Against the Tide of Years (16 page)

“This was the usual thing,” Hollard went on. “Sun People man and Earth Folk woman. She decided she didn’t like him anymore, and he couldn’t get it through his head she could tell him to get lost. Thought it was just a fight, until it came out at the Mast.”

He thought he heard Alston’s aide mutter
“Scumbags”
under her breath, but it wasn’t loud enough to hear. His inner smile was wry; having Fiernan and clansmen from the charioteer tribes in the same unit was murder sometimes; they just didn’t
like
each other and their customs were about as distinct as you could get . . . and neither always meshed with Americans, either, to put it mildly. A complete set of national stock-figures had grown up already, with the same underlying element of truth that most stereotypes had—to the Americans, the Fiernan seemed like good-natured, happy-go-lucky slobs, and to the Fiernan the American Eagle People were detail-obsessed control freaks with a serious pickle up their butts. And both thought the Sun People were homicidal maniacs with hair-trigger tempers—and lazy, to boot.

It would have been easier to have an all-Islander unit, like back during the Alban War; he wouldn’t have had to waste so much time running elementary literacy classes. The problem there was that there just weren’t enough Islanders; everyone was in the militia, of course, but that was for home defense and major wars declared by the Meeting. For that matter, things would have been a little simpler if the Marine expeditionary regiment was all-male, but that ran up against the same objection—not enough recruits—and of course there was the long term to think about. Alston certainly wouldn’t have stood for that sort of precedent, or Martha Cofflin, or his sister, Kat, for that matter.

“That is a problem,” Alston said, in her soft, drawling voice. “Those tribes, they’ve got a confirmed case of the virgin/whore complex.”

“This gets it out of them,” Hollard said grimly, as they came to an area behind C Barracks. “Or at least convinces them to keep it to themselves. Second offense and it’s off to Inagua, or the hangman, depending on circumstances.”

A young man stood shivering and naked before a table. His eyes flicked to the newcomers and grew wide as they saw Commodore Alston.

“Carry on, Lieutenant,” Hollard said.

The Islander at the table was young, around twenty. His voice was stern but not unkindly as it went on, “You understand the nature of the offense and sentence of the court-marital, Private Llandaurth Witharaxsson?”

“Yes, sir,” the recruit said.

The junior officer paused for a translation; Llandaurth nodded again and spoke in his own language. A corporal said, “He understands, sir. He says he took the Eagle People’s salt and agreed to obey their laws. The woman wasn’t his, and he did wrong. He’s ready to face his punishment.”

“You chose the gauntlet?”

The man straightened, his pale skin flushing against the tow color of his hair and an archipelago of freckles. “Llandaurth Witharaxson is no coward, to run from hurt,” he said in slow, careful English.

The lieutenant nodded. “Good. And remember, Private Llandaurth, that your offense is not only against the law but against your comrade-to-arms . . . your oath-sworn shield-br . . . sister. In battle, you must each ward the other’s life. What you did is as if you turned away in battle and left a comrade to the enemy.” A pause. “Translate that, please.”

The fixed look of endurance flickered into puzzlement for a second, then a slow nod.

“Sergeant, execute the sentence.”

A drum began to beat, and the drummer fell in beside the prisoner. Llandaurth turned and began to walk in step with it, a pause between every step, toward an alleyway made of thirty-seven standing figures. All of them were women, all the women in his company; they had their rifle slings in their hands, buckle-end outermost. The first was a private with a black eye and a puffy swelling along the side of her face. She gripped the leather strap with both hands, whirled it around her head and struck. Brass and cowhide snapped into flesh; a bloody welt and gouged wound appeared across the man’s back and buttocks. Another strike smacked into his shoulders. He grunted in involuntary reflex, cupped one hand over his genitals and the other to protect his eyes, and kept walking to the slow beat of the drum as the musician paced down beside him outside the gauntlet.

Hollard pursed his lips.
Some of them are hitting almighty damned hard and fast,
he thought.
On the other hand, this is
supposed
to hurt bad.
If the offense had been a little more serious—real injury to the victim, for instance, or an actual rape—the punishment would have been a noose.

