Island in the Sea of Time (28 page)

“Well I will be dipped in . . . ah, salt,” Alston said, with a rare laugh of delight. “Live and learn.” Swindapa beamed back at her. She turned to Isketerol:

“So you see, it
is
round,” she said.

Isketerol nodded. “Tartessian captains know. It is secret of . . . circle of captains?” he raised a brow at Arnstein.

“Guild,” the historian said.

“Guild of captains. Only we teach to sons.” He made a curving motion through the air. “If watch you the mast top of a ship, sail aways, hull go, low mast go, top mast go. Same on ship sails away from shore. Tall tree, mountain, tower. Bottom go, middle go, top go, can’t see them. How except—” He made the curving motion again, and shrugged. “Others may know, but don’t say. Low people . . . common people don’t know.”

The officers looked at each other. Arnstein nearly rubbed his hands together. “It makes sense, in a way,” he said to Alston. “Sailors and astronomers—”

“Astrologers,” Doreen said sharply, giving him a covert nudge with her elbow.

“Astrologers might well figure it out. They just wouldn’t
tell
anybody. The really new thing about the first Ionian Greek natural philosophers was that they
wanted
other people to know what they’d found out.”

“Which made it possible to build on previous discoveries,” Alston said thoughtfully.

“Sun?” Isketerol said hopefully.

“Oh. Well, if you measure the height of the sun at noon, you can tell exactly how far east or west you are,” she said.
I’ll leave the bit about chronometers for later.
“How do you tell on your voyages, Mr. Isketerol?”

The Tartessian’s grip on his fork was bending it, and his expression was like feeding time at the zoo, in the carnivore section. “Birds,” he said. “Wind, taste water, throw rope with wax and look at sand, mud, rock, shell—shells—from the bottom. Look at clouds, landmarks. Know in here.” He tapped his stomach.

In other words, by guess and by God,
Alston thought. No wonder crossing open seas was daring for these people. It wasn’t the size of their ships. The Tartessian merchantmen she’d seen drawn up on the beach back in Britain were big enough. Bigger than Columbus’s
Nina,
or some European vessels of the Age of Discovery that had sailed the Atlantic dozens of times, even if not as seaworthy. But they had no way of knowing where they
were,
unless they’d been that way before. In a way she was sorry for him. He stood at the beginnings of a nautical tradition, and he was meeting the end of it, the culmination of four thousand years of sailing-ship knowledge.

“Stars,” Swindapa said. “Dark sun-away . . . at night . . . Eagle People look stars. Why?”

 

“This would go faster if you could read,” Ian Arnstein said in frustration.

Isketerol shrugged. “That would take years,” he said. “How do I say that in English?”

“‘That would take years.’”

“That would take years.” In Greek: “It was hard enough learning our script, and I was a boy then. How the scribe beat me, and how I yelled! Most gentry don’t bother.”

The phrase still came out
Dut wuld tika ye-arrrs,
but the Tartessian was making very rapid progress. Even faster than Swindapa, who was across the other side of the cadet mess deck, drilling with Doreen; Isketerol seemed to make her a little uncomfortable. An ewe gave a soft
baaaaa
from a pen in the corner beyond.

“Why would it take years?” Arnstein asked curiously, falling back into Mycenaean.

Isketerol looked at him, arching black brows over russetcolored eyes. “Why, to learn all the signs, noble Arnstein, and the determinatives, and the . . . the context that lets you know what the sign means in any written word. Some of them have fifty or sixty alternate meanings, after all.”

“Ah!” Arnstein grinned. For someone who was so anxious to learn, Isketerol still gave off know-it-all vibrations; it would be interesting to see his reaction to this. Unpredictable, too; when he’d first realized what a clock did, he’d been so frightened that he’d stayed in his bunk for half a day before he came out.

“There are only twenty-six symbols in our script,” Arnstein said. “A man with your memory could learn them quickly.”

Isketerol frowned. “Twenty-six? How is that possible? The Achaean one has over ninety, not counting denotative signs, and each can mean several things.”

“Well—” A thought struck him. “Doreen, Swindapa, you should sit in on this.”

The two women came and joined them. When the explanations were complete, he resumed.

