It wasn’t quite the Henry VIII scene of two-fisted gorging and swilling he’d expected. The women laid slabs of tough dark bread down on the basketwork platters, then piled on the meat and other dishes, or brought clay bowls marked with waving patterns. There seemed to be an elaborate etiquette about who got what, and Daurthunnicar sent several pieces over to Captain Alston. Men cut portions with their belt knives and ate with their fingers, wiping their mouths and fingers occasionally with more pieces of bread ripped off loaves nearby; those might be eaten, or thrown to the big hairy dogs that also lay about. The serving women kept the horns refilled unless a man held his hand over the mouth—which few did. He noticed that while the chiefs and guests here had one horn or cup apiece, most farther from the throne of the
rahax
shared a beaker. The food was seasoned with sage, dill, sorrel, fennel, basil, and herbs he didn’t recognize. Salt went around in wooden bowls, to be sprinkled between thumb and forefinger.
He sipped again at the heavy wine. The glaze it put over things seemed familiar, like the glassy sense of unreality that had been plaguing him and most of the others for the past few weeks. It was one thing to study history, or to imagine it. This was something else entirely.
The Iraiina cheered again. Ian looked up as he felt Alston stiffen with rage beside him. The last gift was brought forward.
“Captain,” he hissed in her ear, as her hand fell to the Beretta at her waist. “Not here, not now. Please!”
“Ah, that thing at her waist is a weapon,” Isketerol said in Tartessian as the last gift was presented.
His cousin Miskelefol nodded. “And she’s angry to be offered the slave girl,” he said. “I wonder why? Indifferent would be understandable, but why angry?”
Isketerol ran an experienced eye over the naked woman of the Earth Folk. The bruises had faded to very faint marks, so the Iraiina weren’t offering spoiled goods; that couldn’t be it. Except that she wouldn’t be a virgin, and as the saying went you didn’t find a slave virgin or a sweet olive, and anyway the Earth Folk didn’t even have a word for virgin. A good enough figure, looking to be even better when she’d been fattened, young, very pretty. Although there was a good deal of unbroken spirit behind the downcast eyes. That was probably why her hands were bound behind her, as well as having a rawhide leash and collar around her neck. If the strange woman didn’t want her for a servant or otherwise—he knew nothing of their taboos; these folk might be as odd a tangle as the Iraiina for all he knew—she’d be a valuable item for resale.
“I wouldn’t mind taking her off the stranger’s hands myself,” Miskelefol said, echoing his thought. “I’d pay well in bronze or wine, and make it back again twice over on Tartessos dockside, four times over if I fed her up first.”
Daurthunnicar’s rumble interrupted them, demanding a translation
Isketerol sighed behind a bland exterior. Achaean wasn’t his favorite language, but it was still a pleasure to speak next to the local hog-tongue. Someday he would be rich enough to sit at home in Tartessos and send younger relatives out as his skippers on these long dangerous voyages. He would lie on a soft couch in the courtyard of his house and eat grapes and count the ingots and bales in his storehouses, the fields and workshops he owned. But for now he must work; he set himself to translate into Achaean simple enough for Ianarnstein to understand. Odd. The stranger spoke sometimes like a poet with a mouth full of ornate kennings, and then like a child who hadn’t mastered the endings of words . . . but he’d improved even in the few hours they’d spoken.
Where had he learned his Achaean?
“We can always turn her loose later,” Arnstein was hissing into Alston’s ear.
“I realize that, Professor,” she gritted out through a broad, false smile. “What’s that potbellied pervert with the beard saying?”
“Ah . . . this girl’s a . . . high one? Something like that.” He paused for back-and-forth with the Tartessian. Translating through three languages, two of them not native to the interpreters, was like trying to get the last garbanzo out of a slippery salad bowl without putting it over the edge. “She’s a . . . princess or something of that nature, of the ‘Fiernan Bohulugi,’ the . . . I think it means People of the Soil, Earth Folk . . . the locals here. Daurthunnicar’s men captured her and he was going to hold her for ransom, but he gives her to you as a sign of his friendship. I think that means the negotiations fell through.”
He translated that back to Isketerol. The man from the south nodded with a cynical wink. “Knowing the Earth Folk, they were afraid she’d contracted bad luck,” he said. “They think everything in a man’s life is governed by the stars at his birth, and it’s misfortune to interfere with it.”
