Island in the Sea of Time (72 page)

Walker laughed and rubbed his hands. “My friend,” he said, “I’ll let you in on a little secret that may brighten your day.” He shouted for food and drink.

“I could use that,” Isketerol said frankly, as they ate; the usual Iraiina fare, roast and boiled meat and bread and a few vegetables, but better done than usual.
I would pay gold for a handful of olives, or good tunny cooked with goat cheese, and a decent salad.
“From what my scouts say I don’t dare put to sea,” he went on. “Not with
Eagle
and those two new ships about. So far, we know nothing of what Alston and the
Eagle
are doing, except stirring mischief.”

A man screamed, not far away. “Odd that you should mention that,” Walker said. “We took an enemy messenger, and he’s been telling us some interesting things. Come take a look.”

They rose and walked around the back of the pavilion. A series of leather panels between poles with a canvas awning overhead made an enclosure there, with two full-armed guards standing stock-still outside the entrance; Isketerol smelled fear on them, and saw it in the sweat that rolled down their faces under the helmet brims despite the cool evening air. Over the entrance hung a mask, the frontal bones of a skull mounted on a hemisphere of polished gold with a light burning within. The flames flickered through, red through the eye sockets and teeth, translucent through the thin-worked bone. Inside a hearth and living area were set up to one side, and a place of work to the other. Ingenious cabinets of folding wood and drawers stood open on the close-cropped sward; between them was a jointed table, now adjusted to a sloping surface. The man fastened to it screamed again as the figure in the green gown bent over him and made an adjustment to some metal tool that burrowed in under his rib cage.

Hong straightened up and pulled down her cloth face-mask. “Hi, Will. Hello, Isketerol, glad you could make it,” she said. Then to one of the early-adolescent girls standing behind her, also in green surgical garb, “The number-four extensor, Missora.”

The girl giggled and stood on tiptoe to whisper something in Hong’s ear. The Amurrukan woman laughed and swatted her assistant lightly on the bottom. “Not yet. Later, when he needs to be cheered up.” Her sister giggled too, crouching over the little brazier where still other instruments were at white heat.

An Iraiina stood by the man’s head;
his
fear was undisguised. “Ask him again, Velrarix,” Hong said.

The tribesman bent over the prisoner and shouted in his ear; the language was the purling glug-glug-glug sound of the Earth Folk tongue. Isketerol caught most of it, although the translator had a vile accent.

The figure strapped to the table tried to shake his head against the clamps that held it. Drops of blood went spattering on the waxed leather covering of the wood, and slow fat tears ran down his cheeks. The glass jar dripping saline solution down a tube into one arm rattled in its holder.

“No?” Hong said. “Well, maybe we’ll advance the schedule again. Scalpel and clamps, little one.”

She selected an instrument from the offered tray and flashed a smile over at the two men. “This is fascinating, you know. Sort of like an operation in reverse. The human body is absolutely amazing, the way it clings to life. And the way you can shape it like wood or marble. I’m developing a true art form here.”

To her assistants: “Kylefra, leave those cauteries and crank his head up a little. Velrarix, explain to him what happens next. After this he’ll be a lot calmer. No bothersome hormones.”

The other girl in the green surgical gown came and turned a screw that pushed up the victim’s head. When the sharp metal tickled the base of his scrotum he began to scream again, and then shout words—numbers, places.

“Got all that?” Hong asked the interpreter, when the Fiernan began to repeat himself for the second time. He nodded, pasty-faced. “Kylefra. We don’t need to hear him speak anymore.”

The men walked back to Walker’s tent.
Demons spare us,
Isketerol thought.
Will is a braver man than I, to bed with that. I’
d rather put the Crone Herself on my staff.
He picked up a glass bottle and poured a little of the
lightning spirit
into a cup, knocking it back with a jerk of his wrist. He’d seen men put to the question before, beaten or burned or flogged, but this . . . The meal sat heavy on his stomach; he drank again. “You learned what you needed?” he said.

