Island in the Sea of Time

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

February – May, Year 2 A.E.

Daurthunnicar scowled and gripped the arms of the huge carved oak chair. The ruathaurikaz of the Tuattauna folk's chieftains had stood here for many generations, time enough to accumulate many treasures. The timbers of the hall were carved and painted in the shape of gods and heroes, and they seemed to move slightly in the red-shot firelit dimness like the smoke-darkened wool hangings on the walls. By the wall across from him was a Sun Chariot and horse, cast in bronze and bearing a great golden disk as high as a man, incised with endless looping spirals. The Iraiina had nothing like that. They had never been a wealthy tribe, and they had been plundered of much of what they did have in the lost war on the mainland. The eyes stared at him through the murk, full of holiness and dread.

But we have victory here. The Sun Lord, the Long-Speared Father of the Sky, gives us victory now, he told himself firmly.

The Iraiina rahax scowled at the Tuattauna high chief as he stood before him, and at the other enemy leaders. They bore themselves proudly, for beaten men looking at a foreign chief in their own high seat… except when their eyes strayed to his son-in-law, where he leaned on his spear beside the throne. Men fear me because Hwalkarz is beside me, he knew. They fear our tribe because Hwalkarz lends it his wizardry and his might. He was not altogether happy with that, not now. What was given could be withdrawn, and if the outlander's hand was taken back, the Iraiina would have many foes and face much hatred.

When you have the wolf by the ears, you cannot let go, be reminded himself. And had he not bound Hwalkarz to him by the closest of ties? His daughter's belly swelled with this man's get, which was more than his witch-wife had ever given him.

True, he's a wizard. But he was also a warrior beyond compare, a never-failing fountain of wealth, and a giver of deep and crafty redes. Some said he was a god… And the old stories did tell of times beyond number when gods or half-gods or warrior Mirutha walked among men and took part in their quarrels in man's shape. It would be a thing of high glory if his grandson was the son of a god. Such a one could make the Iraiina mighty. Such a breed of men could bestride the worlds. If he could not turn the wolf loose, he would wrestle it to the ground, set it to hunting for him.

"You come to hear my word," Daurthunnicar said to the envoys of the defeated. "That is good. Sky Father has given victory to the Iraiina folk and the tribes who have sworn on the oath-ring with them. It is unlucky to strive against the gods."

One of the ambassadors answered, speaking boldly. "Sky Father gives no man victory forever," he said, in the whistling nasal accent his people had. "His favor is fickle."

The defiance would have been more impressive if melting sleet hadn't been dripping off the envoy's beard and hair. Among the tribes of the White Isle it was not the least of grudges against Hwalkarz and the Iraiina that they had broken the old good custom of making war only between spring planting and first frost.

"Sky Father is not so fickle that there will be a steading of the Tuattauna standing whole by next harvest season, if you try to meet us on the raven-feeding field of war," Daurthunnicar said. "Your warriors' flesh feeds the Crow Goddess, your gold is on our arms, your cattle roast over our fires, our women wear your cloth, your wives and daughters spread their thighs for the stallion-cocks of our warriors. This is truth."

The envoys' fists clenched and they growled in their beards. But their eyes flickered to the iron-mailed line of spearmen who stood unmoving along the wall on either side of the Iraiina chieftain. Hwalkarz had taught them that unnatural stillness, and the arts of riding with footrests, arts of moving their warbands in ways that somehow always left their enemies at a disadvantage. Outside the captured hall rested one of the stone-throwing engines that battered down palisades like the fist of the Horned Man. And in two of the greater battles the sorcerer had struck men and horses dead at five times the reach of a bow, throwing bolts of thunder-death. The sorcerer, or the god?

"We…" The chief of the envoys stopped and ground his teeth. "We will pay tribute for peace. A tenth of our herds, a tenth of our bronze and gold, a tenth of our cloth and of this year's harvest."

There was a time when Daurthunnicar would have accounted that triumph and to spare, and taken it gladly. And spent the next year in fear of their revenge, he thought. Instead, he inclined his head slightly toward his son-in-law, holding out a gold-chased drinking horn. A woman scuttled over to fill it with captured mead.

Hwalkarz stepped forward; Daurthunnicar made a gesture, granting him formal leave to speak. When he did he used the Iraiina words with only the slightest trace of an accent. Was that the mark of how they spoke in the halls of the sky?

"You strove against us bravely," he said, turning his spear and grounding the point in sign of peaceful intent. "It's no fault of yours if the gods fought against you. And you're wise to offer us peace. It's a chief's duty to safeguard the life of the tribe."

The envoys relaxed a trifle, knowing that the Iraiina did not intend to grind their faces in the dirt further.

"Of the tribute you would give, we'll ask only half of a half," he went on. Their eyes went round in amazement. "That is, if you give your yes to our other offer."

"Offer?" one said suspiciously. "You've beaten us-we acknowledge it, may the Dead Walkers suck your blood and the Night Ones ride your dreams forever. Why do you speak of offers?"

Hwalkarz smiled. Daurthunnicar shivered slightly behind his face. That smile did not mean what an ordinary man's did.

"The Tuattauna still have most of their warriors," he said. "If we take your tribute, their axes remain-and may strike at us some other time. So if you remain our foes, better that we grind you into nothingness. What we offer instead is that you become our friends."

"Friends! You take our cattle and horses, burn our steadings, kill our men, force our women, and we should become friends'?"

Hwalkarz's voice was soothing. "After war, peace may be made. No feud should last forever; else the kin die out and there are no living to make sacrifice for the spirits of the dead. The Iraiina have already made peace with the Zarthani, the Maltarka, many of the eastern tribes. Their chariots fight side by side with ours, and they share in our plunder-and in our new arts of war and making."

"They are your dogs, you mean, to run at your heel!"

Daurthunnicar could see that the envoys were thoughtful, despite their bold words. He nodded smugly. This was a talking he had heard before, with the other neighbor tribes.

"Who speaks of dogs?" Hwalkarz shrugged. "Speak of wolves, instead." He touched the fanged wolfs head that shone on the green-enameled steel of his breastplate. They had seen his wolf banner on red fields, and the same emblem was more and more common on Iraiina shields. "The wolves run in a pack, and for each pack there is a leader- but all the pack share in the kill. Run with us, be our pack-brothers, and you will feast richly. More than enough to make up for your losses."

"Run against who?" the envoy said dubiously.

"Against all who oppose us," Hwalkarz answered. "In another year, perhaps two, all the tribes of Sky Father's people in these lands will go to war behind Daurthunnicar, high rahax of the White Isle. Already warriors come by the score from the mainland to join our banners and take meat and mead from our rahax, famous for victory-luck and his open hand to those who pledge loyalty."

