And half the humans living west of the Sierras could die in the next six months. Maybe three-quarters or more. Nor was that all.
"Don't forget that hoofprint," he said.
"Your people?" Tidtaway asked, his face unreadable.
"No." Giernas shook his head emphatically. "No, I know all the outposts of our folk and there are none near here… bringing horses here by ship would be hard. Not worth it for a brief visit, and I don't think our ships have even done that." The Islanders looked at each other. Not likely to be William Walker's men, for which they all thanked their various Gods, not while he was pinned in the Mediterranean. Isketerol's would be bad enough…
"Well, hell," Peter Giernas muttered very softly to himself, in the topmost branch of the valley oak that would support his two hundred pounds.
Valley oak ran to big branches; he was sixty feet up, lying on his belly with his long legs wound around the limb below him, screened behind a flickering barrier of green leaves. That was distracting while he peered through the binoculars, but much safer. He'd also taken care with the sun angles to make sure the lenses wouldn't flash and betray him. Now he handed the instrument up to Jaditwara, who could get a good deal higher.
She took them silently, sweat running down her face from the fur cap that covered her buttercup-colored hair, hair that nobody would think was a local Indian's if they saw it through a telescope. The Fiernan woman raised them to her eyes, hand moving slightly as she scanned, then let them drop to hang on her chest, made a correction to the drawing on the big pad before her, repeated the process with exquisite care.
Giernas stared in the same direction, although without the glasses his target was simply a dark blur in the distance, north beyond the river in the middle distance. It was the only break in the dead-flat plain ahead, until the abrupt volcanic pimple of Sutler's Buttes ten miles nortwestward, and unlike those it was man-made. Every detail was burned into his memory.
The Tartessian settlement sat north of the point where the Yuba River flowed down from the mountains and joined the Feather. Everything looked normal on this side of the river. The alienness started on the other shore. Furthest out from the settlement were herds of sheep, cattle, horses, sounders of swine rooting around in the tule-reed marsh by the water's edge. Mounted herdsmen directed locals on foot, and he could see enough of the riders to know that they were white men. The fort-town stood well back from the river, on a natural levee. Not very big, a couple of acres surrounded by a ditch full of sharpened spikes, a turf-sided earth wall twenty feet or so high, with corner bastions of squared logs snouting cannon- twelve-pounders, he thought, though it was hard to be precise. There might well be rocket launchers and mortars inside, of course. There was certainly a wooden palisade all around atop the wall, black-oak logs tightly placed and trimmed to points, about twenty feet tall-probably the butts of the trunks were rammed seven or eight feet deep, with bracing and a fighting platform behind. He could see an occasional flash of metal from along the row of sharp points. Soldiers with Westley-Richards rifles like his.
All in all not very formidable, if there were any way for the Republic's armed forces to get at it, which at present there wasn't. Even in peacetime getting an expedition here would be a stone bitch, assuming you could get the Meeting to put up the money.
Against locals, this fortlet would be as invulnerable as steel and concrete, and it looked formidably permanent. As if to emphasize the fact, cultivated fields surrounded it, wheat and barley waist high in the warm sun, only a month from harvest; corn coming along well, alfalfa, vegetable plots, flax, a low scrubby bush that he thought might be cotton. And small orchards, vineyards showing long green shoots; they looked a little odd, goblet-trained rather than on T-stakes in the Islander manner.
Hmmm. The biggest of those fruit trees, I'd say they were seven, eight years along. But could the Tartessians have done this in the Year 3? Maybe, if they used the Yare and started right after Isketerol's takeover, but that would tie everything up for them… no, wait a minute. This is a lot warmer climate than back home; trees grow faster if you water them. Cut that estimate in half… yeah, they could managed it then, sure.
Unlike the Republic, Tartessos wasn't short of people, just people with the more complex of the new skills. The major cost for this would be tying up ships and navigators.
Hmmm. Lessee… The herds hadn't been very numerous, except for the pigs, which bred like flies; the sheep were in-between. So, ship in young pregnant mares and cows and ewes, a few sows, with only a bull and a stallion and ram or two-
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?"