A woman’s voice shouted: “Don! No!”
The accountant ignored it. Brand’s anger turned to a yell of fear as the man swung at her with the billhook. If he hadn’t been staggering with exhaustion he might have hit her. A root caught at her boot and she went over backward, staring at the sunlight breaking off the edge of the heavy tool as he swung it upward.
Thunk. The butt end of another billhook drove into the berserker’s back. He screamed and whirled, but a third tripped him. Men and women piled on, wrestling him to the ground and holding him despite his thrashings.
“Obliged, Ted,” Angelica said shakily, getting to her feet and dusting herself off. The man nodded silently, which was like Theodore Corby; she’d known him since she was a girl, and he never used a word where an economical movement of the chin would do. “Much obliged.”
She looked around. “Well, nobody said to stop working!” she called. “Come on, everyone, there’s a job to be done!”
“What’ll we do with this guy?”
The man had stopped roaring and heaving. Now he was lying prone in the dirt and ash, crying noisily.
“I���” She hesitated. I run a vegetable farm! she thought. Five to fifty people worked on it, according to season, and this had never happened before. “Bring him along. We’d better call the Chief.”
“Ooooh, gross. Totally, totally gross.”
Ned Shaw turned. The girl was looking at the yard-long cod she’d just pulled in; the lines were arranged over a rollbar around the boat, to make hauling easier. The big fish swayed, flapping, thirty-odd pounds of bad temper on the end of a heavy hook and line.
“Tie it off, tie it off!” he barked, pushing down the crowded deck. He’d been a scalloper most of his life, done some other fishing, but he’d never seen anything like that fish.
The girl made a face, but she swung the line inboard and paid out, letting the cod drop to the boards of the deck. It flopped and jumped, and she skittered backward.
“Like this,” Shaw said.
He put a boot on the fish-it must weigh thirty-five pounds and it wasn’t happy at all-and swung a length of stick with a heavy steel nut on the end. Two crunching blows and the fish was still.
“That’s good eating, that cod,” the fisherman said, heaving it into the well in the center of the boat with a grunt of effort. Mebbe forty, forty-five.
His crew-clerks, salesgirls, high school students, shopkeepers, computer operators-looked at the fish and swallowed. They were all hungry, but���
Then the lines began to jerk all around him. “Get to it!” he yelled.
Lines whirred. Cod came up them; sometimes two or three of the crew would have to pull on a single line, and once a six-foot monster came over the side with people yelling and dancing to get out of its way. That one Shaw pinned to the deck with a boathook, and it took half a dozen two-handed blows of the club to kill it. He looked up, panting. The well in the center of the twenty-foot boat was full of fish, a slippery blue-gray mound of them. The deck was slimy underfoot, covered in scales; the crew were equally smeared, the hair of the women hanging in rattails. They grinned back at him.
“Good day’s work,” he said. “Get the tarpaulin over them and we’ll head in. Lucky we don’t have to clean them.”
The girl who’d caught the first fish of the day daubed at herself. “Gross,” she muttered.
CHAPTER THREE
March, Year 1 A.E.
“Closer. Slow, slow.”
Lieutenant Walker squatted in the prow of the longboat and broke open the harpoon gun. It was shaped like an outsized shotgun. He slid the long steel harpoon down the barrel, cushioned in its wooden sabot. Its mechanism gave a smooth oiled snick as he closed it and swung the simple post-and-groove sights onto the side of the whale, aiming six feet behind the eye. His helper leaned forward and clipped the end of the line to a ring welded onto the shaft just behind the folding barbs and the bulge that held a charge of bursting powder.
Whoever ran this up knew his way around a machine shop, Walker thought. He’d always liked hunting, and a good weapon doubled the pleasure.
