Island in the Sea of Time (70 page)

“It’s begun,” she said.
Chess with lives for pieces, and not knowing how your opponent moves until too late.
And she could not afford to lose.
So I’ll win.

 

“Arucuttag of the Sea!” Miskelefol of Tartessos blurted.

Isketerol ducked out and leveled his binoculars. The shape that loomed out of the morning mist was not quite like anything he’d seen before. A little like the
Yare,
except that there were no square topsails on the forward of the two masts. A gilded eagle flung back its wings below the long bowsprit, seeming to take to the air with every bound across the whitecaps that patterned the estuary. The hull cut the water like a knife slicing flesh, its prow throwing a sunlit burst of spray twenty feet in the air as she rounded and tacked in toward shore. The Tartessian’s eyes went wide behind the lenses as he saw how close she cut to the wind that blew from the north, and did a quick estimate of her speed.

“Quiet!” he roared into the chaos of the camp. His thumb turned the focusing screw and his lips moved as he read the name on the bow, just forward of the diagonal red slash. “
Harriet Tubman.
Odd. Sounds like an Amurrukan name.” It was unlucky to give a ship a person’s name, splitting a soul in two.

He cased the binoculars and looked around. “Quiet, I said. Get to your posts!”

With his cousin’s help he put down the disorder.
Yare
was anchored close offshore, and
Sea Wolf
drawn up on the beach; he’d built her to be capable of that, since it was so useful.
How deep does that . . . schooner, that’s what they’re called . . . draw?
he thought. Eagle People ships tended to have deep keels, but that was a lot smaller than the
Eagle
herself, if bigger than the
Yare. Hmm. Eight feet or so, I’d say, perhaps a little less.
That meant they could get to within three hundred yards of the shore without touching mud, with the tide full like this.

“I
told
you we should have sailed for home last week!” his cousin was saying.

“Quiet, and get your thrower ready,” Isketerol said. His cousin departed at a run.

How many aboard her?
He studied the Nantucket schooner carefully. Hard to say, but somewhere between twenty and forty, unless they had the belowdecks packed with men. “You!” he pointed to a crewman. “Run over to Daurthunnicar’s huts and tell him we’ve enemy in sight. Diketeran!” One of his trustier men, steersman on the
Foam Hunter
in the old days. “Get your horse, ride to Walkerburg, and report. You, fetch my war harness. Now!”

Men scattered to their tasks as they recovered their wits. The Tartessian camp was a half-circle backing onto the sea behind an earth rampart and palisade. At each end where the rampart met the water was a platform of timber and earth; on it crouched a shape of beams and cords. The trebuchets creaked as the Tartessians heaved around the crank handles of the geared windlasses. Isketerol finished snapping the clasps on his Nantucket-made suit of armor, checked his pistol, and walked over to the left-hand stone thrower. The crew had had plenty of time to practice over the winter, especially after
Sea Wolf
was finished. More hands were dragging obstacles of logs studded with iron blades down to the water’s edge, in case of a landing.

“Ready, Skipper,” one of the trebuchet crew said to him, teeth flashing in his olive face.

Isketerol made his own estimate of time and distance.
Moving target . . .
“Up one on the stayrope,” he said. “And . . .
now.
”

The two-hundred-pound boulder whipped into the air as the machine crashed and creaked and thumped. It turned into a tumbling dot, seemed to pause at the height of its curve and then arching down. He used his binoculars again; a hundred yards behind the enemy ship the rock dropped nearly into its wake. Isketerol hid his surprise at how close they’d come. Just then his cousin’s emplacement fired; they were loaded with a large barrel of tallow and pine pitch and turpentine. The barrel—even then Isketerol found himself thinking how sheerly
useful
barrels were, and wondering why nobody in this age had thought of them—landed farther from the schooner than his rock had. The deliberately weakened hoops burst as it hit the waves, scattering the contents. The patch of burning oil floating on the water was probably more intimidating than the splash of the boulder, though, and so was the trail of smoke through the air. Nobody on a wooden ship took fire lightly unless the Jester had eaten their wits.

