Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  They walked half a block southward in the pleasant shade of the streetside arcade; that covered half the herringbone-brick sidewalk, and the roadside maples and oaks and elms the rest. People drove by, or walked, or rode bicycles and a few Segways; a lot of the latter three types stopped to exchange a word or two.

  “Our next stop likes to work Sundays,” Adrienne said. “An anticlerical.”

  Then the covered arcade ended, and the shops and eateries; they were into the fringe of the factory area. Gates of some pale-colored varnished wood split a high blank wall, stucco over stone. Sounds of hammering and clattering came from within, and occasionally the whir of a power tool. Adrienne pressed the button. Someone opened a small eye-level slot with a clack before the main doors swung wide.

  The man inside was in his early seventies but still tough and lean, only a little stooped; the hand he extended to Adrienne was strong but gnarled, callused and scarred with the marks of a carpenter or metalworker. He had a floppy black beret on his head, bushy white eyebrows over bright blue eyes, a cigarette hanging out of one corner of his mouth, and rough baggy overalls below; the bleu de travail Tom had seen in old movies. Like the overalled boys in the soda parlor, he wore it without self-consciousness.

  Of course, Tom thought with a prickle of eeriness. He’s not just capital-F French; he left before looking like this died out. And on this side of the Gate, he’d have no reason to change. Nobody to mock or nag him into it. The trickle of books and movies wouldn’t be enough, particularly if certain people took care to see it wasn’t.

  “Ah, Mademoiselle Rolfe,” the Frenchman said. “Bonjour; it is a pleasure to see you safe home once more.”

  “Pour moi aussi, Marcelle,” she said in reply. “Ça va?”

  The old man waggled a hand. “Comme ci, comme ca,” he said, and went on in accented English: “My liver is not a young man’s, but then what can one do? The rest of me is not a young man’s, either. But come in, come in.”

  “Je vous presente mon ami, M Thomas Christiansen,” Adrienne said as they walked into an open concrete-floored courtyard. “Tom, M Marcelle Boissinot; proprietor of the best tonnellerie, cooperage, in the Rolfe Domain. Christiansen is newly arrived in the Commonwealth; perhaps you saw the article in the newspaper this morning?”

  Tom could follow basic French, if not speak it beyond things like defilade fire or mines; he’d done a little work with the Legion, but he was glad that the conversation had shifted to his mother tongue. The old man gave him a hard, dry handshake.

  “An infinite pleasure, but I had no time for papers,” he said. Then, shrewdly: “Monsieur is a hunter, but once also a hunter of men, n’est pas?”

  “U.S. Army Rangers,” he said. Here’s one person at least who didn’t read my biography, by Jesus. “Up until a couple of years ago.”

  “Ah!” The pale eyes glittered, and Tom felt a sudden unease. “Then monsieur has also been a slayer of les salarabes. Bon!”

  He turned and shouted over his shoulder, speaking rapidly in a quacking guttural-nasal dialect Tom couldn’t begin to identify except that it was French of a sort.

  Open-sided workshops and storerooms surrounded the courtyard, with ten or so men working. A couple of them looked like sons and grandsons of Marcelle; the rest could have been anybody, and their chatter was mostly in English, with a word or phrase of French here or there. There was a strong smell of seasoned timber in the air, and of sawdust and fire and hot wood. Long planks of blond oak were stacked crisscross up to the high rafters along the inside walls of the workshops, and a businesslike clutter of barrel staves and blanks, iron hoops and tools stood against walls and on workbenches. Several younger men were assembling chest-high wine barrels on the open courtyard, each splayed cylinder of smooth curve-sided oak boards resting open side down over a low hot fire of scraps. Tom watched with interest as one man bent the heat-softened wood to shape with a rope and winch, while another slipped an iron hoop over the top and drove it down to its place with quick, skilled strokes of mallet and wedge.

  “Always a pleasure to watch men work who know what they’re doing,” Tom said sincerely.

  As he spoke, a youngster came out with a tray and three glasses of white wine. The old man lifted his. “Death to les salarabes!” he said.

