Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

  Alston walked forward; a file of a dozen armed crewfolk under a petty officer followed behind, and a pair of lanterns. So did her children . . .

  Damn, should have sent them back. Still, let’s keep it casual.

  The Tartessians made a clump on the beach, the small waves breaking white behind them, and the dry scuttering sound of land crabs coming with a flicker of movement from the edge of the pool of light.

  Make that “mostly Tartessians,” she thought.

  From Arnstein’s reports, King Isketerol’s fleet was growing fast enough that Tartessos proper and the kindred groups the king had incorporated by conquest and intimidation couldn’t supply enough men. Most of the ones she saw were Iberian in appearance, olive-skinned whites with bowl-cut dark hair and linen tunics considerably the worse for wear. One or two looked like North Europeans, burly and fair—of course, Spain and Morocco did produce that type now and then. Another was unmistakably an Egyptian, shaved head and sphinx headdress and pleated kilt; astonishingly, there was also a black, tall and lean and ebony-dark, with looping tribal scars on his face, and an Oriental.

  The leader wore jutting chinbeard bound with gold wire, a sea-stained purple cloak, and silver-and-gold buckles on belt and sandals. He had a short broad-bladed steel sword and dagger and a flintlock pistol; most of his men had blades at their belts as well, and muskets in their hands—several of them, she noted with displeasure, copies of the Westley-Richards breechloader. The African had a spear with a broad, shovel-shaped head and a long bow and quiver, and the Oriental wore a two-edged bronze broadsword slung over his back.

  Chinbeard held up a hand in sign of peace and smiled. Alston told herself that the patent insincerity was probably her imagination.

  “Hello, Islander,” the man said, then checked as he saw her properly. He turned a little gray then, and his men stirred and murmured until he glared at them for an instant over his shoulder.

  Alston smiled thinly. Helps to have a reputation. “Hello, Tartessian,” she said in reply. “Do you speak my language? We have interpreters who know yours.”

  Swindapa spoke it fluently, although Alston had never managed more than a few words; Tartessian was distantly related to the Earth Folk tongue, and the Island’s experts thought both were kin to some Bronze Age ancestor of Basque.

  “Alantethol son of Marental is a New Man of the king,” the Tartessian captain said proudly. Ah—one of Isketerol’s protégés, she translated mentally. “I speak well your Englits tongue. I have to Nantucket itself sailed. Welcome you to our anchorage be!”

  “Yoda,” Marian thought to herself. “You seek Yoda!”

  He looked around, taking in the hull of the Chamberlain in its improvised cradle and the gaping hole where the smashed planking had been removed. She could see his eyes taking in much else, as well—particularly the Islander camp, with its sand-and-palm-tree ramparts, and the snouted muzzles of the frigate’s cannon mounted on them. And the dim ranks of the Guard crewfolk standing behind her.

  “Tartessos has no claim on these waters, and the locals are under our protection,” Alston said.

  The man made a dismissive gesture. “Let not civilized men—ah, civilized folk—quarrel over savages,” he said ingratiatingly.

  If you only knew, Alston thought, fighting not to grind her teeth.

  “What are you doing here!” she said.

  “Trading!” the Tartessian said, swelling a little with pride. “For jade, jewels, spices, silk, rare woods—widely trading. Also we take a word of the world to our king, and our king’s word to the world.”

  Uh-oh, Marian thought. With that list of ladings, he might well have been as far east as Indonesia, or even up to the Shang ports.

  “I see you have storm damage,” Alantethol said. “Help sailors should render each other—and my crew has been long at sea, needs shore time, green foods.”

  He scanned the Islander ranks, checking a bit at the sight of Heather and Lucy between Alston and her partner; especially on Lucy, with her pale milk-chocolate mulatto complexion. I can pretty well hear him think, “How the hell did they manage that?” Marian thought with bleak humor.

  “We could share a feast,” he went on.

  “I don’t think so,” Alston said dryly. “And as I said, the locals are under our protection.”

  Alantethol flushed, darkly enough to be visible in the flickering firelight. “The world is the world’s world,” he said, his accent thickening. “Not for only your Island to say, ‘Go here,’ ‘Don’t go there’!”

