Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

  “Gone wild,” Swindapa said. Her eyes raked the woods by the side of the road; they were closing in, as the riders reached beyond the settled zone. “Like that . . . and that.’

  Deer Dancer had the Spear Mark tattooed between her breasts, the sign of a hunter among the Fiernan Bohulugi, and Alston was still surprised sometimes at how sharp her eyes were. She pointed around; at a patch of plantain, dandelions, dock, nettles, a honeybee buzzing between the flowers of white clover, a starling flitting between branches.

  All things from Nantucket that sailed upstream against the tide of years, Alston thought. “Like me, sugar,” she went on aloud. “Worse things than being a weed. Means you’re hardy and difficult to get rid of.”

  Their laughter echoed in the cathedral stillness of the forest, and they kneed their horses into a canter. Traffic would be thin until they reached the training ground where the republic prepared an answer to Walker’s ambitions.

  “Rejoice, Oh King,” Walker said, bowing low.

  “Rejoice, ekwetos Walkeearh,” Agamemnon said, nodding regal benevolence as he stepped down from his chariot.

  The wind was blowing across the Lakonian Gulf, cutting the summer heat where the Eurotas River met the sea. All was bustle in the cove sheltered by the rocky headland; workmen, women with jars on their heads, slaves moving loads of all types, wagons full of grain or timber. Rows of mud-brick huts had been built a little inland, and a tall structure with long, armlike sails going around and around. Curious, he walked toward it and through the broad doorway at its base.

  “Ah, another of your mills, Walkeearh,” he said.

  They were no longer so strange that they shed his eyes in bafflement, although this was different from the ones moved by falling water and the interior was dim and dusty, full of loud creaks and grinding stone. Up above, a long pole turned with the sails outside . . . driven by the wind, Agamemnon thought. Clever. As if the circle of sails was the wheel of a chariot and that pole the axle. That turned a toothed wheel, which turned another wheel on a vertical shaft, and that ran down to ground level. More wheels drove a giant round quern taller than a man, shaped in profile like an old figure-eight shield. Peasants walked up a ramp and tipped jugs of grain into the top. Below, flour poured out of a spout into still larger pithoi, storage jugs as tall as a man’s chest. Slaves dragged them across the stone platform and into waiting oxcarts, some of them the big four-wheeled type that Walkeearh had made.

  “Swift,” Agamemnon said. “But surely you don’t let your slave women sit in idleness? They can’t earn all their keep lying on their backs.”

  The outlander laughed politely at his overlord’s jest, along with a couple of the courtiers who’d driven down from Mycenae with the high king. Walkeearh bowed his head again.

  “True, lord; this wind-mill does the work of five hundred women grinding grain. The women do other chores—work in the fields, or make cloth.”

  Agamemnon grunted and scratched his beard. That sounds . . . sensible, he thought dubiously. Just as the women in the palace at Mycenae could make more cloth and better, with the new looms and spinners that Walkeearh’s wife the wisewoman (his mind carefully avoided the word “sorceress”) had shown them. Many of the slaves the outlander was using in his mills and mines had been bought with that cloth—still more with the silver from new deep shafts in Attica that he’d shown the High King’s men how to make.

  And didn’t Wannax Lakedwos of Athens bawl like a newborn calf when I took those for my own, the Achaean ruler thought with an inward chuckle.

  Much of the metal was being stamped into little disks with Agamemnon’s face and titles on them; convenient, since you didn’t have to weigh the silver, and it spread his fame widely. A year ago he wouldn’t have dared to seize the mines, but with cannon and mortars vassal kings suddenly felt far less secure. He chuckled, imagining Nestor in Pylos or Lakedwos in Athens sitting at meat and looking up now and then, expecting a bursting shell to crash through their roof-trees.

  Still, there was something about all this that made him uneasy, something of the feeling of a chariot whose team had run wild, or even of an earthquake. He quickly made a sign of the horns with his left hand and spat to avert the omen.

  “Show me the ships you are building,” he said, as they came back into the sunlight and slapped flour dust off their tunics.

  “This way, my king.”

