Against the Tide of Years (2 page)

“Come on, Tastes Like Chicken,” the keeper said. “You’ve got an appointment with an ax.”

“Whose bright idea was it to let one of those things loose in town?” Cofflin asked.
Actually they taste more like veal,
he added to himself.

Angelica Brand coughed discreetly. “Well, Chief, we’re roasting a couple of them for the Event Day festivities, and . . . well, it’s a lot easier to get tons of bird into town if they walk, and they’re usually quite docile, this was just a little trouble . . .”

“Someone could have gotten hurt,” he said sternly to the Councilor for Agriculture. He could hear Marian’s quick step in the hallway outside. “Let’s get back to business.”

 

“Executive Council of the Republic of Nantucket will now come to order,” the recording clerk droned. “All are present. Fourth meeting of the Year 8 After the Event, March twenty-first. Chief Executive Jared Cofflin presiding.”

Damn, but we’ve gotten formal,
Jared Cofflin thought. And single-digit years still sounded funny; granted, using “B.C.” and “A.D.” was just plain silly, since nobody knew if or when—when, if you listened to Prelate Gomez of the new Ecumenical Christian Church—Jesus Christ was going to be born in this mutant history. The younger generation found the new system natural enough.

He brushed a hand over sandy blond hair even thinner on top than it had been at the Event; he was fifty-six now, honest, straightforward years even if he had looped around like this. Fisherman, Navy swabby, chief of police . . . and since the Event, head of state.

“Okay,” he said at list, when the ready of the minutes was over. “Let’s get down to the serious stuff. Martha,” he went on to his wife, smiling slightly, more a movement of the eyes than the lips.

Martha Cofflin, née Stoddard; ex-librarian, now Secretary of the Council, with a long, bony Yankee face like his and graying brown hair.

“First item is immigration policy,” she said. “Before the Council are petitions to allow increases in the yearly quota of immigrants and temporary workers to the Island from Alba.” The White Isle, what this era called Britain.

Odd,
Cofflin thought again. There were plenty of islands, but everyone knew what you meant when you said
the
Island these days.
I suppose it was inevitable we’d develop our own slang.

And our own feuds,
he thought as hostile glances went up and down the Council table. On the one hand, Nantucket needed the hands. Everything took so
much
work, with the limited technology they had available; on the other hand . . .

Angelica Brand of Brand Farms nodded; so did half a dozen others.

“I’m trying to get sugar-beet production started, and—”

“We need that next dry dock
badly
—”

“‘If we could only get some coal, there are surface deposits up in Nova Scotia—”

Our budding plutocrats,
Cofflin thought. People on the Council tended to have useful knowledge and to be more energetic than most—that was why he’d picked them. Good people, mostly, but you had to watch them.

“Wait a minute!” said Lisa Gerrard of the School Committee, static crackling from her silver-white hair. “We’re already overburdened. All these immigrants are illiterate—what with the adult education classes my people are working around the clock, the teacher-training program is behind schedule,
and
the crime rate’s up!” Thoughtful nods.

Cofflin looked at his younger cousin George, who’d taken over his old job as head of the Island’s police. “Ayup. Mostly Sun People. Can’t hold their liquor, and then they start hitting. Or if a girl tells them to get lost, or they think someone’s dissed them . . .”

“And besides that,” Martha said, “if we’re the majority, we can assimilate
them
. Too many, and it’ll start working the other way ’round, or we’ll end up as a ruling class with resentful aliens under us. And as George says, many of them just don’t understand the concept of laws.”

“Or why it’s a bad idea to piss up against walls,” someone laughed.

“Actually,” a voice with the soft, drawling accent of the Carolina tidewater cut in, “we may have something of an outlet for their aggressions.”

A couple of the Councilors looked over sharply; Marian was usually extremely quiet at Council meetings, except when her defense and shipbuilding specialties came up.

“From the reports,” she went on, “Walker is leavin’ us no choice but another war to put him down.”

Thank you, Marian,
he thought, letting one eyelid droop slightly. Her imperceptible nod replied,
You’re welcome.

