Amazing how well they adapt to the fighting, too.
That was extremely different from things up in the twentieth. Here you got close enough to look into your opponent’s eyes, close enough to smell him. Close enough to watch the expression as edged metal slammed home. Of course, it also had the advantage of being close enough to see what they intended for you.
The crowd of Fiernans outside the camp was larger, watching silently as the Americans formed up. Some of their Spear Chosen were turning thoughtfully, looking at the ordered ranks before them and then at the clots of followers squatting or sitting or leaning on their spears behind them. They don’t know what we’ve got, but they want it, she thought.
The scouts were already fanning out ahead. Alston took her horse’s reins, put her foot in the stirrup, and swung into the saddle with a slight grunt; the armor rattled, and she could swear she heard a slight ooof from the horse as well. It was a pony, really, barely thirteen hands high, but a sturdy, stocky little beast.
“Forward��� march.”
The officers relayed it. Drums beat and the lead company swung off by the left, spears bobbing in unison. More blocks of troops, then wagons-including the well-sprung ones with the wounded. Alston clucked to her horse and trotted down the line to the front, flags rippling and snapping behind her, and fell into position at the head of the line. The track wound off into the downs; not far from the camp it passed six graves on a hillside with a good view of the battlefield, with stout oak crosses marking them until they had time to do proper stone markers. Alston’s right hand came up to the brim of her helmet with a tick. Behind her orders snapped:
“Eyes��� right!”
The flags dipped, and the formations honored their dead. Even the Fiernans behind made gestures of respect, although they’d suffered far more cruelly than the armored Americans in the brief deadly fight.
“Soon,” Swindapa said as they went through the shallow stream and back up onto the downlands. The burned village was already being rebuilt; the Sun People hadn’t had enough time to completely wreck it. “A few miles to the southeast, and they’ll send someone to meet us. News will have spread everywhere, to the Great Wisdom and as far north as the Goldstone Hills.” Or the Cotswolds, to use a terminology three millennia out of phase.
She sounded eager, but not nervous anymore. Alston looked over at her; the Fiernan was riding with her helmet off and held before her on the saddlebow, looking in her armor like the cover of an adventure novel. The fight last week had changed something. For the better, as far as she could tell.
The landscape became flatter, the fields more open, larger, with more cattle and sheep and less cultivation as they rose. Long earthwork banks ran across it-field markers or symbols or something completely strange. Mounds rose above it, turf-green, sometimes with enigmatic shapes drawn across them in chalk. The crowds along the rutted trackway grew denser as the hours passed.
“Graves,” Swindapa said, pointing to the mounds. “For great folk.”
A scout came back up the trackway at a canter and saluted. “Party approaching on foot,” she said.
Alston returned the gesture. “Carry on.”
Swindapa fell silent, went pale, bit her lip, and blinked hard again and again. A party was approaching down the rutted, trampled dirt road. They wore woven straw cloaks against the rain, and broad hats. Two women with walking staffs, an older and a younger, and a couple of men with spears and bows. Alston threw her hand up, and the trumpet sounded halt and then stand easy. The Fiernans ahead flinched a little at the crashing unison as a hundred and fifty feet pounded to a stop, then came on again. Their eyes went wide again in astonishment as Alston removed her helmet and let them see her skin and features. The middle-aged Fiernan woman moistened her lips and began to speak:
“The Grandmothers of the Great Wisdom have sent me,” she said slowly and ceremoniously. Alston found she could follow it, more or less. “To tell you that no strangers in arms may approach the holy place. Stop here, then, or we will call the Sacred Truce against you.”
“Mother!” Swindapa squeaked, in her own language, throwing herself off the horse.
The woman’s eyes went wide, really looking at the yellow-haired rider for the first time. “Swindapa!” she cried, spreading her arms.
