On the Oceans of Eternity

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

December, 10 A.E,-Cadiz Base, southern Iberia

December, 10 A.E.-Near Hattusas, Kingdom of Hani-land

December, 10 A.E.-Walkeropolis and Rivendell, Kingdom of Great Achaea

December, 10 A.E.-Cadiz Base, southern Iberia

December, 10 A.E.-Black Mountains, south-central Iberia

Clack. The bokken cracked together, slid free, whirled, struck. The world shrank to a strip of brightness under the helmet, cut by the bars of the face guard under it. Swindapa circled, then halted with the oak practice sword in chudan, the middle position, held out below the breastbone, angled up with the point at her opponent's throat level. She was motionless but not stiff; every muscle relaxed into a state where action could come immediately, weight borne by the bones rather than flesh, balance slightly forward on the balls of her feet but kept centered by the low stance.

Rigidity means a dead hand, flexibility means a living hand. One must understand this fully.

That was from the book that Marian liked so well. Very true, like most of it… although there was something repellent about that Miyamoto Musashi, an unhumanness. She could not imagine him dandling a baby, or carving a cradle on a winter's evening, or sitting beneath a tree after the harvest drinking beer and singing with his friends. His words felt like a man with a single huge eye who did nothing but see just one thing.

But he saw that one thing very clearly…

Marian's bokken came up to jodan no kame, over the head with hilt forward. Her hands stood wide-spaced on the long hilt, gripping lightly with thumb and forefinger, more firmly with ring and little fingers, delicate as a surgeon's hold on a scalpel. Swindapa moved forward from bent knees, both feet pushing at once as the sword came up, twisting her wrists as she thrust for the face. That put the cutting edge uppermost, a strike at the vulnerable tendons of the inner wrist at the same time as the point menaced the eyes, motion smooth and fast with a hunza of exhaled breath.

The other's head turned, just enough to let the point of the bokken slide over the enameled metal of the flared helmet. The sword came down one-handed, the fisted right hand snapping aside to put it out of danger for an instant. Then both slapped onto the hilt and she cut from the side, looping up to slice at the younger woman's armpit. Swindapa bounced backward, in again; Marian was using minimal movements and counterattack against her partner's youthful speed and endurance. The Fiernan felt herself grinning as she fought despite the savage concentration of effort and will; this was as beautiful as a Star-Moon dance, in its way. That was how she'd seen it that first time, watching secretly at night as Marian performed kata with the sword on the deck of the Eagle. Dancing with the silver steel beneath the Moon…

There was a final clatter and crash of wood on wood, on steel armor, oak blurring in fast hard whipping arcs. Marian relaxed one leg, pivoted as she fell-stepped aside and snap-kicked the other on the back of a knee. That was hard to counter, wearing the weight of the armor; Swindapa went crashing on her back. Winded, she brought the sword up just a fractional second too late. Marian's came down in a flashing overarm stroke, left hand sliding down the back of the blade for an instant to add force, then clamping on to the hilt as the bokken came to rest across Swindapa's throat, motionless. Swindapa rolled her eyes to the side and met her partner's, grave and dark as she kept the crouched bent-legged posture for a further instant.

"I think that's pretty unambiguous," the Fiernan said.

"Sometimes I think you let me win, these days," Marian grumbled.

"Oh, I would, except that you might get hurt in a real fight if I did that," Swindapa said, grinning.

They knelt facing each other, laid down the blades and bent their foreheads to the ground between their hands, then sat back on their heels and emptied their minds, letting their breath go slow and deep. Marian said she used the image of a still pond to quiet her inwardness. That was hard for the Eagle People; they were always… busy… inside.

Swindapa listened to the Silent Song, the song that the stars danced to with their mother the Moon. Sometimes it was hard to hear it, but then you must try less, not more, and it came.

Voices murmured outside the canvas cubicle; Raupasha recognized King Kashtiliash's. Her hearing was still very sharp.

"You did not know, my brother?" he said in that bull rumble. Then Kenneth Hollard's voice, a murmur she couldn't make out.

