April, 11 A.E.-Sacramento Delta, California
April, 11 A.E.-Feather River Valley, California
April, 11 A.E.-Sacramento Delta, California
April, 11 A.E.-Feather River Valley, California
The tule-reed boat felt… squishy, that's the word. Peter Giernas thought. It was more like being on a living thing than a boat, or… a memory nagged at him, from his childhood. Yes, just after the family had moved to America, three years before the Event, when his father got a job doing plumber's work with a Nantucket construction company. He'd taken the family to the beach, and the eight-year-old Peter Giernas had gone swimming on a half-inflated rubber mattress. This felt a lot like that, except that the mattress had been smooth rather than prickly.
That was the problem with not speaking the local language; you had to do most of your own scouting, or chance some lethal surprise at the last minute… like the one they'd nearly had when he saw the masts of the enemy ship rising above the heads of the reeds, and couldn't make the local behind him understand what masthead lookout meant. He'd gotten them under the shadow of the sloughside reeds, at least.
The little craft was inconspicuous, a lot more so than a thirty-foot dugout, and just the thing for eeling through the marshes, sloughs, swamps, and shallows where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers met to form a huge delta before funneling into the Pacific. Despite his compass and map, Giernas had been thoroughly lost within an hour.
There must be millions of acres of this tule swamp here, he thought. Plus riverbank forest even thicker and more junglelike than upstream on the Sacramento, and islands beyond counting, a demented spiderweb of channels. There was swamp, and islands of grassy prairie covered with stems twelve feet high, and swamp shading into prairie and back into swamp and into forest, dry or with standing water around the trunks of the alders.
Mountains and features like Lake Tahoe didn't pick up and move in periods as short as three thousand years, but this soft muck-soiled landscape subject to annual flood was another matter. Only the broadest outlines had any resemblance to the maps copied from a back-issue National Geographic for the expedition.
The smell was rank in his nostrils, full of life and death and green growing things; just ahead of them was the mouth of a little slough between two small islands. The lupines growing there were four feet high and stretched along the banks on both sides for hundreds of yards, with a band of white popcorn flowers beyond and then masses of sky-blue Dowingia to the water's edge.
He made a stay-here gesture to the local Indian in the canoe, stepping ashore onto peat that yielded under his feet like wet sponge. Going to his belly, he eeled forward until he could part the flowers just enough for the lenses of the binoculars. The vegetation closed over his head as well, making him invisible to observers looking down from a masthead.
There, westward across a hundred yards of open water, was what he sought. He'd seen the bare tips of her masts for better than an hour, but the ship itself was still a bit of a shock. Moored bow and stern to live oaks, on the shore of what another history would have called Sherman Island.
'Bout five hundred tons, he estimated, quickly taking in things like the gunports to give him an accurate estimate of length. Hundred and forty feet, he decided. Beam, say, twenty-five, twenty-eight feet midships.
Schooner-rigged on three masts, big gaff mainsails, a main topsail on the mizzen, square topsails on both the forward masts. A rig like that would make things like beating around the Horn into the teeth of the westerlies easier than something square-rigged throughout, and wouldn't need as heavy a crew. A topsail schooner, with a leering demon-mask figurehead under the long bowsprit.
The name was picked out in gilt letters before the forward anchor; Hortzakadan Kaultzagurrunta, whatever that meant.
A fish jumped just beyond his observation point, plopping back down after its jaws closed on a dragonfly, and splashing water on the lenses. He cursed softly, cleaned them and continued his scan. Six guns a side, bronze twelve-pounders from the size of their muzzles; swivel guns on the quarterdeck rails- what they called murdering pieces. Two stern-chasers, from the ports. Lighter guns, but not something you could disregard.
There were barish patches on the shore where they'd felled trees for fuel or construction, but nothing more. Giernas snorted slightly; if he'd been in charge, he'd have dismounted the ship's starboard guns and put them behind earthworks, to sweep the river north and south of the ship… oh, well, they thought they were safe enough here.
