The Sea Peoples(8)
Through the trees, the triumphal arch of the monument at the park’s heart glistened like silver in the sunshine. On the other side of the square were handsome-looking barracks and stables of white stone, three stories of regular windows above pillars and arches, enough for several regiments and alive with color and motion. It all seemed like a vision of a land strong, contented and at peace as its folk went about the business of their everyday lives, earning their bread and raising their children.
Yet he felt—unsure if it was himself or dream-self—an irresistible impulse to lean out and scream warnings of what crawled hungrily beneath the surface and waited to emerge.
Warnings or threats? Of the doom that falls from the darkening sky?
“Cassilda’s fate shall be yours! You cannot escape! None of you can escape! None of us can escape!”
Alan Thurston woke gasping. His troop-sergeant lifted a hand from his shoulder.
“That must have been a doozy, sir!” he said. “It’s all these heathen fruit you ate giving you collywobbles—not a decent apple in the place.”
Alan sat upright on his cot, head nearly brushing the hot canvas of the tent and smelling the stuffy scent; it had cleared up outside, only a few piled white clouds in a dome of blue sky broken by the white tips of the volcanoes. The sides of the tent were rolled up to show that, and the vivid green of the grass that the encampment of the 1st Latah Volunteer Cavalry (Army of the United States of Boise) was busily treading into mud. Memory tattered away like wisps of yellow thread, sliding through the fingers of his attention, and he shrugged his bare shoulders.
Instead he remembered what day it was, and a long slow smile lit his face.
órlaith! he thought, conscious of a tightness in his throat. And we actually should have some time for each other.
Sergeant Creveld was a weathered man in his thirties with several scars on his tanned face and close-cropped sandy hair; he looked at Alan with avuncular fondness beneath the disciplined respect. Order was strict in all the Boisean forces, but the cavalry were less formal about it than the heavy infantry . . . and this was a volunteer unit anyway, raised for the campaign to avenge the High King’s death. Creveld was a Regular, though, one of the cadre transferred to see that the reservists who made up the rest of the force came up to scratch. Everyone in Boise did his three years in the service and drilled regularly for the next twenty, of course, but cavalry came from ranching areas where folk were born and raised in the saddle.
And it took a lot more than three years to make a first class horse-archer; you had to be practically born at it.
“You wanted a bath, sir? Don’t blame you after wiping down with salt water for weeks. And since you’ve got a date with the local bigwigs and you-know-who . . .”
He grinned, a friendly male expression that knew no rank and grew wider as Alan flushed and cleared his throat.
Alan had worked hard helping get the unit settled in, and everyone was proud that their commander was dating the Crown Princess, who had neither shouted it to the skies nor made any attempt to conceal it. They were more or less proud that the President’s nephew was their commander, too, especially since Frederick Thurston was leading the Boisean contingent personally and had made it plain he wasn’t holding Alan’s father against him. Quite a few of the troopers were his neighbors or retainers or neighbors’ retainers back home, which helped since they’d been used to seeing him at county fairs and barbeques and roundups and militia musters all their lives.
Most of the time he and his mother were just well-to-do neighbors, not internal political exiles, the more so as memories of the Prophet’s War faded and a new generation grew up very tired of hearing their parents’ stories.
Everyone was glad the First Lady was back in Boise watching the store, too. Virginia Thurston had never forgotten or forgiven anything about anyone, as far as anyone knew, and it was widely thought that included anyone descended from her husband’s dead traitor of a brother. She’d have been far more unpopular if it wasn’t equally true that she never forgot a friend or supporter or hesitated to help them when they needed it.
Well, Mother’s more or less the same way—maybe it’s something women with blue eyes have in common, he thought.
He’d been sleeping naked under a light blanket, all you needed here in the heat that also explained why the sides of the tent were rolled up under the eaves—though you did need a roof, since it had rained hard twice in the twenty-six hours they’d been ashore. He ducked out with a towel around his waist—that hid the unmistakable physical evidence that he was thinking about the date too, since he didn’t want to give more help than he had to to the cavalry’s bawdy sense of humor—and found a folding canvas bath steaming and ready, and slipped gratefully into the hot warmth. Working through most of the night had made the afternoon nap just enough, even for someone only twenty-two and in hard good shape. It was nothing he couldn’t handle, as he’d handled spending twenty hours in the saddle on a roundup.
“We’ve got a good spot for drawing water, too, sir. Upstream of that mob from the CORA,” Creveld said.
Alan snorted and nodded agreement. The levy from the Central Oregon Ranchers Association were individually tough plainsmen and mountaineers, hunters and herders who were good riders and handy with blade and their saddlebows; they even had some coordination, at a friends-and-neighbors level. At anything beyond that they were all anarchists by Boisean standards, and while he didn’t really think they pissed in the same places they drew drinking water he wasn’t altogether sure that the company sergeant was just being prejudiced, either.