Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

  Poor kid, Doreen thought. Doing the stiff-upper-lip bit, but she’s hurting. The local value system meant she had to want to avenge her blood first and foremost, but the foster parents were the ones who’d raised her, and they’d been killed in front of her eyes. At some level she had to blame herself for that, fair or not.

  “Well, you’re under the Republic’s protection,” Doreen said. Ian might not have wanted Ken to offer it, but it’s irrevocable. “We could find you something different.”

  “Perhaps carrying one of your . . . rifles, are they called?” A chuckle. “My people are warriors, but that is something I hadn’t considered.”

  Her eyes went unfocused for a moment and she chanted softly. It was definitely poetry, not rhyming but alliterative. Doreen’s ears pricked up; her mother had been Lithuanian, and she’d found that extremely conservative Baltic tongue helpful in learning the languages of the Iraiina and the other charioteer tribes in Alba in this millennium. This language had a haunting familiarity from both.

  “ ‘Our . . . family of warriors’?” she said.

  Raupasha’s head came up. “In Akkadian it would be . . .” She paused for a second, her lips moving silently. “As nearly as I can put it—”

  She shrugged. “That is in the old tongue, though, the ariamannu. Even in the great days of Mitanni few spoke it. My foster father . . .” Her voice choked off for an instant, and she drew a deep breath. “My foster father brought a few things written in it from Washshukanni, our capital.”

  Ian will be in historian’s seventh heaven, until we get him back to practical matters, Doreen thought. Perhaps someday he’d have the opportunity to trace the migrations that brought Raupasha’s ancestors from the steppes of Kazakhstan to be kings among the Hurrians at the headwaters of the Khabur. Speaking of which . . .

  “We’re actually rather concerned about the Rivers district,” Doreen said.

  “Now it is free of the yoke of Asshur,” Raupasha said, nodding toward the flap of the tent with grim pleasure.

  “Well, yes, but Chaos is king there right now. And we need the area secured. Has anyone told you about William Walker?”

  “The rebel against your ruler? Yes, a little. He seems a dangerous man.”

  “That’s far too mild. He makes the Assyrians look like . . . like little lambs. He’s not all that far away, either.”

  The Mitannian nodded. “On the other side of the Hittite realm, yes,” she said. “Lord Kenn’et told me. And his way will be made easier, now that the Hittites are at war among themselves.”

  She rang a small bell, and a maidservant—probably hired locally from among the Assyrian refugees—brought in a tray with bread, cheese, and dried fruits, and the local grape wine plus a carafe of water. Raupasha poured and mixed herself, before she noticed Doreen’s wide eyes.

  “You did not know?” she said. “Ah, well, in the northwest we had more traffic from Hatti-land. Yes, the lord Kurunta of Tarhuntassa has thrown off allegiance to Great King Tudhaliya in Hattusas.”

  Oh, Jesus, Doreen thought. She frantically skimmed through the reference material in her mind.

  Tudhaliya’s supposed to reign for another thirty years—that was well attested. Kurunta, Kurunta . . . wait, that was one of Tudhaliya’s supporters—there was that treaty between them. Wait a minute. Tarhuntassa is southwest of Hattusas, about where Konya would be in Turkey in the twentieth, that’s nearer to the coast and the Greeks, and by now Walker must have made some substantial waves in that area, upsetting trade patterns if nothing else, maybe mixing in the politics, so—

  “Oh, shit,” she muttered.

  They’d known that eventually events here would stop following the history books. Not only deliberate interventions, but butterfly-wing chaotic stuff; a glass jug would get traded hand to hand from Denmark to Poland and someone wouldn’t be born because Dad was swilling mead out of his new possession instead of doing the reproductive thing at the precise scheduled moment. It looked like that had happened here even if Walker hadn’t deliberately set out to split the Hittite realm. So now they’d lost another edge—the books were vague and full of gaps this far back, and sometimes just plain wrong, but they’d been a great help nonetheless.

  With a wrenching effort she pulled her mind back to the matters at hand. I’ll tell Ian when he’s through with King Shuriash for today, and we’ll go over it. Meanwhile, the northwest is more important than ever.