  There was one floating at a pier with men swarming over it, and another half built in a timber cradle at the shore. Agamemnon bit his lip in puzzlement at that one. The way the carpenters worked on it was very strange; instead of mortising the planks together with tongue-and-groove joints and then putting in ribs to strengthen the shell, they were putting up thick ribs and crossbeams and then nailing a shell of planks to them. Several forges stood around it, red-glowing iron hissing as it was quenched in vats of oil or water.

  “Doesn’t that take much metal?” he asked, pointing to the crews nailing the long oak planks to the frame.

  “My lord sees as clearly as Horus, the Falcon of Egypt,” Walkeearh said. “But now we have much metal. And building a ship in this way is so much quicker than the old manner. Less skill is needed, and it’s stronger as well.”

  Agamemnon almost rubbed his hands. All tin and most copper for the making of bronze had to be imported, and it was so expensive, especially the tin. Iron came from within his kingdom, and it grew cheaper by the day. Cheap for him, at least. The mines and smelters were a royal monopoly, by Walkeearh’s suggestion and his decree—under Walkeearh’s exclusive management, and Walkeearh could not be a menace, an outlander who owed everything to the King of Men’s favor.

  That gave him a hand on every vassal’s throat. Gunpowder and cannon gave him a spearpoint held to their eyes.

  “Show me the finished one,” he said.

  “This way. It’s called a gullet, Lord King.”

  Footsteps boomed out along the wharf. He looked keenly at the ship; unlike any he’d ever seen before, it was fully decked, a smooth sweep of planking from pointed prow to rounded stern. Two masts stood tall, whole pine trees smoothed down and glossy as a table, with furled sails. On either side six small cannon waited, on stubby oak carriages with four little wheels. Crewmen scattered from the king’s path as he came up the gangplank—and from the ready spearpoints of his guards, glittering steel-bright in the noonday sun.

  “How is it steered?” he asked, going to the stern and looking over. There was a single steering oar, pivoting like a door on its post, but no apparent way to turn it.

  “This wheel,” Walkeearh said. “It turns ropes that draw pulleys under the deck, moving the tiller—the bar attached to the rudder, the rear steering oar—either way. Here in front of it is the compass, the north-pointing needle.”

  Agamemnon shuddered a little to see a sacred oracle displayed so casually. Perhaps one should be put in the shrine of Zeus the Father and of far-shooting Apollo, he thought. Yes, with sacrifices and celebratory games.

  “Shall I show you how she sails?” Walkeearh inquired.

  “At once,” he said. Then: “Hold, a minute—who are those? Are they doing a sacred dance?”

  Men in tunics were walking about in lines and blocks not far away, holding sticks. Overseers shouted orders, and the lines turned, advanced, marched away again.

  “Oh, those?” Walkeearh smiled charmingly. “Just an idle thought of mine, Lord King. Men to handle a new type of cannon. Very small cannon, such as might be useful in rough country. Men of little account—younger sons, mercenaries, farmers.”

  “Oh,” Agamemnon said dismissively. “Poh. Well, perhaps you can get some useful work out of them. Let us sail; I hear that your ship can sail against the wind.”

  He laughed again, and Walkeearh with him. “Not against, Lord King, unless it is rowed. But closer to it than the old ships, yes.”

  “Superior violence and intensity,” Major Kenneth Hollard read on the last recruit evaluation form. That translated as “beats t
he hell out of opponents in training.” The DI’s notes went on: “Problems with discipline largely overcome.” That usually meant “no longer has to be dragged away with ropes.”

  “We’ve got visitors,” a voice said, breaking his concentration.

  He looked up; it was his second-in-command (and younger sister), Captain Kathryn Hollard. Sweat stained her khaki fatigues and darkened her sandy-blond hair; on her the long family face looked reasonably good even under a short-on-sides Corps haircut. She’d had Second Recruit Battalion out on a field problem, open order in forest country—they’d gotten field drill down well, but you had to be flexible; massed formations were great for fighting spear-chuckers, but that approach would be too dangerous with Walker’s men. Arnstein’s spies said the renegade was doing far better than expected with firearms, and so were the Tartessians.

  The sounds of a working day at Camp Grant filtered in through the outer room where his orderly had her desk—the rippling thump of marching boots with someone calling cadence, hooves clopping, a distant shoonk . . . wonk . . . shoonk . . . wonk from a mortar team practicing on the firing range, the crackle of rifle shots, the rhythmic sound of a smith’s hammer.

