On the Oceans of Eternity (64 page)

“Yes, my sire,” he said. “You will not regret your trust.”

“Good. Now, I must go to war. You are old enough to go with me, but it would be a hard day for the kingdom if we both fell. For now, watch carefully. Think on what I do ... and think on
why.”

“Sire!”

An hour later, Isketerol of Tartessos raised his hands in the chariot, acknowledging the cheers of his people. The horses paced slowly, prancing, their knees flashing high with every step.

“Long live the good King!”
he heard.
“Victory! Victory to our King! Arucuttag fight for the King! Death to the Eagle People! Death to the
Amurrukan!
Death to the Republic!”

The roar that followed was overwhelming, a passionate wall of sound that struck like cannonfire; the crowds pushed and heaved against the soldiers lining the roadway and holding them back. There must be nearly twenty thousand of them along the great processional way to the harbor, every free adult in the city and many from villages and farms and estates from the countryside around. Isketerol felt himself uplifted by the love and trust he saw on their faces, purified, as if his soul had been washed in a stream of mountain water. There might be reserve from the old families, and hate from foreigners, but the commons of his own people loved the King.

Had he not lifted them up, given them mastery and wealth and health, raised the burden of killing toil from their shoulders and preserved the lives of their children? Had he not written the laws down for all to see, so that a man need not accept the memory of a noble who might twist the words to his own gain? Had he not gone with gun and fire and sacrificial throat-knife against bandit and pirate and reaving mountain savage. so that every man might harvest his field and sleep easy knowing he would keep the fruits of it?

Rubber tires and steel springs made the journey down the smooth stone blocks of the road easy, which was well; he’d been too much at sea from his youth to ride easily in a chariot, and with the new stirrups and saddles it was a dying art save for ceremony. Fluttering cloak of Sidonian purple, helmet gilded and plumed, glittering gold on his chest, the snarling lion-heads on the hubs of the wheels, the silver and niello and jewels on the body of the car, all blazed like the harness of a God—made a brave show for the people, heartening them still further. He looked up; balloons were floating above the forts that guarded the entrances to the harbor, tethered by long cables. As he watched a heliograph flashed code from one to the ground, and he read it effortlessly.

Trained will kept his smile from turning into a snarl. No more than three ships had come back to Tartessos from the attack on Nantucket; if all went as he intended, not one of the Islander fleet would return from the Pillars of the Earth-House. The banners and pennants on the masts that crowded the harbor indicated the wind; a bit south of west, not the most favorable but not impossible either.

Should I make them come to me here?
he mused again, for the thousandth time. Then:
No, my first thought was best. If we beat them at sea, all is won. If we are defeated, we can retire here behind the guns of the forts—that is a nut they will break their teeth on. But we will not be defeated—

The other priests waited by the dockside, with the sacrifices for the Sun Lord and Arucuttag. For the Sky Master a fine horse, its coat yellow-gold by nature and sparkling with gold dust, like unto the horses which drew the chariot of the Sun daily across the sky. For Arucuttag a warrior in his prime; on this day of peril not a captive but a volunteer come willing to die for his people, standing proud with the ancient ax resting across his palms, its flint head crusted with old blood and deadly holiness.

“Victory shall be ours!” Isketerol cried as his charioteer reined in. “We will feast on the fish that devour the foe, and manure our fields with the bones of the invaders!”

A slow massive wave of sound rolled back, from the streets and rooftops, from the decks of the ships and from the battlemented walls of the city he had made great.

Mighty Ones,
he prayed in the silence of his mind. Take what
I give, and make safe my people and the seed of my House. If the King’s death is what You demand, know that I am ever willing to make the given sacrifice.

For what was a King, if not he who stood for his folk before the Great Gods?

“D
yce, keep her dyce,” the young lieutenant by the wheels said, tapping his cane against the binnacle and pointing with it to remind the helm crew the heading they were keeping.

A platform put her head above the edge of the sheet-steel-and-timber barricade around the steering station; it wouldn’t stop anything shot out of a cannon, but it would deflect grapeshot and rifle bullets.

“Thus, thus—very well, thus.”

Marian Alston-Kurlelo clasped her hands behind her back, rising very slightly on the balls of her feet as the
Chamberlain
took the swell with a long smooth rocking-horse motion. She had spent ten years of her life building this fleet, made of wood and iron, hemp and canvas and human hearts. Now she was taking it to possible destruction, quite certain wounding and death and mutilation. Worse yet, the deeper, more atavistic fears; for Swindapa, for the children they’d left behind who might be orphaned again this day, fears of death and crippling wounds. Fear of failure worse than any, and a self-disgust at the cold exhilaration that was building beneath it all.

The flagship was leading the Guard warships in toward land, wind from the south on their starboard quarter, masts bare of all but fighting sail, with boarding nets along the sides and splinter netting overhead. The deck was nearly empty, except for the hands waiting at the lines and the Marine Gatling-gun crews crouching at the rail where their weapons snouted out from among the rolled hammocks; she looked up to the tops, where the rest of the Gatlings waited. Down again, through the deck gratings, and she could see the gun crews poised around the sleek blue-black shapes of their Dahlgrens. A few of them looked up, showed teeth that gleamed in the dark, lifted thumbs, but most waited quiet and motionless in the dimness. There was little sound beside the creak and groan of the ship working, the occasional rutch of feet on the sanded decks—sand to keep the footing from growing slippery when the planks ran with blood and body fluids—and the song of the wind in the rigging.

