On the Oceans of Eternity (29 page)

“I
n the long run, I think Mesopotamia may be our Japan,” Ian Arnstein said into the microphone.

He was a very tall man, towering for this era: four inches over six feet, still lanky in late middle age, with a bushy beard turning gray among the original dark russet brown—one that he’d worn before the Event, when he was a professor of classical history from Southern California. What hair was left on the sides and rear of his head was the same color. By a sport of chromosones, his face was of a type common in Anatolia even in the twentieth; beak-nosed, rather full in the lips, with large expressive dark eyes.

“Ian?” his wife said, through the earphones he was wearing, asking for clarification.

Doreen Arnstein was hundreds of miles away in the Hittite capital of Hattusas. Ian Arnstein listened to the boom of a cannon in the not-too-distant west, outside the walls of Troy, and thanked the notional Gods for that.
Now, if only I was there in Hattusas, too.
They’d about exhausted their official business, and it was a relief to talk of matters not immediately practical.

“I think I may have been too sanguine about the Babylonians,” Ian said. “Yeah, it’s going to handicap them not having much in the way of timber or minerals besides oil, but neither does Japan—and look how fast they picked up Western Civ’s tricks. They’ve got a big population, a fairly sophisticated culture of their own, they’re organized, and now they’re run by a really smart, determined guy with a wife from Nantucket, whose kids are going to be educated in our schools. That means for the next two generations, they’re going to make a
really
impassioned effort to catch up with us.”

“We can worry about that after we’ve won this war,” Doreen said. “They’ll be aiming at a moving target anyway. How are things going?”

“Not so great,” Ian said. “King Alaksandrus is holding steady—well, he doesn’t really have much choice, now-but Major Chong isn’t sure how much longer we can hold out.”

“I
told
you you should have gotten out on the last flight, dammit, Ian!”

Ian sighed and shook his head. “Alaksandrus might have given up if I’d done that,” he said. “Then Walker and his Ringapi would be whooping their way to Hattusas by now. You’ve done fine handling the Hittites.” Who fortunately had institutions that didn’t make dealing with a woman disgraceful. “Anyway, is David there?”

Their son was. When he had concluded the personal matters, the Republic’s Councilor for Foreign Affairs sat back with a sigh.

“Bye,” he said at last. “Stay well.”

A hesitation at the other end of the circuit, and his wife’s voice: “You too. The children need their father.”

“I know—” he began; then his voice rose to a squeak.
“Children?
Plural?”

“If everything keeps on track ... about nine months after that last evening before you got yourself trapped there in Troy VII. Serendipity.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me earlier?” he said, fighting down an irrational rush of anger.

“I didn’t want to joggle your elbow with worries. Then. Now I don’t want you feeling free to be a martyr.”

He sighed. “Martyrhood doesn’t attract me,” he said. “Love you.”

“You too, Ian. Come back to us.”

I fully intend to do my best,
he thought as he took off the earphones. Then:

“World’s too damned big,” he muttered to himself, pushing away personal considerations and looking at the map pinned to the wall beside the small square window. “And there’s too damned few of us.”

The square of heavy paper showed what would have been the Middle East and Balkans in the twentieth. Here it bore names that had once been familiar to him only from books. Most of central and eastern Anatolia was the Hittite Empire, and points west and south were vassal states linked to it by treaty. The domains of Pharaoh Ramses II sprawled up from Egypt through what he knew as Israel and southern Syria to meet those governed from Hattusas. To the southeast was Kar-Duniash—Babylonia, an Islander ally and now including Assyria, which meant northern Iraq and chunks of the adjacent mountain country.
Babylonia’s a firm ally, the Hittites a new one, Egypt’s neutral ... although there’s that man of Walker’s there.
The problem lay to the west.

He scowled at the black-outlined splotch on the map labeled
Meizon Akhaia.
Greater Greece, roughly translated; or Great Achaea. It left a mental bad taste; something like
Grossdeutschland.

