On the Oceans of Eternity (14 page)

“That is good,” Isketerol said.
The sulfur will be very useful. It is not necessary that William know that my spies in Nantucket found out about the manganese, and the mines of it in my own Black Mountains.
“Of course, in return for such kingly gifts, I will give royal gifts in return, for my honor’s sake.”
What hypocrites we Kings must be.
“What is it that my brother needs?”

“Quicksilver, as much as you can spare,” Odikweos said. “If you have the mines working again.”

“Better than ever,” Isketerol lied smoothly.
After all, William does not need to know where it comes from, so long as I can deliver
it.

“And more raw cotton.”

“The harvest has been excellent—”

T
he healer bowed deeply before Alantethol of Tartessos, commander of the Hidden Fort of the West—in what the Eagle People called California. He inclined his head slightly in turn; she was a woman, true, but all healers were, and they were close to the Lady of Tartessos—uncomfortably close to the Crone, as well, the bright and shadow sides of the Divine.

“Will more of the ship’s crew die?” he said, shuddering slightly within.

They had found it in the river downstream halfway to the sea, aground on a mudbank; only by the favor of Arucuttag had the crew brought it that far, with so many dead or dying. Only by a for-once-merciful jest of the Jester had the ones who lived included the captain, with his knowledge of modem navigation and this secret place.

“I am not sure, my great lord,” she said, frowning. “Twenty-one at least will surely live. Of the other eight, they are still very weak—and badly scarred. Perhaps none will die, perhaps half. The healer”—her tone was contemptuous; the ship’s medico was not one of the queen’s true pupils, merely one who’d had a few brief lessons—“did not recognize the sickness quickly, and she was not skilled in the understanding of
inoculation.”

Alantethol inclined his head again, in thanks for the truthfulness not hidden behind honied lies. Best be respectful, if she was in turn. And this healer had been a pupil of the King’s wife, Rosita, who had learned her art on Nantucket itself.

The commander ground his teeth at the thought. The Islanders had humiliated him—taken his ships in that skirmish on the African coast, somehow turned his trap on him....

That had been before the war broke out openly, in the spring of the year past; the King had to pay ransom and then publicly upbraid him, dismiss him, lest the conflict come too soon. In private he’d been more merciful, especially when he learned that Alantethol had kept the secret of this outpost. The cover story had held—if the captains told them it was Australia, how could the men know otherwise? Only a few of the captives knew English, anyway, and speakers of Tartessian were even rarer on Nantucket, too rare even for detailed interrogation of the officers.

Hence his appointment here. What better command to give to one who must disappear from public view than one so secret not a dozen people in the kingdom knew of it, save those sent here for life? It put him out of the way, yes—this latest ship had left the homeland only a month after the fall planting—but it was a post of honor.

Nantucket was all things hateful and vile, a land on whom he wished every revenge. Yet also the source of all power, of knowledge beyond price. The King himself owed his rise to his stay there and his alliance with the Nantucketer renegade Walker. Alantethol himself had learned En-gil-its, and read among the books copied from the King’s treasure-store, the Art of War and
Celestial Navigation,
things of deep wisdom. Wisdom that had made the son of a fishing-boat captain a great lord, one of the New Men of the King.

The Tartessian noble stroked his gold-bound tuft of chin-beard. “So, you have this sickness of the small pockmarks under control?”

“Yes, lord,” she said, bowing again. “It was very lucky that the queen’s book contained that knowledge and that the cows here have the little sickness which guards against the greater, or many more of us would have died. I beg the noble commander that word be sent to the homeland as quickly as may be—”

She paused to look around. Here was nobody to overhear, not even a barbarian slave ignorant of their tongue. The commander’s office was on the third story of his residence, that he might have solitude to ponder. As befitted his rank it was lined with plastered walls, with bearskins on the floor and Shang silk on the walls, and much raw gold beaten into sheets. The workers came to clean and polish only under guard.

“... that this be done in the City and its tributaries as well, lest this new pestilence spread to our land.”

Alantethol considered whether he should reveal more, then nodded abruptly. “That has already been accomplished, by King Isketerol’s wisdom,” he said, bowing with hands to forehead at his overlord’s name.

The healer hastily followed suit; this was a new custom since Isketerol took the throne.

“The sickness of the small pockmarks has been reported in Babylon; this ship of ours called at Meluhha on its way here, as part of keeping this base secret.”

Meluhha, where traders came from all the eastern lands and men mingled.
As a sheep defecates, promiscuously, everywhere,
he thought. Undoubtedly that was where they had contracted the disease.

“Best to take no chances with the Jester’s jests,” he went on, in tribute to the King’s wisdom.

They both made genuflection to a small eidolon of the Lady’s favorite son where it sat grinning in a niche. It was solid-cast in gold, and nearly knee high to a man. That was an extravagance possible only here, where gold was like the dirt of the streams. Alantethol took a pinch of pine resin and threw it into a small brazier at the feet of the statue so that aromatic blue smoke coiled upward to please the God.

“But among the naked savages beyond our rule, the tiny daemons of this illness will spread like fire in dry summer grass,” the healer said. “It will reap them as the very knife of the Crone; their flesh will seethe in Her Cauldron like a rich stew.”

“This is not altogether bad,” Alantethol said, pondering. “Earth must be fed,” he added piously.

The savages who infested these lands—otherwise so much like home that even glancing out the window gave him a pang of longing—were not numerous by the standards of the lands of the Middle Sea, or even those of the yellow-haired barbarians of the far northern lands. They could not be, living as they did by the chase and gathering wild plants. But these were lands of amazing wealth in more than gold; well watered by many rivers, swarming with game and fish and flocks of birds, able to support a denser peopling than he would have believed possible without farming. And the Tartessians here were very few, even counting subject-allies brought from the homeland to bolster them.