  Tom touched his lips to the wine but didn’t drink; the word meant wog filth, roughly, and he’d worked with plenty of good-guy Arabs—and Kurds and Afghans and Kazakhs—during the war, ones who hated the loony killers as much as he did. Or more, having a more immediate grudge.

  Marcelle Boissinot’s eyes were fixed on something in the distant past, and he was smiling, a remarkably cruel expression. He took another sip of his wine, and murmured under his breath, “Vive la vin, vive la guerre, vive le sacre legionnaire…”

  Then he shook himself slightly, and turned politely to his guest, looking up the tall blond length of him. “Monsieur is perhaps of German extraction? In Algeria, I served with some Germans in the First REP—I enlisted claiming to be a Walloon, of course—and they were formidable fighting men.”

  “I’m Norwegian-American,” he said. “But I agree; we operated with some German special-forces units.”

  “But this reminds me,” Marcelle said to Adrienne. “Of a certainty, you have heard the scandal?”

  “Scandal?” she said, arching her brows.

  “On the afternoon news; the elopement.”

  “Who?” she asked curiously.

  “Siegfried von Traupitz,” he said. “A sudden marriage before a magistrate. In Santa Barbara, most naturally.”

  Adrienne whistled. “The von Traupitz heir?”

  In an aside to Tom: “Santa Barbara is Commission territory, like Rolfeston—common ground, not part of any domain. The justices of the peace there are elected neutrals who have to take anyone who comes; and it’s a holiday resort, a lot of honeymooners go there.”

  To the cooper, she went on: “Who with? Tell me instantly, Marcelle!”

  The ex-Frenchman’s grin turned enormous, and the cigarette worked at the corner of his mouth.

  “With the child of another Prime,” he said, stretching out the delicious tension as she considered and rejected the limited pool of young women it could be. “With… Rebecca Pearlmutter!”

  “With Rebecca?” Adrienne gasped. Then she gave a peal of laughter that set all the men within earshot grinning in sympathy—and stealing glances at her face, which lit with an inner glow. At rest, her face was beautiful; when she laughed, it went several notches up from there. Tom wrenched his attention away from her to her words.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “But I assure you.” The old man cackled triumphantly. “What a scandal!”

  “Romeo and Juliet,” she said, shaking her head. “I knew they got on fairly well at UNV—they were both in one of the post-Alexandrian history courses I took, and neither of them had much time for the old feuds—but… old Otto will plotz! He’ll have an apoplexy. He’ll melt down into a steaming puddle thinking about Rebecca’s children being his heirs! Abe Pearlmutter won’t exactly be happy, either.”

  “And your grandfather will laugh comme un loup until he has an apoplexy,” Boissinot replied happily.

  Adrienne shook her head. “Ah, that will be a year’s sensation,” she said. “But unfortunately, time presses, Marcelle, and I must get down to business.”

  “Bon,” the old man said briskly. “You wish?”

  “I need one hundred and fifty new, standard-size aging barrels this fall before the crush,” she said. “And fifty reconditioned. First quality, Oregon oak, and from north of Puget Sound.”

  Tom made a curious noise, and she turned her head. “California oaks don’t make good cooperage. Too porous and splintery. French oak staves are impossible to get here, but Oregon oak—that’s Quercus garryana—is just as good. Particularly if you can get slow-grown wood from northern stands.”

  “Oregon oak is nearly as good as French,” Marcelle replied pedantical
ly. “Bien, I can have those for you by September. Twenty-five dollars a barrel for the new, eight for the reconditioned.”

  Adrienne threw up her hands. “Twenty-five dollars! Extortionist! Assassin!”

  Boissinot’s face was calm as he lit another cigarette and made an expansive gesture with it. “Mademoiselle, as a young man in the OAS I was an assassin, and a very good one, even if we unfortunately didn’t get that overgrown Alsatian pimp. Now I am a old man, head of a family, with expenses and a payroll to meet.”

  “Fifteen for the new. Four for the old,” she said.

  He made a contemptuous sound deep in his throat. “Fifteen? I am offering finished work, not raw logs off the dock. Is mademoiselle’s name Rolfe, or Pearlmutter?”

