"Slow-why?"
"I'm of the rip-'em-quick school," Alston replied. "This blow was just what we needed, to see how the crews settled in, test the schooners' seakeeping… and get us across fast."
"The schooners aren't sunk?" Doreen said, looking around.
Nothing. The Eagle came to the crest of a wave, and she couldn't even tell where sea and sky parted company. The Queen Mary couldn't live in this.
"Not as of the last radio check, half an hour ago. Good weatherly little ships-they float like corks. And we've been making three hundred sea miles from noon to noon, or better. This blow's dying, though; we'll rendezvous off Ireland in two, three days. Fast passage."
"I'm glad we're not in danger."
"Oh, there's danger. Let a couple of sails go in this and we'll broach to-be turned broadside on to the waves in a flash."
"Would that be bad?"
"We'd capsize and go down like a rock," Alston yelled cheerfully. "But don't worry-it's a sound ship and the crew's shaken down somethin' wonderful."
"I'll take a 747, thanks, given my choice," Doreen shouted back. "Anyway, Ian says he's finished."
"Lead along then," Alston said. "Ms. Rapczewicz, you have the deck. Keep her so."
They went down the companionway behind the radio shack and forward of the emergency wheel. The narrow passageway on the port side was dimmer than it had been when the electric lights were on; even the smell was different, a very slight fishy-nutty tang from the whale oil, and the officers' galley to their right gave off an occasional whiff of woodsmoke. They turned left, past the usual captain's quarters and back to the flag cabin at the rear.
Ian was sitting at the table, gnawing on a crackerlike piece of ship's biscuit. "Is it still blowing hard up there?" he asked innocently. The two rooms of the flag cabin were warm and dry and fairly well lit, but the swooping lurch was still the same-possibly even worse without the distraction of the heaving sea to watch.
"Excuse me while I strangle my husband, Captain," Doreen said, dripping.
Alston went into the head and returned with towels. Doreen and Swindapa wrapped them around their hair; the captain rubbed her inch-long wiry cap a few times and sat. I wish I could just ignore discomfort like that, Doreen thought.
"Well, Mr. Arnstein?" Alston said.
"I think I've come up with a diplomatic strategy that might work," he said cautiously. "What we discussed, but refined a bit. It turns on a nice little piece of linguistic reconstruction Doreen and Martha and I did back on the island."
Alston's eyes narrowed. "Oh?"
"It turns out the Iraiina and their relatives, what Swindapa calls the Sun People, weren't the first Indo-Europeans to settle in Britain," he said. "They were probably just the first ones to make it stick-would have without us, that is."
He pulled several sheets of paper out of a folder. "Damn, but this almost makes me wish I'd been a comparative philologist; as it is, I'm a rank amateur out of my depth. But look at these words in Fiernan."
He drew a list: bronze, wheel, axle, plow, yoke. Each had a phonetic rendering of the Earth Folk equivalent beside it. "Now look at these Proto-Indo-European equivalents, and the Iraiina ones."
"They don't look very similar to me," Alston said dubiously. "I mean, the Iraiina words do, very similar, but not the Fiernan."
Doreen took up the explanation: "You've got to strip away the grammatical features-and that's damned hard in this language, with this crazy-no offense, Swindapa-prefix-suffix system they've got. Sometime a long time ago, hundreds of years, Swindapa's ancestors borrowed the words for these concepts. From something even closer to the ur-language than Iraiina."
"Oh," Swindapa said, looking at the list. "Yes. I see what you mean; that makes sense. Why didn't you ask me, though?"
Doreen felt her stomach lurch again. Oh, shit. We got too tied up in our research and assumed that preliterates couldn't have a historical sense. Preliterates like the Iraiina couldn't, perhaps; they lived in mythic time, not historical. The Earth Folk were obsessed with memory and measuring natural cycles, though, as much as the Mayans had-would have-been.
Aloud, feebly, she said: "What do you mean?"
"Well, in your years…" The blue eyes took on a remote look; her lips and fingers moved in a mnemonic chant. "A thousand years ago, or a little more."
"The…" She paused for a moment, and her accent grew stronger, as it did when she shifted back to thinking in her native tongue. "The Daggermen, we called them; the Brawlers, the Mannerless. They came from the east-the Sea-Land Country. A few at first, trading, and sometimes stealing things, then more of them. They built their houses in places that weren't good for farming, at first, and raised animals. They had no manners, but they had wonderful things-mead, and copper, and plows, and the very first horses to be seen in the White Isle. They made pots marked with cords for the mead-drinking, and new types of bows, ways of herding cattle, and oh, all sorts of things. There were a lot of fights."
Doreen put her face in her palms. Ian pummeled his temples lightly with the heels of his hands. "Bell-Beaker burials," he said.
"So the Grandmothers sent their daughters to them, to teach them about Moon Woman, and when they learned, they helped us to make the greatest of the Building Wisdoms." Swindapa smiled. "That was eight hundred and fifty-two of your years ago. And they took the Spear Mark, that our hunters had always had, and became part of the Earth Folk."
"Assimilated," Doreen said to Alston. "But not completely. I think that's partly why the two institutions in Earth Folk society don't cooperate very well."
Swindapa shrugged. "The Grandmothers and the Spear Chosen don't have much to do with each other," she pointed out. "Moon Woman and… oh, I see what you mean."
Alston was nodding slowly. "You're right," she said. "Now, let's figure out how to use it."
Ian made an eager gesture and pulled out another sheet, this one with a flow chart on it. "It's a wild coincidence, but there are some similarities in the Earth Folk setup to recorded cultures-particularly the Iroquois. They're matrilineal and matrilocal, for starters, and there's a Sacred Truce celebrated by a gathering at…"
It was a fair spring day when the men of Walkerburg made ready to ride out to war; tender leaves fluttered, and wildflowers starred cornfields and meadows. William Walker pushed the modified Garand into the saddle scabbard and tied the thong that held it in place as he looked around in pride. Not bad, considering that he'd only been here since last September. The seed kernel of an empire. Archaeologists may dig it up someday. The place where the dynasty that ruled the world for a thousand years was born. If things went well, he'd move somewhere more convenient in a couple of years-the site of London, probably-but this was the first ground that had been his.
Alice Hong rode back up the line and handed Walker a piece of birch bark covered with notes. He looked at it and made yet another mental note that he'd have to get going on making paper someday; there was plenty of linen to make the pulp. Hong rode with reasonable confidence, able to stay on at least and keep her horse going in pretty much the direction she intended, which was all you could say for most of the people here. A Browning automatic was belted to her waist.
"Good," he said, returning the list, a last-minute check of the stores.
Unlike most of the others in the war host gathering through the Iraiina lands and Kent and the Thames Valley, his people weren't going to spend half their time foraging. And they weren't going to lose ten men to disease for every one killed in battle, either.