On the Oceans of Eternity (72 page)

Kashtiliash tugged at a mass of wet beard that bore little trace of the careful curling irons his barbers had plied in the Shining Residence. Raupasha wondered a little at his hardihood in these rough conditions, until she remembered tales of how he’d been fostered with his hill-tribe kinfolk and spent much time in the field as a soldier and hunter while his father was King.

Perhaps he finds it a relief, to be away from court,
she thought. From things Kathryn had let drop, that might well be so.

And was Kenn’et looking at her with a new touch of respect?

“Hmmm,” the Babylonian said at last. “I think that these are words of some worth. Men will remain with their accustomed ways of doing, so long as those are successful. They have spent much time and effort becoming good warriors in the old way; their pride is in it. Is defeat then a better teacher than victory, like a schoolmaster with a heavier switch to beat a boy’s back?”

O’Rourke spoke: “Well, that would account for his lack of popularity—as the saying goes, victory has a thousand fathers, and defeat is an orphan.”

Kashtiliash laughed, but went on: “And it would account for the cycles in the affairs of men; for a land raised up by fortune would grow complacent, and thus weak.” He cocked an eybrow at Kenneth. “Thus your land is in great danger, now,” he concluded. “From pride and sloth.”

“Nantucket’s not in as much danger from pride as the land of the Hittites is in from Walker, thank God,” Hollard said. “It all depends on whether we can stop them west of the Halys. Beyond that, they’d be into the Hittite heartlands.”

“That is the question,” Kashtiliash said. He lowered his voice a little: “And whether Tudhaliyas will remain loyal if they do push us beyond the great river. If not, we must retreat over the mountains in winter and Mitanni becomes our front line.”

Raupasha winced inwardly. My poor bleeding country! It would take generations to recover from the Assyrian occupation, and if in the meantime they became the battleground of contending Great Powers...

Everyone nodded. “It’s even money,” O’Rourke said. “We’ve slowed them just a bit, we have.”

“They’re not sure where our separate forces are,” Kenneth said. “Tudhaliyas is building up west of Hattusas; we sent him most of those Tartessian mercenaries we captured, and they’re helping train his own men. Not much in the way of artillery or Gatlings, but enough Westley-Richards rifles and mortars, and now we’ve got the powder mill going there’s plenty of ammunition. Basic stuff, but sound.”

“Ah!” Raupasha said, visualizing one of the Islander maps. “And if he advances eastward to pass us, so as to strike at the Great King of Hatti, we can descend on his sides... I mean his flanks.”

And yes, that
was
a considering look of respect. She made herself sit up, leaning back on the rocky edge of the pool with her arms out to either side, as Kathryn had, acutely conscious of how it made her breasts stand.

“I wonder that Walker has not concentrated and struck at one of our separated forces,” Kashtiliash said.

Just then an orderly came up with a basket. The tantalizing smell of fresh bread came from it. “They got the earth ovens going, sir,” she said proudly. “Real risen leavened bread.”

“Thanks! I get so damned sick of pita,” Kenneth said, rising. “Let’s eat.”

The air was cold; Raupasha gratefully wrapped one of the lengths of plundered—
foraged
, she reminded herself—cloth they were using as towels around herself, knotting it by one armpit so that it covered her from collarbone to knee. The fire hissed and sputtered as a rack of beef ribs and her gift were spitted on green sticks and suspended over the coals. The basket held cheese, raisins, olives and dried figs besides the loaves. O’Rourke showed her how to cut off a slab of the bread and toast it and some cheese over the fire while the meat cooked.

“Yeah,” Kenneth Hollard said, leaning back on one elbow with a handful of olives. “It
would
be logical for Walker to try and destroy us piecemeal. But only if he could find us, and move fast enough on that information. He’s got more troops than we do, and his weapons are just about as good... but we’ve got interior lines, and more important still we’ve got radios and aerial reconnaisance, and he doesn’t.”

O’Rourke nodded: “It’s like fighting a big, strong fellah who’s half-blind and half-deaf.”

Kashtiliash shrugged: “His blows are still nothing to laugh at, when he finds a target.”

