Turtledove, Harry - Anthology 07 - New Tales Of The Bronze Age - The First Heroes (with Doyle, Noreen)

by The First Heroes (anth. ) (lit)

  "Won't we all," her brother said; he was a slim dark young man in his teens, chin blue-black with stubble despite his youth, holding his clipboard with a seriousness that made her smile.

  "This is the last of the chocolate," Tim said as the net creaked to the decking.

  Longshoremen sprang to unhitch it and begin stacking the cargo under the direction of the bosun and his mates; they knew the captain's fanatical insistence on neatness and having everything precisely in place. She grinned inwardly; that was another reason she and Heather didn't ship together if they could avoid it. She drove Heather crazy by being finicky, and Heather's blithe confidence that everything would come right in the end with a lick and a promise infuriated her, the more so since it seemed to work about as well as her methods instead of resulting in the immediate ruin it should. They'd been raised like twins—they were the same age almost to the day, as close as they could figure it—and loved each other dearly, as long as they didn't have to watch each other work too closely.

  It's a very good thing Alston-Kurlelo Shi-p-ping and Trading has three merchantmen and a headquarters to run, now, she thought.

  Lucy nodded to Tim, then sprang and planted a foot on the hook of the line that had held the cargo net and a hand on the cable. A man on deck whistled and waved, and the line jerked upward. She judged her distance easily as her head came above the hatch coaming, then jumped down to the deck, her mind on her return cargo. Tin, of course—alluvial tin washed from the streams was cheap enough to compete with the hard-rock mines here in Alba, with their high fixed costs. The West Alba Mining and Smelting Corporation had annoyed everyone during the long years it had a virtual monopoly.

  Hmm. Can't expect more than a few hundred tons ready for loading. What else? There was always market for teak, but it was bulky in relation to its value. Would it be worth another thousand miles of easting to top up with cinnamon and cloves in the Celebes, then return via the Horn? If she did that, she could make a brief stopover on the coast of Peru; the locals there had silver in the ingot, and

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  cocoa, and some excellent handicrafts. . . . Best keep a careful eye on prices via radio. That helped only so much, though. You still had to take months covering distance.

  The deck was busy too, with sailors making all secure for their departure on the evening tide. The mates and the senior hands were busy as well, showing newcomers how to coil a line, or shoving them into position to clap onto a rope and haul. There was an occasional foot to a backside as well; she frowned, but there wasn't much alternative until the raw hands learned enough to be useful. Until then everyone was doing their own work and half the trainees' as well, and there weren't as many even for simple pull-on-this as she'd have liked. Another group were being shown down the line of guns bowsed up against the bulwarks, sleek blue-black soda-bottle shapes, thirty-two-pounders bought surplus from the Coast Guard a year ago. She suppressed a wish for a Gatling; that would eat half the voyage's profits, and she had over a hundred employees, two children, and four nieces and nephews to support.

  "All's well, Mr. Hands?" she called to the master-gunner.

  He turned and touched a knuckle to his forehead. "As well as can be expected, ma'am. Arms drill

  as soon as we make open water? These handless cows—"

  "A week or two after," she replied. "When they can be trusted to go aloft and reef."

  She was very unlikely to meet a pirate before then, but sailing into a bad blow was entirely possible.

  And when she'd reached the Roaring Forties and started to run her easting down before the

  endless storms . . . then she wanted every jack and jill able to hand, reef, and steer.

  "In the meantime, signal the tug we're ready," she said, as the crew began to batten down the

  hatchway. "Prepare to cast off!"

  A noise on the docks drew her head up. A man was running down the quay, dodging carts and goods and passersby; a young man, with long fair hair and a mainlander's leather kilt. Her eyes widened slightly. That's the woodsrunner, the Keruthinii, she thought. And despite the recent rain, looking rather ghastly with flour-paste; doubtless there was a story behind that. He dashed for the gangway where crewmen were unfastening the lashings.

  "Belay that!" she called, as they snatched up cargo-hooks or put their hands on their belt-knives. "Let him on board!"