  “And I suggest you sail on,” Alston replied. The Tartessian’s face looked ugly. “But before you go, observe this.”

  She took one of the lamps from a sailor and shone it toward the bluff across the harbor, turning it away and back to make the dots and dashes of Morse. Five seconds after the last signal a red spark rose through the darkness from the observation post, arching halfway across the distance between them before the deep thud of a cannon’s report reached them. The shell exploded an instant later, throwing up a column of shattered water. Any ship trying to enter the harbor would have more like that dropped right on its deck.

  The Tartessian nodded curtly and turned on his heel, sand rutching under the sandal. The longboat surged backward as the crew shoved off, then turned with a flash of oars.

  “Mom?” Heather said in a small voice. “Is there going to be trouble?”

  “I hope not, punkin,” Alston said gently. “Let’s go back to the fire.”

  I hope not, but I think there will be, she thought to herself.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  July-September, Year 9 A.E.

  I an Arnstein watched King Shuriash’s white-knuckled grip on the hilt of his sword as they walked toward the landing field in the cool dimness of predawn. The ruler’s face might have been cast in bronze, but there were beads of sweat on his forehead. The councilor for foreign affairs wasn’t all that certain about riding in this wooden balloon himself. In fact, he was probably more worried about it than the Babylonian was; Shuriash knew that the magic of the Eagle People worked. He wasn’t burdened with memories of the Hindenburg newsreel, or the knowledge that hydrogen was highly flammable.

  And I know that Ron Leaton isn’t infallible, Ian thought. He’d spent several exquisitely uncomfortable weeks bending over a sickle, back in the Year 1, because Seahaven Engineering’s first attempt at a reaping machine had failed. And he’d seen Marian Alston’s fury when it turned out that the first percussion primers decayed in humid conditions.

  RNAS Emancipator looked formidably large, sitting here on the flat clay of the landing field outside the walls of Ur Base. Arnstein swallowed and bowed the king and his attendants up the ramp at the rear of the gondola.

  “In only a few hours, we will be outside Asshur,” he said.

  Even then there was a little jostling over precedence in the seating. When it was over, he clipped on his seat belt, a retread from one of the commuter airlines that had flown into Nantucket. The seats were wicker, broader and far more comfortable than those in the deregulated buses-with-wings he’d had to ride in up in the twentieth.

  They were seated just behind the working quarter at the head of the gondola and forward of the first of the engine control stations. Lieutenant Vicki Cofflin—captain of the vessel by function—was in her seat at the forward edge of the floor, with an intercom set on her head, checking instruments.

  “Three hundred pounds heavy at ground level,” she said, snapping a switch. “Feather props.”

  “Feathered.”

  “On with engines!”

  A coughing roar started up; Arnstein saw the Babylonians flinch. Good ol’ internal-combustion noise and stink, he thought—the six motors were burning kerosene, distilled right here at Ur Base, but it was burnt hydrocarbon nonetheless. Outside he could see a crowd of spectators, many of them surged back at the unfamiliar blatting.

  “All engines at forty-five positive.”

  The six crewfolk spaced on eith
er side of the gondola heaved at the wheels that faced them. Through the big, slanting window Arnstein could see the sections of wing and the cowled pods of the engines tilt, pointing the propellers away from the long axis of the dirigible and toward the ground.

  “On superheat!”

  A clicking, hissing roar as hot air rushed into the central gasbag, inflating it. And a soft, mushy feeling under his backside, as if the dirigible were sliding on a surface of smooth, oiled metal.

  “Positive buoyancy! Prepare to cast off.”

  “Ready to cast off, Captain.”

  “Stand by engines. Horizontal controls, forty-five degrees.” The man at the attitude helm spun his ship-style wheel. “Prepare to release . . . Release mooring!”

  There was a series of heavy chunk sounds as the line-grabs along the keel of the gondola let go, and the Emancipator bounced upward, pushed by the air that outweighed the volume she displaced.

  “Engage props, all engines ahead full!”

  The six converted Cessna engines roared, pushing the lighter-than-air craft northward and up, into the wind. Acceleration shoved Arnstein back into his seat as the nose rose above the horizon, a sensation he hadn’t felt in nearly a decade. King Shuriash swore by the private parts of Ishtar, then exclaimed again in delight, pointing with one calloused swordsman’s finger.

