Island in the Sea of Time (25 page)

His voice sank, tempting, promising. At the last, Miskelefol nodded dubiously. “You’re a bolder man than I, kinsman, to risk your life and soul so.”

“I’m bold enough to risk the Crone’s knife for a small profit among the Iraiina—why not with the Amurrukan for riches beyond dreams?”

“What do you wish?”

“You take the
Foam Treader
and the
Wave Hunter
home; my helmsman’s well able to handle the
Hunter
on a safe run. Report to the king . . . but play down everything. Say we saw a big ship from an unknown realm, whose crew said little but who had wonderful trade goods to offer. Give him some, but not of the best; the Corn Goddess knows the dregs are enough to satisfy even a king’s greed. Our men will gossip, but everyone discounts sailors’ lies, and by the time they reach home no two versions will be the same, and the truth is too strange to believe anyway. Summon my father, yours, our uncles, and meet in family conclave . . . hmmm, and my eldest wife, she’s a shrewd one and has friends in the palace. You’ll tell them everything you’ve seen and heard, and all I tell you this night. You’ll make plans. They’ll have to be tentative, since so much will depend on what I learn. And our elders will have their own ideas. Here’s . . .”

The talk went far into the night, with just enough wine to sharpen wits. When his cousin left, Isketerol was still too taken with dreams to sleep, even though the strangers would be leaving on the morning tide. He snapped his fingers and signed, and the slave went over to the pallet, stripping and lying down. As he seeded her, it seemed that visions of glory burst before his eyes, a road of gold and fire stretching to the west.

 

“No, she definitely doesn’t want to return home,” Arnstein said, his voice sounding harassed.

They were all feeling harassed, not to mention sleepdeprived; loading seven hundred tons of cargo on a ship not designed for it, and without any equipment save block and tackle and sweat, had been a nightmare. Not to mention that most of them had come down with at least a mild case of Montezuma’s Revenge—they were calling it British Betty—at one time or another. Now this.

Alston frowned. “You’re sure?”

“Unless Isketerol is lying to me, and I doubt it,” the academic said, running a hand over his balding scalp in a gesture of angry helplessness. “Doreen’s got enough Iraiina now to confirm it, too.”

Swindapa spoke unexpectedly in English. “No home. Go.” She pointed west. “Stay, am me Eagle. Go.”

The captain blinked in astonishment. “You’ve been teaching her English already?” she said.

“No,” Arnstein said, shaking his head. “She’s just got the most amazing goddam memory I’ve ever run across— so does Isketerol, by the way, not as good as hers but still very impressive. Neither of them forgets a word once they’ve heard it twice. He’s much faster at picking up syntax, but then, he’s already learned six languages to her two. If you don’t care about fine points of grammar, you can communicate pretty fast that way. Incidentally, Isketerol can also do some formidable arithmetic in his head, especially considering the clumsy numeral system he uses.”

Alston looked at the Earth Folk girl. In sneakers and blue overalls, with blond locks escaping from a ponytail and blowing in the sea breeze on the deck of the Eagle, she looked like a corn-fed cheerleader type. Except that everything else was different, the way she moved and stood and the way the language she spoke had shaped her face. Now she folded her arms and looked stubborn in a way that crossed cultures and millennia, saying something in her own language and then repeating it in another.

“The . . . ah, the stars put her feet on the ship and she’s not going to disobey them,” Arnstein interpreted. “It’s a religious thing, Captain.”

Alston clenched her hands behind her back and rose slightly on her toes, thinking.
Stubborn,
she decided, and shuddered mentally at the thought of trying to force her into a boat.
She’s got guts, too, to come through what happened to her with her will still strong.
She nodded approval.

“Very well,” she said. “But make it plain she has to keep out of the way and follow instructions.” Swindapa beamed; she seized Alston’s hand and pressed it to her forehead, then kissed it. Alston disengaged it, firmly.

“And teach them both English.”

The girl would probably be a much more reliable translator than the Tartessian . . . and besides, Alston could scarcely throw her over the side, all things considered.

