by Eric Flint
Then, as she used the knives to spread the still-flexible mass into a sheet and cut it into sections, he went back and closed the door to the kiln.
When he got back to the table, he started working on his part, while Stella cut small two-inch squares and placed them in ceramic lens molds, then took the mold top and bottom, and placed glass and all into a vise. Closing the vise, she forced the glass into a basic lens shape. These weren’t for their use. They were to go to the optometrist on 4th Street, who would grind them into prescription lenses.
“So,” Carthalo asked as he used a stone rolling pin to flatten a glass square, “have you heard why Daniel Lang is looking for a job?”
“I only know what I read in the papers, Carthalo. Ship people don’t have a secret information source that we hide from the rest of you.”
“So you claim,” Carthalo said darkly, then laughed at her.
She would have thrown something at him, but hot glass wasn’t something to play with.
“I heard from Kasos that he wanted more money. But Marcus says it’s because he let that Greek Calix get away.”
“I heard he was a spy for Ptolemy,” Stella said.
“From who? Your secret ship people club?”
“No. From Maresi. She has a job with Yolanda Davis. Apparently he was part of Ptolemy’s delegation.”
“I heard it was Antigonus’ delegation, but Arrhidaeus is claiming that they had nothing at all to do with any crimes.”
“Maybe.” Stella looked at the little four-inch squares that Carthalo was making. They would be going into lead frameworks to make windows, like the windows that now adorned both floors of the double townhouse, partly for themselves, but mostly as an advertisement. Once flattened and shaped, the squares would be reheated using a liquid-fueled blowtorch to remelt the surface to smooth them into clear, if slightly wavy glass. She grinned at Carthalo. The way he was doing it, they wouldn’t need much smoothing.
She looked around. They were in back of the house in a half shack that held the kiln, and Carthalo now had an assistant, a native teen who was interested in glass because he loved glass. They made lenses, small windowpanes, glasses, bottles, and small decorative pieces for sale to the Native Americans and for export to Europe.
Stella had lost thirty pounds since The Event and it wasn’t because she was starving. What was left was more muscle and less fat by a healthy margin. She wondered idly when they would be able to make a full-length mirror. Issues of high politics on the Queen of the Sea didn’t really matter that much to her anymore.
CHAPTER 21
Games
Queen of the Sea, Tiz
August 15, 319 BCE
“Are you sure?” Captain Floden asked.
But Daniel noted that Lars didn’t try to talk him out of it. And that made him a bit more sure. He nodded. “Yes, Captain.” Then he waited as Lars Floden stood, walked around the desk, and offered him his hand. He took the hand and shook it, trying not to feel resentment.
Daniel would stay with the Queen for the next two months while he brought his replacement up to speed, and the Queen traded around Africa on its way back to the Med.
Alexandria, Egypt
August 15, 319 BCE
Ptolemy held up the polite refusal, looking at Thaïs. “Why?”
Thaïs was lounging on a couch while an electric fan blew a gentle breeze across her. She sipped her drink with a little wrinkle of concentration in her forehead. “I don’t know, and it worries me.”
Ptolemy walked over to the large cushioned chair next to the lounging couch and sat down. “Tell me about Daniel Lang.”
Thaïs lay back on the couch, closed her eyes, and began to speak. “He was perhaps the most ‘ship people’ of all the ship people. The least willing to accept that our way of seeing the world had any validity at all. All of us were barbarians to him and he made little distinction between you or me or a tribe of cannibals in South America.”
“Then why…I get it.” Ptolemy deliberately used the Greek translation of a ship people phrase. “If we’re all cannibals, what’s the difference?”
“No!” Thaïs’ eyes popped open and she sat up. “He’s not stupid. He would have tried for a bidding war for his services and gotten the best deal he could, if that were the reason. There must be something he wants. Something we don’t have.”
Ptolemy snorted. “Well, whatever it is, Eumenes will have it soon.”
Eumenes’ headquarters, Amphipolis
August 15, 319 BCE
Eumenes looked out his window and over the walls as Cassander’s army moved away from the city in good formation, and smiled.
The victory against Lysimachus at Abdera was finally taking effect. According to his spies in Cassander’s camp, Cassander was only now firmly enough in command of his army to make the move away from the coast, in spite of the Reliance delivering several tons of dried, salted fish over a week ago—and delivering it without so much as a peep out of Cassander’s army.
Eumenes almost giggled. He didn’t, of course. It would be wholly inappropriate for the strategos of the United Satrapies and States of Europe. Then the impulse to giggle died as his thoughts moved on in the standard route. He turned away from the window and went back to the map on the wall of the third-floor room that was his office and war room.
The map was large, made up of twenty-four of the ship people sheets. The paper was locally made, but printed at great expense by the printer on the Reliance. It showed this part of Alexander’s empire. It was mounted on cork from the Iberian Peninsula and had pins stuck in it, showing where Cassander was going.
Abdera. And from Abdera up into Thrace, wherever Seuthes “ran.”
