On the Oceans of Eternity (55 page)

“What I hadn’t expected was to actually
like
her,” he said to himself—again in English.

He hadn’t had one woman around for long since Ygwaina died in childbirth, just before they got chased out of Alba. Even now, he shuddered at that memory.
Could Hong have saved her, if she’d given a damn?
Walker had told him Captain Alston was raising the daughter he’d never seen—told him with that goddamn half smile, half sneer ...

His son by Miw-Sherri was going on nine months now, and both were doing fine.

“My husband?” Miw-Sherri—the name meant “kitten”—said.

“Just thanking the Gods for you, Sherri,” he said, and she snuggled in against him. Egyptians didn’t have the Achaean taboo on public displays of affection.

“And thinking deep thoughts,” she said, poking a finger into his midriff. “Forgetting that Djehuty and Takushet are coming to dinner.”

He slapped his forehead and grinned at her. “I leave all that to you,” he said. “Like the wise man in the tale, I ‘watch and am silent, recognizing your talents.’ ”

“Go then, go,” she said, laughing. At seventeen she was young but a woman by Egyptian standards, and proud of her skill at managing a great nobleman’s household.

He went, out into the private garden near the villa’s chapel. There he stripped to his loincloth and took up the
bokken,
looking forward to burning off some of the frustration of a meeting at the palace. He’d gotten into the
iajutsu
habit during the years with Walker—relaxing, and healthy, and occasionally horribly useful. The household staff knew better than to disturb the master. He lost himself in the movements, patterned choreography of breath and will, until he looked up two hours later, running with sweat and chest heaving deep and slow. Something teased at his awareness—

Blank-faced, he took up Martins’s
dai-katana,
sliding the long steel free of the sheath and raising it in both hands, right hand over left on the long hilt.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” he said, without looking over his shoulder. Then:

The blade swept down. right to left, and the shoulder and arm of the papyrus-reed man-shape before him fell in a clump, the tough springy reeds sheered clear away. Another
kia,
and the return sweep bisected the whole figure.

He turned. The man leaning on his spear watching him was so black that he almost vanished in the shadow of the painted wooden pillars that upbore the portico, like a statue carved in ebony; as tall as McAndrews but a little more lightly built. His kilt was the skin of lions, and a swath of the mane lay on his shoulders; his face was marked by three parallel sets of gouges on each cheek, and by a lion’s steady stare from dark eyes. Raw gold circled his arms, a necklace of lion fangs and gold around his neck, and a light bronze Egyptian army-issue fighting ax was tucked into his belt.

“You speak this language?” McAndrews said in Egyptian, going through the ritual of cleaning and sheathing the blade, his hands and face steady as rock despite the hammering of his heart.

“I learn it from traders,” the other man said, and nodded. Ocher-dyed braids moved, and the ostrich plumes they carried. “And to fight the Horse Masters, the men of Khem. I am Ghejo, chief among the Marazwe, whom your messenger gave safe-conduct over the border and north to this place.”

Suddenly he grinned, teeth very white. “I knew that you were rich, Mek-Andrus. I had heard that you were a wizard. and believed it, from the weapons you gave the Horse Masters. I had heard also that you were a warrior ... and now I believe that, too.”

McAndrews nodded curtly; he had a fair collection of battle scars now.
Yeah, this is a dude you wouldn’t disrespect. But so am I, these days.

“You are my guest,” McAndrews said. confering semisacred status on his visitor.

He turned and dived into the tile-edged pool, swam a length, then hauled himself out. Attendants brought a towel and a fresh kilt, set out a table in the shade of the portico, loaded it with roast duck, fresh wheat bread, a salad, steamed vegetables. and a bowl of fruit. Ghejo ate the duck and bread with enthusiasm and looked at the greens as if his host were eating weeds. McAndrews hid a shudder as the Kushite smacked his lips over a jug of Egyptian beer. The stuff was brewed from a fermented mash of barley bread, and tasted like it.

“So,” Ghejo said at last. “You are a warrior, a wizard, and have great wealth.”

He looked around, obviously determined to be unimpressed and equally obviously awe-smitten.

“What do you wish with us poor desert dwellers?” he went on, a sardonic note in his voice.

“Because you don’t build temples like the Egyptians, or write on papyrus, I don’t imagine you’re a fool,” McAndrews said. “I’m not an Egyptian myself.”

“Yes,” the chiefs son said, considering him. “You look more like us—and your voice is not quite a Khemite’s. Tales reach us from Elephantine, at the first cataract, where you build your wizard weapons, that you are from a far, strange land. I still ask my question.”

McAndrews ate a fig. “Your spear is a good weapon,” he said. It was—seven feet of ironwood, with a bronze butt-spike and a long bronze head. “Have your people many like it?”