The older woman was in her forties and looked a decade or so older, rangy and blond; the family resemblance was obvious. She wore a longer version of the string skirt that seemed to be standard women’s dress here, made of interwoven strips of soft wool, each a subtly different color. Her belt had a gold buckle; the shirt above it was the natural gray of the fleece. Gold bands studded with amber were pushed up her bare arms, and the hands below were worn and capable-looking. Her eyes were the same deep blue as her daughter’s; they kept going back to the young woman at Alston’s side.
“Swindapa?” her mother asked. “I heard��� I didn’t believe���” Tears trickled down her cheeks.
Swindapa hugged the two women again and again, then the men. “Marian, my mother-Dhinwarn of the line of Kurlelo-my sister, Telartano, my uncles Grohuxj and Adaanfa.”
Fiernan purled and bubbled between them, too swiftly for Alston to follow. The camp was going up faster than usual, with the early start and the troops fresh from a short march. Dhinwarn blinked a little at it, and more at the folding canvas chairs that appeared outside the commander’s tent. She sat in one gingerly, as if expecting it to collapse under her. A bundle on the younger woman’s back began to cry; she shifted it forward under her rain cloak, revealed a swaddled infant, and began to nurse it. At points in Swindapa’s tale her mother and sister wept again, quite openly; the uncles growled curses as well as shedding tears. Later they glanced back and forth between Alston and their kinswoman with awe and wonder. At last the torrent of speech slowed down so that the American could follow some of it, or her ear grew accustomed to the machine-gun rapidity. It was her turn to blink.
She can’t be saying what I think she’s saying, can she?
“Ah��� ‘dapa, what are you telling them now, exactly?”
A brilliant, proud smile: “I’m telling them what a wonderful lover you are!”
I thought so, Alston thought with a slight wince. Telling them in extensive detail, from the sound of it; she’d learned Pieman anatomical vocabulary quite thoroughly. Talk about your culture clashes. ” ‘Dapa, no need for blow-by-blow, okay?”
She leaned back, resting her elbows on the arms of the chair and steepling her fingers, marshaling her scanty command of this language. Silence fell, and Swindapa’s mother took up her carved staff.
“We come��� friends,” Alston said at last.
The Fiernans rose, came forward, and placed their hands on Alston’s shoulder for a moment. “Thank you,” Dhinwarn said solemnly. “You have returned my daughter to life.” The others repeated it. “My sister.”
“My sister’s daughter who I put on my knee.”
Alston cleared her throat, touched; like the Navajo, the Earth Folk spoke thanks only for the very greatest of gifts, taking everyday things for granted.
“Swindapa, speak for me,” she said, when they were back in their chairs. “Tell them we’d like-I would, and a few others of us-would like to travel to the Great Wisdom and talk to the Grandmothers.”
Dhinwara frowned, unhappy. “Why would you want to do that?” she said. “You are��� Spear Chosen of the Eagle People.”
Swindapa stopped translating for a moment and began to explain, or tried to. Dhinwarn smiled and shook her head.
“Swindapa says you are much more than that,” she went on. “But a young woman in love often thinks more with her warm heart than her star-cool mind.”
The Fiernan metaphor came through accurately enough, but from what she grasped of the original the phrasing was much more��� earthy. Alston suppressed a giggle.
“We also have knowledge of the moon and stars,” she said, and glanced up. The sky was clearing and sun
set was only an hour off. “If the clouds allow, we’ll show you.” The Arnsteins and the telescope would, rather. “Also some other things you’d find useful. For instance, you memorize all the knowledge you keep, don’t you?”
Swindapa’s mother frowned in puzzlement. “Of course we remember it.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. You use��� things, your circles of standing stones, knotted cords, tally sticks, songs, to help you remember something, don’t you?”
A method with severe limitations. From what Swindapa had told her and what Martha and the Arnsteins had figured out, the Fiernan Bohulugi savants had run into a dead end some time ago. There was only so much information you could store orally; eventually it took so much time that new generations couldn’t add any more without dropping something. Swindapa had mentioned how fewer and fewer of the younger generations were willing to go through the arduous apprenticeship, particularly with the Sun People pressing on them. This Bronze Age world looked static and unchanging to eyes brought up in the twentieth, but it was a time of upheaval by local standards. The faith of Moon Woman couldn’t adapt fast enough; it was rooted in the Neolithic.
