Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  A pause, and the old woman spoke very softly. “soSHo’t’euho’nis kwas dazya’ll-”

  “And since then, the Grandmothers have looked into the future and seen only a darkness without stars before the feet of the Earth Folk.”

  A slight shocked murmur went through the crowd. The old woman sighed, and went on. Swindapa’s voice translated:

  “Every turning, the Moon Woman grows old and comes again. So too for all things. Our moon is past full, we wane, perhaps these strangers bring a new one.”

  Swindapa’s face lit as she spoke, a grin breaking through her solemnity. “These Eagle People also study the stars, although not in our way. Already they have shown us things of great worth-the three rules that govern the movement of the planets, and the law of squares of distances that explains them.”

  Ian squeezed Doreen’s hand. She’d thrown the cat among the pigeons well and truly, with that dose of Keppler, seasoned with a smidgin of Newton and soupcon of Laplace. For a while they’d been afraid the Grandmothers would start tearing out clumps of each other’s hair over the implications.

  “ShahShar’it yewehkey’a-”

  “They are the only strangers who tread that path, and they have dealt well with us. The Grandmothers will tell the Council of the Sacred Truce to listen to their words, and follow them if they find them good.”

  Captain Alston bowed where she sat. Ian felt Doreen jab an elbow in his ribs. They looked at each other in the nickering firelight; she was grinning like a cat. Solemnly, they shook hands.

  Commander Sandy Rapczewicz smiled as she slipped down the night-sight goggles. Wouldn’t the skipper be livid that she wasn’t here, although she’d anticipated this might happen. It was the logical move, after all, and Walker had a high opinion of logic. I hope you’re out there tonight, you son of a bitch, she thought vindictively. Break my jaw, will you? It still ached in cold wet weather. Hell of a thing for a sailor.

  “Ready,” she said aloud, and into the microphone.

  “Ready,” the earphones answered back.

  The goggles turned everything greenish and flat. She could see an occasional whitecap out on the water, and the giant rowboats heading for the Nantucket flotilla, with the canoes following. More than enough to shatter the hulls and swarm over the Nantucketers left behind when the main expeditionary force moved inland, as the enemy’s scouts had surely reported to Walker.

  “Only we weren’t idle over the winter either, Will-me-lad,” she muttered. Louder: “Fire!”

  The fruits of the ROATS program stood along the rail. Crews made their final adjustments, turning aiming screws. Then the master gunner stepped back from each and jerked the lanyard.

  TUNNNGG. They were compact little engines, the throwing arms powered by a mass of coil springs from heavy trucks caught on the island by the Event. They were also more accurate than any counterweight system like a trebuchet, or catapults powered by twisted sinew. Four balls of fire soared out through the night from the Eagle , two from each of the schooners. Where they struck they splashed on the water, burning with a hot red ferocity. Searchlights stabbed out, actinic blue-white through the cloud-dark night.

  “Fire at will!” Rapczewicz shouted.

  “Reach Out and Touch Someone-fire!” a crew chief shouted.

  Hands pumped at levers. Back on shore, within the earth walls of the Nantucketer fort, came a heavy chuff��� chuff��� sound. It built to a faster chufchufchufchuf and then into a racketing snarl.

  “Demons!” Miskelefol screamed.

  “Shut up!” Isketerol shouted, clouting him savagely across the side of his helmeted head.

  More of the fireballs arched across the night. The whale oil burning on the surface of the water gave a ghastly semblance of daylight. One of them splashed onto the galley next to his. It was close enough to hear the glass shatter and the men scream as oil splashed them. Seconds later it caught with a whump, a sound somehow soft and large at the same time, like a giant catching his breath. Or a dragon. Men screamed again, louder, as flame ran down the length of the boat. They cast themselves overboard, diving if they could. Others thrashed in mindless agony, and the oars drooped limp into the water. After an instant, the Tartessian realized what was going to happen when the flames reached the barrel at the prow of the little galley.

  “Right!” he screamed to the man at the tiller. “Hard right, Arucuttag eat you, quickly!”

  The oars kept moving. Isketerol crouched down behind the scant shelter of the tiller and helmsman, counting the seconds and trying to control the pounding of his heart.

