On the Oceans of Eternity

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

November, 10 A.E.-Walkeropolis, Kingdom of Great Achaea

October, 10 A.E.-Great River, southern Iberia

"Sam?" Vicki Cofflin said, looking at the Emancipator's navigator. "Any definite idea of where the hell we are?"

"According to my calculations, the Hattusas radio beacon, and plenty of sheer guesswork, about here. Skipper," she replied.

Vicki leaned over her shoulder. Here was somewhere west of Monemavasia, a coastal town that didn't exist except as an Achaean base. Exactly how far west was impossible to say, with the weather like this. That didn't bother her as much as it might have a Lost Geezer; she'd grown up relying on dead reckoning guess-and-God navigation. Still…

"I hate bombing civilians," Vicki Cofflin said quietly.

"Don't we all," the XO of Emancipator replied.

"Even worse, that bastard Walker's not at home." Vicki sighed. "Well, we have to try and take out his factories." Louder: "Helm, come about to two-two-zero."

The dirigible throbbed about them; the crew were muffled in heavy wool trousers and jackets of glazed sheepskin and knitted wool caps. The thin air was damp and chilly, smelling of machine oil and wicker and tanned whale intestine. Into a patch of cloud and they lost starlight and moonlight. Darkness fell inside the craft save for a few faint lights from the instruments; then silvery light flooded them again as they broke free. The patches of clear air were growing fewer and smaller.

"Hell of a tail wind," Alex Stoddard said. His eyes flicked to the instruments. "Better than forty knots-our ground speed must be up around a hundred mph."

Damn, Vicki thought. Too fast for comfort.

It made her nervous, especially with a mountain range nearly eight thousand feet high to the west of the target and another one only a couple of thousand feet lower to the left. She looked down from the commander's seat onto the crumpled, mountain-strewn landscape of southern Greece, then over at the map table.

"Observers to their stations," she said.

Several of the crewfolk scattered, to point binoculars out ports in the wicker sides of the gondola. Waiting stretched; she sipped cocoa from a thermos and monitored pressure, fuel consumption, and ballast status.

"Skipper!" That brought her over to the portside observer. "That's Mount Taygetos!"

She took the binoculars herself. Single sharp triangular peak, knife ridge running north, she quoted to herself. That was it, snow-stark like a single fang pointing skyward through a gap in the clouds. Which meant…

"Goddammit, we're too far north!"

"Wind's rising and the barometer's falling. Skipper," Alex said quietly.

"How do you feel about aborting, and trying to dock at Hattusas, with no proper mooring tower there and fifteen thousand pounds of mixed incendiaries and gunpowder bombs racked at the keel?" she asked.

"Not very good, ma'am," the XO said. His face was underlit by the instruments, turning it half-Satanic as he grinned. "Of course, there's always the miracle of the bombs and the fishes."

Vicki grunted. Damned if I'm going to waste all this ordnance blowing up inoffensive squid and tuna, she decided; the thought offended her thrifty Nantucket soul.

"We'll take her in." A quick mental calculation; the airship was pointed straight for Walkeropolis, but the wind would take them well north of it. "Left fifty, rudder. Engines all ahead full. Altitude control?"

"Eight thousand two hundred seventy feet," came the crisp reply.

The drone of the engines rose to a snarling bellow. The fabric of the ship creaked and bent as the engines pushed it against the wind.

"Prepare to vent. Neutral buoyancy at three thousand feet," she said. "Vent-off superheat!"

"Superheat off-vent!"

The hissing roar of hot exhaust being funneled into the central gasbag cut off. Sharp clicking and groaning sounds followed as it cooled, and then more as hands spun the wheels that opened big flaps on the upper surface of the Emancipator.

There was a faint, edge-of-perception sensation like a descending elevator.

That brought a few silent winces; awfully low, with high winds, in this type of terrain. It was also the only way to get a radius-of-error less than a couple of miles when it came to aiming bombs. Walkeropolis wasn't a completely defenseless target the way Nineveh and Asshur had been, where they could loiter a few hundred feet up in broad daylight. Great Achaea had rockets, upward-firing rifled cannon, barrage balloons; and the Republic had only this one highly explosive airship, plus another knocked down in the holds of the fleet sailing against Tartessos.

"Listen up, people!" she said, a little louder.

That meant everyone could hear her, except the Gatling crew in the observation bubble topside. She pressed the button on the intercom so that they could listen too.

"We're going to make one run, straight in, and bomb whatever we can get over. The crate is going to head for the Goddamned moon when we shed all that weight. Keep your hands on the valve and ballast controls, and keep your ears open for the word."

A murmur, taut readiness. She nodded and kept her eyes and binoculars scanning through the slanted windows to either side of the commander's chair. Black night outside, and the hiss of rain starting to strike the tight doped fabric stretched over the Emancipator's hull.

"Vents closed-neutral buoyancy at three thousand feet."

God-damn this cloud. God-damn me; I could be back in Nantucket Town, making babies and teaching people how to fly ultralights… after this stinking war is over I am definitely going to ask Alex for that date…

"There!" she said, an involuntary exclamation.

Thunder rumbled above them. Lightning glinted off the Eurotas, just like the maps for one bright instant. For a while she'd been afraid they were going to end up in Italy. Or the way this damned gale was blowing, in China.

"Right fifty, helm."

The dirigible's nose turned right in a descending curve that brought her facing north as she fell. The gondola rocked, the craft pitching and rolling a little in the more turbulent air near the surface.

"She's slightly heavy, Skipper."

"That's the rain. On superheat-ten percent ought to do her."