They'd certainly been hard at work. A big raft made of three layers of lashed-together logs had been secured to the ship's side, and an accommodation ladder run up the side of the hull to give easy access to the deck. The main spars had been re-rigged to act as crane-booms, swinging back and forth with loads of cargo from her holds. Giernas peered sharply at the load in a net swinging down. Bales and boxes and barrels, indistinct at this range. One of the big sailing barges was tied up to the raft, and more workers were going antlike up and down the gangplanks, stowing yet more containers in her open hold.
Okay, now, how many… Some of the teams hauling at the ropes looked like Tartessian sailors, although it was hard to tell-they tanned up pretty dark and worked stripped to their loincloths when the weather was good. Twenty or thirty were definitely locals, and not volunteers from the way they were touched up with the lash now and then. He saw a half a dozen leather-jerkined soldiers, but there might be more below. Slaves would mostly just get in the Tartessians' way in a fight, possibly turn on them when things got hairy.
The sailors though-they'd all know how to handle themselves come a brawl, and they could be murderously effective if they got to the ship's guns. And if the guns were kept loaded. That was standard practice at sea, but-
Hmmm, he thought. Gunports open, but the guns aren't run out-they could have the ports open just for air 'tweendecks, it's pretty hot and humid here in the daytime already, in this damned swamp. Of course, that's assuming an awful /of…
He watched with hunter's patience, occasionally shifting a little to keep muscles from going stiff. When the sun was halfway down to the line of forest on the west, the barge cast loose. Crewmen oar-walked it out into midstream, hoisted sails to the two stubby masts and slid north as the sails bellied out in the gentle easterly breeze.
Okay, subtract six for the barge crew. Lessee…
Alantethol looked at what the soldier brought. It was a spur, of the type made to strap on to a mounted man's bootheel. This was no common bit of gear from the King's workshops, though. It was bronze, inlaid with silver, the rondel larger and the blunt spikes tipped with little balls of gold. Blood drained from the Tartessian commander's face as he recognized where he'd seen it last; Tarmendtal son of Zeurkenol had been showing it off, proud of what his father sent him. He'd been so proud of it that he wore them constantly, especially when he rode off on patrol.
"It could have dropped off," one of the others gathered outside the Hidden Fort's gates said.
Alantethol restrained an impulse to lash his fist into the man's face. That would be bad for discipline… although right now, it would soothe his soul. "I don't think so," he said.
Decision firmed his mouth into a straight line. "Turn out a patrol," he said. "Two files-with remounts. I will take command." Twelve men should be enough. "Supplies for a week's travel, extra ammunition. And our two best trackers from the tame natives."
"Lord," the subordinate said. "That will leave few men here- there is the file at the ship, and three at the cinnabar mine."
"Little girls throwing flowers could hold these walls," he said. "Call up some of the civilians for wall duty-tell them that the King's treasury will make good any loss to them. I must find out what has happened! Doesn't this brainless savage know anything?"
There was a brief exchange between the interpreter and the native who squatted in the dust, looking up from under a tangle of black hair. At last the interpreter shook his head. "Lord Alantethol, he says that he took it from a man upriver in payment of a debt. He saw it must be ours, and that we would not trade such a thing, and ran here-he asks if his family may be forgiven their overdue tribute and his son and daughter returned to him."
Alantethol nodded. "Tell him if we find he tells the truth, his children will be returned, and rich gifts besides." And if he lies, I will have him hung by the testicles and build a slow fire under his head.
Meanwhile bugles had sounded within the fortress. Shouts resounded, demanding that traffic make way, and the sounds of boots striking flesh and yelps of pain. The troops he'd summoned cantered out and drew up, the sergeant who led them saluting with clenched fist. Alantethol looked over the men and ran an eye over the horses on leading-reins behind them, some carrying packs, but enough others to give every man a spare mount. If he had to make speed…
A cold feeling gripped his lower belly, as if the Crone were caressing him like a lover. There were another two weeks before the tribute patrol had to report in. This might be the Jester's laughter at a small mischief, making him look foolish for very little cause. On the other hand, he was a New Man of the King, and he had listened carefully to the King's talks about the quality called methodical by the Eagle People. More than once since then it had served him well. He swung into the saddle of the horse his orderly offered.
