On the Oceans of Eternity (25 page)

“Prepare for landing,” Vicki Cofflin said. “Alex, I’m going to take her in heavy, on prop-lift. Landing crew ready on the ground?”

The XO was peering through heavy pintle-mounted binoculars. “Looks like it, Skipper ... there’s the signal.”

“Helm, right thirty. Engines, all ahead one quarter.”

The long orca shape of the
Emancipator
turned into the wind blowing out of the deserts to the west. “Altitude one thousand thirty. Off superheat!”

A hissing in the background cut off, only noticeable when it was gone. The shadow of the airship passed over the flat rooftops of Babylon, a maze of tenement and courtyard, dun-colored mud-and-timber roofs above adobe buildings. The monstrous step-pyramid shape of the ziggurat loomed ahead of them, its cladding of colored brick, glazing, and paint a blaze three hundred feet high, an artificial mountain looming against the westering sun.

“Vent hot air! All vents full.”

Crewfolk spun cranks. High above, rectangular portlids in the hull swung up, allowing the heated air in the central gasbag to escape. The airship’s smooth gliding passage shifted to a downward vector, and the ground swelled below them. The nose of the great craft dipped, and the uppermost level of the ziggurat
Etemenanki
rose above the gondola windows, gleaming in gold leaf. That was the House of the God, where the priestess called the Bride of Marduk awaited the pleasure of the Lord of the Countries.

“Negative buoyancy! Ship is heavy!” came the crisp call from the altitude controller. “Seven hundred pounds at ground level.”

“Ballast, stand by,” Vicki said. They could vent water from tanks along the keel at need and come around again. “Engines at ninety degrees.”

Hands spun wheels, and outside the six converted Cessna engines on the sections of wing turned until their propellers were pointing at the ground. They were nearly over the courtyard now, coasting slower and slower as the gentle west wind pushed at the blunt prow of the vessel. Dust billowed up, and the robes of the spectators fluttered. The ground crew were from the First Kar-Duniash, the cadre unit Kathryn and a few other Islander officers and noncoms had trained as part of the alliance between the Republic and Babylon. They’d played this part before.

Emancipator’s
descent slowed. “Release ropes!”

Crewfolk opened ports along the keel. Dozens of ropes fell loose, to be snatched up by the soldiers acting as ground crew. They broke into teams as if for a tug-of-war, and pulled.

“All engines off!” Silence roared into the great vessel, the first since the motors were started in Hattusas twelve hours before. “Brace for contact.”

The ground swelled beneath them, and a wailing chant went up as three hundred men hauled the dirigible down hand over hand and into the wind. More waited, and grabbed the oak railing that ran along the gondola on either side of the keel as it came within reach. Those ran the airship forward until it was aligned with massive forged eyebolts whose six-foot shanks had been pounded into the brick pavement of the square. Lashings secured the
Emancipator
in place; this was as safe a mooring site as any, with the bulk of the ziggurat and the enclosure walls to break any sudden winds.

“Feather props all,” Vicki Cofflin said. “Ramp down! Brigadier Hollard, Lieutenant-Colonel, Princess Raupasha, you may disembark.”

The main entryway to the gondola was a ramp at the rear of the hundred-foot room. It lowered with a creak of wicker and wood. A chariot stood there, the horses sweating and rolling their eyes as they shifted from hoof to hoof with a clatter of iron against brick. Around it waited mounted guards, riding with saddles and stirrups of Islander pattern, rifles in scabbards at their right knees.

“The King awaits the
Seg Kallui,”
their officer said, dismounting and saluting, then going to one knee.

Kathryn nodded. “The queen hears the words of the King,” she said.

 

“So, bet you I can make five pat hands from half a deck,” Private Hook said, shuffling easily.

They might be under attack at any minute; that was no reason not to pick up a little extra cash. The best time for it, in fact, with people nervous and wrought-up. The cards poured from side to side temptingly on the gray blanket of the hospital bunk, but there wasn’t time to start a poker game.

“Twenty-five cards, no more.”

“By the Horned Man, I think you can do it too—with your deck,” someone said sardonically.

“No, no,” Hook said smoothly. “With
your
deck, and you get to shuffle.”

