Conquistador (51 page)

“I don't
believe
it.”

“But I assure you.” The old man cackled triumphantly. “What a scandal!”

“Romeo and Juliet,” she said, shaking her head. “I knew they got on fairly well at UNV—they were both in one of the post-Alexandrian history courses I took, and neither of them had much time for the old feuds—but . . . old Otto will
plotz!
He'll have an apoplexy. He'll melt down into a steaming
puddle
thinking about Rebecca's children being his heirs! Abe Pearlmutter won't exactly be happy, either.”

“And your grandfather will laugh
comme un loup
until
he
has an apoplexy,” Boissinot replied happily.

Adrienne shook her head. “Ah, that will be a year's sensation,” she said. “But unfortunately, time presses, Marcelle, and I must get down to business.”

“Bon,”
the old man said briskly. “You wish?”

“I need one hundred and fifty new, standard-size aging barrels this fall before the crush,” she said. “And fifty reconditioned. First quality, Oregon oak, and from north of Puget Sound.”

Tom made a curious noise, and she turned her head. “California oaks don't make good cooperage. Too porous and splintery. French oak staves are impossible to get here, but Oregon oak—that's
Quercus garryana
—is just as good. Particularly if you can get slow-grown wood from northern stands.”

“Oregon oak is
nearly
as good as French,” Marcelle replied pedantically. “
Bien,
I can have those for you by September. Twenty-five dollars a barrel for the new, eight for the reconditioned.”

Adrienne threw up her hands. “Twenty-five dollars! Extortionist! Assassin!”

Boissinot's face was calm as he lit another cigarette and made an expansive gesture with it. “Mademoiselle, as a young man in the OAS I
was
an assassin, and a very good one, even if we unfortunately didn't get that overgrown Alsatian pimp. Now I am a old man, head of a family, with expenses and a payroll to meet.”

“Fifteen for the new. Four for the old,” she said.

He made a contemptuous sound deep in his throat. “Fifteen? I am offering finished work, not raw logs off the dock. Is mademoiselle's name Rolfe, or Pearlmutter?”

“If I were a Pearlmutter, you old fraud, I'd be off to Cressaut in Tara as easy as salmon in spring,” she said. “I wouldn't let sentiment make me pay a ridiculous price to you just because you've been a Rolfe affiliate forever.”

“Mademoiselle is a wealthy aristocrat. She can afford sentiment. I, however, am a man of business; and I need at least nineteen dollars for each new cask. Possibly I might concede six dollars seventy-five apiece for the reconditioned barrels. Transport costs on a special shipment would make up any difference on a quote you could get in Tara, and while Cressaut's barrels are good enough in their way, mine are better.”

“Nineteen is only slightly less ridiculous than twenty-five,” Adrienne said with passionate sincerity. “And the best is the enemy of good enough. You try this with me every summer, Marcelle, and it never works.”

Tom sipped his wine while the haggle went on; personally he detested bargaining, but he had to admit both parties here were skillful, and thoroughly enjoying themselves. This Marcelle Boissinot seemed like a nice enough old duffer, undoubtedly a fine craftsman, beloved by his grandkids and a pillar of the local church and boule club . . . except for that one disquieting glimpse of something else.

Sort of like the Commonwealth of New Virginia,
he thought.

“Ai!”

Jim Simmons swore quietly under his breath as the doctor probed the healing wound in his back.

“Not bad,” the physician said.

“Not bad for
you,
” the Frontier Scout replied.

“Healing well, considering it's been only two weeks since you were hurt,” the doctor said.

“You try lying on your stomach for two weeks,” Simmons said.

There were only two beds in this hospital room: his and Kolomusnim's. The Yokut looked even more absurd in a patient's gown than the Frontier Scout, but he lay with an infinite hunter's patience, eyes fixed on the window and the glimpse of blue sky beyond; both of them were here under the Scout medical insurance program. Kolo's arm was healing well, but he'd lost more weight than Simmons despite the latter's more severe injury; probably because he couldn't adjust to the hospital's idea of “food” as easily, possibly because the environment was just too weirdly alien for him.

“Well, here's some reading material, then,” the doctor said.

Simmons brightened; he already had a stack of books on the adjustable bedside table, and a computer with access to Nostradamus, but a fresh one would be welcome. One of the advantages of having lots of relatives was that there were plenty of people who felt obliged to send you stuff. Of course, they also felt obliged to
visit,
but you couldn't have everything, could you?

It wasn't a book, though: It was a letter, a single cream-colored envelope. Without, he saw, a postage stamp.

“I wonder who couldn't just send an e-mail?” he said to himself, as the doctor finished with his poking and prodding and left the room. “Ah, Adrienne! What a woman!”

He read the letter once, and whistled softly. Then he read it again and again, to make sure the elliptical wording meant what he thought it meant. When he'd finished, he called out to the other man—in his own language.

Simmons wasn't really fluent in Yokut; no more than a hundred or so souls still spoke it, and more than half of those could get along in pidgin English. Still, he'd learned enough to carry on an elementary conversation; Kolo and he had worked together for years, and Simmons had been raised on the frontier, at Scout outposts and stations. It was an interesting tongue; there were things you could say in it with a word or two that required paragraphs in English, and there were English concepts that you couldn't put into Yokut at all.

