Helmet, rifle, bayonet, entrenching tool, two grenades, canteen, a hundred rounds in her bandolier and another hundred in the haversack, four pounds of dog biscuit and jerky with a couple of onions and some salt, bedroll, her share of her eight-Marine section's unit equipment, starting with a section of canvas boiled in linseed oil… At the beginning of a day, it didn't seem like much. When you'd been marching or righting or both every day for a week, it began to feel like you were carrying a chief's chariot on your back.
"What I don't understand," she said, scratching, "is why we keep retreating. We beat the Ringapi at O'Rourke's Ford, we handled Walker's handfast men pretty rough seven days later at Fork Mountain-and every time, as soon as they break off we back off. All we've really done is burn farms and forage. What's the point?"
A voice from two ranks back snarled: "The point is the officers figure out what to do. We just do it."
"Yes, Corporal Hook," she said. He was a bad one to cross, doubly so now he'd been promoted. Granted he deserved it, but…
"We're luring them into a trap," a cheerful voice said.
She looked up, started, and almost stumbled again. Colonel O'Rourke was leading his horse back down the column.
"If you say so, sir… When they catch us, they try to make us run; when we run, they try to catch us. Maybe they'll be so tired from chasing us they'll be easy meat?"
O'Rourke chuckled. "Not quite, Private. Tell me, how have the rations been?"
"Fine, sir, can't complain, haven't touched my iron rations… oh."
She looked over her shoulder at the desolation that was in their wake. And this miserable road to haul supplies on, she thought.
"Oh, indeed," O'Rourke said, and led his horse on down toward the end of the column.
"And what did he mean, then?" Vaukel asked.
"That the enemy are going to get hungry before we do."
Johanna chuckled. "Now that we've eaten the land bare, or burned it."
The weight of rifle and pack seemed lighter than they had a minute ago. She scratched again, hoping it was just sweat and that she hadn't come down with lice. Besides the medics' warnings about how they carried disease, one of the pleasures of Camp Grant-after the shock of having her head hair cropped to a quarter inch and the rest shaved-had been not itching for the first time in her life. You couldn't always avoid them in the field, but the knowledge that you didn't have to have nits all your life had been inexpressibly wonderful.
Nantucket was wonderful itself. She hoped she'd live to see it again.
"This is it, then," Jared Cofflin said aloud.
They were about a mile off the shore of the North Fork; it was a low line in the distance, lime-green of marsh and the green-gold-scarlet colors of autumn trees. He leveled a pair of binoculars.
"Well, not a bad job of navigation, if I say so myself," he said. And it wasn't, not with only a compass and logline to find his way on the map.
The wind was out of the north now, and he squinted beneath the brim of his cap as they scudded a little south of westward before it, the sun low enough on the horizon to be a nuisance. Good boat, he thought with a burst of affection. She answers sweet.
"Ready to come about," he said, busying himself with the line that ran through pulleys on the boom to a sliding track behind him along the stern. "Prepare to gybe."
Oddly enough, running before the wind was the most difficult sort of small-boat sailing. He pulled the tiller toward him, and hauled in the line with his left, to get the boom amidships; you didn't want it crashing back and forth across the cockpit.
"Gybe ho! 'Ware boom!"
The catboat was pointing due south now, and the boom swung out to starboard from the midships position. The sail thuttered as its unstayed edge caught the wind for a second, then cracked as it moved out, filled, and settled down. Time to build up just enough way on her, then-
"Lower away," he said. "Reef her."
Martinelli and Martha were on the rope, lowering the gaff and the sail with it. The children stood to the inboard edge of the boom and fastened the loose folds down with the ties sewn into the sail; they made a creditable job of it, too, if not Guard-neat.
The channel in was marked by poles with string pennants; there was a creek flowing into a shallow inlet, with salt marsh full of osprey nests perched in dead trees on the port and a spit of dry land to starboard. One of the big fish hawks punched the water not far away in a fist of spray, flogged itself back into the air with a foot of thrashing silver in its talons. He could see the mad lemon-yellow ferocity of its eye as it went by the Boojum, intent on its own business and ignoring him. The dock poked out into the water, a board surface on hemlock piles, with rope fenders along the sides.
He let the feel of the water and wind flow through his hands on line and tiller, up from his feet on the deck. He could smell the land now, silt and brackish water and growing things with an autumnal muskiness under it, strong even against the breeze.
"Lower away all… now!" he said.
The gaff came down the rest of the way with a run, and the two adults leaped to secure it. Martha and the petty officer took up the oars and fended off, the Boojum coming to rest against the wharf behind another boat that might have been its twin. There were plenty of hands on the dock to grab the lines thrown to them and make fast, not to mention a brace of excited dogs that looked to be mostly collie. They barked and dashed about until called to heel, then lay with their eyes bright and ears cocked forward.
"Afternoon, Chief," Thomas Hollard said.
The Marine commander's elder brother was in his late thirties, Cofflin knew, a little shorter and darker than Ken. He looked older than his years to pre-Event eyes, the way most people over twenty or so did nowadays; solid and troll-strong, his skin weathered and roughened by outdoor work in all weathers. The hand that shook Cofflin's was hard with callus, with knuckles like walnuts.
What Dad would have called workingman's hands, Jared thought as he shook the offered palm.
The elder Hollard's long straight nose had been broken at some time-during the Alban War, he remembered from the file he'd read yesterday-and reset a little crooked. The farmer sported a short-cropped beard, and wore dark woolen pants, white linen shirt, anorak-style jacket and high, laced boots. Probably his company clothes, and most of the rest of the farm's folk-eight adults, a dozen kids-were in clean, coarse linsey-woolsey bib overalls. Some of the kids barefoot-not surprising on a dry autumn day, seeing that a shirt cost a week's wages for a laborer, and a pair of shoes took a month's pay. One of the definitions of affluent in this Year 10 was having more clothes than a set to wear and a set to wash and a set for church or Meeting. Beside Hollard was his auburn-haired Fiernan wife Tanaswada, carrying their ten-month-old youngest; she was in her late twenties, had been a young widow with a baby at the breast in the aftermath of the Battle of the Downs when she met and married the Nantucketer. That boy must be the oldest child, now a red-haired, straw-hatted youngster giving the chief bashful glances, and admiring ones at Martinelli's Coast Guard uniform.
Let's see, three of their own, and another adoptee, five all up, and they're young yet-Tom here must be trying to raise himself a labor force from scratch, to be ready when his immigrants set up on their own.
"Bill, Mary, why don't you give a hand with the Cofflins' stuff?" Hollard said with an easy authority. "Chief, Ms. Cofflin, you want to see the old Alonski place now, or tomorrow?"
"Might as well take a first look now," he said. "If it's not too much trouble."
"No trouble at all," Hollard said genially. "Hey, what's that?"