The Stone Dogs by S.M. Stirling Read Free Book Online Page B

lever to magnify yo' strength."
    "That's how we dominate. Leverage… and this class is goin' to teach yo' how the process works. Look to either side of the screen, now."
    Murals flanked the two-meter square of the display panel, a landscape of hills rocky and steep and covered with the olive-green scrub bush of southern Africa. A labor-gang was building a road through it, black men in leg-hobbles swinging picks and sledgehammers; others pushed wheelbarrows full of crushed rock, chipped granite blocks for the curbs, pulled stone rollers beside yoked oxen. Draka worked with surveyor's transepts and spirit levels to mark the course, swung their whips over the bent backs of the serfs, sat mounted and armed to guard.
    "Question," the teacher said. "Date this mural and place it."
    Yolande blinked at it, dredging at her memory. No powered machinery, just ox-wagons and horses. Probably before the 1820s. Her eyes switched to the right, a close-up of a horseman.
    Canvas-sided boots, baggy leather pants, a coarse cotton shirt, and a jerkin of zebra-hide; long yellow hair in a twisted braid down his back to the waist. A saber at the belt, and a saw-hilted flintlock pistol in his right hand, double-barreled and clumsy-looking. Two more in holsters at his saddle-bow, and a fourth tucked into the high top of a boot. The long-barreled musket slung across his back was the same as the heirloom antique Mother had brought north from her family's plantation in the far south, a Ferguson breech-loader.
    Her hand went up. "1790s?" she said, when the teacher glanced her way. "Uhhh, somewhere north of the Whiteridge?
    Limpopo valley, I think." Myfwany glanced her way, and Yolande caught the thumb-and-forefinger gesture of approval with a flush of pleasure.
    "Excellent," Harris said. She looked down and tapped again at the controls set in the stone, and a map of Africa appeared on the screens. It jumped as the focus shifted, narrowing down to the southeastern corner of the continent, and a red dot appeared. "1798, in the Northmark." That was the province north of the Limpopo. "Not far from where I was born, just south of the Cherangani mountains. A wild place and time."
    Yolande looked at the man in the picture again. There was a trick she knew, of getting inside someone's head. You had to think really hard , and imagine you were wearing their skin, feeling what they felt. Sometimes it worked; sometimes you could even put it down in words, and that was the most magical feeling there was. She fixed her eyes on the face in the picture, made herself forget that it was pigments on a flat surface.
    There was pale stubble on his cheeks, and she could see the sheen of sweat on it; the hand that held the pistol was tight-clenched, with half-moons of black under cracked nails. He would stink, of sweat and leather and gun-oil and sulfury black powder, and his hands would have the sweet-sour pungent smell of brass from the hilt of his sword. It was a good picture… no, not a picture, that's how he looked .
    Eyes slitted, they would be flickering ceaselessly back and forth. At the laborers, there were hundreds of them, big muscular men with heavy hammers and picks in their hands.
    Captured warriors, not meek born-serfs. At the dense bush all around; rough stumps and edges where it had been cut back from both sides of the road, but it rose dense enough to block sight within javelin-cast. She felt the unseen hating black eyes on her back, and pink-palmed hands gripping the hafts of iron-bladed spears. Trapped in close thornbush country, eight shots and then hand-to-hand with cold steel…
    "Ah, I see yo' understand," Harris said softly as she blinked the present back into her eyes and met the teacher's.
    Yolande's mouth was dry, and she drank from the glass of lemonade beside her screen. "No radios or tanks, no helicopter gunboats or automatic weapons. Tell me, how did you place it?"
    Yolande willed the sour taste of fear to leave her mouth. The feelings lingered