Out here, the acres of courtyard were crowded with an orderly throng. Great banks of kalu—ritual singers—broke into choral song every time the king’s recitation stopped, amid the tinkle and rattle of cistrum and cimbalomlike instruments. Incense smoked into the sky from censers of golden fretwork swung by the priests.
It was all stately beyond words; the problem was that with chants, songs, ritual gestures, it was going to take the rest of the afternoon to reach the temple, at which point the ceremony would actually begin. The dignitaries honored with an invitation had to go at the same pace. Colonel Hollard glanced aside at the crowd filling the open spaces of the courtyard and shivered slightly. Their faces were rapt, open, an abandonment of self beyond anything he could imagine.
Eventually they crossed the temenos, the sacred enclosure. The gates swung wide, and Kenneth Hollard missed his stride. Jesus!
Most of these Babylonian buildings were dim-lit inside; it made the bigger ones impressive, in a mysterious, smoky way. Esagila wasn’t. The inside of the great hall glowed, light caught and reflected back and forth by the gold leaf that covered walls and the giant beams of the ceiling, sparkling from emerald and nacre and lapis. Hollard blinked, stunned for an instant. Then they were through the hall and into the sanctum itself, only the king and his most trusted guests there as witnesses. Hollard’s eyes went up and up, past the man-high golden footstool, past the colossal foot and robe, to the golden, bearded face of the god that seemed to hover beneath the lofty roof, full-lipped and beak-nosed, the embodiment of power, telling all beholders to make peace with their mortality.
He shook himself mentally. Come off it, that’s just a statue. Just a goddam big solid-gold statue. No wonder the locals find it impressive, though.
King Shuriash halted before the image of the god, one hand before his face and the other raised. The elderly sheshgallu came forward in his archaic wrap and relieved him of the symbols of his sovereignty—the tall crown of gold and jewels, the mace, the circle, all placed on a smaller chair before Marduk’s. Then the high priest took him by the ear and made as if to force him to his knees. As a man rather than a king, Shuriash prostrated himself before Marduk and then rose only to his knees to proclaim: I did not sin,
O Lord of the countries.
I did not destroy Babylon;
I did not command its overthrow.
The temple Esagila,
I did not forsake its rites.
I did not rain blows upon the weak,
I did not humiliate the lowly.
I was vigilant for the kingdom.
Hollard found himself nodding. Shuriash actually meant it; for a monarch of the ancient Orient, he really was a pretty good sort. The priest slapped him sharply on both cheeks as the rite required, until tears came to his eyes; the king went on his belly once more, and then was lifted up, the high priest intoning:Have no fear;
The God Bel-Marduk will listen to your prayer
He will magnify your lordship
He will exalt your kingship
The God Bel-Marduk will bless you forever;
He will destroy your adversary;
He will fell your enemy.
One by one, the symbols he had laid down were returned to Shuriash. The chorus of singing priests burst out again, and within the confines of the temple their song was a wave of pure sound.
Hollard glanced aside at Raupasha, watching the intent sparkle of her dark-gray eyes. She was wearing what Doreen had dreamed up as the new Mitannian national costume, an open jacket of crimson silk embroidered with dragons in gold thread over a long, simple gown of indigo blue set with bullion medallions along the hem.
Looks damn fine, he thought. She’s filled out a little with proper food and exercise. Down boy!
Then her eyes went wide, and her hand darted inside the jacket. Time seemed to slow as the slim hand came out with the bulk of a brand-new .40 Python in it, pointing ahead . . . toward King Shuriash. Toward his undefended back, bare to the allies he trusted.
Jesus, she’s gone nuts! he thought. His hand lifted—and halted.
Instead, he pivoted himself, his own right hand clawing at the holster on his waist. The shot was not far from his ear, deafeningly loud. There were screams, cries of anger and rage; Shuriash was pivoting, features slack with amazement as he saw the priest leaping toward him with upraised knife. Raupasha’s shot clipped a fingernail’s width of skin from the man’s nose. The priest’s face was twisted in an ecstacy of hatred, amok with fanaticism. The wound snapped his head around for an instant, and slowed his rush.
