Island in the Sea of Time (84 page)

“Looks like a goddam diaper,” the black woman muttered under her breath . . . in English, though, glancing down at the breechclout.

“It looks lovely on you,” Swindapa said stoutly. The smell of the other’s sweat was so familiar, yet still had that trace of sharp musky strangeness that was uniquely
hers
, alien and exciting. “You did everything perfectly. There’s only the Marking, now.”

Everyone crouched down on hocks as another man came forward; his mask had boar tusks and wolf fangs and antlers as well, and his helper carried a leather tray with bone needles and little horn cups of pigment. The Fiernan girl squatted on her haunches, confident that Marian would bear the slight pain without flinching. She did, the light of the bonfire running ruddy on her dark skin, the full features motionless as the needles pricked and tiny droplets of blood flowed down between her breasts.

Strange
, she thought. Very strange, to be here again—and with Marian; it was like two different worlds meeting.
And I not myself, not as I was.
She shook off the memory; there was enough sadness without raising ghosts from their barrows.

At least it was getting comfortable to squat naturally again; after a year of sitting on chairs, her legs had started going to sleep after a few hours in the old position. With the ceremony over, people sat about the fires and began the feast—Marian’s deer had been set to cook, but they didn’t have to wait for that. The finest hunters among the Spear Mark had brought in other deer, boar, rabbit, duck, and geese, and a good deal more easily than the candidate, since they were allowed to use the usual bows rather than the spear that ancient custom prescribed for the rite. There were wild fruits, nuts, and roots as well, but no bread or beer; for this ceremony only forest foods could be used. That didn’t mean there was no drink, of course. Beakers of honeymead came out, tall bell-shaped clay pots marked with wavy lines. She accepted one and drank a little; it was a fine dry make, seasoned with meadowsweet and powdered hemp seeds.

“How’s everyone taking it?” Marian said, as she sipped in her turn.

“Well, I think—most of them,” Swindapa said.

Truly. I can
feel
the goodwill.
The Spear Mark were her people’s main defense, and they knew better than the Grandmothers how desperate their straits were.

“Good,” Marian said. “We can get to work, then.”

“Not tonight,” Swindapa warned. “That would be . . . bad manners.”

Strange,
she thought. The Eagle People were always pursuing tomorrow, as if it were a precious quarry and they hungry wolves running it down. It was so hard for them simply to
be,
because they were always thinking of becoming.

A man leaned over. “Your friend Marawaynd is a great hunter,” he said, grinning. “She caught a fine deer—both times she came to the White Isle.”

Marian raised her brows at the good-natured guffaws, then smiled herself when Swindapa translated. She replied in her slow, accented Fiernan:

“Other way. She”—nudging Swindapa with an elbow—“track, hunt, leap on me like wolf.”

Laughter rose into the night, as loud as the cracking of the fires. Men staggered forward with a roast boar and set it down before the chief feasters, and knives flashed in the firelight as they carved. Swindapa watched the sparks rising toward the stars, and felt a bewildering tightness in her throat.

Why should I feel like weeping?
she thought, turning her head away from the others.
I only wish this could last forever.

That was so strange a thought she ran it over and over in her mind, forgetting the pang in her chest in puzzlement.
I too am hunting the future and letting the Now slip past,
she thought with a slight chill.
It’s catching.

 

Dammit, I’m a sailor, not a diplomat
, Alston thought, making her fingers unclench from the rough board table that occupied the center of the HQ hut.

“We’ve beaten back their raids before,” one of the Spear Chosen said.

“When the Sun People come against you, they’re going to be coming with every man in their tribes,” she replied. “This won’t be a war of raids, not after the harvest is in. It’ll be a war of—” She switched to English. “Oh, hell,’dapa, what’s the word for
battles?”

Swindapa frowned. “I don’t . . . I don’t think there is a word, not really,” she said at last. “Not if I understand the English properly.”

“—of
really big fights,”
Alston went on. “They’re going to bring thousands of warriors into your land. You have to match them. Then the
armies
. . . the big groups of warrior bands . . . will fight until one flees. We call that a
battle.”

