William Walker, King of Men, he thought. Has a nice ring to it. It was even altruistic, in a way. These goons were going to wreck their own civilization. He'd be doing them a favor-and they'd return the favor to him, and his children after him.
Provided he had an edge… Leaton was already working on a musket, and anyone who could cast a bronze statue could make cannon. Sulfur was probably available, and there were black-powder enthusiasts on the island who knew the whole technique of making gunpowder; he'd drop in on them and pump them for tips. But for all that he'd need a secure base for a while, and preferably more men, as well, before he showed up in the Mediterranean. Isketerol needed a sweetener too.
"The question is, where to get a strong band of men?" Walker said. "I can't recruit more than a few here. Someone would talk, no matter how careful I was."
"There is the White Isle," Isketerol pointed out. "And the lands around it. Of course, for that you would require a ship, and then passage from the White Isle to the Middle Sea."
Passage for a couple of hundred, the American thought. The Yare's useful, but with good carpenters and some time I could reproduce her…
"How would you like this ship for your own?" Walker said.
The Tartessian raised the beer bottle to his lips and looked out over the blue horizon. "Tell me more, my friend," he said.
Nantucket was never hot for long. Fog had rolled in and filled the streets as the sun fell; the air was cool, cool enough that the small blaze she'd kindled in the bedroom fireplace was pleasant, even on a summer's night.
Alston sipped at her bourbon-and-water and opened the first page of Master and Commander, ready for another run-through of the whole set. Luckily she'd had most of her O'Brian collection on board Eagle during the Event, and she'd been able to replace the others here. There'd never be any more, of course, but she'd reluctantly come to the conclusion that The Commodore was the natural end of the series anyway. The big house was very quiet, although an occasional voice came through the open window, and once the slow ringing clop of shod hooves on stone. A grandfather clock ticked the evening away downstairs. She smiled and glanced around the big room. You could get used to this sort of thing, although she liked her cabin on the Eagle well enough, and the lack of running water ashore was a surprisingly hard adjustment. The books and ship plans on the walls, those were hers, and the armor on its stand in a corner with the swords beneath, and the squared-away neatness. It smelled of wax, the nutty-scented lamp oil, metal polish, and flowers.
"Not in the mood," she murmured after a while, setting down the novel.
In fact, I'm feeling restless, bitchy, and itchy-skinned. She'd been having a hard time suppressing the impulse to bark at people, which would be fatal. A commander was the last person on earth who could afford to lose her temper. If she hadn't known for a fact her period was two weeks off, she'd have put it down to PMS.
"Well…"
She picked up another volume; her favorite poet, something she'd stumbled across in a little out-of-the way used-book store in Boston once, many years ago. She'd opened it in idle curiosity, and fallen in love at once; now she whispered aloud, hardly needing to read:
High on the bridge of Heaven whose Eastern bars
Exclude the interchange of Night and Day,
Robed with faint seas and crowned with quiet stars
All great Gods dwell to whom men prayed or pray.
No winter chills, no fear or fever mars
Their grand and timeless hours of pomp and play;
Some drive about the Rim wind-golden cars
Or, shouting, laugh Eternity away.
The daughters of their pride,
Moon-pale, blue-water-eyed,
Their flame-white bodies pearled with falling spray,
Send all their bright hair streaming
Down where the worlds lie gleaming,
And draw their mighty lovers close and say:
"Come over by the stream: one hears
The speech of Nations broken in the chant of Spheres."
"Damn, can't escape the blue-water-eyed daughters," she said. "Ah well." An immense and not unpleasant sadness filled her, like the soft silvery fog creeping through the streets outside. She went on:
Between the pedestals of Night and Morning,
Between red death and radiant Desire
With not one sound of triumph or of warning
Stands the great sentry on the Bridge of Fire.
O transient soul, thy thought with dreams adorning,
Cast down the laurel, and unstring the lyre:
The wheels of Time are turning, turning, turning,
The slow stream channels deep, and doth not tire
Gods on their Bridge above Whispering lies and love
Shall mock your passage down 'the sunless river
Which, rolling all its streams,
Shall take you, king of dreams, -
Unthroned and unapproachable for ever-
To where the kings who dreamed of old
Whiten in habitations monumental cold.
"Seize the day, in other words," she told herself. Nobody else was here tonight; Rapczewicz was on board Eagle, the other officers who'd roomed here temporarily had moved into the two buildings next door, and Swindapa was over at Smith's Baths-
"I'm back," she called, from the entrance hall below. Alston heard the door click shut, and feet bound up the staircase and down the hall. "Foggy out tonight."
"Hello, 'dapa. So you are, so it is."
The Fiernan was wearing a knee-length T-shirt and plastic sandals, with her hair loose and damp around her shoulders, the yellow of it darkened by the water. She came in and sat cross-legged by the fire, holding her hands out to either side with the hair draped over them to dry. The cerulean-blue eyes looked up at her, vivid by contrast with the summer tan, warm and full of affection. And here I thought Whitney Houston was the very definition of hot stuff, she thought. May have to revise that. Marian Alston closed her eyes for a second and sighed, then tried to concentrate on the book again, thumbing through the pages at random:
We that were friends tonight have found
A fear, a secret and a shame:
I am on fire with that soft sound
You make, in uttering my name…
It seemed even the poet had turned against her tonight, she decided ruefully. Well, it isn't the first case of unrequited love you've blundered into, woman, she thought, scolding herself. Usually she had better sense, but there was no way to get away on the island; in retrospect it'd probably been a mistake to have Swindapa living here, but she'd been much more fragile back then and needed a familiar, trusted face around. Alston recognized the symptoms in herself with mournful accuracy, although not until they'd been stealing up on her for a while. That combination of overwhelming tenderness and lust…
"I talked to Cindy Ganger at the baths," Swindapa said after a while, smiling. "She asked me if I was your girlfriend."
Alston choked, spraying bourbon across the page. Swindapa jumped up in alarm and pounded her helpfully on the back, then sat down beside her on the couch.
"Are you all right?" she asked, a little frown of worry between her brows.
"Yes. Just, mmm, surprised," Alston said. And my sinuses have diluted bourbon in them, goddammit. She used a handkerchief to mop the page and blow her nose, which gave her a moment to collect her thoughts. God damn all rumormongers.
When she looked up, Swindapa had an arm draped over the back of the blue Directoire sofa and one leg hooked up under the other. She was still smiling. "I don't really understand you Eagle People," she said after a moment. "I don't know how to… hear what you're saying when you're not speaking, not really well. So I make mistakes like that."