Island in the Sea of Time (55 page)

“Shit,” the captain said. “Stay on my left, ’dapa.”

She ran forward at her lover’s side. The warrior saw them coming and turned, roaring. The rake came down, and the captain’s
katana
came up to meet it. Stone swept along steel with a tooth-grating sound and the warrior half-turned with the impetus of the blow redirected. Flexing wrists snapped the blade up again, up and back, foot stamped forward, and the blade came down in a blurring curve, just as they’d practiced . . . only this time there was a man reeling away with an arm hanging by a thread, reeling and falling. The captain moved forward into the next, sword rising to
chudan no kame.

Another beside him, spear arm back for the thrust. Swindapa pivoted to deal with that one.
Keep your mind out of the way
, ran through her. It was true. Her hands had learned; the sword came up and turned as she thrust, cutting edge up, right hand just behind the guard to guide and left on the pommel to give force, body moving behind it. Down, hands loose, now clench, elbows out . . . the impact, and she continued through the curve of the circular motion, whipping the sword through the diagonal and drawing the cut. Ruin flopped down to lie at her feet.

Swindapa staggered slightly as an obsidian spearpoint broke on her breastplate, knocking her back two steps. Her sword snapped up, cutting into the underside of the Indian’s arms above the elbows, and he fell backward. That put him in the rear rank of spear-bearers, and a shield edge slammed down, twice.

Then there was no one else to fight here. More Olmecs were out beyond the line of spears, caught and slashing as the wielders slammed the points forward. The crossbows were down, and the islanders were unslinging the shields across their backs and drawing the short stabbing swords slung at their right hips. An Olmec rake came down on a metal-faced shield and the cadet staggered beneath it, going to one knee. The warrior stepped closer for another stroke, froze for a second’s incredulity as he saw how the obsidian edge of his weapon exploded into fragments against the metal, and ran onto the long point of the upflung
gladius.
The cadet’s comrades heaved her back as she knelt staring; others closed in, four against one, stabbing. One reeled back yelling and clutching at an arm bone-bruised through the armor that protected it. The others thrust and thrust again. The Olmec staggered, swung his blunted rake in a final circle, and collapsed. Blood ran out on the ashy ground from the broad wounds the leaf-shaped short swords had made.

And then the remaining foemen were running, running back the way they had come.
Woods Woman has their souls,
she thought—panic had taken them, the wild fear that breathes out of the deep forest.

“Fire! Don’t let them get away!” the captain shouted in an astonishing husky roar, enough to cut through the confusion. Crossbows twanged again, enough to bring down a man here, another there, a steady trickle until the last survivors were out of range.

Swindapa tried to swallow, felt her tongue dry as leather. The hand she released from the hilt of the
katana
was sticky, coming free with a
tack
sound as she reached for the water bottle at her waist. The bodies were steaming under the hot sun, the smells of shit and iron-copper blood already underlain by a slight sickly scent as tissue began to go off. Insects swarmed, feeding.

“We won,” she said huskily, staring.

It wasn’t a pleasant sight. The captain was right about that, though she hadn’t truly believed until now. It was certainly a lot better than losing, though.

A hand patted her armored shoulder briefly. She stood straighter, feeling the constriction around her chest easing.

“We surely did,” the captain said.

 

“Thank God for morphine,” the corpsman said.

Alston nodded. The aid station was busy; there were a dozen seriously wounded Americans, one with a raked-open face who might not live.
We should modify these helmets
—
hinged cheek guards.
There were a couple of other face wounds, or blades driven in under armpits, or in the back of the leg. The doctor sewed and bandaged, debrided and cleansed. Orderlies moved the treated back under the awnings and stood by to keep the insects off.

And all from a few seconds of hand-to-hand
, she thought soberly. If it had come to a melee, or if the numbers hadn’t been so grossly unequal by the time the last Olmecs came into arm’s reach, she doubted the Islanders’ armor and weapons would have been enough.
We need a lot more practice, most of us
. Or Uzis and M-16s, whichever they could manage to get first.

“Good work,” she said to the last of the conscious wounded, touching him gently on the shoulder.

