Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

  “You,” he said, indicating one of the departed nobleman’s retainers. “Get us reed mats—several score of them, at least. Now!”

  The peasant levies might not have been much at a pitched battle, but they certainly knew how to work—and Babylonian organization was well up to seeing that there were plenty of sickles and mattocks.

  Kathryn’s battalion stacked arms, stripped to their skivvies, and set to, marking out the lines for the ditches. The Babylonian peasants waded into the swamp as well, bronze sickles flashing; they tied the reeds in neat foot-thick bundles and carried them back on their heads. More of them went at the ditches-to-be, cutting through the low rise that blocked off the riverside swamp. The loose columns of the Babylonian army were gathering further back in the desert plain, gradually coalescing into clumps and sorting themselves out into lines, with much blowing of bronze horns and waving of standards.

  “They’re not going to miss that,” one of Ken’s company commanders said. “They’ll be able to see the reeds falling from the higher ground along the river. And they must have been watching our dust since sunrise.”

  “Right,” he replied. “We’ll deploy First Battalion in double line, ready to move up in support. C Company in reserve. Move the field guns and the launchers up—guns loaded with canister and short-fused shrapnel shell. Hmmm. Get me the local who’s running this bunch now that Warad-Kubi’s gone.”

  Okay, let’s see. Practical range on the bows is three hundred yards max. The locals used a horn-and-sinew-reinforced model that had plenty of range. The best ones were expensive, though, hence rare. On the other hand, that causeway’s going to be fairly narrow.

  The Marines spread out along the edge of the dry land. Carts creaked past, carrying dry desert clay to mix with the layer of mud that went over the bundles of reeds, and more mud flew from shovels. Now that the endless desert march was over, he could hear laughing and joking from the working parties, despite their being smeared with the thick, glutinous soil of the swamp.

  Kathryn came up, grinning through a mask of mud as dense as that on any of her troops; the salute was a little incongruous coming from someone dressed in a pair of regulation-issue gray cotton panties under an inch-thick overall coat of Diyala ooze. He returned it with a snap anyway; the causeway was a good job of work.

  “Going faster than I thought,” she said. “We’ll be through by midafternoon at this rate.”

  “Glad to hear it, Kat. Think the causeway will bear the traffic?”

  “Once, at least.”

  “Good. Make sure your people move their rifles along as it extends.”

  “De nada, boss,” she said and plunged back into the ordered chaos of the construction. There were about a thousand men and women working on it now. He studied one of the two-wheeled oxcarts that was bringing up soil, looking carefully at the way the wheels sank.

  “Captain Chong!”

  The artillery officer came up at a trot. “Captain, I want you to get ready to move two of your field guns forward onto the causeway.”

  “Yessir.” The face of the artillery officer was calmly intent as he pulled out his binoculars, studied the causeway, then trotted over to walk the ground. “I think it’ll take it, sir,” he said when he came back. “Better to manhandle the pieces and limbers forward separately. I’ll need a couple of platoons to help.” The guns weighed two tons apiece and were usually drawn by six-horse teams.

  “By all means.”

  “The mortars?”

  “Not yet. We can’t observe the fall of shot well enough.”

  Hollard forced himself to take a swig of water, although his stomach was suddenly sour. Christ, the last time I went through this I was a grunt. The Marines had been out on punitive expeditions since, teaching Olmec priest-kings and restive Sun People chiefs to mind their manners, but that didn’t really count beside pitched battles.

  Arnstein’s informants—and King Shuriash’s—said that mysterious envoys from the north had been seen in Asshur. Rumor made them sorcerers . . . envoys from the Hittites? If they’re from Walker, they could have shown the Assyrians guns.

  The radio at his waist beeped, rescuing him from the gnawing anxiety of speculation without facts.

  “Hollard here.”

  “Sir.” That was O’Rourke. “Enemy advancing from the riverbank; two to three thousand. Light troops, archers and slingers. Over.”

  “Keep them under observation as long as you can, Captain. Out.”