Spray lapped into his face like the tongue of a salty dog. Behind him the crew of sailors and cadets stroked at their oars again. The day was an enormous bowl of blue, only the tiny dot of the Eagle to break the watery horizon, and scarcely a cloud in the sky. It was hot enough to make him sweat, despite the droplets of seawater striking cold on his T-shirt. Ahead the whale lay basking like a flexible black reef; a right whale, with a huge head that made up a third of its sixty feet. Blackfish, the type that had been the staple of inshore whaling in New England before they were hunted out and the big whalers began to sail to Hawaii and Kamchatka. A white patch of barnacles marked its snout; when it raised a flipper he could see white skin beneath, vivid in contrast to the dark-blue water and the coal color of the animal. Close enough to see the eyes, like golf balls set into the sides of a submarine. It blew, a tall double plume that turned into a mist of spray falling across them.
Whales were spouting all around, hundreds of them, pod after pod.
“Feels like murder,” one of the cadets muttered. The whales had never been hunted, evidently not even by Indians in canoes. You could get within touching distance sometimes.
“Looks like dinner,” Walker said cheerfully. “Ready for it��� now.” He squeezed the trigger.
Tump. The harpoon blasted out of the barrel, blurring through the air. Line whipped out from the improvised tub beside the harpoon gun. It began to smoke with friction, and Cadet Simpson tossed seawater from her bucket on it. Whack. A flat, wet sound as the steel hit the whale’s side.
“Hang on!” Walker yelled.
The whale dove with a smash of its tail that left Walker drenched and dripping, grinning as he clung to the harpoon gun’s mount. The longboat lurched forward, and the crew fell over one another in a tangle of oars punctuated by yells. Water fountained up from either side of the bows as the line jerked forward and down, pulling them along like an outboard motor gone berserk. The Nantucket sleigh ride, they’d called it in the old days. The Coast Guard officer counted the seconds:
��� five��� six��� hope the fucking fuse works this time��� seven��� He wouldn’t be able to hear the blast underwater, but the, whale would surely feel it.
The line went slack as the whale broached, half its length out of the water. Blood streamed from the hole gouged by the grenade, but the four barbs held fast. The great animal lay on the surface and threshed in its death agony, nearly swamping the boat that had killed it. All around, other whales were fleeing the sound of its distress, blowing and diving. At last it slumped into stillness, floating quietly as the crew of the longboat bailed out the water.
“Thank God this type floats when it’s dead,” Walker said. “Let’s make her fast.”
The Eagle was making sail in their direction; there were lookouts up at the mastheads with binoculars. Cadet Simpson slipped out of her pants and jacket and went overboard with a line to make fast around the whale’s flukes. Walker watched with interest; someday they’d have to admit that the old fraternization rules didn’t make much sense. Or maybe there would be opportunities when they went east, next week���
The ship was looming larger, moving fairly quickly despite the four whales secured to her sides. This one towed astern, and they’d have enough for starters.
He looked east. Who knew what waited there? Upon a peak in Darien���
“We’ll take hundreds of these,” Ian Arnstein said.
The spearhead was seven inches long, and three wide at the broadest, cut and ground out of a straightened section of automobile leaf spring. The edge was razor-sharp, tapering to a murderous point. The tang was socketed onto a smooth eight-foot wooden shaft; the whole ensemblage felt heavy and solid and well balanced. Deadly. Ian hefted it and tried to imagine using it. Damn. I’d rather have read about this than had to do it, he thought.
Seahav
en Engineering had moved into a big former boathouse, out east of town near the head of the harbor. The machine shop was noisy, clangs and thumps and shrill screaming sounds as somebody pushed a piece of metal against a grindstone; it smelled of iron and ozone.
Ronald Leaton nodded; he was looking as tired as everyone else, and was dressed in a grease-stained baseball cap and overalls that looked like they’d been on for days. “Here’s some of the other stuff you ordered.”
Big knives ground out of bar stock, and short Roman-style swords. Those had smoothed wooden hilts, brass pommels, and an S-shaped guard made of rebar and welded on. Ian picked one up and hefted it, prodding the point into the battered wooden table it rested on.
“These are probably better steel than the originals,” he said.
