Against the Tide of Years (41 page)

Not quite desert,
he thought; it sort of reminded him of parts of northern New Mexico he’d seen on vacations with his family, back before the Event. Hotter, though—there was a sparse covering of grass, an occasional thicket of low, waxy-green tamarisk in an arroyo, the odd water hole. The vegetation had been getting thicker as they came closer to the jagged blue line of the Jebel Sinjar on the northern horizon, too. Beyond them was the heart of the old kingdom of Mitanni, the district the Semites called Naharim, “the Rivers,” in the plain between the Taurus range and the Jebel. An Assyrian province now, although they’d received vague reports that it was rising in revolt. Or, from the sound of things, just dissolving into a chaotic war of all against all.

Three thousand years in a future that had bred him and wasn’t going to happen—he tried to avoid thinking about that; it made his head hurt—these steppes would be part of the northern borderland between Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Right now it was called, variously, Mitanni, Hanigalibat, the River Country, and God-knew-what, and it had been a marchland between Assyria and the Hittite Empire. Mostly it seemed to be empty except for wandering bands of sheep-herding nomads. Hollard smiled grimly to himself. Empty except for the remnants of the fleeing Assyrian army, the part that wasn’t holed up in Asshur over to the east on the Tigris. The camel-mounted recon company had been traveling through the detritus for days; dead men and donkeys, their corpses seething with maggots, foundered horses, broken chariots, bits of gear—everything from bedrolls to weapons and armor.

He waited for the Babylonian liaison officer to come up. Ibi-Addad had learned to handle his camel fairly well, and like all his countrymen he’d gotten more and more cheerful as the campaign went on, which was understandable. He was even prepared to put up with traveling in the desert, among the wandering Aramaeans—truffle-eating savages, to a man from the settled lands between the rivers. And he could speak Hittite, which might be useful in a little while.

“What do you make of that?” the Islander asked, pointing to what looked like a set of low adobe buildings at the foot of a rocky ridge.

Ibi-Addad stroked his beard, which had gone from neat black curls to a tangled thicket over the past couple of weeks, and raised his own binoculars—that gift would have made him willing to come along even without King Shuriash’s orders.

“I think it is the . . . ” he began, and trailed off into terms Hollard couldn’t follow.

The Nantucketer sighed.
Just when I thought my Akkadian was getting really fluent.

“The manor of a Mitannian
mariannu,
” Ibi-Addad clarified. “They were the ruling folk of Mitanni, before the Assyrians and the Hittites broke that kingdom a hundred years ago. A fragment of it lived on as a vassal state until my father’s time, when they revolted and King Shulmanu-asharidu of Asshur destroyed them. I do not suppose many of that breed are left.”

“Let’s go see,” Hollard said. “I think the Assyrians are paying a visit.” He grimaced; they’d seen the results of that, in villages and nomad camps. “I thought this was part of their kingdom? They’re acting like they were in enemy territory, though.”

Ibi-Addad shrugged eloquently; he was in Marine khakis, but the gesture was purely Babylonian. “They are broken men fleeing defeat, and these are conquered provinces. The people here hate them. Except for the Assyrian colonists, and those are in the cities.”

Hollard nodded and turned in the saddle. “Spread out and look alive!” he called.

The complex of buildings came into view as the camels paced northward in a long double line; a hundred mounted riflemen, and a mortar team with the pack animals. Another thing the Assyrians were having trouble adjusting to was how far a camel-born outfit could swing into the desert and how fast it could move. The locals used donkeys for carrying cargo, and those had to be watered every day or so.

Oooops.
Assyrians, all right—a couple of hundred of them, with half a dozen chariots. That meant some fairly high-ranking officers, given the shape of what remained of their field army. The men were milling around the adobes; those looked like they’d seen better days, with more than half of what had been a substantial village in tumble-down ruins. One or two of the large buildings seemed to have been occupied until recently; they were shedding mud plaster but still largely intact. There must be a spring of good water here, then, and the stubble fields indicated a hundred acres or so of grain, enough to sustain a big household if not a town, together with the grazing.

