Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  “Welcome, Oh Lord of the Manor,” she said.

  Walker grinned; Alice might take her perversions with excessive seriousness, but it was refreshing to have someone who wasn’t totally in awe of him. Of course, he could relax around Alice, The locals would never follow a woman, witch or no, and she knew it. She was crazy, he supposed, but not in the least stupid.

  “How are things going?” he said.

  The serving girl brought in a tray of sandwiches, thin grilled beef with onions on crusty almost-French bread, plus cheese and pickled vegetables. Hong had taught the kitchen staff well-she liked to eat properly herself-and none of them disobeyed her twice.

  “Well, I told that cow Ekhnonpa to stay off her feet more-she’s still puking in the mornings and probably will be until she drops her calf. I don’t like the spotting she had, and I’ve cut her salt intake,” the physician said. “Speaking of that, do you know half the females in this place are pregnant? It’s not decent-as soon as I’ve got one trained to do something, somebody pups her. I’m going to start spaying some of them, or doing some D amp;Cs, or we’ll never get any work done. Anyway, four births and one death this week-brainless bitch fell into the boiling tallow in the soap shed and got scalded, nothing I could do. A beam fell on a slave’s foot and crushed it; he’ll live and I saved the foot, but he’s laid up for months. No more dysentery, thank goodness, just the usual rash of minor injuries, and my assistants could see to most of those. The food stores are holding up with the latest delivery. We’re finally seeing some real production from the spinning and weaving shed.”

  He nodded approval as he swallowed the last of his sandwich and took a bite of strong cheese. A lot of the tribute was in raw wool and flax. Building the kick-pedal flying-shuttle looms and the spinning jenny hadn’t been any problem, but getting the machines into actual production was another matter. Hong had taken the project under her wing for something to do, now that her regular clinic was well organized. It also made work for all those pregnant women, work they actually liked, and if you wanted decent sheeting or pillowcases here you had to make them yourself. The local linen was more like canvas.

  “Good job,” he said. The kitchen girl came in to clear away the wood and pottery plates. “As a reward, come along upstairs.”

  He rose. Hong dropped her chalk beside her quill pen and followed suit, grinning at him and slowly licking her lips. “You too,” he added to the servant.

  “You girls work on your times tables,” Hong said to her helpers.

  “Yes, Ms. Hong,” they chorused, eyes firmly down on their slates.

  The two Americans went out the door into the hallway, pushing the kitchen girl between them and up the stairs. Their hands met on her shivering back. Hong was smiling, and twirling a little silver-handled crop of bone and leather she always wore thonged around her right wrist.

  Life is good, Walker thought, moving his hand down to the girl’s rump. They turned left down the hall to Hong’s room, which had the frontal mask of a human skull nailed to it with golden spikes.

  “Wake up! Wake up!”

  Ian Arnstein yawned and stretched, shaking off a dream in which he was trapped in a seminar without end, populated exclusively by illiterate surfer dudes who kept quoting Foucault at him; or even worse, Paul de Man. It was still dark outside, just the slightest hint of gray in the windows. It was his turn to make up the morning fire, and he snuggled down under the blankets and coverlet in reluctance. It might be March-now that he came a little more out of sleep he realized that it was the anniversary of Event Day, the morning of the expeditionary force’s sailing date-but it was still cold and damp after a week of storms.

  “Wake up!” Doreen said again, shaking his shoulder. “Ian! We’re back in the twentieth! The Event reversed! There’s a jet going by right over us and a Navy helicopter landing down by Steamboat Wharf!”

  Ian hit the floor with a bellow “and tripped, tangled in the sheets. His elbows thumped on the floor; he ignored it and scrambled to the windows, throwing up the sash.

  Cold wind and the drizzle it blew in raised goosebumps on his naked body. Below in the street a cart pulled by two cows went by, piled high with bundles of salted fish under a tarpaulin. A steam whistle sounded mournful and remote; he could smell burning whale oil from the lanterns���

  A giggle from the bed brought him around. Doreen squeaked and hopped off the mattress, keeping the four-poster between them. “Now, darling, it was just a joke-”

  He kept coming. She dodged and somersaulted over the bed. “Joke my hairy arse!” he roared. “That rain was cold, goddammit.”

