On the Oceans of Eternity

by S. M. Stirling

  He clapped his hands; a guard brought a sword. It was made to a traditional Egyptian pattern, a half-moon slashing blade with a short straight section above the hilt, called a kopesh. This was blue-gray gleaming steel, though. The hilt was checked olive wood and the pommel gold and lapis. It was the blade that drew Ghejo's eyes; they lit as he took it up, tested the edge, stood to sweep it through a few practice slashes.

  "A gift," McAndrews said grandly.

  "A good gift!" Ghejo replied.

  "The ore from which this iron is made," McAndrews said, wiping his mouth on a linen napkin and eating a fig, "is common in your land."

  Ghejo's head came up with a snap like a striking snake. "Say you so?" he breathed softly.

  McAndrews smiled, carefully prepared words moving behind his eyes. "I do," he said. "Isn't that interesting?"

  Ghejo's eyes narrowed, and he nodded. McAndrews had picked up considerable experience with barbarians over the past ten years. Most of them weren't much moved by the prospect of being civilized; civilization meant someone like Ramses hitting you up with the bill for his palaces and wars and forty-foot gold statues. He had found that barbarians were just as enchanted as anyone else at the prospect of wealth, and their chiefs were as greedy for power as any Pharaoh. The trick would be to make any arrangement look like a good solid exchange of value-for-value, from someone their bloodthirsty code could let them respect. They were strange, but not necessarily fools.

  Meroe, he thought, as the verbal fencing went on.

  The first great sub-Saharan African kingdom had been there, about where Khartoum was in the original history. It was through there that ironworking had spread to the black peoples. That was slated for five hundred years from now, though, in a history that wasn't going to happen. In this history, the rest of the world was getting an enormous leg up while black Africans were still just getting started. Egypt had more people than all the rest of the continent put together. Most of Africa was still pygmy and bushman country, nearly empty. His own black ancestors were a thin fringe of farmers and herdsmen along the southern edge of the Sahara. They'd barely begun the great millennia-long migration that would take them all the way to Zululand in the Iron Age, and make them masters of the tropical jungles.

  It's not that Alston wants to do down Mother Africa, he thought grudgingly. Or even Cofflin and the others.

  She-all the Islanders-just didn't much care. West Africa wasn't worth their while, considering the effort it would take to push through to the few Neolithic farmers of the savannahs. With so much easier and more agreeable territory open to them…

  But if someone didn't do something, outsiders would take the empty parts of Africa-he'd seen how when farmers met hunters, the farmers pushed the hunters aside without even really noticing they were there. And if the Islanders were too principled to do it, others who'd learned from them would. Black folk would be confined to a little patch in the northwest of the continent, and they'd be an enclave of primitives even there, easy victims for any aggressor.

  Ghejo wouldn't know what he was talking about, if he tried to explain.

  "You are rich here," the chief said. "You have great power here. Why do you wish to make alliance with us? We live in little villages, or follow our herds." By the way he was looking around, Ghejo wouldn't mind an alternative lifestyle himself.

  "I have wealth and power here," McAndrews said. "But I also have many enemies here. If they prevail against me, I would have somewhere to go… but not as a fugitive, dependent on the favor of others. And with me I could bring many others, skilled in making"-he nodded to the steel kopesh- "and other things besides; the fire-weapons."

  "Ahhh…" Ghejo said. McAndrews recognized the look; it was a man seeing possibilities. "We must speak more of this- and I must consult my neighbors…"

  "You will go from here with rich gifts," McAndrews said, smiling. "And perhaps you and many others might gain some experience with the new weapons in the war that begins soon, if you could furnish troops and workmen…"

  There was a lot of potential around Meroe. He knew how to build dams and canals-the area south of Khartoum had plenty of land that could be watered, to support millions of people where now a few villagers scratched fields of millet and herded goats. There was iron ore nearby, and other minerals fairly close. If he wanted a better climate, the Ethiopian highlands were right there to the east, and to west it was flat open grasslands for six thousand miles to the Atlantic. Easy for innovations to spread. When the Nantucketers, or the Achaeans, landed from their helicopters, they weren't going to find nekkid savages with grass skirts, nohow.

