He turned and led Bastard back toward the steps of the Big House. Ekhnonpa stood there, with the smile that brought luck. She was showing now, five months along; Keruwthena was even bigger, standing back with the lower-status staff. Odd. He'd never had any particular or urgent desire for fatherhood-it was far too much trouble and expense and time taken from his own ambitions up in the twentieth. And here he was going to be a daddy twice over… probably more than that, actually, but those were the two he was sure of. It did change your perspective a little; there was a certain satisfaction to thinking of your genes heading down the ages, enjoying the wealth and power you were piling up after you were gone.
He turned and looked out over the gathered folk of his settlement, raising his voice to carry. "While I am gone, my handfast man Bill Cuddy stands as steward in my place," he said.
He looked down at the machinist. "Don't fuck up, Bill," he continued in English.
"De nada, boss," Cuddy said. "No problem."
"And my second wife, Ekhnonpa has charge of household matters," he went on in Iraiina.
She looked at him with worried adoration. "Return to us victorious and hale, husband," she said.
"You are to take care of yourself," he said, patting her stomach. "Remember what Alice told you about straining, and diet."
"Yes, lord," she said, looking past his shoulder at Hong.
A mixture of awe, terror, and fascinated loathing was in the glance. He hadn't let the doctor play any of her little games with the rahax's daughter, but they were no secret.
Alice is very useful. Good wizard/bad witch was as workable as good cop/bad cop.
He swung into the saddle and stood in the stirrups. "0Once more we ride out to victory!" he called.
Local tradition guided most of the speech that followed- uncomfortably florid to American ears.
Wood and metal boomed on the sheet-steel facing of the shields as they hammered their weapons on them and screamed out Walker's name. Success accounted for a lot of that; he'd led many raids, all of them profitable and most of them easy work.
"Yo!" he said at last, waving his hand forward. His standard-bearer raised the banner, topped by a wolf skull and aurochs horns. Cloth went streaming out in the chilly breeze-a black wolf's head on a red ground.
Women made their last farewells; McAndrews tore himself away from his heavily pregnant blonde. Can these mixed marriages work? Walker thought with a flicker of sardonic humor. At least it seemed to have settled the man down; he doted on the wench. A romantic temperament.
Hooves thudded on turf, axles squealed, oxen bellowed as they leaned into the traces.
"I suppose I'm a romantic too, in a way, in a way," Walker whispered to himself. After a while, he began to sing-you didn't get music here unless you made it yourself. The locals just couldn't deal with rock tunes, but the Americans took it up with him.
And it's so right, he thought. I am-
"-Bad to the bone!
"Bbbbbbaad!…"
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
April – June, Year 2 A.E.
"Hard to remember," Swindapa said, looking over the rail, her hair lifting around her face under the baseball cap.
Eagle and her consorts were beating southeast, down the Irish Sea after rounding Anglesey and the bulge of Wales. No land was visible now, save perhaps a distant smudge to port.
"Remember what, 'dapa?" Alston said, brought out of her own thoughts.
If they spoke quietly by the fantail nobody was likely to overhear. The ship lay over at eight degrees, making ten knots with all sail set, its motion a slow smooth rocking-horse plunge. The waist was crowded, ex-cadets and militia volunteers straining for their first sight of the wild lands.
"The sea. Hard to remember that I've only sailed on it this last year. There is so much of it-and always something waiting beyond the edge of it. Always something new to see."
Alston smiled herself. That does sound good. And there was a whole world out there, once Walker and his bloodthirsty ambitions were seen to. Moas, she thought, If we get as far as New Zealand. Great flocks of them, fourteen feet high. Or the elephant bird of Madagascar, extinct a thousand years in the twentieth, the creature that had given rise to Sinbad's legend of the roc. Dodos, too. I'd like to see what San Francisco Bay looks like when it's not all mucked up. Babylon. I'd really like to see Babylon. Or Africa, despite what she'd told McAndrews. Egypt-with an escort big enough to impress the locals-and maybe the Serengeti…
"Someday, 'dapa," she said. Then she turned and took a few paces forward, looking into the radio shack. "Ms. Rapczewicz, signal to the Tubman; it's about time, I think."
The signal lantern clacked, and the schooner dipped her ensign in acknowledgment. Faint and far, the orders echoed across the water and the Tubman's prow turned west of south, heading to round Penzance on the point of Cornwall. Alston clasped her hands behind her back and looked east.
"It's begun," she said. Chess with lives for pieces, and not knowing how your opponent moves until too late. And she could not afford to lose. So I'll win.
"Arucuttag of the Sea!" Miskelefol of Tartessos blurted.
Isketerol ducked out and leveled his binoculars. The shape that loomed out of the morning mist was not quite like anything he'd seen before. A little like the Yare, except that there were no square topsails on the forward of the two masts. A gilded eagle flung back its wings below the long bowsprit, seeming to take to the air with every bound across the whitecaps that patterned the estuary. The hull cut the water like a knife slicing flesh, its prow throwing a sunlit burst of spray twenty feet in the air as she rounded and tacked in toward shore. The Tartessian's eyes went wide behind the lenses as he saw how close she cut to the wind that blew from the north, and did a quick estimate of her speed.
"Quiet!" he roared into the chaos of the camp. His thumb turned the focusing screw and his lips moved as he read the name on the bow, just forward of the diagonal red slash. "Harriet Tubman. Odd. Sounds like an Amurrukan name." It was unlucky to give a ship a person's name, splitting a soul in two.
He cased the binoculars and looked around. "Quiet, I said. Get to your posts!"
With his cousin's help he put down the disorder. Yare was anchored close offshore, and Sea Wolf drawn up on the beach; he'd built her to be capable of that, since it was so useful. How deep does that… schooner, that's what they're called… draw? he thought. Eagle People ships tended to have deep keels, but that was a lot smaller than the Eagle herself, if bigger than the Yare. Hmm. Eight feet or so, I'd say, perhaps a little less. That meant they could get to within three hundred yards of the shore without touching mud, with the tide full like this.
"I told you we should have sailed for home last week!" his cousin was saying.
"Quiet, and get your thrower ready," Isketerol said. His cousin departed at a run.
How many aboard her? He studied the Nantucket schooner carefully. Hard to say, but somewhere between twenty and forty, unless they had the belowdecks packed with men. "You!" he pointed to a crewman. "Run over to Daurthunnicar's huts and tell him we've enemy in sight. Diketeran!" One of his trustier men, steersman on the Foam Hunter in the old days. "Get your horse, ride to Walkerburg, and report. You, fetch my war harness. Now!"
Men scattered to their tasks as they recovered their wits. The Tartessian camp was a half-circle backing onto the sea behind an earth rampart and palisade. At each end where the rampart met the water was a platform of timber and earth; on it crouched a shape of beams and cords. The trebuchets creaked as the Tartessians heaved around the crank handles of the geared windlasses. Isketerol finished snapping the clasps on his Nantucket-made suit of armor, checked his pistol, and walked over to the left-hand stone thrower. The crew had had plenty of time to practice over the winter, especially after Sea Wolf was finished. More hands were dragging obstacles of logs studded with iron blades down to the water's edge, in case of a landing.