Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  “Indeed,” the Batyushkov agreed happily. “Now, you are proceeding to more specialized training?”

  “Yes, sir,” Garshin said. He pointed to the larger, newer building. “That is our duplicate of the Gate complex. All units have been through the assault training at least once, and we are stepping up the pace. Things go faster, since the unteachables have been eliminated. I anticipate little further attrition; no more than one or two percent.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Seven Oaks Manor, Rolfe Domain

  June 2009

  The Commonwealth of New Virginia

  Roy Tully nodded warily to the big Afrikaner as he walked through the gardens at the rear of the Seven Oaks manor house. Piet Botha returned the gesture with a control that showed he returned the same cautious respect, untinged with anything so sentimental as liking. That told Tully something in itself: The bigger man was smart enough not to let the contrast in their sizes fool him into underestimating a possible opponent.

  That is one serious badass, Roy thought. If the time ever comes, there won’t be any “Freeze” or “You’re under arrest” bullshit. I’ll just put a clip right through the center of mass—and then a couple of rounds into the head to be really sure.

  Adrienne had “suggested” that he report to the stable boss, since he’d been emphatically uninterested in helping took the shocks, or whatever you called throwing parcels of wheat around. That was one advantage of not being a big muscular slab of beef like Tom: People didn’t automatically look at you and think of all the work you could accomplish. He managed to find the laneway to the stables, a strip of hoof-marked dirt under the cool shade of an avenue of pepper trees. But it was blocked by people and two horses bearing pack saddles, each carrying a pair of wooden barrels; the crowd included several kids of around ten or so and one extremely good-looking young woman in jeans and checked shirt and western hat. She was black-haired and full-figured, and leading the animals with easy competence.

  “Hi!” Tully said brightly. “Looking for the stable boss.”

  “You’re looking at her,” the young woman said. She transferred both leading reins to one hand and shook with the other. “Sandra Margolin.”

  “Roy Tully,” he replied. “I’m supposed to report to you.”

  “Thank God,” she said. “Henning’s taken all my people for the harvest and I’m trying to do six men’s work with myself and a bunch of kids. You know anything about horses?”

  “They’re big and they’ve got four legs and they eat grass,” Tully said helpfully, grinning. Sandra smiled broadly herself. “Well, hell, that’s honest,” she said. “You’re the other FirstSider, right? Here. You lead one of these. We’re taking some water out to the harvest gangs, me and these imps of Satan here.”

  He took one of the leading reins, holding it the way she did—the slack in the left hand, and the right close to the horse’s chin, ignoring the way it slobbered slightly. The powerful earthy, grassy smell of the animal filled his nostrils as they took a right turn onto a graveled lane that fronted the houses that stood south of the manor.

  “So, Sandra,” he said, “how did you get to be stable boss?”

  Yelling and spreading your tail feathers worked wonders for peacocks, but it had limitations for humans; a lot of guys didn’t realize how much women liked it when a man listened to them. He suspected that that went double for New Virginia.

  Well, this is a new experience, Tom thought, leaning on his fork and watching the tractors pull away from the group of workers.

  The fork was a shaft of polished ash nearly six feet long, topped by two thin, elegantly curved steel tines—the original style of pitchfork, nothing like the digging implement. The overnight fog had lifted since they returned from Rolfe Manor, except for banks that hung like drifting mystery among the thick riverside forest—perhaps the fervent prayers he’d heard, interlarded with equally heartfelt curses, had something to do with it. The sun was clear of the Vaca hills to the east and gave promise of a long, hot, cloudless day; he was grateful for the big-brimmed straw hat he’d been given. Everyone was wearing one, or a cloth equivalent; most of the women had bandannas tied around their heads beneath.

  Four tractors were pulling their side-mounted reaper-binders through the ripe wheat, the first vehicle’s wheels running along a grass verge that lined the inside of the fence. The others were in a staggered line, each ten yards back from the one in front, with the tractor moving through the stubble left by the machine in front, its reaper out in the grain. The long creels turned, pushing a swath of grain backward over the cutting bar; the tying mechanism bound the straw into sheaves and dropped them in a neat, closely spaced row. The noise of the tractor’s diesel and the clattering rattle and buzz of the reaper made him suddenly conscious again of how quiet it was here—no background hum of machinery and traffic and aircraft and voices, so the sound of the harvester echoed distinct and solitary.