Alston tugged unwillingly at the leash, and the girl crouched at her feet. “Tell our host I’m delighted.”
Daurthunnicar grinned back and made a joke that sent the other Iraiina laughing and hooting; the girl looked down at her feet, her mane of yellow hair hiding the disturbing glint in her eyes. That prompted Arnstein to ask another question.
“Yes,” Isketerol said. “She speaks the Iraiina tongue, or one close to it, as well as her own. Daurthunnicar’s people aren’t the first to invade the White Isle; there are other tribes kin to them living north and east of here, who’ve been settled some generations.”
Marian Alston had always considered herself a calm woman, even phlegmatic. Inch by inch she won back to full command of herself, controlling her breathing and forcing rage-knotted muscle to relax in the manner the Way had taught her through nearly twenty years of practice. At last she could pick up another morsel of food without choking on it, even smile and nod across the firelit circle.
I must be calm by nature after all,
she thought ironically, looking at the girl crouched at her feet.
I can get that angry and not kill someone.
She’d come to get what she needed to help her people, and that was what she’d do.
But I’m damned if I’ll sit here looking at those hands.
The collar was four-ply twisted rawhide, it would take tools to remove, but the bonds on the girl’s wrists were simply thongs. The horn was empty; she laid it beside the wicker plate and leaned forward with her knife in hand. It was a Swiss Army model, with a built-in fork and spoon, which had aroused a good deal of attention. The girl gasped, shivered, and stiffened in well-hidden terror as hands touched her wrists. She’d been casting sidelong glances at the
Eagle’
s captain, which was no wonder when she’d probably never seen a non-Caucasian before.
“Hold still,” Alston said. The words didn’t mean anything, but the tone did.
She cut carefully at the tough leather; there were raw chafemarks beneath it. More hoots from the Iraiina warriors made the girl clench her teeth. Alston could hear them grind, very faintly, and smell the faint woodsmoke-and-sweat odor of the blond hair under some soapy-herbal scent. The eyes that glared across the circle were cold blue. They turned and focused on Alston with the same wariness and hate, perhaps the more so because of her strange skin and features. Then they went wide, flickering up and down the other woman’s clothes. She blinked in puzzlement, then carefully lowered her eyes again, rubbing at her wrists where the thongs had worn through the skin and left it angry.
Well, no flies on this one,
Alston thought. Evidently the . . . Earth Folk could see past unfamiliar clothes. “Professor, tell her to eat, would you?”
The cold hate in the eyes dimmed a little, down to wariness. After a moment’s hesitation she scooped food off the platter and ate with wolfish concentration.
Not too well fed lately,
Alston thought. The bruises told of a savage beating some time ago, and lesser ones since. She could guess the rest.
Looks English,
she thought; evidently physical types endured longer than languages or cultures. Straight-nosed oval face, bowed lips, long-limbed shape. Under the recent gauntness she looked to have been well fed most of her life, which her five-six of height bore out, and she had a dancer’s or a gymnast’s muscles. The teeth that tore at bread and meat were white and even; the notoriously bad British record with cavities and crookedness must have entered later in the island’s history, if she was at all typical.
“And what’s her name?”
That took some doing, until Arnstein suggested that Isketerol ask her directly.
“Swindapa.”
Think about this later.
Perhaps they could drop the girl off with her own people . . . a good deed for the day, and if she really was of an important family, an opening for trade.
No way to tell if they’re any less disgusting than this bunch. Later, later, keep your wits about you, woman.
She glanced over at where her cadets sat in a clump. They were eating heartily, smiling meaninglessly at equally uncomprehending smiles from their neighbors, and drinking very lightly, with the upperclassmen keeping a watchful eye.
Good.
One of the men near Daurthunnicar stood up; the old one with the robe and odd staff. He stretched the staff out, and near-silence fell. Then he threw back his head and began to sing, his voice occasionally cracking but still astonishingly full and sweet; a younger man beside him accompanied the song on something like a harp—not much like a harp; it was semicircular rather than triangular with the strings stretched over a parchment-covered soundbox, and the effect was closer to a guitar or mandolin. She had half expected the music to be wholly alien, but it was instead hauntingly familiar, the tone and scale easy to follow. The verses were rhythmic, not exactly rhyming. . . .
