The First Heroes Read online

  His accent was strange to the young man’s ears, and the order and sometimes the endings of the words he used, but comprehensible—many tribes distantly related to the Keruthinii folk had settled across the salt water in Alba, the White Isle. That didn’t mean they were his friends; the opposite, if anything.

  The seaman also scooped up the horsehide bundle that held Blood Wolf’s goods and threw it on the planks of the dock. Two more grabbed the youth by the belt of his wolfskin kilt and half-carried, half-threw him out on worn oak-wood. That done, the crew ignored him as he crawled up the splintery surface toward his goods. Gradually the shaming weakness left him, and he could sit, then stand, spit some of the vile taste out of his mouth, begin to feel like a man once more. He had crossed the Channel to Alba; beyond Alba lay the Summer Isle, and beyond that the River Ocean, and the Island of Wizards, Nantucket.

  First he looked to his weapons: round shield, spear, a light bronze-headed axe, and his precious steel knife, bought from Alban traders. Then he swung his pack onto his back and walked landward as he gazed around, trying hard not to gape at the magical city of Southaven. The shore tended north and south here, but little of it could be seen; great piers of timber framework filled with rock stretched out into the water. Beside them lay ships, more than he could count on fingers and toes both, many times more, their bowsprits looming over the broad cobbled harborside street thronged with folk and beasts and wagons. There were more folk here than in his whole tribe—six or seven tens of hundreds.

  The ships’ masts were taller than trees, their rigging and yards a spiky leafless forest, but that was nothing beside the ones out on the water with chimneys of iron sticking up from their middles and belching black smoke, and great wheels on either side churning up foam.

  “True wizardry,” he murmured to himself, grinning.

  And in the tales, didn’t the great warrior always come off well from his meeting with wizards? Either gaining their friendship and battle-luck, or overcoming and plundering them. He snuffed deeply—silt, fish, salt water, horse-manure, odd sulfur-tinged smoke, but less sweat and ordure stink than you’d expect—and looked along the street. At the thronging folk dressed more richly than great chiefs or tribal kings and more strangely than his eyes could take in; everything from homelike kilts and shifts to shameless string skirts on bare-breasted cloaked women, long embroidered robes, with the odd-looking trousers and jackets and boots that the majority favored, making a dun-colored mass. And at the nets of cargo swinging ashore, laden with sacks and bales and kegs of the Gods alone knew what unguessable wealth; at buildings of baked brick, some five times a man’s height, with great clear windows of glass—and remembered the price the Keruthinii chieftains paid for a single tumbler or goblet of it . . .

  His belly rumbled. It had been more than a day since he’d eaten, and that had gone to the Channel fish. It was a cool brisk day with a strong wind under scudding cloud, enough to awaken any man’s appetite.

  “Stop, thief! Stop him!”

  Kreuha’s head whipped around. The cry had been in En-gil-its, the tongue of wizards and wizard traders; he’d learned a little of it. And the call was repeated in half a dozen other languages, two of them close to his own:

  “Kreuk! Kreuk!” That was the ancient call to raise the hue-and-cry after one who stole by stealth.

  A man came pushing through the crowd, vaulted a pile of barrels, leapt and scrambled over a four-wheeled wagon piled with bales of some dirty-white fibre; that gave him space to pick up speed, heading for the frayed edge of town south of the small-boat docks. He was holding a sword in his hand; Kreuha’s eyes narrowed at the sight. The blade was like none he’d seen, slightly curved and as long as a man’s leg, with a round gold-chased guard and a hilt made for two hands. Sunlight glittered on the bright metal, picking out a waving line in the steel a little back from the cutting edge.

  Kreuha laid his pack and spears down and ran three bouncing strides to put himself in the man’s way. The thief stopped, sweating and snarling; he was a few years older than the newcomer, shorter but broader, with a shock of dark-brown hair and beard. The arms below his sleeveless singlet were thick with muscle and lavishly tattooed. But there was something about the way he stood, the sweat and desperation that made him blink—

  “Give me the sword,” Kreuha said, crouching slightly and spreading his hands so the man couldn’t dodge past him. “And I will return it to the owner.”

  And be richly rewarded, he thought. He’d heard of such weapons. The lords among the wizard-folk wore them. This one is no warrior, only a thief.

