Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  “You promised us victory!” a chief shouted, the necklace of wolf teeth and gold bouncing on his barrel chest as he waved his fists in the air. “Instead the fighting men of a whole tribe are dead, and enemies raid our steadings!”

  “I promised you victory if you followed my redes,” he said coldly. “The Zarthani chose to flout them, going off on their own to raid without my-without our High Rahax’s word.”

  Daurthunnicar stirred slightly; Walker cursed the stumble. His father-in-law was no fool; pig-ignorant and superstitious as a horse, but no fool.

  “The Zarthani fell on their own deeds. If in battle one of your warriors turned from the fight to lie with a woman or drive off a cow without your let, while the arrows still flew and axes beat on shields, how would you do with him?”

  He could feel the anger checked, coiled back. Bearded faces nodded. They’d hang such a man up by the ankle in a sacred grove and run a spear through him, and their whole tribes would cheer.

  “And then the Zarthani had no better sense than to charge at the first foe they met, like a bull at a gate-none of you would have been so foolish, I’m sure.” I’m sure most of you would have done exactly the same thing, he went on silently, watching their solemn nods. “So they let themselves be beaten by women,” he concluded.

  More nods. Daurthunnicar had been magnificently angry when he was finally convinced that Alston was a woman, and the other chiefs were horror-struck at the thought of the shame they’d bear if they were thrashed by one.

  “I came here because you of Sky Father’s tribes live as men should,” he went on. They’ll believe that. Vanity springs eternal. “But that doesn’t mean that the Eagle People don’t have strong knowledge of war. You’re wearing it right now.”

  All the chiefs had mail hauberks and swords turned out in Walkerburg or brought as part of the Fare’s cargo. Hands tightened on those swords as he spoke.

  “And they have strong magic-thunder-death. I have the knowledge and the magic, together with the battle-luck of my rahax, to throw these woman-ruled foreigners back into the sea, dead. But you must move in better order, and obedient to the High Rahax’s will, if we are to conquer now. As my handfast men threw back the Kayaltwar who raided us while our war host was away, so we will crush the Earth Folk and their allies-if you obey.”

  “And if we don’t?” one chief said truculently, leaning forward. The firelight caught the ruddy bronze of the rings that held his braided hair and a black beard twisted into another braid that fell down his chest.

  “Then the Iraiina will leave you to them,” Walker said.

  Daurthunnicar’s hands clenched on the carved oak of his chair. It had taken a long day of argument, wheedling, and blunt threats of desertion to get him to go along with that.

  “We came to the White Isle only last year,” Walker went on, stretching the “we.”

  “With the weapons and arts we have now, we can push back the Keruthinii on the mainland. Anywhere away from the ocean, the Eagle People can’t touch us.” And I hope it doesn’t occur to you that they could intercept us crossing the Channel, so my threat is empty. Aloud, he went on:

  “But they can stamp you flat. You’ll, be beaten by women, ruled by them��� and you’ll lose your lands and cattle and homes.”

  More uproar, gradually dying down. “You can beat these Eagle People?” one said at last.

  “I believe we can-with Sky Father’s help, and by striking hard and fast and skillfully, before they have a chance to teach the Earth Folk how to fight. It isn’t courage the Earth Folk men lack; you know that.” A few unwilling nods. “It’s skill and leadership they want for. With it, and with their numbers���”

  The tribal chiefs weren’t very foresighted men. By the standards of the twentieth, they were insanely impulsive. They were perfectly capable of grasping a fact thrust under their noses, though; many of them looked as if he’d not only thrust a horse turd of fact under their noses but down their throats.

  “The Zarthani threw away our chance for a quick victory. We’ll have to keep some men here, skirmishing and raiding, until the harvest. Then we’ll muster the full levy again. Yes, it’s a delay, but that gives us a chance to���”

  When the talking was finished, Daurthunnicar rose from his high seat beneath the stars. “Now we will make the Great Sacrifice,” he said. Horse, hound, and man, offered in the grove. “Tomorrow you will hearten the warriors. And we shall conquer.”

  “Jesus,” someone said softly.