Hollard flung up a hand as the Assyrians broke into shouts and pointing, and the company came to a halt.
Careless bastards—should have seen us long before now.

“Captain O’Rourke!”

The commander of the recon company whacked his camel on the rump and sped up to the commander’s side.

“Business, sir? ”

“Enemy up ahead. They’ve spotted us, and any minute now . . .”

Oooops again.
A racket of harsh trumpet sounds and cries came from the cluster of beige-colored mud-brick buildings half a mile away.

“We’ll be seeing them off, then, sir?”

“That we will, Paddy,” Hollard said. “Six hundred yards, and set up the mortar. Open order. Let’s not get sloppy.”

The Assyrians were pouring out of the open ground, into the protection of the stout two-story building and its courtyard. The house was windowless on the ground floor, with narrow slits suitable for archers above, and from the looks of it the courtyard wall had a proper fighting platform on the inside. A short, thick tower rose from the rear of it, giving another story over the flat rooftop.

“Looks like a fortress,” he said in Akkadian. Ibi-Addad had picked up a little functional English, but not enough for a real conversation.

“How not, Lord Hollard?” he said. “This is the edge of cultivation—the Aramaeans would be all over anyone not ready to fight like flies on a fresh donkey turd.”

Hollard nodded; they’d seen
that,
too—small bands of Assyrian stragglers overrun by nomads out for loot and payback. They seemed to have a knack for skinning a man alive, from the feet up. He put the image out of his mind with an effort; the Assyrian had still been alive when they found him, one huge scab with eyes staring out of it, and
moving.

“Looks like they’ve learned better than trying to rush us.” O’Rourke chuckled. “Damned alarmin’ it was, a few times.”

Hollard nodded again. Whatever you could say about the Assyrians, they didn’t lack for guts.

“Let’s do it by the numbers, then,” he said.

A thousand yards from the settlement the Islanders came across the first bodies. Hollard’s brows rose; they looked like standard Mesopotamian peasants, men in loincloths or short tunics and women in long ones and shawlike headdresses. These had obviously been caught fleeing. One had a broken arrow stub in the back of his head, probably too tightly wedged to be worth recovering. Several others showed gaping wounds where shafts had been cut out for reuse, and the great pools of black blood were still a little tacky and swarming with flies.

“This morning,” he said, not looking at a few very small bodies.
Those
had been tossed on spears.

“Sunrise, or a little after, I’d say,” O’Rourke said, crossing himself.

Hollard looked eastward. The chariots had probably come in first and caught the workers out in the fields. A good place to halt, about a thousand years from the big flat-roofed house, and barley straw could be sharp enough to hurt a camel’s footpads.

The camels halted and knelt, chewing and spitting, glad enough of a rest; some lifted their long necks and flared the flaps over their nostrils in interest at the scent of water and green growing things from the courtyard ahead. Marines dismounted, unslinging their rifles and exchanging floppy canvas hats for the helmets strapped to their packs. Others hammered iron stakes into the ground and tethered the beasts to them. The mortar team lifted the four-foot barrel of their weapon off a pack camel’s back with a grunt, and there was a series of
clicks
and
clunks
as the weapon was clipped into its base and clamped onto the steel bipod that supported the business end. The sergeant in charge of the weapon was whistling tunelessly between her teeth as she unbuckled the leather strapping on the strong wicker boxes that held the finned bombs.

“Three up, one back?” O’Rourke asked.

Ken nodded; he wasn’t going to second-guess the man on the spot unless he needed it. Patrick Joseph O’Rourke was possibly a little too ready to lean on higher authority—one reason he didn’t have Hollard’s job. Nothing wrong with his aggressiveness at the company level, though, and he had the saving grace of a wicked sense of humor.

The company commander turned and barked: “D Platoon in reserve, A through C in skirmish order. Prepare to advance on the word of command—and fix bayonets!”

The long blades came out and clattered home, their edges throwing painfully bright reflections in the hot Asian sun. Kenneth Hollard hid a slight grimace of distaste at the sight. He
knew
what it felt like to run edged metal into a man, the soft, heavy resistance. And the look in his eyes as he realized he was going to die, and the sounds he made, and the smell . . .

