When the other man had, he moved cautiously to the bow and stood with one hand on the stay line that ran from there to the mast, peering ahead. Then he unshipped his binoculars, careful to settle the loop around his neck-they were big military grade field glasses, an heirloom from his father, irreplaceable if dropped over the side-and took another look.

A long shore, sandy beach backed by fifty-foot bluffs, interrupted here and there with lower parts. And...

"What's wrong?" Kuttner said.

"The books said Nantucket was covered with scrub and thicket, with a few trees here and there, and lots of those houses like back on the Cape," he said.

"Well?"

"It isn't. That's forest there, dense forest. Oak, I think. Maybe hickory, and some pine, but lots of oak."

"That could have grown up since."

The three Villains looked at him; surely nobody could be that ignorant?

"Not in twenty-two years it couldn't," Ingolf said. "And it's sandy there, and there's the salt wind. That's old forest. Not very tall, yeah, but it's old. Take a look."

He handed over the binoculars reluctantly and kept a hand ready to grab; as far as he knew, Kuttner had never been afloat on anything but the Mississippi before this trip.

The smaller man's lips went tight. "We must land," he said, but it was as if he had to force himself to say it.

"Yeah," Ingolf said, equally unhappily. "It's getting too close to dark to head back."

"I do not know," Kaur said. Ingolf looked at her in surprise, and she went on: "It is as if something tells me, Go away."

She shivered. "Perhaps this place is cursed."

Her brother nodded. Ingolf was surprised; usually the two of them had the steadiest nerves of anyone in the company-sometimes he suspected they really didn't care much if they lived or died.

"We don't have a choice. Let's go for it."

An opening in the straight line of the coast showed. It wasn't where the maps said it should be, but it did break the surf bound ramparts.

"And see that?" he said, pointing to a faint trickle of smoke rising there. "That means men. We'd better be cautious."

The three Villains kept the boat's head into the wind as they all put on their fighting gear; the choppy up-and down motion made it awkward, but they managed. Ingolf and the others wolfed down rabbit cooked that morning and some biscuit, grimacing at the sawdust taste of the thrice baked bread. It hadn't been very warm out on the water and it was cooling now, enough that the padding and armor didn't make you sweat much. Kuttner wore his usual odd cuirass of overlapping plates of leather boiled in wax, with metal buckles and trim, its color a russet brown contrast to the oiled gray of the others' mail shirts; his helmet was round-topped, with a spike in the center of its dome and hinged cheek guards.

Ingolf settled his shete over his shoulder, made sure that his bow was protected in its waterproof oiled can vas case by his feet-moisture could play hell with the laminations of a horn and sinew recurve-and then turned the boat into the sheltered waters.

Those were shallow; the keel gave a nasty tick that made the rigging groan and everyone lurch as they crossed in from the sea.

"What was that, Captain?" Singh said, pointing west.

"I didn't see anything," Ingolf answered, concentrat ing on avoiding the green patches as he wended his way towards the shore.

"I saw a flash of light to the west, farther up this coast. Like sun on glass, I thought."

Kaur nodded. Ingolf sighed: "There weren't supposed to be any tall glass buildings here, either. We'll see."

Ingolf had been right; the land around the low spot was mostly forest where it wasn't reed-rustling salt marsh. The trees weren't very tall, forty or fifty feet at most, but the trunks were thick and gnarled, with a dense un derstory of bushes. He recognized white and black oaks, chestnut, beech, maple, pine and hickory; the broadleaf trees predominated, lush in their summer foliage, and there were a lot of dead elms. The smell reached him, strong even compared to the sea salt and the marshes, earthy and wild, familiar from the wooded hills of home and yet a little strange.

Compared to their surroundings, the habitations looked small. Six boats were drawn up, wooden twenty footers; he got the binoculars out and looked. They were open undecked craft made of planks that looked hand sawn, with oarlocks and unstepped masts and furled gaff sails. Behind them was a little hamlet of six long rect angular houses, built low with a mud-and stick chimney coming out of the shingle roofs and earth heaped up against the sides. The chimneys were idle, and the smoke came from a central open hearth in a cleared space.

