Island in the Sea of Time

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

July – September, Year 2 A.E.

"One of them died, Chief," Miller said. "I think we over-tranked it in that storm off the Azores. Heart just stopped-or maybe it died of fright. Damn all horses anyway."

"Damned lucky it was only one," Cofflin said.

The Eagle was back at her usual berth, the old Steamboat Wharf. The wild-eyed little horses were led down a special ramp rigged with canvas barriers on either side, snorting and balking. It was a bright breezy-cool day in early July, with only a scattering of people watching; today was a working day, and there were enough fishing boats these days to sop up most of the able hands on the island. Even the strong sea breeze couldn't quite hide the odors of drying fish, offal in the giant tubs waiting to be hauled out to the fields. A whale-catcher was coming in between the breakwaters as well, the long dark shapes of its catch towing behind. A cheery toot-toot cut through the bustle, sending a white cloud of gulls storming skyward.

Well, we're certainly a seafaring island again, Cofflin thought.

Beside him Angelica Brand was rubbing her hands with glee. "Ninety-seven, ninety-eight," she counted. "All mares. Marvelous."

"It means we can spare Captain Alston the people she wants," Cofflin nodded. "Wasn't sure it was possible."

Hiller looked up sharply. "How so?" he asked.

Cofflin hid his smile; he'd noticed that the Guard people all bristled like that at a suggestion that Alston wasn't infallible. Sign of a good boss. God, but we were lucky. They might have gotten a regulation-worshiping martinet… or, heaven forbid, someone with political ambitions. A grownup Walker. He gave a mental shudder at the thought.

"Angelica's arithmetic," he said aloud.

The woman beside him touched her gray-streaked brown hair. "Oh, my, yes. The reapers are ready to go-all we lacked was traction. Two horses to each, so with the ones we've already got, that's over seventy-five reapers we can put into the fields. Fifteen acres a day each, say a thousand acres a day all up, that means we can harvest the whole small-grain acreage in less than a week with only a hundred and fifty people. Granted we still have to shock and stook it by hand, and then there's the threshing, but it's still hundreds of people rather than thousands, the way it was last year. Plus we can use horse-drawn cultivators to spare a lot of hoe work done by hand."

"Which frees up people for a lot of other work," Cofflin said. "Not that it took that long even with sickles, but the people had to be here-sort of tied 'em down." He exchanged grins with Angelica. "We could use a lot more livestock like this."

"Oh, my, yes," she said. "Another hundred horses at least, and a couple of hundred cows, more sheep too. As long as we can feed them on salt-marsh hay and fishmeal, they're a perfect way to put humus and minerals in the soil. Virtuous feedback cycle, little fertilizer machines."

"The captain said we'd be bringing back machinery," Hiller said.

"And specialists to handle and repair it," Cofflin agreed.

One of the crew came down the gangplank, duffelbag over her shoulder. It took a second glance before he realized she was a… local, he reminded himself. Quite a nice-looking youngster, apart from a few missing teeth that showed as she glanced around with a dazed grin. A Guard cadet came clattering down behind her, and they walked off hand in hand.

Angelica left too, anxious to shepherd her precious horses out to Brand Farms. Cofflin stood looking after her for a moment.

"I'm worried," he said abruptly.

"Why?" Hiller said. "Everything's going according to plan, so far."

"That's what worries me," he said, and shrugged. "Well, let's get to work."

"Ahhhhhh," the crowd muttered.

Alston nodded and smiled, raising a hand to shade her eyes from the sun. Inwardly she was breathing a long sigh of relief; horses were better, but they were using oxen for this demonstration, because they were so much more common. Evidently they would work, too.

The bright burnished-bronze color of the ripe grain was a pleasure to the eye, she had to admit; field after field of it, across the gently rolling surface of the downs. The reaper rumbled and clanked down the edge of one field, the little red-and-white oxen rolling their eyes and walking at an almost-trot as the driver goaded them. A small girl led the four-ox team, and her mother drove the machine itself-they wanted to show how easy these were to use. The plank-and-wire reel spun like a slow paddle wheel, bending the tall stalks backward. Behind them the serrated edges of the cutting bar hummed, slicing the grain off three inches above the ground; it fell onto the moving canvas platform behind, and the raking attachment let it fall behind in a neat linear row.

A roar went up from the watchers. Two women darted forward and bent over the row, grabbing double handfuls and tying them into sheaves with a twist of the straw. Small children ran back and forth shrieking; crowds of their elders trotted into the field and followed the reaper, making the oxen even more nervous. Alston crossed her fingers behind her back, licking lips salty with sweat and thick with dust- at least the weather had been good, hot cloudless days. Less rare now than up in the twentieth, but still unusual for a warm spell to last so long. A good omen, in its way.