“Well, perhaps we should move on to item two,” he said neutrally.

“Item two,” Martha said dryly, giving him a glance.

“William Walker,” she continued.

This time the expressions down the table were unanimous.
Nobody
liked the renegade Coast Guard officer, or any of the twenty-odd other traitors with him. Nantucket had had to fight an expensive little war to stop him over in Alba—and had ended up with a sort of quasi protectorate-hegemony-cum-alliance over most of southern England.

Cofflin cleared his throat and looked at the Councilor for Foreign Affairs and his Deputy—Ian Arnstein and his wife, Doreen. They handed around their summary, and Ian began, sounding much like the history professor he’d once been.

“Our latest intelligence reports indicate he managed to get all the way from the English Channel to Greece, arriving about three months after the end of the Alban War, and—”

There were long faces at the table when he finished; many had hoped they’d seen the last of Walker when he fled Alba years ago. Someone sighed and said it out loud.

“Wishful thinkin’,” Alston snapped. “We should have made sure of him, no matter what it took. I said so then.”

“And the Town Meeting decided otherwise,” Cofflin said. The Republic was very emphatically a democracy. Back then they’d decided that the margin of survival was too thin to keep hundreds under arms combing the endless wilderness of Bronze Age Europe.

And they were right,
Cofflin thought. Not much prospect of catching Walker, and if they’d chased him hard back then he’d have settled somewhere deep in the continental interior, where the Islanders couldn’t touch him. Leave him alone, and his arrogance and lust for revenge would make him stop within reach of salt water—planning to build a navy someday and come back for a rematch.

Marian had once said she was unsuited to Cofflin’s job because she was a hammer . . . and saw all problems as nails.
But she’s a very
good
hammer, and some problems
are
nails,
he mused, and went on aloud: “I think we can prod the Sovereign People into some action now, though.” His statement was only half ironic. The people
were
sovereign here, very directly. “The screaming about how we’re spending too much on defense ought to die down a little, at least. Marian?”

Marian Alston pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Here’s what I propose,” she began.

Little of it was a surprise to him. Contingency planning cost nothing, and he had a limited discretionary fund to work with for more concrete preparations.
At least we could lay the groundwork, since the Alban War.
The new Marine regiment was coming along fairly well, from the reports—young Hollard was a doer, and the Republic had grown enormously over the last eight years, in numbers and capacities.

Cofflin wondered grimly what Walker and his renegades had been doing in those same years. Walker wasn’t the kind to let grass grow under his feet, damn him. If they
didn’t
do something about him, eventually he would do something about
them
.

 

“Oh, sweet fucking Jesus Christ on a Harley,” William Walker muttered in English, before dropping back into archaic Greek. “
Seventy
alternative meanings?”

Thick adobe walls kept the heat at bay, but light lanced in like spears of white through small, high windows. The room was a rectangle, whitewashed plaster on the walls and hard-packed earth covered in gypsum on the floor; it smelled of the damp clay in a tub, and of clay tablets drying in wicker baskets.

The Achaean scribe sat patiently on his stool. “Yes, lord,” he said, humoring the newly-come stranger the High King had set him to serve. “There are seven tens of meanings for this sign.”

His pen was a reed with a sharp thorn set in the tip, and his writing surface moist clay pressed on a board. The thorn scratched a circle divided by two straight lines, like a four-spoked wheel.

“This is the sign
ka,
” he said. “Also the sign for
ga, kha, kai, kas, kan
. . . .”

And you have to figure out which from context,
Walker thought.
What an abortion of a writing system.

The
real
joker was that the script wasn’t even well suited to Greek. The main ancestors of these clowns had arrived in Greece as illiterate barbarian war bands from the north; they’d picked up writing from the Minoan Cretans, along with most of what other feeble claims to civilization they had. The original script had been designed for a completely different language; all the signs for sounds ended in a vowel, and there were a whole bunch of Greek sounds that didn’t have a sign at all.

Pathetic. Which was all to the good, of course. Not a day went by that he didn’t bless Whoever or Whatever had caused the Event.