“Aw,
and you’ll fly to the moon by flapping your arms,” a Marine said.

Several who’d been recruited from the Earth Folk hissed at the blasphemy, which the scoffer answered with a jerk of his middle finger. Hook frowned carefully.

“Well, if you’re not afraid of bad luck after dissing Moon Woman like that, why not put some money on it?” he asked. “Say, five dollars at five-to-one in your favor.”

“I’ll do that,” the other man said brashly. “If you don’t need beer and girls when we get back to Hattusas, I do.”

“And
you’ll
never get laid without paying a local for it, Haudicar,” a female voice said.

The challenger scowled and pulled a Pacific Bank five-dollar note out of his pocket; that took a little work, with his right arm in a cast. Then he went over to his haversack and fished out a pack of cards. Hook waited patiently while the mark shuffled; the Fiernan woman who’d spoken caught his eye and winked behind the victim’s back, moving her fingers and lips silently in the Counting Chant.

“Put up your twenty-five, Hook. Better than three weeks’ pay, a gift from the Gods.”

A belligerent blue-eyed stare from Haudicar, as innocent of mathematics as he was of molecular biology. Hook took the greasy, limp pack and set it on the gray blanket that covered the foot of his bunk, then split it evenly. A fair selection who were mobile enough gathered around; not many went two months in the pungent gloom of a troopship’s hold outbound from Nantucket Town without learning poker.

“Which one?” he said, and the mark tapped the pile of cards on his left.

“Here we go—”

Haudicar stared as the five pat hands flowed out beneath Hook’s nimble features. The onlookers yelped and hooted laughter, and a slow flush went up from the collar of his T-shirt to prominent pink ears.

“Care to try again, double or nothing?” Hook said casually, scooping up the five-dollar bill. He winked back at the Fiernan girl; he usually didn’t need to pay a local when he wanted a tumble—stupid to pay, when charm could get you better sex for free—but even in the Corps it never hurt to set the mood with some beer and fancy eats on the civilian economy. With two men for every woman in most units, the competition could get a little fierce at times. Besides that, he was saving for the end of his hitch. Haudicar swore and pulled out another five-dollar bill.

“Anyone else want to go with the odds?” Hook said brightly.

A few bystanders did, but one insisted on using her pack, and dealing out twenty-five cards at random. Hook grinned like a shark as he arranged another five hands, ignoring the curses and stacking the bills and coins.

“Now, who’ll match this pile one last time?” he said.

It looked as if Haudicar would, until he looked around and saw that all the Fiernan-born in the room were standing back, most of them grinning. Then he made the sign of the horns.

“Magic!” he spat.

The girl who’d winked at Hook laughed aloud. “Arithmetic, you dumb swan-eating sheep-shagger,” she said. “The odds were fifty to one in his favor!”

The roar of laughter that followed that was cut short when a corporal looked through the door.

“You lot are pretty healthy, then,” he said. A working party behind him carried in rifles, bandoliers, and a thousand-round ammunition box. Several entrenching tools were piled rattling atop it. “Get busy—knock some more loopholes in the wall there, it’s only mud brick two stacks thick.”

Those not too ill to work got to work, except for Hook. “Nobody want one last bet?” he asked, riffling the cards.

“At a time like this?” someone said, digging at the wall with the pick-spike on the back of the blade of the entrenching tool.

“Why not? No loss if we lose, we’ll all be dead ... oh, all right then,” Hook grumbled, and picked up a rifle, wincing a bit at the pull of his lanced boil as he went to the slit window. “Holy
shit
!”

 

“So,” Kashtiliash said, shaking back the sleeve of his robe and holding out his cup. A servant slid forward silently and poured, each movement as graceful as a reed. “You will not plead your brother’s case?”

“Nope,” Kathryn Hollard said, reaching for a date. “He can do that himself. You’re the King here, Kash, and he’s the commander of
allied
forces. It’d be a good idea to hear him out, but you decide, and I’ll back you up whatever your decision is. It’s going on for God-damned November; it’ll be the Year 11 before we get to Walker, if we keep dicking around with this stuff.”

