Against the Tide of Years (50 page)

 

“You make the bluff,” Alantethol said, despite the rough hemp of the noose about his neck and the hangman’s knot under his ear. “Your law forbids you to torture prisoners of war. I will tell nothing you.”

The eighty surviving Tartessians—less the wounded too injured to stand—stood sullen under the Islander guns in the waist of the ship. Alantethol and his officers stood on chairs, under the gaff of the
Chamberlain
’s mizzenmast. The lines from the nooses ran up over that, through beckets, and down to be secured to stanchions and belaying pins along the port rail. The ship rocked slightly at her moorings, and Alston could see eyes widening and tongues moistening lips as the men shifted to keep themselves balanced. That wasn’t easy, with their hands tied behind their backs.

Marian Alston smiled—at least that was technically the name for her expression. Swindapa sat in a folding chair behind her, one leg thickly bandaged. The corpsman said it would heal within a month or two, with no loss of function. Two of the Islander crew were dead, and three more unlikely to live. That the Tartessians had suffered more altered Alston’s determination not at all.

“You’re right,” she said, looking up at the sweat-slick face of the Tartessian captain, catching a whiff of the rankness of it mixed with the olive-oil-and-garlic odor of his body.

He was in fear of his life, but the aquiline features were set, the little gold-bound chinbeard jutting with the determination that firmed his mouth.

Alston set her hands on her hips and went on: “The thing is, Tartessos and the Republic are at peace. We have a treaty. You broke it, of your own will. So you’re not prisoners. You’re pirates. And we don’t torture pirates, either. We hang them. ’dapa, repeat that in Tartessian, would you?”

The Fiernan sighed and did; her tone was regretful, but no less determined than her partner’s.

Alantethol lifted his chin toward the east, where the first hint of dawn was paling the stars, lips moving in a silent prayer.

Alston went on: “On the other hand, if any of you were to tell me what arrangements you had with your ships, signals, and so forth, I’d pardon them . . . and give them sanctuary in Nantucket and a thousand dollars in gold. Oh, and I’d spare the others, too; I have the authority to do that. So, who’ll save his life, and his friends, and be a rich man?”

Alantethol’s mouth worked again; she stepped aside smartly to avoid the gobbet of spit. It arched past her to land on the scrubbed boards with a tiny
splat
. Considering what the human body did when it was strangled, the deck might well be a lot messier before long.

The translation took a few moments; Tartessian was a less compact and economical language than English.
Choppier than Fiernan, too,
she thought absently, eyes on the faces of the men standing with the nooses around their necks.

Brave man,
she thought, looking at their commander.
Sadistic bastard
—the San had made clear how the Tartessians had abused their hospitality, and needlessly, too, when you considered their eagerness to please a guest—
but a
brave
sadistic bastard
. She wasn’t all that impressed; physical courage was not a rare commodity, particularly not here in the Bronze Age, and particularly not among those picked for a voyage of exploration by as good a judge of character as Isketerol of Tartessos.

On the other hand, human beings were variable. Brave one day and timid the next; or a lion in the face of storm or battle but unable to contemplate the slow, choking death that awaited them. Some of the other Tartessian officers tried to spit at her as well as she walked down the line; some were standing with their eyes closed. One, younger than the rest, was silently weeping.

And one had a spreading stain on his tunic below the crotch. She caught the sharp ammonia stink of urine as she walked over and put one boot on the stool he was standing on.

“You first,” she said, rocking it slightly. Her Tartessian was good enough for that. “Good-bye, pirate.”

The man’s lips opened just as the third leg of the stool came off the deck. He began screaming words through thick sobs; several of the others were shouting as well—curses and threats, she thought, directed at the man who’d talked.

“Marian!” Swindapa said quickly. “Two red rockets at dawn—they’ll be standing off the coast. That’s the signal for them to come in, that we’ve been captured.”

And raped and murdered, most of us,
Marian thought, her face a basalt mask as she let the leg of the stool thump back to the deck.

“Get them down,” she said to the waiting master-at-arms. “Below, in irons—except for that one.”

