Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

  “Note,” he wrote at the bottom. “Consult with Doreen”—his wife treated Gordian knots the way Alexander had, and that corrected his tendency to on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other himself into paralysis—“then talk it over with Marian, Jared, and Martha.” He brushed the feather tip of the quill over his nose.

  “Note,” he went on. “Talk to Prelate Gomez. Missionaries?”

  For a moment he chuckled at the thought. A thoroughly secular Jew, helping to spread religion among the pagans of Bronze Age Britain. Ecumenical Christianity at that—the federation of denominations here, something rather like very High Church Episcopalian with Unitarian overtones. Another dry chuckle; the snake was biting its own tail with a vengeance, with Americans bringing the Anglican faith to Alba.

  Then he began writing up an appreciation for the Chief; they’d have to explain things to the Town Meeting. How the ancient Athenians had gotten anything done with all decisions made by a committee of thousands baffled him, all the more so now that he’d seen direct democracy in action.

  He sanded and blotted the paper, rose, stretched, and looked at his watch, Four-thirty, and he’d been working since eight. “Christa,” he said to his second assistant, ambling out into the sitting room and then down the corridor to her office. “Get fair copies of these typed up, would you? And run one over to the Chief’s, and one to Commodore Alston-Kurlelo at Guard House.”

  Almost unfair, he thought, looking around at the filing cabinets and map boards. Preliterate cultures just didn’t appreciate the advantage that being able to store and collate information like this gave you. But then again, as Marian Alston-Kurlelo is wont to say, fair fights are for suckers.

  Ian trotted up the first flight of stairs, to one of the converted bedroom suites that served as Doreen’s office. The former student astronomer looked up; she was sitting across a table from a short, dark man in a long woolen robe, flowerpot hat, and curled beard, repeating a sentence in something guttural and polysyllabic. Papers were scattered on the surface, some covered with ordinary writing, others with what looked like Art Deco chicken tracks.

  Akkadian, Ian knew, with a shudder—the Semitic language spoken in Hammurabi’s Babylon; he had to learn it too. Akkadian was the diplomatic language in today’s Middle East, the way French had been in Louix XIV’s Europe. At least they’d been careful with their language teacher this time, after the nasty experience with Isketerol of Tartessos in the Year 1. Shamash-nasir-kudduru—the God Shamash is Guardian of the Boundary Stone, or Sham for short—was a weedy little Babylonian date merchant whom one of the Islander ships had picked up in a brief initial survey of the Persian Gulf; he’d been living on Bahrain (Dilmun to the locals) and not doing very well. In fact, he looked a lot like Saddam Hussein after a long, strict diet.

  “My lady,” he said in a thickly guttural accent, with a sidelong glance at Ian, “here we have the . . . it is to say . . . symbol, meaning ‘day.’ ” He drew one wedge with the broad end upright, and two more springing off to the left and slanting upward. “It to be is able also to be the symbol for a sound.”

  “Which sound?” Doreen asked with a sigh.

  “It is sound ud,” the Babylonian said. “That is first sound. Also symbol is for tu or tam or par or likh or khish . . .” He drew another, with an upright wedge, three horizontal to the side, and an arrowhead to the left. “It is sound shu, qad, qat. Can mean quatu, it is meaning in your speech, ‘hand.’ Also emuqu, ‘strength,’ or gamalu, ‘protection,’ or . . .”

  Ian cleared his throat. “What say we commit some dereliction of duty?” he said.

  “God, yes,” she groaned. “Sham, you can knock off too. Same time tomorrow.”

  The Babylonian made a bobbing gesture over folded hands and collected his writing materials. Doreen tidied her own desk; she was neater than Ian, perhaps because as Doreen Rosenthal before the Event she’d been a budding astronomer in her late twenties rather than a bachelor—well, widower—professor of classical history just past fifty. She also looked extremely good bending over like that in a light summer dress, with her long black hair falling down and half hiding a wonderful view of décolletage. She’d been positively chunky when he’d first seen her, back the day after the Event. That was when she was working as an intern at the Maria Mitchell Observatory, where she’d used the little reflector telescope to pinpoint the real date from the stars. Of course, we all lost weight those first six months, and God knows we’re not likely to sit around watching TV anymore. Nowadays she could have modeled for a statue of Ishtar, one of the sexier kind.

