by Anthology
Men in robes and women in long, baggy dresses only made the impression of age stronger. Some of the men did wear modern shirts and trousers, but none of the women—none—chose the skimpy, clinging styles that were all the rage down by the sea. As far as girl-watching went, it would be a barren time.
But it wouldn’t be dull. Graffiti on whitewashed walls was thicker and fiercer here than it had been in the villages to the southwest. Philistinian soldiers with assault rifles patrolled the narrow, twisting streets. They never traveled in parties smaller than four; the Moabites had assault rifles, too, and other, nastier, toys, and used them whenever they figured they could get away with it.
The APC rattled past a couple of firebombed buildings. A wine bottle full of gasoline with a cloth wick was a low-tech weapon, which didn’t mean it wasn’t effective. Then Pheidas stopped worrying about gasoline bombs, because something a demon of a lot bigger went off much too close. The APC swayed and shook and almost flipped over. Then it stopped so suddenly, it pitched all the soldiers in the fighting compartment into a heap.
“Get off me, Dagon damn you!” Sergeant Dryops shouted. “Open the doors and pile out. Somebody’s gonna need help.”
As usual, a man with a loud voice and a clear notion of what he wanted stood a good chance of getting it. The soldiers unscrambled themselves. Antenor opened the doors at the back of the carrier. The men jumped out, weapons at the ready.
“Gods!” Pheidas exclaimed. He ran forward, boots thudding on cobblestones that might have known the scritch of hobnailed Roman marching sandals.
Someone had driven a car into the Philistinian column—a car with a bomb inside. Then he’d set it off. The car was nothing but twisted steel and flames, with thick black smoke rising from it. Mixed with the chemical stinks was one that held a certain ghastly appeal—it smelled like burnt roast pork. Pheidas’ stomach did a slow lurch: that wasn’t pork burning.
The murder bomber hadn’t just blown himself up. That would have been too much to hope for. He’d wrecked a Philistinian command car almost as thoroughly as the one that carried the bomb. Pheidas didn’t think anybody in there could be alive. And the blast had overturned an APC and set it on fire. Burned and wounded Philistinian soldiers came stumbling out of it.
“Anybody left inside?” Pheidas shouted. He wouldn’t have left a Moabite to cook in there . . . Well, right this minute, maybe he would.
“Did the driver get away?” asked a soldier bleeding from a cut on the forehead.
“We’ll find out.” Pheidas and Antenor both dashed around the burning chassis to see. The driver’s compartment was separate from the one where the soldiers sat, and had its own escape hatches.
If the driver hadn’t got out—and it didn’t look as if he had—he never would now. The APC’s front end had taken the brunt of the blast. With the best will in the world, try to force your way through those flames and you’d end up like one of the babies the Phoenicians up the coast fed to the fires in the old days—and, some people whispered, even now.
A shriek behind Pheidas made him whirl, rifle at the ready. A Moabite woman lay on the ground, blood pouring from a gash in her thigh. Part of Pheidas hoped she would just bleed out. But that wasn’t how he’d been trained. He ran over and yanked up her dress so he could bandage the gash.
“What are you doing to her?” The question came in harsh, guttural Moabite. “Why are you putting hands on her?”
Pheidas glanced up. The Moabite standing over him couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than he was. The fellow had a gash under one eye, but he didn’t know or care. He seemed to think Pheidas would drop his pants and start humping the wounded woman any second now.
“I’m going to fix her leg if I can,” Pheidas answered, using Moabite herself. Speaking the language always made him feel he had a mouth full of rocks. “If you know first aid, you do it instead.”
“Not me. Not me, by Chemosh’s white beard!” The young Moabite backed away. “You better not do anything dirty to her, that’s all.”
“Are you crazy?” Pheidas said, and then he forgot about the kid. He had to tie off a bleeder. He’d learned how to do that, but he’d never actually done it before. He thanked Dagon that he didn’t lose his lunch. He pinned the wound closed, gave the woman a pain shot, and put a bandage around everything. When he finished, his hands were covered with blood. He wiped them on her dress. It was already so bloody, a little more gore wouldn’t matter.
Only then did he look up and see that the young Moabite was still watching him. “You did what you said,” the fellow admitted.
