On the Oceans of Eternity (27 page)

The Babylonian leaned back in his throne; chairs with backs were a rare luxury here, and this was carved with figures of gods and protective genii in ivory, its arms supported by gilded lion-centaurs, its feet the paws of lions with claws of gold.

“And if I demand this woman’s head?” he said softly, his thick-wristed swordsman’s hands gripping the carved ivory.

“That, Lord King, you must not do.” Hollard said, standing at parade rest.

There was a gasp from the Babylonians; “must” was not a word used to the King of the Four Quarters, who held the life of every man in his hand.

“Before this woman was known to the King, I extended the Republic’s protection over her,” Hollard went on. “If her presence is an affront to the King, we will, of course, remove her from the Land of Kar-Duniash. Likewise, if my presence offends the King, he may demand that the Republic replace me as commander of allied forces here.”

“You are a bold man,” Kashtiliash said.

“The Republic honors its word. 0 King, and I am its servant—we bow to no man, but to the Law we are obedient. If the Republic broke its bond to this woman, whatever her faults, could we be trusted to keep it with you?”

Silence stretched. Then the fierce hawk-face of the Kassite monarch split in a harsh grin, teeth very white against the dense black beard.

“You are also a man of honor,” he said, his fist thumping the gilded wood of the throne’s arm. “Know that the word of the King of Kar-Duniash is also something that is not dust to be blown in the wind; it cannot be altered.” His eyes went to Kathryn. “And if my sons are such men as you, it will be well for the realm. Approach.”

Hollard did. Kashtiliash rose and gripped hands in the American gesture, then offered his cheek.
And while I appreciate the gesture,
the Nantucketer thought—it made him technically one of the Royal Kindred—
I
still
feel damned silly kissing a guy on the cheek.

“There—we have regularized your bad manners,” Kashtiliash said; the Royal Kindred were not required to prostrate themselves. It was a rare honor.

The Babylonian ruler sank back on his throne and fastened his eyes on the Mitannian princess. “Rise, Raupasha daughter of Shuttarna, and hear the judgment of the King.” He leaned forward, one elbow on a knee.

“The King’s servant awaits his word,” Raupasha said, rising gracefully and standing with her head bowed under the metallic glitter of a shawl sewn with golden sequins.

“You have served my House well,” he said. “In the matter of Tukulti-Ninurta my great foe, who you slew; in the matter of Shagarakti-Shuriash my father, whose life you preserved. Because of this, and for reasons of State, I am inclined to be merciful. Once. Do you understand me, Raupasha daughter of Shuttarna?”

“My Lord King’s humble servant dares to think she understands his thought, and will strive always to do his will in the future.”

Thank yoooou, Lord Jesus,
Hollard thought, smelling his own sweat.
We don’t have time for this sort of complication. Troy’s under siege already.

“Good,” Kashtiliash said. He nodded regally. “You will both attend the King’s feast this night. Tomorrow we will begin to plan the resumption of the war in the North.”

“W
hy fire?” Tidtaway said suddenly, pointing to the columns of smoke rising from the settlement; he’d been hanging back, listening intently, but Peter Giernas had no idea how much he’d followed.

“Fire to burn out sickness,” he said, and the Indian nodded.

An hour after he’d burned the dead village the expedition crouched by a fire on the ridge above. Dark smoke rose into the air from the lovely valley, and Peter Giernas shivered again as he thought of what the flames fed upon.

“Death like you can’t imagine,” he said. “Men, women, children ... death.”

“You’ve seen it before?” Jaditwara asked quietly.

“Ayup, back East, among the Sea-Land tribes, the Lekkansu and their kin, ’flu, in the Year 2—chickenpox the next year, and again the year after.” He shivered again, hugging his shoulders. The soft leather of his second hunting shirt crinkled under his fingers. “I wasn’t there when the measles hit, thank Christ.”

That
plague had traveled from band to band as far as the Great Lakes and Florida. His head came up, and his eyes caught Sue’s.