  “Wait a minute,” he said as another tractor came up pulling a flatbed trailer with an outward-slanting frame fastened to the front and rear, ten feet high; several more followed it. “Why do you have to get all these sheaves up right away? It’s not as if you’ve got to worry about summer rains here!”

  Adrienne looked up from where she was conferring with Henning. “Well, you may have noticed that we have a lot of birds here,” she said, nodding upward.

  Tom looked up. There were a lot of them there, even by local standards. More waited in chattering flocks in the cypress trees that ran into the distance along the side of the wheat field, or in the boughs of the occasional valley oak left amid the cultivation: rock doves, band-tailed pigeons… Even more birds were scrambling or flying out of the path of the reapers—great explosions of ring-necked pheasant going kaw-kwak!, and even larger coveys of brown California quail, chicken-sized birds looking a little as if they’d been squeezed between the leaves of a book, the males with an absurd little feather plume dangling over their noses, and all of them going chi-CAH-go at the tops of their voices.

  “And deer,” Henning added. “Nocturnal, but they can clear these fences easily enough. Ditto mule deer, elk, and a couple of those new types of antelope. There’s one not much bigger than a rabbit that’s a bigger pest than the rabbits.”

  “Dik-diks, that’s what they’re called,” Adrienne said. “Not to mention bear, black and grizzly. And rabbits… The only ones that don’t like wheat are the cougars and leopards and wolves. Even the coyotes will eat grain. Not to mention grapes, but that’s another story—everything loves grapes.”

  Henning nodded. “If we let the sheaves lie out more than a couple of days, we’d lose half the yield,” he said. “No way we could stand guard on three hundred acres for months.”

  “Just asking,” Tom said. Seems there’s a downside to the abundant wildlife. “I suppose the ones that won’t eat grain like sheep,” he said.

  “Tell me about it,” Adrienne said, rolling her eyes, and Henning grunted agreement. “And they like veal and pork, too. And when a grizzly decides that the walnuts or the cherries or the figs belong on the ground, where he can eat ’em, not on the tree…”

  Then she looked over at the progress the reapers were making, nodded and waved the first tractor pulling a flatbed forward. It came up between the two rows of sheaves and geared down to a slow walk, then stopped.

  Adrienne whistled. “All you first-timers, over here!” she called. “Gather ’round!”

  Tom obediently gathered ’round with a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who came up to his breastbone, and several of the younger nahua, who were about the same height. An older nahua gave a running translation for the Mesoamericans.

  “All right,” Adrienne said. “There are going to be six tractors pulling flatbeds—four loading, one on its way back to the rickyard or unloading there, and one on its way back here—three people on both sides of each flatbed; you load for forty-five minutes and rest for fifteen while your flatbed is away. You’ll be tossing the sheaves to th
e spreaders.”

  She pointed to the flatbed. Two workers were standing on each of the flat trailers, wearing canvas bib aprons over their working clothes, and gloves with elbow-length sleeves attached. Adrienne went on: “Don’t toss too hard. You’ll wear yourselves out if you do, and waste grain, not to mention stabbing people with the pointy end. Just put the fork into the sheaf a little behind the binding…”

  She walked up to the trail of grain and suited action to words. The tines slid into the bundled grain with a slight shink sound; her gloved right hand moved backward.

  “…slide your hand back on the handle…”

  She lifted, turned, pivoted, movements as smooth and graceful as a seal sliding off a rock, and the effort was just enough to present the sheaf at the right height.

  “…and swing it up.”

  The worker on the flatbed was one of the teenagers they’d picked up on the way to the house yesterday, the bashful dark-haired one. The youngster took the sheaf off the tines with the same deceptively easy-looking skill, bending to place it horizontally against the frame at the front of the trailer, and tamping it down with a kick of her boot heel.

  “Don’t try to rush,” Adrienne said, moving on to the next. “Everyone’s got to be synchronized. You’re all partnered up with an experienced hand; listen to them. OK, people, let’s go!”