  He chased her around the room. By the second circuit he was laughing as well; he took time to throw a few dry sticks on the fire before she let him catch her. They were both still smiling when they dressed and went across to breakfast, and so down to the wharves.

  The two schooners Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tub-man were already being hauled out from the dock by the tugs. Eagle still waited. She didn’t look quite so pristine as she had a year ago; they were still short of paint, and would be for years. Extra davits for more boats had been added to her stern and sides, and other shapes crouched at the rails, covered in tarpaulins. Umbrellas and rain slickers crowded the dock; there were hugs and tears as friends and family members said farewell. Father Gomez-who’d been chosen as head of the new church, rather to his own surprise-led a blessing service.

  Then Jared Cofflin climbed onto a board between two barrels.

  “Bad weather for a send-off, so I won’t keep you long,” he said. “We did all the speechifying necessary at the Town Meeting. This is something that has to be done. Lisketter’s bunch got themselves killed, but we don’t know what Walker and his gang have been doing, and we have to go, for our safety and that of our families and our homes. It isn’t that far to Britain.”

  Not too far for Walker to come back with a horde of pirates, if we give him enough time, Ian thought soberly. Or for the Tartessians to do the same. That fact had sunk home well and truly over the winter; three-quarters of the Meeting’s votes had gone to sending an expeditionary force and giving Alston plenipotentiary authority. Even Sam Macy had gone along with it, with a convert’s zeal. Now that the spring plowing was mostly done, the islanders were anxious to see the expedition on its way. Not enthusiastic, certainly, except for some youngsters, but very willing.

  He wondered whether it was the situation that made Town Meeting government work relatively well here, or the fact that this was a community whose core was people with real roots. I doubt a random collection of seven thousand Angelenos would have done nearly as well.

  “I have complete confidence in Captain Alston’s judgment and leadership,” Cofflin finished. “With that, I’ll turn this slippery plank over to her for a minute.”

  There was a friend’s malice in the smile he gave the commander of the Republic of Nantucket’s fleet. Ian knew they both detested public speaking. It was a bit of an irony that they’d both landed jobs where it was an essential part of the work.

  Alston went up on the plank, yellow slicker over her working blues, and stood with hands behind her and feet braced wide. “I’m glad Chief Cofflin and the Meeting have confidence in us,” she said. “This is an essential mission, and I intend to see that it’s done right and at the least possible cost.”

  Well, that’s the captain, he thought. Mission first, people second. She included herself among the expendable, of course.

  “Cheer up,” Doreen whispered in his ear. “Think of the adventure, Oh Speaker to Savages.”

  Adventure is somebody else in deep shit far away, as Marian so eloquently puts it. “Think of the cold, the wet, the cramped bunks, the salt meat and hardtack”-without refrigeration the Eagle and her consorts were back to traditional seafaring provender, “the natives throwing things at us,” he whispered back.

  “If all goes well, we’ll make sure that there’s no long-term menace to Nantucket’s safety, and gain friends, allies, and
trading partners,” Alston went on. “Every one of us will do her or his best to see that things do go well.”

  “Or they’ll answer to me and wish they’d never been born,” Doreen whispered, in a sotto voce impersonation of the icy soprano Alston used when angry.

  “We appreciate your support, and please keep us in your thoughts and prayers,” Alston concluded. “Thank you.”

  She stepped down, and the last of the expeditionary force trooped up the gangplank.

  “Almost wish I were going with you,” Jared said.

  “I don’t,” Martha added bluntly. “I just hope you all come back safe.” She looked down at the baby sleeping in its carriage.

  “You’re right,” Alston said. “That’s important work too.”

  “You will come someday,” Swindapa said. “There will be many voyages. I’ll show you my birth-country.” She bent and touched the baby’s cheek. “You too, little Marian, iho-jax. You will see the midwinter Moon rising over the Great Wisdom.”

  Ian looked aside at Doreen, and smiled. “Remember our honeymoon cruise?”

