Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

“Let’s put it this way—has all that gold brought peace to Mycenae?”

  “As much peace as a piece of fat pork brings to a pack of hounds,” Odikweos said. “Mycenae was always a knot of vipers, but now . . .”

  “Exactly. Also, taking only a tenth, I’m not expected to spend men and goods guarding the mines—and the natives there don’t love us for taking their mountain.”

  “Or for making their men dig in the ground,” Odikweos said.

  “Exactly, again. What’s more, gold can’t buy more than the land produces. Real wealth comes from increasing the yield of men’s hands and then gaining command of that yield—gold is simply a tool. And third and last . . . well, there’s a poem among my birth-folk. In your language . . .” Walker closed his eyes in thought for a moment. “It would go something like this:Gold for the merchant, silver for the maid;

  Copper for the craftsman, cunning at his trade.

  “Good!” laughed the king, sitting in his hall.

  “But iron—cold iron—shall be master of them all.”

  They drew rein before the portico with its green-white stone stairs. A small form burst through the ranks of guards and servants, followed by another, and then by a woman in a gown. He recognized Eurykleia, the household’s chief nursemaid.

  “Dad!” the hurtling bundle cried, and leaped with a trailing mane of white-blond hair. The second just leaped.

  “Whoops,” Walker said mildly and caught each under an arm. “Run along, the rest of you, no need for ceremony.”

  “I’m sorry,lord, they got away—”

  “No problem,” Walker said to the nursemaid. “They’re eight. You’d have to put them in a cage like Egyptian baboons to keep them quiet.”

  The boy and girl wiggled delightedly; they were much of an age, the girl his by an Alban slave, the boy by his wife Ekhnonpa.

  “Plain to see they’ve got spirit,” Odikweos said, grinning.

  “Althea has been misbehaving again, lord,” Eurykleia broke in nervously. “And . . .”

  Walker upended the girl. “What is it this time? Bothering your Aunt Alice again? Not safe, little one.”

  “Sneaking away to watch the warriors practice, lord,” the nursemaid said.

  “If Harold can do it, why can’t I?” the girl pouted. She pronounced it “Haaar-alt,” like the locals.

  “Why not, indeed?” Walker said. He looked up at the servant. “If she wants to train with her brother, we’ll see to it.”

  “But, lord, it isn’t seemly!” she burst out, as Althea crowed in delight.

  Walker’s face went cold, and the nursemaid looked down, her own face gone pale. “Seemly is what I say to be seemly, Eurykleia. I am the King.”

  “Yes, lord,” she said quietly.

  Walker hoisted his son over a shoulder and set the girl on her feet, delivering a swift spanking swat at the same time. “That’s for not coming and asking me first,” he said at her yelp, then gave her another. “And that’s for disobeying Eurykleia. Now both of you run along and mind your manners.”

  He walked up the stairs. “My friend, we have a good deal to talk about,” he said to Odikweos. “So that our children may inherit more than we hold today.

  “Sicily grows dull,” the Ithakan said. “Another man can chase bandits through the hills . . .” He paused. “Is that why you sent so many troublesome men to take up lands there?”

  “Well,” Walker grinned, “it does give them something to do, besides causing me problems.”

  “You are a man with a mind of many turns,” Odikweos said admiringly, a little surprised when Walker laughed loud and long. “Troy next?”

  “Troy, indeed,” Walker said.

  “That will bring in the Hittites.”

  “The worse for them, my friend. The worse for them.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  January, Year 9 A.E.

  “Uh-oh,” Ian Arnstein said. “Thunderclouds,” Doreen agreed, looking at the Commodore as she lowered her binoculars.

  “Mom?” David said. “Why’s Aunt Marian looking so mad?”

  “Shhhhh.”

  The Nantucket outpost on the uninhabited island of Mauritius was one of a chain the Republic was founding as time and resources permitted, staking out a claim to a global thassalocracy of trade and influence. Eventually it was supposed to be a jumping-off point for the settlement of the giant and equally human-empty island of Madagascar to the west and a base for trade throughout the Indian Ocean. The flotilla was two weeks out of a similar hamlet at the site of Cape Town, officially known as Mandela Base. That had met with Marian Alston’s approval; neat little earth-and-turf fort, a well-built pier, a bored-log pipe to bring water down from a spring on Table Mountain, and half a dozen farms up the Liesbeck River to supply fresh produce.

