On the Oceans of Eternity

by S. M. Stirling

  They would eventually wear out the horses; even with solid tires cyclists covered ground six times faster than troops on foot, especially with good roads.

  And these roads are excellent, she thought. I wonder if Isketerol has thought through all the implications of that?

  The one they followed was twenty-five feet broad, with a topping of neatly cambered crushed limestone pounded to a hard smooth surface, graveled shoulders, deep flanking ditches… what the English of the Regency era would have called a MacAdamized turnpike. There were even young trees planted on either side, to grow and eventually shade travelers.

  Hate to think of the labor this must have taken, she thought.

  The day was hot enough to send trickles of sweat down her flanks under the blue uniform jacket despite the cool breeze from the water and the lingering freshness of this morning's rainfall; summer here must be like being on an anvil under the hammer of the sun. There was a scattering of clouds, growing thicker since noon, gilded now in the west where they piled mountain high above the flat horizon; she thought it would probably rain again soon. Fall and winter were the wet season here, the time of growth and life that ended as late spring faded into the dry death of summer, more or less the opposite of Alba or Nantucket.

  To their left stretched the bay, green and blue and scattered whitecaps, shallowing off into a marsh of cattails and reeds close to shore. It was thick and clamorous with birds, shocking-pink flamingos and white spoonbills, greylag geese and wigeon, black-wing stilts wading about on their absurd spindly legs, redshanks dipping their long bills for shellfish and insect "larvae, although they hadn't gotten ahead of the mosquitoes, from the clouds that buzzed about. The yeasty, silty smell of marshland contrasted with the dryer scents of thyme and lavender and spice baked out of the high ground.

  Out in the deeper water a column of black smoke came from the stack of a steamboat, one of the half dozen they'd brought in knocked-down form from Nantucket and assembled at Cadiz. The engine was the simple grasshopper-type that Seahaven had built for tugboats since right after the Event, its chufff… chufff… floating clear over the mile or so of water. The hull was a sixty-foot oval, shallow-draft; armament was two Gat-lings, one on each wing of the bridge, a light three-inch rifled shell-gun forward, and a four-inch mortar on the afterdeck. For riverine and coastal work they'd proved extremely useful, and they could tow barges full of troops and supplies as well. An ultralight buzzed overhead, high enough that it was a dot of color against blue sky and white cloud.

  On the right and ahead was what she'd come to think of as typical Tartessian countryside. Gently rolling right here, which was what it did everywhere it wasn't flat altogether; the mountains of the Sierra de Grazalema were just in sight to the east, and the great range of the Sierra Morena was far to the north, beyond the Guadalquivir.

  Not quite forest just yet, except on some of the occasional hills; more of an open parkland with thickets and copses here and there. Near Cadiz-that-wasn't the sandy beaches were flanked by woods of resin-smelling pine; here it was oaks, cork oak and holm oak and varieties she couldn't name, clumps of gray-green wild olives, all scattered in tall golden grass with the green shoots of new growth pushing up through the natural hay. Patches that had burned off in the dry season were even more vividly green. They'd seen many herds of deer, several of them with scores of individuals, hundreds in all during the day's ride. Plus several big brown bears, a distant glimpse of wolves looking curiously back from a ridgeline, a sure-enough group of wisent, European bison, and black, bristling-fierce wild boar out grazing on fallen acorns. Cattle and horses the locals hadn't had time to drive off, too, and…

  From somewhere ahead a deep grunting, coughing sound came: uuuh-ooongh, uuuh-ooongh, repeated again and again, then building up into a shattering roar. The horses shied again, laying their ears back and rolling bulging eyes, fighting the reins. Their nostrils flared wide and red; they chewed their bits, slobbering foam that dripped on the ground.

  "What the hell is that?" asked one of the Marines nervously, his hand going to the butt of the rifle slung across his back.

  "Silence in the ranks!" Lieutenant Ritter barked, and glanced at the commodore.

  "It's a lion, Lieutenant," Alston said, keeping her face straight with long-practiced ease.

