Against the Tide of Years (58 page)

“On your feet!” she commanded, when the prince’s chariot was dust down the path toward the walls of Ur Base.

“ Now we start the training,” she began.

A voice from the ranks interrupted her. “ When do we get the weapons of fire? ”

“You. Step forward.” A young man did, an eager grin on his face. “ The weapons are called
rifles,
” Hollard said.

“ When do we receive the
rifles
? ” he asked.

“ First lesson. Sergeant Kinney!”

The noncom trotted forward, a large sack of wet sand in her hands.

“ Front and center . . . what’s your name? ”

“Addad-Dan, O Commander.”

“ The first lesson, Dan, is that you
speak when you’re spoken to
!”

The boy flinched. Sergeant Kinney walked behind him, opened the pack laced to his webbing harness, and dropped the sack inside. Addad-Dan staggered and grunted as the weight slammed onto his shoulders and gut.

“Twenty-five circuits of the parade ground!” Kathryn barked. “At the
run,
recruit! See to it, Sergeant.”

“Ma’am, yes ma’am!”

Kinney was grinning, and she had a rifle sling with a loop wound around her right hand. “All right, hero, let’s go for a stroll.”
Whack
of the flat leather across the legs. “Move it!”

Kathryn Hollard set her hands on her hips and looked out over the shocked faces. “Here, there is no rank,” she said. “None of you has
earned
any rank. Here, you are not the sons of great men; here, all you maggots are equally worthless! Your highest hope is to become a soldier—then, maybe, you may think of becoming officers. There are three things a soldier must do: he must obey, he must value his mission before his comrades, and he must value his comrades before himself.

“ There are three skills a soldier must command: he must be able to march, to shoot, and to dig. We’ll start with marching.” She pointed off across the fields to a low ruin mound, a shapeless hill of weathered mudbrick where a settlement had once been. It was just visible on the edge of sight.

“ You see that? We’re all going there. Form up!”

She sighed at the shambling chaos that resulted.
This is going to take a lot of work.

She suspected that her brother-commander had given her this assignment as something between a joke and a punishment; if she liked the locals, she was going to get a bellyful of them.

 

“ Beautiful work,” Kenneth Hollard said.

He swung the Werder to his shoulder and sighted. A squeeze of the trigger and . . .
crack
. There was a slight
tink
sound as the spent shell hit the packed clay behind him. The target at the other end of the range flipped backward, then up with a white board pointer showing where his round had hit—a couple of inches left of the center of mass, or what would be the center of mass if that was a man and not a human-shaped cutout.

Hollard felt a slight glow of pride; that would have put a man out of the fight for good and all, and at six hundred yards, too.

“ Let me try, Lord Kenn’et! Let me try!”

“Ah . . . well, no reason why not, Princess,” Hollard said. He ran her through the firing drill, which was simple enough.

They really did come up with something that’s
simpler
to use than the previous model,
he thought. From his reading of military history, that was a small miracle in itself. Of course, with Commodore Alston in charge . . .

Raupasha brought the weapon up to her shoulder eagerly, but she took the time to aim, and squeezed carefully. She was wearing Marine khakis without insignia and a floppy-brimmed campaign hat with the right side pinned up; wisps of fine black hair had escaped from the thong that held her long mane in a ponytail. Hollard smiled at that, and at her frown of total concentration.

The target flicked up; the bullet had gone squarely through the head.
Hmmm. Not bad at all, at three hundred yards.

“No, no, no!” he said aloud. “
Don’t
show off. Through the center of the body, always. Heads are too easy to miss.”

She gave him an urchin grin. The noncom who brought her more ammunition was grinning too.

Hollard sighed and turned to the Guard commander who’d brought in the cargo and reinforcements; Victor Ortiz had the shield and four gold stripes on his cuffs and epaulettes that meant captain’s rank in the Guard, equivalent to Hollard’s Marine colonelcy. They moved a few paces away. The firing range was too far from the riverside wall of Ur Base to see the masts of the three-ship flotilla, but he knew the crews and the base’s laborers were hard at work. Another battalion of Marine infantry, heavy weapons to match . . . and a lot of long flat crates with Werder rifles in their coats of grease for his command, surplus Westley-Richards from the Republic’s militia for their allies. More crates as well, Werder ammunition, and machinery for the ammunition shop.

