Against the Tide of Years (21 page)

Alston waited until the last second before she called: “Boarders! Boarders to their stations!”

The gun crews shrank again as another thirty left them, grabbing weapons out of the racks as they ran for the companionways. The result looked remarkably piratical, half-naked bodies bristling with flintlocks and edged steel.

And for a wonder, nobody’s spearing anyone in the ass,
she thought with satisfaction. That
had
happened once or twice, earlier. Middies oversaw four guns each, and they were running full tilt from one to the next, correcting aim and heaving on lines themselves.
For a wonder, nobody got their foot run over, either.
That could cause really nasty injuries, but the only way to learn to do this fast was to do it
fast,
exhaustion or no. You had to accept a certain percentage of training accidents if the training was realistic.

“One minute fifty-six seconds,” Swindapa said.

Not so good,
Alston thought; and the crews were collapsed around their weapons, panting like hound dogs on a hot day; she could hear someone retching dryly.

“Master gunner, house your guns and secure the deck,” she said into a silence that seemed to echo in the aftermath of the cannon roar. She lifted her voice a little, waiting until the sail trimmers and boarders had returned to their stations. “Not bad, boys and girls. But it could be better.”

The cheer that followed had an element of groan in it, but there were plenty of smiles as well. First Lieutenant Jenkins was grinning as he saluted her return to the quarterdeck, looking at his own watch.

“We beat
Lincoln
by a good ten seconds, ma’am,” he said.

Alston nodded, smiling a little herself. Victor Ortiz had the other frigate, and he’d be fit to be tied; she knew he’d had the crew doing weight training at intervals, trying to beat her time.

“There’s such a thing as overstraining,” she said. The shriller bark of the eight-pounders and carronades the schooners carried ended the exercise, leaving only a fogbank of powder smoke drifting eastward as it dispersed.

Marian Alston took a deep breath of the clean air and looked at her watch again. “We’ll heave to,” she said. “Signal ‘Captains repair to
Eagle
for a working lunch at thirteen hundred hours’, Ms. Swindapa. Mr. Jenkins, we’ll rig pumps, and have the masthead and a rowing lookout check for sharks.”

Lines formed for the salt-water showers after the sails were struck; the gun crews’ hands and faces were smut-dark with black powder residues. Luckily Fiernans didn’t have a nudity taboo, and the Americans and even the rather prudish Sun People had gotten used to it. Body modesty simply didn’t go with the sort of cramped quarters a mixed force in the field or at sea had to put up with; they’d learned that shortly after the Event. After a while it simply wasn’t much of a deal.

In fact,
she thought,
by now I feel much more self-conscious about being the only darkie among the
bukra.

By an odd quirk of fate she’d been stranded in the Bronze Age along with a piece of American real estate where blacks were rare—no more than a few hundred in all. Rare, and even more so proportionately with the influx of Alban immigrants; language and culture changed, but Sun People and Earth Folk alike
looked
very much like their Anglo-Saxon descendants.

The water felt cold on her bare skin as she turned under the pump; she took the bar of gritty ration-issue lye soap from Colonel Hollard with a polite nod, lathered herself thoroughly, and stepped up to the rail, handing the bar over to the next in line.

“All clear!” the lookout said; the ones in the longboat rowing around the ship carried barbed harpoons and rifle-muskets.

Alston poised, then leaped, taking the fifteen-foot drop in a knifing dive. That carried her deep into water that closed around her like a blue jewel; she turned and looked up, watching as Swindapa slid down toward her with her long yellow hair streaming out behind like a banner. They touched for a moment fifteen feet down, kissed in the discreet silence of the ocean, then kicked for the surface that hung over them like a rippling mirror. She tossed her head as she surfaced, watching as whooping crewfolk followed her off into the water.

Hollard scooped up his sister and threw her in, then followed in a clean dive. For moments it rained soapy Guard crews and Marines; many of them were cannonballing and landing with appalling splashes. She made a mental note to have more swimming classes.

Swindapa trailed her as she made for the stern at an easy crawl, matching her stroke for stroke. The warm Caribbean water caressed her, a feeling of tingling life buoying her. And if there were shark and barracuda in these waters, that was part of life too.

“On deck, there! Sail ho!”

