Against the Tide of Years (42 page)

Hollard nodded; according to the Arnsteins’ briefings the Aramaeans were slated to overrun most of the Middle East in the dark age that the pre-Event histories said was coming, and their tongue and ways would stamp themselves on the region for millennia. Aramaic would be the state language of the Persian Empire, and the native tongue of Jesus. Or would have been . . .

Hollard blinked and coughed as the harsh sulfur-smelling black powder smoke blew past. The mortar was firing for effect now, and the thick, soft adobe walls of the manor house and courtyard wall went up in gouts of dust. Smoke began to trickle skyward as the timbers supporting the roof caught fire. One round landed with spectacular—if accidental—accuracy square on top of the tower, sending a shower of wood, mud brick, and bodies in every direction.

“Roast, run into the wilderness, or come out and get shot,” Ibi-Addad laughed.

Hollard nodded. True enough, although he still didn’t like to hear laughter as men died. None of the choices available to the Assyrians were good.

“Heads up!” one of the snipers called. “Here they come!”

The rest of the line thumbed back the hammers of their rifles, a long multiple-clicking sound, as the enemy swarmed forward over the rubble of courtyard wall and gate.

So, they decided to die fighting,
Hollard thought. Or trying to fight, anyway.

“Independent fire!” O’Rourke called.

The platoon commanders echoed it; Hollard heard “make it count” and “Aim low.” Spray-and-pray was bad enough with automatic weapons; with a single-shot like the Westley-Richards, you really needed to take some trouble.

The rifles began to speak their sharp, spiteful cracks. Hollard estimated the Assyrians at a hundred and fifty or so, and they began dying as soon as they left cover, men falling limp or crawling, screams as faint with distance as the war cries. Other bullets kicked up puffs of dust around them; he saw one Assyrian stop and slam his spear at one, probably thinking it was some sort of invisible devil.

More fell as they drew closer, but none of the enemy turned back toward the shattered, burning buildings. The last one to fall carried a standard with a sun disk in gold on the end of a long pole; his face was set and calm, and by some fluke of ballistics he came within fifty yards of the Islander line before three of the heavy bullets struck him simultaneously. Hollard saw his face go from a set, almost hieratic peace to brief agony and then blankness as he toppled forward. The standard fell in the dirt and lay with the steppe wind flapping the bright cloth against the ground and raising tiny puffs of dust as it struck.

Silence fell, broken by a few moans and whimpers and men calling for their mothers—Holland had noted how that always happened on a battlefield, and he always hated it. Then there was a shout from the ruined buildings; another man emerged, this one waving a green branch torn from one of the trees within.

“Cease fire!” Hollard called.

He walked out in front of the Islander line and waited, one hand resting on the butt of his pistol. “That’s far enough,” he said, when the Assyrian was about six feet away. No sense taking chances with a possible berserker.

The man was obviously not a soldier; he was dressed in the long gown and fringed, embroidered wraparound upper garment that was a mark of high rank, and his curled beard was more gray than black. His face was a pasty gray with recent hardship and with fear, although you could see that before that he’d been well fed.

“Mercy!” he called. He went down on his knees and raised a clod of dirt to his lips; then down on his belly and crawled forward, kissing Hollard’s boot and trying to put it on his neck.

“Mercy!” he bleated.

Kenneth Hollard restrained an impulse to kick the Assyrian nobleman in the face. “Surrender, and live,” he said.

Ibi-Addad sighed and rolled his eyes as the crawling man began to babble thanks and call down benedictions from his gods, his teeth bared in an unconsciously doglike grin of submission.

“You Eagle People,” he said. “Fierce as lions one minute, then like lambs. It makes no sense.”

“Get up, get up,” the Marine colonel said. “Go back there. Tell your countrymen that if they’re not all outside in five minutes, we’ll kill you all. We’ll also kill you all if we find anyone hiding within, or if there’s any resistance. Go! Now!”

O’Rourke was frowning at the enemy dead. “Notice something, sir?” he said.