“Die, blasphemer!” he screamed.
Prince Kashtiliash’s actions had the smooth economy of an expert. His sword slashed out and up, through the assassin’s wrist. The priest did shriek then, although Kenneth couldn’t tell if it was with pain or frustration. The sound cut off . . . literally, as the prince’s second stroke chopped halfway through his neck.
Then the two Hollards, the prince, and some of the nobles were crowding around Shuriash, weapons poised and eyes glaring, putting their bodies between him and any further danger, while priests and onlookers scattered in terror. Hollard noticed that one of the few exceptions was Ian Arnstein, who’d seized his wife in a crouching hug that put his body between her and danger. Time froze, for long instants. The priest-assassin gave a final bubbling rattle, kicked heels, voided, then died. His blood flowed out impossibly red in the light of the shrine, creeping around the feet of those surrounding the king.
“ Let me by,” Shuriash snapped.
Reluctantly, his protectors spread apart, moving outward to make their circle wider. Shuriash looked down at the priest.
“My thanks,” he said to Kashtiliash, and nudged the body. “But it would have been good to ask this one questions—hard questions, in a hard way.”
He caught Raupasha’s eye and inclined his head. “My lady of Mitanni, I seem to owe you a life. I shall not forget.”
Then he looked around. “ Where is the sheshgallu of Marduk? ”
The chief priest came forward, looking shrunken and old in his gorgeous robe and ziggurat hat. “My lord king, may you live forever—”
“If I do, it will be no thanks to your incompetence!” Shuriash snapped.
“O Ensi of Marduk, there are so many priests in Babylon for the akitu. . .”
Shuriash nodded. “ That is true. You, you—” he pointed to guardsmen. “Take the corpse of this dead dog and put it where it may be examined later. You, go speak to the people in the temenos; tell them that the king has been spared by the grace of Marduk and the other great gods assembled here in Babylon. Now, sheshgallu, it is time for me to take the hand of the great god my lord, Bel-Marduk.”
The high priest gaped at him. “ You . . . you wish to go on with the ceremony, King of the Four Quarters? ”
Shuriash snorted. “Of course! If there was any aim to this plot besides killing me, it was to interrupt the akitu, that doubt might be thrown on my right to rule as vice-regent of the great Bel-Marduk. This shall not be! The ceremony shall continue!”
There was a slight commotion at the doorway; it was a breach of decorum for anyone to enter the feasting-hall after the monarch. King Shuriash turned, his shaggy brows rising when Justin Clemens pushed past the guards. He smiled, though, despite the breach of protocol. The guards had known he would; the man who had saved the king’s darling would not be denied audience even if his reasons were frivolous. Not for the first few times, at least.
Nobody thought his reasons were, once they saw his face. He came up to the table at the king’s side and bowed.
“O King,” he said. “I have grave news.” He glanced around. “For your ears, and your heir’s, and these officers of my people.”
Shuriash looked at him keenly for a moment, then nodded. “ Leave us,” he said. There were murmurs from some of the ministers and generals. “ Leave us, I said!” When the audience chamber was empty save for himself and his son and the Islander commanders, he went on:
“ I have given offense to powerful men. There had better be a good reason for this.”
“O King, there is. There is mutanu in your city.”
Shuriash’s tanned skin went gray; so did his son’s. Mutanu translated literally as “certain death.” A better rendering into English would have been “plague.”
“Are you sure?” the king said, grasping at a small image of Shamash that hung at his belt, a rare gesture for him.
“ I am sure. It is. . .” He paused, groping for a word. “ I do not know if you have a word for this mutanu. It starts with fever and a reddish rash, and then red sores erupt upon the body. If the victims live, they may be scarred. We call it smallpox.”
Shuriash shook his head. “ No, I do not know of this mutanu.” His gaze sharpened. “ You do? Have you brought this thing to the land of Kar-Duniash? ”
Clemens licked his lips. God, I wish I was sure, he thought. “I do not think so,” he said. “We have not suffered from this disease for a very long time. We have a means of making a person safe from it.”
