by Eric Flint
Community center, Fort Plymouth
January 16, 319 BCE
Carthalo took his seat with a beer in one hand and a super turkey and bacon corn-flour wrap with lettuce, tomato, and green pepper in the other.
It was the 3:00 to 3:30 news report, the one that was in Phoenician. And most of the people sitting on the chairs in front of the television were from Carthage. About three quarters were former slaves, indentured or not. The rest were freemen who came looking for opportunity. And Captain Boka, who gave all his slaves their freedom, was seated next to his wife, who was a former slave. Carthalo wasn’t sure whether to admire the captain or just acknowledge that he was a crazy man.
The news came on and Carthalo watched as he drank his beer. They talked about the rubber groves up north and the work on the copper-wire-pulling shop on 5th Street, then about where the two big ships were at the moment—which Carthalo didn’t care about at all—then ended up with a report on the war in the Alexandrian Empire, which he cared about even less. He took a bite out of his wrap as the screen showed a map of the Bosphorus with a little red dot where Eumenes’ army was supposed to be.
Then the report was over and so was Carthalo’s lunch. He went back to the shop on 12th Street.
Lydia, east of the Bosphorus Straits
January 16, 319 BCE
The blacksmith took the cone in his hand and placed its tip against the round oblong of wrought iron. Then he struck the conical wedge with his hammer. He looked at the still-yellow oblong and hit it again to try and get his wedge a bit deeper. Then he lifted the whole thing and knocked it against his anvil to loosen the still very much unfinished venturi. Pharnabazus gave him one of the venturi that the ship people made as a model, but he built the tools to make the thing himself, working it out from the shape of the bells, one on each end and the hole between them.
He put the venturi back in the fire and selected a smaller punch. Even with the tools he had and starting from a blank provided by other smiths in Lydia, making a venturi was a lot of work.
On the other hand, Strategos Eumenes had promised to buy all he produced.
Eumenes’ headquarters
Lydia, east of the Bosphorus Straits
“Not enough,” Pharnabazus said. “Not to affect this battle anyway. And probably not to affect any battles that we will fight in the next three or four months.”
“And the cost,” Eurydice complained, “of one of those damned venturi is almost as much as a short sword. Worse, we can only use the venturi once.”
“That is true, Majesty,” Eumenes agreed. “Everything either of you have said is completely true. But even more expensive in the long run would be trying to cross the Bosphorus with only swords and arrows. We could do it, yes. But it would cost us a thousand men and more. If we can get a force on the far side of the strait with minimal casualties, they can hold it while the rest of our army crosses and our army is bigger than Lysimachus’, especially if Seuthes is tying down half of Lysimachus’ army with his attacks.”
“How long, then?” Eurydice asked, even though by now they all knew the schedule by heart. She was just nervous.
“Another week,” Eumenes said.
CHAPTER 7
Crossing the Bosphorus
Lydia, east of the Bosphorus
January 23, 319 BCE
Erica Mirzadeh watched from the radio wagon as the army formed up on the shore. She had a pair of binoculars that were made at New America Glassworks in Fort Plymouth. They were not very good binoculars, only 4-power and the right lens had a rough patch that was irritating. In fact, using them too much tended to give her a headache, but she was going to use them now. She had her phone in her box, but with earbuds and a small mic made back in the world before The Event, she was going to record the battle to the best of her ability and send back a report.
She swung her binoculars to the docks, where they were starting the bridge.
* * *
Nikon shouted and the squad of war-captive slaves pushed the pontoon along the pier. The pontoon was in a little cart, really just a framework of leather and wood with wheels, but the wheels rolled and the cart meant he only needed six men to push the sixteen-foot-long, eight-foot-wide, four-foot-deep pontoons along the pier. They pushed, then pushed some more, then they reached the end of the pier and kept right on pushing. The pontoon went over into the water and the framework cart sank beneath it.
