Island in the Sea of Time (22 page)

That gave her enough of herself back to swing her feet out of the bed and stand, stretching gingerly. She was thirsty, a little hungry, and had an urgent need to empty her bladder. The door swung open under her hand, after she’d fumbled with the handle for a while.

Wait,
she thought. The black chieftain had given her clothes, the same sort of clothes the Eagle ship-people wore. The chieftain who’d taken the collar from her neck, who’d led her back from living death to the Shining World.
I had better wear them, to show that I honor her.

The worst things in the world had happened to her, and then something from beyond the world had lifted her out of it. There must be a meaning in this, a track among the stars making a path for her feet.

The . . .
head
, was the word . . . was just across the passage. Swindapa forced herself to walk erect and calm toward it; the narrow walls and the ceiling above her were terrifyingly like a barrow grave, the places where the Old Ones laid their dead. Inside was a
mirror,
something else both frightening and wonderful beyond words. In it she could see herself, really
see,
not just catch a blurred glimpse as in a pond or polished bronze.

The face that looked out was strange to her. Not the face of the reckless youngster who had gone into battle to avenge her man’s ruined leg and life. Not the student who watched the stars with the Grandmothers. Not the beaten slave of the Sun People, either.
Three times have I died-tomyself and been reborn. Moon Woman has drawn me through the earth and Her light has changed me like a tree.

Whose face was it, then? She would have to learn who it was, and how to be that one.

 

“Don’t offer too much,” Isketerol said.

Alston looked over at him.
Why does he give a damn if we’re overcharged?
she thought.

Daurthunnicar and some of his chiefs were standing before big wicker baskets of grain—emmer wheat, club wheat, barley, rye—and several types of beans. The representatives from the
Eagle
had their own samples on display, the same sort of thing they’d given as gifts the night before. The eyes of the Iraiina chieftains kept straying back to the glass tumblers, cloth, plastic, steel tools, and weapons. Some of them licked their lips as they stood leaning a hip or buttock on the hafts of their axes, using them as their remote British descendants would a shooting stick. Today they were less flamboyantly dressed, though still sporting the odd gold arm ring; the
rahax
had a square silver plate on his belt. He also wore his new steel long sword on a baldric over one shoulder, rarely taking his hand from its hilt.

Arnstein spoke with the Iberian for several minutes. “He says he’s a merchant here too, and if we pay too much we’ll ruin the market,” the Californian said.

“Ask him what he buys here,” Alston said.

“Ah . . . copper and tin in the ingot, and gold dust and nuggets, mostly. Also raw wool, honey, beeswax, flax, tallow, hides and leather, and, ah, slaves. Among other things.”

Alston nodded coolly. In a world this thinly populated, with these crude ships, she hadn’t expected long-range trade in bulk commodities like grain to be of much importance. Isketerol had his own priorities, and keeping the price of wheat down wasn’t one of them.

“Don’t worry, Professor. I realize we’re in another era with other mores.”
Damned if I’ll put up with this sort of thing forever,
she thought.
But for now, no alternative.
“And what does he sell?”

“All sorts of handicrafts, fine cloth, dyes, drugs, olive oil, wine.” Another moment’s consultation. “And Isketerol says he hopes to establish friendly relations with us, if we’re coming here again. So he gives you his knowledge of local conditions as a gift of friendship. He also says that the locals—the word he uses probably means something like ‘savages’ or ‘natives’—don’t have much conception of bargaining. To them, this is sort of an exchange of gifts, and the
rahax
gets status by giving as well as getting. Our goods are very high-status. Daurthunnicar maintains his position partly by what he can give away. If he takes your gifts and doesn’t gift you lavishly in return, he’ll lose face.”

“Does that sound plausible, Professor?”

“Very. In pre-urban economies with no money, gift exchange is nearly as efficient a way to conceptualize handing stuff around as trade. Wealth is a means to power through prestige, face. Warlike tribal cultures like the Iraiina often think that way.”

“And I suspect that losing face among this bunch has very unpleasant consequences. That’s probably a hint from Isketerol, by the way, as well. Assure him he’ll get his share, tactfully. Now, those baskets seem to hold about a couple of bushels each. Let him know that we need . . .”

