On the Oceans of Eternity Read Free Page A

herself, a slight curve of her full lips.
    “I’ve got gloomy tastes,” she said. “If we’re benighted out here and we can find anything that’ll burn, we can at least arrange the venison.” An extremely unlucky deer was slung gralloched across one of their packhorses. “Still, he catches the area, doesn’t he?” she went on, waving.
    She’d visited here as a tourist before the Event—even now her mind gave a slight hitch; English tenses were not suited to time travel—and the bones of the land were the same.
    And the weather’s just as lousy, she thought, sneezing.
    But there were no lush hedge-bordered fields here, no half-timbered farmhouses or little villages with pubs where you sat with the ghosts of cavaliers and highwaymen, no ruined castles and Norman churches, no shards of Roman Viroconium—Uricon, in Shropshire legend. No Iron Age hill forts, either, on the “blue remembered hills.” Not yet, and now not ever, here. Sometimes back on Nantucket among the buildings and artifacts of that future you could forget, or your gut could forget. Forget that an entire history—three millennia of people, being born and living, fighting and building and bearing children and dying—had ... vanished ... when the Event happened.
    The little party rode their horses down narrow rutted trails made by deer and wild boar and aurochs as much as men and men’s herds, beneath towering oaks and beeches, ash and chestnut and lime, tangled thorny underbrush to either side. Wind whipped through leaves turning sere and yellow with early autumn, scattering them downward with a steady drip and drizzle following behind. The air above was thick with wings, many on their way southward for the year, and their cries drifted down with the rain; redpolls and siskins chattered anger at the humans from the boughs. The trail veered down from a ridgeback, through a marsh-bordered stream edged with alders; water lapped her stirrup-irons and mud spattered on her boots and trouser legs with a cold yeasty smell. The storm mounted, moaning through the branches and ruffling the surface of the puddles. It was good to speak into the teeth of the whetted wind:
    Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
    “Roman?” Swindapa asked.
    In the decade they’d been together the young woman of the Fiernan Bohulugi had acquired a fair modern education to add to the lore of an astronomer-priestess of Moon Woman and hunter of the Spear Mark, but not much of it concerned the details of a history that would never happen.
    “A people that invaded ... would have invaded Alba a long time from now. About ...” Let’s see, this is year 10 A.E., which makes it 1240 B.C., Claudius invaded Britain in the 40s A.D., so ... “Call it thirteen hundred years from now. They would have built a city thereabouts.” She nodded off to the northwest, to where Wroxeter stood in her birth-century.
    “Like the Sun People,” Swindapa said with a slight shiver.
    Alston leaned over and squeezed her shoulder for an instant. The Event had dumped her command—the Coast Guard training windjammer Eagle—into the early spring of 1250 B.C., along with the island of Nantucket. The first thing they’d done besides catching a few whales was make a voyage to Britain, to barter steel tools and trinkets for desperately needed food and seed corn and livestock; they’d ended up making their first landing among the Iraiina tribe, the latest of many teuatha of the Sun People to invade the White Isle. Among the gifts those proto-demi-Celts had given Alston was a girl they’d taken prisoner from the Earth Folk, the Fiernan Bohulugi, the megalith-building natives of Alba. Swindapa, who still sometimes woke screaming from nightmares of that captivity.
    “That’s a long time gone, sugar,” Marian said. “Lot of water under the bridge, and the Sun People are pretty