“Dirty job,” O’Rourke said, catching his thought without the irrelevance of words.

“But somebody’s got to do it.”

Some of the Sun People rankers were grinning at the prospect of a fight.
But then, they’re all maniacs, anyway.
Good soldiers but weird. Sometimes he worried a little about the impact they would have when they mustered out and got their citizenship. Up to now most of the immigrants had been Fiernan. Who were weird too, but less aggressive about it.

He raised his binoculars again. Plenty of the distinctive ruddy glitter of bronze along the edges of walls . . .

“Sir? ”

That was Sergeant Winnifred Smith of the mortar team—Immigration Office name, she was obviously Alban by origin—Sun People, from the accent.

No questions asked,
Hollard reminded himself. Your record started the day you took the oath, in the Guard or the Corps.

O’Rourke lowered his own glasses. “Let’s start by knocking down the big gateway into the courtyards,” he said. “With a little luck, they’ll rush us.”

“Yessir,” the sergeant replied.

A broad grin showed as she worked the elevation and traverse screws; the muzzle of the mortar moved up a bit, and to the right.

“Nine hundred yards . . . one ring,” she called over her shoulder.

“One ring, aye,” the man with the mortar bomb in his hands said.

That was an elongated iron teardrop with fins at its base. A section above the fins was perforated, and around that his assistant clipped a linen donut of gunpowder. Then he slipped the friction primer into the base of the bomb, turned the wooden-ring safety and pulled it out. Now when the round was dropped down the muzzle it would drive the primer in on itself, striking a light in exactly the same way as a matchbox and match. Seahaven swore that they’d have percussion caps available in quantity soon, but in the meantime this worked and they could make more in the field at need. Leaton swore he’d have a brass-cartridge rifle available next year too, but Hollard would believe that when it arrived.

“Fire in the hole!” the sergeant barked, and dropped the bomb into the waiting maw of the mortar. The team turned away, mouths open and ears plugged with their thumbs.

A jet of dirty-gray smoke shot out of the muzzle. The bomb followed it, landing in the dirt about fifteen feet in front of the weathered wooden gates.

Whuddump!
The bursting-charge exploded, throwing up a black shape of dirt that stood erect for a moment before drifting westward and falling in a patter of dust and clods. A small crater gaped in the packed earth of the trackway. Shouts and screams could be heard from the men within; the Assyrians had some experience of being under fire from the Islander artillery by now, and they didn’t like it at all. A few stood up over the parapet, shaking fists or weapons.

Not enough experience, though,
Hollard thought coldly, remembering the dead peasants and their children.

“Marksmen may fire on movement!” O’Rourke called out. “No need to let the insolence of them go unrequited.”

Here and there along the line Marines with the sniper star began to fire, slow and deliberate. An Assyrian pitched forward off the parapet over the gates, landing with a limp
thunp
on the ground. Several others toppled backward, some screaming. The others ducked down, and ducked further when a bullet clipped the top of a bronze helmet barely showing over the crenelations of the defense. The helmet went spinning, ringing like a cracked bell. Fragments of the skull and brain beneath probably followed it.

“Lost his head completely, poor fellow,” O’Rourke said.

Sergeant Smith gave the elevating screw a three-quarter turn. “Fire in the hole!” she called again and dropped in the second bomb.

Another malignant whistle overhead, dropping away . . . and this time it crashed precisely into the arch over the gateway. When the smoke cleared the arch had a bite taken out of its apex—more dropped away as Hollard watched—and the wood of the gates was splintered, torn and burning.

“Lord Kenneth-Hollard,” Ibi-Addad said, a frown of worry on his sun-browned face. “What if some of them drop off the wall on the northern side and run?”

“I hope they do,” Hollard said. At the Babylonian’s inquiring look: “All I can do is kill them.”

“Ah,” Ibi-Addad chuckled. “But if the Aramaeans catch them . . .”

“Exactly.”

“And the tribes will be hanging about like vultures on a tamarisk above a sick sheep,” King Shuriash’s man said happily. Then he frowned. “More and more of the sand-thieves roam in these lands every year, though, and they press into the settled country whenever they get a chance.”