Island in the Sea of Time (47 page)

Good
timing,
he thought. Good that it had come so soon, and in such a formless way. He turned and walked back toward the wheel, passing John Martins crouched with his arm around Barbara.

“You know, John,” Walker said cheerfully, “you’d better pray real hard that I stay alive. Because without me, I don’t think you or your little second-wave flower child there would live long enough to dance on my grave.”

He turned aside from their glares, laughing. He was still chuckling when he settled by the wheel. Isketerol was standing there, his cloak flying in the wind and feet braced against the plunging roll of the ship, one hand caressing the butt of his pistol.

“You like not mutiny, do you, blood-brother,” he said with a grin. The language was Tartessian.

“Not unless I’m leading it,” Walker agreed, in the same tongue; slow and halting, but understandable. He switched to Iraiina. “Better this way. I don’t have laws and custom behind me, only my own strength. Now they know my strength.”

“Better still if you’d flogged him,” Isketerol suggested.

Walker clapped the Tartessian on the shoulder. “Maybe with your people, but not with mine, brother. That would have convinced them I’d gone mad, and they’d have killed me to save themselves.”

“You know them best,” Isketerol shrugged. “Will they stay obedient when they learn about the guns?”

Walker shrugged in turn. “They don’t have much choice. They can’t go back, and alone they’re just so much meat. We still have the shotguns and pistols, anyway.” He shook his head admiringly. “That is one smart bitch,” he said. “Of course, look on the bright side.” The Iraiina word was
sun-turned,
but it meant about the same thing.

“Is there a bright side to the most powerful weapons being useless?”

“Of course. We can’t use them without the pins . . . but Alston can’t either, without the
guns.
And we have the two Garands—they’re functional.”

Isketerol nodded respectfully. “You are a hard man to discourage; that is good. No plan works perfectly against an enemy.”

“Interesting; we have exactly the same saying.”

Walker looked up at the sky, and took a glance at the compass and his wristwatch. “We’re making two hundred miles today,” he said. “But we may have to reef; I don’t want to risk the sails.”

Isketerol flipped a hand in agreement, looking around. “What a
ship
!” he breathed. “The
Eagle,
that was like sailing a mountain—it never seemed real to me. But this
Yare,
I understand her. Let me sail her into Tartessos harbor, and in a year I will have four more like her with trained crews.”

“And she’ll be yours,” Walker agreed. “Just as soon as I’m in Tiryns, with my men.”

“We will do much good business together,” Isketerol said, pleased.

Up. Guard, guard, crosscut, crosscut, pivot, guard . . .

The swords moved in perfect unison, flashing in smooth controlled arcs. Their feet rutched across the sand of the beach as one, like a mirror image set side by side as they went through the
kata.
Alston held the last movement, crouched with the sword out and down, until her leg muscles began to quiver slightly. Then she sank back to one knee, sword snapping sideways in the move that was meant to represent flicking excess blood off the blade. Pull the cloth out of your belt, run the sword through it, slide it back into the sheath, sink back on your heels with hands on thighs . . .

That night was the first time I’ve ever actually cut anyone with this thing,
she thought as she completed the movement.

Oh, she’d shot once or twice in the line of duty; hurt men with her hands and feet a few more times in self-defense. Never used the steel to kill before, though, or really thought she would—except in the trancelike way you were supposed to imagine it as you practiced.
Odd. I’d have thought it would affect me more
. Instead she simply felt irritated she hadn’t been able to finish David Lisketter off. Perhaps it was the circumstances; she’d been
angry.
Controlled enough to use it rather than be used by it, but it was nothing like action against a boatful of drug smugglers. Much more personal; her friends had been in danger of death, one hurt . . . she’d never felt so lifted out of herself before.

“How are you?” Swindapa asked beside her.

Alston laid the sheathed sword down before her, bowed to it with hands and forehead to the ground, and sat back. “No pain at all. Just a bit of an itch,” she said, touching the wound under a small bandage.
Of course, an inch this way and I’d have left brains spattered on the Athenaeum notice board.

“I was so frightened for you,” Swindapa said. “I asked Moon Woman to find the good star for you, one that would stand for your birthstar and namestar.”

“You did the right thing though, sugar,” Alston said. “Gettin’ help.” Rushing in like a berserker would have been the worst possible choice at that moment.

“But you’re still hurt,” Swindapa went on, the hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. “You shouldn’t be all alone in that big cabin on the
Eagle—
”

Alston laughed. “I said no yesterday, no this morning, and the answer’s no again at sunset. If I make a rule for my people, I have to keep it, just as they do.”

The no-fraternization-on-shipboard rule was essential to discipline, in her opinion, and without discipline a ship was a snack for the sea to gobble down. There were a good many other things in the Uniform Code of Military Justice that she’d been glad to leave behind in the twentieth century, but that wasn’t one of them.

Swindapa sighed and rolled her eyes. “There’s always the paint locker. . . .”

“I have to keep the rule
better
than they do,” she said. “Let’s get going. We’re not sailing until tomorrow morning, remember. And I am feeling better.”

They picked up their swords and headed back toward town along the beach, running at a steady jog-trot with their arms pumping and bare feet light on the sand. To their right was a sand cliff, covered in low green scrub and topped with houses, trees, and a fringe of seagrass. Waves broke to their left, green-blue and white, hissing up almost to their feet. Out on the water were the sails of the fishing boats; whatever happened, the town had to be fed, something that had sunk home to just about everybody over the summer. The wind blew in from the sea, cool and welcome. Alston concentrated on her breathing, feeling for any trace of dizziness or pain in her head.