"Redouble the watch," he said. "I'll be back in three days, no more; if I'm not, button yourself in here tight, don't throw good money after bad. This may be nothing, but I've a tight scrotum over it."
By the Sun Lord, I'll be a eunuch if it gets any tighter, he added to himself.
The native trackers were stocky dark muscular men, much like any hunters of the local barbarian tribes. Their service showed only in their steel knives and hatchets, cotton tunics and bandannas tying back their hair, and the metal tips of their darts. He'd come to respect their abilities, though.
For the first day's hard riding there was little for them to do, besides interpret when they came to the initial miserable encampment that Tarmendtal son of Zeurkenol would have visited.
"Of course they're telling the truth," Alantethol snarled when the sergeant doubted it. "Look at their arms-they've received the vaccination. And no new cases of smallpox, either. The tracks are plain, besides. You men, leave off with those women-what do you think this is, a harvest festival? Mount up!"
The party with him had covered the distance in a third the time the tribute patrol would have made, unencumbered with a wagon and eating jerky and biscuit in the saddle rather than stopping to hunt. By then Alantethol remembered a joke that the King had told him, one Isketerol had heard from the Islander who taught him to ride horseback while he was in Nantucket. It was in the title of a book by a cavalry commander, Forty Years in the Saddle, by Major Assburns. It didn't seem so funny now.
He stood in the stirrups to survey a stretch of tall grass that looked much like all the others they'd seen on their ride north from the Hidden Fort. The native trackers saw something else, though. They dismounted and cast about, then came trotting back to his stirrup.
"Wagon tracks, stop here," one said, pointing about with his spear. "Whole bunch, stop there-ride about-stop there." He pointed off to the westward, toward another section of the flat plain. "Then wagon go there-" He pointed northward. "Most horses, they there."
Alantethol considered himself a fair man of the chase; his father had helped feed his family by joining hunts for wild pig in the marshes in winter. He still couldn't make hide nor hoof of the signs the trackers showed him, except for the wheel marks of the wagon.
"Wagon go slow, slow," the tracker said. After a while he pursed his lips and spat. "Not so many ox-beasts after here. And heavy, much heavy."
The Tartessian knotted a fist on the pommel of his saddle and looked around, listening to the sough and hiss of wind in grass that was drying toward summer's yellow. One of the great vultures was circling not too far up, more huge than a beast had a right to be. In the Hidden Fort you could forget how far Homeland was, how few civilized men were in this land, the sheer size of it. That was all too painfully apparent, out here where his soldiers were less than an ant crawling along a plank. He shivered, and promised a horse to the Sun Lord; right then he didn't feel confident enough to call the Hungry One's attention to him. Victory came from Him, yes… but never forever.
The other tracker came over and held up something. Alantethol took it up, smelled it, rolled it between his fingers. A ragged circle of scorched felt about the size of this thumb, greasy with beeswax, still scented with burned gunpowder. It was one of the wads that lay at the base of every cartridge, to seal the breech against the hot gas.
"Many of these?" he asked the tracker.
"Many, many," the tame savage said. "There-" He pointed to the little slough that ran down to the river ahead of them. "There-" His hand swung westward. "Many, many, many."
The Tartessian commander snarled. There had obviously been a battle here… but there were no signs of it, no rotting bodies and squabbling buzzards and condors. Not a scrap of gear, either. "We'll follow the wagon," he said at last. Tarmendtal might have sent the wagon on ahead and taken mounted men on a sweep westward into little-known regions, for some reason. Or.. not.
"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 understand 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 Giernas 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 strength. 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.
"Let's get these goddamned fires out-" he began. An overturned lantern could become a catastrophe very quickly.
