Island in the Sea of Time (49 page)

The engine of the
Bentley
burbled into life for the first time in weeks. Sails came down with a rattle, to be roughly lashed to the booms. As the diesel blatting echoed back from the near bank of the river, birds exploded out of it. There were thousands of them, showers of feathered shapes in canary yellow, red, blue, sulfur gold, and sunset crimson. Parrots, macaws, others she couldn’t name, their cries loud and raucous in the heavy air. Alligators slipped off mudbanks into the water with little rippling splashes like lowslung dragons. Insects rose from the river and the swamps along it in clouds, and without the sea breeze to scatter them soon had everyone on the schooner’s deck slapping and scratching.

“Do you have a depth sounder on this ship?” Martha asked.

“No,” the yachtsman said. “But this looks pretty deep.”

Oh, God,
Martha thought, wiping at her face with a handkerchief. Sweat lay oily, refusing to dry. At least she’d stopped getting so sick.

Most of the crew—she supposed that was the way to describe Lisketter’s followers, after a couple of weeks at sea—were resting along the rails of the schooner, pointing and chattering. Everyone was tanned dark, and they looked shaggy and ragged, but they’d managed to get here without sinking or running onto something, rather to Martha’s surprise.

She turned to Lisketter. “You should have someone checking the depth,” she said. “And shouldn’t you break out the guns, after all the trouble you went to to steal them?”

Lisketter had been staring out at the passing wilderness of wood and jungle, transfixed. She came to herself with a start. “Whatever for?” she said. “There’s nobody here but the Native Americans we’ve come to help.”

Martha reined in her sarcasm with a massive effort of will. “They might . . . they might
misunderstand
you,” she said. “After all, we can’t
talk
to them until someone’s learned their language. How do you expect them to know you’re friendly?”

“Well, they’d certainly misunderstand any show of force,” Lisketter said, shrugging. “We’ll demonstrate them when we get to their leadership. From what I’ve read, the Olmecs had a deep spiritual relationship with nature, so it’ll probably be priests or priestesses of some sort.”

Martha closed her eyes and sighed, sinking back on the blanket, only to come alert again when voices rose in excitement. The river had narrowed, though it was still hundreds of yards across. On the north side was a village in a clearing, set on the natural levees that always flanked a lowland river like this, given to seasonal floods. Fields surrounded it; plots of maize stood green, overgrown with bean vines, and interspersed with cotton and other plants she couldn’t begin to identify. The houses were rectangular, thatched, with sides of mud and wattle to waist height and rolled-up screens of matting below. Canoes were drawn up on the dirt beach that fronted the slow-moving river, some of them quite large; others were out on the water, fishing. The buildings straggled, except for some larger ones grouped in a square of beaten dirt around a rectangular earth platform in the center. That held something much larger atop it, still timber and thatch but with corner posts intricately carved. Smoke drifted up from hearths outside the doors of huts and from a larger fire on the platform.

Must be a few hundred people at least,
Martha thought. They were dressed simply, a twisted loincloth for the men and a short skirt for the women; otherwise their brown skins were bare to the late-day sun. As the
Bentley
came into sight they stood for a moment stock-still and amazed. They were almost close enough to see expressions, more than close enough to hear the terror that sent men and women pelting screaming back toward their homes, that drove canoes ashore with flashing blades. A warbling, bellowing sound came from the low earth platform in the center.
Conch-shell trumpet,
she knew with a tremor that chilled even in this steam-oven heat. From there, order spread through the panic and chaos of the village. A small knot of men descended from the mound, the sun bright on their cloaks and masks and vestments, on nodding plumes and banners. They moved among the villagers, pushing and shoving them into silence, shouting, haranguing, slapping faces. Men dashed off to their huts, returned with spears and other weapons she couldn’t make out. They moved down to the shore.

Despite herself, Martha leaned forward in fascination. Among the crowd on the riverbank, circles opened up, and men were swinging lines around their heads. From them came a whirring, thuttering roar that shivered down into the bass notes and back up again, each a little out of time with the others.
Bullroarers.
The conch trumpet wailed, and beneath it came the beating of a drum—a massive, booming, thudding sound that echoed down from the mound and against the trees on the other side of the river. Her head came up. Faint and far, another echoed it, the same irregular staccato rhythm.