Two older men and a woman, richly dressed, stayed by the clump of Americans and their Fiernan allies; one of the men had a thin-bladed bronze sword like a rapier, and the woman carried a walking staff with a carved owl's head on it.

"You did not lie," the man with the sword said. "One such machine"-he used the English word, horribly mangled-"does the work of twenty."

"Yes," Alston said. "And the ones who work the machine need not be strong or fit."

Abe Lincoln's secret weapon, she thought. McCormick's machines had cut the grain of the Midwest while the farmers' sons were away in the blue-clad legions of Sherman and Grant. Unlike the slaves the Confederates had relied on, a reaping machine wasn't likely to run away.

"And that means"-she switched to English for a moment-"Ian, Doreen, the maps"-then back into Fiernan, with occasional help from Swindapa-"that you can send fighters and grain to the meeting place that the Grandmothers of the Great Wisdom and the Council of the Sacred Truce suggested."

At our strong urging, she added silently. No need to complicate matters, and the Fiernans could be damned touchy if they thought someone was trying to boss them.

The three locals were leaders in this area, or at least as close as the rather anarchic Fiernan Bohulugi got. They looked at each other, and then back at the machine making its way around and around the grainfield, working its way in from the edge. Then the woman looked up at the sky.

"The weather is good," she said. "But you can't count on that."

Everyone there nodded. Bad weather in harvest meant grain that had to be dried over fires, or worse still that went bad in the storage pits. That was why these people nearly killed themselves in harvest time; you had to get the harvest cut as fast as humanly possible.

The man with the sword tugged at his barley-colored mustaches; he had a stubbled chin. The cloth of his tunic was plaid, squares of woad blue and pale yellow.

"I don't… will that machine keep working? What if it falls sick? If our strongest are away, and it sickens, then we lose the harvest and our children starve."

"If the Sun People burn your houses and steal your crops, you'll all die. And we have skilled craftfolk who can tend any hurts the machine takes," she went on. The miracle of interchangeable parts. "They'll show your own people how, too."

The third man rubbed a gold neck ring. "As you say it, these machines need fresh… pieces… every now and then? They wear down, like a knife that's been sharpened often?" Alston nodded. "Then if we use them to harvest, we'll have to buy the pieces of you in future years, even if you give them freely this season."

Damn, got to remember-primitive doesn't mean stupid. At that, the Fiernan were better traders than the charioteers; they didn't think of all trade in terms of gift exchanges, for starters. That was one reason the Tartessians didn't like them. The easterners were easier to trick.

"You can always go back to using sickles, when there's no war," Swindapa pointed out spontaneously.

The gold-decked man laughed; he had a narrow dark face and black eyes. "Water flows uphill faster than people will give up an easier way of doing," he said. "And it'll be, Drauntorn, you're the Spear Chosen-go bargain for us with the Eagle People, so we don't have to break our backs or risk untimely rain. And scowls and black looks and no help for us trading men if we don't, so we'll have to pay even if the price ruins us."

Alston spread her hands. "We're not mean-hearted bargainers," she pointed out. "Ask any of your people who've dealt with us."

"I'm kind to my pigs, too, when I'm fattening them," the man said.

"Would you rather deal with a Sun People war band?"

"Few have come this far west… but no, no, there's wisdom in what you say."

"Many of your people think so," Alston said delicately. "Many are gathering."

Swindapa had suggested the strategy. If a Fiernan community got violently unpopular with its neighbors, they'd steal all its herds, plus withdrawing the day-to-day mutual help that was an essential safeguard against misfortune.

The Arnsteins returned and spread the map on the table. The Fiernans' eyes lit as she explained it; they understood the concept, but it took a while to understand the alien pictographic technique.

"… so this shows your land from above," she said, circling her finger over a map of southwestern England from Hampshire to Cornwall and north to the Cotswolds. "Here is your district. Here is where the host will muster, three days' march. All shown as a bird would see it."

Or it shows things as Andy Toffler sees them on surveying flights with his camera, she added to herself.

Aloud: "From this, and from the… ah, memories… of the Grandmothers, the number of fields and the number of houses and people can be told. To make sure that everyone bears a fair share of the burden of the levy, you understand."

And so nobody can wiggle out.

"Men can walk," the mustachioed Spear Chosen said.

"Cattle and sheep can walk." Both the men looked pained; those were their capital assets. The woman-priestess, Alston supposed-gave them a sardonic sideways glance. "But grain can't walk, and it's hard to haul any distance."

Alston rested one hand on the map and pointed with the other, to the big Conestoga-style wagons the Americans were using; dozens of them had come back with the Eagle, knocked down for reassembly.