  “Time to break the mold,” Walker said. “Hoist it out.”

  Men in thick leather aprons and boots and gloves went cautiously close and fastened a three-bar iron grapnel to the top of the mold. A ten-ox team bent their necks to the yoke and pulled in the muddy yard outside, and the long clay tube rose slowly out of the casting pit to the creak of harness and rattle of the block-and-tackle. The workers stood watching and blowing on their hands until it was free, then moved forward to guide it onto a timber cradle as the oxen walked backward and let the great weight down again.

  A whistle blew, and slaves attacked the clay of the mold with wooden mallets and chisels. Large sections of it peeled away, revealing the dull brown-gold color of the bronze, still painfully hot to the touch. Walker and Cuddy stepped close, examining it with painstaking care from the thick breech down through the trunnions and the extra foot of spongy, pitted metal at the muzzle. The center was still full; they’d hollow-cast it with a water-cooled core for greater strength, the outer layers shrinking in as they solidified.

  “We’ll saw this last foot off, and then we’re ready to bore it out,” Walker said, slapping the metal. There’s a thrill to it, he thought. Sort of like having a giant hard-on, in a rarefied intellectual sort of way.

  “Yeah, but that boring, that’s going to be a bitch, boss. The tool pieces and the gearing for the boring machine-that’ll be mostly a hand-filing job.”

  “You’ve got the gauges for measuring results, don’t you?” Walker asked, crouching and looking along the top of the barrel.

  “Boss��� ah, hell, yeah, I can do it. I can build a tool-and-gear cutter, too, it’s just a shitload of work.”

  “Nothing worthwhile without sweat,” Walker said cheerfully. “You’ve got those locals understudying you, don’t you?”

  “Right. Boss, have you tried to get the notion of doing something exactly into these wogs’ heads? It’s like on time, they just don’t have that file on their hard drive.”

  “Actually I have, Bill. It just takes persistence and a boot up the ass now and then.”

  Perfect, he thought, touching the cannon again.

  The sights were elementary, a blade at the front and a notch at the rear, just like the model, the Civil War twelve-pounder Napoleon. Saltpeter was still the bottleneck in gunpowder production, and Isketerol was working on that-his people used it as a medicine, and it was just a matter of scaling up the leaching process. When it was solved, he’d have the same power at his command that stopped Lee’s men at Malvern Hill and Gettysburg.

  “Ultima regio regnum,” Walker said, patting the barrel again. “The last argument of kings.” If the Nantucketers wanted to fuck with him, he was going to give them a right royal welcome.

  Bill Cuddy blinked at the sound of Walker’s laughter, and several of the slaves made covert signs with their fingers as they cringed.

  “Oh, God,” Doreen said, looking up the companionway stairs that led to the fantail of the Eagle and at the tumbled slope of foaming water beyond.

  “Quickly, please, Ms. Arnstein!” the yellow-muffled figure at the head of them said. “Can’t keep this hatchway open!”

  Ice-cold sea spray was blasting through, already hitting her face and trickling down into the layers of quilted parka and wool sweater beneath her waterproofs. She took a breath and ran up the slippery treads; the fact that the ship was riding up the slope of one of the huge waves made it a little easier.

  At least the air and cold cut the nausea. Seasickness had never bothered her before, but the four unbroken days of a high-latitude North Atlantic gale had triggered it well and truly. The crewman grabbed her as she came out and snapped her belt onto one of the safety lines that ran down either side of the quarterdeck. The wind snatched the breath out of her, leaving her gasping as she pulled herself slipping and crouching along past the radio shack and toward the great triple wheels.

  She looked at the waves and felt her stomach heave one last time, but mastered it. It isn’t really storming anymore, she told herself. Not really. Not the way it had been for the previous four days. Then she looked back over a sea like a long range of mountains in labor, white water from horizon to horizon except in the troughs between the great waves. Appalled, she turned her back on it-had to, because otherwise she couldn’t breathe. Somewhere up there it was near noon, but the light was a somber gray wash.