The command tent had been replaced by a post-and-board structure; she could see it made the Earth Folk leaders a little uneasy, which was all to the good.
All the better to kick them out of their mental ruts
. That was why she was holding this meeting at Fort Pentagon. The garrison and the locals they’d hired had done a great deal in the past month. There was a timber-framed rampart all along the edge now, and towers of squared logs at the corners and over the gates. More logs made a rough pavement for the streets, and plank-and-frame barracks had replaced the tents; the little uniflow steam engine that powered Leaton’s dart-throwing machine gun could also pump water, grind grain, and saw timber. There was also a log pier, which meant that the ships—even the
Eagle—
could tie up regardless of the tides and transfer cargo.

“Thousands?” the Fiernan warrior said, scratching at his head. Alston suppressed an impulse to check hers. The locals were a clean enough people, by Bronze Age standards. Those standards weren’t anything like twentieth-century America’s, and didn’t include her horror of resident insect life. He cracked something between finger and thumbnail and continued:

“How can they bring thousands of warriors all together? What would they eat?”

“Your crops,” Alston answered.
Matlonr,
she remembered. Redheaded, the one who’d been with her when they ran head-on into that Zarthani warband.
More flexible than most.
He’d undone the multitude of small braids he’d worn before and cropped his hair in an American-style short cut.

“That’s why they’ll come after the harvest,” she said. “They’ll live off what you’ve reaped and threshed. And your livestock, to be sure.”

The dozen or so Spear Chosen sitting uneasily around the table looked at each other. “But . . . then we would all starve,” he said.

“Exactly. Except the ones the Sun People kept as slaves, of course.”

Swindapa winced. Alston restrained an apologetic glance; it was ruthless, but the truth.

Maltonr nodded thoughtfully. “We can’t sit behind our walls and wait for them to go away, either,” he said.

“Exactly,” Alston repeated.
Except that that word means something more like
running with the same feet,
approximately,
she thought.
Damn, but this is awkward.

“They’ve got engines to batter down walls,” she went on. “They’re heavy and slow, but if the Sun People can move in open country, they can bring them up and smash you to sticks. And if you move out of their way and refuse to . . .”
Damn again, no way to say
give battle
in this language.
“. . . to meet them and have a really, really big fight, they can eat up your settlements one by one.”

Maltonr still looked as if he was thinking hard. The others were simply appalled. “What have you Eagle People brought among us?” one whispered.

Alston felt like wincing herself. “Ask your Grandmothers,” she said. “The Sun People were eating you a little bit at a time; in the end, they would have destroyed you anyway. Walker the outlaw has taught them how to do it all at once . . . but we can show you how to smash
them
all at once, too. Think of being free of their threat, forever.”

That had them nodding. Except the redhead, who cast a thoughtful look around at the solid-looking American base. The very
permanent-
looking American base.
Oho, no flies on Rufus, here. Have to talk to him later.

“Hmmm.” That was Pelanatorn son of Kaddapal, the local magnate. Very much a trader, and very rich, now. “If
we
gather a host of thousands, how will
we
feed them? For that matter, there’s always sickness if too many gather in one place for long.”

“We can show you ways to stop the sickness,” she said.

Boiling water and deep latrines, mostly.
Luckily they’d gotten a lot of prestige with the locals by healing diseases their witch-doctors-and-herbs medicine couldn’t, so they’d probably go along with sanitation.

“Also, there are ways to feed large groups of people. With the proper—” She stopped again.

Oh, hell. How do I say
organization
or
logistics? She settled down to grind the right meanings out of the Fiernan Bohulugi vocabulary.

After the Spear Chosen had left, Alston slumped in her chair. “Christ, I feel like a wrung-out dishrag,” she said.

Swindapa sat looking at her, chin cupped in her hands. “You really have brought a new thing here,” she said slowly.

“ ’Dapa—”

The girl sighed and closed her eyes. “Oh, I know you—we—must,” she said. “But . . . other change, it’s like growing old. You don’t notice it every day, and when it comes, it comes to someone that Moon Woman has made ready for it. But this is like a great tree growing up between nightfall and morning. There’s no . . . no time to get used to it, to change the way the Eagle People bring it.”