  I'm just a dumb nigger with his head full of Afrocentrist shit, hey, Walker King of Men? Didn't occur to you that if I couldn't find the black Egypt of my dreams, I could fucking build one of my own, did it?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  November, 10 A.E.-Western Anatolia

  October, 10 A.E.-Long Island, Republic of Nantucket

  October, 10 A.E.-Coast of northwestern Iberia

  October, 10 A.E.-Long Island, Republic of Nantucket

  November, 10 A.E.-Western Anatolia

  "I don't think retreating blisters hurt any worse than advancing blisters," Private Vaukel Telukuo said seriously, glancing down at his moving boots. "About the same, they are."

  "That's supposed to be a joke, Vauk, you great Fiernan gowk," Johanna Gwenhaskieths growled.

  When she glanced aside and saw his grin she gave him a halfhearted elbow in the ribs.

  "Could be worse," he said. "Could be raining."

  "It was raining half the morning," she replied.

  That was obvious enough; the track they followed to the southeast was deep in mud. That clung to boots, adding a half pound to every step, and a constant squelching undertone. Her company was near the end of the front section, two hundred and fifty helmeted heads ahead of her, then the baggage and sick-carts, then about as many more behind that. It looked a formidable host to her eyes; ten times as many fighting men as her clan had, about as many as her whole teuatha.

  Former tribe, she reminded herself. Some might go back to Alba after their hitch, but she certainly couldn't. The Corps is my clan and the Republic my tribe now. And this is a piss-poor excuse for a road.

  Especially compared to the watertight ones in Nantucket. It was pretty obvious that someone had driven a big herd of cattle this way not long ago; Johanna looked at the cowpats and hoof-prints with envy. Driving off cattle was fun; besides, it meant beef.

  Somebody ahead stumbled, and she cursed as she checked and nearly stumbled herself in the slippery mud. She cursed again, silently, as she tried to get her legs back into the automatic rhythm that would carry her along without much thinking on how they hurt. It was well past the stop for the noon meal, but not nearly time to break off the day's march and make camp.

  Helmet, rifle, bayonet, entrenching tool, two grenades, canteen, a hundred rounds in her bandolier and another hundred in the haversack, four pounds of dog biscuit and jerky with a couple of onions and some salt, bedroll, her share of her eight-Marine section's unit equipment, starting with a section of canvas boiled in linseed oil… At the beginning of a day, it didn't seem like much. When you'd been marching or righting or both every day for a week, it began to feel like you were carrying a chief's chariot on your back.

  "What I don't understand," she said, scratching, "is why we keep retreating. We beat the Ringapi at O'Rourke's Ford, we handled Walker's handfast men pretty rough seven days later at Fork Mountain-and every time, as soon as they break off we back off. All we've really done is burn farms and forage. What's the point?"

  A voice from two ranks back snarled: "The point is the officers figure out what to do. We just do it."

  "Yes, Corporal Hook," she said. He was a bad one to cross, doubly so now he'd been promoted. Granted he deserved it, but…

  "We're luring them into a trap," a cheerful voice said.

  She looked up, started, and almost stumbled again. Colonel O'Rourke
was leading his horse back down the column.

  "If you say so, sir… When they catch us, they try to make us run; when we run, they try to catch us. Maybe they'll be so tired from chasing us they'll be easy meat?"

  O'Rourke chuckled. "Not quite, Private. Tell me, how have the rations been?"

  "Fine, sir, can't complain, haven't touched my iron rations… oh."

  She looked over her shoulder at the desolation that was in their wake. And this miserable road to haul supplies on, she thought.

  "Oh, indeed," O'Rourke said, and led his horse on down toward the end of the column.

  "And what did he mean, then?" Vaukel asked.

  "That the enemy are going to get hungry before we do."

  Johanna chuckled. "Now that we've eaten the land bare, or burned it."

  The weight of rifle and pack seemed lighter than they had a minute ago. She scratched again, hoping it was just sweat and that she hadn't come down with lice. Besides the medics' warnings about how they carried disease, one of the pleasures of Camp Grant-after the shock of having her head hair cropped to a quarter inch and the rest shaved-had been not itching for the first time in her life. You couldn't always avoid them in the field, but the knowledge that you didn't have to have nits all your life had been inexpressibly wonderful.

  Nantucket was wonderful itself. She hoped she'd live to see it again.

  "This is it, then," Jared Cofflin said aloud.