The faces on the quarterdeck were equally grave and quiet, except for a few middies grinning with excitement. Alston turned and looked behind her. The five frigates followed in exact line, their wakes like a single ruled line across the purple-blue of the sea. The low coastline of southwestern Iberia was less than a hint ahead, more like a line of cloud than a firm sight of land—the heights of Gibraltar and the Sierra Nevada were far off to the southeast. Swindapa came up, saluted, and handed her a folder. It held pictures, digital video shots from pre-Event cameras borne by the scouts in the ultralights, dropped onto the
Chamberlain’s
deck and run through the PC and printer in the radio shack.

“They’re coming out,” she said quietly; their eyes met, saying all that was needed.

Alston gave a small precise nod, looking at the picture. All the larger Tartessian ships, and twenty of the galleys.
Fangs out and hair on fire.
The enemy had fought hard during the abortive invasion of Nantucket, but they’d fight harder still here, on the doorsteps of their own homes.

She studied the picture. The Tartessians were forming up in a line, ragged but definitely a line, slanting down the wind to the southeast. The Islanders had the weather gauge, the wind blowing from them to the enemy, but that meant little when both sides obviously wanted a stand-up fight. The two fleets formed the acute angles of a triangle; her mind automatically extrapolated the lines. Where they met ...

“Pass the information to the fleet, Ms. Kurlelo-Alston,” Marian said.

She glanced to starboard. The transports were lying further southward, off the Moroccan coast, hull-down from her present position. Lying to the windward also meant they could move rapidly, if necessary....

The enemy grew from a flash of white to sails to hulls painted dark blue-gray and checked by the opening maws of gunports, as swift as always when fleets were on converging courses. The hulls were long and low, derived from the form of
Yare,
the first modern ship they’d been able to study in detail. Six-to-one
hull-beam ratio,
she noted. There were differences, though; slightly more rake on the masts, an ingenious-looking Y-fork coming up from the stem and used to set the mizzen forestays. The Tartessian shipwrights were men who understood wood and stresses and the sea, with their hands and guts if not mathematically. They’d taken the uptime carpentry tools and techniques and run with them—run far and fast.

“Carry on,” she said, walked to the rail, stepped up to the ratlines, and ran up the shrouds to the mizzen top.

“Good morning,” she said to the occupants—the triangular platform was crowded, with the Gatling crew and several Marine sharpshooters with telescopic sights on their rifles.

“Morning, ma’am,” a sergeant said cheerfully, in a thick Fiernan accent. “Beautiful it is a morning for fight, if fight has to become.”

There was something to that; not too hot, blue sky with an occasional fleecy cloud, a Mediterranean autumn on the edge of winter. She nodded back and climbed further, up the shrouds that used the top as a spreader and to the topgallant crosstrees. That narrow spreader board had room only for one, and the sailor there ran nimbly out onto the yard to give her room. She leveled her binoculars. The galleys were coming up fast behind the twelve sailing ships ...

Like the sailing ships they had fires going in braziers on their quarterdecks next to the wheel, where the three-legged idols of Arucuttag sat in their little shrines. Her lips tightened. Turning these bucanneers loose on the world with nineteenth-century technology and Bronze Age attitudes was the Nantucketers’ fault ... hers, in particular.

The decks of the enemy ships showed plenty of other glints, the edged metal of bayonets and boarding pikes, axes and swords; as she’d expected, they’d shipped heavy crews for this action. Crowding might slow them down if they overdid it. If they didn’t overdo it, it might give them a little edge because they could rotate gun crews and replace casualties. It would certainly make them harder to take by boarding. She looked up their masts, and from one came a wink of reflected light, a spyglass peering back at her.

“And they’ve got a smart, hard, unmerciful man to lead them, one who’s as able as any I’ve ever met, I think,” she murmured to herself.

We gave Isketerol his chance,
she mused.
If the
Eagle
hadn’t turned up there in Alba, he’d have lived and died an obscure adventurer, in a
people
so obscure the archaeologists weren’t even sure they really existed. We gave him an opportunity, and woke the fire in his belly.

What was that phrase Doreen Arnstein had used once ... a “mute inglorious Milton”?

He did have one weakness, or strength, that his friend William Walker lacked. To twentieth-century eyes he was ambitious to the point of madness and cruel as the sea, but he had his own standards. Walker was a solipsist, the one true love of his own life; the rest of the world was game-counters to him. By contrast, the Iberian warlord really cared about his own people; and he was a man of honor, in his way ...

Alston leaned out, wrapped an arm and both legs around a backstay, and slid down, thinking hard as she did, as casual as running downstairs in Guard House back on Main Street. On the quarterdeck, she said:

“Ms. Kurlelo-Alston, order to the schooners. They’re to move in east and west and engage the galleys. And to remember those damned things can go right into the eye of the wind.”

More bitterly than ever she missed the
Farragut,
and pushed that out of her mind.

“Coming into range,” Commander Jenkins said.

“Open fire as you bear on the lead ship, Mr. Jenkins,” she said. “To the fleet; general engagement in line, maintain course.”

A rattle of orders, from Jenkins through his subordinates, down to the gun crews.
Out tompions!
and
run out your guns!
The familiar drumming thunder as the portlids went up and the gleaming blue-black snouts came out, the grunting
hnnnhuh!
each crew in unison as they heaved four thousand pounds of cast-steel cannon across the thick oak planking with rope and block and pulley and sheer hard sweat.

Just then the side of the first Tartessian ship vanished in a cloud of smoke; a perceptible fraction of a second later came the rolling sound of huge doors slamming echoing over the water. Marian’s brows went up; wasting powder, with the guns they had available. Then she frowned. The sound wasn’t quite right, too deep.