On the Oceans of Eternity

by S. M. Stirling

  My dreams sail with the tall white ships

  My heart, it cannot bide at home;

  I share the blue of singing space

  The bitter kiss of foam.

  The pageantry of storm and cloud;

  The mystery of ebb and flow

  The song of water as I sleep…

  All of these I know.

  Swindapa came back from the small head that connected to the commodore's quarters portside and stopped at the sideboard to pour them both drinks. Marian watched her partner's panther-graceful nakedness with a relaxed appreciation that suddenly turned to a stab of joy so piercing that it was pain as well. Memory overwhelmed her for an instant; of a night down along the coast of Brazil, the trades steady on the port quarter in the midnight watch. The two of them had gone forward to watch the phosphorescent waters peeling aside from the bow like waves of heated metal, their wake glowing behind the ship like a mile-long streak of light across the night-dark sea. Swindapa jumped up to the rail, leaning far out with one hand on the shrouds, her loosened hair trailing to the side like a torrent of silver; turned with the wonder of it in her eyes…

  No lesser joy can dim the spell

  Of quietly enchanted hours;

  When the sea wore reflected stars

  Upon a breast like flowers.

  She took the glass and gave a sigh of contentment as the other curled up beside her and they laid their heads together, kissing and murmuring into each other's ears.

  "Yes, dinner was like a feast of kinfolk," Swindapa said, after a minute. "It's a lot like being a part of a lineage, being in the Guard."

  Brine-scented dawns-seafaring dreams

  How richly these have dowered me;

  That I should go through all my days

  Companioned by the sea…

  "That's the way I wanted it, 'dapa," Alston replied. Band of brothers, she thought-a bit sexist, but traditional. "Mmmm, that's good," she added.

  "The whiskey, or this?" Swindapa chuckled, as she undid the buttons of the other's shirt and moved her hands inside.

  "Both," Marian said, and finished off the glass. It was due that much respect, part of her last stock of Maker's Mark. Then she pulled her partner to her, trailing lips down her neck, to the breasts warm in her hands, shadow-black fingers against pearl-white skin. The Fiernan gave a shivering cry of delight. Marian raised her head with a chuckle and said:

  "The only question is, shall we make out here and scandalize the night-watch with the sound effects, or move over to the bed?"

  Swindapa's hands were on her belt buckle. "Both, of course," she said, grinning affectionately. Solemnly for a moment: "It may be our last time to share ourselves."

  The forecastle was silent now, and there was a harsher music in the background; one of the Sun People war bands on shore, roaring out the tune to the squeal of a primitive bagpipe and a bohdran and something shatteringly like a Lamberg drum. It was an ancient battle chant, with verses that were new since the Eagle People came to Alba:

  Axes flash, longswords swing

  Shining armor's piercing ring;

  Horses run with a polished shield

  Fight those bastards 'till they yield!

  Midnight mare and golden roan

  Strike for the lands we call our own;

  Sound the horn, and shout the cry-

  How many of them can we make die?

  "Whooooooppp!" Heather Alston-Kurlelo screeched, and let go of the rope, yodeling as she flew across the barn. "Whoooooooo!"

  For a moment she hung suspended at the top of her arc, feeling the floating sensation of it lifting her stomach and watching the inside of the barn roof through a mist of her own red hair. Then she fell screeching in delicious fear into the soft prickliness of the hay, smelling the dried memory of flowers. It closed over her head and she swam upright in it, wading her way to the beam where the others sat and hitching herself up to sit astraddle it, kicking her bare feet and giggling.

  "That was fun" she said.

  "Yeah, but you shouldn't yell so loud," Chuck Hollard said.

  He looked down to the ground floor of the barn. It was mostly stalls, with the sweet-musky smell of horses; and leather, tack oil, oats, the beery smell of silage in the troughs. The horses made sort of wet crunching sounds as they munched, snorting now and then, or shifting weight from one foot to another with a clomp sound as the hollow hoof hit the packed dirt and straw. The newcomers had already helped him curry and feed them; grudgingly, he admitted to himself that they seemed to know what they were doing despite being townies. Jared Jr. was still down there.

