Against the Tide of Years (9 page)

Vicki swallowed and ran her hands over her hair—probably had memories of being called on the carpet here, since it was Guard HQ.

Jared Cofflin grinned; he’d turned the East Brick over to Marian Alston for residence and headquarters when the
Eagle
returned from its first trading voyage to Alba, that spring right after the Event, and he’d done it with glee.

Part of his pleasure in that was the thought of the California financier who’d paid three-point-seven million dollars for it just six months before and God knew how much in renovations and furnishings. One very irate moneyman, wandering through the primeval Indian-haunted oak woods of the Bronze Age island that the twentieth century had presumably gotten in exchange, looking for his missing investment. Maybe Jesus could love an investment broker, but Jared Cofflin didn’t intend to even try.

He gave another spare chuckle as they walked up the brick sidewalk, careful of the roots of the elms that bulged the surface.

“What’s the joke?” Ian asked.

“Thinking of the fuss back up in the twentieth, when they woke up and found us gone and nothing but trees and Indians on the Nantucket they got,” he said. “Christ, can you imagine what the
National Enquirer
crowd must have done?”

It was an old joke, but they were all laughing when Cridzywelfa opened the door.

“The ladies are in the kitchen, Chief, working all day after the morning,” she said with a quick, choppy Sun People tang to her English. “They said to park yourself, and I’ll take the children on to the back yard through.”

Cofflin nodded, chuckling again at the way New England vowels went with the Bronze Ager’s accent.
Paak the caa in Haav’d yaad ’n go to the paaty.
With no TV or recorded sound to sustain General American, it sounded like the native Nantucketers’ clipped nasal twang as gradually coming out on top in the Island’s linguistic stew.

 

“My ladies, they’re here at the door,” Cridzywelfa said.

“And we’re
ready,
by God,” Alston said, looking at the clock. Half-past seven p.m. exactly. Good. She’d always hated unpunctuality.

The cream for the bisque was just right, very hot but not boiling. She used a potholder to lift the heavy crock from the stovetop and pour it into the soup pot while Swindapa stirred it in with a long wooden spoon.

Thank you, Momma,
she thought. Her mother had gotten her started as a cook, back on Prince Island off the South Carolina coast. And it had been on a cast-iron monster much like this; their little truck farm hadn’t run to luxuries.
Though how she managed with six of us, I’ll never understand.

“Heather! Lucy!”

That last out the window to the gardens, whence came a clack of wood on wood and shrill imitations of a
kia
.

“Mom, we were just playing at
bokken,
” Heather wheedled. “You and Momma Swindapa play at swords all the time. Even with
real
swords,
sharp
ones.”

“That’s not playing, it’s training, and you’ll hurt each other with those sticks,” Alston said, forcing sternness into her voice. “When you’re old enough, you’ll get real
bokken
to train with. Now come in and wash your hands and faces. You can play with David and the other kids until dinner.”

“Oh, David’s just a baby,” Lucy said, with the lordly advantage of two years extra age.

The children dashed up the steps and through the sunroom

“That all smells good, Mom,” Heather said expectantly. “Really, really . . .”

Alston hugged the small form to her, meeting Swindapa’s eyes over her shoulder.
All right, you were right,
she thought.
The kids were a good idea—better than good.
Alston had lost her own children in the divorce after John found out about Jolene . . .
God, was that fifteen years ago?
Or whatever; up in the twentieth, at least. No solitary chance of getting custody, not when he could have destroyed her career in the Guard with one short sentence
and
ruined her chances of being awarded the children in front of a South Carolina court. And Swindapa couldn’t have any children of her own. Pelvic inflammation, from the way the Iraiina had treated her.

Alston cut two slices from a loaf and spread them with wild-blueberry jam; the bread was fresh enough to steam slightly. “That ought to hold you two for the long half hour until dinner’s on the table.”

“Run along,” Swindapa said gently, bending to kiss the small faces. “Get those hands
clean
.”

 

“Ahh,” Jared Cofflin said, pushing the empty bowl away. “Now
that’s
how to treat a lobster soup.”

“Lobster
bisque,
dear,” Martha corrected, helping herself to one of the broiled clams with herbed-crumb crust.

“Ayup.”

