Against the Tide of Years (51 page)

No end to what you’d like to paddle your paws in, you mean,
Walker thought and winced mentally at the thought of these goons rampaging through what he’d built up. They might be sophisticated barbarians, but they still had all that breed’s love of destruction for its own wild sake, and they would smash even more through sheer ignorance.

“Well, we always need more slaves as well,” Walker said. “You tell me you’re often at war with your enemies—we’ll buy all you can catch.”

“That would be easier if we had better weapons.”

Oh, wouldn’t it just,
Walker thought. They’d do anything to get their hands on guns.
Though . . . hmmm . . .

“Of course. Yet we could scarcely hand over the secrets of our power, unless . . .”

He let his voice trail off.

“Unless—” Tautorun said eagerly, his voice a little slurred and his expression less guarded. It was amazing what spiking the wine with a little brandy did to those not used to it.

“We might be able to use fighting men soon,” he said. “We’ve always hired mercenaries, but we need more. Possibly . . . possibly we could use
allies
as well. In the lands to the east of here.”

The Ringapi chieftain’s eyes grew bright with interest. “Ah, Hatti-land,” he breathed.

The talk went on for some hours, until a chill nightfall. Tautorun took off the raven-crested helmet that marked him as a feeder of the Crow Goddess—She whom the Iraiina called the Blood Hag of Battles—and ran a hand through his barley-colored mane.

“Strong talk,” he said. “Some would say wild—but this is a time of wolf and raven, of ax and spear, when new things walk the earth. Perhaps it’s the time of the great War of the Gods that the songs foretell! I’ll bear a word from you to the other chiefs of the Rangapi, and maybe a word from them to you in turn.”

“And then men might go from here to there—skilled men,” Walker said. “Men and goods, and oaths between us and the Ringapi lords.”

“Yes, yes . . .”

“We’ll talk further of this tomorrow,” Walker replied. “Now let’s feast.”

He nodded; across the fencing of the paddock rose terraced gardens, and above those the white marble and bright windows of Walker’s palace. Tautorun’s eyes rested on it with a mix of envy, awe, and greed. He nodded.

“You set a noble table, too,” he said, grinning. “My hand on it.”

They stood and grasped wrists, squeezing a little; they were both strong men. “You’ve guested with me; perhaps we’ll fight together someday,” Walker said.

“That would be a fight to feed Her ravens and make the long-speared Sun Lord smile,” Tautorun said, shaking his right hand a little. He hesitated slightly. “That must have been a fight to remember too, the one that took your eye.”

Walker’s smile turned chill. “It was,” he said. “I lost the battle, but got something better than one victory.”

“It must have been a mighty booty, that you think it was fair exchange for such a wound.”

Walker nodded. “I don’t miss the eye. You see, I sacrificed it for wisdom.”

Tautorun took a step back and shuddered slightly in his wolfskin jacket.

 

“Wave and smile, you son of a bitch, or I’ll spit you here and now.”

Marian Alston smiled, a somewhat grim expression, as she heard the bosun’s mate hissing to the Tartessian standing by the rail and saw the light jab of the bowie knife resting over the prisoner’s kidney. A thick scattering of the enemy prisoners stood there at the bulwark, and the officer who’d agreed to fink on his compatriots was standing on the rail with a hand on the ratlines. More Islanders were mixed in with them, in the clothes of the Tartessians, who sat in their loincloths under guard on the shore. They’d run the Tartessian flag up to the top too.

There was a slight hint of rose-pink over the jungled hills to the east and a layer of mist lying in the blue-green valleys. Already the air was warming, and sweat ran down her flanks under the uniform. Alston stood on the third rung of the rope ladder that lay along the starboard, landward side of the
Chamberlain
. That put her above the level of the deck and gave her a good view of the Tartessian vessels standing in through the narrow channel into Port Luthuli’s roadstead.

