On the Oceans of Eternity (54 page)

In the stretch upstream of the First Cataract lived the Nubians, who were unambiguously
black,
blacker than McAndrews, and so were Kushites south of them—but those were exploited colonies of the Egyptian kingdom, held down by forts and garrisons. Power here lay in the lower Nile valley. Ramses was only the second of his line to be born Pharaoh; his grandfather had been a lucky soldier, and his family were pretty typical of the northeastern Delta area.

Pharaoh flashed him a smile. “Still no pain, Mek-Andrus!” he exclaimed, flicking a finger against one of his teeth. “For the first time in twenty inundations, no pain!”

“Pharaoh is generous,” McAndrews said. “Generous beyond my worth.”

And the second part of that is a lie, mutha’,
he thought at the offical beside him, who was radiating wholehearted agreement with the polite falsehood.

“I eat like a young man again,” Pharaoh said happily, as a man might who’d had abscesses and eight teeth worn down to the nerve pulp. “I tear at meat like a lion!”

That had been another shock. He just hadn’t expected these people to be so fucking
backward
about something so simple. Egyptians had what passed for advanced medical skills in this era; their doctors were much in demand, or had been before the rise of Great Achaea. What they didn’t have was the slightest knowledge of dentistry. Plus their bread was full of grit.

A dentist trained by Walker’s man, some bridgework and caps, ether to make it painless ...

That was the smartest thing I ever did,
the black man thought. It had won him the gratitude of Pharaoh, and a dozen other great men.
Maybe it makes up for being stupid enough to let Walker con me in the first place.

Pharaoh leaned back on his throne. It was supported on either side by golden lions, and the back was a great golden falcon with lapis eyes, whose wings were raised protectively over User-Ma’at-Ra. The wall behind him had a mud-brick core—all secular buildings here did. stone was for tombs, temples, and the Gods. But every inch of its two-story height was covered in tilework, whose glazing shimmered like thin-sliced sapphires and rubies and emeralds in the light that streamed from the small high clerestory windows.

So were the flanking walls; the huge faience murals showed one of Ramses’s favorite stories, his victory at Kadesh more than thirty years before. Bow drawn to his ear, bedizened stallions prancing before his chariot, the Pharaoh charged to victory over tumbled, fleeing Hittites. It was all busy and gaudy beyond words, like a fifties Hollywood Technicolor costume drama, and about as truthful.

Our Son of Ra got his semi-divine ass kicked at Kadesh,
McAndrews knew; the city was still part of the Hittite Empire and Ramses had barely gotten out alive. You didn’t mention it, if you wanted to remain healthy.

And God
—
my mother’s God, not the God-damned things with goat’s heads here
—
but I am so sick of living in places where I could be taken out and killed on one man’s whim.

“So,” Ramses went on cheerfully. “The reports speak well of your armory.”

“Truly Pharaoh sees with the eye of Horus,” McAndrews said. “The iron furnaces, the waterwheels, the rolling and slitting mill and boring machines, all the things necessary to equip the armies of Pharaoh with
rifles
continue. Ships are building in Thebes as fast as timber can be procured and shipwrights trained in the new methods. The cannon-foundry here in your city of Pi-Ramses makes more of the great guns, and will make still more if the bronze can be found.”

He cast a sidelong glance at the vizier, whose responsibility it was to find the metal.

The bureaucrat coughed discreetly. “Perhaps it would be better if the powder mill and gunshops could also be transferred here,” he said. “To have them so far south out of the way, near a turbulent frontier province like Kush ...”

McAndrews shrugged. “Then they would not work, eminent Vizier,” he said. “They need fast-flowing water to turn the wheels. The First Cataract is the nearest place with such rapids. And the iron ore is there, too.”

Pharaoh leaned forward. “And the training of men to fire the
rifles?
How goes that?”

“Chosen of Ra, I have been working closely with Djehuty of the Brigade of Seth, and with your son the Great General of the Armies. We now have a battalion trained every month.”

Ramses nodded. “It seems so swift ...”

“Favored of Amun, a rifle not only strikes faster and harder than a bow, it is much easier to learn.”