Daurthunnicar felt himself swelling with pride. It was true. He'd received envoys hinting that whole clans might follow, taking land to hold of him and joining the Iraiina folk. A tribe shrank with defeat but grew in victory.

"Then who will we go to war against?" the Tuattauna chief asked.

Hwalkarz's grin spread. "Against the Earth Folk of the west and north, of course," he said. "That will be a fat carcass big enough for us all to feast on. And in return for our friendship, we ask only a light tribute-every year-and that you make no war without the consent of our rahax. In return, you will share with us as comrades, and your chieftains will take council with ours."

Daurthunnicar signaled the waiting women to bring in the food and drink. "Come, feast with us, be guests and peace-holy," he said. "We will speak more of this."

This session of the Constitutional Committee's core group was fairly informal, a dozen people sitting around a table with notepads and plates of cookies, and Swindapa at the foot taking shorthand notes-she'd proved to have a natural talent for that.

Informal, hell, it's in my living room, Cofflin thought. The Meeting had given him and Martha a former boardinghouse-cum-inn just past the upper end of Broad, where it turned into Gay Street-Marian had given one of her rare full-bore laughs when she heard, he on Gay and she on Main. They'd pulled out the extra bedrooms, except one for guests and another for a nursery, and turned most of the space into offices of a sort. So now I can't ever get away from the goddam job. He had to admit it was a nice place, and more practical for his work than the old house farther out, which was just too damn far to commute on a bike, especially in winter. There were more fireplaces, too; it was an older house, 1840s, like most in this section of town, and honestly built. Rain beat against the streaked antique glass, and the lilac bushes tapped on them like skeletal ringers. The streets were dark, drizzle falling through chill fog; a good thing nobody had to walk or bike far to get home.

On the other hand, it was just too convenient at times. This meeting around the long dining-room table was going to go on long past the dinnertime it was supposed to end at. On the third hand, with the committee meeting here Martha can go nurse the baby when she has to. Extremely fortunate; the supply of infant formula was strictly limited.

"Look, let's stop squabbling about details for a minute, shall we?" Cofflin said, washing down a bite of oatmeal cookie with lukewarm sassafras.

Because otherwise I may strangle somebody. The dull roar of argument subsided along the long table.

"Most of you were here for the first meetings we had right after the Event. We worked together well enough when we were figuring out how to avoid starving to death, nearly a year ago. Let's apply a little of that spirit."

"Good point, Jared," Martha said. "Everything we do will have repercussions down the road; look at what happened with the original Convention, back in the 1780s. Let's stand on their shoulders and perhaps see farther. Concentrate on principles, and on making them clear as crystal."

"I still say the Meeting should be the final authority," Macy said stubbornly. "Remember the way Congress got, back up in the twentieth? Say one thing, do another, and their hands always out to whoever would give 'em the biggest contribution. Let the voters decide themselves."

"For now, that's fine," Ian Arnstein said. "What happens when it gets too big? It's awkward enough now, when we get a big turnout for a Meeting."

Oh, please, not more about ancient Greek city-states, please.

"How's this?" Doreen said. "We set a maximum size for Towns-say when their Meetings have five thousand members. Bigger than that, they have to split into two. Towns elect delegates to a, oh, let's call it a House of Delegates. With an automatic setup for admitting new Townships. We can put in a formula for how many delegates per voter, say a percentage of the total so the ratio automatically goes up as the number of voters increases. That way the House would always be a manageable size."

"Okay," Macy said cautiously. "I can see that. But changes in the constitution should still be referred back to the Meetings. And the Meetings ought to be able to recall their delegates, too."

"How about a two-thirds majority in two-thirds of the Meetings to approve a change the delegates propose?" Ian said.

"Okay. I can go with that. We need a way for ordinary people to propose changes too… say, the same two-thirds and two-thirds voting on a petition, what do they call it-"

"Voter initiative, we called… will call… would have called it out in California," Ian said. "Damn, those tenses trip you up. We could use the same formula for a recall."

Macy nodded. There was a group that generally followed his lead; they gestured agreement as well.

"All right," Cofflin said, trying hard to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. "All in favor?"

Hands went up along the table. He ruled a line through that item on the list before him. His stomach rumbled complainingly; dinner was being long delayed. The smells coming from the kitchen didn't help.

"Next, the military," he said. "I move we use the Swiss system, suitably modified."

Martha frowned. "Does that really need to go into the constitution, dear?" she said. "Couldn't we just say where the warmaking power lies and then leave the details to the laws?"

"Ayup, the basics do need to go in, I think. How's this? Everyone registers at eighteen, serves the equivalent of Basic, and does periodic training after that. Meeting-or this House of Delegates, later-has to approve any prolonged call-up, or sending the… hell, let's call it the Militia abroad. Details beyond that by legislation."

"I'm for it, Jared," Macy said.

Cofflin looked down the table to Marian Alston.

She nodded. "Sound, as our basic defense. We'll need the Guard for operations abroad, ships and landing parties and so forth. I think that should be at the chief's discretion, with the Meeting as an overall check. We can't be too centralized, particularly with communications so slow."

"All in favor?" He glanced around. "Passed by acclamation. All right, next item, the Declaration of Rights. Let's see, we got the first seven down last session-religion, speech, assembly, franchise, property, privacy, fair and speedy trial by jury."

"What about bearing arms?" Macy said.

"Sam, that comes under 'military service' up the list, in case you hadn't noticed. Everyone's in the militia and they keep the personal weapons issued 'em at home, unless convicted of a felony. Satisfied?"

"I suppose," he grumbled. After a moment: "Ayup, Jared, that about covers it."

"Good. All right, there's a short codicil after all of 'em, to make what we mean clear. Like this bit about the freedom of religion not meaning the town can't put up a creche at Christmas, the speech not including fornicating in the streets, assembly not including rioting, property subject to legal usage, and trial not meaning damnfool stuff like throwing anyone who knows anything off a jury, things like that."

Joseph Starbuck held up a page, his glasses at the end of his nose. "Phrasing here's a bit more elegant than that, Jared," he said dryly.

"Blame Martha." That brought chuckles. "And Father Gomez, he did most of the religion codicil."

"Good," someone farther down the table said. "For a moment there, I was afraid we had a lawyer on the committee."

There was another chuckle at that. "We're ahead of the Philadelphia Convention there, at least," a man said. He'd been a candy-maker before the Event, and still did amazing things with honey and maple sugar now that his chocolate truffles were merely a sadly happy memory. "They were lousy with lawyers."

"All in favor?" Jared asked. "Passed by acclamation. Next item, the everybody-means-everybody-no-exceptions part of the Declaration of Rights. No abridging citizens' rights on the grounds of race, religion, origin, gender, or sexual orientation. The codicil covers things for damn fools again, in case we get many down the road. We didn't put in anything for green-eyed dwarves with two heads, on the assumption you can't cover all the angles."

