Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  “The smell’s awesome, too,” he added aloud, to hear himself talk and bring things back to a human scale. “Like the Mother of all Henhouses.”

  He raised his binoculars, peering through the vision slit of the plank-and-brush hide and suppressing the slight quiver in his hands. Big brownish birds with white-banded necks, Canada geese right enough. Ducks��� mallards and canvasbacks and big black ducks, ducks beyond all reason, more varieties than he could name. On land��� Some sort of pigeon, he thought; enough of them to outnumber the waterfowl, which he wouldn’t have believed possible if he wasn’t seeing it with his own eyes.

  “Martha,” he said, “what sort of pigeon is that? Foot long, sort of a pinkish body, blue��� no, a blue-gray head, long pointed tail.”

  “What?” she shouted, and snatched the glasses out of his hands.

  Cofflin stared at her; it was about the most un-Martha-ish behavior he’d ever seen from her. Martha Stoddard did not lose her composure.

  “Passenger pigeons,” she said, after a long moment’s study. “Passenger pigeons, as I live and breathe, passenger pigeons.”

  Hairs stood up along Cofflin’s forearms, and he felt them struggling to rise down his spine. I’m seeing something no human being has seen in over a century, he thought with slow wonder. Then: No. I’m seeing something common as dirt.

  “I almost hate to do this,” Cofflin said softly.

  Part of him did. The rest of him, particularly his stomach and mouth, was downright eager. Roast duck, crackling skin, dark flavorful meat with a touch of fat that fish just didn’t have��� Jared Cofflin swallowed and gave the lanyard lying by his right hand a good hard yank.

  Bunnnf. Bunnnf. Bunnnf. Bunnnf.

  The modified harpoon guns had been dug into the fields at a slant. Now the finned darts shot into the air, dragging coils of line behind them��� and then a rising arc of net soaring up into the sky, catching the birds as they flung themselves aloft in terror. All across the fields around the pond other nets were rising. From the edge of the water itself came a deeper sound as giant catapults made from whole sets of leaf springs flung weighted nets out over the waterfowl.

  If the sound of the birds at rest had been loud, the tumult that followed was enough to stun. Cofflin dove out of the hide, waving his arms and yelling. The shouts were lost in the cannonade thunder of the rising flocks, but hundreds of islanders saw his signal. They ran forward, waving lengths of plank, golf clubs, baseball bats, leaping and striking at birds-the vast majority-that had escaped the nets. The air was thick with feathers and noise, thick with birds in numbers that literally hid the sun, casting a shadow like dense cloud. It drifted through the sky like smoke; bird dung fell from the air and spattered his hat and the shoulders of his coat, falling as thick as light snow. He ignored it, looking at the carpet of feathered wealth that lay around him��� and there would be others waiting to take a similar harvest at Gibbs Pond and Folger’s Marsh.

  “I hope they don’t take off elsewhere for good,” he said. A broken-winged pigeon fluttered across his feet; he struck at it automatically, to put it out of its pain.

  Martha came up beside him, brushing at her sleeve. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Bless their hard-wired little brains, they migrate pretty automatically. Unless we did this every day��� and for that matter, it’s not the same flocks every time-we’re seeing a segment, like a moving rope touching down once a day. At that, this is just the edge of the main flight path down the coast.”

  Cofflin nodded, looking at the islanders standing and panting. “Now we’ve got to collect all this up,” he said. “Hope we can store it all-didn’t expect this much.”

  “Who could?” Martha said, shaking her head. “I still don’t believe it, and I’m looking at it��� Well, we can make more ice, I suppose. There’s plenty of salt, they can be packed down in oil, pickled in brine, smoked, the offal will go on the fields���”

  He sighed and shook his head in turn, feeling a little of the wonder of it leaving him.

  “Let’s get to work,” he said, pulling up his sleeves. “Big job today.”

  “It’s stolen, isn’t it?” Doreen said quietly. “All the things we’re��� buying.”

  Arnstein nodded, not taking his eyes away from the scene he was watching, a historian’s secret dream made flesh. Every once in a while he would snap another picture.

