Against the Tide of Years (22 page)

The steward brought up coffee. “Thought I was sailing into a fight, ma’am,” McReady said, sipping appreciatively. “Heard the cannon. Thought some damned Tartessian poacher needed his but kicked.”

And just came boiling in with all four of your six-pounder brass popguns,
Alston thought, nodding.
Fairly typical.
The youngsters coming up since the Event were
different;
not necessarily braver than their parents but harder-grained.
Entirely different attitude toward risk.

Less likely to complain about bad luck, too. Of course, the attitude had its downside as well; the new breed seemed to be a good deal less shockable, more case-hardened than Alston would have expected or altogether liked.

I must be getting old,
she thought.
I’m starting to complain about the upcoming generation.

“They do show up here occasionally,” Alston agreed aloud.

The Town Meeting had proclaimed the whole of the Western Hemisphere under the Republic’s jurisdiction—sort of a second-millennium-B. C. Monroe Doctrine—but the Kingdom of Tartessos didn’t acknowledge it. Iberian ships slipped in now and then, bartering with the Olmec chiefdoms, which had their own reasons to resent the Islanders; besides that little war back in the Year 1, the Republic frowned on human sacrifice. A couple of punitive expeditions had made that very clear, via cannon and Marine landing parties.

“Not this time, though. What crew, where from, and what loading?” she went on.

“My third trip this year,” McReady said, jerking a thumb backward at her ship. “My first mate’s my mate, my brother and his wife are quartermaster and sailing master”—Not an uncommon sort of arrangement; they waved from the lower deck of the trading ship—“and we’ve a crew of twelve besides. We shipped out of Nantucket Town to San Lorenzo first, picked up cocoa and dyewoods and raw cotton; dropped it in Pentagon Base in Alba, got a cargo of grain, hides, cheese, and wool, plus some steerage passengers, back to Nantucket. Out to southwest Africa in ballast and trading trinkets.”

Alston nodded. “What loading now?”

McReady grinned. “Commodore, right now my cargo is absolute shit.” She grinned more widely still at the raised brows. “Bird shit. Fertilizer from the islands in Saldhana Bay. One hundred ninety tons, all of it under contract to Brand Farms.” She held up a hand, clenched with the thumb and little finger out as if measuring. “And the price is
just
right. Ought to pay off the Town share of our ship. A little other stuff, hides, horn, ivory—ten tusks—traded for it with the locals.”

“Ah, the Namib,” Alston said. The coast of southwest Africa, not far from where she intended to make landfall. “Any rumors of Tartessian activity there?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact; the locals drew pictures of what looked like a topsail schooner.”

Alston scowled slightly; Tartessos favored that design, copied from the ship Walker had pirated in the Year 1.

“Couldn’t be sure, though. They
are
putting in pretty regular further north, from what I hear.”

This time the black woman forced her teeth not to grind. Slave trading, among other things.

“Thank you, Captain McReady,” she went on, calm and polite. “Perhaps you could join the flotilla’s captains aboard the
Eagle
for lunch. We could use any observations you have on how the trades are this year.”

“Glad to—we’re down to salt horse and biscuit,” McReady said. “Trades’re pretty steady, and further north than usual; haven’t been becalmed yet on this trip. I’ll get my logs.”

Alston clasped her hands behind her back and rose slightly on her toes as the merchant skipper climbed back down into her skiff and pulled for her ship. The expeditionary force was supposed to keep William Walker off-balance, but it was a long-term project. Isketerol was making her nervous in the here-and-now.

God damn William Walker to hell,
she thought.
If it weren’t for him . . .

“There’s always a man like Walker,” Swindapa said quietly. Alston started a little. Her partner had learned her moods
very
well.

“Fortunately, there’s always someone like us, too,” she replied, her head turning northeastward. Right now the renegade was having things all his own way, off in the lands of Mycenae. Some day . . .

Her lips showed teeth in what was only notionally a smile.

 

“There
is
a lot of gold up there,” William Walker agreed, looking up at the portico of his house. A row of pillars marched across it—fluted marble, rather than the painted wood the locals used.
Greek columns, and the Greeks have never heard of them,
he thought with a slight smile. Servants were coming out to greet their lord.

