Against the Tide of Years (69 page)

It was good to speak Fiernan again. Enough to begin thinking in it, even if that meant groping for a word now and then when she used an Islander concept.

Her mother grinned at her. “Even without—” she made a gesture with one finger.

Swindapa chuckled, held up her hand in the same gesture, added the other fingers together, and moved the hand rhythmically.

“ Without nothing, and it’s never tired at that!” she added, and they shared a bawdy laugh.

Marian would be
so
embarrassed,
she thought, smiling fondly.

“ I see you are happy; Moon Woman has set stars at your birth that called you to a strange way, but not a bad one,” Dhinwarn said. She shook her head. “ It’s strange and frightening, this
love-between-only-two people
the Eagle People have. Yet not a starless thing or a turned-back path.”

“ No, wonderful and terrifying,” Swindapa agreed. It had scared her at first, that her whole life should be so wrapped up in only one other. “ There’s nothing so warm; it’s like being
inside
the fire, without being burned.”

Heather and Lucy raced by on their ponies, waving and shouting to their mother; an uncle pursued them, swearing and laughing at the same time.

“ Those two are fine girls,” Dhinwarn said. “ You should bring them here more often.”

“As often as the stars set a path for it,” Swindapa said.

She looked around at the countryside. Not everything was as she remembered, even from her last visit. There were new crops amid the familiar wheat and barley and scrubby grass of fallow fields. Machines were at work, cultivators and disc-plows pulled by oxen—or sometimes by shaggy ponies that had once drawn only chariots. The whir of a hay-mower’s cutting bar made a new thing in the long quiet of the White Isle.

More stock,
she thought.
More fodder to overwinter it. New byres and sheepfolds, too. Bigger beasts, some of them.
Something teased at her eye, until she realized it; she’d seen scarcely a single woman spinning a distaff as she walked or sat.
Thread comes from the machines now.

Some of the small square fields had been thrown together for the convenience of the animal-drawn reapers the Eagle People had brought, too, changing the very look of the land. If you looked closely, there were other changes; iron tools in the hands of the cultivators, more and more colorful clothes and cobbled shoes on the dwellers, brick-walled wells, the little outhouses that the Islander medical missionaries had advised and the Grandmothers agreed to make part of the purity rituals, here and there a chimney, or a wagon with a load of small cast-iron stoves, or a wind pump.

“More changes than you would think, and more every year—like a rock rolling downhill,” Dhinwarn told her, sensing her thought. “Some are discontented, thinking they break old harmonies. Others say no, best of all so many more of our children live and grow healthy.”

Her smile grew slightly savage. “And because we listened first, we grow faster than the Sun People in all ways, wealth and knowledge and numbers. Many of them come west now—not to raid, but asking for work or learning.”

Swindapa nodded. “We had to become other than we were, or cease to be at all,” she agreed.

They spoke more, but her voice was choked off when the Great Wisdom itself rose above the horizon on the east, looming over the bare pasture as it had been made to do so many centuries before. She had seen the pictures on Nantucket, of the great stones shattered and abandoned, their true purpose lost. There were times when that image seemed to overwhelm her memories, but here the Wisdom stood whole and complete, the great triathlons and the bluestone semicircle . . .

She began to sing under her breath, the Naming Chant that called each stone by its title, and listed the Star-Moon-Sun conjunctions that could be sighted from it—not only the great ones, the Midwinter Moon that chased the flighty Sun back to Its work of warming the Earth dwellers, but the small friendly stars that governed the hearth or the best time to take a rabbit skin.

Marian never could sink her mind into this,
she thought.
Odd, for she knows the Eagle People’s counting so well. Perhaps it’s that she can’t see that a word can be a number too.

Beside her Heather and Lucy grew quiet until she finished, their lips silently following along on some of the simpler bits. When she was done and waved them ahead they clapped heels to the ponies and rode off to the north, toward the Kurlelo greathouse, shouting greetings to cousins they hadn’t seen for a quarter of their short lives. Swindapa stood in the stirrups and shaded her eyes with a hand.