  They were about a mile off the shore of the North Fork; it was a low line in the distance, lime-green of marsh and the green-gold-scarlet colors of autumn trees. He leveled a pair of binoculars.

  "Well, not a bad job of navigation, if I say so myself," he said. And it wasn't, not with only a compass and logline to find his way on the map.

  The wind was out of the north now, and he squinted beneath the brim of his cap as they scudded a little south of westward before it, the sun low enough on the horizon to be a nuisance. Good boat, he thought with a burst of affection. She answers sweet.

  "Ready to come about," he said, busying himself with the line that ran through pulleys on the boom to a sliding track behind him along the stern. "Prepare to gybe."

  Oddly enough, running before the wind was the most difficult sort of small-boat sailing. He pulled the tiller toward him, and hauled in the line with his left, to get the boom amidships; you didn't want it crashing back and forth across the cockpit.

  "Gybe ho! 'Ware boom!"

  The catboat was pointing due south now, and the boom swung out to starboard from the midships position. The sail thuttered as its unstayed edge caught the wind for a second, then cracked as it moved out, filled, and settled down. Time to build up just enough way on her, then-

  "Lower away," he said. "Reef her."

  Martinelli and Martha were on the rope, lowering the gaff and the sail with it. The children stood to the inboard edge of the boom and fastened the loose folds down with the ties sewn into the sail; they made a creditable job of it, too, if not Guard-neat.

  The channel in was marked by poles with string pennants; there was a creek flowing into a shallow inlet, with salt marsh full of osprey nests perched in dead trees on the port and a spit of dry land to starboard. One of the big fish hawks punched the water not far away in a fist of spray, flogged itself back into the air with a foot of thrashing silver in its talons. He could see the mad lemon-yellow ferocity of its eye as it went by the Boojum, intent on its own business and ignoring him. The dock poked out into the water, a board surface on hemlock piles, with rope fenders along the sides.

  He let the feel of the water and wind flow through his hands on line and tiller, up from his feet on the deck. He could smell the land now, silt and brackish water and growing things with an autumnal muskiness under it, strong even against the breeze.

  "Lower away all… now!" he said.

  The gaff came down the rest of the way with a run, and the two adults leaped to secure it. Martha and the petty officer took up the oars and fended off, the Boojum coming to rest against the wharf behind another boat that might have been its twin. There were plenty of hands on the dock to grab the lines thrown to them and make fast, not to mention a brace of excited dogs that looked to be mostly collie. They barked and dashed about until called to heel, then lay with their eyes bright and ears cocked forward.

  "Afternoon, Chief," Thomas Hollard said.

  The Marine commander's elder brother was in his late thirties, Cofflin knew, a little shorter and darker than Ken. He looked older than his years to pre-Event eyes, the way most people over twenty or so did nowadays; solid and troll-strong, his skin weathered and roughened by outdoor work in all weathers. The hand that shook Cofflin's was hard with callus, with knuckles like walnuts.

  What Dad would have called workingman's hands, Jared thought as he shook the offered palm.

  The elder Hollard's long straight nose had been broken at some time-during the Alban War, he remembered from the file he'd read yesterday-and reset a little crooked. The farmer sported a short-cropped beard, and wore dark woolen pants, white linen shirt, anorak-style jacket and high, laced boots. Probably his company clothes, and most of the rest of the farm's folk-eight adults, a dozen kids-were in clean, coarse linsey-woolsey bib overalls. Some of the kids barefoot-not surprising on a dry autumn day, seeing that a shirt cost a week's wages for a laborer, and a pair of shoes took a month's pay. One of the definitions of affluent in this Year 10 was having more clothes than a set to wear and a set to wash and a set for church or Meeting. Beside Hollard was his auburn-haired Fiernan wife Tanaswada, carrying their ten-month-old youngest; she was in her late twenties, had been a young widow with a baby at the breast in the aftermath of the Battle of the Downs when she met and married the Nantucketer. That boy must be the oldest child, now a red-haired, straw-hatted youngster giving the chief bashful glances, and admiring ones at Martinelli's Coast Guard uniform.

  Let's see, three of their own, and another adoptee, five all up, and they're young yet-Tom here must be trying to raise himself a labor force from scratch, to be ready when his immigrants set up on their own.

