Strata

came down to face to face confrontations. To pointing. To drawing circles in the sand.
    Circles
in the sand?
    Well – it came down to pointing.
    Much later she found Silver and Marco in their clearing higher up the slope. Silver was sitting beside the dumbwaiter, scooping handfuls of grey and red goo out of a bowl. Marco was lying full length, peering through the leaves at the men on the beach.
    They had lit a fire, and were cooking something.
    Silver nodded at her and did something to the dumbwaiter’s controls.
    ‘I already ate,’ sighed Kin. ‘Some sort of grain meal and dried fish. Didn’t you see?’
    ‘I was, in fact, programming for an emetic.’
    Marco turned over. ‘You ate food without even a rudimentary analysis! Do you wish to die so soon?’
    ‘We need their trust,’ said Kin. She tossed a sliver of fish to Silver. ‘I’ll take your damn potion, but hold that under the ‘waiter’s nose. You know ‘waiter food always tastes like some-body already ate it. While we’re here we might as well have full stomachs.’
    She took a bowl of pink fluid from Silver’s paw and retired to the other side of the clearing, where she was briefly and noisily sick. Silver reached up and dialled the ‘waiter for coffee.
    Presently the machine extruded a tongue of green plastic. She tore it out and read it.
    ‘High on usable protein and vitamins,’ she said. ‘There is a hydrocarbon content from the drying process which may be carcinogenic in the long term, but it appears to pose no great risk.’
    ‘Great,’ said Kin, helping herself to coffee. ‘Suddenly I feel I could never look another dried fish in the face. Now, are you ready for the big answers? As far as I can understand it, the small red-haired man calls himself Leiv Eiriksson.’
    Silver flicked the green printout neatly into the machine’s intake hopper.
    ‘That is a remarkable coincidence or something else,’ she said calmly.
    ‘You’re not kidding.’
    Marco turned back from his surveillance. ‘What is coincidental?’ he said. ‘Did you observe their weaponry?’
    ‘They have swords made out of, uh, bog-iron, hand-beaten. Easily blunted,’ said Kin thoughtfully. ‘Their greatest weapon is their boat. Are you familiar with the term clinker-built?’
    He nodded.
    ‘Good, it means nothing to me. They’re
fast
. These people rule a large part of the sea with those boats and those swords. Sometimes they are pirates, but they’ve got a sophisticated system of law. They’re brave. A thousand-mile journey in a boat like that is commonplace.’
    Marco stared at her. ‘You learned all that?’
    ‘No, all I understood was his name, and only because I’ve heard it before. It’s all from memory.’ She looked at Silver for confirmation. The shand nodded.
    ‘“In the year three hundred and twenty-two”,’ she intoned, ‘“Eiriksson sailed the ocean blue”!’
    ‘Very poetic,’ said Marco levelly. ‘Now, will you please explain ?’
    ‘If you were raised in Mexico you wouldn’t have heard about this,’ said Kin. ‘They’re snobbish about their history down there. Leiv Eiriksson …’ she began to outline Earth’s history … ‘discovered Vinland, more than three hundred years after the Battle of Haelcor had ended the third and last Remem Empire.’
    The big migration followed automatically. The Turks were again pushing west and north. Leiv’s father, Eirik, was a shrewd salesman. His Greenland had turned out nowhere like as green as it had been in his imagination, but from Vinland Leiv had thoughtfully brought rich berries and wild grains. The Northmen went west again.
    They leap-frogged colony after colony down the eastern seaboard, up into the base rugged lands around Tyker’s Sea and down the Long Fjord into the Middle Seas. It was the landscape of their dreams. They called it Valhalla.
    There were natives. But the newcomers were only half-hearted farmers – underneath the agricultural veneer they thought bloody. Those tribes they couldn’t out-fight they out-thought. When they met the Objibwa Confederacy they made treaties. And they spread, and merged.
    By all the theories it should have ended there. Neither the natives nor the invaders had the textbook kind of social dynamic that builds Remes. The Northmen should have become just another tribe, with blue eyes and fair hair.
    The theories were wrong. Something latent in both races was sparked into fire. It was a big continent, and it was rich.
    In short, three