"Soon, my chief," the man said. "By the Bull I swear it."
Man? Hetkdar thought. Eunuch. Woman. No real man would let the Taratuz lead him away captive, to work in their fields and mines.
Then the captive pointed. "There! There! Did I not swear it?"
A buzzing drone came from the south, over the snowcapped tops of the mountains, echoing down the great slopes. The sun flashed on something there, bird-tiny. But it grew, and grew, until it was a fish-shape floating through the air, like a log in water. Hetkdar bared his teeth in hatred. So many new things, and all of them hurt the Real Men.
The great fish-shape came to a halt, hovering still. No wings beat about it. His eyes went wide as he saw men moving behind openings below the long hull; it was longer than long spearcast! The balloons of the Taratuz were nothing compared to this, for it moved like a boat in water, obedient to command. As he watched, ropes fell from its belly and men slid down those ropes. They knelt, in a posture he recognized from Taratuz war bands, their rifles ready. Hetkdar's eyes narrowed as he saw something protruding from the long house that ran beneath the belly of the airboat.
A cannon? he thought. No, for it seemed to be made up of smaller barrels, like a rifle-six of them, in a circle. A weapon, though.
He stood and walked toward the foreigners on the ground, the captive dogging his heels. The thing in the airboat moved a little. A weapon, he thought again. The strangers were properly wary; that was good. And if they had powers greater than the Taratuz…
He smiled broadly as the foreign chief squatted and held out a piece of smoked meat-proper manners, at least. The foreigner looked strange, with close-cut hair of a peculiar reddish-brown color; he was dressed all over in clothes the color of dry earth. That was good-perhaps the strangers had some notion of how to hide.
The stranger spoke. "He asks, do you fight the Taratuz?" the captive translated.
Hetkdar squatted in his turn, leaning on his grounded rifle as he would have on a spear.
"We fight the Taratuz?" he said scornfully. "As a hunter fights deer. They are blind; they are clumsy; they are deaf and fat and slow. Before they got the rifles we took their sheep, their cattle, their grain-food and bronze, their women, raiding almost to the walls of Tartessos City."
The foreigner nodded. "We have heard of this," he said. "We fight the Taratuz also. We have a gift for the Real Men."
Hetkdar leaned forward, quiveringly eager. The stranger smelled odd-almost like flowers. But…
"Rifles?" he said.
"Rifles," the stranger replied; Hetkdar needed no interpreter for that, since the word was much like the Taratuz one. "Rifles for all the warriors of your tribe. Plenty of ammunition, too."
"And in payment?" Hetkdar said, holding himself in.
"We want you to kill Taratuz."
A net came down from the airboat this time. In it were many long narrow boxes, and many small square ones. The chief of the Real Men leaped to his feet and howled, dancing and brandishing his rifle aloft. On the hillside his warriors stood likewise; the stranger blinked, and Hetkdar smiled at his astonishment.
The Real Men, with rifles, would kill many Taratuz.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
April, 11 A.E.-Feather River Valley, California
December, 10 A.E.-Black Mountains, southern Iberia
January, 11 A.E.-Hattusas, Kingdom of Hatti-land
December, 10 A.E.-Cadiz Base, southern Iberia
December, 10 A.E.-Great River, southern Iberia
December, 10 A.E.-Off Tartessos City, southern Iberia
April, 11 A.E.-Feather River Valley, California
Cheers were coming from the riverside wall of the Hidden Fort. Dermentol son of Allakenal craned his neck to see what the fuss was about, over on the other side of town. He was bored with watch on the wall, and wished the regulars were back to do it.
All the men of the Hidden Fort were supposed to be fighting-men as well, but his work was with the engine of steam. He loved the machine, loved the smooth power of it, and the way it was predictable. With the eyes of his mind he could see the steam traveling through the pipes and pushing. None of the others understood it the way he did, and he was anxious for it. It was so powerful, but so vulnerable if the wrong thing was done.
Sometimes his wife complained that he loved it more than his children of flesh.
"I wonder what that is?" he said, and leaned over the parapet of the tower on which he stood.
"It's the ship from Homeland," someone shouted up from below. "It's come up the river, right up to us!"
Dermentol's eyes went wide. That would be tricky navigation for a keel so deep. He shook his head and peered eastward again.
An arm went around his throat, reaching from behind and to the right. For a moment he was too shocked to do anything, and in that moment the arm clamped his larynx in the crook of an elbow and squeezed it shut with brutal, unbearable force. Another hand came from the left and gripped his skull.
A voice hissed in his ear, in the Eagle People tongue: "You shouldn't have hurt my dog, motherfucker."
The arms scissored across. He heard a crackling sound like a green stick breaking, and then heard nothing, ever again.
Peter Giernas lowered the body to the ground, ignoring the death stink, and looked casually behind him as a bored sentry might. Eddie Vergeraxsson climbed over the wall, then pulled up the long rope and unhitched the lariat-loop from the point of the palisade log. He was also in Tartessian military garb, and made a marginally more convincing Iberian than Giernas. Peter had shaved off his bright orange-yellow beard, but he couldn't do anything about his height, or the color of his eyes, or the short straight nose and general Baltic cast of his features.
They both went to the doorway on the top of the gate-tower. The sentry on the other side of the gateway had noticed them; he shouted something and waved. Giernas shouted something back and waved himself; it was just a little too far to see a man's face clearly if you looked down a bit.
"By the Blood Hag, I hope this works," Eddie said. "We'd never get away with it if their real fighting-men weren't mostly away chasing moonbeams."
Peter picked up the cloth satchel his fellow ranger handed him, and reached inside until he felt the toggle of the friction-primer. "I just hope Sue and Jaddi are okay."
The green winter landscape of the Guadalquivir Valley rolled by at twenty-five miles an hour; north and ahead lay the forested slopes of the Sierra Morena, the Black Mountains-white with snow on the summits, looking like shaggy white fur where it rested on the trees. Down here in the rolling plains it was much like a spring day back on Nantucket. just cold enough to make their sweaters-military pullovers with leather patches at the shoulders and elbows-comfortable.
It had been nearly a year since Marian Alston-Kurlelo had ridden in a motor-driven vehicle; more than ten years since she'd done so very often. She'd remembered how convenient and fast they were. The scent of burned hydrocarbons wasn't too bad when you'd grown accustomed to bilgewater at sea and streets that smelled of horse piss and dung by land, no matter how often they were swept and cleaned.