On the Oceans of Eternity

by S. M. Stirling

  "Is that a railroad?" Ian Arnstein asked incredulously.

  It certainly looked like one, snaking north up the valley of the Eurotas, parallel to the two-lane asphalt road from Neayoruk. Wooden crossties in a bed of gravel, and rails on them, shining in the sun that had emerged from the clouds at last.

  Wait a minute, he thought. Those rails were wood, too, with a thin strap of iron nailed on top. Then his eyes went wide again; a train of wagon-cars came rumbling around a low hill, pulled by…

  Elephants? he thought, feeling his mind boggle; it was an interesting sensation, a little like how your knees got after one too many.

  "From Pharaoh," Odikweos said. "A man of the King's left his service some time ago, and found shelter at Ramses's court. We trade with him, and the King bought these creatures. Many men died learning the trick of taming them, but they haul like the Titans of old."

  He waved a hand at the… Elephant-way? Elephant-road? Whatever, Ian thought.

  "There is talk of extending it north to Mycenae, and then to Athens and beyond, as we did the road, years ago. All the changes come first to this part of the kingdom. Now, about Nantucket-

  Feeling his way, Arnstein said: "I thought I wasn't to be interrogated."

  The Greek smiled. "No, only not tortured," he said.

  Arnstein's eyes narrowed. Few of the Ithakan's questions had been specifically military; most of them had been about Nantucket generally, about laws and customs and governance. Comparing my story to what he's had from Walker and his cronies, Ian decided. Now that's smart. Of course, if this was who he thought it was, his cleverness had become a legend that lasted three thousand years…

  He looked around at the vale of Sparta as he spoke, "hollow Lakonia" as it had been called. I can see what he meant about the changes starting here, it being Walker's HQ. Still, they've done an awful lot in less than ten years.

  The road was crowded, troops or slave coffles or local villagers traveling on the graveled verges; trains of big Conestogas and smaller vehicles pulled by oxen or mules on the pavement, sometimes a rich man's chariot, a fair number of riders in modern saddles. Pine trunks rose beside the road at intervals, with a single strand of wire looping along; agents and merchants had confirmed that Walker was using telegraphs. Once there was a body hanging upside down from a pole as well, with a sign reading "wire cutter" spiked to it.

  The Eurotas ran to their right, brown and muddy and swift over a gravel bed, lined with oleander, plane trees, and dwarf palms. The valley bottom went from flattish to rolling and back, broken here and there by escarpments and gullies thick with evergreens and aromatic shrubs. To their left the afternoon sun turned the snowcapped peaks and fingers of Taygetos to flame, casting shadows down the dark fir-forested slopes; the range loomed over the valley below like a wall, rising almost vertically. More forests clothed the gentler foothills of Mount Par-non to the east, pines standing tall in a dense blue-green bristle on the upper slopes, with traces of autumn yellow on the hardwoods mantling the lower. This was not the Greece he knew.

  The valley itself was full of groves, young fruit trees, citrus- Isketerol had ordered thousands of grafted seedlings from Brandt Farms before the war, and evidently passed a lot of them on. Disc plows turned up the rich red earth in fields edged by cypresses, and gangs set out new plantings or dropped quartered seed-potatoes into the furrows. Many new olive plantings mantled slopes green and purple with lupines and vetch. Around the older olive trees workers moved, shaking the branches with long poles and throwing the fruit into baskets. Other laborers pruned and bound vines; there were many irrigated fields, watered from small dams and channels and wind-powered pumps. Most of them grew bright-green alfalfa, or vegetables, or what looked the stalks of cotton.

  Mounted overseers watched them work, and there had been half a dozen armed patrols. Ian put that together with reports, glimpses of tumbledown abandoned villages, new pitched tile roofs on larger manors, rows of new-built adobe cottages looking like they'd been stamped out with a cookie cutter… or run up by construction gangs to an identical plan.

  "Let me guess, lord wannax," he said to Odikweos. "A lot of the peasant tenant farmers who used to live here don't anymore."

  "Yes," the Greek said, looking slightly surprised. "Many have moved to Walkeropolis or Neayoruk, many have gone into the Army, many as colonists to conquered lands."

