On the Oceans of Eternity (36 page)

Red-rimmed eyes blinked at her from behind thick spectacles. “Thank God you’re here, ma‘am,” the young man said. His face worked for an instant, as if he was about to burst into tears, then stiffened. “Ma’am, Captain Clammp was injured when the foremast gave way—knocked down—when the wind shifted. He’s been unconscious ever since. We ... ah, we lost five hands, including Lieutenant Stendins.” Which had left this teenager in command, probably on his first voyage out of home waters. “Several more were injured. We ...” he made a helpless gesture toward the chaos of the ship.

Marian Alston put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. “Son, you kept the ship afloat through as bad a blow as I’ve seen,” she said. “Now help’s on the way. I need to know everything.”

While he told her, Swindapa was directing the unloading of the boats arriving from the frigates. The Merrimacs staggered away from the pumps, and fresh hands began plunging the levers up and down; a tow cable with an empty hogshead on the end for a buoy went overside and the boats made fast, strung out and began to pull the
Merrimac
’s prows to the west of south. Captain Clammp came by, bandaged like a mummy and lashed to a stretcher, to go overside into boats and be rowed out to the warships.

“You’ve done a fine job,” Marian said to young Clammp. “Now rest.”

He staggered off. The new hands at the pumps were swinging the levers vigorously, and there was a perceptible increase in the jets of water going overside. One of them started a chanty, and the others took it up:

More men and women came running to gather around her as she made a high beckoning gesture with the fingers of both hands; the motion of the ship changed beneath her feet as the added thrust of sixty or seventy strong backs swinging ashwood oars came on to the towline. She looked around at the circle of faces; a couple of ensigns, a lieutenant, and half a dozen experienced petty officers and chiefs-ship’s carpenters, rigging specialists.

“All right, people, we need to lighten this ship and get some sail on her,” Alston said briskly. “Guns overside. Get the auxiliary pumps started; once you’ve made some headway in the hold, start her fresh water overside as well—stores, this clutter on deck, everything that can be heaved to the rail except her main cargo.” Most of which was far too bulky and heavy to move anyway. “Chips?”

The
Lincoln
’s master carpenter jerked a thumb westward to where two more boats were towing bundles of white pine spars, seventy feet long and a foot and a half thick in the middle.

“With those spars, ma‘am, we can do jury masts on the main and fore—scarf and wold ’em. That’ll give you something. It’ll take a while.”

“Get it done in the next fifty minutes or there’s no point,” she said over the sound of the chanty. “I want the rigging ready to go up and the sails, too.” She pointed ahead, to where the breakers made a white line to their south and east. “The swell, tide, and wind are all shoving us toward that. We need to bring her head around five points, and get some real way on her—five knots, more would be better—and the wind’s not favorable.” Not dead in their teeth, but coming in over the starboard quarter.

She tapped a fist into a pink palm. “We need what’s on board to win this war: to keep it, we have to save this ship, so that’s exactly what we’re going to do, people. Let’s do it; let’s
go
.”

They gave a short, sharp cheer and scattered to their work at a run. Alston watched them go, fighting down a ferocious impatience. Who knew what devilments Isketerol might be up to, might get up to in the future, if they gave him time?

Swindapa came up and handed her a piece of hardtack. She looked down at the hard gray-brown crackerlike rectangle, puzzled for an instant, then ahead at the cliffs they’d be passing—hopefully passing, and not running into—in an hour or two.

“If Jack Aubrey could get close enough to those rocks to hit ’em with a ship’s biscuit, why not me?” she said, matching Swindapa’s grin for a brief instant. It was good to remember that there was more to the world than their present trouble.

The chanty went on, pounding to the rumble and splash of the pumps:

“
I
like this game,” Raupasha said. “But it will be long before I fight to a draw even with your son, much less you, my sister.”

Doreen Arnstein looked down at the chessboard, shivering a little in a way that had nothing to do with the cold that was sending fingers through the thick robe wrapped about her. She was playing her son David and Raupasha simultaneously, with a time limit on her moves. That made it a challenge, enough to keep her mind off Ian; the news from Troy wasn’t good. In fact, it was desperately bad, and only desperation would have driven Ken to order the last-chance maneuver that was taking place this night.

David had made his move, and went back to the little three-inch reflector she had mounted on this flat rooftop. Originally she’d put that up as a sort of homage to her beginnings; she’d been a student astronomer at the time of the Event, interning at the little observatory on Nantucket run by the Margaret Milson Association. Tonight her son wasn’t studying the stars; in between moves, he had the telescope trained to the southwest.

The Arnsteins had been given a royal villa outside the walls of Hattusas; the Islander military had set up around it, sinking wells and installing rudimentary sanitation and getting doctors and their equipment ready. That had been the first priority, even before starting to shuttle in troops and weapons;
then
they could move westward toward Troy and the Aegean Sea.

Now the campfires and lanterns twinkled about the building in orderly rows, and a long rectangle off to the west marked the
Emancipator
’s landing ground. The chill of autumn fought with the warmth from wood burning in two bronze baskets, and there were fewer bugs splatting themselves there, or against the kerosene lantern on the table beside them. A kettle of sassafras tea kept warm near one brazier; mugs and a platter of cookies stood beside the chessboard.

