"Rivendell," Marlins said proudly.
Rivendell, California, Arnstein thought. There are places like this up in the hills, or there were.
He fought back the disorienting onset of post-Event-Syndrome once again; There were a half dozen low bungalow-style adobe buildings with wood-pillared porches, a barn, footpaths, a wooden water race turning a couple of small watermills, corrals and truck gardens… including one that looked very much like a patch of genuine weed. A smell of baking bread, hot iron, oil, and burning charcoal drifted down to them.
"Walker only let me out from under a little while ago," Martins said. "Till then I was, you know, working for the Man mostly. But I've been building this up for a while. Gotta have your own space here, man, or your head can get completely fucked up."
He pushed the small glasses back up his nose, a gesture that Arnstein copied without thinking of it, like a reflex yawn.
"So I got this place going. Sort of, like, a commune, you know? A couple of the guys I've taught stay on, and some of the chicks and their kids. The others out working on their own mostly chip in to pay us back, so we can do right by some more poor types. Gotta have the bread to pay off the ores."
The wagon pulled up, and a swarm of children came running out to meet it. Martins handed out candied figs and hugs, but attended to business first. One by one the slaves knelt beside a small anvil, and Martins split the soft-iron rivets that closed their collars. Some of them wept and tried to kiss his feet; the balding Californian lifted them up and exchanged extravagant embraces instead, before a brawny young man and a woman in a long granny dress and headscarf led them away.
A hippie squire. Now I've seen everything, Arnstein thought, dazed, as he was brought inside to a big kitchen, all whitewashed walls, copper pots and pans, and scrubbed-oak boards. The floor was brown tile, and one wall held a hand-painted mandala, hypnotic and beautiful.
"That's Barbs's work," Martins said, indicating it. "Groovy, hey?"
A comfortable-looking woman in her forties wearing an Achaean gown and a complex of painted scarves gave Arnstein a motherly hug. "Good to see an American again," she said, and pushed him down on a bench. "Hey, you don't get into my kitchen without eating."
She brought him a cup of hot herbal tea and a big bowl of…
"Granola?" he said. "This is really granola?"
"Sure, man-nuts, raisins, whole grains, natural sugars from honey," Martins said, blinking in surprise. "Keeps the minerals and fiber right. Ain't anyone making it on Nantucket? Hey, Barbs, we gotta lay on a big feed for the professor tonight. He's been having a pretty crappy trip; let's give him a good time before he has to go back to Sauronopolis."
The matronly woman in the long colored scarves nodded. "I'll get the barbeque going," she said. "We'll have the welcome-home party for the new folks at the same time." She bustled out.
Arnstein put a spoonful of the cereal in his mouth; the milk turned out to be fairly thick cream.
"Ah… John," he said, after a moment. "It is good to see you again. But why did Odikweos leave us together?"
"Oh, he ain't such a bad guy," Martins said. "You gotta take account of the state of the karmic evolutionary balance."
"Huh?" Arnstein heard himself say. I will recover my mental balance. I really will.
"Well, I mean, it stands to reason, man. See, everyone's going up or down the ladder, right? So back here in this cycle, most of the people haven't had as much time to get up or down the scale-so you don't get many people as good as say, Martin Luther King or Christ or the Buddha, and you don't get many as bad as, like, Nixon. Or Walker," he added with a grimace.
"Ah… that's logical," Arnstein said. "Ah… no offense, John, but you do realize you're still helping Walker?"
Martins laughed. "Hey, Professor, what do you think me and my guys make? We put on horseshoes, man, and repair plows, and make harrows. And we make ornamental stuff, wrought-iron grilles and gates. And yeah, I make swords and knives, like I did for the SCA and collectors back home. We make good swords; but these Achaeans, they aren't going to conquer nobody with swords, man."
Well, you've got a point, Arnstein thought, then felt something nudge his hand. He looked down.
Martins had pushed a small scrap of paper across to him. On it were a string of numbers and letters intermixed. He held it there long enough for the other man to read, then picked it up, produced a leather pouch, tapped out a brownish-green mass and rolled a cigarette with swift, deft fingers. That he lit from a candle on the table and took a long deep breath, holding it.
The acrid odor had been familiar enough once-Ian Arnstein had been on a California campus for thirty years by the late-nineties date of the Event, starting when the Vietnam War was just getting seriously under way. It had been a long time since he smelled it; or saw someone smoking anything, for that matter.
"Want a hit, boss?" Martins said.
"Ah… no, thanks. It reduces my IQ and makes me sleepy," Arnstein said. Then the complete sentence struck home. "Boss?"
Martins's eyes were almost the same shade as the remaining russet-brown in his graying mustache. "Well, you've been running the Nantucket CIA, right, man?"
"Foreign Affairs Department," Arnstein said automatically. Then: "Wait a minute, you mean-
"Like, totally. I've been working for you for years, man, years. Wow, outtasight-you're doing that secrecy shit so, like, you don't know I'm working for you, or even my code? Far out, man, like, fantastic!"
"Need to know," Ian said dazedly.
Doreen must be running him, he thought. Wait a minute, that means he can tell her I'm alive? How does he get information out… no, I do not need to know that.
"Well, a lot of people tell me stuff," Martins said proudly. "I mean, like heavy industrial shit, man-smiths stick together, and I trained a lot of the hot-pounders Walker used right back in the beginning. I got some compadres in Tartessos, too; worked with 'em back in Alba, or they came over here back when-we're pretty tight, some of 'em and me. We shed a lot of righteous sweat together, and you don't forget that."
"Wait a minute," Arnstein said slowly. "You mean to tell me that Odikweos knows you're an agent for Nantucket?"
Martins's long sheeplike face blushed under the weathered tan. "He, like, sort of figured it out," he said. "I don't know how-Mittler, Walker's tame Nasty-
"Nazi," Arnstein correct absently.
"No, he's more like a Stalin type, seriously heavy authoritarian power trip, but he's plenty nasty, you know? Anyway, he's sniffed around, but he couldn't pin anything on me that the Man would listen to. He wanted to off me a long time ago, that guy."
Suddenly Martins's vague good humor collapsed; his face fell in on itself, looking every year of his age for once.
"Oh, man, you don't know what it's like, living here, you got no idea. I want out, man, I want to get Barbs and the kids and blow this place. Rilly, rilly bad. It's, like, Mordor here, just don't look as bad on the surface, but it's worse down deep. Rivendell, it's like an island in a sea of shit, man. I want to go home."
"I don't blame you," Arnstein said. "But…" His mind worked furiously. "I think we've got things to do first."
Well, keeping fit is a duty, Marian Alston thought, as she stripped off the armor and the sweat-sodden padding underneath. I need the endurance and ability to think clearly under stress. Plus the ability to use a sword with skill was a real military asset here and now. No law saying I can't enjoy it.