On the Oceans of Eternity (10 page)

“Quiet,
ye git!” he snarled—hitting anything from atop a horse was difficult; a bucking horse made it impossible ... but it wasn’t at all impossible for someone on the ground to spear him out of that saddle. Some remote corner of his mind was surprised at his tone, that of a man mildly annoyed in the middle of a difficult task.

Fancy quieted somewhat, less at his voice than at the familiar feel of thighs and the hand on the reins, and spun nimbly about. A barbarian was getting up, a scrape raw and bleeding across one cheek, blood dripping from his nose and his long droopy mustaches and his stubbly-shaven chin. The spear he drew back to throw didn’t look to be made for javelin work; it was six feet long and had a broad flame-shaped bronze head. It didn’t have to be a purpose-made throwing spear, with the thick-muscled arm of the northern savage behind it and only ten feet between them. O’Rourke fired the last three rounds in the revolver as fast as he could squeeze the trigger and bring the muzzle back down. The hammer clicked at last on an empty chamber, but the Ringapi did not throw. Instead he sank down to his knees, looking puzzled, blood welling from nose and mouth. Then he pitched forward on his face, spear dropping in the dust.

O’Rourke was already wheeling his horse, slapping the pistol back into its holster and his heels into Fancy’s flanks.
No time to reload,
he thought, as the stallion sprang forward again, glad to be allowed to gallop at last. He was familiar with the rubber duration of combat—it felt like twenty minutes or so since the Ringapi sprang their ambush, but it was probably less than five by the clock.
And if they’d waited just a bit and hit us all together I’d have been dead the first minute,
he thought, leaning forward into the speed of the horse’s rush.

He’d moved fast enough to distract the barbarians. The Gatling crew were safely past them, bouncing back up the dusty, rutted track toward the Nantucketer outpost. Most of the enemy were behind him, too, but there was one standing in the roadway between him and safety—or at least between him and such safety as the improvised base-cum-field-hospital promised. A quick glance right and left showed that all that solitary Ringapi had to do was delay him a few moments and he’d be swarmed under.

The man ahead looked a little out of the ordinary run of savage. He wore a bowl-shaped rimmed helmet of polished bronze with a tall scarlet-dyed horsehair plume and hinged cheek-guards; there were crossed gilt thunderbolts on the face of his black round-cornered rectangular shield, and gold rings around his arms and his neck. The chain-mail shirt above his flapping checked trousers was from a workshop in
Meizon Akhaia,
and so was the bright silver-glittering steel of the long spearhead. He held the shield up and slammed the butt of his spear into the ground, bracing his right foot against it for further strength and slanting the point forward—probably his folk’s way for a man on foot to face a chariot.

“Damn,” O’Rourke muttered.
This lad’s been to school, he
has. A slinger and archer were running flat out to join him, too, and they’d be there far too soon.

The Nantucketer reached back over his left shoulder and drew the
katana
as the rocking speed of the gallop increased. The sharkskin wrapping of the hilt was rough against his hand as he raised the sword; he’d likely get one and only one chance at this, and the enemy was also likely to be far more experienced with cold steel—well, with edged metal—than he was. Suddenly he didn’t much care.

“Lamh Laidir Abu!”
he shrieked, and braced his feet in the stirrups, rising slightly.

He could see the Ringapi chief’s bared teeth now, and the spearpoint pivoted to follow him—it would be in his side, or Fancy’s, if he turned wide; or if he turned further than that, it would put him in range of the men running through the fields on either side, clambering over fieldstone walls—it wasn’t the ones yelling he was worried about, it was the grimly intent, running as hard as they could. A few premature slingstones and arrows came his way, and the odd bullet.

Everything fell away, except the spearpoint and the fearless blue eyes behind the helmet brim.
Now, he’s used to chariots, which can’t shift all that fast, so—

A press of his right leg, and Fancy crawfished at the last instant. The steel head of the spear flashed by, close enough to strike the stirrup-iron that held O’Rourke’s right boot with a tooth-grating
skrrriinng.
The
katana
came down, and he felt the edge jar into meat. He ripped it upward with a banshee shriek, upward like a polo mallet and into the jaw of the slinger taking aim five yards behind the fallen chief. The man beyond him was drawing a long yew bow, but wasn’t quite fast enough. He threw himself down with a yell, and Fancy gathered himself and took to the air in a soaring leap that would have cleared a six-bar fence.