And I do so count them,
he thought. This far from home, differences that had loomed large in his youth became as nothing, and all Iberians were kindred. Still ...

“We do need some of the free savages,” he said. “There are not enough of us to do all the needful work, even with the slaves we’ve taken. Hmmm.”

He sent a small prayer to the Lady of Tartessos, and another to Her brother Arucuttag of the Sea, who watched over Tartessians abroad beyond the salt waters.
Hungry One, I will give you a strong warrior from among our captives, if you will show me a way... yes!

“Let word be sent to the tribes around us,” he said. “Tell them that we will give this treatment of the cow ... but only if they cease stinting the tribute they pay for our protection.”
Protection from us,
he thought; but that was the usual way. “This can be turned to much good use in subduing the savages, this pestilence of the small pockmarks.”

He grinned. “You say that this illness can be transmitted by the clothing of the sick, as well as their blood and breath and sweat?”

The healer nodded. “Unless such clothing is thoroughly cleaned, with boiling water and strong soap, and exposure to clean air and sunlight. The disease may lurk therein for years, otherwise.”

Alantethol laughed aloud. “Then let the blankets of those who had the sickness be preserved, in a dark warm place,” he said. “If any chief is stubborn, we will send him a gift—a gift of good wool blankets.”

The healer’s laughter echoed his own. “A jest fit for the Jester, lord,” she said. “So Arucuttag inspires the captains He favors in cunning trickery; in killing by stealth and by bold manslaying.”

She withdrew with another bow, and Alantethol sprang up from behind his
desk—
the Eagle People word came so naturally now that he did not feel any jar in the rhythm of his thoughts—and paced. The King would be highly pleased if he increased the profits of the settlement without demanding expensive trade goods brought the long weary dangerous distance from the homeland—voyages took a hundred days and a score even when the winds were favorable, sometimes half as much again. The King would be
highly
pleased....

No, this is not important enough for the magic talker, not in time of war. I will send the report with the next shipment, in code.
Scarcely needed, given the odds of encountering an Islander vessel, but the Tartessians needed no teaching from the Eagle People in the difference between bravery and carelessness.

He stopped at a redwood sideboard and poured himself a measured dollop of brandy, looking out the open shutters—even the commander’s house did not rate window glass yet; the very goblet in his hand was a sign of privilege and luxury. Yet also a sign of how far the kingdom had come; ten years before it would have been an unimaginable extravagance even at Pharaoh’s court. The only glass in Tartessos then had been beads.

Yes, the King is as fierce as a lion, but also as cunning and stealthy as a ferret,
Alantethol thought with wholehearted admiration. You could tell that he had spent his young manhood as a merchant, not lolling in a palace.

If a single Islander ship
did
put in at the great bay where the river flowed into the western ocean, or even one did in every year, they would see nothing except in the fantastically unlikely happenstance that they came at just the same time as the meeting between the Hidden Fort’s barge and the Tartessian vessel ... and how likely were they to come far inland, up that river and its northern tributary? Here he was midway between the gold of the mountains and the cinnabar ore of the coast ranges. Cinnabar, that precious stuff so necessary to make the newest of the new weapons, and to refining ore, and to trade with Great Achaea for powerful cannon.

He finished the brandy, relishing the bite of the spirits and the cold fire running down to his belly, but he was reluctant to return to the papers and ledgers just now. A thought tugged at him—ah. He must fulfill his oath to Arucuttag, and soon. No man was lucky who stole from the Gods, particularly that God. He would go down to the pens, and select the sacrifice.

 

Ranger Peter Giernas of the First Trans-Continental Expedition raised his bow, exhaling softly as he did. The arrow slid smoothly back through the centerline cutout of the weapon, wood and horn and sinew creaking slightly.

Cool morning air stroked his skin, throwing the shadows of the tall ponderosa pines behind him out onto the intense fresh spring green of the grass, starred with orange California poppies, cream-colored pasques, pink bunchberry, lavender water-leaf, golden asters, like a living Persian carpet swaying waist high. The sappy resin scent of the pines was strong, mixed with minty yerba buena, his own smells of woodsmoke and leather, and a hint of snow and rock from the peaks of the Sierra Nevada behind him.

The elk in the meadow before him raised their heads, ears flicking and jaws working as they glanced around, a few raising dripping muzzles from the little stream that ran through it. They were big reddish-brown beasts like scaled-up deer, with a pale yellowish patch on the rump and small white tails. The males had shed their antlers a while ago—it was late spring now—but they were bigger, with shaggy chestnut-brown hair on their necks like a short mane.

About thirty,
he thought.

No old bulls, it was too early in the season for them to stake out breeding territories, this spring of the Year 11. A round dozen cows with their calves, some of them newborns, none more than a month or two, coming around to butt at their dams’ udders or frolicking clumsily. And the ones he was interested in, adolescents of a year or two.

The whole herd was alert now, looking up into the wind from the west and away from him. Then a bristling gray-brown shape burst out of the cover at the far end of the oblong meadow, followed by two more. They seemed a whole pack as they leaped the stream and dashed about, growling, lunging, barking. The elk milled backward in dismay amid high-pitched squeals of alarm from the calves, sharp barking sounds from the cows. They faced the dogs for a moment, waiting for a rush that did not come, then turned about and surged through the flower-starred grass that came nearly to their chests, their heads thrown high and eyes wide with alarm. The pace was more a fast walk than a run, though, and the predators made no effort to close or even to cut out a calf, nipping at heels instead. One of the smaller, younger canines rolled over yelping when a cow’s hind hoof caught it in the ribs with a painful, audible
thump.

“Nice job, Perks,” Giernas muttered, rising smoothly from his crouch as the herd slowed; they were more confused than frightened.