Doreen fought to keep her attention on the chessmen; there was something reassuring about the feel of the pre-Event plastic, like an old teddy bear. It was a reminder of a world where your husband wasn’t threatened by sadistic surgeon-torturers, or mad ex-Coast-Guard warlords, or barbarians with bronze axes....

“You shouldn’t done that,” she said to her son. “Look—I’m in a position where you’re going to lose this castle, to save your King. In fact ...”

The boy came over and scowled, knotting his brow in thought. Doreen felt her heart turn over; he looked so much like his father when he did that. He was tall for his age. with hands and feet that promised something like his father’s inches. but his face and build were more like hers. The Middle Eastern sun had burned him brown over the summer and brought out a few russet highlights in his dark curly hair. The scowl turned into a shrug as he reached out and tipped over his King.

He’s worried, too,
she thought, giving him a quick hug before he turned back to the telescope.
Or he’d fight to the death, the way he usually does.
And he’d be his usual one-question-after-another self, instead of so quiet.

“Now you will beat me like, how you say, the big bass drum,” Raupasha said.

When Doreen was silent for a long moment the Mitannian girl reached out a hand and touched her arm. “I pray to Hebat... Arinna, they call her here in Hattusas ... that your man will return and hold the son you bear in his arms,” she said gently. “My father died while I was in the womb, and that is a heavy thing.”

Doreen found herself blinking back tears, and gave the younger woman’s hand a moment’s squeeze. “Thanks, kiddo,” she said.

“I hope it’s a daughter, though,” she went on. “One of each.”

Raupasha looked a little baffled;
many sons
was a common goodwill wish in this part of the world. Doreen went on, smiling a little: “Now Ken, he’d be a little disappointed if
you’d
turned out to be a boy, for instance.”

Raupasha’s face lit up as if a lamp were burning behind it. “Do you think so? Really?” she said, flushing. “Oh...”

Doreen chuckled. “But there are difficulties. Not least, there’s Kenneth. He ... feels sort of protective toward you, I think.”

Raupasha looked puzzled. “Should a man not feel that he should protect his woman?”

“Well ... that depends. I think part of your problem is that he’s got this idea you’re like a little sister.”

Raupasha snorted. “He will have to learn I am not a little girl!” A sigh. “But there are more difficulties than that.” She paused and changed the subject. “Doreen, what is a Jew?”

Doreen’s eyebrows arched. “Well, it’s sort of—”
hmmm. Can’t say “religion,” because Ian and I aren’t believers, much. And
religion’s
a nearly meaningless word here, where you can mix’n match your deities.
“—sort of like a tribe.”

“But you are all Eagle People, all
Nantukhtar,
aren’t you?”

“Well ... yes. It’s a little more complicated than that ... why do you ask?”

“Because I heard someone say that the Jews are clever, and I wondered what they meant.” She chuckled. “If you are a Jew, then playing this game with you makes me think it must be so.”

Doreen laughed with a sigh in it, and looked down at the chessboard. “Yes, I think you could say ‘clever.’ Part of it’s that we’ve usually been few compared to our neighbors and not much liked, so we had to outsmart those who had more... weight of fist than we did. And part of it’s that our God made us some fiendishly complicated laws, and we spent a lot of our time studying and arguing about them. Or we made the laws fiendishly complicated so we
could
spend our time arguing and studying them. That got to be a habit—so we ended up arguing with everybody and studying everything; like me with the stars, or Ian with ancient times.”

Raupasha nodded. “It’s good to be clever,” she said. “It helps when you’re not strong, and when you are it makes your strength more—”

“It’s the ship!” David squealed. “Dad, it’s
Dad
!”

Doreen dashed over and pushed the boy aside, peering through. The
Emancipator,
right enough.
Why haven’t they radioed?
she thought furiously. Was that a good sign, or a bad?

 

“They’re over the wall in the lower town,” Major Chong said.

“That mean what I think it means?” Ian Arnstein asked.

The air was thick with smoke drifting up from the lower city, smoke that stank of things not meant to burn. Through the narrow window he could see the flames. under an overcast sky darker than the inside of a whale’s gut.

And I’m Jonah, in the belly of the beast,
he thought, as a red spark arched out from the darkness into the maze of flat-topped buildings. The spark snapped with a vicious quickness, flying dirt and timbers showering skyward, then the shadows fell again. Slightly further away a line of orange fire traced across the night.
Flamethrower,
he thought. Simple to use; one man on the hose, two working the pumps ... and the attackers would be under the stream of burning oil as they fought their way through the narrow twisting streets.

Chong coughed and grimaced; a bandage hid most of the left side of his face, crusted dark. “It means that they’re going to be here and damned soon. We cut it close, Councilor.”

“I’m not altogether happy about leaving.” King Alaksandrus was down there, defending the city.
And I talked him into fighting to the last
, he thought with a sharp stab of guilt. A wave of sound came with the flicker of the fires, a distant screaming brabble of voices, punctuated with explosions and a growing crackle of gunfire.

“Sir, you’ve got your orders and I’ve got mine, and the war isn’t over yet. There are Marine units only three days’ march away.”

“That isn’t going to do the Trojans much good,” Arnstein said, unfolding himself from the chair.

“Neither is getting yourself killed, sir.” the Marine said. “You know what the commodore says.”

“Yeah, the Light Brigade got what they deserved, like Custer.” Ian sighed. “All right.”
It’ll be good to see David again, and Doreen. Even though she’s going to ream me out like a Roto-Rooter for getting caught here in the first place
.