Well, there’s hope for the younger generation,
Cofflin thought, and joined his hoarse bass to the final chorus; he’d gotten a lot less self-conscious about singing over the past ten years. You didn’t get compared to recorded professionals anymore, just to the neighbors, or at most to buskers and semi-amateurs at the ceidhles and concerts.
Wheel down, wheel down to southern! Oh, Goover-
ooska, go!
And tell the Salt-Sea Viceroy the story of our woe;
For like the empty shark’s egg the tempest flings ashore,
The beaches of Lukannon shall know their sons no more!
There were other things to point out; two schooners running home from the Georges Bank with their dories stacked on their decks; the unforgettably vile smell and raucous noise of a cormorant rookery on a tiny island; lobster boats and timber barges ...
“I recognize
her,”
he said with a brief grin, four hours later.
It was a smallish craft, ketch-rigged on two masts and about twice the length of the
Boojum,
with a railed crow’s nest on the mainmast. There was another railed enclosure forward of the prow, out on the bowsprit. No harpooner kept station there now; the
Kestrel
was homebound for Nantucket Town, with the tails of half a dozen giant bluefin tuna hanging in triumph from the rigging. The gutted bodies would be in the hold, lying on crushed saltwater ice ...
Cofflin felt his mouth water, it was getting on for lunchtime anyway. “Martha, maybe we’d better fire up the galley,” he said. Louder, with his left hand cupped around his mouth: “Ahoy the
Kestrel,
there!”
The man at the wheel—the tuna-catcher was just large enough to make a tiller cumbersome—nodded and shouted an order to his crew. The
Kestrel
turned, slanting further south of east, then turned up into the wind in a horseshoe maneuver, her sails came down with a rush except for the jib, and she lay with her bows pitching and pointed into the wind. The gulls who’d been following hopefully made a brief white storm of wings and raucous cries around the two craft.
“Neat as ever, John,” Cofflin callea as the catboat came close, and pulled on the tiller to bring her closer to the eye of the northeasterly wind.
Facing full into the wind the sail emptied and rattled, its loose edge thuttering—luffing. Two crew from the fishing craft caught the rail with hooks on the ends of long poles and held her steady. That wouldn’t be safe for long.
“When’re you coming back to real work, Chief?” John Kotalac said.
Cofflin shook his head. He’d spent the first harvest season after the Event harpooning bluefin; he hadn’t been more ignorant than anyone else, and hadn’t gotten anyone killed—not quite. Since then he’d done it most autumns, when the big fish ran up the coast. That was one of the ways you could pay Town tax, like lending a hand mining Madaket Mall, the old landfill dump, or working in some farmer’s harvest gang.
“Time to let nature take its course,” he said. “I’m just plain getting too slow. Not too slow to eat ’em, though. How’d it go?”
“Not bad at all,” the skipper of the tuna boat said. “Got six—and Sweet can relax, not one of them under fifteen hundred pounds. Three are ton-weighters.”
Cofflin nodded. Fifteen hundred pounds was the minimum legal size for bluefin; it meant they were all over thirty-five years old, fully mature and likely to have spent three decades breeding. And all taken with the harpoon. No drift nets
here,
by God. It wasn’t a particular hardship, either. There were a
lot
of mature bluefin migrating up from the Carribean spawning grounds in the Year 10. He’d seen a boat about the
Kestrel’s
size knocked on its beam ends once, when it got between a school of them and the mackerel they were chasing.
“Give you a quarter for twenty-five pounds of it,” he called. “That’s better than you’ll get from those pirates ’longshore.”
Fresh tuna steak was a seasonal delicacy ... but a glut of caviar was still a glut of caviar, in terms of what you could get in a free market. For that matter, caviar was pretty cheap nowadays. Pushcart vendors sold it. Most of the tuna would go into barrels or glass pickling jars for use in winter.
“Sounds good,” John Kotalac said. Raising his voice: “Whoever’s closest!”
“‘Lo, Tekkusumu,” Cofflin went on, waving.
The Indian nodded courteously; he was a short broad man, looking a little incongruous in Nantucketer seagoing sweater and baggy pants and boots, since his hair was still up in a helmet-crest roach with the shaven sides of his head painted vermilion. Many of the tuna boats carried Lekkansu tribesmen from the ’longshore clans as harpooners; they learned the art quickly, since they were used to throwing things in a way few Islanders could match.
