Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

  “And it’s waterproof, unlike the flintlocks, the rifle and the ammunition both,” Alston said. “Virtually soldier-proof, too. Simple, rugged, easy to use and maintain. Until we can go to smokeless powder and a semi-auto, this is our best bet, I think.”

  “Ron,” Cofflin said sincerely, “you’ve done it again. Congratulations!”

  “Ah . . .” Leaton shuffled his feet. “Actually, it’s the fruit of a weird taste in reading matter. It’s German, originally—Bavarian, from the 1860s, I just modified the design a bit here and there. Guy named Werder from Munich developed it, one of those all-round Victorian inventors and machinists. Obscure, but probably the best single-shot rifle ever made.”

  “Okay, tell me the bad news—production?”

  Leaton grinned. “This time, the bad news is good, Chief. We can turn out two hundred a week, and the ammunition will be ample.”

  A thought struck Cofflin. “ Wait a minute,” he said, looking down at the rifle in his hands. I certainly want our boys and girls to have the best, but . . .

  “Couldn’t Walker duplicate this? He’s copying our Westley-Richards now.”

  Marian nodded with a shark’s amusement, and Leaton guffawed. “We hope he tries, Chief,” the engineer said. “Yeah, he could duplicate the rifle without much of a problem.”

  The commodore took up the explanation: “But getting reliable drawn-brass cartridges and primers, that won’t be nearly so easy. God-damned difficult, as a matter of fact.”

  Leaton made a gesture. “He’ll be able to do it, eventually,” he said. “Bill Cuddy’s a first-rate machinist, whatever else is wrong with him, and from the reports you’ve been sending me they’ve got a fair little machine-tool business going there. Still behind ours because they started out without our power sources or stock of materials, but growing fast. So, yes, he could duplicate the Werder and eventually the ammo if he gets a copy to reverse-engineer. Of course, Walker hasn’t got our scale and most of his workers are rote-trained, not all-rounders. Bottom line, it’ll waste his resources for a good year, maybe three, if he tries to switch over—cutting into his Westley-Richards production pretty bad, we think.”

  “And if I know Walker,” Marian Alston said with satisfaction in her tone, “he won’t be able to resist trying to match anything we do, if it’s remotely possible. An ego as big as the Montana skies.”

  The three Islanders shared a long, wolfish chuckle. Leaton turned to a cabinet, opened it, and handed Alston a revolver and belt. “This is by way of a belated coming-home present,” he said. “Modeled on the Colt Python, but in 10 mm—.40. Black-powder, of course, but you’ll find it an improvement over the double-barreled flintlocks, I think.”

  “Why, thank you, Ron,” Marian said, giving the weapon a quick check. “Now, we have to talk priorities.”

  “Ayup,” Cofflin said. “You want the expeditionary force to get first crack?”

  Alston surprised him by shaking her head. “Not until they can make their own ammunition. I’m not going to put a thousand of my people seven thousand miles of irregular sailing-ship passage away from their sole and only ammunition supply. That’s a point-failure source.”

  “Couple of months minimum for that,” Leaton said. “The people you sent can handle the equipment, but some of it’s fairly complex. Take a while to run up another set.”

  “Right,” Alston said. “First we’ll re-equip the Ready Force”—the Islander citizens doing their initial training—“the first-line militia battalions, and the ships’-company Marines. We can ship the surplus Westley-Richards to Kar-Duniash to equip local forces, and the Marines there can hand over theirs too when we get them Werders.”

  “Mmmm, sounds sensible,” Cofflin said. He usually left specialists to handle their own areas of expertise—that was half the secret of doing the Chief’s job right, remembering not to joggle elbows. The other half was picking the right experts to begin with, of course.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  February-March, Year 10 A.E.

  (April, Year 10 A.E.)

  Ur Base’s main communications room held several shortwave sets. They were talking in the clear; one of the few things they definitely did know was that Walker’s radio had stayed behind in Alba when he left. He might be able to intercept a spark-gap Morse signal, but nobody in Mycenaean Greece was going to duplicate a voice set.

  Colonel Hollard sat in the woven-reed chair and put the headset on, adjusting the mike.

