Conquistador (47 page)

Hmmm. Biggest difference is there aren't any garages,
he thought. There
were
some cars, but they were parked by the side of the road, and there weren't very many of them.
And no mobile homes, of course.

He paused to talk with a few of the children. Nobody snatched the kids away from conversation with a stranger, and he discovered another difference from the lands he knew: He hadn't heard so many “sirs” since he'd mustered out of the Tenth Mountain after Iraq. What he sought stood within smelling distance of the mudflats, and a stone's throw from the first factories of the industrial district.

The neighborhood watering hole was called Bobcat Bites; he looked at it for a minute before he realized what the main structure must be. Then he laughed out loud; somebody had taken a medium-sized Quonset hut and stuccoed the outside and whitewashed it—probably, given the degree of uniformity elsewhere, to coincide with the letter if not the spirit of some town-wide building code. Crossing that like the bar of a T was a two-story boxy adobe structure with racks for bicycles and Segways outside, a parking lot to the side with a scattering of cars and pickups, and a sign that gave the tavern's name and encouraged all passersby to sample the free lunch until two-thirty, three P.M. on weekends.

Tully looked at his watch: Twelve P.M.
Why not?
he thought.

There was a long bar on either side of the entrance to the Quonset, complete with mirror, brass footrail and polished bar. “What's the deal on the free lunch?” he asked the woman behind it.

The woman paused in her slow shoving of a rag over the oak.
Now there,
Tully thought,
is someone even Warden Christiansen would admit is a “broad.”
She was around forty, with yellow hair that had rather obviously come out of a bottle. A few years older than him, and she looked it, but in a nice way, wearing a long apron over a red dress, and smoking a cigarette.
Christ, it's going to be hard to keep on the wagon here. The secondary smoke stokes the old craving something fierce.

She looked him up and down; he could tell she was amused, in a friendly sort of way.
And Christ, it's a good thing women don't go as much by looks as we uncouth males do, or after a few generations everyone would look like Tom. Turn on the charm, Roy.

“It means what it says, stranger,” she said. “You buy a drink or a beer, you get all you can eat—ain't that the way it usually is?” Then a pause, and: “Say, aren't you the guy in the paper this morning? From FirstSide?”

“Yeah, the famous Roy Tully,” he said, smiling back at her with his best leering-imp impersonation and sliding a New Virginian dime across the counter. “Make it a beer. Whatever you've got on tap.”

“Bayside Steam,” she said, getting out a frosted glass mug and drawing it full, with the foam edging slightly down the sides. “Enjoy.”

He snagged it, then went down to the spread. There were deviled hard-boiled eggs, half a dozen varieties of bread, sliced meats, soups over heating elements, butter and cheese and olive oil, oysters, smoked salmon, shrimp salad, potato salad, raw vegetables and guacamole, and most of the rest of the makings of a good smorgasbord, plus cakes and muffins under glass.

He loaded a plate, snickering slightly when he thought about the look of resentment he'd get from Tom if he were here. The big guy wasn't exactly a chow-hound, but he liked his food and hated the fact that he had to work hard to burn it off. Tully liked to eat too, but knew from family example and his own experience that he'd be able to stuff himself his life long and stay slim . . . or scrawny, as some unkind souls had called it . . . without bothering to work out unless he wanted to. His father had never lifted anything heavier than a briefcase full of legal papers, and still had the same belt measurement he'd graduated from high school with.

“So, what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he asked, sitting on a stool, taking a drink of the beer—quite good—and a bite of pumpernickel loaded with shrimp—excellent.

“The name's Maud, I'm not a girl, and I own the place, mister,” she replied. “Have since that worthless bastard I married drowned hisself.”

“He probably deserved it,” Tully said.

“He certainly did, not knowing better than taking a boat out while he was drunk,” she replied equably. “Second beer's a nickel.”

Tully sat, ate, and talked with Maud when she wasn't busy with other customers. That was less often as the lunch crowd thickened, and then the families started coming in for a Sunday-afternoon outing. He'd judged right about the location; it was all working stiffs, a cut below the lower-middle-class and skilled-labor area nearer the farmer's market.