Dhinwarn nodded. “We have a way,” Alston said, “of��� marking down in symbols��� both words and numbers, exactly, so that those who know it may take the record even generations later and understand it, as if the first person were speaking in their ear.”
The older woman leaned forward, keenly interested. “How can this be?” she said. “A tally, you can’t tell what it’s numbers of, unless someone remembers what the notches are for. And the relations between numbers, the Wisdom of their ordering, how can this be put in concrete things? Even the Great Wisdom-” they all made a sign with their hands, like drawing a set of geometric shapes-“has meaning only to those brought up to it, learning the Songs.”
Alston sighed and settled down to explaining. The sun faded and a trooper hung a lamp from the tentpole. Dhinwarn took longer than Swindapa had to understand what she was driving at, but her eyes lit like blowtorches when she did. Her voice trembled:
“My daughter��� she says that among your people, there are great Wisdoms where these books are kept, and that any who learn the art may journey among the words of the Grandmothers-before?”
“Yes,” Alston said, impressed at how rapidly she’d grasped the concept. “We call them libraries. And the skill of reading the words is not hard to learn. Swindapa mastered it very quickly. So we can store knowledge like, ah, like grain in a big jar, and draw it out when we need it. Of course, you need to know enough to know what questions to ask.”
The others began volleying questions as well; once when Swindapa mentioned that she had seen constellations farther south unknown here her mother and sister rose and did a slow, stately dance around the fire, singing a minor-key chant. Their astronomy had long predicted it, and exact knowledge of stellar movements was the central element of their religion-it was how you read the intentions of Moon Woman. Alston spread a star map of the southern hemisphere and began explaining. Troopers brought their plates of beans and pork and bread; the Fiernans ate with their eyes glued to the paper.
At last Alston sat back, exhausted. “But I’m not what we’d call an expert,” she said. “I sail ships and I fight, when I have to. Here’s a learned person-Doreen, bring that telescope out-and she can tell you more.”
Damned oddest way to negotiate a military alliance I’ve ever heard of, she thought, watching the astronomer and listening to Dhinwarn’s trilling cry of joy when she realized what the telescope could do. Still, it could be worse.
If it had been the Middle Ages, they might have been burned as heretics-or found the locals dead-set on enlisting their help in liberating the Holy Sepulcher from the Saracens. In her opinion, defending Stonehenge from a bunch of blond Apaches was very much to be preferred.
I wonder how things are going back on the island? And how exactly am I going to explain about Walker?
CHAPTER TWENTY
June ��� July, Year 2 A.E.
“Here’s the title deed,” Cofflin said, “Place is yours.”
“Thanks, Chief,” the Kayles said.
The crowd cheered. Sixty-four acres of sand and scrub, Cofflin thought. The young couple looked eager enough, though; and if you were going to do farming work anyway, you might as well do it on your own property. There would be loans from the Town to pay off, of course. The plank-and-beam barn that stood not far from the house had been financed by the vote of the Meeting, along with the pigs and poultry and miniature herd of three yearling calves brought back by the Eagle.
There was a patter of applause as he handed over the title deeds, and now he had to make a goddam speech. About land titles and banking, of all goddam things.
The mild spring air cuffed at his hair; Martha put a hand up to her broad hat, the baby neatly balanced in the crook of her other arm. Jared Cofflin looked out over the grainfield, still spotted with an occasional haggled brush stump. That might make it awkward for the reapers, come harvest. So much to do��� and so few sets of hands to do it. Harder than ever with so many strong young backs over in Britain. God damn Walker to hell. The air smelled intensely fresh, with a tinge of salt and a hint of cooking from the open-pit barbecue that was getting lunch ready.
