On the Oceans of Eternity (4 page)

“Inform the Lady Ekhnonpa that I’ll be dining with her and the children.”

“The King commands: we obey.”

A hareem was very pleasant, but he had a certain nostalgic affection for Ekhnonpa and he’d kept her around. She’d borne him three children, and put on a good deal of weight, but her undemanding adoration was relaxing, sometimes. Her father, Daurthunnicar, had been a chieftain up in Alba, his first base of operations after he’d cleared out of Nantucket; he’d won the daughter and heir-apparent status by beating the tribal champion ... to death, with his hands and feet. The Nantucketers had upset that applecart—he touched the scar and the patch over the empty eyesocket Alston’s sword had left, and his lips curled back from his teeth for a moment.

 

Swindapa raised her head, took a long breath through her nose, cocked an ear. “Not long now,” she said. “That’s hearth smoke, and a dog barking.”

The deer track widened and turned into a rutted mud road as it wound upward; that made the forest less gloomy, but it also let in more of the rain coming in from the Welsh mountains. A clearing appeared, and little thatched clusters of round wattle-and-daub huts with sheepfolds and cattle corrals around about; the cold breeze ruffled rain-dimpled puddles. Smoke came leaking out of thatch in tatters that ran down the wet driving wind—or in a few cases from chimneys of brick or sheet iron, nowadays. A noisy dog brought some of the inhabitants out to the side of the road. They were wrapped in sheepskins and blanketlike cloaks of raw wool, looking like hairy bundles with feet.

A few carried weapons—steel—headed spears or crossbows handed out to the Republic’s Fiernan allies during the Alban War a decade ago, and a couple of trade muskets with waxed leather wrapped around the flintlock and pan. They relaxed and pointed the business ends skyward when they saw the Nantucketer gear and uniforms, and the standard-bearer that marked an embassy. The Stars and Stripes hung limp and wet on the pole socketed into the bearer’s stirrup, but the gilt eagle above was a bright flash in the rainy dimness.

Marian glanced backward out of the corner of her eye; the khaki-clad Marines were sitting their horses easily, reins in their right hands and Werder rifles riding in the crook of their left arms, eyes wary even here among friendlies. She had her eye on their sergeant, Zena Ritter, for possible promotion—a slender, wire-tough young woman with cropped dark-red hair and an implausible number of freckles, who’d been taking correspondence courses from Fort Brandt OCS via Westhaven HQ. The Republic’s military needed people who could function out on their ownsome without undue hand-holding, satellite links, or a Pentagon to do their thinking for them.

As she watched, Ritter tossed a bar of ration chocolate to a clutch of children. The waxed paper wrapping came off to squeals of delight.

Generous,
Marian thought. Even back on Nantucket chocolate was still expensive, gathered wild in Central America and traded to Islander schooners working the Main.
And they recognized it. Must be a fair bit of trade through here ...

Swindapa reined her horse aside and spoke to the locals in the purling glug-glug of the
Fiernan Bohulugi
tongue, a language that had vanished a thousand years before the birth of Christ in Marian’s history. She dropped the knotted reins on her saddlebow to let her hands move in fluid accompaniment to her thought. When she rode on she was shaking her head in amazement.

“Sugar?”
Marian asked. Lord, if you tied a Fiernan’s hands, they’d be struck dumb.

“It’s ... these people are out in the ... what’s the word, the sticks? They talk a dialect I can barely follow.”

The black woman smiled to herself; Swindapa’s lineage, the Kurlelo, lived by the Great Wisdom—Stonehenge—far south of here in Wiltshire on the open upland downs. By Fiernan reckoning, that made them the center of the world; the Kurlelo Grandmothers were the high priestesses of Moon Woman and students of the stars that revealed Her will. Those dry and sunny hills were thickly peopled and closely farmed as well, very different from these middle lands of Alba; here human habitations were still islands amid swamp and a wildwood-jungle of giant oak trees on heavy clay. Not until the Age of Iron brought better tools and plows would settlers make much progress against the King trees and the thick fertile low-country soils that bore them. In the original history at least ...

