Island in the Sea of Time (81 page)

One of the Indians was a man, hook-nosed in a narrow high-cheeked impassive face, looking weathered and ageless and probably in his thirties; his hair was shaved to a strip down the center of his head and a pigtail behind, the bare scalp on either side painted vermilion in a fashion that seemed common to all the New England tribes in this era—at least, they hadn’t met any that didn’t do it that way, just as the women all wore theirs in braids. His body was naked except for a hide breechclout and an islander blanket over one shoulder; he had a steel-bladed knife on one hip, and a long-hafted island-made trade hatchet thrust through the back of his belt. The women wore a longer wraparound of soft-tanned deerskin like a short skirt, with ornaments of shell beads and bones around their necks and porcupinequill work on their clothes. One of them was in her twenties, with a bundle-wrapped baby on her hip, the others in their early teens; they all carried heavy basketwork containers on their backs. Cofflin could smell them, a sort of hard summery odor combined with leather and the oil on their hair.

At a gesture from the man they set their burdens down on the single oak plank that served as a counter, four feet broad and four inches thick. Behind it were racks with the goods that held his eye: steel knives, spearheads, axes, hatchets, fishhooks and line, nets with lead sinkers, metal traps. The women were chattering with each other and pointing as well, at metal pots and pans, awls, scissors, cloth, cards of needles—Cofflin knew from reports that they used tailored and sewn clothing of leather in cold weather. One made a soft exclamation as she picked up a necklace of burnished copper pennies and let it run through her hands, then ducked her head obediently as the man spoke sharply and put it down again. A third looked guilty as she put aside a mirror. The islander behind the counter helped unload the sacks; Cofflin whistled silently at the sight of pure-white winter ermine pelts. Fur coats had become extremely popular over the cold winter months without oil for central heating. Besides that, the packs seemed to contain only small quantities of any one item: bark jars of nuts, crystallized maple sugar, dozens of varieties of herbs and plants and patches of deer, elk, moose, and beaver hide.

“Doesn’t seem to be much of anything there, Jack,” Cofflin said.

Jack Elkins looked up. “Hi, Chief! No, it’s samples. Hardcase here—that’s as close as I can get to pronouncing his name—”

“At least it wasn’t King Phillip,” Martha muttered.

“—brings the samples here, we show him what we’ve got, we agree on quantities, and he brings the actual stuff to Providence Base over on the mainland and picks up his merchandise. Easier that way. I think he’s collecting from a lot of his friends and relatives, sort of an entrepreneur.”

Cofflin blinked, surprised. “Mighty fancy deal, since you can’t talk to him,” he said.

“Oh, he’s picked up a little English,” Elkins said.

The Indian looked up from sorting his goods. “Hardcase very good talk English,” he said with an indescribable accent, then inclined his head in an odd gesture and returned to his work.

“And you can do a lot by holding up fingers and such.”

“Ayup,” Cofflin replied.
Well, they may not have a market economy, but they understand swapping.
“Surprised they can spare the time to find all this stuff.”

Martha nodded. “Lot of underemployment in most hunter-gatherer economies,” she said. “No point in working to get a surplus, because there’s nothing you can do with it. We provide an outlet, and the trade will build up fast. Provided there are any Indians left around here to do business with.”

Jared winced. Meanwhile Elkins was demonstrating a metal gadget about the size of his hand. He crumbled tinder into a shallow pan. Above that was a steel wheel with a roughened surface; the islander wound up a spring inside it with a spanner key. Then he clicked a holder with a piece of flint in it against the surface of the wheel and pressed a release stud. The wheel spun against the flint, releasing a shower of sparks into the pan. Elkins blew on the tinder softly, then tipped it out into a clay dish on the counter full of wood shavings. They caught and sent a tendril of smoke upward. The islander waited until flames were crackling, then smothered them with a lid.

The Indian’s eyes flared interest as he took the fire-starter up, turning it over and over in his fingers. Cofflin wasn’t surprised; he’d seen Martha’s Scouts demonstrate using a bow-type fire drill. Fifteen minutes to start a fire, if you were lucky—and everything was bone-dry. Evidently the local Indians hadn’t even gotten that far. They were still using the older method of twirling a stick between the palms, and that could take
hours.
This would be a real improvement.

