Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

  An ultralight was going up too, wheeled out of a hangar with ground crew hanging on to the wingtips as they wrestled it around to face into the wind. The fuselage below was a one-person plywood teardrop, with a little lawn mower-style engine and a ducted-fan propeller behind; stubby pylons extended on either side, bearing a brace of black-powder rockets.

  Jesus, I hate those things, Vicki thought. The electric ignition system for the rockets was . . . not very sophisticated—that was a nice, tactful way to put it.

  “You know,” Alex said meditatively after a while, “I’m a little surprised that the Emancipator got approved. I mean, it’ll be useful, having something that can scout way around and carry light cargo—and I’m damned glad I’m getting an opportunity to fly—but is it cost-effective?”

  “Not here,” Vicki said gently. “Not on the Island.”

  “Not—oh.”

  The younger officer nodded. Vicki Cofflin was the daughter of one of the Chief’s sisters, a much closer connection than his to the Secretary of the Council.

  “Well, let’s get back to work,” she said. “Don’t you love being on the cutting edge of technical progress?”

  “Damned right,” Alex said, nodding.

  Jesus, Vicki thought, as she followed him back into the hanger. I thought I was joking.

  CHAPTER TWO

  April, Year 8 A.E.

  Ranger Peter Girenas grunted as he lifted the gutted whitetail from the packhorse’s back and brought it to a nearby cache-tree. Two other deer hung from the white-oak branch already, and he quickly ran the dangling leather cord through a slit between the bone and tendon of this carcass’s hind legs.

  With one hand braced against the flank, he jerked the crossbow bolt free. Easier than digging out a bullet, and cheaper—it was only in the last couple of years that ammunition had gotten cheap enough to use for hunting.

  “Here it is, Pete,” Sue Chau said, handing him half the deer liver, spitted on the green stick she’d used to grill it over the low coals of the fire.

  “Thanks. Perks says thanks, too.”

  She laughed and nudged the dog with her toe. Perks didn’t normally allow liberties, but right now he was too occupied with the deer head to resent it. Girenas squatted by the fire to wolf the meat down; the smell alone was enough to make a man drool after a day’s hard work. It went well with the green smell of summer forest, the leafy-yeasty odor of the mold on the ground, and the spicy sassafras tea boiling in the pot. The rich organ-meat juices filled his mouth and ran down over his chin as he bit into the liver.

  Have to shave soon, he thought, wiping his chin with a palm. The bristles rasped at his hand. Or mebbe start a real beard. He’d tried two years ago, but it had grown in patchy, as well as three shades closer to orange than the ash-blond thatch on his head. Still, he was twenty-one now, old enough to raise a decent crop, and it would be a relief to stop scraping his face. Shaving in the bush was no joke, even with a good Seahaven straightedge.

  He was conscious of the girl’s eyes on him as he stripped off his equipment belt and buckskin hunting shirt and went to the edge of the creek to wash off. Look all you want, he thought, grinning as the water’s pleasant coolness cut through the sweat and dried blood on his skin. He stood an inch over six feet in his moccasins, with long legs and arms and shoulders heavy with the muscle that logging and hunting put on you. His face was broad in the cheeks, snub-nosed, weathered to a dark tan that made the pale gray of his eyes all the more vivid. He flung back his head in a shower of droplets and turned, still grinning. Sue was a couple of years younger than him, but well past the gawky stage; a looker, too, with exotic slanted blue eyes, amber skin, and long black hair, the heritage of a half-Vietnamese father and a French Canadian mother.

  Not that any of that old-timer crap means anything here, he thought, catching her eye and winking, chuckling when she blushed and looked away. You were a Nantucketer or not, that was the important thing here in the Year 8. So far all they’d done on this hunting trip was hunt, but he had hopes . . .

  She frowned as his expression went cold and his eyes slid past her. “Pete—”

  The man cut her off with a chopping gesture. “What is it, Perks?” he said.