He managed a smile, eyes wandering as the combination of drug and shock blurred the edge of thought. “Kicked cannibal butt, didn’t we, Skipper?”

“We surely did, son. Now you rest—you’ve done your bit.”

She stood and moved forward. You could see where the Olmecs had hit the caltrops; there was a row of bodies there, some piled two or three deep.
Must have gotten a third of them that way, held up while we shot them,
she thought. Swindapa came up with a bucket of water and they cleaned themselves. Blood swirled into the silt-brown liquid. They drank again from their water bottles; everyone seemed to be thirsty. She could feel the sweat oozing through the padding under her armor, as saturated as if she’d gone for a swim. Looking down she saw a line of bright scratches and a dint across the lower part of her breastplate, and she didn’t even recall the blow landing. Without the metal, that would have cut halfway through to her spine; those obsidian bladelets were
sharp
. And it had all taken barely half an hour. . . .

“Ma’am.” She returned the young man’s salute; her hand went tick against the edge of her flared helmet. She seemed to be noticing details like that. And sensations stayed with her, the ugly slicing, jarring feeling of the sword going through muscle and bone . . .
Enough. Think about that later.

“Ma’am, what shall we do with the enemy wounded? There are a lot of them.”

“Bring them back to the aid station, but carefully. Mr. Ortiz! Stretcher bearers and guards for the enemy wounded. We’ll do what we can for them.”

“Mr. Toffler,” she went on. “Report.”

The noise of the ultralight’s engine came through the handset. “Captain, they’re still running, most of them, the ones that haven’t fallen down along the way,” he said. “The fancy ones are making for the city; they stopped about half a mile on, and they’re in a clump retreatin’ at a walk. No sign of Martha or Lisketter there, since they took them into the big place on the main earth mound.”

“Thank you, Mr. Toffler. Well done, by the way.”

There was, a slight hesitation on the other end. “Hell, ma’am, I just flew around up here.”

“Nevertheless, well done. Refuel when you have to, and stand by.”

 

Martha watched through the narrow slit. The room was featureless adobe, and the roof overhang was wide, but the ventilation slit gave a bar of light when the sun was at the right angle, a breath of air, and a few minutes’ vision if she braced her toe against a projecting spot in the wall and hung on.

The warriors who straggled back up the broad avenue were a far cry from the host that had set out that morning. Plumes were bedraggled, or hacked away; most of them limped or hobbled, many bore bleeding wounds. Women and children and near-naked servants gathered along the edges of the broad roadway of colored clay, between the basalt pillars and atop the rectangular mounds. They didn’t chant and sing as they had when their men marched out to fight, either. Their silence was like a dirge, compounded by the sound of keening grief that wailed from the interior of the houses. Her arm muscles were beginning to quiver. Gasping, Martha dropped down.

“What did you see?” Pamela Lisketter said. She was beginning to look a little more alert.
Which may be good if we can do something, but on the other hand, everything she’s done so far has been harmful.

Still, it was a little comforting. Having a zombie as your only companion in confinement was hard on the nerves.

“The . . . army has come back. Badly beaten, from the look of it. Less than half the numbers that went out this morning, and most of those wounded.”

“Should I hope for rescue?” Lisketter said, mouth twisting. “What can they do to me that Cofflin and the Town Council won’t?”

Martha looked around the room. It was absolutely bare, except for a tall-necked jug of water and an open pot for wastes. The room stank, of sweat and the chamber pot and their unwashed bodies.

“The town jail’s an improvement on this,” she said dryly. “And as to what they can do, I suggest a prayer that we don’t find out.”

She sank down in the far corner, concentrating on hope.
The
Eagle
’s crew obviously beat them. They may be mythbesotted, but surely they’ll respond to a whack across the face.
The problem was, she didn’t know
how
they’d respond.

She heard the buzz of the ultralight’s engines again, faint through the thick walls of the prison. She didn’t try to climb to the ventilation slit again; the angle was wrong, and in any case it was unwise to strain herself, in her condition. Hours passed, in a silence broken only by the skitter and buzz of insects.