"Among the Mitanni, a ruler must be perfect in body-at least, must have the use of all their limbs and senses. I grieve, too. She has served my House well, and she was brave and very fair-such another she-hawk as my Kat'ryn, with an honor I once did not believe a woman could hold."

Words I would much have given much to hear, Raupasha thought. I have given much for them. I have given all I have, save my life-and that would be a little thing beside the cost. Then: No. I did what honor required. I must not count the cost. Ah, but that is hard!

Hands touched her face, and she flinched an instant before steeling herself.

"The burn will heal faster with a light gauze covering," Justin Clemens said gently, putting down the mirror he had been holding for his patient.

Raupasha daughter of Shuttarna let her head fall back on the pillow; it still felt odd, shorn. So is the fleece of all my hopes shorn and lost, she thought. The words did not hurt much, no more than the dull background ache of her face and hand and side.

Clemens's hands were as gentle as his voice as he administered the ointment and laid the light covering on the left side of her face. The message of the mirror was burned into her, the thickened red scar tissue, the empty, sightless white eye.

"Will the healing… make the skin better?"

"Somewhat," Clemens said.

She turned her head-knowing she would have to learn to do that to see, with only her right eye-and watched his face. It held a compassion that hurt like fire, but also honesty.

"The scars will become less red, but the tissue will remain thick and rigid over about a third of your face."

Feather-light, his finger traced a line from one cheekbone across her eye to the forehead.

"Nor will the hair grow back here. I am very sorry, Princess, but all I can do is give you an ointment that will keep the damaged skin supple."

"Thank you," she said; he touched her shoulder once as he gathered his instruments.

"This will help you sleep," he said, and she felt the sting of an injection in her arm. A curtain seemed to fall between her and the pain, as if it was still happening but to someone else.

"My thanks again," she murmured, as he led on his rounds.

There are others who need his care more than I. Those with no eyes at all, or faces; those lacking limbs; those with worse woundings who yet could not die-it was not altogether a blessing, the healing art of the Island folk. It could save you for a life that was worse than death.

But at least I may weep alone. There was another murmur of voices outside, and Clemens saying something in a grudging tone.

Then the canvas door was pushed aside again, and she must be brave again. Then she saw who it was, and her hand made a fending gesture.

"No-" she said.

Kenneth Hollard came in and sat on the stool by her cot, catching the hand between hers. "Hello, Princess," he said calmly. His eyes did not waver…

Well, he is a warrior. He has seen worse. But not on the face of a woman who-I hoped-he looked upon with the gaze of desire.

"Hello, Lord Kenn'et," she said listlessly.

"Is the pain very bad?" he said, a trace of awkwardness in his voice. This too must be endured…

"No," she said.

"You-" he cleared his throat. "You did very well. You may have saved us all."

And I won his gratitude, when it is useless, she thought. Then, thrusting the bitterness away: I would have given my life for his, she thought. What I had to give, I gave. Let it be enough. Let him remember me… perhaps name a daughter for me. It is enough.

"Thank you," she said. "My father-and my foster father-would not be ashamed of me, I hope."

"Any man would be proud of such a daughter," he said. Then he took a deep breath, as if steeling himself for a difficult task: "And… any man would be proud of such a woman."

Her one gray eye sought his. The medicine against pain is giving me dreams, as they warned me it might.

"My lord?" she whispered. Then with a flash of anger her hand rose and lifted the gauze. "You saw me when I was fair-saw all of me, at the place of hot springs. Now look at me! I am a thing of horror-and princess no more."

"I have seen your face," he said. He leaned closer. "At least it isn't the face of a coward, like mine." She was struck wordless, and saw him force himself to go on. "Who wouldn't speak, because he was afraid… of politics, complications, of himself."

"Oh," she said. "This is a matter of honor."

"No, it's a matter of belated good sense," he said harshly, and squeezed her hand. "I faced the prospect of a life without you in it, Raupasha, and as for your kingdom, that was never more than a hindrance to me."

