On the Oceans of Eternity (93 page)

“Slaves to be freed, except those who wish to go with the rest of you.”

A surprising number always did.
House niggers,
she thought, and then chided herself. A lot of them wouldn’t have many options, particularly women with young children.

“Where are we to go? The highlanders are loose in the land; that is why so many have fled within our walls!” the mayor burst out. “If you drive us out defenseless, they will kill us all before tomorrow’s sunset!”

“Twenty soldiers may keep their rifles, with ten rounds each,” she said. “Men may keep a sword or spear, if they have it. You ought to be all right if you keep together and head straight for the Great River, that way.” She pointed southwest. “That’s my final word, so don’t try wheedling.”

She made herself watch as the citizens shuffled out of the gates, bent under bundles of their belongings—there would be a thick scatter of abandoned household goods all across the countryside, soon enough; the smart ones would have confined the loads to money, a change of clothing, and all the food they could carry. The curses thrown at her were easy enough to take; the sheer hopeless misery of sudden poverty wasn’t, or the crying of the bewildered children trudging by holding on to their mothers’ skirts.

If I can order it done, I can watch,
she thought, her face like something carved from ebony. Swindapa wiped away a tear.

“And this bit isn’t much more fun,” Marian muttered, once the Tartessians were gone.

Like all the towns they’d seen, this one had a broad central square; she wasn’t sure if that was old Tartessian custom or something Isketerol had imposed. Right now it was crowded with about five hundred people, mostly men in rough clothing, with a scattering of women. Some of the slaves looked gaunt and terrified, or bore the marks of shackle and lash, or the scars of working with hot metal and inadequate protection. Others still were just the usual work-roughened Bronze Age locals. All of them hung back from the frightening novelty of the armored car, which gave a useful circle of free space. Marian took a long breath and looked down on the sea of expectant bearded faces turned toward her and shouted:

“You are free!”

Swindapa turned it into Tartessian, working in smooth unison with her partner. Marian relied on trained lungpower; no need to terrify them more with the megaphone. Stunned silence, then cheers; they’d probably been expecting a change of masters at best ... or perhaps rumors about the Day of Jubilee had reached this far. Marian grimaced at an almost physical bad taste in her mouth.

“We cannot take you with us,” she went on; experience had shown that was one of the first questions asked.

“We will give everyone here a rifle and ammunition.”

“You may take what you will from the houses and storehouses.” More cheers at that; a lot of the poor bastards would get no further than the wine jars, and still be sobering up when the Tartessian army arrived. “But be quick, for we will destroy this town.”

She pointed northward. “You may run for the mountains and the forests, or try to make your way south to our bases. Either way, move fast, for the Tartessians will send soldiers here soon, and we are not staying. My advice is to take weapons, clothing, food, and tools only, and to run far and fast.”

The crowd cheered again and broke up, murmuring. Some were wandering around aimlessly, others heading for something long desired. A few thoughtful or timid ones were making for the gates, determined to catch up with their former masters.

Sighing, she dropped back into the turret. “Let’s get to work.”

 

“I’m thinkin’ that ours was the first major battle in history where
both
sides retreated afterward,” Patrick O’Rourke said quietly, warming his hands at the stove.

Doreen Arnstein gave a slight sardonic snort and kept writing. Kenneth Hollard cast him a quelling look.

“Not a funny joke, Pat,” he said, hanging up his sheepskin parka and going over to look at the map wall.

It was snowing again outside the shutters of the ex-Hittite villa. He could feel the force of the icy wind out of the northern mountains. It came sweeping down and onto the high plateau of central Anatolia and driving drafty fingers in here, despite tapestries and rugs.

“Damn,” he said softly. “But I wish he’d come on after the fight.”

“Well, it’s a bit close to the ragged edge we were, at the time.”

“He was closer. All the intel says so, and I could taste it. And he wanted to, too, I could feel that as well. Every time he hit us—when he was personally in command, I mean-it was like getting whacked upside the head with a crowbar. Then he just turned around and walked away when he had us rocked back on our heels.”