As guests, the locals were allowed on the quarterdeck; Isketerol seemed to have enough sense to keep out of the way, and he’d taken a hint from a gift of soap and abandoned his habit of cleaning himself by rubbing down with olive oil and scraping it off, a massive sacrifice on his part. His eyes scanned about like video cameras, missing nothing. Swindapa tended to hover, until Alston gently motioned her back.

The captain looked about. Crew standing by, hands at the wheel, the smooth machinery of the
Eagle
ready to swing into motion. Wind from the northeast, which was just right, and not too strong, ten knots’ worth—also good, in these narrow uncharted waters. If there had been any hope of refueling in the immediate future . . . but instead she’d do it the old-fashioned way, sail the anchors out of the main.

“Tide’s on the ebb, ma’am,” the sailing master said. “Four knots.”

“Very well, Mr. Hiller. Prepare to weigh anchor,” she said. “Make ready.”

“Ready, aye.” He turned to face his subordinates. “Sail stations, sail stations, on the fore, on the main, all hands to stations!”

The crew poured up the ratlines and out along the yards, their dark-blue clothing almost disappearing against the morning sky. Deck teams poised ready to haul.

“Put the royals in gear, fore and main. Jibs as well. The minute the anchors come free.”

“Royals, fore and main, jibs, ma’am.”

“Make it so, Mr. Hiller.”

“Up and down!” The anchor chain was vertical.

“Anchors aweigh.”

“Anchors aweigh, aye!”

White canvas—Dacron, really—blossomed a hundred and fifty feet above their heads. More sail spread down the stays to the bowsprit, the triangular swatches of the flying jib, the outer jib, the jib and the foremast staysail. Teams heaved them up the stay lines that reached to the foremast.

The quartermaster’s whistle rang out again.

“Shift colors!” Jack and ensign came down, and the steaming ensign went up the gaff over their heads.

“House the anchor.”

“Thus, thus,” Alston said, giving the course to the helmsmen. They strained at the triple wheels as the great square-rigger came about and settled her prow to the south. “Mr. Hiller, the mizzen, if you please.”

Alston kept one ear on the smooth sequence of orders, the rest of her mind sketching the ship’s course. The fore-and-aft sails on the rearmost mast went up in a series of long surges as the deck crew heaved at the ropes and raised the gaff.

A boatswain’s mate bellowed: “Now lower your butts, flangeheads, and haul away, haul away!”

“Heave!”

“Haul away and sheet her home!”

“Heave!”

The wind jerked the boom over their heads, swinging it out until it caught against the tackle that controlled its lunge. The green line of the shore wheeled and began to slide past, the cheering throng on the beach dwindling and falling astern. On the port, marshes slid by, ducks and geese and snipe rising thunderous. The air was heavy with the smell of silt and brackish water, a tang that blew away the odors of the Iraiina camp. Marian Alston smiled slightly and looked at the clinometer. Only a few degrees off vertical as yet.

“She trims well, Mr. Hiller.”

“She does, Skipper.”

A bit of a surprise; the
Eagle
had never been designed to carry cargo as a regular thing, and it had taken days of sweating-hard labor to arrange it so that it didn’t throw the ship grossly off-balance. That could be crucial to her sailing performance, and as it was she rode four feet deeper. And the pigs were squealing and stinking in their improvised pens forward; she’d helped raise pigs as a girl, they were too smart by half, and could be downright dangerous. Her younger brother had toddled right into a pen once, and if her father hadn’t been nearby . . .

“Ms. Rapczewicz, what’s our status on fresh water?”

“Fifty-one thousand gallons,” she replied.

Also good; they didn’t want to waste fuel producing drinking water, either.

“Five knots, ma’am. Ten feet under the keel.”

“Five knots, ten feet, aye,” Alston said. “Mr. Hiller, we’ll keep her so for now.”

She’d decided to be conservative and take what the oldtimers had called the String, down south to just north of the Azores and then across the Atlantic on the edge of the trades. Longer, but you got consistent easterlies that way most of the year. You
could
work across on the Viking route way north, up around Greenland, there were intermittent easterlies and the East Greenland and Irminger currents . . . she shuddered at the thought. There would be berg ice, this time of year—
any
time, actually, but worse just now.

