weather holds and assuming we get everything in timely, not too bad. Prices have been reasonable this year, despite all that Alban wheat coming in."
"Then you get your easy season," Cofflin said, chuckling slightly to show sympathy. Hollard's laugh was full-throated.
"Oh, right. Nothing but the fall plowing and planting, muck-spreading, shucking and shelling the corn, ring-barking trees and rolling logs and burning 'em and teaming the prime ones out for the timberyard hauler to pick up-
Tanaswada put a cloth over her shoulder, followed it with the baby, and began patting its back. "I've never had it so easy as here," she said. "There, little one, that feels better, doesn't it? Tom, dear, you sit on a machine, the horses pull it, and it cuts the hay… I drive another machine and it turns and rakes it… all that's left to do is pitch it onto the wagon and take it to the barn. Can you call that work?"
"Yes," her husband said.
When the general chuckle had died down, he went on: "I was afraid you had bad news about Ken."
Cofflin shook his head. "Far as I know, he's doing his job well enough." He cocked an eyebrow. "Ever wish you had it, Tom?"
"Never," Hollard said promptly. "Alba was enough fighting for me, unless someone comes here." He looked at his wife and child, around at home and land. "Then we'll fight. Meantime, I'll leave it to Ken and Kathyrn and the others. I've got my family and a good farm and I'm easy with my neighbors. That's enough for me; I'm content to be a… what's the old word?"
"Yeoman?" Martha said.
"Ayup."
Jared Cofflin sipped at the bitter-tasting coffee, pouring in more of the thick Jersey cream and wishing for the ten-thousandth time that they'd had something more than ornamental coffee plants to plant out down in the Caribbean. Or that they had time to send an expedition to Ethiopia; the books said the wild coffee there was a lot better than this. Which was drinkable, if you added some chicory, but only just.
"Well, the whole purpose of this war is to make sure we won't have to fight on our own doorsteps again," he pointed out. "Surely your brother's made that clear to you."
"Oh, it's clear enough to me," Tom Hollard said. "Not everyone looks that far ahead, though. And like I said, the war taxes're hitting a lot of us just when we were finally getting out from under."
"Then it's up to us to convince 'em," Jared said, settling down to work.
A song came from the forecastle of the Chamberlain after the commodore's officer-guests had departed; voices in soft harmony with a flute and the strum of a guitar:
There is much that life withholds
There is much that life denies-
I am content… and most content…
With seaward-gazing eyes.
Marian Alston smiled up through the sloping windows at the frosted stars. A lot of songs had been pulled out of books and record collections that first year after the Event because there was no other way to have music besides making it yourself… but the old words made more sense these days.
"Well, that went off well," she said aloud.
She kicked off her boots, threw her jacket over the back of one chair, and sank back onto the broad semicircle of cushioned bench that ran around the rear of the cabin below the slanting windows, stretching her arms behind her head. Nothing came through the open panes but a little cool sea air; nothing showed save campfires ashore and the riding lights of the ships on the calm sea, and the crescent moon above casting a westward glimmerpath toward Nantucket and home. A single lantern turned the big room into a place of shadows, gleams from polished wood and metal, from the black-lacquered surfaces of the two sets of katana and wazikashi racked on the wall, from the glass that covered the family portraits of them with the girls. It was quiet outside, and the music came plain:
My dreams sail with the tall white ships
My heart, it cannot bide at home;
I share the blue of singing space
The bitter kiss of foam.
The pageantry of storm and cloud;
The mystery of ebb and flow
The song of water as I sleep…
All of these I know.
Swindapa came back from the small head that connected to the commodore's quarters portside and stopped at the sideboard to pour them both drinks. Marian watched her partner's panther-graceful nakedness with a relaxed appreciation that suddenly turned to a stab of joy so piercing that it was pain as well. Memory overwhelmed her for an instant; of a night down along the coast of Brazil, the trades steady on the port quarter in the midnight watch. The two of them had gone forward to watch the phosphorescent waters peeling aside from the bow like waves of heated metal, their wake glowing behind the ship like a mile-long streak of light across the night-dark sea. Swindapa jumped up to the rail, leaning far out with one hand on the shrouds, her loosened hair trailing to the side like a torrent of silver; turned with the wonder of it in her eyes…
No lesser joy can dim the spell
Of quietly enchanted hours;
When the sea wore reflected stars
Upon a breast like flowers.