  “Thank you,” she went on. “That’s very important news. And we’d like your opinions on what to do about your homeland.”

  “Mitanni?” Raupasha said. “Will the king of Kar-Duniash, your ally, not add it to his domains along with the rest of Asshur’s realm?”

  “Well, yes, but it’s a matter of how. Garrisoning Assyria will be hard enough, even with our help. The Naharim, the Rivers, it’s further away but right on the road to the Hittites. We need to get it pacified, and ideally we’d like it to contribute troops and supplies for the war against Walker . . .”

  Raupasha brightened. “You ask me, a girl?” she said.

  “Raupasha, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a girl,” Doreen said. “ We . . . People of the Eagle don’t think that a woman is necessarily less than a man. And you are of the old Mitannian royal family.”

  “A fallen house, and myself a fugitive in hiding all my life.”

  “But you must have had contacts—men who visited your foster father.”

  A long silence. Then: “I owe you a great debt. What I know, I will tell. Some did visit; not every mariannu family was slain or deported by the Assyrians—and of those who were led away captive to Asshur, some will wish to return.”

  “Good,” Doreen said. “We have a saying: ‘Knowledge is power.’ ”

  “Ludlul bel nemeqi.”

  The voice of the priest rose in a chant, as the ashipu prepared his powders and bits of bone. Clemens found himself translating automatically:Let me praise the Lord of Wisdom

  For a demon has put on my body for a garment;

  Like a net, sleep has swooped down upon me.

  My eyes are open but do not see;

  My ears are open but do not hear;

  Numbness has overcome my entire body . . .

  The Islander doctor grimaced at the thick smell of the Babylonian equivalent of hospital tents, the stink of the liquid feces that soaked the ground under most of the men lying in rows in the scanty shade. Flies buzzed, clustering thickly on the filth, and on eyes and mouths. And carrying the bacteria, whatever it is, to the food and water of everyone else. Stretcher bearers carried bodies away, ragged men willing to incur the pollution of touching a corpse for the sake of a bowl of barley gruel. The priest continued his chant:My limbs are splayed and lie awry.

  I spent the nights on my litter like an ox,

  I wallowed in my excrement like a sheep

  The exorcist shied away from my symptoms,

  And the haruspex confused my omens.

  Then he broke off, seeing the American watching him; then his eyes went wide at the sight of Prince Kashtiliash, and he made a prostration. His duck of the head to Clemens after he rose was no more than barely polite.

  “Honored guest,” he said coldly when he had arisen. His eyes traveled to Azzu-ena beside him; she was still in Babylonian dress. “Although this is scarcely the place to bring a harlot.”

  “This is my assistant,” Clemens said, his voice equally chill. It was a natural enough assumption for a local to make of a woman un-escorted in a war camp. Natural enough . . . once. “Azzu-ena daughter of Mutu-Hadki, asu of the king’s household. We have come to see the men I set aside yesterday. The prince comes with me.”

  “I see.” The priest’s eyes were dark pools of bitterness. “It is not well that men should be denied care. But come; the king’s word cannot be denied.”

  A dozen men had been laid off in one corner of the enclosure; Clemens had had a couple of Marines stationed there, along with the local orderlies he’d trained, to see that hi
s instructions weren’t disregarded as soon as he was out of sight. There were ten sick men there now.

  “The other two?”

  “Dead,” the priest replied. “As might be expected, with the demons of their fevers allowed to rage unchecked.”

  An orderly lifted one of the men with an arm under his shoulders, keeping a glass at his lips until he had swallowed all of its contents; then he made a check mark beside a name on a list and went on to the next.

  Clemens nodded. “And the twelve treated according to your custom?” he asked.

  The priest shrugged. “The demons are strong. Seven have died, and the others weaken.”

  “Yes,” Clemens said. “Of the twelve treated according to our . . . rites . . . ten live. Of those treated by yours, five live. In another day, these ten will be alive. How many of yours?”