  "Bill, Mary, why don't you give a hand with the Cofflins' stuff?" Hollard said with an easy authority. "Chief, Ms. Cofflin, you want to see the old Alonski place now, or tomorrow?"

  "Might as well take a first look now," he said. "If it's not too much trouble."

  "No trouble at all," Hollard said genially. "Hey, what's that?"

  "Tuna," Martha said. "We ran into a catcher boat on our way over, thought you might like some."

  "Thanks; we can find some room on the grill," Hollard said. His wife gave a frank cry of delight; fish was a staple nowadays, but that meant salt cod, not this. "Neighborly of you."

  Cofflin nodded acknowledgment. They'd met fairly often, since the farmer was something of a leader among the Long Island settlers and acted as delegate to cast their votes in the Meeting, but not often enough to be more than friendly acquaintances.

  "Chuck, you finished the chores, didn't you?" Hollard said.

  "Ayup, Dad. Checked the water troughs, an' everything."

  "Why don't you show these youngsters around, then," he said.

  His wife cut in: "Make sure your sister isn't left out." A slight scowl went with the boy's nod; the natural reaction of a ten-year-old burdened with someone half his age. "And don't turn up for dinner covered in mud, either!"

  "Thanks, Dad-sure, Mom-you guys want to see the place?"

  The children dashed off up the dirt track that led up the low slope inland, followed by barking dogs and more sedately by most of the adults. The farmer and his wife walked more slowly still with the Cofflins.

  "Just through here," Hollard said. "It's a pretty enough place."

  Cofflin nodded silently when they passed through the belt of trees along the shoreline. A big field had been cleared from the forest, forty acres or so, even most of the stumps gone. Shin-high autumn grass waved green-gold in the afternoon light, starred with late wildflowers, tall orange-yell
ow butter-and-egg plants, red-purple deer grass and hound's-tongue. A few black-coated steers raised their muzzles to glance at the newcomers, then returned to their cropping, their jaws making wet tearing sounds; only a slight ranginess in the legs and the wicked look of their horns broke the Angus look of the three-quarter-bred cattle. Across the pasture lay a house made of squared logs weathered brownish-gray, sixty feet by thirty, with a shingled roof and a fieldstone chimney in the middle of it. Several long clapboard sheds stood nearby, and a scatter of big trees left when the land was cleared, their leaves turning maple-scarlet, oak-yellow, and beech-red with autumn. They walked up to it through a neglected lawn and peered into the windows, seeing darkness and bulky shapes.

  "That's the Alonski place," Hollard said redundantly. "We were partners, when he started. He wanted to do some serious fishing here, hence the drying sheds-there are oyster beds, right enough, good lobstering, and God knows plenty of fish out there in the Sound; and he thought he could start a bit of a town here eventually, inn for travelers, smithy and suchlike."

  He jerked a thumb southward over his shoulder toward the Great West Road. "It's not that he wasn't a hard worker. It was the transport costs killed him-couldn't compete with the boats working out of Fogarty's Cove, and it ate his mustering-out grant and everything he could scrape together, beg, or borrow. I liked him, he was a man you'd want to have at your back. But stubborn?"

  "Stubborn as a whole sounder of pigs," Tanaswanda said. "With a mule thrown in."

  Her husband nodded. "His cousin Pulakis has the farm two sections east toward the Cove. When Alonski drowned in the storm of '07, his wife and kids moved in with them."

  Hollard shook his head. "He was a good man."

  "Indeed he was," Martha said quietly.

  That's right, Cofflin thought, glancing aside at her. He was in Marian's commando group, when they got Martha out of the Olmecs' hands.

  Hollard nodded at her. "Right you are, Madam Councilor," he said formally. Then he went on: "The parcel's one hundred sixty acres, not counting the salt marsh-it was exempted from the Coastal Reserve on the off-chance that it might actually become a town. I think in another five, mebbe ten years that might have worked, but not now. There's this clearing, I've been turning my cattle in for summer pasture, and the house- I've kept it weathertight, used it for storage-good tube well, no trouble to fit up a water system with a wind pump, and run it out to the drying sheds, they'd do fine for stables. Another thirty or forty acres fit for clearing, the rest good woodlot, and there's the dock. Nice sheltered little inlet, this here is actually sort of a peninsula between the creek and a marsh."