  The beast stayed in his stiff crouch, head pointing northward and hair bristling along his spine, the beginnings of a battle rumble trickling out of his deep chest; he was a mastiff-wolf mix nearly a yard high at the shoulder, and right now he looked to favor his wild father’s side of the cross. Peter’s eyes flicked about. They had camped by a little overhang, where the creek ran down from a stretch of rocky hills. A couple of elms had fallen here in some storm, leaving a clearing edged with thick brush. Half a dozen steps in any direction the woods began, white pine north, white oak and chestnut and hickory lower down, all tall enough to shade out most undergrowth. Now that the sun was three hours past noon, the shadows under the great trees were deep and soft, hard on eyes half blinded by the light spearing down into the open space.

  Sue had gone silent, her eyes scanning as well. She took three casual steps sideways and picked up the Seahaven-made rifle leaning against a shagbark hickory, her thumb going to the hammer to pull it back to full cock. Pete walked toward his own bedroll and weapons, equally slowly . . . no sense in making whoever or whatever was approaching commit themselves.

  A twig snapped, and four men moved through the scrub at the forest edge. Damn, Peter thought as he halted and stood at his ease, his face an unreadable mask. Rather have a bear, or a cougar.

  “Heel, Perks,” he said. The dog trotted to stand beside him, hair bristling on its neck and shoulders, teeth showing long and wet.

  The Nantucketer raised his right hand with the palm forward. “Peace,” he said—the gesture was common here, and they might have that much English.

  Although I doubt it, he decided. They weren’t any group he recognized. Stocky, muscular men with bronze-brown skins, dressed in breechclouts, leggings, and moccasins much like his. Hide bundles rode their backs; two of them gripped flint-headed darts set in atlatls, spear-throwing levers; one had a steel-headed trade hatchet in his hand; another, an elaborately carved hardwood club. Their bold-featured faces were as impassive as his; he watched their eyes, hands, feet, all the clues that told of intentions. Each had the sides of his head shaved and painted vermilion, with the hair up in a roach above and trailing in a queue behind; all the tribes on the coasts near Nantucket did. These had bars of blue pigment across their faces at eyebrow level as well, and a strip of yellow from brow to chin.

  Whatever the hell that means. Maybe from far inland. Or they might not be from any tribe at all, just homeless wanderers from bands broken up in the epidemics. One had heavy facial scarring; he’d seen Indians marked up like that from the chickenpox in the Year 3. Or maybe measles from the year after.

  “Peace,” he said again.

  Uh-oh. They weren’t looking at him; they were looking at the camp. It wasn’t much, just two bedrolls and traveling gear, but it would be a fortune in steel weapons and tools to locals. And attacking strangers wasn’t considered wrong by any of the tribes they’d contacted—not unless oaths had been sworn.

  “You’re welcome to share our camp,” he said. “Hinyep Zhotopo,” he repeated in Lekkansu, the tongue of the seacoast people that the Nantucketers had most dealings with. Hunters from one of the bands who traded with the Americans would have replied in kind; they took hospitality seriously.

  Damn. No response at all, except to widen out a little as they came toward the fire. He was conscious of a cold, sour churning in the pit of his stomach and a furious annoyance that Sue was here . . . and all of it was incredibly distant, like the drumbeat of blood in his ears.

  “Stop!” he said, waving them back, scowling. Can’t just . . .

  The spearcast came with blinding speed. Girenas was already dropping and rolling as the ashwood shaft whickered through the space he’d been occupying to thud three inches deep into a beech tree and stand quivering.
The second spearman was aiming more carefully when Sue’s rifle went off with a sharp crack and a long jet of off-white powder smoke. The Indian folded around himself with a surprised ooof! like a man who’d been punched in the gut. He wouldn’t be getting up again, though, not with an exit wound the size of a baby’s fist blasted out the other side of him by the hollowpoint.

  Girenas flipped himself back to his feet, and the eighteen-inch bowie strapped along his right calf snapped into his fist, then into a gutting swing. The hatchet-man jinked in midleap as he dodged back, his war shriek turning to a yell of alarm. His friend with the club was using it to fend off Perks, the dog showing an endless ratcheting snarl and making little rushes whenever he saw an opening. Ignore it. The world sank down to one man and a razor-edged piece of steel on a two-foot wooden shaft. They circled, crouched, their soft mocassins rutching in the fallen leaves and punk of rotten branches. Five seconds passed, and then the Indian feinted twice and swung in earnest, a blow that would have chopped halfway through Girenas’s face. He met the descending arm with a bladed palm, and the hatchet spun away. The bowie slammed forward, cutting edge up.

