“Ah, a good name for a ship!”
The yacht had about a hundred feet at the waterline, two-masted and flush-decked except for a low cabin directly ahead of the wheel and binnacle, with a burden of a hundred and ten tons. Not as fast as the Eagle, of course, Walker acknowledged to himself. Twelve knots at most, given optimum winds; she was a topsail schooner, fore-and-aft-rigged except for two square sails at the top of the foremast. On the other hand she could go three or four points closer to the eye when tacking upwind, and she drew only six feet to the big windjammer’s seventeen. That was why she was scheduled to go along on the next voyage to Europe, for scouting and inshore work. Plus she was wooden-built, thirty years old but still as sound as the day when the boatyard in Nova Scotia had sent her down the ways. Injury to her hull need not be an irreparable disaster, with tools and carpenters along.
The deck was broken by a low coaming, its cover aside for the present. Hammering and sawing noises came from within, where carpenters were installing a proper hold. The cargo for it waited on the dockside where the ship was moored, under an improvised loading crane also under construction. There were ingots of pig iron from the Eagle’s ballast, barrels of salt fish and meat, barrels of hardtack, and others to hold extra water. A complete set of blacksmith’s tools and forge-furnishings, including Martin’s best homemade anvils, and bar stock for it. Drills, planes, augers, axes, sledges, kegs of nails, two-man saws. A small lathe, and a set of measuring gauges run up on Leaton’s Swiss instrument-making machine; knocked-down metalwork for a sawmill and gristmill. Books, most of them bound photocopies, carefully wrapped in multiple layers of green plastic garbage bag to make them thoroughly waterproof; books on shipbuilding, metalsmithing, agriculture and mining. Trade goods, useful and ornamental, rounding out the heavier load the Eagle would be carrying.
Couldn’t have done it better myself, Walker thought. Of course, he had done much of it himself. With a crew of fifty and the cadets, Eagle was grossly overmanned for routine work; Alston had them all working half a dozen projects ashore as well, herself more than any. Getting the schooner ready was his job. He’d impressed the captain with his zeal and perfect discipline, but it was Hendriksson who was slated to command the Yare. Alston still wanted him close under her eye.
“Bitch,” he muttered to himself.
But a smart bitch-she didn’t miss much. He was still kicking himself for blurting out his half-formed dreams that first night after the Event. Granted he’d been dazed and disoriented, everyone had, but it had still been a stupid thing to do. Hmm. Victor would like the Yare too��� could I recruit him over that? No, probably not. The Cuban-American lieutenant was too much of a straight arrow.
“Come on,” he said to Isketerol.
Careful, careful, be very careful. He hated Captain Alston, but he respected her brains and courage thoroughly. He’d have been more than ready to follow her on an expedition such as the one he planned��� but she’d never do that. She’ll stick with shepherding these sheep on this damned island.
They walked up the gangplank onto the ship, dodging men and women with tools and materials for the refit, and walked back to the little fantail behind the wheel. There was an awning stretched over it like a tent with the mizzensail boom as a ridgepole, and a couple of chairs. The day was hot and clear, with little trace of yesterday’s fog; the breeze off the harbor smelled of fish and salt and tar. Gulls went noisily overhead, their harsh cries thick in the air. A big load of barrel staves and planks sat on the wharf not far from him, just in from Providence Base, adding the vanilla tang of fresh-cut oak to the mixture; beside it were oozing casks of pitch and turpentine from Cape Cod. A chattering party of junior high students were sitting around mending twine nets. Hammering and the hiss of the last cutting torches sounded from the ferry’s upperworks as teams labored to disassemble it from the top down; carts were going back and forth with loads of steel plate, beam, and girder as the work went on. Other working parties were ripping the air-conditioning and partitions out of Eagle, undoing her last refit in ‘79.
Isketerol sat and accepted a bottle of beer from the cooler; he went on in the Mycenaean Greek that Walker now spoke well, since Iraiina lacked the concepts and vocabulary for much of what they had to discuss.