  All at once the strain fell away; he reined himself in. Light-headed overconfidence was as bad as worrying yourself into paralysis.

  Aloud: “Get the locals out! Everyone else, stand to your arms! Set sights for two hundred yards; rapid fire on the word of command.”

  Messengers went out, and the naked mud-spattered peasants poured through the Nantucketer ranks, heading back to where their arms-cum-farming-tools were piled. The Islanders who’d been working with them climbed up onto the causeway, scraping off mud and snatching up their rifles, weapons, and webbing harness—that went rather oddly with the nudity and wet dirt, but neatness bought no yams when you were in a hurry. A dense bristle of rifle barrels pointed into the swamp now, and the more usual line of the rest of the battalion two-deep along the edge of the reeds.

  “Sir.” O’Rourke again. “Sir, they’re sending men into the swamp, daggers and spears.”

  “Pull out to the flanks and keep me informed,” Hollard replied. “Over.”

  “Sir. Withdraw to flanks, keep enemy under observation. Over.”

  Fairly soon now . . . More locals came by, these carrying bundles of reed mats up to the causeway, behind the massed Islanders. There was a crackle of fire from inside the swamp itself, yells, the crump of a grenade. Hollard strained to see what was happening, but nothing could be seen, only swaying reeds and a few drifting puffs of powder smoke.

  “Sir! The enemy are massing along the edge of the swamp! Numbers around twenty-five hundred. We’ve disengaged and have them under observation.”

  “Thank you, Captain.” A hundred and fifty yards away, or a little less . . . Hollard drew the katana slung over his shoulder and raised the blade. Platoon commanders turned to face him, their own swords raised, eyes on the curved sliver of bright steel in his hand.

  There was a massed snapping hum, like thousands of out-of-tune guitar strings being plucked, then a long whistling rush. Light sparkled on the bronze arrowheads rising in a flock over the tall reeds, winking as they reached the top of their arcs and began to descend.

  “Fire!” The sword slashed down.

  BAAAAAMMM. Eight hundred rifles fired in less than a second, the cannon adding their long plumes of off-white smoke and thudding detonations to the mix. They recoiled and were run back with enthusiastic hands while the infantry were busy with breech-lever, cartridge, and priming horn.

  The humming swish of the arrows turned to a whistling as they fell. Mostly short; one of the gunners dropped kicking with a shaft through his throat, and here and there a Marine was dragged back wounded. There were shouts of “Corpsman!” and stretcher bearers ran forward, then back with their burdens, heading for the horse-drawn ambulances.

  The return fire was a continuous crackling roar, like a mixture of Event Day firecrackers and heavy surf; the massive fist-blows of the cannon were punctuation. Smoke rose in a heavy bank, drifting back slowly with the light breeze; Hollard coughed and waved a hand before his face in futile effort to see better. What he could see was enough. The Marines of the First Expeditionary Regiment could all fire six rounds a minute—more here, since all they needed to aim at was a waist-high point in the general direction the arrow storm was coming from.

  At this range, every bullet would be traveling at gut height and a thousand feet per second when it reached the enemy archers. At those velocities, projectiles cut through the giant grass with the neatness of a straight razor, but each semicircular cut glowed for an instant, precisely like a piece of tissue paper touched with a soldering i
ron. Even through the dense fogbank of powder smoke Hollard could see to the other side of the reed marsh now; it was patchy, as if some enormous animal had been grazing on it. What was left thinned as he watched. On the other side were the massed archers the enemy had put forward to harass the construction of the causeway.

  Or what was left of them. Hundreds were down, still or kicking or writhing. Hundreds more were fleeing, despite the efforts of sword-armed officers to keep them to their duty—often by a quick thrust to the kidneys of a man who seemed inclined to turn. Less than half of them were still shooting, and the arrows were now more of a dangerous nuisance than a threat.

  Poor bastards, Hollard thought. They’d done about as well as men could, facing weapons entirely outside their experience; that so many of them were still trying to fight was a miracle of courage and discipline, in its way. The sympathy was real but distant; right now he could be nothing but a will that thought The commodore will give us a “well done” for this.

