Against the Tide of Years (68 page)

“ Next item: disposition of the enemy prisoners of war.”

A low savage growl went through the Meeting. Cofflin stepped aside for a moment and made a gesture with his hand. Marian Alston walked up to the podium. There was a cheer for her, and Cofflin reflected again how lucky the Republic was that Alston had not an iota of political ambition. Now she stared balefully at the crowd until the noise died.

“All those enemy personnel guilty of violations of the laws of war have been punished,” she said flatly. “All remaining prisoners of war will be treated according to the laws of war or I will resign my commission.”

That stopped the mutters of “Hang ’em all!” dead in their tracks; Cofflin grinned behind the bony Yankee dolor of his usual expression. Marian went on:

“And morality aside, mistreating prisoners is very stupid. It discourages people from surrendering. Now. We came through this as well as we did because we took precautions.”

There was an uneasy shifting on the benches; Cofflin knew that was memories of how he and Marian and the others had had to beg and plead and wheedle to get the necessary money and supplies voted.

“Those precautions were adequate—but only just adequate. If it hadn’t rained”—Cofflin nodded; flintlocks didn’t like rain—“it might have taken several days and substantially higher casualties to mop up the enemy forces. Now we’re in a war, and it’s a big, serious war, and I can tell you that half measures are a
really
bad idea. I suggest that we all reflect on that.”

The murmur that went through the crowd was slow and thoughtful, and Marian nodded—much better pleased with that, he guessed, than with the earlier cheers. Cofflin went back to the podium.

“Most of the prisoners aren’t really Tartessians,” he said. “ They’re from tribes the Tartessians have conquered. They’re also trained fighting men, and fairly well equipped. Our military doesn’t want them but they’d be very useful to our allies in the Middle East, and most of them seem to be ready to volunteer.”

As Marian said, they were mercenaries—and the Republic’s gold was as good as Isketerol’s.

“The rest will be sent to a prisoner-of-war camp on Long Island, where they can grow their own food and meditate on their sins. Except for some who’ve requested political asylum in the Republic; the councilor for foreign affairs”—by radio—“strongly recommends that it be granted. Any objections? ”

The meeting churned on. Cofflin sighed to himself; he might have far greater powers to act alone during wartime, but he still wanted to have a solid vote behind him. The Town Meeting system could drive him nuts at times, but when the Sovereign People finally made up their minds, nearly everyone got behind what had to be done.

He needed that, because there were going to be some very unpleasant necessities in the next few years. It was time to deal with Walker, before he dealt with them.

 

“ I keep my promises, Sam,” William Walker said.

The black ex-cadet nodded, blinking in the bright sun that reflected off the nearby ocean. On the docks of Neayoruk, two tall men stood face-to-face; McAndrews about the same height as the Montanan, with the same broad-shouldered, slim-hipped build, perhaps a little more heavily muscled. By now he wore
katana
and pistol as naturally as any; he’d been one of Walker’s troubleshooters for years, commanding troops and helping out Cuddy and others on the organizational side.

And he doesn’t approve of me at all,
Walker thought. He never had, and leaving behind that girl of his in Alba, in the middle of a probably fatal childbirth, had cemented it.

Walker indicated the ship tied up to the stone pier. It was the type he’d started building in his second year in Greece, a copy of a
gullet,
two-masted, about a hundred and fifty tons burden, with a smooth oval outline and curved-cheek bows. The design was eighteenth-nineteenth-century Levantine, and they were handy little ships. This one carried eight guns and was loaded with weapons, powder, tools, books—none of them the very best Mycenae had to offer (the rifles were all muzzle-loaders, for instance) but a priceless load nevertheless.

The Egyptian in a linen robe standing nearby certainly thought so; he was nearly jiggling from foot to foot in his eagerness to be off, like a kid waiting for the washroom.

“Tell Pharaoh that Mycenae is anxious for alliance,” Walker said, dropping back into Achaean . . . which, unlike English, the Egyptian envoy
did
speak.

