On the Oceans of Eternity (81 page)

Marian waited quietly beside her in the bows of the launch as the fort fell away behind them and the minutes passed. To anyone else there would have been nothing in her face, nothing in the way her body waited but a tiger’s patience.

Ah, you cannot fool me, bin’HOtse-khwon,
Swindapa thought.
Not after all these years. I know when you worry. The dance of our souls is woven together in the moonlight.

Inward, she counted off her heartbeats, the old technique for precise time-telling that the Grandmothers had taught before clocks; the effort of controlling your pulse helped you keep calm in danger as well,
feedback
the Eagle People called it. Worry was foolishness; Moon Woman had turned Time itself in a circle to bring them together ...

“Now,” she said, her lips beside Marian’s ear. “We should be there now.”

Marian signaled. The oars froze. waiting, and they coasted forward against the sluggish ’longshore flow. Reeds waved to their left, a moving blackness against the greater darkness of the land. Another boat came very close, saw the white wand in the stern of theirs, veered aside, and waited; unseen, more did behind. Then the prow of theirs grated on something heavy and hard. Her hands reached out with others, felt the links. A chain, massive, the iron links as thick as her thighs and grown with weeds and harsh barnacles. From report, it stretched from one bank of the river to the other, barring the way to anything heavier than a canoe.

“Corporal,” her partner’s voice said, “get to it.”

Rafts of barrels towed astern of them. Figures in carefully preserved black wetsuits, flippers, masks, and snorkels rolled over the side of this and three other of the boats. Those rafts were brought forward and lashed to the chain ten yards apart; a small thick tarpaulin was draped over the middle between while divers anchored the barrels to the river-ooze. Thirty tense seconds, and a rising dragon’s hiss beneath the waters. Light leaked around the tarpaulin, and a smell of scorched metal bubbled to the surface. Then all was as it had been, except that there was a gap where the chain had lain on the water. But nothing to show that at either end ...

Marian smiled in the darkness, teeth showing in a glint of white. Swindapa felt her own glee awaken.

“Let’s go!”

“And to think I thought I’d get away from digging when I joined up,” Vaukel said.

“Shut up and dig—it keeps you warm,” Johanna said.

Vaukel nodded and swung the pick, grunting as it came around and jarred into the tough, rocky earth. After half a dozen strokes he stepped back, panting, while his squadmate went at the loosened earth with her shovel. Most of their company was working in such pairs—you couldn’t do both at once anyway. The rest of the army stretched off to the southward, across the broad undulating terrain, scoring it like an army of moles.

“I think that’s got it,” she said.

The two-person foxhole was a narrow slit a yard wide and two long, with a section running back like the stem of a T. Vaukel jumped down into it; one part was a little deeper, to give him protection equal to his shorter comrade’s.

“Throw down some rocks,” he said; when they came he stamped them into the wet earth, to give better footing.

Then he looked up at the sky, where the morning sun was a glow behind the gray. Back home in the valley of the River of Long Shadows he’d have said such a sky—low, wolf-colored, with wisps of fast-moving cloud—would mean rain, or snow since it was cold enough to see your breath. He took a deep breath through his nose, smelling the mealy scent. It felt a little dry for snow, but who knew so far from Alba?

Who knew the world was so big?
he thought, looking westward.

While he was a boy, it had seemed that his mother’s hamlet was the wide world, ringed by the forest. The sea, or the Great Wisdom, they were a marvelous far-off tale.

When his uncles and elder brothers had marched off to the Battle of the Downs he’d been green with envy ... less so, when not all returned, but he’d listened eagerly to their tales of journeying and war and the fabulous things of the Eagle People. Now he’d seen Irondale, sailed down the river to Westhaven, and across the River Ocean on a great swan-winged ship, and walked the streets of Nantucket, which was more wonderful still. From there around the world, and past Ur and Babylon, marched from there to Hattusas and on and on, and everywhere there were different peoples and their Gods and ways.

Now men were coming across those rolling downs to the westward, coming to kill him, so he must kill them.
Very strange,
he thought.

“Good open country,” Johanna said, as she looked westward. Then she laughed. “More open, now that we’ve burned down or run off everything on it.”

“That’s a bad thing, wasting the land,” Vaukel said mournfully. “Killing stock you can’t eat, Moon Woman doesn’t shine on it.”

For a moment the two Marines looked at each other in the mutual incomprehension of culture-clash, then shrugged and set to improving their quarters with ledges or little caves to store things, and rigging a shelter-half overhead. Snow started to whisk down from the north, small dry granular flakes. They were pounding the heaped dirt and rock ahead of them down with the flats of their entrenching tools—if you left it loose a bullet might punch through—when Captain Barnes came by with a squad leading pack mules.

“Here,” she said, and handed them extra ammunition and a bandolier of grenades.

“Thank you, ma‘am,” Gwenhaskieths said. She hefted the segmented iron egg of a grenade, her thumb caressing the pin. “We could have used some of these at O’Rourke’s Ford, ma’am.”

A swift grin. “Make these count. God bless.”

“And you, ma’am,” they both said, comforted.

Johanna jumped up to the firing step and craned her head around. “We’ve got backup—that’s a Gatling they’re digging in behind us.”

Vauk nodded solemnly and pulled a dog biscuit and stick of hard beef jerky out of his haversack where it rested behind him. The hard cracker challenged his teeth as he bit a comer off and began to chew. They huddled together for the animal comfort of the warmth, and waited. He could feel his companion shivering a little beside him.

Well, that’s the Sun People for you, he
thought good-naturedly.
Flighty they are, sort of. But fierce as you could want when the time comes for a fight.

