Conquistador (62 page)

Tully's jacket was acid green, his shirt purple, trousers fawn, belt-buckle silver and turquoise, and his shoes brown, white and black; the cut of the clothes also had a much bigger hint of the zoot suit than Tom's.

“Picked it up in Rolfeston. I was assured that it's the height of local fashion,” the smaller man replied loftily. “Hello to you too, Kemosabe.”

“It's not that people in men's-wear stores keep lying to you, Roy,” Tom said. “It's the way that you keep
believing
them that gets me.”

“I think he looks fine,” Sandra Margolin said, and Tom threw up his hands.

Besides, I'm feeling at one with the world, and everyone's friend,
he thought, grinning.

A bell began to ring, summoning them to the harvest supper; people streamed off toward the tables set up on the lawn. Those were in the shape of a large T with a double stem and a small crossbar. From what Adrienne had said, Tom gathered that this was a twice-yearly occasion, after the wheat harvest and then in the fall after the grapes were brought in; the manor's cook—a middle-aged woman of Franco-American-Italian descent and formidable heft—her staff, the housewives of the rest of the estate's households, and the odd man who fancied his hand on a grill had all been working overtime, and with a certain ferocious competitiveness. The food reflected the mix of people who'd gone into founding this strange country: the Southern take on traditional Anglo-Saxon cooking, but with a heavy Latin influence via Italy and southern France, and a dash of German and East European.

He suspected that the mix of plebian and haute cuisine dishes was unique to occasions like this, though. Corn on the cob for starters, with an alternate choice of ranch-cured duck prosciutto and pears, or spicy tuna tartare, tomato fondant and chilled coriander broth . . . No, there was a twenty-first-century Californian influence there, too.

The crowd took their places, waiting expectantly. Adrienne had seated Tom at her right, with Tully and his new friend beyond that; the rest of the top table held the
mayordomo
and his family, and the other senior staff and theirs; Simmons's tracker and the
nahua
sat at a separate section at the base. There was also a large ceremonial salt shaker, evidently a social marker separating the upper table from the hoi polloi even on a community occasion like this.

Adrienne rose, and took her glass of white wine in hand. Silence fell, after a few shouts of “Speech! Speech!” and “Go for it, Miz Rolfe!”

“Friends,” she said, “this is the twelfth harvest supper I've hosted as landholder of Seven Oaks. I'd like to thank everyone for the hard work—”

The speech was mercifully brief, and good-humored. The reactions on all the faces he could see were too. He ate—the corn first; he didn't really like raw fish of any sort—and helped himself to Lucillian salads with scallops and lobster tails, and greens he'd seen being picked that morning, a steak of Angus beef lightly brushed with garlic-steeped olive oil from the grove to the north of the house and grilled over oak coals, cauliflower with mustard and fennel seed, beaten biscuits. . . .

Tully made a production of drinking a glass of wine—an open bottle stood between each two diners, with a simple label reading
Seven Oaks,
which included a silhouetted oak tree beneath. Tom drank some of his and decided it was extremely good. When it came to wine he just knew what he liked without pretending to know anything about it. Roy went in for the full wine-country vocabulary.

“Black cherry fruit . . . soft tannins . . . just a bit of vanilla from the oak . . . very nice,” he said to Adrienne, after swirling and tilting a glass, looking through the edge at a candle flame, sniffing and sipping. “Basically a cabernet sauvignon, right? But blended. Is it yours?”

“Well, I'm scarcely going to serve someone else's wine at
my
estate's harvest supper, Roy,” Adrienne said, leaning forward to speak to him across Tom. “Yes, it's a blend, eighty-twenty cabernet and merlot; the 'ninety-two vintage. That was a wonderful year at Seven Oaks, and it just keeps getting better in the bottle.”

“But there's something . . . I can't quite place it. Not bad, just a little different.”

“Probably the fermenting vats,” she said. “We've got temperature control, but we use open-topped redwood tanks, not the closed stainless-steel ones they have FirstSide.” A quick urchin grin. “Our motto—‘Malolactic fermentation is for sissies!' ”

Tully nodded. “I noticed driving up that you don't have the piped water system in the vineyards that they use in the Napa on FirstSide either. What do you do when you get a late frost after budbreak?”

“Ahhh . . . hope next year is better?” she said, blinking at him, and then they both laughed.

Tom suppressed a slightly miffed feeling and waited until Adrienne was talking to someone who'd come up to the head table; she stood and walked aside with the questioner for a moment. Things weren't crowded, and he could be quasi-private when he leaned close to Tully and asked, “Look, do you think we're doing the right thing?”

“Well, it ain't the U.S. of A., Kemosabe, and I'm not real comfortable with this patron-client setup they've got either. But on the whole, it's not too bad—Uncle Sugar had us defending Allah allies who were a hell of a lot more skanky. The anti-Rolfe league definitely looks a hell of a lot worse.”

“I could have told you all that, Roy,” Sandra said, refilling her own wineglass. “How anyone can live FirstSide, from what the video shows, is beyond me.”

Tom looked at her. “What if you didn't want to work the horses here at Seven Oaks?”

“Why shouldn't I?” she said, obviously puzzled. “I love horses, and this is my home—I was born here and so was my father.”

“But if you didn't?”

“If I didn't like it here, I'd go somewhere else and get a job. We aren't slaves, and I'm good at what I do. A dozen places would be glad to take me on; and I've had more than one guy offer me a ring, you know—men with their own farms, or horse trainers.”

“I don't suppose you get invited up
here
for dinner all that often,” Tom said. “When it isn't harvest supper, that is.”

