Against the Tide of Years (17 page)

 

 

“S
teady.”

The mass of Siceliot warriors was three hundred yards away, coming at a dead run. Sunlight blinked off their metal, although for most of them that was only a spearhead or a knife. The sound of their feet and screaming war cries drummed in his ears. Four chariots came ahead of the pack, with chieftains dressed in armor much like the Mycenaeans.

“Speaking of which,” Walker murmured to himself. Most of the Achaean host was still down by the ships; he glanced back over his shoulder and made a small
tsk
sound.

Getting their precious gee-gees and dogcarts out,
he thought.

Odikweos was beside him, leaning on an old-fashioned figure-eight cowhide shield nearly as tall as he was, with his Ithakans behind him. The tall horsehair plume of his helmet bobbed over his head; the protection was rows of bone sawn from boar’s tusks, sewn onto a thick boiled-leather backing. He was wearing a chain-mail shirt under that, though, not the cumbersome affair of bronze plates that was the native equivalent. The Greek hawked dust from his throat, squinted, and spat.

“I hope your savior God inspires you,” he said calmly. His arms-men were shifting in place, wiping their palms on their tunics for a better grip on their spearshafts. “There are about four thousand of them . . . and only six hundred here ready to fight.”

“Let me show you,” Walker said.
Bright boy, this one. Steady nerves, too.

He turned to his own men, four hundred of them, spaced in blocks two ranks deep between the six field guns.

“Ready,” he said, his voice clear but carrying.

The front rank knelt. The second leveled their muskets and thumbed back the hammers, a ripple of motion like the spines of a hedgehog bristling.

“Aim. Gunners, ready. Fire on the word of command.”

The gunners skipped aside, holding the lanyards of their weapons. He judged the distance to the charging locals. Two hundred yards, over ground as near flat as no matter—the heights of Epipolai, that later would be the core of Syracuse, were ragged behind them. He drew his sword and raised it.

The steel flashed downward. The noise that followed was stunning, a blow felt through the gut and chest as much as through the ears. The cannon leaped backward, their trails plowing furrows in the dusty earth. The crash of four hundred rifle-muskets was almost as loud. A huge cloud of dirty-white smoke billowed out, smelling of burnt sulfur. It drifted away rapidly, and there was a murmur and shifting among his men as they saw the results. His own eyebrows went up a little. The guns had cut wedges through the native war-host, as neat as if God had stamped them out with cookie cutters. Within the cleared spaces lay body parts and ground that looked as if it had been
splashed
with red goo. Further away, shapes twitched and moaned. A horse screamed high and shrill, dragging itself along by its forelimbs, then collapsed.

The half-inch minié balls of the muskets had done a fair bit of damage as well, leaving bodies scattered back a hundred yards or more.

Walker smiled like a wolf as he lowered his binoculars. “Steady, there,” he called out. “Keep it going.”

The gun teams were jumping in with swabber and rammer. Hot bronze hissed as the wet sponges were run down, twirled, and pulled free. Loaders came forward with cartridges of case shot, and the rammers pushed them down. Gunners stepped close and ran long steel pins down the touchholes to pierce the thin linen that held the gunpowder, then filled the pans with priming powder from their horns. Six men ran each gun back to its original position, and the cycle was ready to begin again. The musketeers were going through their own drill—bite open a cartridge, prime the pan of their flintlocks, put the butt between their feet, pour the rest of the powder down the barrel, follow it with the hollow-based minié bullet, ram the paper on top as wad, a thump-thump-thump sound. One man fired as soon as his weapon was ready, and an underofficer stepped up behind him and knocked him down with a blow of a baton to the back of his neck.

The rest came to the “ready” with no more than a tense grin or wiping of hands on tunics. The enemy were dribbling to a halt, stunned and bewildered.
They’ll need a minute or so to get the idea,
he told himself. And it probably wouldn’t be this easy again.