  His eyes flicked across the rough plank of the office to the board that had his schedule for the day chalked on it. As usual, it contained enough work for about twenty hours, which was fine if you left out little luxuries like sleep. Hell, farming would have been easier work, he thought. He could have gotten a six-hundred-forty-acre grant on Long Island and a loan from the Town for start-up; all the veterans of the Alban War had been offered that, and his older brother had taken one. He’d decided to stay in the Corps instead; memories of his father, perhaps, and things with Cynthia hadn’t worked out the way he expected.

  Dad would have laughed himself silly, seeing me a major, he thought. Gunnery Sergeant Hollard had refused promotion to commissioned rank four times. Always said he preferred to work for a living, Ken remembered with a wry smile. Not to mention the way he’d get a rise out of a Marine Corps that was part of the Coast Guard.

  Commodore Alston had firmly squelched suggestions that her command be renamed the Republic of Nantucket Navy. Ken Hollard understood that, too. His father had had a dog, and if you asked Semper Fido “Would you rather be in the Army, or dead?” he’d roll on his back, put his paws in the air, and do a fairly good dead-dog imitation.

  “Who the hell is it this time, Kat?” he asked. Visiting firemen had been far too common over the last month or so. “Maybe I can unload it on Paddy . . .”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s the commodore.”

  Oh, Christ, the boss, Hollard thought, shooting reflexively to his feet and looking around like a private caught in his skivvies by a snap inspection.

  “Thanks for the warning,” he said, suppressing an impulse to smooth down his hair and beard and tug at his khaki uniform jacket. Instead he contented himself with a quick look in the mirror. He saw someone a few years closer to thirty than twenty, with sand-colored hair and beard and the tanned, roughened skin of a person who spent much time outdoors in all weathers.

  The face beneath was long and lantern-jawed, with a jutting nose and high cheekbones. It was a common enough face among old-stock Nantucketers—those lines had intermarried until there was a general family likeness. At least Kat and I didn’t get the receding chin. Six feet and an inch tall; he’d been a skinny teenager, but the passing years had put solid muscle on his shoulders and arms. The Sam Browne belt held a double-barreled flintlock pistol and a katana-style officer’s sword; his helmet lay on the table he used as a desk, out in his office-cum-ready-room. He took a deep breath and scooped up the flared metal shape as he went through, tucking it under his left arm and waving to the orderly to keep working.

  If she wanted everything prettied up, she’d have just given us some warning, he thought. Commodore Alston made him nervous—she had that effect on just about everybody—but she had a reassuring tendency to concentrate on function rather than form. There are a lot worse people to work for.

  She was waiting not far from the HQ block with her hands clasped behind her back the way he remembered her on the quarterdeck of the Eagle, with her aide Lieutenant Commander Swindapa by her side—Guard seafaring rank, easy enough to remember, given their blue uniforms. And domestic partner as well as aide, remember that. Wouldn’t want to commit a social gaffe.

  “Welcome to Camp Grant,” he said, saluting. “Commodore, Lieutenant Commander.”

  Commodore Alston-Kurlelo returned the gesture, with the same precision he remembered from the gymnasium of the high school over on the Island, that day he’d volunteered for the first expedition to Alba.

  “Needed to talk over a few things, Major,” she said. “Readiness, and potential assignments.”

  He nodded stiffly, feeling a rush of excitement like a hand squeezing at his diaphragm. Assignments. Hot damn! Real work? He didn’t like combat, not being a lunatic or an Alban charioteer, but peacetime soldiering could get monumentally dull.

  “Ma’am!” he said. “Would you care to inspect the troops, ma’am?”

  “I’ll observe briefly, Captain. I don’t want to interrupt training schedules, and we have some matters to discuss.”

  “Ma’am.”

  The blocks of troops on the parade ground flowed together into a column. Another series of commands, and the formation split and moved forward, opening out like a fan until there was a two-deep line stretching across the parade ground. Another, and they halted in place, the first rank going to one knee and the second rank standing. Another, and each left hand flashed down to that hip, drawing a long sword-bayonet. A rattling click and the knife-edged blades shone in precise alignment, pointing toward an earth-and-log berm along the far side of the parade ground.