  Hollard clicked his handset to the company commander’s frequency. “Aimed fire!” he called.

  With most of the reeds out of the way, the Marine infantry had targets. So did the guns, and the rest of the battery that began firing over their heads with shrapnel shell, and the three-unit battery of rocket launchers. They weren’t very accurate, despite all Seahaven could do with machined venturi units and carefully aligned fins. They did land in the general area they were pointed or, more often, exploded above it, scattering their loads of heavy buckshot like a chain flail in the hands of a giant. Their trails of smoke arched over the battlefield like monochromatic rainbows, twisting as they drifted away, sending men into fresh panic with the moaning scream of their passage.

  Pack mules trotted up bearing panniers full of ammunition. Their drivers handed out ten-round cases or cylindrical packets of fine-ground priming powder. Here and there a rifleman swore and stopped for an instant to insert a spare flint in the hammer jaws of his weapon.

  Four minutes later Hollard swung his sword down in another arc and called out, “Cease fire!”

  Silence fell, broken by a single shot and the scathing curses of a noncom directed at the luckless private who’d been too lost in his loading routine to hear the order relayed down the ranks. The Republic’s commander lowered his binoculars and winced slightly; the only Assyrian archers surviving were the ones who had run first or who had been very lucky. He was suddenly conscious of the thin whine of a mosquito near his ear—and that it was fainter than it had been earlier in the day. This much noise probably wasn’t good for your hearing, long term. If the long term mattered much, in the circumstances.

  “Major Hollard,” he said, as he walked out onto the causeway.

  The troopers grinned as he passed, a few of them pumping clenched fists into the air. Well, they’re Albans, mostly, he thought, nodding back.

  “Sir?”

  “Push two companies out past the swamp—it’s only a hundred yards, and if you lay those mats I had brought up over the fallen reeds they should hold. That should discourage any thoughts the Assyrians have about trying to interfere with us again, and then we can get this causeway finished.”

  She nodded. “Dumb sons of bitches,” she said with a trace of sadness, looking at the piles of enemy dead.

  “They probably won’t be as stupid the second time,” Hollard said grimly. “Certainly not the third.”

  Sitting at the edge of the marsh had been about the worst thing the Assyrians could have done; that made it a contest of pure firepower, which was no contest at all when you stacked breech-loading rifles against bows. Let’s not get overconfident, he reminded himself. There were no prizes for Gallant Last Stands in the Republic of Nantucket’s military.

  “They’ll learn,” his sister agreed. “They’ll try a couple of massed rushes, I’d say—and pick up on tricks like using dead ground where our guns don’t bear for shelter.”

  “And ambushes, night attacks, all that good guerrilla shit,” Hollard agreed, his long face gloomy. “It never stays easy.”

  “Still,” Kathryn said, looking at her virtually unscathed command and then at the ground where Assyrian dead lay two-deep, “It’d rather have our problems than theirs.”

  Marian Alston suppressed a satisfied belch. The bonfire was sending sparks trailing up into the night, warm against the cooler splendor of the Southern Hemisphere’s stars. Shadows from this fire and others flickered along the beach, showing the lines of dancers who paced and stamped and turned to the insistent beat of the drums in their finery of ostrich-shell beads and civet-tail skirts. The sound of the bone rattles strapped to their ankles added an almost hissing undertone, along with the rhythmic chant. The air was cooler with the recent sunset, full of the smells of roasting elephant and eland and bowls of heaped greens gathered by the San women, with an oil-and-vinegar dressing from ship’s stores. The food made a wonderful change from ship’s provisions.

  They were simply enchanted by chocolate, though, and by the wine and beer—she’d ordered the stronger liquor kept in the kegs; pre-agricultural peoples were just too vulnerable to it. They were like their Cape kinsmen in appearance, too; very similar, in fact, except that the women didn’t have the enlarged buttocks that the desert clans further south did, storing fat like camels. Doreen had said that was a sign that the same population had lived in the same environment for a very long time, adapting generation by generation. The people here were a little taller besides; she supposed this lush green countryside was easier to make a living in. Certainly the hunting was good, even if the animals did get a little testy at times.

