Стивен Стирлинг: Against the Tide of Years

"Stop!" he said, waving them back, scowling. Can't just…

The spearcast came with blinding speed. Girenas was already dropping and rolling as the ashwood shaft whickered through the space he'd been occupying to thud three inches deep into a beech tree and stand quivering. The second spearman was aiming more carefully when Sue's rifle went off with a sharp crack and a long jet of off-white powder smoke. The Indian folded around himself with a surprised ooof! like a man who'd been punched in the gut. He wouldn't be getting up again, though, not with an exit wound the size of a baby's fist blasted out the other side of him by the hollowpoint.

Girenas flipped himself back to his feet, and the eighteen-inch bowie strapped along his right calf snapped into his fist, then into a gutting swing. The hatchet-man jinked in midleap as he dodged back, his war shriek turning to a yell of alarm. His friend with the club was using it to fend off Perks, the dog showing an endless ratcheting snarl and making little rushes whenever he saw an opening. Ignore it. The world sank down to one man and a razor-edged piece of steel on a two-foot wooden shaft. They circled, crouched, their soft moccasins rutching in the fallen leaves and punk of rotten branches. Five seconds passed, and then the Indian feinted twice and swung in earnest, a blow that would have chopped halfway through Girenas's face. He met the descending arm with a bladed palm, and the hatchet spun away. The bowie slammed forward, cutting edge up.

The Indian's hand slapped down on his wrist. For an instant they grappled chest to chest, the heavy smell of sweat and the bear grease that the man wore on his hair rank in his nostrils; the warrior's body felt like a bundle of rubber and steel. Then Girenas hooked a heel behind an ankle and pushed. They went down; the Nantucketer landed on top of his opponent, one knee in his stomach. The air wheezed out of him in a choking grunt. Girenas pinned him with his left hand and ripped the other free of the weakening grasp, stabbed once, again, again. The body thrashed under him and blood splashed into his face, but he ignored it as he rolled erect.

That was just in time to see the third Indian grab Sue's rifle in both hands, trying to wrestle it away from her. In a less serious situation, the look on his face as she hopped up, kicked both feet into her attacker's belly, and fell backward to flip him up and over would have been comical. She spun around on her backside like a top, raising both legs and slamming her heels into the Indian's face as he started to rise-a move from the unmercifully practical school of unarmed combat that Marian Alston had made part of Islander schooling. She scrambled to grab the rifle, came up to both knees and pounded the steel-shod butt into the Indian's bloodied face again and again, panting with fright and rage.

The last Indian was writhing under a hundred and twenty pounds of wolf-dog, trying to hold the fangs away from his face. Girenas scooped up his crossbow from where it hung on a branch nub and put the short, thick quarrel through the Indian's chest a second before the wide-stretched jaws would have closed on him.

That was a mercy, in its way.

"Reload!" he snapped at Sue. She was pale and her hands shook. "Reload! Now!" She took a deep breath, let it out, and obeyed. He nodded satisfaction. "Heel, Perks."

Girenas pumped the iron lever set into the forestock of his cross-bow six times, and the thick steel bow cut down from a car's leaf-spring ratcheted back and clicked into place, ready for the quarrel he slipped into it. The girl pushed up the breech lever of the rifle, her eyes enormous in a face gone pale, thumbing home a paper cartridge, closing the action and priming the pan. They both went to ground behind logs, eyes scanning.

"Perks! Circle!" he snapped.

The dog slipped through the underbrush and made its way around their campsite. The ranger followed, infinitely cautious. He found Perks nosing back along a trail and followed it for a few hundred yards, until he saw a place where all the Indians had paused in a muddy patch.

"Only the four of them," he said as he stepped back into the campsite. Relief mingled with sadness as he cleaned the knife and looked at the dead men. "Damn-"

Sue Chau had been staring at them too. Abruptly she turned and blundered three yards away before going to her knees and vomiting up a rush of half-digested deer meat. Girenas nodded, sighed, and took her a pannikin of water.

"Rinse and spit," he said. "Then have a drink of this."

The silver flask had been his father's; it had Cyrillic lettering on it. The contents were pure Nantucket barley-malt whiskey, aged a year in charred oak. The girl obeyed, choking a little, then went to splash her face.

"Sorry," she began.

"Nope," Girenas said. "You did pretty good." He kept his tone cool. "Still want to be a Ranger?"

She looked at the dead men. The bowel stink was already fairly bad, and the flies were arriving in droves. "This sort of thing, does it happen often?"

"Nope," Girenas said again. "Sometimes, though. Mebbe once a year."

Sue took a deep breath. "Well, I'm not quitting," she said.

"Good," he said with approval. "Now let's cover them up and get going." He looked at the sun again. "Might make the base if we push it."

They broke out the shovels and dug, setting rocks from the stream on top of the earth; Girenas planted the men's weapons as markers at their heads. Silence reigned as they broke camp and headed south toward Providence Base; Sue went in the lead with her rifle in the crook of her arm, then the three packhorses with the kills and gear. Girenas brought up the rear, and Perks went further still, like a hairy gray shadow among the trunks of the huge trees.

It was hours before they saw sign of their own people. That was scanty at first, a buried campfire, hoofmarks, a nest of feral honeybees, clover and bluegrass growing wild from seed dropped in horse-dung. Then breaks in the forest canopy where loggers had gone through, clearings scattered with stumps and chips or already rank with tall grass, brambles, flowers, and saplings. They stepped onto a rutted drag-trail heading downhill, and then the hills parted to show Narragansett Bay gleaming out before them, white-ruffled blue water, banks and islands green to the water's edge, sky thick with wildfowl. Half a dozen craft were in sight-a schooner, fishing boats, tugs hauling rafts. Below ran a road, gravel over dirt, and they could hear the faint shriek of a steam whistle.

"Home," Sue said.

She opened the breech of her rifle and used the cleaning rod to tap the paper cartridge out, stowing it in the pouch at her belt before blowing the priming out of the pan and easing the hammer forward. Girenas slipped the quarrel from his crossbow back into its quiver before pulling the trigger with a flat whung sound.

"Home," he agreed, with a sigh.

"Get sent to the past, spend all your time annotating reports," Councilor for Foreign Affairs Ian Arnstein muttered, in the privacy of his sunroom-office. "What a dashing life we exiled adventurers lead. Christ, I might as well be back in San Diego grading history papers."

Well, not exactly, perhaps, he thought, resharpening his goose-quill pen on the razor built into the inkstand and looking down at the report. God, but I hate these pens. The last ballpoints had run out years ago, and nobody had gotten around to fountain pens yet; it was the usual story-too much else with higher priorities.

God, but I miss my PC. Oh, God, for a laser printer.

He pushed his glasses back up his beaked nose-and losing them was something he didn't even want to contemplate, given what the Island lens grinders were turning out as an alternative-and read the paper before him again, winding his fingers absently in his beard. It was a long-standing gesture; unlike many on the Island, he'd had this back before the Event, when shaving was easy. It was bushy and curly and a dark russet brown where it wasn't gray, like what was left of the hair on his head, almost matching the color of his eyes.