He brushed a hand over sandy blond hair even thinner on top than it had been at the Event; he was fifty-six now, honest, straightforward years even if he had looped around like this. Fisherman, Navy swabby, chief of police… and since the Event, head of state.
Christ.
"Okay," he said at last, when the reading of the minutes was over. "Let's get down to the serious stuff. Martha," he went on to his wife, smiling slightly, more a movement of the eyes than the lips.
Martha Cofflin, nee Stoddard; ex-librarian, now Secretary of the Council, with a long, bony Yankee face like his and graying brown hair.
"First item is immigration policy," she said. "Before the Council are petitions to allow increases in the yearly quota of immigrants and temporary workers to the Island from Alba." The White Isle, what this era called Britain.
Odd, Cofflin thought again. There were plenty of islands, but everyone knew what you meant when you said the Island these days. I suppose it was inevitable we'd develop our own slang.
And our own feuds, he thought as hostile glances went up and down the Council table. On the one hand, Nantucket needed the hands. Everything took so much work, with the limited technology they had available; on the other hand…
Angelica Brand of Brand Farms nodded; so did half a dozen others.
"I'm trying to get sugar-beet production started, and-"
"We need that next dry dock badly-"
"If we could only get some coal, there are surface deposits up in Nova Scotia-''
Our budding plutocrats, Cofflin thought. People on the Council tended to have useful knowledge and to be more energetic than most-that was why he'd picked them. Good people, mostly, but you had to watch them.
"Wait a minute!" said Lisa Gerrard of the School Committee, static crackling from her silver-white hair. "We're already overburdened. All these immigrants are illiterate-what with the adult education classes my people are working around the clock, the teacher-training program is behind schedule, and the crime rate's up!" Thoughtful nods.
Cofflin looked at his younger cousin George, who'd taken over his old job as head of the Island's police. "Ayup. Mostly Sun People. Can't hold their liquor, and then they start hitting. Or if a girl tells them to get lost, or they think someone's dissed them…"
"And besides that," Martha said, "if we're the majority, we can assimilate them. Too many, and it'll start working the other way 'round, or we'll end up as a ruling class with resentful aliens under us. And as George says, many of them just don't understand the concept of laws."
"Or why it's a bad idea to piss up against walls," someone laughed.
"Actually," a voice with the soft, drawling accent of the Carolina tidewater cut in, "we may have something of an outlet for their aggressions."
A couple of the Councilors looked over sharply; Marian was usually extremely quiet at Council meetings, except when her defense and shipbuilding specialties came up.
"From the reports," she went on, "Walker is leavin' us no choice but another war to put him down."
Thank you, Marian, he thought, letting one eyelid droop slightly. Her imperceptible nod replied, You're welcome.
"Well, perhaps we should move on to item two," he said neutrally.
"Item two," Martha said dryly, giving him a glance.
All right, all right, so I've learned to be a politician. Someone has to do it.
"William Walker," she continued.
This time the expressions down the table were unanimous. Nobody liked the renegade Coast Guard officer, or any of the twenty-odd other traitors with him. Nantucket had had to fight an expensive little war to stop him over in Alba-and had ended up with a sort of quasi protectorate-hegemony-cum-alliance over most of southern England.
Cofflin cleared his throat and looked at the Councilor for Foreign Affairs and his Deputy-Ian Arnstein and his wife, Doreen. They handed around their summary, and Ian began, sounding much like the history professor he'd once been.
"Our latest intelligence reports indicate he managed to get all the way from the English Channel to Greece, arriving about three months after the end of the Alban War, and-"
There were long faces at the table when he finished; many had hoped they'd seen the last of Walker when he fled Alba years ago. Someone sighed and said it out loud.
"Wishful thinkin'," Alston snapped. "We should have made sure of him, no matter what it took. I said so then."
"And the Town Meeting decided otherwise," Cofflin said. The Republic was very emphatically a democracy. Back then they'd decided that the margin of survival was too thin to keep hundreds under arms combing the endless wilderness of Bronze Age Europe.
And they were right, Cofflin thought. Not much prospect of catching Walker, and if they'd chased him hard back then he'd have settled somewhere deep in the continental interior, where the Islanders couldn't touch him. Leave him alone, and his arrogance and lust for revenge would make him stop within reach of salt water-planning to build a navy someday and come back for a rematch.
Marian had once said she was unsuited to Cofflin's job because she was a hammer… and saw all problems as nails. But she's a very good hammer, and some problems are nails, he mused, and went on aloud: "I think we can prod the Sovereign People into some action now, though." His statement was only half ironic. The people were sovereign here, very directly. "The screaming about how we're spending too much on defense ought to die down a little, at least. Marian?"
Marian Alston pulled out a sheaf of papers. "Here's what I propose," she began.
Little of it was a surprise to him. Contingency planning cost nothing, and he had a limited discretionary fund to work with for more concrete preparations. At least we could lay the groundwork, since the Alban War. The new Marine regiment was coming along fairly well, from the reports-young Hollard was a doer, and the Republic had grown enormously over the last eight years, in numbers and capacities.
Cofflin wondered grimly what Walker and his renegades had been doing in those same years. Walker wasn't the kind to let grass grow under his feet, damn him. If they didn't do something about him, eventually he would do something about them.
"Oh, sweet fucking Jesus Christ on a Harley," William Walker muttered in English, before dropping back into archaic Greek. "Seventy alternative meanings?"
Thick adobe walls kept the heat at bay, but light lanced in like spears of white through small, high windows. The room was a rectangle, whitewashed plaster on the walls and hard-packed earth covered in gypsum on the floor; it smelled of the damp clay in a tub, and of clay tablets drying in wicker baskets.
The Achaean scribe sat patiently on his stool. "Yes, lord," he said, humoring the newly-come stranger the High King had set him to serve. "There are seven tens of meanings for this sign."
His pen was a reed with a sharp thorn set in the tip, and his writing surface moist clay pressed on a board. The thorn scratched a circle divided by two straight lines, like a four-spoked wheel.
"This is the sign ka," he said. "Also the sign for ga, kha, kai, kas, kan…"
And you have to figure out which from context, Walker thought. What an abortion of a writing system.
The real joker was that the script wasn't even well suited to Greek. The main ancestors of these clowns had arrived in Greece as illiterate barbarian war bands from the north; they'd picked up writing from the Minoan Cretans, along with most of what other feeble claims to civilization they had. The original script had been designed for a completely different language; all the signs for sounds ended in a vowel, and there were a whole bunch of Greek sounds that didn't have a sign at all.