Against the Tide of Years (62 page)

 

 

“D
ull duty,” Guard Recruit Mandy Kayle said. “Sky Father give me ‘dull’ anytime,” Petty Officer Samuel Taunarsson said. “ I mean, God the Father and His Son,” he continued, crossing himself. “And His Mother. Whether or not She is Moon Woman, too,” he added for safety’s sake.

Above them the fabric of the balloon creaked in the predawn chill. She could see a few intact aircraft—they’d probably never fly again—pegged down under shelters at the little airport, and the big blimp-construction shed—empty right now. Despite that addition there was a forlorn air to Nantucket Airport, boarded windows and bindweed slithering out over the runways . . . as if the Event had left it stranded in its own little bubble of time. Kayle shivered slightly at the thought; she’d been nine years old the night of the Event, but she was
never
going to forget it. The world before, yes—there were times when she wasn’t sure if her memories were real or dreams.

“ Pressure? ” Taunarsson said.

“Full, Petty Officer,” Kayle said. The two-hundred-foot-long balloon was tugging at its moorings, rocking a little in a fresh westerly breeze. “At present weight, neutral buoyancy at five hundred feet.”

“Drop stationary ballast,” he said, and went to one side of the gondola. Kayle went to the other, her hand on the slipknot of a burlap sack of sand.

“One!”

Two fifty-pound bags hit the asphalt in unison with dull thuds.

“ Two! Three!”

Ropes creaked sharply. The noncom nodded and stepped up to the head of the open oval gondola, picking up the handset. “This is
Eagle’s Eye.
Communications check.”

Evidently that went smoothly too, since he clicked the knob to a different channel and spoke again: “Ready, aye, ready.”

From the gray-shot darkness over the side came the rare brilliance of an electric light; nobody was going to use an open flame near this much hydrogen.

“ Paying up!” came the voice of the line team.

“Stand by to let go fore and aft!” Taunarsson called.

“Ready!”

“On the mark . . .
loose
!”

There was a bobbling heave, a sharp
tung
sound, and a steady
Clinkaclinkaclinka
as the mechanism let the cable run in a smooth, controlled surge. The Coast Guard fixed observation balloon
Eagle’s Eye
rose and turned its nose into the wind as the fins caught the breeze. Kayle yawned and settled back on the bench by her duty station, keeping an eye on the pressure and altitude gauges.

Boring,
she thought.

In the Year 2 the Kayles had taken up a sixty-four-acre Town grant farm out Milestone Road, about halfway to Sconset, a little south of Gibbs Pond. Sixty-four acres and forty crossbred Alban-Jersey dairy cattle, all of ’em needing to be milked twice a day, rain or shine, winter or summer.

Mandy Kayle was just old enough to remember times when the school year ended with a
vacation.
Even though her younger siblings, two blood and two adopted, got old enough to help, she’d been glad to shake the dust of the farm off her feet on her eighteenth birthday.

Shake the dust? Scrape the shit off my feet! Hell, this certainly beats working for a living.
She’d probably get shipboard duty in six months or so. Maybe make petty officer and get into one of the middie slots, a commission in a couple of years. Standing on her own quarterdeck some day . . .

Or I could put in for flight training.
Scuttlebutt had it that more ultralights were being sent far foreign, with the expeditionary force and possibly with ships for scouting.

She stood up to put on her sealskin jacket as they hit a thousand feet—it got brisk up here—and clipped on her safety line before Taunarsson could get on her case about it. He had a serious hair up the ass about regs; but then, he’d sailed with
Commodore Alston,
the lucky bastard.

“Vent water ballast, establish neutral buoyancy at five thousand feet,” he said.

“Aye, aye,” she replied.

That control was a wheel at the end of a pole in the middle of the gondola. She gave it three quick turns, then waited while the rumbling hiss started below and the
Eagle’s Eye
surged upward again, her eye fixed on the altimeter and the converted fuel gauge that showed the level of ballast.

“Forty-five hundred feet,” she said as her ears popped again.

“ Ballast valve off.”

