Another sound came from their right. A bellow, thunder-loud, echoing across the landscape and throwing birds skyward in flocks like beaded smoke rising from tree and marsh. Again and again, a hoarse arrogant strutting proclamation to all the world.
"That's an aurochs," Swindapa said. "And it translates into English as: This ground is yours, you mangy alley cat? Says who? You and whose army?"
A herd of the wild cattle came over a rise. Alston brought out her binoculars to look at them; huge rangy beasts, like Texas longhorns crossed with rhinos, or Spanish fighting bulls on steroids; they were black, with long tapering horns turning to put the points forward above their eyes. If those were the originals of domestic cattle, she seriously wondered how Here-fords and Jerseys had ever been produced; at the shoulder the bull stood four inches taller than the top of her head, and when he lowered his horns and tossed them high bushes went flying.
"Steady, all," she said. "Just keep moving, and don't rile him up. Scatter out of the way if they charge."
Because in a butting match between that and a bulldozer, I'd bet on the bovine. The herd had several young calves with it, and that and the lion's territorial announcement would make them skittish. Alston had learned their bad tempers and hair-trigger readiness to charge anything on earth firsthand in Alba and expeditions to mainland Europe.
At least in open country like this you can see them coming.
They pressed north, and the land became slightly flatter, more closely grazed; they saw cattle and sheep under the eye of mounted herdsmen, and pigs barely distinguishable from their wild cousins. At last they came to wooden fences stretching out of sight northward and to the water on the south. A tall stone pillar stood by the side of the road, crudely carved at the top in the image of a woman's face with stylized representations of breasts and a vulva below. Swindapa reined in her horse and read the lettering around the base slowly; she could speak Tartessian well, and the spelling was in the Latin alphabet and reasonably phonetic:
"Land sacred to the Lady of Tartessos and the Grain Goddess," she recited. "Let no man harm or diminish it, or let his stock or flock do so, on pain of the Cold Curse and the anger of the King."
At Alston's look, she explained: "The Cold Curse-a cold hearth and a cold womb and cold loins for all around it." A frown of puzzlement. "That's odd-the Earth Folk have that curse too… this must be the edge of the territory of that village the herald mentioned."
Marian Alston nodded and signaled the party forward; normally there would be guardians to keep animals out, as well. Her eyes took in the cultivated fields on either side in expert appraisal; estimating an enemy's food-producing capacity was an important part of war, in any era. The plowlands and plantations sent her eyebrows up. The olive orchards were all new, just coming into bearing; before the Event, the Tartessians simply grafted wild trees, more than enough for their limited needs. The grain was planted in large fields, ten or twenty acres each, larger than any whole farm hereabouts until recently, divided by lanes of graded dirt scattered with gravel. And the wheat and barley in them had obviously been planted with a seed-drill; that was easy to see, since the shoots were only just starting to show across the rich dark-brown earth in neat rows. Some scattered oaks had been left in the fields and young cypress trees edged many of the fields, standing like tall green candles drawing a rectilinear pattern across the land.
Mmmm-hmmm. They're using disc plows, from the look of it-six-furrow type. There were harvested fields of corn- maize-as well, chick-peas, lucerne, sunflowers, and-
"Halt," she said, and heeled her horse aside, over the ditch and up to the edge of the post-and-rail fence. "Cotton, by God!" Well picked-over, too. Nobody had raised cotton in the Sea Islands since long before her birth, but she'd seen it growing, visiting relatives up-country as a child, and since the Event in the Olmec country and Peru. This field had furrows running between the rows and cracked mud showed where water had run; there was a brick-lined irrigation ditch beyond, led in from some west-flowing stream.
A scattering of houses stood off by themselves amid the fields or nearer the road. Many were mere tents of brushwood and reed, evidently the traditional farmer's housing here. There were others made of adobe brick, rectangular and roofed in tile, all looking new, surrounded by young orchards of apricot, peach, orange, lemon, and fig. Each of the smaller buildings had an outhouse standing behind. Such a minor thing, but important.
One imposing structure was large enough to be called a mansion, foursquare and massive on a low hilltop in the middle distance, whitewashed, with a tower at one corner, looking for all the world like a Mexican hacienda, down to the row of rammed-earth cottages outside.
Leveling her binoculars she could see that the walls of the big building on its hilltop were black with the heads of people peering over, probably all the folk of the countryside round about, gathered for what protection they could find at the manor of the local aristocrat. Mmmm-hmmm. Loopholes for small arms, looks like a light swivel gun in that tower, dry moat. Though… mmmm-hmmm, those adobe walls would turn to powder under any sort of cannonade. No doubt King Isketerol wanted his local lordlings armed to stand off pirates or barbarian raiders, but not enough to get notions about independence, or potshotting royal tax collectors.
"Forward," she said.
"Walk-march… walk."
The little village at the center of the cultivation looked to be entirely post-Event, bowered in olive groves and orchards and sitting on a slight rise. Ritter halted the truce party well short of it.
"Squads one and three dismount," the lieutenant said, her eyes darting about for hidden assassins and ambushes. "Sergeant, check it out."
"Ma'am!" the noncom said, and barked orders of his own.
Marines fanned out to search, then waved the rest on when they found no human presence. It was eerily quiet with all the dwellers gone, a shutter flapping, a dog loping off as they entered, a few chickens picking through the dirt with idiot calm- and then she remembered that chickens would be a new thing here, too. In the first history they hadn't gotten this far until the Iron Age…
The buildings were all adobe and tile-roofed, many gaudily painted on wall and door and shutter, set well back from the road and the secondary street that ran down to an inlet of the bay and a dock. Trees shaded the houses and walled gardens surrounded them, well watered from channels in tile-lined gutters beside the streets. There were flowers as well as vegetables and herbs, she noticed with interest-roses, cannas, bougainvillea. The big wind pump filling an earthen water tank at the edge of town was a straight copy of one of Leaton's models, with laminated wood vanes that could be turned in sections to feather them in storms.
Larger buildings surrounded a square. One had tall wooden pillars brightly painted, carved in the shape ‹?f a three-legged, one-eyed monster, an armored man set about with weapons and chariot wheels all topped by a golden disk, a woman holding a sheaf of grain and another whose legs were a fish-tail, a bit like a mermaid… although unlike conventional Western representations, the wood-carver had equipped her to do more than tantalize a sailorman. Hooves clattered on rock, for the square was paved with neatly fitted blocks of pale stone in a herringbone pattern.
Beside the fountain in the center was a stone pillar with a bronze plaque attached, rather like the historical markers you saw by the roadside sometimes before the Event.