Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

  Word passed down the line of sailors from the Stormwind and the Sun Dancer. They sank gratefully to their haunches, silent under the ferocious gaze of the quartermasters and steersmen, but taking pulls at their water bottles and scratching at itches. Tanchewa trotted back down the trail to the south, landing softly on the balls of his feet as he moved. As he put the head of the column behind him he slowed, drifting into the side of the trail that offered most shelter. The long killing spear was ready in his right hand, the small rhino-hide shield held in his left. Over his shoulder was his war bow, the same one he used to hunt elephant, and a dozen arrows the length of his leg.

  Alone in the woods, he could feel the irritation and jangling of the crowd dropping away. These were not his woods; the woods of home were denser, hotter, with larger trees and many great rivers rich in hippo and crocodile, but he was still Tanchewa the Leopard, greatest hunter of all the People. He felt the night wind and took a deep breath of its scents, strong and rank with growing things and their decay. Sounds flowed past his ears; he did not consciously attempt to listen, instead sensing the patterns in the small tickings and rustlings, the squalls and creaks. In a little clearing he moved through the tall grass in a slow crouch, bent nearly double. You couldn’t see detail at night, not even if you were Tanchewa, but always the patterns showed if they were disturbed.

  He stopped, his eyes flaring wide. Then he turned and ran back northward with all his speed, hurdling obstacles with a long, raking stride, careless of noise. His lungs filled and he shouted, a long, high, carrying yell.

  The Tartessians leaped to their feet. The weird yell coming from the south seemed to mean something to them; Marian Alston could hear officers calling orders. Maybe it’s Tarzan, she thought. Sounds like him. She bared her teeth in harsh amusement at the thought; just the sort of thing the damned interfering bare-assed bukra of Burroughs’s imagination would do.

  “Now!” she shouted.

  The mortar team dropped their round into the stubby barrel of the weapon. Shoonk, and a blade of fire speared man-high into the night.

  Alston came up on one knee and raked back the hammers of her pistol with the pink-palmed heel of her hand.

  Whonk. The star shell arced up through the leaves and burst. The bright acintic light froze the Tartessians in place for a crucial instant, startled into immobility, blinded by the light they hadn’t been expecting. Her crews had been warned beforehand to look away.

  Ninety Westley-Richards rifles volleyed at the enemy. Alston trained her weapon and fired, letting the weight bring the heavy pistol back into line before she used the second barrel. The Islanders were spread out along the trail behind fallen logs and folds in the hilly ground, twenty to sixty yards back. X’tung’a had picked the ground, and he seemed to know it the way she did her own quarterdeck.

  BAAAAMMMM.

  A dozen or so of the Tartessians were down, some screaming and writhing. Not bad, she thought with the part of her mind that was cold, detached analysis. Rifles weren’t Guard crewfolk’s primary tool, and it was dark. The enemy were leveling their muskets and firing back. They probably couldn’t see a thing to shoot at, but there were a lot of them. Muzzle flashes winked at her like malignant red fireflies, and something went crack past her head, an ugly flat sound. Bullet-clipped leaves and twigs fell on her, and her mouth was a little dry. It always was, times like these.

  Most of that was the knowledge that Swindapa was within arm’s length and very definitely in harm’s way. Campaigning with your lover had a nerve-racking quality all its own . . .

  Ain’t no friends like the friends you make in combat. Her father’s voice, remembered from the porch on a spring day when she was barely up to his navel. Hell, the bukra in my platoon, we was tighter ’n brothers, even them ’Bammy rednecks went around in white sheets back to home. Gooks didn’t pay no never mind if you was white, black, or green.

  The Islanders were replying, a steady crackle of independent fire, and the mortar team switched to explosive rounds and began walking them down the trail. Beside her Swindapa leveled her rifle over a log and squeezed carefully, then reloaded without having to look down and watch her hands work. A Tartessian officer doubled over and fell limp in the midst of waving his men on. They were doing the best thing you could in an ambush—attack.

  Or most were. A few turned and shoved their way into the brush on the other side of the track. Alston snarled to herself. Just about now . . .

