“I think it’s ‘disappointed curiosity’ this time,” Swindapa whispered in her ear, grinning.
Marian snorted. “ You’re much prettier,” she murmured back. “And you don’t have nearly as many fleas.”
Something like this happened every time they guested overnight at a Sun People chieftain’s steading, but her partner still found it endlessly entertaining. Then again, the Fiernan language didn’t even have a word for monogamy; it was something Swindapa did out of love, because her partner cared about it. Marian looked at the servant girl’s neck; no scars, although she’d probably been wearing a collar until a few years ago. The prohibition on slavery in the Alliance treaty hadn’t been as hard to enforce as she’d once feared, but she suspected from the reports and her own observations that the abolition was often more a matter of form than fact, particularly in the backwoods.
Oh, well, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Not everyone who worked in the Republic or served in its ships and regiments stayed on; plenty went back home, like her host’s son. That brought its own problems, but it carried the seeds of progress.
The hall of the Thaurinii chiefs reminded her strongly of the others they’d guested in over the past month, a sameness that underlay differences of detail. The walls were wickerwork thickly daubed with clay, between a framework of inward-sloping timbers that turned into the crutch-rafters that carried the thatch of the roof. The chief ’s seat was in the middle of the southern wall, a tall chair of oak and beech, its rear pillars carved in the shape of the Twin Horsemen, their most notable feature their erect luck-bringing philli. A second chair was for the most honored guests; everyone else sat on stools, or on benches, or the floor, with sheepskins and blankets beneath them if they were lucky.
She noticed one difference there; the floor was mortared flagstones, rather than dirt covered by reeds. There were still fire pits down the center of the floor, but there was also an iron heating stove with a sheet-iron chimney, both probably turned out here in Alba at Islander-owned plants. The feast had been mostly traditional—roast pork, mutton, beef, and horsemeat with bread—but there had been potatoes and chicken as well.
The Thaurinii differed from the more easterly tribes in some other respects too; the women of the chief ’s family had eaten with them, although they were withdrawing to the other end of the hall now that the serious drinking was supposed to begin. Probably residual Fiernan influence. She and Swindapa were being treated essentially as warrior-class men, of course, but she was used to that. Irritating, but not unbearably so.
Progress, she thought. Longest journey, single step, and all that.
Leaping shadows from the fire pits gleamed on the gold or copper that rimmed whole-cowhorn cups, on bright cloth and gold torques around hairy necks, on the weapons and shields hung on the walls between bright crude woolen hangings—she hid a smile at the printed Islander dish towels that held pride of place. Sun People art was often quite good of its kind, but when they fell for Nantucketer stuff they tended to nose-dive into the worst kitsch available. The air smelled of woodsmoke, cooking, a little of sweat and damp dog, but not very unclean—there had been a bathhouse here before the Event, although Winnuthrax had improved it with soap and a real tub since.
They’re really not such bad sorts, Alston told herself. Of course, they’re warlike and macho to the point of insanity, and cruel as cats to anyone who isn’t a blood relative or an oath-sworn ally, and they’d a thousand times rather steal something than make it themselves, but they have their points. They were brave, and many of them were even honest . . .
Winnuthrax leaned over to refill her horn. Marian sighed; headache tomorrow, but at least they weren’t breaking out distilled liquor—when that met a tradition of heroic imbibing, the results could be gruesome.
“So, this is the same war as the one in the distant hot lands, closing in on the wizard Hwalker’s lands? Some of my folk enlisted with your Marine war band for that—two young men outlawed for kine-reaving outside the bans, Delauntarax’s daughter who ran away—but she was, ah, strange—and half a dozen who were just restless or poor or all together. The Cross-God priest at Seven Streams mission brings their letters to us sometimes and reads them. Much good fighting there, gold, good feasting, strange foreign lands to see. If I were younger, I’d be tempted myself.”
“ I am younger, and I am tempted,” his son Heponlos said.
“No, and again, no,” his father said, exasperated. “You are my heir.”
“You could pick one of my uncle’s sons and ask the Folk to hail him.”
“ No!”
