On the Oceans of Eternity (103 page)

Hong was in what Walker thought of as her Safari Dominatrix costume: glossy boots, flared jodhpurs, belted bush jacket carrying revolver and hunting knife, and broad-brimmed hat with a leopardskin band. She took a tall glass of lemonade and playfully tickled the nude servant with the tassel of her riding crop.

Nude except for those
body-piercing
rings and the silver chains, Walker thought. He’d always thought the look sort of grotesque, but Hong was entitled to her own aesthetics.

“You know, your dear regent is seeing an awful lot of Arnstein,” she said, then turned the handle of the crop into one of the chains and jerked sharply, shivering a little at the low shriek that followed.

Blue smoke drifted up from a hardwood fire, and a groom led horses by on their way to a downstream site on the little brook that gurgled through the meadow. The cooks were working hard by the hearths, and the smell made his belly rumble. Others set up the trestle tables and flared out the linen table-cloths. All the comforts of home now, and then some ...

“I expected him to,” Walker said. “Odi just likes finding out about things. That’s one reason he’s so useful. Sometimes you hardly remember he’s a wog.”

“You don’t think he’ll find out too much about Nantucket?”

“Oh, right, a wannax is going to go all mooney over town-meeting democracy.” Walker chuckled. “No, he’s much more likely to pick up valuable stuff from Arnstein. He’ll be more to the dear professor’s taste than any of us. Sanctimonious bastard.”

Knives flashed as the barbeque was carved. Walker shoulder-rolled to his feet and strolled over with the others, snagging a roll as the hunting party and his guests—the Iraiina head of the Royal Guard, a couple of generals, some important local collaborators—gathered. There was the usual slight wait while the eagle-eyed kitchen steward checked nobody had made any unauthorized additions to the cuisine. Luckily the locals didn’t know many good poisons—part of the reputation of Alice’s cult was based on her uptime knowledge.

The first dish was a glazed loin of wild boar, stuffed with a filling of herbs, crumbs, and garlic.

“Hot,”
Hong said, fanning her mouth and reaching for her wine cup. Then she fed morsels to the toy with her fork.

“Ah, you easterners never could handle real barbeque,” Walker said, taking another slice. “We’ve finally got the chilies coming from the Lakonian estates, and the latest cook has some idea how to handle them.”

He drank some himself; he’d also gotten the winemakers to understand that sweeter was not necessarily better. Day after tomorrow it would be back to campaign living, but tonight he could enjoy himself. The sun was setting behind blue hills to the west, casting low shadows as the meal wound down.

God, what’s the proof on this
stuff?
Walker thought, as he spilled a little.
My
nose is going numb already.

The glass slipped from his hands. A sharp cry from Hong drew his eye. She was recoiling, bewildered. The toy had gripped the chain which spanned the rings in her nipples and wrenched it out. Blood spattered down her pale stomach, but her face was expressionless; then it broke into a dawning smile. She stood and ran three steps and fell facedown, her arms and legs beating a tattoo on the turf, like the wings of a beetle thrown on its back.

“Dad!” Harold cried. “I can’t feel my hands! I can‘t—” He slapped himself, tears leaking down his face. “I can’t—”

His words ended in a rush of vomit; Walker could smell how he fouled himself. His father tried to rise and go to him, but his hands slipped off the table despite the sudden and desperate fury that welled up and turned the world misty red. The generals and officers down the table were trying to rise as well, and falling, and moaning.

Walker looked at Hong. Her eyes were wide, and her hands clutched her stomach.

“Aconite,” she whispered. “Chilies hid the taste—ow!”

The sun was falling ... no, the light was falling, faster than the sun. Walker felt a pain in his gut, deep and strong, like a sword stab. He collapsed forward, all the huge strength of his body gone. Hong was shaking as she clutched at herself.

“It hurts, Will,” she whimpered. “Make it stop, Will. Make it—”

The words were lost in retching and convulsions. Men were shouting and running, far away. Walker fumbled at the butt of his pistol, but there was no sensation in his hand. He had to get it out, find the cook, and kill—

“B
ack!” Djehuty snarled.