Wearily, Pheidas pointed to the burning wreck of the car the murder bomber had driven. “A Philistinian didn’t do that to her,” he said. “A Moabite did. One of your people, not one of mine.”
“If you weren’t occupying us, we wouldn’t have to do things like that,” the Moabite answered.
“If we weren’t occupying you, you’d throw us into the sea,” Pheidas said.
“You deserve it. You came from the sea. You should go back into it,” the Moabite said. “If Dagon is so wonderful, he can take care of you there.”
Pheidas swung his assault rifle so it almost bore on the young man. He wasn’t especially devout—most Philistinians weren’t these days—but he wasn’t about to let this fellow mock him. “I didn’t say anything about your god,” he growled, sounding as much like Sergeant Dryops as he could. “Keep your mouth shut about mine.”
“You can’t say anything bad about Chemosh,” the young man said. “Chemosh is a true god. Chemosh is the true god.”
Fanaticism rang in his voice, though he would probably just have called it pride. Pheidas gestured with the rifle. “Get lost, punk, or you’ll be sorry.”
“Ha! You fear the glory of Chemosh! You know Dagon is nothing but a dead statue!” But the Moabite backed off. Unlike the murder bomber, he didn’t have the stuff of martyrs in him—right this minute, anyhow.
Another Moabite came up to Pheidas. This one wore somber business clothes under a headscarf. “I am a physician,” he said in accented but understandable Philistinian. “I will care for the woman now. Thank you for what you did.”
“You’re welcome,” Pheidas said. “Help the soldiers, too, please. Some of them need it more than she does.”
The Moabite doctor hesitated. “I would rather not,” he said at last. “Nothing personal, but I could find myself in a dangerous position if it were discovered that I had done such a thing.”
“Your own people would kill you, you mean,” Pheidas said.
“Yes.” The physician nodded. “Unfortunately, that is exactly what I mean.”
Pheidas felt like pounding his head on the slates of the sidewalk in despair. “How are we both supposed to live on this land when you feel that way?”
“When one of us is gone, the other will live on this land,” the Moabite replied. Pheidas knew exactly what he meant. When you Philistinians are gone, we will live on it.
Sandbagged machinegun nests, barbed wire, and concrete barriers to thwart murder bombers in cars surrounded the Philistinian barracks in Hierosolyma. Pheidas didn’t feel particularly safe even after he dumped his pack by a cot. Too easy to set up a mortar on a roof or in the courtyard of a house and lob a few bombs this way. You could disassemble the thing and hide it long before anybody found you.
“All the comforts of home,” Antenor said, looking around at the dismal place.
“Sure, if you live in a jail,” Pheidas said.
Antenor laughed, for all the world as if he were kidding. “This whole country’s a jail,” he said. “We’re stuck in it, and so are the cursed Moabites.”
“We’re occupying this part of it,” Pheidas said. “If the Moabites ever get the upper hand, they’ll massacre us.”
“They say their god says we deserve it.” Antenor’s raised eyebrow told what he thought of that.
“Chemosh is king!” Pheidas said in Moabite—a phrase any Philistinian had heard o
ften enough to understand, regardless of whether he knew another word of the language. He returned to his own tongue for a two-word editorial: “Stinking fanatics.”
“They are,” Antenor agreed glumly. “It gives them an advantage. They really believe in the fight while we . . . just kind of go on.”
As usual, Sergeant Dryops heard everything that mattered. “I’ll tell you what I believe in,” he rasped. “I believe in not letting one of those ragheads dry-gulch me on account of I got careless—or on account of I got too trusting. Some dogs shouldn’t get even one bite.”
“Heh.” Pheidas knew his laugh sounded nervous. Like Arabs and Aramaeans and Phoenicians, Moabites had little use for dogs. Call one of them a son of a bitch and you made an enemy—quite possibly a murderous enemy—for life.
Dryops understood why Pheidas was jumpy. “None of those mangy hounds in here,” he said. “Cursed well better not be, anyhow.” He laughed.