"Excuse me, Chief." He looked down the table; it was Lisa Gerrard. Might have known.

"Yes, Lisa?" He tried to keep the coldness out of his voice. Gerrard wasn't a bad person, exactly. She did good work on the School Committee, though the closest she came to children of her own was seven cats. Just can't keep her mouth from flapping when she hears certain words. What was that Russian doctor…Pavlov?

"Why do we need to include, um, sexual orientation? Isn't that special rights for some and not others? Those people are covered by the general rights, aren't they?"

Alston touched him on the arm, and he nodded to her. She leaned forward, looking coolly down the stretch of mahogany. "As one of those people, Ms. Gerrard-three times over, black, gay, and female-it's my experience that we're not covered by general provisions unless it's made quite plain. Which is why, fo' example, I lost custody of my children, in fact couldn't even ask for it. Accordingly I'm for that provision. Strongly. Very strongly."

"All in favor?" Hands went up; close enough this time that he had to count. "Abstentions? Opposed? Passed."

He made a mental note to start talking people around.

About sixty-forty. If it was that close, it might not pass the Meeting without some work-mainly on getting people to attend; the constitution was being passed in chunks, and not everyone bothered to attend every session, so a small band of enthusiasts could be disproportionately influential if he didn't watch out. Maybe we should make voting compulsory, like the Aussies did? Ian Arnstein had brought that up a couple of sessions ago. On the other hand, no. People too damned lazy to vote didn't deserve a say. He'd pass the word to Sandy Rapczewicz, and she'd see that the Guard people showed up en masse; most of them would vote for legally protecting cream-cheese three-way llama bondage if they knew Captain Alston favored it, but Marian'd never dream of using her position to influence the turnout. Cofflin had no such inhibitions, and neither did the XO. Hmm. Father Gomez, he'd noticed, abstained-which might mean either…

Christ, I hate politics. Even when you were doing the right thing it could make you feel like you had rancid oil on your soul.

"And that's the last item on tonight's agenda. The minutes'll be posted at the Hub and the Athenaeum as usual, copies of the proposed articles in the Warrant, and we'll all vote on this chunk next Meeting. Thanks, people."

"What my husband means is that he's ready for dinner and would all those who aren't eating here please leave," Martha said.

Cofflin's stomach rumbled again in counterpoint, which brought a general laugh. He stood at the door, shaking hands as people opened their umbrellas and Martha helped them find their coats. The chill night air crept in, raw with the fog and rain.

The door closed finally, leaving only himself, Martha, Alston, and the Fiernan; the Arnsteins were going to settle for sandwiches at a meeting of their chess club. Cofflin winced slightly; he'd taken on Ian in a friendly game once, and it had lasted a whole six moves. Doreen beat him in three. Doc Coleman could give either of them a run for their money, though, and the game had become quite popular over the winter. The four remaining looked at each other and sighed, then a thin wail came from upstairs.

"Our overlord's voice," Martha said resignedly. "Now if only I could learn to tell the 'I'm hungry' cry from the 'I need to be changed' cry. Or the 'Pay attention to me' sub-variety."

"I come too," Swindapa said eagerly, joining the older woman on the stairs.

Cofflin smiled to himself; according to Martha, the Fiernan thought cloth diapers were the greatest invention since matches.

"Better you than me, Martha," Alston said. "I'm going to check the roast. Lordy, how some of those people love to hear themselves talk."

He busied himself clearing and setting the table, taking out the middle leaves that had extended it for the committee meeting and rummaging in the sideboy for the plates and cutlery. The carving knife and sharpening steel rasped together; the pigs the Eagle had brought back from Britain last spring had thrived-there were nearly a thousand of them now-but you couldn't say they were tender eating. Flavorful, yes. Tender, no. Then he uncorked a bottle of the island's red wine, which Martha told him needed to be done to let the stuff breathe. I can't tell the difference, myself.

"Drink?" Cofflin said, when Alston came back.

"Wouldn't say no," Alston replied. "The roast's standing. Ready to carve in about five minutes."

"Thanks for making the time to attend these meetings. It's pretty dull stuff," Cofflin said, handing her a bourbon-and-water. This was her sixth committee meeting, but the first time she'd spoken more than a few words.

"No, I wouldn't say dull," she said, her voice remote as she sipped at the drink and bared her teeth at the bite. "Interestin', more like. Seeing history up close." She paused for a moment and then went on: "You know, before… all this, I'd never met many Yankees. The real thing, I mean, not just people who live no'th of Mason and Dixon's line."

The silence stretched. They leaned back in their chairs, looking into the low blue-red flicker of the heartwood coals. At last he looked over at her. "Penny for 'em," he said.

She turned and looked into his eyes. "Jared, I love this place."

Cofflin blinked surprise; that was a bit effusive, for her. "Well… thanks."

"No, I mean it." Her voice was still remote and calm, but there was a flat intensity of purpose in it. "I was in the Guard a long time, since I turned eighteen, a lot of it down in the Gulf. DEA liaison shit, Columbians, refugees… when we weren't pulling drunken speedboaters out from under after a three-day lovefest with the eels and crabs. Staring up the ass end of the world."

"I was a cop too… well, ayup, you've got a point. I was a small-town cop, here."

"Still and all, I started out thinking I was doin' something worthwhile for the country, you know? And that meant a lot to me, because the country did-does, for that matter, or I wouldn't have kept wearin' the uniform… After a while, I got convinced I was standing at the bottom of the sewer drain, tryin' to push the flow back up with a plumber's helper. A while more, and I got to thinkin' the whole country had flushed itself right down that drain and we were just waiting to hit the septic tank. Got posted to Eagle, training duty, and sometimes at night I'd think… am I just giving these kids a shuck-and-jive?"

They sat listening to the crackle and soft popping sounds from the hearth, and the rippling tap of rain on the windows.

"Here…" she said.

"Here…" Cofflin went on. "No gangbangers, no Wall Street downsizers, no nutcases on a mission from God, no 'national media,' no redneck black-helicopter paranoids, no multi-cultis, no animal rights lunatics-not anymore, thanks to the Jaguar God-no trial lawyers, no Beltway crowd with their collective head so far up their butts they're looking at their tonsils from the rear. Our own share of natural-born damn fools as Martha likes to call 'em, but they're nothing by comparison."

She raised her glass. "Exactly, my friend. Exactly." The full lips quirked in a wry smile. "No damnosa hereditas like the foundin' fathers had on their backs, either. Tom Jefferson talked about havin' the wolf by the ears, but hell, the wolfs ears get mighty sore too. Here we don't have all that."