Vicki kept her eye peeled to port, where the tree-clad mountains seemed to reach for her with crooked witch-fingers every time one of the lightning bolts struck. Emancipator was well below the level of the peaks now; she'd have to crane her head to see them. All her attention was focused northward. Walkeropolis didn't have a blackout; but it didn't have electric light, either. Lanterns ought to stand out, or forge-flare from the manufactories.

"Latest report from Meteorology, ma'am-HQ says a major weather system is building up clear from the Pillars to here."

No kidding; black above as a yard up a hog's arse, except for the increasingly frequent flash of lightning, as often horizontal as down to the ground below. She made herself not think about what one of those bolts into an engine or the metallic fasteners of the hull would do. The wind was picking up, too.

"Fire up the searchlight." Alex looked at her. "We'll be bombing blind, otherwise."

He nodded and unstrapped himself, lifting a hatch on the laminated-wood deck. It held a crank, and he worked that to open the doors below and lower the searchlight out into the airstream. An aluminum tube rose as he did so. Into that he thrust a metal rod with a small wheel on the end; there was a chink-chunk: sound as it fit into the sleeve of the universal joint. Forward or back on the rod would turn the searchlight under the gondola's chin up or down; a twist on the wheel to port or starboard.

"Searchlight… on!"

Light glinted up through gaps in the hatchway. Much more poured down on the landscape below. She could see the tops of trees swaying, the slick line of a wet asphalt highway. And… there, ahead and to port! Buildings, a great clump of them. The stubby brick pyramids of blast furnaces against a hillside, and the courtyard-and-siding arrangement of manufacturing plant downslope of them, all neat and tiny like a model on a table.

Easier to think of it as a model, not as homes…

"Horizontal rudder, left ten," she said, her voice smooth and cool and remote. "Engines, ahead three-quarters." The roar of the Cessna pistons muted slightly. Over it, thunder rolled frighteningly close. "Bomb-bay doors open." The airship's ride grew noticeably rougher, as the panels opened and caught the slipstream. "Bomb-aimer, over to you."

"Ma'am," he said calmly, from his prone position behind the command section; he was using a telescope aimed through the keel. "Sir, if you could swing the light to port about fifteen degrees-yes! Right on those buildings-helm, follow that."

"Barrage balloons going up!" the observers called.

Seconds later, the same came through her headphones from the Gatling post topside. Two of the six-barreled weapons pointed out either side of the gondola as well, but they probably wouldn't get close enough to use them. She could see the barrage balloons herself now, and trained her binoculars on them-nothing else to do, unless she intervened to abort the run. They weren't blimp-shaped; more like giant letter A's made of sausages, instead. The armament was topside on a decking of light planks, they and the men who served them tiny and indistinct at this distance. Reports said it was two-pounder rifled guns on pivot mounts-useful in itself, taking up Walker's scarce precision-machining capacity.

The shape of the balloons turned them into the wind as the cables holding them payed out, a harness like a kite's leading to a single thick line on a windlass. That was no calm nosing into a steady breeze, not tonight; they pitched and tossed as they rose, fighting the ropes that held them. The buffeting the Emancipator was taking was bad enough; what it was like on those bare open decks, lashed by rain and lit by lightning, she hated to imagine. Particularly to a local, unused to the whole concept of flight except as something the Gods did.

Brave men, she thought unwillingly. It would be an easier world if all the villains were cowards, but nobody who'd seen Assyrians in operation would think that.

Little red lights began to snap at her from the ground as well, like malignant winks. More light cannon in counter-weighted cradles; swing the muzzle down, ram a shell down the barrel, swing it up, and fire. Her grandfather had flown B-17s over the Ruhr, and a Flying Fortress would have laughed at such antiaircraft fire. So would her great-grandfather's Sopwith Camel. Neither of those craft were five-hundred-odd feet long, or flying at less than a mile up at fifty miles an hour, or hanging under hundreds of thousands of square feet of explosive gas.

Searchlights lit on the ground as well. They were yellower than her ten-thousand-candlepower electric pre-Event model; probably burning lime in a stream of gas, in front of a mirror. Still capable of spiking her for the absurd muzzle-loading flak, though. And rockets were rising as well, glorified Fourth-of-July models, but they didn't have far to rise, either.

"Coming up on target," the bomb-aimer said.

Something burst with a red snap not too far away. Crewfolk scrambled up the ladders into the hull to rind and patch leaks in the gasbags.

"Preparing to release bombs," the man's voice said.

And the Gatling crew screamed in her ears through the headphones: "Jesus Christ they've got rocket pods on the balloons!" The ripping-canvas sound of the machine gun came in the same instant.

Yield's head came up with a snap. Her mouth opened to give an order, and then the sky to their right lit up. In that light she could see what was on the balloon's upper decking; long bundles of tubes on simple pintle mounts. Flame washed out behind the tubes, and ahead of them as the warheads raced at her.

"Valve crew, stand fast," she said. The last thing in the world they needed right now was a flood of hydrogen above the hull.

"Release bombs!" she went on, keeping her voice from rising with an effort of will that made sweat stand out on her immobile face. "Charlie, now!"

The Emancipator began to leap and shudder as the finned steel eggs nestled in her lower cargo compartments streamed down. At the same instant a dozen tracks of fire raced through the space she had occupied instants earlier. By some malign freak of ballistics, one rocket intersected the trajectory of a bomb at precisely the wrong moment. The explosion heaved the Emancipator upward and pitched her nose-down at the same instant, throwing everyone not strapped in flying; Vicki could hear frames cracking in the hull, and bracers along the wall of the gondola.

The rest of the rockets burst soon after, forlorn fireworks in the rainy darkness of the storm. But something also thudded into the airship, pitching her to the side with a sharp motion totally unlike the battering of the winds. Something else burst right in front of Vicki's station, and she flung up her arms to shield her face.