“ Praise the Town Meeting, from whom all blessings flow,” Hollard said, his voice a mock-pious drone for a second.

“Praise the Chief and the commodore, who kicketh the Meeting’s lazy butt and getteth them to move,” Ortiz said, and raised his brows in a question.

“Yes, Ms. Raupasha does speak some English now,” Hollard replied.

“ I see . . . I’ve been briefed, of course.”

“Good. That was a fast passage you made.”

Ortiz preened a little, which was pardonable. “Sixty-three days, two of those stranded on the goddam mudbanks in this miserable river. We did over four hundred miles a day three days in a row, down in the forties, running our easting down.”

“ What news from home? ”

“Not much. The fall harvest was good; the Girenas expedition is still alive, wonder of wonders. King Isketerol made a fulsome apology and paid a heavy fine to get his people back after that incident in South Africa—less thirty who applied for asylum, and got it—but he was a lot less happy when we kept the ships. That’s it so far, but God knows how long it will last. Oh, and on a personal note, I’m the father of twin boys.”

“Congratulations!” Kenneth Hollard said, pumping his hand. There was a trace of wistfulness in his voice; he’d been thinking that it might be nice to have a family of his own.
Not until this war is settled, I guess,
he thought. “How long
do
you think it will last? ”

“God alone knows,
amigo
. Until that
hijo
Isketerol thinks he has a chance of jumping us—I’m anxious to get my ships loaded and back home, I can tell you.”

“Me too,” Hollard said, looking through the letters Ortiz had hand-delivered—some for security’s sake, and two fat ones from his brother.

He looked forward to reading those. It was . . .
tranquil, that’s the word
. . . listening to him tell of the goings-on around the farm. Not that farm life was any bed of roses; he’d helped out on his brother’s grant often enough to know that. His mind’s eye saw him, writing in the big log kitchen with a cup of sassafras tea by his elbow, snow falling outside the window, Tanaswada nursing the baby . . . and homesickness stabbed him with a moment’s bitter pain.

“ Well, I don’t envy you sailing back into winter,” Hollard said. He walked a few steps back toward Raupasha. “ Princess! If you’re going to shoot that many rounds, wear the earplugs.”

She pouted, then obeyed. “Sergeant, see that the weapon is returned to stores when the princess is finished with it.” To Ortiz: “ We’ve actually got the locals producing a halfway decent beer. Care for a glass, Victor? ”

“ Lead on!”

“ Wait a minute!” Raupasha called.

The Islander officers turned back. “ Watch,” she said.

Raupasha had a round of rifle ammunition pushed through the buttonhole of the left breast pocket of her khaki jacket. She fired, then slipped the bullet out of the hole and into the breech of her Werder in a single quick grab and push.

“ That . . . how do you say . . . slices up? The loading time.”

“ That’s
cuts down,
” Hollard said.

“
Cuts down,
okay.” She dropped back into Akkadian. “Wouldn’t that be useful? ”

“Mmmmm—sort of risky, leaving a bullet through a buttonhole like that.”

“ No, no,” she said impatiently, giving him an exasperated look. “ If you put a . . . a
row
of, not holes, but—what are these things in the bandolier called, that hold the bullets? ”

“Loops,” Hollard said automatically. Then his eyes went wide. “ Loops—a strip of leather, say.”

“Yes! Like this.” The girl’s finger traced a line from near her left shoulder nearly to her breastbone.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Hollard said slowly. “Yes, say six—that would speed loading up considerably . . . no trouble to have the strip attached to the troops’ jackets . . .”

Ortiz made an interrogative sound, having no Akkadian. Hollard explained, and the Guard officer’s eyebrows went up in turn.

“ You know, Ken, that’s actually a pretty damn good idea,” he said. “Smart girl.”