O’Rourke whooped as he came up the slight slope to the base, drops of blood flinging back from the sword as he pulled the horse back to a canter and then to a walk. The Marines stationed on the wall cheered and waved their rifles in the air, the ones who weren’t taking long-range shots at any Ringapi unwise enough to show himself. He was still grinning as Captain Barnes came up and snapped a salute.

“Sir, that was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen!”

“Ah, wasn’t it, though?” O’Rourke said with a laugh, returning the gesture.

“And it was about the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, too—sir.”

“No, no, just Irish,” he chuckled, then nodded to the man beside her as he cleaned and sheathed the sword.

Hantilis son of Tiwataparas was a Hittite; his title translated roughly as
Overseer of One Thousand,
or Colonel, in English; a short heavy-boned muscular man, big-nosed and hairy and stocky and swarthy, with dark eyes under heavy eyebrows. The short sword at his side was steel, a diplomatic gift, as was the razor that kept the blue-black stubble on his chin closer than bronze had ever done; most Hittites of the upper classes were clean-shaven, in vivid contrast to Babylonia. He wore a bronze helmet with a crest that trailed down his back like a pigtail, a belted tunic, and a kilt, with calf-boots that had upturned toes, standard military dress for his people.

“Bravely done,” he said, in slow accented English; King Tudhaliyas had set a number of his officer-nobility to learning the Nantucketer language, as well as a corps of scribes. “Like ... how say, old stories.”

He mimed plucking a stringed instrument, the sort of thing a bard would accompany an epic with. O’Rourke nodded a little smugly; it
had
been a little like something out of the
Cattle Raid of Cooley.
He smiled to himself: as far as Nantucket’s little band of scholars could tell, the Ringapi were some sort of proto-Celt themselves, or else close cousins to the earliest Celts, if distinctions like that had any meaning this far back. They came from what would have become Hungary and Austria in the original history, lured by Walker’s promises of southland loot and help against predatory neighbors; warriors and women and children and household goods in wagons and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all.
Volkerwanderung
like that were common enough, and getting more so; this was an age of chaos and wars and wanderings, even before the Event.

“What is ... Irish?” the Hittite went on

“Ah ...”
Christ, how to answer that in words of one syllable.
“A different ... tribe,” he said. “Not important.”

The Hittite scowled and glanced eastward, where the mercenaries he’d been commanding had gone.

“Kaska dogs—they run like coward sheep,” he said.

He dropped into Akkadian to do it, which he spoke far better than he did English; O’Rourke had a fair grasp on that ancient Semitic language as well, from the year he’d spent in Babylonia. It was the universal second language of the educated here and of diplomacy as well, like Latin in medieval Europe, and so doubly useful.

“I bow in apology,” the Hittite went on, and did so.

O’Rourke shrugged; they’d have fought well enough, against the weapons they understood.

He looked around the enclosure. Walls were being built up to six feet with sacks and baskets of barley, with a fighting platform on the inside for the troops to stand on.

“How many effectives?” he asked.

“Sir,” Brand said. “Lieutenant Hussey and eighty-seven enlisted personnel in my engineering company: another ten from the clinic personnel. About thirty-five sick and wounded from various units that’ve been operating around here; mostly they’re down with the squirts of one sort or another. Plus the sixteen rifles you brought.”

He nodded; dysentery happened, no matter how careful you were about clean water and food. Then he dictated a message for reinforcements—and as a wish rather than a hope, a request for air support—to Hattusas HQ. The ultralights were over-stretched as it was.

“Sir, should you be staying here?” Barnes asked. “We may be cut off.”

“It’s where the action is,” O’Rourke said absently, looking around again. “Hmmm ... Captain, how are we fixed for these barley sacks?”

“Tons of it, sir. This
was
a forward supply collection center. The storehouse is full of boxed dog biscuit, too.”

