Island in the Sea of Time (67 page)

Alston nodded. “But Jared, I’m . . . not qualified. Oh, I can give advice on stuff in my area, but basically what I do is kick ass and take names. I’m a hammer. To me, all the problems look like nails, and they
aren’t.
”

“We’re none of us qualified. I was a fisherman and a cop; Martha was a librarian; Macy’s a carpenter turned contractor; Starbuck was a small-town businessman turned town clerk; the Arnsteins barely knew or cared that the real world existed.”

“Christ, that’s better than a bunch of sociologists and politico lawyers. Ian and Doreen are as bright as anyone I’ve ever met, and between ’em it seems like they’ve read every book in the world, sometimes; Martha’s about as smart, and less naive. Macy drives me nuts, drives
ever’body
crazy, but he’s got a conscience like a bedstead carved out of granite rock—uncomfortable, but it’s solid to the core. And Jared, you know people, and you’ll do what you think is right if you have to head-butt your way through a brick wall to do it. Plus you’ve gotten really good at persuading, in your own way.”

“Ah—” He flushed, looking down into his glass uncomfortably. “I’ll do my best.”

“Know you will. Just . . . be careful, okay? Because it’s for the whole
world.
”

That thought had occurred to him, now and then. It was a sobering one. “Bargain on that, lady.” They touched their glasses.

Alston sighed. “I wish my kids were here, you know? I really do. For their sakes.”

As if on cue, Martha and Swindapa came down from the second-floor nursery. “She’s asleep, at last,” Martha said, wiping her hands on a towel. “For a while. As much as half an hour, if we’re lucky.”

“She’s a beautiful baby—very good, as sweet as new butter,” Swindapa said, smiling. “If I had a baby as good-natured, I’d . . .”

Then the expression ran away from her face, and she stood with her eyes closed, tears squeezing out from under the lids.
Poor kid,
Cofflin thought. Evidently having children was
real
important to her people. A fully equipped fertility lab back up in the twentieth might have been able to do something, but weeks of a raging untreated pelvic inflammation had probably put her beyond any benefit from the island’s clinic.

Martha put an awkward arm around her shoulders. Alston came over and led her to the seat by the fire, pressing the glass of bourbon-and-water into her hand and perching on the arm of the easy chair beside her.

“Your older sister has some children, doesn’t she, honeybunch?” the black woman said gently, stroking her hair. “What’re they like? Tell me.”

Martha drew him out into the kitchen, snagging the long knife and fork along the way. “She’ll be all right by the time you’re finished carving,” she murmured.

 

“It’s called
division of labor,
” Walker said to Ohotolarix.

The phrase was in English; Iraiina didn’t have the words for it, not without a paragraph of cicumlocutions. You couldn’t say
mass or table of organization
in it either, not really.

The long shed was filled with men and women and children at work; most of them wore iron collars with a loop at the back for attaching shackles. At one end of the building thin rods of metal went into a machine of wooden drums and crank handles. Four strong men heaved on levers, and the iron rod was drawn through cast-iron dies until it became wire wound on a length of smooth round oak. There was a smell of hot iron and stale sweat, and the raw timbers the shed was fashioned of.

The wire went from bench to bench; some of the slaves cut the links into circles, others flattened the ends, still others fitted the rings together into preset shapes. At last the rivets were closed by lever-operated presses, and the end product was tumbled in boxes of sand to polish it, then washed and wiped down with flaxseed oil and rolled up for packing and transport. Chain-mail hauberks, in six standard sizes that he’d found would fit nearly everybody; kneelength, with short sleeves and a slit up before and behind so that the wearer could ride a horse. Not quite as good as the plate suits Leaton made back on the island, but almost infinitely better than the local equivalents.

“I see, lord,” Ohotolarix said thoughtfully when he’d explained further. “Because each task is
division
among many.” The Iraiina frowned in puzzlement for a moment.

“But why is this better than having each of these slaves and workmen make a whole set of this fine armor?” He wore his own now, did so virtually every waking moment, in fact.