  “Four��� five���”

  CRACK. A hot breath passed over his back, and the helmsman cried out. Isketerol grabbed the helm as the man collapsed, pawing at a wound in his neck. He braced his feet and clamped the timber between arm and ribs, struggling to keep the galley on course as a wave lifted its hull. Bits of burning timber scattered across the waters; a quick glance rearward showed nothing left of the stricken galley but fragments, and another sinking beyond it.

  “Over to the canoes,” he said, and called to his signaler. “Sound retreat and rally to me,” he barked.

  The man began swinging his lanterns; the signals had been Will’s. The tribesmen in the canoes were sitting motionless, staring open-mouthed.

  “Cowards!” Isketerol called through a speaking trumpet.

  “You flee, southron!” one of them cried in response.

  They looked over their shoulders, fearfully conscious of the fact that nothing waited out there but the River Ocean and ships under the Tartessian’s command-unlikely to help them home if they defied him. If they beached their canoes away from the Eagle People fort, they’d still be in the middle of enemy country, and hunted like hares as they tried to run east to their homes.

  “These rowing boats are too big-the Eagle People can pick them out.” Isketerol said. “Your canoes and hide boats are small and many. Paddle in quickly, and most of you will get through-you can swarm over them, while we follow close behind. Are you warriors, or little girls who weep with fear?”

  A few canoes broke away from the pack and headed for the land that bulked dark to the south. The rest stayed, as the men shouted among themselves. Then they fanned out, heading for the firelit shapes of the Eagle People ships.

  His own remaining craft gathered around them. “Hang back,” he said to them in his own tongue. “Let the savages clear the path for us. If they can put those catapults out of action or occupy their crews, we can attack behind them.”

  One of the boat captains looked puzzled. “But most of the tribesmen will die, if we attack with our torpedoes”- the word was English-“while they are trying to board.”

  “So?” Isketerol grinned. “Should I weep for them? Are they kindred, townsmen of ours?”

  “It’ll be dangerous,” the man warned.

  “A man lives as long as he lives, and not a day more,” Isketerol said-a saying Will had told him, and a good one. “If I’d known you were a woman, Dekendol, we could have gotten more use out of you this last winter.”

  The crews laughed at that; it was a little ragged, but he judged their spirit was still unbroken. “Spread out again,” he said. “Lie on your oars just outside of catapult range”- the farthest those balls of fire had gone was about a quarter mile-“and then dash in if the barbarians make headway.”

  They turned, their formation opening like a fan, and stroked carefully to the edge of safety. “Wait for it!” he called. “Wait, and then put out all your strength!”

  “On the word of command,” Sandy Rapczewicz said. Fuck it. Someone got clever out there.

  There were dozens of the canoes, scores of them. Impossible to hit that many, and they were nimble enough to dodge most of the fireballs. Here and there one was struck, but even then the others could dart in and rescue most of their crews from the water. The others came steadily on to a wild pounding chant of voices.

  “Here’s where we could use a couple of cannon,
loaded with grapeshot,” she muttered to herself.

  That wouldn’t be possible for another year or so. Evidently Walker had found the raw materials for gunpowder in greater abundance; those spar-torpedo boats waiting off at the edge of sight showed how he’d used the sulfur and saltpeter and charcoal. They were silent, in contrast to the barbarian warriors in the canoes. Closer, closer���

  “Now!” she shouted.

  A crewman at the rail swung a long thin barrel, crouching behind it with hands on the grips. Behind him two more pumped frantically, a dark glistening stream arching out from it. Another stretched out a burning wad of rags on the end of a long pole, and the stream of whale oil caught. Whooosh-WHUMP, and it was a long arch of dripping flame, scything back and forth through the night. Men screamed as they turned to blazing torches and threw themselves into water that had turned to a lake of flame. The edges of it lapped up against Eagle’s steel hull, and the canoes that had approached her were billows in the fiery sea. The air filled with the heavy nutty scent of burning whale oil, and the stink of burned flesh as well.

  Rapczewicz whipped her head back and forth. The two wooden schooners couldn’t use such a weapon, not without destroying themselves; they’d anchored well away, too. They did each have hundreds of Fiernan Spear Chosen packed below their decks. As the Sun People warriors scrambled up the sides, the Earth Folk fighters came screaming up the companionways. They boiled to the sides, stabbing with spears, slamming clubs down on Sun People heads and arms and fingers.

