Against the Tide of Years (45 page)

Beautiful in its way, with a plangent sadness. It brought to mind what little he knew of the Nantukhtar homeland—a green land of chill rain, fugitive sun, great forests without end, islands set in icy seas, mystery within mystery.

The commander’s tent was larger than any others, set in some open ground of its own. Lamplight glowed through the canvas, and two sentries stood before the entrance, which was shaded by an extended flap that ran to two poles and made an awning.

“Gettysburg,” he said to their challenge. And “Bayonet Chamberlain.”

The rifles lowered, and the guards looked at each other. A voice came from within.

“That’s all right, Corporal. Dismissed.”

Another exchanged look, a salute, and the slap of hands on metal as the two sentries brought their rifles to
slope arms
—Kashtiliash had learned the Nantukhtar words of command well, at least—and marched smartly off.

Kashtiliash swallowed again; his mouth was dry, and the pulse beat in his neck until he could feel it against the edge of his tunic. He pushed through and let the flap of the tent fall closed behind him.

Kathryn was standing by a table that bore papers and documents in the strange flowing foreign script. From the rest of the lamplit gloom his eyes picked out a pallet on the groundsheet of the tent, hooks on the central pole of the tent for clothing and weapons, a chest with her name and rank stenciled on it in the blockier form of Nantukhtar writing. That was all in an instant, before his eyes fixed on her. She was standing grinning at him, dressed in what the Nantukhtar called a
bath-robe
of white fabric, her short, sun-faded hair still damp from washing. Her hands went to the cloth tie and unfastened it, letting the robe fall to the floor.

Ishtar,
he thought. In Her aspect as the warrior who harried hell to fetch back Tammuz from the realm of the dead. Her skin was pale as new milk where the sun had not touched it, her breasts full and pinknippled, and the hair of her body had been shaved—only a dusting of yellow fuzz across her mound. And in her eyes, something he’d never seen in a woman’s before—a combination of friendship, a lust to match his own, and a total lack of fear.

She set hands on her hips and spoke:

“Well, what are you waiting for, Kash? Let’s see what you’ve got.”

 

Enkhelyawon looked around his office with satisfaction. He had a swivel chair behind a desk, almost like a king’s throne, and glass windows behind him gave light; a trio of coal-oil lamps hung from the ceiling to cast their glow in the dark days of winter. Filing cabinets around the walls held summaries and reports. There were trays and slots for correspondence on the desk and an abacus set up for the new decimal arithmetic, although he seldom needed to touch it himself these days—he could hear the clicking of many more from the central hall where clerks sat in rows.

The Achaean ex-scribe nodded to himself. Here was recorded every estate, its fields and workers, how much it yielded, what its taxes were, who held it, and on what tenure of service. Here were marked and listed the roads and bridges and ports—those built and those building and those planned—the mines and mills and factories, the forests and the flocks and the herds. A
census
told of how many men and women and children dwelt in every province of the Great Realm, of what class they were and what property they held, from the Wolf People lords in their mansions to the rawest barbarian slave.

“Let any lord or commoner try to evade his duty to the
Lawagetas now,
” he said softly, with a deep satisfaction. All his earlier life he had scurried to the commands of
telestai
and
ekwetai;
now they moved to
his,
and his kin’s.

A knock at the door, and his cousin’s niece came in with a stack of files, each bound with a colored ribbon. She bent the knee and put them on the polished olive wood of his desk, standing to await his commands.

Enkhelyawon frowned slightly. He wasn’t altogether sure that a woman working so was seemly . . .
but what the king says is seemly is so,
he reminded himself.

There was another saying abroad in the land, that Walker had a captive Titan in his dungeons, a being with a thousand eyes that could see all things and tell its master their secrets. Enkhelyawon’s thin lips quirked, twitching the pointed salt-and-pepper beard beneath his chin.

I am the Titan,
he thought. It was as well that the ignorant believed so, though. It made his work easier.

The top file was bound with a red ribbon. He opened that first—death sentences, sent to the palace for approval by Walker himself and returned. Those would be for men of some consequence. Twoscore names, and mostly stamped with a
C
for “crucify him.” A few marked
R
for “hold for review.” A lesser number still marked
P
for “pardon.”

