Island in the Sea of Time (41 page)

It was the fact that they had the energy to
sing
that astonished him.

He mopped the bowl with a heel of the bread, and belched with something approaching contentment.

Swindapa shook out her hands and moved back to Alston’s blanket. “You next, Captain,” she said cheerfully.

There was a moment’s silence; Ian looked over at the sudden tension in the air. After a long instant Alston nodded and laid her head face-down in her folded arms. Swindapa moved beside her and crooned the same minor-key chant under her breath; she was smiling as she began to work, a slow dreamy expression.

“No rest for the wicked,” he said to the air, rising and helping Doreen fold the blanket. As they walked toward their bicycles he inclined his head slightly back and raised an eyebrow.

“No, I don’t think so,” Doreen said. “The captain has a . . . highly developed sense of scruples. Almost as hyperthyroid as her sense of duty.”

They picked up their cycles and began walking them down the dirt road out toward the pavement. Nantucket had had a system of bicycle trails before the Event, but the whole road system belonged to it now. The thickets along the path were mostly uncleared, and they had a wild sweet smell of feral roses. The blossoms starred the green undergrowth with red, with a few clusters of blushing-pink phlox for contrast. The main road had a narrow strip of brush and trees along it, and on the far side of that was a broad field of flax already eight feet tall, its blue flowers only a memory. Ian looked at it and winced in prospect. You harvested flax by pulling it up by the roots.

“Positively superhuman self-control,” Ian said dryly. “And Swindapa has a powerful crush.”

Doreen frowned. “I wouldn’t exactly put it that way. She’s not a kid, you know, not by the standards of her own culture.”

Ian shrugged. “I don’t want to let this sweat dry,” he said, changing the subject. He liked them both as well, they were good people, but there were certain things that individuals just had to work out for themselves.

“Smith’s?” she said.

“How about Quigley’s?” he asked.

“You’re not as tired as you looked,” Doreen laughed. Quigley’s was a new place, giving Smith fierce competition; it had individual cubicles for soaking after you scrubbed down.

“Let’s see when we get there,” he grinned.

They reached the pavement and swung into the seats of their cycles.
I may not have the captain’s nobility of character,
he thought, looking at Doreen’s hair flying in the wind.
On the other hand, my life’s a good deal less complicated, and there’s something to be said for that.

 

“S
he’s a fine ship,” Isketerol said. “What does this name mean,
Yare?
”

William Walker thought. He’d heard the word in a movie once . . . yeah, HBO Classics. The one with Katharine Hepburn?
What a fox
, he thought irrelevantly, then concentrated. “Yare means . . . fit, ready, eager,” he said.

“Ah, a good name for a ship!”

The yacht had about a hundred feet at the waterline, two-masted and flush-decked except for a low cabin directly ahead of the wheel and binnacle, with a burden of a hundred and ten tons. Not as fast as the
Eagle
, of course, Walker acknowledged to himself. Twelve knots at most, given optimum winds; she was a topsail schooner, fore-and-aft-rigged except for two square sails at the top of the foremast. On the other hand she could go three or four points closer to the eye when tacking upwind, and she drew only six feet to the big windjammer’s seventeen. That was why she was scheduled to go along on the next voyage to Europe, for scouting and inshore work. Plus she was woodenbuilt, thirty years old but still as sound as the day when the boatyard in Nova Scotia had sent her down the ways. Injury to her hull need not be an irreparable disaster, with tools and carpenters along.

The deck was broken by a low coaming, its cover aside for the present. Hammering and sawing noises came from within, where carpenters were installing a proper hold. The cargo for it waited on the dockside where the ship was moored, under an improvised loading crane also under construction. There were ingots of pig iron from the
Eagle
’s ballast, barrels of salt fish and meat, barrels of hardtack, and others to hold extra water. A complete set of blacksmith’s tools and forge-furnishings, including Martin’s best homemade anvils, and bar stock for it. Drills, planes, augers, axes, sledges, kegs of nails, two-man saws. A small lathe, and a set of measuring gauges run up on Leaton’s Swiss instrument-making machine; knocked-down metalwork for a sawmill and gristmill. Books, most of them bound photocopies, carefully wrapped in multiple layers of green plastic garbage bag to make them thoroughly waterproof; books on shipbuilding, metalsmithing, agriculture and mining. Trade goods, useful and ornamental, rounding out the heavier load the
Eagle
would be carrying.

Couldn’t have done it better myself
, Walker thought. Of course, he
had
done much of it himself. With a crew of fifty and the cadets,
Eagle
was grossly overmanned for routine work; Alston had them all working half a dozen projects ashore as well, herself more than any. Getting the schooner ready was his job. He’d impressed the captain with his zeal and perfect discipline, but it was Hendriksson who was slated to command the
Yare
. Alston still wanted him close under her eye.

“Bitch,” he muttered to himself.

But a
smart
bitch—she didn’t miss much. He was still kicking himself for blurting out his half-formed dreams that first night after the Event. Granted he’d been dazed and disoriented, everyone had, but it had still been a stupid thing to do.
Hmm. Victor would like the
Yare
too
. . .
could I recruit him over that?
No, probably not. The Cuban-American lieutenant was too much of a straight arrow.

“Come on,” he said to Isketerol.

Careful, careful, be
very
careful. He hated Captain Alston, but he respected her brains and courage thoroughly. He’d have been more than ready to follow her on an expedition such as the one he planned . . . but she’d never do that.
She’ll stick with shepherding these sheep on this damned island.