  "We aren't supposed to toss like that by ourselves without someone to check on us," he said. "Dad'll burn my butt if he finds out."

  "Yeah, Uncle Jared would be mad, too." Lucy sighed. She got up and ran out on one of the narrower beams that spanned the waist of the barn and then back. "But he doesn't spank nearly's hard as our mom. Mom Marian," she added. " 'Specially when we do something we shouldn't on shipboard. Then she really gets mad."

  "Oh, yeah," Heather said, rolling her eyes. "Like, really mad. ZHOtopo."

  "You actually get to go sailing! Really sailing-far foreign?" Chuck asked. Raw envy freighted his voice.

  Heather dangled her feet over the edge of the hayloft. The hay behind her had a smell that made her want to sneeze, and to throw herself into it again like they'd been doing. She picked pieces of it out of her hair and looked at the rope that ran along the pulleyway down the center of the barn's ridgepole.

  "Oh, yeah," she said casually, enjoying herself. "All around the world-lots of times. Even when there's fights."

  "Only once," Lucy pointed out.

  I hate it when she does that. She always spoils a story, Heather thought, and stuck out her tongue at her sister, who went on maddeningly:

  "And she didn't expect there was going to be a fight then. It just sort of happened. We stay home when she expects trouble. Like now."

  "Nothing happens here," Chuck said, sick with envy. "Jesus Christ"-he sounded very like his father at that moment-"but I wish I could sail away and see all those places… and all the fights…"

  "Fights are scary," Lucy said. "Looks like there are cool things to do here, though. Riding."

  "Yeah," Heather said. "Ponies of our own."

  "There's hunting, too," Chuck said. "Dad says I can have a hunting gun of my own soon. Dad and Mom and the other grown-ups hunt all sorts of things. Wolves, bears, white-tails, turkeys."

  "We shot an elephant last year," Heather said nonchalantly.

  "Oh," Chuck replied, crushed.

  "We ate the elephant," Lucy said. "It was our moms shot it."

  "Yeah, and then all these little brown people, locals-

  "Sort of yellow-brown-not just brown like me-

  "Real little, they were all grown-up and only a bit taller than us-

  "With funny-looking faces. They chopped up the elephant. Some of them went right inside it," Lucy said. "And chopped bits up."

  "Like butchering a cow?" Chuck asked curiously, his eyes alight. A boy didn't grow up on a farm with any excess of squeamishness.

  "Yeah," Heather said, "but it was big. Tall as this barn!"

  "Well, tall as the place we're sitting on right now."

  "Lucy, stop doing that! You're spoiling it!"

  "No I'm not! It's better if you tell it just the way it was!"

  "Hey!" Chuck held up his hands. "Hey, I want to hear about this bit."

  "Oh," Heather said. "Well, then we built big fires on the beach, and the little people all put grass skirts and stuff on-

  "… and they painted themselves, sort of like Indians-

  "-and they put bone rattles on their ankles-

  "-and we did too-

  "And we all danced."

  "And ate the elephant and all sorts of stuff."

  "Raw?" Chuck asked in ghoulish enthusiasm.

  "No, stupid. Toasted over the fires. All the grown-ups were dancing too… well, a lot of
them. The sailors. And that's when the Tartessian boat came. Mom-

  "Both our moms."

  "Went down and talked with them, and they got really mad. I could tell, even if they weren't shouting."

  "That's when they had the battle?"

  "No, that was a couple of days later," Heather said. She quelled a memory of cold fear. "Our moms went off into the woods with a lot of the hands. We stayed in the camp."

  "We could hear the shooting, though," Lucy said.

  "Yeah, and then our moms came back and then in the morning they had the big fight in the bay. That's when we… well, they… captured the two Tartessian ships. And a whole lot of gold. And ivory and silk and, oh, tons of wonderful cargo. I got this little cat carved out of jade, I'll show you."

  "Plunder!" Chuck said. "Hey, cool."

  "Plundering is against regulations," Lucy said pedantically. "Only pirates plunder. This was prize money."

