"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.
"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."