“I greet you, elder brother,”
Tekkusumu said in his own language-Cofflin had picked up a few words of it—and then continued in good English: “The harpoon flew sweet this year.”
Several of the seven-foot shafts were racked behind him, and he’d been sharpening a head when they came up, a foot-long steel shaft with a toggle-hinged blade at the tip. Now he laid it aside, drew the long knife at his belt, and jumped down into the well of the boat. When he came back up it was with a dripping chunk wrapped in coarse burlap. He leaned far out over his ship’s rail to hand it down to Martha.
“From near the belly,” he said to her.
Jared nodded; muscle from around the body cavity was the best. There were plenty of people on Nantucket who liked it as sushi, although barley groats had to replace the rice.
Sushi’s still raw fish wrapped in seaweed to me,
he thought wryly. But lightly grilled, with just a brush of butter and salt ... The rest of it would make a good guest-gift at their destination.
“Thanks, Tekkusumu, John! Say hello to Sally for me!”
“‘Bye!”
The crewfolk with the boathooks fended them off again, and the
Boojum’s
sail cracked like a whip as it filled and the boat paid off, turning its bow south of west. The tiller came alive in his hand again; the blunt bow surged up to the top of one of the long slow swells, then ran downward, up again ...
A sizzle came from the little cabin, and then Martha’s head came out of the door.
“All right, children; make yourselves useful.”
The kids scurried around, unpacking the picnic baskets. Martha brought the tuna steaks out herself, and spelled him at the tiller while he ate; an occasional sprinkle of salt spray fell across his plate.
Funny thing,
he thought. Before the Event, he’d eaten alone more often than not after his first wife died. He almost never did that now—six of them when it was just a family meal and usually more. There were times it still felt a little odd; like TV, not that he
missed
the mindless blather, just that it was something gone from the background of life.
The rest of the sail was a straight run with a stiff wind on the starboard beam and the port rail nearly under, clocking ten knots or better all the way down to Long Island Sound. Six hours later he surreptitiously worked his left arm. The adults had all taken turns at the tiller, but his shoulder was still a bit stiff and sore, where they’d taken the piece of shell casing from one of Victor C’s mortars out, all those years ago. It hadn’t bothered him any then, he’d had what his grandfather called good-healing flesh, like a young dog. At the time, he’d just been mad it wasn’t enough to get him back to the World, although he’d enjoyed the R&R in Bangkok. The medal he’d flipped into the river the moment his feet were on the gunboat’s deck again.
But these last couple of years, if it was cold or he’d pushed it beyond a certain point, the joint ached where the steel had scored bone and tendon. A ghost-pain from a war that would never happen, a memory of steel still locked unmined in Siberian mountains this fall day. Another clutch of years ... maybe twenty if he was lucky ... and he’d lay his bones beside so many other Cofflins in Nantucket’s sandy loam. Those bones would molder away to nothingness before the year men were due to dig those rocks away and other men smelt and shape and fill them and still more launch them at an American gunboat where a bored, lonely, frightened teenager stood behind the spade-grips of an automatic cannon....
I remember being that youngster, Jared
Cofflin thought.
But
in a way
he’ll
never exist at all, except in my
memories—I’m here and feeling a wound from a battle that never happened, never will....
And that boy was as strange to him as that far-distant year.
He looked up and caught Martha looking at him, fond and dryly amused at the same time.
Act your age, then, Jared,
he thought for her, giving an imperceptible nod.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
September, 10 A.E.—Pi-Ramses, Kingdom of Egypt
“T
he Horus,”
the silver-voiced herald called, half chant and half song.
“The God is among us!”
The Vizier of the North sank to his knees and then bent forward to symbolically kiss dirt. Beside him Mek-Andrus, Commander of Chariots, did likewise, pressing his face to the colorful glazed tile of the floor. It was cool and smooth beneath his lips, and a breath of greenery and flowers touched the skin of his back, wafting in from the pools and gardens outside into the hot gloom.
“He of the Two Goddesses:
Protector of Egypt Who Subdues the Foreign Lands;
The Golden Horus:
Rich in Years, Great in Victories.”
