Island in the Sea of Time (79 page)

“Take a turn around the canoes,” he whispered to the helmsman.

The seaman leaned against the tiller. Rudders were wonderful too, so
fast.
The crew bent to the oars with only a whisper of noise, sculling in perfect unison. Isketerol gripped the lead stay that kept the pole in the bows upright. Not to hold sails; it was topped by a barrel, and a long cord ran back along the pole. Loose
here,
and the pole would fall until the barrel submerged twenty feet ahead of the bows. Pull on this cord, and a flint-and-steel inside the barrel would spark . . . and the load of
gunpowder
would ignite. They’d tested it against rafts; the results were spectacular enough to make hardened sailors soil their loincloths. The effect on a ship’s hull, underwater . . . The Tartessian smiled and licked his lips.

He frowned as they approached the canoes and coracles. The Sun tribes weren’t seamen at the best of times, and in the dark they blundered in continuous near-panic, just as they had ever since they climbed down the sides of the ships and into these smaller craft. He hissed warnings and threats and shaming insults across the water as his larger boat coasted by, bringing a
little
more quiet.
I wish they weren’t along at all.
They might be useful to ram victory home, but they endangered it beforehand.

“This heading,” he said quietly to the man at the tiller. “Slow, all, now.”

Around a headland and there was the target, backlit by the fires ashore. Tall masts raking for the sky, the
Eagle.
On either side of it were the smaller shapes of the
Tubman
and
Douglass,
all three ships anchored at stern and bow with about a hundred yards in between.
Pinned down and helpless,
he thought. Arucuttag of the Sea had delivered them into his hands, and in the silence of his head he promised the Hungry One good feeding. There were fires and lanterns in the fortified camp a few hundred yards farther upstream, but they could do nothing. Will reported that better than three hundred of the Amurrukan were marching inland, far from their base. That left only a score or so per ship, and as many in the fort ashore.

The five boats with the spar torpedoes swung into line, quick flashes of shuttered lanterns guiding them as they’d practiced. The men at the tiller were all well trained, and they’d worked out a simple code to direct them to their targets.

“Forward!” he shouted.

The oarsmen bent to their work, the ashwood shafts flexing in their hands.

 

“Take your eyes off the Swedish Bikini Team, will you?” Doreen said. “This is serious.”

With something of an effort, Ian Arnstein obeyed. The two girls who’d been washing his feet were both about Swindapa’s age and looked a good deal like her. They were also wearing nothing but their string skirts, and he thought he understood the glances and smiles. Unfortunately, so did his wife.

He sighed, belched slightly from an excellent if unfamiliar meal, and put his mind back to business.

These Fiernan houses seemed to be much of a muchness, varying only in style and size. This one was huge, and circular like all the bigger ones. The walls were a framework of oak timbers carefully mortised and pegged together; the intervals were filled with rammed clay, chalk, and flints, covered thickly with lime plaster. Carved pillars made of whole tree trunks stood in three rings inside, and two huge freestanding gateposts like Abstract Expressionist totem poles marked the southeastern door. There were doors at the four quarters of the building, man-tall and made of pegged oak boards, but they were merely fitted into slots, not hung from hinges. When they were opened, as now, the dwellers simply lifted them out and leaned them against the wall. That let in some light, and more of the fresh spring air, along with a little of the fresh British spring drizzle. More of that came down the big central smokehole at the top of the roof, but not too much—there was a little conical cap over it, leaving a rim all around for smoke to escape through. The fire there flickered in a stone-lined depression in the earth that caught the heat and radiated it back out. Such of the smoke as evaded the hole in the roof drifted blue among the rafters and pillars above, joining that from ordinary family hearths spaced around the big building and gradually filtering out through the thatch.

“Not as squalid as I’d have expected,” Ian said to his wife.

She nodded. The interior of the greathouse was cut up by partitions of wicker and split plank, marking out the notional space of family groups smaller than the great interrelated cousinage that shared this dwelling, each with its own fire. The Fiernans didn’t suffer from shyness; they stared, chattered, pointed, asked question after question, held children up at the back of the crowd to get a look. They also pressed things on the visitors, bits of honeycomb, cups of mead flavored with flowers and herbs, pieces of dried fruit.