Walker poured himself more mead. “Better watch that hard liquor,” he warned. “It creeps up on you if you’re not used to it. . . . Yeah, I think I’ve got what we need. And I’ve got a plan for a coordinated action. Here’s what we’ll do.”

Hong’s laughter rang over the sounds from behind the tent. Isketerol shuddered. “I hope you can rule her,” he said.

Walker chuckled. “She has sort of blossomed into her opportunities, hasn’t she? Don’t worry, I can keep her in line . . . and if she goes completely ’round the bend, there’s always—” He made a cutting gesture across his throat. “Now, let’s get down to business. Here’s what sulfur and saltpeter and charcoal are good for. . . .”

In the screened-off area, Hong was singing as she worked:

“How do you like my country?” Swindapa said proudly.

“Beautiful,” Alston said sincerely, touching a heel to her horse.

The long column of Americans stretched back along the trackway. They’d finally made their way out of the ancient oakwoods and up into rolling downs under a mild spring sun. It shone bright on polished steel, and on the gilt eagles that tipped their flagstaffs and the spread-winged version on every breastplate and shield. A drum beat,
triiip-trip-trip
, and a hundred and fifty feet hit the earth as one; spearheads swayed rhythmically.

Not much like it was in the twentieth,
she thought.

Not even the shape of the land. In the England she’d visited, these uplands were mostly bare moorland. In the White Isle they were still covered with a coating of loess, light fertile soil that had yet to erode away. Small square fields were laid out, green with wheat, barley, rye, oats, a few turning yellow with mustard, others shaggy with nettles or yarrow. Most of the fields were already calf-high, and they rippled and fluttered in the brisk south wind that streamed out the flags. Copses of wood covered hilltops or wound across the dales along the sides of streams, birch and beech and oak, leaves fresh and clear-cut, almost glistening in their newness. Flowers starred the grainfields and meadows, thick along the sides of the rutted dirt trace. Hawthorn hedges bloomed, filling the air with a faint elusive scent of wild rose when the wind dropped.

“Absolutely beautiful,” she said, reining aside.

The horse snorted and obeyed, and Swindapa’s followed it. Their Nantucketer expert had broken in enough for a few officers, mounted messengers, and scouts in the weeks since their landfall. They turned and cantered down the line; she exchanged salutes with the officers, fingers going
tick
against the brim of her helmet.

The ordered alignment of the Americans made a stark contrast to the great shambling clot of Fiernans who walked along with them, their own numbers again or more; adventurous youths and maidens, a few Spear Chosen with their followers, traders with a shrewd eye to the main chance and trains of donkeys loaded with packs, or livestock driven along to sell to the wealthy strangers. More ran to gawk from the settlements all around. Most of those were farmers, men in sleeveless tunics of coarse wool, women in string skirts, sometimes bare above the waist, sometimes with a shirt and poncho; children were often naked or nearly so, accompanied by lean whip-tailed dogs. The dwellings they abandoned were mostly huts, round or rectangular, often grouped together and sometimes surrounded by ditch or bank or thorn hedge; the livestock enclosures always were. The thatch was cut and sculpted in attractive abstract patterns, and the wattle walls whitewashed and painted over in geometric shapes; the effect was as much African as anything else, reminding her a little of pictures she’d seen of Ndebele villages. Somehow it looked right for the landscape.

“But . . .” Swindapa said, an edge of trouble in her voice.

“But?”

“It looks . . . it looks
smaller
than I remembered it, somehow,” she said, swiveling her head. “And sort of . . . messy.”

You can’t go home again,
Marian didn’t say. That was one lesson everybody had to learn . . .
or maybe not, here.
Here things
stayed
the same, usually. They didn’t build time-share condos and golf courses over the place you were born and the churchyard where your great-grandfather was buried.

A changed note ran through the burble of Fiernan Bohulugi conversation. Someone was coming running down the trail from the east, stumbling as he ran. A minute, and she could see there was blood on his face, and running down the arm he held cradled in the other. He stopped in shock at seeing the obvious foreigners, but some of the locals who were tagging along with the American column caught him as he started to buckle.

