On the Oceans of Eternity (20 page)

“How’s morale?” she said. “The civilian population, particularly.” Westhaven was under Islander law and had a Town Meeting of its own, but the situation was a bit irregular, constitutionally speaking.

“Excellent, so far,” Hendricksson replied. “Those posters Arnstein’s Foreign Affairs people sent over really whipped up feeling. I had to have our resident Tartessians put under guard for their own protection.”

Alston nodded impassively, hinding an inward wince. There were times when she felt ... not exacty guilty ... more like uneasy ... about some of the things they’d been forced to introduce to this era.

Potatoes are fine, antiseptic childbirth is wonderful, democracy and womens’ rights are excellent. I’m not so sure about the levee en masse, the Supreme General Staff and systematic propaganda,
she thought.

“I’m surprised they were
quite
so effective,” Hendricksson mused. “I mean, yah, yah, they were all
true,
but it was pretty blatant stuff. Maybe because they didn’t grow up with TV commercials?”

“Mmmm
-hmmmm.
People here aren’t ... immunized,” Alston said.

It wasn’t that the folk of this era were inherently gentler than those of the twentieth; what they didn’t have was the accumulated experience and examples and recorded thought of...

a lot more,
Alston thought.
War and politics are technologies, too. They evolve, in their Lamarckian fashion.

She remembered how amazed she’d been to find that the Romans had no real concept of intelligence work—it just didn’t occur to them to keep contact with an enemy, or set up a network of scouts and spies and information analysts. There were a thousand examples like that ...

“Good,” she said aloud, putting a hand on Hendricksson’s shoulder for a moment. “Gerta, this whole campaign depends on Westhaven. I can’t operate in the Straits of Gibraltar with a logistics train stretching all the way back to Nantucket Town. Portsmouth Base doesn’t have the facilities or the hinterland to supply the fleet.”

Hendricksson nodded in her turn. “The salt beef and dog biscuit will keep coming, Commodore, and the powder and shot.” Then she shrugged. “Everything takes longer and costs more, yah?”

“You said it, woman.” Alston smiled crookedly. The make-shifts they had to use were so damned
frustrating
at times. On
the other hand,
she thought snidely,
the squids always got the fancy stuff up in the twentieth;
the Coast Guard got used to
hand-me-downs and making do.

“We’ll manage here,” Hendricksson repeated.

“Excellent, but keep alert.” Their eyes both went up for a moment to the orca shape of the observation balloon that floated over the town on the end of its long tether. “Isketerol isn’t afraid to gamble. That attack on Nantucket in the spring was a bold one ... and just between me ’n’ thee, Greta, it came far too close to success for comfort. A little less warning, or if we hadn’t had the
Farragut
nearly ready to go, or if the weather hadn’t turned wet and drenched their flintlocks—it would have hurt us much more badly. I wouldn’t put it past him to try something else, particularly if he’s desperate.”

“We’ll manage here,” Hendricksson repeated, her face taking on a bulldog look as she glanced around the town whose building had been her lifework. Marian recognized it; people got
attached
to what they made themselves.

She sighed; now she had to go tell the captain of the
Merrimac
what they had in mind for his ship. “Speaking of which, now I’ve got to go and give Mr. Clammp the bad news.”

C
olonel O’Rourke had to admit that Barnes and her people didn’t waste time. The frenzy of work around the little base had died down by the dawn, barely fourteen hours after his arrival.

O’Rourke joined the line of Marines waiting for their breakfasts; regulations were that officers ate the same food as the troops in the field. For that matter, they ate much the same food at a base, save for social occasions, but in a different mess, for discipline’s sake.