  The San hunter with his ankle in a pressure bandage belched enormously—it was probably good manners here, although she couldn’t bring herself to follow. Being less inhibited, Swindapa did and was rewarded with a broad white grin from the little brown man—and giggles from their daughters. Alston smiled herself and leaned an elbow on the log she was using as a backrest. It was surprising how well everything had gone, considering that neither the Islanders nor the local tribesfolk spoke a word of each other’s language. Treating the injured hunter and returning him with gifts had helped; so had indicating that his clan was welcome to help themselves to the elephant carcass.

  Remarkable how many of them showed up, she thought—and even more remarkable how fast they’d managed to demolish the great mountain of flesh. We can probably trade with them for fresh meat and greenstuff. That’ll save time.

  “Go’od,” the little man said, and hiccuped.

  “Good,” Alston replied.

  Out in the darkness the party was probably getting a little rowdier, to judge from the squeals and giggles. There are times not to notice things, she thought—that was one of the secrets of command. The crew deserved a rest, and the locals would reduce the three-to-two male-female ratio that sometimes made a shoreside luau a little tense.

  Swindapa caught her eye and slowly touched her upper lip with the tip of her tongue. Alston’s smile grew broader.

  “Euuu, mushy stuff!” Heather said, as she and her sister returned from the dance, reading the signs with an eight-year-old’s lack of tact.

  “Aw, c’mon, moms, don’t send us away to sleep yet!” Lucy protested. “This is fun.”

  A faint pop from across the harbor interrupted their parents’ chuckle. Alston’s face went cold and intent as she followed the arch of the signal rocket.

  “Blue burst,” she said. That meant foreign ship in sight. Her voice rose to the command call: “All hands, turn to!”

  The San looked around in bewildered alarm as the Guard crewfolk dashed for their weapons and fell in. Alston stood and waited, watching the blinking Morse of the signal station. It was on the two-hundred-foot bluff that closed the southern arm of the harbor mouth, which gave it a wide field of view, and they had telescopes and night-sight glasses.

  “Two . . . Tartessian . . . vessels,” it said. “A large . . . schooner . . . and . . . one . . . larger . . . ship . . . rigged . . . craft.
Landing . . . party . . . heading . . . for . . . harbor . . . entrance . . . in . . . one . . . longboat.”

  “Company,” she said grimly, as the cabin steward ran up with their weapons belts.

  “An attack?” Swindapa said.

  “No, not in one longboat,” Alston said. “But I don’t like it.”

  I don’t like anyone else in these waters, she thought, slitting her eyes against the dark. God damn Walker to hell, and Isketerol too.

  A lantern showed out on the water; the Tartessians had probably realized they’d been seen. Two ships . . . that could be anywhere up to three hundred men, if they’re carrying war crews. And they well might be. This would be a voyage of exploration for them, not just a trading run.

  She turned to the injured hunter and made signs. “Bad,” she said—they’d gotten that far in the impromptu language lesson. Then she made gestures of firing a gun and of a wide-winged ship. He scowled dramatically to show he understood.

  “Ba’ad!” he replied, putting an indescribable tongue click into the word.

  The longboat came into sight, at first a ghostly white of water frothed by oars, then an outline. A good-sized ship’s boat with six oars to a side and several men seated in the stern, and a light mast with no sail bent to it; they’d probably struck that to stay inconspicuous when they realized someone was using the harbor. Not a bad piece of work, she thought. Differences of detail from anything an Islander would build; the bird-head carving of the forepiece, for instance, and the tongue-and-groove fit of the planks. For all that, it was modern, as modern went in the Year 8; it had a rudder, for instance, and the mast was rigged for a fore-and-aft sail.

  The oarsmen bent their backs and then tossed their ashwood shafts up as the keel grated on sand. The crew hopped out and shoved the boat further up the beach, and then a man who flashed with spots of gold in the firelight vaulted down to the sand, his cloak a dark billow behind him.