  Doreen Arnstein whistled softly herself. A small part of her mind was glad to be able to do that, to do anything, without the top of her head feeling as if it were about to pop off. Getting whacked hard enough to knock you out meant headaches, blurred vision, nausea, dizziness, all serious business and lasting for days.

  What she saw ahead of her was serious too. She’d seen pictures of Stonehenge, of course. Those sunken, shattered, diminished remnants had nothing to do with the Great Wisdom, whole and living in the bright spring sunshine. The circle of more than twoscore standing stones loomed complete, each fifty tons in weight and topped by their rectangular lintels, making a perfect unbroken circle. Within stood the taller horseshoe shape, five great double uprights with capstones, and the scores of smaller bluestones. Without were concentric rings of earthwork, ditch and bank, and three circles of tall wooden posts wrapped in cords like maypoles.

  Not maypoles, she thought. Although children were dancing around several, weaving in and out and chanting in high sweet voices-almost all of them girls. They were observation poles. They varied in height, from twelve feet to thirty; each one would mark the prime position of a star at a given time-or rather, dozens of stars, for each cord could be used at a different angle to give a tangent to���

  “My God,” she murmured. “Keeping all that straight.” She felt an unfamiliar pain in her chest. So much knowledge, so many centuries. The Great Wisdom itself was eight hundred years old, in roughly its present form; as old as the Gothic cathedrals had been to her. More impressive still was the huge structure of knowledge, myth, song, ritual that surrounded it, a feat of memory and persistence almost beyond belief. She lost herself in it, forgetting the movement of the saddle between her thighs, the crowd around her, her very self. She’d been an astronomer-in-training all her adult life, and the passion that had raised these stones was close kin to hers.

  “So Thorn and Hawkins were right after all,” Ian murmured beside her, jarring. “And I always thought they were cranks.”

  “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” Doreen said, equally quiet. “I did too, but they didn’t get the half of it. Swindapa’s mother, Dhinwarn, what really won her over was that list of lunar eclipses I ran off the computer back on the island. You know, they have a complete series for more than a thousand years back? And predictions for several centuries-that’s one thing they use that ring of fifty-six holes for, besides those sighting posts.”

  Ian grinned. “Remember when you said how useless an astronomer in the Bronze Age was? You’re our damned passport to these people!”

  “Let’s hope I’m as persuasive to all the Grandmothers as I was to Dhinwarn. She had a personal reason to like us. I get the impression that a lot of the others are pretty xenophobic.”

  The horses turned away from the monument itself, toward one of the big half-timbered roundhouses. Another chorus of girls sang and danced an intricate measure around them. Waiting to meet them were a clump of older women, wrapped in cloaks and silent dignity.

  “End-of-semester exams,” Doreen muttered, feeling her stomach clench.

  “What’s that sound?” Miskelefol said, craning his neck.

  There was a full moon tonight, but it was hidden by high scudding cloud. Nothing showed on the water, only an occasional gleam of white as an oar stroked the calm surface of the bay. They dared not show lights, and only the loom of the land to his right kept them from being completely lost, that and the instincts of a life spent at sea.
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  Isketerol cocked his head to one side, lifting the helmet. “Sort of a buzzing sound, isn’t it?” he said. “I don’t know, some sort of insect?” The life here was still fairly strange to him. “At least it isn’t raining much.”

  “Hurrah, the first time in months,” Miskelefol said dolorously.

  They snared a quiet chuckle, and then their craft swung apart. There were five of them in all, long low things like miniature galleys, each with ten oars to a side. The Yare and Sea Wolf had towed them here, but stayed well off to sea now. The night breeze was directly out of the west, and it would pin any ship at anchor into its port. Even with the Yare’s ability to beat to windward he wouldn’t like to have to claw off this coast right now, particularly with the shallow water and shifting sandbars common through here. He risked a brief flash of lamplight to check the compass strapped to his left wrist. Marvelous things, he thought again.

  “Take a turn around the canoes,” he whispered to the helmsman.