Halfway down, the condemned man’s grunts changed to hoarse cries, torn out past clenched teeth. Llandaurth went to one knee for a second, and the drummer marched in place. That meant extra blows as he staggered back to his feet. Three-quarters of the way, and his body and scalp were a mass of blood and welts, sheening crimson in the sunlight. The rifle slings were spraying drops of red now, and the man fell forward, crawling the last dozen paces like a crippled dog. The drum gave a final flourish and fell silent. Two troopers with a stretcher came forward, and a medic hurried to his side.

“Carry on, Lieutenant,” Hollard said again, as they walked on past the dispersing crowd. One of the women who’d administered the punishment looked pale, and two others were helping her sit and put her head between her knees.

“Unpleasant but necessary,” Alston murmured.

Swindapa nodded vigorously. “The Sun People don’t know how to behave with a woman unless you kick them,” she said. Grudgingly, she went on, “Some can learn from that.”

“I’ve met Americans who could use the same treatment,” Alston said, her full lips pressed together.

“We’ve
given
a few Americans the same treatment,” Hollard said. “Now, this is our armory; every recruit is trained to use the repair tools.”

When the inspection was finished, he led them into his own office, and an orderly brought glasses of fizzy sarsaparilla on a tray. The room was plain boards for the most part, with a window opening onto a porch and the main parade ground. Soon it would be sundown, time for everyone to fall in as the flag was lowered and then be trooped off to dinner.

“Very satisfactory, all in all,” Alston said after a long moment’s silence. “What’s your appraisal of the training program as a whole, Major?”

Oh, Christ, now isn’t
that
a question.

“Ma’am, it’s going smoothly now. Geometric progression, of course—train one, he or she trains two, two become four, four become sixteen, and so forth. Right now we can turn out as many per year as the original plan called for and expand that on short notice.”

“Good,” Alston nodded. “And you’re satisfied with your training cadre?”

“Fully satisfied now, ma’am. In fact . . . well, a lot of them have much more experience than I do—pre-Event experience, that is. I’m surprised I got this appointment.”

“We’re not cursed with a seniority system here, Captain, and you did very well in Alba.” She paused, looking at him; he met eyes so black that you couldn’t see the pupil. It was more than a little disconcerting.

“In a way,” she went on, “pre-Event experience is worse than irrelevant here. Commandin’ this sort of unit isn’t much like drivin’ tanks into Kuwait City.” At Swindapa’s raised brows she went on, “That was a war we had, a little before we came to this time.” To Hollard: “In any case, I couldn’t spare any of my Guard officers; they’re needed for the ships. I thought you’d do well here, and you have. In fact, you’ve pretty well worked your way out of a job.”

“And into another?” Hollard asked eagerly.

“Anxious for a fight?” Alston asked, her voice unaltered.

I must be nuts. Kathryn certainly thinks so.
He remembered the battles of the Alban War well enough. The way his balls had tried to crawl back up into his gut as the enemy host came out of their dust-cloud. The light sparkling on their blades, the sound of their chant as they advanced and the rhythmic boom of weapons hammered on shields. The way a man screamed with an arrow through him. The wounded later, lying across the field like a lumpy carpet that twitched and writhed, calling for water, or their mothers. Kathryn limp on the medic’s table, her leg a mass of blood around the wooden shaft. And the stink . . .

He also remembered what Alston had asked him in the high school gymnasium, back right after the Event, when he and his younger sister had volunteered for the battalion.

“There’s a job needs doing, ma’am.”

She gave a small cool nod of approval, and he felt oddly heartened . . .
and now
I
have to provide that to
my
people. Christ.

“ ’dapa,” she said, “let’s see it.”

Her aide opened a satchel at her side and spread a map on the desk. All three of them leaned forward. “This is our latest appraisal,” she said. Only the slightest trace of the singsong lilt of Fiernan was left in her voice. “Including what we’ve gotten from our Babylonian, Shamash-nasir-kudduru.”

