On the Oceans of Eternity (13 page)

“You are well, and your women and children, your flocks and fields, all those beneath your rooftree?”

They exchanged the necessary courtesies, while outside bonfires and torches and kerosene streetlamps made the streets nearly as bright as day for the festival that would continue for three days and nights. Here in the upper chamber the lamps were also bright, bringing out the murals of dolphins and squid and bright birds that rioted in crimson and umber and blue against the green background. That was a subtle compliment to the Achaean underking, for artists from Mycenae had made them, sent with many other craftsmen as part of the alliance between Walker and his blood brother. The ebony table with its inlay of ivory and faience had been made in Pi-Ramses beside the Nile; it showed that Tartessians had long fared widely. Besides native dishes of tunny baked with goat-cheese and squid fried in garlic-laden olive oil, the golden dishes bore chickens on spits, roast potatoes, salads that included such exotics as tomatoes and avocados; there was chocolate cake for dessert. The foreign delicacies from west over the River Ocean were a reminder that like Great Achaea, Tartessos also commanded the New Learning. The air smelled of the good food, of fresh bread, wine, perfumed resin that sent tendrils up from worked-bronze stands, and of the jasmine that grew in stone troughs by the windows. Cool evening air bore a reminder that summer was past and awoke appetite.

The Greek poured wine—they dined without servants within earshot, for their talk was of statecraft—and added water to his cup. Isketerol winced slightly; that was no way to treat a fine mountain vintage.

“That was a fine sacrifice you made,” Odikweos said, smiling and showing strong white teeth.

He was no taller than the Iberian King and of much the same years, his hair black with reddish glints and his eyes hazel, but more broad-built, his arms and legs thick with knotted muscle, battle scars running white under heavy body hair.

“The King is the land,” he went on. “We have a similar rite to
Gamater
on Ithaka.”

Isketerol nodded noncommittally; he knew Achaeans tended to assume that any foreign deity they met must be much the same as the one of theirs He or She resembled. Himself, he felt that was ... what was the Achaean word? Hubris?

“The Gods send luck,” he said. “It’s up to us to seize it.” They both poured a small libation into bowls left on the floor for that purpose and the King continued: “In the time of my grandfather’s grandfather, legend has it that if the King could not raise a stand to plow the Lady’s Lady, she sacrificed him there and then to bring the rain—spilling his blood rather than his man-seed in offering,” he said. “That was a favorite jest of the Jester.”

Isketerol nodded to a grinning clay statue of the Jester at the foot of the table and tossed a pinch of sweet-smelling resin onto the coals that smoldered in a bowl before it, giving the Lady’s favorite son His due. The smoke rose in a blue coil, hiding the disquieting smile. As the saying went, the Jester slew men as boys threw stones at frogs, for sport ... but frogs and men both died in earnest.

Odikweos shuddered. “The thought alone would be enough to make a prick of bronze go limp!”

Isketerol chuckled. “And in ages before that, the King was
always
sacrificed for the autumn rains; some of the inland villages still give the fields a man every year.”

“I’ve seen much like
that
in Sicily, after we brought it under Great Achaea and I was made viceroy,” Odikweos said.

Isketerol nodded; he’d watched that conquest carefully seven years ago, since Sicily was half the distance across the Middle Sea from the Achaean lands to Tartessos. He’d been greatly shocked at how little time it took the Achaeans under Walker to overrun the huge island, and a little shocked at the methods William used to pacify it; the Eagle People, the
Amurrukan
of Nantucket, had struck him as a soft lot, in the months he’d lived among them. But William was a hard man, and no mistake ...

He plunged his fork into the tunny, savoring a mouthful. “Years ago, when William and I made war in the White Isle, I remember pledging gold to the gods for a taste of tunny with cheese, or olives, or a salad ... or
anything
besides boiled meat and black bread,” he said.

His face grew grave. “Now we make war again, and against the same foe—Nantucket.”

“May the gods grant a better outcome this time, for Tartessos and Great Achaea,” the Greek said, and poured another libation. “Nantucket stands between both of our realms and the desires of our hearts.”