  “Ur Base,” the radio technician said. “This is Ur Base. Come in, Dur-Kurigalzu. Come in, please.”

  “This is Councilor Arnstein’s office in Dur-Kurigalzu. Receiving you loud and clear. Over.”

  “Roger that, Dur-Kurigalzu. I’m handing over to the colonel.”

  “Hello, Ian. What’s up?”

  “Hi, Ken. I’m calling about your lost princess; thought I’d check up on her. And there’s some other news. How’s she doing?”

  “Not badly,” Colonel Hollard said. “We gave her a guesthouse and hired those two Assyrian girls to do the cooking and suchlike. She’s studying English, but pretty quiet otherwise. Not surprising, considering the trauma she went through. The kid’s got guts.”

  “What about brains? Doreen thought she was very bright.”

  “Very is the word. Lot of culture shock, of course, but she’s adaptable as well.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “Sir?”

  “Why so formal, Ken?”

  “Well, I was wondering what you have in mind for her,” Kenneth Hollard said. “We’ve gotten about all the intelligence data we can, and she’s got no real place here. I was thinking about sponsoring her back on-Island—sending her to stay at my brother’s place, maybe.”

  Arnstein chuckled. “Yes, she’s a likable sort too, in that I-am-a-princess way, isn’t she? No, I don’t think we’ll take her off the board just yet, Colonel. Doreen and I have been talking it over, and there must be some sort of use we can make of the last of the Mitannian royal line.”

  “Sir . . .” Hollard fought down annoyance; Arnstein was just doing his job. “Sir, she’s already gone through a lot.”

  “I’m aware of that, Ken,” Arnstein soothed. “And believe me, we’re not going to do anything against her interests. But we’re here for the interests of the Republic, not as a find-a-place-for-strays agency.”

  “Yessir. I’m going to be dropping in on her in a minute, anyway, as a matter of fact.”

  “Good,” Arnstein said. “It would be best if she has positive feelings toward the Republic.”

  “ I don’t think she thinks in those categories, sir,” Hollard said. “ It’s giri, here; personal obligations.”

  “Hmmmmm, you have a point. Mitanni was more of a feudal state than most of these ancient Oriental despotisms, as far as we can tell—which isn’t very far. Damn, but I wish I had more staff qualified to do research in the archives here!”

  “Sir, learning that script is a nightmare.”

  “ You’re telling me,” Arnstein said. “How are the scribes coming? ”

  “Quite well.”

  “Good. I’ll hire a couple and set them going on transliterations,” he said. Akkadian could be written quite well in the Roman alphabet. “Good long-term project, anyway. I doubt cuneiform will be used for more than another century or so, and then anything that hasn’t been written down in the new medium will be lost.”

  Hollard’s brows went up. “ You really think so? ”

  “Oh, yes. Not a certainty, of course, but highly probable, once paper and printing catch on—you can’t print cuneiform, not really. You know, one reason I regret not being immortal is that I won’t find out what’s going to happen here.”

  “Councilor, I’d settle for knowing what’s happening in Greece.”

  “ That I can help you with.”

  Hollard leaned forward eagerly. “ What? ”

  “We’ve finally gotten some informants into coastal Anatolia—your lost princess did help us there, the name
s of some merchants who trade through Hangilibat, and for a wonder they’re alive. The latest intelligence is that this Hittite chief who’s rebelled against King Tudhaliya—the one Raupasha told us about—has gone to Millawanda to confer with a ‘chief of the Ahhiyawa.’ ”

  Hollard made an interrogative noise, and Arnstein sighed. “Millawanda . . . Miletus. Port on the Aegean. Ahhiyawa . . . Achaea. Greece.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Uh-oh, is right. That damned war with Assyria took too long for comfort; the passes over the Taurus into Anatolia will be closed soon. We’ve got to get in contact with Hattusas, and then we’ve got to hit the enemy next spring.”

  “ Yes, sir!”

  “ Which brings us back to Princess Raupasha . . .”

  Colonel Kenneth Hollard was still mulling over the conversation when he walked into his quarters and heard a whine. He looked down. The wicker basket was overset and the hound puppy nowhere in sight. Until he looked in his footlocker, slightly open.

