Eurotas, river. [E-ur-o-tas], named for river in southern Greece, Earth. (see names, Mythological, Graeco-Roman)
Largest river on the planet Sparta [see Sparta];
Length (main stream): 9,600 kilometers
Drainage basin: 8,225,000 sq. kilometers
Maximum volume: 860,000,000 liters
Minimum volume: 475,000,000 liters
Description: The Eurotas is customarily divided into the Lower, Middle and Upper Valleys, respectively, and the Delta. The Delta proper flows northward into the nearly circular Constitution Bay, encompassing an area of approx. 25,000 sq. kilometers of silt and peat-soil marshes, undergoing reclamation for agriculture in some areas. The Lower Valley runs north-south between the Lycourgos Hills fronting on the Aegean Sea in the west, and the twin ranges of Parnassus and Pindaros on the east, separating the Eurotas from the Jefferson Ocean (q.v.). Lying between the river-ports of Clemens and Olynthos is the Middle Valley, occupying a low-lying fault zone between uplifted blocks on the north and south. To the west, the upper portion of the Middle Valley is flanked on the south and west by the Illyrian Dales, a region of limestone uplands, and beyond these by the Drakon Mountains. North of Olynthos the river descends via the Vulcan Rapids from Lake Alexander, a body of water comparable to Earth's Lake Ontario. From the Vulcan Rapids the Upper Valley runs generally north-south to the slightly smaller Lake Ochrid, the formal source of the Eurotas.
The Middle and Lower Valleys are essentially silt-filled rift depressions, whose drainage link is geologically recent. Gradients are therefore small, and vessels drawing up to 3 meters may navigate the Eurotas as far inland as Olynthos, 6,400 kilometers from the mouth of the river. Flooding, siltation, breaks in the natural levees, marshes and ox-bow lakes are common. The Upper Valley is an area of rejuvenated drainage and exposed basic rock, with frequent steep falls.
Climate and Hydrology: The Delta has a humid-Mediterranean regime, with mild rainy winters, warm dry summers and a nearly year-round growing season. The Lower Valley is similar but slightly more continental with increasing distance from the sea; the Middle Valley is comparable, on a larger scale, to the Po basin of Italy, Earth, with cold damp winters with some snow, and warm summers with occasional convection thunderstorms. Winter cold increases westward and northward, until the Upper Valley ranges from cool-temperate semiarid to subarctic north of Lake Ochrid. Lakes Ochrid and Alexander are both frozen for several months of the year, as is the Upper Valley as a whole. The Eurotas reaches maximum flow in the late winter or early spring; summer flow is largely sustained by snowmelt from flanking mountain ranges. More than half the dry-season flow is derived from the snowmelt of the Drakon Range, and most of this flows underground through the 1,400,000 sq. kilometer area of the Illyrian Dales, with their extensive near-horizontal limestone formations.
"Hunf!" Geoffrey Niles grunted, beginning to regret accepting Skida's offer to spar. His forearms slapped down on the boot just before it hit his midriff, and his hands twisted to lock on the foot. Skilly spun around the axis of the trapped foot, tearing it out of his bands before the grip could solidify and then rolled backward off her shoulder, out of his reach and flicking up, then boring back in. The circle of hidehunter faces around the campfire watched with mild interest, jaws moving stolidly as they scooped up stew.
It's going to be difficult to win this without thumping her, he thought; he had not expected that. The Belizean was a big woman, very strong for her weight, but he had fifteen kilos on her and none of it was fat. She must have had some training. There would be bruises on his upper arm, where she had broken a clamp-hold by stabbing at the nerve cluster. . . .
Flick. Snap-kick to his left knee. He let the right relax, and gravity pushed him out of the way; then he punched his fist underarm toward her short ribs. She let the kicking foot drop down and around, spun again with a high slashing heel-blow toward his head; the punch slid off thigh muscle as hard as teak, but his other palm came up hard under her striking leg to throw her backward. Street-warrior style, those high kicks, he thought critically.
She went with it, backflipping off her hands and doing a scissor-roll to land upright facing him. Then she surprised him, coming up out of her crouch, shrugging with a grin and turning away toward the fire.