The Kassite’s thick-muscled shoulders relaxed slightly as he sipped.

Kathryn gave him a slow smile, and went on: “Actually, I had a different sort of discussion in mind for this evening.”

Her eyes traveled to the arched doorway that led into the bedchamber. Kashtiliash grinned back at her.

They were dining in one of the smaller chambers in the King’s private rooms—or as private as anything could be, in this ant farm of a palace. One wall was carved cedar screenwork, giving out onto a section of flat roof that in turn overlooked a courtyard planted with palms and flowers. It was still warm but not uncomfortable, especially with the overhead fan that swept back and forth above, to the pull of a cord in the hand of someone sitting in the corridor outside—she’d gotten the idea from rereading a book of Kipling’s short stories. A
punkah,
they’d called it in the days of the Raj.

She and the King reclined on couches of carved boxwood, cushioned in something remarkably like Moroccan leather, and ate from a low table set between them with lion’s-paw feet done in ivory, its oval Egyptian-ebony top inlaid with lapis, ivory, and semiprecious stones. The platters bore the remains of roast chicken, a dish of beef and lentils with apricots, skewers of grilled lamb, salads, breads, pastries, spiced steamed vegetables. The palace artisans had learned to produce creditable bronze-and-gold imitations of the plain metal fork in a Marine field kit, too, which made eating a lot less messy.

“Makes a nice change from tents and dog biscuit,” she said, stretching and nibbling on the fruit.

They
had
been down to hardtack for a while, when the supply lines up from the navigable Euphrates got shaky. Not to mention the grit and dirt; nothing like a couple of weeks in the field in the deserts of Mitanni—northern Syria, in the twentieth—to really work up an appreciation for a good bath and a soft linen robe. Gentle music tweetled from a corner, vivid tapestries billowed slightly along the walls, curious beasts and flowers and scenes from myths she hadn’t had time to learn; the ceiling was smooth plaster set with rosettes of burnished copper. The Islander kerosene lamps made the room brighter than it would have been a year ago, but the yellow light suited the room, turning it into a fantasy of soft color amid the scents of cedarwood and incense.

“A king’s wealth is some small compensation for being nibbled to death by ducks,” Kashtiliash said. “I would ten times rather be in the field with my troops myself.” He extended his hands. “Yesterday the
ashipu
-diviners of Nabu said that my armpits should be plucked with tweezers because a two-headed lamb was born near Nippur.”

Kathryn held out her hands likewise. Servants glided in, one to pour scented water, another to wipe her hands with a towel, a third to hold the basin beneath.

Still feels a little creepy having everything done for you like this,
she thought with a corner of her mind.

The rest of it was sympathizing with Kashtiliash. His administrative duties were bad enough, but there was a whole clutch of religious stuff that only the King could deal with. Kash might be absolute monarch, but the priesthoods could still tie him in knots by selective omen-reading—ignore them and the whole kingdom from nobles to peasants would expect disaster, which was a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one. The queen had equivalent tasks, but so far she’d been able to plead off on grounds of military necessity and a foreigner’s ignorance.

When his hands were clean, Kashtiliash clapped them together. “Leave us,” he said.

“But King of the Universe—!” a eunuch chamberlain bleated, from where he’d been standing to direct the choreography of the meal.

Eunuchs still creeped her out more than a little, but she ignored the plump shocked face. Usually the King’s retiring was an elaborate ritual, each undoing of sandal strap or sash a jealously guarded privilege of some official or flunky or whatever; it all reminded her of things she’d read about the court of Louis XIV, only with oracles and diviners mixed in. At least upper-crust Babylonians washed a lot more frequently than eighteenth-century Frenchmen.

“Leave us! The King speaks!” Kashtiliash said, not taking his eyes off her.

Everyone prostrated themselves and backed out. The King’s grin grew wider. “Good,” he said. “It has been much too long, my golden lioness. It would shock them, did I vault over the table and ravish you upon the supper couch.”

“You couldn’t,” she said. “Because I’d meet you in midair.”

She stood, reached down with crossed arms, and pulled the robe over her head.

“Golden lioness indeed,” Kashtiliash said, hoarse through a throat gone tight.