She waited, expressionless, as the land fell away astern and on either side. The ship’s motion changed as they came out of the estuary, a longer plunging roll as they came into waves that ran uninterrupted across three thousand miles of ocean; that always made her feel more alive, more free. The breeze stiffened out of the north, and a quiet order brought the yards braced around. She looked west.
Odd.
And in all that space, nothing but fish, birds, and whales. No other ship, until you got to within dugout-canoe range of the Americas . . . would they be called the Americas here?
Probably, if we live to do the naming.
Not a submarine beneath the waves, not an aircraft over it, no lights to pass in the night or float by overhead.

“Helm, south by southwest.”

“South by southwest, aye.”

“Mr. Hiller, make all plain sail.”

“All plain sail, aye.”

He turned and began to shout orders. White sail blossomed upward toward the tops of the
Eagle
’s masts, as if a huge sheet were being shaken out in the wind. As each sail came taut she could feel the ship lift and heel, moving more quickly as the vast horsepower of moving air was caught and channeled through the standing rigging into the hull. The yards were braced around at not quite right angles to the keel and the crew crept down off the yards and out of the rigging; others hauled and set lines across the deck. Slowly, slowly, the big ship leaned to port. The bow wave turned from a gentle swelling to white water, and that foamed higher and higher.

In twenty minutes it was spouting out the hawser holes and along the forecastle decking, to drain out the lee scuppers around the feet of the inevitable seasickness cases. Isketerol of Tartessos looked well enough, holding on to a line and staring incredulously overside as he mentally estimated the speed. Swindapa had turned green, and blundered helplessly until a couple of cadets snapped a safety line to her belt and draped her over the leeside bulwarks just in time.

The port rail was nearly under; Alston looked at the clinometer. Twenty degrees. “Speed,” she said.

“Twelve knots and rising, ma’am.”

“Twelve knots, aye. Ms. Rapczewicz, you have the deck; keep her thus, but reef if the wind freshens. I’ll be in my cabin.”

And she should give Cofflin a call, let him know things had gone well. They probably needed some morale-boosting back home. She checked in midstride for an instant.
Home? Well, our trip here was instructive, at least.
Compared to anywhere else in the world of 1250 B.C., Nantucket was very homelike indeed.

“Whazzit?”

Ian Arnstein came awake with a violent start. The little cabin was dark except for a trickle of light through the closed porthole, and for a moment he was lost, torn from a dream of freeways and shopping malls and teenagers on Rollerblades. Fear made his heart race.

Someone’s here,
he thought. There shouldn’t be; he had the tiny room to himself. Captain Alston had left a fair number of her officers back on the island to oversee fishing and matters maritime, the ones who’d been there mainly as instructors for the cadets.

“Who’s that?” he whispered.

There was a rustling at the edge of the bunk, and a vague shape in the darkness. “Me,” Doreen’s voice said.

“Oh.” His heart still beat faster, but it wasn’t quite the same sort of fear. “Why . . . oh.”

A hand took his and guided it to close on a full breast. “You’re an intelligent man, Ian. Don’t be silly. Why do you
think
I’m here?”

I should be thinking,
he knew through the hammering in his temples.
We’ve only known each other for a few weeks . . . I’m too old for her . . . all this stress has got us acting in ways we wouldn’t . . .
His hands held the blankets up and slid down her back as she slid into the narrow bunk beside him, warm and smelling of clean woman and soap. Her first kiss landed on his nose in the dark, but the second was on target.

“Oh, yeah,” she murmured. “The beard tickles nice.”

“Yeah,” he echoed in the same breathy whisper.

To hell with thinking.
Before he’d expected it she had rolled underneath him and her legs were clamped along his flanks. He moved convulsively and bumped his head against the overhead.

“Damn these bunks!”
he hissed.

Doreen chuckled and wrapped her legs around his waist instead, then gave a sigh that was half groan as he slipped into her. “Come on then,” she whispered into his ear as they began to rock together. “God, come
on,
then.”

Some immeasurable time afterward they lay in a tangle of arms and legs and stray bits of sheet caught between and under them, amid a pleasant smell of sweat and sex.