Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

  “Oshinsky, kill that donkey,” the Republic’s commander said. “And don’t miss.”

  “Sir, yessir,” the Marine replied. She was a brown-haired young woman, a native Islander with corporal’s chevrons and a Sniper star.

  “There will be a loud noise,” the Islander commander said in Akkadian.

  She went to one knee and thumbed back the hammer of her Westley-Richards. Ian could see her squinting thoughtfully as she brought the rifle to her shoulder, exhaled, squeezed . . .

  Crack.

  Forewarned, the king and his son only blinked. A few of his courtiers made covert signs with their fingers, or clenched small idols that hung from their belts. The grizzle-bearded officers clenched their hands as well, on the hilts of their swords, and screams came from the watching crowd. The sulfur-stinking cloud hid the donkey from Ian for a moment; he felt a wordless prayer drifting up with it, to an atheist’s God. The problem was that he knew that particular deity delighted in the perverse; otherwise he wouldn’t be here in the thirteenth century B.C.

  Th donkey gave an agonized bray, and seconds later it collapsed, going to its knees and then falling over sideways to kick a few times.

  “By the brazen prick of Marduk,” Shuriash said quietly, when a terrified guardsman ran back with the shield.

  The men behind him were gabbling prayers under their breath, clutching at amulets; a shaven-headed priest extended his toward the strangers, chanting an incantation. The king held the shield up and then wiggled a finger through the hole the .40-caliber bullet had made through sheet bronze, tough bull hide and layered strips of poplar wood.

  “You can throw thunderbolts?” he went on. His face was set, but sweat gleamed on it. “You must be a nation of mighty sorcerers.”

  Ian nodded to Hollard. “O great King, the earth lies at your feet,” the young colonel said soothingly. “Not a thunderbolt. Lead shot, like a sling.”

  He took Oshinsky’s rifle and raised the lever. “See, O King, here is the shot.” He held up a bullet in his other hand. “Behind it is a powder that burns very fast. That creates a—” Hollard hesitated; there was no word for “gas” in Akkadian—“a hot swift wind that pushes the lead shot out of the iron tube, too swiftly for the eye to see.”

  “Like a sling bullet,” Shuriash said. “Only too swift to see. It can pierce armor? How far?”

  “A thousand long paces, O king. Shall I demonstrate?”

  The king nodded, a tightly controlled gesture. This is a brave man, Ian thought. Several of the courtiers were still trembling; it spoke volumes of their fear of their monarch that none had run. Many of the crowd had, streaming back toward the city to spread Ghu-knew-what rumors.

  Hollard pointed southward along the riverbank. The Islanders had planted stakes there, at fifty-yard intervals. Atop each was a local clay pot.

  “Those are full of water,” Hollard said. “But the bullets would strike through any armor a man could carry, and send his spirit to the realm of Nergal.” He switched to English: “Squad, independent fire. Make it count.”

  Corporal Oshinsky snapped: “You heard the colonel. Llaundaur, you first, then to the right.”

  The Sun People trooper licked his thumb, wet the foresight of his weapon, and brought it up to his shoulder in a smooth movement that ended with another crack; the nearest clay jar shattered in a spectacular leaping jet of water. Colonel Hollard took out his binoculars and showed Shuriash how to adjust them; by the time the last pot broke, the king was looking more at them than at the firearms. Ian could see wheels spinning in the Babylonian’s mind and gave himself a mental kick.

  Hollard rescued the situation. “Let these tubes of far-seeing—these binoculars—be my humble gift to the king’s majesty,” he said.

  “Out! Out!” King Shuriash bellowed.

  The priests bent over the sheep’s liver, the baru-diviners, the mahhu-priests who foretold in frenzies of madness, backed out of the council room where the king of Kar-Duniash had met with the ambassadors, taking with them the smell of blood and incense. Their lord resumed his pacing.

  “Fools, dolts, wit-rotted tablet-chewers!” he roared, with a lion’s guttural menace in his voice. “They can interpret comets and tell me to wear the same shirt for a month, but I ask them a question—I ask for an answer—it should be there in the liver of the sheep, and I receive nothing. Nothing of use!”