McAndrews nodded again. Walker hid a grin. Meeting actual ancient Egyptians had been a shock for poor McAndrews. As anyone not besotted with radical Afrocentric horseshit would have known, they looked very much like Egyptians in the twentieth, except a little paler on average because three thousand years of Nubian and Sudanese genes hadn’t arrived yet via the slave trade south down the Nile from above Aswan. Meri-Sekhmet, the emissary of Ramses II, was a sort of light toast color, with straight features and brown eyes. His body slave, on the other hand, was unambiguously
black,
which had been another shock to McAndrews.

McAndrews shook hands, a bit reluctantly, then walked up the gangplank to oversee the crew, which included a number of specialists Walker had let him recruit—again, not the best but passable.

Meri-Sekhmet bowed and exchanged the usual endless pleasantries in atrocious Achaean Greek before he followed. The gangplank swung back and the ropes cast off; the twenty slaves in the tug grunted as they bent to their oars, sweat glistening on their naked, whip-scarred backs. Walker watched in silence as they towed the ship out beyond the stone breakwaters, out into the endless blue of the Laconian Gulf.

Helmut Mittler spoke, his voice still bearing the rough vowels of a North German. “ I still say we should have liquidated him, sir.”

Walker shook his head. “Remember Machiavelli.”

“Sir? ”

“Or Frederick the Great, for Christ’s sake,” Walker said, a little impatient.
Typical Kraut,
he thought.
All “how” and no “why.” No wonder they got beat twice running.

“Ah.” Mittler’s face cleared. “A prince should only break his word when it’s greatly to his advantage—and to do that, he must haff a reputation for great probity.”

“Exactly,” Walker laughed. “McAndrews will tell Pharaoh that I’m a bastard, but an
honest
bastard, which will come in useful someday. So will Egypt, I think . . . if the damned Nantucketers succeed in linking up with the Hittites. And if the Egyptians are modernized enough to be a significant factor . . .”

“But not enough to be a threat,” Mittler said, obviously running over the limitations of the cargo that McAndrews carried.

“Exactly,” Walker chuckled.

S
windapa smiled as she stepped ashore at Pentagon Base, with the spring wind whipping her hair about her ears. She bent, touching her fingertips to the dust of the White Isle, then to lips, heart, and groin in the gesture of reverence.

It isn’t home, not anymore,
she thought. Home was the red-brick house on Main, the sea, her daughters, and Marian. Tears prickled behind her eyelids, unshed, and she smiled with a sad joy.
But it is the birthplace of my spirit. Though I may never return here whole-hearted, yet I cannot ever altogether leave either.

In the history that bore Marian she had died a captive of the Iraiina, and her folk had gone down into a starless dark, overrun by the Sun People and remade in their image.

We saved them from that. O Moon Woman, great is Your kindness to us. Smile on Your children; send us a fortunate star to guide our feet.
There was confidence behind the prayer; hadn’t Moon Woman twisted time itself to give the dwellers-on-Earth a chance to make a better path?

“When do we get to see Grandma again, Mom?” Heather whispered up to her.

Swindapa stroked her head. “ In a day or two, my child,” she replied in Fiernan. Her daughters spoke it well; how not, when she’d sung to them in their cradles? “She’s at the Great Wisdom, or coming to meet us.”

There was the ritual of disembarking to go through, salutes, greetings. She looked curiously about her at the base; it had been nearly two years since she’d seen it, and it had grown like a lusty infant, seeming to change every time she turned around. The five-sided, earth-and-timber fort from when this was the Islander base for the war against Walker and the Sun People was still there, cannon snouting out from its ramparts. Two flags flew there, the Stars and Stripes and the crescent Moon on green that the Earth Folk had chosen.

Sprawling around it was the town that had grown up under its walls. Some called it Westhaven, some Bristol for the name of the place in the other future the Eagle People had come from.

It roared and bustled around them, full of excitement over the Islander fleet that had sailed in out of the dawn. The town had swallowed up the little Earth Folk hamlet that had stood here, but Pelanatorn son of Kaddapal stood there to greet them, grayer but still hale and looking stout and prosperous. His sister Endewarten spoke for Moon Woman here now, since their mother, Kaddapal, had taken the swan’s road beyond the Moon—died, as the short-spoken English tongue put it. Four or five thousand others dwelt here now; mostly her birth-people, but perhaps one in four were Islanders, and there were hundreds of others from anywhere on this side of the water within reach of Islander ships.