“In the sticks, yes,” Swindapa went on, in pleased wonderment at how far the changes had gone. “And yet look at all they have! Ten years ago, they would have made most of their tools of wood and bone and stone, shared one bronze blade with the whole family. Now they have steel axes, pans, spades, scythes, Nantucket plows ... even iron stoves. And yes, they say we’re getting near Irondale. Right where you thought we were.”

“Glad of it, ’dapa. Gettin’ old and creaky for riding in the rain like this, much less a God-damned week of it.”

She kept herself in shape as conscientiously as she worked at any other duty—a certain bleak inner honesty made her admit that
compulsive
would be a better description—but today creak and click and joint pain told of the teeth gnawing, quiet and relentless. The Event had sent thousands back through time, but every one of them still slid down the slippery slope of entropy at a minute per minute on their own personal world-line.

Wet wool clung and chafed against her skin, and the raw clammy chill had sunken in toward her bones. The cleared fields grew and spread out to the edge of sight, muddy plowland and pasture with treelots, and then the terrain rose slightly, hills deep in forest once more. The road climbed with it, becoming broader and better-built as it did, then snaked down a dry gully toward the Severn, winding its way from the mountains of Snowdonia to the estuary far southward.

She looked up to where the sun would have been, if the sky weren’t the color of wet iron. It was getting on toward evening; somewhere a wolf called to its pack and the sobbing howl echoed through the gathering dusk. The crossbred Morgan-chariot pony mounts scarcely flicked an ear at it; their shaggy coats were wet and mud-streaked, and their heads drooped. One blew out its lips in a blubbery sigh, and Marian slapped her mount’s neck in reassurance.

“Warm stable and oats soon enough, boy. We all need it.”

“I’d rather have some roast pork and a bed, myself,” Swindapa said, her urchin grin bright.
“And
a bath, nice and hot.”

Marian suppressed an involuntary groan at the thought of sinking into a steaming tub. Irondale’s lights showed bright through the wavery murk ahead as they came down onto the road along the narrow riverside flat. By the roadside was a man-tall granite boundary-marker. On one side were Fiernan geometries; the other bore the Republic’s eagle, with an olive branch in one claw and a bundle of arrows in the other.

“It’s grown,” Swindapa went on thoughtfully, looking at the town’s lights. They’d last visited in 04, when the new settlement was nothing but mud, stumps, tents, and construction-yard litter. “Three thousand four hundred residents, according to the latest report.”

Her slight singsong accent grew a little stronger, as it did when she used the mnemonic training she’d received as an apprentice to the Kurlelo Grandmothers at the Great Wisdom.

“When I saw the numbers I thought that was many,” she continued after a moment. “But I hadn’t realized that three thousand four hundred was so many.”

Which was natural enough; the whole of Alba hadn’t had a single town, before the Event. As near as they could tell, there were fewer than half a million people in the whole of the British Isles. Possibly
many
fewer. By the standards of this era that was a dense population; the best estimate the Republic’s explorers and savants had been able to come up with counted around fifty million for the entire planet.

“Halt! Who goes?”

She nodded approval as the sentries stepped out from neatly camouflaged blinds on either side of the road and raised their rifles. One had a bull’s-eye lantern as well, and snapped it open to shine the beam on their faces. Marian raised her right hand to halt the little column.

“Commodore Marian Alston-Kurlelo and Lieutenant Commander Swindapa Kurlelo-Alston and party,” she said.

That flustered the militiaman a little, and he stammered and flushed before stepping back with a salute. “Pass, friend!”

Marian returned the gesture; she could hear him chattering excitedly in Fiernan as they heeled unwilling horses into a walk again and passed on into Irondale.
Fame,
she thought. Her mouth twisted ironically as they rode into the scattering of buildings, several streets of them on either side of the main road. A few were round huts and wood shacks from the early days, more small brick cottages with tile roofs and chimneys, with a scattering of big houses in what she thought of as the Nantucket Georgian style.