“I have confirmed what you told me,” Isketerol said. “They plot to keep me here, always among strangers, never to return to my home, fearing what I might do with the knowledge I’ve gained.” He bared his teeth. “By Arucuttag of the Sea, they’ll regret that.”
“So they will,” Walker agreed.
Actually they haven’t decided to screw you over, good buddy, they’re just thinking about it, he mused. In Alston’s position he would have put Isketerol over the side with a stone tied to his ankles as soon as he’d told all he knew, but Alston was squeamish, to a point. Only to a point. Don’t forget that. Underestimating your opposition was stupid, and stupidity was the only real sin he recognized.
“We can help each other, then,” Walker said. “You need a friend who will guard your back, and so do I.” Solemnly, they clasped hands. “Now, tell me more of the lands of Mycenae. How would they welcome a stranger with powerful gifts?”
“No, I don’t think you should seek out the Achaean lords right away,” the Tartessian said thoughtfully. “They’re too hard and greedy, and not very forethoughtful, most of them��� But they hire many mercenaries from the barbarian lands.”
Walker sipped at the beer. It was too sweet without the hops, but otherwise not bad; only middling cold, though. There were plans for ice pits to store frozen lake ice over the summer; that could probably be done in the Aegean, too.
Greece looks like the best bet. The Hittite Empire was too big and too tightly centralized, a god-king autocracy. He’d learned Troy was a prosperous city-state that controlled the approaches to the Black Sea; but he’d have to learn yet another language to operate there. Greece, now-Greece sounded a lot like Renaissance Italy, or the more turbulent medieval European countries, say the Holy Roman Empire. He grinned like a wolf. According to the reference books, in about fifty years or so the whole Aegean basin was due to go under in a mad-dog scramble of internal warfare and barbarian invasions, with refugees and savages squatting in the ruins, a Dark Age. In other words, a perfect situation for an able, realistic man like himself-provided he had an edge, so that he could establish himself among the locals and work up to a position of strength gradually.
William Walker, King of Men, he thought. Has a nice ring to it. It was even altruistic, in a way. These goons were going to wreck their own civilization. He’d be doing them a favor-and they’d return the favor to him, and his children after him.
Provided he had an edge��� Leaton was already working on a musket, and anyone who could cast a bronze statue could make cannon. Sulfur was probably available, and there were black-powder enthusiasts on the island who knew the whole technique of making gunpowder; he’d drop in on them and pump them for tips. But for all that he’d need a secure base for a while, and preferably more men, as well, before he showed up in the Mediterranean. Isketerol needed a sweetener too.
“The question is, where to get a strong band of men?” Walker said. “I can’t recruit more than a few here. Someone would talk, no matter how careful I was.”
“There is the White Isle,” Isketerol pointed out. “And the lands around it. Of course, for that you would require a ship, and then passage from the White Isle to the Middle Sea.”
Passage for a couple of hundred, the American thought. The Yare’s useful, but with good carpenters and some time I could reproduce her���
“How would you like this ship for your own?” Walker said.
The Tartessian raised the beer bottle to his lips and looked out over the blue horizon. “Tell me more, my friend,” he said.
Nantucket was never hot for long. Fog had rolled in and filled the streets as the sun fell; the air was cool, cool enough that the small blaze she’d kindled in the bedr
oom fireplace was pleasant, even on a summer’s night.
Alston sipped at her bourbon-and-water and opened the first page of Master and Commander, ready for another run-through of the whole set. Luckily she’d had most of her O’Brian collection on board Eagle during the Event, and she’d been able to replace the others here. There’d never be any more, of course, but she’d reluctantly come to the conclusion that The Commodore was the natural end of the series anyway. The big house was very quiet, although an occasional voice came through the open window, and once the slow ringing clop of shod hooves on stone. A grandfather clock ticked the evening away downstairs. She smiled and glanced around the big room. You could get used to this sort of thing, although she liked her cabin on the Eagle well enough, and the lack of running water ashore was a surprisingly hard adjustment. The books and ship plans on the walls, those were hers, and the armor on its stand in a corner with the swords beneath, and the squared-away neatness. It smelled of wax, the nutty-scented lamp oil, metal polish, and flowers.