“The way those people—all those peoples—feel about dogs is enough to make you anti-Semitic,” Antenor said. After three thousand years on the Middle Eastern mainland, Philistinians had a good deal of Semitic blood in them, too. Pheidas found himself nodding all the same.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass how they feel about dogs,” Sergeant Dryops said. “But when they want to murder me . . . that, I don’t like.”
He didn’t need to feel sure he had Dagon’s power behind him. His boundless scorn for the Moabites was plenty to keep him going.
Along with half his squad, Pheidas tramped the narrow, winding streets of Hierosolyma. His eyes went this way, that way, every which way. He registered all the windows, all the balconies, all the rooftops. Every time a Moabite drew near, he tensed. Did the man have a murder belt full of explosives and nails laced around his middle? Was the woman carrying grenades?
Moabite men called names, in their language and in Philistinian. Some of what they said made dog and son of a bitch seem like endearments. In civilian life, Pheidas might have tried to kill someone for insults like that. As a soldier, he had to keep his finger off the trigger. Even sticks and stones weren’t reason enough to open up. So the high command insisted, anyhow.
But the high command wasn’t out there. Soldiers—ordinary human beings—were. Somebody a couple of blocks from Pheidas got hit by a rock and an insult at the same time. He did what he would have done if he were still a civilian. A few seconds later, a young Moabite writhed in the street, blood pouring from his head and his chest.
When Pheidas heard the burst of automatic-weapon fire, the muzzle of his own rifle automatically swung toward the sound. But the screams and shouts and curses that followed weren’t close enough to give him any targets. They got louder instead of softer, though. “That’s trouble,” he said.
“Better believe it,” Antenor said.
Then there were more bangs. These came from the Novgorodian assault rifles terrorists used all over the world. More Philistinian guns barked in reply.
Pheidas had heard plenty. “Come on!” he shouted, and ran toward the sound of the firing. His squad-mates pounded after him.
“Maybe . . . we can keep . . . the riot . . . from starting,” Antenor panted as he ran.
It was already too late. “Death to the Philistinians!” somebody yelled from a second-story window. A wine bottle with a flaming wick flew out and smashed on the cobbles in the street. Flame splashed out in a five-cubit circle. Pheidas sidestepped like a dancer. Behind him, one of the other Philistinian soldiers chucked a grenade through the window from which the incendiary had come. A shriek rang out hard on the heels of the boom. The soldier nodded in grim satisfaction and ran on.
A couple of Philistinians were down. So were more than a couple of Moabites. Pheidas smelled blood and fear. Some of the fear was bound to be his own. Two bullets snapped past his head. He dove into the nearest doorway. When he saw somebody in a headscarf, he fired at him.
The man went down, clutching at his side. “Mesha! My Mesha!” a woman screeched, and then: “Murder!”
More and more Moabites converged on the flashpoint. So many of them carried weapons, Pheidas wondered if they weren’t waiting for a moment like this. Philistinian soldiers ran toward trouble, too, as they’d been trained. When rocks and firebombs and gunfire met them, they answered with gunfire of their own.
An APC awkwardly turned a tight corner. Its heavy machine gun and bulletproof sides let it dominate the field—or would have, if a Moabite hadn’t set it on fire with another bottle full of gasoline. Some of the Philistinians inside managed to get out. Pheidas didn’t think all of them did.
“Chemosh is king!” The cry rose again and again, ever louder. So did another one: “Death to Dagon!”
Pheidas peered out from the doorway. Somebody in a dun-colored uniform like his was down. A Moabite with a Novgorodian rifle drew a bead on the wounded Philistinian from no more than three cubits away. Pheidas shot the Moabite in the back. He threw out his arms as he toppled, the rifle flying from his hands. Pheidas ran to his countryman. The Philistinian had a big chunk blown out of one calf. “Hurts,” he said as Pheidas dragged him back to cover.
“I bet it does.” Pheidas gave him a shot and bandaged the wound. He was glad he’d replenished his aid kit after helping the Moabite woman. He wasn’t so glad he’d helped her, not any more.
“Death to Dagon!” the Moabites howled. “Chemosh is king!”
Another Moabite with a rifle ran out to try to help his friend the way Pheidas had helped the wounded Philistinian. Pheidas shot him, too. He’d never fired his own weapon in anger until this morning. One of these days, he would have to try to figure out what it all meant. Now he just wanted to stay alive.