“Pull, you bastards, pull!” Nikon shouted, and the slaves pulled on the ropes that attached to the cart. Meanwhile, the Bosphorus wasn’t waiting. Its current pulled the pontoon out of alignment, and the rope on the pontoon swung it in, so that it wedged the cart in place at the end of the pier. Nikon started cursing then, and he cursed for most of the rest of the day as the slaves used poles to push the pontoon far enough out so that they could pull up the waterlogged cart, then, by muscle, pull the pontoon back into place so that the platform could be laid onto it and tied in place.
By the time the first pontoon had been placed and tied down, the sun was going down. Nikon looked at the upstream tie-down and noted the stress on it. They were going to need some way of holding the pontoons in place or the current was going to take them all the way to the Marmara Sea.
* * *
Erica Mirzadeh didn’t have a clue how to fix it. “It” being the whole series of interacting problems with the construction of the pontoon bridge.
“We need to redesign the cart,” said Thales of Miletus, a soldier in Eumenes’ army and, as he often pointed out, a relative of the philosopher of the same name.
“How do you mean?” asked Heraclitus, also of Miletus, with such an air of long-suffering patience that it came through clearly, even though Erica was still struggling with Greek unless she used the translation app.
Thales made a gesture that Erica had no trouble at all interpreting, then said, “We need to dump the pontoons without dumping the cart.”
“Won’t work,” Heraclitus insisted, with what sounded like satisfaction in his voice. “You’re ignoring the current. You can’t drop pontoons in the same Bosphorus twice.”
Thales rolled his eyes and Erica checked the translating app while she tried to figure out what Heraclitus was talking about.
Heraclitus pointed at the end of the pier, now extended by a sixteen-foot-square wooden platform supported at the far end by a pontoon. The pontoon was sixteen feet long, eight feet wide, and four feet deep. It had a raised section two feet wide going lengthwise from end to end. The wooden platform was tied to the shoreward side of the raised section of the pontoon. The idea behind the raised section was flexibility. If the waves on the Bosphorus lifted a pontoon, or a weight on the bridge pushed a pontoon down, this design would put less strain on the rest of the bridge. On the other hand, it had the unwanted side effect of having the pontoon stick out past the end of the bridge. Not good when you’re going to be dropping the next pontoon off the end of the bridge.
“You dump the pontoon off the end there,” Heraclitus said, “and the cart’s in the way. The flow of the Bosphorus drags the pontoon, the pontoon pulls the ropes, the ropes pull the cart and the whole thing becomes a tangled-up mess. Not only does the cart get dunked, anyone caught in the wrong place gets dunked as well. And that’s if they’re lucky. If they aren’t lucky, the ropes will cut them in half.”
Nikon looked at the bridge, then he looked at Heraclitus and Thales, then he looked at Erica and said, “Dump the pontoon off the side of the bridge.” With a sidelong glance at Heraclitus, he continued. “The upstream side. That way the Bosphorus will push the pontoon up against the bridge. Then we attach the next bridge section and use it to push the pontoon along to the end of the bridge, tie it off and do the next.”
Erica Mirzadeh didn’t know why he was looking at her. She knew radios, not building. Well, she knew computers before The Event and she was learning radios. But bridge-building wasn’t her thing. Sure, she had helped with surveying of the Bosphorus, and even with the design
of the pontoons. But mostly that was just getting on the radio and telling the engineering types on the Queen and in New America what they needed, then using the dot matrix printer to print out crappy images of what they sent back. “That sounds like a plan,” she said. And it did. She didn’t have any real idea whether it was a good plan.
Heraclitus looked at the single bridge section that had been added to the pier, then at the Bosphorus, then across the Bosphorus. “The current is strong enough here. When we get out near the middle…” He shook his head, real concern showing now.
“We’ll have to run lines to pontoons to keep the river from ripping the bridge up.”
And so it went. There were more problems on the second day, but by the fourth they mostly had it down to a routine. Eight sections a day. By the ninth of February, they were getting close to the far side. Close enough that Lysimachus brought up oxybeles.