“This didn’t look like any of them, though. Some of the bodies were pretty fresh.”

He described the marks, the red pustulent sores, skin and flesh peeling away in layers when the victims had tossed and writhed in the delirium of high fever—and probably of thirst, for there had been none to tend the last of the dying. From the looks, everyone had crowded in around the sick to comfort them, at first; most locals had that custom. Before the Event this had been a continent without much in the way of epidemic disease. Some VD, yes, and plenty of arthritis and whatnot, but not contagious fevers.

“That’s not measles or chicken pox,” Sue said quietly. She’d had some training, and was the closest thing they had to a doctor since Henry Morris decided to stay with the Cloud Shadow people after his leg healed. “I think ... Pete, I think that was smallpox.”

Giemas nodded, raised his eyes to meet Spring Indigo’s; they were huge pools of darkness holding a terror controlled by an iron will. She hugged her child against the breast he fed from.

“I told you a little,” he said. “About how our diseases can be so deadly to the people of these lands.”

She nodded. “But husband ... you said there were medicines to protect our son?” she said softly.

“And you, honey. There are in Nantucket. Not here.”,

They had vaccines for chicken pox and measles now, and there hadn’t been more outbreaks of influenza since the Year 3; the doctors said the population wasn’t big enough to keep it going, and that new strains had mostly come from Asia before the Event anyway. That didn’t help people outside the regular Islander contact points much, but he’d get Spring Indigo and Jared done as soon as they reached Nantucket Town, and they ought to be all right—especially if they settled off-Island, which was what he’d planned. He’d lived in Providence Base on the mainland since it was established, anyway, right after the Event. Most of his family worked in the sawmills there.

And nobody has smallpox on Nantucket, for Christ’s sake! Nobody we’ve run into, either. That we know of.
One thing that this trip had driven home was how little they knew, though. The ones who’d set out from the Island were vaccinated; otherwise, they might have been nearly as vulnerable as the locals.

“Not everyone would have died,” Sue said. “Ninety percent, maybe, if they were unlucky, from what the books said and what we’ve seen on the mainland near Nantucket. But not
everybody.”

Giernas nodded; that was the worst of it. In a virgin-field epidemic a lot of people would be too weak to move within hours, but some would be strong enough to travel for a week or so, and at least a few would take the disease but recover. Those who could run would have, run to neighbors and kinfolk, and the same thing would happen
there,
and—

And half the humans living west of the Sierras could die in the next six months. Maybe three-quarters or more. Nor was that all.

“Don’t forget that hoofprint,” he said.

“Your people?” Tidtaway asked, his face unreadable.

“No.” Giemas shook his head emphatically. “No, I know all the outposts of our folk and there are none near here ... bringing horses here by ship would be
hard.
Not worth it for a brief visit, and I don’t think our ships have even done that.”

The Islanders looked at each other. Not likely to be William Walker’s men, for which they all thanked their various Gods, not while he was pinned in the Mediterranean. Isketerol’s would be bad enough....

 

“Well, hell,” Peter Giernas muttered very softly to himself, in the topmost branch of the valley oak that would support his two hundred pounds.

Valley oak ran to big branches; he was sixty feet up, lying on his belly with his long legs wound around the limb below him, screened behind a flickering barrier of green leaves. That was distracting while he peered through the binoculars, but much safer. He’d also taken care with the sun angles to make sure the lenses wouldn’t flash and betray him. Now he handed the instrument up to Jaditwara, who could get a good deal higher.

She took them silently, sweat running down her face from the fur cap that covered her buttercup-colored hair, hair that
nobody
would think was a local Indian’s if they saw it through a telescope. The Fiernan woman raised them to her eyes, hand moving slightly as she scanned, then let them drop to hang on her chest, made a correction to the drawing on the big pad before her, repeated the process with exquisite care.

Giernas stared in the same direction, although without the glasses his target was simply a dark blur in the distance, north beyond the river in the middle distance. It was the only break in the dead-flat plain ahead, until the abrupt volcanic pimple of Sutter’s Buttes ten miles nortwestward, and unlike those it was man-made. Every detail was burned into his memory.

