Alston turned her gaze to the captured Tartessian ships. Two of them were beached, drawn up ashore on the sandy mud to keep them from sinking. The others were serving as floating POW pens, their own surviving crews repairing superficial damage and working the pumps under guard until something more regular could be arranged.
"What's the status on those?" she asked.
Swindapa flipped two pages on her clipboard, but she was speaking before her eyes hit the print. "The two we ran ashore are… shattered was the word CPO Zelukelo used. The others are essentially sound, but they'll all need to be hauled up for work on their hulls before they're fully functional again."
She looked up. "Really very good ships-well built, fine seasoned wood. Composite masts, though-bound with heat-shrunk iron hoops."
The Republic used single trunks for masts, but it had access to the white pine of New England. Swindapa went on:
"We have forty-eight Dahlgrens from them, cold-core cast steel work. The armory marks read Walkeropolis and Neayoruk, which fits with the Foreign Affairs reports, and Cuddyston, which doesn't but I think it's up in, what's the name, Istria, where we heard they were opening coal mines. The guns are about ten percent heavier than ours, and the machining cruder-particularly on the exteriors. But they'll throw a ball nearly as far and hard as ours, and nearly as accurately."
"Too fucking right, they will," one of the XOs muttered. "Sorry, ma'am," he went on at the Commodore's quelling look.
"Then we'll break up the two on the beach for timber," Alston went on. "That'll give us eight-hundred-odd tons of seasoned plank and beam, more than enough for our repairs and useful for construction, too. Brigadier McClintock, I want to get an accelerated training program for the auxiliaries going, starting tomorrow. We'll-
"Is that a railroad?" Ian Arnstein asked incredulously.
It certainly looked like one, snaking north up the valley of the Eurotas, parallel to the two-lane asphalt road from Neayoruk. Wooden crossties in a bed of gravel, and rails on them, shining in the sun that had emerged from the clouds at last.
Wait a minute, he thought. Those rails were wood, too, with a thin strap of iron nailed on top. Then his eyes went wide again; a train of wagon-cars came rumbling around a low hill, pulled by…
Elephants? he thought, feeling his mind boggle; it was an interesting sensation, a little like how your knees got after one too many.
"From Pharaoh," Odikweos said. "A man of the King's left his service some time ago, and found shelter at Ramses's court. We trade with him, and the King bought these creatures. Many men died learning the trick of taming them, but they haul like the Titans of old."
He waved a hand at the… Elephant-way? Elephant-road? Whatever, Ian thought.
"There is talk of extending it north to Mycenae, and then to Athens and beyond, as we did the road, years ago. All the changes come first to this part of the kingdom. Now, about Nantucket-
Feeling his way, Arnstein said: "I thought I wasn't to be interrogated."
The Greek smiled. "No, only not tortured," he said.
Arnstein's eyes narrowed. Few of the Ithakan's questions had been specifically military; most of them had been about Nantucket generally, about laws and customs and governance. Comparing my story to what he's had from Walker and his cronies, Ian decided. Now that's smart. Of course, if this was who he thought it was, his cleverness had become a legend that lasted three thousand years…
He looked around at the vale of Sparta as he spoke, "hollow Lakonia" as it had been called. I can see what he meant about the changes starting here, it being Walker's HQ. Still, they've done an awful lot in less than ten years.
The road was crowded, troops or slave coffles or local villagers traveling on the graveled verges; trains of big Conestogas and smaller vehicles pulled by oxen or mules on the pavement, sometimes a rich man's chariot, a fair number of riders in modern saddles. Pine trunks rose beside the road at intervals, with a single strand of wire looping along; agents and merchants had confirmed that Walker was using telegraphs. Once there was a body hanging upside down from a pole as well, with a sign reading "wire cutter" spiked to it.
The Eurotas ran to their right, brown and muddy and swift over a gravel bed, lined with oleander, plane trees, and dwarf palms. The valley bottom went from flattish to rolling and back, broken here and there by escarpments and gullies thick with evergreens and aromatic shrubs. To their left the afternoon sun turned the snowcapped peaks and fingers of Taygetos to flame, casting shadows down the dark fir-forested slopes; the range loomed over the valley below like a wall, rising almost vertically. More forests clothed the gentler foothills of Mount Par-non to the east, pines standing tall in a dense blue-green bristle on the upper slopes, with traces of autumn yellow on the hardwoods mantling the lower. This was not the Greece he knew.
The valley itself was full of groves, young fruit trees, citrus- Isketerol had ordered thousands of grafted seedlings from Brandt Farms before the war, and evidently passed a lot of them on. Disc plows turned up the rich red earth in fields edged by cypresses, and gangs set out new plantings or dropped quartered seed-potatoes into the furrows. Many new olive plantings mantled slopes green and purple with lupines and vetch. Around the older olive trees workers moved, shaking the branches with long poles and throwing the fruit into baskets. Other laborers pruned and bound vines; there were many irrigated fields, watered from small dams and channels and wind-powered pumps. Most of them grew bright-green alfalfa, or vegetables, or what looked the stalks of cotton.
Mounted overseers watched them work, and there had been half a dozen armed patrols. Ian put that together with reports, glimpses of tumbledown abandoned villages, new pitched tile roofs on larger manors, rows of new-built adobe cottages looking like they'd been stamped out with a cookie cutter… or run up by construction gangs to an identical plan.
"Let me guess, lord wannax," he said to Odikweos. "A lot of the peasant tenant farmers who used to live here don't anymore."
"Yes," the Greek said, looking slightly surprised. "Many have moved to Walkeropolis or Neayoruk, many have gone into the Army, many as colonists to conquered lands."
"And to replace them. Walker… your King of Men, I mean… supplied slaves to the… telestai, isn't that the word?"
"Barons, yes."
"And so now instead of tenants they could call out to fight for them, the barons have slave gangs who'd run off or revolt without Wai… without the King of Men's armies and police?"
Odikweos's eyes narrowed. "Yes," he said in a neutral tone. "Some do run off, to the mountain forests, and live as skulking bandits until they're hunted down and crucified."
"Uh-huh," Arnstein said. "And I'll bet that instead of every estate being self-sufficient except for luxuries, now they couldn't survive without trade?"
"Hmmmm," Odikweos said, tugging at his beard. "Yes. Grain from Thessaly and Sicily and Macedonia; also tools and cloth from the factories the King of Men established." He dropped the English word into his Achaean without noticing it.