“Yup. That long fancy one you wanted will take another day or two. Got a book from one of the stores, The Complete Bladesmith, had a lot of useful hints. John Martins is setting up a forge-he’s that blacksmith who was here visiting Barbara Allis. He made things like that for hobbyists. And here’s our masterpiece.”
This time Ronald had used a whole leaf from a spring for the crossbow. It was set at the front of a rifle-type stock.
“How does it cock?” Ian asked. There was a steel claw arrangement hooked to the center of the wire string stretched across the shallow cord of the bow. He pulled at the string with a tentative hand. It was like a solid bar, immovable.
“That’s a stiff draw,” he said.
“Over three hundred and fifty pounds,” the machinist said. “Brace the stock against your hip and hold the grip. Now put your other hand on the forestock, through that oval metal loop that sticks out beyond the wood. Feel that catch under your thumb? Press it down.”
Ian obeyed. A steel lever came out of its slot in the forestock, hinged at the rear a few inches ahead of the trigger guard.
“Pump it back and forth, like the lever on a car jack.”
There was a soft heavy resistance with every stroke, and the crossbow’s string inched backward. At the sixth it clicked home near the trigger action and the rear sight, the heavy steel bow bent and ready.
Ian whistled. Not even the windlass-wound monsters the crossbowmen of medieval Genoa and Venice used were more powerful, and it had taken far less time to cock, barely ten seconds, probably less with practice. Almost as fast as a bow, he thought. And it took years to make a good archer; this you could learn to use in a couple of days. Well, we understand mechanical advantage better than they did back then in medieval times��� in the future. The confusion of tenses made it difficult even to talk about time travel.
“We’d better go out back to test this,” Ronald said. The paved space was full of people sorting car parts, putting aside ones to keep in stock for the limited number of vehicles that were being kept running; a crew of car mechanics and enthusiastic amateurs were working on a four-wheeled horse cart made out of tubing and two-by-fours and the wheels and axles from a Saab. A hundred paces away a wooden target was propped up against the wall of an unoccupied summer cottage.
“Just a front and back sight on the bow,” Ronald said. “Here’s something to shoot.”
He handed Ian a bolt, eighteen inches of heavy wooden dowel with a three-bladed steel head at one end and a trio of plastic flight feathers at the other. Ian dropped it into the slot and snuggled the butt against his shoulder. Squeeze the trigger���
Whunnng. The cord whipped forward, and the bolt flashed in a snapping blurr. Whunk! It struck in one corner of the target, sunk half its length and quivering like a malignant bee. Ian pushed his glasses up his nose and whistled.
“Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all.”
He looked at how the bolt had plowed itself a foot deep through solid wood. Logical. These things used to pierce armor.
They certainly weren’t going to be making smokeless powder and metal cartridges anytime soon. They might be able to make black powder and muskets in a few years. In the meantime these would save a lot of utterly irreplaceable ammunition.
“Lunch,” Ronald said, as someone hammered on a triangle back at Seahaven Engineering. “If you don’t mind fish.”
“Fortunately, I don’t,” Ian said. People on the island who were allergic to it were in deep trouble.
“Or there’s steak,” Ronald went on, grinning.
“What?”
“Whale steak. Sort of like beef, only fishy. We made the harpoon gun, so we get dibs.”
“Morning, Chief.”
“Morning, Fred.”
Fred Roberts was up the frame of the wind generator, head and hands inside the opened housing. “You wouldn’t believe how things corrode in this sea air.”
“Oh, I guess I would,” Cofflin said dryly, leaning his bicycle against the steel of the support. “Always thought these eggbeaters were a boondoggle. Your tax dollars at waste.”