“Each symbol stands for one sound, and that sound is the first one of the name of the symbol.” He pulled a piece of paper toward himself and wrote down the letters of the alphabet.
Alpha, beta,
he remembered.
God, the snake’s really swallowing its own tail with a vengeance.

“So you take the symbols for, say, ‘dog.’ That’s d . . . o . . . g . . . Put them together.” He did. “Dog.”

Swindapa frowned, moving her lips; she’d had to get the explanation mostly through Isketerol, and her language seemed to lack some of the words involved. The Tartessian stared. His lips moved as well, and beads of sweat broke out on his brow.

“So . . . but there are still thousands of
words,
” he said. “This—” he pointed to the word DOG written in block capitals—“is as hard to remember as one of the Egyptian symbols. Harder, for they sometimes look like what they represent. And some of them are for sounds, too.”

“No, no, you don’t have to remember what the word looks like,” Ian said.
I’ll leave the horrors of English spelling for a little later.
“You just have to remember the
sounds
each of the twenty-six letters represents. They
all
represent single sounds—not things, and not groups of sounds, and it’s always the same sound. Then you put the sounds together to make words, and you can read a word from the sounds—you don’t have to have seen it before.”

As long as you were taught with phonics,
he added mentally.

He blocked out SWINDAPA and ISKETEROL, leaving spaces between the letters. “Here are your names. S . . . W . . . I . . . N . . . D . . . A . . . P . . . A, and I . . . S . . . K . . . E . . . T . . . E . . . R . . . O . . . L.”

“My name?” the girl said, awed. Her eyes went wide. “You take my name, on paper? Take my name away?”

“No.”
Oh, God, she’s probably afraid of magic.
He refrained from giving a reassuring pat; she didn’t like to be touched, he’d noticed. “No, just the
sound
of your name.”

And let’s hope you can tell the difference between the symbol and the referent. Whole schools of French so-called philosophy couldn’t in the twentieth century.
On the whole the Event had been a disaster, but at least he’d escaped the deconstructionists and semioticists.

Isketerol closed his eyes and bit a knuckle. “I . . . think I see,” he said, after concentrating for a minute. “So . . . so you could write
any
language with this script? And anyone could learn it quickly?”

Arnstein nodded happily. Isketerol slapped the back of his palm to his forehead twice, evidently his people’s gesture of amazement.

“Teach me this!” he cried. In English; he’d learned
those
words quite well.

 

Alston stopped. “Not quite right,” she said.

“Captain?” Doreen said.

“That stance,” she said.

Swindapa and her teacher came erect. The
Eagle
was sailing northeast now, slanting across a warm gentle breeze from the south at eight knots, her deck canted slightly and moving like a tired rocking horse across the long low swells. They were off what would never be the Carolina; the captain had been standing and staring eastward, musing; crewfolk were at make-and-mend, or lounging about on the forecastle deck; the waist was scattered with cadets studying. A few were scrubbing at the results of a visit by a huge flock of pigeonlike birds with pink breasts. There had been enough of them to blacken the rigging, and they’d been exhausted by the wind that blew them out; it had taken half a day to drive the last of them away. They made good eating.

“More like this,” Alston said, demonstrating. “Feet at right angles, back knee bent, and weight on the back leg. Leading hand out in a fist, other hand ready over your solar plexus. You should be able to lift the front foot without shiftin’ your point of balance. That’s better.” She shifted her attention to Swindapa. “You understand?”

“Speak pretty good, okay,” Swindapa said. “Too, am I writing, now. Engelits crazy language.” She paused. “Captain, Doreen, sound different speak why?”

She has a pretty good ear,
Doreen thought. Aloud: “We come from different places. Far apart.”

“Ah. I understand,” Swindapa replied, evidently familiar with regional dialects. She’d shifted the sound of what she said, too, closer to the broad soft vowels that Alston used:
ah unnahstaan.

The captain smiled. “Doreen speaks better English,” she said. “And you’re learning to write, as well?”

Swindapa pulled a scrap of paper out of her pocket and displayed it proudly. It held a shaky alphabet written in pencil. Her own name, Doreen’s, Amstein’s, Alston’s, the
Eagle
’s.