  “If I were a Pearlmutter, you old fraud, I’d be off to Cressaut in Tara as easy as salmon in spring,” she said. “I wouldn’t let sentiment make me pay a ridiculous price to you just because you’ve been a Rolfe affiliate forever.”

  “Mademoiselle is a wealthy aristocrat. She can afford sentiment. I, however, am a man of business; and I need at least nineteen dollars for each new cask. Possibly I might concede six dollars seventy-five apiece for the reconditioned barrels. Transport costs on a special shipment would make up any difference on a quote you could get in Tara, and while Cressaut’s barrels are good enough in their way, mine are better.”

  “Nineteen is only slightly less ridiculous than twenty-five,” Adrienne said with passionate sincerity. “And the best is the enemy of good enough. You try this with me every summer, Marcelle, and it never works.”

  Tom sipped his wine while the haggle went on; personally he detested bargaining, but he had to admit both parties here were skillful, and thoroughly enjoying themselves. This Marcelle Boissinot seemed like a nice enough old duffer, undoubtedly a fine craftsman, beloved by his grandkids and a pillar of the local church and boule club… except for that one disquieting glimpse of something else.

  Sort of like the Commonwealth of New Virginia, he thought.

  June 2009

  Louisa Rolfe Memorial Hospital, Rolfeston

  Commonwealth of New Virginia

  “Ai!”

  Jim Simmons swore quietly under his breath as the doctor probed the healing wound in his back.

  “Not bad,” the physician said.

  “Not bad for you,” the Frontier Scout replied.

  “Healing well, considering it’s been only two weeks since you were hurt,” the doctor said.

  “You try lying on your stomach for two weeks,” Simmons said.

  There were only two beds in this hospital room: his and Kolomusnim’s. The Yokut looked even more absurd in a patient’s gown than the Frontier Scout, but he lay with an infinite hunter’s patience, eyes fixed on the window and the glimpse of blue sky beyond; both of them were here under the Scout medical insurance program. Kolo’s arm was healing well, but he’d lost more weight than Simmons despite the latter’s more severe injury; probably because he couldn’t adjust to the hospital’s idea of “food” as easily, possibly because the environment was just too weirdly alien for him.

  “Well, here’s some reading material, then,” the doctor said.

  Simmons brightened; he already had a stack of books on the adjustable bedside table, and a computer with access to Nostradamus, but a fresh one would be welcome. One of the advantages of having lots of relatives was that there were plenty of people who felt obliged to send you stuff. Of course, they also felt obliged to visit, but you couldn’t have everything, could you?

  It wasn’t a book, though: It was a letter, a single cream-colored envelope. Without, he saw, a postage stamp.

  “I wonder who couldn’t just send an e-mail?” he said to himself, as the doctor finished with his poking and prodding and left the room. “Ah, Adrienne! What a woman!”

  He read the letter once, and whistled softly. Then he read it again and again, to make sure the elliptical wording meant what he thought it meant. When he’d finished, he called out to the other man—in his own language.

  Simmons wasn’t really fluent in Yokut; no more than a hundred or so souls still spoke it, and more than half of those could get along in pidgin English. Still, he’d learned enough to carry on an elementary conversation; Kolo and he had worked together for years, and Simmons had been raised on the frontier, at Scout outposts and stations. It was an interesting tongue; there were things you could say in it with a word or two that required paragraphs in English, and there were English concepts that you couldn’t put into Yokut at all.

  Some things, however, worked quite well in both their mother tongues. Kolomusnim’s face lost its blank look of endurance and came alive as the Scout spoke.

  Revenge was a concept that translated quite easily.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Rolfe Domain: Napa—Seven Oaks

  June 2009

  Commonwealth of New Virginia

  Napa town ended with the abruptness Tom had become used to in this weird through-the-looking-glass place, with a belt of wild country that marked the future limits of the built-up area. Evidently it was never going to be more than about half the size of its FirstSide analogue, at least according to the plan.

