Island in the Sea of Time (33 page)

At last they halted. The young man laid his burden down beneath his feet and faced the rising sun, singing in a strong clear voice with both palms raised. Gradually the arms lowered, but the song went on. It was still ringing out when Daurthunnicar’s sword blurred in a horizontal circle.

Very sharp sword,
Swindapa thought. Cutting through a neck like that was
hard
, even for a man of Daurthunnicar’s huge strength. She gritted her teeth and wished it were the chieftain’s head falling.

The images showed men laying the body of the horse in the grave. Dirt went over it, then the body of the mansacrifice, with the horse’s head in place of its own. Lights came up, and Swindapa breathed out a long sigh of wonder.

The captain gently disengaged her hand, putting Swindapa’s firmly back on her own side of the gap between the chairs. She rose and went to the front of the room, with the Spear Chosen of the Eagle People beside her; he was very tall, with thinning blond hair cut short like a mourner’s. They began to speak; Swindapa strained to hear the language. She could follow it pretty well now, and make herself understood on all ordinary matters.

Strange people, the Americans, the Eagle People. Strange but wonderful.

 

Pamela Lisketter spat to clear her mouth, then rinsed it with water from the bucket by the sink. The image of the horse, falling, falling, blood spurting over the man with the sword, and then the sword flashing again and interrupting the song . . . her stomach nearly rose again, but she pushed the scene away until it was distant—words, images on TV, not so
real.

She walked back out into her living room. The house was mostly that single long space, furnished with futons and her own creations, smelling faintly of incense . . . and now of whale oil. The loom stood by one wall, the windows next to it flooding it with light. Her friends were scattered about. She’d been planning to have a few over for dinner, and ready to sacrifice the last of the tofu, until the revelations tonight. They’d hit some of the others even harder; Cindy Ganger was still sitting silent, with her face crumpled in behind her thick glasses, but then, she was a Wiccan and really believed that her religion went back to ancient times. The only ones who looked at all collected were the Coast Guardsman, Walker, and his friend from Europe, Isketerol. They were sitting with Alice and Rosita. Lisketter frowned a little. The two young women were dilettantes, in her opinion; Hong dabbled in pagan circles for the sexual aspects. Also feckless, as witness who they’d taken up with—but that could be useful now.

“Shocking,” she said at last. “Obviously sexist, patriarchal in the worst way, abusive of animals. And we did business with them.”

“The Iraiina are savages,” Isketerol agreed.

Lisketter felt her lips thin, then forced herself to remember that the . . .
indigenous person
, she decided . . . had learned his English in the wrong place, among people no better than police. “Savages” was a Eurocentric term.
Or Nantucket-centric, I suppose,
she thought with an attempt at gallows humor.

“They are the ancestors of the technolators,” her brother David said. “Remember, oh, what was the book,
The Chalice and the Blade
?”

“Yeah, they’re pretty hard-assed, the Iraiina,” Walker nodded, sipping at his bottle of homemade beer. He looked down at it and grimaced slightly, then continued: “We shouldn’t be selling them weapons.”

“I should hope
not,
” Lisketter said. “Or anyone else, for that matter.” Thoughtfully: “Perhaps we should talk to Ms. Swindapa about
her
people. They seem more . . . more harmonic. If we could get her away from Captain Alston.”

“You couldn’t separate those two with a crowbar,” Walker said. At her raised eyebrows: “You do know the captain’s a dyke, don’t you?”

“That is a homophobic term in this context,” Lisketter said stiffly, flushing with anger.

Walker smiled charmingly. “Sorry. Force of habit. I haven’t been around the right sort of people much, I’m afraid.”

“That’s all right,” Lisketter said, brushing a lock of her long straight hair back. “She does seem male-identified, obsessed with patriarchal rules, and logocentric.”

“Damned right,” Walker said. “Saluting, heel-clicking . . . did you know she had a crewm . . . crewperson dragged behind the ship on a rope? He nearly died.”

There was a shocked murmur in the big brick-floored room. Lisketter tried to remember what she’d heard of the incident, but it
did
seem the sort of thing a power-oriented person would do.

