Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  Another village was passing by on the north bank, much like all the others-including the crowd of armed Indians waiting at the landing. The chanting and war dances were pretty standard too. She did a quick calculation, counting huts and heads, focusing her binoculars to count the relative proportions of commoners and brightly bedecked men with elaborate weapons; also the number of adult males, women, children.

  “Either I’m grossly overestimatin’ the number of people per hut, or a lot of their menfolk are beating our time upriver,” she said.

  Toffler’s ultralight came slanting in from the northwest, sun bright on the colorful striped fabric of its wings. The radio reports were brief and sketchy, just confirmation that Martha Cofflin and Lisketter were alive and captive. Now she could debrief him and get the videotapes; they might not have enough electricity for washing machines, but there was ample to charge a few batteries, thank God.

  The ultralight sheened across the sky; it was as if suddenly reality had broken through the veil of myth. Men bore Martha toward a city where they worshiped a jaguar become human; but a man she knew flew overhead. She stood and waved, saw the wings waggle again in acknowledgment.

  The chattering throng on the dirt roadway scattered like drops of mercury on dry ice. Porters threw away their burdens, men their spears, their screams shrill and loud enough to drown the buzzing little engine. Only a few of the caparisoned warriors followed them. Most grouped tightly around their leader’s litter. Both halted to his command, and the heavy figure stepped forth, down a living staircase of bearers. He stood, arms akimbo, looking upward at the thing that flew five hundred feet above them.

  Doesn’t know what it is, of course, Martha thought. Aloud, in a murmur: “He can’t really see it yet. Too alien. No scale, probably doesn’t realize what size it is, maybe doesn’t see that it’s artificial, and yes, these priest-kings probably do hallucinogens of some sort. He’s used to visions.”

  Toffler circled lower. He steered with one hand; the other held a video camera. Lower still, and suddenly the Olmec warriors realized-not what the flying thing was, but that a man was within it, and steering it. A few more of them fled, but their comrades brought those down with flung darts. The others raised a bristle of points around their lord. Lower still, and a rain of darts sprang up from their atlatls. Even with the spear-throwers they arched well below the aircraft, which circled away and banked. This time it came barely above the reach of the flung spears, straight down the roadway from the plateau citadel. The commander of the guards, a man with a jade plug in his lower lip and a headdress even more fantastically feathered than the rest, snapped an order. Bellowing surprise, the fat priest-king was bowled back into the covered litter. Half a dozen of the warriors threw themselves across him to put their bodies between him and harm. The rest crowded around the litter and its burden, casting darts, waving their rakes and spears and clubs, screaming defiance. Toffler soared above them, then brought the ultralight’s nose up in a sharp climb. He circled once more, waggled his wings again, and circled higher.

  The priest-king surged out of the litter, scattering the men who’d protected him with a shield of flesh. He roared something and slammed a fist into the face of the commander of his guards. The man reeled backward, fell, rose with his face a mask of blood. His overlord struck him again; the commander stood passively under the blows until the other man halted, panting. Then he went down on all fours and prostrated himself. So did the others; the big man kicked a few of them, then climbed back into his litter. The bearers heaved it upright, Martha’s along with it, and trotted forward.

  She watched the ultralight bank away to the southeast. “They’re not far behind,” she said quietly.

  But what can they do?

  “Run that by me again,” Ian Arnstein said sharply.

  The cassette whirred into reverse. The display unit was small, compact enough to be carried along in the boat. That rocked as several officers jostled slightly to see.

  “Freeze that,” he said. A book lay beside him; he picked it up and skimmed rapidly through the pages, each a little limp with the humidity. “Look.”

  He pointed; the picture was of one of the monumental Olmec stone heads. He brought it close to the flickering screen. “Pretty close resemblance, isn’t it?”

  Alston sighed and shook her head. “Well, there goes another theory.” He looked a question at her. “There was speculation that those heads were signs of early contacts with the Old World-West Africa, specifically.”

