Island in the Sea of Time (34 page)

“Because piracy’s hot, here,” Alston said. “Down in the Mediterranean, from what Isketerol’s let drop, anyone will attack anyone, if they think they can get away with it—ships, and ’longshore raids, that’s where pirates make most of their loot anyway. And this island is the richest prize on earth. We underestimated the value of our goods. Badly. One small shipload would make a successful pirate the richest man in the world.”

“Oh.” Cofflin thought. “They couldn’t do much against guns, could they?”

“Not the first time. After that we’d be out of ammunition. What’s more, we’re so short now that we can’t even train people to use the few guns we do have. I saw the locals in operation in Britain. These people—peoples—are warriors; they don’t scare easy.”

“You’re right,” Cofflin said, wincing. “Those Indians we met the first day, a couple of them kept right on coming. Guess they realized all a gun can do is kill you, and they just weren’t that scared of dying.”

“We’d better start training a militia to use weapons we
can
manufacture,” Alston said.

“We’ll have gunpowder eventually,” Martha observed.

“That’s then, this is now. Even when we do, the locals are going to pick up tricks fast. Possibly not democracy or women’s rights, but weapons? You bet. And we
can’t
stay out of contact with the locals, not if we want to do more than decay into a bunch of illiterate potato farmers in a couple of generations. This island’s too barren.” She paused, frowning. “It might be better if Mr. Isketerol stayed here, rather than returning to Tartessos. . . .”

“Thank you for that delightful end to the day,” Cofflin said, turning on Arnstein. “Sorry, Professor, but I was just beginning to think we could relax a little.”

 

“No, no, no, man, it ain’t a sick cat, you can’t tell its temperature by running a thermometer up its ass. You’ve got to, like, look at the color. Really look.”

Marian Alston stopped a moment at the anguished cry, watching the group around the forge.
Always a pleasure to watch someone who really knows what he’s doing,
she thought.

The blacksmith was a tall man, lean but with ropy muscle all along his bare sweat-slick arms and running under the thick canvas apron he was wearing. He was mostly bald on top, but a long ponytail of brown-streaked gray hair fell down his back, and a walrus mustache of the same color hung under sad sherry-colored eyes, like those of a basset hound hoping for a pat and expecting a kick. He held a rod of metal in a pair of pincers, turning it to show how it went from black to cherry-red to a fierce white at the tip.

“That’s welding color, the white. Okay, get me the other piece.”

More clumsily, the apprentice—an ex-office worker in a veterinary clinic—took up his own pincers in his gloved hands and wrestled another piece of steel out of the charcoal.

“Now down on the anvil,” the smith said. “Okay, this stuff is mild steel. It won’t weld as easy as wrought iron, so you have to dust it with a little flux—
”
he added a sprinkling of powder to where the two strips of metal overlapped each other—“and shed some righteous sweat. Here goes.”

The big shed was noisy with a dozen metalworking benches, but the steady
clang . . . clang . . . clang
of the smith’s hammer was the loudest. The metal flowed under it, merging. “Here’s where we reheat and hammer some more,” the smith said happily, putting the joined pieces of strapping back in the coals. “Meantime, drink some water. Important to drink water, man, keep your natural fluids in balance.”

He dipped a cup into a bucket hanging on the wall, drank, then poured another over his head, holding his wirerimmed glasses with their tiny round lenses out as he did so.

“Hey, Captain! What’s happening?” he said cheerfully, peering at her.

Well, at least it isn’t “How’re they hanging,”
Alston thought resignedly. John Martins had been up in the hills of northern California since 1970, and stayed when the commune dissolved around him. A quarter century of lonely effort lay behind the skills he was trying to impart to a dozen apprentices.

“I warned you,” the smith said. “I can’t make anything like that Nip beauty y’showed me. No way, man. That’s some excellent smith’s work in that sword, truly righteous.
”

“Those take too long to make,” she said, inhaling the scent of hot charcoal and scorched metal. It wasn’t unpleasant, in its way, although the heat in here was fierce. “If it’ll work, I’m satisfied.”

