The man with the sword tugged at his barley-colored mustaches; he had a stubbled chin. The cloth of his tunic was plaid, squares of woad blue and pale yellow.

"I don't… will that machine keep working? What if it falls sick? If our strongest are away, and it sickens, then we lose the harvest and our children starve."

"If the Sun People burn your houses and steal your crops, you'll all die. And we have skilled craftfolk who can tend any hurts the machine takes," she went on. The miracle of interchangeable parts. "They'll show your own people how, too."

The third man rubbed a gold neck ring. "As you say it, these machines need fresh… pieces… every now and then? They wear down, like a knife that's been sharpened often?" Alston nodded. "Then if we use them to harvest, we'll have to buy the pieces of you in future years, even if you give them freely this season."

Damn, got to remember-primitive doesn't mean stupid. At that, the Fiernan were better traders than the charioteers; they didn't think of all trade in terms of gift exchanges, for starters. That was one reason the Tartessians didn't like them. The easterners were easier to trick.

"You can always go back to using sickles, when there's no war," Swindapa pointed out spontaneously.

The gold-decked man laughed; he had a narrow dark face and black eyes. "Water flows uphill faster than people will give up an easier way of doing," he said. "And it'll be, Drauntorn, you're the Spear Chosen-go bargain for us with the Eagle People, so we don't have to break our backs or risk untimely rain. And scowls and black looks and no help for us trading men if we don't, so we'll have to pay even if the price ruins us."

Alston spread her hands. "We're not mean-hearted bargainers," she pointed out. "Ask any of your people who've dealt with us."

"I'm kind to my pigs, too, when I'm fattening them," the man said.

"Would you rather deal with a Sun People war band?"

"Few have come this far west… but no, no, there's wisdom in what you say."

"Many of your people think so," Alston said delicately. "Many are gathering."

Swindapa had suggested the strategy. If a Fiernan community got violently unpopular with its neighbors, they'd steal all its herds, plus withdrawing the day-to-day mutual help that was an essential safeguard against misfortune.

The Arnsteins returned and spread the map on the table. The Fiernans' eyes lit as she explained it; they understood the concept, but it took a while to understand the alien pictographic technique.

"… so this shows your land from above," she said, circling her finger over a map of southwestern England from Hampshire to Cornwall and north to the Cotswolds. "Here is your district. Here is where the host will muster, three days' march. All shown as a bird would see it."

Or it shows things as Andy Toffler sees them on surveying flights with his camera, she added to herself.

Aloud: "From this, and from the… ah, memories… of the Grandmothers, the number of fields and the number of houses and people can be told. To make sure that everyone bears a fair share of the burden of the levy, you understand."

And so nobody can wiggle out.

"Men can walk," the mustachioed Spear Chosen said.

"Cattle and sheep can walk." Both the men looked pained; those were their capital assets. The woman-priestess, Alston supposed-gave them a sardonic sideways glance. "But grain can't walk, and it's hard to haul any distance."

Alston rested one hand on the map and pointed with the other, to the big Conestoga-style wagons the Americans were using; dozens of them had come back with the Eagle, knocked down for reassembly.

"We have better wagons, as well," she said. "Each can haul, ah-" she looked down at a conversion list that translated English measurements into the eight-based local number system and units-"two tons of grain five to eight miles a day." Even over these miserable tracks you people call roads. "We have a machine to do the threshing, too. So you can move both the fighters and their food."

The discussion went on. So did the work in the fields; the Fiernans there were singing as they bound and stocked the sheaves of grain behind the reapers, happy as children on holiday. Alston remembered what her back had felt like after stooping over a sickle for a few days. I know exactly how they feel.

"These Eagle People think of everything," the Spear Chosen with the bronze rapier said, his hand on the bone-and-gold hilt.

Swindapa looked after Marian; she was over by the wagons, taking some message. One of the radios had come with them; she shivered a little. She could understand a lot of what Marian's people did-even a steam engine made sense, once you made a picture in your head of the hot vapors pushing through pipes. No different from boiling water lifting the lid on a pot over the fire, not really. But radios were too much like talking to ghosts.

"They are… forethoughtful, careful, they work very hard to make every small thing happen as they desire," she said. How do you say methodical or systematic? she wondered. That sort of thing happened all the time these days, and it made her head itch inside. You just couldn't say some things she'd learned in her birth tongue.

Swindapa's mother shifted her youngest sister around and began to nurse. The girl fought down a sharp stab of envy, followed by an all-consuming anger. Her own hand clenched on the hilt of her katana. The Iraiina would pay for robbing her of that, pay with pain. Yet if all of them died, it would not be enough.

"They have more things than these machines you've seen," Swindapa's mother went on. "Wonderful things… I've seen the hills of the Moon Itself with their tel-e-sk-opes." Everyone touched brow and heart and genitals in awe.

"And the tools, the weapons and armor, and the cloth, and the ornaments," the dark-haired Spear Chosen said eagerly. "We must have these things! We must find what they want in exchange."

"No," Swindapa said slowly. The others looked at her in surprise. "We must learn how to make these things, for ourselves. Or we would become as little children to the Eagle People forever, without their meaning us any harm."

Slow nods went around the circle.

"Another raid so soonly?" Isketerol said, in English. "Soonish? Nowly?"

"So soon," Walker said, correcting him absently. Odd. He's kept getting better at English… oh, he must speak it with what's-her-name, Rosita.

"Political necessity," he went on in Tartessian, unshipping his binoculars. "Got to keep the tribes thinking about the war, if we're to get the levy together again."

Bastard quieted as he dropped the reins on the horn of his saddle. The shade of the trees overhead was welcome- it'd been getting pretty hot for an English summer, and they'd all been out in it as the war of ambush and border skirmish went on relentlessly. Sweat trickled out of the padding of his armor, and out of the helmet lining, stinging his eyes. It mixed with the heavier smell of Bastard's sweat, the oiled-metal scent of armor, going naturally somehow with the creak of leather and the low chinking of war harness from man and horse alike.

Typical enough, he thought, scanning back and forth across the enemy hamlet. They were up on the downs of what would have become Sussex, just on the edge where the open chalklands gave way to the forested clay soils lower down-New Barn Down, the Ordnance Survey maps called it. The Earth Folk settlement was five round thatched huts inside a rough rectangle of earthwork, two of the walls overlapping to make a sort of gate; a palisade of short poles topped it all around. Square fields and pastures of an acre or so each lay about the steading, fading off into forest on the hills to the north. A rutted track led off that way, through a shallow dry valley between two of the downs. There was something odd, though…