Nice-looking ships,
she thought for a moment. She could see how the hull form was derived from the
Yare,
the Nova Scotia-built topsail schooner that Isketerol and Walker had stolen.
’bout a five-to-one hull ratio,
she decided. Long and low and black with pitch, the sharpprowed hulls were throwing a chuckle of bow wave under the dying breeze. Fast ships, then, although they were doing no more than three knots in these sheltered waters. The masts were tall and raked well back; two on the schooner coming in first, the
Sun Dancer,
three on the
Stormwind
following—that was about half the size of the
Chamberlain,
and brig-rigged, square sails on the fore and main, fore and aft on the mizzen.

Wish I was as certain as Heather and Lucy are that this is going to work,
she thought wryly. The girls had given them a rousing send-off, although they’d been shocked underneath at Swindapa’s wound. The Fiernan sat by the wheel on the quarterdeck, a kerchief hiding her bright hair and a cheese of gun wads supporting the injured leg. Alston felt naked, going into a fight without her partner by her side. It had been long years, since that first time down in the Olmec country.

The hyacinth eyes met hers, warm and fond. Alston nodded, and returned all her attention to the oncoming . . .

Targets,
she told herself.
Think of them as targets and nothing else.
No boarding netting rigged, and their decks were crowded with men.
Maybe Isketerol had them sniffing around Australia,
she thought.
He knows about the gold there from the books Walker took.
That would explain stuffing men in that way.

The enemy ships were gliding closer. On each stern was a small platform with a statue on it, a grotesque juju with three legs, six arms, and a single staring eye—Arucuttag of the Sea, Lord of Waves, Master of the Storm, to whom the captains gave gold and man’s-blood.

Closer, closer. How close before they could see through the fiction? And even when the schooner was well within range, the brig would be further out—it was the harder target.
Plus, I want to capture the ships, if I can.
For one thing, they and the prisoners would be valuable counters in whatever diplomatic game the Republic ended up playing with Tartessos. And God alone knew how she’d get the men back without another couple of hulls. It was tempting just to maroon them here, but that was either a sentence of slow death or a trip back home if other Tartessian ships called, both unacceptable.

Swindapa looked over at her, a question on her face. Alston shook her head, waiting. She raised her binoculars and focused on the man by the schooner’s wheel, standing with his hands on his belt and a saffron-dyed cloak fluttering in the wind.

He had a spyglass; Isketerol’s artisans were beginning to turn them out. She ignored the eerie conviction that he was looking at
her
and waited yet again, until she saw him lower the glass and open his mouth to speak. It might be some harmless order, but . . . and the distance was about right.

“Now!”
she shouted.

Deck crew snatched up a line and heaved. It ran to a spring on the anchor cable, and the long hull of the clipper-frigate pivoted smoothly under that leverage, presenting her full broadside to the Tartessian ships.

A rumbling thunder as the bosun’s pipe relayed the order and the waiting crews heaved on the gun tackle. She couldn’t see the port side, but she knew exactly what the Tartessians were seeing, and it justified the gaping horror on their faces. The frigate’s main battery was running out, the portlids swinging up to reveal the black maws of the eight-inch Dahlgrens. On deck, crewfolk were shoving and hustling the prisoners down the hatchways with savage enthusiasm. And—

One long, rolling crash as the gun captains jerked their lanyards and the twelve heavy cannon fired within a second of each other, at point-blank range.

“All yours, ’dapa!” Marian shouted and dropped down the rope ladder with reckless speed.

“Stretch out!” the middie shouted at the tiller of the longboat she landed in, her voice crackling with stress.

They heaved at their oars with panting, grunting effort that made the slender boats sweep forward, despite the weight of the Guard sailors who packed them to the gunwales, armed and cheering.

Four boats were pulling for the
Stormwind,
two for the smaller schooner. That looked to be out of action; she could see blood running in thin streaks through the ship’s scuppers.
Christ, and I thought that was a figure of speech.

Stormwind
had taken bad hits too. Alston was relying on speed and surprise and the stunning effect of those first broadsides to keep them away from their cannon. The next thirty seconds would tell if it was enough.

