Against the Tide of Years (5 page)

He tugged harder as he read on. The Keyaltwar tribe over in Alba were building boats . . . probably war-boats for raiding abroad. Some bright boy in a leather kilt had figured out that while under the Treaty of Alliance they couldn’t hitch up their chariots, take down their tomahawks, and hit the neighbors up for cattle and women in the old style—several punitive expeditions had driven
that
lesson home—third parties weren’t covered.

Those people are like the fucking Energizer Bunny.
There was a map of Alba in one corner of the room. A line ran from roughly what would have become Portsmouth to what would have become southern Yorkshire. Everything east and south of it was the various
teuatha
of the Sun People, the Indo-European-speaking newcomers William Walker had enrolled in his attempt at conquest; these days they were Nantucket allies in theory, a resentful protectorate in fact. West and north of that were the Fiernan Bohulugi, allies in fact.

Dotted lines marked individual tribes. “Keyaltwar . . . right, north bank of the Thames.” The Sun People tribes weren’t much for commerce. What they
did
understand was raiding, rustling, rape, and slaughter; and now they were playing Viking.

“Blond Proto-Celtic Comanches of the Bronze Age,” Ian muttered, turning pages to look at the sketch of the ship. Up front was a figure-head that looked for all the world like a dragon’s head. Some passing Islander trader or priest of the Ecumenical Church might well have
told
them about the Vikings, like dropping a catalyst into a saturated solution.
As if they didn’t get enough ideas of their own. Have to be careful not to push ’em too hard, though.

First, radio Commandant Hendriksson to send out more agents. The treaty forbade hindering traders and missionaries, which was convenient for espionage. Find out who exactly was doing this.
Note: we might use bribes and economic threats to lean on the Keyaltwar high chief, if he’s not involved.
Then see which of the Keyaltwar’s neighbors had the most blood feuds with them—inevitable that some would.
They
could complain to the Alliance Council at Stonehenge, saying that they felt threatened, and that would put it under the treaty’s purview . . . if you stretched that deliberately ambiguous document a point or two.

“Note,” he wrote at the bottom. “Consult with Doreen”—his wife treated Gordian knots the way Alexander had, and that corrected his tendency to on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other himself into paralysis
—
“then talk it over with Marian, Jared, and Martha.” He brushed the feather tip of the quill over his nose.

“Note,” he went on. “Talk to Prelate Gomez. Missionaries?”

For a moment he chuckled at the thought. A thoroughly secular Jew, helping to spread religion among the pagans of Bronze Age Britain. Ecumenical Christianity at that—the federation of denominations here, something rather like very High Church Episcopalian with Unitarian overtones. Another dry chuckle; the snake was biting its own tail with a vengeance, with Americans bringing the Anglican faith to Alba.

Then he began writing up an appreciation for the Chief; they’d have to explain things to the Town Meeting. How the ancient Athenians had gotten
anything
done with all decisions made by a committee of thousands baffled him, all the more so now that he’d seen direct democracy in action.

He sanded and blotted the paper, rose, stretched, and looked at his watch, Four-thirty, and he’d been working since eight. “Christa,” he said to his second assistant, ambling out into the sitting room and then down the corridor to
her
office. “Get fair copies of these typed up, would you? And run one over to the Chief’s, and one to Commodore Alston-Kurlelo at Guard House.”

Almost unfair,
he thought, looking around at the filing cabinets and map boards. Preliterate cultures just didn’t appreciate the advantage that being able to store and collate information like this gave you.
But then again, as Marian Alston-Kurlelo is wont to say, fair fights are for suckers.

 

Ian trotted up the first flight of stairs, to one of the converted bedroom suites that served as Doreen’s office. The former student astronomer looked up; she was sitting across a table from a short, dark man in a long woolen robe, flowerpot hat, and curled beard, repeating a sentence in something guttural and polysyllabic. Papers were scattered on the surface, some covered with ordinary writing, others with what looked like Art Deco chicken tracks.

