The First Heroes

by Harry Turtledove

  “I am waiting for you to put your head in the rope,” he said—in English, thickly accented but fluent enough. “Arktomertos,” he added, in a savage play on the man’s name: Dead Bear.

  The crimp roared anger, turned, snatched up a barrel and threw it. That took strength; it was heavy, and the policeman dodged, falling backward into the street. When the wood staves struck the thick timber uprights of the door they cracked open, and fine-ground flour exploded in all directions. The fat man who’d been Arktorax’s henchman turned to flee; Kreuha’s arm cocked back as he squinted through the dust, then punched forward with smooth, swift grace. The flame-shaped bronze head took the barkeeper between the shoulders and he fell forward with the spearshaft standing up like the mast of a ship sailing to the ice-realms where the spirits of oathbreakers dwelt.

  That left Arktorax. The big man drew a broad-bladed steel knife from beneath the tail of his coat and lunged, holding it underarm and stabbing upward in a stroke that would have opened the younger man like a fish filleted for the grill. Kreuha bounded back with panther ease beyond the reach of the blow, his hand unslinging the bronze-headed axe slung over his back as, for the first time since he’d set foot on the boat that brought him to Alba, he felt at ease: here was something he understood.

  Arktorax wailed as he stumbled forward, drawn by the impetus of the failed stroke. The keen edge of the bronze skittered off his knife and gashed his forearm. He dropped the knife and tried to catch it with his left hand; Kreuha struck backhanded, then again, and again, smiling.

  He was holding up the head when Eric Iraiinisson came through the door—this time with his revolver drawn. He swore in English, then by the hooves of the Horse Goddess.

  “I didn’t mean you to kill them!” he said at last. “We were to capture them for trial—”

  “You didn’t mean to kill them,” Kreuha grinned. “I did, Eric son of the Iraiina—and ask your grandfather why, some day.”

  The policeman shook his head. “This means trouble.”

  “Didn’t you say your law allowed a man to fight in self-defense?” Kreuha said. No. I can’t keep the head, he decided regretfully; he did spit in the staring eyes before tossing it aside, and appropriating the dead man’s knife and the contents of his pockets.

  “Yes . . . but there’s only one witness, and I’m known to have accused him before,” Eric said. “It could be trouble for me as well as you—he does have kin, and friends of a sort here.”

  Kreuha grinned. “Then let me not be here,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of what you said earlier.”

  Eric looked at him, brows raising. “Now that’s forethoughtful,” he said. “Maybe you’ll go far, young warrior. If you live.”

  “All right,” Timothy Alston-Kurlelo said.

  Lucy and her younger brother both stood in the forward hold, watching a cargo-net sway down. It dangled from a dockside crane, which made the rate of descent something she needed to keep an eye on—if they’d been using one of the Pride’s spars as a derrick, she’d have trusted her deck-crew.

  Two sailors had ropes on the net and were guiding it to the clear space at her feet; orderly stacks of other goods rose fore and aft, covered in tarpaulins and tightly lashed down. The early morning air was cold; the first week in November was usually chilly and raw here in southern Alba, and she could scent the faint mealy smell of snow.

  “I’ll be glad to get out of the harbor,” she said, mentally running over the list herself.

  Simple goods for the raw-native trade: spearheads and axe-blades, saws and hammers, kegs of nails, chisels, drills, printed cotton cloth, glassware and ornaments, cheap potato vodka. Wind-pumps and ore-breakers and stationary steam engines for the mining dredges Ellis & Stover had set up out east these last five years; treadle sewing machines and corn-shellers and cotton-gins, threshing engines and sugarcane crushers for the Islander settlements in the Indian Ocean. . . . She took a deep satisfied sniff of the smells, metal and oil and the pinewood of boxes and barrels. Even the bilges were not too bad; the Pride had been hauled out for complete refitting in the Fogarty’s Cove shipyards on Long Island not four months ago.

  “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 Shipping 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 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 do
wn 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 be 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 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.

  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 ba-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 ba, 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 grain 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 Neferkare. 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 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 domains 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.