Winnuthrax sighed, and then shrugged. “ Well, you can see there’s no shortage of young men anxious to blood their spears.”
Marian nodded. “ Yes, this is the same war—but a different part of it. Isketerol of Tarktessos is an ally of Walker’s, and he attacked us this spring. We slaughtered them then, and now we take the fight to their homeland. We don’t require your aid under the Alliance, but we ask it as oath-friends.”
“Hmmm.” Winnuthrax rubbed at his beard and then cracked something between thumb and forefinger. “Well . . . yes, that’s what I’ve heard.”
A feral light gleamed in his son’s eyes. “Tartessos swims in gold, they say; wine and silver and oil and cloth, many fine things.”
Marian felt Swindapa’s faint snort beside her. Yes, I know, she thought. They are a bunch of bandits. But for now, they’re our bunch of bandits.
“ It’ll be a serious war,” she said.
“ But you’ll be supplying weapons? ”
She nodded, a trifle reluctant. The charioteer tribes would do anything to get their hands on firearms; the Republic kept modern ones—as “modern” was defined in the Year 9, meaning breechloaders—out of their hands as far as possible.
“Hmmm. Well, I’ll speak to the folk, talk to the heads of household, and hear their word,” Winnuthrax said.
He was a long way from an autocrat; war-leader, yes, but there was an element of anarchic democracy to these tribes, at least as far as free adult males were concerned.
“Let it never be bandied about that the Thaurinii don’t stand by their oaths and their friends, and you’ve dealt well with us, that’s beyond dispute.” He sighed again. “And enough of business—tomorrow, I can show you some boar worth the trouble of carrying a spear!”
This time it was Marian who sighed. Swindapa had taken the Spear Mark as a teenager, uncommon but not rare for a Fiernan girl; she actually liked hunting big dangerous pigs with a spear. Marian Alston liked hunting, but sensibly, with a gun. Still, you had to keep face. Sun people hospitality was like that; sacrifice, chanting and blood and fire, to put the guest in right with the tribal gods; sonorous ancestral epic; gluttonous feasting, drinking, boasting . . .
All very Homeric, but a month is about all I can take, she thought. Nearly over, thank God, and then she could get back to the sort of rational preparation she felt comfortable with.
“ No, boss, I can’t do that,” Bill Cuddy said. “ Not a straight copy.”
He was sweating, a little. Usually Walker was sensible enough, but his temper was more uncertain than usual after the reverses in the East. It was times like these you remembered that he only had to shout, and the guards would come in and kill you—or even worse, hand you over to Hong.
There are times I really wish I hadn’t listened to Will, Cuddy thought, forcing himself to meet the cold green eyes and shrug. Yeah, I’ve got a mansion and a harem and I’m richer than god, and the work’s interesting, but sometimes . . .
The windows of the private audience room were open; outside, the blue-and-white-checked-marble veranda had an almost luminous glow under the afternoon sun, and the trails of hot-pink bougainvillea that fountained down the sides of man-high vases were an explosion of color. The warm herbal scents of a Greek summer drifted in, and the sound of cicadas, almost as loud as the city-clamor of Walkeropolis beyond. A servant entered and removed the remains of a pizza—Walker had eate
n at his desk today, things were moving fast—and another knelt and arranged a tray of hot herbal tea, cold fruit juice, watered wine, and munchies. Bill Cuddy didn’t feel at all like eating, even those little pickled tuna things on crackers with capers, which he was usually pretty fond of.
Walker indicated the rifle that lay on his desk, acquired at enormous expense via the Tartessian intelligence service in Nantucket.
“ That doesn’t look too complicated.”
“ No, boss, it ain’t. It’s a fucking masterpiece of simplicity; Martins could make one of these by hand, filing it—parts wouldn’t be interchangeable, but it’d work. So, yeah, I can make the rifle, no sweat. It’ll cut into our Westley-Richards output, total production’ll go down for six months, maybe a year—but not all that bad. Besides the loading mechanism and ammo, it’s pretty much the same gun—bit better ballistic performance, is all.”
