"Like this," Shaw said.
He put a boot on the fish-it must weigh thirty-five pounds and it wasn't happy at all-and swung a length of stick with a heavy steel nut on the end. Two crunching blows and the fish was still.
"That's good eating, that cod," the fisherman said, heaving it into the well in the center of the boat with a grunt of effort. Mebbe forty, forty-five.
His crew-clerks, salesgirls, high school students, shopkeepers, computer operators-looked at the fish and swallowed. They were all hungry, but…
Then the lines began to jerk all around him. "Get to it!" he yelled.
Lines whirred. Cod came up them; sometimes two or three of the crew would have to pull on a single line, and once a six-foot monster came over the side with people yelling and dancing to get out of its way. That one Shaw pinned to the deck with a boathook, and it took half a dozen two-handed blows of the club to kill it. He looked up, panting. The well in the center of the twenty-foot boat was full of fish, a slippery blue-gray mound of them. The deck was slimy underfoot, covered in scales; the crew were equally smeared, the hair of the women hanging in rattails. They grinned back at him.
"Good day's work," he said. "Get the tarpaulin over them and we'll head in. Lucky we don't have to clean them."
The girl who'd caught the first fish of the day daubed at herself. "Gross," she muttered.
CHAPTER THREE
March, Year 1 A.E.
"Closer. Slow, slow."
Lieutenant Walker squatted in the prow of the longboat and broke open the harpoon gun. It was shaped like an outsized shotgun. He slid the long steel harpoon down the barrel, cushioned in its wooden sabot. Its mechanism gave a smooth oiled snick as he closed it and swung the simple post-and-groove sights onto the side of the whale, aiming six feet behind the eye. His helper leaned forward and clipped the end of the line to a ring welded onto the shaft just behind the folding barbs and the bulge that held a charge of bursting powder.
Whoever ran this up knew his way around a machine shop, Walker thought. He'd always liked hunting, and a good weapon doubled the pleasure.
Spray lapped into his face like the tongue of a salty dog. Behind him the crew of sailors and cadets stroked at their oars again. The day was an enormous bowl of blue, only the tiny dot of the Eagle to break the watery horizon, and scarcely a cloud in the sky. It was hot enough to make him sweat, despite the droplets of seawater striking cold on his T-shirt. Ahead the whale lay basking like a flexible black reef; a right whale, with a huge head that made up a third of its sixty feet. Blackfish, the type that had been the staple of inshore whaling in New England before they were hunted out and the big whalers began to sail to Hawaii and Kamchatka. A white patch of barnacles marked its snout; when it raised a flipper he could see white skin beneath, vivid in contrast to the dark-blue water and the coal color of the animal. Close enough to see the eyes, like golf balls set into the sides of a submarine. It blew, a tall double plume that turned into a mist of spray falling across them.
Whales were spouting all around, hundreds of them, pod after pod.
"Feels like murder," one of the cadets muttered. The whales had never been hunted, evidently not even by Indians in canoes. You could get within touching distance sometimes.
"Looks like dinner," Walker said cheerfully. "Ready for it… now." He squeezed the trigger.
Tump. The harpoon blasted out of the barrel, blurring through the air. Line whipped out from the improvised tub beside the harpoon gun. It began to smoke with friction, and Cadet Simpson tossed seawater from her bucket on it. Whack. A flat, wet sound as the steel hit the whale's side.
"Hang on!" Walker yelled.
The whale dove with a smash of its tail that left Walker drenched and dripping, grinning as he clung to the harpoon gun's mount. The longboat lurched forward, and the crew fell over one another in a tangle of oars punctuated by yells. Water fountained up from either side of the bows as the line jerked forward and down, pulling them along like an outboard motor gone berserk. The Nantucket sleigh ride, they'd called it in the old days. The Coast Guard officer counted the seconds:
… five… six… hope the fucking fuse works this time… seven… He wouldn't be able to hear the blast underwater, but the, whale would surely feel it.
The line went slack as the whale broached, half its length out of the water. Blood streamed from the hole gouged by the grenade, but the four barbs held fast. The great animal lay on the surface and threshed in its death agony, nearly swamping the boat that had killed it. All around, other whales were fleeing the sound of its distress, blowing and diving. At last it slumped into stillness, floating quietly as the crew of the longboat bailed out the water.
"Thank God this type floats when it's dead," Walker said. "Let's make her fast."
The Eagle was making sail in their direction; there were lookouts up at the mastheads with binoculars. Cadet Simpson slipped out of her pants and jacket and went overboard with a line to make fast around the whale's flukes. Walker watched with interest; someday they'd have to admit that the old fraternization rules didn't make much sense. Or maybe there would be opportunities when they went east, next week…
The ship was looming larger, moving fairly quickly despite the four whales secured to her sides. This one towed astern, and they'd have enough for starters.
He looked east. Who knew what waited there? Upon a peak in Darien…
"We'll take hundreds of these," Ian Arnstein said.
The spearhead was seven inches long, and three wide at the broadest, cut and ground out of a straightened section of automobile leaf spring. The edge was razor-sharp, tapering to a murderous point. The tang was socketed onto a smooth eight-foot wooden shaft; the whole ensemblage felt heavy and solid and well balanced. Deadly. Ian hefted it and tried to imagine using it. Damn. I'd rather have read about this than had to do it, he thought.
Seahaven Engineering had moved into a big former boat-house, out east of town near the head of the harbor. The machine shop was noisy, clangs and thumps and shrill screaming sounds as somebody pushed a piece of metal against a grindstone; it smelled of iron and ozone.
Ronald Leaton nodded; he was looking as tired as everyone else, and was dressed in a grease-stained baseball cap and overalls that looked like they'd been on for days. "Here's some of the other stuff you ordered."
Big knives ground out of bar stock, and short Roman-style swords. Those had smoothed wooden hilts, brass pommels, and an S-shaped guard made of rebar and welded on. Ian picked one up and hefted it, prodding the point into the battered wooden table it rested on.
"These are probably better steel than the originals," he said.
"Yup. That long fancy one you wanted will take another day or two. Got a book from one of the stores, The Complete Bladesmith, had a lot of useful hints. John Martins is setting up a forge-he's that blacksmith who was here visiting Barbara Allis. He made things like that for hobbyists. And here's our masterpiece."
This time Ronald had used a whole leaf from a spring for the crossbow. It was set at the front of a rifle-type stock.
"How does it cock?" Ian asked. There was a steel claw arrangement hooked to the center of the wire string stretched across the shallow cord of the bow. He pulled at the string with a tentative hand. It was like a solid bar, immovable.
"That's a stiff draw," he said.
"Over three hundred and fifty pounds," the machinist said. "Brace the stock against your hip and hold the grip. Now put your other hand on the forestock, through that oval metal loop that sticks out beyond the wood. Feel that catch under your thumb? Press it down."
Ian obeyed. A steel lever came out of its slot in the forestock, hinged at the rear a few inches ahead of the trigger guard.