Another red flare, and stinging pain in her arms and chest and in her forehead. It was too dark; she pawed at her eyes and cheeks, and wiped the blood away. Rain and wind battered at her through the shattered windows. They roared, too, but not too much for her to hear:

"Fire in the hull! Fire at Ring Frame A7! Fire!"

Fire hissed through her. The worst nightmare of anyone who flew these motorized balloons. Fire below, too, as the footprint of the Emancipator's bombs slashed across the landscape. More fire in the sky, as the burning barrage balloon pitched sideways, falling in a graceful arc as its gasbags burst, ignited by the backblast of its own weapons. Most of the airship's crew still standing hurled themselves up the ladders into the hull, in trained damage-control reflex, snatching Nantucket's hoarded store of fire extinguishers as they went. Nothing else mattered if the dirigible was reduced to an exploding smear across the sky of Walkeropolis.

"One and Three portside engines down!"

Vicki scrabbled clumsily at the release of her harness. "Oh, Jesus," she heard herself saying, as the ground fell away and the airship leaped upward, freed of the weight of its deadly cargo.

The slopes of Taygetos were rushing at them, faster and faster as the upper-level winds caught them and the unbalanced force of the engines slewed the Emancipator around toward them.

"Helm, left full rudder! Shut down starboard One and Three! Up elevators!"

"Ma'am, she won't answer! Horizontal attitude controls are jammed!"

Vicki Cofflin wiped the sopping sleeve of her jacket over her face again, trying to get the flowing blood out of her eyes.

"Valve ballast-emergency dump," she called. "All engines ninety degrees."

The problem with that was that most of the hands were up above. She and Alex and the helm crew rushed backward along the long gondola, heaving at the control wheels that turned the engine pods and the propellers downward, at the release levers that opened the stopcocks and let the water from the keel tanks stream out. It went with a rumbling rush that she could feel even now, but it wasn't going to be enough.

"Hold on all!" she shouted to be heard over the rain coming through the broken prow. "I'm going to drop the emergency ballast!"

The Emancipator was nose-up-the vertical controls were still working. All that meant was that she'd hit the mountainside keel-forward. And it made her journey back to the captain's position a climb; she ripped the wire cage off the button and hit with a reaching palm.

There was a shark kerak… kerack… kerack as the explosive bolts released cast-iron weights fastened into the keel. They tumbled free, and the airship leaped like a goosed kangaroo.

Vicki Cofflin had one final glimpse of the onrushing cliff face.

Blackness.

The horse snorted and shied beneath Marian Alston-Kurlelo at the sound of a bicycle bell, moving sideways in a crablike skitter. King Isketerol had proved ready to receive a diplomatic mission, but he'd insisted on a place in the no-man's-land between the Islander base at the site of Cadiz and his own outposts, a day's travel northward.

She controlled her mount with the absentminded skill of someone who'd spent a lot of the last ten years in the saddle. The horses she and Swindapa rode were local, part of the herd they'd requisitioned from villages near their landfall at Cadiz Base over the past two weeks, and still uncertain about their new owners. The standard-bearer with the Stars and Stripes flying above a white truce-pennant was mounted likewise, for dignity's sake, and the westering sun gilded the eagle at the top of the staff afresh. Hooves clopped hollow on the hard surface, and wheels moved with a whine and crunch; the flag snapped and fluttered in the onshore breeze.

The platoon behind her were on the cycles, pre-Event ten-speed models refitted for current conditions, and a four-seater side-by-side hauling a Gatling; the Guard had requisitioned nearly every cycle on Nantucket for this expedition, giving money, apologies, and the heavier, clunkier output of Seahaven in recompense. The highway they were following ran northwest from the Cadiz area along the shore of a great inlet-what had been solid ground and marsh at the mouth of the Guadalquivir in the twentieth was open water here. A rough rectangle of sea stretched in from the coast for miles, almost to the edge of the chalk hills that had been the heart of the sherry country in Marian's birth-century.

They would eventually wear out the horses; even with solid tires cyclists covered ground six times faster than troops on foot, especially with good roads.

And these roads are excellent, she thought. I wonder if Isketerol has thought through all the implications of that?

The one they followed was twenty-five feet broad, with a topping of neatly cambered crushed limestone pounded to a hard smooth surface, graveled shoulders, deep flanking ditches… what the English of the Regency era would have called a MacAdamized turnpike. There were even young trees planted on either side, to grow and eventually shade travelers.

Hate to think of the labor this must have taken, she thought.

The day was hot enough to send trickles of sweat down her flanks under the blue uniform jacket despite the cool breeze from the water and the lingering freshness of this morning's rainfall; summer here must be like being on an anvil under the hammer of the sun. There was a scattering of clouds, growing thicker since noon, gilded now in the west where they piled mountain high above the flat horizon; she thought it would probably rain again soon. Fall and winter were the wet season here, the time of growth and life that ended as late spring faded into the dry death of summer, more or less the opposite of Alba or Nantucket.

To their left stretched the bay, green and blue and scattered whitecaps, shallowing off into a marsh of cattails and reeds close to shore. It was thick and clamorous with birds, shocking-pink flamingos and white spoonbills, greylag geese and wigeon, black-wing stilts wading about on their absurd spindly legs, redshanks dipping their long bills for shellfish and insect "larvae, although they hadn't gotten ahead of the mosquitoes, from the clouds that buzzed about. The yeasty, silty smell of marshland contrasted with the dryer scents of thyme and lavender and spice baked out of the high ground.

