On the Oceans of Eternity (58 page)

“Well, the whole purpose of this war is to make sure we won’t have to fight on our own doorsteps again,” he pointed out. “Surely your brother’s made that clear to you.”

“Oh, it’s clear enough to
me,”
Tom Hollard said. “Not everyone looks that far ahead, though. And like I said, the war taxes’re hitting a lot of us just when we were finally getting out from under.”

“Then it’s up to us to convince ’em,” Jared said, settling down to work.

 

A song came from the forecastle of the
Chamberlain
after the commodore’s officer-guests had departed; voices in soft harmony with a flute and the strum of a guitar:

Marian Alston smiled up through the sloping windows at the frosted stars. A lot of songs had been pulled out of books and record collections that first year after the Event because there was no other way to have music besides making it yourself ...
but the old words made more sense these days.

“Well, that went off well,” she said aloud.

She kicked off her boots, threw her jacket over the back of one chair, and sank back onto the broad semicircle of cushioned bench that ran around the rear of the cabin below the slanting windows, stretching her arms behind her head. Nothing came through the open panes but a little cool sea air; nothing showed save campfires ashore and the riding lights of the ships on the calm sea, and the crescent moon above casting a westward glimmerpath toward Nantucket and home. A single lantern turned the big room into a place of shadows, gleams from polished wood and metal, from the black-lacquered surfaces of the two sets of
katana
and
wazikashi
racked on the wall, from the glass that covered the family portraits of them with the girls. It was quiet outside, and the music came plain:

Swindapa came back from the small head that connected to the commodore’s quarters portside and stopped at the sideboard to pour them both drinks. Marian watched her partner’s panther-graceful nakedness with a relaxed appreciation that suddenly turned to a stab of joy so piercing that it was pain as well. Memory overwhelmed her for an instant; of a night down along the coast of Brazil, the trades steady on the port quarter in the midnight watch. The two of them had gone forward to watch the phosphorescent waters peeling aside from the bow like waves of heated metal, their wake glowing behind the ship like a mile-long streak of light across the night-dark sea. Swindapa jumped up to the rail, leaning far out with one hand on the shrouds, her loosened hair trailing to the side like a torrent of silver; turned with the wonder of it in her eyes ...

She took the glass and gave a sigh of contentment as the other curled up beside her and they laid their heads together, kissing and murmuring into each other’s ears.

“Yes, dinner was like a feast of kinfolk,” Swindapa said, after a minute. “It’s a lot like being a part of a lineage, being in the Guard.”

“That’s the way I wanted it, ‘dapa,” Alston replied. Band of brothers, she thought—a bit sexist, but traditional. “Mmmm, that’s good,” she added.

“The whiskey, or this?” Swindapa chuckled, as she undid the buttons of the other’s shirt and moved her hands inside.

“Both,” Marian said, and finished off the glass. It was due that much respect, part of her last stock of Maker’s Mark. Then she pulled her partner to her, trailing lips down her neck, to the breasts warm in her hands, shadow-black fingers against pearl-white skin. The Fiernan gave a shivering cry of delight. Marian raised her head with a chuckle and said:

“The only question is, shall we make out here and scandalize the night-watch with the sound effects, or move over to the bed?”

Swindapa’s hands were on her belt buckle. “Both, of course,” she said, grinning affectionately. Solemnly for a moment: “It may be our last time to share ourselves.”

The forecastle was silent now, and there was a harsher music in the background; one of the Sun People war bands on shore, roaring out the tune to the squeal of a primitive bagpipe and a bohdran and something shatteringly like a Lamberg drum. It was an ancient battle chant, with verses that were new since the Eagle People came to Alba:

“Whooooooppp!”
Heather Alston-Kurlelo screeched, and let go of the rope, yodeling as she flew across the barn.
“Whoooooooo!”