The Mycenaeans had already had an outpost up north in what he thought of as Macedonia, a fortified border station. The locals were still at the mud-hut stage, but spoke something related to Greek. More important, he’d remembered where Philip of Macedon, Alexander’s father, had gotten his financing—the gold mines of Pangaion, not all that far from the coast. Well worth an expedition.

“About a thousand talents a year worth,” he went on. “I’m satisfied with my tenth.” A talent was sixty pounds, more or less; call it twenty tons for the total output. Nobody here had ever seen precious metals on that scale before. They were learning about inflation, too, and the benefits and drawbacks of coined money.

“Why?” Odikweos said bluntly. “You planned the war, you found the gold, you built the works that tear it daily from the womb of
Gamater
.”

“One of the things I like about you, my friend,” Walker said, “is that you come right at things.”

The Ithakan shrugged. “Paiawon Apollo speaks in words like a serpent in a reedbed, coil upon countercoil,” he said. “But I’ve always been a better friend of the Gray-Eyed Lady of Wisdom, Athana Potnia.”

“Let’s put it this way—has all that gold brought peace to Mycenae?”

“As much peace as a piece of fat pork brings to a pack of hounds,” Odikweos said. “Mycenae was always a knot of vipers, but now . . .”

“Exactly. Also, taking only a tenth, I’m not expected to spend men and goods guarding the mines—and the natives there don’t love us for taking their mountain.”

“Or for making their men dig in the ground,” Odikweos said.

“Exactly, again. What’s more, gold can’t buy more than the land produces. Real wealth comes from increasing the yield of men’s hands and then gaining command of that yield—gold is simply a tool. And third and last . . . well, there’s a poem among my birth-folk. In your language . . .” Walker closed his eyes in thought for a moment. “It would go something like this:

They drew rein before the portico with its green-white stone stairs. A small form burst through the ranks of guards and servants, followed by another, and then by a woman in a gown. He recognized Eurykleia, the household’s chief nursemaid.

“Dad!” the hurtling bundle cried, and leaped with a trailing mane of white-blond hair. The second just leaped.

“Whoops,” Walker said mildly and caught each under an arm. “Run along, the rest of you, no need for ceremony.”

“I’m sorry,lord, they got away—”

“No problem,” Walker said to the nursemaid. “They’re eight. You’d have to put them in a cage like Egyptian baboons to keep them quiet.”

The boy and girl wiggled delightedly; they were much of an age, the girl his by an Alban slave, the boy by his wife Ekhnonpa.

“Plain to see they’ve got spirit,” Odikweos said, grinning.

“Althea has been misbehaving again, lord,” Eurykleia broke in nervously. “And . . .”

Walker upended the girl. “What is it this time? Bothering your Aunt Alice again? Not safe, little one.”

“Sneaking away to watch the warriors practice, lord,” the nursemaid said.

“If Harold can do it, why can’t I?” the girl pouted. She pronounced it “Haaar-alt,” like the locals.

“Why not, indeed?” Walker said. He looked up at the servant. “If she wants to train with her brother, we’ll see to it.”

“But, lord, it isn’t seemly!” she burst out, as Althea crowed in delight.

Walker’s face went cold, and the nursemaid looked down, her own face gone pale. “Seemly is what I say to be seemly, Eurykleia.
I am the King.
”

“Yes, lord,” she said quietly.

Walker hoisted his son over a shoulder and set the girl on her feet, delivering a swift spanking swat at the same time. “That’s for not coming and asking me first,” he said at her yelp, then gave her another. “And that’s for disobeying Eurykleia. Now both of you run along and mind your manners.”

He walked up the stairs. “My friend, we have a good deal to talk about,” he said to Odikweos. “So that our children may inherit more than we hold today.

“Sicily grows dull,” the Ithakan said. “Another man can chase bandits through the hills . . .” He paused. “Is that why you sent so many troublesome men to take up lands there?”

“Well,” Walker grinned, “it
does
give them something to do, besides causing me problems.”

