Read Online On the Oceans of Eternity by S. M. Stirling - Free Book Online

to Iberia. Southern Spain’s a rich area—coal, minerals, timber.”
    Marian Alston-Kurlelo shook her head; there were no excuses for failure. “Well, have to do the best we can with what we’ve got.”
    Swindapa touched her arm. “Moon Woman will send us a fortunate star,” she said, smiling gently. “Heather and Lucy are depending on it.”
    “Everybody is,” Marian said, putting down a slight twinge of pain at the thought of their daughters. They grew and changed so quickly at that age ... “And a lot of them are going do die before we set it all right.”

CHAPTER THREE
    September, 10 A.E.—O’Rourke’s Ford, east of Troy
    October, 10 A.E.—Nantucket Town, Republic of Nantucket
    September, 10 A.E.—O’Rourke’s Ford, east of Troy
    October, 10 A.E.—Nantucket Town, Republic of Nantucket
    C olonel Patrick James O’Rourke (Republic of Nantucket Marine Corps) threw up his hand to halt the column and reined in his horse. The little dapple-gray tossed its head and snorted; he soothed it with a hand down the neck.
    “Steady there, Fancy,” he said, bringing out his binoculars.
    The horse was one of the Oriental chariot ponies they’d bought locally and broken to the saddle. Some laughed at him for riding an entire male, but there were times when you wanted a mount with some aggression, though. The animal was small, barely thirteen hands, but O’Rourke wasn’t a large man himself; a stocky carrot-haired five-foot-eight, which he’d been pleased to find put him well above average in most of the Bronze Age world.
    “There they are,” he went on, pointing to the smoke of cookfires.
    The little outpost below stood in the middle of a valley flanked on either side by rough hills—shrubby maquis of dwarf oak and juniper and tree heather below, real oaks and then tall pines further up their sides, rising to naked rock. Further south loomed Mount Ida; southwestward the rumpled valley dropped down toward the not-quite-visible Aegean Sea, and the plain of Troy beyond. The valley floor was farmland, richer than the rocky plateau to the eastward; it was tawny-colored now at the end of the summer dry season, dust smoking off stubblefields, between drystone walls, turning the flickering leaves of the olive groves a drabber green and coating the purple grapes that hung on the goblet-trained vines. A scatter of stone and mud-brick huts dotted it, clumping around the line of a stream and the rutted track of dry mud road that wound down toward Troy. The sheepfolds and pens near them were empty, and the smokeholes in the flat roofs were cold; like sensible peasants anywhere or when, the locals had headed up into the hills when the armies came near, driving their livestock ahead of them.
    The air was hot and buzzed with the sound of cicadas; sweat trickled down his flanks under the khaki uniform jacket as he scanned the bright openness of the great landscape. There was a strong smell of rosemary and thyme crushed under the hooves of the animals. There were two dozen of those; his staff gallopers, trumpeter, a radio tech with her equipment on pack mules, and two sections of mounted rifles.
    The Nantucketers and their allies were camped around a larger building on a slight rise, a bigger version of the huts; he could see where the poles that held the thick earth-and-brushwood roof poked through the peeling brown mud-plaster of the wall. A few tall poplars near it hinted at a water source; a row of wagons and herd of oxen with a few hobbled horses grazing nearby marked the transport they’d brought with them. Another rectangular building stood some distance away, a storehouse by the look of it, and there were a couple of rough stone paddocks.
    O’Rourke’s eyes caught a flickering brightness on one of the high hills to the south of the valley. Heliograph, he thought. Good that they’re keeping on their toes.
    He chopped his hand forward again. The group rocked into motion, a column of twos threading its way downward at a