Wanda Tamberly considers her position:
"They'll decide at the...court-martial...the hearing. Maybe they'll break me. Maybe that's the right think for them to do. All that I know is that I did what I must, and be damned if I'm sorry." (p. 249)
This chapter could have ended there but, by now, we expect a comment from the wind and, sure enough:
"The wind blew harder." (ibid.)
And that is not all:
"A few snowflakes flew upon it, outriders of winter's last great blizzard." (ibid.)
Tamberly faces an ordeal as Beringia faces a blizzard and we infer that the ordeal will be as harsh as the blizzard.
Meanwhile, Tamberly has continued to play a god-like role. She has promised the Cloud People a better land, a new world, for their children and children's children.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And there were better places than Beringia for the Cloud People to build new homes at.
Ad astra! Sean
I'm the Cloud People's descendant, come to that...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Meaning you have some American Indian ancestry?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: by Glacial Period standards, Beringia wasn't bad.
The glacial steppe south of the icecaps in the North Temperate Zone had an appalling climate in winter, but it also had a massive density of large animals, because it was open grassland -- there's no precise analogue to that ecosystem today.
Sort of like a really, really cold Serengeti Plains.
And because of the widespread presence of permafrost, it was relatively easy to keep meat for long periods; you could kill beasts in the summer (itself never very hot) snd store the meat for winter in caches dug into the ice-layer.
It was actually more productive for hunters than the taiga forests further south, which don't have nearly as much animal biomass.
Sean: yup, about 2% of my DNA, according to the test I took. That must come from my father's side, since my maternal grandparents were both English-born of English families, and so was my paternal grandmother -- in fact, my father traced her ancestry back about 1000 years in Wiltshire. According to family legend, our trace of Amerindian comes from a boy captured (apparently on a whim) by a Micmac-Newfie raiding party scouring the interior for Beothuk, who dropped off the child in Twillingate, a Newfoundland village. (No account of why they didn't kill him along with his relatives.) He was adopted, grew up, became a prosperous schooner captain, married a local girl, had a large family, and after a while everyone in the village was descended from him. I suspect things like this happened fairly often -- usually gender-flipped, since down until the 1830's, the British settlements in Newfoundland had a large male predominance. Relations with the Beothuk were always pretty hostile (the last known Beothuk (a woman named Shanawdithit) the last known Beothuk, died in St. John's, Newfoundland in 1829. But there had been permanent English settlements on the island since the 1600's, and in most of them for a very long time there were 2 or 3 men for every woman. I think Beothuk DNA isn't more common only because the Beothuk were never very numerous; only about 1000 of them at their peak, and much less as the newcomers pushed them away from the coasts and the resources of the ocean. Newfoundland (aka "the Rock") isn't very productive, and the interior is appallingly barren, for the most part.
(From SM Stirling.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling! Your Beringia comment: Very intriguing, esp. the bit about Paleo-Indians being able to preserve meat in the permafrost, in summer, for later use in winter. Also interesting, what you said about your ancestry. Glad your ancestor was not killed! Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the more you study history at the granular level, the more you realize that sheer chance (including very unlikely occurrences) tends to govern things.
(From SM Stirling.)
The goddess, Fortuna.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, re history. Which is why I am so skeptical of ideologies, philosophies, or "sciences" claiming to be able to predict how history will go.
Ad astra! Sean
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