For a moment she hung suspended at the top of her arc, feeling the floating sensation of it lifting her stomach and watching the inside of the barn roof through a mist of her own red hair. Then she fell screeching in delicious fear into the soft prickliness of the hay, smelling the dried memory of flowers. It closed over her head and she swam upright in it, wading her way to the beam where the others sat and hitching herself up to sit astraddle it, kicking her bare feet and giggling.

“That was
fun,”
she said.

“Yeah, but you shouldn’t yell so loud,” Chuck Hollard said.

He looked down to the ground floor of the barn. It was mostly stalls, with the sweet-musky smell of horses; and leather, tack oil, oats, the beery smell of silage in the troughs. The horses made sort of wet crunching sounds as they munched, snorting now and then. or shifting weight from one foot to another with a
clomp
sound as the hollow hoof hit the packed dirt and straw. The newcomers had already helped him curry and feed them; grudgingly, he admitted to himself that they seemed to know what they were doing despite being townies. Jared Jr. was still down there.

“We aren’t supposed to toss like that by ourselves without someone to check on us,” he said. “Dad’ll burn my butt if he finds out.”

“Yeah, Uncle Jared would be mad, too.” Lucy sighed. She got up and ran out on one of the narrower beams that spanned the waist of the barn and then back. “But he doesn’t spank nearly’s hard as our mom. Mom Marian,” she added. “‘Specially when we do something we shouldn’t on shipboard. Then she really gets mad.”

“Oh, yeah,” Heather said, rolling her eyes. “Like, really mad. ZHOtopo.”

“You actually get to go
sailing?
Really sailing—far foreign?” Chuck asked. Raw envy freighted his voice.

Heather dangled her feet over the edge of the hayloft. The hay behind her had a smell that made her want to sneeze, and to throw herself into it again like they’d been doing. She picked pieces of it out of her hair and looked at the rope that ran along the pulleyway down the center of the barn’s ridgepole.

“Oh, yeah,” she said casually, enjoying herself. “All around the world—lots of times. Even when there’s fights.”

“Only once,” Lucy pointed out.

I hate it when she does that. She always spoils a story,
Heather thought, and stuck out her tongue at her sister, who went on maddeningly:

“And she didn’t
expect
there was going to be a fight then. It just sort of happened. We stay home when she expects trouble. Like now.”

“Nothing happens here,” Chuck said, sick with envy. “Jesus Christ”—he sounded very like his father at that moment—“but I wish I could sail away and see all those places ... and all the fights ...”

“Fights are scary,” Lucy said. “Looks like there are cool things to do here, though. Riding.”

“Yeah,” Heather said. “Ponies of our own.”

“There’s hunting, too,” Chuck said. “Dad says I can have a hunting gun of my own soon. Dad and Mom and the other grown-ups hunt all sorts of things. Wolves, bears, white-tails, turkeys.”

“We shot an elephant last year,” Heather said nonchalantly.

“Oh,” Chuck replied, crushed.

“We
ate
the elephant,” Lucy said. “It was our
moms
shot it.”

“Yeah, and then all these little brown people, locals—”

“Sort of yettow-brown—not just brown like me—”

“Real little, they were all grown-up and only a bit taller than us—”

“With funny-looking faces. They chopped up the elephant. Some of them went right
inside
it,” Lucy said. “And chopped bits up.”

“Like butchering a cow?” Chuck asked curiously, his eyes alight. A boy didn’t grow up on a farm with any excess of squeamishness.

“Yeah,” Heather said, “but it was
big.
Tall as this barn!”

“Well, tall as the place we’re sitting on right now.”

“Lucy, stop doing that! You’re spoiling it!”

“No I’m not! It’s better if you tell it just the way it was!”

“Hey!” Chuck held up his hands. “Hey, I want to hear about this bit.”

“Oh,” Heather said. “Well, then we built big fires on the beach, and the little people all put grass skirts and stuff on—”

“... and they painted themselves, sort of like Indians—”

“—and they put bone rattles on their ankles—”

“—and we did too—”

“And we all
danced.”