He switched the view; there were fish drying racks with the catch on them, and more fires-very low smol dering ones, giving off a dense haze that clung to the ground.

That must be to smoke 'em, he thought.

Ten or twelve acres around the hamlet were planted, amid haggled-off stumps that showed how the land had been cleared. Lush growth hid the soil; there were corn stalks wound with beans, pumpkin vines, tomatoes, the tops of potatoes, turnips and more. A buzzing midden a thousand yards away looked to be mostly oyster-shell; when the wind backed and shifted they got a powerful whiff from it. Otherwise the community seemed pretty tidy; there was even a paddock fenced with split rails, though no stock in it he could see.

"I don't think this bunch are wild men," he said. "Not the usual kind at least. How many do you think, Singh?"

"Forty. Sixty if they pack close in those houses," Singh said. "Perhaps twenty fighting men at most, counting boys."

His sister gave him a look, and he cleared his throat and went on: "And perhaps some strong women. That would be as many as could row those boats, as well. You are right, Captain. That is not a wild-man den. Those are people."

Ingolf nodded. "Doesn't mean they're friendly people, necessarily."

He focused on the edge of the woods. "Looks to me like they cleared out when they saw us coming in, but they're watching from there."

Decision firmed. "We'll go in, but cautious. Get one of the anchors and some line."

Two hundred yards from shore they dropped it; it splashed in and sank away to the bottom twenty feet below, and he could see the puff of sand as it struck through the clear water. Then they jerked the heavy rope to see that the flukes had set, and paid out line as they sculled the sailboat closer to shore. He halted them when the bow just touched bottom; that way they could snatch themselves out fast if they had to, pulling up the line. They dropped another anchor and secured it with a slipknot; he took a deep breath.

"Let's go."

The water was cold on his skin as he jumped in and waded ashore, filling his boots. The long shadows of twi light went ahead of them. The others followed, holding their bows above their heads to keep the wet off; then the Sikhs went on first while Kuttner and he covered them as they looked in each of the long huts in turn.

When they came back Singh handed him a leather pouch. The deerskin was well tanned, butter-supple, and worked with a design of porcupine quills and shell beads, with bits of plastic and old glass added.

"That's good tanning," he said, sniffing at it; the rich mellow scent of leather was strong, along with smoke and some herb it had held once. "Brain and bark, I think."

Singh nodded. "There are three or four families in each of the houses, Captain, from the bedrolls. The tools are mostly from before the Change, but look at this."

It was a hoe, with a skillfully shaped handle; the head was a large shell, probably adequate in this light sandy soil.

"Right." Another deep breath. "Let's talk to them."

He walked beyond the buildings. They all held up open hands, yelling about their peaceableness and wav ing come on. Eventually people did, moving out of the thick brush along the forest edge with a skill that made him blink. A dozen men in hide breechclouts led, aged from early teens to their forties; their hair was shaved on either side of the head and gathered up into a standing roach, with a pigtail behind, and they held light javelins settled in the groove of a yard-long throwing stick ending in a hook. They had steel knives, too, and hatchets.

Behind them came an older man in similar dress, and a woman in a buckskin tunic that reached to her knees; as they got closer he saw that her braided hair was gray streaked yellow, and she was the man's age or nearly, looking a bit older because she'd lost most of her teeth. He was Injun, though of no tribe Ingolf knew, with ruddy light brown skin and flattish features, stocky and looking very strong for his size, with thick scarred forearms.

Hmmm, he thought, looking at the younger folk again. A couple looked like white men, a couple like Injuns, and the rest mixed. Nothing odd there; I've seen enough blue eyed Sioux out west, and redheaded Anishinabe up north. People had shifted around a lot, right after the Change, and settled where they could.

The woman looked at him steadily. When she spoke, it was as if the English language came haltingly to her, the sound a little rusty; and there was a trace of an accent he didn't recognize, one that turned are to aaah.

"You are... not..."

The man beside her was probably her husband; he spoke himself, in a complex-sounding language full of quick-rising, slow falling sounds, then made a crook-fingered grabbing gesture with his right hand.

"The Eaters of Men," she said, probably translating; it sounded that way, not quite English phrasing.