The slow, cumbersome business of dickering through two sets of interpreters went on. After a while Iraiina women brought stools for the leaders to sit on, and the tribal idea of breakfast: more of the coarse bread and cheese, leftover meat, and clay pots of the thin, flat sour beer.
At least it’s weak, too, praise the Lord. A possum couldn’t get high on this stuff.
Alston noticed one younger subchief staring at her, more and more intently. A baffled look grew on his face; after a half hour he leaned over and tried to speak quietly in his lord’s ear. Daurthunnicar brushed him aside with one thick arm, then barked him into silence.

“Past noon,” Alston said at last. “Tactfully suggest that we break for lunch.”

Daurthunnicar rumbled agreement; there was more mutual confusion, as three different ideas of reckoning time met and clashed. At last they settled on what Arnstein thought was probably two in the afternoon.

Alston turned. There was a sound of scuffling behind her, footfalls, a quick warning shout of
Captain—

A hand fell on her shoulder; she could feel the strength of the grip even through the cloth of her uniform jacket. Daurthunnicar bellowed in anger in the background, but there was no time for talk. She let herself fall backward in the direction of the pull that would otherwise have spun her around, swaying her hips aside and snapping the hammer end of her clenched fist back and down.

There was a choked-off screech of pain as she turned, a quick pivot in place. The young subchief was bending over convulsively, hands cupping his groin in uncontrollable reflex. Her own left hand flashed up to meet his descending and unguarded throat; the Iraiina warrior had neck muscles like braided iron cable, but that didn’t matter a damn if you sank your thumb and fingers in precisely . . . so. There
wasn’t
any muscle protecting the trachea or carotids, no matter how strong you were. The Iraiina choked again, this time as his windpipe closed and blood stopped flowing to his brain. Her right hand had gone into her pocket and closed on a short lead bar; she pulled that out, poised the fist, and struck with a snapping twist to the side of the head as she released his throat. The Iraiina dropped bonelessly to the ground, breathing with a rasping whistle. She restrained the automatic follow-through which would have brought her heel stamp-kicking down on the back of his neck.

Captain Alston looked up, meeting Daurthunnicar’s eyes. “Ask him if this is the way his people treat guests,” she said.

A bristle of leveled spears surrounded her as the cadets closed up. In back, a few more were unobtrusively bringing their shotguns and rifles around. Most of the Iraiina seemed shocked, bewildered; she saw naked horror on some of their faces. Daurthunnicar looked nearly as purple as his subchief had when her chokehold clamped on his throat. He drew his own dagger and brought it up to his face. Slowly, deliberately, he cut two lines there—shallow, but enough to bring a trickle of blood. Then he stepped forward, sheathed the dagger, and kicked the fallen form of his subordinate hard enough to do far more damage than she’d inflicted.

“Daurthunnicar,
rahax,
begs forgiveness for this shame,” he rumbled; or at least that was how Isketerol relayed it through Arnstein. The
rahax
kicked the fallen warrior again. “How may he wipe out this shame, this attack on a guest, to avert the anger of his gods?”

Alston looked down at the figure of the Iraiina, recovering just enough to writhe. She remembered the screams that had echoed through her ship that morning, and what the ship’s doctor had told her.

“Tell him that his oath is between him and his gods,” she said curtly, making a chopping gesture. “Then tell him to treat this one as his people deal with oathbreakers.”

Daurthunnicar grunted as if he’d been belly-punched; she turned and strode away, her people falling into position around her, back to the waiting longboat with none of the locals but the Iberian trader with them.

The chiefs voice rose in bellowing protest behind her as the tribesfolk milled and shouted into each other’s faces, waving their arms. A few women started to keen. The
rahax
stopped shouting and began to groan and sob; from the thudding sounds he was literally beating his breast as well.

“I didn’t realize that the Coast Guard taught that sort of unarmed combat,” Arnstein said, wiping his forehead.

“They don’t,” Alston said bleakly. “Only a little of the basics. The Way is a hobby of mine.”