  “Hell,” he said, looking down. “Oh, well, I didn’t like that belt anyway, or those slippers. Come here, you damned set of teeth and paws.”

  He clamped the puppy firmly in his arms, avoiding most of the attempts to lick his face, and took it back to the office. The beast was from the royal hunting pack’s kennels; nobles here kept hunting animals, despite the general Babylonian dislike of dogs.

  Of course, the king isn’t a Babylonian, strictly speaking, he thought.

  The royal family and a lot of the nobility here were Kassites who’d come down from the mountains during the breakup of Hammurabi’s empire centuries before and seized power. They’d been pretty well assimilated by now, but they kept up some contact with the old homeland; Prince Kashtiliash had been fostered there for a couple of years, for instance.

  “C’mon, pooch,” he muttered to it, and the puppy went into wiggling ecstasy at the attention. “Got a nice girl I’d like to set you up with.”

  “ That makes no sense!” Raupasha daughter of Shuttarna said.

  The physician’s apprentice Azzu-ena sighed. “I agree,” she said, tapping the paper on the table between them. “But it is the way the Nantukhtar language is.”

  Raupasha looked down. She’d learned the alphabet quickly; it was childishly simple compared to the Akkadian cuneiform. The language it was designed to write was another matter. Azzu-ena knew more of it than she; of course, she was a learned woman, and old—perhaps even thirty. It was good to have her come and help with the studies; it made the house less of a silent prison. And it gave her someone to complain to when the irritation grew too much to bear.

  “ But the form of the words is exactly the same!” the Mitannian girl said. “House dog and dog house. Shouldn’t it be dog’s house, with that possessive ending? ”

  Azzu-ena frowned herself, scratching her big hooked nose. “You would think so . . . but in the English, most of the time, it is the order of the words that determines their meaning, not the declension and inflection as it is in Akkadian. Is it so in Hurrian? ”

  “Yes, and any other language I’ve ever heard of,” Raupasha said. She sighed, and her lips firmed with determination. “ I will learn this tongue! Quickly!”

  “ Why are you in such a hurry? ” Azzu-ena asked. “ I have been, because the knowledge I seek is in this tongue. Why do you drive yourself so? ”

  “Because . . .” Raupasha hesitated. But there is no reason she should not know. And it was good to have someone to talk to. “Because I must understand them, too. I would not always be their client and pensioner, well though they have treated me.”

  The maid padded in with a tray of the small round sweet cakes and a pot of cocoa. Cookies, she reminded herself. Or biscuits. Cocoa had a flavor like nothing on earth, soft and rich and dark and sweet all at once; she found herself craving it often and restrained herself sternly. She was not going to disgrace her blood before these strangers.

  “And to have someone to talk to,” she went on aloud. “ You are not here at Ur Base all of the time, and the house slaves are so stupid!”

  “Not stupid—they’re peasants and far from home and ignorant,” Azzu-ena corrected her, a smile taking any sting out of her words. “And please! Do not call them slaves. They are employees who receive a wage. The Eagle People hate the very word ‘slave’; they are strange in that manner.”

  “They are strange in all manners,” Raupasha said, pouring a little date syrup into the cups of cocoa and stirring them with a whisk. “So many weird taboos and laws of ritual purity—the way all excrement must be carried away out of sight, for instance, and all rubbish buried or burned, and even laborers made to wash every day as if for a ritual in a House of Exclusion.”

  “ They have reason for that; they think that filth causes disease, and they may well be right. Likewise their hatred of insects.”

  “Oh!” Raupasha said. “Still, they are very strange indeed. I asked Lord Kenn’et the other day what his rank was in Nan-tuck-et, and he said he was a citizen. What means this word? ”

  “I am not sure,” Azzu-ena said thoughtfully. “I think it means something like an awelum, a free man of a city.”

  “ But he said something about the citizens choosing the king,” Raupasha said. “Surely that means high nobles, generals, ministers, chief priests? ”

  “I haven’t asked much of how they are governed,” Azzu-ena said. “ Though of course you would, coming of a high family.” She looked around. “And so they treat you, I see.”

