Island in the Sea of Time (13 page)

She shook off the thought. All that could be done about that problem had been; and there was a raft of new ones about to descend. The rigging lines were humming, like a huge stringed instrument all tuned to a single harmony. A voice cried from the mainmast:

“On deck there! Ease the t’gallant buntline.”

Feet thundered across the deck. Alston’s eyes followed the motions that let the line out a trifle and then secured it again with automatic ease. The blue-green swell raised the Eagle in its rhythmic grip, and the big ship heeled deep to port. The masts and the humans on them traced circles against the sky and began their cycle again. Alston went forward of the wheel and into the pilothouse.

“Ms. Rapczewicz,” she said to the woman at the chart table. “Do you have the plot?”

“Here, Skipper,” she said. One of the watch handed Alston a cup of coffee; that was something she was going to miss, when they ran out. “We should make landfall about here, this afternoon. Assuming there’s an England here.”

“There’ll always be an England,” she said, and looked at the XO’s pointing thumb. Just east of the Isle of Wight, Southampton Water. “In a geographical sense, at least,” she added.

“Mr. Arnstein,” she said to the professor. He was there with the astronomer, come up from the cubbyhole where they’d been deep in the books from the Nantucket Athenaeum. “Is there anywhere we could expect to get coffee, here and now?”

“Hmmm?” Arnstein looked up, preoccupied. “Coffee? Oh . . . um, that is, it comes from Ethiopia, originally. Kaffa province, fairly far inland. It went from there to the Yemen, and from the Yemen to everywhere. The Arabs spread it.”

“I don’t suppose . . .”

“Well, Captain, there’s no mention of it for more than two thousand years after this date. Tea, maybe—”

“Boat ho!” The lookout’s voice came faint from the tops through the door of the deckhouse.

Alston turned and went out on the deck. “What do you make?”

“Captain, small boat off to port, a mile and a half!” the lookout cried. Sailors crowded to the port rail.

“Mr. Walker, get those people back to their posts!” she said crisply. “Helm, come about. Stand by aloft, ready to take in sail. Mr. Walker, we’ll heave to once we’re near.”

“Lower a boat, ma’am?”

She shook her head. “Not immediately. I want to take a look at them first. Ms. Rapczewicz, you have the deck.”

“Ms. Rapczewicz has the deck, aye!”

Alston walked down into the waist, securing binoculars to her belt. Then she crouched, leaped to the bulwark, caught the ratlines, and swarmed upward, tarred rope harsh under her hands. She climbed, past the tops—triangular railed platforms halfway and three-quarters of the way up the mainmast—higher still, until the ship was a tiny lozenge far below. She nodded to crewfolk as she passed; the rigging was no place to waste hands on saluting, and she was up here fairly often, for exercise’s sake. At last she came to the uppermost yard, the royal, where the steel tube of the mast was barely as thick through as her waist. A leg over the yard and her foot hooked through a line gave her a secure brace.

The wind whipped at her, chilly and strong, and the sail bellied out below in a pure white curve. She turned the focusing screw of the binoculars with the thumb whose fingers held the instrument, according to the old nautical rule of one hand for yourself and another for the ship. The boat grew; it was an oval about a dozen feet long, low in the water, with neither mast nor sail and a curious double prow. There were five men—five human figures, at least—lying prone in it, some half covered by blankets or cloaks. The boat rose, hesitated on the height of a swell, then skidded downward. The sluggishness of the motion told her it was taking water and would sink in a few hours. The crew certainly weren’t in any shape to bail. She watched until she could see limbs flopping loosely. It would be disappointing if they were all dead. . . . No, one stirred feebly.

“On deck, there!” There was a trick to calling down so you could be heard, a matter of pitch rather than raw volume. “Ms. Rapczewicz, bring us alongside!”

“Alongside, aye!”

Alston went down the ratlines to the middle top, then slid down a stayline, using the soles of her shoes to brake against the hard ridged surface of the cable. When she sprang to the deck the small boat was visible from this level, and a cluster of figures were by the port rail, peering themselves.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “Professor Arnstein, what do you make of her?”

She handed over the binoculars. Arnstein pushed his glasses up on his head and adjusted them more clumsily. At last he gave a surprised grunt.

