On the Oceans of Eternity (104 page)

His last thought was that the earth tasted of salt from the blood that soaked it.

Bits of the formulae for addressing the Judge of the Dead flitted through Djehuty’s head along with blinding pain as his eyelids fluttered open. But it was not jackal-headed Anubis who bent over him, but a foreigner with a cup of water. The Egyptian sucked it down gratefully before he thought to wonder at it.

Prisoner, he thought.
I
must be a
prisoner.
But he was not bound, and beneath him lay a folding cot with a canvas bed, not the hard ground. He turned his head carefully. He was under a great awning, amid rows of others. Sennedjem! His son lay not far away. Djehuty gasped relief to see his chest rising under a mummy’s swath of bandages. But what was held in the clear glass bottle that was connected to his arm by a flexible tube?

Djehuty’s eyes went wide when he realized that the same piece of sorceror’s apparatus drained into his own arm. Gradually the fear died, and the pain in his head became less. When the foreigner’s black commander came, he was able to stare back with something approaching dignity as she sat on a folding stool beside his cot.

She spoke, and the
Sudunu
interpreter relayed the words:

“You and your men fought very well.”

Djehuty blinked, then nodded. “You deceived us very well. Ransom?” he went on without much hope.

She shook her head. “When the war is over, we will release all our prisoners.”

Djehuty blinked again, this time in surprise. It would take a strong commander to deny victorious troops the plunder of victory, and the sale of prisoners was an important part of that. Even Pharaoh, the living God, might have difficulties. With an effort, he fought down bitterness against Ramses; what the Pharaoh decreed, must be done ... even if it destroyed the Brigade of Seth at the word of the foreigner Mek-Andrus.

“Your king must be a ruler of great power,” he said.

“We have no King,” she said, and smiled slightly at his bafflement. “We come from ... very far away. You might call us exiles.”

“Your whole nation?” he said in bafflement.

“No,” she said and explained: “Just one small island of us, and a ship. So we were stranded here and now.”

“Ah,” Djehuty said bitterly. “And with arts of war like none we know, you seek to carve out a great empire.”

Long black fingers knotted into a fist on a trousered knee. “No. Some of us saw that they might become Kings here, with what they knew. The rest of us ... must fight to enforce our law upon them.”

“No King ...” Djehuty frowned. “I find that hard to believe. Only a powerful King can make a people strong in war.”

She shook her head. “That is not so, Djehuty of the Brigade of Seth. We have arts that your people do not, is that not so?” He nodded, reluctantly. “Well, not all of those arts are arts of war. We have found that one man’s wisdom is not enough to steer a great nation, and how to ... melt together the wisdom of many.”

“I do not understand.”

“Let me tell you,” she said, “of a thing we call a constitution, which is a government of laws and not of men ...”

When she rose with a promise to return and speak more, his head was whirling as badly as it had when the spear shaft clubbed him. He heard words in the foreign commander’s language:

“And that’ll cause a lot more trouble than gunpowder, in the
long
run.
”

“Wait,” he said. “One thing—what name will this battle be given? Surely it is a greater one than Kadesh, even.”

Let the chronicles
remember
it, and with it the name of Djehuty. Chronicles that do not lie, like the ones that called Kadesh a victory for Ramses.

She turned, smiling wryly. “We will will name it from the hill that overlooks the battlefield,” she said. “Har-Megiddo. Armaggedon, in our tongue.”

B
attalus lnterruptus,
Kenneth Hollard thought, dazed. Here
I’ve
spent the last three years of my life getting ready to defeat Walker, and they just up and kill the bastard!

He felt a surge of irritation, which died of shame when images from the last field hospital visit went- through his head. Outside the command pavilion the sounds of the greatest block party of all time filtered in through the warm spring air. So did the smell of roasting meat; no more need to conserve every beast.

“No,” Odikweos, King of Men, was saying.

“Excuse me?” Doreen Arnstein said sharply.