Out in the deeper water a column of black smoke came from the stack of a steamboat, one of the half dozen they'd brought in knocked-down form from Nantucket and assembled at Cadiz. The engine was the simple grasshopper-type that Seahaven had built for tugboats since right after the Event, its chufff… chufff… floating clear over the mile or so of water. The hull was a sixty-foot oval, shallow-draft; armament was two Gat-lings, one on each wing of the bridge, a light three-inch rifled shell-gun forward, and a four-inch mortar on the afterdeck. For riverine and coastal work they'd proved extremely useful, and they could tow barges full of troops and supplies as well. An ultralight buzzed overhead, high enough that it was a dot of color against blue sky and white cloud.

On the right and ahead was what she'd come to think of as typical Tartessian countryside. Gently rolling right here, which was what it did everywhere it wasn't flat altogether; the mountains of the Sierra de Grazalema were just in sight to the east, and the great range of the Sierra Morena was far to the north, beyond the Guadalquivir.

Not quite forest just yet, except on some of the occasional hills; more of an open parkland with thickets and copses here and there. Near Cadiz-that-wasn't the sandy beaches were flanked by woods of resin-smelling pine; here it was oaks, cork oak and holm oak and varieties she couldn't name, clumps of gray-green wild olives, all scattered in tall golden grass with the green shoots of new growth pushing up through the natural hay. Patches that had burned off in the dry season were even more vividly green. They'd seen many herds of deer, several of them with scores of individuals, hundreds in all during the day's ride. Plus several big brown bears, a distant glimpse of wolves looking curiously back from a ridgeline, a sure-enough group of wisent, European bison, and black, bristling-fierce wild boar out grazing on fallen acorns. Cattle and horses the locals hadn't had time to drive off, too, and…

From somewhere ahead a deep grunting, coughing sound came: uuuh-ooongh, uuuh-ooongh, repeated again and again, then building up into a shattering roar. The horses shied again, laying their ears back and rolling bulging eyes, fighting the reins. Their nostrils flared wide and red; they chewed their bits, slobbering foam that dripped on the ground.

"What the hell is that?" asked one of the Marines nervously, his hand going to the butt of the rifle slung across his back.

"Silence in the ranks!" Lieutenant Ritter barked, and glanced at the commodore.

"It's a lion, Lieutenant," Alston said, keeping her face straight with long-practiced ease.

There were still some in southern Europe in this era, from Iberia to Greece; it was the demands of the Roman arena that had finally wiped them out, in the other history. A lot harder on the lions than the Christians, in the end. Leopards, too…

She went on: "And I think that remark translates into English roughly as: Mine! All mine!"

Ritter blushed involuntarily-noticeable amid the thick scattered freckles, the same brick-red color as her hair-and smiled worshipfully. Alston hid her sigh, too, as Swindapa looked over at her with one gently mocking eyebrow raised slightly over the remains of a beautiful shiner, all that was left of her collision with the flat side of a rifle butt.

Higamous hogamous, woman monogamous, the black woman thought wryly. Years of involuntary celibacy before the Event, and now if I wasn't extremely partnered and it weren't against regs, I could cut quite a swath.

The problem was she'd never really had aspirations that way-the usual fruitless search for True Love had been more her style before the Event, although what she'd have done if she found it back then was a mystery considering the knuckle-dragging barbarism of the old UCMJ on the matter. Earlier, she'd even spent years trying to convince herself she was in love with a man rather than admit failure in a relationship.

The corner of her mouth hiked up slightly, as she remembered a joke she'd heard in San Francisco, when she was stationed there half a decade before the Event: "What do lesbians drive on their second date?" Answer: "A moving van."

Although that's not an invariable rule. I've known some who were complete bedhopping sluts who lost all interest the second or third time they got into your pants-Jolene, for one…

She choked off the memory of the affair that had led to her divorce, nearly wrecked her career, and certainly cost her custody of the two children she'd borne. It didn't take much effort; time and Swindapa, and Heather and Lucy, had buried that old bitterness; she could smile at the memory now.

Well, it was stupid getting involved with a professor of Women's Studies at Berkeley, anyway. Regardless of other circumstances, when someone says things like disenchanting the hegemonic discourse of compulsory heterosexism with a straight face, and on a date at that, you should know it can only end in tears.

Another sound came from their right. A bellow, thunder-loud, echoing across the landscape and throwing birds skyward in flocks like beaded smoke rising from tree and marsh. Again and again, a hoarse arrogant strutting proclamation to all the world.

"That's an aurochs," Swindapa said. "And it translates into English as: This ground is yours, you mangy alley cat? Says who? You and whose army?"

A herd of the wild cattle came over a rise. Alston brought out her binoculars to look at them; huge rangy beasts, like Texas longhorns crossed with rhinos, or Spanish fighting bulls on steroids; they were black, with long tapering horns turning to put the points forward above their eyes. If those were the originals of domestic cattle, she seriously wondered how Here-fords and Jerseys had ever been produced; at the shoulder the bull stood four inches taller than the top of her head, and when he lowered his horns and tossed them high bushes went flying.

"Steady, all," she said. "Just keep moving, and don't rile him up. Scatter out of the way if they charge."

Because in a butting match between that and a bulldozer, I'd bet on the bovine. The herd had several young calves with it, and that and the lion's territorial announcement would make them skittish. Alston had learned their bad tempers and hair-trigger readiness to charge anything on earth firsthand in Alba and expeditions to mainland Europe.

At least in open country like this you can see them coming.

They pressed north, and the land became slightly flatter, more closely grazed; they saw cattle and sheep under the eye of mounted herdsmen, and pigs barely distinguishable from their wild cousins. At last they came to wooden fences stretching out of sight northward and to the water on the south. A tall stone pillar stood by the side of the road, crudely carved at the top in the image of a woman's face with stylized representations of breasts and a vulva below. Swindapa reined in her horse and read the lettering around the base slowly; she could speak Tartessian well, and the spelling was in the Latin alphabet and reasonably phonetic:

"Land sacred to the Lady of Tartessos and the Grain Goddess," she recited. "Let no man harm or diminish it, or let his stock or flock do so, on pain of the Cold Curse and the anger of the King."

