Ayup. Say eighty in the first batch, a medium-sized square-rigger craft could do that, allowing for wastage. Two round-trips in the first year, drop down to the Canaries and across, then down the trades, and allowing for a hard time around the Horn-three trips if you had good luck running your westing down. That would give you useful locally reared numbers of horses in four or five years. If you bred all the mares as soon as possible, the herd would grow by a quarter to a third every year. Likewise, make steers of most of the male cattle to use as oxen, and in six years… In a generation, they'd have more than they could use, even with cougar and bear and wolf to deal with. Geometric progression started slow, but the curve went up fast.
So let's see, two hundred, mebbe three hundred acres under cultivation all up. Enough to support three hundred people say, with hunting and fishing as well.
Or to produce a surplus if there were less, but the Tartessians most certainly hadn't come this far for food or farmland, no matter how wonderful. Apart from sticking a thumb in the eye of the much-resented Cofflin Doctrine, which banned outsiders from trading or making settlements in the Western Hemisphere without the Republic's leave, what point was there in all this?
Fact is, I don't know yet, he thought ruefully. Decision: We'll have to do some scouting and sneaking and keyhole listening to find out. Gathering information was a ranger's job.
"Jaditwara," he called softly. "I don't see any real buildings outside the wall-do you?"
"Nothing but some sheds, haystacks, windmill pumps, that sort of thing," she replied. "And the boatyard by the water."
That meant everyone came back inside the walls at night. There was a jetty on the river, a mill with an undershot wheel and a boat shed, with smaller craft and a big two-masted flat-bottomed sailing barge that looked to be about eighty, maybe a hundred tons burden. Supplies must come in through San Francisco Bay, or more likely the barge took stuff out there, after a ship's boat had come upriver to let them know, and came back with the return load. A minimum inbound cargo, metals and manufactures, the base as self-sufficient as possible. That was crafty. Even if a ship was caught out, there would be no evidence of anything but a casual visit.
"How many-
"Two hundred sixty-three horses, with one hundred seven two years old or older. Four hundred sixty-two cattle. I couldn't get all the sheep or swine, they're too small at this range. Lots of them, though."
"Ah."
Jaditwara hadn't had the full Grandmother training, but she'd done enough that her ability instantly to count things at a distance never failed to startle him. For that matter, she'd memorized his journal and Sue's, sort of a living backup system, and she had a couple of reference books stored in that long shapely skull.
"Pete," the Pieman's soft singsong voice went on. "You notice the flagpole?"
"Hard to miss," Giernas said. "Two hundred feet if it's an inch."
"One hundred ninety-eight," Jaditwara said absently, touching her fingers together briefly in the Counting Chant. "Why so large?"
" 'Mine's bigger than yours,' " he guessed.
Tartessians thought that way, from what he'd heard of them and the few he'd met. The flagpole was made out of a whole old-growth Ponderosa pine, and the flag with the Tartessian mountain in silver on green looked absurdly small at its top. He didn't envy anyone who had to climb up the ladder of crosspieces to fix a jammed pulley. There was a platform around the top just below the flag, too. Hmmmm. It would make a crackerjack lookout post.
They dropped down the sloping trunk. Perks rose from concealment and came over, serious with the emotions he smelled on the humans. Peter Giernas took his rifle in his right hand and began to trot, careful to keep tree trunks between him and the river, although his buckskins would fade into the vegetation and all the metal on him was carefully browned. Once there was a swell of ground between him and the enemy he picked up the pace-lope a hundred yards, walk a hundred. The horses and the rest of their party were with the locals they'd met ten miles away; two hours' travel, without pushing it harder than was sensible.
Then he'd have to figure out what the hell to do.
"This is frustrating as hell," Sue Chau said.
Giernas nodded. The dark somber face of the chief stared back at him out of the night, from across the low embers of the oak fire. The local leader was short and lean and walnut-colored, with silver in the black hair gathered up on the top of his head through a rawhide circle; he was either called Chief Antelope, or was chief of the Antelope clan. Or "big man."
"important person" might be more accurate than chief… Tattoo marks streaked his cheeks beneath a thin, wispy black beard; four more bars marked his chin; bear teeth were stuck through pierced ears, and a half-moon ornament of polished abalone shell hung from his nose. He was quite naked save for a rabbitskin cloak thrown around his shoulders, a belt, a charm that looked like a double-headed penis on a thong, and several necklaces of beautifully made shell beads. An atlatl and bundle of obsidian-headed darts lay at his feet.
Tidtaway spoke a little of the chiefs language; about as much as he did English. He'd been exposed to it far more often, but only in brief spells years apart, as opposed to the continuous months with the expedition. And the chief spoke Tartessian, a little; so did Jaditwara… also a little. Sue had made the most progress over the winter with Tidtaway's dialect, which by happenstance was a tonal language like the Cantonese she half remembered from her father's efforts to teach. Nobody was talking their native tongue, and sometimes they had to go from one badly learned foreign language through another to a third. That meant mistakes, painful misunderstandings, endless patient repetition, and no chance of conveying anything subtle or abstract.
"I think he understands that we're not Tartessians," Sue said.
Giernas sighed and worked his fingers into the deep ruff around Perks's neck. The dog was content enough, or as content as he could be around strange-smelling outsiders; he gnawed at a rack of grilled elk ribs that his master had finished, crunching the hard bones like candy cane in his massive jaws but keeping a sharp ear cocked for the start of trouble. Sparks from three campfires drifted up toward the branches of trees whose leaves were a flickering ruddiness above. Through them the stars burned many and bright in the clear dry air, like a frosted band across the sky.
"Okay, then does he understand that we can protect him from the smallpox?" Giernas said. I hope, he added to himself.
Sue, Jaditwara, and Tidtaway went to work again, hands moving, sometimes looking as if they were trying to throttle or pound comprehension out of the air.
"I'm not sure," Sue said at last. The others seconded her. "I'm really not sure that I got the idea of the percentage risk of the inoculation process across. I do know he's disappointed that we can't cure the ones already sick."
He nodded wearily. You couldn't get the idea of probabilities over, sometimes-some peoples just didn't have the concept, because they didn't believe anything happened by chance; if someone got sick it was the will of malignant spirits, or witchcraft, or the Evil Eye. Eddie'd thought that way as a kid; he knew better consciously these days, but deep down his gut didn't think that there was such a thing as coincidence.
The chief broke in with an impassioned speech, switching from his own language to Tartessian now and then. Tidtaway and Jaditwara translated, sometimes overstepping each other; Jaditwara's singsong Fiernan accent grew much stronger as she drew on words learned long before she came to the Island. Giernas sighed and settled in to a job of mental cut-and-paste.