Against the Tide of Years (26 page)

“It comes to me—perhaps a god whispers it in my ear—that the strangers bring a new age with them, one in which those who learn their arts will prosper and those who do not will be ground like grain between millstones and blown about by the wind.”

His seamed face split in a broad smile.

“And Kar-Duniash,” he went on, “is perfectly placed to benefit by this new age. Kashtiliash, my son, my heir, for all my life I have fought so that when my time comes to descend to the underworld I might leave to you a realm as strong and rich as that I inherited from my fathers. Now I see a chance to leave you a realm
greater
than I inherited; perhaps as great as Hammurabi’s, greater than that of Gilgamesh. The Nantukhtar will need interpreters . . . as part of our alliance, I will suggest to them that a hundred young scribes be set to learning their language and their writing; and those young men will learn much of their arts. That for a beginning.”

He raised his wine cup. “To the Nantukhtar! With them to pull our chariot, we shall spurn the four quarters of the earth beneath the wheels!”

 

“. . . and it’s the perfect location as far as controlling technology transfer goes,” Ian said—a little smugly, Marian Alston thought.

The command group of the expeditionary force was gathered in the cabin of the
Chamberlain
for a last conference before the fleet left for home, and Ian was highly pleased with the way things had gone so far. So was she, but a contrarian impulse inclined her to look for the shadow side.

“How so, Ian?” Swindapa asked. “My birth-people in Alba started with less than these Akkadians, and they have learned a great deal of Eagle people lore already.”

“Yes,” Ian chuckled, rubbing his hands together, “but apart from the fact that we’ve encouraged that,
they
have iron ore, copper, tin, wood and coal for fuel. These Babylonians have nothing but water and mud.”

“And petroleum,” Alston pointed out. “Which we have to show them how to use, if we’re going to get any benefit out of it.”

“True,” Ian said. “But they still can’t do much in the way of metallurgy without ores or fuels.”

“Probably can’t,” Doreen corrected. “We’ll see.”

“Expect the unexpected,” Alston agreed.

Kenneth Hollard poured more beer from the jug into his tankard, then made a face as he tasted it. “Mebbe we can teach them to make something better than this gruel,” he said.

“It’s safer than the water,” the chief medical officer of the expeditionary force said; Justin Clemens shook his head. “God, this place is a living farm of diseases.”

“Whatever we do, we have to do it fairly quickly,” Alston said. “I can’t keep so many of the Republic’s keels and cannon here on the other side of the world for long. Too much could go wrong back home.”

“I’m a diplomat, not a—” Ian said, then hesitated. “Hey, it just hit me—I
am
a diplomat now, not a history professor playing at diplomacy.”

“Well, duh,” Doreen said affectionately, poking him in the ribs. “It’s only been going on a decade now.”

Ian cleared his throat. “I’m a diplomat, not a magician. We’ll have to see.”

“Don’t underestimate King Shuriash,” Kenneth Hollard said. “He’s one smart cookie, if I’m any judge.”

“I agree,” his sister, Kathryn, said. “So’s his son.” She grinned. “And Prince Kashtiliash is cute as a bug’s ear, too.”

“I suppose so,” Hollard said dryly. “He doesn’t do a thing for me.”

“That’s because you’re narrow-minded, Colonel,
sir,
” she replied, to a general chuckle.

“Doesn’t do much for me, either,” Alston said.

“That’s because
you’re
narrow-minded, darling,” Swindapa said. At Alston’s mock glower she went on: “Well, I promised to be monogamous, not
blind.
”

“I,” Doreen Arnstein said, laying a hand at the base of her throat and looking upward, “will say
nothing at all.
”

 

 

“A
yup,” Jared Cofflin said into the microphone, looking down at the text of the treaty.
Christ, a treaty with Babylon.
“Those
are
good terms. Ian must have them buffaloed.”

“Not exactly,” Marian Alston’s voice said, a little scratchy with distance. “I think they were gettin’ worried about their strategic situation all on their ownsome—it’s as bad as we thought from the histories, maybe worse. And this king of theirs, Shagarakti-Shuriash, he’s one sharp man; Ian thinks so too. We’ll have to watch him, of course.”

“Of course.”

