A roar went up from the watchers. Two women darted forward and bent over the row, grabbing double handfuls and tying them into sheaves with a twist of the straw. Small children ran back and forth shrieking; crowds of their elders trotted into the field and followed the reaper, making the oxen even more nervous. Alston crossed her fingers behind her back, licking lips salty with sweat and thick with dust- at least the weather had been good, hot cloudless days. Less rare now than up in the twentieth, but still unusual for a warm spell to last so long. A good omen, in its way.
Two older men and a woman, richly dressed, stayed by the clump of Americans and their Fiernan allies; one of the men had a thin-bladed bronze sword like a rapier, and the woman carried a walking staff with a carved owl's head on it.
"You did not lie," the man with the sword said. "One such machine"-he used the English word, horribly mangled-"does the work of twenty."
"Yes," Alston said. "And the ones who work the machine need not be strong or fit."
Abe Lincoln's secret weapon, she thought. McCormick's machines had cut the grain of the Midwest while the farmers' sons were away in the blue-clad legions of Sherman and Grant. Unlike the slaves the Confederates had relied on, a reaping machine wasn't likely to run away.
"And that means"-she switched to English for a moment-"Ian, Doreen, the maps"-then back into Fiernan, with occasional help from Swindapa-"that you can send fighters and grain to the meeting place that the Grandmothers of the Great Wisdom and the Council of the Sacred Truce suggested."
At our strong urging, she added silently. No need to complicate matters, and the Fiernans could be damned touchy if they thought someone was trying to boss them.
The three locals were leaders in this area, or at least as close as the rather anarchic Fiernan Bohulugi got. They looked at each other, and then back at the machine making its way around and around the grainfield, working its way in from the edge. Then the woman looked up at the sky.
"The weather is good," she said. "But you can't count on that."
Everyone there nodded. Bad weather in harvest meant grain that had to be dried over fires, or worse still that went bad in the storage pits. That was why these people nearly killed themselves in harvest time; you had to get the harvest cut as fast as humanly possible.
The man with the sword tugged at his barley-colored mustaches; he had a stubbled chin. The cloth of his tunic was plaid, squares of woad blue and pale yellow.
"I don't… will that machine keep working? What if it falls sick? If our strongest are away, and it sickens, then we lose the harvest and our children starve."
"If the Sun People burn your houses and steal your crops, you'll all die. And we have skilled craftfolk who can tend any hurts the machine takes," she went on. The miracle of interchangeable parts. "They'll show your own people how, too."
The third man rubbed a gold neck ring. "As you say it, these machines need fresh… pieces… every now and then? They wear down, like a knife that's been sharpened often?" Alston nodded. "Then if we use them to harvest, we'll have to buy the pieces of you in future years, even if you give them freely this season."
Damn, got to remember-primitive doesn't mean stupid. At that, the Fiernan were better traders than the charioteers; they didn't think of all trade in terms of gift exchanges, for starters. That was one reason the Tartessians didn't like them. The easterners were easier to trick.
"You can always go back to using sickles, when there's no war," Swindapa pointed out spontaneously.
The gold-decked man laughed; he had a narrow dark face and black eyes. "Water flows uphill faster than people will give up an easier way of doing," he said. "And it'll be, Drauntorn, you're the Spear Chosen-go bargain for us with the Eagle People, so we don't have to break our backs or risk untimely rain. And scowls and black looks and no help for us trading men if we don't, so we'll have to pay even if the price ruins us."
Alston spread her hands. "We're not mean-hearted bargainers," she pointed out. "Ask any of your people who've dealt with us."
"I'm kind to my pigs, too, when I'm fattening them," the man said.
"Would you rather deal with a Sun People war band?"
"Few have come this far west… but no, no, there's wisdom in what you say."
"Many of your people think so," Alston said delicately. "Many are gathering."
Swindapa had suggested the strategy. If a Fiernan community got violently unpopular with its neighbors, they'd steal all its herds, plus withdrawing the day-to-day mutual help that was an essential safeguard against misfortune.
The Arnsteins returned and spread the map on the table. The Fiernans' eyes lit as she explained it; they understood the concept, but it took a while to understand the alien pictographic technique.
"… so this shows your land from above," she said, circling her finger over a map of southwestern England from Hampshire to Cornwall and north to the Cotswolds. "Here is your district. Here is where the host will muster, three days' march. All shown as a bird would see it."
Or it shows things as Andy Toffler sees them on surveying flights with his camera, she added to herself.
Aloud: "From this, and from the… ah, memories… of the Grandmothers, the number of fields and the number of houses and people can be told. To make sure that everyone bears a fair share of the burden of the levy, you understand."
And so nobody can wiggle out.
"Men can walk," the mustachioed Spear Chosen said.
"Cattle and sheep can walk." Both the men looked pained; those were their capital assets. The woman-priestess, Alston supposed-gave them a sardonic sideways glance. "But grain can't walk, and it's hard to haul any distance."
Alston rested one hand on the map and pointed with the other, to the big Conestoga-style wagons the Americans were using; dozens of them had come back with the Eagle, knocked down for reassembly.
"We have better wagons, as well," she said. "Each can haul, ah-" she looked down at a conversion list that translated English measurements into the eight-based local number system and units-"two tons of grain five to eight miles a day." Even over these miserable tracks you people call roads. "We have a machine to do the threshing, too. So you can move both the fighters and their food."
The discussion went on. So did the work in the fields; the Fiernans there were singing as they bound and stocked the sheaves of grain behind the reapers, happy as children on holiday. Alston remembered what her back had felt like after stooping over a sickle for a few days. I know exactly how they feel.
"These Eagle People think of everything," the Spear Chosen with the bronze rapier said, his hand on the bone-and-gold hilt.
Swindapa looked after Marian; she was over by the wagons, taking some message. One of the radios had come with them; she shivered a little. She could understand a lot of what Marian's people did-even a steam engine made sense, once you made a picture in your head of the hot vapors pushing through pipes. No different from boiling water lifting the lid on a pot over the fire, not really. But radios were too much like talking to ghosts.