She managed to roll the guttural Akkadian syllables off her tongue readily enough—Hollard was supposed to learn it himself, in his plentiful spare time. He’d made a fair start, but—

Well, she
did
have an advantage on me,
he thought. He’d learned a good deal about Fiernans himself in the course of the past couple of years. The priestesses of Moon Woman had to memorize enough information to rupture a mainframe, starting when they were toddlers. Doing astronomy and fairly complex mathematics without written symbols absolutely required a science of memory.

Hollard examined the map carefully; it showed the Mediterranean basin and the lands beyond as far as the Persian Gulf. The outlines of coast and mountain were much the same as the maps he’d seen in high school—but the names of the countries were utterly different.

Swindapa’s finger touched southern Iberia, just west of Gibraltar. “Tartessos holds the Straits, the Tartessos is no friend of ours—King Isketerol has an alliance with Walker.”

“He also has fairly up-to-date sailing craft with cannon,” Alston said. “Not as good as our ships, or our cannon, but there are a lot of them. We can’t get steamers that far in any numbers, either.” Her finger made a circle on the map. “He controls the whole of southern Iberia and northern Morrocco now. But the real problem is further east.”

Her finger slid over the blue Mediterranean, past Italy.

“From what we’ve been able to gather—some of the Tartessians visiting here talk, and the Arnsteins have agents in place at our embassy in Tartessos—Walker arrived in Greece about six months after the end of the Alban War. Since then, he’s been hard at work, taken over here and here and here. We
have
to stop him. If he gets control of much of this area”—her pink-palmed hand spread long, slender fingers to cover Greece, the Aegean Sea, and much of western Anatolia—“we’re in deep trouble. Half the population of the world in this era lives between Greece and western Persia, countin’ Egypt—and he’s got an embassy in Egypt, too.”

“So we can’t leave him be, and we can’t get at him,” Hollard said.

“Not directly,” Swindapa cut in. “But there’s a back entrance to that compound.”

She set out another map, ranging it below the first. It was a world map; again, the physical characteristics were much the same, but whole continents were blank, or had only a coastal entry or two where an Islander ship had visited.

“Not through here,” she said, tapping the Red Sea. “Egypt is too close to Walker these days, and it’s bad sailing, anyway. Here.” The finger veered eastward, up the Persian Gulf to the point where the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers joined and flowed into the sea.

Hollard whistled soundlessly. “ Iraq . . .” he said.

His own finger moved on the first map, up the rivers and over the mountains to Anatolia; a vague area marked “Hittite Empire,” centered on the city of Hattusas, not far east of where Ankara would have stood, in a future that included a nation called Turkey. As far as anyone knew, the remote ancestors of the Turks were living somewhere in southeastern Siberia at this moment.

“Even with firearms and cannon, that would be a long way to march and fight,” he said neutrally.

“Granted,” she said dryly. “However, what we’ve got in mind is a diplomatic mission with heavy military escort. Land here”—she tapped the head of the Gulf again—“make arrangements with the authorities, move north to the Hittite area, and organize resistance to Walker. Hopefully, keep him busy, keep him off-balance, and limit the amount of territory he controls, until the Republic’s in a position to open the Mediterranean and deal with him directly.”

Hollard kept his face expressionless.
Well, the Council isn’t thinking small,
he decided after a long moment’s silence.

“Ma’am, that’s not within my area of expertise,” he said carefully.

Alston nodded. Swindapa suddenly broke into an urchin grin; he felt his own lips tug upward involuntarily.

“Glad you see that,” the commodore said. “Actually, our diplomatic experts will handle that—the Arnsteins. You’ll be along to provide an escort, to exert force to accomplish the political objectives that the Arnsteins—and the Council, we’ll be in radio touch, of course—set, and to help organize local forces.”

“Oh.” A wave of relief made his knees feel weak. “Thank you, ma’am. I think . . . well, I can at least give
that
a good try.”

“Excellent.” At the black woman’s nod, Swindapa set a heavy stack of files in front of him, all marked “Confidential.” “Start studying these and set up Camp Grant to operate under your successor—make your recommendation as to that. We want to get goin’ as soon as possible, in order that you don’t get there too much behind the news of your coming.”