  "And to replace them. Walker… your King of Men, I mean… supplied slaves to the… telestai, isn't that the word?"

  "Barons, yes."

  "And so now instead of tenants they could call out to fight for them, the barons have slave gangs who'd run off or revolt without Wai… without the King of Men's armies and police?"

  Odikweos's eyes narrowed. "Yes," he said in a neutral tone. "Some do run off, to the mountain forests, and live as skulking bandits until they're hunted down and crucified."

  "Uh-huh," Arnstein said. "And I'll bet that instead of every estate being self-sufficient except for luxuries, now they couldn't survive without trade?"

  "Hmmmm," Odikweos said, tugging at his beard. "Yes. Grain from Thessaly and Sicily and Macedonia; also tools and cloth from the factories the King of Men established." He dropped the English word into his Achaean without noticing it.

  They came to the outskirts of Walkeropolis only two hours travel from Neayoruk; sixteen miles or so as the road wound- though Arnstein noted that the journey-stones beside the road were in kilometers. The small forest of crosses on the outskirts were about what he'd expected. Despite that he closed his eyes and gagged helplessly. The ravens and vultures ignored the passersby as they squabbled over tidbits, jumping back a little and waiting when a man pinned to the wood beat his head back and forth and croaked as he tried to scream past a dry swollen tongue.

  Put it out of your mind, Arnstein, he thought with grim intensity. You're trying to save your life, and maybe more. Ignore it!

  The city proper lay beyond, a mushroom growth with twice the population of Nantucket Town. His eyes went wide in surprise; the reports hadn't prepared him for how alien it looked, neither Mycenaean or modern or anything else he could quite classify. Aqueducts and smokestacks marked a considerable factory district; the buildings there were the same sort of utilitarian adobe-functional he'd noted before, but mostly whitewashed.

  The layout was a grid, modified to fit the hilly terrain, with young plane trees lining the streets. Other hillsides were green with gardens and ornamental groves, red and umber tile and shining marble and neat ashlar blocks showing through, mansions and public buildings. Atop one hillside nearby was…

  He shook his head. The Mycenaean Greeks worshiped more or less the same pantheon of Gods that their Classical descendants would… would have. But they did it in small shrines, or at hilltop altars, or in groves or caves. They didn't build what he saw there, fluted marble columns around a rectangle with a pitched roof, the stereotypical form of a Greek temple (or English bank) shining in white stone, with a big altar before it and a huge cult-statue glimpsed through bronze screenwork inside the pillars.

  The sun caught out points of brightness, gilded Corinthian capitals on the columns, colored terra-cotta on the bas-reliefs of the pediments and metopes, the cartoon-panel-like decorations under the eves and on the triangular spaces at the front above the pillars. A complex of lesser buildings occupied the slopes below. Several other temples were under construction nearby, with a litter of blocks and concrete-mixing troughs and great timber cranes for erecting monolithic pillars.

  "Let me guess," Arnstein said again. "The King of Men has set up an organization"-that word had also been borrowed into the Achaean of the Year Ten-"of full-time paid priests-

  "The Sacred Collegium, yes."

  "-with regional over-priests in the rest of the country all reporting back to someone appointed by him."

  "Yes," Odikweos said, shrugging and smiling slightly. "Many have praised his piety in bestowing these beautiful God-houses on the realm, and skilled servants to attend them
. Is it any wonder that the Gods have favored him so?"

  Was there a slight astringent edge to the Achaean's voice? I hope so, but then I'm listening for my life as well as talking for it. And he wasn't in the backwoods here. This might not be Egypt or Babylon, but it was an old and sophisticated civilization in its way.

  Vulnerable, though. Writing had been a rare thing here until Walker came, used only for accounting and administration. From the number of street signs and quasi billboards, he'd put a lot of ooomph into teaching the three R's-and didn't this archaic Greek look odd written in the Latin alphabet! The first generation of literates in any culture tended to be pretty gullible about print. They also didn't have a word for "religion," or a concept of it as something separate from everyday life, that could be manipulated as an entity.