  There were still some in southern Europe in this era, from Iberia to Greece; it was the demands of the Roman arena that had finally wiped them out, in the other history. A lot harder on the lions than the Christians, in the end. Leopards, too…

  She went on: "And I think that remark translates into English roughly as: Mine! All mine!"

  Ritter blushed involuntarily-noticeable amid the thick scattered freckles, the same brick-red color as her hair-and smiled worshipfully. Alston hid her sigh, too, as Swindapa looked over at her with one gently mocking eyebrow raised slightly over the remains of a beautiful shiner, all that was left of her collision with the flat side of a rifle butt.

  Higamous hogamous, woman monogamous, the black woman thought wryly. Years of involuntary celibacy before the Event, and now if I wasn't extremely partnered and it weren't against regs, I could cut quite a swath.

  The problem was she'd never really had aspirations that way-the usual fruitless search for True Love had been more her style before the Event, although what she'd have done if she found it back then was a mystery considering the knuckle-dragging barbarism of the old UCMJ on the matter. Earlier, she'd even spent years trying to convince herself she was in love with a man rather than admit failure in a relationship.

  The corner of her mouth hiked up slightly, as she remembered a joke she'd heard in San Francisco, when she was stationed there half a decade before the Event: "What do lesbians drive on their second date?" Answer: "A moving van."

  Although that's not an invariable rule. I've known some who were complete bedhopping sluts who lost all interest the second or third time they got into your pants-Jolene, for one…

  She choked off the memory of the affair that had led to her divorce, nearly wrecked her career, and certainly cost her custody of the two children she'd borne. It didn't take much effort; time and Swindapa, and Heather and Lucy, had buried that old bitterness; she could smile at the memory now.

  Well, it was stupid getting involved with a professor of Women's Studies at Berkeley, anyway. Regardless of other circumstances, when someone says things like disenchanting the hegemonic discourse of compulsory heterosexism with a straight face, and on a date at that, you should know it can only end in tears.

  Another sound came from their right. A bellow, thunder-loud, echoing across the landscape and throwing birds skyward in flocks like beaded smoke rising from tree and marsh. Again and again, a hoarse arrogant strutting proclamation to all the world.

  "That's an aurochs," Swindapa said. "And it translates into English as: This ground is yours, you mangy alley cat? Says who? You and whose army?"

  A herd of the wild cattle came over a rise. Alston brought out her binoculars to look at them; huge rangy beasts, like Texas longhorns crossed with rhinos, or Spanish fighting bulls on steroids; they were black, with long tapering horns turning to put the points forward above their eyes. If those were the originals of domestic cattle, she seriously wondered how Here-fords and Jerseys had ever been produced; at the shoulder the bull stood four inches taller than the top of her head, and when he lowered his horns and tossed them high bushes went flying.

  "Steady, all," she said. "Just keep moving, and don't rile him up. Scatter out of the way if they charge."

  Because in a butting match between that and a bulldozer, I'd bet on the bovine. The herd had several young calves with it, and that and the lion's territorial announcement would make them skittish. Alston had learned their bad tempers and hair-trigger readiness to charge anything on earth firsthand in Alba and expeditions to mainland Europe.

  At least in open country like this you can see them coming.

  They pressed north, and the land became slightly flatter,
more closely grazed; they saw cattle and sheep under the eye of mounted herdsmen, and pigs barely distinguishable from their wild cousins. At last they came to wooden fences stretching out of sight northward and to the water on the south. A tall stone pillar stood by the side of the road, crudely carved at the top in the image of a woman's face with stylized representations of breasts and a vulva below. Swindapa reined in her horse and read the lettering around the base slowly; she could speak Tartessian well, and the spelling was in the Latin alphabet and reasonably phonetic:

  "Land sacred to the Lady of Tartessos and the Grain Goddess," she recited. "Let no man harm or diminish it, or let his stock or flock do so, on pain of the Cold Curse and the anger of the King."

  At Alston's look, she explained: "The Cold Curse-a cold hearth and a cold womb and cold loins for all around it." A frown of puzzlement. "That's odd-the Earth Folk have that curse too… this must be the edge of the territory of that village the herald mentioned."

