“Hey, I’m just a Dakota plowboy,” Tom said a little defensively. “We don’t eat snails.”
“Abalone is a big item in North Dakota, then?” Roy jibed, and laughed. “OK, each to their own. Let’s have some of that chardonnay.”
The white wine was chilled from its immersion in seawater, but the temperature of the air was perfect—low seventies. As the sun sank toward the western horizon the Pacific became a glittering road of eye-hurting brightness. The cliffs turned ruddy with the sunset; he refilled the skillet with sliced potatoes, flipping them a couple of times before sliding out a portion for everyone, then putting one of the sage-and-herb-spiced venison sausages on a stick and propping it up with its butt in the sand and the wood over one of the rocks that ringed the fire.
“It’s a good thing life in the field isn’t usually like this,” Tully said, retrieving his sausage and wrapping a slice of the dense, chewy bread around the sputtering, smoking meat before stripping it off the stick. “War might get too popular…. Pass that mustard, would you?”
“Here,” Adrienne said, and tossed it over. “I suspect we’re all going to suffer enough to satisfy the most exacting conscience before this is over, so let’s store up some memories while we can.”
The sun vanished in a line of red fire and hot gold among the clouds on the western horizon. Stars began to appear above the low crescent moon, and the air grew chillier; he put a pot of coffee on the ring, and Sandra unwrapped some chocolate-walnut brownies.
“Made these myself,” she said. “Seven Oaks walnuts—best in the domain.”
Tom sat on the sand and threw a few more sticks of driftwood onto the fire before leaning back against the log. The flotsam burned with a snap and crackle, flames flickering blue and green with the salts dried into the wood. Adrienne curled into his shoulder, and he put an arm around her; he suspected Tully and Sandra were doing the same, but his eyes were a little dazzled by the fire.
“Just my luck,” he said lightly.
“Kemosabe?”
“I find the girl of my dreams, and she’s a spook from another dimension with a license to kill.”
Adrienne chuckled. “Here, you’re from another dimension. Although I grant you’re not a spook—you’re a game warden from another dimension….”
Tom sighed, taking a sip of the coffee and another deep breath of the cool, sea-scented air. “Just doesn’t get better than this, I suppose.”
Adrienne’s lips touched his ear just as he was taking a sip of the coffee; he might have managed that, but not the tongue that slid in after them. When he’d finished coughing, she thumped him helpfully on the back.
“I’ll have you know that I come second to no meal. Or even a Pacific sunset,” she said, grinning wickedly.
“Ah… I think it’s about time to turn in,” Tom said, ignoring laughter from across the fire. “Long day tomorrow.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Southern California
July 2009
The Commonwealth of New Virginia
Piet Botha reined in his horse. He rode in Boer fashion, slumped with his legs nearly straight and slanted forward. His son rode beside him, using the bent-knee New Virginian style. They were alike otherwise, given the twenty-five-year gap in their ages. Schalk Botha was a little lighter in his coloring and had eyes of an unusual tawny shade; besides that he was an inch shorter than his father’s six-three, and without any of the older man’s extra flesh. He was also grinning with excitement.
“Hell, yes, Pa,” he said. “Sounds like fun!”
“You’re not too old for me to clout across the ear,” Piet growled. “This is serious business, boy. We may have to fight some of our relatives, not just the bliddy Indians.”
Schalk shrugged his wide shoulders. “Only if they’re fools enough to get mixed up in treason.”
“Treason is what you do when you lose,” Piet said. “I’d be on the other side myself, if I thought it would work. But it wouldn’t.”
He stopped and leaned down from the saddle to fasten the gate. His cow-beasts were all inside the paddock now, and he looked up the long slope of the land to where his farmhouse glittered white and red among its trees and orange groves, and the mountains reared blue behind it. It was a hot day, but tempered by a breeze from the sea; the air was full of the smell of horse sweat and cattle dung and crushed herbs. Behind them was a dirt road, and beyond that a waste of tall dry grass, dead reeds that had grown in seasonal sloughs earlier in the year, an occasional thicket of oak or sycamore or willow, and patches of the tall stalks of wild mustard.
It’s home to young Schalk, he thought. His homeland. He came here young enough; I’ll be an exile all my life.