They looked up at the Mitannian, who was cleaning the rifle under the noncom’s direction with an air of total concentration spoiled by an occasional glance up under her brows.

“Ms. Raupasha,” Ortiz said, bowing. “ Would you care to join us in that beer? ”

 

 

B
ab-ilim;
Gate of the Gods; Babylon the Great. Kathryn Hollard still felt a prickle of awe as she rode toward the northern gate. Turning in the saddle, she called out: “All right, let’s show them what real soldiers look like!”

After four months, the Babylonians that she and the training cadre had been working with could march, at least. Rifles over their shoulders, arms swinging, booted feet striking the earth of the roadway in unison, the six hundred troops marched like a single organism toward the Ishtar Gate. A banner went at their head, blazoned with the gold sun disk of Shamash and the spade of Marduk. Outriders traveled before them, crying for the crowds to make way—and enforcing the order with their whips when necessary, through the hoard pouring into the city for the springtime New Year festival.

The city she approached was not yet the Babylon of the Bible, the city rebuilt by Nebuchadrezzar and the site of the captivity of the Jews, that would not be—would not have been—for another six centuries. The current Babylon was mostly the city of Hammurabi the Lawgiver, sacked by the Hittites and refurbished by King Shuriash’s ancestors. The Kassite kings dwelt more in their citadel of Dur-Kurigalzu a little to the west, but Babylon remained the greatest of their cities and the symbol of holiness and kingship in the land.

On this March morning it was warm but not hot, and for once the countryside of the Lane between the Rivers looked halfway appealing with its leafy orchards and green-gold barley. Her command had been on a route march and field exercise for the last week; her body itched with dried salt and crusted alkaline dust.

Now and then she saw figures standing on the flat, flower-planted roofs of a nobleman’s mansion looking toward the road and the novel sight of the First Infantry. Travelers crowded to the side of the road to let them pass, staring and gawking, and peasants stopped their work to look. Children ran alongside shouting. Kathryn smiled at them, and now and then threw a few copper pennies when the press grew too great. Even if they’d never heard of coined money, metal was valuable here—her action generally resulted in a squirming heap of naked youngsters, yelling and grabbing for the coins at the bottom of the pile.

A mile out from the real defenses of Bab-ilim was the wall that enclosed the suburbs proper. It was impressive enough, twenty feet high, studded with towers twice that. Within were clustered gardens, groves, here and there the colorful, blocky form of a temple, once an enormous walled enclosure around the Akitu shrine, where much of the New Year ceremony would take place. What she principally noticed were the trades considered too noisome to allow in the city proper: huge tanneries, rows of dye-vats, and the city’s execution ground. It was small compensation that the roadway turned from packed clay to a broad avenue of baked brick.

And there was the growing stink of the city itself, probably the greatest in the world in this age, two hundred thousand souls or more—and all their livestock.

I’ll get used to the stench again,
Kathryn told herself. Of course, in a way that made it
worse
. And it was so
big
. Yes, any of the mainland cities she’d visited up in the twentieth dwarfed it, but those were fading memories. This was here, now,
real
. The continual clamor of wheels, feet, hooves, voices, was like a vibration in her flesh.

Then the city itself appeared, raised above the floodplain over centuries by the decay and rebuilding of the mud-brick buildings of which it was made—the living city raised on the bones of its ancestors, since time out of mind. The city wall proper rose like a mountain range that ran from right to left beyond sight, baked-brick ramparts sixty feet high and thirty feet thick and studded with towers every hundred yards or so. Another wall of equal proportions stood thirty feet within, and the gap between them was filled to the very top with pounded rubble and then paved with a roadway broad enough for three chariots to pass abreast. A moat drawn from the Euphrates ran at the foot of those man-made cliffs, a hundred feet across and twenty deep, the water green and foul.

Kathryn Hollard gave a silent whistle at the sight, impressed despite herself.
Oh, we could knock it down,
she thought. Given enough shells and enough time, of course. Trying to take or hold the city beyond. . .