  A cry behind her. “Boarders!”

  Some of the canoes had circled around and were approaching from the landward side. The Eagle’s skeleton crew dashed to meet them, drawing weapons or snatching javelins from racks along the rail. Wrought-iron grapnels came upward at the ends of knotted ropes, and the warriors behind them. Armored Americans stabbed and shoved and tried to cut the grapnels free, but the ropes were wound with metal wire for several feet down from the loops that held them to the iron hooks.

  Rapczewicz drew the radio with her left hand. “Rapczewicz to Pentagon Base,” she said. “Report status.”

  “Base One here. Status is go, ma’am.”

  “Do it. Rapczewicz out.”

  Her right hand drew the Colt and thumbed back the hammer. A bearded warrior in a kilt tried to force his way through a gap. She fired at two yards’ distance, and a round blue hole appeared in the man’s forehead. The back of his head blew away, and he toppled backward to land on a canoe and overturn it. She blinked to let the muzzle flash that strobed across her vision die away, then aimed at another point-blank target.

  Isketerol of Tartessos flung up a hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the flame, keeping his other braced against the gunwale. The raw wood was rough and splintery under his palm, reminding him unpleasantly of how fast it could burn.

  “Dragon’s breath!” his cousin said, his voice trembling.

  “Dragon’s shit,” Isketerol said, and spat over the side. “Remember the pump?”

  Miskelefol turned to him, his eyes wide and tinted red by the light. “The pump!” he said incredulously.

  Walker had rigged up a piston-style pump for the Tartessian encampment, sucking through a cast-iron pipe from a deep well.

  “Well, think, cousin. That’s a pump there, only it’s spurting out oil-fish oil, whale oil. Then they set it alight.”

  The terror of the supernatural faded out of the other Tartessian’s eyes. “That’s clever,” he said. “But using it on a ship-”

  “On a ship of steel,” Isketerol said, peering through his binoculars. “Wait��� the savages are heading around to the other side of Eagle. And they’re closing in on the schooners, by the Crone. More balls than sense.”

  Miskelefol tensed. “If they can carry them-”

  “No.” Isketerol spat again, peering through the dark. “Too many fighters-more on board than I thought they could have, hidden belowdecks. May the Crone’s knife cut the fatherless sheep-sucking bitch, she’s clever.”

  As clever as you? Isketerol thought uneasily. As clever as Will?

  “Still, they’re heavily engaged. We may be able to run-”

  He was about to raise his voice in a shouted order to close in when the chuffchuffchuff sound from the Amurrukan camp rose in pitch and speed. A high shrill whistle clove the air; he recognized it, a steam whistle from one of the hot-water-engines the Amurrukan used on Nantucket. Then it changed to a hard quick rapping sound, as of a stick dragged quickly down a set of iron rods.

  The air whistled, a different note. One of the rowers pitched sideways, threshing. Isketerol could see the fletching on the short heavy dart that stood three-quarters buried in the man’s temple. Another two quivered in the timbers of the galley, sunk almost as deep. The water whickered to his right as a spray of the same missiles hit it. The full force had struck the galley to his left, and half the rowers were down. His eyes widened. That’s over two thousand paces away! his mind protested. Then it leaped quickly, to the big spinning wheels the steam engines had��� flywheels, that was the word. If you could somehow make a flywheel grab and throw arrows-

  “Back to the ships! Retreat! Retreat!” he bellowed through the megaphone.

  The galley leaped in the water as it turned. Isketerol forced himself not to crouch or cringe. “What next!” he screamed, shaking his fist backward at the taunting reach of Eagle’s masts. It wasn’t fair. “You’ll pay for this!”

  The buzzing noise overhead was back, and louder.

  The radio beeped. Swindapa murmured in her sleep and then stirred, waked from her doze as much by her companion slipping out from under the blankets as by the noise. Low words followed, lost before she was fully conscious of them.

  Marian was smiling as she came back toward the bed; Swindapa could feel it, if not see it, but the smile was not, a happy one. Reeds crackled and rustled under her feet, but she was invisible with only the faint reddish ghost-glow reflected from the beams and thatch above.

