"The Taratusus came seven summers ago this spring."
God, Year 4, they got an early start, Giernas thought. Give that bastard Isketerol his due, he's a planner. It took malignant forethought, to start up something like this when Tartessos was just getting its first home-built three-masters and using its new guns to settle old scores with the neighbors. Or maybe he thought of it as long-term insurance… And mebbe Walker gave him the idea.
"At first they were very few. They gave wonderful things"-he touched an iron knife at his belt-"and they helped my people in their feud with the Sairotse folk who dwell downstream. All they asked in return was help with hunting, some food, and a few basketfuls of the heavy rock from the streams that they showed us how to find."
He touched his necklace, which had rough-shaped gold nuggets between the abalone beads, and continued: "They killed many of the Sairotse men with their death-sticks and thunder-making logs. They took all the others and made them dig their ditch and build their wall, cut timber, haul earth and wood to build their great houses, or took them downriver to dig the red rock from the hills near the sea. They took the women of the Sairotse, but few as wives-instead they make them work like their Big Dogs."
Horses, Giernas translated to himself. It wasn't the first time they'd run into that name, among peoples whose only domestic animal was canine.
"We didn't like all that. We fought the Sairotse sometimes, yes, but also they were our marriage-kin. It's a bad thing that they are all gone, a whole tribe, a very bad thing. And so the spirits became angry, we knew that because there were fevers and sickness around the big houses. More and more of the strangers came-now they are more than all the people of my Nargenturuk clan. They rip up the ground to plant their eating grass without asking our leave. They trade like misers, making us bring more and more heavy rock for less and less; they make us bring captives of other tribes, to dig the red rock and burn it-those get the shaking sickness and die. Last year they told all the peoples here that we must bring the heavy rock, and young men and women, and furs, many other things, for nothing, or they would destroy us!"
"Red rock?" Giernas asked.
"Cinnabar," Jaditwara said, after searching her memory for a moment. "Mercury ore." She frowned. "The Tartessians had their own mine for that, we bought it from them before the war, but I think I heard it was damaged in a revolt just after they got it going-I know the price they asked for it went, how do you say, sky-high. The people who live near it are very fierce. The Inquirer amp; Mirror had an article about it. They thought Walker was also buying it from Isketerol."
"What's mercury good for?"
"Thermometers, barometers. Antifouling paint for the hulls of ships. Tanning furs. Medicines. For refining many ores, silver especially. Some chemical things I don't understand. And… explosives. Blasting caps, percussion caps for guns."
"There's a deposit near… San Jose, I think was the name," Sue put in. "Just south of the big bay."
Giernas grunted. Ok. That's why they came this far. And the gold. Lots of silver in Iberia, but not much gold. The chieftain waited out their interchange, and continued:
"And now they have brought this sickness on us. They boast that only they can halt it, by a magic of their cows.'" He used the Tartessian word for the unfamiliar animal. "They say it shows their spirit-allies are stronger than ours, their-Gods is the word?"
"Vaccination," Sue murmured.
"And they say they will sweep aside any who will not be their dogs. Our people who go to the big houses to trade now are beaten sometimes, kicked aside like dirt. They give us the water-of-dreams, then laugh when we drink it and act foolishly, when we give all our trade goods for another flask. When they think we do not hear, the outlanders boast that one day they will sweep aside all the peoples of this land, take it for their own! And they have some magic, that their women bear many children and all live, so they grow fast even without new ones landing from their great canoes with clouds to push them." He shook his head. "I do not understand this magic. But I can see that soon they will be too strong for us, even if all the peoples united against them."
Giernas nodded sympathetically. Hunter-gatherers like these usually had ways of keeping their birthrates low-low by the standards of the ancient world, of course. They had to, since a woman couldn't handle more than one child too young to walk; not when she had to hunt edible plants every day, and move camp, too, and carry gear besides. So they made sure she had three or four years between kids; via a low-fat diet that lowered fertility, prolonged breast-feeding that did the same, taboos on sex for nursing mothers, sometimes abortion or infanticide, or a lot of kids just plain died of one thing or another in the hungry parts of the year.
The Tartessians had been peasant farmers for thousands of years. They bred a lot faster, since they lived in settled villages. Before the Event they'd also died a lot faster than hunters, particularly their children. Now they had lots of food, and pretty good preventative medicine, thanks to Isketerol and Queen Rosita, who'd been Registered Nurse Rosita Menendez before the Event. Not many of their women died of childbed fever any more, and ninety percent of their kids were going to live to have kids of their own. When the average woman had eight or nine, that added up pretty damned fast. The same thing was happening in Alba, and in the Republic. Even if they didn't get any more people from their homeland, the Tartessian settlement here in California could double in numbers every twenty years, while the locals declined.
"Tell him again that we can do something about the smallpox," Giernas said.
The chief grunted, thought for several minutes in stony silence, absently scratching at his head. Giernas sighed mentally; there would be another long siege against lice. What was the old joke? At least our fleas and nits will mourn the passing of the human race…
"Will you fight for us?" the chief asked.
"Pete, I don't think we've got any choice," Sue said. "Unless we're going to turn around and run like hell, right now."
Giernas swallowed. Leaving most of the people in this part of the continent to die off, and a nest of Tartessians here where nobody suspects. We might not make it back to tell anyone, either. He looked over to where his wife and child sat.
"Honey?" he said softly. "What do you want to do?"
Spring Indigo gripped her son tightly, but her voice was steady. "The Tartessians are Eagle People enemies. How could I not stand beside my man, as my sister says?" A smile: "I know you will fight with a strong heart, Pete."
Giernas nodded. A Cloud Shadow woman adopted her husband's feuds as her own; and Spring Indigo was just plain brave besides. Throw that into the scale, then. He just plain didn't want to look into those dark lioness eyes and say he was going to skedaddle.
"Eddie?" he asked; no doubt there.
"I say fight, if there's anything we can do." A shrug and a grin: "They've got to have more gold in that fort than we can carry. You're the boss here, though."
Hmmm. Eddie's shed a lot of that bull-at-a-gate berserker stuff. Prudence rubbed off, evidently.
"Jaddi?"
The Fiernan-born girl nodded crisply. "Fight," she said. "It is evil, what they do here. I don't want Moon Woman to turn away from me when I ride the Swan."
Giernas sighed. "Okay, let's see what we can do. For starters, we have to make Spring Indigo and young Jared safe." As safe as we can, gnawed at him.