S. Stirling - Against the Tide of Years

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.

"Got 'em right here for you, Mr. Arnstein," the lobsterman said, hauling up a net dangling overside from his boat.

"Thanks, Jack," he replied, handing over a silver nickel, the Republic's own coinage, and accepting the change in coppers.

The former software salesman nodded thanks. David prodded the gently squirming canvas sack with his fingers and giggled at the sensation. Ian checked his turn at the fisherman's soft exclamation and looked to his left.

Another ship was being towed south between the breakwaters and into Nantucket's harbor. The design was American; to be exact, a scaled-up copy of the Yare, a two-masted topsail schooner that had carried tourists around the island before the Event. It wasn't Island-built, though. Countless small details showed that, starting with the stylized mountain on the flag at the mainmast top. Six small bronze cannon rested with their muzzles bowsed up against the bulwarks on each side of the craft.

One of Isketerol's ships. Ian shook his head; you had to hand it to the man…

"When you tell it, my sire, it's as if I can see it with my own eyes," Sarsental said, his eyes glowing.

Isketerol hid a grin. The new king of Tartessos was still in his thirties, with no silver strands in his bowl-cut black hair and all his teeth. He could remember what it was like to be a boy of twelve winters, just coming to a man's estate and wild for great deeds.

He leaned back in the courtyard lounger, smiling at the children sitting around his feet. Deck chairs were another Amurrukan thing. The Eagle People certainly know how to make themselves comfortable, he thought idly.

"Weren't you frightened?" one of his daughters asked.

Isketerol laughed. "Some of us were like to soil our loincloths," he said. "There we were, just two shiploads of us-the old ships, remember, small and frail-alone among the northern savages on a trading voyage. That was dangerous enough, they're wild and uncouth. Then there it was, the Eagle ship itself. Three hundred feet long and made of iron-"