Many men forgot that women and servants had ears, and tongues to talk with. Such men were fools. You could learn invaluable things from underlings, and he intended to learn all he could of this strange house. The gods had given him rocky islands on the edge of the world for his demesne. That wasn't to say that they meant him to spend all his life as a poor underking.

He didn't think this foreigner chief was a fool of the more obvious kind, either. Something could come of that.

"It seems Moon Woman has sent stars to guide my feet on the path of war," Swindapa said, with a sigh.

After most of a decade, Marian's mind translated automatically; the words were English, but the thought was Fiernan. An American would have said: No getting around it. Swindapa's birth-folk were a fatalistic lot.

"We've spent more time exploring and building ships than fighting," she pointed out gently.

"Truth," the blonde said with another sigh and reached over to squeeze the other woman's hand. "Moon Woman turned the years themselves in their tracks to give us that."

Alston laughed. "You know, that's about as good an explanation as I've ever heard," she said.

Swindapa stroked a hand down the neck of her mount. "The ships are wonderful," she said. "And horses are almost as much fun as babies."

They rode side by side, in the shade of the trees left uncut on either side of what was becoming known as the Great West Road down Long Island's north fork. Leaves fluttered down to meet those already in swales by the ditches and thick on the gravel, drifts of old gold and dark crimson. To their right were patches of wood, of salt marsh noisy with wildfowl, and glimpses of the sound. She reined in for a second to watch a schooner beating eastward, its sails white curves of a purity that made her throat ache for a second.

The other side of the road was a mixture of forest and plowland set out in big square fields-the Meeting had handed out square-mile farms to homesteaders, leaving half the land in forest preserve. Cornstalks rustled sere and dry in stooked pyramids amid thick-scattered orange pumpkins, next to the almost shocking green of alfalfa; where it had been mown for hay the scent was as sweet as candy. Wheat and barley stubble was dun-yellow and thick with the clover that grazed herds of crossbred sheep. Where teams of oxen or horses pulled disc plows the turned earth was a rich, moist reddish brown, swarming with raucous gulls squabbling over the grubs exposed by the turning steel.

The riders waved to the workers digging potatoes, to shepherds and their barking dogs, to passersby-farm wagons drawn by calm-eyed oxen, the odd rider, and now and then a lone pedestrian.

Alston smiled at the miles of post-and-board edging the fields, remembering the experiment with splitting black walnut for Virginia-style rail fences. Theoretically that should have been cheaper, but it turned out that the use of wedge and maul was something Abe Lincoln must have learned at his father's knee.

Sure as shit nobody on Nantucket could do it! she chuckled to herself. Anybody could nail boards, though, and one of Leaton's people had come up with a simple pile driver to set the posts.

The road dipped into a belt of trees along a creek; planks boomed beneath the hooves of their mounts. Alston felt her horse take a sudden sideways skitter as something squealed angrily. A sounder of pigs erupted from the mud beneath the pilings, scattering into the trees in a twinkle of hooves and brass nose rings. The air was full of a cool, damp, musty smell, leaf mold and turned earth.,

"Gone wild," Swindapa said. Her eyes raked the woods by the side of the road; they were closing in, as the riders reached beyond the settled zone. "Like that… and that.'

Deer Dancer had the Spear Mark tattooed between her breasts, the sign of a hunter among the Fiernan Bohulugi, and Alston was still surprised sometimes at how sharp her eyes were. She pointed around; at a patch of plantain, dandelions, dock, nettles, a honeybee buzzing between the flowers of white clover, a starling flitting between branches.

All things from Nantucket that sailed upstream against the tide of years, Alston thought. "Like me, sugar," she went on aloud. "Worse things than being a weed. Means you're hardy and difficult to get rid of."

Their laughter echoed in the cathedral stillness of the forest, and they kneed their horses into a canter. Traffic would be thin until they reached the training ground where the republic prepared an answer to Walker's ambitions.

"Rejoice, Oh King," Walker said, bowing low.

"Rejoice, ekwetos Walkeearh," Agamemnon said, nodding regal benevolence as he stepped down from his chariot.

The wind was blowing across the Lakonian Gulf, cutting the summer heat where the Eurotas River met the sea. All was bustle in the cove sheltered by the rocky headland; workmen, women with jars on their heads, slaves moving loads of all types, wagons full of grain or timber. Rows of mud-brick huts had been built a little inland, and a tall structure with long, armlike sails going around and around. Curious, he walked toward it and through the broad doorway at its base.

"Ah, another of your mills, Walkeearh," he said.

They were no longer so strange that they shed his eyes in bafflement, although this was different from the ones moved by falling water and the interior was dim and dusty, full of loud creaks and grinding stone. Up above, a long pole turned with the sails outside… driven by the wind, Agamemnon thought. Clever. As if the circle of sails was the wheel of a chariot and that pole the axle. That turned a toothed wheel, which turned another wheel on a vertical shaft, and that ran down to ground level. More wheels drove a giant round quern taller than a man, shaped in profile like an old figure-eight shield. Peasants walked up a ramp and tipped jugs of grain into the top. Below, flour poured out of a spout into still larger pithoi, storage jugs as tall as a man's chest. Slaves dragged them across the stone platform and into waiting oxcarts, some of them the big four-wheeled type that Wal-keearh had made.

"Swift," Agamemnon said. "But surely you don't let your slave women sit in idleness? They can't earn all their keep lying on their backs."

The outlander laughed politely at his overlord's jest, along with a couple of the courtiers who'd driven down from Mycenae with the high king. Walkeearh bowed his head again.

"True, lord; this wind-mill does the work of five hundred women grinding grain. The women do other chores-work in the fields, or make cloth."

Agamemnon grunted and scratched his beard. That sounds… sensible, he thought dubiously. Just as the women in the palace at Mycenae could make more cloth and better, with the new looms and spinners that Walkeearh's wife the wisewoman (his mind carefully avoided the word "sorceress") had shown them. Many of the slaves the outlander was using in his mills and mines had been bought with that cloth-still more with the silver from new deep shafts in Attica that he'd shown the High King's men how to make.

And didn't Wannax Lakedwos of Athens bawl like a newborn calf when I took those for my own, the Achaean ruler thought with an inward chuckle.

Much of the metal was being stamped into little disks with Agamemnon's face and titles on them; convenient, since you didn't have to weigh the silver, and it spread his fame widely. A year ago he wouldn't have dared to seize the mines, but with cannon and mortars vassal kings suddenly felt far less secure. He chuckled, imagining Nestor in Pylos or Lakedwos in Athens sitting at meat and looking up now and then, expecting a bursting shell to crash through their roof-trees.

Still, there was something about all this that made him uneasy, something of the feeling of a chariot whose team had run wild, or even of an earthquake. He quickly made a sign of the horns with his left hand and spat to avert the omen.