  The priest made as if to spit on the ground. “That means nothing! The demons—”

  “The fever demons seem to fear our rituals more than your gods,” Clemens said.

  “Blasphemer!” the priest began.

  Kashtiliash cut in: “Silence!”

  The priest bowed his head. “I am more taken with deeds than words,” the heir said bluntly. “A man who shits himself to death is as much lost to my host as a man with a spear through his belly. If you will not listen, another will. Go, and think on this.”

  To Clemens: “You spoke the truth, and you have shown it by your deeds. The decree shall be prepared.”

  Clemens and Azzu-ena bowed as Kashtiliash and his guardsmen left. When they had gone, she spoke.

  “What causes this disease?” she said. The corpsmen lifted another man off his fouled pallet and replaced it with a fresh stretch of woven straw, cleaning him gently. “More of the bacteria?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But the actual cause of death is lack of water; too much runs out with the diarrhea and takes with it salts from the body.”

  “As if a man were to sweat in the sun of summer and not drink,” Azzu-ena said thoughtfully. “Yes, that will bring on the fever and delirium, as well. Such a man will die.”

  “Very good!” Clemens said.

  “So,” she said, “the cure is to drink much water?”

  “It isn’t a cure,” Clemens replied. “But it keeps him alive until his body can kill the agent of the disease naturally and then heal itself. It must be pure water—boiled or distilled—with salt and honey or sugar”—Akkadian had no word for that—“in certain exact proportions. These replace what the body has lost. We don’t have enough antibiotics to treat so many men, but this will work. Especially if the treatment begins before the disease takes strong hold.”

  Azzu-ena nodded, her big-nosed face somber, hands folded in the sleeves of her robe. “From bad water?” she said softly. “That explains much; why you Nantukhtar so hate the touch of excrement. . . . It was so my father died.”

  “Ah . . . I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head. “That does not matter. What matters is how we may treat these others.” A toss of her head indicated the field of groaning victims. “The priest of Innana will not aid you, even if the prince commands—not willingly, and not quickly, and he will injure you by stealth if he may. I see it in his eyes.”

  “Right,” Clemens said, frustration in his tone. He ran a hand through his short brown hair. “I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do. There aren’t enough medics or corpsmen with the regiment, or with the whole expedition. And I can’t train them that fast . . .”

  “You can train them for this one thing,” Azzu-ena said, nodding her head toward the fire, where a huge pot of water boiled. “You cannot train them to care for the sick as well as you—we—would, but that is not essential here, no?”

  “No,” Clemens said. “What we need to do is stop this epidemic before it melts the army of Kar-Duniash like snow in Babylon.”

  “Then make up the medicine-water before, and have them boil it. Boiling water is not difficult. For the rest, nursing is what is required, no? Washing the men, keeping away flies . . .” She frowned. “For that, I think you should recruit among the women who follow the camp. They do much of the washing and repairing of clothing already.”

  Bright lady, Clemens thought. Very bright.

  There were those, back on the Island, who said that it would have been better for the locals if Nantucket had stayed isolated, that every action would change the people whose lives they touched, and in ways beyond prediction or control.

  “Yes, it will,” Clemens murmured. “And I don’t mind that at all.”

  Ranger Peter Girenas watched the sky, folding his arms behind his head and smiling at the clouds. The expedition was in what the maps said was central Missouri, but this place had never been mapped. He rested his head on a natural pillow of dropseed, the clump-grass that grows in the middle of the long swales of the tallgrass country. The grasses rustled and closed over his head, and he might have been alone save for Sue Chau sitting at his feet—looking, he thought, as pretty as the wildflowers as she sat in only her deerskin breechclout, combing her long black hair and chewing on a straw.

  The dropseed beneath him was springy and firm, the intervals between the hassocks heavily matted with dried grass to make a perfect hammock. The soil beneath that was prairie loam that was like nothing he’d ever seen before—no clods or sticks or stones at all. He slitted his eyes and enjoyed the feel of the wind caressing his sweaty skin. A day like this, you could remember the crossing of the Ohio—the horse screaming as the raft overset, and the white water trying to topple it—without fear. Or the time they’d nearly lost Eddie to a cottonmouth bite, his body swelling, his mind raving, the two-week hiatus when they stopped to nurse him.