Thank goodness, he thought. She was so damned fast, sooner or later he'd have had to hurt her, and that would be unfair, undermining her in front of her people. And—
Even then he almost caught the backkick that lashed out, the long leg seeming to stretch in the dim light. But there had been no warning from her stance.
"Ufff," he croaked, folding around his paralyzed diaphragm. She caught the outstretched hand in both of hers, twisted to lock the arm. A boot-edge thumped with stunning force into his armpit, then the leg swung over to lock around his elbow, and they were both going down. The ground sprang up to meet them with unnatural heavy-world swiftness, jarring every bone from his lower spine up as she landed half across him with a scissor on his right arm.
The Englishman writhed, turning on his left and reaching behind; there were three ways to break that hold, or with strength alone. . . . He froze as a hard thumbnail poked into the corner of one eye.
"Lie still," the liquid voice said from behind his ear; he could smell the sweat that ran down her face, and the mint she chewed. "This heavy planet, a real gentlemon always let de lady get on top."
"Your point!" he said hastily. He had been around the Upper Valley hidehunters long enough now to know why so many were one-eyed.
"Sure, just a friendly match," Skilly said. She rolled off him and stood, offering a hand and pulling him up after her. They dusted themselves off; the campside was a sandy dried riverbed, with little vegetation. "You not bad, Jeff-my-mon, just . . . Skilly hasn't fallen for that trick since she was ten. You fight too much like a rabiblanco, you know?"
They walked over toward the fire; the fuel was some native plant like a dense orange bamboo, which burned low and hot and gave off a smell of cinnamon. The camp was simple, a ring of saddles and buffalo-hide bedrolls around the hearth. Horses stamped and nickered occasionally where they were tethered a few meters away, and in the distance something howled long and mournfully. Cythera was full, nearly half again as large as Luna, silver-bright against a sky filled with stars in constellations subtly different from Earth's. Meteors streaked across it every few minutes, multicolored fire.
"Rabiblanco?" he said. No Spanish that he recognized.
"Oh, nice clean gym, nice flat mats, pretty little white suits and colored belts, hey?"
Too academic, he translated mentally. Well, she has a point. The shoulder felt stiff, and he rotated it gingerly.
"Yes, but what does it mean?" he asked. They leaned back against their saddles, nearly side by side, and one of the others handed them plates of stew and metal cups of strong black coffee from the pot resting on the edge of the fire.
"Rabiblanco?" she said. Her teeth showed in a friendly grin. "White-ass."
"You're quiet today, Skilly," Niles said.
"Skilly is thinking," she said. "We nearly there."
That was a bit of a relief. Not that she chattered; it had been more like a continuous interrogation nearly every day, starting two hours after breakfast, once she learned of his background at Sandhurst. A grab bag of everything he had sat through in those interminable lectures: leadership, communications, how to parade a regiment, logistics, laser range-finding systems, how to hand-compute firing patterns for mortars, how to maintain recoilless rifles, tactical use of seeker missiles . . . She had taken notes, too. Afternoons and they were back in the saddle and she was grilling him on how to use it, comparing it with things she had heard from others or read in an astonishing number of books, making up hypotheticals and hashing out alternative solutions. Evenings around the fire it had been about him. His relations, who knew who, how were you presented at court, what were the rules about giving parties, schools, table manners. . . .
It had been two weeks since they left the Upper Valley plains and rode into the hill country called the Illyrian Dales, and he was feeling pumped dry. It was like being picked over by a mental crow, all the bright shiny things plucked out and sorted into neat heaps and tirelessly fitted together again. He had mentioned the thought to her, and she had given that delightful laugh and said: Bird that know the ground doan get into stewpot, and begun again.
What a woman, he thought contentedly. Not exactly what you'd bring home to mother—he blanched inwardly at the thought—but absolutely riffing for this caper. From hints and glances, even more delightful when they had some privacy. Burton and Selous should have had it so good, he thought. Although Burton would probably have made more of his chances; the man had translated the Kama Sutra, after all.
"Jeffi, you smiling like the jaguar that got the farmer's pig," Skida said, coming out of her brown study.
"Beautiful country," he said contentedly, waving his free arm around.
That was true enough. The Illyrian Dales were limestone hills, big but gently sloped, endlessly varied. Most of the ridgetops were open, in bright swales of tall grass gold-green with the first frosts. The spiderweb of valleys between was deeper-soiled and held denser growth. Sometimes thickets of wild rose or native semibamboo so dense they had to dismount and cut a path with machetes, more often something like the big maples that arched over their heads here.