  The seaman leaned against the tiller. Rudders were wonderful too, so fast. The crew bent to the oars with only a whisper of noise, sculling in perfect unison. Isketerol gripped the lead stay that kept the pole in the bows upright. Not to hold sails; it was topped by a barrel, and a long cord ran back along the pole. Loose here, and the pole would fall until the barrel submerged twenty feet ahead of the bows. Pull on this cord, and a flint-and-steel inside the barrel would spark��� and the load of gunpowder would ignite. They’d tested it against rafts; the results were spectacular enough to make hardened sailors soil their loincloths. The effect on a ship’s hull, underwater��� The Tartessian smiled and licked his lips.

  He frowned as they approached the canoes and coracles. The Sun tribes weren’t seamen at the best of times, and in the dark they blundered in continuous near-panic, just as they had ever since they climbed down the sides of the ships and into these smaller craft. He hissed warnings and threats and shaming insults across the water as his larger boat coasted by, bringing a little more quiet. I wish they weren’t along at all. They might be useful to ram victory home, but they endangered it beforehand.

  “This heading,” he said quietly to the man at the tiller. “Slow, all, now.”

  Around a headland and there was the target, backlit by the fires ashore. Tall masts raking for the sky, the Eagle. On either side of it were the smaller shapes of the Tubman and Douglass, all three ships anchored at stern and bow with about a hundred yards in between. Pinned down and helpless, he thought. Arucuttag of the Sea had delivered them into his hands, and in the silence of his head he promised the Hungry One good feeding. There were fires and lanterns in the fortified camp a few hundred yards farther upstream, but they could do nothing. Will reported that better than three hundred of the Amurrukan were marching inland, far from their base. That left only a score or so per ship, and as many in the fort ashore.

  The five boats with the spar torpedoes swung into line, quick flashes of shuttered lanterns guiding them as they’d practiced. The men at the tiller were all well trained, and they’d worked out a simple code to direct them to their targets.

  “Forward!” he shouted.

  The oarsmen bent to their work, the ashwood shafts flexing in their hands.

  “Take your eyes off the Swedish Bikini Team, will you?” Doreen said. “This is serious.”

  With something of an effort, Ian Arnstein obeyed. The two girls who’d been washing his feet were both about Swindapa’s age and looked a good deal like her. They were also wearing nothing but their string skirts, and he thought he understood the glances and smiles. Unfortunately, so did his wife.

  He sighed, belched slightly from an excellent if unfamiliar meal, and put his mind back to business.

  These Fiernan houses seemed to be much of a muchness, varying only in style and size. This one was huge, and circular like all the bigger ones. The walls were a framework of oak timbers carefully mortised and pegged together; the intervals were filled with rammed clay, chalk, and flints, covered thickly with lime plaster. Carved pillars made of whole tree trunks stood in three rings inside, and two huge freestanding gateposts like Abstract Expressionist totem poles marked the southeastern door. There were doors at the four quarters of the building, man-tall and made of pegged oak boards, but they were merely fitted into slots, not hung from hinges. When they were opened, as now, the dwellers simply lifted them out and leaned them against the wall. That let in some light, and more of the fresh spring air, along with a little of the fresh British spring drizzle. More of that came down the big central smokehole at the top of the roof, but not too much-there was a little conical cap over it, leaving a rim all around for smoke to escape through. The fire there flickered in a stone-lined depression in the earth that caught the heat and radiated it back out. Such of the smoke as evaded the hole in the roof drifted blue among the rafters and pillars above, joining that from ordinary family hearths spaced around the big building and gradually filtering out through the thatch.

  “Not as squalid as I’d have expected,” Ian said to his wife.

  She nodded. The interior of the greathouse was cut up by partitions of wicker and split plank, marking out the notional space of family groups smaller than the great interrelated cousinage that shared this dwelling, each with its own fire. The Fiernans didn’t suffer from shyness; they stared, chattered, pointed, asked question after question, held children up at the back of the crowd to get a look. They also pressed things on the visitors, bits of honeycomb, cups of mead flavored with flowers and herbs, pieces of dried fruit.

  “And there’s the Archaeologist’s Nightmare,” he said, nodding to a pillar.

  Doreen raised a brow, and he went on: “See how the post’s resting on a stone block?”

  “That’s bad for archaeology?”