“I’ve never seen one either,” he said. “But I think it’s a coracle, a boat made out of sewn hides on a sapling frame. The Irish were using them well into the modern era. Isn’t it a bit far from land for a boat that size?”

“Two hundred miles from the nearest shore, and God knows where they put to sea,” Alston said. The distance was closing rapidly; she took back the glasses and watched. “There are half a dozen people in that boat. They’re not movin’, but I thought I saw . . . Wait, one is moving.”

She turned her head. “Get the medic ready,” she said. “Severe dehydration, salt poisoning.”

“How do you know that, Captain?” Arnstein asked curiously—he was always curious, which was annoying sometimes but a large part of what made him useful.

Not to mention interesting. Her own reading in history had been largely maritime and military. Talking with Arnstein, you always learned something. It might be completely useless, but it would be fascinating . . . and she suspected that many of the facts that
seemed
useless would turn out to be valuable later. Glad to return the favor for once, she continued:

“If you’re lost at sea in a small boat, and it’s not cold enough for hypothermia, the commonest way to die is thirst,” she replied. “Or salt poisonin’ from drinking seawater; that’ll kill you faster, unless you’re very careful to take small sips. And from the look of them, I’d say these people were blown out to sea and mighty thoroughly lost.”

 

Ian Arnstein watched with queasy interest as the sailors went down ropes and climbed into the coracle. It bobbed and heaved as two of them climbed aboard, made fast, and began examining the bodies lying in the shallow water that sloshed in its bottom.

One of the sailors vomited over the side. Even at this distance the livid faces and swollen tongues weren’t pretty, and seagulls or something had been at them. The other went on with her task, checking the inert shapes one by one.

“Only one alive, sir,” she called up after a moment, her fingers on the neck of a figure hidden under several cloaks, as her companion returned to his work. “He’s pretty far gone, though. I need a sling lift.”

“Lot of weapons,” Arnstein said thoughtfully. “Not fishermen.”

Alston nodded. “The survivor probably had enough willpower not to drink from the sea.” Louder: “Send up the gear, after you’ve recovered the live one.”

Doreen pushed her glasses back with a finger and peered, fascinated beneath her nausea. The bodies were all men, all fairly young. Weapons lay beside them: spears, bows, quivers, axes with yard-long handles and long narrow heads of bronze, the drooping edges shaped like a hawk’s beak. The rest of the boat’s load was bundles wrapped in hide or basketwork lashed with thongs.

The ship’s physician and his helpers swung into operation as the body came inboard. The rest of the crew hung back, but nobody objected when Ian pushed close, Doreen beside him. The stranger was a little above average height, perhaps five-eight or -nine. His body was sunburned and his face and lips swollen, but you could see that he was young, probably in his late teens. The sparse yellow beard bore that out too, merely thick down. His hair was twisted back in a braid that reached halfway down his back, bound with bronze rings. For clothes he wore a thigh-length leather kilt pyrographed with cryptic designs, cinched by a broad belt of sheepskin worn with the fleece side in; his feet were bare and heavily callused. The face was generic European of a northern or eastern variety, narrow and long-nosed on a long skull, although the nose had been broken at some time and had healed a little crooked. Arnstein could see a blue eye when the doctor peeled back an eyelid and shone a light into it.

“Quite a bod,” Doreen murmured, playing with a lock of hair.

Ian nodded; the youth was broad-shouldered and narrow in the hips, smooth muscle running over an athlete’s longlegged body. He also had an interesting collection of scars for a young man. A deep pucker on one leg, still a little red; thin white lines on his forearms; a deep gouge out of an upper shoulder. There were scars on his back as well, parallel ones dusty-white against the smooth pale skin.

“Those are whip marks,” Alston said. “He could be a prisoner, or a slave, I suppose?”

Doreen spoke thoughtfully. “Aren’t there cultures where boys are flogged as part of their initiation rites?”

“Yes,” Ian said. “Sparta for one. The other scars look like fights to me. Fairly recent ones.”

The ship’s doctor had hooked up an IV. “Dehydration and sunburn,” he said. “Looks like a pretty healthy young . man. He should be all right in a few days.” “When will he be conscious?” Ian asked.

“Any time.”

