Against the Tide of Years (6 page)

“Got ’em right here for you, Mr. Arnstein,” the lobsterman said, hauling up a net dangling overside from his boat.

“Thanks, Jack,” he replied, handing over a silver nickel, the Republic’s own coinage, and accepting the change in coppers.

The former software salesman nodded thanks. David prodded the gently squirming canvas sack with his fingers and giggled at the sensation. Ian checked his turn at the fisherman’s soft exclamation and looked to his left.

Another ship was being towed south between the breakwaters and into Nantucket’s harbor. The design was American; to be exact, a scaled-up copy of the
Yare,
a two-masted topsail schooner that had carried tourists around the island before the Event. It wasn’t Island-built, though. Countless small details showed that, starting with the stylized mountain on the flag at the mainmast top. Six small bronze cannon rested with their muzzles bowsed up against the bulwarks on each side of the craft.

One of Isketerol’s ships.
Ian shook his head; you had to hand it to the man . . .

 

“When you tell it, my sire, it’s as if I can see it with my own eyes,” Sarsental said, his eyes glowing.

Isketerol hid a grin. The new king of Tartessos was still in his thirties, with no silver strands in his bowl-cut black hair and all his teeth. He could remember what it was like to be a boy of twelve winters, just coming to a man’s estate and wild for great deeds.

He leaned back in the courtyard lounger, smiling at the children sitting around his feet. Deck chairs were another Amurrukan thing.
The Eagle People certainly know how to make themselves comfortable,
he thought idly.

“Weren’t you frightened?” one of his daughters asked.

Isketerol laughed. “Some of us were like to soil our loincloths,” he said. “There we were, just two shiploads of us—the old ships, remember, small and frail—alone among the northern savages on a trading voyage. That was dangerous enough, they’re wild and uncouth. Then there
it
was, the
Eagle
ship itself. Three hundred feet long and made of
iron
—”

They gasped.

“—and with masts a hundred and fifty feet tall. Three of them. Hull shining white as snow, with a red slash of blood-color across it and the great golden image of their Eagle god beneath the bows. Many of us wanted to flee right there, I can tell you.”

“But you didn’t, my sire,” his eldest son said.

“No. Let that be a lesson to you.” He reached out a hand and made a snatching motion. “Be cautious, but when the Jester drops a chance for advantage, take it! The Jester is bald behind, you can’t grab His hair once He’s past. I stayed by the side of the barbarian chief we’d been dealing with, and Arucuttag of the Sea rewarded me. For when the Amurrukan, the People of the Eagle, landed . . . one of them spoke Achaean, and I could act as their go-between with the natives as they dickered for grain and beasts.”

He fixed an eye on his eldest son. “See what learning foreign languages can do? I’d have been dumb as a fish but for that. So study your Achaean and Sudunu and English.”

Sarsental nodded, slow and thoughtful.
Good!
Isketerol thought. He didn’t intend that his heir should fritter away the mightiness he was building here.

“That’s when you met the Medjay chieftainess?” a daughter chimed in eagerly. “The Nubian warrior?”

Isketerol winced slightly.
Have I told it so often that children correct me?
Still, it was important that they all learn; there would be work enough for all the children of his wives. Little Mettri didn’t look as if she’d settle down to spinning and overseeing the housemaids, and she loved this part.

“Yes,” he said. “A tall woman, black as charcoal, was their captain. Alston was her name, a fierce warrior, good sailor, skilled with the sword and very cunning. She’s still the Amurrukan war-leader, under their king, Cofflin.”

“A woman,” Sarsental said dismissively.

Isketerol reached out a hand and rapped him on the head with his knuckles. “Their customs are different. Don’t underestimate an enemy! I’ve made that mistake, to my cost.”