  An Iraiina chief was wheeling his chariot about in the open space before his gathered warriors, its wooden wheels cutting tracks dark green and soil-black through the silvery dew on the grass. The dyed heron plumes on the horses’ heads bobbed and fluttered, the bronze and gold of the trappings glittered, and the chief’s cloak blew back from his shoulders like the wings of a raven. The chief sprang up, his feet on the rim between the holders for bow, quiver, javelins, and long thrusting spear with its own collar of feathers.

  Arnstein had read once-and now seen, these past few days-that chariot riders could run out along the pole that linked the horses’ yokes at a full gallop.

  Studded shield and leaf-shaped bronze long sword shaped the air as he harangued them. At first they cheered and waved arms and spears and axes. After a few moments they screamed, hammering their weapons on their bright-painted shields, roaring into the hollows of the shields until the sound boomed across the camp. When the chief leaped back into the body of his chariot and the driver slapped the reins to spur the horses forward, they poured after him in a leaping, shrieking mass. Before they passed out of sight among fields and scattered copses of oak they had settled down into a loping trot behind the war-cars, silent and all the more frightening for that.

  Doreen went on: “They’re going out to kill people and take everything they have and sell it to us! Why don’t you do something, or tell the captain-”

  Arnstein rounded on her: “Because there isn’t anything I can do, because we need the food or we’ll starve, and because Captain Alston knows both those things perfectly well!

  “Sorry,” he added after a moment, as they turned and trudged through the tumbled, rutted confusion of the Iraiina camp. They were getting used to the smell, a thought that made his skin itch-although to do them justice, it probably wasn’t so bad when they spread out in their normal fashion. In fact, some of the subchiefs had already moved out, up or down the coast, or inland.

  A naked brown boychild ran up to them, a four-year-old with a roach of startling tow-white hair. Daring, he reached out and touched the stranger’s leg and then ran away, shrieking his glee. An Iraiina woman scooped him up and paddled him across the bare bottom, then tucked him under her arm and walked away, casting an apologetic smile over her shoulder as she headed back to her tent.

  “Sorry myself,” Doreen sighed, and tucked her hand through his arm. “I���” She shrugged. “I don’t want to quarrel. There are too few of us for that sort of thing.”

  “Agreed,” Arnstein said, and patted the hand. And so few of us who can hold an intelligent conversation. Captain Alston, of course, but her interests were rather specialized, and in any case she was��� intimidating, that was the word he was looking for.

  Doreen gave his arm a squeeze and changed the subject. “I’m surprised they’ve gotten so��� casual about us so soon,” she went on.

  “We’re marvels,” Arnstein said, relieved. “But they live in a world of marvels, magic, ghosts, demons, gods who talk to men in dreams or father children on mortals-they don’t just tell folk tales, they believe them, more so than any Holy Roller back home. Like a dancing Hasid drunk on God. We’re friendly marvels.”

  For now, he thought uneasily to himself.

  From what he’d seen of them, the Iraiina had their virtues, all of them more comfortably observed from a distance. They were brave, of course. Unflinchingly stoic, loyal to their tribe and chiefs, usually kind to their children and positively affectionate to their horses. Surprisingly clean, for barbarians. They were also callous as cats to anyone outside th
eir bonds of blood and oath, cruel when they were crossed, and they had tempers like well-aged dynamite sweating beads of nitroglycerine. Not just the warriors either; he’d seen two women lighting into each other with distaffs, and then rolling around trying to bite off ears and succeeding in pulling out hanks of hair. The laughing spectators had thought that great sport.

  Let them feel insulted, or let some incident make their superstitious fears boil over, and���

  “Sooner we leave the better,” he said.

  “Yes, it’s sort of like being on safari��� only, you have to make camp with the lions,” Doreen agreed.

