Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  For herself��� Her mother had forbade, her aunts and uncles-even the man who was probably her sire-had shaken his head and said it was a wild youngster’s fancy. Yet here she was. Fear and excitement wrestled in her belly, like the Moon Woman pursuing the Sun. The Sun People had brought her pain; they’d broken the knee and the life of her man, they’d killed and burned. It was time to drive them out. She swallowed through a mouth gone dry and picked her target.

  Two dozen footmen stopped and squatted around the chariot, light winking off bronze spearheads, glinting on polished leather. They talked among themselves in the harsh tongue they’d brought across the water, or swigged from skins. The chief waited for a moment, then called out to his followers. One threw back his head and laughed, and then they rose and spread out in formation behind the war-car, like a flock of geese spread back from the leader in wings on either side. The charioteer clucked to his ponies, and the warrior beside him hawked and spat over the side to clear his throat.

  “Shoot!” the leader of the Earth Folk band bellowed, bounding to his feet. He drew his yew bow to his ear and obeyed his own order.

  Bowstrings snapped and arrows whickered as men sprang erect. A pony went down, screaming like a woman in bad labor. The other reared, and the driver and warrior leaped down from the cart. Swindapa sprang forward, ululating rage, whipped the sling in two swift circles around her head, then cast. The polished egg-shaped stone within was heavy basalt, and flew almost too fast to see. When its arc ended in a snarling Iraiina face there was a half-seen splash of red and the man pitched backward to lie sprattling. She shrieked glee and tossed another stone into the soft leather pocket at the bottom of the sling. Men were running forward with spear and club and knife. Others shot over their heads; she darted about, looking for a clear path to a target. The fight boiled to close quarters; the Sun People stood shield to shield and cast back the first disorderly rush, but there were fewer of them left on their feet. The Earth Folk prowled around their line, rushed forward, retreated with blood on their weapons or on their own rent skins. Metal and stone and wood banged on each other, on the leather of shields. Men screamed in rage, or pain greater than they had thought flesh could feel.

  The natives fell back, panting, and men glared at each other over a dozen paces of space empty save for the dead. The invaders had no missile weapons left; they’d thrown their spears, and few of them were bowmen. The Earth Folk archers had space to shoot again; they came near and stuck their arrows ready in the ground at their feet, grinning mockery. Swindapa ran to join them, yellow hair blowing behind her like a banner beneath her headband, light on her feet as a deer-in the old tongue her name meant Deer Dancer. She tried to see the fight as a whole, tried to ignore the men who wailed or groaned or lay silent on the grass. Perhaps because of that she was the first to see other figures moving through the woods.

  “More of them! Run!” she shouted. The hunters have become prey. The Barrow Woman will eat us unless we flee.

  The men nearby were too intent on their revenge to hear her. She ran up behind one and slammed a callused foot into his backside, dodging back as he whirled. His face went from rage-red to fear-white as he followed her pointing finger. In a few seconds the ambushers-turned-ambushed were ready to flee, but those seconds were too many. A bison war horn dunted in the woods, lowing and snarling. Two more chariots rumbled forth onto the green turf of the clearing. The drivers leaned forward, slapping the horses’ backs with the reins to urge them into a gallop, and they circled to cut the Earth Folk off from the sheltering trees. Behind them their clansmen ran, almost as fast as the horses, in no fixed lines but in better order than any host the Earth Folk could muster, each man keeping his arm’s-length distance from his neighbor. Now the numbers favored the Sun People.

  “Forward!” they cried. She could follow their tongue; most children of the high families learned it, to deal with traders if nothing else. “Forward! Mirutha with us! Tauntutonnaurix with us! Addadawiz Diawas Pithair! Forward with Sky Father!”

  Swindapa had listened to her uncles and their nephews talking of skirmishes with the longer-settled clans of the Sun People in the valley running to the sea northeast of here. In one such her lover had been crippled, his knee smashed with an ax. She grabbed at the shoulder of the band’s leader and shook it.

  “We must break through,” she said. “If we get into the thickets, they can’t follow us. Woods Woman will hide us.”

