On the Oceans of Eternity (12 page)

Not so long ago,
he thought stoutly, stepping forward.
And it did bring me luck!

The Lady’s Lady paced on his left, and the others of the royal household took their places behind—the family, the retainers, the great carved and painted and gilded carts with their images of the Grain Goddess and Arucuttag of the Sea, and their attendant priests and priestesses, that the others of the Great Gods might witness this rite. There was no need for an image of the Crone, of course—She was present everywhere, ubiquitous as shadow, for wherever life went, there Death was also. Musicians beat on drums, plucked harps, played bone flutes, sounded bronze trumpets in peal after peal of sound; warriors followed in the panoply of his youth, bronze disks over their chests secured by leather cross-belts, helmets of sinew sewn with bronze scales, sword and spear and bow. Attendants behind flung handfuls of dried figs, raisins, and olives to the crowd, symbols of luck and abundance. A chorus of girls in white robes, virgins of the best families in the kingdom, came behind them singing of the land’s longing for the Lady’s return with cool winds and fruitful rain after the dry death of summer. Their hands had woven the rich gown his priestess-wife wore, the sacred dedication of their last year of maidenhood.

He’d hidden behind the Year-Maidens, when he was a boy, then rushed forward to touch the King and gotten rapped with a spear shaft for his pains ...

Not so long ago. I’m not forty winters yet.
A young forty winters, only a few strands of gray in his bowl-cut hair, and all his teeth still sound. For the rest the King was a man of the type common here in southern Iberia, olive-skinned, black of hair and eye, of medium height, slender and lithe and quick-moving. His shoulders were broad for his height, his arms strongly muscled, his hands bearing a sailor’s callus from rope and steering oar, spear and sword.

The road under his feet was part of the New City, broad and straight and covered in asphalt, with sidewalks of brick on either side, flanked by buildings of two and even three stories. Many of them were built of pale-rose sandstone barged down the Rainbow River, and those of adobe brick were whitewashed to brilliance; both had sloped roofs of fine red tile, some with doorways of fanciful wrought-iron or cast-bronze fretwork opening onto interior courts where fountains played. Isketerol’s heart swelled with pride at the sight, at the wealth and might and knowledge he had brought to his native city. More Tartessians crowded the windows and balconies, dressed in their best, wreaths in their hair, throwing flowers and handfuls of grain before his feet.

Isketerol came at last to a special ramp built downward into the water of the river; Tartessos stood on a triangle of land where two streams met after their long journey southward from the mountains. Here he looked out over a broad bay, intensely blue beneath the late-summer sun, over to green marshes where birds rose ten thousandfold to add the thunder of their wings to the thunder of voices from behind him. The wharves and city walls and shore were black with his folk; a silence fell on them as the King removed his ornaments and flung them one by one out into the waters.

“Oh Lady of Tartessos, giver of life. You who are the rain and the river and the soft autumn fields that welcome the plow, receive my gifts! By my gifts, know that the King and Your people remain loyal unto You!”

Beside him the Lady’s Lady did the same, murmuring her own invocation—that was not a thing for men’s ears—until they stood naked side by side. Then they waded out, amid the flowers floating on the waters, and swam to a raft anchored some fifty feet beyond. Isketerol turned to the south, toward the place where the fresh water met the salt on the edge of sight. Boats bobbed and dashed about, the sunset ruddy on their sails, turning the foam at their bows to blood-color as well; a few lights already starred masthead and bowsprit in the falling dusk.

“Oh Arucuttag of the Sea,” he prayed, raising his arms high and hands palm outward in the gesture of reverence. “Hungry One, Lord of Waves, Storm Lord, remember my gifts unto You.” Those had been made yesterday, beyond sight of land—gold, and the blood of a strong young warrior. “Remember, and grudge not that Your sister comes to wed with me, for the renewal of the land. Whelm not our ships with Your anger, but give us swift voyaging and good winds, full nets and victory. Wait in patience until the grain grows gold, when She shall return unto You and Her sister of the ripened corn rule the summer.”

He turned, and his wife did as well to face him. This once in all the year he went to his knees before her, because this was not only the mother of his sons but the Lady Herself come in the flesh for this hour. Again he raised his hands in the attitude of prayer.