  They wound their way through the early-morning bustle of the camp, between the huts and tents of households large and small. Women fetched water, cooked over fires or in crude clay ovens, kneaded bread dough in wooden troughs, tended the swarming children, gossiped as they spun thread on their distaffs or sat to weave on broad looms with stone-weighted warps set under leather awnings. Children had chores of their own, starting with minding younger siblings while their mothers worked. A slave could be told by her collar and the non-Iraiina way she braided her hair; she was silent as she knelt to grind grain on an arrangement of two stones much like a Mexican metate, but she didn’t look spectacularly ill-treated. A woman went by with twin buckets of milk on the ends of a yoke over her shoulders. Three more in colorful checked skirts chanted a song as they swung a sloshing bag made from a whole sheepskin suspended under a tripod of staves; making butter, he supposed.

  A brawny redbeard poured molten bronze from a crucible into a mold with exquisite care, while his apprentices blew through hollowed rods to keep the charcoal in his clay hearth hot. Other men cut leather shapes from hides stretched on the ground, braided thongs into ropes, worked with bronze chisel and adze and stone scraper on the growing frame of a chariot, knapped stone into everyday tools for tasks too mundane to rate the precious bronze. The ungreased wooden axles of oxcarts squealed like dying pigs.

  Only a few of the men were slaves. He’d learned that free men were all warriors at need, but except for the chiefs’ few household guards they mainly herded, farmed, and practiced crafts; the chiefs themselves were not above turning their hands to a man’s work. No real leisure class, he decided. This economy’s not productive enough to support one.

  Many more of the menfolk here would be out with the cattle; herding large beasts was male work, while milking and making cheese and butter were for women. When they’d settled into their new land they’d build houses and start plowing and reaping as well, although he got the impression that farming was secondary to livestock with the Iraiina. Sights, smells, sounds reminded him of what he’d seen on vacations in the backlands of Mexico or in Africa or Asia, but always with differences. He finished one roll of film and snapped another into his camera; they were used to that, now, too.

  They came down near the water, where a broad stretch was kept clear around the Tartessian ships. That section was cleaner and less cluttered, if only because the Iberians didn’t have women, children, or domestic livestock along. They also looked more disciplined than the Iraiina. Not having much to do, the crews were lolling about in loincloths or less-they lacked the Iraiina nudity taboo-sunning themselves in the mild spring warmth. A few stood leaning on their spears in front of their leader’s tent of striped canvas, standing to attention not having been invented yet. Some of the idlers made signs with their fingers and spat aside as the strangers walked past; others called invitations which Doreen needed no Tartessian to understand. They fell silent when Isketerol ducked out from under the canvas, walking over to the Americans with a broad smile.

  That didn’t reassure Arnstein. It reminded him too much of a man who’d sold him a car once, in San Diego. That car had cost more than its purchase price in repairs the first six months he drove it.

  “Hello,” the Tartessian said. “Ianarnstein. Msdoreen-rosenthal.”

  Arnstein started to reply, then checked when he realized that the Tartessian had spoken in English��� sort of. “Hello yourself,” he replied.

  White teeth showed broader in the lean olive-skinned face. “Rejoice, as well,” he added in his archaic, gutturally accented Greek. If Arnstein ever met a real Mycenaean, he was probably going to sound extremely Tartessian himself, but comprehension came easily to both of them after a week of practice. He wasn’t doing as well with Iraiina, but Doreen had made some progress there and was beginning to pick up a little of this Greek.

  “I seek to honor you with your own people’s greeting,” Isketerol added.

  “Rejoice,” Arnstein said dryly. “My captain wished to speak with you this morning.”

  “Ah, she does me honor!” Isketerol said. He looked out toward the Eagle. “The loading must be nearly complete,” he went on. “I and my cousin will come.”

  They came to the shore reserved for the Americans’ use. There were disused rafts scattered up and down the beaches where the Iraiina camped, not yet disassembled for timber or firewood. The Eagle’s crew was using them to tow basket after basket of grain and beans out to the ship. Another cast off as they came to the water’s edge, the crew of the longboat towing it bending their backs to the oars. Today the shore also held pens full of pigs-not the pink sluggish creatures Arnstein knew, but lean bristly vicious things like piney-wood razorbacks, three-quarters wild. All of them were young females in farrow except for a brace of boars penned separately; those watched with cunning beady eyes, their long curved tusks ready for anyone who came near. They’d already loaded calves, colts and ewes, for breeding with their stock back on the island.