The other locals lowered their weapons, a few smiling at the strangers.

"No, we're not, ma'am. We're from the Midwest-Wisconsin, me. We're ... explorers."

Suddenly tears were running down her face. "Oh, it's been so long!"

"... came out here from Innsmouth three weeks after the Day," said the woman who'd been Juanita Johnson once, and now thought of herself as Sun Hair. "The Emergency Committee had cut the ration to just one little bowl a day at the Distribution Center and there was fighting every day with the refugees..."

The Day? She must mean the Change, Ingolf thought, nodding.

"My father and mother, my uncle John and aunt Sally and Mr. Granger and Lindy, the Smiths, and us kids... I was fifteen. Things were already very bad, and the rumors..."

She licked her lips again, then took Ingolf's bowl and reached out to spoon more fish stew into it with a wooden ladle; the cauldron was made from the bottom half of an aluminum trash barrel. It was good stew, full of chunks of white cod meat and scallops and vegetables. The firelight shone on the faces-the warriors closest, and the two-score of women and children behind. He caught glimpses of a naked toddler huddled up against her mother, of another younger one at the breast. They murmured among themselves; mostly the odd-sounding language, but in it were English words he caught or half caught.

It was cooler now that the sun was down, not chilly but close enough to it that the fire's warmth felt grateful on his skin. A couple of the older people had cloaks or blankets around their shoulders, made of glossy pelts.

"Later we realized they must be true. A few times in the years after that, boats came here... hunting... and we had to run or fight. Dad and Uncle John loaded ev erything we could find, the tools and seed and the three goats from Uncle John's place we'd hidden from the Committee, and we headed out. I don't know where Dad was really hoping for-he talked about going north to Maine. But there was a storm, and we were cast ashore here; we managed to get most of our stuff out but the boat was wrecked."

She frowned. "I haven't thought about it for a long time... I knew about Nantucket. I'd been there. This isn't Nantucket. It looks a little like it, but the trees... and the people. They're the... we're the..."

Another word in that language; she smiled and thumped her forehead with the heel of her hand.

"The People. Or the Sea-Land People. They're In dians, and they'd never heard of white men. Or metal, or growing corn, or... or anything. They said nobody had-they used to visit the mainland before the Day, only they say it was all forest too, and relatives of theirs lived there, not cities and things. Then there was a dome of fire, colored fire, and when it went away they were here. When my family got here they were sick; someone had already come here and left... I think it was chicken pox. Most of the People died of it. There'd been about a hundred, but only two dozen lived."

All the watchers shuddered at the words chicken pox; some of them made signs that were probably for protection against evil magic.

"But they're good people... and they had food; they knew how to fish and hunt. We stayed, and we helped with the sick, and learned to talk to them, and showed them things, and they showed us... My dad died six years later, drowned while he was out fishing. Mom got sick with some thing a year after that, I don't know what, it was awful; she had this pain in her stomach... Uncle John built boats for a hobby, so he knew how..."

Ingolf finished the food and set the plastic bowl aside as Sun Hair rambled through her tale of years, of children born and folk dying, of learning and forgetting.

I don't think she's really wandered in her wits, he thought. Just a little strange, like a lot who had a hard time in those years. Hers wasn't as hard as some. But Christ, this is weird!

He knew the history of America before the Change, at least in outline; he was a sheriff's son, after all, an educated man who could both read and write fluently and cipher well. He'd read through an entire book on it, the Time-Life one, and another bound together from several carefully preserved National Geographic s with wonderful pictures. This island was near where the first English had settled, four hundred years ago. And the Injuns they met had been farmers, albeit without iron or cattle or horses. How long since Nantucket had been covered in oak trees, peopled by folk who'd never seen corn?

His mind quailed at the gap of years. Of course, it must be possible. It's here, isn't it? And if God made the Change, why not this?

Kaur and Singh were looking bewildered. Kuttner looked like he was three sheets to the wind, and had been smoking something strong along with it. His eyes glittered, a look like lust. He leaned forward and cut in: "And Nantucket town? There?" he said, pointing east.

