On the Oceans of Eternity (8 page)

The heliograph blinked from the hillside again. O’Rourke could read the message as well as any ...
enemy force in sight, numbers several hundred.

“—to give you a hand setting up the defenses,” he said. This base had just gone from a forward supply depot to the penultimate front line.

The garrison in Troy was supposed to be buying time for the First Marines; the First was in the westlands to buy time for the expeditionary force as a whole. He only hoped the people back home were doing something valuable with it.

 

“Heather! Lucy!” Chief Executive Officer Jared Cofflin yelled. “Marian! Junior! Jenny! Sam!”

You had to be specific; just “kids!” didn’t get their attention. The children had burst into the Chiefs House, home from school, and were in the middle of some game that involved thundering up and down stairs and whooping like a Zarthani war party doing a scalp dance, with a couple of barking Irish setters in attendance. Cold autumnal wind blew through the opened door, along with a flutter of yellow-gold leaves and a smell of damp earth, damp dog, woodsmoke, and sea-salt.

“Quiet, I said!”
he bellowed, and snagged one setter by the collar. It wagged its tail and looked sheepish, trying to turn and lick his hand, hitting his elbow instead, putting a wet muddy paw on his leg. “You too, you fool dog.”

“Yes, Uncle Jared?” Lucy asked sweetly.

She looked like a picture of innocence carved from milk chocolate, dressed in jeans and indigo-dyed sweater, twisting a lock of her loose-curled black hair around a finger as she rubbed a foot on the calf of the other leg. Her sister Heather stopped beside her with an identical angelic expression, red-hair-and-freckles version. They were both adopted from Alba, of course. Heather’s parents had been villagers killed by one of Walker’s raiding parties—Swindapa had found her crying in a clump of trees not far from their bodies. And Lucy’s Alban birth-mother had died in childbirth; her father had been one of Walker’s renegades, a black Coast Guard cadet from Tennessee. The Islanders had found her in the remains of Walker’s base after the Battle of the Downs; by now he had to remind himself occasionally that they weren’t really twins.

Both brought their school satchels around and hugged the strapped-together books and lunch box and wood-rimmed slateboards with studied nonchalance, a gesture aimed at his subconscious, where the memory of their excellent marks presumably hid ready to float up and restrain his temper.

Might have fooled me,
he thought, trying to school his face into something formidable.
Fooled me back before the Event.
Back then he’d been a widower, and childless. Here he was married and father of four, two of them also adopted from Alba.
I should be insulted. They don’t try this act on Marian or ’dapa, much.

“What did I say about running around inside the house?” Cofflin asked.

Usually sternness came naturally to him; he had the dour Yankee visage common among the descendants of the seventeenth-century migrations that had settled Nantucket, bleak blue eyes, long face on a long skull, thinning sandy-blond hair streaked with gray. But it was hard to look po-faced at a kid having fun, especially with a close friend’s daughter who’d been in and out of your house all her life.

“Sorry, Uncle Jared,” they said together: and yes, they’d seen the twinkle he’d tried to bury. “Sorry, Dad.” his own added, in antiphonal chorus—ages ten to six, but they played together and stuck together.

Good kids,
he thought, and made his voice gruff for: “Well you should be sorry. You especially, Lucy and Heather. You don’t get to run wild because your mothers are away.”

“Can we go over to Guard House and play till dinner?”

Cridzywelfa, the Alston-Kurlelo’s housekeeper, was looking after it while Marian and Swindapa were off with the expeditionary force. Which was fine, but ...

“All right, as long as you don’t wheedle too big a snack out of her and spoil your supper. Be warned!”

Cridzywelfa had been a slave among the Iraiina, back before the Alban War. Many of the newly freed had moved to Nantucket, after the founding of the Alliance and compulsory emancipation; entry-level jobs here looked good to people from that background, without kin or land. She’d learned English and settled in well, and she spoiled her employers’ kids rotten, but wasn’t what you’d call self-assertive.