  “Those pigs’re going to be a joy to get on board,” Doreen remarked. Arnstein felt his mouth watering at the potential bacon, hams, and chops. There were advantages to being selective about the traditions of your ancestors. He was also acutely conscious of the woman by his side. Different generations, but they had a lot in common. There was nothing like being among aliens to make you realize that.

  She ignored the days-old head that looked down on the beach from a pole, drastic reparation for an insult to a guest. The body was buried, with the head of a sacrificial horse in place of its own, an offering to appease the anger of the gods. Doreen blanched slightly at the memory; the young oathbreaking warrior had danced to the sword with a spring in his step and a face as composed as if he were strolling home to dinner. Probably he thought he was going to his gods���

  “Ah, Professor, Ms. Rosenthal,” Alston said, handing a clipboard to a cadet. “And Isketerol of Tartessos.”

  The Iberian bowed, hand to breast. Alston nodded her head with its cap of close-cut wiry hair. “Translate, please, Professor. Tell Mr. Isketerol that I have a proposition for him.”

  There was a tray nearby, with one of the wardroom attendants standing behind it. Arnstein poured small glasses of wine, despite the early hour, diluting it half and half with soda water. You had to serve refreshments, at least symbolically, or you weren’t trusted. He didn’t think Isketerol trusted them much anyway, but there was no sense in open insult.

  “First,” the captain of the Eagle said, “thank him for the help he gave us.”

  Isketerol made a purely Mediterranean gesture with hands and shoulders; Arnstein had seen its like in Sicily and Greece in his own era. “Of course, you were still cheated, if not so badly as you might have been. In Tartessos, or any of the civilized lands around the Middle Sea, your great ship would have been stuffed to bursting three times over with grain and cloth for half-for one part in ten-of what you lavished on these barbarians.”

  Alston nodded, expressionless. “We may make other arrangements later. Right now, we’re planning one more voyage here this season, after the harvest.”

  “Alas, by then I will have departed. My own ships are nearly ready.”

  Alston turned to Arnstein. “Phrase this very carefully, Professor. Tell him that we want to hire him for the summer, and we’ll pay well. We want him to return with us to the island, teach some
of our people the languages he knows, and then come back here in September when the local harvest is in. In return, we’ll give him a fair sampling of our trade goods.”

  Arnstein sputtered. “Captain Alston! Would you buy a used car from-”

  “You told me who he reminded you of, Professor, but we need him. Learning languages without one both sides can understand is just too slow, and he speaks how many?”

  “Iraiina, several related dialects, the thing the Earth Folk speak, Greek, Tartessian, Egyptian, and some Semitic language I’m pretty sure is ancestral to Hebrew and probably to Phoenician as well. Plus a smattering of others.” Part of the cost of doing business for a Tartessian merchant, evidently. “But Captain, impressions aside, I’m certain he’s a slave trader and pretty sure he’s a part-time pirate.”

  She shrugged slightly. “It’s a calculated risk. I’m afraid I must insist.”

  The words were polite, and so was the tone. Behind it was a will ready to grind like millstones. He sighed and spread his hands.

  The shouting crowd fell silent as the American approached. William Walker craned his head a little, looking over the tops of theirs; he was a tall man even by twentieth-century standards and he’d seen only one or two men bigger here. Two Iraiina warriors had been wrestling in a circle of yelling, cheering onlookers. They were stripped to their kilts, chests heaving and eyes glaring as they backed off warily, looking at him out of the corners of their eyes, panting amid a strong smell of sweat and dust.

  Well, not exactly wrestling, Walker thought. One of them-it was the wog they’d picked up at sea, Ohotolarix-was bleeding slightly where a handful of his sparse young beard had been pulled out. The other man looked roughly handled, too. More like catch-as-catch-can.

  Everyone was looking at him, one of the mysterious, magical strangers from across the sea. A little fear in the eyes of the men, in the women fear and��� Well, well, he thought, smiling at one bold-eyed girl. She was probably not very respectable by local standards; the collar and short dress that showed her ankles indicated that, he thought. But he’d never let that bother him.