Now she did weep, as he bent forward to softly touch his lips to hers. "There it is, for what it's worth. If you spit in my face, I'll understand." A hint of his boyish grin. "Although I'd be very disappointed."

"Never," she said, her free hand going up to touch her lips and then his. The IV rattled as she moved. "Never in all the world."

"We're meeting him here!" Arnstein said incredulously.

"Yes," Odikweos replied, with that slight secret smile of his.

Walkeropolis had recovered with surprising speed from the Emancipator's raid; the firefighting service seemed to be efficient, and they were already in the middle of so many construction projects that repairing damage just meant slowing the schedule on new buildings. He got a few glares as they rode downtown in Odikweos's chariot, and winced a bit at one long row of bodies laid out by the sidewalk to wait the corpse-wagon. Some were very small…

The slave market where they stopped was bustling, a huge complex of linked two-story buildings and courtyards, with doors and corridors color-coded for convenience. Ian worked his shoulders against the prickling feeling that went over them as they entered through polished oak doors and merchants bustled over to greet them.

"No, we will look ourselves. Do not trouble me more," Odikweos said, with an imperious gesture.

This place gives me the creeps, Ian thought.

Not least because it all seemed so ordinary. Sales were made in bulk and coffles marched off; men spat on their palms and slapped them together to mark a deal, as they might have for mules or sheep. Others looked at teeth or felt muscles, and some of the buyers had collars on their own necks, household stewards or workshop managers. Posters advertised skilled labor; stonemasons, bricklayers, seamstresses. Others offered to train raw slaves, and listed fees. There wasn't even much of a smell; Walker's hygiene regulations were in full force; otherwise, this crowded series of iron-barred pens would be a natural breeding ground for half a dozen different diseases. Fear and hopeless misery still sweated out of the dry whitewashed walls in a miasmic cloud he could taste.

It isn't as if Walker invented slavery here, he told himself.

That was true-every Achaean who could afford it had owned at least one to help around farm and house. In an economy without machinery, money, or a market for paid labor, it was the only alternative to doing everything yourself. And the palaces of the wannaxakes had imported hundreds of women from Asia Minor to make the fine cloth and perfumed oils that had been exported to pay for metals and grain. It wasn't any excuse for this, though.

The Achaeans hadn't based their whole economy on this sort of robotized forced labor. Slavery was a common institution, but societies based on slavery were rare. You had to develop elaborate control mechanisms to hold so many adult males in bondage; it just didn't pay, usually, except to mobilize labor for new uses or new lands.

A pair of green-uniformed guards went by, shotguns over their backs and billy clubs tapping against their boots; ex-slaves themselves. Walker had made it possible-not easy, but possible-for the ambitious to get manumission; that provided a safety valve and skimmed off natural leaders.

So he's a smart sociopathic scumbag.

He certainly hadn't expected John Martins to be here; all the reports agreed that he and his wife had been kidnapped by Walker back when he hijacked the Yare. They found the blacksmith telling two collarless men to lead away half a dozen with the iron rings around their necks.

"Hey, Professor," Martins said, holding out his hand. "Good to see you, man-I mean, like, it's a bummer you got to be here, but it's, like, maximum coolness for me."

Arnstein ignored the outstretched hand. Martins was in his late fifties and also tall and lanky, and balding on top. That was about the only point of resemblance; the other man's tie-dyed T-shirt and jeans and sandals, the tiny granny glasses on the end of his nose and the ponytail behind… they'd followed very different career paths in the sixties. His to San Diego and ancient history, Martins up into the hills of northern California. The hard ropy muscle that moved under his skin showed Martins kept up the trade he'd learned there.

"I didn't expect to find you buying slaves, John," he said quietly.

Martins's hand clenched, and the sad russet-brown eyes blinked. "You ain't been here in Mordor for ten years, man," he said, his voice equally soft. "I buy these guys so I can teach 'em and set 'em free, dude. And Barbs teaches the chicks. We've got a good hundred people between us might have been in the mines or the fucking arena without us, man!"

