On the Oceans of Eternity (73 page)

Now it was an instant town of thousands, streets of tents and open squares piled high with supplies. Some of the tents were huge—the field hospital had gone up first, complete with prefabricated board floors. Thousands labored, digging ditches and pit-latrines, throwing up the ramparts of earth-and-timber forts, and a steep berm and ditch around the whole camp. Others were setting up the drill that would punch deep tube wells as soon as the engine came ashore. A pontoon wharf extending out into the harbor was nearly ready, and when it was the freighters could unload directly onto handcarts and wagons; the first heavy cargo to come ashore would be steam-haulers. Off to the west she could hear the dull heavy
thudump!
of a blasting charge, shattering rock to be used to gravel the roadways, and out on the narrow channel oars flashed as boats towed rafts of oak and umbrella pine cut near the shore. A fort was going up there, too, on a point of hard land rising out of green marsh, cutting off any entry.

Alston turned her gaze to the captured Tartessian ships. Two of them were beached, drawn up ashore on the sandy mud to keep them from sinking. The others were serving as floating POW pens, their own surviving crews repairing superficial damage and working the pumps under guard until something more regular could be arranged.

“What’s the status on those?” she asked.

Swindapa flipped two pages on her clipboard, but she was speaking before her eyes hit the print. “The two we ran ashore are...
shattered
was the word CPO Zelukelo used. The others are essentially sound, but they’ll all need to be hauled up for work on their hulls before they’re fully functional again.”

She looked up. “Really very good ships—well built, fine seasoned wood. Composite masts, though—bound with heat-shrunk iron hoops.”

The Republic used single trunks for masts, but it had access to the white pine of New England. Swindapa went on:

“We have forty-eight Dahlgrens from them, cold-core cast steel work. The armory marks read
Walkeropolis
and Neay
oruk,
which fits with the Foreign Affairs reports, and
Cuddyston,
which doesn’t but I think it’s up in, what’s the name, Istria, where we heard they were opening coal mines. The guns are about ten percent heavier than ours, and the machining’s cruder—particularly on the exteriors. But they’ll throw a ball nearly as far and hard as ours, and nearly as accurately.”

“Too fucking right, they will,” one of the XOs muttered. “Sorry, ma’am,” he went on at the Commodore’s quelling look.

“Then we’ll break up the two on the beach for timber,” Alston went on. “That’ll give us eight-hundred-odd tons of seasoned plank and beam, more than enough for our repairs and useful for construction, too. Brigadier McClintock, I want to get an accelerated training program for the auxiliaries going, starting tomorrow. We’ll-”.

 

“Is that a
railroad?”
Ian Arnstein asked incredulously.

It certainly looked like one, snaking north up the valley of the Eurotas, parallel to the two-lane asphalt road from Neayoruk. Wooden crossties in a bed of gravel, and rails on them, shining in the sun that had emerged from the clouds at last.

Wait
a minute, he thought. Those rails were wood, too, with a thin strap of iron nailed on top. Then his eyes went wide again; a train of wagon-cars came rumbling around a low hill, pulled by ...

Elephants?
he thought, feeling his mind boggle; it was an interesting sensation, a little like how your knees got after one too many.

“From Pharaoh,” Odikweos said. “A man of the King’s left his service some time ago, and found shelter at Ramses’s court. We trade with him, and the King bought these creatures. Many men died learning the trick of taming them, but they haul like the Titans of old.”

He waved a hand at the ...
Elephant-way? Elephant-road? Whatever,
Ian thought.

“There is talk of extending it north to Mycenae, and then to Athens and beyond, as we did the road, years ago. All the changes come first to this part of the kingdom. Now, about Nantucket—”

Feeling his way, Arnstein said: “I thought I wasn’t to be interrogated.”

The Greek smiled. “No, only not tortured,” he said.

Arnstein’s eyes narrowed. Few of the Ithakan’s questions had been specifically military; most of them had been about Nantucket generally, about laws and customs and governance.
Comparing my story to what he’s had from Walker and his cronies,
Ian decided. Now that’s
smart.
Of course, if this was who he thought it was, his cleverness had become a legend that lasted three thousand years ...

