Island in the Sea of Time (69 page)

“Oh, there’s danger. Let a couple of sails go in this and we’ll broach to—be turned broadside on to the waves in a flash.”

“Would that be bad?”

“We’d capsize and go down like a rock,” Alston yelled cheerfully. “But don’t worry—it’s a sound ship and the crew’s shaken down somethin’ wonderful.”

“I’ll take a 747, thanks, given my choice,” Doreen shouted back. “Anyway, Ian says he’s finished.”

“Lead along then,” Alston said. “Ms. Rapczewicz, you have the deck. Keep her so.”

They went down the companionway behind the radio shack and forward of the emergency wheel. The narrow passageway on the port side was dimmer than it had been when the electric lights were on; even the smell was different, a very slight fishy-nutty tang from the whale oil, and the officers’ galley to their right gave off an occasional whiff of woodsmoke. They turned left, past the usual captain’s quarters and back to the flag cabin at the rear.

Ian was sitting at the table, gnawing on a crackerlike piece of ship’s biscuit. “Is it still blowing hard up there?” he asked innocently. The two rooms of the flag cabin were warm and dry and fairly well lit, but the swooping lurch was still the same—possibly even worse without the distraction of the heaving sea to watch.

“Excuse me while I strangle my husband, Captain,” Doreen said, dripping.

Alston went into the head and returned with towels. Doreen and Swindapa wrapped them around their hair; the captain rubbed her inch-long wiry cap a few times and sat.
I wish I could just ignore discomfort like that,
Doreen thought.

“Well, Mr. Arnstein?” Alston said.

“I think I’ve come up with a diplomatic strategy that might work,” he said cautiously. “What we discussed, but refined a bit. It turns on a nice little piece of linguistic reconstruction Doreen and Martha and I did back on the island.”

Alston’s eyes narrowed. “Oh?”

“It turns out the Iraiina and their relatives, what Swindapa calls the Sun People, weren’t the first Indo-Europeans to settle in Britain,” he said. “They were probably just the first ones to make it stick—would have without us, that is.”

He pulled several sheets of paper out of a folder. “Damn, but this almost makes me wish I’d been a comparative philologist; as it is, I’m a rank amateur out of my depth. But look at these words in Fiernan.”

He drew a list:
bronze, wheel, axle, plow, yoke.
Each had a phonetic rendering of the Earth Folk equivalent beside it. “Now look at these Proto-Indo-European equivalents, and the Iraiina ones.”

“They don’t look very similar to me,” Alston said dubiously. “I mean, the Iraiina words do, very similar, but not the Fiernan.”

Doreen took up the explanation: “You’ve got to strip away the grammatical features—and that’s damned hard in this language, with this crazy—no offense, Swindapa—prefix-suffix system they’ve got. Sometime a long time ago, hundreds of years, Swindapa’s ancestors borrowed the words for these concepts. From something even closer to the urlanguage than Iraiina.”

“Oh,” Swindapa said, looking at the list. “Yes. I see what you mean; that makes sense. Why didn’t you ask me, though?”

Doreen felt her stomach lurch again.
Oh, shit. We got too tied up in our research and assumed that preliterates couldn’t have a historical sense.
Preliterates like the Iraiina couldn’t, perhaps; they lived in mythic time, not historical. The Earth Folk were obsessed with memory and measuring natural cycles, though, as much as the Mayans had—would have—been.

Aloud, feebly, she said: “What do you mean?”

“Well, in your years . . .” The blue eyes took on a remote look; her lips and fingers moved in a mnemonic chant. “A thousand years ago, or a little more.”

“The . . .” She paused for a moment, and her accent grew stronger, as it did when she shifted back to thinking in her native tongue. “The Daggermen, we called them; the Brawlers, the Mannerless. They came from the east—the Sea-Land Country. A few at first, trading, and sometimes stealing things, then more of them. They built their houses in places that weren’t good for farming, at first, and raised animals. They had no manners, but they had wonderful things—mead, and copper, and plows, and the very first horses to be seen in the White Isle. They made pots marked with cords for the mead-drinking, and new types of bows, ways of herding cattle, and oh, all sorts of things. There were a lot of fights.”