“These to the Ministry of Order, Section One,” he said, and she curtsied again and hurried away.

The next was a report on the explosion at the new gunpowder mill in Pylos. He frowned and dipped his goosefeather pen in the inkwell, making a marginal note. The manager had a thousand excuses for failure, but the smell of incompetence wafted up from the page like stale onions from a slave’s dinner pot.

The Achaean drew a fresh sheet of paper.
To the King’s Eye Hippalos,
he began.
You are directed to investigate . . .

There would be another
C
stamped by a name soon enough, he decided as he sealed the document with a blob of wax and a brisk
thump
from his personal sigil. Or if His Majesty was angry enough—and he might be, given the loss of skilled workers and machines—perhaps the manager would be turned over to the witch-girls in the black-leather masks, the Sisters in whose hands were the gifts of life and of death—of healing and of agony beyond all mortal knowledge. Then at least his blood and pain would serve some purpose, appeasing the Dark Goddess and Her servant, the Lady of Pain.

Enkhelyawon shuddered slightly, paused until his hand was steady again, and wrote.

 

“Why do you like the woods so much, Pete?” Sue Chau asked.

“Why?” Peter Girenas said. “Hmmm . . . sort of hard to say, Sue.”

Choonk. Choonk.
The gasping breath of the little steamer echoed back from the forest that walled the river, with a multiply receding slapping sound. It was a cool, bright day, with a fresh breeze out of the north that made his skin tingle, like fingers caressing his face through the short, dense new beard. Waterfowl lifted thunderously as the steamer’s whistle tooted, and an eagle darted down to take one in a thunderclap cloud of feathers.

They were a fair ways up the Hudson, Long Island and its farms and Fogarty’s Cove long behind them. Even the little fueling station on Manahattan was a fading memory. The floodplain of the river here was fairly narrow, swamp reeds were clamorous with ducks and geese. A passenger pigeon flock was flying by, just the tail end of it, like black clouds drifting past against the sun. The trees along the river were a blush of new green, the leaves looking sharp-cut against the twisted black and brown and gray of the bark. They were also huge, bigger than any he’d seen around Providence Base, or even on Long Island, some near two hundred feet. Beyond them hills rose, dark and silent—silent save for the bellow of an elk or the call of a wolf pack. A bear stood with its legs in the water; it raised its head as the sound of the boat grew louder, lips wrinkling around a huge flopping fish in its jaws.

Girenas looked forward. The side-wheeler was pushing its load of two barges, making a single articulated craft with the steamer at the rear. On the one ahead, Eddie was working with their horses, checking feet, joking with Henry Miller as he crafted a new bow. In the front barge the rest of their party were napping, or working on their equipment, or just sitting and watching the trees go by.

“Why do I like the forest?” he said at last. “Because . . . because it’s clean.”

 

 

“W
ell, thank you. You really know how to complicate my work—
both
of you,” Ian Arnstein muttered as Hollard and Hollard finished their reports. “Has your family got a tropism for picking up royalty, or what?”

The Islander officers looked slightly guilty.
And I feel like I’m back in San Diego, raking some hapless student over the coals,
he thought.
Well, not really.

Doreen wrinkled her nose and looked at the odorous leather bag lying out by the entrance of the big tent. It no longer held the head of the Assyrian king;
that
was on a spear in front of King Shuriash’s tent. The Islander mission had settled in, with something large enough to be called a pavilion for the leaders and their office staff; it had started life as a feature of high school sports days, and the locals found the bright-yellow nylon impressive as all get-out.

“That’s not really fair, Ian,” she said. “Ken didn’t
ask
to find this Lost Princess, or Tukulti-Ninurta’s head either. They just sort of . . . turned up.”

“Yeah.” Kenneth Hollard ran his hand over his sandy hair, sun-streaked now after his pursuit up the Euphrates valley. “Look, I don’t think she’s just going to fade away, either, one way or another. Raupasha’s that sort of girl, if you know what I mean.”

