Страница 56 из 163
Very sharp sword, Swindapa thought. Cutting through a neck like that was hard, even for a man of Daurthu
The images showed men laying the body of the horse in the grave. Dirt went over it, then the body of the man-sacrifice, with the horse's head in place of its own. Lights came up, and Swindapa breathed out a long sigh of wonder.
The captain gently disengaged her hand, putting Swindapa's firmly back on her own side of the gap between the chairs. She rose and went to the front of the room, with the Spear Chosen of the Eagle People beside her; he was very tall, with thi
Strange people, the Americans, the Eagle People. Strange but wonderful.
Pamela Lisketter spat to clear her mouth, then rinsed it with water from the bucket by the sink. The image of the horse, falling, falling, blood spurting over the man with the sword, and then the sword flashing again and interrupting the song… her stomach nearly rose again, but she pushed the scene away until it was distant-words, images on TV, not so real.
She walked back out into her living room. The house was mostly that single long space, furnished with futons and her own creations, smelling faintly of incense… and now of whale oil. The loom stood by one wall, the windows next to it flooding it with light. Her friends were scattered about. She'd been pla
"Shocking," she said at last. "Obviously sexist, patriardial in the worst way, abusive of animals. And we did business with them."
"The Iraiina are savages," Isketerol agreed.
Lisketter felt her lips thin, then forced herself to remember that the… indigenous person, she decided… had learned his English in the wrong place, among people no better than police. "Savages" was a Eurocentric term. Or Nantucket-centric, I suppose, she thought with an attempt at gallows humor.
"They are the ancestors of the technolators," her brother David said. "Remember, oh, what was the book, The Chalice and the Blade?"
"Yeah, they're pretty hard-assed, the Iraiina," Walker nodded, sipping at his bottle of homemade beer. He looked down at it and grimaced slightly, then continued: "We shouldn't be selling them weapons."
"I should hope not," Lisketter said. "Or anyone else, for that matter." Thoughtfully: "Perhaps we should talk to Ms. Swindapa about her people. They seem more… more harmonic. If we could get her away from Captain Alston."
"You couldn't separate those two with a crowbar," Walker said. At her raised eyebrows: "You do know the captain's a dyke, don't you?"
"That is a homophobic term in this context," Lisketter said stiffly, flushing with anger.
Walker smiled charmingly. "Sorry. Force of habit. I haven't been around the right sort of people much, I'm afraid."
"That's all right," Lisketter said, brushing a lock of her long straight hair back. "She does seem male-identified, obsessed with patriarchal rules, and logocentric."
"Damned right," Walker said. "Saluting, heel-clicking… did you know she had a crewm… crewperson dragged behind the ship on a rope? He nearly died."
There was a shocked murmur in the big brick-floored room. Lisketter tried to remember what she'd heard of the incident, but it did seem the sort of thing a power-oriented person would do.
"I'm certainly not going to spend the rest of my life working for her," Walker said. "It was bad enough, a temporary assignment-but here and now, she's set to run the Eagle and everything else that floats for life. An empire-builder."
"The imperialism has already begun," David said. "All those Native Americans dead of our diseases, and Chief Cofflin has a settlement over on the mainland already, stripping the forests of trees and butchering the animals."
Pamela nodded somberly. It had begun, and if they didn't do something it would be worse than the Conquest of Paradise that her ancestors had wrought.
"We have to do something," she said.
"Well, yeah," Walker said smoothly. He and the Iberian exchanged glances. "We're ready to help, of course. Alice and Rosita have opened our eyes."
"It is… what is your word, reassuring," Isketerol said to William Walker.
They had halted their bicycles under a stand of pines, with a few last daffodils still nodding yellow beneath. No one was near; the road was empty, and only heath and fields stretched away on either side, potato vines already bushy and rows of grain just showing like a faint green fuzz on the gray-brown soil. The loudest noise was the sough of the wind in the trees, the buzz of insects. Hot resin scented the air, baked out of the trunks behind them. The noon sun was warm, full of the sound of bees and sleepiness.
"Reassuring?" Walker said.
"That you Amurrukan can also produce your share of fools," Isketerol said. "That is what they are, isn't it, Lisketter and the others? I didn't understand much of what they said, but I haven't been a trader for this long without recognizing an… easy mark, you say."
Walker laughed, a loud rich sound. "Oh, they're fools, all right," he said. "But for you and me, they're useful fools. Useful idiots."
"We should cultivate them, then," Isketerol said.
"Like a garden ripe for the harvest," Walker replied, slapping him on the shoulder. They both laughed as they pedaled on, back toward the town.
"The woman become one the man's thing only? Like among the Sun People?" Swindapa whispered.
Marian Alston moved aside a little as the breath tickled at her ear.
"No," she whispered back. There was still a hum of conversation in the big church, as they waited for the bride to appear at the foot of the aisle. "They can leave each other if they please. I did."
"You had a man of your own?" Swindapa asked eagerly. She knew that questions were impolite, but she'd been trying to learn Alston's background.
"Such as he was. A mistake."
"So this is like the… the, you say, party, as have we, when a woman's man goes to live with her kin?"
"Yes… more or less. The ceremony calls the blessings of God, and settles things like who inherits property and children."
"Oh," the Fiernan girl said, frowning a little in puzzlement.
Evidently her people didn't have anything closely resembling marriage. A man went to the woman's family grouping, and the relationship could be broken by mutual consent at any time. What Alston thought of as the father's role in a child's life fell more to the mother's brothers or other male kin, since they'd always be there. Property passed through the female line. Not exactly a matriarchy, though; nothing she could easily understand. She pushed the thought aside, concentrating on the ceremony.
The church on the hill was crowded, every seat full; the chiefs marriage to the head of the Athenaeum was an event. Royal wedding, Alston thought wryly. She'd gotten a pew for herself and the Eagle's wardroom, plus Swindapa… who is a very nice girl, but clings like a burr. Not intrusively, just refusing to go away for long; it was like trying to push the wind. Isketerol was there too, observing with his usual cool detachment.