“It’s a matter of time,” Kenneth Hollard said. “He’s racing the clock. The further he advances, the less fertile the
country
and the more time we’ve had to strip it ... and pretty soon, it’s going to be full winter. Rain and mud down in the lowlands. Hard snow up on the plateau.”

It had grown dark, only a pink glow left on the snow peaks to the north. The firelight played over the craggy planes of his face, the light dusting of golden hair over his body, the play of long smooth muscles on long limbs and the hard V-shape from broad shoulders to narrow waist. He didn’t have the bulk of thew that gave Kashtiliash a Minotaur’s presence, but he shone with youth and health, strength and a leopard’s deadly speed. Scars only gave him the
gravitas
of experience.

Oh, Ishtar of the Lovers, but he is beautiful,
Raupasha thought, trying to keep her thought from her face
. And if some stranger were to come... even naked as we all are, and among so many proven fighting-men, still he would not have to ask who our leader is.

 

Marian Alston stiffled a yawn with locked jaws and forced herself to listen alertly. The staff meeting was nearly finished; nobody had gotten much sleep last night, and they’d all been hard at work since before sunup. The steam ram had saved their bacon by smashing the Tartessian galleys into unthreatening splinters, but there was still plenty of damage to repair.

“
Farragut’s
still afloat,” Captain Trudeau said grimly, the ointment on his face glistening in the bright sunshine. Usually he was a humorous sort, but under the circumstances... “And that’s
all
I can say.”

The Republic’s fleet lay in the shelter of...
Cadiz, I suppose we can call it,
Marian Alston-Kurlelo thought, with its masts and spars making a spiky leafless forest for the better part of a mile along the shore that sheltered it from the Atlantic swells. Most of them were several hundred yards offshore; they’d brought the steam ram closer in, so that it would have only a few feet to settle if it finally gave up the struggle for buoyancy.

The
Farragut
was looking a bit better than it had when they first arrived, mainly because the rails weren’t quite so close to the water; none of the portholes were submerged anymore, either. A trickle of black smoke came from its funnel to show that the boilers were still hot; the coal smut flowed skyward through holes punched in the sheet steel by grapeshot. The reason for keeping steam up was clear enough, as long fountains of seawater poured from the vents of the ship’s pumps. There were stretches of canvas and rope along the sides, where sails had been fothered under the keel to try and seal the leaking seams between the planks of her hull, and one paddle-housing was shattered and bent. A raft floated next to it, and the sound of sledgehammers and cutting chisels working on bent steel plates rang out like discordant bells. The scent of coal smoke drifted down to the watchers on shore, mingling with the brackish salt of the shoreside marshes.

“I want to get the boilers cool as soon as I can, so we can do some real work on them,” Trudeau went on. His hands were bandaged, and his naturally rather dark high-cheeked face had a reddish flushed look, with his blue eyes peering out like turquoise set in copper.

“The boiler’s frame seams parted during the blow—the supporting timbers flexed under the stress—and water started dripping down into the furnaces. It was wetting the coal, keeping the temperature down so we lost steam. God
knows
what happened when we started using the ram in the battle yesterday. Plus she spewed out most of her oakum.”

“What did you do about the boilers?” Swindapa asked, moving her mouth carefully. The left side of her face was a rainbow of colors from the bruising impact of the rifle butt, and a couple of teeth were still a little loose. “With the furnace, I mean.”

“We had to wrap some people up in water-soaked rags and send them in to slap clay putty on the worst leaks,” Trudeau said. “Nobody died, but a couple collapsed... that slowed us up, had to go in twice . . .”

“People went in while the furnaces were hot?” Victor Ortiz asked incredulously.
“Inside
the furnaces?”

Trudeau nodded. “Had to, Vic—
tabernac
, if we hadn’t, we’d have lost power completely and been driven onto the cliffs. The masts had already gone by the board, and besides that her seams were working so badly we’d have sunk without power to the pumps, it was like trying to go to sea in a sieve. As it was we were down to six knots and barely made it here in time.”

Alston spoke: “I think that was more a matter of
leading
the working party in than
sending
it, wasn’t it, Commander Trudeau?”

Trudeau had been a cadet when Eagle was caught in the Event. He still looked much younger than the twenty-nine he was when he blushed and shrugged. “Someone had to do it,” he said.