Arnstein sighed his exasperation. “She’s another complicating factor, is what she is—particularly now that the news has gotten out that there’s a surviving member of the Mitannian royal family around. And believe me, we did
not
want another complicating factor at this point. It’s put some fire in the belly of the Hurrians and what’s left of their old aristocracy. More fire is not what that area needs. Everyone and his uncle has declared independence.”

“Bad?”

“Bad. And the Aramaeans are burning, looting, running off stock, and generally having a grand old time. If something isn’t done about it, the whole area will be trashed and the nomads will take it over by default, and . . . oh, sit down, for God’s sake. And the Babylonians are stretched thin as it is.”

“The Assyrian field armies aren’t a problem anymore, and we’ve got all the cities,” Kathryn Hollard pointed out.

Doreen gave her a baleful look.
“The flies have conquered the fly-paper,”
she quoted.

Ian amplified: “King Shuriash is enjoying himself, but he’s also worried about getting overextended, and rightly so. He
can’t
keep his levies under arms past fall; they’re needed in the fields, and we can’t do much about that for a couple of years. If his standing army and his nobles’ retainers are tied up holding down Assyria, that leaves nothing for anything else. And the whole
point
of this exercise was to build up Babylon as a base for supporting the Hittites against Walker, you may remember. I said
sit down,
Colonel Hollard.”

Hollard did; he still looked rumpled and stained from his long desert trek. “Yeah, well, talking of complicating factors, at least I’m not sleeping with Raupasha,” he pointed out. “Christ, Kat. First it’s whatshername—”

“Sin-ina-mati.”

“Sin-ina-mati, and then
this.
”

Kathryn’s tanned face flushed. “Look, Colonel Hollard,
sir,
it isn’t an Article Seven, so what the hell business is it of anyone but me and Kash?”

Doreen’s eyebrows went up further. “Kash, Kat?
Kash?
”

“Hell, Doreen, it’d be sort of weird if I was still calling him Lord Prince of the House of Succession, wouldn’t it?”

“Getting involved with a local, and the fucking
crown prince,
for Chrissake—” Hollard began.

Kathryn’s voice rose. “I suppose beautiful-local-princess syndrome is supposed to be limited to men, Colonel, sir?”

Hollard opened his mouth, visibly reconsidered what he had been about to say, and went on, “Look, Kat, I’m not looking for a fight, okay?” After a moment she nodded. “It’s just . . . well, hell, his expectations are going to be
different.
This isn’t the Island, you know. And yeah, there
is
a difference, in a . . . what’s the word . . .”

“Patriarchal,” Doreen supplied.

“. . . patriarchal setup like this.”

“I’ve noticed,” Kathryn Hollard said dryly. “I’ve already turned down an offer to be the leading light of his harem.”

Doreen stifled a chuckle. “How did he take it?”

“Offered to make me queen,” she said. “Lady of the Land, if you want a literal translation.”

Hollard shaped a silent whistle. Ian put an elbow on his desk and dropped his face into his hand. “Oh, and won’t that put the cat among the pigeons—don’t you realize that involves the succession to the throne, here?”

Kathryn snorted. “I turned that down, too, of course,” she said briskly. Her face softened for a moment. “Though I must admit, I hated to do it, he was trying
really
hard . . . I did come back with a counteroffer.”

“What?” Ian asked.

“Well, I said that if he’d make me queen, co-ruler, and general of his armies, and guarantee the succession to any children we had, and have them educated Islander-style, and a bunch of other stuff, I’d seriously consider it.
That
floored him.”

Ian cleared his throat. “So you’re breaking it off?”

Kathryn looked up, her blue eyes narrowing. “No, I am not, Councilor.” She gestured helplessly. “I really
like
the guy, you see. It’s not just that he’s gorgeous and has enough animal magnetism to power a steamboat. He’s also smart, and has a sense of humor, and . . . and it’s mutual. We’ve agreed to see how things turn out.”

Jesus,
Ian whimpered to himself. Heavily: “Major Hollard, you’re a free citizen of Nantucket.”

She winced at that; she was also an officer of the Republic’s armed forces, and a highly placed one at that. Rights came balanced with obligations.