He smashed the pommel of the sword into the fleeing spearman’s face, feeling bone crunch. Behind Djehuty, the men of his personal guard leveled their double-barreled shotguns, and the madness faded out of the faces of the soldiers who’d panicked. Those who still held their spears lowered them, and in the uncertain light of dawn he could see them shuffle their feet and drop their eyes.

“If you run from death, it follows you—and death runs fast,” Djehuty said, his voice firm but not angry. “Remember that it is ruin to run from a fight, for you cannot fight and flee, but the pursuer can still strike at your naked back as he chases you. Return to your positions.”

“Sir—” one said, desperate. “Lord, the thunderbolts strike us and we cannot strike back!”

“I know,” Djehuty said. The bandage on one forearm reminded them that he ran the same dangers. “But they cannot take our position unless they send men forward to claim it, and those men you can strike.” Those of you who are still alive by then. “Return to your companies! Fight the foe!”

He turned, stalking through rows of wounded men groaning on the rocky dirt, through shattered carts and dead horses—someone was skinning them for cooking, at least, and he must find who’d thought to organize parties to fill waterskins—and looked up the pass. Nobody; nobody but his reserves, and they were few enough.

If Pharaoh does not come, we will die here, he thought. Un
less he withdrew now, leaving a rear guard ... No. We have
lost too many of our draught beasts. I cannot save the cannon or the chariots. A grim satisfaction: I have done my part, and
my men as well. If the plan fails, it is not our doing.

Pharaoh’s doing ... he thrust the thought from him.

Then there was something in the pass: a messenger. A mounted messenger, plunging recklessly down the steep rocky way, leaning back with feet braced in the stirrups as his horse slid the final dozen yards almost in a sitting position. It hung its lathered head as the messenger drummed heels on its ribs and came over to him, wheezing as its flanks heaved like a bronzesmith’s bellows. The man looked nearly as done-in as his horse, his face a mask of dust and sweat.

“Here,” Djehuty said, passing over his waterskin.

The man sucked at it eagerly; the water was cut with one-fifth part of sour wine. “Lord,” he gasped after a moment. “From Pharaoh.”

He offered a scroll of papyrus; Djehuty touched it to his forehead in the gesture of respect and broke the seal to read eagerly; his eyes skipping easily over the cursive demotic script.

Enemy ships with many guns at the Gateway of the North, he read, and grunted as if shot in the belly. That was the fortress of Gaza, the anchor of the Royal Road up the coast. Only if it was securely held could even a single man return to Khem across the deserts of Sinai. Troops armed with fire-weapons are landing and investing the fortress. Pharaoh marches to meet them. Hold your position at all
hazards;
you are the rear guard.

Djehuty grunted again, as a man might when he had just been condemned to death. That was where the cream of the enemy forces had gone, right enough.

“Sir!” Another messenger, one of his own men, and on foot. “Sir, the enemy attack!”

 

Helmut Mittler felt himself sweat as he walked through the palace. There was panic in the streets of Walkeropolis, a few fires ... not much, though.

My Security Battalions were ready,
he thought with some satisfaction. And had Walker really believed he wouldn’t find a way to monitor his correspondence?

The Americans had triumphed back home in the future, but it wasn’t because they were better at espionage or covert operations or dezinformatzia. Even the stupid Russians had been better at that.

Now ...

He took a deep breath. “Eumenes, Taltos, I’ll go on alone from here.”

The guards stationed down the long corridor bore the shoulder flashes of the regent’s personal regiment, recruited from his ancestral estates in Ithaka. They stood like statues against the iridescent mosaics of the walls, no doubt ready to put down any challenge to their master’s power.

Any challenge that can be met with brute force, Mittler thought. Not that brute force is to be despised, but
I
think I’ve just demonstrated its limitations. Odikweos would need him ... and there would come a time when he didn’t need Odikweos.

A last pair of guards firmly but courteously relieved him of his weapons and opened the tall doors with their wolfshead handles. The study within was one Walker had been fond of, with French doors overlooking a terrace, the gardens and the city he’d founded. I will keep the name, Mittler decided.

The ... well, not exactly the regent anymore ... was seated behind the desk. Two steel longswords rested on the subtly beautiful inlay; Mittler’s brows rose, but he supposed there was some supersitious reason. At this stage of historical evolution such things were to be expected—the dialectic predicted them.