An unearthly shriek came from the forward part of the deck, where a partition and sheet-iron chimney marked the galley. A fat man staggered around the enclosure holding his hands to his face; they could see the huge blisters spreading beneath his fingers and all down his throat and chest and belly-the sort of marks that you got when someone threw boiling olive oil on you. Giernas raised his rifle to put the man out of his misery, but before he could pull the trigger an Indian woman came after the Tartessian cook. She was naked, and they could see that some of the hot oil had spattered her here and there. That didn't affect her grip on a big iron frying pan; she swung it like a baseball bat, knocked the man down, and began to beat him with it as if she were threshing grain, hard crunching blows that went on after his head split open.
More Indian slaves swarmed up out of the hold; their local allies came down the companionways as well. The rangers pushed and shoved and showed how and ended up stamping out the small puddles of flame themselves, smothering with sand and water from the buckets. The locals were more interested in scouring the ship of the last Tartessians; it had turned from a fight to a hunt, and when a squealing ship's boy barely old enough to raise a whisker was dragged out from a cupboard in the captain's cabin and clubbed, Giernas turned aside in disgust.
Jesus knows they've got reason to hate the Iberians, he thought. Still and all-
"Is there something we're forgetting?" he said, then looked up at the sound of a shot. He held up a hand to mark a pause and leaned out of a gunport. "Sue?" he shouted.
"Here!" her voice came back from the deckhouse behind the wheel. "One or two of them got into the maintop with a rifle. Careful about how you come on deck-I'll keep him pinned down from here."
Jaditwara had gone into a trance of remembering. Her eyes flew open very wide, their pale blue glittering in the lamplight.
"Barrow Woman's teeth!" she blurted. The Fiernan had shipped as a deckhand before she settled at Providence Base, got her immigrant's papers, and drifted into the rangers. "The powder magazine! It'll be on the orlop deck-under the water-line-this way!"
She took off at a flying run with Eddie on her heels. Peter looked around. The locals had broken open the ship's spirit store, and they were passing bottles of wine and brandy from hand to hand; one of them even had a small cask in his hands, holding it up until the pale violent spirits ran over his face and dripped down his bare brown chest, mingling with the streaks of blood. Be some almighty sore heads tomorrow, the ranger thought. Or possibly some deaths-that much raw alcohol on stomachs not accustomed to it. The slaves had pulled out the food supplies from the galley and were eating with a dreadful concentrated hunger, some of them weeping as they stuffed bread and hard biscuit and dried fruit into their mouths, or gnawed on tough jerked meat. One who had learned something about blacksmith's tools had found a hammer and chisel, using them to split the soft wrought-iron rivets that held the captives' manacles closed.
Some of those poor bastards will be dead tomorrow, too, he thought sadly-burst bellies, from cramming in too much too soon on a gut shrunken by hunger.
He shook his head. The rangers were foreigners here, barely able to exchange a few sentences. They certainly didn't have any authority, and trying to exert it would only result in disaster. With some luck, we can keep them from destroying the ship. We may be able to use her.
Instead he turned to the aft companionway, coming up near the wheel, keeping his head below deck level where the roof of the deckhouse cut off the mainmast top. "Sue?"
"He hasn't moved for while-wait a minute-
There was a shot from the mast, a scream from the deck, and the sharp close-at-hand whipcrack of Sue's weapon. Giernas leaped out of the companionway, vaulted the compass binnacle, and threw himself down beside the young woman. Another shot came from the top, and the bullet knocked splinters out of the planks overhead.
"Hi," she said, grinning through powder smuts. "Eddie and Jaddi?"
"Looking after the magazine," he said
"Whoa! Should have thought of that. One of them could have blown us all sky-high."
"Jaddi's closer to a sailor than any of us, and hi yourself," he answered. "How're we going to shift this bastard?"
"I don't know. There may be two, he reloads almightly fast, like it was two guns and he was handing off to someone else who was loading for him. Doesn't seem to be short of ammo, either. There are about twenty or thirty locals out there, hiding behind stuff and on the raft," she said.
"Wish we could figure out a way to use 'em before they all get at the liquor," Giernas mused, rubbing his beard. His eyes roved about. "Think you could cover me as far as the mainmast?"
