Island in the Sea of Time (83 page)

“And it looks good,” he said aloud; Martha nodded in instant comprehension, looking down at the baby on her lap. Young Marian smiled toothlessly and drooled in response, stuffing a small chubby fist into her own mouth.

“Damn good,” Cofflin said.

A tourist might not think so. The fields—wheat and barley and rye planted last fall, corn and oats, potatoes and vegetables put in this spring, an occasional young orchard—were a bit uneven and straggly. The long lines of field workers were just barely keeping ahead of the weeds, too. But that was
life
out there, dearly bought with aching hard work. That waving blue-flowered field of flax wasn’t just pretty; it was rope and sails for the fishing boats that brought in the other two-thirds of their food.

“You can lose the habit of taking food for granted really quickly,” Martha said. “I
love
the sight of those cucumbers.”

“Ayup,” Jared said. “But notice how sensitive we’ve all become to the weather?”

She looked skyward reflexively—clouds, but no rain today—and they shared a laugh. Everyone
did
talk about the weather now, and not just because there wasn’t any TV or national newspapers. The weather was
important.

“I hope Angelica doesn’t go on too long about Long Island,” he said, as the carriage turned off onto the appropriately named Brand Farm Road.

That was unpaved, and gravel crunched under the wheels.
Gravel we’ve got plenty of,
he thought, making an automatic note to check on how much asphalt they had left in stock for patching streets.

A piece of gravel bounced off the wooden side of the carriage, flung up by the horse’s hooves; there was a faint smell of dust in the air, despite yesterday’s rain. Spring flowers starred the sides of the road, daffodils and cosmos and the first tangled roses. There was a fair cluster of livestock this close to Brand Farm, on fields planted to ryegrass and clover; Angelica was keeping most of it under her eye, breeding stock being as precious as it was and the new farmers so inexperienced. Last year’s weanling calves brought from Britain were small shaggy surly-looking adolescent cattle now, with budding horns and polls of hair hanging over their eyes; next year they’d be breeding themselves. The young ewes were adults with offspring of their own, tottering beside their mothers on wobbly legs and butting for the udder. A clutch of yearling foals went by, led on halters by young girls; getting them used to the idea of doing what they were told, he supposed. Far too much hauling and pulling was being done with human muscle, and steam engines weren’t really suited for field work. More horses would be a godsend.

The baby began to complain, wiggling with little snuffles and
whu-wha
sounds. Martha did a quick check as they passed the brewery, winepress, and small vineyard just before the house; a cleared field off to the right was being planted with grafted rootstocks for more vines. The field was full of people, many of them rising to wave and call greetings as the Cofflins went by; they waved back.

“She’s not wet. That’s the ‘I’m getting a little hungry’ one,” she said. “I’ll leave you to tell Angelica no about Long Island again while I feed her.”

Jared nodded; some mothers thought nothing of nursing in public, but Martha didn’t work that way. The carriage slowed as it went uphill to the farmhouse proper, amid its cluster of outbuildings and barns and the great greenhouses. The heavy timber frame of a new barn was going up, with people pulling on ropes and shouting.

“You might consider the Long Island idea again,” she went on.

“Not you too! We don’t have the people to spare, and besides—there are the locals.”

“Only a few hundred on the whole island,” she said with ruthless practicality. “That’s scarcely an impediment. And the climate and soil are a lot better for agriculture. Not this year or next, I grant you, but Dr. Coleman says that with the birthrate the way it is since the Event, our population’s going to double in the next thirty-eight years or less. Not counting immigration.”

“Immigration?” Jared said, raising his eyebrows. “I wouldn’t have thought so, from what we saw this morning.”

“Oh, I was thinking of Swindapa’s people,” Martha said, rocking the infant to try to calm its growing volume of complaint. “They seem compatible enough. Odd, but compatible, and eager to learn.”

Now, there’s a thought,
Jared mused. He made: a mental note of it. More people would be
so
useful, but not if they caused too much trouble.

He looked east for a moment. “It all depends,” he said.

“And we can talk about the university . . . again. Never too early to start planning.”

“Jesus
Christ.”

