Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  “Well, Mr. Arnstein?” Alston said.

  “I think I’ve come up with a diplomatic strategy that might work,” he said cautiously. “What we discussed, but refined a bit. It turns on a nice little piece of linguistic reconstruction Doreen and Martha and I did back on the island.”

  Alston’s eyes narrowed. “Oh?”

  “It turns out the Iraiina and their relatives, what Swindapa calls the Sun People, weren’t the first Indo-Europeans to settle in Britain,” he said. “They were probably just the first ones to make it stick-would have without us, that is.”

  He pulled several sheets of paper out of a folder. “Damn, but this almost makes me wish I’d been a comparative philologist; as it is, I’m a rank amateur out of my depth. But look at these words in Fiernan.”

  He drew a list: bronze, wheel, axle, plow, yoke. Each had a phonetic rendering of the Earth Folk equivalent beside it. “Now look at these Proto-Indo-European equivalents, and the Iraiina ones.”

  “They don’t look very similar to me,” Alston said dubiously. “I mean, the Iraiina words do, very similar, but not the Fiernan.”

  Doreen took up the explanation: “You’ve got to strip away the grammatical features-and that’s damned hard in this language, with this crazy-no offense, Swindapa-prefix-suffix system they’ve got. Sometime a long time ago, hundreds of years, Swindapa’s ancestors borrowed the words for these concepts. From something even closer to the ur-language than Iraiina.”

  “Oh,” Swindapa said, looking at the list. “Yes. I see what you mean; that makes sense. Why didn’t you ask me, though?”

  Doreen felt her stomach lurch again. Oh, shit. We got too tied up in our research and assumed that preliterates couldn’t have a historical sense. Preliterates like the Iraiina couldn’t, perhaps; they lived in mythic time, not historical. The Earth Folk were obsessed with memory and measuring natural cycles, though, as much as the Mayans had-would have-been.

  Aloud, feebly, she said: “What do you mean?”

  “Well, in your years���” The blue eyes took on a remote look; her lips and fingers moved in a mnemonic chant. “A thousand years ago, or a little more.”

  “The���” She paused for a moment, and her accent grew stronger, as it did when she shifted back to thinking in her native tongue. “The Daggermen, we called them; the Brawlers, the Mannerless. They came from the east-the Sea-Land Country. A few at first, trading, and sometimes stealing things, then more of them. They built their houses in places that weren’t good for farming, at first, and raised animals. They had no manners, but they had wonderful things-mead, and copper, and plows, and the very first horses to be seen in the White Isle. They made pots marked with cords for the mead-drinking, and new types of bows, ways of herding cattle, and oh, all sorts of things. There were a lot of fights.”

  Doreen put her face in her palms. Ian pummeled his temples lightly with the heels of his hands. “Bell-Beaker burials,” he said.

  “So the Grandmothers sent their daughters to them, to teach them about Moon Woman, and when they learned, they helped us to make the greatest of the Building Wisdoms.” Swindapa smiled. “That was eight hundred and fifty-two of your years ago. And they took the Spear Mark, that our hunters had always had, and became part of the Earth Folk.”

  “Assimilated,” Doreen said to Alston. “But not completely. I think that’s partly why the two institutions in Earth Folk society don’t cooperate very well.”

  Swindapa shrugged. “The Grandmothers and the Spear Chosen don’t have much to do with each other,” she pointed out. “Moon Woman and��� oh, I see what you mean.”

  Alston was nodding slowly. “You’re right,” she said. “Now, let’s figure out how to use it.”

  Ian made an eager gesture and pulled out another sheet, this one with a flow chart on it. “It’s a wild coincidence, but there are some similarities in the Earth Folk setup to recorded cultures-particularly the Iroquois. They’re matrilineal and matrilocal, for starters, and there’s a Sacred Truce celebrated by a gathering at���”

  It was a fair spring day when the men of Walkerburg made ready to ride out to war; tender leaves fluttered, and wildflowers starred cornfields and meadows. William Walker pushed the modified Garand into the saddle scabbard and tied the thong that held it in place as he looked around in pride. Not bad, considering that he’d only been here since last September. The seed kernel of an empire. Archaeologists may dig it up someday. The place where the dynasty that ruled the world for a thousand years was born. If things went well, he’d move somewhere more convenient in a couple of years-the site of London, probably-but this was the first ground that had been his.

  Alice Hong rode back up the line and handed Walker a piece of birch bark covered with notes. He looked at it and made yet another mental note that he’d have to get going on making paper someday; there was plenty of linen to make the pulp. Hong rode with reasonable confidence, able to stay on at least and keep her horse going in pretty much the direction she intended, which was all you could say for most of the people here. A Browning automatic was belted to her waist.

  “Good,” he said, returning the list, a last-minute check of the stores.

  Unlike most of the others in the war host gathering through the Iraiina lands and Kent and the Thames Valley, his people weren’t going to spend half their time foraging. And they weren’t going to lose ten men to disease for every one killed in battle, either.

  He looked down the column. Sixty riders, all in chain hauberks and conical helmets with bar nasals except for four Americans wearing Nantucket-made plate suits like his. They’d all ride to battle but fight on foot; it took longer than seven months to train a real cavalryman, or to train the horse for that matter. It still gave them unprecedented mobility and striking power by local standards; every man had a steel sword, a spear, and a crossbow slung over his back, although most of them kept their native axes or copies Martins had made at their saddlebows as well. More followed on foot, also all in iron, half of them with spears and half with crossbows. None of his original crew from the Yare among them, except for four as officers; the Americans were more useful at base, mostly��� and not really up to local standards in hand-to-hand fighting, the majority of them. They and the ten native warriors he was leaving would be more than enough to keep the slaves in order.

  For the rest there were a dozen servants; Hong and her native assistants; the train of big wagons and a smaller two-wheeled one he’d modeled on the farrier carts Civil War cavalry units had taken along, with a portable sheet-iron forge and small anvil for Marlins’s best pupil. Plus spare horses, and some cattle driven along for fresh meat.

  And the piece de resistance, two long bronze tubes on wheeled mounts with limbers behind four-horse teams. A nasty surprise, if he needed to pull a rabbit out of his hat.

  Good little army, he thought. They actually had some notion of discipline and coordinated action by now. Combined with the natives’ built-in ferocity and hardihood, it was a formidable combination.

  He turned and led Bastard back toward the steps of the Big House. Ekhnonpa stood there, with the smile that brought luck. She was showing now, five months along; Keruwthena was even bigger, standing back with the lower-status staff. Odd. He’d never had any particular or urgent desire for fatherhood-it was far too much trouble and expense and time taken from his own ambitions up in the twentieth. And here he was going to be a daddy twice over��� probably more than that, actually, but those were the two he was sure of. It did change your perspective a little; there was a certain satisfaction to thinking of your genes heading down the ages, enjoying the wealth and power you were piling up after you were gone.

  He turned and looked out over the gathered folk of his settlement, raising his voice to carry. “While I am gone, my handfast man Bill Cuddy stands as steward in my place,” he said.

  He looked down at the machinist. “Don’t fuck up, Bill,” he continued in English.

  “De nada, boss,” Cuddy
said. “No problem.”

  “And my second wife, Ekhnonpa has charge of household matters,” he went on in Iraiina.

  She looked at him with worried adoration. “Return to us victorious and hale, husband,” she said.

  “You are to take care of yourself,” he said, patting her stomach. “Remember what Alice told you about straining, and diet.”

  “Yes, lord,” she said, looking past his shoulder at Hong.

  A mixture of awe, terror, and fascinated loathing was in the glance. He hadn’t let the doctor play any of her little games with the rahax’s daughter, but they were no secret.

  Alice is very useful. Good wizard/bad witch was as workable as good cop/bad cop.

  He swung into the saddle and stood in the stirrups. “0Once more we ride out to victory!” he called.

  Local tradition guided most of the speech that followed-uncomfortably florid to American ears.

  Wood and metal boomed on the sheet-steel facing of the shields as they hammered their weapons on them and screamed out Walker’s name. Success accounted for a lot of that; he’d led many raids, all of them profitable and most of them easy work.

  “Yo!” he said at last, waving his hand forward. His standard-bearer raised the banner, topped by a wolf skull and aurochs horns. Cloth went streaming out in the chilly breeze-a black wolf’s head on a red ground.

