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Island in the Sea of
Time by SM Stirling
         ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    Many thanks to the people of Nantucket, and none of the
characters in this book are intended to represent any individuals
living or dead! Thanks also to the United States Coast Guard,
which responded nobly to the ignorant inquisitiveness of the
author. All errors, mistakes, lapses of taste, and infelicities of
expression are purely mine. Admiration and thanks also to the
archaeologists and historians who piece together the past of our
species from shards and the equivalent of landfill.

   Particular thanks on-island to Tracy and Swede Plaut; to
Randy Lee of Windshadow Engineering; to Wendy and Randy
Hudson of Cisco Brewers (who make a great pale ale); to Harvey
Young, the friendly (common) native Nantucketer (less common)
at Young's Bicycles; to the Bartletts of Ocean View Farm; to
Mimi Beman of Mitchell's Book Corner; and to many, many
others.

  Thanks also to Chief Petty Officer James for the tour and
answering an afternoon of questions on his lovely ship!

   And to John Barnes for dialectical (in both senses of the word)
help; to Poul Anderson for catching a couple of embarrassing
errors; to Heather Alexander for the use of her beautiful Harvest
Season; to Laura Anne Oilman, for really editing; and to Walter
John Williams for the manuals.

                 CHAPTER ONE
  March, 1998 A.D.

    Ian Arnstein stepped off the ferry gangway and hefted his
bags. Nantucket on a foggy March evening was chilly enough to
make him thankful he'd worn the heavier overcoat; Southern
Californian habits could betray you, here on the coast of New
England. Thirty-odd miles off the coast. The summer houses
built out over the water were still shuttered, and most of the
shops were closed—tourist season wouldn't really start until
Daffodil Weekend in late April, when the population began to
climb from seven thousand to sixty. He was a tourist of sorts
himself, even though he came here regularly; to the locals he was
still a "coof," of course, or "from away," to use a less
old-fashioned term. Everybody whose ancestors hadn't arrived
in the seventeenth century was a coof, to the core of old-time
inhabitants, a "wash-ashore" even if he'd lived here for years.
This was the sort of place where they talked about "going to
America" when they took the ferry to the mainland.

   He trudged past Easy Street, which wasn't, and turned onto
Broad, which wasn't either, up to the whaling magnate's
mansion that he stayed in every year. It had been converted to an
inn back in the 1850s, when the magnate's wife insisted on
moving to Boston for the social life. Few buildings downtown
were much more recent than that. The collapse of the whaling
industry during the Civil War era had frozen Nantucket in time,
down to the huge American elms along Main Street and the
cobblestone alleys. The British travel writer Jan Morris had
called it the most beautiful small town in the world, mellow brick
and shingle in Federal or neoclassical style. A ferociously
restrictive building code kept it that way, a place where
Longfellow and Whittier would have felt at home and Melville
would have taken a few minutes to notice the differences.

   Mind you, it probably smells a lot better these days. Must
have reeked something fierce when the harborfront was lined
with whale-oil renderies. It had its own memories for him, now.
Still painful, but life was like that. People died, marriages too,
and you went on.

  He hurried up Broad Street and hefted his bags up the brick
stairs to the white neoclassical doors with their overhead
fanlights flanked by white wooden pillars. The desk was just
within, but the tantalizing smells came from downstairs. The
whalers were long gone, but they still served a mean seafood
dinner in the basement restaurant at the John Cofflin House.

   Doreen Rosenthal pecked at her computer and sneezed; there
was a dry tickle in her throat she was dolorously certain was
another spring cold. Behind her the motors whined, turning the
telescope toward the sky. It wasn't a very big reflector, just above
the amateur level, but it was an instrument of sorts, and you
could massage information out of the results. Sort of like 0.01
percent of Mount Palo-mar. Astronomy posts weren't that easy
to find for student interns, and the Margaret Milson Association
had given her this one. It meant living on Nantucket, but that
wasn't so bad; she was the quiet sort even at U. Mass. She'd
finally managed to lose some weight, having nothing better to do
with her spare time than exercise. Well, a little weight, and it's
going to be more. Even in winter, the island was a good place to
bike, or you could find somewhere private to do kata. When it
wasn't storming, of course; and there was a wild excitement to
that, when the waves came crashing into the docks, spray flying
higher than the roofs of the houses.

   And always, there were the stars. The rooms below the
observatory held decades of observation, all stored in digital
form now. Endless fascination.

   She took a bite out of a shrimp salad sandwich and frowned
as the computer screen flickered. Not another glitch! She leaned
forward, fingers unconsciously twisting a lock of her long black
hair. No, the digital CCD camera was running continuous
exposures…

   Stargazers didn't actually look at the stars through an
eyepiece anymore. It was ten minutes before she realized what
was happening in the sky.

   Jared Cofflin sighed and leaned back in his office chair. There
really wasn't much for a police chief to do on Nantucket in the
winter. An occasional drunk-and-disorderly, maybe some kids
going on a joyride, now and then a domestic dispute; they'd gone
seven straight years without a homicide. But April came 'round
again, and pretty soon the summer people would be flooding in.
Summer was busy. Coofs were a rowdy lot. Not that the island
could do without them, although sometimes he very much
wished it could. Once it had been Nantucketers who traveled,
from Greenland to Tahiti.

   With a wry grin, he thought of a slogan someone had
suggested to the Chamber of Commerce once as a joke: We used
to kill a lot of whales. Come to Nantucket!

   The little police station was in a building that had once
housed the fire department, and across a narrow road from a
restaurant-cum-nightspot. The buildings on both sides were two
stories of gray shingle with white trim, like virtually everything
on the island that wasn't red brick with white trim. About time
for supper, he thought. No point in going home; he hadn't gotten
any better at serious cooking since Betty passed on five years
ago. Better to step over and get a burger.

   He sighed, stood, hitched at his gunbelt, and reached for his
hat, looking around at the white-painted concrete blocks, the
boxes of documents piled in corners and bursting out of their
cardboard prisons. Hell of a life. And he'd had to let the belt out
another notch recently; it seemed unfair, when the rest of him
was the same lanky beanpole it'd been when he graduated from
high school back around LBJ's inauguration.

   The lights flickered. Nantucket was just about to switch over
to mainland power, via an underwater cable. For the next few
months they had to soldier along on the old diesel generators,
though.

  "Christ," he said. "Not another power-out."

   He walked out into the street and stopped, jarred as if he'd
walked into a wall. Stock-still, he stood for a full four minutes
staring upward. It was the screams from people around him that
brought him back to himself.

  ***
  Nor'easter at twenty knots. Just what we needed, Captain
Marian Alston thought with satisfaction. She kept a critical eye
and ear on the mast captains' work as the royals and topgallants
were doused and struck.

   "Clew up! Rise tacks and sheets!"

   "Ease the royal sheets!"

   The pinrail supervisor bellowed into the wind: "Haul around
on the clewlines, buntlines, and bunt-leechlines!"

    The upper sails thuttered and cracked as the clewlines hauled
them up to the yards, spilling wind and letting the ship come a
little more upright, although the deck still sloped like the roof of
a house.

   "Lay them to aloft," Alston said to the sailing master. "Sea
furl."

   The crew swarmed up the ratlines and out along the yards
that bore the sails, hauling up armfuls of canvas as they bent
over the yards; doll-tiny shapes a hundred feet and more above
her head as they fought the mad flailing of the wet Dacron.

   No sense in leaving that much sail up, on a night as dirty as
this looks to be. Too easy for the ship to be knocked down or
taken aback by a sudden shift of wind. The chill bit through the
thick yellow waterproof fabric of her foul-weather gear like cold
damp fingers poking and prodding.

   She stood with legs braced against the roll and hands locked
behind her back by the ship's triple wheel, a tall slim woman
from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, ebony-black,
close-cropped wiry hair a little gray at the temples; her face was
handsome in a high-cheeked fashion like a Benin bronze. Spray
came over the quarterdeck railing like drops of salt rain, cold on
her face and down her neck. The sun was setting westward over a
heaving landscape of gray-black water streaked with foam, and
the ship plunged across the wind with the yards sharp-braced.
Her prow threw rooster tails every time the sharp cutwater
plowed into a swell, twin spouts jetting up over the forecastle
from the hawseholes where the anchor chains ran down through
the deck. Then the ship would heave free as if shrugging her
shoulders, water foaming across the forecastle deck and swirling
out the scuppers.

  Alston smiled behind the expressionless mask of her face.
Now this, this is real sailing, she thought.

   The Coast Guard training ship Eagle was a three-masted
steel-hulled windjammer. It had been built in 1936, and the
original incarnation was called the Horst Wessel before the
United States took it as war reparations. There were still
embarrassing swastikas buried under the layers of paint here
and there, but it was sound engineering, solid work from Blohm
& Voss, the firm that built the Bismarck. Three hundred feet
from prow to stern, a hundred and fifty to the tops of the main
and foremasts, eighteen hundred tons of splendid, lovely
anachronism. Good for another fifty years hard sailing, if the
Powers That Be didn't decide to scrap her.

  "Secure the forward lookout," she said. It was getting a little
dangerous for someone to perch up in the bows.

   "Come about, ma'am?" the sailing master asked.

   "In a minute or two, Mr. Hiller," she said.

    Nantucket was off to the northeast, fairly close, and it paid to
be careful in the dark; the sea between the island and Hyannis
on the mainland was shoal water, full of sandbars, and southeast
was worse. She'd been tacking into the teeth of the wind for
practice's sake; fairly soon she'd turn and let the Eagle run
southwestward. Cadets and crew-people were swarming up the
rigging; more stood by on deck, poised to haul on ropes. Archaic,
but the best training for sea duty there was—the Coast Guard
still taught stellar navigation, too, despite the fact that you could
push a button on a GPS unit and get your exact location from
the satellites. Lieutenant William Walker was taking a sight on
Arcturus from the edge of the quarterdeck, and Victor Ortiz was
running one of his pupils through the same procedure. Usually
they did the first cruise of the season without cadets, but this
year the Powers in their ineffable wisdom had changed the
schedules a little. Completely rearranged them, in fact, causing
everybody endless bother and inconvenience. It was a
considerable relief to get out to sea, where a captain was her own
master.

  "The wind's southing, ma'am," Thomas Hiller, the sailing
master, hinted.

  "Brace them sharp, then."

   The centuries-old litany of repeated orders echoed across the
deck; Eagle had been built to operate the old-fashioned way, no
high-geared winches or powered haulage. It ended with a
boatswain's mate bellowing: "Ease starboard, haul port, lively
port!"

   "Heave!" shouted the line leader in a trained scream that cut
through the moan of the wind.

   "Ho!" chorused the twenty young men and women on the line,
surging back in unison.

  "Heave!"

  "Ho!"

   "Ma'am." Alston looked up. Hiller looked a little lost, which
was a first. He'd been on the Eagle for eight years. "Ma'am…
there's something odd about the compass reading."

   An old-fashioned magnetic card compass binnacle stood
before the wheels. She took a step and looked down into it; the
card was whirling, spinning in complete circles. Captain Alston
blinked in surprise. What on earth could cause that? The sky was
clear to the horizon, only a little high cloud boiling in on the
wind—unusually good weather for this time of year and these
latitudes, although there might be a storm riding in on the
nor'easter. No lightning, certainly. Then she noticed that the
gyro repeater compass was quivering too.

   Marian Alston had been in the Coast Guard much of her
thirty-eight years, commanded the Eagle for four, and served on
search-and-rescue craft and armed cutters before that; she'd
joined up the year sea duty was opened to women. You learned
to trust your gut. And never, never to trust the sea.

  "Finish up and get them down," she said.

   Cadets and crew poured down the ratlines, the latter
sometimes helping the former along; for the first few weeks out,
there would always be the odd officer cadet who froze a hundred
and fifty feet up on a swaying rope.

   A fat blue spark jumped from her hand to the metal housing
between the ship's three wheels. Alston bit back a startled
obscenity—you had to set an example—and shook her hand.
Something white-hot stretched for an instant from sky to sea off
to her left. More sparks flew; people were leaping and cursing all
across the deck. Not the four hands standing on the benchlike
platforms either side of the wheels, she noted with satisfaction.
They flinched, their eyes went wide, but they kept her steady on
the heading they'd been given.

   Light flickered from left to right behind her, curving ahead of
the ship in a line only a few hundred yards away— curving from
east to west, in a line her navigator's eye could see was the arc of
a huge circle. St. Elmo's fire ran along the Eagle's rigging, blue
witch-flame. The curses were turning to screams as the lightning
reared up into a crawling dome of orange and white overhead.
Like being under the biggest, gaudiest salad bowl in the world,
ran through her mind as she stood paralyzed for a moment. Then
the noise on deck penetrated.

   Easily. The roaring wind had dropped away to nothing in the
space of a few seconds, and the drumhead-taut sails slackened
and thuttered limp. The motion of the ship lost its purposeful
rolling plunge, changed to a shuddering as the waves turned into
a formless chop, and then to a slow sway as they subsided.
Shouts and screams echoed through an eerie silence as the
rigging's moaning song of cloven air died.

  "Silence there!" she snapped, quiet but carrying. "Mr.
Roysins, let's get some order here. Whatever's happening, panic
won't help."
  But it would feel so good, part of her mind gibbered, looking
up at the dome of lights that turned night into shadowless day.

    "On with engines," she said. Max the diesel hammered into
life and steerageway came on the ship. "Strike all sails. Give me a
depth-finder reading."

   She clenched her hands behind her back and rose slightly on
her toes, ignoring the blasting arch of fire. "We've got a ship to
sail."

   "Got the stores covered?" Chief Cofflin asked, as he pushed
through the crowd on Main Street.

   "Right, liquor, grocery, and jewelry—just in case. We're
stretched pretty thin."

   His assistant hesitated; he was a short thin young man named
George Swain, and a fourth cousin. Everyone on the island was a
cousin, except wash-ashores. It made for a certain lack of
formality. So did the fact that there were only twenty-five officers
on the force.

  "Some of our own people are a mite shaky, Chief."

   "Ayup. Don't blame 'em, George. Still, we've got a job to do."
He stopped to think for a moment, running through a list of
names in his head. "Get everyone who's off-duty back on. And
call Ed Geary, Dave Smith, Johnnie Scott, and Sean Mahoney.
Tell them to each pick six friends they can trust and come down
to the station. Deputize 'em."

   George missed a step. "Chief, we can't do that on our own
say-so!"

   "I can and I just did," Cofflin said. "Ed's a good man and he
knows an emergency when he sees one, and so are the rest. You
call them and get them posted. Meanwhile, let's see if I can talk
some sense into these people here." The selectmen or somebody
should be doing it; he was a policeman, not a politician. But they
were probably out there running around with the rest of the
crowd.
   He mounted the steps of the bank at the head of Main Street
and looked down the cobbles toward the big planter at the foot of
the street. The lights on the cast-iron lampposts shone on a sea
of faces, on a street that should be mostly clear this time of
night. Overhead the ghastly, garish lights still crawled and
sparked, adding a weird touch to the upturned faces; all it
needed was torches and pitchforks to be something out of a
movie. He raised a battery-powered megaphone to his lips.

   "Now, let's have some sense here," he said.

   "What the fuck's going on?" someone yelled, and the crowd
roared with him.

   "QUIET, DAMMIT!"

   The bullhorn cut through the gathering madness, stopped it
feeding on itself.

   "If I knew what was going on, I'd tell you," Cofflin said bluntly,
in the silence that followed. "I can tell you going hog-wild won't
help any. That—" he pointed upward toward the shimmering
dome of light—"hasn't hurt anyone yet. But we've had a dozen
accidents, a suicide, and two assaults-with-intent tonight. That
has hurt people."

   It wasn't real easy to have a riot in a town of four thousand
people; particularly not when most of them were old-stock
Yankees and phlegmatic by inclination and raising… but
everyone was coming real close about now. He looked up. If he
thought it'd do any good, he'd be inclined to start screaming
himself. The dome of fire had been there all night, hanging over
the town, over the whole island, like the face of an angry God.
Every church on the island was jam-packed, but at least those
people weren't causing any harm and might be doing some good.

   "The phone to the mainland's out," he went on. "Radio and TV
are nothing but static; the airport can't get through either. The
last planes from Hyannis and Boston didn't arrive. Now why
don't you all go home and get some sleep. If things aren't back to
normal in the morning, we'll—"
   A collective shout that was half gasp went up from the crowd.
The stars were back. There was no transition this time; one
minute the dome of lights was there, and the next it wasn't. He
suddenly realized that a sound had accompanied it, like very
faint frying bacon, noticeable only when it was gone.

   The crowd's gasp turned to a long moan of relief.

  "—we'll take further measures," he went on. "And we'll all try
not to do anything that will make us feel damned silly in the
morning, won't we?"

   He could feel the tension in the crowd ease, like a wave easing
back from the beach. People were laughing, talking to their
neighbors, slapping each other on the back, even
hugging—though he'd bet that those were coofs. A few were
crying in sheer reaction. Cofflin himself breathed a silent prayer
of thanks to a God he didn't believe should be bothered with
trivialities. Everything's all right, he thought, looking up at the
infinitely welcome stars. His gaze sharpened. Mebbe so. Mebbe
not.

   "So why don't you all go home now?" he went on to the people.
"It's—" he looked at his wrist—"two-thirty and I'm plenty tired."

   The crowd began to break up. George came up, holding his
cell phone. "Geary wants to know if we still need help," he said.

  "Ayup," Cofflin said. The assistant blinked surprise. "Son,"
Cofflin went on, "don't say a word to anyone else, but take a
gander up there."

   He nodded skyward. The younger man looked up. "Nothing
but stars, Chief," he said. "And I'm glad to see them, I'll tell you
that."

   "Ayup. But take a look at the moon, George."

   The other policeman's face went slack, then white. The moon
was a crescent a few days past new; and it ought to be right out
there now, getting ready to set. Instead it was nearly full…
   "And the North Star should be just about there. T'ain't. Just
be glad nobody else's noticed yet," Cofflin said grimly. "Now let's
see if the phones to the mainland are working again."

   Doreen Rosenthal looked at the image on her screen and
blinked again. One hand raised close-chewed nails toward her
mouth, and she forced it down with an effort of will. The other
twisted itself into her hair. She'd felt like weeping with relief
when that weird… phenomenon. Let's not get emotional here…
had gone away. Now she was feeling sick again, with a griping
pain below her breastbone.

    "Let's look for the polestar," she said. One had to be
systematic. She split the screen and called up an exposure from
last night's .sequence beside the latest one for comparison. Her
fingers flew over the keyboard. "This doesn't make any sense at
all," she complained. Nothing was where it should be!

   A thought struck her. Now you're going completely nuts, she
thought. Still, it couldn't hurt. It wouldn't take a minute to call
up the program and get the data fed.

   More keystrokes. Nothing. Well, there's one crazy idea junked
. Lucky nobody would ever know she'd tried. Then she paused.
"Well, it can't hurt to be absolutely sure."

   "Search… for… all… correlations," she typed. Now the
program would run a back-and-forth search until it found a
stellar pattern corresponding to the one on the latest CCG
exposure.

  Dawn was turning the eastern horizon pale pink before she
was sure.

  Gevalt, she thought. It seemed appropriate. Tears trickled
down her face to drop and blotch on the keyboard.

  This can't be happening to me! I'm an overweight Jewish
grad student from Hoboken, New Jersey! Things like this didn't
happen to anyone, and if they did it was to some blonde in a
movie, meeting Bruce Willis or something. Her arms hugged her
middle, feeling a cramping like a bad period.
   Mother, help! That calmed her a little. Mother would have
panicked even worse, if she had been here. "You're a scientist,
act like one," she chided herself, blowing her nose and wiping the
keyboard. "Let's firm this up and get a little precision here."

  ***

  "Ma'am, still nothing," the radio operator said.

   Captain Alston had been staring up at the infinitely welcome
stars. A new unease was eating at the first relief as she checked
and rechecked. Either her memory had deserted her, or…

   She shook her head and stepped into the small rectangular
deckhouse behind the wheels, rather grandly called the Combat
Information Center. She preferred to think of it as the radio
shack. "Still gettin' static?" she asked.

   "No, ma'am. It's clear since those lights went away. There just
isn't anything to receive, not on any of the frequencies."

  She bit back that's impossible. Obviously everything that had
happened since sundown was impossible; nevertheless, it was
happening. A thought occurred to her.

  "Try a GPS reading," she said.

   That should read the ship's location off to within a few feet.
"Nothing, ma'am. Nothing. Maybe the storm scrambled all our
electronics."

   Not unless it was EMP like a fusion bomb's, Alston thought.
Or maybe the elves had carried them off to fairyland and Br'er
Fox would be by any minute, riding on Willy the Orca; right now
one hypothesis looked about as good as another. The crewman's
voice was taking on a shrill note.

   "Steady, sailor." She paused. "Lieutenant, you have a pocket
receiver, don't you?"

   The young man nodded. It was a camper's model, accurate to
within a few hundred yards, looking much like a hand calculator.
William Walker pulled it out and punched at the keys.

  "No reading, ma'am." His Montana twang was as
expressionless as if this was a training exercise. "As far as this
unit's concerned, the satellites just aren't there t'all."

   "Ma'am! I've got someone on the radiophone."

   Alston carefully did not lunge for the receiver. "Who?"

  "Nantucket, ma'am." That made sense; they were only a few
miles away. As much as anything made sense this night. "It's the
harbor. They're sort of babbling, ma'am."

   "Ms. Rosenthal, I'm really rather busy." Cofflin's long bony
face was set in implacable politeness; he ran a hand through his
thinning blond hair as he spoke, his blue eyes bloodshot with
sleeplessness. Most of Nantucket had gone home and gone to
sleep, but the ones still awake were slowly realizing that the
island was still cut off from all communication with the outside
world. Pretty soon the rest would wake up, and try to turn on the
TV and find out what CNN had to say. Then we will be well and
truly fucked. Normally he wasn't much of a swearing man,
hadn't been since the Navy, but now…

   "Chief Cofflin, I know what happened."

   That brought him up. Doreen Rosenthal was a coof, but she
wasn't one of the flake-and-nut brigade, the artists and artisans
and neo-hippies who were much of the island's permanent
population. She was a student of astronomy, good enough to get
an internship at the MM, and Cofflin had a solid Yankee respect
for learning.

   "What?" he said sharply.

   "I was… I was taking observations. When it happened. I kept
the, well, I kept the video going. I got a good shot when the…
whatever it was stopped."

   Cofflin looked at her.
  "I got a good shot of the stars, Chief Cofflin," she went on,
pushing her thick-lensed glasses back up her nose.

   Cofflin took her elbow. "Look, we've all had a rough night—"
he began.

   She pulled away. "The stars are wrong."

   Her voice was shrill but not hysterical. Not by tonight's
standards, at least.

   "How are the stars wrong?" he prompted.

   "They're in the wrong places." She fumbled in the big canvas
carrying bag beside her chair, one with University of Mass.
Amherst on it, and pulled out a printout. Spreading it on the
desk, she pointed out circles and lines drawn around the white
dots of stars. "See, the polar orientations—"

   Cofflin swallowed. "Give me the gist, please, Ms. Rosenthal."

  She looked up at him, white around the lips. "I ran a
comparison—I've got a stellar progressions program on my
computer. This is not the sky of March 1998."

   "Why haven't the morning planes arrived?" someone said
plaintively. "We still can't raise the mainland. We've had to
ground everything because we can't file flight plans, and there
are people waiting for their planes!"

   Cofflin held on to the tightly controlled fear that made him
want to snap at the hapless airport employee, or at Rosenthal for
blowing her nose behind him. The airport was a little stretch of
double pavement off in the middle of the island's moor and
scrubland not far from the south coast. Twin-engine prop puddle
jumpers flew in from the mainland, and private planes. Right
now it looked a little forlorn in the light of earliest dawn, the sky
blue but bleak and cold with mare's tails of high cloud. The
buildings were shingle-covered, like most stuff on the island; a
bunch of mainlanders were waiting, with their children and
carry-on luggage. Waiting to go to an America he suspected
they'd never see again.
  "Sorry, Mary," he said. "That's what I'm trying to find out.
Andy Toffler here yet?"

  "You called?" a voice said. "Jared. Mornin', ma'am."

   Cofflin turned; there was Andy, in a battered old leather flying
jacket, holding a paper cup of coffee and one of the Emergency
Town Meeting—1:00 P.M. Today flyers the police chief had
ordered spread around.

  "Andy. I need an emergency flight to the mainland."

  "I hate to take her up so soon," the pilot said. "God alone
knows what all that, whatever-it-was did to the electronics. I still
can't get my radio to pick up anything but stations here on
Nantucket."

  "It's the only seaplane on the island," Chief Cofflin said.

   Andy looked at him. "Something wrong, Jared?" he said. "I
mean, beyond what we know's wrong. Why do you need a
floatplane to hop over to Boston?" His eyes narrowed as he
looked at Rosenthal and saw the carrying case over Cofflin's
shoulder. "Why the scattergun?"

   "Andy, you wouldn't believe me if I told you. Look, I don't
often ask for favors, but—"

   "Okay, okay," the pilot said, spreading his hands in a
placating gesture. He'd been a fighter jock once, but the bravado
had mellowed with the years that left him bald on top. Not all
the Kentucky was out of his voice, though. "No problem. We're
tanked up. Y'all come on aboard."

   Cofflin handed the astronomer in through the door and
followed himself, folding his lanky frame into the copilot's seat.
The little floatplane shuddered as the prop spun and then settled
down to a steady vibrating roar behind the silver circle. He
reached for the headphones.

  "Mind if I make a call?"
  "Go right ahead," Toffler said, running through his flight
check. "Hope you have better luck than I did."

   As the airplane taxied out on the little wheels built into the
floats, Cofflin turned to the frequency the Coast Guard ship used.
"Eagle, Eagle, this is Cofflin, over," he said. "Do you read?"

   "Cofflin, this is Eagle. Captain Alston heah." The Coast Guard
officer's voice was accented like gumbo, but it carried a sense of
crisp confidence that the policeman was glad to hear. "Anythin'
new since we spoke?"

   Alston had taken Rosenthal's news with a long silence, then
calmly said that her own observations of the night sky were
"compatible." It was nice to have someone else who wasn't
inclined to gibber.

   "I'm taking a floatplane and doing some reconnaissance on
the mainland," Cofflin replied. "We need… ah, confirmation of
Rosenthal's theory."

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then: "Could
you stop off here and pick someone up? I'd like to have one of my
people go along, if you don't mind."

  "Captain, I'd appreciate it. There's room for one more— just
me, the pilot, and Ms. Rosenthal at present."

   And the astronomer was there because he'd been afraid she'd
crack up if he left her behind; crack up, and/or start babbling
her findings all over town. Behind him her face was crumpled
and blotched, and she was going through Kleenex at a ferocious
rate. He really didn't blame her much. It must be even worse for
a scientist, used to an orderly and predictable world.

   "That's fine, Chief Cofflin," Alston said. "You have our
location?"

  "Roger that."

  "We'll heave to, and anchor after you pick up my officer."
  "Roger. Cofflin out." He looked at the pilot. "You got that?"

  "Hop, skip, and a jump."

   The Coast Guard officer turned out to be a fresh-faced young
lieutenant with an M-16 over his shoulder, plus webbing with
ammunition. He hopped nimbly from the ship's boat to the right
float of the seaplane, and offered a hand all around as he slid into
the other rear seat, putting the assault rifle between his knees.
He had a camera, too, something better than the Polaroid Cofflin
had brought.

  "Lieutenant William Walker," he said; there was a Western
twang to his voice, and he looked like a younger version of the
Marlboro Man, square-jawed and handsome in a boyish way.

  No, Cofflin thought. He looks like… what's that guy's name…
Redford, yeah.

  "Happy to meet you."

   "Can't say as I'm too happy about anything, at the moment,"
Cofflin said with a dry smile, shaking his hand. It was hard and
felt extremely strong. "But welcome aboard." He nodded at the
assault rifle. "See you came prepared."

   Walker chuckled. "The sum total of the Eagle's armament, if
you don't count the flare pistol," he said. "I notice…" He nodded
at the shotgun in turn.

   Conversation died away as they accelerated, throwing up
spray from the floats. "Water looks odd," Toffler commented as
they lifted and circled the windjammer, then headed for the
mainland. "And what the hell's that?" He indicated a silvery
patch below.

  "Take a look," Cofflin said.

   The plane banked and slid down, swooping; not all Toffler's
fighter-pilot reflexes had gone the way of his hair. They leveled
out and made a pass with the floats nearly touching the water,
the heavy salt smell filling the cabin. And not only salt.
  "It's fish," Cofflin said, wrinkling his nose. "Dead fish. Damn,
but there's a lot of 'em." Seagulls swarmed around the massive
shoal, diving and pecking.

   "Cod," Lieutenant Walker said, peering out through
binoculars. "Thousands and thousands of cod, big cod."

   Cofflin grunted skeptically. There hadn't been concentrations
of codfish like that around New England waters for… then he
remembered what Rosenthal had told him, and shivered.

   "What killed them?" he said, trying to lose awe in practicality.

   "There's a curving mark in the water," the astronomer behind
him said suddenly. He started a little; she hadn't spoken much
since the airport. "See, you can follow it." Different shades of
blue, and a crosshatching of waves.

   The Coast Guard lieutenant used his binoculars. "The lady's
right. It's the edge of a circle, a very big circle, or at least some
geometric figure. Like the effect you get with a river estuary
emptying into the sea, or two very distinct currents… I've never
seen anything quite like it, though. Like two different bodies of
water just starting to merge."

   "Never seen anything like it. That's something we're all
getting used to saying," Cofflin said dryly. He clicked on the
radiophone and relayed the information to the Eagle.

  "Could you fly along the edge of the phenomenon for a few
miles?" Alston said. "I'd like to get a radius."

   "Good idea." He handed the radiophone to Walker, who called
the data to his commander.

   A few minutes later she answered: "Got that. Just a second…
Not a circle. It's pretty well a precise ellipse, centered somewhere
on the island. Not an exact distance in miles or kilometers,
though—something like twenty-three point four miles across and
five in height. We were just inside the edge of it, then."

   Cofflin grinned humorlessly at the tinge of bitterness and took
the radiophone. "Bad luck for you, Captain—but good for the rest
of us, I think. We're heading in to the coast now."

  "You folks know something that I don't?" Toffler said. Sweat
shone on his forehead and the high dome of his head, and the
Kentucky accent was stronger.

  "Fill him in, Ms. Rosenthal," Cofflin said wearily.

  The fact of what had happened was beginning to sink in now,
and it left silence in the wake of the astronomer's hesitant voice.

   "The… the transition event must have included a body of
water around the island," she finished. "That's what we're seeing
here. There would be differences in temperature, salinity, and so
forth. Perhaps the fish were caught at the, um, interface. It
looked electrical and it affected our electronic apparatus. Where
it met the water, I think it electrocuted some of the sea life."

   The floatplane flew low, a few hundred feet up, over intensely
blue ocean just rough enough to show whitecaps; the sky was
clear but a little hazy with high cloud. After a few minutes,
Toffler tipped one wing and spoke:

  "Thar she blows."

  Cofflin shaped a silent whistle. Thar she did, in twin-tailed
spouts. He'd never in his life seen that many whales; the spouts
and glistening backs stretched for miles. "Big pod," he said
expressionlessly. "Right whales. Blackfish."

   Which had been virtually extinct in these waters since the
eighteenth century.

   By the time they overflew a Cape Cod empty of roads and
houses and reached Boston, he was almost unsurprised at what
they found. There was still a bay and islands, but only roughly
like the maps. Dense forest grew almost to the water's edge, huge
broadleaf trees towering hundreds of feet into the air, and birds
rose in their tens of thousands from salt marsh and creekmouth,
enough to make the pilot swerve. Toffler circled for a few
minutes, aimlessly. What clear spots there were on dry land
looked to be the result of old forest fires. Under his numbness
Cofflin thought how beautiful it was, with an unhuman
comeliness that made Yosemite look like a cultivated garden.

  "Well," he said, "I think you were right, miss." Rosenthal
nodded and sneezed into her Kleenex.

  Walker pointed. "There."

   A stretch of shingle beach edged a seaside clearing where a
creek ran into the sea. In it were a score or so of shelters made by
bending saplings into U-shapes, and then covering the sides with
bark and brush, like Stone Age versions of Quonset huts. Fires
trickled smoke, and human figures pointed upward. When the
plane came lower overhead they scattered like drops of mercury
on dry ice; a few pushed big log canoes into the water and
paddled frantically away along the shore. Lower, and they could
see a woman turn back, scoop up a crying infant, and scuttle for
the edge of the woods with the child in her arms.

  "Can you take us down there, Andy?"

   "Sure," the pilot said. "Water's calm, and that looks like a
sloping surface—I should be able to ground the floats."

   The seaplane turned into the wind and sank. There was a
skip… skip… skip sensation as the floats touched; the airplane
surged forward, then sank back to a slightly nose-up position as
Toffler turned it toward the shore. Cofflin cracked the door and
looked down.

  "Sand and gravel… getting shallow, any minute now…"

   Toffler killed the engine and the plane coasted forward. The
aluminum of the floats touched bottom; they slewed about
slightly and stopped. Cofflin picked up his shotgun and stepped
down, onto the float and then into knee-deep water. He wiped
his brow.

  "Hot for March," he said, looking inland.

  Walker followed him, using his binoculars again. "Can't see
any of the… Indians, I suppose. Looks like they've cleared out."

  "Wouldn't you?" Toffler asked. "Let's get the plane secured.
We need to stake down some lines."

   The men occupied themselves. Rosenthal took some items
from her backpack and fiddled with them. "You're right, Chief
Cofflin. It's eighty Fahrenheit." That was unusual for
Massachusetts in early spring. "And look at the trees, the other
vegetation."

   Cofflin straightened up and did. "Season's pretty far along,"
he said. "But how do we know it's March?"

   "I worked on my calculations," she said. "It's March, all right.
Early spring, at least, but I'm morally certain it's the same day,
down to the hour, that it, ah, would have been. Sunrise was at
exactly the right time." She paused. "The climate may well be in
a warmer phase."

   Cofflin nodded, feeling his stomach twist with a sensation that
was becoming unpleasantly familiar; sheer whirling
disorientation, as if the ground kept vanishing from beneath his
feet. He clicked off half a dozen pictures of the shore, then
handed the camera to the astronomer.

  "Let's take a look. Andy, you take the left; Lieutenant Walker,
you're right; I'm point; and Ms. Rosenthal, you keep behind me,
and get plenty of pictures."

  "Why?" she said, with a flicker of spirit, and a sneeze.

   "Because you're not armed," he replied, glad to see the
stunned depression leaving her face.

    The air was not only warm, it was fresh like nothing he'd ever
smelled. Closer to the huts it wasn't as pleasant; evidently
whoever lived there had never heard of latrines. From the look of
it they kept dogs, too. The primitive wickiups were even cruder
than they'd looked at a distance; inside were hides and furs,
bedding made of spruce branches and grass. All around was a
scattering of tools made of bone, stone, horn, and wood, and
shallow lug-handled soapstone dishes. Hide stretchers,
fire-carved bowls, wooden racks lashed together with thongs that
held drying fish… He picked up a flint scraper somebody had
abandoned beside a raw deerhide. Not a museum piece, he
realized suddenly. It was still warm from the hand of whoever
had left it.

   "Incoming.'"

   Cofflin hit the deck with old reflex, and something went shunk
into the ground ahead of him. A spear, he thought. It seemed
pretty slender for that, though, more like a huge arrow. His
hands racked the slide of the shotgun automatically. Five
rounds, mixed rifled slugs and deershot, he thought.

   Then he saw the men. Six, maybe ten of them running
forward in dashes from cover to cover, short brown men with
queues of shoulder-length black hair, naked except for hide
breechclouts looped through belts around their waists. One of
them fitted another of the slender javelins into a wooden holder
with a curved end piece to hold a shaft in position and a
butterfly-shaped stone weight on its end. He ran a few steps,
half-skipping sideways, and swept his arm forward. The spear
came forward, pivoting out on the end of the flexing stick.

   Spear-thrower, Cofflin realized. Atlatl. He'd read about it in
a National Geographic article. The stick extended the length of
the thrower's arm, giving enormous leverage. The spear blurred
through the air and someone shouted with pain—Andy, he
realized with a sudden stab of panic. Their pilot. The surge of
adrenaline cut through the glassy barrier insulating him from
the world. Suddenly everything became real again, and he knew
that he could die here.

   "Over their heads!" he shouted, and let a round off. Walker
followed suit, the M-16 giving its light spiteful crack over the dull
thump of his shotgun.

   One of the Indians screamed and threw away his spears,
pelting back toward the woods. The others dropped to the
ground. Cofflin twisted to look over his shoulder; Rosenthal was
next to Andy, working on his leg. A spear was through the pilot's
calf, but from the way he was swearing it wasn't immediately
fatal.

   "How's he look?" he asked.

   "I'm not sure," the astronomer said. "There isn't much
bleeding."

   "Hurts like hell, but it's through the muscle," the pilot said,
his voice tight with control. "Miss, get my knife out and cut it off
here—that's right. Now let's pull… Christ, woman… sorry. Okay,
okay, now pack it with the handkerchief." He looked up at
Cofflin. "I've got a first-aid kit in the plane. Should be all right,
but I'm not going to be runnin' any marathons soon."

   "I doubt they hold 'em here," Cofflin said, voice tight with
relief.

   "Heads up," the young Coast Guard officer said.

   The Indians were getting up… and moving forward, fitting
more javelins to their spear-throwers. Their voices sounded, a
shrill yipping broken with howls like wolves. Deliberately like
wolves, he realized.

   "Damn, but they've got guts," Cofflin said. Thinking straight,
too. Saw that the noise didn't hurt anyone, and now they're
coming to clear the strangers out of their homes. Probably
their families're waiting back in the woods.

   Maybe in their stories the hero always beat the evil magician
in the end. It still took guts to attack outlandish men who
climbed out of a great metal bird.

   "I hate to hurt them," Toffler said, echoing his thought. "It's
their home."

   "Them or us. That Mighty Mattel is more accurate than my
scattergun, lieutenant. Try to wound."

   Walker set himself, exhaled, and squeezed his trigger. This
time one of the Indians fell, screaming and clutching at his leg.
The others wavered. Walker fired again, and dirt spurted up at
another's feet. That was enough for most of them; they followed
the first and ran yelling into the woods. The last man threw
down his javelins and spear-thrower and charged, a longer
stabbing spear in one hand and a flint hatchet in the other,
dodging and jinking like a broken-field runner. His face was a
contorted mass of glaring eyes and bared teeth.

   "Damn, he's not stopping for shit," Cofflin said, Navy reflexes
taking over from peacetime habit. "Take him down, lieutenant."
Poor brave bastard.

  Crack. The Indian fell.

   The islanders waited tensely, but there was no sound save the
birds and insects. Nothing moved. At last Cofflin stood. "Let's
take a look at them," he said. "Ms. Rosenthal, could you get the
aid kit from the plane, please?"

   The wounded Indians were short men, neither over five-six;
they wore a long roach of hair on top of their heads, braided at
the back, but the sides of their heads were shaved and painted
vermilion. Their skin was a light copper brown, their features
sharper than Cofflin would have expected. The first one to fall
had a gouge over the big muscle of his thigh; he stopped trying
to squeeze it shut with his hands and started crawling when they
approached, naked terror on his face. He pulled a stone knife
from a birch-bark sheath at his waist and swiped at them; he
was chanting, something high-pitched and rhythmic.

  Death song, Cofflin guessed, dredging at bits of old
knowledge. Okay, let's see if we can communicate.

   He put down his shotgun and spread his open hands. The
Indian waited, tense and wary. His eyes widened as Rosenthal
came up beside the other man. Cofflin glanced aside at her. Oh,
he thought. The astronomer was wearing a T-shirt under an
open jean jacket, and her gender was entirely obvious.

   "I think the fact that you're a woman makes him less
frightened, Ms. Rosenthal," he said. "Wait a minute. Get out one
of the rolls of bandage."
   Slowly, Cofflin mimed a wound on his leg, and binding it up,
then pointed to his companion. After a moment, the Indian
made an odd circular motion of his head that seemed to
correspond to a nod. His bloody hand began to return the flint
knife to its sheath. Cofflin shook his head, then made a waving
motion with his hands. He took the scraper from his own belt,
tossed it aside, and pointed to the Indian as he recovered it.

   Reluctantly, the Indian did the same with his own weapon.
"All right, doctor," Cofflin said. "Move slowly, and be careful. I've
got you covered. Put some of the antiseptic powder on it, then
bandage it up."

   He held the shotgun ready. Rosenthal licked her lips and
moved in, motions slow and careful. The narrow black eyes of the
wounded man went wide for an instant as the astringent powder
struck the wound, but he moved the leg to let the woman finish
bandaging it. She sat back, sneezed, and looked helplessly at her
blood-covered hands.

  "All right, back off again," Cofflin said. Maybe the gesture of
goodwill would help. "Lieutenant, what about the other one?"

   "He's bad," the Coast Guardsman said. "Sorry. Thighbone's
broken, compound fracture. I've stopped the bleeding and put
him out, but without a good doctor and antibiotics, he's a dead
man."

    Cofflin watched the other wounded Indian drag himself
backward toward the woods. If we leave him, he'll die. On the
other hand, if we take him away, they'll think God knows what.
On the third hand, we can patch him up, maybe teach him a
little English, and he can interpret. Give him some presents,
knives, pots and pans, costume jewelry. Squanto R Us.

   "All right, then," he said. "Let's get out of this screwup."

   The limp weight of the unconscious man brought back other,
unpleasant memories for Cofflin. He thrust them aside;
manhandling the dead weight into the airplane was hard enough
as it was. As an afterthought, he taped the man's wrists and
ankles together. Having him wake up and freak in midair was
not something he wanted to experience. Then they returned for
the pilot; with an arm over each man's shoulder he made a slow
hopping way back to the airplane.

   "Goddam," he sighed, settling into the pilot's seat. "You know,
I was feeling pretty lousy coming here. As if nothing was real,
you know. But this, this feels damned real. Shot in the leg by an
Indian. Goddam."

   Cofflin nodded. So did Walker, and Rosenthal sneezed
agreement. He picked up the radiophone.

   "Might as well have an ambulance waiting," he said, looking
down at the wounded man lying unconscious at his feet. The
bandage around his thigh was glistening red. "And then there's
that Town Meeting."

  "Captain, it's the XO. I think you should come at once,
ma'am."

   Marian Alston cursed silently and tore herself away from the
radiophone. "Take down anything they say," she said to the
operator.

   The cadet who'd brought the news looked scared green.
Lieutenant Commander Roysins, her executive officer, had
excused himself half an hour ago, when Walker reported the
news from… where Boston ought to have been but wasn't. No
way to keep it secret, not on shipboard; the rumor was running
through the hull like a fire, and she'd have to do something—say
something to the crew—soon.

  "Ma'am."

   The wind on the quarterdeck was fairly stiff, and the Eagle
pitched at her anchors, bows into the whitecaps.

  "Captain on deck!"

  "As you were."

  She returned the officer of the deck's salute and went down
the companionway behind the radio shack. The officers' cabins
were tiny cubicles on the deck directly below. The largest was the
flag cabin at the rear, usually empty except for important
visitors. Hers was just ahead of it to the left, little more than a
glorified closet, something she'd often thought confirmed her
conviction that God was an ironist. The rest of Officers' Country
stretched ahead and to the wardroom on the other side.

   The XO's cabin door was shut. "He won't answer, ma'am. I
tried."

  "Stand easy," she said, and pounded on the metal with her
own fist. "Mr. Roysins, open this door! That's an order!"

   Silence. Fear dried her mouth. She slammed at the door
again. "Roysins!"

   Still nothing. She licked her lips. "Beauchamp," she said to the
cadet. "My regards to the officer on watch in the engine room,
and someone with a toolkit to this cabin, on the double."

  "Ma'am!" The cadet bolted, glad of an order.

   Alston waited, expressionless, until he returned. With him
was a bald man in stained blues with a toolbox and a
squared-away baseball cap with EAGLE across its front in gold
letters.

  "Ma'am?" he said.

   "Let's have this open, Chief," she said. Baker, a CPO and a
reliable man.

   He nodded phlegmatically and went to work. Thirty seconds
later the door swung open. There wasn't any of the smell she'd
feared, the sort that happened when a man hung or shot himself.
Roysins was lying on his back in the bunk, staring open-eyed at
the low ceiling of the cabin. One arm trailed down, moving with
the motion of the ship, and an empty glass rolled beside an
equally empty plastic pill container. The other arm clutched
something to his chest. Alston ducked in and put her fingers to
the man's neck, just to be sure. The skin was already cooling. She
gently pulled the framed picture of Roysins's wife and children
free, then crossed the man's arms on his chest and closed the
eyes, holding them shut for a moment to make sure they'd stay
that way. A coverlet went over his face.

   God damn you, Roysins, she thought sadly. I needed you,
dammit. She was going to need all the officers, to keep things
going. This was no time to bug out. Roysins wouldn't have
suicided if a car crash or a tornado had lost him his family, she
felt fairly sure. It was the feeling of absolute separation. But
that's an illusion. Nobody's died, they just got… unavailable.
Still, she was beginning to realize why the old buccaneers had
used marooning as a punishment, instead of just knocking
someone on the head and pitching him overboard.

   "My compliments to the operations officer, and I'll see her in
my cabin," she said. "Chief, get a sailmaker and some cloth in
here."

  She looked at her watch. 1000 hours. Christ.

                 CHAPTER TWO
  March, 1250 B.C.

  March, Year 1 After the Event

   Ian Arnstein wandered down the street, pushing the bicycle
he'd just bought with his last two-hundred-dollar traveler's
check; he always felt ridiculous riding one of the things—another
of the drawbacks of being several inches over six feet. And I
never even liked basketball. It was a cruelly pretty day, blue sky
and wisps of cloud, warm enough that he was comfortable in a
long-sleeved shirt and no jacket. There were daffodils set out in
pots, and the whole town had the scrubbed, fresh-painted air
that it always did… and nothing was the same. He wheeled the
bicycle into the guesthouse where he was staying and up the
stairs into his room, and stood looking at the fireplace.

   "Still functional, I suppose," he said to himself, stroking his
bushy reddish-brown beard; it had stayed luxuriant while the
hair vanished from the top of his head. Except for that he might
have been a face off an Assyrian bas-relief, heavy hooked nose
and strong features, apart from the mild scholar's eyes.

  When winter came, a working fireplace…

   The bags and boxes from the grocery store nearly
hid-it—nearly hid the whole wall, come to that. Spare clothing,
canned food, dried peas, everything he could think of. There
hadn't been many people in the stores, and he'd still been able to
write traveler's checks, which proved that nobody had thought
through the implications of the rumors. He looked at his watch.
Nearly noon. Unbelievable rumors, but they accounted for what
had happened better than anything else.

   Time for the Town Meeting. That was going to be crowded. It
was also probably going to determine whether or not he met a
long, nasty death in the coming months. Possibly whether he was
killed for the meat on his bones. He shivered. That was the
problem with the sort of reading he did for recreation. History
undermined certain comfortable assumptions about how human
beings acted…

   He sat at the desk, slumped with his head in his hands. At this
point in the type of novel that was his favorite reading the hero
would be brimming with ideas, getting people moving,
organizing things, providing some leadership.

   "The problem is," he said to himself, "I couldn't lead three
sailors into a whorehouse. Somebody else will have to do it."

  "The moderator's not… available," the town clerk said.

   "What do you mean, not available!" Jared Cofflin answered,
frantic. "Look, Joseph, we've got to get this Town Meeting under
way."

   The old man nodded somberly. "But Alan Scinters isn't going
to moderate it," he said.

   The sound from the crowd out in the auditorium of the high
school was growing louder, more insistent. To Cofflin's ears it
was beginning to sound uncomfortably like the mob on Main
Street last night.

   There was supposed to be room for seven hundred and fifty,
plus another hundred and fifty in the little annex where
nonvoters sat. From the noise, there were more than a thousand
heads crammed in, and more milling around in the corridors
outside. The auditorium was named after a former principal of
the old Nantucket High School; it was big, a broad blunt wedge
with concrete steps that were upholstered in blue where people
sat and left bare in the strips they were supposed to use for
stairs. The whole idea had been sold to the Town Meeting as a
civic center and place for amateur theatricals as well as a school
facility.

  The principal had been a fearsome old biddy, by all accounts,
and she'd ruled with an iron hand for the best part of two
generations. He tried to imagine how she'd have handled this.

   "Why isn't Scinters going to do it?"

   "Because he and the chairman of the board of selectmen have
been in Boston since Friday last!" Joseph Starbuck snapped. "Of
the other four selectmen, Vida… Dr. Coleman has her under
sedation." The town clerk's mouth shut like a steel trap. "Along
with about a hundred others right now. Four suicides, he says,
and a dozen attempted. Jane's babbling, and that leaves Tom
and Clarice."

   Cofflin blinked: those two weren't the brightest of the lot.
"Well, somebody's got to do it. Listen to them out there! They
need someone who sounds like he knows what he's doing. You're
the town clerk."

  "I'm not up to it. Too old, getting set in m'ways. Afraid you'll
have to do it, Cofflin."

   "Me? I'm the police chief, not an elected official!"

  "You're also the only one who seems to be doing anything
much. You know what's going on. Get out there, man, or we'll
have a riot on our hands."
   For a moment Jared Cofflin felt his mind stutter. I wanted
someone to take over! The reality of what he'd found on the
mainland still sat in his mind like a lump of stodgy food, refusing
to split up and move through the rest of his brain. If he couldn't
come to terms with this… event, how on earth was he going to
help everyone else do it? They all want someone to take over,
and they want it now.

   Jared Cofflin took a deep breath and walked out onto the
stage. The acoustics were superb, enough to bring across the
rasp of fear and building rage in the crowd's undertone. These
people were in fear of their lives, and if the man who spoke didn't
give them something to calm their terror they might well rip him
into quite literal pieces. And then go on to destroy the town and
any chance of saving their lives in a surge of blind ferocity.

   He walked out to the podium and stood in front of the
meeting, shoulders slightly hunched as if he was facing into a
winter storm. "All right," he began. "You know we're still not in
contact with anyone on the mainland. Some of you have
probably heard why. Now I'll tell you all. The whole—" he
suppressed the word that came to mind— "damned island is
back in, well, in the past."

   The noise burst over him like surf. He quieted it—somehow,
eventually—and went on: "Over at the observatory, Ms.
Rosenthal—" he nodded to where she sat not far from
him—"used the computer and telescope there to figure it out."

  "What if they're wrong? Computers—" someone shouted.

   "You may not have noticed," Cofflin said, stung into heavy
sarcasm, "but we're still cut off from the mainland. Because
there isn't any mainland, at least, no buildings or roads. Just
wilderness. I went and took a look personally. Nothing but trees
and Indians with spears.

   "Quiet! We're not going to get anything done by shouting!"
Cofflin bellowed, angry at last and somehow no longer in the
least afraid. "George, Matt, Susan, get those people there out of
here!"
  Most of those who'd broken down let themselves be led away
quietly. One had to be put in a hammerlock and handcuffed.
"Put him in the cells—he can cool off overnight," Cofflin said.
Unfortunately, that was one of the town selectmen. There goes
half of what's left of our elected government.

   The babble subsided. "All right, now you know. Andy Toffler
and me and Ms. Rosenthal here, and Lieutenant Walker from
the Eagle, flew over to the mainland this morning. There's no
Hyannis, and there's no Boston, no roads and no buildings. The
Indians threw spears at us. We took some pictures—Andy, could
you get that projector working?"

   The wounded pilot wheeled his chair about on the dais,
slipping the pictures they'd taken under an overhead projector
that threw them enlarged onto a pull-down screen.

   The pictures flicked on, sharp close-ups of the Indian camp.
Then a blurred one as Doreen dove for cover, and then another
series done with steady clarity. She may have been on the verge
of a breakdown, but she kept doing her share of the work, he
thought with respect. Good pictures too: an Indian winding up,
running forward, the streak of the spear, then the weapon
standing in the ground. At last two of each of the wounded
Indians, close-ups of their faces and gear.

   "Captain Alston of the Coast Guard ship Eagle—the Eagle was
just offshore last night and ended up here with us, for those of
you who didn't know—has something to say. Let's let Captain
Alston talk, people," he said.

   His own voice was hoarse, his head ringing with too little
sleep and too much coffee. Captain Alston cleared her throat.
Hard weathered hands turned the uniform cap as she stood, then
stopped as if she was forcing herself not to fidget. Otherwise she
stood calm as a statue, a welcome contrast to how most people
were acting.

  "We were near the edge of the, ah, phenomenon," she said.

  Her Southern accent made her voice soft, but the diction was
oddly precise, almost finicky, as if every word was carefully
chosen. The voice of an autodidact, self-educated.

   "It evidently, ah, transposed an ellipse of ocean as well as the
island, reachin' several miles offshore; we've seen evidence of
that—dead fish caught at the rim, and so fo'th. The only thing we
could tell about it was that it was electrical in nature—there were
static discharges and effects on our electronic equipment. My
observations of the stars confirm Ms. Rosenthal's. The stars have
moved, and the shift's… the same sort that would be produced by
bein'… thrown back in time. How long did you say, Ms.
Rosenthal?" She pronounced the title miz.

  "The spring of 1250 B.C.," Rosenthal said. "Three thousand
two hundred and forty-eight years before the present. Before
what was… before the… transition event."

  "All right, now," Cofflin said when order had been restored.
"Doc Coleman?"

    Coleman, a lean, bony man in his sixties who headed the
island's hospital-clinic, stood up. "I'm treating the… Indian. His
leg wound's stabilized. He's never been vaccinated, he's got no
fillings or other dental work on his teeth—remarkably good teeth,
by the way—and from the X-rays, he's had several broken bones
that healed without benefit of casts."

   "All right," Cofflin said. "We've obviously got an emergency
here. We're…" It was hard to go on. "We're back in the past,
somehow—the whole island is. The question is, what are we
going to do about it?"

   Someone raised his hand. Cofflin recognized him vaguely, as
much because of the way he looked as for a few brief exchanges
of words; some sort of professor who spent part of his summers
here. A Californian; tall, balding, with a brown bush of beard
and beak-nosed. He looked a lot calmer than most of the people
here. Maybe he'd keep people paying attention until things
quieted down.

  "You, sir."

  "Ian Arnstein—Dr. Ian Arnstein. I'm a professor of classical
history at the University of San Diego. I was wondering if anyone
had considered the implications of what's happened to us."

   The Westerner looked around. "Look, either… whatever
happened will reverse itself, or it won't. If it goes into reverse, we
don't have to worry. We do have to worry if it doesn't. We're all
in danger of death if it doesn't."

  "How so, professor?" Cofflin asked. We're in danger of
complete chaos, sure enough. That had been his main worry.

    "Chief Cofflin, there's no United States out there. There are no
oil refineries, no farms to ship us produce, no A&P to deliver
vegetables and canned food. No factories. Once we use anything
up, it's gone unless we replace it ourselves. What are we going to
eat? Winter's coming in another seven months; what are we
going to heat houses with? Banks, money—it's all worthless now."

   That brought complete silence. The sheer weirdness of what
had happened had overwhelmed most, to the exclusion of
practical matters. Cofflin was impressed. This one is a thinker,
he decided. Then the thought struck home.

  "You have any ideas, Professor Arnstein?" he said calmly,
while he scribbled a note: Get the guards back on the stores
SOONEST. He handed the note to his assistant. The man nodded
and hurried out.

   "Well, yes. I've, ah, I've read a lot of speculative fiction about
things like this, and I'm a historian. We need to get organized.
Supplies will have to be rationed. We have to get working on
inventory so we know what it is we've got, and then we have to
conserve everything that can't be replaced. We need to start
building up our food supplies. It ought to be possible to fish—the
fishing grounds around here should be fantastically rich—and we
should see what can be grown. There will be whales. We could
get firewood and so forth from the mainland—and maybe we
could trade, as well."

  "Indians!" someone shouted. "We could get corn from the
Indians, like the Pilgrims."
   "If you hadn't shot at them," Pamela Lisketter said.

   Cofflin recognized her too, a member of the flake-and-nut
contingent, a weaver who sold fantastically expensive handmade
blankets to support a "simple" lifestyle. She was a tall thin
woman, her only noticeable features large green-gold eyes and an
air of intense conviction; she was involved in every good cause,
and a great many marginal ones as well.

   "Ms. Lisketter," Cofflin said, "I assure you we acted strictly in
self-defense. Now please let Professor Arnstein finish."

   Arnstein shook his head. "We can trade for hides and game,
maybe, but not corn. If this is the thirteenth century B.C., the
local paleo-Indians will still be pure hunter-gatherers. Maize
hasn't gotten far out of Mexico yet. There were farming villages…
ah, there are farming villages away down in Mexico and Central
America, but even the Olmecs haven't happened yet, or maybe
they're just starting. I'd have to look it up."

   A hand went up, and Cofflin nodded. The chief librarian of the
Athenaeum rose, Martha Stoddard, a spinster lady of about
forty, dry and spare; archaeology was her hobby.

   "The Olmecs built… are building…" For a moment
uncharacteristic puzzlement showed on her slightly horse-like
Yankee face. "Well, the first Olmec ceremonial centers were
started about the thirteenth century B.C. at San Lorenzo, yes,
and the first Chavin temples in Peru. Dr. Arnstein is right about
the local Indians, I'm afraid. Not paleo-Indians, late Archaic
phase. No farming to speak of. Possibly some gardens with
squash and gourds, but no corn. You said that there was forest
down to the water's edge near Boston?"

   "Ayup, Ms. Stoddard."

   "There you are, then. When the Puritans arrived, that was all
open land around there—cleared by Indians for cornfields and
fuel. That hasn't happened yet."

   She sat down again, and Arnstein continued: "Europe,
though, Europe is in the Bronze Age. We could get grain there.
We do have a ship."

   Everyone looked at Captain Alston. "I'm willing to help," she
said. "But Dr. Arnstein is right—we need to get organized."

   Arnstein nodded vigorously. "We need an executive—a
president, a coordinator, something like that. And a council. I
don't exactly know the procedures for your Town Meetings, but
I'd like to propose—"

   "Hey, he's not a registered voter in this town!" Lisketter
exclaimed. "He's an off-islander!"

  You're one to talk, Pamela Lisketter, Cofflin thought.

  Granted she'd been on the island ten years, and was quite
popular with her own crowd, but she was a coof nonetheless.

  Cofflin knocked his empty water glass on the podium as a
makeshift gavel. "We're all locals now," he said sharply. "Think
about it for a moment, people."

   Arnstein had stopped, uncertain. He cleared his throat and
went on: "I'd like to propose Chief Cofflin as… ah, as chief
executive officer for the duration of the emergency or until we
come up with something better."

  The town clerk shot to his feet. "Seconded!"

   "Now, wait a—" Cofflin began. Hands shot up all over the
room.

  "Carried by acclamation," the man said.

   You're going to regret this, Joseph Starbuck, Cofflin thought
with a glower.

   Arnstein spoke again. "I'd also like to propose that the chief
executive officer appoint a council to propose measures to get us
through this emergency. We can elect a… a legislature later, but
we need to do things right now if we're going to pull through."

  "Seconded!" Joseph Starbuck said again.
  The hands shot up again. Cofflin's neck bristled slightly; he
could feel the mood of the meeting shifting, turning from
unfocused rage to an equally unbalanced hope. It could turn
again as quickly, if he disappointed it.

   "All right," Cofflin said. "And you're one, Joseph. Captain
Alston, you're another; Professor Arnstein, Ms. Rosenthal, Ms.
Lisketter, Ms. Brand"—who owned Brand Farms, the island's
main nursery and truck-garden operation— "and the rest of the
selectmen."

   "Chief," Dr. Coleman said, touching his sleeve as the last of
the townsfolk straggled out. "A word."

   "Mmm-hmm?"

   "The Indian's dying," he said.

  Cofflin blinked surprise. "You said his leg was stable?" he said
mildly.

   "It is," Coleman nodded. "That's not it. As far as I can tell, he's
dying of the common cold. Possibly the flu, but it looks more like
a monster cold on steroids, and that's what Ms. Rosenthal has. I
thought it might be better to tell you quietly."

   "Nobody dies of a cold, Doc."

   "I know that, but he's managing it somehow. Progressive
congestion of the nasal and bronchial passages, faster than I can
drain, fever over a hundred and seven. Nothing I've got works."
He shook his head. "It came on like wildfire. It's as if his immune
system had no resistance at all, as if he were a petri dish full of a
growth solution."

    Arnstein had come up while they were speaking. "Virgin
field," he murmured.

  Cofflin's eyes flew open. He remembered Rosenthal sneezing.
Coleman was nodding somberly.

   "It's what they call it when a disease hits a population with no
previous exposure," he said quietly. "The results can be…
unpleasant. Minor diseases, childhood diseases, they become
killers."

   Arnstein bobbed his head; he was six-six, and seemed
accustomed to directing his body language downward. "Ninety
percent of the Indians in the Americas died within a century of
Columbus," he said. "Never been exposed to the Afro-Eurasian
disease environment. It might be even worse here."

  "Why?" Cofflin whispered.

   "Well, we don't have smallpox, thank God, but these
Indians—they're a lot more thinly scattered, less numerous than
the ones the European discoverers met, would have met, three
thousand years from now. There probably aren't any epidemic
diseases at all, and not many endemic ones. But now…" he
shrugged. "Measles… I wonder if anyone here has measles? We'd
better check. That could be very bad. Even in Europe and Asia, it
didn't arrive in the Roman Empire until the second century, but
when it did a quarter of the population died of it. Hmmm…" He
trailed off, mumbling.

  "Jesus," Cofflin said.

   Coleman's face had turned pale. "I'll… we'll have to be very
careful, very careful, with anyone who touches shore off this
island. I'm going to start checking to see if anyone has measles."

   "Measles, syphilis, anything like that," Arnstein said.
"Otherwise, we could exterminate whole groups just by
breathing on them."

  "Jesus." Cofflin kneaded his eyes in a vain attempt to dislodge
what felt like hot sand.

   "I should test," Coleman said. "For everything. AIDS, too… of
course, I can't test the entire…" Suddenly a grim smile lit his
face. "Wait a minute. I can do that. Can't I?"

   "Doctor, you can do anything you please for the public good
right now. Anything you can get past me and the Town Meeting,
that is."

   "And that's the situation, people," Captain Alston said.

   She was speaking from the quarterdeck bridge above the
pilothouse, with the ship's officers around her. The crew covered
the main deck, standing by divisions as if for an inspection at
Quarters, all within easy hearing distance. They murmured, the
sound growing louder and louder, until the petty officers and
boatswain shouted for quiet.

   Easier to deal with than civilians, she thought. The town
meeting ashore had been the next thing to a riot, and it had
lasted most of the day. At least you could tell people in uniform
to shut up and listen. She glanced over at Nantucket; they'd
dropped anchor in the dredged channel that led to the steamer
dock, there being no room to tie up with the big ferry at its
moorings. For the moment she was just as glad not to be at
quayside. The situation on board would be easier to handle if it
could be kept isolated from the rest of the island for a little while.

   This anchorage is going to be a bitch in rough weather, she
thought, her mind distracted for a moment. Sheltered enough
for ordinary storms, but in a really stiff norther… When full
quiet had been restored, she went on:

   "Ladies and gentlemen, we're in an… unprecedented situation.
There is no United States Coast Guard. There is no United
States. We're marooned, adrift in time."

   She pointed. "A little more than seven thousand of us
altogether, and the rest of the planet in a state of savagery.
However, we still need discipline and organization. Accordingly,
anyone who wants to take his or her chance ashore may do so
now. Those who wish to remain with the ship will be under
orders as before, and I'm placing the ship at the disposal of Chief
Cofflin and the Council in Nantucket. There may be no United
States, but these people are still Americans—and helping them is
what we're in this uniform for."

   "What about our families?" someone called.
   Alston clamped her hands behind her back. "There's nothing
to be done about that. Everyone and everythin' we knew is gone.
People, either this… whatever it was will reverse itself, or it
won't," she said. "If it does, everything is back to normal—except
that y'all make your fortunes on the talk-show circuit."

    That brought a shaky laugh. She went on: "But we have to
operate on the assumption that it won't. Because if it doesn't,
and we sit down and wait for a return that doesn't happen, we're
all going to die. If we work, we may pull through. As for our
people ashore… they'll have to assume we were lost, somehow.
Nobody knows what happened back up in the… future." It was
still a little hard to say it. "At a guess, the year 1998 got the
Nantucket that should be here, in which case they'll have some
inkling of what happened to us. Grief is natural, but we've no
time to sit down and cry."

   Not if I have any say in the matter, she added mentally.

   Keeping people too busy to think was an ancient military
tradition, and for very good reason. She hadn't asked to be stuck
in this situation, but things weren't going to fall apart if she had
anything to do with it. The United States Coast Guard, or the
Lord God Almighty, or fate, or whatever, had left them in her
hands.

   The uproar began as she finished speaking. It lasted far into
the night, and ended with half a dozen cadets and a couple
members of her crew sedated or under restraint.

  "But nobody," she said in the officers' wardroom, "wants to
jump ship."

   "I think it may have struck them that at least they get rations
here," Hiller said.

   Like her, the sailing master didn't have any ties ashore. Well,
she had two children, but they'd gone with their father in the
divorce and that was going on fifteen years ago. Wouldn't have
done any good to fight for custody, not in South Carolina with
what John knew and threatened to reveal if she contested, and it
would have wrecked her career when things came out. At least
John had warned her first, not just blabbed to the wind.

   Some of the other officers still looked as if they'd been hit
behind the ear with a sandbag. Most of them did have people
back when. Walker, now, Walker looked excited. She had her
doubts about him, anyway. Intelligent, hard-working, and they
even shared a hobby in the martial arts, but there was
something…

  "Speaking of rations, how are we found?" she asked.

   The fuel-oil tanks were full—they'd topped up in New London
before they left. Thank God for small mercies. The Eagle's
auxiliary was a fairly recent thousand-horsepower Caterpillar
diesel named Max, practically immortal given that the ship's
own machine shop could make most replacement parts; the
generators and freshwater plant ran off the same fuel system. Oil
would be the weak point. Wind only from now on, she thought.
We use the auxiliary on nothing but real emergencies.

   "Ma'am," the quartermaster said. "We'll be out of fresh
vegetables and the like shortly. Flour, canned and dried goods,
and so forth, maybe four weeks. But ma'am, two hundred people
take a lot of feeding."

   "Reduced rations immediately then. Use the perishables first,
and I'll talk to Chief Cofflin and see what they can spare from
shore. From what Lieutenant Walker says, the fishing and so
forth will be very good. We can lend a hand with that right away.
We'll also probably be making a run to England—well, to the
British Isles, whatever they're called here-and-now—to trade for
grain. I'd like your ideas on that ASAP, by tomorrow morning, if
you please."

   Officers needed to be kept busy too. "Also on how we can
convert the ship for operations in a low-tech environment. More
fuel's out of the question, and so are electronics or most machine
parts except those we can make in the shop on board or get from
the island. We'll be lucky to get cordage and sails."

  "Captain Alston." That was the former operations officer,
Sandy Rapczewicz, now acting XO. She was a competent-looking
woman in her thirties with a weathered, pug-nosed Slavic face;
her eyes were red, but she seemed calm enough. A teenaged son
ashore, Alston remembered, and a husband. "I was just thinking.
We're in the past, right?"

   She nodded. Rapczewicz went on: "But if we, um, do
things—make contact with the locals, that sort of thing— won't
we, um, sort of change the way things happened? It isn't in the
history books, thousands of people and a ship appearing in
Moses' time."

   Silence fell around the table. Alston nodded. "Sandy, you're
right." Some of the officers were beginning to look frightened.
"On shore, I talked about that to some of Cofflin's Council, a
history professor and an astronomer, and the town librarian,
who's an amateur archaeologist." Odd what types ended up on
Nantucket, but it wasn't your average island. "One thing they
agreed on—even if we all dropped dead tomorrow morning,
we've already changed history."

  "How's that, Captain? We haven't done anything yet."

   "We're here. A lot of buildings and so forth are here, including
brick and concrete and stone that'll last. When Europeans
arrived, they'd find the ruins. More important, the islanders
already sent some people ashore, they had contact with the
Indians—and according to the doctor in charge of the local
clinic, the one they brought back is dying of the common cold."

   That brought everyone up. "The person with the cold sneezed
on one of the others on shore, too, which means their whole tribe
probably has it by now. You think that isn't going to change
history? They'll pass it on, since not all of them will keel over at
once. And as a practical matter, everyone on the island isn't
going to drop dead tomorrow. People will try to survive. Even if
everything goes wrong, hundreds will be around for years, and
everything they do will change things."

   Rapczewicz crossed herself. "Then we could be destroying the
future—everyone we know, the whole country."

  "If we have, we've already done it. Think it through. We're
still here, so the history that produced us is too, somewhere,
probably. Arnstein—the history professor— thinks that what'll
happen is that there will be two futures, the one we came from,
and the one that happens because we landed here. Rosenthal, the
scientist, says that that could be—something to do with quantum
mechanics."

  "Yeah, the Many Worlds interpretation. We studied it in
physics," Lieutenant Walker said thoughtfully.

   Alston cleared her throat. "In any case, it's irrelevant. We
can't do anything about it. Even mass suicide, which is not going
to happen, wouldn't change the fact that we're here and the
consequences that follow. But we do have to eat, y'all will
recollect. So, ladies and gentlemen, let's get down to some
serious plannin'."

  The meeting went on for hours. As the officers left for their
bunks, Alston signaled to Walker to stay. "Lieutenant, I think
you've had an idea that you're not sharing."

   "Ma'am," the young man said. He hesitated. "It's just that
there are so many possibilities here."

  "Including death by starvation, unfortunately. That has to be
our maximum priority for the present."

  "Yes, ma'am."

   The younger officer had a boyishly open face, green eyes, and
a mop of reddish-brown hair; he looked like an overgrown Huck
Finn. And I can believe that as much as I want to, she thought.

  "Thank you, ma'am."

   Alston sighed and sat alone, cradling her coffee and wishing
for a drink. Coast Guard ships were dry, though, just like the
Navy's. Like the Navy's had been… would be… whatever.

   She poured another cup. Thinking about what had happened
made her head hurt even worse. She'd considered drawing a
trank herself, she needed the sleep, but no. She also needed her
wits if something happened. Lucky for her she'd never been able
to strike any deep roots, anywhere. At least she was used to
disadvantages.

   What more can the Supreme Ironist do? Let's see, you're a
woman. A black woman. A black woman who came up through
the ranks. A black, ex-ranker, divorced woman. A black,
ex-ranker, divorced, gay woman. A black, ex-ranker, divorced,
gay woman in charge of a ship. A black, ex-ranker, divorced,
gay woman in command of a ship thrown back three thousand
years in time with a crew getting more hysterical by the
moment. What else could happen?

  She had an uneasy feeling she'd find out.

   The Nantucket Council was meeting around an office table in
the Town Building, on Broad Street down by the Whaling
Museum. The building was eighteenth-century brick Georgian
on the outside, late-twentieth Institutional Bland inside. Voices
sounded through open windows as outside, slippery mounds of
fish were manhandled into boxes, garbage bags, and the backs of
pickups and the island's ubiquitous Jeep Cherokees for
distribution. The smell was already fairly powerful.

   Cofflin rapped his knuckles on the table and spoke: "All right,
people, we've toted it up, and with strict rationing we've got
enough food for about two to three weeks from our reserves.
Thank God not many of the summer people had arrived, but
we're still up against it. Captain Alston? What's the fishing
situation?"

  Marian Alston had been sitting quietly, making notes now
and then. Occasionally she would change a small ball of hard
rubber from one hand to another, squeezing steadily.

   "There are two real trawlers operating out of Nantucket, and
another that was here from Mattapoisett, sheltering from rough
weather. As long as the fuel lasts, they can pull in enough to give
everyone on the island a pound or more of fish a day—the schools
of cod and herring and flounder and whatnot out there have to
be seen to be believed. The main problem is breaking nets
because the yields are so heavy."
   "Thank God for that," Cofflin said. "Both Nantucket trawlers
were slated to be junked next year," he went on. He'd been a
commercial fisherman himself for a while, between getting out of
high school and joining the Navy; he'd gone into police work
after that. Like most trades that were really essential, working
the nets had paid squat and had zero prospects. Back up in the
twentieth, at least. Here the priorities were different.

   Alston nodded. "As long as the fuel lasts, they'll be very useful.
When it's gone, which will be fairly soon, they're useless. We can
adapt the scallop boats to long-line hand fishing—there's an old
man on the island we found who knows the technique, and we've
got him giving lessons to yachtsmen and they're teaching others.
We can use the sailing yachts too. They won't be what you'd call
efficient, but they'll do for seine netting. Without fuel to spare,
the motorboats are worthless—unless we cut them down and
convert them to dories. I've got some parties workin' on that, too,
but we're short of beams, planks, wood of all kinds."

   "No problem there." Cofflin pushed a pile of papers across the
table. "Here's a list of surplus buildings. Use the materials. Lord
knows the island's got plenty of house carpenters—they're yours
for this. Get in touch with Sam Macy. He's about the best
housebuilder, and everyone knows him." He paused. "Bottom
line, what are the fishing prospects?"

   "Good. We're landing several tons a day already. Even shore
fishing is yielding significant amounts. The hand techniques
should be coming online about the time we run out of motor fuel
for the trawlers, giving us our daily needs and about a quarter or
more over for reserves. The problem is preservation. We need
salt, and lots of it. Even more when we start bringing in
whalemeat."

   "Whales! You can't kill whales." Pamela Lisketter gasped.

  The other members of the Council looked down the table at
her. "Why not?" Rosenthal snapped.

   "They're an endangered species!"

   "Not here they're not," Captain Alston said. "They're a
navigation hazard. You can't sail five miles out there without
bumping into the damned things. We need the meat, and we
need oil for lighting and cooking, and the rest of them we can
grind up and use on the crops."

   She turned to the farm owner. "Ms. Brand, we'll also be
producing a lot of fish offal, by-products. Good fertilizer, I
understand."

   Dr. Coleman cut in. "Save the livers of the cod. We're going to
have problems with vitamin deficiencies, too. I've rounded up all
the supplements and pills on the island, but with the shortage of
fresh greens and fruits you're projecting, we may have actual
scurvy by winter."

   Cofflin nodded. "Right now, we'll eat fresh fish and whale
meat, plus perishables, and save all the canned goods and other
keepers for the winter to eke out what we salt down and preserve
and what we can grow. Doc, we should be able to get wild fruits
and berries. Would cranberries and blueberries help? We've got
a couple of hundred acres of cranberry bog, right enough."

   "If they're properly preserved, yes, they'll help with the
vitamin problem."

   Martha Stoddard tapped the table in her turn, with one
finger. "There are a lot of wild plants that have useful quantities
of vitamins, and edible seaweed too. My Girl Scout troop was
doing a project on them. Some of the seaweed can be dried, as
well. Dulse, for example—health food stores sell dried dulse as a
snack. High in vitamin C."

   "Good," Cofflin said. "Why don't you and the doctor get
together on that?"

  "Medicinal herbs too," Coleman said. "I'm experimenting with
producing simple antibiotics, but we're going to be short of a
good deal else."

   "Good. Now that we know we're not going to starve to death
right away, what about the next few months to a year?" Cofflin
said. He looked over at Angelica Brand.
   "I'm sorry, Chief, but my operation is basically for flowers and
luxury vegetables," she said. "There's only the greenhouses, and
about a hundred acres under vegetables every summer, and
that's a drop in the bucket."

   Cofflin restrained an impulse to run his hands through his
hair. Brand Farms was the only real agricultural enterprise on
the island. There were a few hobby farms, an herb grower,
private vegetable gardens, people who kept a cow or a horse or
something, a lone vineyard, and that was it. It had been a long,
long time since Nantucket fed itself. Even back in the
Revolutionary War there had been famine here when the British
blockaded the island, and they'd already been trading whale oil
and fish for grain. The manager of the A&P had been invaluable
in tracking down all the food reserves, but there just wasn't
much. Deliveries from the mainland came three times a week
even in winter.

   Then Brand struck the palm of her hand to her forehead.
"Wait a minute—my off-season cover crop is winter rye. If I don't
plow that up for vegetables, we can harvest it, by hand if we have
to. Call it a hundred acres at twenty or so bushels… say two
thousand bushels of grain. Not until late August, though. That's
about…" She punched her calculator. "About one-fifth of our
needs for a year, not counting what I'd have to hold back as
seed."

   "Potatoes," Ian Arnstein said. The others looked at him; he
flushed slightly and went on: "Potatoes are a pretty complete
diet, they grow well in a sandy soil, and an acre will support two
people. They keep well, too. The Irish used to live off potatoes
and skim milk. We could live on potatoes and salt fish over the
winter, probably."

  Angelica Brand went into a huddle with the A&P manager
and her secretary and pecked at her calculator. At last she said:

   "It's pretty elementary farming, and we've got our usual
shipment of seed potatoes on hand at my place. We could plant a
couple of hundred acres, although that will cut down on the
period for living off stored food," she said. "Plus I can put in a
few hundred acres of corn and vegetables, drawing on my own
stocks and the stuff from the gardening and supply shops. But I
don't have the equipment to cultivate that much, even counting
the relics used as lawn ornaments and such I've been tracking
down. There isn't that much cleared land on the island, in fact,
even if we use lawns and flowerbeds. Incidentally, we should use
some of the lawns for fodder, grazing and hay, if we can."

   Chief Cofflin closed his eyes, then opened them in decision.
"People are going crazy sitting around with nothing to do,
anyways." Most of the island's economy depended on tourists.
The demand for real estate agents, store clerks, waiters, and
cooks had taken an abrupt nosedive. "We'll do the clearing and
planting by hand if we have to." He went on, "We'll divide them
into teams. Ms. Brand, you use your tractors to do the heavy
clearing, plus what earthmoving equipment we can dig up. Then
we'll have the teams move in and get ready to plant with hand
tools. Anything else you've got seed for, too. Carrots, beets,
turnips, you name it. Find the best land and we'll worry about
compensation for the owners later, if we live."

   "How are we going to pay people to work? It's just sinking in
that money isn't worth much anymore," the town clerk said.

  That was a good question. "Any ideas?"

   Starbuck nodded. "Food. I say anyone who wants to eat,
works. We can run a sort of chit system, so many hours drawing
so much, and then juggle it. Of course, we'll have to figure out
something different for people who can't work, and eventually
we'll need a money of our own. But that's going to have to wait."

   Martha Stoddard cleared her throat. "The older people, we've
got a lot of retirees, they can do things like child-minding. We'll
need a day-care system with everybody able-bodied working."

   "Good idea, Martha. Yours too, Joseph: work if you want to
eat. Damn, you know, that sounds pretty good… Any objections?"
Cofflin didn't see any. "Speaking of money, we'll have to make a
register of houses, land, and cars and suchlike owned by coo… by
people who weren't here when the Event happened. We'll have to
commandeer property owned by residents, too, but let's make it
clear from the beginning that there'll be compensation
eventually."

  Everyone nodded. Angelica Brand returned to her specialty:

   "Chief, this island is just a big sand dune out in the ocean.
There's not much in the way of nutrients in this soil, and I don't
have much fertilizer, either. What's more, the best land has the
thickest scrub cover."

   "Plant everything you can, and you've got the stuff from the
composting sewage works." He silently thanked God they'd
managed to keep that going, for a few crucial hours a day at
least. Without it they might have had plague already. "We can
use sludge from septic tanks too, if it's treated—find out how. I'm
putting you in charge of food production. Levy the people you
need. From now on we're farmers, like it or not."

  "Brush," Arnstein said. The others looked at him, and he
hurried on: "We have to clear the brush anyway, so we burn it
and turn under the ashes. Slash-and-burn farming. The ashes
should enrich the soil for a year or two."

   Brand nodded and began to make notes. "We'll be short of
hand tools. I'll get on to the machine shop. Seahaven Engineering
ought to be able to handle what we'll need, them and the
plumbers. And seed's going to be a problem next year—these
hybrids don't breed true… And I suppose we'll have to keep all
the livestock for breeding."

  "Everything that can breed," Cofflin agreed.

   Martha Stoddard spoke again: "You might try locating wild
Jerusalem artichokes, here and on the mainland. They're a
native plant. Yield and methods are about like potatoes, and they
like a poor sandy soil. They keep well right in the soil overwinter,
too."

   Cofflin looked at her with respect. "Now, that's an excellent
idea, Martha. Perhaps your scout troop could start in on that as
well."

  "And this being March, the stores would be full of packets of
garden seed," Martha went on thoughtfully. "The feed stores
might have whole unmilled oats, too. Some of them might
sprout."

   She paused for a moment. "And get on to Paul Hill-water, the
botanist—he's been doing a study of Nantucket's historical
ecology for years now. He can advise us on what not to clear, to
keep wind erosion down and block salt spray. That used to be
quite a problem here when the island was mostly bare."

  Angelica Brand nodded and started to speak; Cofflin held up a
hand. "Hold off on that for a moment, Angelica. The Professor
suggested something. Ron, you heard anything yet you can't
handle in the way of toolmaking?"

   Ron Leaton, the owner of Seahaven Engineering, was a
slender man in early middle age, with long-fingered hands like a
violinist. "Oh, I can work up anything you want," he said. "Give
me power and bar stock or sheet steel. The problem is there's
only one of me. I can do anything, but not everything."

   That was a problem. Nantucket simply didn't have much
industry. Seahaven was a one-man quasi-hobby; most of
Leaton's living had come from his computer dealership, with the
machine shop in his basement. At that, it was the sole and
singular metalworking facility on the island, unless you counted
the high school shop classes and the Eagle's onboard machine
shop.

   Cofflin pressed his ringers to his forehead. "Let's look at it this
way. What have you got, what can it do, and what can you do to
do more of it?"

  "Ah…" Leaton frowned. "Well, I've got a 1956-type Bridgeport
milling machine, with digital controls added on, an old Atlas
twelve-by-thirty-six engine lathe, an Atlas horizontal milling
machine, a seven-inch Ammco shaper, and I just got in a
Schaublin eight-by-eighteen precision tool-making lathe, a real
beauty—Swiss. All light-to-medium stuff. There may be more
on-island. I'll start looking."

   The head of the Nantucket Electric Company cut in: "You
made those flanges for us, and some other fairly heavy work. The
turbocharger, for instance."

   "Yup, but I sort of cheated—used the Bridgeport as a vertical
lathe with a rotary table." He looked around. "Forty-eight inches
by twenty-nine, machined out of solid five-eighths plate—"

  Cofflin cleared his throat. Leaton flushed and continued:

    "Bottom line, Chief, is that I could make just about anything,
including more tools; a lathe is one of the few tools that can
make a copy of itself. It'll be a little awkward without a foundry,
but I could make a round bar bed lathe, the Unimat type; it'll
work perfectly well, just not as durable as a cast or forged bed.
I'm making a tool cutter of my own right now, or was before this
all happened."

  "Excuse me," Arnstein cut in. "You're saying that eventually
you could duplicate your operation, and then duplicate it again,
and so forth? And that you can do pretty well any metal shape?"

  "Yup," Leaton said, obviously puzzled. "Give me the metal,
and yes. Wasn't that what I was saying?"

  "You could make, for example, a steam engine?"

   "Well, I do that all the time—little ones, and they're working
scale models. I've got machinery that can work to
ten-thousandths of an inch, and Watt did it with tolerances of
an eighth of an inch. I've got a nice set of Weber
measuring-gauge blocks, after all. I could turn out, say, a
twenty-five-horsepower model in a week, maybe convert an old
VW flat-type engine. Need a welder to help me with the boiler…
maybe use a propane tank… but hell, we've got half a dozen
top-notch welders and some heavy bending rolls. Bit difficult to
make really big cylinders without a foundry or casting plant, but
I could if you gave me a month or two to tool up. Up to a couple
of hundred horsepower. But we don't have the fuel for many of
those. Hell, we can't keep the town power plant running for more
than six months, no matter how we ration, right, Fred?"

  The head of the Electric Company nodded, abstracted; he was
making frantic notes.

   Cofflin let out a long sigh. "Well, you'll need more space than
that basement, and more people. Look up anyone with
experience, and, hmm, you and Joseph here scout for a building
that'll give you room to expand."

  He noticed Lisketter scowling. "Ms. Lisketter, what about
your artisans?"

  She tapped the edges of the papers in front of her. What are
we going to do when we run out of paper? he thought.

  "There are dozens of weavers," she said. "And…"

   Cofflin was surprised at the cogent, well-organized list that
followed. He nodded at the end of it. "Good work, Ms. Lisketter.
So we'll be well enough off for clothing when our current stores
run out?"

   They'd also have a large surplus of silversmiths and graphic
artists. And, thank God, a number of metalworkers, farriers,
three genuine blacksmiths; one who specialized in blades, a
visitor caught here. Plenty of pottery makers, and there was even
a glassblower who'd just moved his studio to the island last year.

  She shook her head. "We don't have the raw materials.

  We need flax and wool—cotton if you can get it. I know it's not
our top priority, but…"

  Arnstein cleared his throat. "Cotton might be available in the
Caribbean or Mexico," he said. "Flax and wool certainly from
Europe."

   "We could grow flax here—the climate's right. It's a useful
oilseed as well. We could get the flax seed along with grain from
Europe," Brand said thoughtfully. "Grinding grain might be a
problem—"

  "Ayup," Cofflin said. "Remember the Old Mill? We'll finally get
some use out of the damned tourist trap."
   There was a chuckle around the table, particularly from the
native islanders. The Old Mill was a shingled windmill, kept
functional for the tourist trade.

   Brand spoke: "Chief, get me seed and tools and people and I
can produce grain. But I'd have to have the seed soon, for spring
planting—it looks like the growing season's longer here, but even
so, it'll be tight. We could use more animal breeding stock as
well. There's some poultry, and those will reproduce fast. It's the
larger stock that are the problem. We have a small herd of sheep,
good dual-purpose Corriedales; and four stallions, forty-two
mares, twenty-one geldings; and some cows, several of them in
calf, thank God, so we should get a bull calf or two, but not a pig
on the island. Pigs would be ideal—they breed so quickly and eat
anything—and we could use ewes, mares and cows as well.
They're the limiting factor."

   Cofflin looked at Alston. She spread her hands. "I can take the
Eagle across the Atlantic easily enough," she said. "Assumin' the
winds and currents are basically similar, in about two weeks on
the northern route, with a little more to get back. Plus whatever
time it takes to dicker with the locals and to load. The Eagle
wasn't designed to carry cargo. My only real problem is the stars,
now that we're back to celestial navigation as our only means of
finding where we are. Everything's slightly off. We can
compensate, but it'll take time to figure out how."

   Rosenthal spoke: "I can get you a new set of data, complete
tables. I'll have the printout to you in a couple of days."

   The chief gnawed at his lip, wishing he'd been able to get
more sleep. Risking the Eagle was not something he wanted to
do, not at all. It was a priceless asset… but an asset had to be
used.

  "Let's see if we can get some figures here," he said.

   They consulted, punched calculators—oh, those are going to
be missed when the batteries run out—argued. In the end the
results showed that there might be enough to keep them through
winter from what they could grow and catch with the resources
already on the island… if their assumptions weren't wrong, and
everyone pitched in.

   "No margin," he said. "That settles it, we need more food." He
turned to the Coast Guard officer. "When were you planning on
going whaling?" he said.

   "We're rigging for it now, and Mr. Leaton has done a fine job,
a harpoon gun that ought to work. Tomorrow we start, and we
don't think it'll take more than a few days to get all the dead
whales you can handle, using a plane for spotting. Some of your
people are getting the rending tubs and whatever out of the
Whaling Museum right now. Lookin' like they'll be functional."

  Cofflin nodded. "Where can we get bulk salt? Anyone know?"

   Arnstein cleared his throat. "The Bahamas—Inagua island,
down at the southern tip. There are big salt lagoons there, or at
least there were in our time. You can scoop it up around the
edges with shovels."

   Cofflin chuckled. "Damn, but that education of yours is
turning out useful."

   "Actually I honeymooned there with my late wife. The tour
guide told me."

   Alston spoke: "That's shoal water. I'd hate to take the Eagle in
close there."

   Cofflin nodded. "What's that two-master sailing yacht
called…"

   "The Yare," Alston said. "Wooden-hulled topmast schooner,
about a hundred tons burden, Canadian-built, old but still
sound. Small auxiliary engine. It's a replica—the original design
was a revenue cutter. There's another tied up, the Bentley,
seventy-foot schooner, about three-quarters her displacement,
but the masts and rigging need work. The Yare can leave
anytime. I'll put one of my officers in command."

   "All right, we'll send the Yare to Inagua. We send the Eagle
east for grain. Everyone draw up your wish lists of things to get
that might be there." He paused and thought. "Professor, what
should we take for trade goods?"

   "Almost anything," Arnstein said. "Cloth, ornaments— with
the number of jewelry stores on the island, that should be no
problem—metal tools, anything like that. Bits of glass would
probably do, wire…"

  "I'm putting you in charge of it," Cofflin said. "Incidentally,
you're going." Arnstein yelped. "You're the closest thing to an
expert on dealing with primitives we have."

   "But I won't even be able to talk to them!" Arnstein protested.

   "I thought you knew ancient languages?"

   "I know Latin, which isn't spoken yet, and Greek, classical
Greek, and I've read Homer and looked at the Linear B stuff. But
even the classical period's seven hundred years in the future!
Homeric Greek is to classical what Shakespeare's English is to
ours, and Mycenaean is five hundred years before that, call it
Chaucerian. And they won't be speaking Greek on the shores of
the English Channel, anyway."

   "Neither will anyone else be able to talk to the locals, will
they?" Cofflin said.

   "Not unless we have a Lithuanian," Arnstein admitted. The
others looked at him. "Lithuanian is a very conservative
language," he said. "About like Sanskrit, which is being spoken
in northwestern India at this date. Indo-European languages
should be spreading through western Europe about now,
defining now as being the last millennium and a half or so,
unless you believe Colin Renfrew's nonsense… sorry, academic
squabble. But someone who spoke it would probably be able to
pick up any of the early versions of Indo-European fairly quickly,
other things being equal." He shrugged. "But how likely are we to
find—"

   Doreen Rosenthal cleared her throat, twisting a lock of hair
around a finger. "My mother came from Vilnus. I speak it," she
said.
   Martha Stoddard looked up from her notepad. "There's a
fairly good languages section at the Athenaeum," she noted.
"And I know at least one retired linguist on island. Speaking of
which, Jared, we're going to be doing a fair bit of research on
one thing and't'other. Old-style ways of doing, and such." She
frowned. "Plus we ought to print out some things on CD-ROM,
right now, while we can."

   "Good idea, Martha. You're in charge of research projects, of
course." Cofflin turned his head to the manager of the Nantucket
Electric Company. "Fred, how are we fixed for energy?"

   "I've got about one month's fuel," he said. "Fuel barge was tied
up at the… Event, topping up to take us through to the
switchover to the mainland cable. According to the gas stations
and boating people, there's enough gasoline for, say, two weeks
at normal usage. After that, well, we might be able to get those
windmills going again. Remember that wind-farm idea?"
Everyone nodded. The tall frames of the wind generators still
stuck up out of fields around the town. "That would give us, oh,
five, eight percent of our usual output indefinitely."

  Cofflin nodded. "We're closing down all private autos as of
now," he said. "Official use, ambulances, fire engines, and
Angelica's tractors only. The trawlers have first priority. How
many bicycles do we have?"

   "About thirty-five hundred, counting private, in the rental
places, and in the stores."

   "Good, that'll help." One advantage of being a tourist trap.
"Fred, you get together with Doc Coleman, and we'll arrange an
essential-uses-only electricity schedule. That ought to stretch the
fuel oil. The rest of us will have to go to bed with the sun until we
get whale-oil lanterns. Next…"

   It was a relief to be finally doing something.

   "We're working like slaves!" the man complained.

   He was thirty-something, and from the look of his jeans and
plaid shirt, wealthy. Certainly coof—that New York accent was a
dead giveaway. Not liking the work much, from the way he
straightened and rubbed at his back and threw down his
billhook.

  I can't blame him, Angelica Brand thought. This is something
out of a made-for-TV special. She was a farmer from twelve
generations of farmers, but her generation used tractors and
genetic engineering.

   Pictures of Nantucket from back in her great-grandfather's
day showed a landscape that looked like North Dakota, hardly a
bush over knee-high, but most of the island was overgrown now
with a thick head-high spiny growth of scrub oak, bayberry,
beach plum, red cedar, honeysuckle, pitch pine, and God knew
what, all laced together with wild grapevines and Rosa rugosa.

   The tractors, bulldozers, and earthmoving equipment from
construction sites had knocked down much of the aboveground
brush. The machines left the scrub still chest-high to head-high,
many of the main stems still unbroken. The clumsy untrained
labor of hundreds was scarcely sufficient to cut the brush loose
and drag it into windrows for burning, especially when most of
them had never lifted anything heavier than a computer mouse
or a squash racket in their lives. The smell of it was acrid in her
nostrils, but the ash would be useful. Clumps of men and women
were scattered through the scraggly-looking wreckage she was
supposed to turn into a field, hacking and levering and dragging
at the roots. Tools were in short supply, too.

   Other squads were slumped resting near the truck with the
water, hardly even bothering to lie in its shade despite the
unseasonable heat. A few were putting a better edge on their
tools at the portable grindstone someone had dug out of an attic.
It was the foot-powered type, and worth its weight in gold.

  The man thrust his hands under her nose. "Look at this!"

   Shreds of skin hung down from broken blisters, and bits of the
cloth he'd used to wrap his hands clung, sticky with the lymph.
Angelica Brand nodded sympathetically. "We've got a tub of
ointment back at the house," she said. "When your shift's off,
come on up. There's some cider, too."
  "I'm a certified public accountant!" the man half screamed.
Spittle flung from his lips. "I'm finished with this!"

   He'd picked up the billhook again. It had a wooden shaft five
feet long, with a steel blade socketed onto the end, like an
arm-long single-edged knife with an inward-curving tip at the
end.

   "You can take this fucking thing and ram it up your ass,
bitch!"

   Angelica planted her hands on her hips and glared back.
"Don't you use language like that to me, mister!" she snapped,
fatigue and irritation flaring. "I don't care if you were a rocket
scientist. We have to eat this winter. Or do you think somebody's
going to dock with a ship full of bananas and Big Macs?"

  "I'm an accountant, not a farmer!"

  "We don't need accountants right now. And if you don't work,
you don't get any rations. No exceptions for the able-bodied."

  A woman's voice shouted: "Don! No!"

   The accountant ignored it. Brand's anger turned to a yell of
fear as the man swung at her with the billhook. If he hadn't been
staggering with exhaustion he might have hit her. A root caught
at her boot and she went over backward, staring at the sunlight
breaking off the edge of the heavy tool as he swung it upward.

   Thunk. The butt end of another billhook drove into the
berserker's back. He screamed and whirled, but a third tripped
him. Men and women piled on, wrestling him to the ground and
holding him despite his thrashings.

  "Obliged, Ted," Angelica said shakily, getting to her feet and
dusting herself off. The man nodded silently, which was like
Theodore Corby; she'd known him since she was a girl, and he
never used a word where an economical movement of the chin
would do. "Much obliged."

  She looked around. "Well, nobody said to stop working!" she
called. "Come on, everyone, there's a job to be done!"

  "What'll we do with this guy?"

   The man had stopped roaring and heaving. Now he was lying
prone in the dirt and ash, crying noisily.

   "I…" She hesitated. I run a vegetable farm! she thought. Five
to fifty people worked on it, according to season, and this had
never happened before. "Bring him along. We'd better call the
Chief."

  "Ooooh, gross. Totally, totally gross."

   Ned Shaw turned. The girl was looking at the yard-long cod
she'd just pulled in; the lines were arranged over a rollbar
around the boat, to make hauling easier. The big fish swayed,
flapping, thirty-odd pounds of bad temper on the end of a heavy
hook and line.

   "Tie it off, tie it off!" he barked, pushing down the crowded
deck. He'd been a scalloper most of his life, done some other
fishing, but he'd never seen anything like that fish.

  The girl made a face, but she swung the line inboard and paid
out, letting the cod drop to the boards of the deck. It flopped and
jumped, and she skittered backward.

  "Like this," Shaw said.

    He put a boot on the fish—it must weigh thirty-five pounds
and it wasn't happy at all—and swung a length of stick with a
heavy steel nut on the end. Two crunching blows and the fish was
still.

   "That's good eating, that cod," the fisherman said, heaving it
into the well in the center of the boat with a grunt of effort.
Mebbe forty, forty-five.

  His crew—clerks, salesgirls, high school students,
shopkeepers, computer operators—looked at the fish and
swallowed. They were all hungry, but…
   Then the lines began to jerk all around him. "Get to it!" he
yelled.

   Lines whirred. Cod came up them; sometimes two or three of
the crew would have to pull on a single line, and once a six-foot
monster came over the side with people yelling and dancing to
get out of its way. That one Shaw pinned to the deck with a
boathook, and it took half a dozen two-handed blows of the club
to kill it. He looked up, panting. The well in the center of the
twenty-foot boat was full of fish, a slippery blue-gray mound of
them. The deck was slimy underfoot, covered in scales; the crew
were equally smeared, the hair of the women hanging in rattails.
They grinned back at him.

  "Good day's work," he said. "Get the tarpaulin over them and
we'll head in. Lucky we don't have to clean them."

  The girl who'd caught the first fish of the day daubed at
herself. "Gross," she muttered.

               CHAPTER THREE
  March, Year 1 A.E.

  "Closer. Slow, slow."

   Lieutenant Walker squatted in the prow of the longboat and
broke open the harpoon gun. It was shaped like an outsized
shotgun. He slid the long steel harpoon down the barrel,
cushioned in its wooden sabot. Its mechanism gave a smooth
oiled snick as he closed it and swung the simple post-and-groove
sights onto the side of the whale, aiming six feet behind the eye.
His helper leaned forward and clipped the end of the line to a
ring welded onto the shaft just behind the folding barbs and the
bulge that held a charge of bursting powder.

  Whoever ran this up knew his way around a machine shop,
Walker thought. He'd always liked hunting, and a good weapon
doubled the pleasure.

  Spray lapped into his face like the tongue of a salty dog.
Behind him the crew of sailors and cadets stroked at their oars
again. The day was an enormous bowl of blue, only the tiny dot
of the Eagle to break the watery horizon, and scarcely a cloud in
the sky. It was hot enough to make him sweat, despite the
droplets of seawater striking cold on his T-shirt. Ahead the whale
lay basking like a flexible black reef; a right whale, with a huge
head that made up a third of its sixty feet. Blackfish, the type
that had been the staple of inshore whaling in New England
before they were hunted out and the big whalers began to sail to
Hawaii and Kamchatka. A white patch of barnacles marked its
snout; when it raised a flipper he could see white skin beneath,
vivid in contrast to the dark-blue water and the coal color of the
animal. Close enough to see the eyes, like golf balls set into the
sides of a submarine. It blew, a tall double plume that turned
into a mist of spray falling across them.

  Whales were spouting all around, hundreds of them, pod after
pod.

  "Feels like murder," one of the cadets muttered. The whales
had never been hunted, evidently not even by Indians in canoes.
You could get within touching distance sometimes.

  "Looks like dinner," Walker said cheerfully. "Ready for it…
now." He squeezed the trigger.

   Tump. The harpoon blasted out of the barrel, blurring
through the air. Line whipped out from the improvised tub
beside the harpoon gun. It began to smoke with friction, and
Cadet Simpson tossed seawater from her bucket on it. Whack. A
flat, wet sound as the steel hit the whale's side.

  "Hang on!" Walker yelled.

   The whale dove with a smash of its tail that left Walker
drenched and dripping, grinning as he clung to the harpoon
gun's mount. The longboat lurched forward, and the crew fell
over one another in a tangle of oars punctuated by yells. Water
fountained up from either side of the bows as the line jerked
forward and down, pulling them along like an outboard motor
gone berserk. The Nantucket sleigh ride, they'd called it in the
old days. The Coast Guard officer counted the seconds:
  … five… six… hope the fucking fuse works this time… seven …
He wouldn't be able to hear the blast underwater, but the, whale
would surely feel it.

    The line went slack as the whale broached, half its length out
of the water. Blood streamed from the hole gouged by the
grenade, but the four barbs held fast. The great animal lay on the
surface and threshed in its death agony, nearly swamping the
boat that had killed it. All around, other whales were fleeing the
sound of its distress, blowing and diving. At last it slumped into
stillness, floating quietly as the crew of the longboat bailed out
the water.

   "Thank God this type floats when it's dead," Walker said.
"Let's make her fast."

   The Eagle was making sail in their direction; there were
lookouts up at the mastheads with binoculars. Cadet Simpson
slipped out of her pants and jacket and went overboard with a
line to make fast around the whale's flukes. Walker watched with
interest; someday they'd have to admit that the old
fraternization rules didn't make much sense. Or maybe there
would be opportunities when they went east, next week…

   The ship was looming larger, moving fairly quickly despite the
four whales secured to her sides. This one towed astern, and
they'd have enough for starters.

  He looked east. Who knew what waited there? Upon a peak in
Darien…

  "We'll take hundreds of these," Ian Arnstein said.

   The spearhead was seven inches long, and three wide at the
broadest, cut and ground out of a straightened section of
automobile leaf spring. The edge was razor-sharp, tapering to a
murderous point. The tang was socketed onto a smooth
eight-foot wooden shaft; the whole ensemblage felt heavy and
solid and well balanced. Deadly. Ian hefted it and tried to
imagine using it. Damn. I'd rather have read about this than
had to do it, he thought.
   Seahaven Engineering had moved into a big former
boat-house, out east of town near the head of the harbor. The
machine shop was noisy, clangs and thumps and shrill
screaming sounds as somebody pushed a piece of metal against a
grindstone; it smelled of iron and ozone.

   Ronald Leaton nodded; he was looking as tired as everyone
else, and was dressed in a grease-stained baseball cap and
overalls that looked like they'd been on for days. "Here's some of
the other stuff you ordered."

   Big knives ground out of bar stock, and short Roman-style
swords. Those had smoothed wooden hilts, brass pommels, and
an S-shaped guard made of rebar and welded on. Ian picked one
up and hefted it, prodding the point into the battered wooden
table it rested on.

  "These are probably better steel than the originals," he said.

   "Yup. That long fancy one you wanted will take another day or
two. Got a book from one of the stores, The Complete Bladesmith
, had a lot of useful hints. John Martins is setting up a
forge—he's that blacksmith who was here visiting Barbara Allis.
He made things like that for hobbyists. And here's our
masterpiece."

   This time Ronald had used a whole leaf from a spring for the
crossbow. It was set at the front of a rifle-type stock.

   "How does it cock?" Ian asked. There was a steel claw
arrangement hooked to the center of the wire string stretched
across the shallow cord of the bow. He pulled at the string with a
tentative hand. It was like a solid bar, immovable.

  "That's a stiff draw," he said.

   "Over three hundred and fifty pounds," the machinist said.
"Brace the stock against your hip and hold the grip. Now put
your other hand on the forestock, through that oval metal loop
that sticks out beyond the wood. Feel that catch under your
thumb? Press it down."
   Ian obeyed. A steel lever came out of its slot in the forestock,
hinged at the rear a few inches ahead of the trigger guard.

   "Pump it back and forth, like the lever on a car jack."

   There was a soft heavy resistance with every stroke, and the
crossbow's string inched backward. At the sixth it clicked home
near the trigger action and the rear sight, the heavy steel bow
bent and ready.

   Ian whistled. Not even the windlass-wound monsters the
crossbowmen of medieval Genoa and Venice used were more
powerful, and it had taken far less time to cock, barely ten
seconds, probably less with practice. Almost as fast as a bow, he
thought. And it took years to make a good archer; this you could
learn to use in a couple of days. Well, we understand mechanical
advantage better than they did back then in medieval times…
in the future. The confusion of tenses made it difficult even to
talk about time travel.

   "We'd better go out back to test this," Ronald said. The paved
space was full of people sorting car parts, putting aside ones to
keep in stock for the limited number of vehicles that were being
kept running; a crew of car mechanics and enthusiastic
amateurs were working on a four-wheeled horse cart made out of
tubing and two-by-fours and the wheels and axles from a Saab. A
hundred paces away a wooden target was propped up against
the wall of an unoccupied summer cottage.

  "Just a front and back sight on the bow," Ronald said. "Here's
something to shoot."

    He handed Ian a bolt, eighteen inches of heavy wooden dowel
with a three-bladed steel head at one end and a trio of plastic
flight feathers at the other. Ian dropped it into the slot and
snuggled the butt against his shoulder. Squeeze the trigger…

   Whunnng. The cord whipped forward, and the bolt flashed in
a snapping blurr. Whunk! It struck in one corner of the target,
sunk half its length and quivering like a malignant bee. Ian
pushed his glasses up his nose and whistled.
   "Not bad," he said. "Not bad at all."

   He looked at how the bolt had plowed itself a foot deep
through solid wood. Logical. These things used to pierce armor.

   They certainly weren't going to be making smokeless powder
and metal cartridges anytime soon. They might be able to make
black powder and muskets in a few years. In the meantime these
would save a lot of utterly irreplaceable ammunition.

  "Lunch," Ronald said, as someone hammered on a triangle
back at Seahaven Engineering. "If you don't mind fish."

   "Fortunately, I don't," Ian said. People on the island who were
allergic to it were in deep trouble.

   "Or there's steak," Ronald went on, grinning.

   "What?"

  "Whale steak. Sort of like beef, only fishy. We made the
harpoon gun, so we get dibs."

   "Morning, Chief."

   "Morning, Fred."

   Fred Roberts was up the frame of the wind generator, head
and hands inside the opened housing. "You wouldn't believe how
things corrode in this sea air."

   "Oh, I guess I would," Cofflin said dryly, leaning his bicycle
against the steel of the support. "Always thought these
eggbeaters were a boondoggle. Your tax dollars at waste."

   More of the Nantucket Electric Company people and teams
from the general population were running up sheds around the
base. He recognized four or five men who'd worked as house
carpenters before the Event, with dozens of the unskilled doing
fetch-and-carry. Cofflin looked inside the long shed; electricians
were setting up row after row of car batteries in parallel, on
bookshelf-style supports that filled the inside. He nodded at their
greetings. The batteries would help even out the flow of power
from the windmills, taking up the slack when the air was calm or
giving extra at peak demand. Luckily, it was a rare day on the
island without a breeze. He ducked back out; Fred was
answering his last remark:

   "They were a boondoggle, but we're lucky to have them…
There." He pulled his head out of the machine and wiped his face
on the sleeve of his overall. "Got it, I think. We should be able to
get most of these things running, for a while at least. Robbing
Peter to pay Paul, and it'll get harder and harder to replace lost
parts. I suppose we could rewind the coils by hand with
telephone wire…"

    His voice died off into a preoccupied mumble, an expert
talking with himself. Cofflin nodded and looked out over the
landscape of the island that had been his ancestors' home for
fifteen generations. More, if you counted the very faint trace of
Indian blood.

   Not far away, one of Brand's tractors was dragging an
improvised harrow over half-cleared land. People were walking
behind it in long rows stretched across the turned gray-brown
soil. The first row were making holes with shovels, hoes,
billhooks, and sticks. The second row had sacks slung from their
shoulders, and they were dropping in quartered potatoes, each
piece with two eyes for sprouting. The third were carrying
buckets, dropping in a dollop of fertilizer—better not to ask
where it came from—and filling in the holes, tamping them down
with their hands. It came to him that he'd never seen that many
people working in a field, not even when he spent a few summers
picking tobacco in the Connecticut Valley. Not that many… not
in America, at least. In Asia, yes. Though most of his traveling
there had been behind the splinter shield of a 20mm.

   Fred was climbing down the ladder built into the support leg.
"It's amazing," he said. "Here we're doing just a few things, and
everyone on the island is working dawn to dusk."

   Cofflin took a Tupperware container of fish sticks from the
carryall at the rear of the bike. He opened the top and offered
some to the other man. Fred sighed, then brightened slightly at
the taste. ,

   "S'good," he said.

   "Ayup. Martha made 'em up. Not looking forward to the day
the spices run out," he said. "Reason I came was we need more
ice. Until we can salt down the fish, that is. Loads are coming in
pretty fast."

  "Well, I suppose we could switch on the A&P again, and put
buckets of water in the freezers…"

   Marian Alston strolled toward the point where the streets
met, hands in her pockets. It was very dark without the
streetlights, but heaven was frosted with stars and the moon was
full. She walked quietly; nobody was about at this hour, and the
houses around were dark and shuttered, waiting for summer
dwellers who would never arrive. Trees overarched brick
sidewalks crumpled into unevenness by thrusting roots; she took
the middle of the road, where a little cool white light filtered
through the leaves of the elms. The night was quiet enough that
an occasional voice from the distant center of town sounded
clear. The crickets in the small marsh up the street were louder.
Both seemed to enhance the silence.

   Tempting to leave it all. Sail away from the problem, go see
the strangeness she'd been landed in, lose herself in wandering
and adventure. Not really an option, of course. Yet it was Eagle
she loved, and the sea. This island was too new to her to hold her
heart.

   Different, she thought. She'd liked to walk out at night
sometimes when she was a girl in her father's house. The sky
looked cooler here; life was colored in shades of blue and
fog-gray, without the yeasty aliveness of the Low Country. She
wondered what it would be like to visit there now, so long and
long before the first small wooden ships dropped anchor before
rivers not yet named Ashley or Cooper. No crumbled tabby ruins
to find among the trees, overgrown remains of Great House and
slave quarters. No weathered wooden shacks; no clipped green
golf courses amid the palmettos either. Just water, reeds, stars…
her lips quirked. Indians, of course. The mosquitoes would be
there too.

   She shook her head ruefully and returned to the present. The
monument in the center of the crossroads was small and
unassuming. No statue, just a round millstone base and above a
granite plinth with the names of the island's Union dead. Very
many names, for so small a town; men who could have stayed
home in comfort, and the way the war turned out wouldn't have
affected their lives one bit. Men who ended lying on bloodstained
tables down from Cemetery Ridge, with their bones shattered
into splinters by minie balls and the surgeon's saw ready; men
shivering and puking out their lives with yellow fever in the
swamps along the Chickahominy; men drowned in the blackness
of Farragut's ironclad in Mobile Bay; men down in the red clay
while ants marched over their tongues toward sightless eyes.
They had gone a long way from home, to die among angry
strangers.

   The captain of the Eagle took two steps backward and came
to attention. Her salute was slow, with a precise quivering snap
at the end. Then she turned and walked homeward.

   "Still working, Ms. Rosenthal?" Ian Arnstein asked.

   Doreen Rosenthal started and looked up from her books.

   The Eagle had electric light still, which was one reason why
she'd moved aboard a little early. He didn't intend to move his
bag of essentials and crates of references into the little cubbyhole
they'd assigned him until tomorrow, the day of their departure.
He sat down across from her; the officers' wardroom was empty,
although there was coffee in the corner for the night watch.

   "Studying, not working," she said, holding up the cover of the
book. It was a physics text; the title made very little sense to him.
"Trying to figure out what happened to us. That's Doreen, by the
way. No sense in being formal if we're going on a cruise." She
smiled shyly.

  He smiled back. "Well, it beats bush-clearing detail, Doreen."
Everyone on the Council was supposed to put in at least a few
hours. It made sense in a political sort of way, he supposed, but
his back hurt. "Most people call me Ian."

   "Funny, you don't look Scottish."

  They shared a laugh. "My parents were extremely assimilated.
Any luck with the search for the causes of the Event?"

   He went over to the urn and poured them both a cup; no more
coffee soon, so make the best of it. No more cream or sugar,
either—the output of the few dozen cows on the island was
reserved for the sick and children. Cows could breed, but he
didn't even know if sugarcane had been domesticated yet, and
they certainly weren't going to be sending any expeditions to
India to find out for a while. I wonder if we could get honeybees
in England? he thought.

  One more thing to look up. He remembered that there hadn't
been any in the Americas when the settlers arrived, but not
whether anyone was raising them at this early date in the Old
World. Or there might be some hives on Nantucket.

  "No luck," Doreen said, sticking a piece of paper in the book
and closing it.

   "How do you take it?"

   "Black."

   Paper… Ian shoved the thought into the enormous to-do file.
"Do you favor the Act of God hypothesis, or the Saucer People
theory?" he asked with a grin, setting down the cups. "Those are
the two main schools of thought on the island, and apart from
food and blisters, people don't talk about much else. Then there
are the dissenting minority churches; the Satan-did-it, and the
Government Secret Project slash Conspiracy. And a new eclectic
faith, the Saucer People Are Part of the Conspiracy."

   "I'm in the minority," she said ruefully. "I comprehend the
vastness of my own ignorance. I'm morally certain that whatever
caused the Event was deliberate, at least in the sense that a
chemical plant blowing up is deliberate. The whole thing was
too… too artificial not to be the result of intent, even if it was an
accident, some machine some-when going off half cocked, or
whatever, somewhere and somewhen. The precise ellipse around
the island, for instance. But apart from that I've got no earthly
inkling what happened. I did have a wild idea…"

  "What?" he said eagerly. "Tell me."

   She rubbed a hand across the cover of the book. "I thought…
well, how do we know this is the same universe, exactly, as the
one we left? I decided to try to remeasure the physical constants,
to see if anything had changed."

  "And?"

   "And everything's exactly the same, as far as I can
determine—I don't have much in the way of equipment, you
understand. Gravity, electrical resistance, they're all the same.
For that matter, solid-state electronics wouldn't work here if the
constants were very different." She sighed. "As I said, I'm
beginning to comprehend how much I don't know."

   "Socrates thought that was the beginning of wisdom," Ian
said.

    Doreen's mouth twisted wryly. "It's the beginning of
uselessness," she said. "I mean, you know a lot of things that are
useful. History's your specialty. What earthly use is my degree
here?" She propped her head on a palm. "I suppose I could teach
school, or something of that nature. Maybe a self-defense course,
if I can get back in the swing—I used to do that sort of thing. The
only really useful thing I've done since the Event is figure out
exactly when we were."

   "You've come up with a number of good ideas," Ian said'
stoutly, patting her hand. "Which is more than most of the
selectmen. The only thing they did was manage to acquire some
popularity before the Event, totally irrelevant now. You helped
with the navigation tables and saved invaluable time."

   "What is relevant?" Doreen said moodily, sipping at her
coffee. "Certainly not my plans for an academic career. Did you
know, I wanted to be a ballet dancer once?" She looked down at
herself and sighed. "When I was six. But even then it was obvious
I'd never have legs up to my armpits."

   Ian shrugged. "I've had an academic career," he said. "Not the
same field, of course. At least you don't have to worry about
cutbacks now."

  She looked up at him. "You don't seem as… disoriented as
most of us."

   "Cofflin and the captain aren't, much," Ian said. "Which is
fortunate, because it's keeping us alive. As for me, well, I'm a
historian, and here we are in capital-H History. I didn't have any
close ties at home, so…"

   He stirred the coffee and looked at the rear of the spoon.
Made in Japan. Nothing much made in Japan right now except
pots… Jomon? No, that was thousands of years before this. He
shivered slightly. It could awe you, the sense of years before
years, lives before lives, the sheer depth of history, even at the
best of times. Right now…

    He cast off the feeling. "I wanted to be a science fiction writer
myself," he said. "I even wrote a few books—fantasy really, under
a pen name. Then there was this car accident, my wife was
killed…"

   "I'm sorry," Doreen said. It seemed to be genuine. She patted
his hand.

    "Frankly, we were about to get divorced. Then I got a teaching
position, which was an incredible stroke of luck when you
consider the market for classical-era historians, and never had
time for the writing. Not fiction, at least. But I always kept up
reading it. Time travel's a fairly common theme in science
fiction, and some of it's surprisingly well thought out." He
shrugged. "Could have been worse; at one point, I was thinking
of specializing in the Byzantine period, and there's something
recondite for you."

   "Ian…" she paused. "What do you think's going to happen to
us?"
   He spread his hands, palms out. "How should I know? We
might all be turned into turnips tomorrow or carried off to Alpha
Centauri, or thrown back into the Jurassic and eaten by
velociraptors, or… hell, my sense of the orderly and predictable
course of nature has taken a severe knock! If we're left here? We
might make it. I'm more hopeful than I was right after the Event.
But it'll be close. This voyage is important."

  Doreen nodded thoughtfully, one hand touching the smooth
oak staff beside her. "I'll do my best."

   "If you don't mind me saying so, you're doing better than a lot
of people too. Adjusting, that is," Arnstein said.

  "My father's dead, I'm an only child, and my mother… well,
we're not close," she said. "I could almost wish to see her face
when she gets the news. No husband, no kids, no time for it yet.
There are friends I'm going to miss, but it's not like they're dead.
They're just not here."

   Of course, we could have wiped them all out by landing here,
Ian thought. He kept that firmly to himself. Nobody wanted to
think about that hypothesis. Better to believe the more
comforting one, that they had simply started another branch on
the tree of time.

   "It's fortunate that it's Nantucket, in a way," he said. "Most of
the islanders were born here, and they're pretty clannish
anyway."

  "Yeah, I get the idea some of them have hardly noticed the
outside world vanishing," Doreen laughed.

   "Why don't we take a turn on deck?" he said. "The stars may
be different, but they're pretty."

  The shy smile returned. "Don't mind if I do."

  "There's a certain irony involved here," Captain Alston said
next morning, looking over the bales and boxes that her ship
would be taking east.
   Most of the cargo was from the boutiques and souvenir shops
of the town—costume jewelry and colored beads, packed in green
plastic garbage bags. Ditto for the cloth, the more colorful the
better. There was a fair sampling of liquor, some tools, knives,
the spears…

   Booze, beads, and trinkets for the bare-arsed spear-chuckers
of England, she thought.

   Her father would have loved this. For a moment she smiled at
the memory of a big soft-spoken figure with a workingman's
hard hands, swinging her up toward the ceiling. Later he'd
encouraged the reading habit in a girl, and that in a dirt-poor
rural setting where it was unusual for anyone. The only time he'd
ever really lost his temper with her was when her marks fell off.
White man wants a dumb nigger, he'd shouted. Smart black
folk scare 'em. You scare 'em, girl, you scare the shit out of
every one, or you'll feel my hand.

   The smile died. Her family had been farmers on Prince Island
since slavery days. After emancipation that had meant owning
their own land, not sharecropping; her great-great-grandfather
had used his back pay to buy the farm when he mustered out of
the Union Army's black regiments in 1865. Not much of a farm,
but it had fed them and paid their tax for generations, and
they'd hung on to it through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the
Depression. Through times when being too prosperous or too
independent could get a black man hung from a tree, doused in
kerosene, and burned alive while he was still kicking. When the
real-estate taxes went through the roof, her father had lost the
land to a consortium building a resort. Nothing much had gone
right for him after that, until the cancer came and ended it.

  But he would have enjoyed seeing this.

  Ian Arnstein nodded. "I wish we had a specialist in the
European Bronze Age," he said, rubbing at his reddish-brown
beard. "I wish anyone knew anything useful about the European
Bronze Age."

   "You've been doing a lot of research," Alston said. She liked
seeing someone who took their work seriously. "You and Ms.
Rosenthal and the librarian."

   "Ms. Stoddard, yes. And not finding out much. I can tell you
that Stonehenge has been up for a long time, and I can tell you
that the Wessex Culture buried its chieftains with gold and
amber and worked bronze. I can't tell you what language they
spoke, or how they were organized, or whether they were
peaceful or the equivalent of Comanches."

  "You're a hell of a lot better than nothing," Alston said.

   They were standing on the docks, as
townsfolk-turned-stevedores carried bundles up the gangways
and nets full of bales and boxes swung by on pulleys rigged from
a cargo boom pivoting on the mainmast. The captain of the
Eagle looked eastward and smiled.

  "We'll go see."

  Words welled up, from a poet who'd touched something in
her; she stood looking out to sea and let them roll through her
mind:

  What shall we tell you? Tales, marvelous tales

  Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,

  Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,

  And winds and shadows fall towards the West…

   Martha Stoddard stood and watched the departure. Last
night's fog had lifted, leaving only a few patches drifting
silver-gray against the darker wolf-gray of the ocean. Engines
throbbed, sacrificing precious fuel to take the ship through the
narrow channel, around Brant Point and its lighthouse, past the
breakwaters and into the open sea. She supposed that next time
it would be boats with human beings sweating at the oars…

   Orders rang out, faint across the waters. The figures of the
crew were ant-tiny on the yards, their feet resting on the rope
rests below. Canvas dropped, fluttered, filled out in graceful
curves. The yards braced around, and slowly, slowly, the great
ship moved; water rippled smoothly back from either side of her
sharp cutwater. Then she seemed to bow, rose again in a burst of
spray, gathered speed toward the rising sun, and left a wake
creamy white across the long blue swells. The crowd on the docks
cheered themselves hoarse, then gradually fell silent and began
to disperse, off to the work that awaited. A few lingered until the
hull of the ship disappeared behind the curve of the world.

  That's that, she thought.

   Oh, the ship would be in radio contact, but she was getting a
new appreciation of what distance meant. Martha Stoddard had
lived on Nantucket most of her life, nearly all of it except for her
university days. You could feel very isolated here, especially in
the winter when a storm closed down the ferry and airport and
sent waves crashing up to the base of Main Street. Loneliness
had never been a problem with her; she was content enough with
her books and music—and oh, how she missed the music, there
at a touch—and unwilling to tolerate much of the compromise
that having other people in your life meant. It was only now that
she realized what isolated really meant.

    Jared Cofflin was among the last to turn away from the dock.
Martha had a nodding acquaintance with him for many years,
but they'd never really talked much before the… Event. He looked
a little lost in civilian clothes, but he'd insisted that if they
wanted to call him chief executive officer of the island instead of
police chief, he wasn't going to wear a badge and gun. Another
facet of the man revealed by the Event.

  Odd that we're calling it that, she thought. Although she
supposed they had to have some name for whatever it was that
had happened. And don't think too much about it, don't wonder
how or why or who as you lie waiting for sleep, or it will drive
you mad and Doc Coleman will have to come with the needle
and the soothing words…

  "Wish you were off with them, then, Jared?" she said.

  He started, taken out of his brown study. A rueful smile lit his
bony middle-aged face, and he smoothed a hand over the
thinning blond hair on his scalp. "Ayup. Looks to be interesting
over there."

  "You're working too hard," she said suddenly.

  "Everyone's working too hard," he answered. "We have to."

   "You're doing the type that keeps you from sleeping, too. Not
a good thing. What did you have planned?"

   "Spending the morning doing paperwork, and the afternoon
going 'round and seeing how things are developing."

  "Going to and fro in the world, eh?"

   He smiled, a chuckle of genuine humor this time. "Well,
Pastor Deubel has been hinting that I'm inspired from that
direction," he said.

   "Man's a fool," she snorted. And attracting more attention
than is healthy.

  "A natural-born damned fool," he said, nodding agreement.

   "Well, if you're going to be inspecting this afternoon, come
inspect my Girl Scout troop. They're doing good work—"

  "They are at that."

  "—and they deserve to get a word for it."

  He nodded, relaxing a little. "I think I'll do that, Martha."

   "They're also making a picnic lunch of the edible greens," she
said. "You're welcome to share it."

   He smiled. "Bribery?" Fresh vegetables were already running
out, the frozen were tightly rationed, and the canned were being
saved for winter.

  "Consider it research."

  They stood on the dock, acknowledging the greetings of the
crews of the fishing boats; the first loads would be coming in
soon, to add to the malodorous vats of fish offal that stood
waiting to be dragged out to the fields.

   "Be seeing you, then," Jared said, hitching at his belt and
settling his shoulders like a man contemplating a hard day's
work.

   She stood for a moment more, looking eastward. History and
archaeology were her hobby; one thing that had always
impressed her was how thin the record of the past was, a thing
assembled out of rubbish and broken pots and the chance
survival of a few words. Whatever they found east over the sea, it
would be surprising.

   Martha smiled to herself. Life had ceased to be dull, at any
rate. On the other hand, there was that old Chinese saying…

   "Interesting times," she murmured to herself, drawing the
jacket closer around herself against the chill spring morning.
"Extremely interesting."

                CHAPTER FOUR
  March, Year 1 A.E.

    Daurthunnicar son of Ubrotarix hid his relief as the last of the
ponies swam ashore from where they'd been pushed off the
decks; that was safer for their legs than scrambling over the
sides of a beached ship. The stocky hammerheaded beasts shook
themselves, snapping and kicking as their masters led them up
the beach, whinnying at the pair hitched to the chariot in which
he stood. Transporting horses across open sea was like a dream
sent by the Night Ones, endless toil and danger. He made a sign
with the bronze-headed tomahawk thonged to his wrist to avert
ill luck at the thought. But they'd lost few of the chariot ponies
that were the wealth and strength of the tribe. Lost hardly
anything, in truth. One boat swept away and gone when the
weather turned bad, no more. He'd feared worse, for his people
were not sailors, although they'd dwelt near the shores of the sea
a hand and half a hand of generations. Before that they came
from the east, from the hills and great rivers and endless forests,
and in the distant times of the heroes and gods-among-us they'd
lived on the sea of grass where the sun rose.

    The two great ships drawn up on the shore were another sign
that his luck was good once more, his luck and the luck of his
clan and tribe; he'd bargained for weeks to gain the help of the
southron traders, offering goods and trading rights. Without
them it would have taken a long time to get the whole of his
people across the waters to the White Island, if it could have
been done at all. As it was, most of the folk and their goods had
come in canoes and rafts and coracles of tanned, tarred bullhide.
A few now camped in the round wattle huts of the Earth Folk
village that had been here before the Iraiina came; the rest up
and down the shore in hide tents and boothies made of branches
and turf, more than enough in these warm spring days. The
traders had their own tents, near the beached ships—a sensible
precaution, Daurthunnicar thought, although their leaders had
drunk mead with him from a single cup where their blood had
mingled, and sworn oaths to his gods and theirs. He put more
trust in their need of him, and of the price he'd promised for
their aid.

   Their leader came toward him, a slight dark man in a tunic of
fine Southland linen stained by the sea, with a cloak over his
shoulder held by a golden brooch. A short bronze sword hung
from his studded belt, and a knife; the men who followed him
carried shield and spear, or bows. The traders traded where the
local folk were strong, but they were ready enough to raid if the
pickings looked good. The chariot chieftain had seen their men
fight; they were well armed and well ordered, and their ships
were wonders—sixty feet long, with a score of oars on either side
and a square sail. Daurthunnicar raised his ax again, in salute,
but he kept the advantage of height that the chariot gave him.
The young nephew who held the reins kept the restive ponies
motionless.

   "Diawas Pithair give you strength," he said politely, invoking
the Sky Father who was the overgod of the Iraiina. "And the
Horned Man ward the Night Ones from the paths of your
dreams."
   Isketerol of Tartessos inclined his head. "And the Lady of the
Horses be gracious to you, chieftain, and make your herds
fertile," he said with equal courtesy.

   He spoke the tongue of the Iraiina people well, but with an
accent and choice of words unlike anything Daurthunnicar had
ever heard. He'd said that he'd learned it not far from the shores
of the Middle Sea, where kindred tribes had come to make their
camps long before.

  "We have fulfilled our oath," the merchant went on. "All your
people are here, safe and hale."

   Daurthunnicar grinned. "Hale when they stop puking," he
said. "And I and the vanguard have begun to make good our
word, as well. Come."

   The Tartessian stepped up into the car; the wicker floor gave
slightly under his weight, but the framework of light wood
beneath was strong, and a chariot could hold three at a pinch.
The driver chucked his tongue and leaned forward, and the
shaggy ponies broke into a walk, then a trot. Daurthunnicar
stood effortlessly erect despite the bumping of the unsprung
wheels over rut and clod and root, knees and balance keeping
him so with a skill learned since he was barely able to toddle.
Isketerol did well enough for a sailor, only needing to lay one
steadying hand lightly on the leather bucket that held javelins
when the war-car was rigged for battle. The merchant's men
trotted after, along with a half-dozen of Daurthunnicar's own
war band, younger sons and such who had sworn themselves to
his personal service. Men hailed the chief as he passed through
the encampment, through the smoke of fires and the smells of
cooking, sweat and horse dung and damp wool. It didn't stink
too badly, despite the sprawling disorder; the chief and his clan
leaders and the heads of household saw to that, and they
wouldn't be here much longer anyway. Women and diasas
—slaves—bowed low as the chariot went by, sun winking on
ornaments of bronze and gold studding the wicker sides and the
harness of the horses.

   His driver drew rein before a rough pen of woven saplings.
Inside were a score of captives; Earth Folk, natives of the island,
taken prisoner in the month since the vanguard came ashore.
Some of them bore wounds, but the invaders hadn't bothered to
gather in any of the severely injured. Guards lifted their spears
and cried Daurthunnicar hail as he leapt down.

    "Good strong ones," he said to his ally. "The women are
comely—I've had a few myself. They and the men will work hard
if they're beaten well, and the children can be raised to any
useful task. We've taken gold and copper, as well; hides, furs,
grain. Your ships will not go empty from our new land."

   Isketerol nodded, appraising the captives carefully through
the bruises and dirt that were their only clothing. "The mines at
home can always use more hands," he said.

  Daurthunnicar smiled. It wasn't safe to keep too many unfree
males about, even of the rabbit-hearted Earth Folk. Hmm. When
we've beaten them thoroughly, we'll leave the villages that
submit standing. They can pay tribute. Thus had his ancestors
done with the Earth Folk on the mainland, and over generations
remade them in their own image.