Those were turning with the frosts too, to fire-gold and scarlet, and there was a rustling bed of leaves that muffled the beat of hooves from the horses and pack-mules. Afternoon light stabbed down in stray flickers into the gloom below, turning the ground into a flaming carpet of embers for brief seconds. Sometimes there would be a hollow sound under the iron-shod feet of the animals, or they would have to detour around sinkholes; the others had told him of giant caves, networks that ran for scores of kilometers underground. Few rivers, but many springs and pools. West and south on the horizon gleamed the peaks of the Drakon Range, higher than the Himalayas and three times as long. The air was mildly chill and intensely clean, smelling of green and rock.
Best game country I've seen, too, he thought happily. Whoever was sent on ahead to make camp could count on finding supper in half an hour; there were usually a couple of fat pheasant or duck or rabbit waiting to be grilled, and the hidehunters had grumbled at having to eat venison four days in a row when one of them snapshot a yearling buck from the saddle.
"Thinking like a rabiblanco again," Skilly said, gently teasing. "Outback is bugs and boring, solamente, you know? Skilly is here because of her job, then it's city life for her."
"Incorrigible white-ass, that's me," Geoffrey laughed.
Ahead and to their right he could see a herd of bison on a rise in the middle distance, about a kilometer away. A few of the bulls raised their heads at the sound of hooves, and the clump of big shaggy animals began a slow steady movement away, flowing like a carpet over the irregular ground.
"I'm surprised there's so many big grazers after only, what, eighty years?"
"CoDo," Skilly shrugged. "They seeded the plants, did the gene-thing with some of them to grow faster, you know? Then the animals, sent all females and all pregnant, and screwed around with their genes too, so they have only one bull to ten cowbeasts for a while. No diseases and plenty room, grow by ge-o-metric progressive. Only last couple of years the meateaters start to catch up." Those had come from zoos, mostly; the Greens had had a lot of influence back in the 2030s, enough to override local protests and have bears, wolves, dholes, leopards and tigers and whatnot dropped into remote areas. No point in trying that on Earth, the former ranges were jammed with starving people who would gladly beat a lion to death with rocks for the meat on its bones.
"Quiet now."
The valley opened up slightly, glances of blue noon sky and Sparta's pale-yellow sun through the canopy above. Skida halted her mount with a shift of balance, touching its neck with the rein to turn it three-quarters on.
"Skilly sees you," she said in a bored tone of voice.
Niles blinked, as two figures rose from the hillside. Both had been invisible a few minutes earlier; they were covered from head to foot by loose-woven twine cloaks stuck with twigs and leaves, and the scope-sighted rifles cradled in their arms were swaddled in mottled rags. Farther up the hill the ground moved aside under the roots of a pine, and a man vaulted out and skidded down the slope to the mounted party. This one wore leather breeches and boots, a camouflage jacket over that, and webbing gear. A machine-pistol was slung across his chest and there were corporal's stripes on his sleeve; the military effect was a little offset by the black pigtail, bandanna and brass hoop-earring.
"Corporal Hermanez," Skilly said, returning his casual salute.
"Field Prime," he said, obviously pleased that she had remembered his name. "How did you spot my scouts?"
"Leaf piles doan scratch their arse." The guerrilla noncom turned to glare briefly at one of the men, who stiffened. "Two-knife?"
"Off popping the virgins, Field Prime—another fifty recruits in yesterday."
"Carry on."
The valley narrowed again. Alerted, Niles thought he saw movement now and then, once something that might be a sonic sensor input mike. The skin on the back of his neck crawled slightly. Then the thickly grown rock flared back on either side of them, into a hummocky clearing of gravel and rock and thin grass several hectares in extent, scattered with medium-sized oaks and big eucalyptus trees with peeling bark. Camouflage nets were rigged between the trees at a little over head-height, mimicking the ground. Across the way was a taller hill where the shell of limestone rock had collapsed inward. Water fell over the lip to a pool at the base, and he could see several dark spaces in the light-colored rock that reached back out of sight.
"Home," Skilly said. "Base One."
