Island in the Sea of Time (27 page)

“Practice who?” Swindapa said again, handing her water.

Doreen gulped it gratefully. “Practice
with what,”
she said.

Swindapa had a superb memory and a mimic’s ear for sound, but too many of the grammatical conventions of the English language seemed to make no sense to her. Her own language was an agglutinative horror that made the complex inflections and declensions of Lithuanian or Iraiina seem straightforward. Three
separate
forms of the “r” sound, all of which were distinct to her and indistinguishable to the English-speaking ear. . . . Doreen shuddered at the memory.

“Practice with what?” the Fiernan girl repeated agreeably.

“Staff.
Bo
.
”
They repeated the conversation in Iraiina for practice’s sake. That was merely a complicated language, not impossible.

The
bo
was a piece of polished hardwood, five and a half feet long and about the thickness of her paired thumbs. She’d kept it on half a dozen moves after she stopped going to the dojo, never quite certain that she’d given up the art for good, but never having enough time to actually attend, either.

“For what?”

“To hit,” Doreen said. “I’ll show you.”

She stood in front of the younger woman, the staff held slantwise across her body.

“Spear?” Swindapa said, and made jabbing motions.

“No. Like this.”

Very gently, she ran the rounded tip of the staff into the weak point of the other’s solar plexus, just below the breastbone. Even in the strongest, fittest set of abdominal muscles that was an empty spot, and it was right under the heart and lungs. The other woman folded over with a surprised mild
oooof.
Doreen followed through with a slow uppercut that would have smashed the jaw if it had been for real. That led naturally into a turn, the
bo
tossed up and allowed to slide between her hands as she pivoted so that the movement became a two-handed sweep. Step forward, sliding the left hand to the center of the staff, point down, use it to scoop behind the knee . . .

Swindapa went down realistically, grinning. Doreen smiled back; everyone liked the Fiernan girl, the more so since she’d relaxed—and stopped waking up
every
night screaming. She play-acted ramming the staff into the other’s throat, then gave her a hand up.

“You show?”

Doreen hesitated, then nodded. “That’s ‘Will you show me?’ ”

“Will you show me?”

Training a novice might be just what she needed to keep her motivation up. “Stand like this,” she began.

“Lesson over,” she wheezed twenty minutes later.

Swindapa was just working up a sweat, but she reluctantly handed the
bo
back to Doreen, rubbing at a few bruises where the wood had gotten away from her.

“We’ll get you one of these,” the American said. The Fiernan was in good condition, a natural athlete, and she’d seemed to enjoy it. “We’ll do more tomorrow.”
And by the time you know enough, I’ll have some endurance back.

They turned to watch Isketerol trying a fall with Lieutenant Walker. Doreen didn’t like the too-cheerful junior officer; for one thing, he gave off God’s-gift-to-women vibrations. She disliked the Tartessian rather more, so it was a point up whoever got thumped. The Iberian trader moved in cautiously, crouched with hands held high and low, rather like pictures she’d seen on very old pottery in museums. Walker waited until the other man made a grab. She knew what came next.

Thump.
The Tartessian landed on his face on the foam mat, winded and stunned. Nobody here seemed to know how to fall. Walker landed astride him—in a real fight the knees would have driven into the fallen man’s back, probably crushing his ribs and snapping the spine.

“That’s enough,” Marian Alston said; she was barefoot, in calf-length cotton
gi
pants and an armless singlet, dripping wet from the work she’d been doing. Her skin shone like wet coal over long lean muscles, and she was smiling slightly. “Playtime’s over, boys and girls. Classwork next.”

The sparring circles and drill lines began to break up amid good-natured groans. Walker called out: “Try a few rounds, Skipper?”

Doreen frowned; the words were right, informal to suit the occasion, but there was an overtone. A few cadets paused to watch.

“Surely,” Alston said quietly. “Light contact?”

“Sounds good, Skipper,” Walker said. “Somebody call it.”

They walked onto the mat, faced off, bowed slightly. Walker put his right fist to his left palm as he did; Alston bowed with her fists held before her thighs. An impromptu referee raised a hand between them.

