On the Oceans of Eternity (52 page)

Ahead, the enemy were strung out on a track beside a little stream lined with oleander and poplars. Part of their force was a train of wagons, some big ones of the Nantukhtar type, others commandeered from the people of this land. The rest was a working party, local peasants digging and ditching and throwing dirt and gravel from baskets onto the surface of the roadway. The two groups had fouled each other, a wagon had bogged to the hubs leaving the made section of the road, and extra teams and men had been hitched to free it. Teamsters and laborers ran about getting in the way, oxen bellowed in panic, and the escorting warriors ran for their weapons.

Connor looked back over his shoulder. “Good,” he grunted.

Raupasha looked there, too, a single quick glance; yes, those men were following their orders. Hard, hard, to miss the thundering glory of this moment.

Most of the escort were Ringapi, the wild men Walker had seduced. A brace of chariots came out to meet hers, six—she had to admit they had courage, lashing their horses on and bellowing their war cries. Their foot soldiers followed, forming a ragged line to protect their charges. To one side were a half score of men in Walker’s uniform, who’d been overseeing the roadwork. They went fanning out in more orderly wise, then fell to their stomachs. The dark-gray of their clothing nearly disappeared against the ground, and their rifles began to speak in puffs of off-white smoke.

She judged distance. “Now!” she shouted to Iridmi.
“Wartanna!”
Turn!

He leaned back and hauled on the reins. The horses turned, and the war-car followed. Connor and she jumped for the outside rail, their weight keeping the chariot from overturning. Despite practice, one or two of those behind did—or perhaps the bullets began to strike home, and they tumbled in disaster, broken men and horses and yoke-poles.

The chariot settled down again with a thump that resounded from her feet up her spine and clicked her teeth together. Now the Mitannian line was moving parallel to the wagon train, and only fifty yards away. She leveled the rocket launcher.

“Clear!”
she shouted, and pulled the trigger.

A tongue of pale fire lanced out, over the heads of the warriors, and behind her into the air behind the right rear of the chariot. Exultation rose beneath her breastbone as she saw that the curved white smoke trail would come down—
yes!

The rocket landed under the front wheel of a large wagon. There was a flash—

“Ammo wagon!” Connor whooped, yelling into her deafened ear.

Raupasha blinked, shook her head, blinked seared eyes. Where the wagon had been was only a smoking hole and some fragments. Bits and pieces of wagon and ox and man rained down from the sky for scores of yards all about, and the line of Ringapi foot soldiers were panicked. The galloping bar of Mitannian chariots had all opened fire—some of them were galloping very quickly indeed, as if the horses had bolted at the blast. Her men fired shotguns and rifles, pulled the pins and threw the little bombs called
grenades.
Arrows, slingstones, and a few bullets came back at them, and then she was past the end of the enemy position.

Iridmi pulled the team to the right, back up the slope, then around across it. The rest of the chariots followed, forming a
Circle of Yama,
keeping up a continuous fire on the foe. Two more chariots fired rockets: one headed over the stream to burst harmlessly, and the second struck turf near Walker’s men. The noise and fire and smoke still added to the terror she wanted....

“They run!” Tekhip-tilla shouted to her his chariot pulling up level with hers. “They flee!”

“Good,” Raupasha said. “But—”

A bullet went
kerwackkk
through the space between them.

“—remember the plan!”

Iridmi pulled the horses to a halt. The others did likewise, and from each car two men with firearms leaped down. Outnumbered ten to one, Walker’s men died hard but swiftly. Whooping, the Mitannians descended on the supply caravan.

“Only what you can take quickly!” Raupasha reminded them, in a firm, carrying voice.

Gold ornaments were ripped free from bodies and transferred to the victors, along with the occasional silver-hilted dagger or good-looking pair of shoes. The fire-weapons were collected quickly; the Achaeans had been armed with Westley-Richards breechloaders. All others were thrown into a quickly kindled fire, to spoil them. Jugs of olive oil were smashed over boxes of biscuit, sacks of grain, sides of bacon, and soon another pillar of dirty smoke rose to the sky. Jars of flour were shattered and scattered in the rutted mud of the road. Wagons they hacked to pieces, and fed the flames that consumed bandages and medicines, cloth and leather. Most of the wine was spilt as well, although she did not begrudge the men a swallow or two.

Raupasha looked on, her joy tinged with sadness. She had spent all her life until the Nantukhtar came in a little tumbledown manor. Every family of the peasants there had been known to her, the playmates of her youth. Sweat and pain were the price of this food, as well she knew; waste meant somewhere hearths would be cold and children would hunger. With an effort, she shook off the thought.

“Kill the cattle,” she said when the supply convoy was wreckage or a few choice bits lashed to the sides of chariots.

“My Queen?” one man asked, aghast.

“Kill the oxen,” she said. “This is true war, not a cattle raid. We cannot take them with us or leave them to work for the enemy, or to feed him.”

A great silence fell, men looking at her round-eyed. Was not the ancient word for “war” the same as “to seek cattle”? And these men’s families had been impoverished by the Assyrians. There was no wealth so handy as good oxen broken to the yoke ...

She drew her pistol. A man made a halfhearted attempt to block her way, then fell back from a gray-eyed glare. Raupasha put the weapon to the beast’s ear, steeling herself against the mild expression of its great brown eyes.

Crack.
The animal gave a strangled bellow, tossed its head, then went to its knees and fell with a limp thud to the muddy ground.

“Butcher one,” she said. “But quickly! The rest, hack them apart, slash the flesh, rub filth in the cuts. Now! Obey!”

