On the Oceans of Eternity (98 page)

“Yeah, man,” he said quietly to Arnstein. “Came in about an hour ago—didn’t want to mention it, while, like, you-know-who was here. Don’t want to tempt him to pile up any more bad karma, you know? Figure he’s used to you staying over on visits by now.”

Arnstein fought down trembling eagerness while he ate, the food sitting leaden on his stomach.

“Hey, you dudes gotta remember to eat your vegetables,” Martins went on earnestly, looking down-table at his followers. “Natural fibers’re essential to, like, cleaning out your impurities. Too bad we ain’t got any brown rice.”

The journeymen and apprentices looked a little bewildered. Vegetables were poverty foods here; the great nobles ate meat and some bread and fruit, and success was defined by how closely you could imitate them. They obediently shoveled down steamed cauliflower and broccoli with cheese sauce nonetheless.

If he suggested they paint themselves blue, they’d probably do that too,
Ian thought whimsically. It was interesting to speculate on what the blacksmith subculture was going to be like here in a generation or two.

He managed to make himself wait until the ice cream was carried in-even then he couldn’t resist snagging a bowl-and headed up the stairs. His anticipation was enough to overcome his usual revulsion at the long-bearded carved dwarves who upbore the balustrade. In his room he turned up the lanterns on the working table and took up the leather satchel tossed carelessly on the quilt—hidden in plain sight.

The heavy coarse paper of the envelope crackled around his fingers as he broke the seals. Within was a sheet written in a hand he recognized; for a moment he simply sat with the letter in his hand. Then he set it down and read:

“King’s pawn to...”

He smiled.
Now,
there’s
a cipher.
A substitution code, based on their favorite responses to the listed chess moves. Cryptographers back up in the twentieth could probably break it fairly easily, with their supercomputers and staffs of experts. Walker-or even Mittler? I
don’t think so.

Further inside the packet was another, and he lifted out the infinitely precious treasure; not forgetting to put his ice-cream bowl on the other side of the room and wash and carefully dry his hands first with the jug-basin-towel set provided.

“Oh, excellent,” he said softly.

The watermark was perfect; mainly because it
was
Great Achaea’s royal watermark, and that of the Temple of the Threefold Hekate. The handwriting was near-perfect, too; Walker’s smooth hand with the little extra pressure on the “t,” a very occasional splotch where too much pressure was applied.

Got a bit of buried anger there, Walker-me-lad, bubbling under that smooth exterior.
And Alice Hong’s.
Slants backward. Ooooh, look at those spiky i’s and the little horns on the w’s. Classic. Got some unassimilated trauma lurking around there, don’t you, you monstrous little bitch?

“Well, come on now, Ian,” he said.
Now I’m channeling Doreen. This place is driving me crazy.
“It’s not really their writing, just a very very good imitation.”

God, that was even her
style,
the giggling little-girl descriptions of how she planned to “operate” ... did anyone really still use words like “wee-wee” for penis? The choice of words was perfect, worth all the effort and risk of getting samples. Walker’s people had been pretty good about destroying documents with important
information.
They’d been much less careful about casual notes concerning nothing in particular. The Walker was good, too:

The date was in April ... Yes, by God, April 1. That was the crowning touch.

“Of course, that means we have to have a victory about then for these to fit. Not a problem; if we don’t by then, Odikweos won’t move, nohow.”

And he himself would die. Most probably exactly the way pseudo-Hong described in these precious pages. They’d been taken from real life, after all.

 

There were at least a hundred bodies around the gates, lying in the inevitable posture of the dead left on a battlefield—backs arched and limbs splayed as decay and gas build-up had their way with them. Brigadier McClintock grunted as he swung his binoculars back and forth. It was a common scene in Sicily, this February of the Year 11.

“What did they do, just charge right in?” he said.

“That’s exactly what they did,” Marian Alston-Kurlelo replied grimly, not taking her field glasses from her eyes.

The wind shifted and brought the gagging reek strongly down the road that wound up to the fort. She decided she was getting very sick of the smell of rotting human flesh combined with the bitter scents of burning. The damp freshness of the Sicilian upland winter and the bright sunlight through sky washed clean by yesterday’s rain made it worse. Birds hopped and heaved and squabbled around the bodies; Walker must have given them this type of feast on a regular basis.

She shifted her attention to the countryside ’round about.
Not very Sicilian,
she thought.

Eagle
had been through the Mediterranean several times before the Event, on training-show-the-flag voyages; a tall ship made great PR. Central Sicily in the twentieth was a wasteland of rock, scrubby maquis and scraggly crops, and the tumbled remains of worked-out mines. Makers of spaghetti Westerns used it as a good stand-in for Arizona, and it was full of crumbling gray villages where the only living things were ancient crones in black tottering along under huge bundles of brushwood. Or sitting and staring at you with hooded, bitter eyes.

Here it was a sea of branches, oak and hazelnut and pine shaggy on the sides of the hills, giving way to savannas of scattered trees and tall green grass on the flats. Some land had been cleared for contour-plowed fields of wheat and barley and clumps of fig and olive and soft fruits around the remains of a megaron-hall, an Achaean-style manor house; that was still smoldering, along with its outbuildings. She pointed a little further, to another collection of wrecked structures—most of those long, low-slung
ergastulae,
half-underground slave barracks surrounded by a fence of spiked bars and overlooked by the stump of a watchtower. Beside them was an ugly yellow gash on the side of the hill, pockmarked with the black mouths of tunnels, and a short thick smokestack.

“Sulfur mine,” she said. “And see the collection of crosses around it?”

“Surely do,” McClintock said tightly. “So the miners came up here and hit the fort after they’d finished off the overseers?”