February 9, 319 BCE
Erica Mirzadeh looked across the Bosphorus at the oxybeles being pulled into place. Oxybeles were bows on a frame that were cranked back before firing. What surprised Erica was that they weren’t all that much bigger than the crossbows that the Silver Shields on the Queen carried. She watched as they were positioned with care, then as they were cranked up, then as the commander of the oxybeles shouted and brought his sword down. Fifty or so of them went off as close to simultaneously as made no difference. It wasn’t a huge barrage, but it made it all the way across the gap from the far shore to the end of the pontoon bridge.
Of the fifty bolts that were sent, four fifths missed cleanly. And half the bolts that fell among the engineers and pontoons didn’t hurt anyone. Several of them did hit the pontoon that was almost ready to be put into the Bosphorus. Of the last five, three struck shields or armor, minimizing the damage they did, and two, by mischance, struck the same man. He was dead before he hit the ground.
Erica Mirzadeh looked over at Eumenes and Eurydice and waited for them to give the order to fire the rockets.
No such order was forthcoming. More men moved out onto the bridge, pushing more carts carrying pontoons and bridge sections…and that was all.
For over three hours, while two more sections were placed and tied down, while another anchor was dragged upriver by a small rowboat, dropped and cranked tight, while men died in increasing numbers…Eumenes and Eurydice did nothing at all.
Then, finally, Eumenes gave orders. But not orders to fire the rockets. No. He ordered a wooden shield put over the end of the bridge and the men back out of range of the oxybeles. Then he ordered five more pontoons to be put over the side of the bridge. Two on the upstream side and three on the downstream side, tied off with ropes. And that was all…until the sun set.
* * *
“Pull!” Krakos shouted.
Makis pulled. He couldn’t see what his pulling was doing because it was blacker than Olympias’ heart out here, in spite of the torches. Another flight of bolts came and Makis ducked. Too late to do any good, but he ducked anyway.
“I saw that, you coward!” shouted Krakos. “Stop your cowering and pull, you gutless wonder!”
Makis pulled. The rope burned his hands in spite of the leather rags wrapped around them, and the air smelled of tar and dead fish. The pontoon moved. He could feel it through the ropes and hear the scraping. Then another flight of bolts came in. Part of it hit the shield on the end of the bridge, but several of the bolts came over the shield at a sharp angle and plunged into the planking of the bridge section. Hades, arrows fell all around them.
Makis heard a scream and the rope jerked as one of the gang fell away and the rest of them had to take up the slack. Makis was pulled forward a step, then another, and stepped on a soft black form in the night. The rope was attached to the pontoon by way of a pulley that was supposed to keep them safe by letting them pull from behind the shield.
Fucking idiots. Makis didn’t know if he meant the idiots who designed the system or the idiots pulling the rope for a ship people silver talent. You couldn’t spend it if you were dead.
All through the night, volunteers pulled those pontoons forward and tied them together with almost no light. Volunteers, who each received a ship people silver talent—or their heirs did. And at least a third of them died in the doing.
February 10, 319 BCE
The next morning, the end of the bridge was less than fifty yards from the shore, and now it wasn’t the oxybeles they were facing. It was a thousand archers, who massed along the shore.
A thousand archers, backed by two thousand infantry carrying sarissa, the twenty-foot-long spears that turned a Greek phalanx into a fort.
For the first hour, Eumenes waited while Lysimachus deployed his troops in a packed mass on the far shore of the Bosphorus.
Eumenes pulled the binoculars from his eyes and passed them to Eurydice. “There should be more.”
Eurydice looked, and grunted in frustration. “Do you think he’s hidden them?”
“Where?” The far shore of the Bosphorus had trees and rocks aplenty, but they were back from the shore, at least here.
“Do it then!” Eurydice said.