  The road up the valley was two-lane blacktop flanked on either side by broad grass verges and by rows of Italian cypress trees, a little west of the streamside forest. The trees beside the road were giants forty feet tall and more, standing like dark green candles casting endless flickering bars of shade across the road as they drove north; more were growing as field-edge windbreaks among the cultivated land. Their shadows lengthened as the sun dipped westward toward the rough sawtooth ridge of the forest-shaggy Mayacamas; eastward the lower, drier Vaca hills were distant shapes colored in olive-green chaparral and golden grassland; the flat valley floor was never more than five miles from edge to edge, nowhere out of sight of the mountains.

  Much of the land was in pasture the color of old honey tinged with green, enclosed with chest-high redwood fences weathered nearly black. The fields were starred with violet camass, blue-flag and golden mariposa lily, and still dotted with a thinned-out scattering of huge oaks that gave the whole valley the look of a great park. Herds of glossy black Angus or white-faced Herefords ambled through grass to their knees and rested in the shade; so did sheep with the rather silly naked look the beasts always had after shearing, and sounders of black-and-tan pigs rooting for last season’s acorns. Horses drowsed, or looked over the fences at the vehicles passing by. Every fifth or sixth field was in wheat or barley, ripe now and the same bronze-gold color as Adrienne’s hair, almost glittering as it swayed in the long shadows of the evening sun, and so thickly splashed with crimson poppies that he knew without asking they didn’t use herbicides here.

  Occasional modest vineyards stood green and shaggy with their summer foliage, the earth between the rows disked clean and showing through the leaves in tones of cinnabar or pale gray or brown. The grapevines were well west of the road, close to the foot of the mountains; he blinked again, seeing in his mind’s eye the endless monoculture of grapes that was the Napa in the California he knew. Here they were a minor element in the landscape’s symphony, and small orchards of other fruit seemed as numerous: cherry and apricot, pear and plum, pomegranate and almond and walnut, gray-green olive and bushy fig. Close to the road an occasional strip of land lay under the whirling spray of irrigation sprinklers, watering crops of vegetables and soft fruit; a crew handpicking tomatoes into boxes waved as they passed.

  “Pretty,” he said after a moment. Actually, it’s fucking beautiful, but let’s not get overenthusiastic. “And it looks a lot more… mmm… established than I’d have expected, considering how recent it all is.”

  Adrienne nodded. “The climate helps,” she said. “Things grow fast here; we started settling the Napa in the late forties. And the Old Man is fond of saying that one of the merits of aristocracy is that it encourages the people in charge to think about long-term consequences. If your descendan
ts are going to be living on the same piece of land, you’re careful how you treat it. ’Specially if you think in terms of bloodlines and families, and we New Virginians most emphatically do think that way.”

  “I can see aristocracy might look nearly perfect, if you’re on the top of the heap,” Tom said dryly. “Or one of the kids of the people on top.”

  “Oh, Granddad also says the drawbacks include continual feuding and faction fights,” Adrienne said. “We’ve managed to keep those political rather than shootin’ affairs. So far.”

  They drove slowly, not because the traffic was thick, but because much of it was tractors towing flatbeds loaded with hay or other cargo. One was filled with a pungent material Adrienne identified as Peruvian guano. It made the freshness more of a contrast once they’d pulled by; the air was warmer here than it had been near the strait, in the high seventies, and it had an intense scent that held sun-cured grass, wildflowers, turned earth, a breath of coolness from the jungle-like riverside forest to the east.

  That was a thick mass of jade green, deep green, brown-green; tall valley oaks with interlaced crowns; beneath them sycamores, black walnut, Oregon ash and box elder, laced together with a thick mass of California blackberry, poison oak and willow, interwoven still tighter with wild grapevine and blossoming Castilian rose. Birdsong was loud even over the engine noise, and the buzz of insect life nearly as intense; they had to stop a time or two for explosions of monarch butterflies, drifting across the road in orange-white clouds dense enough to hinder vision. Now and then a gap showed a small sunlit meadow or the glitter of the river’s flow, or a bend opened up into a little marsh. A half hour north of Napa town they saw a swath cleared for a long timber bridge to the eastern shore, and beneath it a trio of boys on an improvised raft valiantly trying to pole their ungainly craft off a gravel bank in the bright shallow water.