Evidently the Eagle People commander wasn’t mad. The schooner whipped around, heeling far over, and let the booms of her fore-and-aft sails swing far out, wheeling and running south along the shore away from the Tartessian camp. The spearmen, archers, and crossbowmen grouped behind the spiked log barricade cheered and waved derisively.

“Good shooting,” Isketerol said to his cousin.

“
Now
shall we head home?” Miskelefol said. “We can sail with the evening tide—”

“And meet the
Eagle
out on the open sea?” Isketerol said, grinning.

“Maybe she’s not here.”

“But probably she
is
. I don’t think I’m ready to go to the Hungry One just yet, son of my uncle.”

“Shall we wait for
Eagle
here, then?”

“Why not? She can’t come close to shore. This camp is strong and we can call warriors from inland if they try to send men ashore. If we run here the Amurrukan may well come for us in Tartessos. Walker is right; we have to teach them that it’s too costly to interfere with us, or we’ll never be safe anywhere near salt water. Besides, I gave him my oath.”

The other Tartessian sighed. “As you will.”

“Indeed,” Isketerol said.

His glance went inland. What was it Walker was fond of saying?
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

 

Swindapa leaped over the side of the longboat as its keel grated on the shingle and ran up the beach with the quiet water cold on her shins. Then she went to her knees and took a double handful of the dirt there, grass and weeds and soil tight between her fingers. Her chest felt tight too, and tears prickled at her eyes as the nettles did at her skin. They didn’t drop free to land on her native earth, though. If she’d felt this way a year ago, they would have. But the Eagle People wept seldom; they kept their thoughts and their joys and their sorrows more within themselves. Part of them had entered into her, she knew, in the time she had spent among them, and in Marian’s arms. She would not weep, nor dance her joy along the seashore. Instead she let the bittersweet happiness fill her, like something growing behind her breastbone. A rose, with beauty and with thorns.

I am not what I was,
she thought, standing and looking around. That was both bad and good; more good, perhaps. The Earth Folk would have to become other than they had been, or they would cease to be at all.
Moon Woman
has
turned time itself to give us this.

The land lay green and bright about her, beneath a hazed-blue sky empty of all but a few high clouds and swirls of wings as birds took flight from the reeds to the southwest. There was a hamlet not far away, several compounds, one quite large. She’d been here before; it was an important place, boats from the Summer Isle—Ireland—came here, and people from inland to trade. Long ago the bluestones for the Great Wisdom had been brought this way, from far in the Dark Mountain Land—what the Eagle People called Wales. The soil was firm right down to the water’s edge here, not like the tidal flats and marsh to either side; and not far north two rivers met, the long Hillwater and the shorter Glimmerfish. There were beaten tracks through this pasture, and between the square fields of the settlement. Young wheat and barley cast bluish-green waves over those; farther away were cattle with red-and-white hides and long horns, and youngsters watching over them. Between the grainfields came others hurrying toward the strangers—light blinked off metal, spearheads, and the bronze rivets of shields.

Marian came up beside her. “Hostile?” she said.

Swindapa shook her head, touching the other’s arm briefly for reassurance. “No, making sure of us,” she said.

They were talking the Fiernan Bohulugi tongue; Marian worked doggedly at it even though the sounds were hard for one of the Eagle People.

“There must be war in the land, or they wouldn’t turn out in arms without sending a scout first.” She looked around at the
Eagle,
lying at her anchors well out on the broad waters. The
Douglass
spread her white wings beyond it, cruising inland cautiously. “Or, well, the ship may have frightened them.”

Crewfolk were forming up around them as they spoke; the Earth Folk party slowed and then halted as they saw so many spears. A cadet trotted up with a green branch, and the
Eagle’s
emissaries moved forward, waving it in sign of peace. Light twinkled as the Fiernan spoke among themselves, waving arms and spears; then some of them trotted back to the huts. The sun beat down, warm enough to make you sweat under armor. More of her people came from the settlement, hesitated, then came closer once more, and halted in speaking distance. One of them bore a branch as well, and several young men carried a wicker chair padded with blankets, holding an aged woman in a long patterned cloak. The rest were men in their prime, some with the Spear Mark on bare chests, others in tunics and leggings; one with gray in his beard wore a sword and a belt with gold studs, and a necklace of bear teeth and gold and amber. They flinched back at the strangeness when Marian took off her helmet and showed her black face and alien features, then visibly nerved themselves to come on again. Sweat shone on their faces. Their eyes flickered over the foreigners, and then out over the water to the great ship and its smaller consort.