Doreen put her face in her palms. Ian pummeled his temples lightly with the heels of his hands. “Bell-Beaker burials,” he said.

“So the Grandmothers sent their daughters to them, to teach them about Moon Woman, and when they learned, they helped us to make the greatest of the Building Wisdoms.” Swindapa smiled. “That was eight hundred and fifty-two of your years ago. And they took the Spear Mark, that our hunters had always had, and became part of the Earth Folk.”

“Assimilated,” Doreen said to Alston. “But not completely. I think that’s partly why the two institutions in Earth Folk society don’t cooperate very well.”

Swindapa shrugged. “The Grandmothers and the Spear Chosen don’t
have
much to do with each other,” she pointed out. “Moon Woman and . . . oh, I see what you mean.”

Alston was nodding slowly. “You’re right,” she said. “Now, let’s figure out how to use it.”

Ian made an eager gesture and pulled out another sheet, this one with a flow chart on it. “It’s a wild coincidence, but there are some similarities in the Earth Folk setup to recorded cultures—particularly the Iroquois. They’re matrilineal and matrilocal, for starters, and there’s a Sacred Truce celebrated by a gathering at . . .”

 

It was a fair spring day when the men of Walkerburg made ready to ride out to war; tender leaves fluttered, and wildflowers starred cornfields and meadows. William Walker pushed the modified Garand into the saddle scabbard and tied the thong that held it in place as he looked around in pride. Not bad, considering that he’d only been here since last September. The seed kernel of an empire.
Archaeologists may dig it up someday. The place where the dynasty that ruled the world for a thousand years was born.
If things went well, he’d move somewhere more convenient in a couple of years—the site of London, probably—but this was the first ground that had been
his.

Alice Hong rode back up the line and handed Walker a piece of birch bark covered with notes. He looked at it and made yet another mental note that he’d have to get going on making paper someday; there was plenty of linen to make the pulp. Hong rode with reasonable confidence, able to stay on at least and keep her horse going in pretty much the direction she intended, which was all you could say for most of the people here. A Browning automatic was belted to her waist.

“Good,” he said, returning the list, a last-minute check of the stores.

Unlike most of the others in the war host gathering through the Iraiina lands and Kent and the Thames Valley,
his
people weren’t going to spend half their time foraging. And they weren’t going to lose ten men to disease for every one killed in battle, either.

He looked down the column. Sixty riders, all in chain hauberks and conical helmets with bar nasals except for four Americans wearing Nantacket-made plate suits like his. They’d all ride to battle but fight on foot; it took longer than seven months to train a real cavalryman, or to train the horse for that matter. It still gave them unprecedented mobility and striking power by local standards; every man had a steel sword, a spear, and a crossbow slung over his back, although most of them kept their native axes or copies Martins had made at their saddlebows as well. More followed on foot, also all in iron, half of them with spears and half with crossbows. None of his original crew from the
Yare
among them, except for four as officers; the Americans were more useful at base, mostly . . . and not really up to local standards in hand-to-hand fighting, the majority of them. They and the ten native warriors he was leaving would be more than enough to keep the slaves in order.

For the rest there were a dozen servants; Hong and her native assistants; the train of big wagons and a smaller two-wheeled one he’d modeled on the farrier carts Civil War cavalry units had taken along, with a portable sheet-iron forge and small anvil for Martins’s best pupil. Plus spare horses, and some cattle driven along for fresh meat.

And the
piece de résistance,
two long bronze tubes on wheeled mounts with limbers behind four-horse teams. A nasty surprise, if he needed to pull a rabbit out of his hat.

Good little army,
he thought. They actually had some notion of discipline and coordinated action by now. Combined with the natives’ built-in ferocity and hardihood, it was a formidable combination.

He turned and led Bastard back toward the steps of the Big House. Ekhnonpa stood there, with the smile that brought luck. She was showing now, five months along; Keruwthena was even bigger, standing back with the lower-status staff.
Odd.
He’d never had any particular or urgent desire for fatherhood—it was far too much trouble and expense and time taken from his own ambitions up in the twentieth. And here he was going to be a daddy twice over . . . probably more than that, actually, but those were the two he was sure of. It did change your perspective a little; there was a certain satisfaction to thinking of your genes heading down the ages, enjoying the wealth and power you were piling up after you were gone.