She took the glass and gave a sigh of contentment as the other curled up beside her and they laid their heads together, kissing and murmuring into each other's ears.
"Yes, dinner was like a feast of kinfolk," Swindapa said, after a minute. "It's a lot like being a part of a lineage, being in the Guard."
Brine-scented dawns-seafaring dreams
How richly these have dowered me;
That I should go through all my days
Companioned by the sea…
"That's the way I wanted it, 'dapa," Alston replied. Band of brothers, she thought-a bit sexist, but traditional. "Mmmm, that's good," she added.
"The whiskey, or this?" Swindapa chuckled, as she undid the buttons of the other's shirt and moved her hands inside.
"Both," Marian said, and finished off the glass. It was due that much respect, part of her last stock of Maker's Mark. Then she pulled her partner to her, trailing lips down her neck, to the breasts warm in her hands, shadow-black fingers against pearl-white skin. The Fiernan gave a shivering cry of delight. Marian raised her head with a chuckle and said:
"The only question is, shall we make out here and scandalize the night-watch with the sound effects, or move over to the bed?"
Swindapa's hands were on her belt buckle. "Both, of course," she said, grinning affectionately. Solemnly for a moment: "It may be our last time to share ourselves."
The forecastle was silent now, and there was a harsher music in the background; one of the Sun People war bands on shore, roaring out the tune to the squeal of a primitive bagpipe and a bohdran and something shatteringly like a Lamberg drum. It was an ancient battle chant, with verses that were new since the Eagle People came to Alba:
Axes flash, longswords swing
Shining armor's piercing ring;
Horses run with a polished shield
Fight those bastards 'till they yield!
Midnight mare and golden roan
Strike for the lands we call our own;
Sound the horn, and shout the cry-
How many of them can we make die?
"Whooooooppp!" Heather Alston-Kurlelo screeched, and let go of the rope, yodeling as she flew across the barn. "Whoooooooo!"
For a moment she hung suspended at the top of her arc, feeling the floating sensation of it lifting her stomach and watching the inside of the barn roof through a mist of her own red hair. Then she fell screeching in delicious fear into the soft prickliness of the hay, smelling the dried memory of flowers. It closed over her head and she swam upright in it, wading her way to the beam where the others sat and hitching herself up to sit astraddle it, kicking her bare feet and giggling.
"That was fun" she said.
"Yeah, but you shouldn't yell so loud," Chuck Hollard said.
He looked down to the ground floor of the barn. It was mostly stalls, with the sweet-musky smell of horses; and leather, tack oil, oats, the beery smell of silage in the troughs. The horses made sort of wet crunching sounds as they munched, snorting now and then, or shifting weight from one foot to another with a clomp sound as the hollow hoof hit the packed dirt and straw. The newcomers had already helped him curry and feed them; grudgingly, he admitted to himself that they seemed to know what they were doing despite being townies. Jared Jr. was still down there.
"We aren't supposed to toss like that by ourselves without someone to check on us," he said. "Dad'll burn my butt if he finds out."
"Yeah, Uncle Jared would be mad, too." Lucy sighed. She got up and ran out on one of the narrower beams that spanned the waist of the barn and then back. "But he doesn't spank nearly's hard as our mom. Mom Marian," she added. " 'Specially when we do something we shouldn't on shipboard. Then she really gets mad."
"Oh, yeah," Heather said, rolling her eyes. "Like, really mad. ZHOtopo."
"You actually get to go sailing! Really sailing-far foreign?" Chuck asked. Raw envy freighted his voice.
Heather dangled her feet over the edge of the hayloft. The hay behind her had a smell that made her want to sneeze, and to throw herself into it again like they'd been doing. She picked pieces of it out of her hair and looked at the rope that ran along the pulleyway down the center of the barn's ridgepole.
"Oh, yeah," she said casually, enjoying herself. "All around the world-lots of times. Even when there's fights."
"Only once," Lucy pointed out.
I hate it when she does that. She always spoils a story, Heather thought, and stuck out her tongue at her sister, who went on maddeningly:
"And she didn't expect there was going to be a fight then. It just sort of happened. We stay home when she expects trouble. Like now."
"Nothing happens here," Chuck said, sick with envy. "Jesus Christ"-he sounded very like his father at that moment-"but I wish I could sail away and see all those places… and all the fights…"
"Fights are scary," Lucy said. "Looks like there are cool things to do here, though. Riding."