  "What's the difference?" Chuck asked, intrigued.

  "We're the good guys," Lucy said. "So when we capture the bad guys' ships and take all their stuff, it's okay. And that's how we're going to buy that land down near the water."

  "And have ponies and stuff," Heather finished triumphantly.

  "I'm sort of busy, Doctor," Kenneth Hollard said. They were usually on first-name terms; the formality backed up the meaning of the words.

  "I know, sir," Justin Clemens said. "It's about the smallpox, sir."

  Hollard's long face changed from tightly reined impatience to a fear kept under equally close control. Nobody who'd been there when the disease broke loose in Babylon's teeming warrens could react otherwise.

  He rose, silencing Clemens with a hand, and went to the door flap of his tent. A murmured command sent the sentries further from the tent, and posted others around it. Then he ducked back into the cooling olive-tinted, canvas-smelling gloom and turned up the kerosene lantern that hung from the central ridgepole.

  "Now, let me have it, Doctor. I thought we had it under control?"

  "We do, sir, in Kar-Duniash," Clemens said. He sat forward in the folding chair, knotting his hands together. "And we've got a good start on a vaccination program here in Anatolia. I thought we had reason to celebrate."

  "So did I," Hollard said. "Like your wedding, Doctor."

  Clemens smiled for a second; Hollard had arranged for a wedding feast in the palace, with his royal brother-in-law dropping by with a substantial golden gift. Tab-sa-Dayyan had been flabbergasted, and Azzu-ena had cried. Then his naturally cheerful face turned grave again.

  "No, it's the news from Meluhha, Brigadier," he said. At Hollard's blank look-nobody could keep up with everything-

  "Meluhha. India, what'll be Bombay. There's a steady trickle of trade between there and the Gulf, via Dilmun."

  He moistened his lips, chapped with the long hard journey up from Mitanni. "There's been an outbreak there."

  "Damn!" Hollard said, knotting his sun-faded brows. They were a startlingly light color against the teak-dark tan of his face. "How did that happen?"

  "It's the damn smallpox bug, it's tough-great big mother of a thing for a virus, with a hard sheath, you can actually see it under a microscope. It'll stay infectious for years at room temperature under the right conditions. I think… I think what must have happened is that someone saw they could make a killing by stealing and selling clothing from the victims, instead of burning it. Remember how we gathered it in big heaps by the fires, toward the end there?"

  Hollard nodded grimly. Thousands had died in Babylon, tens of thousands throughout the country, before quarantines and compulsory inoculation got the brushfire under control. Good cloth was valuable here, relative to most other things, because the whole process of making it from sheep to sewing was so labor-intensive. A good cloak or tunic would take a third of a year's wages for an ordinary man. A shipload was a fortune.

  Clemens went on: "In a pile of wool blankets or clothes, the infection could linger indefinitely. It's a sit-and-wait pathogen, lying around on surfaces."

  "Well, Jus, that's damned bad news," Hollard said, and shook his head. "After the war, we'll have to do something about it, if we can."

  Clemens looked at the general, jaw dropping. "After-" His voice broke in a squeak. "Sir, they've got the disease there right now. This news is months old! We have to do something now."

  The lamplight brought out the planes and angles of Hollard's bony face. "Out of the question," he snapped. The blue eyes speared Clemens's. "I have a war to run, in case you hadn't noticed, Doctor, and it's at a critical point. Every ship and sailor and Marine is needed."

  The doctor looked at the general for a long moment, silent with horror. "But sir… Ken… for the love of God, Meluhha's a major trade center! I'm pretty sure, I've been tracing it, somehow we managed to get it to Babylon-from the African coast, or somewhere along the Red Sea, maybe. Now that it's in Meluhha, it'll spread all through continental Asia, maybe to southeast Asia as well. Virgin field epidemic-a quarter of the human race could die."

  Hollard's face might have been rough-cast in an Irondale foundry. "And if I divert our resources, the Republic may die. I know my duty, Doctor. So should you."

  "I'm a doctor, dammit. People are dying and I know how to keep them alive!"

