Island in the Sea of Time (30 page)

“A name for every street, and a number on every house,” he muttered to himself.

Oh, he could see how useful that would be, but it was a bit daunting. What was really useful was the counting system. It had taken him two days of questioning—driving Arnstein and his woman almost insane—before it sank in that there was some use in a symbol for
nothing.
Humiliating, that the Earth Folk slave girl had grasped it earlier. He scowled slightly. It would be more convenient if the bitch weren’t along, or if she’d been too stupid to learn a new language. Scant hope of that; the Star Priest families bred for wit.

He mustered his courage and walked through the door; there was a short corridor, two more doors with the symbols for the wonderful better-than-Cretan interior latrines the Amurrukan had (but why separate ones for men and women?), and a half-door to the left where the taproom was.

Even before William Walker waved him over to a table it was reassuring. After so much that was alien, things so strange that he had to force his eyes to
see
them, this was only middling unsettling. The lights on the walls came from lamps of wonderful design, glass and bronze, but they burned with honest flame—he recognized the smell of whale oil. So did the candles in more glass holders on the tables. There was a fire of wood in a tiny alcove set into the wall, with an opening above to take away the smoke through a brick tunnel—now,
that
he could use at once, back home. Wooden tables with benches and chairs, floor of smooth lime mortar, brick walls—different in detail but not in essence from things he’d seen before. The smells were familiar too, fire, cooking fish and meat, wine, beer, a little sweat . . . and the strange cleaning fat they called soap.

He slid onto the bench across from Walker. The Amurrukan had his arm around the shoulders of a girl, wonderfully and scandalously dressed in nothing but a halter for her breasts and short breeks tight enough to show the shape of her mound. Her jewelry was strange, but would have bought a good-sized farm in Tartessos, although her hands were work-roughened. She had long black hair, skin the color of old ivory, a tiny nose, and eyes that seemed to tilt up at the corners, lovely in an exotic way. The one on his bench was even prettier, nicely plump, dark-haired and colored like an Egyptian herself. Need stirred. It had been a long time since they left the White Isle, and the Amurrukan had not allowed him to bring a servant.

Careful, careful,
he told himself. The easiest way to get yourself into killing trouble in a strange land was over women, if you didn’t know the customs. It wasn’t enough to know formal laws, you had to understand the ways those were bent or changed by unspoken taboo. These probably weren’t harlots and certainly weren’t slaves; the Amurrukan had none, none at all. He decided to think of them as young priestesses of the Grain Goddess, to be courted.

“Greetings, friend,” Walker said in mangled Tartessian. Then in English: “Alice, Rosita, here’s my friend Isketerol who I told you about—a prince of Tartessos, which is a kingdom in Iberia. Isketerol, Rosita Menendez, and Alice Hong.
Dr.
Alice Hong.”

Isketerol bowed slightly, hand to chest, and flashed his best smile. The women smiled back. He wasn’t exactly a prince, if he understood the word rightly, although his family were relatives of the king. There certainly wasn’t any need to tell the women the details, though.

“All Tartessos has nothing more beautiful,” he said carefully in his best English.

 

Jared Cofflin smiled as the last of the deck cargo trotted down to Steamboat Wharf. Those waiting with handcarts and a few improvised horse-drawn vehicles managed to raise a cheer as well, although this load was not grain but several dozen loudly argumentative pigs, the last left on the ship.

“I’m surprised they can stand to make any noise, after the homecoming celebration,” Captain Alston said. “A few of my cadets and crew still can’t, and the aspirin are rationed.”

She looked around the dockside. Cofflin tried to see it as she would. Not much had changed in the time away . . .
only six weeks, Christ.
The main difference was the absence of motor vehicles. The sailing boats which had ridden at mooring poles in the enclosed basin to her left were mostly out fishing; so were the trawlers and the converted scallop boats. Work went on to turn the cabin cruisers and other motor craft to something useful. Two steam tugs waited over in the Easy Street marina basin, next to an improvised barge they’d towed over from the mainland. Perhaps the smell was the biggest difference, and that had crept up on him so gradually that he hardly noticed anymore. They did their best to scrape up every fragment from the fish landed here, if only because it was needed for the fields everyone else had been laboring to clear. Still, there were scales, and a definite smell.

