Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  “You couldn’t separate those two with a crowbar,” Walker said. At her raised eyebrows: “You do know the captain’s a dyke, don’t you?”

  “That is a homophobic term in this context,” Lisketter said stiffly, flushing with anger.

  Walker smiled charmingly. “Sorry. Force of habit. I haven’t been around the right sort of people much, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s all right,” Lisketter said, brushing a lock of her long straight hair back. “She does seem male-identified, obsessed with patriarchal rules, and logocentric.”

  “Damned right,” Walker said. “Saluting, heel-clicking��� did you know she had a crewm��� crewperson dragged behind the ship on a rope? He nearly died.”

  There was a shocked murmur in the big brick-floored room. Lisketter tried to remember what she’d heard of the incident, but it did seem the sort of thing a power-oriented person would do.

  “I’m certainly not going to spend the rest of my life working for her,” Walker said. “It was bad enough, a temporary assignment-but here and now, she’s set to run the Eagle and everything else that floats for life. An empire-builder.”

  “The imperialism has already begun,” David said. “All those Native Americans dead of our diseases, and Chief Cofflin has a settlement over on the mainland already, stripping the forests of trees and butchering the animals.”

  Pamela nodded somberly. It had begun, and if they didn’t do something it would be worse than the Conquest of Paradise that her ancestors had wrought.

  “We have to do something,” she said.

  “Well, yeah,” Walker said smoothly. He and the Iberian exchanged glances. “We’re ready to help, of course. Alice and Rosita have opened our eyes.”

  “It is��� what is your word, reassuring,” Isketerol said to William Walker.

  They had halted their bicycles under a stand of pines, with a few last daffodils still nodding yellow beneath. No one was near; the road was empty, and only heath and fields stretched away on either side, potato vines already bushy and rows of grain just showing like a faint green fuzz on the gray-brown soil. The loudest noise was the sough of the wind in the trees, the buzz of insects. Hot resin scented the air, baked out of the trunks behind them. The noon sun was warm, full of the sound of bees and sleepiness.

  “Reassuring?” Walker said.

  “That you Amurrukan can also produce your share of fools,” Isketerol said. “That is what they are, isn’t it, Lisketter and the others? I didn’t understand much of what they said, but I haven’t been a trader for this long without recognizing an��� easy mark, you say.”

  Walker laughed, a loud rich sound. “Oh, they’re fools, all right,” he said. “But for you and me, they’re useful fools. Useful idiots.”

  “We should cultivate them, then,” Isketerol said.

  “Like a garden ripe for the harvest,” Walker replied, slapping him on the shoulder. They both laughed as they pedaled on, back toward the town.

  “The woman become one the man’s thing only? Like among the Sun People?” Swindapa whispered.

  Marian Alston moved aside a little as the breath tickled at her ear.

  “No,” she whispered back. There was still a hum of conversation in the big church, as they waited for the bride to appear at the foot of the aisle. “They can leave each other if they please. I did.”

  “You had a man of your own?” Swindapa asked eagerly. She knew that questions were impolite, but she’d been trying to learn Alston’s background.

  “Such as he was. A mistake.”

  “So this is like the��� the, you say, party, as have we, when a woman’s man goes to live with her kin?”

  “Yes��� more or less. The ceremony calls the blessings of God, and settles things like who inherits property and children.”

  “Oh,” the Fiernan girl said, frowning a little in puzzlement.

  Evidently her people didn’t have anything closely resembling marriage. A man went to the woman’s family grouping, and the relationship could be broken by mutual consent at any time. What Alston thought of as the father’s role in a child’s life fell more to the mother’s brothers or other male kin, since they’d always be there. Property passed through the female line. Not exactly a matriarchy, though; nothing she could easily understand. She pushed the thought aside, concentrating on the ceremony.

  The church on the hill was crowded, every seat full; the chiefs marriage to the head of the Athenaeum was an event. Royal wedding, Alston thought wryly. She’d gotten a pew for herself and the Eagle’s wardroom, plus Swindapa��� who is a very nice girl, but clings like a burr. Not intrusively, just refusing to go away for long; it was like trying to push the wind. Isketerol was there too, observing with his usual cool detachment.

