"At ease, sailor," Alston growled, hiding sympathy. "You can tell them I'm awake. And apparently we survived."

"Yes, ma'am. The foremast going, that was the worst."

Alston sighed again; she always hated it when they got that hero-worshiping look in their eyes, when all she'd done was her job. As he left she swung her feet out of the bunk; someone had put her in a long T-shirt. There was a bandage around her chest, but it didn't feel- quite-bad enough to be cracked ribs.

"Please get my clothes, would you, girls?"

The Tylenol was taking effect, and she was beginning to feel more nearly human, when Swindapa came in with an ensign behind her. She hugged the children and scooted them on their way with the injured crewman.

"Good morning, Commodore," she said, saluting; it was a formal occasion, after all. "Shall I report?"

"Good morning, Lieutenant Commander," Alston replied. "Let's have it. I'm functional. Mo' or less."

"Lieutenant Jenkins is in sick bay-broken arm, dislocated hip," Swindapa said. "We have nine missing and presumed dead, seventeen seriously injured, and contusions and sprains for nearly everyone." She moved her right shoulder. "Dislocated, but it works."

Alston nodded. God damn, she though sadly. It could have been worse, but she always hated losing any of her people. Words ran through her:

We have fed our sea for a thousand years-

Yet she calls to us, unfed.

Seafaring was dangerous, that was all there was to it; doubly so in these small sailing ships, I should visit sick bay as soon as I can. She'd have to visit the families of the dead when she got back-she hated that too, but it was duty. They'd earned it.

"Ship status?" she said.

"We lost the foremast, of course. The main's cracked just below the lower top-we woolded it with capstan bars, but it's not going to take much strain. What's really worrying is the hole forward where the mast kept hitting us before we cut it clear. We just finished fothering it with a sail"-that meant sliding a sail over the hole as a canvas patch-"but a lot of the seams are sprung, and we're still taking on water. And with this cargo…"

Alston winced again, this time for her ship. Two hundred tons of dried barley in the bottom of the hold, with dates, wool, and sesame oil in big jugs on top of that. The rest didn't matter, but the dried grain did; as it soaked up water it would swell, and if they were unlucky the soggy, swelling mass could push planks right off the frames, the way expanding ice did when a barrel froze.

"What time is it?"

"Fourteen hundred hours, Commodore."

"What news of the flotilla?"

"Radio's out-the deckhouse hatch caved in when the second wave came over the quarterdeck. Everything smashed up, and the operator's one of the dead. The rest of the radio shack crew are in sick bay too."

"Damn!" Alston took a deep breath. "Let's go take a look."

The feel of the ship under her feet was more alarming, down by the head and sluggish, with a counter jerk after each roll; that was water or loose cargo surging in the hold. Teams were working the pumps, sending solid jets of water overside.

"What's the depth?" she said, when the junior lieutenant and the chief warrant officers had gathered, together with a CPO or two.

"Four feet in the hold, and we're keeping just ahead of it, ma'am," a warrant officer said-he was ship's carpenter. "But God help us if the grain blocks the pumps; it's chaos and Old Night down there, oil two inches thick on the water and bales and jars floating around."

"Carry on, Chips," Alston said, looking aloft and narrowing her eyes.

The ship looked naked, ugly and lopsided without the foremast, of course. The mess on deck had been policed up, loose line secured and a jury-rigged forestay had been erected from the mainmast to the bowsprit. Her eyes traced the mainmast; a deep crack up at the fifty-foot mark, with a ring of twelve-foot capstan bars lashed around it. Even with the tight woolding of line around it she could see the crack flex. Plus we lost most of the boats, she realized.

"We put the cords on wet when we woolded the mainmast and it's getting a little tighter as they dry," Swindapa said. "But it still looks ugly to me."

"Damn right," Alston said, concealing a rush of pride. Couldn't have done better myself, she thought.

The mizzenmast looked all right, and the mizzen topsail was up as well, but with all the sail aft like that the ship would be a stone bitch to steer. "We have to get some sail for'ard," she said.

A couple of the faces grimaced. "Ma'am, if we put too much stress on that mast, it's going overboard."

"And if we don' make shore, we may founder," Alston said. "If we get another blow before we've had a chance to repair her, we will founder." She paused for a moment, thinking. "We'll try rigging a jury staysail up near the bowsprit."

Nods all around. "Are we going to try and make Mauritius Base?" the junior lieutenant-Sherman was her name-asked. "It's only six or seven hundred miles."

Alston shook her head. "Not with the wind out of the north, and at this time of year chances are it'll stay that way. We'll try for the mainland, and as far north as we can reach," she said. Hopefully not too far south. An iron-bound shore, given to sudden storms and waves even more monstrous than the ones that had hit the flotilla yesterday. Back-or ahead-in the 1940s, one had gone right over a British heavy cruiser, putting the turrets all six feet under before the ship resurfaced. Plenty of other vessels before and after had just vanished there.

"We're all going to be very busy, ladies, gentleman," she continued. "Ms. Alston-Kurlelo, please draw up a new watch schedule, spelling everyone on the pumps-and I do mean everyone without broken bones. Next, we're going to have to get some of that cargo overside." It was that or jettison the guns, and she wasn't going to get rid of the weapons if she could help it. "We'll rig a boom on the mainmast just below the crack; Chips, find out what suitable spars we have for that. Next…"

She finished with: "And I want a careful lookout kept."

That was all she could do for the rest of the flotilla. With an effort of will that got no easier with practice, she forced herself not to think about the other ships. Either the sea had eaten them, or not.

Melanterol son of Suaberon stopped to buy a skewer from a street vendor down New Whale Street; it was chunks of lobster meat with onions, savory and hot, filling his mouth with the water of hunger. The woman took his copper and laid the food in a split roll, deftly stripping out the thin wooden sliver and adding some of the biting hot peppers the Amurrukan imported from the Olmec country. Those were becoming popular in Tartessos as well; they were called chilly, which he thought a stroke of wit.

The spring wind from the north really was chilly-Nantucket was usually cool compared to his native Tartessos, and the winters were enough to rot the testicles off an ape. He was in Amurrukan dress- trousers, boots, jacket, and knitted wool cap-and that kept him warm. Besides that, it meant no one would take him for a foreigner at first glance; there were enough Amurrukan with his sharp olive-skinned looks that a casual glance would slide over him. It was obvious when he opened his mouth, though; his English was good, but not that good. Yet.

"… Still no word from the commodore…" he heard, unobtrusively circling near a party of dignitaries who stood around, waiting for the ceremony to begin.

Ah, he thought. The Islanders' black she-devil war-leader was still lost, then, after that storm on the other side of the world. The king will be interested to hear that. If it came to war, the Republic would be weakened considerably without her and those ships.

He swallowed the last of the roll and clapped with the others as the Islander ruler walked up and cut the ribbon. This too was information; the king wished to know every little detail, for it might bear on the Island's strength. The great building behind him had formerly been the A amp;P, whatever that was, a merchant's dwelling, from the way they spoke of it. Since the Event the Islanders had used it as a whale rendery-he could still smell that-but a new channel had been dredged east up the harbor for the whale-catchers and their prey. The A amp;P and its wooden extension running down to Old South Wharf were now to be a huge covered market for farm produce and fish; many of those watching were excited at the prospect of renting stalls. All of them were relieved at getting the stink and greasy smoke of this trade out of the center of their city. He could understand that, since tanneries and smithies were banished outside the walls of Tartessos by law.