Another had worked his way around the circle covered by the Tartessian rifles, all the way to the stalled wagon. He flopped to the ground near Giernas; then the two men looked at each other, realizing suddenly that they had no word in common.
"Jaddi!" he called. "Tidtaway!"
Get the iron tube and its legs from the wagon, he thought, preparing for the work of translation and ducking slightly as another bullet cut a path above his head. The horse snorted, but kept still as he fired across its flank. Even a light field mortar outranged rifles comfortably. Bring it back there- another three hundred yards southward should make a safe firing position. And then…
Ahead, a faint rhythmic sound came from the embattled Tartessians. It was a moment before he realized it was singing. Jaditwara paused in her leopard-crawl through the grass, her rifle across the crooks of her elbows.
"It is, how you say, a hymn," she said. "A hymn to the Lady of Tartessos, they ask her to welcome her children home to her." Giernas's mouth quirked. The yellow-haired girl went on: "That they are brave does not mean they are not bad, Pete."
He nodded, sighing. He'd do whatever it took to win, and to win safety for his child and friends, but there were times he didn't like the taste of it.
The site of the battle was much as Peter Giernas had left it an hour ago, although the locals had gotten tired of jumping around and waving their new knives and swords in the air; a few were dressed in bits and pieces of Tartessian uniform. The captured horses were staked out to a picket line, at least, and his friends had seen that the rifles were collected. Birds were wheeling overhead, buzzards, condors, even a few hawks and eagles-none of them fussy eaters, he knew. The bodies had been piled up into a heap. He sighed as he came close.
"Yeah! Come up there!"
Eddie Vergeraxsson bent, gripped the central tuft of a dead man's hair, and made a quick circle with his skinning knife, wrenching and pulling as he did. The locals looked on with expressions ranging from awe through horror to fascination; scalping wasn't a widespread custom in the Americas of this era. It was among the Sun People of Alba, though, when they didn't have a chance to take the whole head home and nail it over the doorway.
More of the Indians were wandering around the heaped corpses, some brandishing captured swords; others were sitting by their own dead, singing quietly in a wailing falsetto, minor-key laments. They'd lost more men than the Tartessians, even in victory.
"Eddie, cut that out-you're giving them ideas, goddammit."
"Okay, Pete," the other ranger said cheerfully. "Though-I mean, hell, if you want to keep their ghosts down you have to at least… oh, well, sorry." He stopped, picked up one of the locals' darts, stripped off the feathers to make it look more like a spear, and ceremoniously threw it over the mound of corpses, dedicating them to Sky Father and the Crow Goddess.
Giernas nodded. There isn't a man in the world I'd rather have at my back in a fight or beside me on a hunt, he thought. You can rely on Eddie, and he's fun to sit down and have a beer with, too. I love him like a brother. It's just that sometimes he's an asshole, is all.
He rode on to the wagon. Sue and Jaditwara were inside, talking as they inventoried the contents:
"… nucleosis you Eagle People are always on about."
"Monogamy. Mononucleosis is a disease."
"As I said."
"Little Jared's cute as a button; but raising kids sure is easier with an extra pair of hands. We'll even find a use for you-know-who-
He could tell by the way they cut off when he reined in that they'd been talking about him. Women, he thought. Grand creatures, but Lord do they like to gossip.
He slid out of the saddle and tethered the horses, taking Jared from his mother and swinging him high until he gurgled and giggled, then handing him back.
"Everything okay?" he asked Sue anxiously.
"Hi, Indigo! Yeah,'s okay, Pete. I talked some with the Tartessian medico-slight concussion, gave her some willow-bark extract-and they're using the straight Jenner vaccination technique. That cow most definitely has cowpox, too."
She brought down a wooden box, brown olive wood marked with a device like an inverted pyramid divided by a line, and bound with brass at the corners. Opened, it revealed vials marked in the Tartessian tongue, with English translations, hypodermics, scalpels, probes.
"She's not a doctor, really, even by their standards-about equivalent to me, sort of, if Jaditwara understands what she said. This is the cowpox serum. Matter from the udder sores, egg medium." The serum was in little wax-and-cork sealed glass vials nested in individual bolls of cotton, labeled by date.
"I'm using one of my hypos, our needles are finer." She broke the seals, jabbed in the point of the hypodermic. "We want this just under the skin-putting it in a scratch would do it, but this'll be faster."
"And then we will be safe from the sickness, sister?" Indigo asked, looking at the hypodermic with interest. She'd seen them used before, mostly for administering morphia. Everyone had had an injury or two over the past year, and the expedition had doled out a little painkiller now and then to people they were guesting with.
"You may get a few days of feeling ill, light fever, maybe a bit of a rash. Then you'll be safe forever; from the smallpox, at least, sister."
Spring Indigo slipped the buckskin shirt down from her shoulder, face impassive at the slight sting, and then held the piece of cotton fluff on the spot until it stuck. When she noticed him watching her milk-full breasts, she rolled the hip she was holding Jared on a little and winked.
The toddler smiled and babbled and tried to grab at Sue as Spring Indigo brought him 'round. His cry of Mama! turned into a wail of betrayal as the needle jabbed his buttock.
"There, there, sweetums," Sue said. "There there-momma will make it all better."
Not from the way he's sounding, Giernas thought, amusement bubbling up under a vast wash of relief. Nothing wrong with this boy's lungs. Startled and angry more than hurt, but loud.
"You're one to tease us about monogamy," he grumbled to Jaditwara. "Hell, you stick to Eddie like glue. Even when you're fighting and you drive him crazy with that cold-shoulder act."
"1 like Eddie," the ex-Fiernan ranger said. "I want to stay with him and have children together. He just needs to learn that 'my woman' isn't the same thing as 'my horse.' You Eagle People started his… how do you say, consciousness lifting… and I'm finishing it."
Young Jared's wails turned into sobs. The three women gathered around making soothing noises; he felt a little of the usual adult-male uselessness that such occasions brought out, and walked over to where Tidtaway and the local chief and Eddie were moving slowly along the line of captured rifles leaning against a log. Their mountaineer guide already had one of the rifles over his shoulder, and a bandolier and bayonet at his waist, he noted. Others of the war band were butchering the fallen oxen and horses.
"Give me a hand for a second, Eddie," he said.
They unhitched the rest of the ox-team, watching as the big red-and-white beasts lumbered out into the open grass away from the disturbing smell of blood and strange humans. They shook themselves out, milled around, and began to graze. Won't go far, Giernas thought; he'd worked a fair bit with oxen when he did stints as a timber runner for the sawmills in Providence Base. It helped that there was good grazing and water here. The other ranger nodded agreement.