  Whudump! A crashing blast and stab of red fire like a sword blade into the dark, rank belly of the jungle. A Claymore was a very simple weapon, really; just a curved iron plate with the concave side facing the enemy, a layer of explosive, and a layer of lead shot inside a thin tin cover. Friction primers weren’t as lasting or reliable, but they’d usually work when somebody’s leg hit the trip wire—

  More screams. Another schoonk . . . whonk! as the mortar team fired more star shell. The Tartessians came on recklessly, many of them throwing aside their guns and drawing cold steel, or carrying the guns by the barrels to use as clubs.

  Whudump! Whudump! Whudump!

  Alston’s snarl grew wider as the flashes strobed, and the burnt-sulfur stink drifted through the hot night. There were Claymores between this position and the trail, too. The Tartessians froze again as men fell or stumbled back screaming and bleeding; they went to earth and began firing back. Loading a musket like theirs while lying down could be done, but you had to be a contortionist, and it was slow. Only a few of them had breechloaders.

  “Ready!” Marian called through the shadow-lit night. “Take it slowly and do it right. Now!”

  Beside her, Swindapa laid down her rifle and pulled an iron egg out of a pouch on her harness. A metal ring protruded from the top; she hooked her right index finger through it, twisted sharply and pulled. In the darkness Marian could hear the scritch as the friction primer ignited, the hissing of the fuse. Then the Fiernan rose and threw it with a snapping twist of arm and torso.

  I hate those things, Marian thought. Most of Ron Leaton’s weapons were unavoidably less advanced than their equivalents up in the twentieth. The grenades were unavoidably less reliable; they scared her.

  More were arching out from the Islander ambush; they began exploding crackcrackcrackcrack, quick red sparks among the huddled Tartessians.

  And there was a whistling shunk from behind her. Swindapa’s drop back to cover behind the huge rotting fallen log started as gracefully as all her motions. It turned into a tumble and a cry of startled pain. A long black arrow was through the fleshy part of her thigh; she stared at it for an instant, wide-eyed.

  From behind us. Marian knew, suddenly and crystal-certain. Someone knows where our leadership is and they’re trying to take it out.

  Her body was reacting without any need for her mind’s prompting; she grabbed Swindapa under the arms and rolled over the log with her, ignoring the small shriek as the rough movement twisted at the shaft through the Fiernan’s leg. Another arrow went vhwwweept through the space she’d occupied a second earlier, close enough to make a shallow cut across one shoulder blade before she was belly-down to the earth.

  “’s not bad,” Swindapa said through clenched teeth. “Not bleeding much. I can’t use the leg.”

  Thunk. Another arrow, this one driven through the top curve of the log. A scream from nearby, as someone took a shaft in the back.

  “One man behind us!” Marian called. “Torwnello, Reuters, John-son, Aynaraxsson, about-face!”

  “Torwnello’s down, ma’am!” a voice called. “We’re watching!”

  More grenades were arching out behind her. She could ignore that for the moment, though; the Tartessians weren’t going anywhere, and the bullets they were putting out were essentially a random factor. Let whoever it was come to her. Whoever it was was good.

  Tanchewa threw down his bow. His eyes speared the gloom—there. The two women were on the other side of the log and had enough sense to lie tight along it. If he could kill the dark-
skinned woman chief, the others might well flee, or at least be thrown into enough disorder that his comrades could escape. He took his shield by the central handgrip and charged, moving like his totem beast, feet landing light and sure among the vines and brush and fallen trees. Rifles barked at him, tongues of fire, and something scored along his ribs like a hot knife. That made him miss one stride, until the extent of the pain told him it was only a flesh wound—time enough to tend it later, if he lived.

  Noise and motion in the fire-lit darkness; screams, the shit stink of death, the iron-copper-salt of blood, the rotten-egg smell of gunpowder. Chaos. Marian Alston let it flow through her as she reached over her shoulder and drew the katana. Distraction was a state of mind; if you weren’t distracted, you would always see what was necessary and never be surprised. A rushing black shadow coming toward her. Smooth, very quiet, very fast—but not hurrying in the least, at full speed through brush, in near-total darkness.