Cofflin leafed through the terms again; trade, of course—a couple of the new merchant houses were already chomping at the bit—and alliance, first against Babylonia’s enemies, then against Walker. That was excellent,
provided
they could get the Hittites in later. He read on.
Hmmmm.
An Islander base near Ur, under the Republic’s sovereignty; joint courts for any civil or criminal case involving Islanders in the kingdom of Kar-Duniash.

“Good work, the lot of you,” he muttered. Damned if he was going to leave any citizen, under any circumstances whatsoever, to what passed for ancient Babylonian justice.

“Let’s see . . .” Right of passage up the Tigris and Euphrates for Islander transport, an embassy in Babylon itself, technical aid, mineral concessions . . .

“Crackerjack job, Marian,” he said. “I’m not going to have any trouble getting
this
past the Town Meeting, I can tell you. It reads pretty much like our wish list. We’ll post it right away.”

“Ian’s doing; I stayed in the background.” A chuckle. “The locals are having to put up with enough culture shock as it is. Now, if we can just get past the Tartessians next year or the year after, it’ll be Walker who’s caught between two fires.”

“Big if.”

“Very big. We’ve finished disembarking and unloading and shipped our return cargoes, so we’ll sail tomorrow—take a day or two to get through those damned reed-swamps, and then it’s ‘all plain sail.’ Thank God the ships could get this far upstream. See you in two months or so.”

“Ayup. Give our love to ’dapa and the kids.”

“Same to you and Martha and the tribe,” Alston said. “Over.”

“And out.”

Cofflin sighed again and tossed the treaty into his Out tray; the shortwave set stood on a side cabinet. It was a cold, wet, early-March day outside. Branches were still bare; he could see a rider going past, a blurred vision of a head bowed under a rain slicker and the pony’s drooping dejection. He half envied the expeditionary force, off in the warm lands, and the hardwood fire crackling in the fireplace was more than welcome. His hands hurt a little, the way they’d taken to doing in weather like this.

“Linda!” he called aloud. His secretary came in, and he indicated the treaty with a lift of his chin.

“Get this down to the Bookworks, would you, have them set it and print up, oh, three hundred copies for the Athenaeum to distribute—and tell ’em it’s going in the next Warrant as well. Thanks.”

“Sure, Chief,” she said, leafing though it avidly; her younger sister was with the expeditionary force, he remembered. “I’ll run it right over.” She hurried out; he could hear a clatter as she grabbed an umbrella from the stand by the front door.

Printing that many would take a while with a handpress; it would also put it on the agenda for the next Meeting. There were times when direct democracy drove him crazy, but it had one great merit—when a decision was finally made,
everyone
felt they’d had their say. In a way he’d be sorry when the population got big enough for the House of Delegates provision in the new constitution to kick in—that would be soon, too, the way things were going.

“Next,” he muttered, and looked at his In box.

A proposal to license and inspect day-care centers . . .
ask Martha
. Leaton wanted to import a trial run of coal from Alba for the forge-works . . .
ask him whether it’s really necessary.
A proposal to establish a new Base down around the site of Buenos Aires.

Hmmm. That’s a tough one.
It was a
long
way away, and they were already spread out thinner than he liked. On t’other hand, that was the edge of one of the biggest areas of good farmland on the planet; also, the preliminary survey said the locals were
very
thin on the pampas, even by the standards of the 1242 B.C. Americas, which meant an Islander settlement wouldn’t be too disruptive. In the very long run, it would mean a big chunk of the world modeled on the Republic’s ideals.

Put it in the discuss-with-the-Council file,
he decided after a moment.

And it looked like Peter Girenas was going to get enough votes before the Meeting to finance his expedition. He scanned down the list of names on the petition form, stopped, and began to laugh. After a moment Martha stuck her head in the office door.

“Something funny, dear?” she said, arching an expressive eyebrow.

“Mebbe, or mebbe I’m laughing so I won’t curse. Take a look at who’s backing young Girenas and Company’s petition for a grant.”

She came over to his desk. “The usual suspects . . .
Emma Carson?
”

“
And
all her friends.” He shook his head. “I guess she thinks his chances of coming out of it alive are even worse than I do . . . and Emma never did forget an injury.”

“Plus, she thinks with him out of the way, the Rangers might not be so hard on her,” Martha said thoughtfully.