“Yes,” he went on, “she was the one who invited me to their homeland across the River Ocean, to teach them the languages of these lands around the Middle Sea. On the
Eagle
I met
William Walker
”—he pronounced the Amurrukan name carefully—“and became his blood brother, for he was discontented with the rule of Cofflin and Alston and wished to find a land where he himself could be lord. And there I learned much; and from him I learned much. Together we pirated the
Yare
and her cargo from Nantucket, together we conquered and ruled among the Sun People and the Earth Folk of Alba. When the Amurrukan made alliance with the Earth Folk and defeated him, it was I who took him and his band to the Achaean lands, and I received in reward the great ship
Yare
and much of her burden of treasures.”

“After you stopped here in Tartessos and made yourself king with his aid!” they chorused.

“Not just made myself king,” Isketerol said. “Began to make Tartessos great—and after the Crone comes for me, you who are my children must make our city greater still. And to do that you must learn many things, so—”

They groaned but obeyed as he signaled to the servant to take them back to their lessons.

Isketerol stretched and sighed. Time to get back to work. He was a slight, wiry man of medium height such as was common in southern Iberia, dark of hair and eye and olive of skin, with thin white scars seaming the brown skin of his forearms and a mariner’s calloused hands.

“Send in the king’s chief of makers,” he said. The mustketeer guards by the entrance to the courtyard stood motionless, but a messenger from the rank standing by the wall hurried out.

Soon the official came, with a slave bearing a long bundle behind him. Both went down on their faces in prostration, and Isketerol signed them up.

“Let me see it,” he said. Then: “Yes,” he went on, pulling back the hammer of the musket. “You have done well. I will not forget it.”

The musket was solid and deadly feeling in his hands, stocked in beechwood, the iron blued to an even finish. Its smell of oiled metal was heavy and masculine amid the scents of flowers and sun-dried earth. He swung it to his shoulder and took aim at the figure of a warrior in the mural painted on the whitewashed wall of adobe brick across the courtyard.

Squeeze
the trigger, he remembered.
Click-whap!
and the hammer snapped down. Sparks flew as it cracked the frizzen-cover back. A pouch of cartridges accompanied the weapon, each with one charge in a cylinder of paper, and a bullet shaped like a conical helmet with a hollow in the flat base. A
minié ball,
the books said—why, he didn’t know, for it was not in the least round.

“Yesss,” the king of Tartessos said happily.

His hands caressed the weapon. Much better than the first crude batches. In a few years they would have breechloaders, but this was well enough.

“How many?” he asked his Chief of Makers.

“Lord of the city and the Land, Bridegroom of the Corn Goddess, Favored Son of Arucuttag of the Sea and the Lady of Tartessos . . . fifty now, and ten more each seven days, to begin with. Each with
bayonet
and
ramrod.
” The man’s tongue stumbled slightly over the English words.

That was not such pleasant hearing. The man hurried on: “Lord King, if you did not insist on the, the
measuring with screws
of each part—”

“Then the guns could not be repaired at need with ready-made parts,” Isketerol snapped.

And if many had to be taught to repair the parts, they would start making them for themselves.
William had left him a set of duplicate micrometer gauges along with the spare lathe, and he intended to keep the manufacture of guns his own monopoly just as long as he could.

“I do not understand this making of each thing so like another thing,” the artisan said.

“It is not necessary that you understand, only that you obey!” Isketerol shouted in exasperation.

“You are the king, lord,” the man said, bowing, turning pale beneath his natural olive.

Not only the king, but a king more powerful than the one who had fallen to iron-armored warriors and fire-powder bombs and William’s deadly
Garand rifle
. The old king had done nothing without consulting the heads of the great families.

Today many of those heads hung on iron hooks from the walls of the palace. Now when the king of Tartessos commanded, men fell on their faces and obeyed—men in the whole southern half of Iberia, and in the lands south across the Pillars, as well. He and Will had spoken much, those months in the White Isle, and his share of the
Yare
’s cargo included books to supplement what he’d learned in Nantucket itself. The history of the years that might-have-been was full of hints on the manner of ruling and how a king might gather all the reins of power to himself, on the keeping of records and maps and registers, on police and
bu-reau-cra-cy
and armies, on the coining of money and the building of roads. The problem was that he had so few others who understood. Most of them were young men he’d raised up from nothing, but that was good too—such men knew that all they had depended on his favor, not on their birth.