“What a mess.” Thanks to the shot, the wounded Philistinian sounded dreamy, not tormented.
“Man, you can say that again,” Pheidas said. “The Arabs in Amman will be screaming about what we did to their little Semite brothers. So will the Phoenicians, and the Turks in Babylon. We’ll be lucky if we don’t wind up in another real war.”
“Yeah.” The wounded man didn’t seem to care. That was the drug talking—the drug and the fact that he wouldn’t be doing any more fighting for a while no matter what.
An ambulance rolled up, lights flashing and sirens wailing. The Moabites threw rocks at it even though it had the Green Waves painted on the doors. They didn’t recognize that symbol of mercy; their ambulances, like most in the Middle East, used the Green Sun instead. Parthians used the Green Lion, while most of the world preferred the Green Hammer.
Pheidas waved to the ambulance driver, who stopped the vehicle. A couple of medics got out and picked up the man who’d been shot. They both had pistols on their hips. Medics were supposed to be non-combatants, but the Moabites didn’t care about leaving them alone, so they protected themselves as best they could.
The ambulance screamed away. “Over here!” somebody shouted in Philistinian. “Quick!”
Pheidas caught the slight guttural accent. “Sit tight! He’s a fraud!” he yelled. What did the Moabites have waiting? Snipers? A machine gun? Grenades?
A tank fired. The boom of the cannon and the blam of the bursting shell came almost too close together to separate into two noises. Screams followed a moment later. Pheidas hoped some of them came from the Moabite who’d tried to trap his buddies.
“You all right?” That was Antenor’s voice.
“So far, yeah. You?” Pheidas called back.
“I’m not bleeding, anyway,” his friend said. “Don’t know what the demon I’m supposed to do, though.”
“Stay alive. Shoot the ragheads if they get too close. What else is there?” Pheidas said.
“There should be something.” Antenor sounded desperately unhappy. Pheidas hoped he wouldn’t think too much. If you did, you were liable to give the bad guys a chance to punch your ticket when you could have punched theirs instead.
To them, of course, you were the bad guys. The Moabites were surer they were right than Phei
das’ own folk were. Now who’s thinking too much? Pheidas wondered.
“To me! To me!” That was an unmistakable Philistinian voice. Pheidas dashed out of the doorway. He sprayed a quick burst to make any Moabites in the neighborhood keep their heads down. The Philistinian shouted again. He was inside a grocery. Pheidas ran over and jumped through the blown-out front window.
“What’s up?” he asked, flopping down flat.
The Philistinian who’d called wore a captain’s three dragons on each shoulder strap. “I’ve got a captive here, and I want to make sure we get him out in one piece,” he answered, keeping his rifle trained on a plump, most dejected-looking man. “I think he’s one of those Sword Buddha maniacs from Babylon, here to stir up the Moabites.”
“Great,” Pheidas said, peering out to make sure nobody was getting ready to rush the grocery.
“My name is Chemoshyatti,” the man said in flawless Moabite. “I have run this grocery for years. By my god, Philistinian, you mistake me.”
“My left one,” the captain said. “I found the tracts in your register’s cash drawer.” He didn’t turn his head away from Chemoshyatti, but addressed his next words to Pheidas: “The usual garbage.”
“Uh-huh,” Pheidas said. In the Middle Kingdom and Southeast Asia, Buddhism was a peaceful faith. But the variant the Turks brought down off the steppe preached that nirvana came through killing foes. You didn’t even have to be a Buddhist yourself to gain it if you took enough enemies with you. Babylonia fostered terrorists as far as its acolytes could reach.
Antenor and another Philistinian soldier warily approached the grocery. Pheidas raised up enough to let them see him in helmet and uniform, then ducked down again. The captain urged them on, saying, “Now we’ve got enough men to make sure we can get this guy to the people who need to ask him questions.”
That wouldn’t be much fun, not for the fellow who had to do the answering. Chemoshyatti, or whatever his real name was, must have decided the same thing. One second, he stood there looking innocent and sorry for himself. The next, he flung himself across the five or six cubits that separated him from the Philistinian officer. He was good; nothing gave the move away until he made it.