But Seuthes wasn’t going to be running. Eumenes turned to the table and picked up the two-day-old radio telegraph that described the king of Thrace’s arrival in Abdera with his daughter Nike. The message made it clear that Seuthes was in Abdera to stay. Then there was the next message from Seuthes, the one that requested that Nike be made a lady-in-waiting to Eurydice. A series of messages, in fact, that arranged for Nike’s transport by ship from Abdera to Amphipolis. She would be arriving in two days.
From some of those telegrams, Eumenes suspected that Nike’s arrival had less to do with Eurydice than it did with himself. He suspected that Seuthes was setting him up with the girl, but she was just a girl. He might be wrong, though, because if you wanted your daughter to learn how to be a queen there probably wasn’t a better teacher than Eurydice, unless it was Roxane.
The door opened and Eurydice came in, followed by Philip. As he usually did, Philip smelled lightly of marijuana smoke. He scanned the room, looking everywhere but at Eumenes, and walked over to the map on the wall.
“Is Cassander leaving a blocking force to maintain the siege?”
“He doesn’t appear to be.” Eumenes waved at the window. “But I don’t intend to sally until he is well away and we have sent out scouts.”
Eurydice nodded, but there was a dissatisfied twist to her lips. Eurydice wasn’t happy about letting Cassander’s army leave without an attack.
“We have no reason to attack. We have to wait for your new lady-in-waiting, after all.” Eumenes looked down at the messages again.
“Why me?” Eurydice complained, sounding about twelve years old. “Roxane would be a better choice. Let the little princess learn to powder her nose from her.”
“Seuthes wants her to learn to lead armies,” Philip said, still looking at the map. “We should delay the move east.”
“We’ve talked about that,” Eurydice told her husband.
“You didn’t listen,” Philip said, then turned and faced Eurydice and repeated, “You didn’t listen!” shouting the last word.
Eumenes’ head came up, and he stared in shock at the usually quiet monarch. He looked at Eurydice, whom the ship people had nicknamed “the Philip whisperer.”
She was looking shocked. Then she said, “I thought we listened?” Her tone was questioning
.
“Food production!” Philip said, just as he had said before. Many times before.
“You said that before.”
“You didn’t listen.” He didn’t shout this time.
“I listened, but maybe I didn’t understand. Explain it to me, please.”
Then Philip started repeating figures. So many amphorae of grain, so many pigs, so many goats. It went on for fifteen minutes and seemed to Eumenes to be a fairly full description of the annual production of food and materials of all of Macedonia and Thrace. Then he said “food production” again, and began another set of numbers. This time each followed by the name of a town or city.
“What are those numbers?” Eumenes asked.
“Number of dead.”
“Dead how?” Eurydice asked.
“Starvation, malnutrition, disease.”
Fort Plymouth, New America
August 16, 319 BCE
Al Wiley held up the radio telegram and looked around the room. “Well, is his autistic majesty correct? Is there going to be a famine over there in Europe?” Al tried, but he wasn’t comfortable around the mentally challenged, no matter what problems they suffered. He had sympathy for them, but he preferred to be sympathetic at a distance.
Everyone had read the telegram, or at least they should have. He looked over at George Sevier, the former mayor of Jackrabbit, Utah, a town of three thousand or so, surrounded by farm country. George and his wife were on the Queen for Al’s daughter’s wedding and was the natural choice for interior secretary because he studied land management before going into politics.
George shrugged. “If these numbers are right, he could well be. I don’t care how much of a savant Philip is, the uncertainty comes from the accuracy of the source data. Frankly, if his numbers are anywhere near accurate, I would be surprised if you didn’t lose more, even without a campaign during harvest season. For the Lord’s sake, Al, any time you have armies marching across fields, you’re going to lose crops. With folks living as close to the edge as they do in this time, one bad season is starvation, and two in a row is mass starvation.”
“What my friend is saying,” Yolanda Davis said, “is that Philip is right in principle, even if he isn’t in the specifics.”
“What do you think we ought to do?” Al asked the table in general. The table included his cabinet as well as representatives from congress.
“Well, they aren’t asking our permission for any action they take. They simply want a read on whether Philip III’s numbers add up,” said General Leo Holland. “I say we give them our best guess on that, but I also think we should focus on food production for a while. Any we don’t eat, we can export.”
Docks, Amphipolis
August 17, 319 BCE
Eumenes, along with Eurydice and Philip, waited on the dock as the ship Tiberius, under the command of Captain Iakchos, was tied up and the boarding ramp run down. Then a set of four armored soldiers, followed by a small, skinny girl, a middle-aged woman, and four more armored men-at-arms, came down the ramp.
Eurydice walked out in front and greeted Nike, the daughter of Seuthes and princess of Thrace. “Welcome to my service, Princess Nike. May Thrace benefit from your time here. This is my husband Philip, emperor of the United Satrapies and States of the Empire.” She waved at Philip, who nodded to the ocean, nowhere near where Nike was located. He wasn’t at his best among new people.
“And this is Eumenes, strategos of the USSE,” she finished, and Nike bowed all around.
* * *
Back in the office war room, Eurydice, following her mother’s custom with daughters and ladies in waiting, included Nike in the conversation. “You need to know what’s going on,” she started, then spent fifteen minutes catching Nike up on Philip’s issues with the ongoing war.
