Conquistador (48 page)

“A rifle of the Deathwalkers!” a general said. “But Lord Seven Flower, always they have refused to trade such with us. Not for silver, or gold, or turquoise, or cacao or hummingbird feathers will they trade such!”

“A rifle of the Deathwalkers,” Lord Seven Flower agreed. “And for one thing will they trade such—some of them, at least. Fighting men. They too have their factions.”

All of his chief followers were survivors of the long struggles between the Zapotec cities, and within them. The land had heaved and shifted like bubbling cornmeal in a pot for three generations now, brought to a boil by the plagues and the new weapons and goods. Intrigue and assassination, war and battle and sudden revolt were in their blood. None of them had to be told how useful foreign mercenaries could be in a faction fight. All of them bowed their heads to the ground in a wave of colorful feathers and fur, silver and jade and gold. Several were smiling as they rose to a sitting position again; they also knew how
useful
foreign mercenaries could make themselves useful in ways not intended by their employers.

The general who'd spoken before added: “How difficult are these weapons to learn to use, o man made in the image of the gods?”

“Easier than a musket,” Lord Seven Deer replied. “As a musket is easier than a bow. In any case, the lords of the Deathwalkers will provide instruction; when the instruction is complete, the men will be used for their purposes, then returned to us for ours. Ammunition and spare parts will also be sold, though not cheaply.” His gaze sharpened on his supporters. “Each of you will find fifty warriors. Tried and tested men, but young. Cunning, but obedient and loyal. And none of such note or name that they will be missed. This must remain a secret of secrets.”

He rose and clapped his hands. The slaves filed in, bearing trays of carved wood heaped high with steaming food; others carried golden vessels of cacao and fermented fruits and northern brandy.

Only the king and the nobles, priests and the most trusted guards would return from this meeting, of course. The others would serve to buy the favor of the gods.

The ferry that ran across the Carquinez Strait was a big wooden rectangle with movable ramps at both ends, diesel-powered; when the wind blew back toward them for an instant the smell reminded him suddenly of FirstSide, and the way he'd hated the big-city stink of exhausts. That prompted another train of thought; he looked at the power lines that ran down to the northern edge, borne on wooden tripods and crossbeams made of whole Douglas fir trunks a hundred feet long with their feet braced in cast-concrete drums. The cable looped down to a ground station on the northern bank—there was a small hamlet there, where the city of Benicia stood in
his
California—and then reappeared on the southern shore, striding down the valleys, and he supposed over the hills to Rolfeston and the other Bay Area settlements.

“Where's the generating station?” he asked curiously. “What's the energy source?”

Adrienne looked over at him and winked, laying a finger along her nose. “Geothermal,” she said. “And on Rolfe land. Up north of Calistoga—in the geyser country—the Rolfe domain holds everything from Napa Town up through Clear Lake, and over to the Berryessa Valley. You might say we understand the power of power!”

“Ah.” He nodded. That was the world's biggest geothermal-power area FirstSide, and the geography was the same here. “That the only power station?”

“The only one between Mendocino and Monterey, apart from some very small-scale hydro, and emergency generators at hospitals an' suchlike,” she said. “The settlement up in Oregon uses hydropower, and down around San Diego they've got a turbine setup running on natural gas.”

Her accent's gotten a little stronger since we came through the Gate,
he noted silently.
Not acting as much, I suppose.
Aloud, he went on: “I suppose Sierra Consultants did the design work?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she said, looking at him with surprise and respect. “One of their last studies for us, in the late fifties. We've got about a hundred and fifty megawatts capacity installed as of now, and since
we
weren't dumb enough to neglect pumping the condensed steam back down the holes, the Commission thinks that we can eventually pull out ten times as much or more on a sustained-yield basis. That'll be enough; we aren't going to let the population here grow indefinitely.”

There were stairs to a walkway that ran along each side of the ferry. Tom took the ones on the left—
port,
he thought—and they stood on the gallery there, looking about and at the water that foamed by below. It wasn't much disturbed; the blunt bow of the ferry threw its wave in a correspondingly wide arc, and only smooth surging ripples ran along the hull amidships. The water was blue but clear, amazingly free of silt despite being downstream of the Central Valley and the marshes; he could look straight down and see a pair of fifteen-foot sturgeon swimming slowly downstream, and then a school of eight-inch threadfin shad so thick that they made the water boil, leaving him staring into an infinite blue-tinted chamber of mirrors full of flickering silver.

There was a thick fringe of marsh along the strait's northern edge; it suddenly occurred to him that upstream the delta country would be eight million acres of nothing
but
marsh. He looked around again, eyes on the blue cloud-flecked sky. This was a little past the main spring migration season and a month early for the start of the autumn one, but the flocks made those he remembered from his own Red River country in the fall season seem like a tattered remnant. In one casual glance he saw curlews, pelicans numerous as snowflakes slanting down to the surface of the water, ospreys falling like miniature thunderbolts and thrashing back into the air with silver fish writhing in their claws, redthroated loons diving from the surface, three types of grebe, great blue herons striding along the edge of the water, and on and on.

“This area really swarms with life, doesn't it?” he said.

Adrienne nodded. “Even more than when Granddad arrived,” she said softly; he turned his head and surprised an expression of soft pleasure on her face as she watched the pageant. “God, I love this.”

That surprised him a little, both the expression and the words.

“
More
than when your grandfather came?” he said. “I know he's a conservationist of sorts, but—”

She put a hand on his shoulder for a moment; it felt good.
And hell, I'm just being professional.

