Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  Ian Arnstein watched with queasy interest as the sailors went down ropes and climbed into the coracle. It bobbed and heaved as two of them climbed aboard, made fast, and began examining the bodies lying in the shallow water that sloshed in its bottom.

  One of the sailors vomited over the side. Even at this distance the livid faces and swollen tongues weren’t pretty, and seagulls or something had been at them. The other went on with her task, checking the inert shapes one by one.

  “Only one alive, sir,” she called up after a moment, her fingers on the neck of a figure hidden under several cloaks, as her companion returned to his work. “He’s pretty far gone, though. I need a sling lift.”

  “Lot of weapons,” Arnstein said thoughtfully. “Not fishermen.”

  Alston nodded. “The survivor probably had enough willpower not to drink from the sea.” Louder: “Send up the gear, after you’ve recovered the live one.”

  Doreen pushed her glasses back with a finger and peered, fascinated beneath her nausea. The bodies were all men, all fairly young. Weapons lay beside them: spears, bows, quivers, axes with yard-long handles and long narrow heads of bronze, the drooping edges shaped like a hawk’s beak. The rest of the boat’s load was bundles wrapped in hide or basketwork lashed with thongs.

  The ship’s physician and his helpers swung into operation as the body came inboard. The rest of the crew hung back, but nobody objected when Ian pushed close, Doreen beside him. The stranger was a little above average height, perhaps five-eight or -nine. His body was sunburned and his face, and lips swollen, but you could see that he was young, probably in his late teens. The sparse yellow beard bore that out too, merely thick down. His hair was twisted back in a braid that reached halfway down his back, bound with bronze rings. For clothes he wore a thigh-length leather kilt pyrographed with cryptic designs, cinched by a broad belt of sheepskin worn with the fleece side in; his feet were bare and heavily callused. The face was generic European of a northern or eastern variety, narrow and long-nosed on a long skull, although the nose had been broken at some time and had healed a little crooked. Arnstein could see a blue eye when the doctor peeled back an eyelid and shone a light into it.

  “Quite a bod,” Doreen murmured, playing with a lock of hair.

  Ian nodded; the youth was broad-shouldered and narrow in the hips, smooth muscle running over an athlete’s long-legged body. He also had an interesting collection of scars for a young man. A deep pucker on one leg, still a little red; thin white lines on his forearms; a deep gouge out of an upper shoulder. There were scars on his back as well, parallel ones dusty-white against the smooth pale skin.

  “Those are whip marks,” Alston said. “He could be a prisoner, or a slave, I suppose?”

  Doreen spoke thoughtfully. “Aren’t there cultures where boys are flogged as part of their initiation rites?”

  “Yes,” Ian said. “Sparta for one. The other scars look like fights to me. Fairly recent ones.”

  The ship’s doctor had hooked up an IV. “Dehydration and sunburn,” he said. “Looks like a pretty healthy young man. He should be all right in a few days.”

  “When will he be conscious?” Ian asked.

  “Any time.”

  Doreen looked at the materials coming over the side. Besides the weapons, the bundles held mostly extra clothes-kilts, and simple T-tunics of linen or wool, woven in plaids or dyed in soft natural colors, blanketlike woolen cloaks, and a few pairs of shoes made out of a single piece of soft leather, rather like moccasins. There were baskets of dried meat, fish, hard crumbly cheese, and crackerlike hard bread. And there was an array of shields, difficult to see at first since they’d been laid down as seats. They were round or oval, frames of wicker and shaped wood covered in hide and painted in gaudy shapes, the swastika-like fylfot, or animals. Horses, wolves, bears, the head of a bull, or a figure half man and half elk, with horns growing from his head. A few had bronze rivets as well.

  “What’s this?” she said, prodding at a string of varicolored bits of leather with straggling fur attached. A thought struck her, and she backed away and wiped the hand frantically down the leg of her trousers.

  “Human hair,” the doctor said, glancing aside. “Scalps.”

  A murmur went through the crew. Doreen swallowed and forced her mind back to the task at hand.

  “This man’s people use representative art,” she said. “Why don’t we get some pictures? We can show them to him and ask the names. There’s a set of National Geographies in the wardroom that would be perfect.”