  He looked at the picture. The features did look a little negroid, if you assumed that the depiction was realistic. But even so, the likeness to the heavy-featured man in the litter was unmistakable.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “The archaeologists thought these heads were portrait-statues of Olmec rulers,” Ian said. “From the looks of it, they were right for once. And now look at this.”

  He hit the fast-forward button, to the minute where the guards threw themselves over their ruler. “Does this suggest something?” he said.

  “The Secret Service do the same with the president, up in the twentieth,” an officer objected.

  “Yes, but he doesn’t beat them up afterward,” Ian pointed out. “I think that’s a significant datum.”

  “Proving that pudgy-face here is a son of a bitch?” Hendriksson asked.

  “Proving he’s an absolute ruler. I’d guess he was a god-king; it was a common pattern later in these Mesoamerican cultures. Common in a lot of very early civilizations, for that matter. Old Kingdom Egypt, or the Shang. We know they practice human sacrifice, too. So it’s probably very tightly centralized��� one royal or divine family that marries within its own boundaries, or maybe with the other Olmec principalities, if there are more than one. That would account for the unusual appearance, too.”

  “It’s a thought,” Alston said meditatively. “Possibly irrelevant even if accurate, but it is a thought.” A slender black arm moved past him to touch the controls. “Let’s take a look at the layout of that city.”

  Martha blinked as they came up the slope and over the crest. The single-minded determination that had leveled this plateau and covered it with the structures she saw was impressive. They climbed up a spur on the southern side, debouching onto a broad ceremonial avenue that stretched thousands of yards ahead. The surface was made of hard-pounded clay stained different colors, reds and greens and oranges, making patterns she could only guess at as they went by. Two of the giant stone heads like those she’d seen in museums flanked the entrance, twelve feet high and hulking in their brutal menace, but they were not the monochrome remnants of her day. Here they were painted: yellow spotted with brown for the faces, brilliant yellow-green for the eyes, crimson for the tight-fitting helmets. On either side of the avenue were rows of hexagonal basalt pillars on timber bases; beyond them stretched rectangular pools joined by covered stone drains; more drains led to fountains done in wood and clay.

  Around the pools were statues by the score, each in its cleared space; the brooding thick-lipped heads, birds of prey, jaguars and men in every possible degree of merging.

  Nor was that the only type of merging depicted: one huge statue showed a gigantic jaguar copulating with a supine human female. The same theme was repeated over and over again on the vividly painted carved stelae of flat stone and stucco that covered the sides of the low earth mounds marking the axis of the avenue and its side streets. The woman gave birth, and the race of jaguar-faced infants was swept up by men in elaborate headdresses like those of the warriors around her.

  She thought of the labor needed to haul stone hundreds of miles through these swampy alluvial lowlands, to carve it into these intricate shapes with nothing better than rock and wood for tools, to heap up these thousands of tons of earth, to gnaw hard tropical woods into shape���

  Atop the mounds were buildings, their exteriors lavish with colored stucco and carving. In the doorways and open sides stood more people, including women of th
e same flat-featured massiveness as the priest-king. Banners of colored cloth and woven feathers streamed from the buildings; the women were bright with jewelry of colored stone and cloth. The smell was surprisingly clean for a preindustrial city, none of the sewer reek she’d experienced traveling in some Third World areas��� but then, they have those drains.

  The knowledge wasn’t particularly comforting. The Romans had had excellent sewers as well, and look at their taste in entertainment.

  “Well, here’s the sticking point,” Hendriksson said.

  Alston nodded, looking ahead. A line of canoes stood from bank to bank of the river; beyond them, faint in the hazy distance, she could see the flat outline of the plateau where the Olmec city stood. She estimated their crews at six to seven hundred men, mostly naked brown peasants with spears and clubs; some two hundred of the feather-clad warriors she’d decided to call jaguar knights made up the center of the array. Most of those were on the two big catamarans that made up the center of the opposing host. Their chanting and the boom of their drums was loud in her ears, louder somehow than the droning putter of engines. Light glittered off the glass and painted wood of their weapons, a different sight from the metallic gleam from the American forces.