That hadn’t existed in any of the histories he’d studied. Ten years ago it had been simply Achaea, part of it a loose confederation of vassal realms reigned over lightly by the Kings of Men in Mycenae, the rest independent minikingdoms, tribes and whatnot. Walker had been at work there for a long time now, first as henchman and wizard-engineer to Agamemnon King of Men, then as puppetmaster, for the last few years as ruler himself. Now it was a tightly centralized despotism, tied together by armies and roads, telegraphs, bureaucrats armed with double-entry bookkeeping. It had grown, too. Besides the whole of Greece proper, Walker’s satraps ruled most of the Balkans up to what would have become Bulgaria and Serbia, plus Sicily, Italy, the Aegean islands. The American renegade had built up a terrifying degree of modern industry, as “modern” went in the Year 10, and as long as his Tartessian ally held the Straits of Gibraltar, the Achaean navy dominated this end of the Mediterranean.

Of course,
he thought,
it’s a spatchcocked modernization so far, mostly confined to a few centers. A thin film of literacy and machines pasted over a peasant mass dragooned into labors it doesn’t understand by terror and the whip. Stalin’s methods.

The problem was that, at this level of technology, those techniques
worked.

“The world’s
far
too big,” he muttered to himself, tugging at his beard. “And everything
takes
so bloody long. Sailing ships and marching feet, over half the world.”

The Republic of Nantucket was trying to conduct a struggle on a geographic scale about equal to World War I, but the forces involved were ludicrously tiny. Great Achaea probably had about a million people; Babylonia and the Hittites two or three times that each; the Republic was a couple of small towns and a fringe of farms haggled out of wilderness. Neither of the “advanced” powers could field more than a few thousand men with firearms, a few dozen cannon-armed ships, but those were the fulcrum the whole thing would turn on.

“Sure, we know the history,” he mused. “Walker too—surprisingly well-read, for a complete swine. But there’s nothing
in
the original history that jumbled up eras and technologies and methods like this.”

He poked the the headphones with a finger and sighed; they were an example. They had some pre-Event shortwave sets, all transistors and synthetics, none of which could be allowed anywhere as dangerous as Troy. What the Republic’s engineers and artisans could make instead was this 1930’s-style monstrosity—five times as big and with five times the power consumption and half the effectiveness of pre-Event electronics. But they could
replace
the handblown vacuum tubes, which they couldn’t do with the modern equipment. Meanwhile, the electricity came from a windmill, or squads on bicycle generators during calms.

The sound of cannon came again, louder than before, a huge heavy dull sound, like an enormous door shutting in the far distance. He rose and hurried through the corridors of the palace. They’d been opulent not long ago, before the siege; smooth gypsum floors, walls painted in a fanciful half-naturalistic style, costly embroidered hangings. The building itself was made of timber and mud brick on stone foundations, flat-roofed, two-and three-story blocks built around courtyards, all rather like a Southwestern pueblo. Now it was crowded, like the whole of the small city inside Troy’s walls; here it was mainly gentry from the countryside and their immediate retainers. Most were relatives of the King, bunking in rooms normally used for storage or weaving or kept empty for guests. They looked at him with an awe that hurt, the foreign magician who would save them from the Wolf Lord of the west; a granny hunched over a piece of sewing, girl-children playing a game remarkably like hopscotch and giggling as they skipped, a proud black-haired woman with a huge-eyed child on her lap, a tall cloaked man, white-bearded, who bowed gravely. The smell wasn’t too bad overall; the Republic’s military medics were enforcing sanitation with fanatical determination backed up by their reputation as wizards, but there was a sour undertone to it. Those sanitary regulations were the only thing that kept this whole city from going up in a pyre of epidemics; out in the lower town below the citadel the peasant refugees were crammed in like sardines, even many of the streets turned over to makeshift shacks.

There weren’t many men of fighting age in the palace. They were on the walls, or working. Ian kept his face solemn, as local manners required, and returned the greetings. Inwardly he winced a bit. They would fight to the end, now. They didn’t have much choice. The original terms for surrender Walker had offered had been relatively generous, and he’d probably have kept them.

But I convinced them to fight.
That was certainly to the advantage of the Republic and its Hittite and Babylonian allies.
It’s only to Troy’s advantage if the relief force gets here in time.
If it didn’t, this whole people would be blotted off the face of the earth.

