Гарри Тертлдав - The First Heroes

Not from anywhere near the trade-outposts at the mouth of the Loire and Seine and Rhine, either, she thought.

At a guess—

"Khwid teuatha tuh'ori?" she said: What tribe is yours? Of what people do you come? "Bawatavii?" she went on: "Jowatani?"

Those were the nearest coastal groups over the water, but he looked a little too raw for that. He'd been staring at her in wonder from the moment she showed up. Lucy was used to that; black people weren't common in Nantucket and extremely rare elsewhere. Her own birth-mother had been Alban, her father an American—a Coast Guardsman who later turned renegade and eventually ended up as a king on the upper Nile. One of her two adoptive mothers had been true coal-black, as opposed to Lucy's own light milk-chocolate, and there were still people in Alba who thought Marian Alston was some sort of spirit or demigoddess . . . though her deeds had more to do with that than her appearance.

"Keruthinii teuatha eghom h'esmi," he said, shaking his head and visibly gathering himself. "I am of the Keruthini folk." He drew himself up proudly: "Those who drove the Iraiina to Alba in my grandfather's time."

She grinned; that had happened just before the Event landed the late-twentieth-century island of Nantucket in 1250 B.c.E. It'd been a typical tribal scuffle between two small bands of scruffy bandits.

Evidently it was a legendary battle-of-the-heroes thing with this boy's people, now that the tribal bards had had a generation to work it over. Then his jaw dropped a trifle more as he noticed she was a woman; he might not have at all, save that her jacket was open on a well-filled sweater.

Still, he recovered fairly well. "This is yours?" he said, turning the katana and offering it hilt-first—and surprised her by saving it in gut-turally accented but fairly good English. "You are from the Island of Wizards?"

Well, not just pretty, but fairly smart, she decided, carefully examining the edge—this was a pre-Event heirloom, carried back in time with the island of Nantucket to the Late Bronze Age—and then wiping it clean with a cloth before slipping it into the sheath whose lip rode over her left shoulder.

Not just an heirloom, though. The layer-forged metal had minute etchings along three-quarters of its length, where the salt and acids of blood had cut into the softer layers between the glass-hard edge steel. Only some of them were from her mother's time.

"It is and I am," she said. "Lucy Alston-Kurlelo, captain of the merchantman Grey Lady's Pride . . ." She saw his eyes open slightly at the family name; curse of having two famous mothers. "And I'm shipping out soon. Interested in a berth?"

For a moment the man's face—he looked to be in his late teens, considerably younger than she—grew keen. Then he looked wary. "On . . . ship? Ocean?" He pointed out toward the salt water. At her nod he raised his hands in a warding gesture and swallowed. Lucy laughed and flipped him a gold ten-dollar piece. He caught the small bright coin and nodded with regal politeness. She sighed as she turned and led her people back toward the ship.

"Well, let's go see what other gutter-scrapings, shepherdesses, and plowboys we can rustle up," she said to her companions—first mate and bosun and two senior deckhands; her younger brother Tim was supercargo and in charge back at the dock.

They nodded in unison. The Coast Guard kept the North Atlantic fairly free of pirates, and Tartessos did the same for the waters south of Capricorn and the western Mediterranean. You could take a chance and sail shorthanded on the crowded runs between here and home, and you needed to squeeze every cent until it shrieked to meet your costs even so.

Where the Pride was going, Islander craft were all too likely to meet locals who'd acquired steel and even gunpowder without developing any particular constraints on taking whatever they wanted whenever they could. You needed a crew big enough to work the guns and repel boarders; the extra risk and expense was what kept competition down and profits high on the Sumatra run and points east. It was also one reason she and her sister-cum-business-partner Heather never shipped together on these long voyages.

No sense in making two sets of children orphans with the same shower of poisoned blowgun darts.

The strangers departed while Kreuha was marveling over the gold-piece; he had seen copper and silver coins from Alba and the Isle of Wizards, Nantucket, but this was the first one of gold he'd ever held. He held it up to the fading light of afternoon; there was an eagle clutching a bundle of arrows and a peace-wreath on one side, and strange letters and numbers on the other.

One of the strangers had remained, a young brown-haired man in blue tunic and trousers, with a wooden club and one of the fearsome-wonderful fire-weapons at his belt—the awesome type called revolver, which let the bearer hold the deaths of six men in his hand. He pulled a metal whistle free and blew three sharp blasts on it.

"Ual kelb soma krweps," he said, to Kreuha in something close to the warrior's own language: "To summon help with the body." Blood Wolf nodded, although he didn't offer to help himself—dead bodies were unclean, and he didn't know how he'd get a purification ceremony done so far from home. The man went on: "I am . . . you would say, a retainer of my chief. A warrior charged with keeping order and guarding against ill-doers among the people. In English, a 'policeman."

Kreuha's brows rose. That was a duty he didn't envy; you'd be the target of endless ill-will if you had to offend people as part of your duty. He'd never walked away from a fight, but now that he'd come to man's estate he didn't go looking for them, not all the time. His lips moved, as he repeated the word softly several times, to add to his store of En-gil-its terms.

"It's also my duty to advise strangers," the armsman went on. "No slight to your honor, stranger, but it's forbidden here to fight unless you are attacked." He looked at Kreuha's spears. "How were you planning on finding your bread in this land?"

Kreuha drew himself up. "I am Kreuha Wolkwos, the Blood Wolf," he said. "Son of Echwo-Pothis, Horse Master; son of a chief who was son of a chief, and I am foremost among the men of war of my people.

I come to find some great lord of the wizard-folk who needs my arm and faith, so that I may win fortune and everlasting fame."

The armsman—policeman—made a wordless sound and covered his brow and eyes with a hand for a moment. Then he sighed. "You think that, do you!?"

"How not?" Kreuha said, puzzled. "Already a lord . . . well, lady, mistress . . . from Nantucket itself wished me to follow in their fighting-tail. Surely I would quickly rise in any such band."

"Oh, Captain Lucy," the policeman said, nodding. "Well, you were lucky to get that offer, and you'd probably see some fighting on the Pride. Hard work too, but she's run on shares." At Kreuha's look, he went on: "You get a share of the gain at the end of the voyage."

Kreuha nodded—a lord always shared booty with his sworn men. But then he remembered the voyage here to Alba, and gulped again. "I cannot. . . not on the sea. A lord by land, yes." It was more than the memory of his misery; it was the helplessness. How could the Blood Wolf be mighty if his belly made him weaker than a girl? The policeman grinned, the more so at Kreuha's black look. "Nobody ever dies of seasickness," he said. "They just wish they would— until it passes, which may take a day or two."

He pointed out a building with a tall tower attached to it, a street or two back from the dockside. "That's the Town Meetinghouse. It's a hiring hall, too. If you can't find work, go there and mention my name: I'm Eric Iraiinisson. They can always find something for a strong back, enough for stew and a doss, at least." Sternly: "Remember also that here robbers are flogged and sent to the mines for many years, and robbers who slay or wound are hung up and their bodies left for the crows."