“Once upon a time—you might be surprised,” she said, with a twinkle in her dark eyes. “But anyway, yeah, that's true for most people, but how often did you have dinner with . . . oh . . .” She stopped, obviously searching for a FirstSide equivalent to Adrienne or her grandfather.

“The governor? Bill Gates?” Tully said, grinning. “All the
time,
girl. Why, just the other day I dropped in on Bill at home and went into the kitchen and popped myself a brewski. Then I slapped my ass down on the sofa beside Billy-boy and his old lady and I said, ‘Bill, how're they hanging? And dude, you gotta do something about the bugs in the new—”

Tom waved him quiet. “OK, OK, Tonto, I get the idea. Nice not to have to feel too guilty about my own take on things, you betcha.”

Sandra went on, “And can you call up the governor or this Gates guy and get help or backup if you need it?” she said. “Doesn't sound like it; from what I've heard it's sink or swim over there. I can go to Adrienne or her dad if I have to—I'm a Rolfe affiliate and so was my dad. We back them up—they back us up.”

Tom nodded; it wasn't what he'd been brought up to think of as the ideal system, but as Tully had said, it didn't seem impossibly bad; he'd been in places—Turkmenistan, for instance—where people literally physically broke out into a cold sweat of fear when someone mentioned the Maximum Leader's name without implying he walked on air, or publicly doubted that he'd earned every one of the votes he needed to come out at ninety-nine percent plus every single election.

Adrienne had turned back and caught the last of that. Her leaf-green eyes were full of an ironic amusement . . . and real fondness. “Satisfied?”

“No,” he said. “But I'm not completely repulsed, either.” He smiled back at her. “In a manner of speaking . . .”

“Glad to know I'm not completely repulsive,” she said.

“Roy and I will help you with this . . . political problem you've got,” he went on, and felt an absurd lurch at the brilliance of her smile. “Once the”—
carefully unnamed conspiracy, in this rather public venue
—“problem is solved, all bets are off, of course.”

“Of course,” Adrienne said gravely. “And now . . . we can dance.”

The band pealed out a high sustained brass note, then swung into action. Tom led Adrienne out; Tully was already cutting a jitterbug rug on the way over, with Sandra clapping her hands as she followed. A pair of heels and long slender bare legs suddenly appeared over the head of the crowd, as one girl did a daring handstand on her partner's palms. Tom met Adrienne's eyes, nodded, gripped her hands and swung her over one hip, over the other, down between his legs, up in an overhead twirl. . . .

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Now, this is the way I like to go on an op,” Tully said. “Landed gentry of goddamned Little Rock, that's me. Natural affinity for horses. Make way, ye peasants!”

“You're not falling off anymore, at least,” Sandra replied.

When I stop feeling vaguely guilty, I'm really going to enjoy this place,
Tom thought as he watched.
And when I don't have the prospect of a long deadly hike through deserts and savage hostile nomads toward a fortress stuffed full of heavily armed Aztec mercenaries. Of course, if I get a chance to get back, all bets are off.
He'd made that clear.

He and the object of his thoughts stood watching side by side, each with a foot on the lowest plank of the board fence, leaning on posts with their elbows—his at breastbone level, hers just under her chin. Tully
was
staying on better; he didn't have any particular gift for horses, but he did have good balance, excellent coordination and physical training to draw on. And falls didn't faze him, which had won him a good deal of respect from Sandra, who had evidently been put on her first pony about the time she graduated from diapers.

Tom wasn't surprised in the least; he'd never yet met anything in the way of physical danger that
did
faze Roy. He had the scrappy determination of a terrier.

And if we win, and then there's no way to get out of here . . . I won't die of grief,
he thought, breathing in the mixed scent of horses, pepper trees, warm dust and greenery.

He'd miss his brother Lars and his sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, but he didn't see them more than once a year anyway. And he had no other close ties. . . .

“Elbows in, and don't flap them!” Sandra called to her pupil. “You're supposed to hold the reins, not try to fly like a crow!”

Tully grinned and obeyed, turning his mount with leg pressure. It broke into a canter—Sandra called again, telling him to keep his knees bent to absorb the harder gait—then into a gallop, and rose over an obstacle of poles and barrels.

“Not bad,” Adrienne said judiciously. “He's really a very quick learner.”

“Glad you like him,” Tom said, and found that he was.
I keep getting these irrational bursts of benevolence,
he thought.
Must be love.

“Jim Simmons heard from Frontier Scout HQ this morning,” Adrienne said more softly. “He and his tracker will be taking a coastal schooner down to San Diego—he's been assigned to look into the tribal raiding there.”

“Convenient,” he said, and she grinned back at him.

“And how are we to make our descent on the southland look casual?” he asked.

“By making it casual,” she said. “Hmmm. Can you fly a light airplane?”

“Yah, you betcha,” Tom said. “Roy too. Fish and Game liked its field people to qualify.”

“Then we'll—”

One of the stable hands came up and cleared her throat. “Miz Rolfe,” she said. “Fella from the paper wants to talk to you.”

Adrienne muttered an impolite word under her breath. “Fetch him, then, Terry.”

The reporter was a photographer too, carrying the latest digital model. To Tom's eyes it clashed horribly with the suit and snap-brimmed fedora and pencil-thin trimmed mustache; it was like a computer terminal in
It Happened One Night.
He looked to be about thirty, with reddish-brown short-cut hair and hazel eyes and a sharp, foxy face.

“Miz Rolfe,” the man said, “you may not remember me—”

“How could I forget?” she said with a charming smile, extending a hand. “Charlie Carson, isn't it? Society news column for
City and Domain
magazine? I remember the article you did when I got back from Stanford.”