“Signal drum,” she said, touching Lisketter on the arm. “They’re sending the news upstream.”

They waited, sweating, as the sun crept lower in the sky. She tried not to think about Jared, without much success.
Poor bear.
He’d be fretting so. . . . Lisketter paced, watching the shore.

“Why don’t they send anyone out?” she asked fretfully, slapping at her face. A red splotch appeared where the mosquito had been. “What are they waiting for?”

“Waiting for us, I think,” Martha said. Lisketter glanced at her, and she sat back against the rail. “No. This foolishness is your idea. You can force me into the boat, but you can’t make me think or talk.”

David Lisketter was thin and pale, but the wrist hadn’t festered. He pushed forward. “I’ll do it, Pam,” he said. “I’ve been studying that Mayan dictionary.”

Much good may it do you
, Martha thought, but did not say. The archaeologists didn’t have a clue what language the Olmecs spoke, since they hadn’t left any written records. The theory that they’d been Mayan-speakers depended on a single very late inscription resembling the Mayan calendar. For that matter, the language ancestral to modern Mayan would be unrecognizably different in the thirteenth century B.C. Only a professional linguist would be able to tell that some barbarian dialect in Germany-to-be this night was going to turn into English in the course of the next three thousand-odd years.

There was a good deal of arguing, but eventually David Lisketter and three others lowered the boat that hung at the
Bently’s
stern and tumbled down the rope ladder into it. She saw that he had a pistol strapped to his left hip; Lisketter saw in the same instant, opened her mouth, and then closed it. Silence fell as the boat approached the shore. The thudding drum on the platform rose to a crescendo and then stopped along with the conch and bullroarer; it was only then she knew how the great drum had come to dominate the scene, like the heartbeat of a giant who’d swallowed them all. Then she realized that it
hadn’t
stopped, not completely. The upstream echo of the rhythm went on for three seconds after the drum in the village had halted. Then true silence fell, quiet enough that the cries of the birds were the loudest things they heard. Flocks swirled in toward the treetops backlit by the setting sun. The way the river bent southward here put a tongue of jungle between them and the west.

The schooner’s lifeboat grounded among the beached canoes of the villagers. David Lisketter and his-companions advanced toward the clump of brightly clad watchers, their open hands—only one, in his case—held out in sign of peace. Headdresses of plumes and fur nodded as the locals stood to meet them.

“I can’t
see
what’s going on,” Pamela Lisketter fretted.

“It wouldn’t do you any good if you could,” Martha muttered. You couldn’t
predict
what a people this alien were going to do on first contact. It all depended on how the strangers fit into the local belief structure. Did gods come from the east? Cortez had used that myth, which might or might not be present here-and-now. Or perhaps they had a belief like the Balinese, that evil came from the sea and goodness from inland. Or they might be perfectly ready to deal with strangers as humans, odd but otherwise like themselves.

A tossing confusion went through the meeting ahead. Shouts arose. Then a sound this river had never heard before: the flat snapping
crack
of a light automatic pistol. “What is he
doing?
” Lisketter cried, shrill fear in his voice.

Trying to save his life,
Martha knew. It was the only reason someone like Lisketter’s brother would shoot at his precious Olmecs.

Everyone on board had eyes glued to the shore now, difficult though the fading light made it. There was a swirling eddy in the crowd around the Americans, shouts and screams. Weapons moved, flourished overhead or driving forward; she couldn’t see precisely what they were, except in a general way. Despite the danger, Martha felt a small chilly satisfaction. She’d been waiting for something like this since Lisketter’s brother came into her library behind a gun. That gun cracked again and again, and men toppled—some of them men in elaborate cloaks, as well as the near-naked peasant spearmen. A bubble of space grew around the Americans for a second, and they took advantage of it, toppling backward into their boat and shoving off. Two dragged a third, and David Lisketter walked backward toward them, holding the gun threateningly.

