Выбрать главу

“The master of Erika, Kapitan Klaus Hauer, and his son and first mate—the fine young man who had rowed over to my vessel—Fritz Hauer, escorted me to the new seat of government and introduced me to him who just then was serving as Präsident of the Aristokratisch Sammlung of Hamburgerstadt, Herr Hubert Klapp-Panzertöt, whose surname was derived of his grandfather, who had been a great hero of the stand against the Eastern European hordes that had invaded Germany.

“When once Hubert learned just how much I in my mind held of the old, near-forgotten technologies of the world of almost, by then, three full generations before, he saw me declared an aristocrat and we two worked together for years until his death, at which time I moved on, traveling with merchants as far as Westphalia. I lived there for some years, a client of the Graf, to whose retainers I taught refinements of swordplay and oriental martial arts. After some years there, I moved on; of course, you know how and why it must be so, Milo.

“For longer or shorter times, I lived all over the German lands, in France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Rumania, the Baltic States, the Russian princedoms, all of Scandinavia, the Kingdom of Ukrainia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Macedonia and, finally the Peloponnese.

“By then, nearly two hundred years after the Great Dyings, the Greeks were once more getting a bit crowded on their poor and rocky holdings; despite their idiosyncratic perversions, no one ever has been able to fault Greeks at the act of breeding. Unable to feed themselves by way of farming or fishing, many of the men of Greece were become pirates of shipping and consummate raiders of other lands, and my own fleet was one of the largest, strongest and most feared, incorporating as it did techniques and relics of times past which gave it a distinctive edge over its opponents.

“However, as the fleets got larger and more numerous, not just Greek but Italian, Sicilian, Turkish, Syrian, Spanish, southern French and others too numerous to recount, we too often found ourselves fighting each other, bleeding and dying and losing ships to no real account or gain. The field was becoming overcrowded, you see, friend Milo. That was when the great idea occurred to me.

“Following actual years of careful plannings and negotiations, I was able to organize a relatively peaceful meeting of all the leaders of all the larger fleets of Mediterranean pirates and shore-raiders. So successful in many ways were our parleys that some began to take to heart my contention that were they to not all die by way of bloody violence and find as their only grave the belly of some sea-beast, then they had best find arable land somewhere, that they could hold and which would easily nurture them and their get.

“All knew that such was simply not available in most of the seacoast Mediterranean lands, and what little still was would be so hotly defended by present inhabitants as to demand a cost far greater than any possible gain, could it be taken at all. So I told them of the vast, almost-empty spaces of the sparsely inhabited North America that I recalled from before I had sailed back to Europe. I spoke of the fertility of the earth there, of the rich ruins to be stripped, of the thick forests, the abundance of clear water, the sad, huddled, all but helpless knots of survivors, the plentitudes of wild and feral beasts to be eaten and skinned or captured and retamed to the uses of man.

“Two decades of my sermons they heard, and following two deadly calamities that struck almost as one—a very powerful man ascended to the sultancy of the Turks and began to not only put down pirates with his numerous and intrepid fleet, but actually to mount bloody seaborne raids on the bases of the raiders, then a succession of terrible earthquakes and resultant tsunamis devastated the Peloponnese, Crete and many other islands—a large percentage of the sea-robbers of Greece, southern Italy, Syria, Sicily and even far-off Spain made indication that they would favorably consider setting sail across the ocean to a new land where the Turks could not so easily hunt them out.”

Milo just stared. “You? It is you who was responsible for the conquest of most of the East Coast by the ancestors of the Ehleenohee, Clarence?”

Bookerman-Laskos shrugged, self-deprecatingly. “It wasn’t all that easy, Milo. Ships that were fine for sailing or rowing on the tideless Mediterranean would never have made it across the Atlantic, and I knew this fact even if others did not know it or think of it. I had all of the bases moved from Crete and Cyprus, Sicily and Malta, Sardinia and Corsica and the Balearics to a single point, a huge, sprawling base, on the coast of Portugal, a bit south of the vast ruins of Lisbon. We were compelled to conquer the people of that land in a succession of wars. Only then could we go about utilizing their labor, their wood and their shipyards to build for us an oceangoing fleet.

“I like to think that we were good rulers and protectors of the people, Milo. We drove off countless raids by sea-rovers, defeated utterly two in-force raiding fleets of Moors and one of Basques. In answer to repeated provocations, we sailed up to Bilbao, scuttled or burnt all of their ships and even boats, went ashore and defeated their forces, then looted and fired the town that squatted among the ancient ruins. No, I had forgotten, we did not destroy all of their ships; those that looked usable to our purposes, we sailed or towed back to our base to add to our burgeoning flotilla, and, having learned from this episode, we began to do the same to other Atlantic-coast Spanish, French, English, Irish and other ports. We carefully scouted out objectives, struck with overpowering forces, fought hard, but then most often sailed away with only usable ships and easily come-by bits of loot, ships’ stores and perhaps a few new women.

“Even so, doing the best that we could, doing it as carefully but still as fast as we could, it took us the best part of eight years to make ready for the great adventure. Using ancient maps and charts, I laid out our course for North America, and, late in August of that year, we set sail out of our jam-packed harbor— nearly twelve thousand men aboard seventy-eight ships, leaving almost as many men to follow in a second wave whenever enough bottoms were built or taken from others to bear them. And even as we sailed out into the Atlantic, more of our kind were sailing in from the Mediterranean, fleeing the wrath of the savage Turks.

“The voyage, unlike my terrifying solitary one two centuries past, was relatively easy and almost serene. We did not begin to lose ships until we had sailed into the coastal waters and begun to run up against unmarked shoals and other dangers that were not, of course, shown on the two-hundred-year-old charts. But, recall, please, Milo, this all occurred more than two and a half centuries prior to that horrible spate of seismic disturbances, volcanism, tsunamis and land subsidences, so the coast was basically unchanged, with few swamps worthy of the name along them, so landings were effected with a fair degree of ease and we began to acquire a few mounts and send out some parties of scouts to see what lay before us and allow us to carefully choose initial objectives, for it was plain that the lands were not deserted as I had recalled them from so long in the past, but that certain numbers of folk were living on them, exploiting them in various ways.

“We had landed on the Atlantic coast of that area once known as the State of Georgia. There were many ruined places, yes, but there were also quite a few agricultural settlements, two of these large enough to be considered small cities, by then-current Mediterranean standards, and these were called Savannah and Brunswick. We knew that both must fall quickly were we to gain uncontested possession of the rich croplands between them; also, we needed harborage for our fleet, lest the autumnal and winter storms wreck it.