On the Oceans of Eternity

by S. M. Stirling

  Vaukel fired one last round with the muzzle three feet from a man's face. Then he lunged downward with his bayonet; it went in over a collarbone and grated as he withdrew, the sensation traveling up the wood and metal and resonating gruesomely in his chest. A flicker of motion out of the corner of his left eye caught him; Gwenhaskieths was down, a Ringapi with a hand clamped around her throat and his other raising his shield to chop her in the face with the edge. Training brought Vaukel pivoting on his heel-fighting shield-armed warriors you struck at the one on your left, his unprotected spear-side. The twenty-inch blade of his bayonet caught the savage under his short rib and impaled him across the width of his torso, a soft meaty resistance and then things crunching and popping beneath the sharp point.

  He twisted the blade, withdrew, slashed at another snarling face as he brought it around, punched the butt after it and felt bone break. Gwenhaskieths pulled herself erect, coughing and retching with the bruising of that iron grip on her throat, and grabbed up her rifle. The line of the north wall was surging and swaying…

  The bugle sounded: fall back and rally. Long habit brought Vaukel around, as if the brassy notes were playing directly on his nervous system; he grabbed Gwenhaskieths under the arm and helped her along the first three paces, until she shook him free and ran herself. Ahead of them the Marines from the south wall had turned-behind them came the braaaaap… braaaaap of the Gatling firing out into the gathering darkness and the firefly sparkling of muzzle flashes from the Ringapi riflemen on the hillside above. Captain Barnes was there in the center of the line, steady, her face calm under the helmet as she waited with pistol outstretched and left wrist supporting right. Vaukel felt the sight hearten him as he dashed through the ordered khaki line, turned, knelt, brought his hand down to the bandolier for a round.

  That let him see what was happening. The Ringapi surged over the suddenly empty wall, roaring exultation, expecting nothing but the helpless backs of their foes. Then they saw the line of rifles awaiting them and for one very human, very fatal instant they stopped. The wave pouring over the wall behind them crowded them forward, piling up in a mass of human flesh six bodies deep, jammed skin to skin and less than thirty feet from the line of Marines. Firelight and the last dying sun washed across their faces with a color like blood.

  "First rank… volley fire, present-fire!"

  The Ringapi packed along the inside face of the wall seemed to writhe in unison somehow as the volley slashed into them, those in front punched off their feet by the heavy bullets that slammed through to wound again in the press behind them.

  "Reload! Second rank, advance!"

  Vaukel took two paces forward through the Marines reloading and brought his Werder to his shoulder in unison with the rest of those who'd been holding the north wall.

  "Second rank… volley fire, present-fire!

  The noise inside the compound was so enormous that even the bark of forty rifles in unison was muffled. A scream went up from the Ringapi, and the front two ranks turned and scrabbled backward; some threw away their weapons, and some used them to clear a path through their fellows.

  "Reload! First rank, advance! Second rank… volley fire, present-fire!"

  Three more times, and the enemy broke backward in a mass. The Marines leveled their bayonets and charged with a long shout, back to the barley-sack parapet. Vaukel found himself standing there, trying to make sense of the last ten minutes. Not far down the wall a Ringapi turned at bay; Chaplain Smith swept him up with a grip at throat and crotch:

  "Saint Michael is with us! For the Lord, and for Gideon!" he bellowed, hair and beard bristling, and pitched the man over the wall to crash down on two of his fleeing tribesfolk.

  Vaukel felt his hands begin to shake. Gwenhaskieths staggered up, helmetless, snarling in a rasp through her damaged throat. A Ringapi came to his feet in the pile of dead and wounded barbarians ahead of her; she spitted him through the kidney from behind. At the barricade another was sitting up, until she whipped the butt of her rifle into his face, twice, and pushed the body away with a foot. A good many others were throwing aside Ringapi bodies as well, after making sure that they were bodies and not just temporarily out of commission; there were enough to hamper everyone's footing.

  A moment later she was shaking the Earth Folk Marine by the shoulder. "C'mon… wake up… get down!"

