Island in the Sea of Time (77 page)

She dusted crumbs off her gorget and then put on her helmet, clipping the cheekpieces together under her chin. Working parties had already packed the coils of barbed wire back on the wagons; others were shoveling the embankment down into the ditch. Little was left of the rest of the encampment, and less every second. Squads were filling their canteens at the water barrets—easier to purify in bulk—and falling in. Alston looked at her watch again and nodded in satisfaction. Quite an improvement since the first night on the march, much less what they’d done back on the island in practice. Cold raindrops began to tinkle on her helmet, not a steady drizzle but occasional bursts from the ragged clouds overhead. She ignored it, as the troops on foot did. The only people traveling dry would be the wounded under the canvas tilts on the wagons.

That was extremely different from things up in the twentieth. Here you got close enough to look into your opponent’s eyes, close enough to smell him. Close enough to watch the expression as edged metal slammed home. Of course, it also had the advantage of being close enough to see what they intended for
you.

The crowd of Fiernans outside the camp was larger, watching silently as the Americans formed up. Some of their Spear Chosen were turning thoughtfully, looking at the ordered ranks before them and then at the clots of followers squatting or sitting or leaning on their spears behind them.
They don’t know what we’ve got, but they
want it, she thought.

The scouts were already fanning out ahead. Alston took her horse’s reins, put her foot in the stirrup, and swung into the saddle with a slight grunt; the armor rattled, and she could swear she heard a slight
ooof
from the horse as well. It was a pony, really, barely thirteen hands high, but a sturdy, stocky little beast.

“Forward . . .
march.
”

The officers relayed it. Drums beat and the lead company swung off by the left, spears bobbing in unison. More blocks of troops, then wagons—including the well-sprung ones with the wounded. Alston clucked to her horse and trotted down the line to the front, flags rippling and snapping behind her, and fell into position at the head of the line. The track wound off into the downs; not far from the camp it passed six graves on a hillside with a good view of the battlefield, with stout oak crosses marking them until they had time to do proper stone markers. Alston’s right hand came up to the brim of her helmet with a
tick.
Behind her orders snapped:

“Eyes . . .
right!
”

The flags dipped, and the formations honored their dead. Even the Fiernans behind made gestures of respect, although they’d suffered far more cruelly than the armored Americans in the brief deadly fight.

“Soon,” Swindapa said as they went through the shallow stream and back up onto the downlands. The burned village was already being rebuilt; the Sun People hadn’t had enough time to completely wreck it. “A few miles to the southeast, and they’ll send someone to meet us. News will have spread everywhere, to the Great Wisdom and as far north as the Goldstone Hills.” Or the Cotswolds, to use a terminology three millennia out of phase.

She sounded eager, but not nervous anymore. Alston looked over at her; the Fiernan was riding with her helmet off and held before her on the saddlebow, looking in her armor like the cover of an adventure novel. The fight last week had changed something. For the better, as far as she could tell.

The landscape became flatter, the fields more open, larger, with more cattle and sheep and less cultivation as they rose. Long earthwork banks ran across it—field markers or symbols or something completely strange. Mounds rose above it, turf-green, sometimes with enigmatic shapes drawn across them in chalk. The crowds along the rutted trackway grew denser as the hours passed.

“Graves,” Swindapa said, pointing to the mounds. “For great folk.”

A scout came back up the trackway at a canter and saluted. “Party approaching on foot,” she said.

Alston returned the gesture. “Carry on.”

Swindapa fell silent, went pale, bit her lip, and blinked hard again and again. A party was approaching down the rutted, trampled dirt road. They wore woven straw cloaks against the rain, and broad hats. Two women with walking staffs, an older and a younger, and a couple of men with spears and bows. Alston threw her hand up, and the trumpet sounded
halt
and then
stand easy.
The Fiernans ahead flinched a little at the crashing unison as a hundred and fifty feet pounded to a stop, then came on again. Their eyes went wide again in astonishment as Alston removed her helmet and let them see her skin and features. The middle-aged Fiernan woman moistened her lips and began to speak:

“The Grandmothers of the Great Wisdom have sent me,” she said slowly and ceremoniously. Alston found she could follow it, more or less. “To tell you that no strangers in arms may approach the holy place. Stop here, then, or we will call the Sacred Truce against you.”