  I'll give you any odds that Walker's got his tame priesthood working on some sort of Holy Scripture, too-a pagan Koran or Book of Oracles or something with the King of Men as the Numero Uno favored of Zeus Pater. I wonder what Odikweos would make of that?

  There was no need to ask about the structure like a football stadium built into the side of a hill, with a mule-drawn trolley line running out to it. The reports had gone into revolting detail about Walker's revival… or premature invention… of the Roman munera. A crowd was pouring out of it as he watched, animated and brisk, many of them leading or carrying their children, and he could hear the ooompa-ooompa of a band that included a big water organ.

  Nor much doubt about the smaller temple of gray-and-red stone on a nearby height. Instead of an exterior altar in front of the building, that had a ten-foot-high double-headed cobra making a circle in gilded cast bronze. It enclosed a sun and moon-black sun, black moon, under the flared fanged heads with their ivory teeth and ruby eyes. A party of women in rich clothing and delicately beautiful masks of black leather and silver led a man with his head covered in a sack up to it. The women stopped and bowed, then made a gesture with both fists clenched before the face, imitating the serpents, before they passed on into the temple proper.

  "A few years ago it was just another snake cult," he quoted to himself in a low mutter. "And where's Conan when you need him?"

  Behind the snake-sun-moon sigil was another bronze, a statue of a woman with three faces pointing in different directions-the Triple Hekate of the Crossroads. The rest of the figure wasn't at all Greek; more like Kali, multiple arms holding scalpels, bowls, knives, whips, fetters, human hearts-rendered quite accurately-and dancing in a hip-shot posture.

  A tablet at the beginning of the road leading up to the building read:

  Cold be hand, and heart, and bone;

  And cold be sleep, under stone…

  Ian Arnstein's lips quirked upward as he read; Tolkien translated quite well into Greek.

  Then the ironic humor washed out of him like a candle guttering in a high wind as a long, high scream came down the hill, and he realized the man must have had the bag removed and seen his fate. The scream continued, with chanting running under it like a counterpoint. The skulls all around the temple's metope weren't sculpted replicas. They were the real thing, human bone mounted on polished metal disks, hundreds of them, and as many again on a pyramidal skull rack outside.

  That wasn't Greek in inspiration either. Aztec, the way they'd displayed the results of their massacre-sacrifices.

  It's like a theme park for demons. Walker and sado-bitch and the others have turned this place into their own multicultural sociopath's Disneyland. Except these are real people they're playing with.

  He turned his eyes from Hong's temple and wished he could shut it out of his mind as well. Evil sweltered out of the very stones, like some vile metaphysical ooze that made his soul feel polluted, echoing with the agony within. He'd felt the same before, on a trip to Europe before the Event… at the gate of Dachau.

  "This gift from your Island… some of us do not appreciate it here," Odikweos said softly.

  "That is not something you can blame on us" Arnstein said. "Hong is an outlaw; were she back on Nantucket, we'd hang her."

  He thought of trying to say she was crazy, but the closest you could come to saying that in this language meant literally possessed by spirits. The last thing he wanted to do was back up her claim to divine inspiration.

  "Of course you would; she and the King are rebels against your ruler."

  "No. We'd hang her for what she's done here."

  The Achaean gave a noncommittal toss of his head. It was nearly dark now, the sun sinking crimson on the high peak to the westward; a steam whistle hooted mournfully somewhere.

  More people were spilling onto the street, but the crowds parted before the chariot and mounted guards, some murmuring or pointing after a ripple of bows and salutes. Most of the streets were lined with colonnades, with shops behind those and living quarters above; either Walker was a genuine enthusiast for the column-and-marble bit, or all this neo-Classicism was another one of his ghastly mocking jokes.

  Or maybe he just read Howard Fast's Spartacus at an impressionable age.

  There were statues here and there; they looked more Egyptian, with stiff forward-facing stances and hands clenched at their sides; probably because that was where Walker could get sculptors used to working in hard stone. There were fountains at the intersections, with women drawing water, and from the relative lack of smell there must be fairly good sewers as well.