  The Indian’s hand slapped down on his wrist. For an instant they grappled chest to chest, the heavy smell of sweat and the bear grease that the man wore on his hair rank in his nostrils; the warrior’s body felt like a bundle of rubber and steel. Then Girenas hooked a heel behind an ankle and pushed. They went down; the Nantucketer landed on top of his opponent, one knee in his stomach. The air wheezed out of him in a choking grunt. Girenas pinned him with his left hand and ripped the other free of the weakening grasp, stabbed once, again, again. The body thrashed under him and blood splashed into his face, but he ignored it as he rolled erect.

  That was just in time to see the third Indian grab Sue’s rifle in both hands, trying to wrestle it away from her. In a less serious situation, the look on his face as she hopped up, kicked both feet into her attacker’s belly, and fell backward to flip him up and over would have been comical. She spun around on her backside like a top, raising both legs and slamming her heels into the Indian’s face as he started to rise—a move from the unmercifully practical school of unarmed combat that Marian Alston had made part of Islander schooling. She scrambled to grab the rifle, came up to both knees and pounded the steel-shod butt into the Indian’s bloodied face again and again, panting with fright and rage.

  The last Indian was writhing under a hundred and twenty pounds of wolf-dog, trying to hold the fangs away from his face. Girenas scooped up his crossbow from where it hung on a branch nub and put the short, thick quarrel through the Indian’s chest a second before the wide-stretched jaws would have closed on him.

  That was a mercy, in its way.

  “Reload!” he snapped at Sue. She was pale and her hands shook. “Reload! Now!” She took a deep breath, let it out, and obeyed. He nodded satisfaction. “Heel, Perks.”

  Girenas pumped the iron lever set into the forestock of his crossbow six times, and the thick steel bow cut down from a car’s leaf-spring ratcheted back and clicked into place, ready for the quarrel he slipped into it. The girl pushed up the breech lever of the rifle, her eyes enormous in a face gone pale, thumbing home a paper cartridge, closing the action and priming the pan. They both went to ground behind logs, eyes scanning.

  “Perks! Circle!” he snapped.

  The dog slipped through the underbrush and made its way around their campsite. The ranger followed, infinitely cautious. He found Perks nosing back along a trail and followed it for a few hundred yards, until he saw a place where all the Indians had paused in a muddy patch.

  “Only the four of them,” he said as he stepped back into the campsite. Relief mingled with sadness as he cleaned the knife and looked at the dead men. “Damn—”

  Sue Chau had been staring at them too. Abruptly she turned and blundered three yards away before going to her knees and vomiting up a rush of half-digested deer meat. Girenas nodded, sighed, and took her a pannikin of water.

  “Rinse and spit,” he said. “Then have a drink of this.”

  The silver flask had been his father’s; it had Cyrillic lettering on it. The contents were pure Nantucket barley-malt whiskey, aged a year in charred oak. The girl obeyed, choking a little, then went to splash her face.

  “Sorry,” she began.

  “Nope,” Girenas said. “You did pretty good.” He kept his tone cool. “Still want to be a Ranger?”

  She looked at the dead men. The bowel stink was already fairly bad, and the flies were arriving in droves. “This sort of thing, does it happen often?”

  “Nope,” Girenas said again. “Sometimes, though. Mebbe once a year.”

  Sue took a deep breath. “Well, I’m not quitting,” she said.

  “Good,” he said with approval. “Now let’s cover them up and get going.” He looked at the sun again. “Might make the base if we push it.”

  They broke out the shovels and dug, setting rocks from the stream on top of the earth; Girenas planted the men’s weapons as markers at their heads. Silence reigned as they broke camp and headed south toward Providence Base; Sue went in the lead with her rifle in the crook of her arm, then the three packhorses with the kills and gear. Girenas brought up the rear, and Perks went further still, like a hairy gray shadow among the trunks of the huge trees.