Spearmen in kilts, banded linen cuirasses and beehive-shaped helmets marched through the doorway and faced outward, weapons grounded and big rectangular oval-topped shields braced.
“The King of Upper and Lower Egypt:
Strong in Right is Ra—
User-Ma’at-Ra.”
The herald’s voice grew to a shout:
“Son
of Ra, Ramses, beloved of Amun! The God is among us!”
Mek-Andrus—who had been George McAndrews in Memphis, Tennessee—saw the gilt sandals stride into view. More feet came in the background, mostly bare; fan-bearers with brightly dyed ostrich feathers on the ends of gilded poles, scribes, attendants, a couple of musicians ... just the minimal attendants for an ordinary day’s work. The hem of Pharaoh’s translucent-thin pleated robe rustled across his ankles, and the sandals settled on a footstool carved with bound, kneeling Asiatics and Nubians—literally being trampled underfoot by Pharaoh.
The fan-bearers began fanning and the scribes sank into their cross-legged posture, pens poised over the scrolls of papyrus that spanned their laps.
“Rise,” a clear tenor voice said.
He and the vizier came upright on their knees, raising their hands palm-forward in the gesture of worship common to most of this part of the ancient world.
“Hail to
Setep-en-Ra,
the Chosen of Ra!” McAndrews cried in unison with the official beside him.
His Egyptian was very good now. He’d been practicing hard all the years since Walker came to the Middle Sea, and he’d acquired an Egyptian servant to achieve full fluency years ago. He even had a Delta accent. His court etiquette was pretty good, too. You couldn’t go far wrong here if you kissed ass upward and kicked it down.
“Rise,” the Pharaoh said again. “Seat yourselves, my servants.”
He did.
And with a lot less puffing and grunting than our esteemed Vizier of Lower Egypt,
he thought, as the pudgy bureaucrat settled on a stool beside his. At this range, even in midmorning, he got a whiff to remind him that while upper-class Egyptians bathed twice daily, they also rubbed themselves all over with perfumed hippopotamus fat to prevent wrinkles from the dry air.
McAndrews was a big man, two inches over six feet, and at thirty biological years still in the shape he’d had as a running back at the Coast Guard Academy before the Event; broad-shouldered, with thick muscular arms, flat stomach, and long legs. That showed to advantage, since he was wearing a simple knee-length linen military wraparound kilt, vividly white against his natural dark-brown skin and cinched by a heavy belt.
By a stroke of luck, the Egyptians were among the peoples here who admired a trim figure, at least in a soldier; other men of substance were expected to have a substantial belly.
He’d shaved his head as well—fairly common, though compulsory only for priests—and wore a sphinx-type linen
khat
headdress and high-strapped sandals with silver studs. On his upper arms were snake-shaped gold bracelets; on his chest the Gold of Valor, Egypt’s equivalent of the Medal of Honor and rather more, a massive thing, rows of gold disks strung into necklaces and a spray of gold braids and flowers across his broad chest.
No sword at the belt, of course, not in Pharaoh’s presence here in the capital of Pi-Ramses. He raised his eyes to Ramses’s face, feeling again the echo of the shock he’d undergone that first time.
All right, Pharaoh is
not
a brother,
he admitted.
Today the ruler wore—informally, as a mark of honor, and probably because the daily morning meetings with the vizier were just too frequent for the full treatment—his own short hair with no wig, under a cloth-of-gold skullcap. That hair was a grizzled dark auburn-brown, in this the thirty-ninth year of his reign and sixtieth of his life; Pharaoh’s eyes were hazel, his chin knobby, his nose a scimitar beak ... and all in all he reminded McAndrews of a guy who’d run a really good Italian restaurant in Memphis.
That’s Memphis, Tennessee, not the place up the Nile
...
Although Mario DeCiccio hadn’t used kohl eyeshadow or rouge on his cheeks, or gold and carnelian earrings, or a broad collar of lapis and silver ...
He fought down a brief, bitter stab of homesickness.
All right,
most
Egyptians aren’t brothers.
Not until well north of Thebes; skin color darkened to a rye-toast-brown like McAndrews’s in Upper Egypt just before you got to Elephantine—Aswan, where the first rapids interrupted the Nile.