Atlantis and Other Places (33 page)

“The way those people—all those peoples—feel about dogs is enough to make you anti-Semitic,” Antenor said. After three thousand years on the Middle Eastern mainland, Philistinians had a good deal of Semitic blood in them, too. Pheidas found himself nodding all the same.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass how they feel about dogs,” Sergeant Dryops said. “But when they want to murder me . . . That, I don’t like.”

He didn’t need to feel sure he had Dagon’s power behind him. His boundless scorn for the Moabites was plenty to keep him going.

 

 

Along with half his squad, Pheidas tramped the narrow, winding streets of Hierosolyma. His eyes went this way, that way, every which way. He registered all the windows, all the balconies, all the rooftops. Every time a Moabite drew near, he tensed. Did the man have a murder belt full of explosives and nails laced around his middle? Was the woman carrying grenades?

Moabite men called names, in their language and in Philistinian. Some of what they said made
dog
and
son of a bitch
seem like endearments. In civilian life, Pheidas might have tried to kill someone for insults like that. As a soldier, he had to keep his finger off the trigger. Even sticks and stones weren’t reason enough to open up. So the high command insisted, anyhow.

But the high command wasn’t out there. Soldiers—ordinary human beings—were. Somebody a couple of blocks from Pheidas got hit by a rock and an insult at the same time. He did what he would have done if he were still a civilian. A few seconds later, a young Moabite writhed in the street, blood pouring from his head and his chest.

When Pheidas heard the burst of automatic-weapons fire, the muzzle of his own rifle automatically swung toward the sound. But the screams and shouts and curses that followed weren’t close enough to give him any targets. They got louder instead of softer, though. “That’s trouble,” he said.

“Better believe it,” Antenor said.

Then there were more bangs. These came from the Novgorodian assault rifles terrorists used all over the world. More Philistinian guns barked in reply.

Pheidas had heard plenty. “Come on!” he shouted, and ran toward the sound of the firing. His squadmates pounded after him.

“Maybe . . . we can keep . . . the riot . . . from starting,” Antenor panted as he ran.

It was already too late. “Death to the Philistinians!” somebody yelled from a second-story window. A wine bottle with a flaming wick flew out and smashed on the cobbles in the street. Flame splashed out in a five-cubit circle. Pheidas sidestepped like a dancer. Behind him, one of the other Philistinian soldiers chucked a grenade through the window from which the incendiary had come. A shriek rang out hard on the heels of the boom. The soldier nodded in grim satisfaction and ran on.

A couple of Philistinians were down. So were more than a couple of Moabites. Pheidas smelled blood and shit and fear. Some of the fear was bound to be his own. Two bullets snapped past his head. He dove into the nearest doorway. When he saw somebody in a headscarf, he fired at him.

The man went down, clutching at his side. “Mesha! My Mesha!” a woman screeched, and then, “Murder!”

More and more Moabites converged on the flashpoint. So many of them carried weapons, Pheidas wondered if they weren’t waiting for a moment like this. Philistinian soldiers ran toward trouble, too, as they’d been trained. When rocks and firebombs and gunfire met them, they answered with gunfire of their own.

An APC awkwardly turned a tight corner. Its heavy machine gun and bulletproof sides let it dominate the field—or would have, if a Moabite hadn’t set it on fire with another bottle full of gasoline. Some of the Philistinians inside managed to get out. Pheidas didn’t think all of them did.

“Chemosh is king!” The cry rose again and again, ever louder. So did another one: “Death to Dagon!”

Pheidas peered out from the doorway. Somebody in a dun-colored uniform like his was down. A Moabite with a Novgorodian rifle drew a bead on the wounded Philistinian from no more than three cubits away. Pheidas shot the Moabite in the back. He threw out his arms as he toppled, the rifle flying from his hands. Pheidas ran to his countryman. The Philistinian had a big chunk blown out of one calf. “Hurts,” he said as Pheidas dragged him back to cover.

“I bet it does.” Pheidas gave him a shot and bandaged the wound. He was glad he’d replenished his aid kit after helping the Moabite woman. He wasn’t so glad he’d helped her, not any more.

“Death to Dagon!” the Moabites howled. “Chemosh is king!”

Another Moabite with a rifle ran out to try to help his friend the way Pheidas had helped the wounded Philistinian. Pheidas shot him, too. He’d never fired his own weapon in anger till this morning. One of these days, he would have to try to figure out what it all meant. Now he just wanted to stay alive.

“What a mess.” Thanks to the shot, the wounded Philistinian sounded dreamy, not tormented.

“Man, you can say that again,” Pheidas said. “The Arabs in Amman will be screaming about what we did to their little Semite brothers. So will the Phoenicians, and the Turks in Babylonia. We’ll be lucky if we don’t wind up in another real war.”

“Yeah.” The wounded man didn’t seem to care. That was the drug talking—the drug and the fact that he wouldn’t be doing any more fighting for a while no matter what.

An ambulance rolled up, lights flashing and sirens wailing. The Moabites threw rocks at it even though it had the Green Waves painted on the doors. They didn’t recognize that symbol of mercy; their ambulances, like most in the Middle East, used the Green Sun instead. Parthians used the Green Lion, while most of the world preferred the Green Hammer.

Pheidas waved to the ambulance driver, who stopped the vehicle. A couple of medics got out and picked up the man who’d been shot. They both had pistols on their hips. Medics were supposed to be noncombatants, but the Moabites didn’t care about leaving them alone, so they protected themselves as best they could.

The ambulance screamed away. “Over here!” somebody shouted in Philistinian. “Quick!”