The slanted blue eyes narrowed. "Maybe, but-
"Hey, cover us!" That was Eddie's voice.
"Wait a second." Giernas took out a pocket mirror and held it up gingerly. It was hard to say in the darkness, but-
"I think he's behind those hammocks, right over to the port side of the tops. I'll go first, you on the count of two."
"Right."
"Wait for the word, Eddie. One-" He came up to one knee and fired, smooth and quick. Crack, and he shouted: "Two!"
Crack from Sue's rifle, and the other two rangers rolled into the shelter of the deckhouse. "Found the magazine," Jaditwara said. "Safe."
"One of the Tarties was trying to get in," Eddie amplified. "But the locals scragged him first." He held up a key, which nobody born around here would recognize. "Padlocked. I took a look in-we're not short of ammunition anymore. They must have been bringing it in for their settlement here."
"Right," Giernas nodded. "You three cover me. I'm going to get to the base of the mainmast and see about shifting our friend up there."
"Hey, why do you get all the fun?" Eddie said.
The other three looked at him for a second. "I'm a better shot," Giernas pointed out; which was true. Not that Eddie wasn't very good. "Get ready."
His testicles tried to crawl back up inside him for protection, and he grinned at the sensation; his bladder felt too full, too. Wait until everyone was in position, rifles primed and cocked. Blow the priming out of his own and renew it.
"Go!"
Crack!
Jaddi's gun, blasting into the rolled hammocks around the maintop. Giernas rose as he saw her finger squeeze, his soft moccasins thumping on the quarterdeck as he drove himself forward. A malignant red eye winked at him from the top, and splinters flew from the idol of Arucuttag of the Sea that stood by the binnacle.
Crack! Crack! Sue and Eddie fired.
Over the quarterdeck railing, vaulting on his left hand. Crack! Jaditwara firing again, and there was a hoarse cry from above. His moccasins thumped down on the main deck; it was a six-foot drop, and he took it on flexed knees and then dived for the base of the mast, sliding the last six feet over the smooth deck planks as if he was sliding for home plate. His feet touched the raised collar around the mast, and he brought the rifle up with a smooth searching motion. The floor of the maintop was a latticework. The figures moving on it were outlined against moonlight and starlight. His finger stroked the trigger, feeling a familiar light, crisp resistance.
Crack! The recoil was worse than usual, with his shoulder pinned to the deck. He'd have a bruise there, in a while.
Someone screamed. A rifle fell over the edge of the fighting platform, pinwheeling down through the lamplight and into the dark with a splash. Peter raised his legs high, flicked himself back to his feet, and sprang to the rail and the ratlines. Eddie whooped and sprang down from the quarterdeck, bounding to the other side of the ship and swarming up faster than the bigger man. Sue and Jaditwara came to one knee, covering them. Giernas reached down and drew his bowie as he climbed, then put it between his teeth-climbing was about the only situation where that actually made sense. The thick back fillet of the heavy blade filled his mouth with its unpleasant, bitter taste of oiled steel. Any second now someone would lean over the tattered hammocks around the fighting top and blow the top of his head off at point-blank range…
Nothing happened, except that the sound of wheezing grew stronger. The triangular basket of the fighting top was occupied by two figures. One was a man in his thirties-from the elaborate decoration on his tunic, probably the captain of the ship. He'd been wounded in one arm and patched it up with a cloth; the second bullet hole was through the upper part of his chest, just where the breastbone gave way to the neck. Blood ran out in a flood, slowing as he watched. The other was much younger, scarcely more than a boy; even in the starlight he could see the resemblance in the faces. Blood spread black in the moonlight across his torso as he struggled to lift the rifle across his lap. It wobbled, and then the muzzle sank. The boy's head slumped forward as well, and he gave a long sigh and stopped struggling for breath.
Giernas opened his mouth, catching the hilt of the bowie as it dropped and sliding it back into the sheath on his right leg.
"Hey, looks like they're both dead," Eddie Vergeraxsson said.
"Yeah," Giernas replied heavily. "They are."