“Greetings, if you come in peace,” the sword-bearing man said in the charioteers’ tongue.

“A fortunate star rule our meeting,” Swindapa replied in Fiernan. “Moon Woman send it so.”

A gasp went up from the little group, and an excited babbling.

“You speak like one of ours!”

“Like one of those turn-up-the-nose snobs from the downland country,” someone muttered toward the back of the group.

“I am Swindapa of the Star Blood line of Kurlelo,” she said.

The old woman exclaimed, then hobbled close. Swindapa bent her ear to the other’s whisper, and whispered in her turn, exchanging certain words.

“She is as she says,” the Grandmother said to the men, probably her son and grandsons. “The Kurlelo line who dwell by the Great Wisdom.”

“Don’t you know my face, Pelanatorn?” Swindapa said. Not really fair, she’d been four years younger the last time they’d met, and that had been brief. Who paid attention to one youngster among many?

As far as the Grandmother was concerned the Words settled matters, since Swindapa was obviously not a captive. No line was wiser or older than the Kurlelo. Her son looked dubiously at the twoscore or so foreigners already ashore.

“Who are these?” he said to her. “Yes, I am Pelanatorn son of Kaddapal,” he added, remembering his manners, and naming his mother to her in the same sentence.

“These are the Eagle People, from across the waters beyond the Summer Isle,” she said. “They come friends. Last little planting season they rescued me from the Sun People—the Iraiina, the new tribe, caught me, they held me captive—and I have been a Moon Year in their land, guesting. This is their . . . Spear Chosen,” she said, touching Marian on the shoulder. “Marian Alston. My lover,” she added proudly.

More gasps and murmurs; she might as well have claimed to have spent the year among the stars and brought back Moon Woman’s heart.

“They come friends?” the man said, looking at her with respect shaded with awe, taking half a step back. “That is well. We have need of friends.”

“There is war?” she asked anxiously.

“When hasn’t there been, since the Sun People came?” the man said bitterly. “But since last year, it’s worse in all ways. They have a sorcerer to lead them now, a child of Barrow Woman’s own suckling. Instead of fighting each other mostly, they beat us like threshers flailing out the grain. And their Tartessian friends raid along the coast in their ships.”

Swindapa’s eyes went wide in fear as she turned to translate.

 

The captain of the
Eagle
looked down at the picture again. It had been taken with a telephoto lens, from the deck of a moving ship, but it was clear enough.

“Will you look at that,” she said, throwing it down on the folding table with a tightly controlled gesture of disgust.

It was growing dark, the sun a fading crimson in the west, but the sides of the tent were still rolled up and the lantern hanging from its peak made the inside bright enough. The officers gathered round and leaned over the glossy photograph, exclaiming. Alston scowled out through the open side of the tent as they pointed out the details.

With three hundred and fifty pair of hands working, the American camp was going up rapidly. She’d had it laid out in the shape of a pentagon; there had been a few smiles at that, but it wasn’t really a joke. The five-sided figure gave you enfilading fire on the flanks from all the points where the lines met. A few locals—
Do
not
think of them as
“natives,”
she reminded herself firmly—stood by and watched, gaping. They’d picked a stretch of firm meadow not far from the high-tide mark, and the ditch went in quickly, dirt flying up. It was six feet deep and twelve across, with the earth piled on the inner side to make the rampart; inside went laneways flanked by ditches, with tents in neat rows and a clear central space for a parade ground. Working parties carefully cut squares of turf and laid the grass on the soil of the embankment; without cover the whole thing might well erode into a mudpie at the first hint of rain.

Time for refinements later
, Alston thought, hands clasped behind her back. A palisade, of course, when they had time to cut the necessary timber; huts for stores . . . and a central platform for Leaton’s pride, the centerpiece of the ROATS program.