Against the Tide of Years (39 page)

At this range, every bullet would be traveling at gut height and a thousand feet per second when it reached the enemy archers. At those velocities, projectiles cut through the giant grass with the neatness of a straight razor, but each semicircular cut glowed for an instant, precisely like a piece of tissue paper touched with a soldering iron. Even through the dense fogbank of powder smoke Hollard could see to the other side of the reed marsh now; it was patchy, as if some enormous animal had been grazing on it. What was left thinned as he watched. On the other side were the massed archers the enemy had put forward to harass the construction of the causeway.

Or what was left of them. Hundreds were down, still or kicking or writhing. Hundreds more were fleeing, despite the efforts of sword-armed officers to keep them to their duty—often by a quick thrust to the kidneys of a man who seemed inclined to turn. Less than half of them were still shooting, and the arrows were now more of a dangerous nuisance than a threat.

Poor bastards,
Hollard thought. They’d done about as well as men could, facing weapons entirely outside their experience; that so many of them were still trying to fight was a miracle of courage and discipline, in its way. The sympathy was real but distant; right now he could be nothing but a will that thought
The commodore will give us a “well done” for this.

Hollard clicked his handset to the company commander’s frequency. “Aimed fire!” he called.

With most of the reeds out of the way, the Marine infantry had targets. So did the guns, and the rest of the battery that began firing over their heads with shrapnel shell, and the three-unit battery of rocket launchers. They weren’t very accurate, despite all Seahaven could do with machined venturi units and carefully aligned fins. They did land in the general area they were pointed or, more often, exploded above it, scattering their loads of heavy buckshot like a chain flail in the hands of a giant. Their trails of smoke arched over the battlefield like monochromatic rainbows, twisting as they drifted away, sending men into fresh panic with the moaning scream of their passage.

Pack mules trotted up bearing panniers full of ammunition. Their drivers handed out ten-round cases or cylindrical packets of fine-ground priming powder. Here and there a rifleman swore and stopped for an instant to insert a spare flint in the hammer jaws of his weapon.

Four minutes later Hollard swung his sword down in another arc and called out, “Cease fire!”

Silence fell, broken by a single shot and the scathing curses of a noncom directed at the luckless private who’d been too lost in his loading routine to hear the order relayed down the ranks. The Republic’s commander lowered his binoculars and winced slightly; the only Assyrian archers surviving were the ones who had run first or who had been very lucky. He was suddenly conscious of the thin whine of a mosquito near his ear—and that it was fainter than it had been earlier in the day. This much noise probably wasn’t good for your hearing, long term. If the long term mattered much, in the circumstances.

“Major Hollard,” he said, as he walked out onto the causeway.

The troopers grinned as he passed, a few of them pumping clenched fists into the air.
Well, they’re Albans, mostly,
he thought, nodding back.

“Sir?”

“Push two companies out past the swamp—it’s only a hundred yards, and if you lay those mats I had brought up over the fallen reeds they should hold. That should discourage any thoughts the Assyrians have about trying to interfere with us again, and then we can get this causeway finished.”

She nodded. “Dumb sons of bitches,” she said with a trace of sadness, looking at the piles of enemy dead.

“They probably won’t be as stupid the second time,” Hollard said grimly. “Certainly not the third.”

Sitting at the edge of the marsh had been about the worst thing the Assyrians could have done; that made it a contest of pure firepower, which was no contest at all when you stacked breech-loading rifles against bows.
Let’s not get overconfident,
he reminded himself. There were no prizes for Gallant Last Stands in the Republic of Nantucket’s military.

“They’ll learn,” his sister agreed. “They’ll try a couple of massed rushes, I’d say—and pick up on tricks like using dead ground where our guns don’t bear for shelter.”

“And ambushes, night attacks, all that good guerrilla shit,” Hollard agreed, his long face gloomy. “It never stays easy.”

“Still,” Kathryn said, looking at her virtually unscathed command and then at the ground where Assyrian dead lay two-deep, “It’d rather have
our
problems than
theirs
.”