“But you did it,” she said, nodding and marking it down for later reference. Ortiz was grinning through his bandage. “I take it that the
Farragut
isn’t fit for duty anytime soon?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, she did well enough yesterday, Gary. The account’s in the black for a good long while.”

The circle of officers nodded, silent for a second. Marian felt her soul wince slightly, remembering the rowers screaming as the steel-plated bows of the steam ram crashed into the side of a galley and rode it under in a single wallowing rush. The severed halves had each risen like broken pencils sticking out of the ocean for a moment before they plunged, and in the same instant the ram caught another of the lightly built craft with charges of canister, leaving her riddled and sinking in water that turned red....

If it hadn’t been for one making a suicide run to fire its Dahlgrens into the port paddle wheels, not a single Tartessian galley would have escaped. She also remembered the sheer enormous feeling of
relief
as a tactical draw and strategic defeat turned into an unambiguous victory.

Mmm-hmmm,
she mused.
As it is, they got most of their galleys back, and four of their sail warcraft. Must have lost better than fifteen hundred men killed and wounded, though, and we took a thousand prisoners. That’s got to hurt.

The Islander losses had been a little over a tenth of that number, and
they
certainly hurt...
And we took all those cannon.

“Well, there’s no reason for the enemy to know that Farragut’s out of commssion for a while,” she said meditatively. “We’ll set up manual pumps... no, by God, what we’ll do is put one of the stationary engines on a raft and float it out. Ms. Kurlelo-Alston, see to it.” Swindapa nodded and made a note on her clipboard.

“The engines are coming ashore later today, Commodore,” the blond officer said, using the clipboard to point eastward. “Captain Trudeau, I’ll have to borrow your chief engineer?”

“Gladly, Ms. Kurlelo-Alston,” he said.

The five surviving frigates were anchored as well; working parties were swarming over them, setting up masts and rigging from the stores-ships, repairing the upperworks, pumping hard; they’d haul them ashore one at a time to do permanent patches on the holes below the waterline, and in a week or so they’d be good as new. There were five schooners as well, but two of them would need extensive overhauls out of the water.

“Captain Galen, you’ll take
Sherman
up to La Coruna and escort the
Merrimac
and the collier south,” she said, picking the commander of the least damaged large warship. “On the next tide; transfer powder and shot from the other frigates’ magazines to save time, and enough people to bring you up to full complement. We can keep a schooner on picket duty off Tartessos, and ultralights of course. Mr. Haddon.”

The commander of the transports stepped forward and saluted, looking a little self-conscious. He was a reservist, a stocky man in his mid-forties with a gray-shot beard, a yachtsman before the Event and a merchant skipper on the Baltic run in peacetime. He’d brought his ship in to relieve the
Chamberlain
without a moment’s hesitation, though.

“Ma’am?”

She returned the gesture. “Mr. Haddon, as soon as the troops and stores are disembarked, I want the troop-transports to make sail for home; except for four—all over two hundred and fifty tons—who’ll be dispatched to Westhaven for another supply run. How soon?”

“Ah ... two days, ma’am. We’re really very well found now, for the most part. Four ships ... that’s more than enough.”

The old custom of Marque and Reprisal had been revived with a vengeance for this war, and wherever Islander merchantmen met Tartessian, they fought. There weren’t any major enemy warships abroad, though, so four big Nantucketer ships ought to be fairly safe.

“Good.” She tapped two fingers on her chin; putting hands behind her back hurt, given the wounds she’d picked up.
Let’s see
...

In her birth-century and for a millennia and more before that, Cadiz was a peninsula on the southern coast of Spain, just southeast of the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. Here it was a narrow scrub-covered offshore island nearly eight miles long, just southeast of a vast shallow bay that reached inland nearly to the site of Seville-that-wasn’t. The landward side was a narrow channel a mile or two across at its northern end, with salt marsh and pinewoods on the mainland giving way to low rolling hills of oak-savanna and grass, both turning green with the autumn rains, and a few villages of fishers and farmers. The island itself was a sandbank rising to a central spine of low hills—not unlike Nantucket, some of the wags had noted—with a few smaller ones not far away. The only stone was on the western verge, where a few shallow reefs ran up out of the Atlantic swells; doubtless they were what had caught the sand drifting with the longshore current in the first place.