“And there’s the Archaeologist’s Nightmare,” he said, nodding to a pillar.

Doreen raised a brow, and he went on: “See how the post’s resting on a stone block?”

“That’s bad for archaeology?”

“Very. I asked, and these people used to set their posts right into the ground for big buildings like this. Post holes like that leave traces—you can dig them up thousands of years later, if the conditions are right. Then they switched over to resting the uprights on stone blocks so they wouldn’t rot . . . and that
doesn’t
leave any trace, if someone takes the block away later. The stones-and-bones crowd were as puzzled as hell, wondering why the locals suddenly stopped building big round houses. . . . Oh-oh, look out.”

Silence spread out through the folk like a ripple through water. Like a wave they sank down on their haunches, leaving a path clear. More of the Grandmothers came to sit by the edge of the fire. Two more walked on either side of a still older woman; the helpers were in their sixties, unambiguously
old
, white-haired and wrinkled, but hale. If you ran the gauntlet of childhood diseases and made it to adulthood, you had some hope of seeing the Biblical threescore and ten here, about one chance in five. The Kurlelo were what passed for an upper class among the Earth Folk, too, partly supported by the gifts of the pious, and so not quite as likely to be prematurely aged by a Bronze Age peasant’s endless toil.

The woman the junior Grandmothers were helping along was far older than threescore and ten; older than God, from her looks. Thin white hair bound by a headband carrying a silver moon; sunken cheeks, lips fallen in over a mouth where most teeth were gone; back bent forever. The attendants fussed around her as she sank painfully onto cushions and a wicker backrest, tucking her star-embroidered blue cloak around her and putting a closed clay dish full of embers beneath her feet for warmth. She shooed them aside impatiently and leaned forward a little, long gnarled spotted hands leaning on a stick whose end was carved into a bird’s head—an owl, here as in later ages the symbol of the moon.

Her pouched and faded eyes traveled across the assembly. Ian Arnstein felt a disinct slight chill as they met his. The mind that rested behind them was not in the least enfeebled. This was the one who’d received the reports of the Grandmothers who interviewed the Americans, day after day.

“Swin . . . dapa,” the old woman said, her voice hoarse but feather-soft. It carried clearly; there were no other sounds in the greathouse, save for the crackling of fires and a quickly hushed baby, and the breathing of sixscore.

The young Fiernan came forward and crouched at the ancient woman’s feet.
Great-grandmother?
Ian wondered.
Great-great?

The knotted fingers raised Swindapa’s face, and the ancient leaned forward to kiss her on the brow. They exchanged murmurs, too quiet to carry, and Swindapa turned and sat cross-legged at her feet.

“I will give you the Grandmother’s words,” she said.

The old woman paused for a long moment, lips moving slightly, hands gripped on the owl-headed staff.

“Uhot’na,
” she said at last.
“In HOja, inyete, abal’na.”

Her hand shaped the air as she spoke; after a moment her age-cracked voice merged with Swindapa’s clear soprano, and Ian forgot he was listening to a translation.

“A good star shine on this meeting. Moon Woman gather it to her breast. Long ago—” Swindapa hesitated, translating from her people’s lunar calendar. “Thousands of years ago, the Grandmothers of the Grandmothers came here to the White Isle. They came bearing gifts; the gift of planting and sowing, of weaving and the making of pots, the herding of cattle and sheep, many good things. The Old Ones, the hunters, came and learned these things, and their lives became better, and they became us, and we became them.”

The old woman’s hand rose skyward.
“awHUMna inyetewan dama’uhot’nawakwa
—”

“Best of all, they brought knowledge of Moon Woman and Her children the stars, Her sisters of the woods and earth—knowledge of foretelling and understanding. In those days Her messengers traveled from the Hot Lands to the Ice-and-Fog Place, and everywhere they brought Her wisdom, and the knowledge of the building of the Wisdoms and the studying of the stars.”