“Thank you, Enkhelyawon,” he said to the scribe.
No fucking wonder nearly everyone’s illiterate here.
“Now, how have you progressed with my people’s script?”

In the original history, if “original” meant anything here, Mycenaean civilization was going to go under in another fifty years or so in a chaos of civil war and barbarian invasion; this writing system would be completely lost, and when the Greeks became literate again after their Dark Age it would be by borrowing the ancestral alphabet from the Phoenicians. The Romans would get it from the Greeks and then pass their version down to Western civilization . . . and here he was, teaching it to the ancestors of the Greeks.
More weird shit.

“Lord, a child could master that script you showed me,” Enkhelyawon said tolerantly. “Twenty-six signs? That is nothing.”

He picked up another slab of prepared clay and quickly wrote out the Roman alphabet. “It is interesting, lord—I have yet to find a word that cannot be written in it.”

“You won’t,” Walker said dryly. “And it
can
be learned by a child—that’s the whole point.”

The scribe was a middle-aged man, which meant mid-thirties here, with a few streaks of gray in his pointed black beard. Walker could watch the thought percolating through, and some of the implications popping up like lightbulbs. It was a look he’d become deeply familiar with since the Event. The locals weren’t necessarily stupid; show them a concept and they’d often grasp it PDQ—the smarter and less hidebound ones. Not all of them thought that
So it was in the days of our fathers
was the answer to every problem, when you showed them an alternative. The trick was finding the right ones.

Enkhelyawon looked down at the clay tablet. “And . . . ah, I see. The sounds of the letters seldom change.”

“Small need for us scribes, then,” the Achaean went on after a moment, his voice subdued.

“No,
more
need for scribes,” Walker reassured him. “The more that can be written, the more will be written. And here you write on skins as well as clay, true?”

“Of course, lord,” Enkhelyawon said. “Clay is for rough notes, for monthly tallies. We transfer to parchment for lasting use; parchment is costly, of course.”

Because it was a by-product of the sheep-and-goat industry, the hide scraped and pumiced until it was thin and smooth. Meat was an upper-class luxury here, and leather had a hundred other uses.

“Here is something we call
paper.
”

“Ahh,” the scribe said again, handling the sheet. “Like the Egyptian papyrus?”

“No. Notice it’s more flexible. And it’s made out of linen rags; this sample piece was made here in Mycenae. Nearly as cheap as clay, and it’s much easier to write on.”

More lightbulbs went on. Walker nodded and rose; one thing he’d learned in Alba, before those interfering bastards from Nantucket upset his applecart, was that power was like an iceberg—nine-tenths of it was invisible, the unspectacular, organizational side of things. At least here he didn’t have to start from absolute ground zero with a bunch of savages who didn’t even have the
concept
of organization beyond family and clan.

“Think about these things, Enkhelyawon,” Walkler said. “I will need a man who understands both the new and the old ways of writing and record keeping. Such a man could rise high, in my service. You must speak with my vassal Edward son of John.” Who had been a CPA, before the Event. Double-entry bookkeeping . . .

He nodded to the Achaean’s bow and walked out into the main hallway of the house Agamemnon had granted him—his town house; there were also estates in the countryside down by Tiryns, and the land in the vale not yet called Sparta.

This was a typical nobleman’s mansion for this day and age. The basement storerooms and the lower course of the wall were made from big blocks of stone, neatly fitted; above that were two stories of massive adobe walls and a flat roof. The outside was whitewashed, the walls inside covered in smooth plaster and then painted with vividly colored frescoes of fabulous beasts, war, and the hunt; the beams and stucco of the ceilings were painted too. In the center of the hall was a big circular hearth, sunken into the floor and stone-lined, surrounded with a coaming made of hard blue limestone blocks. Even in a summer a notional fire was kept going, the smoke wafting up to a hole in the ceiling; four big wooden pillars surrounded it, running through the second story and up to a little extra roof with a clay quasi chimney in it. A gallery surrounded the pillars with balconies from which you could look down into the great hall.