  His son nodded. Sincerely, he thought. The generals and bureaucrats nodded agreement with their lord, too. With them, who knew what their real thoughts were? Over the years he had come to suspect that the priests, too, shaded their omens according to what he wished to hear, as well; or worse, according to how their temples wished to bend his policy.

  “ ‘Great opportunity, but great danger,’ ” Shuriash quoted. “I could have told them that and saved the waste of a good sheep.”

  “The priests will eat the sheep,” Kashtiliash pointed out.

  “As I said, wasted,” Shuriash replied.

  There were smiles and a few shocked looks at the delicious blasphemy; only his son dared to laugh aloud.

  “There are two questions here, O King,” Kidin-Ninurta said. “First, what can the Nan-tu’kht-ar do for us? And second, what do they wish? What will be the price of their aid?”

  The king nodded. “We know they are rich,” he said.

  Emphatic nods; the gifts they’d given the king amounted to about a year’s taxes from Ur and its district.

  “We know they are powerful, with their fire-weapons.” Even more emphatic agreement; the rifles were bad enough, but the strangers had also demonstrated what their cannon could do.

  “O King, they are more powerful than that,” Kidin-Ninurta said thoughtfully. “Consider their ships. Consider those.” He pointed to the binoculars on the table. “Consider the arts they must have to make all these things.”

  “O King my father,” Kashtiliash said. “Consider also the most excellent order of their warriors. In their every movement they anticipate commands; like the fingers of a man’s hand, they obey.” He paused. “Consider also that each one was equipped and dressed exactly like the others—even to the shade of the cloth they wore.”

  Shuriash felt his heart glow with pride. I have bred me a lion that can think as well as fight, he thought. It was a good thought. The Nan-tu’kht-ar soldiers were like the marks of a cylinder-seal rolled many times on wet clay. The implications of that were . . . interesting.

  “This Yhared-Koff’in must be a ruler of great power; his people must fear him more than the demons,” Shuriash said. “They must obey as if he were a god among them.”

  “Women,” Kashtiliash said thoughtfully. “All other things to one side, how can they be useful as warriors when half the time their bellies bulge with children? And if they can stop soldiers from fornicating, they are not sorcerers, but rather gods.”

  “Prince of the House of Succession,” Kidin-Ninurta said. “Of that I asked the merchant Shamash-nasir-kudduru; for a brief time I was able to speak with him. The Nan-tu’kht-ar have a way of preventing conception. One that actually works without fail.”

  “Strange, even so,” the prince said, tugging at his beard and disarranging the careful curls that hot bronze rods and oil had put in it. “How can a people grow strong if their women do not bear many children?”

  “That also I asked, O my lord; diligently I inquired. Their medicines ensure that few children die—less than one in ten, if what the merchant said can be believed. They can bind Lamashtu, the demoness of cradle fever!”

  That brought more exclamations, some skeptical, some wondering. “This merchant,” Shuriash said. “He knows their language; he knows their ways. Such a man would be very valuable to us.”

  Kidin-Ninurta spread his hands. “O King, your servant thought of this. But the Nan-tu’kht-ar guard him like a lioness with a single cub.”

  “Yet this Shamash-nasir-kudduru does not wish to dwell among them all his days?” Kashtiliash murmured.

  �
�No, Prince of the House of Succession. That is not his wish; it is not the yearning of his liver. He wishes to dwell in the land of Kar-Duniash as a great man, as a man of wealth and power.”

  “For which he needs the favor of the king, as well as the silver of the Nan-tu’kut-ar,” Shuriash said. “Something might be made of that.”

  He paused and leaned two palms on the table, looking at the strange maps the Nan-tu’kut-ar had given him on their even stranger papryrus. His own scribes made maps, but this was fantastically detailed, and with the round glass on a metal holder—the magnifying glass—he could read the small legends printed out in Akkadian writing. What a tool of power! he thought, looking at his land laid out as a god might see it . . . and the neighboring lands as well. It wasn’t perfect; the Euphrates was shown too far to the west. But that could be corrected, they said.

  His son went on: “With all their strengths, why do the Nantukhtar come here to speak of treaties, of agreements? Why do they not break down the walls of the cities, seize the wealth of the land for themselves?”

