Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  “Daurthunnicar son of Ubrotarix,” came through eventually, with Arnstein helping out. “Rahax of the Iraiina folk.”

  Alston saluted; it seemed to suit the occasion. “Marian Alston, captain of the Eagle,” she replied firmly, meeting the impassive blue eyes. That got through too; Ohotolarix had known what to call the ship’s gilded figurehead. “American,” she added.

  A slender boy came forward with a platter of basketwork. It held a golden cup, a piece of coarse dark bread, a slab of cheese, and a knife. Daurthunnicar picked up the knife and pricked his thumb, squeezing out a few drops of blood into the cup. Alston felt her own hands move in dreamlike precision, stripping off a glove and placing the razor-edged bronze against her skin. Her own blood fell into the liquid in the cup; that was yellow, the color of straw. The native chief picked up the cup in both hands; it seemed to vanish in their hamlike vastness. He raised it to the setting sun and pronounced something long and sonorous; she caught Diawas Pithair, the name of their chief god. Sky Father; cognate with Zeus and Jupiter and Tiwaz and the old Norse Tyr, according to Arnstein. Others, a list of them-Mirutha, which seemed to be some sort of angels; a Horned Man or god of beasts and forests; Hepkwonsa, who was the Lady of the Horses, and her sons the Twin Riding Brothers; the Crow Goddess, whose true name was Blood Hag of Battles���

  He drank, slurping, then handed the cup to her. About half the contents were gone; on impulse she took it in both hands as he’d done, tilting it back until the last drops ran down her throat. It was alcoholic, no doubt about that, and sickly-sweet.

  The crowd gave a long sigh. The rahax proceeded to cut the bread and cheese and sprinkle them with salt. She ate her portion and gave a polite smile as he grinned back at her out of a crumb-filled beard. This time the watchers cheered, waving weapons and torches over their heads.

  “That makes us guests,” Arnstein murmured again. “At a guess, we’re now holy and inviolate.”

  “Hell of a thing to have to guess at,” she said. It made sense, though.

  Daurthunnicar waved a few others forward. Introductions, Alston thought. She tried to keep the names straight-or they might be titles, of course-but she was glad of Rosenthal busy writing on her pad.

  Arnstein stiffened beside her when the one of the other men, the dark cleanshaven ones, was introduced. “Isketerol of Tharatushus.”

  “Tartessos?” he echoed.

  The Latin-looking man nodded. “Isketerol. Tharatushus,” he replied, pointing southeast.

  “Tartessos!”

  Arnstein burst into another language. Isketerol replied, and Arnstein turned to Alston, excitement ablaze on his face.

  “Captain, he speaks Greek! It’s very archaic, and he’s got a thick accent, it’s not his native language either, but I can catch about one word in every two-more, with a little practice. He’s Isketerol, and those ships on the beach are his. They’re from Tartessos-it’s a city-state in southwestern Spain, not much known about it except that it was wealthy and important in the late Bronze Age and down into early classical times. I didn’t know it existed this early, but nobody’s ever found the site of it-very obscure.”

  Finally! Alston thought. “You can translate through him? Excellent. Tell the sachem here we’ve got gifts for him. And by the way, be careful with the Iberian.” Anyone who could survive as a merchant adventurer here was likely to be on the ball, and her antennae were prickling anyway. “He’s sharp.”

  Isketerol smiled and inclined his head, before turning and speaking in the harsh choppy Iraiina language. Daurthunnicar seemed to sigh with relief as well.

  “He says that he’s got gifts for us too, we’re his guests- ‘guest-friends’ is the term, it’s fairly serious if it means the same thing in this dialect of Greek and if he’s translating accurately-and we’re to come to the feast, you and your warriors, and eat with him and his.”

  “Lead on,” Alston said.

  “Be careful,” his cousin said to Isketerol. “Whether or not they’re wizards, you can see these strangers aren’t as brainless as the local oafs.”

  Isketerol nodded, legs folded gracefully before him as the feast began. “That grunting boar Daurthunnicar hasn’t realized that the Nubian is a woman, did you notice? I think he knows about the one with the man who speaks a little Achaean-you can scarcely mistake those breasts-but he hasn’t spotted the leader, or the ones among her spear-bearers.”