On the other hand, her own two, they might as well be American teenagers. Or Nantucketers, to be more accurate.
The melting pot was bubbling away merrily around here, of which he heartily approved, but not all the seasoning came from the local shelves.

The pack of them took off, with the dogs bouncing around them. The door banged shut, and the sound of children’s feet and voices faded down the brick sidewalk.

“Sorry,” he said to his two guests as he led them down the hallway.

Sam Macy grinned and shook his head. “Heck, I’ve got five of my own, Jared.”

Emma Carson smiled politely—it didn’t reach her eyes, which were the same pale gray as her short hair—and accompanied the two men into the sitting room. The Chiefs House had been a small hotel before the Event, and long before that a whaling skipper’s mansion, back in the glory days of Nantucket’s pre-Civil War supremacy in the baleen and boiled-blubber trades. Given a few modifications, that had made it ideal for his new job; among other things, it had a couple of public rooms on the first floor that did fine for meetings, business and quasi-business and the sort of hospitality that someone in his position had to lay on.

Being chief of police was a lot simpler than being Chief Executive Officer of the Republic of Nantucket,
he thought, something that had occurred to him just about every day since the Event landed him with the latter position.

The meeting room had a fireplace with brass andirons and screen; he took a section of split oak from the basket and flipped it onto the coals. For the rest, it sported the usual decor that antique-happy Nantucket had had back when it was a tourist town: oval mahogany table and chairs, sideboy and armoire, mirrors, flowered Victorian wallpaper, pictures of whaling ships. He felt a small glow of pride at the thought that by now anything here could be replaced from the Island’s own workshops, at need; and there were souvenirs dropped off by Marian and a dozen other Islander skippers. A wooden sword edged with shark teeth, a three-legged Iberian idol, a boar’s-tusk helmet plumed I with a horse’s mane dyed scarlet ...

One of the paintings was post-Event, of him signing the Treaty of Alliance with Stonehenge in the background.

Not Stonehenge. The Great Wisdom.
That was a better name, for a temple still whole and living.
And O’Hallahan left out the rain halfway through the ceremony, and all the umbrellas. And the Grandmothers looked a lot more scruffy than that—opinionated old biddies—and the Sun People war chiefs were scowling, not smiling
—
God-damned gang of thugs—and a lot of them looked pretty beaten-up, still bandaged from the Battle of the Downs. And Marian would eat kittens before she’d look that self-consciously Stern & Noble. Oh, well... Washington probably didn’t stand up when he crossed the Delaware, either.

People needed legends. Nations were built on them, as much as on plowland and factories, or gunpowder and ships.

The oil lanterns over the mantelpiece were quite functional now, too, and he lit one with a pine splinter from the fire before joining the others at the table. Martha came in with a tray bearing cookies, a silver pot of hot chocolate, and cups. She set it down and sat, opening her files; she was General Secretary of the Executive Council, and one of the Oceanic University directors, as well as his wife since the Year 1. She’d been a librarian at the Athenaeum before the Event, back when he was police chief—Navy swabby and fisherman before that, to her Wellesley and amateur archaeologist.

Odd,
he thought happily.
Beer-and-hamburger vs. wine-and-quiche.
It had turned out to be a good match. She was still rail-thin despite bearing two children and helping raise four, a few more wrinkles and more gray in the seal-brown hair, a long slightly horselike face on the same model as his own.
And we make a good team.

The necessary greetings went around, few and spare as local custom dictated. “Ayup, business,” Cofflin said.

God-damn all political wheedling,
he thought, with a touch of anger he kept strictly off his own features.
You’d think with a war on and good men and women dying, everyone would pull together.

He, knew how Martha would react to that; a snort, and a sharp word or two on the subject of his being too smart—and too old—to think anything of the sort.

 

“Well, they’re not wasting time,” Patrick O’Rourke said.