  "A fine beginning," Isketerol went on.

  "And only a beginning," Daurthunnicar agreed.

   He looked north and west where the wildwood fenced in sight.
Inland were open downs his scouts had traveled, and farther
west still were the larger kingdoms of the Earth Folk. There they
had once built their circles of standing stones, bigger even than
the ones on the mainland. There they had gold, copper, tin,
herds. True, they were many, but once he'd won some initial
victories to show that luck and Sky Father and the Mirutha were
with him, he could summon more warriors from across the
narrow sea. The tribes were on the move there, pressed by their
own growing numbers and by new migrants from the eastern
lands; the Keruthlnii were distant kinfolk, but no less fierce and
greedy for that.

   Young men would come to pledge their axes to him, and
perhaps households and clans after them. His folk would grow
strong and spread over the land, and it would be theirs and their
sons', and their sons' sons'.

   The High Chief of the Iraiina smiled at his tomorrows.

   "Reveille, reveille; heave out, trice up, lash and stow, lash and
stow!"

   The whistling pipes and the orders echoed through the Eagle.
On the quarterdeck the officer of the watch nodded and the
brass bell was struck, its clear metallic tones echoing across the
deck.

   "Sir!" the master-at-arms barked. "Crew turned out!"

   Marian Alston smiled and cocked an ear at the sounds from
the deck above, familiar as heartbeat. Now the mops began
flogging the deck; scrub down weather decks, sweep down
compartments, wipe down deckhouses. The harsh rasp of
holystones on wet teak sounded. She finished her morning
routine of stretching and chin-ups on the bar in the corner of her
cabin and did a few kata—the sort you could do with barely
arm's length on either side—before padding into the bathroom to
brush her teeth. 0630 hours, and she was actually looking
forward to the fried fish of breakfast; she left the last of the
cornflakes to those who really needed them. Seasickness had
never been one of her problems, even in the sort of blow they'd
had last week south of Iceland: hundred-foot seas and freezing
sleet.

   And today…

   "Today we ought to sight land," she said ten minutes later,
sliding into her place at the wardroom table; the commanding
officer usually ate breakfast and lunch in the officers' wardroom
and dinner in the flag cabin aft. There was a buzz of speculation
among the morning watch. Next the night-watch reports, the
ship's situation-and-condition summary; freshwater
consumption, distance to nearest point of land… Everything
routine, or as routine as it could be under the circumstances.

  "I still say Bristol would be a better bet, ma'am," Lieutenant
Hendriksson said.
   Alston shook her head, neatly filleting her cod while
compensating for the roll of the ship and grabbing a sliding
saltshaker in automatic reflex. "The Southampton area has more
natural deep water, Ms. Hendriksson," she said. "What did we
run tonight?" Under minimal sail, for caution's sake.

  "Ninety miles, ma'am."

  There was more conversation, passing by her in a meaningless
buzz as she lost herself in thought.

   "Good morning, Captain." A cadet stood at her elbow. "Officer
of the deck reports the approach of eight o'clock. Permission to
strike eight bells on time."

  "Make it so." She followed him up the companionway ladder
and faced aft to salute the steaming ensign on the gaff.

  "Captain on deck!"

  "Captain Alston here," she said crisply to the quarterdeck
watch, returning their salutes.

   Alston strode around the radio shack to the wheel and stood
with her hands clasped behind her back. The morning wind was
fresh from the southeast, stiffening, and the sky was blue but
hazed around the horizon, a last few stars fading as winds and
shadows fell toward the west. No weather satellites now; she
cocked an experienced eye and made an estimate. The smell was
salt and intensely clean. Perhaps it was imagination, but she
thought there was a keener scent to it than up in the twentieth…
the currents and winds seemed to follow pretty much the same
pattern as the one she knew, though.

  "Looks to me like she'll quicken," she said to the sailing
master. "But not enough to give us another blow."

   "I agree, ma'am," he said, stifling a yawn; he'd been up since
the relief watch was called at 0345. "Shall we let her run?"

  Alston nodded. It was time to resume full speed; they'd made
good time across the eerily empty northern Atlantic, under full
press ahead day and night. The last two days they'd been more
cautious, working south around Ireland and up toward the
southern English coast… or what would someday become the
southern English coast, after Celt and Roman and Saxon and
Dane and Norman had come and gone…

  "And you should get some sleep, Mr. Hiller," she said.

   The sailing master had been on the ship years longer than she,
and he regarded Eagle as he might a beautiful, willful, and
rather retarded child that had to be watched and cherished every
moment.

   "Sail stations," she said, when he had taken his leave. "On the
fore, on the main, set uppers and lowers."

    "Uppers and lowers, aye!" Lieutenant Walker echoed her; he
was OOD right now. They were a bit overofficered, even without
all the cadets' instructors on board, and she'd suspended the
practice of having upperclassmen stand watches for now. He
turned and went on:

  "Lay aloft and loose all sail!"

  Orders ran across the deck. The crew swarmed up the ratlines
and out along the yards, or prepared to haul.

  "Let fall!"

   The crew aloft released the gaskets that held the furled upper
sails on the yards. She kept a critical eye on that; if anyone was
slow the whole weight of the sail would hang on the unreleased
gasket, and it might have to be cut. This time it went smoothly,
leaving all the sails in gear, ready to be deployed.

  We're gettin' a lot of practice, Alston thought.

  "Sheet home the lower topsail. Belay!"

  "Throw off the buntlines, ease the clewlines!"

  "Haul around on the sheets."
   The white canvas blossomed free, running up the masts from
bottom to top. The ship gathered way, a living feeling that came
up through the feet and legs as she bounded forward. Alston laid
a hand on a backstay to sense the huge strain as the standing
rigging passed the force of the sails to the hull.

  "Walk away with the halyard! Ease the upper topsail braces!"

   Almost done now, smooth curves stretching taut over her
head. No need to overhaul, plenty of wind to set the foot of the
sails against the weight of the lines.

  "A little to starboard, if you please, Mr. Walker," she said
quietly, without taking her eyes off the sails. Her legs felt the
heave of the deck and the way the long sharp bows cut the waves,
and her skin gauged wind and spray.

   "Ease starboard, haul port, handsomely port!" the junior
officer shouted over the quarterdeck rail.

    The Eagle gathered way, heading northeast on a course that
might have been drawn on the water with a ruler. The sun still
had its lower edge dipped in the water, turning the low cloud
there fire-crimson. Alston looked at the polished brass
clinometer on the deckhouse. The ship was heeled to eighteen
degrees, and they were making a good twelve knots. Excellent,
but the wind was favorable, twenty degrees off her stern to
starboard. Four cadets were draped over the lee rail, their safety
lines snapped on, returning their breakfast to the ocean whence
it came, but the rest were settling down nicely. If anything, the
enlisted crew were showing more in the way of problems, which
was a little surprising. There seemed to be a hump for everyone,
when suddenly they stopped just knowing what had happened to
them and believed it, down in the gut and blood. That was the
crisis point, and if they got through it, they were safe enough.
Keeping them working, hands blistered and backs aching, helped
them over the hump. It reduced the feeling of unreality, of being
lost in a nightmare dream.

   She shook off the thought. All that could be done about that
problem had been; and there was a raft of new ones about to
descend. The rigging lines were humming, like a huge stringed
instrument all tuned to a single harmony. A voice cried from the
mainmast:

  "On deck there! Ease the't' gallant buntline."

   Feet thundered across the deck. Alston's eyes followed the
motions that let the line out a trifle and then secured it again
with automatic ease. The blue-green swell raised the Eagle in its
rhythmic grip, and the big ship heeled deep to port. The masts
and the humans on them traced circles against the sky and
began their cycle again. Alston went forward of the wheel and
into the pilothouse.

  "Ms. Rapczewicz," she said to the woman at the chart table.
"Do you have the plot?"

   "Here, Skipper," she said. One of the watch handed Alston a
cup of coffee; that was something she was going to miss, when
they ran out. "We should make landfall about here, this
afternoon. Assuming there's an England here."

  "There'll always be an England," she said, and looked at the
XO's pointing thumb. Just east of the Isle of Wight,
Southampton Water. "In a geographical sense, at least," she
added.

   "Mr. Arnstein," she said to the professor. He was there with
the astronomer, come up from the cubbyhole where they'd been
deep in the books from the Nantucket Athenaeum. "Is there
anywhere we could expect to get coffee, here and now?"

   "Hmmm?" Arnstein looked up, preoccupied. "Coffee? Oh…
um, that is, it comes from Ethiopia, originally. Kaffa province,
fairly far inland. It went from there to the Yemen, and from the
Yemen to everywhere. The Arabs spread it."

  "I don't suppose…"

   "Well, Captain, there's no mention of it for more than two
thousand years after this date. Tea, maybe—"

  "Boat ho!" The lookout's voice came faint from the tops
through the door of the deckhouse.

  Alston turned and went out on the deck. "What do you
make?"

   "Captain, small boat off to port, a mile and a half!" the
lookout cried. Sailors crowded to the port rail.

   "Mr. Walker, get those people back to their posts!" she said
crisply. "Helm, come about. Stand by aloft, ready to take in sail.
Mr. Walker, we'll heave to once we're near."

  "Lower a boat, ma'am?"

   She shook her head. "Not immediately. I want to take a look
at them first. Ms. Rapczewicz, you have the deck."

  "Ms. Rapczewicz has the deck, aye!"

    Alston walked down into the waist, securing binoculars to her
belt. Then she crouched, leaped to the bulwark, caught the
ratlines, and swarmed upward, tarred rope harsh under her
hands. She climbed, past the tops—triangular railed platforms
halfway and three-quarters of the way up the mainmast—higher
still, until the ship was a tiny lozenge far below. She nodded to
crewfolk as she passed; the rigging was no place to waste hands
on saluting, and she was up here fairly often, for exercise's sake.
At last she came to the uppermost yard, the royal, where the
steel tube of the mast was barely as thick through as her waist. A
leg over the yard and her foot hooked through a line gave her a
secure brace.

   The wind whipped at her, chilly and strong, and the sail
bellied out below in a pure white curve. She turned the focusing
screw of the binoculars with the thumb whose fingers held the
instrument, according to the old nautical rule of one hand for
yourself and another for the ship. The boat grew; it was an oval
about a dozen feet long, low in the water, with neither mast nor
sail and a curious double prow. There were five men—five human
figures, at least—lying prone in it, some half covered by blankets
or cloaks. The boat rose, hesitated on the height of a swell, then
skidded downward. The sluggishness of the motion told her it
was taking water and would sink in a few hours. The crew
certainly weren't in any shape to bail. She watched until she
could see limbs flopping loosely. It would be disappointing if they
were all dead… No, one stirred feebly.

  "On deck, there!" There was a trick to calling down so you
could be heard, a matter of pitch rather than raw volume. "Ms.
Rapczewicz, bring us alongside!"

   "Alongside, aye!"

   Alston went down the ratlines to the middle top, then slid
down a stayline, using the soles of her shoes to brake against the
hard ridged surface of the cable. When she sprang to the deck
the small boat was visible from this level, and a cluster of figures
were by the port rail, peering themselves.

  "I've never seen anything like it," she said. "Professor
Arnstein, what do you make of her?"

   She handed over the binoculars. Arnstein pushed his glasses
up on his head and adjusted them more clumsily. At last he gave
a surprised grunt.

   "I've never seen one either," he said. "But I think it's a coracle,
a boat made out of sewn hides on a sapling frame. The Irish were
using them well into the modern era. Isn't it a bit far from land
for a boat that size?"

   "Two hundred miles from the nearest shore, and God knows
where they put to sea," Alston said. The distance was closing
rapidly; she took back the glasses and watched. "There are half a
dozen people in that boat. They're not movin', but I thought I
saw… Wait, one is moving."

  She turned her head. "Get the medic ready," she said. "Severe
dehydration, salt poisoning."

   "How do you know that, Captain?" Arnstein asked
curiously—he was always curious, which was annoying
sometimes but a large part of what made him useful.
   Not to mention interesting. Her own reading in history had
been largely maritime and military. Talking with Arnstein, you
always learned something. It might be completely useless, but it
would be fascinating… and she suspected that many of the facts
that seemed useless would turn out to be valuable later. Glad to
return the favor for once, she continued:

   "If you're lost at sea in a small boat, and it's not cold enough
for hypothermia, the commonest way to die is thirst," she
replied. "Or salt poisonin' from drinking seawater; that'll kill you
faster, unless you're very careful to take small sips. And from the
look of them, I'd say these people were blown out to sea and
mighty thoroughly lost."

   Ian Arnstein watched with queasy interest as the sailors went
down ropes and climbed into the coracle. It bobbed and heaved
as two of them climbed aboard, made fast, and began examining
the bodies lying in the shallow water that sloshed in its bottom.

   One of the sailors vomited over the side. Even at this distance
the livid faces and swollen tongues weren't pretty, and seagulls or
something had been at them. The other went on with her task,
checking the inert shapes one by one.

   "Only one alive, sir," she called up after a moment, her fingers
on the neck of a figure hidden under several cloaks, as her
companion returned to his work. "He's pretty far gone, though. I
need a sling lift."

  "Lot of weapons," Arnstein said thoughtfully. "Not fishermen."

  Alston nodded. "The survivor probably had enough willpower
not to drink from the sea." Louder: "Send up the gear, after
you've recovered the live one."

   Doreen pushed her glasses back with a finger and peered,
fascinated beneath her nausea. The bodies were all men, all fairly
young. Weapons lay beside them: spears, bows, quivers, axes
with yard-long handles and long narrow heads of bronze, the
drooping edges shaped like a hawk's beak. The rest of the boat's
load was bundles wrapped in hide or basketwork lashed with
thongs.
   The ship's physician and his helpers swung into operation as
the body came inboard. The rest of the crew hung back, but
nobody objected when Ian pushed close, Doreen beside him. The
stranger was a little above average height, perhaps five-eight or
-nine. His body was sunburned and his face, and lips swollen, but
you could see that he was young, probably in his late teens. The
sparse yellow beard bore that out too, merely thick down. His
hair was twisted back in a braid that reached halfway down his
back, bound with bronze rings. For clothes he wore a
thigh-length leather kilt pyrographed with cryptic designs,
cinched by a broad belt of sheepskin worn with the fleece side in;
his feet were bare and heavily callused. The face was generic
European of a northern or eastern variety, narrow and
long-nosed on a long skull, although the nose had been broken at
some time and had healed a little crooked. Arnstein could see a
blue eye when the doctor peeled back an eyelid and shone a light
into it.

  "Quite a bod," Doreen murmured, playing with a lock of hair.

   Ian nodded; the youth was broad-shouldered and narrow in
the hips, smooth muscle running over an athlete's long-legged
body. He also had an interesting collection of scars for a young
man. A deep pucker on one leg, still a little red; thin white lines
on his forearms; a deep gouge out of an upper shoulder. There
were scars on his back as well, parallel ones dusty-white against
the smooth pale skin.

   "Those are whip marks," Alston said. "He could be a prisoner,
or a slave, I suppose?"

   Doreen spoke thoughtfully. "Aren't there cultures where boys
are flogged as part of their initiation rites?"

   "Yes," Ian said. "Sparta for one. The other scars look like
fights to me. Fairly recent ones."

  The ship's doctor had hooked up an IV. "Dehydration and
sunburn," he said. "Looks like a pretty healthy young man. He
should be all right in a few days."

  "When will he be conscious?" Ian asked.
  "Any time."

   Doreen looked at the materials coming over the side. Besides
the weapons, the bundles held mostly extra clothes—kilts, and
simple T-tunics of linen or wool, woven in plaids or dyed in soft
natural colors, blanketlike woolen cloaks, and a few pairs of
shoes made out of a single piece of soft leather, rather like
moccasins. There were baskets of dried meat, fish, hard crumbly
cheese, and crackerlike hard bread. And there was an array of
shields, difficult to see at first since they'd been laid down as
seats. They were round or oval, frames of wicker and shaped
wood covered in hide and painted in gaudy shapes, the
swastika-like fylfot, or animals. Horses, wolves, bears, the head of
a bull, or a figure half man and half elk, with horns growing from
his head. A few had bronze rivets as well.

   "What's this?" she said, prodding at a string of varicolored
bits of leather with straggling fur attached. A thought struck her,
and she backed away and wiped the hand frantically down the
leg of her trousers.

  "Human hair," the doctor said, glancing aside. "Scalps."

   A murmur went through the crew. Doreen swallowed and
forced her mind back to the task at hand.

   "This man's people use representative art," she said. "Why
don't we get some pictures? We can show them to him and ask
the names. There's a set of National Geographies in the
wardroom that would be perfect."

  "Special court-martial is now in session. When did this
happen, Ms. Hendriksson?" Captain Alston said.

   "About half an hour ago, ma'am. Cadet Winters and several
other members of the crew came to me, with Seaman Rodriguez
in custody, and I had him put under arrest."

   The lieutenant was young, looking as stern and efficient as
someone with freckles and a snub nose could; her eyebrows and
lashes were as white-blond as her hair, standing out against
tanned skin. Cadet Winters had a black eye and an arm in a
sling; Seaman Rodriguez was standing between two guards,
sullen and hangdog, a scowl on his acne-scarred face. His lower
lip was wrenched and swollen, with a deep bite mark sending a
trickle of blood down his chin, and his nose was going up like a
balloon. From the look of it someone had stuck fingers into it
and pulled hard. Every so often his hand made an abortive
movement, as if to rub his crotch, and he stood slightly bent
over. Most of the off-duty crew hung back a little, close enough to
hear what was going on on the quarterdeck.

   Alston sat behind a table, the XO and a chief petty officer on
either side of her. It was a little odd for a special court-martial,
but the circumstances were more so.

   "Seaman Rodriguez, what's your explanation?" Alston asked.

   "Ah, ma'am, she said she'd go into the paint locker with me."
Which was strictly against the rules, but it happened now and
then. "Then she changed her mind and started yelling and
hitting me. Ma'am."

  Winters was spitting angry, Alston saw—which was all to the
good, much better than depression. "Cadet Winters?"

    "He grabbed me and tried to stick a sock in my mouth and
drag me into the locker," she bit out. "I gave him a knee where
it'd hurt, ma'am, and then he punched me and dislocated my
arm, so I went for him and yelled."

   "Ms. Hendriksson?"

   "Several of the crew heard screaming, ma'am, and ran to the
locker. They found Seaman Rodriguez struggling with Cadet
Winters; her clothing was torn, and they were both injured.
Seaman Rodriguez had been drinking."

   Others stepped forward to confirm the testimony. Captain
Alston fixed Rodriguez with a basilisk stare. There was sweat on
his face, and he looked around unconsciously for support and
found none. She thought for a moment, and the three judges
bent their heads together to consult in whispers.
   "Court will now pronounce its verdict and pass sentence," she
said aloud, in a formal tone.

  "Hey—I mean, ma'am, this isn't no real court-martial."

   "No, it isn't, Seaman. However, since it's unlikely we're going
to get back to a base in the near future"—or the distant past,
you noxious little shit—"it'll have to do. We're not under the
Uniform Code of Military Justice anymore; we're operating
under the authority of the Nantucket Council. I think," she went
on to the others behind the table, "that we're agreed this goes
beyond sexual harassment."

  "Attempted rape, aggravated assault," Rapczewicz agreed.

  "Ten years minimum, dishonorable discharge," the CPO said.

   And concealing liquor, she thought; Rodriguez seemed to be
the sort who couldn't win for losing. Aloud: "Seaman Rodriguez,
you are found guilty. As imprisonment is impractical, under the
circumstances I think discharging you on the nearest shore
would be equitable."

   Everyone knew what the nearest shore was, and they'd all seen
the contents of the coracle or heard about the scalps. Rodriguez
lunged forward, face crumpling. The guards grabbed him by the
arms as he tried to go down on his knees.

   "Oh, madre de dios, please, Captain, no—" They shook him
into silence.

   "But heinous as your crime is, under the law it isn't
punishable by death, which marooning you probably would
cause. Get him a lifejacket."

   Hands shoved the bright-orange float jacket onto the man and
laced it tight. "Get a rope sling and secure it on him. Reeve the
other end to the fantail railing. Chief Master-at-Arms, execute
the sentence," Alston said, her face like something carved from
obsidian.

  Two of the ship's noncoms obeyed with gusto, with the sole of
a boot in the small of Rodriguez's back. The push sent him out
like a screaming meteor, to fall in the curling blue water and
white foam of the ship's wake. The line paid out and then sprang
taut where it had been secured around the rail's metal supports.
He wouldn't quite drown, but being towed behind the ship would
be considerably worse than the flogging Rapczewicz had
suggested. That water was cold, too. Not North Atlantic frigid,
but chilly. He probably wouldn't die of hypothermia either. Not
quite.

  "Court is adjourned," Alston said. "Hands to their stations, if
you please."

   She caught the tenor of their murmurs. Not bad, she thought.
That would preserve discipline, without making the crew think
she'd started doing a Captain Queeg. And Coast Guardsmen
were as much policemen as anything; they didn't have much
sympathy for criminals. Plus more than two-thirds of the crew
were cadets and one-third were women. All in all, she'd done the
right thing. For justice, and for the good of the ship.

   It wasn't her fault if she'd enjoyed it. She didn't like criminals
either, particularly that kind. I hope there are sharks out there,
you little piece of shit.

  Walker coughed discreetly. "The… man we picked up is
awake, ma'am," he said. "You said to let you know."

   ***

  The stranger thrashed and moaned as Marian Alston bent
over him. His eyes were blue, and right now they were showing
white all around the iris.

  "I think you'd better back out of sight, Captain," Ian said. "I
don't think he's ever seen a black person before, and this
environment is strange enough as it is."

   Alston nodded and stepped back with some difficulty; it was
crowded in the little one-bunk sickbay. "I'll be on deck," she said.
"Report when you've found out anything significant."
   "And don't exhaust him," the doctor warned. "He's still weak
as a kitten."

   The stranger stopped his feeble struggling and let himself be
pushed back into the bunk, although his eyes still flickered
across bulkheads and porthole, electric lights and metal
shapes—alien madness, terror building on strangeness. "He must
think he's dead and among evil spirits or something," Doreen
murmured.

   Ian leaned forward. The sight of his bearded face seemed to
reassure the stranger. Ian put a cup of water to his lips, and the
man sucked greedily at it; the IV they'd just removed had
pumped a good deal into his system, but it wouldn't have
soothed the throat. He said something in a fast-moving language
and sighed, wiping his mouth with the palm of one hand and
then letting the arm flop back to the sheet.

  Ian looked over at Doreen, who shook her head. Well, that
was a long shot, he thought. "Give it a try anyway," he said.

   "Ar… mane… spurantate?" Doreen said, leaning close and
speaking slowly. Do you understand me? in Lithuanian, her
mother's tongue.

   That brought a puzzled frown and more of the gibberish, but
in a different tone. "I think he almost understood that," Doreen
said regretfully. I may have caught one or two words. I think."

  Ian smiled at the stranger—Well, first things first, that's
obvious, he thought—and pointed at himself.

  "Ian. Ian Arnstein."

   The narrow blue eyes frowned, then flew wide in
understanding. "IanArnstein," he said, prodding a callused
finger with a rim of dirt under the nail at the man who sat
beside the bunk. "lanArnstein, p'tos."

   Ian mimicked the gesture, pointing at the young man's bare
chest. He nodded and rattled off a string of incomprehensible
syllables. Ian sighed and made a rapid gesture through the air,
then a very slow one. After a couple of repetitions the other got
the idea and sounded out his name very slowly:

   "Ohotolarix," Doreen said. "Ohotolarix son of somebody. I
think," she added, making a note on her pad.

  Ohotolarix nodded vigorously, smiling and revealing very
white teeth—except for one missing at the front.

   "Let's try him on the numerals," Ian said. "They're stable over
time. You start."

   Doreen leaned closer again and held up one finger. "Vienas,"
she said. Two fingers. "Du." Three. "Trys." Four. "Keturi." Five. "
Pied."

   "Eka!" Ohotolarix said. He held up one finger himself, then
the rest in sequence. "Aonwos, duo, treyi, k'wethir, penkke!"

   After a few tries the two Americans caught the pronunciation,
and Doreen noted them down. He grinned at the woman, then
glanced aside at Ian, looking a little abashed.

   Which is a significant datum in itself, Ian thought. It was
probably impolite to look at another man's woman, where this
kid came from. Ian cleared his throat and went up the number
scale; Ohotolarix seemed to have increasing difficulty, speaking
slowly and counting on his fingers as they climbed.

    Damn, he thought. This was going to take a while. In most of
the fiction he'd read, there was some ingenious way around
language difficulties—a Universal Translator or a wizard with a
spell, or the side effects of a dimensional gate. Here he was,
living it instead of reading it, and he'd have to trudge dismally
through the basics instead. I should complain to the author. He
smiled at the thought; back when he'd written those
thud-and-blunder heroic fantasies, he'd had a nightmare about
meeting his own characters in a dark alley and having them
revenge themselves on him for what he'd put them through.

  "Hundred," he said, slowly holding up ten fingers ten times.
  "Simtas," Doreen echoed.

  "Kweadas," came the reply.

   "It's a centum language," Ian said to Doreen. "Western
branch of the family."

  "Show him the horse."

   The picture was a photo of a drawing, rather than a
photograph of the animal; they'd decided that would be more
familiar. Awe stood out on Ohotolarix's face as he handled the
glossy paper. Ian pointed to the animal.

  "Horse?" he said.

  "Hepkwos!" Ohotolarix said delightedly. "Hworze. Hepkwos!"

  Next she held up a picture of a timber wolf. "Vilkos," she said.

  "Wolkwaz!"

  Ian ran his thumb down his list of words.
Proto-Indo-European wlkwos, wolf, he read. Almost unchanged.
God, we are a long way back.

   The exchange went on until Ohotolarix dropped suddenly and
irrevocably asleep, and the doctor chased them out of sickbay.
Alston looked at them sharply as they came up to the
quarterdeck.

  "Well?" she said.

   Doreen waved her notebook. "It's definitely an Indo-European
language, ma'am. A lot of the words were very close to
Lithuanian, and some of the inflections and syntax, even. He
caught a few phrases I spoke right off—'give bread,' things like
that. I think I could learn it in a couple of months—for very very
simple things, in a week."

  "That could be extremely useful," Alston said. "Anything else,
Professor?"
   Ian shook his head. "Not much. It's a highly inflected
language, and if I knew more Mycenaean Greek… I think it
might be an extremely early form of Celtic. Some of the sound
shifts between what he speaks and what the references list as
Proto-Indo-European forms suggest that it might be a sort of
Proto-Celtic. I'm not a linguist, though— my knowledge is very
general, and I'm not sure we're transcribing accurately. Hell, the
language might just as well be Proto-Tocharian, or some
subfamily that never got—"

   "Anything else we can use, I meant, Professor," Alston said
with heavy patience.

   Ian reined himself in. "Apart from that, this guy's a
wirtowonax, which I think means warrior, or possibly
something like freeman or tribesman or citizen; and he's got a
chief, or king, or panjandrum, a rahax, named Daurthunnicar.
I'm probably playing hob with the inflections there, by the way.
From sign language as much as anything, this Daurthunnicar
and his warriors, and women and children and horses, were
crossing a body of water. To fight someone, presumably. Our
boy—his name's Ohotolarix, by the way—and his friends were
caught by a squall and couldn't find the land again. I'd guess
they paddled in circles until they dropped. Ohotolarix hates
boats, incidentally, and loves horses."

  "Oh, joy," Alston muttered. "We're sailing right into the
middle of someone's war. Hell of a situation to trade in."

  "Oh, I don't know," Ian said. His face slowly creased into a
smile. "It might just be the best possible situation to trade in, if
you know what I mean, Captain."

  "They come," the scout whispered. "Back along their track, as
we thought they would."

   They could hear how hooves pounded dirt away down the
forest trail, louder and louder as the invader war band neared.
Human feet slapped the earth, wheels creaked, an axle squealed,
a horse blew out its lips in a wet flutter of sound. The war-car
held a near-nude adolescent driver and a warrior in leather
armor and bone-strapped leather helmet. The ponies stamped
and snorted, their breath visible in the early-morning chill as the
blur of the eight-spoked wheels slowed.

   Swindapa of the Star Blood line of Kurlelo slowly drew the
sling taut between her hands. The early-spring leaves made
scanty cover, but the band hidden here were all hunters with the
Spear Mark tattooed on their chests; most of them were from
lands overrun by the invaders, the Sun People, too. Thirty of
them, more than enough for this. She was the only woman, but
the others had allowed her along for the sake of her birth, and
the weapons she had brought… and after she'd shown them what
she could do with the leather strap she carried. These were
desperate men who cared little for law or custom or the will of
the Star Blood who had not protected their homes.

   For herself… Her mother had forbade, her aunts and
uncles—even the man who was probably her sire—had shaken his
head and said it was a wild youngster's fancy. Yet here she was.
Fear and excitement wrestled in her belly, like the Moon Woman
pursuing the Sun. The Sun People had brought her pain; they'd
broken the knee and the life of her man, they'd killed and
burned. It was time to drive them out. She swallowed through a
mouth gone dry and picked her target.

   Two dozen footmen stopped and squatted around the chariot,
light winking off bronze spearheads, glinting on polished leather.
They talked among themselves in the harsh tongue they'd
brought across the water, or swigged from skins. The chief
waited for a moment, then called out to his followers. One threw
back his head and laughed, and then they rose and spread out in
formation behind the war-car, like a flock of geese spread back
from the leader in wings on either side. The charioteer clucked to
his ponies, and the warrior beside him hawked and spat over the
side to clear his throat.

   "Shoot!" the leader of the Earth Folk band bellowed, bounding
to his feet. He drew his yew bow to his ear and obeyed his own
order.

   Bowstrings snapped and arrows whickered as men sprang
erect. A pony went down, screaming like a woman in bad labor.
The other reared, and the driver and warrior leaped down from
the cart. Swindapa sprang forward, ululating rage, whipped the
sling in two swift circles around her head, then cast. The
polished egg-shaped stone within was heavy basalt, and flew
almost too fast to see. When its arc ended in a snarling Iraiina
face there was a half-seen splash of red and the man pitched
backward to lie sprattling. She shrieked glee and tossed another
stone into the soft leather pocket at the bottom of the sling. Men
were running forward with spear and club and knife. Others shot
over their heads; she darted about, looking for a clear path to a
target. The fight boiled to close quarters; the Sun People stood
shield to shield and cast back the first disorderly rush, but there
were fewer of them left on their feet. The Earth Folk prowled
around their line, rushed forward, retreated with blood on their
weapons or on their own rent skins. Metal and stone and wood
banged on each other, on the leather of shields. Men screamed in
rage, or pain greater than they had thought flesh could feel.

   The natives fell back, panting, and men glared at each other
over a dozen paces of space empty save for the dead. The
invaders had no missile weapons left; they'd thrown their spears,
and few of them were bowmen. The Earth Folk archers had space
to shoot again; they came near and stuck their arrows ready in
the ground at their feet, grinning mockery. Swindapa ran to join
them, yellow hair blowing behind her like a banner beneath her
headband, light on her feet as a deer—in the old tongue her
name meant Deer Dancer. She tried to see the fight as a whole,
tried to ignore the men who wailed or groaned or lay silent on
the grass. Perhaps because of that she was the first to see other
figures moving through the woods.

  "More of them! Run!" she shouted. The hunters have become
prey. The Barrow Woman will eat us unless we flee.

   The men nearby were too intent on their revenge to hear her.
She ran up behind one and slammed a callused foot into his
backside, dodging back as he whirled. His face went from
rage-red to fear-white as he followed her pointing finger. In a few
seconds the ambushers-turned-ambushed were ready to flee, but
those seconds were too many. A bison war horn dunted in the
woods, lowing and snarling. Two more chariots rumbled forth
onto the green turf of the clearing. The drivers leaned forward,
slapping the horses' backs with the reins to urge them into a
gallop, and they circled to cut the Earth Folk off from the
sheltering trees. Behind them their clansmen ran, almost as fast
as the horses, in no fixed lines but in better order than any host
the Earth Folk could muster, each man keeping his arm's-length
distance from his neighbor. Now the numbers favored the Sun
People.

   "Forward!" they cried. She could follow their tongue; most
children of the high families learned it, to deal with traders if
nothing else. "Forward! Mirutha with us! Tauntutonnaurix with
us! Addadawiz Diawas Pithair! Forward with Sky Father!"

   Swindapa had listened to her uncles and their nephews
talking of skirmishes with the longer-settled clans of the Sun
People in the valley running to the sea northeast of here. In one
such her lover had been crippled, his knee smashed with an ax.
She grabbed at the shoulder of the band's leader and shook it.

   "We must break through," she said. "If we get into the
thickets, they can't follow us. Woods Woman will hide us."

   The man nodded, the wild flickering of his eyes growing
steadier. "We go," he growled.

   Swindapa never remembered much of the fight that followed.
She managed to sling most of the stones left in her pouch,
breaking a horse's fetlock and striking men—one she thought
had an arm broken beneath his shield. Then the loose mass of
the Earth Folk's charge struck the running line of the Iraiina war
band. The first line buckled before their packed weight, but more
ax-bearing men leaped howling into the fray from either side,
each aiding the other like a pack of wolves. Swindapa darted into
the melee, jumped on the back of a Sun People warrior, and
whipped the sling around his neck, twisting as hard as she could
with crossed wrists. The axman choked and flung up his hands
to scrabble at his throat, then collapsed. Swindapa flung herself
backward to roll free and run, jinked past a spearthrust, dropped
flat under the swing of a chieftain's bronze sword, and bounced
back to her feet.

  Something struck her across the shoulders. Her face plowed
through the turf; her palms burned as they took the impact of
the fall. For a single instant she lay dazed, long enough to see the
last of her companions die under the tomahawks and spears. A
sandaled foot tried to stamp down on her hand, and she flogged
herself back to alertness. She snatched out her bronze dagger
and slashed at the hands trying to seize her. A man tumbled
backward with a yell as the razor-sharp edge drew a line across
his thigh. Swindapa was on her feet now, twisting, dodging.
Another slash scored along a hairy muscular forearm, and the
man dropped his ax and swore.

   His companions hooted mirth at him. More rushed at her
behind shields. She leaped to try and vault one, stabbing at the
man behind. The other slammed into her side, sent her
staggering. A spearshaft cracked against her wrist and the knife
went flying through the air. Arms grabbed her from behind,
around the chest. She shrieked and bit down into a wrist, kicked,
tried to gouge an eye and ripped skin across a cheek as the man
twisted his fork-bearded head. A fist rocked into her jaw,
another into her belly, another into her head above the ear.

   The world went away in whirling colors. Everything was very
faint. She could only mumble and push feebly as they threw her
down and ripped off her thong skirt. Two men pulled her legs
wide, and a third knelt between them, fumbling at his kilt.

   ***

   "The rahax won't be pleased," Shaumsrix son of Telenthaur
said.

   He scowled around the clearing. "Four good warriors dead,
and eight more wounded—" he counted only those too badly hurt
to trek and fight, of course—"one of those so badly he'll be
crippled if he lives. And three good horses lost."

   Men were moving around, hooting and puffing and slapping
each other on the shoulder. They gave rough aid to the wounded,
retrieved arrows, scalped slain foemen, made repairs, skinned
the dead horses. Unless they'd lost an oath-brother, the clansmen
were content with their victory. A chief had to think more
deeply.
   "We fed two-hands-three-times of them to the Blood Hag," his
brother Merenthraur said recklessly; she didn't like to be called
that, better to use her praise-name of Crow Goddess. He counted
on his fingers and then said: "Two-hands-less-two of them for
every one of us, nearly."

   Night Ones eat your eyes for a blockhead, the elder sibling
thought. You couldn't say such things to a chief's son, not to his
face, of course, even if you were the elder brother by the senior
wife. Aloud he went on: "Thirty Earth Folk farmers are a poor
bargain for four of our clan's warriors. We're not so many we can
afford to lose men every day. We lost too many back in the
homeland."

  And lost the war, he did not add, not in words.

   That still clawed at him, the memory of tumbled broken
chariots and burning thatch, fear and flight. He forced his
shoulders to unknot and pulled his lips back down on his teeth. It
was different here. The Keruthinii who'd driven them off the
mainland were Sky Father's children too, even if they called Him
only by His praise-name Long Spear. The Earth Folk here were
not; they worshiped the devil-bitch Moon Woman. Only Sky
Father's children had victory-right in war. The Iraiina would win
here. If they were wise as well as strong. No Iraiina lacked
courage— they tested their boys too well and saw that cowards
did not live long enough to breed. But all the gods and warrior
spirits would spit on a fool and send him bad luck, even a brave
fool.

   Merenthraur shrugged; the bone scales on his leather jerkin
clattered. "We won. And we can't let bands of them skulk in the
woods, either, or how are we ever to set up our own steadings?"

   Shaumsrix nodded reluctantly. "Too many of these had good
weapons," he said. Most of them had had metal knives, and there
were a fair number of bronze spearheads, too. Even the girl had
had a good bronze knife. Used it pretty well, too, as well as any of
the rabbit-men she'd been with.

   A thought came to him. "You, pick the Fiernan slut up," he
said, walking over as a man finished with her.
   "Plenty for all," he said resentfully.

   The chief looked down at the woman—girl, rather; she'd never
dropped a youngling, from the look of her hips and belly.
Probably pretty when she wasn't bruised and battered; there
were streaks of semen and blood down the insides of her thighs
and bite marks on her high breasts, and one of her eyes was
swelling shut. Long yellow hair trailed out on the grass, and there
were red marks across her chest where a necklace of
gold-rimmed amber disks she wore had been ground into her
skin by the men mounting her. Nobody had bothered taking it
from her yet; let loot carry loot. Shaumsrix leaned down and
yanked the necklace free. Her head flopped loosely as he pulled
the ornament away. There was no mind behind the eye left open.

   "Ordinary Earther bitches don't wear things like this," he
said, waving it in the clansman's face. "This one may be useful,
or she may know something. The rahax will decide. Put her in
my chariot. Not that way, fool."

   The man who'd grabbed her by an ankle dropped it and
sulked off. Two others, older men, picked her up and slung her
onto the wicker floor of the war-car; Shaumsrix ordered his
driver to bind her wrists and ankles. She'll live, he decided. If the
blows to the head didn't kill her, sometimes there were
convulsions and death days later. He tossed the necklace in his
free hand, scowling; a nice piece of plunder, fine smoothed
amber disks rimmed in worked gold—but he'd rather have his
warriors back, for all the scalps and bronze they'd taken. Their
axes were the strength of the tribe, and the strong could always
get booty. He looked down at the girl again.

   He had a feeling that there was something important about
this one; perhaps a warrior Mirutha was whispering in his ear,
perhaps an ancestor's ghost… or perhaps it was a land spirit,
even a Night One. Shaumsrix shivered. He'd ask the Wise Man
when he got back to camp, and make a sacrifice.

  The chieftain slammed the flat of his ax against the side of his
chariot. "Get ready, you slugs!" he bellowed. "We move in—"

   His axhead caught the light as it pointed to where the sun
would be in twenty minutes.

                 CHAPTER FIVE
  April, Year 1 A.E.

   "We're going to try and find this boy's people," Alston's voice
said through the earphones. "We have a few words of his
language, and presumably there'll be a goodwill factor for
handing him back."

  "Unless he dies of the common cold," Cofflin said gloomily.

   "Our medic doesn't think so. He did get the runs, but a few
pills cleared him up." A pause. "How are things back there?"

   "Everything's more or less on schedule," Cofflin said. "Enough
to eat, just, but everyone's getting tired of fish. There's been
some tension, people are upset—I think it's really sinking in that
we're stuck here."

    "Here too, but this situation is a little more exhilarating,"
Alston said. "Perhaps because everything is strange. In any case,
I'll keep you informed of developments, Chief Cofflin. Over."

  "Likewise, Captain," he said. "Cofflin out," he added, and laid
down the radiophone.

  "Reception's good," the operator said. "Better than I can
remember it ever being, before."

    "Nobody else on the air, Karen," he said, looking out over the
little airport from the control tower.

   It already had a deserted look. The small planes were all in the
hangers, or staked down under tarpaulins; Andy Toffler was
doing the air scouting for the fishing and whaling, with what
gasoline they could spare. Out beyond, thick columns of smoke
marked fields where the brush was being fired.

  He looked down at his notes. Quick passage, no trouble so far,
and they'd made a beginning on talking to the locals, picked one
up at least. I wish everything was as smooth here.

   At least his stomach didn't hurt every time he thought about
the food situation anymore. You could live on fish. He still
dreamed about that burger he'd been about to buy when all this
started; they'd eaten the fresh meat almost overnight, with no
more coming in. Except whale meat, which was oily and always
had a slight fishy overtone. Well, hell, whole peoples had lived off
salt cod. The clearing was mostly done, planting going well… and
everyone was going a little crazy.

  Or most people were. "Well, I've got a dinner date," he said.

  "Martha Stoddard?" the operator said, grinning.

  "None of your business, Karen."

  The phone rang. "It's for you, Chief. Pastor Deubel is at it
again."

   "Science has no explanation for this thing that has happened
to us," the clergyman said.

   There were over a hundred people listening to the open-air
service outside the little church on Milk Street. Normally there
wasn't a church on the island that got that many on a Sunday,
not on Nantucket, where the biggest congregations were
Unitarian and Congregationalist. The day was fine, mild, a
breeze from the south that kept the smell of whale blubber
boiling from creeping up from the docks. The people…

   Cofflin leaned his bicycle against the wall of a house built for
whaling skippers—it crossed his mind, an irrelevant fragment,
that they'd be perfectly at home with the faint smell of oil and
fish that hung over the crowd. Their faces were rapt as they
watched the man on the steps. He paced back and forth, as worn
as they—the able-bodied clergy had been pitching in, like
everyone else—but his face glowing with conviction.

   That's a good way to put it, Cofflin thought. It was a fire, and
sparks were catching in the dull faces of the onlookers, lighting
them from within.
   "Science cannot explain it. We must ask ourselves, brothers
and sisters in Christ, why has this thing happened to us? For
this is a mighty and terrible thing that has happened, a thing to
shake the earth. Not only earth: a thing to echo from the walls of
Heaven, and make the gates of Hell rejoice."

  "Fallacy," muttered a voice beside him.

  Cofflin started. He had been caught up in the sermon, despite
himself. Martha Stoddard was not; her gray eyes were cool and
appraising.

   "Fallacy," she said again. "Two, in fact. Science couldn't
explain how the sun kept going, before Einstein. That didn't
mean science was inadequate, simply that it hadn't gotten
around to solving that problem yet. And just because something
big falls on you doesn't mean there's an intention behind it.
That's the pathetic fallacy, historical division. Mount St. Helens
didn't blow up because God was mad at the bears."

   Cofflin grinned. They were all off balance psychologically, with
a few exceptions. Martha Stoddard seemed to be one of them.

   Pastor Deubel was winding up: "All this I have said to you
before, my brothers and sisters. Today we must ask a new
question. If science cannot explain this thing that has happened
to us, and if some great purpose is here, what is that purpose?"

  He wheeled and pointed out into the crowd. "What is the
purpose for which this miracle—for it can be nothing else—has
been accomplished?"

   Cries of God! and Jesus loves us! punctuated his gesture. He
raised his hands.

   "Why would God, a loving God, a God who watches as each
sparrow falls, thrust the blameless into danger and hardship?"

   "Oh, Lord have mercy, doesn't that man's church teach any
theology at all?" Martha hissed through clenched teeth.

  "We have been thrust into the past before Christ," Deubel
shouted. "Christ's sacrifice is not yet made. Moses has yet to
bring God's holy word down from Sinai to the Jews. We are lost
in a world of pagans and devil-worshipers, cut off from the
healing blood of the Lamb. To take the blood and wine now is
blasphemy."

   This time there were moans and cries of no! from the crowd.
Many were weeping. Cofflin felt a touch of apprehension himself;
he was a believing man, if not much of a churchgoer. Come on,
now, he told himself, remembering something his own minister
had said once. God's not in time. God's outside time, He's
eternal.

    "Some mighty power of the other world has done this thing. I
tell you, there can be only one answer: Satan! And his purpose?
Haven't we all thought how our presence here must change the
history of humankind? Can there be a Herod, if history is
changed? A Roman Empire? Can there be an Augustus who
sends out a decree that all the world is to be taxed? A Pontius
Pilate? Will there even be a House of David?

   "What else can the Evil One intend than to frustrate God's
plan by preventing the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ?"

   This time the reaction from the crowd included screams of
fear. Many fell to their knees and began to shout prayers.

   "Well, that's original, at least," Cofflin said quietly. He moved
forward half a step, so that the clergyman could see him. It cut
through the exaltation on the man's face. The rest of the sermon
was a call to pray for guidance.

   "Man's dangerous, Jared," Martha said.

   "Ayup. On't'other hand, I was a policeman, and now I'm head
of state, God help me—but this isn't a police state. So long as the
man does nothing but talk, I can't stop him."

   "Later might be too late."

  Cofflin took his bicycle by the handles, and they turned and
walked toward Martha's house, not far from the Athenaeum with
its white columns. The house she was using, rather; she'd moved
into one of the fancy pensions on Broad Street, since the owners
weren't there and neither were the guests booked for the
summer. A number of teachers had followed her; one thing the
Town Meeting had been firm about was that the schools had to
continue, somehow, at least part of the week. She and they
weren't the only ones that had switched dwellings. Some families
were doubling up, and many single people were taking over the
empty boardinghouses in groups. It saved on cooking and
housework and made child care easier, and without television or
radio or recorded music, or even electric light, most people
found a whole house too cheerless for one person.

  "No sense in allowing perfectly good broiled scrod to go to
waste," Martha said practically. "Held off on it when I heard you
had trouble with Deubel."

  "Ayup," Cofflin said, and nodded greetings to several of the
people passing by.

   She pulled back a cover on the basket she was carrying.
"Dandelion greens, chicory, and pigweed, with sliced raw
Jerusalem artichokes. Salad."

  Cofflin's mouth watered, and he swallowed. "Thoughtful of
you, Martha," he said.

  "Ought to get some use out of being a Girl Scout leader."

   They walked up the porch, through the dining room, and out
into the backyard. Several of the teachers were sitting around,
fiddling with a whale-oil lamp. They'd found hundreds of the
lamps, maybe more, in antique shops, in the hotels as
ornamentals… most of them functional, with a little work. The
whale oil was abundant now, since they were harvesting the
whales for their meat more than anything else. More of the oil
had started off the wood in the barbecue, but the coals were low
and glowing now. A pot burbled on one corner of it, sending out
a savory, almost nutty odor.

  "Dulse," Martha said, jerking her head toward it and picking
up a platter with two large breaded fish on it. She slipped them
onto the grill. They began to sizzle immediately. Meanwhile she
rinsed the wild greens from a bucket of water standing in the
kitchen—the running water was on one hour a day—and dumped
them into a bowl, adding something else from a Styrofoam
cooler. "Sea grass," she added. "Ulva lactuca." She tossed them
with a little oil and vinegar.

   Both her own suggestions. Bless her, Cofflin thought. He'd
never considered seaweed as anything but stuff that washed up
on beaches and smelled, and him a fisherman and a fisherman's
son.

  "Well, make yourself useful, Jared," she said.

   He flipped the fish, which were just firming up, and then slid
them back onto the serving platter. They went into the dining
room and sat; it was just about sundown, and someone had lit
the lamp bracketed to the wall. It cast a puddle of yellow light
around their table.

  "Fine eating on these scrod," Jared observed after a moment.
"Haven't been doing this well myself."

  "Bachelor," Martha observed, serving the dulse.

   There were some mussels cooked with it, in a thickened broth.
Jared savored the green nutty taste of the cooked seaweed and
the contrasting flavors of the wild herb salad. His forehead was
sweating slightly, and not from the eating or the mild spring
weather. Martha ate with the same spare economy she did most
things; he was a bit surprised when she brought out a half-bottle
of white wine and poured them both a glass.

  "Ill wind that blows no good," he observed after a moment.
"Been meeting people I wouldn't have, before the Event."

   Martha nodded. "Think I can guess what you're leading up to,
Jared," she said.

   He paused with a forkful of fish on the way to his mouth. The
sweat rose more heavily on his forehead. Christ, man, what sort
of a fool are you? he thought. A high school graduate fool. Just
because the world had turned upside down didn't mean
everything was changed. If Martha Stoddard wanted someone,
it would be someone from her own level.

  "And I'm not saying no," she added.

   "You're not?" An effort of will prevented his voice from
turning into a squeak.

   "Wouldn't have asked you over if I were," she said. "Or seen
this much of you since the Event. I'm not a cruel woman by
nature, though I can't abide fools. Which is why I'm still single,
despite a few offers. There was a man in university,
archaeologist, did some excellent work on Mogollon pots, but
then he started to talk about football… Mind you, I'm not saying
yes either."

  An even greater effort of will prevented him from saying
You're not? in idiotic counterpoint to his last contribution to the
conversation.

   "And the world was crowded enough as it was," Stoddard
went on meditatively. "None of that applies now, of course… and
I'd say you're not any kind of a fool, Jared. But we do have to find
out how we'd suit, and that should take a while. Plus we're none
of us ourselves, right now. Best not to be hasty."

   "Bundling's a little out of style, even here," he said, feeling a
laugh welling up. He let it out as a dry chuckle, and felt his
shoulders relax. It seemed that some things went on despite
glowing domes of light and journeys into the past. Even tentative
middle-aged romance, apparently.

  "It may come back, with a cold winter and no central
heating," she replied. They touched their glasses.

   The Cappuccino Cafe was still open, although the days when it
served what Cofflin had always thought of as yuppie fast
food—quiches and such—were long past. There were still
customers, although the food was made mostly from the same
basic rations as everyone was eating. A new exchange system
was growing up using the work chits the Council issued. They
could be exchanged for food and fuel, but a lot of people
preferred to trade some of them in and eat at a place like this
now and then, rather than cook at home. Barter, too, he thought,
watching two teenagers come in with a brace of rabbits and a
duck and begin haggling with the proprietor. Their bicycles were
leaned up against the lampposts on Main Street outside, and
they had slingshots stuck in the back pockets of their jeans. It
was the end of a chilly, foggy spring day; outside a few windows
showed lit against the gray gloom. The light had an unfamiliar
yellow tinge, lanterns or candles rather than the white brilliance
of electricity.

   "At least we're not short of whale oil," Cofflin said to Dennis
Brown, the manager-owner, when the youngsters had collected
their chits and IOUs.

  "I should hope not," Brown laughed.

    He jerked his head toward the counter behind him. The pots
and warming pans were suspended over improvised whale-oil
heating lamps. Back in the kitchen an equally improvised stove
with a chimney of sheet metal had replaced the electric ranges. It
burned wood well doused with the oil, and twists of rendered
blubber. The smell of the blubber was a little more ripe than the
nutty odor of the oil itself, but they'd all gotten used to it… a
little, at least. Here it was just an undertang to the scent of
cooking.

  "What'll it be, Chief?"

  "A turkey club sandwich, and a fresh green salad, with a
banana and a couple of peaches for dessert," Cofflin said. They
both laughed. "What've you got?"

   "Lentil soup with rabbit, mixed seafood chowder, and
whaleburger. Or whaleloaf, if you want to call it that. And
biscuits."

   "Rabbit and biscuits! Hot damn! The lentil with rabbit, and
biscuits," he said. "Three hour-chits do it, or do you want some
sort of trade?"
   Dennis shrugged. "I've got two kids, Chief; I figure we're
pulling through because of the way you got things organized. It's
on the house."

   "The town pays me to do my job," Cofflin said gruffly. "I'm not
taking freebies." He held up a hand. "Not even when it's all right.
Bad example. Thanks anyway. Two orders, then."

   Dennis nodded. One of his people dipped out ladlefuls of the
soup into bowls and surrounded them with the biscuits. There
were only two each, but he still felt saliva spurt into his mouth at
the sight and smell of them. Flour was getting scarce; there just
wasn't much on the island.

   He took the tray and ambled over to a table, sitting with a bit
of a groan of relief. He'd been on his feet all day, or pedaling the
damned bicycle, and whatever Coleman said about it being good
for them, he still missed cars. For a moment he sighed and
remembered; you just got in, turned the key… and suddenly five
miles wasn't all that far. Less than ten minutes' travel, warm and
dry and comfortable. The power seemed almost godlike. At least
Nantucket was relatively flat—although he'd become painfully
conscious, mostly in his calves and thighs, that a rise that was
barely perceptible behind the wheel was all too obvious when you
were pushing pedals. Cofflin looked at his watch. Martha had
said she'd be here at six, and it wasn't like her to be late.

   The bell over the door rang, and a man pushed through.
Cofflin looked up, and smiled to see Martha behind him. The
smile ended when he focused on the man's face again. It was
scraggly and unshaven, but no more than many in town these
days—Cofflin had given up shaving more than twice a week
himself, what with the razor blade situation, until he found an
old cutthroat straight razor in the attic. The man stank of dried
sweat, too, for which there was less justification, and his coat
was crusted with food stains and dirt. Before the Event, Cofflin
would have figured him for a bum—homeless, the jargon
was—and seen that he got on the ferry back to the mainland first
thing. These days, he looked like an islander who'd been letting
himself go a bit.

  Have to see about that proposal for bathhouses, he thought.
It was just too hard to heat water yourself and then haul it
upstairs to a bathtub, particularly when you were exhausted
already.

   A few people gave the man room, wrinkling their noses at his
smell. He marched over to a table, one where a quiet-looking
woman in her thirties was sitting with a half-eaten bowl of
chowder and a book. She was as worn as he, but considerably
cleaner. When she looked up at him, she frowned and snapped:

  "Donald, what part of no don't you understand? It's over.
Learn to live with it."

  "Do you understand this, bitch?" the man said.

   Something in his voice froze Cofflin's smile. His head was
turning even as the Glock came out. Time slowed; he could even
see the rims of dirt under the man's fingernails, and the yellow
color of his teeth as he snarled through a matted beard glued in
clumps with old food.

  "Do you?" the man—Donald, Cofflin supposed—said thickly.
"Do you understand this?"

   Donald Mansfield, he remembered. Up on assault charges for
attacking Angelica Brand a couple of weeks ago. Sentenced to
extra hard labor and reduced rations; his wife had left him
shortly after that. Evidently he hadn't been adjusting to the
Event as well as she had. There was a fair amount of that. Men
seemed to be slightly less psychologically flexible, on average.

   All that took just long enough for the expression on Martha's
face to freeze and her eyes widen as they slid sideways toward
the man with the gun. Cofflin's hand dropped toward his, and
found only an empty belt holding up a pair of blue jeans. George
Swain was head of the police these days. Maybe I should have
kept the gun. He began to surge forward, cursing the decades
that had slowed him down.

   The woman's face had gone fluid with shock; her hands came
up in a pushing gesture in front of her and she turned her head
aside. That left it facing toward Cofflin. He could see the features
twist, not so much with pain as incredulous shock as the bullets
punched into her torso. Blood leaked from mouth and nose. She
toppled backward and the man grabbed at her. He caught her
with one arm around her body and staggered backward himself,
to rest with his shoulders against the rear wall of the restaurant,
sliding down to sit on the built-in couch. The dying woman slid
across him, lying in his lap in a parody of affection. Somewhere
in the room a scream tailed off into a choking, retching sound.
Ricochet, Cofflin thought. No time to turn around and check
who.

   "You wouldn't listen to me, Michelle," the gunman crooned.
"It'll be better now. We're together again. I'm sorry I had to hurt
you…"

   The gun came up and trained on Cofflin. He stepped slightly
sideways, putting himself between it and most of the people in
the room; those to the side were moving away on their own.

   Now, what do you say to someone who's utterly, completely,
incontestably bugfuck? Cofflin thought.

  "Mr. Mansfield, why don't you put the gun down before
anyone else gets hurt?" he said, his voice calm and controlled.
High pucker factor here. "You can't hold on to it forever."

  "Michelle will be with me forever!" he said. "You'll never take
her away from me!"

   He was a little over twice arm's length away. Cofflin was quite
close enough to see his hand begin to clench on the gun, much
too far to cover the distance needed to stop the 9mm bullet
punching into him.

   Whack. Something struck the wall near Mansfield. Whack.
This time it hit him in the body, bringing a grunt of surprise and
pain. The gun roared, loud in the confined space of the
restaurant, and the bullet went by with an ugly flat crack. Then
they were swaying chest to chest, grappling. Even then Cofflin
had time to notice the man's sour stink. The frenzied wiry
strength was inescapable, wrenching and twisting at his hand
where it held the automatic by the slide and strove to force it
upward. Then blackened fingernails clawed for his eyes. He
ducked under them and jammed his head into the filthy cloth of
Mansfield's coat. Can't let go. Too many people behind him,
Martha behind him. He hooked an ankle behind the madman's
and pushed. They fell, toppling bruisingly through chairs and
marble-topped tables and rolling about.

   Whump. This time the gun's discharge was muffled by the
press of their bodies. Cofflin felt hot gases burn his skin, and
waited for the battering pain of ripped flesh. Nothing happened
except a fresh set of stinks. The body locked against his began to
thrash convulsively, and blood spurted into his face. He rolled
free, spitting and wiping at his face, his hands coming away red
as crimson gloves. One look told him that Mansfield was dying,
his body jerking as he drowned in the blood pouring into his
lungs. The messy, undignified process would be over in less than
a minute. His wife—ex-wife—was already limp beside him, in the
crimson pool that was spreading around them; Cofflin put
fingers to her throat to check for a pulse, knowing it was futile.
Blood was splashed everywhere, walls, the mirrored pillars, even
droplets on the pressed steel flowers of the ceiling. More on
Martha, where she stood with the teenager's Y-fork slingshot in
her hand. He moved toward her.

  "None of it mine," she said, in a voice like ash.

   One of the teenagers lay at her feet, with his companion and
another islander giving him first aid; from the way he clutched
at his lower stomach, he'd need it to survive until the ambulance
got here. And there should be a helicopter to take him to a
hospital on the mainland. This shouldn't have happened at all.

   He stooped to pick up the Glock, ejecting the magazine. Three
cartridges left, out of twelve. "Damn," he said hoarsely. "We've
got to do something about this."

   The vehicle arrived, sirens wailing; someone must have heard
the gunshots. The paramedics leaped into action, injecting a
painkiller, cutting away cloth, and rigging a plasma drip. One
swore softly as he exposed the wound in the youngster's stomach.
They moved the torso quickly, slapping a pressure bandage on
the larger exit wound and lifting the victim onto the stretcher.
Another was already calling instructions into her radiophone
from behind the wheel of the ambulance.

  Martha dropped the slingshot, shuddering. Cofflin slipped an
arm around her. "You saved my life," he said quietly.

  "Had to," she said. "Wasn't anyone else. You saved us all. Take
me out of here, please."

   He did. We've got to do something about this, he thought
grimly. People were just too near the edge. Get the guns and
explosives under control for a while.

   "Thought so," Cofflin said to himself, as the phone in his
jacket buzzed.

   They were sitting side by side in the chair swing on the front
porch, holding hands. The grin he'd been suppressing—he'd
never live this down, and several people had passed by close
enough to see him in the light of the whale-oil lanterns—slid
away unnoticed. The expression left behind was one generations
of Cofflins had shown to the sea in its wilder moods, or to a
boatload of Papuans trying to storm a whaler cast aground in
the South Seas. Charles Fs troops might have recognized it,
coming at them behind a three-barred lobster-tail helmet at
Marston Moor.

   He pulled the phone out and listened. "Go ahead with it," he
replied briefly, then rose and tucked it away. He checked the
action of his pistol and reholstered it.

  "What's wrong?" Martha said sharply.

   "You weren't wrong the other day, about Deubel," Cofflin said
shortly. "I couldn't arrest him before he did anything… but that
didn't mean I couldn't have him watched. Now he's doing
something. I'm a cop again, for a little while."

  "Setting fires?" she asked.

  He looked at her sharply. "Deduction," she replied. "The town
was nearly wiped out by fires in the 1830s, and he knows it. And
it'll serve his crazy purpose if we're just damaged enough to die
off. The history he's interested in protecting ends after 30 A.D.,
and he doesn't care about what Europeans will find in the
Americas."

   That is one hell of a woman, he thought. The grin threatened
to come back for a second.

   "We do think alike, Martha," he said. "Have to go. See you at
the Council meeting tomorrow. Thanks for the dinner."

   The man fumbled with the oil-soaked rag. One match went
out, then another. At last the cloth caught, flames running up it
in sullen yellow and red. It dropped to the ground as the
yard-long club made solid contact with the back of the arsonist's
head.

  "That's enough," Cofflin said sharply, stamping on the torch.
The flame sputtered alive again and again, until he kicked dirt
over it.

   The militiaman—volunteer police reserve sworn in last week,
technically—was winding up, wild-eyed, ready for a solid blow
that would have cracked the arsonist's skull. The man on the
ground was moaning and trying to crawl; abruptly he began to
vomit. It wasn't as easy to knock a man out as the movies could
make you think, and when you did he didn't wake up a little later
as if he'd taken a nap. A member of the TV generation with no
training or practical experience was all too likely to hammer a
skull into mush and expect the recipient to get up and fight
again like Jean Claude Van Whatsisname.

  "Watch him," he said. "The rest of you, follow me."

   The volunteers lined up with their shields and wood-dowel
clubs. No guns tonight, thank God. The island had turned out to
have an appalling amount of firepower, but it was all safely
under lock and key now. Cofflin led his party of volunteers up
Main Street. A few of Deubel's fanatics fled before them. None
had had enough time to do much mischief, although he could
hear the wail of the fire engine from the station off to his right
rear. At the head of the street he met George Swain. He could
barely recognize him in the gloom. Speaking of which…

  He took out the phone. "Ready?"

  "Ready."

  "Throw the switch."

   He squeezed his eyes to slits as the streetlights came on for
the first time since the second night after the Event. Amazing
how bright it looked, after a few weeks without electric light.

   "Let's get the rest of them rounded up," he said. "Then we can
figure out what the hell to do with them."

   The volunteers trotted down the street after him. He could
hear the other squads, but such of his attention as could be
spared was on the houses around him. Wood, mostly. They
couldn't keep the pumping system going all the time. The last
time a real fire had broken loose here back in the nineteenth
century, half the town had been leveled. If it happened now,
there would be no aid from the mainland. His stomach clenched
at what it would be like, trying to survive with most of the town
in ashes.

  What the hell are we going to do with them?

   The circle closed in on the little church. A few fights broke
out, and ended with more stunned or weeping men and women
sitting on the curbsides, handcuffed or hugging bruises. More
and more ordinary townsfolk were following along behind, drawn
by the noise and the appearance of the streetlights. Deubel's
congregation were hammering on the door and calling on their
leader, but the door was locked against them, and the church's
windows showed empty and dark. A last surge of pushing and
shoving, and the would-be aronists let themselves be led down
between the ranks of club-bearing volunteers and regular police.

   "You're all under arrest, under the emergency powers invested
in me by the Town Meeting," Cofflin said harshly, when they'd
been gathered together. "You'll get a fair hearing. Now sit down
and be quiet, will you?"
   It was less formal than the pre-Event procedures, but it'd
serve. "Hell of a thing, George," he said. "Better than twenty of
them."

  "Just glad you called it ahead of time, Chief," the younger
man replied.

   "So am I—but this's as far as I thought. Get the doorknocker,
would you?" A piece of law enforcement equipment rarely used
on the island before, but they did have one in stock.

   It came up with four of his old officers staggering up the
stairs under its weight, a steel forging with handles; shooting the
lock out of a door was also something that looked a lot
easier—and safer—in the movies. In real life the ricochets and
flying metal made it a last resort.

  "Pastor Deubel, please open this door. We don't want to
damage your church." True in the literal sense; in the
metaphorical, he wanted to get rid of Deubel's church and
congregation, and get the people in it acting sane again. "Pastor
Deubel, this is your last warning."

   Cofflin sighed. It had been years since he had had to break
down a door, and he'd never liked it. There ought to be a place
where a man could go and lock the world away; on the other
hand, people ought to be able to sleep secure in their beds
without fear of a lunatic burning the roof over their heads.

   Suddenly a sound cut through the murmur of voices and the
distant wail of fire-truck sirens. A huge thudding boom, coming
from the east, down toward the harbor. A cloud of smoke rose
skyward, shot with sparks of firelight.

  "Uh-oh," Cofflin said. "That was—"

   George Swain took the phone from his ear. "—the warehouse
with the guns and stuff, Chief."

    Cofflin winced. Maybe that wasn't such a bright idea after
all, he thought. Then: No, goddammit. Think what Deubel
might have done with some firepower.
  "Get some more volunteers down there," he said. "All right,
Ted, Caitlin, Matt, Henry. Go for it."

   He signed everyone else back from the steps and drew his
pistol, holding it up in the two-handed grip that made it more
difficult to grab. Only the second time he'd drawn iron as a
policeman, other than to clean the piece. Deubel's crazy enough
for anything. Sometimes he wondered what God thought of the
number of people who claimed to act in His name. What had
that old book said? A fanatic is someone who does what he
knows God would do if only the Almighty knew the facts of the
case.

   Boom. The police officers staggered back as the steel
rebounded from the stout doors, but there had been splintering
as well. Stronger than a house door—those gave in at once. Boom
. This time the splintering was louder. Boom. The doors swung
open, and the team staggered a few steps into the aisle, drawn by
the momentum of their ram. It was nearly pitch-dark in there,
only a few gleams from the streetlamp up the road penetrating.
Cofflin unhitched the L-shaped flashlight from his waist and
shone it within.

  "Christ," he whispered.

   Deubel was there, all right—swinging from an iron light
bracket, the cord that had once fed the light deep in his swollen
neck. Matter dripped from his feet to the floor below, the usual
release of bowels and bladder, and the stink was heavy inside the
musty closeness of the church. He'd made a hash of hanging
himself, too. Not enough drop, and his hands were still fastened
to the cord where they'd scrabbled to stop his slow choking.

   "The poor man," a voice said behind him. Cofflin looked back;
it was Father Gomez, from St. Mary's.

   Cofflin nodded to the priest. "Excuse me, Father." Louder.
"Ladder in here, and a stretcher." Not much doubt about the
cause of death; no need to rout someone out for an autopsy.

   "The poor deluded man," Gomez said again, crossing himself,
as the blanket-covered body was carried out. Deubel's followers
looked at it as it went by, some weeping, some impassive, a few
cursing or spitting at the dead cleric who'd left them to face the
consequences of his preaching.

  "Manichaeism is always a temptation," Gomez went on.
"Chief Cofflin, I think if I talked to some of these people…"

   "Do you think it would do any good, Father?" Cofflin asked.
He wasn't Catholic himself, but he had a fair degree of respect
for the little priest. Certainly he took his job more seriously than
some of the other clergy on the island, and he'd been a voice of
good sense since the Event. "They're not exactly of your
denomination."

   "We're all Christians, Chief Cofflin," Gomez said.

   "What was that… Manni-something?"

   "A perennial heresy—imagining that Satan is as strong as
God. Poor Deubel thought that the Incarnation could be
halted—which is to say that God's will could be defied. But even
Satan is part of God's plan; He is omniscient and omnipotent, or
He's not God at all. I don't pretend to understand what's
happened to us here, but then there are many things we're not
supposed to understand or can't understand. Mystery is at the
heart of life. If God makes many worlds, He'll arrange them as
He pleases—including when and where to send His son in this
one."

   Cofflin looked at him thoughtfully. "You know, I think it might
be a good idea if you did have a talk with these people," he said.

   "I will." Gomez hesitated. "Not to tell you how to do your own
job…"

   "Go ahead—everyone else does. It's a free… island."

   "But it might be better if any formal trial, any Town Meeting,
were held off for a week or so. People were frightened enough
without this, and…"

   "… frightened men are vicious, I know," Cofflin said. And by
then I can figure out something, I hope. I'll ask Martha.

  Cofflin rubbed a hand across the back of his aching neck. "I
hate this job," he muttered.

  "And that's a very reassuring thing, my son," Gomez said.

                   CHAPTER SIX
  April, Year 1 A.E.

   The coast of England was green and silent, save for birds in
numbers that made the sky restless. It might have been a
morning before man, except that—she focused the
binoculars—there was a haze of smoke a little farther to the
northeast.

   Well, well, Marian Alston said to herself. Then, aloud:
"Soundings."

   "Forty feet and shoaling, ma'am. Twenty-three feet under the
keel."

  "Twenty-three feet, aye," Captain Alston replied. "Keep it
comin'."

   At least they had the depthfinder; she'd have to remember to
have someone trained in throwing the lead line from the
bowsprit nets against the day that it unrecoverably wore out. It
made her teeth stand on edge to come this close to shore when
her shoal charts were useless and the only repair facilities for a
steel-hulled ship were a long, long couple of thousand years
away. At least the weather looked fair and the glass was steady,
just enough wind to scatter whitecaps across blue ocean. Water
was lighter over shoals and mudbanks, of which the area looked
to have more than its share. The low coast ahead stood green
and wild, marsh and tossing forest and occasional clearings.
Some of it looked like second growth, scrubby trees and
underbrush. Now and then they saw a plowed field green with
new crops, but some of the little clusters of round huts were
burned and deserted.
   What wind and wave there was would be broken a little by the
Isle of Wight off to the southwest, and by the sides of the estuary
on either hand, safe enough in anything but a really bad blow.
She didn't dare go much farther up the Southampton Water,
though, not with the bottom shoaling like this.

  "Eighteen feet under the keel, ma'am."

  "Eighteen feet, aye."

   And… there. They were coasting steadily closer to the smudge
of smoke that marked a settlement of some type.

  "Hampshire," she murmured.

   She'd been here… before. It had looked nothing like this, of
course. Perhaps if she was flying over it the resemblances would
be more, but too many thousand years of human hands had
shaped the lowlands of the coast, draining and ditching, clearing
and planting. That land of tacky seaside resorts and naval bases,
green fields inland with time-burnished villages and manors—it
was all more distant than the moon, than the farthest star. She
was adrift in the sea of time.

  "On deck! Boats on the beach, there. Big ones!"

   She trained her own binoculars. The beach came into view
slowly, as the ship ghosted close at a bare three knots. Two boats,
right enough; you could even call them ships, especially
compared to the dozens of rafts and canoes and hide coracles
also hauled up. About sixty footers, she estimated, pulled up on
the shore above the high-tide mark. Prows curled up, carved in
the likeness of a horse's head and gaudily painted; there were
decked sections fore and aft, open amidships. Masts were
stepped, rather short ones—probably they could be taken down
at will—but the yards and sails were elsewhere, perhaps used for
the big tents she saw a little behind the vessels. Two heavy
steering oars, one on either side, canted up now and held by
ropes. The hulls were fairly tubby, broader amidships, but with
oar ports along the sides, and black with tar or pitch. Men
crowded around them, sunlight flashing on their bronze
spearheads. Alston scanned right and left. The camp sprawled
for the better part of a mile, tents and huts, men in kilts and
women in long skirts and shawls, oxcarts, fires and rubbish
heaps and… yes, horse-drawn chariots driving down to the edge
of the water. Pretty much like illustrations she'd seen, except
that the panels around them were higher at the sides than the
front. All too far away to see clearly, but it was plain enough that
they were getting a reception party ready.

   Sensible enough, she thought. If someone showed up off her
shore in a ship fifty times the size of anything she'd seen before,
she'd have the troops out, and locked and loaded too.

   "Sixteen feet under the keel, ma'am."

   "Sixteen feet, aye. Prepare to strike all sail," she said quietly.
"Stand by the starboard anchor. Three shots at the water's edge."

   Most of the Eagle's poles were bare already, except for a
topsail, the gaff on the mizzen, and a few of the jibsails still up to
keep steerage way on her. A minute of disciplined effort and the
rest were struck.

   "Let go the starboard anchor!"

    There was a sharp clung as the blackened steel dropped into
the water and the chain took up the slack. The Eagle checked as
the flukes dug into the bottom, heaved forward a little, and
swung to. The other splashed home as well and then they were
still, rocking slightly to the longshore swell.

   "She holds, ma'am!"

   "Holding, aye."

   The quartermaster's whistle rang out across the deck. "Shift
colors!"

  The steaming ensign came down from the gaff. The blue Coast
Guard jack broke out at the bows, and the national ensign to the
mainmast.

   Noise grew on the shore, faint across the half mile of waters.
Shouts, screams, a weird dunting hu-hu-hu-hu-huuuu that must
be some sort of musical instrument. Tom Hiller came up beside
her.

  "That doesn't look like a permanent settlement to me,
Captain," the sailing master said.

   "No, I'd say they'd only been there weeks, maybe a couple of
months," she said. "Let's get Arnstein's tame savage up here, Mr.
Hiller."

   Ohotolarix came bounding up the companionway with easy
grace; the speed of his recovery had surprised the doctor. When
he saw the shore he gave a great shout of joy, then threw up his
arms in a gesture that looked religious somehow, palms up to the
sky. They'd given him back his leather kilt; it looked a little
incongruous with the blue T-shirt he was wearing.

    Arnstein and the astronomer followed more slowly. They had
all they could do to dam the flow of words from the young
warrior, but at last they managed it. After a moment Ian turned
to the captain.

   "That's his king's camp—his rahax," the academic said. He
rubbed a nose peeling a little from sunburn. "Daurthunnicar."
He sounded out the name slowly. "And those are his people, the
Iraiina."

   "Eka, Daurthunnicar, rahax," the young man said happily,
smiling and pointing. More gibberish followed. Then: "Iraiina
teuatha."

  "That means 'tribe,' or 'people.' I think."

  "Can you make him understand 'we come in peace' and 'we
want to talk to your leader'?" Alston asked.

  "I think so," Arnstein said slowly. "We've been working on it."

  "Ms. Hendriksson, get the boat ready. Boat crew of the watch,
and six of your people fully armed." With the best Nantucket had
had to offer, which wasn't much. "Remember, we don't want any
conflict, but if they attack, shoot to kill." She was sending
Hendriksson because she thought Walker might be inclined to
jump the gun in a tricky situation.

  "Ma'am."

  "Mr. Arnstein, let's hand him the gifts."

   First they returned the boy's ax, which made him seem inches
taller as he thonged it to his wrist. The grin grew wider as they
handed over a fire ax, one of the short swords, and necklaces of
plastic beads. He touched his open palm to his forehead, bowed,
seemed to glow with happiness as the sailors led him away to the
boat.

   Captain Alston waited tensely as it stroked in toward shore.
They had the island's lone .50-caliber machine gun clamped to
the rail, and a couple of sailors with scope-sighted hunting rifles,
but it was still tricky sending people to within arrow range. The
longboat stroked away, oars flashing in unison. It halted in
shallow water, and she could see Ohotolarix jump overboard and
wade ashore, holding his treasures aloft. A great screaming roar
went up from the crowd on the beach; there must be at least a
thousand, possibly two.

  "I hope to hell this works," she muttered.

  Daurthunnicar forced his hand to relax on the haft of his ax.

  "He bleeds!" the rahax shouted. "He is no ghost!"

   A sigh of relief went through the crowd as the young man held
up his arm, a trickle of red running down it from where the high
chief had scored it slightly. A Dead Walker back from his grave
would be cold and bloodless and full of hunger for the living.

   "This is a thing for the chiefs," he said. "All of you, back to
your households. Chieftains, the Wise Man—and you, our ally,"
he added unwillingly, as Isketerol bowed. "Come, we will make
council." Best to include the Tartessian, who had knowledge of
strange lands and peoples.
   They gathered around his chariot, casting glances out over the
water. The size of the thing! It looked small with distance, but
his vision was still good for things far away, had even grown
better since the first gray appeared in his beard. He could see
folk moving about on it, climbing up the mountain-high masts.
Five times the length of the great ships of Tartessos, and those
were the wonders of the world. Like a stallion beside a rabbit.

    Young Ohotolarix was still grinning like a loon. Well, a man
brought back from death had a right to feel joyful. He'd been a
little less pleased to give up the strange things he brought, but he
knew better than to gainsay his chief and knew he could await
rich gifts in recompense. Besides, the Wise Man said the things
must be purified, lest they carry a curse.

   "This metal, what is it?" Daurthunnicar said, turning the
strange ax in his hands.

  "Iron," Isketerol said. "I think, for I've never seen more than a
small piece shaped as a ring before. The Great King's artisans
know the secret of it, in Haiti at the eastern end of the Middle
Sea. But it's rare and very precious. Harder than bronze, I hear,
and it takes a better edge, if you know how to work it."

   The rahax took up the ax. The head shone like silver, and it
shaved bare a patch of hair from his forearm when he tested the
edge. He swung it tentatively; about the heft of his own war ax,
or a little heavier—the strangers must be men of strong arms,
since he swung more weight than most. Not badly balanced,
either. He swung it down at a stump; the blade sank deep, and
when he wrenched it out it was still sharp. The sword was an
even greater wonder, finer by far than the goodly weapon the
Tartessian captain carried. And no one had ever seen anything
like the ornaments, smooth and shining and of colors brighter
than the sun. Daurthunnicar felt his greed itch. If he had gifts
like this to give out, warriors would flock to him from every tribe
of Sky Father's people.

  More than goods. What powers may these strangers have?
His people were in need of strong allies.

  "Say again how they treated you," he commanded.
   "Lord," Ohotolarix said. "I woke a little as they hauled me to
their great ship. The next I knew, their ruler bent over me. Their
ruler is black, lord. With skin the color of charcoal."

   A sigh that held fear rustled through the Iraiina chiefs. The
robed Wise Man raised his staff to hold back evil magic, and
talismans of bronze and bone clinked along its length. The Night
Ones were black… although they did not walk in the light of day.

   Isketerol leaned forward. "Was their chief flat of nose, with
thick lips, and hair curled tightly, thus?" he asked.

   Daurthunnicar frowned at the interruption, but felt new
respect when Ohotolarix nodded.

  "Strange," the Tartessian muttered. "A Medjay, here?"

  "You know of them?" the rahax asked.

   "At Pharaoh's court. He has warriors from far south up the
Nile, in Nubia, the Medjay folk. Very fierce. And voyagers of my
people who sailed far south of the Pillars say the folk there are
black of skin, too, with features like that."

  "Eka," Daurthunnicar nodded.

   From what he'd heard the sun shone brighter the farther
south you went. The Tartessians were shorter and darker of skin
and hair than most folk in these parts. Perhaps the sun baked
the skin dark, as fire did clay, darker still as you went farther
south. Pleased with his thought, the rahax signaled the young
warrior to go on.

  "Were all of them dark?" he asked.

   "No, only a few, my chief. Others were like us, though their
clothes and ways are strange. And some were brown, and some
had skin the color of amber, and eyes aslant, so." He put his
index fingers to the corners of his eyes and pushed them up. "But
only a few. They treated me well, lord, like a son or oath-brother.
They healed my hurts with strange medicines, and gave me a soft
bed and food— strange, and not enough meat for my liking, but
plenty of it. And these gifts, as you see."

   Daurthunnicar looked at Isketerol, and the Tartessian shook
his head. Strange to him, then, too.

   "The men among them mostly shave their chins," Ohotolarix
continued. "And they dress strangely, both men and women, in
garments sewn to fit their limbs, as a quiver fits arrows. Richly,
richly, even the commoners are clothed from head to foot in fine
woven things. Every one carries a knife and tools of metal."

   The chief grunted. Women along… did that mean the
strangers had come to settle? His gut hurt at the thought of
another foe, but perhaps an accommodation could be reached.
"Did you see cattle, wagons, children?" he asked.

   "None, my chief." Ohotolarix hesitated. "It seemed as if all
were one warband and its wives or concubines. Perhaps they
hold them in common, for there were far fewer than the men… I
think. When the black-faced high chief spoke, all others obeyed.
The chiefs under him spoke, and his word was carried out, the
others obeying like the fingers of a man's hand."

   This time the chiefs grunt carried envy. He'd always wished
his underchiefs obeyed like that. They did better than the Earth
Folk, who went each his own way, but…

   "And what powers did they have?" the Wise Man asked,
leaning forward. His seamed face was calm, but his eyes glittered
with interest.

   "Wise One," Ohotolarix said, looking more nervous than he
had facing the rahax, "they had many. Light they could make
appear in darkness, light as bright as the sun. They could make
water appear in their bowls at will, and when they voided
themselves into vessels of fine clay, the water came and took
away their filth."

  "Knossos," Isketerol muttered, then shook his head when the
rahax looked his way.

   "I don't think they showed me all their powers," the young
man went on. "I learned a few of their words, they a few of
mine—there was a man, an old man, very tall, and his woman,
who tried to learn our tongue. And they had a curious magic
they worked, one that I couldn't see the purpose of. They made
marks on thin-scraped skins, so—" he picked up a short stick and
mimed tracing on a square held in front of him—"and they
would look at the marks, even hours later, and repeat my words."

  The Tartessian started again, narrow dark eyes going wide.
Daurthunnicar bared his teeth in the silence of his head. His ally
knew something he did not, and wasn't telling.

   "But I think," Ohotolarix said, "that I know why they come.
They showed me pictures of grain, of bread, of cattle. They want
these things, and they will give rich gifts for them."

   "Ahhhh," Daurthunnicar sighed.

   He looked at the ax, at the wonderful sword, at the shining
jewelry. A chieftain who could open his hands and give such
things to his followers would have power beyond power. A
thought nickered through his mind: canoes, coracles, a night
raid. Then he looked out again at the ship, its masts towering to
pierce the sky, bulwarks like cliffs, the blood-red slash across its
side and the cryptic symbols down the hull, the great golden
eagle-god figure at its prow. No, no, he wouldn't raise blade
against that power unless he must, for the lives of his folk. Better
to deal in peace with such strength, if it could be done without
offending the tribe's guardian gods. He would make parlay with
these People of the Eagle.

   "Wise Man?" he said.

   The priest leaned on his staff. "I sense no great evil here," he
said. "The Powers are at work, yes, but as likely to bless as to
curse. Best I go to my tent, and ask of… others."

   A few of the chiefs made signs as the old man stalked off.
Daurthunnicar rapped the blunt end of his ax against the thin
bronze panels that sheathed his chariot. "Hear the word of your
rahax," he said. "We will send an envoy to these strangers, with
a green branch and a white shield. You"—he pointed at
Ohotolarix—"will go with him. We will bid them guest with us;
they will share bread and meat and blood, and they will be
peaceholy in all the camps of the Iraiina folk, unless I unsay the
word of peace or they break it. Hear me! Any who raises hand
against them, who insults them, will answer to me and to Sky
Father and the Horned Man."

   The chiefs bowed their heads. That was good, that meant they
thought his word was wise. If they hadn't, he'd be hearing
objections by now, loud and frequent. Most of the chiefs were his
kin, and he was rahax as long as the most of them wished it, just
as they were chiefs as long as the warriors respected and feared
them.

   "We will bid them to feast with us," Daurthunnicar went on.
"We will speak of alliance and the giving of gifts. Sky Father is
with us, and the Horned Man; they send us strong aid, much
magic, much luck."

   Swindapa lay motionless on her side, her knees drawn up to
her chest, trying to ignore the aches and the itching and burning
between her legs, and the cold feeling in her chest that never
went away. The bonds that held her hands behind her back
chafed, and so did the thick collar on her neck. That had a leash
whose other end was braided around a wooden stake pounded
into the ground. Even with her hands free she couldn't have
removed collar or leash, not without a knife; they were twisted
cowhide many strands thick. Everyone had gone away; she could
hear the Sun People screaming and crying out down by the
water. Her head lifted from the ground in a tangle of dirt-crusted
hair. Nobody, not a dog, not the children who'd prodded her
with sticks and thrown clods of earth, not the pack of older boys
who sometimes hung around waiting for a chance to rush in and
force her while her keepers' attention was elsewhere…

   She shivered and ground her teeth, feeling herself starting to
shake again. No. Instead she started working her bound hands
down her back. If she could get her feet between them she could
start gnawing on the hide that bound her wrists. With a grunt of
pain she fell back on her side, panting. She was too stiff from
lack of stretching and the binding was too broad. Tears of
frustration ran down her cheeks. A tethered goat on the other
side of a dead fire cropped at a bush and looked at her with
unblinking eyes as it chewed.

    Swindapa tried to whisper a Cursing Song, but it didn't feel
right, as if the Moon Woman couldn't hear her in this place. She
started again as footsteps moved toward her, from the other side
of the two-wheeled oxcart. Please. It wasn't time for the woman
who brought her food and water. Brought most days; sometimes
they forgot. The big leather tent twenty paces away in that
direction was Daurthunnicar's. Sometimes men came over from
there and forced her or hurt her in other ways. That hadn't
happened for twice seven of days; she'd tried to make herself too
filthy, by voiding in the dirt instead of the trench they'd made
her dig, and rolling in the mud. If they were drunk enough on
mead or hemp they might not care—

   It was the woman, and a few others with her, and behind
them the whole crowd was returning to camp, chattering. There
was a high note to their voices, excitement or fear.

  The women paused around her. "She stinks," one said. "The
guests will be insulted."

   Swindapa stayed huddled on the ground, legs drawn up under
her and ready to scrabble away. Sometimes the women were
kind, but other times they kicked her, or dropped the food in the
dirt.

   "She did that to keep the men off," another voice said. This
one was younger, and there was colored work in the shoes
beneath the dyed woolen skirt. "They haven't been at her for two
seven-days now. She'll look all right when she's cleaned up. The
bruises are mostly gone."

   Another voice chuckled. "It'd take more than a whiff to keep
that boar-stallion away when he's had a few horns." The tone
changed. "Diasas. Get up." The toe prodded her in the ribs.

  "Yes, Iraiina," Swindapa said.

  The tribe-name meant "free" or "noble" in the Sun People
tongue. She came to her feet, gritting her teeth and stretching.
The Iraiina women averted their eyes a little; it was shameful to
go without clothes among the Sun People. That was why they'd
kept her stripped, to shame her. Among her people, clothes were
for warmth or comfort or show, but now she knew what their
word naked meant. It meant helplessness.

   A kinder voice spoke: "Come. The rahax says you are to be
washed clean." That one made a tsk sound between her teeth.
"He should have bestowed you long before this. He wouldn't treat
a dog so, why a woman?"

   "Wirronnaur's arm festered where she cut him," the younger
woman explained. "And her kin wouldn't pay enough for her,
they don't, you know—they say that if they pay for one, we'll take
others, so it's against their law. The rahax was angry."

   "Well, he still shouldn't have let them treat her like this, as if
this were a raiders' camp. Come on, Earth girl, we have to clean
you and see you're sound."

   "Why?" Swindapa asked.

  The woman sawing the leash tugged on it painfully. "The
rahax says it."

  "Careful," the older women said. To Swindapa: "Foreigners
came today, in a great ship."

  "Wizards," the younger woman said, spitting in the dirt and
making the sign of the horns. "Night Ones, maybe."

   "No, these Eagle People are men. Maybe wizards, and very
strange, but men," the older woman said. She had a plump face,
with four braids of graying black hair secured by bronze rings.
Her voice was not unkind as she spoke to Swindapa. "Don't
worry, you'll be treated better when you have one master to
protect you. The rahax is to give you as a feasting-gift tomorrow.
You'll be the stranger chief's. If you please him, you might be free
soon, even become a second or third wife. You'll live well
then—the strangers are rich and powerful. Come, we've got
soaproot and sweet herbs, and then we're to feed you. That will
feel better, won't it?"

   "Why do we have to carry these pigstickers, sir?" one of the
cadets asked, looking dubiously at the spear he'd been handed.

   "Because the natives don't know what guns are, and we aren't
going to let them know unless we need to surprise them, and we
don't want them to think we're unarmed except for
funny-looking clubs, either," Lieutenant Walker said. He looked
around with a bright-eyed interest that was somehow also cool.
"Now shut up."

    Alston noted the byplay and forced herself to stop fiddling
with her gloves. She was in dress uniform—well, mostly, damned
if she was going to wear a skirt—and a lot was riding on the
impression she made. The medal ribbons were ridiculous, but
that was one of the Coast Guard's little foibles. You could get
four or five of them just for getting out of boot camp or the
Academy.

   There were twenty in the shore party: herself, Arnstein,
Rosenthal, Walker, and an escort of cadets, picked largely
because they still remembered how to march smartly in step, not
something the Coast Guard generally put much emphasis on.
The cadets all had Army Kevlar helmets from Nantucket, a little
incongruous but better than anything available locally. They
carried spears and shields made up in the island machine shop,
for show, and likewise short swords. The pistols at their waists
and the rifles and shotguns across their backs were for
emergency use. If it came to that she supposed they could shoot
their way out without much problem; people who'd never been
exposed to firearms of any sort would scatter at the first blast
and not stop running for a while.

   And it had better not come to that. They needed the grain
back on the island. Badly. Besides, she didn't relish the thought
of gunning down men virtually unarmed.

   She was wearing a sword herself, one she'd saved several years
to buy, back in her early twenties in San Francisco, and a shorter
companion on the other side of her belt. She wondered for a
moment what Sensei Hishiba would think of where the set of
katana and wakizashi had ended up…

  "Let's go," she said. "Ms. Rapczewicz, you have the deck."

   The boatswain's pipes squealed. "Eagle departing!" rang out
as she stepped into the boat and the davits swung out to lower it.
The ship's bell rang three times, then again a single time.

   Oars bit the water; the boats threw long shadows ahead of
themselves as the sun sank behind. Bonfires blossomed ahead,
up and down the shoreline, but the forest inland was a rustling
sea of darkness. When full dark came, the sky overhead would be
a frosted blaze of stars, as it never was ashore in her own time. A
low chanting was running through the crowds ahead, backlit
against their fires, deep men's voices and a keening female
oversong weaving among trumpets that sounded like nothing so
much as Tibetan radongs. Drumbeat thudded under it… no, she
realized, that was the sound of feet, pounding the earth in
unison. A crawling went up her spine, less fear than sheer
lonesomeness. The oars caught slightly.

  "Steady there," she said.

   The boats' keels grounded on sand and shingle. Oars nipped
up in unison, and the landing party disembarked. The sailor
crews pushed the boats off again, to wait ready just in case.

   Marian Alston stepped ashore onto dry land that crunched
under her boots. The chanting and stamping cut off. A bristle of
trumpets sounded again, upright shapes six feet long with
gaping mouths shaped like the heads of wolves and boars. The
cadets formed around her and the other officer, except for those
who were lugging the bundles of gifts. She blinked aside
strangeness and the failing light to see what awaited her.

   More of the green boughs, for starters—evidently a peace
signal, like the Biblical olive branch. A group of men waited, in
the leather kilts she'd come to expect but with brightly dyed
tunics and leggings as well, bracelets and neck rings of chased
gold, pendant necklaces of amber and gold, silver pectorals set
with colored stones. Behind them their chariots were drawn up.
The horses wore headdresses of nodding plumes, and hangings of
felt covered with writhing colored applique shapes of animals
and monsters along their flanks.

   "Captain," Arnstein murmured into her ear. "Look at the ones
standing off to the left."

   Her eyes moved that way. Several men. Shorter than the ones
about them, black-haired and olive-skinned, cleanshaven,
dressed in linen tunics, their ornaments more restrained and
subtly… different. She gave an imperceptible nod and kept up
her steady pace. A man was moving out to meet her, flanked by
warriors of his own. Big, easily six feet, three inches taller than
she and towering by the standards of this age, she guessed, and
massively built. His chest strained at his sheet-bronze
breastplate, decorated with raised hammered spirals over the
nipples and gold studs along the neck and waist. The impression
of height was increased by the bronze helmet he wore, rounded
at the front and back, flat sides rising to a peak embellished by a
fore-and-aft crest running from brow to nape of neck.

   Talk about your dickheads, she thought irreverently; it
helped break the hieratic mood.

    A gold disk engraved with the sun hung on his chest; the haft
of the war ax sloped over his shoulder was set with rings of
bronze and gold, the falcon-bill head inlaid in silver, and he bore
a long bronze sword at his waist. His beard was glossy brown
streaked with gray, forked and held by more rings of gold where
it trailed down on his barrel chest. The beginnings of a potbelly
added to his impression of thick-armed strength. He raised the
ax in a curious gesture and rested it on the ground, spoke in a
rumbling bass.

   "Daurthunnicar son of Ubrotarix," came through eventually,
with Arnstein helping out. "Rahax of the Iraiina folk."

   Alston saluted; it seemed to suit the occasion. "Marian Alston,
captain of the Eagle," she replied firmly, meeting the impassive
blue eyes. That got through too; Ohotolarix had known what to
call the ship's gilded figurehead. "American," she added.

  A slender boy came forward with a platter of basket-work. It
held a golden cup, a piece of coarse dark bread, a slab of cheese,
and a knife. Daurthunnicar picked up the knife and pricked his
thumb, squeezing out a few drops of blood into the cup. Alston
felt her own hands move in dreamlike precision, stripping off a
glove and placing the razor-edged bronze against her skin. Her
own blood fell into the liquid in the cup; that was yellow, the
color of straw. The native chief picked up the cup in both hands;
it seemed to vanish in their hamlike vastness. He raised it to the
setting sun and pronounced something long and sonorous; she
caught Diawas Pithair, the name of their chief god. Sky Father;
cognate with Zeus and Jupiter and Tiwaz and the old Norse Tyr,
according to Arnstein. Others, a list of them—Mirutha, which
seemed to be some sort of angels; a Horned Man or god of beasts
and forests; Hepkwonsa, who was the Lady of the Horses, and
her sons the Twin Riding Brothers; the Crow Goddess, whose
true name was Blood Hag of Battles…

   He drank, slurping, then handed the cup to her. About half
the contents were gone; on impulse she took it in both hands as
he'd done, tilting it back until the last drops ran down her
throat. It was alcoholic, no doubt about that, and sickly-sweet.

   The crowd gave a long sigh. The rahax proceeded to cut the
bread and cheese and sprinkle them with salt. She ate her
portion and gave a polite smile as he grinned back at her out of a
crumb-filled beard. This time the watchers cheered, waving
weapons and torches over their heads.

  "That makes us guests," Arnstein murmured again. "At a
guess, we're now holy and inviolate."

   "Hell of a thing to have to guess at," she said. It made sense,
though.

   Daurthunnicar waved a few others forward. Introductions,
Alston thought. She tried to keep the names straight—or they
might be titles, of course—but she was glad of Rosenthal busy
writing on her pad.

   Arnstein stiffened beside her when the one of the other men,
the dark clean-shaven ones, was introduced. "Isketerol of
Tharatushus."
   "Tartessos?" he echoed.

   The Latin-looking man nodded. "Isketerol. Tharatushus," he
replied, pointing southeast.

   "Tartessos!"

  Arnstein burst into another language. Isketerol replied, and
Arnstein turned to Alston, excitement ablaze on his face.

   "Captain, he speaks Greek! It's very archaic, and he's got a
thick accent, it's not his native language either, but I can catch
about one word in every two—more, with a little practice. He's
Isketerol, and those ships on the beach are his. They're from
Tartessos—it's a city-state in southwestern Spain, not much
known about it except that it was wealthy and important in the
late Bronze Age and down into early classical times. I didn't
know it existed this early, but nobody's ever found the site of
it—very obscure."

   Finally! Alston thought. "You can translate through him?
Excellent. Tell the sachem here we've got gifts for him. And by
the way, be careful with the Iberian." Anyone who could survive
as a merchant adventurer here was likely to be on the ball, and
her antennae were prickling anyway. "He's sharp."

   Isketerol smiled and inclined his head, before turning and
speaking in the harsh choppy Iraiina language. Daurthunnicar
seemed to sigh with relief as well.

   "He says that he's got gifts for us too, we're his guests—
'guest-friends' is the term, it's fairly serious if it means the same
thing in this dialect of Greek and if he's translating
accurately—and we're to come to the feast, you and your
warriors, and eat with him and his."

   "Lead on," Alston said.

   "Be careful," his cousin said to Isketerol. "Whether or not
they're wizards, you can see these strangers aren't as brainless as
the local oafs."
   Isketerol nodded, legs folded gracefully before him as the feast
began. "That grunting boar Daurthunnicar hasn't realized that
the Nubian is a woman, did you notice? I think he knows about
the one with the man who speaks a little Achaean—you can
scarcely mistake those breasts— but he hasn't spotted the leader,
or the ones among her spear-bearers."

   The trader chief's cousin nodded. It wasn't surprising that the
Tartessians saw deeper, although stay-at-home kin in their
native city might have been fooled as well. When you sailed all
over the Middle Sea, though, and the shores of the River Ocean,
you met innumerable different styles of dress, of custom. Your
eyes saw more, after a while. Tartessians were real voyagers, not
like the Achaeans, who composed an epic on their own bravery if
they spent one night out of sight of land.

   "The plump woman is writing," he said to his elder. "That
looks like papyrus, don't you think?"

   "A little, but that isn't Egyptian script… although women
learn to read there, sometimes, noblewomen. And they had a
woman as Pharaoh long ago, what was her name… Hatshe… I
can't remember. But they don't have woman warriors. How does
the ink get on that pen, I wonder? Or is it like a grease stick?"

   "How did they learn Achaean? You hardly ever see those
reaver bastards west of Sicily—for which thanks be to Arucuttag
of the Sea. Should we tell Daurthunnicar about the Nubian?"

   "Don't be more of a fool than the Womb Goddess made you,"
Isketerol said. "Of course not. It might be useful sometime. You
know the saying: Give away your goods for nothing, rather than
a secret."

   His eyes glittered. "Look, they're laying out their gifts. Have
you ever seen the like?" A rhetorical question. "The king himself
back home doesn't have anything like that. The Crone take me,
Ramses in Memphis doesn't have anything like that, and they're
throwing it away on these savages as if it were a wad of grass
they'd used to wipe their arse!"

  Both the Tartessians looked over at the strangers with
profound respect. Wealth like that deserved it.

   "Well, that worked," Alston said to Arnstein. "So far," he said.

   The gifts had been received with rapture, particularly the
bolts of brightly colored synthetic cloth, the glass bowls and
tumblers, and most of all the leaf-spring longsword in a sheath of
wood bound with brass wire and glued-on polyester;
Daurthunnicar kept that by his side, stroking the hilt
occasionally. Lieutenant Walker had demonstrated it by hacking
through a bronze spearhead, and the warriors had roared and
pounded their fists on the ground.

   Now they sat in a small circle between two fires; other circles
were dotted around the open meadow. The rahax had a heavy
wooden chair; it was ancient, made of blackened oak and bone,
with eight-foot wooden pillars at its back in the shape of
men—or perhaps of gods—with erect phalli; the carvings moved
like something alive in the uncertain light of the bonfires. A
smaller chair was placed across the circle from him for his guest
of honor; everyone else sat or squatted on blankets or furs over
straw. Women in long skirts, shawls, and what looked like
primitive sweaters came through and handed everyone a horn;
many of them wore copper or gold stomachers and jewelry.
Arnstein sipped at his, and found it was some sort of mead,
honey-beer. The savory scent of roasting meat filled the air.

  Damn, he thought. You couldn't put a hollow cowhorn down
while there was anything in it; that probably meant everyone
was supposed to get thoroughly blasted.

   Isketerol sat a little forward of the throne, then leaned
forward and began to speak in deliberately slow Greek:

   "You understand, now the wannax—absurd to give this tribal
chief the title of the High King of Mycenae—will give you gifts in
return. Tonight everything must be an exchange of gifts, for
honor's sake. Tomorrow they will dicker. Badly."

   Arnstein heard the Tartessian through two or three times,
wishing that the surviving Mycenaean texts weren't all
inventories and taxation lists, in a script badly adapted to the
sounds of Greek. With a wrenching mental effort he made
himself think in Homeric Greek, and kept the Linear B word lists
in the forefront of his mind. Doing that and talking at the same
time made his forehead and scalp shine with sweat.

  "They're going to give us gifts," he said to Alston. "It's a big
symbolic thing. We'd better look pleased."

   "That won't be hard, I imagine," she said.

  Isketerol spoke again: "By the way, Ianarnstein, did you want
our host to know that your leader is a woman?"

   "You mean he doesn't!" Arnstein said, his voice half a squeak.

   "By no means. He may listen well to his wives or even fear
their tongues in private, but a man of the Iraiina does not sit at
council or feast with a female. They make a great concession by
allowing your woman to attend you."

  Again, repetitions were needed to make meaning plain.
Swallowing, Arnstein relayed the information to the commander.

    She smiled thinly. "Don't deny it, but don't make an issue of
it, either," she said. "I've run into the same thing abroad. If the
people you're visiting have got really strong and rigid dress codes
for the sexes, and you don't have the sort of figure that pushes
itself on the eyes, it's not uncommon to be mistaken for a man.
They don't see past the costume and the way you're acting."

  Ian nodded and spoke in turn to the Tartessian, careful to
shape his handling of the language to the merchant's.

  "Very perceptive of your captain," the Tartessian said. "Ah,
here are the gifts."

    Weapons piled up at Alston's feet: spears, axes, a long
leaf-shaped slashing sword with a broad bronze blade inlaid with
swirling patterns and a beautifully worked hilt in gold wire.
Jewelry, barbarically splendid and often skillfully made. Some of
it didn't seem to be in the same sinuous, whirling style as the
rest. Plunder, he thought. These people were obviously invaders
here. Furs, glossy and well-tanned, wolf, otter, fox, martin,
ermine, a couple of huge bearskins big enough for grizzly. A
leather bag made of a whole sheepskin that Isketerol said
contained wine from his homeland; Alston received another
cheer when she had that opened and shared out. It was too sweet
for Arnstein's taste, halfway between Manischewitz and a coarse
sherry, but an improvement over the tooth-hurting mead or the
thin sour beer flavored with spruce buds that were the
alternatives.

   Well, now we know why there wasn't any Mediterranean
pottery of this era for archaeologists to discover, he thought
sourly. It wasn't because there was no trade in wine and oil this
early; it was just that the Iberians transferred everything to skin
containers before they left home, and those rotted away
untraceably. He reached into his knapsack, took out the
reference book, and flipped to the illustrations, ignoring
Isketerol's fascinated glances as he held it to the firelight,
comparing the images with the heap of gifts and muttering to
himself:

   "Flame-shaped spearhead with short socket… yup… round
shield… sword with solid-cast flanged hilt… Celt-socketed ax…
collared thin-walled pottery… yup, Penard-group stuff—very
early Urnfield. Okay, that settles the question of how the
Deverel-Rimbury period ended. These guys chopped it into
dogmeat. Mid and later thirteenth century B.C., spot on." He
closed the book and looked at the spine. The Age of Stonehenge,
by Colin Burgess. Martha had dug it up out of a private library
in a summer vacationer's house. "God bless you, Colin Burgess,
wherever you are."

   The food came in, heaping mounds of fresh bread, cheese,
onions, steamed roots, stews in clay bowls, pigeons and ducks on
skewers, sausages, and endless roasts of pork, beef, mutton, and
what he learned was horsemeat. The old man in the long robe
stood and blessed the food with a staff topped with looped holly
branches, and everyone fell to.

  It wasn't quite the Henry VIII scene of two-fisted gorging and
swilling he'd expected. The women laid slabs of tough dark bread
down on the basketwork platters, then piled on the meat and
other dishes, or brought clay bowls marked with waving
patterns. There seemed to be an elaborate etiquette about who
got what, and Daurthunnicar sent several pieces over to Captain
Alston. Men cut portions with their belt knives and ate with their
fingers, wiping their mouths and fingers occasionally with more
pieces of bread ripped off loaves nearby; those might be eaten, or
thrown to the big hairy dogs that also lay about. The serving
women kept the horns refilled unless a man held his hand over
the mouth—which few did. He noticed that while the chiefs and
guests here had one horn or cup apiece, most farther from the
throne of the rahax shared a beaker. The food was seasoned with
sage, dill, sorrel, fennel, basil, and herbs he didn't recognize. Salt
went around in wooden bowls, to be sprinkled between thumb
and forefinger.

   He sipped again at the heavy wine. The glaze it put over
things seemed familiar, like the glassy sense of unreality that had
been plaguing him and most of the others for the past few weeks.
It was one thing to study history, or to imagine it. This was
something else entirely.

    The Iraiina cheered again. Ian looked up as he felt Alston
stiffen with rage beside him. The last gift was brought forward.

   "Captain," he hissed in her ear, as her hand fell to the Beretta
at her waist. "Not here, not now. Please!"

  "Ah, that thing at her waist is a weapon," Isketerol said in
Tartessian as the last gift was presented.

   His cousin Miskelefol nodded. "And she's angry to be offered
the slave girl," he said. "I wonder why? Indifferent would be
understandable, but why angry?"

   Isketerol ran an experienced eye over the naked woman of the
Earth Folk. The bruises had faded to very faint marks, so the
Iraiina weren't offering spoiled goods; that couldn't be it. Except
that she wouldn't be a virgin, and as the saying went you didn't
find a slave virgin or a sweet olive, and anyway the Earth Folk
didn't even have a word for virgin. A good enough figure, looking
to be even better when she'd been fattened, young, very pretty.
Although there was a good deal of unbroken spirit behind the
downcast eyes. That was probably why her hands were bound
behind her, as well as having a rawhide leash and collar around
her neck. If the strange woman didn't want her for a servant or
otherwise—he knew nothing of their taboos; these folk might be
as odd a tangle as the Iraiina for all he knew—she'd be a valuable
item for resale.

   "I wouldn't mind taking her off the stranger's hands myself,"
Miskelefol said, echoing his thought. "I'd pay well in bronze or
wine, and make it back again twice over on Tartessos dockside,
four times over if I fed her up first."

   Daurthunnicar's rumble interrupted them, demanding a
translation.

   Isketerol sighed behind a bland exterior. Achaean wasn't his
favorite language, but it was still a pleasure to speak next to the
local hog-tongue. Someday he would be rich enough to sit at
home in Tartessos and send younger relatives out as his skippers
on these long dangerous voyages. He would lie on a soft couch in
the courtyard of his house and eat grapes and count the ingots
and bales in his storehouses, the fields and workshops he owned.
But for now he must work; he set himself to translate into
Achaean simple enough for Ianarnstein to understand. Odd. The
stranger spoke sometimes like a poet with a mouth full of ornate
kennings, and then like a child who hadn't mastered the endings
of words… but he'd improved even in the few hours they'd
spoken. Where had he learned his Achaean?

   "We can always turn her loose later," Arnstein was hissing
into Alston's ear.

   "I realize that, Professor," she gritted out through a broad,
false smile. "What's that potbellied pervert with the beard
saying?"

   "Ah… this girl's a… high one? Something like that." He paused
for back-and-forth with the Tartessian. Translating through
three languages, two of them not native to the interpreters, was
like trying to get the last garbanzo out of a slippery salad bowl
without putting it over the edge. "She's a… princess or
something of that nature, of the Tiernan Bohulugi,' the… I think
it means People of the Soil, Earth Folk… the locals here.
Daurthunnicar's men captured her and he was going to hold her
for ransom, but he gives her to you as a sign of his friendship. I
think that means the negotiations fell through."

   He translated that back to Isketerol. The man from the south
nodded with a cynical wink. "Knowing the Earth Folk, they were
afraid she'd contracted bad luck," he said. "They think
everything in a man's life is governed by the stars at his birth,
and it's misfortune to interfere with it."

   Alston tugged unwillingly at the leash, and the girl crouched
at her feet. "Tell our host I'm delighted."

   Daurthunnicar grinned back and made a joke that sent the
other Iraiina laughing and hooting; the girl looked down at her
feet, her mane of yellow hair hiding the disturbing glint in her
eyes. That prompted Arnstein to ask another question.

    "Yes," Isketerol said. "She speaks the Iraiina tongue, or one
close to it, as well as her own. Daurthunnicar's people aren't the
first to invade the White Isle; there are other tribes kin to them
living north and east of here, who've been settled some
generations."

   Marian Alston had always considered herself a calm woman,
even phlegmatic. Inch by inch she won back to full command of
herself, controlling her breathing and forcing rage-knotted
muscle to relax in the manner the Way had taught her through
nearly twenty years of practice. At last she could pick up another
morsel of food without choking on it, even smile and nod across
the firelit circle.

   I must be calm by nature after all, she thought ironically,
looking at the girl crouched at her feet. I can get that angry and
not kill someone. She'd come to get what she needed to help her
people, and that was what she'd do.

   But I'm damned if I'll sit here looking at those hands. The
collar was four-ply twisted rawhide, it would take tools to
remove, but the bonds on the girl's wrists were simply thongs.
The horn was empty; she laid it beside the wicker plate and
leaned forward with her knife in hand. It was a Swiss Army
model, with a built-in fork and spoon, which had aroused a good
deal of attention. The girl gasped, shivered, and stiffened in
well-hidden terror as hands touched her wrists. She'd been
casting sidelong glances at the Eagle's captain, which was no
wonder when she'd probably never seen a non-Caucasian before.

   "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 her 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.

   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.

    "The smell's awesome, too," he added aloud, to hear himself
talk and bring things back to a human scale. "Like the Mother of
all Henhouses."

   He raised his binoculars, peering through the vision slit of the
plank-and-brush hide and suppressing the slight quiver in his
hands. Big brownish birds with white-banded necks, Canada
geese right enough. Ducks… mallards and canvasbacks and big
black ducks, ducks beyond all reason, more varieties than he
could name. On land… Some sort of pigeon, he thought; enough
of them to outnumber the waterfowl, which he wouldn't have
believed possible if he wasn't seeing it with his own eyes.
   "Martha," he said, "what sort of pigeon is that? Foot long, sort
of a pinkish body, blue… no, a blue-gray head, long pointed tail."

  "What?" she shouted, and snatched the glasses out of his
hands.

   Cofflin stared at her; it was about the most un-Martha-ish
behavior he'd ever seen from her. Martha Stoddard did not lose
her composure.

  "Passenger pigeons," she said, after a long moment's study.
"Passenger pigeons, as I live and breathe, passenger pigeons."

   Hairs stood up along Cofflin's forearms, and he felt them
struggling to rise down his spine. I'm seeing something no
human being has seen in over a century, he thought with slow
wonder. Then: No. I'm seeing something common as dirt.

  "I almost hate to do this," Cofflin said softly.

   Part of him did. The rest of him, particularly his stomach and
mouth, was downright eager. Roast duck, crackling skin, dark
flavorful meat with a touch of fat that fish just didn't have…
Jared Cofflin swallowed and gave the lanyard lying by his right
hand a good hard yank.

  Bunnnf. Bunnnf. Bunnnf. Bunnnf.

   The modified harpoon guns had been dug into the fields at a
slant. Now the finned darts shot into the air, dragging coils of
line behind them… and then a rising arc of net soaring up into
the sky, catching the birds as they flung themselves aloft in
terror. All across the fields around the pond other nets were
rising. From the edge of the water itself came a deeper sound as
giant catapults made from whole sets of leaf springs flung
weighted nets out over the waterfowl.

   If the sound of the birds at rest had been loud, the tumult that
followed was enough to stun. Cofflin dove out of the hide, waving
his arms and yelling. The shouts were lost in the cannonade
thunder of the rising flocks, but hundreds of islanders saw his
signal. They ran forward, waving lengths of plank, golf clubs,
baseball bats, leaping and striking at birds—the vast
majority—that had escaped the nets. The air was thick with
feathers and noise, thick with birds in numbers that literally hid
the sun, casting a shadow like dense cloud. It drifted through the
sky like smoke; bird dung fell from the air and spattered his hat
and the shoulders of his coat, falling as thick as light snow. He
ignored it, looking at the carpet of feathered wealth that lay
around him… and there would be others waiting to take a
similar harvest at Gibbs Pond and Folger's Marsh.

   "I hope they don't take off elsewhere for good," he said. A
broken-winged pigeon fluttered across his feet; he struck at it
automatically, to put it out of its pain.

   Martha came up beside him, brushing at her sleeve. "I don't
think so," she said. "Bless their hard-wired little brains, they
migrate pretty automatically. Unless we did this every day… and
for that matter, it's not the same flocks every time—we're seeing
a segment, like a moving rope touching down once a day. At
that, this is just the edge of the main flight path down the coast."

    Cofflin nodded, looking at the islanders standing and panting.
"Now we've got to collect all this up," he said. "Hope we can store
it all—didn't expect this much."

   "Who could?" Martha said, shaking her head. "I still don't
believe it, and I'm looking at it… Well, we can make more ice, I
suppose. There's plenty of salt, they can be packed down in oil,
pickled in brine, smoked, the offal will go on the fields…"

  He sighed and shook his head in turn, feeling a little of the
wonder of it leaving him.

   "Let's get to work," he said, pulling up his sleeves. "Big job
today."

  "It's stolen, isn't it?" Doreen said quietly. "All the things
we're… buying."

   Arnstein nodded, not taking his eyes away from the scene he
was watching, a historian's secret dream made flesh. Every once
in a while he would snap another picture.
    An Iraiina chief was wheeling his chariot about in the open
space before his gathered warriors, its wooden wheels cutting
tracks dark green and soil-black through the silvery dew on the
grass. The dyed heron plumes on the horses' heads bobbed and
fluttered, the bronze and gold of the trappings glittered, and the
chief's cloak blew back from his shoulders like the wings of a
raven. The chief sprang up, his feet on the rim between the
holders for bow, quiver, javelins, and long thrusting spear with
its own collar of feathers.

   Arnstein had read once—and now seen, these past few
days—that chariot riders could run out along the pole that linked
the horses' yokes at a full gallop.

   Studded shield and leaf-shaped bronze long sword shaped the
air as he harangued them. At first they cheered and waved arms
and spears and axes. After a few moments they screamed,
hammering their weapons on their bright-painted shields,
roaring into the hollows of the shields until the sound boomed
across the camp. When the chief leaped back into the body of his
chariot and the driver slapped the reins to spur the horses
forward, they poured after him in a leaping, shrieking mass.
Before they passed out of sight among fields and scattered copses
of oak they had settled down into a loping trot behind the
war-cars, silent and all the more frightening for that.

   Doreen went on: "They're going out to kill people and take
everything they have and sell it to us! Why don't you do
something, or tell the captain—"

   Arnstein rounded on her: "Because there isn't anything I can
do, because we need the food or we'll starve, and because
Captain Alston knows both those things perfectly well!

   "Sorry," he added after a moment, as they turned and trudged
through the tumbled, rutted confusion of the Iraiina camp. They
were getting used to the smell, a thought that made his skin
itch—although to do them justice, it probably wasn't so bad
when they spread out in their normal fashion. In fact, some of
the subchiefs had already moved out, up or down the coast, or
inland.
   A naked brown boychild ran up to them, a four-year-old with
a roach of startling tow-white hair. Daring, he reached out and
touched the stranger's leg and then ran away, shrieking his glee.
An Iraiina woman scooped him up and paddled him across the
bare bottom, then tucked him under her arm and walked away,
casting an apologetic smile over her shoulder as she headed back
to her tent.

   "Sorry myself," Doreen sighed, and tucked her hand through
his arm. "I…" She shrugged. "I don't want to quarrel. There are
too few of us for that sort of thing."

   "Agreed," Arnstein said, and patted the hand. And so few of
us who can hold an intelligent conversation. Captain Alston, of
course, but her interests were rather specialized, and in any case
she was… intimidating, that was the word he was looking for.

   Doreen gave his arm a squeeze and changed the subject. "I'm
surprised they've gotten so… casual about us so soon," she went
on.

   "We're marvels," Arnstein said, relieved. "But they live in a
world of marvels, magic, ghosts, demons, gods who talk to men
in dreams or father children on mortals—they don't just tell folk
tales, they believe them, more so than any Holy Roller back
home. Like a dancing Hasid drunk on God. We're friendly
marvels."

  For now, he thought uneasily to himself.

   From what he'd seen of them, the Iraiina had their virtues, all
of them more comfortably observed from a distance. They were
brave, of course. Unflinchingly stoic, loyal to their tribe and
chiefs, usually kind to their children and positively affectionate
to their horses. Surprisingly clean, for barbarians. They were also
callous as cats to anyone outside their bonds of blood and oath,
cruel when they were crossed, and they had tempers like
well-aged dynamite sweating beads of nitroglycerine. Not just
the warriors either; he'd seen two women lighting into each
other with distaffs, and then rolling around trying to bite off ears
and succeeding in pulling out hanks of hair. The laughing
spectators had thought that great sport.
  Let them feel insulted, or let some incident make their
superstitious fears boil over, and…

  "Sooner we leave the better," he said.

  "Yes, it's sort of like being on safari… only, you have to make
camp with the lions," Doreen agreed.

   They wound their way through the early-morning bustle of the
camp, between the huts and tents of households large and small.
Women fetched water, cooked over fires or in crude clay ovens,
kneaded bread dough in wooden troughs, tended the swarming
children, gossiped as they spun thread on their distaffs or sat to
weave on broad looms with stone-weighted warps set under
leather awnings. Children had chores of their own, starting with
minding younger siblings while their mothers worked. A slave
could be told by her collar and the non-Iraiina way she braided
her hair; she was silent as she knelt to grind grain on an
arrangement of two stones much like a Mexican metate, but she
didn't look spectacularly ill-treated. A woman went by with twin
buckets of milk on the ends of a yoke over her shoulders. Three
more in colorful checked skirts chanted a song as they swung a
sloshing bag made from a whole sheepskin suspended under a
tripod of staves; making butter, he supposed.

   A brawny redbeard poured molten bronze from a crucible into
a mold with exquisite care, while his apprentices blew through
hollowed rods to keep the charcoal in his clay hearth hot. Other
men cut leather shapes from hides stretched on the ground,
braided thongs into ropes, worked with bronze chisel and adze
and stone scraper on the growing frame of a chariot, knapped
stone into everyday tools for tasks too mundane to rate the
precious bronze. The ungreased wooden axles of oxcarts
squealed like dying pigs.

   Only a few of the men were slaves. He'd learned that free men
were all warriors at need, but except for the chiefs' few
household guards they mainly herded, farmed, and practiced
crafts; the chiefs themselves were not above turning their hands
to a man's work. No real leisure class, he decided. This
economy's not productive enough to support one.
   Many more of the menfolk here would be out with the cattle;
herding large beasts was male work, while milking and making
cheese and butter were for women. When they'd settled into
their new land they'd build houses and start plowing and reaping
as well, although he got the impression that farming was
secondary to livestock with the Iraiina. Sights, smells, sounds
reminded him of what he'd seen on vacations in the backlands of
Mexico or in Africa or Asia, but always with differences. He
finished one roll of film and snapped another into his camera;
they were used to that, now, too.

   They came down near the water, where a broad stretch was
kept clear around the Tartessian ships. That section was cleaner
and less cluttered, if only because the Iberians didn't have
women, children, or domestic livestock along. They also looked
more disciplined than the Iraiina. Not having much to do, the
crews were lolling about in loincloths or less—they lacked the
Iraiina nudity taboo—sunning themselves in the mild spring
warmth. A few stood leaning on their spears in front of their
leader's tent of striped canvas, standing to attention not having
been invented yet. Some of the idlers made signs with their
fingers and spat aside as the strangers walked past; others called
invitations which Doreen needed no Tartessian to understand.
They fell silent when Isketerol ducked out from under the canvas,
walking over to the Americans with a broad smile.

   That didn't reassure Arnstein. It reminded him too much of a
man who'd sold him a car once, in San Diego. That car had cost
more than its purchase price in repairs the first six months he
drove it.

  "Hello," the Tartessian said. "Ianarnstein.
Msdoreen-rosenthal."

   Arnstein started to reply, then checked when he realized that
the Tartessian had spoken in English… sort of. "Hello yourself,"
he replied.

   White teeth showed broader in the lean olive-skinned face.
"Rejoice, as well," he added in his archaic, gutturally accented
Greek. If Arnstein ever met a real Mycenaean, he was probably
going to sound extremely Tartessian himself, but comprehension
came easily to both of them after a week of practice. He wasn't
doing as well with Iraiina, but Doreen had made some progress
there and was beginning to pick up a little of this Greek.

   "I seek to honor you with your own people's greeting,"
Isketerol added.

   "Rejoice," Arnstein said dryly. "My captain wished to speak
with you this morning."

   "Ah, she does me honor!" Isketerol said. He looked out toward
the Eagle. "The loading must be nearly complete," he went on. "I
and my cousin will come."

   They came to the shore reserved for the Americans' use. There
were disused rafts scattered up and down the beaches where the
Iraiina camped, not yet disassembled for timber or firewood.
The Eagle's crew was using them to tow basket after basket of
grain and beans out to the ship. Another cast off as they came to
the water's edge, the crew of the longboat towing it bending their
backs to the oars. Today the shore also held pens full of pigs—not
the pink sluggish creatures Arnstein knew, but lean bristly
vicious things like piney-wood razorbacks, three-quarters wild.
All of them were young females in farrow except for a brace of
boars penned separately; those watched with cunning beady
eyes, their long curved tusks ready for anyone who came near.
They'd already loaded calves, colts and ewes, for breeding with
their stock back on the island.

   "Those pigs're going to be a joy to get on board," Doreen
remarked. Arnstein felt his mouth watering at the potential
bacon, hams, and chops. There were advantages to being
selective about the traditions of your ancestors. He was also
acutely conscious of the woman by his side. Different
generations, but they had a lot in common. There was nothing
like being among aliens to make you realize that.

   She ignored the days-old head that looked down on the beach
from a pole, drastic reparation for an insult to a guest. The body
was buried, with the head of a sacrificial horse in place of its
own, an offering to appease the anger of the gods. Doreen
blanched slightly at the memory; the young oath-breaking
warrior had danced to the sword with a spring in his step and a
face as composed as if he were strolling home to dinner.
Probably he thought he was going to his gods…

   "Ah, Professor, Ms. Rosenthal," Alston said, handing a
clipboard to a cadet. "And Isketerol of Tartessos."

   The Iberian bowed, hand to breast. Alston nodded her head
with its cap of close-cut wiry hair. "Translate, please, Professor.
Tell Mr. Isketerol that I have a proposition for him."

   There was a tray nearby, with one of the wardroom
attendants standing behind it. Arnstein poured small glasses of
wine, despite the early hour, diluting it half and half with soda
water. You had to serve refreshments, at least symbolically, or
you weren't trusted. He didn't think Isketerol trusted them much
anyway, but there was no sense in open insult.

   "First," the captain of the Eagle said, "thank him for the help
he gave us."

   Isketerol made a purely Mediterranean gesture with hands
and shoulders; Arnstein had seen its like in Sicily and Greece in
his own era. "Of course, you were still cheated, if not so badly as
you might have been. In Tartessos, or any of the civilized lands
around the Middle Sea, your great ship would have been stuffed
to bursting three times over with grain and cloth for half—for
one part in ten—of what you lavished on these barbarians."

   Alston nodded, expressionless. "We may make other
arrangements later. Right now, we're planning one more voyage
here this season, after the harvest."

   "Alas, by then I will have departed. My own ships are nearly
ready."

   Alston turned to Arnstein. "Phrase this very carefully,
Professor. Tell him that we want to hire him for the summer,
and we'll pay well. We want him to return with us to the island,
teach some of our people the languages he knows, and then come
back here in September when the local harvest is in. In return,
we'll give him a fair sampling of our trade goods."
   Arnstein sputtered. "Captain Alston! Would you buy a used
car from—"

    "You told me who he reminded you of, Professor, but we need
him. Learning languages without one both sides can understand
is just too slow, and he speaks how many?"

   "Iraiina, several related dialects, the thing the Earth Folk
speak, Greek, Tartessian, Egyptian, and some Semitic language
I'm pretty sure is ancestral to Hebrew and probably to
Phoenician as well. Plus a smattering of others." Part of the cost
of doing business for a Tartessian merchant, evidently. "But
Captain, impressions aside, I'm certain he's a slave trader and
pretty sure he's a part-time pirate."

   She shrugged slightly. "It's a calculated risk. I'm afraid I must
insist."

   The words were polite, and so was the tone. Behind it was a
will ready to grind like millstones. He sighed and spread his
hands.

   The shouting crowd fell silent as the American approached.
William Walker craned his head a little, looking over the tops of
theirs; he was a tall man even by twentieth-century standards
and he'd seen only one or two men bigger here. Two Iraiina
warriors had been wrestling in a circle of yelling, cheering
onlookers. They were stripped to their kilts, chests heaving and
eyes glaring as they backed off warily, looking at him out of the
corners of their eyes, panting amid a strong smell of sweat and
dust.

   Well, not exactly wrestling, Walker thought. One of them—it
was the wog they'd picked up at sea, Ohotolarix— was bleeding
slightly where a handful of his sparse young beard had been
pulled out. The other man looked roughly handled, too. More like
catch-as-catch-can.

   Everyone was looking at him, one of the mysterious, magical
strangers from across the sea. A little fear in the eyes of the men,
in the women fear and… Well, well, he thought, smiling at one
bold-eyed girl. She was probably not very respectable by local
standards; the collar and short dress that showed her ankles
indicated that, he thought. But he'd never let that bother him.

  "Go ahead," he said, backing up with an urging gesture.
"Don't let me stop the fun."

   Tentative smiles met his. He nodded and looked at the two
contestants. The other warrior was black-haired, more densely
bearded than Ohotolarix, and more heavily built, a few years
older and sporting a couple of missing teeth. He spat something
at the young blond and lunged with hairy arms spread.

   Ohotolarix met him chest to chest. Catch-as-catch-can, all
right, Walker thought. Butting, biting and… yup, attempted
gouging allowed. Pathetic.

   They were fast and strong, but neither man seemed to have
any idea what to do with his fists and feet—wild haymakers like
something out of a 1930s movie, and they didn't even attempt to
kick. At last they closed again, and grappled at each other's
heavy padded belts, straining and grunting. The older man lifted
Ohotolarix bodily into the air and slammed him down again on
the hard-packed ground. Blood was running from his mouth and
nose now too, but he doggedly began to get up. The victor waited
panting until he was on his hands and knees, then delivered a
solid moccasined foot to the ribs—evidently kicking wasn't
against the rules, they just didn't know how to do it effectively.

   Ohotolarix collapsed, wheezing. His opponent dropped on him
and grabbed him by the braid, pounding his head on the clay.
When the younger man went limp he rose, dusted himself off,
and walked toward the girl who'd smiled at Walker. He collected
some trinkets from the bystanders, grabbed her wrist, and began
to jerk her away; all around him men were laughing or scowling
as they exchanged small items, knives or ornaments.

   Bets, Walker realized. Girlie there's the main stake.
Ohotolarix was hauling himself up, wheezing and snarling as he
clutched at his ribs. Tsk. Not fair; he must still be weak. On the
other hand, life isn't fair. On the other hand…

  "Wait," Walker said easily, putting out a hand. "Hold it, Mr.
Macho. Why don't we discuss this?"

  The Iraiina flinched a little, then visibly gathered himself and
began to brush past.

  Maybe that was a mistake, Walker thought. On the third
hand, the guy just dissed me.

   He put a hand on the man's face and pushed, moving his foot
in a simple heel hook. The Iraiina landed on his backside in a
puff of dust. There was an amazed buzz from the crowd, then a
rising note of excitement as Walker stripped off his jacket and
shirt, holding them out with one hand. The girl took them,
moving back to the edge of the reforming circle.

   "No sense in prolonging this," Walker said easily, suddenly
feeling alive. Feeling like I'm really here, not watching it.

   He made a gesture that he'd seen among the locals, one that
evidently hadn't changed its meaning in three thousand years.

   "Mithair," he said. It was a pity he didn't know the word for
"your" as well as "mother" yet, but the motion of arm and finger
was unmistakable. The victorious warrior screamed at him and
leaped.

  "Well, maybe they take motherhood more seriously here,"
Walker said.

   He swayed aside, grabbed arm and belt, set his feet in stance,
and turned with a snapping flex of his waist and shoulders.
Momentum turned into velocity, and the leap turned into a
windmilling arc that ended in a crowd of laughing spectators.
They broke his fall, and he came up shaking his head. Eyes fixed
and pupils wide to swallow the color, lips curled back from teeth,
a trail of mixed drool and blood coming from one corner of his
mouth.

  "Uh-oh," Walker said. I don't think this is a sporting contest
anymore.

  The Iraiina snatched a long bronze dagger from the belt of a
man next to him and charged, shrieking something
high-pitched. Walker's reaction was automatic: one hand
slashed upward and cracked the edge of his palm into the
knifeman's wrist. The blade flew free, twinkling in the evening
sun as it spun end over end. A continuation of the same motion
sent the American's hand around the Iraiina's arm, locking it
under his armpit and torquing it up with the elbow locked
against its natural bend. Walker's other arm slammed forward,
fingers curled back to present the heel of his right hand as the
striking hammer on the anvil of his opponent's breastbone.

  "Disssaaa!" he shouted, deep and loud, the focusing kia.

   He had just enough control left to pull the blow as it rammed
into the Iraiina's chest over the heart. Bone bounced it back at
him, and the other man dropped, limp, rasping for breath, and
clawing at his chest while his face turned purple.

   Walker wheeled, crouching and dropping into stance before
he realized that the crowd weren't attacking. Instead they were
cheering; men pressed forward to slap him on the shoulders and
back, pressing things on him—gold bracelets, worked bronze
rings, even the knife the fallen man had used to attack him. The
girl handed him back his clothes and made shooing motions at
the others as he dressed. He straightened, wary, then grinned
and held his hands over his head.

  "I've got to control these chivalrous impulses," he muttered to
himself.

   Ohotolarix was on his feet, smiling wryly—either that or his
mouth was too sore to do more. He limped over to the American
and started to speak. Then he sighed, shook his head, and took
the girl's hand, laying it in Walker's. She looked at him with
another smile, this one broader and more appraising, before she
cast her eyes down modestly.

   "Oh, God damn the captain and her fucking floating Sunday
school," Walker groaned.