 

Marian Alston suppressed a satisfied belch. The bonfire was sending sparks trailing up into the night, warm against the cooler splendor of the Southern Hemisphere’s stars. Shadows from this fire and others flickered along the beach, showing the lines of dancers who paced and stamped and turned to the insistent beat of the drums in their finery of ostrich-shell beads and civet-tail skirts. The sound of the bone rattles strapped to their ankles added an almost hissing undertone, along with the rhythmic chant. The air was cooler with the recent sunset, full of the smells of roasting elephant and eland and bowls of heaped greens gathered by the San women, with an oil-and-vinegar dressing from ship’s stores. The food made a wonderful change from ship’s provisions.

They were simply enchanted by chocolate, though, and by the wine and beer—she’d ordered the stronger liquor kept in the kegs; pre-agricultural peoples were just too vulnerable to it. They were like their Cape kinsmen in appearance, too; very similar, in fact, except that the women didn’t have the enlarged buttocks that the desert clans further south did, storing fat like camels. Doreen had said that was a sign that the same population had lived in the same environment for a
very
long time, adapting generation by generation. The people here were a little taller besides; she supposed this lush green countryside was easier to make a living in. Certainly the hunting was good, even if the animals did get a little testy at times.

The San hunter with his ankle in a pressure bandage belched enormously—it was probably good manners here, although she couldn’t bring herself to follow. Being less inhibited, Swindapa did and was rewarded with a broad white grin from the little brown man—and giggles from their daughters. Alston smiled herself and leaned an elbow on the log she was using as a backrest. It was surprising how well everything had gone, considering that neither the Islanders nor the local tribesfolk spoke a word of each other’s language. Treating the injured hunter and returning him with gifts had helped; so had indicating that his clan was welcome to help themselves to the elephant carcass.

Remarkable how many of them showed up,
she thought—and even more remarkable how fast they’d managed to demolish the great mountain of flesh.
We can probably trade with them for fresh meat and greenstuff. That’ll save time.

“Go’od,” the little man said, and hiccuped.

“Good,” Alston replied.

Out in the darkness the party was probably getting a little rowdier, to judge from the squeals and giggles.
There are times not to notice things,
she thought—that was one of the secrets of command. The crew deserved a rest, and the locals would reduce the three-to-two male-female ratio that sometimes made a shoreside luau a little tense.

Swindapa caught her eye and slowly touched her upper lip with the tip of her tongue. Alston’s smile grew broader.

“Euuu, mushy stuff!” Heather said, as she and her sister returned from the dance, reading the signs with an eight-year-old’s lack of tact.

“Aw, c’mon, moms, don’t send us away to sleep yet!” Lucy protested. “This is
fun
.”

A faint
pop
from across the harbor interrupted their parents’ chuckle. Alston’s face went cold and intent as she followed the arch of the signal rocket.

“Blue burst,” she said. That meant
foreign ship in sight.
Her voice rose to the command call: “All hands, turn to!”

The San looked around in bewildered alarm as the Guard crewfolk dashed for their weapons and fell in. Alston stood and waited, watching the blinking Morse of the signal station. It was on the two-hundred-foot bluff that closed the southern arm of the harbor mouth, which gave it a wide field of view, and they had telescopes and night-sight glasses.

“Two . . . Tartessian . . . vessels,”
it said.
“A large . . . schooner . . . and
. . .
one
. . .
larger
. . .
ship
. . .
rigged
. . .
craft. Landing . . . party . . . heading . . . for . . . harbor . . . entrance . . . in . . . one . . . longboat.”

“Company,” she said grimly, as the cabin steward ran up with their weapons belts.

“An attack?” Swindapa said.

“No, not in one longboat,” Alston said. “But I don’t like it.”

I don’t like anyone else in these waters,
she thought, slitting her eyes against the dark.
God damn Walker to hell, and Isketerol too.

A lantern showed out on the water; the Tartessians had probably realized they’d been seen.
Two ships . . . that could be anywhere up to three hundred men, if they’re carrying war crews.
And they well might be. This would be a voyage of exploration for them, not just a trading run.