“Not in the mood,” she murmured after a while, setting down the novel.
In fact, I’m feeling restless, bitchy, and itchy-skinned. She’d been having a hard time suppressing the impulse to bark at people, which would be fatal. A commander was the last person on earth who could afford to lose her temper. If she hadn’t known for a fact her period was two weeks off, she’d have put it down to PMS.
“Well���”
She picked up another volume; her favorite poet, something she’d stumbled across in a little out-of-the way used-book store in Boston once, many years ago. She’d opened it in idle curiosity, and fallen in love at once; now she whispered aloud, hardly needing to read:
High on the bridge of Heaven whose Eastern bars
Exclude the interchange of Night and Day,
Robed with faint seas and crowned with quiet stars
All great Gods dwell to whom men prayed or pray.
No winter chills, no fear or fever mars
Their grand and timeless hours of pomp and play;
Some drive about the Rim wind-golden cars
Or, shouting, laugh Eternity away.
The daughters of their pride,
Moon-pale, blue-water-eyed,
Their flame-white bodies pearled with falling spray,
Send all their bright hair streaming
Down where the worlds lie gleaming,
And draw their mighty lovers close and say:
“Come over by the stream: one hears
The speech of Nations broken in the chant of Spheres.”
“Damn, can’t escape the blue-water-eyed daughters,” she said. “Ah well.” An immense and not unpleasant sadness filled her, like the soft silvery fog creeping through the streets outside. She went on:
Between the pedestals of Night and Morning,
Between red death and radiant Desire
With not one sound of triumph or of warning
Stands the great sentry on the Bridge of Fire.
O transient soul, thy thought with dreams adorning,
Cast down the laurel, and unstring the lyre:
The wheels of Time are turning, turning, turning,
The slow stream channels deep, and doth not tire
Gods on their Bridge above Whispering lies and love
Shall mock your passage down ‘the sunless river
Which, rolling all its streams,
Shall take you, king of dreams, -
Unthroned and unapproachable for ever—
To where the kings who dreamed of old
Whiten in habitations monumental cold.
“Seize the day, in other words,” she told herself. Nobody else was here tonight; Rapczewicz was on board Eagle, the other officers who’d roomed here temporarily had moved into the two buildings next door, and Swindapa was over at Smith’s Baths-
“I’m back,” she called, from the entrance hall below. Alston heard the door click shut, and feet bound up the staircase and down the hall. “Foggy out tonight.”
“Hello, ‘dapa. So you are, so it is.”
The Fiernan was wearing a knee-length T-shirt and plastic sandals, with her hair loose and damp around her shoulders, the yellow of it darkened by the water. She came in and sat cross-legged by the fire, holding her hands out to either side with the hair draped over them to dry. The cerulean-blue eyes looked up at her, vivid by contrast with the summer tan, warm and full of affection. And here I thought Whitney Houston was the very definition of hot stuff, she thought. May have to revise that. Marian Alston closed her eyes for a second and sighed, then tried to concentrate on the book again, thumbing through the pages at random:
We that were friends tonight have found
A fear, a secret and a shame:
I am on fire with that soft sound
You make, in uttering my name���
It seemed even the poet had turned against her tonight, she decided ruefully. Well, it isn’t the first case of unrequited love you’ve blundered into, woman, she thought, scolding herself. Usually she had better sense, but there was no way to get away on the island; in retrospect it’d probably been a mistake to have Swindapa living here, but she’d been much more fragile back then and needed a familiar, trusted face around. Alston recognized the symptoms in herself with mournful accuracy, although not until they’d been stealing up on her for a while. That combination of overwhelming tenderness and lust���
“I talked to Cindy Ganger at the baths,” Swindapa said after a while, smiling. “She asked me if I was your girlfriend.”
