Conquistador (66 page)

He could feel Adrienne's chilled flesh gradually thawing against him, and a big blanket could hide a fair degree of movement.
Interesting. Definitely interesting,
he thought, and she whispered through a shiver, “I seem to affect you more than the Pacific Ocean itself.”

“I'm not complaining, and neither is he,” he murmured into her ear.

After a while they were warm enough to go wash the salt off under the fringes of the waterfall—like God's cold shower, as Roy put it—dry off around the fire some more, and dress. He felt relaxed and supple and strong again after fighting the chilly waters, but it wasn't something you'd choose to do every day—or every week.

“Invigorating, though,” he said.

“I agree,” she said when he voiced the thought, wringing out the thick fall of her hair and running a comb through it with wincing determination before tying it back. “Too bad we're not really on vacation; the family has a place at La Jolla, just north of San Diego, with a beach that's nearly as pretty as this—and the water's a
lot
warmer.”

Tom nodded; he liked “the Jewel,” even if he found it expensive and a bit
pwecious;
it was probably something to see, here. Speaking of which . . .

“Anyone up for a walk?”

They staked out the nets full of abalone in a pool to keep them alive and fresh, along with a couple of bottles of white wine. Tully went up the steep rocky slope at the bottom of the U of the beach with a coil of rope over his shoulder; that was the only spot where it wasn't nearly vertical. The other three stood with their rifles in the crooks of their arms, keeping a close eye on the climber and his surroundings.

“Nice technique,” Adrienne said, watching Tully.

“Oh, yeah,” Sandra said. “Climbs good, too.”

Tom felt himself blushing a little as they laughed—who'd ever said women were the bashful sex? Roy did know how to go up steep ground, though; Tom fancied he could do it nearly as well, but one-hundred-sixty pounds could go where two-thirty couldn't. At the crest Tully stopped and rove one end of the rope through a conveniently placed eyebolt sunk into living rock, and let the other end fall down to the sand. All of them could have made it up without, but there was no reason not to take advantage when you could.

Tom went next, walking up the steep slope and hand-over-handing along the rope. He was breathing deeply when he reached the top, and it felt a little strange to be hiking in coastal California with a rifle slung over his back, but . . .

“Lions and tigers and bears, oh, my,” Roy said as his partner's cropped white-blond thatch came over the edge.

“Tigers and bears, at least,” Tom replied. “I understand the lions are mostly south and west of here. But plenty of cougars and leopards.”

They grinned at each other for a moment, and then Adrienne's bandanna-covered head came over the crestline; Tom extended a hand, closing it around her strong slender wrist, and pulled her up. Sandra followed, puffing slightly.

“I ought to get out on my own feet more often,” she said after a moment. “It uses different muscles than riding.” Then: “Lord, that's pretty, isn't it?”

They stood in silence, looking out over infinite blue, along the steep green coastline, down at the white curl of foam along the sand and the arch of the waterfall. Seabirds scattered as a peregrine thunderbolted out of the sky above; it missed its strike, fluttered to a halt just above the shore and then coasted south, gaining height. Then they turned and walked up the line of the creek; it fell in pools and miniature torrents over a rocky bed, under tall cypress and tanbark oak, and then among redwoods—ancient ones, towering above and shading the floor of the forest to a carpet of soft needles, moss and ferns. Tully looked up into the cathedral silence of it, where light seemed to fall like slow honey from gaps above. Then he frowned.

“You know, I'd swear I'd seen exactly the same redwood here on FirstSide—the one with the kink and the big burl.”

“You may have,” Adrienne said quietly. “The older sequoias up in the mountains, and the bristlecone pines, are the same on both sides of the Gate. They're older than the divergence between this world and FirstSide, and as far as we can tell everything was exactly the same until that day in 323 B.C.”

Tom looked at the redwood. It was big, well over two hundred feet tall, but . . .

“I wouldn't think this one was twenty-three hundred years and change old; that's near the limit for a redwood, and this is the southern margin of their range.”

“Wouldn't have to be quite that ancient. It was centuries before the changes in the Old World started affecting things here—quite a few centuries. Eventually it did; butterfly-effect stuff there started making it rain on different days here, and so an elk went left instead of right and ate a seedling that he didn't FirstSide, things like that.”

They stared up at the great reddish-brown columns for a while, then turned back toward their campsite. The fire had died down to a bed of coals red-glowing or white-hot; he looked at his watch and found it was well after seven. His stomach told him the same thing, and that it had been a long time since a sandwich lunch.

“Just one thing missing for a campsite,” he said as they stacked their rifles.

He squatted beside a section of driftwood log and lifted it free of the sand with a long pull and grunting exhalation, then plumped it down beside the fire and brought another across the firepit from the first.

“Well, you pass the brute-strength test, you big, beautiful brute,” Adrienne said, handing him the net bag of abalone. “Let's see how you do on manual dexterity.”

Shelling and trimming the abalone was a familiar chore. He cut the muscle free of the iridescent interior of the shell with a small sharp blade; once the head and viscera were off and thrown to the attentive gulls he wrapped each one in a towel for a moment, set it on a log and gave it a couple of solid whacks with the flat of a heavy knife.

“Spare the cutting board?” he said.

She passed it over, and he scored the abalone fillets with a series of cuts about half an inch deep and an inch apart and repeated the process on the other side, running the cuts at right angles to the first set and piling the meat on a plate. Adrienne reclaimed the board and sliced a few cloves of garlic as Sandra and Roy unpacked the picnic basket, opened the coolers that held venison sausage and salad whose greens had been picked fresh at Seven Oaks that morning, cut bread, uncorked the wine. . . .

