Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  “Hold still,” Alston said. The words didn’t mean anything, but the tone did.

  She cut carefully at the tough leather; there were raw chafemarks beneath it. More hoots from the Iraiina warriors made the girl clench her teeth. Alston could hear them grind, very faintly, and smell the faint woodsmoke-and-sweat odor of the blond hair under some soapy-herbal scent. The eyes that glared across the circle were cold blue. They turned and focused on Alston with the same wariness and hate, perhaps the more so because of her strange skin and features. Then they went wide, flickering up and down the other woman’s clothes. She blinked in puzzlement, then carefully lowered her eyes again, rubbing at her wrists where the thongs had worn through the skin and left it angry.

  Well, no flies on this one, Alston thought. Evidently the��� Earth Folk could see past unfamiliar clothes. “Professor, tell her to eat, would you?”

  The cold hate in the eyes dimmed a little, down to wariness. After a moment’s hesitation she scooped food off the platter and ate with wolfish concentration. Not too well fed lately, Alston thought. The bruises told of a savage beating some time ago, and lesser ones since. She could guess the rest.

  Looks English, she thought; evidently physical types endured longer than languages or cultures. Straight-nosed oval face, bowed lips, long-limbed shape. Under the recent gauntness she looked to have been well fed most of her life, which her five-six of height bore out, and she had a dancer’s or a gymnast’s muscles. The teeth that tore at bread and meat were white and even; the notoriously bad British record with cavities and crookedness must have entered later in the island’s history, if she was at all typical.

  “And what’s her name?”

  That took some doing, until Arnstein suggested that Isketerol ask her directly.

  “Swindapa.”

  Think about this later. Perhaps they could drop the girl off with her own people��� a good deed for the day, and if she really was of an important family, an opening for trade. No way to tell if they’re any less disgusting than this bunch. Later, later, keep your wits about you, woman.

  She glanced over at where her cadets sat in a clump. They were eating heartily, smiling meaninglessly at equally uncomprehending smiles from their neighbors, and drinking very lightly, with the upperclassmen keeping a watchful eye. Good.

  One of the men near Daurthunnicar stood up; the old one with the robe and odd staff. He stretched the staff out, and near-silence fell. Then he threw back his head and began to sing, his voice occasionally cracking but still astonishingly full and sweet; a younger man beside him accompanied the song on something like a harp-not much like a harp; it was semicircular rather than triangular with the strings stretched over a parchment-covered soundbox, and the effect was closer to a guitar or mandolin. She had half expected the music to be wholly alien, but it was instead hauntingly familiar, the tone and scale easy to follow. The verses were rhythmic, not exactly rhyming���

  Arnstein leaned close to Isketerol to whisper, then back to the captain. “It’s the ancestors and deeds of our host,” he said. “Sort of like the begats in the Bible, with an occasional blood feud or war thrown in. Takes his bloodline back to their gods.”

  “Great, saga-singing biker gangs of the Bronze Age,” Alston muttered, and settled down to listen. This wouldn’t be the first long ceremony she’d sat through��� and the food was good, at least. She’d been getting damned sick of fish.

  The bosun’s pipe whistled as the captain came back up the hanging stair and over the bulwarks. “Eagle arriving!” barked the watch. Three bells rang, and another as her foot touched the deck.

  The welcome stuttered a little as he saw who was included among the party following her, but made a creditable finish.

  “Eagle aboard. Captain on deck!”

  “As you were,” she said, returning the salutes of the watch. “Ms. Rapczewicz has the deck.” Then, with the same toneless precision: “Get me a pair of bolt-cutters, and some clothes for Ms. Swindapa here. On the double.”

  They came quickly, the tool and a blue sweatsuit. Swindapa had been glancing around, her eyes enormous. She bit her lip at the sight of the long-handled cutters.

  Probably thinks it’s some instrument of torture, Alston thought grimly.

  Carefully-the collar was tight-she maneuvered the blades under the tough rawhide. The leather parted with a dull snap; Alston pulled off the broken collar with her hands and threw the pieces overside. An ungovernable impulse made her spit after them.