He reined in his temper as the chief of makers trembled before him; it had taken Isketerol long enough to understand the Amurrukan words
interchangeable parts
and
mass production
himself.

In that false history the Eagle People recorded, nothing remained of Tartessos three thousand years from now. No trace of the city or her people, of her gods or tongue or customs. If he was to build a house that would last forever, the foundations must be laid deep. His voice was stern but not angry when he went on.

“Work harder on the machines for the cutting of metal! Then you will make many, many more muskets, and everything else that the kingdom needs.”

“Lord King, we hear and we obey,” the man said, backing away.

Isketerol relaxed back onto the lounger and considered the list written on the paper before him, written in his language but using the Eagle People’s
alphabet
. He frowned slightly; paper the Islanders would sell, glassware, tools, luxuries. But not lathes or milling machines. Well, Tartessians might not have the arts from out of time, but they were no fools . . . and he had the drawings, the books, the men Will had helped train in Alba.

Already they had done much; oddly, the most useful of all had been the machine with lead seals for the making of books—
moveable type,
in the Amurrukan tongue. He intended to see every free child in Tartessos schooled in it, even the girls.

All the common people of Tartessos called down blessings on his name; he’d given them wealth, made captains of fishermen and lords of farmers, brought in foreign slaves to do the rough work. Even the new customs, the burying-of-excrement and washing-with-soap rituals, no longer brought complaints. Not when so few died of fever or flux.

The Eagle People had godlike powers, but they were men with the needs and weaknesses of men. He could offer land, slaves, silver, wealth, power as nobles under him. It was a great pity Will hadn’t accepted his offer, but William Walker was not a man to take second place, no matter how rich the rewards.

Rosita Menendez walked in, her robe of gold-shot crimson silk brushing the tiled floor. Isketerol winced slightly; silk was another thing the Islanders would sell in Tartessos, but the price was enough to draw your testicles up into your gut. And, of course, what one of his wives had, all the others demanded, leaving him no peace until he bought it for them.

“Hi,” she said in the Amurrukan tongue, sitting on a stool by his feet. He replied in the same, to keep fluency.

“Hello, Rosita. How does your school go?”

“Fine, Iskie,” she said.

Has she been drinking again?
he wondered, but then he relaxed. No, it was just Eagle People gaucherie; they had no sense of ceremony or manners.
Well, she’s far from her people, lonely sometimes.
Most of the time being a queen in Tartessos was enough compensation for her . . . although to be sure, he hadn’t mentioned his other two wives when he’d courted her back on Nantucket.

“Actually, Iskie, some of the students could take over more of the basics, the way they do the ABC stuff now,” she said. “Plus Miskelefol and a couple of others are good enough to do most of the routine translations of the books, if I help them a little with the dictionary,” she went on.

“Good. You will have more time for teaching the mathematics and bookkeeping and medicine.”

She rolled her eyes but kept her sigh silent. Even a queen wasn’t immune from the knotted cords of her husband’s belt. Especially a foreigner queen with no kindred in the city.

Well, she’s pretty enough—
and she’d given him one child, a son—
but her knowledge is more important than her loins.
She’d been a healer’s helper back on Nantucket, a
registered nurse
in
Eng-il-ish
. Invaluable here.

Walker’s woman, Alice Hong, would have been even more useful. A full doctor, a mistress of some of the Islanders’ most powerful arts.

“Then again, no,” Isketerol said to himself, shuddering slightly. “I am very glad the Lady of Pain is far, far away.”

Far enough away that the thought of her was stirring. He drew aside the loincloth that was his only covering on this warm day and motioned Rosita closer. She knelt on a pillow beside the lounger.

“Use some of that Amurrukan knowledge,” he said, grinning and guiding her head with a hand on the back of her neck. This was another thing he’d learned on the Island, and it was catching on fast here.