"We have better wagons, as well," she said. "Each can haul, ah-" she looked down at a conversion list that translated English measurements into the eight-based local number system and units-"two tons of grain five to eight miles a day." Even over these miserable tracks you people call roads. "We have a machine to do the threshing, too. So you can move both the fighters and their food."

The discussion went on. So did the work in the fields; the Fiernans there were singing as they bound and stocked the sheaves of grain behind the reapers, happy as children on holiday. Alston remembered what her back had felt like after stooping over a sickle for a few days. I know exactly how they feel.

"These Eagle People think of everything," the Spear Chosen with the bronze rapier said, his hand on the bone-and-gold hilt.

Swindapa looked after Marian; she was over by the wagons, taking some message. One of the radios had come with them; she shivered a little. She could understand a lot of what Marian's people did-even a steam engine made sense, once you made a picture in your head of the hot vapors pushing through pipes. No different from boiling water lifting the lid on a pot over the fire, not really. But radios were too much like talking to ghosts.

"They are… forethoughtful, careful, they work very hard to make every small thing happen as they desire," she said. How do you say methodical or systematic? she wondered. That sort of thing happened all the time these days, and it made her head itch inside. You just couldn't say some things she'd learned in her birth tongue.

Swindapa's mother shifted her youngest sister around and began to nurse. The girl fought down a sharp stab of envy, followed by an all-consuming anger. Her own hand clenched on the hilt of her katana. The Iraiina would pay for robbing her of that, pay with pain. Yet if all of them died, it would not be enough.

"They have more things than these machines you've seen," Swindapa's mother went on. "Wonderful things… I've seen the hills of the Moon Itself with their tel-e-sk-opes." Everyone touched brow and heart and genitals in awe.

"And the tools, the weapons and armor, and the cloth, and the ornaments," the dark-haired Spear Chosen said eagerly. "We must have these things! We must find what they want in exchange."

"No," Swindapa said slowly. The others looked at her in surprise. "We must learn how to make these things, for ourselves. Or we would become as little children to the Eagle People forever, without their meaning us any harm."

Slow nods went around the circle.

"Another raid so soonly?" Isketerol said, in English. "Soonish? Nowly?"

"So soon," Walker said, correcting him absently. Odd. He's kept getting better at English… oh, he must speak it with what's-her-name, Rosita.

"Political necessity," he went on in Tartessian, unshipping his binoculars. "Got to keep the tribes thinking about the war, if we're to get the levy together again."

Bastard quieted as he dropped the reins on the horn of his saddle. The shade of the trees overhead was welcome- it'd been getting pretty hot for an English summer, and they'd all been out in it as the war of ambush and border skirmish went on relentlessly. Sweat trickled out of the padding of his armor, and out of the helmet lining, stinging his eyes. It mixed with the heavier smell of Bastard's sweat, the oiled-metal scent of armor, going naturally somehow with the creak of leather and the low chinking of war harness from man and horse alike.

Typical enough, he thought, scanning back and forth across the enemy hamlet. They were up on the downs of what would have become Sussex, just on the edge where the open chalklands gave way to the forested clay soils lower down-New Barn Down, the Ordnance Survey maps called it. The Earth Folk settlement was five round thatched huts inside a rough rectangle of earthwork, two of the walls overlapping to make a sort of gate; a palisade of short poles topped it all around. Square fields and pastures of an acre or so each lay about the steading, fading off into forest on the hills to the north. A rutted track led off that way, through a shallow dry valley between two of the downs. There was something odd, though…

Isketerol spotted it. "They've been beforehand with their harvest," the Tartessian said. He looked up. "It's been hot and dry for this sodden marsh of an island, but it's still early for them to have it all in."

Walker lowered the binoculars and nodded thoughtfully. The grainfields were all reaped stubble, not even any sheaves of grain standing in the fields. Usually the locals left those in little three-sheaf tipis in the fields, so the crop would dry better. He looked through the field glasses again. Yup. Grain stacks inside the wall. Even so… He did a quick mental calculation. Less than there should be, and the harvest had been good this year from all the scout's reports. Maybe they'd rushed it because of the war.

"Yeah, something funny there," he said slowly.

The creaking got a little louder. He looked around; his followers were grinning and sweating with single-minded eagerness. For them it was just another fight, and an easy one with sixty of them in full gear against one little farm hamlet. Plus there were cattle and sheep grazing around the Earth Folk settlement, and he'd found that the Iraiina and their relatives had a peculiar attitude about livestock. Sort of like a yuppie and his Lamborghini, or his car and his bank account put together. Their idea of status was to sit and watch endless herds of their very own cow-beasts driven by: Iraiina used the same word for big herd of cattle and wealth in general. Not entirely unlike the Bitterroot ranchers he'd been raised among.