A few minutes brought him to the place he sought, the main courtyard, which had been taken over by Major Chong of the Marine Corps for his weapons, a battery of heavy mortars. Their snouts showed above the lips of the berms below, each dug into a cell of earth; for a brief moment he felt an illogical sorrow for the gardens that had given air and sweetness to this section of the great building. Now that air was heavy with the stink of burned sulfur from the black-powder propellant. The loading teams sprawled, resting. Most of them were Trojans, in tunics and kilts much like their Achaean cousins. Over the weeks of the siege there had been time to train them for most of the work, each team under a Marine or two, while the rest of the crews acted as officers elsewhere.

Ian waved to them, and turned through what had once been the queen’s audience chamber. The palace and the citadel around it were on the highest ground available, and Trojan architecture ran to exterior galleries on the higher stories. Chong was there, and King Alaksandrus of Wilusia—Ilios, Troy—in full fig of bronze armor, boar’s-tooth helmet, horsehair plume, the rifle across his back looked a little incongruous. Ian exchanged solemn greetings.

It’s a matter of morale,
he thought, feeling a melancholy amusement at the Trojan’s finery.
Like a Victorian Englishman changing into formal wear for dinner in the middle of some godforsaken jungle or a residency besieged by mutinous sepoys. Stiff upper lip and all that.

“How’s it going, Major?” he asked the Marine officer.

Chong’s family had been Realtors on Nantucket, ethnic-Chinese refugees from Vietnam originally. There was a slight tinge of Yankee drawl to the man’s vowels, and his handsome amber-hued face was drawn with fatigue as he shrugged.

“Exactly the way I anticipated,” he said—in English, but Alaksandrus had grown resigned to his allies using their incomprehensible tongue when they wanted to leave him out of the conversation.

“That bad?”

“Take a look, Councilor.”

He bent to the heavy tripod-mounted binocular telescope. The scene that jumped out at him was wearily familiar. The enemy vessels were further up the coast, just barely visible to the north, unloading new devilments; the bay that reached nearly to the wall was too close to Chong’s mortars. Around Troy stretched a semicircle of siegeworks, trenches, and bunkers cut into the soft soil of the coastal flats and then over the rocky heights behind them. Beyond them stretched camps, orderly rows of tents for the Wolf Lord’s men, a sprawling chaos of brushwood shelters and rammed-earth huts and leather lean-tos for his barbarian allies.

“The Ringapi don’t look too happy,” he said. Misery hung over those encampments as palpably as dust haze and smoke.

“Should they be?” Chong said.

“No,” Ian said.

Prisoners had brought in tales of disease and hunger. He could fill in the rest for himself; the chieftains were probably wishing they’d never left the middle Danube. So far they’d gotten scant loot, and having plundered the countryside bare they were utterly dependent on Walker for their daily bread. Apparently he was doling it out in lots only slightly more generous than his allotments of second-rate firearms. You needed a long spoon to sup with that particular devil.

“Still, he’s getting the work done,” Chong said. “Here—”

With expert help, Ian could make out the zigzag covered ways thrust out from the encircling walls. Here and there, men toiled with pick and shovel and woven baskets full of earth to extend them, and others hauled timber and dirt forward to provide overhead cover. From two such bastions the slow bombardment came, heavy shells thudding home into the hastily heaped earth berm that the Islanders had shown the Trojans how to pile against their vulnerable stone curtain-wall.

“Dahlgren-type guns,” Chong said. Ian licked dry lips and fought for a similar detachment. “Rifled pieces would be giving us more problems.”

A subordinate called the Marine officer over to a map table; he looked at the results of the triangulation, nodded, spoke into a microphone. Less than thirty seconds later a massive
whunk!
sound came from the courtyard behind them, and a plume of smoke just visible over the rooftop. A falling shriek went northwestward, and a tall plume of dirt and debris gouted out of the plain of Troy like a momentary poplar tree. The
thudump
of the explosion came a measureable time later.

“Have to be dead lucky to get a direct hit on one of the guns,” Chong explained. “Especially since we have to conserve ammunition ...”