At Alston's look, she explained: "The Cold Curse-a cold hearth and a cold womb and cold loins for all around it." A frown of puzzlement. "That's odd-the Earth Folk have that curse too… this must be the edge of the territory of that village the herald mentioned."

Marian Alston nodded and signaled the party forward; normally there would be guardians to keep animals out, as well. Her eyes took in the cultivated fields on either side in expert appraisal; estimating an enemy's food-producing capacity was an important part of war, in any era. The plowlands and plantations sent her eyebrows up. The olive orchards were all new, just coming into bearing; before the Event, the Tartessians simply grafted wild trees, more than enough for their limited needs. The grain was planted in large fields, ten or twenty acres each, larger than any whole farm hereabouts until recently, divided by lanes of graded dirt scattered with gravel. And the wheat and barley in them had obviously been planted with a seed-drill; that was easy to see, since the shoots were only just starting to show across the rich dark-brown earth in neat rows. Some scattered oaks had been left in the fields and young cypress trees edged many of the fields, standing like tall green candles drawing a rectilinear pattern across the land.

Mmmm-hmmm. They're using disc plows, from the look of it-six-furrow type. There were harvested fields of corn- maize-as well, chick-peas, lucerne, sunflowers, and-

"Halt," she said, and heeled her horse aside, over the ditch and up to the edge of the post-and-rail fence. "Cotton, by God!" Well picked-over, too. Nobody had raised cotton in the Sea Islands since long before her birth, but she'd seen it growing, visiting relatives up-country as a child, and since the Event in the Olmec country and Peru. This field had furrows running between the rows and cracked mud showed where water had run; there was a brick-lined irrigation ditch beyond, led in from some west-flowing stream.

A scattering of houses stood off by themselves amid the fields or nearer the road. Many were mere tents of brushwood and reed, evidently the traditional farmer's housing here. There were others made of adobe brick, rectangular and roofed in tile, all looking new, surrounded by young orchards of apricot, peach, orange, lemon, and fig. Each of the smaller buildings had an outhouse standing behind. Such a minor thing, but important.

One imposing structure was large enough to be called a mansion, foursquare and massive on a low hilltop in the middle distance, whitewashed, with a tower at one corner, looking for all the world like a Mexican hacienda, down to the row of rammed-earth cottages outside.

Leveling her binoculars she could see that the walls of the big building on its hilltop were black with the heads of people peering over, probably all the folk of the countryside round about, gathered for what protection they could find at the manor of the local aristocrat. Mmmm-hmmm. Loopholes for small arms, looks like a light swivel gun in that tower, dry moat. Though… mmmm-hmmm, those adobe walls would turn to powder under any sort of cannonade. No doubt King Isketerol wanted his local lordlings armed to stand off pirates or barbarian raiders, but not enough to get notions about independence, or potshotting royal tax collectors.

"Forward," she said.

"Walk-march… walk."

The little village at the center of the cultivation looked to be entirely post-Event, bowered in olive groves and orchards and sitting on a slight rise. Ritter halted the truce party well short of it.

"Squads one and three dismount," the lieutenant said, her eyes darting about for hidden assassins and ambushes. "Sergeant, check it out."

"Ma'am!" the noncom said, and barked orders of his own.

Marines fanned out to search, then waved the rest on when they found no human presence. It was eerily quiet with all the dwellers gone, a shutter flapping, a dog loping off as they entered, a few chickens picking through the dirt with idiot calm- and then she remembered that chickens would be a new thing here, too. In the first history they hadn't gotten this far until the Iron Age…

The buildings were all adobe and tile-roofed, many gaudily painted on wall and door and shutter, set well back from the road and the secondary street that ran down to an inlet of the bay and a dock. Trees shaded the houses and walled gardens surrounded them, well watered from channels in tile-lined gutters beside the streets. There were flowers as well as vegetables and herbs, she noticed with interest-roses, cannas, bougainvillea. The big wind pump filling an earthen water tank at the edge of town was a straight copy of one of Leaton's models, with laminated wood vanes that could be turned in sections to feather them in storms.

Larger buildings surrounded a square. One had tall wooden pillars brightly painted, carved in the shape ‹?f a three-legged, one-eyed monster, an armored man set about with weapons and chariot wheels all topped by a golden disk, a woman holding a sheaf of grain and another whose legs were a fish-tail, a bit like a mermaid… although unlike conventional Western representations, the wood-carver had equipped her to do more than tantalize a sailorman. Hooves clattered on rock, for the square was paved with neatly fitted blocks of pale stone in a herringbone pattern.

Beside the fountain in the center was a stone pillar with a bronze plaque attached, rather like the historical markers you saw by the roadside sometimes before the Event.

"It's the King's Laws, according to this," Swindapa said, leaning down to read. "Mmmm… all free children to attend the Place of the New Learning four days in eight except in harvest season, every family to contribute food and cloth for the teacher in rotation…"

Alston looked around. Yes, one of the buildings had the look of a schoolhouse, long and rectangular; she heeled her mount over and sheltered her eyes with her hand to peer through thick wavy window glass. She saw rows of benches within, and a large slate blackboard; times-table in Arabic numerals on one wall, a big map of some sort on another, and a print of King Isketerol's face hanging over a teacher's table at the front.