They were ready enough to talk to a newcomer, as well: small-town friendly, but with little of the underlying standoffishness you often found in little out-of-the-way places.

Probably because it's new and growing, instead of a place where you're born and people are more likely to move out than in,
he thought.

Gentle prodding was more than enough to set people talking about themselves. Most of the women were housewives; the rest were in the service trades, or were things like elementary school teachers, with a few nurses. The men worked in the factories—consumer goods, boatbuilding, an electric-arc foundry owned by the O'Briens, small machine shops that made a surprisingly broad range of spare parts—or in construction, or drove forklifts at the Gate complex, or crewed fishing boats and coastal ships, or did things like sewer maintenance. A large majority had been born in the Commonwealth, and many were second or third generation; a majority of their grandparents had come from America, with a bias toward the upper South, and the rest had ancestors who were German, French, and Italian, with a scattering from all over Eastern Europe. The immigrant minority included Russians, Afrikaners, and a few Croats and Serbs.

The talk wasn't all that different from a bar-cum-restaurant in a small deep-rural Arkansas town somewhere in the Ozarks: sports, weather, gossip, fishing and hunting, how the farmers were doing that year—the main difference was the absence of national media and their stories. He heard a fair amount of grousing about the Thirty, mostly straightforward envy, and a fair amount of gossip about them as well, mostly of the sort you heard about the upper crust back home, but with more personal knowledge, and a bit less lurid. The main buzz was an elopement between the children of two Family heads, Primes.

People he spoke to often congratulated him on getting out of FirstSide; they generally thought it was pretty bad, even if they also discounted some of the Commission's propaganda.

A little later he overheard a political conversation.

“. . . doesn't sound too bad to me,” one man said. “Couple of
nahua
girls to peel grapes and drop 'em in my mouth while their brothers do all the work and I kick their asses now and then.”

The other man snorted; his English had a thick South African accent, clipped and guttural, like the late, unlamented Schalk van der Merwe. “Man, where exactly are they going to work for
you?
On the big farm you don't have? The factory you don't own? Down the mine you'll never get?”

The Afrikaner held up his hands. “All you've got is your house and these, just like me, you bliddy fool. If we get a lot more
nahua
in here working for fifty cents a day, and staying around long enough to learn skilled trades, what's to stop your boss paying
you
fifty cents, and telling you he'll put one of them in your place if you complain, and then you can live on nothing? Bliddy poor whites, that's what
we'd
be.”

“Ah, hell, Rhodevik, it ain't gonna happen anyway.” The other man shrugged. “So who do you like—San Diego or Rolfeston?”

“None of you
soutpens
can play rugby anyway,” the immigrant said with a friendly sneer. “Now . . .”

And on that note,
Roy thought, rising and dropping a nickel tip.
Tomorrow I'll take a look across the bay.

Lord Seven Flower held the meeting in the ruins of Zaachila, for the sacredness that dwelt in the stones of the lost city. No living men had made their homes here for a long time; what the plagues that swept through in his grandfather's day had begun, the wars and chaos that followed in their wake had finished. He kept his own seat of power in the great city of Tututepec, much closer to the coast and the foreign trade that had helped make him overlord of half the Zapotec peoples. Yet once this had been the place of the
Vuijato,
the Great Seer, the Speaker to the Gods—he whose hand conferred sovereignty on kings.

That would help to overawe turbulent nobles, and even his closest advisers could turn back into such, if his grip wavered. The setting was the more numinous because it was night, and because of the day—Eight Deer—in the holy calendar. The trees had gone far in their reconquest of the sacred city and loomed about like living green walls, but he had had this courtyard kept clear of the encroaching bush and vines. Except where staircases ascended at the four corners, the great courtyard was flanked by walls higher than a man, carved in bass-relief from hard limestone and still vividly colored despite years of weathering. They showed the story of the first Eight Deer, the great leader who seized power in the War of Heaven—showed it in long pictures, and word-glyphs. The rise of the rival cities of Tilantongo and Red-White Bundle, the feuds and marriages of their lords, the suicide of one such forced by the machinations of Lady Six Monkey, the blood sacrifice of the defeated king of Red-White Bundle by the victorious warlord whose naming day this was . . .