  “Ah, my lord prince,” Kidin-Ninurta said. “I have thought on this; I have pondered it. I think that the Nantukhtar are few in numbers, very few. From what Shamash-nasir-kudduru let fall, their city of Nantukhtar is smaller than Ur, far smaller than Kar-Duniash—rich and strong but not large. Thither to that city and its lands they bring many of their subject-allies every year to bolster their own strength, to work and farm and fight.”

  “Perhaps that is why they use their women for many tasks,” Kashtiliash said slowly. “Perhaps they have too few men.”

  “Perhaps we build a great ziggurat from a single brick,” Shuriash said dryly. “Also we circle the heart of the matter like vultures around a dying donkey. These Nantukhtar have great powers, yes, but can they foretell the future so much better than our students of the stars, of birds, of entrails?”

  A long silence fell. “I pray to Marduk and Ishtar, to Shamash and Sin, the great gods of the land, that it is not so,” Kashtiliash said. “What they said lies in our future . . .” He shuddered.

  Shuriash nodded again, and his thick fingers traced over the surface of the map. He had read from the Assyrian chronicle the strangers had brought. It had made grisly hearing:I forced Kashtiliash, King of Kar-Duniash, to give battle; I brought about the defeat of his armies, his warriors I overthrew. In the midst of that battle my hand captured Kashtiliash, the Kassite king. His royal neck I trod on with my feet, like a galtappu stool. Stripped and bound, before Ashur my lord I brought him. Sumer and Akkad to its farthest border I brought under my sway.

  “And the Elamites at the walls of Nippur,” Shuriash said.

  “Surely it is not possible!” Kashtiliash burst out.

  “Long ago the Elamites burned Uruk, when Uruk was as Babylon is now,” Shuriash said. “My son, you are a great warrior and a crafty leader, but I fear it is all too possible.”

  He could see the younger man contemplating it, as if an abyss had opened before his feet. When he spoke, his voice was slow and thoughtful. “In the time of your father Shalmaneser of Assyria broke King Shattuara and the last remnant of Mitanni, of Hangilibat, of Hurri-land. That frees his son Tukulti-Ninurta to turn all his power southward.”

  Shuriash sighed. “So, son of my loins, son of my heart, you see that Kar-Duniash is between the hammer and the anvil. Against Assyria, we are strong; against Elam, we are strong. Against both together . . . and that is why I believe the Nantukhtar. What they say of the years to come agrees all too well with my fears, with fears that have haunted my nights.”

  Kashtiliash had hunted lions and armed men with a smile on his lips; now he turned gray beneath his olive tan. Shuriash knew he was seeing the vision of himself brought bound and leashed like a dog before the altar of Ashur. Or of watching an Assyrian victory feast as a severed head hanging from a pomegranate tree in the gardens of Tukulti-Ninurta’s palace—Assyrians were given to gestures like that. But fell fighters and grim, and their rulers crafty and war-wise.

  “The Nantukhtar are too strange for my liver to feel easy at relying upon them. We might ally with the Hittites instead, or as well,” the prince said. “They know Asshur’s eye lies hungrily on their holdings west of the Euphrates.”

  “We might, if they did not have this new foe on their far western border, the Ekwesh,” Shuriash said. “Now this rebel against the Nantukhtar king has risen to power there; he teaches the wild Ekwesh their arts; he gives them the secret of these fire weapons.”

  “So we will make alliance with the Nantukhtar, father and lord?”

  “We will make alliance.” His fingers traced the map again. “And then, once our enemies have been beaten, we will war against theirs—this rebel, the Ekwesh—if we can persuade the Hittites to it.

  “It comes to me—perhaps a god whispers it in my ear—that the strangers bring a new age with them, one in which those who learn their arts will prosper and those who do not will be ground like grain between millstones and blown about by the wind.”

  His seamed face split in a broad smile.

  “And Kar-Duniash,” he went on, “is perfectly placed to benefit by this new age. Kashtiliash, my son, my heir, for all my life I have fought so that when my time comes to descend to the underworld I might leave to you a realm as strong and rich as that I inherited from my fathers. Now I see a chance to leave you a realm greater than I inherited; perhaps as great as Hammurabi’s, greater than that of Gilgamesh. The Nantukhtar will need interpreters . . . as part of our alliance, I will suggest to them that a hundred young scribes be set to learning their language and their writing; and those young men will learn much of their arts. That for a beginning.”