  She went over to meet him; her first mate fell in behind her, and a pair of the older hands with belaying pins from the rack around the mainmast, held casually but ready. He bounded up the plank with a stride that made him look as if his legs were rubber springs, then halted and cried her hail.

  "What are you doing on my ship?" she asked quietly. The young man—Blood Wolf, she dredged out of her mind; typical melodramatic charioteer-tribe name—was breathing deeply but easily, and he grinned with a cocky self-confidence. "I came to see if you still wish my allegiance, chieftainness," he said. "For I wish to leave this dunthaurikaz, and see far lands." Lucy snorted, hooking her hands in the brass-studded belt she wore over her long sea-sweater. "I'm not taking you on board if you've broken Southaven law," she said.

  He offered her a piece of paper. She snorted again; it had the municipal stamp, and the Republic's eagle; she recognized Eric Iraiinisson's handwriting and signature, as well. Apparently the youngster wasn't wanted . . . exactly.

  And I could use another hand. This one looks to he quick-thinking as well as strong.

  "It's fifty cents a day and your keep," she said, and looked him over.

  "Eight months to a year round-trip and a share of the take to depend on how you're rated when we make the chops of Nantucket Channel and pay off. And you do what you're told when you're told, or it's the rope's end or the brig. Understood?"

  He grinned again. "Command and I obey," he said with a grandiloquent gesture, then went down on one knee and placed his hands between hers.

  She knew the ceremony; this wasn't the first time she'd gone through it, either.

  "Mr. Mate!" she called.

  "Ma'am?"

  "Sign this man on; rate him ordinary and see he's issued slops and a duffel." Louder: "Prepare to

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  cast off!"

  The crew bustled about; Lucy went up the treads to the quarterdeck, taking her place beside the wheel, with the helmsman and pilot. She looked southward, to where the gray water of Southaven Water waited, and the world beyond. Down on the deck, Blood Wolf was looking in the same direction, and she could hear his clear, delighted laughter.

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  After the Old Kingdom, when the world entered a period of climate change that some researchers speculate was precipitated by the near passage of comet Hale-Bopp, Egypt slipped into a century and a half of political chaos (c. 2190—2040 B.C.). Local lords fought for and against a quick succession of kings who claimed to rule Upper and Lower Egypt. Noreen Doyle introduces us to one of these lords loyal to the king: Ankhtifi, who, in his tomb at modern-day Mo'alla, was the first Egyptian to take the epithet translated as "the Hero" or "the Brave."

  Ankhtifi the Brave is Dying

  Noreen Doyle

  Yet he is not an old man. He can hold his back straight. He does not lean so very much upon his long staff. The two loaves of khenmet-bread and the foreleg of a calf he carries in a finely woven basket do not cramp his arms. It is, he supposes, the wounds of campaigns festering invisibly beneath his skin. They have violated his body, pierced his shadow, created windows through which his fca-soul would fly, as he has defended his King. Or perhaps it is the scarcity of bread, the thinness of cattle and fowl, the filth in the water. In time, he allows his fluttering ha, in time. Not yet. It is dawn, not dusk.

  The sun mounts the eastern horizon, over the steep cliffs toward which he walks on a path carefully beaten down and clean, on which oxen will someday drag a sledge and his coffin from the town of Hefat. Unlike other lords in other districts, he keeps no sunshade-bearer to follow him: now that man sits at the door of Idy's house, giving out g
rain to the needy, of which there are so many in these days. Ankhtifi himself shades Hefat. Does the mountain that shades the city need a fan of ostrich feathers held over its peak?

  Only falcon wings shade his head, great ones, perfumed.

  Soon they will fly away, Ankhtifi thinks as the scent of incense fills his nose, warmed by the morning sun. They will fly away to the far-off Residence until sleep and desire draw them back again to these two khenmet-loaves and the foreleg of a calf.

  Spearmen walk behind him, one on the right, one on the left. It is a small display of the force he can muster at an instant. Everyone loves Ankhtifi here in Hefat and in the Districts of Nekhen and Edfu, but men from other districts and other cities sail upstream and moor here, from Thebes and from Koptos, and those men must not forget.