Slowly, he said: "That's why you finally gave in and started coming to these committee meetings?"

Alston nodded. "But Jared, I'm… not qualified. Oh, I can give advice on stuff in my area, but basically what I do is kick ass and take names. I'm a hammer. To me, all the problems look like nails, and they aren't."

"We're none of us qualified. I was a fisherman and a cop; Martha was a librarian; Macy's a carpenter turned contractor; Starbuck was a small-town businessman turned town clerk; the Arnsteins barely knew or cared that the real world existed."

"Christ, that's better than a bunch of sociologists and politico lawyers. Ian and Doreen are as bright as anyone I've ever met, and between 'em it seems like they've read every book in the world, sometimes; Martha's about as smart, and less naive. Macy drives me nuts, drives ever'body crazy, but he's got a conscience like a bedstead carved out of granite rock-uncomfortable, but it's solid to the core. And Jared, you know people, and you'll do what you think is right if you have to head-butt your way through a brick wall to do it. Plus you've gotten really good at persuading, in your own way."

"Ah-" He flushed, looking down into his glass uncomfortably. "I'll do my best."

"Know you will. Just… be careful, okay? Because it's for the whole world."

That thought had occurred to him, now and then. It was a sobering one. "Bargain on that, lady." They touched their glasses.

Alston sighed. "I wish my kids were here, you know? I really do. For their sakes."

As if on cue, Martha and Swindapa came down from the second-floor nursery. "She's asleep, at last," Martha said, wiping her hands on a towel. "For a while. As much as half an hour, if we're lucky."

"She's a beautiful baby-very good, as sweet as new butter," Swindapa said, smiling. "If I had a baby as good-natured, I'd…"

Then the expression ran away from her face, and she stood with her eyes closed, tears squeezing out from under the lids. Poor kid, Cofflin thought. Evidently having children was real important to her people. A fully equipped fertility lab back up in the twentieth might have been able to do something, but weeks of a raging untreated pelvic inflammation had probably put her beyond any benefit from the island's clinic.

Martha put an awkward arm around her shoulders. Alston came over and led her to the seat by the fire, pressing the glass of bourbon-and-water into her hand and perching on the arm of the easy chair beside her.

"Your older sister has some children, doesn't she, honey-bunch?" the black woman said gently, stroking her hair. "What're they like? Tell me."

Martha drew him out into the kitchen, snagging the long knife and fork along the way. "She'll be all right by the time you're finished carving," she murmured.

"It's called division of labor," Walker said to Ohotolarix.

The phrase was in English; Iraiina didn't have the words for it, not without a paragraph of circumlocutions. You couldn't say mass or table of organization in it either, not really.

The long shed was filled with men and women and children at work; most of them wore iron collars with a loop at the back for attaching shackles. At one end of the building thin rods of metal went into a machine of wooden drums and crank handles. Four strong men heaved on levers, and the iron rod was drawn through cast-iron dies until it became wire wound on a length of smooth round oak. There was a smell of hot iron and stale sweat, and the raw timbers the shed was fashioned of.

The wire went from bench to bench; some of the slaves cut the links into circles, others flattened the ends, still others fitted the rings together into preset shapes. At last the rivets were closed by lever-operated presses, and the end product was tumbled in boxes of sand to polish it, then washed and wiped down with flaxseed oil and rolled up for packing and transport. Chain-mail hauberks, in six standard sizes that he'd found would fit nearly everybody; knee-length, with short sleeves and a slit up before and behind so that the wearer could ride a horse. Not quite as good as the plate suits Leaton made back on the island, but almost infinitely better than the local equivalents.

"I see, lord," Ohotolarix said thoughtfully when he'd explained further. "Because each task is division among many." The Iraiina frowned in puzzlement for a moment.

"But why is this better than having each of these slaves and workmen make a whole set of this fine armor?" He wore his own now, did so virtually every waking moment, in fact.

"If a man does only one thing, he works faster," Walker said. "And if you only have to teach him one thing, he can learn it quickly-little skill is involved in doing only one step over and over again. And if he does only that one thing, it's easier to check that he does it well and quickly, and to drive him on."

A sort of primitive assembly-line system, although he'd gotten the idea from Adam Smith's description of how pins were made in the eighteenth century.

The young Iraiina frowned, thinking the matter through. "I see it must be as you say, lord," he said at last. "Eka, truth, I've never seen so many work so swiftly for so long. It's like…" He searched for words. "It's like the spokes of a wheel, going 'round and 'round."

Walker nodded, unsurprised; these people were burst workers. At crisis times like the harvest they labored at a pace that would kill most residents of the twentieth, but much of the rest of their working days they spent loafing along, stopping when they pleased. None of them had any precise time sense, either, and they absolutely hated working regular hours at high intensity as a steady thing.

Not as much as they hate flogging or the hotbox or the cross, though, he thought with some satisfaction. Or Hong's patented special gelding without anesthesia, although that was reserved for extreme cases. He grimaced a little; he wasn't what you'd call a squeamish man, but there were times when Hong's kid-in-a-candy-store approach to torture made him a little uneasy, not to mention this cult she'd started, with herself as the avatar of the Lady of Pain…

Outside a bell rang to mark the noon hour, echoing across the buildings and fields. At a shout from an overseer the workers in the shed downed their tools. Wheeled carts came in with tubs of food: porridge for the slaves, meat and bread and beer for the skilled freemen and overseers, a covered plate of ham and eggs for the American supervising the whole operation-Rodriguez, today. That would probably get a little cold; the sailor had taken one of the women back into the little wicker cubicle where the accounts were kept the minute the bell went, and the grunts and moans and rhythmic rattling were already loud. Walker grinned; Rodriguez was becoming something of a legend for the amount of action he got.

Still thinks with his balls, he thought, slightly contemptuous. But he's learned to keep it out of working hours. And he'd become downright devoted to the boss.

Walker and his chief Iraiina follower walked out into the courtyard. Walkerburg had grown considerably over the winter; he had sixty full-time warriors and retainers now- some from the new allied tribes, as well as Iraiina-plus their wives and children and dependents and the Americans and their women; most of them had a steady squeeze now, or more than one. And the slaves, who outnumbered all the rest put together. Plus the horses, milch cows, and draft oxen they needed, with corrals on the pastures downwind toward the river, and the watermill, the workshops, the warehouses. They'd logged off most of the heavy timber in the area over the cold months, and muddy ground interspersed with stumps spread around. New leaf was showing on the trees he'd left for shade and appearance, and a haze of grass and grain across the fields; the sun shone on wind-ruffled puddles and cuffed at the hair he'd let grow long in accordance with local custom.