Spring Indigo Giernas woke in the darkness. She knew at once that it was very late; the moon was down, and the woods by the river were quiet, the air cool and full of a deep stillness. The baby in his rabbitskin blanket was still, she could hear his breathing slow and even. It was a tickle against the soles of her feet that woke her; Perks raised his head from where he lay curled at the opening of the tent.
"Qesh'Perks'huo?" she mumbled, hoping it wasn't just the howl of some coyote. Perks was an excellent watcher and far better trained than any hound of her parents' people, but his ideas of what was important enough to wake up for weren't always the same as a man's.
She could see the outline of the wolf-dog against the lesser darkness of the tent's open flap. First his head, ears pricked; then he came to his feet and crouched, with a sound half whine and half growl. The other dogs were stirring now, too. Spring Indigo felt a cold chill at the base of her belly. A fire smoldered under its own ash outside the tent, with a low earth mound at its back to throw the heat inward; she fought down an impulse to poke it up and throw on lightwood. Instead she scrambled into her clothes-the leather kept warm and supple by lying under the blanket with her. That took an instant; snatching up the saddlebags, throwing them over a shoulder, sticking the pistols through her belt, taking up her crossbow in her right hand and her child in her left arm, scarcely longer.
A deep-chested rumble of a snarl from Perks. "Quiet!" she hissed.
He obeyed and so did his son and daughter, but suddenly there was barking from other dogs-those in the camp of the people of the land near here. Fires were prodded to life there, and sparks flew up among the big trees. Then a voice shouted- another screamed-and there was the flat unmusical crack of a gunshot.
The baby stirred in drowsy protest. She paused to give him the breast for a moment; it was worth the time, to keep him sleepy and content. I am not as afraid as I thought I would be, she thought as she ducked out the flap of the tent and moved northward toward the horse lines, crouching.
Yes, her mouth was dry, and her heart beat like a Summoner's drum in her ears. But it was not as bad as the fear of the Dog People, in that last hopeless flight before Peter and the other Islanders came.
I am older, she thought. I have learned much. I will save my son, and greet my husband once more.
Perks and Saule and Ausra-the names meant Thunder and Moon and Dawn, in a language, that was not English-came close behind her heels as she headed through the dew-wet grass. The two horses on the picket line were stirring, throwing up their heads against the reins that bound bridles to the hide rope stretched between two trees. Their hooves spurned the cut grass heaped for them to eat, sending wisps of it floating toward her. The others whickered and milled in the crude brush corral. Closer, quick and quiet, and…
If I were raiding this camp, I would-
Shadow-figures stood by the corral wall. Starlight let her see just enough of them to make out the distinctive outlines of men raising rifles to their shoulders, and she went to the ground with her body curled over her son. Perks froze for an instant. Then he charged with his belly to the ground, silent as death, a dark-gray streak in the darkness. Saule and Ausra attacked with a good deal more noise, bounding to keep their heads above the tall grass.
Crack. Crack. The muzzle flashes blinked like red eyes in the night. A howl was broken by a yelping moan of pain, and then a roaring snarl and a man's scream. Spring Indigo forced herself to come upright on her knees-Jared was crying and struggling against the rabbitskin wrapper that held him, but she had to see what was coming.
A Tartessian, swearing and limping. He was looking about for another man, something on a level with his eyes, and didn't see her until almost the moment she raised the heavy flintlock pistol and fired both barrels at him from less than ten feet away.
Even with her eyes slitted, the double red flash nearly blinded her. The weapon bucked in hands smaller than it was designed for, the hammers nearly gouging her forehead as it recoiled. The Tartessian spun and fell, screaming and thrashing. She tossed the weapon aside and pulled the other, scooping up the solid weight of the toddler as she went. On, past the limp body of a dog, and to the picket line itself. There two figures rolled and snarled, man hardly to be distinguished from beast. Teeth flashed in the starlight, and the bright gleam of a steel knife blade. Spring Indigo ran over and thrust the pistol barrels into the body of the man lying beneath Perks and pulled the trigger; the sound of the shot was muffled, but blood and matter blew back across her, and this time the pistol was wrenched out of her grip.
