Island in the Sea of Time (85 page)

Tom Hiller came up and saluted. “Captain.” The sailing master was looking harassed, his long face like a basset hound’s expecting yet another kick. “She trims . . . oh, hell, she trims as well as you’d expect. She wasn’t built for carrying horses, Captain.”

“She wasn’t built for carrying anythin’ but people, Mr. Hiller,” she replied, returning the courtesy. “Needs must when the devil drives. How are the new hands shaping?”

They’d sworn on two dozen Fiernan deckhands, out of hundreds wild to enlist.
Which is a good sign in itself. They’re not afraid we’re going to roast and eat them as soon as we’re out of sight of land.
Taking on locals also meant that she could get another transatlantic voyage in without putting too many of her precious trained Americans out of reach. For various reasons, she’d seen that more than half of the recruits were young women, and all from the coastal fishing hamlets.

“Pretty well,” Hiller said, turning his cap in his hands. “They’re all fit—better than your average cadet was to start with, and they’re used to living rough. And they pick up stuff like
haul
and
climb
damn quick. That phrasebook was really useful, by the way.”

“Thank the Arnsteins. What else is on your mind, Mr. Hiller?”

“Look—” He hesitated. “Look, Captain, I just don’t like leaving right now. Couldn’t somebody else—”

“No,” Alston said bluntly. “You’re the best sailor, and you’re leaving with the next tide. Everyone else who could command
Eagle
is doing something I can’t spare him or her from. And I need those wagons, and all the rest of it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he sighed.

 

“O
ne of them died, Chief,” Hiller said. “I think we over-tranked it in that storm off the Azores. Heart just stopped—or maybe it died of fright. Damn all horses anyway.”

“Damned lucky it was only one,” Cofflin said.

The
Eagle
was back at her usual berth, the old Steamboat Wharf. The wild-eyed little horses were led down a special ramp rigged with canvas barriers on either side, snorting and balking. It was a bright breezy-cool day in early July, with only a scattering of people watching; today was a working day, and there were enough fishing boats these days to sop up most of the able hands on the island. Even the strong sea breeze couldn’t quite hide the odors of drying fish, offal in the giant tubs waiting to be hauled out to the fields. A whale-catcher was coming in between the breakwaters as well, the long dark shapes of its catch towing behind. A cheery
toot-toot
cut through the bustle, sending a white cloud of gulls storming skyward.

Well, we’re certainly a seafaring island again,
Cofflin thought.

Beside him Angelica Brand was rubbing her hands with glee. “Ninety-seven, ninety-eight,” she counted. “All mares.
Marvelous.
”

“It means we can spare Captain Alston the people she wants,” Cofflin nodded. “Wasn’t sure it was possible.”

Hiller looked up sharply. “How so?” he asked.

Cofflin hid his smile; he’d noticed that the Guard people all bristled like that at a suggestion that Alston wasn’t infallible.
Sign of a good boss. God, but we were lucky
. They might have gotten a regulation-worshiping martinet . . . or, heaven forbid, someone with political ambitions. A grown-up Walker. He gave a mental shudder at the thought.

“Angelica’s arithmetic,” he said aloud.

The woman beside him touched her gray-streaked brown hair. “Oh, my, yes. The reapers are ready to go—all we lacked was traction. Two horses to each, so with the ones we’ve already got, that’s over seventy-five reapers we can put into the fields. Fifteen acres a day each, say a thousand acres a day all up, that means we can harvest the whole small-grain acreage in less than a week with only a hundred and fifty people. Granted we still have to shock and stook it by hand, and then there’s the threshing, but it’s still hundreds of people rather than thousands, the way it was last year.
Plus
we can use horse-drawn cultivators to spare a lot of hoe work done by hand.”

“Which frees up people for a
lot
of other work,” Cofflin said. “Not that it took that long even with sickles, but the people had to be
here
—sort of tied ’em down.” He exchanged grins with Angelica. “We could use a lot more livestock like this.”

“Oh, my, yes,” she said. “Another hundred horses at least, and a couple of hundred cows, more sheep too. As long as we can feed them on salt-marsh hay and fishmeal, they’re a perfect way to put humus and minerals in the soil. Virtuous feedback cycle, little fertilizer machines.”

“The captain said we’d be bringing back machinery,” Hiller said.

“And specialists to handle and repair it,” Cofflin agreed.

One of the crew came down the gangplank, duffelbag over her shoulder. It took a second glance before he realized she was a . . .
local
, he reminded himself. Quite a nice-looking youngster, apart from a few missing teeth that showed as she glanced around with a dazed grin. A Guard cadet came clattering down behind her, and they walked off hand in hand.

Angelica left too, anxious to shepherd her precious horses out to Brand Farms. Cofflin stood looking after her for a moment.

“I’m worried,” he said abruptly.

“Why?” Hiller said. “Everything’s going according to plan, so far.”

“That’s what worries me,” he said, and shrugged. “Well, let’s get to work.”

“Ahhhhhh,” the crowd muttered.

Alston nodded and smiled, raising a hand to shade her eyes from the sun. Inwardly she was breathing a long sigh of relief; horses were better, but they were using oxen for this demonstration, because they were so much more common. Evidently they would work, too.

The bright burnished-bronze color of the ripe grain was a pleasure to the eye, she had to admit; field after field of it, across the gently rolling surface of the downs. The reaper rumbled and clanked down the edge of one field, the little red-and-white oxen rolling their eyes and walking at an almost-trot as the driver goaded them. A small girl led the four-ox team, and her mother drove the machine itself—they wanted to show how easy these were to use. The plank-andwire reel spun like a slow paddle wheel, bending the tall stalks backward. Behind them the serrated edges of the cutting bar hummed, slicing the grain off three inches above the ground; it fell onto the moving canvas platform behind, and the raking attachment let it fall behind in a neat linear row.