  At the touch he started and dropped down a little. Out beyond the wall it was hard to see what was happening, but voices were haranguing the enemy, the voices of their chiefs. Gwenhaskieths grinned, coughed as she drank from her canteen, spat, and offered it to him. He drank in his turn.

  "Funny how close that sounds to my language," she said. "For things like coward and motherfucker and one more time and take their heads, at least. Watch it!"

  Colonel O'Rourke came by, with a dried cut over one eyebrow and a bandage on his neck. "That's the way, Marines," he said, and slapped them both on the shoulder. "Keep it up, and we'll dance on their graves."

  He passed on down the line. Vaukel hunched down; the Gatling fire from the hill behind was dying down at least. Then he heard a sharp loud crack, like a rifle but bigger. He turned, and saw the sergeant who'd been firing the Gatling on the south wall staggering back clutching at the ruin of a hand. Smoke poured from the machine gun where shells had hit the overheated chambers and exploded.

  "Cook-off, gang-fire!" someone called.

  "Oh, that's unfortunate," Vaukel said hoarsely. "Very."

  "Could I have a drink?" Ian Arnstein asked, when he and his escorts had reached the Achaean encampment outside Troy.

  The hour's trip between was a blur, and from things he remembered as half-seen glimpses he wanted it to stay that way. There were things you did not want to remember, or know that human beings could do to each other. They were too hard to forget.

  The soldiers looked at their officer. "The King commanded that he be treated well," the Greek said.

  The flask they handed him was pewter. The liquid inside was enough to take the lining off your throat, eighty proof at least; some sort of grappa, like the stuff Mediterranean peasants up in the twentieth distilled from the grape husks left after pressing the fruit for wine; another of Walker's innovations. He coughed, swallowed, took another long sip and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The cold fire burned down his gullet and hit his stomach, pushing back the chills and shaking of incipient shock. His head still hurt viciously, he'd heard that even a borderline concussion did that.

  I would have been willing to believe that on hearsay, without the firsthand evidence.

  "Thank you," he said, handing back the flask.

  "Aye, it's not easy to face one with the god-force on him," Philowergos said with a certain rough sympathy. "Nor to see the claws of the Lady of Pain stretched out for you." His troops made gestures of aversion at the name. He offered the flask again, and Arnstein shook his head.

  "Good," the guardsman said. "A little of this is strength, too much is weakness. Come."

  The orderly layout of Walker's camp was disconcertingly like that of the Nantucket Marines, although the tents were leather rather than canvas. A high dirt wall enclosed a neat gridwork of graveled streets, ditches, artillery parks with rows of iron muzzles. The darkness was lit by the red glow of campfires where men cooked pots of boiling grain-mash, and by the brighter yellow of big kerosene lanterns on poles at intervals, or outside tents or rough wood-and-wattle structures larger than others. Horse-drawn ambulances clattered past them, the troops on foot giving way; here and there a mounted messenger or officers, then a mortar pulled by two mounts, the thick barrel swung up and clamped along the draught-pole. Soldiers were beginning to strike their tents as well, and they passed a broad open square where convoys of wagons were being loaded and ox-teams harnessed. There was a smell of animal dung, sweat, woodsmoke, turned earth, oil and leather, but none of the sewer reek you usually got when a large group of Bronze Agers stayed in one place for long. The prisoner and his guards halted in
one corner of the square, the officer striding over to give orders and then returning to wait with them.

  A mule-drawn vehicle came by, set up a bit like a Western chuck wagon, and halted to hand out small loaves of coarse dark bread, still warm from the oven, and dollops of bean soup with chunks of pork in it into the mess tins of the troops; strings of dried figs and a handful of salted olives came with it. Philowergos saw that the prisoner got some as well. Ian could feel his brain starting to work again, soaking up data like a sponge. Most likely he'd never get to use it-

  To hell with that bullshit. I have a country and a family to go home to. The food helped. The body kept on functioning… until it didn't anymore.

