On the Oceans of Eternity (24 page)

“It is good, and more than good,” he said at last. “You will prepare a list of these projects, from the least difficult to the most, with the costs and difficulties of each. This you will bring before me, and soon. You have the King’s leave to go.”

His next audience would be less pleasant. He looked at his watch, also a gift from his queen’s people. The flying ship would be here late in the day. Perhaps tomorrow morning...

 

“I wish we were on higher ground,” O’Rourke murmured, as the first of the enemy came into sight far down the road.
They’re not wasting time; twenty-four hours after I got here.
“Or that things were more open here.”

“If we were on higher ground, we wouldn’t have water,” Barnes replied.

The alarm had caught her washing off under the pump, and she’d come running with towel in hand; Hantilis kept sliding his eyes toward her and then away until an orderly came up with her uniform. Some corner of O’Rourke’s mind not preoccupied with matters professional smiled amusement. Functional needs and Fiernan influence had more or less killed the nudity taboo in the Republic, most particularly in the military, but it always caused at least some friction when they ran into cultures that did have that sort of prohibition. He suspected that Hantilis’s subconscious hadn’t been registering Barnes and the others as really female in his brief exposure to the Nantucketer military, and was disconcerted when the visual evidence was unmistakable.

“Bugler, sound
stand to.”
Barnes said, buttoning her tunic and swinging on the Sam Browne harness that held pistol, sword, and belt pouches.

The clear sweet notes of the bugle sounded; few of the garrison had far to travel. Most of them had already taken up the rifles that had rested in neat tripods overnight and dashed to their posts on the walls. Others trotted out of the sunken bunker that held the explosives, each pair carrying an ammunition box by the rope handles on each end. They plumped the boxes down at intervals along the fighting platform, then used their bayonets to pry open the lids with a screech of nails.

Each lid had a label burned into its surface:
Werder .40 1000 rounds.
Within the ammuntion lay in ten-round packets. The Marines on the fighting platform around the wall buckled back the covers of the bandoliers that hung from their webbing belts, revealing the neat brass rows of shells in the loops within. Barnes looked over at him, and he nodded with a slight jerk of his chin.

“Company—” she called, in a high carrying voice.

“Platoon—” It echoed through the subordinate commanders. “Squad—”

“Fix—”

“Fix—”

There was a long slithering rasp and rattle and click as the twenty-inch blades came free and locked to the ring-and-bar fasteners under the muzzles of the rifles. One fumbled and dropped the weapon halfway through the procedure, and caught a hissed
“Sharpen up, you sloppy excuse for a Marine!”
from his corporal.

“Load!”

The same relay, and another series of clicks as the grooved breech-blocks were pushed down, a round was shoved into the breech, and the arming-piece in its curved slot at the right side of the weapon was thumbed back to full cock. A murmur, as the noncoms repeated:
“Eyes front. Set your sights at two hundred yards. Wait for the command.”

O’Rourke glanced around.
Ready for the dance,
he thought. Rifles to the walls, the Gatling between the two overturned wagons that made up the gate—that faced roughly southwest, covering the largest area of open ground. Far too many stone walls, olive groves, and shallow ravines round about otherwise, and the steep hills that pinched the valley were far too close, but that was God’s lookout. Speaking of which:

“Praise be the Lord God who trains my fingers to the bow and makes my hand strong to war—
”

Chaplain Smith was at it again, not a bad text. Even if the man was an Iraiina convert and therefore a bit of a fanatic, with a taste for the bloodier Psalms.

The enemy were coming up the road and through the fields to either side; far too many of them for comfort. O’Rourke licked sweat off his lips and took a thoughtful swig from his canteen before picking up the binoculars he’d laid on a barley sack.

They obviously weren’t Walker’s regulars; just irregular clots of footmen following chiefs in chariots. A few mounted scouts came galloping closer; and the glitter off the weapons of the host was as much steel as bronze. Presumably some of them would have learned a bit about modern warfare at Troy....