"All right," he said quietly. "Let's do this by the numbers."

Ohotolarix raised his aurochs-horn trumpet to his lips. It dunted huu-huuu-huuuu through the beeches and oaks, a harsh droning echo. With a crashing and ripping of branches and underbrush, two parties of a dozen men each spurred their horses out and around on either side, heading upslope to cut the Fiernans off from the north. The rest came out of hiding more carefully, forming into a line and trotting forward. Screams sounded from ahead; Fiernan herders tried to get their charges moving north, then saw they'd be cut off and abandoned the animals to run for the settlement. His followers whooped triumph as they rounded up the bawling, baaing livestock and edged it out of the way, back toward the woods.

No horses, he thought. Not much of a surprise; the Earth Folk didn't keep many of them. He swung down out of the saddle and the rest of the band followed, except for a few scouts; youths not ready for full warrior status came forward to hold reins. Make more sense to have the men do that, taking turns. Not possible, though. Honor forbids. He sneered a little. That attitude would have to go eventually, but for now it wasn't worth the trouble of offending their superstitions.

"Let's go," he said, drawing his sword. "No male prisoners." Too much trouble to take back; they were a fair way from home. "Forward!"

The men bayed answer: "Forward with Sky Father! Horned Man with us!"

Hard dusty ground and ankle-length stubble caught at his feet. Shieldmen formed up before and on either side of him, and his bannerman by his side. His head swiveled as he checked. Front rank with shields up-the Fiernans had some pretty good archers, much better than the eastern tribes-and spears bristling. Crossbowmen behind them, with their shields slung over their backs. He frowned as he looked ahead. Those L-shaped entrances could be tricky; you couldn't just hit the wall on either side and storm the gate. All right, we'll hit the outer wall, cross the laneway, and then turn in. He gave orders, and the pace picked up to a trot, his plate armor clattering among the musical chink-chink of the others' chain hauberks. Makes it easy to stay in shape, this does. No more steppercizer.

An arrow wobbled out from the palisade and stood in the dirt. Men barked laughter, and the taut whung of crossbows sounded. They were well within range, and the heavy quarrels would probably go right through the rickety stakes that made up the chest-high defenses; those were as much to keep livestock in as enemies out. Screams of pain confirmed the thought.

Walker paused a half-stride to pull the enemy arrow out of the ground. About thirty inches long, ashwood, fletched with gray goose feathers-fairly standard. The head was not- a narrow steel thing like a miniature cold chisel. His teeth skinned back from his lips. Nantucket-made, to an old pattern. Bodkin point, they'd been called in medieval England.

Arrowheads like that had flown in deadly storms at Crecy and Agincourt.

The first wave of Walkerburg men hit the embankment and scrambled up, chopping the edges of their shields into the turf as they toiled to mount the breast-high earthwork; the others stood close behind and shot over their heads-his men didn't just bull in regardless, he'd gotten that well drilled into them, that winning was more important than showing how brave you were. He hung back himself, watching the action. Walker had proved himself often enough to make that possible, and besides, he was a wizard-halfway to a god, in fact, which exempted him from the usual standards.

"This is too easy," he muttered.

Sections of the palisade were down, ripped aside. His men stood exchanging spearthrusts through the gaps, then began to push through-and none of them were down, that he could see. The second rank were slinging their crossbows, drawing swords, and setting shields on their arms. He signed abruptly to the men around him, and they trotted toward the gate, holding their shields up to protect him. Few arrows flew as they ran, although there was a sharp crack and yelp as a slingstone struck a man on the thigh. He stumbled and limped, but kept walking, which made him lucky-those things could break bone easily enough.

The gate was closed with wattle hurdles, woven stick barriers usually used to pen sheep, reinforced with a two-wheeled cart and some pieces of thorny bush. Walker's eyes narrowed in interest as a thin column of black smoke rose from within the enclosure; that was probably a signal. He noticed something else as someone on the other side of the cart tried to hit him with a flail-a long stick with a short one fastened to it with a leather thong, usually used to beat grain out of the stalk.

Shunngg. The thong parted against the razor-edged katana, and the shorter oak batten went pinwheeling off. His downstroke slashed the wielder across the upper arms as she goggled at him, and the Fiernan fell in a spray of blood that caught him across the face.

Too many women, he thought, spitting out the warm salt-copper taste and wiping a hand across his mouth. Even Iraiina women would fight sometimes when their homes were attacked, and the Earth Folk were less hidebound about things like that. But there should still have been more men behind the barricade, a solid majority at least. Those that were there were too old, or too young, besides being too few.

