Island in the Sea of Time (31 page)

“Project Night?”

“Sort of like a suggestion box,” Cofflin explained. “I figured there must be a lot of good ideas out there about things we should be doing. Had Martha Stoddard over at the Athenaeum screen out the crazies, and God but there are enough of those. Then, I figure, once a month the serious ones get to do a presentation, and the month after that the Town Meeting votes which projects to tackle. Martha had a good one herself—have Angelica Brand turn part of her greenhouses over to growing orange trees, lemons, that sort of thing. We had the seeds, after all. Even got some coffee plants—ornamentals, but they’ll grow coffee beans, right enough.”

“Not enough yield to be worth the trouble, surely?”

“Ayup, not here—but we keep sending the
Yare
down to the Caribbean for salt, anyway. They can plant seedlings, leave ’em, and let them grow wild. Martha tells me explorers used to do that, whenever they touched at a newfound island. In a few years we’ll have the fruit.”

“Now that is clever,” Alston said respectfully.

“Martha’s a clever lady,” he said. They had come to where Main Street veered to the left, forming a Y-fork with Liberty. “It’s along here. Right here, as a matter of fact.”

He enjoyed the look of well-hidden surprise on Alston’s face. The house was one of the Three Bricks, a big Federalstyle mansion with two white pillars on either side of the entrance. There was a flagpole above it, now bearing the Coast Guard’s banner, and a square cupola on the roof flanked by two chimneys at either end. Someone had even put up a brass plaque over the entrance,
Coast Guard House
. It stood four-square and peaceful, two more like it to their left.

“Ah . . .” she said. “Chief Cofflin, Ah did have thoughts’bout a big house with white columns as a girl, but isn’t this a bit . . . grand?”

Cofflin laughed. “It’s also Town property, since the owner didn’t make the voyage with us. Don’t worry; we’re turning it over to you as your headquarters, as well as someplace to store your toothbrush ashore. Room for some of your officers, as well.”

“Thank you kindly,” she muttered, craning her head up at the facade and accepting the key ring.

“I’ll be off,” Coleman said as they opened the door. “While I can still do some good.” The humor left his seamed, elderly face as he pushed his bicycle to a start.

“Definitely a little grand,” Alston said, looking around the lobby.

There was a curving staircase to the upper floors, rising from an entrance papered in Empire style with gold medallions against cream. Two large sitting rooms flanked it on either side, each with a black marble fireplace and eight-foot windows; the colors were gray and green and beige, picked out with coral and yellow. The furniture was quietly sumptuous, Persian rugs on the wide-plank floors, pictures . . .

“I’d hate to have to dust all this. . . . Does the doctor have a problem?”

Cofflin nodded somberly. “Things running out. Insulin, specifically.”

“I . . . see.”

“He’s trying to save some of the diabetics with special diets and exercise,” Cofflin said. “Martha dug out an old treatment, a tea made from parsnip leaves, believe it or not—lowers the blood sugar.”

“That won’t work for most of the Type Ones,” Alston said clinically.

Cofflin felt anger flare again, and throttled it down.
Make sure he said what you think he said,
his father had always told him.
Almost as many fools ruined by their ears by as their lips.

“You’re a cool one, aren’t you?” he said.

Alston caught the tone and faced him. “Chief Cofflin,” she said quietly, “practical is what I am. I try to do what I can, and that takes all I’ve got, so I don’t wail and beat my breast over things I can’t do an earthly thing about. It’s what’s kept me sane through this . . . thing. I hope that’s all right with you, because I have no intention of changing. Gave up tryin’ to make myself over to other people’s patterns when I filed for divorce.”

Cofflin spread his hands. “I can’t argue with that.” A wry smile. “Or with someone who does their job. Too few of ’em.”

Alston returned the smile. “Too right,” she agreed. “Look, we do have a lot to talk about. Let’s get to it. Does this place have a kitchen?”

Blue collar reflexes
, he thought—like him. They walked through a dining room under a brass-and-crystal chandelier. The kitchen beyond had been thoroughly modernized, in a meticulous-restoration style. Much of the equipment was of the latest and completely useless with only a thin trickle of rationed electricity available, and that earmarked for the clinic and machine shops, but there was a big black cast-iron wood stove as well. Alston’s eyes lit up at the sight of it.