Hollard did, and heard Ibi-Addad’s surprised grunt follow. “They’re all armed like a noble’s retainers,” he said.

Corselets of bronze scales, or bronze studs in thick bull hide; good metal-bossed shields, and nearly every man had a sword as well. His eye picked out other details: embroidered rosettes along the edge of a tunic, gold and silver inlay on a belt buckle or hilt, silver buckles on a sandal, a tooled-leather baldric. Some of the Marines were eyeing the same things with interest. Albans weren’t squeamish about picking up valuables; he’d have to tell off a working party, when things were settled.

The remaining Assyrians were scrambling out of the wrecked building, a score or so of them, including some badly wounded enough to require carrying or dragging. They went to their knees as the Nantucketers approached, touching clods of earth to their lips or holding out their hands to touch feet or thighs in token of submission, babbling in their rough northern dialect of Akkadian.

“Shut up!” Hollard barked. “Captain O’Rourke, give me a squad; we’ll check the building.”

“Ah . . . wouldn’t it be better if I did that, sir?”

Hollard smiled for the first time in several hours. “No, it wouldn’t, Paddy.” Leading from the front went with the job in the Republic’s forces. “Keep an eye on the prisoners and have the medic patch those that need it. And be careful: smoke draws more than vultures, here.”

Hollard made sure that the
katana
slung over his back was loose in its sheath. Then he drew his pistol and used the weapon to wave the eight-bayonet section forward with him. The house wasn’t exactly burning, but wood was smoldering and sending up black smoke here and there.
If there’s enough left for shelter, we can put it out,
he thought. The shattered adobe was loose and treacherous beneath his feet as he climbed through.

The courtyard enclosed by the L shape of the main building and its own wall was substantial and had been handsome before it was shelled. A spring bubbled up in a stone-lined basin in the center; that would be priceless here. There were the remains of grapevines trained up trellises along the walls, and rows of fruit trees as well as banks of herbs, vegetables, and flowers. What attracted his attention was the six men and women impaled on tree trunks that had been cut down and sharpened in lieu of stakes. One of the privates behind him swore softly in Fiernan, another in English.

Well,
he thought, swallowing hard himself and looking away from the contorted features of those who’d died in agony,
at least it makes you feel better about the job.
He was glad the heavy fog of dust and burnt powder was enough to cover most of the stink.

There weren’t any living Assyrians in the courtyard, although the iron scythe of shell fragments from the mortar had left plenty of dead ones; he forced down a chilly satisfaction at that and walked through toward the building. There were two big doors standing open, leading into a sort of hallway. It had been a handsome space once, with painted frescoes on the plastered wall, and stone benches around the all-around, but the paint was faded and patched with plain mud, and the tile floor was cracked and worn.

The Assyrians had made modifications of their own. A table was draped in an expensive-looking knotted rug, and on it was a very dead man in armor of gilded scales, a purple-crimson cloak spread over him. His eyes were wide, and someone had slashed diagonally across his neck, a deep, ugly wound. A young man, with the heavy hooked nose, dense curled beard, and full lips common in these lands; deep chested as well, and judging from the muscular forearms and legs, very strong in life. The tanned skin was pale with blood loss, but seamed white scars were still visible.

And at the foot of the improvised bier, a woman was hanging from the ceiling, dangling by a rope looped around her wrists and secured to a notch in one of the exposed rafters. Her ankles were bound as well, and below her feet was a neatly prepared tepee of kindling and sticks ready to light. She wore the diaperlike undergarment universal here, and dried blood marked a scattering of ship marks on her back.

“Catch her!” Hollard barked, tossing the pistol into his left hand and reaching over that shoulder with his right. “And then get the corpsman.”

The
katana
came out with a long
shinnnng
of steel on leather and wood. Two of the Marines slung their rifles and obeyed; the rope was plaited leather, and it took two strokes before the tough hide parted. The woman gave a hoarse grunt as she fell back into their arms and opened her eyes as they lowered her to the ground. Her arms stirred only slightly as Hollard went to one knee and held his canteen to her lips; she drank eagerly, water spilling down her face.