  “Special court-martial is now in session. When did this happen, Ms. Hendriksson?” Captain Alston said.

  “About half an hour ago, ma’am. Cadet Winters and several other members of the crew came to me, with Seaman Rodriguez in custody, and I had him put under arrest.”

  The lieutenant was young, looking as stern and efficient as someone with freckles and a snub nose could; her eyebrows and lashes were as white-blond as her hair, standing out against tanned skin. Cadet Winters had a black eye and an arm in a sling; Seaman Rodriguez was standing between two guards, sullen and hangdog, a scowl on his acne-scarred face. His lower lip was wrenched and swollen, with a deep bite mark sending a trickle of blood down his chin, and his nose was going up like a balloon. From the look of it someone had stuck fingers into it and pulled hard. Every so often his hand made an abortive movement, as if to rub his crotch, and he stood slightly bent over. Most of the off-duty crew hung back a little, close enough to hear what was going on on the quarterdeck.

  Alston sat behind a table, the XO and a chief petty officer on either side of her. It was a little odd for a special court-martial, but the circumstances were more so.

  “Seaman Rodriguez, what’s your explanation?” Alston asked.

  “Ah, ma’am, she said she’d go into the paint locker with me.” Which was strictly against the rules, but it happened now and then. “Then she changed her mind and started yelling and hitting me. Ma’am.”

  Winters was spitting angry, Alston saw-which was all to the good, much better than depression. “Cadet Winters?”

  “He grabbed me and tried to stick a sock in my mouth and drag me into the locker,” she bit out. “I gave him a knee where it’d hurt, ma’am, and then he punched me and dislocated my arm, so I went for him and yelled.”

  “Ms. Hendriksson?”

  “Several of the crew heard screaming, ma’am, and ran to the locker. They found Seaman Rodriguez struggling with Cadet Winters; her clothing was torn, and they were both injured. Seaman Rodriguez had been drinking.”

  Others stepped forward to confirm the testimony. Captain Alston fixed Rodriguez with a basilisk stare. There was sweat on his face, and he looked around unconsciously for support and found none. She thought for a moment, and the three judges bent their heads together to consult in whispers.

  “Court will now pronounce its verdict and pass sentence,” she said aloud, in a formal tone.

  “Hey-I mean, ma’am, this isn’t no real court-martial.”

  “No, it isn’t, Seaman. However, since it’s unlikely we’re going to get back to a base in the near future”-or the distant past, you noxious little shit-“it’ll have to do. We’re not under the Uniform Code of Military Justice anymore; we’re operating under the authority of the Nantucket Council. I think,” she went on to the others behind the table, “that we’re agreed this goes beyond sexual harassment.”

  “Attempted rape, aggravated assault,” Rapczewicz agreed.

  “Ten years minimum, dishonorable discharge,” the CPO said.

  And concealing liquor, she thought; Rodriguez seemed to be the sort who couldn’t win for losing. Aloud: “Seaman Rodriguez, you are found guilty. As imprisonment is impractical, under the circumstances I think discharging you on the nearest shore would be equitable.”

  Everyone knew what the nearest shore was, and they’d all seen the contents of the coracle or heard about the scalps. Rodriguez lunged forward, face crumpling. The guards grabb
ed him by the arms as he tried to go down on his knees.

  “Oh, madre de dios, please, Captain, no-” They shook him into silence.

  “But heinous as your crime is, under the law it isn’t punishable by death, which marooning you probably would cause. Get him a lifejacket.”

  Hands shoved the bright-orange float jacket onto the man and laced it tight. “Get a rope sling and secure it on him. Reeve the other end to the fantail railing. Chief Master-at-Arms, execute the sentence,” Alston said, her face like something carved from obsidian.

  Two of the ship’s noncoms obeyed with gusto, with the sole of a boot in the small of Rodriguez’s back. The push sent him out like a screaming meteor, to fall in the curling blue water and white foam of the ship’s wake. The line paid out and then sprang taut where it had been secured around the rail’s metal supports. He wouldn’t quite drown, but being towed behind the ship would be considerably worse than the flogging Rapczewicz had suggested. That water was cold, too. Not North Atlantic frigid, but chilly. He probably wouldn’t die of hypothermia either. Not quite.