  "You're also a soldier of the Republic of Nantucket," Hoi-lard said. "What do you think we should do? Send a fleet and a regiment to Meluhha? Because that's what it would take; they're not going to allow us to stick needles into them on our say-so. And then another fleet and more regiments to track down all the places people from Meluhha might have gone? All the Coast Guard and Marine Corps together wouldn't be enough to lock that barn door. The horse is out. That's very bad, and I'm sorry it happened, but it has."

  Appalled, Clemens stared. "You're not going to do anything!"

  "I'll recommend we step up the vaccination program at every outpost and base, and encourage all the people near 'em to come in and get it," Hollard said. "And just between me and thee, we let Walker know about the epidemic while it was on, and the Tartessians. They've got their own vaccination programs going, according to Intelligence. More we cannot do, not until the war is over. I'm sorry, Justin."

  "Sorry," Clemens said. "Thank you very much, sir," he said.

  He stood, saluted, and turned on his heel. Behind him Kenneth Hollard dropped his head into his hands, unseen.

  Clemens stalked to the tent he'd been assigned. Azzu-ena was busy within, setting out their gear; she looked up at his approach and wordlessly folded him into her embrace.

  "You did what you could, beloved," she said softly in his ear.

  "I did nothing," he groaned. "I could… I could appeal to the chief, to the Town Meeting, launch a petition…"

  "Would they listen, where the general would not?"

  A sigh went out of him, and the rigid tension of anger. "No," he said. "They wouldn't… if I was them, I honestly don't know if I'd do anything either… why, dammit, why?" His fist struck the canvas-covered dirt where they sat.

  "Ah, beloved, that is something not all the arts of your people or mine can answer," she said softly.

  "What can I do?

  Her tone became a little sharper: "You will save those lives you can," she. said. "The regimen I shall adopt, remember? Your patients are here. They are those you can assist. You will do them no good if you waste the strength of your spirit brooding on what you cannot do."

  He sighed, straightened, ran a hand over his cropped hair. "I suppose… no, you are right." He smiled into the dark eyes. "What would I do without you?"

  "I will do you good and not evil all your days," she said softly, quoting the marriage ceremony. Then she laid a hand on her stomach and her smile grew wider. "And you have already done something with me you could not do without. I was going to wait another week, but…"

  He folded her in his arms, feeling joy blaze. The haunting thought of blankets and baskets traveling from one port to the next didn't quite fade, but it was en
ough. It was reason to keep going.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  April, 11 A.E.-Feather River Valley, California

  After so long in tunic and leggings like those of the rangers, it felt a little odd to Spring Indigo Giernas to go once more in nothing more than a brief wraparound skirt of deerskin, much like what she would have worn in summer as a young woman of the Cloud Shadow people. She leaned into the tumpline that held the big carrying basket on her back, both hands gripping the rawhide just past the padded section that rested across her forehead. How quickly you got used to having horses to carry things! The burden made it natural to keep her eyes down on the graveled surface of the road. It also made it easier to hide the smile that threatened to break through when she remembered how Peter-Sue had told her the name meant "rock," which was very good-had bellowed and roared when she told him that she had to be the one to scout the enemy encampment.

  Who shall go? she'd said. My sister, with her eyes like the summer sky? Jaditwara, with those eyes and hair the color of the sun, too? You, my husband, taller than a tree and bearded like a bear-a bear whose face hair is always on fire? Even if the hair and eyes were like these people here, you all have faces like hatchets, pushed forward. Or like Eagles, of course, very handsome once it stops being strange! No, no, it must be me- didn't you say that your law was one for men and women?

  She hid a chuckle behind a decorous face. Oh, he had bellowed, yes, roared and pawed the earth like a bison in the rutting season… which he was like, and in more ways than on the blanket. She and Sue had worn him down though; for he was a fair man and just. It was well for a strong chief to have two wives who worked in concert-they could usually make a man see reason, which was better for everybody.

  Spring Indigo licked dust from her lips, putting down fear. The fort of the Tartessians came nearer with every step, growing from a description, a shadow, to a thing like a mountain made by men.