S. Stirling - On the Oceans of Eternity

Odikweos of Great Achaea walked beside them with a sailor's roll to his stride, shrewd hazel eyes missing nothing.

"So this is the city that brought all the great kingdoms to their knees," he said, as they halted with the group about the steps of the Councilor for Foreign Affairs' house.

"Brought them together in peace, Your Majesty," Ian Arnstein said soothingly.

"Is there a difference?" Odikweos said; but he said it grinning. "Forgive my wayward son," he went on to Marian and Swindapa, bowing in courtly wise with a swirl of his cloak. "He found… ah…"

"Company more interesting than ours, and much prettier than his father," Alston finished for him. "We'd best be getting on to Guard House. I don't quite trust anyone else to do a moa leg properly-they go dry if n you don't catch them just right. And the wine will have breathed, the steaks are sitting in the garlic marinade ready to go on the grill, and oysters are better chilled."

Swindapa leaned over to whisper in her ear and she laughed, an easy full-throated sound, as at an old family joke. Then she called: "Heather! Lucy!"

The children were eventually rounded up, to fall in behind the adults. They took the roundabout route to Guard House, which led them back into the crowds spilling up from Main Street; they dodged a conga line led by a couple of Marines in rumpled uniform, and including a Kassite warrior from the Babylonian Royal Guard, a piratical-looking scarred Achaean, a Tartessian in a saffron cloak followed by a nude redhead who was probably Fiernan and certainly the merrier for the bottle of screech she was waving in a free hand. The crowds about cheered them on, just as polyglot and nearly as carefree, in languages that rang with Semitic gutturals, the rapid-fire sinuosities of Greek, nasal Yankee twangs…

"Hard to believe it's over," Jared Cofflin said again.

"Over?" his wife replied. "It's barely beginning!"

Doreen Arnstein looked upwards. "Did you know," she said thoughtfully, "that time travel is mathematically identical to faster-than light travel? If one's possible, the other must be too. Someday…"

"Ayup," Jared nodded, in answer to both. "Mebbe." He looked around. "Mebbe this time we'll be able to avoid some of the old mistakes."

"Yes, we'll make new ones-all our own," Swindapa laughed.

"Undoubtedly," Ian Arnstein said. "At least they'll be new and interesting blunders. In the meantime… let's eat!"

Althea Walker, last scion of the House of the Wolf, turned in the saddle and looked behind her. The Carpathians had long since faded from view; all she could see from horseback was an infinity of grass that waved stirrup high on her horse, hissing in the long melancholy wind. Ahead was the line of a great river, marked by the green groves of trees vivid against the brown-tawny summer grass. She turned her mount away from the caravan and spurred it up a slight rise.

Here she could wave the mounted guards back a little, far enough that none could see the tears drying on her cheeks in the hot dry wind as she stared westward. It whipped strands of her blond hair around her face, sun-faded white against the brown tan.

Nothing to see except grass rippling like the sea, beneath the huge blue dome of heaven. Wagon after wagon creaked by, wheels jolting on the hard ground and canvas tilts fluttering in the dry hay-scented breeze; they and the herds of cattle and sheep and horses raised dust that hung overhead in a haze. They were important wagons, though; stuffed with machine tools and books, and the skills of those who rode in them or trudged along beside were crucial, too.

Mounted warriors formed a screen that stretched out to the edge of sight, sun blinking off their metal. Ohotolarix came trotting in from an inspection sweep, his horse taking the slope effortlessly despite a tall warrior's weight. Well, it was a son of Bastard, her father's quarter horse…

He saw the carved-stone set of her face, and the direction of her eyes.

"He shall be avenged," her father's handfast man said, laying his own hand on her shoulder for a moment.

Althea nodded. "But that wasn't what I was thinking of," she said.

He looked at the girl in surprise. "What, then?"

"That I won't make my father's mistakes. That I will not strike too soon, nor will I settle by the sea where the Islanders-" she spat to one side, into the tall grass-"can get at me."

Ohotolarix nodded. "Well, this Ferghanna place we're heading for is about as far from salt water as we could go," he said.

"Pete!"

It was Eddie, calling from the space he'd kept open in the basement taproom of the Brotherhood of Thieves. Treaty celebrations meant there was just barely room for three more at the end of the long table, now that the guitar-and-drums band on the tiny corner dais had folded up. A low roar of sound came out to meet them, along with smoke, the smell of roasting meat and frying fish and fresh bread and the smells of massed humanity; Spring Indigo flinched back a little as it died away and a song bellowed out:

Head the ship to homeward

Shake out every sail

Lithe leap the billows - merry sings the gale !

Captain, work the reckoning

How many knots a day?

' Round the world - and home again

That's the Island way !

Peter Giernas touched her on one elbow, Sue on the other; she shifted Jared on her hip, smiled and headed in with them. A waiter eeled through the crowd, blinked in recognition, and half-shouted apologetically: "I'm sorry, Captain Giernas-no dogs allowed!" Perks was sticking close to his master's side, pressed against his thigh. At the words he looked up at the waiter, sensed his meaning and fixed him with a yellow-eyed glare, bristling and showing long wet teeth. Giernas made a precautionary grab for his ruff and smiled at the server.

"Don't worry," he said. "Perks here is fine, as long as I'm with him."

"Ah… oh, well, he's a war hero too, I suppose." Heroes dime a dozen , Giernas thought, as they pushed the rest of the distance and squeezed in. He didn't mind the crowding-much. It wasn't as if he had to take it for long, after all. Eddie was grinning, a little the worse for beer but not drunk by any manner of means. The voices in the background went on, as the four of them settled in:

We've fought pirates from Achaea

Bought tin 'mid Java seas

Drunk beer in Anyang taverns

In the shade of camphor trees!

Across the Line and Gulf Stream

'Round by Table Bay

Everywhere - and home again

That's the Island way !

"Here," Eddie said. "Still hot."

The plates were heaped, with roast pork and crackling, potatoes, steamed new vegetables; there were hunks of good wheat bread hot from the oven dripping with butter, and honey for dipping. Spring Indigo nibbled a piece of the bread cautiously, then bit enthusiastically.

"This is better than bannock with bear fat!" she said.

"Hell of a lot better, honey." Giernas laughed and took a pull on the mug. "Well, people, I got through to the man at the Pacific Bank, and the prize's been condemned, right enough." He brought out a folded piece of paper from a pocket of his buckskin hunting shirt. "Here it is!"

When he read out the figures, Jaditwara's eyes went wide. Eddie let loose with a Zarthani war whoop, which didn't attract as much attention as it might have, not tonight. Giernas laughed long and loud himself; it was good to be young, a well-loved father and husband… and rich. Before the war, before the Expedition, he'd been a bachelor, content enough to rent a room over the Laughing Loon in Providence for the times he wasn't rangering around and camping under a tree. Now…