“I’m certainly not going to spend the rest of my life working for her,” Walker said. “It was bad enough, a temporary assignment—but here and now, she’s set to run the
Eagle
and everything else that floats for life. An empirebuilder.”

“The imperialism has already begun,” David said. “All those Native Americans dead of our diseases, and Chief Cofflin has a settlement over on the mainland already, stripping the forests of trees and butchering the animals.”

Pamela nodded somberly. It had begun, and if they didn’t do something it would be
worse
than the Conquest of Paradise that her ancestors had wrought.

“We have to do something,” she said.

“Well, yeah,” Walker said smoothly. He and the Iberian exchanged glances. “We’re ready to help, of course. Alice and Rosita have opened our eyes.”

 

“It is . . . what is your word, reassuring,” Isketerol said to William Walker.

They had halted their bicycles under a stand of pines, with a few last daffodils still nodding yellow beneath. No one was near; the road was empty, and only heath and fields stretched away on either side, potato vines already bushy and rows of grain just showing like a faint green fuzz on the gray-brown soil. The loudest noise was the sough of the wind in the trees, the buzz of insects. Hot resin scented the air, baked out of the trunks behind them. The noon sun was warm, full of the sound of bees and sleepiness.

“Reassuring?” Walker said.

“That you Amurrukan can also produce your share of fools,” Isketerol said. “That is what they are, isn’t it, Lisketter and the others? I didn’t understand much of what they said, but I haven’t been a trader for this long without recognizing an . . . easy mark, you say.”

Walker laughed, a loud rich sound. “Oh, they’re fools, all right,” he said. “But for you and me, they’re
useful
fools. Useful idiots.”

“We should cultivate them, then,” Isketerol said.

“Like a garden ripe for the harvest,” Walker replied, slapping him on the shoulder. They both laughed as they pedaled on, back toward the town.

 

“The woman become one the man’s thing only? Like among the Sun People?” Swindapa whispered.

Marian Alston moved aside a little as the breath tickled at her ear.

“No,” she whispered back. There was still a hum of conversation in the big church, as they waited for the bride to appear at the foot of the aisle. “They can leave each other if they please. I did.”

“You had a man of your own?” Swindapa asked eagerly. She knew that questions were impolite, but she’d been trying to learn Alston’s background.

“Such as he was. A mistake.”

“So this is like the . . . the, you say, party, as have we, when a woman’s man goes to live with her kin?”

“Yes . . . more or less. The ceremony calls the blessings of God, and settles things like who inherits property and children.”

“Oh,” the Fiernan girl said, frowning a little in puzzlement.

Evidently her people didn’t have anything closely resembling marriage. A man went to the woman’s family grouping, and the relationship could be broken by mutual consent at any time. What Alston thought of as the father’s role in a child’s life fell more to the mother’s brothers or other male kin, since they’d always be there. Property passed through the female line. Not exactly a matriarchy, though; nothing she could easily understand. She pushed the thought aside, concentrating on the ceremony.

The church on the hill was crowded, every seat full; the chiefs marriage to the head of the Athenaeum was an event.
Royal wedding,
Alston thought wryly. She’d gotten a pew for herself and the
Eagle’s
wardroom, plus Swindapa . . .
who is a very nice girl, but clings like a burr
. Not intrusively, just refusing to go away for long; it was like trying to push the wind. Isketerol was there too, observing with his usual cool detachment.

All were in their best; she sat stiffly in her dress uniform, thinking wryly of the last time she’d worn it at Daurthunnicar’s feast. Although this time it was
with
the regulation skirt. Swindapa couldn’t have looked more different, in a white dress with lace panels, a broad-brimmed hat beside her on the pew, her hair fastened up with pearl-headed pins.
Certainly an improvement on a collar and leash.
Fancy clothes were going cheap on-island these days; overalls were harder to get. Still, it looked wonderful.

The organ started, thundering in the high vaulted white spaces of the church. She’d attended Baptist churches in her childhood, of course—mostly built out of weathered pine, down sandy tracks and surrounded by rattletrap cars. Not much like this Congregational one, three-storied snowy spire and stately white walls on what passed for a hill on this sandspit island.
We had better singing, though
. Everyone stood. The sound was like a subdued slither under the trembling of the instrument, a rustle of cloth as people looked back toward the entrance.