  Oh for the days when one cast arrows and spears at one's foe and received them in return, rather than bags of barley and chickling peas. Oh for the days when all the falcons in the sky were little ones, whose shadows frightened only geese, although Ankhtifi is not afraid, not so very much.

  The track takes him from brown fields that crack like bread left too long in the oven to the desert, where life has forever been even sparser. A pyramid of a mountain rises before him, quite apart from the enormous cliffs to the east: a pyramid built by the gods, Ankhtifi's way to heaven when his body is interred here and his ba at last flies away from this droughtened earth to the Field of Offerings, eternally moist, forever green.

  Every season the Red Land creeps a little nearer to the river. The withered roots of lentils and lettuce and weeds cannot hold it back. Only the river, rising from its bed like an army, can do so, and so within his tomb there is a prayer invoking the name of the King: May Horus grant that the river will flood for his son Neferhare. It has not done so very well, not for a very long time.

  Ankhtifi enters his little valley-temple, where someday priests will present offerings, but today it is unfinished and empty: the priests are not yet appointed, and the workmen labor elsewhere in the tomb. From this chapel a paved causeway leads partway up the steep mountainside. Ankhtifi walks this way, knowing someday he will be carried, and arrives in the forecourt, where, at his signal, the spearmen pound their piebald shields with the butts of their weapons. With his staff Ankhtifi traces out the threshold of Elephantine granite at the entrance of his tomb, mindful of the royal uraei raising their

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  hooded necks on the architrave above his head.

  "Great Overlord!" comes a cry from deeper shadows. Voices echo from within the tomb.

  A man emerges with a broom in his hand and bows low before Ankhtifi. He is thin.

  "You may speak," says the Royal Seal-bearer, Lector-priest, General, Chief of Scouts, Chief of Foreign Regions, the Great Overlord of Edfu and Nekhen, Ankhtifi.

  "My lord," says the man, Sasobek, showing dusty tongue and teeth, "you are welcome in your house of eternity. We did not expect you so early in the day, or else we would have brought a leg of beef and beer sweetened with date juice."

  More intention than promise fills Sasobek's words; there is little beer and less beef in Hefat or elsewhere in the districts, and the dates have not ripened well. Sasobek would offer them if he could.

  The antechamber spreads wide before them, aglow in a patchwork of lamplight: thirty columns hewn from living rock hold aloft its ceiling; its floor is swept clean of any trace of dirt.

  "My name is here, coupled with your dearest desire," says the falcon that has shaded him, now settling into a particular darkness. No one else hears this voice or sees the bright eye and the brighter eye staring at the two loaves and the leg Ankhtifi has set down at his own feet. "Take care."

  "In your name, my lord, I have always taken care," Ankhtifi whispers. The workmen hear but say nothing because he is their overlord and a lector-priest, and they know that he speaks to the god.

  In pools of light stand and crouch men, all thinner than they once were, scraping out their lives in the drought and the famine that has worn them down as if they were chisels and brushes. They bow before him, careful amid their bowls of paint. Ankhtifi takes stock of them not as though they were tools but as though they were his sons. He knows them, every one, and their wives and sisters and aged parents, their sons and daughters, their cattle and their fields, their skills and their follies.

  He is surprised to find the son-of-his-body Idy here among the outline-draftsmen and painters.

  Brightly colored scenes surround them, painted on plaster, newly finished, their figures bold and vigorous. The festival of the falcon-god Hemen of Hefat is celebrated in paddled boats. Fatted cattle are herded and butchered, fish harpooned and netted in abundance. Porters bring bag after bag after bag of emmer on their shoulders to be emptied into the granaries. Once it was so. Idy and his three brothers accompany Ankhtifi. Once that, too, was so.

  What, Ankhtifi wonders, is his last surviving son doing here? Why is Idy not at home before the door from which barley is handed, or inspecting the granaries, or overseeing the riverbank? He taps his staff upon the immaculate floor of his tomb.

  "My son, my heir."

  "My lord, my father."

  "Tell me your business. I would know what occurs in my doma ins and what you have seen, for soon you will stand in my place and see what I see. I would see by your eyes while I'm still among the living."