  No defenses ringed the city, but there was a wall topped with iron spikes and an openwork bronze gate between the common streets and the palace district. A huge rambling complex covered most of a large hill, terraces and columns, towers and bright tile and colored marble showing through gardens still fantastically lovely. His captor's guards and chariot turned aside, toward a mansion that was merely large.

  "We will talk, after you have bathed and eaten," Odikweos said under the pillars of the entrance way. "There is much I have wished to learn."

  Night had fallen by the time Marian Alston-Kurlelo had finished her rounds of the wounded. That was almost as hard as the battle itself.

  The hospital smelled of antisepsis and pain, with an overtone of broth from the soup kettles being wheeled through for those who could use them. The first rush of emergency surgery was over, and most of the patients were lying quiet, but the lanterns in the operating theater were still burning bright. Nurses and doctors bustled by, sometimes stepping aside for a gurney with a prone patient, bags of saline drip suspended on poles.

  One ward was much quieter, most of the patients there slipping quietly into the waiting darkness with their pain muffled by morphia. A priestess of the Ecumenical Church knelt murmuring beside a cot; she was just kissing the stola before lifting it over her head, and an open box beside her held a vial and wafers. Several Marines were kneeling there, too, some of them bandaged, heads bowed over clasped hands that held crucifix and rosary.

  Price of doing business, Marian Alston-Kurlelo forced herself to think. It wasn't as if they'd introduced war here, and a bronze-tipped spear in the guts killed you just as painfully and just as dead as grapeshot. At least this is about something more than a cattle raid. Swindapa was weeping, a quiet trickle of tears from the cerulean-blue eyes, undramatic and matter-of-fact. Wish I could do that. Wouldn't do, though. The Midnight Mare's got to keep up the image for the crews.

  Commander Arthur Jenkins was sitting propped up in bed; his left forearm ended in a mass of bandage three inches below the elbow, and other straps immobilized it. A tray was across his lap, fixed to rails on either side of the collapsible hospital cot, with a bowl of beef broth made from concentrate-what the rank and file called "Gomez soup" after the Prelate of the Ecumenical Church, because it proved the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Flesh-and the remains of a small loaf of bread. He put down the spoon as they approached and smiled.

  A cheerful expression that squeezed at Alston's chest below the breastbone.

  "Commodore," he said. The smile went wider. "I'll have to change my name, if I'm ever pr
omoted." At her raised eyebrows he moved the left arm slightly. "Captain Hook, what else?"

  Alston found herself unable to stop a small snort of laughter. "I hope you don't think I'm going to let you off with a soft job because of this, Arthur."

  "Ma'am, I'm sure there will be something useful to the Republic I can do," he said, keeping the smile on his face.

  "Certainly there will," Marian said. "Commanding the Chamberlain, if I don't manage to get her sunk in the interim- the doctors tell me you'll be on your feet in about a month."

  He looked up at her, startled hope in his eyes. She leaned forward, smiling herself, a rare flash of white teeth against her coal-black face, and laid a long-fingered hand gently on his shoulder.

  "Arthur, the Republic pays you a munificent six dollars fifty cents a day-less income tax and witholding tax-to be an officer and a fighting sailor, not to play the piano, although I know you're going to miss that. And I set policy on disabilities, so-called. If Nelson could command an entire fleet at Trafalgar with one arm, I think you can run one ship with one-and-a-half."

  "Violin, ma'am," he said, grinning as if it hurt his face less now. "I play, played, the fiddle. And hell, I can still do 'Chopsticks.''

  Swindapa leaned forward from the other side and kissed him softly on the forehead. "You are very brave," she said simply.

  Alston cleared her throat. "Anyway, your family've been informed that you're alive and recovering," she said. "Standard thirty-word radiophone message back from your wife, but I thought it wouldn't hurt if I jumped the queue and brought it to you myself." He took it up eagerly. "Good luck, and listen to the doctors. I'll be in to see you now and then."

  Swindapa leaned over to whisper in her ear as they left: "I don't think he was listening to that last bit," she chuckled.

  They walked out the front door flap of the field hospital, their boots noiseless on the soft sand of the street outside; it would be a few days before the road team was ready to gravel it. The Marine sentries on either side slapped hands to rifles, and the officers returned the gesture of respect.