“Mother!” Swindapa squeaked, in her own language, throwing herself off the horse.

The woman’s eyes went wide, really looking at the yellow-haired rider for the first time. “Swindapa!” she cried, spreading her arms.

 

The older woman was in her forties and looked a decade or so older, rangy and blond; the family resemblance was obvious. She wore a longer version of the string skirt that seemed to be standard women’s dress here, made of interwoven strips of soft wool, each a subtly different color. Her belt had a gold buckle; the shirt above it was the natural gray of the fleece. Gold bands studded with amber were pushed up her bare arms, and the hands below were worn and capable-looking. Her eyes were the same deep blue as her daughter’s; they kept going back to the young woman at Alston’s side.

“Swindapa?” her mother asked. “I heard . . . I didn’t believe . . .” Tears trickled down her cheeks.

Swindapa hugged the two women again and again, then the men. “Marian, my mother—Dhinwarn of the line of Kurlelo—my sister, Telartano, my uncles Grohuxj and Adaanfa.”

Fiernan purled and bubbled between them, too swiftly for Alston to follow. The camp was going up faster than usual, with the early start and the troops fresh from a short march. Dhinwarn blinked a little at it, and more at the folding canvas chairs that appeared outside the commander’s tent. She sat in one gingerly, as if expecting it to collapse under her. A bundle on the younger woman’s back began to cry; she shifted it forward under her rain cloak, revealed a swaddled infant, and began to nurse it. At points in Swindapa’s tale her mother and sister wept again, quite openly; the uncles growled curses as well as shedding tears. Later they glanced back and forth between Alston and their kinswoman with awe and wonder. At last the torrent of speech slowed down so that the American could follow some of it, or her ear grew accustomed to the machine-gun rapidity. It was her turn to blink.

She
can’t
be saying what I think she’s saying, can she?

“Ah . . . ’dapa, what are you telling them now, exactly?”

A brilliant, proud smile: “I’m telling them what a wonderful lover you are!”

I thought so,
Alston thought with a slight wince. Telling them in extensive detail, from the sound of it; she’d learned Fiernan anatomical vocabulary quite thoroughly.
Talk about your culture clashes.
“ ’Dapa, no need for blow-by-blow, okay?”

She leaned back, resting her elbows on the arms of the chair and steepling her fingers, marshaling her scanty command of this language. Silence fell, and Swindapa’s mother took up her carved staff.

“We come . . . friends,” Alston said at last.

The Fiernans rose, came forward, and placed their hands on Alston’s shoulder for a moment. “Thank you,” Dhinwarn said solemnly. “You have returned my daughter to life.” The others repeated it. “My sister.” “My sister’s daughter who I put on my knee.”

Alston cleared her throat, touched; like the Navajo, the Earth Folk spoke thanks only for the very greatest of gifts, taking everyday things for granted.

“Swindapa, speak for me,” she said, when they were back in their chairs. “Tell them we’d like—I would, and a few others of us—would like to travel to the Great Wisdom and talk to the Grandmothers.”

Dhinwarn frowned, unhappy. “Why would you want to do that?” she said. “You are . . . Spear Chosen of the Eagle People.”

Swindapa stopped translating for a moment and began to explain, or tried to. Dhinwarn smiled and shook her head.

“Swindapa says you are much more than that,” she went on. “But a young woman in love often thinks more with her warm heart than her star-cool mind.”

The Fiernan metaphor came through accurately enough, but from what she grasped of the original the phrasing was much more . . . earthy. Alston suppressed a giggle.

“We also have knowledge of the moon and stars,” she said, and glanced up. The sky was clearing and sunset was only an hour off. “If the clouds allow, we’ll show you.” The Arnsteins and the telescope would, rather. “Also some other things you’d find useful. For instance, you memorize all the knowledge you keep, don’t you?”