  “Let’s pick up David and grab something to cook down at the docks—couple of lobster, we’ll boil ’em up and throw together a salad.”

  Their housekeeper-nanny had the boy in the kitchen with her while she sat with a cookbook, reading slowly, her lips moving. Back at the end of the Alban War the Islanders had insisted that the defeated Sun People tribes let all their slaves go free. Denditwara had been one of many who came to Nantucket, since she had no surviving family. The gap in living standards was so enormous that even the most lowly job here was luxury by Bronze Age standards.

  Sort of like Mexico and California, only more so, Ian thought. “If you haven’t started dinner yet, Denditwara, don’t bother,” he said. “We’ll handle it—Quigley’s Baths first, and then the evening’s yours.”

  “Thank you, boss,” she said, dipping her head; she was half his age and short, a round-faced blonde who looked extremely English, physical types evidently being much more constant than culture or language. The Alban gave them a shy smile of gratitude for the free time; she was seeing a young man who worked in the whalebone mill.

  Ian and Doreen winced slightly. Getting her to use something else besides the Sun People term for “master” had been difficult. So had getting across the concept of being an employee and working for wages.

  “Can I see the boats, Daddy?” David asked. He showed signs of sharing his father’s height, but the face had Doreen’s oval shape and olive tone and black ringlets hung around his ears.

  “Yes, you can see the boats if you promise to keep close to me and your mother,” Ian said. He could see the six-year-old considering the bargain.

  “Will,” he said. “I want to see the boats.”

  That’s a relief, Ian thought, chuckling. Nantucket was a better place for children than L.A., but there were still street hazards.

  “What a zoo,” Ian muttered an hour later, as they watched Denditwara scamper off to meet her bone grinder and David started to tell them about a game of catch he’d played with one of the other children in the baths. The roar of traffic nearly drowned the child’s treble piping.

  “All right, all right, hold your horses, we’ll get out of the way,” Ian said, as a carter cried for space. He and Doreen were standing on the broad, flat expanse of the Steamship Dock, where the ferry from the mainland had tied up to drop off cars and trucks and tourists, back before the Event.

  Arnstein looked up reflexively as he remembered that never-to-be-forgotten night . . . God, eight years ago. A little more, since the Event had been in March and it was into July now. The crawling dome of fire over the island, and then the terror next day as the impossible truth sank in. Then the even worse terror: seventy-five hundred Americans on an island that produced little besides daffodils and a few gourmet vegetables. Fear of starvation, food riots, cannibalism . . . Hell of a thing for a middle-aged professor of classical history to get himself caught in. Hell, he’d almost canceled his spring vacation on Nantucket that year.

  “But we made it. Tight at times, but we made it,” he muttered.

  He looked over at Doreen as she bent to jerk their son back from a determined attempt to pet a pony. The shaggy, stiff-maned animal was sulking in the traces of a cart heaped high with barrels of maple syrup from Providence Base on the mainland. It had a look of settled discontent on its face, an I-am-about-to-bite-you expression. The Bronze Age chariot ponies they’d brought back from Alba usually
did. The first generation crossbred from the Alban mares and the Island’s quarter horse and Morgan and Thoroughbred stallions were a lot better, but still expensive.

  “What was that, Ian?”

  “I said we’d made it.” The two of them nodded in silent agreement.

  Fishing boats were unloading amid a raucous swarm of gulls a little to the southeast, at Straight Wharf and its basin and the row of long piers constructed over the last few years. That part of town hadn’t been as densely built up before the Event, and the new waterfront there was full of fish-drying sheds, workshops, warehouses, and timberyards built since.

  Here on Steamship Dock only the respect due Councilors kept a small bubble of space open. Half a dozen brigs and schooners were tied up—the classes that Nantucket’s new merchant houses used for long-distance work. The ratcheting of the spindly cranes and winches that swung heavy loads ashore was loud even against the clatter of hooves and iron wheels on the pavement.