  All were in their best; she sat stiffly in her dress uniform, thinking wryly of the last time she’d worn it at Daurthunnicar’s feast. Although this time it was with the regulation skirt. Swindapa couldn’t have looked more different, in a white dress with lace panels, a broad-brimmed hat beside her on the pew, her hair fastened up with pearl-headed pins. Certainly an improvement on a collar and leash. Fancy clothes were going cheap on-island these days; overalls were harder to get. Still, it looked wonderful.

  The organ started, thundering in the high vaulted white spaces of the church. She’d attended Baptist churches in her childhood, of course-mostly built out of weathered pine, down sandy tracks and surrounded by rattletrap cars.

  Not much like this Congregational one, three-storied snowy spire and stately white walls on what passed for a hill on this sandspit island. We had better singing, though. Everyone stood. The sound was like a subdued slither under the trembling of the instrument, a rustle of cloth as people looked back toward the entrance.

  Martha Stoddard stood there. She held a bouquet of flowers; otherwise she wore only another of her subdued but elegant gray suits.

  “Silly to pretend I’m a girl,” she’d said. Alston’s lips quirked slightly. No side on that woman. Good-looking, too. In a spare sort of way; excellent bones, and those eyes would be full of mind and will when she was ninety. Now why don’t I ever meet anyone like that? That wasn’t quite the problem, of course, but���

  Cofflin was waiting at the head of the aisle, sweating under the collar of his formal suit, looking pale. Looking rather like a bull waiting for the second blow from the slaughterhouse sledgehammer, in fact, or a man wondering desperately if he’d done the right thing.

  The minister stood at the altar as the bride and her party walked down the isle. “Dearly beloved,” she began.

  “Well, there’s one superstition disposed of,” Alston said.

  “Hmmm?” Cofflin asked.

  He’d recovered most of his color by the time the outdoor reception began to wind down, and he was wandering about with his wife, talking to people and nibbling at the cake on his plate. Irreplaceable nuts and sugar and candied fruit had gone into the wedding cake, as well as flour made from grain the Eagle had brought back from Britain.

  Alston looked over at him, and when she glanced back the remains of the piece on her own plate were gone. Swindapa was licking her fingers, grinning unrepentantly. Sometimes you can remember that she’s still a teenager. Just turned eighteen, to be precise.

  “What superstition?” Cofflin asked.

  “About catching the bouquet,” the captain said. It had been pure accident; the thing came flying at her face and she grabbed by instinct.

  “It might come true,” Martha observed.

  “When pigs fly,” Alston said.

  “Congratulations again,” a voice said; Ian Arnstein, with Doreen. They were holding hands.

  Damned mating frenzy, Alston thought, smiling slightly. Maybe there’s something in the air here in 1250 B.C. Or maybe it was just that people felt the loneliness pressing in on them and sought comfort where they could find it.

  The ex-professor went on: “Have you mentioned what we discussed to the chief yet?”


  “I didn’t want to impose,” Alston said dryly. “It is his wedding day, you know.”

  “Oh��� sorry��� bit of an obsessive-compulsive���” Arnstein floundered in embarrassment., “Always was socially challenged���”

  “What did you discuss?” Martha Cofflin asked sharply.

  “Well, the captain and I had this appalling thought.”

  Best get it over with, Alston decided. “We were talking about Isketerol’s ships, and I mentioned that they could sail the same course to the Americas that we did, if Isketerol was keepin’ his eyes open. Which he was.”

  Cofflin seemed to choke on a piece of the cake. “They could!” he wheezed, looking around.

  “Easy. It’s followin’ winds most of the year, on the southern course. Ships no bigger did it routinely back in the early days after Columbus. Damnation, people have taken rowboats across the Atlantic. It’s all a matter of knowing what’s where, and how far, and the wind and current patterns. I may have made a mistake persuading him to come here, but he’s so damned useful.”