  “Very. I asked, and these people used to set their posts right into the ground for big buildings like this. Post holes like that leave traces-you can dig them up thousands of years later, if the conditions are right. Then they switched over to resting the uprights on stone blocks so they wouldn’t rot��� and that doesn’t leave any trace, if someone takes the block away later. The stones-and-bones crowd were as puzzled as hell, wondering why the locals suddenly stopped building big round houses��� Oh-oh, look out.”

  Silence spread out through the folk like a ripple through water. Like a wave they sank down on their haunches, leaving a path clear. More of the Grandmothers came to sit by the edge of the fire. Two more walked on either side of a still older woman; the helpers were in their sixties, unambiguously old, white-haired and wrinkled, but hale. If you ran the gauntlet of childhood diseases and made it to adulthood, you had some hope of seeing the Biblical threescore and ten here, about one chance in five. The Kurlelo were what passed for an upper class among the Earth Folk, too, partly supported by the gifts of the pious, and so not quite as likely to be prematurely aged by a Bronze Age peasant’s endless toil.

  The woman the junior Grandmothers were helping along was far older than threescore and ten; older than God, from her looks. Thin white hair bound by a headband carrying a silver moon; sunken cheeks, lips fallen in over a mouth where most teeth were gone; back bent forever. The attendants fussed around her as she sank painfully onto cushions and a wicker backrest, tucking her star-embroidered blue cloak around her and putting a closed clay dish full of embers beneath her feet for warmth. She shooed them aside impatiently and leaned forward a little, long gnarled spotted hands leaning on a stick whose end was carved into a bird’s head-an owl, here as in later ages the symbol of the moon.

  Her pouched and faded eyes traveled across the assembly. Ian Arnstein felt a distinct slight chill as they met his. The mind that rested behind them was not in the least enfeebled. This was the one who’d received the reports of the Grandmothers who interviewed the Americans, day after day.

  “Swin��� dapa,” the old woman said, her voice hoarse but feather-soft. It carried clearly; there were no other sounds in the greathouse, s
ave for the crackling of fires and a quickly hushed baby, and the breathing of sixscore.

  The young Fiernan came forward and crouched at the ancient woman’s feet. Great-grandmother? Ian wondered. Great-great?

  The knotted fingers raised Swindapa’s face, and the ancient leaned forward to kiss her on the brow. They exchanged murmurs, too quiet to carry, and Swindapa turned and sat cross-legged at her feet.

  “I will give you the Grandmother’s words,” she said.

  The old woman paused for a long moment, lips moving slightly, hands gripped on the owl-headed staff.

  “Uhot’na,” she said at last. “InHOja, inyete, abal’na.”

  Her hand shaped the air as she spoke; after a moment her age-cracked voice merged with Swindapa’s clear soprano, and Ian forgot he was listening to a translation.

  “A good star shine on this meeting. Moon Woman gather it to her breast. Long ago-” Swindapa hesitated, translating from her people’s lunar calendar. “Thousands of years ago, the Grandmothers of the Grandmothers came here to the White Isle. They came bearing gifts; the gift of planting and sowing, of weaving and the making of pots, the herding of cattle and sheep, many good things. The Old Ones, the hunters, came and learned these things, and their lives became better, and they became us, and we became them.”

  The old woman’s hand rose skyward. “awHUMna inye-tewan dama’uhot’nawakwa-”

  “Best of all, they brought knowledge of Moon Woman and Her children the stars, Her sisters of the woods and earth-knowledge of foretelling and understanding. In those days Her messengers traveled from the Hot Lands to the Ice-and-Fog Place, and everywhere they brought Her wisdom, and the knowledge of the building of the Wisdoms and the studying of the stars.”

  Another long pause; her eyelids drifted downward, covering the faded brilliance for a while. Is she asleep? Ian wondered. Then they flickered open:

  “atTOwak em’dayaus’arsi immlHEyet-”

  “Then the Sun People came from the eastlands where the morning is born, fierce and greedy like little boys grown tall without learning a man’s manners, and the great-” Swindapa paused, obviously hunting for a word. “-great harmony-in-changing-time-again-and-again was��� made to not turn as it should, and as we had thought it would through all the changings of the world.”