  She came to her feet with a long silibant hiss of exhaled breath, and the sword flowed upward to jodan no kame, high and very slightly to the right, hilt level with her eyes. Neither anger nor fear, beyond intention and desire. A knee relaxed and she swayed out of the line of the thrust. The sword floated down, diagonal cut, elbows coming in, wrists locking, gut muscles tensed and throat open for the kia as the long curved blade blurred. A sliver of silver as starlight caught the layer-forged steel.

  “Dissaaaa!”

  A jarring shock, flowing through her and gone, as the man’s buckler shed the steel. He was pivoting, whirling, striking again in the same motion, one move flowing into another, shield, spearhead, the butt of the shaft. She parried again, blade down, right hand with the heel of the palm braced against the pommel. Scrinnngg as the tough wood slid along her sword. She felt the essence of the man she was fighting in that instant, the long-limbed quickness, the deadly balance.

  Teki ni naru, Musashi had called it: to become the enemy.

  They were moving together in a dance, the sword an extension of her back and shoulders, feet at right angles, weight centered over her chi. She let the rhythm of the combat form in her mind, a gestalt that made their interaction a single construct . . .

  Now.

  Alston sensed the rhythm of the attack and knew where the spearhead would come. Bang of steel on wood, and they were past each other. The sword flicking, reversing, stabbing—an iado move, to strike behind without turning. Soft, somehow thick sensation as the slanted-chisel point met skin. Sword looping up into the ready position as she turned, cut coming down with the stamping fall of her left foot.

  “Dissaaaa!”

  Crouched in the follow-through, blade out and level with the ground, she came back to herself. Seconds only had passed; Swindapa was lowering her pistol, the firefight was dying—

  “We surrender!” someone shouted from the Tartessian position. “Please!”

  Marian Alston looked down at the broken body of the tribesman, suddenly conscious of an enormous sadness. The face was contorted, the light painting it ghastly red as blood flowed from his mouth, but the features were still kin to hers—the features of the Dahomey, the Mandinka, the Yoruba, of tribes yet unborn in the tides of time. Of an ancestor, perhaps.

  Strong, long-fingered hands clawed into the forest duff as the man tried to form words. A language she did not know, and they were gurgled through blood. Heels drummed for an instant, and he died in the usual human squalor.

  Alston turned and shouted toward the Tartessians: “Throw down your weapons! Come forward with your hands up!”

  Swindapa echoed it in their own language. When they obeyed, Marian shouted in her turn, for a corpsman. The medic came at a run, kneeling by the Fiernan and taking out his kit.

  Swindapa winced and raised herself on her elbows. “Fast . . . he was so fast, I couldn’t fire.”

  Alston knelt for a second to close the staring eyes. “Very fast,” she said, with a wry quirk of her full lips. “But that’s a race we all lose, in the end.”

  “You make the bluff,” Alantethol said, despite the rough hemp of the noose about his neck and the hangman’s knot under his ear. “Your law forbids you to torture prisoners of war. I will tell nothing you.”

  The eighty surviving Tartessians—less the wounded too injured to stand—stood sullen under the Islander guns in the waist of the ship. Alantethol and his officers stood on chairs, under the gaff of the Chamberlain’s mizzenmast. The lines from the nooses ran up over that, through beckets, and down to be secured to stanchions and belaying pins along the port rail. The ship rocked slightly at her moorings, and Alston could see eyes widening and tongues moistening lips as the men shifted to keep themselves balanced. That wasn’t easy, with their hands tied behind their backs.

  Marian Alston smiled—at least that was technically the name for her expression. Swindapa sat in a folding chair behind her, one leg thickly bandaged. The corpsman said it would heal within a month or two, with no loss of function. Two of the Islander crew were dead, and three more unlikely to live. That the Tartessians had suffered more altered Alston’s determination not at all.

  “You’re right,” she said, looking up at the sweat-slick face of the Tartessian captain, catching a whiff of the rankness of it mixed with the olive-oil-and-garlic odor of his body.