Alantethol seemed as much startled as furious as he was bundled past her. Alston sighed as she felt the tension ease out of her neck.

“Why is it,” she said softly, “that cruel bastards like that think they have a monopoly on ruthlessness?”

“I don’t know,” Swindapa said. “I don’t like to kill, myself. There are many things that I don’t like but that are necessary anyway. Moon Woman orders the stars so.” After a moment: “How many would you have hung?”

“All of them,” Marian said, her voice as flat as her eyes. “And then started on the crew.”

 

“Who’s Mr. Me-Heap-Big-Chief-Gottum-Chicken-On-My-Hat?” Alice asked. “Honestly, the people you bring home to dinner sometimes, Will.”

William Walker hid his smile. The northern chieftain
did
look a little absurd, in his high, conical helmet with a wood-and-boiled-leather raven on it; the way the wings flapped when he moved didn’t help, either.

Hong came stepping daintily down the middle of the brick pathway; the horses in the stalls on either side raised their heads and snorted a little, as if they could smell the blood and madness in her eyes. Her riding crop tapped against her high, glossy boots and kidskin jodhpurs as she looked the visiting barbarian up and down.

“Hello, big fellah,” she said in English. “If I pull on those long droopy mustaches, will the wings flap?”

Tautorun was a son of the high chief of a considerable confederation of proto-demi-God-knew-what in the Danube valley, in what would have become Hungary in the original history. They reminded Walker of his first followers, among the Iraiina of Alba. The language was similar too, sort of like the difference between Spanish and Portuguese up in the twentieth. Most people from Russia to Alba spoke similar dialects in this period, from what he’d been able to gather.

“This is High Chief Tautorun son of Arimanu, lord among the Ringapi,” Walker said slowly in Iraiina, trying to make the sounds more like his guest’s language—dropping initial
h
before
e
was one, he’d noticed. “Lord Tautorun, my wife the wisewoman Alice Hong.”

Tautorun bowed, smiling and exchanging a few words with Alice before she sauntered off. If he thought her appearance strange—and he’d certainly never seen an Oriental woman before, much less one in pants—he gave no sign of it. No sign of being afraid of her reputation, either. They switched back to Achaean after that, which the visitor spoke quite fluently, albeit with a strong accent.

Smoother than the Iraiina ever were,
Walker thought.

Rather
advanced
barbarians, in fact; they made his former father-in-law Daurthunnicar’s bunch in the White Isle look like hillbillies from the deep hollows. Tautorun didn’t wear a leather kilt, but instead trousers of well-woven cloth in a check pattern; his coat was wolfskin, but beautifully tanned and sewn, as were his bull-hide shoes. The long leaf-shaped bronze sword at his side was as good as anything Agamemnon’s smiths had turned out, the sheath tooled leather with chased-gold bands, and his jewelry was splendid in a lavish sort of way, arm-rings like coiled snakes and a necklace of gold, amber, and carnelian.

The visiting chief ran a thoughtful hand over his chin; the Ringapi even shaved there, although they were fond of long, sweeping mustaches. Tautorun’s hung halfway to his collar, tawny like the hair that spilled out from under his ceremonial helmet. It was a considerably closer shave than he’d had before he was introduced to steel razors and lathering soap, of course, about which he’d been wildly enthusiastic—those and a number of other things.

As far as Walker could tell, the Ringapi were interested in more than trade—sniffing for opportunities, and feeling him out for an alliance. There had been naked greed in the barbarian’s gray eyes for most of his tour through Mycenae and Walkeropolis, too.

Not least about the horses. “By the Lady Eponha,” he said, viewing Walker’s quarter horse stallion Bastard over the bar rails of the box. “I don’t know why you’ve been buying horses from us, if you have many like
him
.”

Bastard was getting a little long in the tooth, now—fifteen or so, and Walker had retired him from anything but stud duties years before. He was still a fine figure of a horse, though, a fast, sleek giant by the standards of 1242 B.C., and with luck he’d be siring colts for another decade.

I’m getting fond of horses again,
he thought, taking a deep breath of the smells of a well-kept stable.
It’s a lot more fun with some slaves to shovel the shit, of course.
And maybe the local attitudes were rubbing off on him. Certainly his kids old enough to walk were all horse-mad.

