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"We bargained for a perpetual lease on the land from the Telukuo lineage," Leaton said. "They got a lump sum and a one-fifth stockholding in the Irondale Company, and a lot of them got in on the ground floor as employees, so they're foremen and skilled workers now-we've trained some really good machinists-they're getting rich, hardly bother to farm anymore." He gri
"I hear Sam Macy is complaining about that," Alston said.
She and Swindapa had gotten a fair bit of cash last year; prize money from some ships taken in a skirmish with the Tartessians before open war was declared, and they'd put much of it into Irondale Company stock. Money wasn't extremely important to her, but she'd been born ain't-no-doubt-'bout-it-grits-every-day poor, and disliked it. And there were the children to think of.
"Cheap-labor competition undercutting Nantucket industries, Sam says," she went on.
Leaton flushed. "I talked to him just before I came over, two weeks ago. Don't get me started!"
"Oh, by the milk of Moon Woman's flowing breasts, don't get him started," Swindapa said-in Fiernan-and rolled her eyes.
"Macy's not so bad," Alston said. "A representative government has to have an opposition party-better him than, say, Emma Carson."
The engineer snorted. "Nantucket's an island, for Christ's sake, and not a very big island, either-fifty square miles of sandbank, and the water supply's limited to shallow wells. Way things are going, Nantucket Town alone will have twenty thousand people in another decade and we'll be ru
Alston raised her eyebrows; she'd read a good deal of history, but mostly in the military and maritime fields. Leaton had run a computer store before the Event; more importantly, he'd operated a machine shop out of his basement and studied the history of technology as an obsessive hobby. The hobby had turned into Seahaven Engineering, and those lathes and milling machines and gauges, the library of technical works and hard-won personal skills, had saved them all and gone on to grow and multiply and mutate in the years since. Making Leaton the most powerful of the Republic's new merchant princes along the way. if also the least worldly.
I like him. Usually do, with someone who really knows their work and is proud of it.
He continued: "Well, if you want to get technical, this"-he tapped his boot on the stone floor-"is where they first used, would have used, coal to smelt iron, and where the first iron steam-engine cylinders were cast, and where the first iron bridge was built-Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge Gorge. First railroad, first iron boat… Not by accident, any of it! The seams in these hillsides, they've got iron ore, coal, and fireclay in the same strata-some of the hills around here ooze bitumen. It's finest low-sulfur coking coal, too, no impurities, sweet enough to eat with a spoon. Plus abundant waterpower that's easy to tap and a navigable river at our doorstep and plenty of good timber, limestone, big area of farmland upriver to supply food, lead mines… If I were doing it over again, I wouldn't have built a Bessemer plant back on the Island at all, we should concentrate on high-value-added stuff there-Alston saw Erica Stark put an affectionate hand on the engineer's arm. Well, well, perhaps the inveterate bachelor has met his match. Or at least someone who could stop one of his lectures in its tracks. When Leaton said "if you want to get technical," strong men blanched.
"You don't have to convince me, Ron," the Guard commander said. "Save it for the Council sessions, or the Town Meetin'. Just tell me about what I ordered."
"Oh." Leaton cleared his throat. "Well, yes, it's about ready. All the plating, three-point-five inch and ready for assembly, edges milled and holes for bolts drilled. That"-he nodded northwards, toward the faint muffled sound of the forging hammer-"is the crankshaft being finished off; we turned the propeller shaft last week. Erica did, rather."
"The lathing-shed team did, rather," she said. "For once, everything was on schedule."
A Fiernan in Nantucketer clothes that didn't hide six months of pregnancy came with thick clay steins and a small glass on a tray: three beers, a mead, and a whiskey. Alston sipped at the liquor; wheat-mash bourbon, not quite Maker's Mark, but smoothly drinkable. Then she blew froth and took a mouthful of the beer, crisp hop-bitter coolness to follow the love-bite of the spirits.
"Not bad," she said.
Particularly compared to the flat, spoiled-barley bilgewater she'd tasted on her first trip to Alba. Someone who'd worked at Cisco Breweries on-Island had come back here with a bag of hop seed and a head full of tricks.
"Scheduling trouble?" she went on.
"Mostly Alban workforce," Stark said, in a tone that was half groan. "Back on Nantucket they're the minority and work our way. Here… There's a festival, they stop working to dance for the Moon. Their second cousin twice removed visits, they get drunk, then stop working. The salmon are ru
Swindapa set down her mead, scowling. "Swans are sacred," she said, her tone unusually clipped.
Marian Alston-Kurlelo winced slightly; not only that, but they carried the souls of the dead to the afterlife and back to be reborn, in the faith of Moon Woman-she'd wondered sometimes if that was the far faint source of the legends about babies and storks. One of the few things that could get Fiernans into the mood for a really murderous riot was harm done to one of the big white birds. They were as bad that way as Hindus were with cows.
Would have been with cows, she reminded herself. Right now, the Aryan ancestors of the Hindus were beef-eating, booze-swilling charioteer barbarians not much different from their remote cousins here in Alba.
"And people aren't machines, Ms. Stark," Swindapa went on. "Fiernan aren't zorr'HOt'po, either." The word meant something like "maniacs" or "obsessive-compulsives."
"Who in their right mind would spend all their days in a coal mine, or a factory full of heat and stink? You've told them that working for pay isn't like being a slave, and that's how they behave-like free people."
"Oh, no offense meant," Stark said soothingly. "But it is inconvenient, sometimes. Machinery costs the same whether it's working or not. We're having trouble just getting enough people, too; we're importing labor from as far away as the Baltic- got two hundred in from Jutland just last week, they're having a famine or war or something over there."
Alston nodded and took another mouthful of the beer. It wasn't that these Bronze Age peoples were lazy. They went after seasonal jobs like planting and reaping at a pace that would kill most people from the twentieth. The problem was that they were burst workers; much of the year they loafed, or worked a long day at a slow pace with frequent breaks as whim took them. The sort of steady, methodical, clock-driven effort that post-industrial Western urbanites put in was alien to them, and usually profoundly distasteful. That prompted a thought.
"How did those, mmmm, 'Silicon Valley' types you mentioned deal with the problem?" she asked. "They must have been getting their miners and forge-workers straight off the farm, too."
Leaton and Stark glanced at each other, and she caught similar looks of distaste. "Unpleasant ways," the man said. "Nearly as bad as the ones Walker uses."