  The trader chief’s cousin nodded. It wasn’t surprising that the Tartessians saw deeper, although stay-at-home kin in their native city might have been fooled as well. When you sailed all over the Middle Sea, though, and the shores of the River Ocean, you met innumerable different styles of dress, of custom. Your eyes saw more, after a while. Tartessians were real voyagers, not like the Achaeans, who composed an epic on their own bravery if they spent one night out of sight of land.

  “The plump woman is writing,” he said to his elder. “That looks like papyrus, don’t you think?”

  “A little, but that isn’t Egyptian script��� although women learn to read there, sometimes, noblewomen. And they had a woman as Pharaoh long ago, what was her name��� Hatshe��� I can’t remember. But they don’t have woman warriors. How does the ink get on that pen, I wonder? Or is it like a grease stick?”

  “How did they learn Achaean? You hardly ever see those reaver bastards west of Sicily-for which thanks be to Arucuttag of the Sea. Should we tell Daurthunnicar about the Nubian?”

  “Don’t be more of a fool than the Womb Goddess made you,” Isketerol said. “Of course not. It might be useful sometime. You know the saying: Give away your goods for nothing, rather than a secret.”

  His eyes glittered. “Look, they’re laying out their gifts. Have you ever seen the like?” A rhetorical question. “The king himself back home doesn’t have anything like that. The Crone take me, Ramses in Memphis doesn’t have anything like that, and they’re throwing it away on these savages as if it were a wad of grass they’d used to wipe their arse!”

  Both the Tartessians looked over at the strangers with profound respect. Wealth like that deserved it.

  “Well, that worked,” Alston said to Arnstein. “So far,” he said.

  The gifts had been received with rapture, particularly the bolts of brightly colored synthetic cloth, the glass bowls and tumblers, and most of all the leaf-spring longsword in a sheath of wood bound with brass wire and glued-on polyester; Daurthunnicar kept that by his side, stroking the hilt occasionally. Lieutenant Walker had demonstrated it by hacking through a bronze spearhead, and the warriors had roared and pounded their fists on the ground.

  Now they sat in a small circle between two fires; other circles were dotted around the open meadow. The rahax had a heavy wooden chair; it was ancient, made of blackened oak and bone, with eight-foot wooden pillars at its back in the shape of men-or perhaps of gods-with erect phalli; the carvings moved like something alive in the uncertain light of the bonfires. A smaller chair was placed across the circle from him for his guest of honor; everyone else sat or squatted on blankets or furs over straw. Women in long skirts, shawls, and what looked like primitive sweaters came through and handed everyone a horn; many of them wore copper or gold stomachers and jewelry. Arnstein sipped at his, and found it was some sort of mead, honeybeer. The savory scent of roasting meat filled the air.

  Damn, he thought. You couldn’t put a hollow cowhorn down while there was anything in it; that probably meant everyone was supposed to get thoroughly blasted.

  Isketerol sat a little forward of the throne, then leaned forward and began to speak in deliberately slow Greek:

  “You understand, now the wannax-absurd to give this tribal chief the title of the High King of Mycenae-will give you gifts in return. Tonight everything must be an exchange of gifts, for honor’s sake. Tomorrow they will dicker. Badly.”

  Arnstein heard the Tartessian through two or three times, wishing that the surviving Mycenaean texts weren’t all inventories and taxation list
s, in a script badly adapted to the sounds of Greek. With a wrenching mental effort he made himself think in Homeric Greek, and kept the Linear B word lists in the forefront of his mind. Doing that and talking at the same time made his forehead and scalp shine with sweat.

  “They’re going to give us gifts,” he said to Alston. “It’s a big symbolic thing. We’d better look pleased.”

  “That won’t be hard, I imagine,” she said.

  Isketerol spoke again: “By the way, Ianarnstein, did you want our host to know that your leader is a woman?”

  “You mean he doesn’t!” Arnstein said, his voice half a squeak.

  “By no means. He may listen well to his wives or even fear their tongues in private, but a man of the Iraiina does not sit at council or feast with a female. They make a great concession by allowing your woman to attend you.”

  Again, repetitions were needed to make meaning plain. Swallowing, Arnstein relayed the information to the commander.