  Idy's gaze drifts, for a moment into light, for a moment into shadows. Does he see the god? His lips part, so that Ankhtifi sees Idy's tongue before he speaks.

  "I came to account for the workmen's rations."

  Good, then, good, Ankhtifi thinks. There is enough in Hefat that none go entirely without, but

  only because for enough the hungry do not mistake excess nor do the treasurers mistake too little.

  And Idy does not see the god, not yet.

  Idy goes on: "What work these artists do at your word! O you will dwell contentedly in the Field of Offerings, my lord, my father, and none shall ever dishonor your name, nor pollute your house of eternity." He turns away from Ankhtifi to gesture at the painted plaster on the western wall. "You are forever young, and your beloved wife stands here, and your beloved daughters, and your beloved sons, my brothers, here and here and here—and I! Since the days of our forefather Sobekhotep, no one here has ever seen the like of this tomb or its owner."

  "Since?" Ankhtifi rasps. Is this doubt in his son's voice? Could it be? Ankhtifi's next breath catches in his throat. But Idy says, "Not even then—not ever, before or after! Did Sobekhotep call himself Great

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  Overlord? Did the god Horus plan out his tomb? Did the god Hemen dictate a spell to guard it? Did any god ever proclaim anyone other than Ankhtifi to be peerless, whose like has never before been seen nor ever will be seen? Who else has ever called himself the hero, the brave?"

  With his staff Ankhtifi strikes a pillar with such force that a little yellow paint scrapes away. It does not matter. The relief carved upon its face will endure for a million years.

  There are murmurs in the dark. Sasobek comes forward with his broom and sweeps the imperceptible flecks from the floor. Sand has come along on Ankhtifi's sandals, and Sasobek discreetly attends to that, too.

  The falcon stirs in the shadows, rasping claws along the standard upon which he perches when at rest. None sees him, none hears him, but Ankhtifi, and none but he and the falcon is party to the agreement between them.

  Ankhtifi walks to the edge of the burial shaft cut into the center of the floor, like a black pool that gives no reflection, that refuses the light. His staff prods its darkness. "Do you remember Khuu, the wretch of Edfu?"

  "Yes!" the workmen cry, and Idy says, "I do."

  "Men killed their neighbors, the fields of Edfu were left untended like marshland. This is the state of affairs that those in Thebes would wish upon the entire countryside. They deny our rightful King Neferkare, a child of the House of Khety, and would place their own line of wretches upon the Horus-throne. Horus hi
mself summoned me, Ankhtifi, to sail upstream and free knives from men's palms and make men embrace those who had slain their brothers."

  "We remember that day," says Idy. The others echo him. "You spoke when all of us were silent, when the other lords had lost their speech and could not raise their arms." "I led you to the river," Ankhtifi says. "It was a little higher in those days." A little, he thinks, just a little. "Do you remember?"

  "We remember!" the men cry, and, as the falcon—it is full daylight; why is he still here? will the King in his Residence sleep the day through?—makes a noise like the bending of a copper saw, Ankhtifi remembers.

  People were less hungry in those days. Boats were sailed upstream and rowed downstream, rudders set at sterns or quarters with less concern for sandbars and stones. There had been even better years with abundant harvests and fatted cattle and nets burdened with fish of all kinds, but those were all lost to living memory and known only through tales of the days of kings named Khufu and Unas and Pepy, when men were called northward to labor on great pyramids.

  One day—that day—a boat came downstream. Its spars were laid across its beams, but there was no sail or rigging. Eight men manned its oars, a ninth kept his hand at the tiller, and women and many children huddled in its wet bottom, for most of the deck planking had been taken up.

  "Where is the Great Overlord? We have sworn not to take our hands from looms and tiller until we have come to the city where the Great Overlord lives! Our hands bleed! We have passed by Nekhen because he was not there! Is he here in Hefat?" cried the helmsman as the rowers pulled in their oars. Two of them leapt into the river and drove the boat ashore as the children dumped themselves overboard and splashed in the water until their mothers joined them and herded them to land. They crouched in a place of a little shade of a tree, where they looked like twigs broken from its branches. The helmsman said, "Where is the Great Overlord of this district?"