The door banged open. Warriors stood there, warriors with bandaged wounds and rough cloth wrapped around their feet. Behind the fanged, carved masks their eyes were as dark and hard as the obsidian of their weapons. Both Americans had learned the local word for “come”; there was no point in being dragged. Outside was a corridor, and then a wooden colonnade enclosing a court. A ball game was in progress there. The object seemed to be to drive a rubber ball through a vertical wooden hoop on either side of the court. Knowing what she knew, Martha wasn’t surprised when the three members of the winning team passed through a ritual and then knelt with their throats over a basin. She did turn her head aside, likewise when the priest came by flicking droplets of their blood on the two women.

That made her stare at their escort. She frowned slightly after an instant; he seemed to be ill in a way unrelated to the cuts and punctures on his arms and chest and thighs. He was swallowing convulsively, and now and then putting his hand to his throat, or rubbing at his loincloth.

A suspicion formed in her mind. Sharp terror drove it forth as they were prodded into another court. This encircled one of the oval pools, and more brightly clad members of the priest-king caste stood around it, men and women. The open side giving onto the avenue held one of the giant jaguar-and-woman statues, and all around it were panels of carved stone or stucco portraying the myth of the jaguarmen. A woman alone in the jungle, and the cat sprang upon her. The same woman hugely pregnant; her tribesfolk menaced her with weapons, and she fled into the jungle to squat and give birth, but the babe was born with fangs and talons. The jaguar returned, to devour mother and child, but the child turned within its stomach and the jaguar rose to walk on its hind legs like a man. . . .

“Shamanistic practices aimed at bringing about a complex of feline transformation,”
she quoted to herself
. The archaeologists didn’t know the half of it.

“Are . . . are they going to sacrifice us too?” Lisketter asked.

“I don’t—”

A painful rap on the back of her head silenced her. A ripple went through the waiting crowd as the ultralight passed overhead, the setting sun red on its wings. Then they turned their attention back to their task.
Imploring the help of their god, or gods, or ancestral spirits,
she assumed.

Aromatic gums burned in clay holders. Brightly clad figures, men and women, acted out scenes whose importance—usually whose nature—she had no conception of. The ritual went on and on. Objects were raised before the huge masked figure who sat immobile and cross-legged on yet another of the table-altars. The ropes he grasped in either hand led to prisoners on either side; ordinary peasants, by the look of them, naked and with one hand tied behind their backs. The other hand dangled limp, pierced by a stingray spine.

The drums began to beat again, a thudding in the same rhythm as a human heartbeat; flute and shell and bone xylophone. She was numb enough that the death of the two captives went by almost unnoticed, like a flicker in a movie someone else was watching. Lisketter’s whimper as they dragged her away toward the pond cut through the glaze a little. Priestesses grasped her and stripped away the rags of her clothes, pushing her down and scrubbing her as they chanted. Then they pulled her onto the bank and began dressing her in an outfit that was mostly woven feathers and not many of those. The last touch was to dip wads of cloth in some murky, musky-smelling substance and wipe them across Lisketter’s belly and inner thighs and genitals. Then they bore her between them to the altar, binding her over it spread-eagled.

Martha obeyed numbly as she was pushed into a position near the carved block of stone; in one hand she was to hold a stalk of maize, in the other a rod carved to represent a burning snake. It wasn’t until warriors led in the muzzled jaguar on two thick leashes that she could bring herself to believe what was going to happen. Lisketter began to scream and heave against the ropes that held her, and the big cat’s tail lashed as it licked its nose and took the scent.

 

The connection was through a relay on the
Eagle,
but good enough. Alston went on: “The good part is that we gave them a first-class lickin’,” she said.

“Casualties?” Cofflin’s voice.

Strange to think of him in the air traffic control tower back on the island. It seemed so far, here in the night where the drums boomed and the light of fires silhouetted the great buildings of the plateau-city ahead.

“Ours? One dead, one critical, twelve or so serious, and the rest walkin’ wounded. Theirs . . . couple of hundred dead, maybe more. Plenty of wounded, too.” She hesitated. “The bad part is I still can’t get them to talk.”