Her expression was sharp, but she hadn’t let go of Ian Arnstein’s hand since they sat down side by side at the head of the big table. He still looked a little stunned, after his first glimpse of his daughter.

“I said, no,” Odikweos repeated, flashing a white smile through his grizzled beard. “Is this not your English word?” He tossed his head.

“No, I will not give up all the Wolf Lords ... that is, the
eqwetai
of my former liege-lord. Those who needed slaying have been slain. The others are too useful to me; I shall confirm them in the most of their estates and titles, and their sons shall be Achaeans and serve my son. Nor will you attempt to slay them by stealth if you value my friendship. I will withdraw my troops from the Hittite lands; and since you hold it already, I will agree to make no moves against Sicily. Beyond that,
I
rule Great Achaea, and I shall make such changes there as seem good to me. We are not defeated suppliants in this war; we have decided to end it at our pleasure, for our own reasons.”

Oh
, please God, don’t order me to invade Greece, Hollard thought.

Scratchy through the speaker, Jared Cofflin’s dry Yankee voice spoke:

“Something there. Let’s thrash this out.”

King Kashtiliash pulled at his curled beard. “I came here because of my treaty with you, to put down the threat of Walker,” he said. “Now that threat is gone. I wish to go home, and settle my realm.” A broad carnivore grin. “Since my realm now includes Canaan, the Egyptians having withdrawn from it.”

Tudhaliyas stirred unhappily. Kashtiliash raised a soothing hand: “And my brother the One Sun of Hatti-land will doubtless have much to do. Now that he is the only monarch with the new weapons in these lands, who may easily sweep to the Achaean sea, put down the Kaska mountain tribes, and push his frontiers far to the north and east in the Caucasus and around Lake Van.”

Tudhaliyas’s long dark clean-shaven face began to smile; it looked a little unnatural on his gloomy countenance. “Oh, indeed,” he said, rubbing his hands. Then he cocked a sharp eye at the other Great King: “Provided nobody encroaches on my domains of Karkemish and Ugarit.”

“But of course,” Kashtiliash purred, a rumble in his deep chest. “Although we should consult about these horse-tamer tribes they say are advancing against us through northern Elam, the ...”

“Medes and Persians,” Kathryn Hollard said. “And Saka and Scythians and whatnot.”

“Yes, those. Perhaps we should divide those lands between us.”

“Perhaps we should,” Tudhaliyas said thoughtfully.

“Perhaps we should indeed,” the Seg Kallui of Kar-Duniash said. “First thing I’m going to do, though, is visit Dr. Clemens and get the IUD removed. Please hold any wars for about ten months.”

Everyone chuckled. Well, nearly everyone; Marian Alston just smiled slightly. “You’re making a good start on getting back to managing your own affairs,” she said. “Still, I think a general treaty all ’round would be a good idea—trade, that sort of thing.”

“Ayup,” Cofflin’s voice said. They could hear a murmur in the background, as of someone speaking softly in his ear. “I’ve got some ideas on that ...”

 

King Kashtiliash crouched to look down one of the avenues of the great model city atop the table. Justin Clemens and his wife Azzu-ena waited uncertainly amid a bustle of scribes, clerks, engineers Babylonian and Nantucketer, officers, and attendants. Outside the tent, the great sprawling construction camp on the west bank of the Euphrates was in full swing. Most of the streets and broad avenues were still only pegs and string, but thousands of laborers were already trenching the lines for sewers and water systems.

From the corner of his eye he could see a first section of sewer actually being built, an egg-shaped tunnel of fired brick set in asphalt mortar. Not far away rested lengths of ceramic water pipe, tubes ten feet long and a yard across, with walls four inches thick. The great petroleum-fired kilns added another tang to the air, under the massed stink of Babylon across the river.

“Ah, Justin Clemens son of Edgar!” the King said. Clemens bowed. “How goes your work?”

“Faster than I thought it could, King of the Four Quarters,” Clemens said.