 

“It’s the only way the Spear Mark will listen to you. A lot of them, ah, the Grandmothers sort of . . . well, irritate them,” Swindapa had said. “They always have. And the Grandmothers treat them like bad little children.”

Which leaves me out here in the woods, buck nekkid with mosquitos biting me,
Marian Alston thought, gripping her spear.
Well, not quite. I get to wear this knife, too. What was that remark I made last spring, about the bare-assed spear-chuckers of England?

“Goddam Paleolithic rituals,” Alston whispered, barely moving her lips.

Literally
Paleolithic. The Arnsteins thought this probably went right back before agriculture, two or three thousand years. She gritted her teeth against the chill that raised goose bumps down her dew-slick ebony skin. She was crouched in a clump of tall ferns, with the crown of a hundred-foot beech tree overhead. Most of the trees about her were oaks, though, huge and gnarled and shaggy. Water dripped down from the fresh green of the leaves and the ferns, splashing on her.
Dammit, hypothermia amd
pneumonia
are
not
what I need.
She was covered with the juices of crushed plants, too, that were supposed to kill her scent. They certainly itched. The forest was more open than she’d have expected, kept that way by the shading crowns of the big trees and by periodic forest fires that swept away the undergrowth. It was eerily quiet, only a few birdcalls and the buzz of insects.

She breathed deeply, forcing thought out of her mind as Sensei Hishiba had taught. The discomfort did not vanish, but bit by bit it became simply another sensation, cramping and cold and hunger flowing without feedback across the surface of her perceptions. Slowly everything faded but her surroundings, rustle of growth, drip of water on the deep soft layer of rotting leaves, the faint cool scents of decay and growth. Outlines grew sharp, down to the feathery moss that coated the gnarled oak bark.

And . . . a rustle. Faint. A footfall, a small sharp
clomp.
She let her eyes drift closed, focusing. Inch by fractional inch the spear went back and her body shifted balance without moving, feet digging into the softness of the forest floor, pressing until wet clay oozed up between her toes.

The eyelids drifted up again. Alston made no attempt to focus them, let movement and color flow by and through. Her heart sped, not in excitement but in natural preparation for movement. She took a long, slow breath—

—and
lunged.

The movement was too shocking-sudden for the buck to do more than begin a leap sideways. The long sharp steel thudded into its flank, behind the left shoulder; she followed through, shoving and twisting as the wood jerked in her hands. A moment later the deer pulled free and staggered off sideways, head down. Blood pumped from its flanks and mouth and nostrils, spattered her with thick gobbets; it staggered sideways, tripped, went down by the hindquarters. For an instant its forelegs struggled to lift it, while she waited, panting. Then it laid down its head, kicked, voided, and died.

She leaned on the spear, panting, so exhausted that her knees began to buckle.
Takes it out of you.
When you focused like that, there was nothing held back.

“Time’s a-wastin’,” she said, laying down the spear and kneeling beside the dead animal.
Sorry,
she thought, touching the soft neck.
It was necessary.

 

The sun had fallen, and the air was growing cooler despite the great fire in the ancient pit at their backs and the smaller blazes around the edge of the clearing. “It’s a new thing,” one of the men grumbled. “A foreigner . . .”

Swindapa glared at him. Pelanatorn hushed him with a gesture. “Not the first,” he said. “Let the forest spirits decide. If she brings her deer, well enough.”

A younger man’s voice called out, cracking with excitement. “It is the hour!”

Swindapa stood with the others beside the high-leaping fire, beating time on the ground with her spear, listening to the thudding rhythm and the slapping of palms on drumheads that matched it. Sweat ran down her face under the overshadowing tanned mask of a deer, down her flanks beneath its hide. Around her stood the ranks of the Spear Mark, their heads bearing the likeness of deer and boar, aurochs and wolf and bear, the bronze or Eagle People steel of their spears glinting reddish. She strained her eyes into the spark-shot darkness, knowing it was useless—the trees came close here, and nothing was visible under their branches. Wind ghosted out of them, cool and green on her hot skin, smelling of green and damp earth.

The chant broke, but the drums continued under it like a giant’s heartbeat, echoing back from the forest edge.

“Terge ahwan!”
someone shouted.