Warriors drilled, marching, thrusting in unison with their spears or firing crossbows under McAndrews's direction, or rode their horses around an obstacle course. An Iraiina he'd taught was breaking horses to the saddle in a corral, cowboy-fashion. Laborers unloaded a broad-wheeled Conestoga wagon full of iron bars and barrel staves and charcoal and tanned hides. Another was being loaded with small barrels full of the output from his latest project, a still for homemade white lightning. That was wildly popular among the natives despite being rawly undrinkable; he supposed that was because they'd never been exposed to distilled liquor before, but it was another hold on the chiefs.

"Can we plow and herd enough to support so many?" Ohotolarix said, worry fighting with pride in his tone. None of the native settlements was as big as this; they didn't have the organization to feed large numbers, and disease was a constant threat to any substantial group.

"No," Walker replied. "We don't need to."

They walked across toward the main house; he nodded to followers of his about their errands, and took a deep breath of the fresh early-spring air. Apart from woodsmoke and the odors of baking and cooking, there was little taint in it. Alice had seen to the sanitation, with his full power behind her. He'd even set up a bathhouse, and made the slaves wash regularly with soap, another of his innovations. The natives were already talking in awe of how few died here, particularly children. The place was certainly swarming with rug rats.

"No, we won't plow that much," he went on aloud. "But we'll get ample grain and beans and beef from our share of the rahax's levies on our tributary folk, and from our Earther tenants. Here we'll raise just enough for garden truck, and fresh grazing for our beasts. Thus we'll be freed to fight, and work on other things."

And he'd had Martins run up a few plows and nineteenth-century-style seed drills, miles better than the simple wooden crook with a stone share the locals used. Nobody here had much grasp on stuff like liming the soil or rotating crops, either. Not that he intended to spend his time on agriculture, but he'd spread that sort of thing around, first of all on the lands the rahax had given him directly to work with slaves and tenants. It ought to be easy enough to double or triple productivity, which would be essential when he got around to the sort of building he had in mind. You could round up all the slaves you pleased, but they weren't much good if you couldn't feed them; that went double for armies. He was a young man; plenty of time.

Ohotolarix nodded and strode off to his own house; he had a growing family, and his youngest son was named Hwalkarz. The American walked into the hall of the two-story log dwelling, waiting while a servant knelt to take off his muddy boots and fit felt slippers. Alice Hong looked up from her papers on the table in the dining room and rang a bell for more food, then rubbed out some notes on a flat slate and chalked in others. Keruwthena's young sisters sat on either side of her; Hong was training them up, easier than with someone older. That was the main drawback of ruling primitives. You could make them do things, but you had to show them how first.

"Welcome, Oh Lord of the Manor," she said.

Walker grinned; Alice might take her perversions with excessive seriousness, but it was refreshing to have someone who wasn't totally in awe of him. Of course, he could relax around Alice, The locals would never follow a woman, witch or no, and she knew it. She was crazy, he supposed, but not in the least stupid.

"How are things going?" he said.

The serving girl brought in a tray of sandwiches, thin grilled beef with onions on crusty almost-French bread, plus cheese and pickled vegetables. Hong had taught the kitchen staff well-she liked to eat properly herself-and none of them disobeyed her twice.

"Well, I told that cow Ekhnonpa to stay off her feet more-she's still puking in the mornings and probably will be until she drops her calf. I don't like the spotting she had, and I've cut her salt intake," the physician said. "Speaking of that, do you know half the females in this place are pregnant? It's not decent-as soon as I've got one trained to do something, somebody pups her. I'm going to start spaying some of them, or doing some D amp;Cs, or we'll never get any work done. Anyway, four births and one death this week-brainless bitch fell into the boiling tallow in the soap shed and got scalded, nothing I could do. A beam fell on a slave's foot and crushed it; he'll live and I saved the foot, but he's laid up for months. No more dysentery, thank goodness, just the usual rash of minor injuries, and my assistants could see to most of those. The food stores are holding up with the latest delivery. We're finally seeing some real production from the spinning and weaving shed."

He nodded approval as he swallowed the last of his sandwich and took a bite of strong cheese. A lot of the tribute was in raw wool and flax. Building the kick-pedal flying-shuttle looms and the spinning jenny hadn't been any problem, but getting the machines into actual production was another matter. Hong had taken the project under her wing for something to do, now that her regular clinic was well organized. It also made work for all those pregnant women, work they actually liked, and if you wanted decent sheeting or pillowcases here you had to make them yourself. The local linen was more like canvas.

"Good job," he said. The kitchen girl came in to clear away the wood and pottery plates. "As a reward, come along upstairs."

He rose. Hong dropped her chalk beside her quill pen and followed suit, grinning at him and slowly licking her lips. "You too," he added to the servant.

"You girls work on your times tables," Hong said to her helpers.

"Yes, Ms. Hong," they chorused, eyes firmly down on their slates.

The two Americans went out the door into the hallway, pushing the kitchen girl between them and up the stairs. Their hands met on her shivering back. Hong was smiling, and twirling a little silver-handled crop of bone and leather she always wore thonged around her right wrist.

Life is good, Walker thought, moving his hand down to the girl's rump. They turned left down the hall to Hong's room, which had the frontal mask of a human skull nailed to it with golden spikes.

"Wake up! Wake up!"

Ian Arnstein yawned and stretched, shaking off a dream in which he was trapped in a seminar without end, populated exclusively by illiterate surfer dudes who kept quoting Foucault at him; or even worse, Paul de Man. It was still dark outside, just the slightest hint of gray in the windows. It was his turn to make up the morning fire, and he snuggled down under the blankets and coverlet in reluctance. It might be March-now that he came a little more out of sleep he realized that it was the anniversary of Event Day, the morning of the expeditionary force's sailing date-but it was still cold and damp after a week of storms.

"Wake up!" Doreen said again, shaking his shoulder. "Ian! We're back in the twentieth! The Event reversed! There's a jet going by right over us and a Navy helicopter landing down by Steamboat Wharf!"

Ian hit the floor with a bellow "and tripped, tangled in the sheets. His elbows thumped on the floor; he ignored it and scrambled to the windows, throwing up the sash.

Cold wind and the drizzle it blew in raised goosebumps on his naked body. Below in the street a cart pulled by two cows went by, piled high with bundles of salted fish under a tarpaulin. A steam whistle sounded mournful and remote; he could smell burning whale oil from the lanterns…

A giggle from the bed brought him around. Doreen squeaked and hopped off the mattress, keeping the four-poster between them. "Now, darling, it was just a joke-"

He kept coming. She dodged and somersaulted over the bed. "Joke my hairy arse!" he roared. "That rain was cold, goddammit."

He chased her around the room. By the second circuit he was laughing as well; he took time to throw a few dry sticks on the fire before she let him catch her. They were both still smiling when they dressed and went across to breakfast, and so down to the wharves.

