“You want us to rig up a stretcher for her, sir?”
“It might come to that, but let’s give her a while to see if she comes around. I’ll stay with her. You two go farther up this trail and see what you can find.”
“We’ll be back in half an hour, sir.”
There was a fallen tree a few yards away. I sat down on it and lit up a cigar, waiting.
I was halfway through my stogie when this Indian with a big steel lumberman’s axe broke out of the brush not twenty feet from me. He ran right past me while I was too startled to move, and planted his axe in the woman’s head. Then he noticed me, pulled out his axe, and started to run toward me. He was yelling something that I couldn’t understand with his bloody weapon held high above his head.
By that time, I had my temporal sword out. It never even occured to me to draw the steel one. When he was six feet from me, I slashed him across the middle, cutting him in half, but he kept on coming.
Both halves hit me hard enough to knock me down.
I heaved the pieces off me and got up, shaking. I looked down at what I’d done to the man.
“Why?” I said, knowing that he couldn’t understand me. “Why did you kill her? Why did you try to kill me?”
He looked back at me. He blinked, and then he died.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Building a Small City
I was covered with blood and shit. My hands were shaking so bad that it was a few minutes before I could get the radio working to call back the troops.
All six of the people on the surveying team got to me at about the same time. The Smoothies got sick all over again, while Sergeant Kuhn led me away from the carnage.
“First time you ever killed anybody, sir?”
“Yeah. Richards told me we shouldn’t get involved, but I figured I had to help the woman. Now she’s dead and the other Indian’s dead, too. I feel sick.”
“Look, sir. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. As to causality, well, we’re still here, aren’t we? Before long, all of the Indians on these islands will be dead and gone, be it from European diseases, slavers, or their fellow cannibals. And don’t feel ashamed of being shook up at your first kill. Most of us go through the same thing. You want me to send one of the men back to camp with you?”
“No. No, I’ll be all right. We’ve got a job to do.”
“That’s the spirit, sir. Richards! Take that axe back with us. Leave everything else as it is. We’re moving out!”
“What do you want with the axe?” I asked.
“Nothing. But it’s a very valuable tool in this time and place. That Indian’s friends would think it very weird if we left it.”
That evening, I changed outfits as soon as we got back. Barb took one look at my dirty clothes and threw them into the campfire. Even the boots. I had to rescue the sword, sheath, and baldric from the fire, since I didn’t have any spares with me.
There were three Canadian geese roasting over that fire. Lieutenant McMahon had bagged them that afternoon in a small nearby stream.
“I didn’t know that Canadian geese lived in these islands,” I said.
“Neither did I,” Ian said. “It’s the sort of information we came here to find out. You want to talk about what happened this afternoon?”
“Not just yet.”
The women and the Smoothies turned in early, talking about tomorrow being a long day. Two Killers stood guard duty, but the rest gathered around the fire, passing around cold beer, whiskey and ice cubes. After a few beers, I found that I needed the whiskey. Before long, Sergeant Kuhn was talking about the first man he’d ever killed.
“I was on point, going down a forest trail in what is now southern England, with the whole Ninth Roman Legion strung out behind me. Suddenly, this tall guy wearing nothing but blue paint and a scowl jumps out from behind a tree, swinging a big, two-handed sword. I took it on my shield, just like in training, and got him in the gut with my gladius. That was the way the Romans fought. Big shield, short sword. He went down, but I had to stab him three more times before he quit moving. It was strange, everything seemed to be moving so slowly, but somehow I was still faster than the other guy, which is why I’m still here, I guess. They gave me a triple ration of wine that night, and I needed it.”
Three of the other guards told stories of their own, before I was ready to talk about what had happened to me.
Much later, with a lot of empty bottles lying around, the lieutenant explained, “We call it debriefing, sir. When you’re in a fight, and it’s kill or get killed, you have to do things that are contrary to everything they taught you about morality and decency, ever since you were old enough to walk. After something like that, a man has to talk it out, among friends if possible. You have to settle it all out in your mind. And maybe it’s a little like confession. But not doing it makes a man crazy, and old before his time.”
* * *
It turned out that there wasn’t a better site for a town than the place we’d come up at. The island didn’t have a natural harbor, and since we wanted this to be a base for further exploration, we would have to build one ourselves. Our tunnel entrance had to be hidden and protected, and the eighteenth century being a rather violent time, we planned to build a fort covering it. The fact that it had come up at the island’s high point didn’t hurt a bit.
One of the construction crew, Jolsen, was an architect who had spent years studying the construction techniques of this century. Not that we planned to use those techniques, but for obvious reasons, it was important that when we got finished with construction, it had to look period.
Jolsen looked rather sheepish when he unrolled his plans for the town. It took me a while to find out why.
They showed a town that could hold three thousand people by the cramped standards of the eighteenth century. It was built around an irregularly shaped deep-water harbor that was big enough to hold two of the largest ships of this century and a dozen smaller ones. There were eight big stone piers and a largish dry dock. The main road of the town followed the shore. Most of this was to be cut from solid rock.
The town’s defenses looked like something the Spanish would have done in this century, with two small forts guarding the harbor entrance, a thirty-foot wall with fourteen towers and three gates surrounding the town, and a powerful castle on the hill. Where these defenses couldn’t be cut from bedrock, they were to be built of cut stones weighing two tons each, the limit of what our lift truck could handle.
It was when we got down to details like the water and sewage systems that we found out what our architect was so sheepish about. You see, he wanted to put in water and sewage systems, and that just wasn’t done much in the eighteenth century.
“Yes, sir. You’re right, sir. But without these systems, life in this town would be smelly and uncomfortable by modern standards, not to mention disease ridden. What I want us to build is well within the limits of eighteenth-century technology. The sewage system consists of a single tunnel that runs under the main buildings of the town. The bottom of the tunnel is at the level of low tide in this area. At one end of the sewage tunnel, a gate connects with the harbor. This is manually opened at high tide twice a day, flooding the tunnel. At the other end is a second gate that connects with the sea. This is opened at low tide, flushing the sewage out to sea.”
“Yeah, that much is fine,” Ian said. “But somebody is bound to get curious about the flush toilets.”
“I hadn’t planned to use flush toilets, sir. Just a seat with a hole in it. A tight-fitting lid should keep the smell down.”
“If we can teach the men to put down the toilet seats,” Barbara said.
“I suppose I could hinge the lids so that you had to hold them up, ma’am. That way they would close automatically.”
“Why couldn’t they do that in our century?” Barbara said, but I shushed her.
“What about the water system?” I asked.