  “Look! We fly, Ian Aren-s’hein! We fly like the birds of the air, like the gods themselves!”

  Shuriash had four attendants with him—a great concession, considering how important the king’s dignity was—and three of them shared the king’s childlike enjoyment; they were young noblemen, followers of his son. The fourth was Samsu-Indash, and the elderly priest was sitting rigid in his chair with his eyes clamped shut, lips moving in silent prayer. Ian suspected that the command to attend the king was something of a royal joke. Shuriash was not a cruel man, for an ancient Oriental despot, but he was an absolute ruler, and men forgot that at their peril.

  The figures below shrank to the size of dolls, then ants. It’s like riding a bicycle, Ian thought. You don’t forget. At the same time it wasn’t like taking off in an airliner, either. There was a surging lightness to it, sort of like riding Pegasus—if you could imagine Pegasus as one of the Clydesdales that pulled the Budweiser wagon.

  “Neutral buoyancy at twenty-two hundred feet,” the second-in-command of the Emancipator reported. “Wind is from the north-northwest at three miles per hour.”

  “Engines at zero inclination,” Lieutenant Cofflin commanded. The wheels spun, and Ian could feel the airship move forward more rapidly as the propellers came level with the keel.

  “All ahead three-quarters.” Vicki glanced down at the instruments. “Airspeed is sixty-seven miles per hour.”

  Wow! Ian thought, half ironically. Fast! Considerably faster than he’d traveled since the Event, at least. He translated for Shuriash and saw the king’s well-hidden amazement.

  “Navigator, lay me a course for Asshur,” Vicki went on.

  King Shuriash was looking down in fascination as the city of Ur slid beneath them, the great ziggurat reduced to model size. The rising sun silvered it, and for a moment canals great and small flashed metallic.

  “I see now the excellence of your Nantukhtar maps,” the Babylonian ruler murmured. “Strange to see the lands so . . . there are no boundaries to mark the realm of one king from the next.”

  His glance sharpened on Arnstein, and his smile grew sharkish. “Not that there would be, now, between Kar-Duniash and the lands of Asshur.”

  Ian nodded. “Together, our armies have been victorious,” he said piously.

  To himself: Meaning, we shot the Assyrians up until they ran, and then your boy Kashtiliash chased them until his troops got tired.

  Of course, from what Hollard and Hollard said, it worked both ways. The Islanders could shatter the Assyrian armies in pitched battle, but there weren’t enough of them to hold ground—without Babylonian manpower, they wouldn’t have controlled more than the land they stood on. Less at night.

  “Yes,” Shuriash said. “And I admit it, we could not have conquered without you Nantukhtar. Certainly not without paying more in blood and treasure. We are much in your debt, and the debt shall be repaid. For now I rule from the northern mountains to the Sea-Land, and the way is clear to the Hittite country.”

  “Indeed, all these lands are now yours to rule as you would,” Arnstein said.

  The Babylonian looked up from beneath shaggy brows. “When a man says that, he is about to tell me how I should rule as he would have me do,” he said sardonically.

  Ian spread his hands. “I would offer advice. Whether the king hearkens to it shall be as the king thinks best.” Shuriash nodded, and the Islander went on: “It is one thing to conquer a land, and another to hold it.”

  Shuriash nodded again. “True. Hammurabi ruled widely, but his sons soon found their thrones rocking beneath them—and if the stories are true, the same held for Gilgamesh! What is your thought, councilor of my brother Jaered-Cofflin?”

  “First, O King, that your enemies are the king and nobles of Assyria, not the people of the land, or their gods.”

  That was enough to bring Samsu-Indash out of his stupor. “As the men of Asshur bow to our King, so must their gods to ours—to Marduk, King of the Universe!”

  Ian made a soothing gesture. “Oh, none could doubt it. Yet the great gods of the land bow to Marduk in their own temples, where their own priests serve them, as men were created to serve the gods.”

  “Ah, I see,” Shuriash said. “You think that the temples of Asshur should remain unplundered, and we should not carry off the images to Babylon.”

