Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

  More stock, she thought. More fodder to overwinter it. New byres and sheepfolds, too. Bigger beasts, some of them. Something teased at her eye, until she realized it; she’d seen scarcely a single woman spinning a distaff as she walked or sat. Thread comes from the machines now.

  Some of the small square fields had been thrown together for the convenience of the animal-drawn reapers the Eagle People had brought, too, changing the very look of the land. If you looked closely, there were other changes; iron tools in the hands of the cultivators, more and more colorful clothes and cobbled shoes on the dwellers, brick-walled wells, the little outhouses that the Islander medical missionaries had advised and the Grandmothers agreed to make part of the purity rituals, here and there a chimney, or a wagon with a load of small cast-iron stoves, or a wind pump.

  “More changes than you would think, and more every year—like a rock rolling downhill,” Dhinwarn told her, sensing her thought. “Some are discontented, thinking they break old harmonies. Others say no, best of all so many more of our children live and grow healthy.”

  Her smile grew slightly savage. “And because we listened first, we grow faster than the Sun People in all ways, wealth and knowledge and numbers. Many of them come west now—not to raid, but asking for work or learning.”

  Swindapa nodded. “We had to become other than we were, or cease to be at all,” she agreed.

  They spoke more, but her voice was choked off when the Great Wisdom itself rose above the horizon on the east, looming over the bare pasture as it had been made to do so many centuries before. She had seen the pictures on Nantucket, of the great stones shattered and abandoned, their true purpose lost. There were times when that image seemed to overwhelm her memories, but here the Wisdom stood whole and complete, the great triathlons and the bluestone semicircle . . .

  She began to sing under her breath, the Naming Chant that called each stone by its title, and listed the Star-Moon-Sun conjunctions that could be sighted from it—not only the great ones, the Midwinter Moon that chased the flighty Sun back to Its work of warming the Earth dwellers, but the small friendly stars that governed the hearth or the best time to take a rabbit skin.

  Marian never could sink her mind into this, she thought. Odd, for she knows the Eagle People’s counting so well. Perhaps it’s that she can’t see that a word can be a number too.

  Beside her Heather and Lucy grew quiet until she finished, their lips silently following along on some of the simpler bits. When she was done and waved them ahead they clapped heels to the ponies and rode off to the north, toward the Kurlelo greathouse, shouting greetings to cousins they hadn’t seen for a quarter of their short lives. Swindapa stood in the stirrups and shaded her eyes with a hand.

  The huge round, half-timbered shape of the greathouse, with its conical roof of thatched wheat-straw, looked subtly different. A metal tube at the apex . . .

  “ You put in a copper smoke-hood!” she said, delighted.

  Her mother nodded and took off her conical straw hat. “It’s much easier on the eyes now,” she said. “And warmer in winter. Better for the girls doing the Chants, too.” She smiled. “We’ve so much more time for that! More time for songs and stories, for making bright-please-eye-warm-heart-joy-in-hands things.”

  Swindapa’s smile died as she remembered that this was not only a visit. It was a meeting, and the news was of war. The Grandmothers didn’t decide such matters; that wasn’t their business, save where the Sacred Truce was concerned. But those who did decide such matters would listen carefully to their opinions.

  “Uhot-na. InHOja, Inyete, abal’na,” the elder of the Grandmothers in the circle began, as the last of those who felt they should be here drifted into the smaller round hut and ranged themselves about its hearth. Her owl-headed staff nodded in her hand.

  There were a score and one in all, a lucky number, although nobody had arranged it thus. Swindapa breathed in the scent of woodsmoke and thatch and cloth and sweat . . . yet even this wasn’t as it always had been. The smells included soap, the bitter scent of hops, and one of those sitting around the whitewashed wall was wearing glasses.

  “A good star shine on this meeting. Moon Woman gather it to her breast. We’re here to talk, let’s talk,” the Eldest said.

  She picked up the sticks in her hands, tapping lightly along their colored, notched lengths. Each notch and inset in the yard-long wands marked some happening, or feeling, or shade of meaning. They squatted on their hams around the fire, shadows flickering on their faces—wrinkled crone, stout matron whose drooping breasts were proud sign of the children she had born, Swindapa the youngest of them but the one whose path had wandered beyond Time along the Moon-trail. Others, star-students, Rememberers, Seekers.

