On the Oceans of Eternity Read Free Page B

quiet, nowadays.”
    “There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ‘twas the Roman, now ’tis I.
     
    The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
Today the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.”
    “Yes,” Swindapa said quietly. “Would you, would we have made war on the Sun People, if Walker hadn’t come here and tried to be a King among them?”
    Ouch. That’s a toughie. “I think we’d have helped the Earth Folk defend themselves,” she said. “I was pushin’ for that, as soon as I got to talking with you.”
    A brilliant smile rewarded her, and Marian felt the familiar but always startling warmth under her breastbone. And personal matters aside, we needed something like the Alliance. Nantucket was too small in area and numbers to keep even the ghost of civilization alive on its own.
    “You were so shy in those days,” Swindapa said. “I knew Moon Woman had sent you to rescue me and put down the Sun People, and that Her stars meant us to be together always, but I had to drag you into bed,” she went on.
    “Well, whatever else the Fiernan Bohulugi are, they aren’t shy,” Marian agreed. Lordy, no. Got me out of the closet, for starters.
    Swindapa sighed again. “I thought once the Sun People were beaten, we’d have peace. Sailing, work, and the children.”
    Marian’s expression turned grim. “Not while William Walker’s above-ground, I think.” Her fist hit the saddle horn. “Damn, but I should have finished him off!”
    “You were nearly dead with wounds, yourself. And he was prepared to flee if he lost.”
    Alston shook her head. There were no excuses for failure. “A rat always has a bolt-hole. All our problems since, they’re because he got away.”
    “When I was a fighting-man, the kettle-drums they beat;
The people scattered roses before my horse’s feet.
And now I am a mighty King, and the people dog my track;
With poison in the wine-cup, and daggers at my back. ”
    “Self-pity, Will?” Dr. Alice Hong asked mockingly.
    “Robert E. Howard,” William Walker replied. “Kull the Conqueror, specifically.”
    He turned from the tall French doors and their southward view over the palace gardens and the city of Walkeropolis. The valley of the Eurotas reached beyond, drowsing in a soft palette of green and brown and old gold, up to the blue heights of Mount Taygetos. The city’s smoke and noise drifted in, mixed with flower scents from the gardens, and a warm hint of thyme and lavender from the hills.
    The King of Men smiled at her. “I thought it was appropriate.”
    He was a little over six feet, tall even by twentieth-century standards, towering here in the thirteenth century B.C. Broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, he moved with an athlete’s quick, controlled gracefulness; reddish-brown hair fell to his shoulders, confined by the narrow diadem of royalty wrought in gold olive leaves. The face it framed would have been boyishly handsome yet, even in his thirties, if it had not been for the deep scar that cut a V across his cheek and vanished under the patch that hid his left eyesocket; the level green stare of the surviving eye glittered coldly. He wore loose trousers of black silk tucked into polished half-boots, and a gold-trimmed jacket of the same material cinched by a tooled-leather belt that bore revolver and chryselephantine dagger. A wolfshead signet ring of ruby and niello on the third finger of his right hand was the only other ornament.
    “Or to put it in American, babe,” he went on in a voice that still held a trace of Montana, “the Greek VIPs liked it better when I was the wizardly power in the background and not Supreme Bossman. Planting my own lowborn outlander ass on the throne of the Kings of Men has seriously torqued them out.”
    “Rational deduction from the information available,” Helmut Mittler agreed, running a hand