He turned and looked out over the gathered folk of his settlement, raising his voice to carry. “While I am gone, my handfast man Bill Cuddy stands as steward in my place,” he said.

He looked down at the machinist. “Don’t fuck up, Bill,” he continued in English.

“De nada,
boss,” Cuddy said. “No problem.”

“And my second wife, Ekhnonpa has charge of household matters,” he went on in Iraiina.

She looked at him with worried adoration. “Return to us victorious and hale, husband,” she said.

“You are to take care of yourself,” he said, patting her stomach. “Remember what Alice told you about straining, and diet.”

“Yes, lord,” she said, looking past his shoulder at Hong.

A mixture of awe, terror, and fascinated loathing was in the glance. He hadn’t let the doctor play any of her little games with the
rahax
’s daughter, but they were no secret.

Alice is
very
useful.
Good wizard/bad witch was as workable as good cop/bad cop.

He swung into the saddle and stood in the stirrups. “Once more we ride out to victory!” he called.

Local tradition guided most of the speech that followed—uncomfortably florid to American ears.

Wood and metal boomed on the sheet-steel facing of the shields as they hammered their weapons on them and screamed out Walker’s name. Success accounted for a lot of that; he’d led many raids, all of them profitable and most of them easy work.

“Yo!” he said at last, waving his hand forward. His standard-bearer raised the banner, topped by a wolf skull and aurochs horns. Cloth went streaming out in the chilly breeze—a black wolf’s head on a red ground.

Women made their last farewells; McAndrews tore himself away from his heavily pregnant blonde.
Can these mixed marriages work?
Walker thought with a flicker of sardonic humor. At least it seemed to have settled the man down; he doted on the wench. A romantic temperament.

Hooves thudded on turf, axles squealed, oxen bellowed as they leaned into the traces.

“I suppose I’m a romantic too, in a way, in a way,” Walker whispered to himself. After a while, he began to sing—you didn’t get music here unless you made it yourself. The locals just couldn’t deal with rock tunes, but the Americans took it up with him.

And it’s so right,
he thought.
I
am—

 

“H
ard to remember,” Swindapa said, looking over the rail, her hair lifting around her face under the baseball cap.

Eagle
and her consorts were beating southeast, down the Irish Sea after rounding Anglesey and the bulge of Wales. No land was visible now, save perhaps a distant smudge to port.

“Remember what, ’dapa?” Alston said, brought out of her own thoughts.

If they spoke quietly by the fantail nobody was likely, to overhear. The ship lay over at eight degrees, making ten knots with all sail set, its motion a slow smooth rocking-horse plunge. The waist was crowded, ex-cadets and militia volunteers straining for their first sight of the wild lands.

“The sea. Hard to remember that I’ve only sailed on it this last year. There is so
much
of it—and always something waiting beyond the edge of it. Always something new to see.”

Alston smiled herself.
That does sound good
. And there was a whole world out there, once Walker and his bloodthirsty ambitions were seen to.
Moas,
she thought,
if we get as far as New Zealand. Great flocks of them, fourteen feet high.
Or the elephant bird of Madagascar, extinct a thousand years in the twentieth, the creature that had given rise to Sinbad’s legend of the roc.
Dodos, too. I’d like to see what San Francisco Bay looks like when it’s not all mucked up. Babylon. I’d really like to see Babylon.
Or Africa, despite what she’d told McAndrews. Egypt—with an escort big enough to impress the locals—and maybe the Serengeti. . . .

“Someday, ’dapa,” she said. Then she turned and took a few paces forward, looking into the radio shack. “Ms. Rapczewicz, signal to the
Tubman;
it’s about time, I think.”

The signal lantern clacked, and the schooner dipped her ensign in acknowledgment. Faint and far, the orders echoed across the water and the
Tubman
’s prow turned west of south, heading to round Penzance on the point of Cornwall. Alston clasped her hands behind her back and looked east.