Some things, however, worked quite well in both their mother tongues. Kolomusnim's face lost its blank look of endurance and came alive as the Scout spoke.

Revenge was a concept that translated quite easily.

Napa town ended with the abruptness Tom had become used to in this weird through-the-looking-glass place, with a belt of wild country that marked the future limits of the built-up area. Evidently it was never going to be more than about half the size of its FirstSide analogue, at least according to the plan.

The road up the valley was two-lane blacktop flanked on either side by broad grass verges and by rows of Italian cypress trees, a little west of the streamside forest. The trees beside the road were giants forty feet tall and more, standing like dark green candles casting endless flickering bars of shade across the road as they drove north; more were growing as field-edge windbreaks among the cultivated land. Their shadows lengthened as the sun dipped westward toward the rough sawtooth ridge of the forest-shaggy Mayacamas; eastward the lower, drier Vaca hills were distant shapes colored in olive-green chaparral and golden grassland; the flat valley floor was never more than five miles from edge to edge, nowhere out of sight of the mountains.

Much of the land was in pasture the color of old honey tinged with green, enclosed with chest-high redwood fences weathered nearly black. The fields were starred with violet camass, blue-flag and golden mariposa lily, and still dotted with a thinned-out scattering of huge oaks that gave the whole valley the look of a great park. Herds of glossy black Angus or white-faced Herefords ambled through grass to their knees and rested in the shade; so did sheep with the rather silly naked look the beasts always had after shearing, and sounders of black-and-tan pigs rooting for last season's acorns. Horses drowsed, or looked over the fences at the vehicles passing by. Every fifth or sixth field was in wheat or barley, ripe now and the same bronze-gold color as Adrienne's hair, almost glittering as it swayed in the long shadows of the evening sun, and so thickly splashed with crimson poppies that he knew without asking they didn't use herbicides here.

Occasional modest vineyards stood green and shaggy with their summer foliage, the earth between the rows disked clean and showing through the leaves in tones of cinnabar or pale gray or brown. The grapevines were well west of the road, close to the foot of the mountains; he blinked again, seeing in his mind's eye the endless monoculture of grapes that was the Napa in the California he knew. Here they were a minor element in the landscape's symphony, and small orchards of other fruit seemed as numerous: cherry and apricot, pear and plum, pomegranate and almond and walnut, gray-green olive and bushy fig. Close to the road an occasional strip of land lay under the whirling spray of irrigation sprinklers, watering crops of vegetables and soft fruit; a crew handpicking tomatoes into boxes waved as they passed.

“Pretty,” he said after a moment.
Actually, it's fucking beautiful, but let's not get overenthusiastic.
“And it looks a lot more . . . mmm . . . established than I'd have expected, considering how recent it all is.”

Adrienne nodded. “The climate helps,” she said. “Things grow fast here; we started settling the Napa in the late forties. And the Old Man is fond of saying that one of the merits of aristocracy is that it encourages the people in charge to think about long-term consequences. If your descendants are going to be living on the same piece of land, you're careful how you treat it. 'Specially if you think in terms of bloodlines and families, and we New Virginians most emphatically
do
think that way.”

“I can see aristocracy might look nearly perfect, if you're on the top of the heap,” Tom said dryly. “Or one of the kids of the people on top.”

“Oh, Granddad also says the drawbacks include continual feuding and faction fights,” Adrienne said. “We've managed to keep those political rather than shootin' affairs. So far.”

They drove slowly, not because the traffic was thick, but because much of it was tractors towing flatbeds loaded with hay or other cargo. One was filled with a pungent material Adrienne identified as Peruvian guano. It made the freshness more of a contrast once they'd pulled by; the air was warmer here than it had been near the strait, in the high seventies, and it had an intense scent that held sun-cured grass, wildflowers, turned earth, a breath of coolness from the jungle-like riverside forest to the east.

That was a thick mass of jade green, deep green, brown-green; tall valley oaks with interlaced crowns; beneath them sycamores, black walnut, Oregon ash and box elder, laced together with a thick mass of California blackberry, poison oak and willow, interwoven still tighter with wild grapevine and blossoming Castilian rose. Birdsong was loud even over the engine noise, and the buzz of insect life nearly as intense; they had to stop a time or two for explosions of monarch butterflies, drifting across the road in orange-white clouds dense enough to hinder vision. Now and then a gap showed a small sunlit meadow or the glitter of the river's flow, or a bend opened up into a little marsh. A half hour north of Napa town they saw a swath cleared for a long timber bridge to the eastern shore, and beneath it a trio of boys on an improvised raft valiantly trying to pole their ungainly craft off a gravel bank in the bright shallow water.

“Probably convinced they're on the Mississippi, if I remember my brothers,” Adrienne said.

Tom had to grin; there were a lot worse ways to spend a summer afternoon stolen from chores than imagining you were adrift with Jim and Huck and the Professor.
He
certainly had, and it took a lot more imagination when you were using the Red River of the North with its bare banks running through endless fields of flax and sunflowers. The two Irish setters splashing around the raft seemed to think it was great sport too.