Akkadian,
Ian knew, with a shudder—the Semitic language spoken in Hammurabi’s Babylon; he had to learn it too. Akkadian was the diplomatic language in today’s Middle East, the way French had been in Louix XIV’s Europe. At least they’d been careful with their language teacher this time, after the nasty experience with Isketerol of Tartessos in the Year 1. Shamash-nasir-kudduru—the God Shamash is Guardian of the Boundary Stone, or Sham for short—was a weedy little Babylonian date merchant whom one of the Islander ships had picked up in a brief initial survey of the Persian Gulf; he’d been living on Bahrain (Dilmun to the locals) and not doing very well. In fact, he looked a lot like Saddam Hussein after a long, strict diet.

“My lady,” he said in a thickly guttural accent, with a sidelong glance at Ian, “here we have the . . . it is to say . . . symbol, meaning ‘day.’ ” He drew one wedge with the broad end upright, and two more springing off to the left and slanting upward. “It to be is able also to be the symbol for a
sound
.”

“Which sound?” Doreen asked with a sigh.

“It is sound
ud,
” the Babylonian said. “That is first sound. Also symbol is for
tu
or
tam
or
par
or
likh
or
khish
. . .” He drew another, with an upright wedge, three horizontal to the side, and an arrowhead to the left. “It is sound
shu, qad, qat.
Can mean
quatu,
it is meaning in your speech, ‘hand.’ Also
emuqu,
‘strength,’ or
gamalu,
‘protection,’ or . . .”

Ian cleared his throat. “What say we commit some dereliction of duty?” he said.

“God, yes,” she groaned. “Sham, you can knock off too. Same time tomorrow.”

The Babylonian made a bobbing gesture over folded hands and collected his writing materials. Doreen tidied her own desk; she was neater than Ian, perhaps because as Doreen Rosenthal before the Event she’d been a budding astronomer in her late twenties rather than a bachelor—well, widower—professor of classical history just past fifty. She also looked
extremely
good bending over like that in a light summer dress, with her long black hair falling down and half hiding a wonderful view of décolletage. She’d been positively chunky when he’d first seen her, back the day after the Event. That was when she was working as an intern at the Maria Mitchell Observatory, where she’d used the little reflector telescope to pinpoint the real date from the stars.
Of course, we all lost weight those first six months, and God knows we’re not likely to sit around watching TV anymore.
Nowadays she could have modeled for a statue of Ishtar, one of the sexier kind.

“Let’s pick up David and grab something to cook down at the docks—couple of lobster, we’ll boil ’em up and throw together a salad.”

Their housekeeper-nanny had the boy in the kitchen with her while she sat with a cookbook, reading slowly, her lips moving. Back at the end of the Alban War the Islanders had insisted that the defeated Sun People tribes let all their slaves go free. Denditwara had been one of many who came to Nantucket, since she had no surviving family. The gap in living standards was so enormous that even the most lowly job here was luxury by Bronze Age standards.

Sort of like Mexico and California, only more so,
Ian thought. “If you haven’t started dinner yet, Denditwara, don’t bother,” he said. “We’ll handle it—Quigley’s Baths first, and then the evening’s yours.”

“Thank you, boss,” she said, dipping her head; she was half his age and short, a round-faced blonde who looked extremely English, physical types evidently being much more constant than culture or language. The Alban gave them a shy smile of gratitude for the free time; she was seeing a young man who worked in the whalebone mill.

Ian and Doreen winced slightly. Getting her to use something else besides the Sun People term for “master” had been difficult. So had getting across the concept of being an employee and working for wages.

“Can I see the boats, Daddy?” David asked. He showed signs of sharing his father’s height, but the face had Doreen’s oval shape and olive tone and black ringlets hung around his ears.

“Yes, you can see the boats if you promise to keep close to me and your mother,” Ian said. He could see the six-year-old considering the bargain.

“Will,” he said. “I
want
to see the boats.”

That’s a relief,
Ian thought, chuckling. Nantucket was a better place for children than L.A., but there were still street hazards.

“What a zoo,” Ian muttered an hour later, as they watched Denditwara scamper off to meet her bone grinder and David started to tell them about a game of catch he’d played with one of the other children in the baths. The roar of traffic nearly drowned the child’s treble piping.

“All right, all right, hold your horses, we’ll get out of the way,” Ian said, as a carter cried for space. He and Doreen were standing on the broad, flat expanse of the Steamship Dock, where the ferry from the mainland had tied up to drop off cars and trucks and tourists, back before the Event.