   He took the hand and put it back in Ohotolarix's. The Iraiina
looked puzzled, then the beginnings of anger showed on his
puffy, dust-and-blood smeared face.

  "Uh-oh again," Walker muttered. Think, dude.

   He mimed fighting, then stood by Ohotolarix and held a
protecting arm above him. Then he stepped behind the Iraiina,
taking his arm and raising it in fighting position as if to shield
Walker; last of all he pulled the bronze knife he'd tucked through
his belt and held it out to the warrior, hilt first.

   "Listen, you dumb wog," he said, in slow solemn tones. "I
don't have your spear-chucker's script handy, but this is some
sort of heap big medicine. You're going to like it and not make
trouble, because while I could talk my way out of this I'd rather
not. You savvy, blondie?"

   Something seemed to have gotten through to the young
Iraiina. He took a step back, peering at Walker's face, then slowly
went to one knee and took the knife. He grasped the American's
hands and put his between them, touching them to his forehead
and heart.

   "Pothis," the Iraiina said. A string of machine-gun-rapid
syllables followed.

   "Uh-oh again," Walker muttered. What did I just get myself
into?

   Ohotolarix seemed to want him to follow. He did, through the
dusty tangle of the Iraiina camp, to a small hollow. Two
fair-sized leather tents stood there, with a fire between them and
bundles and baggage in leather sacks all around; a tripod of
spears, a shield, and a long-hafted bronze tomahawk completed
the picture. A swaddled infant was propped up against a heap of
baskets, and a woman bent over the fire doing something with a
big clay pot. She gave a small shriek at the sight of Ohotolarix,
rushing forward and then halting in alarm at the sight of Walker
beside him.

   Wifey, Walker decided, nodding to her as she drew her shawl
over her head. The young woman was about Ohotolarix's age,
five months pregnant, and quite pretty, with dark-blond hair
done up on her head with long bronze-headed bone pins and a
round, cheerful face. No collar, longer dress, more jewelry.

   The young warrior spoke, and the woman went back to the
fire; the other one went into the smaller horsehide tent. Walker
sat at his host's urging, and the pregnant girl brought them both
bowls from the pot; it turned out to be mutton stew with barley,
and hunks of rather dry bread to go with it, along with mead.

  "This would be a lot more interesting if I could understand
you, or knew what the hell was going on," Walker said. "You
know," he went on, finishing his stew, "I sort of like it here. You
guys have a lot to learn, and I could—"

   The smaller tent's flap came half open and a voice called.
Walker looked over; the girl with the collar had shed all her other
clothing, and was kneeling on a heap of sheepskins, beckoning.
He let a slow grin creep over his face, looking back at Ohotolarix.
The young Iraiina gave him the same expression back, with a
wink, and made the same gesture Walker had used on his
opponent before waving at the tent.

  "But oh, context is everything," Walker laughed, nodding and
moving toward the tent, where a bare arm wiggled fingers at
him. He picked up the cup of mead as he went.

  "And the captain did say we should be careful not to offend.
Quickest way to offend wogs is to turn down their hospitality."

   He ducked inside and closed the flap behind him. The girl
leaned back on her elbows, tossing a mane of rust-colored hair
behind her; it wasn't very clean, and she smelled fairly strongly of
sweat and woodsmoke.

  But I don't give a damn, he thought. I like this place. It's
more… straightforward.

   And God, but there was an opening for someone with his
talents here. Heading back to Nantucket with a cargo of pigs and
the prospect of a year spent fishing suddenly looked rather dull.

   Hold on, boy, he said, stripping and looking down at the girl.
You don't know the languages or the customs, and you
certainly don't want to get marooned here by your lonesome.

  "I'll have to think," he said, taking a breast in each hand. The
woman shivered and arched her back. "Later, that is."

   "You can't be serious!" Miskelefol shouted. "Has the Jester
stolen your wits?"

   "Quiet!" Isketerol hissed. The tent's walls were thin, and too
many ears listened outside. They were alone within save for a
single native slave he'd bought from the Iraiina, crouched in the
corner, but he suspected several members of the crews spied for
rivals.

   The senior Tartessian leaned forward on his stool and caught
the neck of his cousin's tunic, hauling him close. Firelight stole
through the slit of the tent's flap, underlighting the younger
man's face. The smells of dinner cooking came through with the
reflected flame, and the voices of men preparing for the night,
doing chores about the camp, or playing at stones-and-squares.
A woman giggled in the hull of the ship whose horse figurehead
reared above them.

    "Of course I'm serious," Isketerol went on. "All the gods and
goddesses have given me this opportunity, I'd be mad not to take
it!"

   He sprang to his feet and paced in the slight room the tent
allowed, his step lithe and springy as a youth's although he'd
seen nearly thirty winters.

   "They need me, cousin. They haven't anyone who can speak
anything but Achaean, and that badly; and more than that, they
know nothing about the lands on this side of the ocean. Forget
what they've promised me for a summer's stay—even though it's
ten times ten times the profit we expected on this voyage. Think
of what could come of being their adviser and go-between when
they come to negotiate with the king, or with Pharaoh, even! You
know how our house has fallen from the wealth we once had.
Why else are we here, risking our hides dickering with savages?
This is our gods-given chance to do more than restore it."
   He returned to the stool, forcing calm upon himself. He leaned
close, hissing in his kinsman's ear. "Think of learning their
secrets, and how to wield them!"

  "Their magic?" Miskelefol whispered back, spitting aside and
making the sign of the horns.

   "Perhaps. A spell is a tool. But not all their secrets are magic.
The Great King's men in Haiti get iron out of the rocks and know
how to work it; that's a mystery, but not one you need to be a
mage to understand. These Eagle People, these Amurrukan, they
have arts that we don't, just as we have knowledge the
barbarians don't. And they're not good at keeping secrets, most
of them. With what I can learn…"

  "You think you can build a ship of iron?" his cousin said. It
had taken them both days to grasp that, but two visits to the
Eagle had made them sure.

   "No, fool!" Isketerol grabbed patience. "Your pardon, cousin. I
misspoke. No, but it isn't magic that pushes her, it's sails—better
sails than we know how to make, better arranged. It's smithcraft
that forges those swords and spears. Weavers and dyers to make
that cloth, artisans to make glass… glass shaped into pitchers,
glass clear as spring water, common enough to give away when
one beaker would buy riches at court! Listen, cousin…"

  His voice sank, tempting, promising. At the last, Miskelefol
nodded dubiously. "You're a bolder man than I, kinsman, to risk
your life and soul so."

  "I'm bold enough to risk the Crone's knife for a small profit
among the Iraiina—why not with the Amurrukan for riches
beyond dreams?"

  "What do you wish?"

   "You take the Foam Treader and the Wave Hunter home; my
helmsman's well able to handle the Hunter on a safe run. Report
to the king… but play down everything.

  Say we saw a big ship from an unknown realm, whose crew
said little but who had wonderful trade goods to offer. Give him
some, but not of the best; the Corn Goddess knows the dregs are
enough to satisfy even a king's greed. Our men will gossip, but
everyone discounts sailors' lies, and by the time they reach home
no two versions will be the same, and the truth is too strange to
believe anyway. Summon my father, yours, our uncles, and meet
in family conclave… hmmm, and my eldest wife, she's a shrewd
one and has friends in the palace. You'll tell them everything
you've seen and heard, and all I tell you this night. You'll make
plans. They'll have to be tentative, since so much will depend on
what I learn. And our elders will have their own ideas. Here's…"

   The talk went far into the night, with just enough wine , to
sharpen wits. When his cousin left, Isketerol was still too taken
with dreams to sleep, even though the strangers would be leaving
on the morning tide. He snapped his fingers and signed, and the
slave went over to the pallet, stripping and lying down. As he
seeded her, it seemed that visions of glory burst before his eyes, a
road of gold and fire stretching to the west.

   "No, she definitely doesn't want to return home," Arnstein
said, his voice sounding harassed.

    They were all feeling harassed, not to mention sleep-deprived;
loading seven hundred tons of cargo on a ship not designed for
it, and without any equipment save block and tackle and sweat,
had been a nightmare. Not to mention that most of them had
come down with at least a mild case of Montezuma's
Revenge—they were calling it British , Belly—at one time or
another. Now this.

  Alston frowned. "You're sure?"

   "Unless Isketerol is lying to me, and I doubt it," the academic
said, running a hand over his balding scalp in a gesture of angry
helplessness. "Doreen's got enough Iraiina now to confirm it,
too."

  Swindapa spoke unexpectedly in English. "No home. Go." She
pointed west. "Stay, am me Eagle. Go."

  The captain blinked in astonishment. "You've been teaching
her English already?" she said.

   "No," Arnstein said, shaking his head. "She's just got the most
amazing goddam memory I've ever run across— so does
Isketerol, by the way, not as good as hers but still very
impressive. Neither of them forgets a word once they've heard it
twice. He's much faster at picking up syntax, but then, he's
already learned six languages to her two. If you don't care about
fine points of grammar, you can communicate pretty fast that
way. Incidentally, Isketerol can also do some formidable
arithmetic in his head, especially considering the clumsy
numeral system he uses."

   Alston looked at the Earth Folk girl. In sneakers and blue
overalls, with blond locks escaping from a ponytail and blowing
in the sea breeze on the deck of the Eagle, she looked like a
corn-fed cheerleader type. Except that everything else was
different, the way she moved and stood and the way the language
she spoke had shaped her face. Now she folded her arms and
looked stubborn in a way that crossed cultures and millennia,
saying something in her own language and then repeating it in
another.

   "The… ah, the stars put her feet on the ship and she's not
going to disobey them," Arnstein interpreted. "It's a religious
thing, Captain."

   Alston clenched her hands behind her back and rose slightly
on her toes, thinking. Stubborn, she decided, and shuddered
mentally at the thought of trying to force her into a boat. She's
got guts, too, to come through what happened to her with her
will still strong. She nodded approval.

   "Very well," she said. "But make it plain she has to keep out of
the way and follow instructions." Swindapa beamed; she seized
Alston's hand and pressed it to her forehead, then kissed it.
Alston disengaged it, firmly.

  "And teach them both English."

   The girl would probably be a much more reliable translator
than the Tartessian… and besides, Alston could scarcely throw
her over the side, all things considered.

   As guests, the locals were allowed on the quarterdeck;
Isketerol seemed to have enough sense to keep out of the way,
and he'd taken a hint from a gift of soap and abandoned his
habit of cleaning himself by rubbing down with olive oil and
scraping it off, a massive sacrifice on his part. His eyes scanned
about like video cameras, missing nothing. Swindapa tended to
hover, until Alston gently motioned her back.

   The captain looked about. Crew standing by, hands at the
wheel, the smooth machinery of the Eagle ready to swing into
motion. Wind from the northeast, which was just right, and not
too strong, ten knots' worth—also good, in these narrow
uncharted waters. If there had been any hope of refueling-in the
immediate future… but instead she'd do it the old-fashioned
way, sail the anchors out of the main.

  "Tide's on the ebb, ma'am," the sailing master said. "Four
knots."

  "Very well, Mr. Hiller. Prepare to weigh anchor," she said.
"Make ready."

   "Ready, aye." He turned to face his subordinates. "Sail
stations, sail stations, on the fore, on the main, all hands to
stations!"

  The crew poured up the ratlines and out along the yards, their
dark-blue clothing almost disappearing against the morning sky.
Deck teams poised ready to haul.

  "Put the royals in gear, fore and main. Jibs as well. The
minute the anchors come free."

   "Royals, fore and main, jibs, ma'am."

   "Make it so, Mr. Hiller."

   "Up and down!" The anchor chain was vertical.

   "Anchors aweigh."
  "Anchors aweigh, aye!"

   White canvas—Dacron, really—blossomed a hundred and fifty
feet above their heads. More sail spread down the stays to the
bowsprit, the triangular swatches of the flying jib, the outer jib,
the jib and the foremast staysail. Teams heaved them up the stay
lines that reached to the foremast.

  The quartermaster's whistle rang out again.

  "Shift colors!" Jack and ensign came down, and the steaming
ensign went up the gaff over their heads.

  "House the anchor."

  "Thus, thus," Alston said, giving the course to the helmsmen.
They strained at the triple wheels as the great square-rigger
came about and settled her prow to the south. "Mr. Hiller, the
mizzen, if you please."

   Alston kept one ear on the smooth sequence of orders, the rest
of her mind sketching the ship's course. The fore-and-aft sails on
the rearmost mast went up in a series of long surges as the deck
crew heaved at the ropes and raised the gaff.

   A boatswain's mate bellowed: "Now lower your butts,
flangeheads, and haul away, haul away!"

  "Heave!"

  "Ho!"

  "Haul away and sheet her home!"

  "Heave!"

  "Ho!"

   The wind jerked the boom over their heads, swinging it out
until it caught against the tackle that controlled its lunge. The
green line of the shore wheeled and began to slide past, the
cheering throng on the beach dwindling and falling astern. On
the port, marshes slid by, ducks and geese and snipe rising
thunderous. The air was heavy with the smell of silt and brackish
water, a tang that blew away the odors of the Iraiina camp.
Marian Alston smiled slightly and looked at the clinometer. Only
a few degrees off vertical as yet.

   "She trims well, Mr. Hiller."

   "She does, Skipper."

   A bit of a surprise; the Eagle had never been designed to carry
cargo as a regular thing, and it had taken days of sweating-hard
labor to arrange it so that it didn't throw the ship grossly
off-balance. That could be crucial to her sailing performance,
and as it was she rode four feet deeper. And the pigs were
squealing and stinking in their improvised pens forward; she'd
helped raise pigs as a girl, they were too smart by half, and could
be downright dangerous. Her younger brother had toddled right
into a pen once, and if her father hadn't been nearby…

   Eating well is the best revenge, when it comes to pig.

   "Ms. Rapczewicz, what's our status on fresh water?"

   "Fifty-one thousand gallons," she replied.

  Also good; they didn't want to waste fuel producing drinking
water, either.

   "Five knots, ma'am. Ten feet under the keel."

   "Five knots, ten feet, aye," Alston said. "Mr. Hiller, we'll keep
her so for now."

   She'd decided to be conservative and take what the old-timers
had called the String, down south to just north of the Azores and
then across the Atlantic on the edge of the trades. Longer, but
you got consistent easterlies that way most of the year. You could
work across on the Viking route way north, up around
Greenland, there were intermittent easterlies and the East
Greenland and Irminger currents… she shuddered at the
thought. There would be berg ice, this time of year— any time,
actually, but worse just now.
   She waited, expressionless, as the land fell away astern and on
either side. The ship's motion changed as they came out of the
estuary, a longer plunging roll as they came into waves that ran
uninterrupted across three thousand miles of ocean; that always
made her feel more alive, more free. The breeze stiffened out of
the north, and a quiet order brought the yards braced around.
She looked west. Odd. And in all that space, nothing but fish,
birds, and whales. No other ship, until you got to within
dugout-canoe range of the Americas… would they be called the
Americas here? Probably, if we live to do the naming. Not a
submarine beneath the waves, not an aircraft over it, no lights to
pass in the night or float by overhead.

  "Helm, south by southwest."

  "South by southwest, aye."

  "Mr. Hiller, make all plain sail."

  "All plain sail, aye."

   He turned and began to shout orders. White sail blossomed
upward toward the tops of the Eagle's masts, as if a huge sheet
were being shaken out in the wind. As each sail came taut she
could feel the ship lift and heel, moving more quickly as the vast
horsepower of moving air was caught and channeled through the
standing rigging into the hull. The yards were braced around at
not quite right angles to the keel and the crew crept down off the
yards and out of the rigging; others hauled and set lines across
the deck. Slowly, slowly, the big ship leaned to port. The bow
wave turned from a gentle swelling to white water, and that
foamed higher and higher.

   In twenty minutes it was spouting out the hawser holes and
along the forecastle decking, to drain out the lee scuppers
around the feet of the inevitable seasickness cases. Isketerol of
Tartessos looked well enough, holding on to a line and staring
incredulously overside as he mentally estimated the speed.
Swindapa had turned green, and blundered helplessly until a
couple of cadets snapped a safety line to her belt and draped her
over the leeside bulwarks just in time.
   The port rail was nearly under; Alston looked at the
clinometer. Twenty degrees. "Speed," she said.

  "Twelve knots and rising, ma'am."

  "Twelve knots, aye. Ms. Rapczewicz, you have the deck; keep
her thus, but reef if the wind freshens. I'll be in my cabin."

   And she should give Cofflin a call, let him know things had
gone well. They probably needed some morale-boosting back
home. She checked in midstride for an instant. Home? Well, our
trip here was instructive, at least. Compared to anywhere else in
the world of 1250 B.C., Nantucket was very homelike indeed.

  "Whazzit?"

   Ian Arnstein came awake with a violent start. The little cabin
was dark except for a trickle of light through the closed porthole,
and for a moment he was lost, torn from a dream of freeways
and shopping malls and teenagers on Rollerblades. Fear made
his heart race.

   Someone's here, he thought. There shouldn't be; he had the
tiny room to himself. Captain Alston had left a fair number of
her officers back on the island to oversee fishing and matters
maritime, the ones who'd been there mainly as instructors for
the cadets.

  "Who's that?" he whispered.

  There was a rustling at the edge of the bunk, and a vague
shape in the darkness. "Me," Doreen's voice said.

   "Oh." His heart still beat faster, but it wasn't quite the same
sort of fear. "Why… oh."

   A hand took his and guided it to close on a full breast. "You're
an intelligent man, Ian. Don't be silly. Why do you think I'm
here?"

   I should be thinking, he knew through the hammering in his
temples. We've only known each other for a few weeks… I'm too
old for her… all this stress has got us acting in ways we
wouldn't… His hands held the blankets up and slid down her
back as she slid into the narrow bunk beside him, warm and
smelling of clean woman and soap. Her first kiss landed on his
nose in the dark, but the second was on target.

  "Oh, yeah," she murmured. "The beard tickles nice."

  "Yeah," he echoed in the same breathy whisper.

  To hell with thinking. Before he'd expected it she had rolled
underneath him and her legs were clamped along his flanks. He
moved convulsively and bumped his head against the overhead.

  "Damn these bunks!" he hissed.

   Doreen chuckled and wrapped her legs around his waist
instead, then gave a sigh that was half groan as he slipped into
her. "Come on then," she whispered into his ear as they began to
rock together. "God, come on, then."

   Some immeasurable time afterward they lay in a tangle of
arms and legs and stray bits of sheet caught between and under
them, amid a pleasant smell of sweat and sex.

   "It is cramped," he said, and sighed. "For the first time since
this whole thing started, I feel as if I'm really here."

   "Why, thank you, sir," Doreen purred into his ear. "The
feeling's mutual."

   A thought jarred him. "Wait a minute—you're protected,
aren't you?"

  "It's a bit late to ask, but yes."

   Ian sighed relief. "It'd be a shame to waste this waist." He ran
a hand down the damp smooth skin of her back. "Many happy
returns of the night," he said, then checked himself.

   "Mmmm-hmm," Doreen said affirmatively, nuzzling into the
curve of his neck. "Hoped you'd say that."
  Silence ticked away. "I'm a bit, well, old, middle-aged really,
and—"

   "I'm not a teenager either, I'm nearly thirty," she said. "Well
into spinsterhood, by Bronze Age standards, I suppose." A
chuckle fluttered across his skin, cool on the dampness. "Besides,
you're certainly the most eligible Jewish man around. Even if
you're not a medical doctor. Unless I sail east and put the make
on Moses."

   "We'll see how it goes, then," he said drowsily, feeling an
enormous peace. A minute later he tugged his eyelids open.
"God, we can't go to sleep, or she'll tow us at the end of a rope at
dawn!" Captain Alston had impressed him as the type who
enforced regulations with an old-fashioned absolutism.

  "Mmmm, no. I asked. She said as civilians all we had to be
was discreet."

   They rearranged themselves with some effort, smoothing the
sheets a little and drawing up the blanket, then settling down
spoon fashion. It was a long while since he'd slept— in the
go-to-sleep sense of the term—with a woman, and never in a bed
so narrow. After a half hour his drowsiness faded.

   "My, for a middle-aged man…"

                CHAPTER EIGHT
   April, Year 1 A.E.

   "Well, people, we have a problem," Jared Cofflin said. He
looked out over the crowd. Attendance at Town Meeting was
certainly up from the days before the Event; of course, the stakes
were a lot higher now. But I don't like the look in their eyes, he
thought. They're still scared. Deubel's crazed arson plot had put
the fear of death into them, like nothing since the Event. He
could smell it in their sweat, and hear the shrill undertone in the
murmurs as they adjusted their folding chairs. A few young
children cried in their mothers' arms, ignoring the patting and
shushing.
  "The trial's over," he went on. "Judge Gardner can testify it
was fair."

   The judge nodded. "However, under the circumstances,
sentencing is a problem. Arson generally carries a fairly long
term of imprisonment."

   "It's time we faced some facts. Look, we want a government of
laws, don't we?" There were nods throughout the crowd. Cofflin
felt sweat running down his collar, and was extremely glad that
Martha Stoddard was sitting next to him at the table on the
dais, spare and precise in a gray dress and single string of pearls.

   "But let's face it, the laws of the United States don't run here
any more. There isn't any United States, no Congress, no
president, no Supreme Court. Sure, we want the same sort of
laws—"

  "Like hell," someone said from the ranks of townspeople. "The
IRS can stay lost for all I care."

    That brought a gust of laughter; Cofflin joined in for an
instant. "Generally speaking, I mean. In the end, though,
this—this Town Meeting here—is the source of law on this
island. You are. You're the Congress, you're the Senate. You can
make peace and declare war; you decide what the penalties for
crimes are. You bind and loose."

   That brought silence for a long moment, except for the angry
hiccupping of a fretful baby. "All right, then. Here we've got
eighteen men and women who tried to burn down the town,
which would probably have killed us all, one way or another."
There had been twenty to start with, but two had managed to
follow their ex-pastor into suicide.

  "We've given them a fair trial, and they've mostly confessed
anyway. The question is, what do we do with them?"

   "Hang 'em!" someone shouted, and there was a menacing
snarl from the crowd. Together on a bench before the dais the
prisoners shrank together.
    Cofflin hammered his gavel. "That's one solution," he said
calmly. "And you're the ultimate authority here. If you vote for it,
it'll be carried out. Now, I just want you to think about that.
Eighteen nooses. Eighteen people with broken necks hanging
there—if we don't botch it and just strangle them slowly. I'll
insist that it be done publicly; people should see the results of
what they order. And then I'll resign."

   There was an uproar at that. Cofflin gaveled it into silence. He
recognized the woman with the crying baby. She stood, anger
crackling off her:

  "I'm not going to let those… those lunatics loose to threaten
my baby again." A growl rose from the crowd.

   Cofflin nodded. "Ms. Saunders, I agree completely. I'm not
against the death penalty as such in the ordinary course of
events. This is a little different. We need to come up with a way
to keep ourselves safe from these people here, without killing
them. You're also right; they were acting like lunatics. Haven't
most of us felt like running mad lately, now and then? Hell, a
couple of us have run mad."

   With a Glock, in one case.

   Saunders blinked. "What do you think we should do?"

   "Well, we can't just keep them in jail. For one thing, it'd cost
too much—we'd have to feed them. What I had in mind was a
productive form of exile."

  Martha leaned forward and spoke into the microphone.
"You'd better listen carefully," she said. "Jared Cofflin's the best
man to head our Council, and you'd be well advised to keep him."

  "You're partial, Martha," someone said from the crowd.
"You're engaged to him, after all."

   Cofflin felt a small glow at the thought, even then. He'd
enjoyed the engagement, too; all three days of it, so far.

   "John Detterson, if you think I'd flatter a man just because
I'm going to be married to him, you're more of a fool than I
thought you," Martha said tartly.

   The tension he could feel in the air crackled a little lower;
there was not quite a laugh, but a relaxation.

   "Everyone hates the salt-gathering detail," Cofflin went on.
"We've been drawing lots for it. What I'm saying is that we
should send these people down there, for a year at least and then
further until they're safe to have back among us. We can send a
boat down to pick up the salt and drop off supplies every month
or so. It's a hard sentence, yes, but we don't have to kill any of
our own, and we don't have to waste time and resources we can't
spare on them."

   More murmurs. Cofflin pointed the gavel. "Winnie McKenzie."

   "That's an indefinite sentence, Chief," she said. "How are we
going to tell if they're really safe? What's to prevent them lying
about it and getting up to the same tricks when they get back?"

   "I'll let Father Gomez answer that," Cofflin said.

   "These poor people were deluded by a man who was deluded
himself," the priest said, rising from his seat in the middle of the
meeting. "I have volunteered to go with them to Inagua and help
them. Father Connor can run the affairs of the Catholic parish
here while I'm gone. With God's help, I think I can bring these
unfortunate people back to reason, or at least tell if they haven't
changed their thinking."

   "And I have full confidence in Father Gomez's judgment,"
Cofflin said. Since he suggested this whole scheme in the first
place, he added to himself. "What's more, I think a year spent
shoveling salt and eating flamingo down on Inagua is at least
equivalent to ten in a mainland jail. No way to escape, either."
No way to escape and live, he amended. If they chose to drown
themselves, that was their problem and a solution to his.

  "Anyone second the motion?" he asked. A double dozen of
hands went up. "Let's put it to the vote. All in favor, raise their
hands. Now, all opposed." He swung his head from one end of
the crowd to the other. "Joseph?"

  "Carried," the town clerk said. Nobody objected; the ayes had
outnumbered the nays by at least five to one.

   Cofflin looked down at the prisoners; one or two defiant, a
woman weeping softly, most of them simply stunned. "By vote of
the Town Meeting of the island of Nantucket, you are hereby
sentenced to exile on the island of Inagua for a period of not less
than one year. Your exile will continue until Father Gomez, as
authorized by the Meeting, determines that you are safe to live
here again. You'll have one day to say your farewells, and the
Yare will leave with the evening tide tomorrow. That's all."

   The police officers shepherded the prisoners out. Well, that's
a hell of a lot simpler than it used to be, Cofflin thought. Aloud:
"All right, let's get on with it." He pointed the gavel. "Sam Macy."

    Sam Macy was a house carpenter, and a very good one,
island-born. "Chief, it's the way we're running things," he began,
setting himself stubbornly. "This telling everyone where they
have to work and such. It's too much like communism for my
liking."

   "Sam, you're one hundred percent right about that," Cofflin
said. "The problem is, it had to be done—still will, for a while.
Joseph"—he pointed at the town clerk—"and a couple of our
potato-planting bankers—"

  That did get a laugh, a rueful one.

   "—are working on getting a money system going. After we've
got the crops planted and the fishing steady, we can start
swapping things around more as we please. People will still have
to work or contribute stuff to the Town, though— otherwise we
just can't pull through. Next year we can loosen up some more,
and more still the year after that. Believe me, the last thing I
want is to be a tin-pot Mao. If anyone can come up with a better
way of doing it, they're welcome to ask the Meeting to give them
this job… more than welcome," he added sincerely, running a
hand over his hair.
   Angelica Brand spoke: "We've been running most of the
plantings as a single unit because there wasn't time to do
otherwise," she said. "But I'd be just as pleased to split them up
into smaller farms. Trouble is, not many of us know how to run a
small farm with hand tools and animal traction. One thing I can
tell you, it's damned hard work."

   There was a general murmur of agreement on that. Cofflin
went on: "We can reopen some of the stores pretty soon now, too,
as soon as Joseph gets this chit system going. Satisfied, Sam?"

    "Not altogether," Macy said. "There's that order collecting up
all the guns."

   The townsfolk groaned; Macy was a bit of a monomaniac on
the subject of the Second Amendment.

  "Sam, you know what happened at the Cappuccino Cafe.
Everyone thought Don Mansfield was as sane as any of us and he
goes and kills three people—one of 'em a kid. Then there was
Johnstone—"

  "Guns don't—"

   "—kill people, people do. Ayup, I agree—but guns make it so
much easier. By the way, Sam, if you want a crossbow, you're
welcome to one. Once things settle down, all the firearms will be
handed back to their owners, unless the Town needs them—we're
going to have to handle our own defense, and from what Captain
Alston says there are some mighty rough people out there over
the water."

  "We'd have more if you hadn't—"

  Cofflin nodded. "Putting near all of them in one place was a
bad mistake; I'll say that myself. But imagine what Deubel would
have done with automatic weapons!"

  Macy looked around, hesitated, and sat down; he was an
opinionated man, but far from stupid.

  "And hell, Sam," Cofflin went on, "if you want to make a
motion, propose it and we'll vote."

  Macy stayed down, unconvinced but aware that the Meeting
was moving from boredom to irritation.

   "All right, next item. Ron Leaton here needs more people who
want to apprentice as metalworkers and machinists. The worst
of the clearing is about over, so we can spare some hands. I'd like
to suggest…"

   When the Meeting was over, Cofflin ran a handkerchief over
his face. "I'd rather face a half-dozen drunk coofs on the spree
anyday," he grumbled.

    "You did very well," Martha said. "Very Athenian, really."
Cofflin raised his brows. "Aristotle thought about three thousand
citizens was the largest number who could meet in assembly and
decide issues," she went on. "Well, we're about the right size for
his ideal city-state, aren't we?"

  "Greek to me," Cofflin grinned. The librarian slapped his
shoulder in mock reproof.

   "Come along to supper, then," she said, sliding a hand into
his. "And maybe we can do something about that bundling you
mentioned."

  "Er—" he said, flushing slightly.

    Martha smiled. "This is the twentieth century," she said. "Or
at least it was."

  "You do, what is?" Swindapa asked.

   Nearly mash my toes, that's what I do, Doreen thought,
wiping her palms and picking up the length of wood she'd
dropped.

   "Practice," she said aloud, running through another slow
form. Trying to get the rhythm back where breath and
movement, body and feet and hands, united into a single flowing
unity. Instead her thighs and shoulders ached and her eyes stung
despite the terry-cloth headband she was wearing.

   The deck was stable as the ship ghosted along at a crawl,
creeping past the edge of a Sargasso that seemed to be larger in
this era. Part of the crew were busy swabbing, painting, and
chipping, but the rest were doing unarmed combat drill, under
the tutelage of Lieutenant Walker and the captain —Doreen
supposed that Alston had ordered it on the principle that the
devil made work for idle hands. Ian was infuriatingly reading a
book in a deck chair, smugly satisfied with his argument that he
was a civilian and far too middle-aged for all this "chucking
about." It was hot, too; they were down about the latitude of
Bermuda. Doreen panted as she rested on the bo, the T-shirt
sticking to her breasts and shoulders. The deck was full of yells
and thuds as the fit, limber nineteen-year-old cadets ran through
holds and throws or hammered at each other through padding.

  "Practice who?" Swindapa said again, handing her water.

  Doreen gulped it gratefully. "Practice with what," she said.

   Swindapa had a superb memory and a mimic's ear for sound,
but too many of the grammatical conventions of the English
language seemed to make no sense to her. Her own language was
an agglutinative horror that made the complex inflections and
declensions of Lithuanian or Iraiina seem straightforward.
Three separate forms of the "r" sound, all of which were distinct
to her and indistinguishable to the English-speaking ear…
Doreen shuddered at the memory.

  "Practice with what?" the Fiernan girl repeated agreeably.

   "Staff. Bo." They repeated the conversation in Iraiina for
practice's sake. That was merely a complicated language, not
impossible.

   The bo was a piece of polished hardwood, five and a half feet
long and about the thickness of her paired thumbs. She'd kept it
on half a dozen moves after she stopped going to the dojo, never
quite certain that she'd given up the art for good, but never
having enough time to actually attend, either.
  "For what?"

  "To hit," Doreen said. "I'll show you."

   She stood in front of the younger woman, the staff held
slantwise across her body.

  "Spear?" Swindapa said, and made jabbing motions.

  "No. Like this."

   Very gently, she ran the rounded tip of the 'staff into the weak
point of the other's solar plexus, just below the breastbone. Even
in the strongest, fittest set of abdominal muscles that was an
empty spot, and it was right under the heart and lungs. The
other woman folded over with a surprised mild oooof. Doreen
followed through with a slow uppercut that would have smashed
the jaw if it had been for real. That led naturally into a turn, the
bo tossed up and allowed to slide between her hands as she
pivoted so that the movement became a two-handed sweep. Step
forward, sliding the left hand to the center of the staff, point
down, use it to scoop behind the knee…

   Swindapa went down realistically, grinning. Doreen smiled
back; everyone liked the Fiernan girl, the more so since she'd
relaxed—and stopped waking up every night screaming. She
play-acted ramming the staff into the other's throat, then gave
her a hand up.

  "You show?"

  Doreen hesitated, then nodded. "That's 'Will you show me?'"

  "Will you show me?"

  Training a novice might be just what she needed to keep her
motivation up. "Stand like this," she began.

  "Lesson over," she wheezed twenty minutes later.

  Swindapa was just working up a sweat, but she reluctantly
handed the bo back to Doreen, rubbing at a few bruises where
the wood had gotten away from her.

   "We'll get you one of these," the American said. The Fiernan
was in good condition, a natural athlete, and she'd seemed to
enjoy it. "We'll do more tomorrow." And by the time you know
enough, I'll have some endurance back.

   They turned to watch Isketerol trying a fall with Lieutenant
Walker. Doreen didn't like the too-cheerful junior officer; for one
thing, he gave off God's-gift-to-women vibrations. She disliked
the Tartessian rather more, so it was a point up whoever got
thumped. The Iberian trader moved in cautiously, crouched with
hands held high and low, rather like pictures she'd seen on very
old pottery in museums. Walker waited until the other man
made a grab. She knew what came next.

   Thump. The Tartessian landed on his face on the foam mat,
winded and stunned. Nobody here seemed to know how to fall.
Walker landed astride him—in a real fight the knees would have
driven into the fallen man's back, probably crushing his ribs and
snapping the spine.

   "That's enough," Marian Alston said; she was barefoot, in
calf-length cotton gi pants and an armless singlet, dripping wet
from the work she'd been doing. Her skin shone like wet coal
over long lean muscles, and she was smiling slightly. "Playtime's
over, boys and girls. Classwork next."

   The sparring circles and drill lines began to break up amid
good-natured groans. Walker called out: "Try a few rounds,
Skipper?"

   Doreen frowned; the words were right, informal to suit the
occasion, but there was an overtone. A few cadets paused to
watch.

  "Surely," Alston said quietly. "Light contact?"

  "Sounds good, Skipper," Walker said. "Somebody call it."

  They walked onto the mat, faced off, bowed slightly. Walker
put his right fist to his left palm as he did; Alston bowed with
her fists held before her thighs. An impromptu referee raised a
hand between them.

  "Assume …"

  Get ready. They fell into stance. Then the hand flashed down.

  "Kumite!"

  Fight.

   Doreen could make some sense of what followed. Korean-style
kicking attack by the man, heels scything. Block and spinning
kick in counterattack, straight-on, by the woman… shotokan, she
thought. It was like the captain to have trained in a
straightforward power style. Then there was a flurry of
movement, fast and fluid. It ended with Walker skidding
backward on his backside, clutching his gut, and Alston standing
in a straddle-legged horse stance, shaking her head and wiping
blood from her upper lip.

  "Sorry… Skipper," Walker wheezed.

  Wheeze he should, Doreen thought indignantly. That last
backfist hadn't been pulled. Lousy control, for all he's fast. Serve
him right if the captain hadn't pulled her thrust-kick, and given
him a ruptured gut or broken pubic bone instead of just the
wind knocked out of him.

  "No problem, Mr. Walker," Alston replied. "And now I think
we have work to do."

   "Scumbag," Swindapa muttered beside Doreen, glaring, her
hands clenching. She'd picked up bits and pieces of English from
other members of the crew besides her official teachers. "T'row
in water one him over side, fuckin' A."

  "Ah, Swindapa, that's not a… nice thing to say," Doreen said.

  The guileless blue eyes met hers. "Nice?"

  "Not… ah, 'fuckin' A' is low." She held her hand down by her
knees. " That's right,' or 'A-OK,' are better—are high." She held
her hand up.

   Swindapa shrugged. "Captain give life me," she said. "Cut one
him neck—" she made a violent slitting gesture while she glared
at Walker—"A-OK. That's right."

   Isketerol picked himself up and rubbed his neck ruefully. And
here I thought I was a good wrestler and boxer, he thought,
squinting against the sun. He'd practiced at home, as any boy of
good family did, learned tricks from Ugarit to Pi-Ramses, and by
the time he was a man grown he'd been able to hold his own in a
tavern brawl in Memphis with off-duty nakhtuaa of Pharaoh's
guard, the well-named strong-arm boys. Those tricks had saved
his life more than once, and let him put much bigger men on
their backs among savages like the Iraiina. Which had been
useful in winning respect, and hence profit. But this…

  The challenge to the Eagle's captain caught him by surprise.
For the captaincy? he thought wildly, moving back. Then:
Surely not. Even the Iraiina weren't quite that primitive. No.
Why, then?

   Perhaps for face, in a campaign of prestige? He knew an
ambitious man when he saw one, even if the nuances must wait.
I must learn Inglicks—no, that's Eng-il-ish—faster. He already
understood it far better than he spoke, or than anyone suspected,
but the "sh" sound was maddening.

   The brief fight ended. Isketerol's eyes widened. The Nubian
had nothing worse than a nosebleed. Walker wasn't bleeding, but
he'd been helpless for a few seconds, and seconds was all it would
have taken to kill. He stepped back as the young officer went by.
There would be a time later to talk to this Walker. A dissatisfied
man could be a useful man, to the Tartessian.

   Marian Alston toweled herself down quickly and thoroughly,
enjoying the sensation of the rough cloth against clean skin and
exercise-warmed muscle. The captain's quarters of the Eagle
were spartan enough, but they did rate a private bathroom with
a shower.
   "That's one problem solved… for now," she said to her
reflection in the mirror, feeling at her nose.

   Swollen a little, but that would pass—and her nose was
wide-arched and set close between high cheekbones, harder to
injure than a long thin buckra beak. Lieutenant Walker was
good, as well as more than a decade younger. She didn't know
why he'd taken up the Art seriously. Going beyond the
rudimentary basics taught by the military ate a lot of an officer's
sparse spare time. But he had, and not wasted his lessons, either.

    Alston herself had decided in her teens that men were bigger
and heavier and usually stronger. If she was going to make her
way in the world she had to have something in reserve to
compensate for it, as much for the confidence-breeding
knowledge at the back of her mind as for the extremely rare
actual violence. The more so when she decided to enlist as her
ticket out of the Carolina low country; she'd picked the Coast
Guard at the time because she loved the sea and the Navy had
still barred women from operational assignments. Well worth
the effort and trouble in different dojos since, although it was
easier to make the fourth dan above black belt for people like her
with no social life to speak of. Even in the Guard, it still helped to
know deep down that you could handle men without the
protection of the uniform and the rules when push came to
shove.

   The only man who'd ever struck her and gotten away with it
had been her husband, and that for the sake of the children in
the brief while before the divorce. Everyone was entitled to at
least one major misjudgment in her life, though.

   So Walker got his little lesson, she thought. And I will watch
him. Probably he'd just wanted her to lose face, but that
indicated some sort of long-term plan. And she was on her own
now. No high command to back her up, unless you counted
Cofflin on the island—and how could he have enforced orders, if
whoever ran the Eagle simply decided to sail away? Walker had
had fun in England—you could see the possibilities churning
behind his glass-green eyes. Walker wanted power badly, and
would use it badly—because his only loyalty was to William
Walker.

    She dressed quickly in the little white-painted cabin, feeling
loose and relaxed except for the slight throb of her nose, a spring
in her step as she walked the dozen steps to the wardroom. One
of the shoats had broken its fool neck yesterday, climbing out of
its pen, and she thought that contributing ribs and crackling was
the least it could do to make up for the clutter and stink its kind
had made on Eagle's decks. It had dressed out at about a quarter
pound per head for the crew, counting chitterlings.

   They sat; lunch started when the captain appeared. Walker
was his smiling self, cheerful, polite… and you'd better stay that
way, buckra boy. The professor and Rosenthal were at the table,
along with the two locals, as guests of the ship, which made
things a little crowded. A cadet came up to the table as she was
shaking out her linen napkin, another of the ship's old-fashioned
touches.

   "Good morning, Captain. The officer of the deck sends his
regards and announces the approach of noon. Chronometers
have been wound. Request permission to strike eight bells."

   "Make it so," Alston said, with a mild enjoyment of the small
ritual.

   It was homelike; about as homelike as they could get, now.
The whole daily routine was invaluable, from reveille through
falling in for quarters after lunch to the clean sweepdown fore
and aft. Ordinarily they'd have tested the ship's alarms and
whistles, too, but the electrical systems were powered down as
far as was possible without actually endangering the ship.

  "Excuse," Isketerol said. He was handling knife and fork with
some skill and confidence now. "Why is high sun… noon… why is
noon big?" She looked at him. "Excuse, why im-por-tant."

   "Navigation," she said, taking a mouthful of the pork and
swallowing. The crackling was exactly right, and the meat was
good too, although stronger-tasting and stringier than the pork
she was used to. When Isketerol looked blank she went on:
"Finding where the ship is."
  "Ahhh. How?"

   Isketerol might be loathsome to modern sensibilities— she
was never, ever going to find it in her heart to think well of a
slave trader—but he was a seaman, in his way. She went on:

  "First, the world is round—like a ball. You understand?"

   Ian Arnstein looked as if he would like to make shushing
noises. Both Isketerol and Swindapa looked at her with shocked
surprise.

  "Captain knows true?" Swindapa said.

  Alston looked at her and smiled back, which was easy
enough. Can't say it's unpleasant to be hero-worshiped.
Embarrassing, but not unpleasant…

  "It is true," she assured her.

   "No—I—" She looked frustrated, and then marshaled her
thoughts. "People Swindapa… Swindapa's people know round
earth. Swindapa… did… not… know… Captain know."

   Alston felt her fork pause again. "You know the earth is
round?" she said. Jaws had dropped up and down the wardroom
table.

  "Only…" She spoke a phrase in her own language.

   "Star-Moon-Sun Priests," Isketerol translated automatically,
through Arnstein. "The Grandmothers."

   "Grandmothers know. Watched stars, sun, moon, many many
winter-summer. Make—" She pushed salt and pepper shakers
into a circle and mimed squinting through them.

   "By God," Arnstein said. "I think she's talking about
Stonehenge!"

  A flurry of questions through the Tartessian settled that.

  "Stonehenge," Swindapa repeated, and added the name in her
own tongue. "The Great Wisdom. Watch, measure. Long time
know. Secret, for Star Priest, families."

   "Well I will be dipped in… ah, salt," Alston said, with a rare
laugh of delight. "Live and learn." Swindapa beamed back at her.
She turned to Isketerol:

   "So you see, it is round," she said.

   Isketerol nodded. "Tartessian captains know. It is secret of…
circle of captains?" he raised a brow at Arnstein.

   "Guild," the historian said.

   "Guild of captains. Only we teach to sons." He made a curving
motion through the air. "If watch you the mast top of a ship, sail
aways, hull go, low mast go, top mast go. Same on ship sails
away from shore. Tall tree, mountain, tower. Bottom go, middle
go, top go, can't see them. How except—" He made the curving
motion again, and shrugged. "Others may know, but don't say.
Low people… common people don't know."

   The officers looked at each other. Arnstein nearly rubbed his
hands together. "It makes sense, in a way," he said to Alston.
"Sailors and astronomers—"

   "Astrologers," Doreen said sharply, giving him a covert nudge
with her elbow.

  "Astrologers might well figure it out. They just wouldn't tell
anybody. The really new thing about the first Ionian Greek
natural philosophers was that they wanted other people to know
what they'd found out."

   "Which made it possible to build on previous discoveries,"
Alston said thoughtfully.

   "Sun?" Isketerol said hopefully.

   "Oh. Well, if you measure the height of the sun at noon, you
can tell exactly how far east or west you are," she said. I'll leave
the bit about chronometers for later. "How do you tell on your
voyages, Mr. Isketerol?"

   The Tartessian's grip on his fork was bending it, and his
expression was like feeding time at the zoo, in the carnivore
section. "Birds," he said. "Wind, taste water, throw rope with
wax and look at sand, mud, rock, shell—shells—from the bottom.
Look at clouds, landmarks. Know in here." He tapped his
stomach.

   In other words, by guess and by God, Alston thought. No
wonder crossing open seas was daring for these people. It wasn't
the size of their ships. The Tartessian merchantmen she'd seen
drawn up on the beach back in Britain were big enough. Bigger
than Columbus's Nina, or some European vessels of the Age of
Discovery that had sailed the Atlantic dozens of times, even if not
as seaworthy. But they had no way of knowing where they were,
unless they'd been that way before. In a way she was sorry for
him. He stood at the beginnings of a nautical tradition, and he
was meeting the end of it, the culmination of four thousand
years of sailing-ship knowledge.

  "Stars," Swindapa said. "Dark sun-away… at night… Eagle
People look stars. Why?"

   "This would go faster if you could read," Ian Arnstein said in
frustration.

   Isketerol shrugged. "That would take years," he said. "How do
I say that in English?"

  " 'That would take years.' "

   "That would take years." In Greek: "It was hard enough
learning our script, and I was a boy then. How the scribe beat
me, and how I yelled! Most gentry don't bother."

   The phrase still came out Dut wuld tika ye-arrrs, but the
Tartessian was making very rapid progress. Even faster than
Swindapa, who was across the other side of the cadet mess deck,
drilling with Doreen; Isketerol seemed to make her a little
uncomfortable. An ewe gave a soft baaaaa from a pen in the
corner beyond.
  "Why would it take years?" Arnstein asked curiously, falling
back into Mycenaean.

    Isketerol looked at him, arching black brows over
russet-colored eyes. "Why, to learn all the signs, noble Arnstein,
and the determinatives, and the… the context that lets you know
what the sign means in any written word. Some of them have
fifty or sixty alternate meanings, after all."

   "Ah!" Arnstein grinned. For someone who was so anxious to
learn, Isketerol still gave off know-it-all vibrations; it would be
interesting to see his reaction to this. Unpredictable, too; when
he'd first realized what a clock did, he'd been so frightened that
he'd stayed in his bunk for half a day before he came out.

   "There are only twenty-six symbols in our script," Arnstein
said. "A man with your memory could learn them quickly."

   Isketerol frowned. "Twenty-six? How is that possible? The
Achaean one has over ninety, not counting denotative signs, and
each can mean several things."

  "Well—" A thought struck him. "Doreen, Swindapa, you
should sit in on this."

  The two women came and joined them. When the
explanations were complete, he resumed.

    "Each symbol stands for one sound, and that sound is the first
one of the name of the symbol." He pulled a piece of paper
toward himself and wrote down the letters of the alphabet.
Alpha, beta, he remembered. God, the snake's really swallowing
its own tail with a vengeance.

   "So you take the symbols for, say, 'dog.' That's d… o… g… Put
them together." He did. "Dog."

   Swindapa frowned, moving her lips; she'd had to get the
explanation mostly through Isketerol, and her language seemed
to lack some of the words involved. The Tartessian stared. His
lips moved as well, and beads of sweat broke out on his brow.
   "So… but there are still thousands of words," he said. "This—"
he pointed to the word DOG written in block capitals—"is as
hard to remember as one of the Egyptian symbols. Harder, for
they sometimes look like what they represent. And some of them
are for sounds, too."

   "No, no, you don't have to remember what the word looks
like," Ian said. I'll leave the horrors of English spelling for a little
later. "You just have to remember the sounds each of the
twenty-six letters represents. They all represent single
sounds—not things, and not groups of sounds, and it's always the
same sound. Then you put the sounds together to make words,
and you can read a word from the sounds—you don't have to
have seen it before."

   As long as you were taught with phonics, he added mentally.

   He blocked out SWINDAPA and ISKETEROL, leaving spaces
between the letters. "Here are your names. S… W…

   • I… N… D… A… P… A, and I… S… K… E…T…E…R…O… L."

   "My name?" the girl said, awed. Her eyes went wide. "You
take my name, on paper? Take my name away?"

   "No." Oh, God, she's probably afraid of magic. He refrained
from giving a reassuring pat; she didn't like to be touched, he'd
noticed. "No, just the sound of your name."

  And let's hope you can tell the difference between the symbol
and the referent. Whole schools of French so-called philosophy
couldn't in the twentieth century. On the whole the Event had
been a disaster, but at least he'd escaped the deconstructionists
and semioticists.

   Isketerol closed his eyes and bit a knuckle. "I… think I see," he
said, after concentrating for a minute. "So… so you could write
any language with this script? And anyone could learn it
quickly?"

   Arnstein nodded happily. Isketerol slapped the back of his
palm to his forehead twice, evidently his people's gesture of
amazement.

  "Teach me this!" he cried. In English; he'd learned those
words quite well.

   Alston stopped. "Not quite right," she said.

   "Captain?" Doreen said.

   "That stance," she said.

   Swindapa and her teacher came erect. The Eagle was sailing
northeast now, slanting across a warm gentle breeze from the
south at eight knots, her deck canted slightly and moving like a
tired rocking horse across the long low swells. They were off what
would never be the Carolinas; the captain had been standing and
staring eastward, musing; crewfolk were at make-and-mend, or
lounging about on the forecastle deck; the waist was scattered
with cadets studying. A few were scrubbing at the results of a
visit by a huge flock of pigeonlike birds with pink breasts. There
had been enough of them to blacken the rigging, and they'd been
exhausted by the wind that blew them out; it had taken half a
day to drive the last of them away. They made good eating.

   "More like this," Alston said, demonstrating. "Feet at right
angles, back knee bent, and weight on the back leg. Leading
hand out in a fist, other hand ready over your solar plexus. You
should be able to lift the front foot without shiftin' your point of
balance. That's better." She shifted her attention to Swindapa.
"You understand?"

   "Speak pretty good, okay," Swindapa said. "Too, am I writing,
now. Engelits crazy language." She paused. "Captain, Doreen,
sound different speak why?"

   She has a pretty good ear, Doreen thought. Aloud: "We come
from different places. Far apart."

   "Ah. I understand," Swindapa replied, evidently familiar with
regional dialects. She'd shifted the sound of what she said, too,
closer to the broad soft vowels that Alston used: ah unnahstaan.
  The captain smiled. "Doreen speaks better English," she said.
"And you're learning to write, as well?"

   Swindapa pulled a scrap of paper out of her pocket and
displayed it proudly. It held a shaky alphabet written in pencil.
Her own name, Doreen's, Arnstein's, Alston's, the Eagle's.

  "Like birds," she said.

  "Birds?"

   "Words fly like birds. Write, catch, put in basket. There you
there when want them."

   Alston laughed, something unusual enough to make a few of
the other Coast Guard personnel on deck glance over. "Keep it
up—you'll find it very useful," she said, and nodded for them to
continue.

   "A-OK," Swindapa said, taking up a perfect backstance. "You
start, Doreen."

   Alston turned back. "I presume Mr. Isketerol is learning to
read as well?"

   Doreen paused and nodded. "Ian's teaching him. And
Lieutenant Walker."

   The Eagle's brass bell struck three. Swindapa could tell the
time to within half of one of the Eagle People hours, anytime she
could see the stars or the sun, but she had to admit that it was
convenient to have something tell you exactly. The nights were
getting a little chillier as they coasted north, but were still
spring-mild; the blue sweatsuit was more than warm
enough—much warmer than she'd have been in the normal Earth
Folk woman's dress of string skirt and poncho, this time of year
at home. She crouched under the bulwark and hugged her knees.
Tonight would have been a bad night to sleep, she could tell that,
so she'd come on deck instead. The Burning Snake would have
taken her back to the time of the Iraiina, and broken her with
fear in her sleep when she could not fight it. Awake, she could
hum the Warding Song and keep the Snake at bay. Especially
under the friendly stars, with Moon Woman casting her silvery
light. She talked silently with Moon Woman and played the
Constellation Game for a while, tying every visible star into more
and more intricate patterns, but the way the sails swayed across
the sky distracted her. There weren't many of the crew on deck.
The weather was mild, and they could be summoned quickly at
need.

    Instead she began by naming all the ropes and sails on the
ship, stumbling a little over the more difficult ones like main
topgallant staysail downhaul. Then she began counting over the
list of stars; it would take a while, since there were over three
thousand, and the names changed eight times a year according
to the season. It had taken her to her twelfth summer to learn
them; she'd never been more than an indifferent student.

  Swallowflitting, dragonfly-in-amber, moonblood dewdrop,
angry fly…

   After a while that reminded her too much of home. She ran
through a Building Wisdom instead; safely abstract, since
nobody had actually done a Great Star-Moon-Sun Wisdom in so
long. Her grandmother's voice sounded in her ear: Take a circle
of forty Building Rods where you will erect your stones. Align
the circle and draw with your cord the southern half. How do
you flatten the northern half to keep the curve smooth and
avoid splitting the length of the outside of your Work into
parts-of-a-whole-length?

   She shut her eyes and squeezed out distractions. The problem
was to make the length of the outside of the circle come to
exactly three of the cross-length, instead of the three-and-a-bit
of a natural circle. Well, take your cord, knotted to the right
length, then stretch it in a line…

   She smiled. Yes, that's it. The forms lay perfect in her mind.
Swindapa began to put the numbers into the figures, holding her
fingers out before her and tapping them together in the patterns
of the Counting Chant. Forty laid out circle means twenty—

  Voices sounded on the quarterdeck above her, startling her
out of the calculations. She huddled deeper into the shadow
where the bulwarks met the rise to the quarterdeck, not wanting
to be seen. Only her hair would give her away, so she pulled up
the hood of the sweatsuit jacket.

   It was the captain. She looked almost invisible, dressed not in
her usual garb but in a long black jacket of loose cloth tied with a
broad black cloth belt, and baggy trousers that ended just below
the knee. She carried something long and curved in her hands;
she placed it on the deck, knelt, and bowed her head to the
boards.

  Should I go? Swindapa thought. These might be private
devotions.

   Then the captain took up the curved thing, and Swindapa saw
that it was a sheathed sword. Her eyes widened, recognizing it
from the night of the Iraiina feast, when her captivity ended.
Swords were rare even among the Sun People, very rare among
hers, and always two-edged. This had a curve like the crescent
moon, and it was silvery as it was half-drawn—

   A sword from Moon Woman! she thought suddenly,
excitement choking her. Moon Woman had sent the captain to
rescue her. A silver sword against dark skin, dark like the night
sky. She focused to quivering attention. The Eagle People guide
themselves by the stars. Not in exactly the way the Earth Folk
did. Perhaps a better way?

    The black woman tucked the sheathed sword edge-up through
her belt and went to one knee, her left hand holding it horizontal,
right resting on the hilt. A moment of absolute stillness. Then
movement, the blade flashing out and up and down in a blurring
arc of brightness… and frozen stillness again, the sword's curved
cutting edge not quite touching the deck, arms and shoulders
upright, legs crouched. No sound but the chuffing pulse of
exhaled breath that had accompanied the motion. Another
strike, equally swift, the sword reversing and thrusting
backward, the wielder's body swinging to follow it and the sword
slicing diagonally with a hiss of cloven air, another turn and a
downward cut with the left palm sliding down the back of the
sword to add force to the strike. Again the hunh of breath at the
moment of impact. Swindapa could almost see the target falling
away cloven—Daurthunnicar with his forked beard, down, dying.

   She clasped her clenched fists to her heart, feeling its beating.
This dancing with the sword was a thing of beauty, deadly and
lovely like the Eagle chieftain.

   I will study harder, she thought. When I have learned all the
others can teach me, I will ask the captain to show me this
thing. She raised her hands to the night sky in prayer. Moon
Woman, be my friend!

                 CHAPTER NINE
  April, Year 1 A.E.

   God, it'll be good to get my ship clean again, Alston thought.
The Eagle had a faint but unmistakable barnyard odor of
pigshit, despite all they could do with pumps and swabbing. At
least with the breeze on the beam most of it was carried off
beyond the forecastle deck, little reaching her here on the bridge
over the pilothouse forward of the wheels. The Eagle's bowsprit
was swinging around to the east; at noon they'd come up past
Muskeget, the little islet off Nantucket's western point.

  "I'd better look Cofflin up right away," she said to Sandy
Rapczewicz. "See if we can't arrange a barbecue or something for
our people."

   The XO nodded, a little oddly, she thought. She'd also radioed
ahead to have accommodation prepared for Swindapa and
Isketerol. I'll have to find a place myself, she noted. Probably not
a problem, with so many houses vacant. And some office space.
She hoped Cofflin was as competent as he'd seemed in the brief
time between the Event and the Eagle's departure.

   "We'll have to—" she began, about to order the engines fired
up.

  "Ma'am, it's the island. Chief Cofflin."

  Alston blinked surprise and swung down the stairs. She
walked back past the helm—only two sailors on the knee-high
platforms beside the wheels, on a fair April day with an
eight-knot wind—and into the radio shack.

   "Eagle here."

   "Chief Cofflin here," the familiar voice said. "We've got a little
surprise for you—a tow, so you don't have to waste fuel getting
into harbor."

   "This ship's a little heavy for rowboats," Alston said. Not that
the Eagle couldn't be warped in that way, but it would be
extremely labor-intensive.

   "Too true, Captain. Take a look." Cofflin's voice held a smile.

   "On deck! A… something off the port bow!"

   "Eagle out," Alston said dryly. She really didn't much like
surprises.

   A plume of gray smoke was approaching. She leveled her
binoculars.

   Well, I will be dipped in shit, she thought. The hull looked to
be a medium-sized powerboat, a forty-footer, cut down to a flush
deck. Wooden paddle wheels framed within a steel circle
churned on either side. Each was driven by a peculiar
arrangement that looked a little like a Texas oil derrick, nodding
up and down. Rocking-beam engine, she thought; they'd been
common on steamships a hundred and fifty years ago. Each
rocking beam was moved by a single steam cylinder, mounted
with the piston rod upward. Between them was a boiler that
looked like welded sheet steel, and a tall chimney of the same
material. Crewfolk were throwing split logs into a furnace
underneath it; someone pulled on a lanyard, and the
unmistakable melancholy hooting of a steam whistle greeted
them.

   Cadets and crew lined the rail, cheering and waving their
hats. Alston let them, for a few minutes; it was a special
occasion. Isketerol came up beside her, peering as the tug came
closer.
  "More diesel magic, Captain?" he asked.

   She shook her head absently. "Steam," she said. "Heated
water. The fire heats the water, the water becomes steam, the
steam is confined in metal pipes and pushes, doing work."

   The Tartessian blinked and nodded, moving aside and staring
hungrily. Did I do the right thing? she thought with slight
unease. Just because he's ignorant doesn't mean he's stupid.
Neither of the Bronze Agers was that. But the languages would
be so useful…

  "Ms. Rapczewicz, strike all sail, if you please," she said aloud.
"Rig for tow. We're home."

   "… and you've done a good job, one that's important in the
survival of thousands of our people," Alston said, finishing the
brief speech. It wasn't a part of her role that she enjoyed, but
they deserved to hear it. The waist was packed solid, orderly
ranks as if for Quarters. "I'm proud of you all."

   The crew of the Eagle cheered. "Chief Cofflin tells me that he's
declared today and tomorrow public holidays, and I've arranged
for everyone to draw some of the Town chits we're using for
money these days; they're good for beer, at least. Liberty for
everyone but the posted skeleton crew. Behave yourselves—but
have fun. You deserve it. Dismissed from quarters!" The cheers
grew wilder, and hats flew into the air.

   Alston looked grimly at what awaited them on the dock. The
noise had alerted her first, as the Eagle came through the harbor
entrance. Cofflin had said that the Town Meeting had voted a
public holiday; she'd expected the harbor to be quiet. Instead
there was a surf-roar of noise, and the quays were crowded with
people.

  "They did say some people would be on hand to say hello,"
Tom Hiller said.

   "Some people… Cofflin didn't say anything about this, the
lying hound," Alston snapped.
   A huge banner stretched across the steamship dock,
WELCOME EAGLETS, with a big gold-painted wooden eagle
above it. The quays and streets were densely packed with people;
there was even a high school band, complete with drum
majorettes and trombones tootling away.

   She stood glowering at the three-ring circus. The crew were
hiding smiles. Swindapa looked impressed; she suspected
Isketerol had seen ceremonies more grand, traveling about the
Mediterranean. Alston turned an accusing eye on her sailing
master.

  "You knew about this, didn't you?" she said.

   "Well, the chief, the XO, and I discussed things a bit," Hiller
said, grinning.

  "Traitor. You all knew."

   "We knew you don't like public occasions, at least in theory,
Skipper. Consider it a surprise party."

   She snorted and relaxed. No use in fighting the inevitable,
she decided. Cofflin and most of the Council were waiting to
greet her on the dock. And the crew certainly deserved a rousing
public reception and cookout.

   That reminded her. "Mr. Isketerol, Ms. Swindapa, we'll
arrange quarters for you ashore," she said.

   Isketerol bowed silently. Swindapa frowned, an edge of panic
in her face. "Not stay captain's with… place?" she said. "Send
away?"

   The Tartessian had reverted to his native dress for the
occasion, saffron tunic with a complex folded belt holding knife
and short sword of bronze, and a long blue cloak. Swindapa kept
to the Eagle working blues she'd been given, the spare pair of a
cadet about her size. The hands that clenched the baseball cap
were quivering slightly now, matching the desperate look on her
face.
   "I'm sure there will be room," Alston said hastily. Damn. I'm a
sailor, not a trauma therapist! This is as bad as having a chick
imprint on you when it hatches. Swindapa relaxed and put on
the cap.

   Not much choice in the matter. Have to get her some things,
Alston noted. She'd have to organize a good deal, get a regular
shore establishment going, if she was going to run Nantucket's
maritime endeavors as well as captain the Eagle herself. A
number of ideas had occurred to her, along those lines. I need a
good long talk with Chief Cofflin.

   "Ms. Swindapa." The blue eyes turned to her, pools the color
of hyacinth flowers. "I'd like you to see the doctor here," she said.

   "Already seen Eagle doctor, ma'am. Feel goods—I mean,
better."

   "All the same, I'd like you to see the one here, please." The
Fiernan girl ducked her head in a shy nod. She had an appealing
face, really… Careful, Alston reminded herself.

   The gangplank swung out and crunched into place ashore.
Alston set her own hat in place and walked down the gangway to
the waist, past the rows of sailors and cadets now braced to
attention. The boatswain's pipe sang out:

   "Eagle departing!" The bells rang. Cofflin shook her hand at
the bottom of the gangway and handed her a microphone.

   "A few words, Captain," he said.

   "Ah—" Alston cleared her throat, and Swindapa and Isketerol
jumped and started at the amplified sound. "It's all right," she
said, flicking the thing off for a second.

   Then: "We're all happy to be back, and back with the food the
island needed. The trip was… interesting… and there'll be a
report, film, and photographs handed out. We accomplished our
mission, and we'll probably be able to trade in Britain again later
this year. The crew of the Eagle have worked very hard for the
community, and in their name I'm honored to accept your
thanks." She paused. "That's all. Thank you again."

  "Short but to the point," Cofflin murmured, and took the
microphone from her. "Three cheers for Captain Alston and the
Eagle!"

  At least nobody can see me blush, Alston thought as she
endured it.

   Cofflin led the way. Trestle tables had been set up on Main
Street, and from the looks of it Nantucket's abundant cooks had
been at work. Mostly seafood, of course, but well prepared, and a
surprising abundance of poultry, roast goose and duck, and big
plump birds that looked a little like chickens but weren't. They'd
raided the accumulated stores, too; there was even a butter
sculpture of the Eagle. Sitting in crisp brown glory with an apple
in its mouth was proof of why Cofflin had been so considerate in
getting the first load of pigs off the Eagle via the tug; glazed with
the honey that had also been a part of the cargo, it waited on a
bed of rice. Alston shrugged with a rueful chuckle, sat next to the
chief, and poured herself a glass of wine—the island's own
vintage, she noticed. Cadets and crew were already pouring
ashore and filling the tables below her, interspersed with the
townsfolk.

  "Thanks—my boys and girls deserve a blowout," she said to
Cofflin.

  "They and the town," Cofflin said, sharpening a carving knife
and falling to.

   "What's this?" she added, looking at a bowl surrounded with
crackers, full of a jellylike substance. Daubed on a cracker, it had
a creamy, salty taste. "Tastes interestin'… some sort of seafood?"

   "Caviar," Cofflin said. "It's sturgeon-spawning time over on
the mainland. We sent some boats to the mouth of the
Connecticut River." He nodded down the table.

   Alston looked and gave a silent whistle. "Now, that's a big
fish." The section sitting in the middle of one of the trestle tables
was three feet thick and ten long, resting on a base of steamed
seaweed.

    "Half a ton," Cofflin said, smiling a little. "We had to harpoon
it, and nearly lost the first boat that tried. Things've been a bit…
hairy here at times. It's a good idea to give everyone some time
off, throw a party, celebrate—and you've given us a fair bit to
celebrate."

   "Starting with this most excellent pig," she said, loading her
plate; the mashed potatoes were the instant type, but edible.
"Pass those drumsticks too, please… Ms. Swindapa, Mr.
Isketerol, Mr. Jared Cofflin, our chief executive officer."

   Hell, I deserve a holiday, she thought, as the two Bronze
Agers leaned across her to shake hands with him. And here's
everything necessary. Of attainable things, she thought, looking
wistfully at a young man and woman freed of the Eagle's rule on
Public Displays of Affection and holding hands as they ate. It
would be nice to have someone myself. Or even just to get laid.

   Isketerol of Tartessos sipped at the odd-tasting, bubbly beer
and watched silently as the feast wound down into the night.
He'd left the public square when most of the others did, finding
his way to this half-underground tavern in the basement of
another of the strange, magnificent houses; he could tell What it
was, from the sounds and scents making their way out the door.
He sounded out the words written on the wooden sign above.

  Brotherhood of Thieves. The sign pictured a man with short
bullhorns on his head, holding a small chained woman on one
hand and a sack on the other. A god of trade, perhaps? But it
was a Brotherhood of Thieves…

   His eyebrows rose at the thought. The Amurrukan seemed like
far too orderly a folk to have an open thieves' den flaunting itself
here in this impossibly clean city… but he was confident enough
of what he'd read. His English was as good as his Egyptian now,
and he'd spent many months, in visits over the years, to learn
that.

   "Brotherhood of Thieves," he sounded out aloud, and looked
around. This street was one of the ones with the strange smooth
dark substance coating it, not the honest cobblestones of Main
Street. The buildings were mostly wood, covered in shingles and
white or gray paint; some had little courtyard gardens. He could
see the spire of a temple… no, they called it a church… not far
away. Large trees grew on either side of the street, which was
broad—enough for two loaded wagons to pass abreast, at least.
The temple tower had another one of the clocks in it. He
shuddered. Cutting away your life, second by second, the way the
Crone's knife did at the last when she put you in the Cauldron.
Seconds, he thought. Only the Amurrukan would divide time up
into pieces like that, like a cook dicing onions for soup.

  "A name for every street, and a number on every house," he
muttered to himself.

   Oh, he could see how useful that would be, but it was a bit
daunting. What was really useful was the counting system. It had
taken him two days of questioning—driving Arnstein and his
woman almost insane—before it sank in that there was some use
in a symbol for nothing. Humiliating, that the Earth Folk slave
girl had grasped it earlier. He scowled slightly. It would be more
convenient if the bitch weren't along, or if she'd been too stupid
to learn a new language. Scant hope of that; the Star Priest
families bred for wit.

   He mustered his courage and walked through the door; there
was a short corridor, two more doors with the symbols for the
wonderful better-than-Cretan interior latrines the Amurrukan
had (but why separate ones for men and women?), and a
half-door to the left where the taproom was.

   Even before William Walker waved him over to a table it was
reassuring. After so much that was alien, things so strange that
he had to force his eyes to see them, this was only middling
unsettling. The lights on the walls came from lamps of wonderful
design, glass and bronze, but they burned with honest flame—he
recognized the smell of whale oil. So did the candles in more
glass holders on the tables. There was a fire of wood in a tiny
alcove set into the wall, with an opening above to take away the
smoke through a brick tunnel—now, that he could use at once,
back home. Wooden tables with benches and chairs, floor of
smooth lime mortar, brick walls—different in detail but not in
essence from things he'd seen before. The smells were familiar
too, fire, cooking fish and meat, wine, beer, a little sweat… and
the strange cleaning fat they called soap.

   He slid onto the bench across from Walker. The Amurrukan
had his arm around the shoulders of a girl, wonderfully and
scandalously dressed in nothing but a halter for her breasts and
short breeks tight enough to show the shape of her mound. Her
jewelry was strange, but would have bought a good-sized farm in
Tartessos, although her hands were work-roughened. She had
long black hair, skin the color of old ivory, a tiny nose, and eyes
that seemed to tilt up at the corners, lovely in an exotic way. The
one on his bench was even prettier, nicely plump, dark-haired
and colored like an Egyptian herself. Need stirred. It had been a
long time since they left the White Isle, and the Amurru-kan had
not allowed him to bring a servant.

   Careful, careful, he told himself. The easiest way to get
yourself into killing trouble in a strange land was over women, if
you didn't know the customs. It wasn't enough to know formal
laws, you had to understand the ways those were bent or
changed by unspoken taboo. These probably weren't harlots and
certainly weren't slaves; the Amurru-kan had none, none at all.
He decided to think of them as young priestesses of the Grain
Goddess, to be courted.

   "Greetings, friend," Walker said in mangled Tartessian. Then
in English: "Alice, Rosita, here's my friend Isketerol who I told
you about—a prince of Tartessos, which is a kingdom in Iberia.
Isketerol, Rosita Menendez, and Alice Hong. Dr. Alice Hong."

   Isketerol bowed slightly, hand to chest, and flashed his best
smile. The women smiled back. He wasn't exactly a prince, if he
understood the word rightly, although his family were relatives
of the king. There certainly wasn't any need to tell the women the
details, though.

   "All Tartessos has nothing more beautiful," he said carefully
in his best English.

  Jared Cofflin smiled as the last of the deck cargo trotted down
to Steamboat Wharf. Those waiting with handcarts and a few
improvised horse-drawn vehicles managed to raise a cheer as
well, although this load was not grain but several dozen loudly
argumentative pigs, the last left on the ship.

   "I'm surprised they can stand to make any noise, after the
homecoming celebration," Captain Alston said. "A few of my
cadets and crew still can't, and the aspirin are rationed."

   She looked around the dockside. Cofflin tried to see it as she
would. Not much had changed in the time away… only six
weeks, Christ. The main difference was the absence of motor
vehicles. The sailing boats which had ridden at mooring poles in
the enclosed basin to her left were mostly out fishing; so were the
trawlers and the converted scallop boats. Work went on to turn
the cabin cruisers and other motor craft to something useful.
Two steam tugs waited over in the Easy Street marina basin,
next to an improvised barge they'd towed over from the
mainland. Perhaps the smell was the biggest difference, and that
had crept up on him so gradually that he hardly noticed
anymore. They did their best to scrape up every fragment from
the fish landed here, if only because it was needed for the fields
everyone else had been laboring to clear. Still, there were scales,
and a definite smell.

  "The town needed a rest," he said. "And what you brought
back, that's going to make a big difference."

   "A third of a pound of bread per person per day for a year,"
she said, and looked around. "Y'all have been busy."

   The pigs were being herded into the carts, with barriers of
wire netting set up to give them only one route. Enraged squeals
sounded, the whack of poles on bristly hides, and the shout of
someone whose hand was saved only by the thick glove he left in
a pig's mouth.

   "If y'all only knew how glad I am to see the last of those
things," she muttered; he presumed the remark was directed at
the world in general. "I hope we can feed them. Seventy-five sows
made it, say three batches of eight piglets per year each, and
they start breedin' within a year themselves—"
   "We'll manage. Feed 'em alewives, if nothing else," he said.
They weren't particularly good eating fish, but they were
certainly abundant—no wonder the Pilgrims had used them as
fertilizer. "Good thing Steamboat Wharf is deep enough for you
to dock," he said.

   "It's a menace," she replied absently. "The land around the
harbor here isn't really enough to break a first-class storm. We
could lose the ship, if she was caught here in a bad norther, and
we don't have much warning without a weather service. I'm
inclined to park her over on the mainland in the winter.
Providence harbor ought to do—it's deep and sheltered up there
at the end of Narrangansett Bay. Inconvenient as hell, though."

   "Well, we've got a sort of base there," Cofflin said. "The ferry's
there now, for one last trip before we lay her up.

    We're bringing back timber—you wouldn't believe the quality
of the lumber we've been getting. Seems a pity to use so much of
it for firewood. We figured it was worth the fuel, and now we've
got the tugs on the same run, and some sailboats. They're
bringing salt-marsh hay, too, for the livestock."

   "You won't regret it come winter," Alston said. Her voice took
on a more serious tone: "Look, Chief, that grain will help, but
we'll need more."

  He nodded. "Farming here never was more than a scramble,
and a chancy one at that."

   "Damn right," Alston said. "My family were farmers down
South; it's a nice hobby and a hell of a way to make a living. I've
got some ideas about how we should trade this fall."

   "Not with the same crowd?" Cofflin said, one brow arching.

   "Not if we can avoid it. I'm not what you'd call squeamish,
but…" She shrugged. "Besides, they don't control a big territory
as yet, and they're making war. Not the situation to produce
good crops."

   "Are there any others likely to do better?" he said.
   She frowned and clasped her hands behind her back. "I think
there may. We could just pick another spot, somewhere else in
Europe or even the Mediterranean, but… I told you about Ms.
Swindapa?"

  "Seems to be a nice girl," Cofflin said cautiously. "Doc
Coleman is taking a look at her, as you asked."

  "Speak of the devil."

   The doctor appeared, wobbling in on a bicycle. He coasted to
a halt beside them and dismounted. "Whooo," he panted. "I've
known for years that I should get more exercise." Then he looked
up at Alston. "Well, I confirmed what your ship's surgeon said.
She's in remarkably good condition, for someone who was beaten
to within an inch of her life and gang-raped to the point of
internal lesions. Anal and vaginal."

   Cofflin sucked in his breath. The radiophone report had said
"badly abused"; he'd assumed something like this, but…

   "I think they make them tough in the here-and-now," Alston
said thoughtfully. Only someone who knew her rather well could
have interpreted the slight tightening of the skin around her
mouth. "The ones that live, anyway."

   "And the pelvic inflammation's cleared right up," Cole-man
went on. "Nice to see a bug that doesn't sneer at sulfonamides.
There's probably fallopian scarring, I'm afraid. I've given her and
that Isketerol fellow every vaccine and shot in the armory, just in
case, too. Apart from that she's in fine condition. Full set of
teeth, not one cavity, twenty-twenty vision…"

  "Right," Alston nodded. God, she's a cool one, Cofflin thought.
He was angry, himself; policeman's reflex, if you were a good
one.

   "Ms. Swindapa is connected with a prominent family in the…
I don't think it's a kingdom or a country, exactly, but it occupies
most of southwestern England in this era," Alston said. "I hope
to learn more when she speaks better English, and she's learning
remarkably fast."
   "Can't Dr. Arnstein translate?"

   "Only through Isketerol, and I'd rather not."

   Cofflin's eyes narrowed. "You're thinking alliance," he said.

   "I'm thinking we should consider it," she said, and held up a
pink-palmed hand. "No, I'm not dreaming conquistador dreams.
We've only got a couple of dozen real firearms left, with pitiful
stores of ammunition. But we could make a difference helping
one side or the other… and Ms. Swindapa's people are being
attacked without provocation. They also have plenty of what we
need: foodstuffs, livestock, linen, wool, and eventually metals.
Copper and tin already, and we could show them how to mine
and smelt iron. A few simple innovations…"

   Cofflin whistled silently. "That's something the whole Council
will have to talk about, and the Town Meeting too," he said. "You
certainly don't think small or dawdle, Captain."

   Alston shrugged again. "The iron's hot. But yes, this is all
tentative now. We've got photographs and video footage you
should see, too."

   He nodded. "Let's take this further. We have your baggage
moved into the quarters we found for you—we can go there and
talk in privacy."

   They turned and walked south along Easy Street, then west
along the ankle-turning cobblestones of Main. The shops were
mostly shuttered and locked, but there were ladders against
many of the cast-iron lampposts, and the glass frames had been
taken off their tops.

   "Putting in whale-oil lanterns," Cofflin said, to Alston's look of
inquiry. "The field clearing and planting's done, most of it;
Angelica can get the grainfields sown in a day or two with her
machinery—they're ready and waiting. We've got a little leisure
for other things."

  "Too much," Coleman said grimly. "How many suicides did
you have, Captain?"
   "One… wait a minute."

   Coleman smiled bleakly as he saw the woman blink at the
implications. "We've had over a hundred and fifty," he said. "In a
population of less than eight thousand, that's… quite a few. Plus
a rash of depression. The work was good for that. The suicides
have tailed off, thank God, but there's still a few every week. I'm
afraid of what might happen if everyone has much time to
think."

   Cofflin sighed. "It just seems to hit people, particularly when
they have a chance to sit down and think," he said. "Did me, for
a while."

   A whole day when he could not summon the energy to get out
of bed or answer the insistent voices, and nothing seemed real.
The memory still haunted him, worse than things he'd seen in
his naval service, and not just because it was more recent. This
had been a failure within himself, a failure of his will. A failure of
the thing that kept him going, and if your will could fail you,
what could stand?

   "I noticed something similar on the Eagle, but we were
extremely busy… and a ship's company is a self-contained group
anyway," she said. "Hmm. I'd give odds that most of the suicides
were adults, and not many of them were Council members."

  Coleman looked at her in surprise. "Average age thirty-eight,
and no, only one of the selectmen killed himself," he said.

  "It makes sense," Alston said. "Upward mobility's great for
your self-confidence."

   "None of us wanted this catastrophe!" Cofflin said.

  "Didn't say that; I'd rather it hadn't happened too. But you,
me, the others who've… taken charge, for us the catastrophe has
meant scope for our talents."

   "Everyone's been stretched to the limit."

   "Planting potatoes, fishing; hard labor, for people who aren't
used to it, mostly. The whole world lost, even the little
things—morning TV, hot water from a tap, hamburgers. We,
though, we've been suddenly promoted from lower middle
management to president-Cabinet-Joint Chiefs level. Everyone's
life depends on us, and that's a burden to crack your back, but
you can't put it down."

  Cofflin's anger faded. "You may be right," he admitted.
"That's what pulled me out of it, I think—knowing that too many
people were depending on me."

  "I definitely think you're right," Coleman said. "But how
should we apply the knowledge?"

   "Keep people busy. The Lord knows there's enough to do,"
Alston said. "Beyond that, I'd try to get them involved in the
planning more."

   Coleman laughed aloud. "Funny you should say that. People
seem to be planning for the future already, in their way. With all
those suicides it took a while to notice, but the number of
pregnancies is up too, about three times what it should be."

  "More mouths," Cofflin grumbled.

   "More hands, eventually," the doctor replied. To Alston: "And
along the lines you suggested, the Chief's been pushing this
Project Night thing…"

  "Project Night?"

    "Sort of like a suggestion box," Cofflin explained. "I figured
there must be a lot of good ideas out there about things we
should be doing. Had Martha Stoddard over at the Athenaeum
screen out the crazies, and God but there are enough of those.
Then, I figure, once a month the serious ones get to do a
presentation, and the month after that the Town Meeting votes
which projects to tackle. Martha had a good one herself—have
Angelica Brand turn part of her greenhouses over to growing
orange trees, lemons, that sort of thing. We had the seeds, after
all. Even got some coffee plants—ornamentals, but they'll grow
coffee beans, right enough."
  "Not enough yield to be worth the trouble, surely?"

   "Ayup, not here—but we keep sending the Yare down to the
Caribbean for salt, anyway. They can plant seedlings, leave 'em,
and let them grow wild. Martha tells me explorers used to do
that, whenever they touched at a newfound island. In a few years
we'll have the fruit."

  "Now that is clever," Alston said respectfully.

   "Martha's a clever lady," he said. They had come to where
Main Street veered to the left, forming a Y-fork with Liberty. "It's
along here. Right here, as a matter of fact."

   He enjoyed the look of well-hidden surprise on Alston's face.
The house was one of the Three Bricks, a big Federal-style
mansion with two white pillars on either side of the entrance.
There was a flagpole above it, now bearing the Coast Guard's
banner, and a square cupola on the roof flanked by two chimneys
at either end. Someone had even put up a brass plaque over the
entrance, Coast Guard House. It stood four-square and peaceful,
two more like it to their left.

   "Ah…" she said. "Chief Cofflin, Ah did have thoughts 'bout a
big house with white columns as a girl, but isn't this a bit…
grand?"

   Cofflin laughed. "It's also Town property, since the owner
didn't make the voyage with us. Don't worry; we're turning it
over to you as your headquarters, as well as someplace to store
your toothbrush ashore. Room for some of your officers, as well."

   "Thank you kindly," she muttered, craning her head up at the
facade and accepting the key ring.

   "I'll be off," Coleman said as they opened the door. "While I
can still do some good." The humor left his seamed, elderly face
as he pushed his bicycle to a start.

   "Definitely a little grand," Alston said, looking around the
lobby.
   There was a curving staircase to the upper floors, rising from
an entrance papered in Empire style with gold medallions
against cream. Two large sitting rooms flanked it on either side,
each with a black marble fireplace and eight-foot windows; the
colors were gray and green and beige, picked out with coral and
yellow. The furniture was quietly sumptuous, Persian rugs on the
wide-plank floors, pictures…

   "I'd hate to have to dust all this… Does the doctor have a
problem?"

   Cofflin nodded somberly. "Things running out. Insulin,
specifically."

  "I… see."

   "He's trying to save some of the diabetics with special diets
and exercise," Cofflin said. "Martha dug out an old treatment, a
tea made from parsnip leaves, believe it or not—lowers the blood
sugar."

   "That won't work for most of the Type Ones," Alston said
clinically.

   Cofflin felt anger flare again, and throttled it down. Make sure
he said what you think he said, his father had always told him.
Almost as many fools ruined by their ears by as their lips.

  "You're a cool one, aren't you?" he said.

   Alston caught the tone and faced him. "Chief Cofflin," she said
quietly, "practical is what I am. I try to do what I can, and that
takes all I've got, so I don't wail and beat my breast over things I
can't do an earthly thing about. It's what's kept me sane through
this… thing. I hope that's all right with you, because I have no
intention of changing. Gave up tryin' to make myself over to
other people's patterns when I filed for divorce."

  Cofflin spread his hands. "I can't argue with that." A wry
smile. "Or with someone who does their job. Too few of 'em."

  Alston returned the smile. "Too right," she agreed. "Look, we
do have a lot to talk about. Let's get to it. Does this place have a
kitchen?"

   Blue collar reflexes, he thought—like him. They walked
through a dining room under a brass-and-crystal chandelier. The
kitchen beyond had been thoroughly modernized, in a
meticulous-restoration style. Much of the equipment was of the
latest and completely useless with only a thin trickle of rationed
electricity available, and that earmarked for the clinic and
machine shops, but there was a big black cast-iron wood stove as
well. Alston's eyes lit up at the sight of it.

   "Now that's going to be fun," she said.

   "You cook?" he asked, a little surprised.

   "I was a complete failure as a mother and not cut out for a
wife," she said, "but yes, my momma did whack one feminine
accomplishment into me. It's relaxin'. Splice the mainbrace?
Think I saw a liquor cabinet back there."

   "One won't hurt."

   She came back with two glasses and a bottle. "I see someone
told you my tastes, or whoever owned this place knew whiskey."

   "It's your local brand?"

   "It's Maker's Mark," she said, pouring a finger into both
glasses and adding water to hers. She raised an eyebrow; at his
nod she splashed a dollop of water into his as well. "Also known
as Kentucky Champagne. Where I came from, the local brand
went right from the still into pint jars."

   They sat across the carefully scrubbed pine boards of the
table. "To a long and successful association, Chief," she said.

   He sipped; the whiskey went down smoothly. Nothing but the
best for the man who'd owned this place. For a moment he
smiled at the thought of an enraged stockbroker wandering
through the primeval woods of the 1250 B.C. Nantucket
that—presumably—was dumped into 1998, looking for his
three-point-seven-million-dollar investment. The smile was
without much sympathy. In his book financiers were right up
there with publicans and sinners among the people only a
mother or Jesus could love.

   "I'm not sure that I can drink to that," he said. "A long
association means I have to keep this miserable job they've
pushed off on me." A sudden thought struck him, and he glanced
at her speculatively.

   "Oh, no. No way this woman-chile goin' fall fo' that, Yankee."
Flatly: "Wouldn't work. I'm an outsider here, a woman, and
black."

   "I'd noticed," he said dryly. "I don't think you'd have much
trouble that way here. It's a pretty open-minded place,
Nantucket."

  "Let me be the judge of that," she said, in the same flat tone.

   He shrugged ruefully. "Well, I suppose you would be in a
better position to judge."

  "Not necessarily, Chief—"

  "Jared."

   "—Jared. If you're black, there are people out there who are
going to do their best to mess you up, and if you're a woman it's
twice compounded… and one of the subtle ways they get you is to
tempt you into using their prejudice as an excuse every time you
screw up, and if you make excuses for failin', you'll do nothing
but fail. Huggin' resentments isn't very productive, even if they're
justified; gets to be one of those self-fulfillin' prophecies."

   She smiled wryly. "Besides, you don't know the half of it… and
I'm doing exactly what I'm suited for." Meditatively: "They were
going to lay the Eagle up, did you know? I think that's why I got
her after Quillman broke his neck in that damn-fool accident,
they thought I'd make a good PR choice as last captain. A good
thing it was brought back with the island."
   "Some useful things came along," Cofflin agreed. "The
problem is when they run out. All the makeshifts and
replacements we come up with take so much more time. Paper
towels," he went on. "Did you ever think how many man-hours of
washing up paper towels save?"

   "My own thoughts along those lines were a little more
personal," she said. "I still remember vividly my first thought
when you told me about Rosenthal's notion that we were back in
the Bronze Age." Her eyes went wide in mock horror: "What, no
more Tampax, ever?"

   They shared the chuckle and lifted their glasses to meet with a
chink. "Well, let's get down to business."

   Isketerol of Tartessos sat in the garden outside the tall white
columns of the Athenaeum, with his face in his hands.

  "Three thousand years," he whispered to himself.

   It was a number—meaningless, not real like three thousand
ingots of copper or three thousand sheep or three thousand
paces. "Three thousand years. Three thousand years. Three—"

   He stopped himself with a wrenching effort of will,
shuddering, and the few folk passing by under the cruel
brightness of the sunshine gave him only a glance or two.

   Why didn't they tell me? he asked, anger bubbling up under
eerieness. "Because you didn't have enough command of their
tongue, fool!" he snarled to himself.

   He probably wouldn't have believed, then. Now it made too
much sense, with what he'd seen and heard. This island was only
the fragment of a greater realm; that was why there were so
many people and so little farmland.

  "Hardly even a memory of us survives," he whispered.

   He looked down the corridors of the ages, and saw his city and
his people and his very gods forgotten, dust and ashes and a few
corroded remnants pored over by strangers indulging an idle
curiosity. His father's house, that he had hoped to build strong
for the years; his wives, his children.

   The little crooked lanes where he had run as a boy, the bay
where he had learned to handle a boat, the dock where he left on
his first real voyage.

   Tartessos, and the whole world. He remembered the pictures
the Amurrukan woman inside the white building had shown
him, the shattered wreck of the Lion Gate of Mycenae, the
Egyptian temples stripped of their colors and crumbling away
amid the sands. He remembered standing in the crowd and
watching Ramses return from his campaign in Canaan, like the
graven image of a god in the chariot behind high-stepping
horses. The blaze of faience and gold from the temples and
palaces, great colored streamers hanging between the pylons. He
remembered the sheer awe that had gripped him when he saw
the pyramids, those mountains made by men like gods… and the
pictures of them stripped of their smooth shining coats of
limestone, lying jagged and worn beside the Nile…

   Dizziness swept over him, and he moaned. Gradually, fighting
as he'd done to bring the Wave Hunter through a storm on the
River Ocean, he won back to himself.

  Think, he told himself. The Womb Goddess and the Lady of
Tartessos had given him wits; he was no brainless savage to
cower before the unknown.

   Yes, a mighty magic had taken this island, this Nantucket,
and set it adrift in the sea of time. The anger of some god, for no
sorcerer could do this, could bestride the universe and compel
the Powers. The Amurrukan themselves, with all their arts, had
no inkling of how or why. Yes, yes… And their arts were
deserting them, they said so themselves. Only the simpler ones
remained.

  He took heart from what the wisewoman in the temple of
writings had said. Now the course of the world was turned on a
new tack. A new heading, on which anything might happen.
Nothing need be as it was shown in those deadly, lying pictures.
He was free.
   Slowly his breathing slowed. He wiped his face on a linen
handkerchief, a gift of Walker, and looked around. He had
known he was faring into strangeness, beyond the world he
knew—and he had seized the opportunity with both hands. Well,
it was still there. He was learning much; already he had learned
enough to make his house the greatest in the city. How to make a
ship sail against the wind, the secrets of the rudder and the
north-pointing needle. Something of the currents and winds of
the River Ocean far beyond the coasts, and if they were as
reliable as the Eagle captain said, that was much.

   You are in no danger here. Not unless the wrath of the gods
struck again, and against that he could do nothing. If a curse
rode these shores, so be it.

   No danger. He had the promise of rich rewards, beyond what
he'd sent back home with his cousin. They had quartered him in
a house that was not large, but furnished like a king's. He had a
friend, of sorts, in Walker. He even had a woman. Isketerol made
himself dwell on that, and grinned; a very inventive woman,
better than any he'd ever bedded, and a mine of unintentional
information. He was a merchant adventurer of Tartessos, who'd
dared storm and beasts and wild men in unknown waters. Abide
the summer, teach the languages he'd promised, and see what
opportunities offered. Snatch them when they came.

   Swindapa sat on the soft bed and bounced experimentally. It
creaked and the four posts at the corners swayed a little,
fluttering the fringe of the canopy all around. She looked around
the room, awed. The floor was planks of wood, smoothly fitted
together like the wood on Eagle's deck. The walls were smooth
too, showing no sign of the potlike baked clay lumps—bi-ri-ks,
she told herself—on the outer walls. Patterns of blue and green
flowers covered them, so lovely she wanted to kick off her shoes
and run dancing barefoot through the spring meadows they
showed. There were fitted wooden windows, with panes of the
clear icelike glass, and folding shutters. One wall held a hearth,
with faint traces of ash and a metal rack for holding wood.

  Strange. Where is the smoke-mark? Smoke was useful— it
kept vermin out of your thatch as it soaked through, and dried
the straw. A hearth like this should leave a broad band of smoke
up the wall and on the roof, but that was smooth and white,
looking like the gypsum plaster used to coat some
Star-Moon-Sun workings. She went over and knelt, looking up.
There was a tunnel of bricks leading away upward for the smoke.
The room didn't smell of smoke, and the hearth only very faintly.

  It smelled like flowers. Swindapa followed her nose. Yes, a
bowl of dried petals on the wooden shelf over the hearth. That
was homelike; bunches of dried herbs and flowers hung around
any Earth Folk dwelling. There were flowers on the rug that
warmed the floor, too, somehow drawn in cloth.

   A big wooden box on short legs stood by the bed. It had real
metal fastenings on it, polished bronze. I wonder if this might be
like the thing in the wall on the ship? She tugged on one brass
handle, and a sliding box within the larger box came out, filled
with things of fine cloth. She pulled one out. It was an Eagle Folk
loincloth, the type made from two triangles of cloth and an odd
stretchy belt that clung and stayed up by itself. You could put
one of the little pads inside it to catch your Mourning blood, too,
when your womb wept with Moon Woman. Another wonderful
thing of the Eagle People.

   "Surely even Tartessos has nothing this fine," she murmured
to herself, looking around the room. "Not even Egypt."

   It was getting dark, and she remembered something the
captain had showed her. This place didn't have the ship-magic
that made a little star glow when you touched the wall. The lamp
screwed to the wall was almost as delightful. You took off the tall
glass bulb—carefully, carefully, the clear stuff was as fragile as a
snowflake—and lit a match. That was a pleasure in itself, when
you thought of how long and uncertain using a fire drill was; no
wonder the Eagle People didn't have to keep a fire going all the
time for folk to take splinters from. Then you touched the flame
to the flat strip of thick cloth that ran down into the cup of oil
below. She put the chimney back on the lamp and turned the
brass knob. Warm yellow light filled the room. A fire in the
hearth would have been good too, even though the night was
warm, but the lantern was pleasant.
   She yawned, full and sleepy, remembering to cover her mouth
in the way the Eagle People considered polite. A whole bed that
size to myself. She'd gotten used to lying so far off the ground,
and no longer worried about rolling off the edge in her sleep, but
she'd never expected to have so much space to herself. That's
good, though. Outside your kin, it was extremely bad manners
not to share pleasure with someone sleeping in the same bed if
he wanted to, and she didn't think she could stand to have
anyone touch her that way right now. Even the gentle old healer's
impersonal hands had made her struggle not to weep and
scream.

   Her teeth ground together in rage. Another thing the Iraiina
had stolen from her. She forced herself to relax again. Vengeance
was coming. Moon Woman had taken her out of the world to
find it; or brought this place into the world, perhaps. She
couldn't quite understand what the Eagle People had tried to
explain about that yet, but she would.

   She padded down the corridor to the washing place, and did
the Eagle People ritual of tooth-scrubbing. Many of them seemed
to have trouble with their teeth, so chewing a cedar twig wasn't
enough for them. Although the captain's are beautiful, shining
like pure salt.

   Perhaps the Powers which gave the Eagle People so much sent
them that trouble to balance things.

  "It is fun to have more room," Doreen said.

   Ian laughed as he came back to the big four-poster bed with
two glasses of sherry. He'd had to turn over all the provisions
he'd accumulated on that panic-stricken morning right after the
Event, but the Council's regulations had let everyone keep his
booze. The island was out of bottled beer, although the local
microbrewery was ready to start malting the barley they'd
brought back. God knew what it would taste like with the supply
of hops so limited, but it ought to be drinkable. That was all you
could say about Nantucket's own wine, though. The real surprise
was that grapes would grow here at all, probably because the
island sat in the middle of the Gulf Stream!
  He checked half a step, then climbed back into the bed.

   "Penny for them," Doreen said, snuggling close and taking her
glass.

  Ian propped pillows up against the headboard and leaned
back into them. "I was just thinking that when things settle
down, it might be an idea to look into a wine-importing
business," he said. "That Tartessian wine wasn't half bad— it
reminded me of sherry, which is why I thought of it just
now—and with a few hints, they could probably do even better."

  Doreen tweaked his chest hairs. "It reminded me of
Manischewitz," she said.

   "Oh, not that bad—-well, actually, that was my first thought
too."

   "You're just looking for an excuse to go do historical research
in the first person personal," she said.

    "I wouldn't mind seeing a few things," he admitted. Isketerol
had let fall a few hints about Egypt that made his scholar's mind
drool; and the thought of seeing Agamemnon's Greece… God! To
get there with a camera! "But there's still the matter of making
a living."

   He glanced down. "Making a living for us?" he said
tentatively.

  Did I really say that? he thought. Yup.

   Doreen grinned up at him through the fringe of her abundant,
rather coarse black hair. "Trying to make an honest woman of
me?" she said. He nodded.

  "Thank you, Ian," she said. After a long moment. "Yes."

   They clinked the glasses gently together. "Strange," Ian said.
"I've only done that once before, and the results weren't all that
great."
   Doreen knocked her knuckles against one of the posts of the
bed. "Avert the omen. I've never said yes before… haven't been
asked all that often, either."

  "I can't think why," he said sincerely. "Smart, agreeable,
good-looking."

   She laughed ruefully. "Zaftig," she corrected. "A lot better
looking on this enforced diet and exercise program God's sent us
on."

    She had lost a good twenty pounds, in the right places,
although she'd never be the ballerina she'd once wanted to be. He
ran a hand down her back to her hip. "I've got no objections at
all," he said. "When?"

  "Well, Chief Cofflin's getting married… after that?"

  He nodded. That would be a town-wide blowout; they could
have a quiet ceremony with only a few friends. Odd. I actually
have more friends here than in California. A thought struck
him. "Should we apply for a house of our own?"

  "Why bother?" Doreen said. "There's nobody else in this
building. We could convert the other rooms to office and library
space, and there's a nice living room and solarium downstairs."

    "No kitchen, though," Ian pointed out. The place was part of
the John Cofflin, with three suites on each of its upper two floors.
Each held a bedroom, bathroom—largely inoperable now—and
sitting room, of variable sizes.

   "I'm not the hausfrau type, particularly not with wood stoves
or whatever we're going to be using. The main building's just
across the way for meals. Later on we could put an attached
kitchen out back—there's plenty of room."

   Ian sighed. Nice to be thinking about something normal…
relatively normal. "And it's right downtown," he said. "The
location will be convenient while we're working for the
government." The term came naturally now.
   "You're the head of the State Department," Doreen giggled.
Her eyes took on a thoughtful look. "That could be a pretty
dangerous job, here. It isn't a nice era, from what Swindapa said.
Interesting, in the Chinese sense. We'll be back across the
Atlantic in August, maybe September."

   Ian nodded uncomfortably. Doreen had spent more time with
the Fiernan girl than he. "She's, ah, recovered fairly well, hasn't
she?"

    "I'm not sure," Doreen said. "She's a nice kid, but weird—well,
with that background, you'd expect it. We talked astronomy, did
I tell you?"

   "You mentioned it. Do they know much?"

   "It's all tied up with their religion, but once you strip out the
stuff about Moon Woman and her children the stars—and boy,
do they believe the stars control your destiny!—they've actually
got a pretty good grasp of things. Pre-Copernicus, but very
sound. They even know the sun's a star and the planets aren't,
although the sun's the bad figure in their mythology."

   "The devil?"

   "More like a wayward child who needs a lot of discipline,"
Doreen said. "I'm not sure; the theology's as complicated as the
Kabbalah, and I get the feeling this astronomical stuff was
overlaid, a long time ago, on an older religion. The thing is,
they've got an amazing grasp of stellar motions for people with
no instruments to speak of and no way of writing any of it down
like the Babylonians did. And their math, geometry in particular.
Even something like algebra. No wonder Swindapa's got a good
memory—the amount of stuff the poor kid had to memorize! She
says some of the mnemonic songs they use are so old the
language has changed beyond recognition."

   We are made for each other. Make love, lie here with a glass
of wine, and talk about anthropology, Ian mused ruefully.

  Doreen thought for a second. "It's really odd how much they
know, and how little hint of it there is in the history of the field,"
she said. "Really. They've got a good idea of the size of the earth,
for instance, and of the distance to the moon. As good as the
Greeks, better in some respects. Yet there's no trace of it in the
records at all."

   "I don't think that's surprising," Ian said grimly. "Let's put it
this way. Imagine everything the same as we saw in Britain, only
we didn't arrive. What would have happened to Swindapa?"

   "She'd have died, the way they were treating her," Doreen said
at once. "Or gone mad. Oh."

   Ian nodded. "The Iraiina, or their relatives, are—were— would
have—hell, you know what I mean—were scheduled to blot her
people out. At least Swindapa's class, the ones who hold their
accumulated knowledge. There's no trace of their language in
our history, either. All that'll be left is their monuments and
burials, which nobody will really understand."

  "Poor kid," Doreen said again. "At least that's one thing we
improved on." She sighed, then brightened and returned to a
more personal subject:

   "There's plenty of room here for a nursery, too." Ian stiffened
in momentary panic. "No, I'm not pregnant—back a while I got
Norplant." She rolled her arm to show the five little tubes under
the skin.

   "Were you, ah, involved with anyone?" he asked. Odd that I
waited until now to ask that. A convention was growing up that
you didn't lightly inquire about what links a person had had
off-island before the Event. Irrelevant, and often painful.

   "Not recently. I was overoptimistic," she sighed. "It'll wear off
in another year and a half, and we can decide what we want to
do then." Her grin turned wicked. "No reason we can't practice,
though, is there?"

  "None at all." He finished the sherry and put his glass beside
hers on the side table.

                  CHAPTER TEN
  May, Year 1 A.E.

  "Ahhh," Swindapa sighed under her breath.

   Everyone in the huge building was sitting on padded chairs of
stone, like steps ringing the wooden platform ahead of her.
Hundreds of people; she did a quick count. Nine hundred
eighty-six, with a dozen children carried in their mothers' arms,
almost as many as a Midwinter Moon ceremony at the Great
Wisdom. The chairs had been enough for wonder, that and the
building itself—like a Star-Moon-Sun work, only more vast and
stately. Now the banner of white cloth up at the head of it was
showing nickering images, colored, with sounds. The sounds of
an Iraiina chant, of their magic.

   Shivering, she huddled a little closer to the captain sitting
beside her, reached down and seized her hand. She and the
others were watching the moving shapes of light as if they were…

   Something went click inside her head. She remembered the
shadows of dancers thrown against the walls of a hut as they
leaped and whirled around the fire. Ahhhhhh! The images were
shadows of things past, like a memory taken out and put on the
banner of white cloth! She relaxed a little. This was a seeming,
and the captain wouldn't let the magic hurt her.

   Figures walked through a meadow at dawn. Iraiina figures,
stalking between two high-leaping bonfires and a double line of
warriors. One was huge, heavy-bodied, scarred and hairy, swag
belly above pillar legs, barrel chest and bear-thick arms above.
Daurthunnicar. Naked save for the kilt and the mask over his
face and shoulders, the head and neck of a horse, skillfully
tanned and mounted on wicker. Equally naked in his hand was
the long sword of silvery metal that he'd been given by the Eagle
People. The younger man had designs painted over his body in
blue and ocher-red.

   The Iraiina priest came forward, with two acolytes leading a
chariot; they unyoked the right-hand pony of the team and
brought it to the magus, who raised his staff and began to chant.
The words were strange, like Iraiina but longer and twisted. Old
speech, she decided. The Grandmothers used an old speech for
some of the most ancient Star Working Songs; Moon Woman
might not like it if any of those were changed. Maybe the Iraiina
sky god felt the same way.

   Behind the priest and the horse a hole gaped in the earth,
with dirt piled up on either side of it. The Iraiina warriors began
to dance in a great circle around it, stopping now and then to
drink deeply from skins of mead, tossing their heads and
neighing; it was the hepkwos-midho, the horse-drunk.

   Daurthunnicar danced too; the Dance of the King Stallion,
knees flashing high as he pranced. The chant filled the hall, and
she could hear the Eagle People murmuring beneath it. Then the
Iraiina chieftain stopped, standing straddle-legged. The horse
was led forward, and the holders urged it to its knees. The young
man in the kilt came forward, and took up a stone-headed maul.
With a shout he swept it up and then down into the forehead of
the horse, stunning it.

   Daurthunnicar struck as well, two-handed. The sword severed
the horse's spine; five more strokes cut through its neck, until
the head rolled free. Blood splashed the rahax from head to foot,
until scarlet dripped from his beard and from the mane of the
horse mask. The younger man stooped, then stood with the
horse's head held stiffly over his own, corded arms straining at
the weight. Both men danced again, younger following older, the
muzzles of the horses jerking and swooping in unison.

   At last they halted. The young man laid his burden down
beneath his feet and faced the rising sun, singing in a strong
clear voice with both palms raised. Gradually the arms lowered,
but the song went on. It was still ringing out when
Daurthunnicar's sword blurred in a horizontal circle.

   Very sharp sword, Swindapa thought. Cutting through a
neck like that was hard, even for a man of Daurthunnicar's huge
strength. She gritted her teeth and wished it were the chieftain's
head falling.

   The images showed men laying the body of the horse in the
grave. Dirt went over it, then the body of the man-sacrifice, with
the horse's head in place of its own. Lights came up, and
Swindapa breathed out a long sigh of wonder.

   The captain gently disengaged her hand, putting Swindapa's
firmly back on her own side of the gap between the chairs. She
rose and went to the front of the room, with the Spear Chosen of
the Eagle People beside her; he was very tall, with thinning blond
hair cut short like a mourner's. They began to speak; Swindapa
strained to hear the language. She could follow it pretty well
now, and make herself understood on all ordinary matters.

  Strange people, the Americans, the Eagle People. Strange but
wonderful.

   Pamela Lisketter spat to clear her mouth, then rinsed it with
water from the bucket by the sink. The image of the horse,
falling, falling, blood spurting over the man with the sword, and
then the sword flashing again and interrupting the song… her
stomach nearly rose again, but she pushed the scene away until
it was distant—words, images on TV, not so real.

   She walked back out into her living room. The house was
mostly that single long space, furnished with futons and her own
creations, smelling faintly of incense… and now of whale oil. The
loom stood by one wall, the windows next to it flooding it with
light. Her friends were scattered about. She'd been planning to
have a few over for dinner, and ready to sacrifice the last of the
tofu, until the revelations tonight. They'd hit some of the others
even harder; Cindy Ganger was still sitting silent, with her face
crumpled in behind her thick glasses, but then, she was a
Wiccan and really believed that her religion went back to ancient
times. The only ones who looked at all collected were the Coast
Guardsman, Walker, and his friend from Europe, Isketerol. They
were sitting with Alice and Rosita. Lisketter frowned a little. The
two young women were dilettantes, in her opinion; Hong
dabbled in pagan circles for the sexual aspects. Also feckless, as
witness who they'd taken up with—but that could be useful now.

   "Shocking," she said at last. "Obviously sexist, patriardial in
the worst way, abusive of animals. And we did business with
them."

  "The Iraiina are savages," Isketerol agreed.
   Lisketter felt her lips thin, then forced herself to remember
that the… indigenous person, she decided… had learned his
English in the wrong place, among people no better than police.
"Savages" was a Eurocentric term. Or Nantucket-centric, I
suppose, she thought with an attempt at gallows humor.

   "They are the ancestors of the technolators," her brother
David said. "Remember, oh, what was the book, The Chalice and
the Blade?"

   "Yeah, they're pretty hard-assed, the Iraiina," Walker nodded,
sipping at his bottle of homemade beer. He looked down at it
and grimaced slightly, then continued: "We shouldn't be selling
them weapons."

   "I should hope not," Lisketter said. "Or anyone else, for that
matter." Thoughtfully: "Perhaps we should talk to Ms. Swindapa
about her people. They seem more… more harmonic. If we could
get her away from Captain Alston."

   "You couldn't separate those two with a crowbar," Walker
said. At her raised eyebrows: "You do know the captain's a dyke,
don't you?"

    "That is a homophobic term in this context," Lisketter said
stiffly, flushing with anger.

  Walker smiled charmingly. "Sorry. Force of habit. I haven't
been around the right sort of people much, I'm afraid."

   "That's all right," Lisketter said, brushing a lock of her long
straight hair back. "She does seem male-identified, obsessed
with patriarchal rules, and logocentric."

   "Damned right," Walker said. "Saluting, heel-clicking… did
you know she had a crewm… crewperson dragged behind the
ship on a rope? He nearly died."

   There was a shocked murmur in the big brick-floored room.
Lisketter tried to remember what she'd heard of the incident,
but it did seem the sort of thing a power-oriented person would
do.
   "I'm certainly not going to spend the rest of my life working
for her," Walker said. "It was bad enough, a temporary
assignment—but here and now, she's set to run the Eagle and
everything else that floats for life. An empire-builder."

   "The imperialism has already begun," David said. "All those
Native Americans dead of our diseases, and Chief Cofflin has a
settlement over on the mainland already, stripping the forests of
trees and butchering the animals."

  Pamela nodded somberly. It had begun, and if they didn't do
something it would be worse than the Conquest of Paradise that
her ancestors had wrought.

  "We have to do something," she said.

   "Well, yeah," Walker said smoothly. He and the Iberian
exchanged glances. "We're ready to help, of course. Alice and
Rosita have opened our eyes."

  "It is… what is your word, reassuring," Isketerol said to
William Walker.

   They had halted their bicycles under a stand of pines, with a
few last daffodils still nodding yellow beneath. No one was near;
the road was empty, and only heath and fields stretched away on
either side, potato vines already bushy and rows of grain just
showing like a faint green fuzz on the gray-brown soil. The
loudest noise was the sough of the wind in the trees, the buzz of
insects. Hot resin scented the air, baked out of the trunks behind
them. The noon sun was warm, full of the sound of bees and
sleepiness.

  "Reassuring?" Walker said.

   "That you Amurrukan can also produce your share of fools,"
Isketerol said. "That is what they are, isn't it, Lisketter and the
others? I didn't understand much of what they said, but I haven't
been a trader for this long without recognizing an… easy mark,
you say."

  Walker laughed, a loud rich sound. "Oh, they're fools, all
right," he said. "But for you and me, they're useful fools. Useful
idiots."

  "We should cultivate them, then," Isketerol said.

   "Like a garden ripe for the harvest," Walker replied, slapping
him on the shoulder. They both laughed as they pedaled on, back
toward the town.

   "The woman become one the man's thing only? Like among
the Sun People?" Swindapa whispered.

   Marian Alston moved aside a little as the breath tickled at her
ear.

   "No," she whispered back. There was still a hum of
conversation in the big church, as they waited for the bride to
appear at the foot of the aisle. "They can leave each other if they
please. I did."

   "You had a man of your own?" Swindapa asked eagerly. She
knew that questions were impolite, but she'd been trying to learn
Alston's background.

  "Such as he was. A mistake."

  "So this is like the… the, you say, party, as have we, when a
woman's man goes to live with her kin?"

  "Yes… more or less. The ceremony calls the blessings of God,
and settles things like who inherits property and children."

  "Oh," the Fiernan girl said, frowning a little in puzzlement.

   Evidently her people didn't have anything closely resembling
marriage. A man went to the woman's family grouping, and the
relationship could be broken by mutual consent at any time.
What Alston thought of as the father's role in a child's life fell
more to the mother's brothers or other male kin, since they'd
always be there. Property passed through the female line. Not
exactly a matriarchy, though; nothing she could easily
understand. She pushed the thought aside, concentrating on the
ceremony.

   The church on the hill was crowded, every seat full; the chiefs
marriage to the head of the Athenaeum was an event. Royal
wedding, Alston thought wryly. She'd gotten a pew for herself
and the Eagle's wardroom, plus Swindapa… who is a very nice
girl, but clings like a burr. Not intrusively, just refusing to go
away for long; it was like trying to push the wind. Isketerol was
there too, observing with his usual cool detachment.

   All were in their best; she sat stiffly in her dress uniform,
thinking wryly of the last time she'd worn it at Daurthunnicar's
feast. Although this time it was with the regulation skirt.
Swindapa couldn't have looked more different, in a white dress
with lace panels, a broad-brimmed hat beside her on the pew,
her hair fastened up with pearl-headed pins. Certainly an
improvement on a collar and leash. Fancy clothes were going
cheap on-island these days; overalls were harder to get. Still, it
looked wonderful.

   The organ started, thundering in the high vaulted white
spaces of the church. She'd attended Baptist churches in her
childhood, of course—mostly built out of weathered pine, down
sandy tracks and surrounded by rattletrap cars.

   Not much like this Congregational one, three-storied snowy
spire and stately white walls on what passed for a hill on this
sandspit island. We had better singing, though. Everyone stood.
The sound was like a subdued slither under the trembling of the
instrument, a rustle of cloth as people looked back toward the
entrance.

   Martha Stoddard stood there. She held a bouquet of flowers;
otherwise she wore only another of her subdued but elegant gray
suits.

    "Silly to pretend I'm a girl," she'd said. Alston's lips quirked
slightly. No side on that woman. Good-looking, too. In a spare
sort of way; excellent bones, and those eyes would be full of mind
and will when she was ninety. Now why don't I ever meet
anyone like that? That wasn't quite the problem, of course, but…
   Cofflin was waiting at the head of the aisle, sweating under
the collar of his formal suit, looking pale. Looking rather like a
bull waiting for the second blow from the slaughterhouse
sledgehammer, in fact, or a man wondering desperately if he'd
done the right thing.

  The minister stood at the altar as the bride and her party
walked down the isle. "Dearly beloved," she began.

   "Well, there's one superstition disposed of," Alston said.

   "Hmmm?" Cofflin asked.

   He'd recovered most of his color by the time the outdoor
reception began to wind down, and he was wandering about
with his wife, talking to people and nibbling at the cake on his
plate. Irreplaceable nuts and sugar and candied fruit had gone
into the wedding cake, as well as flour made from grain the
Eagle had brought back from Britain.

   Alston looked over at him, and when she glanced back the
remains of the piece on her own plate were gone. Swindapa was
licking her fingers, grinning unrepentantly. Sometimes you can
remember that she's still a teenager. Just turned eighteen, to be
precise.

   "What superstition?" Cofflin asked.

   "About catching the bouquet," the captain said. It had been
pure accident; the thing came flying at her face and she grabbed
by instinct.

   "It might come true," Martha observed.

   "When pigs fly," Alston said.

  "Congratulations again," a voice said; Ian Arnstein, with
Doreen. They were holding hands.

   Damned mating frenzy, Alston thought, smiling slightly.
Maybe there's something in the air here in 1250 B.C. Or maybe
it was just that people felt the loneliness pressing in on them and
sought comfort where they could find it.

   The ex-professor went on: "Have you mentioned what we
discussed to the chief yet?"

  "I didn't want to impose," Alston said dryly. "It is his wedding
day, you know."

   "Oh… sorry… bit of an obsessive-compulsive…" Arnstein
floundered in embarrassment., "Always was socially
challenged…"

  "What did you discuss?" Martha Cofflin asked sharply.

  "Well, the captain and I had this appalling thought."

   Best get it over with, Alston decided. "We were talking about
Isketerol's ships, and I mentioned that they could sail the same
course to the Americas that we did, if Isketerol was keepin' his
eyes open. Which he was."

   Cofflin seemed to choke on a piece of the cake. "They could!"
he wheezed, looking around.

   "Easy. It's followin' winds most of the year, on the southern
course. Ships no bigger did it routinely back in the early days
after Columbus. Damnation, people have taken rowboats across
the Atlantic. It's all a matter of knowing what's where, and how
far, and the wind and current patterns. I may have made a
mistake persuading him to come here, but he's so damned useful
."

   "Tartessians are sneaky," Swindapa said. "And greedy. They
don't liked we trade our own bronzework to anyone. At sea they
sink boats coming from, ah, you call it Ireland? Yes, the Summer
Isle, we say. And amber traders from the mainland they sink,
toos." Her features thinned to rage for a moment: "Theys help
the Sun People invade our land."

   Doreen nodded. "They want a monopoly," she said. "Tin's
scarce here. Britain and northwestern Spain are the only sources
these people know west of Bohemia and the Caucasus."
   "The Tartessians are sort of upstarts, who've been getting
quasi-civilized over the past century or so," Arnstein added.
"They've copied the eastern civilizations somewhat, adapting
them to their own patterns—rather like the Japanese with us.
They're not as set in their ways as most people here-and-now."

   Cofflin brushed a few crumbs off his jacket. "Well, so the
locals could sail here. That's a bit startling, but why's it
appalling?"

   "Because piracy's hot, here," Alston said. "Down in the
Mediterranean, from what Isketerol's let drop, anyone will attack
anyone, if they think they can get away with it— ships, and
'longshore raids, that's where pirates make most of their loot
anyway. And this island is the richest prize on earth. We
underestimated the value of our goods. Badly. One small
shipload would make a successful pirate the richest man in the
world."

  "Oh." Cofflin thought. "They couldn't do much against guns,
could they?"

   "Not the first time. After that we'd be out of ammunition.
What's more, we're so short now that we can't even train people
to use the few guns we do have. I saw the locals in operation in
Britain. These people—peoples—are warriors; they don't scare
easy."

   "You're right," Cofflin said, wincing. "Those Indians we met
the first day, a couple of them kept right on coming. Guess they
realized all a gun can do is kill you, and they just weren't that
scared of dying."

  "We'd better start training a militia to use weapons we can
manufacture," Alston said.

  "We'll have gunpowder eventually," Martha observed.

   "That's then, this is now. Even when we do, the locals are
going to pick up tricks fast. Possibly not democracy or women's
rights, but weapons? You bet. And we can't stay out of contact
with the locals, not if we want to do more than decay into a
bunch of illiterate potato farmers in a couple of generations. This
island's too barren." She paused, frowning. "It might be better if
Mr. Isketerol stayed here, rather than returning to Tartessos…"

   "Thank you for that delightful end to the day," Cofflin said,
turning on Arnstein. "Sorry, Professor, but I was just beginning
to think we could relax a little."

   "No, no, no, man, it ain't a sick cat, you can't tell its
temperature by running a thermometer up its ass. You've got to,
like, look at the color. Really look."

  Marian Alston stopped a moment at the anguished cry,
watching the group around the forge. Always a pleasure to
watch someone who really knows what he's doing, she thought.

   The blacksmith was a tall man, lean but with ropy muscle all
along his bare sweat-slick arms and running under the thick
canvas apron he was wearing. He was mostly bald on top, but a
long ponytail of brown-streaked gray hair fell down his back, and
a walrus mustache of the same color hung under sad
sherry-colored eyes, like those of a basset hound hoping for a pat
and expecting a kick. He held a rod of metal in a pair of pincers,
turning it to show how it went from black to cherry-red to a
fierce white at the tip.

   "That's welding color, the white. Okay, get me the other
piece."

   More clumsily, the apprentice—an ex-office worker in a
veterinary clinic—took up his own pincers in his gloved hands
and wrestled another piece of steel out of the charcoal.

  "Now down on the anvil," the smith said. "Okay, this stuff is
mild steel. It won't weld as easy as wrought iron, so you have to
dust it with a little flux—" he added a sprinkling of powder to
where the two strips of metal overlapped each other—"and shed
some righteous sweat. Here goes."

   The big shed was noisy with a dozen metalworking benches,
but the steady clang… clang… clang of the smith's hammer was
the loudest. The metal flowed under it, merging. "Here's where
we reheat and hammer some more," the smith said happily,
putting the joined pieces of strapping back in the coals.
"Meantime, drink some water. Important to drink water, man,
keep your natural fluids in balance."

   He dipped a cup into a bucket hanging on the wall, drank,
then poured another over his head, holding his wire-rimmed
glasses with their tiny round lenses out as he did so.

   "Hey, Captain! What's happening?" he said cheerfully, peering
at her.

   Well, at least it isn't "How're they hanging," Alston thought
resignedly. John Martins had been up in the hills of northern
California since 1970, and stayed when the commune dissolved
around him. A quarter century of lonely effort lay behind the
skills he was trying to impart to a dozen apprentices.

   "I warned you," the smith said. "I can't make anything like
that Nip beauty y'showed me. No way, man. That's some
excellent smith's work in that sword, truly righteous."

   "Those take too long to make," she said, inhaling the scent of
hot charcoal and scorched metal. It wasn't unpleasant, in its
way, although the heat in here was fierce. "If it'll work, I'm
satisfied."

   He went over to the wall and took down a sword. She drew it
from the plain leather-bound wooden sheath, raised it in both
hands and tried a simple downward cut in slow-time, the
pear-splitter. It followed the shape of her katana exactly, and the
weight and balance were much the same. Not quite the living
feel hers had, but much better than the cheap copies you got in
most martial arts stores. The hilt was bound with cord, and the
guard was a plain brass disk.

   "I welded a sandwich of mild steel around a strip of 5160 for
the cutting edge—y'know, the moroha way. Lotta fun, rilly."

   This moroha blade wasn't quite the marvel that you got from
the ori awasi san mat or shihozume methods, but it didn't take
a year to produce, either. Alston turned the blade
cutting-edge-up, admiring the wavy yakiba line in the steel that
marked the hardened edge; she smiled, imagining Swindapa's
face lighting up when she saw the sword. The Fiernan girl was a
natural, too; teaching her was a real pleasure. So you couldn't
really say it was favoritism to let her have this…

  Ron Leaton came up wiping his hands on an oily rag. "Our
anachronism doing right by you, Captain Alston?"

   "Peace. I love you too, man." the smith said, and turned back
to his work.

  "I have a horrible feeling he's the wave of the future and the
machinery is an anachronism," Alston said, snapping the sword
back into the sheath.

   "Well, we're fitting out a whole building just for him and his
apprentices," Leaton said; she suspected it would be a relief to
both of them to part company. "Meanwhile, things are going
pretty well. I found another three Bridgeport milling machines,
eight engine lathes larger than twelve-inch, three larger than
fourteen-inch, and one eighteen-inch—that was a pile of rusting
parts down at the Electric Company, but it's restorable. What
we're really short of is tool steel for drills and working edges, and
stuff like Teflon lagging tape, hacksaw blades, files, sandpaper…
we've swept every basement on the island and it still isn't
enough."

   She looked around. The boat-storage-cum-engineering-shop
had changed, beyond the appearance of the big charcoal hearth
and its surroundings in one corner. Dozens of people were
laboring with hand tools at workbenches scattered through the
cavernous interior; many of them were assembling crossbows
from parts turned out on the lathes and cutters. The five
machine tools they'd moved here from Seahaven Engineering's
original basement setting and the ones Leaton had scavenged
out of attics and forgotten storerooms were all set up, and
they'd… spawned was the best word, she decided. There were
another four lathes, and heavy six-foot-by-three platforms were
being built to house more. Metal shapes and curves lay scattered
about, with men and women working on them, assembling a
gear-cutter. The new lathes had been converted to work from
leather belts taking off a power shaft rigged near the ceiling, and
she could hear the chuffing of one of Leaton's prize steam
engines. A big flywheel was going up against one wall, and beside
it a bulky clumsy thing like a miniature stripped-down
locomotive, the old choo-choo kind.

   "Where did you find that?" she asked.

   "Oh, Martha and Jared dug it up. Steam traction engine.
Someone imported it years ago for the tourists, then stuck it in a
storage shed and forgot it. Nearly got it working again; it eats
wood, and by God we've got wood. We're going to hook it up to a
generator, for times when the wind's down, and then we're going
to duplicate it, maybe modify it a little. I'm doing some plans for
a steam road hauler, too."

   She nodded. That will be useful, she thought, and continued
aloud: "How's that project I started you on going?"

  "Better than we expected," Leaton said. "No shortage of sheet
metal and bar."

   He sighed, halfway between pleased and sad, and she knew
why. The Steamship Authority's big motor ferry had been laid up
for good. Useless, with no fuel oil available, and the thousands of
tons of steel in the hull would last the islanders for many years.
For that matter, the Eagle had nearly four hundred tons of
pig-iron ballast in her, now being laboriously brought out and
replaced with granite from the mainland. Then there was the
fuel barge, another fifteen hundred tons of metal, and the old
lightship, as much again, and structures like the oil storage
tanks.

  "The first set's ready, the first we're really satisfied with. Over
here. Made to your measurements, by the way, Captain."

   It rested on a workbench. The first part was a jacket of tough
quilted canvas. The elbow-length sleeves were chain mail,
rustling and clinking as she touched them; so was the collar, and
a patch below the waistline at front and rear. Two workers
nearby were winding sanded coathanger wire around wooden
rods and cutting off links for more.
   "Might as well try it on," she said. It pulled over her head. Not
too bad. Not comfortable, of course, but you couldn't expect
that.

   "Not bad," she went on, "but you ought to make the mail
inserts, removable—lacing, or somethin' like that, so the padding
can be cleaned without getting the metal wet."

   The breastplate was a smooth shallow curve, basically
Japanese in design like the rest of the armor but somewhat
simplified; the backplate hinged to it at the shoulder, and clasps
fastened at the flanks. She'd drawn the plans from what she was
familiar with, and what Martha could find in her references,
modified to make it possible for one person to put on by herself.
She lifted the set, ducked her head through and pressed it closed,
then fastened the brass clips under her left arm and pulled the
loose mail collar out to rest on the surface of the armor. The
metal extended to waist level, and hinged to it were jointed skirts
of sliding curved plates to protect the thighs. Fitted armguards
for the forearms went on next, and greaves for the shins.

   She hadn't told the metalworkers to enamel everything green
with yellow trim, and put a golden eagle copied from her ship's
figurehead across the chest. "Bit bold, isn't it?" she said, jerking
her chin toward a mirror that leaned against the wall.

    I feel like an actor in a pageant. Against people armed with
flint-tipped arrows and bronze spearheads, though, this was
high-tech weaponry.

   "We had the paint on hand, and it wasn't any great effort to
bake on the enamel," Leaton said virtuously. "And it'll keep it
from rusting, too."

    Alston grunted noncommittally. She bent, twisted, squatted,
rose, did a few long low stances to test the equipment. Heavy, of
course, but she'd carried far more weight less well distributed on
camping trips, and it was no more awkward than practice armor
for a kenjutsu bout—very similar to that, in fact. This was
flexible enough not to impede movement much, too. She did a
slow forward roll and came to her feet with a grunt, clattering a
little. Have to wear this a lot to get used to it. Then she settled
on the helmet and snapped the chin strap.

   "Cool!" someone said. "Just like the ones in Star Wars!"

   Alston gritted her teeth, and bit back Lucas and I both copied
from the same source.

  "It'll do," she said. "But plain green for the rest, if you don't
mind. How many, how quickly?"

  "Thirty a week, given the priorities the Council's set," the
engineer said. "Scaling up to a hundred."

   "You, sir, snore," Martha said, sipping at a cup of hot herb
tea.

    "Well, a man can't tell his fiancee everything," Jared said
reasonably. "Or his bride. Not before the end of the honeymoon,
at least. Where's the romance and mystery in that?" They'd
anticipated the parson, of course, but not by all that much—and
never actually slept together before moving in after the wedding.

   She gave a dry chuckle. "Unsuspected depths; even a sense of
irony. What will it be next?"

    They looked at each other and smiled. Well, we're neither of
us nineteen, he thought with satisfaction. Forty and
fifty-plus-six-months, in fact. She set her cup down on the
kitchen table and sat on his lap; not what you'd call well
upholstered, but damned pleasant nonetheless. We suit, that's
the best way to put it, he decided, and grinned.

   "A penny for them. Or a pound of dulse, in our barter
economy."

   "Thinking of how different I felt about a woman on my lap in
the morning thirty years ago. Not," he added hastily, "that it
doesn't—"

   She put an arm around his neck. "Jared, from puberty to their
thirties men aren't human beings. They're hormones with feet. I
prefer one with enough functioning mind to be interesting…
which you are."

   A few minutes later: "But the hormones still seem to be
functioning, too. Not on the kitchen table, dear, and not before
breakfast. The griddle cakes, I think," she went on, slightly
breathless, sliding away to her own seat. "You didn't tell me you
could cook, either."

   Functioning indeed, Jared thought, with a slight trace of
smugness. "I was a widower for five years, and a hunter for
twenty-three. Breakfasts I can do," he said, getting up and going
to the counter.

   "Have to look into making baking powder—we'll be out soon,"
he added, as he got out the jar of oil and the frying pan and
wound a cloth around his hand to open the wire-handled oven
door to check the coals.

  "Mmm," she said, watching him.

   He poured a little oil into the iron frying pan and set it to
heat, mixed the dry ingredients and beat the wholewheat flour
into the water and eggs, and added some of the syrup to make up
for the lack of richening milk. The oil was ready when a drop of
water flicked off the end of a finger hopped and sputtered. One
big spoonful three times, and you could do three at a time.

   "Baking soda…" she said thoughtfully, straightening her
bathrobe and hair. "Sodium bicarbonate and an acid. Cynthia at
the high school might know. I'll look into it."

  "These'll be better when the blueberries ripen in July," he said
mildly. "Here we go."

   He edged the spatula under the crackly, lacy brown-rim of the
griddle cake; the top surface was just browning a little, and
spotted with bubbles. He slid the first three onto a plate, covered
it with a dishtowel, and put it on the warming tray at the rear of
the cast-iron stove. When there were enough for two he took the
lot back to the table with the crock of maple syrup. Now, all we
lack is—no, by God, we don't. There was a little bit left of the
wedding present from Angelica.
   "Here you are," he said cheerfully, putting a tray with a lump
of butter the size of a peach pit down beside the pancakes and
removing the cover with a flourish. "Luxuries of the island elite;
welcome to the ruling class."

   Martha looked cheerful herself, in her subdued way, as she
loaded her plate. Right up to the moment she raised the first
forkful to her mouth.

   "Oh, dear," she said then, swallowing and staring at the
syrup-laden pancake. "Oh, my. Oh shit."

   Her fork clattered to the plate and she bolted from the
kitchen. He sat frozen for an instant, fear tasting of acid at the
back of his mouth. Then he levered himself to his feet and
followed her; she'd made it as far as the small downstairs
bathroom, and he could see her kneeling in front of the toilet. A
hand waved him away.

   All right, then, he thought, a little of the fist that was
squeezing under his breastbone relaxing. Bad fish? They'd had
problems with that. He padded back into the kitchen, his
slippers scuffing on the floorboards, and got a dry towel, a damp
one, and a glass of water—there were a couple of large buckets
sitting on the counter, filled during the hour the town mains
were running. He carried the glass and cloth back into the small
washroom after a discreet pause, and found Martha sitting on
the closed seat lid of the toilet, breathing deeply.

   "Here," he said. She rinsed, spat into the sink, and wiped her
face gratefully. "Shall I go get Doc Coleman?"

   His wife shook her head. There was a little color back in her
face again. "Later. It's not urgent."

  "It isn't?" he said, puzzled. "Food poisoning can—"

   "It isn't that… I think. We'll check with Coleman, but I think
the bunny just died."

  "The… oh, sh—, ah, oh dear."
    Her smile flickered wan; she stood, bracing herself with one
arm against the wall. He gathered her to him, lips shaping a
silent whistle over her shoulder.

   "What was that saying on the tombstone?" she asked. "I
expected this, but not so soon? At our ages . .'. and on this diet,
I've been irregular anyway, thought it might be early menopause
coming on…"

  He nodded into her graying brown hair. They'd discussed the
possibility, but only in an abstract sort of way. This…

  "Sort of risky," he said after a moment.

