On the Oceans of Eternity (74 page)

A tablet at the beginning of the road leading up to the building read:

Ian Arnstein’s lips quirked upward as he read; Tolkien translated quite well into Greek.

Then the ironic humor washed out of him like a candle guttering in a high wind as a long, high scream came down the hill, and he realized the man must have had the bag removed and seen his fate. The scream continued, with chanting running under it like a counterpoint. The skulls all around the temple’s
metope
weren’t sculpted replicas. They were the real thing, human bone mounted on polished metal disks, hundreds of them, and as many again on a pyramidal skull rack outside.

That wasn’t Greek in inspiration either. Aztec, the way they’d displayed the results of their massacre-sacrifices.

It’s like a theme park for demons. Walker and sado-bitch and the others have turned this place into their own multicultural sociopath’s Disneyland. Except these are
real people
they’re playing with.

He turned his eyes from Hong’s temple and wished he could shut it out of his mind as well. Evil sweltered out of the very stones, like some vile metaphysical ooze that made his
soul
feel polluted, echoing with the agony within. He’d felt the same before, on a trip to Europe before the Event... at the gate of Dachau.

“This gift from your Island... some of us do not appreciate it here,” Odikweos said softly.

“That
is not something you can blame on us,” Arnstein said. “Hong is an outlaw; were she back on Nantucket, we’d hang her.”

He thought of trying to say she was crazy, but the closest you could come to saying that in this language meant literally
possessed by spirits.
The last thing he wanted to do was back up her claim to divine inspiration.

“Of course you would; she and the King are rebels against your ruler.”

“No. We’d hang her for what she’s done
here.”

The Achaean gave a noncommittal toss of his head. It was nearly dark now, the sun sinking crimson on the high peak to the westward; a steam whistle hooted mournfully somewhere.

More people were spilling onto the street, but the crowds parted before the chariot and mounted guards, some murmuring or pointing after a ripple of bows and salutes. Most of the streets were lined with colonnades, with shops behind those and living quarters above; either Walker was a genuine enthusiast for the column-and-marble bit, or all this neo-Classicism was another one of his ghastly mocking jokes.

Or maybe he just read Howard Fast’s
Spartacus
at an impressionable age.

There were statues here and there;
they
looked more Egyptian, with stiff forward-facing stances and hands clenched at their sides; probably because that was where Walker could get sculptors used to working in hard stone. There were fountains at the intersections, with women drawing water, and from the relative lack of smell there must be fairly good sewers as well.

No defenses ringed the city, but there was a wall topped with iron spikes and an openwork bronze gate between the common streets and the palace district. A huge rambling complex covered most of a large hill, terraces and columns, towers and bright tile and colored marble showing through gardens still fantastically lovely. His captor’s guards and chariot turned aside, toward a mansion that was merely large.

“We will talk, after you have bathed and eaten,” Odikweos said under the pillars of the entranceway. “There is much I have wished to learn.”

 

Night had fallen by the time Marian Alston-Kurlelo had finished her rounds of the wounded. That was almost as hard as the battle itself.

The hospital smelled of antisepsis and pain. with an overtone of broth from the soup kettles being wheeled through for those who could use them. The first rush of emergency surgery was over, and most of the patients were lying quiet. but the lanterns in the operating theater were still burning bright. Nurses and doctors bustled by, sometimes stepping aside for a gurney with a prone patient, bags of saline drip suspended on poles.

One ward was much quieter, most of the patients there slipping quietly into the waiting darkness with their pain muffled by morphia. A priestess of the Ecumenical Church knelt murmuring beside a cot; she was just kissing the stola before lifting it over her head, and an open box beside her held a vial and wafers. Several Marines were kneeling there, too, some of them bandaged, heads bowed over clasped hands that held crucifix and rosary.

Price of doing business, Marian Alston-Kurlelo forced herself to think. It wasn’t as if they’d introduced war here, and a bronze-tipped spear in the guts killed you just as painfully and just as dead as grapeshot.
At least this is about something more than a cattle raid.
Swindapa was weeping, a quiet trickle of tears from the cerulean-blue eyes, undramatic and matter-of-fact.
Wish I could do that. Wouldn’t do, though. The Midnight Mare’s got to keep up the image for the crews.