The dining room had changed a little since this became Guard House. The burgundy wallpaper was the same, with the brilliant gold foliage around the top; so were the Waterford chandelier, the Philadelphia-Federal sideboard and the long mahogany table, but the rugs on the floor were from Dilmun at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. A pair of crossed tomahawks over the fireplace had bronze heads shaped like the bills of falcons, lovely and deadly. Those were from the Iraiina, a tribe settled in what would have become Hampshire—plunder of the Alban War.

Elsewhere were mementos of the
Eagle
’s swift survey around the globe in the Year 2 A.E. and voyages since: a Shang robe of crimson and gold silk made in Anyang; a square-section bronze sacrificial ax covered in ancestral Chinese ideographs; a blazing indigo-and-red-green tapestry of dyed cotton from coastal Peru, covered in smiling gods and geometric shapes.

Cofflin helped collect the soup plates and take them out to the kitchen to soak; off that, in the sunroom, the children were eating, with just as much noise and chaos as you would expect from ten healthy youngsters between three and seven, plus the housekeeper’s two teenagers and the Colemans’ youngest, who was still in a high chair. Cridzywelfa was presiding, with a smile that seemed genuine. He’d noticed that the locals just weren’t as fastidious about mess and confusion as those born in the twentieth.

God knows I love ’em, but it’s nice to eat without the kids now and then,
he thought. At least
his
were all past the dump-your-porridge-over-your-head stage. Most of the time. The way Marian’s redhead was squealing and waving her fork looked like danger to life and limb.

“Why did you name her Heather?” Cofflin asked idly, as everyone came back in with fresh dishes and exclaimed over the suckling pig borne aloft in glory with an apple in its mouth. Swindapa began handing around plates. He picked an olive from a bowl and ate it.

“Why do you
think,
Jared?” Marian replied, carving with quick, skilled strokes.

The savory meat curled away from her blade, and she looked down the table, visibly estimating portions; the Cofflins, the Arnsteins, Starbuck, Captain Sandy Rapczewicz and Doc Coleman—Sandy had been Executive Officer on the
Eagle
when all this started, and she’d kept her maiden name when she married the Island’s senior medico. Victor Ortiz, who’d been a lieutenant back then; his wife was a relative of Swindapa’s named Jairwen, hugely pregnant now, and the two were chattering away in the soft
glug-glug
sound of Fiernan, the tang and lilt of a language that had died a thousand years before Christ.

“Wouldn’t have asked if I knew,” Cofflin said, smothering a mild annoyance when most of the rest of the table got the allusion and he didn’t. Martha was chuckling into her wineglass. Only Vicki looked as baffled as he was.

“Heather Has Two Mommies, dear,” his wife said. “Don’t you remember?”

“Well, of course she has two—oh.” He thumped the heel of his hand on his forehead.

“It’s a perfectly good name,” Alston said. “ ’dapa, this load is for the other table. One of my grandmothers was named Heather.” A slight quirk of the lips. “Doubt she expected to have any red-haired great-grandchildren, though.”

Steaming layers of sliced pork lay on the edge of the platter, cut with a surgeon’s neatness.
Of course, doing that Japanese sword stuff
was
her hobby,
Cofflin thought, passing the applesauce.
Other hobby, besides cooking, that is.

“Say,” he went on—it was all old friends here—“do Heather and Lucy ever have much in the way of, ah, problems about that? Now that they’ve started school?”

“About their parents?” Marian gave a slight cold smile, and Swindapa looked briefly furious. “Yes, sometimes. A few times.”

“Sorry about that,” Cofflin said, flushing with embarrassment.

“Oh, no problem. They’re very athletic little girls, for their ages.”

The smile went slightly wider at his look of incomprehension. “I gave them some pointers and told them to ambush whoever gave them serious trouble about their mothers, two on one, and beat the living shit out of them. And if the parents complained—well, they could come complain to
me
.”

He looked into the dark eyes of the person who he knew was, after Martha, his best friend in this post-Event world. And the embarrassment turned, just for a second, to a jolt of pure, cold fear.

“Barbarians,” Swindapa muttered under her breath.

“What was that?” Martha said.

“Nothin’ much,” Marian said, smiling slightly. “Swindapa has a low opinion of some Eagle People attitudes, is all.”