Conical iron helmets came up behind the Earth Folk, and red-dripping blades. Combat turned into flight and massacre.

"Prisoners!" Walker shouted. "Get me some prisoners!"

He stalked through the chaos, keeping an eye out to make sure nobody got enthusiastic with torches. The black smoke was coming from a small hot fire that had been half doused with damp straw and old woolen rags; he kicked it apart with a boot and stamped on the embers. Isketerol was already busy with a girl, his buttocks pumping like a fiddler's elbow as she screamed and sobbed and writhed- the Tartessian wasn't as bad as Rodriguez, but he did have a severe case of Spanish Toothache nonetheless-while most of the rest were looting by the numbers, the way he'd taught them. He knocked aside one spearshaft poised to run through a screeching five-year-old.

"Nits make lice, lord," the warrior growled.

"The young ones train easier," Walker replied mildly; the man lowered his eyes and shuffled feet. "Get to work."

Something's wrong, he thought again, standing by the big stack of unthreshed grain.

Ohotolarix and another of his Iraiina came up, pushing a woman ahead of them. "Here's your prisoner, lord," they said, grinning; one shoved her forward. She was naked, a big-breasted brunette staring around in near-hysteria. "We didn't even mount her ourselves," Ohotolarix added virtuously.

"You," Walker said, putting the tip of his reddened sword under her chin. She froze at the touch of the sharp wet steel, eyes going even bigger. "Where men? Where of-you men?

She licked her lips and spoke, very carefully. He caught about one word in four; the Earth Folk language was just too damn difficult. The man with Ohotolarix frowned and translated:

"Toward the big… the Great Wisdom, she says, lord." The warrior made a warding sign of the horns, with the index and little finger of his right hand. "The Moon-bitch's place. Evil magic."

A gust of fury filled Walker, like a blinding light behind the eyes. Thoughts strung themselves together, dropping into place. He was suddenly conscious of the woman flopping and gurgling on the ground before him with her throat gashed open, and the two Iraiina staring at him goggle-eyed.

"We don't have much time," he forced himself to say, running his sword through a rag and sheathing it. "Ohotolarix, see to the most portable loot, nothing else-no women, nothing bulky. We leave now. Nothing that can't keep up with the horses. Go, go, go!"

They went, running; it was a big perk of having people think you were supernatural. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell them to turn the cattle loose too, but there were things even Hwalkarz the Wizard had to think twice about.

"What's the matter, blood-brother?" Isketerol said, coming up smiling and adjusting his clothing.

"Look at that," Walker grated in English, pulling a sheaf of wheat from the stack.

"It's just…" The Tartessian's eyes flicked from Walker's face to the grain. "The straw is too long. Why would anyone bend that low to cut grain?"

"No one did," Walker said, remembering the smooth low cut in the fields outside the settlement. "A machine did it. So the fighting men here didn't need to. And if they're gone even from this pissant little place close to the frontier-"

Isketerol's eyes bulged. "The Fiernans could be mobilizing all their fighting men-right now, while we thought they were still working on the harvest!"

Walker turned and walked up to the top of the embankment, facing north, unshipping his binoculars, and looking carefully from horizon in the east to horizon in the west until he caught the blink… blink… from the hilltop two miles away.

"What is that?" the Iberian asked,

"Heliograph. Signals by flashing lights off a mirror in code. With good binoculars, it's almost as fast as radio- and harder to detect." He had a continuous radio watch kept on the equipment Yare had brought over; a bicycle rig for charging batteries had been part of the cargo. "And we, my friend, have been suckered. Let's torch this shitheap and get going. Time to get the army together."

Isketerol nodded thoughtfully. "Perhaps… we should take some, ah, what's the word, precautions!"

Walker nodded. "Just in case."

Andy Toffler swore softly under his breath as he stooped, pushing the goggles up on his forehead. Bad one, he thought. The buildings and grain were all burning, and the raw harsh scent made him cough as he flew through it. Lower, and he could see bodies lying between the burning huts, and more scattered outside the enclosure. Some of them were moving.

"GHU here. Hamlet has definitely been destroyed," he said. "Doesn't look like much is left. Over."

"Central here. Any sign of wheel tracks?"

"That's negative, Central. Ground's too hard anyway. I'm going in."

"Negative on that. Return to base. Over."

"Sorry, transmission breaking up. Over."

He eased the ultralight down, into the stubble field next to the hamlet. The soft balloon wheels touched as he flared the nose up a little, killing speed, and the machine ran itself to a stop in scarcely twelve feet. There was a shotgun in a scabbard on the frame next to his seat. He racked the slide and made his way cautiously toward the fires.