Pheidas caught the slight guttural accent. “Sit tight! He’s a fraud!” he yelled. What did the Moabites have waiting? Snipers? A machine gun? Grenades?

A tank fired. The boom of the cannon and the blam of the bursting shell came almost too close together to separate into two noises. Screams followed a moment later. Pheidas hoped some of them came from the Moabite who’d tried to trap his buddies.

“You all right?” That was Antenor’s voice.

“So far, yeah. You?” Pheidas called back.

“I’m not bleeding, anyway,” his friend said. “Don’t know what the demon I’m supposed to do, though.”

“Stay alive. Shoot the ragheads if they get too close. What else is there?” Pheidas said.

“There should be something.” Antenor sounded desperately unhappy. Pheidas hoped he wouldn’t think too much. If you did, you were liable to give the bad guys a chance to punch your ticket when you could have punched theirs instead.

To them, of course, you were the bad guys. The Moabites were surer they were right than Pheidas’ own folk were.
Now who’s thinking too much?
Pheidas wondered.

“To me! To me!” That was an unmistakable Philistinian voice. Pheidas dashed out of the doorway. He sprayed a quick burst to make any Moabites in the neighborhood keep their heads down. The Philistinian shouted again. He was inside a grocery. Pheidas ran over and jumped through the blown-out front window.

“What’s up?” he asked, flopping down flat.

The Philistinian who’d called wore a captain’s three dragons on each shoulder strap. “I’ve got a captive here, and I want to make sure we get him out in one piece,” he answered, keeping his rifle trained on a plump, most dejected-looking man. “I think he’s one of those Sword Buddha maniacs from Babylonia, here to stir up the Moabites.”

“Great,” Pheidas said, peering out to make sure nobody was getting ready to rush the grocery.

“My name is Chemoshyatti,” the man said in flawless Moabite. “I have run this grocery for years. By my god, Philistinian, you mistake me.”

“My left one,” the captain said. “I found the tracts in your register’s cash drawer.” He didn’t turn his head away from Chemoshyatti, but addressed his next words to Pheidas: “The usual garbage.”

“Uh-huh,” Pheidas said. In the Middle Kingdom and Southeast Asia, Buddhism was a peaceful faith. But the variant the Turks brought down off the steppe preached that nirvana came through killing foes. You didn’t even have to be a Buddhist yourself to gain it if you took enough enemies with you. Babylonia fostered terrorists as far as its acolytes could reach.

Antenor and another Philistinian soldier warily approached the grocery. Pheidas raised up enough to let them see him in helmet and uniform, then ducked down again. The captain urged them on, saying, “Now we’ve got enough men to make sure we can get this guy to the people who need to ask him questions.”

That wouldn’t be much fun, not for the fellow who had to do the answering. Chemoshyatti, or whatever his real name was, must have decided the same thing. One second, he stood there looking innocent and sorry for himself. The next, he flung himself across the five or six cubits that separated him from the Philistinian officer. He was good; nothing gave the move away till he made it.

But the captain was good, too. He hadn’t let the man he’d caught come too close, and he hadn’t let the fellow’s nondescript appearance lull him. Before the grocer who said he was a Moabite could reach him, the captain squeezed off a neat four-round burst, just the way he’d learned to do it in basic. The rounds stitched across the plump man’s chest. The captain sidestepped. Chemoshyatti crashed down and didn’t get up.

He choked out a few words that weren’t Moabite:
“Om mani . . . padme hum
.
”
Then he slumped over, dead. A latrine stink filled the grocery as his bowels let go.

“Sword Buddhist, sure as demons from the afterworld,” the captain said grimly.

“Why don’t they leave us alone?” Pheidas said. “The Moabites would be bad enough without the Turks stirring them up.”

“That’s what the Turks live for, though,” the officer said. “Maybe we’ll have to pay some more unofficial calls on Babylonia.” Philistinian planes had wrecked a Babylonian nuclear pile a few years back; the idea of Sword Buddhists with atomic bombs gave politicians all over the world the galloping jimjams. None of the big powers wanted to do anything about it, though, for fear of offending others and starting the war they wanted to head off. The Philistinians, in a tradition that dated back to the days of Crete, took the bull by the horns. Babylonian bonzes often came down with sudden and unexplained cases of loss of life, too. Officially, Philistinia denied everything. But the captain hadn’t talked about anything official.

He scooped out the propaganda pamphlets he’d mentioned. They were of the usual sort, preaching the glories of murder and martyrdom in punchy text and bright pictures. One headline grabbed Pheidas’ eyes and didn’t want to let go. CHEMOSH WANTS PHILISTINIANS DEAD! it screamed.

“Know what I heard, sir?” Pheidas said.

“What’s that?” the captain asked.

“That there are Sword Buddhists in Philistinia, too. They want to get us to murder Moabites. They don’t care who kills who, as long as somebody’s killing somebody.”

“I’ve heard the same thing. You wouldn’t want to think that kind of nonsense could take hold in modern, educated people, but it does, curse it. It does.” The captain scowled. “I’ll bet some of them get driven round the bend because of the things the Moabites do.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Pheidas nodded. Another burst of gunfire not far away made him spin back toward the window, but he decided halfway through the motion that the shooting wasn’t close enough to be dangerous. He went on, “And the ragheads say the same thing about us. How did it all get started? How do we make it stop?”

“It goes back to the days when we first came to Philistinia,” the captain said, “all those years ago. Maybe it’d be different now if things were different back then. I don’t know. I don’t know how to get off the wheel, either, any more than anybody else does. And as long as we’re on it, we’d better keep winning.”

“Yes, sir,” Pheidas said.

THE HORSE OF BRONZE