  She walked over to Tom; evidently she was the one “partnered up” with him; a big dog ambled at her heels, occasionally wagging its tail and then flopping down to watch the people work, with the air of someone humoring lunatics. The flatbeds moved off at the pace of a leisurely stroll, arrayed in a staggered line like the harvesting machines. That was the only leisurely thing about the proceedings; when you had to keep up and keep the wheat flowing smoothly, your movements tended to the brisk. Yet the sheaves weren’t heavy at all, and Tom was hugely strong, and in first-class condition. The first half hour was just enough to bring out a sweat.

  “You’re going to regret that,” Adrienne said, swinging up another sheaf with an easy, smooth motion, timing each word to her breath.

  “Regret what?” Tom said, following suit.

  His pitch wasn’t as practiced, but it got the sheaf where it was supposed to be, and the stacker didn’t have to dance back from the points of the tines the way she’d had to do a couple of times with the other greenhorns.

  “You’re muscling the sheaf up,” Adrienne said. Her breathing was slow, even, controlled to a perfect match with her movements. “You’re lifting it.”

  “That’s bad?”

  “It will be in four hours, or six,” she said. “Use your left hand as a fulcrum and the shaft of the fork as a lever. Pivot the sheaf up. Like this.”

  He tried it for a while, but the effort of moving his hands on the ash wood seemed more than it was worth, particularly since he was wearing rather stiff work gloves. He was also going to get blisters eventually; they were task-specific. It got a little harder as they went on; the stackers were standing on layer after layer of sheaves, and he had to lift a lot more to get each sheaf to them. After three quarters of an hour, the flatbed carried a huge mass of yellow grain on paler white-blond straw, piled up like a giant blunt wedge between the frames at each end.

  “That’s it!” the brunette girl—Anne-Marie, that’s her name, Tom reminded himself—cried out from the top of the stack. “Full up!”

  The tractor backed and turned carefully, then drove off across the reaped stubble with the great stack bouncing and swaying behind it. Tom and Adrienne and the rest of their group walked over to the section next to the un-reaped grain, leaning on their forks and waiting for the flatbed to return; Adrienne’s dog followed, shifting into a patch of shade cast by the standing crop. The wheat whispered with a dry rustling voice; it was a lot taller than the short stiff-stalk hybrids his family had raised, waist-high on him instead of knee-high-and-a-bit, but it had a familiar smell—dusty and mealy at the same time. The itchiness of culms stuck in his sweat was familiar too, and not nearly as bad as after the days he’d spent in the bed of a truck shoveling the loose grain pouring out of a combine’s spout.

  A kid came up to him holding out a big mug of water; it had a slight mineral tang, product of the volcanic mountains to the west, and tasted wonderful. He nodded thanks, and the boy—he was about eleven, wearing a baseball cap and shorts—dashed off; Tom looked around and saw two horses loaded with barrels of water, and a bucket brigade of kids a bit too young for the work he was doing trotting around handing people cupfuls.

  And Roy, talking to… Say, that’s the old Indian woman’s granddaughter. Sandra Margolin, he thought. She threw back her head and laughed, a caroling sound that carried across the hundred feet between them.

  He nodded toward them. “Looks like Roy’s made a friend,” he said.

  Adrienne looked and nodded. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “With his line of patter, that is. He makes you laugh.” She frowned in thought, then spoke quietly after checking that nobody else was likely to overhear. “I think we need to bring Sandra in on this.”

  Tom blinked in surprise. “I thought we were supposed to keep things confidential.”

  “Sandy knows how to keep her mouth shut; I’ve known her all my life, and we can trust her. She’s my stable boss here; her father was before her. What she doesn’t know about horses isn’t worth knowing, and she’s done a lot of rough-country work; I suspect that we’re going to be needing that skill set before this is over…. I’ve had a few thoughts on what the Collettas are up to. Specifically, on where.”

  Jim Simmons extended his hand. “Botha,” he said.

  The Afrikaner took it, a firm shake without any squeezing nonsense. “Simmons,” he replied.