"Damn," he said softly. "Gawd damn."

The first thing he ran into was sheep, savagely hacked and stabbed, as if by someone in a very bad mood. Then people, together as if they'd been herded into a bunch. Women mostly, and some children. A lot of the women lying on their backs naked, with their throats cut, or curled around a spear wound. Toffler swallowed a mouthful of spit and made himself look at the ground. In the stretch about the hamlet's embankment there was sign of horses-dung, and the imprint of a shod hoof where one of them had stepped in it. More bodies just within the wall, these looking as if some of them had gone down fighting. Many of them had Nantucket-style crossbow bolts in them, or the broken stubs, or gaping holes where they'd been cut out for reuse.

"Walker," Toffler said, as if the word made his mouth feel dirty.

The heat within the enclosure was savage, as the wooden frames of the buildings went up. Walls collapsed, and he could hear voices… and there was nothing he could do.

"God damn me if there isn't," he muttered, and turned on his heel.

The track of the cattle was obvious even on this hard ground, pointing southeast toward the lower wooded ground and the river valley. He ran back toward the ultralight and flung himself into the seat, ignoring the faint squawking from the headphones of the radio. The run was downhill and into the wind; the little fabric-and-struts aircraft hurled itself aloft as if angels were pulling on strings from the cloudless sky. Toffler took it recklessly low, the tricycle undercarriage virtually brushing the tops of the big oaks and beeches. He remembered things from his boyhood in the knob country of Kentucky. Driving cattle like that, you'd have to… yes!

A faint track, more like a deer trail than a road-just barely visible through the lush late-summer leaves. They couldn't have gone far, even by the plodding standards of this abortion of an aircraft-oh, God, for his Phantom and a mixed load of snake and nape! Nothing like white phosphorus and napalm for chastising the evildoers. He did have a helmet with a holder for a pair of binoculars. He used it, and blurred closeness appeared.

There. Cattle, and men on horseback, glimpsed in flickering instants through the leaves and branches. He throttled back the engine and pushed up the glasses with a snick, ghosting down through the air as quietly as he could. His left hand held the yoke while his right was busy with the racked glass bombs by his seat, unlatching the safety fastener and making ready. They'd put in some improvements since he flew against the Olmecs, including a friction primer and fins to guide the fall. Plus he'd practiced.

Ahead, the enemy were coming out into a small almost-clearing, littered with the trunks of dead trees and briers, grass, brush-second growth. The herd of small hairy cattle bawled and churned with panic at being driven so fast from their accustomed range, and even expert herdsmen were having their hands full. His eyes flicked back and forth; forty, fifty men, perhaps a few more. No chariots. They were all on horseback, riding with regular saddles and stirrups, leading packhorses as well. All in metal armor… Jesus, maybe that's Walker himself down there!

Ease back on the throttle, engine noise sinking to a low buzzing drone. The ultralight was almost like flying a parachute; when you headed into the wind the stall speed was near zero. Careful. If the wind dies down you could drop like a rock.

Closer, closer, coming down as if he were falling along an inclined plane. A few of the men had time to look up at the last moment.

Snap. The first bomb soared away in an arc, trailing smoke. It shattered a dozen feet up on the trunk of a sapling and fire sprayed in all directions. Horses went berserk, and men tumbled on the ground screaming as clinging flame ran under their armor.

Toffler rammed the throttle home and hauled the nose of the little arrowhead-shaped craft skyward, banking. Sorry about the horses, he thought. This time he came in fast and level, adjusting by eye. Long way from computerized radar bombsights, aren't we.

"Eyee-yeeeeee-fazaaa!" he screamed, a yell his Rebel great-grandfather might have used when he charged behind Nathan Bedford Forrest. "Take that, you motherfuckers!"

Snap. Snap. Snap. More of the bombs tumbled away and slashed knives of flame across the clearing. Cattle scattered into the woods, and horses. Men died, and the brush itself was catching alight. This late in summer it might well turn into a full-fledged forest fire. Then something winked bright at him from the ground.

Pttank!

A hole appeared in the aluminum framing not far from him, with a fleck of sparks that licked his own neck in stinging fire. Hands and feet hit yoke and pedals with automatic skill, and the ultralight jinked from side to side with the agility of a hummingbird. Crack. Crack. Pttank! Another hit, and gasoline was leaking from the tank behind him.

"Uh-oh," he muttered, pushing the throttle forward to the stops. I know what uh-oh means, he thought. Uh-oh means "I fucked up."