  The Grandmothers of the Great Wisdom.

  The Eldest spoke, with her voice and with the flashing sticks: “ Would that the Eldest-Before was with us, who first greeted the Eagle People, was here.”

  She saw so far, so much. I’m lost without her.

  Another set of sticks took up the tapping rhythm. “You sat by her feet a long time. We’ll listen to you; there are many here, we’ll find out what Moon Woman wants. Everybody rides the Swan sometime.”

  Love, trust.

  Greatly daring, Swindapa took up her rods. She’d made them herself, on the voyage over. They looked different; more angular, in parts, with strange colors. That showed her spirit . . .

  “ I’ve seen the changes here. Most of them are happy.”

  Doubt, uncertainty, a tremulous joy, children laughing, cattle lowing, peace.

  More tick-tapping, weaving in and out. An older woman spoke: “Happy for now. In the many-cycles to come, who knows.”

  Doubt, nagging worry—concern.

  The eldest: “Eldest-Before saw only a darkness without stars before the feet of the Earth Folk, before the Eagle People came from out of time.”

  Relief, joy, an aching not noticed until it went away.

  Another: “ We thought we’d have peace, but now the Eagle People are talking of a war, far away, with people who never harmed us. Is that the path Moon Woman’s stars reflect, now? ”

  Distaste, wariness, doubt, doubt.

  “Moon Woman shines in all the lands—who aren’t Her children? The Eagle People came from very far to help us, shouldn’t we do the same for others? ”

  Resolution, resignation.

  “Earth Folk have never carried spears so far. Bad enough to fight for our own hearths.”

  Blood, mothers burying children, burning, grief, wrongness.

  Swindapa took up the exchange. Her people were great rememberers. So:

  “Once the Earth Folk lived from the Hot Lands to Fog-and-Ice place. We didn’t carry spears beyond our own neighborhoods, but the dyaus arsi, the Sun People, they carried them everywhere. One fight, another, everyone hoped each would be the last. And when the Eagle People came, we’d gone back so far our heels were wet in the ocean at our backs. Not everything is good, just because we always did it.”

  Resolution, fierceness, sadness.

  Another voice: “There’s too much of the dyaus arsi in the Eagle People, for my taste. They are a restless breed; even in their Wisdom Working they cut everything up, then stick the bits together to suit them. Bossy, rude, turn-up-the-nose-we-know-best. I don’t like this Father-Son-Spirit teaching they bring, either.”

  Irritation, disquiet, longing for peace, for the endless turning-in-harmony-growing.

  Swindapa: “ Yes, they descend from the Sun People, but with some of us in them, too. And an acorn doesn’t look much like an oak; you can’t eat an apple until it’s ripe.”

  Patience, waiting-becoming, patience.

  Another: “There’s more than one road to the same place. Call an apple an ash, it’s still an apple—the Father-Son-Spirit-Mother doesn’t teach as Diawas Pithair did. If the Eagle People are greedy and fierce, they don’t take it out and stroke it the way the charioteers do.”

  Wonder, acceptance.<
br />
  Dhinwarn: “They gave my daughter back to me, when she was taken from the Shining World. They beat back the Burning Snake for her, that had eaten all her dreams.”

  Love, warmth, hearthache-assuaged, joy.

  The words went back and forth, until the words faded out of it and there was a tapping chorus of agreement, woven in and among the humming song. After a while they began to sway, and then they rose, dancing in a spiral. The spiral wove out of the hut, and an owl hooted and flew above them as they swayed and hummed toward the Great Wisdom.

  “ This is more Ian and Doreen’s kind of work than ours,” Swindapa said, drawing her horse a little aside.

  Marian cocked an eye at her and chuckled. “First you grumble about how we’re always fighting,” she said. “Now we’re playing at diplomats, and you complain about that.”

  Swindapa smiled herself, then sighed and shrugged. “I don’t like going among the Sun People much,” she said.

  Marian nodded sympathy. “Don’t let them make you il’lunHE peko’uHOtna, then,” she said.