“It was the smart move,” O’Rourke said. “As you say, he was run ragged by then ... not least thanks to Princess Raupasha and the others.”

“Yeah. You know what annoys me about Walker?”

“The complete evil of the man, is it?”

“No, Paddy. That’s why
I hate
him. What
irritates
me is that if he wasn’t such an armor-plated swine, he’d be a really valuable leader ... and we need those, God knows we do.”

“If only the fellah hadn’t had his conscience surgically removed, the pity and the black shame of it. But I can’t see him taking out his own garbage for the compost wagon, like the chief or the commodore.”

“There is that,” Hollard said, looking at the map again and trying to force his enemy’s intentions out of it by sheer will.
Where? When? How?

“It’s a map, not an oracle, Brigadier sir,” O’Rourke said. His voice grew a little dreamy. “By the way, have you been givin’ any thought to what you’ll do after the war?”

“Hmmmm,” Hollard said.
I suppose I should, he thought
with surprise.
The Corps will be cut back drastically once we’ve won. Be a bit dull, drilling and the occasional skull-thumping expedition against some Sun People chief.

“You know, I haven’t, not really.”

“Not thinking of settling down here, then? Or taking up the pioneering life back home?”

Kenneth favored him with another glare at the gentle teasing. “No,” he said shortly. “Live here? Not if I can avoid it.”
Not least because of the political complications.
“And I helped my brother out at harvesttime too often to have any illusions about farming.” He grinned. “Why do you think I went into the Corps after the Alban War, Paddy, if it wasn’t an easier way to make a living?”

“If you two gentlemen don’t mind, we do have to
win
the war first ...”

Doreen Arnstein was going over the papers at the head of the table, each pile arranged with her usual neatness and a cup of cocoa at hand; even near term her pregnancy didn’t show much under the thick ankle-length wool robe. She spoke without looking up, her glasses on the end of her nose as she made a note in her small, precise hand.

And why is she smiling more?
The offical reports were that Ian was alive and in Walkeropolis, no more.
She must know more than I do.
Which was exactly as it should be, of course.

Ken stayed in front of the map drawn on the plaster of the wall, looking at the pins and wondering how many of them corresponded to something real.

“God-damn, but I miss the
Emancipator,”
he said. “We should never have risked her on a bombing run—far too useful shuffling high-priority stuff around.”

A stamp-clash of feet and hands on wood and metal came from the corridor outside as the sentries brought their rifles to present arms in salute. The other Allied leaders trooped in; Tudhaliyas,
Tawannannas
Zuduhepa, Kashtiliash, and Kathryn ... and Raupasha daughter of Shuttarna. He felt a chaotic mixture of anger, worry, and affection, and irritation at his own irrationality ; fought them all down with an effort while everyone went through the necessary formalities.

She’s walking better, he thought.
The-young woman,
not
“girl.
”
Kathryn was right to ream me out about that-was
in the dark wolfskin jacket that had become something of a trademark, beating snow off it with her knitted cap, looking slim and dark and dashing.

Clemens said the left leg ought to recover full function, and the hand nearly so. Still a heavy limp, but less pain.
But the scar tissue will always be more sensitive to heat and cold, or to drying out.
It must have cost her considerably to come here through the weather outside.

He could see most of her face; the molded black-leather mask only covered the affected areas, a triangle from brow over the left eye and down to the corner of her mouth. That mouth turned up in a smile as she saw him, the lines of endurance melting to unaffected pleasure. He forced the silly grin back ...

... and yeah, it’s logical to have mood swings after a trauma like that. The problem was, how exactly did you convince someone you weren’t just courting her out of a misplaced sense of personal honor?
Especially when you are a bit of a prig.

Everyone sat, and also eagerly accepted the cups of hot cocoa an aide dealt out from the big pot warming over a spirit lamp in a corner of the big room.

Big market there after the war,
he thought, half-amused at the sharp-nosed Yankee profiteer buried somewhere in his subconscious.