“ Ballast valve off, aye.”

Silence fell, broken only by the clean, cold whistle of the wind around the balloon. The cable stretched away in a diminishing curve below them to the toy-small recovery gear, and Nantucket Island spread out, gradually rising from shadow to light as the sun heaved itself above the eastern horizon. The Island was a lopsided triangle, gray-green set in blue and edged with white surf. She could see other land—Martha’s Vineyard to the northwest, the mainland to the north—but her homeland was laid out below her like a map.

“ Let’s get to work,” Taunarsson said. “ You’ve got first watch.”

“Aye, aye, Mr. Taunarsson,” she said.

There was a thermos of hot cocoa in a box bolted to the side of the gondola that also held their boxed lunches; she poured for both of them, automatically adjusting for the continuous dip and sway of the tethered balloon. She’d been miserably sick the first couple of times, and she still remembered the petty officer’s cheerful command
—Overside, and show the civvies what you think of ’em, Recruit.

Then she broke out her binoculars, resting her elbows on the chest-high rail, careful to check that the strap was hitched around her neck and through the brass loop at the rear of her leather jacket before she took them anywhere near the edge of the little craft. What the lieutenant—hell, what the commodore—would say if she lost the irreplaceable pre-Event instrument just didn’t bear thinking about.

Green-blue water shading out into dark blue, edged with whitecaps, stretching out all around to the edge of the world—back to greenish again over the sandbanks that dotted Nantucket Sound like silent hands waiting to grab ships’ keels. The low shorelines of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard easily in view from here—there were threads of smoke coming up from both, probably from charcoal kilns and turpentine works, and a bigger one from the glassworks at Hyannis Base. What she and Taunarsson were
supposed
to look for were ships, and whales spouting, and schools of fish—so the Guard could pass the information on to whalers and fishers and tug captains—or people in trouble. Those were the things the Guard was for, along with exploring and fighting.

The scan was automatic by now. She could ignore the wind that brought red to her cheeks and ears, the almost inaudible murmur of the petty officer reading to himself as he went over a textbook—studying for a move up, of course. Mandy had a copy of that navigation manual herself. She could read it without moving her lips, but then, she hadn’t learned to read as an adult—and in a second language at that.

Clouds in the north,
she thought. Might be weather building up there.
Bit of a haze to the east.

Out there the ocean stretched to Alba, to the Summer Isle, to the weird places along the Baltic that the
Douglass
had found—she saw herself standing in the prow of a whaleboat as it grounded on a sandy shore edged with pine; she saw painted men leaning on their spears, holding up strings of amber, drums beating in the dark forests . . .

Odd.
There were
sails
out there; she could swear it. She flipped through the arrivals and departures checklist. Two brigs and a clipper were due in from far foreign this week, from the penal settlement on Inagua, Trinidad, and the Pacific, respectively.
Hell, there are
already
more than three there. Damn that haze.
And ships bearing up from the Caribbean usually ran in west of Madaket and picked up a tug there.

“Oh, shit,” she whispered a second later.

 

“I’d forgotten how much I hated those things,” Marian mumbled, then forced herself to full alertness and reached over Swindapa’s sleepy murmur of protest to pick up the telephone. Her partner clung to her like a warm, drowsy octopus, sighing and stretching as Marian’s hand fumbled in the dark through the clutter on the side table.

Matches, handkerchief, water glass, Greatest Chinese Invention of All time, right, there it is, telephone,
she thought, yawning.

“Alston heah,” she said. It had to be fairly important to use the still-limited telephone service.
“ What? ”

Swindapa sat up in midstretch, eyes sharp and alert.

“Yes, of course notify the Chief, Sandy,” Marian snapped. “At once. And sound the General Alarm and Turn Out. Yes, I’m authorizing it, goddamnit. Get to it!”

“ What’s happening? ” Swindapa said steadily as they rolled out of bed and began to dress.

“Great minds think alike,” Marian said, looking out the window.

The spring dawn was just breaking in the east, gilding the white pillars of the Two Greeks across Main Street from Guard House.

