As she watched, Ritter tossed a bar of ration chocolate to a clutch of children. The waxed paper wrapping came off to squeals of delight.

Generous, Marian thought. Even back on Nantucket chocolate was still expensive, gathered wild in Central America and traded to Islander schooners working the Main. And they recognized it. Must be a fair bit of trade through here…

Swindapa reined her horse aside and spoke to the locals in the purling glug-glug of the Fiernan Bohulugi tongue, a language that had vanished a thousand years before the birth of Christ in Marian's history. She dropped the knotted reins on her saddlebow to let her hands move in fluid accompaniment to her thought. When she rode on she was shaking her head in amazement.

"Sugar?" Marian asked. Lord, if you tied a Fiernan's hands, they'd be struck dumb.

"It's… these people are out in the… what's the word, the sticks'? They talk a dialect I can barely follow."

The black woman smiled to herself; Swindapa's lineage, the Kurlelo, lived by the Great Wisdom-Stonehenge-far south of here in Wiltshire on the open upland downs. By Fiernan reckoning, that made them the center of the world; the Kurlelo Grandmothers were the high priestesses of Moon Woman and students of the stars that revealed Her will. Those dry and sunny hills were thickly peopled and closely farmed as well, very different from these middle lands of Alba; here human habitations were still islands amid swamp and a wildwood-jungle of giant oak trees on heavy clay. Not until the Age of

Iron brought better tools and plows would settlers make much progress against the King trees and the thick fertile low-country soils that bore them. In the original history at least…

"In the sticks, yes," Swindapa went on, in pleased wonderment at how far the changes had gone. "And yet look at all they have! Ten years ago, they would have made most of their tools of wood and bone and stone, shared one bronze blade with the whole family. Now they have steel axes, pans, spades, scythes, Nantucket plows… even iron stoves. And yes, they say we're getting near Irondale. Right where you thought we were."