“And ate the elephant and all sorts of stuff.”

“Raw?” Chuck asked in ghoulish enthusiasm.

“No, stupid. Toasted over the fires. All the grown-ups were dancing too ... well, a lot of them. The sailors. And that’s when the Tartessian boat came. Mom—”

“Both our moms.”

“Went down and talked with them, and they got really mad. I could tell, even if they weren’t shouting.”

“That’s when they had the battle?”

“No, that was a couple of days later,” Heather said. She quelled a memory of cold fear. “Our moms went off into the woods with a lot of the hands. We stayed in the camp.”

“We could hear the shooting, though,” Lucy said.

“Yeah, and then our moms came back and then in the morning they had the big fight in the bay. That’s when we ... well, they ... captured the two Tartessian ships. And a whole lot of gold. And ivory and silk and, oh, tons of wonderful cargo. I got this little cat carved out of jade, I’ll show you.”

“Plunder!” Chuck said. “Hey, cool.”

“Plundering is against regulations,” Lucy said pedantically. “Only pirates plunder. This was
prize money.”

“What’s the difference?” Chuck asked, intrigued.

“We’re the good guys,” Lucy said. “So when we capture the bad guys’ ships and take all their stuff, it’s okay. And that’s how we’re going to buy that land down near the water.”

“And have ponies and stuff,” Heather finished triumphantly.

 

“I’m sort of busy, Doctor,” Kenneth Hollard said. They were usually on first-name terms; the formality backed up the meaning of the words.

“I know, sir,” Justin Clemens said. “It’s about the smallpox, sir.”

Hollard’s long face changed from tightly reined impatience to a fear kept under equally close control. Nobody who’d been there when the disease broke loose in Babylon’s teeming warrens could react otherwise.

He rose, silencing Clemens with a hand, and went to the door flap of his tent. A murmured command sent the sentries further from the tent, and posted others around it. Then he ducked back into the cooling olive-tinted, canvas-smelling gloom and turned up the kerosene lantern that hung from the central ridgepole.

“Now, let me have it, Doctor. I thought we had it under control?”

“We do, sir, in Kar-Duniash,” Clemens said. He sat forward in the folding chair, knotting his hands together. “And we’ve got a good start on a vaccination program here in Anatolia. I thought we had reason to celebrate.”

“So did I,” Hollard said. “Like your wedding, Doctor.”

Clemens smiled for a second; Hollard had arranged for a wedding feast in the palace, with his royal brother-in-law dropping by with a substantial golden gift. Tab-sa-Dayyan had been flabbergasted, and Azzu-ena had cried. Then his naturally cheerful face turned grave again.

“No, it’s the news from Meluhha, Brigadier,” he said. At Hollard’s blank look—nobody could keep up with everything— “Meluhha. India, what’ll be Bombay. There’s a steady trickle of trade between there and the Gulf, via Dilmun.”

He moistened his lips, chapped with the long hard journey up from Mithnni. “There’s been an outbreak there.”

“Damn!” Hollard said, knotting his sun-faded brows. They were a startlingly light color against the teak-dark tan of his face. “How did that happen?”

“It’s the damn smallpox bug, it’s tough—great big mother of a thing for a virus, with a hard sheath, you can actually see it under a microscope. It’ll stay infectious for years at room temperature under the right conditions. I think ... I think what must have happened is that someone saw they could make a killing by stealing and selling clothing from the victims, instead of burning it. Remember how we gathered it in big heaps by the fires, toward the end there?”

Hollard nodded grimly. Thousands had died in Babylon, tens of thousands throughout the country, before quarantines and compulsory innoculation got the brushfire under control. Good cloth was valuable here, relative to most other things, because the whole process of making it from sheep to sewing was so labor-intensive. A good cloak or tunic would take a third of a year’s wages for an ordinary man. A shipload was a fortune.