“Not if we have anything to do with it,” he replied.

On impulse, he pulled his wife down into his lap. She gave a small snort and arched that eyebrow again, but put an arm around his shoulders and kissed him.

“Am I correct in assuming you want to quit work early?” she said, stirring strategically.

“Ayup,” he grinned. “Why not? We do have a treaty to celebrate.”

 

The door of the Wild Rose Chance opened, letting in a blast of cold air and a few drops of stinging March rain. Peter Girenas looked up and waved his friends over. They came, after they’d wiped their boots and hung their rain slickers on pegs driven into the wall to drip into the trough beneath. Several paused sheepishly when one of the waitresses pointed to a sign stating: NO WEAPONS ALLOWED and handed her their rifles or crossbows to be racked behind the bar.

Eddie Vergeraxsson was the first to reach him. He was a chief’s son from Alba who’d been brought over as a hostage after the Alban War and decided he liked the Republic better and stayed; about twenty, brown-haired and hazel-eyed, lean and fast like a bundle of whipcord. He wore the fringed, camo-patterned Ranger buckskins as if he hadn’t been brought up to kilts, and the bowie at his waist and tomahawk thrust into the back of his belt as if they’d grown there.

“Why so much ammunition?” he said, reading over the older ranger’s shoulder. “Gonna be heavy.”

Peter Girenas sighed a little, in the privacy of his head. Eddie was a good ranger—perhaps the best tracker and woodsman in the Corps, after Peter, good at languages, brave as a lion, deadly with any weapon. A nice guy to sit down and have a beer with, too. But he
was
Alban, and he had the
mañana
attitude of his tribe deep in his bones. His people took to guns like Lekkansu to firewater, though.

“Eddie, we’re going a
long
ways from home. We can’t drop over to the mill and trade some venison for another hundred rounds. That’s why I’m taking two stallions along as well as a dozen pack mares. Just in case everything takes longer than we thought.”

“Oh. Okay, Pete, that sounds sensible.”

He leaned back and took a pull at his beer. The table they’d taken at the Wild Rose Chance was littered with notes and letters and files, plus plates and bowls and jugs. Peter propped the paper he was reading up against a milk jug and pulled his plate closer, forking up ham steak in red gravy with a hearty appetite.

“I think we’re going to make it,” he said. “What the Meeting voted, it’ll just cover what we need.”

Nods went up and down the table. “You did good, Pete—made those lost geezers back on the Island sit up and take notice,” Sue Chau said.

He felt himself puffing up a little but suppressed it. “Not too hard,” he said. “Hell, I even got the Carsons rooting for me.”

Eddie laughed into his beer. “Diawas Pithair, won’t they turn red and blue when we come back richer than kings? And even richer in glory.”

Peter nodded. He wouldn’t have put it quite that way—“glory” wasn’t a word he was comfortable with—but there was no denying that was part of the reason. Even more than the gold or the cheers, though . . .
I want to
see
it. I want to be the first Islander to see it, while it’s still . . . fresh.

He looked around the table. There were probably as many reasons as there were people in his group; more, since each of the six probably had more than one.

Eddie wants to shine, and get enough gold to buy a big farm here and a horse-herd and throw parties and maybe take a vacation back in Alba and impress the hell out of his relatives,
he thought.

Beside him was Henry Morris, the oldest in the group—over thirty. A big, slow, strong redhead, a pupil of Hillwater’s; trained by Doc Coleman too.
He
had a thing about animals and plants and such; he was looking for a long-term career with the Conservancy Office. This would make up for a youthful indiscretion; he’d been involved with Pamela Lisketter, back when. Not much, but enough to make it difficult for him to get a government job. He’d be worth his weight in gold; no knowing when they’d need a sawbones.

Sue . . .
well, maybe I flatter myself, but Sue wants to come along because
I’m
going, I think.
Partly, and partly for the sheer fun of it.

Dekkomosu the Lekkansu was quiet, down at the other end. Beer hit him that way; he was short and stocky and muscular, hair still in a roach, but he was dressed in a white woods-runner’s buckskins rather than his native not-much. He and Peter were blood brothers, and there wasn’t much left of the tribesman’s family; they’d been hit heavy in the plagues.
Figure he just wants to get far away and forget things.