He looked around, scowling.
The hospital’s got to be inside the perimeter. That leaves us with this goddamned east-west rectangle of wall to hold—inefficient.
The walls were very long relative to the area within.

“Then run another breastwork,
here”—
he drew a line in the dirt with the tip of his boot, extending it across the last, eastward third of the rectangle, the one that included the storehouse. “We’ll need a fallback position. And a last-stand redoubt in the center of the space it encloses, using all the barley sacks you have left over—nine feet high, with a firing step.”

“And the Gatling, sir? There?”

“No, plunging fire isn’t effective against a massed attack,” O’Rourke said, shaking his head. “We’ll use it to cover the largest field in front of the gate here and shift the rifles to ...”

After he’d finished, he noted Hantilis staring at what the Marines had accomplished, working on the field entrenchments. It
was
fairly impressive; they’d turned an enclosure that might have done a good job of keeping goats out into something resembling a miniature fort.

“How they work!” the Hittite said, in a mixture of English and Babylonian, amazement clear in his tone. “I have never seen even slaves beneath the overseer’s lash toil so!”

“And you won‘t,” O’Rourke said dryly. “A slave—his tools are his enemies and he delights in idleness; to destroy your goods is his pleasure. On the Island, a free man’s pride is in the work of his hands, and all honest work is counted honorable—to employ such a one is to profit, even if the wage be high. A slave just eats your food and dies.”

Hantilis frowned, something his heavy-boned face made easy; the Islander could see him turning the thought over in his head. Then he shook it aside for now.

“Can we stop the enemy here?” he asked. “My King prepares for war, but he must have time.”

“We’re
buying
time,” O’Rourke said. “That’s what expendable means, boyo.”

 

“Sam, we needed that ship,” Jared Cofflin said. “Sorry, but there is a war on.”

Emma Carson stayed quiet.
Quiet as a snake,
Jared thought.
Heard a snake bit her once. The snake died.
A little off-balance here in the Chiefs House, though; she wasn’t a frequent guest.

Sam Macy nodded unwillingly. “Wish you could have taken something besides the
Merrimac,
Jared,” he said. “Or given me some warning. The Republic’s paying fair compensation, but I had a buyer lined up”—who was confidential information, of course—“and it isn’t going to do my reputation any good having to back out. Reputation’s my stock-in-trade, as much as plank and beam.”

Macy was a short thick-bodied man of Jared’s age, most of it muscle despite an incipient pot. His gray-shot black hair was still abundant, though, and he’d added a short spade-shaped beard back when shaving got difficult, and kept it after hot water, soap, and straight-edge razors became available again. Before the Event he’d been a house-building contractor; since then he’d become something of a timber baron in the limitless forests over on the mainland, that leading his firm naturally to interests in shipyards and ships, and occasionally to operating ships until the right price was offered.

“It was there, and the less warning, the less likely word is to get to the enemy,” Jared said. “The Arnsteins are pretty sure they’ve still got some eyes here. We can move information more quickly, Tartessos doesn’t have radios, thank God. Yet. But there are ways for them to communicate.”

Macy nodded. “Well, if you let the
Inquirer
&
Mirror
have the story eventually, so everyone knows it was ... what’s the word ...”

“Force majeure,”
Martha supplied helpfully.

“Right.”

“Mmmmn-hmm,” Cofflin said, nodding an affirmative.

“What the hell did you want her for, anyway?” Macy said. “She’s a good ship, weatherly and fast—but I thought there were ample transports? The buyer was looking into opening a regular private trade with Anyang.”

“State secret,” Cofflin said. “We need her; leave it at that.”

It made him a little uneasy to use phrases like that, but it worked. The abortive Tartessian invasion this spring past had frightened and enraged the entire population. It was also a pity he had to put a spoke in the wheel of those plans for trade. Policy was to encourage private enterprise, wherever possible. He’d detested the period of absolute emergency right after the Event when he and the Council had to run everything, handing out rations and assigning work. Each step toward normalacy since had been a relief, and his greatest ambition as head of government had been to become as irrelevant as he could to as many people as possible. He didn’t like the way the war was making them lose ground.