  “Unplundered, but subject to the control of the king,” Ian confirmed.

  That meant a 20 percent tax on temple revenues, and the temples were the largest landowners and bankers in any Mesopotamian kingdom.

  Shuriash had been polite but wary at the start, then increasingly ready to consider his allies’ suggestions . . . and since Dr. Clemens saved his favorite, downright friendly. Mind you, he’s still damned shrewd and nobody’s fool. Leaving the conquered temples standing is in his own interests, even in the short term. The Babylonians might not know the negative elenchos, but they were fully aware that you couldn’t skin the cow and milk it too.

  “So the hearts of the people will not be filled with hatred against the king of Kar-Duniash,” Arnstein finished. “Likewise, if the land is not laid waste, it will pay much more in taxes than it would if it were plundered.”

  “True—although to tell soldiers not to plunder is to offend against the nature of men. You have other such advice?”

  “Yes, Oh King. I think that it would be very useful to you if you were to summon the men of Asshur’s lands and make known to them the laws by which you will govern them.”

  Shuriash frowned. “How might that be? Proclamations in each city?”

  “Better than that. Let a royal decree be sent forth, that in every district all the heads of households—all the men of consequence—should gather together and select one to be their delegate. Let these delegates come before the throne, to hear the word of the king and take it back to their homes. You could do that at regular intervals, so that all the land would know the decrees of the king and hear of his deeds.”

  “Hmmmm.” A tug at the grizzled beard. “Much as the puhrum—the assembly of a city—does. Hmmmm, that might well be useful . . . useful enough that I might summon these delegates also from my own ancestral lands. And if such men were gathered before me, I could consult with one here, another there—learn the mind of the land and what could be safely demanded of it.”

  He clapped a hand on Arnstein’s shoulder. “You are a councilor indeed, and my brother Jaered-Cofflin is fortunate to have your wisdom!”

  Well, the British history course had something to do with it, Arnstein thought as he inclined his head. The English parliament had started that way, with magnates called together to hear what the king had i
n mind. Arnstein smiled to himself.

  Eventually, though, it started working the other way ’round.

  The camel complained, a groan tapering off into a moaning sigh.

  That’s what they’re best at, Kenneth Hollard thought, and pulled on the rein. Complaining. I’m getting used to the way they smell, though, and that worries me.

  The rein was fastened to a bronze ring in the beast’s nose, and it turned with a fair show of obedience. Hollard wiped a forearm across his face to get rid of some of the grit-laden sweat and stood in the stirrups to take a slow scan from east to west. Hmmm. Something there.

  It was getting on toward noon, anyway, bleaching the landscape to shades of fierce white and umber. In this land you stopped for at least four hours in the heat of day and then traveled on into the night.

  Not quite desert, he thought; it sort of reminded him of parts of northern New Mexico he’d seen on vacations with his family, back before the Event. Hotter, though—there was a sparse covering of grass, an occasional thicket of low, waxy-green tamarisk in an arroyo, the odd water hole. The vegetation had been getting thicker as they came closer to the jagged blue line of the Jebel Sinjar on the northern horizon, too. Beyond them was the heart of the old kingdom of Mitanni, the district the Semites called Naharim, “the Rivers,” in the plain between the Taurus range and the Jebel. An Assyrian province now, although they’d received vague reports that it was rising in revolt. Or, from the sound of things, just dissolving into a chaotic war of all against all.

  Three thousand years in a future that had bred him and wasn’t going to happen—he tried to avoid thinking about that; it made his head hurt—these steppes would be part of the northern borderland between Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Right now it was called, variously, Mitanni, Hanigalibat, the River Country, and God-knew-what, and it had been a marchland between Assyria and the Hittite Empire. Mostly it seemed to be empty except for wandering bands of sheep-herding nomads. Hollard smiled grimly to himself. Empty except for the remnants of the fleeing Assyrian army, the part that wasn’t holed up in Asshur over to the east on the Tigris. The camel-mounted recon company had been traveling through the detritus for days; dead men and donkeys, their corpses seething with maggots, foundered horses, broken chariots, bits of gear—everything from bedrolls to weapons and armor.