Swindapa was still reading: "… then there's the Great Taboo of Shit Avoidance-that's what it says, I swear, and a good many others. Everyone to wash with zapotlkez… soap? It looks like a sort of combination of public-hygiene notice and list of… well, there's stuff about farming-nobody to grow grain for more than two years in the same field before sowing it to fodder crops-money to be accepted for all debts, each household's public work on the roads and irrigation canals-taxes, the King's Fifth, what can be paid in kind and what in cash… all the Laws to be read out to the assembled people once in every moon-turning."

The Republic's commander nodded. Well, he can't explain everything, I suppose. The Nantucketers had used persuasion and example in Alba; with fewer teachers and more power, Isketerol seemed to be relying more on rote-learning.

One of the buildings off the square was a smithy, well equipped with a selection of cast-iron anvils, two hearths with piston bellows and a wallful of tools, from pincers to rasps. Even a grindstone and a simple lathe powered by foot-cranks… Bins outside held coal-coke as well as charcoal.

And those rafters were cut in a sawmill-probably floated down the Guadalquivir… machine-drawn nails, too. Mmmm-hmmmm.

Next to it was a warehouselike affair; Swindapa read the sign over the doors: "Depot of Things for Households: Let Any Who Will Buy Tools From the King on Credit."

The radio handset in Alston's saddlebags hissed and popped. She took it out, looking up reflexively for the butterfly shape of the ultralight. "Commodore Alston heah."

"Commodore, this is Scout Flight One Niner. The Tartessians under the flag of truce are approaching from the north. Thirty-one in the party as per agreement, all mounted."

"Carry on, pilot," Alston said.

She and Swindapa and the standard-bearer remained mounted, but the Marines put their bicycles on the kickstands and formed up in a rank; the Gatling crew unhitched their weapon and swung it 'round. Lieutenant Ritter reached over her shoulder and proudly drew her new officer's katana.

"Fix… bayonets."

Hands flashed down to the left hip and the twenty-inch blades flashed free, rattling as they were clipped onto the Werders.

"Shoulder… arms."

The Marines stood like khaki statues, an image a little spoiled by the peeling sunburns many of them sported. That had been one reason she wanted a fall-winter campaign; with a force made up of people from cool misty northern islands, the relatively mild and cloudy season promised less in the way of heatstroke.

That's an irony, if you like, she thought, flexing a hand on the pommel of her saddle and looking at the natural UV protection of her eggplant-colored skin.

Still, this was the best season to fight here. Summer made water scarce in these hot lowlands and likely to be bad, and sharply cut into the fodder for draught animals. The Tartessian flintlocks were temperamental beasts that didn't like the damp, too; that had worked powerfully in the Nantucketers' favor during the spring invasion.

The clatter of hooves and a low cloud of dust came down the highway from the north. Alston soothed her mount with a hand on its neck and gathered the reins a bit as well. The colors of brightly dyed cloth and polished metal came into view next, westering sun winking blinding off edged metal; then figures became distinct, mounted men…

And one woman, she thought, slightly surprised; even more so when she saw it was Rosita Menendez… well, nee Menendez, she corrected herself.

That identification took a little doing, when her hair was coiled around her ears in circles bound with silver and turquoise, topped by a flat-topped headdress of silk a little like a wimple. Square fringed earrings, rings, belt flashing with golden studs; otherwise, her clothing was a practical-enough affair of long split tunic and loose trousers.

Isketerol rode beside her, in a polished gilded helmet with purple-dyed ostrich-feather plumes at the front, saffron tunic, gold disk across his chest supported by tooled-leather straps, silver-and-leather bracers on his wrists, jewel-hiked sword… and a very practical-looking revolver. He must be in his early forties now but looked ageless; still lithe and hard-muscled, but with deeper lines grooved into his face from nose to mouth. Menendez had put on some weight, in a solid matronly way.

The Tartessian troops carried rifles… Yes, that's Walker's imitation of the Werder. They couldn't have all that many of them, either. Most of the weapons captured after the sea fight had been copies of the older Westley-Richards flintlock. If he had more of those, he'd have used them.

Isketerol's standard-bearer and a herald rode ahead, drawing rein in the square a half dozen yards from her position. The herald had a curled trumpet over his shoulder, sunlight turning the polished metal to gold; he brought the mouthpiece to his lips and blew, a long harsh brass scream, and then shouted in Tartessian:

"The King comes! King Isketerol, Bridegroom of the Lady of Tartessos and the Grain Goddess, Embodiment of the Sun Lord, Lord of the Cold Mountains and the Hot and all between, Sea-King by favor of Arucuttag Lord of Waves. Who comes to treat with the Great King, the King who admits no rival or equal within the boundaries of his power?"

Alston listened to Swindapa's murmured translation, then nodded imperceptibly, sitting with her back straight, reins in her left hand and right on the butt of her Python. The younger woman heeled heir horse a few steps forward and called out in the local tongue, its harsh buzzing softened by her Fiernan accent-Tartessian and the language of the Fiernan Bohulugi were distantly related, but they sounded no more alike than, say, Swedish and Hindustani, which were similarly linked.

"Commodore Marian Alston, Founding Councilor, Nantucket’s Councilor for War…" She paused and added the proudest title of all, with a slight deliberate emphasis. "Citizen of the Republic of Nantiacket, comes to treat with King Isketerol."

Isketerol's hard hawklike olive-brown face showed a slight smile. When he spoke, his English was harshly accented but fluent, much morte fluent than it had been the last time she spoke to him in person-that was more than nine years ago, when he'd been on Nantucket, before he helped Walker hijack the Yare.