  That meant something like gloomy; or perhaps dark-spirited or Moon-deprived. Even after these years, she still found the Earth Folk language a tangle; she suspected that you had to grow up speaking it to truly understand it well. Still more the dialect of Swindapa’s home, where they piled pun upon allusion upon myth in a riot of metaphors.

  “ You’re right, my Bin’HOtse-khwon,” Swindapa said. “ But I miss the children.”

  “So do I, sugar, but they’re happy enough at your mother’s place for a while.”

  The Islander party drew rein at the edge of the woodland trail, looking downward. The sun of the summer evening cast long shadows across them, and over the landscape that stretched away to the marshes by the Thames—the Ahwun’rax, the Great Chief River. In one course of the tides of time, this was the border of southern Bucking-hamshire, not far from Windsor. Here it was the tribal lands of the Thaurinii folk, the teuatha of the Bull.

  The stockaded ruathaurikaz of their chieftains stood atop a low chalk cliff above the river. Faint and far, a horn droned. Below, at the foot of the heights, lay that which made this clan more important than most. The river split around a long oval-shaped island; from the south bank a bridge of great timbers reached to the isle, and another from there to the north shore. Boats lay at anchor downstream of them; even from here Marian could see that some of them were quite large, one a modern design, probably out of Portsmouth Base or Westhaven.

  Around the fortlet lay open pastureland where shaggy little cattle and horses and goatlike sheep grazed. Fields were smaller than the grazing, wheat and barley just beginning to show golden among the green; hawthorn hedges marked them out, or hurdles of woven willow withes. Farmsteads lay strewn about, dwellings topped with gray thatch cut from river reeds. Men at work in the fields, women hoeing in gardens, all stopped and pointed and stared, the racket of their voices fainter than the buzzing of insects. Not far away a girl in a long dress and shawl squeaked as she heard the thud of hooves and rattle of metal. She almost dropped the wicker basket of wild strawberries in her hands, then took to her heels, yelling.

  Apart from that there was no sign of alarm, no signal fires or glints from a gathering of spearheads; instead the folk gathered to stare and point, some crying greetings. The peace of the Alliance lay on the land of the Thaurinii, with not so much as a cattle raid to break it. There had always been more trade here than in most steadings; the boats marked it, and the sign of many wagons on the roadway.

  Dust smoked white under hooves and wheels as they rode down the gentle slope. The sun was hot for Alba, and sweat prickled her body under the wool and linen of her uniform. Behind her the Marine guard drew into a neat double rank of riders, with the Stars and Stripes of the Republic at their head. Behind them were the two-wheeled baggage carts and the attendants that Sun People respectability required.

  The horn dunted again from the chieftain’s steading, and the narrow gate swung open. No chariot came out of it; the reports were accurate, then—this particular tribal hegemon was progressive, as such things went in the Year 9. Instead of the traditional war-cart, he and his rode horseback, with saddles and stirrups made to Nantucketer models. They did carry weapons, but that was to show respect to warrior guests, swords slapping at sides in chased bronze scabbards or the more common axes across saddlebows, painted shields across their backs.

  Likewise their finery, bright cloaks and tunics in gaudy patterns, kilts pyrographed in elaborate designs—or, for some, Islander trousers. The leader wore a tall bronze helmet with great ox horns mounted on it, the totem of his tribe. Beside him was a younger man whose helm was mounted with a metal raven, its wings flapping as his horse cantered; that was bravado, a declaration that he claimed the favor of the Crow Goddess, the Blood Hag of Battles. Behind the chieftain and his retainers walked trumpeters blowing on long, upright horns. Their bellowing echoed back from trees and river and palisade and a storm of wildfowl took wing from the water.

  Marian flung up her hand. The trumpeter behind her blew his bugle, and the little column came to a halt. A wind from the river flapped out the red-white-and-blue silk of Old Glory, and the gilt eagle above it seemed to flap its wings as well.

  “I am Commodore Marian Alston-Kurlelo,” she said in the local tongue. “Daughter of Martin, War Chief of the Eagle People.”

  That harsh machine-gun-rapid speech came easily enough to her now; the complex inflections and declensions were simple, compared to her partner’s language.