   "At my age, you mean?" she replied. "Jared, we're in the year
1250 B.C. Risk…" She sighed and shrugged. "Risk has assumed a
whole new meaning. Let's go talk about this. There's still some
RU-486 if that's what we decide, but let's go talk." A moment.
"I'm even hungry again."

  ***

  "Turnabout's fair play," Alice Hong said, pouting.

  "Nope," William Walker said, pulling on his trousers.

  "Well, untie me then. I've got roomies, remember."

  "I believe in spreading the joy of life."

   He looked around the room. A little untidy for his tastes—he
was a man of fastidious neatness—but not bad. A series of Escher
prints, and others he didn't recognize, heavy-metal varieties with
a lot of skulls, candle flames behind their eyes, and people tied
up with barbed wire, pentagrams, bat wings, real symbolism. A
good modern bed, not the four-posters so common in this
antique-happy town. Alice Hong was lying on her stomach in the
middle of that bed, ankles lashed to wrists behind her back with
padded ties. A number of her other toys were scattered about.
She squirmed over, which left her arched like a bow and
spread-eagled. He admired the view; she was deeply into this
stuff, and it had its points. Probably tedious as a full-time diet,
but not bad as a change. There was a full-length mirror opposite
the bed; he admired the view in that, too. In even better shape
than I was, he decided smugly. Washboard stomach carrying a
full six-pack, broad shoulders, narrow waist, every muscle
moving just so under tanned skin. A heavy investment there, but
worth it. William Walker had to live in that temple, after all. He
smiled at himself.

  "Yeah, you're gorgeous," Alice said, collapsing onto her side. "
Sure you don't want to try it from this side? It can be fun."

   He stepped over to the bed and jerked her head back by her
hair. She gave a gasp, smiling at him. The sweat running into the
marks the cane had made across her back had to sting too, but
she didn't look any the worse for it.

   "I'm strictly a pitcher S&M-wise, darling," he said. "Not a
catcher, and you shouldn't have been quite so honest on why you
got blacklisted in every pain club on the East Coast. Besides, I'm
on duty in a while. The captain has an uncivilized attitude
toward unpunctuality."

  "Mmm," Alice said, the tip of her tongue touching her lips.
"You're a workaholic too…"

    "It's how you get places, babe." He pulled her head back a
little farther; she shivered and clenched her teeth. "How'd you
get that medical degree?"

  "Took a five-year holiday from life," she said. "Everyone needs
holidays. What's the captain like, anyway? Everyone talks about
her. Real mysterious. Cute, too."

   "I don't think you're her type, Alice," he said. "She's
surprisingly straitlaced, if you know what I mean." They both
laughed.

   "And you get to go back to those fascinating places with her,"
Alice said enviously. "That sacrifice, that was wild. Sure looks
like more fun than dancing around in nightgowns with a bunch
of middle-aged hausfrau geeks who think they're witches. All the
stupid bitches ever want to do is bless the crops, anyway. Dull."
   "Why, I don't think Pamela Lisketter would like to hear you
talking that way," Walker chuckled.

  "Fuck Lisketter—on second thought, no thanks."

  "You know, Alice, I really like you. You're my kind of lady.
How'd you like to travel to beautiful Bronze Age Europe
yourself?"

  "Oh, yeah," she said, skeptical.

   "I mean it. Can't you see yourself as the Great White
Queen—Great Asian-American Queen—of a tribe of adoring
barbarians? Stone palaces, silk blowing in the wind, some really
kinky stuff. Sacrifices. Flames in the dark. Screams. No more
make-believe, no taking turns…"

  She gave a complex shudder. "Tease. Now let me loose, c'mon.
Rosita's coming back any minute, and Isketerol will be with her."

   He buttoned his shirt and tucked it in, tying his tie and
picking up the uniform cap from a dresser. "I'm sure all three of
you will enjoy that thoroughly," he said. "Hasta la vista, and call
me when you're not all tied up."

  "Asshole!" she cried after him.

  He stopped, turned, and stuck his head back around the
doorjamb.

  "Yes," he said, with a brilliant grin. "I am. But I am no
ordinary asshole."

   Walker went down the stairs two at a time, chuckling, with
the woman's curses ringing in his ears. She is my kind of girl, he
thought. And maybe … A doctor could be very useful, in a
number of different ways.

  "Hunff!"

   The katana flashed in the evening sunlight, halting just above
the ragged surface of the grass. Marian Alston looked critically
out of the kitchen window; Swindapa was still hard at it, doing
the kata long after Alston had gone in to oversee dinner.
Saturday afternoons were supposed to be free time; she'd been
doing paperwork until noon herself. Doreen was running through
staff forms doggedly. She'd never be really good, no natural
talent, but she'd improved considerably. Ian was watching from
a deck chair, his thumb keeping place in his book.

   The Fiernan flicked the sword aside to shed imaginary blood,
sheathed it, and went to one knee. A long quiet moment and
then she drew and thrust straight back without turning, flicked
the blade up for a straight cut, blocked, blocked, backing…
Alston looked at her feet and the set of her shoulders.

  "You're forcing it," she called through the open kitchen
window. "Relax. No tension until the end of the stroke. Let the
sword do it."

  "Do," Swindapa panted. "I that."

   She stood, relaxing and shaking out one wrist and then the
other, then began the kata again.

   Still hasn't got English syntax quite down, Alston thought,
smiling. She caught her own expression in the slanted glass of
the window. Uh-oh, she thought. Watch it, woman. There was
enough grief in life without courting it.

   Instead she looked down at the loaves, tapping them out of
the sheet-metal pans with a cloth to protect her hands. The
bottom of the bread was light honey-brown; she tapped it with a
fingernail. Just the right sound, slightly hollow.

   The kitchen door opened. "Damn, but that smells great,
Skipper," Sandy Rapczewicz said. "What is it?"

   Rapczewicz and Lieutenant Victor Ortiz went over to one of
the sinks and washed their hands, using economical dippers of
water from the buckets beside it. Both the Coast Guard officers
looked worn—everyone did—and their working blues were
stained with engine oil.
   "Duck," Alston said. "Bread-and-sage stuffing." That didn't
get the groans that seafood would have. "Sea lettuce and
pickerelweed salad, courtesy of the Guides. Cattail stalks and
dock. And fresh bread, of course."

  "Good," Rapczewicz said, sitting down at the kitchen table
and slumping wearily. "Max is up and running, Skipper," she
went on. "But God alone knows for how long. Those bearings…"

  "We're almost out of diesel oil anyway," Ortiz said.

   "Worth it, to keep the trawlers running as long as we could,"
Alston said, wrapping a corner of her apron around her hand
and opening the oven door, blinking through a cloud of fragrant
steam. She prodded a serving fork into the birds and looked at
the color of the juice. "Ah, just about—"

   Swindapa bounced up the steps into the kitchen, ducking into
the sunroom for a second to rack her sheathed sword.

    "I help can I?" she said. The two scholars followed her, Doreen
still panting.

   "That's can I help, 'dapa. Toss me those potholders, and get
those cattail stalks ready, would you?"

   They worked in companionable silence for a few moments as
Alston finished the gravy and began to dismember the ducks.

  "Shouldn't—" Alston began. Then: "Speak of the devil."

  Dr. Coleman came through the door; Sandy had invited him
again. Hmmm. Seeing a lot of each other, Alston thought.

  "Not exactly the devil," he said. "Been mistaken for Daniel
Webster, though." His long nose quivered. "Smells wonderful."

  "All the more dishes to wash," she said. "And it's served."

   Everyone carried plates to the pinewood table, and for a few
minutes there was no sound but concentrated eating. Long days
of hard physical labor had taught them all exactly what hungry
was, and it wasn't much like just being ready for dinner. The
duck was good if she said so herself, and the boiled dock tasted
hauntingly like spinach, or like spinach with a squeeze of lemon;
cattail turned out to have a flavor a little like sweet corn. Alston
sat next to the Fiernan girl, conscious of a slight summery odor
of clean sweat; more agreeable than a lot of islanders, with soap
and hot water both difficult to get.

  Coleman plied his fork with a will. "Wouldn't have thought
you were a chef, on top of everything else," he said to the Coast
Guard officer.

    "I'm not fancy enough to be a chef," she said. "I'm a cook…
it's, mmm, relaxin'. Everyone should have a hobby."

   "Better this butter—" Swindapa stopped and frowned.

   "This would be better with butter," she went on carefully,
dipping a piece of the bread into the fat.

   "So it would," Alston said. "We don't have enough cows yet."

   Swindapa frowned. "Why not?" she said. "Understand that
the island Nantucket is-and-was only part of-United States, here,
but every part of the White Isle has always cows—how could not?
Everyone needs butter, and cheese and milk and hides and
meat."

   "We had ways of keeping those from spoiling, and of sending
them a long way very quickly," Alston said.

   "Ah," Swindapa nodded. "Steam engines." She tapped a book
at the end of the table: The Great Inventions. "Reading is fun,"
she added. "Especially at night."

  When she's given to nightmares, Alston thought, nodding.
Not surprising. Aloud:

   "We might think about a steam auxiliary for Eagle, when the
last diesel's gone," she said thoughtfully.

   "Bulky, though," Rapczewicz said.
  Swindapa sneezed and raised a hand. Alston made an
admonitory clucking noise. "Sorry," the girl said, pulling out a
handkerchief and using that instead of her fingers.

   "Useful for short distances," Alston said. "She couldn't carry
any great amount of wood, but wood's not scarce, either. Victor,
why don't you look into it? Have a talk with Leaton, see what you
can come up with. It's a long-term project, though."

   The Cuban-American officer made an inarticulate sound of
agreement around a mouthful of drumstick. "I'll get Will…
Lieutenant Walker in on it, Skipper," he said. "He's got an eye for
machinery, and he's a good draftsman, too."

  "By all means, Victor," Alston said.

   She thought she heard Swindapa mutter scumbag under her
breath. I can't completely disagree, she thought. On the other
hand, I can't completely agree, either. You had to be fair; a gut
feeling wasn't enough to justify coming down on a capable,
hardworking officer. On the other hand, there's that
administrative reprimand over the junk that went missing
from the evidence locker. Nothing proved, not even enough
evidence for a decent suspicion. Still…

   "I understand he's found permanent quarters ashore," she
said.

  "Moved in with Dr. Hong—Alice Hong," Ortiz said.

   Coleman cleared his throat. "She's a very capable physician,"
he said, with a neutral tone that spoke volumes. Alston raised an
eyebrow. These Yankees can say more with the words they
don't speak…

   "Well, we can hardly insist that everyone live in barracks,"
Alston said, after swallowing a mouthful of duck. "One thing we
can do…" She turned her eyes to the Arnsteins, at the foot of the
table. "And I'd like your help on this. We've got to get a
classroom schedule going again for the cadets. Academics may
not be as important here as back up in the twentieth, but I want
those young people to have something approachin' a liberal
education, as well as specialized things."

  Ian nodded. "Well, I'll be glad to teach a history course… God,
maybe 'current affairs' would be a better description? Will we
have time?"

  Alston nodded firmly. "We'll make time."

  Doreen pursed her lips thoughtfully. "I should talk to Martha
about this too. She's been worrying that we don't have anything
past high school on the island."

   Alston's eyebrows went up. "Hadn't thought of that," she
admitted. There's a certain comfort to having a limited sphere
of responsibilities, she thought. All she really had to do was
oversee matters military and maritime, including the Guard…
which was a hell of a job, but not nearly as nerve-racking as
Jared's. He had to be responsible for everything, and she didn't
envy him in the slightest.

   The site of Providence that would never be was beautiful in
the summer sun. Water glimmered broad across Narragansett
Bay, like a field of hammered metal under the sunlight. Water
purled back from the steamboat's prow, churned foam-white
from its thrashing paddles; the steady whunk-chuff of its engine
echoed back from the great trees that lined the shore as they
headed northwest up the bay. On the hills above the bay, green
waves receded into blue distance, the edge of a climax forest that
stretched from Florida nearly to Hudson Bay and inland to the
Mississippi, rustling mystery ten stories high.

   It was thicker, ranker, the trees growing straighter and taller
than those which had greeted the first of Cofflin's English
ancestors. Birds flocked thickly, gulls, pelicans, duck, geese, and
the hawks and eagles and falcons that preyed on them. He saw a
bald eagle swoop by within a hundred yards of the noisy
steamboat and snatch a two-foot fish from the surface of the
bright water. Its wingtips dimpled the wave once, twice as it
flogged the air, and then it was a dark soaring shape heading
back toward the shore with its quarry in its talons.

  He winced a little at the thought of the Indians. The islanders
had come, very cautiously, and found abandoned huts. The ones
near Boston had been full of the dead— whole families lying
rotting. Perhaps the worst had been the children who hadn't
died of the virus out of time, who'd starved or died of thirst as
they lay beside dying parents…

   We didn't know! he cried out inside himself. At least all the
local tribes seemed to have fled inland, plenty of coastal
campsites but no people. Nobody since had reported any
contacts, and overflights hadn't seen any fires that weren't
natural. He pushed the matter out of his mind; no help for it,
and too much else to consider.

   Cofflin stood and watched as the shore drew nearer. A
piledriver mounted between two rafts went thunk… thunk…
thunk over and over as rope and pulley and hand-powered crank
drew the stone-weighted oak pole up and released it with a
downward rush. It was driving seventy-foot logs into the mud of
the bay, in a row four trunks broad and already twenty long. As
he watched another log came slithering down a steep trail, pulled
by a brace of hairy-footed horses, with cursing humans steadying
the great bulk of timber with ropes snubbed around stumps and
trunks to keep it at least mostly under control. The bottom of it
had already been shaped into a rough point. Other logs were
being pegged and mortised into the vertical piles, webbing them
together. Near it a barge-shaped raft of rough-cut timbers held a
cargo of charcoal in wooden tubs, piled firewood, and slatted
wooden cages full of captured wild turkeys gobbling in
indignation.

   He stepped out onto a floating pier of smaller logs as the
teams pushed the big timber into the water. Rowboats hitched
on and began hauling it toward the end of the growing wharf; he
walked carefully shoreward, feeling the surface bob a little
beneath his feet.

  "Making progress, Sam," he said to the man who waited for
him. They shook hands.

   "More to be done," the burly carpenter turned lumber boss
said. "Wharf'll be ready come July." He shook his head. "Feels
odd, having timber cheap and nails scarce like this. But she'll be
ready."

   Cofflin felt a glow of satisfaction. That would give the Eagle a
secure, protected deepwater anchorage for the winter. In the
meantime, it meant cargo from here could be loaded directly
onto her decks, at an enormous saving in time and effort. They
were all becoming fanatics for the labor-saving device; there was
simply so much to do.

   Sam Macy waved him toward the shelters, and they fell into
step. Half a hundred yards away stood a row of log buildings.
The timbers had been roughly squared on top and bottom, then
notched at the ends and pushed up sloping poles into position;
Martha had done up an instruction pamphlet on the technique,
culled from history books and more recent hobbyist magazines.
Stable and barn with hayloft, smokehouse for the venison, bear,
and duck the crews hunted in their spare time. Hides were
tacked to its outer wall, stretching and drying. Bunkhouses,
another divided into apartments for the married couples;
storehouse, cookhouse, mess hall. Last but not least was the one
beside the stream, a framework of upright timbers instead of
horizontal logs. A flume guided water to the top of an overshot
wheel on its side, and from within came the ruhhhh… ruhhhh…
ruhhhh of a vertical saw ripping its way through the tough wood.

   "We're getting beam and plank in some quantity now, as well
as the firewood and charcoal," Sam Macy said. "But Jared, it
burns my butt to use trees like this for fuel, it really does. Planks
four feet across and twenty yards long, and not a single knot!"

   "No choice, Sam."

   The logging boss nodded gloomily. "At least we've managed to
get some wood alcohol out of the sawdust and chips," he said.

   "Doc Coleman'll be glad. Needs it for disinfectant." Someday
they might get enough to use as motor fuel.

   "We could do more if Leaton could send us someone who
could do real repairs on the metalwork," Macy said. "That's one
of the big things holding us up, sending broken parts back to the
island. That and the fact that only a few of us have even a faint
idea of what we're doing. God, some of these people, they can't
lift a sandwich without putting their backs out—and making
charcoal is dangerous. Get airing the pile just a little wrong, and
it can explode, not just spoil the load."

   Cofflin chuckled. "You think you've got problems that way," he
said. "You should hear Leaton." His face grew serious. "Now let's
settle this little matter."

   They stepped into one of the big cabins. The floor and the
fireplace at one end were local rock, hastily shaped and then
cemented together. Light came from windows cut through the
logs, but it was a little gloomy inside nonetheless. The pothooks
and andirons that held a black iron cauldron over the low flames
were a hundred and eighty years old, and had spent the last
couple of generations in a museum, but they were still
functional. Two figures sat at a table made of a single great
plank, holding hands. They stood defiantly as Chief Cofflin
walked in. He peered.

   "Why, I thought… Sam, you can build a house, you can run a
lumber camp, but you can't send a message to save your life. I
thought you said it was Ed Smith who'd gotten her pregnant."

  "That's Fred Smith. I swear, Jared, I said Fred."

   Edward Smith was this boy's father, in his fifties, married
with three children. Jared Cofflin had come over from Nantucket
ready to kick some molesting butt, full of righteous anger.

   Cofflin sighed. Another thing that was hard to get used to, not
being able to call up and settle details over the phone. Radios
were precious, used for emergencies, batteries even more
so—though Sam was talking about hooking a car alternator up to
the waterwheel here once they had time to get the necessary
gearing done back at Seahaven.

  "Let's sit down and talk this over, why don't we?" Cofflin said.

   Nice girl, he thought. Black hair in a ponytail, blue eyes,
scrubbed outdoors look. The kid had a scraggly beginning brown
fuzz of beard; a lot of the male islanders were sprouting chin
fungus these days. Muscle swelled at the sleeves of the young
man's T-shirt and stretched it across his shoulders, probably a
lot of it added since the Event, like the hard callus on the palm of
the hand he offered.

   "Fred Smith, Tiffany Penderton?" Cofflin asked.

    The camp cook brought them four mugs of hot liquid from a
smaller pot over the fire. It was sassafras tea, deep red and a
little astringent despite the honey added to sweeten it. Sure as
hell isn't coffee. Still, having a cup of something in your hand
helped to break the ice.

   "Son, there's been a misunderstanding here," Cofflin said. The
boy's hand tightened on the girl's. "The report reached me
secondhand, and I heard it as Ed Smith being the man
responsible."

   Tiffany giggled, looking much younger. Her companion went
blank for a second, and then said: "Dad?" After a moment he
went on: "Sir, when I heard you were coming, and we were
supposed to drop everything and meet you, I thought that
Tiffany's parents had, um…"

   "Got to me, yes, I know, son."

   The tension around the table dissolved into laughter. "All
right. Now, I understand you two are willing to do the right
thing?"

  They nodded. "Yeah. We've been planning on it for, oh,
months now."

   "That long?" Cofflin said dryly. "Well, it's breaking out all
over, isn't it?" They looked at him as if he were an alien being, or
a different order of creature at least. "Mrs. Cofflin is expecting as
well."

  Polite bafflement this time, and perhaps slight horror. Well, it
must seem unnatural, people our age, he thought charitably.

   "Remember, taking care of a baby is a lot of work—on top of
everything else you have to do."

  "I'm not afraid of work," the boy said.

   "Isn't, at that," Macy amplified. "Good hand, learned as fast
as any of us. Tiffany's a dab eye for edible greenery, too."

    As if on cue, the cook came back with four bowls and a platter
of thick-cut bread. There wasn't any butter, but the bread was
still hot from the oven, and there were mushrooms and some sort
of chunky root in the venison stew. "Pity you don't have much
time to hunt," he said. "Some people back on the island would
kill for this." Wild mustard leaves and chives, too, he decided.

   He went on: "Well, do you want a church wedding back in
town, or what?"

  "No, sir," Smith said earnestly. "We really like it here, and our
parents, well, ah, actually Tiffany's parents, well…"

   "I understand," he said. The Pendertons were coofs, and
pretty well-to-do at that. Ed Smith had been a garage mechanic,
before the Event. "When do you want the ceremony?"

   He certainly rated as better than a justice of the peace, all
things considered. As long as it was performed in public and
duly witnessed, they weren't being technical about weddings.

  "Tonight, Chief?" Tiffany Penderton said quietly.

  "Why not?"

   He ate another spoonful of the venison stew. You could
probably get sick of this—he'd gotten tired of lobster lately— but
it was a very pleasant change. The deer on Nantucket would be
killed out soon. When they had time, maybe they could send
some more hunting parties ashore…

   Time, he thought, smiling at the youngsters. Time was he'd
have thought the pregnancy a sign of trouble to come, and the
kids far too young; plus they'd probably never have been thrown
together enough to meet. Not everything about the Event had
been a disaster.

   "I wish Ms. Stoddard—I mean, Ms. Cofflin—could be here,"
Tiffany said wistfully. "It was a lot of fun, being in the Scouts
with her teaching us things."

  Not everything, by any manner of means. " A man pelted in.
"Boss!" he called. "Chief!"

  Cofflin looked around at the tone in his voice, and waited
while he controlled his breathing.

   "Chief, there's an Indian up the track—just where we were
cutting those black walnut. He's just standing there, keeps
putting his hand up empty and talking Indian at us."

   Cofflin and Sam Macy looked at each other. "Solve one
problem…" Macy began.

  "… get another," Cofflin replied. "I'd better go take a look."

  "There!" Swindapa whispered close to her ear. "There, see?"

   Marian Alston bent slowly and peered through the thorny
scrub, squinting. It was a gray day, low cloud scudding by
overhead like cavalry of the sky, with an occasional spatter of
rain; the air was so moist it would have been fog, if the wind
hadn't been at twenty knots from the south. A flicker of brown
ears… a deer, its lips and tongue cropping delicately at the new
growth.

   No harm there… but beyond this thicket was the rolling
surface of one of Angelica Brand's new grainfields. Shoots of
wheat ran bluish-green over what had been thicket and
moorland a few short months ago, rippling nearly calf-high in
the wind. Except for some near the edge of the cleared zone,
eaten down to the roots. There were a thousand deer on
Nantucket, or had been when the island was covered in scrub
and moorland. They had to go, now that it was to be farmland
once more. Fencing was out of the question this year at least,
and couldn't be deer-proof anyway.
   Besides, I crave red meat, Alston thought. Hunting was useful
recreation, in the intervals between taking the Eagle out,
training, overseeing the militia, getting the fishing fleet built and
maintained. She enjoyed it; Swindapa gloried in it.

   The deer bent its head again. The crossbow came up to her
shoulder with studied slowness. Snuggle your cheek into the
stock. Curl finger on the trigger, stroking it. Altogether too much
like making out, she gibed in some recess of her mind. Now.
Bring the foresight down until it settled in the notch at the back.
Distance… about thirty yards. Raise the angle a little, then. The
crossbow bolt didn't go anything like as fast a bullet. Exhale.
Squeeze.

   Whunnnng. The butt kicked back against her shoulder. The
short heavy arrow whipped out through the thin-branched
scrub. And…

    The deer leaped convulsively. Alston cursed and leaped up
herself; the worst possible result, a wounded deer careering off.
Swindapa drew her knife and bounced forward, eeling through
the spiny growth. Alston followed more slowly, sharp thorns
snagging at her jeans and denim jacket, wondering at the young
woman's skill. She'd said that she was an indifferent hunter, that
being mainly men's business among her people. Blood spattered
the trail, drops and then thick gobbets of it, smelling of copper,
salt, and iron. The deer was lying on its side a hundred steps
farther in under a dwarf pine, with the crossbow bolt sunk past
the fletching behind its shoulder. Its hind legs kicked a final time
as she came up; the graceful shape laid itself limp. Swindapa
trimmed a branch and dipped it in the blood. She stood and
flicked it north, south, east, west, murmuring in her own
language as she did so. Then she crouched by the deer and began
breaking it, butchering with easy skill.

   "Bad that we can't hang it up," she said, red to the elbows.

   Her English still held a strange lilt and roll, but it was fully
fluent.

   "Easier that way… unHUojx, look, the liver." The girl sliced off
a bit and popped it in her mouth, chewing with relish. "Best
part. Want to start a fire and grill it?"

   "Nnno, I don't think so," Alston said. For a number of reasons
. She squatted as well to help with the messy task; not
unfamiliar, she'd helped butcher animals as a child. "I prefer it
with onions, and we've got some back home. Besides, we don't
have much water here. Dried blood is sticky."

   Vegetables were more precious than gold—those Brand had
planted back in the spring were watched like ailing firstborn
children, or perhaps the ailing firstborn children of hungry
cannibals—but red meat had scarcity value too. For an
occasional haunch of venison, you could do wonders trading on
the quiet. She didn't feel that was cheating, not like using her
official position; after all, she did kill the deer herself.

  They occupied themselves in companionable silence for a
moment. "I've been meaning to ask you," she said. "What's that
mark?"

   Swindapa was wearing a shirt, unbuttoned partway down in
the warm weather with the tails tied off under her bosom. Just
between the upper curve of her breasts was a small tattoo,
shaped like an arrowhead.

   "That?" she said, peering down. "That's the…" She considered
for a moment, her lips shaping words. "The Spear Mark. When I
was fifteen… years, I think, we count by thirteens of the moon… I
took the Spear Mark, nearly three years ago when I was young. I
stalked a deer close enough to kill it with my spear, and came
back with the antlers on my head and the hide wrapped around
me, and jumped the fire trench, and they put the Spear Mark on
my chest."

   "Everyone does that?" Alston said.

   "Oh, no. Some-many boys every year, and some-few girls
sometimes. My—the one I did the Moon Spring Rites with, you'd
say, my boyfriend?"

   " 'Lover' might be more appropriate, I think."
   "My lover was a big—no, a great—hunter, didn't study the
stars even though he was part of the Egurnecio family. A warrior,
too, a… Spear Chosen, someone who leads warriors. I wanted to
be with him." She looked bleak for a moment, then sighed and
shook it off. "The Sun People hurt him, smashed his leg, he
couldn't run or hunt or fight anymore. He got angry all the time,
got sick with too much mead, then he died."

  And I know the rest, Alston thought.

   They'd finished gralloching the deer; they left the entrails for
the ants and birds, packed heart, liver, tongue, and kidneys back
in the stomach hollow, and removed the head. Then they ran a
pole between the bound legs, brushed the blood off their hands
and arms with sand as best they could, and lifted it with an end
of the carrying pole on each shoulder.

  "Do some more sword work tonight?" Swindapa wheedled.

   "If you don't mind the others," Alston replied. She'd started
classes for some of her cadets and a few islanders who showed
promise. In our copious spare time.

   They came out onto the road and dumped the deer carcass
into the wire baggage holder at the rear of the two-seater
tricycle; it was a fairly robust thing, one of many worked up
since the Event by Leaton. Alston looked at the sky; not long to
dinner. Deer liver and onions sounded more wonderful all the
time.

   "No problem, more fun with lots of people," Swindapa said.
She went on, "Good hunt today," giving Alston a quick hug
before jumping onto her seat.

   I wish she wouldn't do that, the captain thought. Evidently
Swindapa's people embraced and touched at the slightest
provocation, and she was gradually starting to do that again as
her memories healed over a little. She has no idea how… difficult
that makes things.

   Well, life was difficult. They began pedaling in unison,
enjoying the cooling effect of the breeze.
  "We'll stop at Smith's," Swindapa said happily.

   Smith was an enterprising soul who'd put the hot-water
shortage to work and opened an Oriental-style scrub-and-soak
bathhouse; much more economical of fuel than trying to heat
water and pour it into a tub in a single house, now that the
electrical and gas heaters were useless. The Council had
approved, since it was just the sort of thing that was needed to
jump-start the island away from the emergency-collective setup
that necessity had forced on them. Unfortunately, Smith didn't
run to individual tubs yet, just one big one for men and another
for women.

  Oh, well. Life is difficult.

  "No, I'll sponge down at home," she replied. And avoid all
temptation. My own virtue sickens me at times.

              CHAPTER ELEVEN
  July-August, Year 1 A.E.

  "I say the last thing we need is foreign entanglements!" Sam
Macy said.

   There was a rumble of agreement from here and there in the
Town Meeting. Cofflin sighed inwardly. He could understand
Sam's position only too well; the problem was that while that
sentiment felt right, the balance of facts was against it. Macy
was a nice guy to sit down and have a beer with, he did his job
well—hell, he'd turned out to be a genius at logging, sawmilling,
anything to do with wood— and he kept his people over at
Providence Base happy with their boss. The problem was that
when Macy got onto politics, he had certain fixed opinions that
couldn't be shifted with plastique and bulldozers.

   "We're just getting things going right," Macy went on,
flushing as eyes turned to him all across the big room. The
microphones were long gone, and his voice came out in an
untrained foghorn roar. "We've got plenty to eat, it looks like the
harvest will be good—" he knocked on wood— "and we've got
plenty to keep us warm this winter—"
  "Good job, Sam!" someone said. Macy stuttered and then
went on:

   "—and we're learning how to do lots of stuff. We all saw the
pictures and video Captain Alston brought back. I'm not saying
we shouldn't have sent the Eagle over to Britain, but those aren't
the sort of people we want to get involved with. Why should we
risk the lives of good American boys and girls for those dirty
savages? It's worse than Bosnia."

  Another mutter of agreement, louder this time. Swindapa's
hand went up. She stood as Cofflin pointed the gavel.

    "My people are not savages like the Iraiina," she said simply.
"They come to take our land for no better reason than they want
it, and to make us slaves because they would rather take our
crops than work to grow their own." Her face was flushed, but
she spoke firmly under the lilting singsong accent her birth
tongue gave to her English. "We don't ask them to walk the stars
with Moon Woman. All we want is that the Sun People leave us
alone."

  Silence fell after she sat, crossing her arms on the dark-blue
sweater with Nantucket woven on it in yellow cord.

   Poor kid, Cofflin thought. Still comes up and bites her when
she thinks about it. Post-traumatic stress disorder, a fancy name
for very bad memories that wouldn't leave you alone.

  "Pamela Lisketter," Cofflin said.

   "That's all very well," the thin woman said. On most people
the results of hard work and a fish diet were an improvement,
but she'd started out gaunt; that made her yellow-green eyes
seem enormous by contrast. "But isn't it true that the real reason
you want to interfere in the affairs of these people is to exploit
them?"

  "Nope," Cofflin said. "Fair exchange is what we've got in
mind. Professor?"

  Arnstein stood and stroked his bushy reddish-brown beard.
"This island can't produce enough to do more than keep us
alive," he said. "It doesn't even have much timber, much less
metals or fuel. Seven thousand-odd people—call it five thousand
working adults and teenagers—that just isn't enough to keep
civilization going, if most of us have to spend all our time
producing food. We can't have teachers and engineers and clerks
and, oh, silversmiths and everything else, all the specialists,
because there won't be enough food or enough raw materials or
enough markets. But if we can trade widely, we can have those
specialists, and exchange what they make for what we need. The
question is, do you want your grandchildren to have something
like a decent life, or do you want them to be illiterate peasants?"

   A thoughtful silence fell. "Ms. Lisketter."

    "There's nothing wrong with a simple life! We should all learn
to lower our expectations and walk lightly on the earth, not kill
its whales and cut down its trees and… We've got an opportunity
to escape from a culture dominated by machines, and cultivate
our skills and the spiritual—"

   A chorus of whistles, catcalls, and boos shouted her down.
"I've had all the fucking simple-life blisters I want or need!"
someone shouted, and there was a roar of approval.

   Cofflin kept his face impassive as he hammered for order.
Inwardly he was grinning; Lisketter had a hard core of
supporters, but the numbers had dropped off drastically.
Imagining a world without internal combustion engines and
electricity and actually living in one were two entirely different
things.

   "Let's keep it polite here. This is a Town Meeting, not a
football game. Ms. Lisketter has a right to say what she believes
whether anyone else likes it or not."

    Lisketter was quivering, but the tears in her eyes were rage,
not chagrin. "You're making exactly the same mistakes that
people back home did, wrecking the earth and any chance of
living in peace with each other!" she said. "Please, please don't
be so blind! There aren't very many of us now, but if you start the
same cycle all over again that won't matter. The real frontier
isn't out there." She waved at the world beyond the darkened
windows. "It's in ourselves. If we're not at peace with ourselves
and the earth, what does it matter if we have material wealth?"

  "Dane Sweet?"

   The manager of the bicycle shop—nowadays he was more like
assistant secretary for transportation—stood. "Pamela, you and I
go back a long way. We agree on a lot of things. But can't you
understand that we're not back home any more?"

  "This isn't Kansas anymore, Toto," someone said.

   Sweet waved them to silence and went on: "If you want to
preserve the environment and the Native Americans, and I do
too, you're not going to do it by making the people here want to
lynch you. It's one thing to tell people who've got too much to cut
back, but you may not have noticed we're not exactly living in
the lap of postindustrial luxury here."

  "Anything more to say, Ms. Lisketter? Then I suggest you sit
down." She sat. "Joseph?"

   Starbuck stood. The town clerk was as near to a minister of
finance as they had. "And we're not doing as well as Mr. Macy
thinks, either. We're living off our capital—off what we had
before the Event. Yes, we're growing and catching our own food,
but we're not building our own houses, making our own clothing,
or shoes, or even tools for the most part—and what we are
making, we're largely making out of accumulated raw materials
that were here before the Event. Consider the effort needed to
find and smelt metals, for example. Or to find fiber and leather
to replace what we've used, or glass. What Dr. Arnstein said is
quite correct."

   That brought a thoughtful silence. He's got a point, Cofflin
mused. He pointed his gavel into the midst of the crowd.
"Professor?"

   "We do have an opportunity to do things better," Arnstein
said. "That doesn't mean sitting on our behinds and finding
infinite Mandelbrot sets in our navels. Let me tell you, people
have never lived in harmony with nature. Goats and axes and
wooden plows can ruin countries every bit as surely as bulldozers
and chemical plants; it just takes a little longer. We've got three
thousand years of knowledge to apply to a fresh world. Let's do it
right this time."

   There was a smattering of applause, growing louder and then
dying away. Cofflin saw another hand raised. Surprise held him
for a moment, and then he pointed the gavel. Can't let Swindapa
speak and can him, he thought.

   "My hosts," Isketerol said, bowing in several directions. His
guttural English flowed, as fluent as a native speaker's apart
from the accent and an occasional choice of words. "I, a poor
foreigner, cannot advise you… except that if you wish to trade,
why deal with the poor and warlike savages of the White Isle, the
island you call Britain? Instead, send your wonderful ships to the
Middle Sea, where men dwell in cities obedient to law, not like
bears in the forests. In Tartessos, my home, or Mycenae rich in
gold, or splendid Egypt. Grateful for your many favors, I will be
ready to advise and guide in whatever small way I can. You will
find rich return, I promise you."

   That is one smart son of a bitch, Cofflin thought. Yes, he was
a slave trader and probably a pirate when occasion offered, but
this was the thirteenth century before Christ— you couldn't
expect him to act any other way. He'd lived up to every bargain
he made with the islanders, that was for sure. Nobody had any
complaints about the way he'd behaved since he arrived, either.
But that proposition has its own risks.

   "I think Captain Alston has something to say to that," he said
aloud.

   Alston stood, her face the usual impassive mask she wore in
public. "Once we're in regular contact with the more… advanced
peoples of this era," she said, "they're going to be able to sail
here; that's why we've been drilling our new militia. We have a
military edge, but not a very large one, frankly. Consider the
numbers, as well. And this island is a glittering prize, by local
standards. If we wave that relative wealth in front of the locals
who can come and make a try for it, I won't answer for the
consequences. It's my opinion that we should limit our contact
with the higher civilizations for the next few years at least. The
British peoples of this era are no such threat."

  That caused an uproar; Macy was on his feet demanding to
know why they couldn't seal off the island from all outside
contact.

   "Because the ocean is a very big place," Alston replied. "And
we have only one large ship to date. Buildin' others means we
have fewer people growing food." She indicated Arnstein with a
jerk of her chin. "It's the professor's point again. Everyone we
have do anything but produce essentials means fewer essentials,
unless we can get resources from elsewhere."

   Cofflin tapped the gavel again, "We need trade," he said. "We
need to trade somewhere where the locals won't be a menace to
us. We could use allies, and extra hands, as well. Ms. Swindapa
tells us, and our own experience in Britain bears out, that her
people are basically peaceful— not saints, mind you—and they
can produce most of what we need. Especially if we give them
some help. That'll include some military help, but not much;
more a matter of showing them how to do things."

   Advisers and military aid, he thought with a wince. Well, by
God, we can do better than LBJ and McNamara. At least I hope
so. Aloud: "Ms. Swindapa."

   The Fiernan girl rose again. "My people don't have a, a
government," she said. "There is nobody who can order everyone
to do things. But there are families and Spear Chosen who many
will listen to. My family, the line of Kurlelo, is a family like that.
We welcome peaceful traders, and we need strong friends.
Please, be the friends we need."

  Another hand shot up. Cofflin sighed and pointed the gavel.
This was bad enough, and they were only discussing a
hypothetical situation. Wait until they got the report about the
Indians approaching Providence Base and offering to trade. That
was going to send Lisketter and her crowd completely ballistic.

   The core of the Nantucket Council stood and watched the new
militia at practice.

   "Big turnout," Jared Cofflin said, surprised. Wouldn't have
thought so many people would volunteer for more sweat, he
thought. Of course, with harvest still some time off and the
fishing going so well, people weren't nearly as hard pressed as
they had been in the spring. And this was a novelty.

  Alston nodded, her armor rustling and clanking slightly as she
moved. "It'll thin out when it sinks in how much work it is, I
expect," she replied cynically.

   "I'm surprised we have the time," Martha Cofflin said
thoughtfully. "I assumed that without machinery, we'd be
working every hour of the day and night."

  Cofflin the fisherman-turned-policeman chuckled; so did
Angelica Brand the farmer, and Marian Alston the farmer's
daughter.

   "I said something funny?" Martha inquired tartly.

   "My daddy used to say that farming is two kinds of butt
work," Alston said. "Bust your butt working fit to kill yourself,
then sit on your butt 'cause there's nothing to do."

   "Fishing's a lot like that, too," Cofflin added.

   "Seasonal," Martha said. "So there's time for this."

   The big sandy field held several hundred men and women. All
the Eagle's cadets and off-duty crew, of course, for whom it was
compulsory, and nearly as many volunteers. The islanders
present were a mixed bag, mostly younger; a good many were
friends the cadets and crew had made in the months since the
Event. There were enough crossbows for practice, and shields
with foam rubber bound around their rims, spears with blunt
cloth-bound tips, extra-weight wooden short swords. A few
worked with bokken, wooden replicas of the katana. Nearly half
the Eagle's complement were in the new armor Leaton was
turning out, getting accustomed to the weight and heat. Trainees
attacked wooden posts and practiced simple formations.
   Grunts, Rebel yells, and the thump and clatter of wood on
wood and metal sounded across the dust raised by so many feet.
The Eagle's instructors were busy hammering home the basics of
close-order drill. Cofflin watched with interest as a column of
about thirty countermarched, each pair's spears crossing in an X
as they turned. A little farther off two rows with crossbows faced
a hastily-erected wooden wall backed by earth.

   "Front rank!" the officer drilling them shouted. "Ready!"
crossbows came to port-arms position, held across the chest.
"Aim!" The weapons came up to their shoulders with a unified
jerk. "Fire!"

  WHUNNGGGG! The strings released in near-unison.

  "Reload! Second rank, fire!"

   The first rank braced the butts of their weapons on their hips
and pumped the levers built into the forestocks. The second rank
took half a step forward and fired in their turn. By the time they
stepped back, the first rank were clipping bolts into the firing
grooves of their weapons.

  "Think that'll do much good?" Cofflin asked.

   "I think so," Alston said; she'd been looking at her watch, and
gave a grunt of satisfaction. "It's what Maurice of Wassau
originally developed drill for. Few of us can match"—she pointed
eastward—"for individual ferocity and skill at arms just yet, but
the Iraiina aren't much at coordination, which can be more
important. From what I saw and can get out of our guests,
battles are a series of individual brawls here."

  Cofflin nodded. "They're having a lot of fun, too," he said.
"Working off some energy."

   Martha chuckled. "Human energy we seem to have enough of.
Amateur theatricals, people giving lessons in the guitar and
piano, quilting bees, glee clubs, learn-how-to-make-it groups,
debating societies, mushroom-collecting circles…" She shook her
head. "We're going to have to move the notice board out of the
Athenaeum and put a few more in down by the Hub convenience
store. Getting in the way, it's so crowded." She looked'
thoughtful. "Blackboards and chalk, perhaps?"

   "No more mass media, it isn't surprising people've turned
back to making their own pastimes. We've got a lot of Internet
junkies going through withdrawal pains, as well," Dr. Coleman
said. He smiled, a not altogether pleas-ant expression. "Not to
mention real junkies. Suicides are down, though. I guess most of
those inclined that way are gone." His smile turned rueful. "The
rest of us are getting disgustingly healthy. Lots of exercise,
low-fat diet, no cigarettes, and not much alcohol. Did you know
that the average islander has lost ten pounds?"

    "If you could sell it back up in the twentieth, you'd be set for
life, Doctor," Cofflin said.

   That brought a chuckle from the rest of them. The group
began to split apart, only Cofflin and Martha accompanying
Alston toward the circles where individuals sparred. Alston looks
quite natural in that stuff, Cofflin thought. There was a sort of
archaic handsomeness to her face above the enameled metal,
and she swung along as if oblivious of the weight and the hot
summer sun, which must make the inside under the padding like
a solar oven. Her long sword was slung across her back in a
special baldric tight-cinched to the armor, and it rattled slightly
as she walked, clinking occasionally against the neck guard of
her flared helmet.

   He grinned mentally. In fact, he knew she still felt hideously
self-conscious in the armor, even though she'd issued an order,
backed by the Council, making it the equivalent of working and
walking-out dress for Guard and militia members.

   As they reached the chalk circles for individual sparring,
Swindapa fell backward out of one, winded, armor clattering.
She lay stunned by the impact for a moment, blond hair leaking
out from under her helmet brim. The islander she'd been
fighting advanced his practice spear and tapped her on the
chest; then he looked up and saw Alston. He came to rigid
attention, blanching a little under the flush of exercise.

   "Sorry, ma'am, I, ah, got carried away, and—"
   Alston frowned. "Middleton, you were doing what you're
supposed to be doing. If you ever have to use that pigsticker, it'll
be for real. And Ms. Swindapa wouldn't thank you fo' playin'
patty-cake." She turned and hauled the blond Fiernan girl up
with a forearm-to-forearm grip. "Here, let me show you."

   She took the bokken, the oakwood practice katana that some
of the advanced students were using rather than shield and short
sword. In shape and weight it was exactly the same as the real
weapon, although the aerodynamics were different, since the
wood was thicker.

   "Slow-time, Middleton. Here's what you did, 'dapa." She stood
with the hilt at waist level and the point slanted up toward her
opponent's eyes. "Chudan no kame, for starters."

   The young man advanced, thrusting the spear with both
hands. Alston brought the wooden sword up under the
cloth-bound point, hands braced widely on the long hilt.

  "So far, so good." The wooden shaft rose as it slid across the
sword until the breastplates met with a cling sound. "Here's
where you went wrong. Come on, Middleton, push."

   "You were tryin' to stop his impetus like a wall. Bad idea. If
you fight, you'll be fighting men, and they'll likely be bigger and
stronger, and weigh more. Don't try to oppose strength with
strength."

  "I was trying to get into a place… a position to cut strong,"
Swindapa said, a frown of concentration on her face.

    "It isn't cutting strongly or weakly that's the point, 'dapa. 'One
is totally involved with getting the opponent to die,' " she
quoted. "Watch. Middleton, we'll go through this again.
Slow-time, please."

   They set themselves. The spear came forward, and the sword
rose to meet it. This time it circled from left to right, pushing the
spear slightly aside and down. "Don't stop the thrust, redirect it."
Her right foot skimmed forward. "Now turn yo' hips at a
forty-five-degree angle. Turn the edge of the sword to face your
opponent—it's just a motion of the wrists. You're inside his
guard and he can't stop moving toward you, or not quickly
enough. From here you can strike at the upper arms, at the
throat, or at the face, snapping your hips into the movement for
added force, then follow through."

   Her bokken tapped the areas indicated. "Again."

    "If you can't step aside, redirect the spear, not the man." She
faced the thrust directly, snapping the bokken up from right to
left.

   "That puts you in position for a diagonal cut. His spear is over
your left shoulder, and so is your blade. Let it fall back until the
point is almost touching your back. Now quickly, elbows out,
hands light on the hilt, you bring it down. At the same time, your
legs go down, your arms come around as your hips pivot, elbows
moving together, wrists clench, breathe out, and the blade
strikes so." It tapped at the young man's right shoulder and slid
down across his torso. "Drawing the cut."

   And opening him like a can of sardines, Cofflin thought with
a shudder. He'd seen men blown open by flying shards of steel,
and a lot of accidents with heavy machinery. It didn't take much
imagination to fit those memories to what he'd just watched.

   Swindapa nodded. "But what if he has armor?" she asked. "Or
a shield?"

   "Good point. Then you redirect here—" she turned the blade
back to its starting position and swung it higher, across throat
level—"or down at the thighs, or you use his thrust to turn
yourself three-quarters 'round." The circling motion of the sword
pushed the spear aside, and Alston's feet landed in a
cramped-looking position that moved her eighty degrees with a
fluid speed he could see even in the slow-motion mime. "And
that puts you in position to strike here, here, here." The sword
tapped at the armpit, the back of the knee, stabbed toward the
inner thigh and groin. "Again, use speed and precision against
his weight."

   Swindapa frowned. "What if he's just as fast and skilled, and
still stronger and heavier?" she said.

  Alston met her eyes. "Then you probably die," she said quietly.
To the young man: "Full-speed, please."

   The spear came punching forward. Crack. The bokken
snapped up and met it with a sound like a gunshot. There was a
whirling and a clang as Alston pivoted on her bent front leg, the
knee half-collapsing as she went, her left leg coming around like
a scythe. It struck the man behind his knees, and he flipped
backward to land on his back. That left him looking up at Alston
as she came down in a wide-footed straddle stance. The point of
the bokken came down and stopped precisely over the hollow of
his throat.

   "Well, that's your lesson, Middleton," Alston said, smiling
slightly. "Don't focus on the weapon. There are no dangerous
weapons, only dangerous people. Fight the whole enemy." She
gave him a hand up. "See you later, 'dapa." She tossed the
wooden sword back to her.

   "Does that work as well as it looks?" Cofflin asked as they
walked away. "It looks as impressive as hell, but then so does
Olympic fencing, and that's got damn-all to do with real fighting,
I understand."

   "Well, that's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question," Alston
said. "I think so. The unarmed parts do work; I've used them in
real-life situations a few times, back before the Event and here
too."

   She reached over her shoulder and touched the hilt of the
katana. "The Japanese were in their equivalent of the Middle
Ages until one long lifetime ago, and men fought to the death
with these almost within livin' memory. My sensei learned in a
school that's been—would have been— in operation continuously
in the same place since the year 1447, at a shrine to the Shinto
sword god. It teaches bu-jutsu, the war arts, not the sport or
spiritual-learning versions. So, chances are it'll work in practice."

   She held up crossed fingers. "Best we can do. I'd rather win by
intimidation than fighting any day, but you have to calculate on
the worst possible case."

   She turned her head slightly. "I wonder why Middleton looked
like I was going to cut out his liver for a moment there, though?"
she added.

   Cofflin coughed and looked away. Martha touched Alston's
elbow and said gently: "Ah, Captain, there have been, well,
certain rumors about you and Ms. Swindapa."

   "Oh." She paused for a moment. "He thought I was going to
annihilate him for beating up on my girlfriend? Oh. Hell, and
here I thought I'd kept everyone in the dark by avoiding the
softball team and not leavin' old copies of Deneuve around."

  Her mouth quirked at his expression. "Sorry, in-joke." She
shook her head. "What really annoys me is the idea that anyone
would suppose I'd be unfair like that."

   "Umm—" Cofflin began. He could see Alston's face take on a
set calmness, like a mask carved from obsidian. By now he knew
her well enough to realize what that meant: total determination.
When she went on, it might have been a machine speaking.

   "If you're asking, the rumors are wrong in particular— she's,
ah, not suitable—but true in general. Yes, I'm gay. You might
even use the dreaded 1-word." The eyes met his, dark within
dark, seemingly all pupil in the smoky whites. "Do you have a
problem with that, Chief Cofflin?"

  "Myself? Absolutely not," Cofflin said.

   I think, he added to himself. You met the occasional queer in
the Navy, of course, and while he had no objection in principle
he didn't like the reality. On the other hand, those were men.
Women just didn't bother him like that, which was illogical and
probably unenlightened, but what the hell… And Alston was
simply too valuable to alienate, besides being damn likable in her
chilly way. The thought of trying to handle this mess without her
was enough to give him the cold willies.

  "But some other people might, eh?" she said, relentless.
   "If they do, that's their problem," Cofflin said. "I'm behind
you. You're doing your goddam job, lady, and as long as you do I
don't give a flying… curse whether you sleep with men, women,
or sheep."

   "Mostly by myself, actually, worse luck," Alston said, with a
slow grin. She offered her hand. "Here's to the league of people
who do their jobs, then." He took it in his, and Martha laid hers
on top.

  "Amen," she said.

   "More?" Alston said politely, indicating the venison ragout
and the single remaining new potato; they'd fallen on those
pretty ravenously.

   The cadets shook their heads. "Great, Captain," one of them
said. "But I'm stuffed."

  "Clear up, then, please," she said, turning and pulling a roll of
mapping paper from a sideboard.

   The three young men and two women made short work of
cleaning the table. She'd made a regular thing of these off-duty
meetings, to keep in touch with the cadets. Dining-in on Eagle
was a little too formal, considering the gap in rank, not to
mention the cramped quarters. For that matter, cruises on the
Eagle had been a small part of a cadet's education, just enough
to familiarize them. The Academy at New London was a very
long way away, now.

  A whale-oil lamp in the center of the table gave a glow good
enough for reading, quite passable if you made yourself forget
what electric light was like.

  "Take a look at this," Alston said, leaning over the table and
unrolling the plans.

   She weighted the corners down with saltshakers and
candlesticks. The upperclassman cadets picked up their cups of
sassafras tea and leaned over it.
   "It's the Bluenose, isn't it, Captain?" one of them said,
interested.

   The plans showed a two-masted schooner with a long sleek
hull curving up to a prow like the point of a laurel-leaf
spearhead. The design breathed speed, but not the fragile
swiftness of a racing yacht—there was hard work in every line of
her.

   "Not quite, though it's based on it," Alston said. She nodded
to the ship model. "That's the Bluenose. This here—" she tapped
the plans—"is a little smaller, two hundred tons displacement;
she's shallower-draft, with a longer straight run below, and
doesn't carry as much mast. Probably not quite so fast, but even
better suited for inshore work. Look at it well, ladies and
gentlemen, because you'll be officers on something like this in
the not-too-distant future."

   The cadets sat down slowly. Alston smiled at them. "I'm not
deaf. Now that we've a little leisure to think, you're all afraid that
you'll spend the rest of your lives hauling ropes and reefing sails
on the Eagle… and you signed up at the Academy to be
officer-trainees, not deckhands."

   "Yes, some of us have been thinking about that, ma'am," one
of the cadets said slowly. McAndrews, a big soft-spoken black kid
from Memphis. "We didn't like to complain, though. Not your
fault, after all."

   "That's appreciated."

   Another half-raised her hand. "Won't we be building more
steamboats?"

  "Certainly, for tugs, whale-catchers, 'longshore work generally.
But it'll be a long time before we can make deep-sea steamers.
For long-distance work we need ships that don't need fuel or
machine shops and that can be repaired with local resources
where they make landfall, at a pinch. The Eagle's a fine
open-ocean ship, but she wasn't built to haul cargo, and she's too
deep in the keel for inshore work in this era, without made
harbors.
   "This"—she nodded her head at the drawings—"is just right.
Wood-built, and we're not short of good timber and masts. Big
enough to go anywhere on earth and haul a useful amount of
cargo, fore-and-aft-rigged, nimble, and not requirin' a heavy
crew. Eventually we'll have a dozen or more, in the carrying
trade, exploring, swapping our manufactures for food and raw
materials. Guarding the island, too, and whatever settlements we
make elsewhere. I've talked it over with the chief, and we'll be
putting a proposal to start building to the Town Meeting, fairly
soon. There's enough seasoned timber on hand now."

   Alston saw enthusiasm kindle. "Since we're stuck here, it's
better to think of it as an opportunity, not exile."

   "Sort of like Francis Drake and those guys, ma'am?" one of the
cadets asked.

  "Mmmm, not quite, I hope. But lots of exploration, yes."

    The conversation broke up some time later. "Stay for a
moment, McAndrews," she said. "You had something you
wanted to say?" She leaned back, watching the young man twist
a little. "I won't bite y'head off for speaking your mind."

  "It's… we're going back to England, right, ma'am?"

  She nodded.

  "What I was wondering was, why England, ma'am?"

  "Trade," she said. "We need to develop a secure base for it."

  "Yes, ma'am, but why England?"

   "Oh," Alston said. "Ah, I see what you're driving at. You'd
rather we try, say, Africa?"

  "Yes, ma'am!" McAndrews beamed.

  "You're thinking that instead of giving the buckra a leg up, we
should sail to Africa and get in contact with the great kingdoms
and empires there? Ghana, Mali, Dahomey, the Ashante? And
with our technology, they'll grow to dominate the world?"

  "Yes ma'am!"

   Alston sighed. She reached up and removed an invisible hat.
"All right, Cadet, for just this once I'm going to take off my
captain's cap and speak to you as sister to brother." She leaned
forward. "You ever heard the saying 'Free your head and your ass
will follow'?" He nodded.

   She went on: "Well, I'm afraid your head's gotten stuffed with
something that'd fit in better down below, boy. None of those
empires and kingdoms exist now, and they won't for a long long
time. Thousands of years. South of the deserts it's mostly still
hunters, with a few farming villages in the grasslands. Sail to
West Africa and all you'll find is jungle and pygmies. And maybe
malaria and yellow fever."

   McAndrews's face fell. Alston sighed internally. I won't ask
him who he thinks sold our ancestors to the white slavers, she
thought. That had been one of her more disillusioning personal
discoveries. At least, the West African kings and merchant
princes were the ones who'd sold her personal ancestors, seeing
as she was black as tar. McAndrews was a sort of rye-bread-toast
color; more than a few buckra in his own personal woodpile. Let
him down easy. He's probably stuffed with shit about ancient
Tanzanian jets and the black Cleopatra and suchlike.

   "North Africa is mostly filled with people who look like
Isketerol, only they're savages," Alston went on. "The only place
in Africa that isn't full of savages is Egypt." At his look, she
continued: "Have you ever been to Egypt, Cadet?"

  "No, ma'am."

   "I have. Up in the twentieth, the Egyptian slang for a black
person is abdeed, which means slave, in case you hadn't guessed.
Look, when Isketerol first saw me, he thought I was a Medjay.
Ever hear of them?" He shook his head. "Neither had I. They're
mercenary soldiers from Nubia at Pharaoh's court. The only
other black folk there are black slaves."
   At his look of shock, she pushed on ruthlessly: "Who do you
think started the slave trade, Cadet? You go to Egypt as of 1250
B.C., you're just another nigger barbarian, as far as they're
concerned, and so am I. Of course, they'd consider Isketerol a
nigger too, or Lieutenant Hendriksson. Anyone who isn't an
Egyptian is a nigger to them."

  "I… suppose I see," he said after a long minute's thought.

   "Don't take it so hard, Cadet," she said kindly. "If things work
out well here, there'll never be a Middle Passage. And we've got
plenty of real heroes. Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth is
worth a dozen imaginary African princes any day."

  He frowned. "Then what's going to happen to us, here,
ma'am? I mean, as a people."

   The island had less than two hundred black residents, and
fewer still of other minorities; she'd checked the figures,
discreetly. The population was 96 percent white. She'd always
regarded white people as sort of like the weather; they were
there, sometimes pleasant, often not, and you had to deal with
them as best you could. Here-and-now they were pretty well the
whole damn climate, and that was just that, whether she liked it
or not.

   Alston shrugged. "What happens when you squeeze a drop of
ink into a glass of milk and shake, Cadet? It mixes in and pretty
soon it's gone." Alston spread her hands. "From now on, you'd do
best to think of this island as home and everyone who lives here
as your people. We really don't have much choice."

   Seahaven Engineering was getting more crowded by the day,
even though Martins and his forge had been moved out to their
own quarters, and the sound of metal on metal was deafening.

   Ronald Leaton and Cofflin stood in one corner, looking at the
latest development, and occasionally moving aside as someone
went through with a handcart of materials or parts. Sweat ran
down their faces; the sun was bad enough, beating down on the
sheet-metal roof, and the steam engines turning shafts and
pumping compressors added to the heat and noise. The machine
shop stank of hot metal, hot whale oil, sweat, and smoke. The big
doors to the water were open, giving an occasional draft of
welcome cool air, and you could see smudges of black
woodsmoke drifting out over the smaragdine brightness of the
harbor. Sails speckled it, and the ocean beyond; closer too a
Guard officer was overseeing the loading of a large handcart,
yelling out his checklist to the Seahaven clerk:

  "Breastplates, twenty-five, size All"

  "Check!"

  "Helmets, twenty-five, size All"

  "Check!"

   Cofflin shook his hea'd. Busy as bees, he thought. There was
just so much to do, before winter set in—and never enough time
or hands.

   "It's a blow-drier for fish," Leaton explained, kicking the
frame and handing over a sample. "Desiccator, if you want to get
technical. I figure it'll cut down the spoilage rate to nearly
nothing."

   Cofflin nodded, turning the slab of dusty-white, rock-hard cod
in his hands and looking at the wood-and-iron… thingumabob,
he decided. The rack for the fish wasn't much different from the
improvised ones they'd been using, looking a little like a giant
bedstead, except that it had a mesh cover over the top to keep
the flies off… and they'd lost far more cod than he liked to think
about to maggots.

   Off to one side of it was a contraption of sheet metal and
wood, with a flat covered steel pan, a round metal chimney, and
a shaft running down from that into a wooden box that underlay
one edge of the drying rack. Leaton took pieces off the sides of
each.

  "See, you light the fire in the pan here—ordinary wood fire,
and there's this grating underneath for the ashes."
   Cofflin nodded solemnly. Wood ash was prime fertilizer, and it
had half a dozen other major uses—you needed it to make soap,
for instance, which wasn't something he'd suspected before.
There was a Town ordinance now that everyone had to keep
ashes for collection.

   "Then some of the hot air goes up the chimney and turns this
fan. That turns this metal shaft running down here, which turns
this wooden fan, and that blows more of the hot dry air…"

  A ton of fish sounded like a lot, until you remembered how
much seventy-two hundred people ate in a day. Every pound
counted, and this would save a lot of spoilage.

  "Good work," he said sincerely. "How many, how fast, and
what do you need?"

   "Well, we can make up the metal parts here. Thornton's can
do the carpentry"—another new industry, working with the hand
and simple power tools Seahaven turned out, and Macy's
shipments of timber from the mainland—"and I thought we'd
take over another boathouse or something for the assembly
work. It gets in the way here."

  "Say another forty, maybe sixty people all up," Cofflin said.
"Damn, we're running short—particularly of people who know
which end of a hammer to pick up."

  "It'll save in the long run," Leaton said earnestly. "You don't
need nearly so many watching the drying racks."

  "A lot of those are kids," Cofflin mused. "But yeah, I think so.
Okay, go for it."

   "And you can use it to make jerky, any kind, and dried
sausage as well, or dry vegetables for keeping—"

   "Ayup. You've struck oil, Ron, you can stop drilling," Cofflin
said dryly.

   The problem with being the one who can bind or loose is that
everyone keeps trying to convince you of things, he thought
wryly.

   "Ah… thanks, Chief."

   "Thank you, Ron. What's next?"

   "Well, the barrel-stave machine is working now, and the one
for the hoops." Cofflin grunted satisfaction; barrels for storage
were a big bottleneck. "And we've got something here that'll
make us all a lot more comfortable," the engineer went on.

   He led Cofflin over to where two more samples rested against
the wall. One was a simple steel box with a hinged front door and
a section of sheet-metal piping coming out the back.

   "Heating stove," Leaton said, taking a rag out of the back
pocket of his overalls and wiping his hands—futile, since grease
and dirt were ground into the knuckles. "An outer box, an inner
box, the intervals filled with sand— retains heat, the way thick
cast iron would if we could cast iron, which we can't
yet—ashpan, grate, door for feeding wood, and an adjustable
flue. It's about airtight, and the thermal efficiency is seven, eight
times the best fireplace. You just stick it in a fireplace, and the
pipe here goes up the chimney a bit."

   "Excellent," Cofflin said. They'd all been chilly in the tag end
of early spring. "We can start on these later in the year,
though—after harvest."

   Leaton nodded. "And there's this." The other stove was much
larger, standing on legs. The top held what looked like
solid-metal equivalents of heating elements on a normal stove,
and there was a big oval tank welded to one side.

    "Wood-fired cooking stove," he went on proudly. "We modeled
it on the old style, with some improvements. That thing on the
side is a hot-water tank—the exhaust flue goes right through it."

   "Oh, that's going to be popular!" Cofflin said.

  Not least with those who had to do dishes. People who
couldn't do anything else had taken to filling in with housework,
for those who were otherwise occupied. It let them earn Town
chits of their own, and freed up the able-bodied for essential
tasks.

  "Wait a minute—you should put in a heating tray at the back.
That done, you can put those into production right away, say
twenty a week to start with?" he said.

   "Can do, but I'll need more assembly space. They bolt
together, and the parts are standardized."

   "I'll get you the people, at least until the harvest," Cofflin said.
"The Council will go along with it. Speaking of which, is the
reaper working yet?"

   "Ah—" Leaton's eyes shifted. "Well, we're still getting some of
the bugs out, Chief."

   "Goddammit, Ron, we were counting on that…"

   "God," Ian Arnstein wheezed, straightening up and rubbing at
his back. "Now I know what 'stoop labor' really means."

   Everyone had toughened up considerably since the spring, but
reaping grain with a sickle and bagging hook evidently took
muscles and degrees of flexibility they'd never called on before.
Swindapa was proof positive, two people down from him in the
row. She moved with an economical rhythm: stoop with leg
advanced, sweep the wooden hook with the left hand to gather in
a swatch of grain, bring the sickle up sharply head-high and slice
downward and back, tip the hook to spill the cut rye in a neat
row, step forward, stoop… despite the T-shirt and cutoff jeans,
moving like that she didn't look at all American. She was well
ahead of Alston and Doreen, and stopped occasionally to let
them catch up, putting a better edge on her sickle now and then
with a pull-through sharpener. Others were doing the same,
punctuated with the odd yelp or curse as someone cut a hand.
Ian had already, twice, and sweat stung like fire as it ran into the
superficial gashes.

   The rye stretched before him, waving in the sun with an evil
brown-gold beauty, starred here and there with wild-flowers;
he'd have admired those more if he hadn't learned by painful,
personal experience how much harder weeds made the work. It
was a hot August day, sunny except for some high haze and a few
puffy white clouds. The field was fairly large, about twenty acres,
part of Brand Farms' winter cover crop let ripen. A hundred
islanders were advancing across it in a staggered row, sickles
flashing. As many more followed behind, gathering the ragged
rows of grain into sheaves and tying them with a twist of straw.
There was a buzz of crickets in the air, and a dusty smell of
earth, cut stems, and sweat, mingled with the wilder scent of the
weeds cut along with the stalks. According to the books they
ought to be able to reap a third of an acre or so per day per
worker. It was an hour past noon, and fairly obvious they'd be
lucky to do a quarter of that.

   If we had a hundred Swindapas cutting this stuff, maybe, Ian
thought, bending again with a groan. A bell rang behind him,
and he felt like weeping with relief. The second shift.

   They were rotating people through the harvesting gangs, so as
many as possible would have experience before the much larger
fields of spring-planted grain came ripe. A thousand acres of
barley alone, Christ on a crutch, I'll never make it. He looked at
the sky again. When the time came, they'd have to go all-out.
You couldn't count on the weather here, and rain at the wrong
time could be a disaster—literally a disaster; it would mean the
difference between eating well and going hungry. With the
planting so late it would be touch and go, first to harvest, and
then to get all the grain under cover.

   Then we get to pull the flax and dig up the potatoes. And
harvest and shuck the corn. And cut the buckwheat. And cut the
last hay and turn it and dig the Jerusalem artichokes and
harvest the sunflowers and… Oh, joy, oh, my aching back.

  "And I thought 'bust your ass' was a metaphor," he said.

   "Come and get it!" the cook at the wagon over by the pines
shouted.

  "About time," Doreen said.
   She was wearing a T-shirt around her head like a headdress,
with strands of her long black hair escaping, and a bikini top
and shorts. Her skin was tanned to a deep olive brown, flesh
firmed up and trimmed down and turned to something more like
the opulent shape of a Levantine fertility goddess; even the sweat
on neck and breasts and the bits of straw stuck in it merely
completed the picture. At the moment he was too tired to really
appreciate the sight, except in an abstract way. He trudged over
to the wagon and the blessed shade of the trees, dropping his
sickle and hook into the racks. Plastic trash barrels full of water
stood there. He drank four mugfuls one after the other, almost
shuddering with ecstasy as the cool water cut through the
gummy saliva and dust in his mouth and throat. Then he poured
more over his head; it felt icy as it cut runnels through the sweat.
The towel he used to wipe his face and hands was limp and
damp, but afterward he felt halfway human—as if he'd been dead
for days, rather than months. Human enough that the smell of
the stew penetrated and set his stomach rumbling like a wolf
trying to claw its way out.

  "Surf 'n' Swine, folks! Come and get it!" the cook said again.
"Surf 'n' Swine! Come and get it!"

   He got in line and took a big red plastic bowl of thick brown
pork and lobster stew. The helper added half a loaf of rough dark
bread, and Ian filled his mug again. The shade beneath the
stubby pines where he and Doreen spread their blanket was
infinitely welcome, but he could feel his muscles stiffen further as
they cooled. He sank down with a groan.

   "The chief is carrying this egalitarianism to extremes," he
grumbled. "I notice he's not here."

   "He's out harpooning bluefin tuna," Alston said from a few
feet farther along the line of shade. "Those things go up to a ton
weight; it's hard, dangerous work." She raised herself on one
elbow; she wasn't looking particularly tired, although the singlet
was plastered to her torso with sweat.

  But then, she's an athlete and younger than I am, he thought.

  "I know, I know, I'm being unfair," Ian said ruefully. "I'm also
being a middle-aged man with blisters and a crick in my back."

   "Easy work," Swindapa said, laying down her food and
stretching on tiptoe with her fingers pointed at the sky.

   Woof, woof, Ian thought. Even gaunt and terrified, the
Fiernan had been pretty. Filled out, glowing with health and
youth, tanned a light toast-brown that made even more vivid her
blue eyes and the sun-bleached hair falling down her bare back…
He looked back at his wife. Damn, the view is good here all
'round. Then: I must be recovering. He looked down at himself;
he'd never been anything but lanky, but the middle-aged pot he'd
added had about vanished. He was fitter than he'd been. He just
wished it didn't hurt so much.

  "Not what I'd call easy," he said.

   "Try doing it with a wooden sickle with flint blades, Ian, or
even a bronze one," Swindapa said. She frowned when he moved
and then winced. "Lie down on your front."

   Curious, he obeyed. The blond woman walked over and knelt
beside him. "You Eagle People do some wonderful things, but
you aren't much as farmers," she said, beginning to knead along
his spine with strong skilled fingers. She sang under her breath
in her own language as she worked, timing the motions of her
hands to the slow chant.

  He gave a small whimper of mixed pain and pleasure. "We
had machines to do this sort of thing," he said. "With any luck,
we will again—next year."

   Leaton's attempt at a horse-drawn reaping machine had been
a spectacular failure, jamming itself every second step. He swore
that he could perfect it now that he had fields to test
adjustments on, but the crop wouldn't wait. Cradle scythes
would have been more efficient than the sickles and easier to
make than the McCormick-style reaper, but it turned out that
they required both unusual strength and a lot of practice to use.
They'd have to solve the grain problem this first year by simple
brute force and massive ignorance, throwing every pair of hands
not catching fish into the fields for a brace of weeks. At least the
threshing machine looked like it would work, so they wouldn't
have to spend the winter beating this stuff with flails in the
intervals between digging potatoes.

   Swindapa finished the massage on the muscles of his neck,
then drummed the heels of her hands down from the nape of his
neck to the base of his spine. The knots loosened, and he gave a
groaning sigh of relief. She moved over to Doreen and began to
repeat the process; Ian sat up and spooned down the stew. He
was beginning to understand why farmers usually ate their main
meal at midday; it seemed like a long time since breakfast. A few
dozen feet away another bunch of resting harvesters was singing
to a flute and guitar:

  Corn ricks and barley sheaves—

  And garlands of holly;

  No, I'll ne're forget the nights I spent

  Among the sheaves, with Mollie…

   He wasn't surprised at the plaintive-cheerful Old English tune.
Nantucket was just the sort of place for acoustic-guitar folkie
enthusiasts who drank home-brewed beer and did Morris
dancing.

  Come gather golden honey

  Come reap the tender corn;

  And with me lay in new-mown hay

  Before the winter's bourne…

   It was the fact that they had the energy to sing that
astonished him.

   He mopped the bowl with a heel of the bread, and belched
with something approaching contentment.

   Swindapa shook out her hands and moved back to Alston's
blanket. "You next, Captain," she said cheerfully.
   There was a moment's silence; Ian looked over at the sudden
tension in the air. After a long instant Alston nodded and laid
her head face-down in her folded arms. Swindapa moved beside
her and crooned the same minor-key chant under her breath;
she was smiling as she began to work, a slow dreamy expression.

   "No rest for the wicked," he said to the air, rising and helping
Doreen fold the blanket. As they walked toward their bicycles he
inclined his head slightly back and raised an eyebrow.

   "No, I don't think so," Doreen said. "The captain has a…
highly developed sense of scruples. Almost as hyper-thyroid as
her sense of duty."

   They picked up their cycles and began walking them down the
dirt road out toward the pavement. Nantucket had had a system
of bicycle trails before the Event, but the whole road system
belonged to it now. The thickets along the path were mostly
uncleared, and they had a wild sweet smell of feral roses. The
blossoms starred the green undergrowth with red, with a few
clusters of blushing-pink phlox for contrast. The main road had
a narrow strip of brush and trees along it, and on the far side of
that was a broad field of flax already eight feet tall, its blue
flowers only a memory. Ian looked at it and winced in prospect.
You harvested flax by pulling it up by the roots.

  "Positively superhuman self-control," Ian said dryly. "And
Swindapa has a powerful crush."

   Doreen frowned. "I wouldn't exactly put it that way. She's not
a kid, you know, not by the standards of her own culture."

  Ian shrugged. "I don't want to let this sweat dry," he said,
changing the subject. He liked them both as well, they were good
people, but there were certain things that individuals just had to
work out for themselves.

  "Smith's?" she said.

  "How about Quigley's?" he asked.

  "You're not as tired as you looked," Doreen laughed. Quigley's
was a new place, giving Smith fierce competition; it had
individual cubicles for soaking after you scrubbed down.

  "Let's see when we get there," he grinned.

   They reached the pavement and swung into the seats of their
cycles. I may not have the captain's nobility of character, he
thought, looking at Doreen's hair flying in the wind. On the other
hand, my life's a good deal less complicated, and there's
something to be said for that.

             CHAPTER TWELVE
  August-October, Year 1 A.E.

  "She's a fine ship," Isketerol said. "What does this name
mean, Yare?"

  William Walker thought. He'd heard the word in a movie
once… yeah, HBO Classics. The one with Katharine Hepburn?
What a fox, he thought irrelevantly, then concentrated. "Yare
means… fit, ready, eager," he said.

  "Ah, a good name for a ship!"

   The yacht had about a hundred feet at the waterline,
two-masted and flush-decked except for a low cabin directly
ahead of the wheel and binnacle, with a burden of a hundred and
ten tons. Not as fast as the Eagle, of course, Walker
acknowledged to himself. Twelve knots at most, given optimum
winds; she was a topsail schooner, fore-and-aft-rigged except for
two square sails at the top of the foremast. On the other hand
she could go three or four points closer to the eye when tacking
upwind, and she drew only six feet to the big windjammer's
seventeen. That was why she was scheduled to go along on the
next voyage to Europe, for scouting and inshore work. Plus she
was wooden-built, thirty years old but still as sound as the day
when the boatyard in Nova Scotia had sent her down the ways.
Injury to her hull need not be an irreparable disaster, with tools
and carpenters along.

  The deck was broken by a low coaming, its cover aside for the
present. Hammering and sawing noises came from within, where
carpenters were installing a proper hold. The cargo for it waited
on the dockside where the ship was moored, under an
improvised loading crane also under construction. There were
ingots of pig iron from the Eagle's ballast, barrels of salt fish and
meat, barrels of hardtack, and others to hold extra water. A
complete set of black-smith's tools and forge-furnishings,
including Martin's best homemade anvils, and bar stock for it.
Drills, planes, augers, axes, sledges, kegs of nails, two-man saws.
A small lathe, and a set of measuring gauges run up on Leaton's
Swiss instrument-making machine; knocked-down metal-work
for a sawmill and gristmill. Books, most of them bound
photocopies, carefully wrapped in multiple layers of green plastic
garbage bag to make them thoroughly waterproof; books on
shipbuilding, metalsmithing, agriculture and mining. Trade
goods, useful and ornamental, rounding out the heavier load the
Eagle would be carrying.

   Couldn't have done it better myself, Walker thought. Of
course, he had done much of it himself. With a crew of fifty and
the cadets, Eagle was grossly overmanned for routine work;
Alston had them all working half a dozen projects ashore as well,
herself more than any. Getting the schooner ready was his job.
He'd impressed the captain with his zeal and perfect discipline,
but it was Hendriksson who was slated to command the Yare.
Alston still wanted him close under her eye.

   "Bitch," he muttered to himself.

   But a smart bitch—she didn't miss much. He was still kicking
himself for blurting out his half-formed dreams that first night
after the Event. Granted he'd been dazed and disoriented,
everyone had, but it had still been a stupid thing to do. Hmm.
Victor would like the Yare too… could I recruit him over that?
No, probably not. The Cuban-American lieutenant was too much
of a straight arrow.

   "Come on," he said to Isketerol.

   Careful, careful, be very careful. He hated Captain Alston, but
he respected her brains and courage thoroughly. He'd have been
more than ready to follow her on an expedition such as the one
he planned… but she'd never do that. She'll stick with
shepherding these sheep on this damned island.

   They walked up the gangplank onto the ship, dodging men
and women with tools and materials for the refit, and walked
back to the little fantail behind the wheel. There was an awning
stretched over it like a tent with the mizzensail boom as a
ridgepole, and a couple of chairs. The day was hot and clear,
with little trace of yesterday's fog; the breeze off the harbor
smelled of fish and salt and tar. Gulls went noisily overhead,
their harsh cries thick in the air. A big load of barrel staves and
planks sat on the wharf not far from him, just in from
Providence Base, adding the vanilla tang of fresh-cut oak to the
mixture; beside it were oozing casks of pitch and turpentine
from Cape Cod. A chattering party of junior high students were
sitting around mending twine nets. Hammering and the hiss of
the last cutting torches sounded from the ferry's upperworks as
teams labored to disassemble it from the top down; carts were
going back and forth with loads of steel plate, beam, and girder
as the work went on. Other working parties were ripping the
air-conditioning and partitions out of Eagle, undoing her last
refit in '79.

   Isketerol sat and accepted a bottle of beer from the cooler; he
went on in the Mycenaean Greek that Walker now spoke well,
since Iraiina lacked the concepts and vocabulary for much of
what they had to discuss.

   "I have confirmed what you told me," Isketerol said. "They
plot to keep me here, always among strangers, never to return to
my home, fearing what I might do with the knowledge I've
gained." He bared his teeth. "By Arucuttag of the Sea, they'll
regret that."

   "So they will," Walker agreed.

   Actually they haven't decided to screw you over, good
buddy, they're just thinking about it, he mused. In Alston's
position he would have put Isketerol over the side with a stone
tied to his ankles as soon as he'd told all he knew, but Alston was
squeamish, to a point. Only to a point. Don't forget that.
Underestimating your opposition was stupid, and stupidity was
the only real sin he recognized.

   "We can help each other, then," Walker said. "You need a
friend who will guard your back, and so do I." Solemnly, they
clasped hands. "Now, tell me more of the lands of Mycenae. How
would they welcome a stranger with powerful gifts?"

   "No, I don't think you should seek out the Achaean lords right
away," the Tartessian said thoughtfully. "They're too hard and
greedy, and not very forethoughtful, most of them… But they hire
many mercenaries from the barbarian lands."

   Walker sipped at the beer. It was too sweet without the hops,
but otherwise not bad; only middling cold, though. There were
plans for ice pits to store frozen lake ice over the summer; that
could probably be done in the Aegean, too.

   Greece looks like the best bet. The Hittite Empire was too big
and too tightly centralized, a god-king autocracy. He'd learned
Troy was a prosperous city-state that controlled the approaches
to the Black Sea; but he'd have to learn yet another language to
operate there. Greece, now— Greece sounded a lot like
Renaissance Italy, or the more turbulent medieval European
countries, say the Holy Roman Empire. He grinned like a wolf.
According to the reference books, in about fifty years or so the
whole Aegean basin was due to go under in a mad-dog scramble
of internal warfare and barbarian invasions, with refugees and
savages squatting in the ruins, a Dark Age. In other words, a
perfect situation for an able, realistic man like himself—
provided he had an edge, so that he could establish himself
among the locals and work up to a position of strength gradually.

    William Walker, King of Men, he thought. Has a nice ring to
it. It was even altruistic, in a way. These goons were going to
wreck their own civilization. He'd be doing them a favor—and
they'd return the favor to him, and his children after him.

   Provided he had an edge… Leaton was already working on a
musket, and anyone who could cast a bronze statue could make
cannon. Sulfur was probably available, and there were
black-powder enthusiasts on the island who knew the whole
technique of making gunpowder; he'd drop in on them and
pump them for tips. But for all that he'd need a secure base for a
while, and preferably more men, as well, before he showed up in
the Mediterranean. Isketerol needed a sweetener too.

   "The question is, where to get a strong band of men?" Walker
said. "I can't recruit more than a few here. Someone would talk,
no matter how careful I was."

   "There is the White Isle," Isketerol pointed out. "And the
lands around it. Of course, for that you would require a ship, and
then passage from the White Isle to the Middle Sea."

   Passage for a couple of hundred, the American thought. The
Yare's useful, but with good carpenters and some time I could
reproduce her…

  "How would you like this ship for your own?" Walker said.

  The Tartessian raised the beer bottle to his lips and looked
out over the blue horizon. "Tell me more, my friend," he said.

   Nantucket was never hot for long. Fog had rolled in and filled
the streets as the sun fell; the air was cool, cool enough that the
small blaze she'd kindled in the bedroom fireplace was pleasant,
even on a summer's night.

   Alston sipped at her bourbon-and-water and opened the first
page of Master and Commander, ready for another run-through
of the whole set. Luckily she'd had most of her O'Brian collection
on board Eagle during the Event, and she'd been able to replace
the others here. There'd never be any more, of course, but she'd
reluctantly come to the conclusion that The Commodore was the
natural end of the series anyway. The big house was very quiet,
although an occasional voice came through the open window,
and once the slow ringing clop of shod hooves on stone. A
grandfather clock ticked the evening away downstairs. She
smiled and glanced around the big room. You could get used to
this sort of thing, although she liked her cabin on the Eagle well
enough, and the lack of running water ashore was a surprisingly
hard adjustment. The books and ship plans on the walls, those
were hers, and the armor on its stand in a corner with the
swords beneath, and the squared-away neatness. It smelled of
wax, the nutty-scented lamp oil, metal polish, and flowers.

   "Not in the mood," she murmured after a while, setting down
the novel.

   In fact, I'm feeling restless, bitchy, and itchy-skinned. She'd
been having a hard time suppressing the impulse to bark at
people, which would be fatal. A commander was the last person
on earth who could afford to lose her temper. If she hadn't
known for a fact her period was two weeks off, she'd have put it
down to PMS.

  "Well…"

   She picked up another volume; her favorite poet, something
she'd stumbled across in a little out-of-the way used-book store
in Boston once, many years ago. She'd opened it in idle curiosity,
and fallen in love at once; now she whispered aloud, hardly
needing to read:

  High on the bridge of Heaven whose Eastern bars

  Exclude the interchange of Night and Day,

  Robed with faint seas and crowned with quiet stars

  All great Gods dwell to whom men prayed or pray.

  No winter chills, no fear or fever mars

  Their grand and timeless hours of pomp and play;

  Some drive about the Rim wind-golden cars

  Or, shouting, laugh Eternity away.

  The daughters of their pride,

  Moon-pale, blue-water-eyed,

  Their flame-white bodies pearled with falling spray,

  Send all their bright hair streaming
  Down where the worlds lie gleaming,

  And draw their mighty lovers close and say:

  "Come over by the stream: one hears

  The speech of Nations broken in the chant of Spheres."

   "Damn, can't escape the blue-water-eyed daughters," she said.
"Ah well." An immense and not unpleasant sadness filled her,
like the soft silvery fog creeping through the streets outside. She
went on:

  Between the pedestals of Night and Morning,

  Between red death and radiant Desire

  With not one sound of triumph or of warning

  Stands the great sentry on the Bridge of Fire.

  O transient soul, thy thought with dreams adorning,

  Cast down the laurel, and unstring the lyre:

  The wheels of Time are turning, turning, turning,

  The slow stream channels deep, and doth not tire

  Gods on their Bridge above Whispering lies and love

  Shall mock your passage down 'the sunless river

  Which, rolling all its streams,

  Shall take you, king of dreams, —

  Unthroned and unapproachable for ever—

  To where the kings who dreamed of old

  Whiten in habitations monumental cold.
   "Seize the day, in other words," she told herself. Nobody else
was here tonight; Rapczewicz was on board Eagle, the other
officers who'd roomed here temporarily had moved into the two
buildings next door, and Swindapa was over at Smith's Baths—

  "I'm back," she called, from the entrance hall below. Alston
heard the door click shut, and feet bound up the staircase and
down the hall. "Foggy out tonight."

  "Hello, 'dapa. So you are, so it is."

   The Fiernan was wearing a knee-length T-shirt and plastic
sandals, with her hair loose and damp around her shoulders, the
yellow of it darkened by the water. She came in and sat
cross-legged by the fire, holding her hands out to either side with
the hair draped over them to dry. The cerulean-blue eyes looked
up at her, vivid by contrast with the summer tan, warm and full
of affection. And here I thought Whitney Houston was the very
definition of hot stuff, she thought. May have to revise that.
Marian Alston closed her eyes for a second and sighed, then tried
to concentrate on the book again, thumbing through the pages
at random:

  We that were friends tonight have found

  A fear, a secret and a shame:

  I am on fire with that soft sound

  You make, in uttering my name…

   It seemed even the poet had turned against her tonight, she
decided ruefully. Well, it isn't the first case of unrequited love
you've blundered into, woman, she thought, scolding herself.
Usually she had better sense, but there was no way to get away
on the island; in retrospect it'd probably been a mistake to have
Swindapa living here, but she'd been much more fragile back
then and needed a familiar, trusted face around. Alston
recognized the symptoms in herself with mournful accuracy,
although not until they'd been stealing up on her for a while.
That combination of overwhelming tenderness and lust…
  "I talked to Cindy Ganger at the baths," Swindapa said after a
while, smiling. "She asked me if I was your girlfriend."

   Alston choked, spraying bourbon across the page. Swindapa
jumped up in alarm and pounded her helpfully on the back, then
sat down beside her on the couch.

   "Are you all right?" she asked, a little frown of worry between
her brows.

   "Yes. Just, mmm, surprised," Alston said. And my sinuses
have diluted bourbon in them, goddammit. She used a
handkerchief to mop the page and blow her nose, which gave her
a moment to collect her thoughts. God damn all rumormongers.

   When she looked up, Swindapa had an arm draped over the
back of the blue Directoire sofa and one leg hooked up under the
other. She was still smiling. "I don't really understand you Eagle
People," she said after a moment. "I don't know how to… hear
what you're saying when you're not speaking, not really well. So I
make mistakes like that."

  "Body language?" Alston said, her mouth a little dry. She took
another sip of the whiskey. Swindapa picked the glass out of her
hand and sipped herself before returning it.

   "Yes, that's a good way to say it—body language." The smile
lessened. "I'd like to be your girlfriend, you know. But you move
away when I touch you, even though I think you like me. Back
home it's bad manners to come right out and ask someone older
than you—you have to wait for them to ask you when you show
you want them to. I keep showing you, and you never ask!"

   "Ah…" Oh, hell, what can you say to that? " 'Dapa, that's very
flattering, but it's impossible."

   "Don't you like me?" Swindapa asked, her eyes going wide and
beginning to fill. "I thought you were getting to like me, not just
feel sorry for me."

   Oh, hell and damnation. "Of course I like you. I like you a
great deal. But you're too young, and you're my… guest."
  "I know you want me. I can tell that."

  Alston's tongue locked on a denial. She hated lying,
particularly to friends. The necessity of doing so in the service
had rasped her soul.

  Swindapa frowned. "I'm not a child," she said angrily. "I wish
you wouldn't act as if I was. I've got the Spear Mark; lots of girls
my age back in the White Isle have babies and their own hearths.
Do you Eagle People have some rule against sleeping with people
who are your guests?"

   "No, we don't, not exactly," Alston said. Christ, I must have
been a monster in a past life to deserve this.

  "Is it because I'm ugly, too pale, not beautiful like you?"

  "Christ no."

  Swindapa's voice took on a note of exasperation. "Then why?"

   Alston opened her mouth to reply, then closed it. It was true;
Swindapa was young, but not a child, not in the way an
American her age would be. She wasn't someone under Alston's
command, either, nor a dependent. What reasons did that
leave? Sheer cowardice, she thought, and leaned forward. Fear
of rejection. Fear of public opinion. Rationalizations. Their lips
met. This may be just the worst thing I could do, but the hell
with it.

   Minutes later she sighed breathlessly into the fine-spun blond
hair. Deer Dancer certainly didn't need any instruction on
kissing. "I've wanted to do that for some time now."

  "Me too." Softly. "I was afraid I never could, after the Iraiina.
But I can." They kissed again.

  Alston felt a cold knot untie itself in her chest, then travel
down from neck to spine as the warm closeness dissolved doubt
and tension. After a moment the hug turned into a moving
embrace. The T-shirt floated to the floor. She gave a sigh of
wonder as her hands glided over the Fiernan's back and stomach
and moved up to cup her breasts. Swindapa wiggled and gave a
little chuckle of delight, arching into the caress. Her hands began
undoing the buttons of Alston's uniform tunic. After a moment:

  "How do you take this off?"

  No bras in the Bronze Age. "The catch is at the back."

  Fingers touched her. "Does that feel nice?"

  "Oh, yes." Any nicer and I may faint.

  "Stand up for a second, I can't get at this buckle."

  Well… Alston stood, grinning. No bashfulness problem.

  "Oh, good! I wondered if your hair was lovely and… what's
your word… nappy down here too."

  I never did like bashful types, anyway, Alston thought, dizzy.
"Come here, girl."

   They lay on the bed, wrapping arms and legs around each
other, kissing and nuzzling. A thought struck Alston:

  "Ah… 'dapa, you have done this before, haven't you?"

  "Of course. I told you about my boyfriend, didn't I?"

  "Ah… I meant with another woman."

   "Oh." Alston shivered as the other's fingers traced up her
spine and lips nibbled down her neck. That feels incredibly good.
Involuntarily her thighs squeezed together with one of
Swindapa's between them.

  "Not really," Swindapa whispered.

  Tickling fingers found the base of her spine. Alston shivered
again and arched her back. The Bronze Age isn't all backward.

   "Not—ah!—not really!?" she said. She hadn't thought it was
the sort of thing you could be uncertain of.
  "It was dark… some friends, after a feast, lots of mead… you
know how it is. Does it matter?"

   "Not really," Alston laughed. The Fiernan Bohuguli seemed a
lot like Trobriand Islanders in some ways.

   "I like it better with these wonderful lamps," Swindapa said.
She looked down to where their breasts pressed together. "See
how we go together, like the moon and the night sky. Isn't it
pretty?"

   "Yes," Alston said throatily. It is also better to give than to
receive. Or at least pleasantly excruciating to start with.

   She pressed the girl back and stroked her lightly with her
fingertips, just touching the fine down-hairs. Lips touched
breasts and tongue curled around a nipple. The other's soft
explosive sigh made her own skin tingle from head to toe, like
being caressed with heated mink gloves. After a while she
worked her way downward, caressing the other's inner thighs
and urging them apart. The hands that stroked her head
trembled, and she smelled the delicious musky scent of desire.
She slid down, stroked a hand onto either hip, and began.
Swindapa gave a shocked cry of surprise and delight at the
delicate caress; then a whimpering moan.

  Well, well, something new has been invented since the Bronze
Age, Alston thought happily.

  "Yeah, it was a lot too much like hard work for my taste," the
man said.

   William Walker nodded, straddling the chair and resting his
elbows on the back. "Over there in Europe, they've got peasants
to do this sort of thing," he said.

   They were watching the parade from a roadside cafe on Easy
Street, before it turned west on Main and stopped in the upper
section near the Pacific Bank. The floats were a little amateurish,
made up with what was to hand. The commonest theme was
sheaves of grain, appropriate considering this was a harvest
festival; some of them were made up into big human figures, and
everyone wore a wreath of it. Most of the floats were
horse-drawn, apart from one pulled by a chuffing steam traction
engine, a miniature model about the size of a Volkswagen.
People milled along in the parade as well, carrying torches; the
school band tootled away. At the front rode the Bronze Ager,
Swindapa—wearing a wreath of wheat around her hair and
carrying a sheaf, and a sash with "Best Reaper" on it over a white
dress. She was laughing and waving, and the hair falling past her
shoulders had the same wheat-blond color as the ripe grain she
carried in the crook of one arm.

    What a fox, he thought. Wasted on the captain, although he
couldn't fault her taste, and it was the traditional reward for
rescuing the beautiful princess, although the application was a
little… unorthodox in this case.

   Chief Cofflin was waiting up on Main; there would be a speech
and a barbecue, patting everyone on the head for working hard.
Suckers, Walker thought. The priests and pastors would be there
too, to bless the fruits of the fields and invoke Big Juju. The
oldest sucker racket in the world. He made a mental note to
himself to become very pious, once the Plan was in place.
Nothing like having the supernatural on your side. People who
thought Big Juju was looking over their shoulders, why, that was
better than all the secret police ever foaled.

   The man—Cuddy, he was called, Bill Cuddy—flexed his hands.
"I can still feel my blisters," he said.

   "Yeah, like I said, it's ridiculous we should be doing this stuff,
as if we were Stone Age wogs," Walker went on. "I mean, think of
what our technology and what we know could do over across the
ocean. Those spear-chuckers would be glad to do the
donkeywork."

   Cuddy looked at Walker, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. He
was a nondescript-looking man a little older than the Coast
Guard officer, brown of hair and beard, wary gray eyes in a
tanned face.

   "Look, Will," he said. "You've been fan-dancing around this
for days now, you and your friends there." He nodded; Seaman
Rodriguez and Cadet McAndrews sat behind Walker, lounging at
their ease. "Gold and dancing girls, yeah, it sounds good. A lot
better than shoveling shit for a living. How, though? Cut to the
chase, man."

   "Okay, Bill," Walker said. "You want to stay here all your life?"

   "Not particularly," Cuddy said. "Leaton's a pretty good boss,
but I don't want to be a machinist, it's just the best thing
available. And I certainly don't want to bust my ass cutting
fucking wheat or chopping down trees. On the other hand, I
don't want to go live in a mud hut, either, even if it's the biggest
fucking hut in the village."

   Walker nodded with a charming grin. "There's a lot more
than mud huts over there, in some places," he said. "There's my
friend Isketerol's hometown, for example, or Greece. Shit, they've
even got running water in the Mycenean palaces—flush toilets.
Which we don't, anymore. Plus we can get the natives to build
what we want. Plenty of places a bunch of us could pretty well
write our own tickets."

   "If the locals didn't punch our tickets," Cuddy said.

   "Timid?" Walker asked, a slight edge of mockery in his tone.

   "No, just cautious. We don't have any fucking tanks, man."

   "Yeah, that's a point. That's why it'd have to be done in a
group, with some organization."

   "And you to head up the organization?"

   He shrugged. "Somebody has to," he said. "Why not me? I've
got the training, I know some history, and I've learned the
languages. There'll be plenty for everyone when it comes time to
share out."

   Cuddy sipped at his drink. "Why me?" he said.

   "You don't have any local ties, you've learned a lot of useful
stuff from Leaton, and I think you're the ambitious type… but
reasonable about it," Walker said. "And hell, it's not even illegal.
The law's back up in the twentieth. Nobody declared Cofflin's
goddam Town Meeting a sovereign state. The captain's authority
came from the Department of Transportation and the UCMJ; it
ended when we got shoved here. They've got no right to tell us we
have to stay here and make like farmers."

   The other man put down his glass. "They've got the power,
though. Most people are behind them. What if I go to the chief,
or your captain, and tell them what you've told me?"

  "Then I'd be in deep shit, and you'd be back to blisters."

   Walker said. The grin slipped off his face, leaving an
expression more like something out of the deep woods. "For the
rest of your life."

   Cuddy looked slightly nervous for the first time. However long
the rest of your life was ran unspoken between them. He nodded
slowly.

   "Okay, I'll think about it." He looked around. "Even with
things the way they are, this place still has some of the comforts
of home. Doctors, for instance."

  Walker flipped one palm up. "Give me credit for some brains,
Cuddy."

   "Ah, right, you'll have gone looking for other people who know
things you need. Like, I did a hitch in the Crotch, too."

   Walker clapped. "Give the Marine a great big cigar!" he said
dryly. "Semper Fi, mac. Now's the time, Cuddy. Are you in, or are
you out? Last chance to be out and just keep your mouth shut.
Once you're in, you do it my way."

   Cuddy finished his drink and looked after the procession. The
music and lights were fading into the darkness of the summer
night, a little cool here near the waterfront even in this season.
The road was littered, straw and flowers and fresh horse dung.
Walker saw his face harden in decision.
   "Okay," he said. "You've got the brains for it, if you've come
this far without getting caught, and you've got the balls for it,
looks like." He nodded and offered his hand. "I'm in… boss."

  "Kemosabe, me think it too quiet," Cofflin said.

  "That's right up there with 'What you mean we, white man?' "
Marian Alston quoted. "What's too quiet, Jared?"

   September was a good time for a civic holiday; the grain
harvest was in, and everything else was well in hand, well enough
for the school year to be starting up again soon.

   Not that there isn't enough to do, Cofflin thought. He was
beginning to see why socialism was impractical, something he'd
simply taken on faith before; there just wasn't a mind alive that
could soak up all the information needed to make all the
economic decisions, even for this miniature city-state. It was a
profound relief to get the government— which had somehow
turned out to be himself and his friends—out of more and more,
after the desperate scramble of the first weeks after the Event.

   Private schemes were bubbling up on all sides: to make
iceboxes to replace refrigerators; to cut and store ice in
underground pits; to start a manufactory to weave sailcloth,
once the flax was cut; another to put up a ropeworks— Eagle
alone had five miles of running rigging.

   Now at least he could deal with priority projects, like the
schooners Marian wanted built, and public policy… and one
policy was that everyone not superessential had to take a few
days off after the harvest party.

   The beach wasn't crowded, there was too much of it and too
few people for that, but there were parties clumped along it as
far as he could see. Flying kites or playing volleyball, throwing
Frisbees, playing the guitar and singing, or just sitting around
talking. More out in the water swimming; Nantucket's offshore
water got fairly warm in the late summer, up in the seventies, in
vivid contrast to most of the New England coast. From what he'd
heard, there were even a few hardy souls surfing today, over on
the south shore. Rod-fishermen were casting in the waves for
bluefish, and families with rakes were gathering scallops. It
might have been an evening some year back before the Event…
except that everything was different. Even the way people looked;
they'd acquired the roughened, weathered patina of outdoor
workers.

   Bonfires cast sparks into the sunset, down the long curve to
the point. The evening was warm enough for his T-shirt and
jeans to be comfortable, or Martha's single-piece bathing suit
and sunrobe, or Marian Alston's cycle shorts and muscle shirt. A
rummage of children went by shrieking down at the water's
edge, chasing a soccer ball and kicking up spray. Their noise was
soon lost in the vastness of sea and sky.

  "Ah, the hell with it," he said. "The only thing that really
worries me is that Pamela Lisketter has shut up."

   He got up and went over to the pit. There was an art to a
successful clambake. First you had to have lots of rock-weed, and
after all the soul-butter he had to hand out in this damned
politician's job they'd saddled him with, wading out to collect
it—Polpis Harbor was the best spot—was a relief. You couldn't
soft-talk a wave; go at it wrong and it dunked you, and that was
that. The pit he'd dug in the sand behind a dune was properly
shallow. He'd lined it with wood—driftwood was best—and then
carefully packed the stones and surrounded them with a mound
of more wood.

   "That's the tricky part," he said to Alston as she came up, beer
in hand. "You've got to build the rocks up so there's room for air
to filter around every rock, but not too much."

   "Looks hot enough," Alston said. The rocks were beginning to
flake, glowing and cracking with dangerous popping sounds.

   "Ayup." Cofflin cast a critical eye on them, then picked up a
long-handled rake.

  "I thought you'd be glad that Lisketter stopped talking about
walking lightly and petitioning to stop all the trips to the
mainland," Martha said, bringing up the baskets of food. She
was just beginning to show, a rounding out of the stomach.
   A father. Christ. He and Betty had never been able to have
kids—something with the fallopian tubes—and had never got
around to adopting. Doc Coleman said there shouldn't be any
problems, but a first child at forty was always risky.

   "That's my worry," he said, pushing at the stones. "She's
stopped talking." The rocks slid into a thick red-white glowing
mass, evenly spread across the pit. "All right, let's get the
rockweed on."

   The bags of damp weed were ready. They tossed it in a thick
layer over the rocks, and clouds of fragrant steam rose, like the
distilled essence of the sea. "Quick, now," he said.

    The food went on top of the seaweed: clams in net bags,
potatoes, young corn in the husk, a quartered turkey, lobsters
still feebly waving their antennae in protest, and cheesecloth
bags stuffed with homemade pork and venison sausage. Alston
borrowed the rake and used it to add a thick closed clay pan with
her contribution in it; more of her famous beaten biscuits. They
threw another layer of weed on top, a tarpaulin over that, then
spadefuls of sand.

   Cofflin took up the thread again: "Lisketter's about as
stubborn as… as you, by God, Martha. If she's given up
speechifying at the Town Meeting, it's because she's got another
angle."

   They returned to the campfire and its thermos of sassafras tea
and cooler of beer. "The other environmentalists are treating her
like a leper," Martha said. "Dane and Terri and the rest."

   "Yeah, but they're the sensible ones. Hell, they're some of our
most useful people. They know things—marine biology,
handicrafts, stuff like that. And they know I'll listen to them. But
Lisketter… she's a True Believer."

   Alston settled back on an elbow, the blanket dimpling into the
sand and her full African features thoughtful. "You're the
expert," she said; he couldn't tell if she meant on clambakes or
political dissidents. Her eyes lifted.
   Cofflin followed them. A group of youngsters in bathing
suits—islanders and cadets—were throwing a football in an
impromptu touch game. Swindapa leaped and caught it,
ululated some ferocious-sounding warcry in her own language,
and went pelting down the beach, fair hair flying in the wind.
Doreen Rosenthal went after her, puffing. Marriage suits her, he
thought. Or our Bronze Age health spa setup. From chunky the
ex-astronomer had gone to a figure that turned heads in a bikini,
particularly among men who liked the look of a woman with the
promise of something to grab on to.

  By contrast Swindapa had filled out a little, and gotten even
more deer-graceful, if that was possible.

  "Lisketter's been talking to me a good deal," Martha said.
"Doing some research."

  "Research on what?" Cofflin asked.

  "Early Mesoamerican cultures," she said.

  "Aztecs?"

   "Oh, no, much earlier than that—Olmec and proto-Mayan,
this century we're in. Really trying to learn something, too. Her
brother's with her a fair amount of the time."

  Cofflin frowned. Pamela Lisketter was odd, but functional.
Her brother David, on the other hand…

   Ian Arnstein stirred beside his copy of The Oxford Illustrated
Prehistory of Europe. He yawned and woke fully when Doreen
plopped down beside him, panting. "Dinner ready yet?" he said.

  "Works up an appetite, snoozing does?" she said.

   "You had me swimming for an implausibly long time earlier,"
Arnstein said. "Have mercy on an antique. Besides, I just
finished harvesting an area equivalent to the state of Kansas."

  Swindapa trotted up, throwing the football and a word over
her shoulder. She settled down by Alston, giving her a quick
brush of the lips and linking hands. Glad we haven't had any
more trouble about that, he thought. The black woman hadn't
flaunted it, but she hadn't made any secret of it either; they'd
just quietly gone down to the Town Building and registered as
domestic partners under the ordinance Nantucket had passed a
year before the Event. And she'd been smiling a lot more. So had
Swindapa. Very, very glad we haven't had any trouble.

   The island depended too much on what Eagle and the Guard
brought in; it had made the difference between bare survival at
very best, and a sufficiency you could almost call comfortable. Of
course, that was one reason why there hadn't been more than a
fringe murmur among the more conservative; plus many
Nantucketers had a Yankee respect for privacy. That and the fact
that it would take a very bold man to stand up to the basilisk
stare of Captain Alston in a cold rage; he'd seen it once or twice,
and had no desire at all ever to experience it personally from the
receiving end.

  Oh, well, I'm in love myself. It made you feel sort of mellow
and ready to think well of people, he found.

   "Furthermore, I wasn't sleeping, I was thinking," Ian said
virtuously. He turned his head toward Cofflin and Alston. "We've
finally figured out something about the Earth Folk language—it's
very distantly related to Basque."

  "Ah, that's interesting," Cofflin said. "Should we try to find
someone who speaks Basque?"

  "Very distantly," Doreen said, sitting near her husband and
combing out her hair. "The way we see it, the languages are
about as close as English is to Sanskrit."

   "Oh." One more factoid for the Useless Trivia File. He
supposed there were people up in the twentieth who'd pay a
fortune for information like that, to settle those perpetual feuds
academics enjoyed.

  "Tartessian is related to Basque too, we think, possibly
ancestral to it," Ian said. "Or closely related to the ancestor of
Basque, whatever that is and wherever it's spoken in this
century. And therefore Tartessian is related to Fiernan. We
think. And Iraiina, it's probably a bridge dialect between
proto-Germanic and proto-Celtic. How's the clambake coming?"

  "Dinner won't be ready for a while," Cofflin said. "Someone
could hand around that bucket of oysters, though."

   The boats brought them back by the hundred bushel; they
were common as dirt over on the mainland coast, but you had to
be careful about the size if you planned to eat them on the half
shell—many were so big the only way to approach them was with
a knife and fork. He began opening these with a knife and
handing them around; there was no butter for the bread, of
course, but somebody had managed to scavenge a half-bottle of
Tabasco sauce.

   Swindapa looked down at her oyster and blinked dubiously.
Then she primed it with a drop of the Tabasco, slid it into her
mouth, and swallowed, imitating the others. "These things are…
interesting, you'd say?"

  "You don't have them in Britain?" Ian asked, surprised.

   "Not where I was live then-when-there—lived then, I mean, by
the Great Wisdom. And I never visited the coast while they were
in season."

   She looked at the next he handed her. Her eyes went wide,
and she began to giggle helplessly. Alston bent her head, and the
Fiernan whispered in her ear.

  "… better warm." He caught the last words; with the full
message, Alston was fighting not to laugh.

   Cofflin cut another slice from the loaf. Every couple's entitled
to their own private jokes, he thought—slightly irked, because
the Arnsteins had also caught the byplay, and they were
laughing too. So was Martha…

  "Later, dear," she said. "I'll tell you later."

  The driftwood fire crackled, flames running blue and green,
and the wind was full of the clean scent of the sea. Cofflin sank
back on one elbow and watched the sun going down over the
waves and headland to the west; Martha handed out blankets
from the picnic hampers, and those in swimsuits wrapped them
around their shoulders.

  Pretty good day, Cofflin thought contentedly. It was amazing
how much better all that wheat and rye and barley and beans
and flax and dried fish in the warehouses made everyone feel.
Maybe quiet isn't so bad, after all.

   The knock was loud and insistent. "Ignore it and it'll go away,"
Cofflin advised. The three couples tried, but it came louder and
louder.

   "I'll get it," sighed Martha. "The doctor says walking is good
for me." She pushed herself to her feet, kissed Jared on the top of
his head, and walked over to the curving staircase that led to the
ground floor of the Athenaeum.

   Marion Alston relaxed, tired after the long day at the beach,
full from the clambake. She smiled with drowsy contentment,
looking across the table at Swindapa. Her love life hadn't been
much; the disastrous marriage with John, the even more
disastrous affair with Jolene that had ended it… and since then
the extreme discretion that someone in uniform had to practice,
in her position. Discretion so complete it made any real
relationship difficult to impossible.

   Of course, Martha and Jared and Doreen and Ian were in
the same boat. Had to leave the twentieth to find the right one.
Truly odd. Even odder that now I am the one who sets personnel
policy for the Guard. Now it's the bigots who have to keep their
mouths shut for fear of consequences. That was intensely
satisfying.

   They were sitting at one of the tables in the lecture hall of the
Athenaeum, a big room covering the second floor of the white
neoclassical main building; a desk was to their rear, shelves of
old books to either side, and at the head a stage where Frederick
Douglass had once spoken.
   Ian and Doreen were sitting side by side and holding hands,
discussing anthropology or something of that nature. There were
times when she was very glad she wasn't an academic.

   "We're closed." Martha's voice came up, muffled by the
distance to the front door. "Tomorrow."

   "I know, Ms. Cofflin," a voice said from below. "Please let us
in, though."

  "I'll go down and help her run them off," Jared said, pushing
himself upright and walking away with a sigh. "Damn, doesn't
anyone realize we have to sleep too?"

   Alston's mind divided between the final cargo loads that
would have to be swung onto Eagle tomorrow and the way
Swindapa was tickling her behind the knee with one bare foot
under the concealing table. If humans could purr, I would, she
decided. Love was wonderful; so was humping your brains out as
an end to the perfect day, and when you put the two together…

   Something in the voices from downstairs brought her back to
full wakefulness with a cold jolt. She sat up and signaled
Swindapa's suddenly alert face to silence with a finger across the
lips.

  "What—" Ian began.

  "Quiet." He shut up as if she'd slapped him.

   She didn't have a gun with her—nobody in the Guard wore
one on the island except on duty, and that rarely— but their
swords were bundled in a pair of blankets with the other things
from the picnic, taken along to do a few kata. She slid the long
steel free of its sheath.

   "Wait here," she whispered in the blond girl's ear. "Be careful.
Get help if things go wrong. Look after Ian and Doreen, and do
not come charging in. Go that way."

  She jerked her head at the sash window and drew the blade.
"Understand?"
  Unwillingly, Swindapa nodded. Just then a gun barked, a
small flat crack; there was a cry of pain, and angry voices raised.
Her mind clicked it off; pistol, very light caliber.

   "Ian, Doreen, stay out of this," she said. Doreen had some
training, Ian none. Damn, this would have to happen with
civilians around.

  She walked to the head of the stairs and looked down.
Nothing. Down the stairs and the circulation desk's to the left.
Main entrance to the right, only a few feet away.

   She kicked off her sandals and padded barefoot down and out
into the entranceway, the sword held in her left hand with the
blade not exactly concealed, but not forcing itself on anyone's
attention, either.

   Pamela Lisketter was there, with her brother and a few more
of her followers. Her brother had the gun. It was a .22 Hammerli
auto target pistol, of all absurd things, looking oversized in his
hand. His eyes glared behind the thick glasses, jumping from one
point to the next, and the muzzle jerked around at her as she
walked into view. A round cracked off, ricocheted somewhere to
her right, and ended in a tinkle of glass.

   Cofflin was down on the ground, swearing softly, and his big
fisherman's hands squeezed a bleeding wound just above his
knee. Either Dave Lisketter was a very good shot—unlikely—or
he'd been dead lucky. Incapacitating a determined man with one
light bullet was not easy, and from the way Cofflin was glaring at
them he had all the determination you could want.

  One of those little bullets between the eyes and you're as
dead as if it was a rifled shotgun slug, she reminded herself.
Everything was very bright and clear.

   Martha was backed up against a desk, quivering with the
anger she was keeping off her face, except for the two red spots
on her cheeks. Pamela Lisketter looked out of her depth, but
grimly determined to carry through. Her brother's twitching eyes
and bared buck teeth gave him the look of a gopher on pure
crystal meth, capable of anything, one way or another. Other
figures moved behind Lisketter, taking boxes of books out of the
Athenaeum.

   "You'd better put that-there down, white boy," she said,
conscious in some remote corner of her mind that the Gullah
accent she'd fought so long and hard to control was back in full
force. "Y'might hurt yoselfs wit it."

   "Drop that sword!" he barked, shrill. She continued to walk
forward, slow and soundless, then halted just beyond arm's
reach. "Drop it."

  "No, doan' think I'll do that thing," she said carefully.

  "Drop it!" He looked bewildered and waved the gun. "You
have to drop it!"

   "That there's a gun, white boy. It ain't no magic wand," she
said, and turned her head to Martha. "What's goin' on here?"

   "Ms. Lisketter," Martha said, her voice frigid with contempt,
"is going to- save the Indians—"

  "Native Americans!"

   "Native Americans. By taking them our guns and a copy of
the Encyclopedia Britannica."

   Alston laughed deliberately, a deep rich sound. "Even crazier
than Ah thought," she said. "Lisketter, tell your brother that if he
puts that there gun down now, I won' hurt him." Much, she
added to herself. These people didn't have any experience with
violence, or much confidence in their use of it. If she could shake
them enough…

   Her senses expanded, taking in the room and the positions of
everyone in it. One long controlled breath. Another.

   Lisketter spoke: "Your own Lieutenant Walker is helping us,"
she said.

  Alston laughed again. "Walker doan' help nobody but
Walker," she said. "So…"

   Lisketter wasn't going to back down. Her brother had so
much adrenaline in his system he was on the verge of going
berserk, which would make him an utterly unpredictable factor.
Time to act.

   A number of things about swords were surprising to those
who'd never trained with them. The first was how far a yard-long
blade at the end of an arm could reach. A drawing cut sliced
through David Lisketter's flesh, through the radius and ulna of
his arm, hardly slowing at all. He shrieked and whirled, the
stump of his forearm sending up twin jets of deep-crimson blood
halfway to the low ceiling as the hand clutching the gun spun
away.

   In the instant that followed, Marian Alston knew two things
with angry certainty. The first was that her training had
betrayed her; she stepped forward into stance and whipped the
blade back and around for the finishing stroke in drilled reflex,
leaving Pamela Lisketter a crucial moment to react. The second
was that Pamela Lisketter also had a gun, and that she'd fired it
through the pocket of her coat.

  Blackness.

   Isketerol smiled as he pushed through the door and over to
the desk. The partition—the plastic partition—had been taken
down; the Amurrukan who lived here year-round didn't fear each
other much. There was only one police officer sitting there
yawning. Probably feeling resentful that he wasn't off-duty and
celebrating the harvest like most of the island. It was dark on the
street outside, save for the noise and lamplight spilling down
from the Ocean Cafe half a block away.

  "What can I do for you?" the policeman asked.

  "You can die, foreigner," Isketerol said in Tartessian.

   His left hand flashed out and clamped in the Amurru-kan's
hair, jerking the man forward, while his right flashed out from
behind his back with the steel dagger the smith had made for
him. It was double-edged and needle-pointed, about seven inches
long, and sharper than anything he'd ever held before. The point
punched into the side of the Amurrukan's neck just behind the
windpipe; he could feel the stiff tissues crunching and popping
as the broader shoulders of the weapon sliced in. He jammed the
man's head down on the desk as he wrenched the blade forward.
Blood spurted, covering the short tunic—the T-shirt—he was
wearing. His victim's movements went spastic for an instant,
then slumped away. Bowels and bladder released their smells to
the iron-copper tang of blood.

  "To You, Arucuttag of the Sea, I dedicate this offering. Take
what I give, Hungry One, and grant my desire," Isketerol said. A
wet finger outlined a red wave on his forehead.

   He turned to the door and signaled the others in. One of them
took a single look and bent over, vomiting, Isketerol hid his
contempt. Despite their powers the Amurrukan are womanish,
he thought.

   "Get moving," he said, raising the barrier between the
entranceway and the night officer's desk.

   He pushed the body backward, so that it slumped off the chair
and onto the floor. No sense in taking unnecessary chances. A
moment served to strip off the gunbelt and buckle it around his
own waist; he cleaned and sheathed the dagger, then took the
crossbow one of Lisketter's followers handed him, instead of
drawing the pistol as he longed to do. Best to use a weapon he'd
practiced with, and one that made no loud noise.

   "Harry? What's going on out there?" someone called from
within the building.

   Isketerol's lips skinned back from his teeth. So. There is a
second one. He waited until the doorknob began to move; the
panels were thin wood. Then he shot.

   Whunng. The crossbow spoke its single musical note. There
was a sharp crack as the bolt punched through the door, hardly
slowing, then a heavy grunt from the other side. The door swung
open toward him and the policeman toppled out, the stubby
arrow sunk to its fletchings through his breastbone. The body
sprattled and leaked, then went still.

  "Quickly!" Isketerol snapped, reloading.

   Lisketter's followers and Walker's men had come prepared, on
the assumption that a sixteen-pound sledgehammer and a pry
bar were the most versatile keys ever invented. They pushed
through into the police station, where the shotguns were in
racks, padlocked closed. Three ringing blows disposed of the
locks, and the long arms went into crates and were manhandled
out to the handcart. Ammunition was in locked boxes beneath;
they simply carried those out, since they could be opened later.
The door of the storeroom where the private firearms were being
kept yielded to two strong men with sledges in less than a minute
of battering. Isketerol nodded approval. The best password is an
ax, he thought. That was an old saying of the Sidonians, and he'd
found much value in it.

   Inside was the smaller type of gun, pistols. Each was neatly
labeled with its owner's name; they were due to be returned to
the private citizens soon, perhaps within the week—that had
been one reason they decided on this night to make their strike
and flee. Hands dragged in two large boxes, padded with
blankets. Walker's man, the gunsmith, began to toss weapons
into each, carefully segregating out the magnums from the
Saturday-night specials, and seeing that Walker's box for the
Yare got the former. Isketerol did the same for the long arms,
where the differences were less subtle and the pictures he'd
memorized made the work easy. Most of the best ones had
already been sent aboard Eagle—that was Will's task—but there
were two that were especially formidable; Garands, Will called
them, weapons with which the Amurrukan had fought a great
war in Walker's grandsire's day. Improved somehow, something
about twenty-round magazines. Lisketter's people accepted the
others, the .22 popguns and the kiddie can-plinkers, without
dispute. Few of them were familiar with firearms, less than he
was, even; and those who knew anything were away with
Liskettef herself.

  Metal clattered on metal. Seconds crawled by like minutes,
minutes like hours. Like a battle, Isketerol thought, working a
dry mouth. Or rather like the waiting before one; he could
remember feeling like this as a stripling, out with the city levy to
fight off a raid by mountain tribesmen on the valley farms
tributary to Tartessos.

   At last they were finished. Isketerol chivvied them out,
turning to check that all the other doors to the building were
locked from the inside. Then he shut the last one and stuck a
strip of soft brass into the slot for the key, hammering the end
home with the butt of his dagger and then breaking it off with a
sideways blow. That would delay whoever came to check on the
station, and moments might be crucial. He took a coat from the
handcart and draped it over his shoulders, hiding the weapons at
his belt. The crossbow went within, his hand on it as he stood
beside the cart in the position he would walk.

   A quick glance up and down the street. Nobody was looking
this way. "To the docks," he said. "Walk as if you own the world."

  If this plan succeeded, Isketerol son of Elantinin would own a
good deal of it. His part had begun well. He could only ask the
Powers that the others might do as well, and keep alert.

   "Go!"

   "Told you the blacksmith would be working," Walker said,
looking down at his watch. "Right where we need him."

  Time to go for it. Three coordinated strikes. Yeah, Isketerol
will bring his off. Lisketter… fuck it, I'm committed. Go for it.

   He could smell the fear-sweat on the men behind him,
Rodriguez and McAndrews. Casual, you dumb bastards, act
casual, he thought. We're just some friends out for a stroll.
There were a fair number of people out tonight, dropping in on
neighbors or heading for parties or whatever. Theirs wasn't the
only lantern drawing a yellow light through the dark streets away
from the streetlamps of Main. He could smell the clean hot scent
of burning charcoal from the big shed up ahead of them, hot
metal, sneeze-making cinders, the heavy frying smell of the oil
bath used for quenching and tempering.
    Dumb bastards. This is the safe part. You're not committed
till we go through that door.

   You took what material was to hand, but he wasn't impressed
with either. The Puerto Rican sailor thought with his balls, and
McAndrews had more nonsense stuffed into his thick head than
one of Lisketter's flakes, just a different flavor. On the other
hand, neither was a coward. McAndrews was even fairly bright,
when his brain wasn't focused on the Glories of Africa;
squeamish, though.

   They could hear the clang of the hammer from the shed; it
was a converted truck garage near Seahaven Engineering, chosen
for its concrete floor. Smoke floated up from the new forge
chimney, ghostly in the star-sheening night sky. Sheet metal had
been laid around the brick of the stack, to lessen the risk of fire.
Red light leaked out around the edges of the doors and through
the big propped-open windows.

   Good. Only Martins and his bimbo there. There were six
separate hearths inside, and a selection of special-purpose anvils.
Walker pushed open the door just enough for a man's body and
slipped through. Even with good ventilation it was hot inside,
and Martins's bare skin shone with sweat. He was standing by
the oil bath, and it hissed and bubbled smoke as he plunged the
bright metal into it. Over by the forge his girlfriend, Barbara,
rested at the pedal-worked bellows, her inevitable cat in her lap.
She was a comfortable-looking woman in her late thirties, given
to wearing long scarves; she'd run an herb store, before the
Event.

   "Hey, man." Martins looked up and smiled, his round-lensed
glasses looking absurd on his long-nosed face. "Like, what's
happenin'? It ain't the time for your regular lessons."

   Walker jerked his head at the other two men. They spread out
behind him, covering the entrances. I really need this turkey, he
told himself. Martins knew his work; he was even a good teacher,
and Walker had put himself out to learn the basics over the
summer. Knowledge was always valuable, and among other
things he now knew how the smith thought.
   "Your friends want some lessons too?" Martins said, his voice
full of its usual dreamy mildness.

   "Actually, John," Walker said, "what I'd like is for you to come
along with me. Right now."

   The mild brown eyes blinked at him. "Okay, but like, I'm
sorry, man, I got some work I have to do. Another time, Okay?"

   "I'm afraid it'll have to be now, John," Walker smiled, coming
closer. "Really."

    "Man, I can't go anywhere now. You know how it is, you're
tempering something, it like rilly has to be done in its own time.
It's the flow, man."

   Barbara was looking up, blinking, an edge of suspicion in her
eyes. Something snapped in William's head. He drew the Beretta
from its waist holster under his jacket and brought it around.

  "Now, you dumb fossil hippie bastard!"

   His voice had taken on a crack of command that usually
brought results. Martins only blinked again, his mouth setting
stubbornly under the walrus mustache.

   "Guns," he said. "Oh, I don't like guns. I'm sorry for you, man.
Heavy. You're carrying some heavy power trip there, like,
authoritarian stuff? No way am I going to, like, reinforce that
sort of negative trip." He turned away, lifted the blade out of the
oil, and began to wipe it down.

  Barbara had given a little scream at the sight of the pistol.
Now her eyes flickered to the other two men, the hands resting
under their sweatsuit jackets.

   "Johnnie," she said breathlessly, "I don't think these guys are
kidding. Maybe you'd better go with them."

  "Hey, Barbs—you can't let stuff like this divert your energy,
you know? It's Will's karma. He has to work it through."
   William Walker smiled bleakly and bolstered his pistol. This
had not been altogether unanticipated. The tanto he drew from
under his left armpit was one of Marlins's own, a heavy-backed
thing with a blade six inches long, very slightly curved, with a
slanting chisel point. The edge was whetted to just short of razor
sharpness. He took four lithe steps and grabbed Barbara by the
ear, dragging her to her feet with a squeal of pain.

   Martins rounded on him, his hammer going up. "Drop her,
man! Drop her now!" His sheeplike face was transformed,
forgelight gleaming in his eyes and turning them red. The
twenty-pound forging hammer went up as if it weighed no more
than a thistle.

   Walker smiled and reached around Barbara from behind,
letting the tip of his knife rest just under her eye. "Let's put it
this way, John. You start cooperating, and I won't cut this stupid
cunt here a new set of orifices. You do anything but what I say,
and I'll start taking bits off her; she's a big girl, and there are lots
of bits. You understand this concept, John? Do you grok it?"

  The hammer dropped slowly. "Yeah," he said hollowly.
"Careful, man, that's sharp."

   Barbara was crying with short, sharp inhalations, tears
gleaming in the red-and-white light of the bed of coals in the
forge.

   "Glad we're communicating at last, John. Here's what you're
going to do."

   William Walker swung onto the Eagle's deck and turned
smartly to salute the flag. "Permission to come aboard, Ms.
Hendriksson," he said, turning to the OOD and saluting her in
turn.

   "Very well, Mr. Walker," she said, returning the courtesy. Less
formally: "What's up, Will?"

  "Working party, Greta," he said. "A few last things the skipper
wanted shifted to the Yare before you take her over tomorrow.
Thought I'd get them done tonight so you'd have a clear deck in
the morning and no distractions."

  "Thanks," Hendriksson said, impressed with his zeal—it was a
holiday, after all. "You've been doing a great job working her up."

   "De nada," Walker said with an easy smile. He'd cultivated
Hendriksson. In a very comradely way; she had a boyfriend
ashore now.

   He looked around the deck. Not much activity, as you'd expect
with the ship at anchor and most of the crew on liberty ashore.
The swell was slight, and the ship rode easily under a sky ablaze
with stars, a frosted band against the night. Not quite deserted,
though. There were still enough people to screw things up
completely, if the alarm was given. Speed was the ticket, that
and acting as if he had a perfect right to be where he was and
doing what he was.

  "Sooner done, sooner I can get to sleep," he said. Hendriksson
nodded and returned to her post near the wheel, trotting up the
gangway from the waist to the poop deck.

   Walker fought not to wheeze relief. Sweat trickled down his
flanks; it could have been very awkward if she'd stayed closer. A
dozen men followed him up the companionway, moving with
professional briskness; he'd drilled them in the movements often
enough, although in fact only about half of them were Coast
Guard.

   "This way," he barked, waving them forward with his
clipboard.

   Lights were dimmed below; he led them down to the second
deck, and the locked door that held the Eagle's armory. Full now,
since the ship was nearly ready to sail; full with the pick of the
island's firearms, what was left after the warehouse fire back in
spring. Gray steel door, and a plain gray lock.

   "Jimmie," he whispered. Even in a small town like Nantucket
you could find appropriate talents, if you looked. A small man
eeled his way forward, knelt by the door, and went to work.
  Four endless minutes later it clicked open; all he'd had to do
was savagely hiss the restless into silence. The door swung back,
and Walker shone his flashlight within.

   "All right, get the light." A larger battery-powered item went
on. "That's the machine gun. Get that and the ammunition first.
Rifles next, then the shotguns, then the handguns, then the
cleaning oil and parts. Keep it looking normal, no running, but
move."

   Seconds stretched agonizingly. When two men dropped a box
of ammunition they were carrying by the rope-sling handles he
had all he could do not to light into them with fists and feet as
the deck boomed. Minutes crawled by, and exultation with
them. I'm going to do it, by God!

  The last boxes went up the stairwells and out on the deck. He
never knew exactly what it was that woke Commander
Rapczewicz, only that he heard her voice from above, raised in a
sharp tone of command:

   "You there! Yes, you. Who are you? What are you doing on
the Eagle?"

   She was the XO. She knew everyone authorized to be on the
ship, at least by sight… and the approximations of uniform he'd
slowly, painfully accumulated for his recruits were only that,
makeshifts. He went up the companionway in four bounding
steps and burst onto the deck. Willpower slugged him to a halt,
made him walk over calmly with a smile on his face, extending
the clipboard.

   "Sorry, ma'am," he said. She was hastily dressed—buttons
misaligned—and blinking sleep out of her eyes, but narrowly
suspicious. "It's right here—"

   That brought him within arm's reach. The heel of his right
hand rocketed up, punching into the angle of her jaw. Sandy
Rapczewicz was a solidly built woman, but his hundred and
ninety pounds outweighed her mass by forty. She snapped
backward with her heels barely touching the ground and lay in a
crumpled heap with blood running from her nose and mouth.
Luckily that brought her into the shadows by the bulwark. He
looked around. Nobody.

   "Get that crate down to the boat," he said, forcing himself out
of his crouch. "Now, you fools. Move it." The flat calm of his
voice was a better lash than a shriek. They fumbled it up and
started down the companionway, feet clattering.

  "Mr. Walker. Is everything all right?"

   Walker turned at the hail from the quarterdeck. Well, there
goes any chance of quietly scuttling the Eagle, he thought
savagely. Fuck, fuck, fuck! Aloud: "Everything's okay, just
dropped a box," he said.

   Hendriksson turned to go. It was at that moment that Sandy
Rapczewicz crawled into a pool of light and collapsed again, her
blood-slick face ghastly in the yellow light of the lamps. Walker
responded instantly, pulling out his Beretta and firing. Bullets
thunked into teak decking and spanged off steel with vicious red
sparks. The lieutenant threw herself flat. Walker whirled and
raced down the gangway, half-throwing the two men and their
burden ahead of him into the boat and leaping after. The
rowboat swayed wildly and shipped water over one side; it was
perilously heavy-laden, even for a calm night.

  "Out oars and stroke!" he roared.

    They responded, clumsily at first, then bending their backs to
it. He turned and knelt, holding the pistol in a two-handed range
grip, squeezing off the rest of the magazine at the side of Eagle's
quarterdeck, shooting at movement and lights. The boat
gathered way, heading for the riding lights of the Yare where she
stood out from Nantucket Town's breakwaters. Voices and
shouts were rising on the Eagle… but he'd put the XO in the
hospital for a while, at least, and Hendriksson was a by-the-book
type. She'd send for orders; besides, there probably wasn't
anything but a handgun or two left aboard the ship. If that.
Damn, I've got all the guns in the world!

  The boat came alongside the Yare. Lines came overside, and
men made them fast to guns and crates. More hands hauled
them up; Walker went up a line himself, hand over hand.
Isketerol stood by the wheel, hands on hips, cloak flapping a little
in the night breeze. He was grinning, and Walker felt himself
answering the expression.

  "We did it!" he said. A bit premature, but they had done it.

  "Arucurtag of the Sea was with us," the Tartessian whooped.

   Two women huddled behind him; Alice Hong, and
what's-her-name, Rosita. Martins and his girlfriend were
securely handcuffed below, and…

  The last boxes came aboard and went below, secured with
padlock and chain.

   "A taste of things to come," he said to the Iberian. "The guns
weren't half as hard to steal as that bastard of a quarterhorse."
As if to punctuate his words an indignant neigh came from the
hold, and the drumbeat sound of hooves on wood.

  Turning to his crew: "Start engines!"

   The diesel coughed to life under his feet. That took longer and
made more noise than he liked, but there was no point in trying
to sail her off in the face of an onshore breeze, not with this
scratch crew. They'd be clumsy at it despite the economical
nature of the schooner's rig, much easier to set than a
square-rigger of the same size. You'll all be sailors by the time
we reach our destination, he promised himself. A vast wild
exhilaration was building in him, and he struggled to keep it
under control. Another boat was rocking not far away; smaller
than the Yare, but more heavily crewed. Walker walked to the
port rail and called across, cupping his hands:

   "Thanks for the help, and good luck!" he called. Thanks for all
the fish, he was tempted to say, but he doubted she'd catch the
reference. "Also goodbye!"

   Panic-stricken cries rose; the other boat's engines were
turning over as well. That had been the plan, to run the engines
dry building up a lead. The plan had been to do it together,
though. He laughed, a barking sound.

   "Where are you going?" Pamela Lisketter cried, springing up
to the rail and clutching at a line. "We need you!"

  "But I don't need you," he chuckled again, and shouted: "And
wherever I'm going, it isn't fucking Mexico, you dumb bitch.
Give my regards to the proto-taco-benders and Formative Period
bean-eaters!"

    He roared laughter again; it had been the hardest work of his
life, putting on a convincing imitation of a would-be tofu
muncher and humanitarian weepy for this collection of…
pathetic geeks and tree-hugging wimps, he decided. That had a
fair, objective sound to it.