Some of the Olmecs had fled—all villagers in loincloths, Martha noted, not the men in bright costumes. Others stood their ground, waving weapons and fists; several lay still, or writhed groaning on the ground. The ones still hale took fresh heart when the boat slid out into the water. The . . .
priests? nobles? officers?
Martha wondered; men in authority, at any rate—pushed and yelled them forward. The boat went slowly. Pamela Lisketter’s hands gripped the rail with a force that turned the fingers white as flung spears and darts beat the water around it or stuck quivering in the wood. Her brother fumbled with the pistol, reloading, then began to shoot back as the others rowed. Another Olmec toppled, but most of the bullets went astray or inflicted only wounds; it was too far, the boat too unstable, and the light too uncertain for the gun to be very deadly.

Then one of the rowers stood, screaming. A black-hafted dart sprouted between his ribs. He fell, thrashing and moaning, and the boat capsized with him. The others were thrown into the water. Lisketter screamed again and again. Others rushed aimlessly around the deck of the
Bentley;
a few with more presence of mind dashed below and returned with weapons. Martha intercepted one of them and snatched the gun away; it was a .22 target rifle, a bolt-action toy with a tubular magazine. She’d never done any shooting to speak of herself, but Jared had shown her some things on general principle. Men from the village danced and screamed triumph on the beach; others were manning and pushing off in canoes, emboldened by their victory over the pale wizards.

If we can beat them back, we can get out of here,
Martha thought. Not even Lisketter would be crazy enough to linger after
this.

Because she was looking northward, Martha was the first to see what came around the bend in the river. A moment later everyone did, as the flotilla of canoes whipped their torches into flaring life and the drums began to beat again. For a long instant she stared slack-jawed at the spectacle approaching them.

Most of the canoes were simple dugouts, holding four to twelve men. But leading them were a pair of giants, doublehulled craft with the floats eighty feet long and linked by a broad platform. Burning torches on tall poles gave detail a ghastly clarity. Each held forty paddlers to a side, standing and digging their leaf-bladed oars into the water with a chant of
hi-hi-ye-YI, hi-hi-ye-YI,
repeated endlessly. Flamelight glistened on the sweat-slick skin of their muscular bodies. Water coiled back from the prows, which curled up in a ten-foot figurehead carved in the form of a snarling jaguar pug face. Great drums stood on the platforms, manhigh, with two drummers each beating out BOOM-ba-da, BOOM-ba-da with yard-long wooden mallets. Behind the drummers the platforms were crowded with warriors in garish cloaks and trappings, carved helmet-masks fantastically colored and sweeping up to impossibly tall plumes of flamingo and quetzal feathers. They waved spears and weirdly carved wooden club-swords and rakes edged with the teeth of sharks or with obsidian chips. At the rear of the giant catamarans hulked platforms on which the commander squatted, and above that more jaguars—this time in frozen wooden leaps. Every inch of the big canoes that she could see was carved, painted, inlaid, in a riot of grotesque imagery.

Both catamarans held at least forty armed men. Scores of canoes followed after.

Martha grabbed the yachtsman who had served as Lisketter’s captain. “Get us
out
of here!” she screamed in his ear, shaking him, tasting sour vomitus at the back of her throat. Features slack with bewilderment and fear firmed a little, and he turned and dashed for the wheel. “Shoot, you fools! Shoot!” she called to the others.

“No—we came to
help—
” Lisketter began.

For once her followers ignored her. The diesel coughed and roared into life. When it did the men sitting cross-legged on the platforms at the rear of the catamarans sprang erect. They held up masks overhead in both arms, making pushing motions toward the schooner.
Magic of their own,
Martha thought wildly. She aimed at one of the men, remembering what her husband had told her—breathe out, squeeze the trigger—and felt the light kick of the .22 against her shoulder. The man looked up as the ceremonial mask tugged in his hands, then returned to his gestures. Martha worked the bolt and shot, again and again until the magazine was empty. She wasn’t sure if she had hit anything. The schooner lurched under her feet as the helmsman tried to take her downstream and ran up against the anchor. The
Bentley
swayed and dipped, throwing people off their feet. Someone with more presence of mind than most ran to the bows and leaned far overside, chopping at the mooring line with a machete.