  Each right hand went to the knob on the back of the rifle’s stock, and a lever came up like a monkey’s tail to expose the breech. Another movement of the right hand, to the cartridge box at their belts. The nitrated-paper cartridges dropped into the open breeches of the rifles, to be pushed home with a thumb.

  Slap. The levers went down again. Click, and the hammers were pulled back to half cock. Hands dropped to the belts again, this time to bring up the spring-loaded priming flasks. Those rattled against the frizzens, knocking them forward to expose the pan and drop in a measured amount of fine-grain powder. Snick, and the frizzens snapped closed, the sparking surface in position to meet the flint in the hammer’s jaws.

  “Ready . . .”

  Three hundred and sixty thumbs pulled back the hammers to full cock, a ratcheting metallic sound.

  “Aim . . .”

  The rifles came up; there was a slight ripple as each muzzle pointed at one of the man-shaped timber outlines staked to the berm. That had been one of Alston’s ideas; better to make the targets as close as possible to what the troops would actually be shooting at.

  “In volley . . . front rank . . . fire.”

  BAAAMMMM.

  A small fogbank of dirty beige smoke drifted sideways, smelling of fireworks and rotten eggs . . . smelling of death, he thought. The thought of what these breech-loading rifles would do was satisfying in a technical sense, but the pictures in his mind’s eye were best put aside.

  Both ranks came to their feet, grounded the butts of their rifles with a rattle, and stood braced. Alston walked down the files, her face an unreadable mask, her eyes appraising; he followed at her right hand, the courtesy position.

  The uniforms were gray-khaki-brown linsey-woolsey four-pocket tunic and trousers with deerskin patches on elbows and knees, flared samurai-style helmet, rifle, utility knife and twenty-inch bayonet, webbing harness and pack. The faces were less uniform. Few of the rankers were Island-born; many more of the noncoms and nearly all the officers, of course. A scattering of Indians, they made wonderful scouts, but most were from Alba, about evenly divided between Fiernan Bohulugi and Sun People.

  “Interesting,” Alston said to him sotto
voce. “I can’t always tell which are which.”

  He nodded, pleased. You weren’t supposed to have a past, in the Corps.

  She stopped in front of one. “What’s your name, Recruit?”

  “Ma’am, this recruit is Winnifred Smith, ma’am!” The voice carried a harsh, choppy accent that had never been bred on the Island.

  Must be an Immigration Office name, he thought. Replacing something a Sun People tribeswoman on the run from her kinfolk didn’t want remembered. Probably on the run from something that got a woman pinned facedown in a bog with her head shaved and her throat cut.

  “What’s your tribe and clan?” Marian Alston asked.

  “Ma’am, this recruit’s tribe is the Republic of Nantucket and her clan is the Corps!”

  Alston gave a small crisp nod and walked on; Hollard hid his gratified smile. The Republic of Nantucket had found them one way or another, from its bases in Alba or the docksides on this side of the Atlantic; adventurous youths, runaway slaves, absconding wives, taboo-breakers, the ambitious attracted to the promise of Islander citizenship and a land grant for six years’ service. Many were simply uprooted from home and folk and custom. The Alban War and the flood of Islander trade and tools and ideas after it had left growing upheaval in their wake.

  They smelled of dust, sweat, leather, gun oil, burnt powder, and healthy well-washed young bodies. Kenneth Hollard kept his face impassive, but he felt a glow of pride; this was his work, built from small beginnings—the Marines had started out as landing parties for Guard ships.

  Following along behind the Commodore, he could see eyes flicking toward Alston reflexively as she passed. To the Fiernan Bohulugi she was the warrior who’d come from beyond the world to take the Spear Mark, rescue and court a priestess of the Kurlelo line, lead Moon Woman’s people to victory and crush their ancient enemies. There was a star named for her now, folded into the endless chants that they sang at the Great Wisdom, what would have been called Stonehenge. To the Sun People she was more of an ogre, word spread by the few who’d gotten back alive to their homes from the Battle of the Downs. Her race heightened things in both cases; the Sun People had a tradition of dark-skinned demons they called Night Ones, and almost none of these Bronze Agers had seen a non-Caucasian before.