Men in the same uniform came and led the horses away at a trot. Niles followed Skida as she ducked under one of the tarpaulins and walked toward the falls, trying not to be too obvious as he looked around. Not my idea of a rebel encampment, he thought. There were dug-in air defense missiles, light Skyhawks and frame-mounted Talons; CoDo issue, or copies. Plenty of people moving around; not a spit-and-polish outfit, but they all seemed fairly clean and to know where they were going. Crates and boxes were stacked in neat heaps, and there were half a dozen circles around blackboards or pieces of equipment, familiarization-lectures. A pile of meter-diameter cylinders lay on a timber frame. He stared at them in puzzlement and then recognized a Skysweeper, a simple solid-fuel rocket that could loft a hundred-kilo load of ball bearings into the orbital path of a spy satellite.
His lips shaped a soundless whistle. Not too shabby, he thought. A squad jogged by, rifles at port; Skilly returned their leader's salute, the same half-casual wave, and then slapped palms with a figure he recognized: the big Indian he had met briefly in Sparta City, with his twin machetes over his back. Here he also carried a light machine gun, dangling from one hand as if it were no more than a rifle.
"Yo, Two-knife. How it go?"
"Yo, Skilly. Not bad. Your little yellow men got here with their toys, setting up now." He jerked a thumb at the caves.
"Toys may save our asses, Two-knife. Any trouble?"
"Discipline parade for offenders, and taking in the fresh meat. Got them kit, ran them up and down hills all yesterday, usual thing like you say." The blank black eyes turned on Niles, and the Indian said something in a choppy-sounding language, not Spanish.
"He's a trained officer, not just a pretty face," Skilly replied; Niles felt oddly flattered, and returned the bigger man's gaze coolly. She slung her rifle. "Let's go. Niles should see our discipline."
The stench almost made Niles gag as they walked past the row of a half a dozen pits. Each was just wide enough to hold a man and deep enough that only the faces showed; none of them looked up.
"We got this from the CoDo Marines," Skilly said, watching him out of the corner of her eye. "Make them dig a hole and then live in it for a week. Next step up from punishment drill. Lot of our original trainers were ex-Marines"—mostly gone now, she thought but did not say—"and we had a bunch of our Movement people do hitches with the CD and some of the other armies."
"Second offense, not cleaning rifle," Two-knife said, kicking dirt in the direction of the first pit and walking on to each in turn. "Stealing. Second offense, refusing to wash. This one didn't want to learn to read. Backtalking his squad leader. Smoking borloi. Lighting fire in the open."
Beyond the row of pits were two upright X-frames made of saplings, with men lashed to them spreadeagled. Odd-looking bruises and dried crusted scabs covered their naked bodies.
"Gauntlet," Skilly explained. Niles kept his face carefully blank; that meant running between lines of your comrades while they flogged you with their belts. You could not have an army without discipline, and a guerrilla army like this had no system of laws and courts to fall back on. Not to mention the type of recruits they would have to depend on, men on the bad side of the law to begin with.
"Asleep on watch," Two-knife said of the first man. "Striking an officer," of the second. "Got an offender among the virgins, too," he went on.
They were near the C-shaped bowl that fronted the clearing; the waterfall was a hundred meters away, at the center of the curve, and its sound was a burr of white noise in the background. Here the ground ran down to the base of the cliff in a natural amphitheater. Fifty or so men and a few women were squatting on the rocky ground, in uniform but looking awkward in it, and groggy with exhaustion where they were not tense with fear. Very out of place, as well; you could tell these were men who had spent their lives in cities, and on their streets. A few armed troops stood by, not quite guarding the recruits; two more flanked a bound prisoner at the base of the slope, very definitely guarding him. A short woman stood nearby, glaring at the one under guard.
"The virgin's name is Carter," Two-knife continued. "The other one is Werewolf. He caught Williams in the third back warehouse cave, tried to hump her. She caught him a couple and he whipped on her muy mal, then ran when the patrol came."
"Williams . . . Citizen family, University, come in right after we blow the Peacemaker? Her squeeze killed by Milice?"
He nodded and Skilly fell silent, taking in the parties as she walked down toward them. Then she turned to face the recruits, ignoring the judicial matter for the moment.