He looked around at the vale of Sparta as he spoke, “hollow Lakonia” as it had been called.
I can see what he meant about the changes starting here, it being Walker’s HQ. Still, they’ve done an awful lot in less than ten years.

The road was crowded, troops or slave coffles or local villagers traveling on the graveled verges; trains of big Conestogas and smaller vehicles pulled by oxen or mules on the pavement, sometimes a rich man’s chariot, a fair number of riders in modern saddles. Pine trunks rose beside the road at intervals, with a single strand of wire looping along; agents and merchants had confirmed that Walker was using telegraphs. Once there was a body hanging upside down from a pole as well, with a sign reading “wire cutter” spiked to it.

The Eurotas ran to their right, brown and muddy and swift over a gravel bed, lined with oleander, plane trees, and dwarf palms. The valley bottom went from flattish to rolling and back, broken here and there by escarpments and gullies thick with evergreens and aromatic shrubs. To their left the afternoon sun turned the snowcapped peaks and fingers of Taygetos to flame, casting shadows down the dark fir-forested slopes; the range loomed over the valley below like a wall, rising
almost
vertically. More forests clothed the gentler foothills of Mount Par-non to the east, pines standing tall in a dense blue-green bristle on the upper slopes, with traces of autumn yellow on the hardwoods mantling the lower. This was not the Greece he knew.

The valley itself was full of groves, young fruit trees, citrus—Isketerol had ordered thousands of grafted seedlings from Brandt Farms before the war, and evidently passed a lot of them on. Disc plows turned up the rich red earth in fields edged by cypresses, and gangs set out new plantings or dropped quartered seed-potatoes into the furrows. Many new olive plantings mantled slopes green and purple with lupines and vetch. Around the older olive trees workers moved, shaking the branches with long poles and throwing the fruit into baskets. Other laborers pruned and bound vines; there were many irrigated fields, watered from small dams and channels and wind-powered pumps. Most of them grew bright-green alfalfa, or vegetables, or what looked the stalks of cotton.

Mounted overseers watched them work, and there had been half a dozen armed patrols. Ian put that together with reports, glimpses of tumbledown abandoned villages, new pitched tile roofs on larger manors, rows of new-built adobe cottages looking like they’d been stamped out with a cookie cutter ... or run up by construction gangs to an identical plan.

“Let me guess, lord
wannax,”
he said to Odikweos. “A lot of the peasant tenant farmers who used to live here don’t anymore.”

“Yes,” the Greek said, looking slightly surprised. “Many have moved to Walkeropolis or Neayoruk, many have gone into the Army, many as colonists to conquered lands.”

“And to replace them, Walker ... your King of Men, I mean... supplied slaves to the ...
telestai
, isn’t that the word?”

“Barons, yes.”

“And so now instead of tenants they could call out to fight for them, the barons have slave gangs who’d run off or revolt without Wal ... without the King of Men’s armies and police?”

Odikweos’s eyes narrowed. “Yes,” he said in a neutral tone. “Some do run off, to the mountain forests, and live as skulking bandits until they’re hunted down and crucified.”

“Uh-huh,” Arnstein said. “And I’ll bet that instead of every estate being self-sufficient except for luxuries, now they couldn’t survive without trade?”

“Hmmmm,” Odikweos said, tugging at his beard. “Yes. Grain from Thessaly and Sicily and Macedonia; also tools and cloth from the
factories
the King of Men established.” He dropped the English word into his Achaean without noticing it.

They came to the outskirts of Walkeropolis only two hours travel from Neayoruk; sixteen miles or so as the road wound—though Arnstein noted that the journey-stones beside the road were in kilometers. The small forest of crosses on the outskirts were about what he’d expected. Despite that he closed his eyes and gagged helplessly. The ravens and vultures ignored the passersby as they squabbled over tidbits, jumping back a little and waiting when a man pinned to the wood beat his head back and forth and croaked as he tried to scream past a dry swollen tongue.

Put it out of your mind, Arnstein,
he thought with grim intensity.
You’re trying to save your life, and maybe more. Ignore it!