For that matter, Tudhaliyas and his queen were casting an occasional envious glance at the little tile stove. Even a Great King spent the winters here being miserably chilly when he was out of bed. Enough braziers to heat a fair-sized room also courted carbon monoxide poisoning, unless you left the windows wide open, which sort of defeated the purpose. Kenneth suspected that—presuming they beat Walker—Tudhaliyas would be moving heaven and earth to get an Islander engineer in to do a fixup on the palace. Which meant all his nobles would, too, and then ...

“Let’s get going,” Doreen said.

Most of it was as boring as policy meetings always were; figures and estimates, troop dispositions and training, the endless question of how to keep the refugees fed; some of them had been moved all the way down to Carchemish to be within reach of grain barged up the Euphrates.

“So in the end,” Tudhaliyas said, “What we have gained is a chance to do everything over again this coming year, with both sides stronger and my country a battleground once more.”

“Better a battleground than spear-won land of the Achaeans,” Zuduhepa said sharply.

Kashtiliash blinked, not quite used to a woman showing such outspokenness before a King.
Kathryn gets away with it,
Hollard thought.
But she’s in a special category in his mind, I think.
He felt a moment’s envy at the solid bond that was almost physically perceptible between the Babylonian and his sister. But then, they were both
solid
people; and they’d put in time and effort enough to earn it.

He wasn’t looking forward to next year’s campaign either. Raupasha didn’t flinch when anyone looked at her any more, but God knew what another set of battles would do; he’d bribed her attendants to tell him about the nightmares and crying jags.

Doreen tapped the wooden handle of her steel-nib pen against the surface of a report. “We have gained time, which is the most precious thing of all,” she said. “Remember, the war here in Hatti-land is only one front...”

The usual translation difficulties stopped them for a while, searching for a word for “sector.”

“... sector, division,
part,
then, of a larger struggle.”

“So you say,” Tudhaliyas said. “We fight Great Achaea, not Tartessos.”

“As a matter of fact,” Doreen said, smiling ...

Smugly,
Hollard decided. But a nice smug,
if you’re on her side.

“... I’ve got something more concrete to tell you about the news from Tartessos.”

 

“‘That was quick work,” Marian Alston-Kurlelo said, looking at what was left of the
Merrimac.

It was one of those mild, brilliant Andalusian winter days that gave her occasional daydreams of wangling a posting here after the war. Wind like spun silk caressed her face, and everything from the ship before her to the flamingos cruising like giant pink butterflies in the marshes had a fine-cut clarity.

“Four weeks and four days from the time we hauled her up on the slipway,” the Seahaven supervisor said, wiping her hands on a greasy rag.

The gesture was one of Ron Leaton’s trademarks, and engineers all over the Republic copied it, along with his air of abstracted competence. There were were worse role models, and most of the mechanics and engineers
had
come up through Seahaven or its spin-offs.

An entirely forgivable foible,
Marian Alston-Kurlelo decided, walking through the construction-yard litter of timber, tools, and grinning workers slapping each other on the shoulders to view the craft from all sides.

The big merchantman had been cut down to the waterline. A sloping three-foot glacis surrounded the hull above that, solid oak beams a yard on a side covered by a bolted carapace of big interlocking steel plates three and a half inches thick. More steel covered the low deck, and a slope-sided central casement at midsection. That had three gunports a side, and a row of them in the cone-sectioned front and rear where a pivot-mounted gun could swivel around. A single thick smokestack rising from an armored collar, a couple of air-scoops and a low octagonal pilothouse with vision slits completed the picture topside, with a big bronze propeller at the stern.

It didn’t give her the stab of pure pleasure a good sailing craft did; in fact, she still felt guilty at murdering something beautiful to make this. But it was ...
solid workmanship,
she thought, taking a deep breath and inhaling the scents of drying paint, varnish, tar, timber, brass, iron, and whale-oil lubricating grease. Satisfying.
It’ll do the job it’s designed for.