“Ready,” he said. “Take aim.
Fire.
”

Point-blank range, less than a hundred yards. Thousands of lead projectiles slammed into the Sicilians, all of them traveling at more than a thousand feet per second. Dust spurted up, and smoke drifted away. When it did, the enemy were running for the hills, or hobbling or crawling; hundreds of them lay in the dirt, and the noise of their terror was like a huge sounder of pigs squealing.

Walker laughed. “Reload, fix bayonets, prepare to advance. one round of canister in the guns and limber up to follow.”

About a mile thataway was the headquarters of the paramount chief of this district, the closest thing Bronze Age Sicily had to a king—he traded with the Greeks regularly, or had, before Walker talked Agamemnon into this expedition. Why make withdrawals when you could steal the bank? Besides, if his enterprises were to expand the way they should he would need a source of raw materials, labor, and food outside the Achaean system—there was a limit to what he could commandeer before the nobles revolted.

Goddam low-surplus economy,
he thought.
I need to build up on the QT, until I’m too strong even if they do realize I’m undermining the system.
Luckily, the Bronze Age Greeks were—no, not stupider than their classical descendants, just not given to rational, systematic thought.

“We’ll be first with the plunder,” Odikweos said.

Walker nodded.
I like these guys,
he thought, not for the first time.
Straightforward.

“And maybe a few girls worth fucking,” he said; that was often fun in an athletic sort of way if they fought. “But the island itself is the real plunder.”

Odikweos nodded. “If we can hold it,” he said.

The Achaean licked the sweat off his lips, looking sideways at the grinning, laughing riflemen and gunners. A drumbeat and the whole mass moved forward in step, bayonet points in a bristling line. “With these, we may be able to.”

“If the right man is in charge,” Walker said.
And
I
certainly don’t have the time for it.

 

Swindapa daughter of Dhinwarn, of the Star Blood line of Kurlelo, spun on the ball of her foot and paused, then sank slowly back down with both hands raised to the crescent moon in the last gesture of the dance. Her long hair floated down around her shoulders as she did, sliding over bare skin like a kiss.

“ahTOwak hdimm’uHOtna nawakawa!”
she cried.

The others in the circle echoed her:
Silver starlight make a path for the children of Moon Woman.

That was the end of the most sacred part of the ceremony. The circle stood silent for a moment, then gave a soft sigh together and became individuals once more. She stood watching the glimmering trail that stretched out over Nantucket Harbor as a singing peace replaced exultation.

Coming to herself, she looked up at the sleek curve of the hull that stood on the slipway above them, smelling of cut wood and fresh paint. The English word for such a ship was “clipper.” It was not a bad name—there was something of urgent speed in the sound of it—but not a great one, either; it lacked the swan-grace, the eager dancer’s leap, needed. The mind-mother of this ship had been called
Cutty Sark,
and that had a better ring . . .

Marian came forward from the shadows of the slipway. She wasn’t a Star-Moon Dancer, of course—you had to be born as well as trained for that—but she’d been initiated into the Spear Mark, and that made her one of Moon Woman’s children, so she could be part of the end of the ceremony.

“We must sing her a soul down from the stars,” Swindapa said.

Marian closed her eyes for a second—she always felt awkward about speaking in public, even more about singing; it was odd, but an endearing shyness. Then she began:

“What is it, Doc?” Cofflin asked, looking up from his desk.

Dr. Henry Coleman looked grave; but then, the head of the Island’s medical efforts usually did, even on a fine fall day like this. The round-faced man beside him was grave too, although he looked like the type who usually wore a smile.

“Justin Clemens, isn’t it?” Cofflin said.
Twenty-five,
the filing system in his mind said.
In the medical apprentice program since the Event. Passed for doctor two years ago. Odd, I haven’t seen him around much.

“Yes, Chief.”

“Been over on the mainland—medical extension officer,” Coleman said.

Clemens made a slight face; Cofflin sympathized. There had been bad problems with uptime diseases in Alba, but nothing compared to what happened among the Archaic-phase Indians. Even
Alban
diseases were a major problem to the Amerindians. The Islanders had been trying to help, but it was debatable whether it did anything more than soothe the Town Meeting’s conscience.