Isketerol spoke: “A very shrewd move, honored captain,” he said. “That fool saw that you were a woman. Now none will dare think so—even if they suspect, they will keep silence. To admit that a woman beat one of their own hand to hand would be unbearable shame, so they cannot admit it even to themselves. Also Daurthunnicar will have to give you a better bargain, for his honor’s sake.”

“Tell Mr. Isketerol,” Alston said, without looking around, “that I thank him for his assistance. Also that I have
nothing
to hide.”

 

“Damn,” Cofflin said softly, with a touch of awe. “I just don’t by God
believe
it.”

He looked out over Sesachacha Pond and suppressed an impulse to take off his cap as if he were in church, instead of out in the country at the eastern end of the island. His mind groped for a description of what he was seeing. “Flock of birds” was completely inadequate, the way “large building” would be for the World Trade Center. He was looking north to Quidnet across the ash-black remains of the arrowroot and scrub oak thickets Angelica Brand’s people had cleared, over the water to the low barrier beach that separated the pond from the ocean.
And I can’t see a damned thing but birds.
Birds so thick ashore that the ground
moved
with them, like a rippling carpet of feathers and beaks. Their sound was a gobbling, honking thunder, a continuous rustling background loud enough to make speech difficult at less than a shout. The explosions of wings were louder still.

“The smell’s awesome, too,” he added aloud, to hear himself talk and bring things back to a human scale. “Like the Mother of all Henhouses.”

He raised his binoculars, peering through the vision slit of the plank-and-brush hide and suppressing the slight quiver in his hands. Big brownish birds with white-banded necks, Canada geese right enough. Ducks . . . mallards and canvasbacks and big black ducks, ducks beyond all reason, more varieties than he could name. On land . . .
Some sort of pigeon,
he thought; enough of them to outnumber the waterfowl, which he wouldn’t have believed possible if he wasn’t seeing it with his own eyes.

“Martha,” he said, “what sort of pigeon is that? Foot long, sort of a pinkish body, blue . . . no, a blue-gray head, long pointed tail.”

“What?”
she shouted, and snatched the glasses out of his hands.

Cofflin stared at her; it was about the most un-Marthaish behavior he’d ever seen from her. Martha Stoddard did not lose her composure.

“Passenger pigeons,” she said, after a long moment’s study. “Passenger pigeons, as I live and breathe,
passenger pigeons.”

Hairs stood up along Cofflin’s forearms, and he felt them struggling to rise down his spine.
I’m seeing something no human. being has seen in over a century,
he thought with slow wonder. Then:
No. I’m seeing something common as dirt.

“I almost hate to do this,” Cofflin said softly.

Part of him did. The rest of him, particularly his stomach and mouth, was downright eager. Roast duck, crackling skin, dark flavorful meat with a touch of fat that fish just didn’t have. . . . Jared Cofflin swallowed and gave the lanyard lying by his right hand a good hard yank.

The modified harpoon guns had been dug into the fields at a slant. Now the finned darts shot into the air, dragging coils of line behind them . . . and then a rising arc of net soaring up into the sky, catching the birds as they flung themselves aloft in terror. All across the fields around the pond other nets were rising. From the edge of the water itself came a deeper sound as giant catapults made from whole sets of leaf springs flung weighted nets out over the waterfowl.

If the sound of the birds at rest had been loud, the tumult that followed was enough to stun. Cofflin dove out of the hide, waving his arms and yelling. The shouts were lost in the cannonade thunder of the rising flocks, but hundreds of islanders saw his signal. They ran forward, waving lengths of plank, golf clubs, baseball bats, leaping and striking at birds—the vast majority—that had escaped the nets. The air was thick with feathers and noise, thick with birds in numbers that literally hid the sun, casting a shadow like dense cloud. It drifted through the sky like smoke; bird dung fell from the air and spattered his hat and the shoulders of his coat, falling as thick as light snow. He ignored it, looking at the carpet of feathered wealth that lay around him . . . and there would be others waiting to take a similar harvest at Gibbs Pond and Folger’s Marsh.

“I hope they don’t take off elsewhere for good,” he said. A broken-winged pigeon fluttered across his feet; he struck at it automatically, to put it out of its pain.