  She smiled thinly. “Don’t deny it, but don’t make an issue of it, either,” she said. “I’ve run into the same thing abroad. If the people you’re visiting have got really strong and rigid dress codes for the sexes, and you don’t have the sort of figure that pushes itself on the eyes, it’s not uncommon to be mistaken for a man. They don’t see past the costume and the way you’re acting.”

  Ian nodded and spoke in turn to the Tartessian, careful to shape his handling of the language to the merchant’s.

  “Very perceptive of your captain,” the Tartessian said. “Ah, here are the gifts.”

  Weapons piled up at Alston’s feet: spears, axes, a long leaf-shaped slashing sword with a broad bronze blade inlaid with swirling patterns and a beautifully worked hilt in gold wire. Jewelry, barbarically splendid and often skillfully made. Some of it didn’t seem to be in the same sinuous, whirling style as the rest. Plunder, he thought. These people were obviously invaders here. Furs, glossy and well-tanned, wolf, otter, fox, martin, ermine, a couple of huge bearskins big enough for grizzly. A leather bag made of a whole sheepskin that Isketerol said contained wine from his homeland; Alston received another cheer when she had that opened and shared out. It was too sweet for Arnstein’s taste, halfway between Manischewitz and a coarse sherry, but an improvement over the tooth-hurting mead or the thin sour beer flavored with spruce buds that were the alternatives.

  Well, now we know why there wasn’t any Mediterranean pottery of this era for archaeologists to discover, he thought sourly. It wasn’t because there was no trade in wine and oil this early; it was just that the Iberians transferred everything to skin containers before they left home, and those rotted away untraceably. He reached into his knapsack, took out the reference book, and flipped to the illustrations, ignoring Isketerol’s fascinated glances as he held it to the firelight, comparing the images with the heap of gifts and muttering to himself:

  “Flame-shaped spearhead with short socket��� yup��� round shield��� sword with solid-cast flanged hilt��� Celt-socketed ax��� collared thin-walled pottery��� yup, Penard-group stuff-very early Urnfield. Okay, that settles the question of how the Deverel-Rimbury period ended. These guys chopped it into dogmeat. Mid and later thirteenth century B.C., spot on.” He closed the book and looked at the spine. The Age of Stonehenge, by Colin Burgess. Martha had dug it up out of a private library in a summer vacationer’s house. “God bless you, Colin Burgess, wherever you are.”

  The food came in, heaping mounds of fresh bread, cheese, onions, steamed roots, stews in clay bowls, pigeons and ducks on skewers, sausages, and endless roasts of pork, beef, mutton, and what he learned was horsemeat. The old man in the long robe stood and blessed the food with a staff topped with looped holly branches, and everyone fell to.

  It wasn’t quite the Henry VIII scene of two-fisted gorging and swilling he’d expected. The women laid slabs of tough dark bread down on the basketwork platters, then piled on the meat and other dishes, or brought clay bowls marked with waving patterns. There seemed to be an elaborate etiquette about who got what, and Daurthunnicar sent several pieces over to Captain Alston. Men cut portions with their belt knives and ate with their fingers, wiping their mouths and fingers occasionally with more pieces of bread ripped off loaves nearby; those might be eaten, or thrown to the big hairy dogs that also lay about. The serving women kept the horns refilled unless a man held his hand over the mouth-which few did. He noticed that while the chiefs and guests here had one horn or cup apiece, most farther from the throne of the rahax shared a beaker. The food was seasoned with sage, dill, sorrel, fennel, basil, and herbs he didn’t recognize. Salt went around in wooden bowls, to be sprinkled between thumb and forefinger.

  He sipped again at the heavy wine. The glaze it put over things seemed familiar, like the glassy sense of unreality that had been plaguing him and most of the others for the past few weeks. It was one thing to study history, or to imagine it. This was something else entirely.

  The Iraiina cheered again. Ian looked up as he felt Alston stiffen with rage beside him. The last gift was brought forward.

  “Captain,” he hissed in her ear, as her hand fell to the Beretta at her waist. “Not here, not now. Please!”

  “Ah, that thing at her waist is a weapon,” Isketerol said in Tartessian as the last gift was presented.

  His cousin Miskelefol nodded. “And she’s angry to be offered the slave girl,” he said. “I wonder why? Indifferent would be understandable, but why angry?”