  The soldiers of his escort were talking among themselves. Arnstein cocked an ear at it. He was fluent in Achaean; he'd been studying the archaic Mycenaean Greek almost since the Event, and he'd been a Classical scholar before that. Captain Philowergos had been easy to understand, just some sort of regional dialect giving a roughness to the vowel sounds. What his soldiers spoke was different, almost a pidgin-Greek, stripped of many of the complex inflections, with a massive freight of English loan-words for things like rifle and cannon and combat engineer, and more vocabulary from languages he didn't recognize at all. They had wildly differing accents, as well.

  He peered at faces. Some were olive-skinned and dark of hair and eye, like most southern Greeks here and in the twentieth; Captain Philowergos's swarthy, dense-bearded good looks reminded him of a waiter in a restaurant in Athens from his last pre-Event visit. Others looked like Albanians or Serbs or Central Europeans; one or two were like nothing he'd ever seen-where did the man with the white-blond hair, flat face, and slanted blue eyes come from? The rest of the army breaking camp were just as mixed; he even saw one or two blacks. They must be from far up the Nile, or West Africans brought in by Tartessian merchants.

  The dozen men who'd been told off to guard him squatted to eat, or sat on piles of boxes. With a little effort he could make out the conversation. Talk about the fighting, and how relieved they were at the end of the siege, of families, of places back in Greece he mostly couldn't identify. One freckle-faced rifleman complained that they hadn't even gotten a chance at the city's women; his corporal jeered at him cheerfully and slapped him on the top of the head.

  "Thin like stick by now, idiot boy. Stink, bugs. Break cock on bones. Good whores in Neayoruk, clean fat ones, all you want."

  "If pay," the young soldier grumbled. "No loot I see, no; not cloth, scrap silver, not a slave to sell."

  The officer cut in: "The good King will see that all get a share, recruit," he said. To Arnstein: "Wannax Walkheear is the best of lords for a fighting-man. Even if your deeds are not beneath his eye he hears of them, and the reward is swift and generous. Me, I'll save the pay and the bonus, and wait until home and my wife. I'll need it all for my farm, when my service ends."

  "Walker- ' the Islander paused at the scowls. "Wannax Walker gives land to his soldiers?"

  "When they grow too old to fight, or are wounded and can't serve," Philowergos said. "Or if he wants men to hold down a new conquest. Gold is good, horses, slaves, silver-but land, land for your sons and the sons of your sons, that is best of all."

  "Truth, despotes," the older man with sergeant's chevrons said; he had a native Greek-speaker's way with the language. "My brother lost a hand fighting the northern tribes near the…"

  Arnstein asked a question; from the answer he thought the location was somewhere in what would have been Serbia. Uh-oh. Leaton's people said there are zinc deposits there. Zinc made brass, which made cartridges.

  "… and now he has land in Sicily-land like a lord, two hundred acres, good land, cropland and vines and meadow by the river, with man-thralls to till the fields, and slave girls to take the work off his wife and to warm his bed. He lives like a lord, too, drinking and hunting as he pleases; and us both born poor farmers, tenants on a telestai's estate!"

  The corporal who'd slapped his recruit on the head spoke: "And if a warrior shows courage and whattitakes"-another English phrase there, though it took him a moment to puzzle it out-"he may be raised up to a commander, become a noble and great lord."

  The soldiers nodded and murmured agreement, calling the blessings of the Gods-the Greek ones, and an assortment of Pelasgian and Balkan and Danubian deities-down on Walker's head. Ian Arnstein had been a scholar most of his life, and his post-Event job hadn't been too different; they both required insatiable curiosity. The coldest attitude toward Walker he could make out in his guards was deep respect combined with fear; from there it shaded up through doglike devotion to literal hero worship. More than one dropped hints about demi-godhood, or outright divinity. He suspected that only fear of hubris-bred bad luck kept that at the hint level.

  Bad, he thought. This is bad. It looked like Walker had been taking some hints from Napoleon's bag of tricks, every soldier with a marshal's baton in his pack. Hmmmm. Unless that pissed off too many of the old elite of the Achaean kingdoms. But Walker's got a lot of goodies to hand out, maybe enough to keep them all happy. Or he would as long as he kept winning. How solid would his hold be if there were some bitter defeats to swallow?

