Against the Tide of Years (11 page)

“Sir?” Girenas felt his voice rise almost to a humiliating squeak. “I’m no . . . no speechmaker!”

Martha Cofflin’s expression mingled sympathy and unyielding resolution. “Then learn. You’ve got until spring.” Then, kindly: “Your age ought to help. Lot of younger people will be glad to see one of theirs proposing something.”

“Lord,” Girenas muttered.

He scarcely noticed his dismissal until he was out in the street again.
Hell, I haven’t been in Nantucket more’n once a year,
he thought. Then:
They didn’t tell me to forget it, either.
Resolution firmed. “I
can
do it, by God!”

He turned west. Hills rose on the edge of sight, blue and dreaming. Hills and mountains, the rivers like inland seas and the plains full of buffalo, Alder Gulch and its gold . . .
grizzlies and Indians and wolves, oh, my!

 

 

R
eveille,
Marian Alston-Kurlelo thought as her eyes opened, waiting for the pitch and roll of a bunk at sea, the creak of cordage and lap of the waves and the way a ship’s timbers spoke as they moved.

But it wasn’t a noncom bellowing, “lash and stow”; it was roosters, and someone beating on a triangle. “Rise and shine, sugar,” she whispered.

“I will rise, but I refuse to shine,” Swindapa said, mock-grumpy, yawning and stretching; the corn shucks in the mattress beneath them rustled as she moved to give Alston an embrace and then swing out of the bed.

The ferry had brought them in late last night; it was a chilly fall morning, and the water in the jug and basin beside the window raised goose bumps on the black woman’s skin as she washed and pulled on her clothes. The coarse blue wool of the uniform was clean by the standards of Year 8—it didn’t have visible dirt and it didn’t smell. Considering something unwearable after one use had gone the way of electric washer-dryer combos.

Fogarty’s Cove was already bustling. Only an archaeologist would be able to find any trace of the Indians, less than a decade after the Event had crashed into their world; the stones of a heath, a scatter of chipped flint, a tumbled drying rack, gourds gone wild. The Islanders had done considerably more. Steel screeched on wood in the sawmills, while hammers and adzes rang in the boatyard down by the wharves, where a big fishing smack was taking shape. Faint and far in the distance came a soft heavy
thudump . . . thudump
as stumps were blasted out of newly cleared fields with gunpowder. The streets were full of wagons bringing in grain and meat, raw wool, eggs, pumpkins and apples, peaches and potatoes, wine and butter and cheese—all from the new farms stretching westward from this outpost. Storekeepers and craftsfolk were opening their shutters and doors; livery stable, blacksmith and farrier, doctor, haberdasher.

The air was full of the strong smells of horses and cattle, woodsmoke, drying fish. Over the rooftops she could see the bright yellows and crimson of autumn trees in woodlots and field verge, the old gold of tasseled corn, copper leaves in a vineyard, a wide-horned bull drowsing beneath an oak as mist drifted over the dew-wet pasture’s faded green.

Lively,
Alston smiled to herself. Crude enough by the standards of the twentieth, but those weren’t the standards anyone with sense used anymore.
A lively little kid, growing fast.

Swindapa came up behind her and wrapped arms around her, resting chin on shoulder. Alston sighed, a sound that mixed a vast content and an anticipation of the day. Words ran through her mind:

They buckled on their webbing; knife, pouches, binoculars, and double-barreled flintlock pistols at their belts,
katanas
over their backs with the hilt jutting up behind the left ear. Saddlebags held their traveling kit; they carried those downstairs in their arms, slinging them over the benches beside them as they sat at the long trestle tables in the tavern’s taproom.

Wild Rose Chance was an example of what “log cabin” could mean when the logs were a hundred feet long and a yard thick. The big room was already fairly warm with the fire in the long iron-backed field-stone hearth and busy—a score or more sitting down to a hearty breakfast. Alston nodded to friends and acquaintances as she loaded her own plate and sank her teeth into a slab of hot, coarse whole-wheat bread with butter melting on its steaming surface.

At least I don’t have to worry about my weight,
she thought. Not when things like traveling fifteen miles to Camp Grant meant half a day in the saddle, not fifteen minutes in a car.

“Hey, there anyone here who speaks Fiernan?” a voice called from the open street door.

Alston and her partner looked up sharply. A woman stood there, in ordinary bib overalls, but with a shotgun over her back and a star pinned to one strap. Behind her were a young couple, dressed Islander-style except for their near-naked toddler, but obvious immigrants. Behind
them
was a clamoring pack—she thought she recognized several farmers, a straw boss from one of the timber mills, and the owner of the boatyard among them.

Swindapa began to rise, then sank back as the proprietor of the inn went over, drying his hands on a corner of his apron.

“Thought you did, Sarah,” he said.

“Thought I did too, Ted.”

Swindapa did rise then, smiling, when mutual bewilderment became too obvious. She returned chuckling.

“They speak Goldenhill dialect,” she said. “Thicker than honey—I’m not surprised the sheriff couldn’t make hoof or horn of it and the poor couple were frightened out of the seven words of English they had between them. The sheriff will put them up in the Town Hall tonight and find someone to explain about contracts.”