Good archers had to be virtually born at it; any peasant pulled from the plow could learn a musket in a couple of months.

“Already we have employed both the rifles and the cannon against your enemies to the southward.”

Pharaoh nodded: “We have seen the reports of the damage wrought. They are all your first demonstrations led me to believe.”

His fist descended slowly on his knee. “Kashtiliash in Babylon and Tudhaliyas in Hattusas have both sent to me, and this upstart from nowhere Jared Cofflin, they have all sent insolent insults, demanding that I give up your person, Mek-Andrus. To so demand you is to demand that Egypt have none of the new weapons! The weapons Kashtiliash used to conquer the Assyrians and Elamites, and which the King of Men has used to spread his power over the Sea Kingdoms. Do they think me a fool? Do they think I will leave the Two Lands bound, naked and helpless?”

That didn’t seem to call for any comment. Then Ramses went on: “But now I can meet all of them on equal terms.”

“Strong Bull, it is my grief that this is not so,” McAndrews said, reckless of Pharaoh’s frown. “At present, we have only the simpler of the new weapons.”

Muzzle-loading minié rifles, basic bronze cannon, iron blades, some improvements like better chariot harness; Civil War-era matériel, or earlier.

How to put it so Ramses could understand? You couldn’t even say “interchangeable parts” in Egyptian.

“The weapons we have are to the ones the King of Men has ... as a simple bow of wood is to the bow of a chariot fighter, strengthened with horn and sinew.”

Ramses scowled again. “How long until we have the best of weapons? Nothing less is acceptable to My person!”

“Divine Horus, I have been here only one year and a few months. To make the things we need, more machines must be built and more men trained; this is not a matter of rounding up peasants to chop stone and haul dirt. It is more like training a goldsmith. Not less than one more year to produce what Great Achaea does now; perhaps as many as three. I tell the Lord of the Great House that which is true, not soothing lies.”

The vizier’s expression showed what he thought of
that.
Ramses was a little uncertain; but then, he’d spent his whole life wondering if people would tell him only what he wanted to hear.

“Work unceasingly,” Ramses ordered. “Be vigilant for Pharaoh’s interests!” And then more bowing and scraping, until he could get away.

Household slaves handed him his weapons belt, and he unhitched the Gold of Valor and handed it to one of his own retainers with a word of thanks, supressing a grunt of relief at not having the twenty-pound weight around his neck. Otherwise, Egyptian clothes made a lot of sense for the climate.

Right now the
katana
and Walkeropolis-made revolver were a lot more reassuring than a gong; there had been two assassination attempts already. Pharaoh’s favor didn’t necessarily protect you from a knife in the back.

Goddamn Egyptians,
he thought, stepping into his chariot.

The driver flicked up the horses, wheeling them about in the broad paved forecourt. McAndrews’s own retainers rose from where they’d squatted on their hams with weapons across their knees. They bowed to him and swung into the saddle, the butts of their rifles again resting on their thighs, thumbs ready to draw back the hammers and eyes wary.

They were all Nubians or Kushites or from further south, and all ex-slaves. It turned his stomach to bid in a slave market, but buying men and then treating them well, and freeing them for good behavior, was the only really quick way of getting loyal followers here. Particularly if you didn’t have any hereditary clout. Many of them were from the estates in the far south that Pharaoh had granted him, winning favor for their families as well as themselves.

The party took off in a spurt of gravel. This end of the palace quarter of Pi-Ramses was all gardens and pools and canals. The great colored mass of the palace was to the northward, and beyond that the Temple of Wadjet, the Cobra Goddess; another pile of masonry to the east honored Hathor-Isis-Astarte; south was the Temple of Seth and west was Amun. Those two were the primary patrons of the Ramesside dynasty, and he’d gone to considerable lengths to pacify their priesthoods.

“
God-
damned
Egyptians,”
he muttered aloud—in English, as they passed a forty-foot-tall colossus of Ramses, carved from Aswan granite and overlaid with sheet gold; it hurt the eyes to look at it.

Swearing in English was a bit of a safety valve.
Will they listen to me? No, they will not listen. What does a foreigner know?