  “What happened?” Swindapa asked drowsily.

  The wicker partitions gave them privacy from sight, but none from sound. It wasn’t very noisy; a dog stirring now and then, a baby crying, a couple making love, the low crackle of the central hearth. Swindapa found the noises broke her rest more than she’d expected. That’s strange. This is home. How can it be hard to sleep, when I slept here all my life? Without the woven walls, either-those were for elders. She was glad of the flea powder Marian had sprinkled on their bedding, too. I’ve become fussy. Her relatives had stared as she ate with a fork and wiped her lips with a cloth.

  “What happened?” Marian repeated. Her voice had a growling undertone. “The ships back at Pentagon Base were attacked-the Tartessians, we think, with local allies.”

  Swindapa stiffened and gripped her as she slid beneath the blankets. “What happened!”

  Marian gave a whispering wolf-chuckle. “Let’s put it this way-the flamethrowers worked.”

  “Oh.” A bad death, she thought. On the shadow side, they deserved it. If they want to live long, let them stay at home. “Good.”

  The black woman sighed after a moment. “I was worried,” she admitted, her voice soft against Swindapa’s shoulder. “Damn worried. Complex plan. Too many things that could have gone wrong. And I couldn’t be there.”

  The Fiernan smiled in the darkness, holding her close and stroking her back, feeling the tension in the muscles. So many worries, she thought. Only me to hear them. Marian bore a weight heavier than the Grandmother of Grandmothers knew. For everyone else she must always be strong.

  “It did work,” the Fiernan said. Lips met in darkness. “Now forget that, and pay attention to me. And this.”

  “Sugar, I’m a little tired-mmmm!”

  “You’re not tired, you’re tense. And you’re pretty��� so pretty.”

  Some time later Marian was quivering again. “If you only knew how fine that feels,” she sighed.

  “I know exactly how it feels
,” Swindapa purred. “But maybe this will feel even better.”

  Marian made a choked sound, turned her head aside and bit into the coarse wool of the blanket, then relaxed with a long sigh.

  “You’re not tense anymore,” Swindapa chuckled, raising herself on her elbows and peering up toward the other’s face.

  A hand ran fingers through her hair. “Any less tense and I may just flow away like watah. Why don’t you move up here a little?”

  Later a cry mounted up from belly to throat, escaping like the swans that bore souls to the moon.

  Afterward, a fierce whisper in her ear with unwilling laughter underneath it. “Did you have to yell like that, ‘dapa?”

  Swindapa stretched, blinking and wiggling her toes in pure contentment. “Of course I did, my love,” she said. “I had to think of your��� your reputation, you’d say.” She turned and snuggled closer. “Now everyone will think I’m selfish, but they’ll know you aren’t.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  July ��� August, Year 2 A.E.

  Seahaven Engineering had a sales shop attached to it these days. It was a long wooden structure reaching out from one side near what had been the front entrance, covering a stretch of redundant parking lot. Most of the shop sold metalware to islanders, everything from hardware to eggbeaters, sausage grinders to sheet-steel stoves, but one corner was devoted to the mainland trade. As he came through the door Jared Cofflin suppressed an impulse to hold his breath at the sight of the four Indians there; there was just nothing they could do about diseases, except take a few precautions and otherwise let them run their course. Unless they cut the mainland off completely, and that just wasn’t practical.

  One of the Indians was a man, hook-nosed in a narrow high-cheeked impassive face, looking weathered and ageless and probably in his thirties; his hair was shaved to a strip down the center of his head and a pigtail behind, the bare scalp on either side painted vermilion in a fashion that seemed common to all the New England tribes in this era-at least, they hadn’t met any that didn’t do it that way, just as the women all wore theirs in braids. His body was naked except for a hide breechclout and an islander blanket over one shoulder; he had a steel-bladed knife on one hip, and a long-hafted island-made trade hatchet thrust through the back of his belt. The women wore a longer wraparound of soft-tanned deerskin like a short skirt, with ornaments of shell beads and bones around their necks and porcupine-quill work on their clothes. One of them was in her twenties, with a bundle-wrapped baby on her hip, the others in their early teens; they all carried heavy basketwork containers on their backs. Cofflin could smell them, a sort of hard summery odor combined with leather and the oil on their hair.