She controlled her mount with the absentminded skill of someone who'd spent a lot of the last ten years in the saddle. The horses she and Swindapa rode were local, part of the herd they'd requisitioned from villages near their landfall at Cadiz Base over the past two weeks, and still uncertain about their new owners. The standard-bearer with the Stars and Stripes flying above a white truce-pennant was mounted likewise, for dignity's sake, and the westering sun gilded the eagle at the top of the staff afresh. Hooves clopped hollow on the hard surface, and wheels moved with a whine and crunch; the flag snapped and fluttered in the onshore breeze.
The platoon behind her were on the cycles, pre-Event ten-speed models refitted for current conditions, and a four-seater side-by-side hauling a Gatling; the Guard had requisitioned nearly every cycle on Nantucket for this expedition, giving money, apologies, and the heavier, clunkier output of Seahaven in recompense. The highway they were following ran northwest from the Cadiz area along the shore of a great inlet-what had been solid ground and marsh at the mouth of the Guadalquivir in the twentieth was open water here. A rough rectangle of sea stretched in from the coast for miles, almost to the edge of the chalk hills that had been the heart of the sherry country in Marian's birth-century.
They would eventually wear out the horses; even with solid tires cyclists covered ground six times faster than troops on foot, especially with good roads.
And these roads are excellent, she thought. I wonder if Isketerol has thought through all the implications of that?
The one they followed was twenty-five feet broad, with a topping of neatly cambered crushed limestone pounded to a hard smooth surface, graveled shoulders, deep flanking ditches… what the English of the Regency era would have called a MacAdamized turnpike. There were even young trees planted on either side, to grow and eventually shade travelers.
Hate to think of the labor this must have taken, she thought.
The day was hot enough to send trickles of sweat down her flanks under the blue uniform jacket despite the cool breeze from the water and the lingering freshness of this morning's rainfall; summer here must be like being on an anvil under the hammer of the sun. There was a scattering of clouds, growing thicker since noon, gilded now in the west where they piled mountain high above the flat horizon; she thought it would probably rain again soon. Fall and winter were the wet season here, the time of growth and life that ended as late spring faded into the dry death of summer, more or less the opposite of Alba or Nantucket.
To their left stretched the bay, green and blue and scattered whitecaps, shallowing off into a marsh of cattails and reeds close to shore. It was thick and clamorous with birds, shocking-pink flamingos and white spoonbills, greylag geese and wigeon, black-wing stilts wading about on their absurd spindly legs, redshanks dipping their long bills for shellfish and insect "larvae, although they hadn't gotten ahead of the mosquitoes, from the clouds that buzzed about. The yeasty, silty smell of marshland contrasted with the dryer scents of thyme and lavender and spice baked out of the high ground.
Out in the deeper water a column of black smoke came from the stack of a steamboat, one of the half dozen they'd brought in knocked-down form from Nantucket and assembled at Cadiz. The engine was the simple grasshopper-type that Seahaven had built for tugboats since right after the Event, its chufff… chufff… floating clear over the mile or so of water. The hull was a sixty-foot oval, shallow-draft; armament was two Gat-lings, one on each wing of the bridge, a light three-inch rifled shell-gun forward, and a four-inch mortar on the afterdeck. For riverine and coastal work they'd proved extremely useful, and they could tow barges full of troops and supplies as well. An ultralight buzzed overhead, high enough that it was a dot of color against blue sky and white cloud.
On the right and ahead was what she'd come to think of as typical Tartessian countryside. Gently rolling right here, which was what it did everywhere it wasn't flat altogether; the mountains of the Sierra de Grazalema were just in sight to the east, and the great range of the Sierra Morena was far to the north, beyond the Guadalquivir.
Not quite forest just yet, except on some of the occasional hills; more of an open parkland with thickets and copses here and there. Near Cadiz-that-wasn't the sandy beaches were flanked by woods of resin-smelling pine; here it was oaks, cork oak and holm oak and varieties she couldn't name, clumps of gray-green wild olives, all scattered in tall golden grass with the green shoots of new growth pushing up through the natural hay. Patches that had burned off in the dry season were even more vividly green. They'd seen many herds of deer, several of them with scores of individuals, hundreds in all during the day's ride. Plus several big brown bears, a distant glimpse of wolves looking curiously back from a ridgeline, a sure-enough group of wisent, European bison, and black, bristling-fierce wild boar out grazing on fallen acorns. Cattle and horses the locals hadn't had time to drive off, too, and…
From somewhere ahead a deep grunting, coughing sound came: uuuh-ooongh, uuuh-ooongh, repeated again and again, then building up into a shattering roar. The horses shied again, laying their ears back and rolling bulging eyes, fighting the reins. Their nostrils flared wide and red; they chewed their bits, slobbering foam that dripped on the ground.
"What the hell is that?" asked one of the Marines nervously, his hand going to the butt of the rifle slung across his back.
"Silence in the ranks!" Lieutenant Ritter barked, and glanced at the commodore.
"It's a lion, Lieutenant," Alston said, keeping her face straight with long-practiced ease.
There were still some in southern Europe in this era, from Iberia to Greece; it was the demands of the Roman arena that had finally wiped them out, in the other history. A lot harderonthe lions than the Christians, in the end. Leopards, too…
She went on: "And I think that remark translates into English roughly as: Mine! All mine!"
Ritter blushed involuntarily-noticeable amid the thick scattered freckles, the same brick-red color as her hair-and smiled worshipfully. Alston hid her sigh, too, as Swindapa looked over at her with one gently mocking eyebrow raised slightly over the remains of a beautiful shiner, all that was left of her collision with the flat side of a rifle butt.
Higamous hogamous, woman monogamous, the black woman thought wryly. Years of involuntary celibacy before the Event, and now if I wasn't extremely partnered and it weren't against regs, I could cut quite a swath.
The problem was she'd never really had aspirations that way-the usual fruitless search for True Love had been more her style before the Event, although what she'd have done if she found it back then was a mystery considering the knuckle-dragging barbarism of the old UCMJ on the matter. Earlier, she'd even spent years trying to convince herself she was in love with a man rather than admit failure in a relationship.
The corner of her mouth hiked up slightly, as she remembered a joke she'd heard in San Francisco, when she was stationed there half a decade before the Event: "What do lesbians drive on their second date?" Answer: "A moving van."
Although that's not an invariable rule. I've known some who were complete bedhopping sluts who lost all interest the second or third time they got into your pants-Jolene, for one…
She choked off the memory of the affair that had led to her divorce, nearly wrecked her career, and certainly cost her custody of the two children she'd borne. It didn't take much effort; time and Swindapa, and Heather and Lucy, had buried that old bitterness; she could smile at the memory now.
Well, it was stupid getting involved with a professor of Women's Studies at Berkeley, anyway. Regardless of other circumstances, when someone says things like disenchanting the hegemonic discourse of compulsory heterosexism with a straight face, and on a date at that, you should know it can only end in tears.