Alston sighed herself, as she rose and put a hand for a moment on the girl’s shoulder. There was nothing much comforting to say. In a couple of generations, the Earth Folk way of life was going to be changed beyond recognition. That was better than being overrun and butchered, but it still wasn’t easy to swallow.

Andy Toffler came in, checked for a moment, then continued when she nodded. “Goin’ pretty smooth, ma’am,” he said. With the air survey, we should be able to estimate the harvest pretty close, and do up proper maps of the whole area with updated terrain features. Ian wants to get together with the both of us on it. They’re getting records from the local bigwigs, too—seems they’ve got a sort of tithe system here.”

He grinned. “And God Help Us, it surely does impress hell out of the locals, ma’am.”

“They haven’t seen people fly before,” Swindapa said dryly.

Toffler ducked his head, looking surprisingly boyish for a man in his fifties. “No offense, miss. They’re good folks, your people, and I’m happy to be here helpin’ them against those murdering scumbags.”

He scowled; they’d all seen evidence of the way the Sun People made war, and there certainly wasn’t a Geneva Convention in this millennium.
Seems to have hit Toffler harder than most,
she thought. There were hints of a knightly soul under that good-old-boy act . . . and he’d been scrupulously respectful to
her,
whatever his private opinions, which she had to give some credit for.

“Tell Ian I can see you at . . .” She glanced at her watch and read down a mental checklist.
The day would have to be forty hours long to get all that done.
“. . . at about eighteen hundred hours.”

“See you later,” she went on to Swindapa, answering the Fiernan’s mute nod, scooping up her helmet, and leaving.
Sometimes you need to be alone to think.
The guard fell in behind her; it was getting so she hardly even noticed that.

Enough space to drill several hundred had been left in the middle of the fort. As she passed along the edge of the field, Alston watched about that number of Fiernans in Nantucket-made armor learning the rudiments of close-order movement.

“
Hay-
foot,
straw-
foot,” the Nantucketer noncom screamed, to the pulsing beat of a drum. “
Hay-
foot,
straw
-foot!”

That was strange, too. Most of the locals could do any number of intricate, precise dance steps, but simple left-right-left gave them endless problems. They looked rather silly, each with a piece of hay tied to the left foot and a twist of straw to the right, but it worked.
What really worries me is keeping them in line in a fight.
They were brave enough, but they weren’t used to the
concept
of taking massive casualties all at once, the way you did in open-field massed combat.

She exchanged salutes with the guard at the sea gate, walking through the open portals and under the snouts of the flamethrowers that protruded from the bunkerlike slits in the flanking towers. There was a fair bit of traffic; boots and wheels and hooves boomed on the bridge over the ditch. The smell of stale water came up from it, around the bases of the sharpened stakes that bristled forward from the lower bank around the moat. That mixed with other smells—woodsmoke and horse sweat, leather, cooking from the tangle of Fiernan huts that had gone up outside, dung from the corrals. There were as many locals as Americans in the bustle. Spear Chosen war chiefs coming to learn or take council; traders, scores of them, with little oxcarts or pack donkeys or porters, or hauling stuff up from the beach where they’d landed coracles or canoes or whatever; others come to trade labor for the wonderful things the strangers had, or just to gawk. Even a few weirdly tattooed men from across the channel to the west, from what the locals called the Summer Isle.

The pier was even busier. As she came to the end, a sedated, blindfolded, hobbled, and still rather resentful-looking horse swung up into the air and over to the
Eagle
’s deck on a line and a band slung under its belly.

“Let go . . . and
haul,
” the line leader barked.

The animal slid down gently, whinnying as its hooves made contact with the decking. Alston paused for a moment, looking up at the clean lines of rigging and clewedup sails and masts, feeling the familiar rush of love at the sight of her ship.
Beautiful as
. . .
as Swindapa,
by God,
she thought, smiling with a slight quirk at the corner of her mouth. Right now the
Eagle
was leaving her for a while. Heading back home, with a cargo of horses, firkins of butter, and meat pickled and salted and smoked. Plus several small, heavy little chests full of gold bars and dust and some crude silver ingots.