  Silence fell, save for the jungle noises. Sweat trickled down out of the foam-rubber padding of her helmet, stinging in her eyes; she licked it off her lips. The inflated fabric of the boat dimpled under her hand. Well, I certainly can’t fight a naval engagement. The inflatable boats were simply too vulnerable and the odds too steep. The problem with technological surprise is that it’s only a surprise once. After that, a determined opponent could usually figure out some countertactic. On the other hand, we need to survive the next couple of hours. Drums beat louder, and the native canoes began to surge forward. There was a time when you had to expend an asset.

  “Mr. Toffler,” she said into the microphone. “Now, if you please. The two big craft.”

  The ultralight skimmed over their heads, rising beyond to just above spear range. Black pins arched into the air as the Olmecs tried to bring him down; they’d lost a good deal of their initial awe of the aircraft-inevitable, if it was to stay over their heads and report back.

  A dot arched down from the rod-and-fabric aircraft, trailing smoke. It landed on the river before the lead catamaran and burst into a puddle of flame several feet across. The Olmecs hardly noticed. Closer, only a few hundred yards now. Toffler came around again, recklessly low. Another dot. This one crashed into the foredeck near the drummer.

  “What are those?” Doreen asked.

  “Gasoline, benzene, detergent flakes, in three-gallon glass jars with a burnin’ cloth fuse,” Alston said without looking around. “Poor man’s napalm.”

  She trained her binoculars. The Olmecs weren’t ignoring this. The flame had spattered wide, soaking into the reed matting that covered the catamaran’s deck, into the dry wood beneath. Gobbets spattered warriors and rowers; they leaped into the river, howling. The elaborate panoplies of the warriors burned like tinder, tall plumes of flame replacing the feathers of their headdresses. The advance of the canoe fleet suddenly turned ragged. Smoke and yellow-white fire billowed up from the catamaran, and the frantic water splashed by the crew did little good.

  A few seconds later the warriors abandoned the drifting, helpless hulk and let it ride down on the current toward the Americans. Toffler banked and dove toward the second; it turned and drove back the way it had come, angling for the docks nearer the city. The ultralight pursued. Another bomb missed; a third hit, and by the time the frantic paddles drove the catamaran onto the riverbank mud, half of it was burning. The smaller canoes fled also, some in the wake of the bigger vessel, some upstream with no apparent intention of stopping, and some to the far shore, where the crews took to their heels.

  “Molotov cocktails, by God!” Ian whooped. Cheers spread across the little riverboat fleet.

  “Just so, Professor,” Alston said grimly. “Next time they’ll realize that those things can’t hit small moving targets. If the other canoes had pressed in, we’d have been in trouble.”

  She raised the microphone. “All boats, to the shore.”

  They turned, bows lifting as the engines revved. The buzzing of the ultralight faded as it chivvied the fleeing canoes toward the city; the Olmecs were thoroughly panicked for now, and unlikely to make a stand. The motor launches and inflatables grounded where the natural levee of the riverbank was comparatively low, covered in cornfield and laced with footpaths.

  Marian Alston stepped off the side and quickly forward, out of the zone where her boots were driven deep into the mud. More armored figures dashed by on either side of her. Other hands were deflating the lifeboats, heaping up the flattened shapes and pulling a tarpaulin over them. She wet a finger and held it up. Despite the clouds westward, the wind was from the sea-southeast, blowing from here toward the hilltop citadel.

  “Get it started,” she said.

  Islanders kindled torches and spread out. Even in this damp climate the cornstalks were fairly dry by this season. Soon a wall of fire and black smoke was walking westward, faster than a man could. The smell was heavy and rank; behind it the fire left embers, black glowing stalks toppling into ash, a foot-catching chaos of half-burned vines bearing squash and beans. They tramped through it, to the highest point of the levee’s ridge. To their right stretched more fields, and patches of undrained marsh. Behind Alston the standard-bearers raised their poles. One streamed with the Stars and Stripes, the other with the Coast Guard flag. Both bore gilded eagles above, and each standard-bearer was flanked by six guards with short swords and big oval shields. The expeditionary force fanned out to either side, a broad shallow V facing toward what would have been San Lorenzo. Crates went forward; working parties donned heavy gloves and began scattering their contents.