"This," she said, indicating herself with a thumb, "is Field Prime. Field Prime commands the Spartan People's Liberation Army. We call ourselves the Helots; pretty soon you learn why. Helots are under the direction of the Movement Council and Capital Prime. Field Second," she continued, turning to Two-knife, "repeat the charge."
When he had finished, she turned to the woman. Girl, rather; about nineteen, but it was difficult to tell anything else because of massive purple-and-yellow bruises that covered her face.
"Yes."
"Louder, Helot."
"Yes! I told him to go away and he grabbed me and I kicked him and he started hitting me and—" She turned away, arms tightly crossed over her chest.
"So, Carter," Skida continued, to the prisoner "What you say?"
"Lies," the man said. He was not much older than his victim, still in gang colors, a thin acne-scarred face and darting eyes. "Them University cunts, they'll spread for anything. Stuck-up bitch probably has the crud, anyway."
Skida looked at Two-knife, then took the girl's chin between thumb and forefinger for a moment to examine her injuries. A slight nod and the guards stepped away from Carter, who smiled and stood taller. Skida was wearing a Walther in a cross-draw holster below her left breast, with the butt turned in. Her hand did not seem to move with any particular haste, but the echoing crack of the first shot rang out before Carter's eyes had time to do more than widen. He jerked back, folding as if an invisible horse had kicked him in the gut. The flat slap of the 10mm bullet hitting the muscle of his stomach was just audible under the gunshot, and she held the second until he clapped his hands to the spreading red patch and moaned in shock. The next bullet left a black hole in the middle of his forehead and snapped him erect again for an instant while the back of his skull blew out in a shower of bone-chips and pink-gray jelly.
"Take this shit away and throw it down a hole," she said, holstering the weapon.
"First lesson!" she continued to the recruits. "Only two ways out of this army!" Skida held up a fist. One finger shot up. "One, when we marches down the Sacred Way in the victory parade." Another finger. "Two—feet first. This the Revolution. The Revolution not a tea party; it not so kind, so gentle, so reasonable as that."
She paused to let the recruits absorb that; one was retching, and a few were looking shaky. Most of the rest sat stock-still, but the smell of their fear was rank. After a moment she tapped herself on the chest.
"Skilly—that Field Prime to you—Skilly knows you. Knows all the secret of you dirty little souls. You think you baaad, eh? Think the world give you a hard time, think the world owe you something. Now you going to go take it, eh?" Mutters of approval. The tall woman sneered.
"Well, Skilly tells you something; you half right. Yes, the world shit on you all your lives. The Welfare officers, the CoDo, the rich, the taxpayers back on Earth, Citizens here—all of them fuck you over from the day you born. What does that make you?"
She paused, then spoke in a tone thick with scorn. "Shit yourselves, is what." Another murmur, hostile this time and quickly dying under her glare. "Yes! You everything the bossman ever tell you you are. You worthless, you useless, no good to yourself or anybody. They laughing at you, mon."
"But here"—she tapped a booted toe against the rocky earth—"here, you maybe become something. Here you learn how to take what the world owe you." She crossed her arms. "How? Not by sitting in a bar, talking wit' you friends about how you do something next month, for sure. Not by rolling drunks and beating up on tourists and cutting each other. Not by pushing shit into your arm or up your nose.
"Here, you learn to fight. Here, you learn to be an army. That is power, mon! Who wants that? Who wants power, who wants to fuck the people that been up your ass all your life?" They cheered at that, a raw savage sound. Niles felt his stomach clench with the sudden realization that it was directed at him and people like him.
Alarming, he thought. And exhilarating, the same wild excitement you got on a fast powder-snow slope.
"Shut up! Shouting won't get it for you; lying under a tree won't, nohow. Work get it for you." There was dead silence now; Skida's grin was gaunt and knowing. "Yes, compadres, here you work. You work harder than field-hands cutting cane, you work until the brains run out your nose like sweat. And you learn." She stooped, and caught up a glob of semiliquid gray. A tuft of hair and bone was still attached to the glistening string of matter. Skida swung her arm in an arc, spattering it at the feet of the crowd, grimly amused as they shrank back.
"Look at that! Brains, and never used for anything but holding two deaf ears apart. Brains that wouldn't learn, wouldn't listen. At least now the ants eat them, get some use out of them. You want to be like that? No? So that the next thing you do here, you learn to use the brains. You stupid, now. Too stupid to know you stupid; now, we fix that.