Of course, once they’re used to it, they’ll be dependent on it,
he thought uneasily. The same went for woven cloth and metal tools, even more so. Martha nodded when he voiced the thought aloud, and replied:

“No telling. No telling how that virus epidemic disrupted their society either. . . . Nothing much we can do, dear.”

One of the Indian women had looked up with a startled expression at Martha’s voice, and she put her hand to her mouth in a gesture of surprise. Cofflin followed her gaze; his daughter was in a stroller in front of his wife, sleeping peacefully. The Indian woman craned her head to see around the hood of the baby carriage, then came over to look down. She unslung her own—
well, papoose, I suppose—
and held it out to Martha, smiling broadly and speaking in her own fast-rising, slow-falling language. Martha smiled back at her and picked up young Marian; the women held their babies side by side, the Indian fascinated by the pink skin and the cloth diaper with its safety pin. She exclaimed and laughed when the American demonstrated that, bringing her own around to nurse as she did so. The Cofflins’ child yawned, waved pudgy hands, and went back to sleep.

Well, only fair,
Jared thought, smiling.
She didn’t do much sleeping last night, and so neither did we.

The man’s voice rose behind them. Then he was at the Indian woman’s side, pulling her away with a swift hard tug on one braid. She cried out sharply in pain, then stood half-crouched. He cuffed her across the side of the head, then raised the hand again.

“Hold it, dickweed!”

The guard who’d been sitting unobtrusively on a stool in one corner pushed between them. There was a bolt locked into the firing groove of her crossbow, the edges of the three-bladed head glinting cruel and sharp in the sunlight that came through the window behind her. The Indian froze. One hand moved very slightly toward the knife at his belt.

“Back off, shithead!” the guard barked. “Now. I mean it, fucker. Back off or your liver does the shish kebab thing.”

Sweat beaded the Indian’s forehead; he knew exactly what one of those crossbows could do. The Nantucketers had demonstrated, and also refused to sell them at any price. Behind him the clerk brought another out from under the counter and laid it on the wood with a small deliberate clatter. The Indian drew himself up, turned, and walked back to his bundles of goods, the woman with the papoose following meekly behind him. The bargaining resumed, slow and stiff.

Cofflin let out a breath he hadn’t been conscious of holding. Martha put the baby back in the carriage, tucking her in; there was a small protesting murmur.

“You have much trouble like that?” Cofflin asked the guard.
Amelia Seckel,
his mind prompted him. As far as he knew, she was working for Seahaven’s clerical department. “Ms. Seckel,” he added.

“Nope, not often, Chief. Just, you know, sometimes with these guys you have to use, like, visual aids to get things across.” She patted her crossbow. “It’s the universal language. That’s why Ron has one of us out here when they’re in to trade, me or John or Fred Carter. Hey, cute kid! You want I should watch her while you’re in there? Bit noisy on the workshop floor for a youngster.”

“Thanks, Ms. Seckel, I’ll take you up on that,” he said. “Culture clash,” he murmured to his wife as they turned for the main entrance.

Martha nodded, her mouth still drawn thin. “Well, that settles Angelica’s notion, I think.”

“What—oh.”

Angelica Brand had been wondering aloud at Council meetings if they couldn’t recruit some temporary harvest labor on the mainland. It
would
be extremely convenient; with enough seed and to spare, they were clearing more land and planting a
lot
more this year, and every other project was crying out for hands as well. Putting everything on hold while they got in the harvest was an absolute pain in the fundament—and the various crops meant that harvest stretched through most of the summer and on into fall.

On the other hand, the locals didn’t look like being the best imaginable
braceros,
and anyway, it was a bad precedent to start relying on foreign labor, he supposed.

“I see what you mean.”