  A vehicle drew up. Arnstein blinked again. A stagecoach, by God, he thought, then: no, not quite, but Walker must have been watching Gunsmoke when he was a kid. His inexperienced eye could make out a few differences; steel springs and shock absorbers, for instance. The side doors bore a blazon of Walker's wolfshead logo, red outline on black. Handlers came behind, leading mounts for the escort.

  "In, despotes," Philowergos said, and followed him.

  The seats were leather-padded; the Achaean officer sat across from him, drawing his revolver and keeping it in his lap. Ian Arnstein fought not to groan with relief at the cushioned softness, and wished he was as dangerous as the escort thought him.

  "Thank you for your courtesy," he said.

  Teeth flashed white in the dimness, splitting the cropped black beard. "You are of the King's people," the Greek said.

  Well, Rumanian Jewish via New York and California vs. Scots-Irish-German via Georgia and Montana, Arnstein thought. Still, you've got a point. Although personally he didn't even like to consider himself part of the same species as William Walker, much less of the same nationality.

  "And if you take service with him, you will rise high," Philowergos said. "All you Wolf People do, with your wizard knowledge. Why should I anger one who may be a high lord, especially when the King has ordered me to treat him well?" He shrugged. "And if you won't serve the King… well, Zeus Pater sends luck to those who befriend the dying."

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  April, 11 A.E.-Feather River Valley, California

  Tarmendtal son of Zeurkenol, squadron commander in the Royal War-Host of Tartessos, of the cavalry attached to the Hidden Fort of the West, enjoyed leading a spring patrol out to trade and take tribute and show the flag.

  It was a relief to be out in open prairie-what another history would have come to call the Sacramento Valley-after the dense fogs and long rains and sameness of the winter trapped within the fort's walls, and the deep mud of early spring. The ground was firm now, but the grass that waved chest high on the horses was still fresh and green, starred with unfamiliar flowers, thick with game. Off to the northwest were the slopes of the abrupt hills they had named Duwakodeiztatun mem Mantzizetatuas, the Piercers of Clouds, replacing the unpronounceable native gruntings. They were a welcome relief to the eye, in the tabletop flatness all about.

  Yet underneath the differences of detail was a homelikeness. It reminded him of younger days, rambling about his father's estate in the country between Tartessos City and the Great River to the eastward. This whole country reminded him of home, if you could imagine home with a few brown savages, and different animals, and so much bigger.

  He rode down the line, checking gear and bearing. They were good lads, but inclined to brood at being stuck here beyond the edge of the world, and some could
never adjust to the strangenesses. Most weren't really Tartessians, of course; they were from the new tributary provinces in Iberia, or across the Pillars.

  Today, most looked cheerful. It was a change of scene from the fort and the trodden path from there to the cinnabar mines; there had been fresh girls at the hamlet of the savages they'd stayed in last night; and hunting was excellent. He nodded to a few of the file leaders; they were of the kingdom proper, though lowborn. Older than he, too-he'd seen nine rains when Isketerol returned to take the throne and begin the changes, and seventeen when assigned this post three years ago. Then he'd been angry, sure that he was half a hostage, taken to ensure that his father remained loyal to the upstart King. Now…

  Perhaps I'll stay here, he thought. This land was rich, rich in gold and many other things. And the dwellers so few and weak compared to the countries around the Middle Sea! More, it was much too far from Tartessos to remain tightly bound to the old country, at least a hundred days sailing and sometimes twice that. Once the settlement grew bigger and was less dependent on the yearly supply ship…

  I could be a mighty man, here, with land to the horizon. In time my sons could be Kings. All that was needed were more people.

  He pulled up beside the oxcart that carried the healer, smiling at her. She was a comely woman, perhaps eighteen winters, with olive skin stretched over high cheekbones and sharp features, but pleasantly rounded beneath her long tunic and skirt. Unwedded, too, despite being only a few years younger than he. Many men feared to take a woman dedicated to the Lady of Tartessos or the Grain Goddess to their beds, frightened by the aura of power that clung to such. But they were valued brides to men of sense and wealth, for their mana and connections and knowledge-especially in these days of the New Learning. Tarmendtal's own mother had been one of Her women, in her time.