"Pull up!" Raupasha ordered. Then, in an instant's tender scold: "Plunderer!" to the dog.
The chariots halted a few yards below the crestline; the two fighters jumped from each and turned back to crouch just out of sight from the valley below. The war-cars rolled on a little, waiting with the heads of their teams pointing southeast and the drivers looking over their shoulders. Connor leaped down from hers, and ran to where the mortar team were waiting, checking the elevation on their weapon. The Gatling crew had their hands on the tripod that supported their terrible weapon, ready to run it up to bear on the attackers. Raupasha flopped down on the grass herself, shotgun ready.
"Yes!" she said.
The Achaeans had remounted and were coming on regardless, leaning forward and lashing their mounts into a run. Very sure they would see only the retreating rumps of their enemies when they crested the rise.
"Ready!" she said.
The numbers were about even. With the wonder-weapons the Nantukhtar had given them, though, and the advantage of surprise…
Jared Cofflin kept the Boojum slanting away northwestward on a long tack before turning west, sailing reach with the strong fall wind a little behind his right shoulder. Nobody got seasick this time, thank goodness. Petty Officer Martinelli went forward of the mast, keeping a lookout. Once the spouts of a pod of right whales a hundred strong rose around the catboat, the warm breath-smelling fog drifting around them, and the children stood in wide-eyed wonder.
"They're traveling south from their feeding grounds in the north," Jared said. There weren't any whale-catcher boats in sight. Quota already caught for the year, he thought. "Down to calve in the warm seas."
The tiller bucked in his hand as one rose from the water and crashed down again, sending a wave surging beneath the Boojum's keel, and he laughed aloud at the children's delighted shrieks and the sheer pleasure of the thing.
"Look!" Marian called, pointing. "Oh, Dad, Mom, everybody, look!"
It was one of the small islets off the western shore of Nantucket proper, a low sandy dome rising a few feet above high tide. It was dark with a ring of what looked like moving spotted gray rocks, so thick that the sands were invisible. Jared Cofflin cocked an eye at the wind, craned his head to see by the color of the water if the shoals lay the way he remembered them, and steered closer.
The rocks lifted pointed whiskered noses and their hoarse cries made a rumble of thunder through the bright air. The summer-born pups were fairly large now, their whitish bellies turning blue-gray, craning to see the boat go by with wide-eyed curiosity. Young Marian sighed, and began to recite; then to sing, a tune made recently to suit the poem as it was taught in the Natural History classes of the Republic's schools:
I met my mates in the morning (and oh, but I am old!)
Where roaring on the ledges the summer ground swell rolled,
I hear them lift their chorus to drown the breakers' song-
The beaches of Lukannon-two million voices strong!
"There aren't two million there, are there, Dad?" Jared Jr. said.
"No, son, only a couple of thousand there," his father replied. Jesus, but standards change-a "couple of thousand" seals! "Those are harbor seals; they don't migrate much, just like to congregate. They have their pups in summer."
Martinelli spoke up: "I've seen easy two million-heck, seven or eight, maybe ten, the experts say-up on the St. Lawrence ice, when I shipped on a catcher for the winter harvest. Harp seals-saddlebacks. That's quite a sight, but it's bitter there come February-bitter cold."
Martha got out her guitar, and the young sailor joined in with the children on the next chorus:
The song of pleasant stations beside the salt lagoons,
The song of flowing squadrons that shuffled down the dunes,
The song of midnight dances that churned the seas to flame-
The beaches of Lukannon-before the sealers came!
I met my mates in the morning (I'll never meet them more!);
We came and went in legions and darkened all the shore.
Among the foam-flecked offing as far as voice could reach
We hailed the landing-parties-we sang them up the beach.
The beaches of Lukannon-the winter wheat so tall-
The dripping, crinkled lichens, the sea fog drenching all!
The porches of our playground, all shining smooth and worn!
The beaches of Lukannon-the home where we were born!
I meet my mates in the morning, a broken, scattered band,
Men shoot us in the water-men club us on the sand;
Men drive us to the Salt House like silly sheep and tame,
But still we sing Lukannon-before the sealers came.
"Dad, you won't let that happen, will you?" Marian asked anxiously. "All the seals gone, I mean, Dad."
"No, I won't." He caught Martha's eye. "That is, we won't- all of us-let anything like that happen again," he said. I hope. All we can do is our best. "The law is that people can't take more than the seals can replace, like the rules for whales or fish, so there will always be more." So your kids can see what you do, sweetness, he thought.
The girl's lower lip pouted slightly. "Why do we have to take any seals?"
Unexpectedly, Martinelli spoke up: "Because we have to eat, missy; same reason the seals take fish and squid," he said. "There's plenty of working folk who're glad of a seal-flipper pie, come February. We need fur and oil, too." He shook his head. "Still, that was really something, coming over the pack
»ice and them stretching out further than you could see-to the end of the world, ice and seals, seals and ice. Loud, too, louder 'n cannon-Lord thundering Jesus, but there were a world of them!" He shook his head again in slow wonder. "I'd hate to think of that… not being in the world, that sight."
Well, there's hope for the younger generation, Cofflin thought, and joined his hoarse bass to the final chorus; he'd gotten a lot less self-conscious about singing over the past ten years. You didn't get compared to recorded professionals anymore, just to the neighbors, or at most to buskers and semi-amateurs at the ceidhles and concerts.
Wheel down, wheel down to southern! Oh, Goover-ooska, go!
And tell the Salt-Sea Viceroy the story of our woe;
For like the empty shark's egg the tempest flings ashore,
The beaches of Lukannon shall know their sons no more!
There were other things to point out; two schooners running home from the Georges Bank with their dories stacked on their decks; the unforgettably vile smell and raucous noise of a cormorant rookery on a tiny island; lobster boats and timber barges…
"I recognize her" he said with a brief grin, four hours later.
It was a smallish craft, ketch-rigged on two masts and about twice the length of the Boojum, with a railed crow's nest on the mainmast. There was another railed enclosure forward of the prow, out on the bowsprit. No harpooner kept station there now; the Kestrel was homebound for Nantucket Town, with the tails of half a dozen giant bluefin tuna hanging in triumph from the rigging. The gutted bodies would be in the hold, lying on crushed saltwater ice…
Cofflin felt his mouth water; it was getting on for lunchtime anyway. "Martha, maybe we'd better fire up the galley," he said. Louder, with his left hand cupped around his mouth: "Ahoy the Kestrel, there!"