  Here . . .

  The Islander ships stood in on an easting breeze, only a trace of white foam at their bows as they ghosted along at five knots. Eastward was a broad natural harbor where a river ran down to a silver-sand beach. Beyond rose mountains, densely green in the foreground, fading to blue-green as they rolled away inland. Green was the overwhelming first impression, huge broadleaf trees growing almost to the water’s edge, and dark mangroves wherever a mudflat allowed; the white of sails, gray of hulls, and the broad red diagonal slash of the Guard along the ship’s flanks were the only man-made color to break it. The settlement had run a pier out into the deep water, made of upright ebony logs and looking massively solid. Onshore . . .

  Half-built, Ian decided; that was the best way to describe it. A couple of biggish buildings, but one of them had only the skeleton of a roof, and tiles were missing on the other. A windmill by the river looked broken, its vanes unmoving. Logs lay in untidy piles, and the patches of cleared land were weedy. Here and there were the signs of frantic last-minute effort that served only to make the rest seem more slovenly.

  “By the mark, ten! By the mark, nine!” the leadsman standing braced in the bowsprit netting said, whirling the lead line around her head and throwing it far out to plop into the greening water. “By the mark . . . Christ, by the mark, seven. Bye the mark, six!”

  “Captain Nguyen, I suggest you strike all sail,” Marian Alston said tightly. “Signal to the flotilla. I’m not fully confident in the buoys marking the channel, here.”

  The officer nodded curtly, gave orders. Feet thundered on the Eagle’s crowded deck, and teams bent to pull on ropes. Many of them included Marines, but the men and women clambering aloft in the ratlines all wore the blue sailor suits of the Guard; that was specialist work, hard and skilled and a little dangerous even in calm weather. They swarmed out along the yards and bent over them, gathering up armfuls of sail as the clewlines hoisted them up.

  “Put your backs into it!” called a petty officer from the boats towing the Eagle up to the dock. The dark-blue water was fading to green as they neared the shore, and white foam curled as the ashwood oars stroked into it.

  More thick ropes flew out, and the steel flank of the big windjammer kissed the coconut-fiber baffles. Further out, sails furled and anchors splashed, whistles sounded and the steaming ensigns came down, the national flag breaking out at the tops. He could see the party that stood ready to greet them on the dock bracing. Some had sickly smiles, others expressionless masks. The gangplank swung out and thumped down; Ian used councilor’s rank shamelessly, crowding in behind the initial quartet of Commodore Alston, Swindapa, Colonel Hollard, Major Hollard, and Captain Nguyen of the Eagle. A bell rang from the quarterdeck.

  “Eagle departing!”

  “Welcome, Commodore,” the commandant of Mauritius Base said.

  Marian Alston returned his salute. He was a heavyset, balding man in his early forties, dressed in shorts and sandals and loose shirt and sweating until his scalp glistened through thinning black hair.

  Might be the heat making him sweat, Ian thought. Mebbe not. He put Jared Cofflin’s dry, skeptical Yankee voice to the thought.

  “We’ve a luncheon laid
on,” the man—Marvin Lockley, he remembered—began.

  “Later,” Alston snapped. “I think we need to have a discussion, Mr. Lockley.”

  Not using his militia rank, Ian noted.

  She turned. “Colonel Hollard, Captain Nguyen, please see to disembarking the troops and passengers,” she went on in a flat, even tone that anyone who knew her recognized as the danger signal it was.

  She turned on one heel and strode away, the luckless Lockley trailing in her wake. Ian followed, looking about. A cat lay in the shade of a thatched hut, nursing kittens. For a moment he accepted the sight, then grunted in shock.

  That litter represents half a dozen feral cats in the making, he thought. Dane Sweet will have kittens himself. The Councilor for Conservation had been nervous about colonizing the home of the dodo anyway, and he and his faction had insisted on safeguards. Which, evidently, Mr. Lockley had let slip. A pregnant Fiernan girl waved to them; she was wearing nothing but a palm-frond hat and driving a sow ahead of her with a stick. Feral pigs, too. They were supposed to be strictly penned. A man in ragged shorts sat propped against a wall, a jug beside him . . .