  Swindapa spoke softly: “I hate this,” she said. “The children haven’t harmed anyone, and they will go hungry.”

  Alston nodded. “Can’t be helped, ‘dapa. Lieutenant Ortiz! Get that line set up!”

  The radio beeped at her waist. She brought it up in one gauntleted hand.

  “They’re coming, Captain,” Toffler’s voice said. ” ‘bout a thousand of them, or a little more. I dropped a Molotov, but they just opened out around the spot and kept right on.”

  “About as I expected. Keep me posted and watch for any activity on the river.” She went on to the officers: “Aggressive to a fault. Let’s make some use of that.”

  Behind her the corpsmen were setting up an aid station for casualties. The Arnsteins were nearby; a clear path led from there to the bank, not that many could retreat if things went wrong.

  Ian Arnstein nodded; he was a little pale, but otherwise taking it well. “We’ve probably stepped into a myth,” he said. “They’re reacting to what they think we are.”

  “Haven’t even tried to parley,” she agreed. And they’d thrown things at every boat she’d sent forward to try and talk. “I’ve got to keep them off-balance, keep hitting them.”

  “What do you plan on doing?” Ian asked.

  “Giving them a good thrashin’,” she replied. “Then maybe they’ll listen to reason.”

  Swindapa shivered a little as she watched the Eagle People spread out in response to the captain’s orders. It was a strange and terrible thing, this discipline. There was none of the shouting and shoving and milling about you’d expect with a big crowd of people, or even the arguing at a Town Meeting on the island. Just quiet directions, and hundreds moved as if they were the fingers of a single hand. Even stranger and more terrible on land than on the great ship. The captain’s face was closed and shuttered, gone away from her while she made this Working, as if a different Power were there behind the dark eyes. Still, they would fight side by side.

  She kept her left hand on the hilt of her sword and raised a shading hand to her brow, looking westward. Nothing to be seen there but smoke. Her braided hair was hot on her head; the hel
met would give some shade, but also more heat. Never had she been so hot, the weight of the armor and padding squeezing at her ribs. Her heart thudded; the last fight she’d been in had not gone well. I am with the Eagle People now, she told herself. And the captain. The evil luck had been taken away when Moon Woman bore her beyond the circles of the world.

  The islander force was spread out on either side, seventy-five armed with crossbows on each wing, standing in two ranks. In the center were a block of spear-bearers with oval shields, three deep. Green-enameled steel armor gleamed and clanked as they settled themselves; the round shields slung over the crossbowmen’s backs clattered. The captain walked through the ranks, up and down once in front of them, speaking a word here and there. Then she returned, at the same steady, even pace.

  “They should be-right, there they are,” she said softly, looking west. “Wish I had more of a reserve��� For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.”

  The enemy host were coming out of the smoke, trotting along, a great humming wailing chant preceding them. Their spearpoints bobbed and rippled as they came, a huge clot nearly a thousand strong. Some limped or hobbled, from feet seared as they walked through the embers. Others leaped or stamped, jerking in circles, dancing their way to the ground of war. Hands hammered on drums, mouths blew shell trumpets, bullroarers whirled. The feather banners were eye-hurtingly bright and beautiful.

  “Not in any order,” the captain murmured beside her, raising the binoculars. “But those are their shock troops in the center, the ones in the fancy clothes. The others are farmers. How far would you say, ‘dapa?”

  “Seven hundred yards?” she estimated.

  It was called the Socratic Method, after a great teacher of ancient times, teaching with questions. There was a trick to judging distances; look at the men and see whether you could tell the movements of their legs, their arms, the shape of their weapons. Each gave you a measuring point to judge the distance. It was as cunning as a Star Working, in its way��� but more practical.