Against the Tide of Years (33 page)

The walls were like nothing he’d ever seen either. A low mound, a deep, broad moat, and then massive low-slung ramparts sunk behind the protection of the ditch. They formed a square, with triangular bastions at each corner and more before the gates. The surface . . .

“Is that all baked brick?” he asked, amazed.

Hollard nodded. “Look there, lord,” he said, pointing. Down by the riverside was a series of low structures, shaped like long half-tubes.

“Kilns fired by . . .
dis-till-ed
black water? I did not know there was a spring of it here,” Kashtiliash said. He would have known; the stuff had many uses, although it was costly.

“We drilled a well for it. That is what our
steamboats
burn here, too.”

The prince nodded, hiding a shiver. He’d heard the Nantukhtar explanation, and it was true—a sealed vessel of water put on the fire
did
explode, so there
was
much force in the vapors of heated water. It was still eerie.

He glanced at the lavish, manyfold thousands of bricks.
We should look into using the black water thus ourselves.
Building was one of the primary duties of a king, and the better the buildings, the greater the
mana
.

“The residue is bitumen, also useful,” Hollard went on.

“What is that other building, then, beside the kilns?”

“That is where we turn your reeds into . . . into a stuff like Egyptian papyrus. We call it
paper
, and it was our thought that your merchants could make it and then sell it to ours in return for our goods. We show them how, there.”

“Excellent, Kenneth-Hollard,” he said. The scribes sent to the Nantukhtar schools were sending good reports, but there was so much to learn here . . .

The roadway was thick with traffic; Nantukhtar wagons, one of them pulled by yet another
steam engine
, and men of Kar-Duniash as well. He looked keenly about at the land itself. New canals had been cut, and plants were growing whose like he did not know. Many peasants were at work, weeding and digging. None were occupied in lifting water with bucket and shadoof, though. Instead, skeletal structures of wood, with whirling vanes at their tops, stood at intervals, and from their bases water gushed as if by sorcery, running out into the furrows that laced the fields.

“Those are some new crops we thought would be useful here,” Hollard said smoothly. “Sugarcane, cotton, citrus, rice, others. We can supply your farmers with seeds and slips from here.”

Kashtiliash rolled the foreign names over in his mind.
Well enough
. In the end, all wealth came from the land.

They passed under the frowning gates, and under the muzzles of cannon. The Kassite prince looked at those with what he knew was an expression of pure lust.
With
cannon,
a king need fear no rebel
. They could pound down city walls like the bull-horn of Marduk—sieges would last only days instead of army-destroying months in camps where plague walked.

After a few hours’ tour, his mind reeled.

Everything was alien, and much was so strange that he could stare at it and not see. Sometimes when he
could
see, the disorientation became worse—as when Hollard explained the
lathes
as being like a potter’s wheel for the shaping of metal. When he heard those words there was a
click
somewhere behind his eyes, and suddenly he could see through the bristling foreignness of the machine to the principle behind it. Some things familiar were even more disturbing; to learn that pipes underlay the new streets and took away waste. . . . It was not that he didn’t know of sewers and baths. Such things were common enough in the greathouses of kings and city governors.

It is that such things may be given to common soldiers, to servants, and laborers
, he thought.
That
awed him, in a way that even outright sorcery like the fire-boats did not.

And the Nantukhtar have come not for a day, or a year, but for a lifetime
, he thought a little uneasily. Nobody would go to this much trouble otherwise.
My father knew I would be dealing with the Eagle People all my days
, he remembered.
A wise man.

At last he seized on something his mind could grasp. “This is a school?” he said.

The two-story building had a bronze disk over its entrance, with a bas-relief of an eagle clutching a sheaf of arrows and a wreath of olive branches; he’d noticed that symbol before among the Nantukhtar, as the gilded figureheads of their ships and the smaller figures that topped their battle standards.
The eagle must be their guardian god, then.
The corridors within rang with chants. He smiled, remembering his own long tutelage in the House of Succession, with the sons of nobles and priests for company. How the rod had fallen on their backs! How they had hated the scribes and scholars who beat a little wisdom into their hard heads!