  The man nodded, the wild flickering of his eyes growing steadier. “We go,” he growled.

  Swindapa never remembered much of the fight that followed. She managed to sling most of the stones left in her pouch, breaking a horse’s fetlock and striking men-one she thought had an arm broken beneath his shield. Then the loose mass of the Earth Folk’s charge struck the running line of the Iraiina war band. The first line buckled before their packed weight, but more ax-bearing men leaped howling into the fray from either side, each aiding the other like a pack of wolves. Swindapa darted into the melee, jumped on the back of a Sun People warrior, and whipped the sling around his neck, twisting as hard as she could with crossed wrists. The axman choked and flung up his hands to scrabble at his throat, then collapsed. Swindapa flung herself backward to roll free and run, jinked past a spearthrust, dropped flat under the swing of a chieftain’s bronze sword, and bounced back to her feet.

  Something struck her across the shoulders. Her face plowed through the turf; her palms burned as they took the impact of the fall. For a single instant she lay dazed, long enough to see the last of her companions die under the tomahawks and spears. A sandaled foot tried to stamp down on her hand, and she flogged herself back to alertness. She snatched out her bronze dagger and slashed at the hands trying to seize her. A man tumbled backward with a yell as the razor-sharp edge drew a line across his thigh. Swindapa was on her feet now, twisting, dodging. Another slash scored along a hairy muscular forearm, and the man dropped his ax and swore.

  His companions hooted mirth at him. More rushed at her behind shields. She leaped to try and vault one, stabbing at the man behind. The other slammed into her side, sent her staggering. A spearshaft cracked against her wrist and the knife went flying through the air. Arms grabbed her from behind, around the chest. She shrieked and bit down into a wrist, kicked, tried to gouge an eye and ripped skin across a cheek as the man twisted his fork-bearded head. A fist rocked into her jaw, another into her belly, another into her head above the ear.

  The world went away in whirling colors. Everything was very faint. She could only mumble and push feebly as they threw her down and ripped off her thong skirt. Two men pulled her legs wide, and a third knelt between them, fumbling at his kilt.

  *

  “The rahax won’t be pleased,” Shaumsrix son of Telenthaur said.

  He scowled around the clearing. “Four good warriors dead, and eight more wounded-” he counted only those too badly hurt to trek and fight, of course-“one of those so badly he’ll be crippled if he lives. And three good horses lost.”

  Men were moving around, hooting and puffing and slapping each other on the shoulder. They gave rough aid to the wounded, retrieved arrows, scalped slain foemen, made repairs, skinned the dead horses. Unless they’d lost an oath-brother, the clansmen were content with their victory. A chief had to think more deeply.

  “We fed two-hands-three-times of them to the Blood Hag,” his brother Merenthraur said recklessly; she didn’t like to be called that, better to use her praise-name of Crow Goddess. He counted on his fingers and then said: “Two-hands-less-two of them for every one of us, nearly.”

  Night Ones eat your eyes for a blockhead, the elder sibling thought. You couldn’t say such things to a chief’s son, not to his face, of course, even if you were the elder brother by the senior wife. Aloud he went on: “Thirty Earth Folk farmers are a poor bargain for four of our clan’s warriors. We’re not so many we can afford to lose men every day. We lost too many back in the homeland.”

  And lost the
war, he did not add, not in words.

  That still clawed at him, the memory of tumbled broken chariots and burning thatch, fear and flight. He forced his shoulders to unknot and pulled his lips back down on his teeth. It was different here. The Keruthinii who’d driven them off the mainland were Sky Father’s children too, even if they called Him only by His praise-name Long Spear. The Earth Folk here were not; they worshiped the devil-bitch Moon Woman. Only Sky Father’s children had victory-right in war. The Iraiina would win here. If they were wise as well as strong. No Iraiina lacked courage-they tested their boys too well and saw that cowards did not live long enough to breed. But all the gods and warrior spirits would spit on a fool and send him bad luck, even a brave fool.