Oh, they’d take
some
things he offered gladly: gunpowder, cannon, iron weapons and armor, stirrups. The Hyksos conquest still lived in memory, when they’d been caught napping by the first horse-and-chariot: army to reach the Nile valley. Weapons they’d take, and things necessary to make the weapons.

But, say, a wind pump to replace peasants with
shadoofs,
or alphabetic writing? The Gods forbid! The scribes had been even more horrified when he pointed out that twenty-six symbols from their own writing system would convey all the sounds of Egyptian, and reduce the schooling time for literacy from twelve years to six months. He strongly suspected some of them were behind one of the failed assassins. Products of the scribal schools dominated the whole bureaucracy of the kingdom; they all had a vested interest in keeping up the value of their expensive training, and the tricks of a civil service two thousand years old let them tie you in knots without breaking a sweat.

The Gods alone knew who the other knifeman had been working for, which made him even more nervous. He’d taken on a food taster recently.

Arithmetic? Rule-of-thumb worked for grandpa, so away with outland gibberish; same for real paper, no matter how much cheaper and better than papyrus. He’d demonstrated a simple rotary quern for grinding grain, and met flat, blank disinterest, or contempt—did the dumb nigger barbarian think that Egypt didn’t have enough slave girls to rub two rocks together?

No, that’s not quite fair,
he made himself acknowledge. It wasn’t really his skin color they held against him; it was the fact he wasn’t Egyptian. If you tried really hard to assimilate, they’d accept a foreigner ... or maybe his kids or grandkids. But you had to accept that Egypt was the center of everything and home of absolutely everything worthwhile.

For the first time in his life he felt some sympathy for British imperialists—at least in nineteenth-century China.

Yeah, the Confucian bureaucrats kept calling all the Brit emissaries “tribute bearers” from the “barbarian vassal Victoria.
”
You were from the Middle Kingdom, or you were a dumb-ass barbarian-no box marked “other. ”

Egyptians of this era made those Manchu mandarins look like web junkie change-aholics. There were times when he day-dreamed about sailing a gunboat up the Water of Ra—the Canoptic branch of the Nile—and blowing the vizier’s residence sky-high with a few shells from an eighteen-pounder, himself. Lately that had replaced strangling William Walker as his favorite fantasy.

The chariot trotted out of the high, blank, whitewashed wall that surrounded the palace complex and onto a long avenue lined with sphinxes; most bore the head of Ramses, although some had that of a curl-horned ram, the symbol of Amun, with little statues of Ramses tucked under their chins.

Yeah, the symbolism runs from
I am God
to
God Really Likes Me.
Hot shit.

Pi-Ramses was a planned city, and only about forty years old; it had many processional ways like this, as well as plenty of twisting, slimy alleys in the poorer quarters. The streets here were quiet; now and then a noble lady with her parasol-bearer sheltering her from the sun, a shaven-headed priest with a leopardskin over his shoulder, a Libyan mercenary in cloak and penis sheath, a Syrian merchant with curled beard and long striped wool robe and train of porters, or slaves from as far away as Punt or Alba on errands. Sometimes a unit of spearmen or archers or musketeers marched along to the beat of a drum. Those were like a horizontal bongo slung around the musician’s neck, beaten with the hands; a glittering fan-shaped standard on a pole went before.

McAndrews’s own town villa wasn’t far from the palace, a mark of favor. It had a perimeter wall, too, enclosing stables, gardens, ornamental pools, pillared halls—all on a smaller scale than the palace, of course, but that must be like living in a monster hotel. This was something altogether more civilized, once he’d installed Achaean-made water filters, shower, bath, and flush johns. And given everyone a dose for worms.

He’d
almost
gotten used to the lack of privacy a great man had to endure in this era. It was still a relief when he was alone in the north loggia—alone except for Miw-Sherri. She smiled and handed him a cup of pomegranate juice, a slender brown girl in a long sheath dress banded in bright colors. That and the gold necklace set off skin one shade darker than his. She was a daughter of Ramses himself, not by a Great Wife or even acknowledged concubine, of course; informally, by a harem attendant. It was still a major honor, another sign of Pharaoh’s favor ...