“Overran the
latifundia
there first; probably a lot of the slaves from there joined them, and then they came helling up the road and tried to do the same here. The Achaeans were waiting for them, by then. Probably they were drunk ... or just drunk on the prospect of getting their own back.”

McClintock nodded tightly. Under Walker, the Achaeans had done their best to turn the whole island into a giant plantation, with gangs of slaves pumping out wheat and wool and cotton, sulfur and asphalt and timber for his projects. The process was far from complete, he’d had only a little more than half a decade, but it had gone a long way. They’d overrun a couple of labor camps that made even the mines look good.

“That fort would be expensive,” he said after a moment. “Even with a good road, we’ll have trouble getting enough artillery here and in range. They’ve got some of those ... what are they called ...”

“It’s a rip-off of a French weapon called the Montigny Miltrailleuse—from the 1860s. A bunch of barrels clamped together, bullets in a plate you slide into the breech and fire with a crank. The Achaean word translates as
quickshooter.”

“Those, yeah, in those bunkers around the perimeter. Mortars in the courtyards-see the craters on the hill slopes? No dead ground around here. Rocket launchers ... Ma’am, it’ll take a regular siege. I’d need at least a battalion, and, oh, six of the five-inch rifles ... take a couple of weeks.”

Marian nodded. “The problem is there are dozens of forts like this. That’s why they built them in the first place, to nail down the countryside.”

For that matter, there were a couple of pretty large areas where the Achaean settlers had come out on top against the slaves and natives, even with the Islanders providing weapons and backup. And Syracuse was still holding out.

“Well, what do we do, then, ma’am?”

She smiled grimly. The Islanders hadn’t exactly taken over Great Achaea’s Sicilian colony by landing and proclaiming liberation. They
had
turned it into a three-cornered exercise in massacre and countermassacre, as natives and slaves and Achaeans fought each other like crabs in a bucket. It reminded her of what she’d read about Haiti during the slave uprising there in the 1790s, years of terror and madness. However discouraging the Nantucketers’ problems looked, she didn’t think the other factions felt particularly victorious, either.

“I’m a hammer,” she said. “I see problems as nails—even big, badass nails like that.” A jerk of her chin at the fort. “The chief has a different approach. That’s what I’m going to Syracuse for, to give it a try. And to see what they’ve been doing with the Fleet in my absence.”

 

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Hiller said.

The longboat pitched easily, the crew leaning on their oars. The Great Harbor of Syracuse stretched around them, most of the shore swampy and noisy with duck and flamingos and spoonbills, adding a silty smell of marsh to the clean salt breeze. Water shone blue-purple, shading to emerald over shoal and sandbank. The Islander fleet was further away from the enemy guns, anchored in neat rows with a busy commerce of small craft and rafts shuttling back and forth to shore.

“We hit a mine, that’s all I can say,” Hiller went on. “Hit a couple, but the first two were duds. The third wasn’t, and it blew a hole just back from the bows you could drive an oxcart through. It’s a miracle we got most of the engine-room gang out.”

Marian nodded; she knew what the words hid. The sudden inrush of water, like a wet avalanche down a hull with no interior bulkheads. The crew struggling up the ladders in darkness, with the roar of water and the toning sounds of the boilers’ self-destruction all around them as cold sea met hot steel....

“Lucky it was shallow and not many of their guns bore on it,” he said.

“Not really luck; that’s why they put the mines there.”

In another history, during the eighth century before Christ, settlers from Corinth would have landed on the island they called Ortygia, and founded the city later known as Syracuse. Here it had been the seat of a local chief, until William Walker led Achaeans spearheaded by his rifle-armed troops here to conquer. The fortifications had probably started right away, and judging by the piles of stone were still going on. As she watched a ripple of smoke puffs ran along one of the slanting walls. Seconds later the dull flat
booommm
of heavy cannon came, and water began to gout skyward in columns of green and shattered white near the grounded ironclad. That was a small target, only the casement showing above the surface. Seconds later the ship’s own broadside guns replied, their rifled barrels giving them a harder, sharper bark. Stone shattered where they struck and avalanched downward. Then the long forward six-inch gun fired, sending its heavy shell past the island and into the town proper.

“Eleven-inch Dalghrens,” Hiller said. “We get ammunition and supplies to the
Eades
at night in small boats, and volunteers, and bring others out for rest. So far she’s given as good as she’s got, but eventually they’ll pound her to pieces, since she can’t move. Quicker, if they get that damned heavy mortar moved ...”

Alston’s eyes went to the civilan settlement around the head of the causeway. That was fortified as well, excellent low-slung works behind a deep moat and glacis. The Islander artillery on the heights of Epipolai beyond still bore on the city below, the distant slamming-door sound of its firing echoing across the water. Then came the long whistling fall, and another tall billow of pulverized adobe, timber, stone, and people. They were densely packed in there, too; Achaean colonists had fled here from all the province around. Crowds of Sicel natives and slave rebels sprawled near the orderly tent-rows and earthworks of the Republic’s Marines.

“Not a problem, if ... there,” Alston said, looking down at her watch.

A rocket went up from the fortress on Ortygia, bursting green. The same signal came up from the Islander works ashore, and from the bridge of the
Farragut,
where she patrolled off the line of anchored frigates and transports.

“Head us in for the landing grounds, if you please, Mr. Hiller.”

Her command tent wasn’t big enough for the delegates this time; they met on a piece of sloping ground. They’d all agreed to come unarmed, trusting to Alston’s reputation for keeping strictly to the terms of agreements. Nantucketer Marines separated the three parties, Achaeans and native Sicilians and up-risen slaves.

Although the Achaeans look like they need protecting from
each other, Marian noted with cold amusement as dagger glances went back and forth. Not really
all Achaeans
,
either; lot
of Walker’s
mercenaries
are from all over.