“Lieutenant Trudeau,” she said. “Deploy from column of march into line, if you please. Nyugen, scouts out forward.”

She and Swindapa spurred forward to the group around the wounded man. He stared from one to the other, wide-eyed. A torrent of Fiernan consonants followed, and Swindapa answered; both were too fast and complex for Alston to follow.

Swindapa’s eyes went wide as well. “A big Sun People raiding party—many of them, a great host, more than a hundred men. Not far up the track—he ran for perhaps an hour. But there shouldn’t be, not this far west and north!”

“Walker has changed things. Get some details, numbers, weapons.”

That took some time. Alston used it to remove her helmet, get out her binoculars, and stand in the stirrups, scanning slowly from left to right ahead.
There.
A faint trace of smoke. Burning things seemed to be a Sun People fixation.
Time to stop ambling along being a tourist.
And very faintly came the
huuuu-huuuu
sound of an aurochs-horn war trumpet.

She looked back. The wagons were drawing up in a circle, frontier-style . . . or Boer style, which was irony, if you thought about it. The three-hundred-odd Americans were fanning out, running to take up position in a line perpendicular to the rutted, muddy track on which they had been marching, with their left wing resting on the wagons and their right . . .
well, hanging in air.
And the locals . . .

Alston spurred her horse out in front of them. Most of the farmers were running for their huts—probably to get their spears and bows. The noncombatants were streaking for the tall timber or local equivalent, or herding their stock and children toward the big palisaded roundhouses. And the Spear Mark men who’d come along were starting to run
toward
the smoke-smudge, all seventy or eighty of them.

“Well, you can’t fault their guts,” she said; the Fiernan might not be long on organization, but they had a terrier courage which made it more understandable how they’d held out against the invader tribes so long. She trotted out ahead of them.

“Stop!” she shouted. “Stop now!” That much Fiernan she could manage.

The leading Spear Chosen was a rangy young man with freckles and a fiery head of copper-colored locks trained in dozens of braids. “Why?” he said. “We come to fight the Sun People; they burn our houses, attack our kindred.”

“Swindapa, tell him we’ll show him how the Eagle People fight. Remind him that they usually lose fighting the charioteers, but tactfully.”

Swindapa broke into voluble, arm-waving speech, a little odd to see from horseback; eventually they started listening to her. Alston put her helmet back on, swinging down the new hinged cheekpieces and clipping them together under her chin. The padding was rough against her skin, and the world took on a hard outlined shape from beneath the low brim. About half of the Fiernans stopped, sullen and restless, shifting their feet; the steel-headed spears the Americans had handed out danced in their hands. The others pelted by, heading for the invaders. Light-armed riders fanned out ahead of her, crossbows bouncing at their backs. They came back minutes later, galloping.

“Ma’am, they’ve taken a village about two and a half miles up thataway. Seven chariots, say a couple of hundred men. They’ve stopped to loot.”

“Any sign of out-time equipment, weapons, armor?”

“Hard to say for sure, ma’am. Most of it was straight Bronze Age stuff, right out of the briefings.”

“Carry on.”
Well, they won’t stay stopped to loot when that gang of wild men that went haring off down the lane hits them,
she thought. They’d beat the Fiernans like a drum; for starters, they outnumbered them eight to one.
And then they’ll chase them, all the way back here.

Other fires were puffing smoke into the sky, from hilltops around about or from the big round enclosures. “Alarms?” she said to Swindapa.

“Yes, to show that the Sacred Truce is invoked. Many Spear Chosen and their bands will come soon now. Well, in a while.”

Alston nodded; about what she’d expected. From what she’d been able to gather, none of them had ever been able to take land
back
from the invaders, though. And there was only one end to a game where the rules went
what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable.

Swindapa rode back to the injured man, now being treated by an American medic. She swung down out of the saddle, going to one knee beside him, then led her horse over to Alston again.