“Oh Lady of Tartessos,” he called. It was as if Someone else spoke through his lips: now he was the Sun Lord. “You have been in Your brother’s hall all the long summer while the land grew dry. My longing has called the grain from the moist soil and given it My gold, and I have lain with Your sister to bring forth the harvest for the reapers. Yet You came not, and now the dry land perishes for Your rain, that the grain may be sown once more. Without You, My light cannot make the Grain Goddess’s earth fruitful. Do You hide Your face in anger from Your people? Do You come from Your brother’s sea in anger, with the waves of the salt flood?”

“No!” she called. “The Lady comes again in love, bringing the rain that gives Her people life, swelling the rivers as a mother’s breasts swell with milk. Come to me, Sun Lord, as the Sun sinks beneath the River, and together we will bring rain and cloud, sowing and reaping!”

She sank gracefully to the heaped wool blankets, opening arms and legs to him. The deathly silence broke into cheers as he went in unto her, and cannon roared all along the city walls and from the ships anchored in the harbor, rockets flaring up to burst in multicolored splendor overhead.

 

The fall weather of the Year 10 had cleared, down near the reaches where the Severn gave into the Bristol Channel. The day was bright, brisk, a chill wind whipping the blood into your face; the coal smoke from the steamboat’s stack tattered away south and west, losing itself over smargadine waters and white-crested waves. Marian stood on the deckhouse that spanned the curved boxes that held the vessel’s paddle wheels, behind opened windows, Swindapa beside her. Froth churned white behind them, surging against the first of the train of four barges on their tows behind. The craft’s blunt bows sledged their way into the waves, and spray on her lips tasted of salt now. There was a new roll and swing to the craft’s movement, infinitely familiar, paradoxically reassuring with its hint of accustomed danger. Now and then water would show green over shallows, or throw spray skyward from a rock. The captain of the tug stood beside the wheel, a stocky middle-aged man in sweater and sea boots and the shapeless remains of what had been a peaked yachtsman’s cap, scratching in his close-clipped gray-yellow beard now and then and occasionally raising his binoculars. From time to time he gave an order, in English or Fiernan or a mishmash of the two tongues. When he spoke to Marian Alston, it was in a cornhusker Indiana rasp.

“Tricky navigation in these parts, ma’am. We missed the tidal bore you can get around here this time, mostly, thank God, but there’s rocks and shifting sandbanks most of the way from here to Westhaven.” He looked over his shoulder, down at the water, then unplugged a speaking tube, whistled into it, then shouted in a good-humored bellow:

“More steam, goddammit! Or I’ll come
wo‘tuHuma ssoWya
and fry my bread in your drippings!
N’wagHA tobos!
”

Wonder how he ended up here?
Marian thought.
Knows his work, obviously, though.

“Left two, Cindy,” he went on to the young woman at the wheel, then put his hand on it. “Good—smooth, not too fast, don’t try to force it.”

“Aye aye, Dad.” A chuckle. “And Dad? It wasn’t really nice to say you’d stuff them in the furnace.”

“You don’t have to hire ‘em,” he said, and rumpled her hair with rough affection. To Marian: “Hard to get stokers, Commodore. Even harder to keep ’em. Black Gang work ain’t what you’d call popular.”

“Understandable, Captain Bauerman,” she replied, clasping her hands behind her back and rising slightly on the balls of her feet. Keeping balance against the movement of the deck was something a life at sea had made wholly automatic.

He grinned, respectful of her rank but not in the least intimidated by it. “Oh, hell, Captain’s a little too fancy for a tugboat skipper,” he said. “Good to get home, though.”

Westhaven was a little west of the site of Bristol in the twentieth, not far from where the Lower Avon joined the Severn estuary.
Or where the Hillwater joins the River of Long Shadows,
she thought, with a quirk of her mouth. First landfall near Portsmouth, right after the Event, where she’d rescued Swindapa; then here the following spring to deal with Walker. Pentagon Base, they’d called it, after the shape of the fort they built.

She turned her head and saw Swindapa looking at her, smiling, knew that she was remembering the same days.
Lot of water under the bridge,
she thought, with a warm lightness that hadn’t changed. It always made her want to break out in a silly grin, too....

“Lot of changes,” she said aloud instead, nodding toward the land.