Arnstein leaned close to Isketerol to whisper, then back to the captain. “It’s the ancestors and deeds of our host,” he said. “Sort of like the begats in the Bible, with an occasional blood feud or war thrown in. Takes his bloodline back to their gods.”
“Great, saga-singing biker gangs of the Bronze Age,” Alston muttered, and settled down to listen. This wouldn’t be the first long ceremony she’d sat through . . . and the food was good, at least. She’d been getting damned sick of fish.
The bosun’s pipe whistled as the captain came back up the hanging stair and over the bulwarks.
“Eagle
arriving!” barked the watch. Three bells rang, and another as her foot touched the deck.
The welcome stuttered a little as he saw who was included among the party following her, but made a creditable finish.
“
Eagle
aboard. Captain on deck!”
“As you were,” she said, returning the salutes of the watch. “Ms. Rapczewicz has the deck.” Then, with the same toneless precision: “Get me a pair of bolt-cutters, and some clothes for Ms. Swindapa here. On the double.”
They came quickly, the tool and a blue sweatsuit. Swindapa had been glancing around, her eyes enormous. She bit her lip at the sight of the long-handled cutters.
Probably thinks it’s some instrument of torture,
Alston thought grimly.
Carefully—the collar was tight—she maneuvered the blades under the tough rawhide. The leather parted with a dull snap; Alston pulled off the broken collar with her hands and threw the pieces overside. An ungovernable impulse made her spit after them.
“What’s that phrase for ‘You can go home’ and ‘You are free’?” Alston asked. Arnstein relayed it, and Swindapa’s eyes went very wide. Alston mimed bound wrists, and then breaking them. It took a moment more to show her how to put on the clothes, and turn her over to the surgeon’s assistant. Especially when she threw herself to her knees and clutched at Alston’s legs, weeping.
“You’d better do the examination,” she said to the assistant, who was also a woman. “Check for infection and so forth.
“Well, that’s done,” she said more normally to the officers. “Yes, things went fairly well. We were lucky; there are a couple of people there who speak a form of Greek that Professor Arnstein halfway understands. The natives are friendly, and we can probably do the business we came for, PDQ. Our trade goods seem to have enormous relative value here.”
Sandy Rapczewicz rubbed her chin. “You don’t seem to like the taste of it much, skipper,” she said.
Alston shrugged. “No, I can’t say that I do. I really don’t approve of handin’ out human beings as party favors.”
The XO blanched. Alston went on: “But that buys no yams. It won’t be the first time I’ve done something that stuck in my craw in the line of duty.”
Several of the others nodded; they’d been on the Haitian refugee patrol too, turning starving people back into the hellhole of junta-ruled Port-au-Prince.
Rapczewicz shrugged. “At least it’s in a better cause than rescuing some politican’s credit with the voters,” she said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
April, Year 1 A.E.
S
omeone was screaming. It was not until after she had opened her eyes that Swindapa realized it was her own voice. Her hands flailed about, until a painful knock on hard wood brought her shuddering to full consciousness. She sat bolt upright in the small soft bed, heart beating as if it were a bird trying to escape the basketwork cage of her chest. Sweat ran down her forehead, neck, flanks, turning clammy and chill. She put a hand to her neck. The collar was gone, was gone . . . nothing there but the ointment the Eagle People healer had put on it and her other scrapes.
The Burning Snake had me,
she knew. The Dream Eater. It had taken her back, made her feel again the crushing weight and the tearing, splitting pain. As if she were being wedged apart like a log for planks.
She looked around, breath slowing. It was the Red Swallowstar time, just before Moon Woman led the Sun into the sky. Light came through the round window by her side, a window covered in crystal and rimmed with metal like an amber button, but huge. The bed was soft, made with very thin cloth like a fine tunic and thick warm cloaks, but a frightening distance from the floor. Walls surrounded her, straight on two sides, sloping on the other that bore the windows. Enigmatic objects filled the little chamber about her, things whose shapes shed her eyes, making them slip aside. She could hear footsteps and voices above, and the room itself was moving. The great thing she was on was floating, then; her memory did not twist but flew on a true curve. Out the round hole she could see the shore, and the Iraiina camp. She was away from it.