“If a man does only one thing, he works faster,” Walker said. “And if you only have to teach him one thing, he can learn it quickly—little skill is involved in doing only one step over and over again. And if he does only that one thing, it’s easier to check that he does it well and quickly, and to drive him on.”

A sort of primitive assembly-line system, although he’d gotten the idea from Adam Smith’s description of how pins were made in the eighteenth century.

The young Iraiina frowned, thinking the matter through. “I see it must be as you say, lord,” he said at last.
“Eka,
truth, I’ve never seen so many work so swiftly for so long. It’s like . . .” He searched for words. “It’s like the spokes of a wheel, going ‘round and ’round.”

Walker nodded, unsurprised; these people were burst workers. At crisis times like the harvest they labored at a pace that would kill most residents of the twentieth, but much of the rest of their working days they spent loafing along, stopping when they pleased. None of them had any precise time sense, either, and they absolutely
hated
working regular hours at high intensity as a steady thing.

Not as much as they hate flogging or the hotbox or the cross, though,
he thought with some satisfaction. Or Hong’s patented special gelding without anesthesia, although that was reserved for extreme cases. He grimaced a little; he wasn’t what you’d call a squeamish man, but there were times when Hong’s kid-in-a-candy-store approach to torture made him a little uneasy, not to mention this cult she’d started, with herself as the avatar of the Lady of Pain. . . .

Outside a bell rang to mark the noon hour, echoing across the buildings and fields. At a shout from an overseer the workers in the shed downed their tools. Wheeled carts came in with tubs of food: porridge for the slaves, meat and bread and beer for the skilled freemen and overseers, a covered plate of ham and eggs for the American supervising the whole operation—Rodriguez, today. That would probably get a little cold; the sailor had taken one of the women back into the little wicker cubicle where the accounts were kept the minute the bell went, and the grunts and moans and rhythmic rattling were already loud. Walker grinned; Rodriguez was becoming something of a legend for the amount of action he got.

Still thinks with his balls,
he thought, slightly contemptuous.
But he’s learned to keep it out of working hours.
And he’d become downright devoted to the boss.

Walker and his chief Iraiina follower walked out into the courtyard. Walkerburg had grown considerably over the winter; he had sixty full-time warriors and retainers now—some from the new allied tribes, as well as Iraiina—plus their wives and children and dependents and the Americans and
their
women; most of them had a steady squeeze now, or more than one. And the slaves, who outnumbered all the rest put together. Plus the horses, milch cows, and draft oxen they needed, with corrals on the pastures downwind toward the river, and the watermill, the workshops, the warehouses. They’d logged off most of the heavy timber in the area over the cold months, and muddy ground interspersed with stumps spread around. New leaf was showing on the trees he’d left for shade and appearance, and a haze of grass and grain across the fields; the sun shone on windruffled puddles and cuffed at the hair he’d let grow long in accordance with local custom.

Warriors drilled, marching, thrusting in unison with their spears or firing crossbows under McAndrews’s direction, or rode their horses around an obstacle course. An Iraiina he’d taught was breaking horses to the saddle in a corral, cowboy-fashion. Laborers unloaded a broad-wheeled Conestoga wagon full of iron bars and barrel staves and charcoal and tanned hides. Another was being loaded with small barrels full of the output from his latest project, a still for homemade white lightning. That was wildly popular among the natives despite being rawly undrinkable; he supposed that was because they’d never been exposed to distilled liquor before, but it was another hold on the chiefs.

“Can we plow and herd enough to support so many?” Ohotolarix said, worry fighting with pride in his tone. None of the native settlements was as big as this; they didn’t have the organization to feed large numbers, and disease was a constant threat to any substantial group.

“No,” Walker replied. “We don’t need to.”

They walked across toward the main house; he nodded to followers of his about their errands, and took a deep breath of the fresh early-spring air. Apart from woodsmoke and the odors of baking and cooking, there was little taint in it. Alice had seen to the sanitation, with his full power behind her. He’d even set up a bathhouse, and made the slaves wash regularly with soap, another of his innovations. The natives were already talking in awe of how few died here, particularly children. The place was certainly swarming with rug rats.