“Ah,” Shuriash said. “ That is well; that is very well.”
Clemens shook his head. “Lord King, we have such a means at home in Nantucket, not here. Not our best means.” In English, to the appalled faces of Kenneth Hollard and the other Islanders: “We’ve got enough vaccine on hand to immunize a couple of hundred people, no more.”
“ Is there another way, then? ” Shuriash asked.
“ Yes.” Clemens hesitated, and the Babylonian made an imperious gesture. The doctor licked his lips again, tasting the salt of fear.
“Lord King, we can protect you and your family by the best method, for we have some of that medicine.”
He winced internally. Still, there was no choice—they couldn’t vaccinate the population at large, and if they were going to pick a few hundred, then it would have to be—coldly—based on who was most essential to the Republic’s purposes.
“And my people? ” Shuriash asked quietly.
“ There is another way. It, too, protects against the disease, but . . . there are drawbacks.”
Colonel Hollard snorted. “Spit it out, Lieutenant,” he said.
“Lord King, the other method involves—” How the hell do I say “attenuated virus” in Akkadian, goddammit? He took another breath and began again. “It involves giving the healthy a weak form of the disease. In most cases, they recover with little harm and are henceforth immune.”
Kashtiliash leaned forward, his brown eyes narrowed. “Most? That is a word as slippery as a fish dipped in sesame oil,” he said.
Clemens nodded. “Of every fifty so treated, one will develop the strong form of the disease. Of those, one in two will die.”
Shuriash seemed to swell where he sat. “You would kill”—he paused to calculate; Babylonian arithmetic used an eight-base system—“one in every hundred of my people? ”
“King, if we do not, at least two in every ten will die! And that is . . . to rely on the favor of the gods.” It wasn’t easy to say “probability” in Akkadian either. “ If this is truly the first time that this mutanu has visited your lands, then as many as nine in ten or more may die. And I think it is the first time; your asu Azzu-ena knows nothing of it, and her knowledge of your healing arts is very complete.”
“Oh, shit,” Hollard said, into the echoing silence that followed Clemens’ words. “ Why didn’t I stay on Nantucket, where they don’t have emergencies? ”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
May, Year 10 A.E.
“Dull duty,” Guard Recruit Mandy Kayle said. “Sky Father give me ‘dull’ anytime,” Petty Officer Samuel Taunarsson said. “ I mean, God the Father and His Son,” he continued, crossing himself. “And His Mother. Whether or not She is Moon Woman, too,” he added for safety’s sake.
Above them the fabric of the balloon creaked in the predawn chill. She could see a few intact aircraft—they’d probably never fly again—pegged down under shelters at the little airport, and the big blimp-construction shed—empty right now. Despite that addition there was a forlorn air to Nantucket Airport, boarded windows and bindweed slithering out over the runways . . . as if the Event had left it stranded in its own little bubble of time. Kayle shivered slightly at the thought; she’d been nine years old the night of the Event, but she was never going to forget it. The world before, yes—there were times when she wasn’t sure if her memories were real or dreams.
“ Pressure? ” Taunarsson said.
“Full, Petty Officer,” Kayle said. The two-hundred-foot-long balloon was tugging at its moorings, rocking a little in a fresh westerly breeze. “At present weight, neutral buoyancy at five hundred feet.”
“Drop stationary ballast,” he said, and went to one side of the gondola. Kayle went to the other, her hand on the slipknot of a burlap sack of sand.
“One!”
Two fifty-pound bags hit the asphalt in unison with dull thuds.
“ Two! Three!”
Ropes creaked sharply. The noncom nodded and stepped up to the head of the open oval gondola, picking up the handset. “This is Eagle’s Eye. Communications check.”
Evidently that went smoothly too, since he clicked the knob to a different channel and spoke again: “Ready, aye, ready.”
From the gray-shot darkness over the side came the rare brilliance of an electric light; nobody was going to use an open flame near this much hydrogen.
“ Paying up!” came the voice of the line team.