Nike, totally unsure of what she was supposed to do, simply nodded. Partly because she didn’t understand why Philip should care. Mostly, the people who might die during a famine wouldn’t even be his serfs and slaves. But she kept her mouth shut.
Then Eumenes started talking and she noticed how old the carter’s son was. He must be forty. His hair was going gray, and he had lines around his mouth and eyes. But his eyes were steady and his voice was calm and reasoned. Boring. He droned on about the possibility that even if they stopped their attacks, Cassander wouldn’t stop his. Cassander was off balance now, and if they pushed hard he would be dead and in the ground by the end of the year. Which seemed to Nike to be the best option.
But because he was so boring, her mind wandered to the Olympic games, the games her brother planned to attend, but were cancelled for the first time in centuries because of the arrival of the ship people and the changes they wrought, including these people winning rather than losing and her brother being dead.
“We need some way to convince Cassander and Antigonus to halt hostilities for a few months and give the empire time to recover, time to import food to keep the death toll down,” Eumenes said.
“Why?” Nike blurted. “Who cares? Those who die will be serfs and slaves. No one who matters. Not like my brother, who should have been at the Olympic games last year, not getting ready to die in a battle that never would have been fought without you.” Then, realizing what she’d said and who she said it to, Nike turned and fled the room.
* * *
“And I suspect that Nike just summed up Cassander’s attitude,” Eumenes said. “Any ideas?”
“The truce of the Olympics?” Eurydice asked, but not like she thought there was much chance of it working.
“The truce never actually stopped the fighting. Besides, the Olympics were supposed to happen last year. And for the first time in centuries, they were canceled due to war.”
“Use that,” Eurydice said. “Let us make it up to the gods by making these games and their truce greater. Offer an expanded Olympic truce to Cassander, from now until the Olympics. Not just free passage to Olympia, but no battles until after the games. No raiding, no looting, nothing.”
“You think Cassander would keep to that?”
“No, not entirely. But he would pretend to, and that would limit his depredations.”
“Will it buy us enough time? Even if this was the wrong year, the games should have happened by now.”
“We make them fall games.” Eurydice waved that objection away. Once she got her teeth into an idea, she was loath to give it up. “And while we’re at it, we propose that we expand the games to include women and non-Greeks. And that we hold off on fighting until it’s settled.”
Eumenes shrugged. “It’s worth a try. I’ll send the proposal to the satraps and kings, as well as the city-states. And an extra message to Ptolemy about shipping more grain from Egypt. Athens and the other city-states will probably sign on. They weren’t happy when the games were canceled last year.”
Queen of the Sea, Indian Ocean, approaching Madagascar
August 18, 319 BCE
Roxane sipped the cup of real coffee, grimaced, and passed it over to Dag.
Dag smiled. There still wasn’t much coffee to be had, so he was just as pleased for Roxane not to acquire the habit yet. He sipped the coffee and sighed in contentment. Then, at Roxane’s “Humph,” set the coffee aside and went back to the telegraph message. “What do you think?”
“I think we should pursue the war and feed Cassander’s body to the crows,” Roxane said. “I don’t know what’s gotten into Eurydice.” Then she smirked. “Well, I do know what’s gotten into her, but I can’t imagine Philip’s such a good lover as to have this sort of effect.”
“Crude woman!” Dag said.
“Victoria and her insane notions are two thousand years away in a different universe, praise the gods. All the gods from all the pantheons. Even Jehovah is not so crazy.”
Roxane was wearing a negligee that was purple, but so transparent as to leave very little to the imagination. And Dag did thank the gods, at least for her attitude about sex.
He brought himself back fr
om thoughts of a bit of after-breakfast exercise. “I disagree,” he said. “I understand how you feel and in a strictly military sense you’re absolutely right. And there were a lot of people even in the twenty-first century who thought that military, or more broadly security, necessities should trump all other considerations. But by the time The Event happened, most people had realized that that was a road that only led to police states and slavery for the citizenry.
“You don’t just have to win the war. You have to have a nation to rule after you’ve won it. Doing this—and doing it publicly so that everyone knows you are doing it for your people in spite of the military cost—will go a long way to insuring the loyalty of the common people. And they do matter.”
Roxane sighed and leaned back in her chair, giving Dag a nice view. Then she said, “I know. I want to agree with you, but I am afraid. I don’t want to give Cassander time to regroup. I don’t want to give Antigonus time to persuade the eastern satraps that we are too weak to rule. I don’t want my son to be murdered in his bed while his mommy is fed to dogs.”
Dag got up, walked around the table, knelt, and kissed her. “I know, love. It’s scary doing the right thing.”
Roxane kissed him back. And the co-emperor of the USSE chose that moment to wander in and proclaim, “Eww, mush.”
Totally killing the mood.
The ship people, Roxane thought, are a bad influence.
Cassander’s camp, near Abdera
August 20, 319 BCE
Sitting in his tent with the walls pulled up to allow a breeze, Cassander read the radio telegram with poorly concealed glee. Idiots, he thought. He looked at the messenger in his bronze breastplate and ship people–style britches and boots. “This is real?”