Commander Arthur Jenkins was sitting propped up in bed; his left forearm ended in a mass of bandage three inches below the elbow, and other straps immobilized it. A tray was across his lap, fixed to rails on either side of the collapsible hospital cot, with a bowl of beef broth made from concentrate—what the rank and file called “Gomez soup” after the Prelate of the Ecumenical Church, because it proved the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Flesh—and the remains of a small loaf of bread. He put down the spoon as they approached and smiled, a cheerful expression that squeezed at Alston’s chest below the breastbone.

“Commodore,” he said. The smile went wider. “I’ll have to change my name, if I’m ever promoted.” At her raised eyebrows he moved the left arm slightly. “Captain Hook, what else?”

Alston found herself unable to stop a small snort of laughter. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to let you off with a soft job because of this, Arthur.”

“Ma’am, I’m sure there will be something useful to the Republic I can do,” he said, keeping the smile on his face.

“Certainly there will,” Marian said. “Commanding the
Chamberlain,
if I don’t manage to get her sunk in the interim—the doctors tell me you’ll be on your feet in about a month.”

He looked up at her, startled hope in his eyes. She leaned forward, smiling herself, a rare flash of white teeth against her coal-black face, and laid a long-fingered hand gently on his shoulder.

“Arthur, the Republic pays you a munificent six dollars fifty cents a day—less income tax and witholding tax—to be an officer and a fighting sailor, not to play the piano, although I know you’re going to miss that. And
I
set policy on disabilities, so-called. If Nelson could command an entire fleet at Trafalgar with one arm, I think you can run one ship with one-and-a-half.”

“Violin, ma‘am,” he said, grinning as if it hurt his face less now. “I play, played, the fiddle. And hell, I can still do ‘Chopsticks.’”

Swindapa leaned forward from the other side and kissed him softly on the forehead. “You are very brave,” she said simply.

Alston cleared her throat. “Anyway, your family’ve been informed that you’re alive and recovering,” she said. “Standard thirty-word radiophone message back from your wife, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt if I jumped the queue and brought it to you myself.” He took it up eagerly. “Good luck, and listen to the doctors. I’ll be in to see you now and then.”

Swindapa leaned over to whisper in her ear as they left: “I don’t think he was listening to that last bit,” she chuckled.

They walked out the front door flap of the field hospital, their boots noiseless on the soft sand of the street outside; it would be a few days before the road team was ready to gravel it. The Marine sentries on either side slapped hands to rifles, and the officers returned the gesture of respect.

“Well, neither would I, if I was in his shoes,” Alston said.
Lord, but I hate
doing this, she thought, looking over her shoulder for a second at the backlit canvas of the hospital-tent complex.
Duty.
“His wife’s with Brandt Farms, isn’t she?”

“Plant-breeding program,” Swindapa agreed. Her eyes grew a little abstracted, and her Fiernan accent went from a trace to noticeable. It always did, when she opened the doors of that memory-palace within that her training at the Great Wisdom had built. “Three children ... she’s expecting a fourth ... they have an application in for an adoption. You know,” she went on in a conversational voice, “my ... mmm, cousin ... at the Old Circle has a mother‘s-sister’s-daughter, niece, who died giving birth to twins this summer, a boy and a girl. They’d be glad to put them with a good family on the Island.”

“See about that,” Marian said, smiling within. Her face went colder. “Now we have to do the funerals.”

Most of the Guard’s dead from the sea fight had gone over the side at once in the heat of action; there would be a common ceremony for them. Some had died since and would be buried ashore, and there were more from the Marines and the auxiliaries. Cremation was one of the few things the Sun People and Fiernan Bohulugi had in common, and the Ecumenical Church had no objection to it; that was a lot more practical than sending home bodies. At least they had plenty of firewood....

“S
am?” Vicki Cofflin said, looking at the
Emancipator’s
navigator. “Any definite idea of where the hell we are?”