  “Court is adjourned,” Alston said. “Hands to their stations, if you please.”

  She caught the tenor of their murmurs. Not bad, she thought. That would preserve discipline, without making the crew think she’d started doing a Captain Queeg. And Coast Guardsmen were as much policemen as anything; they didn’t have much sympathy for criminals. Plus more than two-thirds of the crew were cadets and one-third were women. All in all, she’d done the right thing. For justice, and for the good of the ship.

  It wasn’t her fault if she’d enjoyed it. She didn’t like criminals either, particularly that kind. I hope there are sharks out there, you little piece of shit.

  Walker coughed discreetly. “The��� man we picked up is awake, ma’am,” he said. “You said to let you know.”

  *

  The stranger thrashed and moaned as Marian Alston bent over him. His eyes were blue, and right now they were showing white all around the iris.

  “I think you’d better back out of sight, Captain,” Ian said. “I don’t think he’s ever seen a black person before, and this environment is strange enough as it is.”

  Alston nodded and stepped back with some difficulty; it was crowded in the little one-bunk sickbay. “I’ll be on deck,” she said. “Report when you’ve found out anything significant.”

  “And don’t exhaust him,” the doctor warned. “He’s still weak as a kitten.”

  The stranger stopped his feeble struggling and let himself be pushed back into the bunk, although his eyes still flickered across bulkheads and porthole, electric lights and metal shapes-alien madness, terror building on strangeness. “He must think he’s dead and among evil spirits or something,” Doreen murmured.

  Ian leaned forward. The sight of his bearded face seemed to reassure the stranger. Ian put a cup of water to his lips, and the man sucked greedily at it; the IV they’d just removed had pumped a good deal into his system, but it wouldn’t have soothed the throat. He said something in a fast-moving language and sighed, wiping his mouth with the palm of one hand and then letting the arm flop back to the sheet.

  Ian looked over at Doreen, who shook her head. Well, that was a long shot, he thought. “Give it a try anyway,” he said.

  “Ar��� mane��� spurantate?” Doreen said, leaning close and speaking slowly. Do you understand me? in Lithuanian, her mother’s tongue.

  That brought a puzzled frown and more of the gibberish, but in a different tone. “I think he almost understood that,” Doreen said regretfully. I may have caught one or two words. I think.”

  Ian smiled at the stranger-Well, first things first, that’s obvious, he thought-and pointed at himself.

  “Ian. Ian Arnstein.”

  The narrow blue eyes frowned, then flew wide in understanding. “IanArnstein,” he said, prodding a callused finger with a rim of dirt under the nail at the man who sat beside the bunk. “lanArnstein, p’tos.”

  Ian mimicked the gesture, pointing at the young man’s bare chest. He nodded and rattled off a string of incomprehensible syllables. Ian sighed and made a rapid gesture through the air, then a very slow one. After a couple of repetitions the other got the idea and sounded out his name very slowly:

  “Ohotolarix,” Doreen said. “Ohotolarix son of somebody. I think,” she added, making a note on her pad.

  Ohotolarix nodded vigorously, smiling and revealing very white teeth-except for one missing at the front.

  “Let’s try him on the numerals,” Ian said. “They’re stable over time. You start.”

  Doreen leaned closer again and held up one finger. “Vienas,” she said. Two fingers. “Du.” Three. “Trys.” Four. “Keturi.” Five. “Pied.”

  “Eka!” Ohotolarix said. He held up one finger himself, then the rest in sequence. “Aonwos, duo, treyi, k’wethir, penkke!”

  After a few tries the two Americans caught the pronunciation, and Doreen noted them down. He grinned at the woman, then glanced aside at Ian, looking a little abashed.

  Which is a significant datum in itself, Ian thought. It was probably impolite to look at another man’s woman, where this kid came from. Ian cleared his throat and went up the number scale; Ohotolarix seemed to have increasing difficulty, speaking slowly and counting on his fingers as they climbed.

