There were many other things even stranger-sometimes the little things were oddest of all, like wagons each keeping to the right side of the street. They rode through a great open-air market, past streets of shops and businesses, past chariots and wagons and carriages drawn by high-stepping Eastern horses.

Even shops for bread, the Achaean king thought with astonishment, watching a baker load loaves into the carrying-basket of a woman and take little copper disks in payment. Next door a leatherworker bowed low as a servant of one of Walker's Wolf People lords took delivery of a saddle; beyond that a treadle-powered lathe whirred, turning out the spokes of a wheel.

"One thing that does surprise me, my friend," Odikweos said as they turned uphill to the palace through elaborate gardens and the mansions of Walker's own ekwetai. "Is that you took no larger share of the credit for the war in the lands north of Olympus-and no larger share of the gold. You don't seem to me to be a man unconcerned with wealth."

Walker laughed.

The Dolphin was less graceful than her name; three hundred tons, three masts, but much tubbier than the Chamberlain or even the Guard schooners modeled on the Bluenose. She bobbed in the lee of the frigate, and her commander came up the rope ladder with a practical swarming motion.

"Permission to come aboard?" she called, with a wave of a salute.

"Permission granted," Alston said. "Captain McReady, isn't it?"

"Candice McReady at your service, Commodore," the merchant skipper said, holding out her hand.

Typical enough, Alston thought. No more than twenty-one, which would have made her all of thirteen at the Event, the twentieth century most likely a fading dream. A stocky, brown-haired young woman with a weather-red face and squint lines around her eyes that made her look older. She wore a floppy canvas hat and a sleeveless jacket of sealskin belted 'round with a cutlass, bowie, and flintlock pistol. The ironmongery looked as natural on her as the easy, straddled stance and the gold hoop in one earlobe. The hand she extended felt rough and dry and competent in Alston's.

The steward brought up coffee. "Thought I was sailing into a fight, ma'am," McReady said, sipping appreciatively. "Heard the cannon. Thought some damned Tartessian poacher needed his butt kicked."

And just came boiling in with all four of your six-pounder brass popguns, Alston thought, nodding. Fairly typical. The youngsters coming up since the Event were different; not necessarily braver than their parents but harder-grained. Entirely different attitude toward risk.

Less likely to complain about bad luck, too. Of course, the attitude had its downside as well; the new breed seemed to be a good deal less shockable, more case-hardened than Alston would have expected or altogether liked.

I must be getting old, she thought. I'm starting to complain about the upcoming generation.

"They do show up here occasionally," Alston agreed aloud.

The Town Meeting had proclaimed the whole of the Western Hemisphere under the Republic's jurisdiction-sort of a second-millennium-B.C. Monroe Doctrine-but the Kingdom of Tartessos didn't acknowledge it. Iberian ships slipped in now and then, bartering with the Olmec chiefdoms, which had their own reasons to resent the Islanders; besides that little war back in the Year 1, the Republic frowned on human sacrifice. A couple of punitive expeditions had made that very clear, via cannon and Marine landing parties.

"Not this time, though. What crew, where from, and what loading?" she went on.

"My third trip this year," McReady said, jerking a thumb backward at her ship. "My first mate's my mate, my brother and his wife are quartermaster and sailing master"-Not an uncommon sort of arrangement; they waved from the lower deck of the trading ship-"and we've a crew of twelve besides. We shipped out of Nantucket Town to San Lorenzo first, picked up cocoa and dyewoods and raw cotton; dropped it in Pentagon Base in Alba, got a cargo of grain, hides, cheese, and wool, plus some steerage passengers, back to Nantucket. Out to southwest Africa in ballast and trading trinkets."

Alston nodded. "What loading now?"

McReady grinned. "Commodore, right now my cargo is absolute shit." She grinned more widely still at the raised brows. "Bird shit. Fertilizer from the islands in Saldhana Bay. One hundred ninety tons, all of it under contract to Brand Farms." She held up a hand, clenched with the thumb and little finger out as if measuring. "And the price is just right. Ought to pay off the Town share of our ship. A little other stuff, hides, horn, ivory-ten tusks-traded for it with the locals."

"Ah, the Namib," Alston said. The coast of southwest Africa, not far from where she intended to make landfall. "Any rumors of Tartessian activity there?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact; the locals drew pictures of what looked like a topsail schooner."

Alston scowled slightly; Tartessos favored that design, copied from the ship Walker had pirated in the Year 1.

"Couldn't be sure, though. They are putting in pretty regular further north, from what I hear."

This time the black woman forced her teeth not to grind. Slave trading, among other things.

"Thank you, Captain McReady," she went on, calm and polite. "Perhaps you could join the flotilla's captains aboard the Eagle for lunch. We could use any observations you have on how the trades are this year."

"Glad to-we're down to salt horse and biscuit," McReady said. "Trades're pretty steady, and further north than usual; haven't been becalmed yet on this trip. I'll get my logs."

Alston clasped her hands behind her back and rose slightly on her toes as the merchant skipper climbed back down into her skiff and pulled for her ship. The expeditionary force was supposed to keep William Walker off-balance, but it was a long-term project. Isketerol was making her nervous in the here-and-now.

God damn William Walker to hell, she thought. If it weren't for him…

"There's always a man like Walker," Swindapa said quietly. Alston started a little. Her partner had learned her moods very well.

"Fortunately, there's always someone like us, too," she replied, her head turning northeastward. Right now the renegade was having things all his own way, off in the lands of Mycenae. Some day…

Her lips showed teeth in what was only notionally a smile.

"There is a lot of gold up there," William Walker agreed, looking up at the portico of his house. A row of pillars marched across it- fluted marble, rather than the painted wood the locals used. Greek columns, and the Greeks have never heard of them, he thought with a slight smile. Servants were coming out to greet their lord.

The Mycenaeans had already had an outpost up north in what he thought of as Macedonia, a fortified border station. The locals were still at the mud-hut stage, but spoke something related to Greek. More important, he'd remembered where Philip of Macedon, Alexander's father, had gotten his financing-the gold mines of Pangaion, not all that far from the coast. Well worth an expedition.

"About a thousand talents a year worth," he went on. "I'm satisfied with my tenth." A talent was sixty pounds, more or less; call it twenty tons for the total output. Nobody here had ever seen precious metals on that scale before. They were learning about inflation, too, and the benefits and drawbacks of coined money.

"Why?" Odikweos said bluntly. "You planned the war, you found the gold, you built the works that tear it daily from the womb of Gamater."

"One of the things I like about you, my friend," Walker said, "is that you come right at things."

The Ithakan shrugged. "Paiawon Apollo speaks in words like a serpent in a reedbed, coil upon countercoil," he said. "But I've always been a better friend of the Gray-Eyed Lady of Wisdom, Athana Potnia."