  Merenthraur shrugged; the bone scales on his leather jerkin clattered. “We won. And we can’t let bands of them skulk in the woods, either, or how are we ever to set up our own steadings?”

  Shaumsrix nodded reluctantly. “Too many of these had good weapons,” he said. Most of them had had metal knives, and there were a fair number of bronze spearheads, too. Even the girl had had a good bronze knife. Used it pretty well, too, as well as any of the rabbit-men she’d been with.

  A thought came to him. “You, pick the Fiernan slut up,” he said, walking over as a man finished with her.

  “Plenty for all,” he said resentfully.

  The chief looked down at the woman-girl, rather; she’d never dropped a youngling, from the look of her hips and belly. Probably pretty when she wasn’t bruised and battered; there were streaks of semen and blood down the insides of her thighs and bite marks on her high breasts, and one of her eyes was swelling shut. Long yellow hair trailed out on the grass, and there were red marks across her chest where a necklace of gold-rimmed amber disks she wore had been ground into her skin by the men mounting her. Nobody had bothered taking it from her yet; let loot carry loot. Shaumsrix leaned down and yanked the necklace free. Her head flopped loosely as he pulled the ornament away. There was no mind behind the eye left open.

  “Ordinary Earther bitches don’t wear things like this,” he said, waving it in the clansman’s face. “This one may be useful, or she may know something. The rahax will decide. Put her in my chariot. Not that way, fool.”

  The man who’d grabbed her by an ankle dropped it and sulked off. Two others, older men, picked her up and slung her onto the wicker floor of the war-car; Shaumsrix ordered his driver to bind her wrists and ankles. She’ll live, he decided. If the blows to the head didn’t kill her, sometimes there were convulsions and death days later. He tossed the necklace in his free hand, scowling; a nice piece of plunder, fine smoothed amber disks rimmed in worked gold-but he’d rather have his warriors back, for all the scalps and bronze they’d taken. Their axes were the strength of the tribe, and the strong could always get booty. He looked down at the girl again.

  He had a feeling that there was something important about this one; perhaps a warrior Mirutha was whispering in his ear, perhaps an ancestor’s ghost��� or perhaps it was a land spirit, even a Night One. Shaumsrix shivered. He’d ask the Wise Man when he got back to camp, and make a sacrifice.

  The chieftain slammed the flat of his ax against the side of his chariot. “Get ready, you slugs!” he bellowed. “We move in-”

  His axhead caught the light as it pointed to where the sun would be in twenty minutes.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  April, Year 1 A.E.

  “We’re going to try and find this boy’s people,” Alston’s voice said through the earphones. “We have a few words of his language, and presumably there’ll be a goodwill factor for handing him back.”

  “Unless he dies of the common cold,” Cofflin said gloomily.

  “Our medic doesn’t think so. He did get the runs, but a few pills cleared him up.” A pause. “How are things back there?”

  “Everything’s more or less on schedule,” Cofflin said. “Enough to eat, just, but everyone’s getting tired of fish. There’s been some tension, people are upset-I think it’s really sinking in that we’re stuck here.”

  “Here too, but this situation is a little more exhilarating,” Alston said. “Perhaps because everything is strange. In any case, I’ll keep you informed of developments, Chief Cofflin. Over.”

  “Likewise, Captain,” he said. “Cofflin out,” he added, and laid down the radiophone.

  “Reception’s good,” the operator said. “Better than I can remember it ever being, before.”

  “Nobody else on the air, Karen,” he said, looking out over the little airport from the control tower.

  It already had a deserted look. The small planes were all in the hangers, or staked down under tarpaulins; Andy Toffler was doing the air scouting for the fishing and whaling, with what gasoline they could spare. Out beyond, thick columns of smoke marked fields where the brush was being fired.

  He looked down at his notes. Quick passage, no trouble so far, and they’d made a beginning on talking to the locals, picked one up at least. I wish everything was as smooth here.

