“You were groaning and mumbling.” “Earth is always with us,” he said, and he left her to figure that out for herself. With him he took the thunder mug to the neighborhood deposit hut which was about a hundred paces away. There he greeted a score of men and women, all on the same task. They dumped the contents of the pots into a large bamboo wagon. After breakfast, this would be hauled out of the building by a team of men into the foothills to the base of a mountain. There the excrement would be treated to make potassium for black gunpowder. Frigate worked two days a month there and four days on the sentinel towers. A grailstone was just on the other side of the hill on which their hut stood. Usually, he and Eve took their grails to it. This morning, however, he wanted to talk to the crew of the boat that had arrived during the night. Eve would not object if he went by himself, since she had to finish stringing necklaces of hornfish vertebrae, varicolored helical bones in demand as ornaments. She and Frigate traded them for tobacco and liquor and flints. Frigate also made boomerangs and, occasionally, dugouts and canoes.
Frigate carried his grail with his left hand and his yew-wood flint-tipped spear in the other. A fish-skin belt around his waist held a sheath containing a chert axe. A quiver of arrows, flint tipped and fletched with thin, carved bones, was slung over one shoulder. A bow of yew, wrapped in bamboo paper, was strapped to the quiver to protect it from the early-morning moisture.
The little state of which he was a citizen, Ruritania, was not at war or under threat of war. The law requiring that all have their weapons handy was a hangover from the old days of turbulence. Obsolete laws had almost as hard a time dying here as on Earth.
Social inertia was everywhere, though its resistance to change varied from state to state.
Frigate walked among the huts spread out over the plain. Hundreds, covered like him from foot to head against the chill, joined him. About a half-hour after the sun rose, they began to shed their cloths. While eating breakfast, Frigate looked for new faces. There were fifteen, all from the newly arrived schooner, the Razzle Dazzle. They sat in a group, eating and talking to those interested in the newcomers. Peter sat down by them to watch and listen.
The captain, Martin Fairington, also known as the Frisco Kid, was a muscular man of medium height. His handsome face looked Irish. His hair was reddish-bronze and curly; his eyes, large and deep blue; his chin, strong. He talked energetically, smiling often, cracking jokes. His Esperanto was fluent but not perfect, and it was evident that he preferred English.
The first mate, Tom Rider, also known as Tex, stood about 5.08 centimeters or 2 inches shorter than Frigate’s 1.8 meter or 6 feet.
He was what the pulp magazine writers of Frigate’s youth called “ruggedly handsome.” Not as muscular as the captain, he moved quickly though gracefully with a confidence that Frigate envied. His dark hair was straight and if his tanned skin had been two shades browner, he could have passed for an Onondaga Indian. His Esperanto was perfect, but, like Farrington, he was pleased to find some English-speakers in the crowd. His voice was a pleasant baritone which combined a Southwestern drawl with a Midwestern pronunciation.
Frigate learned much about the crew just by listening to their uninhibited account of themselves. They were the usual motley collection met on the larger boats that wandered up and down The River. The captain’s woman was a nineteenth-century South American Caucasian; the first mate’s, a citizen of the Roman city of Aphrodita of the second century a.d. Frigate remembered that its ruins had been discovered by archaeologists in Turkey sometime around the 1970’s.
Two of the crew were Arabs. One was Nur el-Musafir (The Traveler). The other had been the wife of a captain of a South Arabian ship which had traded with the southwest African empire of Monomotapa in the twelfth century a.d.
The Chinese crewman had ended his Earthly life by drowning when Kubla Khan’s invasion fleet was destroyed by a storm enroute to Japan.