More of the Nantucket Electric Company people and teams from the general population were running up sheds around the base. He recognized four or five men who’d worked as house carpenters before the Event, with dozens of the unskilled doing fetch-and-carry. Cofflin looked inside the long shed; electricians were setting up row after row of car batteries in parallel, on bookshelf-style supports that filled the inside. He nodded at their greetings. The batteries would help even out the flow of power from the windmills, taking up the slack when the air was calm or giving extra at peak demand. Luckily, it was a rare day on the island without a breeze. He ducked back out; Fred was answering his last remark:
“They were a boondoggle, but we’re lucky to have them��� There.” He pulled his head out of the machine and wiped his face on the sleeve of his overall. “Got it, I think. We should be able to get most of these things running, for a while at least. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, and it’ll get harder and harder to replace lost parts. I suppose we could rewind the coils by hand with telephone wire���”
His voice died off into a preoccupied mumble, an expert talking with himself. Cofflin nodded and looked out over the landscape of the island that had been his ancestors’ home for fifteen generations. More, if you counted the very faint trace of Indian blood.
Not far away, one of Brand’s tractors was dragging an improvised harrow over half-cleared land. People were walking behind it in long rows stretched across the turned gray-brown soil. The first row were making holes with shovels, hoes, billhooks, and sticks. The second row had sacks slung from their shoulders, and they were dropping in quartered potatoes, each piece with two eyes for sprouting. The third were carrying buckets, dropping in a dollop of fertilizer-better not to ask where it came from-and filling in the holes, tamping them down with their hands. It came to him that he’d never seen that many people working in a field, not even when he spent a few summers picking tobacco in the Connecticut Valley. Not that many��� not in America, at least. In Asia, yes. Though most of his traveling there had been behind the splinter shield of a 20mm.
Fred was climbing down the ladder built into the support leg. “It’s amazing,” he said. “Here we’re doing just a few things, and everyone on the island is working dawn to dusk.”
Cofflin took a Tupperware container of fish sticks from the carryall at the rear of the bike. He opened the top and offered some to the other man. Fred sighed, then brightened slightly at the taste.,
“S’good,” he said.
“Ayup. Martha made ‘em up. Not looking forward to the day the spices run out,” he said. “Reason I came was we need more ice. Until we can salt down the fish, that is. Loads are coming in pretty fast.”
“Well, I suppose we could switch on the A amp;P again, and put buckets of water in the freezers���”
Marian Alston strolled toward the point where the streets met, hands in her pockets. It was very dark without the streetlights, but heaven was frosted with stars and the moon was full. She walked quietly; nobody was about at this hour, and the houses around were dark and shuttered, waiting for summer dwellers who would
never arrive. Trees overarched brick sidewalks crumpled into unevenness by thrusting roots; she took the middle of the road, where a little cool white light filtered through the leaves of the elms. The night was quiet enough that an occasional voice from the distant center of town sounded clear. The crickets in the small marsh up the street were louder. Both seemed to enhance the silence.
Tempting to leave it all. Sail away from the problem, go see the strangeness she’d been landed in, lose herself in wandering and adventure. Not really an option, of course. Yet it was Eagle she loved, and the sea. This island was too new to her to hold her heart.
Different, she thought. She’d liked to walk out at night sometimes when she was a girl in her father’s house. The sky looked cooler here; life was colored in shades of blue and fog-gray, without the yeasty aliveness of the Low Country. She wondered what it would be like to visit there now, so long and long before the first small wooden ships dropped anchor before rivers not yet named Ashley or Cooper. No crumbled tabby ruins to find among the trees, overgrown remains of Great House and slave quarters. No weathered wooden shacks; no clipped green golf courses amid the palmettos either. Just water, reeds, stars��� her lips quirked. Indians, of course. The mosquitoes would be there too.
She shook her head ruefully and returned to the present. The monument in the center of the crossroads was small and unassuming. No statue, just a round millstone base and above a granite plinth with the names of the island’s Union dead. Very many names, for so small a town; men who could have stayed home in comfort, and the way the war turned out wouldn’t have affected their lives one bit. Men who ended lying on bloodstained tables down from Cemetery Ridge, with their bones shattered into splinters by minie balls and the surgeon’s saw ready; men shivering and puking out their lives with yellow fever in the swamps along the Chickahominy; men drowned in the blackness of Farragut’s ironclad in Mobile Bay; men down in the red clay while ants marched over their tongues toward sightless eyes. They had gone a long way from home, to die among angry strangers.
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