“Yes, lord,” Hollard said. “Many among us brought their families with them, and it is our law that all children receive such teaching.”

Kashtiliash nodded, walking down the corridor that divided the building. Then he stopped. “Those are the women my father sent!” he said.

They were dressed in Nantukhtar clothing, mostly, but they recognized him and sprang up from the benches facing the chalkboard to prostrate themselves.

He signaled them up and turned to glance at Hollard. “My father was not well pleased to learn that you had spurned his gift, sending away the servants he bestowed,” he said. “Now I see them here. What is this?”

The Nantukhtar inclined his head. “Lord Prince,” he said, “there has been a misunderstanding—such is inevitable when tongues and customs are so different. No offense was meant, and we did not spurn your father’s gift. We did manumit the slaves, for such is our law, but they labor here for us nonetheless, as you see. And we thank the king your father greatly.”

“You teach servant women to
read
?” said Kashtiliash.

Anger awoke—he was not accustomed to spend his time gaping at a new wonder around every corner, like some Aramaean sheep-diddler seeing his first city. He fought it down.
Look and learn
, he thought. The Nantukhtar were men, whatever the peasants might believe, and what some men could do, others could as well.
If we learn how.

“Why not?” Hollard said. “Good for them, more . . . how you say . . . more useful for us.”

Kashtiliash nodded grudgingly. The scribes his father had sent were being trained as interpreters . . . but the Nantukhtar would not want all such to be in the service of the king of Kar-Duniash.

“I understand,” he said after a moment.

Only a fool whose alliance was worthless trusted an ally completely.

 

 

“D
uck up!” Marian Alston said crisply, leveling her binoculars. The clewlines hauled up the mainsail. Through the space cleared she could see one of the ship’s whaleboats beating up toward the
Chamberlain,
its small triangular sail bellied taut and the six sailors of the crew sitting on the windward rail as she heeled sharp over.

They’ll be alongside in one more tack,
she thought, and even as she did the boat came about.
Neatly done, by God.
The tiller over, the boom across, and the crew paid out, tied off, and switched gunwales in a single motion, neat as dancers.

As she watched, the factors were running through her head. Fine weather, a six-knot breeze out of the northeast, and a moderate swell under a blue sky scattered with small, fluffy clouds. The pumps were keeping pace . . . just. A steady hose-stream of water was pouring over the leeward rail.

I could clear the land and run down along the Wild Coast,
she thought.

The problem was that this was the Southern Hemisphere’s fall season—weather season, and as soon as anything
but
a moderate swell came up, the pumps started losing ground. Badly. And she was so damned
slow
under this jury-rig, not to mention steering like an ox. All along that ironbound coast, rocks, and reefs, with sudden squalls down off the mountains and freak waves rolling up out of the Roaring Forties—

The deck crew were going about their work in dogged silence, exhausted with the pumps and the endless sail trimming needed to keep the
Chamberlain
slanting across the wind. Meanwhile, the whaleboat skidded into the lee of the frigate, throwing a fine plume of spray off her bow. The sail and mast came down, the oars unshipped, and she came in under the anchor chains, fending off as the middie in command came up a line, as matter-of-factly as climbing the stairs in her own home.

“Permission to come aboard?”

“Granted,” the OOD said; the middie saluted the quarterdeck and came up to salute again and remove her billed cap from short sun-streaked brown hair.

“Ma’am, it’s a bay, all right. Narrow entrance, headland to the south and a sandspit to the north.”

“A bar, Ms. Harnish?”

“Yes, ma’am, but deep—twelve feet at low tide, something like twenty-two, twenty-three at high. I think it’s been scouring lately. Here’s the drawing, ma’am.”