He went over to the wall and took down a sword. She drew it from the plain leather-bound wooden sheath, raised it in both hands and tried a simple downward cut in slow-time, the pear-splitter. It followed the shape of her
katana
exactly, and the weight and balance were much the same. Not quite the living feel hers had, but much better than the cheap copies you got in most martial arts stores. The hilt was bound with cord, and the guard was a plain brass disk.

“I welded a sandwich of mild steel around a strip of 5160 for the cutting edge—y’know, the
moroha
way. Lotta fun, rilly.”

This
moroha
blade wasn’t quite the marvel that you got from the
ori awasi san mai
or
shihozume
methods, but it didn’t take a year to produce, either. Alston turned the blade cutting-edge-up, admiring the wavy
yakiba
line in the steel that marked the hardened edge; she smiled, imagining Swindapa’s face lighting up when she saw the sword. The Fiernan girl was a natural, too; teaching her was a real pleasure. So you couldn’t really say it was favoritism to let her have this. . . .

Ron Leaton came up wiping his hands on an oily rag. “Our anachronism doing right by you, Captain Alston?”

“Peace. I love you too, man.” the smith said, and turned back to his work.

“I have a horrible feeling he’s the wave of the future and the machinery is an anachronism,” Alston said, snapping the sword back into the sheath.

“Well, we’re fitting out a whole building just for him and his apprentices,” Leaton said; she suspected it would be a relief to both of them to part company. “Meanwhile, things are going pretty well. I found another three Bridgeport milling machines, eight engine lathes larger than twelve-inch, three larger than fourteen-inch, and one eighteen-inch—that was a pile of rusting parts down at the Electric Company, but it’s restorable. What we’re really short of is tool steel for drills and working edges, and stuff like Teflon lagging tape, hacksaw blades, files, sandpaper . . . we’ve swept every basement on the island and it still isn’t enough.”

She looked around. The boat-storage-cum-engineering-shop had changed, beyond the appearance of the big charcoal hearth and its surroundings in one corner. Dozens of people were laboring with hand tools at workbenches scattered through the cavernous interior; many of them were assembling crossbows from parts turned out on the lathes and cutters. The five machine tools they’d moved here from Seahaven Engineering’s original basement setting and the ones Leaton had scavenged out of attics and forgotten storerooms were all set up, and they’d . . .
spawned
was the best word, she decided. There were another four lathes, and heavy six-foot-by-three platforms were being built to house more. Metal shapes and curves lay scattered about, with men and women working on them, assembling a gearcutter. The new lathes had been converted to work from leather belts taking off a power shaft rigged near the ceiling, and she could hear the chuffing of one of Leaton’s prize steam engines. A big flywheel was going up against one wall, and beside it a bulky clumsy thing like a miniature stripped-down locomotive, the old choo-choo kind.

“Where did you find
that?
” she asked.

“Oh, Martha and Jared dug it up. Steam traction engine. Someone imported it years ago for the tourists, then stuck it in a storage shed and forgot it. Nearly got it working again; it eats wood, and by God we’ve
got
wood. We’re going to hook it up to a generator, for times when the wind’s down, and then we’re going to duplicate it, maybe modify it a little. I’m doing some plans for a steam road hauler, too.”

She nodded.
That
will
be useful
, she thought, and continued aloud: “How’s that project I started you on going?”

“Better than we expected,” Leaton said. “No shortage of sheet metal and bar.”

He sighed, halfway between pleased and sad, and she knew why. The Steamship Authority’s big motor ferry had been laid up for good. Useless, with no fuel oil available, and the thousands of tons of steel in the hull would last the islanders for many years. For that matter, the
Eagle
had nearly four hundred tons of pig-iron ballast in her, now being laboriously brought out and replaced with granite from the mainland. Then there was the fuel barge, another fifteen hundred tons of metal, and the old lightship, as much again, and structures like the oil storage tanks.

“The first set’s ready, the first we’re really satisfied with. Over here. Made to your measurements, by the way, Captain.”

It rested on a workbench. The first part was a jacket of tough quilted canvas. The elbow-length sleeves were chain mail, rustling and clinking as she touched them; so was the collar, and a patch below the waistline at front and rear. Two workers nearby were winding sanded coathanger wire around wooden rods and cutting off links for more.