  Raupasha nodded. The house here in the Nantukhtar base was smaller than her foster father’s manor, but more comfortable than anything she had ever known. There were no frescoes on the walls, but there were framed pictures unbelievably lifelike, and windows of glass clear as solid air. Those were open now, and slatted screens of woven reed let in air without the glare of the afternoon sun. The tile floors were covered in fine rugs, for the Nantukhtar put them on the floor, rather than hanging them on the walls—an extravagance that gave her a guilty pleasure every time her toes worked into them. The furniture was beautifully made, much of it Babylonian—and that of the finest. And there was a kitchen and a bitrimki, a bathhouse, as fine as those of a king’s palace in a great city like Nineveh or Dur-Kurigalzu.

  “That is partly the lord Arnstein and his lady,” Raupasha said shrewdly. “ They think I may be of some use to them . . . I do not know what. If my family were still rulers, they might seek to make an advantageous marriage-alliance through me, but I have neither gold nor power to bring. Isn’t it so odd that Lord Arnstein’s wife is also his right-hand man . . . ah, you know what I mean!”

  “ Yes.” A smile, turning the homely face of the female physician almost comely for an instant. “ That is a strange custom to which I have no objection at all. Nor do you object that you are treated as suits your birth, rather than your wealth!”

  Raupasha nodded. “ But part of it is Lord Kenn’et, I think. He is an odd man—a great warrior, a slaughterer of Assyrians, yet his heart is moved to compassion, as if I were his kin.” She scowled slightly. “As if I were a small child of his own kin, sometimes.”

  “ That is the way of the Eagle People,” Azzu-ena replied. “ It is . . . contradictory. Their weapons slay like the hand of the plague-gods, and then they bind up the wounds of those they threw down.” She paused and smiled slyly. “ I have seen Lord Kenn’et only a few times. As you say, a great warrior . . . a man of great beauty, too. Tall as a palm tree and ruddy, strong and sturdy.”

  “ Yes.” Raupasha flushed, then coughed. “ There is a thing I would ask you, Lady Azzu-ena.”

  “Ask.” The Babylonian’s face changed from happy gossiper to the impersonal attentiveness of a professional.

  “I am troubled by my dreams. You are a person of learning, and I thought perhaps . . .”

  “I am sorry, I am a physician, not a baru-diviner,” Azzu-ena said sympathetically. “ I can recommend a good one.”

  “ No . . . it is not that my dreams are an
omen, I think. It is only . . . I awaken, and before I am fully awake I see again the faces of my foster father and foster mother. They are smiling, and I am a child again and happy, but then . . . they change. I do not know why they should trouble me; their blood is avenged! Yet sometimes I fear to sleep because of it.”

  “ That is perhaps an omen, or a fate laid on you . . .”

  A knock came at the door. The maid went to it and then opened it quickly, falling to her knees.

  “Don’t do that,” Colonel Kenneth Hollard snapped. The maid bounced up again, flustered. “Hello, Princess. Ms. Azzu-ena. May I come in? ”

  “My house is yours,” Raupasha said. If it is mine, really, she thought.

  Hollard was carrying a dog in his arms; a puppy, rather, flop-eared and spotted. Azzu-ena looked at it and raised her brows.

  “Lord Kenn’et,” she said. “I thought your people had a horror of touching dogs, even more than ours.”

  “Only unclean dogs,” he said.

  “Unclean? ” she asked, baffled.

  “Dogs that are left to run around towns and villages, untended and eating filth.”

  “Oh. You mean that dogs such as nobles keep for hunting, or shepherds, are not unclean.”

  “Ah . . . approximately, yes.” He turned to the Mitannian girl, smiling. “I think you told me that dogs are not a pollution to your folk, either? ”

  “No,” Raupasha said, shaking her head and stifling a giggle. The puppy was making a determined effort to lick the Nantukhtar commander’s face, and then chewing at the leather strap across his chest that supported his belt and sword. He is so grave and dignified, and it is worrying him like a piece of rawhide, she thought.

  “We honor them,” she went on solemnly aloud, “For we say that they neither break faith nor lie. My foster father kept a kennel of hunting hounds, and we had mastiffs to protect the sheep.”

  “Well, this one’s from King Shuriash’s kennels,” he said. “I thought you might like to have it.”