Walker fired a last round on the off chance, then lowered the rifle and looked around. A scream died off into a gurgle and then silence as a comrade's knife gave a man burned over half his body the mercy stroke. "How many?" he called. "Let each man answer his name." They did, as horses were caught and brought under control. Three dead, five badly wounded, another half-dozen burned to some degree. And the woods around them were going up… while the men looked at him. The smell of singed hair and burned flesh was heavy, and heat prickled sweat across his skin under the armor.

"That flying thing can kill you, but no deader than a spear," he said quietly. "I warned you that we would be making war against wizards… but my magic drove it off."

"It flew, lord. A great bird, with a man in its talons."

"The man ruled it. I've flown so myself, in the past."

Murmurs of awe. He went on: "Are you men and warriors? Do you fear death because it wears a new face?"

Of course you do, he knew. But they couldn't possibly admit or show it, and that put new strength into them. They might have fled screaming a few minutes before if he hadn't fought back, but now they would be all the fiercer for that moment of weakness.

"Ohotolarix," he said. "Rig horse litters for the ones too badly wounded to walk."

The war band grew busy. Isketerol got his horse under control and led it over.

"That must have been shadowing me all the time I moved against the Eagle," he said bitterly. "That's how they knew my attack was coming. Why haven't they used it to drop death from above before?"

"At a guess, they only have the one. And probably they were saving it for a surprise," Walker said tightly. He clicked the magazine out of the rifle and inserted a fresh one. "It's too low and slow to be a great threat if there's someone with a rifle waiting."

Which means I have to black out Walkerburg against air raids, and keep Cuddy and one of the Garands there. "Oh, but there's payback time coming."

"There he is!"

Swindapa reined in and stood in the stirrups. Beside her Marian lowered her binoculars and passed them across. The Fiernan focused them. Yes, the flying thing had landed, and Toffler lay unmoving in the harness. The air of a summer afternoon enfolded her, warm and sweet with the smells of horse and crushed grass, but she shivered a little.

The party urged their horses into a trot and then a gallop. Even then she enjoyed that a bit; it was like being a bird, flying to the drumbeat of the hooves. The horses blew and stamped as they reined in, and the American physician ran across to the injured man.

"Alive!" he said, and others crowded around to help him lower the man to a blanket. "Cracked rib, hole in his side- lost a lot of blood."

He looked up, hands busy and red. "Who's Type O?" Several hands went up, and one of the volunteers dismounted and lay down beside the injured man, baring her arm. Swindapa looked over at Marian, remembering how they'd been joined that way on Eagle, after the battle with the Jaguar People. The black woman was frowning at the flying thing, leaning close to examine it.

"Thirty ought six," she said. "Or near enough. One of those Garands Walker had with him. Probably him, then. Smith, Valenz, you take six and stay with the medic and Toffler. Message to forward HQ, we need a wagon, a mechanic, spare parts, and reinforcements. The rest of you, follow me."

She drew the pistol at her side. Swindapa brought up the crossbow that hung at her knee, checking to make sure the quarrel was seated properly, and noticed the others doing the same. They spread out into a line across the fields and cantered slowly forward, examining the ground as they went, checking every hollow and patch of trees. In one small copse they found a body, a woman lying facedown in the litter of oak leaves and acorns, not far from a spring that bubbled slowly out of a moss-lined hollow.

Swindapa dismounted. The body was cool but not stiffened, and there was a wound under the ribs, and blood turning black all down the side and flank. Despite the shade, flies were busy already, walking over drying eyeballs and swarming around the rent flesh. She would have been very thirsty, the Fiernan girl thought sadly, with a touch of anger like a bronze gong rung far away. So she was crawling to the water.

She closed the staring eyes, then brought her head up sharply at a sound. A squeaking sort of sound…

"Wait," she said when Marian motioned impatiently. "Wait."

(Casting back and forth, she caught a smell familiar to anyone who'd grown up around infants. She followed it, and another squeaking sound. The baby was swaddled in a pair of wool shawls, hidden in the roots of a half-fallen oak. She opened the bundle, cleaned the infant and her hands with leaves and springwater-it was a girl, she saw- and rewrapped it.

"The mother must have run this far with it," she said to Marian. "It's not hurt, just hungry."

Marian nodded grimly. "You'd better stay here with it, then."

"I will not!" Swindapa said hotly. Then, remembering she was supposed to keep the discipline: "Ma'am."

Marian snorted; the Fiernan could see her smile struggling to break free, and wondered again why she kept the lovely thing caged so often. It should fly like a bright bird.

"All right then," she said. "Let's be on the alert, people."

They rode farther. The low smoldering told them the fire had had its way with the hamlet. Swindapa looked down in bewilderment at the dead sheep; somehow they seemed almost as bad as the people. Ravens rose in a protesting storm of black wings as the horses came near, except for a few too busy with their feasting.