The two schooners Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tub-man were already being hauled out from the dock by the tugs. Eagle still waited. She didn't look quite so pristine as she had a year ago; they were still short of paint, and would be for years. Extra davits for more boats had been added to her stern and sides, and other shapes crouched at the rails, covered in tarpaulins. Umbrellas and rain slickers crowded the dock; there were hugs and tears as friends and family members said farewell. Father Gomez-who'd been chosen as head of the new church, rather to his own surprise-led a blessing service.

Then Jared Cofflin climbed onto a board between two barrels.

"Bad weather for a send-off, so I won't keep you long," he said. "We did all the speechifying necessary at the Town Meeting. This is something that has to be done. Lisketter's bunch got themselves killed, but we don't know what Walker and his gang have been doing, and we have to go, for our safety and that of our families and our homes. It isn't that far to Britain."

Not too far for Walker to come back with a horde of pirates, if we give him enough time, Ian thought soberly. Or for the Tartessians to do the same. That fact had sunk home well and truly over the winter; three-quarters of the Meeting's votes had gone to sending an expeditionary force and giving Alston plenipotentiary authority. Even Sam Macy had gone along with it, with a convert's zeal. Now that the spring plowing was mostly done, the islanders were anxious to see the expedition on its way. Not enthusiastic, certainly, except for some youngsters, but very willing.

He wondered whether it was the situation that made Town Meeting government work relatively well here, or the fact that this was a community whose core was people with real roots. I doubt a random collection of seven thousand Angelenos would have done nearly as well.

"I have complete confidence in Captain Alston's judgment and leadership," Cofflin finished. "With that, I'll turn this slippery plank over to her for a minute."

There was a friend's malice in the smile he gave the commander of the Republic of Nantucket's fleet. Ian knew they both detested public speaking. It was a bit of an irony that they'd both landed jobs where it was an essential part of the work.

Alston went up on the plank, yellow slicker over her working blues, and stood with hands behind her and feet braced wide. "I'm glad Chief Cofflin and the Meeting have confidence in us," she said. "This is an essential mission, and I intend to see that it's done right and at the least possible cost."

Well, that's the captain, he thought. Mission first, people second. She included herself among the expendable, of course.

"Cheer up," Doreen whispered in his ear. "Think of the adventure, Oh Speaker to Savages."

Adventure is somebody else in deep shit far away, as Marian so eloquently puts it. "Think of the cold, the wet, the cramped bunks, the salt meat and hardtack"-without refrigeration the Eagle and her consorts were back to traditional seafaring provender, "the natives throwing things at us," he whispered back.

"If all goes well, we'll make sure that there's no long-term menace to Nantucket's safety, and gain friends, allies, and trading partners," Alston went on. "Every one of us will do her or his best to see that things do go well."

"Or they'll answer to me and wish they'd never been born," Doreen whispered, in a sotto voce impersonation of the icy soprano Alston used when angry.

"We appreciate your support, and please keep us in your thoughts and prayers," Alston concluded. "Thank you."

She stepped down, and the last of the expeditionary force trooped up the gangplank.

"Almost wish I were going with you," Jared said.

"I don't," Martha added bluntly. "I just hope you all come back safe." She looked down at the baby sleeping in its carriage.

"You're right," Alston said. "That's important work too."

"You will come someday," Swindapa said. "There will be many voyages. I'll show you my birth-country." She bent and touched the baby's cheek. "You too, little Marian, iho-jax. You will see the midwinter Moon rising over the Great Wisdom."

Ian looked aside at Doreen, and smiled. "Remember our honeymoon cruise?"

"Time to break the mold," Walker said. "Hoist it out."

Men in thick leather aprons and boots and gloves went cautiously close and fastened a three-bar iron grapnel to the top of the mold. A ten-ox team bent their necks to the yoke and pulled in the muddy yard outside, and the long clay tube rose slowly out of the casting pit to the creak of harness and rattle of the block-and-tackle. The workers stood watching and blowing on their hands until it was free, then moved forward to guide it onto a timber cradle as the oxen walked backward and let the great weight down again.

A whistle blew, and slaves attacked the clay of the mold with wooden mallets and chisels. Large sections of it peeled away, revealing the dull brown-gold color of the bronze, still painfully hot to the touch. Walker and Cuddy stepped close, examining it with painstaking care from the thick breech down through the trunnions and the extra foot of spongy, pitted metal at the muzzle. The center was still full; they'd hollow-cast it with a water-cooled core for greater strength, the outer layers shrinking in as they solidified.

"We'll saw this last foot off, and then we're ready to bore it out," Walker said, slapping the metal. There's a thrill to it, he thought. Sort of like having a giant hard-on, in a rarefied intellectual sort of way.

"Yeah, but that boring, that's going to be a bitch, boss. The tool pieces and the gearing for the boring machine- that'll be mostly a hand-filing job."

"You've got the gauges for measuring results, don't you?" Walker asked, crouching and looking along the top of the barrel.

"Boss… ah, hell, yeah, I can do it. I can build a tool-and-gear cutter, too, it's just a shitload of work."

"Nothing worthwhile without sweat," Walker said cheerfully. "You've got those locals understudying you, don't you?"

"Right. Boss, have you tried to get the notion of doing something exactly into these wogs' heads? It's like on time, they just don't have that file on their hard drive."

"Actually I have, Bill. It just takes persistence and a boot up the ass now and then."

Perfect, he thought, touching the cannon again.

The sights were elementary, a blade at the front and a notch at the rear, just like the model, the Civil War twelve-pounder Napoleon. Saltpeter was still the bottleneck in gunpowder production, and Isketerol was working on that-his people used it as a medicine, and it was just a matter of scaling up the leaching process. When it was solved, he'd have the same power at his command that stopped Lee's men at Malvern Hill and Gettysburg.

"Ultima regio regnum," Walker said, patting the barrel again. "The last argument of kings." If the Nantucketers wanted to fuck with him, he was going to give them a right royal welcome.

Bill Cuddy blinked at the sound of Walker's laughter, and several of the slaves made covert signs with their fingers as they cringed.

"Oh, God," Doreen said, looking up the companionway stairs that led to the fantail of the Eagle and at the tumbled slope of foaming water beyond.

"Quickly, please, Ms. Arnstein!" the yellow-muffled figure at the head of them said. "Can't keep this hatchway open!"

Ice-cold sea spray was blasting through, already hitting her face and trickling down into the layers of quilted parka and wool sweater beneath her waterproofs. She took a breath and ran up the slippery treads; the fact that the ship was riding up the slope of one of the huge waves made it a little easier.