“No, we won’t plow that much,” he went on aloud. “But we’ll get ample grain and beans and beef from our share of the
rahax
’s levies on our tributary folk, and from our Earther tenants. Here we’ll raise just enough for garden truck, and fresh grazing for our beasts. Thus we’ll be freed to fight, and work on other things.”

And he’d had Martins run up a few plows and nineteenth-century-style seed drills, miles better than the simple wooden crook with a stone share the locals used. Nobody here had much grasp on stuff like liming the soil or rotating crops, either. Not that he intended to spend his time on agriculture, but he’d spread that sort of thing around, first of all on the lands the
rahax
had given him directly to work with slaves and tenants. It ought to be easy enough to double or triple productivity, which would be essential when he got around to the sort of building he had in mind. You could round up all the slaves you pleased, but they weren’t much good if you couldn’t feed them; that went double for armies. He was a young man; plenty of time.

Ohotolarix nodded and strode off to his own house; he had a growing family, and his youngest son was named Hwalkarz. The American walked into the hall of the two-story log dwelling, waiting while a servant knelt to take off his muddy boots and fit felt slippers. Alice Hong looked up from her papers on the table in the dining room and rang a bell for more food, then rubbed out some notes on a flat slate and chalked in others. Keruwthena’s young sisters sat on either side of her; Hong was training them up, easier than with someone older. That was the main drawback of ruling primitives. You could make them do things, but you had to show them how first.

“Welcome, Oh Lord of the Manor,” she said.

Walker grinned; Alice might take her perversions with excessive seriousness, but it was refreshing to have someone who wasn’t
totally
in awe of him. Of course, he could relax around Alice. The locals would never follow a woman, witch or no, and she knew it. She was crazy, he supposed, but not in the least stupid.

“How are things going?” he said.

The serving girl brought in a tray of sandwiches, thin grilled beef with onions on crusty almost-French bread, plus cheese and pickled vegetables. Hong had taught the kitchen staff well—she liked to eat properly herself—and
none
of them disobeyed her twice.

“Well, I told that cow Ekhnonpa to stay off her feet more—she’s still puking in the mornings and probably will be until she drops her calf. I don’t like the spotting she had, and I’ve cut her salt intake,” the physician said. “Speaking of that, do you know
half
the females in this place are pregnant? It’s not decent—as soon as I’ve got one trained to do something, somebody pups her. I’m going to start spaying some of them, or doing some D&Cs, or we’ll never get any work done. Anyway, four births and one death this week—brainless bitch fell into the boiling tallow in the soap shed and got scalded, nothing I could do. A beam fell on a slave’s foot and crushed it; he’ll live and I saved the foot, but he’s laid up for months. No more dysentery, thank goodness, just the usual rash of minor injuries, and my assistants could see to most of those. The food stores are holding up with the latest delivery. We’re finally seeing some real production from the spinning and weaving shed.”

He nodded approval as he swallowed the last of his sandwich and took a bite of strong cheese. A lot of the tribute was in raw wool and flax. Building the kick-pedal flying-shuttle looms and the spinning jenny hadn’t been any problem, but getting the machines into actual production was another matter. Hong had taken the project under her wing for something to do, now that her regular clinic was well organized. It also made work for all those pregnant women, work they actually liked, and if you wanted decent sheeting or pillowcases here you had to make them yourself. The local linen was more like canvas.

“Good job,” he said. The kitchen girl came in to clear away the wood and pottery plates. “As a reward, come along upstairs.”

He rose. Hong dropped her chalk beside her quill pen and followed suit, grinning at him and slowly licking her lips. “You too,” he added to the servant.

“You girls work on your times tables,” Hong said to her helpers.

“Yes, Ms. Hong,” they chorused, eyes firmly down on their slates.

The two Americans went out the door into the hallway, pushing the kitchen girl between them and up the stairs. Their hands met on her shivering back. Hong was smiling, and twirling a little silver-handled crop of bone and leather she always wore thonged around her right wrist.