Island in the Sea of Time (14 page)

Everyone knew what the nearest shore was, and they’d all seen the contents of the coracle or heard about the scalps. Rodriguez lunged forward, face crumpling. The guards grabbed him by the arms as he tried to go down on his knees.

“Oh,
madre de dios,
please, Captain, no—” They shook him into silence.

“But heinous as your crime is, under the law it isn’t punishable by death, which marooning you probably would cause. Get him a lifejacket.”

Hands shoved the bright-orange float jacket onto the man and laced it tight. “Get a rope sling and secure it on him. Reeve the other end to the fantail railing. Chief Master-at-Arms, execute the sentence,” Alston said, her face like something carved from obsidian.

Two of the ship’s noncoms obeyed with gusto, with the sole of a boot in the small of Rodriguez’s back. The push sent him out like a screaming meteor, to fall in the curling blue water and white foam of the ship’s wake. The line paid out and then sprang taut where it had been secured around the rail’s metal supports. He wouldn’t quite drown, but being towed behind the ship would be considerably worse than the flogging Rapczewicz had suggested. That water was cold, too. Not North Atlantic frigid, but chilly. He probably wouldn’t die of hypothermia either. Not quite.

“Court is adjourned,” Alston said. “Hands to their stations, if you please.”

She caught the tenor of their murmurs.
Not bad,
she thought. That would preserve discipline, without making the crew think she’d started doing a Captain Queeg. And Coast Guardsmen were as much policemen as anything; they didn’t have much sympathy for criminals. Plus more than two-thirds of the crew were cadets and one-third were women. All in all, she’d done the right thing. For justice, and for the good of the ship.

It wasn’t her fault if she’d enjoyed it. She didn’t like criminals either, particularly that kind.
I hope there are sharks out there, you little piece of shit.

Walker coughed discreetly. “The . . . man we picked up is awake, ma’am,” he said. “You said to let you know.”

The stranger thrashed and moaned as Marian Alston bent over him. His eyes were blue, and right now they were showing white all around the iris.

“I think you’d better back out of sight, Captain,” Ian said. “I don’t think he’s ever seen a black person before, and this environment is strange enough as it is.”

Alston nodded and stepped back with some difficulty; it was crowded in the little one-bunk sickbay. “I’ll be on deck,” she said. “Report when you’ve found out anything significant.”

“And don’t exhaust him,” the doctor warned. “He’s still weak as a kitten.”

The stranger stopped his feeble struggling and let himself be pushed back into the bunk, although his eyes still flickered across bulkheads and porthole, electric lights and metal shapes—alien madness, terror building on strangeness. “He must think he’s dead and among evil spirits or something,” Doreen murmured.

Ian leaned forward. The sight of his bearded face seemed to reassure the stranger. Ian put a cup of water to his lips, and the man sucked greedily at it; the IV they’d just removed had pumped a good deal into his system, but it wouldn’t have soothed the throat. He said something in a fast-moving language and sighed, wiping his mouth with the palm of one hand and then letting the arm flop back to the sheet.

Ian looked over at Doreen, who shook her head.
Well, that was a long shot,
he thought. “Give it a try anyway,” he said.

“Ar
. . .
mane . . . spurantate?”
Doreen said, leaning close and speaking slowly.
Do you understand me?
in Lithuanian, her mother’s tongue.

That brought a puzzled frown and more of the gibberish, but in a different tone. “I think he
almost
understood that,” Doreen said regretfully. I may have caught one or two words. I think.”

Ian smiled at the stranger—
Well, first things first, that’s obvious
,
he thought—
and pointed
at
himself
.

“Ian. Ian Arnstein.”

The narrow blue eyes frowned, then flew wide in understanding. “IanArnstein,” he said, prodding a callused finger with a rim of dirt under the nail at the man who sat beside the bunk. “IanArnstein,
p’tos.”

Ian mimicked the gesture, pointing at the young man’s bare chest. He nodded and rattled off a string of incomprehensible syllables. Ian sighed and made a rapid gesture through the air, then a very slow one. After a couple of repetitions the other got the idea and sounded out his name very slowly:

“Ohotolarix,”
Doreen said. “Ohotolarix son of somebody. I think,” she added, making a note on her pad.

Ohotolarix nodded vigorously, smiling and revealing very white teeth—except for one missing at the front.

“Let’s try him on the numerals,” Ian said. “They’re stable over time. You start.”

Doreen leaned closer again and held up one finger.
“Vienas,”
she said. Two fingers.
“Du.
” Three.
“Trys
.” Four.
“Keturi
. ” Five.
“Pieci
.”

“
Eka!
” Ohotolarix said. He held up one finger himself, then the rest in sequence.
“Aonwos, duo, treyi, k’wethir
,
penkke!”

After a few tries the two Americans caught the pronunciation, and Doreen noted them down. He grinned at the woman, then glanced aside at Ian, looking a little abashed.

Which is a significant datum in itself
, Ian thought. It was probably impolite to look at another man’s woman, where this kid came from. Ian cleared his throat and went up the number scale; Ohotolarix seemed to have increasing difficulty, speaking slowly and counting on his fingers as they climbed.

Damn
, he thought. This was going to take a while. In most of the fiction he’d read, there was some ingenious way around language difficulties—a Universal Translator or a wizard with a spell, or the side effects of a dimensional gate. Here he was, living it instead of reading it, and he’d have to trudge dismally through the basics instead.
I
should complain to the
author.
He smiled at the thought; back when he’d written those thud-and-blunder heroic fantasies, he’d had a nightmare about meeting his own characters in a dark alley and having them revenge themselves on him for what he’d put them through.

“Hundred,” he said, slowly holding up ten fingers ten times.

“Simtas,”
Doreen echoed.

“Kweadas,”
came the reply.

“It’s a
centum
language,” Ian said to Doreen. “Western branch of the family.”

“Show him the horse.”

The picture was a photo of a drawing, rather than a photograph of the animal; they’d decided that would be more familiar. Awe stood out on Ohotolarix’s face as he handled the glossy paper. Ian pointed to the animal.

“Horse?” he said.

“Hepkwos!”
Ohotolarix said delightedly. “Hworze.
Hepkwos!”

Next she held up a picture of a timber wolf.
“Vilkas,”
she said.

“Wolkwaz!
”

Ian ran his thumb down his list of words.
Proto-Indo-European
wlkwos,
wolf
, he read. Almost unchanged.
God, we are a long way back.

The exchange went on until Ohotolarix dropped suddenly and irrevocably asleep, and the doctor chased them out of sickbay. Alston looked at them sharply as they came up to the quarterdeck.

“Well?” she said.

Doreen waved her notebook. “It’s definitely an Indo-European language, ma‘am. A lot of the words were very close to Lithuanian, and some of the inflections and syntax, even. He caught a few phrases I spoke right off—‘give bread,’ things like that. I think I could learn it in a couple of months—for very very simple things, in a week.”

“That could be extremely useful,” Alston said. “Anything else, Professor?”

Ian shook his head. “Not much. It’s a highly inflected language, and if I knew more Mycenaean Greek . . . I
think
it
might
be an extremely early form of Celtic. Some of the sound shifts between what he speaks and what the references list as Proto-Indo-European forms suggest that it might be a sort of Proto-Celtic. I’m not a linguist, though—my knowledge is very general, and I’m not sure we’re transcribing accurately. Hell, the language might just as well be Proto-Tocharian, or some subfamily that never got—”

“Anything else we can
use
, I meant, Professor,” Alston said with heavy patience.

Ian reined himself in. “Apart from that, this guy’s a
wirtowonax
, which I think means warrior, or possibly something like freeman or tribesman or citizen; and he’s got a chief, or king, or panjandrum, a
rahax
, named Daurthunnicar. I’m probably playing hob with the inflections there, by the way. From sign language as much as anything, this Daurthunnicar and his warriors, and women and children and horses, were crossing a body of water. To fight someone, presumably. Our boy—his name’s Ohotolarix, by the way—and his friends were caught by a squall and couldn’t find the land again. I’d guess they paddled in circles until they dropped. Ohotolarix hates boats, incidentally, and loves horses.”

“Oh, joy,” Alston muttered. “We’re sailing right into the middle of someone’s war. Hell of a situation to trade in.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ian said. His face slowly creased into a smile. “It might just be the best possible situation to trade in, if you know what I mean, Captain.”

 

“They come,” the scout whispered. “Back along their track, as we thought they would.”

They could hear how hooves pounded dirt away down the forest trail, louder and louder as the invader war band neared. Human feet slapped the earth, wheels creaked, an axle squealed, a horse blew out its lips in a wet flutter of sound. The war-car held a near-nude adolescent driver and a warrior in leather armor and bone-strapped leather helmet. The ponies stamped and snorted, their breath visible in the early-morning chill as the blur of the eight-spoked wheels slowed.

Swindapa of the Star Blood line of Kurlelo slowly drew the sling taut between her hands. The early-spring leaves made scanty cover, but the band hidden here were all hunters with the Spear Mark tattooed on their chests; most of them were from lands overrun by the invaders, the Sun People, too. Thirty of them, more than enough for this. She was the only woman, but the others had allowed her along for the sake of her birth, and the weapons she had brought . . . and after she’d shown them what she could do with the leather strap she carried. These were desperate men who cared little for law or custom or the will of the Star Blood who had not protected their homes.

For herself. . . . Her mother had forbade, her aunts and uncles---even the man who was probably her sire—had shaken his head and said it was a wild youngster’s fancy. Yet here she was. Fear and excitement wrestled in her belly, like the Moon Woman pursuing the Sun. The Sun People had brought her pain; they’d broken the knee and the life of her man, they’d killed and burned. It was time to drive them out. She swallowed through a mouth gone dry and picked her target.

Two dozen footmen stopped and squatted around the chariot, light winking off bronze spearheads, glinting on polished leather. They talked among themselves in the harsh tongue they’d brought across the water, or swigged from skins. The chief waited for a moment, then called out to his followers. One threw back his head and laughed, and then they rose and spread out in formation behind the war-car, like a flock of geese spread back from the leader in wings on either side. The charioteer clucked to his ponies, and the warrior beside him hawked and spat over the side to clear his throat.

“Shoot!” the leader of the Earth Folk band bellowed, bounding to his feet. He drew his yew bow to his ear and obeyed his own order.

Bowstrings snapped and arrows whickered as men sprang erect. A pony went down, screaming like a woman in bad labor. The other reared, and the driver and warrior leaped down from the cart. Swindapa sprang forward, ululating rage, whipped the sling in two swift circles around her head, then cast. The polished egg-shaped stone within was heavy basalt, and flew almost too fast to see. When its arc ended in a snarling Iraiina face there was a half-seen splash of red and the man pitched backward to lie sprattling. She shrieked glee and tossed another stone into the soft leather pocket at the bottom of the sling. Men were running forward with spear and club and knife. Others shot over their heads; she darted about, looking for a clear path to a target. The fight boiled to close quarters; the Sun People stood shield to shield and cast back the first disorderly rush, but there were fewer of them left on their feet. The Earth Folk prowled around their line, rushed forward, retreated with blood on their weapons or on their own rent skins. Metal and stone and wood banged on each other, on the leather of shields. Men screamed in rage, or pain greater than they had thought flesh could feel.