The noise started again, like a giant drum, or the chuffing of a monstrous steam engine. This time he could see what it was, thousands of them beating the flats of their weapons on their shields in ragged unison. The sound boomed back from the rocky slopes on either hand as well....

“Oh, for a couple of rifled cannon,” Barnes said.

“Or a heavy mortar, or some rocket launchers,” O’Rourke agreed.

That was a distance problem, though. Ur Base’s armory down at the top of the Persian Gulf could make small-arms ammunition and some replacement parts for rifles. Every single heavy weapon and every round for them had to come by ship from Nantucket or Alba, down the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, up across the Indian Ocean, up the Gulf, unload at Ur Base, go up the Euphrates by steamboat and barge, then hundreds of miles more to the Anatolian plateau and westward to here by wagon and camel and pack mule.

Great Achaea, now... their factories weren’t as many or as good, but being ten thousand miles closer covered a multitude of sins. Better to have a second-rate weapon that was here, rather than a first-rate one that hadn’t arrived yet because the ship bringing it was becalmed in the doldrums.

The sound died out and the enemy began to spread; the nobles were getting out of their chariots, too.
Too bad. I
wish
they were more conservative about that.
Most of the men squatted or sat, leaning on spears or rifles. Horns blared, long upright bronze trumpets with the mouths of wild beasts, grouped around a knot of men in bright gear: gilded bronze armor, helmets topped with boars and wolves and ravens, chain mail and steel swords, guns. The knot eddied, then moved southward and up the slopes of a fairly steep hill, threading their way through terraced vineyards to the clear rocky summit. O’Rourke moved his binoculars and found himself staring at the doll-tiny figure of a man in a raven-crested helmet with long gray mustaches putting an even longer brass spyglass to his eye and looking right back at the Nantucketer. Great minds thought alike ...

“Hmmm ... I think the laddie with the bandaged arm beside him is the gentleman with the spear I had a bit of a brush with yesterday,” O’Rourke said lightly.

The chief with the spyglass took it down from his eye and waved. Spears repeated the gesture down the hillslope, and a band of warriors five hundred strong rose and moved forward. They weren’t moving in ranks, but there was an unpleasant steadiness to the way they came forward, flowing into dead ground, the shelter of groves or walls, up a long gully that sheltered everything but the tips of their spears.

“This bunch won’t be spooked the first time they see guns go off,” Barnes said thoughtfully. “Mother.”

“This won’t be the first time,” O’Rourke said. “We managed to get a fair number of firearms into Troy, one way and another, and these lads have been on the receiving end.”

Hantilis nodded. “I, too, was put in fear, the first time I saw the fire-weapons work their slaying,” he said. “After that, I saw also that the men they killed were no more dead than those fallen to a bow or spear. Guns are better than any spear or bow, yes. They kill further, faster, more surely, yes. Still, these guns are not the thunder-club borne by Teshub of the Weather. They are only weapons. And a man with a knife or even a rock from the fields may slay a man with sword, spear, and armor, if he be brave and very lucky. A score of men with knives or rocks against
one
with a sword...”

Barnes and O’Rourke glanced at each other and nodded very slightly. You didn’t have to have a modern education to be able to put two and two together, if the native cleverness was there.

The Hittite confirmed their thought a moment later: “That little ravine—it is a highway toward us. Only a little more than long bowshot, and the ... Gatling... does not bear on it ...”

Damn, I do wish we had a mortar,
O’Rourke thought. Dropping shells right into dead ground like that was what they were made for. Then:
If wishes were horses, we wouldn’t need the Town Meeting to produce horseshit, would we, then?

“Here they come!” someone shouted from the walls.

 

“People can get used to anything,” Kathryn Hollard said, looking down from one of the slanting windows in the airship’s passenger compartment.