Arnstein felt a rush of shame. "Sorry," he said, holding out his own hand. Martins's closed on it with careful strength. "People change, you know."

"Yeah, man, I do," Martins said. He looked at Odikweos. The Achaean nodded.

"These guards speak nothing but Achaean," he said. "They are my men, also."

He turned and walked away.

Oh, yeah, Arnstein thought Yup, I've got plenty of chances to escape-with six professional soldiers guarding me, and hundreds of miles of enemy territory between me and our forces, and Mittler's goons longing to start pulling my toenails out-or hold my head underwater, if they don't want marks. And me a sixty-something desk jockey. Yup.

"C'mon, man," Martins said.

They walked out into the cool sunlight The men Martins had bought and an equal number of young women sat in a buckboard hitched to two mules; some of them looked stunned, some sullen, some wistfully hopeful. The wagon took them out of Walkeropolis to the northwest, up toward the harsh slopes of Taygelos, then into a steepish narrow valley.

"Rivendell," Marlins said proudly.

Rivendell, California, Arnstein thought. There are places like this up in the hills, or there were.

He fought back the disorienting onset of post-Event-Syndrome once again; There were a half dozen low bungalow-style adobe buildings with wood-pillared porches, a barn, footpaths, a wooden water race turning a couple of small watermills, corrals and truck gardens… including one that looked very much like a patch of genuine weed. A smell of baking bread, hot iron, oil, and burning charcoal drifted down to them.

"Walker only let me out from under a little while ago," Martins said. "Till then I was, you know, working for the Man mostly. But I've been building this up for a while. Gotta have your own space here, man, or your head can get completely fucked up."

He pushed the small glasses back up his nose, a gesture that Arnstein copied without thinking of it, like a reflex yawn.

"So I got this place going. Sort of, like, a commune, you know? A couple of the guys I've taught stay on, and some of the chicks and their kids. The others out working on their own mostly chip in to pay us back, so we can do right by some more poor types. Gotta have the bread to pay off the ores."

The wagon pulled up, and a swarm of children came running out to meet it. Martins handed out candied figs and hugs, but attended to business first. One by one the slaves knelt beside a small anvil, and Martins split the soft-iron rivets that closed their collars. Some of them wept and tried to kiss his feet; the balding Californian lifted them up and exchanged extravagant embraces instead, before a brawny young man and a woman in a long granny dress and headscarf led them away.

A hippie squire. Now I've seen everything, Arnstein thought, dazed, as he was brought inside to a big kitchen, all whitewashed walls, copper pots and pans, and scrubbed-oak boards. The floor was brown tile, and one wall held a hand-painted mandala, hypnotic and beautiful.

"That's Barbs's work," Martins said, indicating it. "Groovy, hey?"

A comfortable-looking woman in her forties wearing an Achaean gown and a complex of painted scarves gave Arnstein a motherly hug. "Good to see an American again," she said, and pushed him down on a bench. "Hey, you don't get into my kitchen without eating."

She brought him a cup of hot herbal tea and a big bowl of…

"Granola?" he said. "This is really granola?"

"Sure, man-nuts, raisins, whole grains, natural sugars from honey," Martins said, blinking in surprise. "Keeps the minerals and fiber right. Ain't anyone making it on Nantucket? Hey, Barbs, we gotta lay on a big feed for the professor tonight. He's been having a pretty crappy trip; let's give him a good time before he has to go back to Sauronopolis."

The matronly woman in the long colored scarves nodded. "I'll get the barbeque going," she said. "We'll have the welcome-home party for the new folks at the same time." She bustled out.

Arnstein put a spoonful of the cereal in his mouth; the milk turned out to be fairly thick cream.

"Ah… John," he said, after a moment. "It is good to see you again. But why did Odikweos leave us together?"

"Oh, he ain't such a bad guy," Martins said. "You gotta take account of the state of the karmic evolutionary balance."

"Huh?" Arnstein heard himself say. I will recover my mental balance. I really will.