Swindapa’s mother frowned in puzzlement. “Of course we remember it.”

“No, that’s not what I meant. You use . . . things, your circles of standing stones, knotted cords, tally sticks, songs, to
help
you remember something, don’t you?”

A method with severe limitations. From what Swindapa had told her and what Martha and the Arnsteins had figured out, the Fiernan Bohulugi savants had run into a dead end some time ago. There was only so much information you could store orally; eventually it took so much time that new generations couldn’t add any more without dropping something. Swindapa had mentioned how fewer and fewer of the younger generations were willing to go through the arduous apprenticeship, particularly with the Sun People pressing on them. This Bronze Age world looked static and unchanging to eyes brought up in the twentieth, but it was a time of upheaval by local standards. The faith of Moon Woman couldn’t adapt fast enough; it was rooted in the Neolithic.

Dhinwarn nodded. “We have a way,” Alston said, “of . . . marking down in symbols . . . both words and numbers, exactly, so that those who know it may take the record even generations later and understand it, as if the first person were speaking in their ear.”

The older woman leaned forward, keenly interested. “How can this be?” she said. “A tally, you can’t tell what it’s numbers of, unless someone remembers what the notches are for. And the relations between numbers, the Wisdom of their ordering, how can this be put in concrete things? Even the Great Wisdom—” they all made a sign with their hands, like drawing a set of geometric shapes—“has meaning only to those brought up to it, learning the Songs.”

Alston sighed and settled down to explaining. The sun faded and a trooper hung a lamp from the tentpole. Dhinwarn took longer than Swindapa had to understand what she was driving at, but her eyes lit like blowtorches when she did. Her voice trembled:

“My daughter . . . she says that among your people, there are great Wisdoms where these
books
are kept, and that any who learn the art may journey among the words of the Grandmothers-before?”

“Yes,” Alston said, impressed at how rapidly she’d grasped the concept. “We call them
libraries.
And the skill of reading the words is not hard to learn. Swindapa mastered it very quickly. So we can store knowledge like, ah, like grain in a big jar, and draw it out when we need it. Of course, you need to know enough to know what questions to ask.”

The others began volleying questions as well; once when Swindapa mentioned that she had seen constellations farther south unknown here her mother and sister rose and did a slow, stately dance around the fire, singing a minor-key chant. Their astronomy had long predicted it, and exact knowledge of stellar movements was the central element of their religion—it was how you read the intentions of Moon Woman. Alston spread a star map of the southern hemisphere and began explaining. Troopers brought their plates of beans and pork and bread; the Fiernans ate with their eyes glued to the paper.

At last Alston sat back, exhausted. “But I’m not what we’d call an expert,” she said. “I sail ships and I fight, when I have to. Here’s a learned person—Doreen, bring that telescope out—and she can tell you more.”

Damned oddest way to negotiate a military alliance I’ve ever heard of
, she thought, watching the astronomer and listening to Dhinwarn’s trilling cry of joy when she realized what the telescope could do.
Still, it could be worse.

If it had been the Middle Ages, they might have been burned as heretics—or found the locals dead-set on enlisting their help in liberating the Holy Sepulcher from the Saracens. In her opinion, defending Stonehenge from a bunch of blond Apaches was very much to be preferred.

 

“H
ere’s the title deed,” Cofflin said. “Place is yours.” “Thanks, Chief,” the Kayles said.

The crowd cheered.
Sixty-four acres of sand and scrub,
Cofflin thought. The young couple looked eager enough, though; and if you were going to do farming work anyway, you might as well do it on your own property. There would be loans from the Town to pay off, of course. The plank-and-beam barn that stood not far from the house had been financed by the vote of the Meeting, along with the pigs and poultry and miniature herd of three yearling calves brought back by the
Eagle.

There was a patter of applause as he handed over the title deeds, and now he had to make a goddam
speech.
About land titles and banking, of all goddam things.