Eric Flint - Time spike

The first thing to do was to reestablish his authority, of course. But de Soto was not particularly concerned about that. He was very good at establishing authority. "We will have our revenge!" he shouted, drawing his sword. "What do we do with the bodies?" Edelman asked.

He grimaced, looking over the field. Andy had been considering the matter himself. The bodies of the dead Spaniards had been stripped of everything. Clothes as well as the armor, tools and weapons they'd had on them. Any and all of that stuff could prove useful in the future, and they'd been able to round up enough horses to haul the stuff back on the travois the Cherokees had made. The pack mounts were already fully loaded. That left the bodies themselves, piled naked in horrid stacks. Andy didn't much like the answer he'd come up with, but he could live with it. The most important thing was to get back to the Cherokee town as soon as possible-and then, back to the prison. By now, the C.O.'s he'd left behind to guard the convicts would be nearing exhaustion. "Nothing, is what we do," he said harshly. He moved his head in a little circling motion. "There'll be scavengers out there who'll do the work for us." He took a deep breath. "Except Yost and Littleton, of course. I don't want to bury them here, though.

Even in this heat and humidity, we can get their bodies back to the town in time for a funeral there." Hulbert looked a bit skeptical.

"Well… yeah. But forget any idea of carrying them all the way back to Alexander." They'd lost two of the guards in the battle. Both from gunshot wounds, both of which were obviously stray shots. The two men had been killed before the charge started, while still behind shelter. But the Spaniards had gotten off a lot of shots, in that first minute or two, and it was only to be expected that a few of them would hit something they'd been aimed in the general direction of, even if only by accident. Perhaps ironically, the Spaniards had fired many fewer shots once the charge started. By sheer happenstance-Andy certainly couldn't claim the credit for it-the charge had caught most of the Spaniards while they were still reloading their guns. A half dozen other guards had gotten wounded then, mostly by edged weapons when they got too close. But only Steve Adams had been hurt badly enough to require being carrying on a stretcher, and his injury wasn't life-threatening as long as they could keep it from getting infected.

The casualties had been much fewer than Andy had expected, actually.

But they were still a blow. Yost had been a new guard, whom nobody really knew. So while his death was a matter of concern, it didn't cause anyone any personal grief. Ted Littleton, on the other hand, had worked at the prison for years and had been well liked. Andy himself had spent more evenings than he could remember having a beer and a pleasant conversation with the man after work. Watkins didn't say anything, but his opinion was obvious. It wouldn't be fair to say the Cherokee chief was callous, as such. But he had a very thick hide and wasn't given to fretting over indignities suffered by his enemies.

Certainly not dead ones. "The much bigger problem," Edelman said, "is what to do with the captives we freed." Andy had been skirting around that problem. They'd rescued twenty-three of the villagers. Thirteen of them were children. No babies or very young children, though. The Spaniards had butchered those. Apparently, they'd only wanted children big enough to make the march to the coast. Have a chance, rather. Some of them would have died along the way, even if there'd still been a coast to reach at the end of the forced march. After Andy saw a baby in one of the huts whose skull had been crushed by a musket butt, he stopped having any qualms about the work Kershner and his men had been doing. For a moment, he'd just had a fierce wish that the rifle he was carrying was equipped with a bayonet. And he stopped second-guessing himself about whether or not he should have tried to parlay with de Soto. From now on, as far as he was concerned, the only good conquistador was a dead conquistador. That still left the problem of the captives. If they simply left them here, he didn't think they had much chance of surviving. Not most of the kids, for sure. Andy's experience with the Cherokees had taught him not to underestimate the survival skills of so-called "primitive peoples," but these Indians were on a much lower cultural level than very sophisticated and often literate Cherokees. They were in a world they didn't know at all, and had just lost everyone in their village old enough to have really know very much. Even the adult captives were young, no older than their early twenties. On the other hand, Andy wasn't sure at all how the captives would react if the guards simply started marching them along.

There was a complete language barrier, for the Cherokees as much as for the modern Americans. Watkins and his people had no idea what language the captives were speaking. It wasn't any Indian language they knew, although Kevin Griffin thought some of the words sounded like garbled Choctaw. Andy wished Jenny were here. She was the only one of them with any experience at all when it came to dealing with a situation like this. "Why you get paid the big bucks," he muttered.

"I'll see what I can do," he said, and headed toward the captives.

They were still huddled together in a group. They watched him come, all of them down to the littlest and youngest child. They were obviously apprehensive, but Andy had no idea if they were scared of him, or by him-or perhaps simply scared that he might leave them. When he reached the group of captives, he turned and pointed in the direction of the Cherokee town. He didn't accompany the gesture with any words. Words as such were pointless, and he'd just feel stupid doing another recitation of poetry. Then, he made a circling gesture that, more or less, indicated the entire group of guards and their Cherokee allies. He felt stupid as it was. Then, made areally stupid sort of gesture that-he hoped-would get across the idea that all of them were leaving now, headed for the town. Finally, he half-bowed and made a gesture with both hands that-he hoped-would convey the idea that the captives were welcome to join. Without-he hoped-implying any sort of coercion. Apparently, he was something of a genius at jury-rigged sign language. It didn't take the adult captives more than twenty seconds to look at each other, jabber something back and forth, and then start nodding at him. It didn't occur to him until much later than maybe a headnod wasn't a human gesture that meant the same thing to every group of people who'd ever lived. But, by then, it was a moot point. Clearly enough, it meant the same thing tothis group of people. If there was any point at which a corner was turned, Marilyn Traber provided it. After they'd marched maybe two hundred yards, she said: "Put the kids on the cart. I bet they'll get a charge out of that." And so they did. In fact, before the first minute was up, they were squealing gleefully. They couldn't all fit at once, of course, so pretty soon Marilyn was having to arbitrate whose turn it was. She managed that pretty well, given that she and the kids didn't speak the same language. If Andy remembered right, the inhabitants of the New World hadn't ever used wheeled transport until the Spanish and Portuguese arrived. It was obvious that this group of native Americans had never seen wheeled transport. It took a lot longer to coax the adults onto the cart. One of the young women just flatly refused, and never relented until they reached their destination. Then, with the cart safely unhitched from the horses, she climbed up on it. But she only stayed there for a few seconds before hastily clambering down.

The poor horses having to haul the cart looked long-suffering. The Spaniards had loaded the cart heavily to begin with, even before the human cargo got added. But Andy wasn't worried about that. The horses that de Soto's expedition had brought with them were on the small side, true. But they were obviously hardy. Carmichael and Hulbert said they were some sort of jennets, and then fell to arguing about whether they were more like modern Sorraias, Spanish Barbs or Andalusians.