  The Eagle’s bow climbed until it was pointing at the growling iron sky. Wind moaned and whistled through the rigging, loud enough to drown out a voice five paces away. No sleet today, but spray still came in sheets. The ship seemed to pause and then pitch forward under a mountain of gray and steel blue streaked with white, plumes of white throwing back from the twisting lunge of the bows. The rigging changed its note as the height of the wave itself sheltered them a little from the force of the monster wind raging down out of Greenland. Dim in the sheets of water coming over the side, figures in yellow slickers fought with the ropes in the waist or aloft.

  The wave broke behind them and poured across the port rail, cataracted across the waist deck, hip-deep to the crew. Doreen felt her feet slip out from beneath her and clung for sheer life to the safety line; it bent like a bowstring under the terrible leverage, and her head went under-or she thought it did. With wind and water so intermingled there was no real surface to the billow streaming about her, only a zone of increasing density. Then like some great dog Eagle shook herself and roared upright again, with a Niagara pouring overside and through the scuppers.

  Oh, God, thank You, she thought, coughing and wheezing to get the water out of her lungs as she fought her way to the wheels. Eight crewfolk wrestled the savage leverage of the following seas as it played through the rudder and the gearing.

  “Sharp weather,” the captain called, bending to shriek into her ear. “This is real sailin’!”

  “You’re out of your mind!” Doreen yelled back.

  White teeth split the black face dimly seen under the slicker’s hood. “Yeah, I am. Ain’t it cool?” Alston shouted in turn.

  Swindapa laughed beside her. She was bareheaded, long wet hair streaming like a yellow banner in the gale.

  One advantage of weather like this was that you could mutter and not be heard. “Oh, great, I stop puking my guts out for the first time in sixty hours, and what do I get? The Loony Lesbian Sailors’ Comedy Hour.”

  She pulled herself closer, holding on to the safety line. “How are we doing, Captain?”

  Alston seemed in a playful mood. “Do you take Band-Aids off slowly or rip ‘em quick?” she yelled.

  “Slow-why?”

  “I’m of the rip-‘em-quick school,” Alston replied. “This blow was just what we needed, to see how the crews settled in, test the schooners’ seakeeping��� and get us across fast.”

  “The schooners aren’t sunk?” Doreen said, looking around.

  Nothing. The Eagle came to the
crest of a wave, and she couldn’t even tell where sea and sky parted company. The Queen Mary couldn’t live in this.

  “Not as of the last radio check, half an hour ago. Good weatherly little ships-they float like corks. And we’ve been making three hundred sea miles from noon to noon, or better. This blow’s dying, though; we’ll rendezvous off Ireland in two, three days. Fast passage.”

  “I’m glad we’re not in danger.”

  “Oh, there’s danger. Let a couple of sails go in this and we’ll broach to-be turned broadside on to the waves in a flash.”

  “Would that be bad?”

  “We’d capsize and go down like a rock,” Alston yelled cheerfully. “But don’t worry-it’s a sound ship and the crew’s shaken down somethin’ wonderful.”

  “I’ll take a 747, thanks, given my choice,” Doreen shouted back. “Anyway, Ian says he’s finished.”

  “Lead along then,” Alston said. “Ms. Rapczewicz, you have the deck. Keep her so.”

  They went down the companionway behind the radio shack and forward of the emergency wheel. The narrow passageway on the port side was dimmer than it had been when the electric lights were on; even the smell was different, a very slight fishy-nutty tang from the whale oil, and the officers’ galley to their right gave off an occasional whiff of woodsmoke. They turned left, past the usual captain’s quarters and back to the flag cabin at the rear.

  Ian was sitting at the table, gnawing on a crackerlike piece of ship’s biscuit. “Is it still blowing hard up there?” he asked innocently. The two rooms of the flag cabin were warm and dry and fairly well lit, but the swooping lurch was still the same-possibly even worse without the distraction of the heaving sea to watch.

  “Excuse me while I strangle my husband, Captain,” Doreen said, dripping.

  Alston went into the head and returned with towels. Doreen and Swindapa wrapped them around their hair; the captain rubbed her inch-long wiry cap a few times and sat. I wish I could just ignore discomfort like that, Doreen thought.