The man at the wheel-the tuna-catcher was just large enough to make a tiller cumbersome-nodded and shouted an order to his crew. The Kestrel turned, slanting further south of east, then turned up into the wind in a horseshoe maneuver; her sails came down with a rush except for the jib, and she lay with her bows pitching and pointed into the wind. The gulls who'd been following hopefully made a brief white storm of wings and raucous cries around the two craft.
"Neat as ever, John," Cofflin called as the catboat came close, and pulled on the tiller to bring her closer to the eye of the northeasterly wind.
Facing full into the wind the sail emptied and rattled, its loose edge thuttering-luffing. Two crew from the fishing craft caught the rail with hooks on the ends of long poles and held her steady. That wouldn't be safe for long.
"When're you coming back to real work, Chief?" John Kotalac said.
Cofflin shook his head. He'd spent the first harvest season after the Event harpooning bluefin; he hadn't been more ignorant than anyone else, and hadn't gotten anyone killed-not quite. Since then he'd done it most autumns, when the big fish ran up the coast. That was one of the ways you could pay Town tax, like lending a hand mining Madaket Mall, the old landfill dump, or working in some farmer's harvest gang.
"Time to let nature take its course," he said. "I'm just plain getting too slow. Not too slow to eat 'em, though. How'd it go?"
"Not bad at all," the skipper of the tuna boat said. "Got six-and Sweet can relax, not one of them under fifteen hundred pounds. Three are ton-weighters."
Cofflin nodded. Fifteen hundred pounds was the minimum legal size for bluefin; it meant they were all over thirty-five years old, fully mature and likely to have spent three decades breeding. And all taken with the harpoon. No drift nets here, by God. It wasn't a particular hardship, either. There were a lot of mature bluefin migrating up from the Caribbean spawning grounds in the Year 10. He'd seen a boat about the Kestrel's size knocked on its beam ends once, when it got between a school of them and the mackerel they were chasing.
"Give you a quarter for twenty-five pounds of it," he called. "That's better than you'll get from those pirates 'longshore."
Fresh tuna steak was a seasonal delicacy… but a glut of caviar was still a glut of caviar, in terms of what you could get in a free market. For that matter, caviar was pretty cheap nowadays. Pushcart vendors sold it. Most of the tuna would go into barrels or glass pickling jars for use in winter.
"Sounds good," John Kotalac said. Raising his voice: "Whoever's closest!"
" 'Lo, Tekkusumu," Cofflin went on, waving.
The Indian nodded courteously; he was a short broad man, looking a little incongruous in Nantucketer seagoing sweater and baggy pants and boots, since his hair was still up in a helmet-crest roach with the shaven sides of his head painted vermilion. Many of the tuna boats carried Lekkansu tribesmen from the 'longshore clans as harpooners; they learned the art quickly, since they were used to throwing things in a way few Islanders could match.
"I greet you, elder brother," Tekkusumu said in his own language-Cofflin had picked up a few words of it-and then continued in good English: "The harpoon flew sweet this year."
Several of the seven-foot shafts were racked behind him, and he'd been sharpening a head when they came up, a foot-long steel shaft with a toggle-hinged blade at the tip. Now he laid it aside, drew the long knife at his belt, and jumped down into the well of the boat. When he came back up it was with a dripping chunk wrapped in coarse burlap. He leaned far out over his ship's rail to hand it down to Martha.
"From near the belly," he said to her.
Jared nodded; muscle from around the body cavity was the best. There were plenty of people on Nantucket who liked it as sushi, although barley groats had to replace the rice. Sushi's still raw fish wrapped in seaweed to me, he thought wryly. But lightly grilled, with just a brush of butter and salt… The rest of it would make a good guest-gift at their destination.
"Thanks, Tekkusumu, John! Say hello to Sally for me!"
" 'Bye!"
The crewfolk with the boathooks fended them off again, and the Boojum's sail cracked like a whip as it filled and the boat paid off, turning its bow south of west. The tiller came alive in his hand again; the blunt bow surged up to the top of one of the long slow swells, then ran downward, up again…
A sizzle came from the little cabin, and then Martha's head came out of the door.
"All right, children; make yourselves useful."
The kids scurried around, unpacking the picnic baskets. Martha brought the tuna steaks out herself, and spelled him at the tiller while he ate; an occasional sprinkle of salt spray fell across his plate.
Funny thing, he thought. Before the Event, he'd eaten alone more often than not after his first wife died. He almost never did that now-six of them when it was just a family meal and usually more. There were times it still felt a little odd; like TV, not that he missed the mindless blather, just that it was something gone from the background of life.
The rest of the sail was a straight run with a stiff wind on the starboard beam and the port rail nearly under, clocking ten knots or better all the way down to Long Island Sound. Six hours later he surreptitiously worked his left arm. The adults had all taken turns at the tiller, but his shoulder was still a bit stiff and sore, where they'd taken the piece of shell casing from one of Victor C's mortars out, all those years ago. It hadn't bothered him any then, he'd had what his grandfather called good-healing flesh, like a young dog. At the time, he'd just been mad it wasn't enough to get him back to the World, although he'd enjoyed the R amp;R in Bangkok. The medal he'd flipped into the river the moment his feet were on the gunboat's deck again.
But these last couple of years, if it was cold or he'd pushed it beyond a certain point, the joint ached where the steel had scored bone and tendon. A ghost-pain from a war that would never happen, a memory of steel still locked unmined in Siberian mountains this fall day. Another clutch of years… maybe twenty if he was lucky… and he'd lay his bones beside so many other Cofflins in Nantucket's sandy loam. Those bones would molder away to nothingness before the year men were due to dig those rocks away and other men smelt and shape and fill them and still more launch them at an American gunboat where a bored, lonely, frightened teenager stood behind the spade-grips of an automatic cannon…
I remember being that youngster, Jared Cofflin thought. But in a way he'll never exist at all, except in my memories-I'm here and feeling a wound from a battle that never happened, never will… And that boy was as strange to him as that far-distant year.
He looked up and caught Martha looking at him, fond and dryly amused at the same time. Act your age, then, Jared, he thought for her, giving an imperceptible nod.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
September, 10 A.E.-Pi-Ramses, Kingdom of Egypt
The Horus," the silver-voiced herald called, half chant and half song. "The God is among us!"
The Vizier of the North sank to his knees and then bent forward to symbolically kiss dirt. Beside him Mek-Andrus, Commander of Chariots, did likewise, pressing his face to the colorful glazed tile of the floor. It was cool and smooth beneath his lips, and a breath of greenery and flowers touched the skin of his back, wafting in from the pools and gardens outside into the hot gloom.
"He of the Two Goddesses: Protector of Egypt Who Subdues the Foreign Lands; The Golden Horus: Rich in Years, Great in Victories."