Arnstein looked up reflexively as he remembered that never-to-be-forgotten night . . .
God, eight years ago.
A little more, since the Event had been in March and it was into July now. The crawling dome of fire over the island, and then the terror next day as the impossible truth sank in. Then the even worse terror: seventy-five hundred Americans on an island that produced little besides daffodils and a few gourmet vegetables. Fear of starvation, food riots, cannibalism . . . Hell of a thing for a middle-aged professor of classical history to get himself caught in. Hell, he’d almost canceled his spring vacation on Nantucket that year.

“But we made it. Tight at times, but we made it,” he muttered.

He looked over at Doreen as she bent to jerk their son back from a determined attempt to pet a pony. The shaggy, stiff-maned animal was sulking in the traces of a cart heaped high with barrels of maple syrup from Providence Base on the mainland. It had a look of settled discontent on its face, an I-am-about-to-bite-you expression. The Bronze Age chariot ponies they’d brought back from Alba usually did. The first generation crossbred from the Alban mares and the Island’s quarter horse and Morgan and Thoroughbred stallions were a lot better, but still expensive.

“What was that, Ian?”

“I said we’d made it.” The two of them nodded in silent agreement.

Fishing boats were unloading amid a raucous swarm of gulls a little to the southeast, at Straight Wharf and its basin and the row of long piers constructed over the last few years. That part of town hadn’t been as densely built up before the Event, and the new waterfront there was full of fish-drying sheds, workshops, warehouses, and timberyards built since.

Here on Steamship Dock only the respect due Councilors kept a small bubble of space open. Half a dozen brigs and schooners were tied up—the classes that Nantucket’s new merchant houses used for long-distance work. The ratcheting of the spindly cranes and winches that swung heavy loads ashore was loud even against the clatter of hooves and iron wheels on the pavement.

Factors and dealers and storekeepers dickered and yelled, customs agents prowled, sailors chanted their rhythmic
Heave . . . ho! stamp and go, stamp and go, heave . . . ho!
as they hauled to unload cargo. Indians in blankets jostled kilted Proto-Celtic warriors and priestesses of the Fiernan Bohulugi cult of Moon Woman from Alba in poncho and thong skirt, watched by an Olmec noble wearing a cloak of woven hummingbird feathers that shimmered in impossible shades of turquoise, scarlet, purple. A herd of moas—the smaller breed, only four feet at the shoulder—were being pushed clucking and protesting onto a barge, headed for Long Island and the farming life. The spattered by-product of their fright added its aroma to the thick odors of drying fish and boiling whale blubber, raw leather, horses and horse dung, sweat and woodsmoke, tarred rope and wooden hulls.

The fresh sea breeze kept it tolerable even in summer. Mostly tolerable. One reason the Meeting had authorized steam dredgers was to dig deep channels southeast up the lagoon, so some of the more odorous trades could be moved downwind of town.

They dodged around a cargo from the Caribbean going inland on steam-haulers—bulk salt from the Islander penal settlement in the Bahamas, a few precious sacks of coffee from plants set out on Trinidad the spring after the Event, chunks of raw asphalt, sulfur for gunpowder.

Plus quetzal feathers, jaguar pelts, chocolate beans, raw cotton, mahogany and dyewoods from trading along the Main,
he thought. The list sounded more romantic than the hot, sweaty, dangerous reality; the Indians down there were corn farmers and therefore more numerous and better organized than the hunting peoples along the New England coast. There had been one short, sharp war with the Olmecs already.

Of course, that was that noble savage True Believer idiot Lisketter’s fault. Rousseau, what sins have been committed in Thy name!
Lisketter and her followers had ended up very dead, along with a few of the Islander military and a whole raftload of Olmecs. Lisketter’s people had been sacrificed to the Jaguar God and eaten, most of them. He didn’t even like to
think
about what had happened to Lisketter before she died.

“And speaking of lobster pots,” he said.

They pushed their way to the base of the Steamship Dock, along a waterside section of Easy Street, then over to the shallower basin beyond Old North Wharf, which now catered to the inshore fishery.