He walked to the edge of the model; it was twenty feet on a side, resting on thick planks and those on trestles. The city of dreams it showed was definitely Babylonian—marked with the terraced pyramids of ziggurats, the blocky shapes of palace and temple. The layout wasn’t, though; a gridwork of avenue and street, with broad radial ways driving through from the center. Along the water side was a great brick wall and highway to contain floods, and three long-arch bridges crossed the broad Euphrates. There was no city wall; instead a quartet of low-slung forts bristling with cannon covered the landward approaches and commanded the river passage. Blue-painted canals brought water to parks and gardens as well.

Clemens pointed to his own project near the northeastern corner.

“The waterworks are going up quickly,” he said. “The big pumps just arrived from Irondale in Alba, and a couple of Leaton’s people. We should have enough clean water for the labor force within a week.”

Kashtiliash nodded. His wife Kathryn looked up from the other end of the table, making a quick note and handing it to a messenger.

“I want to get the sewer works functional as soon as possible too,” she said. “If we can get the farmers using processed sludge rather than raw night soil, it’ll cut dysentery in the villages around here by three-quarters.”

“We need to put in village wells as well,” Clemens noted quickly. “Sealed-tube wells with hand pumps.”

“All in good time,” Kashtiliash said. “There is work for my lifetime, and my sons’.” He looked at his queen and grinned, and she returned the expression.

A shake of the leonine head. “But that is not what I wish to speak of, best of healers,” he said. “Here, come.”

He drew a cloth from a smaller table. The model there was of a complex of buildings, two-story blocks around courtyards; there were even models of tiny palm trees there.

“You wished to remain in the land of Kar-Duniash, did you not, Justin son of Edgar?”

Clemens nodded, a little wary. There was more good he could do here, and he thought it would be easier for him to adapt to this than Azzu-ena to Nantucket.

“Well, here you shall. It shall be called the Clemens Teaching
Hospital
.”

He stopped, grinning at the younger man. Clemens grew aware that his mouth was hanging open like a carp’s. Jesus,
I
thought we’d have a little clinic, build it up gradually ...

“King of the Four Quarters—I and my wife cannot run such an, an institution by ourselves.”

Kashtiliash rumbled laughter under Kathryn’s contralto chuckle.

“You won’t have to,” the queen said. “There’s all those orderlies that the Coast Guard trained—remember, those slaves Kash’s father gave us, and we freed? You did a fair bit of that yourself.”

“And there will be other
Nantukhtar
doctors who will come,” Kashtiliash said. “Even if they come only for a brace of years each, they will not find me niggardly. You yourself, Justin son of Edgar, I will double the wage you receive—and you will have this fine house, and I will add thereunto a thousand iku of well-watered land near the city by
kudurru-grant.”

Clemens felt a sharp pain in his ankle, where Azzu-ena had kicked him; outwardly she was the picture of demure modesty, with her shawl drawn over her head and held across her lower face with one hand.

“Ah,” he said, bowing again, “The Bull of Marduk is generous!”

“And in this
hospital
you will not only cure the sick, but teach,” Kashtiliash said, warming to his thoughts. “I have sent to your Island for copies of the books of healing—soon my own printing press will be at work, with men trained at Ur Base. You will take the sons—”

“And daughters,” Azzu-ena and Kathryn said simultaneously.

“And daughters.” Kashtiliash smiled fondly. “Of physicians and scribes and priests—thus their families will object less—as apprentices.”

“And commoners, my Lord King,” Clemens said, quietly but firmly.

“As you wish. And this is only the beginning! Near your hospital will grow over the years a great school of all learning—the lore of my folk, and the New Learning of yours. Such is called a university, is it not? Yes, it will take much gold, as much as many regiments of riflemen, but it will—”

He looked at the queen. “Remember that night on the terrace, beloved of the King’s heart?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling.

“I promised then that I would not leave my people in the dirt. And I will not!”

The great scarred hand closed unconsciously into a fist, and the dark hawk eyes flashed. Clemens cleared his throat.

“Ah, King of the Universe, I ... my wife and I did plan to visit Nantucket before settling.”