“Thus, thus!” Alston shouted. Suddenly it was
there,
looming huge from the low-riding longboat.
“Up and at them!”

“UP AND AT ’EM!” roared the laden boats.

A Tartessian cannon
did
fire, but too late—the ball went overhead, close enough for her to feel the ugly wind and know that fifteen seconds earlier it might have decapitated her as cleanly as a guillotine. Then they were up against the forepeak of the
Stormwind,
wood grinding on wood. Marian leaped up and swarmed up one of the ropes with a shout of “Follow me!”

Her head came level with the rail, to see a Tartessian bleeding from half a dozen superficial wounds rushing at her with a boarding pike. She drew her pistol one-handed, raked the hammers back against her thigh and fired. The long steel head of the pike scored across her side like a line of cold fire.

A flip put the barrels of the pistol in her hand. She smashed it into the man’s face, and his nose went flat in a spurt of blood. He roared and reeled backward. That let her get her legs down on the
Stormwind
’s deck and take a full-armed swing. Bone crumpled; she threw the pistol in the next Tartessian’s face and swept out her
katana
. That draw turned into a cut, diagonally down from the left with her foot stamping forward. The ugly jar of steel in meat and bone hit her wrists, and she ripped the blade through its arc with a whipping twist of arms, shoulders, gut.

Something slapped her head around, stinging pain; the sensory data were distant, nothing to pay attention to unless it crippled her—she felt calm and utterly alive at the same time, information pouring in through ears and eyes and skin and out in the movements of her sword and orders. For a moment the two forces were locked together, blows given and received chest to chest. Her
katana
jammed in bone, and someone kicked her feet out from underneath her while it was stuck, by accident or design.

Training saved her, making muscle go limp as she fell to the blood-slick boards. She drew the shorter
wazikashi
and her tanto-knife, but there was no way to parry the clubbed musket that a short, thick, heavy-bodied Tartessian sailor was raising to beat out her brains. Then the Tartessian screamed and fell back, his face half sliced off by a boarding ax in the hands of a Chamberlain. The crewman was a Sun People tribesman, and the battle madness of his folk was on him, eyes showing white all around the iris, moving with a lethal, inhuman fury . . .

Alston flipped herself back to her feet. “You!” she shouted, grabbing the bosun. The fighting had surged past her a little. “Get that!”

She pointed to a small stubby carronade standing to port of the enemy ship’s wheel, a flintlock piece with the hammer cocked—ready, but the enemy had been surprised before they could use it. The bosun nodded, understanding her gesture if not her voice in the overwhelming noise. He and she and half a dozen others grabbed the little cannon and ran it forward.

“Way, there!” they called.

The Guard fighters parted, and there was a single moment to see the appalled faces of the Tartessians before she jerked the lanyard. It leaped backward, right up the quarterdeck and through the stern rail, but it had done its work . . . and it was loaded with grape.

The enemy gave way, turning and running down into the waist of the ship. Marian paused an instant to recover her sword, aware in some distant corner of her mind that the sensation of her feet sliding greasily in a pool of blood and body fluids would come back to her later. And the stink, the stink . . .

The Marines among the boarders fell out, reloaded their rifles, and volley-fired from fo’c’sle and quarterdeck, effective beyond their numbers in their crisp discipline and the ordered glitter of their bayonets. A Tartessian threw down his cutlass and fell to his knees, holding out his hand for quarter. There was an instant’s wavering, and then the enemy’s morale broke like a glass jar dropped on a granite paving stone.

“Cease fire!” Marian called as the rest of the enemy joined the first. “Belay fighting, there—cease fire!”

She stood, suddenly conscious of pain and of blood pouring in a wet sheet down her neck and her side. Her fingers went to one ear as a Tartessian in an officer’s gaudy tunic came and knelt, offering his sword. She took it, wincing at the same time.

Well, there goes the earlobe,
she thought, as the boarders began cheering, loud even after the memory of combat. One ran cat-nimble up the
Stormwind
’s rigging, slashed the crowned mountain of Tartessos down from the mast and ran up the Stars and Stripes.