It was amazing how travel broadened your perspective. Here, dyaus arsi and Fiernan Bohulugi and Eagle People were like a litter from the same dam.

Thunder rumbled in the west. He looked up for a moment, surprised; you almost never got thunder in a snowstorm like this.

“Guns,” Gwenhaskieths said. “It’s started.”

P
eter Giernas felt himself begin to shake as the canoe came to shore and he vaulted out and splashed ashore, leaving the others to haul the dugout craft onto the bank.

The campsight where he’d left Spring Indigo and Jared was empty ... empty save for burned scraps and tattered leather flapping in the breeze. Heads remained as well, stuck on stakes; heads of local warriors, and of his dogs Saule and Ausra. No Spring Indigo. No Jared. A low bitter smell of smoke and shit wisped up from coals mostly dead with dawn dew. His eyes misted over, and he heard sounds coming from his throat as if from a great distance. The shaking grew worse. He turned in the direction of the distant Tartessian fort and took a step ...

“Snap out of it!” Sue said, grabbing his arm. The muscle was rigid under her fingers, like carved wood. “Going berserk won’t help!”

He shuddered again, like a horse twitching at the bite of flies, and shook his head. Eddie’s arms gripped him from behind, and he heaved and twisted. Sue and Jaditwara joined in, wrestling him to a halt; he wasn’t quite far enough gone to hurt any of them.

“Blood brother!” Eddie Vergeraxsson shouted in his ear. “Call back your spirit! We’ll get them, or get revenge, but we have to
think.”

Step by step he won back to himself. At last he relaxed. “Thanks,” he said, his voice harsh and unfamiliar in his own ears. “Now let’s look around.”

They did, keeping the locals at the shoreline. Most of the ground around the Islander campsite was trampled too heavily for useful information, but some of it gave him a grim satisfaction that took a little of the shadow from the bright spring day.

“I think at least one of them bled out here,” he announced.

“Pete!”

Sue’s voice called him to the line where the horses had been picketed. “Pete, I think there was a hell of a fight here.”

He came, bent low and shading his eyes with a hand. “Yup,” he said. “Pawprints, lots of ‘em ... then most of the horses got led away, some of ’em broke free ... Look, this is a blood trait.”

Not much of one, an occasional brown drop. It led to the narrow band of riverside swamp.

“Cover me,” he said, stripping off his buckskin tunic and taking knife and tomahawk in hand. He eeled through, the wind warm on his bare back as he followed the tiny clues—a broken tule reed, an impression in a patch of mud, tufts of brown and gray fur. A low uncertain whine greeted him.

“Perks?” he said incredulously. “Perks, boy?”

His left hand reached out through the reeds, his right ready with his tomahawk. The palm came down on a dead man’s face, half-chewed away. He suppressed a startled curse and swept the tall tule rushes aside. Flies buzzed around the dead man’s caked blood, and on more—his own and others’—that matted the wolf-dog’s fur. Perks quivered, crawling forward on his belly, ears laid back, and licked his face and hands.

“Here, Perks. Steady, fellah.”

A jet of fear went through him as the dog struggled to rise. He yelped gently as Giemas slid the tomahawk through the loop at the back of his belt and picked him up; the ranger moved carefully, but a hundred and twenty pounds was a considerable weight even for his strength.

Sue came running at his call. She ran her hands over the wounded animal. “Nothing fundamental,” she said. “Except ... yes, there’s a pistol ball under the skin here on his left shoulder, must have skipped around. And this slash, and a stab here. I’ll have to probe for the bullet, the rest is antiseptic and some stitches. This is one tough dog.”

“He was tougher than one Tartessian, at least,” Giernas said. “Do what you can.”

He and Eddie and Jaddi were better trackers. He joined them, casting about through tall grass, riverside mud, beneath stands of live oak.

“Here’s where the Tartessians left,” Eddie said. “North—down the wagon track.”

That would lead the enemy a day’s hard ride north, and then they’d find the missing patrol’s wagon—the Indians with it had peeled off by ones and little groups, in places where they’d be hard to trace. The wagon would be alone. destroyed, with its load of charred Tartessian bodies.
That
would drive the enemy troops absolutely bugfuck, of course.

“And they had most of our horses with them,” Eddie went on, pointing. “Look.”

Giernas nodded. They’d gotten familiar enough with their tracks to identify individuals by their hoofprints. Those were as individual as a man’s fingerprints, when you knew how to look.

“They had a net of outriders all around,” Giernas said. “Look, there and there.”

Eddie frowned and nodded. “If Indigo got away, I don’t think she could avoid or outrun them,” he said unhappily. “Not after sunrise. They were pressing it hard, by the looks of it.”

“Pete!” Jaditwara called, her voice faint with distance. “Eddie!”

They trotted over, running easily at a steady wolf trot with their rifles pumping back and forth in their right hands and their moccasins rustling through the soft ground cover. Insects and a few birds burst out ahead of them. Jaditwara was lying on her belly, hands parting two clumps of the tall grass. They circled up behind her to avoid overtreading the trail and knelt, reaching out with their riflebarrels to part more of the grass. Hoofprints, unshod ones ...

“That’s two horses ... Shadowfax and Grimma, isn’t it?” he asked.

Jaditwara nodded; those were two of hers, a mare and a gelding named after characters from some old story she liked; she’d read big chunks of it aloud to them around the fire overwinter.

“Shadowfax is carrying a rider,” she said. “But a light one. Grimma is on a lead rope.”

Hope blazed up in him. “Spring Indigo got away!” he said. “She must have cut west and then south, back along the Tarties’ trail. That’s the one way they
wouldn’t
look.”