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

by The First Heroes (anth. ) (lit)

  A shift in wind pushed aside smoke to disclose still-burning houses, flames from their collapsed roofs flickering through doors like glowing ovens. Occasionally Nanshe could hear a faint shout call down, and so knew the direction of the city walls. Lips cracked, she groped across open ground to the well, which she discovered surrounded by corpses. Desperation drove her to the exposure of the levee, where at last she fell forward to drink.

  It is Gilgamesh come to subjugate Lagash, if you like, or else the Gutians sweeping out of the hills. Better perhaps a Sumerian enemy, for Nanshe had been assured that the armies would clash on the plains beyond the cultivated fields, or else before the city gates, and that soldiers would only kill soldiers. Hiding in the tamarisk brush, Nanshe understands only that what the boys had said about war was not true. She is not pondering the implications of this, any more than she is thinking about her parents or their smoldering home, for she is in a kind of shock. Alert to any movement in the brightening morning, she knows that nothing around her will proceed as she had been told.

  Can you tell that story? The vaunting steles do not, nor any poems that officials preserved.

  It cannot be reduced to a game, nor presented in terms of one. The metaphor itself is immoral.

  A wail floated down the stairs, its eerie pitch catching the ageless-ness of the dreaming mind. Leslie left the room at once, negotiating the darkened floor's furniture and doorways with intimate familiarity. At the top of the stairs she heard it again, wavering between frightened and querulous, and went to her daughter's room. Megan was asleep but in distress, her head turning from side to side in the faint moonlight as her mouth shaped half words. As Leslie approached, she saw the dim glint of open eyes.

  "It's all right, honey." Experts advise that children having nightmares not be wakened, but her parents had learned how to offer Megan comfort without disturbing her. Leslie stroked her daughter's hair and murmured that everything was okay.

  "I heard the plane and it scared me."

  "Plane?" The Bridgeport Airport was a few miles away, and corporate jets sometimes landed late at night. Leslie tried to recall whether she had heard a plane a minute before.

  "It sounded like a jet," Megan said lucidly.

  Leslie doubted that her daughter had ever heard a nonjet engine overhead, but she took her true meaning. Storm-tossed but hearing the lighthouse, she realized with a pang that her misery did not matter, nor Trent's professional tribulations nor his baffled fury, but only her daughter's well-being, which she had heeded but not enough. "It's all right," she said, leaning forward and touching foreheads in the dark. "No more bad planes."

  What is wrong cannot soon be put right—at least not what lies in the mind, which occupies not two or even three dimensions, but the infolds of a space no one has mapped. Leslie began attending her daughter more closely, reading to her at night (no Homer) and stopping with her for hot chocolate on their way back from the library or soccer practice. Megan worried about the school's winter pageant, holiday plans, a classmate's parents' divorce. She mentioned the World Trade Center only when discussing an assignment to summarize the week's news. What more concerned her was an image she had come upon while searching the Net with a friend's older sister: a condemned woman being forced to kneel while a Taliban executioner put a rifle to her skull.

  "It's a horrible picture," Leslie agreed. She was furious that her daughter had been shown it. "The people who did that. . ." Megan spoke with unaccustomed hesitancy. "They belong to al Qaeda, don't they?"

  "Not exactly." If you want to get technical. "The Taliban let al Qaeda stay in their country, but they did not help carry out the attacks. The President insisted that they turn over Osama bin Laden, which they probably couldn't do, so he launched an invasion."

  "I don't care," said Megan firmly. She was staring into the middle distance, where the woman

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  kneeling facedown was visible to both of them. "I'm glad he's dead."

  He wasn't the only one, though. As the death toll from the September attacks steadily dropped from the initial six thousand to just more than half that, a reciprocal number, of those killed in Afghanistan, rose to match it. The first, dwindling value was widely followed and subtly resented—one couldn't actually accuse those compiling it of unpatrio-tism—while the second, swelling one was neither: its extent (reported only on dissident websites) unacknowledged and enjoyed.

