The tribal chiefs weren't very foresighted men. By the standards of the twentieth, they were insanely impulsive. They were perfectly capable of grasping a fact thrust under their noses, though; many of them looked as if he'd not only thrust a horse turd of fact under their noses but down their throats.
"The Zarthani threw away our chance for a quick victory. We'll have to keep some men here, skirmishing and raiding, until the harvest. Then we'll muster the full levy again. Yes, it's a delay, but that gives us a chance to…"
When the talking was finished, Daurthunnicar rose from his high seat beneath the stars. "Now we will make the Great Sacrifice," he said. Horse, hound, and man, offered in the grove. "Tomorrow you will hearten the warriors. And we shall conquer."
"Jesus," someone said softly.
Doreen Arnstein whistled softly herself. A small part of her mind was glad to be able to do that, to do anything, without the top of her head feeling as if it were about to pop off. Getting whacked hard enough to knock you out meant headaches, blurred vision, nausea, dizziness, all serious business and lasting for days.
What she saw ahead of her was serious too. She'd seen pictures of Stonehenge, of course. Those sunken, shattered, diminished remnants had nothing to do with the Great Wisdom, whole and living in the bright spring sunshine. The circle of more than twoscore standing stones loomed complete, each fifty tons in weight and topped by their rectangular lintels, making a perfect unbroken circle. Within stood the taller horseshoe shape, five great double uprights with capstones, and the scores of smaller bluestones. Without were concentric rings of earthwork, ditch and bank, and three circles of tall wooden posts wrapped in cords like maypoles.
Not maypoles, she thought. Although children were dancing around several, weaving in and out and chanting in high sweet voices-almost all of them girls. They were observation poles. They varied in height, from twelve feet to thirty; each one would mark the prime position of a star at a given time-or rather, dozens of stars, for each cord could be used at a different angle to give a tangent to…
"My God," she murmured. "Keeping all that straight." She felt an unfamiliar pain in her chest. So much knowledge, so many centuries. The Great Wisdom itself was eight hundred years old, in roughly its present form; as old as the Gothic cathedrals had been to her. More impressive still was the huge structure of knowledge, myth, song, ritual that surrounded it, a feat of memory and persistence almost beyond belief. She lost herself in it, forgetting the movement of the saddle between her thighs, the crowd around her, her very self. She'd been an astronomer-in-training all her adult life, and the passion that had raised these stones was close kin to hers.
"So Thorn and Hawkins were right after all," Ian murmured beside her, jarring. "And I always thought they were cranks."
"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day," Doreen said, equally quiet. "I did too, but they didn't get the half of it. Swindapa's mother, Dhinwarn, what really won her over was that list of lunar eclipses I ran off the computer back on the island. You know, they have a complete series for more than a thousand years back? And predictions for several centuries-that's one thing they use that ring of fifty-six holes for, besides those sighting posts."
Ian grinned. "Remember when you said how useless an astronomer in the Bronze Age was? You're our damned passport to these people!"
"Let's hope I'm as persuasive to all the Grandmothers as I was to Dhinwarn. She had a personal reason to like us. I get the impression that a lot of the others are pretty xenophobic."
The horses turned away from the monument itself, toward one of the big half-timbered roundhouses. Another chorus of girls sang and danced an intricate measure around them. Waiting to meet them were a clump of older women, wrapped in cloaks and silent dignity.
"End-of-semester exams," Doreen muttered, feeling her stomach clench.
"What's that sound?" Miskelefol said, craning his neck.
There was a full moon tonight, but it was hidden by high scudding cloud. Nothing showed on the water, only an occasional gleam of white as an oar stroked the calm surface of the bay. They dared not show lights, and only the loom of the land to his right kept them from being completely lost, that and the instincts of a life spent at sea.
Isketerol cocked his head to one side, lifting the helmet. "Sort of a buzzing sound, isn't it?" he said. "I don't know, some sort of insect?" The life here was still fairly strange to him. "At least it isn't raining much."
"Hurrah, the first time in months," Miskelefol said dolorously.
They snared a quiet chuckle, and then their craft swung apart. There were five of them in all, long low things like miniature galleys, each with ten oars to a side. The Yare and Sea Wolf had towed them here, but stayed well off to sea now. The night breeze was directly out of the west, and it would pin any ship at anchor into its port. Even with the Yare's ability to beat to windward he wouldn't like to have to claw off this coast right now, particularly with the shallow water and shifting sandbars common through here. He risked a brief flash of lamplight to check the compass strapped to his left wrist. Marvelous things, he thought again.
"Take a turn around the canoes," he whispered to the helmsman.
The seaman leaned against the tiller. Rudders were wonderful too, so fast. The crew bent to the oars with only a whisper of noise, sculling in perfect unison. Isketerol gripped the lead stay that kept the pole in the bows upright. Not to hold sails; it was topped by a barrel, and a long cord ran back along the pole. Loose here, and the pole would fall until the barrel submerged twenty feet ahead of the bows. Pull on this cord, and a flint-and-steel inside the barrel would spark… and the load of gunpowder would ignite. They'd tested it against rafts; the results were spectacular enough to make hardened sailors soil their loincloths. The effect on a ship's hull, underwater… The Tartessian smiled and licked his lips.
He frowned as they approached the canoes and coracles. The Sun tribes weren't seamen at the best of times, and in the dark they blundered in continuous near-panic, just as they had ever since they climbed down the sides of the ships and into these smaller craft. He hissed warnings and threats and shaming insults across the water as his larger boat coasted by, bringing a little more quiet. I wish they weren't along at all. They might be useful to ram victory home, but they endangered it beforehand.
"This heading," he said quietly to the man at the tiller. "Slow, all, now."
Around a headland and there was the target, backlit by the fires ashore. Tall masts raking for the sky, the Eagle. On either side of it were the smaller shapes of the Tubman and Douglass, all three ships anchored at stern and bow with about a hundred yards in between. Pinned down and helpless, he thought. Arucuttag of the Sea had delivered them into his hands, and in the silence of his head he promised the Hungry One good feeding. There were fires and lanterns in the fortified camp a few hundred yards farther upstream, but they could do nothing. Will reported that better than three hundred of the Amurrukan were marching inland, far from their base. That left only a score or so per ship, and as many in the fort ashore.
The five boats with the spar torpedoes swung into line, quick flashes of shuttered lanterns guiding them as they'd practiced. The men at the tiller were all well trained, and they'd worked out a simple code to direct them to their targets.
"Forward!" he shouted.
The oarsmen bent to their work, the ashwood shafts flexing in their hands.
"Take your eyes off the Swedish Bikini Team, will you?" Doreen said. "This is serious."