"I am younger, and I am tempted," his son Heponlos said.
"No, and again, no," his father said, exasperated. "You are my heir."
"You could pick one of my uncle's sons and ask the Folk to hail him."
"No!"
Winnuthrax sighed, and then shrugged. "Well, you can see there's no shortage of young men anxious to blood their spears."
Marian nodded. "Yes, this is the same war-but a different part of it. Isketerol of Tartessos is an ally of Walker's, and he attacked us this spring. We slaughtered them then, and now we take the fight to their homeland. We don't require your aid under the Alliance, but we ask it as oath-friends."
"Hmmm." Winnuthrax rubbed at his beard and then cracked something between thumb and forefinger. "Well… yes, that's what I've heard."
A feral light gleamed in his son's eyes. "Tartessos swims in gold, they say; wine and silver and oil and cloth, many fine things."
Marian felt Swindapa's faint snort beside her. Yes, I know, she thought. They are a bunch of bandits. But for now, they're our bunch of bandits.
"It'll be a serious war," she said.
"But you'll be supplying weapons?"
She nodded, a trifle reluctant. The charioteer tribes would do anything to get their hands on firearms; the Republic kept modern ones- as "modern" was defined in the Year 9, meaning breechloaders-out of their hands as far as possible.
"Hmmm. Well, I'll speak to the folk, talk to the heads of household, and hear their word," Winnuthrax said.
He was a long way from an autocrat; war-leader, yes, but there was an element of anarchic democracy to these tribes, at least as far as free adult males were concerned.
"Let it never be bandied about that the Thaurinii don't stand by their oaths and their friends, and you've dealt well with us, that's beyond dispute." He sighed again. "And enough of business-tomorrow, I can show you some boar worth the trouble of carrying a spear!"
This time it was Marian who sighed. Swindapa had taken the Spear Mark as a teenager, uncommon but not rare for a Fiernan girl; she actually liked hunting big dangerous pigs with a spear. Marian Alston liked hunting, but sensibly, with a gun. Still, you had to keep face. Sun people hospitality was like that; sacrifice, chanting and blood and fire, to put the guest in right with the tribal gods; sonorous ancestral epic; gluttonous feasting, drinking, boasting…
All very Homeric, but a month is about all I can take, she thought. Nearly over, thank God, and then she could get back to the sort of rational preparation she felt comfortable with.
"No, boss, I can't do that," Bill Cuddy said. "Not a straight copy."
He was sweating, a little. Usually Walker was sensible enough, but his temper was more uncertain than usual after the reverses in the East. It was times like these you remembered that he only had to shout, and the guards would come in and kill you-or even worse, hand you over to Hong.
There are times I really wish I hadn't listened to Will, Cuddy thought, forcing himself to meet the cold green eyes and shrug. Yeah, I've got a mansion and a harem and I'm richer than god, and the work's interesting, but sometimes…
The windows of the private audience room were open; outside, the blue-and-white-checked-marble veranda had an almost luminous glow under the afternoon sun, and the trails of hot-pink bougainvillea that fountained down the sides of man-high vases were an explosion of color. The warm herbal scents of a Greek summer drifted in, and the sound of cicadas, almost as loud as the city-clamor of Walkeropolis beyond. A servant entered and removed the remains of a pizza- Walker had eaten at his desk today, things were moving fast-and another knelt and arranged a tray of hot herbal tea, cold fruit juice, watered wine, and munchies. Bill Cuddy didn't feel at all like eating, even those little pickled tuna things on crackers with capers, which he was usually pretty fond of.
Walker indicated the rifle that lay on his desk, acquired at enormous expense via the Tartessian intelligence service in Nantucket.
"That doesn't look too complicated."
"No, boss, it ain't. It's a fucking masterpiece of simplicity; Martins could make one of these by hand, filing it-parts wouldn't be interchangeable, but it'd work. So, yeah, I can make the rifle, no sweat. It'll cut into our Westley-Richards output, total production'll go down for six months, maybe a year-but not all that bad. Besides the loading mechanism and ammo, it's pretty much the same gun-bit better ballistic performance, is all."
"You're telling me you can, and then you can't?" Suddenly Walker smiled, an open, friendly grin, and thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Oh, wait a minute-it's the ammo, right?"
He spun a brass cartridge on the table next to the rifle; the polished metal caught the sun that came through the French doors and spilled flickering shadows across furniture inlaid in ivory, silver, and lapis lazuli.
"Yeah, boss. Look, I could turn out small quantities, yessir. Machining rounds from solid bar stock, maybe-but that'll eat materials, and Christ, it'll tie up an entire lathe all day to turn out a couple of hundred! The drawing and annealing plant to turn out millions of those fuckers-no way. Not in less than three, four years-and to do that, I'd have to pull all my best people off other stuff, and off teaching. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, boss, I just don't have the range of machine tools that Leaton does, or electric power sources or-and he doesn't have to teach all his trainees to goddam read first!"
"Okay," Walker said grudgingly. "God damn. This is going to hurt morale-the men aren't used to the other side having more firepower." A wry smile. "And I'm used to having you pull miracles out of your hat."
The smile didn't reach all the way to the eyes; Cuddy felt himself beginning to sweat again. "Well, yeah, we can't do that ammo yet, but I've had an idea."
"Oh?" Cool interest this time, complete focus.
"Yeah. Actually I was busting my ass trying to figure out how we were going to do what Leaton did, and it occurred to me-why not do an end run instead? So I looked up some stuff I remembered from that book you've got, the one by the dude called Myatt, some Limey Major or something…"
"The Illustrated History of Nineteenth-Century Firearms!" Walker said, nodding unsurprised. They'd already gotten a lot of use out of that one.
"Yup. So I thought, they must have had a lot of problems with drawn-brass stuff to begin with, maybe they had something else? Something that didn't work quite as smooth but that still did the job?"
Walker nodded again; that was also something they had a lot of experience with.
"So here it is."
He reached down into the leather briefcase at his side and handed over a round of ammunition. Walker took it and turned it over in his hands. It was made a little like a shotgun shell, built up of iron and brass and cardboard.
"The thing like the iron top hat, that's the base," Cuddy said. "Primer we can do-I've been dicking around with mercury fulminate for nine years now; you should crucify me if I hadn't made some progress. Percussion cap in the base, then you wrap a strip of thin brass around that, and then that holds the cardboard tube with the bullet and powder."
The lynx eyes speared him. "Tell me the disadvantages."
"It's not as strong as the regular type. Not completely waterproof, either. And the brass, when the chamber's real hot, it may glue itself to the walls and jam, or tear apart when the extractor hits. But it'll work, boss. I can duplicate this rifle, all it needs changed is the shape of the chamber, and I can turn out this ammo in quantity-simple stamping and rolling, and then handwork assembly-line style."
"Cuddy, you're a fucking genius!" Walker leaned back in his swivel chair, a dreamy smile on his face. "You say it would have screwed us if I'd ordered you to go ahead on duplicating the ammo?"