“Fully justified, in some cases,” Martha said dryly.

People started passing things; gravy, bowls of scalloped potatoes, roast garlic, cauliflower au gratin, sliced onions and tomatoes in oil and vinegar, steamed peas, butternut squash, wilted spinach with shallot dressing, lentils with thyme, potato-and-lobster-claw salad, green salad, bread.

“Oh, Mother of God, but I got so sick of edible seaweed,” Ortiz said, biting into a piece of tomato with an expression of nearly religious ecstasy.

“Saved us from scurvy the winter of ‘01,” Martha observed, slightly defensive. “My Girl Scouts did a good job there, finding wild greens.”

“Oh, they did,” Ortiz agreed. “No dispute there. I’m just so glad to see vegetables again.”

Murmurs of agreement interrupted the chomping of jaws.

“The economy’s doing reasonably well,” Starbuck conceded, grudgingly.
Christ, and they think
I’m
stingy,
Cofflin thought. The ex-banker went on, “Despite the lavish use of public funds on projects such as yours, young lady.”

Vicki looked down at her plate for a second. “Defense takes precedence over affluence, sir,” she replied.

Starbuck’s shaggy white brows went up. “Nice to hear one of the younger generation quoting Adam Smith at me,” he said grudgingly. “Well, I suppose it won’t bankrupt us. Not quite yet.”

Things
had
improved. Cofflin spread butter on a piece of the chewy, crusty whole-wheat bread. Butter, for instance. There hadn’t been more than two dozen cows on the whole island, at first. The breeding program was going well, though.

“You Eagle People complain about the oddest things,” Jairwen said, tossing back her long brown hair. “You’ve ways to have got vegetables in the middle of winter, and then complain you that they aren’t fresh picked as were.”

“You’ve got a point,” Doc Coleman said. “This diet is actually healthier than what we had before the Event; a little heavier on salt than I’d like, especially in the winter with all the dried fish, but plenty of fiber and roughage, not much sugar and less fat—look how lean this pork is, even. Plus, I doubt there are fifty people on the Island who don’t do more physical exercise than they used to, just getting around.” Luxury transport these days was a bicycle. “And no tobacco or recreational drugs, thank God. Pass the gravy.”

“It’s back to dried dulse for some of us,” Alston sighed.

“You’re ready so soon?” Cofflin blurted.
Hell, I thought I was following things closely!

“Oh, not for the real push,” Alston said. “We need more ships, more—sorry, ’dapa, just a little business—but it occurs to me that we just can’t wait until we’ve got enough ships and people to do it directly, so we’d better start laying the groundwork through the back door. Lieutenant Cofflin—sorry, Vicki—has her pet coming along right nice. We can run the tests on her, and then start taking it apart again.”

The younger Cofflin glanced between her uncle and the black woman, suddenly alert. Alston smiled slightly and nodded. “Time you were brought into the loop. Everybody here’s cleared.”

She sketched out a plan, and a little way down the table, Ian Arnstein sighed and rolled his eyes.

“Oh, God,” he said. “
Another
two languages to learn.”

He couldn’t quite conceal the grin that broke through. His wife hit him with her napkin and groaned.

“The first part, that’ll be more in the nature of a long trip than a military expedition,” Marian said. “ Then . . .”

“Enough business,” Swindapa said firmly. “I will work tomorrow. Today is for play. Dessert, and then we dance.”

“All right,” Jared Cofflin said, chuckling and leaning back with a cup in his hand. “You know, one of the few good things about this job is that it lets you meet every nutcase in the Republic, and just yesterday I met one even crazier than the gang around this table. Let me tell you about a young man named Girenas over at Providence Base and
his
weird idea.”

 

Peter Girenas looked at himself anxiously in the small mirror by the washstand, checking his chin and his mottled-leather Ranger uniform. Then, swallowing, he glanced around the room. It wasn’t home, just the place he lived when he was in town; the owner of the Laughing Loon was glad to let him have it in return for a deer every week or two. Bed and floor were mostly covered in skins of his own hunting, bear and wolf and wolverine; there was a Lekkansu spirit-mask on one squared-log wall, a coverlet of ermine pelts, a shelf of books, his rifle and crossbow, some keepsakes and a photograph of his mother. And on a table beside the bed was a sheaf of papers.