  “Tartessians are sneaky,” Swindapa said. “And greedy. They don’t liked we trade our own bronzework to anyone. At sea they sink boats coming from, ah, you call it Ireland? Yes, the Summer Isle, we say. And amber traders from the mainland they sink, toos.” Her features thinned to rage for a moment: “Theys help the Sun People invade our land.”

  Doreen nodded. “They want a monopoly,” she said. “Tin’s scarce here. Britain and northwestern Spain are the only sources these people know west of Bohemia and the Caucasus.”

  “The Tartessians are sort of upstarts, who’ve been getting quasi-civilized over the past century or so,” Arnstein added. “They’ve copied the eastern civilizations somewhat, adapting them to their own patterns-rather like the Japanese with us. They’re not as set in their ways as most people here-and-now.”

  Cofflin brushed a few crumbs off his jacket. “Well, so the locals could sail here. That’s a bit startling, but why’s it appalling?”

  “Because piracy’s hot, here,” Alston said. “Down in the Mediterranean, from what Isketerol’s let drop, anyone will attack anyone, if they think they can get away with it-ships, and ‘longshore raids, that’s where pirates make most of their loot anyway. And this island is the richest prize on earth. We underestimated the value of our goods. Badly. One small shipload would make a successful pirate the richest man in the world.”

  “Oh.” Cofflin thought. “They couldn’t do much against guns, could they?”

  “Not the first time. After that we’d be out of ammunition. What’s more, we’re so short now that we can’t even train people to use the few guns we do have. I saw the locals in operation in Britain. These people-peoples-are warriors; they don’t scare easy.”

  “You’re right,” Cofflin said, wincing. “Those Indians we met the first day, a couple of them kept right on coming. Guess they realized all a gun can do is kill you, and they just weren’t that scared of dying.”

  “We’d better start training a militia to use weapons we can manufacture,” Alston said.

  “We’ll have gunpowder eventually,” Martha observed.

  “That’s then, this is now. Even when we do, the locals are going to pick up tricks fast. Possibly not democracy or women’s rights, but weapons? You bet. And we can’t stay out of contact with the locals, not if we want to do more than decay into a bunch of illiterate potato farmers in a couple of generations. This island’s too barren.” She paused, frowning. “It might be better if Mr. Isketerol stayed here, rather than returning to Tartessos���”

  “Thank you for that delightful end to the day,” Cofflin said, turning on Arnstein. “Sorry, Professor, but I was just beginning to think we could relax a little.”

  “No, no, no, man, it ain’t a sick cat, you can’t tell its temperature by running a thermometer up its ass. You’ve got to, like, look at the color. Really look.”

  Marian Alston stopped a moment at the anguished cry, watching the group around the forge. Always a pleasure to watch someone who really knows what he’s doing, she thought.

  The blacksmith was a tall man, lean but with ropy muscle all along his bare sweat-slick arms and running under the thick canvas apron he was wearing. He was mostly bald on top, but a long ponytail of brown-streaked gray hair fell down his back, and a walrus mustache of the same color hung under sad sherry-colored eyes, like those of a basset hound hoping for a pat and expecting a kick. He held a rod of metal in a pair of pincers, turning it to show how it went from black to cherry-red to a fierce white at the tip.

  “That’s welding color, the white. Okay, get me the other piece.”

  More clumsily, the apprentice-an ex-office worker in a veterinary clinic-took up his own pincers in his gloved hands and wrestled another piece of steel out of the charcoal.

  “Now down on the anvil,” the smith said. “Okay, this stuff is mild steel. It won’t weld as easy as wrought iron, so you have to dust it with a little flux-” he added a sprinkling of powder to where the two strips of metal overlapped each other-“and shed some righteous sweat. Here goes.”

  The big shed was noisy with a dozen metalworking benches, but the steady clang��� clang��� clang of the smith’s hammer was the loudest. The metal flowed under it, merging. “Here’s where we reheat and hammer some more,” the smith said happily, putting the joined pieces of strapping back in the coals. “Meantime, drink some water. Important to drink water, man, keep your natural fluids in balance.”