  “If you try to strike me, I will kill you and take it,” the Keruthinii tribesman continued calmly.

  The man hesitated for an instant and then cut desperately, a sweeping two-handed roundhouse blow at waist level. It was clumsy, and Kreuha could see the prelude coming a full three heartbeats before the steel began to move, but it was hard enough to slice him to the spine if it landed—the more so as the blade looked knife-sharp. Kreuha leapt straight up as the sword moved, and it hissed like a serpent as it passed beneath the calloused soles of his feet. One long leg smashed out, and his heel slammed into the thief’s breastbone with a sound like a maul hitting a baulk of seasoned oak and a crackling noise beneath that. The man was shocked to a halt, staggered backward with his face turning dark purple, coughed out a spray of bright arterial blood, and fell bonelessly limp.

  Kreuha landed on his feet and one hand, then bounced erect. The sword spun away, landing on the cobbles and sparking as steel struck flint-rich stone. The tribesman winced at the slight to a fine weapon and bent to retrieve it, marveling at the living feel it had in his hands. He was considering whether he could take the head when a party of strangers came up, breathing hard from their run.

  “Oh, hell,” Lucy Alston-Kurlelo said, looking down at the body of the dead thief. He was extremely dead, and stank. “I knew I shouldn’t have hired him.”

  She turned to glare at the Southaven policeman. He spread his hands, including the one holding a revolver: “I offered you hands from the lockup willing to sign up rather than work off their sentences here. Ardaursson was a brawler and a drunk and a thief, and this looks like a clear case of self-defense. I didn’t say anyone you bought out of lockup would be any good.”

  Lucy shrugged. That was true enough; there simply weren’t enough deckhands to go around, with demand so high; more so as the Pride was going far foreign, a long high-risk voyage, not schlepping back and forth across the Pond between Alba and Nantucket. The thief had been a fisherman by trade, worth any dozen farmers or dockside sweepings . . . if he’d been honest.

  “No charges?” she said.

  “No charges. Plain enough case of taken-in-the-act; I’ll file the report.”

  And you did supply this piece of garbage yourself, she thought to herself. Instead of arguing with the peace officer—officials in Southaven had gotten very assertive since the local Town Meeting was admitted to the Republic two years ago, and though young, the policeman came of a prominent local family—she looked at the kilted youngster who’d kicked in the luckless thief’s chest.

  Pretty, she thought. In a chisel-faced blond athletic way. And he was obviously fresh off the boat from the European mainland. No east-Alban tribesman would still be carrying bronze-headed spears, even in the backwoods of the north; hell, most of them were in trousers these days, some building themselves brick houses and sending their children to missionary schools.

  Not from anywhere near the trade-outposts at the mouth of the Loire and Seine and Rhine, either, she thought.

  At a guess—

  “Khwid teuatha tuh’on?” she said: What tribe is yours? Of what people do you come? “Bawatavii?” she went on: “Jowatani?”

  Those were the nearest coastal groups over the water, but he looked a little too raw for that. He’d been staring at her in wonder from the moment she showed up. Lucy was used to that; black people weren’t common in Nantucket and extremely rare e
lsewhere. Her own birth-mother had been Alban, her father an American—a Coast Guardsman who later turned renegade and eventually ended up as a king on the upper Nile. One of her two adoptive mothers had been true coal-black, as opposed to Lucy’s own light milk-chocolate, and there were still people in Alba who thought Marian Alston was some sort of spirit or demigoddess . . . though her deeds had more to do with that than her appearance.

  “Keruthinii teuatha eghom h’esmi,” he said, shaking his head and visibly gathering himself. “I am of the Keruthini folk.” He drew himself up proudly: “Those who drove the Iraiina to Alba in my grandfather’s time.”

  She grinned; that had happened just before the Event landed the late-twentieth-century island of Nantucket in 1250 B.C.E. It’d been a typical tribal scuffle between two small bands of scruffy bandits. Evidently it was a legendary battle-of-the-heroes thing with this boy’s people, now that the tribal bards had had a generation to work it over.

  Then his jaw dropped a trifle more as he noticed she was a woman; he might not have at all, save that her jacket was open on a well-filled sweater.