“ You’re telling me you can, and then you can’t? ” Suddenly Walker smiled, an open, friendly grin, and thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Oh, wait a minute—it’s the ammo, right? ”
He spun a brass cartridge on the table next to the rifle; the polished metal caught the sun that came through the French doors and spilled flickering shadows across furniture inlaid in ivory, silver, and lapis lazuli.
“Yeah, boss. Look, I could turn out small quantities, yessir. Machining rounds from solid bar stock, maybe—but that’ll eat materials, and Christ, it’ll tie up an entire lathe all day to turn out a couple of hundred! The drawing and annealing plant to turn out millions of those fuckers—no way. Not in less than three, four years—and to do that, I’d have to pull all my best people off other stuff, and off teaching. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, boss, I just don’t have the range of machine tools that Leaton does, or electric power sources or—and he doesn’t have to teach all his trainees to goddam read first!”
“Okay,” Walker said grudgingly. “God damn. This is going to hurt morale—the men aren’t used to the other side having more firepower.” A wry smile. “And I’m used to having you pull miracles out of your hat.”
The smile didn’t reach all the way to the eyes; Cuddy felt himself beginning to sweat again. “ Well, yeah, we can’t do that ammo yet, but I’ve had an idea.”
“Oh? ” Cool interest this time, complete focus.
“Yeah. Actually I was busting my ass trying to figure out how we were going to do what Leaton did, and it occurred to me—why not do an end run instead? So I looked up some stuff I remembered from that book you’ve got, the one by the dude called Myatt, some Limey Major or something . . .”
“The Illustrated History of Nineteenth-Century Firearms?” Walker said, nodding unsurprised. They’d already gotten a lot of use out of that one.
“Yup. So I thought, they must have had a lot of problems with drawn-brass stuff to begin with, maybe they had something else? Something that didn’t work quite as smooth but that still did the job? ”
Walker nodded again; that was also something they had a lot of experience with.
“So here it is.”
He reached down into the leather briefcase at his side and handed over a round of ammunition. Walker took it and turned it over in his hands. It was made a little like a shotgun shell, built up of iron and brass and cardboard.
“The thing like the iron top hat, that’s the base,” Cuddy said. “Primer we can do—I’ve been dicking around with mercury fulminate for nine years now; you should crucify me if I hadn’t made some progress. Percussion cap in the base, then you wrap a strip of thin brass around that, and then that holds the cardboard tube with the bullet and powder.”
The lynx eyes speared him. “ Tell me the disadvantages.”
“ It’s not as strong as the regular type. Not completely waterproof, either. And the brass, when the chamber’s real hot, it may glue itself to the walls and jam, or tear apart when the extractor hits. But it’ll work, boss. I can duplicate this rifle, all it needs changed is the shape of the chamber, and I can turn out this ammo in quantity—simple stamping and rolling, and then handwork assembly-line style.”
“Cuddy, you’re a fucking genius!” Walker leaned back in his swivel chair, a dreamy smile on his face. “ You say it would have screwed us if I’d ordered you to go ahead on duplicating the ammo? ”
“Up the ass, boss, totally. Not just losing production, but it would have dicked up our expansion program by tying up my people.”
A harsh chuckle from his overlord. “One gets you ten, that’s exactly what they planned!” His hand struck the desktop with a gunshot crack. “ That bitch Alston thinks she has me typed—and she’s smart, I nearly did that.”
Cuddy swallowed and looked away. Alston was the only thing that could make Walker’s eyes look, for a moment, entirely too much like Alice Hong’s for comfort.
Walker went on, “ What about the Gatlings? ”
Cuddy shook his head again. “No way, bossman. The ammo isn’t strong enough to be hopper- or clip-fed.” His grin went wider. “ But.”
“ But? ”
“But the same book had an idea the Frogs used, back around Gatling’s time. You take a whole bundle of rifle barrels, say seventy-five of them, and clamp them together. You load them with plates in a frame—the plates hold the ammo. Load a plate in, wham, hit the trigger, take the plate out, put in another one.” He held up a hand. “ Yeah, heavier and slower than a Gatling, but it’ll work.”
“Cuddy, you are my main man! Get right onto both of them. Top priority.”