  “What’s that phrase for ‘You can go home’ and ‘You are free’?” Alston asked. Arnstein relayed it, and Swindapa’s eyes went very wide. Alston mimed bound wrists, and then breaking them. It took a moment more to show her how to put on the clothes, and turn her over to the surgeon’s assistant. Especially when she threw herself to her knees and clutched at Alston’s legs, weeping.

  “You’d better do the examination,” she said to the assistant, who was also a woman. “Check for infection and so forth.

  “Well, that’s done,” she said more normally to the officers. “Yes, things went fairly well. We were lucky; there are a couple of people there who speak a form of Greek that Professor Arnstein halfway understands. The natives are friendly, and we can probably do the business we came for, PDQ. Our trade goods seem to have enormous relative value here.”

  Sandy Rapczewicz rubbed her chin. “You don’t seem to like the taste of it much, skipper,” she said.

  Alston shrugged. “No, I can’t say that I do. I really don’t approve of handin’ out human beings as party favors.”

  The XO blanched. Alston went on: “But that buys no yams. It won’t be the first time I’ve done something that stuck in my craw in the line of duty.”

  Several of the others nodded; they’d been on the Haitian refugee patrol too, turning starving people back into the hellhole of junta-ruled Port-au-Prince.

  Rapczewicz shrugged. “At least it’s in a better cause than rescuing some politican’s credit with the voters,” she said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  April, Year 1 A.E.

  Someone was screaming. It was not until after she had opened her eyes that Swindapa realized it was her own voice. Her hands flailed about, until a painful knock on hard wood brought her shuddering to full consciousness. She sat bolt upright in the small soft bed, heart beating as if it were a bird trying to escape the basketwork cage of her chest. Sweat ran down her forehead, neck, flanks, turning clammy and chill. She put a hand to her neck. The collar was gone, was gone��� nothing there but the ointment the Eagle People healer had put on it and her other scrapes.

  The Burning Snake had me, she knew. The Dream Eater. It had taken her back, made her feel again the crushing weight and the tearing, splitting pain. As if she were being wedged apart like a log for planks.

  She looked around, breath slowing. It was the Red Swallowstar time, just before Moon Woman led the Sun into the sky. Light came through the round window by her side, a window covered in crystal and rimmed with metal like an amber button, but huge. The bed was soft, made with very thin cloth like a fine tunic and thick warm cloaks, but a frightening distance from the floor. Walls surrounded her, straight on two sides, sloping on the other that bore the windows. Enigmatic objects filled the little chamber about her, things whose shapes shed her eyes, making them slip aside. She could hear footsteps and voices above, and the room itself was moving. The great thing she was on was floating, then; her memory did not twist but flew on a true curve. Out the round hole she could see the shore, and the Iraiina camp. She was away from it.

  That gave her enough of herself back to swing her feet out of the bed and stand, stretching gingerly. She was thirsty, a little hungry, and had an urgent need to empty her bladder. The door swung open under her hand, after she’d fumbled with the handle for a while.

  Wait, she thought. The black chieftain had given her clothes, the same sort of clothes the Eagle ship-people wore. The chieftain who’d taken the collar from he
r neck, who’d led her back from living death to the Shining World. I had better wear them, to show that I honor her.

  The worst things in the world had happened to her, and then something from beyond the world had lifted her out of it. There must be a meaning in this, a track among the stars making a path for her feet.

  The��� head, was the word��� was just across the passage. Swindapa forced herself to walk erect and calm toward it; the narrow walls and the ceiling above her were terrifyingly like a barrow grave, the places where the Old Ones laid their dead. Inside was a mirror, something else both frightening and wonderful beyond words. In it she could see herself, really see, not just catch a blurred glimpse as in a pond or polished bronze.

  The face that looked out was strange to her. Not the face of the reckless youngster who had gone into battle to avenge her man’s ruined leg and life. Not the student who watched the stars with the Grandmothers. Not the beaten slave of the Sun People, either. Three times have I died-to-myself and been reborn. Moon Woman has drawn me through the earth and Her light has changed me like a tree.