The city proper lay beyond, a mushroom growth with twice the population of Nantucket Town. His eyes went wide in surprise; the reports hadn’t prepared him for how alien it looked, neither Mycenaean or modem or anything else he could quite classify. Aqueducts and smokestacks marked a considerable factory district; the buildings there were the same sort of utilitarian adobe-functional he’d noted before, but mostly whitewashed.

The layout was a grid, modified to fit the hilly terrain, with young plane trees lining the streets. Other hillsides were green with gardens and ornamental groves, red and umber tile and shining marble and neat ashlar blocks showing through, mansions and public buildings. Atop one hillside nearby was ...

He shook his head. The Mycenaean Greeks worshiped more or less the same pantheon of Gods that their Classical descendants would ... would have. But they did it in small shrines, or at hilltop altars, or in groves or caves. They
didn’t
build what he saw there, fluted marble columns around a rectangle with a pitched roof, the stereotypical form of a Greek temple (or English bank) shining in white stone, with a big altar before it and a huge cult-statue glimpsed through bronze screenwork inside the pillars.

The sun caught out points of brightness, gilded Corinthian capitals on the columns, colored terra-cotta on the bas-reliefs of the pediments and
metopes,
the cartoon-panel-like decorations under the eves and on the triangular spaces at the front above the pillars. A complex of lesser buildings occupied the slopes below. Several other temples were under construction nearby, with a litter of blocks and concrete-mixing troughs and great timber cranes for erecting monolithic pillars.

“Let me guess,” Arnstein said again. “The King of Men has set up an
organization
”—that word had also been borrowed into the Achaean of the Year Ten—“of full-time’ paid priests—”

“The Sacred Collegium, yes.”

“—with regional over-priests in the rest of the country all reporting back to someone appointed by him.”

“Yes,” Odikweos said, shrugging and smiling slightly. “Many have praised his piety in bestowing these beautiful God-houses on the realm, and skilled servants to attend them. Is it any wonder that the Gods have favored him so?”

Was there a slight astringent edge to the Achaean’s voice?
I hope so, but then I’m listening for my life as well as talking for
it. And he wasn’t in the backwoods here. This might not be Egypt or Babylon, but it was an old and sophisticated civilization in its way.

Vulnerable, though. Writing had been a rare thing here until Walker came, used only for accounting and administration. From the number of street signs and quasi billboards, he’d put a lot of
ooomph
into teaching the three R’s—and didn’t this archaic Greek look odd written in the Latin alphabet! The first generation of literates in any culture tended to be pretty gullible about print. They also didn’t have a word for “religion,” or a concept of it as something separate from everyday life, that could be manipulated as an entity.

I’ll give you any odds that Walker’s got his lame priesthood working on some sort of Holy Scripture, too—a pagan Koran or Book of Oracles or something with the King of Men as the
Numero Uno
favored of Zeus Pater. I wonder what Odikweos would make of that?

There was no need to ask about the structure like a football stadium built into the side of a hill, with a mule-drawn trolley line running out to it. The reports had gone into revolting detail about Walker’s revival... or premature invention... of the Roman
munera.
A crowd was pouring out of it as he watched, animated and brisk, many of them leading or carrying their children, and he could hear the
ooompa-ooompa
of a band that included a big water organ.

Nor much doubt about the smaller temple of gray-and-red stone on a nearby height. Instead of an exterior altar in front of the building, that had a ten-foot-high double-headed cobra making a circle in gilded cast bronze. It enclosed a sun and moon—black sun, black moon. under the flared fanged heads with their ivory teeth and ruby eyes. A party of women in rich clothing and delicately beautiful masks of black leather and silver led a man with his head covered in a sack up to it. The women stopped and bowed, then made a gesture with both fists clenched before the face, imitating the serpents, before they passed on into the temple proper.

“A few years ago it was just another snake cult,” he quoted to himself in a low mutter. “And where’s Conan when you need him?”

Behind the snake-sun-moon sigil was another bronze, a statue of a woman with three faces pointing in different directions—the Triple Hekate of the Crossroads. The rest of the figure wasn’t at all Greek; more like Kali, multiple arms holding scalpels, bowls, knives, whips, fetters, human hearts—rendered quite accurately—and dancing in a hip-shot posture.