She handed it over, and at Marian’s gesture Swindapa, Jenkins, and a few others came to peer over her shoulder as she spread it against the compass binnacle. The bay within was liver-shaped, with two streams running into its southern portion. The middie had marked broad areas of marsh and tidal mud; beyond that, brush and dense forest of tropical hardwoods came down almost to the shore.

“Durban,” Marian said. Not very much like what the twentieth-century charts showed, but they were used to that.

“No lack of timber, ma’am,” the officer-candidate said. “A lot of them a hundred, hundred and twenty feet to the first branch. But we wouldn’t be the first there.”

“Locals?”

“No, ma’am. Found some marks of big fires on the beach, piled wood, and this.”

The chunk of square-sawn wood was about a foot long, obviously broken off from a larger timber. Through it was a short piece of iron bolt. That brought whistles from the spectators. Alston brought it close and tilted it to catch the sun, brushing off a crust of rust with her thumb.

“Hammer-stipples on the bolthead,” she said grimly. “Not Nantucket Shipyard work, or any of the contractors.”

They machined their bolts; the only thing formed by lathe on this was the actual screw thread. King Isketerol’s artificers were still short of machine tools, although from the reports of Ian’s agents they were making up the lack with shocking speed.
Well, scratch that thought of a signal fire,
she decided. The cannon and gear on the
Chamberlain
would be a prize beyond price in Isketerol’s kingdom; no sense in putting temptation in their way.

“Tartessian,” Lieutenant Jenkins said, wincing slightly as someone jostled his slung and splintered left arm. “Well, they’ve got the ships and the maps—I suppose we should expect they’d be snooping around the Indian Ocean too.”

Marian made a noncommittal sound and closed her eyes in pure concentration for a moment. “We’ll do it.”

“Ah . . . ma’am, twenty-two feet’s chancy, with the ship this heavy.”

“We’ll have to lighten outside the bar, of course,” she said and cocked an eye at the sky.
And pray for good weather while we do it,
went unspoken.
Not to mention that our Tartessian friends don’t show up while we’re hauled down.
The Republic and the Kingdom of Tartessos were formally at peace; that didn’t mean that the Iberians wouldn’t do their best to stick a thumb in the Islanders’ eye if they thought it could be done quietly.

 

“Dispatch,” the messenger wheezed, obviously having run all the way from the communications ready room. “Sir.”

“Stand easy, Marine,” Colonel Hollard said, looking up from his desk and putting down the cup of coffee.

The evening was cool and dark outside the slit window, an hour before the rise of the moon, the stars a thick frosting across the desert sky. From outside there was a low murmur of voices, the neigh of a horse in the distance, the burbling moan of a camel—they were finally getting some of them in from the southern deserts. He took the transcript of the radio message and read quickly, whistling silently under his breath.

“Thank you, corporal—and this had better not leak,” he said. “Dismissed.”

He swept aside the duty rosters and stores reports and opened a folder of maps that Intelligence had put together in the two months since their arrival.
Hmmm.

I need to talk to Kat about this,
he thought. His second-in-command would probably be in her quarters; she’d been out on a field problem for the last two days—forced marches, among other things, getting the troops used to moving in this heat.

He left his office, returning the salute of the sentries, and walked briskly across the lane behind the praetorium headquarters—Officer Country was a row of cottages behind the central square where the routes from the main gates met; the design was based on a Roman legionary marching camp.

“Kat!” he said, walking into the sitting room. “News from—ooops.”

Major Hollard couldn’t actually shoot to her feet; not with the Babylonian woman on her lap clinging so hard and facing away from the door. She did manage to disengage, rise, and brace to attention, flushing visibly even in the light of the single dim lamp and making an abortive effort to button her shirt. There was a flask of the local wine on the low table beside them, and two cups.

Hollard’s eyebrows shot up; the local woman was one of the ex-slaves King Shuriash had sent as part of his gift to the Islanders. Then further.
You know, I could have sworn to
God
Kat was straight as a yardstick,
he thought, shaken.
Not that I
mind,
but it’s a bit of a shock. And . . .