"One last thing. Look at each other." She waited a moment, until their heads turned uncertainly from side to side. "These people your compadres. These are the peoples you live with, eat with, work with, fight beside from now. Field Prime isn't your mother; Field Prime doesn't care if you love each other. You can hate each other like brothers. But when we finished with you, you will be tighter than brothers—you will save your compadre's ass, because you know he will save yours.
"And when you've done all that, then you'll have the power. The power of an army. Do you understand?"
"Answer, Yes, Field Prime!" Two-knife shouted; it was an astonishing sound, loud enough for a powered megaphone.
"Yes, Field Prime!"
"Louder, so Field Prime can hear you."
"YES, FIELD PRIME!"
"And this your place, right next to mine," Skilly said.
Niles nodded, a little dazed. The tour had been exhaustive, and combined with a running staff meeting and a series of introductions; he sensed that was a test too, of his ability to assimilate information quickly and not lose his feet. The network of caverns was enormous; on Earth it would have been a famous tourist attraction. Here it was being put to more practical use: stables, armories, kitchens, barracks, infirmary, machine-shop, a hydro-generator running on an underground stream, classrooms, even a small computer room with a commercial optical-disk system capable of holding almost unlimited data. The Meijians had been setting up shop next to that; farther back were caves stacked high with hides and tallow and jerky, part of the operation that provided cover and additional funds.
"This . . . must have taken years," he said.
"Near ten years. Skilly found it just after she got here"—over a decade—"but she was really running a hide-hunting business then." She waved a hand into the darkness. This stretch of corridor was lit by fluorescent tubes stapled to the rock. "Plenty more place like this in the Dales. About four hundred Helots here now, most training, and then we push them out to the other bases, keep everything dispersed. Duplicate all the facilities here, too, stuff in various place, if we ever have to move out fast. Building up the numbers now, got the framework and just need the warm bodies."
"Well, ah, yes, Field Prime," he said. She was leaning against the doorway of her quarters, set into the fissured rock, smiling slightly.
"Field problem in the morning," she said, looking at the chronometer-compass on her wrist. "Oh," she added, just as she closed the door. "Connecting door from your place inside. Not locked."
This is ridiculous, Geoffrey Niles thought, staring at the doorknob.
His room was a simple bubble in the rock, roughly shaped with pneumatic hammers; the floor was covered with mats of woven quasibamboo, and there was simple furniture of wood and metal that looked as if it had been knocked together in one of the workshops and doubtless had been. There was a jug and bowl on the dresser and a field phone beside the bed, which was covered in furs that would have been worth a fortune on Earth and were probably what the poor used on Sparta. Someone had unpacked his gear and stowed it neatly in the dressers: there were four sets of Helot uniforms in his size with Senior Group Leader's rank-badges—about equivalent to Major—hanging from the wooden rod that served as a closet, a complete set of web gear, and boots that fitted him. No excuse to linger beyond washing up and changing his clothes.
Also a bottle of brandy and some glasses in a cupboard. For a moment he considered taking a shot . . . Don't be ridiculous, he told himself again. You're twenty-four years old, not some schoolboy virgin. You've had plenty of experience with women. His palms were sweating; he wiped them, and looked at the door again. Saw Skilly's face as she shot the man in the stomach this morning, bored disinterest. Saw it as they ran down the stairs in Sparta city, laughing as the grenade blew and shrapnel licked at their heels amid the screams and curses. He shivered slightly with a complex emotion he could not have named, and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
"So she's not a debutante," he muttered.
The door swung open noiselessly. There were two chambers on the other side; the first was an office, tables of neatly stacked papers, filing cabinets, a retrieval system and desk; all dim, lit only by the reflected light of a small lamp in the next. The only ornament was something that looked like an Indian figurine about six inches high, a six-armed goddess dancing.
He walked through. The bedroom was larger than his, but scarcely better furnished, except for one wall that held racked bookcases and a veedisk player. A big Japanese-looking print beside that, but he paid little attention to it. Skilly was lying reading on her bed, the blankets and ermine coverlet folded down to the foot of it. She was entirely naked, and there were two glasses of brandy waiting on the night table. "Well," she said softly, putting aside the book. Some distant part of his brain noted the title: Seven Pillars of Wisdom. "Skilly was beginning to think you not mon enough, Jeffi."