  Still, he recovered fairly well. “This is yours?” he said, turning the katana and offering it hilt-first—and surprised her by saying it in gutturally accented but fairly good English. “You are from the Island of Wizards?”

  Well, not just pretty, but fairly smart, she decided, carefully examining the edge—this was a pre-Event heirloom, carried back in time with the island of Nantucket to the Late Bronze Age—and then wiping it clean with a cloth before slipping it into the sheath whose lip rode over her left shoulder.

  Not just an heirloom, though. The layer-forged metal had minute etchings along three-quarters of its length, where the salt and acids of blood had cut into the softer layers between the glass-hard edge steel. Only some of them were from her mother’s time.

  “It is and I am,” she said. “Lucy Alston-Kurlelo, captain of the merchantman Grey Lady’s Pride . . .” She saw his eyes open slightly at the family name; curse of having two famous mothers. “And I’m shipping out soon. Interested in a berth?”

  For a moment the man’s face—he looked to be in his late teens, considerably younger than she—grew keen. Then he looked wary.

  “On . . . ship? Ocean?” He pointed out toward the salt water. At her nod he raised his hands in a warding gesture and swallowed.

  Lucy laughed and flipped him a gold ten-dollar piece. He caught the small bright coin and nodded with regal politeness. She sighed as she turned and led her people back toward the ship.

  “Well, let’s go see what other gutter-scrapings, shepherdesses, and plowboys we can rustle up,” she said to her companions—first mate and bosun and two senior deckhands; her younger brother Tim was supercargo and in charge back at the dock.

  They nodded in unison. The Coast Guard kept the North Atlantic fairly free of pirates, and Tartessos did the same for the waters south of Capricorn and the western Mediterranean. You could take a chance and sail shorthanded on the crowded runs between here and home, and you needed to squeeze every cent until it shrieked to meet your costs even so.

  Where the Pride was going, Islander craft were all too likely to meet locals who’d acquired steel and even gunpowder without developing any particular constraints on taking whatever they wanted whenever they could. You needed a crew big enough to work the guns and repel boarders; the extra risk and expense was what kept competition down and profits high on the Sumatra run and points east. It was also one reason she and her sister-cum-business-partner Heather never shipped together on these long voyages.

  No sense in making two sets of children orphans with the same shower of poisoned blowgun darts.

  The strangers departed while Kreuha was marveling over the gold-piece; he had seen copper and silver coins from Alba and the Isle of Wizards, Nantucket, but this was the first one of gold he’d ever held. He held it up to the fading light of afternoon; there was an eagle clutching a bundle of arrows and a peace-wreath on one side, and strange letters and numbers on the other.

  One of the strangers had remained, a young brown-haired man in blue tunic and trousers, with a wooden club and one of the fearsome-wonderful fire-weapons at his belt—the awesome type called revolver, which let the bearer hold the deaths of six men in his hand. He pulled a metal whistle free and blew three sharp blasts on it.

  “Ual kelb soma krweps,” he said, to Kreuha in something close to the warrior’s own language: “To summon help with the body.”

  Blood Wolf nodded, although he didn’t offer to help himself—dead bodies were unclean, and he didn’t know how he’d get a purification ceremony done so far from home. The man went on:

  “I am . . . you would say, a retainer of my chief. A warrior charged with keeping order and guarding against ill-doers among the people. In English, a policeman.”

  Kreuha’s brows rose. That was a duty he didn’t envy; you’d be the target of endless ill-will if you had to offend people as part of your duty. He’d never walked away from a fight, but now that he’d come to man’s estate he didn’t go looking for them, not all the time. His lips moved, as he repeated the word softly several times, to add to his store of En-gil-its terms.

  “It’s also my duty to advise strangers,” the armsman went on. “No slight to your honor, stranger, but it’s forbidden here to fight unless you are attacked.” He looked at Kreuha’s spears. “How were you planning on finding your bread in this land?”

  Kreuha drew himself up. “I am Kreuha Wolkwos, the Blood Wolf,” he said. “Son of Echwo-Pothis, Horse Master; son of a chief who was son of a chief, and I am foremost among the men of war of my people. I come to find some great lord of the wizard-folk who needs my arm and faith, so that I may win fortune and everlasting fame.”