While the grisly work went on she saw to the dead and wounded. There were only six dead; a few broken bones from the wrecked cars, to be set and splinted by the Nantucktartrained Babylonian orderly, a flesh wound or two. It was as Kat‘ryn and Kenn’et had said; surprise and speed mattered more than numbers. When they had been loaded and sent off, the destruction was near complete.

“Princess!” Tekhip-tilla said.

He pointed. Raupasha unshipped her binoculars and looked. Yes, Walker’s men, several score of them.
Mounted riflemen,
in the English tongue. The reports said that several
battalions
were deployed to guard against just such raids as hers. Not very many men, for so huge a land.

“Be ready!” she called to her squadron commanders. Kat’ryn had taught her; if you sounded as if disobedience was impossible, it was. “Remember the plan—every man must act his part. ”

They did, doing their best to look like heedless plunderers. Walker’s men were taught to despise those who fought from chariots ...
dumb wogs,
that was the phrase they used.

The gray-uniformed men came on, deploying into line as they came. “Remember their doctrine,” Gunnery Sergeant Connor murmured from close behind her. “They’ll dismount at four hundred yards.”

She waited, tense. Yes: now they pulled up their mounts, began to swing down. Two could play this game.

“To your chariots,” she called.

The Mitannians poured back to their vehicles, slapped leather on rumps, got their mounts moving back over the ridge they’d hidden behind before the attack. They were careful to drive in a disorderly mob, careful to give no hint of stopping as they fled over the brow of the rise. Sabala was the last over the ridge, a heavy ox shank in his jaws.

“Pull up!” Raupasha ordered. Then, in an instant’s tender scold: “Plunderer!” to the dog.

The chariots halted a few yards below the crestline; the two fighters jumped from each and turned back to crouch just out of sight from the valley below. The war-cars rolled on a little, waiting with the heads of their teams pointing southeast and the drivers looking over their shoulders. Connor leaped down from hers, and ran to where the mortar team were waiting, checking the elevation on their weapon. The Gatling crew had their hands on the tripod that supported their terrible weapon, ready to run it up to bear on the attackers. Raupasha flopped down on the grass herself, shotgun ready.

“Yes!” she said.

The Achaeans had remounted and were coming on regardless, leaning forward and lashing their mounts into a run. Very sure they would see only the retreating rumps of their enemies when they crested the rise.

“Ready!” she said.

The numbers were about even. With the wonder-weapons the Nantukhtar had given them, though, and the advantage of surprise ...

 

Jared Cofflin kept the
Boojum
slanting away northwestward on a long tack before turning west, sailing reach with the strong fall wind a little behind his right shoulder. Nobody got seasick this time, thank goodness. Petty Officer Martinelli went forward of the mast, keeping a lookout. Once the spouts of a pod of right whales a hundred strong rose around the catboat, the warm breath-smelling fog drifting around them, and the children stood in wide-eyed wonder.

“They’re traveling south from their feeding grounds in the north,” Jared said. There weren’t any whale-catcher boats in sight.
Quota already caught for the year,
he thought. “Down to calve in the warm seas.”

The tiller bucked in his hand as one rose from the water and crashed down again, sending a wave surging beneath the Boojum’s keel, and he laughed aloud at the children’s delighted shrieks and the sheer pleasure of the thing.

“Look!” Marian called, pointing. “Oh, Dad, Mom, everybody,
look!”

It was one of the small islets off the western shore of Nantucket proper, a low sandy dome rising a few feet above high tide. It was dark with a ring of what looked like moving spotted gray rocks, so thick that the sands were invisible. Jared Cofflin cocked an eye at the wind, craned his head to see by the color of the water if the shoals lay the way he remembered them, and steered closer.

The rocks lifted pointed whiskered noses and their hoarse cries made a rumble of thunder through the bright air. The summer-born pups were fairly large now, their whitish bellies turning blue-gray, craning to see the boat go by with wide-eyed curiosity. Young Marian sighed, and began to recite; then to sing, a tune made recently to suit the poem as it was taught in the Natural History classes of the Republic’s schools:

“There aren’t two million there, are there, Dad?” Jared Jr. said.

“No, son, only a couple of thousand there,” his father replied.
Jesus, but standards change
—
a “couple of thousand”
seals! “Those are harbor seals; they don’t migrate much, just like to congregate. They have their pups in summer.”

Martinelli spoke up: “I’ve seen easy two million—heck, seven or eight, maybe ten, the experts say-up on the St. Lawrence ice, when I shipped on a catcher for the winter harvest. Harp seats—saddlebacks. That’s quite a sight, but it’s bitter there come February—bitter cold.”

Martha got out her guitar, and the young sailor joined in with the children on the next chorus:

“Dad, you won’t let that happen, will you?” Marian asked anxiously. “All the seals gone, I mean, Dad.”

“No, I won’t.” He caught Martha’s eye. “That is, we won’t—all of us—let anything like that happen again,” he said.
I hope. All we can do is our best.
“The law is that people can’t take more than the seals can replace, like the rules for whales or fish, so there will always be more.”
So your kids can see what you do, sweetness,
he thought.

The girl’s lower lip pouted slightly. “Why do we have to take any seals?”

Unexpectedly, Martinelli spoke up: “Because we have to eat, missy; same reason the seals take fish and squid,” he said. “There’s plenty of working folk who’re glad of a seal-flipper pie, come February. We need fur and oil, too.” He shook his head. “Still, that was really something, coming over the pack ice and them stretching out further than you could see—to the end of the world, ice and seals, seals and ice. Loud, too, louder ’n cannon—Lord thundering Jesus, but there were a world of them!” He shook his head again in slow wonder. “I’d hate to think of that ... not being in the world, that sight.”