  He raised his wine cup. “To the Nantukhtar! With them to pull our chariot, we shall spurn the four quarters of the earth beneath the wheels!”

  “. . . and it’s the perfect location as far as controlling technology transfer goes,” Ian said—a little smugly, Marian Alston thought.

  The command group of the expeditionary force was gathered in the cabin of the Chamberlain for a last conference before the fleet left for home, and Ian was highly pleased with the way things had gone so far. So was she, but a contrarian impulse inclined her to look for the shadow side.

  “How so, Ian?” Swindapa asked. “My birth-people in Alba started with less than these Akkadians, and they have learned a great deal of Eagle people lore already.”

  “Yes,” Ian chuckled, rubbing his hands together, “but apart from the fact that we’ve encouraged that, they have iron ore, copper, tin, wood and coal for fuel. These Babylonians have nothing but water and mud.”

  “And petroleum,” Alston pointed out. “Which we have to show them how to use, if we’re going to get any benefit out of it.”

  “True,” Ian said. “But they still can’t do much in the way of metallurgy without ores or fuels.”

  “Probably can’t,” Doreen corrected. “We’ll see.”

  “Expect the unexpected,” Alston agreed.

  Kenneth Hollard poured more beer from the jug into his tankard, then made a face as he tasted it. “Mebbe we can teach them to make something better than this gruel,” he said.

  “It’s safer than the water,” the chief medical officer of the expeditionary force said; Justin Clemens shook his head. “God, this place is a living farm of diseases.”

  “Whatever we do, we have to do it fairly quickly,” Alston said. “I can’t keep so many of the Republic’s keels and cannon here on the other side of the world for long. Too much could go wrong back home.”

  “I’m a diplomat, not a—” Ian said, then hesitated. “Hey, it just hit me—I am a diplomat now, not a history professor playing at diplomacy.”

  “Well, duh,” Doreen said affectionately, poking him in the ribs. “It’s only been going on a decade now.”

  Ian cleared his throat. “I’m a diplomat, not a magician. We’ll have to see.”

  “Don’t underestimate King Shuriash,” Kenneth Hollard s
aid. “He’s one smart cookie, if I’m any judge.”

  “I agree,” his sister, Kathryn, said. “So’s his son.” She grinned. “And Prince Kashtiliash is cute as a bug’s ear, too.”

  “I suppose so,” Hollard said dryly. “He doesn’t do a thing for me.”

  “That’s because you’re narrow-minded, Colonel, sir,” she replied, to a general chuckle.

  “Doesn’t do much for me, either,” Alston said.

  “That’s because you’re narrow-minded, darling,” Swindapa said. At Alston’s mock glower she went on: “Well, I promised to be monogamous, not blind.”

  “I,” Doreen Arnstein said, laying a hand at the base of her throat and looking upward, “will say nothing at all.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  March, Year 9 A.E.

  “Ayup,” Jared Cofflin said into the microphone, looking down at the text of the treaty. Christ, a treaty with Babylon. “Those are good terms. Ian must have them buffaloed.”

  “Not exactly,” Marian Alston’s voice said, a little scratchy with distance. “I think they were gettin’ worried about their strategic situation all on their ownsome—it’s as bad as we thought from the histories, maybe worse. And this king of theirs, Shagarakti-Shuriash, he’s one sharp man; Ian thinks so too. We’ll have to watch him, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Cofflin leafed through the terms again; trade, of course—a couple of the new merchant houses were already chomping at the bit—and alliance, first against Babylonia’s enemies, then against Walker. That was excellent, provided they could get the Hittites in later. He read on. Hmmmm. An Islander base near Ur, under the Republic’s sovereignty; joint courts for any civil or criminal case involving Islanders in the kingdom of Kar-Duniash.

  “Good work, the lot of you,” he muttered. Damned if he was going to leave any citizen, under any circumstances whatsoever, to what passed for ancient Babylonian justice.