Alston nodded approval and threw down her napkin. Everyone was short of labor, but that was no excuse for taking advantage of ignorance. Her inner smile grew to a slight curve of full lips.
Jared’s seen to that.
By the time the immigrant couple had put in five years they’d speak the language and be eligible for citizenship; a few years more, and they’d probably have a farm or boat or shop of their own, and be down at the docks clamoring for a chance at a hired hand themselves.
And
their kids would be in school.

There had been times in the Coast Guard when she’d wondered what the hell she was doing—on the Haitian refugee patrol, for instance.

Or “cooperating” with those cowboy assholes in the DEA and BAFT,
she thought. If you had to be hired muscle, it was nice to work for an outfit run by actual human beings.

They took their saddlebags out; the inn’s groom had horses waiting, four-year-old Alba/Morgan crosses. Alston swung into the saddle, heeling her mount out into the road.

“Worth fighting for,” Swindapa said, indicating the town with an odd circling motion of her head.

“Let’s go tell it to the Marines, love,” Alston replied.

“Yeah, it’s coming along okay, man,” the blacksmith said, his long, sheeplike face neutral.

William Walker was always a little careful around John Martins. For one thing, the Californian ironworker hadn’t come along to Alba willingly, like the rest of his American supporters. That had taken a knife to the throat of his woman, Barbara. For another, Walker suspected that under his vaguely Buddhisty hippy-dippy exterior, Martins was capable of a really serious dislike.

“Well, should we go for a converter, or should we do the finery-chafery method?”

He looked around the raw little settlement. Walker had been to Greece a couple of times up in the Twentieth, once on Coast Guard business and once on holiday. This looked very different from what he remembered. The plain of the Eurotas River stretched away on either hand, about forty miles of it from where it left the northern mountains to where it reached the sea. More mountains lined it on either side, and they weren’t the bare limestone crags of the twentieth century, either. There hadn’t been nearly as much time for the goats and axes of men to do their work; these uplands were densely forested, pine on the higher elevations, mixed with evergreen oak and chestnut and ilex further down. The glade in which they stood was waist-high grass; the wind down from the heights smelled of fir sap. Not quite like Montana—for a bitter moment he remembered the snow peaks of the Rockies and the wild, clean smell—it was warmer, somehow, in a way that had nothing to do with the air temperature. Spicier, with scents like thyme and lavender.

“Hey, I’m just a blacksmith, man,” Martins said, hefting the sledge in his hand. “You get me iron, and I can work it.”

Walker pushed his face closer to Martins’s. The Californian was a tall man, as tall as himself, and ropily muscular. Older, of course—in his late forties now—with a ponytail more gray than brown at the rear of a head mostly bald, and absurd small lens glasses always falling toward the end of his nose.

“Don’t try to bullshit me, Martins,” Walker said. “I know
exactly
what you can and can’t do, family man. Now, I think I asked you a question?”

The sad russet eyes turned away slightly. Besides Barbara, there was an infant now, and Martins knew exactly what Walker was capable of, too.

“Converter will take six months, maybe a year, if we can do it at all, man—have to, like, talk to Cuddy too. Finery I can do right away, no shit, and blister steel.”

“Then get started on it. We’ll work on the converter later.”

Walker turned away and surveyed the work site. Trimmed timbers were piling up fast, with teams of near-naked peasants and yoked oxen hauling them out of the woods. The Achaean architect Augewas and Enkhelyawon the scribe were standing near the stream, drawing with sticks in the dirt. Walker paced over, still feeling a little odd in the Mycenaean tunic and kilt. It was comfortable clothing for this climate, however, at least in the warmer seasons.

“Gwasileus,”
the two Greeks said, bowing. “Lord.”

In classical Greek that would come to be
basileus
and mean king, but here and now it was simply the word for chieftain, overlord, boss man.

“How do things go?” Walker said.

“Lord,” the architect said, “there is good building stone near here—limestone, hard and dense, a blue stone. And I can build a wall across this stream.”

He nodded. The creek was about chest deep in the middle and twenty feet across. By southern Greek standards it was a major river; according to the locals, it shrank by about half in summertime. Flow was seasonal here, but not nearly as much as it would be up in the twentieth. The greater forest cover held water longer, and so runoff was slower. There were more springs, too; he wasn’t sure if the actual rainfall was greater, but it certainly
felt
as if it was.

“But, Lord, why do you wish it to be built this way?” Augewas said, indicating the ground. He’d sketched the slight narrowing a hundred yards east, where they were putting in the dam, and a curved line across it with the convex end upstream.

Ah, that’s right, they don’t have the arch or true dome,
Walker thought. He drew his sword and used the tip as a pointer.

“The weight of the water pushes on the dam,” he said. “If the wall is straight, only the strength of the wall holds it back. If it is curved, the water pushes the earth and rock into the sides.”

“Lord?” the architect said, baffled.

Walker sheathed his sword and looked around.
Don’t underestimate them,
he reminded himself. They built good roads for this era, and aqueducts, bridges, towers of great cyclopean blocks; they knew how to handle stone, in a solid rule-of-thumb, brute-force-and-massive-ignorance fashion.

Ah,
he thought after a moment, and cut a branch. “Here,” he said, holding it straight between his palms. “Push downward.”

Augewas did, and the green stick curved under his finger. “Now,” Walker went on, “I will bend it upward like a bow.” He did so. “Push again. See how it resists the push? Now put it between your own palms and
I
will push. Held straight, only the strength of the stick opposes my finger. Now bend it into an upward arch. Feel how the push goes against your hands when it is bent?”