He shrugged at the thought; he’d be an exile in the land of his birth, too, even if he could live there unmolested by the new government’s police—something unlikely in the extreme. The country that had borne him didn’t exist anymore, not really. Instead he spoke of practical things. “We’ll be getting the horses. Good ones—no show beasts, mind—ones that’ll stay alive over the mountains. And the mules.”
Adrienne Rolfe smiled to herself as they climbed out of the amphibian and onto the floating dock, blinking lazily in the bright San Diegan sunshine. I’m feeling disgustingly sleek and satisfied, she thought, as the crewmen took the ropes. I like Tom. I like him a lot.
She grew aware of exactly how sleek and satisfied her smile was, and shrugged ruefully at Tom’s expression; Tully’s was carefully neutral, but the little man was alarmingly perceptive.
San Diego was the third-largest city in the Commonwealth, nearly twenty thousand people and growing fast. She rather liked it, in small doses—except when the Santa Ana was blowing, of course. The town was a decade younger than the ones around the bay, and it had a tarry practicality, a big-shouldered quality that gave piquancy to the sun-washed, mountain-backed setting. It was also a Commission territory, not dominated by any Family the way Napa or New Brooklyn were. It wasn’t centered around the Families collectively either, the way the capital was. Settler merchants and manufacturers set the tone here.
The floatplane docks were near the yacht basin, and just over from the main harbor, all facing south toward Coronado Island and within the sheltering hook of land that cut off the harbor from the Pacific. The land airport was on the shore to the west; a Hercules was coming in as she watched, with the winged Thompson gun of the Collettas on its tailfin; her mouth quirked at the irony.
The main harbor was busy too, amid a white storm of gulls: ten big windjammers , a couple of flat-decked wooden tankers and dozens of smaller craft, from tugs down to fishing craft and rowboats, all moving about the dredged channels to the redwood piers. New nahua workers filed over the gangplanks of a three-master up from the southern ports; cranes swung ashore its other cargo: baled raw cotton, rare tropical woods, cacao in the bean, leather, featherwork cloaks, chilies and caged macaws. Another fair-sized sailing ship was being towed in; the absence of a diesel auxiliary and some subtle elements in her lines showed she was foreign—Dahaean out of Hagamantash, probably, from what FirstSiders would call Shanghai—laden with silk and cotton fabrics, tea, pepper and cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg and inlaid furniture, jade statues and thousand-knot rugs. A Tahitian schooner looked more exotic, with its twin prows and flamboyantly colorful tiki-mask figurehead.
Most craft were from the Commonwealth, swapping northern timber and manufactures and FirstSide goods for refined petroleum, chocolate, cement, brick, tile, borax….
And there she is, Adrienne thought.
A tall young woman with yellow hair came swinging down the docks; she was dressed in a white linen dress with a thin black belt and a wide-brimmed white hat; a little discreet jewelry, and the Families’ gold-and-platinum ring on her left thumb. She took off her sunglasses and waved with a bright artificial smile, and walked more quickly.
“Tom Christiansen, my cousin Heather Fitzmorton,” Adrienne said formally. The bitch, she did not add aloud, as t
hey exchanged a formal kiss on the cheek.
Heather was Adrienne’s age to a year. Her eyes flicked across Tully, lingered on Sandra for an instant, then took Tom in from feet to head.
“Well, Cuz,” she drawled, “I see your taste has improved—and gotten a lot more conventional.”
“Ha,” Adrienne said flatly. “Ha. You always were such a kidder, Cuz.” Heather’s handshake was lingering when she took Tom’s hand. “And here are the keys. I presume Irene is around?”
“At the town house,” Heather said. “It wouldn’t do to have her standing next to you where people could see; it might give them ideas.”
“Thanks for helping out.”
“All a mispocha-mitzvah, as the saying goes,” Heather said, taking the keys and dropping them into her handbag. “And it’s a guilt-free chance to get away from my kids for a while.” She wiggled her fingers at the rest of the party. “Ta,” she finished, and walked away.
Tom blinked. “I got the impression she doesn’t like you?” he said, taking in Sandra’s black scowl at the retreating back of the woman of the Families.