She turned to the injured hunter and made signs. “Bad,” she said—they’d gotten that far in the impromptu language lesson. Then she made gestures of firing a gun and of a wide-winged ship. He scowled dramatically to show he understood.

“Ba’ad!” he replied, putting an indescribable tongue click into the word.

The longboat came into sight, at first a ghostly white of water frothed by oars, then an outline. A good-sized ship’s boat with six oars to a side and several men seated in the stern, and a light mast with no sail bent to it; they’d probably struck that to stay inconspicuous when they realized someone was using the harbor.
Not a bad piece of work,
she thought. Differences of detail from anything an Islander would build; the bird-head carving of the forepiece, for instance, and the tongue-and-groove fit of the planks. For all that, it was modern, as modern went in the Year 8; it had a rudder, for instance, and the mast was rigged for a fore-and-aft sail.

The oarsmen bent their backs and then tossed their ashwood shafts up as the keel grated on sand. The crew hopped out and shoved the boat further up the beach, and then a man who flashed with spots of gold in the firelight vaulted down to the sand, his cloak a dark billow behind him.

Alston walked forward; a file of a dozen armed crewfolk under a petty officer followed behind, and a pair of lanterns. So did her children . . .

The Tartessians made a clump on the beach, the small waves breaking white behind them, and the dry scuttering sound of land crabs coming with a flicker of movement from the edge of the pool of light.

Make that “mostly Tartessians,
” she thought.

From Arnstein’s reports, King Isketerol’s fleet was growing fast enough that Tartessos proper and the kindred groups the king had incorporated by conquest and intimidation couldn’t supply enough men. Most of the ones she saw were Iberian in appearance, olive-skinned whites with bowl-cut dark hair and linen tunics considerably the worse for wear. One or two looked like North Europeans, burly and fair—of course, Spain and Morocco
did
produce that type now and then. Another was unmistakably an Egyptian, shaved head and sphinx headdress and pleated kilt; astonishingly, there was also a black, tall and lean and ebony-dark, with looping tribal scars on his face, and an Oriental.

The leader wore jutting chinbeard bound with gold wire, a sea-stained purple cloak, and silver-and-gold buckles on belt and sandals. He had a short broad-bladed steel sword and dagger and a flintlock pistol; most of his men had blades at their belts as well, and muskets in their hands—several of them, she noted with displeasure, copies of the Westley-Richards breechloader. The African had a spear with a broad, shovel-shaped head and a long bow and quiver, and the Oriental wore a two-edged bronze broadsword slung over his back.

Chinbeard held up a hand in sign of peace and smiled. Alston told herself that the patent insincerity was probably her imagination.

“Hello, Islander,” the man said, then checked as he saw her properly. He turned a little gray then, and his men stirred and murmured until he glared at them for an instant over his shoulder.

Alston smiled thinly.
Helps to have a reputation.
“Hello, Tartessian,” she said in reply. “Do you speak my language? We have interpreters who know yours.”

Swindapa spoke it fluently, although Alston had never managed more than a few words; Tartessian was distantly related to the Earth Folk tongue, and the Island’s experts thought both were kin to some Bronze Age ancestor of Basque.

“Alantethol son of Marental is a New Man of the king,” the Tartessian captain said proudly.
Ah—one of Isketerol’s protégés,
she translated mentally. “I speak well your Englits tongue. I have to Nantucket itself sailed. Welcome you to our anchorage be!”

“Yoda,”
Marian thought to herself.
“You seek Yoda!”

He looked around, taking in the hull of the
Chamberlain
in its improvised cradle and the gaping hole where the smashed planking had been removed. She could see his eyes taking in much else, as well—particularly the Islander camp, with its sand-and-palm-tree ramparts, and the snouted muzzles of the frigate’s cannon mounted on them. And the dim ranks of the Guard crewfolk standing behind her.

“Tartessos has no claim on these waters, and the locals are under our protection,” Alston said.

The man made a dismissive gesture. “Let not civilized men—ah, civilized folk—quarrel over savages,” he said ingratiatingly.