“You are a man with a mind of many turns,” Odikweos said admiringly, a little surprised when Walker laughed loud and long. “Troy next?”

“Troy, indeed,” Walker said.

“That will bring in the Hittites.”

“The worse for them, my friend. The worse for them.”

 

 

“U
h-oh,” Ian Arnstein said. “Thunderclouds,” Doreen agreed, looking at the Commodore as she lowered her binoculars.

“Mom?” David said. “Why’s Aunt Marian looking so mad?”

“Shhhhh.”

The Nantucket outpost on the uninhabited island of Mauritius was one of a chain the Republic was founding as time and resources permitted, staking out a claim to a global thassalocracy of trade and influence. Eventually it was supposed to be a jumping-off point for the settlement of the giant and equally human-empty island of Madagascar to the west and a base for trade throughout the Indian Ocean. The flotilla was two weeks out of a similar hamlet at the site of Cape Town, officially known as Mandela Base.
That
had met with Marian Alston’s approval; neat little earth-and-turf fort, a well-built pier, a bored-log pipe to bring water down from a spring on Table Mountain, and half a dozen farms up the Liesbeck River to supply fresh produce.

Here . . .

The Islander ships stood in on an easting breeze, only a trace of white foam at their bows as they ghosted along at five knots. Eastward was a broad natural harbor where a river ran down to a silver-sand beach. Beyond rose mountains, densely green in the foreground, fading to blue-green as they rolled away inland.
Green
was the overwhelming first impression, huge broadleaf trees growing almost to the water’s edge, and dark mangroves wherever a mudflat allowed; the white of sails, gray of hulls, and the broad red diagonal slash of the Guard along the ship’s flanks were the only man-made color to break it. The settlement had run a pier out into the deep water, made of upright ebony logs and looking massively solid. Onshore . . .

Half-built,
Ian decided; that was the best way to describe it. A couple of biggish buildings, but one of them had only the skeleton of a roof, and tiles were missing on the other. A windmill by the river looked broken, its vanes unmoving. Logs lay in untidy piles, and the patches of cleared land were weedy. Here and there were the signs of frantic last-minute effort that served only to make the rest seem more slovenly.

“By the mark, ten! By the mark, nine!” the leadsman standing braced in the bowsprit netting said, whirling the lead line around her head and throwing it far out to plop into the greening water. “By the mark . . . Christ, by the mark,
seven. Bye the mark, six!
”

“Captain Nguyen, I suggest you strike all sail,” Marian Alston said tightly. “Signal to the flotilla. I’m not fully confident in the buoys marking the channel, here.”

The officer nodded curtly, gave orders. Feet thundered on the
Eagle’s
crowded deck, and teams bent to pull on ropes. Many of them included Marines, but the men and women clambering aloft in the ratlines all wore the blue sailor suits of the Guard; that was specialist work, hard and skilled and a little dangerous even in calm weather. They swarmed out along the yards and bent over them, gathering up armfuls of sail as the clewlines hoisted them up.

“Put your backs into it!” called a petty officer from the boats towing the
Eagle
up to the dock. The dark-blue water was fading to green as they neared the shore, and white foam curled as the ashwood oars stroked into it.

More thick ropes flew out, and the steel flank of the big windjammer kissed the coconut-fiber baffles. Further out, sails furled and anchors splashed, whistles sounded and the steaming ensigns came down, the national flag breaking out at the tops. He could see the party that stood ready to greet them on the dock bracing. Some had sickly smiles, others expressionless masks. The gangplank swung out and thumped down; Ian used councilor’s rank shamelessly, crowding in behind the initial quartet of Commodore Alston, Swindapa, Colonel Hollard, Major Hollard, and Captain Nguyen of the
Eagle.
A bell rang from the quarterdeck.

“
Eagle
departing!”

“Welcome, Commodore,” the commandant of Mauritius Base said.

Marian Alston returned his salute. He was a heavyset, balding man in his early forties, dressed in shorts and sandals and loose shirt and sweating until his scalp glistened through thinning black hair.

Might be the heat making him sweat,
Ian thought.
Mebbe not.
He put Jared Cofflin’s dry, skeptical Yankee voice to the thought.