The Tartessian settlement sat north of the point where the Yuba River flowed down from the mountains and joined the Feather. Everything looked normal on
this
side of the river. The alienness started on the other shore. Furthest out from the settlement were herds of sheep, cattle, horses, sounders of swine rooting around in the tule-reed marsh by the water’s edge. Mounted herdsmen directed locals on foot, and he could see enough of the riders to know that they were white men. The fort-town stood well back from the river, on a natural levee. Not very big, a couple of acres surrounded by a ditch full of sharpened spikes, a turf-sided earth wall twenty feet or so high, with corner bastions of squared logs snouting cannon— twelve-pounders, he thought, though it was hard to be precise. There might well be rocket launchers and mortars inside, of course. There was certainly a wooden palisade all around atop the wall, black-oak logs tightly placed and trimmed to points, about twenty feet tall—probably the butts of the trunks were rammed seven or eight feet deep, with bracing and a fighting platform behind. He could see an occasional flash of metal from along the row of sharp points. Soldiers with Westley-Richards rifles like his.

All in all not very formidable, if there were any way for the Republic’s armed forces to get
at
it, which at present there wasn’t. Even in peacetime getting an expedition here would be a stone bitch, assuming you could get the Meeting to put up the money.

Against locals, this fortlet would be as invulnerable as steel and concrete, and it looked formidably permanent. As if to emphasize the fact, cultivated fields surrounded it, wheat and barley waist high in the warm sun, only a month from harvest; corn coming along well, alfalfa, vegetable plots, flax, a low scrubby bush that he thought might be cotton. And small orchards, vineyards showing long green shoots; they looked a little odd, goblet-trained rather than on T-stakes in the Islander manner.

Unlike the Republic, Tartessos wasn’t short of people, just people with the more complex of the new skills. The major cost for this would be tying up ships and navigators.

Hmmm. Lessee ...
The herds hadn’t been very numerous, except for the pigs, which bred like flies; the sheep were in-between. So, ship in young pregnant mares and cows and ewes, a few sows, with only a bull and a stallion and ram or two—

Ayup. Say eighty in the first batch, a medium-sized square-rigger craft could do that, allowing for wastage. Two round-trips in the first year, drop down to the Canaries and across, then down the trades, and allowing for a hard time around the Horn—three trips if you had good luck running your westing down. That would give you useful locally reared numbers of horses in four or five years. If you bred all the mares as soon as possible, the herd would grow by a quarter to a third every year. Likewise, make steers of most of the male cattle to use as oxen, and in six years ... In a generation, they’d have more than they could use, even with cougar and bear and wolf to deal with. Geometric progression started slow, but the curve went up fast.

Or to produce a surplus if there were less, but the Tartessians most
certainly
hadn’t come this far for food or farmland, no matter how wonderful. Apart from sticking a thumb in the eye of the much-resented Cofflin Doctrine, which banned outsiders from trading or making settlements in the Western Hemisphere without the Republic’s leave, what point was there in all this?

Fact is, I don’t know yet,
he thought ruefully. Decision:
We’ll have to do some scouting and sneaking and keyhole listening to find out.
Gathering information was a ranger’s job.

“Jaditwara,” he called softly. “I don’t see any real buildings outside the wall—do you?”

“Nothing but some sheds, haystacks, windmill pumps, that sort of thing,” she replied. “And the boatyard by the water.”

That meant everyone came back inside the walls at night. There was a jetty on the river, a mill with an undershot wheel and a boat shed, with smaller craft and a big two-masted flat-bottomed sailing barge that looked to be about eighty, maybe a hundred tons burden. Supplies must come in through San Francisco Bay, or more likely the barge took stuff
out
there, after a ship’s boat had come upriver to let them know, and came back with the return load. A minimum inbound cargo, metals and manufactures, the base as self-sufficient as possible. That was crafty. Even if a ship was caught out, there would be no evidence of anything but a casual visit.