Martha nodded again, a gesture sharp enough to cut hide. “Well, there’s always the Sir Charles Napier method of cultural reconciliation,” she said. At his raised eyebrow, she went on: “He was a British governor in India, back—you know what I mean—in the 1830s. A delegation of Brahmins came to him and complained that he was oppressing them by forbidding
suttee,
widow-burning, that it was part of their religion.”

“What did he tell them?” Cofflin asked, curious.

“Roughly . . .” She assumed a British accent; it wasn’t too different from her native academic New England:

A few people looked up as Cofflin guffawed
. “There’s
British understatement for you,” he said. “We’re not really in a position to do much crusading, though.”

“No, but we’ll do what we can where we can.” She swallowed. “That’s one thing I became quite determined about during the . . . episode . . . down south.”

He touched her shoulder, squeezing in reassurance.

“I didn’t think Indians were so hard on women,” he said, changing the subject. “The Iroquois and all that.”

“Depends,” Martha said, relaxing. “Lots of variation from time to time and place to place, tribe to tribe—well, Sicily and Sweden weren’t exactly alike up in the twentieth, were they? Or New England and south Texas, come to that. Offhand, I’d say it was agriculture that made the difference here. When these woodland Indians took—would have taken—up maize and bean farming, women raised the crops and it probably increased their general say in things.”

The inside of the machine shop
was
noisy, also steamy and hot despite the big doors leading to the water being left open. There were four large steam engines going now. Dozens of lathes, grinders, drill presses, and machines more complex whined and growled and screamed. As the Cofflins entered a yell of triumph went up from a crowd at the far end of the building. They walked over, peering at the new machine. It was vaguely shaped like an elongated upright C on a heavy flat base, about twelve feet tall; a cylinder was fixed by wrist-thick bolts to the top, and from it depended a heavy rod with a hammerlike weight at the end. A steelslab anvil rested below it; Ron Leaton was just placing an egg on that. He stepped back, gripped a lever with a theatrical flourish, and pulled it toward him. The hammer on the end of the piston rod came down on the egg . . . and stopped, barely touching it. The control lever sent it back upward with a hiss and
chunk
sound.

Leaton stepped forward, grinning, and picked up the egg. He peeled it—hard—boiled, evidently—and ate it with ostentatious relish. The crowd dispersed back to their tasks, laughing and back-slapping.

“Another masterpiece of invention?” Cofflin asked dryly.

“Naysmith’s steam hammer—pneumatic, actually; we’re using compressed air,” Leaton said cheerfully, wiping his hands on his inevitable oily rag and stuffing it back into a pocket of his overalls. “He did that bit with the egg to show it had precision as well as a heavy wallop, and I thought, what the hell, it worked for him—” He shrugged. “It’ll be really useful, now that we’re making progress with that cupola furnace. With that and the hammer, we can start doing some real forging work—crankshafts, propeller shafts even.”

“Good work,” Cofflin said, sincerely impressed. Leaton was a godsend; without the seed of his little basement shop, the island as a whole would be a lot farther behind than it was. “What was it you wanted to discuss with us, Ron?” He had a couple of things to say himself, but it was easier if Leaton started the conversation.

“Well, a couple of things, Jared, Martha,” the proto-industrialist said.

The three of them walked over to his office, a plank box built in a corner. They ducked in and lifted tools, samples, plans, and parts off the board chairs before they sat.

“First thing is, I need more lubricants and more leather for drive belts,” he said.

“Talk to the whaling skippers and Delms,” Cofflin said immediately. Delms had taken over the contract on the whale rendery down by the Easy Street basin, with a tannery as a sideline. Cofflin approved. Let
Delms
take the continuous flack for the way it smelled. There was a motion afoot to have the whole thing moved farther from town, anyway, and the bonemeal plant and salting works along with it.

His mouth quirked up at one corner. “Government’s out of that business, Ron. Thank God.”

“And we’re getting too much ash built up here,” Leaton said. The engines were all wood-fired, and the valuable waste was supposed to go onto the soil immediately.

“Take
that
up with Angelica and the farmers,” Cofflin replied promptly. This time he grinned outright. “It’s their fertilizer. Government’s out of that, too.
Christ,
but it’s good to be able to say that!”