  Marian Alston nodded and signaled the party forward; normally there would be guardians to keep animals out, as well. Her eyes took in the cultivated fields on either side in expert appraisal; estimating an enemy's food-producing capacity was an important part of war, in any era. The plowlands and plantations sent her eyebrows up. The olive orchards were all new, just coming into bearing; before the Event, the Tartessians simply grafted wild trees, more than enough for their limited needs. The grain was planted in large fields, ten or twenty acres each, larger than any whole farm hereabouts until recently, divided by lanes of graded dirt scattered with gravel. And the wheat and barley in them had obviously been planted with a seed-drill; that was easy to see, since the shoots were only just starting to show across the rich dark-brown earth in neat rows. Some scattered oaks had been left in the fields and young cypress trees edged many of the fields, standing like tall green candles drawing a rectilinear pattern across the land.

  Mmmm-hmmm. They're using disc plows, from the look of it-six-furrow type. There were harvested fields of corn- maize-as well, chick-peas, lucerne, sunflowers, and-

  "Halt," she said, and heeled her horse aside, over the ditch and up to the edge of the post-and-rail fence. "Cotton, by God!" Well picked-over, too. Nobody had raised cotton in the Sea Islands since long before her birth, but she'd seen it growing, visiting relatives up-country as a child, and since the Event in the Olmec country and Peru. This field had furrows running between the rows and cracked mud showed where water had run; there was a brick-lined irrigation ditch beyond, led in from some west-flowing stream.

  A scattering of houses stood off by themselves amid the fields or nearer the road. Many were mere tents of brushwood and reed, evidently the traditional farmer's housing here. There were others made of adobe brick, rectangular and roofed in tile, all looking new, surrounded by young orchards of apricot, peach, orange, lemon, and fig. Each of the smaller buildings had an outhouse standing behind. Such a minor thing, but important.

  One imposing structure was large enough to be called a mansion, foursquare and massive on a low hilltop in the middle distance, whitewashed, with a tower at one corner, looking for all the world like a Mexican hacienda, down to the row of rammed-earth cottages outside.

  Leveling her binoculars she could see that the walls of the big building on its hilltop were black with the heads of people peering over, probably all the folk of the countryside round about, gathered for what protection they could find at the manor of the local aristocrat. Mmmm-hmmm. Loopholes for small arms, looks like a light swivel gun in that tower, dry moat. Though… mmmm-hmmm, those adobe walls would turn to powder under any sort of cannonade. No doubt King Isketerol wanted his local lordlings armed to stand off pirates or barbarian raiders, but not enough to get notions about independence, or potshotting royal tax collectors.

  "Forward," she said.

  "Walk-march… walk."

  The little village at the center of the cultivation looked to be entirely post-Event, bowered in olive groves and orchards and sitting on a slight rise. Ritter halted the truce party well short of it.

  "Squads one and three dismount," the lieutenant said, her eyes darting about for hidden assassins and ambushes. "Sergeant, check it out."

  "Ma'am!" the noncom said, and barked orders of his own.

  Marines fanned out to search, then waved the rest on when they found no human presence. It was eerily quiet with all the dwellers gone, a shutter flapping, a dog loping off as they entered, a few chickens picking through the dirt with idiot calm- and then she remembered that chickens would be a new thing here, too. In the first history they hadn't gotten this far until the Iron Age…

  The buildings were all adobe and tile-roofed, many gaudily painted on wall and door and shutter, set well back from the road and the secondary street that ran down to an inlet of the bay and a dock. Trees shaded the houses and walled gardens surrounded them, well watered from channels in tile-lined gutters beside the streets. There were flowers as well as vegetables and herbs, she noticed with interest-roses, cannas, bougainvillea. The big wind pump filling an earthen water tank at the edge of town was a straight copy of one of Leaton's models, with laminated wood vanes that could be turned in sections to feather them in storms.