Doreen looked at the materials coming over the side. Besides the weapons, the bundles held mostly extra clothes—kilts, and simple T-tunics of linen or wool, woven in plaids or dyed in soft natural colors, blanketlike woolen cloaks, and a few pairs of shoes made out of a single piece of soft leather, rather like moccasins. There were baskets of dried meat, fish, hard crumbly cheese, and crackerlike hard bread. And there was an array of shields, difficult to see at first since they’d been laid down as seats. They were round or oval, frames of wicker and shaped wood covered in hide and painted in gaudy shapes, the swastika-like fylfot, or animals. Horses, wolves, bears, the head of a bull, or a figure half man and half elk, with horns growing from his head. A few had bronze rivets as well.

“What’s this?” she said, prodding at a string of varicolored bits of leather with straggling fur attached. A thought struck her, and she backed away and wiped the hand frantically down the leg of her trousers.

“Human hair,” the doctor said, glancing aside. “Scalps.”

A murmur went through the crew. Doreen swallowed and forced her mind back to the task at hand.

“This man’s people use representative art,” she said. “Why don’t we get some pictures? We can show them to him and ask the names. There’s a set of
National Geographics
in the wardroom that would be perfect.”

 

“Special court-martial is now in session. When did this happen, Ms. Hendriksson?” Captain Alston said.

“About half an hour ago, ma’am. Cadet Winters and several other members of the crew came to me, with Seaman Rodriguez in custody, and I had him put under arrest.”

The lieutenant was young, looking as stern and efficient as someone with freckles and a snub nose could; her eyebrows and lashes were as white-blond as her hair, standing out against tanned skin. Cadet Winters had a black eye and an arm in a sling; Seaman Rodriguez was standing between two guards, sullen and hangdog, a scowl on his acne-scarred face. His lower lip was wrenched and swollen, with a deep bite mark sending a trickle of blood down his chin, and his nose was going up like a balloon. From the look of it someone had stuck fingers into it and pulled hard. Every so often his hand made an abortive movement, as if to rub his crotch, and he stood slightly bent over. Most of the off-duty crew hung back a little, close enough to hear what was going on on the quarterdeck.

Alston sat behind a table, the XO and a chief petty officer on either side of her. It was a little odd for a special court-martial, but the circumstances were more so.

“Seaman Rodriguez, what’s your explanation?” Alston asked.

“Ah, ma‘am, she said she’d go into the paint locker with me.” Which was strictly against the rules, but it happened now and then. “Then she changed her mind and started yelling and hitting me. Ma’am.”

Winters was spitting angry, Alston saw—which was all to the good, much better than depression. “Cadet Winters?”

“He grabbed me and tried to stick a sock in my mouth and drag me into the locker,” she bit out. “I gave him a knee where it’d hurt, ma’am, and then he punched me and dislocated my arm, so I went for him and yelled.”

“Ms. Hendriksson?”

“Several of the crew heard screaming, ma’am, and ran to the locker. They found Seaman Rodriguez struggling with Cadet Winters; her clothing was torn, and they were both injured. Seaman Rodriguez had been drinking.”

Others stepped forward to confirm the testimony. Captain Alston fixed Rodriguez with a basilisk stare. There was sweat on his face, and he looked around unconsciously for support and found none. She thought for a moment, and the three judges bent their heads together to consult in whispers.

“Court will now pronounce its verdict and pass sentence,” she said aloud, in a formal tone.

“Hey—I mean, ma’am, this isn’t no real court-martial.”

“No, it isn’t, Seaman. However, since it’s unlikely we’re going to get back to a base in the near future”—or the
distant past, you noxious little shit—
“it’ll have to do. We’re not under the Uniform Code of Military Justice anymore; we’re operating under the authority of the Nantucket Council. I think,” she went on to the others behind the table, “that we’re agreed this goes beyond sexual harassment.”

“Attempted rape, aggravated assault,” Rapczewicz agreed.

“Ten years minimum, dishonorable discharge,” the CPO said.

And concealing liquor,
she thought; Rodriguez seemed to be the sort who couldn’t win for losing. Aloud: “Seaman Rodriguez, you are found guilty. As imprisonment is impractical, under the circumstances I think discharging you on the nearest shore would be equitable.”