  Isketerol ran an experienced eye over the naked woman of the Earth Folk. The bruises had faded to very faint marks, so the Iraiina weren’t offering spoiled goods; that couldn’t be it. Except that she wouldn’t be a virgin, and as the saying went you didn’t find a slave virgin or a sweet olive, and anyway the Earth Folk didn’t even have a word for virgin. A good enough figure, looking to be even better when she’d been fattened, young, very pretty. Although there was a good deal of unbroken spirit behind the downcast eyes. That was probably why her hands were bound behind her, as well as having a rawhide leash and collar around her neck. If the strange woman didn’t want her for a servant or otherwise-he knew nothing of their taboos; these folk might be as odd a tangle as the Iraiina for all he knew-she’d be a valuable item for resale.

  “I wouldn’t mind taking her off the stranger’s hands myself,” Miskelefol said, echoing his thought. “I’d pay well in bronze or wine, and make it back again twice over on Tartessos dockside, four times over if I fed her up first.”

  Daurthunnicar’s rumble interrupted them, demanding a translation.

  Isketerol sighed behind a bland exterior. Achaean wasn’t his favorite language, but it was still a pleasure to speak next to the local hog-tongue. Someday he would be rich enough to sit at home in Tartessos and send younger relatives out as his skippers on these long dangerous voyages. He would lie on a soft couch in the courtyard of his house and eat grapes and count the ingots and bales in his storehouses, the fields and workshops he owned. But for now he must work; he set himself to translate into Achaean simple enough for Ianarnstein to understand. Odd. The stranger spoke sometimes like a poet with a mouth full of ornate kennings, and then like a child who hadn’t mastered the endings of words��� but he’d improved even in the few hours they’d spoken. Where had he learned his Achaean?

  “We can always turn her loose later,” Arnstein was hissing into Alston’s ear.

  “I realize that, Professor,” she gritted out through a broad, false smile. “What’s that potbellied pervert with the beard saying?”

  “Ah��� this girl’s a��� high one? Something like that.” He paused for back-and-forth with the Tartessian. Translating through three languages, two of them not native to the interpreters, was like trying to get the last garbanzo out of a slippery salad bowl without putting it over the edge. “She’s a��� princess or something of that nature, of the Tiernan Bohulugi,’ the��� I think it means People of the Soil, Earth Folk��� the locals here
. Daurthunnicar’s men captured her and he was going to hold her for ransom, but he gives her to you as a sign of his friendship. I think that means the negotiations fell through.”

  He translated that back to Isketerol. The man from the south nodded with a cynical wink. “Knowing the Earth Folk, they were afraid she’d contracted bad luck,” he said. “They think everything in a man’s life is governed by the stars at his birth, and it’s misfortune to interfere with it.”

  Alston tugged unwillingly at the leash, and the girl crouched at her feet. “Tell our host I’m delighted.”

  Daurthunnicar grinned back and made a joke that sent the other Iraiina laughing and hooting; the girl looked down at her feet, her mane of yellow hair hiding the disturbing glint in her eyes. That prompted Arnstein to ask another question.

  “Yes,” Isketerol said. “She speaks the Iraiina tongue, or one close to it, as well as her own. Daurthunnicar’s people aren’t the first to invade the White Isle; there are other tribes kin to them living north and east of here, who’ve been settled some generations.”

  Marian Alston had always considered herself a calm woman, even phlegmatic. Inch by inch she won back to full command of herself, controlling her breathing and forcing rage-knotted muscle to relax in the manner the Way had taught her through nearly twenty years of practice. At last she could pick up another morsel of food without choking on it, even smile and nod across the firelit circle.

  I must be calm by nature after all, she thought ironically, looking at the girl crouched at her feet. I can get that angry and not kill someone. She’d come to get what she needed to help her people, and that was what she’d do.

  But I’m damned if I’ll sit here looking at those hands. The collar was four-ply twisted rawhide, it would take tools to remove, but the bonds on the girl’s wrists were simply thongs. The horn was empty; she laid it beside the wicker plate and leaned forward with her knife in hand. It was a Swiss Army model, with a built-in fork and spoon, which had aroused a good deal of attention. The girl gasped, shivered, and stiffened in well-hidden terror as hands touched her wrists. She’d been casting sidelong glances at the Eagle’s captain, which was no wonder when she’d probably never seen a non-Caucasian before.