He took a small loaf of fresh barley bread and a chunk of hard white cheese, and held out his mess tin. The cook scooped it full of barley porridge; they’d managed to find raisins for it, and some honey for sweetener. His nose twitched at the smells; it had been a long time since dinner, and that had been a couple of hardtack crackers and a strip of jerky with everyone busy pitching in to get the defenses ready. The outer wall made a good perch; he straddled it and set the food down, tearing the loaf apart. Steaming hot from the improvised clay ovens, it was good enough to eat without butter and went well with the cheese. He spooned up the porridge, washing it down with draughts of cold water; a good tube well had been the first thing the combat engineers had put in here.

The smells went well with the fresh clarity of early morning, and he watched the purple shadows running down the slopes of the hills and lifting from the dark pines on the higher shoulders.
Now, wouldn’t this be a terrible day to die,
he thought.

Captain Barnes and Hantilis came to join him. The Hittite had joined in the work readily enough, which did him credit.

“I am puzzled,” Hantilis said, between bites of porridge. “You work side by side with common soldiers, yet they obey you more promptly than my own warriors would—my
real
warriors, I mean, not those Kaska dogs. How can soldiers obey you, if they do not fear you as one placed on high above them, a man favored of the Gods?”

Cecilie chuckled. “Oh, they’re afraid of their officers, all right,” she said. O’Rourke helped with the translation; Barnes had no Hittite and very little Akkadian. “And even more, their sergeants.”

“We’re Marines,” O’Rourke amplified. “We’re all a band of brothers ...”

“And sisters,” Barnes put in.

“And sisters. But some of us are
elder
brothers, as it were. Everyone works, everyone fights, and everyone does what their superiors tell them to do.”

Hantilis shook his head in puzzlement. They finished and scoured their pannikins gleaming clean; the noncoms were checking that everyone did likewise, which was one important way to avoid food poisoning and assorted belly complaints.

“I’m off to sluice down while I have a chance,” Barnes said.

O’Rourke nodded distantly. He was going to feel rather embarrassed if nothing happened ... but it was better to be overprepared than under.

Hantilis’s head came up. A moment later the Nantucketer heard it as well.

“That
can’t
be a steam engine,” O’Rourke said. It was too far away, and too big. His head turned toward the lookout post higher up the mountain slope to the south.

 

“I don’t think much of the soil here,” Private Vaukel Telukuo said. He dug his bayonet into the turf beside him and ripped up a handful, looking critically at the dry reddish dirt that clung to its roots. “Too dry—not much weight to it, if you know what I mean.”

He was a tall sallow young man, dark of hair and eye, with a big nose and long bony jaw. His companion’s name on the rolls was Johanna Gwenhaskieths. He doubted that was anything her parents had given her;
gwenha
simply meant “woman” in the tongue of the eastern tribes, and
skieths
was “shield.” Shield-woman probably meant something like female warrior, which was odd when you considered that among the charioteers such weren’t merely rare, as they were among the Earth Folk, but except in stories virtually unknown.

Unknown until the Eagle People came,
he corrected himself.

Johanna was peering down the huge sweep of hillside below them, occasionally raising the field glasses they’d been issued when they were put on outpost duty; she was several inches shorter than he, her cropped hair so fair it was almost invisible, narrow eyes a cold gray.

“Nothing so far,” she said, and then dug a heel into the ground to reply to his first remark. “Not much like the fat black earth where I was born either ... but you don’t have to farm it, Vauk.”

“Ah, well, I thought I was tired of farming,” he said mildly. “Boring I thought it was, you know? But this soldiering, it’s boring too. And I miss my cattle.”

“I can stand boring,” she said; where his voice gave English a singsong burbling lilt, hers was choppy and hard. “They were going to bury me facedown in a peat bog, with a forked hazel branch over my neck to keep my ghost from walking. So walk I did, by night, to the Cross-God mission station. The priestess there got me into the Corps.” She crossed herself. “Honor to Him of the Cross, and His Father and Mother.”

“Now why would anyone do such a thing?” Vaukel said indignantly. “Drown you in a bog, that is.”

Johanna chuckled. “For spreading my thighs for a fine young warrior rather than a fat old man who had seven cows to give my father,” she said. “And here I am, with all the fine young warriors I could want, being one myself, and nobody to send me to the bog ... what’s that?”