None.
Good. The island didn’t run to a CAT scan or MRI imager, and there was no way to tell if the trauma had produced an aneurysm or clot, short of waiting for her brain to burst. She grinned without mirth. They’d been thrown back more than three thousand years, but every one of the temporal deportees still moved forward an inexorable minute per minute in her own losing fight with Father Time. You could win battles, but entropy won all the wars.

“Let’s go!”

They turned inland and raced for a long wooden staircase built up the near-vertical slope of the bluff.

From here she could see the masts of the
Eagle,
where it waited in the harbor. There were clouds on the northern horizon; she’d have to check the barometer. Bad to be caught on a lee shore in this shoal water, with the wind blowing toward the shallows. Hard to beat off, unless she fired up Max the engine and won free that way, got some sea room for tacking. Maybe they’d have the steam tug take them well out, a couple of miles.

Pedaling back along the smooth paved road was almost a relaxation. Chief Cofflin was waiting for her, standing with boulder patience before the police station and leaning on his crutch. The street there still had bloodstains, where the life of the two police officers had flowed out under the doorjamb. She strongly suspected that if Cofflin’s leg hadn’t been injured he’d be on board
Eagle,
all arguments to the contrary. The look in the blue Yankee eyes was worse than fury; a cold, grim deadliness, intelligent and calculating.

“I’m fit for duty,” she said quietly, swinging down from her seat. “We leave at dawn tomorrow.” Stepping closer and taking his hand: “I’ll get her back, Jared.”

She didn’t add:
or die trying.
That was for losers.

“You’ve got the best chance,” Cofflin said, returning a controlled pressure before releasing her. “That’s why I waited two days.” Hiller could have taken the
Eagle
west and south. She knew that Cofflin had vetoed that because he trusted her judgment better in a fight.

“They need her alive,” she said.

Cofflin nodded, his face unchanging. “That bunch, they’ll be lucky to keep alive themselves.”

“Right. That’s another reason I voted to go after
Bentley
first. Walker is almost as smart and tough as he thinks he is, and he needs Martins for his skills and Barbara to control Martins with. Lisketter will probably need to be rescued herself.”

Cofflin’s smile was icy. “Kidnapping’s a capital crime, the Town Meeting decided,” he said with a tone even colder. “I don’t give a shit if she dies down there or hangs back here.”

Not much to say to that,
Alston thought. Swindapa reached out and touched Cofflin’s shoulder.

“I will talk to Moon Woman and ask for a favorable constellation,” she said. “The captain already carries great luck for the rescue of those in need, I know.”

The edge of Cofflin’s narrow Yankee mouth turned up slightly. “Thank you,” he said, sounding sincere.

They turned to watch the last cargo going down to the docks, ready to be loaded on
Eagle.
Bundles of spears, of swords, of crossbow bolts. Suits of armor carried on poles run through the armpits; the sight prickled at Alston, a shadow familiarity . . .
yes, the Bayeaux tapestry.

She hoped that was a good omen; William
cognomine bastardus
had sailed to victory. She looked eastward, unconscious that her expression was twin to Cofflin’s. There was a debt to be paid there too, and she’d always believed in the full, precise, and punctual payment of obligations.

Not least, that this world didn’t deserve to have Walker unleashed on it.

 

T
he beach in Bronze Age England had changed since the
Eagle
’s visit in early spring. The great encampment of the Iraiina was gone, most of it, emptied as they had dispersed to take up their steadings. The land it had covered drowsed in the late-summer sunlight. Grass mantled it, or red-brown fields ready to be sown with winter grain; Walker supposed the accumulated filth of the temporary city had manured the soil. Half a mile inland on a slight rise was a cluster of buildings. He leveled his binoculars. There was one largish oval hall, eighty feet by thirty across, with smoke trickling up into the morning air from three or four places on the thatched roof. The inward-sloping walls looked like turf, with a framework of heavy timbers. Smaller buildings were scattered around it, and piles of trimmed logs he thought were probably for a stockade. There were large stock pens up already, holding a herd of scrubby cattle, hairy sheep that looked to be more goat, and a dozen stocky hammerheaded little horses like Icelandic ponies. Daurthunnicar’s
ruathaurikaz,
the Iraiina term for a high chief’s steading. Evidently the
rahax
kept a good lookout; men were boiling out of the buildings and hitching up chariots.

Like home,
he thought sardonically.
Minus a couple of millennia
or so. He’d been raised on a ranch up in the Bitterroot country of western Montana, a miserable little cow-calf spread that had swallowed his father and his older brothers and broken his mother in a lifelong losing battle with the bank and the weather.
Back to the cowshit, but not for long.
He’d gotten out at eighteen, working harder to make the Academy than he’d ever done roping or branding.

There was an additional factor drawn up on the beach. Tartessian ships, two of them. They
were
the ships that’d been there last year, he recognized the horse heads at the bows. Isketerol must have been extremely persuasive back last spring to get his cousin to bring ships north this late in the sailing season; Walker didn’t like the thought of taking one of those glorified rowboats through a winter blow in the Channel, or the Bay of Biscay. The Tartessians didn’t seem inclined to go anywhere either, since they’d run up substantial-looking huts on the shore above the high-tide mark.

“They’ll be here for the winter?” he asked Isketerol.

The Tartessian nodded. “Sail home this near the storm season?” he said. “In the
Yare,
yes. In those, never. The Hungry One eats enough of us as it is, without tempting Him.”

Now, just how far can I trust my good buddy Isketerol?
Walker thought.
Oddly enough, rather far, I think.
For one thing, the Tartessian seemed to take certain types of promise very seriously; for another, their ambitions ran in concert.
Or so I think. But he’s from a completely different background. His logic may be my madness.
For that matter, look at how differently he and Alston thought, and they
did
come from the same background, more or less.
Well, nothing ventured . . .