“Asume
. . .
”

Get ready. They fell into stance. Then the hand flashed down.

Fight.

Doreen could make some sense of what followed. Korean-style kicking attack by the man, heels scything. Block and spinning kick in counterattack, straight-on, by the woman . . .
shotokan,
she thought. It was like the captain to have trained in a straightforward power style. Then there was a flurry of movement, fast and fluid. It ended with Walker skidding backward on his backside, clutching his gut, and Alston standing in a straddle-legged horse stance, shaking her head and wiping blood from her upper lip.

“Sorry . . . Skipper,” Walker wheezed.

Wheeze he should,
Doreen thought indignantly. That last backfist
hadn’t
been pulled.
Lousy control, for all he’s fast.
Serve him right if the captain hadn’t pulled her thrust-kick, and given him a ruptured gut or broken pubic bone instead of just the wind knocked out of him.

“No problem, Mr. Walker,” Alston replied. “And now I think we have work to do.”

“Scumbag,” Swindapa muttered beside Doreen, glaring, her hands clenching. She’d picked up bits and pieces of English from other members of the crew besides her official teachers. “T’row in water one him over side, fuckin’ A.”

“Ah, Swindapa, that’s not a . . . nice thing to say,” Doreen said.

The guileless blue eyes met hers. “Nice?”

“Not . . . ah, ‘fuckin’ A’ is
low.
” She held her hand down by her knees. “‘That’s right,’ or ‘A-OK,’ are better—are high.” She held her hand up.

Swindapa shrugged. “Captain give life me,” she said. “Cut one him neck—” she made a violent slitting gesture while she glared at Walker—“A—OK. That’s right.”

 

Isketerol picked himself up and rubbed his neck ruefully.
And here I thought I was a
good
wrestler and boxer
, he thought, squinting against the sun. He’d practiced at home, as any boy of good family did, learned tricks from Ugarit to Pi-Ramses, and by the time he was a man grown he’d been able to hold his own in a tavern brawl in Memphis with off-duty
nakhtu-aa
of Pharaoh’s guard, the well-named strong-arm boys. Those tricks had saved his life more than once, and let him put much bigger men on their backs among savages like the Iraiina. Which had been useful in winning respect, and hence profit. But this . . .

The challenge to the
Eagle
’s captain caught him by surprise.
For the captaincy?
he thought wildly, moving back. Then:
Surely not.
Even the Iraiina weren’t quite that primitive.
No. Why, then?

Perhaps for face, in a campaign of prestige?
He knew an ambitious man when he saw one, even if the nuances must wait.
I must learn Inglicks—no, that’s Eng-il-ish—faster.
He already understood it far better than he spoke, or than anyone suspected, but the “sh” sound was maddening.

The brief fight ended. Isketerol’s eyes widened. The Nubian had nothing worse than a nosebleed. Walker wasn’t bleeding, but he’d been helpless for a few seconds, and seconds was all it would have taken to kill. He stepped back as the young officer went by. There would be a time later to talk to this Walker. A dissatisfied man could be a useful man, to the Tartessian.

 

Marian Alston toweled herself down quickly and thoroughly, enjoying the sensation of the rough cloth against clean skin and exercise-warmed muscle. The captain’s quarters of the
Eagle
were spartan enough, but they did rate a private bathroom with a shower.

“That’s one problem solved . . . for now,” she said to her reflection in the mirror, feeling at her nose.

Swollen a little, but that would pass—and her nose was wide-arched and set close between high cheekbones, harder to injure than a long thin
buckra
beak. Lieutenant Walker was
good,
as well as more than a decade younger. She didn’t know why he’d taken up the Art seriously. Going beyond the rudimentary basics taught by the military ate a lot of an officer’s sparse spare time. But he had, and not wasted his lessons, either.

Alston herself had decided in her teens that men were bigger and heavier and usually stronger. If she was going to make her way in the world she had to have something in reserve to compensate for it, as much for the confidence-breeding knowledge at the back of her mind as for the extremely rare actual violence. The more so when she decided to enlist as her ticket out of the Carolina low country; she’d picked the Coast Guard at the time because she loved the sea and the Navy had still barred women from operational assignments. Well worth the effort and trouble in different dojos since, although it was easier to make the fourth dan above black belt for people like her with no social life to speak of. Even in the Guard, it still helped to know deep down that you could handle men
without
the protection of the uniform and the rules when push came to shove.

