Island in the Sea of Time

Alston felt her fork pause again. "You know the earth is round?" she said. Jaws had dropped up and down the wardroom table.

"Only…" She spoke a phrase in her own language.

"Star-Moon-Sun Priests," Isketerol translated automatically, through Arnstein. "The Grandmothers."

"Grandmothers know. Watched stars, sun, moon, many many winter-summer. Make-" She pushed salt and pepper shakers into a circle and mimed squinting through them.

"By God," Arnstein said. "I think she's talking about Stonehenge!"

A flurry of questions through the Tartessian settled that.

"Stonehenge," Swindapa repeated, and added the name in her own tongue. "The Great Wisdom. Watch, measure. Long time know. Secret, for Star Priest, families."

"Well I will be dipped in… ah, salt," Alston said, with a rare laugh of delight. "Live and learn." Swindapa beamed back at her. She turned to Isketerol:

"So you see, it is round," she said.

Isketerol nodded. "Tartessian captains know. It is secret of… circle of captains?" he raised a brow at Arnstein.

"Guild," the historian said.

"Guild of captains. Only we teach to sons." He made a curving motion through the air. "If watch you the mast top of a ship, sail aways, hull go, low mast go, top mast go. Same on ship sails away from shore. Tall tree, mountain, tower. Bottom go, middle go, top go, can't see them. How except-" He made the curving motion again, and shrugged. "Others may know, but don't say. Low people… common people don't know."

The officers looked at each other. Arnstein nearly rubbed his hands together. "It makes sense, in a way," he said to Alston. "Sailors and astronomers-"

"Astrologers," Doreen said sharply, giving him a covert nudge with her elbow.

"Astrologers might well figure it out. They just wouldn't tell anybody. The really new thing about the first Ionian Greek natural philosophers was that they wanted other people to know what they'd found out."

"Which made it possible to build on previous discoveries," Alston said thoughtfully.

"Sun?" Isketerol said hopefully.

"Oh. Well, if you measure the height of the sun at noon, you can tell exactly how far east or west you are," she said. I'll leave the bit about chronometers for later. "How do you tell on your voyages, Mr. Isketerol?"

The Tartessian's grip on his fork was bending it, and his expression was like feeding time at the zoo, in the carnivore section. "Birds," he said. "Wind, taste water, throw rope with wax and look at sand, mud, rock, shell-shells-from the bottom. Look at clouds, landmarks. Know in here." He tapped his stomach.

In other words, by guess and by God, Alston thought. No wonder crossing open seas was daring for these people. It wasn't the size of their ships. The Tartessian merchantmen she'd seen drawn up on the beach back in Britain were big enough. Bigger than Columbus's Nina, or some European vessels of the Age of Discovery that had sailed the Atlantic dozens of times, even if not as seaworthy. But they had no way of knowing where they were, unless they'd been that way before. In a way she was sorry for him. He stood at the begi

"Stars," Swindapa said. "Dark sun-away… at night… Eagle People look stars. Why?"

"This would go faster if you could read," Ian Arnstein said in frustration.

Isketerol shrugged. "That would take years," he said. "How do I say that in English?"

" 'That would take years.' "

"That would take years." In Greek: "It was hard enough learning our script, and I was a boy then. How the scribe beat me, and how I yelled! Most gentry don't bother."

The phrase still came out Dut wuld tika ye-arrrs, but the Tartessian was making very rapid progress. Even faster than Swindapa, who was across the other side of the cadet mess deck, drilling with Doreen; Isketerol seemed to make her a little uncomfortable. An ewe gave a soft baaaaa from a pen in the corner beyond.

"Why would it take years?" Arnstein asked curiously, falling back into Mycenaean.

Isketerol looked at him, arching black brows over russet-colored eyes. "Why, to learn all the signs, noble Arnstein, and the determinatives, and the… the context that lets you know what the sign means in any written word. Some of them have fifty or sixty alternate meanings, after all."

"Ah!" Arnstein gri

"There are only twenty-six symbols in our script," Arnstein said. "A man with your memory could learn them quickly."

Isketerol frowned. "Twenty-six? How is that possible? The Achaean one has over ninety, not counting denotative signs, and each can mean several things."

"Well-" A thought struck him. "Doreen, Swindapa, you should sit in on this."

The two women came and joined them. When the explanations were complete, he resumed.

"Each symbol stands for one sound, and that sound is the first one of the name of the symbol." He pulled a piece of paper toward himself and wrote down the letters of the alphabet. Alpha, beta, he remembered. God, the snake's really swallowing its own tail with a vengeance.

"So you take the symbols for, say, 'dog.' That's d… o… g… Put them together." He did. "Dog."

Swindapa frowned, moving her lips; she'd had to get the explanation mostly through Isketerol, and her language seemed to lack some of the words involved. The Tartessian stared. His lips moved as well, and beads of sweat broke out on his brow.

"So… but there are still thousands of words," he said. "This-" he pointed to the word DOG written in block capitals-"is as hard to remember as one of the Egyptian symbols. Harder, for they sometimes look like what they represent. And some of them are for sounds, too."

"No, no, you don't have to remember what the word looks like," Ian said. I'll leave the horrors of English spelling for a little later. "You just have to remember the sounds each of the twenty-six letters represents. They all represent single sounds-not things, and not groups of sounds, and it's always the same sound. Then you put the sounds together to make words, and you can read a word from the sounds-you don't have to have seen it before."

As long as you were taught with phonics, he added mentally.

He blocked out SWINDAPA and ISKETEROL, leaving spaces between the letters. "Here are your names. S… W…

• I… N… D… A… P… A, and I… S… K… E…T…E…R…O… L."

"My name?" the girl said, awed. Her eyes went wide. "You take my name, on paper? Take my name away?"

"No." Oh, God, she's probably afraid of magic. He refrained from giving a reassuring pat; she didn't like to be touched, he'd noticed. "No, just the sound of your name."

And let's hope you can tell the difference between the symbol and the referent. Whole schools of French so-called philosophy couldn't in the twentieth century. On the whole the Event had been a disaster, but at least he'd escaped the deconstructionists and semioticists.

Isketerol closed his eyes and bit a knuckle. "I… think I see," he said, after concentrating for a minute. "So… so you could write any language with this script? And anyone could learn it quickly?"

Arnstein nodded happily. Isketerol slapped the back of his palm to his forehead twice, evidently his people's gesture of amazement.

"Teach me this!" he cried. In English; he'd learned those words quite well.