“We’ve got a problem,” Coleman said. “Nothing on the mainland. A problem for
us
.”

“Problems, worry, and grief are my specialty here,” Cofflin said, rising and pouring three cups of cocoa from the pot over the spirit-lamp by the window, then handing them around.

“Now, what’s the problem?”

He sat back, stirring his cup. The kids were all in school, Martha had spent the morning teaching and was back getting some Council resolutions drawn up as legislation for the Meeting to vote on, and he’d finally gotten down to the only
mildly
urgent stuff. The dock-workers union meetings specifically—he was giving them some sub-rosa encouragement, and the shipowners and merchants were complaining.

“Well, let them,” he muttered.

“We have cowpox,” Coleman said.

Jared sat up straighter, putting aside his cup. “What’s cowpox?” he said, cudgeling his memory.
Doesn’t sound good, whatever it is.

“Justin here spotted it, had some Alban immigrants working on a dairy farm in for their chicken-pox shots.” They’d worked out a live-virus inoculation that was usually effective.

Clemens kneaded his fingers together. “Ah . . . it’s a viral disease in cows, sometimes jumping to humans in close contact. Fever, rash of red spots sometimes leaving very faint pockmarks.”

“Sound like anything familiar?” Coleman added grimly.

Cofflin frowned. “Sounds like . . . Christ, no!”

Coleman nodded. “Smallpox is a very close relative. Best guess, back in the twentieth, was that it was a mutation of cowpox, probably started among pastoralists somewhere. Nobody knows where, exactly. When it hit the Mediterranean basin—thousands of years before the twentieth-well, call it the Red Death. Every bit as bad as bubonic plague.”

Cofflin ran a hand over his forehead. Chicken pox had been ghastly among the local Indians, and it had killed more than a few Albans here on Nantucket before they’d gotten it under control. The fact that it took weeks to cross the Atlantic was a help too, since the voyage time exceeded the latency period and not many on the Island had turned out to have shingles, the chronic form. Those who did weren’t allowed off, either. The thought of a
smallpox
epidemic . . .

“What can we do?” he asked.

“Luckily, there’s no evidence at all that smallpox exists here,” Coleman said. “What we’ve got is the
possibility
of it lurking in some backwater. That’s the good news.”

“The bad news is that we’re poking into a lot of backwaters,” Cofflin said. “Ayup. can’t stop, either.”

Clemens leaned forward eagerly, balancing his cup and saucer on his knee and gesturing with his free hand.

“We can do something,” the young man said. “Vaccination originally meant simply infecting everyone with cowpox as children, and repeating the process periodically. I recommend we put it to the Meeting and have a universal program—everyone on the Island, everyone who
touches
on the Island, and everyone we can get to do it over on Alba, too.”

Cofflin glanced over to Coleman for confirmation, then nodded decisively, and pulled a pad of paper toward himself. “Right. Let’s get going on this . . . just a second.”

He ducked into the next room, where Martha was dictating a letter to her secretary. “Sorry to interrupt, Martha, but could you handle Gerrard next? Doc Coleman and I’ve got a bit of a crisis.”

“Certainly, dear, but you should see Hillwater after that.”

He nodded. Paul Hillwater wanted this new Conservancy Office set up, to regulate things like whaling and forestry. Good long-term idea, and in the shorter term he needed Hillwater’s friends Dane Sweet and the other old-line environmentalists.

I’ll put Sweet in charge,
he thought. Two good reasons for that; one, he’d do a good job of it, being a conservationist but not crazy, and two, then
Sweet
would be the lightning rod for complaints. Let
him
take the heat from both directions.

Martha smiled at him, the familiar dry, quiet curve of the lips.
Knows exactly what’s going through my mind,
he thought. It was a profoundly comforting thing. Doreen and Ian were like that, too. Marian and Swindapa weren’t, and he wondered how they stood it.

People are different,
he decided. Just because it was banal didn’t make it any less true.