"Why… why kill like this?" she said.

"Because they were interrupted, at a guess," Marian said, her face like something carved from basalt. "That made them angry. Stevenson, Hamid, Cortelone, scout the enclosure. Everyone else, keep your eyes moving."

They did, but nothing moved. Nothing but the wind drifting scraps of bitter smoke across the sun-faded fields, and the grass, and birds and insects. One of the Americans raised his crossbow and shot a raven perched on a body and trying for an eyeball; it died in a spatter of blood and long glossy feathers, and that made her feel worse. The baby fretted.

"Nobody," the Eagle People soldier called Stevenson said, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. "Not even the children. They… put them all in a hut before they…"

Marian nodded. "Let's get going," she said tonelessly. "It's time to put an end to this."

Swindapa let her eyes fall to the wiggling bundle in the crook of her arm. She could scarcely feel the movements, through the armor. Time and past time, she thought, as unshed tears burned her eyes. Then: I'll have to find a nanny goat.

The baby cried, lonely and hurt and alive.

"Another raid, while we wait here," Maltonr raged. "How many struck that place?" Alston asked patiently, looking down over the assembled warriors from her hillside perch. More than I expected. A good four thousand.

"Sixty, from the tracks! It was a slaughter!"

"And… 'dapa?"

The Fiernan hesitated, looked at them both, and then went on reluctantly: "Five warriors are here, from that place."

"Would five warriors have made a difference against sixty armored fighters of Walker's own band?… Well? I asked you a question, Maltonr son of Sinsewid."

"No," he said after a long moment, looking aside. "No, they would not."

"They would have died, Maltonr, died with the rest to no purpose. But this-" She jerked her head toward the assembly. "This can accomplish our purpose and put an end to such things forever. Is that truth?"

"It is truth," he ground out.

"Then let's get on with this."

"Congratulations, Captain," Ian said from her other side. "You've managed to introduce conscription and taxation to the Earth Folk at one fell swoop."

"More like one swell foop," Alston muttered, looking out over the plain. More and more bands of Earth Folk fighters-and would-be fighters-were trickling in. The provisions were coming in, too. "Not really conscription. They're all volunteers."

"Volunteers after you made it plain that the ones who'd joined you would all raid the herds of the ones who hadn't," Ian pointed out. "Thus bankrupting them. All the ones who don't want to go back to farming have to join up."

"Volunteers. And somebody has to feed them. The Grandmothers have always collected this tithe thing."

"For building and maintaining their monuments," he said. "You're handing around the collection plate for the Pentagon. Sorry," he added as she turned to look at him.

The broad-featured black face showed white teeth in a smile. "No offense," she said. Her helmeted head jerked toward the east. "When Walker brings the Sun People at us, they're goin' to come with levies of near every fit man in their tribes. If we don't get some organization into this shambolic crowd, these here'll get ground into hamburger."

"Don't you like my people?" Swindapa said, frowning.

Alston started slightly and turned. " 'Dapa, I like your people very much. They just need to learn some new things, is all." She's been saying things like that too often lately.

Swindapa sighed and looked down from the slight rise. Her expression grew glum. "That is true."

Alston turned again, blinking slightly at the sun that was almost in her eyes. That meant everyone could see her clearly, though. The speech ran through her mind, cobbled together in all-night bull sessions with the Arnsteins, Swindapa, a clutch of Fiernan bards and poets who'd provided local symbolism and would spread it far and wide.

"Warriors of the Spear Mark," she began, raising the microphone to her lips. She waited for the gasps to die down as the amplified sound boomed out. "Friends, allies, Earth Folk-this is your earth. Eastward lies the enemy, those who burn and destroy, those who come to take all the White Isle from you-this sacred isle, this almost-heaven, this village set about with the palisade of the sea against misfortune and the storms of war…"

Half an hour later she licked sweat from her lips, lifting her arms until the rolling cheers died down somewhat, and continued:

"Forward, children of Moon Woman! You fight for your hearths and your families, for the ashes of your ancestors"-luckily the Earth Folk did cremate their dead, which meant she didn't have to find a better metaphor than the author of The Persians-"and the Wisdoms of your faith. Forward! To the fighting! Winner takes all!"

The long slow roar of their voices washed over her like surf. She threw her arms up again in the Fiernan gesture of prayer; and between them was framed the rising moon, just as they'd planned. A growl came from behind the hill, and then Andy Toffler soared over in the repaired ultralight. He'd insisted on flying, and the wound was healing. This time the craft's wings were painted to mimic those of the sacred Owl, messenger and avatar of Moon Woman.

The roar turned to a shuddering mass gasp. "Victory!" she shouted.