In twenty minutes it was spouting out the hawser holes and along the forecastle decking, to drain out the lee scuppers around the feet of the inevitable seasickness cases. Isketerol of Tartessos looked well enough, holding on to a line and staring incredulously overside as he mentally estimated the speed. Swindapa had turned green, and blundered helplessly until a couple of cadets snapped a safety line to her belt and draped her over the leeside bulwarks just in time.
The port rail was nearly under; Alston looked at the clinometer. Twenty degrees. "Speed," she said.
"Twelve knots and rising, ma'am."
"Twelve knots, aye. Ms. Rapczewicz, you have the deck; keep her thus, but reef if the wind freshens. I'll be in my cabin."
And she should give Cofflin a call, let him know things had gone well. They probably needed some morale-boosting back home. She checked in midstride for an instant. Home? Well, our trip here was instructive, at least. Compared to anywhere else in the world of 1250 B.C., Nantucket was very homelike indeed.
"Whazzit?"
Ian Arnstein came awake with a violent start. The little cabin was dark except for a trickle of light through the closed porthole, and for a moment he was lost, torn from a dream of freeways and shopping malls and teenagers on Rollerblades. Fear made his heart race.
Someone's here, he thought. There shouldn't be; he had the tiny room to himself. Captain Alston had left a fair number of her officers back on the island to oversee fishing and matters maritime, the ones who'd been there mainly as instructors for the cadets.
"Who's that?" he whispered.
There was a rustling at the edge of the bunk, and a vague shape in the darkness. "Me," Doreen's voice said.
"Oh." His heart still beat faster, but it wasn't quite the same sort of fear. "Why… oh."
A hand took his and guided it to close on a full breast. "You're an intelligent man, Ian. Don't be silly. Why do you think I'm here?"
I should be thinking, he knew through the hammering in his temples. We've only known each other for a few weeks… I'm too old for her… all this stress has got us acting in ways we wouldn't… His hands held the blankets up and slid down her back as she slid into the narrow bunk beside him, warm and smelling of clean woman and soap. Her first kiss landed on his nose in the dark, but the second was on target.
"Oh, yeah," she murmured. "The beard tickles nice."
"Yeah," he echoed in the same breathy whisper.
To hell with thinking. Before he'd expected it she had rolled underneath him and her legs were clamped along his flanks. He moved convulsively and bumped his head against the overhead.
"Damn these bunks!" he hissed.
Doreen chuckled and wrapped her legs around his waist instead, then gave a sigh that was half groan as he slipped into her. "Come on then," she whispered into his ear as they began to rock together. "God, come on, then."
Some immeasurable time afterward they lay in a tangle of arms and legs and stray bits of sheet caught between and under them, amid a pleasant smell of sweat and sex.
"It is cramped," he said, and sighed. "For the first time since this whole thing started, I feel as if I'm really here."
"Why, thank you, sir," Doreen purred into his ear. "The feeling's mutual."
A thought jarred him. "Wait a minute-you're protected, aren't you?"
"It's a bit late to ask, but yes."
Ian sighed relief. "It'd be a shame to waste this waist." He ran a hand down the damp smooth skin of her back. "Many happy returns of the night," he said, then checked himself.
"Mmmm-hmm," Doreen said affirmatively, nuzzling into the curve of his neck. "Hoped you'd say that."
Silence ticked away. "I'm a bit, well, old, middle-aged really, and-"
"I'm not a teenager either, I'm nearly thirty," she said. "Well into spinsterhood, by Bronze Age standards, I suppose." A chuckle fluttered across his skin, cool on the dampness. "Besides, you're certainly the most eligible Jewish man around. Even if you're not a medical doctor. Unless I sail east and put the make on Moses."
"We'll see how it goes, then," he said drowsily, feeling an enormous peace. A minute later he tugged his eyelids open. "God, we can't go to sleep, or she'll tow us at the end of a rope at dawn!" Captain Alston had impressed him as the type who enforced regulations with an old-fashioned absolutism.
"Mmmm, no. I asked. She said as civilians all we had to be was discreet."
They rearranged themselves with some effort, smoothing the sheets a little and drawing up the blanket, then settling down spoon fashion. It was a long while since he'd slept- in the go-to-sleep sense of the term-with a woman, and never in a bed so narrow. After a half hour his drowsiness faded.
"My, for a middle-aged man…"
CHAPTER EIGHT
April, Year 1 A.E.
"Well, people, we have a problem," Jared Cofflin said. He looked out over the crowd. Attendance at Town Meeting was certainly up from the days before the Event; of course, the stakes were a lot higher now. But I don't like the look in their eyes, he thought. They're still scared. Deubel's crazed arson plot had put the fear of death into them, like nothing since the Event. He could smell it in their sweat, and hear the shrill undertone in the murmurs as they adjusted their folding chairs. A few young children cried in their mothers' arms, ignoring the patting and shushing.
"The trial's over," he went on. "Judge Gardner can testify it was fair."
The judge nodded. "However, under the circumstances, sentencing is a problem. Arson generally carries a fairly long term of imprisonment."
"It's time we faced some facts. Look, we want a government of laws, don't we?" There were nods throughout the crowd. Cofflin felt sweat running down his collar, and was extremely glad that Martha Stoddard was sitting next to him at the table on the dais, spare and precise in a gray dress and single string of pearls.
"But let's face it, the laws of the United States don't run here any more. There isn't any United States, no Congress, no president, no Supreme Court. Sure, we want the same sort of laws-"
"Like hell," someone said from the ranks of townspeople. "The IRS can stay lost for all I care."
That brought a gust of laughter; Cofflin joined in for an instant. "Generally speaking, I mean. In the end, though, this-this Town Meeting here-is the source of law on this island. You are. You're the Congress, you're the Senate. You can make peace and declare war; you decide what the penalties for crimes are. You bind and loose."
That brought silence for a long moment, except for the angry hiccupping of a fretful baby. "All right, then. Here we've got eighteen men and women who tried to burn down the town, which would probably have killed us all, one way or another." There had been twenty to start with, but two had managed to follow their ex-pastor into suicide.
"We've given them a fair trial, and they've mostly confessed anyway. The question is, what do we do with them?"
"Hang 'em!" someone shouted, and there was a menacing snarl from the crowd. Together on a bench before the dais the prisoners shrank together.