“We
don’t
have all that many more like him,” Walker went on aloud. “Several hundred three-quarter, half, and quarter breeds from him, though. I could give you one of his sons, for your return.”

“That is a chief’s gift indeed!” Tautorun said, hiding his eagerness as best he could. “I shall tell all at home of the riches and generosity of the Achaean lands.”

Walker nodded.
And I’m smelling horseshit from more than the stalls, dude,
he thought.

Tautorun’s people had always traded a little with Mycenae, through a long chain of middlemen; Walker had set up a base at the mouth of the Danube to speed things up, although that still meant paying protection money to the Trojans on the way. The new flood of trade had brought more information as well, both ways. The Ringapi lived on the Middle Danube, their lords charioteers dwelling in fortress-towns and taking tribute from scores of villages. They themselves were horse breeders and herdsmen as much as farmers, their trade stretching from the Adriatic to the Baltic along the ancient amber routes; they had more-tenuous contacts further still, east and west among distant kin from the English Channel to Central Asia.

They were also warriors, who kept an ever-more-greedy eye on the wealth of the Aegean countries, and they were being pressed by their neighbors—the tribes were on the move across much of Europe, to a rumble of chariot wheels and crackle of torched hill forts. According to the references he had (and thank
God
he’d managed to get a copy of the
Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe
among the
Yare
’s cargo, when he hijacked her) a big
volkerwanderung
was due in another couple of generations. A bit like the fall of Rome with Attila the Theodoric and their horsey-set biker gangs of Vandals and Goths and Huns and whatnot.

Kingdoms would fall and cities burn all across these seas and far into Anatolia and the Canaanite country; from hints in the books and what he’d learned of the Ringapi and their neighbors, Walker suspected that that horde of Bronze Age Vikings that Ramses III fought would include a lot of Central and North Europeans as well as Achaeans, Sardinians, and odds-and-sods from everywhere. There was no reason why not; you could walk from Denmark to Greece in a month or two. An army or migrating horde could do it between spring and winter, provided they could threaten or muscle their way through and didn’t mind leaving famine-desert in their wake.

Or all that
would
have happened, without him. He certainly didn’t intend to have barbarian hordes wandering around territory he planned to conquer himself and pass on to his heirs.

But on the other hand, they
could
be useful. Walker sat on a bench that looked out over an exercise yard where handlers were leading two- and three-year-olds around, and Tautorun sat beside him. It was a little chill and damp, but the horses in the building gave warmth, and southern Greece never got really cold by his standards, or by those of the man beside him. A slave came up with wine in gold-rimmed glass goblets, and the northerner drank deep—they were wildly enthusiastic about wine too, an expensive luxury up in the woods. Walker sipped and schooled his face to charm.

“I’m glad you’ve enjoyed my hospitality,” he said mildly. “Keep the glassware, by the way; no, I insist . . . I hope you
do
tell of Mycenae’s wealth and generosity when you return.”

“To make trade grow faster?” Tautorun said shrewdly.

A little way from them, a brace of his retainers squatted on their hams, leaning their arms on their grounded spears. A squad of Walker’s Royal Guards stood at parade rest near them, in their gray uniforms and armor, with their new breechloaders slung at their shoulders—Cuddy finally had acceptable copies of the Nantucketer Westley-Richards coming out of the workshops in some numbers.

“Trade, yes,” Walker said. “We can use more horses.”

Best not to go into too much detail about what they were using them for—mostly to pull reaping machines, although artillery teams were also a major user. Agamemnon’s nobles, whose ancestors had been northern horse-barbarians, hadn’t been happy about it, either. All that breed felt that putting horses to farming work was some sort of obscure social demotion for themselves, too.

Walker went on: “And we need metals, tin particularly. Raw wool, too, and hides, more than we can raise ourselves. If we can pacify the river route well, possibly other goods.”

“And we your tools and weapons of
steel,
” Tautorun said. “Wine and oil, this fire-wine, glass, fine cloth . . . there is no end to what we need.”