“The town needed a rest,” he said. “And what you brought back, that’s going to make a big difference.”

“A third of a pound of bread per person per day for a year,” she said, and looked around. “Y’all have been busy.”

The pigs were being herded into the carts, with barriers of wire netting set up to give them only one route. Enraged squeals sounded, the whack of poles on bristly hides, and the shout of someone whose hand was saved only by the thick glove he left in a pig’s mouth.

“If y‘all only knew how glad I am to see the last of those things,” she muttered; he presumed the remark was directed at the world in general. “I hope we can feed them. Seventy-five sows made it, say three batches of eight piglets per year each, and they start breedin’ within a year themselves—”

“We’ll manage. Feed ’em alewives, if nothing else,” he said. They weren’t particularly good eating fish, but they were certainly abundant—no wonder the Pilgrims had used them as fertilizer. “Good thing Steamboat Wharf is deep enough for you to dock,” he said.

“It’s a menace,” she replied absently. “The land around the harbor here isn’t really enough to break a first-class storm. We could lose the ship, if she was caught here in a bad norther, and we don’t have much warning without a weather service. I’m inclined to park her over on the mainland in the winter. Providence harbor ought to do—it’s deep and sheltered up there at the end of Narrangansett Bay. Inconvenient as hell, though.”

“Well, we’ve got a sort of base there,” Cofflin said. “The ferry’s there now, for one last trip before we lay her up. We’re bringing back timber—you wouldn’t
believe
the quality of the lumber we’ve been getting. Seems a pity to use so much of it for firewood. We figured it was worth the fuel, and now we’ve got the tugs on the same run, and some sailboats. They’re bringing salt-marsh hay, too, for the livestock.”

“You won’t regret it come winter,” Alston said. Her voice took on a more serious tone: “Look, Chief, that grain will help, but we’ll need more.”

He nodded. “Farming here never was more than a scramble, and a chancy one at that.”

“Damn right,” Alston said. “My family were farmers down South; it’s a nice hobby and a hell of a way to make a living. I’ve got some ideas about how we should trade this fall.”

“Not with the same crowd?” Cofflin said, one brow arching.

“Not if we can avoid it. I’m not what you’d call squeamish, but . . .” She shrugged. “Besides, they don’t control a big territory as yet, and they’re making war. Not the situation to produce good crops.”

“Are there any others likely to do better?” he said.

She frowned and clasped her hands behind her back. “I think there may. We could just pick another spot, somewhere else in Europe or even the Mediterranean, but . . . I told you about Ms. Swindapa?”

“Seems to be a nice girl,” Cofflin said cautiously. “Doc Coleman is taking a look at her, as you asked.”

“Speak of the devil.”

The doctor appeared, wobbling in on a bicycle. He coasted to a halt beside them and dismounted. “Whooo,” he panted. “I’ve known for years that I should get more exercise.” Then he looked up at Alston. “Well, I confirmed what your ship’s surgeon said. She’s in remarkably good condition, for someone who was beaten to within an inch of her life and gang-raped to the point of internal lesions. Anal and vaginal.”

Cofflin sucked in his breath. The radiophone report had said “badly abused”; he’d assumed something like this, but . . .

“I think they make them tough in the here-and-now,” Alston said thoughtfully. Only someone who knew her rather well could have interpreted the slight tightening of the skin around her mouth. “The ones that live, anyway.”

“And the pelvic inflammation’s cleared right up,” Coleman went on. “Nice to see a bug that doesn’t sneer at sulfonamides. There’s probably fallopian scarring, I’m afraid. I’ve given her and that Isketerol fellow every vaccine and shot in the armory, just in case, too. Apart from that she’s in fine condition. Full set of teeth, not one cavity, twenty-twenty vision . . .”

“Right,” Alston nodded.
God, she’s a cool one,
Cofflin thought. He was angry, himself; policeman’s reflex, if you were a good one.

“Ms. Swindapa is connected with a prominent family in the . . . I don’t think it’s a kingdom or a country, exactly, but it occupies most of southwestern England in this era,” Alston said. “I hope to learn more when she speaks better English, and she’s learning remarkably fast.”