Isketerol joined him in the gesture of sacrifice—it could not hurt—and waited in silence. Back then he’d been a mere merchant and of a house richer in honor than goods or power, adventuring in the northlands in hope of profit. It was there he’d met William ...

“My High King has heard of the repulse of your attack on Nantucket,” Odikweos said gravely. “He grieves with his blood brother.”

Isketerol nodded.
And I can believe as much of that as I wish,
he thought. He and the High Wannax had been allies, blood brothers, and friends of a sort for a good ten years now, since they met on Alba. That didn’t mean either trusted the other overmuch. After all, Walker had begun his climb to power by betraying his superiors and his oaths to them....

“How will the High Wannax show his grief?” Isketerol asked pointedly. “I could use more boring machines, and help with the converter to make steel. If the Islanders attack, I will need better artillery.”

He glowered a little at that; it had been his spies in Nantucket who told him of the
manganese
that was necessary if the steel was to be good and not a spongy mass of air-holes, not his blood brother in Mycenae.

Back on Nantucket William had bought his help with promise of the great ship
Yare
and half its cargo of treasures—books and tools and machinery that the Islanders had put aboard to establish a base of their own in Alba. He’d helped William to pirate it; stood at his side while he conquered a kingdom in Alba with it; stayed at his side when the Nantucketers broke him, and carried his fugitive band to Greece. At first it seemed that Isketerol had had the better of the deal. Walker had helped put him on the throne of Tartessos with his gunpowder bombs and those first few cannon they’d cast in Alba, and the deadly
Garand rifle.
He’d made no dispute over division of the cargo. There Isketerol was, King of his native city; and William only a foreign mercenary at Agamemnon’s court, leader of nothing but his little band of Islander renegades and Alban warriors. It was only in the years that followed that he realized how much knowledge was not in the books he’d learned to read, but in the heads of that score of men ... not only skills, but a universe of wisdom that enabled them to
understand
things in the books which Isketerol must puzzle out by himself.

He clenched a fist.
It was the Jester’s gift that I met Rosita on Nantucket.
He’d brought her along only because he’d sworn to, and then she’d turned out to be invaluable. Her, and a scant handful of other
Amurrukan
he’d lured here over the years with bribes of silver and land and high rank. Bitter it was, to realize that a common laborer of the Eagle People commanded knowledge so priceless that he must make them nobles here ...

Odikweos inclined his head, and Isketerol made a similar gesture in acknowledgment. William had selected his envoy well; this one’s face showed nothing but what he intended. He changed the subject smoothly, giving news of the Nantucketers who were active in Babylon and among the Hittites, and Great Achaea’s war with Troy.

“I think that the High King’s gifts will make his brother glad,” he said at last, when the servitors had cleared the table and withdrawn.

“Then let us go and see them,” Isketerol said.

“Now?”

“What better time?”

There are few enough seasons when the King could walk through the streets of Tartessos City without ceremony and too many prying eyes—and although the Republic’s embassy had left when war was declared, there would be eyes of theirs remaining. Probably with
radios
to report; the tiny but immensely powerful type they called
solid-state.

Cloaks with hoods provided concealment, and more went masked than not on this day of festival; they took only a brace of guards each. Carnival rioted through the streets about them, masks and costumes from old story or modern fancy. Here two danced in the skin of a giant bear, or a gold-tusked boar-mask topped a naked body that capered and squealed, or deerantlered men sported with women decked out in sheaves of wheat and little else; there a mock-Pharaoh paced, his kilt of Egyptian linen showing the waggling of a giant leather phallus, beside a would-be northern barbarian in shaggy furs, tow-flax wig and bronze ax; poetry and bawdy song echoed from walls; tables were set out with jugs of wine and rich food from the King’s storehouses and those of wealthy nobles and merchants who wished to win the Lady’s favor; everywhere men and women coupled, serving the Lady through Her act of generation. On these three days all the usual barriers were lowered.

“Plenty of children, next spring,” Odikweos chuckled. “I don’t doubt my men on shore leave are having a good time.”

Isketerol nodded. “We seed our women, as the Sun Lord seeds the moist earth of the Lady. Such births are called god-children, and a foreigner brings double luck.”

