Maltonr still looked as if he was thinking hard. The others were simply appalled. "What have you Eagle People brought among us?" one whispered.

Alston felt like wincing herself. "Ask your Grandmothers," she said. "The Sun People were eating you a little bit at a time; in the end, they would have destroyed you anyway. Walker the outlaw has taught them how to do it all at once… but we can show you how to smash them all at once, too. Think of being free of their threat, forever."

That had them nodding. Except the redhead, who cast a thoughtful look around at the solid-looking American base. The very permanent-looking American base. Oho, no flies on Rufus, here. Have to talk to him later.

"Hmmm." That was Pelanatorn son of Kaddapal, the local magnate. Very much a trader, and very rich, now. "If we gather a host of thousands, how will we feed them? For that matter, there's always sickness if too many gather in one place for long."

"We can show you ways to stop the sickness," she said.

Boiling water and deep latrines, mostly. Luckily they'd gotten a lot of prestige with the locals by healing diseases their witch-doctors-and-herbs medicine couldn't, so they'd probably go along with sanitation.

"Also, there are ways to feed large groups of people. With the proper-" She stopped again.

Oh, hell. How do I say organization or logistics? She settled down to grind the right meanings out of the Fiernan Bohulugi vocabulary.

After the Spear Chosen had left, Alston slumped in her chair. "Christ, I feel like a wrung-out dishrag," she said.

Swindapa sat looking at her, chin cupped in her hands. "You really have brought a new thing here," she said slowly.

" 'Dapa-"

The girl sighed and closed her eyes. "Oh, I know you- we-must," she said. "But… other change, it's like growing old. You don't notice it every day, and when it comes, it comes to someone that Moon Woman has made ready for it. But this is like a great tree growing up between nightfall and morning. There's no… no time to get used to it, to change the way the Eagle People bring it."

Alston sighed herself, as she rose and put a hand for a moment on the girl's shoulder. There was nothing much comforting to say. In a couple of generations, the Earth Folk way of life was going to be changed beyond recognition. That was better than being overrun and butchered, but it still wasn't easy to swallow.

Andy Toffler came in, checked for a moment, then continued when she nodded. "Goin' pretty smooth, ma'am," he said. With the air survey, we should be able to estimate the harvest pretty close, and do up proper maps of the whole area with updated terrain features. Ian wants to get together with the both of us on it. They're getting records from the local bigwigs, too-seems they've got a sort of tithe system here."

He grinned. "And God Help Us, it surely does impress hell out of the locals, ma'am."

"They haven't seen people fly before," Swindapa said dryly.

Toffler ducked his head, looking surprisingly boyish for a man in his fifties. "No offense, miss. They're good folks, your people, and I'm happy to be here helpin' them against those murdering scumbags."

He scowled; they'd all seen evidence of the way the Sun People made war, and there certainly wasn't a Geneva Convention in this millennium. Seems to have hit Toffler harder than most, she thought. There were hints of a knightly soul under that good-old-boy act… and he'd been scrupulously respectful to her, whatever his private opinions, which she had to give some credit for.

"Tell Ian I can see you at…" She glanced at her watch and read down a mental checklist. The day would have to be forty hours long to get all that done. "… at about eighteen hundred hours."

"See you later," she went on to Swindapa, answering the Pieman's mute nod, scooping up her helmet, and leaving.

Sometimes you need to be alone to think. The guard fell in behind her; it was getting so she hardly even noticed that.

Enough space to drill several hundred had been left in the middle of the fort. As she passed along the edge of the field, Alston watched about that number of Fiernans in Nantucket-made armor learning the rudiments of close-order movement.

"Hay-foot, straw-foot" the Nantucketer noncom screamed, to the pulsing beat of a drum, "Hay-foot, straw-foot!"

That was strange, too. Most of the locals could do any number of intricate, precise dance steps, but simple left-right-left gave them endless problems. They looked rather silly, each with a piece of hay tied to the left foot and a twist of straw to the right, but it worked. What really worries me is keeping them in line in a fight. They were brave enough, but they weren't used to the concept of taking massive casualties all at once, the way you did in open-field massed combat.

She exchanged salutes with the guard at the sea gate, walking through the open portals and under the snouts of the flamethrowers that protruded from the bunkerlike slits in the flanking towers. There was a fair bit of traffic; boots and wheels and hooves boomed on the bridge over the ditch. The smell of stale water came up from it, around the bases of the sharpened stakes that bristled forward from the lower bank around the moat. That mixed with other smells-woodsmoke and horse sweat, leather, cooking from the tangle of Fiernan huts that had gone up outside, dung from the corrals. There were as many locals as Americans in the bustle. Spear Chosen war chiefs coming to learn or take council; traders, scores of them, with little oxcarts or pack donkeys or porters, or hauling stuff up from the beach where they'd landed coracles or canoes or whatever; others come to trade labor for the wonderful things the strangers had, or just to gawk. Even a few weirdly tattooed men from across the channel to the west, from what the locals called the Summer Isle.

The pier was even busier. As she came to the end, a sedated, blindfolded, hobbled, and still rather resentful-looking horse swung up into the air and over to the Eagle's deck on a line and a band slung under its belly.

"Let go… and haul," the line leader barked.

The animal slid down gently, whinnying as its hooves made contact with the decking. Alston paused for a moment, looking up at the clean lines of rigging and clewed-up sails and masts, feeling the familiar rush of love at the sight of her ship. Beautiful as… as Swindapa, by God, she thought, smiling with a slight quirk at the corner of her mouth. Right now the Eagle was leaving her for a while. Heading back home, with a cargo of horses, firkins of butter, and meat pickled and salted and smoked. Plus several small, heavy little chests full of gold bars and dust and some crude silver ingots.

Tom Hiller came up and saluted. "Captain." The sailing master was looking harassed, his long face like a basset hound's expecting yet another kick. "She trims… oh, hell, she trims as well as you'd expect. She wasn't built for carrying horses, Captain."

"She wasn't built for carrying anythin' but people, Mr. Hiller," she replied, returning the courtesy. "Needs must when the devil drives. How are the new hands shaping?"

They'd sworn on two dozen Fiernan deckhands, out of hundreds wild to enlist. Which is a good sign in itself. They're not afraid we're going to roast and eat them as soon as we're out of sight of land. Taking on locals also meant that she could get another transatlantic voyage in without putting too many of her precious trained Americans out of reach. For various reasons, she'd seen that more than half of the recruits were young women, and all from the coastal fishing hamlets.

"Pretty well," Hiller said, turning his cap in his hands. "They're all fit-better than your average cadet was to start with, and they're used to living rough. And they pick up stuff like haul and climb damn quick. That phrasebook was really useful, by the way."