Martha Stoddard stood there. She held a bouquet of flowers; otherwise she wore only another of her subdued but elegant gray suits.

“Silly to pretend I’m a girl,” she’d said. Alston’s lips quirked slightly.
No side on that woman. Good-looking, too
. In a spare sort of way; excellent bones, and those eyes would be full of mind and will when she was ninety.
Now why don’t I ever meet anyone like that?
That wasn’t quite the problem, of course, but . . .

Cofflin was waiting at the head of the aisle, sweating under the collar of his formal suit, looking pale. Looking rather like a bull waiting for the second blow from the slaughterhouse sledgehammer, in fact, or a man wondering desperately if he’d done the right thing.

The minister stood at the altar as the bride and her party walked down the isle. “Dearly beloved,” she began.

 

“Well, there’s one superstition disposed of,” Alston said.

“Hmmm?” Cofflin asked.

He’d recovered most of his color by the time the outdoor reception began to wind down, and he was wandering about with his wife, talking to people and nibbling at the cake on his plate. Irreplaceable nuts and sugar and candied fruit had gone into the wedding cake, as well as flour made from grain the
Eagle
had brought back from Britain.

Alston looked over at him, and when she glanced back the remains of the piece on her own plate were gone. Swindapa was licking her fingers, grinning unrepentantly.
Sometimes you can remember that she’s still a teenager.
Just turned eighteen, to be precise.

“What superstition?” Cofflin asked.

“About catching the bouquet,” the captain said. It had been pure accident; the thing came flying at her face and she grabbed by instinct.

“It might come true,” Martha observed.

“When pigs fly,” Alston said.

“Congratulations again,” a voice said; Ian Arnstein, with Doreen. They were holding hands.

Damned mating frenzy,
Alston thought, smiling slightly.
Maybe there’s something in the air here in 1250 B.C
. Or maybe it was just that people felt the loneliness pressing in on them and sought comfort where they could find it.

The ex-professor went on: “Have you mentioned what we discussed to the chief yet?”

“I didn’t want to impose,” Alston said dryly. “It is his wedding day, you know.”

“Oh . . . sorry . . . bit of an obsessive-compulsive . . .” Arnstein floundered in embarrassment. “Always was socially challenged . . .”

“What
did
you discuss?” Martha Cofflin asked sharply.

“Well, the captain and I had this appalling thought.”

Best get it over with,
Alston decided. “We were talking about Isketerol’s ships, and I mentioned that they could sail the same course to the Americas that we did, if Isketerol was keepin’ his eyes open. Which he was.”

Cofflin seemed to choke on a piece of the cake. “They
could
?” he wheezed, looking around.

“Easy. It’s followin’ winds most of the year, on the southern course. Ships no bigger did it routinely back in the early days after Columbus. Damnation, people have taken
rowboats
across the Atlantic. It’s all a matter of knowing what’s where, and how far, and the wind and current patterns. I may have made a mistake persuading him to come here, but he’s so damned
useful
.”

“Tartessians are sneaky,” Swindapa said. “And greedy. They don’t liked we trade our own bronzework to anyone. At sea they sink boats coming from, ah, you call it Ireland? Yes, the Summer Isle, we say. And amber traders from the mainland they sink, toos.” Her features thinned to rage for a moment: “Theys help the Sun People invade our land.”

Doreen nodded. “They want a monopoly,” she said. “Tin’s scarce here. Britain and northwestern Spain are the only sources these people know west of Bohemia and the Caucasus.”

“The Tartessians are sort of upstarts, who’ve been getting quasi-civilized over the past century or so,” Arnstein added. “They’ve copied the eastern civilizations somewhat, adapting them to their own patterns—rather like the Japanese with us. They’re not as set in their ways as most people here-and-now.”

Cofflin brushed a few crumbs off his jacket. “Well, so the locals could sail here. That’s a bit startling, but why’s it appalling?”