On the Oceans of Eternity (23 page)

Slightly to Marian’s surprise, Swindapa willingly shook the young chiefs hand. Only someone who knew her well could have detected the chilly edge to her smile.

“That was good of you,” Marian said softly, when they’d walked past the local welcoming party and were among the uniformed Islanders beyond.

“No, it wasn’t. It was cruel,” Swindapa said.

Marian made an interrogative sound, and the Fiernan continued: “The men who hurt me are dead; how could hurting their children soothe my heart? But in a generation or two the Iraiina will be gone, as if they had never been—they’ll be Eagle People—and they will have done it to themselves. I am
well
avenged.”

There are always new depths to you,
Alston thought, shaking her head slightly, then turning to look out over the base.

The tented camps were mostly down now, and there were a good thirty sail riding at anchor in Portsmouth Base’s harbor. Five of them were major warships,
Lincoln-class
clipper frigates, just under a thousand tons, with twenty-four eight-inch Dalghrens each, and half a dozen smaller armed schooners. They rode at anchor in deeper water, decks shining and sails furled, the diagonal red slash and fouled-anchor symbol of the Coast Guard bright on their sea-gray sides. Beside them was the
Farragut,
the newest addition to the Republic’s fleet. It was slightly smaller than the frigates, lower-slung, also with three masts but with a long slender smokestack forward of the mainmast. On either side were boxes for the paddle wheels, armored to the front by wedge-shaped timber frames sheathed in bolted steel plates, and more of the same on her ax-shaped bows; her armament consisted of two four-inch rifled cannon at bow and stern, mounted with pivots to the rear and wheels forward running on circular steel tracks set into the deck. That let them be turned rapidly in any direction.

Good ship to have in a fight.
It was a pity that she sailed like a pig of cast iron, but you couldn’t expect every design to work perfectly the first time, the more so as this was something genuinely new, not working to a pre-Event historical model.

The rest of the fleet were civilian ships mobilized for the war, or hired transports for hauling troops and equipment. The Marines had gone aboard the troopships in neat files, packs on their backs and rifles slung, gear boxed to be swung from dock to hold. Embarking the native irregulars was something else again.

Marian Alston-Kurlelo clasped her hands behind her back and rose slightly on the balls of her feet. Southampton Base was nearly as old as Westhaven; this was near where the Eagle had landed on that first trip to Alba, better than ten years ago now. Her head turned right, northward, remembering that day. That had been early spring, cold and windy like this, but sunny rather than overcast. She’d been heading into the beginnings of a war then, too, only she hadn’t known it. Her eyes sought a tall fair head among the throngs along the brick-paved waterside; Swindapa was holding a checklist, issuing curt orders to several chiefs. One of them bridled, a backwoodsman from the northeast by the look of his pyrographed leather kilt and forked beard. A comrade grabbed his arm, whispered urgently, led him aside. The rest of them nodded and scattered to obey.

Marian allowed herself a quirk of the lips, remembering how the chief of the Iraiina hadn’t even realized she was a woman, back when the
Eagle
made its first trip up the Southampton Water. She remembered the chaos of the Iraiina camp she’d found, as well. The noisy sprawl of pushing and shoving around the docks here was order itself compared to that, although it was loud enough to scare flocks of wildfowl from the marshes across the harbor, where Gosport would have been in the other history. Even the Sun People could learn ...

She watched one war band filing up a gangplank in excellent order, the tough wood bending a little under their feet, the sideropes moving under their hands and prompting uneasy glances downward—few of that breed were seamen yet. They were in no uniform, but most of them wore trousers, jacket, and boots of Islander inspiration. The webbing harness, packs, and bayonets
were
Nantucket-made, and so were the Werder rifles slung reverently over their shoulders—the bandoliers were going to stay empty until they arrived at their destination, of course. Most of them had long tomahawks thrust through the straps of their knapsacks, a few still bronze-headed. Their leader might almost have been an Islander himself, though, a young man with cropped hair, clipped mustache, shaven chin, polished boots, a new Python revolver at his waist. And a list in his hand, from which he was obviously reading....