Half a mile up the S-shaped valley of the tributary stream a dam penned back the flow into an artificial lake, and sluicegates released it in a torrent of white foam onto the tops of half a dozen thirty-foot overshot waterwheels, they turned with a constant groaning rumble and splash, a querning undertone to the other noises. As the riders watched, a blade of fire lanced skyward from a blast furnace, white at its core and framed in red where it left the top of the sooty pyramid of brick, shedding a long plume of spark and cinder downwind. It was accompanied by an enormous shrill scream, like a wounded horse the size of a mountain. The living horses beneath them shied and skittered, then quieted as the sound stopped and their riders soothed them. A smell of hot iron and coal smoke drifted down through the wet along with the clangor of the works and multicolored volcanos of sparks from the Bessemer converters.

Their horses’ hooves clopped hollow on asphalt pavement; they passed schools, Ecumenical Christian church, public baths, library in a corner of the town hall, medical clinic where a pair of doctors from the Cottage Hospital healed and taught. Then the inn, a rambling brick structure two stories high, wings added on to an original modest core, with yellow lamplight showing behind its windows. That brought an inner groan of relief. She threw up her right arm, hand palm-forward.

“Halt and dismount!” Swindapa called crisply beside her, and the hoof-clatter died.

Alston swung down out of the saddle with a creak of leather, conscious of a little more stiffness than she would have felt a few years earlier. Despite the rain and raw chill, people were thick on the sidewalks here, under the bright gaslights of the cast-iron streetlamps. It was a mixed crowd, Nantucketers born and naturalized, Fiernan Bohulugi and Sun People from scores of lineages and tribes, plus little dark hillmen from the mountains to the west who were neither. Plenty from beyond Alba, too; a burly redhead covered in swirling tattoos from the Summer Isle—Ireland—to—be—a pale giant from the Baltic in a shaggy bearskin cloak, gawking about him in wonder ... More and more, in wildly varying costume although sensible Islander-inspired overalls and jackets and boots predominated; many wore miner’s helmets with lamps, or hard hats; there were even umbrellas. A round score of languages sounded, with weirdly accented
lingua franca
varieties of English the most common and the smooth pleasant singsong of Fiernan a close second.

If clotted cream could speak, it’d sound like Fiernan,
Alston thought as she arched her back and stretched muscles stiffened by a long day in the saddle.
Too bad a commodore can’t rub her ass in public
... Alder-wood clogs rattled on the brick, almost as loud as the clop of shod hooves and the rumble of steel-rimmed wheels.

“Stand easy, Corporal,” Swindapa said.

“Ma’am! Squad, stand easy. Unload,” Sergeant Ritter echoed.

The Marines raised the muzzles of their rifles, thumbed the cocking levers on the right side to the safety position; then came a chink-
ting
as the triggers were pulled. The grooved blocks that closed the breeches snapped down and the shells in the chambers ejected, to be neatly caught and returned to bandoliers.

The inn’s sign creaked above her. She could make out a gilt low-relief eagle—modeled on the figurehead of her
Eagle,
the Coast Guard training windjammer she’d sailed a little too close to Nantucket the night of the Event. Beside it was the crescent Moon that had become the Fiernan national sigil. An open door swung a waft of warm air and light and cooking smells in their faces.

“Commodore Alston-Kurlelo!” the innkeeper said. He walked with a limp, and snapped off a salute to her as he came, then advanced with the hand extended and a wide white grin.

The name and face popped up out of the officer’s retrieval system at the back of her brain; he’d been a first-year cadet on the
Eagle
at the time of the Event, and with the expeditionary force in the Alban War, the year after. Badly wounded at the Battle of the Downs, when they broke Walker and the Sun People war-host. Plus blacks were rare enough in the Republic to be notable.

“Cadet Merrithew,” she said, shaking his hand. “Wayne Merrithew.” He was a stocky man in his late twenties now, his dark-brown skin a few shades lighter than hers, wearing an apron and holding a towel and a glass he’d been polishing.

“I thought you were working over in Fogarty’s Cove on Long Island, back the other side of the pond?”

He shook his head, still grinning. “Not since 05. Decided to get my savings and gratuity out of the Pacific Bank and set up here, ma’am, once my in-laws sent word how well things were going in Irondale,” he said.

He’d married an Alban, as had many of her original cadets—they’d been over two-thirds male, which had upset the gender balance back on Nantucket considerably, in the beginning. She’d been relieved when so many war brides turned up.