The huge round, half-timbered shape of the greathouse, with its conical roof of thatched wheat-straw, looked subtly different. A metal tube at the apex . . .

“ You put in a copper smoke-hood!” she said, delighted.

Her mother nodded and took off her conical straw hat. “It’s much easier on the eyes now,” she said. “
And
warmer in winter. Better for the girls doing the Chants, too.” She smiled. “We’ve so much more time for that! More time for songs and stories, for making bright-please-eye-warm-heart-joy-in-hands things.”

Swindapa’s smile died as she remembered that this was not only a visit. It was a meeting, and the news was of war. The Grandmothers didn’t decide such matters; that wasn’t their business, save where the Sacred Truce was concerned. But those who
did
decide such matters would listen carefully to their opinions.

 

“Uhot-na. InHOja, In
ye
te, abal’na,”
the elder of the Grandmothers in the circle began, as the last of those who felt they should be here drifted into the smaller round hut and ranged themselves about its hearth. Her owl-headed staff nodded in her hand.

There were a score and one in all, a lucky number, although nobody had arranged it thus. Swindapa breathed in the scent of woodsmoke and thatch and cloth and sweat . . . yet even this wasn’t as it always had been. The smells included soap, the bitter scent of hops, and one of those sitting around the whitewashed wall was wearing glasses.

“A good star shine on this meeting. Moon Woman gather it to her breast. We’re here to talk, let’s talk,” the Eldest said.

She picked up the sticks in her hands, tapping lightly along their colored, notched lengths. Each notch and inset in the yard-long wands marked some happening, or feeling, or shade of meaning. They squatted on their hams around the fire, shadows flickering on their faces—wrinkled crone, stout matron whose drooping breasts were proud sign of the children she had born, Swindapa the youngest of them but the one whose path had wandered beyond Time along the Moon-trail. Others, star-students, Rememberers, Seekers.

The Grandmothers of the Great Wisdom.

The Eldest spoke, with her voice and with the flashing sticks: “ Would that the Eldest-Before was with us, who first greeted the Eagle People, was here.”

Another set of sticks took up the tapping rhythm. “You sat by her feet a long time. We’ll listen to you; there are many here, we’ll find out what Moon Woman wants. Everybody rides the Swan sometime.”

Greatly daring, Swindapa took up her rods. She’d made them herself, on the voyage over. They looked different; more angular, in parts, with strange colors. That showed her spirit . . .

“ I’ve seen the changes here. Most of them are happy.”

More tick-tapping, weaving in and out. An older woman spoke: “Happy for now. In the many-cycles to come, who knows.”

The eldest: “Eldest-Before saw only a darkness without stars before the feet of the Earth Folk, before the Eagle People came from out of time.”

Another: “ We thought we’d have peace, but now the Eagle People are talking of a war, far away, with people who never harmed us. Is that the path Moon Woman’s stars reflect, now? ”

“Moon Woman shines in all the lands—who aren’t Her children? The Eagle People came from very far to help us, shouldn’t we do the same for others? ”

“Earth Folk have never carried spears so far. Bad enough to fight for our own hearths.”

Swindapa took up the exchange. Her people were great rememberers. So:

“Once the Earth Folk lived from the Hot Lands to Fog-and-Ice place. We didn’t carry spears beyond our own neighborhoods, but the
dyaus arsi,
the Sun People, they carried them everywhere. One fight, another, everyone hoped each would be the last. And when the Eagle People came, we’d gone back so far our heels were wet in the ocean at our backs. Not everything is good, just because we always did it.”

Another voice: “There’s too much of the
dyaus arsi
in the Eagle People, for my taste. They are a restless breed; even in their Wisdom Working they cut everything up, then stick the bits together to suit them. Bossy, rude, turn-up-the-nose-we-know-best. I don’t like this Father-Son-Spirit teaching they bring, either.”