  His gaze probed the stiff way the younger man sank into a lounger on the terraced pavement behind the manor. “How are you doing, man?”

  “I’m mobile,” Simmons said. “The doctors say I’ll be fit for duty in two weeks or so; it’s healing fast—neither of the arrows went very deep. Kolo’s ahead of me.”

  The Indian was sitting on his heels with his back against a planter and his face unreadable. Simmons lay for a moment, soaking up the morning sunlight and the smell of flowers and water and the wild forests on the mountains rearing to the westward.

  God, but I’m glad to be out of that hospital, he thought. And glad to be out of the city. All those people and buildings in one place always give me hives. The trip up from Rolfeston had been a bit rough, but…

  “Sorry to hear about your partner, old boy,” he went on. “He saved my arse from those hostiles.”

  Botha nodded. “Miss Rolfe said I should fill you in,” he said.

  Simmons felt his lips curl back and show teeth; it wasn’t a friendly expression, but Botha echoed it—they were on the scent of the same game this time. They’d also both been hunters their entire adult lives. Hunters, and hunters of men not least.

  “Bit of a bliddy coincidence, those bushmen having rifles and knowing how to use them, wasn’t it?” the Afrikaner said. “Here’s what I heard among my own folk, when I went back to my farm after we got back from FirstSide. I should have suspected it; hell, Schalk was always trying to get me interested….”

  Tom pitched another sheaf. This was the first time he’d ever gotten a producer’s-eye look at a California farming landscape, in contrast to the view from a car, or backpacking through the wilderness.

  Of course, this isn’t much like anything in my world’s California, he thought dutifully. Except in the basic geography. And this wasn’t the view from the cab of an eight-wheel modern tractor either, high off the ground and enclosed.

  On his own feet, it looked… larger, he thought. Quite a bit larger.

  He would have expected the valley to feel narrow, but instead it simply seemed directed, oriented by the mountains looming to his right as he looked south and the more distant ones to his left. The flat fifty-acre field of wheat was big when you were attacking it this way, a rustling mystery
as the tractors chewed their four staggered swaths through it. The redwood fences and rows of cypress windbreaks alternated, closing in the view either way; he knew consciously that this trough in the earth was only an hour or so drive from top to bottom even on the local gravel roads, but emotionally it seemed to stretch for days both ways, as if his mind were putting it on a foot-travel scale.

  A rabbit came out of the wheat and looked at the humans. Adrienne’s dog pointed an alert muzzle its way, and the rabbit obviously decided that discretion was the better part of valor, by the way it turned and dashed back into the standing grain.

  The stubble was also taller than a combine would have left, which made the boots and gaiters a good idea—cut wheat stems had sharp ends. He looked down and kicked the stubble tentatively; there were thick green shoots wound into the straw, some just tall enough to be lopped off by the reaper’s cutter bar. Far too uniform for weeds, probably some sort of fodder crop undersown into the grain in the spring.

  “Grass ley?” he asked her, half grunting as he lifted another sheaf.

  “Legume-grass mixture,” she replied. “Two years in grain, four in grass, then back.”

  The tractor came back, pulling the empty flatbed. Adrienne whistled cheerfully, and twirled her fork around her body for a moment like a martial-arts staff.

  “Do many of your, ah, landholders pitch in like this?” he asked as they resumed work. “I would have thought horsebacking around and directing the peasants with a riding crop would be more appropriate.”

  “I don’t have any tenants here, which means there’s a lot more to do than most landholders have with just their home ranches, and I always did like to lend a hand—Dad thought it was an affectation, ‘playing at peasants,’ as he called it.”

  “Which was why you kept doing it?”

  Adrienne shrugged ruefully. “Well, at that time, if Dad had said sleeping with grizzly bears was a bad idea, I’d probably have decided that they were really sort of cute…. Anyway, different domains, different Family traditions. The von Traupitzes like to do the blood-and-soil Germanic chieftain thing; I doubt any of the Collettas or their collaterals get closer to harvest than eating the results, or watching. The Contessa approved of that, though she despised old Salvo—and it was mutual, believe me. Not that it makes much difference; allod farms work this way too, just on a much smaller scale, the tenant’s family and a couple of extras.”