At least the air and cold cut the nausea. Seasickness had never bothered her before, but the four unbroken days of a high-latitude North Atlantic gale had triggered it well and truly. The crewman grabbed her as she came out and snapped her belt onto one of the safety lines that ran down either side of the quarterdeck. The wind snatched the breath out of her, leaving her gasping as she pulled herself slipping and crouching along past the radio shack and toward the great triple wheels.

She looked at the waves and felt her stomach heave one last time, but mastered it. It isn't really storming anymore, she told herself. Not really. Not the way it had been for the previous four days. Then she looked back over a sea like a long range of mountains in labor, white water from horizon to horizon except in the troughs between the great waves. Appalled, she turned her back on it-had to, because otherwise she couldn't breathe. Somewhere up there it was near noon, but the light was a somber gray wash.

The Eagle's bow climbed until it was pointing at the growling iron sky. Wind moaned and whistled through the rigging, loud enough to drown out a voice five paces away. No sleet today, but spray still came in sheets. The ship seemed to pause and then pitch forward under a mountain of gray and steel blue streaked with white, plumes of white throwing back from the twisting lunge of the bows. The rigging changed its note as the height of the wave itself sheltered them a little from the force of the monster wind raging down out of Greenland. Dim in the sheets of water coming over the side, figures in yellow slickers fought with the ropes in the waist or aloft.

The wave broke behind them and poured across the port rail, cataracted across the waist deck, hip-deep to the crew. Doreen felt her feet slip out from beneath her and clung for sheer life to the safety line; it bent like a bowstring under the terrible leverage, and her head went under-or she thought it did. With wind and water so intermingled there was no real surface to the billow streaming about her, only a zone of increasing density. Then like some great dog Eagle shook herself and roared upright again, with a Niagara pouring overside and through the scuppers.

Oh, God, thank You, she thought, coughing and wheezing to get the water out of her lungs as she fought her way to the wheels. Eight crewfolk wrestled the savage leverage of the following seas as it played through the rudder and the gearing.

"Sharp weather," the captain called, bending to shriek into her ear. "This is real sailin'!"

"You're out of your mind!" Doreen yelled back.

White teeth split the black face dimly seen under the slicker's hood. "Yeah, I am. Ain't it cool?" Alston shouted in turn.

Swindapa laughed beside her. She was bareheaded, long wet hair streaming like a yellow banner in the gale.

One advantage of weather like this was that you could mutter and not be heard. "Oh, great, I stop puking my guts out for the first time in sixty hours, and what do I get? The Loony Lesbian Sailors' Comedy Hour."

She pulled herself closer, holding on to the safety line. "How are we doing, Captain?"

Alston seemed in a playful mood. "Do you take Band-Aids off slowly or rip 'em quick?" she yelled.

"Slow-why?"

"I'm of the rip-'em-quick school," Alston replied. "This blow was just what we needed, to see how the crews settled in, test the schooners' seakeeping… and get us across fast."

"The schooners aren't sunk?" Doreen said, looking around.

Nothing. The Eagle came to the crest of a wave, and she couldn't even tell where sea and sky parted company. The Queen Mary couldn't live in this.

"Not as of the last radio check, half an hour ago. Good weatherly little ships-they float like corks. And we've been making three hundred sea miles from noon to noon, or better. This blow's dying, though; we'll rendezvous off Ireland in two, three days. Fast passage."

"I'm glad we're not in danger."

"Oh, there's danger. Let a couple of sails go in this and we'll broach to-be turned broadside on to the waves in a flash."

"Would that be bad?"

"We'd capsize and go down like a rock," Alston yelled cheerfully. "But don't worry-it's a sound ship and the crew's shaken down somethin' wonderful."

"I'll take a 747, thanks, given my choice," Doreen shouted back. "Anyway, Ian says he's finished."

"Lead along then," Alston said. "Ms. Rapczewicz, you have the deck. Keep her so."

They went down the companionway behind the radio shack and forward of the emergency wheel. The narrow passageway on the port side was dimmer than it had been when the electric lights were on; even the smell was different, a very slight fishy-nutty tang from the whale oil, and the officers' galley to their right gave off an occasional whiff of woodsmoke. They turned left, past the usual captain's quarters and back to the flag cabin at the rear.

Ian was sitting at the table, gnawing on a crackerlike piece of ship's biscuit. "Is it still blowing hard up there?" he asked innocently. The two rooms of the flag cabin were warm and dry and fairly well lit, but the swooping lurch was still the same-possibly even worse without the distraction of the heaving sea to watch.

"Excuse me while I strangle my husband, Captain," Doreen said, dripping.

Alston went into the head and returned with towels. Doreen and Swindapa wrapped them around their hair; the captain rubbed her inch-long wiry cap a few times and sat. I wish I could just ignore discomfort like that, Doreen thought.

"Well, Mr. Arnstein?" Alston said.

"I think I've come up with a diplomatic strategy that might work," he said cautiously. "What we discussed, but refined a bit. It turns on a nice little piece of linguistic reconstruction Doreen and Martha and I did back on the island."

Alston's eyes narrowed. "Oh?"

"It turns out the Iraiina and their relatives, what Swindapa calls the Sun People, weren't the first Indo-Europeans to settle in Britain," he said. "They were probably just the first ones to make it stick-would have without us, that is."

He pulled several sheets of paper out of a folder. "Damn, but this almost makes me wish I'd been a comparative philologist; as it is, I'm a rank amateur out of my depth. But look at these words in Fiernan."

He drew a list: bronze, wheel, axle, plow, yoke. Each had a phonetic rendering of the Earth Folk equivalent beside it. "Now look at these Proto-Indo-European equivalents, and the Iraiina ones."

"They don't look very similar to me," Alston said dubiously. "I mean, the Iraiina words do, very similar, but not the Fiernan."

Doreen took up the explanation: "You've got to strip away the grammatical features-and that's damned hard in this language, with this crazy-no offense, Swindapa-prefix-suffix system they've got. Sometime a long time ago, hundreds of years, Swindapa's ancestors borrowed the words for these concepts. From something even closer to the ur-language than Iraiina."

"Oh," Swindapa said, looking at the list. "Yes. I see what you mean; that makes sense. Why didn't you ask me, though?"

Doreen felt her stomach lurch again. Oh, shit. We got too tied up in our research and assumed that preliterates couldn't have a historical sense. Preliterates like the Iraiina couldn't, perhaps; they lived in mythic time, not historical. The Earth Folk were obsessed with memory and measuring natural cycles, though, as much as the Mayans had-would have-been.

Aloud, feebly, she said: "What do you mean?"

"Well, in your years…" The blue eyes took on a remote look; her lips and fingers moved in a mnemonic chant. "A thousand years ago, or a little more."