  Whose face was it, then? She would have to learn who it was, and how to be that one.

  “Don’t offer too much,” Isketerol said.

  Alston looked over at him. Why does he give a damn if we’re overcharged? she thought.

  Daurthunnicar and some of his chiefs were standing before big wicker baskets of grain-emmer wheat, club wheat, barley, rye-and several types of beans. The representatives from the Eagle had their own samples on display, the same sort of thing they’d given as gifts the night before. The eyes of the Iraiina chieftains kept straying back to the glass tumblers, cloth, plastic, steel tools, and weapons. Some of them licked their lips as they stood leaning a hip or buttock on the hafts of their axes, using them as their remote British descendants would a shooting stick. Today they were less flamboyantly dressed, though still sporting the odd gold arm ring; the rahax had a square silver plate on his belt. He also wore his new steel long sword on a baldric over one shoulder, rarely taking his hand from its hilt.

  Arnstein spoke with the Iberian for several minutes. “He says he’s a merchant here too, and if we pay too much we’ll ruin the market,” the Californian said.

  “Ask him what he buys here,” Alston said.

  “Ah��� copper and tin in the ingot, and gold dust and nuggets, mostly. Also raw wool, honey, beeswax, flax, tallow, hides and leather, and, ah, slaves. Among other things.”

  Alston nodded coolly. In a world this thinly populated, with these crude ships, she hadn’t expected long-range trade in bulk commodities like grain to be of much importance. Isketerol had his own priorities, and keeping the price of wheat down wasn’t one of them.

  “Don’t worry, Professor. I realize we’re in another era with other mores.” Damned if I’ll put up with this sort of thing forever, she thought. But for now, no alternative. “And what does he sell?”

  “All sorts of handicrafts, fine cloth, dyes, drugs, olive oil, wine.” Another moment’s consultation. “And Isketerol says he hopes to establish friendly relations with us, if we’re coming here again. So he gives you his knowledge of local conditions as a gift of friendship. He also says that the locals-the word he uses probably means something like ‘savages’ or ‘natives’-don’t have much conception of bargaining. To them, this is sort of an exchange of gifts, and the rahax gets status by giving as well as getting. Our goods are very high-status. Daurthunnicar maintains his position partly by what he can give away. If he takes your gifts and doesn’t gift you lavishly in return, he’ll lose face.”

  “Does that sound plausible, Professor?”

  “Very. In pre-urban economies with no money, gift exchange is nearly as efficient a way to conceptualize handing stuff around as trade. Wealth is a means to power through prestige, face. Warlike tribal cultures like the Iraiina often think that way.”

  “And I suspect that losing face among this bunch has very unpleasant consequences. That’s probably a hint from Isketerol, by the way, as well. Assure him he’ll get his share, tactfully. Now, those baskets seem to hold about a couple of bushels each. Let him know that we need���”

  The slow, cumbersome business of dickering through two sets of interpreters went on. After a while Iraiina women brought stools for the leaders to sit on, and the tribal idea of breakfast: more of the coarse bread and cheese, leftover meat, and clay pots of the thin, flat sour beer. At least it’s weak, too, praise the Lord. A possum couldn’t get high on this stuff. Alston noticed one younger subchief staring at her, more and more intently. A baffled look grew on his face; after a half hour he leaned over and tried to speak quietly in his lord’s ear. Daurthunnicar brushed him aside with one thick arm, then barked him into silence.

  “Past noon,” Alston said at last. “Tactfully suggest that we break for lunch.”

  Daurthunnicar rumbled agreement; there was more mutual confusion, as three different ideas of reckoning time met and clashed. At last they settled on what Arnstein thought was probably two in the afternoon.

  Alston turned. There was a sound of scuffling behind her, footfalls, a quick warning shout of Captain—

  A hand fell on her shoulder; she could feel the strength of the grip even through the cloth of her uniform jacket. Daurthunnicar bellowed in anger in the background, but there was no time for talk. She let herself fall backward in the direction of the pull that would otherwise have spun her around, swaying her hips aside and snapping the hammer end of her clenched fist back and down.