Alston looked up sharply, catching the hail from the masthead at the second shout.

“Damn,” she said mildly, spitting out salt water and stroking swiftly to the ship’s side. Ropes hung over the railing; she swarmed up one hand over hand, then directly up the ratlines to the mainmast top.

“Where away?” she said to the lookout, dripping on the hot planks of the triangular platform.

“East by south, ma’am,” the lookout said, in a faint but definite Sun People accent, harsh and choppy under the nasal twang of Islander English. “Ship-rigged or a bark, I’d guess.”

Alston took his heavy binoculars and focused them. White shapes of sail, a three-master, bark-rigged like the
Eagle
but much smaller.

“On deck, there! Hands to stations, Mr. Jenkins, and notify the flotilla!” she called down. “And have my uniform sent up, if you please.”

It came up, and Swindapa with it. They shared a towel and dressed, disregarding the slight stickiness of salt on their skins; that went with voyaging, since fresh water was never abundant enough to waste on washing. She put the sails in her binoculars again; the strange ship was flying the Stars and Stripes, but that meant little. Details of construction meant more, and she ran through a mental file of everything the Islanders had built in the past eight years, and what they knew of the Tartessian and Alban yards.

“One of ours, I think,” she said after a moment. “Let’s get down and ready to hail her.”

You had to be wary, in a world with the likes of King Isketerol and William Walker loose in it.

 

“You haven’t been letting the grass grow under your arse, by the gods,” Odikweos said.

He held out his hand and looked around at stone-built wharves, streets, buildings, the ribs of ships on the slipways. Nothing here but a fishing village a few years ago, and now it was a city—
Neayoruk,
Walker had called it.
“New” I know,
Odikweos thought.
I wonder what or where Yoruk was or is?

“A lazy man has no luck,” Walker replied, taking the offered palm in the American gesture, which had become quite the fashion.

Hammers, hooves, wheels, and voices made a surflike roar of noise throughout the little town, full of pungent smells of sweat and dust and manure baking under the hot June sun. Foreign ships were tied up here too, looking tiny beside the craft Walker had built. Slaves carried elephant tusks ashore from an Egyptian merchantman, tapestries from one out of Byblos, purple-dyed cloth and clay jugs of wine from Ugarit, oxhide-shaped copper ingots from a Cypriot trader. So much wealth so close to the sea would have been an irresistible lure for raiders in the old days, but a fortress of earthwork and stone stood at the edge of the harbor, cannon snouting from embrasures along its thick, sloping walls. And armed schooners out on patrol had met the Ithakan’s ship half a day’s sailing away.

A groom brought a mount forward, one of the half-breed sons of the sixteen-hand quarter horse that Walker rode himself. The Achaean put a foot in a stirrup and swarmed aboard, competently, if not with the ease a lifetime’s practice had given Walker. He wore trousers of fine kidskin as well as his tunic; those had become fashionable too, among younger nobles flexible enough to consider a saddle as dignified as a chariot.

The two vassal kings rode north up the valley of the Eurotas, with their escorts clattering behind and outriders ahead with a harsh, repeated cry of “Way, make way!” Odikweos stretched his eyes, taking everything in, including the way Walker kept an eye on his reactions.

The road itself was a novelty. Instead of graveled dirt it was a smoothly beveled curve of Sicilian asphalt mixed with crushed rock, twenty feet across, lavishly ditched, with young trees planted in rows on either side.

“How far north does this run?” Odikweos asked.

“All the way up the valley, and three-quarters of the way to Mycenae. We’ll have it through to there by the fall rains.”

“Through the
mountains
? In only three years?”

Walker nodded. “Gunpowder is a tool as well a a weapon,” he said. “Blasting makes road building easier.”

Not to mention unlimited salve labor. Chain gangs were moving up from the port, while down by the river more were at work on an irrigation canal, its stark geometric shape cutting across the softly patterned fields. Harvest was under way. Part of it was as always, men and some women cutting the yellow barley and wheat with sickles, others following behind to bind the sheaves. In other fields horses drew a machine that left a neat trail of reaped grain behind it. Odikweos nodded thoughtfully as he watched it, and he saw other fields that had been in grain in years before now planted with crops he didn’t recognize.

“What are those?” he asked.