  The armsman—policeman—made a wordless sound and covered his brow and eyes with a hand for a moment. Then he sighed. “You think that, do you?”

  “How not?” Kreuha said, puzzled. “Already a lord . . . well, lady, mistress . . . from Nantucket itself wished me to follow in their fighting-tail. Surely I would quickly rise in any such band.”

  “Oh, Captain Lucy,” the policeman said, nodding. “Well, you were lucky to get that offer, and you’d probably see some fighting on the Pride. Hard work too, but she’s run on shares.” At Kreuha’s look, he went on: “You get a share of the gain at the end of the voyage.”

  Kreuha nodded—a lord always shared booty with his sworn men. But then he remembered the voyage here to Alba, and gulped again. “I cannot . . . not on the sea. A lord by land, yes.”

  It was more than the memory of his misery; it was the helplessness. How could the Blood Wolf be mighty if his belly made him weaker than a girl?

  The policeman grinned, the more so at Kreuha’s black look. “Nobody ever dies of seasickness,” he said. “They just wish they would—until it passes, which may take a day or two.”

  He pointed out a building with a tall tower attached to it, a street or two back from the dockside. “That’s the Town Meetinghouse. It’s a hiring hall, too. If you can’t find work, go there and mention my name: I’m Eric Iraiinisson. They can always find something for a strong back, enough for stew and a doss, at least.” Sternly: “Remember also that here robbers are flogged and sent to the mines for many years, and robbers who slay or wound are hung up and their bodies left for the crows.”

  Kreuha nodded with stiff dignity; just then two more men and a woman dressed alike in the blue clothes came up. They had a horse with them, and tossed the corpse onto its back with brisk efficiency.

  “I have gold,” he pointed out. “Cannot gold be bartered here?”

  Eric Iraiinisson nodded. “While it lasts,” he said.

  Kreuha saw eyes upon him. This tavern was full of men who looked a little less alien than the smooth folk of the upper town; there he’d noticed stares and smiles at his dress and manner. Here there was a dense fug of sweat and woodsmoke from the hearth, and plain rushes on packed dirt below, and plain stools a
nd benches. He had feasted well on beef roasted with some spice that bit the tongue, and beer that was good though strange. Now a man had offered to pay for his drink; he knew of coined money, but such was rare and precious in his tribe still, not something to be casually thrown about on an evening’s bowsing. Still, the amber drink was whiskey, something that only the High Reghix had tasted at home . . .

  “I will drink, if you will drink with me again afterward,” he said. “Drink from my bounty. I have gold!”

  Remember that whiskey is more potent than beer, he reminded himself. Still, it couldn’t be much stronger than ice-mead, and his belly was full of bread and meat to sop it up.

  “Arktorax thanks you,” the man said, then grinned at him and tossed off the small shot-glass, breathed out satisfaction, then followed it with a long swallow of beer. Kreuha imitated the stylish snap of the wrist, throwing the amber liquid at the back of his throat.

  “Ai!” he wheezed a moment later, when he’d stopped coughing. “What do you make this out of, dragon’s blood?”

  “Barley,” Arktorax laughed; he fit his name of Lord Bear, being bear-tall and thick. “It’s made from barley. But if it’s too strong for you—”

  Kreuha’s fist thumped the table. “By He of the Long Spear, nothing’s too strong for a Keruthinii of the Wolf clan! I’ve drunk the vats dry and danced all night, at our festivals.”

  He soothed his throat with a long draught of the beer. It made a pleasant coolness after the fire of the whiskey, but the flame had turned to a comfortable warmth by now.

  “That’s the problem with being a Keruthinii,” he went on, signaling to the wench who served the tables. “You’re so tough and hardy you can’t get drunk.”

  His new friend laughed long and loud. “Are you boasting, or complaining?” he said, and tossed off his glass in turn.

  Kreuha missed the considering look in his eye, and the glance he exchanged with the impassive figure behind the plank bar. Instead he laughed himself, until the tears ran from his eyes. The next whiskey went down far more smoothly than the first, and tasted good: there was a peaty, sweetish flavor to it he hadn’t noticed the first time. That called for another beer, and when it came he stood, swaying a little.