  “I notice that the water-furrow and the sawmill are incomplete,” Alston said in a conversational tone.

  “Ah . . . we’ve had some difficulties . . . hard to get parts . . .”

  “I see. I think we should discuss this, Commandant.”

  They turned into what was evidently the commandant’s quarters, a series of thatched rondavels. Swindapa halted outside and made a sign to Ian and Doreen; they did likewise and shushed their son. Voices came from within. He couldn’t follow them for the most part, not until near the end, when Alston’s voice rose to a quarterdeck bellow:

  “This may be an island, and it may be a tropical island, BUT IT ISN’T GILLIGAN’S GOD-DAMNED ISLAND—YOU HEAR ME, MISTER?”

  A moment later they came out. Lockley was gray-white under his tan, and shaking. Alston stood blinking in the sunlight for a second. The troops from the Eagle were filing ashore, then being dismissed; the civilian technicians and specialists and their families followed. Her eyes came to rest on Lucy and Heather, and a little of the stiffness went out of her shoulders.

  “Mr. Nguyen,” she said.

  The Vietnamese-American officer came to attention as the commodore went on: “Mr. Lockley has decided to resign his position here and ship out on the Eagle as a foremast hand. Rate him ‘seaman recruit’ and see that he’s assigned some fatigues.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Ms. Stearns.”

  The former commandant’s second-in-command swallowed and braced herself. “Ma’am?”

  “In the light of Mr. Lockley’s resignation, I’m provisionally appointing you commandant of Mauritius Base. With the expeditionary force and the crews, we have more than a thousand pairs of hands here; we ought to be able to get things shipshape in fairly short order.” A pause. “Shouldn’t we?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good.” She sighed. “Now, let’s see about that lunch.”

  Doreen gave Ian a silent whistle behind the commodore’s back and waggled a hand. He nodded agreement. As they walked away, Swindapa dropped back beside them for a moment.

  “Ian,” she said, frowning slightly, “who’s Gilligan?”

  “Let go, and haul!”

  A squared ebony log jerked up off the pier, then swung out over the deck of the Eagle as the yard acting as crane pivoted on the mast.

  “Heave . . . ho! Heave . . . ho!”

  “Handsomely there, handsomely!”

  Captain Nguyen lowered his speaking-trumpet and turned to Marian Alston.

  “That’s the last of them, Commodore,” he said with quiet pride. He bent a critical eye on his ship. “I’m glad we finally got around to installing a proper hold. She trims well, even so.”

  “That she does, although I’d like to see her under way,” Alston said. “She’s a little by the stern.”

  “Better that than dead-level. I’d been meaning to come at the ballast and shift it a bit anyway. Less likely to press her forefoot down under full sail that way.”

  “She’s your baby,” Alston agreed, suppressing an inner pang. Promoted away from ship command, goddammit, she thought.

  “That’s the last of the cargo loaded, and we’re wooded and watered,” Nguyen said. He nodded toward the other ships of the flotilla. “Ready to sail with the evening tide, ma’am.”

  “Well, we’re not in that much of a hurry.” Theoretically, the stop-over on Mauritius was supposed to rest the expeditionary force’s people before the action at the end of it. Instead they’d spent an effortful week getting the base itself shipshape.

  “Watch crews only,” she went on. “We’ll give everyone a day or two of leave, then get under way. Morning tide on Monday—oh-nine-hundred hours. Lieutenant Commander, pass the word.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Swindapa said, conscientiously marking it in the daybook to be issued as a general order.

  Cheers and flung hats rose to the sky as Nguyen announced the leave and then exchanged salutes with the commodore. Alston removed her billed cap, sighed, and ran fingers over her damp forehead and close-cropped hair as they walked back up the single street of the little settlement.

  “Looks better,” Swindapa said.

