The Coast Guard captains looked at him. "Herself, Mr. Raith, herself," Marian corrected him. "A suggestion; look into hauling out the Farragut on the slipway while we're waiting for Merrimac. It would be a lot easier to get her back into shape that way and it'll give your team some shakedown work."
Then she tapped the end of the pointer into her palm, eyes raking the assembled officers. "What we're going to do now," she said, "is take the initiative. I intend to have the enemy reacting to what we do, and always a day late and a dollar short, with a new surprise every time he thinks he's adjusted. We're going to get inside his decision loop. Brigadier, you'll take the Third Marines and the auxiliaries north along this route…"
"Row soft, there." The voice of the coxswain came from the tiller. "Row soft, all."
Swindapa Kurlelo-Alston blinked under the overhang of helmet as rain came hissing down out of the night sky. That hid the Tartessian fort on the bluffs over there to the east, but she could feel its hulking menace in the part of her spirit that bore the Spear Mark of the hunter-eleven-inch guns there…
The darkened oars rose and fell, a low creaking of thwarts their only sound, lost in the white noise of the rain. The water and the night hid everything, sight and sound and scent.
Marian waited quietly beside her in the bows of the launch as the fort fell away behind them and the minutes passed. To anyone else there would have been nothing in her face, nothing in the way her body waited but a tiger's patience.
Ah, you cannot fool me, bin 'HOtse-khwon, Swindapa thought. Not after all these years. I know when you worry. The dance of our souls is woven together in the moonlight.
Inward, she counted off her heartbeats, the old technique for precise time-telling that the Grandmothers had taught before clocks; the effort of controlling your pulse helped you keep calm in danger as well, feedback the Eagle People called it. Worry was foolishness; Moon Woman had turned Time itself in a circle to bring them together…
"Now," she said, her lips beside Marian's ear. "We should be there now."
Marian signaled. The oars froze, waiting, and they coasted forward against the sluggish 'longshore flow. Reeds waved to their left, a moving blackness against the greater darkness of the land. Another boat came very close, saw the white wand in the stern of theirs, veered aside, and waited; unseen, more did behind. Then the prow of theirs grated on something heavy and hard. Her hands reached out with others, felt the links. A chain, massive, the iron links as thick as her thighs and grown with weeds and harsh barnacles. From report, it stretched from one bank of the river to the other, barring the way to anything heavier than a canoe.
"Corporal," her partner's voice said, "get to it."
Rafts of barrels towed astern of them. Figures in carefully preserved black wetsuits, flippers, masks, and snorkels rolled over the side of this and three other of the boats. Those rafts were brought forward and lashed to the chain ten yards apart; a small thick tarpaulin was draped over the middle between while divers anchored the barrels to the river-ooze. Thirty tense seconds, and a rising dragon's hiss beneath the waters. Light leaked around the tarpaulin, and a smell of scorched metal bubbled to the surface. Then all was as it had been, except that there was a gap where the chain had lain on the water. But nothing to show that at either end…
Marian smiled in the darkness, teeth showing in a glint of white. Swindapa felt her own glee awaken.
"Let's go!"
"And to think I thought I'd get away from digging when I joined up," Vaukel said.
"Shut up and dig-it keeps you warm," Johanna said.
Vaukel nodded and swung the pick, grunting as it came around and jarred into the tough, rocky earth. After half a dozen strokes he stepped back, panting, while his squadmate went at the loosened earth with her shovel. Most of their company was working in such pairs-you couldn't do both at once anyway. The rest of the army stretched off to the southward, across the broad undulating terrain, scoring it like an army of moles.
"I think that's got it," she said.
The two-person foxhole was a narrow slit a yard wide and two long, with a section running back like the stem of a T. Vaukel jumped down into it; one part was a little deeper, to give him protection equal to his shorter comrade's.
"Throw down some rocks," he said; when they came he stamped them into the wet earth, to give better footing.
Then he looked up at the sky, where the morning sun was a glow behind the gray. Back home in the valley of the River of Long Shadows he'd have said such a sky-low, wolf-colored, with wisps of fast-moving cloud-would mean rain, or snow since it was cold enough to see your breath. He took a deep breath through his nose, smelling the mealy scent. It felt a little dry for snow, but who knew so far from Alba?
Who knew the world was so big? he thought, looking westward.
While he was a boy, it had seemed that his mother's hamlet was the wide world, ringed by the forest. The sea, or the Great Wisdom, they were a marvelous far-off tale.
When his uncles and elder brothers had marched off to the Battle of the Downs he'd been green with envy… less so, when not all returned, but he'd listened eagerly to their tales of journeying and war and the fabulous things of the Eagle People. Now he'd seen Irondale, sailed down the river to West-haven, and across the River Ocean on a great swan-winged ship, and walked the streets of Nantucket, which was more wonderful still. From there around the world, and past Ur and Babylon, marched from there to Hattusas and on and on, and everywhere there were different peoples and their Gods and ways.
Now men were coming across those rolling downs to the westward, coming to kill him, so he must kill them. Very strange, he thought.
"Good open country," Johanna said, as she looked westward.
Then she laughed. "More open, now that we've burned down or run off everything on it."
"That's a bad thing, wasting the land," Vaukel said mournfully. "Killing stock you can't eat, Moon Woman doesn't shine on it."
For a moment the two Marines looked at each other in the mutual incomprehension of culture-clash, then shrugged and set to improving their quarters with ledges or little caves to store things, and rigging a shelter-half overhead. Snow started to whisk down from the north, small dry granular flakes. They were pounding the heaped dirt and rock ahead of them down with the flats of their entrenching tools-if you left it loose a bullet might punch through-when Captain Barnes came by with a squad leading pack mules.
"Here," she said, and handed them extra ammunition and a bandolier of grenades.
"Thank you, ma'am," Gwenhaskieths said. She hefted the segmented iron egg of a grenade, her thumb caressing the pin. "We could have used some of these at O'Rourke's Ford, ma'am."
A swift grin. "Make these count. God bless."
"And you, ma'am," they both said, comforted.
Johanna jumped up to the firing step and craned her head around. "We've got backup-that's a Gatling they're digging in behind us."
Vauk nodded solemnly and pulled a dog biscuit and stick of hard beef jerky out of his haversack where it rested behind him. The hard cracker challenged his teeth as he bit a corner off and began to chew. They huddled together for the animal comfort of the warmth, and waited. He could feel his companion shivering a little beside him.
Well, that's the Sun People for you, he thought good-naturedly. Flighty they are, sort of. But fierce as you could want when the time comes for a fight.
It was amazing how travel broadened your perspective. Here, dyaus arsi and Fiernan Bohulugi and Eagle People were like a litter from the same dam.
Thunder rumbled in the west. He looked up for a moment, surprised; you almost never got thunder in a snowstorm like this.