“I’m not exactly popular, and Heather’s a model of respectability,” Adrienne said. “I warned you about that, remember… but Heather has a perfectly adequate sense of responsibility, fortunately, so I could ask her for a favor.”
“Mmmm… mispocha-mitzvah… something ‘good deeds’?” Tully said. “If that was Yiddish.”
“More or less,” Adrienne said. “‘Clan duty’ might be closer to the actual colloquial meaning.”
“I didn’t think mispocha meant family.”
“It doesn’t, FirstSide. It sort of came to here; old Sol Pearlmutter used to mutter, ‘What a mispocha!’ about the Families, so… Heather’s my aunt Jennifer’s daughter—her father’s a Fitzmorton, of course, a collateral, and they have a place just across the Mayacamas in the Fitzmorton domain—Sonoma Valley, you’d say.”
“And Irene?”
“Another cousin; and she looks a lot more like me than dear Heather. Blame it on the way the Fitzmortons and Rolfes kept interbreeding back on Firstside. In the meantime, let’s get to the hotel.”
The San Diego Arms knew they were coming in, and sent transport—a brand-new European fuel-cell van; it was open in back, and Adrienne enjoyed pointing out the sights as they moved inland, through the bustle of the harbor district and into the town proper: the paved highway and pipeline stretching north toward Long Beach, the new movie theater…
“And who the hell are they?” Tom blurted, pointing to two men.
“Those?” Adrienne said. Got to remember what looks weird to a FirstSider, she chided herself.
Those were two big brown-skinned men, with middle-aged fat overlying impressive muscles, swirling tattoos over much of their faces and bodies, wearing what looked like crested Grecian helmets made of orange and green feathers, multicolored cloaks and sarongs. They strode along the sidewalk under the pepper trees, occasionally stopping to look in a shop window. Nobody but a few fascinated small boys noticed them.
“Those are Hawaiian ali’i—nobles—from Tahiti.”
“Ah…” Tully scratched his head. “If they’re Hawaiian, how come they’re from Tahiti?”
“Long story… well, about the time we sent our first ships across the Pacific, the Hawaiian islands got hit with a really bad series of plagues—smallpox from the Selang-Arsi country and chicken pox and measles from who knows where. We bought the islands from the survivors—paid them with vaccination and, umm, a few other things.”
“And they moved to Tahiti?” Tom asked, his fair brows knotted in thought. “Because they’re closely related cultures, I suppose?”
“Well, it was more on the order of Tahiti being part of the ‘few other things’ we paid them with. Their ancestors had come from there, and they remembered.”
“Wait a minute,” Tom said. “What did the Tahitians say to all this?”
“The ‘few other things’ also included ships, a couple of thousand trade muskets, some muzzle-loading brass cannon, and a lot of gunpowder.”
“Oh,” he said. “Then they conquered Tahiti?”
Adrienne felt like patting him on the cheek. Tom’s so gentle and sweet! she thought. Aloud, she went on: “Sort of. Actually, they ate a lot of the Tahitians, as I understand it: You could consider it a conquest, or a really big hunt for long pig. And sacrificed a lot of them to Kuka’ilimoku—the war god.”
Tom and his friend winced. Adrienne went on: “Just because someone gets the dirty end of the stick doesn’t mean they’re very nice,” she pointed out.
Tom would have enjoyed the Sea-Witch more if he’d been able to relax, if they were really headed west to the islands for nothing more serious than scuba diving and surfing and climbs among the mountain forests.
As it was… I’m enjoying myself anyway, he thought. Just not as much.
He’d done a little boating—canoeing in the North Woods of Minnesota, and a little sailing in California; he’d have done a lot more, but it took money he didn’t have.
Right now he was standing at the forepeak, clinging to the foresail shroud where the long bowsprit lanced out from the hull, and looking back at the taut curve of the sails. The two-masted schooner was sailing reach before a following wind, slicing its way northwest and throwing bursts of spray twice the height of his head as it rose to the swells. Land had dropped below the eastern horizon hours ago. The sea was indigo under an azure bowl of sky, cloudless save for a little high haze in the east; the wind was not quite stiff enough to show whitecaps, and the waves were long and smooth. Foam peeled back from the yacht’s sharp cutwater, and the bow-wave curled deep along the hull, showing the copper sheathing that protected the wood from teredo-worms. A school of bottlenose dolphins rode the wave, lancing out of the water in smooth curves and spearing back with hardly a splash, dancing with the sea and the ship.