Another long pause; her eyelids drifted downward, covering the faded brilliance for a while.
Is she asleep?
Ian wondered. Then they ftickered open:

“Then the Sun People came from the eastlands where the morning is born, fierce and greedy like little boys grown tall without learning a man’s manners, and the great—” Swindapa paused, obviously hunting for a word. “—great harmony-in-changing-time-again-and-again was . . . made to not turn as it should, and as we had thought it would through all the changings of the world.”

A pause, and the old woman spoke very softly.
“soSHo t’euho’nis kwas dazya’ll—”

“And since then, the Grandmothers have looked into the future and seen only a darkness without stars before the feet of the Earth Folk.”

A slight shocked murmur went through the crowd. The old woman sighed, and went on. Swindapa’s voice translated:

“Every turning, the Moon Woman grows old and comes again. So too for all things. Our moon is past full, we wane, perhaps these strangers bring a new one.”

Swindapa’s face lit as she spoke, a grin breaking through her solemnity. “These Eagle People also study the stars, although not in our way. Already they have shown us things of great worth—the three rules that govern the movement of the planets, and the law of squares of distances that explains them.”

Ian squeezed Doreen’s hand. She’d thrown the cat among the pigeons well and truly, with that dose of Keppler, seasoned with a smidgin of Newton and soupçon of Laplace. For a while they’d been afraid the Grandmothers would start tearing out clumps of each other’s hair over the implications.

“ShahShar’it ye
weh
key’a
—”

“They are the only strangers who tread that path, and they have dealt well with us. The Grandmothers will tell the Council of the Sacred Truce to listen to their words, and follow them if they find them good.”

Captain Alston bowed where she sat. Ian felt Doreen jab an elbow in his ribs. They looked at each other in the flickering firelight; she was grinning like a cat. Solemnly, they shook hands.

 

Commander Sandy Rapczewicz smiled as she slipped down the night-sight goggles. Wouldn’t the skipper be livid that she wasn’t here, although she’d anticipated this might happen. It was the logical move, after all, and Walker had a high opinion of logic.
I hope you’re out there tonight, you son of a bitch,
she thought vindictively.
Break my jaw, will you?
It still ached in cold wet weather. Hell of a thing for a sailor.

“Ready,” she said aloud, and into the microphone.

“Ready,” the earphones answered back.

The goggles turned everything greenish and flat. She could see an occasional whitecap out on the water, and the giant rowboats heading for the Nantucket flotilla, with the canoes following. More than enough to shatter the hulls and swarm over the Nantucketers left behind when the main expeditionary force moved inland, as the enemy’s scouts had surely reported to Walker.

“Only we weren’t idle over the winter either, Will-melad,” she muttered. Louder: “Fire!”

The fruits of the ROATS program stood along the rail. Crews made their final adjustments, turning aiming screws. Then the master gunner stepped back from each and jerked the lanyard.

They were compact little engines, the throwing arms powered by a mass of coil springs from heavy trucks caught on the island by the Event. They were also more accurate than any counterweight system like a trebuchet, or catapults powered by twisted sinew. Four balls of fire soared out through the night from the
Eagle,
two from each of the schooners. Where they struck they splashed on the water, burning with a hot red ferocity. Searchlights stabbed out, actinic blue-white through the cloud-dark night.

“Fire at will!” Rapczewicz shouted.

“Reach Out and Touch Someone—
fire
!” a crew chief shouted.

Hands pumped at levers. Back on shore, within the earth walls of the Nantucketer fort, came a heavy
chuff . . . chuff . . .
sound. It built to a faster
chufchufchufchuf
and then into a racketing snarl.

 

“Demons!” Misklefol screamed.

“Shut up!” Isketerol shouted, clouting him savagely across the side of his helmeted head.

More of the fireballs arched across the night. The whale oil burning on the surface of the water gave a ghastly semblance of daylight. One of them splashed onto the galley next to his. It was close enough to hear the glass shatter and the men scream as oil splashed them. Seconds later it caught with a
whump,
a sound somehow soft and large at the same time, like a giant catching his breath. Or a dragon. Men screamed again, louder, as flame ran down the length of the boat. They cast themselves overboard, diving if they could. Others thrashed in mindless agony, and the oars drooped limp into the water. After an instant, the Tartessian realized what was going to happen when the flames reached the barrel at the prow of the little galley.