A roar went up from the watchers. Two women darted forward and bent over the row, grabbing double handfuls and tying them into sheaves with a twist of the straw. Small children ran back and forth shrieking; crowds of their elders trotted into the field and followed the reaper, making the oxen even more nervous. Alston crossed her fingers behind her back, licking lips salty with sweat and thick with dust—at least the weather had been good, hot cloudless days. Less rare now than up in the twentieth, but still unusual for a warm spell to last so long. A good omen, in its way.

Two older men and a woman, richly dressed, stayed by the clump of Americans and their Fiernan allies; one of the men had a thin-bladed bronze sword like a rapier, and the woman carried a walking staff with a carved owl’s head on it.

“You did not lie,” the man with the sword said. “One such
machine
”—he used the English word, horribly mangled—“does the work of twenty.”

“Yes,” Alston said. “And the ones who work the machine need not be strong or fit.”

Abe
Lincoln’s secret weapon
, she thought. McCormick’s machines had cut the grain of the Midwest while the farmers’ sons were away in the blue-clad legions of Sherman and Grant. Unlike the slaves the Confederates had relied on, a reaping machine wasn’t likely to run away.

“And that means”—she switched to English for a moment—“Ian, Doreen, the maps”—then back into Fiernan, with occasional help from Swindapa—“that you can send fighters and grain to the meeting place that the Grandmothers of the Great Wisdom and the Council of the Sacred Truce suggested.”

At our strong urging,
she added silently. No need to complicate matters, and the Fiernans could be damned touchy if they thought someone was trying to boss them.

The three locals were leaders in this area, or at least as close as the rather anarchic Fiernan Bohulugi got. They looked at each other, and then back at the machine making its way around and around the grainfield, working its way in from the edge. Then the woman looked up at the sky.

“The weather is good,” she said. “But you can’t count on that.”

Everyone there nodded. Bad weather in harvest meant grain that had to be dried over fires, or worse still that went bad in the storage pits. That was why these people nearly killed themselves in harvest time; you had to get the harvest cut as fast as humanly possible.

The man with the sword tugged at his barley-colored mustaches; he had a stubbled chin. The cloth of his tunic was plaid, squares of woad blue and pale yellow.

“I don’t . . . will that
machine
keep working? What if it falls sick? If our strongest are away, and it sickens, then we lose the harvest and our children starve.”

“If the Sun People burn your houses and steal your crops, you’ll all die. And we have skilled craftfolk who can tend any hurts the machine takes,” she went on.
The miracle of interchangeable parts
. “They’ll show your own people how, too.”

The third man rubbed a gold neck ring. “As you say it, these machines need fresh . . . pieces . . . every now and then? They wear down, like a knife that’s been sharpened often?” Alston nodded. “Then if we use them to harvest, we’ll have to buy the pieces of you in future years, even if you give them freely this season.”

Damn, got to remember
—
primitive doesn’t mean stupid.
At that, the Fiernan were better traders than the charioteers; they didn’t think of all trade in terms of gift exchanges, for starters. That was one reason the Tartessians didn’t like them. The easterners were easier to trick.

“You can always go back to using sickles, when there’s no war,” Swindapa pointed out spontaneously.

The gold-decked man laughed; he had a narrow dark face and black eyes. “Water flows uphill faster than people will give up an easier way of doing,” he said. “And it’ll be,
Drauntorn, you’
re the Spear Chosen—go bargain for us with the Eagle People, so we don’t have to break our backs or risk untimely rain.
And scowls and black looks and no help for us trading men if we don’t, so we’ll have to pay even if the price ruins us.”

Alston spread her hands. “We’re not mean-hearted bargainers,” she pointed out. “Ask any of your people who’ve dealt with us.”

“I’m kind to my pigs, too, when I’m fattening them,” the man said.

“Would you rather deal with a Sun People war band?”

“Few have come this far west . . . but no, no, there’s wisdom in what you say.”

“Many of your people think so,” Alston said delicately. “Many are gathering.”

Swindapa had suggested the strategy. If a Fiernan community got violently unpopular with its neighbors, they’d steal all its herds, plus withdrawing the day-to-day mutual help that was an essential safeguard against misfortune.

The Arnsteins returned and spread the map on the table. The Fiernans’ eyes lit as she explained it; they understood the concept, but it took a while to understand the alien pictographic technique.

“. . . so this shows your land from above,” she said, circling her finger over a map of southwestern England from Hampshire to Cornwall and north to the Cotswolds. “Here is your district. Here is where the host will muster, three days’ march. All shown as a bird would see it.”

Or it shows things as Andy Toffler sees them on surveying flights with his camera,
she added to herself.

Aloud: “From this, and from the . . . ah, memories . . . of the Grandmothers, the number of fields and the number of houses and people can be told. To make sure that everyone bears a fair share of the burden of the levy, you understand.”

“Men can walk,” the mustachioed Spear Chosen said. “Cattle and sheep can walk.” Both the men looked pained; those were their capital assets. The woman—priestess, Alston supposed—gave them a sardonic sideways glance. “But grain can’t walk, and it’s hard to haul any distance.”

Alston rested one hand on the map and pointed with the other, to the big Conestoga-style wagons the Americans were using; dozens of them had come back with the
Eagle,
knocked down for reassembly.

“We have better wagons, as well,” she said. “Each can haul, ah—” she looked down at a conversion list that translated English measurements into the eight-based local number system and units—“two tons of grain five to eight miles a day.”
Even over these miserable tracks you people call roads.
“We have a
machine
to do the threshing, too. So you can move both the fighters and their food.”