The shoreline passed, in stretches of reddish sandstone cliff or low salt marsh; inland were rolling fields and woodland turning to blue hills in the distance. The air was full of wings, raucous gulls following lug-sailed fishing boats, waterfowl from the seaside swamps, sea eagles; seals in the water and a spray of fish jumping to flee the liquid grace of their rush, a whale spouting not too far away.

I never knew how ... empty of life ... the twentieth was,
Alston thought, not for the first time. With luck and good management, they’d see that things stayed that way. If we win the
war,
she thought grimly.
I doubt Walker would give a damn.

As they watched, one of the deep-ocean ships cast off from the steam tug that had brought it out of Westhaven harbor and hoisted sail—it was a three-masted schooner, about two hundred tons, a whale among the minnow-tiny coracles and sewn-plank fishing boats around it.
Maybe Alban-built,
she thought, as it heeled and the sails bellied out into taut beige curves, a white bow wave surging back from its sharp prow. They knew wood, cloth, and rope well enough and could afford to buy what they couldn’t make. Certainly mostly Alban-crewed; Fiernans, or at least Fiernans who’d studied with the Grandmothers, picked up the math needed for practical navigation fast enough.

There were changes ashore, too; progress had gone furthest and fastest in this area, near the largest of the Islander bases in Alba. A decade ago the land had been strewn with widely scattered hamlets of round huts, small fields about them worked with hand-hoe and scratch-plow; beyond broad rings of scrubby second growth and rough pasture. Now most of the brush had been cleared, stubblefields and pasture edged with fences or new-planted hawthorn hedges; even the primal wildwood had retreated a bit, though nobody had found it worthwhile to drain much of the vast swamps.

Alston leveled her own binoculars. A puffing steam road-hauler pulled a threshing machine; harvest was well past, the wheat and barley in thatched stacks, and the thresher was on its rounds, doing in a few hours what would take scores of workers all winter with flails. More wagons piled with sacks of grain waited beside a dammed stream and its mill, the big wooden wheel turning briskly under the white water pouring from the sluice.
That
represented about a thousand women who didn’t have to spend three hours every morning kneeling to grind their families’ daily grain on a metate-like arrangement of two stones.

Among the Sun People further east grain-grinding had been the primary work of slave women, that and carrying buckets of water on a yoke across the shoulders, and gathering firewood. The Earth Folk had been more humane about distributing the toil, but it still meant endless hours of backbreaking monotony for somebody.

“Many changes,” Swindapa said. leaning her elbows on the edge of the window before them. The breeze of their passage cuffed locks of wheat-colored hair backward around her tanned face, and she squinted into the wind. Fine lines appeared beside her eyes as she did, the beginning of the sailors’ wrinkles that were more deeply grooved in Marian’s skin.

Lord, ’dapa’s going on thirty now.
Marian thought with a sudden shock. One reason she’d resisted the younger woman’s determined attempts at seduction back on the Island those first few months had been the difference in their ages.

“Are you happy about what’s changed?” the black woman asked.

Swindapa turned her head and smiled. “Oh, mostly,
bin-HOtse-khwon,”
she said, and nodded toward the shore. “Some of the Earth Folk grumble, not most. Who’d watch their children die, when they didn’t have to? Half did, in the old days. And we have peace, at least in our own land.”

“Mmmmm-hmmm, I’ve heard complaints about everything being done the Eagle People way.”

“Bread together,” Swindapa said, and at her raised brows went on: “Haven’t I told you that saying? Well, you take flour and water and yeast—none of them rules the others, and together they make the bread. Together we’re making something new, and the Fiernan Bohulugi are the yeast, I think.”

If we win this war,
Marian thought; and knew from the shadow in the other’s eyes that she had seen that thought, too.

 

“Odikweos, my friend, it is good to see you,” Isketerol said.

His part in the autumn rites was done for now, with the Sacred Wedding. He had bathed, dressed himself in a saffron-yellow tunic trimmed with purple dye of Ugarit, thought carefully and consulted a few advisers. He clasped hands with the other man in the
Amurrukan
fashion that Walker had made common in Great Achaea, then received a kiss on the cheek as from a near equal; the other man was a ruler himself, after all, if also a vassal of the King of Men in Mycenae. This was not the first time he’d come to Tartessos as envoy and negotiator.