Giernas stroked his beard. He could feel the information sinking in, then stirring like seeds planted in damp earth in the spring. "Good. Now we know a lot more," he said.
Tidtaway grunted. "Now we know our enemies are very strong," he said.
"Not as strong as they would be if they knew that we knew," Giernas said, not certain that it got across. He bent his brows in thought. Easy enough to say, but exactly how was he going to use the information. Oh, well, if I'd wanted a quiet life with no problems, I'd have joined the Marines…
"I don't think cottonwood's best for this," Eddie Vergeraxsson said.
"It's not," Peter Giernas replied. He took a step back, surveyed the cut, spat on his hands and took up the adze again. "If I was building something to last. This only has to be used once, and black cottonwood works easy."
It was a hot spring day in the California lowlands, and both men had stripped to breechclouts and moccasins for the work despite the mosquitoes. Sweat ran down their bodies as they straddled the edges of the cut in the big cottonwood log, a familiar enough sensation to both of them as they swung the adzes with full-armed overhead cuts. The soft wood came free in big wedges, flying to join the piles of chips on either side. Occasionally they would pause to throw handfuls more out of the growing trough, or to touch up the edge on an adze. The air was heavy with the balsam odor of the sap in the fresh wood.
He'd decided on this spot because there was a grove of the cottonwoods near the banks of the river. They'd cut four, each with a good straight section fifty feet long and at least a yard across. The locals' eyes had gone wide at how fast the felling went with good steel axes, and even wider when the Nantucketers broke out the two-man ripsaw and used it to trim the trunks to size and give them a rough point at the front. Then they'd braced each with stakes driven deep into the soft ground and trimmed off the scaly bark; their volunteers had helped with that. Now they were cutting out the interiors of the big canoes, highly skilled work that would take months to teach anyone else to do. Both of them had learned to handle wood the hard way, working in sawmills and timber camps around Providence Base.
He worked until the strain began to throw his eye off, then stopped for a brief rest, hopping down and reaching for his canteen where it hung on one of the bracing stakes; it was a two-liter plastic pop bottle salvaged from Madaket Mall on the Island, encased in thick boiled hide molded around the shape, the best you could get. Sweat ran down into the mat of gingery blond hair on his chest, itching, and he scratched absently. The water was tepid but delicious as he threw back his head and drank, then wiped a callused palm across his face and looked around the camp. Locals were finishing off the other three canoes, smoothing inside and out with knives, pieces of sandstone and small hatchets, or arranging poles down the paths they'd take to the water. Sue and Jaditwara were over toward the camp proper, where they'd set up an improvised workbench and sawhorse, roughing the oars from red alder wood with saws and axes, finishing them with handadze, pullknife, and spokeshave before handing them over to tribeswomen to smooth by rubbing with sand and leather. For variety they trimmed plank seats from sections of split alder, drilling holes and whittling out treenails to fit from black oak sticks.
He noticed more than a few envious looks at their tools- drills, gouges, chisels-as tribesmen went by. Well, looks like I'm doing Gardner Tool amp; Hardware's sales pitch for them again. The more complicated Islander machines might appear magical and distant from ordinary life; they evoked wonder rather than a fierce lust to possess. But show people a tool that would really ease their daily work, and that was another matter altogether. You could cut down trees with a polished stone ax, and shape them with fire, flint, and obsidian, but it was hard. The Tartessians evidently hadn't more than scratched the surface of local demand.
Spring Indigo looked up from the main campfire and waved to him. There was a big trough there, a sort of large bucket of hide slung from a pole frame, nearly full of water. Venison and wild onions and roots and greens were cooking in it, heated by dropping in hot rocks and then stirring them around to make sure they didn't burn through the leather. It was a little more cumbersome than a metal cauldron, but a lot lighter, and easier to carry unbroken than pottery. The wind brought him a whiff of it, and his belly rumbled. He waved back to her and rubbed the ridged muscle over his stomach, grinning. She pointed up to where the sun would be in an hour and a half.
The expedition's two leather tents were set up on either side of a big live oak that offered convenient branches to hang things from, and their horses were grazing not far away; the locals were camped a bit downstream. The river to the east was the Sacramento, not the Feather, so there was little chance of Tartessians happening by, but he'd made sure that nothing was visible from the water itself-they would cut paths for the canoes at the last minute-and he had plenty of sentries about. The locals might not have much notion of consistent effort, but they understood keeping watch very well indeed.
What they didn't know, though… he sighed and looked at the firing range they'd set up. Tidtaway was running the eager volunteers through another round of dry-firing, doing the loading drill with imaginary cartridges and priming powder over and over again, firing with no flints in the jaws of the hammers to spare the surfaces of the frizzens. Then he would pace off the distance to the nearest target, counting loudly, run back to point out the appropriate notch on the sights, go further, and repeat the process.
Luckily most of the local hunters were pretty good at estimating range already, and they'd eliminated all the ones with bad eyesight. With only ten or so rounds each to practice real shooting with, though, he wasn't sure how much good it would all do. Every hour or so he or Sue or one of the others would go over and make sure that Tidtaway wasn't teaching anything too wretchedly wrong. The mountaineer from the Tahoe country did seem to have the makings of a good shot, if only they could let him practice enough.
They just didn't have much time, at all…
A cold wet nose thrust into his armpit.
"Goddammit, Perks!" Giernas hissed, blinking his eyes open into the predawn gloom of the big bison-hide tent. The air smelled of leather, sweat, and a bit of the damp chill, like the beginnings of fog.
The dog backed away, mouth hanging open in a canine grin, then turned and slipped through the opening of the tent. Spring Indigo poked her head in a second later.
"It is time to wake, husband, sister. Come wash yourself with water, drink water, make your blood thin and healthy!"
Spring Indigo's furs and blankets were already neatly rolled up. Giernas yawned, stretched and reached over to pull down the light blanket Sue was using. As usual, she was sleeping on her face and still dead to the world except for a few muffled grumbles.
"Wakie-wakie!" he cried, then administered a resounding slap to her buttocks. The resilient muscle under the thin smooth layer of female fat bounced his palm back into the air, stinging slightly.