  Long ago, now; it seemed long ago and far away. Now he could smell elk strips smoking over a slow green fire and the liver roasting for dinner. He saw dragonflies darting off below to the slough, a squadron of monarch butterflies flitting above the tall grass; he could hear a bobolink’s bubbling song as it hung in the air twenty feet up, until that red-winged hawk silenced it by floating past far overhead. But the hawk was too high to be hunting, and too late to be migrating.

  “Soaring just for the hell of it,” Pete said. “He doesn’t fool me. He looks busy, but he’s loafing today, just like us.”

  High above the hawk were steady ranks of clouds, coasting on the westerly winds, dragging a shadow across the earth every now and then. He stood, only his head and shoulders above the grass, and watched the shadow cross the huge, rolling landscape, the grass rippling beneath it like waves on the sea.

  Even more than the sea, he thought. It took some wind to move the sea, but the tall grasses bowed and moved to the slightest breath of it, out to the edge of sight. They were on a slight rise, well into the lowlands that stretched out to the line of cottonwoods and poplar along the levees of the Missouri River. From here he could see half a dozen other hawks, and a herd of buffalo along the edge of the woods, birds misting up from the water far away like black smoke . . .

  I love the forest, he thought. He did—the endless silences of it, the multitudinous life from rotting log to forest crown. But this, it feels like there’s no end to the world.

  The others were not far away, lying around a tree—a fire-gnarled oak—that had rooted itself where the ground rose a little more steeply. That had provided the firewood they needed to smoke the elk meat and cook dinner—elk-hump steaks, liver, kidneys, marrow and wild greens. Henry Morris had had to bully some of the others to eat enough organ meat, saying it was the only way to get all their vitamins when there was little green food.

  The fire was built on pieces of overturned knife-cut sod; the rest of their gear rested under groundsheets or was stacked against the tree. Hobbled, the horses drifted and grazed—this was certainly horse heaven, although now and then one of their three stallions would throw up its head and snort, at one of its own kind or at a scent of predator drifting down the wind. Mostly they hung around with their own group of packho
rse mares, most of which were pregnant by now—Alban ponies were tough enough to take that sort of treatment. Perks lay growling softly in pleasure as he gnawed at a gristly lump of elk shoulder, while the expedition’s other dogs kept a decent, deferential distance.

  “Not going to be this nice come winter,” Sue said behind him.

  He chuckled. “Well, we’re making reasonable time,” he said. “It isn’t a race. If we have to find a place to winter over, we will.”

  Dekkomosu came in out of the grasses, hand in hand with Jaditwara the Fiernan. He was grinned broadly at Pete and began to say something—he’d gotten more cheerful as they got further from home—when his face went quiet.

  “What’s that?” he said, pointing.

  Damn good eyes, Girenas thought, unslinging his binoculars from the stub branch where the case hung on. It was just townie myth that Indians had better vision; they did tend to notice more of what they saw than a townie, but then, living in town you had to pull in your senses or go nuts.

  “Damn,” he said softly. Everyone was up now, looking along with him. “Well, I guess we know where those bodies were coming from.”

  The last two weeks, they’d seen five—hard to be absolutely sure, since the parts were so scattered. In the binoculars he saw the end of a chase that had probably started a good long time ago. A group of women and children, thirty or so, broke out of a line of trees and ran upward into the grass. Behind them were men, ten or so if you counted teenagers. They wore leggings and tunics; he could see quill decorations, and bones and feathers woven into long braids. They carried spears, or darts set into atlatls, and they walked backward in a wide arc between their women and children and whatever was pursuing them.

  Then a dart arced out toward them, and faint and far came a yelping like wolves. The men who boiled out of the riverside thickets in pursuit were thirty or more, all in their prime. Their naked torsos were painted with bars and circles of yellow and red, their hair drawn up in topknots through hide rings, their faces covered with more slashes of color.