Cuddy rose, nodding; he paused to greet Helmuth Mittler on the way out. He and the head of Section One weren’t all that close—the ex-Stasi agent reminded him too much of cops who’d busted him in the past, those pale eyes with the I’ve-got-the-goods-on-you look. Still, the former East German did good work . . . and it was just as well to keep on the good side of him, he was important at court too.
Maybe I’m not sorry I listened to Will after all, Cuddy thought. His bodyguard fell in around him as he walked down the corridor. Tonight I’ll celebrate. Susie. Yeah, Susie.
Susie—her own name was unpronounceable—was the most enthusiastic girl he’d picked up here; like a demented anaconda in bed and she worshiped him like a god.
Of course, I did win her off Hong, he thought. Probably quite a contrast.
It was all a matter of contrasts. He’d felt hard-done by, that first six months after the Event; now things were fine. Susie felt her life had taken a turn for the better when he won her from Hong . . . all a matter of contrasts, and of being adaptable.
“Guys, this is crazy,” Peter Girenas said.
The tall redheaded man shrugged, smiling. “Pete, crossing North America in the Year 8—9, now—that’s crazy. Staying where we like it, that’s sensible.”
The bluff where the Islanders and their newfound friends had wintered looked better now that spring had melted the last of the snow and green grass covered the mud in fresh growth. The row of log cabins had their doors and windows open to air; they’d been crowded but not impossibly so. Now most of the Cloud Shadow People were back in hide tents; there were plenty of hides, with more pinned to the logs to dry.
Henry Morris was still limping, very slightly; he probably would for the rest of his life. His wife, Raven Feather, stood beside him, smiling, with their baby in her arms. Henry was dressed for the hunt in leggings and long leather shirt; so were the two young men beside him, but they carried bows, rather than atlatls and darts. Bows they’d made themselves, under Morris’s skilled direction.
“Dekkomosu. . . .” Giernas began.
The Lekkansu—former Lekkansu, now a Cloud Shadow warrior, Girenas thought—smiled and shook his head.
“My heart’s full of love for you, brother,” he said softly. “But not for your people. I’ll stay here, where I don’t have to meet them soon. And where I can help these people who’ve taken me in.”
“Look, Henry, it’s okay now . . . but what if you decide you’ve made a mistake? W
hat if you get sick? ”
“If I get sick, I’ll heal or I’ll die,” Morris said. “And if I decide I’m making a mistake, well, I’m closer to the Island than you are, aren’t I? ”
“Okay, okay,” Girenas said. “So, that’s fair; we leave you your share of the gear and all the mares in foal, and one of the stallions. Good enough?”
“Good enough,” Morris said. He advanced and shook Girenas’s hand, embraced Sue Chau, thumped Eddie Vergeraxsson on the shoulder.
Girenas swung into the saddle. Their six packhorses and remounts were ready. So was Eddie, of course, and Sue. Beside her Spring Indigo rode, their child across the saddlebow in a carrying cradle he’d made overwinter himself. Girenas turned his horse’s head to the west. Ahead the spring prairie waved in a rippling immensity of green, starred with flowers, loud with birdsong.
“Let’s get going,” he said to his party. “Long way to California. Hell—” he turned in the saddle and looked back at Morris. “You’ll never find out what happens!”
Morris waved, laughing. “ I’ll know what happens here,” he called. “And that’s as much as any man can know!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
May-August, Year 10 A.E.
“He should have called off the ceremony,” Clemens said desperately. “He could not,” Azzu-ena said. “A king who does not celebrate the New Year is no king, or so the people think.”
He turned away from the beds. There were twenty in this room, but only ten were occupied—the only patients he was absolutely sure were going to recover. There were over a hundred in the wards now, and the guardsmen were bringing in dozens more every day. Twenty deaths a day, that he was sure of—he was also sure that more victims were being hidden by their relatives.
He bent over one and drained a pustule into the little ceramic dish. Then he scrubbed down, shed gown and mask, and moved into another chamber, where a long line of palace servitors and royal guardsmen waited. A couple of Kathryn Hollard’s New Troops were there too, to keep order and make sure nobody bolted.
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