The only man who’d ever struck her and gotten away with it had been her husband, and that for the sake of the children in the brief while before the divorce. Everyone was entitled to at least one major misjudgment in her life, though.

So Walker got his little lesson
, she thought.
And I will watch him.
Probably he’d just wanted her to lose face, but that indicated some sort of long-term plan. And she
was
on her own now. No high command to back her up, unless you counted Cofflin on the island—and how could he have enforced orders, if whoever ran the
Eagle
simply decided to sail away? Walker had had fun in England—you could see the possibilities churning behind his glass-green eyes. Walker wanted power badly, and would use it badly—be—cause his only loyalty was to William Walker.

She dressed quickly in the little white-painted cabin, feeling loose and relaxed except for the slight throb of her nose, a spring in her step as she walked the dozen steps to the wardroom. One of the shoats had broken its fool neck yesterday, climbing out of its pen, and she thought that contributing ribs and crackling was the least it could do to make up for the clutter and stink its kind had made on
Eagle
’s decks. It had dressed out at about a quarter pound per head for the crew, counting chitterlings.

They sat; lunch started when the captain appeared. Walker was his smiling self, cheerful, polite . . .
and you’d better stay that way, buckra boy.
The professor and Rosenthal were at the table, along with the two locals, as guests of the ship, which made things a little crowded. A cadet came up to the table as she was shaking out her linen napkin, another of the ship’s old-fashioned touches.

“Good morning, Captain. The officer of the deck sends his regards and announces the approach of noon. Chronometers have been wound. Request permission to strike eight bells.”

“Make it so,” Alston said, with a mild enjoyment of the small ritual.

It was homelike; about as homelike as they could get, now. The whole daily routine was invaluable, from reveille through falling in for quarters after lunch to the clean sweepdown fore and aft. Ordinarily they’d have tested the ship’s alarms and whistles, too, but the electrical systems were powered down as far as was possible without actually endangering the ship.

“Excuse,” Isketerol said. He was handling knife and fork with some skill and confidence now. “Why is high sun . . . noon . . . why is noon big?” She looked at him. “Excuse, why im-por-tant.”

“Navigation,” she said, taking a mouthful of the pork and swallowing. The crackling was exactly right, and the meat was good too, although stronger-tasting and stringier than the pork she was used to. When Isketerol looked blank she went on: “Finding where the ship is.”

“Ahhh. How?”

Isketerol might be loathsome to modern sensibilities—she was never, ever going to find it in her heart to think well of a slave trader—but he was a seaman, in his way. She went on:

“First, the world is round—like a ball. You understand?”

Ian Arnstein looked as if he would like to make shushing noises. Both Isketerol and Swindapa looked at her with shocked surprise.

“Captain knows true?” Swindapa said.

Alston looked at her and smiled back, which was easy enough.
Can’t say it’s unpleasant to be hero-worshiped. Embarrassing, but not unpleasant. . . .

“It is true,” she assured her.

“No—I—” She looked frustrated, and then marshaled her thoughts. “People Swindapa . . . Swindapa’s people know round earth. Swindapa . . . did . . . not . . . know . . . Captain know.”

Alston felt her fork pause again. “You know the earth is round?” she said. Jaws had dropped up and down the wardroom table.

“Only . . .” She spoke a phrase in her own language. “Star-Moon-Sun Priests,” Isketerol translated automatically, through Arnstein. “The Grandmothers.”

“Grandmothers know. Watched stars, sun, moon, many many winter-summer. Make—” She pushed salt and pepper shakers into a circle and mimed squinting through them.

“By God,” Arnstein said. “I think she’s talking about Stonehenge!
”

A flurry of questions through the Tartessian settled that.

“Stonehenge,” Swindapa repeated, and added the name in her own tongue. “The Great Wisdom. Watch, measure. Long time know. Secret, for Star Priest, families.”