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.
Someone 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.
That gave her enough of herself back to swing her feet out of the bed and stand, stretching gingerly. She was thirsty, a little hungry, and had an urgent need to empty her bladder. The door swung open under her hand, after she'd fumbled with the handle for a while.
Wait, she thought. The black chieftain had given her clothes, the same sort of clothes the Eagle ship-people wore. The chieftain who'd taken the collar from her neck, who'd led her back from living death to the Shining World. I had better wear them, to show that I honor her.
The worst things in the world had happened to her, and then something from beyond the world had lifted her out of it. There must be a meaning in this, a track among the stars making a path for her feet.
The… head, was the word… was just across the passage. Swindapa forced herself to walk erect and calm toward it; the narrow walls and the ceiling above her were terrifyingly like a barrow grave, the places where the Old Ones laid their dead. Inside was a mirror, something else both frightening and wonderful beyond words. In it she could see herself, really see, not just catch a blurred glimpse as in a pond or polished bronze.
The face that looked out was strange to her. Not the face of the reckless youngster who had gone into battle to avenge her man's ruined leg and life. Not the student who watched the stars with the Grandmothers. Not the beaten slave of the Sun People, either. Three times have I died-to-myself and been reborn. Moon Woman has drawn me through the earth and Her light has changed me like a tree.
Whose face was it, then? She would have to learn who it was, and how to be that one.
"Don't offer too much," Isketerol said.
Alston looked over at him. Why does he give a damn if we're overcharged? she thought.
Daurthunnicar and some of his chiefs were standing before big wicker baskets of grain-emmer wheat, club wheat, barley, rye-and several types of beans. The representatives from the Eagle had their own samples on display, the same sort of thing they'd given as gifts the night before. The eyes of the Iraiina chieftains kept straying back to the glass tumblers, cloth, plastic, steel tools, and weapons. Some of them licked their lips as they stood leaning a hip or buttock on the hafts of their axes, using them as their remote British descendants would a shooting stick. Today they were less flamboyantly dressed, though still sporting the odd gold arm ring; the rahax had a square silver plate on his belt. He also wore his new steel long sword on a baldric over one shoulder, rarely taking his hand from its hilt.