   Give her credit, though, he thought, still chuckling. Lisketter
didn't waste any more time—didn't even stop for several of her
crew, who went overside and began swimming back to
Nantucket. She simply put the helm about and headed west…
Isketerol already had the Yare moving east; he'd had a thorough
grounding in how to use the wheel.

   Walker went to stand beside the Tartessian. "I see you
brought Rosita," he said to the adventurer… other adventurer,
he thought. Freedom was like wings, like striding over the earth,
omnipotent.

   "But of course," Isketerol said, looking down at where she
huddled against the rail. "I promised her that I would take her as
a wife. And so I will. Third wife, to be sure— but when we are
finished, my third wife will be more than Pharaoh's great
queen." He jerked his chin without looking around. "Your Alice,
as well."

  Hong got to her feet. "What the hell do you think you're doing,
Will? This tame goon of yours comes along and strong-arms
us—"

   He swung around, still grinning, and pointed a finger. It
didn't quite touch the young doctor's nose, but she jarred to a
halt. "Shut up," he said. "You're along because I don't intend to
entrust my precious personal body to the local witch doctors if I
get sick. But I'm a healthy guy, so your value isn't infinite." She
froze, clasping her arms around her nightgown.

   Restoring order and setting watches took a few minutes. It left
him still full of energy, bouncing on his toes, sleep out of the
question, like a hit of cocaine—something he'd tried once or
twice, on confiscated material that went missing. No more than
that—William Walker wasn't going to wreck himself to make a
bunch of Colombian greaseballs rich—but the sensation was
pretty much the same. Except that this high was free, and high
as the gleaming moon above him. The thudding diesel drove the
schooner's sharp prow eastward at a steady ten knots, water
curling back from it in opalescent wings. He grabbed Alice Hong
by one arm and pushed her ahead of him down the stairs before
the wheel, then sternward and into the captain's cabin. There
were two big bunks on either side of a table, with a semicircle of
padded seats under the fantail windows. Out of them he could
see the Yare's wake disappearing behind him.

  The woman rounded on him. "What the fuck do you think
you're doing, you son of a bitch?" she began.

   Crack. His hand took her across the face, just hard enough to
leave a red imprint. She staggered back a step and caught herself
against the edge of the table.

   "Hey, Will—" Her voice was tremulous. "No need to get
rough."

   "But you like it rough, don't you, Alice?" he said, sliding off his
belt.

   A combination of fear and queasy excitement brightened her
eyes and made her moisten her lips. She did; he'd discovered
Alice Hong had more kinks than a corkscrew, which made her
more interesting… and more useful, in some respects. Leather
whistled in his hand.

   "Please, Will… what are you doing?"

   "Whatever I want, from now on," he said. "I told you about it,
remember?"

  "I thought you were just bullshitting me, fantasies to get me
hot!"

   "No, Alice. I'm going to be a king… and those who follow me
are going to have wealth and power beyond their dreams. As
long as they obey me. Turn around."

    She obeyed. He gripped the back of her nightgown and ripped
it off with a single yank that brought a gasp from her. A hand
between the shoulder blades bent her over the table.

   Smack. The leather raised a welt across her buttocks. "Isn't
that right, Alice? Anything I want." Smack.

   "Yes, God, yes!"

   He laughed and unzipped. "There are a lot of things you'd like,
aren't there, Alice?" he said, and thrust into her. She yelped and
gripped the edges of the table. Wet, he thought. This is one sick
bitch puppy. Wet tightness around him. He began to move, eyes
on the moonlit road across the waters behind the ship.

   "You'd like to have a place where you could dish it out, too,
when you felt like it," he said. "Gold and silk, wealth, girls, boys,
do some real rough stuff of your own, with no laws and no place
you had to stop. Real whips, real knives."

  "Yes," she hissed, pushing back to meet him. "Yes, you
bastard—you weren't just—Jesus!—you weren't just
daydreaming."

   He laughed, one hand gripping the back of her neck with
painful force, thrusting into her with a savagery that battered
her thighs against the edge of the table.

   "I'm the man who makes dreams come true."

           CHAPTER THIRTEEN
   October, Year 1 A.E.
  "She's coming 'round," Coleman said.

   Cofflin rolled his wheelchair closer. The left leg was straight
out before him, the wound a dull ache under the anesthetic. The
other pain couldn't be dulled—he could feel it nibbling at the
edges of his mind, roiling with a killing rage. But there was no
time for it, not if he was to do what had to be done.

   Alston's eyes fluttered open. They were bloodshot, wandering.
Coleman leaned over her and shone a light into one and the
other. A long-fingered black hand came up; Swindapa gripped it
in hers and bent close. Alston's eyes closed again for a moment,
and she sighed. Cofflin fought down a moment of sickening envy;
it wasn't Alston's fault that he was the one left alone.

  "Water."

   A nurse cranked the hospital bed up. "Hospital" was a bit too
grand for the little forty-bed clinic that was all the island
had—all it had needed, when the mainland's hospitals and
specialists were close. Morning sunlight shone through the open
windows, and a breath of sea and flowers. The garden outside
was heedlessly, cruelly beautiful with roses.

  Swindapa held a cup to Alston's lips. The officer felt at the
bandages above her left ear. When she spoke, it was quiet but
coherent. "Hurts like hell."

  "You're a very lucky woman," Coleman said, in the
semi-scolding tone doctors always used in these situations.

  "Ah'm lucky… the bitch was usin' a popgun," she said.
"Concussion?"

   "It skipped around the bone," Coleman said. "Light bullet, as
you guessed. Some blood loss, minor concussion"— which was
better than a serious one, but that was all you could say for
it—"and you'll have a small scar. White streak through your hair,
maybe. It didn't even need a stitch."

  Alston sighed again. Her eyes swiveled around to Cofflin. "Fill
me in."
   "It was Lisketter and her gang," he said. "They took a
boat—the schooner, Bentley—and kidnapped Martha. And I
couldn't do a God damned thing." His fist pounded the arm of
the chair, once, twice.

  "Not… with a bullet through your knee," Alston responded.
"That the whole of it?"

   Cofflin shook his head. "Your… formerly your Lieutenant
Walker was in on it. We got a couple of prisoners, Lisketter's
people who jumped ship. Evidently he and Isketerol, the
Tartessian, scammed Lisketter—got her to help them hijack the
town's weapons and create a diversion. Meanwhile Walker got a
gang of his own together, some Coast Guard, most townies, and
took the weapons from the Eagle's armory, together with the
Yare, its cargo, and John Martins and his lady Barbara. They
were kidnapped too, evidently. Lisketter thought Walker was
going down to San Lorenzo, Mexico, up the Coatzacoalcos River,
to help her, some crazy scheme to arm the Indians there to
protect them from big bad us. Then when the Yare and the
Bentley were both out beyond the breakwaters, Walker gave her
the finger and sailed east."

  "I'm… extremely sorry, Chief Cofflin." Alston said softly.
"Extremely."

   "You did better than any of the rest of us," Cofflin said
roughly. Which isn't very fucking good. "We got overconfident.
We got lazy."

  Alston nodded and winced. "How long?" she said to Coleman.

   "I will not let you out of that bed for another two days," he
said. "I'd like to have you under observation for another week
after that."

  "Not possible. Is Eagle still here?"

  Cofflin cleared his throat and jerked his chin toward the next
bed. Alston rolled her head slowly and carefully. Sandy
Rapczewicz was there, her lower face immobilized in a brace.
She held up a slate, marked in chalk:
  Bastard broke my jaw, Skipper. Sorry.

  Cofflin saw something in her eyes that answered his. He
nodded. "Can you catch them?"

   "Which ones?" Alston said. "Eagle's got more hull speed than
either, but they can both cut closer to the wind. If Yare's gone
east, and she has, I can probably catch him. Those are following
winds—best for a square-rigger. Bentley will be beating to
windward most of the way down. Eagle'd be traveling three sea
miles to her two. Plus it's a big ocean and we don't have spotter
planes. Eagle's radar is short-range."

   "And besides, if you did run Yare down, he's got the machine
gun, and most of the rifles. Unless you could ram him"—as a
former fisherman he knew how nearly impossible that would be,
especially for two ships under sail—"it would be a… hairy
proposition."

  Cofflin waited; he saw with some amazement that Alston was
suppressing a laugh. At last she spoke:

   "Not all that bad… I've got a nasty paranoid mind. The firm'
pin, bolt, and return spring for that Browning are in a box under
my bed at Guard House. Plus the pins fo' the rifles, although he
might be able to make more of those. Various other crucial
parts, too."

   This time she did laugh, a snarling chuckle which ended with
a wince. Cofflin grinned, a baring of teeth. He had a score to
settle with Lieutenant Walker, someday. But first…

  He looked at Alston. There were two hostages on Yare, as
opposed to one on Bentley… four on Yare, if Menendez and Hong
hadn't gone of their own wills; their rooms were suspiciously
unpacked.

   "Bentley," Alston said. "We go after Bentley. More difficult…
do that first. Then run down Yare."

   Cofflin closed his eyes for an instant, shuddering, then opened
them and met hers. His nod held a promise: I owe you one.
Whatever the reason, she'd go after Martha first.

  "Did I get… what's-his-name?"

   "David Lisketter. We're not sure; they didn't leave a body, at
least. They did leave the hand and the gun it was holding. They
panicked, dropped any other plans and ran."

   Alston nodded, closing her eyes and laying her head back on
the pillows. Coleman stood and made shooing motions. "Let her
rest; she'll recover faster that way. Out, all of you!

   Well, you can stay, young lady, if you're very quiet. Out, the
rest of you. Out!"

  "You're not just a prick, Rodriguez, you're a stupid prick, you
know that?"

   The Yare was heeled over sharply, making twelve knots with a
following wind. She was heading north by northeast, into the
higher latitudes, and the raw wind was colder already over seas
huge and ice gray. The schooner crested a rise, hesitated, then
plunged downward with spray flying twice man-height from her
bows. The others of her crew— twenty in all, not counting the
women or Martins—were watching silently, except for the two at
the wheel and a few more leaning over the rail, retching as the
waves lashed their faces.

   "I was just, like, trying to get some," the sailor whined. He was
visibly forcing himself not to cringe, but there was a cornered
viciousness in his eyes. "You got your squeeze, so does the
wog—why shouldn't the rest of us get some?"

   Crack. Rodriguez staggered back and grabbed at a rope, the
imprint of Walker's hand across his face. Behind him Bill Cuddy
picked a spare belaying pin out of the rack around the foremast
and stepped forward, with McAndrews just behind him. Walker
waved them back. This had to be settled right. He went on:

   "Because, you dumb fuck, I told you to keep your hands off the
blacksmith's woman. And you do what I tell you. What part of
that is too complicated for you to understand?"
  "You said we'd all get women!"

   "You will… when you've earned it. Work to do first, fighting to
do—and all of it when I say so. I say jump, you say 'How high,
sir!' Got that? Sabe?" He grinned, slow and savage. "Or maybe
you'd like to give the orders? Come on, Rodriguez, this isn't the
Coast Guard. You want a piece of me, come and get it."

   The Puerto Rican hesitated, wiping blood from his mouth,
then whipped out his knife and lunged. Walker caught the wrist
with a slap of flesh on flesh. Let's do this the simple,
brute-strength, old-fashioned way.

    He squeezed. Muscle stood out in cords along his forearm,
and Rodriguez dropped the knife. It struck the deck point-down
and the sharp point sank in enough to support it quivering by
their feet. Walker kept up the pressure, until the bones in the
smaller man's wrist began to grate together. He screamed and
lashed out with the other hand. Walker caught that as well,
twisting both arms until the seaman rose up on his toes, face
livid and writhing with the unbearable pressure on his joints.

  "And incidentally, Rodriguez, Isketerol is XO of this ship. So
you don't call him 'wog.' You call him 'sir.' Capiche?"

  "Sir, yessir!" came out in a gasp.

   "And the reason I'm not pulling your arms out by the roots is
that you're useful. But not that useful. So you're not going to try
disobeying my orders again, are you?"

  "Sir, nossir!"

   This time it was more like a scream. Walker released him and
he dropped to his knees, arms quivering with the released strain.
The former Coast Guard officer raised his voice:

   "Let's all get one thing straight. I'm in charge. Because I'm
stronger and faster and meaner than any of you, but most of all
because I'm smarter. I know the languages, I know the countries,
I've got the plan. Without me you'd all be dead in a month—if
you were lucky. Any arguments?"
    There was a murmured chorus of agreement, a few grins and
salutes. He went oh: "And I don't remember saying stop working
." The crew split like magnetized billiard balls, back to the duties
he'd assigned. "Thanks, by the way," he continued to McAndrews
and Cuddy, nodding. "I'll remember that."

   Good timing, he thought. Good that it had come so soon, and
in such a formless way. He turned and walked back toward the
wheel, passing John Martins crouched with his arm around
Barbara.

   "You know, John," Walker said cheerfully, "you'd better pray
real hard that I stay alive. Because without me, I don't think you
or your little second-wave flower child there would live long
enough to dance on my grave."

   He turned aside from their glares, laughing. He was still
chuckling when he settled by the wheel. Isketerol was standing
there, his cloak flying in the wind and feet braced against the
plunging roll of the ship, one hand caressing the butt of his
pistol.

   "You like not mutiny, do you, blood-brother," he said with a
grin. The language was Tartessian.

   "Not unless I'm leading it," Walker agreed, in the same
tongue; slow and halting, but understandable. He switched to
Iraiina. "Better this way. I don't have laws and custom behind
me, only my own strength. Now they know my strength."

  "Better still if you'd flogged him," Isketerol suggested.

   Walker clapped the Tartessian on the shoulder. "Maybe with
your people, but not with mine, brother. That would have
convinced them I'd gone mad, and they'd have killed me to save
themselves."

  "You know them best," Isketerol shrugged. "Will they stay
obedient when they learn about the guns?"

  Walker shrugged in turn. "They don't have much choice. They
can't go back, and alone they're just so much meat. We still have
the shotguns and pistols, anyway." He shook his head
admiringly. "That is one smart bitch," he said. "Of course, look
on the bright side." The Iraiina word was sun-turned, but it
meant about the same thing.

   "Is there a bright side to the most powerful weapons being
useless?"

  "Of course. We can't use them without the pins… but Alston
can't either, without the guns. And we have the two
Garands—they're functional."

   Isketerol nodded respectfully. "You are a hard man to
discourage; that is good. No plan works perfectly against an
enemy."

  "Interesting; we have exactly the same saying."

   Walker looked up at the sky, and took a glance at the compass
and his wristwatch. "We're making two hundred miles today," he
said. "But we may have to reef; I don't want to risk the sails."

   Isketerol flipped a hand in agreement, looking around. "What
a ship!" he breathed. "The Eagle, that was like sailing a
mountain—it never seemed real to me. But this Yare, I
understand her. Let me sail her into Tartessos harbor, and in a
year I will have four more like her with trained crews."

   "And she'll be yours," Walker agreed. "Just as soon as I'm in
Tiryns, with my men."

   "We will do much good business together," Isketerol said,
pleased.

  ***

  Up. Guard, guard, crosscut, crosscut, pivot, guard…

   The swords moved in perfect unison, flashing in smooth
controlled arcs. Their feet rutched across the sand of the beach
as one, like a mirror image set side by side as they went through
the kata. Alston held the last movement, crouched with the
sword out and down, until her leg muscles began to quiver
slightly. Then she sank back to one knee, sword snapping
sideways in the move that was meant to represent flicking excess
blood off the blade. Pull the cloth out of your belt, run the sword
through it, slide it back into the sheath, sink back on your heels
with hands on thighs…

  That night was the first time I've ever actually cut anyone
with this thing, she thought as she completed the movement.

   Oh, she'd shot once or twice in the line of duty; hurt men with
her hands and feet a few more times in self-defense. Never used
the steel to kill before, though, or really thought she
would—except in the trancelike way you were supposed to
imagine it as you practiced. Odd. I'd have thought it would
affect me more. Instead she simply felt irritated she hadn't been
able to finish David Lisketter off. Perhaps it was the
circumstances; she'd been angry. Controlled enough to use it
rather than be used by it, but it was nothing like action against a
boatful of drug smugglers. Much more personal; her friends had
been in danger of death, one hurt… she'd never felt so lifted out
of herself before.

  "How are you?" Swindapa asked beside her.

   Alston laid the sheathed sword down before her, bowed to it
with hands and forehead to the ground, and sat back. "No pain
at all. Just a bit of an itch," she said, touching the wound under
a small bandage. Of course, an inch this way and I'd have left
brains spattered on the Athenaeum notice board.

  "I was so frightened for you," Swindapa said. "I asked Moon
Woman to find the good star for you, one that would stand for
your birthstar and namestar."

   "You did the right thing though, sugar," Alston said. "Gettin'
help." Rushing in like a berserker would have been the worst
possible choice at that moment.

   "But you're still hurt," Swindapa went on, the hint of a smile
at the corners of her mouth. "You shouldn't be all alone in that
big cabin on the Eagle—"
   Alston laughed. "I said no yesterday, no this morning, and the
answer's no again at sunset. If I make a rule for my people, I have
to keep it, just as they do."

   The no-fraternization-on-shipboard rule was essential to
discipline, in her opinion, and without discipline a ship was a
snack for the sea to gobble down. There were a good many other
things in the Uniform Code of Military Justice that she'd been
glad to leave behind in the twentieth century, but that wasn't one
of them.

   Swindapa sighed and rolled her eyes. "There's always the
paint locker…"

   "I have to keep the rule better than they do," she said. "Let's
get going. We're not sailing until tomorrow morning, remember.
And I am feeling better."

   They picked up their swords and headed back toward town
along the beach, running at a steady jog-trot with their arms
pumping and bare feet light on the sand. To their right was a
sand cliff, covered in low green scrub and topped with houses,
trees, and a fringe of seagrass. Waves broke to their left,
green-blue and white, hissing up almost to their feet. Out on the
water were the sails of the fishing boats; whatever happened, the
town had to be fed, something that had sunk home to just about
everybody over the summer. The wind blew in from the sea, cool
and welcome. Alston concentrated on her breathing, feeling for
any trace of dizziness or pain in her head.

    None. Good. The island didn't run to a CAT scan or MRI
imager, and there was no way to tell if the trauma had produced
an aneurysm or clot, short of waiting for her brain to burst. She
grinned without mirth. They'd been thrown back more than
three thousand years, but every one of the temporal deportees
still moved forward an inexorable minute per minute in her own
losing fight with Father Time. You could win battles, but entropy
won all the wars.

  "Let's go!"

  They turned inland and raced for a long wooden staircase
built up the near-vertical slope of the bluff.

   From here she could see the masts of the Eagle, where it
waited in the harbor. There were clouds on the northern horizon;
she'd have to check the barometer. Bad to be caught on a lee
shore in this shoal water, with the wind blowing toward the
shallows. Hard to beat off, unless she fired up Max the engine
and won free that way, got some sea room for tacking. Maybe
they'd have the steam tug take them well out, a couple of miles.

   Pedaling back along the smooth paved road was almost a
relaxation. Chief Cofflin was waiting for her, standing with
boulder patience before the police station and leaning on his
crutch. The street there still had bloodstains, where the life of the
two police officers had flowed out under the doorjamb. She
strongly suspected that if Cofflin's leg hadn't been injured he'd be
on board Eagle, all arguments to the contrary. The look in the
blue Yankee eyes was worse than fury; a cold, grim deadliness,
intelligent and calculating.

   "I'm fit for duty," she said quietly, swinging down from her
seat. "We leave at dawn tomorrow." Stepping closer and taking
his hand: "I'll get her back, Jared."

   She didn't add: or die trying. That was for losers.

   "You've got the best chance," Cofflin said, returning a
controlled pressure before releasing her. "That's why I waited
two days." Hiller could have taken the Eagle west and south. She
knew that Cofflin had vetoed that because he trusted her
judgment better in a fight.

   "They need her alive," she said.

   Cofflin nodded, his face unchanging. "That bunch, they'll be
lucky to keep alive themselves."

   "Right. That's another reason I voted to go after Bentley first.
Walker is almost as smart and tough as he thinks he is, and he
needs Martins for his skills and Barbara to control Martins with.
Lisketter will probably need to be rescued herself."
   Cofflin's smile was icy. "Kidnapping's a capital crime, the
Town Meeting decided," he said with a tone even colder. "I don't
give a shit if she dies down there or hangs back here."

  Not much to say to that, Alston thought. Swindapa reached
out and touched Cofflin's shoulder.

   "I will talk to Moon Woman and ask for a favorable
constellation," she said. "The captain already carries great luck
for the rescue of those in need, I know."

  The edge of Cofflin's narrow Yankee mouth turned up slightly.
"Thank you," he said, sounding sincere.

   They turned to watch the last cargo going down to the docks,
ready to be loaded on Eagle. Bundles of spears, of swords, of
crossbow bolts. Suits of armor carried on poles run through the
armpits; the sight prickled at Alston, a shadow familiarity… yes,
the Bayeaux tapestry.

   She hoped that was a good omen; William cognomine
bastardus had sailed to victory. She looked eastward,
unconscious that her expression was twin to Cofflin's. There was
a debt to be paid there too, and she'd always believed in the full,
precise, and punctual payment of obligations.

  Not least, that this world didn't deserve to have Walker
unleashed on it.

           CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  October-November, Year 1 A.E.

   The beach in Bronze Age England had changed since the
Eagle's visit in early spring. The great encampment of the Iraiina
was gone, most of it, emptied as they had dispersed to take up
their steadings. The land it had covered drowsed in the
late-summer sunlight. Grass mantled it, or red-brown fields
ready to be sown with winter grain; Walker supposed the
accumulated filth of the temporary city had manured the soil.
Half a mile inland on a slight rise was a cluster of buildings. He
leveled his binoculars. There was one largish oval hall, eighty feet
by thirty across, with smoke trickling up into the morning air
from three or four places on the thatched roof. The
inward-sloping walls looked like turf, with a framework of heavy
timbers. Smaller buildings were scattered around it, and piles of
trimmed logs he thought were probably for a stockade. There
were large stock pens up already, holding a herd of scrubby
cattle, hairy sheep that looked to be more goat, and a dozen
stocky hammerheaded little horses like Icelandic ponies.
Daurthunnicar's ruathaurikaz, the Iraiina term for a high chiefs
steading. Evidently the rahax kept a good lookout; men were
boiling out of the buildings and hitching up chariots.

   Like home, he thought sardonically. Minus a couple of
millennia or so. He'd been raised on a ranch up in the Bitterroot
country of western Montana, a miserable little cow-calf spread
that had swallowed his father and his older brothers and broken
his mother in a lifelong losing battle with the bank and the
weather. Back to the cowshit, but not for long. He'd gotten out
at eighteen, working harder to make the Academy than he'd ever
done roping or branding.

   There was an additional factor drawn up on the beach.
Tartessian ships, two of them. They were the ships that'd been
there last year, he recognized the horse heads at the bows.
Isketerol must have been extremely persuasive back last spring
to get his cousin to bring ships north this late in the sailing
season; Walker didn't like the thought of taking one of those
glorified rowboats through a winter blow in the Channel, or the
Bay of Biscay. The Tartessians didn't seem inclined to go
anywhere either, since they'd run up substantial-looking huts on
the shore above the high-tide mark.

  "They'll be here for the winter?" he asked Isketerol.

   The Tartessian nodded. "Sail home this near the storm
season?" he said. "In the Yare, yes. In those, never. The Hungry
One eats enough of us as it is, without tempting Him."

   Now, just how far can I trust my good buddy Isketerol?
Walker thought. Oddly enough, rather far, I think. For one
thing, the Tartessian seemed to take certain types of promise
very seriously; for another, their ambitions ran in concert. Or so
I think. But he's from a completely different background. His
logic may be my madness. For that matter, look at how
differently he and Alston thought, and they did come from the
same background, more or less. Well, nothing ventured…

  "You go set up the meeting with Daurthunnicar," he said.
They clasped wrists. "This is the beginning of something good."

   He watched the Tartessian depart, then called McAndrews
and Cuddy; they stood quietly, waiting for him to talk. The
voyage across the Atlantic had established discipline, at least. He
stood, pressing his palms together and tapping the bunched
fingers on his chin. Then, spearing a forefinger at each:

    "All right, this is going to be tricky. We have to get in good
with the locals; and incidentally, we have to watch our
Tartessian friends, just in case they decide to get a jump on their
part of the bargain. McAndrews, you're going to be in charge of
the ship while I'm ashore." The black upperclassman was the
most reliable of them all. He was in this to save his beloved black
Egyptians; Walker had promised to send him to Pharaoh's court
with a ship and a selection of goodies, when he was well set up.
"I'll leave you Smith, Gianelli…"

   He rapped out the orders, most of his mind on the dickering
ahead, and a fraction wandering westward. If his luck was very
good, Lisketter would manage not only to get killed—that was
more or less inevitable—but to take the captain and the Eagle
with her. Alston would certainly go after Lisketter first, with
Chief Cofflin's wife along on that particular Ship of Fools; that
was why he'd persuaded Lisketter that Ms. Martha Cofflin would
be indispensable. With only moderate luck, it would be spring
before the captain arrived in England—and by then he planned
to be ready to depart for points south, or to have an unassailable
position here. He'd read up a little on Lisketier's destination, and
without her blinkers. They were going to be very unhappy when
they got there.

   Good luck with the People of the Jaguar God, Skipper, he
thought ironically.

  "Duck!"
   Everyone on the decks of the Bentley did. The booms swung
across the deck and sails slapped taut as the schooner's bow
swung through the eye of the wind onto the other leg of her tack
southwestward. Martha Cofflin felt her stomach heave again and
forced it down by an effort of will. She closed her eyes on the
painful brightness of the day and sipped again at the cup of
broth.

  When she opened them again, Lisketter was standing near
her, clutching at a stay.

   "It won't work," she said to the kidnapper.

  "I know it probably won't," Lisketter said with a sad smile.
That was enough to surprise a raised eyebrow out of Martha.
"But I have to try."

   "Try what!" Exasperation drove out anger and even nausea.
"Do you really think seven thousand people on Nantucket are
going to overrun a continent and… and shoot all the buffalo?"

   Lisketter shook her head. "It's not that simple, although who
knows what might happen in a few generations? But you've
already begun trading with the Europeans, and they'll learn
things from you. Alston said it herself—in a few years, they'll be
able to sail here. What do you think they'll do, if we don't give the
Native Americans some defense? They'll conquer the Americas,
three thousand years earlier than in the world we left. I know the
people on Nantucket aren't genocides, not really. But the… the
Iraiina, or the Tartessians, what about them?"

   Martha finished the broth and crossed her arms. "I don't
suppose it occurred to you that you might persuade the Town
Council to open peaceful contact with the more advanced
Amerindian cultures? There would be profit in it for the island,
as well. No, you have to hare off on this crazy stunt—"

   "They never listened to me! I was silenced!"

    "You and Andrea Dworkin," Martha said scornfully. "They
listened to you, all right; they just didn't agree with you. Which
isn't surprising, considering the way you treated them like idiots
or bad-mannered children. Did you think you could scold them
into agreeing with you?"

  "I told them the truth," she said quietly. "Now, Martha—"

  "That's Ms. Cofflin to you, Pamela Lisketter."

   "Ms. Cofflin. We're here, you're here, and I hope you'll be
reasonable and help us. You have knowledge that will be crucial."

   Martha regarded her bleakly. "I'll do my best to keep you
alive," she said, laying a hand on her stomach in unconscious
protective reflex. "I daresay you won't listen to me about that,
either."

  "I—we—intend to consider carefully anything you can tell us.
Making contact with the Native Americans—"

   "Olmecs, isn't it?" At the surprised look: "I do note what
research people do."

  "Yes, they seem to be the most likely to benefit from what we
have to offer. In any case, making contact will be a very delicate
matter. We don't want to frighten them, or disrupt their culture
more than absolutely necessary."

   Oh, Lord have mercy, Martha thought. Does she really think
that the Indians are so fragile that twenty people in a boat can
bring them crashing down? Their bacteria might, of course, but
Lisketter seemed to have been very careful about that.

   Instead Martha switched back to practical matters. "Do you
really think you can get away with it? Think, will you? The Eagle
is probably on our track right now."

   "Unless they're following that… that… Walker to Europe," she
said. "In any case, what can they do? We took the guns."

   "Those that Walker didn't hijack to Europe," Martha said
with malice aforethought. There was a certain satisfaction in
seeing Lisketter flush. "You shot Jared and Captain Alston,
Lisketter, but you didn't kill either of them. Never do an enemy a
small injury." Particularly if the enemy is smarter and tougher
than you'll ever be. You and your brother both seem to think
firearms are Evil Magical Talismans that you can wave and
everyone has to obey you. No use telling her it didn't work like
that.

   It was amazing what a combination of strong emotion, faulty
assumptions, and inexperience could do. Make a high-IQ type
act like an utter natural-born damned fool, for instance.

   The one good thing about this, Marian Alston thought, is that
tacking broad means we cover more ocean and are more likely
to blunder into 'em.

   The Eagle lay hard over with her port rail nearly under and
white water foaming from the bow and hawse holes; the wind
was out of the south—a little to the east of south—and they were
making sixteen knots with all sail set. She locked her hands
behind her back and gritted her teeth, taking little of her usual
pleasure in the dolphin grace of the big windjammer's passage or
the blood-flogging breeze and spindrift in her face. Sixteen knots
by the log, but they were tacking, zigzagging up into the teeth of
the wind and making more mileage left and right than forward.
Eagle was square-rigged on her two forward masts, which meant
she couldn't point anything like as near to the wind as a
schooner. That gave the Bentley a two-knot advantage in actual
sea miles covered southward, overall, sailing straight into wind
like this. She looked up into a cloudless sky. If the wind were to
back and come out of the north, she could cannonball down at
twice the Bentley's best rate; schooners were at a disadvantage
running before the wind, and the one she was chasing was no
greyhound, nor was it well manned, probably.

    On the other hand, if I could run her straight before the
wind, I might well simply sail past Bentley. The ship's radar had
a limited coverage, and it was a big, empty ocean. If Lisketter
changed her plan and ran the Bentley into the Chesapeake or one
of the big Gulf rivers, there wouldn't be the chance of a
Klansman at a Black Muslim convention of finding them.
Everyone was keeping an eye out, too, not just the posted
lookouts; that was an old Coast Guard tradition.
   Tom Hiller cleared his throat. "Very well, Mr. Hiller," she said.

   "Aye aye, Captain." Louder: "Ready about!"

   The orders echoed louder than they had before the Event,
without the continual burr of generators and fans; those were
secured for emergency use only, now.

    Feet thundered across the deck. At least they had a full
crew—overfull. Walker had taken only six of the Eagle's
complement with him, thank God. None of them were men she
would miss, except McAndrews, and she could guess how Walker
had scammed the black cadet; no women among the deserters,
she noted without surprise. As it was, there were a hundred and
fifty sets of hands available for this maneuver where thirty would
do at a pinch.

   Commands cracked out, to the helm, to the hands on the lines
across the decks. Everything had to be adjusted throughout the
maneuver, and precisely, with split-second timing.

   "Fore manned and ready," shouted the foremast captain.

   "Main manned and ready."

   "Mizzen manned and ready."

   "Helm's alee!" she ordered. "Right full rudder."

   The four hands standing on the platforms beside the wheels
heaved at the spokes. Down in the waist and on the forecastle
deck came a chorus of heave… ho as the lines controlling the
yards that held the square sails braced to starboard were paid
out and their mirror images drawn taut.

   "Ease the headsail sheets!"

   The ship's bowsprit began to move from port to starboard, left
to right. Dacron thuttered and flapped in thunder-cracks up
aloft. She could feel the ship's deck swaying back toward the level
as the wind lost leverage on the sails. This was the critical part of
the maneuver; unless they were hauled around sharp and the
vessel's momentum was sufficient to carry her through the dead
spot, she could be taken aback and held in irons—sliding
humiliatingly sternward.

  "Haul spanker boom amidships!"

   "Rise tacks and sheets!" Clewlines hauled the square sails up,
spilling wind.

  "Mainsail… haul!"

  The Eagle was through the eye of the wind, and the orders
continued:

  "Shift headsail sheets!"

  "Ease spanker!"

  "Ease the helm!"

  The wheels spun, pointing her rudder amidships.

  "Let go, and haul! Set the main!"

   Eagle tilted to starboard. The sails swung, set, braced, filled
out into lovely white curves. Feet moved across the deck in a
dance more neatly choreographed than any ballet, making lines
fast to belaying pins, cleats, and bits.

   "On the port tack, ma'am," Hiller said, satisfaction in his
voice.

   Alston looked at her watch and the clinometer, and overside.
They were almost back up to speed, slicing southeast instead of
southwest. "Six minutes forty-five seconds. Very good, Mr.
Hiller."

   He nodded. That had been very good. There was an easier way
to come about onto the other tack, but it meant going the wrong
way for a few minutes, and took a bite-sized chunk out of your
forward passage.

  And there was no time to spare. One small consolation was
that they knew, pretty well, where the Bentley was headed. The
other was that Cofflin knew better than to nag her over the
radio; she'd had superiors in uniform who hadn't grasped the
futility of jogging a subordinate's elbow nearly so well. Even as it
was, she felt an impatience that seemed strong enough to urge
the Eagle faster through the water by a sheer effort of will.

    Swindapa came bounding up the gangway stairs from the
waist, where she'd been helping out on the line teams. You never
have to tell her twice, or find her work to do, Alston thought,
fighting back a grin she knew would be both unprofessional and
silly. The impulse faded quickly, driven out by worry. There
would probably be fighting at the end of this trip, one way or the
other.

   Loving means giving hostages to fortune, she told herself
grimly. Do your best; it's all anyone can.

   "That's the Coatzacoalcos River," the yachtsman among
Lisketter's followers said.

    Silence fell as the Bentley ghosted forward under an
unmerciful noon. The air here where the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
narrowed was hot, hazy and hot and damp, still and full of the
smell of vegetable rot. The waters of the Gulf of Mexico—Martha
supposed it should be called that, for want of another
name—beat on the shores as the schooner coasted down along
them; sometimes on beaches of white sand, as often on marsh
and forest growing tangled to the water's edge. They had stopped
at islands for wood and water, never seeing a dweller. There were
Indians in the Caribbean, she knew, but they were few and
scattered. Farming hadn't penetrated there yet, and wouldn't for
some centuries. Mile after mile, white beaches that turned
jungle-green at the high-tide mark, islands like lush emeralds in
the unbelievably blue sea.

   Martha listened to the conversation behind her at the wheel
with half an ear, already convinced that the sailor was right. The
maps were unreliable for the smaller things, lesser streams,
shoals, reefs, the precise outlines of coasts; such had changed too
much in the three millennia between now and the day the charts
were drawn. That said, mountains and the great rivers were
much the same as they'd be in the twentieth. This river was
broad and deep, fringed by mangrove and marsh along the coast,
rising up to dense jungle behind. Ebony, mahogany, dyewood,
great buttressed trunks coming into view as the schooner slowed
still more and breasted into the current. Vines laced them
together, thicker than her thigh and running up to the tops of
the canopy nearly two hundred feet above.

   The engine of the Bentley burbled into life for the first time in
weeks. Sails came down with a rattle, to be roughly lashed to the
booms. As the diesel blatting echoed back from the near bank of
the river, birds exploded out of it. There were thousands of them,
showers of feathered shapes in canary yellow, red, blue, sulfur
gold, and sunset crimson. Parrots, macaws, others she couldn't
name, their cries loud and raucous in the heavy air. Alligators
slipped off mud-banks into the water with little rippling splashes
like low-slung dragons. Insects rose from the river and the
swamps along it in clouds, and without the sea breeze to scatter
them soon had everyone on the schooner's deck slapping and
scratching.

  "Do you have a depth sounder on this ship?" Martha asked.

  "No," the yachtsman said. "But this looks pretty deep."

   Oh, God, Martha thought, wiping at her face with a
handkerchief. Sweat lay oily, refusing to dry. At least she'd
stopped getting so sick.

   Most of the crew—she supposed that was the way to describe
Lisketter's followers, after a couple of weeks at sea—were resting
along the rails of the schooner, pointing and chattering.
Everyone was tanned dark, and they looked shaggy and ragged,
but they'd managed to get here without sinking or running onto
something, rather to Martha's surprise.

    She turned to Lisketter. "You should have someone checking
the depth," she said. "And shouldn't you break out the guns, after
all the trouble you went to to steal them?"

  Lisketter had been staring out at the passing wilderness of
wood and jungle, transfixed. She came to herself with a start.
"Whatever for?" she said. "There's nobody here but the Native
Americans we've come to help."

    Martha reined in her sarcasm with a massive effort of will.
"They might… they might misunderstand you," she said. "After
all, we can't talk to them until someone's learned their language.
How do you expect them to know you're friendly?"

   "Well, they'd certainly misunderstand any show of force,"
Lisketter said, shrugging. "We'll demonstrate them when we get
to their leadership. From what I've read, the Olmecs had a deep
spiritual relationship with nature, so it'll probably be priests or
priestesses of some sort."

   Martha closed her eyes and sighed, sinking back on the
blanket, only to come alert again when voices rose in excitement.
The river had narrowed, though it was still hundreds of yards
across. On the north side was a village in a clearing, set on the
natural levees that always flanked a lowland river like this, given
to seasonal floods. Fields surrounded it; plots of maize stood
green, overgrown with bean vines, and interspersed with cotton
and other plants she couldn't begin to identify. The houses were
rectangular, thatched, with sides of mud and wattle to waist
height and rolled-up screens of matting below. Canoes were
drawn up on the dirt beach that fronted the slow-moving river,
some of them quite large; others were out on the water, fishing.
The buildings straggled, except for some larger ones grouped in
a square of beaten dirt around a rectangular earth platform in
the center. That held something much larger atop it, still timber
and thatch but with corner posts intricately carved. Smoke
drifted up from hearths outside the doors of huts and from a
larger fire on the platform.

   Must be a few hundred people at least, Martha thought. They
were dressed simply, a twisted loincloth for the men and a short
skirt for the women; otherwise their brown skins were bare to
the late-day sun. As the Bentley came into sight they stood for a
moment stock-still and amazed. They were almost close enough
to see expressions, more than close enough to hear the terror
that sent men and women pelting screaming back toward their
homes, that drove canoes ashore with flashing blades. A
warbling, bellowing sound came from the low earth platform in
the center. Conch-shell trumpet, she knew with a tremor that
chilled even in this steam-oven heat. From there, order spread
through the panic and chaos of the village. A small knot of men
descended from the mound, the sun bright on their cloaks and
masks and vestments, on nodding plumes and banners. They
moved among the villagers, pushing and shoving them into
silence, shouting, haranguing, slapping faces. Men dashed off to
their huts, returned with spears and other weapons she couldn't
make out. They moved down to the shore.

   Despite herself, Martha leaned forward in fascination. Among
the crowd on the riverbank, circles opened up, and men were
swinging lines around their heads. From them came a whirring,
thuttering roar that shivered down into the bass notes and back
up again, each a little out of time with the others. Bullroarers.
The conch trumpet wailed, and beneath it came the beating of a
drum—a massive, booming, thudding sound that echoed down
from the mound and against the trees on the other side of the
river. Her head came up. Faint and far, another echoed it, the
same irregular staccato rhythm.

  "Signal drum," she said, touching Lisketter on the arm.
"They're sending the news upstream."

  They waited, sweating, as the sun crept lower in the sky.

   She tried not to think about Jared, without much success.
Poor bear. He'd be fretting so… Lisketter paced, watching the
shore.

   "Why don't they send anyone out?" she asked fretfully,
slapping at her face. A red splotch appeared where the mosquito
had been. "What are they waiting for?"

   "Waiting for us, I think," Martha said. Lisketter glanced at
her, and she sat back against the rail. "No. This foolishness is
your idea. You can force me into the boat, but you can't make me
think or talk."

   David Lisketter was thin and pale, but the wrist hadn't
festered. He pushed forward. "I'll do it, Pam," he said. "I've been
studying that Mayan dictionary."

   Much good may it do you, Martha thought, but did not say.
The archaeologists didn't have a clue what language the Olmecs
spoke, since they hadn't left any written records. The theory that
they'd been Mayan-speakers depended on a single very late
inscription resembling the Mayan calendar. For that matter, the
language ancestral to modern Mayan would be unrecognizably
different in the thirteenth century B.C. Only a professional
linguist would be able to tell that some barbarian dialect in
Germany-to-be this night was going to turn into English in the
course of the next three thousand-odd years.

    There was a good deal of arguing, but eventually David
Lisketter and three others lowered the boat that hung at the
Bentley's stern and tumbled down the rope ladder into it. She
saw that he had a pistol strapped to his left hip; Lisketter saw in
the same instant, opened her mouth, and then closed it. Silence
fell as the boat approached the shore. The thudding drum on the
platform rose to a crescendo and then stopped along with the
conch and bullroarer; it was only then she knew how the great
drum had come to dominate the scene, like the heartbeat of a
giant who'd swallowed them all. Then she realized that it hadn't
stopped, not completely. The upstream echo of the rhythm went
on for three seconds after the drum in the village had halted.
Then true silence fell, quiet enough that the cries of the birds
were the loudest things they heard. Flocks swirled in toward the
treetops backlit by the setting sun. The way the river bent
southward here put a tongue of jungle between them and the
west.

   The schooner's lifeboat grounded among the beached canoes
of the villagers. David Lisketter and his companions advanced
toward the clump of brightly clad watchers, their open
hands—only one, in his case—held out in sign of peace.
Headdresses of plumes and fur nodded as the locals stood to
meet them.

  "I can't see what's going on," Pamela Lisketter fretted.

  "It wouldn't do you any good if you could," Martha muttered.
You couldn't predict what a people this alien were going to do on
first contact. It all depended on how the strangers fit into the
local belief structure. Did gods come from the east? Cortez had
used that myth, which might or might not be present
here-and-now. Or perhaps they had a belief like the Balinese,
that evil came from the sea and goodness from inland. Or they
might be perfectly ready to deal with strangers as humans, odd
but otherwise like themselves.

   A tossing confusion went through the meeting ahead. Shouts
arose. Then a sound this river had never heard before: the flat
snapping crack of a light automatic pistol. "What is he doing?"
Lisketter cried, shrill fear in his voice.

  Trying to save his life, Martha knew. It was the only reason
someone like Lisketter's brother would shoot at his precious
Olmecs.

    Everyone on board had eyes glued to the shore now, difficult
though the fading light made it. There was a swirling eddy in the
crowd around the Americans, shouts and screams. Weapons
moved, flourished overhead or driving forward; she couldn't see
precisely what they were, except in a general way. Despite the
danger, Martha felt a small chilly satisfaction. She'd been
waiting for something like this since Lisketter's brother came
into her library behind a gun. That gun cracked again and again,
and men toppled—some of them men in elaborate cloaks, as well
as the near-naked peasant spearmen. A bubble of space grew
around the Americans for a second, and they took advantage of
it, toppling backward into their boat and shoving off. Two
dragged a third, and David Lisketter walked backward toward
them, holding the gun threateningly.

   Some of the Olmecs had fled—all villagers in loincloths,
Martha noted, not the men in bright costumes. Others stood
their ground, waving weapons and fists; several lay still, or
writhed groaning on the ground. The ones still hale took fresh
heart when the boat slid out into the water.

   The… priests? nobles? officers? Martha wondered; men in
authority, at any rate—pushed and yelled them forward. The
boat went slowly. Pamela Lisketter's hands gripped the rail with
a force that turned the fingers white as flung spears and darts
beat the water around it or stuck quivering in the wood. Her
brother fumbled with the pistol, reloading, then began to shoot
back as the others rowed. Another Olmec toppled, but most of
the bullets went astray or inflicted only wounds; it was too far,
the boat too unstable, and the light too uncertain for the gun to
be very deadly.

    Then one of the rowers stood, screaming. A black-hafted dart
sprouted between his ribs. He fell, thrashing and moaning, and
the boat capsized with him. The others were thrown into the
water. Lisketter screamed again and again. Others rushed
aimlessly around the deck of the Bentley; a few with more
presence of mind dashed below and returned with weapons.
Martha intercepted one of them and snatched the gun away; it
was a .22 target rifle, a bolt-action toy with a tubular magazine.
She'd never done any shooting to speak of herself, but Jared had
shown her some things on general principle. Men from the
village danced and screamed triumph on the beach; others were
manning and pushing off in canoes, emboldened by their victory
over the pale wizards.

   If we can beat them back, we can get out of here, Martha
thought. Not even Lisketter would be crazy enough to linger
after this.

   Because she was looking northward, Martha was the first to
see what came around the bend in the river. A moment later
everyone did, as the flotilla of canoes whipped their torches into
flaring life and the drums began to beat again. For a long instant
she stared slack-jawed at the spectacle approaching them.

   Most of the canoes were simple dugouts, holding four to
twelve men. But leading them were a pair of giants,
double-hulled craft with the floats eighty feet long and linked by
a broad platform. Burning torches on tall poles gave detail a
ghastly clarity. Each held forty paddlers to a side, standing and
digging their leaf-bladed oars into the water with a chant of
hi-hi-ye-YI, hi-hi-ye-YI, repeated endlessly. Flamelight glistened
on the sweat-slick skin of their muscular bodies. Water coiled
back from the prows, which curled up in a ten-foot figurehead
carved in the form of a snarling jaguar pug face. Great drums
stood on the platforms, man-high, with two drummers each
beating out BOOM-ba-da, BOOM-ba-da with yard-long wooden
mallets. Behind the drummers the platforms were crowded with
warriors in garish cloaks and trappings, carved helmet-masks
fantastically colored and sweeping up to impossibly tall plumes
of flamingo and quetzal feathers. They waved spears and weirdly
carved wooden club-swords and rakes edged with the teeth of
sharks or with obsidian chips. At the rear of the giant
catamarans hulked platforms on which the commander
squatted, and above that more jaguars—this time in frozen
wooden leaps. Every inch of the big canoes that she could see was
carved, painted, inlaid, in a riot of grotesque imagery.

   Both catamarans held at least forty armed men. Scores of
canoes followed after.

   Martha grabbed the yachtsman who had served as Lisketter's
captain. "Get us out of here!" she screamed in his ear, shaking
him, tasting sour vomitus at the back of her throat. Features
slack with bewilderment and fear firmed a little, and he turned
and dashed for the wheel. "Shoot, you fools! Shoot!" she called to
the others.

  "No—we came to help—" Lisketter began.

   For once her followers ignored her. The diesel coughed and
roared into life. When it did the men sitting cross-legged on the
platforms at the rear of the catamarans sprang erect. They held
up masks overhead in both arms, making pushing motions
toward the schooner. Magic of their own, Martha thought
wildly. She aimed at one of the men, remembering what her
husband had told her— breathe out, squeeze the trigger—and felt
the light kick of the .22 against her shoulder. The man looked up
as the ceremonial mask tugged in his hands, then returned to his
gestures. Martha worked the bolt and shot, again and again until
the magazine was empty. She wasn't sure if she had hit anything.
The schooner lurched under her feet as the helmsman tried to
take her downstream and ran up against the anchor. The Bentley
swayed and dipped, throwing people off their feet. Someone with
more presence of mind than most ran to the bows and leaned far
overside, chopping at the mooring line with a machete.
   Martha saw a warrior in the lead catamaran set an atlatl dart
in his spear-thrower. The arm whipped forward and the
American hung upside down, pinned to the side of the schooner
like an insect in a collector's cabinet. More of the darts whistled
by in flat fast arcs, and slingstones cracked. The schooner's
engine gave a cough and died. Martha went down behind the
meager protection of the low deckhouse; some impulse made her
pull Lisketter down beside her. The catamarans swept in on
either side, throwing grapnels pronged with wood and stone.
They bound fast to the bows of the Bentley, and the rowers threw
themselves flat. Over them, vaulting off their backs, came the
warriors in their garb of feathers and skins and painted wood.
What followed could hardly be called a fight. She saw one Olmec
slam a three-pronged pick shaped like claws into an American's
shoulder, haul him close like a gaffed fish, and stab into his belly
with a knife of volcanic glass. Another crewman reeled back with
his chest gashed open by a shark-toothed rake.

   The noise died, except for a screaming that went on and on
until a warrior stabbed downward to end the annoyance. A few
of Lisketter's followers fled belowdecks. Olmecs followed them,
poking ahead gingerly with their spears and holding torches
high. Others scoured the deck. Martha came to her feet
cautiously, holding up empty hands, trying not to shake. The
onslaught had been so quick and brutal that it was hard to
grasp; it seemed impossible that people who'd been whole just a
few seconds before were now bleeding lumps of meat. Eyes
turned toward her, and toward Lisketter where she crouched in
shock-driven silence. Pride stiffened her spine; she crossed her
arms on her chest, resisting the impulse to lay protective hands
over her swelling belly. They can kill me, but I'm the only one
who can make myself act like a disgrace, she told herself. And
she didn't think that groveling would do much good with this
bunch.

   The warriors seized her, and hauled Lisketter to her feet. They
were hustled forward to the clearer space near the bow; there
was only one other living prisoner, dazed, bruised, and battered.
The Indians were laying a gangway from one catamaran to the
deck of the schooner. The man from the platform at the rear
stepped up onto it, and it shuddered under his tread. He was big,
tall and massively built, heavy muscle moving under a generous
coat of fat. Cross-straps over his shoulders held an ornate
pectoral of colored woods inlaid with rosettes of stone. Over it
hung a concave mirror that she recognized as polished hematite,
iron ore, polished until it reflected torchlight as brightly as glass
might have done. On his head was a mask-helmet in the shape of
a jaguar's head cunningly fashioned from wood, bone, and real
fur, with his own thick-lipped, heavy-featured face staring out
through the fanged muzzle. A cloak of jaguar skin half-hid his
massive upper arms, and one hand bore a curious ceremonial
weapon, four basalt claws fixed at the end of a yard-long shaft.

   He walked with an odd swaying gait, each foot turned a little
sideways as it went forward. Of course, Martha thought, dazed.
He's trying to imitate a panther … no, a jaguar. Her glance
darted aside. The warriors were much like the folk she'd seen on
visits to the Yucatan over the years; darkish brown, of medium
height, their faces almond-eyed and big-nosed; these men were
tremendously lithe and muscular as well, many of them
hideously scarred under their finery. She remembered how
they'd advanced howling into gunfire, undaunted by death
utterly mysterious and supernatural. Their commander looked
different enough to be of a separate race, even discounting the
obesity. Or maybe an inbred royal family? Priest-king, she
decided. It was a label no more likely to mislead than any other.

   There was no mistaking the look in his eyes, though. Power,
raw and absolute. It showed too in how the warriors bowed low
as he passed. Others held the prisoners forward for his
inspection. A word, and they were stripped as well, and torches
brought close to examine them. The big man seemed fascinated
by the strangeness of their skin and hair, pinching and tugging.
When he came to Martha his eyes lit and he touched her
rounded belly, smacking his lips as he did so. His teeth were filed
to points; they glittered in the torchlight. The pupils of his eyes
were wide, wider than the dimness would have made them. Next
he turned to Lisketter.

   "We came to help—" she began.

   There were shocked cries from the warriors, and raised
weapons. Evidently you didn't speak until spoken to, with Big
Chief Baby-Face. The back of his meaty hand smacked across her
mouth, leaving blood trickling in its wake. Lisketter's eyes went
even wider with shock; she looked around, as if the blow had
brought her out of a stupor and made her realize that this was
real. The priest-king's hand rose to strike again, and then froze.
He gave back a step, pointing at Lisketter's face. He shouted
something in his own language, a tongue that seemed to consist
mostly of "u."

  "x," and "z" sounds.

  No, not at her face! Martha thought, with a trickle of
desperate hope. At her eyes, that's what he's frightened by.

   What… of course! Lisketter had greenish-yellow eyes, about as
close as a human could get to the way the eyes of one of the big
cats looked. Were-jaguar cult. Nobody knew for sure, but the
Olmec myths—or at least some of them—seemed to center on a
mating between a woman and a divine jaguar that produced a
race of part-felines. Evidently the archaeologists and
anthropologists had guessed right this time. I get off because I'm
pregnant, and Lisketter because she's cat-eyed.

   Spared. Who knew for how long, and for what purpose? But
every moment you were alive was one you weren't dead… The fat
chieftain recovered his composure, enough to signal again with
his claw-pick. The warriors holding the two American women
dragged them back a few paces. More forced the next captive to
his knees and pulled back his head. A flat-bottomed ceramic
bowl was brought forward, one big enough to hold gallons. She
closed her eyes and swallowed hard, heard the brief desperate
gasping and a long scream cut off in a gurgle. Slowly— it was the
hardest thing she had ever done—she forced the lids open again.
The warriors were dragging the corpse away by its ankles—away
to the catamaran, with the other bodies, those killed in the
fighting. She thought she knew why. The priest-king held the
flat-bottomed bowl up to his lips and drank deeply, trickles of
red running down from the corners of his mouth, then passed it
to his followers. Then what she had expected happened; fire on a
big wooden ship was a menace they'd be unlikely to understand,
not having anything with enclosed decks. Flame belched out of a
porthole, and the remaining Indians poured up the
companionways, yelling in panic.

   The gangway thundered under the chiefs steps as he retreated
to his own vessel. His followers hustled the Americans in his
wake and the rest poured after. The oarsmen rose from the
crouch where they had waited like statues and pushed their craft
away. By then fire was licking upward from every door and
porthole, red tongues of flame casting a flickering light on the
river, and the roar became loud. Martha watched motionless,
ignoring the grip on her arms. Beside her Pamela Lisketter stood
as silent, weeping slow tears that fell from her face. The canoes
rowed for the land, with a last fierce heave by the oarsmen that
sent the keels of the twin hulls riding up on the slick mud.

   Out on the river the masts of the schooner fell into the blaze;
there was chanting and singing ashore, dancing, fires built high
in the hot insect-swarming night. Martha and Lisketter were
dragged up to the earthen mound, past larger buildings of wood
and thatch, past hearths being prepared for cooking. Behind a
massive wood table was a cage; hands thrust them inside, and
spearmen stood as guards. The giant priest-king seated himself
on the table—throne, perhaps?—and sat like a statue with legs
crossed. His warriors stood before him, then went to a resting
posture on one knee, weight back on that heel. Their feather
crests bobbed in the slight breeze, casting grotesque shadows as
the feast was prepared; they and the platform-throne cut off
sight of what was being done.

  A little later a woman came with bowls of food: cakes of maize
and cassava, fish, beans, and a small bowl of meat. The two
Americans began to eat mechanically, after a while.

   "I wouldn't touch that," Martha said quietly when Lisketter
reached for the bowl of meat.

  The kidnapper looked up dully. "Why not?" she said.

   "You can't smell what's cooking out there, stuffed up like
that." The other woman had been weeping until her nose ran. "I
can."
   Lisketter's eyes and lips framed a question. There was no need
for speech. After a moment she pushed the bowl violently away
and curled around herself on the earth platform stacked with cut
grass that served the cage as a bed. Martha doggedly forced
down as much as she could. There was a gourd of fermented
maize as well, like a thin gruel-beer. She drank that too.
Tomorrow and in the days that followed she would need
strength, and the baby had to be fed.

  When the time came… she looked around. They'll need to
know we're alive.

  ***

   Alston lowered her binoculars. "No sign of them," she said,
keeping her face carefully blank. It was illogical to feel
disappointed. Not sensible to expect the Bentley to be trapped
neatly here, but there was a feeling of letdown all the same.

   "They'll have gone upriver, Captain," Ian said. "That's
definitely the Coatzacoalcos."

  "Or they foundered on the way here, or passed on farther
south, or stopped farther north," Alston noted. Still, this was the
maximum probability…

  "Ma'am!"

  The forward lookout called. "Something floating!"

   The winds were faint, and the echo sounder showed these
waters to be shallow. It took some time to maneuver the Eagle
close to the debris, and a few minutes more to lower a boat to
hook onto it. Alston stood like stone, feeling the sweat trickling
down her flanks even under the light tropical uniform with its
short-sleeved shirt. The heat didn't particularly bother her; it
was even a little homelike—summers in the Carolina low country
were much like this. Her gathering suspicions of what they
would find, however…

  The sailor in the ship's boat next to the flotsam prodded at
something. "There's a body here, ma'am, legs tangled in
something. Looks like one of ours, from the clothing. Been in the
water a while, couple of days."

   "Well, you were right," she said quietly to Arnstein. To the
sailing master: "We'll anchor here, Mr. Hiller."

   Tom Hiller looked around at the estuary of the Coatzacoalcos.
The land was low and flat, and the sea stretched behind them
like hammered metal. "We could get a nasty blow out of the Gulf
any time, ma'am," he said. "It's hurricane season."

  "That's not the only nasty thing 'round here," she said,
nodding downward.

   The body was—had been—an American; the clothing was
unmistakable. She heard Doreen swallow a retch behind her, but
the Coast Guard officers were all familiar with the bloating that
went with a submerged body and the way the sea life ate its way
in. What drew her eye was the broken-off shaft that protruded
from the dead man's ribs.

   "Think of a few thousand of the locals coming out under cover
of darkness," she said. "Especially if we were farther in, where
the banks are close and there's no room to maneuver."

  He nodded. "How are we going to get up the river at all, then,
Captain?" he asked.

   "Cautiously, in small boats, and with difficulty, I suspect, Mr.
Hiller," she said thoughtfully. "But first we'll have to find out
what went on, and where everyone is. Call Mr. Toffler, and get
his transport ready."

   Assembling the ultralight was difficult in the cramped
quarters of the Eagle's waist deck; the wings were long enough to
overlap the rails on both sides. It was essentially a big hang
glider with an aluminum trapeze below, a tiny pusher prop and
engine behind the seat, and rudimentary controls.

   Sort of like a beginner's sketch of an airplane, the Kentuckian
pilot thought. A far cry from going "downtown" in an F-4
Phantom; more like being a forward air controller, not a trade
he'd ever wanted to take up before. The sodden heat was familiar
enough, though, and the look of the shore. They were all sweating
hard, and in this oily humidity it didn't evaporate, just got into
your shorts and chafed.

   Sailors and cadets finally mounted the frame on the cut-down
metal canoes that served for floats and bolted the wing to it. The
boom came around; two dozen hands held steadying ropes, while
others hauled at the line that hoisted it free of the deck.

  "Careful, there," he muttered; no point in saying it aloud.

   They slid it out sideways, threading the wings between the
rigging and then swaying them around bit by bit until they were
parallel to the ship. After that it was fairly simple to pay out the
ropes until the God Help Us lay bobbing slightly beside the big
windjammer. He'd named it himself, after the first flight back on
the island.

  "Eagle, the Coast Guard's first aircraft carrier," he said as
Captain Alston came up beside him.

   She nodded, as expressionless as usual. Toffler wasn't quite
sure about her. He didn't really approve of women in situations
like this, and he certainly didn't approve of her private life; he
was a good Baptist. On the other hand, he was pretty certain she
wouldn't lose her nerve. If she went wrong, it would be the other
way.

  "Keep in close contact and follow the program," she said. He
nodded. "Remember that they may have rifles. And good luck."

  "Thanks, Captain," he said.

   I am certainly not going to forget that they may have rifles,
he thought, climbing over the side. You didn't necessarily get less
brave as you got older, but you did start realizing that you could
really, really, really die, and how easy it would be. Sometimes he
wondered if war would be possible at all without that
nineteen-year-old conviction of immortality. Well, you're here,
aren't you? he asked himself sardonically. And you're getting
into this miserable goddam excuse for an aircraft, aren't you?
   Crewfolk were holding the ultralight steady for him. He
stepped onto one of the floats, ignored the alarming bob and dip,
scrambled up into the seat, and strapped himself in. The
earphones went on next.

  "This is GHU," he said into the microphone before his lips.
"Testing, testing."

  "Eagle here. Loud and clear. Keep in touch."

  "Roger wilco that."

   The engine caught with a lawn-mower buzz. Toffler looked up
to check the wind direction, came into it, and pushed the
throttles forward. The little Rogallo-wing aircraft came up off the
surface as if angels were pulling on rubber bands. He banked;
the GHU was maneuverable enough, but only about as fast as a
car. The height and stiff wind cut the muggy heat to something
more nearly bearable, and he felt the exhilaration he always did
aloft. Certainly more interesting than flying a puddle-jumper
between Hyannis and Nantucket, ferrying tourists. Looking for
whales and schools of fish had been getting pretty routine, too.

   The river wound through the forest beneath. He looked at the
map taped to the frame to his right, and then at the compass
strapped to his left forearm. "Heading west," he said.

  "Roger."

   The lesser canoes peeled off to villages along the riverbanks as
they headed west. Martha and Lisketter had a good view; they
were kept near the throne-seat of the chief at the rear of the
catamaran. The settlements were much like the first they'd seen,
but they grew larger and more numerous, the jungle between
them less, as they traveled. None were very far from the river's
banks, though, or the banks of the tributaries that gave into it.
Despite weariness, Martha found herself a fascinated spectator.
We knew so little…

   Crops grew more densely on the rich silt of the riverbanks.
Canoes and rafts passed ever more thickly, but the water still
teemed with life and the sky was always full of wings. And the
people… Oh, damn, what I wouldn't give for a camera, or even
pen and paper to take notes! Part of her knew that the thought
bordered on madness, but she pushed that away. Better than
brooding on her helplessness.

    The river narrowed and the current became stronger; the sun
blazed down through a sky half-hazy, and she was glad of the
shade at the rear of the craft. At intervals servants— she
assumed that those near-naked figures were such— brought food
and water or the weak maize-beer-gruel to the commander and
his warriors, and to the two American women; this time it
included small avocados juicy enough to be eaten by themselves,
and once a hot liquid brewed at a clay hearth amidships. After a
moment she identified it as unsweetened chocolate, harsh and
bitter, and set it aside. Others fanned the obese figure that sat
cross-legged and silent on his platform beneath the gaudy colors
of the carved beasts, brushing away insects and bringing a little,
little coolness to the constant clinging heat.

   At last they came to a sudden fork, where the waters divided
around an oblong island some miles across and more long. Most
of it was covered with oxbow lakes, or drained for farming and
speckled with thatched hamlets of clay huts. But the plateau at
the southern tip had been sheered off and built up; suggestions
of color and massiveness showed even at several miles' distance.
The catamarans turned for the shore; the paddlers were too
exhausted now to chant, grunting in unison instead. Ten yards
from the edge of the water they stopped with a final panting
shout, and the big vessel coasted forward, sliding to a halt with
hardly a jar. Crowds of attendants waited for them on the beach;
warriors, more villagers or servants in plain loincloths and skirts,
other types she couldn't hope to identify. Drums beat, smaller
than the great booming instrument in the bows of the
catamaran; other instruments played, pipes, gourd rattles, shell
whistles, and the people sang accompaniment. A dozen bore a
huge litter, and those waded out into the water until the
priest-king could step onto it dry-shod. They bore his massive
weight without a bob or waver, walking back up onto the land
and then swinging away in a disciplined lockstep trot.

  "We're next," Martha said.
   Another litter came down to the side of the catamaran. It was
as ornately carved as its predecessor, but lacked the canopy
above. Warriors shoved and pointed, indicating the two women
should climb aboard it; around them were piled spoils from the
Bentley.

  "Why are they doing this?" Lisketter whispered, as the bearers
swung up the beach and onto a packed-dirt road. She hadn't
spoken since the previous evening.

   "Who knows?" Martha said. "At a guess, we've stumbled into
some sort of myth that's important to them—something to do
with their primary god or goddess or whatever, the jaguar. We're
starring actors in a play and we don't have any idea what the
script is."

   The bearers broke into a trot along the dirt road. It was
embanked and neatly ditched, raising it a little above the soft
black earth of the cornfields tasseling out around them and the
cassava patches, vegetable gardens, groves.

   "Why? It doesn't make sense, none of it makes sense."

   "For someone who's supposed to be a multiculturalist,"
Martha said, "you had a really naive faith that everyone else's
sense would be the same as yours. That's a little logocentric, isn't
it?" Lisketter winced as from a blow. Martha put a hand on her
arm. "Sorry, but… no, sorry. Just keep your eyes open. I have a
very bad feeling about all this, and if we're to come out of it alive
we need to keep our wits about us."

   Shouts broke out among the Indians crowding around them,
and the workers in the fields. They were pointing southward,
into the sky. Martha turned.

              CHAPTER FIFTEEN
   October, Year 1 A.E.

   The natives are restless," Alston said, listening to the drums
as they echoed under the sound of the engines. Beside her
Swindapa nodded gravely. Lieutenant Hendriksson cast a quick
uncertain glance her way, then smiled wryly. Somebody farther
back in the boat snickered.

   Good for morale, Alston thought. Let her people see that the
skipper wasn't oppressed by the alien weirdness of the
surroundings. Much, she added to herself in blunt honesty.
Besides, it had come to her spontaneously.

   The boats from the Eagle were advanced up the twisting river
in a broad wedge, with the motor launches to the fore acting as
scouts. Behind them came the twoscore big inflatable lifeboats;
their powerful outboard engines let some of them tow long
whaleboats brought along for this voyage. On either side the
jungle reared, a medley of greens and great gaudy slashes of
flowers, flights of birds like living jewels with their long tails
dangling behind them in streaming banners of blue and
turquoise, showers of rainbow-hued butterflies. Birdcalls echoed,
raucous or sweet. Now and then an alligator, now and then a
cluster of tapirs on the bank snorting away in crashing, noisy
panic. Once the unmistakable scream of a jaguar. Always the
muggy, clinging heat; always the faraway stutter of the drums.

    Sweat trickled down into the padding under her armor; a
certain percentage were wearing theirs, the others keeping it
near to hand, and the sets switching over at two-hour intervals.
Practice and sound design meant that they could scramble into
it in short order, even in the cramped quarters of the boats.
Wearing it courted heat exhaustion, though; and anyone who
went overside in forty pounds of steel… well, it was a long wet
walk along the bottom to the edge. She blinked at the huge red
disk of the sun, sinking ahead of them. Not always directly
ahead; the river wound considerably.

   What really worries me is how vulnerable these rubber
boats are to flung weapons, she thought. And they were laden
enough that the outboard engines gave them only a little edge of
speed against a well-crewed canoe.

  A buzzing came from the radio. "GHU, this is Eagle, over."

  "Eagle, the village is just around the next bend in the river,"
Toffler said. His ultralight was circling at the edge of vision,
perhaps a mile and a half ahead. "The sunken hulk is definitely
the Bentley. Burned at her moorings, looks like."

  "Sure they've cleared out, GHU?"

  "Ma'am, they ran like hell. Over."

  "Rendezvous there, then. Over and out."

   For a moment the craziness of it struck her. An aerial scout, a
flotilla of inflated boats of complex synthetics driven by engines,
the whole coordinated by radio, and each boat filled with
Nintendo-generation warriors in steel armor armed with swords,
spears, and crossbows. And the real irony is that this medieval
metalwork is almost as far-future compared to the locals as the
solid-state electronics in this radio. That reminded her to make
yet another mental note to be careful with that equipment.
Nantucket wouldn't be making microchips in her lifetime.

   She had a Colt Python .357 Magnum at her side, but less than
thirty rounds for it—twenty-seven, to be precise, counting the six
in the chamber. The machine shop back on Nantucket could
make more, in limited quantities, but there was nothing to
charge them with, nor fulminate for the primers. There were
three other handguns with the expeditionary force, and another
back on Eagle, and that was it. The Bentley had, or had had,
more in the way of firearms, and it hadn't seemed to have done
them much good. What Alston did have was two hundred
trained, disciplined people. She hoped that would make the
difference.

   They sailed into gathering murk; it was quieter as the day's
wildlife sought its lairs and roosts, and the nocturnal versions
weren't out. A long looping curve and suddenly there were
cleared fields, then buildings and canoes drawn up on the bank.

   And the schooner's grave. The tip of one mast still stuck
forlornly out of the water, not far from where Toffler's ultralight
bobbed on its floats. She could see how fast it must have sunk by
the relative lack of damage; it just looked like something had
taken big black-fringed bites out of the sides. They'd brought an
Aqua-Lung, but she didn't think the diver would find much
useful. On the north bank the village waited, smoke still trailing
up into the darkening sky but eerily quiet, not even a dog
barking.

   "We'd better get set up," she said, and switched the radio to
the general frequency. "Smith, Bulosan, take first picket." Those
were the motor launches; they also had the diver. "Group A, all
personnel in battle order, and follow me. Mr. Ortiz, you'll
maintain station with Group B until I give the signal."

   She put on her helmet and clipped a small walkie-talkie to the
belt about her waist; it still felt rather odd to have no specific
sensation of pressure or weight there, but the armor took all
that. The lifeboat rocked under her as crew scrambled into their
armor. A dozen boats turned inward for the shore, cut their
engines, and grounded. The Americans leaped over the sides,
hauled their craft up, and fanned out to make a perimeter.
Alston was with them, eyes peering into the gathering murk.
Nothing moved, except the rustling of scrubby-looking
cornstalks and the buzz of insects. She raised the radio to her
lips. "Lieutenant Ortiz, bring Group B in and take over here."

   The others followed her as she walked down the single street
of the village. The huts were laid out with some precision, and
were bigger than she might have expected. Her followers
inspected each, prodding at the recesses with blades to make
sure nobody was hiding. She entered one herself, clicking on her
flashlight. Bedding and tools lay tumbled, as if the locals had
simply snatched up whatever was at hand when they fled the
apparition in the sky. They must have been three-quarters
terrified already, after the brush with the Bentley. The solid
wattle-and-daub walls came only to waist height, leaving the hut
relatively cool and airy with the woven mats rolled up under the
eaves. Possessions were few: flat-bottomed pottery that looked
hand-formed, not thrown on a wheel, and bigger globular jugs,
both decorated with incised designs. One end of the hut held a
terra-cotta figurine of a babylike figure with flat features and
fangs; probably a shrine. Hooks, lines, barbed fishing spears, and
stone hoes and adzes were in corners. A metate and grindstone
lay abandoned, surrounded by corn and maize meal; beside it
was a clay platter with a mound of oozing grated cassava.
  "Captain!"

   She dropped a hand to the pistol; that voice was urgent. A
cadet dashed up. "Ma'am, Section Leader Trudeau says there's
something you ought to see right away."

    He led her and the others up the village street to the earth
platform. It was about five feet high, a rectangle thirty feet by
fifty, made of the same clay loam as the earth around. The sides
sloped inward, smoothed and coated with colored stucco in
patterns that looked abstract until she saw past the alien
iconography to the shapes of men, animals, and birds. They went
up turf steps to a platform that held buildings larger and more
ornate than the village, but of the same basic style. The exposed
wood was carved and painted in a floridly baroque style. Damn,
but those animals look like something out of Dr. Seuss, she
thought. Cooking hearths stood beneath gazebo-like roofs. Stone
gutters led water away, keeping the surface dry; there were
ornamental plantings.

   Ruling-class housing, she thought. Or possibly the equivalent
of a church. A place where power resided, at least. "Ma'am."

   That was Trudeau, his face looking pale and ill in the fading
light. That reminded her that the enemy would probably be
much better at sneaking around in the dark than most of her
command. "Let's get some floods set up here," she called over her
shoulder. "Mr. Trudeau?"

   He was an upperclassman, near graduation; a slender dark
blue-eyed young man, Maine-born of French Canadian stock.

  "Ma'am, I've, uh, found where some of the Bentley's crew
went."

   She began to suspect as he led her over to one of the hearths.
The bones were unmistakably human, and the dental work in the
skulls equally certainly of the twentieth century. The meat on the
spits and in the pots… The smell was thick, like pork stewing or
roasting, horribly appetizing. She swallowed heavily once;
behind her came the sound of retching.
  "Arrange a burial detail, Mr. Trudeau," she said. "But not
until I give the word. There was something else?"

    Lights blinked on as the equipment was carried up from the
village. Trudeau turned away, obviously relieved. "This way,
ma'am."

   Like the village, the settlement on the platform was laid out
on either side of a street. At one end was an open space,
trampled hard and set down into the soil. Wooden scaffolds set
with stone and painted figures held hoops at either end; in a
weird way, it reminded her of a basketball court. At the other
end was a wooden platform, smoothly pegged together. Its front
was carved in the likeness of a cross-legged man wearing a
jaguar mask and holding a rope in either hand. That led around
the sides of the slab, to carved images of bound prisoners on
either side. Behind the slab in turn stood a roofed cage, with a
single door that could be securely fastened. The senior cadet led
her toward it.

    "It took a bit of looking, ma'am," he said. "And we were sort
of, you know, shook up. But here it is."

  They entered the cage, flashlights probing. Insects fluttered in
and out of the beams. "Over here by the back."

   The bars of the cage were hard wood, notched into a single
huge undecorated foundation beam on each side. Part of their
surface had grown soft and punky with rot, and doubtless they
would have been replaced soon. In the meantime they had a
surface soft enough to scratch. The shaky letters on one of them
spelled one word: Upstream.

   Behind her, Ian Arnstein spoke softly: "At least it's not
'Croatan.' Some of them were alive, then. One at least."

  "And I know just which one, Professor," Alston said.

   Deep in a fissure of the wood, metal gleamed. She went to one
knee and dug carefully with the point of her tanto knife. The
wood was hard below the weathered layer, but in a few seconds
the metal popped free and she scooped it up. A plain golden ring,
sized for a woman's hand. A wedding ring. She held it up and
shone the flashlight on the inner surface.

    "Martha Cofflin's," she said, and knelt silent for a moment,
long black fingers curling about it. Then she rose and spoke
briskly: "Trudeau, maintain your perimeter." With the handset
in her grasp, she gave further orders: "Mr. Ortiz, please relieve
all perimeter guards and workin' parties in succession. I want
them all to come and see something up here." It was a good
thing to know your enemy.

   "So, does this count as our first fight?" Doreen said,
tight-lipped.

   "We're not fighting, we're just discussing," Ian hissed back.

   The expeditionary force had built up the hearths from stored
firewood—except the ones where that had been cooking—and
put a line of watchfires along their perimeter. Doubtless the eyes
of the village's inhabitants saw that, where they huddled in the
jungle and swamp that bordered the inland edge of their fields,
and also the harsher brilliance of portable electric lights. Insects
buzzed about; the stores of mosquito repellent were already
running low, and huge bright tropical moths plunged into the
fires. Despite the shock of what they'd seen, the camp was no
longer funeral-quiet. Food was cooking, stored rations, fish and
duck caught on the trip up the river, cornmeal and vegetables
from the huts. For a while he'd thought he would never want to
eat again, but the smell set his stomach rumbling. It had turned
very slightly cooler, with a breeze from the river, as the sections
assembled below the earth platform. The Arnsteins fell silent
with the rest as Captain Alston stood to address them.

   "You've all seen what was going on here," she said.

   A snarling mutter went through the ranks below. More angry
than afraid, Ian decided. Evidently Captain Alston knew them
better than he did… which was, after all, her specialty.

   "We have definite proof that Ms. Cofflin, at least, was still
alive yesterday and was taken upriver toward these… people's
main town. I intend to follow and rescue her. Because I really
don't approve of Americans being tortured, killed, and eaten.
These people need to be taught a good, hard lasting lesson along
those lines."

   The mutter grew into an angry cheer, guttural and full of
menace. Alston nodded. "Good. Keep eager. Just remember that
the difference between a real military force and a bunch of
savages is discipline. We've got it, they don't, and that's why
we're going to go up that river tomorrow and kick cannibal
butt."

   The next cheer was more like a roar. Alston cut it off with a
chopping gesture of her hand. "So eat hearty and get a good
night's sleep; you'll need your strength tomorrow. Dismissed."

   "Where were we?" Doreen said, as the ranks broke, their noise
louder and more cheerful.

   "Ah… I think we were about to have a totally useless
argument," Ian said.

   "Yup, that sounds right," Doreen said. They met each other's
eyes and laughed.

   "It's not as if the captain would lay on a boat to take you back
to the Eagle, anyway," he sighed. "Still, I wish you hadn't
insisted."

   "We're a team," Doreen said. They began walking toward
their quarters. "How'd you put it… Speakers-to-Savages?"

    A burst of laughter came from the next hearthfire down. "A
little touch of Harry in the night," Ian quoted. Doreen chuckled.
Most of the sections assigned to huts had kept the fires going at
a low level even after their cooking was done, despite the heat
and the insects it attracted. The flames were heartening, he
supposed; ancestral memories.

  "Odd to think we're actually going to be fighting a battle like
Agincourt," she said. "Swords and spears and all… Hi, Marian."

  Alston sank down a little way from the fire that burned in its
clay bowl before their hut, nodding reply to their greetings. "Fo'
Christ's sake don't offer me another cup of that goddam
sassafras tea, Doreen," she said. "I'm going to be up often enough
tonight as it is." Her teeth showed white against the darkness,
and her eyes; otherwise she almost vanished.

   "Wait until you're my age," Ian grumbled. "Every bloody
night."

  "You should try being pregnant," Alston said, topping him
neatly.

   He blinked. Yes, she was once, wasn't she? Twice. Odd to
think of it. Odd to think of her as a mother, too.

  "Aren't you going to reassure us?" he asked.

   "I might, if you were going to be anywhere near the action,"
she said. "Assumin' there is action. I'd prefer to bargain Martha
out and go." She paused, arms around her knees and chin on
them. "Well, no, that's not quite right. I'd prefer to drop napalm
an' cluster bombs on them. As it is, I'd rather not fight. Too
much chance of our hostages bein' hurt, for starters."

  "What do you think our chances are?" Doreen asked.

  "Mmmm, pretty good," she replied. Little flames licked in the
dark irises as she stared into the flames. "Cortez conquered
Mexico at longer odds. I—we—could probably do the same."

  "You think so?" Ian said, surprised.

   She nodded slowly, with the faraway look of deep thought.
Alston wasn't what he'd consider well read in history, but she
had a good working knowledge of those parts of it that interested
her.

   "Cortez conquered Indians with Indians," she said. "He could
do it because he came from a more… advanced military an'
political tradition. Weapons didn't—won't— wouldn't
have—mattered much. They outthought the locals as much as
they outfought them."
   "I see what you mean," Ian said thoughtfully. "That was
Machiavelli's home century, near enough. Montezuma spent his
time worrying about whether Cortez was the Feathered Serpent
come back again, while good old Hernan was analyzing how the
Mexica hegemony worked and taking it apart. We could
probably learn the languages, find out who's enemy to who,
and—"

   "Exactly," Alston said. "We've got more of a technical edge
than the Spaniards did, too. The only thing Cortez had that I
envy was experienced troops to start with. Ours are green,
'specially at this hand-to-hand style of fightin'. That's the only
thing that worries me, and that not much."

   Doreen looked alarmed, and sounded it. "Surely you're not
thinking of conquering this country!"

   Alston showed her teeth. "What, live here in this rotting
sauna, and get stuck rulin' these lunatics? I'd rather juggle live
squid in a laundromat. Thought you knew me better than to
think that's what I want, Doreen."

  The fire had died down; many of the others were out, and the
huts filled with sleep. Not to mention snores, Ian thought. He'd
noticed that the young needed sleep less and got it more easily.

   "What do you want, if you don't mind me asking?" he said,
curious. As soon as the words were out he half wished them
back. On the other hand, curiosity was one itch he'd never been
able to resist scratching, and he doubted he ever would.

  "Want?" She shrugged. "What does anyone want? A job doing
something important, and doing it well, and enjoying doing it.
To have good friends, and deserve them. Love too, of course."
Her smile grew gentle. "Can't complain on any of those counts,
now."

   Doreen's hand sought Ian's. "Things must have been, um,
difficult for you, before the Event."

  "Oh, I wouldn't say that," Alston said judiciously. "Unless
you'd call havin' any chance of a decent personal life destroyed by
lying politicians who pander to the bigotry of a bunch of dimwit
redneck peckerwood jackasses 'difficult.' Difficult." She snorted.
"Thus do we protect our sacred family values."

  "Sorry."

   "Oh, no problem." She rose, and grinned again. "Got nothin'
to complain about now that I'm making the rules… although they
give you privileges I don't get, you lucky civilians, you."

   After their goodbyes the two looked at each other. "She's
right, you know," Ian said, straight-faced. "It would be
unfriendly and ungrateful not to."

   Still holding hands, they went into the hut. And besides, Ian
thought, tomorrow we may die. Quite literally.

   "What would you have done if they were all dead?" Swindapa
asked.

   The alien night pressed down around her; despite the heat she
shivered slightly. They were sitting at the edge of the earthen
platform, looking down at the village. Out on the water two more
lights went like stars and glittered in the river, where boats
guarded against surprise. Trees cut off the horizon on every
hand, black against the frosted multitude of stars. Those
glimmered in the water, bright and many. Even the smells of
water and earth were different, strange in a way that the Island
was not, scents like spoiled bread and yeast and brewing beer.
She looked up. Moon Woman's home floated huge and yellow
near the horizon, casting a soul-path across the ripples.

   All this world is Your daughter, Swindapa thought. So You
are always with me. Her hand reached out and touched the
captain's. Fingers clenched, infinitely soothing; so much could be
allowed, here where none could see. How good it would be to lay
arms around each other in comfort! This place was like the
things the Sun People believed about Night Ones; like a dream of
Barrow Woman, clutching at the souls of the dead.

   "I would have turned around and gone back, if they'd all been
killed," the captain said, her voice equally soft.
  "Not taken revenge?" Swindapa asked.

   Almost invisible, the dark head shook. "Not worth the risk of
lives," she said. "As long as Martha's alive, yes, we keep goin'."

  "Many more may die than one, though, if there's a fight."

  A soft chuckle. "That's not the same thing. We don't…
abandon our own, not while I'm in charge."

  Swindapa nodded. "That's a good law," she said, and sighed.

   The fingers tightened on hers. "I know you want to see your
home again," the other woman said. "This… we may not be able
to, this fall. The storm season is coming."

  "I know," Swindapa said, keeping the shiver of longing out of
her voice. Her mother, brothers, sisters, uncles. And the Iraiina.
They must be put back. "I know. I know you had to do this, too."

   The fingers squeezed hers gratefully. She touched them to her
cheek. The journey will come when it comes, she thought. There
was a rightness to going and returning in the same season. But
oh, the time seemed long!

   Morning broke hot and fierce, the dawn coming up like
thunder out of the jungle to the. east and clouds that piled on the
edge of the world, turning their black heights to crimson and
burning gold. Alston finished stretching and watched. Mist lay
on the river, drawn by the increasing heat. Tendrils of it drifted
between the great trees, as twisted as the vines and lianas that
laced them together. I really do prefer the temperate zone, she
thought.

   "We'd better get under way as soon as Toffler reports," she
said to Lieutenant Hendriksson; she and Lieutenant Ortiz
followed their commander's gaze and nodded. "I don't like the
look of those clouds."

  The village swarmed with cadets and sailors making ready.
The ultralight was drawn up, Toffler overseeing as fuel was
pumped into the tanks from cans brought along.
  "Full gear today," she went on. "And be ready for—"

   Voices broke in, shouting—a group of the perimeter guards
were hustling someone along. Not a local; he was dressed in the
tattered remains of shorts and T-shirt. He stumbled and jerked
as one of the cadets behind him prodded at him with a
spearpoint. Alston frowned; then her face relaxed for a moment
into carnivore anticipation as she saw the man had only one
hand. Hers twitched to take the long hilt of the katana.

   Finish the job, she thought. Then, scolding herself: Of course
not. We'll take him home, give him a fair trial, and hang him
right next to his sister, if we can. Still…

   David Lisketter stumbled to a halt before her. He was
plastered in mud, his thin face blotched with insect bites that
also covered much of his body. The green-yellow eyes were
staring behind smeared spectacles. At last they blinked and
focused somewhat.

  "Captain… Alston," he said.

   "David Lisketter," she said. "You are under arrest for robbery,
assault with intent to kill, complicity in first-degree murder, and
kidnapping. Oh, yes, and high treason, too."

   He straightened. "All right," he mumbled. "But Pamela,
they've got Pamela, and Ms. Cofflin too. I saw."

  "Saw what?"

  "Canoes, big double canoes, two of them."

  Alston made a motion with her hand. "Get the Arnsteins."

   The cadets pushed him into the shade, and someone brought
food and water. He wolfed the dry cassava bread and drank in
gulping heaves. Ian and Doreen came up and hovered. Lisketter's
account of the attack on the Bentley was disjointed; he'd seen
only glimpses as he swam downstream and hauled himself out
among the trees.
   "They wouldn't listen," he said, again and again. "I tried the
Mayan words from the dictionary, and I thought they recognized
a few—'east,' 'sea,' a few—but they kept talking so fast. And then
they grabbed me, grabbed all of us, and they kept pointing to my
eyes and shining lights in them and they wouldn't let go. I had to
shoot, I had to!"

   Ian Arnstein leaned forward, face gone keen. "Your eyes are
the same color as your sister's, aren't they?"

  Lisketter peered at him. "Yes, yes," he said.

   Ian hurried off to the hut where he'd slept, and came back
with something in his hands. It was a wooden mask, of a face
halfway between human and jaguar, the eyes inlaid with some
polished stone. He held it up beside the one-handed man. The
eyes of the living man were a shade of amber-green almost
identical to the jade insets.

   "I think we have something here," Alston said. She clapped
Ian on the back. "Congratulations, Professor."

  "What… what happened to the others?" Lisketter asked.

  "The locals ate them," Alston said. Lisketter bent over
abruptly and lost the food he'd just swallowed.

  "Get him cleaned up, and handcuff him."

  "Ma'am? What about the village?"

   "Load everythin' we can use," she said. Her eyes swept over
the buildings. "Then torch it."

   "Why haven't they tried to stop us, Captain?" Lieutenant Ortiz
asked, bringing his boat alongside. "They've got a lot of those
canoes, and they did attack the schooner."

    Alston nodded; she liked junior officers who tried to puzzle
things out. "The Bentley was sitting still. We're moving without
oars, making a funny sound, and we've got Toffler's ultralight
flying overhead. At a guess, they're spooked. They'll fight
eventually, though, when we get to their capital."

    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 the 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
helmet 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.

  " 'Bout that," Alston nodded. "What do you think they'll do?"

  "Come around our edges… our flanks?"

  "That would be the sensible thing to do, but—ah."

   The conch trumpets wailed again, and the Olmec host
stopped, eddying and swirling. Silence fell over the burned fields,
broken only by the small clatters of warriors shifting in place and
the flapping silk of the banners overhead. A tall figure strode
forth from the enemy ranks, his body gorgeous with a tunic of
plaited feathers; more fringed his painted shield and waved from
his carved helmet-mask; he brandished a long wooden rake set
with flint as he walked slowly forward. His voice came high and
shrill, an endless wailing chant.

    "A champion, making a challenge," Swindapa said, setting her
helmet on her head and buckling the chin strap in place. Shade
fell over her eyes, and on the back of her neck.

  Alston nodded. "Doubtless you're right," she said, and waited
until he was within range. Then she lifted the radio to her lips.
"Mr. Ortiz, have that man seen to."

   An order was barked. A cadet stepped out of the ranks of the
crossbows, leveled her weapon, aimed carefully, and pulled the
trigger.

  Whung.

   The sound was small and tiny, lost in the wind and the chaotic
mutter of the enemy warriors. The Olmec champion stopped
dead, jerking backward a little. He tottered three steps on his
heels and fell with arms outstretched, raising a puff of black ash
as his back hit the dirt. The enemy host stopped moving, talking,
chanting, everything. For a long second Swindapa could feel
their unbelief, and afterward sense their swelling outrage coming
in a wave that made the little hairs along the back of her neck
struggle to rise. Then a united scream of rage came up from
them, and their selves followed behind it. First one, then another,
then clumps of them, even the musicians casting aside their
instruments. The host moved in a dense clot, many deep and still
overlapping the line of the Eagle People. The captain reached
back and drew her katana; her other hand held the radio. Her
lips curled to show her teeth, and the Fiernan girl knew that this
was exactly as she'd hoped.

   She shivered a little. Marian was wonderful, a true gift from
Moon Woman… but there were times when she was a little
frightened of her.

   "Points down." she said. The order was repeated, and the long
spears came down in a single rippling motion. "Ready."

   Voices echoed back from either side. The front rank of
crossbows knelt, and both brought their weapons to their
shoulders.

  "About—" the captain murmured.

   The Olmecs' massed pounding run was building into a
headlong charge that nothing could stop. Then suddenly it did
stop, leaping and screaming with a different note—pain, instead
of rage. Those behind piled into those in front, sending many of
them rolling and screaming even louder. Their own momentum
packed them together; not until the sharp iron was in their feet
could they understand why those in the lead had stopped at all.
Caltrops, Swindapa knew. Two pieces of sharp iron, twisted
together so that one of the four points stood uppermost no
matter how they landed. And the enemy went barefoot…

   "Just goes to show," the captain said, "that you shouldn't get
so mad you don't look where you're putting your feet." Louder:
"Commence firing!"

   WHUNNNG. The kneeling front rank of the crossbows loosed.
There was another sound, like a wind through reeds, and then a
slapping like fists on flesh. She could hear the section leaders
shouting: "Reload! Second rank… fire!"

   WHUNNNG. The short heavy bolts sleeted out like horizontal
rain. They punched through hide and shield and bone, and in
that massed target scarcely a single point could miss.

  "First rank… fire!"

  WHUNNNG.

   Again and again; she set her teeth and made herself watch.
Toffler swooped down and dropped another firebomb; this time
the enemy were bunched, immobile. Men burned, clawing at the
fire that stuck to their skins.

   "Ignore the ones running! Go for the fancy-dress brigade!" the
captain barked.

   Those warriors were at the front of the Olmec array, facing
the islander spears. And they were advancing, twisting the iron
out of their feet and coming forward, stopping to do it again,
leaving red tracks through the ash behind them. WHUNNNG.
WHUNNNG. A tenth or more of them went down with every
volley.

  "Why don't they run?" Swindapa cried.
  "They're warriors," the Captain said. "Their whole lives are
bound up in their courage and sense of their own honor. They
can't let danger or pain turn them aside."

   A trickle of warriors won past the caltrops and ran forward,
screaming defiance. Crossbow bolts slammed into them, but now
they were a more scattered target, and some did not fall.

   Closer, and Swindapa could see the contorted painted faces
within the mask-helmets. One reached the line of spears, hacked
down at a point, pushed forward. The second line stabbed at
him.

  "Harder! Kill him, goddammit!" the captain barked.

   The Olmece swung his stone-edged club-sword with desperate
force. His shield went up to stop a spearpoint, but the long steel
head punched through the light wicker and the arm beneath.
Another caught him in the side, pulling back with a jerk. More
probed at him, until the feathers of his costume were dyed fresh
scarlet. The warrior went to his knees with blood leaking from
his mouth, but a comrade vaulted on his back and leaped,
howling. The third-rank islander stumbled backward under the
impact, and more Olmecs were coming up, loping for the gap in
the line.

  "Shit," the captain said. "Stay on my left, 'dapa."

   She ran forward at her lover's side. The warrior saw them
coming and turned, roaring. The rake came down, and the
captain's katana came up to meet it. Stone swept along steel
with a tooth-grating sound and the warrior half-turned with the
impetus of the blow redirected. Flexing wrists snapped the blade
up again, up and back, foot stamped forward, and the blade
came down in a blurring curve, just as they'd practiced… only
this time there was a man reeling away with an arm hanging by
a thread, reeling and falling. The captain moved forward into the
next, sword rising to chudan no kame.

   Another beside him, spear arm back for the thrust. Swindapa
pivoted to deal with that one. Keep your mind out of the way,
ran through her. It was true. Her hands had learned; the sword
came up and turned as she thrust, cutting edge up, right hand
just behind the guard to guide and left on the pommel to give
force, body moving behind it. Down, hands loose, now clench,
elbows out… the impact, and she continued through the curve of
the circular motion, whipping the sword through the diagonal
and drawing the cut. Ruin flopped down to lie at her feet.

   Swindapa staggered slightly as an obsidian spearpoint broke
on her breastplate, knocking her back two steps. Her sword
snapped up, cutting into the underside of the Indian's arms
above the elbows, and he fell backward. That put him in the rear
rank of spear-bearers, and a shield edge slammed down, twice.

   Then there was no one else to fight here. More Olmecs were
out beyond the line of spears, caught and slashing as the wielders
slammed the points forward. The crossbows were down, and the
islanders were unslinging the shields across their backs and
drawing the short stabbing swords slung at their right hips. An
Olmec rake came down on a metal-faced shield and the cadet
staggered beneath it, going to one knee. The warrior stepped
closer for another stroke, froze for a second's incredulity as he
saw how the obsidian edge of his weapon exploded into
fragments against the metal, and ran onto the long point of the
upflung gladius. The cadet's comrades heaved her back as she
knelt staring; others closed in, four against one, stabbing. One
reeled back yelling and clutching at an arm bone-bruised
through the armor that protected it. The others thrust and
thrust again. The Olmec staggered, swung his blunted rake in a
final circle, and collapsed. Blood ran out on the ashy ground
from the broad wounds the leaf-shaped short swords had made.

   And then the remaining foemen were running, running back
the way they had come. Woods Woman has their souls, she
thought—panic had taken them, the wild fear that breathes out
of the deep forest.

   "Fire! Don't let them get away!" the captain shouted in an
astonishing husky roar, enough to cut through the confusion.
Crossbows twanged again, enough to bring down a man here,
another there, a steady trickle until the last survivors were out of
range.
  Swindapa tried to swallow, felt her tongue dry as leather.

   The hand she released from the hilt of the katana was sticky,
coming free with a tack sound as she reached for the water
bottle at her waist. The bodies were steaming under the hot sun,
the smells of shit and iron-copper blood already underlain by a
slight sickly scent as tissue began to go off. Insects swarmed,
feeding.

  "We won," she said huskily, staring.

   It wasn't a pleasant sight. The captain was right about that,
though she hadn't truly believed until now. It was certainly a lot
better than losing, though.

   A hand patted her armored shoulder briefly. She stood
straighter, feeling the constriction around her chest easing.

  "We surely did," the captain said.

  "Thank God for morphine," the corpsman said.

   Alston nodded. The aid station was busy; there were a dozen
seriously wounded Americans, one with a raked-open face who
might not live. We should modify these helmets—hinged cheek
guards. There were a couple of other face wounds, or blades
driven in under armpits, or in the back of the leg. The doctor
sewed and bandaged, debrided and cleansed. Orderlies moved
the treated back under the awnings and stood by to keep the
insects off.

   And all from a few seconds of hand-to-hand, she thought
soberly. If it had come to a melee, or if the numbers hadn't been
so grossly unequal by the time the last Olmecs came into arm's
reach, she doubted the Islanders' armor and weapons would have
been enough. We need a lot more practice, most of us. Or Uzis
and M-16s, whichever they could manage to get first.

   "Good work," she said to the last of the conscious wounded,
touching him gently on the shoulder.

  He managed a smile, eyes wandering as the combination of
drug and shock blurred the edge of thought. "Kicked cannibal
butt, didn't we, Skipper?"

  "We surely did, son. Now you rest—you've done your bit."

   She stood and moved forward. You could see where the
Olmecs had hit the caltrops; there was a row of bodies there,
some piled two or three deep. Must have gotten a third of them
that way, held up while we shot them, she thought. Swindapa
came up with a bucket of water and they cleaned themselves.
Blood swirled into the silt-brown liquid. They drank again from
their water bottles; everyone seemed to be thirsty. She could feel
the sweat oozing through the padding under her armor, as
saturated as if she'd gone for a swim. Looking down she saw a
line of bright scratches and a dint across the lower part of her
breastplate, and she didn't even recall the blow landing. Without
the metal, that would have cut halfway through to her spine;
those obsidian bladelets were sharp. And it had all taken barely
half an hour…

   "Ma'am." She returned the young man's salute; her hand
went tick against the edge of her flared helmet. She seemed to be
noticing details like that. And sensations stayed with her, the
ugly slicing, jarring feeling of the sword going through muscle
and bone… Enough. Think about that later.

   "Ma'am, what shall we do with the enemy wounded? There
are a lot of them."

   "Bring them back to the aid station, but carefully. Mr. Ortiz!
Stretcher bearers and guards for the enemy wounded. We'll do
what we can for them."

  "Mr. Toffler," she went on. "Report."

   The noise of the ultralight's engine came through the handset.
"Captain, they're still running, most of them, the ones that
haven't fallen down along the way," he said. "The fancy ones are
making for the city; they stopped about half a mile on, and
they're in a clump retreatin' at a walk. No sign of Martha or
Lisketter there, since they took them into the big place on the
main earth mound."
  "Thank you, Mr. Toffler. Well done, by the way."

   There was a slight hesitation on the other end. "Hell, ma'am, I
just flew around up here."

   "Nevertheless, well done. Refuel when you have to, and stand
by."

   Martha watched through the narrow slit. The room was
featureless adobe, and the roof overhang was wide, but the
ventilation slit gave a bar of light when the sun was at the right
angle, a breath of air, and a few minutes' vision if she braced her
toe against a projecting spot in the wall and hung on.

   The warriors who straggled back up the broad avenue were a
far cry from the host that had set out that morning. Plumes were
bedraggled, or hacked away; most of them limped or hobbled,
many bore bleeding wounds. Women and children and
near-naked servants gathered along the edges of the broad
roadway of colored clay, between the basalt pillars and atop the
rectangular mounds. They didn't chant and sing as they had
when their men marched out to fight, either. Their silence was
like a dirge, compounded by the sound of keening grief that
wailed from the interior of the houses. Her arm muscles were
beginning to quiver. Gasping, Martha dropped down.

   "What did you see?" Pamela Lisketter said. She was beginning
to look a little more alert. Which may be good if we can do
something, but on the other hand, everything she's done so far
has been harmful.

  Still, it was a little comforting. Having a zombie as your only
companion in confinement was hard on the nerves.

  "The… army has come back. Badly beaten, from the look of it.
Less than half the numbers that went out this morning, and
most of those wounded."

  "Should I hope for rescue?" Lisketter said, mouth twisting.
"What can they do to me that Cofflin and the Town Council
won't?"
   Martha looked around the room. It was absolutely bare,
except for a tall-necked jug of water and an open pot for wastes.
The room stank, of sweat and the chamber pot and their
unwashed bodies.

   "The town jail's an improvement on this," she said dryly. "And
as to what they can do, I suggest a prayer that we don't find out."

   She sank down in the far corner, concentrating on hope. The
Eagle's crew obviously beat them. They may be myth-besotted,
but surely they'll respond to a whack across the face. The
problem was, she didn't know how they'd respond.

    She heard the buzz of the ultralight's engines again, faint
through the thick walls of the prison. She didn't try to climb to
the ventilation slit again; the angle was wrong, and in any case it
was unwise to strain herself, in her condition. Hours passed, in a
silence broken only by the skitter and buzz of insects.

   The door banged open. Warriors stood there, warriors with
bandaged wounds and rough cloth wrapped around their feet.
Behind the fanged, carved masks their eyes were as dark and
hard as the obsidian of their weapons. Both Americans had
learned the local word for "come"; there was no point in being
dragged. Outside was a corridor, and then a wooden colonnade
enclosing a court. A ball game was in progress there. The object
seemed to be to drive a rubber ball through a vertical wooden
hoop on either side of the court. Knowing what she knew,
Martha wasn't surprised when the three members of the winning
team passed through a ritual and then knelt with their throats
over a basin. She did turn her head aside, likewise when the
priest came by flicking droplets of their blood on the two women.

   That made her stare at their escort. She frowned slightly after
an instant; he seemed to be ill in a way unrelated to the cuts and
punctures on his arms and chest and thighs. He was swallowing
convulsively, and now and then putting his hand to his throat, or
rubbing at his loincloth.

   A suspicion formed in her mind. Sharp terror drove it forth as
they were prodded into another court. This encircled one of the
oval pools, and more brightly clad members of the priest-king
caste stood around it, men and women. The open side giving
onto the avenue held one of the giant jaguar-and-woman statues,
and all around it were panels of carved stone or stucco
portraying the myth of the jaguar-men. A woman alone in the
jungle, and the cat sprang upon her. The same woman hugely
pregnant; her tribesfolk menaced her with weapons, and she fled
into the jungle to squat and give birth, but the babe was born
with fangs and talons. The jaguar returned, to devour mother
and child, but the child turned within its stomach and the jaguar
rose to walk on its hind legs like a man…

   "Shamanistic practices aimed at bringing about a complex
of feline transformation," she quoted to herself. The
archaeologists didn't know the half of it.

  "Are… are they going to sacrifice us too?" Lisketter asked.

  "I don't—"

   A painful rap on the back of her head silenced her. A ripple
went through the waiting crowd as the ultralight passed
overhead, the setting sun red on its wings. Then they turned
their attention back to their task. Imploring the help of their
god, or gods, or ancestral spirits, she assumed.

  Aromatic gums burned in clay holders. Brightly clad figures,
men and women, acted out scenes whose importance—usually
whose nature—she had no conception of.

   The ritual went on and on. Objects were raised before the
huge masked figure who sat immobile and cross-legged on yet
another of the table-altars. The ropes he grasped in either hand
led to prisoners on either side; ordinary peasants, by the look of
them, naked and with one hand tied behind their backs. The
other hand dangled limp, pierced by a stingray spine.

   The drums began to beat again, a thudding in the same
rhythm as a human heartbeat; flute and shell and bone
xylophone. She was numb enough that the death of the two
captives went by almost unnoticed, like a flicker in a movie
someone else was watching. Lisketter's whimper as they dragged
her away toward the pond cut through the glaze a little.
Priestesses grasped her and stripped away the rags of her
clothes, pushing her down and scrubbing her as they chanted.
Then they pulled her onto the bank and began dressing her in an
outfit that was mostly woven feathers and not many of those. The
last touch was to dip wads of cloth in some murky,
musky-smelling substance and wipe them across Lisketter's belly
and inner thighs and genitals. Then they bore her between them
to the altar, binding her over it spread-eagled.

   Martha obeyed numbly as she was pushed into a position near
the carved block of stone; in one hand she was to hold a stalk of
maize, in the other a rod carved to represent a burning snake. It
wasn't until warriors led in the muzzled jaguar on two thick
leashes that she could bring herself to believe what was going to
happen. Lisketter began to scream and heave against the ropes
that held her, and the big cat's tail lashed as it licked its nose
and took the scent.

    The connection was through a relay on the Eagle, but good
enough. Alston went on: "The good part is that we gave them a
first-class lickin'," she said.

  "Casualties?" Cofflin's voice.

   Strange to think of him in the air traffic control tower back on
the island. It seemed so far, here in the night where the drums
boomed and the light of fires silhouetted the great buildings of
the plateau-city ahead.

    "Ours? One dead, one critical, twelve or so serious, and the
rest walkin' wounded. Theirs… couple of hundred dead, maybe
more. Plenty of wounded, too." She hesitated. "The bad part is I
still can't get them to talk."

  Silence came across the miles. "Can you get her back?"

   "Not by direct assault. That city isn't walled, but it's over a
hundred feet uphill, and they still outnumber us. Storming that…
even if it worked, the butcher's bill would be ugly. Nothin' to stop
them killing her right off, either. If I try to besiege them? Well,
right now we've got them dazed, but they'll get their wits back,
maybe call up overwhelmin' numbers to finish us off, or block the
river back to Eagle."

   "You're giving up?"

  "Didn't say that. There's something I'm goin' to try, but it's
damn dangerous, bit of a long shot."

   Another long silence. "I'm leaving things in your hands. You're
the expert."

  "Thanks, Chief. We'll be in touch tomorrow, one way or
another."

   She turned to her command group, where they gathered
around the folding table with the photographs of the city made
with the carefully hoarded Polaroid.

    Town, really, she thought. For all the massiveness of the
monuments and works, the housing didn't look to have room for
more than a few thousand permanent inhabitants. She turned
the screw of the oil lantern, and the yellow flame grew brighter.
A big tropical moth beat its wings against the glass. She shooed
it away and traced a line with her finger.

   "This looks like the best approach," she said, drawing a line
up from the south, where the tumbled outlying hills of the
plateau came right down to the water. From the picture they
were covered with thick scrub.

  "This building here is where they were, and this courtyard is
where the… ceremony took place?" she asked.

   "Yes, ma'am," Toffler said. Beads of sweat glistened on his
balding scalp. "By the big pond."

   "That's it, then. Any questions?"

   "Ma'am," Ortiz said, "I still think it's inappropriate that you
lead this operation in person."

   Alston nodded. "Acknowledged, Mr. Ortiz. However, I have
certain skills that'll increase the probability of success. So does
everyone else I've picked." From a very large pool of volunteers,
surprisingly large. Amazing how many people will clamor for a
chance at probable death. Though I should talk.

   She looked at her watch. "Twenty hundred hours. Let's get
going. If they move the hostages, things could get very sticky
indeed."

   There were five in the party. Herself and Swindapa, of course.
Lieutenant Hendriksson, who came from rural Minnesota and
went bow-hunting for deer as a hobby; she had her weapon in
her hand, a Bear compound, and a carefully padded quiver over
her back. Pulakis and Alonski, cousins from a small mining town
in west-central Pennsylvania. . They were hunters as well, good
shots with the crossbow, and both built alike—square young men
the same width from pelvis to broad shoulders, long-armed,
moon-faced under cropped black hair, their little blue eyes calm.
Both of them could probably bend horseshoes with their hands.
It was just as well to have a couple of heavy lifters along.

   A final check. Everyone was in loose dark clothing; she and
the Fiernan were carrying their twin swords, with the .357, a
blowgun, and the sling for distance weapons. Swindapa and
Hendriksson had stocking caps to pull over their light hair.
Burnt cork for rubbing on face and hands also went around;
Alonski finished and began to hand it to her, then halted,
wincing in embarrassment.

   "I'm covered," she said dryly. She took up a final piece of
equipment from the table, a slender section of hollow tubing,
broke it down at the joint in the middle, and tucked it into her
harness. "Let's go."

   She turned to Ortiz. "Lieutenant, in the event of failure, don't
throw good money after bad. Withdraw. Is that understood?"

  "Yes, ma'am." He didn't look happy about it, but on the other
hand, she didn't intend to fail.

  "Mr. Toffler, you have the signals?"

  "Flashlight for Phase One, flare for Phase Two, yes."
   "Then let's be about it."

   Martha sat in a corner of the cell, head in her hands. It was
very quiet. Lisketter lay staring; she hadn't made a sound or a
voluntary movement since she stopped screaming, during the
rite. When they'd pulled the jaguar off her and the priest-king in
his costume of furs had come to take its place.

   Catatonic shock, she thought. Probably better. The stucco
friezes made it plain what Martha's part in tomorrow's ceremony
would be, the cutting and then the feasting.

   Now there was a sound—the intolerable taunting buzz of the
ultralight going by overhead, freedom just beyond arm's reach.
Her head sank wearily down on her knees again.

   Then the sound altered; shouting came beneath it, a growing
roar. After a moment, the faint light of watchfires that shone
through the slit above her head grew brighter.

   "Here," Alston whispered into the hot wet darkness of the
river.

   Slow and muffled, the paddles slid the rubber boat toward the
shore. Trees grew almost to the edge, roots grew into the stream,
amid thigh-deep water. Do they have leeches here? she
wondered, as they gripped at branches and made the boat fast.
The water felt tepid and stagnant, and smelled of swamp. She
went over the side, holding her swords high in one hand, and
waded up to dry—drier— land. The cotton of her trousers clung
wetly; she slipped the long katana back into the carrier across
her shoulders and the short wakizashi into her belt. Then she
took out the pipe, fitted the sections back together, and pushed a
round through the plastic mouthpiece and into the tube. It was a
steel needle five inches long, with the base set into a plastic bead;
a dozen more waited in a case at her waist.

   Through a gap in the foliage she could see the riding light of
Toffler's craft, circling over the city ahead. Binoculars brought it
closer, although not close enough to see the figure beneath or the
night-sight goggles on his face. Not particularly modern ones,
Israeli-army surplus bought from a catalog by someone on
Nantucket before the Event, but they worked. She brought up
the flashlight, braced it against a convenient stem, and blinked it
on. Three long, one short… and hope that nobody on the plateau
was looking in precisely the wrong direction. The undergrowth
buzzed with insects, and with slight crinkling and rustling
noises. Nightbirds sang or croaked or screeched. Somewhere
close a bull 'gator bellowed, announcing his territory to the
saurian world.

   She waited, controlling her breathing and feeling the sweat
slide gelid down her flanks and spine. Might have to do it twice.
…

   No. The riding light on the aircraft returned the signal. She
turned her head; the others had the boat tethered and tucked
away out of sight. There was just enough light to see their faces
as they approached. She knelt in the damp earth and laid down
the photograph, then shone a red-dimmed light on it for a
second. Swindapa put a hand out to help her steady the curling
square of paper, grinning in the dark. Young, Alston thought,
with a wrench of the heart that she thrust aside with an effort of
will. Calm, calm, she could only be centered and calm at this
moment. Don't try to hurry.

   In Heiho speed is not the true Way. Speed is the fastness or
slowness which occurs when the rhythm is out of
synchronization.

   "This heading," she whispered, tucking the aerial shot away
again. "Follow me."

   Her head swung, sighting through the trees on pieces of easily
recognized higher ground. It was appallingly easy to get lost in
the dark, in unfamiliar brush. They moved forward, placing each
step carefully. She pushed vines aside, unhooked from thorns,
ignored unseen slapping branches that gouged for her eyes.
Every thirty seconds she clicked her tongue softly and they all
halted, listening. Good. Quiet. Swindapa quietest of all, and the
others not much worse. Steeper ground, crawling on all fours.
The lip of the plateau above them now, cutting off half the sky,
and the rooftrees of thatched buildings beyond it. She looked at
the compass and the landmarks, wiped the dirt and moisture off
her palms on the sleeves, of her jacket. Excellent. And it was
about time for Toffler to—

   A crash came from above, muffled by distance. Shouts. They
waited; she could hear Swindapa trying to match her long slow
breaths. A glow began to silhouette the rooflines ahead of her.
She grinned, a silent snarl. World's first fire-bombing. The
homemade napalm would send those roofs of dried grass up like
tinder, and they were an easy target, even in the dark.

  "Go!" she hissed.

   They surged up the final steep section and then sank down
again, flattened to an earth roadway of pounded, colored clay. A
log retaining wall loomed ahead of them, probably set to prevent
erosion along the edge of the plateau. Two guards were walking
along it, looking northward toward the fire, talking and pointing.

   Most excellent, Alston thought. These Olmecs seemed to make
war to a rigid set of rules and conventions—duels by champions,
taking prisoners for sacrifice; she had an intuition that they'd
refused to talk because trying to get captives back was an
outrageous defiance of custom. Their fighting garb was a clue as
well, designed for formalized, almost ritual combat out in the
open by day. She intended to wring every possible ounce of
advantage out of that.

   She touched Swindapa's shoulder and pointed to the
right-hand of the pair; the men were only sixty feet away, and at
that range the Fiernan was eye-punching accurate with the sling.
An egg-shaped lead shot went into the pouch. Alston raised the
mouthpiece of the blowgun to her lips, took a deep breath,
aimed… huff!.

  The man on the left stopped talking and went stiff. He turned,
shaking; she could see his jaws gaping wide in a spastic yawn.
Then he toppled forward like a cut-through tree. God. Must have
caught him in the spine.

   Swindapa leaped upright as Alston fired. Her body flexed as
she swept the sling twice around her head and loosed. A fraction
of a second later there was a hard thock sound, just as the
second guard was drawing breath to shout. He fell across the
body of his comrade, leaking gray and pink from a skull
shattered above the ear. The Americans dashed forward and
flattened to the earth by the bodies.

   "Uh-oh," Hendriksson muttered.

   Another man was standing between two bestial statues,
looking over toward where the guards should have been.
Hendriksson rose to one knee and drew an arrow through her
compound bow; the four edges of the hunting broad-head
glittered slightly in the distant firelight. The wheels on the tips of
the stave flipped over as she drew to the ear and loosed. Another
arrow was on the way before the first struck, but the man had
time for one strangled shout. They sprinted past him, into a lane
between two buildings atop mounds. Alston looked again at her
compass and matched it against the memorized image viewed
from the air.

   "This way. Go, go!"

   They ran; speed was more important than stealth now. A
quick glance to her right showed the rooftops there aflame, and
people swarming about them, forming bucket chains from the
ponds and tearing at thatch with hooks on poles. Toffler circled
above, the firelight red on the wings of his craft, now and then
dropping another Molotov when it looked as if the workers might
contain the blaze. The commando headed left, toward the larger
building that crowned a mound at the avenue's southern end.
There was a wide doorway, flanked by monumental stone heads,
and a spear leaning against one—probably the men here had
gone to help fight the flames. Inside was a courtyard surrounded
by wooden pillars, with rooms leading off from it, and corridors
at the corners. Men stood at the entrance to one. When they saw
the raiding party they began to shout; two turned and dashed off
down the passageway they guarded.

   "There!" Alston shouted.

   Crossbows snapped, the bowstring slapped against its guard,
Swindapa's sling whistled. Two men fell, and another three
retreated behind the angle of the wall. Their shouts rang loud.
   "No help for it," Alston said grimly, drawing her katana. "Go
for them."

   They sprinted around the colonnade. The Olmecs were
waiting, in the straight confines of the corridor, a splash of color
moving in the darkness. Sekka no atari: the words flowed
through her mind, but it was as if she were watching her own
actions and commenting. Spark of the flint; to strike without
windup, without raising the sword. It is not possible to deal this
blow without diligent practice, Musashi had said.

   She'd had sixteen years of it. Her edge flashed in under the
Olmec's rising elbow, landing on the drum-tight skin just below
his floating rib. Thumping jar of impact, elbows down, hands
clenching as she ripped the curved blade across his gut. Ignore
the falling body, turn as the blade swept around. Swindapa was
backing up, parrying the blurring strokes of the stone-edged
rake, clang and clatter and bang and rattle in the murk.

   Fast, she thought, as her body reversed stance to point her the
other way. The Olmec was very fast. The blade came up, and her
body went forward with the downstroke. Another grinding
thump as the vertebrae of the neck parted. Hendriksson and the
others were swarming silently over the last Indian, shields
pinning him back and short swords stabbing. Alston ignored
them and sprinted down in pursuit of the two who'd run first.
They were bent over a door set into the painted adobe wall, a
door made of strong hardwood and secured with a thick hide
knot. One of them turned at the last minute to meet the point of
her shoulder.

    "Ufff!" Their lungs gasped out air almost together, hers a
controlled half-shout to add force to the blow, his an involuntary
gasp; mi no atare, the body-strike. Even braced for it, she felt as
if she'd rammed herself into a wall. The Indian was shorter than
she, but half again as heavy and built like a solid block of
mahogany. He staggered, though, falling backward. Her legs
moved sideways again, sidethrust kick, the most powerful in the
Empty Hand repertoire. Usually a bit slow, but here she was in
perfect position for it. The heel caught him in the throat just as
he started to straighten. She used the leverage of that to kick off
and spin around, ignoring him—larynx crushed at least.

   The last Olmec had managed to get the knot slashed open.
She saw his back disappearing into the cell, dropped her katana
and drew the shorter wakizashi as she plunged after him. The
light in the corridor was faint, but this was like diving into an
ocean of blackness.

   She nearly died as her eyes adjusted. The spear whistled past,
the shaft giving her a painful thump on the neck. She scarcely
noticed; the Olmec was following his flung weapon, a dagger of
volcanic glass in his hand. The ugly wind of it passed before her
eyes as she jerked her torso back. Then it shattered against the
curved steel of the wakizashi. The Indian shrieked a war-cry and
drove in, reckless of the edge and point in her right hand.

   Can't let him grapple. Not with his advantages of weight and
strength. That was easier to think than do, in this dark confined
space. Cut. Cut, and a hiss of pain. A second's blind flurry, and
she drove the point home in meat—into the biceps of his right
arm. His shriek was as much agony as rage, but his left hand
came up and grasped at her wrist, momentum driving her back
against the adobe wall with bruising, winding force. The back of
her skull rang off the sun-dried brick, and she barely managed to
twist as they fell down on their sides. The eighteen-inch blade of
the wakizashi wavered between them as he strove to force her
wrist back. The Indian suddenly rolled, gaining the uppermost
position.

   Can't hold him. Luckily she had one more functioning arm
than he did. It groped downward, between thighs spraddled as
he tried to pin her and gain possession of the knife. All she could
see was his teeth snarling, but her hand found what it sought.
She grabbed, wrenched, and twisted.

   Some pains will reach even a berserker, and the Olmec wasn't
quite that far gone. He reared up in a soundless gape of agony.
Behind him something moved, a bright horizontal slash and a
wet heavy impact. The body pitched sideways. Swindapa stood
there panting, sword out in the follow-through, her eyes anxious
in the cork-darkened face; Hendriksson had a flashlight out
behind her.
   " 'm all right," Alston gasped. And there was Martha Cofflin,
thank God. Coming this far and not finding her…

  "Good to see you," the Yankee said, showing teeth and
pushing herself upright along the wall.

  "Jared sends regards," Alston said, with the flash of a smile.
We're going to pull it off, hot damn!

  "Lisketier's in the corner."

   "Oh, shit," Alston said, as the light speared empty, mindless
eyes. There was drool running down her chin. "Pulakis, you carry
her. Swindapa, take point; Martha, you go with Pulakis;
Hendriksson, Alonski, we'll take rearguard. Move."

   The squat Pennsylvania Slav bent and took Lisketter's limp
form across his shoulders in a fireman's lift, rising again with
effortless ease. Alston recovered her katana, wiping it down and
resheathing it; catching her breath as well.

  "Right," she said after a moment. "Let's go home."

    They moved out into the corridor, past the still bodies. The
floor was wet with blood, enough to make the dirt tacky and
slippery under their feet in the dark. None of the Americans had
taken more than superficial bruises and cuts, but she had no
illusions about that. They'd had surprise on their side. Now was
time to get out, just as fast as they could.

   Swindapa darted out into the courtyard, and called them on.
The raiding party followed, retracing its steps. The fires were
bigger now, spreading to more of the north end of the city as
tufts of burning thatch drifted with the wind. They were beside
the ornamental pool when Lisketter started screaming.

   "That's torn it," Alston said, sparing the carved stone altar a
single disgusted glance. "Run."

   They did, at as fast a jog as was possible. When the Olmecs
came across the bodies of their fellows and saw the
prisoners—vessels of sacredness to them—gone, their shrieks of
rage sounded trumpet-loud. They pelted after the Americans,
closing the distance fast. Alston reached the retaining wall,
leaped down, and calculated the times.

   "Damn," she said mildly. Aloud: "Swindapa, Pulakis, get
Martha and the prisoner back to the boat. We'll take rear
guard." When the Fiernan hesitated, she put a whipcrack into
her voice: "Now!"

   The three of them turned back to watch the pursuers. "All
right," Alston said as the others behind them crashed down
through the scrub on the hillside. "Let's discourage this lot."

   Some of the Olmecs running toward them were carrying
torches. All of them were backlit as the wood-and-thatch
buildings burned out of control. She drew the Colt and leaned
forward, her chest against the logs of the retaining wall and both
elbows on the clay of the roadway. She wasn't an expert with the
pistol, but this was as straightforward as any shooting
range—silhouetted men running straight toward you. Beside her
Alonski aimed his crossbow and Hendriksson reached over her
shoulder for an arrow.

   Crack. She slitted her eyes against the muzzle flash of the
magnum. One of the men with torches down. Crack… crack…
crack… Let the pistol drop back naturally after each shot.
Crack… crack. Open the cylinder, work the ejector to spill the
spent brass, slip in two speedloaders each holding three rounds.
Snap it shut and get back into firing position. Spears whistled
overhead in the dark, but the Indians were shooting blind. One
of them landed uncomfortably close; well, they had the muzzle
flashes to aim at. She shifted a few feet along the wall, firing
steadily. The crossbowman and the archer shot, shot again,
steady as metronomes. Damn fine work, both of them. Closer…
then the enemy were tumbling backward.

  "Go, both of you, go!"

   They went, sliding down the trampled path on their
backsides. Alston followed. Behind her she could hear voices,
shouting, whatever the Olmecs used as officers rallying their
troops. They certainly didn't lack guts; the past few days had
shown that for certain. More war whoops through the darkness
behind her. Branches and thorns clawed at her face, at her limbs,
at her feet. Torches broke the darkness, cast wavering red gleams
of light through leaves and vines. Mistake, she thought, turning
to shoot. An atlatl dart thudded into a trunk near her. She
crashed downward another dozen feet, shot again, retreated.
They were down on the flat below the hillslope, mud catching at
her boots; she turned and emptied the revolver, never knowing if
she struck anyone. Back toward the edge of the water a little
moonlight came in, reflected off the river. The pistol clicked
empty.

   Her hands swept the sword out. Starlight glimmered on its
clean arc. She filled her lungs, gave a kia, and rushed forward.
The Olmecs hadn't been expecting that; tateki no kurai, the way
of fighting multiple opponents. The first took her point right in
the face. She jerked it free and slashed another across the chest
and upper arms. Damn, but I'm glad Master Hishiba made us
practice outdoors and in the dark.

  "Diiiiissaaa!" Alston shrieked.

   She retreated a step, another, dodged a rake, beat a
spearhead aside, and slashed the hand that held it on the
backstroke. The Indians had never met anything like the
continuous whirling menace of the katana; however brave they
were, it threw them off their balance for a few crucial seconds.
There was no way she could tell what her comrades were doing.
Behind her something went pop and brilliant light washed across
her shoulders, throwing her shadow stark before her. Flare pistol
. The leading Olmec stopped, staring goggle-eyed at her face.
Never seen a black before, she thought. Her hands took
advantage of the moment and slashed the sword in a horizontal
cut. The falling body tripped the man behind as he stumbled
squint-eyed in the sudden light. The katana came down in the
pear-splitter. She lost a crucial second as she tugged it free from
his skull.

    Something stung in her leg. The damp ground hit her as she
fell and she was looking wide-eyed at a spear driven into her leg
six inches above the knee. An Indian loomed over her, raising
another spear in both hands. Then something silvery slashed
across him and he staggered back. Swindapa came leaping after
her sword-strike, darkness save for starlight on her katana and
wisps of hair leaking out from under the wool cap, screaming
something saw-edged in her native language. The Indian came
back at her, snarling and drawing back his spear to thrust.

   Above and behind him a great winged shape slid down out of
the night like the god of all owls, its wings black against the
bellowing inferno that topped the plateau. Red dots fell from it,
to blossom into fire amid the scrub of the slope, and then it was
by only a few feet over their heads and banking out over the
river. Swindapa caught the spearman as his head whipped
around in shock, a gash across neck and chest that sent him
back gurgling and thrashing; the sword in her hands swung in
red arcs that drove the Olmecs beyond arm's reach for an
instant. Other hands grabbed at Alston, and she bit her tongue
in the effort needed not to scream; the shock was wearing off,
and the pain of the wound flooded into her.

   Water, then inflated rubber flexing under her back, firelight
red all around them. The flat twanging snap of crossbows; the
whaleboats were out on the water where they'd been waiting all
night, just beyond spear range. Swindapa tumbled over her,
bringing an involuntary grunt of agony as the haft of the spear
was jarred, and paddles dug frantically at the water. Indians
waded into the river after them, fell as the Americans in the
longboats pumped crossbow bolts into them. Darts fell around
the rubber boat, struck into the body of it, and it hissed as air
began to escape.

  The last nicker of consciousness left her as she was dragged
again, into the whaleboat. Her mind clamped down on her right
hand, bringing the sword with her, and then there was darkness.

  "She won't live long," someone was saying in a hushed voice.

   Marian Alston knew where she was without opening her
eyes—in the flag cabin aboard Eagle. Her thoughts seemed clear
enough, but distant and slow. She forced her eyelids up.

  "Surely not that bad," she said quietly.
  The ship's doctor was there, and most of her officers; also the
Arnsteins, and Swindapa sitting beside her bunk. Hendriksson
had her arm in a sling and a bandage around her head.

   The voices fell silent, then all broke out at once for a moment.
The doctor overrode them: "Not you, ma'am. Pamela Lisketter.
Javelin under the short ribs as you were leaving. Alonski was
wounded badly too, but he ought to pull through. You lost a lot of
blood, though—one of the big veins got nicked. Be thankful
you've got a fairly common type."

   Swindapa smiled at her and held out her left arm; there was a
patch of gauze taped over the inside fold of her elbow.

  Alston nodded slowly; that seemed to take an inordinate
amount of effort. "Ms… Cofflin?"

  The doctor smiled. "Fine, ma'am, and the baby."

  "Mr… Hiller?"

   "We're under way, ma'am. Heading north-northeast. I don't
like the look of the barometer. We're in for a blow, and I wanted
sea room."

  "Very well," she sighed, closing her eyes again.

   Martha Cofflin clung to the line as the quarterdeck canted
under her feet. No nausea, thank God, but the sky looked dirty,
clouds brassy and black at the .same time. The wind was
increasing as well, a shrill piping sound in the rigging. David
Lisketter went by between two sailors, his hands—hand and
stump, rather—bound before him.

   "Hello, Mr. Lisketter," she said flatly, and just loud enough to
be heard above the gathering scream of the wind. "There was
something I wanted to ask you."

  His eyes stared at her like those of an ox in the slaughter
chute, and she almost left it at that. No. It's necessary. This
musn't happen again, and Jared might be too forgiving. Her
hand rested on her stomach; it would have been so easy to lose
it…

  "Have you-ever had mumps?" she asked.

  Slow thought stirred. "Mumps?" he said. "I'm… I think so.
Most people do, don't they?"

   "Most people aren't asymptomatic carriers," she said. "A few
are. I noticed several of the Indians showing the symptoms,
though. So one of your party must have been; but you were here
long enough for the eight-day minimum incubation period to
run… and of course, eating undercooked meat is a wonderful way
to catch something. Congratulations, Mr. Lisketter."

  "Con… gratulations?" he whispered.

  "On your revenge."

  "People don't die of…" He stopped, appalled.

   "Oh, the fatalities will be heavy," she said. "But it's the
long-term effects I was thinking of. You do know that adult-onset
mumps often causes male sterility, don't you? I expect that in a
population that hasn't been previously exposed, that will be
nearly universal. Congratulations, Mr. Lisketter. You've avenged
your sister and your friends quite thoroughly. You've
single-handedly wiped out the first Mesoamerican civilization,
and all the ones which followed from it. Genocide."

   Martha turned and headed for the companionway down to
the cabins. She had the captain's, with Alston recuperating in
the flag suite. There was a shout behind her, and a scream. The
splash did not carry over the noise of the birthing storm. Some
people were simply too dangerous to have around her friends
and family.

            CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  October, Year 1 - February, Year 2 A.E,

   Jared," Martha said, stooping to kiss his forehead where he
sat in the wheelchair.
  "Martha," he replied.

   Thank You, he added in silence to God; he wasn't much of a
praying man, ordinarily, but this was a special occasion. Jared
cleared his throat and looked up the gangplank at the Eagle and
her crew. It was a cool, bright day, and the flags were flying at
her masts in a wind that smelled of salt and fish.

  "Best we get out of the way, I suppose," he said.

    She nodded, and they stood to one side as the others came
down—crew and cadets by squads, and the wounded, limping or
on stretchers. He tried to look each one in the face and print the
features on his memory forever, returning their greetings with
solemn nods. The crowd spilling up the dock behind him, filling
it and Broad and Easy streets behind him, was almost equally
respectful, parting for the ambulances… and nobody begrudged
the precious remnant of gasoline they burned.

  "Eagle departing!" the boatswain's voice barked.

   A pipe shrilled, and the ship's bell rang three times and once
again. Marian Alston stood at the top of the gangplank, crutches
under her arms. She blinked as a voice called from among the
cadets and crew crowding the dock:

  "Three cheers for the skipper!"

   Cofflin joined in the three crashing shouts, self-conscious but
loud as he felt his wife's fingers squeeze his. Alston nodded, then
drew herself up slightly and saluted the dock; those who'd sailed
south with her answered in snapping unison. Swindapa came up
to steady her as she maneuvered slowly down the gangplank,
then sank into a wheelchair beside the Chief's.

   "Christ, we're a matched pair," she muttered, as they endured
the necessary formalities.

  "Not all that long, I hope," he said.

   "The medic says it was a nice clean puncture—blade went in
with the grain of the muscle, not across it. Should heal without
any loss of function."

   When the street emptied somewhat, their partners wheeled
them about and began pushing them up it.

   "You up to that, Martha?" Cofflin asked anxiously.

   "Jared, I'm pregnant, not ill," she replied tartly, then stroked
his head for an instant. A smile went between her and Swindapa.

   Cofflin's head turned to Alston. He swallowed. "There…" He
cleared his throat and began again. "There aren't any words
except thank you, and that isn't enough," he said. "And, ah—"

   Alston's broad-lipped mouth quirked. "You're welcome,
Jared."

    He turned in his chair and reached out a hand. "Look, I mean
it. I owe you Martha's life, and our child's. That's one hell of a big
debt. When you need me, I'll be there, whatever it is. All right?"

   She took his hand in reply; it was narrower than his, the
fingers long and slender, with a grip like steel wire in his big
fisherman's paw.

   "I was doin' my job… but I may take you up on that,
someday." She sighed. "It's going to be a while before we can go
after Walker and finish the job," she went on. "We aren't ready.
Weren't ready for what we just did, but we were lucky."

   Martha snorted. "I don't believe in unearned luck," she said.

   "Earned or unearned, we were still lucky." She looked down at
her leg. "Well, I'm not going anywhere for a while. Spring, then."
Alston looked over her shoulder and smiled. "By the way, you
should probably thank 'dapa here, too. She saved me, at least."

   The Fiernan beamed. "Yes, I did—Marian was hurt, and all at
once Moon Woman filled my bones with fire and my liver with
strength… We're here."