Sun Hair began to cry; her husband put an arm around her. "That's where my boy Frank went!" she sobbed. "And he never came back! He never came back to me!"

"I don't like doing this to them," Ingolf said, looking back at the Sea-Land People.

This was as close as they came to the great fishhook harbor where the maps said Nantucket town should stand. So far all they'd seen was forest and game trails, weaving to avoid patches of marsh and a few open old-field meadows. They were lamenting, weeping and throwing their hands rhythmically into the air at this act of suicide by their guests.

Morning sunlight speared through gaps in the forest canopy, thinner here right near the sea, and seemed to surround the locals with a nimbus of light as they wept and swayed.

Good people, he thought.

They'd had plentiful reason to fear and suspect out siders from the mainland, but they'd taken the travelers in without hesitation once they saw they weren't wild men. One girl in particular had been very friendly later that night... though he suspected part of it was that they had a real limited selection of mates here if they wanted to avoid inbreeding. Singh was looking sort of sleek, too.

They moved forward; the trail was overgrown, and Singh and Kaur unlimbered their shetes and cut at ferns and blueberry bushes. Then they were in open country, on a neatly trimmed stretch of green, though that might be the angora goats the Sea Land People kept, descendants of the original nanny and her two kids.

Light flashed, through his eyes, through his upraised hands, through his mind as he shouted in protest. The moment of pain was endless, and over instantly. And****

Sheriff Ingolf Vogeler sat in his chair of judgment, look ing down at the bound thief. It was a formal room, with a shelf of books, and black bordered pictures of his father and brother Edward on the wall behind...

"Christ!" he wheezed.

For an instant, two complete lives warred for posses sion of his mind, and he realized he didn't even like the pompous self-righteous bastard he might have been.

Troop-lieutenant Ingolf Vogeler looked down at the Sioux arrow that sprouted in his chest; he toppled slowly forward in the flame-shot night, dropping his shete as the choking salt invaded his lungs, dead on the day of his nineteenth birthday...

Ingolf Vogeler looked at the slowly rotating hologram model of the molecule and knew he wasn't going to get the parasmallpox to do what he wanted...

"Save, store and restart from one-C," he growled, reaching for the can of Mango cola.

Somewhere his body took another step forward. Images of the land ahead of him strobed through his eyes-or perhaps not through his eyes. A quiet cobbled street lined with brick buildings. Ruins. The same cobbled street, with people in weird clothes or nothing, and vehicles that floated on turning silvery balls that seemed liquid somehow.

Planes of crystal light turning through spaces that hurt his mind like razors slicing at his flesh, too big, too big. Something stretched, gave way, like a guitar string stretched around the universe, shivering with a note that vibrated from fire to darkness and back to fire.

And Ingolf Vogeler was stumbling forward. He walked; there were stones beneath his feet, but someone else was walking just a second to the side of him, like standing between two mirrors and watching yourself recede into infinite distance. The building ahead of him was square, with five windows across the upper story, four and a door flanked by white pillars below, comely in an antique fashion like some of the older buildings back home, what an old man had told him once was called the Federal style. A flag hung from a pole over the white-painted door, the old US flag of Stars and Stripes.

The door opened. His hands and feet moved at nor mal speed, but somehow it took an endless effort of will to keep them in motion, a harder struggle than freeing a bogged horse once, when he stood in the muck and strained until the muscles of his stomach started to tear loose. Blurred afterimages floated behind every movement.

A hallway, with strange magnificent pictures-one of a blond woman in a skirt made of strings. And a voice, a voice that spoke within him, a roar of white noise that he struggled to understand. He felt like a tiny spout, with a torrent vaster than a waterfall trying to force its way through. He could not, and he must.

You are not the one. You must find him. Travel from sunrise to the sunset, and seek the Son of the Bear Who Rules. Tell the Sword of the Lady what awaits him.

A door swung open, slowly. The light behind it was terrible, and more than anything in all the world he wanted to turn away, turn aside, but he knew it would shine wherever he turned his head. Blood dribbled from his bitten lips, and the sting was sweetness.

The sword hung there. He craved it, and dropped to his knees, beating his fists on the floor, wailing the anguish of denial.