“According to my calculations, the Hattusas radio beacon, and plenty of sheer guesswork, about here, Skipper,” she replied.

Vicki leaned over her shoulder.
Here
was somewhere west of Monemavasia, a coastal town that didn’t exist except as an Achaean base. Exactly how far west was impossible to say, with the weather like this. That didn’t bother her as much as it might have a Lost Geezer; she’d grown up relying on dead reckoning guess-and-God navigation. Still ...

“I hate bombing civilians,” Vicki Cofflin said quietly.

“Don’t we all,” the XO of
Emancipator
replied.

“Even worse, that bastard Walker’s not at home.” Vicki sighed. “Well, we have to try and take out his factories.” Louder: “Helm, come about to two-two-zero.”

The dirigible throbbed about them; the crew were muffled in heavy wool trousers and jackets of glazed sheepskin and knitted wool caps. The thin air was damp and chilly, smelling of machine oil and wicker and tanned whale intestine. Into a patch of cloud and they lost starlight and moonlight. Darkness fell inside the craft save for a few faint lights from the instruments; then silvery light flooded them again as they broke free. The patches of clear air were growing fewer and smaller.

“Hell of a tail wind,” Alex Stoddard said. His eyes flicked to the instruments. “Better than forty knots—our ground speed must be up around a hundred mph.”

Damn,
Vicki thought.
Too fast for comfort.

It made her nervous, especially with a mountain range nearly eight thousand feet high to the west of the target and another one only a couple of thousand feet lower to the left. She looked down from the commander’s seat onto the crumpled, mountain-strewn landscape of southern Greece, then over at the map table.

“Observers to their stations,” she said.

Several of the crewfolk scattered, to point binoculars out ports in the wicker sides of the gondola. Waiting stretched; she sipped cocoa from a thermos and monitored pressure, fuel consumption, and ballast status.

“Skipper!” That brought her over to the portside observer. “That’s Mount Taygetos!”

She took the binoculars herself.
Single sharp triangular peak, knife ridge running north,
she quoted to herself. That was it, snow-stark like a single fang pointing skyward through a gap in the clouds. Which meant ...

“Goddammit, we’re too far north!”

“Wind’s rising and the barometer’s falling, Skipper,” Alex said quietly.

“How do you feel about aborting, and trying to dock at Hattusas, with no proper mooring tower there and fifteen thousand pounds of mixed incendiaries and gunpowder bombs racked at the keel?” she asked.

“Not very good, ma’am,” the XO said. His face was underlit by the instruments, turning it half-Satanic as he grinned. “Of course, there’s always the miracle of the bombs and the fishes.”

Vicki grunted.
Damned if I’m going to waste all this ordnance blowing up inoffensive squid and tuna,
she decided; the thought offended her thrifty Nantucket soul.

“We’ll take her in.” A quick mental calculation; the airship was pointed straight for Walkeropolis, but the wind would take them well north of it. “Left fifty, rudder. Engines all ahead full. Altitude control?”

“Eight thousand two hundred seventy feet,” came the crisp reply.

The drone of the engines rose to a snarling bellow. The fabric of the ship creaked and bent as the engines pushed it against the wind.

“Prepare to vent. Neutral buoyancy at three thousand feet,” she said. “Vent—off superheat!”

“Superheat off—vent!”

The hissing roar of hot exhaust being funneled into the central gasbag cut off. Sharp clicking and groaning sounds followed as it cooled, and then more as hands spun the wheels that opened big flaps on the upper surface of the
Emancipator.
There was a faint, edge-of-perception sensation like a descending elevator.

That brought a few silent winces; awfully low, with high winds, in this type of terrain. It was also the only way to get a radius-of-error less than a couple of miles when it came to aiming bombs. Walkeropolis wasn’t a completely defenseless target the way Nineveh and Asshur had been, where they could loiter a few hundred feet up in broad daylight. Great Achaea had rockets, upward-firing rifled cannon, barrage balloons; and the Republic had only this one highly explosive airship, plus another knocked down in the holds of the fleet sailing against Tartessos.