  Women made their last farewells; McAndrews tore himself away from his heavily pregnant blonde. Can these mixed marriages work? Walker thought with a flicker of sardonic humor. At least it seemed to have settled the man down; he doted on the wench. A romantic temperament.

  Hooves thudded on turf, axles squealed, oxen bellowed as they leaned into the traces.

  “I suppose I’m a romantic too, in a way, in a way,” Walker whispered to himself. After a while, he began to sing-you didn’t get music here unless you made it yourself. The locals just couldn’t deal with rock tunes, but the Americans took it up with him.

  And it’s so right, he thought. I am-

  “-Bad to the bone!

  “Bbbbbbaad!���”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  April ��� June, Year 2 A.E.

  “Hard to remember,” Swindapa said, looking over the rail, her hair lifting around her face under the baseball cap.

  Eagle and her consorts were beating southeast, down the Irish Sea after rounding Anglesey and the bulge of Wales. No land was visible now, save perhaps a distant smudge to port.

  “Remember what, ‘dapa?” Alston said, brought out of her own thoughts.

  If they spoke quietly by the fantail nobody was likely to overhear. The ship lay over at eight degrees, making ten knots with all sail set, its motion a slow smooth rocking-horse plunge. The waist was crowded, ex-cadets and militia volunteers straining for their first sight of the wild lands.

  “The sea. Hard to remember that I’ve only sailed on it this last year. There is so much of it-and always something waiting beyond the edge of it. Always something new to see.”

  Alston smiled herself. That does sound good. And there was a whole world out there, once Walker and his bloodthirsty ambitions were seen to. Moas, she thought, If we get as far as New Zealand. Great flocks of them, fourteen feet high. Or the elephant bird of Madagascar, extinct a thousand years in the twentieth, the creature that had given rise to Sinbad’s legend of the roc. Dodos, too. I’d like to see what San Francisco Bay looks like when it’s not all mucked up. Babylon. I’d really like to see Babylon. Or Africa, despite what she’d told McAndrews. Egypt-with an escort big enough to impress the locals-and maybe the Serengeti���

  “Someday, ‘dapa,” she said. Then she turned and took a few paces forward, looking into the radio shack. “Ms. Rapczewicz, signal to the Tubman; it’s about time, I think.”

  The signal lantern clacked, and the schooner dipped her ensign in acknowledgment. Faint and far, the orders echoed across the water and the Tubman’s prow turned west of south, heading to round Penzance on the point of Cornwall. Alston clasped her hands behind her back and looked east.

  “It’s begun,” she said. Chess with lives for pieces, and not knowing how your opponent moves until too late. And she could not afford to lose. So I’ll win.

  “Arucuttag of the Sea!” Miskelefol of Tartessos blurted.

  Isketerol ducked out and leveled his binoculars. The shape that loomed out of the morning mist was not quite like anything he’d seen before. A little like the Yare, except that there were no square topsails on the forward of the two masts. A gilded eagle flung back its wings below the long bowsprit, seeming to take to the air with every bound across the whitecaps that patterned the estuary. The hull cut the water like a knife slicing flesh, its prow throwing a sunlit burst of spray twenty feet in the air as she rounded and tacked in toward shore. The Tartessian’s eyes went wide behind the lenses as he saw how close she cut to the wind that blew from the north, and did a quick estimate of her speed.

  “Quiet!” he roared into the chaos of the camp. His thumb turned the focusing screw and his lips moved as he read the name on the bow, just forward of the diagonal red slash. “Harriet Tubman. Odd. Sounds like an Amurrukan name.” It was unlucky to give a ship a person’s name, splitting a soul in two.

  He cased the binoculars and looked around. “Quiet, I said. Get to your posts!”

  With his cousin’s help he put down the disorder. Yare was anchored close offshore, and Sea Wolf drawn up on the beach; he’d built her to be capable of that, since it was so useful. How deep does that��� schooner, that’s what they’re called��� draw? he thought. Eagle People ships tended to have deep keels, but that was a lot smaller than the Eagle herself, if bigger than the Yare. Hmm. Eight feet or so, I’d say, perhaps a little less. That meant they could get to within three hundred yards of the shore without touching mud, with the tide full like this.