Young,
he decided. Not more than her late teens. Not quite like the physical type usual here, either. Her long black hair was feathery-fine and straight; it had russet highlights, while the eyes were a dark gray rimmed with amber-green. Her skin was a clear olive, features straight-nosed and regular, and her build more slender than the rather stocky local norm. On Nantucket he’d have said she had Italian in her background, or maybe Spanish. A memory teased at him . . .

The medic came running in, her red-cross-marked satchel in hand. “Diawas Pithair!” she blurted, in the Keyaltwar dialect, calling on the sky father who was overgod of the Sun People tribes.

The young woman’s head came up, her eyes losing the glaze of pain. She looked at Hollard, then at the medic and a few others who were crowding around, and spoke.

“Dyaush Pitar?” she said, and then an eager string of sentences.

The medic looked baffled and replied in her own tongue as she began her work, which consisted mainly of ointment and bandages for wrists and ankles and whip marks. She shook her head and looked up at Hollard as she finished.

“Sir, it’s real funny—I sort of feel I
should
be able to understand what she’s saying, but I can’t. Uh, she’s okay—the shoulder joints are stressed, but they’ll do fine if she rests ’em for a few days.”

The woman spoke again in another language, throaty and agglutinative-sounding, and then in Akkadian; the Babylonian version of it, he noticed.

“Who are you?” she said.

Hollard sat back on his heel, resting his weight on an elbow across his thigh. “Colonel Kenneth Hollard, Republic of Nantucket Marine Corps,” he said and then translated: “Kenneth Hollard, commander of a thousand in the host of the Eagle People.”

“Ahhh! I heard the pigs of Asshur speak of you—an army of demons with weapons that spat fire and smashed walls like the fist of Teshub. I thought they lied, but I am glad that they spoke the truth.”

Yet another non-admirer of the Assyrians,
Hollard thought.
They have a positive
gift
for negative PR.

“And who are you, young gentlewoman?” Hollard said.

Someone with a lot of guts, anyway,
he thought. From the looks of things she’d been about to be tortured to death, and now she was surrounded by weirdly armed strangers, yet she looked cool as a cucumber, working her shoulders without even a wince at what must be considerable pain.
Probably near collapse underneath, though,
he thought—he could sense the quivering intensity of her control.

“I am Raupasha daughter of Shuttarna.” The girl’s chin lifted. “Who would have been rightful king of Mitanni, if the gods had not thrown the realm down in the dust.”

Well, shit,
Hollard thought.
That may complicate things.

“Ah . . . if your father was here . . .”

A bleak expression; she turned her head aside for an instant and drew a deep breath. “No. He died while I was yet in the womb; the Assyrians killed him when they destroyed the last of the kingdom, and my mother died bearing me. I saw what they did out there; they made me watch. That was the lord Tushratta, the
mariannu
—the warrior-retainer—who bore me southward to this last estate of his and raised me as his own.”

“Er . . . what happened here?”

A shrug, and she turned her face away, blinking rapidly.

“The Assyrians came last night, fleeing defeat. My foster father greeted them as guests. What could he do, with twenty men only and they peasants, against more than a hundred in full armor? Then they demanded that I dance for their leader—meaning that he would rape me at his pleasure.”

Her smile grew even bleaker. “And dance I did, and when he seized me—breaking the law of hospitality that all the gods hold sacred—I opened his neck with the knife in my sleeve. Then they slaughtered all here, save me—they gave over thought of ravishing me and after much argument decided that to flog me to death would be too merciful. Instead they hung me up as you saw. Not long after, I heard the thunder of your weapons. So my life was spared—Teshub, and Hepat, and Shaushga, and Indara, and Mitra, and Auruna, and the other gods and goddesses must favor me greatly.”

Remind me not to get this chick mad at me,
Hollard thought.

She struggled to her feet and made an imperious gesture; one of the Marines hastily picked up a long shawl, and she wrapped it around herself. Then she walked stiffly to the side of the bier and spat in the dead man’s face.