Let me sail, let me sail, let the Orinoco flow,
Let me reach, let me beach, on the shores of Tripoli.
The tune ran through his head as he watched, like a lilt of infinite possibilities beyond the horizon.
Adrienne waved from the rear of the yacht near the wheel and aft of the deckhouse, a hundred and forty feet back. That was only a little more than the height of the mainmast—the foremast was a bit shorter—and she carried ten thousand square feet of canvas in her fore-and-aft sails. That was a number; the dazzling mass piled overhead was reality, like clouds brought to earth and imprisoned in a suave geometry of curves and lines. He levered himself up and walked backward—sternward, he reminded himself—along the deck; it was relatively narrow, nowhere more than thirty feet across, and uncluttered save for the low shapes of the geared winches that controlled the sails.
The crew nodded as he passed, not pausing in their work, and Tom returned the gesture. There were twelve men aboard, and three women. Captain McKay was a taciturn man whose hair had been lion-colored before it went mostly badger gray, with blue eyes and a kink in his nose that looked as if it had been put there with something sharp, and scar tissue half an inch thick over his knuckles. His accent was an improbable mixture of Scots and Aussie, when he did speak; his wife was purser-cook, his daughter her assistant, and his son first mate. Evidently McKay had been running the Sea-Witch since she was built in the Pearlmutter yards in New Brooklyn thirty-five years before. What he’d done before that, FirstSide, was not mentioned. The rest of the crew were New Virginian-born, except for one Dahaean picked up recently in San Diego, a dark Eurasian-looking man with the front of his scalp shaved and the black hair at the rear worked up into braids and looped over his ears.
Tom nodded to him, too: The man was dressed in a pair of tar-stained breeches that ended at the knee, showing a remarkable assortment of scars on his whipcord-lean torso. God alone knew how he’d ended up here.
And according to Adrienne, his language is a creolized form of North Iranian with a heavy Sinic influence. Whatever the hell that means.
&
nbsp; Captain MacKay was seated at the table on the fantail, under an awning, along with the rest of their party. A steward was just laying out luncheon: salad, skewers of grilled shrimp the size of Tom’s thumb in curry sauce, cold meats, bread, cheese and fruit. The skipper of the Sea-Witch had his white peaked cap on the table and was filling a foul old briar pipe; luckily the stiff breeze would snatch away everything but a hint of its reek.
“Aye, we’ll cruise a bit off Santa Barbara,” he said to Adrienne, giving Tom a courteous nod. “Those are well-traveled waters, s’truth. We’ll be seen by ships and aircraft both; then we’ll turn and head”—he waved to the southwest. “Off the wind on that heading lie the Marquesas, and we’ll be nicely making way. Cruise there, up to the islands, and it’ll be a while before it’s realized you’re no aboard, miss, but the Sea-Witch herself, she’ll be seen and spoken of at once—on the radio, too, no fear.”
Tom seated himself. “I’m a bit noticeable myself,” he pointed out.
McKay grinned, a snaggletoothed expression in his bushy beard and mustache, and pointed silently to his son.
The young man was in his twenties, and only a finger under Tom’s six-three and a bit, but he was gangly rather than broad-shouldered and deep-chested, and until today his freckled face had been topped by a thatch of stiff gingery curls. Tom’s eyebrow went up as he saw that the unruly mop had been cut close in a good imitation of the Ranger crop he wore, and dyed silver-blond as well.
“From a distance…” he said.
“Aye,” McKay said with satisfaction. He cocked an eye skyward. “This wind’ll no hold. I may need the auxiliary if we’re to make the coast again by sunset.”
Tom had the impression that McKay regarded using the diesel engine as a confession of failure of some sort. Purist, he thought.
Adrienne’s eyes met his; she was wearing a sarong, a halter, and red hibiscus flowers in her hair; she winked slightly, and he knew she’d read his thoughts.
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