  Leslie spoke twice with Megan's teacher, and even rejoined the list-serv of women who had become pregnant the same month she had, which she had dropped four years ago. She read online reports of children experiencing anxiety and bad dreams, spoke to her therapist of Megan rather than herself, and watched her daughter: eating breakfast, doing homework, asleep. When troubled Megan was before her, she ignored everything else.

  Rumblings from the shocked economy sounded dimly from work and home. Great Games, losing market share, canceled its plans for a line of Ziggurat novels, and Trent (midway through the second book but not yet paid for the first) slid from stunned rage into depression. Leslie comforted him distractedly. Truckloads of rubble filed by the thousands, like a column of ants reducing a picnic's rubbish, from the still-smoldering wreckage of Ground Zero to Staten Island's Fresh Kills landfill, where it was sifted for personal effects and body parts. Troops of the "Northern Alliance" (a cognomen worthy of Star Wars) drove the remains of the Taliban into the mountains, which shuddered beneath the impact of enormous American bombs called "daisycutters."

  Leslie wanted to spend the hour before dinner with her daughter, but Trent finally protested at cooking every night. Coming from the kitchen, she heard them sitting in the office together, discussing return trips to favorite movies.

  "Dumbledore is kind of like Gandalf," Megan was saying matter-of-factly, "except I don't think Gandalf would be very good with children."

  "He treated those hobbits like children."

  "... But Sauron and Lord Voldemort are even more similar, aren't they?"

  "Well, it's hard to put much spin on evil incarnate, isn't it?"

  "Incarnate?" Leslie could hear her taste the word. "Is that what they call the 'evil-doers'?"

  Trent groaned softly. "How I hate that term."

  "Because they don't think what they're doing is evil," said Megan wisely. Leslie stood outside the doorway, leaning forward slightly to see them. "They think that God wants them to do this."

  "That's right. And our culture—what the President calls 'Western Civilization'—believes that we are doing what God wants, though the government is careful not to say so in as many words. In the real world, your enemy doesn't oblige you by acting like Sauron or Voldemort."

  "Or Darth Vader." Megan has a happy thought. "We'll be seeing Part Two of all three movies next year! Too oh oh too!"

  "It must be the age of sequels."

  "And the age of Evil-doers."

  Trent laughed. "In movies, yes. In real life, it would be better if people were more careful about

  using that word."

  "Or'cowardly.'"

  "Indeed." Trent looked at their daughter closely. "You still think about that?"

  Megan shrugged. "Julie's dad almost got killed." She paused, then asked, "Did Gilgamesh

  represent Western values?"

  "Gilgamesh? He lived before there was a West, or a Middle East."

  She is changing the subject, Leslie wanted to cry out, but Megan turned to face her father and

  said, "I'm sorry your book's not going to be published."

  Trent blinked. "Heavens, dear, don't worry about that. Maybe someone else will publish it. Maybe

  I was writing the wrong book." He extended an arm, and Megan slipped under it. "That's an awfully

  tiny problem, if you think about it."

  Lying awake, Leslie listened to her husband's steady breathing and wondered at the loss of his

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  dream, the rout of the last ditch. He had told her in college that prose narrative was dead, that t
hey

  stood at the end of its era just as the—had he actually said ancient Sumerians?— stood at its birth.

  Science fiction was the mode of the era, but its future masterpieces would not come in strings of

  sentences. The Web—he had charmed her by admitting that he too had reflexively read www. as

  "World War Won"—had blossomed in their college years from jury-rigging of dial-ups to a vast

  nervous system, and Trent's vision of nonlinear, multimedia fictions—richly complex structures of

  word, image, and sound, detailed as Cibachrome and nuanced as Proust—seemed ready to take

  shape in the hypertrophied craniums of the ever-cheaper CPUs.

  Trent seemed untroubled that the point of entry to this technology would be through electronic games, which were being developed solely for audiences uninterested in formal innovation and poststructural dif-ferance. He expected not to retain copyright to his early work, which would be remembered only as technical exercises and crude forerunners of the GlasTome. Its form would emerge by pushing against commercial boundaries from the inside. Even product, he told Leslie, could be produced with a greater or lesser degree of artistry.