"Yeah," Heather said. "Ponies of our own."
"There's hunting, too," Chuck said. "Dad says I can have a hunting gun of my own soon. Dad and Mom and the other grown-ups hunt all sorts of things. Wolves, bears, white-tails, turkeys."
"We shot an elephant last year," Heather said nonchalantly.
"Oh," Chuck replied, crushed.
"We ate the elephant," Lucy said. "It was our moms shot it."
"Yeah, and then all these little brown people, locals-
"Sort of yellow-brown-not just brown like me-
"Real little, they were all grown-up and only a bit taller than us-
"With funny-looking faces. They chopped up the elephant. Some of them went right inside it," Lucy said. "And chopped bits up."
"Like butchering a cow?" Chuck asked curiously, his eyes alight. A boy didn't grow up on a farm with any excess of squeamishness.
"Yeah," Heather said, "but it was big. Tall as this barn!"
"Well, tall as the place we're sitting on right now."
"Lucy, stop doing that! You're spoiling it!"
"No I'm not! It's better if you tell it just the way it was!"
"Hey!" Chuck held up his hands. "Hey, I want to hear about this bit."
"Oh," Heather said. "Well, then we built big fires on the beach, and the little people all put grass skirts and stuff on-
"… and they painted themselves, sort of like Indians-
"-and they put bone rattles on their ankles-
"-and we did too-
"And we all danced."
"And ate the elephant and all sorts of stuff."
"Raw?" Chuck asked in ghoulish enthusiasm.
"No, stupid. Toasted over the fires. All the grown-ups were dancing too… well, a lot of them. The sailors. And that's when the Tartessian boat came. Mom-
"Both our moms."
"Went down and talked with them, and they got really mad. I could tell, even if they weren't shouting."
"That's when they had the battle?"
"No, that was a couple of days later," Heather said. She quelled a memory of cold fear. "Our moms went off into the woods with a lot of the hands. We stayed in the camp."
"We could hear the shooting, though," Lucy said.
"Yeah, and then our moms came back and then in the morning they had the big fight in the bay. That's when we… well, they… captured the two Tartessian ships. And a whole lot of gold. And ivory and silk and, oh, tons of wonderful cargo. I got this little cat carved out of jade, I'll show you."
"Plunder!" Chuck said. "Hey, cool."
"Plundering is against regulations," Lucy said pedantically. "Only pirates plunder. This was prize money."
"What's the difference?" Chuck asked, intrigued.
"We're the good guys," Lucy said. "So when we capture the bad guys' ships and take all their stuff, it's okay. And that's how we're going to buy that land down near the water."
"And have ponies and stuff," Heather finished triumphantly.
"I'm sort of busy, Doctor," Kenneth Hollard said. They were usually on first-name terms; the formality backed up the meaning of the words.
"I know, sir," Justin Clemens said. "It's about the smallpox, sir."
Hollard's long face changed from tightly reined impatience to a fear kept under equally close control. Nobody who'd been there when the disease broke loose in Babylon's teeming warrens could react otherwise.
He rose, silencing Clemens with a hand, and went to the door flap of his tent. A murmured command sent the sentries further from the tent, and posted others around it. Then he ducked back into the cooling olive-tinted, canvas-smelling gloom and turned up the kerosene lantern that hung from the central ridgepole.
"Now, let me have it, Doctor. I thought we had it under control?"
"We do, sir, in Kar-Duniash," Clemens said. He sat forward in the folding chair, knotting his hands together. "And we've got a good start on a vaccination program here in Anatolia. I thought we had reason to celebrate."
"So did I," Hollard said. "Like your wedding, Doctor."
Clemens smiled for a second; Hollard had arranged for a wedding feast in the palace, with his royal brother-in-law dropping by with a substantial golden gift. Tab-sa-Dayyan had been flabbergasted, and Azzu-ena had cried. Then his naturally cheerful face turned grave again.
"No, it's the news from Meluhha, Brigadier," he said. At Hollard's blank look-nobody could keep up with everything-
"Meluhha. India, what'll be Bombay. There's a steady trickle of trade between there and the Gulf, via Dilmun."
He moistened his lips, chapped with the long hard journey up from Mitanni. "There's been an outbreak there."
"Damn!" Hollard said, knotting his sun-faded brows. They were a startlingly light color against the teak-dark tan of his face. "How did that happen?"