He watched the impact footprints of the mortar shells walk up the broad valley toward his position, each a brief airborne sculpture the shape of an Italian cypress made from pulverized dirt and rock. It hadn’t been more than half an hour since he’d arrived to give Captain Barnes the bad news and gotten caught in it himself.

Whoever was on the other end of that mortar wasn’t very good at it, but they’d get the shells here eventually....

His staff gave him an occasional glance, as if to wonder when he was going to notice the approaching explosions.
Time to take pity on them,
he thought, and went on aloud:

“Take cover!”

The base’s garrison were already in their slit trenches. Everyone else dived for a hole once he’d given the signal, and he hopped into his after them, with a whistling in the sky above to speed him on his way.

The explosion was close enough to drive dirt into his clenched teeth. He sneezed at the dusty-musty smell and taste of it and grinned.
There’s one thing to be said for a war; it teaches you things about yourself, it does.
One thing he’d learned was that physical danger didn’t disturb him much; some, yes, but not nearly with the gut-wrenching anxiety that, say, being afraid of screwing up and giving the wrong commands could do.

In fact, sometimes it was exciting, like rock-climbing or a steeplechase on a wet raw day. Whether that said something good or bad about his own character he didn’t know.

Or much care,
he thought. Horses screamed in terror in the pen beyond the field hospital. That was one thing he
did
regret about being back here; the poor beasts were still caught up in the quarrels of men. There were human screams, too, fear mostly—he’d become unpleasantly familiar with the sounds of agony—from the throats of locals.

A safe, sane year in the last decade of the twentieth century. PCs, parties, Guinness on tap, girls, cars, trips to England or Italy, himself an up-and-coming young prospective law student in an affluent family. Nothing to bother him but boredom and a nagging doubt he really wanted to follow the law for the rest of his life.

He’d done it the first year for the money and travel, and the second for fun; it was a wild young crowd on the island during the summer back then, one long party. When you were nineteen, working three jobs and sleeping in a garage
could
be classified as fun.

“Or goin’ fer a soldier, which ye’ve doon, at that, ye iijit,” he muttered under his breath, mimicking his grandfather’s brogue before dropping back into his natural mid-Atlantic-with-a-lilt. “Maybe the English are right, and we’re so stupid we don’t even know how to fuck without arrows sayin’
this way
tattooed on the girl’s thighs ...”

On the other hand, not even the English ever claimed that the Irish weren’t hell in a fight. It was just a bit of irony that nearly half the soldiers under his command were some sort of Alban proto-Celts from the dawn of time, who’d been in the process of conquering England when the Nantucketers arrived. Ireland itself was still populated by tattooed Moon-worshiping gits not yet up to the chariot-and-tomahawk stage. Even the
Fiernan Bohulugi
who made up most of the rest of the First Marine Regiment thought they were backward.

“Oh, well, at least Newgrange is there in the now,” he muttered, shivering a little inwardly. The great tomb-temple by the Boyne River was already millennia old in this predawn age, as old now as Caesar’s Rome had been to the time in which he was born.

He levered himself back up and looked about, shaking clods off his cloth-covered coal-scuttle helmet—what the Yanks called a Fritz. No real damage and it didn’t look as if there had been any casualties. Except among the Hittite auxiliaries; some of them had been caught in the open, and all two hundred hale enough to run were taking to their sandaled heels, except for their officer.
He
was trying to stop them, poor soul, striking at fleeing men with his whip. At least they were so terrified they were just dodging rather than stabbing or clubbing the man. Discarded spears and bows marked their passage back up the valley toward the high plateau and at least momentary safety.

“No surprise
there,”
one of his aides said sourly. “Here we are, outnumbered twenty to one and our allies are running like hell.”

“It’s a typical Marine Corps situation, to be sure, Sally.” he answered, replacing the helmet and dusting off his uniform instead. “Don’t be too hard on the locals, though; it’s a bit alarming, the first time under fire.” Probably they wouldn’t stop this side of Hattusas.