  He dipped a cup into a bucket hanging on the wall, drank, then poured another over his head, holding his wire-rimmed glasses with their tiny round lenses out as he did so.

  “Hey, Captain! What’s happening?” he said cheerfully, peering at her.

  Well, at least it isn’t “How’re they hanging,” Alston thought resignedly. John Martins had been up in the hills of northern California since 1970, and stayed when the commune dissolved around him. A quarter century of lonely effort lay behind the skills he was trying to impart to a dozen apprentices.

  “I warned you,” the smith said. “I can’t make anything like that Nip beauty y’showed me. No way, man. That’s some excellent smith’s work in that sword, truly righteous.”

  “Those take too long to make,” she said, inhaling the scent of hot charcoal and scorched metal. It wasn’t unpleasant, in its way, although the heat in here was fierce. “If it’ll work, I’m satisfied.”

  He went over to the wall and took down a sword. She drew it from the plain leather-bound wooden sheath, raised it in both hands and tried a simple downward cut in slow-time, the pear-splitter. It followed the shape of her katana exactly, and the weight and balance were much the same. Not quite the living feel hers had, but much better than the cheap copies you got in most martial arts stores. The hilt was bound with cord, and the guard was a plain brass disk.

  “I welded a sandwich of mild steel around a strip of 5160 for the cutting edge-y’know, the moroha way. Lotta fun, rilly.”

  This moroha blade wasn’t quite the marvel that you got from the ori awasi san mat or shihozume methods, but it didn’t take a year to produce, either. Alston turned the blade cutting-edge-up, admiring the wavy yakiba line in the steel that marked the hardened edge; she smiled, imagining Swindapa’s face lighting up when she saw the sword. The Fiernan girl was a natural, too; teaching her was a real pleasure. So you couldn’t really say it was favoritism to let her have this���

  Ron Leaton came up wiping his hands on an oily rag. “Our anachronism doing right by you, Captain Alston?”

  “Peace. I love you too, man.” the smith said, and turned back to his work.

  “I have a horrible feeling he’s the wave of the future and the machinery is an anachronism,” Alston said, snapping the sword back into the sheath.

  “Well, we’re fitting out a whole building just for him and his apprentices,” Leaton said; she suspected it would be a relief to both of them to part company. “Mean
while, things are going pretty well. I found another three Bridgeport milling machines, eight engine lathes larger than twelve-inch, three larger than fourteen-inch, and one eighteen-inch-that was a pile of rusting parts down at the Electric Company, but it’s restorable. What we’re really short of is tool steel for drills and working edges, and stuff like Teflon lagging tape, hacksaw blades, files, sandpaper��� we’ve swept every basement on the island and it still isn’t enough.”

  She looked around. The boat-storage-cum-engineering-shop had changed, beyond the appearance of the big charcoal hearth and its surroundings in one corner. Dozens of people were laboring with hand tools at workbenches scattered through the cavernous interior; many of them were assembling crossbows from parts turned out on the lathes and cutters. The five machine tools they’d moved here from Seahaven Engineering’s original basement setting and the ones Leaton had scavenged out of attics and forgotten storerooms were all set up, and they’d��� spawned was the best word, she decided. There were another four lathes, and heavy six-foot-by-three platforms were being built to house more. Metal shapes and curves lay scattered about, with men and women working on them, assembling a gear-cutter. The new lathes had been converted to work from leather belts taking off a power shaft rigged near the ceiling, and she could hear the chuffing of one of Leaton’s prize steam engines. A big flywheel was going up against one wall, and beside it a bulky clumsy thing like a miniature stripped-down locomotive, the old choo-choo kind.

  “Where did you find that?” she asked.

  “Oh, Martha and Jared dug it up. Steam traction engine. Someone imported it years ago for the tourists, then stuck it in a storage shed and forgot it. Nearly got it working again; it eats wood, and by God we’ve got wood. We’re going to hook it up to a generator, for times when the wind’s down, and then we’re going to duplicate it, maybe modify it a little. I’m doing some plans for a steam road hauler, too.”

  She nodded. That will be useful, she thought, and continued aloud: “How’s that project I started you on going?”