“Now
that’s
going to be fun,” she said.

“You cook?” he asked, a little surprised.

“I was a complete failure as a mother and not cut out for a wife,” she said, “but yes, my momma did whack one feminine accomplishment into me. It’s relaxin’. Splice the mainbrace? Think I saw a liquor cabinet back there.”

“One won’t hurt.”

She came back with two glasses and a bottle. “I see someone told you my tastes, or whoever owned this place knew whiskey.”

“It’s your local brand?”

“It’s Maker’s Mark,” she said, pouring a finger into both glasses and adding water to hers. She raised an eyebrow; at his nod she splashed a dollop of water into his as well. “Also known as Kentucky Champagne. Where
I
came from, the local brand went right from the still into pint jars.”

They sat across the carefully scrubbed pine boards of the table. “To a long and successful association, Chief,” she said.

He sipped; the whiskey went down smoothly. Nothing but the best for the man who’d owned
this
place. For a moment he smiled at the thought of an enraged stockbroker wandering through the primeval woods of the 1250 B.C. Nantucket that—presumably—was dumped into 1998, looking for his three-point-seven-million-dollar investment. The smile was without much sympathy. In his book financiers were right up there with publicans and sinners among the people only a mother or Jesus could love.

“I’m not sure that I can drink to that,” he said. “A long association means I have to keep this miserable job they’ve pushed off on me.” A sudden thought struck him, and he glanced at her speculatively.

“Oh, no. No way this woman-chile goin’ fall fo’ that, Yankee.” Flatly: “Wouldn’t work. I’m an outsider here, a woman, and black.”

“I’d noticed,” he said dryly. “I don’t think you’d have much trouble that way here. It’s a pretty open-minded place, Nantucket.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” she said, in the same flat tone.

He shrugged ruefully. “Well, I suppose you
would
be in a better position to judge.”

“Not necessarily, Chief—”

“Jared.”

“—Jared. If you’re black, there are people out there who are going to do their best to mess you up, and if you’re a woman it’s twice compounded . . . and one of the subtle ways they get you is to tempt you into using their prejudice as an excuse every time you screw up, and if you make excuses for failin’, you’ll do nothing but fail. Huggin’ resentments isn’t very productive, even if they’re justified; gets to be one of those self-fulfillin’ prophecies.”

She smiled wryly. “Besides, you don’t know the half of it . . . and I’m doing
exactly
what I’m suited for.” Meditatively: “They were going to lay the
Eagle
up, did you know? I think that’s why I got her after Quillman broke his neck in that damn-fool accident, they thought I’d make a good PR choice as last captain. A good thing it was brought back with the island.”

“Some useful things came along,” Cofflin agreed. “The problem is when they run out. All the makeshifts and replacements we come up with take so much more
time
. Paper towels,” he went on. “Did you ever think how many man-hours of washing up paper towels save?”

“My own thoughts along those lines were a little more personal,” she said. “I still remember vividly my first thought when you told me about Rosenthal’s notion that we were back in the Bronze Age.” Her eyes went wide in mock horror: “What, no more Tampax,
ever
?”

They shared the chuckle and lifted their glasses to meet with a chink. “Well, let’s get down to business.”

 

Isketerol of Tartessos sat in the garden outside the tall white columns of the Athenaeum, with his face in his hands.

“Three thousand years,” he whispered to himself.

It was a number—meaningless, not real like three thousand ingots of copper or three thousand sheep or three thousand paces. “Three thousand
years
. Three
thousand
years.
Three
—”

He stopped himself with a wrenching effort of will, shuddering, and the few folk passing by under the cruel brightness of the sunshine gave him only a glance or two.

Why didn’t they tell me?
he asked, anger bubbling up under eerieness. “Because you didn’t have enough command of their tongue, fool!” he snarled to himself.

He probably wouldn’t have believed, then. Now it made too much sense, with what he’d seen and heard. This island was only the fragment of a greater realm;
that
was why there were so many people and so little farmland.