“It makes sense when you think about it,” she said. “After the Gate opened, three hundred thousand top predators who hunted every day for food got replaced by two hundred thousand—mostly concentrated here around the bay—who hunt occasionally for fun. And the Indians used a lot of the wild plant life, too; acorn mush was their staple, plus they burned off millions of acres every year to keep the countryside open. Ecologically speaking, we New Virginians are grass eaters who get most of our food from restricted areas in a few valleys.”

Tom nodded. “So the Indians were the keystone species here; humans generally are. I imagine you've had some pretty wild ecological swings since then.”

Like an engine without a governor, racing and stalling,
he thought; and tried not to think of the bands and villages struck down by bacteria and viruses from—literally—beyond their world, most likely the last survivors dying from sheer thirst or hunger as they lay tossing with none but the stinking corpses of the dead for company.

“Right. I can remember the forest and bush getting thicker and encroaching on open country in my own lifetime—though we're trying to use controlled burns to slow that down.” She glanced sideways at him as they leaned on the railings. “And speaking of wild ecological swings, we're nearly in Africa.”

“Africa?” he said.

“Formally it's the North Bay Permanent Wilderness Reserve and Acclimatization Area, but nobody's called it anything except Africa since 1950.”

She pointed and moved her arm from west to east against the low hills that rimmed the horizon.

“From Miller Creek to about there, and from tidewater inland through the Carneros hills. The whole north shore of San Pablo and Suisun bays, all the wetlands and a rim of dry country too. Easier to show you why it's called ‘Africa' than tell you. It's the reason Ralph called his place the Mermaid Café, though.”

At his curious glance she went on: “You know, Joni Mitchell? ‘Carey'?” A sigh: “I forgot, you didn't have Ralph shaping your musical tastes as a teenager.” She began to sing in a husky soprano:

“All right, all right,” he said. “Yeah, I
have
heard that golden oldie.” He gave a snort of laughter. “I like that man's sense of humor.”

“Rock music's still faintly scandalous in the Commonwealth,” she said. “So there! You thought I was a fuddy-duddy for liking the classics.”

There was a rush of feet and blasphemous cursing from the crew as they came into the U-shaped pier on the north bank, thick ropes were made fast, and the ramp at the front of the vessel was let down with a clattering thud.

Their Hummer was first on and first off; several two-and-a-half-ton trucks loaded with boxed cargo followed, and another with a huge coil of cable. Adrienne took the wheel, letting the other vehicles pass her as she drove through a pleasant, sleepy-looking village nestled among trees and then past a formidable turf-covered earthwork and ditch. The road forked there, one branch heading northeast, the other more sharply west of north, where it cut like a winding ribbon through the rolling hills and crossed their creeks on trestle bridges. Those looked odd, until he realized the huge size of the interlocked timbers.

There was no fringe of cultivation beyond the town's gardens; a mile later she turned off the road, downshifted and splashed through a small stream, and then tackled the side of a thirty-degree hill's slope. The Hummer took the uneven steepness with ease; he'd always liked the way the power-shifting system to the four wheels made them grip like giant fingers. Coming upslope they startled a flock of ostriches into explosive flight, and halted beneath a single small oak near the crest of a hill.

The cooling engine ticked; the cries of birds and the endless sough of the wind were louder. The smell of hot metal was quickly lost beneath the aromas of laurel, ceanothus and minty yerba santa crushed beneath the wheels. Long champagne-pale grass rippled in the cool wind off the water, thickly sown with late California poppies in drifts of small golden coins; nearer the water's edge, vast fields of tule rushes tossed like a rolling poplin-green sea. Freshwater marsh lined every stream among the many that meandered southward toward the bay. There were trees on their edges, and clumps elsewhere, but everywhere the land stretched immense to the blue horizon.

She handed him the binoculars, and he silently looked about, restraining an impulse to swear and exclaim alternately. A group of brown-and-cream eland wandered along the edge of a patch of blue oak in a swale between two hills, big antelope the size of an ox but with longer legs, dewlaps and spiral horns. A herd of about two hundred elk were scattered in fawn dots up a farther hill; scattered among them were pronghorns, wildebeest, mule deer, and what he thought might be Thomson's gazelle. A distant drumming of hooves heralded a group of wild horses, flowing over a rise like a wave and then down into a vale; water and birds splashed up as they breasted the damp ground there and vanished over the next hillcrest. Scattered bison grazed, and a grizzly rested under the shade of a blue oak, while two yearling cubs wrestled and fell around her.

“Is there anything that maniac of a grandfather of yours
didn't
turn loose here?” Tom asked.

“Well, chimps didn't do so well in California; they didn't like the winters. But see that edge of swamp over there? Those knobs and twitchy things are the nostrils and eyes and ears of a bunch of hippos. They're finally adjusting well. The chimps and the gorillas are doing fine down in Central America. We didn't introduce just African animals, of course: tigers from China, snow leopards and the ordinary variety, European wild boar—”

“Arrrgghh!” he said, a cry from the heart. “Feral swine are organic bulldozers! They—”

“Don't worry; the wild pigs aren't as much of a pest as they are FirstSide. The cougars and wolves and lions and tigers and leopards keep 'em down. And it turns out golden eagles
love
raw suckling pig. Tom, there are a lot more predators large enough to tackle a boar here than there are FirstSide. Not to mention we hunt them.”