They both frowned and looked westward. The sound was a deep rumbling beat, echoing off the hillsides and cliffs about them. “Sounds like...” Vaukel said slowly. “Sounds like a
drum,
doesn’t it?”

“The drum of a God.” Johanna said. “Or one of those machines of steam.” She brought the glasses up again, then blurted out a half sentence in her birth-tongue. In English: “Message to the base—”

When it was over and the reply came they snatched up their rifles, then the tripod with its tilt-mounted mirror that flashed coded sunlight. Vaukel put it over his shoulder, and they bounded and ran and tumbled down the steep slopes and then across the flat, running for the barley-sack ramparts of the little outpost.

“What’s up?” one of the pickets called to them.

Vaukel pointed westward. “Here they come!” he yelled. “Spears like stars on water, and thicker than the grass!”

* * *

“I wish we could just elope,” Justin Clemens said, dodging a rush of liquid garbage from a narrow second-story window.

The movement was a little jerky with nervousness. He consciously controlled his breathing; meeting prospective in-laws was bad enough, worse when they were foreign, worse still when you knew they and your fiancée had been feuding for years.

“Then we would not be married—not by the laws of the Land of Kar-Duniash,” said Azzu-ena.

He knew that brisk tone fairly well, by now. It was eighteen months since she’d talked him into taking her on as an apprentice, and two since he’d convinced her to marry him.

And ten years going on eleven since the Event.
Focus, you fool! he thought. She went on:

“I will not let my uncle and his she-demon grasp everything that was my father’s in their claws; their children I would not grudge it to, the little ones who love their cousin, but
I
will settle what they receive. And those two would neglect the funerary offerings for my father. Bad enough that he had no sons to make them. Come, betrothed, come.”

“Oh, all right,” Clemens grumbled, wiping his face with his bandanna; weather on the banks of the Euphrates was not easy for a man inclined to plumpness, even getting on toward winter. This sun wasn’t easy on the naturally pink, either; his floppy canvas campaign hat was welcome, and so was the shade of the blank-walled two-story buildings that lined the narrow twisting laneway. It didn’t help that he’d had to leave off shaving for the last two weeks, but everyone told him that it would be impossible to go into a marriage-contract discussion looking like a smooth-cheeked eunuch. The resultant growth was a bit lighter than the cropped sun-streaked brown hair on his head, which made him even more conspicuous. Plus it itched and caught sweat.

Nantucketers were no longer so rare in the streets of Babylon that they attracted a crowd—small children following along, yes, and stares, pointed fingers, more than a few gestures to avert the Evil Eye and baleful magic, hands gripping amulets or small images of the gods. Clemens looked about as he walked; he was more familiar with the everyday city than most of the Islander expeditionary force, since he’d been in charge of stopping the smallpox epidemic. This was still very different from the palace quarter where he spent most of his time when not in the field or down at the Republic’s outpost, Ur Base, near the mouth of the Euphrates. The street was narrow, twisting, deep in shadow and in dust at the tail end of summer, doubtless a quagmire of mud in the infrequent winter rains. An irregular trickle of sewage ran down the middle and insect-buzzing heaps of rubbish lay wherever a householder had dumped them.

Skinny feral dogs wound among the crowds, and an occasional pig even more lean and savage rooted among the offal; most Semites of this era had no taboo on hog products—though considering what the beasts ate, the Nantucketer very much wished they did. Most houses had a drain through their front walls, adding their trickle to the mess; Clemens hopped or strode over the rivulets as he walked, brushing at the omnipresent flies. The stink he’d gotten used to, mostly, but his doctor’s skin crawled at the thought of the germs swarming around him like a host of the invisible fever demons the locals believed in.

Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good metaphor for the disease environment here,
he thought. That was what happened when you crammed two hundred thousand people and a total ignorance of public hygiene together in a few hundred stagnant, blistering-hot acres.