  “I told you we should have sailed for home last week!” his cousin was saying.

  “Quiet, and get your thrower ready,” Isketerol said. His cousin departed at a run.

  How many aboard her? He studied the Nantucket schooner carefully. Hard to say, but somewhere between twenty and forty, unless they had the belowdecks packed with men. “You!” he pointed to a crewman. “Run over to Daurthunnicar’s huts and tell him we’ve enemy in sight. Diketeran!” One of his trustier men, steersman on the Foam Hunter in the old days. “Get your horse, ride to Walkerburg, and report. You, fetch my war harness. Now!”

  Men scattered to their tasks as they recovered their wits. The Tartessian camp was a half-circle backing onto the sea behind an earth rampart and palisade. At each end where the rampart met the water was a platform of timber and earth; on it crouched a shape of beams and cords. The trebuchets creaked as the Tartessians heaved around the crank handles of the geared windlasses. Isketerol finished snapping the clasps on his Nantucket-made suit of armor, checked his pistol, and walked over to the left-hand stone thrower. The crew had had plenty of time to practice over the winter, especially after Sea Wolf was finished. More hands were dragging obstacles of logs studded with iron blades down to the water’s edge, in case of a landing.

  “Ready, Skipper,” one of the trebuchet crew said to him, teeth flashing in his olive face.

  Isketerol made his own estimate of time and distance. Moving target��� “Up one on the stayrope,” he said. “And��� now.”

  The two-hundred-pound boulder whipped into the air as the machine crashed and creaked and thumped. It turned into a tumbling dot, seemed to pause at the height of its curve and then arching down. He used his binoculars again; a hundred yards behind the enemy ship the rock dropped nearly into its wake. Isketerol hid his surprise at how close they’d come. Just then his cousin’s emplacement fired; they were loaded with a large barrel of tallow and pine pitch and turpentine. The barrel-even then Isketerol found himself thinking how sheerly useful barrels were, and wondering why nobody in this age had thought of them-landed farther from the schooner than his rock had. The deliber
ately weakened hoops burst as it hit the waves, scattering the contents. The patch of burning oil floating on the water was probably more intimidating than the splash of the boulder, though, and so was the trail of smoke through the air. Nobody on a wooden ship took fire lightly unless the Jester had eaten their wits.

  Evidently the Eagle People commander wasn’t mad. The schooner whipped around, heeling far over, and let the booms of her fore-and-aft sails swing far out, wheeling and running south along the shore away from the Tartessian camp. The spearmen, archers, and crossbowmen grouped behind the spiked log barricade cheered and waved derisively.

  “Good shooting,” Isketerol said to his cousin.

  “Now shall we head home?” Miskelefol said. “We can sail with the evening tide-”

  “And meet the Eagle out on the open sea?” Isketerol said, grinning.

  “Maybe she’s not here.”

  “But probably she is. I don’t think I’m ready to go to the Hungry One just yet, son of my uncle.”

  “Shall we wait for Eagle here, then?”

  “Why not? She can’t come close to shore. This camp is strong and we can call warriors from inland if they try to send men ashore. If we run here the Amurrukan may well come for us in Tartessos. Walker is right; we have to teach them that it’s too costly to interfere with us, or we’ll never be safe anywhere near salt water. Besides, I gave him my oath.”

  The other Tartessian sighed. “As you will.”

  “Indeed,” Isketerol said.

  His glance went inland. What was it Walker was fond of saying? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  Swindapa leaped over the side of the longboat as its keel grated on the shingle and ran up the beach with the quiet water cold on her shins. Then she went to her knees and took a double handful of the dirt there, grass and weeds and soil tight between her fingers. Her chest felt tight too, and tears prickled at her eyes as the nettles did at her skin. They didn’t drop free to land on her native earth, though. If she’d felt this way a year ago, they would have. But the Eagle People wept seldom; they kept their thoughts and their joys and their sorrows more within themselves. Part of them had entered into her, she knew, in the time she had spent among them, and in Marian’s arms. She would not weep, nor dance her joy along the seashore. Instead she let the bittersweet happiness fill her, like something growing behind her breastbone. A rose, with beauty and with thorns.