  Larger buildings surrounded a square. One had tall wooden pillars brightly painted, carved in the shape ‹?f a three-legged, one-eyed monster, an armored man set about with weapons and chariot wheels all topped by a golden disk, a woman holding a sheaf of grain and another whose legs were a fish-tail, a bit like a mermaid… although unlike conventional Western representations, the wood-carver had equipped her to do more than tantalize a sailorman. Hooves clattered on rock, for the square was paved with neatly fitted blocks of pale stone in a herringbone pattern.

  Beside the fountain in the center was a stone pillar with a bronze plaque attached, rather like the historical markers you saw by the roadside sometimes before the Event.

  "It's the King's Laws, according to this," Swindapa said, leaning down to read. "Mmmm… all free children to attend the Place of the New Learning four days in eight except in harvest season, every family to contribute food and cloth for the teacher in rotation…"

  Alston looked around. Yes, one of the buildings had the look of a schoolhouse, long and rectangular; she heeled her mount over and sheltered her eyes with her hand to peer through thick wavy window glass. She saw rows of benches within, and a large slate blackboard; times-table in Arabic numerals on one wall, a big map of some sort on another, and a print of King Isketerol's face hanging over a teacher's table at the front.

  Swindapa was still reading: "… then there's the Great Taboo of Shit Avoidance-that's what it says, I swear, and a good many others. Everyone to wash with zapotlkez… soap? It looks like a sort of combination of public-hygiene notice and list of… well, there's stuff about farming-nobody to grow grain for more than two years in the same field before sowing it to fodder crops-money to be accepted for all debts, each household's public work on the roads and irrigation canals-taxes, the King's Fifth, what can be paid in kind and what in cash… all the Laws to be read out to the assembled people once in every moon-turning."

  The Republic's commander nodded. Well, he can't explain everything, I suppose. The Nantucketers had used persuasion and example in Alba; with fewer teachers and more power, Isketerol seemed to be relying more on rote-learning.

  One of the buildings off the square was a smithy, well equipped with a selection of cast-iron anvils, two hearths with piston bellows and a wallful of tools, from pincers to rasps. Even a grindstone and a simple lathe powered by foot-cranks… Bins outside held coal-coke as well as charcoal.

  And those rafters were cut in a sawmill-probably floated down the Guadalquivir… machine-drawn nails, too. Mmmm-hmmmm.

  Next to it was a warehouselike affair; Swindapa read the sign over the doors: "Depot of Things for Households: Let Any Who Will Buy Tools From the King on Credit."

  The radio handset in Alston's saddlebags hissed and popped. She took it
out, looking up reflexively for the butterfly shape of the ultralight. "Commodore Alston heah."

  "Commodore, this is Scout Flight One Niner. The Tartessians under the flag of truce are approaching from the north. Thirty-one in the party as per agreement, all mounted."

  "Carry on, pilot," Alston said.

  She and Swindapa and the standard-bearer remained mounted, but the Marines put their bicycles on the kickstands and formed up in a rank; the Gatling crew unhitched their weapon and swung it 'round. Lieutenant Ritter reached over her shoulder and proudly drew her new officer's katana.

  "Fix… bayonets."

  Hands flashed down to the left hip and the twenty-inch blades flashed free, rattling as they were clipped onto the Werders.

  "Shoulder… arms."

  The Marines stood like khaki statues, an image a little spoiled by the peeling sunburns many of them sported. That had been one reason she wanted a fall-winter campaign; with a force made up of people from cool misty northern islands, the relatively mild and cloudy season promised less in the way of heatstroke.

  That's an irony, if you like, she thought, flexing a hand on the pommel of her saddle and looking at the natural UV protection of her eggplant-colored skin.

  Still, this was the best season to fight here. Summer made water scarce in these hot lowlands and likely to be bad, and sharply cut into the fodder for draught animals. The Tartessian flintlocks were temperamental beasts that didn't like the damp, too; that had worked powerfully in the Nantucketers' favor during the spring invasion.

  The clatter of hooves and a low cloud of dust came down the highway from the north. Alston soothed her mount with a hand on its neck and gathered the reins a bit as well. The colors of brightly dyed cloth and polished metal came into view next, westering sun winking blinding off edged metal; then figures became distinct, mounted men…