  Alston nodded. It did; the major buildings were all completed, the sawmill in action, livestock neatly penned, and the hollow-log aqueduct had filled the casks and tanks of each ship in turn as they were warped in to the dock. Good spring water too, not likely to go bad out in the middle of nowhere. Hollard’s Marines were still putting the finishing touches on the fort, adding stone retaining walls below the earth ramparts. The colonel was lending a hand himself, stripped to the waist, sweat-shining skin rippling as he heaved an eighty-pound block into position. She caught Swindapa’s frank look of appreciation and mock-scowled.

  “Just looking,” the Fiernan said. “I look at girls, too.”

  “As long as it’s strictly a visual relationship,” Alston chuckled. She added, “He’s setting a good example for his troops.”

  Alston’s expression softened into a smile as they came to the circle of children sitting under a tall, slender tree with a silvery-gray trunk—a tambalacoque. Doreen Arnstein was taking the class, pointing alternately to a live dodo in a wicker cage and a diagram on the portable blackboard. There were around three dozen youngsters, mostly children of the technicians attached to the expeditionary force. This was a long-term project, and you couldn’t expect people to leave their children behind for an indefinite stay.

  They waited for a moment while the assistant councilor for foreign affairs finished her rundown on evolutionary biology and younger children continued practicing the alphabet on their slates. Nantucket’s still small enough to be informal, Alston thought. I like that. It was also small enough that Martha Cofflin had managed to thoroughly revamp the curriculum, and as a parent she liked that even better—they saw eye to eye on phonics and drill, and even Lisa Gerrard had come around on most of it.

  Gerrard’s not a bad councilor, Alston thought. Just a bit stubborn. She’d even shed most of her prejudices. After nearly nine years of working with a real, live, breathing, capital-L Lesbian.

  The class broke up. Heather and Lucy came running, and Alston crouched, grabbed the redhead under her arms and swung her up.

  “Do Jesus, either you’re getting heavy or I’m getting older!” she said.

  “Hey, Mom, did you know these gonzo birds could fly once but they got too lazy?” Heather said.

  “No, it was their ’cestors who could fly,” Lucy said from Swindapa’s shoulders. “That’s why you get sunburnt and I don’t. ’cause of your ’cestors. It’s evolutionary adoption.”

  “That’s adaptation,” Swindapa corrected.

  “Like I said, Mom.”

  Heather stuck out her tongue at her sister, and Alston felt her heart turn over inside her. Nice to know what you’re fighting for.

>   CHAPTER EIGHT

  February, Year 9 A.E.

  “The King comes! Eat dirt before shar kibrat ’arbaim, the King of the Four Quarters of the Earth! King of Sumer and Akkad, King of Kar-Duniash, King of Babylon, Ensi of Marduk. . . .”

  The great audience hall of Ur was tense, dense-packed with robed clerks, priests in old-style wraps that left one shoulder bare, and soldiers with their beards freshly oiled and curled. The hot still air smelled of that perfumed oil, sweat, and fear. Light from the small, high windows stabbed into the gloom hot and bright, breaking off the colors of tapestries and murals that showed the king’s ancestors at war, at the hunt, making sacrifice to the gods. Save for the ever-watchful royal guard, all went down on their bellies as the king entered.

  “Shagarakti-Shuriash, son of Kudur-Enlil, son of Kadashman-Enlil, descendant of the kings who were before the kings, unto whom the Gods have given rule! La sanan, sa mahira la isu! The king who has no rival! O King, live forever!”

  Shagarakti-Shuriash seated himself and made a sign. The crowd rose, standing with folded hands and downcast eyes, as was seemly.

  “Let the king’s servant Kidin-Ninurta approach! Let the king’s servant Arad-Samas approach!”

  Kidin-Ninurta cast a single burning glance at his rival as they prostrated themselves before the throne. When they rose, he found himself under the king’s gaze.

  Shagarakti-Shuriash was a man in his early middle years, with gray in his curled beard; he was perhaps a little lighter of skin and more hawkish of feature than his average subject, legacy of the Kassite hillmen and Mitannian princesses among his ancestors. His body was stocky and thick with muscle, beginning to grow at the waist but at ease in the gorgeous embroidered linen of his robe. Gray-streaked black hair was clubbed at the base of his head with gold wire and confined around his brows with a circlet of gold shaped like a city wall.

  “I have come a long way from Babylon,” he said. This had better be worth my time, came unspoken afterward.