That was in the Old Tongue;
The hunter comes.
The rest of them took it up, making a new chant in the flame-shot darkness. The crowd parted for Marian. The bloody hide of her kill was draped around her flanks, and the open eyes of the head stared out from above hers. The butchered quarters and organs dragged behind her on a travois of poles bound with sinew.

A man in breechclout and leggings stood forth. Gold bands shone around the tusks of his boar mask and on the haft of the ceremonial mace in his hand. He held it up to bar her way.

“Shm’ u-ahwa?”
he asked.
Who comes?

“Na-ahawun t’ngamo sssgama nwn’tu,”
Marian replied, her voice loud and firm.
One who brings meat for the people.
She stood tall and let the travois fall, holding out her spear so that the bloodied head could be seen.

“Na-terge ahwan!”
the boar-man shouted.
It is a hunter who comes!

The crowd shouted it out together:
“Na-terge ahwan!”

Swindapa felt her heart swell. Marian was doing everything perfectly—even the difficult sounds of the Old Tongue, the hunter’s language, that nobody really spoke anymore. Helpers came forward to take the meat away for preparation, and to throw buckets of water over the initiate—part of the ceremony, more comfortable, and preparation for what must follow. Sleek wetness glistened in the firelight, like a statue of living onyx.

“Is the hunter weary?” the man with the boar said. “Does the hunter seek to rest?”

“The hunter runs faster than the deer, longer than the wolf,” Marian answered. “The hunter runs hotter than the breath of fire.”

She turned left and began to walk. The Spear Mark formed a laneway for her, in a spiral that led counterclockwise around the blaze again and again. A tense silence, then a spear lashed out—reversed, the butt low to trip her. Without breaking stride she dove over it, in a forward roll that seemed to bounce her back to her feet as if on cords let down from the moon.
The Art,
Swindapa thought
. Ah, if only I could move like that!

To the Spear Mark it seemed like magic. A roar of approval went up. More spearshafts darted out, and sling cords swung to tangle and trip. Beneath the mask, Swindapa bit her lip in worry.
She’s so hard to see in the dark, someone might slip.
Nobody was supposed to be really hurt in this, but accidents were not unknown—particularly if someone had ill-wishers. She’d collected more than a few bruises herself, on the night of her initiation; a lot of men felt annoyed when a woman took the Spear Mark. None landed on Marian that she could see, and the woman of the Eagle People ran faster and faster as the rite prescribed, dancing, jinking, dodging, throwing herself forward in diving rolls over an outstretched shaft or leg. The hunters yelled, egging her on; the sound rose as she disappeared behind the fire, and Swindapa knew she was sprinting up the ramp. And . . .

She soared over the flames; the Fiernan girl felt the blast of heat as if it were drying her own skin. Landing, standing with legs braced and spear held aloft on widespread arms.

Swindapa grounded her own spear, pulled down the deer mask, and danced out into the cleared space before the fire, taking the part of the prey in the Showing. She was a good enough hunter, and she’d learned warrior’s knowledge from Marian—but this was her first skill, the one that had earned her the name Deer Dancer, an adult’s name and not a child’s. The hard soil was easy as turf beneath the balls of her feet as she sprang, seeming to float in the air as a deer did when it leaped, her long legs flashing in the ftamelight. She landed, crouched, stepping light, quivering with the seed of leaps to come, as a deer was, always ready to flash away, turning and darting. She was the deer, and Marian was the hunter—stalking closer, her movements just as swift and smooth but harder, more focused. They spiraled about each other, playing the mime of stalk and flight, until the spear flashed below her last leap. She crumpled around it, lay still as the steel was withdrawn from the earth and thrust upward.

“It is accomplished!” Marian shouted.

“It is accomplished!”
the hunters roared, and the drums gave a final flourish and went silent.

The tense hieratic stillness of the moment broke in laughter and cheers. Swindapa hurried forward, snatching up a parcel she’d arranged herself. It held a breechclout and leggings of fine white doeskin, and moccasins; she’d have liked it still better if she could have made them with her own hands, but there hadn’t been time and her sisters and aunts had done it for her. She grounded her spear near Marian and began to help her on with the clothes.