Hmmm. On the other hand, not all progress is unambiguously positive.
Not every Sun People warrior who enlisted in Guard or Marines took citizenship and stayed in the Republic after his hitch was up. Those who came back to Alba and their tribes brought their knowledge with them: many of them were the sons of chiefs, and all of them became influential men, with the skills and prestige and gold they’d earned.

Nothing like getting the hell beaten out of you to provide an incentive for learning,
she thought uneasily. The Fiernan Bohulugi were genuine allies; the Sun People were that in theory, and a resentful protectorate in fact.

Teaching a barbarian can make him civilized
...
or just a more dangerous savage.
You did what you had to do in the short run, but the long-term worries were killers.

“
O
h Lord King, your armies are victorious!” the officer of the New Troops said, rising from his prostration and snapping off a salute he’d learned from his Nantucketer instructors.

Kashtiliash leaned back in the chair of state, elbow on the arm of the chair and jaw resting on thumb and forefinger. The officer was dressed in something similar to the Nantucketer uniform as well, boots and breeches and loose jacket with many pockets, with webbing harness of coarse double-ply canvas. He’d added an ostrich plume to the front of the cloth-covered steel helmet, though; Kashtiliash decided to check to see that nobody was wearing them thus in the field. It had been hard for him to grasp that firearms made it essential for soldiers to skulk like hunters or bandits. It would not do for them to acquire bad habits that would turn lethal when they met enemies armed likewise.

“You drove the Aramaeans before you?” Kashtiliash asked skeptically.
That
wasn’t particularly difficult.

Even without firearms, it was seldom a problem to
beat
the Aramaeans ... if they would stand and fight, which they almost never did unless they vastly outnumbered the force sent against them. Aiming a blow at the sand thieves was like driving a chariot wheel through a mud puddle; the contents spattered and flew apart in tiny globules, then ran together again and all was unchanged. So the nomads were, striking at defenseless peasant hamlets or the donkey-caravans of merchants, then fading back into the endless wastes to the west. Sometimes a King could frighten them into meekness by occupying water holes, or going after their women and sheep, but even that was difficult. Every year they grew bolder and more numerous. Villages had been abandoned in the areas most subject to their raids, and canals left to silt. Yet if the edge of cultivation moved back, then the herdsmen took those fields over and districts further east became exposed to raids.

The chronicles said the Amorites had come likewise from the western deserts long ago, and ended by ruling all the Land—Hammurabi had been of that blood. His own ancestors had been herdsmen from the other quarter, in the mountains to the eastward. The Aramaeans were only a minor nuisance so far, but a great sandstorm began with a single gust of wind.

Thus had he sent a unit of his elite, the New Troops armed and trained by the Nantukhtar, against them.

“No, King of the Universe! We did not merely chase them, we
slaughtered
them. We killed over a thousand; I have the ears in sacks,
O
Viceregent of Marduk. A thousand strong warriors alone; and we took over three thousand prisoners, mostly women and children, and ten thousand sheep and goats, hundreds of donkeys. The
Subartu-
tribe of Bit-Yakin will never again trouble the Land, for it has ceased to be—its flocks and its herds, its tents and its clans and its
nasiku
-sheiks.”

“How?” Kashtiliash asked. “I wouldn’t have thought they would stay to face our new fire-weapons.”

“It was the camels, King of the Four Quarters of the Universe. The beasts are possessed of devils, but they can travel like devils. We went three days from water—”

“Here, show me,” Kashtiliash said eagerly. There were times when he felt trapped here in the palace, but the King could not take the field for a minor punitive expedition, as a prince of the House of Succession might.

The small audience room had changed somewhat since the Nantukhtar came. The throne was the same, but one wall had been stripped of tapestries and murals and whitewashed. On it was drawn a map of the Land, as the Gods might see it. The officer took up an olive-wood pointer.