“Hardly even a memory of us survives,” he whispered.

He looked down the corridors of the ages, and saw his city and his people and his very gods forgotten, dust and ashes and a few corroded remnants pored over by strangers indulging an idle curiosity. His father’s house, that he had hoped to build strong for the years; his wives, his children. The little crooked lanes where he had run as a boy, the bay where he had learned to handle a boat, the dock where he left on his first real voyage.

Tartessos, and the whole
world.
He remembered the pictures the Amurrukan woman inside the white building had shown him, the shattered wreck of the Lion Gate of Mycenae, the Egyptian temples stripped of their colors and crumbling away amid the sands. He remembered standing in the crowd and watching Ramses return from his campaign in Canaan, like the graven image of a god in the chariot behind high-stepping horses. The blaze of faience and gold from the temples and palaces, great colored streamers hanging between the pylons. He remembered the sheer awe that had gripped him when he saw the pyramids, those mountains made by men like gods . . . and the pictures of them stripped of their smooth shining coats of limestone, lying jagged and worn beside the Nile. . . .

Dizziness swept over him, and he moaned. Gradually, fighting as he’d done to bring the
Wave Hunter
through a storm on the River Ocean, he won back to himself.

Think,
he told himself. The Womb Goddess and the Lady of Tartessos had given him wits; he was no brainless savage to cower before the unknown.

Yes, a mighty magic had taken this island, this Nantucket, and set it adrift in the sea of time. The anger of some god, for no sorcerer could do this, could bestride the universe and compel the Powers. The Amurrukan themselves, with all their arts, had no inkling of how or why. Yes,
yes
. . . And their arts were deserting them, they said so themselves. Only the simpler ones remained.

He took heart from what the wisewoman in the temple of writings had said. Now the course of the world was turned on a new tack. A new heading, on which anything might happen. Nothing need be as it was shown in those deadly, lying pictures. He was free.

Slowly his breathing slowed. He wiped his face on a linen handkerchief, a gift of Walker, and looked around. He had known he was faring into strangeness, beyond the world he knew—and he had seized the opportunity with both hands. Well, it was still there. He was learning much; already he had learned enough to make his house the greatest in the city. How to make a ship sail against the wind, the secrets of the
rudder
and the north-pointing needle. Something of the currents and winds of the River Ocean far beyond the coasts, and if they were as reliable as the Eagle captain said, that was much.

You are in no danger here.
Not unless the wrath of the gods struck again, and against that he could do nothing. If a curse rode these shores, so be it.

No danger.
He had the promise of rich rewards; beyond what he’d sent back home with his cousin. They had quartered him in a house that was not large, but furnished like a king’s. He had a friend, of sorts, in Walker. He even had a woman. Isketerol made himself dwell on that, and grinned; a very inventive woman, better than any he’d ever bedded, and a mine of unintentional information. He was a merchant adventurer of Tartessos, who’d dared storm and beasts and wild men in unknown waters. Abide the summer, teach the languages he’d promised, and see what opportunities offered. Snatch them when they came.

 

Swindapa sat on the soft bed and bounced experimentally. It creaked and the four posts at the corners swayed a little, fluttering the fringe of the canopy all around. She looked around the room, awed. The floor was planks of wood, smoothly fitted together like the wood on
Eagle
’s deck. The walls were smooth too, showing no sign of the potlike baked clay lumps—
bi-ri-ks,
she told herself—on the outer walls. Patterns of blue and green flowers covered them, so lovely she wanted to kick off her shoes and run dancing barefoot through the spring meadows they showed. There were fitted wooden windows, with panes of the clear icelike glass, and folding shutters. One wall held a hearth, with faint traces of ash and a metal rack for holding wood.

Strange. Where is the smoke-mark?
Smoke was useful—it kept vermin out of your thatch as it soaked through, and dried the straw. A hearth like this should leave a broad band of smoke up the wall and on the roof, but that was smooth and white, looking like the gypsum plaster used to coat some Star-Moon-Sun workings. She went over and knelt, looking up. There was a tunnel of bricks leading away upward for the smoke. The room didn’t smell of smoke, and the hearth only very faintly.