S. Stirling - On the Oceans of Eternity

"No!" she called. "The Lady comes again in love, bringing the rain that gives Her people life, swelling the rivers as a mother's breasts swell with milk. Come to me. Sun Lord, as the Sun sinks beneath the River, and together we will bring rain and cloud, sowing and reaping!"

She sank gracefully to the heaped wool blankets, opening arms and legs to him. The deathly silence broke into cheers as he went in unto her, and cannon roared all along the city walls and from the ships anchored in the harbor, rockets flaring up to burst in multicolored splendor overhead.

The fall weather of the Year 10 had cleared, down near the reaches where the Severn gave into the Bristol Channel. The day was bright, brisk, a chill wind whipping the blood into your face; the coal smoke from the steamboat's stack tattered away south and west, losing itself over smargadine waters and white-crested waves. Marian stood on the deckhouse that spanned the curved boxes that held the vessel's paddle wheels, behind opened windows, Swindapa beside her. Froth churned white behind them, surging against the first of the train of four barges on their tows behind. The craft's blunt bows sledged their way into the waves, and spray on her lips tasted of salt now. There was a new roll and swing to the craft's movement, infinitely familiar, paradoxically reassuring with its hint of accustomed danger. Now and then water would show green over shallows, or throw spray skyward from a rock. The captain of the tug stood beside the wheel, a stocky middle-aged man in sweater and sea boots and the shapeless remains of what had been a peaked yachtsman's cap, scratching in his close-clipped gray-yellow beard now and then and occasionally raising his binoculars. From time to time he gave an order, in English or Fiernan or a mishmash of the two tongues. When he spoke to Marian Alston, it was in a cornhusker Indiana rasp.

"Tricky navigation in these parts, ma'am. We missed the tidal bore you can get around here this time, mostly, thank God, but there's rocks and shifting sandbanks most of the way from here to Westhaven." He looked over his shoulder, down at the water, then unplugged a speaking tube, whistled into it, then shouted in a good-humored bellow:

"More steam, goddammit! Or I'll come wo'tuHuma ssoWya and fry my bread in your drippings! N'wagHA tobos !"

Wonder how he ended up here ? Marian thought. Knows his work, obviously, though .

"Left two, Cindy," he went on to the young woman at the wheel, then put his hand on it. "Good-smooth, not too fast, don't try to force it."

"Aye aye. Dad." A chuckle. "And Dad? It wasn't really nice to say you'd stuff them in the furnace."

"You don't have to hire 'em," he said, and rumpled her hair with rough affection. To Marian: "Hard to get stokers, Commodore. Even harder to keep 'em. Black Gang work ain't what you'd call popular."

"Understandable, Captain Bauerman," she replied, clasping her hands behind her back and rising slightly on the balls of her feet. Keeping balance against the movement of the deck was something a life at sea had made wholly automatic.

He grinned, respectful of her rank but not in the least intimidated by it. "Oh, hell, Captain's a little too fancy for a tugboat skipper," he said. "Good to get home, though."

Westhaven was a little west of the site of Bristol in the twentieth, not far from where the Lower Avon joined the Severn estuary. Or where the Hillwater joins the River of Long Shadows , she thought, with a quirk of her mouth. First landfall near Portsmouth, right after the Event, where she'd rescued Swindapa; then here the following spring to deal with Walker. Pentagon Base, they'd called it, after the shape of the fort they built.

She turned her head and saw Swindapa looking at her, smiling, knew that she was remembering the same days. Lot of water under the bridge , she thought, with a warm lightness that hadn't changed. It always made her want to break out in a silly grin, too…

"Lot of changes," she said aloud instead, nodding toward the land.

The shoreline passed, in stretches of reddish sandstone cliff or low salt marsh; inland were rolling fields and woodland turning to blue hills in the distance. The air was full of wings, raucous gulls following lug-sailed fishing boats, waterfowl from the seaside swamps, sea eagles; seals in the water and a spray of fish jumping to flee the liquid grace of their rush, a whale spouting not too far away.

I never knew how … empty of life… the twentieth was , Alston thought, not for the first time. With luck and good management, they'd see that things stayed that way. If we win the war , she thought grimly. I doubt Walker would give a damn .

As they watched, one of the deep-ocean ships cast off from the steam tug that had brought it out of Westhaven harbor and hoisted sail-it was a three-masted schooner, about two hundred tons, a whale among the minnow-tiny coracles and sewn-plank fishing boats around it. Maybe Alban-built , she thought, as it heeled and the sails bellied out into taut beige curves, a white bow wave surging back from its sharp prow. They knew wood, cloth, and rope well enough and could afford to buy what they couldn't make. Certainly mostly Alban-crewed; Fiernans, or at least Fiernans who'd studied with the Grandmothers, picked up the math needed for practical navigation fast enough.

There were changes ashore, too; progress had gone furthest and fastest in this area, near the largest of the Islander bases in Alba. A decade ago the land had been strewn with widely scattered hamlets of round huts, small fields about them worked with hand-hoe and scratch-plow; beyond broad rings of scrubby second growth and rough pasture. Now most of the brush had been cleared, stubblefields and pasture edged with fences or new-planted hawthorn hedges; even the primal wildwood had retreated a bit, though nobody had found it worthwhile to drain much of the vast swamps.

Alston leveled her own binoculars. A puffing steam road-hauler pulled a threshing machine; harvest was well past, the wheat and barley in thatched stacks, and the thresher was on its rounds, doing in a few hours what would take scores of workers all winter with flails. More wagons piled with sacks of grain waited beside a dammed stream and its mill, the big wooden wheel turning briskly under the white water pouring from the sluice. That represented about a thousand women who didn't have to spend three hours every morning kneeling to grind their families' daily grain on a metate-like arrangement of two stones.

Among the Sun People further east grain-grinding had been the primary work of slave women, that and carrying buckets of water on a yoke across the shoulders, and gathering firewood. The Earth Folk had been more humane about distributing the toil, but it still meant endless hours of backbreaking monotony for somebody.

"Many changes," Swindapa said, leaning her elbows on the edge of the window before them. The breeze of their passage cuffed locks of wheat-colored hair backward around her tanned face, and she squinted into the wind. Fine lines appeared beside her eyes as she did, the beginning of the sailors' wrinkles that were more deeply grooved in Marian's skin.

Lord, 'dapa's going on thirty now , Marian thought with a sudden shock. One reason she'd resisted the younger woman's determined attempts at seduction back on the Island those first few months had been the difference in their ages.

Well, nobody can accuse me of cradle-robbing anymore.

"Are you happy about what's changed?" the black woman asked.

Swindapa turned her head and smiled. "Oh, mostly, bin'-HOtse-khwon ," she said, and nodded toward the shore. "Some of the Earth Folk grumble, not most. Who'd watch their children die, when they didn't have to? Half did, in the old days. And we have peace, at least in our own land."