  Damn, he thought. This was going to take a while. In most of the fiction he’d read, there was some ingenious way around language difficulties-a Universal Translator or a wizard with a spell, or the side effects of a dimensional gate. Here he was, living it instead of reading it, and he’d have to trudge dismally through the basics instead. I should complain to the author. He smiled at the thought; back when he’d written those thud-and-blunder heroic fantasies, he’d had a nightmare about meeting his own characters in a dark alley and having them revenge themselves on him for what he’d put them through.

  “Hundred,” he said, slowly holding up ten fingers ten times.

  “Simtas,” Doreen echoed.

  “Kweadas,” came the reply.

  “It’s a centum language,” Ian said to Doreen. “Western branch of the family.”

  “Show him the horse.”

  The picture was a photo of a drawing, rather than a photograph of the animal; they’d decided that would be more familiar. Awe stood out on Ohotolarix’s face as he handled the glossy paper. Ian pointed to the animal.

  “Horse?” he said.

  “Hepkwos!” Ohotolarix said delightedly. “Hworze. Hepkwos!”

  Next she held up a picture of a timber wolf. “Vilkos,” she said.

  “Wolkwaz!”

  Ian ran his thumb down his list of words. Proto-Indo-European wlkwos, wolf, he read. Almost unchanged. God, we are a long way back.

  The exchange went on until Ohotolarix dropped suddenly and irrevocably asleep, and the doctor chased them out of sickbay. Alston looked at them sharply as they came up to the quarterdeck.

  “Well?” she said.

  Doreen waved her notebook. “It’s definitely an Indo-European language, ma’am. A lot of the words were very close to Lithuanian, and some of the inflections and syntax, even. He caught a few phrases I spoke right off-‘give bread,’ things like that. I think I could learn it in a couple of months-for very very simple things, in a week.”

  “That could be extremely useful,” Alston said. “Anything else, Professor?”

  Ian shook his head. “Not much. It’s a highly inflected language, and if I knew more Mycenaean Greek��� I think it might be an extremely early form of Celtic. Some of the sound shifts between what he speaks and what the references list as Proto-Indo-European forms suggest that it might be a sort of Proto-Celtic. I’m not a linguist, though-my knowledge is very general, and I’m not sure we’re transcribing accurately. Hell, the language might just as well be Proto-Tocharian, or some subfamily that never got-”

  “Anything else we can use, I meant, Professor,” Alston said with heavy patience.

&nbs
p; Ian reined himself in. “Apart from that, this guy’s a wirtowonax, which I think means warrior, or possibly something like freeman or tribesman or citizen; and he’s got a chief, or king, or panjandrum, a rahax, named Daurthunnicar. I’m probably playing hob with the inflections there, by the way. From sign language as much as anything, this Daurthunnicar and his warriors, and women and children and horses, were crossing a body of water. To fight someone, presumably. Our boy-his name’s Ohotolarix, by the way-and his friends were caught by a squall and couldn’t find the land again. I’d guess they paddled in circles until they dropped. Ohotolarix hates boats, incidentally, and loves horses.”

  “Oh, joy,” Alston muttered. “We’re sailing right into the middle of someone’s war. Hell of a situation to trade in.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ian said. His face slowly creased into a smile. “It might just be the best possible situation to trade in, if you know what I mean, Captain.”

  “They come,” the scout whispered. “Back along their track, as we thought they would.”

  They could hear how hooves pounded dirt away down the forest trail, louder and louder as the invader war band neared. Human feet slapped the earth, wheels creaked, an axle squealed, a horse blew out its lips in a wet flutter of sound. The war-car held a near-nude adolescent driver and a warrior in leather armor and bone-strapped leather helmet. The ponies stamped and snorted, their breath visible in the early-morning chill as the blur of the eight-spoked wheels slowed.

  Swindapa of the Star Blood line of Kurlelo slowly drew the sling taut between her hands. The early-spring leaves made scanty cover, but the band hidden here were all hunters with the Spear Mark tattooed on their chests; most of them were from lands overrun by the invaders, the Sun People, too. Thirty of them, more than enough for this. She was the only woman, but the others had allowed her along for the sake of her birth, and the weapons she had brought��� and after she’d shown them what she could do with the leather strap she carried. These were desperate men who cared little for law or custom or the will of the Star Blood who had not protected their homes.