   The two women watched the Cofflins negotiate the stairs;
someone had put in a ramp for the chair. Swindapa frowned
slightly as she pushed Alston's back down Orange toward the
junction of Liberty and Main.

   "They didn't say much when they saw each other," she said.

  "Well, they're Yankees," Alston replied, smiling. "They like to
squeeze all the use they can out of a word, or an expression."
Then she yawned. "Tired."

   "Of course you are. Home soon, and you'll get better fast." She
shook her head. "You need lots of sleep, and—" She continued in
her own language. Alston looked over her shoulder and raised
her brows. The Fiernan continued: "Someone to… keep your
spirit warm. Cuddle, you'd say. Everyone knows that speeds
healing."

   Alston laughed. "I believe it may," she said. "It very well may,
'dapa."

   Her head turned eastward, and her voice went harsh and flat
for an instant. "And I'm going to need all my strength. Yes
indeed."

   With the Tartessians acting as go-betweens, the formal
meeting with Daurthunnicar was delayed several days for
ceremony's sake. When all was arranged the sun was nearing the
edge of the world, on an evening that fell clear and warm for
autumn.

  "Glad of the delay," Walker said, looking critically at the
quarterhorse stallion. "Bastard here needed to get his land legs
back."

    The horse still wasn't fit for hard work; standing idle in a
cramped stall in Yare's hold all the way across the Atlantic had
lost it some condition. Still, it had enough energy to try to rear a
little. Walker slugged it down with a hand on the bridle, pulling
up and back as it rolled an eye and stamped.

   "None of that, Bastard," he said. "You're not some yuppie's
pet now."
   He'd been raised a cowboy on an old-fashioned working
spread, and didn't have sentimental illusions about horses. They
were near-as-no-matter brainless, often malicious, and
dangerous, a primitive, less valuable form of organic pickup
truck. Rich hobbyists could afford to spend years coaxing a horse
into doing tricks; when you worked the range, you needed it to
do what you wanted, right then and there.

   Walker swung into the Western saddle and looked behind. His
followers were drawn up, except for the few on the ship; he'd left
them the firearms, save a Colt and shotgun for himself, but
everyone wore island-made armor and carried spear, sword,
crossbow. They marched across the fields in good order,
following a beaten track that ran down to the beach. Isketerol
walked at his stirrup, with his cousin and a clump of men from
the ships.

   The rahax came a third of the way to meet him, standing tall
in his chariot; a considerable concession, implying that Walker
was a guest of rank, rather than merely a suppliant. The
American swung down from the saddle, put his hand to his heart
and bowed.

   "Greetings. The favor of your gods—" he listed them, which
took a while—"and great good luck be with you always,
Daurthunnicar son of Ubrotarix, rahax of the Iraiina."

   The shrewd little eyes in the heavy, bearded face blinked at
him. After a long moment, he nodded. "Come, you are peace-holy
in my steading, welcome beneath my rooftree. Be my guest,
drink and eat of my bounty, and we will talk."

   "Okay, boys, we're guests," he said, turning to his followers.
"Keep your hands off the women, unless you hear me say
different, and watch your manners. This is tricky and I don't
want any of you queering the deal."

   Jared Cofflin reached out and cut the ribbon. Above him the
vanes of the new windmill began to turn with a rumbling of
gears. Water gushed from a thick pipe onto the sloping inner
face of the holding tank. Cheers rang out behind him, first from
the crews who'd built the pumping engine, then from hundreds
of islanders behind them, most of whom had spent
pick-and-shovel time on the basin that would hold the water.
The big wind machine was much like the eighteenth-century Old
Mill in outline, a round cone of beams and planks on a circular
base of mortared stone, ending in a timber circle twenty feet
above.

   Steel ground on steel from within. The wind was brisk out of
the north, carrying scudding tatters of iron-gray cloud with it,
from a dark horizon. A few spatters of cold rain came flicking
into their faces. Hard to believe it's November already. It
seemed longer than eight months since the Event; and it seemed
sometimes as if it were still a dream, that he might wake any
morning to the sounds of cars and television.

   Cofflin turned to face the crowd, leaning on his stick to spare
the healing knee. Coleman allowed that, as long as he didn't
overdo it. He smiled inwardly; Alston was still on strict bed rest,
and snarling abominably. Swindapa must be a saint.

   "When the rest are finished," he said, pointing to the
foundations of five more spaced along the earth berm of the
reservoir, "we'll have twenty-four-hour running water again
throughout the town. Three cheers for Ron Leaton and Sam
Macy and their teams!"

   The cheers were long and heartfelt. Twenty-four-hour flush
toilets again, by damn, Cofflin thought, grinning. That was one
thing few people could get used to doing without. And the
composting sewage works is so useful. The engineer and the
carpenter waved and smiled themselves.

  "Civilization, brick by brick," he said to the two men and their
workers, as the gathering broke up.

   "Plank by plank," Macy said, looking pridefully at the
structure.

   "Gear by gear," Leaton said with equal conviction. "And those
cogwheels are six feet across, the main ones. The bevel gears
weigh a hundred and fifty pounds each."
  "Good piece of work," Cofflin said, clapping them each on the
shoulder. "Now, when can we get the whole project wrapped?"

  Whump.

   Walker fired the last shot and held the shotgun to his face,
blowing into the open breech. The first rifled slug had killed the
aurochs, but he'd put the whole six-round magazine into the
beast, all at the head. What was left looked as if something very
large had chewed on it, and then spat it out again. The locals
were suitably impressed.

    He walked around the animal. It had stood a good seven feet
at the shoulder, and the hump was still level with his eyes now
that it had collapsed upright. "Wild cattle" didn't give any idea
of its size and ferocity; it made a bull bison look like a Jersey
milker. Sort of like a cross between a cow and a rhinoceros, he
thought. Blood pooled out on the sere yellow leaves and dead
grass that carpeted the little clearing. The oak trees roundabout
still bore a few leaves, but mostly their huge gnarled limbs
reached for the sky like a giant's arthritic fingers from the
massive moss-covered trunks. It was chilly enough that the
Iraiina were all wearing thick leggings and double tunics as well
as their usual kilts and cloaks. The American wore mackinaw
and ski pants, and a cap with earflaps. He didn't want to blend
in too much. A touch of mystery helped with his purposes.

  All hail the wizard-chief, he thought.

   Thumbing more shells into the breech of the shotgun, he
looked around. Some of the Iraiina chiefs looked as though
they'd prefer to be running just as far and as fast as they could;
they made covert signs with their fingers, spat aside, stared out
of pale faces. The half-dozen young warriors who'd sworn service
with him looked terrified but even more proud as they drew
knives and advanced to begin skinning and butchering the
ton-weight of animal. After a moment one of them came over to
him with a slice of the heart; the man's arms were red to the
elbow.

  "Yours is the hunter's right, lord," he said to Walker.
   "My thanks, Ohotolarix," Walker said and took a piece
between his teeth, cutting it off with his belt knife and chewing
the hot rank meat.

  Tough as boot leather, he thought. The chiefs' followers were
building a fire. He chewed with relish. Well begun, half done.

  "There's nothing men have ever made more beautiful," Cofflin
murmured.

   "Men in the generic sense, yes," Martha said, nodding
agreement with the sentiment.

   It was raining outside, freezing rain that turned to glistening
treacherous black ice underfoot; the big sheet-metal building
drummed to the beat of it. Even with the steam-powered
compressor thumping and shedding heat in one corner, the
interior was chilly. The huge shed had been built for storing
boats overwinter; now it was used for building them. Saws
whined and drills whirled, filling the air with the fresh sappy
scent of cut wood. The ribs of the schooner curled up from the
keelson like the skeleton of some sleek sea beast cast ashore,
embraced by the cradle that held them in place while the frame
was spiked and treenailed together. The interior braces were
mostly in place, and the shell of planks was starting to go on. A
crew heaved at a line as they watched, and a big curved shape of
oak went up on a pulley rigged from the roof and swung down to
where the deck would be. Other hands reached up and guided it
down. Already the half-built ship looked as if it yearned for the
water, to turn its sharp prow southward and race for the
unknown seas.

  "How does she shape?" Cofflin called up. "Everything looks
good from here."

   Marian Alston came out from behind a rib and climbed down
the board staircase stiffly, limping over to them with a roll of
plans in one hand.

   "Shapes like the beauty she is," she said. "We'll have her ready
to come down the slipway by the beginning of February, and
then we can fit her out and mount her sticks and start on the
next."

  "Fast work," Cofflin said.

    "The next one will go a lot faster, with what we've learned.
And Leaton's made up some more compressed-air power tools.
It'd take a year, if we were usin' hand methods only."

  "Decided what to call her yet?" he said.

  "Well, that's not entirely my say-so…" Alston began.

  Cofflin snorted. "The hell it isn't, after what you did."

   "Frederick Douglass, I thought. He worked as a caulker in a
shipyard for a while, you know, before he got free. And Harriet
Tubman for number two."

  Martha nodded. "Excellent choices, Marian," she said, sighing
and sinking back on an upturned bucket. Her stomach curved
out the loose dress she wore. "More sore ankles."

  "You work too much, Martha," Alston said.

   "Hell, those are my lines," Cofflin grinned. He tilted his head
up and looked at the bulk of the schooner. "I envy you
something… straightforward like this."

   "Speaking of straightforward," Alston said, tapping the rolled
plans into her other hand, "I'll need to make some promotions
when we commission the schooners. Bump Ortiz and
Hendriksson to lieutenant commander and give them each a
couple of ensigns and lieutenants. I have my eye on some of the
upperclassmen for that."

   "Sounds good," Cofflin said. Alston was always conscientious
about recognizing the supremacy of the civil authorities, and he
didn't interfere in her bailiwick. "I assume your
second-in-command agrees?"

   "Certainly. I'd like to move Sandy up to commander as well,
for symmetry's sake. For that matter I'm going to be leaving her
in command of Eagle a good deal of the time, when we get to
Britain."

   Cofflin nodded. "Again, no problem. We can put together
some sort of ceremony, I suppose. I wish everything went as
easily."

  "Don't tell me—y'all've just come from another Constitutional
Committee meeting?"

   "Almost as bad," Cofflin said, shuddering slightly for effect.
"Finance." He dug in one pocket of his parka. "Here. Three
bucks."

   He flipped the coin to Alston. She caught it; it was gold, about
the size of. a dime, with LIBERTY on one side beneath an eagle's
wings, and Republic of Nantucket: 1 A.E. on the other. The
picture inside that was a lighthouse—specifically, Brant Point
lighthouse at the northwestern entrance to the harbor.

   "I thought you were going to use the Unitarian Church
tower?" she said. "Don't tell me…"

   "All the other denominations objected. One-tenth of an ounce
fine gold, though, eighteen-karat—smelted down from jewelry.
Starbuck swears gold-based money'll work. God knows we need
a currency. Swapping is so damned awkward."

  "Useful for trade, once the locals get the idea." She looked
down at the coin. "Can't say 'queer as a three-dollar bill'
anymore, can we?"

   "Ah… hadn't thought of that." He gave a dry chuckle; it was
funny, when you thought about it. "Starbuck's bad enough on
Finance, but everyone on the Constitutional Committee has a bee
in their bonnet."

   "We need a constitution, and that's more important than
this." She jerked her head at the schooner. "Much as I hate to
admit it."

  They both sat on stacks of boards, and began to massage their
injured legs with an identical gesture. "The Twin Gimps," Alston
said.

  Cofflin snorted. "You could spend more time on the
Constitutional Committee, then," he said. "Since it's so damn
important."

   "A cobbler should stick to her last and a sailor to her ship. I
just don't have your capacity to endure fools," she said, with a
slight momentary smile he'd learned was her equivalent of a
grin. "Didn't I get the Arnsteins to enroll? Aren't they a help?"

   "Too much. Every time I turn around they're telling us how
the Republic of Venice or the Hanseatic League or ancient
Athens did it—Ian's always trying to pin some unpronounceable
Greek name on everything we do, at that. It's as intimidating as
hell. Then Sam Macy loses his temper with them, and I have to
smooth it over."

  "Thus getting your own way," Martha pointed out. "Politics
may not be your trade, dear, but you're learning it."

  Damn, but it's… energizing… being married to someone
smarter than you are, he thought.

   "How's it look, basically?" Alston asked, leaning forward to get
out of the way of someone carrying two buckets of hot tar on the
ends of a shoulder yoke. The strong scent made Martha hold her
breath for a moment.

   "Oh, a republic with a chief executive—everyone seems to like
the name—and a Council, reporting to the Town Meeting and
with appointments subject to confirmation, and the Meeting to
pass laws and review and vote on all the major decisions," Cofflin
said. "That's the bare bones. Right now we're thrashing out
whether the militia should be separate from the Coast Guard,
and whether the commander of that should be called an admiral
or not. Want to be an admiral?"

   "Only if I can wear one of those fancy fore-and-aft hats and
gold braid," Alston said dryly.
   "Talk of calling you people the Republic of Nantucket Navy,
too."

   That brought her upright and indignant, as he expected.
"Look, Cofflin—" She saw his grin, and relaxed. "Sorry, but tell
them Guard people would rather barbecue their mothers. No
offense—I know you were a squid."

  "None taken," he said. "And they're debating whether the
Town Meeting can amend the constitution with a simple
majority or not; Arnstein's strong for a two-thirds vote two years
running. Goes on about something the Athenian Assembly did."
He lifted a brow. "Hung some admirals for losing a battle, it
was."

   "Sounds reasonable," Alston said. "Christ, you know how a
crowd can get, 'specially when someone tells them what they all
want to hear."

  "You could come and tell the committee…" he said.

   "You've got a fund of low cunning, Jared, you know that?" she
said. "Maybe. If I've got time. After Christmas."

  "So at this point, you just pack up and go home," William
Walker said.

   Shaumsrix scowled; he was an experienced war chief by
Iraiina standards. "Of course. We can't take the fort, we don't
have enough men, and if we wait here too long many will get sick
in this cold and wet. Or nearby chiefs will come and overfall us
with numbers we can't match, even though this chief is at feud
with all his neighbors. We've taken many cattle and sheep, and
horses, yes—I admit that your riders let us surprise them that
way. Now we should go home and guard against their revenge."

   Walker leaned his hands on the pommel of his saddle and
looked around at his own followers. Most of them were mounted;
chariot ponies broke to the saddle easily enough, and at thirteen
hands were big enough to carry a man if he changed off every so
often. They stamped and fretted a little, their newly shod hooves
squelching in the damp earth, breath blowing white from their
flaring nostrils into the chilly air of late fall.

   "Time for our next surprise, boys," he said. "Break out the
axes."

   An ox-wagon creaked up behind them. Not the local kind, two
solid wheels and two beasts; this was as close as he could get to a
Boer trek wagon or a Conestoga, with eight yoke pulling it via a
stout iron chain. It wasn't fast, but it could carry a couple of tons
of weight pretty well anywhere.

   "More magic?" the Iraiina said fearfully.

  "Just a little applied mechanics," Walker said. Shaumsrix
made a sign with his fingers.

   It took all that day and most of the next to set the engine up.
At last Walker stepped forward and took the lanyard. A swift
tug…

  Thack-WHUMP. The long arm of the trebuchet whipped
upward.

   It was nothing but an application of the lever: the short arm
carried a timber box full of rocks, the long a sling at its end to
throw rocks or other projectiles. The bigger medieval examples
had been able to throw a ton of weight half a mile. This was a bit
smaller, but ample for his needs.

   "Devil's in the details," Walker snorted to himself, watching
the barrel of lard wrapped in burning rags arching up into the
blue November sky. At least we've got some decent weather for
a change. Most of the time he'd been wading in mud while he
worked on the damn thing back at base.

   He leveled the binoculars and watched. The target was a
round earthwork dunthaurikaz, a little fortlet with perhaps a
dozen big huts inside, and a stockade surrounding it made of
upright logs rammed into the top of the earthwork. Pathetic
even compared to the Western forts he'd seen on TV when he
was a kid, but nearly invulnerable by here-and-now standards.
The defenders had been standing on the platform behind the
ramparts, shooting an occasional arrow and yelling insults. He
could understand them, more or less; their language and the
Iraiina tongue weren't far apart—about like the difference
between BBC English and what a small-town Texan spoke. The
screams of fear as the barrel flew toward them were
understandable anywhere. It struck near the sharpened points of
the logs and snapped two off as it shattered. Burning tallow flung
in all directions, spattering. Wood began to catch.

  "Haul away, boys!" he called.

   Four horses were waiting. They were local chariot ponies, but
he'd had proper horse-collar harnesses made up, not the choking
throat-strap yoke these people used. A strong rope ran back from
them to the pulleys, and the longer throwing arm began to swing
downward with a creaking of its raw timbers, hauling up the
great box of rocks on the other end. John did a good job on the
ironwork, he thought. But then, the blacksmith always did a
good job, it was a habit with him… and Walker had done enough
work with him back on the island to know exactly what he was
capable of, and how fast.

  The crew snapped the iron hook into the loop bolted into the
arm. Ohotolarix came up beside him.

   "Lord, that thing is a marvel—but we don't want to burn all
the loot, do we?"

   The young Iraiina swaggered, hand on his new steel sword,
but there was plenty of deference in the way he spoke to his new
chief.

  "Good point," Walker said. To the crew at the trebuchet:
"Give 'em a stone this time, men."

   Four of them lifted a three-hundred-pounder into the heavy
leather sling. McAndrews adjusted the stop ropes, frowning in
concentration.

  "That ought to do it, sir."

  "Go for it."
   The tall black jerked at the cord that tripped the release.
Thack-WHUMP. The rounded boulder spun through the air. For
a wonder—aiming this thing was by guess and by God—it struck
not far away from where the barrel had. Four logs snapped
across, raw white splinters showing in their heartwood, and a
man arched out to land crumpled in the wet pastureland
between the fort and the invaders. The chiefs and warriors who'd
agreed to come along on this raid shrieked and beat their axes
on their shields in glee.

  "Reload."

   "We'll batter them to sausage meat, lord!" Ohotolarix said
with wild enthusiasm.

   These people are like kids, Walker thought, not for the first
time. One minute they were all agog over a novelty, then next
sulking in the corner or stamping and waving their fists in quick
anger… not what you'd call dependable. On the other hand, they
can learn. At least the younger ones.

   "No we won't," Walker said. "Because they can figure that out
themselves, and any minute now…"

   The narrow gate of the fort was hauled open. Hands thrust a
gangway through, over the muddy ditch that surrounded the
settlement, and two chariots thundered across. Behind them ran
forty or so men, all the adult free males in this chiefs following,
bellowing their war cries. The Iraiina whooped themselves, and
ran to meet their foes.

   "Remember what I told you!" Walker barked. "Shoulder to
shoulder! March!"

   His own little band tramped forward, spears lowered and
crossbows ready, swinging around the clot of combat where
chieftains hurled javelins and taunts from their war-cars and
footmen met in milling, deadly chaos. Grossly outnumbered to
begin with, none of the enemy fought long. Walker met one of
the last, an axman bleeding but still wolf-swift. The tomahawk
chopped at him, trailing red drops. He brought his katana up in
a looping curve to meet it, and the ash-wood slid off steel. The
American planted his feet and swung, drawing the cut across the
native's neck. The contorted fork-bearded face went slack and
dribbled blood, then collapsed. A few others, perhaps seven or
eight, threw down their weapons.

  "Don't kill them!" Walker yelled, pointing his blade to the
warriors who'd surrendered. "I want prisoners."

   "Well struck, lord!" Ohotolarix said. His own short sword was
red. "Now we plunder!"

    The flanking move had done more than end the fight quickly;
it had also put Walker's band nearest the gate. "Double-time!" he
shouted. First plunder, then burn.

   The inside of the fortress was stink and chaos; the locals had
driven much of their stock inside, and brought themselves from
steadings all around, packing it far beyond its usual capacity.
Hairy little cattle bawled and surged in panic; sheep milled in
clots; women and children ran likewise. One or two of the
mothers had already cut their children's throats and plunged
daggers into their own chests, or hung themselves from the
carved rafter ends of their houses.

   "You, you, you, get those fires out!" Walker barked. "The rest
of you, round these people up! They're no use to us dead. Get
their stuff over there."

   He pointed to the… porch, he decided… of the biggest
building in the fort. Almost certainly the fallen chief's dwelling;
the roof ran out a dozen feet or so beyond the wall, supported on
wooden pillars, and there was a raised floor a bit out of the mud,
covered with the same cut reeds used inside.

   The other Iraiina were surging into the fort in his wake, but
even their chiefs were a little, overawed by the foreigner who'd
won the favor of the rahax and shown such command of
war-magic. Instead of flinging themselves on the plunder and
women they shouted commands to their own followers, enforcing
them with an occasional cuff or shove. The burning sections of
the palisade were put out or dragged away, the livestock herded
out to await division, the survivors kicked and pushed and
spear-prodded into a mass.

   "Chief Hwalkarz," one of the charioteer lords said. "As you
wished, we have done."

   Men were shouting in glee as they dragged out their booty.
Bolts of woolen cloth, clothing, furs, bronze tools; some gold and
silver ornaments, more of bronze and stone and shell. Pottery
jugs and skins of mead and beer were added; they called out
reports of stored food, grain, cheeses, smoked and pickled meat.

  Happy as kids at Christmas, Walker thought, smiling and
wiping his sword.

   "Here's what we'll do," he said to the two Iraiina chiefs. "You
can have all the bronze and cloth, and half the gold and silver."

   They whooped and pounded him on the back; Ohotolarix
looked a little startled, then relaxed. The bronze tools and
weapons weren't much use to them, and they could trade for
cloth.

    "We divide the food and livestock equally—half for me, half for
you two to split. Half the prisoners are mine, and I get first pick.
Is that just?"

    "Just and more than just," the senior of the two Iraiina
leaders said; he was about Walker's years, although he looked a
little older with his weathered face and several teeth knocked out
in fights. The dark-brown braid of his hair was bound with
leather thongs and wolf fangs; it twitched as he looked around.
"Never shall you or your men lack for meat and drink at the
steading of Shaumsrix son of Telenthaur."

   "That is good," Walker said politely. Sucker. He had an eye on
several of Shaumsrix Telenthaur's son's followers, and he
suspected the Iraiina would be less than pleased when they
switched allegiance.

  "We should make a thank-offering to the gods," he went on.

  "Else no few of our fear-despising heroes will lie sleepless in
dread of Dead Walkers," the Iraiina chief agreed. "Hmm. One
horse and, eka, four cattle? That will make enough fresh meat for
the victory feast." He grinned, a carnivore expression. "We've
given enough man-meat to please the Mirutha and the Crow
Goddess. He of the Long Spear was with us, and the Blood Hag
drank deep."

   "Your word is strong," Walker said, clasping wrists with the
other man. "Let it be as you say."

   He walked over to where the prisoners waited, weeping or
stoic or watching with silent dread. The men and older boys had
been bound at wrist and ankle and shoved into a hut with a
barred door. The locals were surprised he hadn't just cut their
throats… but then, the Iraiina had little idea of how to make men
work. Three among the remainder caught his eyes, two girls
about twelve and an older one of eighteen or so, holding the
younger ones against herself. They looked enough alike to be
sisters and probably were, with seal-brown hair and gray eyes.
Their clothing was good by local standards, the bright plaid wool
of their long dresses woven in a sort of herringbone twill, and the
older wore a gold bracelet; they all had shoes, which was swank
among the natives. The way their hair tumbled loose to their
shoulders meant they were unmarried.

   Alice said she could use some more household help, he
thought. Fair enough; it was wasteful to have a qualified medico
doing scutwork, and he wanted to keep her happy. Not to
mention …

  "You," he said, smiling and beckoning.

   The younger ones whimpered, and the older girl clutched
them tighter. "You, come here," Walker went on. They stumbled
to him. I must look strange, he thought. Rumors about the new
wizard who'd taken up residence among the Iraiina would have
spread far, too.

   He gripped the older girl by the hair, just hard enough to
immobilize her, and checked her over. Some of these women
carried razor-sharp little triangular bronze knives tucked away
in the most unexpected places. There was nothing beneath her
clothing but girl though, shaped very pleasantly… and these
people didn't wear underwear. Walker looked around while his
hand moved beneath her skirt. The girl trembled and closed her
eyes, biting at her lip. She didn't seem very surprised, though;
this was what happened after a lost battle, here.

   "All right, boys," he said in English. "Party time. Pick one
each. Remember, the supply's limited, and you'll be taking these
back home, so don't get too rough." Then he repeated it in the
more formal phrasing of Iraiina.

   There was going to be a lot of work, getting all this stuff and
the people back to the base he'd named Walkerburg. No reason
not to relax tonight, of course. A raw whoop rose from his
followers, and the war bands of the other chiefs jostled, waiting
their turn to pick. He noticed McAndrews hanging back. Can't
have that, he thought.

   He released the brown-haired girl for a moment and grabbed
another, a full-figured blonde in her twenties who was wiping
away her tears and trying to smile at the conquerors. Obviously
one with an eye for the main chance. The ones glaring defiance
or standing slumped in despair wouldn't do for a shrinking violet
like the cadet from Tennessee. The eyes went wide in alarm as he
ripped the dress off her shoulders and shoved her over to
McAndrews; nobody around here had ever seen blacks before.

   "You're entitled to your share, Ensign," he said. The younger
man stuttered, obviously torn between horror and temptation.
"You wouldn't want anyone to think you were looking down on
us, would you?" Walker said. His smile was cold. "Not hurt
anyone's feelings? I'd just purely hate to have you hurt m'
feelings, McAndrews."

  "Ah… no, of course not, sir."

  "Good man. Have fun."

  Laughing, he turned and pushed the brown-haired girl he'd
chosen into the hall, scooping up one of the jugs of mead as he
passed; her younger sisters tailed along uncertainly. It was dark
and smoky within, but the turf walls and the fires smoldering in
pits down the length of the floor kept it reasonably warm; there
were a few low wicker partitions, but otherwise it was just one
big room, with tools and bundles of herbs and hams hanging
from the low rafters. He led the others behind one of the woven
barriers; the younger girls huddled in the corner, clinging to
each other. Furs and wool blankets covered straw.

  "What's your name?" he asked, shedding his sword belt and
hanging the weapons carefully behind him. No sense in taking
chances, he thought, undoing the latches of his armor and
swinging out of the suit.

   "Keruwthena, lord," she said, clenching her hands and looking
down. Then she forced her eyes back up. She seemed a little
reassured that he looked like other men beneath the steel.

  "Lord, my sisters… they're very young," she went on, as she
unfastened the pins that held her gown at the shoulders.

   Meaning, please don't throw them to your men, he supposed.
"Don't worry," Walker said. Not often your fantasies come true
so precisely, he thought, laughing at the hammering of his own
heart. "They're safe enough, if you're going to be sensible."

   Some time later he rose and began dressing. Keruwthena did
too. "I…" she said. "I am glad you are not a cruel man, lord," she
said after a moment. "The stories…"

   Walker finished off the jug of mead. "Not cruel unless I'm
crossed," he said genially.

   A woman in her position's best hope was to end up a
prominent warrior's possession, and work her way up to minor
wife and personal freedom, or as much freedom as a woman ever
had among the eastern tribes. She doubtless thought she'd
lucked out, with him. Then he laughed; Keruwthena tried a
shaky smile, and the two young girls stared at him in terrified
awe.

   You're lucky so far, he thought. But then you haven't met
Alice yet.
   It was still near-dark along Main Street, and cold fog swirled
about the iron lampposts and the trunks of the great elms, blown
in the damp chill air from the sea. Jared Cofflin ambled slowly
up the street, past the small crowd already gathered near the
bulletin boards at the Hub, the store halfway up Main; there
wasn't enough paper to print a newspaper yet, but the Inquirer
and Mirror continued its hundred-and-seventy-year tradition by
posting a newsletter in strategic places. He inhaled deeply,
taking in the cold salt air, as familiar as breathing itself. Snow
tonight, most likely. Or mebbe not. Everything else had changed,
but walking up the brick sidewalk in a December fog still felt the
same.

   As if to give him the lie, a shrill steam whistle split the air.
That must be one of the tugs, heading out to haul back another
raft of mainland firewood and charcoal and planks while the sea
allowed. Moisture dripped down his collar, and he hurried his
pace a little. Another new smell reached him, one he didn't mind
at all—the scent of new-baked bread in wood-fired ovens.

   His stomach rumbled. Smells great, tastes delicious, doesn't
keep worth a damn, he thought; so it had to be baked fresh
every day, which meant a couple of dozen new bakeries to use the
fruits of the harvest. A couple of slices with an egg or two and
some cranberry preserve made a decent breakfast. Possibly we'll
have coffee again about the time I die, he thought. Angelica
Brand was growing several hundred seedlings in her
greenhouses, and the plan was to drop a boat down to Puerto
Rico in the spring and plant them out along with the oranges
and lemons and whatnot. God knew if it would work; the birds
might eat them all, or something.

   In the meantime it was pleasure enough to walk without pain
in his leg, even on a damp cold morning. Lucky the bullet hadn't
done much damage to bone and tendon as it drilled its way
through; lucky it hadn't been a hollowpoint, too. He nodded
greeting to friends and acquaintances, and once to a mainlander,
an Indian struggling not to gape around him, a blanket wrapped
about his shoulders. The sight set his teeth on edge. It was
impossible to avoid all contact, he knew—if nothing else they
were within canoe-paddling distance of Martha's Vineyard and
the continent— and Doc Coleman was taking every possible
precaution, but still… What will happen will happen.

   At least the locals had proved reasonable enough, once you
learned how to approach them. Eager to trade for cloth and
tools, too; pelts, deerskins, birch-bark containers of maple syrup,
gathered nuts and dried berries, roots and herbs.

   He heard feet on the sidewalk behind him and turned. Alston
and Swindapa were running side by side, sheathed swords in
their left hands pumping back and forth with the movement of
their legs. She's not limping either anymore, he thought with
satisfaction. Alston must be back in fighting trim. He was glad of
that, for her sake, and… And frankly, she was like a penned
she-wolf for a while there. They slowed to a walk as they came
up to him, wiping the sweat from their faces with the towels
slung around their necks. You could work up some heat even in
this weather, and they were wearing thick track suits and gloves.

   "Mornin', Jared," she said, breathing deep and slow.

   "Morning, Marian, Swindapa," he said.

   "You're out early, I see."

   He shrugged. "Martha didn't feel well last night, so I thought
I'd let her sleep when she finally could." One drawback of
marrying late was that she'd never gotten used to having
someone else in the same bed; and when you piled morning
sickness on top of it, a lot of rest got lost. "The doctor says it's
natural enough. Why do they call it morning sickness?"

   "Don't worry," Marian said. "There's a lot of variation. I was
sick at unpredictable intervals right into the seventh month. And
everythin' went smoothly enough come the time."

   " 'Bye, Jared. I got to get breakfast ready, it's my turn,"
Swindapa said, giving Alston a kiss. "French toast today. Maple
syrup!" She dashed off, vaulting smoothly over one of the
sidewalk benches and pelting up past the shuttered Pacific Bank.

   "Glad to see you're back in shape. Must be a bit of a trial,
keeping up with all that youthful energy," he said, grinning.

   She rolled her eyes. "Oh, tell me 'bout it, Jared. 'Sides, I've got
sisters—and both of them hit two hundred and thirty pounds by
their second baby. Powerful incentive to sweat."

  He turned his head sharply. "… that the sort of role model we
want in front of our young people—" came from behind him.
Sound was tricky in a fog like this.

   Alston's head was turning too, the friendly expression
congealing into that flat glare she had. She'd gotten a lot less
likely to let that sort of thing pass recently. Cofflin turned on his
heel and stalked back down the street, halting when he came to
Lisa Gerrard. He'd recognized her voice; she was on the School
Committee, and spoke often. Very often. He thrust his face into
hers, conscious of the cold anger in him and holding it back. The
words came out slow, deliberate, and bitten off:

   "Well, actually, Ms. Gerrard, I do consider Captain Alston an
acceptable role model. Considering that she saved Martha's life
and nearly got killed doing it, and that she led the expedition
that got us the food we're eating this winter, and everything else
she's doing for this ungrateful island, I consider her an excellent
role model. And when you, Lisa Gerrard, have done one tenth as
much for the common good, maybe—just maybe—you can
criticize her. Until then I suggest you shut… the… hell… up!"

  He'd started loud, and the last part rose to a bellow. Whistles,
cheers, and clapping came from the crowd around the bulletin
board, and Gerrard retreated in confusion. Cofflin gave a curt
nod to them and stalked back to Alston, who stood waiting with
her brows raised.

   "Why, Jared, I didn't know you cared," she said. "Thanks, by
the way."

  He snorted, but the tension relaxed out of his shoulders.
"How's the ROATS program coming along?" he said, slightly
embarrassed.

   "Not bad, considerin', although we surely miss Martins.
Leaton says the turntables and hull bracing shouldn't be any
problem. Come on, I'll fill you in. 'Dapa's learned to make a
smokin' piece of French toast with turkey eggs and barley
bread."

   John Martins turned away from the open end of the smithy.
From here he could see the workers—slaves, in iron
collars—putting up a new building, with a couple of the
Americans supervising. There were already half a dozen
frontier-style log buildings around a square, William's house,
accommodation for his retainers, storehouses and workhouses
and stables, and the smithy. The square itself had been roughly
cobbled with round stones from the river, and the whole
settlement kept reasonably dry with drainage
ditches—refinements not current in these parts. Another
working party labored to hollow out split logs, the chain-link
hobbles between their ankles clinking as they moved. The logs
would be strapped back together with iron bands and used to
pipe in water from a spring not far distant.

   One slave stopped a little too long to stretch his back, and the
overseer's cane whistled. There was a pop, a yelp, and the man
began working again with furious speed. Walker had mentioned
that he was using Roman methods, including the ergostula, the
windowless half-underground jail where most of the male slaves
were kept shackled at night.

  "Oh man, that guy is, like, an ore" he muttered to himself.

  "What say?" one of the apprentices said.

   There were four other men in the smithy with him, two of
Isketerol's Tartessians and two Iraiina who'd sworn service with
Walker. Not counting the poor bastard in the collar working the
bellows, of course. He and the men learning from him were
communicating fairly well now, in bits and pieces of each other's
languages, despite the way Walker kept sending him new ones.
Eventually you got across what you needed to, and teaching
helped take his mind off the general shittiness of the situation.
The smithy was warm and close inside, well lit by the glow of the
big charcoal hearth as well, despite the rainy dimness outside.
He turned back to the forge, explaining:
   "Like, this is cast iron, man," he said, taking a piece that had
originally been in the Eagle's ballast out of the forge and laying it
on an anvil. "It won't forge like the wrought stuff we've been
working—it's too brittle."

  He demonstrated with a blow of his hammer. The iron split,
showing gray at its heart.

   "You gotta get the carbon out. So y' heat, sorta stir the puddle
of melted stuff around, y' hammer to get the slag out, and heat
again."

   "Eventually," he went on, "it gets to be, you know, wrought
iron. Then you can work it like we've been doing, or harden it up
again to steel. Like, you need a rilly big hearth for a finery, not
just a forge like this—this is just to give you an idea."

   He picked out a piece farther along and bent it into a curl
shape with a few skilled blows. Each of the others duplicated the
process under his critical eye.

   "This cast iron," one of the Tartessians said, "it is the same as
will come from the blast furnace when it is finished?"

   "Yeah, man, right on. You got it."

    The twelve-foot-high fieldstone furnace was nearly complete,
and there was ore and limestone and charcoal in abundance;
mineral deposits didn't change, and they had the Ordnance
Survey maps. They did need cylinder bellows and water-powered
draft, though, which was taking a while. Judging from the way
things had gone with other stuff, they'd have to fiddle around a
good long while to get it to work really right—there were lots of
little things the books never mentioned. Meanwhile they
stockpiled materials.

   "That little sucker will put out a thousand pounds a day, and
then—"

   "Good work, John," a voice said from the entryway.

   Martins turned, gritting his teeth. Walker was standing there,
holding the reins of his quarterhorse stallion. "Bastard here
needs a shoe on his left fore. Kicking again."

   Martins grunted wordlessly and took a blank from a rack on
the wall and flipped it into the forge to heat. Then he took up
pincers and rasp and walked around to the left side of the horse.
Walker gripped the bridle more tightly— Bastard was well
named and found the bent-over rump of a blacksmith an
irresistible temptation, teeth-wise—and Martins pulled up the
left forefoot, gripping it between his knees. He took the pincers
and began drawing the nails on the loose shoe.

   Behind him Walker spoke to one of the Tartessians: "You
learn?"

   "I learn a great deal, lord! Already we can do many of the
simpler tasks. In some ways this iron is easier to work than
bronze. A great pity it's so difficult to cast, but it works well
beneath the hammer. The blast furnace"—he used the English
phrase—"goes well too, soon it will be ready, and we learn how to
find the ores of iron. There is much of it back home, I think."

   The hoof hissed as the hot iron touched it, and the glowing
shoe gave a shuffffff as it was quenched in a bucket of water after
he'd tapped the final adjustment; he drove the nails home that
held it in place, and crimped them. Both the Iraiina apprentices
could already do that much, but it didn't hurt to show them
again. He hated the thought of anyone messing this up and
hurting a horse's feet.

   "Be seeing you, John," Walker said, swinging into the saddle.
"Promised Daurthunnicar I'd bring Bastard over to cover some
of his mares." He slapped his mount's neck. "Now that the
locals've seen what he can do, he's in stallion heaven."

  "Aren't we all, boss?" laughed one of the three riding escort; it
was Rodriguez, the ex-Coast Guardsman.

  The four horses clattered across the cobbles and then their
passage turned to the softer thudding of hooves on dirt.

  Martins stared sullenly after them. It was bad enough when
Walker was around, but much as he hated to admit it, it was
worse when the renegade was gone. Some of the things that
Hong woman did… his eyes slid away from the big two-story log
house across the courtyard. Of course, he'd thought about
running.

  Shit, I think about it all the time, man. This is, like, totally
Mordor here. That dude's head is in a truly fucked-up place.

   But he'd seen others who ran brought back with hounds,
flogged… and once, crucified. He might make it, especially if he
could steal a horse, but Barbs certainly couldn't. She wasn't the
outdoor type, and their natural-method contraceptives had
failed, badly. At least Walker didn't have him in an iron collar or
chained up at night. Not yet. Plus there wasn't anywhere to run
when you thought about it. From what he'd seen most of the
locals were every bit as ferocious as Walker, just less systematic.
He'd heard the Earth Folk were more mellow, sort of laid-back,
but they lived a long way away to the west.

   Barbara came out of his own smaller cabin and banged a
spoon against the bottom of a frying pan. "Time to break for
lunch," Martins said gratefully. "C'mon, you guys."

  "Well, I'll admit that you're a pretty good pool player, but
nobody could make that shot," Cofflin grumbled. "Besides, don't
you have to go baste that turkey again or something?"

   The basement recreation room of Guard House was
dominated by the billiard table; the other end of the room held
only a set of well-used weights and some Nautilus machines,
both brought in since the Event. The oil lantern over their heads
provided more than enough light, and it was no more than
medium chilly, something everyone had gotten used to since the
beginning of their first winter without central heating.

   Marian Alston grinned like a shark as she chalked her cue and
pulled back the sleeves of her sweater. Got him, she thought. Not
a bad player, but you needed killer instinct for pool. Good to
have someone to shoot with, though. You could really relax over
this game, and it bored Swindapa like an auger.
   Although there are some drawbacks to hanging out with
straights. Wouldn't understand the turkey-baster jokes, for
instance.

   "Know, Oh Cofflin, that my state of karmic spiritual
enlightenment puts me beyond all need for your praise. Yet not
beyond need for your beer. Extra bottle on this shot?
Thirty-seven up and with anothah three I win."

   "Well… all right."

   Smack. The white caromed off a cushion, kissed one ball, then
tickled the twelve. It spun on the edge of the pocket, wavered,
and settled again.

  "Damn! If you hadn't reminded me about the turkey, I'd have
done it," she swore.

   The smell from upstairs was getting better and better,
mingling with the lingering aroma of the baking she'd done
earlier in the day.

   "All right, then, I'll split that beer with you." He ambled over
to the cooler and took out a bottle, part of the Cofflins'
contribution to the Christmas quasi-potluck dinner. "One good
thing about this weather is you can get the beer really cold."

   "Amen." She looked at her watch. "I will have to go look at
that turkey—"

   "Marian." Martha's voice. "You'd better come up, I think."

   "Oh, hell."

   She laid the cue down and took the stairs at a bounding run.
The other early arrivals—Martha and the Arnsteins, Sandy
Rapczewicz and Doc Coleman—had been sitting in the kitchen,
for the warmth and to nibble. Swindapa was standing by the
black-iron stove, long spoon still clutched in one hand, tears
streaking down her face in slow trickles.

   "Hey, honeypie, it's all right, I'm here," Alston said softly,
reaching for her. " 'Sail right, sweetheart. There, there, Marian's
here, sugar."

   Swindapa dropped the spoon and gripped her convulsively.
Alston made a waving gesture toward the stove with her free arm
and led the Fiernan out into the vacant sun-room. They sat on
one of the sofas, and the tears became racking sobs. Outside
snow fell in huge soft flakes, batting at the windows like slithery
cold kitten-paws.

   "I miss my mother! I want my family!" The words trailed off
into unpronounceable Fiernan consonants, gasped out into the
hollow of her shoulder between sputtering heaves of grief.

    And this time of year is a big family feast over there, too,
Alston thought, making a low humming in her throat and
rocking the other, stroking her back through the check shirt.
Fiernan don't leave home, at least not the women, From what
Swindapa had said, a girl usually just moved elsewhere in the
greathouse and built a hearth of her own when she started
having babies, staying in the same huge extended family all her
life. The other's misery wrung at her; she buried her face in the
silky hair and crooned.

   After a while the tight grip around her chest relaxed and the
sobs faded into sniffles. She pulled a handkerchief from her
pocket, wiping her companion's face and smiling wryly as she
remembered the screaming Valkyrie figure who'd stood over her
on the shore of the Coatzacoalcos. After another while of silence,
Swindapa sighed and blew her nose.

  "I feel better now," she said, smiling, cuddling with a
mercurial change of mood.

  Didn't apologize for crying, either, or say thanks, Alston
noted. An American would have. At least she'd learned to use a
handkerchief instead of her fingers. Well, the fact that you love
someone doesn't make them more like you.

   Her mouth quirked. She'd always—well, ever since Jolene
left—had dreams about the ideal Significant Other. Someone
black, of course. About her own age, and with similar interests,
just enough difference to be interesting… And here I'm settled
down with a blond bukra teenager from 1250 B.C. who prays to
the Woman in the Moon, she thought. Well, you had to work at
any relationship worth having.

  "Glad you do feel better, 'dapa," she said tenderly.

  They went back into the kitchen. Sandy Rapczewicz had the
oven door open and was standing over the turkey with baster in
one hand and spoon in the other, looking irresolute. "I have the
deck there, Ms. Rapczewicz," Alston said. "It's nearly ready,
anyway."

   "Thanks, Skipper," the XO muttered. She was still a little
tender about the face, but the bones were knitting well, the
rather lumpy Slavic countenance unaltered.

   "The secret to a really good turkey," Alston went on easily, "is
keeping the flesh moist—'specially with these lean wild ones."

   The bird weighed about twenty pounds, the upper limit with
the woods-caught types from the mainland the island was
rearing now. She prodded a fork into the joint between
drumstick and body. The juice ran clear. "Right, let's take it out
and let it stand for a little while. Now everyone but volunteers
out of the kitchen—this is the tricky part."

  Getting everything to the table at the same time and neither
overcooked nor cold was difficult.

   "I feel as if I were mutilating my eldest son," Miskelefol said
dolefully. "And this climate! It's bad enough in summertime. In
winter the damp would rot the testicles off a Sardinian."

   "You've seen what the Yare—the Eager—can do," Isketerol
said cheerfully. A Tartessian crew was training on her, under the
supervision of Walker's men. "Think what this will be capable of.
And it keeps the men busy over winter."

   Both men peered out the door of the hut. They had broken up
the hulls of the Wave Treader and the Foam Hunter for their
wood, and put up improvised stocks to hold the frame of another
ship. One about two-thirds the Yare's size, considerably shorter
but broader in the beam. Back home on the Middle Sea, a ship's
hull went up first, with the boards fitted to each other
tongue-and-groove, and the frame put in later as strengthening.
The Eagle People method was to build the frame first, cut the
planks straight, and then nail them on, twisting them as
necessary. It was just as strong, and much easier… once you were
used to it. The sailors practically had to be driven to it, full of
mutterings about bad luck. Not to mention doubts that caulking
would hold out the water, even when they'd seen with their own
eyes.

   The other cause of delay had been the need for iron
smithwork. Isketerol looked out from the edge of his hut and
smiled as the distinctive clang… clang came from another hut
closer to the beach. Now he had two men of his own skilled in the
ironsmith's art, at least the beginnings of it, and they were
teaching others. And they'd helped with every stage of setting up
the blast furnace, learning that mystery as well.

    "When the Sea Wolf is finished, we'll load her with a cargo of
sixty tons of iron, cousin," he said. He slapped the younger man
on the back. "Then we'll sail her and Yare into Tartessos town
and be richer than the king. You saw what tools and armor made
of iron can do."

   Turn a bronze spearpoint as if it were made of lead, for
starters. Everyone will pay high at first, he thought. But the
price will come down. No matter. He'd charge high prices to
have his smiths teach the skills to begin with, and meanwhile sell
widely.

  And then… who knew what he'd do then?

   The turkey was a skeleton, and the mashed potatoes, peas,
squash, and carrots mostly memories—cherished memories,
because vegetables were a strictly rationed luxury this winter,
doled out in grudging lots to hold off scurvy. The pumpkin pie
tasted a little odd with honey as the sweetener, but lacked
nothing but whipped cream otherwise—milk was still worth its
weight in gold, almost literally. Sandy Rapczewicz looked down
at her plate for a second. 'Then she looked out of the corners of
her eyes at Coleman, who nodded; Alston could see her gathering
herself for an announcement.

  "Think I didn't know?" she said, forestalling it.

  "Yeah, well," she said. "We were… well, sort of waiting, you
know, Skipper?"

  Waiting to be sure we were here for good, Alston thought.
Rapczewicz had been married, back up in the twentieth. But the
Event was as final a method of divorce as death, and
considerably more so than a decree nisi.

    "Congratulations," Alston said aloud, glancing from her to Dr.
Coleman. A bit May-September, but I'm not in a position to talk
. "Just one thing, Sandy. Get married by all means, but if you get
pregnant before this spring's operations, I'll perform an
operation on you. A hysterectomy, with a blunt butterknife. I'm
goin' to need my XO."

  "Sure, Skipper," Rapczewicz said, grinning in relief. "Wouldn't
miss it for the world."

    The guests joined in carrying the dishes back into the kitchen,
then trooped back into the front parlor with drinks, and plates of
dried-cranberrry muffins and cookies. Alston looked at them a
little wryly. Lost in time, and we still play bridge and have
Christmas dinner parties. It was such a workaday crowd, among
the period-piece splendors of the mansion. One of the better
things about the Event was that it had amputated the social
pyramid at both ends, though. No masses of poor, and by
definition nobody on the island could be rich these days.

   They exchanged the gifts piled under a miniature tree, then
Coleman sat down at the piano and began tinkling something
vaguely Straussian from the book of sheet music someone had
given him. Swindapa pulled her up by the hand and did a
creditable waltz. Where the hell did she learn that? Alston
wondered. They'd never danced together before; she felt rusty by
comparison. Damn, this is nice. She really is graceful as a deer.
Sweet-smelling, supple, strong, looking at her with that guileless
smile she knew full well covered an unselfconscious, inventive
randiness. Damn, and here I thought I was the cold,
self-contained type…

   Several of the other couples rose to dance as well. "Can I cut
in?" Cofflin asked after a moment.

   "Sure, but with who?" Alston said, smiling secretly to see him
blush. "And who leads?"

   "You were really warning Sandy, weren't you?" he said quietly
as they danced off. His style was basic-competent. "I don't think
fighting's an 'unlikely contingency we should be prepared for'
with this British expedition, is it?"

   "Hell, no." They swayed aside to avoid a table. "Should have
cleared the room for this… Unlikely? No, not with Walker over
there. If he's cleared out of Britain, that's one thing. If he
hasn't…"

  "You get to kick some Iraiina butt?" Cofflin said gently.

   "I confess, wouldn't be the least pleasin' thing in the world."
Her eyes touched Swindapa, where she led Ian Arnstein through
the steps. "Think, though, Jared. King William Walker, wherever
he is, is a deadly threat to us. We're not talkin' about a Lisketter
here. He knows too much. The knowledge will make the locals
dangerous to us, and if Walker gets enough power, he'll be
dangerous to us—as the only potential limit to his power, he has
to strike at us. It's the way he'll think, believe me."

  "I do believe you," Cofflin sighed. "Worse luck. Ayup, I'll back
anything within reason at the Meeting." His face hardened.
"God damn Walker."

  "May God damn him indeed. But I'll do my best to help."

   "Friends come!" Walker shouted at the top of his lungs.
"Friends come! Friends come!"

   That was Iraiina law; if you didn't call out three times when
you approached a steading, you were assumed to be hostile. In
this case it was purely formal; Daurthunnicar's scouts had seen
him some time ago. Several of them were mounted, with simple
pad saddles and stirrups. Bastard trumpeted a challenge at their
mounts, and he reined him in sharply; the quarterhorse swiveled
its ears back, but he'd taught it to know better than to buck.
Walker would still be very glad when there were a couple of his
get old enough to break to the saddle—mares would do, a gelding
by preference, of course. Riding an uncut stallion was taking
machismo to absurd lengths.

   He threw back the hood of his cloak. It was a typical English
winter day of the better variety: fleeting patches of sun,
interspersed with gray overcast and occasional chill drizzle. He'd
almost prefer a hard freeze and some snow, but that didn't
happen often in southern Hampshire. It was amazing how cold
the Nantucket-made armor and underpadding were, when you
thought of how uncomfortably hot they could be in warm
weather. He'd be glad to change over to the set of fancy duds in
the leather trunk the pack-horse was carrying. The fields were a
sodden sort of green, patched with brown and occasional
puddles. Mud sucked at the horses' hooves, coating their lower
legs and spattering the trousers of their riders. The smell was
rich and earthy, mixed with damp wool from their cloaks. Those
were woven from raw fiber, unfulled, with the grease still in it; he
was surprised at how well they shed water, almost as good as a
rubber slicker.

   There were other changes around Daurthunnicar's
ruathaurikaz, besides stirrups and horseshoes. It had gotten
bigger, and one of the new buildings was made of horizontal logs.
A couple of wheelbarrows were leaned up against the walls of
buildings; it was amazing how much difference those made.
Beside the bronze-casting workshop was a small ironworking
smithy, and instead of all the women grinding grain by hand,
two male slaves walked around a rotary quern pushing at a
beam, linked to it by chains from their iron collars.

   The heads nailed above the hall doorway were very much in
the local tradition, though. None of them had had time to
weather down to skulls.

  Cuddy nodded to the gristmill. "Great what you can find in
books, isn't it, boss?"

   Walker grinned. "Actually, I got that one out of a movie, Bill,"
he said.

    He'd suggested they use horses here on the mill when he built
it for them; that would be quite practical with the new harness
he'd introduced. Everyone had looked at him as if he'd
recommended eating their own children. Odd people, the Iraiina.

   "You know, if we did stay here, we could be running the place
in about five years," he said to Bill Cuddy. "Running the whole of
England."

   The former machinist grunted and looked around at the
trampled mud, pigs rooting for slops, a blue-fingered girl in a
tattered shift milking a scrubby little cow into a bucket carved
out of a section of log.

   "This?" he said. "Run this, boss?"

  "Well, Walkerburg's already a lot better. Not as much already
built as in Greece, yeah, but less opposition, too."

   "You thinking of changing the plan, boss?"

  "Just a notion. The climate here sucks dead dog farts, I give
you that. I'll think about it."

   They swung down out of the saddle, armor clanking. He'd kept
the conversation with Cuddy quiet; Ohotolarix was picking up
English fast, and there were things he preferred to keep private.
Retainers came up to take their beasts, and two unsaddled
Bastard and led him gingerly off to the round corral where the
hobbled mare waited. By the time they got there they were being
dragged by the horse, rather than vice versa. His enraged squeal
cut through the air.

   There were a lot of horses in the other pens, and four extra
chariots stood in a wicker-walled shed. Well, well, he thought,
drinking off the ceremonial horn of beer that marked you as a
guest. Another tribe, ready to talk alliance with the Iraiina. Our
efforts are bearing fruit. And some Tartessians were there,
lounging about the entrance, trading warmth for fresh air.

  "Good to see you again, blood-brother," Isketerol said,
shaking wet from his own cloak; by the look of him, he hadn't
been here long. "We should talk, later."

  "That we should, later."

   The rahax's hall was thronged with warriors and guests
tonight, heavy with the smells of woodsmoke and cooking and
beer and damp dog from the hounds that lay growling amid the
feasters' feet. Daurthunnicar came down from the carved seat
along the southern wall to greet him and lead him to the stool of
honor at his right hand. Over to the left were half a dozen
visitors; they wore their long fur-trimmed woolen jackets and
went without the leggings Iraiina wore this time of year, and
their hair was in twin braids rather than the single ponytail of
Daurthunnicar's folk.

  Easterners, an embassy from one of the Kentish tribes.
Looking rather sullen, but polite enough. Or scared.

  A huge platter of smoking roast pork was borne in before the
rahax. He directed the server to carry a portion of the loin to
Walker. The American smiled at her; she was Daurthunnicar's
daughter, a statuesque blond young woman with gold on her
wrists and in her braids. The rahax was really doing him honor.
That was the champion's portion of the carcass, too.

   As he reached for the meat, someone shouted. Walker looked
up sharply.

  "No! No!"

   It was an Iraiina, one of Daurthunnicar's own followers, with
a holding not far from the high chiefs. A big man, but not one
ounce of it fat; his shoulders were a solid knot of muscle. Face
and arms were seamed with scars, although the man couldn't be
more than thirty, and he had a formidable collection of gold arm
rings, a tore, and a checked plaid tunic that clashed horribly
with both. He stamped and roared:
   "No! Why should this outlander get the hero's meat? Let him
eat husks with swineherds!"

   The whole hall was thrown into confusion. Men stood, yelled
into each other's faces, shook fists as pro- and anti-Walker
factions coalesced. Some of the women were screaming too with
excitement, and the easterner guests weren't bothering to hide
their smiles. Daurthunnicar surged erect, frowning like a
thundercloud, and waved his sword—everyone else had to hang
his weapons on the wall—until the uproar died off to a low
babble. He yelled at the big Iraiina:

   "You shame your rahax by insulting his guest! The man he
has made wehaxpothis, a chief among our tribe. You shame the
brave warriors who have sworn to follow him."

  Ohotolarix certainly seemed to feel so; he was half off the
bench, fingering his eating knife and glaring blue-eyed murder.
Walker reached out and put a hand on his arm, gently urging
him back to his' seat.

   "No, this is good," he murmured. "Wait—remember what I
told you. Anger is like fire, a fine servant but a poor master. The
fool will fall on his own words."

   Daurthunnicar was shouting: "He has brought victory and
much booty to the camps of the Iraiina, new things to make us
strong. Your forefathers are ashamed, Tautanorrix son of
Llaunnicarz!"

   "No!" the strongman declared. "He is nothing but a wizard.
He offends against old custom and law, his slant-eyed wife is a
witch, and the gods and Mirutha will shun us for harboring
them, stealing our luck. Send him away, lord, or better still, cut
his throat in the grove and make a bonfire of his goods and
followers, to appease the Mighty Ones."

   More uproar, with Daurthunnicar shouting louder than
anyone. Walker stayed relaxed, leaning back with his horn of
beer. Totally clueless, he thought. These people didn't have the
least conception of government, or even of war, really. They
fought like tigers individually or in small groups, but their sole
idea of a war was a series of big raids, until one side or the other
got sick of it and moved out or paid tribute. And this near-riot
was their concept of how to settle policy questions.

   He waited until the shouting had passed its peak, then rose to
his feet. "Hear me, lord," he called, not raising his voice much
but pitching it to carry through the swell as if it were storm-roar
at sea.

   "Hear me. This fool and son of slaves—"

   Tautanorrix roared again, wordless, his face turning purple.

   "—has offered you offense by breaking the peace of your hall,
like a mannerless swineherd. As your handfast man, let me
punish him."

   Near-silence fell through the firelit dimness of the big
turf-walled hall.

   "And since he might fear my sword is enchanted, let us fight
here and now with only the weapons the gods give to every man,"
he went on, holding up his clenched fists. That provoked a
surprised rumble. "To the death, of course."

   Laughter at that, fists and the pommels of knives pounding
trestle boards until the pottery tableware rattled. That bitch
Alston wasn't completely wrong, he thought. This is a lot like a
biker gang. Guts and toughness were everything. He'd put his
stock up considerably by challenging Man Mountain here, and
he'd have lost everything if he'd backed down.

   Daurthunnicar's fork-bearded face swung back and forth
between them, little blue eyes narrowed. On the one hand,
Tautanorrix was a valued supporter. On the other, Walker had
made the chief rich—and unlike virtually every other subchief of
the tribe, he'd consistently deferred to his patron, thrown his
weight behind him in council, and given him shrewd advice on
how to increase his own power, make himself a real king. The
idea was strange to the Iraiina chieftain, but he'd taken to it like
a Russian to vodka. And Walker had a strong following of his
own among the younger Iraiina warriors.
  The rumbling voice of the high chief went on:

   "You are both warriors of note, forward in shedding blood and
manslaying, generous in feeding the Crow Goddess. Indeed, it
might be said that you're among the best of us. If you fought, the
tribe would lose whoever died." A long pause. "But words have
been passed which cannot be brought back. Hear the word of
the rahax! Let these men fight. Let the Wise Man see that no
enchantments are used, only strength and skill and luck."

  More rousing cheers from the warriors and warrior guests
and their women, and cat-yowls of excitement as the betting
began. Daurthunnicar was a shrewd leader in his way; he knew
when to rule by taking this pack of wolves in the direction it
wanted to go. Tautanorrix bellowed with glee.

   The rahax held up his sword again. "The tribe must be one,
here in our new lands. So I, your rahax, will pay the blood and
honor price to the kindred of the man who falls. Let both of you
swear, in the name of your kindred, that they will take the price
and not seek blood for blood; that is honorable, because this is
no killing by stealth, but an honest challenge."

  Walker nodded. "Hear the wisdom of our rahax!" he said.
Sotto voce in English, to Cuddy: "If I lose, kill the bastard."

   Tautanorrix sneered: "I will break him between my hands and
give his body to the Blood Hag. Yet the word of our rahax is
wise."

   Daurthunnicar went on: "And the victor shall be
acknowledged by all men as the champion of the rahax, first
among the warriors of the Iraiina folk, with an honor price of a
hundred horses and two hundred cattle. In acknowledgment of
this, he who is victor here shall take as his wife my daughter
Ekhnonpa."

   That brought full silence. The rahax had no living sons,
although he was well provided with nephews. That made the
marriage all the more significant, since whoever wed the chiefs
daughter would be a member of the chieftain's kin by tribal law,
and eligible himself to become rahax.
  Oho! Walker thought. Well, maybe I will stay.

   He vaulted over the trestle table into the open space between
the firepits. Isketerol was leaning back with a raised eyebrow;
Walker slipped him a wink as he stripped off coat and shirt and
T-shirt. Tautanorrix blinked surprise but did the same, save for
the gold bands on his arms and neck. His chest was shaggy with
the same yellow hair that swung in a braid down his back and
cascaded from his chin; the skin was almost blue-white where it
hadn't been exposed to the sun. Blue-and-crimson rings of tattoo
circled his biceps under the gold armlets.

    The American looked at him critically; about two-forty on the
scales, he judged, and built like a Swedish weight lifter. So, he's
fifty pounds heavier, stronger, and probably fast too, Walker
estimated, taking slow deep breaths. He put right fist to left
palm and bowed slightly, then brought both fists up.

  Normally he thought of fair fights as something for suckers,
but this time there had to be a real battle, something the
audience could understand.

   Tautanorrix bellowed and leaped, arms wide to grip and
crush.

   The attackers came at her steadily, unintimidated, moving
the shields just enough to block. Alston took a deep breath and
launched herself forward in a shoulder strike, pinning the other
short sword back as she did. Her armored shoulder punched into
the shield before her with a metallic crack. The man behind the
shield staggered backward, away from his companion. She
followed up, slamming at him until the shield boomed and he
was wavering back on his heels. Then she had to wheel herself as
his companion came up, boring in and stabbing.

  "Stop," she called.

  The trainees did, leaning on the shields and panting, the
double-weight wooden training swords dangling from their
hands. Elsewhere in the high school gymnasium the noise
continued unabated, the whack of wood on the pells, or on the
metal of armor. Most of the trainees were wearing wire face
protectors as well; they'd had quite a few accidents involving
broken noses or lost teeth, and Alston had been utterly intolerant
of any toning-down of the regimen. Others were doing unarmed
combat, or climbing up ropes and over barricades in armor.
There was a heavy smell of whale-oil lanterns and sweat, and a
cold damp tang to the air; snow lay a foot deep outside, and the
huge empty spaces had been designed for central heating, not
wood stoves.

   She controlled her own breathing, keeping it slow and deep as
she felt the sweat soaking her padding turn chill, and watched
the purple faces of the two youngsters. Siblings, Kenneth and
Kathryn Hollard, about two years between them; they had the
Yankee look, light brown hair and blue eyes, long bony faces.

  "You two have been really practicin'," she said.

  "Yes ma'am," they chorused, with grins of enthusiasm.

  "Why do you want to volunteer for the expedition?" she said.

  They looked at each other. "Ah…" the young man said. "It
needs to be done."

   Good answer, she decided. More thoughtful than most his
age. They weren't talking about the other reasons, of course:
boredom, longing to travel, even the desire for adventure. Her
mouth quirked slightly at the corner.

  "Mr. Hollard, Ms. Hollard, remember that adventure is
someone else in deep trouble a long way away. I can tell you that
having a spear through your leg is no… fun… at… all. Sterowsky!"

   The sailor barking at a group ramming spears into a
wall-mounted target came loping over. He'd recovered
reasonably well from the blow of the obsidian rake across his
face, but the scar was still purple along its edges and his beard
was growing in white along the line. It pulled up his mouth into
a continual half-sneer.

  "Want to show me off again, ma'am?" he said.
  "If you don't mind."

  "De nada, ma'am."

  The two young islanders had turned a little pale.

  "Not everybody can come, and there's militia work to be done
here, too. We'll need qualified instructors. Listen, you
two—people are going to get killed, people are going to get cut
up, crippled for life."

   "Ma'am… I'd rather go with the expedition." They spoke in
almost-unison, like a bad mixing job on a record.

   Alston nodded. "You understand that you'll be under military
discipline?" she said.

  "Yes ma'am. Our dad was in the Marines."

   "All right then; you can both sign up and move into barracks."
She wanted the teams that would be fighting together to live
tight for as long as possible first. You did better with people who
knew each other than with strangers. Her eyes went to the girl.
"After you report to the clinic and get the IUD fitted."

   Kathryn Hollard blushed; her brother grinned at her with an
elder sibling's lack of compassion. "Ah, ma'am, I'm, uh—" she
began.

  "No exceptions. Virginity isn't a reliable contraceptive." As
opposed to mister-ectomy, but that was a minority taste.

   She could see them deciding whether or not to smile. Good
kids, most of the islanders were, not many attitude
problems—but not very deferential either. They settled on shy
grins; she nodded in reply.

  "Meanwhile, back to work. Mark 'em down, 'dapa."

   Swindapa made a note on her clipboard; she'd more or less
fallen into the role of aide-de-camp and general factotum. Alston
sighed and went over to the side of the big room for a dipper of
water.

   "Oh, 'lo, Jared," she said, looking up.

   "Still trying to discourage volunteers?" he said, nodding
greetings to Swindapa.

   "Just making sure they know what they're getting into," she
replied, drinking deep. Ahhhh. One of the best things about
exercise is the way it makes water taste. She shook her head.
"Seems to be a lot of enthusiasm."

    He chuckled! "Farmers and fishermen used to be the best
recruiting grounds," he said. "Now we know why. Even soldiering
is easier."

   "How's Leaton coming with the reapers?" she said. That
would remove a crucial time constraint on the expedition, if they
didn't absolutely have to get those hands back by harvest.

  "Looks like they'll really work this time. Nobody is going to
miss those sickles. Once was enough."

   She nodded. "We should take a couple of reapers along." she
said thoughtfully. "They'd be a big productivity boost over
there."

   Cofflin snorted. "Everyone's getting their oar in this thing. It's
the clergy, next—they've scheduled a meeting with me for next
week."

  Alston sighed: "Almost as many as want something brought
back from Britain. Still, there's—"

  Her face took on the flat, blank calm of intense concentration.
Suddenly she smiled and snapped her fingers. "That's it!"

   "That's what?" he said.

   "Old military saying. Amateurs talk tactics, dilettantes talk
strategy, professionals talk logistics."

   He frowned. "I've heard that, but just how does it apply-"
  " 'Scuse me, Jared." She hefted her bokken and headed back
toward one of the practice groups, quickening her stride.
Someone had just tried something that Jackie Chan would have
had trouble pulling off on his best day.

  There was a clattering thump, and a trainee landed half off a
mat. She lay gasping while her opponent leaned on his spear and
panted.

  "Don't tell me," Alston said. "You watched a lot of martial-arts
movies, right?"

  "No ma'am," the young woman said. "It was TV—Xena,
Warrior Princess."

   Alston closed her eyes for an instant. Lord, give me strength,
she thought. "Well, let me show you why lifting your leg above
your head is a bad idea. Especially when you don't have a
scriptwriter on your side."

   Tautanorrix swung a fist the size of a ham. Walker slashed the
edge of his palm into the Iraiina's wrist. His heel flashed into the
back of the bigger man's knee, and the warrior landed face
forward in the dirty rushes. His face was thoughtful as he rose,
shaking a numb arm.

  That's the last thing we need, Walker knew.

  "Looking for your mother down there?" he asked. "Or for your
mare's heart?"

   That brought another bellowing charge. He met it with a front
stamping kick that flashed between Tautanorrix's outstretched
arms and thudded into the big man's chest; the flat of it, not the
deadly heel. The Iraiina stopped as if he'd run into a brick wall.
Walker felt as if he'd kicked one, as the impact jarred into the
small of his back.

   Christ, but this fucker's built. Tautanorrix's hands came up to
protect his torso; his face was a splotched pattern of purple and
white. This time Walker's foot went out like a frog's tongue
darting for a fly, aimed low. The heel slammed into the top of the
Iraiina's kneecap with a sound like a maul striking wood.

   Tautanorrix tried to grab for the foot and nearly fell. The
warrior's quick downward glance showed the kneecap twisted
offside, like a lumpy growth under the skin on the side of his leg.
He bent down and twisted it back into place with a pop. Talk
about your high pain tolerance, Walker thought. He circled, and
Tautanorrix pivoted on his good leg to follow.

  "I thought you were supposed to hit me, swineherd," the
American said through a grin.

   This time Tautanorrix ignored him, utterly intent. Well,
overconfidence could last only so long… The granite fist flashed
out toward his taunting grin. This time both his hands met it,
slapping it aside and then locking around the bigger man's wrist.
He pivoted on his rear foot, leaning far over and pulling
Tautanorrix with him. His left foot slashed upward into the
Iraiina's armpit. Tautanorrix came up on his toes, mouth gaping
in a hoarse grunt. Walker released him and flipped away with a
fancy handstand and twirl that ended with him back in fighting
stance. Tautanorrix stood swaying, his right arm dangling
useless and dislocated.

   "Time, big fellah," Walker panted and came back in, fluid and
fast. "Time to die."

   The left hand struck at him. He blocked, grabbed the thick
wrist, and locked the other man's arm tight with a twist,
pivoting. His own right forearm slammed into the locked elbow,
and it broke with a sound like green branches snapping. Walker
screamed out the Ida, launching a flurry of fist-strikes, face,
belly, throat, slashing with the tips of bladed fingers at the other
man's forehead and eyes. Tautanorrix lurched and stumbled,
swaying like a cut-through tree, his ruined features sheening
with blood. Walker grabbed him by the belt of his kilt and the
base of his braid, bending him over and smashing his own knee
into the Iraiina's face over and over again. Bone splintered.

   He looked down, panting, naked torso slick with sweat and
the dead man's blood. First time, he realized. First time he'd
been able to keep on with the hand-to-hand until the other
fucker was dead. He turned, feet dancing, fists flung over his
head in an instinctive gesture of triumph. The Iraiina were
roaring out his name, Daurthunnicar among them.

   His daughter Ekhnonpa stood watching the victor with
shining eyes, her hands clenched at her breasts, chest heaving.
Walker met her eyes and grinned.

   Man, this is great, he thought, as his followers pushed
forward with blankets to wipe him down and a horn of beer for
his thirst. It doesn't get any better than this.

   "Thank you," the Catholic priest said, accepting a cup of
sassafras tea. "You understand, Chief Cofflin, that the division of
the Visible Church of Christ has long been a scandal."

   Father Gomez looked tanned and fit; he'd been shoveling salt
along with the prisoners he was supposed to rehabilitate… had
rehabilitated, Cofflin reminded himself. He trusted the little
priest's judgment.

    So did his colleagues, evidently. The Town Building office held
the pastors of the Episcopal and Baptist churches as well, the
Congregationalists, the Methodists… even the Unitarians. Only
the Quakers and Jews were missing, and neither were very
common on Nantucket, particularly the former—ironic, since the
island had once been a stronghold of the Friends. Cofflin looked
out the square-paned window for a second, as wet snow clung to
it and more fell down onto the quiet dockside. The hulking shape
of the big motor ferry sat there, dim and dark in the winter's
afternoon, looking chewed on where half the superstructure had
been disassembled. Symbolic, Cofflin thought. Old things broken
up for material to make the new. He stirred uneasily. This sort of
thing made him embarrassed.

  "I know you gentlemen and ladies"—the Congregational
minister was a woman—"have been holding a conference."

   "We have indeed," Gomez said. "We've been trying to come to
some understanding of what God meant by the Event, in a
specifically religious sense. Some things are obvious. Questions
of episcopacy and papal supremacy are… well, completely moot.
We think that this means that God is telling us to fall back on
the simple wisdom of the early church; wherever two or more of
us are gathered in His name, there He is… and all believers are
one."

  Cofflin nodded. That made sense. For that matter, there'd
been something of a religious revival on the island since the
Event. Not showy, and there'd never been many fundamentalists
here—Unitarians and mainstream Protestants were in the
majority, with the Catholics a not very close second. More people
had been showing up of a Sunday, though.

    The Congregational minister went on: "At the same time, God
is also telling us something by the very fact that it was
Nantucket that was thrown into the sea of time. And not, say,
Sicily or an island in Indonesia."

   She looked at her colleagues. "There's a certain balance of
denominational forces here that's pretty well unique. And we're
in a world where, say, Islam or Buddhism is completely absent,
even Zoroastrianism. No other what you might call competing
higher religions."

  "So you're going to unite and form a single church?" he said.

  Gomez spread his hands. "More of a federation."

  "Congratulations… but there's no question of a state church, I
hope you realize that."

  "Of course."

  "Well, then, what exactly is the point of all this?" Cofflin said.

   The clerics looked at each other. Gomez cleared his throat and
took up the thread: "Well, Chief Cofflin, you must realize that
God is also telling us something by putting us in a world still
wholly pagan. Some of it reasonably clean paganisms like… oh,
like Ms. Swindapa's. Others abominations like the Olmec jaguar
cult. Obscene by worldly standards, and possibly of demonic
inspiration."
   Cofflin nodded grimly. Cultural autonomy be damned, that
deserved to be scrubbed off the face of the planet. The problem
with eliminating undeserving customs, though, was that it was
hard to do it without wiping out the people who held them. He
was a lot less enthusiastic about that.

   "Well, the obvious inference is that God wants His word
brought to these people… There are some technical issues to do
with the effect of the Incarnation on man's fallen nature, but I
won't bother you with that. Basically, we're called to spread the
Word, and to do that, we need some help from the government of
our new republic here."

  "Oh. Missionaries?"

   "Certainly. On a more secular note, conversion will also make
trade and other peaceful relations easier."

  "Hmm." Cofflin pondered. "What exactly did you have in
mind?"

   Funny, William Walker thought. The Iraiina verb for "to
marry" was wedh. It also meant "to carry away," which was
precisely what you did with the bride. Ekhnonpa was a big young
woman, but he lifted her easily onto his saddlebow; a pleasant
armful, and her face was nice enough—not exactly pretty, but it
wasn't paper-bag-ugly, either. It would have been a chariot in an
entirely traditional upper-class wedding. She shivered a little
through the fur cloak and leaned against him; he waved and
called back greetings to the guests who thronged
Daurthunnicar's steading. They roared out good wishes, mostly
of an obscene nature, with plenty of puns on "riding home," the
bawdy mirth of a stockbreeding people. The women crowded
close, pelting them with handfuls of wheat and barley for
fertility. Ekhnonpa had been in high good spirits all through the
ceremony—the viewing of the dowry, the handing over by the
father, the bride and groom eating from a loaf cut by the man's
sword—but now she became a little subdued.

   The grass in the fields was silvery with frost where tips lifted
out of last night's snow. The branches of the oaks were a tracery
of silver where the path ran beneath, and a mist of ice crystals
drifted down, reddened by the morning sunlight. Breath puffed
white from men and animals. Walker fell back beside the light
horse-drawn cart that drew up the rear of the procession.

  "Here, wife," he said. "This will be more comfortable for you."

   She made a small sound of surprise at the heaped wool and
bearskins under the padded leather canopy, more so at the
smooth ride the springs gave, glowing with satisfaction at this
demonstration of her man's status. Her two attendants were
already sitting there; he could hear them chattering to each
other as he rode back to the head of the line. His men called
congratulations, waving spears or slapping him on the back as
he passed.

   "No, I don't have any objection," Isketerol said, taking up the
thread of the conversation as their horses paced side by side.
He'd adopted trousers and jacket and cap with earflaps for
winter wear. "Even better, if you stay here. More for Tartessos in
the Middle Sea, and richer trade— you'll want to buy wine, oil,
dried fruits, things like that."

   "It'll depend on what happens this winter and spring," Walker
said. "I think I can build a position the Nantucketers won't care
to mess with, particularly not if I'm prepared to be reasonable
about trading. Which I will be." For a while, he added to
himself. "And then again, if I can open peaceful relations with
the island, I can attract more specialists here. I can certainly
offer them a better deal than they have back home, and good
luck to Cofflin and the captain if they try to stop it. Pretty soon
you'll have ships on that run." And so will I, of course. You're a
good buddy, Isketerol, but I'm not giving you a monopoly.

   The folk of his own steading came out to greet them as they
arrived around noon; the winter sun was fairly low in the
southern sky. He stopped to put Ekhnonpa back on his
saddlebow. She looked around, awe plain on her face as they
rode into the courtyard.

  "Walkerburg," he said.

  "It's larger than father's ruathaurikaz already!" she said,
startled. "And no palisade?"

   "It's our enemies who need walls," he said, and tried to see it
with her eyes.

    All the buildings of horizontal logs, with split strakes for
roofing, and fieldstone chimneys carrying away the smoke. The
stone pavement of the courtyard showed, the snow brushed off
it; the barn and stables were built to the pattern he remembered
from his boyhood. Martin's hammer went clang… clang from the
smithy, but otherwise everyone was here. He'd throw a party for
the common laboring slaves as well; letting them get blasted and
laid on high occasions was good management practice. There
were a row of smaller log cabins for his free followers, and the
big house he'd put up out of logs from the palisades of plundered
settlements.

    All in all, it didn't look like his family's ranch in the Bitterroot
country of southwestern Montana any more. It looked like the
little crossroads hamlet where his grandfather had gone four
times a year to lay in supplies.

  "Nut a izzy plessta mekka livvin'," he quoted softly,
remembering Gramps. "But kip y'feet uffa m' prop'ty. Ent much
but it's mine."

   "My husband?" she said.

   "Nothing," he replied. "Old memories."

   He swung down, swept up the Iraiina woman in his arms, and
carried her through the big house door. He'd built the place on
the shotgun principle, four rooms up and down separated by a
hall, with a lean-to kitchen out back. It was fairly comfortable,
too. Squared-log walls made good insulation, and Martins had
run up some Franklin stoves.

  "It's warm!" she said in amazement as he put her on her feet
again. An arm stayed around his waist. "Warm as summer!"

   Warm as a sixty-degree English summer, maybe.
   Ekhnonpa gasped again; she'd never seen a floor of split logs,
sanded smooth and covered with rag rugs, or
plumb-line-straight walls hung with native tapestries, or a
staircase, or proper hinged doors. Nor the brightness that
glass-chimney oil lamps and molded wax candles allowed.

  "This is like the palaces of the gods," she blurted.

   Actually more like summer camp, Walker thought with some
pride. But it's a start.

   Alice Hong came up. Ekhnonpa made a bobbing gesture,
halfway between a curtsy and a bow, as was due to the senior
wife.

  "Greetings, my elder sister," she said quietly.

  Hong nodded to her, smiling, and went on to Walker in
English: "All right, if you like big blond horses. Being a cowboy, I
suppose…"

  "Tsk, tsk, meow," he replied in the same language.
"Everything ready?"

   "Yes, oh Master," she said, leading the way into the dining
room. "The runner got here an hour ago. And I delivered a baby
and set a broken leg in my abundant spare time today."

  "Cut the sarcasm—I'm hungry."

   The table was set for a dozen, his principal followers.
Ekhnonpa looked around at the room, the table with its place
settings and candelabra, the chairs—those were only for
chieftains, among the Iraiina—and laughed nervously. "I can see
that there is much I must learn about helping to run a household
of the Eagle People. Much my elder sister Alauza must teach
me."

  Alice had enough Iraiina by now to understand that. She
began to laugh into her wineglass. The other Americans joined
her, and the Iraiina looked at the ceiling or the table, anywhere
but at the chieftain's bride. Servants scurried in with platters of
food and baskets of bread, the candlelight flashing on their silver
collars.

  "I teach well," Alice said, looking aside at Walker. "Don't I,
Will?"

  "Not this time," he said in English. "Political considerations,
my sweet."

   She pouted slightly. "You get all the fun, with this bloody
log-cabin harem of yours."

   "You've been having a good enough time."

   "Pickles and ice cream are nice, but they're no substitute for
beef," she said. "There isn't enough of you to go 'round, Will, and
now there'll be less, and you've developed a really medieval
jealous streak."

   "This is the Land of the Double Standard, Alice my medicinal
querida." For an instant his face went utterly cold, until she
looked aside. "I don't give a shit personally, but I can't afford to
lose face, which I would if you strayed. If I lose face, you lose your
face. Clear?"

   "Clear," she said sullenly. "Pass the peas."

    Walker did, then helped Ekhnonpa fill her plate. A fork could
be surprisingly difficult if you'd never used one before, and he
helped her with that too. He kept her wineglass filled. Before long
she was blushing and giggling at him, and leaning closer
unconsciously. He grinned inwardly. Iraiina men had no
technique. In bed they just put a woman on her back and leaped
aboard, and outside it they socialized mainly with each other. A
little American smoothness went a long way here. And for the
present, Ekhnonpa was going to be very useful to him.

   "That's fun," Swindapa said, swinging down out of the saddle.

   Ian Arnstein stifled a groan. Well, young women are
supposed to like horses, he thought. He didn't, and besides that
he looked ridiculous on any but a fairly large one. On the Bronze
Age ponies… he'd be lucky if they didn't walk out from
underneath him and leave him standing like a straddle-legged
statue. There'd been a Viking chief with that problem; they'd
called him Hrolf Ganger, Hrolf the Walker.

   The big barn had two sawdust riding rings inside it, and the
board walls cut the chill a little… a very little. It smelled of the
sweat and other by-products of horses, despite the snow that lay
three inches deep outside. Cynthia Kelton had rented stable
space before the Event, to support her habit—the habit being
horses, of course. She was about thirty herself, and she'd been
plump before the Event; that showed in the looseness of her
jodhpurs. There was a visible glow to her as she tutored Eagle's
officers and selected members of the militia who'd be going east
with the expeditionary force. She would be along herself, to
break in local horses they planned to buy on the other side of the
ocean, which was considerably easier than carrying any with
them.

   "Of course it's fun," Kelton said to Swindapa. "And a very
promising student you are, too. Nice seat and good hands."

   "Better her than me," Arnstein muttered under his breath.

   He'd always been convinced that the only purpose a horse
served was to take up space that might otherwise be occupied by
another large quadruped, say a cow or a camel.

   "It's not that bad, Ian," Doreen said, turning out a leg with a
riding boot on it to admire the curve.

   "I'd rather hoof it myself on shank's mare than saddle myself
with one of these things," he said, heading toward the mounting
block. "What is it with women and horses?"

   "They don't make puns, for starters," she said. "Or leave
cracker crumbs in bed."

  Marian Alston doubted anything like the Dance of the
Departing Moon had been done in Nantucket before. Certainly
not by someone in pink bikini briefs spangled with blue flowers.
Swindapa was humming to herself as she danced, turning,
whirling, leaping, crouching, then slowing to a stately gliding
walk in the intricate measure; it was like a ballet laid out by a
mathematician with a taste for geometry. Long blond hair spun
out in a final spiral as she collapsed gracefully into a pattern of
limbs, the fixed look of religious ecstasy fading from her face.

  Well, that explains how she picked up the Art so quickly.
With that sort of training…

   "That will bring our journey luck," the Fiernan said, rising
and kneeling up on the sofa at the foot of the bed, elbows on the
back and palms supporting her chin. "Oh, it will be good to see
my family again! And I'm looking forward to showing you off to
everybody, my friends and my uncles and aunts, and having you
meet my mother and sisters."

   Alston blinked a little. The Fiernan Bohulugi had plenty of
taboos. Swindapa wouldn't eat swan, for instance, or eat at all on
certain days, or wash clothes or plant in the dark of the moon.
But they evidently had different taboos. The thought of acquiring
a whole new set of—well, might as well call them in-laws—was a
bit daunting. Plus that meant more culture clash. The memory of
the day they'd spent going over the concept of monogamy wasn't
pleasant; the Fiernan language didn't even have a word for it.
And what if she wants to stay home? With an effort, Alston put
that thought out of her mind.

   She looked out the window; dawn was just breaking, gray
through early-spring clouds. "Not worth trying to go back to
sleep," she said. The Arnsteins were coming over for a working
breakfast, planning diplomatic strategy.

  "No, it isn't worthwhile going back to sleep," Swindapa said.

   Alston looked down to the foot of the bed. The Fiernan was
skinning out of her briefs and crawling up toward her, grinning
through a fall of tousled wheat-colored hair. She'd never
considered herself a very passionate woman, until now. Live and
learn, she thought.

  A hand knocked at the door a little later. "Go away!"
Swindapa shouted, laughing.
   Alston found herself laughing too; then stiffened as it turned
into a long shivering moan. They lay clasped together, and then
the knock came again—louder this time, and Ian Arnstein's
distinctive mumble. She rolled off the bed and snatched up her
bathrobe, belting it on as she strode over to the door.

   "This had better be good, Arnstein," she said as she flung it
open, trying to make the words a bark and knowing she still had
an ear-to-ear smile on. "In case you hadn't noticed, breakfast
time isn't for another hour and a half."

   It was the scholar, looking extremely nervous, and then
blushing slightly as he looked over her shoulder.

   "Sorry, Captain." He didn't call her that onshore unless it was
a formal occasion or he was very nervous. "It's Martha."

   Her irritation vanished into a cold clench of worry. "She's all
right?"

    "So Coleman says, and the baby's doing fine for someone only
fifteen minutes old—but they want you there."

  Alston blinked; she hadn't realized the labor had started yet.
"Oh. Give me a minute, Ian, I'll be right with you."

   Swindapa was dancing again with excitement as they
scrambled into their clothes and downstairs to where their
bicycles waited. They kept to the sidewalks to avoid Main
Street's bone-shaking cobbles, then swung onto pavement.
Rainwater misted up from the asphalt, soaking her lower legs.
For a moment she remembered her own children, something
she'd carefully schooled herself not to do. Forget it, woman, she
scolded herself. They're a long way away. Three thousand
years is an even better wall than a divorce decree.

   The streets were quiet, and so was the maternity ward—
section, rather—of the hospital. Martha was lying in a freshly
made bed with the baby in the crook of her arm; she was tired
but triumphant, the baby was as crumpled and formless as
babies usually were, and Jared Cofflin had the same
sledgehammer-between-the-eyes look that he'd had on his
wedding day, only more so.

  "Congratulations," Marian said inanely. "Everything went
well?"

   Coleman was still in his green surgical gown. "For a
primigravida in her forties, very smoothly. Nice healthy
bouncing eight-pound baby girl," he said, with a workman's
pride.

  "You wouldn't say smooth if you'd been doing it yourself,"
Martha said tartly.

  "No indeed," Marian said emphatically.

  "Does it get better the second time?" Martha asked.

   "No, can't say that it does," the black woman said. "But you
sort of expect it more." And afterward you feel very, very—

   "Is there a kitchen in this torture chamber?" Martha asked
sharply.

  —hungry.

   "You are recovering well," the doctor said, "Someone will be
along with a tray shortly. And if you'll pardon me…"

  Cofflin cleared his throat. "We've got a name for her," he said.
"Marian Deer Dancer Cofflin. Hell of a moniker, but it seemed
appropriate."

   Alston felt the blood mount to her face, glad that it couldn't be
seen. "Ah…" she said. "Er, ah… why, thank you, Jared, Martha."
She stopped her feet from shuffling with an effort of will.

    "We'd like you and Swindapa to be the godparents, if that's all
right," Martha went on. "As neither I nor the baby would be here
if it weren't for you. We can have the baptism before you leave."

  Marian looked down at the wrinkle-faced form and stroked
one arm with a finger. A tiny hand closed around it, rose-pink
against black, the nails perfectly formed miniatures.
   "That's fine," she said. "Mighty fine. We'll just have to see that
there's a good world for her to live in, won't we?

   "Ayup," Cofflin said. "Amen."

          CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
   February - May, Year 2 A.E.

   Daurthunnicar scowled and gripped the arms of the huge
carved oak chair. The ruathaurikaz of the Tuattauna folk's
chieftains had stood here for many generations, time enough to
accumulate many treasures. The timbers of the hall were carved
and painted in the shape of gods and heroes, and they seemed to
move slightly in the red-shot firelit dimness like the
smoke-darkened wool hangings on the walls. By the wall across
from him was a Sun Chariot and horse, cast in bronze and
bearing a great golden disk as high as a man, incised with
endless looping spirals. The Iraiina had nothing like that. They
had never been a wealthy tribe, and they had been plundered of
much of what they did have in the lost war on the mainland. The
eyes stared at him through the murk, full of holiness and dread.

  But we have victory here. The Sun Lord, the Long-Speared
Father of the Sky, gives us victory now, he told himself firmly.

   The Iraiina rahax scowled at the Tuattauna high chief as he
stood before him, and at the other enemy leaders. They bore
themselves proudly, for beaten men looking at a foreign chief in
their own high seat… except when their eyes strayed to his
son-in-law, where he leaned on his spear beside the throne. Men
fear me because Hwalkarz is beside me, he knew. They fear our
tribe because Hwalkarz lends it his wizardry and his might. He
was not altogether happy with that, not now. What was given
could be withdrawn, and if the outlander's hand was taken back,
the Iraiina would have many foes and face much hatred.

   When you have the wolf by the ears, you cannot let go, be
reminded himself. And had he not bound Hwalkarz to him by the
closest of ties? His daughter's belly swelled with this man's get,
which was more than his witch-wife had ever given him.
   True, he's a wizard. But he was also a warrior beyond
compare, a never-failing fountain of wealth, and a giver of deep
and crafty redes. Some said he was a god… And the old stories
did tell of times beyond number when gods or half-gods or
warrior Mirutha walked among men and took part in their
quarrels in man's shape. It would be a thing of high glory if his
grandson was the son of a god. Such a one could make the
Iraiina mighty. Such a breed of men could bestride the worlds. If
he could not turn the wolf loose, he would wrestle it to the
ground, set it to hunting for him.

   "You come to hear my word," Daurthunnicar said to the
envoys of the defeated. "That is good. Sky Father has given
victory to the Iraiina folk and the tribes who have sworn on the
oath-ring with them. It is unlucky to strive against the gods."

  One of the ambassadors answered, speaking boldly. "Sky
Father gives no man victory forever," he said, in the whistling
nasal accent his people had. "His favor is fickle."

   The defiance would have been more impressive if melting
sleet hadn't been dripping off the envoy's beard and hair. Among
the tribes of the White Isle it was not the least of grudges against
Hwalkarz and the Iraiina that they had broken the old good
custom of making war only between spring planting and first
frost.

   "Sky Father is not so fickle that there will be a steading of the
Tuattauna standing whole by next harvest season, if you try to
meet us on the raven-feeding field of war," Daurthunnicar said.
"Your warriors' flesh feeds the Crow Goddess, your gold is on our
arms, your cattle roast over our fires, our women wear your
cloth, your wives and daughters spread their thighs for the
stallion-cocks of our warriors. This is truth."

   The envoys' fists clenched and they growled in their beards.
But their eyes flickered to the iron-mailed line of spearmen who
stood unmoving along the wall on either side of the Iraiina
chieftain. Hwalkarz had taught them that unnatural stillness,
and the arts of riding with footrests, arts of moving their
warbands in ways that somehow always left their enemies at a
disadvantage. Outside the captured hall rested one of the
stone-throwing engines that battered down palisades like the fist
of the Horned Man. And in two of the greater battles the sorcerer
had struck men and horses dead at five times the reach of a bow,
throwing bolts of thunder-death. The sorcerer, or the god?

  "We…" The chief of the envoys stopped and ground his teeth.
"We will pay tribute for peace. A tenth of our herds, a tenth of
our bronze and gold, a tenth of our cloth and of this year's
harvest."

   There was a time when Daurthunnicar would have accounted
that triumph and to spare, and taken it gladly. And spent the
next year in fear of their revenge, he thought. Instead, he
inclined his head slightly toward his son-in-law, holding out a
gold-chased drinking horn. A woman scuttled over to fill it with
captured mead.

   Hwalkarz stepped forward; Daurthunnicar made a gesture,
granting him formal leave to speak. When he did he used the
Iraiina words with only the slightest trace of an accent. Was that
the mark of how they spoke in the halls of the sky?

   "You strove against us bravely," he said, turning his spear and
grounding the point in sign of peaceful intent. "It's no fault of
yours if the gods fought against you. And you're wise to offer us
peace. It's a chief's duty to safeguard the life of the tribe."

   The envoys relaxed a trifle, knowing that the Iraiina did not
intend to grind their faces in the dirt further.

   "Of the tribute you would give, we'll ask only half of a half," he
went on. Their eyes went round in amazement. "That is, if you
give your yes to our other offer."

   "Offer?" one said suspiciously. "You've beaten us—we
acknowledge it, may the Dead Walkers suck your blood and the
Night Ones ride your dreams forever. Why do you speak of
offers?"

   Hwalkarz smiled. Daurthunnicar shivered slightly behind his
face. That smile did not mean what an ordinary man's did.
  "The Tuattauna still have most of their warriors," he said. "If
we take your tribute, their axes remain—and may strike at us
some other time. So if you remain our foes, better that we grind
you into nothingness. What we offer instead is that you become
our friends."

   "Friends! You take our cattle and horses, burn our steadings,
kill our men, force our women, and we should become friends'?"

   Hwalkarz's voice was soothing. "After war, peace may be
made. No feud should last forever; else the kin die out and there
are no living to make sacrifice for the spirits of the dead. The
Iraiina have already made peace with the Zarthani, the
Maltarka, many of the eastern tribes. Their chariots fight side by
side with ours, and they share in our plunder—and in our new
arts of war and making."

  "They are your dogs, you mean, to run at your heel!"

   Daurthunnicar could see that the envoys were thoughtful,
despite their bold words. He nodded smugly. This was a talking
he had heard before, with the other neighbor tribes.

   "Who speaks of dogs?" Hwalkarz shrugged. "Speak of wolves,
instead." He touched the fanged wolfs head that shone on the
green-enameled steel of his breastplate. They had seen his wolf
banner on red fields, and the same emblem was more and more
common on Iraiina shields. "The wolves run in a pack, and for
each pack there is a leader— but all the pack share in the kill.
Run with us, be our pack-brothers, and you will feast richly.
More than enough to make up for your losses."

  "Run against who?" the envoy said dubiously.

   "Against all who oppose us," Hwalkarz answered. "In another
year, perhaps two, all the tribes of Sky Father's people in these
lands will go to war behind Daurthunnicar, high rahax of the
White Isle. Already warriors come by the score from the
mainland to join our banners and take meat and mead from our
rahax, famous for victory-luck and his open hand to those who
pledge loyalty."
   Daurthunnicar felt himself swelling with pride. It was true.
He'd received envoys hinting that whole clans might follow,
taking land to hold of him and joining the Iraiina folk. A tribe
shrank with defeat but grew in victory.

   "Then who will we go to war against?" the Tuattauna chief
asked.

   Hwalkarz's grin spread. "Against the Earth Folk of the west
and north, of course," he said. "That will be a fat carcass big
enough for us all to feast on. And in return for our friendship, we
ask only a light tribute—every year—and that you make no war
without the consent of our rahax. In return, you will share with
us as comrades, and your chieftains will take council with ours."

   Daurthunnicar signaled the waiting women to bring in the
food and drink. "Come, feast with us, be guests and peace-holy,"
he said. "We will speak more of this."

   This session of the Constitutional Committee's core group was
fairly informal, a dozen people sitting around a table with
notepads and plates of cookies, and Swindapa at the foot taking
shorthand notes—she'd proved to have a natural talent for that.

    Informal, hell, it's in my living room, Cofflin thought. The
Meeting had given him and Martha a former
boardinghouse-cum-inn just past the upper end of Broad, where
it turned into Gay Street—Marian had given one of her rare
full-bore laughs when she heard, he on Gay and she on Main.
They'd pulled out the extra bedrooms, except one for guests and
another for a nursery, and turned most of the space into offices
of a sort. So now I can't ever get away from the goddam job. He
had to admit it was a nice place, and more practical for his work
than the old house farther out, which was just too damn far to
commute on a bike, especially in winter. There were more
fireplaces, too; it was an older house, 1840s, like most in this
section of town, and honestly built. Rain beat against the
streaked antique glass, and the lilac bushes tapped on them like
skeletal ringers. The streets were dark, drizzle falling through
chill fog; a good thing nobody had to walk or bike far to get
home.
   On the other hand, it was just too convenient at times. This
meeting around the long dining-room table was going to go on
long past the dinnertime it was supposed to end at. On the third
hand, with the committee meeting here Martha can go nurse
the baby when she has to. Extremely fortunate; the supply of
infant formula was strictly limited.

   "Look, let's stop squabbling about details for a minute, shall
we?" Cofflin said, washing down a bite of oatmeal cookie with
lukewarm sassafras.

   Because otherwise I may strangle somebody. The dull roar of
argument subsided along the long table.

   "Most of you were here for the first meetings we had right
after the Event. We worked together well enough when we were
figuring out how to avoid starving to death, nearly a year ago.
Let's apply a little of that spirit."

   "Good point, Jared," Martha said. "Everything we do will have
repercussions down the road; look at what happened with the
original Convention, back in the 1780s. Let's stand on their
shoulders and perhaps see farther. Concentrate on principles,
and on making them clear as crystal."

   "I still say the Meeting should be the final authority," Macy
said stubbornly. "Remember the way Congress got, back up in
the twentieth? Say one thing, do another, and their hands always
out to whoever would give 'em the biggest contribution. Let the
voters decide themselves."

   "For now, that's fine," Ian Arnstein said. "What happens
when it gets too big? It's awkward enough now, when we get a
big turnout for a Meeting."

  Oh, please, not more about ancient Greek city-states, please.

   "How's this?" Doreen said. "We set a maximum size for
Towns—say when their Meetings have five thousand members.
Bigger than that, they have to split into two. Towns elect
delegates to a, oh, let's call it a House of Delegates. With an
automatic setup for admitting new Townships. We can put in a
formula for how many delegates per voter, say a percentage of
the total so the ratio automatically goes up as the number of
voters increases. That way the House would always be a
manageable size."

   "Okay," Macy said cautiously. "I can see that. But changes in
the constitution should still be referred back to the Meetings.
And the Meetings ought to be able to recall their delegates, too."

  "How about a two-thirds majority in two-thirds of the
Meetings to approve a change the delegates propose?" Ian said.

   "Okay. I can go with that. We need a way for ordinary people
to propose changes too… say, the same two-thirds and
two-thirds voting on a petition, what do they call it—"

  "Voter initiative, we called… will call… would have called it
out in California," Ian said. "Damn, those tenses trip you up. We
could use the same formula for a recall."

   Macy nodded. There was a group that generally followed his
lead; they gestured agreement as well.

   "All right," Cofflin said, trying hard to keep the sarcasm out of
his voice. "All in favor?"

   Hands went up along the table. He ruled a line through that
item on the list before him. His stomach rumbled complainingly;
dinner was being long delayed. The smells coming from the
kitchen didn't help.

   "Next, the military," he said. "I move we use the Swiss system,
suitably modified."

  Martha frowned. "Does that really need to go into the
constitution, dear?" she said. "Couldn't we just say where the
warmaking power lies and then leave the details to the laws?"

  "Ayup, the basics do need to go in, I think. How's this?
Everyone registers at eighteen, serves the equivalent of Basic,
and does periodic training after that. Meeting—or this House of
Delegates, later—has to approve any prolonged call-up, or
sending the… hell, let's call it the Militia abroad. Details beyond
that by legislation."

  "I'm for it, Jared," Macy said.

  Cofflin looked down the table to Marian Alston.

   She nodded. "Sound, as our basic defense. We'll need the
Guard for operations abroad, ships and landing parties and so
forth. I think that should be at the chief's discretion, with the
Meeting as an overall check. We can't be too centralized,
particularly with communications so slow."

    "All in favor?" He glanced around. "Passed by acclamation. All
right, next item, the Declaration of Rights. Let's see, we got the
first seven down last session—religion, speech, assembly,
franchise, property, privacy, fair and speedy trial by jury."

  "What about bearing arms?" Macy said.

   "Sam, that comes under 'military service' up the list, in case
you hadn't noticed. Everyone's in the militia and they keep the
personal weapons issued 'em at home, unless convicted of a
felony. Satisfied?"

  "I suppose," he grumbled. After a moment: "Ayup, Jared, that
about covers it."

   "Good. All right, there's a short codicil after all of 'em, to
make what we mean clear. Like this bit about the freedom of
religion not meaning the town can't put up a creche at
Christmas, the speech not including fornicating in the streets,
assembly not including rioting, property subject to legal usage,
and trial not meaning damnfool stuff like throwing anyone who
knows anything off a jury, things like that."

   Joseph Starbuck held up a page, his glasses at the end of his
nose. "Phrasing here's a bit more elegant than that, Jared," he
said dryly.

   "Blame Martha." That brought chuckles. "And Father Gomez,
he did most of the religion codicil."
   "Good," someone farther down the table said. "For a moment
there, I was afraid we had a lawyer on the committee."

  There was another chuckle at that. "We're ahead of the
Philadelphia Convention there, at least," a man said. He'd been a
candy-maker before the Event, and still did amazing things with
honey and maple sugar now that his chocolate truffles were
merely a sadly happy memory. "They were lousy with lawyers."

   "All in favor?" Jared asked. "Passed by acclamation. Next
item, the everybody-means-everybody-no-exceptions part of the
Declaration of Rights. No abridging citizens' rights on the
grounds of race, religion, origin, gender, or sexual orientation.
The codicil covers things for damn fools again, in case we get
many down the road. We didn't put in anything for green-eyed
dwarves with two heads, on the assumption you can't cover all
the angles."

  "Excuse me, Chief." He looked down the table; it was Lisa
Gerrard. Might have known.

  "Yes, Lisa?" He tried to keep the coldness out of his voice.
Gerrard wasn't a bad person, exactly. She did good work on the
School Committee, though the closest she came to children of
her own was seven cats. Just can't keep her mouth from flapping
when she hears certain words. What was that Russian
doctor…Pavlov?

   "Why do we need to include, um, sexual orientation? Isn't that
special rights for some and not others? Those people are covered
by the general rights, aren't they?"

   Alston touched him on the arm, and he nodded to her. She
leaned forward, looking coolly down the stretch of mahogany.
"As one of those people, Ms. Gerrard—three times over, black,
gay, and female—it's my experience that we're not covered by
general provisions unless it's made quite plain. Which is why, fo'
example, I lost custody of my children, in fact couldn't even ask
for it. Accordingly I'm for that provision. Strongly. Very
strongly."

  "All in favor?" Hands went up; close enough this time that he
had to count. "Abstentions? Opposed? Passed."

  He made a mental note to start talking people around.

   About sixty-forty. If it was that close, it might not pass the
Meeting without some work—mainly on getting people to attend;
the constitution was being passed in chunks, and not everyone
bothered to attend every session, so a small band of enthusiasts
could be disproportionately influential if he didn't watch out.
Maybe we should make voting compulsory, like the Aussies did?
Ian Arnstein had brought that up a couple of sessions ago. On
the other hand, no. People too damned lazy to vote didn't
deserve a say. He'd pass the word to Sandy Rapczewicz, and
she'd see that the Guard people showed up en masse; most of
them would vote for legally protecting cream-cheese three-way
llama bondage if they knew Captain Alston favored it, but
Marian'd never dream of using her position to influence the
turnout. Cofflin had no such inhibitions, and neither did the
XO. Hmm. Father Gomez, he'd noticed, abstained—which might
mean either…

   Christ, I hate politics. Even when you were doing the right
thing it could make you feel like you had rancid oil on your soul.

   "And that's the last item on tonight's agenda. The minutes'll
be posted at the Hub and the Athenaeum as usual, copies of the
proposed articles in the Warrant, and we'll all vote on this chunk
next Meeting. Thanks, people."

  "What my husband means is that he's ready for dinner and
would all those who aren't eating here please leave," Martha said.

   Cofflin's stomach rumbled again in counterpoint, which
brought a general laugh. He stood at the door, shaking hands as
people opened their umbrellas and Martha helped them find
their coats. The chill night air crept in, raw with the fog and
rain.

   The door closed finally, leaving only himself, Martha, Alston,
and the Fiernan; the Arnsteins were going to settle for
sandwiches at a meeting of their chess club. Cofflin winced
slightly; he'd taken on Ian in a friendly game once, and it had
lasted a whole six moves. Doreen beat him in three. Doc Coleman
could give either of them a run for their money, though, and the
game had become quite popular over the winter. The four
remaining looked at each other and sighed, then a thin wail
came from upstairs.

  "Our overlord's voice," Martha said resignedly. "Now if only I
could learn to tell the 'I'm hungry' cry from the 'I need to be
changed' cry. Or the 'Pay attention to me' sub-variety."

   "I come too," Swindapa said eagerly, joining the older woman
on the stairs.

   Cofflin smiled to himself; according to Martha, the Fiernan
thought cloth diapers were the greatest invention since matches.

   "Better you than me, Martha," Alston said. "I'm going to
check the roast. Lordy, how some of those people love to hear
themselves talk."

   He busied himself clearing and setting the table, taking out
the middle leaves that had extended it for the committee
meeting and rummaging in the sideboy for the plates and
cutlery. The carving knife and sharpening steel rasped together;
the pigs the Eagle had brought back from Britain last spring had
thrived—there were nearly a thousand of them now—but you
couldn't say they were tender eating. Flavorful, yes. Tender, no.
Then he uncorked a bottle of the island's red wine, which Martha
told him needed to be done to let the stuff breathe. I can't tell the
difference, myself.

   "Drink?" Cofflin said, when Alston came back.

  "Wouldn't say no," Alston replied. "The roast's standing.
Ready to carve in about five minutes."

   "Thanks for making the time to attend these meetings. It's
pretty dull stuff," Cofflin said, handing her a bourbon-and-water.
This was her sixth committee meeting, but the first time she'd
spoken more than a few words.

   "No, I wouldn't say dull," she said, her voice remote as she
sipped at the drink and bared her teeth at the bite. "Interestin',
more like. Seeing history up close." She paused for a moment
and then went on: "You know, before… all this, I'd never met
many Yankees. The real thing, I mean, not just people who live
no'th of Mason and Dixon's line."

   The silence stretched. They leaned back in their chairs,
looking into the low blue-red flicker of the heartwood coals. At
last he looked over at her. "Penny for 'em," he said.

  She turned and looked into his eyes. "Jared, I love this place."

  Cofflin blinked surprise; that was a bit effusive, for her.
"Well… thanks."

    "No, I mean it." Her voice was still remote and calm, but there
was a flat intensity of purpose in it. "I was in the Guard a long
time, since I turned eighteen, a lot of it down in the Gulf. DEA
liaison shit, Columbians, refugees… when we weren't pulling
drunken speedboaters out from under after a three-day lovefest
with the eels and crabs. Staring up the ass end of the world."

  "I was a cop too… well, ayup, you've got a point. I was a
small-town cop, here."

   "Still and all, I started out thinking I was doin' something
worthwhile for the country, you know? And that meant a lot to
me, because the country did—does, for that matter, or I wouldn't
have kept wearin' the uniform… After a while, I got convinced I
was standing at the bottom of the sewer drain, tryin' to push the
flow back up with a plumber's helper. A while more, and I got to
thinkin' the whole country had flushed itself right down that
drain and we were just waiting to hit the septic tank. Got posted
to Eagle, training duty, and sometimes at night I'd think… am I
just giving these kids a shuck-and-jive?"

   They sat listening to the crackle and soft popping sounds from
the hearth, and the rippling tap of rain on the windows.

  "Here…" she said.

  "Here…" Cofflin went on. "No gangbangers, no Wall Street
downsizers, no nutcases on a mission from God, no 'national
media,' no redneck black-helicopter paranoids, no multi-cultis,
no animal rights lunatics—not anymore, thanks to the Jaguar
God—no trial lawyers, no Beltway crowd with their collective
head so far up their butts they're looking at their tonsils from the
rear. Our own share of natural-born damn fools as Martha likes
to call 'em, but they're nothing by comparison."

   She raised her glass. "Exactly, my friend. Exactly." The full
lips quirked in a wry smile. "No damnosa hereditas like the
foundin' fathers had on their backs, either. Tom Jefferson talked
about havin' the wolf by the ears, but hell, the wolfs ears get
mighty sore too. Here we don't have all that."

  Slowly, he said: "That's why you finally gave in and started
coming to these committee meetings?"

   Alston nodded. "But Jared, I'm… not qualified. Oh, I can give
advice on stuff in my area, but basically what I do is kick ass and
take names. I'm a hammer. To me, all the problems look like
nails, and they aren't."

   "We're none of us qualified. I was a fisherman and a cop;
Martha was a librarian; Macy's a carpenter turned contractor;
Starbuck was a small-town businessman turned town clerk; the
Arnsteins barely knew or cared that the real world existed."

    "Christ, that's better than a bunch of sociologists and politico
lawyers. Ian and Doreen are as bright as anyone I've ever met,
and between 'em it seems like they've read every book in the
world, sometimes; Martha's about as smart, and less naive. Macy
drives me nuts, drives ever'body crazy, but he's got a conscience
like a bedstead carved out of granite rock—uncomfortable, but
it's solid to the core. And Jared, you know people, and you'll do
what you think is right if you have to head-butt your way
through a brick wall to do it. Plus you've gotten really good at
persuading, in your own way."

    "Ah—" He flushed, looking down into his glass uncomfortably.
"I'll do my best."

  "Know you will. Just… be careful, okay? Because it's for the
whole world."

   That thought had occurred to him, now and then. It was a
sobering one. "Bargain on that, lady." They touched their glasses.

   Alston sighed. "I wish my kids were here, you know? I really
do. For their sakes."

   As if on cue, Martha and Swindapa came down from the
second-floor nursery. "She's asleep, at last," Martha said, wiping
her hands on a towel. "For a while. As much as half an hour, if
we're lucky."

  "She's a beautiful baby—very good, as sweet as new butter,"
Swindapa said, smiling. "If I had a baby as good-natured, I'd…"

   Then the expression ran away from her face, and she stood
with her eyes closed, tears squeezing out from under the lids.
Poor kid, Cofflin thought. Evidently having children was real
important to her people. A fully equipped fertility lab back up in
the twentieth might have been able to do something, but weeks
of a raging untreated pelvic inflammation had probably put her
beyond any benefit from the island's clinic.

   Martha put an awkward arm around her shoulders. Alston
came over and led her to the seat by the fire, pressing the glass of
bourbon-and-water into her hand and perching on the arm of
the easy chair beside her.

  "Your older sister has some children, doesn't she,
honey-bunch?" the black woman said gently, stroking her hair.
"What're they like? Tell me."

  Martha drew him out into the kitchen, snagging the long
knife and fork along the way. "She'll be all right by the time
you're finished carving," she murmured.

  "It's called division of labor," Walker said to Ohotolarix.

    The phrase was in English; Iraiina didn't have the words for
it, not without a paragraph of circumlocutions. You couldn't say
mass or table of organization in it either, not really.
   The long shed was filled with men and women and children at
work; most of them wore iron collars with a loop at the back for
attaching shackles. At one end of the building thin rods of metal
went into a machine of wooden drums and crank handles. Four
strong men heaved on levers, and the iron rod was drawn
through cast-iron dies until it became wire wound on a length of
smooth round oak. There was a smell of hot iron and stale sweat,
and the raw timbers the shed was fashioned of.

   The wire went from bench to bench; some of the slaves cut the
links into circles, others flattened the ends, still others fitted the
rings together into preset shapes. At last the rivets were closed
by lever-operated presses, and the end product was tumbled in
boxes of sand to polish it, then washed and wiped down with
flaxseed oil and rolled up for packing and transport. Chain-mail
hauberks, in six standard sizes that he'd found would fit nearly
everybody; knee-length, with short sleeves and a slit up before
and behind so that the wearer could ride a horse. Not quite as
good as the plate suits Leaton made back on the island, but
almost infinitely better than the local equivalents.

   "I see, lord," Ohotolarix said thoughtfully when he'd explained
further. "Because each task is division among many." The Iraiina
frowned in puzzlement for a moment.

  "But why is this better than having each of these slaves and
workmen make a whole set of this fine armor?" He wore his own
now, did so virtually every waking moment, in fact.

   "If a man does only one thing, he works faster," Walker said.
"And if you only have to teach him one thing, he can learn it
quickly—little skill is involved in doing only one step over and
over again. And if he does only that one thing, it's easier to check
that he does it well and quickly, and to drive him on."

   A sort of primitive assembly-line system, although he'd gotten
the idea from Adam Smith's description of how pins were made
in the eighteenth century.

   The young Iraiina frowned, thinking the matter through. "I
see it must be as you say, lord," he said at last. "Eka, truth, I've
never seen so many work so swiftly for so long. It's like…" He
searched for words. "It's like the spokes of a wheel, going 'round
and 'round."

   Walker nodded, unsurprised; these people were burst
workers. At crisis times like the harvest they labored at a pace
that would kill most residents of the twentieth, but much of the
rest of their working days they spent loafing along, stopping
when they pleased. None of them had any precise time sense,
either, and they absolutely hated working regular hours at high
intensity as a steady thing.

   Not as much as they hate flogging or the hotbox or the cross,
though, he thought with some satisfaction. Or Hong's patented
special gelding without anesthesia, although that was reserved
for extreme cases. He grimaced a little; he wasn't what you'd call
a squeamish man, but there were times when Hong's
kid-in-a-candy-store approach to torture made him a little
uneasy, not to mention this cult she'd started, with herself as the
avatar of the Lady of Pain…

   Outside a bell rang to mark the noon hour, echoing across the
buildings and fields. At a shout from an overseer the workers in
the shed downed their tools. Wheeled carts came in with tubs of
food: porridge for the slaves, meat and bread and beer for the
skilled freemen and overseers, a covered plate of ham and eggs
for the American supervising the whole operation—Rodriguez,
today. That would probably get a little cold; the sailor had taken
one of the women back into the little wicker cubicle where the
accounts were kept the minute the bell went, and the grunts and
moans and rhythmic rattling were already loud. Walker grinned;
Rodriguez was becoming something of a legend for the amount
of action he got.

  Still thinks with his balls, he thought, slightly contemptuous.
But he's learned to keep it out of working hours. And he'd
become downright devoted to the boss.

   Walker and his chief Iraiina follower walked out into the
courtyard. Walkerburg had grown considerably over the winter;
he had sixty full-time warriors and retainers now— some from
the new allied tribes, as well as Iraiina—plus their wives and
children and dependents and the Americans and their women;
most of them had a steady squeeze now, or more than one. And
the slaves, who outnumbered all the rest put together. Plus the
horses, milch cows, and draft oxen they needed, with corrals on
the pastures downwind toward the river, and the watermill, the
workshops, the warehouses. They'd logged off most of the heavy
timber in the area over the cold months, and muddy ground
interspersed with stumps spread around. New leaf was showing
on the trees he'd left for shade and appearance, and a haze of
grass and grain across the fields; the sun shone on wind-ruffled
puddles and cuffed at the hair he'd let grow long in accordance
with local custom.

   Warriors drilled, marching, thrusting in unison with their
spears or firing crossbows under McAndrews's direction, or rode
their horses around an obstacle course. An Iraiina he'd taught
was breaking horses to the saddle in a corral, cowboy-fashion.
Laborers unloaded a broad-wheeled Conestoga wagon full of iron
bars and barrel staves and charcoal and tanned hides. Another
was being loaded with small barrels full of the output from his
latest project, a still for homemade white lightning. That was
wildly popular among the natives despite being rawly
undrinkable; he supposed that was because they'd never been
exposed to distilled liquor before, but it was another hold on the
chiefs.

   "Can we plow and herd enough to support so many?"
Ohotolarix said, worry fighting with pride in his tone. None of
the native settlements was as big as this; they didn't have the
organization to feed large numbers, and disease was a constant
threat to any substantial group.

  "No," Walker replied. "We don't need to."

   They walked across toward the main house; he nodded to
followers of his about their errands, and took a deep breath of
the fresh early-spring air. Apart from woodsmoke and the odors
of baking and cooking, there was little taint in it. Alice had seen
to the sanitation, with his full power behind her. He'd even set
up a bathhouse, and made the slaves wash regularly with soap,
another of his innovations. The natives were already talking in
awe of how few died here, particularly children. The place was
certainly swarming with rug rats.

   "No, we won't plow that much," he went on aloud. "But we'll
get ample grain and beans and beef from our share of the
rahax's levies on our tributary folk, and from our Earther
tenants. Here we'll raise just enough for garden truck, and fresh
grazing for our beasts. Thus we'll be freed to fight, and work on
other things."

   And he'd had Martins run up a few plows and
nineteenth-century-style seed drills, miles better than the simple
wooden crook with a stone share the locals used. Nobody here
had much grasp on stuff like liming the soil or rotating crops,
either. Not that he intended to spend his time on agriculture,
but he'd spread that sort of thing around, first of all on the lands
the rahax had given him directly to work with slaves and
tenants. It ought to be easy enough to double or triple
productivity, which would be essential when he got around to the
sort of building he had in mind. You could round up all the
slaves you pleased, but they weren't much good if you couldn't
feed them; that went double for armies. He was a young man;
plenty of time.

   Ohotolarix nodded and strode off to his own house; he had a
growing family, and his youngest son was named Hwalkarz. The
American walked into the hall of the two-story log dwelling,
waiting while a servant knelt to take off his muddy boots and fit
felt slippers. Alice Hong looked up from her papers on the table
in the dining room and rang a bell for more food, then rubbed
out some notes on a flat slate and chalked in others.
Keruwthena's young sisters sat on either side of her; Hong was
training them up, easier than with someone older. That was the
main drawback of ruling primitives. You could make them do
things, but you had to show them how first.

  "Welcome, Oh Lord of the Manor," she said.

   Walker grinned; Alice might take her perversions with
excessive seriousness, but it was refreshing to have someone who
wasn't totally in awe of him. Of course, he could relax around
Alice, The locals would never follow a woman, witch or no, and
she knew it. She was crazy, he supposed, but not in the least
stupid.

   "How are things going?" he said.

   The serving girl brought in a tray of sandwiches, thin grilled
beef with onions on crusty almost-French bread, plus cheese and
pickled vegetables. Hong had taught the kitchen staff well—she
liked to eat properly herself—and none of them disobeyed her
twice.

   "Well, I told that cow Ekhnonpa to stay off her feet
more—she's still puking in the mornings and probably will be
until she drops her calf. I don't like the spotting she had, and I've
cut her salt intake," the physician said. "Speaking of that, do you
know half the females in this place are pregnant? It's not
decent—as soon as I've got one trained to do something,
somebody pups her. I'm going to start spaying some of them, or
doing some D&Cs, or we'll never get any work done. Anyway, four
births and one death this week—brainless bitch fell into the
boiling tallow in the soap shed and got scalded, nothing I could
do. A beam fell on a slave's foot and crushed it; he'll live and I
saved the foot, but he's laid up for months. No more dysentery,
thank goodness, just the usual rash of minor injuries, and my
assistants could see to most of those. The food stores are holding
up with the latest delivery. We're finally seeing some real
production from the spinning and weaving shed."

   He nodded approval as he swallowed the last of his sandwich
and took a bite of strong cheese. A lot of the tribute was in raw
wool and flax. Building the kick-pedal flying-shuttle looms and
the spinning jenny hadn't been any problem, but getting the
machines into actual production was another matter. Hong had
taken the project under her wing for something to do, now that
her regular clinic was well organized. It also made work for all
those pregnant women, work they actually liked, and if you
wanted decent sheeting or pillowcases here you had to make
them yourself. The local linen was more like canvas.

  "Good job," he said. The kitchen girl came in to clear away the
wood and pottery plates. "As a reward, come along upstairs."

   He rose. Hong dropped her chalk beside her quill pen and
followed suit, grinning at him and slowly licking her lips. "You
too," he added to the servant.

   "You girls work on your times tables," Hong said to her
helpers.

   "Yes, Ms. Hong," they chorused, eyes firmly down on their
slates.

    The two Americans went out the door into the hallway,
pushing the kitchen girl between them and up the stairs. Their
hands met on her shivering back. Hong was smiling, and twirling
a little silver-handled crop of bone and leather she always wore
thonged around her right wrist.

   Life is good, Walker thought, moving his hand down to the
girl's rump. They turned left down the hall to Hong's room,
which had the frontal mask of a human skull nailed to it with
golden spikes.

  "Wake up! Wake up!"

    Ian Arnstein yawned and stretched, shaking off a dream in
which he was trapped in a seminar without end, populated
exclusively by illiterate surfer dudes who kept quoting Foucault
at him; or even worse, Paul de Man. It was still dark outside, just
the slightest hint of gray in the windows. It was his turn to make
up the morning fire, and he snuggled down under the blankets
and coverlet in reluctance. It might be March—now that he came
a little more out of sleep he realized that it was the anniversary
of Event Day, the morning of the expeditionary force's sailing
date—but it was still cold and damp after a week of storms.

   "Wake up!" Doreen said again, shaking his shoulder. "Ian!
We're back in the twentieth! The Event reversed! There's a jet
going by right over us and a Navy helicopter landing down by
Steamboat Wharf!"

   Ian hit the floor with a bellow "and tripped, tangled in the
sheets. His elbows thumped on the floor; he ignored it and
scrambled to the windows, throwing up the sash.
   Cold wind and the drizzle it blew in raised goosebumps on his
naked body. Below in the street a cart pulled by two cows went
by, piled high with bundles of salted fish under a tarpaulin. A
steam whistle sounded mournful and remote; he could smell
burning whale oil from the lanterns…

   A giggle from the bed brought him around. Doreen squeaked
and hopped off the mattress, keeping the four-poster between
them. "Now, darling, it was just a joke—"

   He kept coming. She dodged and somersaulted over the bed.
"Joke my hairy arse!" he roared. "That rain was cold,
goddammit."

   He chased her around the room. By the second circuit he was
laughing as well; he took time to throw a few dry sticks on the
fire before she let him catch her. They were both still smiling
when they dressed and went across to breakfast, and so down to
the wharves.

    The two schooners Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tub-man
were already being hauled out from the dock by the tugs. Eagle
still waited. She didn't look quite so pristine as she had a year
ago; they were still short of paint, and would be for years. Extra
davits for more boats had been added to her stern and sides, and
other shapes crouched at the rails, covered in tarpaulins.
Umbrellas and rain slickers crowded the dock; there were hugs
and tears as friends and family members said farewell. Father
Gomez—who'd been chosen as head of the new church, rather to
his own surprise—led a blessing service.

  Then Jared Cofflin climbed onto a board between two barrels.

    "Bad weather for a send-off, so I won't keep you long," he said.
"We did all the speechifying necessary at the Town Meeting. This
is something that has to be done. Lisketter's bunch got
themselves killed, but we don't know what Walker and his gang
have been doing, and we have to go, for our safety and that of
our families and our homes. It isn't that far to Britain."

   Not too far for Walker to come back with a horde of pirates,
if we give him enough time, Ian thought soberly. Or for the
Tartessians to do the same. That fact had sunk home well and
truly over the winter; three-quarters of the Meeting's votes had
gone to sending an expeditionary force and giving Alston
plenipotentiary authority. Even Sam Macy had gone along with
it, with a convert's zeal. Now that the spring plowing was mostly
done, the islanders were anxious to see the expedition on its way.
Not enthusiastic, certainly, except for some youngsters, but very
willing.

   He wondered whether it was the situation that made Town
Meeting government work relatively well here, or the fact that
this was a community whose core was people with real roots. I
doubt a random collection of seven thousand Angelenos would
have done nearly as well.

   "I have complete confidence in Captain Alston's judgment and
leadership," Cofflin finished. "With that, I'll turn this slippery
plank over to her for a minute."

  There was a friend's malice in the smile he gave the
commander of the Republic of Nantucket's fleet. Ian knew they
both detested public speaking. It was a bit of an irony that they'd
both landed jobs where it was an essential part of the work.

    Alston went up on the plank, yellow slicker over her working
blues, and stood with hands behind her and feet braced wide.
"I'm glad Chief Cofflin and the Meeting have confidence in us,"
she said. "This is an essential mission, and I intend to see that
it's done right and at the least possible cost."

   Well, that's the captain, he thought. Mission first, people
second. She included herself among the expendable, of course.

  "Cheer up," Doreen whispered in his ear. "Think of the
adventure, Oh Speaker to Savages."

   Adventure is somebody else in deep shit far away, as Marian
so eloquently puts it. "Think of the cold, the wet, the cramped
bunks, the salt meat and hardtack"—without refrigeration the
Eagle and her consorts were back to traditional seafaring
provender, "the natives throwing things at us," he whispered
back.
   "If all goes well, we'll make sure that there's no long-term
menace to Nantucket's safety, and gain friends, allies, and
trading partners," Alston went on. "Every one of us will do her or
his best to see that things do go well."

   "Or they'll answer to me and wish they'd never been born,"
Doreen whispered, in a sotto voce impersonation of the icy
soprano Alston used when angry.

   "We appreciate your support, and please keep us in your
thoughts and prayers," Alston concluded. "Thank you."

   She stepped down, and the last of the expeditionary force
trooped up the gangplank.

  "Almost wish I were going with you," Jared said.

  "I don't," Martha added bluntly. "I just hope you all come
back safe." She looked down at the baby sleeping in its carriage.

  "You're right," Alston said. "That's important work too."

   "You will come someday," Swindapa said. "There will be many
voyages. I'll show you my birth-country." She bent and touched
the baby's cheek. "You too, little Marian, iho-jax. You will see the
midwinter Moon rising over the Great Wisdom."

  Ian looked aside at Doreen, and smiled. "Remember our
honeymoon cruise?"

  "Time to break the mold," Walker said. "Hoist it out."

   Men in thick leather aprons and boots and gloves went
cautiously close and fastened a three-bar iron grapnel to the top
of the mold. A ten-ox team bent their necks to the yoke and
pulled in the muddy yard outside, and the long clay tube rose
slowly out of the casting pit to the creak of harness and rattle of
the block-and-tackle. The workers stood watching and blowing
on their hands until it was free, then moved forward to guide it
onto a timber cradle as the oxen walked backward and let the
great weight down again.
   A whistle blew, and slaves attacked the clay of the mold with
wooden mallets and chisels. Large sections of it peeled away,
revealing the dull brown-gold color of the bronze, still painfully
hot to the touch. Walker and Cuddy stepped close, examining it
with painstaking care from the thick breech down through the
trunnions and the extra foot of spongy, pitted metal at the
muzzle. The center was still full; they'd hollow-cast it with a
water-cooled core for greater strength, the outer layers shrinking
in as they solidified.

   "We'll saw this last foot off, and then we're ready to bore it
out," Walker said, slapping the metal. There's a thrill to it, he
thought. Sort of like having a giant hard-on, in a rarefied
intellectual sort of way.

   "Yeah, but that boring, that's going to be a bitch, boss. The
tool pieces and the gearing for the boring machine— that'll be
mostly a hand-filing job."

  "You've got the gauges for measuring results, don't you?"
Walker asked, crouching and looking along the top of the barrel.

   "Boss… ah, hell, yeah, I can do it. I can build a tool-and-gear
cutter, too, it's just a shitload of work."

  "Nothing worthwhile without sweat," Walker said cheerfully.
"You've got those locals understudying you, don't you?"

   "Right. Boss, have you tried to get the notion of doing
something exactly into these wogs' heads? It's like on time, they
just don't have that file on their hard drive."

   "Actually I have, Bill. It just takes persistence and a boot up
the ass now and then."

   Perfect, he thought, touching the cannon again.

    The sights were elementary, a blade at the front and a notch
at the rear, just like the model, the Civil War twelve-pounder
Napoleon. Saltpeter was still the bottleneck in gunpowder
production, and Isketerol was working on that—his people used
it as a medicine, and it was just a matter of scaling up the
leaching process. When it was solved, he'd have the same power
at his command that stopped Lee's men at Malvern Hill and
Gettysburg.

   "Ultima regio regnum," Walker said, patting the barrel again.
"The last argument of kings." If the Nantucketers wanted to fuck
with him, he was going to give them a right royal welcome.

   Bill Cuddy blinked at the sound of Walker's laughter, and
several of the slaves made covert signs with their fingers as they
cringed.

   "Oh, God," Doreen said, looking up the companionway stairs
that led to the fantail of the Eagle and at the tumbled slope of
foaming water beyond.

   "Quickly, please, Ms. Arnstein!" the yellow-muffled figure at
the head of them said. "Can't keep this hatchway open!"

   Ice-cold sea spray was blasting through, already hitting her
face and trickling down into the layers of quilted parka and wool
sweater beneath her waterproofs. She took a breath and ran up
the slippery treads; the fact that the ship was riding up the slope
of one of the huge waves made it a little easier.

   At least the air and cold cut the nausea. Seasickness had never
bothered her before, but the four unbroken days of a
high-latitude North Atlantic gale had triggered it well and truly.
The crewman grabbed her as she came out and snapped her belt
onto one of the safety lines that ran down either side of the
quarterdeck. The wind snatched the breath out of her, leaving
her gasping as she pulled herself slipping and crouching along
past the radio shack and toward the great triple wheels.

   She looked at the waves and felt her stomach heave one last
time, but mastered it. It isn't really storming anymore, she told
herself. Not really. Not the way it had been for the previous four
days. Then she looked back over a sea like a long range of
mountains in labor, white water from horizon to horizon except
in the troughs between the great waves. Appalled, she turned her
back on it—had to, because otherwise she couldn't breathe.
Somewhere up there it was near noon, but the light was a
somber gray wash.

   The Eagle's bow climbed until it was pointing at the growling
iron sky. Wind moaned and whistled through the rigging, loud
enough to drown out a voice five paces away. No sleet today, but
spray still came in sheets. The ship seemed to pause and then
pitch forward under a mountain of gray and steel blue streaked
with white, plumes of white throwing back from the twisting
lunge of the bows. The rigging changed its note as the height of
the wave itself sheltered them a little from the force of the
monster wind raging down out of Greenland. Dim in the sheets
of water coming over the side, figures in yellow slickers fought
with the ropes in the waist or aloft.

   The wave broke behind them and poured across the port rail,
cataracted across the waist deck, hip-deep to the crew. Doreen
felt her feet slip out from beneath her and clung for sheer life to
the safety line; it bent like a bowstring under the terrible
leverage, and her head went under—or she thought it did. With
wind and water so intermingled there was no real surface to the
billow streaming about her, only a zone of increasing density.
Then like some great dog Eagle shook herself and roared upright
again, with a Niagara pouring overside and through the
scuppers.

   Oh, God, thank You, she thought, coughing and wheezing to
get the water out of her lungs as she fought her way to the
wheels. Eight crewfolk wrestled the savage leverage of the
following seas as it played through the rudder and the gearing.

  "Sharp weather," the captain called, bending to shriek into
her ear. "This is real sailin'!"

  "You're out of your mind!" Doreen yelled back.

  White teeth split the black face dimly seen under the slicker's
hood. "Yeah, I am. Ain't it cool?" Alston shouted in turn.

   Swindapa laughed beside her. She was bareheaded, long wet
hair streaming like a yellow banner in the gale.

  One advantage of weather like this was that you could mutter
and not be heard. "Oh, great, I stop puking my guts out for the
first time in sixty hours, and what do I get? The Loony Lesbian
Sailors' Comedy Hour."

