She can't be saying what I think she's saying, can she?
"Ah… 'dapa, what are you telling them now, exactly?"
A brilliant, proud smile: "I'm telling them what a wonderful lover you are!"
I thought so, Alston thought with a slight wince. Telling them in extensive detail, from the sound of it; she'd learned Pieman anatomical vocabulary quite thoroughly. Talk about your culture clashes. " 'Dapa, no need for blow-by-blow, okay?"
She leaned back, resting her elbows on the arms of the chair and steepling her fingers, marshaling her scanty command of this language. Silence fell, and Swindapa's mother took up her carved staff.
"We come… friends," Alston said at last.
The Fiernans rose, came forward, and placed their hands on Alston's shoulder for a moment. "Thank you," Dhinwarn said solemnly. "You have returned my daughter to life." The others repeated it. "My sister."
"My sister's daughter who I put on my knee."
Alston cleared her throat, touched; like the Navajo, the Earth Folk spoke thanks only for the very greatest of gifts, taking everyday things for granted.
"Swindapa, speak for me," she said, when they were back in their chairs. "Tell them we'd like-I would, and a few others of us-would like to travel to the Great Wisdom and talk to the Grandmothers."
Dhinwara frowned, unhappy. "Why would you want to do that?" she said. "You are… Spear Chosen of the Eagle People."
Swindapa stopped translating for a moment and began to explain, or tried to. Dhinwarn smiled and shook her head.
"Swindapa says you are much more than that," she went on. "But a young woman in love often thinks more with her warm heart than her star-cool mind."
The Fiernan metaphor came through accurately enough, but from what she grasped of the original the phrasing was much more… earthy. Alston suppressed a giggle.
"We also have knowledge of the moon and stars," she said, and glanced up. The sky was clearing and sunset was only an hour off. "If the clouds allow, we'll show you." The Arnsteins and the telescope would, rather. "Also some other things you'd find useful. For instance, you memorize all the knowledge you keep, don't you?"
Swindapa's mother frowned in puzzlement. "Of course we remember it."
"No, that's not what I meant. You use… things, your circles of standing stones, knotted cords, tally sticks, songs, to help you remember something, don't you?"
A method with severe limitations. From what Swindapa had told her and what Martha and the Arnsteins had figured out, the Fiernan Bohulugi savants had run into a dead end some time ago. There was only so much information you could store orally; eventually it took so much time that new generations couldn't add any more without dropping something. Swindapa had mentioned how fewer and fewer of the younger generations were willing to go through the arduous apprenticeship, particularly with the Sun People pressing on them. This Bronze Age world looked static and unchanging to eyes brought up in the twentieth, but it was a time of upheaval by local standards. The faith of Moon Woman couldn't adapt fast enough; it was rooted in the Neolithic.
Dhinwarn nodded. "We have a way," Alston said, "of… marking down in symbols… both words and numbers, exactly, so that those who know it may take the record even generations later and understand it, as if the first person were speaking in their ear."
The older woman leaned forward, keenly interested. "How can this be?" she said. "A tally, you can't tell what it's numbers of, unless someone remembers what the notches are for. And the relations between numbers, the Wisdom of their ordering, how can this be put in concrete things? Even the Great Wisdom-" they all made a sign with their hands, like drawing a set of geometric shapes-"has meaning only to those brought up to it, learning the Songs."
Alston sighed and settled down to explaining. The sun faded and a trooper hung a lamp from the tentpole. Dhinwarn took longer than Swindapa had to understand what she was driving at, but her eyes lit like blowtorches when she did. Her voice trembled:
"My daughter… she says that among your people, there are great Wisdoms where these books are kept, and that any who learn the art may journey among the words of the Grandmothers-before?"
"Yes," Alston said, impressed at how rapidly she'd grasped the concept. "We call them libraries. And the skill of reading the words is not hard to learn. Swindapa mastered it very quickly. So we can store knowledge like, ah, like grain in a big jar, and draw it out when we need it. Of course, you need to know enough to know what questions to ask."
The others began volleying questions as well; once when Swindapa mentioned that she had seen constellations farther south unknown here her mother and sister rose and did a slow, stately dance around the fire, singing a minor-key chant. Their astronomy had long predicted it, and exact knowledge of stellar movements was the central element of their religion-it was how you read the intentions of Moon Woman. Alston spread a star map of the southern hemisphere and began explaining. Troopers brought their plates of beans and pork and bread; the Fiernans ate with their eyes glued to the paper.
At last Alston sat back, exhausted. "But I'm not what we'd call an expert," she said. "I sail ships and I fight, when I have to. Here's a learned person-Doreen, bring that telescope out-and she can tell you more."
Damned oddest way to negotiate a military alliance I've ever heard of, she thought, watching the astronomer and listening to Dhinwarn's trilling cry of joy when she realized what the telescope could do. Still, it could be worse.
If it had been the Middle Ages, they might have been burned as heretics-or found the locals dead-set on enlisting their help in liberating the Holy Sepulcher from the Saracens. In her opinion, defending Stonehenge from a bunch of blond Apaches was very much to be preferred.
I wonder how things are going back on the island? And how exactly am I going to explain about Walker?
CHAPTER TWENTY
June – July, Year 2 A.E.
"Here's the title deed," Cofflin said, "Place is yours."
"Thanks, Chief," the Kayles said.
The crowd cheered. Sixty-four acres of sand and scrub, Cofflin thought. The young couple looked eager enough, though; and if you were going to do farming work anyway, you might as well do it on your own property. There would be loans from the Town to pay off, of course. The plank-and-beam barn that stood not far from the house had been financed by the vote of the Meeting, along with the pigs and poultry and miniature herd of three yearling calves brought back by the Eagle.
There was a patter of applause as he handed over the title deeds, and now he had to make a goddam speech. About land titles and banking, of all goddam things.
The mild spring air cuffed at his hair; Martha put a hand up to her broad hat, the baby neatly balanced in the crook of her other arm. Jared Cofflin looked out over the grain-field, still spotted with an occasional haggled brush stump. That might make it awkward for the reapers, come harvest. So much to do… and so few sets of hands to do it. Harder than ever with so many strong young backs over in Britain. God damn Walker to hell. The air smelled intensely fresh, with a tinge of salt and a hint of cooking from the open-pit barbecue that was getting lunch ready.
Martha turned and smiled at him, a wry quirk of the corner of her mouth, and he felt a decision jell in his mind. "All right, people. I was supposed to sit up here and bray some stuff about the state of our economy, forsooth." A rippling laugh went across the people sitting in folding chairs. Joseph Starbuck winced. "And these poor folks would have had to stand and listen while their party was on hold."