  There was a choked-off screech of pain as she turned, a quick pivot in place. The young subchief was bending over convulsively, hands cupping his groin in uncontrollable reflex. Her own left hand flashed up to meet his descending and unguarded throat; the Iraiina warrior had neck muscles like braided iron cable, but that didn’t matter a damn if you sank your thumb and fingers in precisely��� so. There wasn’t any muscle protecting the trachea or carotids, no matter how strong you were. The Iraiina choked again, this time as his windpipe closed and blood stopped flowing to his brain. Her right hand had gone into her pocket and closed on a short lead bar; she pulled that out, poised the fist, and struck with a snapping twist to the side of the head as she released his throat. The Iraiina dropped bonelessly to the ground, breathing with a rasping whistle. She restrained the automatic follow-through which would have brought her heel stamp-kicking down on the back of his neck.

  Captain Alston looked up, meeting Daurthunnicar’s eyes. “Ask him if this is the way his people treat guests,” she said.

  A bristle of leveled spears surrounded her as the cadets closed up. In back, a few more were unobtrusively bringing their shotguns and rifles around. Most of the Iraiina seemed shocked, bewildered; she saw naked horror on some of their faces. Daurthunnicar looked nearly as purple as his subchief had when her chokehold clamped on his throat. He drew his own dagger and brought it up to his face. Slowly, deliberately, he cut two lines there-shallow, but enough to bring a trickle of blood. Then he stepped forward, sheathed the dagger, and kicked the fallen form of his subordinate hard enough to do far more damage than she’d inflicted.

  “Daurthunnicar, rahax, begs forgiveness for this shame,” he rumbled; or at least that was how Isketerol relayed it through Arnstein. The rahax kicked the fallen warrior again. “How may he wipe out this shame, this attack on a guest, to avert the anger of his gods?”

  Alston looked down at the figure of the Iraiina, recovering just enough to writhe. She remembered the screams that had echoed through her ship that morning, and what the ship’s doctor had told her.

  “Tell him that his oath is between him and his gods,” she said curtly, making a chopping gesture. “Then tell him to treat this one as his people deal with oathbreakers.”

  Daurthunnicar grunted as if he’d been belly-punched; she turned and strode away, her people falling into position around her, back to the waiting longboat with none of the locals but the Iberian trader with them.

&n
bsp; The chief’s voice rose in bellowing protest behind her as the tribesfolk milled and shouted into each other’s faces, waving their arms. A few women started to keen. The rahax stopped shouting and began to groan and sob; from the thudding sounds he was literally beating his breast as well.

  “I didn’t realize that the Coast Guard taught that sort of unarmed combat,” Arnstein said, wiping his forehead.

  “They don’t,” Alston said bleakly. “Only a little of the basics. The Way is a hobby of mine.”

  Isketerol spoke: “A very shrewd move, honored captain,” he said. “That fool saw that you were a woman. Now none will dare think so-even if they suspect, they will keep silence. To admit that a woman beat one of their own hand to hand would be unbearable shame, so they cannot admit it even to themselves. Also Daurthunnicar will have to give you a better bargain, for his honor’s sake.”

  “Tell Mr. Isketerol,” Alston said, without looking around, “that I thank him for his assistance. Also that I have nothing to hide.”

  “Damn,” Cofflin said softly, with a touch of awe. “I just don’t by God believe it.”

  He looked out over Sesachacha Pond and suppressed an impulse to take off his cap as if he were in church, instead of out in the country at the eastern end of the island. His mind groped for a description of what he was seeing. “Flock of birds” was completely inadequate, the way “large building” would be for the World Trade Center. He was looking north to Quidnet across the ash-black remains of the arrowroot and scrub oak thickets Angelica Brand’s people had cleared, over the water to the low barrier beach that separated the pond from the ocean. And I can’t see a damned thing but birds. Birds so thick ashore that the ground moved with them, like a rippling carpet of feathers and beaks. Their sound was a gobbling, honking thunder, a continuous rustling background loud enough to make speech difficult at less than a shout. The explosions of wings were louder still.