"Well, I mean, it stands to reason, man. See, everyone's going up or down the ladder, right? So back here in this cycle, most of the people haven't had as much time to get up or down the scale-so you don't get many people as good as say, Martin Luther King or Christ or the Buddha, and you don't get many as bad as, like, Nixon. Or Walker," he added with a grimace.

"Ah… that's logical," Arnstein said. "Ah… no offense, John, but you do realize you're still helping Walker?"

Martins laughed. "Hey, Professor, what do you think me and my guys make? We put on horseshoes, man, and repair plows, and make harrows. And we make ornamental stuff, wrought-iron grilles and gates. And yeah, I make swords and knives, like I did for the SCA and collectors back home. We make good swords; but these Achaeans, they aren't going to conquer nobody with swords, man."

Well, you've got a point, Arnstein thought, then felt something nudge his hand. He looked down.

Martins had pushed a small scrap of paper across to him. On it were a string of numbers and letters intermixed. He held it there long enough for the other man to read, then picked it up, produced a leather pouch, tapped out a brownish-green mass and rolled a cigarette with swift, deft fingers. That he lit from a candle on the table and took a long deep breath, holding it.

The acrid odor had been familiar enough once-Ian Arnstein had been on a California campus for thirty years by the late-nineties date of the Event, starting when the Vietnam War was just getting seriously under way. It had been a long time since he smelled it; or saw someone smoking anything, for that matter.

"Want a hit, boss?" Martins said.

"Ah… no, thanks. It reduces my IQ and makes me sleepy," Arnstein said. Then the complete sentence struck home. "Boss?"

Martins's eyes were almost the same shade as the remaining russet-brown in his graying mustache. "Well, you've been running the Nantucket CIA, right, man?"

"Foreign Affairs Department," Arnstein said automatically. Then: "Wait a minute, you mean-

"Like, totally. I've been working for you for years, man, years. Wow, outtasight-you're doing that secrecy shit so, like, you don't know I'm working for you, or even my code? Far out, man, like, fantastic!"

"Need to know," Ian said dazedly.

Doreen must be running him, he thought. Wait a minute, that means he can tell her I'm alive? How does he get information out… no, I do not need to know that.

"Well, a lot of people tell me stuff," Martins said proudly. "I mean, like heavy industrial shit, man-smiths stick together, and I trained a lot of the hot-pounders Walker used right back in the beginning. I got some compadres in Tartessos, too; worked with 'em back in Alba, or they came over here back when-we're pretty tight, some of 'em and me. We shed a lot of righteous sweat together, and you don't forget that."

"Wait a minute," Arnstein said slowly. "You mean to tell me that Odikweos knows you're an agent for Nantucket?"

Martins's long sheeplike face blushed under the weathered tan. "He, like, sort of figured it out," he said. "I don't know how-Mittler, Walker's tame Nasty-

"Nazi," Arnstein correct absently.

"No, he's more like a Stalin type, seriously heavy authoritarian power trip, but he's plenty nasty, you know? Anyway, he's sniffed around, but he couldn't pin anything on me that the Man would listen to. He wanted to off me a long time ago, that guy."

Suddenly Martins's vague good humor collapsed; his face fell in on itself, looking every year of his age for once.

"Oh, man, you don't know what it's like, living here, you got no idea. I want out, man, I want to get Barbs and the kids and blow this place. Rilly, rilly bad. It's, like, Mordor here, just don't look as bad on the surface, but it's worse down deep. Rivendell, it's like an island in a sea of shit, man. I want to go home."

"I don't blame you," Arnstein said. "But…" His mind worked furiously. "I think we've got things to do first."

Well, keeping fit is a duty, Marian Alston thought, as she stripped off the armor and the sweat-sodden padding underneath. I need the endurance and ability to think clearly under stress. Plus the ability to use a sword with skill was a real military asset here and now. No law saying I can't enjoy it.