Ah, she thought. He must speak it with Menendez, and there are a few other Islanders… ex-Islanders… here, too. Smart of him to work at achieving full fluency. Reading the books that had been part of Yare's cargo, and ones he'd bought openly since, had 'doubtless helped as well. He'd also acquired a very slight Puerto Rican-Hispanic accent from his American wife, which was am irony, if you thought about it. As far as looks went, he could have been a brother of Victor Ortiz…

"Now that we have made the… you say… necessary gestures, shall we speak?" he asked.

"Yes," Alston said, surprised to feel a wry respect. Well, he's a pirate… but hie wasn't raised to know better.

The leaders and. their companions swung down from the saddle, handed the reins to attendants, walked a little aside. Isketerol looked up at the ultralight, westward to where the steam gunboat waited o›n the blue-and-cream waters of the gulf, pitching slightly with her head into the wind and paddles turning just enough to› keep her so. They sent a white froth down her sides as well, and coal smoke rose night-black against the crimson disk of the setting sun.

"A not bad time to end the war, from your point of… perspective? View? To ah, quit while you are ahead," Isketerol said.

"We're prepared to end it, on terms," Alston said. She nodded to the flag with the truce-banner below it, her face like a mask of obsidian. "Our terms. And once made, we'll keep them. The Republic's word is good."

Isketerol nodded; the Islanders had a carefully maintained reputation of driving a hard bargain and then respecting it meticulously.

"Yes," he said. "That simplifies negotiations." A white smile, and he took off the helmet, showing a few silver hairs in the bowl-cut blue-black mane. He tossed his hair to let air blow through the sweat-wet thickness. "Unless you are waiting for the time when it really pays to lie."

Alston shrugged. "That's an argument without an answer," she said. "But think about this, King Isketerol of Tartessos, how far can you trust Walker's word? Did he give you every assistance he could? How hard would he fight for you, if he didn't stand to benefit by it?"

The olive face stayed imperturbable, but she caught a slight flare of the nostrils. Isketerol would make a good poker player, though. His fingers did not clench on the gilded helmet they were turning idly.

"He gave me enough help to become King and conquer an… empire, that's the term. And we have an alliance, and my word is good. You have won a battle, yes. You have not won a war, not against my kingdom. Still, you have won a battle. My word is this; if you will return home and trouble us no more, I will agree to the…" He turned and murmured in Rosita's ear and nodded at her reply. "To, you say, the status quo. Yes, things as they were before this war. Those are the terms of the King."

Alston put her fists on her hips and slowly shook her head. "Return to your closing the Straits against our ships, skirmishing with us and then calling it overzealous private actions by your captains, to your helping Walker? After you invaded our country last spring for no better reason than you wanted to take it? I don't think so."

"If you fight Walker in the east without passing through my waters, traveling around Africa and through the Gulf as your other expeditions have, I will not interfere," he said. "That much I can in honor say. No more. I will not turn on a guest-friend and blood brother who helped put me on my throne, simply because it would spare me effort and expense. And if you destroy King Walker, what check will there be on your power? How do I know you will not turn on me, next? Already you claim half the world and say we may trade and settle only in those scraps you deign to allow us."

"Do you doubt that Walker would turn on you, without us to worry about? Does your honor require that you see all that you've built up"-she waved about-"cast down?"

Isketerol's eyes narrowed. "You have not the strength to conquer Tartessos," he said. "I hold far more land than your Republic does in fact, claims of just nothing but words aside, and I have twenty times more people. I can afford to lose battles-you cannot. Great kingdoms are not overthrown in a single fight."

Well, he's grasped that principle, Alston thought. Wordlessly she pointed to the ultralight, to the gunboat. Isketerol shrugged.

"Yes, you have better weapons," he admitted. "But I have more weapons, many more. If they are not as fine as yours, still they are not spears and bows. We destroyed one of your great ships in the battle."

"You lost a dozen."

"I can spare a dozen, build anew, and find new crews; you cannot. If we fight and I hurt you one-tenth as much as you hurt me, I win. And you are few, and far from home, and cannot call fresh armies to you." Another shrug. "There are not enough of you to conquer Tartessos."

"Perhaps not. But there are enough of us to destroy the Tartessos you have made, I think." She went on: "Tell me, King Isketerol, do the words command and control decision loop mean anything to you?"

Narrow-eyed, Isketerol shook his head. Rosita Menendez frowned, as if something was tugging at her memory, then shrugged. Alston's face remained a basalt mask, but inwardly something bared its teeth. Walker would have known-would have understood the importance of forces being able to transmit information faster, and act on it more rapidly. He was a product of Western civilization and its military-technic tradition.

Isketerol wasn't.

Yes, Isketerol's smart. He's a genius, I think. But he'd grown to adulthood in this world. Doubtless he'd learned a great deal from the books. It would still be filtered through the worldview built into the structure of his mind from childhood. Doubtless he'd learned a good deal from Walker, and Rosita, too, but the one would be careful not to teach too much and the other wasn't particularly intelligent or well educated…

Snidely, to herself: And Rosita was a really close friend of Alice Hong, which says something about her standards of taste and judgment.

"Why do I have a feeling," Isketerol said, an edge of whimsy in his voice, "that what you just asked me was like one of those oracles that only make sense after the disaster has happened?"

Got to be careful not to underestimate him, though. Slowly and deliberately she smiled, spread her hands.

He sighed. "Well, then, what are your terms for ending this war? I might pay…" He turned to the interpreters and fell into Tartessian. Swindapa supplied the word: she'd had ten years with Marian Alston and her tastes in reading matter.

"… weregild for the invasion last spring, yes, blood price. Beyond that I cannot go, without violating my oaths to Walker or my duty to my folk. So, what does Cofflin offer me, in return for ending this struggle?"

Alston began to tick off points. "First, you must pay, as you said, damages-partly in cash, and partly in supplies." She held up a hand. "Not guns or powder to be used against Walker, no."