They’d come down the Euphrates, endless miles of irrigation canals lined with date palms, long narrow fields—about half of them flooded to soften the earth for the fall plowing, half fallow—and villages of dun mud-brick shacks. Now the shadow of the
Emancipator
passed over Babylon, slipping over square miles of flat roofs and courtyards and narrow twisty streets, cut here and there by the broader processional ways.

The sight of the dirigible overhead no longer made men scream in Babylon, or women cast themselves down in prayer. Even the donkeys had stopped bolting. Usually the craft came into a field by the river outside the northern wall; the engineers of the expeditionary force had put in basic support facilities, tanks of fuel—the engines burned a mixture of kerosene and hydrogen from the gasbag—a small steam-powered generator to crack lifting gas from water, stores of spare parts. Today the airship was coming into land at the square that surrounded the great ziggurat
Etemenanki,
the House That Is the Foundation of Heaven and Earth, near the northern gate of the city. That was the only open space in Babylon that could accommodate the
Emancipator’s
more than five hundred feet of length; it was also convenient to the main palace-administrative complex just inside the Ishtar Gate.

“Kash is not happy at all, and this is one way of showing it,” Kathryn went on.

“I’m not happy either,” her brother replied. “To put it mildly.”

“I’m not happy—the thermals here are a stone bitch,” Vicki Cofflin said.

They all glared for a second at the Princess Raupasha. That young woman folded her arms and glared back. Seventeen going on eighteen, she was tall by contemporary standards, which made her average among Americans born in the twentieth; the Marine khakis she wore showed smooth curves. Fine raven-dark hair fell to her shoulders, framing an oval straight-nosed face and dark gray eyes rimmed with green; her skin was a natural pale olive tanned to honey-brown. It wasn’t quite the physical type common in Kar-Duniash, but she had been born further north, under the Taurus range, in what would be Kurdish country in the twentieth. Some of her ancestors had come from much further than that, outflung spindrift of a migration that had begun in the foothills of the Ural Mountains a thousand years before. The main stream of it had driven their chariots and horse-herds over the Hindu Kush and down into the Land of Five Rivers, where her distant Aryan cousins were compiling the
Rig-Veda
in these very decades. Raupasha’s ancestors had drifted westward, to become kings at the head-waters of the Khabur and lose themselves among their Hurrian subjects.

“I did wrong,” she said, in English thickly accented with the clotted sounds of her Hurrian mother tongue. “It—” For a moment a flicker of uncertainty made her seem her age. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. You had told me, Lord Kenn’et, that in your country women often take the lead in such things ...”

“Not without warning, not in public, not in front of an army, not in a language the man doesn’t speak so it looks like he’s
agreeing
with it, and not when it buggers up years of work!” Kenneth Hollard barked.

My, what an interesting shade of red you turn when you’re angry, big brother,
Kathryn thought irreverently. She and her brother both tanned fairly well for blonds, but she could see the dark blood rising over his collar.

“I did wrong,” Raupasha said again, quietly. Tears welled in the great gray eyes, but she blinked them away. “I have wronged you, to whom I owe so much. Let King Kashtiliash have my head, then, to appease the anger of his heart and bring his favor back to you.”

Kenneth Hollard sighed in exasperation. His sister answered for him: “No, we won’t do that. You’re under the Republic’s protection, and we don’t withdraw that. But that’s protection for you, as an individual, not for your people or their former kingdom. You may have to leave these lands altogether.”

“And we all have to strap in,” Vicki Cofflin said. “Sir, ma’am, we’re coming in for a landing.”

Everyone sat, in a stony silence. Kathryn Hollard swallowed a bubble of anxiety.
God, I want to see Kash again. God, I’m nervous.

Neither of them was exactly afraid of the other but they’d both found occasion enough for irritation, differences of custom and outlook and belief that made a word or action sweet reasonableness to one and intolerable to the other. And neither of them was meek by nature.

The marriage contract specified she could leave anytime she wanted to.
The problem is, I
don’t
want to.