“The bushes are
cotton,
” Walker said. “They make a fabric like flax but easier to work and finer. The tall stalks are a grain called
corn;
it needs watering in your dry summers, but it yields more heavily than wheat or barley. The low vines, those are
potatoes,
the last of them. The grow over the winter here. My guest friend King Isketerol of Tartessos brought the seeds and shoots from . . . a land far away and passed some on to me. Wait until you taste your first tomato, my friend.”

“I see why you’ve been taking so much of the wheat from Sicily,” Odikweos said. “Thousands more mouths to feed, and fewer fields in grain.”

He nodded at a train of huge four-wheeled wagons rumbling along ahead of them, too large to make way for the kings; they guided their horses onto the graveled verge of the road to pass them by. Sixteen span of oxen drew each four-ton load.

“What are those called?” Odikweos said, pointing to one wheel. ‘I’ve seen the ones in Sicily, but nobody knew the name or the why of them.”

“Double-bow springs,” Walker replied. “See how they flex? That way, a jolt from the wheels doesn’t harm the wagon’s frame as much as it might. and the body is built like a boat—it yields and bends and so doesn’t break. We call them
Conestogas.
”

They rode north for most of the morning, speaking of many things, then turning left onto a branch of the road that ran toward the mountains that towered in the west, dividing the vale of Sparta from Messina. The traffic was still heavy; they were riding toward Walkeropolis, Walker’s stronghold. The American pointed out features—the stone-lined channel that brought water down from the mountains, the four furnaces built into the side of a hill so that carts could bring fuel and ore to their tops. Smoke belched out of them, trailing away to the south; there was a deep rumbling sound from the furnaces, and endless clangor from the forges and workshops, and a clatter and bustle of uncounted folk in the broad gridwork of paved streets.

Not such smell,
Odikweos thought, surprised.

This town must be nearly as big as Pylos by now, yet there was little of the shit-and-garbage stink you expected in a city. There were even slaves sweeping up dung with broom and pan and wheelbarrow. Even now, it still seemed odd to see so many male slaves together. In Walkeropolis they were marked out by the iron collars, and they were everywhere—hauling and pushing and carrying; there were great low-set barracks for them nearer the manufacturies. Elsewhere there were no wells with lines of slave girls carrying jugs of water on their heads, but instead public fountains, fed by underground pipes. More pipes ran to the houses of the wealthy.

There were many other things even stranger—sometimes the little things were oddest of all, like wagons each keeping to the right side of the street. They rode through a great open-air market, past streets of shops and businesses, past chariots and wagons and
carriages
drawn by high-stepping Eastern horses.

Even shops for bread,
the Achaean king thought with astonishment, watching a baker load loaves into the carrying-basket of a woman and take little copper disks in payment. Next door a leather-worker bowed low as a servant of one of Walker’s Wolf People lords took delivery of a saddle; beyond that a treadle-powered lathe whirred, turning out the spokes of a wheel.

“One thing that does surprise me, my friend,” Odikweos said as they turned uphill to the palace through elaborate gardens and the mansions of Walker’s own
ekwetai.
“Is that you took no larger share of the credit for the war in the lands north of Olympus—and no larger share of the gold. You don’t seem to me to be a man unconcerned with wealth.”

Walker laughed.

 

The
Dolphin
was less graceful than her name; three hundred tons, three masts, but much tubbier than the
Chamberlain
or even the Guard schooners modeled on the
Bluenose.
She bobbed in the lee of the frigate, and her commander came up the rope ladder with a practical swarming motion.

“Permission to come aboard?” she called, with a wave of a salute.

“Permission granted,” Alston said. “Captain McReady, isn’t it?”

“Candice McReady at your service, Commodore,” the merchant skipper said, holding out her hand.

Typical enough,
Alston thought. No more than twenty-one, which would have made her all of thirteen at the Event, the twentieth century most likely a fading dream. A stocky, brown-haired young woman with a weather-red face and squint lines around her eyes that made her look older. She wore a floppy canvas hat and a sleeveless jacket of sealskin belted ’round with a cutlass, bowie, and flintlock pistol. The ironmongery looked as natural on her as the easy, straddled stance and the gold hoop in one earlobe. The hand she extended felt rough and dry and competent in Alston’s.