Martha turned and smiled at him, a wry quirk of the corner of her mouth, and he felt a decision jell in his mind. “All right, people. I was supposed to sit up here and bray some stuff about the state of our economy, forsooth.” A rippling laugh went across the people sitting in folding chairs. Joseph Starbuck winced. “And these poor folks would have had to stand and listen while their party was on hold.”
The Kayles and their friends clapped enthusiastically. Cofflin went on: “I’ll sort of condense it. We’re going to be handing out more of these farms, a hundred and twenty or so. No room for more; it isn’t a big island, and we can’t take too much of the ground cover off or we’ll have all sorts of problems with erosion and so on. Angelica tells me we can build up the soil fertility and we’ll have more livestock soon. You all know we’ll have another four big schooners by the end of summer, and some more tugs. There’s more. Tom Ervine has his paper mill working-” another patter of applause; paper was so damned useful-“and the First Pacific Bank is reopening.”
Boos and hisses at that. “I know, I know. But it’s sure convenient to have money again, isn’t it?” He put a hand into his pants pocket and held up a crisp ten-dollar note, the island’s new issue. “Believe me, it’s a big load off my shoulders. It’s a lot easier to tell someone to go buy their own goddam dinner instead of figuring out rations!”
He threw his jacket across the chair behind him. Nobody, thank God, was wearing a necktie anymore, except a few fossils like Starbuck. “And I could go on and on. Ayup. What it amounts to is we’re getting on our feet again, pretty well-better than any of us expected. So I’ll move on to what we’re all anxious about, how things are going over in England.”
A stir and rustle of interest. “News just came through. That piece of���” Martha tugged at his leg. “��� scum Walker has been making himself a kingdom over there. He’s already got an army and he’s making them iron weapons, and raiding and killing and taking slaves.” A growl of anger rose from before him. “What’s more, he and his Tartessian friend have built a ship, at least one, that Captain Alston says could easily carry a hundred men to Nantucket. There’s some evidence he’s made gunpowder; we’ve just now gotten our first small load of sulfur from the Caribbean, but there are sources in Britain, so he’s ahead of us there.”
Complete silence now, intent and focused. “If we’d left him another year, he’d have had cannon and a dozen ships ready to attack us. Captain Alston and the expeditionary force have already fought a battle with the savages he’s got working for him.” He paused, feeling the tension beating on him like heat. “The captain reports that the savages were completely defeated, with over a hundred dead, many more wou
nded, and the rest fleeing for their lives.”
The crowd rose, cheering madly; men thumped each other on the back, women hugged. Cofflin raised a hand. “It wasn’t cost-free. Six of our people were killed.” The families had received first notification, of course, but otherwise he was ahead of the rumors.
Silence again, broken by a low murmur. Cofflin nodded. “This is serious business. I think we should have a moment of silence.”
They waited with bowed heads. “And,” he went on when it was over, “Captain Alston asks that we all remember them in our prayers.”
Walker looked around the little natural amphitheater with disgust. It was dark now; attendants had lit torches on poles all around, and they still weren’t an inch closer to deciding what to do. The ten chiefs and their principal retainers were making enough noise for a Red Sox game all by themselves. The sound died down a little as he stood and stepped forward to stand beside Daurthunnicar’s chair-the others were on stools, to mark the Iraiina chief’s status as High Rahax. Noise sank further when he slammed the iron butt cap of his spear against a rock; the steel sparked on the flint-rich lump of hardened chalk. When he had full silence, he leaned on the spear and spoke:
“Are you chieftains?” he asked rhetorically. “Are you even warriors of Sky Father’s people?”
That brought their anger around on him. Good enough, he thought, meeting the glares. Most of these men had enough experience to control their tempers at least a little. If he could get them acting together, he could probably turn things around. Not if they went on quarreling with one another, though. Those hatreds were too old and well set.
Island in the Sea of Time Page 58