  Factors and dealers and storekeepers dickered and yelled, customs agents prowled, sailors chanted their rhythmic Heave . . . ho! stamp and go, stamp and go, heave . . . ho! as they hauled to unload cargo. Indians in blankets jostled kilted Proto-Celtic warriors and priestesses of the Fiernan Bohulugi cult of Moon Woman from Alba in poncho and thong skirt, watched by an Olmec noble wearing a cloak of woven hummingbird feathers that shimmered in impossible shades of turquoise, scarlet, purple. A herd of moas—the smaller breed, only four feet at the shoulder—were being pushed clucking and protesting onto a barge, headed for Long Island and the farming life. The spattered by-product of their fright added its aroma to the thick odors of drying fish and boiling whale blubber, raw leather, horses and horse dung, sweat and woodsmoke, tarred rope and wooden hulls.

  The fresh sea breeze kept it tolerable even in summer. Mostly tolerable. One reason the Meeting had authorized steam dredgers was to dig deep channels southeast up the lagoon, so some of the more odorous trades could be moved downwind of town.

  They dodged around a cargo from the Caribbean going inland on steam-haulers—bulk salt from the Islander penal settlement in the Bahamas, a few precious sacks of coffee from plants set out on Trinidad the spring after the Event, chunks of raw asphalt, sulfur for gunpowder.

  Plus quetzal feathers, jaguar pelts, chocolate beans, raw cotton, mahogany and dyewoods from trading along the Main, he thought. The list sounded more romantic than the hot, sweaty, dangerous reality; the Indians down there were corn farmers and therefore more numerous and better organized than the hunting peoples along the New England coast. There had been one short, sharp war with the Olmecs already.

  Of course, that was that noble savage True Believer idiot Lisketter’s fault. Rousseau, what sins have been committed in Thy name! Lisketter and her followers had ended up very dead, along with a few of the Islander military and a whole raftload of Olmecs. Lisketter’s people had been sacrificed to the Jaguar God and eaten, most of them. He didn’t even like to think about what had happened to Lisketter before she died.

  “And speaking of lobster pots,” he said.

  They pushed their way to the base of the Steamship Dock, along a waterside section of Easy Street, then over to the shallower basin beyond Old North Wharf, which now catered to the inshore fishery.

  “Got ’em right here for you, Mr. Arnstein,” the lobsterman said, hauling up a net dangling overside from his boat.

  “Thanks, Jack,” he replied, handing over a silver nickel, the Republic’s own coinage, and accepting the change in coppers.

  The former software salesman nodded thanks. David prodded the gently squirming canvas sack with his fingers and giggled at the sensation. Ian checked his turn at the fisherman’s soft exclamation and looked to his left.

  Another ship was being towed south between the breakwaters and into Nantucket’s harbor. The design was American; to be exact, a scaled-up copy of the Yare, a two-masted topsail schooner that had carried tourists around the island before the Event. It wasn’t Island-built, though. Countless small details showed that, starting with the stylized mountain on the flag at the mainmast top. Six small bronze cannon rested with their muzzles bowsed up against the bulwarks on each side of the craft.

  One of Isketerol’s ships. Ian shook his head; you had to hand it to the man . . .

  “When you tell it, my sire, it’s as if I can see it with my own eyes,” Sarsental said, his eyes glowing.

  Isketerol hid a grin. The new king of Tartessos was still in his thirties, with no silver strands in his bowl-cut black hair and all his teeth. He could remember what it was like to be a boy of twelve winters, just coming to a man’s estate and wild for great deeds.

  He leaned back in the courtyard lounger, smiling at the children sitting around his feet. Deck chairs were another Amurrukan thing. The Eagle People certainly know how to make themselves comfortable, he thought idly.

  “Weren’t you frightened?” one of his daughters asked.

  Isketerol laughed. “Some of us were like to soil our loincloths,” he said. “There we were, just two shiploads of us—the old ships, remember, small and frail—alone among the northern savages on a trading voyage. That was dangerous enough, they’re wild and uncouth. Then there it was, the Eagle ship itself. Three hundred feet long and made of iron—”

  They gasped.