  When asked to reconcile this conviction with his love of novels, Trent replied that he also loved verse dramas. Reading the draft chapters of his biography of the great man, Leslie wondered at the wretched fellow's dogged attempts (remorselessly documented by Trent) to traverse the swamp of commercial fiction and pull his soles free of it later. Better to emulate the great man's own master: subordinate all to your work, let creditors and family wait upon your genius? Perhaps, as with the intervening James, fame will greet you anyway!

  Lie down in bogs, wake up with fees. Trent had ended his unhappy sojourn in the land of the

  games without copyright or royalties, footloose into the barrens. But we have our daughter, dear. The

  occasional classes he taught, the magazine articles and the tiny fellowship, offered no visible path

  back to the realm where word and image alike danced in the flux of Aye and Nought. But what you do

  is valued, and I love you. An old colleague had offered the chance to beta-test and Trent had

  obliged, poor hopeful fool, been sucked in and spat out. Write something about ancient Sumer.

  Your banishing Eden beguiles then betrays you, leaving you stunned with grief, lost to truer

  pleasures, deaf to your lover's cry. It is the fracture of the unmalleable heart, the oldest story in the

  world.

  It is Christmas Day, "a celebration of great antiquity," as the great man once put it. Dinner with Leslie's sister in Riverside Heights, their first trip to Manhattan since summer. Megan balks at going (she has heard some report of a possible "terrorist attack" over the holidays), and must be reassured that Caroline lives on the other end of the island from Ground Zero. Despite Christmas carols on the car radio and a half hour of The Two Towers on tape, she is moody and withdrawn.

  "Are you still reading Odile}" Leslie asks, seeing the book resting in Trent's lap.

  Trent picks up the book, studies a passage, then translates rapidly. " 'For years I have deluded myself and lived my life in complete error. I thought I was a mathematician. I now realize that I am not even an amateur. I am nothing at all: I know nothing, understand nothing. It's terrible, but that's how it is. And do you know what I was capable of, what I used to do? Calculation upon calculation, out of sight, out of breath, without purpose or end, and most often completely absurd. I gorged myself on figures; they capered before me until my head spun. And I took that to be mathematics!'"

  Leslie glances sidelong at him; she isn't sure if this is the point where Trent had stopped reading or a passage he had marked. "So is the novel both an iliad and an odyssey?" she asks carefully.

  "Not that I can tell. I asked an old classmate, who wrote back last night: he says that the novel was written years before Queneau published that theory and that the title was likelier a play on 'Idyll' and 'Odalisque.'"

  "Oh." Leslie frowns. "Academics exchange e-mail on Christmas Eve?"

  "Why not? And now I can't remember where I read that claim— probably online."

  "Did you search for the site?"

  "Can't find it now."

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  Leslie gets her brooding family to the apartment of her sister, whose husband speaks with zest about the coming assault on Iraq. Caroline and Megan exchange whispers about presents in the kitchen, while Trent politely declines to be baited. Kubrick's film, sound muted, plays on the DVD; Leslie can see the second monolith tumbling in space. Sipping her whiskeyed eggnog, she thinks about 2002, the first year in a while that doesn't sound science-fictional.

  On the third day Lugalkitun rode out to survey the damage, striding angrily through the village that had been destroyed when the battle overran its intended ground. Vultures took wing at his approach, though with insolent slowness, and a feral dog fled yelping after he shied a rock into its flank.

  Beside the fields of an outlying farm he regarded the body of a girl, sufficiently well attired to be of the owner's family. Her clothing had been disturbed, either before or after death, and the king turned away, scowling. If the enemy had enjoyed the leisure for such diversions, they would also have paused to contaminate the wells.

  Caroline asks Trent about a news item that appeared a few days ago announcing that a quantum computer, primitive but genuine, had successfully factored a number by using switches comprising individual atoms, which could represent 0 and 1 simultaneously. Is this still digital? she wonders. Trent, who was examining his gift—a new hardcover edition of the great man's Cities in Flight—offers a wintry smile and tells her that the spooky realm of quantum physics will make software designers feel like the last generation of engineers to devote their careers to zeppelin technology.

  They go outside, mid-November weather of the warmest Christmas in memory. Down the street a circle of older women are singing, some of them wearing choir robes. A wind off the river blows the sound away, and Megan, looking anxiously upward, does not see them.

