"Paddle!" he said.

The other canoes were out as well, cutting broad circles on the expanse of the Sacramento; it was a good thing it was a couple of hundred yards wide here; they passed within a few feet of Eddie's, and the other ranger was cursing and waving his free hand, trying to kick the nearest local.

They should shake down in a few hours, Giernas thought. And it's all downstream from here.

November, 10 A.E.-Western Anatolia

October, 10 A.E.-Straits of the Pillars, Tartessos

October, 10 A.E.-Long Island, Republic of Nantucket

October, 10 A.E.-Tartessos City, southwestern Iberia

The jolt of the colonel talking to her faded, and Johanna Gwenhaskieths's marching day dragged on; an hour of march, ten minutes of rest to swig water and gnaw a dog biscuit, another hour on the muddy road. Even in one day's march up the Seha valley, though, the landscape had begun to change; fewer trees and groves, more of them olives, a drier feel to the land. Mountains rose in the east, the edge of the high country. If it hadn't been for that change of landscape, she might have thought this the afterlife, and she condemned to a march without end.

The sun dropped behind them to the right, throwing long shadows. A bugle call sounded; Johanna found her feet stopping automatically, even before the fall out and stack arms sounded.

Good campground, she thought automatically. A nice little hill, a ruined farmstead for dry firewood… and she smiled beatifically at the little flock of sheep in a pen.

"Fresh meat tonight," she said happily; feast-day food.

And it wasn't her company's turn for night-watch, so there wouldn't be a four-hour chunk taken out of her sleep. That didn't mean the end of work, of course, but at least she could walk over to where her section would be in the battalion camp, add her rifle and helmet to one of the tripods, and drop her webbing harness and rucksack. Then she pulled out a bundle of stakes with a steel blade on either end-swine-feathers, to be driven into the trench outside the earthwork-and took her entrenching tool to the perimeter.

When she came back a fire was already crackling, and she caught the smell of mutton roasting on it, enough to make her forget aching muscles, mud, and sweat.

One of her squad was frying crumbled dog biscuit in the grease that dropped from the chunks of meat; from the look, the beast had been a yearling lamb. She took some of the biscuit in her mess tin and hacked off a couple of chops from the spit with her clasp knife, blowing on her fingers as she juggled the hot food. While she gnawed the savory meat and ate the fat-rich morsels of biscuit (for once not worrying about breaking a tooth on it) Vaukel came up with two buckets of water. She hid a smile; even after this long, it was still a little odd to have someone doing women's work for her. Not unpleasant, she'd come to like Eagle People ways and even Fiernan more than those she'd grown up with.

"The corpsmen say the water's safe," Vaukel said.

"Ah, good!" she said, dipping up a cup that didn't have the unpleasant mineral taste of the purifying powder.

The she tossed her uniform over a branch and made for her rucksack, to fetch out a scrap of soap and half a dozen pairs of underwear and socks. A chance to clean them and herself; if she propped them on sticks by the embers of the fire they'd probably dry overnight, and if they didn't they'd be close enough to pack, or wear. When she came back the tent was up, and her squadmates were unrolling their bedding inside, and her legs were starting to tell her their tale of cooling, stiffening muscle.

"Ah, I'm getting to be a crone," she said as she slumped down.

"Legs stiff?" Vaukel said beside her. "Should I loosen them?"

"Thanks, Vauk," she said; Fiernans had a knack for that, healing magic in their fingers.

She sighed as he kneaded the knots and tension out of one leg, then another, finishing by stretching her ankles, rubbing the soles of her feet and drumming the edges of his hands up and down from heel to buttocks. Ahh, that does feel better. When he'd finished she looked up and caught his hopeful unspoken question, not to mention the rampant evidence of it.

"Sure," she said, with a drowsy chuckle.

A glance sideways showed the camp settling down for the night, the sun only a faint rim of light in the west. "But none of that Fiernan fancy work this time," she said, rolling onto her back. The Earth Folk could turn something as simple as fucking into something as elaborate as one of their dancing ceremonies. "I need my sleep."

Later, yawning and on the verge of slumber, she listened to a sentry's boots going past at the perimeter not far away, a wolf howling somewhere, a rustle of chill wind through the tree whose branches spread over the tent. The squad's fire was banked with earth on its outer side, to throw the warmth of the fire into the open flap of the tent. The stars were many and bright, promising dry weather… and dry socks, tomorrow.

War's a fine trade, she thought happily.

Even in the field like this the living was no rougher than the damp chill huts of home, parents and siblings and cousins and the livestock all sleeping in the same straw. Nor was the work harder than a croft-born girl's endless round of butter-churning and grain-grinding, cooking and weaving, walking miles under a weight of water buckets or bundled firewood; in barracks it was a good deal softer all 'round, and the company was better either way. More freedom, too; and in the uniform of the Corps nobody dared or cared to scorn you.

Then her belly tightened a little as she remembered the hissing roar of the Ringapi surging against the barricade, or the moaning scream of a mortar round from out of the sky overhead. She moved a little closer to the broad warm strength of Vaukel's back, comforted by the snores and sighs and body heat of the rest of the squad beyond as well.

At least, when you don't have a battle to fight, war's a fine trade.

"This was as close as the ultralights could get," Marian Alston said, spreading the photographs on the table. The captains crowded around, balancing instinctively against the sway of a ship under way. "The enemy have taken considerable counter-measures against airborne reconnaissance. Particularly at low altitudes."

Light cannon on counterbalanced yoke mounts designed to shoot upward, balloons with heavy pivot-rifles mounted in their gondolas and platforms on top of the gasbags, rockets. All of them crude and inaccurate, but the little motorized hang gliders weren't all that sophisticated either.

Dammit, if only we had real aircraft! Of course, while she was at it she could wish for missile boats and a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier… She glanced out the stern gallery windows, at the frigates following the flagship in a line that extended for miles, one ruler-straight millrace wake white across the blue of the ocean. We'll make do.

Still, the shots of Tartessos the City from above were fairly clear; a digital videocamera in the ultralight, run through the PC in Chamberlain's radio shack and its inkjet printer.

They lay next to the maps compiled by the Department of Foreign Affairs. Both showed what would become the junction of the Odiel and Tinto Rivers in the twentieth century-would have become, she thought with a mental stutter so familiar she hardly noticed it now. This was considerably different from what the uptime maps recorded. The great bay was larger, the peninsula of land down its middle far narrower, and there was less in the way of swamp and marsh around its fringes. Three thousand years of human beings cutting trees in the mountains, freeing soil to erode away downstream and rivers to drop the silt on the ocean shore; three thousand years of plowed fields doing likewise. Those could change the very contours of the land.