“We swung out into the deep desert—as Lord Kenn’et of the Nantukhtar did against the Assyrians, when he pursued them north last year. I bethought myself of that, and took the two hundred men trained to ride the demon-beasts. While the others came in on foot from the east, and the Aramaeans retreated before them. Even the nomads do not go so far into the sands. They were taken wholly by surprise, between the hammer and the anvil—and we could pursue their bands faster than they scattered.”

Kashtiliash nodded thoughtfully. The camels came from the desert peninsula to the southwest of the Land Between the Rivers, brought north by
Nantukhtar
ships. The southernmost nomads had begun to use them, these last few generations, but they knew little of saddling and harnessing them as yet, and the northerly Aramaean tribes didn’t use them at all, traveling on foot with their possessions on donkey-back. A donkey had to be watered every day, and could carry barely more than a man, and no more quickly. A camel could travel up to a week without water, eat anything that grew, carry three times the weight of a grown man, and cover many times the ground men or horses could. Kat’ryn had told him of how that would change this part of the world, in the centuries to come. In her histories, it had benefited mostly the sand-thieves themselves, the ones who came after the Aramaeans—the Arabs, they were called, still hundreds upon hundreds of miles to the south, in this age.

That shall not be so, here,
he thought.

He had grasped whence the Nantukhtar really came, their island adrift on the oceans of eternity. Few others in this age could, he thought, even shrewd men, learned men. The Nantukhtar hadn’t made any particular secret of it, but most dismissed the thought with a shudder as merely more of the eldritch air of magic that surrounded the strangers.

Aloud: “You have done well, and I say unto you well done; the King’s heart is pleased with you, Awil-Sin. Nor shall you and your men be without reward.”

Awil-Sin prostrated himself again, then bowed backward out of the audience chamber past the motionless Royal Guards—standing to attention was another art which the Nantukhtar had brought. Kashtiliash glanced aside at Kidin-Ninurta, formerly his father’s chief superintendant of matters dealing with Dilmun and Meluhha, now in charge of dealings with the Nantukhtar. And in their pay, of course. but his ultimate loyalty was to the kingdom. Beside him sat Bahdi-Lim, the wakil of the
karum,
the king’s overseer of trade.

“You hear?” he said.

“I hear, O King who is without rival. Shall the prisoners be sold?”

“Mmmm, no,” Kashtiliash said. For one thing, his allies would object, starting with his wife. “We shall settle them on the Elamite frontier—on the new lands watered by the canal cut by the
steam-dredges.
Well mixed with prisoners from the Assyrian war and with our own people. I have some men it is in my mind to favor with
kudurru-
grants; Awil-Sin, for one.”

The two officials nodded. Land, even land next to an irrigation canal, was valueless without tenant-farmers to work it.

Kidin-Ninurta went on thoughtfully. “These camels could be of much use to us.”

“Indeed. Bahdi-Lim, see that we acquire more—as many as the southern tribes will sell; inquire among the merchants who deal in Dilmun and send agents there. See that more men are trained in their handling, and see that a breeding program is put in hand.” The King owned vast estates, many of them dedicated to the breeding of horses for the royal chariot corps; camels couldn’t be impossibly different.

Kidin-Ninurta bowed over folded hands; he was a plump man in his middle years, beard shining with the oil of prosperity. “And when there are enough, our merchants will be greatly aided, thus bringing more wealth to the Throne. With strings of camels rather than donkeys, they could cross the wastes bearing greater loads at lower costs. Yet another thing from which we may draw wealth!”

“Yes ... speak your thoughts, both of you.”

The two bureaucrats were bubbling over with schemes to take the New Learning and make the Land rich, not to mention themselves. Kashtiliash didn’t mind that; if you used oxen to tread out grain, they took an occasional mouthful. If he was to build a new standing army equipped with fire-weapons, with rifles and cannon, he would need much wealth. Even more, if he was to lift his kingdom to equality with the Nantukhtar. That would be a work of generations, though.