  Near the burned house he came upon a toy cart, intact among so much rubble. Its chicken head stared as though astonished to find itself upended, and the king righted it with the tip of his boot. He had seen such contrivances before, and they vexed him. Miniature oxcarts and chariots he could understand, they were copies for children; but the wheeled chicken possessed no original—it stood for something that didn't exist. Set one beside a proper boy's clay chariot and you irresistibly saw both at full size, the huge head absurd in a way that somehow spilled onto the chariot.

  The toy's wheels, amazingly, were unbroken: it rolled backward from his pettish kick. It never occurred to Lugalkitun to crush it; a shadow cast by nothing is best left undisturbed. He looked at the ruins about him, pouring smoke into and summoning beasts out of the open sky. Neither emptiness above nor crowding below concerned him; his brown gaze ranged flat about his own realm, imagining retribution in full measure, cities aflame, their people in flight across the hard playing ground of The Land.

  The wind shifts, and the last strains of melody—a gospel hymn— reach them. "Let's go listen," says Caroline, taking her niece by the hand. By the time they cross the intersection the choir is singing again, in a mournful, swelling contralto that courses through Leslie like vibrations from a church organ.

  There is a balm in Gilead To make the wounded whole;

  There is a balm in Gilead To heal the sin-sick soul.

  Megan begins to cry. "I don't want a bomb," she sniffles, pressing her face against her mother's side.

  Leslie and Trent exchange bewildered expressions. The notes soar into the air, fading with distance. Leslie pats Megan's shoulder, feeling wet warmth soak through her sweater. My daughter is not well, she thinks, deeply disordering words. Their wrongness reaches through her, and she furiously tells herself not to cry, that composure will calm her child. But the stone of resolve begins to crac
k, and two beads of moisture seep through, welling to spill free—their path will trace the surest route—and carve twin channels down her face.

  —August 2001-July 2002

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  Sometime around 1160 B.C., Hekla, the most active volcano in Iceland, erupted, with dire consequences for northern Europe and beyond. Even before the cataclysm, the harsh conditions of the Orkney Islands, off the northern tip of Scotland, demanded adaptability from their human and animal habitants. The archaeological record preserves evidence that the ancient breed of Orkney sheep met those demands in a peculiar way (and continues to do so today). As Laura Frankos shows us, Hekla, having rallied the oppressive forces of Father Winter, also pushed the people of these islands to the limits of their bodies and especially of their spirits

  The Sea Mother’s Gi ft

  Laura Frankos

  Dett stood on Western Isle's cliff, ignoring the thousands of birds wheeling and shrieking above him, even when some spattered his deerskin cloak with their droppings. He studied the sky as the sun dipped toward the horizon, as he had done these past few months whenever the clouds lifted enough to see the sunset. That wasn't often; the Islands usually spent the summer months wrapped in fog, and this particular summer had been especially cold. What he saw unnerved him. These colors are wrong, he thought. Too red, too orange, too yellow—like fire. I have never seen sunsets like this before, yet ever since the Day of Darkness in late spring, they have all looked this way. Why have the sunsets changed? It must mean something. But what?

  He turned his gaze upon the waves pounding the sheer cliffs below him. Guillemots, kittiwakes, and auks, unafraid of the power of the Mother of the Sea, darted in and out of the water, seeking fish and crabs. His eye was accustomed to their rapid motion, likewise, to that of the seals hunting their prey. Then, at the base of the cliffs, he spied a strange sight amidst the seafoam.

  A blood-red figure—its color much the same as the queer skies— broke through the billows and stretched a long red arm upward, grasping, but catching nothing. A powerful wave knocked it back under, but only for a moment. It surged up once more, allowing Dett a glimpse of a gigantic head with a gaping mouth, before another wave, as strong as if pushed by the Mother herself, overcame it. Dett watched the same spot for more than an hour, but the thing did not return. The wind that tore at his hair and clothes and chapped his lips didn't bother him. He would have noticed it more if the wind had stopped. Gust-blowing demons continually plagued the Islands, sometimes banding together to create a terrific gale in hopes of pleasing their lord, Father Winter.