They walked up the gangplank onto the ship, dodging men and women with tools and materials for the refit, and walked back to the little fantail behind the wheel. There was an awning stretched over it like a tent with the mizzensail boom as a ridgepole, and a couple of chairs. The day was hot and clear, with little trace of yesterday’s fog; the breeze off the harbor smelled of fish and salt and tar. Gulls went noisily overhead, their harsh cries thick in the air. A big load of barrel staves and planks sat on the wharf not far from him, just in from Providence Base, adding the vanilla tang of fresh-cut oak to the mixture; beside it were oozing casks of pitch and turpentine from Cape Cod. A chattering party of junior high students were sitting around mending twine nets. Hammering and the hiss of the last cutting torches sounded from the ferry’s upperworks as teams labored to disassemble it from the top down; carts were going back and forth with loads of steel plate, beam, and girder as the work went on. Other working parties were ripping the air-conditioning and partitions out of
Eagle
, undoing her last refit in ’79.

Isketerol sat and accepted a bottle of beer from the cooler; he went on in the Mycenaean Greek that Walker now spoke well, since Iraiina lacked the concepts and vocabulary for much of what they had to discuss.

“I have confirmed what you told me,” Isketerol said. “They plot to keep me here, always among strangers, never to return to my home, fearing what I might do with the knowledge I’ve gained.” He bared his teeth. “By Arucuttag of the Sea, they’ll regret that.”

“So they will,” Walker agreed.

Actually they haven’t
decided
to screw you over, good buddy, they’re just
thinking
about it,
he mused. In Alston’s position he would have put Isketerol over the side with a stone tied to his ankles as soon as he’d told all he knew, but Alston was squeamish, to a point.
Only to a point. Don’t forget that.
Underestimating your opposition was stupid, and stupidity was the only real sin he recognized.

“We can help each other, then,” Walker said. “You need a friend who will guard your back, and so do I.” Solemnly, they clasped hands. “Now, tell me more of the lands of Mycenae. How would they welcome a stranger with powerful gifts?”

“No, I don’t think you should seek out the Achaean lords right away,” the Tartessian said thoughtfully. “They’re too hard and greedy, and not very forethoughtful, most of them. . . . But they hire many mercenaries from the barbarian lands.”

Walker sipped at the beer. It was too sweet without the hops, but otherwise not bad; only middling cold, though. There were plans for ice pits to store frozen lake ice over the summer; that could probably be done in the Aegean, too.

Greece looks like the best bet.
The Hittite Empire was too big and too tightly centralized, a god-king autocracy. He’d learned Troy was a prosperous city-state that controlled the approaches to the Black Sea; but he’d have to learn yet another language to operate there. Greece, now—Greece sounded a lot like Renaissance Italy, or the more turbulent medieval European countries, say the Holy Roman Empire. He grinned like a wolf. According to the reference books, in about fifty years or so the whole Aegean basin was due to go under in a mad-dog scramble of internal warfare and barbarian invasions, with refugees and savages squatting in the ruins, a Dark Age. In other words, a perfect situation for an able, realistic man like himself—provided he had an edge, so that he could establish himself among the locals and work up to a position of strength gradually.

William Walker, King of Men,
he thought.
Has a nice ring to it.
It was even altruistic, in a way. These goons were going to wreck their own civilization. He’d be doing them a favor—and they’d return the favor to him, and his children after him.

Provided he had an edge. . . . Leaton was already working on a musket, and anyone who could cast a bronze statue could make cannon. Sulfur was probably available, and there were black-powder enthusiasts on the island who knew the whole technique of making gunpowder; he’d drop in on them and pump them for tips. But for all that he’d need a secure base for a while, and preferably more men, as well, before he showed up in the Mediterranean. Isketerol needed a sweetener too.

“The question is, where to get a strong band of men?” Walker said. “I can’t recruit more than a few here. Someone would talk, no matter how careful I was.”

“There is the White Isle,” Isketerol pointed out. “And the lands around it. Of course, for that you would require a ship, and then passage from the White Isle to the Middle Sea.”

Passage for a couple of hundred
, the American thought.
The Yare’s useful, but with good carpenters and some time I could reproduce her. . . .

“How would you like this ship for your own?” Walker said.

The Tartessian raised the beer bottle to his lips and looked out over the blue horizon. “Tell me more, my friend,” he said.

 

Nantucket was never hot for long. Fog had rolled in and filled the streets as the sun fell; the air was cool, cool enough that the small blaze she’d kindled in the bedroom fireplace was pleasant, even on a summer’s night.

Alston sipped at her bourbon-and-water and opened the first page of
Master and Commander
, ready for another run-through of the whole set. Luckily she’d had most of her O’Brian collection on board
Eagle
during the Event, and she’d been able to replace the others here. There’d never be any more, of course, but she’d reluctantly come to the conclusion that
The Commodore
was the natural end of the series anyway. The big house was very quiet, although an occasional voice came through the open window, and once the slow ringing clop of shod hooves on stone. A grandfather clock ticked the evening away downstairs. She smiled and glanced around the big room. You could get used to this sort of thing, although she liked her cabin on the
Eagle
well enough, and the lack of running water ashore was a surprisingly hard adjustment. The books and ship plans on the walls, those were hers, and the armor on its stand in a corner with the swords beneath, and the squared-away neatness. It smelled of wax, the nutty-scented lamp oil, metal polish, and flowers.

“Not in the mood,” she murmured after a while, setting down the novel.

In fact, I’m feeling restless, bitchy, and itchy-skinned.
She’d been having a hard time suppressing the impulse to bark at people, which would be fatal. A commander was the last person on earth who could afford to lose her temper. If she hadn’t known for a fact her period was two weeks off, she’d have put it down to PMS.

“Well . . .”

She picked up another volume; her favorite poet, something she’d stumbled across in a little out-of-the way usedbook store in Boston once, many years ago. She’d opened it in idle curiosity, and fallen in love at once; now she whispered aloud, hardly needing to read: