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Alston's lips pressed together. Flogging and terror, she thought. The reports from the Councilor for Foreign Affairs' agents were gruesome. Stark took up the story:
"And Britain had millions of people then, most of them day laborers. It was take any work they could get or starve, for a lot of them."
Good point, the Guard commander thought. It would take generations for Alba to get crowded, even with the medical missionaries at work. By then birth control might have caught on.
She shrugged. "The factories exist for us, not us for the factories," she said.
Specialists tended to forget that. Just as I occasionally need Jared to remind me that the Guard exists for the Republic, not vice versa. "You got what I needed done, and in time-just."
"Right," Leaton said. "It'll all be aboard the Merrimac by the end of the week along with the technicians, and she ready to sail from Westhaven to join the fleet at Portsmouth Base."
"Most excellent," Marian said. "Isketerol of Tartessos is making far too much progress for my taste. I want to have an ace up my sleeve besides the Farragut. 'Dapa and I will ride downriver with the cargo and around Cornwall with the ship. Faster, and I want another look at the Merrimac anyway."
Swindapa sighed. "I don't understand how Isketerol's done so much so quickly," she said. "Walker had twenty helpers from Nantucket."
"My fault," Alston-Kurlelo said with bitter self-accusation. "It was my idea to bring him back to Nantucket, when we came here right after the Event to trade for seed corn. I wanted him to teach the languages he knew, and about conditions in the Mediterranean. He learned far too much, far too fast."
"He got half of all the stuff that Walker stole," Leaton pointed out gently. "Which was a cargo intended to set up a self-sufficient base and included a pretty complete technical library. Plus what Walker made here, and training for his crew from Walker's gang while they were in Alba, and the ship they took as a model. Plus he's snookered us more than once since then-remember when he bought all those treadle-powered sewing machines, and we found out he was taking them apart and using the gearing for machine tools? Plus he had a whole kingdom to draw on once he got back to Iberia. Southern Spain's a rich area-coal, minerals, timber."
Marian Alston-Kurlelo shook her head; there were no excuses for failure. "Well, have to do the best we can with what we've got."
Swindapa touched her arm. "Moon Woman will send us a fortunate star," she said, smiling gently. "Heather and Lucy are depending on it."
"Everybody is," Marian said, putting down a slight twinge of pain at the thought of their daughters. They grew and changed so quickly at that age… "And a lot of them are going do die before we set it all right."
CHAPTER THREE
September, 10 A.E.-O'Rourke's Ford, east of Troy
October, 10 A.E.-Nantucket Town, Republic of Nantucket
September, 10 A.E.-O'Rourke's Ford, east of Troy
October, 10 A.E.-Nantucket Town, Republic of Nantucket
Colonel Patrick James O'Rourke (Republic of Nantucket Marine Corps) threw up his hand to halt the column and reined in his horse. The little dapple-gray tossed its head and snorted; he soothed it with a hand down the neck.
"Steady there, Fancy," he said, bringing out his binoculars.
The horse was one of the Oriental chariot ponies they'd bought locally and broken to the saddle. Some laughed at him for riding an entire male, but there were times when you wanted a mount with some aggression, though. The animal was small, barely thirteen hands, but O'Rourke wasn't a large man himself; a stocky carrot-haired five-foot-eight, which he'd been pleased to find put him well above average in most of the Bronze Age world.
"There they are," he went on, pointing to the smoke of cookfires.
The little outpost below stood in the middle of a valley flanked on either side by rough hills-shrubby maquis of dwarf oak and juniper and tree heather below, real oaks and then tall pines further up their sides, rising to naked rock. Further south loomed Mount Ida; southwestward the rumpled valley dropped down toward the not-quite-visible Aegean Sea, and the plain of Troy beyond. The valley floor was farmland, richer than the rocky plateau to the eastward; it was tawny-colored now at the end of the summer dry season, dust smoking off stubblefields, between drystone walls, turning the flickering leaves of the olive groves a drabber green and coating the purple grapes that hung on the goblet-trained vines. A scatter of stone and mud-brick huts dotted it, clumping around the line of a stream and the rutted track of dry mud road that wound down toward Troy. The sheepfolds and pens near them were empty, and the smokeholes in the flat roofs were cold; like sensible peasants anywhere or -when, the locals had headed up into the hills when the armies came near, driving their livestock ahead of them.
The air was hot and buzzed with the sound of cicadas; sweat trickled down his flanks under the khaki uniform jacket as he sca
The Nantucketers and their allies were camped around a larger building on a slight rise, a bigger version of the huts; he could see where the poles that held the thick earth-and-brushwood roof poked through the peeling brown mud-plaster of the wall. A few tall poplars near it hinted at a water source; a row of wagons and herd of oxen with a few hobbled horses grazing nearby marked the transport they'd brought with them. Another rectangular building stood some distance away, a storehouse by the look of it, and there were a couple of rough stone paddocks.
O'Rourke's eyes caught a flickering brightness on one of the high hills to the south of the valley. Heliograph, he thought. Good that they're keeping on their toes.
He chopped his hand forward again. The group rocked into motion, a column of twos threading its way downward at a trot. The wind was from the east, blowing their own hot dust onto their backs; even at the head of the column O'Rourke could feel it seeping gritty down his collar and getting between his teeth. There were a lot of birds in the sky. This was the season northern Europe's flocks left for their winter quarters, crossing over from Thrace via the Dardanelles; eagles, herons, storks, in clumps and drifts and singly.
For a moment he wished they'd bring some of their weather with them, then crossed himself to avert the omen. The fall rains would start soon enough. Dust was bad. Mud was worse when you had to move, especially if you had to move in a hurry. Nobody in this part of the world built all-weather roads. Nobody except William Walker…
A line of Marines covered the eastern approach to the Nantucketer base, waiting with their rifles ready behind low sangars of stone. O'Rourke nodded approval. Beyond that the little base was bustling; several Conestoga wagons and native two-wheel oxcarts, pyramids of boxed supplies, of barley in sacks and wicker baskets and big pottery storage pithoi. Working parties bustled about, Marines in khaki trousers and boots and T-shirts, Hittite auxiliaries in kilts and callused bare feet.
A wiry twentysomething woman with a brown crew cut came up and saluted; he'd have thought her indecently young for the rank, if he hadn't rocketed up from captain to colonel in about two years himself. Between the breakneck expansion of the Corps in the last couple of years, casualties, and officers getting siphoned off for everything from training local allied troops to ru