“Like birds,” she said.

“Birds?”

“Words fly like birds. Write, catch, put in basket. There you there when want them.”

Alston laughed, something unusual enough to make a few of the other Coast Guard personnel on deck glance over. “Keep it up—you’ll find it very useful,” she said, and nodded for them to continue.

“A-OK,” Swindapa said, taking up a perfect backstance. “You start, Doreen.”

Alston turned back. “I presume Mr. Isketerol is learning to read as well?”

Doreen paused and nodded. “Ian’s teaching him. And Lieutenant Walker.”

 

The
Eagle
’s brass bell struck three. Swindapa could tell the time to within half of one of the Eagle People hours, anytime she could see the stars or the sun, but she had to admit that it was convenient to have something tell you exactly. The nights were getting a little chillier as they coasted north, but were still spring-mild; the blue sweatsuit was more than warm enough—much warmer than she’d have been in the normal Earth Folk woman’s dress of string skirt and poncho, this time of year at home. She crouched under the bulwark and hugged her knees. Tonight would have been a bad night to sleep, she could tell that, so she’d come on deck instead. The Burning Snake would have taken her back to the time of the Iraiina, and broken her with fear in her sleep when she could not fight it. Awake, she could hum the Warding Song and keep the Snake at bay. Especially under the friendly stars, with Moon Woman casting her silvery light. She talked silently with Moon Woman and played the Constellation Game for a while, tying every visible star into more and more intricate patterns, but the way the sails swayed across the sky distracted her. There weren’t many of the crew on deck. The weather was mild, and they could be summoned quickly at need.

Instead she began by naming all the ropes and sails on the ship, stumbling a little over the more difficult ones like
main topgallant staysail downhaul.
Then she began counting over the list of stars; it would take a while, since there were over three thousand, and the names changed eight times a year according to the season. It had taken her to her twelfth summer to learn them; she’d never been more than an indifferent student.

Swallowflitting, dragonfly-in-amber, moonblood dewdrop
,
angry fly . . .

After a while that reminded her too much of home. She ran through a Building Wisdom instead; safely abstract, since nobody had actually done a Great Star-Moon-Sun Wisdom in so long. Her grandmother’s voice sounded in her ear:
Take a circle of forty Building Rods where you will erect your stones. Align the circle and draw with your cord the southern half. How do you flatten the northern half to keep the curve smooth and avoid splitting the length of the outside of your Work into parts-of-a-whole-length?

She shut her eyes and squeezed out distractions. The problem was to make the length of the outside of the circle come to
exactly
three of the cross-length, instead of the three-and-a-bit of a natural circle. Well, take your cord, knotted to the right length, then stretch it in a line. . . .

She smiled.
Yes, that’s it
. The forms lay perfect in her mind. Swindapa began to put the numbers into the figures, holding her fingers out before her and tapping them together in the patterns of the Counting Chant.
Forty
laid out
circle means
twenty—

Voices sounded on the quarterdeck above her, startling her out of the calculations. She huddled deeper into the shadow where the bulwarks met the rise to the quarterdeck, not wanting to be seen. Only her hair would give her away, so she pulled up the hood of the sweatsuit jacket.

It was the captain. She looked almost invisible, dressed not in her usual garb but in a long black jacket of loose cloth tied with a broad black cloth belt, and baggy trousers that ended just below the knee. She carried something long and curved in her hands; she placed it on the deck, knelt, and bowed her head to the boards.

Should I go?
Swindapa thought. These might be private devotions.

Then the captain took up the curved thing, and Swindapa saw that it was a sheathed sword. Her eyes widened, recognizing it from the night of the Iraiina feast, when her captivity ended. Swords were rare even among the Sun People, very rare among hers, and always two-edged. This had a curve like the crescent moon, and it was silvery as it was half-drawn—

A sword from Moon Woman!
she thought suddenly, excitement choking her. Moon Woman had sent the captain to rescue her. A silver sword against dark skin, dark like the night sky. She focused to quivering attention.
The Eagle People guide themselves by the stars.
Not in exactly the way the Earth Folk did. Perhaps a better way?