“Can’t Dr. Arnstein translate?”

“Only through Isketerol, and I’d rather not.”

Cofflin’s eyes narrowed. “You’re thinking alliance,” he said.

“I’m thinking we should consider it,” she said, and held up a pink-palmed hand. “No, I’m not dreaming
conquistador
dreams. We’ve only got a couple of dozen real firearms left, with pitiful stores of ammunition. But we could make a difference helping one side or the other . . . and Ms. Swindapa’s people are being attacked without provocation. They also have plenty of what we need: foodstuffs, livestock, linen, wool, and eventually metals. Copper and tin already, and we could show them how to mine and smelt iron. A few simple innovations . . .”

Cofflin whistled silently. “That’s something the whole Council will have to talk about, and the Town Meeting too,” he said. “You certainly don’t think small or dawdle, Captain.”

Alston shrugged again. “The iron’s hot. But yes, this is all tentative now. We’ve got photographs and video footage you should see, too.”

He nodded. “Let’s take this further. We have your baggage moved into the quarters we found for you—we can go there and talk in privacy.”

They turned and walked south along Easy Street, then west along the ankle-turning cobblestones of Main. The shops were mostly shuttered and locked, but there were ladders against many of the cast-iron lampposts, and the glass frames had been taken off their tops.

“Putting in whale-oil lanterns,” Cofflin said, to Alston’s look of inquiry. “The field clearing and planting’s done, most of it; Angelica can get the grainfields sown in a day or two with her machinery—they’re ready and waiting. We’ve got a little leisure for other things.”

“Too much,” Coleman said grimly. “How many suicides did you have, Captain?”

“One . . . wait a minute.”

Coleman smiled bleakly as he saw the woman blink at the implications. “We’ve had over a hundred and fifty,” he said. “In a population of less than eight thousand, that’s . . . quite a few. Plus a rash of depression. The work was good for that. The suicides have tailed off, thank God, but there’s still a few every week. I’m afraid of what might happen if everyone has much time to think.”

Cofflin sighed. “It just seems to
hit
people, particularly when they have a chance to sit down and think,” he said. “Did me, for a while.”

A whole day when he could not summon the energy to get out of bed or answer the insistent voices, and nothing seemed real. The memory still haunted him, worse than things he’d seen in his naval service, and not just because it was more recent. This had been a failure within himself, a failure of his
will
. A failure of the thing that kept him going, and if your will could fail you, what could stand?

“I noticed something similar on the
Eagle,
but we were extremely busy . . . and a ship’s company is a self-contained group anyway,” she said. “Hmm. I’d give odds that most of the suicides were adults, and not many of them were Council members.”

Coleman looked at her in surprise. “Average age thirty-eight, and no, only one of the selectmen killed himself,” he said.

“It makes sense,” Alston said. “Upward mobility’s great for your self-confidence.”

“None of us
wanted
this catastrophe!” Cofflin said.

“Didn’t say that; I’d rather it hadn’t happened too. But you, me, the others who’ve . . . taken charge, for us the catastrophe has meant scope for our talents.”

“
Everyone’s
been stretched to the limit.”

“Planting potatoes, fishing; hard labor, for people who aren’t used to it, mostly. The whole world lost, even the little things—morning TV, hot water from a tap, hamburgers. We, though, we’ve been suddenly promoted from lower middle management to president-Cabinet—Joint Chiefs level. Everyone’s life depends on us, and that’s a burden to crack your back, but you
can’t
put it down.”

Cofflin’s anger faded. “You may be right,” he admitted. “That’s what pulled me out of it, I think—knowing that too many people were depending on me.”

“I definitely think you’re right,” Coleman said. “But how should we apply the knowledge?”

“Keep people busy. The Lord knows there’s enough to do,” Alston said. “Beyond that, I’d try to get them involved in the planning more.”

Coleman laughed aloud. “Funny you should say that. People seem to be planning for the future already, in their way. With all those suicides it took a while to notice, but the number of pregnancies is up too, about three times what it should be.”

“More mouths,” Cofflin grumbled.

“More hands, eventually,” the doctor replied. To Alston: “And along the lines you suggested, the Chiefs been pushing this Project Night thing . . .”