The practice yard bustled, shouts and kia and the thump and clatter of practice with bokken or the Empty Hand, personnel- mostly officers-getting in the time before the camp fully woke to the day's labor. It was just dawn, the light a twilit purple across the uneven ground and rocks and stumps; she'd never approved of getting too used to good footing and level ground. A steady firecracker ripple from the firing ranges told of others at work; a group of auxiliaries came by on the eastern beach, shambling exhausted beside their Marine instructors after a night exercise further down the long sandspit island.

McClintock says they're about as ready as they'll be without going through Camp Grant, she mused. Oh, well, needs must when the devil drives.

A lot of them had also stood around green with envy as the raiding party lined up to take the first installment of their prize money off the drumheads-part simple greed, part the prestige, status, keuthes of victory and plunder. Many of the Marines and Guard crewfolk felt that way, too; she'd seen one in line in a wheelchair with his leg in a cast, pushed by a friend with her arm in a sling, and they'd both been grinning ear to ear.

She doubted that any of the native-born Islanders would have been that cheerful. It's not that they're any braver than Americans, Alston thought. They're… tougher? Harder-grained? They're certainly less likely to be… shocked… when bad things happen to them. Maybe fatalistic is the word I'm looking for.

"What's on the agenda?" she asked Swindapa as the exercise-yard orderlies collected their armor, bokken, and sodden undergarments, handing them towels and harsh gray ration-issue bars of soap.

"It's 0545 now," the Fiernan said. "At 0700 you're supposed to meet those people Captain Reedy got out of the swamp. Then-

"Fill me in while we walk, sugar."

The beach was blinding-white sand; it and the small wavelets were tinged pink by the sun rising over the water to the east, and the pine forest and marshland of the mainland beyond. The air smelled chill, damp, salt, and very fresh despite the thousands encamped near here. The doctors said the deep wells were producing abundant fresh water, and the composting latrines wouldn't contaminate it. More than enough water for freshwater showers, and some had been rigged here.

Not far away a long U-shape of prefabricated timbers ran down into the water, with smooth steel rollers inset. The Farragut was hauled out on it, kept upright with tree trunks braced against her upper sides, swarming with workers the way a dropped banana would with ants. Most of the copper sheathing had come off her planks. Caulking hammers rang as oakum was pounded between her seams; new sections of planks showed yellow-brown against the weathered gray paint of the rest; tar heated pungent in buckets.

Gary Trudeau was there himself with his officers and chief engineer and the Seahaven people, directing the crews that had the damaged paddle bared to the bright new sun. With the protecting frame of timbers and metal gone you could see what the point-blank cannon shot could do; also how rod and cam angled each blade as it came down to strike the water or rise out of it. She remembered how proud Leaton had been of that…

"What's the word, Commander?"

"Well, the slipway works-no shifting now that the cradle arms are braced on the piles," Trudeau said. "Be a real calisse de tabernac if they moved with that much weight on 'em!"

Alston nodded soberly. The Merrimac was a lot heavier, and it was good in a way that they had a trial run first. A vagrant thought struck her: did the younger man swear in patois because it felt better, or to remind himself of the lost world of Aroostock County, Maine, and its expatriate Quebecoisl There probably weren't a dozen other people in this whole world who'd grown up speaking French, and in another generation there wouldn't be a single one.

"The good news," the young officer went on, "is that there's nothing major wrong with her. No hull frames cracked, the diagonal bracing held. The bedding for the boilers and furnace is a lot better than I thought it might be."

He pointed to where a clangor of hammers sounded, like a legion of dwarves in a steel bucket.

"The funnel will be easy, and then she'll draw okay again. Best of all, we can arc-weld the sprung seams on the boiler pretty easy, once the generator's up."

"The bad news?"

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

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

She looked at her watch. "Now I've got to get on to those maroons."

"Maroons, ma'am?" Trudeau asked curiously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hetkdar leaned forward, quiveringly eager. The stranger smelled odd-almost like flowers. But…

"Rifles?" he said.

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

"And in payment?" Hetkdar said, holding himself in.

"We want you to kill Taratuz."

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

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