"No, food and cordage and timber that will free your shipping space for guns and powder," Isketerol said dryly.

"Of course. Next, you must be neutral in this war-and to guarantee that, disarm your war fleet and give us hostages. You must give us bases-the island my fleet's on now, the Rock of Gibraltar, and another south across the Pillars. And you must swear that in future…" She pulled up a phrase Swindapa had suggested, as more like the Tartessian equivalent than noninterference in our sphere of influence "… that in future you will keep your spoon out of our stewpot."

The Iberian's smile was unpleasant, and a dark flush had risen under his tan. "The world is to be yours, then; but of your gracious favor, you will allow us to keep our own homes… or most of them. What, do you not demand also that we free all our slaves and adopt… what's the word… an equal rights amendment and universal suffrage? As if we were naughty children who piddled on the floor, to be spanked and taught better."

"I'd like to demand just that," she said frankly; and saw him blink and nod.

This was a man who appreciated hearing what you thought, not soul-butter. Although how long will that last, Isketerol-me-lad, if this absolute monarchy you're setting up continues? She went on aloud:

"But I don't set policy, I just carry it out. First, it's not within our power to force those reforms on you. We couldn't make you want those things-you in the plural, your people-and it would be pointless if you didn't. By offending your people's pride, we'd make them more likely to move in the opposite direction, in fact. Second, while we may use our power for that sort of thing where we have it, we don't go a-conquering just so we can spread enlightenment. We certainly couldn't hold down Tartessos tightly enough to redo your… customs… without an effort which would destroy us. No, what I listed is the whole of our terms. Our terms now."

"Meaning they'll get worse, if you win," Isketerol said tightly. "So will mine, once you've broken your teeth on our defense." A pause, and he seemed to push away anger with an exhalation of breath. "The old King, the one I cast down and slew, he was my kinsman.

"Yes," he went on frankly, "I wanted the Throne for the glory and power and wealth. Yes, also to hand that down to my own sons and bloodline. But also, I struck for my people- for their glory and power, for the heritage of their sons, and the sons of their sons, that our tongue and Gods and customs would not go down into dust and be less than dust as I read on Nantucket all those years ago. Your books could not say if we even existed at all! Then I wept and raged at the Gods; yet later I came to see that this was the gift that the Gods had given me, a glimpse of a different course to be steered through the oceans of eternity. And since then I have worked and planned and fought to turn the helm thus. It was not to make my folk clients of yours that I struck that good old man down, that for years I have labored and shed blood when I might have rested in wealth and ease."

Alston nodded soberly. She understood that, well enough. Her thoughts went to ancestors of hers; and to the systems analysts of Bangalore, India, and the suit-wearing Parliamentary deputies of Taiwan, and here… Mmmm-hmmm, John Iraunanasson, for instance. You may find that you're destroying what you're trying to preserve, in the long run. King Isketerol. And that the only way you can fight us is to become us.

Since the Event she'd come to appreciate just how weird and wide and wonderful this ancient Earth was; it wasn't altogether pleasant to think of it being remade on a single pattern, no matter how dear and much-loved that pattern was. On the other hand, I've also learned damned well that all customs and ways-of-doing and thinking are not equal. Some are just flat-out better than others. Freedom was better than slavery; the Town Meeting was better than a God-King.

You couldn't expect Isketerol to look at it that way, of course. It was a dilemma without any easy solution; one for Heather and Lucy, and their children and great-grandchildren. And Isketerol's…

"So this war must continue, until you see that we are not to be bent to your will," Isketerol said soberly.

"You tried to bend us to yours," she pointed out.

"Of course," he said, with another flash of teeth, genuinely amused. "And I would have ruled Nantucket well-I know that honey catches more flies than vinegar. But it didn't work-I underestimated you. And I can learn a lesson as well as the next man, when it's shot at me out of a cannon. Can you?"

"Most of the lessons life teaches us are surprises," she replied. "Usually unpleasant ones."

Isketerol nodded, and paused for a moment: "You took many prisoners this spring. What is their fate?"

"Some asked us for sanctuary," she said.

The Iberian made a gesture that Swindapa murmured was acceptance and acknowledgment. Many of the officers of that force had been from the old ruling families that Isketerol distrusted, a sentiment they shared.

"The mercenaries took service with us, and we have sent them to our allies in Kar-Duniash and Hattusas. The rest are on Long Island; they live together, lightly guarded but working as they will to earn their keep. When the war is over, we will send them home; you'll find many of them have learned useful skills."

Alston paused. "We have a number of your wounded from the latest battle; we'll return the badly hurt, if you wish. Men with limbs gone, or broken bones, deep hurts in their flesh. That would mean extending the truce, though… say to sundown, day after tomorrow."

"Ah," Isketerol said shrewdly. "You do not expect this war to continue long, if you return men who will fight once more in a few months."

"No, I don't," Alston said frankly.

"But in any case, that is well-done," he said meditatively, and stood in thought for a moment. "We have some of yours, who washed ashore after the battle off Tartessos-we will return them to you when you hand over our hurt men. And for this war, I will fight according to your Eagle People laws of battle-prisoners to be treated gently." A grin. "I have found this makes opponents less likely to fight to the death, in any case."

"Good." Alston cocked an eyebrow. "You'll find that many of our notions are more practical than you might think."

A long pause, and he surprised her by offering his hand. "Sundown, day after tomorrow-fighting to start again when a black thread cannot be told from a white. The war must continue, it seems."

She took it, dry and strong in hers. "It seems it must. Sundown, day after tomorrow. And may God defend the right."

"You Amurrukan, you are… how do you say… weird."'

"I've often thought so," Alston agreed.