“My lord Regent,” Mittler said. “I regret to report that rioters—doubtless in the pay of the conspirators—have eliminated the remaining family of our beloved fallen lord.”

Some of the children had had to be dragged out of closets and from under beds. Regrettable, but given the dynastic beliefs of these people, necessary.

The Achaean nodded, his craggy features set and somber in the light of the single lamp. “Everything you say, my friend, is to the point,” he said. “You are a man of swift wit, Lord Mittler. But you have never been a sailor.”

“A sailor, my lord?”

“If you had, you would know that a rope is no stronger than its weakest part. So with a braided rope of thoughts. If the first strand is weak, all the others fail, be they braided with ever so much skill.”

The French doors opened, and a tall man stepped in. He was in Achaean dress, but height and the glasses on his beak nose and the whole way he held himself shouted of the twentieth century.

“You,” Mittler whispered.

“Me,” Ian Arnstein said. He smiled unpleasantly. “The Jewboy. We do meet again, Herr Mittler. I understand that you enjoy chess ... and so do I. Check, and mate.”

Mittler felt blood running to his face, and rage made the collar of his uniform tunic too tight. “
You
,” he said. “I should have known—”

Odikweos lifted one of the swords and rapped it on the table. “You should not have assumed that because a man was born in this time, he was a fool. The King of Men, for all his cunning, also thought so,” he said gently. “I have never made that mistake, even with women, slaves, or barbarians. A man who underestimates a foe is a fool indeed.”

“You were in this with the Jew!”

The Achaean shook his head. “By no means. I was angry with my lord, and so I told this man. I told him also what I would do were my lord to fall; but I did not raise my hand against him. Nor did he slay my lord. You did, Lord Mittler. Thus when you die, my lord is avenged ... and I am free of obligation, in the eyes of Gods and men. And Walker’s handfast men are free to follow me, since their lord’s sons died with him.”

The noise from the city beyond was swelling. The crackle of small arms came loud, and the flat boom of cannon, and the screaming of many voices.

“That is the attack on the headquarters of your ministry,” Odikweos said.

“You—” Mittler forced his anger down. “I will serve you well,” he said. “You need me.”

Odikweos laughed; it was a sound no man of the twentieth could have made, and entirely amused. “Serve me as you served the lord you betrayed?” he said. “No, Lord Mittler, I do not need you. I am not a foreigner who must rule the telestai of the Achaeans by putting them in constant fear. I am of the blood of Zeus; I am a man they can obey without cost to their honor. They have been at war and in a storm of change for near ten years. They will welcome one of their own—who holds the capital and the armies—and they will welcome a time of rest.”

Arnstein crossed his arms and smiled again; Mittler wondered why he had ever thought the other man soft. The Achaean lord put the point of his sword under the blade of the other, near the hilt. With an expert flip of his thick wrist he flicked it up, to land at the German’s feet. The steel sang with a discordant harmonic.

“Pick it up,” Odikweos said, coming around the desk. He moved lightly despite the solid strength of his shoulders. “The talons of the Kindly Ones are on your neck, Mittler. My lord Walker’s ghost waits for your blood to be spilled in offering before he crosses Lethe.”

Mittler picked up the sword. It felt heavy and awkward in his hand; for a brief instant he wondered how the same weight could be so graceful in Odikweos’s grip.

 

The steel kopesh was lead-heavy in Djehuty’s hand as he retreated another step; the ring of Egyptians grew smaller as they stood shoulder to shoulder around the standard. For Khem, he thought, and slashed backhand. The edge thudded into the rim of an Aramaean’s shield, and the leather-covered wicker squeezed shut on the blade. The nomad shrieked with glee and wrenched, trying to tear the weapon from the Egyptian’s hand. Djehuty’s lips bared dry teeth as he smashed the boss of his own shield in the man’s face, then braced a foot on his body to wrench the sickle-sword free. For Sennedjem! he thought, swinging it down. Distracted, he did not see the spearhead that punched into his side just below the short ribs. Bent over, wheezing, he saw the spearman staring incredulously at the way the bronze point had bent over double against the iron scales of his armor, then scream frustration and club the spear. Exhaustion weighed down his limbs as he struggled to turn, to bring up shield and blade. Something struck him again, he couldn’t tell where, and the world went gray.