   She pulled herself closer, holding on to the safety line. "How
are we doing, Captain?"

   Alston seemed in a playful mood. "Do you take Band-Aids off
slowly or rip 'em quick?" she yelled.

   "Slow—why?"

   "I'm of the rip-'em-quick school," Alston replied. "This blow
was just what we needed, to see how the crews settled in, test the
schooners' seakeeping… and get us across fast."

   "The schooners aren't sunk?" Doreen said, looking around.

  Nothing. The Eagle came to the crest of a wave, and she
couldn't even tell where sea and sky parted company. The Queen
Mary couldn't live in this.

   "Not as of the last radio check, half an hour ago. Good
weatherly little ships—they float like corks. And we've been
making three hundred sea miles from noon to noon, or better.
This blow's dying, though; we'll rendezvous off Ireland in two,
three days. Fast passage."

   "I'm glad we're not in danger."

   "Oh, there's danger. Let a couple of sails go in this and we'll
broach to—be turned broadside on to the waves in a flash."

   "Would that be bad?"

   "We'd capsize and go down like a rock," Alston yelled
cheerfully. "But don't worry—it's a sound ship and the crew's
shaken down somethin' wonderful."

  "I'll take a 747, thanks, given my choice," Doreen shouted
back. "Anyway, Ian says he's finished."

   "Lead along then," Alston said. "Ms. Rapczewicz, you have the
deck. Keep her so."

   They went down the companionway behind the radio shack
and forward of the emergency wheel. The narrow passageway on
the port side was dimmer than it had been when the electric
lights were on; even the smell was different, a very slight
fishy-nutty tang from the whale oil, and the officers' galley to
their right gave off an occasional whiff of woodsmoke. They
turned left, past the usual captain's quarters and back to the flag
cabin at the rear.

   Ian was sitting at the table, gnawing on a crackerlike piece of
ship's biscuit. "Is it still blowing hard up there?" he asked
innocently. The two rooms of the flag cabin were warm and dry
and fairly well lit, but the swooping lurch was still the
same—possibly even worse without the distraction of the heaving
sea to watch.

   "Excuse me while I strangle my husband, Captain," Doreen
said, dripping.

   Alston went into the head and returned with towels. Doreen
and Swindapa wrapped them around their hair; the captain
rubbed her inch-long wiry cap a few times and sat. I wish I could
just ignore discomfort like that, Doreen thought.

  "Well, Mr. Arnstein?" Alston said.

    "I think I've come up with a diplomatic strategy that might
work," he said cautiously. "What we discussed, but refined a bit.
It turns on a nice little piece of linguistic reconstruction Doreen
and Martha and I did back on the island."

  Alston's eyes narrowed. "Oh?"

    "It turns out the Iraiina and their relatives, what Swindapa
calls the Sun People, weren't the first Indo-Europeans to settle in
Britain," he said. "They were probably just the first ones to make
it stick—would have without us, that is."

   He pulled several sheets of paper out of a folder. "Damn, but
this almost makes me wish I'd been a comparative philologist; as
it is, I'm a rank amateur out of my depth. But look at these
words in Fiernan."

   He drew a list: bronze, wheel, axle, plow, yoke. Each had a
phonetic rendering of the Earth Folk equivalent beside it. "Now
look at these Proto-Indo-European equivalents, and the Iraiina
ones."

  "They don't look very similar to me," Alston said dubiously. "I
mean, the Iraiina words do, very similar, but not the Fiernan."

   Doreen took up the explanation: "You've got to strip away the
grammatical features—and that's damned hard in this language,
with this crazy—no offense, Swindapa—prefix-suffix system
they've got. Sometime a long time ago, hundreds of years,
Swindapa's ancestors borrowed the words for these concepts.
From something even closer to the ur-language than Iraiina."

  "Oh," Swindapa said, looking at the list. "Yes. I see what you
mean; that makes sense. Why didn't you ask me, though?"

   Doreen felt her stomach lurch again. Oh, shit. We got too tied
up in our research and assumed that preliterates couldn't have
a historical sense. Preliterates like the Iraiina couldn't, perhaps;
they lived in mythic time, not historical. The Earth Folk were
obsessed with memory and measuring natural cycles, though, as
much as the Mayans had—would have—been.

  Aloud, feebly, she said: "What do you mean?"

   "Well, in your years…" The blue eyes took on a remote look;
her lips and fingers moved in a mnemonic chant. "A thousand
years ago, or a little more."

   "The…" She paused for a moment, and her accent grew
stronger, as it did when she shifted back to thinking in her
native tongue. "The Daggermen, we called them; the Brawlers,
the Mannerless. They came from the east—the Sea-Land
Country. A few at first, trading, and sometimes stealing things,
then more of them. They built their houses in places that weren't
good for farming, at first, and raised animals. They had no
manners, but they had wonderful things—mead, and copper, and
plows, and the very first horses to be seen in the White Isle. They
made pots marked with cords for the mead-drinking, and new
types of bows, ways of herding cattle, and oh, all sorts of things.
There were a lot of fights."

   Doreen put her face in her palms. Ian pummeled his temples
lightly with the heels of his hands. "Bell-Beaker burials," he said.

   "So the Grandmothers sent their daughters to them, to teach
them about Moon Woman, and when they learned, they helped
us to make the greatest of the Building Wisdoms." Swindapa
smiled. "That was eight hundred and fifty-two of your years ago.
And they took the Spear Mark, that our hunters had always had,
and became part of the Earth Folk."

   "Assimilated," Doreen said to Alston. "But not completely. I
think that's partly why the two institutions in Earth Folk society
don't cooperate very well."

  Swindapa shrugged. "The Grandmothers and the Spear
Chosen don't have much to do with each other," she pointed out.
"Moon Woman and… oh, I see what you mean."

   Alston was nodding slowly. "You're right," she said. "Now, let's
figure out how to use it."

   Ian made an eager gesture and pulled out another sheet, this
one with a flow chart on it. "It's a wild coincidence, but there are
some similarities in the Earth Folk setup to recorded
cultures—particularly the Iroquois. They're matrilineal and
matrilocal, for starters, and there's a Sacred Truce celebrated by
a gathering at…"

   It was a fair spring day when the men of Walkerburg made
ready to ride out to war; tender leaves fluttered, and wildflowers
starred cornfields and meadows. William Walker pushed the
modified Garand into the saddle scabbard and tied the thong
that held it in place as he looked around in pride. Not bad,
considering that he'd only been here since last September. The
seed kernel of an empire. Archaeologists may dig it up
someday. The place where the dynasty that ruled the world for
a thousand years was born. If things went well, he'd move
somewhere more convenient in a couple of years—the site of
London, probably—but this was the first ground that had been
his.

   Alice Hong rode back up the line and handed Walker a piece
of birch bark covered with notes. He looked at it and made yet
another mental note that he'd have to get going on making paper
someday; there was plenty of linen to make the pulp. Hong rode
with reasonable confidence, able to stay on at least and keep her
horse going in pretty much the direction she intended, which
was all you could say for most of the people here. A Browning
automatic was belted to her waist.

   "Good," he said, returning the list, a last-minute check of the
stores.

   Unlike most of the others in the war host gathering through
the Iraiina lands and Kent and the Thames Valley, his people
weren't going to spend half their time foraging. And they weren't
going to lose ten men to disease for every one killed in battle,
either.

    He looked down the column. Sixty riders, all in chain
hauberks and conical helmets with bar nasals except for four
Americans wearing Nantucket-made plate suits like his. They'd
all ride to battle but fight on foot; it took longer than seven
months to train a real cavalryman, or to train the horse for that
matter. It still gave them unprecedented mobility and striking
power by local standards; every man had a steel sword, a spear,
and a crossbow slung over his back, although most of them kept
their native axes or copies Martins had made at their
saddlebows as well. More followed on foot, also all in iron, half of
them with spears and half with crossbows. None of his original
crew from the Yare among them, except for four as officers; the
Americans were more useful at base, mostly… and not really up
to local standards in hand-to-hand fighting, the majority of
them. They and the ten native warriors he was leaving would be
more than enough to keep the slaves in order.

   For the rest there were a dozen servants; Hong and her native
assistants; the train of big wagons and a smaller two-wheeled
one he'd modeled on the farrier carts Civil War cavalry units had
taken along, with a portable sheet-iron forge and small anvil for
Marlins's best pupil. Plus spare horses, and some cattle driven
along for fresh meat.

    And the piece de resistance, two long bronze tubes on wheeled
mounts with limbers behind four-horse teams. A nasty surprise,
if he needed to pull a rabbit out of his hat.

   Good little army, he thought. They actually had some notion
of discipline and coordinated action by now. Combined with the
natives' built-in ferocity and hardihood, it was a formidable
combination.

    He turned and led Bastard back toward the steps of the Big
House. Ekhnonpa stood there, with the smile that brought luck.
She was showing now, five months along; Keruwthena was even
bigger, standing back with the lower-status staff. Odd. He'd
never had any particular or urgent desire for fatherhood—it was
far too much trouble and expense and time taken from his own
ambitions up in the twentieth. And here he was going to be a
daddy twice over… probably more than that, actually, but those
were the two he was sure of. It did change your perspective a
little; there was a certain satisfaction to thinking of your genes
heading down the ages, enjoying the wealth and power you were
piling up after you were gone.

   He turned and looked out over the gathered folk of his
settlement, raising his voice to carry. "While I am gone, my
handfast man Bill Cuddy stands as steward in my place," he said.

  He looked down at the machinist. "Don't fuck up, Bill," he
continued in English.

  "De nada, boss," Cuddy said. "No problem."

  "And my second wife, Ekhnonpa has charge of household
matters," he went on in Iraiina.

   She looked at him with worried adoration. "Return to us
victorious and hale, husband," she said.

  "You are to take care of yourself," he said, patting her
stomach. "Remember what Alice told you about straining, and
diet."

  "Yes, lord," she said, looking past his shoulder at Hong.

   A mixture of awe, terror, and fascinated loathing was in the
glance. He hadn't let the doctor play any of her little games with
the rahax's daughter, but they were no secret.

   Alice is very useful. Good wizard/bad witch was as workable
as good cop/bad cop.

  He swung into the saddle and stood in the stirrups. "0Once
more we ride out to victory!" he called.

  Local tradition guided most of the speech that followed—
uncomfortably florid to American ears.

   Wood and metal boomed on the sheet-steel facing of the
shields as they hammered their weapons on them and screamed
out Walker's name. Success accounted for a lot of that; he'd led
many raids, all of them profitable and most of them easy work.

   "Yo!" he said at last, waving his hand forward. His
standard-bearer raised the banner, topped by a wolf skull and
aurochs horns. Cloth went streaming out in the chilly breeze—a
black wolf's head on a red ground.

  Women made their last farewells; McAndrews tore himself
away from his heavily pregnant blonde. Can these mixed
marriages work? Walker thought with a flicker of sardonic
humor. At least it seemed to have settled the man down; he
doted on the wench. A romantic temperament.

   Hooves thudded on turf, axles squealed, oxen bellowed as they
leaned into the traces.

   "I suppose I'm a romantic too, in a way, in a way," Walker
whispered to himself. After a while, he began to sing—you didn't
get music here unless you made it yourself. The locals just
couldn't deal with rock tunes, but the Americans took it up with
him.
  And it's so right, he thought. I am—

  "—Bad to the bone!

  "Bbbbbbaad!…"

           CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  April - June, Year 2 A.E.

   "Hard to remember," Swindapa said, looking over the rail, her
hair lifting around her face under the baseball cap.

   Eagle and her consorts were beating southeast, down the Irish
Sea after rounding Anglesey and the bulge of Wales. No land was
visible now, save perhaps a distant smudge to port.

   "Remember what, 'dapa?" Alston said, brought out of her own
thoughts.

   If they spoke quietly by the fantail nobody was likely to
overhear. The ship lay over at eight degrees, making ten knots
with all sail set, its motion a slow smooth rocking-horse plunge.
The waist was crowded, ex-cadets and militia volunteers
straining for their first sight of the wild lands.

   "The sea. Hard to remember that I've only sailed on it this last
year. There is so much of it—and always something waiting
beyond the edge of it. Always something new to see."

   Alston smiled herself. That does sound good. And there was a
whole world out there, once Walker and his bloodthirsty
ambitions were seen to. Moas, she thought, If we get as far as
New Zealand. Great flocks of them, fourteen feet high. Or the
elephant bird of Madagascar, extinct a thousand years in the
twentieth, the creature that had given rise to Sinbad's legend of
the roc. Dodos, too. I'd like to see what San Francisco Bay looks
like when it's not all mucked up. Babylon. I'd really like to see
Babylon. Or Africa, despite what she'd told McAndrews.
Egypt—with an escort big enough to impress the locals—and
maybe the Serengeti…
   "Someday, 'dapa," she said. Then she turned and took a few
paces forward, looking into the radio shack. "Ms. Rapczewicz,
signal to the Tubman; it's about time, I think."

   The signal lantern clacked, and the schooner dipped her
ensign in acknowledgment. Faint and far, the orders echoed
across the water and the Tubman's prow turned west of south,
heading to round Penzance on the point of Cornwall. Alston
clasped her hands behind her back and looked east.

  "It's begun," she said. Chess with lives for pieces, and not
knowing how your opponent moves until too late. And she could
not afford to lose. So I'll win.

  "Arucuttag of the Sea!" Miskelefol of Tartessos blurted.

   Isketerol ducked out and leveled his binoculars. The shape
that loomed out of the morning mist was not quite like anything
he'd seen before. A little like the Yare, except that there were no
square topsails on the forward of the two masts. A gilded eagle
flung back its wings below the long bowsprit, seeming to take to
the air with every bound across the whitecaps that patterned the
estuary. The hull cut the water like a knife slicing flesh, its prow
throwing a sunlit burst of spray twenty feet in the air as she
rounded and tacked in toward shore. The Tartessian's eyes went
wide behind the lenses as he saw how close she cut to the wind
that blew from the north, and did a quick estimate of her speed.

   "Quiet!" he roared into the chaos of the camp. His thumb
turned the focusing screw and his lips moved as he read the
name on the bow, just forward of the diagonal red slash. "
Harriet Tubman. Odd. Sounds like an Amurrukan name." It was
unlucky to give a ship a person's name, splitting a soul in two.

   He cased the binoculars and looked around. "Quiet, I said. Get
to your posts!"

   With his cousin's help he put down the disorder. Yare was
anchored close offshore, and Sea Wolf drawn up on the beach;
he'd built her to be capable of that, since it was so useful. How
deep does that… schooner, that's what they're called… draw? he
thought. Eagle People ships tended to have deep keels, but that
was a lot smaller than the Eagle herself, if bigger than the Yare.
Hmm. Eight feet or so, I'd say, perhaps a little less. That meant
they could get to within three hundred yards of the shore
without touching mud, with the tide full like this.

  "I told you we should have sailed for home last week!" his
cousin was saying.

  "Quiet, and get your thrower ready," Isketerol said. His cousin
departed at a run.

   How many aboard her? He studied the Nantucket schooner
carefully. Hard to say, but somewhere between twenty and forty,
unless they had the belowdecks packed with men. "You!" he
pointed to a crewman. "Run over to Daurthunnicar's huts and
tell him we've enemy in sight. Diketeran!" One of his trustier
men, steersman on the Foam Hunter in the old days. "Get your
horse, ride to Walkerburg, and report. You, fetch my war
harness. Now!"

   Men scattered to their tasks as they recovered their wits. The
Tartessian camp was a half-circle backing onto the sea behind
an earth rampart and palisade. At each end where the rampart
met the water was a platform of timber and earth; on it
crouched a shape of beams and cords. The trebuchets creaked as
the Tartessians heaved around the crank handles of the geared
windlasses. Isketerol finished snapping the clasps on his
Nantucket-made suit of armor, checked his pistol, and walked
over to the left-hand stone thrower. The crew had had plenty of
time to practice over the winter, especially after Sea Wolf was
finished. More hands were dragging obstacles of logs studded
with iron blades down to the water's edge, in case of a landing.

   "Ready, Skipper," one of the trebuchet crew said to him, teeth
flashing in his olive face.

   Isketerol made his own estimate of time and distance. Moving
target… "Up one on the stayrope," he said. "And… now."

  The two-hundred-pound boulder whipped into the air as the
machine crashed and creaked and thumped. It turned into a
tumbling dot, seemed to pause at the height of its curve and then
arching down. He used his binoculars again; a hundred yards
behind the enemy ship the rock dropped nearly into its wake.
Isketerol hid his surprise at how close they'd come. Just then his
cousin's emplacement fired; they were loaded with a large barrel
of tallow and pine pitch and turpentine. The barrel—even then
Isketerol found himself thinking how sheerly useful barrels were,
and wondering why nobody in this age had thought of
them—landed farther from the schooner than his rock had. The
deliberately weakened hoops burst as it hit the waves, scattering
the contents. The patch of burning oil floating on the water was
probably more intimidating than the splash of the boulder,
though, and so was the trail of smoke through the air. Nobody on
a wooden ship took fire lightly unless the Jester had eaten their
wits.

   Evidently the Eagle People commander wasn't mad. The
schooner whipped around, heeling far over, and let the booms of
her fore-and-aft sails swing far out, wheeling and running south
along the shore away from the Tartessian camp. The spearmen,
archers, and crossbowmen grouped behind the spiked log
barricade cheered and waved derisively.

  "Good shooting," Isketerol said to his cousin.

   "Now shall we head home?" Miskelefol said. "We can sail with
the evening tide—"

   "And meet the Eagle out on the open sea?" Isketerol said,
grinning.

  "Maybe she's not here."

  "But probably she is. I don't think I'm ready to go to the
Hungry One just yet, son of my uncle."

  "Shall we wait for Eagle here, then?"

   "Why not? She can't come close to shore. This camp is strong
and we can call warriors from inland if they try to send men
ashore. If we run here the Amurrukan may well come for us in
Tartessos. Walker is right; we have to teach them that it's too
costly to interfere with us, or we'll never be safe anywhere near
salt water. Besides, I gave him my oath."

   The other Tartessian sighed. "As you will."

   "Indeed," Isketerol said.

   His glance went inland. What was it Walker was fond of
saying? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

   Swindapa leaped over the side of the longboat as its keel
grated on the shingle and ran up the beach with the quiet water
cold on her shins. Then she went to her knees and took a double
handful of the dirt there, grass and weeds and soil tight between
her fingers. Her chest felt tight too, and tears prickled at her eyes
as the nettles did at her skin. They didn't drop free to land on her
native earth, though. If she'd felt this way a year ago, they would
have. But the Eagle People wept seldom; they kept their thoughts
and their joys and their sorrows more within themselves. Part of
them had entered into her, she knew, in the time she had spent
among them, and in Marian's arms. She would not weep, nor
dance her joy along the seashore. Instead she let the bittersweet
happiness fill her, like something growing behind her
breastbone. A rose, with beauty and with thorns.

   I am not what I was, she thought, standing and looking
around. That was both bad and good; more good, perhaps. The
Earth Folk would have to become other than they had been, or
they would cease to be at all. Moon Woman has turned time
itself to give us this.

   The land lay green and bright about her, beneath a hazed-blue
sky empty of all but a few high clouds and swirls of wings as
birds took flight from the reeds to the southwest. There was a
hamlet not far away, several compounds, one quite large. She'd
been here before; it was an important place, boats from the
Summer Isle—Ireland—came here, and people from inland to
trade. Long ago the blue-stones for the Great Wisdom had been
brought this way, from far in the Dark Mountain Land—what the
Eagle People called Wales. The soil was firm right down to the
water's edge here, not like the tidal flats and marsh to either
side; and not far north two rivers met, the long Hillwater and the
shorter Glimmerfish. There were beaten tracks through this
pasture, and between the square fields of the settlement. Young
wheat and barley cast bluish-green waves over those; farther
away were cattle with red-and-white hides and long horns, and
youngsters watching over them. Between the grainfields came
others hurrying toward the strangers—light blinked off metal,
spearheads, and the bronze rivets of shields.

  Marian came up beside her. "Hostile?" she said.

   Swindapa shook her head, touching the other's arm briefly for
reassurance. "No, making sure of us," she said.

   They were talking the Fiernan Bohulugi tongue; Marian
worked doggedly at it even though the sounds were hard for one
of the Eagle People.

   "There must be war in the land, or they wouldn't turn out in
arms without sending a scout first." She looked around at the
Eagle, lying at her anchors well out on the broad waters. The
Douglass spread her white wings beyond it, cruising inland
cautiously. "Or, well, the ship may have frightened them."

   Crewfolk were forming up around them as they spoke; the
Earth Folk party slowed and then halted as they saw so many
spears. A cadet trotted up with a green branch, and the Eagle's
emissaries moved forward, waving it in sign of peace. Light
twinkled as the Fiernan spoke among themselves, waving arms
and spears; then some of them trotted back to the huts. The sun
beat down, warm enough to make you sweat under armor. More
of her people came from the settlement, hesitated, then came
closer once more, and halted in speaking distance. One of them
bore a branch as well, and several young men carried a wicker
chair padded with blankets, holding an aged woman in a long
patterned cloak. The rest were men in their prime, some with the
Spear Mark on bare chests, others in tunics and leggings; one
with gray in his beard wore a sword and a belt with gold studs,
and a necklace of bear teeth and gold and amber. They flinched
back at the strangeness when Marian took off her helmet and
showed her black face and alien features, then visibly nerved
themselves to come on again. Sweat shone on their faces. Their
eyes flickered over the foreigners, and then out over the water to
the great ship and its smaller consort.
   "Greetings, if you come in peace," the sword-bearing man
said in the charioteers' tongue.

   "A fortunate star rule our meeting," Swindapa replied in
Fiernan. "Moon Woman send it so."

  A gasp went up from the little group, and an excited babbling.

  "You speak like one of ours!"

  "Like one of those turn-up-the-nose snobs from the downland
country," someone muttered toward the back of the group.

  "I am Swindapa of the Star Blood line of Kurlelo," she said.

   The old woman exclaimed, then hobbled close. Swindapa bent
her ear to the other's whisper, and whispered in her turn,
exchanging certain words.

   "She is as she says," the Grandmother said to the men,
probably her son and grandsons. "The Kurlelo line who dwell by
the Great Wisdom."

   "Don't you know my face, Pelanatorn?" Swindapa said. Not
really fair, she'd been four years younger the last time they'd met,
and that had been brief. Who paid attention to one youngster
among many?

   As far as the Grandmother was concerned the Words settled
matters, since Swindapa was obviously not a captive. No line was
wiser or older than the Kurlelo. Her son looked dubiously at the
twoscore or so foreigners already ashore.

   "Who are these?" he said to her. "Yes, I am Pelanatorn son of
Kaddapal," he added, remembering his manners, and naming
his mother to her in the same sentence.

   "These are the Eagle People, from across the waters beyond
the Summer Isle," she said. "They come friends. Last little
planting season they rescued me from the Sun People—the
Iraiina, the new tribe, caught me, they held me captive—and I
have been a Moon Year in their land, guesting. This is their…
Spear Chosen," she said, touching Marian on the shoulder.
"Marian Alston. My lover," she added proudly.

  More gasps and murmurs; she might as well have claimed to
have spent the year among the stars and brought back Moon
Woman's heart.

   "They come friends?" the man said, looking at her with
respect shaded with awe, taking half a step back. "That is well.
We have need of friends."

   "There is war?" she asked anxiously.

   "When hasn't there been, since the Sun People came?" the
man said bitterly. "But since last year, it's worse in all ways. They
have a sorcerer to lead them now, a child of Barrow Woman's
own suckling. Instead of fighting each other mostly, they beat us
like threshers nailing out the grain. And their Tartessian friends
raid along the coast in their ships."

   Swindapa's eyes went wide in fear as she turned to translate.

   The captain of the Eagle looked down at the picture again. It
had been taken with a telephoto lens, from the deck of a moving
ship, but it was clear enough.

   "Will you look at that," she said, throwing it down on the
folding table with a tightly controlled gesture of disgust.

   It was growing dark, the sun a fading crimson in the west, but
the sides of the tent were still rolled up and the lantern hanging
from its peak made the inside bright enough. The officers
gathered round and leaned over the glossy photograph,
exclaiming. Alston scowled out through the open side of the tent
as they pointed out the details.

   With three hundred and fifty pair of hands working, the
American camp was going up rapidly. She'd had it laid out in the
shape of a pentagon; there had been a few smiles at that, but it
wasn't really a joke. The five-sided figure gave you enfilading fire
on the flanks from all the points where the lines met. A few
locals—Do not think of them as "natives, " she reminded herself
firmly—stood by and watched, gaping. They'd picked a stretch of
firm meadow not far from the high-tide mark, and the ditch
went in quickly, dirt flying up. It was six feet deep and twelve
across, with the earth piled on the inner side to make the
rampart; inside went laneways flanked by ditches, with tents in
neat rows and a clear central space for a parade ground.
Working parties carefully cut squares of turf and laid the grass
on the soil of the embankment; without cover the whole thing
might well erode into a mudpie at the first hint of rain.

   Time for refinements later, Alston thought, hands clasped
behind her back. A palisade, of course, when they had time to
cut the necessary timber; huts for stores… and a central platform
for Leaton's pride, the centerpiece of the ROATS program.

  "That's the Yare, isn't it?" Ian Arnstein said, peering at the
photograph. "And that other one doesn't look at all like the
Tartessian ships we saw this time last year."

   The Coast Guard officers looked at him, silent. "Well, I'm not
an expert," he said defensively.

   "It's a bloody brigantine," Alston said. "Look at the thing, the
way it's rigged. Oh, she'll have a lot of leeway sailing close and
she's too beamy to be really fast, but that bastard Isketerol didn't
waste his time on Nantucket, if he could build that from
scratch."

   She saw his incomprehension. "Remember what I said, about
sailing across the Atlantic in the ships they had?"

   He nodded. She stabbed a finger into the picture and went on:
"With this, he could sail across the Pacific. He probably broke up
a couple of those ships we saw last spring to make it. You could
circumnavigate the world in this—Magellan did it, in somethin'
less seaworthy—or carry a hundred men to Nantucket."

   "This brig isn't just a copy, either," she continued. "It's a
clever adaptation of our ideas for local use. That shallow draft…"

  "You can beach it without damage," Sandy Rapczewicz—
she'd kept her maiden name in her second marriage too— said
mournfully. "That'd be handy, for inshore work."

   "Or an invasion," Alston said, nodding. "Well, taking Isketerol
with us—I made a bad mistake, there. We've got to put a stop to
this now, if we can."

  She looked up at Lieutenant Commander Hendriksson. The
young Minnesotan drew herself a little more erect. "What did
you make the water there, Ms. Hendriksson?"

   "I had twelve feet, but that was quarter of a mile offshore,"
she said. "From the color and the look of the bottom on the lead
line, it shelves quickly."

   Alston picked up the photograph again and measured with
her eye. A man was standing upright beside the beached hull of
the Tartessian brig to give her some idea of the size. Somewhere
between seventy-five and a hundred tons displacement, she
decided. Slightly less than half the size of her two schooners, but
much stubbier and tubbier than the Tubman or Douglass.
Which meant…

  "This thing may draw less than four feet," she said.

   "And the brig's got oar ports," Hendriksson pointed out. "That
could be useful, inshore, given a calm or a wind right in her
teeth."

   "Well, at least we know the range of those rock-throwers,"
Alston said. "What did you make of their camp?"

  "Ma'am, that wall and ditch they've got… I wouldn't like to try
and storm it."

  "No, you're right on that," Alston said. "If I know Walker, he's
had the Tartessians put underwater obstacles in, too."

   She spread her fingers on the table and looked around at the
others. "I hope I don't have to say keep a careful lookout," she
said dryly.

  There were somber nods. Together the Yare and this brig
could carry almost as many fighters as the expeditionary force
numbered, at least for a short coasting voyage.

  "From what Ms. Swindapa's people were able to tell us,
Walker has a strong position in the east—either he's in charge, or
nearly so, with a real army under his control. Plus we're not
nearly as completely in command of the sea as we'd hoped. We
obviously need better intelligence, and we need help. This is the
back crick of the beyond, by local standards. We'll have to send a
party inland."

   She smiled, a shark's expression. "And perhaps we'll give him
a surprise or two, busy little bee that he's been."

  "Ma'am? Lieutenant Commander Ortiz is back."

  She ducked her head out of the tent for a second; the
commander of the Frederick Douglass was coming up from the
improvised dock. She returned his salute.

   "I've got 'em," Ortiz said. "And ma'am, you're welcome to
them."

    Alston nodded, hands clasped behind her back, watching the
livestock coming ashore from the schooner. All of it safely dead,
at least; there was slaughter stock for sale a few hours' run up
the channel. They'd put in a small wharf, enough for the ships'
boats, and wheelbarrows and handcarts and strong young backs
began trundling the carcasses up into the camp. Several dozen
locals were among them, led by Pelanatorn's sons and nephews,
daughters and nieces.

  "No problems, Mr. Ortiz?"

   "Well, the locals are damned light-fingered, ma'am," he said.
"Anything metal particularly. And, ah, some of them are so
friendly that it creates problems. Otherwise no; once we
convinced them we weren't pirates, they were eager to trade."

  "Good. Have a look at this, Mr. Ortiz—Ms. Hendriksson hasn't
been idle."
   He exclaimed over the picture of the Yare and the Tartessian
brig. Alston stood deep in thought, rising and sinking slowly on
the balls of her feet with her hands clasped behind her.

    "Which brings me to a matter of standing orders," she said.
"Now, you've all read the briefing sheet. These people here don't
have anything like what we'd call a government. If we want to get
them on our side—and we need them— we have to win them over
small group by small group. Ms. Swindapa and the Arnsteins
and I are working on the, ah, the Grandmothers—fairly soon we'll
be taking a party off to consult with more of them inland.
However, they've also got a series of local councils and another
great council covering most of the southwestern part of England
that meets near Stonehenge. It's a more of a religious
institution, in charge of what they call the Sacred Truce, but it
has a lot of influence. It's composed of men, but they're selected
by the Grandmothers. On top of all this, there are the Spear
Chosen, who are the closest thing the Fiernan have to military
leaders. They're not elected or appointed at all; anyone who gets
a good reputation as a leader and who throws a lot of parties
gradually becomes accepted as one—sort of a potlatch thing.
Land here is owned by lineages; trading or owning a lot of cows
is the only way you can become really rich. Evidently among
themselves the Fiernan Bohulugi don't really fight, they skirmish
in a sort of ritual way with livestock as the prize."

  "Jesus, what a marvel of organization," someone muttered.
"Real Prussian stuff."

   Alston frowned; Swindapa was scowling at the slight on her
people. "So if we want to get the Spear Chosen on our side, the
way is to lavish hospitality and plenty of gifts. Hence this series
of barbecues. Clear?"

   "Yes, ma'am," Ortiz said. "Ah, the locals, they evidently have a
rather, ah, wild idea of a party."

   Alston smiled thinly. "Well, that brings me to the next order
of business. As you know, I've always insisted on enforcing the
nonfraternization and public-displays-of-affection orders strictly
on board ship. I intend to continue to do so."
   Nods went around the table. Shipboard was enough of a
pressure cooker as it was.

   "However, onshore, that's a different matter. We have nearly
four hundred healthy young people here, and they aren't going to
live like Cistercians indefinitely. Never give an order you know
will be ignored." Emphatic nods; doing that made the next one
more likely to be ignored as well.

   "I'd like to emphasize, however, ladies, gentlemen, and have
you pass on to your commands, that any misuse of rank, in fact
any fraternization up or down the chain of command, is going to
be goddam painful for all involved. In short, I'll come down on it
like a ton of wet cement, and so will each and every one of y'all.
Ditto anythin' else that interferes with discipline or combat
readiness. Every officer will take a personal interest in seein' that
any such individual will suffer. Clear? Off-duty, however, we'll
apply the consentin'-adults rule."

   She relaxed slightly. "However, that brings up another
problem. Our expeditionary force is about two-thirds male, as
you know. This can cause… awkwardness."

   More nods; in fact, it had created fairly serious problems back
on Nantucket. The cadets were numerous enough in the island's
small young-adult population to throw the balance between the
genders off, and there had been fights and tension over it,

   "I anticipate that our position vis-a-vis the locals will, ah,
lessen the problem."

   "God, yes, ma'am," Ortiz said. "Like I said—very, very friendly
around here."

   And we'll probably end up with a fair number of war brides,
Alston reflected. Nothing wrong with that; I could scarcely
complain even if there was, all things considered.

   She smiled secretly to herself behind an impassive face.
Swindapa had also said, privately and emphatically, that if they
were going to do this monogamy thing they could at least do, it
frequently. Not much danger of Lesbian Bed Death there.
  "Now, as soon as a fair number of locals come in," she went
on, "we'll have to start outfittin' and trainin' them."

  A crewman saluted. "Ma'am. The locals are at the gate."

   "Very well," she said, returning the courtesy. "Ladies,
gentlemen, we have guests." Alston drew on her gloves; dress
uniform again, even if it meant nothing to the locals. Strange.
Last time here it was for Daurthunnicar. And hadn't that been
a total fuckup… she looked at the Fiernan girl. Well, not quite.
Not at all, personally speakin'.

  She ducked out of the tent, returning the sentries' salutes, and
toward the gate; it was local courtesy to greet guests at the door.

  "So Walker is a king already, as he wished," Swindapa said,
while they walked toward the inland apex of the pentagonal fort.

  "I'm sorry, 'dapa," Alston said quietly. "If we could have come
again last year…"

  "That wasn't the way the stars moved," Swindapa replied in a
murmur. "It's Walker's fault, not yours."

  "Besides"—Swindapa shrugged—"if things weren't bad, they
might not listen to you. They might not anyway."

   They'd certainly talked a good fight here, full of anger against
the Sun People, but Alston didn't know how much of that was
telling her what she wanted to hear. From what the Arnsteins
and Martha had told her, most primitive people took hospitality
very seriously—if you traveled at all, it had to be as a guest. No
Ho Jo's here.

    The locals were back—not the old woman in the intricately
checked and embroidered cloak, but the middle-aged man and
his sons, and this time some girls as well, dressed in string skirts
and short-sleeved knitted shirts and colorful shawls. They looked
around in awe, and there was well-hidden fear in the older man's
eyes. Pelanatorn, she remembered. The younger Fiernans called
greetings to the sentries on the walls, and seemed surprised and
a little hurt at being ignored; even more surprised at the way the
gate guard braced to attention and saluted as Alston came up.

  "Better explain, 'dapa," she said.

   "I have—I told them that it's prayer, to please the Eagle People
spirits of war."

   Alston's mouth quirked. That's actually not far from the
truth. Most of the Fiernans were holding baskets, two had a
gutted and dressed pig on a carrying pole thrust between its legs,
and several children drove a pair of cattle and four sheep.

   "And thank them for the gifts," she said, after calling for a
detail to come and take them.

  "Oh, no—that would be impolite, thanking them for being
hospitable, as if they might not be," Swindapa said. "Just smile
and nod."

   Well, thank God for interpreters, Alston thought. They slowed
things down so you could avoid putting your foot into it too
badly. I feel like Captain goddam Cook.

  "Stop there, outlander. Who are you?"

  Two warriors stepped out from behind the smooth, mottled
bark of a huge beech. Isketerol reined in his horse. I'm a man
with a sore arse, he said to himself; he'd learned how to ride
over the winter, but doing twenty miles in a day still told. His
horse seemed to agree, lowering its head and blowing out its lips.

   "Isketerol of Tartessos, oath-brother of Wehaxpothis
Hwalkarz of the Iraiina," he said. "These are my handfast men,"
he added, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the others and
the train of packhorses.

   "Oath-brother to the sorcerer?" The bearded faces behind the
spearheads—steel spearheads, he noticed—went pale. "Pass."

   The weapons dipped in salute. The Tartessians booted their
horses up out of the vale and onto the hillsides. The war camp of
the Iraiina and their allies lay sprawled about them, a vast
shapeless mass in clumps and clusters across the downs. There
was no problem in finding his blood-brother. The Walkerburg
men had pitched their tents in neat rows, northward and
upstream of the others; some of them were still digging the
latrines their lord insisted on, grumbling as shovelfuls of chalky
subsoil flew. Sentries paced the outlines of the camp, full-armed;
most of the rest lay around their cooking fires, throwing dice or
talking, working on their gear or already rolled in their blankets
and asleep. Servants carried grain and cut grass to the picketed
horses, or tended the trek oxen near the wagons that made a wall
around half the camp. Wind blew the scents of wildwood from
the great forest to the north, overcoming the stench of massed
humanity and animals. Meat roasted over the flames, and flat
griddle cakes of wheat flour cooked.

   Sentries cried him hail as he reined in, and men dashed over
to care for his horse and his followers'. All the Walkerburg folk
knew the friend of their chief, who guested with him so often.
The Tartessian took the hot mead one offered and drank it
gratefully, walking over to the wehaxpothis's pavilion. It wasn't a
cold day, by the standards of spring in the White Isle, but the
wind could still flog your blood to racing.

   "Good to see you!" Walker said, in English. "Did you get the
saltpeter? And the barrels from base?"

    The Amurrukan were like that, abrupt; he meant no insult by
it. "That I did," he said. "And I left the saltpeter at Walkerburg.
What do you need it for? All it's good for is cooling the blood, as
far as I know." Isketerol sat in one of the folding canvas chairs
before Walker's tent.

    Walker laughed and rubbed his hands. "My friend," he said,
"I'll let you in on a little secret that may brighten your day." He
shouted for food and drink.

   "I could use that," Isketerol said frankly, as they ate; the usual
Iraiina fare, roast and boiled meat and bread and a few
vegetables, but better done than usual. I would pay gold for a
handful of olives, or good tunny cooked with goat cheese, and a
decent salad. "From what my scouts say I don't dare put to sea,"
he went on. "Not with Eagle and those two new ships about. So
far, we know nothing of what Alston and the Eagle are doing,
except stirring mischief."

   A man screamed, not far away. "Odd that you should mention
that," Walker said. "We took an enemy messenger, and he's been
telling us some interesting things. Come take a look."

    They rose and walked around the back of the pavilion. A series
of leather panels between poles with a canvas awning overhead
made an enclosure there, with two full-armed guards standing
stock-still outside the entrance; Isketerol smelled fear on them,
and saw it in the sweat that rolled down their faces under the
helmet brims despite the cool evening air. Over the entrance
hung a mask, the frontal bones of a skull mounted on a
hemisphere of polished gold with a light burning within. The
flames nickered through, red through the eye sockets and teeth,
translucent through the thin-worked bone. Inside a hearth and
living area were set up to one side, and a place of work to the
other. Ingenious cabinets of folding wood and drawers stood
open on the close-cropped sward; between them was a jointed
table, now adjusted to a sloping surface. The man fastened to it
screamed again as the figure in the green gown bent over him
and made an adjustment to some metal tool that burrowed in
under his rib cage.

   Hong straightened up and pulled down her cloth face-mask.
"Hi, Will. Hello, Isketerol, glad you could make it," she said. Then
to one of the early-adolescent girls standing behind her, also in
green surgical garb, "The number-four extensor, Missora."

   The girl giggled and stood on tiptoe to whisper something in
Hong's ear. The Amurrukan woman laughed and swatted her
assistant lightly on the bottom. "Not yet. Later, when he needs to
be cheered up." Her sister giggled too, crouching over the little
brazier where still other instruments were at white heat.

  An Iraiina stood by the man's head; his fear was undisguised.
"Ask him again, Velrarix," Hong said.

   The tribesman bent over the prisoner and shouted in his ear;
the language was the purling glug-glug-glug sound of the Earth
Folk tongue. Isketerol caught most of it, although the translator
had a vile accent.

   The figure strapped to the table tried to shake his head
against the clamps that held it. Drops of blood went spattering
on the waxed leather covering of the wood, and slow fat tears ran
down his cheeks. The glass jar dripping saline solution down a
tube into one arm rattled in its holder.

  "No?" Hong said. "Well, maybe we'll advance the schedule
again. Scalpel and clamps, little one."

   She selected an instrument from the offered tray and flashed a
smile over at the two men. "This is fascinating, you know. Sort of
like an operation in reverse. The human body is absolutely
amazing, the way it clings to life. And the way you can shape it
like wood or marble. I'm developing a true art form here."

   To her assistants: "Kylefra, leave those cauteries and crank his
head up a little. Velrarix, explain to him what happens next.
After this he'll be a lot calmer. No bothersome hormones."

   The other girl in the green surgical gown came and turned a
screw that pushed up the victim's head. When the sharp metal
tickled the base of his scrotum he began to scream again, and
then shout words—numbers, places.

  "Got all that?" Hong asked the interpreter, when the Fiernan
began to repeat himself for the second time. He nodded,
pasty-faced. "Kylefra. We don't need to hear him speak
anymore."

   The men walked back to Walker's tent. Demons spare us,
Isketerol thought. Will is a braver man than I, to bed with that
I'd rather put the Crone Herself on my staff. He picked up a
glass bottle and poured a little of the lightning spirit into a cup,
knocking it back with a jerk of his wrist. He'd seen men put to
the question before, beaten or burned or flogged, but this… The
meal sat heavy on his stomach; he drank again. "You learned
what you needed?" he said.

   Walker poured himself more mead. "Better watch that hard
liquor," he warned. "It creeps up on you if you're not used to it…
Yeah, I think I've got what we need. And I've got a plan for a
coordinated action. Here's what we'll do."

   Hong's laughter rang over the sounds from behind the tent.
Isketerol shuddered. "I hope you can rule her," he said.

   Walker chuckled. "She has sort of blossomed into her
opportunities, hasn't she? Don't worry, I can keep her in line…
and if she goes completely 'round the bend, there's always—" He
made a cutting gesture across his throat. "Now, let's get down to
business. Here's what sulfur and saltpeter and charcoal are good
for…"

  In the screened-off area, Hong was singing as she worked:

  "I've bought myself a new knife

  You'd be surprised at what my knife can do;

  Guns can jam; bombs are complex;

  Sometimes grenades fail to explode.

  My knife is simple—this is true;

  Part of it I hold… the other part of it's for you.

  A girl needs a knife… oh, a girl needs a knife…

  And I've got mine!"

  "How do you like my country?" Swindapa said proudly.

  "Beautiful," Alston said sincerely, touching a heel to her horse.

   The long column of Americans stretched back along the
trackway. They'd finally made their way out of the ancient
oakwoods and up into rolling downs under a mild spring sun. It
shone bright on polished steel, and on the gilt eagles that tipped
their flagstaffs and the spread-winged version on every
breastplate and shield. A drum beat, trip-trip-trip, and a
hundred and fifty feet hit the earth as one; spearheads swayed
rhythmically.
  Not much like it was in the twentieth, she thought.

   Not even the shape of the land. In the England she'd visited,
these uplands were mostly bare moorland. In the White Isle they
were still covered with a coating of loess, light fertile soil that
had yet to erode away. Small square fields were laid out, green
with wheat, barley, rye, oats, a few turning yellow with mustard,
others shaggy with nettles or yarrow. Most of the fields were
already calf-high, and they rippled and fluttered in the brisk
south wind that streamed out the flags. Copses of wood covered
hilltops or wound across the dales along the sides of streams,
birch and beech and oak, leaves fresh and clear-cut, almost
glistening in their newness. Flowers starred the grainfields and
meadows, thick along the sides of the rutted dirt trace.
Hawthorn hedges bloomed, filling the air with a faint elusive
scent of wild rose when the wind dropped.

  "Absolutely beautiful," she said, reining aside.

   The horse snorted and obeyed, and Swindapa's followed it.
Their Nantucketer expert had broken in enough for a few
officers, mounted messengers, and scouts in the weeks since
their landfall. They turned and cantered down the line; she
exchanged salutes with the officers, fingers going tick against the
brim of her helmet.

   The ordered alignment of the Americans made a stark
contrast to the great shambling clot of Fiernans who walked
along with them, their own numbers again or more; adventurous
youths and maidens, a few Spear Chosen with their followers,
traders with a shrewd eye to the main chance and trains of
donkeys loaded with packs, or livestock driven along to sell to the
wealthy strangers. More ran to gawk from the settlements all
around. Most of those were farmers, men in sleeveless tunics of
coarse wool, women in string skirts, sometimes bare above the
waist, sometimes with a shirt and poncho; children were often
naked or nearly so, accompanied by lean whip-tailed dogs. The
dwellings they abandoned were mostly huts, round or
rectangular, often grouped together and sometimes surrounded
by ditch or bank or thorn hedge; the livestock enclosures always
were. The thatch was cut and sculpted in attractive abstract
patterns, and the wattle walls whitewashed and painted over in
geometric shapes; the effect was as much African as anything
else, reminding her a little of pictures she'd seen of Ndebele
villages. Somehow it looked right for the landscape.

  "But…" Swindapa said, an edge of trouble in her voice.

  "But?"

   "It looks… it looks smaller than I remembered it, somehow,"
she said, swiveling her head. "And sort of… messy."

   You can't go home again, Marian didn't say. That was one
lesson everybody had to learn… or maybe not, here. Here things
stayed the same, usually. They didn't build time-share condos
and golf courses over the place you were born and the
churchyard where your great-grandfather was buried.

   A changed note ran through the burble of Fiernan Bohulugi
conversation. Someone was coming running down the trail from
the east, stumbling as he ran. A minute, and she could see there
was blood on his face, and running down the arm he held cradled
in the other; He stopped in shock at seeing the obvious
foreigners, but some of the locals who were tagging along with
the American column caught him as he started to buckle.

   On the other hand, raiding arsonists can also rearrange the
landscape.

  "Lieutenant Trudeau," she said. "Deploy from column of
march into line, if you please. Nyugen, scouts out forward."

   She and Swindapa spurred forward to the group around the
wounded man. He stared from one to the other, wide-eyed. A
torrent of Fiernan consonants followed, and Swindapa answered;
both were too fast and complex for Alston to follow.

  Swindapa's eyes went wide as well. "A big Sun People raiding
party—many of them, a great host, more than a hundred men.
Not far up the track—he ran for perhaps an hour. But there
shouldn't be, not this far west and north!"
  "Walker has changed things. Get some details, numbers,
weapons."

   That took some time. Alston used it to remove her helmet, get
out her binoculars, and stand in the stirrups, scanning slowly
from left to right ahead. There. A faint trace of smoke. Burning
things seemed to be a Sun People fixation. Time to stop ambling
along being a tourist. And very faintly came the huuuu-huuuu
sound of an aurochs-horn war trumpet.

   She looked back. The wagons were drawing up in a circle,
frontier-style… or Boer style, which was irony, if you thought
about it. The three-hundred-odd Americans were fanning out,
running to take up position in a line perpendicular to the rutted,
muddy track on which they had been marching, with their left
wing resting on the wagons and their right… well, hanging in air
. And the locals…

   Alston spurred her horse out in front of them. Most of the
farmers were running for their huts—probably to get their spears
and bows. The noncombatants were streaking for the tall timber
or local equivalent, or herding their stock and children toward
the big palisaded roundhouses. And the Spear Mark men who'd
come along were starting to run toward the smoke-smudge, all
seventy or eighty of them.

   "Well, you can't fault their guts," she said; the Fiernan might
not be long on organization, but they had a terrier courage
which made it more understandable how they'd held out against
the invader tribes so long. She trotted out ahead of them.

  "Stop!" she shouted. "Stop now!" That much Fiernan she
could manage.

   The leading Spear Chosen was a rangy young man with
freckles and a fiery head of copper-colored locks trained in
dozens of braids. "Why?" he said. "We come to fight the Sun
People; they burn our houses, attack our kindred."

   "Swindapa, tell him we'll show him how the Eagle People
fight. Remind him that they usually lose fighting the charioteers,
but tactfully."
   Swindapa broke into voluble, arm-waving speech, a little odd
to see from horseback; eventually they started listening to her.
Alston put her helmet back on, swinging down the new hinged
cheekpieces and clipping them together under her chin. The
padding was rough against her skin, and the world took on a
hard outlined shape from beneath the low brim. About half of
the Fiernans stopped, sullen and restless, shifting their feet; the
steel-headed spears the Americans had handed out danced in
their hands. The others pelted by, heading for the invaders.
Light-armed riders fanned out ahead of her, crossbows bouncing
at their backs. They came back minutes later, galloping.

   "Ma'am, they've taken a village about two and a half miles up
thataway. Seven chariots, say a couple of hundred men. They've
stopped to loot."

  "Any sign of out-time equipment, weapons, armor?"

  "Hard to say for sure, ma'am. Most of it was straight Bronze
Age stuff, right out of the briefings."

   "Carry on." Well, they won't stay stopped to loot when that
gang of wild men that went haring off down the lane hits them,
she thought. They'd beat the Fiernans like a drum; for starters,
they outnumbered them eight to one. And then they'll chase
them, all the way back here.

   Other fires were puffing smoke into the sky, from hilltops
around about or from the big round enclosures. "Alarms?" she
said to Swindapa.

  "Yes, to show that the Sacred Truce is invoked. Many Spear
Chosen and their bands will come soon now. Well, in a while."

   Alston nodded; about what she'd expected. From what she'd
been able to gather, none of them had ever been able to take
land back from the invaders, though. And there was only one end
to a game where the rules went what's mine is mine, what's
yours is negotiable.

   Swindapa rode back to the injured man, now being treated by
an American medic. She swung down out of the saddle, going to
one knee beside him, then led her horse over to Alston again.

   "Marian, it's odd. From what that man tells, those were
Zarthani, from one of the eastern tribes of the Sun People, east of
the Great Forest. Not Iraiina at all."

  "Walker has made some friends," Alston nodded. She studied
her position, then rode over to the Spear Chosen.

   "Maltonr, put all your men with bows and slings in there, on
the beds of the wagons." The canvas tilts had been rolled up until
they offered only overhead protection. The Americans were
linking the vehicles together with chains and spiked steel bars.
"The spears, to the right of my line."

  Maltonr scratched his red head. "Why?" he said. "First the
shooting, then the fight hand-to-hand."

   "They'll be more effective shooting all together. Trust me. And
when the Sun People hit us, your archers can fight from behind
the wagons, like a fort."

   The Fiernan shrugged; the Eagle People were strange, but
he'd go along. Lord have mercy if I don't win this fight, Alston
thought, licking dry lips and fighting down an urge to drink from
her water bottle. Stopping to pee in this armor was just too
damned difficult, particularly for a woman.

   Instead she rode down the American line. "No different from
the cannibals, boys and girls," she said. More than half had been
with her among the Olmecs, and the rest had been drilling with
them for months, five days a week. "Hold steady, listen for the
word, then shoot straight and hit hard. Remember, we fight as a
unit. Anyone who gets carried away will have his or her ice
cream ration reduced." Laughter, a little nervous, and some
grins.

   She called the unit commanders together, sketched plans,
shifted a squad over to provide backup in the wagon circle,
checked that the handset radios were all working, then dismissed
them to their troops. Very faint, the sound of combat came from
over the rise ahead. Lieutenants and petty officers checked
equipment, and quietly blistered ears over loose straps or clasps
unbuckled for marching and not done up again. Then the
Americans stood at parade rest, spears vertical with the butts
resting on the ground and both hands clasped on them at chest
height, or loaded crossbows carried at the port. No time for
fancy tricks with caltrops this time, and no heavy equipment
along. A straight stand-up fight. Good ground, at least. It looked
like the enemy thought they were just going to stomp straight
over everything in their way.

  Christ, I run away to sea and here I am, in the goddam
Army.

   A thousand yards, mostly level, straight ahead; steeper ground
to the left and right. Open, except for a few hurdle fences, not
even much planted ground. Then a dip down to the creek, and
the enemy would have to forge uphill from the water to reach
this plateau.

   A spatter of Fiernans came past first, the fastest ones, many
wounded, many weaponless. The others murmured, milled
about, then slowly settled down again. One of her scouts came
trotting up over the rise, galloped across the open ground, then
drew rein and saluted.

    "Here they come, ma'am, just like you said they would," he
said, grinning from a painfully young face. "Three hundred and
fifteen by my count, seven chariots, nothing fancy, just heading
straight for us as fast as they can."

  "Very good."

   She glanced aside. Swindapa was watching the rise to the
east, her face gone milk-pale under the light tan, hands
quivering-tight on the reins. Christ, I forgot. These are the same
sort of people who captured her. She brought her horse a little
closer and rested a hand on the girl's armored shoulder.

  "Dapa, you're not alone now. We're going to kick their butts
and send them off howling for their dead." She paused. "Don't let
me down."
  A start, and a flush, then a tight smile. "I won't, Marian."

  "By the Dagadevos, who are you?" Dekarchar son of
Wirronax, high chief of the Keyaltwar, asked. "You look like a
Tartessian to me."

   Lieutenant Commander Victor Ortiz, born in Havana, raised
in Florida, commissioned by the United States, and currently
serving in the Coast Guard of the Republic of Nantucket, smiled
and spread his hands. They'd assigned him to slip around to the
east coast of the island and raise some trouble in the enemy rear
because he'd picked up the language faster than the other ship
commanders.

   "Some of my ancestors came from there," he said. "I'm of
the… Eagle People."

   The chieftain scowled and looked through the door at the end
of his hall at the schooner rocking at its moorings in a channel
that wound through the marshes. "You mean you're a friend of
that turd of a wizard Hwalkarz and his Iraiina shit-eaters and
Tartessian arse-lickers?" he rumbled menacingly.

   The Keyaltwar chief had reddish-gold hair and the pale
complexion that went with it, liberally starred with light brown
freckles, and rather protuberant blue eyes in a narrow, beaky
face. The way he clenched his hand on the handle of his ax was
probably unconscious, rather than a direct threat to his guest. So
was the red flush of rage that crept up his cheeks under beard
and scars.

  "Are all the children of Sky Father friends of the Iraiina?"
Ortiz asked rhetorically, following the script the captain and the
Arnsteins had mapped out for him.

  "Well, no," the chief grumbled, sinking back in the chair.

  "So not all the Eagle People are friends of Hwalkarz. He is an
outcast among us; oathbreaker, murderer by stealth, thief. A
wolfs head, we call such a man—that's why he uses it as his
banner."
   The Americans' visit had coincided with spring cleaning;
women and slaves were raking out the old reeds from the dirt
floor, and a winter's accumulated bones and garbage with them,
and replacing them with fresh. The fires were out—rekindling
them would be one of the year's most important ceremonies and
the hall was rather fusty and disarranged.

  Ortiz sank down on the stool before the chiefs seat and smiled,
moving one hand in a spreading gesture. "You haven't bent the
knee to Daurthunnicar yet, I take it."

   "Never! Never!"

    The chief did rise this time, waving his ax in the air. The
other warriors hanging about his hall did likewise, stamping and
screaming. Some of them dyed their hair with lime, which made
it stand out in spikes. They looked like enraged daisies as they
waved their weapons and shrieked; the noise grew so loud that
other folk from the hamlet put their heads in to see what was
going on, and they shouted too. Eventually even the animals got
into it, loud enough to startle clouds of ducks and geese and
storks out of the tidal marshes that stretched for mile after mile
along the north bank of the Thames.

  Ortiz waited out the spontaneous demonstration. So this is
what they fake at political conventions, he thought.

   "Our folk came here as conquerors!" the chief brayed.

   Probably chased here by stronger tribes on the mainland,
Ortiz thought, remembering his briefings. Like the Iraiina.
Possibly by the Iraiina, generations ago. There seemed to be a
billiard-ball effect to these migrations, with the end ball getting
bumped out over the Channel. The original impetus might have
started as far away as the Ukraine or even Central Asia.

   "We live as free men! We sent Daurthunnicar's dogs back with
a boot under their tails, and he and his wizard haven't done a
thing but puff and stamp!"

  Actually you're just too difficult to get to; too much swamp
and bog forest in the way, Ortiz thought.
   "Why don't you raid them, for such an insult?" he said. "Why
don't the Keyaltwar show the wizard and his dog what they think
of him?"

   "Well, now," Dekachar said, sitting back. He signaled for more
beer to be brought. "Well, now, we Keyaltwar are men of honor,
but we aren't fools. Daurthunnicar has too many allies now,
curse him, and the wizard has given his men fine
weapons—armor of this iron stuff. And they're far away, many
days' journey."

   "Farther than that," Ortiz said. "The Iraiina and their allies
are moving west, against the Earth Folk. Their steadings lie
stripped of fighting men. Stuffed with cattle, bronze, gold,
women, cloth, the new iron tools and weapons."

  "What?" Dekarchar leaned forward eagerly. "You know this?"

  "I know it. My… high chief fights them even now, in the west."

   Dekarchar counted on his fingers, called for counsel from his
advisers. "No, no," he said regretfully. "It would take too long for
a raiding party to strike at the Iraiina lands and return—they'd
catch us in the open with numbers we couldn't withstand. They
move too fast these days, curse them, all this riding." He shivered
slightly. "And the wizard… no, no."

   "That's if you go by land," Ortiz said helpfully. "My ship could
carry three, four hundred warriors for a short journey… say over
to the south bank of the river, west of here. From there it's less
than a day's march to the northernmost Iraiina steadings, or to
tribes allied to them. Or we could carry you and your warriors to
a point on the south coast near Daurthunnicar's own
ruathaurikaz. Stuffed with the plunder of a dozen tribes…"

   Dekarchar began to breathe heavily. "Tell me more of this," he
said.

   Here they come, black as hell and thick as grass, Marian
Alston thought, with a slight ironic twist of her lips. That had
been the cry of the British sentry at the battle of Rorke's Drift,
during the Zulu War. The Sun People war band coming over the
rise wasn't as numerous or as disciplined, but they had a good
deal of the same ferocious impetus and will to combat. These
buckra mean business. They fought to kill, and defined winning
as being the only one left standing.

   "So do I," she muttered to herself. She also remembered
something else from the Zulu War, and urged her horse over to
the Fiernans.

  "Maltonr," she said, "have your men turn around, walk forty
paces, and sit down with their backs to the enemy."

  "What?" he said.

   "Swindapa, interpret for me. Explain it's a magic. When I tell
them to turn around and fight, they'll each have the strength of
two." Because they won't charge in when their feelings overflow
. "And lay their spears flat, to gain strength from the earth."

   The Fiernan girl broke into enthusiastic speech. Interest
dawned on the faces looking up at them, replacing sullen
bewilderment. They turned and squatted on their heels, holding
spear and shield before them, a buzz of excited conversation
rising over their heads.

   "Oh, and tell them if anyone looks behind him before they're
told, it'll spoil the magic."

   Maltonr gave her a doubtful look, then smiled ruefully and sat
with his followers and the spear-armed peasants. "How are you
going to do that?" Swindapa asked, as they cantered back to
their position. "Make each of them strong as two, that is."

  Alston shrugged. " 'Dapa, a properly timed flank attack does
double the effect," she said. "Now let's get down to business."

   They halted by the standard-bearers. She looked down her
own line as the chariot people milled on the lip of the rise a
thousand yards to the east. The circle of wagons, with the
Fiernan archers and slingers inside. More were trickling in every
minute, to be shoved into the ring of the wagon-fort or called
there by their friends. Others straggled over to join Maltonr and
his crouching spearmen. Call it forty or so in the wagons, as
many again or a little more with Maltonr, double that soon. Then
her own force, a central block of fifty spears three deep and a
double line of seventy-five crossbows on either side. She kicked
her horse out again, a hundred yards in front, and looked over
the line from the enemy's perspective. Good. The Fiernans
weren't at all conspicuous; Maltonr's bunch were nearly invisible,
what with a slight dip in the ground.

  This is going to be ugly, she thought, returning to her station.

   The Zarthani had paused for a moment to work out what was
waiting for them; then they spread out in a line, blowing their
ox-horn trumpets and snouting. Even at this distance she could
see bronze and gold and bright felt trappings gleaming on the
horses, the heron-feather plumes nodding as they snorted and
tossed their heads.

   "Nyugen, Trudeau," she said. The two senior lieutenants stood
at her stirrup. "Remember, infantry usually breaks before a
chariot charge here. When ours doesn't, the chariots may wheel
off and try and shoot us up while their infantry close with us, or
they may just ram in close as they can. In either case,
concentrate fire on the chariots—go for the teams—and then
switch to those following. Any questions?"

  Both shook their heads. "Good luck."

   The tribesmen had shaken themselves out, seven clumps
behind the chariots of their chieftains. They started toward her
at a walk, yelps and hoots and the odd high shriek coming as
they worked themselves up. Wooden axles squealed like tortured
pigs, wheels rumbled, hooves pounded the short dense turf, bare
human feet slapped dirt. The chariots loomed larger and larger.
Now she could see the men in them, the near-naked youths
driving, and the leather-armored aristocrats standing behind,
although one… she focused the binoculars. Chain mail, by God.
Walker had been a busy little bee; and wouldn't one of these suits
be a potent bribe here. The riders stood easily in the jouncing
unsprung carts with their feet braced wide and knees bent,
javelins and bows in their hands. Must train them from toddlers
to do that, she thought. The horses trotted as the drivers slapped
their backs with the reins, and behind them the hairy kilted
warriors began to lope, keeping up effortlessly.

  Four hundred yards. "Now," she said.

   "Spears… down!" the officers barked. The Nantucket troops
gave a single deep shout and raised their polearms high. Drums
beat, and the cool English sunlight sparkled on the edges and
points as the nine-foot shafts swung down into line.

  "Prepare to receive cavalry!"

   The first rank knelt, propping their oval shields on their
shoulders and the ground ahead of them, slanting their spears
out. The next two lines stood in staggered formation, points
reaching out to make a bristling three-layered forest of
knife-sharp heads poised to stab.

  "Prepare to fire." The front rank of crossbows knelt. Three
hundred and fifty yards. A bugle call. "Fire!"

   Alston swung down off her horse, and Swindapa followed. The
standard-bearers and their guards and the twelve
sword-and-buckler troops formed up behind them. The
easterners were at a full run now, horses galloping, pulling the
chariots ahead of the footmen. The long shadows of the spears
seemed to reach out toward them.

   WHUNNNG. Seventy-five crossbow bolts nickered across the
space between the two forces, moving in long shallow arcs
blurred by their speed. Men fell; the short heavy arrows would
punch right through the light hide-and-wicker shields, through
the arm holding the shield and then the breastbone, and crunch
into the spine. A chariot went over in a tumbling, splintering
whirl as both its horses were struck by several bolts apiece and
collapsed in mid-stride.

   WHUNNNG. The second volley brought another two chariots
down, and a dozen men; the range was closing fast. A slight
ripple through the spearpoints as the troops braced themselves.
WHUNNNG. WHUNNNG. The ratcheting click of the
mechanisms as the crossbows' cocking levers were pumped. A
chariot veering and going off on a wild tangent, a bolt standing
in the rump of the off-lead horse and the animal plunging and
bucking with its eyes bulged out, squealing piteously.
WHUNNNG. More men down, but not as many as with the
Olmecs—the easterners had a better formation than that,
irregular but strung out so that men could support each other
without crowding. So had their ancestors conquered, spreading
out from the steppes of inner Asia, west to the Atlantic and east
to the borderlands of China.

   WHUNNNG. More chariots out of action, the man in chain
mail dismounting and running forward, screaming hatred at
those who'd wounded his precious horses. The remaining
war-cars edged away from the sleeting death of the crossbows,
heading toward the massed spearpoints at the bottom of the
American formation. Then still farther to the right, as the
Fiernan archers and slingers in the circled wagons opened up,
ragged but enthusiastic. Arrows whistled, and slingstones
cracked on shields, whunked into flesh. WHUNNNG. Very close
now, a hundred yards, and the bowmen among the Zarthani
were shooting as they ran. Shafts arched up into the sky,
slammed down. Bronze and flint sparked and bent and shattered
on steel armor and pattered on metal-faced shields. Here and
there one slipped through to find vulnerable flesh, and a few
Americans were dragged backward by the stretcher-bearers;
their comrades closed the ranks.

   Half the Zarthani were left on their feet, many of them
wounded. One chariot came on, its horses streaming blood and
foam, bolting, but bolting in the direction their driver wanted
them to go. Alston could see snarling grins, shouting faces, axes
whirling overhead in blurring circles.

   "Bows down!" barked the officers. Trumpets reinforced the
orders. A last spatter of bolts, and the crossbows went over their
users' shoulders. The round bucklers slung across their backs
went forward, and hands slapped down to the hilts at their right
hips. "Draw!"

   Long months of practice made the motion a single flicker of
light as the leaf-shaped stabbing swords came free of their
wood-and-leather sheaths.

   "Give 'em the Ginsu!" someone shouted. Alston's teeth showed
in a not-quite-smile. Ian Arnstein had wanted the short sword
called a gladius, after the Roman blades it was modeled on.
Public opinion had proved stronger. Ginsu it was.

   Alston reached over her shoulder and drew her own sword,
head moving back and forth as she kept the whole action in sight
through the intervening ranks. A long rattle of thrown spears
came from the Zarthani, in the moment before impact. An
American not far ahead dropped on his back kicking; a spear
had bounced off the rim of his shield and up into the
unprotected underside of his jaw. The driver of the last chariot
was leaning back, hauling on the reins to try to skim along the
line while his warrior shot arrows. He almost made the quick
turn, but the horses were too far gone in hysteria to respond as
they'd been trained. Their too-tight curve put their legs into the
thicket of spear-points, and they collapsed. The chariot
cartwheeled sideways; its crew were thrown out straight onto the
waiting points, but the wood-and-wickerwork vehicle followed
right behind.

  "Oh, shit," Alston said.

   It was the worst possible thing that could have happened; the
line of spears disintegrated just where it formed a junction with
the right-wing crossbows as the chariot's flying body bowled into
them. You couldn't have gotten any horses ever foaled to do that
voluntarily, or most men, but the accident had sent a kamikaze
into her formation.

  " 'Dapa, tell Maltonr to face about and bring his spearmen,
now. The rest of you, follow me!"

  She ran for the spot where the war-car had crashed into the
American line just as the howling clansmen leaped to follow the
chariot into the gap it had made.

           CHAPTER NINETEEN
  June, Year 2 A.E.
   Bill Cuddy listened to the panting messenger. His Iraiina was
pretty good now, more than enough for this.

   "Keyaltwar for certain," the messenger gasped. "Hundreds of
them, maybe others of the northeast tribes—burning, killing,
looting. They came from the coast."

  Somebody had to have given them a lift. Not hard to
do-—there was plenty of deserted beach along the south shore.
"The Guard got smart," he muttered to himself, looking around.

   Everyone was looking at him. He thought of what the boss
would say if he came back and found Walkerburg burned… and
without Walker, there was no place at all for him in this world
now.

  Okay, he thought. Let's see what we can do. "How's the
rahax's place holding out?"

  "The stockade holds, but they ravage among the holdings
outside. A strong band is coming this way—they must know
where you are."

   "We'll deal with them first, then," he said. "All right, get the
ergastula filled. The rest of you, get your weapons and fall in."

   There were twenty free men left here, half and half Iraiina and
Americans. The slaves had learned their lesson, though, the ones
left alive after the past year; they turned and shuffled toward the
low-set building at the sound of the settlement bell rung three
times and then three times again. Nervous hands shoved and
prodded them down into the odorous darkness.

  The women were running out of their houses, or from the
workshops. "Fuck this," Cuddy muttered, then shouted: "All of
you, back to your houses!"

   Ekhnonpa appeared beside him. "I will deal with them, and
see that a meal is prepared for the warriors, and the first aid
equipment"—that was in English—"is made ready."

   "Thank you, lady," he said in Iraiina. In his mother tongue:
"Charlie, John, Sam, c'mon. We've got to get the Mule ready."

   They slung their shotguns and dragged open the doors of the
carpenter's shed where the catapult rested. The men he'd named
ran to hitch the four-horse team. That reminded him.

   "Shaurshix, Llankwir, you get your horses and scout down the
track to Daurthunnicar's place." He pulled out a key and
unlocked the door of a new storehouse, a small stoutly timbered
one standing some distance off by itself. Inside were shelves with
rows of small ten-pound kegs. He grabbed one under each arm
and ran toward the Mule with them. "Get over to the smithy and
get me some scrap iron. And I want some bigger barrels, about
twice this size— doesn't matter what's in them as long as it's
dry—dump it and bring them. Fast!"

   Swindapa ran to deliver the message to her waiting
countrymen, her feet jolting on the hard sheep-cropped grass.
The forty pounds of jointed steel she was wearing did not hinder
her much, not after nearly a year of practice almost every day. It
was the sight of the Zarthani that squeezed at her chest, the
leather kilts and long tomahawks and the yelling snarling faces
so close on her left. Sweat poured down her face and flanks, and
memories opened and bled. When she reached the waiting band
of her people she could scarcely gasp out the command.

   The wheeze was enough. Only conviction that strong magic
was involved had kept them still. They trembled too, and sweat
dripped from them, but it was eagerness. With a single long,
savage scream they leaped up and swarmed past her, the bright
metal of their weapons gleaming in the light of noon.

   She followed, feeling her feet weighed down as if with heavy
stones. The enemy had lapped around the right end of the Eagle
People's line; the ones there were fighting back to back.
Convinced that they each carried the mana of two, the Fiernans
struck into the backs of the Zarthani and pushed them back, and
now the Sun People were squeezed in turn. It all seemed
curiously remote, something happening far away. All she could
remember was the flexing, pounding feeling of fists hitting her,
the world whirling away, herself strengthless as they threw her
down.
    Trotting past bodies writhing or still; Fiernan, Sun People, a
few of the Eagle People as well. No lines now. A figure turning on
her, a young Zarthani warrior snarling past a sparse brown
beard clotted with blood from a light slash along his jaw. He had
a shield painted with a bull's head, the sun between its horns,
and a long one-handed ax with a bronze head that drooped like a
falcon's beak. He nearly ran onto the point of her katana,
bounced back, and came at her again. Her sword came up but
the movement seemed dreamlike. Invisible hands twisted inside
her stomach, shooting pain, and she tasted sour vomitus at the
back of her throat. Parry, parry, wrists crossed on the long
cord-bound hilt; the steel rang under the fast savage blows of the
ax. Her heel caught on a clump of grass, and she staggered. The
tomahawk rang off the curved surface of her breastplate, leaving
a line of bright steel where it scored through the enamel. Again,
again, three times in five seconds the armor saved her life. The
shield slammed into her and she was over backward, down,
hitting with a thump that knocked the wind out of her and drove
the edges of the armor into her skin. The sword flew spinning.

   Everything was still very slow, except the Zarthani warrior. He
alone moved quickly, leaping forward to stamp a bare foot down
and hold her in place while the ax went up for a looping chop at
her neck. The muscles of his chest and arm knotted as the
weapon went up; she could smell him, sweat and greased leather
and smoke.

  Don't let me down.

  No. Her left arm came off the ground and slammed into the
back of the Zarthani's knee. I won't leave you alone.

   The man heaved backward with a yell. She surged half upright
and hammered a gloved right fist up under his kilt. The yell
turned to a high yelp of agony. Swindapa kicked her legs free and
shoulder-rolled, sweeping the katana up from where it lay. The
Zarthani was up too, gray-faced and sweating but still fast. She
lunged forward, and the point jammed through wicker and into
the warrior's arm. He croaked rage and swung the ax. Her hands
pushed up and her wrists crossed, presenting the blade at a
precise forty-five-degree angle, the point near her own shoulder
blade. Tough ashwood, the shaft of the ax slid down the metal
and the force of the blow turned the Zarthani half around. She
planted her feet and lashed the sword back at him; a frantic leap
and twist still left him with a gash leaking red along the outside
of his right arm, a flap of skin and flesh dangling. She moved in,
iodan no kame, sword up over her head.

   Cut, and a section of the wicker shield spun away. Strike up
from the follow-through, and her blade met the descending arm,
already weakened by the first cut. This time the edge jarred
solidly into meat, and she pivoted from the hips, a snapping
twist that grated the blade into bone and past it. The
follow-through sent a fan of red drops across the grass, and the
sword seemed to fly of itself back into the high-stroke position
for the killing blow.

  "Quarter!" the Zarthani yelled, falling back and putting up a
hand against it in a futile warding gesture. "I yield!"

   For a long moment Swindapa stood, feeling fire torrenting
through her blood.

  "I won't let you down," she whispered, in her lover's tongue.

   The Zarthani swarmed into the breach howling, striking at
Americans still dazed on the ground, or still cumbered by their
long spears. The bang and clatter and crash of hand-to-hand
combat sounded all around them, like a load of scrap metal
dropping on a concrete floor.

   "Follow me," Alston said firmly, as Swindapa dashed off to
bring the Fiernan reserve into action.

  The standard-bearers fell back a little as the command party
moved forward, and the dozen sword-and-shield guards closed
up in a blunt wedge behind her.

  "Rally!" she shouted. "Rally, there!"

   The American line was starting to reform, yielding flexibly
without breaking ranks, rallying about the flag. But too many of
the barbarians were through; a knot of them hacked and
trampled their way to the rear of the formation. Alston led her
band directly at them, forcing them to turn and meet her. At
their head was the chieftain with the chain-mail hauberk; he
carried a small shield painted with paired thunderbolts and a
long steel-shod spear whose head was surrounded by a collar of
white heron feathers. Armored, he still moved lightly, a lithe fast
knot of bone and gristle and tough muscle.

   The spear punched at her. Worry fell away; you couldn't think,
not in a fight. You reacted. He leaped backward frantically as
her katana slammed down in a blurring arc, but the tip still
burst links; without the armor it would have gashed his shoulder
to the bone. Pale eyes went wide… and he'd gotten his first real
look at her face.

  "Night One!" he said in his own tongue.

   Beside her one of his followers struck, and the ax boomed off
an American shield. That trooper stepped in, stabbing and
punching the shield forward. The whole wedge of guards was
pushing forward, stepping into place and sealing the breach in
the line.

   Alston thrust two-handed at the chief's face, shrieking the kia.
He yelled back and caught the blade on the face of his shield,
short-gripping the spear and stabbing underarm. The point
skittered off the lower part of her breastplate and the thigh
guards. He backed again, but she followed closely, keeping
herself too close for his longer weapon to be fully useful. The
brass cap at the base of the katana's hilt punched up at his face,
taking him at the angle of his jaw. Bone broke, but the Zarthani's
shield edge whipped around and struck her across the head and
shoulder. She tasted the iron and salt of blood in her mouth and
went with the stroke, letting her right knee loose. Weight and
momentum pushed her down on one knee, and the long curved
blade took the warrior on the back of the leg, just above the knee.
He fell backward with a scream, one that ended in a gurgle as
the katana came down across his neck.

   Alston spat blood and came to her feet. The fight was ending,
knots and clumps of the Zarthani turning and running lest they
be caught between the Fiernans swinging in from the right and
the Nantucket line. Training pays off, she thought, dragging her
mind back to the chessplayer's state a commander needed. True
for the Romans, true for us.

  "Shall we pursue?" Lieutenant Nyugen said.

  "No," she replied.

  No point; they couldn't possibly chase down unarmored men,
not without cavalry, and those took years to train.

  She shook her head. "Let the locals do it."

   The Fiernans were hallooing off across the stretch of pasture,
spearing running Zarthani in the back or wounded ones on the
ground with the ruthless enthusiasm bred by old, old scores that
they'd never had a chance to pay off before. That reminded her…

   "See to the prisoners." Where the Fiernans had passed, there
simply weren't any—which was a pity but also a load off her
mind; there weren't any facilities for them. "We'll need a few for
interrogation."

   Stretcher-bearers were taking the wounded off to the circle of
wagons where the doctors waited. There were already birds
circling above, ravens and crows, waiting for the living humans
to get out of the way. And…

   Swindapa. For an instant she could be an single human
being, not the head of a hundredfold body. Fear and love roiled
under the shell of control. The Fiernan girl wasn't far away,
cleaning her sword and standing over an enemy prisoner. As
Alston came up she pushed back the cheek-pieces and removed
her helmet, turning a wondering look on the American.

   "I beat him. He gave up," she said. "I beat him, and he gave
up."

   Alston put an arm around her shoulders. The armor made it
like embracing a statue, but she squeezed anyway. "Damn right,"
she said, grinning in relief and fierce pride. "I didn't waste all
that teachin' time."
  "I didn't let you down."

  "Never."

   The Zarthani warrior lay not far away, rough field dressings
on a couple of bad wounds on his right arm. His look of sullen
fear turned to amazement, doubled as Alston bared her head to
the cooling breeze and his suspicious eyes studied her throat.

  "Women?" he blurted, horror in his voice. "I surrendered to
women?"

  Alston and Swindapa looked at each other for a long moment.
Then they began to laugh.

  "Here they come," Ian said.

  "Get down from there," Doreen said nervously, pulling at the
back of his bush jacket as he stood above her on the floor of the
wagon.

  "I really don't like battles," she said.

  Ian nodded, climbing down, his eyes still glued on the
onrushing… barbarian horde. A real, live, very ugly barbarian
horde.

   He didn't like battles either. He remembered the one with the
Olmecs all too vividly—in dreams, at times. Not that he'd seen
much of it, from his post well to the rear, but he'd seen the
aftermath close up… and smelled it. Right now all he could smell
was his own sweat, the fairly powerful odor of the threescore
Fiernans massed in the forward part of the ring of wagons, and
the strong disinfectant the medics were getting ready.

   The doctors and orderlies were pulling their steel-tube folding
tables out of the supply wagons and setting up, lighting a fire to
heat the pressure cookers that would sterilize their implements.
The Arnsteins helped them; it felt rather odd, since the orderlies
were in armor.

  "Periods all jumbled up," Doreen said, holding the platform of
a table while an orderly spun the wing nuts that secured it to the
frame.

  "Bronze Age, medieval, twentieth," Ian agreed.

  "Excuse me, sir," a petty officer said. "Is that loaded?"

  "What loaded?" Ian said.

  "The gun, sir," the noncom said, her voice heavily patient.
"The one you're wearing slung across your back."

  "Oh, that gun," Ian said.

  It was a 12-gauge double-barrel model, cut down. He clicked
open the breech; empty.

  "You should load it, sir. We're not supposed to need 'em here,
but you never know."

    The shells were double-ought buckshot, and had an
unpleasant weight and solidity as he slid them into the breech;
the snick and click as he closed the weapon had an evil finality to
it. He could hear the crossbows firing now, and the shrieks and
screams of the enemy were much closer. Stretcher-bearers came
trotting in with the first of the wounded, an American with an
arrow through the biceps and into the bone. He was cursing, a
steady flat-toned stream of obscenity and scatology, until the
painkiller took effect. As he went limp an orderly cut the shaft of
the arrow off an inch above his skin with a pair of pruning
shears. The surgeon pulled an instrument from a tray, one Ian
recognized—an arrow-extractor spoon, an ancient model that
probably hadn't been used in centuries… or wouldn't be invented
for millennia, depending on how you looked at it.

   He looked away, himself, as the doctor's intent face bent over
the wounded man. As he did there was a long whirring
shoooosshh sound from the east-facing side of the wagon fort,
underscored by a flat twanging. Bows, he realized; he was
hearing massed archery. Here and there a slinger stood in a
circle of open space, flicking his leather thong around his head
with a one… two… throw motion; he'd seen Swindapa do it, in
practice. The lead eggs the Americans had provided their allies
as ammunition blurred out almost too fast to see. From here he
couldn't see the action, but he could still hear the steady
metronomic whunnng sound of the crossbows volleying. Then he
couldn't, and a few seconds later there was a long rasping slither,
a deep shout, and then a frantic multiple clang and thump and
snarling brabble of voices.

  "And the din of onset sounded," he quoted to himself. He was
coming to have a deeper appreciation of Homer than he'd ever
imagined… or wanted.

   The Fiernan archers standing on the wagon beds were still
shooting, but carefully now—picking their targets, holding the
shaft, and then loosing. Occasionally one would stop to yell a
taunt, or pull up his tunic and slap his buttocks at the enemy.

   What do I do now? The answer to that was "nothing"; he
couldn't even shout for news, his Fiernan wasn't up to it and it
wouldn't really be tactful to use the Sun People tongue right at
this moment. Casualties trickled in, not all that many of them;
more than half came from the Fiernans fighting along the
forward edge of the wagons. Amazing how important armor is.
The noise grew greater, and there were high-pitched screams,
piteous and astonishingly loud. Wounded horses. Somehow they
sounded even worse than the human beings; their pain was
without comprehension or recourse.

  "Look out!"

   That was the petty officer who'd reminded him to load the
shotgun. Ian whipped around. A couple of Zarthani were
climbing through the wagons almost directly behind him,
trampling Fiernan corpses.

   The battle suddenly seemed very close indeed. The non-com
and an orderly snatched up their big oval shields, and Doreen
reached for her oak staff. One of the Zarthani made a flying leap
and hit a shield feet-first. The sheet metal boomed under the
impact of the callused heels and the collision sent them both
down. Less burdened, the barbarian was back on his feet first;
his spear slammed down, scoring the enameled eagle on the
shield. The American had no chance of getting back on her feet,
not with the armor on. Instead she curled up under the shield as
she'd been trained, keeping it between her and the barbarian
with the tip of the gladius ready around the edge if his
unprotected legs came too close. Screaming frustration, the
warrior danced around his prone opponent, his spear darting
out like the flickering of a frog's tongue. The fallen noncom's
companion was backing up himself, desperately trying to fend off
two Zarthani who were edging out to take him in the rear, their
axes moving continually in blurring, looping arcs. The edges
glinted, razor-sharp. Even if they couldn't cut through steel, they
could still break bones under mail.

  "Oh, shit," Ian muttered, looking frantically around.

   Nobody else here but the doctors and nurses, so frantically
busy with the wounded that they didn't even look up. The rest of
the stretcher-bearer-cum-orderlies were back along the line,
bringing in more wounded. Nobody else in reach.

   Doreen had come to the same conclusion a split second
earlier. She swallowed, took a firmer grip on the bo, and stepped
forward.

  "Wait!" Ian croaked, hands fumbling on the shotgun.

  Goddammit, this isn't my field!

    The Zarthani didn't seem to consider any of that important.
He caught the movement of Doreen's staff out of the corner of his
eye and struck, turning almost as fast as the outflung head of his
long tomahawk. The axhead sliced through the upper part of the
bo, but the staff saved Doreen's life even as a third of its length
went flipping end over end. Deflected, it was the flat of the ax
rather than its edge that glanced off the side of her head. Blood
welled up from a torn scalp, and she dropped like a puppet with
its strings cut. The barbarian crowed triumph and swung the
bronze ax up again.

   Everything seemed to move very slowly after that. He took two
steps forward. The Zarthani turned toward him, lips peeled back
from his teeth, the ax whirling. For an instant his ringer froze on
the trigger. I'm not a killer. He never knew just what it was that
released him; perhaps it was the crooked cross painted on the
man's shield. The barbarian wasn't a Nazi, but he was near
enough to an original-article Aryan as no matter.

    Thudump. He'd fired at less than four feet distance, with the
butt of the shotgun clamped between elbow and ribs. Recoil spun
him around and wrenched at his arm, nearly tearing the weapon
away. He turned back with desperate speed, bringing it up to his
shoulder. His finger tightened even as he saw the chewed red
ruin the deershot had made of the man's chest. Thudump. A
bruising, hammering blow to his shoulder, and the muzzles
twisted skyward. Momentum had put the barbarian's contorted
face less than a yard from the business end of the shotgun. He
flipped backward, his face splashing away from the shattered
bones of his skull. Bits of it struck, spattering on Ian's face and
chest, a lump of something gelatinous slapping into his open
mouth. He dropped to his knees and vomited in uncontrollable
reflex, shuddering and spitting to clear his mouth.

   Even then he clutched the shotgun to his chest, and tried to
open the breech to reload it. Fortunately, that wasn't necessary.
The retreating American had stopped when the odds against
him dropped to even. The other Zarthani faltered, shocked by the
thunderous sound and the sudden death beside him. While he
goggled the American sheathed his short sword in the man's
belly, ripped it out, and bowled the dying barbarian over with a
slamming blow from his shield. The petty officer levered herself
back erect, and it was the last Zarthani's turn to retreat
helplessly before numbers. He was far more vulnerable, though.
A moment's clatter and boom, and he was down on his knees,
coughing blood and clutching at his chest. A short hard chop put
the edge of a gladius into the back of his neck with a
tooth-grating wet chunk-crack sound, like an ax going into
damp wood.

   "God bless the Ginsu," the American wheezed, freeing his
blade with a jerk. "Slices, dices, julienne-fries."

  Ian wiped his mouth on his sleeve and dropped his weapon,
fumbling at Doreen's head with trembling fingers. "Oh, God, she
can't die," he mumbled, knowing that he lied.

   The wound was bleeding freely, leaving his hands red to the
wrist, but he couldn't find any crack in the bone. That didn't
mean there wasn't internal damage, pressure on the brain. He
peeled back one eyelid and then the other; the left pupil was
larger, and didn't shrink as much.

  "Oh, God."

  He put an arm under her shoulders and another behind her
knees and straightened up, not feeling the strain, and walked
over to the aid station.

   The doctor there had splashes of blood on his gown. "Head
wound?" he said. Ian nodded, afraid to speak. The gloved fingers
probed, washed, and probed again.

  "Not too bad," the medic said. Ian felt an enormous
shuddering sensation of relief, so strong that he had to grip the
edge of the table as his knees loosened.

    "I think," the medico added. "No fracture… concussion…
probably be sick as a dog for a couple of days. This scalp wound
is superficial, doesn't even need a stitch." He looked up to his
assistant. "Bandage it. Next!"

   He followed while Doreen was laid out on a blanket, with
another over her. People bumped into him. At last an orderly
spoke:

  "Sir, you're in the f… goddam way. She's going to be out for
hours. Couldn't you move?"

  He did, getting a drink of water and trying to force his mind
back into action. He found the captain standing with her helmet
under one arm, talking with a knot of her officers and a
worshipful-looking pair of Fiernan Spear Chosen.

   "… five dead, and twenty seriously wounded," someone was
saying.
   "Damn," Alston said sadly. "Well, no worse than I
expected—better, actually." She looked around. "We'll make
camp over there. Ditch and obstacles, if you please; best we get
into the habit. Let's get on with it. As I understand it, we have to
wait for permission to approach the Great Wisdom anyway. Ah,
Ian."

   Her gaze sharpened on him, taking in the spatters and the
blood on his hands; there was some drying across the front of her
breastplate as well, and up her right armguard. "Not hurt, I
hope?"

   "No… Doreen was." He swallowed, "That is, she got a thump
on the head. I had to, that is, use the shotgun. The doctor says
she'll be fine."

   "Glad you're both all right," she said. "Come take a look at
this."

   He forced down an irrational spurt of anger. She's got more
than us to think about. At least the emotion served to break
through the glassy, numb feeling he'd had since the ugly
scrimmage among the wagons. They walked out into the ghastly
remains. The dead were thickly scattered across three hundred
yards of beaten ground, singly and in clumps. The ground was
actually sticky with blood in places; the broad triple-edged heads
of the heavy arrows cut gruesome channels through flesh and
internal organs. Some of the barbarians were still moving,
missed by the Fiernan pursuers. The ground smelled a little like
an old-fashioned butcher's shop where blood and meat had gone
slightly off in the sun, and more like an outdoor toilet.

   Like a Marrakesh souk, only worse, Ian thought, gagging
slightly. "One thing I can tell you," he said. "You probably won't
have any trouble from this particular tribe anytime soon."

  Alston looked at him, eyebrows raised. "They seemed
remarkably stubborn to me," she said. "Zarthani is what this
here bunch're called, by the way."

  Ian shook his head. "From what we saw of the Iraiina and
what Swindapa's said, not many of these tribes are more than
four, five thousand people," he said. "You… we… probably killed
something like every third male of military age in the Zarthani
tribe's entire population in less than an hour, plus a lot of their
leaders. They can't have battles like this very often. Couldn't
afford them."

   "Good point," she said, musing. "I think they were plenty
surprised, all right." A bleak smile: "Remember the night before
the fight with the Indians, when I said what we lacked was
experienced troops? We're quickly makin' that lack good."

   Where the line of battle had stood, the Zarthani dead lay
thicker, two deep where the hedge of spears had met them. The
smell was riper; spearheads and swords had pierced the
abdominal cavity more often than not. Ian tried to avoid looking
at the faces. Alston bent and pulled the light frame of a chariot
upright, tumbling a corpse off it.

   "Notice anythin'?" she said.

   Breathing through his mouth, Ian forced himself to look. After
a moment he blinked.

   "Iron tires!" he said, and bent closer, adjusting his glasses.

   "Heat-shrunk on. Iron coulter pins, too, and those spokes were
turned on a lathe." His gaze went forward to the dead horses.
"Collar harnesses, too, by God. And horseshoes."

   "Walker," Alston said, making the name a quiet curse. "That'll
increase their military potential quite drastically."

    "That's not the half of it, Mar—Captain. That yoke-and-strap
harness these people were using chokes a horse when it pulls.
With a collar, it's four, five times more efficient— perhaps more.
It revolutionized agriculture in the Middle Ages. I suppose he's
given them stirrups, too. Faster transportation. I wonder what
else he's come up with?"

   Working parties of Americans and Fiernans were stripping
the bodies of anything useful and hauling them off, and
cautiously taking the enemy wounded toward the aid station. A
hundred or so were digging a long trench, six feet deep,
spadefuls of the light chalky earth flying up. Ian winced a little
again. Granted, it was necessary sanitation, but…

   Alston pointed out another body. "This for starters."

  He bent, ignoring the flies walking across the fixed, dry eyes.
"Chain mail," he said, a little redundantly, and looked closer.
"Machine-drawn wire, I'd say, but the rest looks like handwork."

   He stood, eyes absent. "I wonder if he—Dr. Hong, actually, I
suppose—has told them about antiseptic childbirth? That'd start
a population explosion all by itself… He's already done enough to
turn this society—this continent— upside down. God alone
knows how it'll evolve now."

   "God may know, but I hope we'll have some say in the
matter," Alston said grimly. "Well, back to work. I don't think
our absent friend is going to be wasting his time. I should look in
on the wounded."

   "Captain. Captain Alston."

  She turned, a slightly different expression on her face.
"Captain… can I ask you a question?"

   "Sure, Ian," she said. There was nobody within overhearing
distance, if they kept their voices down. Nobody alive, anyway.

   "What…" He wet his lips, then nearly retched at the memory
of what had flown into them. "What do you think about killing
people?"

   The thin eyebrows went up, and her face changed—out of the
commander's mode, and into a friend's face for a moment. She
squeezed his arm, then looked around at the aftermath of the
fight. "It's disgusting," she said quietly. "Afterward, that is. At
the time… at the time I'm concentrating too hard to feel much of
anythin', mostly."

    He nodded. "That's… do you find yourself, ah, thinking about
it a lot?"
   "Dreams, flashbacks, that sort of thing?" He nodded. She went
on: "Not so far. Takes people different ways. My daddy, he was in
Korea, it still hit him now and then; he'd take a bottle and go out
and sit in the woods, but I don't think that's my way. Losing my
own people, yes, that bothers me… but if these men wanted to
stay safe, they shouldn't have attacked me. And if that says
somethin' unfavorable about me as a human being, I don't give
much of a damn."

   After a moment she began to murmur. Somewhat to his
astonishment, he realized she was reciting poetry:

  "I am afraid to think about my death,

  When it shall be, and whether in great pain

  I shall rise up and fight the air for breath,

  Or calmly wait the bursting of my brain.

  "I am no coward who could seek in fear

  A folklore solace or sweet Indian tales:

  I know dead men are deaf and cannot hear

  The singing of a thousand nightingales.

  "I know dead men are blind and cannot see

  The friend that shuts in horror their big eyes,

  And they are witless—O, I'd rather be

  A living mouse than dead as a man dies."

   She looked around again. "Say what you like about killin', it
sure beats the alternative."

   Ian remembered Doreen falling under the ax. Two Fiernans
were picking up a dead Zarthani, lifting by the legs and under
the arms, grunting as they swung the limp weight into the grave
trench.
   "I see what you mean," he said slowly. And I actually feel
better. Unsuspected depths, the captain has.

   "Hooooly shit," one of the Americans said. "Quiet," Cuddy
barked.

   He'd seen local war parties often enough, over the past eight
months—never from the receiving end, though. The main
difference with this lot was that there weren't any chariots;
probably too difficult to ship. He could identify the chiefs by
their bronze helmets, grouped around a pole with an aurochs
skull for a standard. The warriors milled about, a hundred or so
of them, working themselves up for a rush, trampling the young
grain. Even at two hundred yards or more he could sense their
nervousness; this was the dwelling place of the sorcerer Hwalkarz
and the Lady of Pain. On the other hand, they also held riches
beyond the dreams of avarice, and what was even more
important to the locals, a challenge and the prospect of glory.

  "Well, come on, there's only eighteen of us," Cuddy yelled.
"What're you waiting for, your mommies to tell you it's okay?"

   It seemed like the sort of thing the boss would say in a
situation like this. Some of the Iraiina at his back laughed, and
one or two of the Americans. One of them spoke, licking his lips:

  "Hey, ain't you going to see them off, Cuddy?"

   He had the butt of the Garand resting on one hip; he'd clicked
a modified twenty-round magazine into it. He'd done a hitch in
the Crotch, been in the Gulf, but they'd trained him on M-16s.
For present purposes he preferred the old battle rifle. These
.30-06 rounds had real authority.

  With luck, he wouldn't have to use them. "Nah," he said.
"Ammo's too expensive. Let's use what we can make."

  He turned to the Mule. The catapult lay ready, throwing arm
back and a barrel resting in it, double-strapped with thick bands
and wire. Within that barrel was another, and between them
were scrap iron, rocks, and pieces of hard pottery. A long cord
hung from the side. Cuddy stepped over to it and pulled out his
lighter.

   "Flick of the Bic," he said, grinning at the weapon's crew.

   They were looking a little nervous as he touched the flame to
the fuse. It sputtered and refused to take for a moment. Then the
red dot and trailing blue smoke raced ahead, hung fire again,
raced ahead.

   "Fire!" he yelled, skipping backward.

    The Mule kicked, its rear wheels lifting clear of the mud as the
throwing bar slammed into the padded top. The barrel traced an
arc across the lowering gray sky, trailing faint smoke. The men
around the spot where the barrel was headed simply opened
their ranks to let it land, then stopped in puzzlement when it
didn't break apart or burst into flame. One stepped forward
curiously and prodded it with a spear. Others gathered around
him, unwilling to be outdone in courage. Cuddy fought back a
giggle as another rocked it with his foot. A stab of fear followed
it. It was a damp day; not exactly rainy, but full of that
particularly English raw misty chill. What if the fuse had gone—

   KRRRAACK!

   A red snap in the heart of the Kayaltwar, and bodies flung
backward like jointed rag dolls, a spurting pillar of gray-black
smoke and pulverized dirt and body parts. His giggle became a
full-throated laugh. Probably fifty or sixty of the eastern
tribesmen lay dead or writhing around the small crater where
ten pounds of gunpowder had gone off. Most of the rest were
running, screaming and throwing away their weapons, running
or hobbling or limping and crawling.

   Their Sky Father showed His wrath by throwing thunderbolts.

   A few were running toward the Walkerburg men. As the boss
liked to say, the locals often made up for their lack of know-how
by sheer balls. Cuddy studied them through the telescopic sight,
murmuring bang… bang … to himself as he tracked from one to
the other. The men with Nantucket-style crossbows were taking
careful aim too, and firing. None of the Kayaltwar got closer than
fifty yards.

   "Well, as the boss says, nobody said to stop working," Cuddy
said, when the whoops and back-slapping had died down a little.
Some of the Iraiina were looking a little shaky; they were Sky
Father's children too. On the other hand, the Big Boss God had
just shown his favor to their lord rather unmistakably. "Let's get
shackles on the survivors," he finished. "And we'll have to scout
down to Daurthunnicar's and get a message to the boss."

   He thought Walker would be rather pleased.

   Marian Alston woke to the sound of a bugle. It was followed
by the familiar bellow: "Reveille, reveille; heave out, trice up,
lash and stow, lash and stow!"

   She blinked, drowsy with sleep and the warmth of Swindapa's
back against her chest. No help for it. It was still dark outside
the tent, turning to the peculiar gray-black of predawn, cool and
raw under scudding cloud. C'mon, woman, set an example for
the crew… the troops. It still felt damned odd, commanding a
force ashore.

   And today's the day. Crucial to the success or failure of her
mission; on a personal note, she was going to meet Swindapa's
kindred. The Fiernan's eyes danced as they exchanged a
good-morning kiss.

   "Water, ma'am."

   A bucket outside the door, waiting when they came back from
the latrines. She and Swindapa knelt beside it, scrubbing in the
cold river water and then brushing their teeth; nudity taboos
were going the way of computers and toilet paper, with a mixed
force living in the field. She looked at her watch, a self-winding
mechanical model, a minor privilege of rank: five in the morning
exactly. The square marching camp stirred into a hive of orderly
activity as she dressed in the working uniform they'd designed
over the winter, tough olive-drab jacket and trousers. They
weren't intolerably smelly yet, but the quilted padding for the
armor was, rank as a ferret and difficult to wash out here.
Swindapa wrinkled her nose, and they switched to the alternate
sets; they were going to have to make a good impression today.
When they left the tent a squad had it struck down within
minutes, well before they reached the head of their mess line.
Breakfast was stale bread, butter and cheese, and slices of cold
roast pork, with purified water or milk brought to a rolling boil
for ten minutes—the doctors had insisted on that, after one look
at the way dairy cattle were kept here. It was also one of the
reasons she'd kept everyone at the base camp where they'd
landed for some days, time for digestions to adapt as much as
they were going to.

   Amazing how you get used to things, she thought, looking at
the others breaking camp in the gradually increasing light. A
year ago … A year ago, TV and takeout Chinese, flush toilets and
daily showers and a spray for the pits, riding in cars, taking a
747 and vacationing in the Rockies. A world where smells were
flushed away, and everything was so damned easy. No homicidal
savages with spears…

   "No, just homicidal savages with Tech-9s," Alston muttered to
herself. One of the few merits of low technology was that it was
difficult to do a drive-by with an ax.

   She dusted crumbs off her gorget and then put on her helmet,
clipping the cheekpieces together under her chin. Working
parties had already packed the coils of barbed wire back on the
wagons; others were shoveling the embankment down into the
ditch. Little was left of the rest of the encampment, and less
every second. Squads were filling their canteens at the water
barrels—easier to purify in bulk—and falling in. Alston looked at
her watch again and nodded in satisfaction. Quite an
improvement since the first night on the march, much less what
they'd done back on the island in practice. Cold raindrops began
to tinkle on her helmet, not a steady drizzle but occasional bursts
from the ragged clouds overhead. She ignored it, as the troops on
foot did. The only people traveling dry would be the wounded
under the canvas tilts on the wagons.

  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 sunset 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 grain-field, 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 wounded, 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.

    "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.

   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, save 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."

   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 Amurru-kan 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.

   At a gesture from the man they set their burdens down on the
single oak plank that served as a counter, four feet broad and
four inches thick. Behind it were racks with the goods that held
his eye: steel knives, spearheads, axes, hatchets, fishhooks and
line, nets with lead sinkers, metal traps. The women were
chattering with each other and pointing as well, at metal pots
and pans, awls, scissors, cloth, cards of needles—Cofflin knew
from reports that they used tailored and sewn clothing of leather
in cold weather. One made a soft exclamation as she picked up a
necklace of burnished copper pennies and let it run through her
hands, then ducked her head obediently as the man spoke
sharply and put it down again. A third looked guilty as she put
aside a mirror. The islander behind the counter helped unload
the sacks; Cofflin whistled silently at the sight of pure-white
winter ermine pelts. Fur coats had become extremely popular
over the cold winter months without oil for central heating.
Besides that, the packs seemed to contain only small quantities
of any one item: bark jars of nuts, crystallized maple sugar,
dozens of varieties of herbs and plants and patches of deer, elk,
moose, and beaver hide.

   "Doesn't seem to be much of anything there, Jack," Cofflin
said.

  Jack Elkins looked up. "Hi, Chief! No, it's samples. Hardcase
here—that's as close as I can get to pronouncing his name—"

  "At least it wasn't King Phillip," Martha muttered.

  "—brings the samples here, we show him what we've got, we
agree on quantities, and he brings the actual stuff to Providence
Base over on the mainland and picks up his merchandise. Easier
that way. I think he's collecting from a lot of his friends and
relatives, sort of an entrepreneur."

   Cofflin blinked, surprised. "Mighty fancy deal, since you can't
talk to him," he said.

   "Oh, he's picked up a little English," Elkins said.

   The Indian looked up from sorting his goods. "Hardcase very
good talk English," he said with an indescribable accent, then
inclined his head in an odd gesture and returned to his work.

   "And you can do a lot by holding up fingers and such."

   "Ayup," Cofflin replied. Well, they may not have a market
economy, but they understand swapping. "Surprised they can
spare the time to find all this stuff."

   Martha nodded. "Lot of underemployment in most
hunter-gatherer economies," she said. "No point in working to
get a surplus, because there's nothing you can do with it. We
provide an outlet, and the trade will build up fast. Provided there
are any Indians left around here to do business with."

   Jared winced. Meanwhile Elkins was demonstrating a metal
gadget about the size of his hand. He crumbled tinder into a
shallow pan. Above that was a steel wheel with a roughened
surface; the islander wound up a spring inside it with a spanner
key. Then he clicked a holder with a piece of flint in it against the
surface of the wheel and pressed a release stud. The wheel spun
against the flint, releasing a shower of sparks into the pan. Elkins
blew on the tinder softly, then tipped it out into a clay dish on
the counter full of wood shavings. They caught and sent a tendril
of smoke upward. The islander waited until flames were
crackling, then smothered them with a lid.

   The Indian's eyes flared interest as he took the fire-starter up,
turning it over and over in his fingers. Cofflin wasn't surprised;
he'd seen Martha's Scouts demonstrate using a bow-type fire
drill. Fifteen minutes to start a fire, if you were lucky—and
everything was bone-dry. Evidently the local Indians hadn't even
gotten that far. They were still using the older method of twirling
a stick between the palms, and that could take hours. This would
be a real improvement."

   Of course, once they're used to it, they'll be dependent on it,
he thought uneasily. The same went for woven cloth and metal
tools, even more so. Martha nodded when he voiced the thought
aloud, and replied:

   "No telling. No telling how that virus epidemic disrupted their
society either… Nothing much we can do, dear."

   One of the Indian women had looked up with a startled
expression at Martha's voice, and she put her hand to her mouth
in a gesture of surprise. Cofflin followed her gaze; his daughter
was in a stroller in front of his wife, sleeping peacefully. The
Indian woman craned her head to see around the hood of the
baby carriage, then came over to look down. She unslung her
own—well, papoose, I suppose—and held it out to Martha,
smiling broadly and speaking in her own fast-rising, slow-falling
language. Martha smiled back at her and picked up young
Marian; the women held their babies side by side, the Indian
fascinated by the pink skin and the cloth diaper with its safety
pin. She exclaimed and laughed when the American
demonstrated that, bringing her own around to nurse as she did
so. The Cofflins' child yawned, waved pudgy hands, and went
back to sleep.

   Well, only fair, Jared thought, smiling. She didn't do much
sleeping last night, and so neither did we.

   The man's voice rose behind them. Then he was at the Indian
woman's side, pulling her away with a swift hard tug on one
braid. She cried out sharply in pain, then stood half-crouched.
He cuffed her across the side of the head, then raised the hand
again.

  "Hold it, dickweed!"

   The guard who'd been sitting unobtrusively on a stool in one
corner pushed between them. There was a bolt locked into the
firing groove of her crossbow, the edges of the three-bladed head
glinting cruel and sharp in the sunlight that came through the
window behind her. The Indian froze. One hand moved very
slightly toward the knife at his belt.

   "Back off, shithead!" the guard barked. "Now. I mean it,
fucker. Back off or your liver does the shish kebab thing."

   Sweat beaded the Indian's forehead; he knew exactly what one
of those crossbows could do. The Nantucketers had
demonstrated, and also refused to sell them at any price. Behind
him the clerk brought another out from under the counter and
laid it on the wood with a small deliberate clatter. The Indian
drew himself up, turned, and walked back to his bundles of
goods, the woman with the papoose following meekly behind
him. The bargaining resumed, slow and stiff.

  Cofflin let out a breath he hadn't been conscious of holding.
Martha put the baby back in the carriage, tucking her in; there
was a small protesting murmur.

  "You have much trouble like that?" Cofflin asked the guard.
Amelia Seckel, his mind prompted him. As far as he knew, she
was working for Seahaven's clerical department. "Ms. Seckel," he
added.

   "Nope, not often, Chief. Just, you know, sometimes with these
guys you have to use, like, visual aids to get things across." She
patted her crossbow. "It's the universal language. That's why Ron
has one of us out here when they're in to trade, me or John or
Fred Carter. Hey, cute kid! You want I should watch her while
you're in there? Bit noisy on the workshop floor for a youngster."

  "Thanks, Ms. Seckel, I'll take you up on that," he said.
"Culture clash," he murmured to his wife as they turned for the
main entrance.

  Martha nodded, her mouth still drawn thin. "Well, that settles
Angelica's notion, I think."

  "What—oh."
   Angelica Brand had been wondering aloud at Council
meetings if they couldn't recruit some temporary harvest labor
on the mainland. It would be extremely convenient; with enough
seed and to spare, they were clearing more land and planting a
lot more this year, and every other project was crying out for
hands as well. Putting everything on hold while they got in the
harvest was an absolute pain in the fundament—and the various
crops meant that harvest stretched through most of the summer
and on into fall.

   On the other hand, the locals didn't look like being the best
imaginable braceros, and anyway, it was a bad precedent to
start relying on foreign labor, he supposed.

  "I see what you mean."

   Martha nodded again, a gesture sharp enough to cut hide.
"Well, there's always the Sir Charles Napier method of cultural
reconciliation," she said. At his raised eyebrow, she went on: "He
was a British governor in India, back— you know what I
mean—in the 1830s. A delegation of Brahmins came to him and
complained that he was oppressing them by forbidding suttee,
widow-burning, that it was part of their religion."

  "What did he tell them?" Cofflin asked, curious.

   "Roughly…" She assumed a British accent; it wasn't too
different from her native academic New England:

   "It is your custom to burn widows. We also have a custom.
When men burn a woman alive, we take those men, tie a rope
around their necks, and hang them. Build your funeral pyre;
beside it my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow
your national custom. And then we will follow ours."

   A few people looked up as Cofflin guffawed. "There's British
understatement for you," he said. "We're not really in a position
to do much crusading, though."

   "No, but we'll do what we can where we can." She swallowed.
"That's one thing I became quite determined about during the…
episode… down south."
  He touched her shoulder, squeezing in reassurance.

  "I didn't think Indians were so hard on women," he said,
changing the subject. "The Iroquois and all that."

   "Depends," Martha said, relaxing. "Lots of variation from
time to time and place to place, tribe to tribe—well, Sicily and
Sweden weren't exactly alike up in the twentieth, were they? Or
New England and south Texas, come to that. Offhand, I'd say it
was agriculture that made the difference here. When these
woodland Indians took—would have taken—up maize and bean
farming, women raised the crops and it probably increased their
general say in things."

   The inside of the machine shop was noisy, also steamy and
hot despite the big doors leading to the water being left open.
There were four large steam engines going now. Dozens of lathes,
grinders, drill presses, and machines more complex whined and
growled and screamed. As the Cofflins entered a yell of triumph
went up from a crowd at the far end of the building. They walked
over, peering at the new machine. It was vaguely shaped like an
elongated upright C on a heavy flat base, about twelve feet tall; a
cylinder was fixed by wrist-thick bolts to the top, and from it
depended a heavy rod with a hammerlike weight at the end. A
steel-slab anvil rested below it; Ron Leaton was just placing an
egg on that. He stepped back, gripped a lever with a theatrical
flourish, and pulled it toward him. The hammer on the end of
the piston rod came down on the egg… and stopped, barely
touching it. The control lever sent it back upward with a hiss
and chunk sound.

   Leaton stepped forward, grinning, and picked up the egg. He
peeled it—hard-boiled, evidently—and ate it with ostentatious
relish. The crowd dispersed back to their tasks, laughing and
back-slapping.

  "Another masterpiece of invention?" Cofflin asked dryly.

   "Naysmith's steam hammer—pneumatic, actually; we're using
compressed air," Leaton said cheerfully, wiping his hands on his
inevitable oily rag and stuffing it back into a pocket of his
overalls. "He did that bit with the egg to show it had precision as
well as a heavy wallop, and I thought, what the hell, it worked for
him—" He shrugged. "It'll be really useful, now that we're making
progress with that cupola furnace. With that and the hammer,
we can start doing some real forging work—crankshafts,
propeller shafts even."

    "Good work," Cofflin said, sincerely impressed. Leaton was a
godsend; without the seed of his little basement shop, the island
as a whole would be a lot farther behind than it was. "What was
it you wanted to discuss with us, Ron?" He had a couple of things
to say himself, but it was easier if Leaton started the
conversation.

   "Well, a couple of things, Jared, Martha," the
proto-industrialist said.

   The three of them walked over to his office, a plank box built
in a corner. They ducked in and lifted tools, samples, plans, and
parts off the board chairs before they sat.

   "First thing is, I need more lubricants and more leather for
drive belts," he said.

   "Talk to the whaling skippers and Delms," Cofflin said
immediately. Delms had taken over the contract on the whale
rendery down by the Easy Street basin, with a tannery as a
sideline. Cofflin approved. Let Delms take the continuous flack
for the way it smelled. There was a motion afoot to have the
whole thing moved farther from town, anyway, and the bonemeal
plant and salting works along with it.

   His mouth quirked up at one corner. "Government's out of
that business, Ron. Thank God."

  "And we're getting too much ash built up here," Leaton said.
The engines were all wood-fired, and the valuable waste was
supposed to go onto the soil immediately.

   "Take that up with Angelica and the farmers," Cofflin replied
promptly. This time he grinned outright. "It's their fertilizer.
Government's out of that, too. Christ, but it's good to be able to
say that!"
  Leaton laughed ruefully. "All right, what good are you these
days?" He shook his head. "The Town still is in charge of unused
buildings, isn't it? We could use double the space."

   Jared and Martha looked at each other. She cleared her
throat. "Ronald, the Council has been considering that. We were
thinking that it might be advisable to have some of your people
start their own engineering shops, for the simpler work. Town
would help them get started, the way it did you."

   "Oh." Leaton blinked, surprised. "Not satisfied with the job
I'm doing?" he asked, sounding slightly hurt.

  "Hell no," Jared said. "You're doing a wonderful job. It's
policy. Better to have competition, ayup? And we want to
encourage people to set up on their own, not have too many on
wages."

  "Oh." Leaton frowned thoughtfully. "You know, that's not a
bad idea, now that I come to think of it. Must be a bit annoying,
only having me to come to when you need something done."

   Glad you see the point, Cofflin thought with an inaudible sigh
of relief. These days it seemed that everyone on the island had a
wonderful idea that needed a machine built to do it, everything
from flax-crushing and ropemaking to pressing hazelnut oil, and
only Seahaven to do any of it. It was better to have a lot of little
firms, where more people had a chance to become their own
boss. Speaking of which… He glanced over at Martha.

   "We were talking with Starbuck about organizing the
financial setup here, too," she said. "Now that things are getting
less informal. Organizing Seahaven as a company, that is. You
put up your experience and the original machine tools, the Town
provides the building and all the raw materials we've furnished,
and the staff gets a share too that they hold as a block trust, and
anyone can cash their share out if they leave. We thought that
forty-thirty-thirty would be a proper ratio, organized as a
joint-stock company. It won't make all that much practical
difference right away, but for the long term…"

  "Ah." Leaton frowned even harder. "Well, to tell you the truth,
I've been thinking about organization myself, this last couple of
months. Right now we've got everything jumbled up
together—splitting up a bit would help, ah, even out the flows all
'round. Save time and effort. For example, we made up the
blowers and hearth and so forth for the glassmaking plant, but
there's no earthly reason it should be run as part of Seahaven."

   "Exactly," Cofflin said, relieved.

    Martha nodded. "Wish that glassworks was more useful than
it is," she added. "We've got the glass jars, but you need tight lids
for heat canning, though, and it's hard to do that without rubber
washer rings."

   They all sighed agreement. Everyone had gotten extremely
sick of salt fish and meat last winter, even if wild greens had kept
scurvy and other deficiency diseases at bay. Nobody had wanted
to see another piece of dried dulse by spring, either. The
icehouses and bigger vegetable crops would help with that this
year, and vary the diet, but it would be nice to be able to put up
vegetables and fruits in quantity.

   "Terri Susman had an idea about that," Leaton said. "She
thinks we can reprocess tires to get good-quality sealing rubber.
Have to get the steel wire and the cord out, of course, then chop
up and reheat the rubber."

   "Have her talk to Martha, then," Cofflin said. She was in
charge of screening new Town-backed projects. "We should get
on to that before summer, when the truck crops start coming in.
Plenty of glass jars available now, if we can get the sealing we
need."

   Martha made a note on a pad she kept with her. "We'll need
sulfur to cure raw rubber, won't we?" she said.

    Leaton nodded vigorously. "That's getting to be our problem,"
he said. "Mechanical things, that I and my people can handle.
It's chemistry that we're running into bottlenecks with. I could
use some sulfuric acid for pickling and cleaning steel, God knows
I could, but we can't make it in quantity—and what we do make
is cruddy, full of impurities, and the quality is variable as hell.
Same with nitric acid. Here, let me show you."

   He pulled a scrap of crinkly-looking cotton cloth from a
drawer of his desk and put it in a metal pan on the top. Then he
took out a fire-starter, snapped it, and dumped the tinder. The
cloth went up with a whoosh, a subdued crackling, and a puff of
bitter smoke.

   "There's our prospect of nitro powder," he said, exasperation
in his tone. "If we could do it, we could get blasting explosive and
propellants out of sawdust and cloth scraps, anything with
cellulose. But we can't. The acid we make's too dirty, and we
can't stabilize the results—it goes off if you breathe on it. The
chemistry teacher over at the high school, Cynthia Dawes, she's
working on it. Probably get it right in a year or two, but it's the
old story, not enough people, specialists especially."

    . "Plus we have to be careful about by-products," Martha said.
"No PCBs or dioxin in the groundwater here, and I'd like to keep
it that way."

    Both men nodded; Nantucket was a small island, and its
water supply was completely dependent on the underground
aquifer. Keeping that unpolluted had been hard enough up in the
twentieth. The island didn't have that much fresh water to spare
in the first place—if you over-pumped the underground supply it
got brackish and then salt—and they couldn't possibly let poisons
filter down through the sandy soil into the reservoir below.

   "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" Leaton said, and Martha
nodded. Jared blinked and shrugged; he got the gist, if not the
actual reference. "We're redoing the early Industrial Revolution,
only we can't afford to make the mistakes they did. Anyway,
smokeless powder's out of the question, for a couple of years at
least. Black powder we can do—but there the limiting factor's the
raw materials. Charcoal is no problem, but we're just now
getting significant amounts of saltpeter from the sewage works.
And sulfur, well, the nearest accessible sources are down in the
Caribbean."

   "Through jungle and up volcanoes," Cofflin added. He'd taken
a look at the reports. "It's even less popular than the salt-mining
detail. Thanks for that mechanical scoop thing, by the way—it's
taken a lot of the heartbreak out of that salt collection."

  "Plus it's dangerous," Leaton went on. "Making black
gunpowder, that is, no way to avoid occasional frictional
explosions, that's why Du Pont got out of the business. Once
we're up above the couple-of-pounds-a-batch level, I'm going to
move we put the plant out by the old airport."

   He sighed. "We're doing the best we can with what we've got…
I showed you our Hawkeye addition to the ROATS program,
didn't I?"

   "No, actually," Cofflin said. "With this job and a kid, some
details just don't get through. Captain Alston was satisfied, and I
took her word for it."

  "Ah. Well, come have a look, then."

   Cofflin suspected that the machinist just liked an excuse to
get out of his office and get his hands on some machinery; but
hell, he didn't like sailing a desk much himself. They followed
him out into the main shop, and then into the tangle of outdoor
projects on the other side of the main building. Leaton dodged
into a shed and brought out a weapon, slinging a leather satchel
over one shoulder as well.

  "Here it is," he said with diffident pride.

  "Hmm."

   Cofflin hefted the rifle… better check. Yes, spiral grooves down
the barrel. Fully stocked in black walnut, looking a little like a
hunting rifle except for the hammer and frizzen pan on the side.
He swung it up to his shoulder and looked down the barrel;
heavier than an M-16, about nine pounds, but well balanced and
with a nice solid feel. Mauser-style adjustable sights.

  "Feels sweet," he said. "A flintlock, I see."

  "Ayup. We've got another model ready to go into production
when we finally get the percussion-cap problem licked. We're
going to use a tape primer method, like a kid's cap pistol, only
using sheet copper instead of paper."

  "How's it work?" Cofflin asked.

   "Pull the hammer back to half cock," Leaton said. "Then hold
the rifle in your left hand and raise that knob along the back of
the stock."

  "Ah," Cofflin said.

   There was a plunger-shaped brass tube bolted to the
underside of the section that had swung up, set so that the head
of it would slide into the rear of the chamber when the lever was
pushed back down.

  "Hmm. Will that give you a tight enough gas seal?"

   "Nope," Leaton admitted. "Not by itself. And drawn-brass
cartridges are not feasible, right now; too big an operation.
Here's what we did instead."

   He opened the satchel hung over his shoulder and handed the
Chief a round of ammunition. The bullet was shaped much like
the rifle rounds he was familar with. Not jacketed, though, and it
looked like…

  "Plain lead?" he said.

   "Slightly alloyed with antimony and tin. Ten millimeter, or
point-four-inch, if you prefer."

   Cofflin snorted, and Martha gave a dry chuckle. The
metric-versus-old-style controversy was taking up a lot of time at
the more recent Meetings, with the constitution on hold until the
expeditionary force in Britain returned. The question of whether
or not to hold Daffodil Weekend was a close second.

   The rest of the cartridge was paper, and he could feel the
black powder crunching within as he rolled it between thumb
and forefinger. The rear felt thicker and stiffer.
   "Go ahead," Leaton said eagerly. "There's a wad of greased felt
at the base of the round. It packs into the gap between the head
of the plunger and the chamber under the gas pressure, and seals
it—well enough for one use, anyway."

  Cofflin slid the cartridge into the chamber with his thumb
and snapped the lever back down; an unseen spring held it
snugly in its groove atop the rifle's stock. "Ayup, I see," he said
admiringly.

   "That's really quite clever," Martha said, her tone neutral.

   The men both looked at her. She raised a brow and continued:
"No, really. I'm just not an enthusiast. Guns are like tractors or
can openers to me—tools. It's a gender thing, I think."

   "Marian likes weapons," Cofflin said, feeling slightly defensive.

    "No, she's interested in them. They're part of her work, as
filing systems were for me when I was a librarian," Martha
corrected. "And swords are her recreation, like squash rackets.
Anyway, dear, I wouldn't deny you the pleasure of firing it."

  Jared put a hand over his heart. "Cut to the quick," he said.
"Put in m' place. Range is over there, Ron?"

  They walked to a shooting gallery that ended in a high sand
mound with a wooden target. "Prime it like this," Leaton said.
He pushed the pan forward and dropped a measured quantity of
powder into it from a spring-loaded flask, then flipped it back.

   Cofflin raised the rifle to his shoulder, snuggled it firmly, and
thumbed the hammer back to full cock. The target was only a
hundred yards away, no need to adjust the sights. Squeeze the
trigger gently…

   Shhssst. Flame and whitish smoke shot out of the pan. Crack
on the heels of that, the gap almost imperceptible. The rifle
thumped his shoulder, harder than he was used to but not
intolerably. More dirty-white smoke shot out the muzzle. Almost
at once a gray fleck appeared on the bull's-eye, where the bullet
had punched through the paper to the wood beneath; it was
about an inch up and two to the right of center.

   "Not bad," he said admiringly, lowering the rifle and working
the lever again. It slid up, releasing more sulfur-smelling smoke.
"I'm rusty, I think, to miss that far on a clout shot. How'd you
load the next round?"

   "Just push," Leaton explained. "The spent wad blasts out
ahead of the next bullet, and as a bonus it cleans out some of the
black-powder fouling. Insert the next cartridge, prime the pan,
and you're ready to go again. It shoots faster than the crossbows
with practice, it's less muscular effort, and it's got three times
the range. More stopping power, too—that big soft bullet makes
some pretty ugly wounds, and the muzzle velocity is up around
fourteen hundred feet per second. And it'll punch through any
practical metal armor."

   He paused, pursing his lips. "It's not perfect, of course.
Flintlocks are vulnerable to wet weather—we can't help that. You
have to watch the fouling buildup in the barrel, clean it regularly,
and not let the chamber get too hot between rounds. But it's a
hell of a lot better than the crossbows; about as good as 1860s,
1870s weapons, except for the priming."

  "Now break my heart," Cofflin said. Walker can't have
anything like this. Not enough precision machining capacity.
"Not enough ammunition?"

   "Not enough ammunition," Leaton sighed. "The bullets are no
problem. We can stamp them out of sections of drawn lead wire,
and half the sailboats here had lead keel weights, so there's
plenty of the metal. It's the powder."

   Cofflin sighed along with the machinist. A wonderful rifle with
no ammunition was just a rather awkward club. And you not
only had to have enough to Use, you had to have enough for
regular practice.

  "Keep the miracles coming, Ron. We'd better get back to our
baby and the job," Cofflin said.

  "What's next on the schedule?" he asked, as they walked back
through the factory and picked their daughter up from the
cooing guard. The Indians were gone, leaving only a faint
woodland smell and a hackle-raising memory.

   "Lunch at Angelica's," Martha said. Brand had stayed in her
farmhouse; it was the most practical headquarters for overseeing
the island's agriculture. "Officially, we're going to discuss who
gets the last of the rooted cuttings for the fruit trees. Unofficially,
she's going to nag you about that idea of hers, putting in a
farming settlement on Long Island."

   "Good God," he groaned. "Doesn't she ever give up?"

   "Rarely," Martha said. "It's a national characteristic."

   They came out the end door of the wooden extension. A
carriage with a single horse between shafts was waiting for
them; it looked rather odd, low-slung, with car wheels and a
wooden body, but the seats were comfortable and there were
good springs and shock absorbers. They climbed into the open
passenger compartment and settled themselves. The teenage
driver clucked and flapped the reins, and the vehicle set off; up
Washington, to avoid some street repairs, down Stone Alley, past
the Unitarian church on Orange, up Cherry to Prospect, then out
into open country along Milk until it became Hummock Pond
Road. Cofflin shook his head slightly as the countryside slid past.
Not the same island at all, he thought. Oh, the contours of the
land were there, but apart from a strip along the road and some
windbreaks, the scrub of bayberry, low oak, hawthorn, rose, and
whatever was mostly gone—haggled-off stubs at most. Instead
there were open fields divided by board-and-post fences, many
with the beginnings of hawthorn hedges planted along them.

  "And it looks good," he said aloud; Martha nodded in instant
comprehension, looking down at the baby on her lap. Young
Marian smiled toothlessly and drooled in response, stuffing a
small chubby fist into her own mouth.

   "Damn good," Cofflin said.

   A tourist might not think so. The fields—wheat and barley and
rye planted last fall, corn and oats, potatoes and vegetables put
in this spring, an occasional young orchard— were a bit uneven
and straggly. The long lines of field workers were just barely
keeping ahead of the weeds, too. But that was life out there,
dearly bought with aching hard work. That waving blue-flowered
field of flax wasn't just pretty; it was rope and sails for the
fishing boats that brought in the other two-thirds of their food.

  "You can lose the habit of taking food for granted really
quickly," Martha said. "I love the sight of those cucumbers."

   "Ayup," Jared said. "But notice how sensitive we've all become
to the weather?"

   She looked skyward reflexively—clouds, but no rain
today—and they shared a laugh. Everyone did talk about the
weather now, and not just because there wasn't any TV or
national newspapers. The weather was important.

   "I hope Angelica doesn't go on too long about Long Island," he
said, as the carriage turned off onto the appropriately named
Brand Farm Road.

   That was unpaved, and gravel crunched under the wheels.
Gravel we've got plenty of, he thought, making an automatic
note to check on how much asphalt they had left in stock for
patching streets.

    A piece of gravel bounced off the wooden side of the carriage,
flung up by the horse's hooves; there was a faint smell of dust in
the air, despite yesterday's rain. Spring flowers starred the sides
of the road, daffodils and cosmos and the first tangled roses.
There was a fair cluster of livestock this close to Brand Farm, on
fields planted to ryegrass and clover; Angelica was keeping most
of it under her eye, breeding stock being as precious as it was
and the new farmers so inexperienced. Last year's weanling
calves brought from Britain were small shaggy surly-looking
adolescent cattle now, with budding horns and polls of hair
hanging over their eyes; next year they'd be breeding themselves.
The young ewes were adults with offspring of their own, tottering
beside their mothers on wobbly legs and butting for the udder. A
clutch of yearling foals went by, led on halters by young girls;
getting them used to the idea of doing what they were told, he
supposed. Far too much hauling and pulling was being done with
human muscle, and steam engines weren't really suited for field
work. More horses would be a godsend.

   The baby began to complain, wiggling with little snuffles and
whu-wha sounds. Martha did a quick check as they passed the
brewery, winepress, and small vineyard just before the house; a
cleared field off to the right was being planted with grafted
rootstocks for more vines. The field was full of people, many of
them rising to wave and call greetings as the Cofflins went by;
they waved back.

   "She's not wet. That's the 'I'm getting a little hungry' one," she
said. "I'll leave you to tell Angelica no about Long Island again
while I feed her."

   Jared nodded; some mothers thought nothing of nursing in
public, but Martha didn't work that way. The carriage slowed as
it went uphill to the farmhouse proper, amid its cluster of
outbuildings and barns and the great greenhouses. The heavy
timber frame of a new barn was going up, with people pulling on
ropes and shouting.

   "You might consider the Long Island idea again," she went on.

   "Not you too! We don't have the people to spare, and
besides—there are the locals."

   "Only a few hundred on the whole island," she said with
ruthless practicality. "That's scarcely an impediment. And the
climate and soil are a lot better for agriculture. Not this year or
next, I grant you, but Dr. Coleman says that with the birthrate
the way it is since the Event, our population's going to double in
the next thirty-eight years or less. Not counting immigration."

  "Immigration?" Jared said, raising his eyebrows. "I wouldn't
have thought so, from what we saw this morning."

   "Oh, I was thinking of Swindapa's people," Martha said,
rocking the infant to try to calm its growing volume of
complaint. "They seem compatible enough. Odd, but compatible,
and eager to learn."
    Now, there's a thought, Jared mused. He made a mental note
of it. More people would be so useful, but not if they caused too
much trouble.

  He looked east for a moment. "It all depends," he said.

   "And we can talk about the university… again. Never too early
to start planning."

  "Jesus Christ."

   "It's the only way the Spear Mark will listen to you. A lot of
them, ah, the Grandmothers sort of… well, irritate them,"
Swindapa had said. "They always have. And the Grandmothers
treat them like bad little children."

   Which leaves me out here in the woods, buck nekkid with
mosquitoes biting me, Marian Alston thought, gripping her
spear. Well, not quite. I get to wear this knife, too. What was
that remark I made last spring, about the bare-assed
spear-chuckers of England?

  "Goddam Paleolithic rituals," Alston whispered, barely
moving her lips.

   Literally Paleolithic. The Arnsteins thought this probably
went right back before agriculture, two or three thousand years.
She gritted her teeth against the chill that raised goose bumps
down her dew-slick ebony skin. She was crouched in a clump of
tall ferns, with the crown of a hundred-foot beech tree overhead.
Most of the trees about her were oaks, though, huge and gnarled
and shaggy. Water dripped down from the fresh green of the
leaves and the ferns, splashing on her. Dammit, hypothermia
and pneumonia are not what I need. She was covered with the
juices of crushed plants, too, that were supposed to kill her scent.
They certainly itched. The forest was more open than she'd have
expected, kept that way by the shading crowns of the big trees
and by periodic forest fires that swept away the undergrowth. It
was eerily quiet, only a few birdcalls and the buzz of insects.

  She breathed deeply, forcing thought out of her mind as
Sensei Hishiba had taught. The discomfort did not vanish, but
bit by bit it became simply another sensation, cramping and
cold and hunger flowing without feedback across the surface of
her perceptions. Slowly everything faded but her surroundings,
rustle of growth, drip of water on the deep soft layer of rotting
leaves, the faint cool scents of decay and growth. Outlines grew
sharp, down to the feathery moss that coated the gnarled oak
bark.

   And… a rustle. Faint. A footfall, a small sharp clomp. She let
her eyes drift closed, focusing. Inch by fractional inch the spear
went back and her body shifted balance without moving, feet
digging into the softness of the forest floor, pressing until wet
clay oozed up between her toes.

   The eyelids drifted up again. Alston made no attempt to focus
them, let movement and color flow by and through. Her heart
sped, not in excitement but in natural preparation for
movement. She took a long, slow breath—

  —and lunged.

    The movement was too shocking-sudden for the buck to do
more than begin a leap sideways. The long sharp steel thudded
into its flank, behind the left shoulder; she followed through,
shoving and twisting as the wood jerked in her hands. A moment
later the deer pulled free and staggered off sideways, head down.
Blood pumped from its flanks and mouth and nostrils, spattered
her with thick gobbets; it staggered sideways, tripped, went
down by the hindquarters. For an instant its forelegs struggled to
lift it, while she waited, panting. Then it laid down its head,
kicked, voided, and died.

   She leaned on the spear, panting, so exhausted that her knees
began to buckle. Takes it out of you. When you focused like that,
there was nothing held back.