  “ We come in peace,” she went on, “to speak for the Republic to the chieftains of Sky Father’s children.” They’d undoubtedly heard of the mission and its message by now, but the forms had to be observed.

  The older man nodded. He was tall for this era, an inch or two more than Marian. His brown beard was in twin braids and his hair in a ponytail down his back, the traditional Sun People styles. The face was handsome in a battered way; in his mid-thirties, early middle age by contemporary standards. The little finger of his left hand was missing, and his tanned skin was seamed with thin white scars; all in all he looked tough enough to chew logs, but the green-hazel eyes were friendly enough. Unlike those of some his followers . . .

  “ I am Winnuthrax Hotorar’s son,” he replied. “Rahax of the Thaurinii folk. Be you guests and peace-holy beneath my roof and among my people. May the long-speared Sky Father hear me, and the Horned Man, and the Lady of the Horses. May your crops stand thick and your herds bear fruitfully; may your wi—” He coughed, paused, and am-mended the traditional “May your wives bear many sons.” “May your household prosper.”

  “Long life and fruitful fields, weather-luck and victory-luck and undying fame be yours, Winnuthrax son of Hotorar,” Marian said ceremoniously. “May many descendants make sacrifice at your grave in times to come. May the God of my people guard you and all yours.”

  Winnuthrax smiled, nodded, and dismounted. “ Your God is a powerful God,” he said, as Marian joined him. A youth came up with a platter of bread and salt, and a cup of mead. “As we learned on the Downs.”

  “ You were there? ” she said, sprinkling the bread and taking a bite. The two leaders pricked their thumbs and squeezed a drop of blood into the mead, then shared the cup.

  “ Indeed. I lead my tribe’s war band to the battle on the Downs, following the wizard,” he said casually. “ Likely I’d have laid my bones there if I hadn’t taken an arrow through my shoulder. Your Eagle People healers found me after our host fled, and it healed clean. Otherwise you’d be dealing with my son here. Eh, Heponlos? ”

  The young man with the raven-decked helmet nodded. When he removed the helm, she saw he was short-haired and that his beard was cropped close to his jaw—Eagle People styles.

  “So I know your God is strong to give victory,” Winnuthrax said. He inclined his head politely to Swindapa. “And so is Moon Woman, of course, lady. . . . Some of my people here have taken the water-blessing of your Eagle People
skylord, He of the Cross, and the crops haven’t suffered, so the land-spirits don’t mind. I’d make Him sacrifice too, but His priests and priestesses say He won’t have those who don’t forsake others.”

  Marian nodded and walked by the Thaurinii chieftain’s side as they led their horses up the slope to the stockade. She wasn’t surprised at the chief ’s lack of resentment; the Sun People tribes didn’t feel any lasting grudge at being beaten in a straight-up battle, and the Americans hadn’t ravaged their homes or harmed their families—quite the contrary—they’d prevented reprisals by the Fiernan Bohulugi, who did carry grudges. There were plenty of the easterners who resented the Alliance, but it was for other things.

  “ You’ve prospered, chieftain,” Marian observed as they walked.

  The broad shoulders shrugged. “ We’ve always been traders here as well as fighters—there’s blood of Moon Woman’s people in us, for all that we’re Sky Father’s children now. More trade of late, yes; and some of our young men have taken work on your ships, or in your war bands. The gold they win buys us new things, and those who return bring new knowledge and seemly ways.”

  His son tossed off a creditable salute and smiled when Marian returned it in reflex.

  “Hard Corps, fuckin’ A,” he said in English that was heavily accented, but fluent. “Corporal Heponlos Winnuthraxsson, Marine rifleman aboard Frederick Douglass on the Baltic expedition, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, but we’ve sworn an oath to the Eagle People God to lie with none but each other,” Marian said politely.

  “As you wish, of course,” Winnuthrax said, raising his mead-horn. He looked a little relieved; the obligations of Thaurinii hospitality hadn’t been designed with this sort of cross-cultural contact in mind. The servant girl he’d summoned looked relieved as well . . . or possibly that was a look of disappointed curiosity rather than anxious relief.