  He was in fear of his life, but the aquiline features were set, the little gold-bound chinbeard jutting with the determination that firmed his mouth.

  Alston set her hands on her hips and went on: “The thing is, Tartessos and the Republic are at peace. We have a treaty. You broke it, of your own will. So you’re not prisoners. You’re pirates. And we don’t torture pirates, either. We hang them. ’dapa, repeat that in Tartessian, would you?”

  The Fiernan sighed and did; her tone was regretful, but no less determined than her partner’s.

  Alantethol lifted his chin toward the east, where the first hint of dawn was paling the stars, lips moving in a silent prayer.

  Alston went on: “On the other hand, if any of you were to tell me what arrangements you had with your ships, signals, and so forth, I’d pardon them . . . and give them sanctuary in Nantucket and a thousand dollars in gold. Oh, and I’d spare the others, too; I have the authority to do that. So, who’ll save his life, and his friends, and be a rich man?”

  Alantethol’s mouth worked again; she stepped aside smartly to avoid the gobbet of spit. It arched past her to land on the scrubbed boards with a tiny splat. Considering what the human body did when it was strangled, the deck might well be a lot messier before long.

  The translation took a few moments; Tartessian was a less compact and economical language than English. Choppier than Fiernan, too, she thought absently, eyes on the faces of the men standing with the nooses around their necks.

  Brave man, she thought, looking at their commander. Sadistic bastard—the San had made clear how the Tartessians had abused their hospitality, and needlessly, too, when you considered their eagerness to please a guest—but a brave sadistic bastard. She wasn’t all that impressed; physical courage was not a rare commodity, particularly not here in the Bronze Age, and particularly not among those picked for a voyage of exploration by as good a judge of character as Isketerol of Tartessos.

  On the other hand, human beings were variable. Brave one day and timid the next; or a lion in the face of storm or battle but unable to contemplate the slow, choking death that awaited them. Some of the other Tartessian officers tried to spit at her as well as she walked down the line; some were standing with their eyes closed. One, younger than the rest, was silently weeping.

  And one had a spreading stain on his tunic below the crotch. She caught the sharp ammonia stink of urine as she walked over and put one boot on the stool he was standing on.

  “You first,” she said, rocking it slightly. Her Tartessian was good enough for that. “Good-bye, pirate.”

  The man’s lips opened just as the third leg of the stool came off the deck. He began screaming words through thick s
obs; several of the others were shouting as well—curses and threats, she thought, directed at the man who’d talked.

  “Marian!” Swindapa said quickly. “Two red rockets at dawn—they’ll be standing off the coast. That’s the signal for them to come in, that we’ve been captured.”

  And raped and murdered, most of us, Marian thought, her face a basalt mask as she let the leg of the stool thump back to the deck.

  “Get them down,” she said to the waiting master-at-arms. “Below, in irons—except for that one.”

  Alantethol seemed as much startled as furious as he was bundled past her. Alston sighed as she felt the tension ease out of her neck.

  “Why is it,” she said softly, “that cruel bastards like that think they have a monopoly on ruthlessness?”

  “I don’t know,” Swindapa said. “I don’t like to kill, myself. There are many things that I don’t like but that are necessary anyway. Moon Woman orders the stars so.” After a moment: “How many would you have hung?”

  “All of them,” Marian said, her voice as flat as her eyes. “And then started on the crew.”

  “Who’s Mr. Me-Heap-Big-Chief-Gottum-Chicken-On-My-Hat?” Alice asked. “Honestly, the people you bring home to dinner sometimes, Will.”

  William Walker hid his smile. The northern chieftain did look a little absurd, in his high, conical helmet with a wood-and-boiled-leather raven on it; the way the wings flapped when he moved didn’t help, either.

  Hong came stepping daintily down the middle of the brick pathway; the horses in the stalls on either side raised their heads and snorted a little, as if they could smell the blood and madness in her eyes. Her riding crop tapped against her high, glossy boots and kidskin jodhpurs as she looked the visiting barbarian up and down.

  “Hello, big fellah,” she said in English. “If I pull on those long droopy mustaches, will the wings flap?”