She slid down from the pillows and stretched; her chocolate-colored skin rippled in long smooth curves as she linked her hands behind her head. Her breasts were high and rounded, the nipples plum-dark and taut. He felt his hands open and close convulsively, and when he spoke his voice was hoarse with the pulse that hammered painfully in throat and temples and groin.
"I think you'll find me man enough and more."
She laughed, with a child's gleeful malice in the tone. "Come show Skilly, then. Show me what you made of."
The Englishman murmured slightly as Skida slipped out of bed; she waited for a moment until he turned over and burrowed his head into the pillow. Chuckling soundlessly, she pulled the ermine coverlet up around him before slipping into her pajamas and out the door. This was officer country and safe, but she tucked a small automatic into the back of the trouser-band just the same; habit, and good habits kept you alive. She gave a contented yawn as she padded down to the wardroom and over to the cooler unit set against one wall, taking out a tall glass of milk and a plate of her favorite oatmeal cookies before flopping down on a couch. The wardroom's style was deliberately casual, to encourage the command cadre to develop a club spirit. Not very likely anyone would be here at this hour, though; Base One rose with the dawn, and Sparta's nights were short.
She sipped and nibbled contentedly, thinking, smiling to herself.
"Skilly looking happy," Two-knife said. "You going to drop Croser?" He knew she seldom had more than one man at a time; Skida Thibodeau hated mess and confusion and unnecessary trouble.
"Not right now, but it time to put us on a more professional footing," she said lightly.
Two-knife walked over to the cooler and fixed himself a plate of cold chicken, popping the cap off a beer bottle with one thumb. He was wearing only cotton-duck trousers, and the faint glowlight emphasized the heavy bands of muscle over shoulders and chest and stomach; he was taller than her, but broad enough to seem squat. She smiled affectionately, remembering the time a pimp in Mayopan had decked her from behind with a crowbar during a negotiation session over territorial rights; Two-knife had grabbed him by wrist and neck and done a straight pull until the man's arm came out at the shoulder socket.
"What joke?" he said.
"Remembering old times," she said; they dropped back into a familiar mixture of Belizean English, Spanish and low-country Mayan. "Remember the time RoBo was going to shoot you?"
Two-knife laughed, a rumbling sound. "Never forget it. The look on his face when you broke his neck! Ah, those were the days, Skilly." There was a companionable silence. "How long you going to keep the Englishman?"
"Permanent, Skilly thinks," she said. At his look of surprise: "Well, Croser not the one I want for keeps. Hard man, him, maybe too much to handle up close. Besides, Skilly don't like cutting throats in the family, and if . . ." She made a gesture, and he nodded: it had long been obvious there would be an endgame after the Revolution, if they won.
"Jeffi perfect; got the right connections, smart enough, make good babies"—she had had several hundred ova frozen a couple of years ago—"just what Skilly need to put on the polish when she move up in the world. Anyway, going to be busy for a while."
Two-knife grunted. "Yes. There's going to be a lot of dead white-asses soon."
"Hey," she said playfully, "no race prejudice in the Helots—that a gauntlet offense!" They both laughed. Of course, there was a regulation to that effect; there had to be, given the polyglot nature of the force. Two-knife made a show of despising everyone but Mayans from his home district, anyway, and for that matter, the term meant "naive fool" as much as anything specifically ethnic.
"Besides, Skilly's momma was a white-ass."
"I, Two-knife, will forgive you for that. Even forgive you that your father was a damned Black Carib pimp."
She finished her milk and licked her lips. "Hey, Two-knife, serious, mon; remember after we win, we gots to put this place back together and run it." She looked at him from under her eyelids. "Ah! Skilly will find you a nice widow—widows be plentiful then—with yellow hair and big tits and good hips and a big hacienda, she teach you how to take off your boots in bed and eat with a fork, so Skilly won't have to hide you in the closet at the fancy parties."
"You want to kill me, woman?" he asked, shaking with laughter again; then his face fell, as he realized she was half-serious. And when Skilly made a plan . . . "You told the Englishman he's getting married?" he said.
"No," she said, dusting her hands as she finished the last cookie. "Skilly will train him up to it gradual."