The practice yard bustled, shouts and kia and the thump and clatter of practice with bokken or the Empty Hand, personnel- mostly officers-getting in the time before the camp fully woke to the day's labor. It was just dawn, the light a twilit purple across the uneven ground and rocks and stumps; she'd never approved of getting too used to good footing and level ground. A steady firecracker ripple from the firing ranges told of others at work; a group of auxiliaries came by on the eastern beach, shambling exhausted beside their Marine instructors after a night exercise further down the long sandspit island.
McClintock says they're about as ready as they'll be without going through Camp Grant, she mused. Oh, well, needs must when the devil drives.
A lot of them had also stood around green with envy as the raiding party lined up to take the first installment of their prize money off the drumheads-part simple greed, part the prestige, status, keuthes of victory and plunder. Many of the Marines and Guard crewfolk felt that way, too; she'd seen one in line in a wheelchair with his leg in a cast, pushed by a friend with her arm in a sling, and they'd both been grinning ear to ear.
She doubted that any of the native-born Islanders would have been that cheerful. It's not that they're any braver than Americans, Alston thought. They're… tougher? Harder-grained? They're certainly less likely to be… shocked… when bad things happen to them. Maybe fatalistic is the word I'm looking for.
"What's on the agenda?" she asked Swindapa as the exercise-yard orderlies collected their armor, bokken, and sodden undergarments, handing them towels and harsh gray ration-issue bars of soap.
"It's 0545 now," the Fiernan said. "At 0700 you're supposed to meet those people Captain Reedy got out of the swamp. Then-
"Fill me in while we walk, sugar."
The beach was blinding-white sand; it and the small wavelets were tinged pink by the sun rising over the water to the east, and the pine forest and marshland of the mainland beyond. The air smelled chill, damp, salt, and very fresh despite the thousands encamped near here. The doctors said the deep wells were producing abundant fresh water, and the composting latrines wouldn't contaminate it. More than enough water for freshwater showers, and some had been rigged here.
Not far away a long U-shape of prefabricated timbers ran down into the water, with smooth steel rollers inset. The Farragut was hauled out on it, kept upright with tree trunks braced against her upper sides, swarming with workers the way a dropped banana would with ants. Most of the copper sheathing had come off her planks. Caulking hammers rang as oakum was pounded between her seams; new sections of planks showed yellow-brown against the weathered gray paint of the rest; tar heated pungent in buckets.
Gary Trudeau was there himself with his officers and chief engineer and the Seahaven people, directing the crews that had the damaged paddle bared to the bright new sun. With the protecting frame of timbers and metal gone you could see what the point-blank cannon shot could do; also how rod and cam angled each blade as it came down to strike the water or rise out of it. She remembered how proud Leaton had been of that…
"What's the word, Commander?"
"Well, the slipway works-no shifting now that the cradle arms are braced on the piles," Trudeau said. "Be a real calisse de tabernac if they moved with that much weight on 'em!"
Alston nodded soberly. The Merrimac was a lot heavier, and it was good in a way that they had a trial run first. A vagrant thought struck her: did the younger man swear in patois because it felt better, or to remind himself of the lost world of Aroostock County, Maine, and its expatriate Quebecoisl There probably weren't a dozen other people in this whole world who'd grown up speaking French, and in another generation there wouldn't be a single one.
"The good news," the young officer went on, "is that there's nothing major wrong with her. No hull frames cracked, the diagonal bracing held. The bedding for the boilers and furnace is a lot better than I thought it might be."
He pointed to where a clangor of hammers sounded, like a legion of dwarves in a steel bucket.
"The funnel will be easy, and then she'll draw okay again. Best of all, we can arc-weld the sprung seams on the boiler pretty easy, once the generator's up."
"The bad news?"
"Ma'am, there are a lot of medium and small things wrong- we're going to have to replace all the blades on the port paddle, retrue the cams and rods, patch a quarter of the hull… a week."
"Fast as you can," Alston said. "I want that cannon and ram to discourage any adventurous thoughts they have over in Tartessos City. And we'll need that slipway as soon as the Merrimac gets here."
She looked at her watch. "Now I've got to get on to those maroons."
"Maroons, ma'am?" Trudeau asked curiously.
She smiled, a slight baring of teeth. "Common phenomenon in slave societies, Mr. Trudeau. People who run away and form communities in swamps and forests and mountains, usually striking back at their former masters in raids."
"Ah," Trudeau said, his blue eyes lighting up in the long face, the Huron tinge in his ancestry showing in swarthy skin and high cheekbones. "Sort of instant, ready-mix, prefabricated guerillas, from our point of view."
"Exactly. And they can be very useful. Our good friend King Isketerol has been making himself a lot of enemies in his haste to build. An illustration of why slow and careful is better, sometimes."
Hetkdar, Zaumin's son, crouched behind a rock. It was cold, and he wore only a tunic of goatskin and rough hide shoes of the same material. He ignored the chill, as he ignored the lice in his bush of stiff black hair and the hunger that gnawed at his middle. If what the returned captive said was true-it sounded wild, but so many impossible things had happened in the years since he was a youngling. All of them had been bad, that was the problem…
The open grassy valley below was on the northern side of the Dark Mountains, near the fringe of his tribe's traditional ranges, though not those of his own Ridge Runner clan. Now it was all that they had. The mountains directly to the south were high, with no passes that any but a Real Man could walk; that had kept the Taratuz away, for they were creatures of the flatlands. But one of their cursed-of-the-Bull roads was not far away to the east, with one of their twice-cursed stinking forts to guard it. The Taratuz could not find the Real Men in the hills, but the thrice-cursed Adirak to the north, who licked their piss, could, and would if bribed with weapons and meat.
I will eat the heart and testicles of their chief, the Bull hear me, he swore to himself.
Hetkdar looked around. Even he could see few of his men, which meant that no outlander could see any of them. Twenty-two, from the Ridge Runners, the Boulder Leapers, and one from the dead clan of the Spear Tossers-they had all been caught in a Taratuz ambush three years ago, and those who did not die went for slaves.
He shifted his grip on the Taratuz rifle that was his proudest possession-only three other men in the clan had one-and turned to glare at the ex-captive. The man was still dressed in a ragged Taratuz tunic of cloth, although he no longer had the fine curved steel sword he'd carried, of course; that rested safely at Hetktdar's side. He looked indecently well fed, too.