"It's the damn smallpox bug, it's tough-great big mother of a thing for a virus, with a hard sheath, you can actually see it under a microscope. It'll stay infectious for years at room temperature under the right conditions. I think… I think what must have happened is that someone saw they could make a killing by stealing and selling clothing from the victims, instead of burning it. Remember how we gathered it in big heaps by the fires, toward the end there?"
Hollard nodded grimly. Thousands had died in Babylon, tens of thousands throughout the country, before quarantines and compulsory inoculation got the brushfire under control. Good cloth was valuable here, relative to most other things, because the whole process of making it from sheep to sewing was so labor-intensive. A good cloak or tunic would take a third of a year's wages for an ordinary man. A shipload was a fortune.
Clemens went on: "In a pile of wool blankets or clothes, the infection could linger indefinitely. It's a sit-and-wait pathogen, lying around on surfaces."
"Well, Jus, that's damned bad news," Hollard said, and shook his head. "After the war, we'll have to do something about it, if we can."
Clemens looked at the general, jaw dropping. "After-" His voice broke in a squeak. "Sir, they've got the disease there right now. This news is months old! We have to do something now."
The lamplight brought out the planes and angles of Hollard's bony face. "Out of the question," he snapped. The blue eyes speared Clemens's. "I have a war to run, in case you hadn't noticed, Doctor, and it's at a critical point. Every ship and sailor and Marine is needed."
The doctor looked at the general for a long moment, silent with horror. "But sir… Ken… for the love of God, Meluhha's a major trade center! I'm pretty sure, I've been tracing it, somehow we managed to get it to Babylon-from the African coast, or somewhere along the Red Sea, maybe. Now that it's in Meluhha, it'll spread all through continental Asia, maybe to southeast Asia as well. Virgin field epidemic-a quarter of the human race could die."
Hollard's face might have been rough-cast in an Irondale foundry. "And if I divert our resources, the Republic may die. I know my duty, Doctor. So should you."
"I'm a doctor, dammit. People are dying and I know how to keep them alive!"
"You're also a soldier of the Republic of Nantucket," Hoi-lard said. "What do you think we should do? Send a fleet and a regiment to Meluhha? Because that's what it would take; they're not going to allow us to stick needles into them on our say-so. And then another fleet and more regiments to track down all the places people from Meluhha might have gone? All the Coast Guard and Marine Corps together wouldn't be enough to lock that barn door. The horse is out. That's very bad, and I'm sorry it happened, but it has."
Appalled, Clemens stared. "You're not going to do anything!"
"I'll recommend we step up the vaccination program at every outpost and base, and encourage all the people near 'em to come in and get it," Hollard said. "And just between me and thee, we let Walker know about the epidemic while it was on, and the Tartessians. They've got their own vaccination programs going, according to Intelligence. More we cannot do, not until the war is over. I'm sorry, Justin."
"Sorry," Clemens said. "Thank you very much, sir," he said.
He stood, saluted, and turned on his heel. Behind him Kenneth Hollard dropped his head into his hands, unseen.
Clemens stalked to the tent he'd been assigned. Azzu-ena was busy within, setting out their gear; she looked up at his approach and wordlessly folded him into her embrace.
"You did what you could, beloved," she said softly in his ear.
"I did nothing," he groaned. "I could… I could appeal to the chief, to the Town Meeting, launch a petition…"
"Would they listen, where the general would not?"
A sigh went out of him, and the rigid tension of anger. "No," he said. "They wouldn't… if I was them, I honestly don't know if I'd do anything either… why, dammit, why?" His fist struck the canvas-covered dirt where they sat.
"Ah, beloved, that is something not all the arts of your people or mine can answer," she said softly.
"What can I do?
Her tone became a little sharper: "You will save those lives you can," she. said. "The regimen I shall adopt, remember? Your patients are here. They are those you can assist. You will do them no good if you waste the strength of your spirit brooding on what you cannot do."
He sighed, straightened, ran a hand over his cropped hair. "I suppose… no, you are right." He smiled into the dark eyes. "What would I do without you?"
"I will do you good and not evil all your days," she said softly, quoting the marriage ceremony. Then she laid a hand on her stomach and her smile grew wider. "And you have already done something with me you could not do without. I was going to wait another week, but…"
He folded her in his arms, feeling joy blaze. The haunting thought of blankets and baskets traveling from one port to the next didn't quite fade, but it was enough. It was reason to keep going.