  “—and with masts a hundred and fifty feet tall. Three of them. Hull shining white as snow, with a red slash of blood-color across it and the great golden image of their Eagle god beneath the bows. Many of us wanted to flee right there, I can tell you.”

  “But you didn’t, my sire,” his eldest son said.

  “No. Let that be a lesson to you.” He reached out a hand and made a snatching motion. “Be cautious, but when the Jester drops a chance for advantage, take it! The Jester is bald behind, you can’t grab His hair once He’s past. I stayed by the side of the barbarian chief we’d been dealing with, and Arucuttag of the Sea rewarded me. For when the Amurrukan, the People of the Eagle, landed . . . one of them spoke Achaean, and I could act as their go-between with the natives as they dickered for grain and beasts.”

  He fixed an eye on his eldest son. “See what learning foreign languages can do? I’d have been dumb as a fish but for that. So study your Achaean and Sudunu and English.”

  Sarsental nodded, slow and thoughtful. Good! Isketerol thought. He didn’t intend that his heir should fritter away the mightiness he was building here.

  “That’s when you met the Medjay chieftainess?” a daughter chimed in eagerly. “The Nubian warrior?”

  Isketerol winced slightly. Have I told it so often that children correct me? Still, it was important that they all learn; there would be work enough for all the children of his wives. Little Mettri didn’t look as if she’d settle down to spinning and overseeing the housemaids, and she loved this part.

  “Yes,” he said. “A tall woman, black as charcoal, was their captain. Alston was her name, a fierce warrior, good sailor, skilled with the sword and very cunning. She’s still the Amurrukan war-leader, under their king, Cofflin.”

  “A woman,” Sarsental said dismissively.

  Isketerol reached out a hand and rapped him on the head with his knuckles. “Their customs are different. Don’t underestimate an enemy! I’ve made that mistake, to my cost.”

  “Yes,” he went on, “she was the one who invited me to their homeland across the River Ocean, to teach them the languages of these lands around the Middle Sea. On the Eagle I met William Walker”—he pronounced the Amurrukan name carefully—“and became his blood brother, for he was discontented with the rule of Cofflin and Alston and wished to find a land where he himself could be lord. And there I learned much; and from him I learned much. Together we pirated the Yare and her cargo from Nantucket, together we conquered and ruled among the Sun People and the Earth Folk of Alba. When the Amurrukan made alliance with the Earth Folk and defeated him, it was I who took him and his band to the Achaean lands, and I received in reward the great ship Yare
and much of her burden of treasures.”

  “After you stopped here in Tartessos and made yourself king with his aid!” they chorused.

  “Not just made myself king,” Isketerol said. “Began to make Tartessos great—and after the Crone comes for me, you who are my children must make our city greater still. And to do that you must learn many things, so—”

  They groaned but obeyed as he signaled to the servant to take them back to their lessons.

  Isketerol stretched and sighed. Time to get back to work. He was a slight, wiry man of medium height such as was common in southern Iberia, dark of hair and eye and olive of skin, with thin white scars seaming the brown skin of his forearms and a mariner’s calloused hands.

  “Send in the king’s chief of makers,” he said. The mustketeer guards by the entrance to the courtyard stood motionless, but a messenger from the rank standing by the wall hurried out.

  Soon the official came, with a slave bearing a long bundle behind him. Both went down on their faces in prostration, and Isketerol signed them up.

  “Let me see it,” he said. Then: “Yes,” he went on, pulling back the hammer of the musket. “You have done well. I will not forget it.”

  The musket was solid and deadly feeling in his hands, stocked in beechwood, the iron blued to an even finish. Its smell of oiled metal was heavy and masculine amid the scents of flowers and sun-dried earth. He swung it to his shoulder and took aim at the figure of a warrior in the mural painted on the whitewashed wall of adobe brick across the courtyard.

  Squeeze the trigger, he remembered. Click-whap! and the hammer snapped down. Sparks flew as it cracked the frizzen-cover back. A pouch of cartridges accompanied the weapon, each with one charge in a cylinder of paper, and a bullet shaped like a conical helmet with a hollow in the flat base. A minié ball, the books said—why, he didn’t know, for it was not in the least round.

  “Yesss,” the king of Tartessos said happily.