The Sea Peoples(48)
They all nodded to him as he followed órlaith out, most of them smiling. One medium-sized man with long brown hair and mustache gave him a considering look, walking a few paces to take in all of him. He had a wildcat build, a thin torc of twisted gold around his neck and tattoos all over his otherwise naked body; apparently what they said about McClintocks was true, though Alan had never met any before he came east for the war. Latah County in the US of B and the hill lands south of the Willamette down by the old Californian border where the Clan McClintock laired were both mountain-and-valley, but apart from that they were about as far apart as possible in every imaginable way.
Diarmuid’s his name, Alan reminded himself.
He’d been working on learning who was who in the Household.
Diarmuid Tennart McClintock. Personal name, family name, clan, like the Mackenzies. He’s a tacksman, sort of like a rancher or squire, and in his mid-twenties, oldest man here.
Diarmuid gave Alan a final close examination and spoke to the big blond young Mackenzie, Karl Aylward:
“Nae scrat up. Ye owe tha’ price ay a scuttle sheeps,” he said cheerfully; his accent was thick even compared to the way Mackenzies spoke, and much rougher. “Ah tauld ye she wasnae given tae claws.”
Two women—the short slight Sioux girl and the tall black-haired Ranger with the scar—quietly stepped up behind the McClintock. Each planted a foot against her side of his bare butt and shoved in neat unison, and he went windmilling forward to land in the water with a shout cut short in a gurgle and a huge splash.
Karl Aylward Mackenzie apparently thought that was hilarious, which was the sort of rural sense of humor Alan was familiar with. Heuradys d’Ath grabbed Karl’s arm while he was standing helpless with bellowing laughter, put it in a lock and spun him neatly into the water after the southern clansman with a move Alan recognized but thought he might have had trouble countering. Diarmuid promptly tried to hold his head underwater.
Alan had never swum in anything but rivers and ponds in his home-range, though in plenty of those; they were handy and fun, especially if you didn’t mind sharing the water with beavers, trout and the occasional muskrat.
This pool was an oval of marble occupying most of a courtyard, with water running into it from a wall-fountain shaped like a bronze lion’s mouth; like the marble, it was probably salvage. The fancy villa was the best the locals had and they’d quite rightly provided it for the Crown Princess’ party. He’d thought the expeditionary force was being more deferential to local sensibilities than was strictly necessary, considering that the fleet and the army it escorted numbered rather more than the entire population of the island’s capital city.
I have trouble taking Hawai?i all that seriously, he thought, watching with appreciation as órlaith dove in with scarcely a splash and began doing an underwater lap. Maybe I should try harder.
In the days of his grandfather Lawrence Thurston the United States of Boise—back then, they’d just called it the United States of America because they hadn’t cared how it read with the neighbors—had aspired to recreate the United States from sea to sea. That hadn’t worked out despite President-General Lawrence Thurston’s fanatical dedication—he’d been a soldier of the old Republic and took it very seriously—but Montival incorporated the western third of what had been the United States and what had been British Columbia as well, which had made Boise’s membership go down a lot easier. It was a reunification of sorts, even if not the one their first General-President had had in mind.
Granted that large parts of Montival’s vast expanse were empty, or empty of anything but a few neo-savages living on deer and collecting their enemies’ heads, or had scattered hamlets and herding camps whose contact with the High Kingdom were entirely theoretical, but it was still hard for him to take this little miniature toy of a kingdom in mid-Pacific very seriously. You could drop it into Boise alone a dozen times over without making much of a splash. And while the USB was probably the second most populous part of Montival—the other possibility was Boise’s neighbor New Deseret—it wasn’t the biggest in area by a long shot. He’d known Montival was huge before he left home, and after traveling overland on horseback and by rail and barge all the way to the coast he appreciated it down in his gut in a way that only watching countryside crawl by for weeks could bring.
The official and even more the unofficial briefings they’d gotten before landing had repeatedly made it crystal clear that anyone in the USB Army who let the locals see that sort of dismissive attitude was going to be very, very sorry, and so were the NCO’s and officers who allowed it. He supposed that the other contingents of the Montivallan expeditionary force had received the same message, in appropriate ways; some of them came from places where heads will roll wasn’t necessarily a metaphor.
Alan dove into the sun-filtered water himself. It was a big enough pool that there was still plenty of room even with several of órlaith’s Household making determined attempts to drown each other in it. One end was around four feet deep, and the other twelve, and it was all just deliciously, comfortably cool given the warmth of the local climate.
He came to the surface and shook back his head, the honey-brown of his curls darkened by the water. The contrast with diving into a mountain lake fed by glacial runoff was startling. The closest he could think of was a stock-watering pond in summer, without its disadvantages, starting with what cattle and horses and sheep did whenever and wherever they felt like it.