  It was hours before they saw sign of their own people. That was scanty at first, a buried campfire, hoofmarks, a nest of feral honey-bees, clover and bluegrass growing wild from seed dropped in horse-dung. Then breaks in the forest canopy where loggers had gone through, clearings scattered with stumps and chips or already rank with tall grass, brambles, flowers, and saplings. They stepped onto a rutted drag-trail heading downhill, and then the hills parted to show Narragansett Bay gleaming out before them, white-ruffled blue water, banks and islands green to the water’s edge, sky thick with wildfowl. Half a dozen craft were in sight—a schooner, fishing boars, tugs hauling rafts. Below ran a road, gravel over dirt, and they could hear the faint shriek of a steam whistle.

  “Home,” Sue said.

  She opened the breech of her rifle and used the cleaning rod to tap the paper cartridge out, stowing it in the pouch at her belt before blowing the priming out of the pan and easing the hammer forward. Girenas slipped the quarrel from his crossbow back into its quiver before pulling the trigger with a flat whung sound.

  “Home,” he agreed, with a sigh.

  “Get sent to the past, spend all your time annotating reports,” Councilor for Foreign Affairs Ian Arnstein muttered, in the privacy of his sunroom-office. “What a dashing life we exiled adventurers lead. Christ, I might as well be back in San Diego grading history papers.”

  Well, not exactly, perhaps, he thought, resharpening his goose-quill pen on the razor built into the inkstand and looking down at the report. God, but I hate these pens. The last ballpoints had run out years ago, and nobody had gotten around to fountain pens yet; it was the usual story—too much else with higher priorities.

  God, but I miss my PC. Oh, God, for a laser printer.

  He pushed his glasses back up his beaked nose—and losing them was something he didn’t even want to contemplate, given what the Island lens grinders were turning out as an alternative—and read the paper before him again, winding his fingers absently in his beard. It was a long-standing gesture; unlike many on the Island, he’d had this back before the Event, when shaving was easy. It was bushy and curly and a dark russet brown where it wasn’t gray, like what was left of the hair on his head, almost matching the color of his eyes.

  He tugged harder as he read on. The Keyaltwar tribe over in Alba were building boats . . . probably war-boats for raiding abroad. Some bright boy in a leather kilt had figured out that while under the Treaty of Alliance they couldn’t hitch up their chariots, take down their tomahawks, and hit the neighbors up for cattle and women in the old style—several punitive expeditions had driven that lesson home—third parties weren’t covered.

  Thos
e people are like the fucking Energizer Bunny. There was a map of Alba in one corner of the room. A line ran from roughly what would have become Portsmouth to what would have become southern Yorkshire. Everything east and south of it was the various teuatha of the Sun People, the Indo-European-speaking newcomers William Walker had enrolled in his attempt at conquest; these days they were Nantucket allies in theory, a resentful protectorate in fact. West and north of that were the Fiernan Bohulugi, allies in fact.

  Dotted lines marked individual tribes. “Keyaltwar . . . right, north bank of the Thames.” The Sun People tribes weren’t much for commerce. What they did understand was raiding, rustling, rape, and slaughter; and now they were playing Viking.

  “Blond Proto-Celtic Comanches of the Bronze Age,” Ian muttered, turning pages to look at the sketch of the ship. Up front was a figure-head that looked for all the world like a dragon’s head. Some passing Islander trader or priest of the Ecumenical Church might well have told them about the Vikings, like dropping a catalyst into a saturated solution. As if they didn’t get enough ideas of their own. Have to be careful not to push ’em too hard, though.

  First, radio Commandant Hendriksson to send out more agents. The treaty forbade hindering traders and missionaries, which was convenient for espionage. Find out who exactly was doing this. Note: we might use bribes and economic threats to lean on the Keyaltwar high chief, if he’s not involved. Then see which of the Keyaltwar’s neighbors had the most blood feuds with them—inevitable that some would. They could complain to the Alliance Council at Stonehenge, saying that they felt threatened, and that would put it under the treaty’s purview . . . if you stretched that deliberately ambiguous document a point or two.