Perks gave the Tartessian's face one last tear with his jaws and then rose, trying to walk toward her. He nearly fell, then hunched along with one foreleg drawn up to his chest; the blood was black in the night. She hesitated for a single second, torn… but Jared gave a squall, and the dog weighed more than she did. Even if she could get him slung across one of the horses, it would take far too long. The crackle of shots around the encampment of the people of the land was already dying down, and she could see the ruddy light of flame there.
"Guard, Perks!" she said.
The saddle was already on the horse, loosely fastened. She quieted the eye-rolling nervousness of the animal, threw the saddlebags over its withers, and jerked the girths tight, then strapped her child into the carrying basket. Grim concentration got her into the saddle, and feet into stirrups already shortened for her. A quick slash left the lead line of the other horse free, and she wound it around her free hand.
"Hi, eeeeya go't" she shouted, then her heels thumped into the flanks of the horse, and it turned its head into the north and ran.
Alantethol took the pistol in his hands. It was of the type that his own folk had copied for some years, a twin-barreled flintlock, not the damnable six-shot repeaters the Eagle People had come to use lately. There were enough differences to show where it was made, though; the machining was smoother than any shop in Homeland could yet produce, the wood of the butt was one he didn't recognize, and the stamp on the locks showed the rampant Eagle of the Republic, rather than the crowned mountain of Tartessoss.
"Curse them," he whispered. "Curse them, is there nowhere in the world they will leave us in peace?"
He shook his head, looking around at the trampled remains of the camp. Two leather tents-six men, at most. Twelve horses, unshod ponies, some of them with colts at heel. Surprisingly little gear… except that they would have hidden most of it before they left. From the reports, only one of the Amurrukan had been here when his band attacked.
A scream came from the ground a little eastward, toward the river. He walked over. The captive was proving surprisingly stubborn; the file leader questioning him gave another twist to the stick in the knotted cord twisted around the native's brow. Blood ran down from the leather, and the black eyes bulged. The tame guide bent and shouted a question in the man's ear, listened to his answer, then shrugged.
"He says the Eagle People made canoes and went downstream," he said at last.
Alantethol felt the usual itch of discontent that came of working through badly trained interpreters; you might get the general sense of what someone said, but there was always a slippage of meaning-and you never got the little details that could be so crucial.
"How many? Where?" he grated.
The answers came, slow and unwilling and unsatisfactory, although they flowed a little better once the questioner had brushed burning liquid sulfur over the savage's crotch. At last Alantethol turned away and paced back and forth, hand on the hilt of the sword whose scabbard slapped at his boot. Scowling, he kicked at a tuft of the long grass and thought. The problem was that the savages here didn't know anything to speak of. The Eagle People had been even more handicapped by lack of the local tongues than he was. They hadn't told their allies overmuch because they couldn't.
Four of them downstream with some natives, he thought. Best send a messenger to the ship, although there were far too few of the enemy to attack there. Still, with the Eagle People…
"They are not more than us!" he muttered to himself. "A man of Tartessos with a rifle is the equal of any of them."
Yes, they were probably trying to make the great bay on the coast. Ships of theirs did put in there now and then. He grinned like a shark. Not for months, though, and the savages would hunt them down, given threats and rewards enough. Once they were located it would be easy enough to overfall them with numbers.
Hmmm, what of the woman they left here? he thought. Only a woman… but it was well to be cautious where Amurrukan women were concerned; they were more like men, in many respects. But this one is a savage, the description was clear. The Eagle People mostly looked like Albans or other northerners; this one was short, black of hair and brown of skin and flat-faced, from the descriptions. But she did escape, probably killed two of my men. Best to track her down, and see what she knows. Even if she was nothing but some chance bedmate-servant picked up along the way, she might know more than the local idiots. He would leave good men on it, and return to the Hidden Fort to keep his hand on things.
"There will be revenge for you, Tarmendtal son of Zeurkenol. By the Hungry One, by the Lord of Waves, I swear it."