The air smelled of their doings, of woodsmoke and coal smoke, of fresh-cut timber and brick-kilns and mortar, of hot iron and brass; it was filled with the clamor of hooves and hammers, the whirring of machines, the
chuff . . . chuff . . .
of steam.

They walked up toward the fortress in company with Commander Hendriksson, the base commandant; the town itself was under Nantucket law, mainly because Earth Folk custom had no way to deal with such a huddling of people without lineage ties. Lucy and Heather dropped back to walk with the commandant’s children, their initial shyness dissolving in chatter. A policeman watched them go by; another thing the Earth Folk had not had before, or need for it.

But nobody need carry a spear when they drive their cattle to water, either,
Swindapa thought. Aloud, she said: “Many more buildings.”

“Mmmm-hmmm,” the black woman replied, brought out of her thoughts. “All sorts, too.”

The streets were mostly paved with brick, and over them traffic brawled and bustled. More manufacturies had opened on the outskirts, where roads gnawed into field and forest, and the docks were thronged with ships. Swindapa smiled to see that some of them were captained as well as crewed by her folk. Those who studied the Stars made good navigators.

Many of the shops—carpenters, smiths, wainwrights, saddlers—had signs out advertising for apprentices, who would also be mostly Earth Folk. So were the workers in the new industries, the healer-helpers studying in the new hospital, and many of the students in the Islander school.

We learn,
she thought. A haildom of Moon Woman stood near a Christian church.
And the Eagle People learn from us, as well. What comes of it will have the bone and blood of both of us in it.

She smiled more broadly yet to see a charioteer chieftain of the Sun People drive by, gawking in awe. He carried a steel sword at his waist, and his horses were shod in the same iron that rimmed the wheels of his war-car. But a Spear Chosen of the Fiernan Bohulugi rode past him on horseback, feet in the stirrups, a musket at his saddlebow, ignoring him with lordly contempt. The charioteer flushed, but the peace of the Alliance held his hand.

“ I’d really better go on to the Great Wisdom first,” she said to Marian. “ The Grandmothers will be more ready to listen to you after I’ve listened to them. I’ll take the children on, and they can visit with Mother and their cousins.”

A smile replied, the same rare beautiful thing that had captured her heart.

“ I’ll miss you, sugar. A few days, then.”

 

The road up from Pentagon Base was less of a rutted track now.
More of a rutted road,
Swindapa thought, as a warm spring shower cleared and she pulled off her oilskins and tossed them across the saddlebow, then looked around with delight on the mellow evening that brought them up onto the downland country, her oldest home.

Wind chased cloud-shadow over the great open roll of the countryside, fluttering the grasses and the leaves of the beech trees in patches of forest on hilltops. It was intensely green and fresh, and even when the scents—cut grass, horse, damp earth—were the same as in Nantucket, they were different in a subtle way her nose knew even if she had no word for it. Here and there she saw a barrow-grave of the ancients rising as an island of green turf, perhaps speckled with the gray-brown or white of sheep. The whitewashed wattle-and-daub walls of the round houses, great or small, were marked with intricate patterns of soot, ochre and saffron that told stories her eyes could read. Clumps of greenweed starred the pasture with yellow gold, and there were crimson tormentil, betony, hawkbit, the blue of clustered bellflowers; butterflies exploded upward at the clop of horses’ hooves, meadow browns, marbled whites.

Every now and then she reached out to touch the shoulder or arm of her mother; strange to have her riding a horse, wonderful that it was beside her. And the horse itself had come west-over-sea from what the Sun People called Jutland, brought by Fiernan traders now that the beasts had so many more uses than war.

“Are you still happy, child of my womb? ” Dhinwarn said.

“Oh, very,” Swindapa replied. “Into what star-path-through-shadow (life, living) isn’t rough-going-storm-cold (weeping-laughing) woven? Mostly, very happy.”