Alston choked, spraying bourbon across the page. Swindapa jumped up in alarm and pounded her helpfully on the back, then sat down beside her on the couch.
“Are you all right?” she asked, a little frown of worry between her brows.
“Yes. Just, mmm, surprised,” Alston said. And my sinuses have diluted bourbon in them, goddammit. She used a handkerchief to mop the page and blow her nose, which gave her a moment to collect her thoughts. God damn all rumormongers.
When she looked up, Swindapa had an arm draped over the back of the blue Directoire sofa and one leg hooked up under the other. She was still smiling. “I don’t really understand you Eagle People,” she said after a moment. “I don’t know how to��� hear what you’re saying when you’re not speaking, not really well. So I make mistakes like that.”
“Body language?” Alston said, her mouth a little dry. She took another sip of the whiskey. Swindapa picked the glass out of her hand and sipped herself before returning it.
“Yes, that’s a good way to say it-body language.” The smile lessened. “I’d like to be your girlfriend, you know. But you move away when I touch you, even though I think you like me. Back home it’s bad manners to come right out and ask someone older than you-you have to wait for them to ask you when you show you want them to. I keep showing you, and you never ask!”
“Ah���” Oh, hell, what can you say to that? ” ‘Dapa, that’s very flattering, but it’s impossible.”
“Don’t you like me?” Swindapa asked, her eyes going wide and beginning to fill. “I thought you were getting to like me, not just feel sorry for me.”
Oh, hell and damnation. “Of course I like you. I like you a great deal. But you’re too young, and you’re my��� guest.”
“I know you want me. I can tell that.”
Alston’s tongue locked on a denial. She hated lying, particularly to friends. The necessity of doing so in the service had rasped her soul.
Swindapa frowned. “I’m not a child,” she said angrily. “I wish you wouldn’t act as if I was. I’ve got the Spear Mark; lots of girls my age back in the White Isle have babies and their own hearths. Do you Eagle People have some rule against sleeping with people who are your guests?”
“No, we don’t, not exactly,” Alston said. Christ, I must have been a monster in a past life to deserve this.
“Is it because I’m ugly, too pale, not beautiful like you?”
“Christ no.”
Swindapa’s voice took on a note of exasperation. “Then why?”
Alston opened her mouth to reply, then closed it. It was true; Swindapa was young, but not a child, not in the way an American her age would be. She wasn’t someone under Alston’s command, either, nor a dependent. What reasons did that leave? Sheer cowardice, she thought, and leaned forward. Fear of rejection. Fear of public opinion. Rationalizations. Their lips met. This may be just the worst thing I could do, but the hell with it.
Minutes later she sighed breathlessly into the fine-spun blond hair. Deer Dancer certainly didn’t need any instruction on kissing. “I’ve wanted to do that for some time now.”
“Me too.” Softly. “I was afraid I never could, after the Iraiina. But I can.” They kissed again.
Alston felt a cold knot untie itself in her chest, then travel down from neck to spine as the warm closeness dissolved doubt and tension. After a moment the hug turned into a moving embrace. The T-shirt floated to the floor. She gave a sigh of wonder as her hands glided over the Fiernan’s back and stomach and moved up to cup her breasts. Swindapa wiggled and gave a little chuckle of delight, arching into the caress. Her hands began undoing the buttons of Alston’s uniform tunic. After a moment:
“How do you take this off?”
No bras in the Bronze Age. “The catch is at the back.”
Fingers touched her. “Does that feel nice?”
“Oh, yes.” Any nicer and I may faint.
“Stand up for a second, I can’t get at this buckle.”
Well��� Alston stood, grinning. No bashfulness problem.
“Oh, good! I wondered if your hair was lovely and��� what’s your word��� nappy down here too.”
I never did like bashful types, anyway, Alston thought, dizzy. “Come here, girl.”
They lay on the bed, wrapping arms and legs around each other, kissing and nuzzling. A thought struck Alston:
Island in the Sea of Time Page 31