Eight Deer had no royal ancestors,
Lord Seven Flower thought.
Like me, he was the son of a priest, and a great warrior. Like me, he seized power in a time of chaos. Like his, my name will live forever, and my dynasty rule for a thousand years!

Torches burned at the staircases, torches of aromatic wood that added a heavy, spicy scent to the odors of damp and growth and ancient stone, heavier than the mouthwatering scents of roasting dog and brewing cacao from the cooking-fires nearby. Around the courtyard shone the kerosene lanterns he gained in trade, brighter than any torch. The guards at the staircases bore bronze-headed spears and wooden swords set with bronze shark-tooth edges on both sides, the weapons of his grandfather's day, before the Deathwalkers came from the northern sea.

The guards who stood about the walls in the courtyard below bore modern steel machetes and flintlock muskets. The lesson was one he wanted driven home frequently and hard.

Lord Seven Flower himself was in the traditional costume: silver armbands and greaves, a loincloth intricately folded so that a long flap of snowy cotton edged with embroidery hung to his knees before and behind, gold chains and a gold pectoral across his chest, and a headdress made in the form of a snarling silver jaguar's head with golden spots, eyes of turquoise and ivory teeth, sporting a huge torrent of colored plumes from its rear in gaudy crimson and green and mauve.

The face that looked out between the jaguar's jaws was square and hard, dark brown save where white scars seamed it, his narrow eyes a black so deep the pupil merged with the iris. It was pitted with the marks of the Great Sickness—as were those of most men and women of his generation.

Those who lived,
he thought mordantly.

The priests and generals and high nobles who sat on cushions before him numbered twelve, dressed only slightly less gorgeously than himself. They also looked a little surprised that the feast had not begun; in the holy city one ate to bursting, drank to drunkenness, ate of certain mushrooms, and then the idols of the gods would speak—or the mummified bodies of one's ancestors, in the old days. Like him, few of the men before him came from families of sufficient ancient rank to have their forefathers preserved. The idols were present—great Bezelao with his cup of wisdom, Xochipilli with his crest of macaw feathers, and many more.

Also present were twenty men tied to upright wooden posts: common men, naked, slaves or peasants—men of no account, unlikely to be missed, as he had specified to the officials in charge of such matters.

Lord Seven Flower raised the ceremonial sword he bore in his hand; it was so old and holy that the blades were edged with bits of obsidian instead of bronze, like a priest's sacrificial knife.

“Stand forth, Five Deer,” he called.

A man stepped forward, plainly dressed in cotton loincloth and sandals, but bearing himself proudly. He carried a weapon. There were gasps as the grandees recognized it; not an ordinary musket, although shaped much like it—this one had a projecting box in front of the trigger guard, and no hammer at all, but a complex of metal shapes in roughly the same position.

“These men offend me. Slay them,” he went on, pointing to the stakes with his stone-edged sword.

The strange musket leaped to Five Deer's shoulder.
Crack!

The sound was not like the boom of a musket: harder, sharper, quicker, the flash a brief jet of hot flame in the darkness. A brass cartridge jumped out of the odd metal shapes, and the leftmost of the captives jerked and then slumped, a red spot appearing on his breast.

Again, and again: twenty times, as fast as Five Deer could shift his aim and pull the trigger. Lord Seven Flower's generals and priests were watching with fullest attention, swearing and pounding their fists on the mats that covered the stone pavement, some giving high yelping cries of excitement. There were screams from some of the captives, too; not every shot killed at once, though some did so dramatically—one took the whole top off a captive's head, and spattered his brains across a mural of human sacrifice. At Lord Seven Flower's nod, one of the guards stepped forward and silenced the wounded with a knife across the throat. Thick straw mats kept the blood from flowing too far and inconveniencing the great men.