"The…" She paused for a moment, and her accent grew stronger, as it did when she shifted back to thinking in her native tongue. "The Daggermen, we called them; the Brawlers, the Mannerless. They came from the east-the Sea-Land Country. A few at first, trading, and sometimes stealing things, then more of them. They built their houses in places that weren't good for farming, at first, and raised animals. They had no manners, but they had wonderful things-mead, and copper, and plows, and the very first horses to be seen in the White Isle. They made pots marked with cords for the mead-drinking, and new types of bows, ways of herding cattle, and oh, all sorts of things. There were a lot of fights."

Doreen put her face in her palms. Ian pummeled his temples lightly with the heels of his hands. "Bell-Beaker burials," he said.

"So the Grandmothers sent their daughters to them, to teach them about Moon Woman, and when they learned, they helped us to make the greatest of the Building Wisdoms." Swindapa smiled. "That was eight hundred and fifty-two of your years ago. And they took the Spear Mark, that our hunters had always had, and became part of the Earth Folk."

"Assimilated," Doreen said to Alston. "But not completely. I think that's partly why the two institutions in Earth Folk society don't cooperate very well."

Swindapa shrugged. "The Grandmothers and the Spear Chosen don't have much to do with each other," she pointed out. "Moon Woman and… oh, I see what you mean."

Alston was nodding slowly. "You're right," she said. "Now, let's figure out how to use it."

Ian made an eager gesture and pulled out another sheet, this one with a flow chart on it. "It's a wild coincidence, but there are some similarities in the Earth Folk setup to recorded cultures-particularly the Iroquois. They're matrilineal and matrilocal, for starters, and there's a Sacred Truce celebrated by a gathering at…"

It was a fair spring day when the men of Walkerburg made ready to ride out to war; tender leaves fluttered, and wildflowers starred cornfields and meadows. William Walker pushed the modified Garand into the saddle scabbard and tied the thong that held it in place as he looked around in pride. Not bad, considering that he'd only been here since last September. The seed kernel of an empire. Archaeologists may dig it up someday. The place where the dynasty that ruled the world for a thousand years was born. If things went well, he'd move somewhere more convenient in a couple of years-the site of London, probably-but this was the first ground that had been his.

Alice Hong rode back up the line and handed Walker a piece of birch bark covered with notes. He looked at it and made yet another mental note that he'd have to get going on making paper someday; there was plenty of linen to make the pulp. Hong rode with reasonable confidence, able to stay on at least and keep her horse going in pretty much the direction she intended, which was all you could say for most of the people here. A Browning automatic was belted to her waist.

"Good," he said, returning the list, a last-minute check of the stores.

Unlike most of the others in the war host gathering through the Iraiina lands and Kent and the Thames Valley, his people weren't going to spend half their time foraging. And they weren't going to lose ten men to disease for every one killed in battle, either.

He looked down the column. Sixty riders, all in chain hauberks and conical helmets with bar nasals except for four Americans wearing Nantucket-made plate suits like his. They'd all ride to battle but fight on foot; it took longer than seven months to train a real cavalryman, or to train the horse for that matter. It still gave them unprecedented mobility and striking power by local standards; every man had a steel sword, a spear, and a crossbow slung over his back, although most of them kept their native axes or copies Martins had made at their saddlebows as well. More followed on foot, also all in iron, half of them with spears and half with crossbows. None of his original crew from the Yare among them, except for four as officers; the Americans were more useful at base, mostly… and not really up to local standards in hand-to-hand fighting, the majority of them. They and the ten native warriors he was leaving would be more than enough to keep the slaves in order.

For the rest there were a dozen servants; Hong and her native assistants; the train of big wagons and a smaller two-wheeled one he'd modeled on the farrier carts Civil War cavalry units had taken along, with a portable sheet-iron forge and small anvil for Marlins's best pupil. Plus spare horses, and some cattle driven along for fresh meat.

And the piece de resistance, two long bronze tubes on wheeled mounts with limbers behind four-horse teams. A nasty surprise, if he needed to pull a rabbit out of his hat.

Good little army, he thought. They actually had some notion of discipline and coordinated action by now. Combined with the natives' built-in ferocity and hardihood, it was a formidable combination.

He turned and led Bastard back toward the steps of the Big House. Ekhnonpa stood there, with the smile that brought luck. She was showing now, five months along; Keruwthena was even bigger, standing back with the lower-status staff. Odd. He'd never had any particular or urgent desire for fatherhood-it was far too much trouble and expense and time taken from his own ambitions up in the twentieth. And here he was going to be a daddy twice over… probably more than that, actually, but those were the two he was sure of. It did change your perspective a little; there was a certain satisfaction to thinking of your genes heading down the ages, enjoying the wealth and power you were piling up after you were gone.

He turned and looked out over the gathered folk of his settlement, raising his voice to carry. "While I am gone, my handfast man Bill Cuddy stands as steward in my place," he said.

He looked down at the machinist. "Don't fuck up, Bill," he continued in English.

"De nada, boss," Cuddy said. "No problem."

"And my second wife, Ekhnonpa has charge of household matters," he went on in Iraiina.

She looked at him with worried adoration. "Return to us victorious and hale, husband," she said.

"You are to take care of yourself," he said, patting her stomach. "Remember what Alice told you about straining, and diet."

"Yes, lord," she said, looking past his shoulder at Hong.

A mixture of awe, terror, and fascinated loathing was in the glance. He hadn't let the doctor play any of her little games with the rahax's daughter, but they were no secret.

Alice is very useful. Good wizard/bad witch was as workable as good cop/bad cop.

He swung into the saddle and stood in the stirrups. "0Once more we ride out to victory!" he called.

Local tradition guided most of the speech that followed- uncomfortably florid to American ears.

Wood and metal boomed on the sheet-steel facing of the shields as they hammered their weapons on them and screamed out Walker's name. Success accounted for a lot of that; he'd led many raids, all of them profitable and most of them easy work.

"Yo!" he said at last, waving his hand forward. His standard-bearer raised the banner, topped by a wolf skull and aurochs horns. Cloth went streaming out in the chilly breeze-a black wolf's head on a red ground.

Women made their last farewells; McAndrews tore himself away from his heavily pregnant blonde. Can these mixed marriages work? Walker thought with a flicker of sardonic humor. At least it seemed to have settled the man down; he doted on the wench. A romantic temperament.

Hooves thudded on turf, axles squealed, oxen bellowed as they leaned into the traces.

"I suppose I'm a romantic too, in a way, in a way," Walker whispered to himself. After a while, he began to sing-you didn't get music here unless you made it yourself. The locals just couldn't deal with rock tunes, but the Americans took it up with him.

And it's so right, he thought. I am-

"-Bad to the bone!

"Bbbbbbaad!…"