“It looks like King Isketerol decided not to wait for us to hit him first.”

 

“ It’s
hanging in the air,
” Shaudriskol of Tartessos said, looking up at the tiny dot lazing in the morning sky. Light flashed off something beneath it, metal or glass.

“We knew they could do that,” his uncle Zeurkenol said quietly. The kingdom had hot-air balloons as well, this last year. “Keep it down, don’t startle the men. When we’ve taken the island, we too will command the skies.”

It was a clear, fresh morning, and the whole fleet was cutting across the wind—pointing up from the southeast. The lookouts had cried out that the Jester had relented and Arucuttag of the Sea had brought them to landfall some time ago; small fires in metal bowls burned thank-offerings before the little model shrines on every quarterdeck. Even now, when Tartessian ships had spanned the oceans of Earth, it still felt a little unnatural to see nothing but sea for weeks.

He raised the far-seeing glasses to his eye, examined the coast, then looked down at the map carefully secured to a board, holding aside the oiled leather that protected it when it was not in use. The spy had stolen them a fine map indeed;
The Complete Map of Nantucket,
by something that the Eagle People called a
Chamber of Commerce—
like most men of rank, Zeurkenol had learned a smattering of En-gil-ish along with the new script.

His skin prickled a little at the sight of the low, sandy shore ahead; it was like sailing to the Otherworld—Nantucket, the home of everything mysterious, magical, eldritch . . .

“And the richest prize in all the world,” he murmured.

“ With the fate of the kingdom riding on our shoulders,” his nephew added proudly.

“Don’t flatter yourself, son of my brother,” Zeurkenol said dryly. “Did you notice which regiments the king sent? ”

“ Wiseant, Boar, Wolf, Otter, and Bear,” his nephew-aide said automatically. “ They’re . . . oh.”

A substantial proportion of the new
standing army—
he used the Eng-il-its word when he thought, there being no close Tartessian equivalent; the closest you could come was
household guards.
First-rate troops armed with the new breechloaders, and with many other cunning new weapons. But all recruited from the new subject peoples in the lands south of the Pillars, tribal mercenaries from the mountains of the Riff. Fierce fighters and loyal to their salt, but there would be no politically destabilizing grief in the capital if they were lost.

“ But the officers are of the best families in the City!”

“Yes,” Zeurkenol said. “Not many unmarried men among them, either.”

His nephew was young, no more than eighteen winters, but no fool. His eyes widened. All of them with hostages within the city walls. None of the New Men among them, either, none of the king’s strongest supporters.

“ You don’t mean . . . the king
wants
us to fail? To die here? ”

“Oh, no, never think it. The king strikes boldly here, and if we conquer, our rewards will be great . . . back in Tartessos, under his eye.”

Isketerol was no fool, either, nor did he love blood for its own sake. There was not much to say against how the king
used
his new power, except that he
had
it.

I would be easier in my mind if I were sure his son would use it likewise,
the nobleman thought.

The king in Tartessos might as well be a living god now, like Pharaoh. That was well for the city when the king was a very able man, although even the ablest made mistakes. The
next
king, though . . .

He pushed the thought out of his mind. There was a war to fight, and if he won it Tartessos would bestride the world.

“A general message,” he said. It would be a repetition, but all the better for that—the troops were good fighting men but inclined to be a bit wild. “ To all warriors ashore. Remember that the king has commanded that all nonfighters or those who surrender be treated well, as his subjects. There is to be no burning, no plunder, no forcing of women—any man found breaking these orders will be castrated and burned alive before the altar of Arucuttag!”

So the king had said, and like most of his orders there was wisdom in it. The loot of Nantucket would be beyond the dreams of avarice, even a king’s dreams, but the skills and knowledge it held were a treasure far greater. Best to destroy as little as possible in taking them.

 

There was a crowd around the table in the map room; that was in the Middle Brick, the nearly identical building just south of Guard House. Marian looked down at the big relief map again, as more counters went into the clump hovering off the eastern end of the island. A cup of coffee was thrust into her hand, and she sipped automatically.