“Might as well try it on,” she said. It pulled over her head.
Not too bad
. Not comfortable, of course, but you couldn’t expect that.

“Not bad,” she went on, “but you ought to make the mail inserts removable—lacing, or somethin’ like that, so the padding can be cleaned without getting the metal wet.”

The breastplate was a smooth shallow curve, basically Japanese in design like the rest of the armor but somewhat simplifed; the backplate hinged to it at the shoulder, and clasps fastened at the flanks. She’d drawn the plans from what she was familiar with, and what Martha could find in her references, modified to make it possible for one person to put on by herself. She lifted the set, ducked her head through and pressed it closed, then fastened the brass clips under her left arm and pulled the loose mail collar out to rest on the surface of the armor. The metal extended to waist level, and hinged to it were jointed skirts of sliding curved plates to protect the thighs. Fitted armguards for the forearms went on next, and greaves for the shins.

She
hadn’t
told the metalworkers to enamel everything green with yellow trim, and put a golden eagle copied from her ship’s figurehead across the chest. “Bit bold, isn’t it?” she said, jerking her chin toward a mirror that leaned against the wall.

I feel like an actor in a pageant.
Against people armed with flint-tipped arrows and bronze spearheads, though, this was high-tech weaponry.

“We had the paint on hand, and it wasn’t any great effort to bake on the enamel,” Leaton said virtuously. “And it’ll keep it from rusting, too.”

Alston grunted noncommittally. She bent, twisted, squatted, rose, did a few long low stances to test the equipment. Heavy, of course, but she’d carried far more weight less well distributed on camping trips, and it was no more awkward than practice armor for a
kenjutsu
bout—very similar to that, in fact. This was flexible enough not to impede movement much, too. She did a slow forward roll and came to her feet with a grunt, clattering a little.
Have to wear this a lot to get used to it.
Then she settled on the helmet and snapped the chin strap.

“Cool!” someone said. “Just like the ones in
Star Wars
!”

Alston gritted her teeth, and bit back
Lucas and I both copied from the same source.

“It’ll do,” she said. “But plain green for the rest, if you don’t mind. How many, how quickly?”

“Thirty a week, given the priorities the Council’s set,” the engineer said. “Scaling up to a hundred.”

 

“You, sir, snore,” Martha said, sipping at a cup of hot herb tea.

“Well, a man can’t tell his fiancée
everything,
” Jared said reasonably. “Or his bride. Not before the end of the honeymoon, at least. Where’s the romance and mystery in that?” They’d anticipated the parson, of course, but not by all that much—and never actually
slept
together before moving in after the wedding.

She gave a dry chuckle. “Unsuspected depths; even a sense of irony. What will it be next?”

They looked at each other and smiled.
Well, we’re neither of us nineteen,
he thought with satisfaction. Forty and fifty-plus-six-months, in fact. She set her cup down on the kitchen table and sat on his lap; not what you’d call well upholstered, but damned pleasant nonetheless.
We suit, that’s the best way to put it,
he decided, and grinned.

“A penny for them. Or a pound of dulse, in our barter economy.”

“Thinking of how different I felt about a woman on my lap in the morning thirty years ago. Not,” he added hastily, “that it doesn’t—”

She put an arm around his neck. “Jared, from puberty to their thirties men aren’t human beings. They’re hormones with feet. I prefer one with enough functioning mind to be interesting . . . which you are.”

A few minutes later: “But the hormones still seem to be functioning, too. Not on the kitchen table, dear, and not before breakfast. The griddle cakes, I think,” she went on, slightly breathless, sliding away to her own seat. “You didn’t tell me you could cook, either.”

Functioning indeed,
Jared thought, with a slight trace of smugness. “I was a widower for five years, and a hunter for twenty-three. Breakfasts I can do,” he said, getting up and going to the counter.

“Have to look into making baking powder—we’ll be out soon,” he added, as he got out the jar of oil and the frying pan and wound a cloth around his hand to open the wirehandled oven door to check the coals.

“Mmm,” she said, watching him.