Swindapa: “ Yes, they descend from the Sun People, but with some of us in them, too. And an acorn doesn’t look much like an oak; you can’t eat an apple until it’s ripe.”

Another: “There’s more than one road to the same place. Call an apple an ash, it’s still an apple—the Father-Son-Spirit-Mother doesn’t teach as Diawas Pithair did. If the Eagle People are greedy and fierce, they don’t take it out and stroke it the way the charioteers do.”

Dhinwarn: “They gave my daughter back to me, when she was taken from the Shining World. They beat back the Burning Snake for her, that had eaten all her dreams.”

The words went back and forth, until the words faded out of it and there was a tapping chorus of agreement, woven in and among the humming song. After a while they began to sway, and then they rose, dancing in a spiral. The spiral wove out of the hut, and an owl hooted and flew above them as they swayed and hummed toward the Great Wisdom.

 

“ This is more Ian and Doreen’s kind of work than ours,” Swindapa said, drawing her horse a little aside.

Marian cocked an eye at her and chuckled. “First you grumble about how we’re always fighting,” she said. “Now we’re playing at diplomats, and you complain about
that.
”

Swindapa smiled herself, then sighed and shrugged. “I don’t like going among the Sun People much,” she said.

Marian nodded sympathy. “Don’t let them make you
il’lunHE peko’uHOtna,
then,” she said.

That meant something like
gloomy;
or perhaps
dark-spirited
or
Moon-deprived.
Even after these years, she still found the Earth Folk language a tangle; she suspected that you had to grow up speaking it to truly understand it well. Still more the dialect of Swindapa’s home, where they piled pun upon allusion upon myth in a riot of metaphors.

“ You’re right, my
Bin’HOtse-khwon,
” Swindapa said. “ But I miss the children.”

“So do I, sugar, but they’re happy enough at your mother’s place for a while.”

The Islander party drew rein at the edge of the woodland trail, looking downward. The sun of the summer evening cast long shadows across them, and over the landscape that stretched away to the marshes by the Thames—the Ahwun’rax, the Great Chief River. In one course of the tides of time, this was the border of southern Bucking-hamshire, not far from Windsor. Here it was the tribal lands of the Thaurinii folk, the
teuatha
of the Bull.

The stockaded
ruathaurikaz
of their chieftains stood atop a low chalk cliff above the river. Faint and far, a horn droned. Below, at the foot of the heights, lay that which made this clan more important than most. The river split around a long oval-shaped island; from the south bank a bridge of great timbers reached to the isle, and another from there to the north shore. Boats lay at anchor downstream of them; even from here Marian could see that some of them were quite large, one a modern design, probably out of Portsmouth Base or Westhaven.

Around the fortlet lay open pastureland where shaggy little cattle and horses and goatlike sheep grazed. Fields were smaller than the grazing, wheat and barley just beginning to show golden among the green; hawthorn hedges marked them out, or hurdles of woven willow withes. Farmsteads lay strewn about, dwellings topped with gray thatch cut from river reeds. Men at work in the fields, women hoeing in gardens, all stopped and pointed and stared, the racket of their voices fainter than the buzzing of insects. Not far away a girl in a long dress and shawl squeaked as she heard the thud of hooves and rattle of metal. She almost dropped the wicker basket of wild strawberries in her hands, then took to her heels, yelling.

Apart from that there was no sign of alarm, no signal fires or glints from a gathering of spearheads; instead the folk gathered to stare and point, some crying greetings. The peace of the Alliance lay on the land of the Thaurinii, with not so much as a cattle raid to break it. There had always been more trade here than in most steadings; the boats marked it, and the sign of many wagons on the roadway.

Dust smoked white under hooves and wheels as they rode down the gentle slope. The sun was hot for Alba, and sweat prickled her body under the wool and linen of her uniform. Behind her the Marine guard drew into a neat double rank of riders, with the Stars and Stripes of the Republic at their head. Behind them were the two-wheeled baggage carts and the attendants that Sun People respectability required.