   "Time's a-wastin'," she said, laying down the spear and
kneeling beside the dead animal. Sorry, she thought, touching
the soft neck. It was necessary.

   The sun had fallen, and the air was growing cooler despite the
great fire in the ancient pit at their backs and the smaller blazes
around the edge of the clearing. "It's a new thing," one of the
men grumbled. "A foreigner…"

   Swindapa glared at him. Pelanatorn hushed him with a
gesture. "Not the first," he said. "Let the forest spirits decide. If
she brings her deer, well enough."

   A younger man's voice called out, cracking with excitement.
"It is the hour!"

   Swindapa stood with the others beside the high-leaping fire,
beating time on the ground with her spear, listening to the
thudding rhythm and the slapping of palms on drumheads that
matched it. Sweat ran down her face under the overshadowing
tanned mask of a deer, down her flanks beneath its hide. Around
her stood the ranks of the Spear Mark, their heads bearing the
likeness of deer and boar, aurochs and wolf and bear, the bronze
or Eagle People steel of their spears glinting reddish. She
strained her eyes into the spark-shot darkness, knowing it was
useless—the trees came close here, and nothing was visible under
their branches. Wind ghosted out of them, cool and green on her
hot skin, smelling of green and damp earth.

   The chant broke, but the drums continued under it like a
giant's heartbeat, echoing back from the forest edge.

   "Terge ahwan!" someone shouted.

   That was in the Old Tongue; The hunter comes. The rest of
them took it up, making a new chant in the flame-shot darkness.
The crowd parted for Marian. The bloody hide of her kill was
draped around her flanks, and the open eyes of the head stared
out from above hers. The butchered quarters and organs
dragged behind her on a travois of poles bound with sinew.

   A man in breechclout and leggings stood forth. Gold bands
shone around the tusks of his boar mask and on the haft of the
ceremonial mace in his hand. He held it up to bar her way.

   "Shm' u-ahwa?" he asked. Who comes?

   "Na-ahawun't'ngamo sssgama nwn'tu," Marian replied, her
voice loud and firm. One who brings meat for the people. She
stood tall and let the travois fall, holding out her spear so that
the bloodied head could be seen.

  "Na-terge ahwan!" the boar-man shouted. It is a hunter who
comes!

   The crowd shouted it out together: "Na-terge ahwan!"

   Swindapa felt her heart swell. Marian was doing everything
perfectly—even the difficult sounds of the Old Tongue, the
hunter's language, that nobody really spoke anymore. Helpers
came forward to take the meat away for preparation, and to
throw buckets of water over the initiate—part of the ceremony,
more comfortable, and preparation for what must follow. Sleek
wetness glistened in the firelight, like a statue of living onyx.

  "Is the hunter weary?" the man with the boar said. "Does the
hunter seek to rest?"

    "The hunter runs faster than the deer, longer than the wolf,"
Marian answered. "The hunter runs hotter than the breath of
fire."

   She turned left and began to walk. The Spear Mark formed a
laneway for her, in a spiral that led counterclockwise around the
blaze again and again. A tense silence, then a spear lashed
out—reversed, the butt low to trip her. Without breaking stride
she dove over it, in a forward roll that seemed to bounce her
back to her feet as if on cords let down from the moon. The Art,
Swindapa thought. Ah, if only I could move like that!

   To the Spear Mark it seemed like magic. A roar of approval
went up. More spearshafts darted out, and sling cords swung to
tangle and trip. Beneath the mask, Swindapa bit her lip in
worry. She's so hard to see in the dark, someone might slip.
Nobody was supposed to be really hurt in this, but accidents
were not unknown—particularly if someone had ill-wishers.
She'd collected more than a few bruises herself, on the night of
her initiation; a lot of men felt annoyed when a woman took the
Spear Mark. None landed on Marian that she could see, and the
woman of the Eagle People ran faster and faster as the rite
prescribed, dancing, jinking, dodging, throwing herself forward
in diving rolls over an outstretched shaft or leg. The hunters
yelled, egging her on; the sound rose as she disappeared behind
the fire, and Swindapa knew she was sprinting up the ramp.
And…

   She soared over the flames; the Fiernan girl felt the blast of
heat as if it were drying her own skin. Landing, standing with
legs braced and spear held aloft on widespread arms.

    Swindapa grounded her own spear, pulled down the deer
mask, and danced out into the cleared space before the fire,
taking the part of the prey in the Showing. She was a good
enough hunter, and she'd learned warrior's knowledge from
Marian—but this was her first skill, the one that had earned her
the name Deer Dancer, an adult's name and not a child's. The
hard soil was easy as turf beneath the balls of her feet as she
sprang, seeming to float in the air as a deer did when it leaped,
her long legs flashing in the flamelight. She landed, crouched,
stepping light, quivering with the seed of leaps to come, as a deer
was, always ready to flash away, turning and darting. She was
the deer, and Marian was the hunter—stalking closer, her
movements just as swift and smooth but harder, more focused.
They spiraled about each other, playing the mime of stalk and
flight, until the spear flashed below her last leap. She crumpled
around it, lay still as the steel was withdrawn from the earth and
thrust upward.

  "It is accomplished!" Marian shouted.

    "It is accomplished!" the hunters roared, and the drums gave
a final flourish and went silent.

   The tense hieratic stillness of the moment broke in laughter
and cheers. Swindapa hurried forward, snatching up a parcel
she'd arranged herself. It held a breechclout and leggings of fine
white doeskin, and moccasins; she'd have liked it still better if
she could have made them with her own hands, but there hadn't
been time and her sisters and aunts had done it for her. She
grounded her spear near Marian and began to help her on with
the clothes.
   "Looks like a goddam diaper," the black woman muttered
under her breath… in English, though, glancing down at the
breechclout.

   "It looks lovely on you," Swindapa said stoutly. The smell of
the other's sweat was so familiar, yet still had that trace of sharp
musky strangeness that was uniquely hers, alien and exciting.
"You did everything perfectly. There's only the Marking, now."

    Everyone crouched down on hocks as another man came
forward; his mask had boar tusks and wolf fangs and antlers as
well, and his helper carried a leather tray with bone needles and
little horn cups of pigment. The Fiernan girl squatted on her
haunches, confident that Marian would bear the slight pain
without flinching. She did, the light of the bonfire running ruddy
on her dark skin, the full features motionless as the needles
pricked and tiny droplets of blood flowed down between her
breasts.

   Strange, she thought. Very strange, to be here again— and
with Marian; it was like two different worlds meeting. And I not
myself, not as I was. She shook off the memory; there was
enough sadness without raising ghosts from their barrows.

   At least it was getting comfortable to squat naturally again;
after a year of sitting on chairs, her legs had started going to
sleep after a few hours in the old position. With the ceremony
over, people sat about the fires and began the feast—Marian's
deer had been set to cook, but they didn't have to wait for that.
The finest hunters among the Spear Mark had brought in other
deer, boar, rabbit, duck, and geese, and a good deal more easily
than the candidate, since they were allowed to use the usual
bows rather than the spear that ancient custom prescribed for
the rite. There were wild fruits, nuts, and roots as well, but no
bread or beer; for this ceremony only forest foods could be used.
That didn't mean there was no drink, of course. Beakers of
honeymead came out, tall bell-shaped clay pots marked with
wavy lines. She accepted one and drank a little; it was a fine dry
make, seasoned with meadowsweet and powdered hemp seeds.

   "How's everyone taking it?" Marian said, as she sipped in her
turn.
  "Well, I think—most of them," Swindapa said.

  Truly. I can feel the goodwill. The Spear Mark were her
people's main defense, and they knew better than the
Grandmothers how desperate their straits were.

  "Good," Marian said. "We can get to work, then."

  "Not tonight," Swindapa warned. "That would be… bad
manners."

   Strange, she thought. The Eagle People were always pursuing
tomorrow, as if it were a precious quarry and they hungry wolves
running it down. It was so hard for them simply to be, because
they were always thinking of becoming.

   A man leaned over. "Your friend Marawaynd is a great
hunter," he said, grinning. "She caught a fine deer—both times
she came to the White Isle."

   Marian raised her brows at the good-natured guffaws, then
smiled herself when Swindapa translated. She replied in her
slow, accented Fiernan:

  "Other way. She"—nudging Swindapa with an elbow— "track,
hunt, leap on me like wolf."

   Laughter rose into the night, as loud as the cracking of the
fires. Men staggered forward with a roast boar and set it down
before the chief feasters, and knives flashed in the firelight as
they carved. Swindapa watched the sparks rising toward the
stars, and felt a bewildering tightness in her throat.

  Why should I feel like weeping? she thought, turning her
head away from the others. I only wish this could last forever.

   That was so strange a thought she ran it over and over in her
mind, forgetting the pang in her chest in puzzlement. I too am
hunting the future and letting the Now slip past, she thought
with a slight chill. It's catching.

  Dammit, I'm a sailor, not a diplomat, Alston thought, making
her fingers unclench from the rough board table that occupied
the center of the HQ hut.

  "We've beaten back their raids before," one of the Spear
Chosen said.

   "When the Sun People come against you, they're going to be
coming with every man in their tribes," she replied. "This won't
be a war of raids, not after the harvest is in. It'll be a war of—"
She switched to English. "Oh, hell, 'dapa, what's the word for
battles!"

   Swindapa frowned. "I don't… I don't think there is a word, not
really," she said at last. "Not if I understand the English
properly."

   "—of really big fights," Alston went on. "They're going to
bring thousands of warriors into your land. You have to match
them. Then the armies… the big groups of warrior bands… will
fight until one flees. We call that a battle."

   The command tent had been replaced by a post-and-board
structure; she could see it made the Earth Folk leaders a little
uneasy, which was all to the good. All the better to kick them out
of their mental ruts. That was why she was holding this meeting
at Fort Pentagon. The garrison and the locals they'd hired had
done a great deal in the past month. There was a timber-framed
rampart all along the edge now, and towers of squared logs at
the corners and over the gates. More logs made a rough
pavement for the streets, and plank-and-frame barracks had
replaced the tents; the little uniflow steam engine that powered
Leaton's dart-throwing machine gun could also pump water,
grind grain, and saw timber. There was also a log pier, which
meant that the ships—even the Eagle—could tie up regardless of
the tides and transfer cargo.

   "Thousands?" the Fiernan warrior said, scratching at his
head. Alston suppressed an impulse to check hers. The locals
were a clean enough people, by Bronze Age standards. Those
standards weren't anything like twentieth-century America's,
and didn't include her horror of resident insect life. He cracked
something between finger and thumbnail and continued:
  "How can they bring thousands of warriors all together? What
would they eat?"

   "Your crops," Alston answered. Maltonr, she remembered.
Redheaded, the one who'd been with her when they ran head-on
into that Zarthani warband. More flexible than most. He'd
undone the multitude of small braids he'd worn before and
cropped his hair in an American-style short cut.

   "That's why they'll come after the harvest," she said. "They'll
live off what you've reaped and threshed. And your livestock, to
be sure."

   The dozen or so Spear Chosen sitting uneasily around the
table looked at each other. "But… then we would all starve," he
said.

   "Exactly. Except the ones the Sun People kept as slaves, of
course."

  Swindapa winced. Alston restrained an apologetic glance; it
was ruthless, but the truth.

  Maltonr nodded thoughtfully. "We can't sit behind our walls
and wait for them to go away, either," he said.

   "Exactly," Alston repeated. Except that that word means
something more like running with the same feet, approximately,
she thought. Damn, but this is awkward.

   "They've got engines to batter down walls," she went on.
"They're heavy and slow, but if the Sun People can move in open
country, they can bring them up and smash you to sticks. And if
you move out of their way and refuse to…" Damn again, no way
to say give battle in this language. "… to meet them and have a
really, really big fight, they can eat up your settlements one by
one."

  Maltonr still looked as if he was thinking hard. The others
were simply appalled. "What have you Eagle People brought
among us?" one whispered.
   Alston felt like wincing herself. "Ask your Grandmothers," she
said. "The Sun People were eating you a little bit at a time; in the
end, they would have destroyed you anyway. Walker the outlaw
has taught them how to do it all at once… but we can show you
how to smash them all at once, too. Think of being free of their
threat, forever."

   That had them nodding. Except the redhead, who cast a
thoughtful look around at the solid-looking American base. The
very permanent-looking American base. Oho, no flies on Rufus,
here. Have to talk to him later.

   "Hmmm." That was Pelanatorn son of Kaddapal, the local
magnate. Very much a trader, and very rich, now. "If we gather a
host of thousands, how will we feed them? For that matter,
there's always sickness if too many gather in one place for long."

  "We can show you ways to stop the sickness," she said.

   Boiling water and deep latrines, mostly. Luckily they'd gotten
a lot of prestige with the locals by healing diseases their
witch-doctors-and-herbs medicine couldn't, so they'd probably
go along with sanitation.

   "Also, there are ways to feed large groups of people. With the
proper—" She stopped again.

   Oh, hell. How do I say organization or logistics? She settled
down to grind the right meanings out of the Fiernan Bohulugi
vocabulary.

  After the Spear Chosen had left, Alston slumped in her chair.
"Christ, I feel like a wrung-out dishrag," she said.

   Swindapa sat looking at her, chin cupped in her hands. "You
really have brought a new thing here," she said slowly.

  " 'Dapa—"

  The girl sighed and closed her eyes. "Oh, I know you—
we—must," she said. "But… other change, it's like growing old.
You don't notice it every day, and when it comes, it comes to
someone that Moon Woman has made ready for it. But this is
like a great tree growing up between nightfall and morning.
There's no… no time to get used to it, to change the way the
Eagle People bring it."

   Alston sighed herself, as she rose and put a hand for a
moment on the girl's shoulder. There was nothing much
comforting to say. In a couple of generations, the Earth Folk way
of life was going to be changed beyond recognition. That was
better than being overrun and butchered, but it still wasn't easy
to swallow.

    Andy Toffler came in, checked for a moment, then continued
when she nodded. "Goin' pretty smooth, ma'am," he said. With
the air survey, we should be able to estimate the harvest pretty
close, and do up proper maps of the whole area with updated
terrain features. Ian wants to get together with the both of us on
it. They're getting records from the local bigwigs, too—seems
they've got a sort of tithe system here."

   He grinned. "And God Help Us, it surely does impress hell out
of the locals, ma'am."

  "They haven't seen people fly before," Swindapa said dryly.

   Toffler ducked his head, looking surprisingly boyish for a man
in his fifties. "No offense, miss. They're good folks, your people,
and I'm happy to be here helpin' them against those murdering
scumbags."

   He scowled; they'd all seen evidence of the way the Sun People
made war, and there certainly wasn't a Geneva Convention in
this millennium. Seems to have hit Toffler harder than most,
she thought. There were hints of a knightly soul under that
good-old-boy act… and he'd been scrupulously respectful to her,
whatever his private opinions, which she had to give some credit
for.

   "Tell Ian I can see you at…" She glanced at her watch and read
down a mental checklist. The day would have to be forty hours
long to get all that done. "… at about eighteen hundred hours."
   "See you later," she went on to Swindapa, answering the
Pieman's mute nod, scooping up her helmet, and leaving.

  Sometimes you need to be alone to think. The guard fell in
behind her; it was getting so she hardly even noticed that.

   Enough space to drill several hundred had been left in the
middle of the fort. As she passed along the edge of the field,
Alston watched about that number of Fiernans in
Nantucket-made armor learning the rudiments of close-order
movement.

   "Hay-foot, straw-foot" the Nantucketer noncom screamed, to
the pulsing beat of a drum, "Hay-foot, straw-foot!"

   That was strange, too. Most of the locals could do any number
of intricate, precise dance steps, but simple left-right-left gave
them endless problems. They looked rather silly, each with a
piece of hay tied to the left foot and a twist of straw to the right,
but it worked. What really worries me is keeping them in line in
a fight. They were brave enough, but they weren't used to the
concept of taking massive casualties all at once, the way you did
in open-field massed combat.

    She exchanged salutes with the guard at the sea gate, walking
through the open portals and under the snouts of the
flamethrowers that protruded from the bunkerlike slits in the
flanking towers. There was a fair bit of traffic; boots and wheels
and hooves boomed on the bridge over the ditch. The smell of
stale water came up from it, around the bases of the sharpened
stakes that bristled forward from the lower bank around the
moat. That mixed with other smells—woodsmoke and horse
sweat, leather, cooking from the tangle of Fiernan huts that had
gone up outside, dung from the corrals. There were as many
locals as Americans in the bustle. Spear Chosen war chiefs
coming to learn or take council; traders, scores of them, with
little oxcarts or pack donkeys or porters, or hauling stuff up from
the beach where they'd landed coracles or canoes or whatever;
others come to trade labor for the wonderful things the strangers
had, or just to gawk. Even a few weirdly tattooed men from
across the channel to the west, from what the locals called the
Summer Isle.
   The pier was even busier. As she came to the end, a sedated,
blindfolded, hobbled, and still rather resentful-looking horse
swung up into the air and over to the Eagle's deck on a line and a
band slung under its belly.

   "Let go… and haul," the line leader barked.

   The animal slid down gently, whinnying as its hooves made
contact with the decking. Alston paused for a moment, looking
up at the clean lines of rigging and clewed-up sails and masts,
feeling the familiar rush of love at the sight of her ship. Beautiful
as… as Swindapa, by God, she thought, smiling with a slight
quirk at the corner of her mouth. Right now the Eagle was
leaving her for a while. Heading back home, with a cargo of
horses, firkins of butter, and meat pickled and salted and
smoked. Plus several small, heavy little chests full of gold bars
and dust and some crude silver ingots.

  Tom Hiller came up and saluted. "Captain." The sailing
master was looking harassed, his long face like a basset hound's
expecting yet another kick. "She trims… oh, hell, she trims as
well as you'd expect. She wasn't built for carrying horses,
Captain."

   "She wasn't built for carrying anythin' but people, Mr. Hiller,"
she replied, returning the courtesy. "Needs must when the devil
drives. How are the new hands shaping?"

   They'd sworn on two dozen Fiernan deckhands, out of
hundreds wild to enlist. Which is a good sign in itself. They're
not afraid we're going to roast and eat them as soon as we're
out of sight of land. Taking on locals also meant that she could
get another transatlantic voyage in without putting too many of
her precious trained Americans out of reach. For various
reasons, she'd seen that more than half of the recruits were
young women, and all from the coastal fishing hamlets.

  "Pretty well," Hiller said, turning his cap in his hands.
"They're all fit—better than your average cadet was to start with,
and they're used to living rough. And they pick up stuff like haul
and climb damn quick. That phrasebook was really useful, by the
way."
  "Thank the Arnsteins. What else is on your mind, Mr. Hiller?"

   "Look—" He hesitated. "Look, Captain, I just don't like leaving
right now. Couldn't somebody else—"

   "No," Alston said bluntly. "You're the best sailor, and you're
leaving with the next tide. Everyone else who could command
Eagle is doing something I can't spare him or her from. And I
need those wagons, and all the rest of it."

  "Yes, ma'am," he sighed.

       CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  July - September, Year 2 A.E.

   "One of them died, Chief," Miller said. "I think we
over-tranked it in that storm off the Azores. Heart just
stopped—or maybe it died of fright. Damn all horses anyway."

  "Damned lucky it was only one," Cofflin said.

   The Eagle was back at her usual berth, the old Steamboat
Wharf. The wild-eyed little horses were led down a special ramp
rigged with canvas barriers on either side, snorting and balking.
It was a bright breezy-cool day in early July, with only a
scattering of people watching; today was a working day, and
there were enough fishing boats these days to sop up most of the
able hands on the island. Even the strong sea breeze couldn't
quite hide the odors of drying fish, offal in the giant tubs waiting
to be hauled out to the fields. A whale-catcher was coming in
between the breakwaters as well, the long dark shapes of its
catch towing behind. A cheery toot-toot cut through the bustle,
sending a white cloud of gulls storming skyward.

   Well, we're certainly a seafaring island again, Cofflin
thought.

   Beside him Angelica Brand was rubbing her hands with glee.
"Ninety-seven, ninety-eight," she counted. "All mares. Marvelous
."
  "It means we can spare Captain Alston the people she wants,"
Cofflin nodded. "Wasn't sure it was possible."

  Hiller looked up sharply. "How so?" he asked.

   Cofflin hid his smile; he'd noticed that the Guard people all
bristled like that at a suggestion that Alston wasn't infallible.
Sign of a good boss. God, but we were lucky. They might have
gotten a regulation-worshiping martinet… or, heaven forbid,
someone with political ambitions. A grownup Walker. He gave a
mental shudder at the thought.

  "Angelica's arithmetic," he said aloud.

    The woman beside him touched her gray-streaked brown
hair. "Oh, my, yes. The reapers are ready to go—all we lacked was
traction. Two horses to each, so with the ones we've already got,
that's over seventy-five reapers we can put into the fields. Fifteen
acres a day each, say a thousand acres a day all up, that means
we can harvest the whole small-grain acreage in less than a week
with only a hundred and fifty people. Granted we still have to
shock and stook it by hand, and then there's the threshing, but
it's still hundreds of people rather than thousands, the way it was
last year. Plus we can use horse-drawn cultivators to spare a lot
of hoe work done by hand."

   "Which frees up people for a lot of other work," Cofflin said.
"Not that it took that long even with sickles, but the people had
to be here—sort of tied 'em down." He exchanged grins with
Angelica. "We could use a lot more livestock like this."

    "Oh, my, yes," she said. "Another hundred horses at least, and
a couple of hundred cows, more sheep too. As long as we can feed
them on salt-marsh hay and fishmeal, they're a perfect way to
put humus and minerals in the soil. Virtuous feedback cycle,
little fertilizer machines."

   "The captain said we'd be bringing back machinery," Hiller
said.

  "And specialists to handle and repair it," Cofflin agreed.
   One of the crew came down the gangplank, duffelbag over her
shoulder. It took a second glance before he realized she was a…
local, he reminded himself. Quite a nice-looking youngster, apart
from a few missing teeth that showed as she glanced around
with a dazed grin. A Guard cadet came clattering down behind
her, and they walked off hand in hand.

   Angelica left too, anxious to shepherd her precious horses out
to Brand Farms. Cofflin stood looking after her for a moment.

   "I'm worried," he said abruptly.

   "Why?" Hiller said. "Everything's going according to plan, so
far."

   "That's what worries me," he said, and shrugged. "Well, let's
get to work."

   ***

   "Ahhhhhh," the crowd muttered.

   Alston nodded and smiled, raising a hand to shade her eyes
from the sun. Inwardly she was breathing a long sigh of relief;
horses were better, but they were using oxen for this
demonstration, because they were so much more common.
Evidently they would work, too.

   The bright burnished-bronze color of the ripe grain was a
pleasure to the eye, she had to admit; field after field of it, across
the gently rolling surface of the downs. The reaper rumbled and
clanked down the edge of one field, the little red-and-white oxen
rolling their eyes and walking at an almost-trot as the driver
goaded them. A small girl led the four-ox team, and her mother
drove the machine itself—they wanted to show how easy these
were to use. The plank-and-wire reel spun like a slow paddle
wheel, bending the tall stalks backward. Behind them the
serrated edges of the cutting bar hummed, slicing the grain off
three inches above the ground; it fell onto the moving canvas
platform behind, and the raking attachment let it fall behind in a
neat linear row.
   A roar went up from the watchers. Two women darted
forward and bent over the row, grabbing double handfuls and
tying them into sheaves with a twist of the straw. Small children
ran back and forth shrieking; crowds of their elders trotted into
the field and followed the reaper, making the oxen even more
nervous. Alston crossed her fingers behind her back, licking lips
salty with sweat and thick with dust— at least the weather had
been good, hot cloudless days. Less rare now than up in the
twentieth, but still unusual for a warm spell to last so long. A
good omen, in its way.

   Two older men and a woman, richly dressed, stayed by the
clump of Americans and their Fiernan allies; one of the men had
a thin-bladed bronze sword like a rapier, and the woman carried
a walking staff with a carved owl's head on it.

   "You did not lie," the man with the sword said. "One such
machine"—he used the English word, horribly mangled—"does
the work of twenty."

  "Yes," Alston said. "And the ones who work the machine need
not be strong or fit."

  Abe Lincoln's secret weapon, she thought. McCormick's
machines had cut the grain of the Midwest while the farmers'
sons were away in the blue-clad legions of Sherman and Grant.
Unlike the slaves the Confederates had relied on, a reaping
machine wasn't likely to run away.

   "And that means"—she switched to English for a
moment—"Ian, Doreen, the maps"—then back into Fiernan, with
occasional help from Swindapa—"that you can send fighters and
grain to the meeting place that the Grandmothers of the Great
Wisdom and the Council of the Sacred Truce suggested."

   At our strong urging, she added silently. No need to
complicate matters, and the Fiernans could be damned touchy if
they thought someone was trying to boss them.

   The three locals were leaders in this area, or at least as close
as the rather anarchic Fiernan Bohulugi got. They looked at each
other, and then back at the machine making its way around and
around the grainfield, working its way in from the edge. Then
the woman looked up at the sky.

   "The weather is good," she said. "But you can't count on that."

   Everyone there nodded. Bad weather in harvest meant grain
that had to be dried over fires, or worse still that went bad in the
storage pits. That was why these people nearly killed themselves
in harvest time; you had to get the harvest cut as fast as humanly
possible.

   The man with the sword tugged at his barley-colored
mustaches; he had a stubbled chin. The cloth of his tunic was
plaid, squares of woad blue and pale yellow.

   "I don't… will that machine keep working? What if it falls
sick? If our strongest are away, and it sickens, then we lose the
harvest and our children starve."

   "If the Sun People burn your houses and steal your crops,
you'll all die. And we have skilled craftfolk who can tend any
hurts the machine takes," she went on. The miracle of
interchangeable parts. "They'll show your own people how, too."

  The third man rubbed a gold neck ring. "As you say it, these
machines need fresh… pieces… every now and then? They wear
down, like a knife that's been sharpened often?" Alston nodded.
"Then if we use them to harvest, we'll have to buy the pieces of
you in future years, even if you give them freely this season."

   Damn, got to remember—primitive doesn't mean stupid. At
that, the Fiernan were better traders than the charioteers; they
didn't think of all trade in terms of gift exchanges, for starters.
That was one reason the Tartessians didn't like them. The
easterners were easier to trick.

  "You can always go back to using sickles, when there's no
war," Swindapa pointed out spontaneously.

   The gold-decked man laughed; he had a narrow dark face and
black eyes. "Water flows uphill faster than people will give up an
easier way of doing," he said. "And it'll be, Drauntorn, you're the
Spear Chosen—go bargain for us with the Eagle People, so we
don't have to break our backs or risk untimely rain. And scowls
and black looks and no help for us trading men if we don't, so
we'll have to pay even if the price ruins us."

  Alston spread her hands. "We're not mean-hearted
bargainers," she pointed out. "Ask any of your people who've
dealt with us."

   "I'm kind to my pigs, too, when I'm fattening them," the man
said.

  "Would you rather deal with a Sun People war band?"

  "Few have come this far west… but no, no, there's wisdom in
what you say."

   "Many of your people think so," Alston said delicately. "Many
are gathering."

   Swindapa had suggested the strategy. If a Fiernan community
got violently unpopular with its neighbors, they'd steal all its
herds, plus withdrawing the day-to-day mutual help that was an
essential safeguard against misfortune.

   The Arnsteins returned and spread the map on the table. The
Fiernans' eyes lit as she explained it; they understood the
concept, but it took a while to understand the alien pictographic
technique.

   "… so this shows your land from above," she said, circling her
finger over a map of southwestern England from Hampshire to
Cornwall and north to the Cotswolds. "Here is your district. Here
is where the host will muster, three days' march. All shown as a
bird would see it."

    Or it shows things as Andy Toffler sees them on surveying
flights with his camera, she added to herself.

  Aloud: "From this, and from the… ah, memories… of the
Grandmothers, the number of fields and the number of houses
and people can be told. To make sure that everyone bears a fair
share of the burden of the levy, you understand."

  And so nobody can wiggle out.

  "Men can walk," the mustachioed Spear Chosen said.

   "Cattle and sheep can walk." Both the men looked pained;
those were their capital assets. The woman—priestess, Alston
supposed—gave them a sardonic sideways glance. "But grain
can't walk, and it's hard to haul any distance."

   Alston rested one hand on the map and pointed with the
other, to the big Conestoga-style wagons the Americans were
using; dozens of them had come back with the Eagle, knocked
down for reassembly.

   "We have better wagons, as well," she said. "Each can haul,
ah—" she looked down at a conversion list that translated
English measurements into the eight-based local number system
and units—"two tons of grain five to eight miles a day." Even
over these miserable tracks you people call roads. "We have a
machine to do the threshing, too. So you can move both the
fighters and their food."

   The discussion went on. So did the work in the fields; the
Fiernans there were singing as they bound and stocked the
sheaves of grain behind the reapers, happy as children on
holiday. Alston remembered what her back had felt like after
stooping over a sickle for a few days. I know exactly how they
feel.

   "These Eagle People think of everything," the Spear Chosen
with the bronze rapier said, his hand on the bone-and-gold hilt.

   Swindapa looked after Marian; she was over by the wagons,
taking some message. One of the radios had come with them;
she shivered a little. She could understand a lot of what Marian's
people did—even a steam engine made sense, once you made a
picture in your head of the hot vapors pushing through pipes. No
different from boiling water lifting the lid on a pot over the fire,
not really. But radios were too much like talking to ghosts.
   "They are… forethoughtful, careful, they work very hard to
make every small thing happen as they desire," she said. How do
you say methodical or systematic? she wondered. That sort of
thing happened all the time these days, and it made her head
itch inside. You just couldn't say some things she'd learned in
her birth tongue.

   Swindapa's mother shifted her youngest sister around and
began to nurse. The girl fought down a sharp stab of envy,
followed by an all-consuming anger. Her own hand clenched on
the hilt of her katana. The Iraiina would pay for robbing her of
that, pay with pain. Yet if all of them died, it would not be
enough.

   "They have more things than these machines you've seen,"
Swindapa's mother went on. "Wonderful things… I've seen the
hills of the Moon Itself with their tel-e-sk-opes." Everyone
touched brow and heart and genitals in awe.

   "And the tools, the weapons and armor, and the cloth, and the
ornaments," the dark-haired Spear Chosen said eagerly. "We
must have these things! We must find what they want in
exchange."

   "No," Swindapa said slowly. The others looked at her in
surprise. "We must learn how to make these things, for
ourselves. Or we would become as little children to the Eagle
People forever, without their meaning us any harm."

  Slow nods went around the circle.

  "Another raid so soonly?" Isketerol said, in English. "Soonish?
Nowly?"

  "So soon," Walker said, correcting him absently. Odd. He's
kept getting better at English… oh, he must speak it with
what's-her-name, Rosita.

   "Political necessity," he went on in Tartessian, unshipping his
binoculars. "Got to keep the tribes thinking about the war, if
we're to get the levy together again."
   Bastard quieted as he dropped the reins on the horn of his
saddle. The shade of the trees overhead was welcome— it'd been
getting pretty hot for an English summer, and they'd all been out
in it as the war of ambush and border skirmish went on
relentlessly. Sweat trickled out of the padding of his armor, and
out of the helmet lining, stinging his eyes. It mixed with the
heavier smell of Bastard's sweat, the oiled-metal scent of armor,
going naturally somehow with the creak of leather and the low
chinking of war harness from man and horse alike.

   Typical enough, he thought, scanning back and forth across
the enemy hamlet. They were up on the downs of what would
have become Sussex, just on the edge where the open chalklands
gave way to the forested clay soils lower down—New Barn Down,
the Ordnance Survey maps called it. The Earth Folk settlement
was five round thatched huts inside a rough rectangle of
earthwork, two of the walls overlapping to make a sort of gate; a
palisade of short poles topped it all around. Square fields and
pastures of an acre or so each lay about the steading, fading off
into forest on the hills to the north. A rutted track led off that
way, through a shallow dry valley between two of the downs.
There was something odd, though…

   Isketerol spotted it. "They've been beforehand with their
harvest," the Tartessian said. He looked up. "It's been hot and
dry for this sodden marsh of an island, but it's still early for them
to have it all in."

   Walker lowered the binoculars and nodded thoughtfully. The
grainfields were all reaped stubble, not even any sheaves of grain
standing in the fields. Usually the locals left those in little
three-sheaf tipis in the fields, so the crop would dry better. He
looked through the field glasses again. Yup. Grain stacks inside
the wall. Even so… He did a quick mental calculation. Less than
there should be, and the harvest had been good this year from all
the scout's reports. Maybe they'd rushed it because of the war.

   "Yeah, something funny there," he said slowly.

   The creaking got a little louder. He looked around; his
followers were grinning and sweating with single-minded
eagerness. For them it was just another fight, and an easy one
with sixty of them in full gear against one little farm hamlet. Plus
there were cattle and sheep grazing around the Earth Folk
settlement, and he'd found that the Iraiina and their relatives
had a peculiar attitude about livestock. Sort of like a yuppie and
his Lamborghini, or his car and his bank account put together.
Their idea of status was to sit and watch endless herds of their
very own cow-beasts driven by: Iraiina used the same word for
big herd of cattle and wealth in general. Not entirely unlike the
Bitterroot ranchers he'd been raised among.

  "All right," he said quietly. "Let's do this by the numbers."

   Ohotolarix raised his aurochs-horn trumpet to his lips. It
dunted huu-huuu-huuuu through the beeches and oaks, a harsh
droning echo. With a crashing and ripping of branches and
underbrush, two parties of a dozen men each spurred their
horses out and around on either side, heading upslope to cut the
Fiernans off from the north. The rest came out of hiding more
carefully, forming into a line and trotting forward. Screams
sounded from ahead; Fiernan herders tried to get their charges
moving north, then saw they'd be cut off and abandoned the
animals to run for the settlement. His followers whooped
triumph as they rounded up the bawling, baaing livestock and
edged it out of the way, back toward the woods.

   No horses, he thought. Not much of a surprise; the Earth Folk
didn't keep many of them. He swung down out of the saddle and
the rest of the band followed, except for a few scouts; youths not
ready for full warrior status came forward to hold reins. Make
more sense to have the men do that, taking turns. Not possible,
though. Honor forbids. He sneered a little. That attitude would
have to go eventually, but for now it wasn't worth the trouble of
offending their superstitions.

  "Let's go," he said, drawing his sword. "No male prisoners."
Too much trouble to take back; they were a fair way from home.
"Forward!"

  The men bayed answer: "Forward with Sky Father! Horned
Man with us!"

  Hard dusty ground and ankle-length stubble caught at his
feet. Shieldmen formed up before and on either side of him, and
his bannerman by his side. His head swiveled as he checked.
Front rank with shields up—the Fiernans had some pretty good
archers, much better than the eastern tribes—and spears
bristling. Crossbowmen behind them, with their shields slung
over their backs. He frowned as he looked ahead. Those L-shaped
entrances could be tricky; you couldn't just hit the wall on either
side and storm the gate. All right, we'll hit the outer wall, cross
the laneway, and then turn in. He gave orders, and the pace
picked up to a trot, his plate armor clattering among the
musical chink-chink of the others' chain hauberks. Makes it easy
to stay in shape, this does. No more steppercizer.

  An arrow wobbled out from the palisade and stood in the dirt.
Men barked laughter, and the taut whung of crossbows sounded.
They were well within range, and the heavy quarrels would
probably go right through the rickety stakes that made up the
chest-high defenses; those were as much to keep livestock in as
enemies out. Screams of pain confirmed the thought.

   Walker paused a half-stride to pull the enemy arrow out of the
ground. About thirty inches long, ashwood, fletched with gray
goose feathers—fairly standard. The head was not— a narrow
steel thing like a miniature cold chisel. His teeth skinned back
from his lips. Nantucket-made, to an old pattern. Bodkin point,
they'd been called in medieval England.

  Arrowheads like that had flown in deadly storms at Crecy and
Agincourt.

   The first wave of Walkerburg men hit the embankment and
scrambled up, chopping the edges of their shields into the turf as
they toiled to mount the breast-high earthwork; the others stood
close behind and shot over their heads—his men didn't just bull
in regardless, he'd gotten that well drilled into them, that
winning was more important than showing how brave you were.
He hung back himself, watching the action. Walker had proved
himself often enough to make that possible, and besides, he was
a wizard—halfway to a god, in fact, which exempted him from
the usual standards.

  "This is too easy," he muttered.
   Sections of the palisade were down, ripped aside. His men
stood exchanging spearthrusts through the gaps, then began to
push through—and none of them were down, that he could see.
The second rank were slinging their crossbows, drawing swords,
and setting shields on their arms. He signed abruptly to the men
around him, and they trotted toward the gate, holding their
shields up to protect him. Few arrows flew as they ran, although
there was a sharp crack and yelp as a slingstone struck a man on
the thigh. He stumbled and limped, but kept walking, which
made him lucky—those things could break bone easily enough.

   The gate was closed with wattle hurdles, woven stick barriers
usually used to pen sheep, reinforced with a two-wheeled cart
and some pieces of thorny bush. Walker's eyes narrowed in
interest as a thin column of black smoke rose from within the
enclosure; that was probably a signal. He noticed something else
as someone on the other side of the cart tried to hit him with a
flail—a long stick with a short one fastened to it with a leather
thong, usually used to beat grain out of the stalk.

   Shunngg. The thong parted against the razor-edged katana,
and the shorter oak batten went pinwheeling off. His downstroke
slashed the wielder across the upper arms as she goggled at him,
and the Fiernan fell in a spray of blood that caught him across
the face.

   Too many women, he thought, spitting out the warm
salt-copper taste and wiping a hand across his mouth. Even
Iraiina women would fight sometimes when their homes were
attacked, and the Earth Folk were less hidebound about things
like that. But there should still have been more men behind the
barricade, a solid majority at least. Those that were there were
too old, or too young, besides being too few.

   Conical iron helmets came up behind the Earth Folk, and
red-dripping blades. Combat turned into flight and massacre.

  "Prisoners!" Walker shouted. "Get me some prisoners!"

   He stalked through the chaos, keeping an eye out to make
sure nobody got enthusiastic with torches. The black smoke was
coming from a small hot fire that had been half doused with
damp straw and old woolen rags; he kicked it apart with a boot
and stamped on the embers. Isketerol was already busy with a
girl, his buttocks pumping like a fiddler's elbow as she screamed
and sobbed and writhed— the Tartessian wasn't as bad as
Rodriguez, but he did have a severe case of Spanish Toothache
nonetheless—while most of the rest were looting by the numbers,
the way he'd taught them. He knocked aside one spearshaft
poised to run through a screeching five-year-old.

  "Nits make lice, lord," the warrior growled.

   "The young ones train easier," Walker replied mildly; the man
lowered his eyes and shuffled feet. "Get to work."

   Something's wrong, he thought again, standing by the big
stack of unthreshed grain.

   Ohotolarix and another of his Iraiina came up, pushing a
woman ahead of them. "Here's your prisoner, lord," they said,
grinning; one shoved her forward. She was naked, a big-breasted
brunette staring around in near-hysteria. "We didn't even mount
her ourselves," Ohotolarix added virtuously.

   "You," Walker said, putting the tip of his reddened sword
under her chin. She froze at the touch of the sharp wet steel, eyes
going even bigger. "Where men? Where of-you men?

   She licked her lips and spoke, very carefully. He caught about
one word in four; the Earth Folk language was just too damn
difficult. The man with Ohotolarix frowned and translated:

    "Toward the big… the Great Wisdom, she says, lord." The
warrior made a warding sign of the horns, with the index and
little finger of his right hand. "The Moon-bitch's place. Evil
magic."

   A gust of fury filled Walker, like a blinding light behind the
eyes. Thoughts strung themselves together, dropping into place.
He was suddenly conscious of the woman flopping and gurgling
on the ground before him with her throat gashed open, and the
two Iraiina staring at him goggle-eyed.
   "We don't have much time," he forced himself to say, running
his sword through a rag and sheathing it. "Ohotolarix, see to the
most portable loot, nothing else—no women, nothing bulky. We
leave now. Nothing that can't keep up with the horses. Go, go,
go!"

   They went, running; it was a big perk of having people think
you were supernatural. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell
them to turn the cattle loose too, but there were things even
Hwalkarz the Wizard had to think twice about.

  "What's the matter, blood-brother?" Isketerol said, coming up
smiling and adjusting his clothing.

  "Look at that," Walker grated in English, pulling a sheaf of
wheat from the stack.

   "It's just…" The Tartessian's eyes flicked from Walker's face to
the grain. "The straw is too long. Why would anyone bend that
low to cut grain?"

   "No one did," Walker said, remembering the smooth low cut
in the fields outside the settlement. "A machine did it. So the
fighting men here didn't need to. And if they're gone even from
this pissant little place close to the frontier—"

   Isketerol's eyes bulged. "The Fiernans could be mobilizing all
their fighting men—right now, while we thought they were still
working on the harvest!"

   Walker turned and walked up to the top of the embankment,
facing north, unshipping his binoculars, and looking carefully
from horizon in the east to horizon in the west until he caught
the blink… blink… from the hilltop two miles away.

  "What is that?" the Iberian asked,

   "Heliograph. Signals by flashing lights off a mirror in code.
With good binoculars, it's almost as fast as radio— and harder to
detect." He had a continuous radio watch kept on the
equipment Yare had brought over; a bicycle rig for charging
batteries had been part of the cargo. "And we, my friend, have
been suckered. Let's torch this shitheap and get going. Time to
get the army together."

  Isketerol nodded thoughtfully. "Perhaps… we should take
some, ah, what's the word, precautions!"

  Walker nodded. "Just in case."

   Andy Toffler swore softly under his breath as he stooped,
pushing the goggles up on his forehead. Bad one, he thought.
The buildings and grain were all burning, and the raw harsh
scent made him cough as he flew through it. Lower, and he could
see bodies lying between the burning huts, and more scattered
outside the enclosure. Some of them were moving.

  "GHU here. Hamlet has definitely been destroyed," he said.
"Doesn't look like much is left. Over."

  "Central here. Any sign of wheel tracks?"

   "That's negative, Central. Ground's too hard anyway. I'm
going in."

  "Negative on that. Return to base. Over."

  "Sorry, transmission breaking up. Over."

    He eased the ultralight down, into the stubble field next to the
hamlet. The soft balloon wheels touched as he flared the nose up
a little, killing speed, and the machine ran itself to a stop in
scarcely twelve feet. There was a shotgun in a scabbard on the
frame next to his seat. He racked the slide and made his way
cautiously toward the fires.

  "Damn," he said softly. "Gawd damn."

   The first thing he ran into was sheep, savagely hacked and
stabbed, as if by someone in a very bad mood. Then people,
together as if they'd been herded into a bunch. Women mostly,
and some children. A lot of the women lying on their backs
naked, with their throats cut, or curled around a spear wound.
Toffler swallowed a mouthful of spit and made himself look at
the ground. In the stretch about the hamlet's embankment there
was sign of horses—dung, and the imprint of a shod hoof where
one of them had stepped in it. More bodies just within the wall,
these looking as if some of them had gone down fighting. Many
of them had Nantucket-style crossbow bolts in them, or the
broken stubs, or gaping holes where they'd been cut out for
reuse.

   "Walker," Toffler said, as if the word made his mouth feel
dirty.

   The heat within the enclosure was savage, as the wooden
frames of the buildings went up. Walls collapsed, and he could
hear voices… and there was nothing he could do.

   "God damn me if there isn't," he muttered, and turned on his
heel.

   The track of the cattle was obvious even on this hard ground,
pointing southeast toward the lower wooded ground and the
river valley. He ran back toward the ultralight and flung himself
into the seat, ignoring the faint squawking from the headphones
of the radio. The run was downhill and into the wind; the little
fabric-and-struts aircraft hurled itself aloft as if angels were
pulling on strings from the cloudless sky. Toffler took it recklessly
low, the tricycle undercarriage virtually brushing the tops of the
big oaks and beeches. He remembered things from his boyhood
in the knob country of Kentucky. Driving cattle like that, you'd
have to… yes!

   A faint track, more like a deer trail than a road—just barely
visible through the lush late-summer leaves. They couldn't have
gone far, even by the plodding standards of this abortion of an
aircraft—oh, God, for his Phantom and a mixed load of snake
and nape! Nothing like white phosphorus and napalm for
chastising the evildoers. He did have a helmet with a holder for a
pair of binoculars. He used it, and blurred closeness appeared.

   There. Cattle, and men on horseback, glimpsed in flickering
instants through the leaves and branches. He throttled back the
engine and pushed up the glasses with a snick, ghosting down
through the air as quietly as he could. His left hand held the yoke
while his right was busy with the racked glass bombs by his seat,
unlatching the safety fastener and making ready. They'd put in
some improvements since he flew against the Olmecs, including
a friction primer and fins to guide the fall. Plus he'd practiced.

   Ahead, the enemy were coming out into a small
almost-clearing, littered with the trunks of dead trees and briers,
grass, brush—second growth. The herd of small hairy cattle
bawled and churned with panic at being driven so fast from their
accustomed range, and even expert herdsmen were having their
hands full. His eyes flicked back and forth; forty, fifty men,
perhaps a few more. No chariots. They were all on horseback,
riding with regular saddles and stirrups, leading packhorses as
well. All in metal armor… Jesus, maybe that's Walker himself
down there!

  Ease back on the throttle, engine noise sinking to a low
buzzing drone. The ultralight was almost like flying a parachute;
when you headed into the wind the stall speed was near zero.
Careful. If the wind dies down you could drop like a rock.

   Closer, closer, coming down as if he were falling along an
inclined plane. A few of the men had time to look up at the last
moment.

   Snap. The first bomb soared away in an arc, trailing smoke. It
shattered a dozen feet up on the trunk of a sapling and fire
sprayed in all directions. Horses went berserk, and men tumbled
on the ground screaming as clinging flame ran under their
armor.

    Toffler rammed the throttle home and hauled the nose of the
little arrowhead-shaped craft skyward, banking. Sorry about the
horses, he thought. This time he came in fast and level, adjusting
by eye. Long way from computerized radar bombsights, aren't
we.

   "Eyee-yeeeeee-fazaaa!" he screamed, a yell his Rebel
great-grandfather might have used when he charged behind
Nathan Bedford Forrest. "Take that, you motherfuckers!"

  Snap. Snap. Snap. More of the bombs tumbled away and
slashed knives of flame across the clearing. Cattle scattered into
the woods, and horses. Men died, and the brush itself was
catching alight. This late in summer it might well turn into a
full-fledged forest fire. Then something winked bright at him
from the ground.

  Pttank!

   A hole appeared in the aluminum framing not far from him,
with a fleck of sparks that licked his own neck in stinging fire.
Hands and feet hit yoke and pedals with automatic skill, and the
ultralight jinked from side to side with the agility of a
hummingbird. Crack. Crack. Pttank! Another hit, and gasoline
was leaking from the tank behind him.

   "Uh-oh," he muttered, pushing the throttle forward to the
stops. I know what uh-oh means, he thought. Uh-oh means "I
fucked up."

    Walker fired a last round on the off chance, then lowered the
rifle and looked around. A scream died off into a gurgle and then
silence as a comrade's knife gave a man burned over half his
body the mercy stroke. "How many?" he called. "Let each man
answer his name." They did, as horses were caught and brought
under control. Three dead, five badly wounded, another
half-dozen burned to some degree. And the woods around them
were going up… while the men looked at him. The smell of singed
hair and burned flesh was heavy, and heat prickled sweat across
his skin under the armor.

   "That flying thing can kill you, but no deader than a spear," he
said quietly. "I warned you that we would be making war against
wizards… but my magic drove it off."

  "It flew, lord. A great bird, with a man in its talons."

  "The man ruled it. I've flown so myself, in the past."

  Murmurs of awe. He went on: "Are you men and warriors? Do
you fear death because it wears a new face?"

  Of course you do, he knew. But they couldn't possibly admit
or show it, and that put new strength into them. They might
have fled screaming a few minutes before if he hadn't fought
back, but now they would be all the fiercer for that moment of
weakness.

  "Ohotolarix," he said. "Rig horse litters for the ones too badly
wounded to walk."

  The war band grew busy. Isketerol got his horse under control
and led it over.

   "That must have been shadowing me all the time I moved
against the Eagle," he said bitterly. "That's how they knew my
attack was coming. Why haven't they used it to drop death from
above before?"

   "At a guess, they only have the one. And probably they were
saving it for a surprise," Walker said tightly. He clicked the
magazine out of the rifle and inserted a fresh one. "It's too low
and slow to be a great threat if there's someone with a rifle
waiting."

   Which means I have to black out Walkerburg against air
raids, and keep Cuddy and one of the Garands there. "Oh, but
there's payback time coming."

  "There he is!"

   Swindapa reined in and stood in the stirrups. Beside her
Marian lowered her binoculars and passed them across. The
Fiernan focused them. Yes, the flying thing had landed, and
Toffler lay unmoving in the harness. The air of a summer
afternoon enfolded her, warm and sweet with the smells of horse
and crushed grass, but she shivered a little.

   The party urged their horses into a trot and then a gallop.
Even then she enjoyed that a bit; it was like being a bird, flying
to the drumbeat of the hooves. The horses blew and stamped as
they reined in, and the American physician ran across to the
injured man.

  "Alive!" he said, and others crowded around to help him lower
the man to a blanket. "Cracked rib, hole in his side— lost a lot of
blood."

   He looked up, hands busy and red. "Who's Type O?" Several
hands went up, and one of the volunteers dismounted and lay
down beside the injured man, baring her arm. Swindapa looked
over at Marian, remembering how they'd been joined that way
on Eagle, after the battle with the Jaguar People. The black
woman was frowning at the flying thing, leaning close to
examine it.

  "Thirty ought six," she said. "Or near enough. One of those
Garands Walker had with him. Probably him, then. Smith,
Valenz, you take six and stay with the medic and Toffler.
Message to forward HQ, we need a wagon, a mechanic, spare
parts, and reinforcements. The rest of you, follow me."

   She drew the pistol at her side. Swindapa brought up the
crossbow that hung at her knee, checking to make sure the
quarrel was seated properly, and noticed the others doing the
same. They spread out into a line across the fields and cantered
slowly forward, examining the ground as they went, checking
every hollow and patch of trees. In one small copse they found a
body, a woman lying facedown in the litter of oak leaves and
acorns, not far from a spring that bubbled slowly out of a
moss-lined hollow.

    Swindapa dismounted. The body was cool but not stiffened,
and there was a wound under the ribs, and blood turning black
all down the side and flank. Despite the shade, flies were busy
already, walking over drying eyeballs and swarming around the
rent flesh. She would have been very thirsty, the Fiernan girl
thought sadly, with a touch of anger like a bronze gong rung far
away. So she was crawling to the water.

   She closed the staring eyes, then brought her head up sharply
at a sound. A squeaking sort of sound…

  "Wait," she said when Marian motioned impatiently. "Wait."

  (Casting back and forth, she caught a smell familiar to anyone
who'd grown up around infants. She followed it, and another
squeaking sound. The baby was swaddled in a pair of wool
shawls, hidden in the roots of a half-fallen oak. She opened the
bundle, cleaned the infant and her hands with leaves and
springwater—it was a girl, she saw— and rewrapped it.

  "The mother must have run this far with it," she said to
Marian. "It's not hurt, just hungry."

  Marian nodded grimly. "You'd better stay here with it, then."

  "I will not!" Swindapa said hotly. Then, remembering she was
supposed to keep the discipline: "Ma'am."

   Marian snorted; the Fiernan could see her smile struggling to
break free, and wondered again why she kept the lovely thing
caged so often. It should fly like a bright bird.

  "All right then," she said. "Let's be on the alert, people."

   They rode farther. The low smoldering told them the fire had
had its way with the hamlet. Swindapa looked down in
bewilderment at the dead sheep; somehow they seemed almost
as bad as the people. Ravens rose in a protesting storm of black
wings as the horses came near, except for a few too busy with
their feasting.

  "Why… why kill like this?" she said.

   "Because they were interrupted, at a guess," Marian said, her
face like something carved from basalt. "That made them angry.
Stevenson, Hamid, Cortelone, scout the enclosure. Everyone else,
keep your eyes moving."

   They did, but nothing moved. Nothing but the wind drifting
scraps of bitter smoke across the sun-faded fields, and the grass,
and birds and insects. One of the Americans raised his crossbow
and shot a raven perched on a body and trying for an eyeball; it
died in a spatter of blood and long glossy feathers, and that
made her feel worse. The baby fretted.

  "Nobody," the Eagle People soldier called Stevenson said,
wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. "Not even the
children. They… put them all in a hut before they…"

   Marian nodded. "Let's get going," she said tonelessly. "It's
time to put an end to this."

   Swindapa let her eyes fall to the wiggling bundle in the crook
of her arm. She could scarcely feel the movements, through the
armor. Time and past time, she thought, as unshed tears burned
her eyes. Then: I'll have to find a nanny goat.

  The baby cried, lonely and hurt and alive.

  "Another raid, while we wait here," Maltonr raged. "How
many struck that place?" Alston asked patiently, looking down
over the assembled warriors from her hillside perch. More than I
expected. A good four thousand.

  "Sixty, from the tracks! It was a slaughter!"

  "And… 'dapa?"

   The Fiernan hesitated, looked at them both, and then went on
reluctantly: "Five warriors are here, from that place."

  "Would five warriors have made a difference against sixty
armored fighters of Walker's own band?… Well? I asked you a
question, Maltonr son of Sinsewid."

  "No," he said after a long moment, looking aside. "No, they
would not."

   "They would have died, Maltonr, died with the rest to no
purpose. But this—" She jerked her head toward the assembly.
"This can accomplish our purpose and put an end to such things
forever. Is that truth?"

  "It is truth," he ground out.

  "Then let's get on with this."

  "Congratulations, Captain," Ian said from her other side.
"You've managed to introduce conscription and taxation to the
Earth Folk at one fell swoop."
   "More like one swell foop," Alston muttered, looking out over
the plain. More and more bands of Earth Folk fighters—and
would-be fighters—were trickling in. The provisions were coming
in, too. "Not really conscription. They're all volunteers."

  "Volunteers after you made it plain that the ones who'd joined
you would all raid the herds of the ones who hadn't," Ian pointed
out. "Thus bankrupting them. All the ones who don't want to go
back to farming have to join up."

  "Volunteers. And somebody has to feed them. The
Grandmothers have always collected this tithe thing."

  "For building and maintaining their monuments," he said.
"You're handing around the collection plate for the Pentagon.
Sorry," he added as she turned to look at him.

   The broad-featured black face showed white teeth in a smile.
"No offense," she said. Her helmeted head jerked toward the
east. "When Walker brings the Sun People at us, they're goin' to
come with levies of near every fit man in their tribes. If we don't
get some organization into this shambolic crowd, these here'll
get ground into hamburger."

  "Don't you like my people?" Swindapa said, frowning.

   Alston started slightly and turned. " 'Dapa, I like your people
very much. They just need to learn some new things, is all." She's
been saying things like that too often lately.

  Swindapa sighed and looked down from the slight rise. Her
expression grew glum. "That is true."

   Alston turned again, blinking slightly at the sun that was
almost in her eyes. That meant everyone could see her clearly,
though. The speech ran through her mind, cobbled together in
all-night bull sessions with the Arnsteins, Swindapa, a clutch of
Fiernan bards and poets who'd provided local symbolism and
would spread it far and wide.

  "Warriors of the Spear Mark," she began, raising the
microphone to her lips. She waited for the gasps to die down as
the amplified sound boomed out. "Friends, allies, Earth
Folk—this is your earth. Eastward lies the enemy, those who
burn and destroy, those who come to take all the White Isle from
you—this sacred isle, this almost-heaven, this village set about
with the palisade of the sea against misfortune and the storms of
war…"

  Half an hour later she licked sweat from her lips, lifting her
arms until the rolling cheers died down somewhat, and
continued:

   "Forward, children of Moon Woman! You fight for your
hearths and your families, for the ashes of your
ancestors"—luckily the Earth Folk did cremate their dead, which
meant she didn't have to find a better metaphor than the author
of The Persians—"and the Wisdoms of your faith. Forward! To
the fighting! Winner takes all!"

   The long slow roar of their voices washed over her like surf.
She threw her arms up again in the Fiernan gesture of prayer;
and between them was framed the rising moon, just as they'd
planned. A growl came from behind the hill, and then Andy
Toffler soared over in the repaired ultralight. He'd insisted on
flying, and the wound was healing. This time the craft's wings
were painted to mimic those of the sacred Owl, messenger and
avatar of Moon Woman.

   The roar turned to a shuddering mass gasp. "Victory!" she
shouted.

     CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  September - October, Year 2 A.E.

  "Well this is it," Alston said.

   Christ on a crutch, that's inane, she thought. Her mouth was
dry, despite a swig from the canteen, and the morning's bread
and meat had settled under her breastbone in a sour lump. Too
much. Too fuckin' much depends on this.

  The command group was placed on a slight rise behind the
long ridge. All along the reverse slope stood—and squatted and
sat and lay—the Fiernans and Americans. Five thousand four
hundred thirty-three as of this morning. There might be a
hundred more or less by now; the locals still had a tendency to
come and go as they pleased. About a thousand of the Fiernans
in Nantucket-made armor, and the rest in their native linen
tunics; at least now everyone had a short sword and knife, the
spears all had steel heads, and the archers had steel arrowheads
and the slingers lead shot.

   Scattered clouds went by above, pushed by a freshening wind
out of the west cool enough to make sweat feel a bit chilly.
Patches of shade went with it, throwing the host into shadow.
When they passed, sunlight glinted on edged metal, on unit
banners, on the crouching shapes of catapults and
flamethrowers. Her eyes flicked back and forth to make sure;
reserves, solid blocks of archers and spearmen, heliographs and
mounted messengers ready…

    Up. Her gaze came up, and fixed on the host of the easterners,
bending slightly to look through the eyepieces of the big
tripod-mounted binoculars. About our numbers— probably a
little less. That confirmed what Toffler and the scouts and spies
had estimated.

   Turning the traversing wheel put blurring jumps between
moments of clear vision. Ordinary herdsmen-warriors in leather
kilt and tunic, their hair twisted into braids… but most of the
spearheads and axes flashed with the cold brightness of steel, not
the ruddy warmth of bronze. Here a grizzled patriarch came
trotting, ax over his shoulder and six sons around him, from a
solid bearded family man down to a fresh-faced youth barely old
enough to raise a fuzz. There an iron-armored chief in a chariot
bright with paint and bronze and gold, throwing up his spear
and kissing it, laughing as his stocky ponies pranced in their
bedizened harness. Here, there,-thousands upon thousands of
them, coming to battle as eagerly as to their bridal nights. A
haze of dust marked their coming, stretching from south to
north nearly a mile; and all along it light sparkled and broke and
glittered on point and edge, rippling like a field of stars as they
marched.
   Where… ah. There in the center of the enemy, four or five
hundred men marching in a solid block, every one of them
armored in chain mail, with conical helmets and metal-faced
shields. Most of the shields bore the same emblem, a fanged
wolfs head in red on a black background. One or two figures in
Nantucket-made plate suits, beneath the banner with its
wolf's-head flag and aurochs horns. A huge man in a chariot
following behind; that must be Daurthunnicar himself,
accompanying his son-in-law. Spies and prisoner-of-war
interrogations had given them a pretty fair assessment of the
enemy command structure.

  And behind him, two metal shapes on wheeled carts, each
pulled by six horses. The cannon, dammit.

   "Ian, Doreen," she said. "You'd better get back to the aid
station. This isn't goin to be so… neat and tidy for long. Not with
these armies."

  The Arnsteins grinned at her; a little stiffly, but they did it.
"No, I think we'll hang around for a while," Doreen said.

  Ian nodded. "Priceless opportunity for a historian," he said.
"Besides, we've got these shotguns, if worse comes to worst."

   Alston nodded, and took a cup from Swindapa's offered hand.
"A toast then. Ladies, gentlemen—let's kick their butts back to
the Channel!"

   She knocked back the whiskey. The Americans in the
command staff cheered; so did the Fiernans, as the translators
gave them the words. The glasses tinkled and crashed on a rock
as they all emptied theirs and threw, and then she motioned to
the signaler:

   "Phase one, execute."

   Flags went up all along the line—Old Glory in the center,
flanked by the crescent Moon the Fiernans had chosen when they
grasped the concept of a national banner. It was silver on green,
the same as the traditional flag of Islam; even then she spared a
brief instant's cold inner laughter at how the Muslims would
have hated that. Slave-trading, woman-hating bastards. And
better still, odds are you'll never even exist here.

   There was a massive rumbling sound, thousands of feet
pounding the dry short grass. The front ranks of the allied force
crested the hill and went a few steps beyond it; she could see the
easterners halting in ragged clumps as they saw the ridgeline
before them sprout armed men. Meanwhile all along the allied
front warriors were at work, pounding short stakes with iron
points at either end into the ground; swine feathers, they'd called
them in Europe back in the old days. Planted at a
forty-five-degree angle, they were just the right height to catch a
horse in the chest. The blocks of archers started planting shafts
in the dirt at their feet, ready to hand, and moving their quivers
from their backs around to their waists. Alston turned and
checked; cartloads of bundled shafts were moving up in the low
ground behind the line, ready to replenish as needed.

  "What are they doing?" Swindapa asked, nodding toward the
enemy. Her voice was a little husky, but calm.

   "Maneuvering," Alston said. "Their center's hanging back,
flanks are moving."

   Head and horns formation, she thought. Evidently she wasn't
the only one who'd studied the Zulu Wars. Damn, and here I get
to play the British. Life's little ironies.

   "Messenger. Unit commanders are to repeat the standing
orders; when the cannon points at you, fall flat. Keep lookin' at it,
and when the flash is over, get up again."

  That wouldn't work if the other side had more guns… hell, it
might not work now with only two.

  The thunder of feet from the enemy host grew, and the
squealing of ungreased wooden wheels. The sound drew her eyes
over to the right, where the barbarians were moving in.

    "Here we go." Here's where I find out if they were really
listening to what I said.
   Merenthraur felt his heart swell with pride. Fifty chariots!
Fifty chariots followed him. He looked upslope toward the
Earther host. Many, many… but the sons of long-speared Sky
Father were many, too, and the gods fought for them. Not much
of a slope. Smooth grass, not enough hill to really slow a team.

   A swift-footed youth ran up, panting. "The rahax
commands—take your men, smash those of the foe on the end of
their line, there," he said, pointing to the southward. "If you
prevail, the host follows, and great will be your reward."

  "I hear the word of the rahax."

  Word of Hwalkarz, in truth, but that is as good. Better.
Daurthunnicar was a good rahax for the tribe in the old way, but
Hwalkarz would make the Iraiina lords of all the earth.

  If we win this fight, he reminded himself, looking back. The
chariots were ready—Iraiina, and allies. The footmen waited
behind. He waved his spear, then blew three blasts on the
cowhorn war trumpet.

   His knees flexed automatically to take the jerk of the chariot
starting forward, moving from a walk to a trot. Earth hammered
at his feet. "Keep it slow," he commanded. "No more than a trot
to just outside bowshot range, then fast as they'll go."

   He pushed back his helmet by the nasal; the new headgear
gave more protection than his old bone-strapped leather cap, but
you couldn't see as well. The Earthers were standing oddly—in a
line, the way Hwalkarz taught. In two lines, one just over the
crest of the hill, another behind it on the highest ground. More
strangeness; on the edge of their line was a clump all with
spears, then a larger one only with bows. Foolishness—a man
with a spear had some chance of stopping a chariot at close
quarters. They were counting on those little spears driven into
the earth, but he had a cure for that.

   "When we get to flung-spear distance, turn right," he barked
to the nephew who drove his chariot. "Take their line at a slant,
so."
   He pointed with a javelin, and blew the cowhorn again. That
way the breasts of the horses would take the sides of the poles,
not the points—and now their breasts were protected by armor
too. We'll lose some to the arrows, he knew. Perhaps he'd be
killed himself. Well, he had sons and nephews enough to carry on
his blood, and Sky Father would greet him in the halls of the sun,
perhaps grant him rebirth. That was the way for a man to die, at
another warrior's hands, not in his sleeping-straw like a woman.
He lifted the javelin, ready to cast. And the sun will be in their
eyes, anyway.

   Nearer. Behind him the tribesmen were snarling, roaring into
the hollows of their shields, shaking axes and spears and
screaming out threats and the savage war cries of their clans.
Now the driver shook out the reins, and the horses rocked into a
gallop, the other chariots spreading out on either side of him like
the wings of a bird—like the wings of a falcon, stooping on its
prey! His heart lifted, but he crouched down slightly and brought
his shield forward on the left, ready to protect himself and the
driver as well. The javelin cocked back.

   The front rank of Fiernans were raising their bows, drawing
to the ear… but none were shooting! What is this? The enemy
grew nearer, nearer, nearly close enough to cast. Behind him the
charge of the chariots was a groaning thunder, the whoops and
shrieks of their drivers the howling of a pack.

   Then someone shouted on the slope ahead. Arrows rose into
the air—first those of the Earthers he could see, then more,
impossibly many and all at once, swarming up from the hollow
behind the ridge. All headed at him. A deep-toned thrumming
rose and died, and over it a wailing, whistling sound.

   Arrows cracked into his shield, half a dozen of them, driving
his crouch down into an almost-squat. Points jammed through
sheet steel and leather and wood, glittering on the inside of the
curve. Another whacked off the side of his helmet and skittered
away. Three hit the driver, sulking feather-deep into his
unarmored torso. Too many to count struck in the frame of the
chariot, and as many more into the horses that drew it.
Merenthraur was far too shocked to react consciously, but a
lifetime's training curled him for the impact as the war-car went
over at speed. Still something wrenched with blinding pain in his
leg as he landed, an explosion of stars in his head and the taste of
blood and dust in his open mouth. He spat a tooth and dragged
the shield over him as arrows sprouted in the ground all around
him, driving into the turf with multiple shink sounds.

   He could see the iron-tipped rain falling on his men. The
chariots were mostly down, or wheeling back. Behind them the
footmen faltered and stopped, doing precisely the wrong
thing—hesitating between courage and fear. Rage filled
Merenthraur; what trick was this? Arrows came at you one at a
time, as the archer drew and loosed! Not in a single blasting
storm, so thick no man could dodge or shield himself.

   Above him a man's voice bellowed. He didn't know the
Fiernan Bohulugi language. If he had, the words would still have
sounded odd, in an accent like that of his sorcerer-lord. Three
words, shouted over and over again: draw… all together… shoot!

   The footmen broke and ran, the few surviving chariots among
them. Merenthraur pushed himself to his feet with his shield,
shouting incoherently against the piteous squealing of wounded
horses. The Fiernan spearmen were rushing out into the wreck of
the chariots, points busy. He drew his sword and set himself as
two attacked him, one a youth and one with a grown man's
beard; his blade chopped a shaft aside, but his knee betrayed
him when he tried to follow through with a blow of the shield,
and he toppled sideways.

   He had just enough time to realize the youth was a woman
before the point of her spear grated through his face and into his
brain. The sound of splintering bone was the last he ever heard.

  "Shit, shit, shit," Alston swore under her breath. "Rapczewicz,
you're in charge here until I get back. Shit!"

   She ran down the slope and flung herself into the saddle,
barely conscious of how six months' practice had made that
possible—not easy, she realized as she groped for a stirrup and
the animal squealed and surged sideways, but possible. Then she
was galloping southward along the front of the line, ignoring the
cheers, barely conscious of Swindapa's form beside her with the
banner in one hand and the butt braced on her stirrup iron.

  "Back!" she shouted. "Back, damn you all, back."

   The milling chaos that had been the right wing of her line
slowed and stopped. "They flee!" one man shouted, pointing back
toward the easterners line. "They run in fear!"

   Alston stood in the stirrups, the flag beside her and her height
on horseback drawing eyes. "Back! It's a trick—" not now it isn't,
but it might be next time—"and you'll fight when I tell you, not
before. So you swore! Is your oath good?"

   Swindapa came in on her heels, in a torrent of Fiernan
Bohulugi. Slowly, the general rush stopped and then turned back
toward their positions. Just then there was a huge flat whunk
sound, and a rising screech came at her, the horse rearing as
something plowed up the turf not twenty feet away. Alston
slugged the reins and forced it trembling back to all fours; it
tried to turn in a circle and then subsided. A glance over her
shoulder showed the plume of dirty-white gunpowder smoke
rising from the enemy line.

   "Stay in your positions until you're told!" she shouted, and
repeated the message as they cantered back to the original
position. "Stay! Hold them!"

   "That was a fucking fiasco," Walker muttered, tracking with
his binoculars. "Refusing the slope—Alston has me pegged as
Napoleon, but I'm not that crazy yet."

   She must have the archers standing on the opposite side of
that rise, just out of sight. The old trick the British had used in
the war against Napoleon's marshals, keeping their infantry out
of cannon fire until the last moment.

   He went on in Iraiina: "It's not the first blow that settles a
fight," he said confidently, and moved over to the cannon. "They
may—yes, they're giving us a target. Lay her so."

  Two men at the end of the first gun's trail heaved, and the
muzzle swiveled around. The gunner turned the elevating screw
and stepped aside, poising the linstock and its glowing slow
match. Walker raised his glasses again. The Fiernans were
swarming forward to the attack.

   "Yup, can't stand seeing someone run away… Oh, good, it's
the black bitch herself. There's your aiming point, men—that
flag. Now."

   The crew were practiced enough, but he'd only had enough
powder for a few live firings. The massive whump sound set
horses rearing and men starting in fear down the long ragged
line of the Iraiina-led host. He watched the fall of shot and swore
softly as the streaming Stars and Stripes came galloping out of
the plume of dirt plowed up by the roundshot. Cheering ran
along the enemy line as the two riders made their way back
along it.

   "Reload with ball and hold fire," he said to the cannon crew as
they ran their weapon forward; recoil jumped it back every time,
of course. Louder: "Sky Father fights for us! Hear His thunder!"

   That brought cheers for him, too. The crew went through
their routine: stick the bundle of rags on the end of the rammer
into the leather bucket, then down the barrel with a quick twist
to quench any lingering sparks in a long hiss of steam. Then the
cartridge, powder in a dusty linen bag, a wooden sabot, and the
iron cannonball.

   "They're obviously not going to come to us," he muttered to
himself. Well, he wouldn't in Alston's position, either. His army
needed to get into the Fiernan Bohulugi lands and get at their
supplies, or hunger would force them to disperse in a week or
less. He had to attack, to break them, and do it soon.

  "Father and lord," he said, stepping over to Daurthunnicar's
chariot. "Summon the chiefs."

  "Aren't they going to, ah, try and take us in the flank or
something?" Ian asked.

  Alston chuckled without lifting her eyes from the big
tripod-mounted binoculars. "They just did, Ian, and it didn't
work."

   Her head came up. "They're havin' a staff conference, looks
like… You see," she went on to the scholar, "that sort of thing is
easier said than done—flank attacks, indirect approach,
blitzkrieg, elegant ways of fightin'. Usually happens when one
army is a lot better than the other—better organized, most often.
Or the generals are. Or somebody gets dead lucky. But there's not
much room for that here; neither of these armies is what you'd
call maneuverable. The Sun People are a bit fiercer, but the
Fiernans are fightin' for their homes. No real unit structure on
either side, not much cavalry except those chariots, and they're
awkward. And I'm not a fool, and neither is Walker, damn him.
Worst sort of battle, both sides pretty evenly matched."

  "What decides who wins, then?"

   "Luck and endurance. There they are, and here we are, and
both of us have a pretty good idea of where all the other side's
forces are. So we'll probably just pound and pound and pound at
each other, till somebody makes a really bad mistake, or breaks
under the strain. We've got some advantage, since defending is
easier than attacking."

   "Oh," Ian said, shivering slightly. Last man standing wins. It
didn't sound very pleasant.

   He switched his attention back to the enemy. They were
stirring, a stream of chariots wheeling away from the central
location to points along the line. Bright sunlight flickered and
glimmered on the war-cars, gold and bronze and plumes on the
horses. Chiefs, he realized. Probably called in to hear orders;
more likely to listen to them that way than to a low-status
messenger, from what he knew of Iraiina customs. Horns
sounded, dunting and snarling.

   Then the enemy formation stretched at the ends, thinning
out. The center of it seethed for a while, then began to move
forward in a compact mass many ranks deep. The armored elite
in the center was moving in a blunt wedge shield to shield,
chanting as they came, a deep rolling male chorus, thousands of
voices, Ha-ba-da, Ha-ba-da, Ha-ba-da, endlessly. After a
moment they began to punctuate it by beating time on their
shields with the shafts of their spears: BOOM-boom-boom,
BOOM-boom-boom. It was shattering to hear, seemed to take
control of his heart and make it thunder to escape from the cage
of his ribs. In the middle of the swaying, chanting horde men
trundled something on wheels, like a small wagon, covered in
tarpaulin.

  "Well," he heard Alston mutter, "either he's given up on
subtle, or he's bein' more subtle than I can grasp."

  Then she rapped out an order. "Ready with the darters.
Prepare to execute Phase B, part one. Execute."

   Closer, and the enemy on the flanks was moving forward as
well. He moistened his lips. Two slamming-door sounds, and the
bronze cannon behind the enemy jumped back as they vomited
plumes of smoke. A rising, whistling sound and a crash; plumes
of earth shot up from the slope in front of the Fiernan position.
Not ten yards in front of him it struck again, and several Fiernan
were down, some of them screaming. The others closed in as the
dead and injured were dragged backward into the shelter of the
ridge.

   "Not too bad," Alston said quietly. "Come on, boys and girls,
hold them, hold, hold…

  "Now!" she said.

    Bugles and trumpets blew. The crews of the dart-throwing
engines pushed them up over the crest of the hill and spun the
wheels. Tunk. Tunk. Six-foot shafts leaped out toward the
easterner phalanx in long arching curves, seeming to slow as
they gained distance. Ian winced as he saw one strike, slamming
through a shield and the man behind it and the man behind him
, like lumps of meat on a shish kebab. The enemy formation was
just close enough to begin to see faces now, still chanting and
pounding, their pace picking up. The cannon firing in support
were aiming at the dart-casters. A cannonball struck one twenty
yards down the line with an enormous crash of splintering wood
and metal. More screaming came from around it, and bodies
were carried away.

  Oh, God, make it stop, he thought.

   To either side and ahead the massed archers were putting
shafts to their bows; only the first two rows could see the
approaching enemy, but the others behind were taking their
alignment from them. A cannonball struck two of the forward
rank as he watched, and they splashed backward onto their
comrades. He could see staring eyes and clenched teeth, but the
ranks stayed firm, raising their yew bows skyward. Marian drew
her sword and held it over her head, marking the time for the
central blocks. Officers turned their eyes to it, raising their own
hands or blades to repeat the signal.

   "What a fuckin' waste of courage," she said quietly, looking at
the approaching host. "Now!" The blade slashed downward.

   A thousand bows released within a second of each other. The
arrows streaked upward, the points winking at the top of their
arches as the sunlight caught the whetted metal, then poised for
a second and fell. Before they struck, two more volleys were in
the air, whistling.

   A hundred yards away, the pounding chant of the enemy gave
way to a long, guttural howling roar that made the small hairs
along his spine struggle to rise under the constricting cloth.
Their measured advance broke into a crashing trot, and the rear
ranks swept their shields up over their heads. The arrows came
down on them like iron hail. Most stuck quivering in the shields,
or bounced aside from the tough wood and leather, or glanced
from helmets and mail coats. Many went through, and the
marching ranks rippled and eddied around bodies still or
writhing on the ground.

  Again and again, a volley falling every six seconds, but the
warriors of the Sun People kept coming.

   "Forward the spears," Alston said. Drums and trumpets
signaled.

  Columns trotted forward, up and over the rise, spreading out
with a deep-chested shout mixed here and there with the
hawk-shrieks of female voices. These were the Fiernans who'd
received Nantucket plate-armor suits and a modicum of training
in the last few months. A cannon round struck one six-deep file
as it breasted the rise, and a whole row went down in wreck. The
remainder closed up and followed, fanning out to meet the Sun
People in a bristling array of spearpoints.

   God, I can smell it, he thought—like the aid station after the
last battle, but here it was in the open air, shit and blood. Like
any slaughterhouse, God, I may become a vegetarian after this.

   "Open fire, catapults," Alston ordered, her hand clenching on
the hilt of her sword.

    The second set of machines went into action, throwing arms
lobbing globes that trailed smoke. There were four of them; one
fell short, trailing fire between the forces. Another overshot, and
a splash of orange-red streaked the slope behind the attackers,
where arrow-wounded men screamed and tried to crawl out of
the path of the sticky jellied gasoline. Two more came down
squarely on target, shattering on the upraised shields of the
attackers. Men dropped to the ground writhing, or ran tearing
and beating at their flesh. The whole phalanx wavered, and then
steadied as chiefs shouted and waved their standards.

   "Forward!" he could hear them screaming. "Forward with Sky
Father! Death-shame for all cowards! Will you turn your backs
on women? Your ancestors will piss on your spirits!"

   The Fiernan spears were ready, but their ranks were
thinner—had to be, when so many were archers. The shafts kept
falling out of the sky, but soon the foremost enemy would be at
handgrips, too close to risk blind fire.

   Everything seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then the
rhythmic shouting gave way to a long roar, and under it the flat
unmusical clang and crash and rattle of metal on metal and
wood and leather. The Fiernan ranks swayed back a step under
the impact, then another… and held. Men gasped and struck,
and here and there one would sink down; the front ranks were
dropping their spears and drawing shorter weapons, while their
comrades thrust over their shoulders. Knives were out, and men
were rolling under the feet of others locked shield to shield,
stabbing upward. He saw one such take a heel in the face, try to
crawl back, and then go down under a half-dozen boots as the
line swayed over him and men stamped desperately for footing.
Flung spears from the rear ranks of the attackers answered the
rain of arrows, and dead men stayed upright in the close press.

   Alston was standing like an onyxine statue as she tried to keep
the whole long thrashing line of battle in sight, through dust and
smoke and confusion. Then something wobbled up out of the
enemy ranks, slow enough to be clearly seen—a barrel.

  "Down!" she shouted, diving for the earth.

   Something jerked Ian's feet out from under him; he went
down awkwardly, the air battered out of him through his armor.
Something went bwammp 'behind him, and something else
went whrit-whrit-whrit over his head, hitting something with a
sound like a buzz saw going into wet wood. Blood splashed his
face. Then there was a larger, softer whump from behind him,
and he felt heat wash over the back of his neck.

   Doreen's hands were fumbling at him. "I'm all right," he
gasped, kicking in revulsion at the mangled something that lay
across his legs. "I'm all right." Which was physically true, he
realized, but otherwise a lie. "What happened!"

   "Gunpowder, barrel full of gunpowder—it landed right on top
of the flamethrower and its fuel. Why didn't you get down, you
idiot? I had to pull on your feet—you could have been killed.
Meshuggah!" Her voice had a touch of shrillness.

  "Oh," he grunted, coming half upright. "Thanks."

   He looked back that way and then averted his eyes, wishing he
could squeeze out the memory as people braver than he felt tried
to haul survivors out of the lake of fire. Alston was on her feet
again, listening to a messenger.

  "Running?" she said sharply.
   The Fiernan messenger grinned. "No, but backing up very
fast—that way," he said, pointing. "They don't like our arrows,
not as many there have armor, either side."

  Alston blinked, looked to her left, to the north, and tried to
remember exactly how the ridge curved, and her line with it.
"They're backing up to the northeast? Not just east?"

      The sound from that direction had altered, a different note to
it.

  "Yes," he said happily. "Northeast—maybe they want to go
home."

   "Oh, shit," she said. "Rapczewicz! Take over! Ortiz, move the
second company to face north, refuse the flank, we've got a
disaster brewing. I'm taking the first company and doing what I
can. Get to it. Now."

   She turned and ran down the hill—the horses were gone,
they'd been too near where that barrel of powder had landed,
and thank the Lord Walker didn't seem to have more to spare.
One of the reserve companies was waiting there, a company of
her precious Americans—troops she could really rely on to do as
they were told. As she ran her mind's eye could paint the picture.
The Sun People falling back, Maltonr—he was the senior Fiernan
on that end—going whooping in for glory and vengeance, real
redhead stuff. Then the enemy turning out in the open where the
Fiernan archers couldn't mass their fire, turning the fight into a
melee, sweeping back up the ridge and into the rear of her line…

  Just like Senlac. And Harold Godwinsson led an army of
militia from Wessex too, and the Norman commander was
named William. God, I know You're an ironist, but isn't this
going a bit far?

   "Enemy breakthrough," she snapped to Hendriksson. "We're
going to contain it." Or so I hope. "Follow me."

  The Americans formed up smoothly, moving off at the
double-quick. Ahead of them was a growing roar.
  "Ask me for anything but time," Walker quoted angrily to
himself, then took his temper in an iron grip.

   "No, father and lord," he said to Daurthunnicar. "You must
stay here with the last of the reserves. I and my hand-fast men
will strike the enemy from the rear, and then they will give way.
You must strike then, to push them into rout—when they start to
run, to flee in terror, then we can slaughter until our arms grow
tired. But it must be at the right time."

   Daurthunnicar hesitated, shirting in his chariot. The
framework creaked; he'd put on a good deal of weight over the
last six months. "Honor is with the foremost," he protested.
"How can men obey me as high rahax if my spear is not red and
my ax is still bright?"

   Oh, fucking Jesus Christ on a skateboard. "Honor is in
victory, father and lord," he ground out between clenched teeth.
"When all men see your banner sweeping the enemy into flight,
honor will be yours."

   After a long moment the Iraiina chieftain shifted his eyes, not
convinced, but giving way to his son-in-law's superior mana. "I
hear your word. Go and take the victory, chieftain who shares my
blood."

   "All right," Walker muttered, raising a hand in salute. "Let's
go."

   His eyes were fixed to the north. Right on target. That
Shaumsrix. is a smart cookie. Pretend to run away, take 'em
when they got scattered in pursuit, then follow up with a nice
brisk attack of your own—the Iraiina had caught on to the idea
like it was a religious revelation. Just two things were needed to
turn it into the battle-winner it deserved to be.

   He turned in the saddle to look at his men. They were
gripping their weapons and leaning forward, their longing eyes
trained on the great heaving scrimmage up along the crest of the
ridge.

  "Listen up!" The helmeted faces turned to him. "We're going
there—" he pointed northwest—"and we're going to kill them all.
Limber up those guns, and keep in good order—any man who
breaks ranks, dies like a dog. This is the ax blow that will decide
this fight, and I mean to hit hard and straight."

   They cheered him, roaring out his name. "Cheer after the
victory, not before. Let's go!"

   He led off, keeping the horse to a fast walk; the men behind
him were on foot, and no matter how fit you were, you started
puffing and blowing pretty fast if you tried to run in armor. No
use at all getting there with the men too exhausted to fight. The
field guns rumbled along behind him, and he grinned at the
sound, looking down at a map drawn on deerhide with charcoal
held across the horn of his saddle. Most of Alston's army was
sheltering on or just behind this long ridge, with a broad smooth
stretch of open country just beyond. If he could get the cannon
setup there at the north end of the Fiernan line, they'd have
enfilade fire right down the whole enemy force. Alston wouldn't
have any choice—she'd have to come to him. All the men would
have to do would be to guard the guns, and when the enemy
rushed them… well, that was why God and William Walker had
invented grapeshot.

   The ground ahead was littered with wounded, and he was only
a couple of hundred yards from the rear of the Sun People's array
as he hurried toward the right flank. Most of the injured here
had arrows in them; they were lying and crying for water or help
or crawling slowly back toward the host's lines. A few of them
tried to grab at the boots of Walker's band as they passed, and
were kicked aside. Eastward was a long dry valley, filled with
scrub and second growth; they'd trampled paths through it that
morning, marching to the battleground.

  I'll really have to organize some sort of medical corps
someday, he thought. It was wasteful to allow useful fighting
men to die unnecessarily. His own band had a horse-drawn
ambulance to take their wounded back to Hong.

   He bent his head again over the leather map. Just as he did so
something went through the air where his head had been, with a
flat vicious whiplike crack.
   Walker's men stopped and milled in puzzlement as their
leader's uptime reflexes threw him out of the saddle and flat on
the ground. He peered through the nervously moving legs of the
quarterhorse and saw a puff of smoke from a clump of bushes
two hundred yards away.

  "There!" he roared, pointing. "Kill him! There, you fools!"

   He scrambled upright, gripping at the reins to keep the horse
between him and the unseen sniper, reaching over the saddle to
grope for the Garand in its saddle scabbard. "Keep still,
Bastard," he hissed, but the stallion was rolling its eyes and
laying back its ears, spooked by the smell of blood and the noise.

   A second later there was another crack, this time
accompanied by a ptank and a tremendous sideways leap-surge
of the horse; that knocked Walker flat, still gripping the reins as
Bastard reared. An ironshod hoof came down on his shoulder,
and he shouted at the hard sharp pain as a thousand pounds of
weight shifted for a second onto the thin metal protecting
muscle and bone… and yielding to the weight. He hammered his
right fist into the horse's leg and scrambled upright again, sick
and dizzy with the waves of cold agony washing outward from
the wound. All he could do for a moment was cling gasping to
the saddle; when he tried for the weapon again his fingers found
a splash of still-hot lead across the receiver, and crushed parts
below that.

   Anxious hands gripped him. "They've caught the evil one,
lord—are you all right?"

   He moved his left arm, snarling at the sudden streaking fire.
"You… grab my arm. Ohotolarix, hold me steady. Get ready. Pull
."

   They were all familiar with putting a dislocated shoulder back
in action. Walker clenched his teeth; you couldn't show pain with
this gang if you wanted to keep their respect, at least not
something this minor. Minor. Jesus Christ. By the time he could
move the arm again, two of his troopers were dragging up a
third limp figure. One covered in a net cloak, the cloak stuck all
over with twigs and bunches of grass.
   "Here, lord," one of the men said. He held up a rifle. "This evil
one had a death-magic, but weak compared to yours." The little
finger of his left hand was missing, the stump bound with a
leather thong. "All it made was a big noise and this small hurt,
and we speared this one like a salmon in spawning season."

  "Let me have it," Walker said tightly, examining the action.
Oh, that's clever. Westley-Richards, but in flintlock. Good thing
you couldn't make more of these.

   He took the satchel of paper cartridges and the horn of
priming powder and slung them over his own shoulder. The
landscape went gray for a second. God, I'm not that badly hurt…
oh. A glance upward showed thickening cloud sliding in from the
west, and a welcome coolness in the breeze.

  "Let's get going," he said. Ohotolarix made a stirrup of his
hands to help him into the saddle; the left arm was mobile, but it
would be weeks before it was first-rate again. "Now! Go, go, go!"

   "Halt!" Alston shouted. The false retreat had caught the
Fiernan left well and truly, and they looked thoroughly smashed.
"Fall in beside us! You'll just die if you run!"

   Swindapa joined in, but it was probably the sight of the
ordered American ranks that stopped the fugitives. Many fell in
on either side of the Americans, readying bows and spears or
snatching up rocks from the ground, gasping as they tried to
recover their breath.

   Alston looked left and right. The ridge was sharper here to the
east, the country flat and open to the west. They'll come straight
down, try to hit us in the rear. The ground to her right was too
steep for easy footing, far too steep for a chariot—chances were
they'd avoid it.

   "Open order," she said, heeling her horse a dozen paces to the
left. She looked upward; it was typical English weather, utterly
unpredictable. Right now it looked as if it might rain soon. Just
what we need. Damp bowstrings.

   The first chariot came around the east-trending bend of the
ridge just behind the hoof-thunder and axle-squeal herald of its
passage, horses galloping with their heads down. She was close
enough to see the goggle-eyed look of surprise on the driver and
warrior-chief, just before Hendriksson snapped an order and a
spray of crossbow bolts hit the two horses. They went down as if
their forelegs had been cut out from under them, and the pole
that ran between them dug into the dirt and flipped the chariot
forward like a giant frying pan. Driver and warrior flew
screaming through the air to land with bone-shattering thumps.
Behind the chariot came panting a group of fighters on foot; they
sensibly took one look and pelted back around the curve.

   "Here's where it gets hands-on," Alston said grimly, swinging
her leg over the horse's neck and sliding to the ground with a
clatter of armor.

  "I'm glad I'm with you, Marian," Swindapa said, dismounting
and handing the banner to the color party.

   Alston touched her shoulder for an instant. "Me too, 'dapa."
Their eyes met. But I'd rather we were both back home, lying in
front of the fire and making love. The thought passed without
need for words.

   She reached over her left shoulder and drew the katana,
drawing a deep breath and then letting it out slowly, pushing
worry and confusion with it, letting the first three-deep file of the
reserve company trot past her.

   "Runner," she said calmly. "Message to Commander
Rapczewicz. I need some archers here, and backup on my left;
also a catapult. Lieutenant Commander Hendriksson, we'll
advance at marching pace from here. You have tactical
command."

   The high ground swung away to her right. This time the
enemy came in mass, two hundred of them at least. They all
seemed to have iron weapons, though; quite a few had helmets,
and there was a scattering of the chain-mail suits. The chiefs
dismounted from their chariots, sending them to the rear—that
was one of their standard tactics, and it meant they were
planning on a serious fight. For a moment men milled around
their lords, shaking their weapons and shouting. A couple of the
iron-suited leaders drew their swords and threw the sheaths
away; if that meant what she thought it did…

   The cowhorn trumpets blatted, and the mass of kilted
clansmen howled and began to trot forward, their yelps rising
into a screaming chorus as they broke into a headlong rush.

   "Company… halt," Hendriksson barked. "Spears… down." The
points came into line, the crossbows spread out like wings on
either side, pointing a little forward as if they were the mouth of
a funnel.

  "First rank . . .fire."

  WHUNG.

  "Reload! Second rank . . .fire."

  WHUNG.

   The steady sleet of bolts shook the easterners' charge, but it
couldn't stop it. Alston could see the set contorted faces of the
clansmen, a glare of exaltation like the homicidal equivalent of a
Holy Roller's trance. She spared a glance for the Nantucket
troops; faces set and hard, teeth clenched between the covering
cheekguards, tiny shifts as they braced themselves for the
impact.

  WHUNG. WHUNG. WHUNG.

   A sleet of flung spears and axes came in the last second.
Americans went down, still or kicking, and their comrades closed
ranks over them; metal rattled off metal with a discordant
clatter. A long slithering rasp went on either side as the
crossbowmen slung their weapons, swung their bucklers around,
and drew the short swords at their right hips with a snapping
flex of the wrist. They feel sound, she thought. Something down
in the gut told her; some intangible border had been crossed, in
the months of marching and skirmishing and drilling. These
were veterans now.
  So am I, I suppose, she thought with mild surprise. Which
doesn't mean we can't get wiped out.

   "Fair fights are for suckers," she muttered. Circumstances
seemed to have forced her into one. "This way!" she said aloud,
moving off to the left where the barbarians might overlap the
American line.

   That put her and the dozen in the color guard party behind
the left-flank crossbows—fighting at close quarters, now. She saw
an American sink his gladius into a tribesman's belly with the
short upward gutting stroke he'd been taught, then stagger back
as a tomahawk slammed into the side of his helmet. A relief from
the second rank stepped forward into the hole, stooping and
slamming the edge of her shield into the ax-man's foot while he
was off-balance and then into the side of his head as he bent in
uncontrollable reflex.

   "Give 'em the Ginsu!" she shouted, crouching and taking her
place in line. The half-stunned American fell into the second
rank shaking his head and wobbling a bit as he recovered from
the blow.

  "Here's our part of the job," Alston said as they came to the
end of the line.

   A man in a mail hauberk was leading a dozen warriors at the
vulnerable end of the ranks, where two Americans were fighting
back to back. He yelled frustration as the dozen swords of the
color guard swung into place and blocked him.

   Beside her Alston heard Swindapa gasp. "Shaumsrix!" she
screamed.

   That's a name—an Iraiina name—wait a minute, wasn't that
the one who she said—

  "Remember me, Shaumsrix!" the Fiernan girl shrieked.

  The Iraiina turned, rattlesnake-swift. His spear lanced out.
Swindapa's katana was in jodan no kame, up and to the right. It
snapped downward, slashing through the tough ashwood just
behind the iron wire that bound the shaft for a foot behind the
head. The metal spun and tinkled away; his shield boomed under
her second stroke.

   "Remember me, Shaumsrix! Remember the Earther girl!"

   "Oh, hell, 'dapa—forward! Forward!"

   Shaumsrix was staggering back on his heels as the katana
blurred at him, backed by a cold, bitter rage. Alston moved by
the girl's side, let a knee relax as an ax flashed by to bury itself in
the turf, took the wielder's arm off just below the elbow, whipped
the long sword up to knock aside a spear. The Iraiina chief had
recovered his balance and unshipped his ax, a copy in steel of the
old charioteer's weapon. His sworn men closed in on either side,
meeting the Americans of the color guard shield to shield.

   Alston lunged one-handed, using the katana like a saber. The
man on the end of the point hadn't been expecting that, and he
ran right into it. The blade sank in, then stuck in bone. The
warrior folded around it, and someone stabbed at her from
behind him. She ignored it, ducking her head, and the
spearpoint slid from the helmet as she put a boot on the man's
body and pushed. The layer-forged steel sliced through a rib and
came free; the sprattling corpse tripped the spearman behind.

    She ignored him as well, as he struggled to regain his balance.
Instead she let her right knee go slack and turned as she went
down, striking hard and level and drawing the cut. It slashed
through the tough leather binding around the Iraiina chieftain's
left calf. Fair fights are for suckers, especially if you're a woman
, she thought, and brought her sword up to guard position just in
time to deflect another ax. The impact jarred through her wrists,
but beside her Swindapa screamed again:

   "Remember!" and lunged two-handed past the chieftain's
falling guard. The point jammed into the bone of his face. She
ripped it free, and he fell to his hands and knees, helmet rolling
free. The next stroke went across his neck.

  Wailing, the fallen man's followers cast themselves on the
American points, and died, while Alston and her companion
stood guarding each other. She saw sanity seep back into the
Pieman's eyes.

   Thack. A spearman fell backward, his face a red mass.
Alston's head swiveled. Fiernans were running along the ridge to
the east, nimble on the steep turf. One of the first was a slinger;
he waved his leather thong over his head at her, and then
reached into his pouch for another round. More archers and
slingers came behind him, moving forward and shooting over the
Americans' heads, into the growing mass of easterner warriors
jammed against their line. Alston could feel the pressure on that
line waver as the shafts and lead bullets whistled into them.
Spear-armed Fiernans were trotting up as well, fanning out on
the open flank of the Nantucketer force.

   Alston spat to clear her mouth of gummy saliva and reached
for her canteen. The motion froze as she recognized the banner
behind the enemy mass. Walker. Walker, and his special goon
squad, marching in step and in line. And behind them, the
cannon.

   "Christ," she whispered. We can't run. They'd be all over us
like flies on cowshit. And if they stood…

   Even at a hundred yards' distance, the muzzles of the cannon
looked big enough to swallow her head as the crews unhitched
them and wheeled them around.

  William Walker laughed, despite the nagging ache in his
shoulder. "Oh, how surprised you must be, Skipper," he
chuckled. "What a sad end to the day. How fucking tragic.
Christ, this feels even better than I thought it would!"

   He turned to his men, hand around the stock of the rifle,
letting it fall across his shoulder. "We'll move off to the right,
away from the ridge," he said. "When they break, we'll move in
and take a new place for the guns. And get those fools ahead of
us out of the way!"

    The gun crews were busy, grunting with effort as they
rammed the grapeshot down the barrels of the bronze
fieldpieces. His men were drawing off to one side with him,
except for the ones he'd sent forward to get the tribal levy out of
the way—it was tempting to just fire anyway, but that would be
really bad politics. He chuckled again at the thought.

   It was never easy to get the Sun People fighting men to give
way, but they'd all acquired a healthy superstitious dread of
gunpowder weapons. A minute, and they were backing away
from the American line; then they turned and ran, to get out of
crossbow range as fast as they could. The Nantucketers didn't
fire, although the growing mass of Fiernan archers and whatnot
up on the slope to his left did. The retreating warriors halted
behind the guns, panting and glaring. Walker called one of the
chiefs over.

   "Take some of your men and put them right behind the guns,"
he said. "Men not afraid to hear a loud noise and see their
enemies slain. My crews will need help pushing them forward
after each few lightning bolts. I and my sworn men will go
there"—he pointed to the right—"to attack when the foe runs.
When we do, your men will push the guns forward quickly."

   That way they could move down the ridge in bounds, and it
wouldn't take too many forward leaps before the whole
Nantucketer-Fiernan army disintegrated; they were still at it
hammer-and-tongs with the Sun People force attacking their
front.

    He walked over to where Ohotolarix waited. That put him
nearly three hundred feet away from the guns, and to their
side—a perfect vantage point. He laughed again as the
Americans ahead went flat, and the linstock came down on the
first cannon's touchhole.

   BAMMMMMM. A long plume of off-white smoke, and the gun
leaped back.

  Screams up ahead, as shot tore into the backs of the prone
Americans—fewer hit than if they'd been standing up, but
enough, enough. The crew leaped to reload, the second gun
waiting until they were halfway through.

  "Lord," Ohotolarix said, tugging at his arm—the sound one,
fortunately. "Lord, isn't that the fire-dropper?"

   Walker's head came up. The ultralight. He snarled and
unslung the flintlock, thumbing back the hammer, then cursed
as his left arm wobbled a little. "You," he said to one of his men.
"I'm going to brace this on your shoulder. Don't move, or I'll turn
you over to Hong."

   He smiled a little, to show that it was a joke… but the man
went pale anyway. Control your breathing, he told himself. This
thing's got good sights, and he probably can't hit anything with
those bombs anyway—no real bombsight, he'll have to go by
fast or I'll get him. God damn, I wish I had the Garand. Breathe
in. Breathe out.

   He waited. The arrow shape grew, coming in straight and
level. Fool. He adjusted the Mauser-style sights and led it off, the
way he would a flying duck. Squeeze gently…

   Crack. The ultralight wobbled, nearly heeled over into the
ridge.

   Walker threw his hands into the task, reloading, pushing with
his thumb until the wad went forward, slapping down the slide,
cocking the hammer, and priming the pan. When he looked up
he almost lost the target, because the aircraft hadn't pulled up
into the shallow arc he'd anticipated.

   "What's the crazy bastard—no, you idiot, pull up, pull up—"

   Crack. He thought he'd hit this time too, but it didn't matter,
the kamikaze fool was going to— What did I do to deserve this?
Why's an American ready to do this to me, for Christ's sake? he
thought, helpless resentment paralyzing him for an instant.
Then:

   "Oh, Jesus, the ammo in the limbers with the cannon, there's
better than a hundred rounds. Down, down, everybody down."

   He threw himself to the earth. It said much for the discipline
he'd imposed that more than half obeyed without even pausing
to think. Walker felt the earth rise and smash him in the face like
an enemy's fist. When he rose, there was nothing left but a
crater, and his dulled ears heard the screams of the survivors
running or crawling away from its fringes.

  "Lord, lord, what shall we do?" someone was asking.

   William Walker drew himself up, climbing to his knees and
then his feet, spitting blood and ignoring the ringing in his ears.
A quick glance showed him the Americans and Fiernans were
almost as stunned, but that wouldn't last. And Bastard… for a
wonder, Bastard wasn't far away. He fumbled his canteen free
and croaked:

   "Get me the horse." He groped inside for the handset, and
clicked it on.

  "Walkerburg, come in. Come in, Walkerburg."

  "Here, boss."

  "Operation Bugout, Cuddy," Walker said into the microphone.

  "Ah… roger, boss."

   Walker grinned mirthlessly at the note he caught. "And
remember, Cuddy—I'm the one who knows the rendezvous
point."

  "Sure, boss. See you on the road. Out."

   Walker turned to his native followers: "I mean to leave this
land and cross the water, seeking a new kingdom. Who among
you comes with me?" he said harshly, his voice hoarse and throat
sore.

   The men before him were fewer, but they gave a low growl at
his words.

   "Lord, we are your handfast men," Ohotolarix said, a note of
protest in his voice. "We have eaten from your board, taken
weapons from your hands, our blood is sworn for yours. Lead us
anywhere—even to the Cold Lands beyond the sunset and the
grave."

    "Right," he replied. Touching, you fools. "This battle is lost.
Now those who would follow me, follow. We'll have to fight to do
it."

   Slowly, wearily, he began to climb aboard the horse. They just
might make it off the field before the enemy caught
them—Daurthunnicar was still there with the reserves, after all.

  "Orders? Ma'am, orders?"

  Marian Alston shook her head in wonder. "The poor brave
bastard," she whispered.

  "Orders, ma'am?"

   That brought her back to herself. She looked northward; the
surviving enemy were running as fast as their feet could take
them. "North, and then we do to them what they were going to
do to us. Runner! Notify Commander Rapczewicz that the enemy
is broken on this flank and I'm swinging in on them. Commit the
reserves—general advance, and pursuit when they break."

   The Americans were climbing to their feet, gazing in an awe
almost as great as their allies'. "Hard pounding, this," Alston
murmured under her breath. A chilly feeling of purpose filled
her. "We shall see who pounds the hardest."

    "I thought… I thought vengeance would feel better," Swindapa
said quietly, looking at the mound of dead. "But I just feel… like
it's over."

   Rain clouds scudded across the low plain, dimming it even
more than the early-autumn twilight. The battle was breaking up
into clumps of men who stumbled with fatigue, blundering into
each other and hacking in a weary frenzy. Bands of the Earth
Folk and their American allies pursued easterners. Some fled in
blind panic, wailing; others stood shield to shield and retreated
toward the woods to the southeast. The wounded screamed and
moaned, calling for their friends; those farther gone toward the
waiting darkness called for their mothers, whether they were Sun
People, Fiernan, or Nantucketer. Thrashing around the wreckage
of chariots, horses added their louder note to the agony that
sounded across trampled stubble and muddy pasture. The chill
air kept the smell down, a sickly sewer stink under the whetted
wind.

  "So this is war," Swindapa said, her voice hoarse and quiet.
"O Moon Woman, what have we earth dwellers done, that we
deserve each other?"

   Alston braced herself erect and reached for the water bottle at
her belt. It still held a little; she raised it, then saw how it—and
her whole arm, and the front of her armor—were splashed with
red. Blood, and bits or… matter, and hair. She drank regardless,
and handed the bottle to her friend.

  "I'm afraid it is," she said gently. The most disturbing thing
about it is how numb I feel, she thought. Only a faint generalized
nausea…

   She looked around. A dozen of the reserve were still with her,
and the banner. "It isn't over yet," she said. "We have to make
sure. If too many get away, we may have to do this all over
again."

  Swindapa shuddered and closed her eyes for a second. Tears
had worn streaks down through the blood and dirt on her
cheeks, but the cerulean eyes were steady. She nodded.

   They formed up and moved across the muddy plain, collecting
stragglers as they went. The ground rolled, hiding one band from
the next; in a few minutes they were away from the spindrift of
bodies that marked where the opposing hosts had met. "This is
about as far—"

   Alston stopped. The group that came over the slight rise was
unquestionably enemy; several on horseback, many others in
leather kilts and jerkins. They were still in fairly good order, and
they outnumbered her own band by about three to one; sixty of
them, say. A number were in Nantucketer armor; surviving
members of Walker's traitors… Thank you, God. That's Walker
himself.
    "Saunders," she said to the only one of the command group
still leading a horse. "We need some help, and we need it fast.
Go."

   The cadet threw herself across the back of the shaggy pony
and drummed her heels into its flanks. A horseman from the
enemy group began to pursue, then turned back at a shouted
order. She spared a moment to touch hands with Swindapa as
the little group of allied warriors spread out into a line and
moved to cut the easterners off from the forest.

  "Can we hold them?" Swindapa asked. She leaned her sword
against her armored thigh for a moment, clenching and
unclenching each hand and shaking out her wrists.

   "They outnumber us, but they've been beaten and run once,"
Alston said. "On the other hand, we're between them and safety.
We'll see." She paused. "By the way, I love you."

   "Me too," Swindapa said. Her face was radiant for an instant
through dirt and weariness. It changed, clenching in. "Here they
come."

  "Halt!" Alston called, "when they came in earshot. "Lay down
your weapons and you won't be harmed."

   Alston ground her teeth slightly as she saw the familiar boyish
grin… although it looked more twisted now. Walker himself
looked older, a little thinner in the face.

  "What, even me, Skipper?" he gibed.

  "You get a rope around your neck," Alston replied.

   "Not interested," he replied jauntily. "How's this—you get out
of our way, right now, and I'll let you and your squeeze there
live."

    His hand began to creep toward the rifle at his knee. Oh,
damn, she thought, taking a closer look. It was the Island-made
flintlock. Androwski must be dead. Dammit to hell.
  She blinked, rigid in shock for a second. How to delay them,
how, how—

   "I challenge you," she said—in Iraiina. The men behind
Walker were mostly locals, all from the Sun People. "If you have
the courage, meet me blade to blade and let the gods decide
between us."

   Her smile was cruel as she saw his face whiten. Gotcha, she
thought. He had to keep these men with him if he wanted to get
out alive—and if he refused a challenge to single combat, they'd
turn on him like wolves on a crippled pack leader. Particularly a
challenge from a woman. There was a certain satisfaction to
catching him out this way.

   Neither of them wasted time on words after that. Walker
swung down, murmured a few orders to the men around his
horse, and walked forward drawing his sword. Alston swung hers
in a few practice arcs to loosen the arm muscles and came to
meet him at the same measured pace. I'm tired. I'm better with
the sword—ought to be, lots more training—he's stronger and
younger and has the reach on me. And he's… ahhh, favorin' the
left arm, by God. Now let's do it, woman. Empty the mind.
Don't think, just do.

   The katana came up to chudan no kame, the middle guard
position. Alston let the breath slide out through half-open lips,
felt her attention focus down to the man alone, hands and eyes
and blade and feet. In a way this was homelike, like a kenjutsu
match in the dojo back by the Bay, even the style of the armor.
Throat, waist, hips, underarm, inside of the thigh, face, she
remembered. Bad habits had crept in from fighting near-naked
opponents.

   Now. Walker cut, smooth and very fast… but there was a tiny
grimace, a tensing, first. She parried, contact on the flat—you
never parried edge to edge. A long musical soring sound and
they were circling again, the tips of their blades almost crossing.

   Again. Again. Hard attacking style, Alston thought
dispassionately. He likes overarm strikes. Safer for him, with his
longer reach. A bit of a tremor in her arms, but just as much in
his—whatever that injury to his left was, it must be hurting him
badly. Good. You took what was offered and used it.

   Victory is achieved in the heiho of conflict by ascertaining
the rhythm of each opponent, by attacking with a rhythm not
anticipated by the opponent, and by the use of knowledge of the
rhythm of the abstract.

  "Very well, Master Musashi," she murmured, trancelike. Just
words. You had to do.

   She lunged forward with a two-handed stab, cutting edge
up—very difficult to counter, since you exposed the wrists. He
jerked his torso backward from the waist and snapped his blade
across and down. She followed with an attack, overarm, the
pear-splitter. The response to that was automatic… but it put
the strain of holding the block on your left arm as the swords
clashed and slid and locked at the guards.

   They stood corps a corps, and his arm began to buckle.
Another leap back, and she stepped in, the last thing he
expected, leaving her vulnerable to his greater weight and
strength… and able to hammer the pommel of her sword
two-handed into his arm, six inches above the elbow.

    Walker screamed, as much rage as pain, as his left hand
spasmed open on the long hilt of the katana Martins had forged
for him. Momentum spun him half around, setting the sight
path for her stroke. The sword seemed to float along the line of
its own volition, angling up and to the right—under the flared
brim of his helmet, his first-model helmet without the hinged
cheek guards she'd had added after the Olmec war. The move
had a dreamy slow-motion inevitability, even as her breath came
out in a rasping kia to add force to the blow.

   So did his response, dropping the sword, punching out with
the bladed fingers of his right hand. Mail coif and padding took
some of it, but the impact threw her off enough that she felt her
blade grate glancingly on bone instead of sinking into the soft
flesh under the jaw. Walker fell backward as her sword flew free
trailing a line of red droplets. She was down in the dirt, choking,
trying to suck air through her impacted larynx, trying and
failing.

  A voice, in the Sun People's tongue: "Save the chief! Save
him, Hwalkarz's men!"

   Vision flickered. Americans driving forward past her.
Walker's native guards throwing themselves onto the points,
selling their lives for time with furious gallantry as others of their
band dragged away the man whose salt they had taken. Grayness
closing in around her vision as Swindapa knelt above her, hands
scrambling under the coif, thumbs pressing on either side of the
dented section of cartilage. A pop and a shooting pain, and
unbelievable fainting relief as air flooded back into her lungs.
Then the pain hit, enough to bring a breathless scream. Blood
thundered behind her eyes, turning the rain-misted landscape
reddish.

   The power of will could substitute for strength. Her right
hand scrabbled at her hip and pulled the Beretta; Walker wasn't
ten paces away.

   A shadow loomed over them both, the bleeding figure of one
of Walker's troopers, his ax raised in both hands over Swindapa's
neck. An instant to alter the point of aim, and the man's kneecap
exploded into ruin. A crushing weight fell—two bodies on top of
hers. She dropped the pistol and locked her fingers into the
man's windpipe. He drew his knife and stabbed clumsily,
wheezing; Swindapa grabbed the flailing arm.

   Alston poured herself into the gripping hand. Fingers sank in
behind the windpipe as awareness faded, and with the last
strength in her she wrenched. There was a scream from very far
away, and a warm soft falling.

       CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
   October - November, Year 2 A.E.

   "Will the chieftain live?" Ohotolarix said, his voice shaking.

   "He'll live," Alice Hong said, completing the bandaging. "Bad
scar, and that eye's gone, I'm afraid. Still, it's clean and the
stitching was neat if I say so myself," she added, twiddling her
fingers before she washed them in the bowl.

   The little log surgery-clinic was empty except for the tools
she'd just finished using; her assistants were cleaning and
packing them as she laid them aside, and she'd been working in
her custom-made traveling leathers, black with silver studs. A
few more bloodstains wouldn't harm those. She paused to pat
Walker's cheek; he was out with the ether, but he'd be awake
soon enough. With a nostalgic sigh she looked around the
board-and-split-log room, and the cheery little fireplace with its
built-in rack for heating irons. Ah, well, there will be other
places, she thought.

  "Take him out to the wagon," she said, picking up her shotgun
and slinging it muzzle-down over her back.

    It was raining again outside, so she added a hooded cloak as
she stepped out the door and watched the warriors carry the
litter to the waiting Conestoga. Drops pattered on the veranda
above her and on the canvas tilts of the wagons; people were still
running around with crates and barrels, loading the last of the
stuff they'd stripped out—what hadn't gone with the first
caravans, back before that damned battle. You've got to hand it
to Will—he thinks ahead.

   Bill Cuddy came up with the big black ex-cadet. "It's
Ygwaina," the young man from Tennessee said. "She's… isn't it
taking too long? Why doesn't she open her eyes?"

  "Bad labor," Hong said absently. "Aneurysm, possibly— it's
quite a strain, you know."

  "How are we going to move her?" the young man said.

   He's actually wringing his hands, by the Divine Marquis,
Hong thought. She'd never actually seen anyone do that
before—but then, she'd been having a lot of new experiences
lately.

   "We aren't, of course," Hong said. "First, it would be too much
trouble, and second, it would kill her—if she isn't brain-dead
already. I'll leave that local midwife, what's-her-name."

   "No—" McAndrews began. Then he heard the soft snick of an
automatic's slide being pulled back behind him and froze.

    Hong brought out the hypodermic from under her cloak and
stabbed it through the wool of his jacket, sending the plunger
home with her thumb. Two men caught the unconscious form as
it slumped; she carefully retrieved the hypodermic and examined
it to make sure the needle wasn't bent—no disposables here.

   "Neat," Cuddy said. "He'll get over it, especially when we're
going toward his Egyptians. Dumb bastard."

  "Now, now," Hong said. "What about the slaves?"

  "The ones we're leaving? Got 'em locked in the ergastula, like
we have since last week," Cuddy said, beginning to turn away.

   Behind him Ekhnonpa was handing her swaddled baby up
into the two-wheeled light carriage, and climbing in after it.
Martins and his wife were in the one behind; that one was
closed, and securely locked. He'd been under guard since the day
of the battle, also part of Walker's contingency plan.

   "Why not set the ergastula on fire as we leave?" Hong said
brightly. "It would be sort of… appropriate, wouldn't it?"

   Cuddy looked at her with wondering distaste; "You just never
stop, do you?" he said softly.

   "Well, why should I? Live for the moment and enjoy every day,
that's my motto, Billy-boy," she said, fluttering her lashes.

   "No," he said curtly, and walked toward his horse. Louder, he
called: "Let's get going! Now!"

   "I…" Ian Arnstein swallowed. "Most of them are still alive.
Some of them ate… well…" He spat into the muddy cobblestones
of the street.

  Oh, God, he thought. He'd been a classical historian, and he'd
thought he knew what latifundium and ergastula meant. I didn't
. There was no mind left behind their eyes, most of them, as they
yammered and cowered away from the light. He met the
captain's eyes, and she nodded quietly in perfect understanding.

  Marian Alston stood by the neck of her horse, stroking it
absently as she looked about the remains of Walkerburg. There
was a giant crucifix of whole logs standing in the middle of the
square, with iron shackles dangling from the arms.

   "You can see the sort of kingdom Walker would have built,"
she said quietly. "Two days?"

  "Two days," Arnstein said. "Nobody knew which way they
were going."

   "I can guess," she said. "We may be able to catch them at
sea." But Eagle's still halfway across the Atlantic, dammit, she
thought with cold self-reproach. With Isketerol's ships gone,
she'd assumed the Tartessian had bugged out for Iberia. Instead
he waited for Walker. He's probably lying up in a marsh
somewhere, or the fenland, or the Thames— could be anywhere.
Not many places in Britain more than two days' wagon-travel
from the sea. Certainly not this one. Granted she'd been laid up
right after the battle, but…

   Swindapa came out of a hut. There was a squalling bundle in
her arms. Oh, God, not another one… why couldn't it be puppies
?

   Her smile changed as the Fiernan lifted the baby up close
enough to see. That milk-chocolate color was not something
she'd expected to see in the White Isle. McAndrews's child.

  "The mother is dead, in the birthing."

   "Well," Alston said after a moment. "There's room on Main
Street for the four of us, I suppose."

   A chill colder than the rain ran down her spine as Swindapa
lowered her eyes silently.
    "We've won," Alston rasped into the microphone; her throat
still hurt. "The question is, what the hell do I do now?"

    "You've done a damn fine job," the chief said, his voice clear
under the crackle of static—very clear, for a transatlantic
broadcast with this equipment. "What you should do now is wait
a little. From the sound of it, you're not up for much diplomacy."

   She leaned back in the canvas chair, conscious mainly of an
overwhelming weariness. Fort Pentagon's HQ hut was chilly and
drafty in the aftermath of the week's rains, despite the brazier
glowing in one corner. And Swindapa's hardly spoken to me in a
week. She turned pale as a ghost when I mentioned going
home… home, Christ, where is her home. Enough. There's work
to do.

   "I got a third of my command killed." She sat silent for a
moment. "Christ, Jared, those were kids. They should have been
back in the Academy, cramming for exams, with nothing more
serious to worry about than zits and their social lives."

  "We're none of us where we would have been," the slow
Yankee twang said. "Anyway, we've sent some people over on
Eagle this trip… That conference you arranged still on?"

   Well, I said I was an ass-kicker, she thought wryly,
suppressing a tinge of hurt. Jared's taking me at my word and
sending someone to handle the problems that aren't nails. Put
the hammer back on the shelf…

   "Right. We've got a lot of mana with the Earth Folk now, and
the Sun People tribes are too scared not to do what we tell them.
They lost a lot of their fighting men, especially in the pursuit."
She'd tried to keep the Fiernans from slaughtering those who
surrendered, but it had cost her a lot of grief and chunks of
political prestige.

  "All the better," Jared said, a hint of iron in his voice. "If they
wanted to stay safe, they shouldn't have started a war. Over."

   "Over and out."
   She clicked the microphone back onto the radio and sat,
silent. It was with a start she saw how much time had gone by,
and hauled herself erect. Eagle would be arriving with the flood
tide; and for appearance's sake, she had to be on hand. Alone.
Swindapa was off visiting her relatives again.

   "Oh, Christ," she murmured, squeezing her eyes shut for an
instant, gripping the edge of the table to the brink of pain. "Get a
grip. Now go."

  Jared Cofflin shook Alston's hand at the bottom of the
gangplank.

  "Martha and the daughter are along, too," he said, grinning.
"Why miss the chance?" He looked around, searching the faces.
"Where's Swindapa?"

   "Visiting her mother," Alston said neutrally.

   Cofflin started to speak and visibly switched gears. "Hope the
voice is getting better," he said.

    "The medics say it will. Inconvenient as hell, let me tell you. If
I talk above a whisper for more than a few minutes I'm dumb as
a fish. If you'll pardon me, Chief, I have some organizational
work…"

   He looked after her, then turned to the Arnsteins with raised
brows.

  Doreen coughed. "Swindapa's people… her family… they've
been after her to stay. She won't talk about it. Marian…"

  "Damn," he said quietly. "Well, let's get on with it," he said
wearily.

   He swallowed. The noise from the crowd outside was growing
louder, almost a roar until a steady clanging cut through it. He
puzzled over that for a second, then realized it was the sound of
short swords being slapped against the sheet-steel facings of
Nantucketer shields—the American troops reminding the
audience of decorum.
   "No sense in waiting," he muttered, squaring his shoulders. At
least it wasn't raining anymore.

   The crowd were standing—some had been sitting, but they
stood for him—all around the slopes of the natural bowl. No
more than a hundred all told; Spear Chosen of the Fiernans and
a clump of Grandmothers to the left, and the Sun Folk chieftains
to the right. Most of those were very young or very old, survivors
because they'd been non-combatants. They looked at him with
sullen, hangdog anger, seeming half naked without their
weapons, bright with defiant finery. Along the circular ridge
stood the Nantucketer troops, with another two squads on either
side of him.

   He raised his hand. "Please, sit down," he said. "We have to
talk."

   The translations echoed him; he forced the distraction from
his consciousness, and the feeling of sweat trickling down under
his collar. Christ, the fate of nations, and I have to decide.

   "The war is over," he went on. "Too many have died in it,
us"—the translators rendered that as Eagle People; he supposed
the Americans were stuck with that moniker— "Fiernan
Bohulugi, and the eastern tribes. No more."

  That got him nods, even from the Sun People. Nobody here
had ever experienced war on this scale before,

  "We must take council to see that it never happens again,
here in the White Isle."

    A Spear Chosen shot to his feet, wincing and staggering a
little as a bandaged wound on one leg caught him with a spike of
pain. "Throw the Sun People back into the sea! They brought
nothing but trouble with them. Their tread on the land disturbs
its spirits. Let them go, or die if they refuse!"

   That brought nods from the left side of the circle, and a sound
halfway between a groan and a rising growl from the right. The
American pointed to a white-bearded chief.
  "My people came here in my father's father's time—" he
began.

   "Your tribe? One hundred twenty-six years this spring," one of
the Grandmothers said dryly. "That is yesterday. Nothing."

   The easterner glared at her. "—time out of mind, we have
lived here. Here are the graves of our fathers and the holy shaws
of our gods, here we plow and sow and herd, here our children
are born. This is our home. We will not leave it."

  Cofflin nodded. "We could expel you all—or kill you all, we and
our Earth Folk friends. Do you doubt it?"

   The charioteer lords fell silent again, a shuddering stillness.
Jared turned to the Americans' allies. "But we will not, unless
they force us to it. If you drive these out, others will come—or
these again. You can't take away their knowledge of what Walker
taught them… and Walker himself is still out there, over on the
mainland."

   Great, now I've got them both mad at me, he thought,
through the uproar that followed. And Martha was right. The
Fiernan Bohulugi were lovely people, but they needed what the
charioteers had, or some of it.

   Eventually the clamor found a voice: "Would you leave them
free to attack us again?"

   "No," he said. "Not that." He turned to the defeated, raising
his hand. "If you are to live in this land, it's by our say-so—our
leave," he added, as the translators looked puzzled. "On our
terms."

   "What terms?"

   "First, you must swear by your own gods that you will make
no more war on the Earth Folk or on us."

   Slow nods; they'd expected that.

   "Next, you will make no war on each other, either. Every
teuatha of Sky Father's children must swear to aid us in
punishing any tribe that breaks this pledge. In return, we— the
Eagle People—will swear to let nobody"—that was directed at the
Fiernan, but tactfully—"attack you, either. You'll be guaranteed
safety in the lands you now hold, but no more."

   That stunned them. "No war?" one young chief with a
peach-fuzz beard said, blinking. There were actual tears in his
eyes. "How… how will we blood our spears, where will we find
honor and bridewealth? Are we to sit in our fathers' houses and
never do anything of our own?"

   "There are other ways to wealth besides taking it from
someone else," Cofflin said. "We'll show you some—new ways of
farming, new crafts, and trade. We'll be trading with all of you.
And besides that, we're going to be sending more ships out, all
over the world. The world is bigger than you can imagine, and a
lot of it's dangerous. We'll need marines—guards—more than we
can supply. I imagine some of your adventurous young men
would find that an acceptable way to gain honor. And wealth."

   There were frowns, but the young chief looked interested. So
did many of the other younger tribesmen. No grudges, Cofflin
thought. From what the specialists had gathered, a straight-up
fight didn't breed lasting resentment among the Sun People;
they considered it the way of nature.

  "You ask no tribute?" the older man asked skeptically.

    "For ourselves? No," Cofflin said. "But you can't expect to
start a fight, lose it, and go scot-free… I mean, get away without
loss. You attacked the Fiernan Bohulugi without cause. You'll
give back any lands you took in the last few years, you'll release
all slaves and captives of their people you hold—with gifts in
compensation—and you'll pay the Earth Folk an indemnity for
the harm you caused.

   We'll set it; it'll be heavy, but not beyond what you can pay.
Consider it a… a fee for learning a valuable lesson. Oh, and some
of our holy men would like to travel among you and tell you
about our beliefs. You don't have to listen, but you won't hinder
them, either."
   That didn't seem to make much impact compared to the
prospect of having to pay indemnity, but it was far more
important in the long run. The full-grown warriors might not
want to give up their sky-clan of godlets, but he'd bet others in
their tribes would—the women, to start with. Nantucket-style
Christianity had a lot more to offer them than their own people's
faith; and while they might not convert their husbands, they'd
certainly have a lot of influence on their sons. He hid his smile.
These people weren't sophisticated enough to see through that
sort of gambit— hell, he hadn't been either. Martha and Father…
Prelate Gomez had come up with it between them.

   Again, the grumbles came from both sides of the circle.
"We've suffered, we've bled at your side! Many of us have lost
everything—we've lost homes, fields, flocks, brothers and
parents," a voice from the Fiernan ranks called. "What do you
have for us?"

    "You fought and bled for your own land and your families,"
Cofflin said sharply. Then more gently: "We don't forget our
friends.

   "You have our word—and everyone in the White Isle knows
what the Eagle People's word is, now—that we'll stand by you if
you're threatened again. You'll have peace, the first real peace
you've had in centuries. Freedom from fear. Isn't that something
for the Fiernan Bohulugi?"

   "It is a great thing," one of the younger Grandmothers said
firmly. "We do not wish to see our sons ever returning on their
shields. Moon Woman did not mean mothers to bury their
children."

   Cofflin nodded. "There's more than that, as well," he said.
"You Spear Chosen are great traders—well, there's going to be
more trade than you can imagine. As you say, there are many of
your people who've lost their homes, lost their kin, in this war.
We Eagle People have need of new helpers. We'll welcome them;
we'll adopt the orphans, give homes to the displaced. Those who
wish can learn our ways and become part of our people. Those
who don't will return here with new wealth and new skills,
because they'll learn from us. You'll be the first people to learn
our arts, and it'll make you rich and strong beyond your
dreams."

   And Angelica will get that damn settlement on Long Island
she's been wanting, he thought. The adults might never fit in
really well, but their children would—universal schooling was a
wonderful thing.

   "Besides that, we'll send skilled folk here to set up new
things—mines, forges, water mills." Brand and Leaton thought
that with a little technical aid they could just about quadruple
the Earth Folk's productivity in a single generation. "Wealth for
you, and for us. We'll also send our healers"—thus ensuring a
population explosion, but we can deal with that later—"and
wise folk. Your Grandmothers will learn more of the stars than
they ever knew before." Which will gradually undermine their
religion, but sufficient unto the day is the evil or not-so-evil
thereof.

   There was a fair bit to recommend the cult of Moon Woman,
but it did breed an unhealthily otherworldly attitude, and
excessive fatalism—sort of like an astrological Buddhism, as Ian
had put it.

   The uproar began again; this time it got to the fist-shaking
stage and the soldiers had to start thumping their shields again.
He sighed. This was going to take a good long while.

   He took off his coat and shifted his shoulders, as if settling a
load. This was his work, and he was going to by God do it the
best he could.

   "We're going to need someone to stay here and ride herd on
this bunch," he muttered. "Ayup. I can't stay, Martha can't stay,
Marian's got too much else to do…"

  He turned his head and looked at the Arnsteins. Ian raised his
hands.

   "Now, wait a minute, Chief—"

   Marian woke to find the bed empty. She ran a hand into the
spot where Swindapa had lain; it was still faintly warm. The
children were sleeping in the next room, from the sound of it; the
wet nurse was with them anyway. She slipped out into the chill
and dressed quickly. The sanded log planks were warmer than
any tent or the locals' housing, but she'd never felt entirely easy
sleeping in the house Walker built. I'd rather have burned it.
That would be far too wasteful. They'd take what he'd made, and
put it to better use.

  Or Swindapa will, she thought. God, God—

   Outside the stars were frosted across the arch of heaven. The
full moon was setting, casting a bright glimmer over dew-wet
fields past the guards pacing their rounds. She found Swindapa
standing in one meadow, her arms raised with palms up,
swaying and chanting. The half-song broke down in sobs, and
the Fiernan girl covered her face with her hands.

   " 'Dapa?" Alston asked softly, touching her shoulder. "Can I
help?"

   "I want to stay, it's my home, they're my family, my people,
they need me! I want to stay!"

  Alston stood frozen. I need you too flashed through her, and
her lips clenched on the words. And I cannot say that, not when
you're in pain like this.

   "I want to stay, and I can't," the Fiernan went on, and turned
to grip with bruising strength. "You're my life."

   Alston wrapped the cloak about both of them; they stood in
silence, watching the moon—the Moon, she thought— fade below
the horizon and the first stars turn pale in the east.

   "We'll come back here, again and again," she murmured at
last. "Believe me, 'dapa—your people and mine, we'll never be
apart, now."

  "Yes," the other sighed. Then, later: "I'm cold. Let's go back to
bed."
   I'm not cold, Alston thought, as they walked hand in hand
through the chill wet grass. Birds were piping, fluting greetings
to the coming dawn. Never cold again, I think. The years
stretched ahead, and the work that filled them stoked the glow
below her breastbone.

  EPILOGUE

  March, Year 3 A.E.

   Ian Arnstein stepped off the gangway and slung the duffel bag
over his shoulder. Nantucket was its chilly, foggy March self this
evening, but they'd learned to make a pretty good turtleneck
sweater over in the White Isle.

  "Home at last," Doreen said. "Praise God, home at last."

   They walked up past Easy Street, keeping to the sidewalk—the
horses from Eagle's latest shipment were being led up the
cobbles, their new horseshoes casting sparks and an iron clangor
that echoed back from houses-turned-warehouse, factor's office,
chandler's shop. People bustled about as work shut down for the
evening; a long blasting steam whistle echoed from one of the
new factories.

   "Dirty trick, making us ambassadors plenipotentiary," Doreen
said.

   "Oh, I don't know. The work was sort of fun, actually," Ian
answered. Laying the foundations of a country, and who'd have
thought he was flying from California into that when he left LAX,
two years ago almost to the day on his personal world-line.

   "Making us stay through the English winter—now that was a
dirty trick."

   Of course, they'd also gotten Walker's mansion as their own in
fee simple, and the surviving Iraiina and their new chief had
insisted on throwing in a tract of land around it.

   "Come on, everyone's waiting—we've got all the gossip since
last September to catch up on," Doreen said.
  In theory the dinner tonight was supposed to be a surprise
anniversary party for them, combined with Event Day and
coordinated by radiophone. Doreen wormed it out of Sandy
Rapczewicz on the trip back from Fort Pentagon.

   He had an uneasy feeling that the chief and Marian had
something else in mind, too, like the role he was going to
"volunteer" for in this Mediterranean expedition everyone was
talking about. Oh, we're off to see the Pharaoh, the wonderful
Pharaoh of…

   Ian Arnstein began to laugh as they turned onto Broad,
looking around and drawing a deep breath of air pungent with
whale oil from the street lanterns, woodsmoke from hearths, the
delicious scents of cooking and the not so pleasant but infinitely
familiar smells of horses and their by-products.

  "What's the joke?"

   "That time travel forward can bring you back full circle just as
surely as time travel backward," he said, and shook his head at
her puzzled frown. "Later. I'm hungry."

   They hurried up the street past whalers and fishermen,
Indians in blankets and Fiernan Bohulugi Moon Priestesses
wrapped in dignity, past kilted Sun People warriors gawking
about in wonder, past carts and steam carriages and running
whooping children. Some things didn't change. They still served
a mean seafood dinner in the basement restaurant at the John
Cofflin House, even in the Bronze Age.