“Stand by to let go fore and aft!” Taunarsson called.
“Ready!”
“On the mark . . . loose!”
There was a bobbling heave, a sharp tung sound, and a steady Clinkaclinkaclinka as the mechanism let the cable run in a smooth, controlled surge. The Coast Guard fixed observation balloon Eagle’s Eye rose and turned its nose into the wind as the fins caught the breeze. Kayle yawned and settled back on the bench by her duty station, keeping an eye on the pressure and altitude gauges.
Boring, she thought.
In the Year 2 the Kayles had taken up a sixty-four-acre Town grant farm out Milestone Road, about halfway to Sconset, a little south of Gibbs Pond. Sixty-four acres and forty crossbred Alban-Jersey dairy cattle, all of ’em needing to be milked twice a day, rain or shine, winter or summer.
Mandy Kayle was just old enough to remember times when the school year ended with a vacation. Even though her younger siblings, two blood and two adopted, got old enough to help, she’d been glad to shake the dust of the farm off her feet on her eighteenth birthday.
Shake the dust? Scrape the shit off my feet! Hell, this certainly beats working for a living. She’d probably get shipboard duty in six months or so. Maybe make petty officer and get into one of the middie slots, a commission in a couple of years. Standing on her own quarterdeck some day . . .
Or I could put in for flight training. Scuttlebutt had it that more ultralights were being sent far foreign, with the expeditionary force and possibly with ships for scouting.
She stood up to put on her sealskin jacket as they hit a thousand feet—it got brisk up here—and clipped on her safety line before Taunarsson could get on her case about it. He had a serious hair up the ass about regs; but then, he’d sailed with Commodore Alston, the lucky bastard.
“Vent water ballast, establish neutral buoyancy at five thousand feet,” he said.
“Aye, aye,” she replied.
That control was a wheel at the end of a pole in the middle of the gondola. She gave it three quick turns, then waited while the rumbling hiss started below and the Eagle’s Eye surged upward again, her eye fixed on the altimeter and the converted fuel gauge that showed the level of ballast.
“Forty-five hundred feet,” she said as her ears popped again.
“ Ballast valve off.”
“ Ballast valve off, aye.”
Silence fell, broken only by the clean, cold whistle of the wind around the balloon. The cable stretched away in a diminishing curve below them to the
toy-small recovery gear, and Nantucket Island spread out, gradually rising from shadow to light as the sun heaved itself above the eastern horizon. The Island was a lopsided triangle, gray-green set in blue and edged with white surf. She could see other land—Martha’s Vineyard to the northwest, the mainland to the north—but her homeland was laid out below her like a map.
“ Let’s get to work,” Taunarsson said. “ You’ve got first watch.”
“Aye, aye, Mr. Taunarsson,” she said.
There was a thermos of hot cocoa in a box bolted to the side of the gondola that also held their boxed lunches; she poured for both of them, automatically adjusting for the continuous dip and sway of the tethered balloon. She’d been miserably sick the first couple of times, and she still remembered the petty officer’s cheerful command—Overside, and show the civvies what you think of ’em, Recruit.
Then she broke out her binoculars, resting her elbows on the chest-high rail, careful to check that the strap was hitched around her neck and through the brass loop at the rear of her leather jacket before she took them anywhere near the edge of the little craft. What the lieutenant—hell, what the commodore—would say if she lost the irreplaceable pre-Event instrument just didn’t bear thinking about.
Green-blue water shading out into dark blue, edged with whitecaps, stretching out all around to the edge of the world—back to greenish again over the sandbanks that dotted Nantucket Sound like silent hands waiting to grab ships’ keels. The low shorelines of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard easily in view from here—there were threads of smoke coming up from both, probably from charcoal kilns and turpentine works, and a bigger one from the glassworks at Hyannis Base. What she and Taunarsson were supposed to look for were ships, and whales spouting, and schools of fish—so the Guard could pass the information on to whalers and fishers and tug captains—or people in trouble. Those were the things the Guard was for, along with exploring and fighting.
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