S. Stirling - On the Oceans of Eternity

"He's not exactly what I'd have expected, for the son of one of these absolute monarchs," she said cautiously. "Of course, I've only met him a couple of times. Lots of… ah… presence." They both knew what she meant; a maleness that blazed.

Kathryn grinned. "Oh, yes indeed; smart, too, and likes new ideas. Did you know that his family have run Babylonia for nearly four hundred years? They foster their kids out with their kinfolk who stayed in the highlands, and then put them in the House of Succession-sort of like a strict boarding school, with other grandees' kids, where they get used to hard work and people saying 'no.' Not a bad system."

Vicki nodded. She couldn't imagine marrying a local herself, King or no King, but tastes differed. "What about your kids, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Oh, we agreed on a Nantucket tutor, and a spell on the Island with my relatives." She sighed. "Not that I'm going to have time to be pregnant until this damned war is over, probably."

"Yeah, it is inconvenient," Vicki said. She'd been thinking about a family of her own… False dawn showed in the east; time to get back to work. "Best of luck, then."

"It's all such a monumental distraction from the real war," Hollard said.

"Or at least our part of it," Vicki replied.

Hollard chuckled. "Yeah. At least we don't have the chief's worries, or the commodore's."

"Good to find you on this side of the pond, Ron," Marian Alston-Kurlelo said.

It was also good to be full, dry, dressed in a warm kaftan and slippers instead of a sopping uniform and wet boots, eating something because of the way it tasted, not because you were so hungry that hardtack and jerky went down easy.

"That's why I dropped by," she went on. "Didn't want to pass up a chance of settling some details with you in person."

She looked down at her half-finished dessert and pushed it away with a sudden memory of what her older sisters had looked like after forty-odd years of chitterlings, ham hocks, and sweet-potato pie. Swindapa snagged the dish and began to finish it off; it was baked apples with honey and cream, one of her favorites. They were sitting in the snug, a booth by the fire, with Councilor Ron Leaton and the manager of the Irondale Works, Erica Stark. She was a competent-looking woman in her late thirties, with the pale bony face and faded blue eyes of an old-stock Nantucketer. Leaton was as abstracted as ever, despite more gray in his light-brown hair and beard. The long pianist's fingers with their ground-in patina of machine grease toyed with a cup as he spoke.

"I was up on Anglesy, some problems with the drainage engines in the copper mines, then dropped down to troubleshoot the Merrimac project with Erica. I was surprised to hear you were coming," he said. "I expected you and the fleet to be off by now."

Alston nodded and glanced over her shoulder. Over at one of the long common tables the Marine escort were enjoying themselves with food, drink, and local company caught by the glamor of the uniform. She caught Swindapa conscientiously checking in that direction occasionally as well. They were good troops, but young, and only Ritter was actually something approaching a native Islander-she'd been a ten-year-old orphan adopted by an elderly couple in Nantucket Town, right after the Alban War. The rest of her squad were foreigners enlisted for pay, adventure, and the promise of citizenship at the end of their hitch, like much of the Coast Guard proper and most of the Marine Corps these days. Four of them linked arms over shoulders and sang, fairly tunefully:

" When you see the Southern Cross for the first time,

You'll understand why you came this way -'

Nobody was getting too loud, and nobody minded. OK, that's well in hand , Alston thought, then sighed as she replied to the engineer-entrepreneur. "I expected to be away by now myself, but the first casualty in any war is your battle plan," she said. "Sometimes even before the war starts… Two clans of the Uarwasoru teuatha started another round of one of their Goddamned blood feuds on their way to the muster point."

"And none but Marian could deal with it," Swindapa said pridefully.

Alston smiled a crooked smile. "I do have the baraka , the keuthes , they call it," she said. "Or the Sun People think I do, which is 'bout the same thing."

"So they could surrender to you without losing too much face," Stark said shrewdly.

To the Sun People, keuthes was rather like having Fate putting a finger on your side of the scales, or a big spiritual battery pack full of capital-L Luck. The way the charioteer tribes looked at it, she, Alston, had a monstrously unfair amount of war-keuthes , giving her an unbeatable edge in anything involving fighting, raiding, or plundering. They called her the Midnight Mare , and it was a title of high respect and fear, which were much the same thing in their terms, invoking both the feared black-hued demons of the night and the wild power of Hepkonwsa , the Lady of the Horses.

Ron Leaton nodded. "You're the one who beat their war-host and wizard chief on the Downs. They believe in legends and heroes, not institutions and governments."

Marian shrugged. What I'm needed for here is to keep our local allies together, and convince them we'll win. Luckily, I've got a good general staff, who can handle things at home under Jared . A moment of worry: Do the enemy? It wouldn't necessarily be obvious to our agents . She didn't think so. Walker would be too suspicious of possible rivals, and the concept would be alien to Isketerol of Tartessos.

Instead she went on: " 'Dapa and I had to take a company of Marines from Portsmouth Base up north to kick ass and take names. We had a radio along, heard Ron was here, sent most of the party back, and dropped over ourselves to consult after the shouting was done."

The actual slaying that started the whole mess had been a fair enough fight, which helped.

Alston was glad they hadn't had to actually open fire; she'd gone armed and in uniform all her adult life, but not from any love of combat. I leave that to maniacs and Sun People warriors , which is much of a muchness . Killing human beings was a disgusting incident of her real job, which was winning safety for her children, partner, friends, people.

Now, William Walker and Alice Hong, a few of their collaborators, I'll make an exception for them, yes. I'll have to repress an impulse to swing on the bastard's ankles when we hang him.

"Short form"-leaving out days of knife-edge tension amid hair-trigger barbarian tempers and alien weirdness of belief and custom-"it went fairly smoothly, but somebody with less keuthes might have had to kill some of them, and that might have screwed up the whole muster, so it was worthwhile doing it myself, even at the cost of some delay."

Everyone nodded; that sort of thing could get very ugly very quickly. Every clan of the eastern tribes had a feud with somebody waiting to flare up again, and everyone was related to everyone else by descent or marriage or blood brotherhood, so a single killing could sprawl out into an uncontrollable free-for-all of ambushes and lethal brawls like a sweater unraveling from a single tug. When things got to that stage you had to send in a punitive expedition, which nobody liked.

"Swan-eating savages," Swindapa said, in her own language; that was a vile insult, to a Fiernan.

Stark nodded agreement. "We get a fair bit of that sort of trouble," she said. "There are a lot of migrant laborers from the Sun People tribes working here." A grimace of distaste. "Had to hang a couple for this and that."

"Mmmm, this is extraterritorial, isn't it?" Marian said. Places like Irondale were usually under the Republic's legal system. Fiernan law and custom had no provisions for towns, for any settlements of individuals who weren't related to each other; or any real conception of government or the State, come to that.