The guards at the entrance to the military docks were on duty and alert, though; they brought their rifles up, then stiffened as they recognized Isketerol when he flipped back the cowl of his cloak.

“Silence,” he said as they bowed. “You have not seen me.”

“Seen who, lord?” the young officer said brashly, grinning—this
was
the Lady’s Festival, after all.

Isketerol smiled and nodded, noting the youth’s face; you could always use a man who thought quickly on his feet. The little party passed through the thick seawall made of warehouses joined end to end, out onto the broad paved quayside and the long wharves with their cast-iron bollards. A leafless forest of mast and spar and rigging lifted against the bright stars and crescent moon, and that light and the lanterns atop the wall reflected from the rippling waters. A creak and groan of timber sounded through the night, wind in the tracework of rigging, call of a watchman, the sound of waves slapping like wet hands at the planking of hulls. There was a thick smell of the sea, of brackish water and tar, bilges and cargoes. Most of the ships here were large three-masters from the royal yards, well gunned, the ships that had scoured the western end of the Middle Sea clean of pirates and rivals and gone venturing to the ends of the earth.

Where the cursed Amurrukan don’t forbid,
he thought with a scowl.

Who were the Nantucketers to declare whole continents taboo to all but themselves? Before the war began their traders and sailors walked through the streets of Tartessos in lordly wise, looked down on his people’s ways and customs, refused to trade machinery and skills he needed to build the Kingdom. As if they strove to make that lying history they’d shown him true, a future in which Tartessos was forgotten, less than legend, a few broken pots and shards. It was intolerable! He’d struck them a hard blow this spring, come close to taking the Island itself, but they’d beaten his force off with heavy losses. Now his spies said they were planning a counterstrike of their own.

Let them come, and we’ll give them a warm welcome—warm as the Crone’s boiling cauldron,
he thought grimly. They were strong in knowledge, but few in numbers. What was that saying Will liked?
Ah, yes: “quantity has a quality all its own.
” Tartessos held most of Iberia now, and the lands south across the Pillars.

Achaean guards waited at the gangplanks of the three big eastern vessels that had brought Odikweos; they cried him hail, raising their rifles. Isketerol looked keenly at those; they were the new type he’d heard of, that took cartridges of brass instead of paper and needed no flintlock or priming pan. The Greek underking saw the direction of his eyes and smiled as they took the ladder into the ship’s hold.

It was a big vessel with three masts; they passed down through the gun deck into the hold. That stretched dim and shadowy as the guard lifted his lantern behind them, showing boxes and bales piled high: the air was still, with odd metallic scents under the stale odor of the bilge.

“Here,” the Achaean said, and pulled back a tarpaulin.

Despite himself, Isketerol gave an exclamation of delight. The cannon squatting in a timber cradle was of the type called
Dahlgren.
They could take a heavier charge of powder, and hurl a larger ball further and harder than simple tapered metal tubes such as his makers had learned to fashion ... as his fleet had found to its cost, in the abortive invasion of the Republic. And these were poured steel, lighter and stronger than the cast iron his makers had been forced to use until recently.

“Eighty eight-inch steel Dahlgrens,” Odikweos said. “Twenty nine-inch, ten eleven-inch. Ammunition. And sample patterns and molds for all, and for the boring and turning engines, and a dozen technicians trained in the art.”

He handed a printed book to the Iberian monarch. It was in Achaean—mostly in Achaean, with many words from the
Amurrukan
tongue of Nantucket, English. Isketerol spoke Greek well, and had learned how it was written in the new Islander alphabet. He flipped quickly through the volume. It held exact instructions for steel converter work, and for pouring and working heavy castings. Mingled gratitude and bitterness spread through him. If he had had this years ago ...

Odikweos might have read his thought. “Lord Cuddy, the High King’s Master of Engineers, says that much of this is the result of his own seeking,” he said. “To make the ... what’s the word ...
Bessemer converter
work properly required much
experiment.”
That last word was perforce English as well. “And our third ship carries a hundred tons of the
manganese
you will need, from the mines in Messine. Also a hundred tons of sulfur from Sicily for your gunpowder mills. More of that will follow, as much as you can use.”