  At least his stomach didn’t hurt every time he thought about the food situation anymore. You could live on fish. He still dreamed about that burger he’d been about to buy when all this started; they’d eaten the fresh meat almost overnight, with no more coming in. Except whale meat, which was oily and always had a slight fishy overtone. Well, hell, whole peoples had lived off salt cod. The clearing was mostly done, planting going well��� and everyone was going a little crazy.

  Or most people were. “Well, I’ve got a dinner date,” he said.

  “Martha Stoddard?” the operator said, grinning.

  “None of your business, Karen.”

  The phone rang. “It’s for you, Chief. Pastor Deubel is at it again.”

  “Science has no explanation for this thing that has happened to us,” the clergyman said.

  There were over a hundred people listening to the open-air service outside the little church on Milk Street. Normally there wasn’t a church on the island that got that many on a Sunday, not on Nantucket, where the biggest congregations were Unitarian and Congregationalist. The day was fine, mild, a breeze from the south that kept the smell of whale blubber boiling from creeping up from the docks. The people���

  Cofflin leaned his bicycle against the wall of a house built for whaling skippers-it crossed his mind, an irrelevant fragment, that they’d be perfectly at home with the faint smell of oil and fish that hung over the crowd. Their faces were rapt as they watched the man on the steps. He paced back and forth, as worn as they-the able-bodied clergy had been pitching in, like everyone else-but his face glowing with conviction.

  That’s a good way to put it, Cofflin thought. It was a fire, and sparks were catching in the dull faces of the onlookers, lighting them from within.

  “Science cannot explain it. We must ask ourselves, brothers and sisters in Christ, why has this thing happened to us? For this is a mighty and terrible thing that has happened, a thing to shake the earth. Not only earth: a thing to echo from the walls of Heaven, and make the gates of Hell rejoice.”

  “Fallacy,” muttered a voice beside him.

  Cofflin started. He had been caught up in the sermon, despite himself. Martha Stoddard was not; her gray eyes were cool and appraising.

  “Fallacy,” she said again. “Two, in fact. Science couldn’t explain how the sun kept going, before Einstein. That didn’t mean science was inadequate, simply that it hadn’t gotten around to solving that problem yet. And just because something big falls on you doesn’t mean there’s an intention behind it. That’s the pathetic fallacy, historical division. Mount St. Helens didn’t blow up because God was mad at the bears.”

  Cofflin grinned. They were all off balance psychologically, with a few exceptions. Martha Stoddard seemed to be one of them.

  Pastor Deubel was winding up: “All this I have said to you before, my brothers and sisters. Today we must ask a new question. If science cannot explain this thing that has h
appened to us, and if some great purpose is here, what is that purpose?”

  He wheeled and pointed out into the crowd. “What is the purpose for which this miracle-for it can be nothing else-has been accomplished?”

  Cries of God! and Jesus loves us! punctuated his gesture. He raised his hands.

  “Why would God, a loving God, a God who watches as each sparrow falls, thrust the blameless into danger and hardship?”

  “Oh, Lord have mercy, doesn’t that man’s church teach any theology at all?” Martha hissed through clenched teeth.

  “We have been thrust into the past before Christ,” Deubel shouted. “Christ’s sacrifice is not yet made. Moses has yet to bring God’s holy word down from Sinai to the Jews. We are lost in a world of pagans and devil-worshipers, cut off from the healing blood of the Lamb. To take the blood and wine now is blasphemy.”

  This time there were moans and cries of no! from the crowd. Many were weeping. Cofflin felt a touch of apprehension himself; he was a believing man, if not much of a churchgoer. Come on, now, he told himself, remembering something his own minister had said once. God’s not in time. God’s outside time, He’s eternal.

  “Some mighty power of the other world has done this thing. I tell you, there can be only one answer: Satan! And his purpose? Haven’t we all thought how our presence here must change the history of humankind? Can there be a Herod, if history is changed? A Roman Empire? Can there be an Augustus who sends out a decree that all the world is to be taxed? A Pontius Pilate? Will there even be a House of David?

  “What else can the Evil One intend than to frustrate God’s plan by preventing the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ?”

  This time the reaction from the crowd included screams of fear. Many fell to their knees and began to shout prayers.