Eumenes turned then and waved at a courier who rode down to a group of men who were set up in a protected spot near the shore. A few moments later, the first rocket fired. Then the first fifty.
Eumenes watched as the projectiles shot into the sky, trailing smoke and fire. Shot up and up, then arched over and started down. He followed their trajectory all the way across the Bosphorus. They were short. Not very short, but they struck the shore, half of them falling in the water.
* * *
“No, no, no!” Philip of Macedon shouted before the rockets were more than halfway to the far shore. Then he shouted to the mortar men who were manning the tubes to adjust their azimuth. “Two turns.” It was a shift in arc of less than half a degree, but it shifted the impact point almost thirty yards inland. The next salvo of rockets landed right in the middle of the archers.
And the next did the same, because a phalanx cannot move, not that fast. It can either stand or shatter.
This one shattered.
Not from a lack of courage.
From a lack of understanding, a lack of experience.
The men in that phalanx, at least many of them, had followed Alexander across the world, beating every foe they faced, all the way to India.
But fire falling out of the sky to rip them into small pieces when they couldn’t fight back, when all they could do was run or die, was not exactly too much. It was too terrifyingly strange.
* * *
Lysimachus was not in the right place to be hit by that salvo of hell, but he saw it and heard it. And if he wasn’t the most honest of men, he was neither a coward nor slow of wit. Even before the second salvo of rockets landed among his archers, he realized that stopping Eumenes at the Bosphorus was no longer an option. He didn’t know yet what options would work, but letting his army stand out there and get slaughtered was stupid, whatever happened next.
Lysimachus didn’t order a retreat. He ordered a rout. “Have them run for the trees!” he shouted. “Don’t try to keep formation. Throw away the sarissa, but get into the trees! Get away from that, that—” A short pause. “Whatever it is. Ship people magic.”
Even so, it took time. Time while more rockets fell. Time while men ran without orders. Time while what had been an army turned into a terrified mob. Time that would be reflected in still more time trying to reconstitute his army.
* * *
The rockets flew and the rocketeers watched. Then an order from Eumenes came. “Stop shooting.”
Philip, hearing that, shouted, “Cease fire!” That was the proper command, not “stop shooting.” He looked around, wondering why the order to cease fire had been given.
A sergeant looked at him and said, “Look there. They’re running. Have run. The cowards are halfway to the trees. They won’t be shooting at our bridge crews, not anymore.”
Philip looked. Then nodded. Fo
ur hundred forty rockets fired, thirteen misfires, and only forty-five left. They needed more rockets.
February 11, 319 BCE
Nikon, bandage on his arm, ordered the last ramp into place and walked down it to the shore of the Bosphorus. At that, he was one of the very few injured in the battle for the Bosphorus. He was on the bridge during the night, dragging the pontoons forward under the bolts of the enemy.
* * *
Erica Mirzadeh typed, then saved the file describing the battle. She sent the message open to the Queen for general dispersal. It would go to Athens, Alexandria, and even to Babylon, now that Susan Godlewski had arrived there, which was only three days ago.
Once the file was sent, she stood. “Okay, Tacaran Bayot. Let’s get the gear packed up.”
* * *
Erica Mirzadeh wrapped the antenna wire around the spool as Tacaran Bayot packed up the body of the radio into a padded wooden crate. The radio was replaceable, but it was a thing of tubes and was more fragile than the integrated circuits and gorilla glass of a phone or the plastic case of a laptop.
Erica Mirzadeh swallowed bile. She had seen through her binoculars what it looks like when a mass of people comes under a barrage of rockets with black powder and shrapnel warheads. And now, even as she worked, the images of bodies being torn apart came to her and tore at her soul. She knew that if the battle had gone…
No, that wasn’t a battle any more than a man tied to a post and shot by a firing squad is a battle. But still, she knew they had no choice. They hadn’t yesterday, and they wouldn’t tomorrow. Not if the remnants of Alexander’s empire were to turn into something worthwhile.