The picnic hamper also held an iron ring on three short stubby legs; he dropped that into the coals and set the frying pan on top. Adrienne dropped in a healthy dollop of butter and waited until it sizzled, then added the garlic. Saliva flooded Tom's mouth—nothing on earth smelled any better than that, unless you threw some onions into the mix.

“The secret of pan-frying abalone is to do it quick,” he said, and plopped the first into the hot, frothing butter-and-garlic mixture.

A few seconds on each side and it was ready; he did enough for everyone, then came to sit beside Adrienne; they ate sitting side by side on the log, with their plates on their knees.

“God, that's good.” He sighed. “Particularly considering the fact that it's essentially a giant seagoing snail.”

“Nothing wrong with snails, done with some garlic and butter,” Adrienne said, mopping her plate with a heel of the crusty bread.

“Big fella doesn't like 'em,” Tully said. “Maybe he should get a rubber escargot ; he likes the
sauce
well enough, but—”

“Hey, I'm just a Dakota plowboy,” Tom said a little defensively. “We don't eat snails.”

“Abalone is a big item in North Dakota, then?” Roy jibed, and laughed. “OK, each to their own. Let's have some of that chardonnay.”

The white wine was chilled from its immersion in seawater, but the temperature of the air was perfect—low seventies. As the sun sank toward the western horizon the Pacific became a glittering road of eye-hurting brightness. The cliffs turned ruddy with the sunset; he refilled the skillet with sliced potatoes, flipping them a couple of times before sliding out a portion for everyone, then putting one of the sage-and-herb-spiced venison sausages on a stick and propping it up with its butt in the sand and the wood over one of the rocks that ringed the fire.

“It's a good thing life in the field isn't usually like this,” Tully said, retrieving his sausage and wrapping a slice of the dense, chewy bread around the sputtering, smoking meat before stripping it off the stick. “War might get too popular. . . . Pass that mustard, would you?”

“Here,” Adrienne said, and tossed it over. “I suspect we're all going to suffer enough to satisfy the most exacting conscience before this is over, so let's store up some memories while we can.”

The sun vanished in a line of red fire and hot gold among the clouds on the western horizon. Stars began to appear above the low crescent moon, and the air grew chillier; he put a pot of coffee on the ring, and Sandra unwrapped some chocolate-walnut brownies.

“Made these myself,” she said. “Seven Oaks walnuts—best in the domain.”

Tom sat on the sand and threw a few more sticks of driftwood onto the fire before leaning back against the log. The flotsam burned with a snap and crackle, flames flickering blue and green with the salts dried into the wood. Adrienne curled into his shoulder, and he put an arm around her; he suspected Tully and Sandra were doing the same, but his eyes were a little dazzled by the fire.

“Just my luck,” he said lightly.

“Kemosabe?”

“I find the girl of my dreams, and she's a spook from another dimension with a license to kill.”

Adrienne chuckled. “Here,
you're
from another dimension. Although I grant you're not a spook—you're a game warden from another dimension. . . .”

Tom sighed, taking a sip of the coffee and another deep breath of the cool, sea-scented air. “Just doesn't get better than this, I suppose.”

Adrienne's lips touched his ear just as he was taking a sip of the coffee; he might have managed that, but not the tongue that slid in after them. When he'd finished coughing, she thumped him helpfully on the back.

“I'll have you know that I come second to no meal. Or even a Pacific sunset,” she said, grinning wickedly.

“Ah . . . I think it's about time to turn in,” Tom said, ignoring laughter from across the fire. “Long day tomorrow.”

Piet Botha reined in his horse. He rode in Boer fashion, slumped with his legs nearly straight and slanted forward. His son rode beside him, using the bent-knee New Virginian style. They were alike otherwise, given the twenty-five-year gap in their ages. Schalk Botha was a little lighter in his coloring and had eyes of an unusual tawny shade; besides that he was an inch shorter than his father's six-three, and without any of the older man's extra flesh. He was also grinning with excitement.

“
Hell,
yes, Pa,” he said. “Sounds like fun!”

“You're not too old for me to clout across the ear,” Piet growled. “This is serious business, boy. We may have to fight some of our relatives, not just the bliddy Indians.”

Schalk shrugged his wide shoulders. “Only if they're fools enough to get mixed up in treason.”

“Treason is what you do when you lose,” Piet said. “I'd be on the other side myself, if I thought it would work. But it wouldn't.”

He stopped and leaned down from the saddle to fasten the gate. His cow-beasts were all inside the paddock now, and he looked up the long slope of the land to where his farmhouse glittered white and red among its trees and orange groves, and the mountains reared blue behind it. It was a hot day, but tempered by a breeze from the sea; the air was full of the smell of horse sweat and cattle dung and crushed herbs. Behind them was a dirt road, and beyond that a waste of tall dry grass, dead reeds that had grown in seasonal sloughs earlier in the year, an occasional thicket of oak or sycamore or willow, and patches of the tall stalks of wild mustard.

It's home to young Schalk,
he thought.
His homeland. He came here young enough; I'll be an exile all my life.

He shrugged at the thought; he'd be an exile in the land of his birth, too, even if he could live there unmolested by the new government's police—something unlikely in the extreme. The country that had borne him didn't exist anymore, not really. Instead he spoke of practical things. “We'll be getting the horses. Good ones—no show beasts, mind—ones that'll stay alive over the mountains. And the mules.”