Ghejo scowled. “You know we do not,” he said. “The Horse Masters take our ivory, ebony, plumes, gold dust, slaves, and give us a pittance. When we fight them, we have spears with heads of bone or stone against their bronze, and no chariots. Now we face your thunder-death-makers as well.”

McAndrews nodded; with their only real trade route downstream to Egypt, the free Kushites—dwellers in what he’d known as the northern Sudan—were on the receiving end of a monopoly.

“Spearheads are made of copper and tin,” McAndrews said. “Or they were, until I brought the art of iron and steel to these lands.”

He clapped his hands; a guard brought a sword. It was made to a traditional Egyptian pattern, a half-moon slashing blade with a short straight section above the hilt, called a kopesh. This was blue-gray gleaming steel, though. The hilt was checked olive wood and the pommel gold and lapis. It was the blade that drew Ghejo’s eyes; they lit as he took it up, tested the edge, stood to sweep it through a few practice slashes.

“A gift,” McAndrews said grandly.

“A good gift!” Ghejo replied.

“The ore from which this iron is made,” McAndrews said, wiping his mouth on a linen napkin and eating a fig, “is common in your land.”

Ghejo’s head came up with a snap like a striking snake. “Say you so?” he breathed softly.

McAndrews smiled, carefully prepared words moving behind his eyes. “I do,” he said. “Isn’t that interesting?”

Ghejo’s eyes narrowed, and he nodded. McAndrews had picked up considerable experience with barbarians over the past ten years. Most of them weren’t much moved by the prospect of being civilized; civilization meant someone like Ramses hitting you up with the bill for his palaces and wars and forty-foot gold statues. He
had
found that barbarians were just as enchanted as anyone else at the prospect of wealth, and their chiefs were as greedy for power as any Pharaoh. The trick would be to make any arrangement took like a good solid exchange of value-for-value, from someone their bloodthirsty code could let them respect. They were strange, but not necessarily fools.

Meroe,
he thought, as the verbal fencing went on.

The first great sub-Saharan African kingdom had been there, about where Khartoum was in the original history. It was through there that ironworking had spread to the black peoples. That was slated for five hundred years from now, though, in a history that wasn’t going to happen. In
this
history, the rest of the world was getting an enormous leg up while black Africans were still just getting started. Egypt had more people than all the rest of the continent put together. Most of Africa was still pygmy and bushman country, nearly empty. His own black ancestors were a thin fringe of farmers and herdsmen along the southern edge of the Sahara. They’d barely begun the great millennia-long migration that would take them all the way to Zululand in the Iron Age, and make them masters of the tropical jungles.

It’s not that Alston
wants
to do down Mother Africa,
he thought grudgingly.
Or even Cofflin and the others.

She—all the Islanders—just didn’t much care. West Africa wasn’t worth their while, considering the effort it would take to push through to the few Neolithic farmers of the savannahs. With so much easier and more agreeable territory open to them ...

But if
someone
didn’t do something, outsiders would take the empty parts of Africa—he’d seen how when farmers met hunters, the farmers pushed the hunters aside without even really noticing they were there. And if the Islanders were too principled to do it, others who’d learned from them would. Black folk would be confined to a little patch in the northwest of the continent, and they’d be an enclave of primitives even there, easy victims for any aggressor.

Ghejo wouldn’t know what he was talking about, if he tried to explain.

“You are rich here,” the chief said. “You have great power here. Why do you wish to make alliance with us? We live in little villages, or follow our herds.” By the way he was looking around, Ghejo wouldn’t mind an alternative lifestyle himself.

“I have wealth and power here,” McAndrews said. “But I also have many enemies here. If they prevail against me, I would have somewhere to go ... but not as a fugitive, dependent on the favor of others. And with me I could bring many others, skilled in making”—he nodded to the steel
kopesh—
“and other things besides; the fire-weapons.”

“Ahhh ...” Ghejo said. McAndrews recognized the look; it was a man seeing possibilities. “We must speak more of this—and I must consult my neighbors ...”

“You will go from here with rich gifts,” McAndrews said, smiling. “And perhaps you and many others might gain some experience with the new weapons in the war that begins soon, if you could furnish troops and workmen ...”

There was a lot of potential around Meroe. He knew how to build dams and canals—the area south of Khartoum had plenty of land that could be watered, to support millions of people where now a few villagers scratched fields of millet and herded goats. There was iron ore nearby, and other minerals fairly close. If he wanted a better climate, the Ethiopian highlands were right there to the east, and to west it was flat open grasslands for six thousand miles to the Atlantic. Easy for innovations to spread. When the Nantucketers, or the Achaeans, landed from their helicopters, they weren’t going to find nekkid savages with grass skirts, nohow.

“N
o I don’t think retreating blisters hurt any worse than advancing blisters,” Private Vaukel Telukuo said seriously, glancing down at his moving boots. “About the same, they are.”

“That’s supposed to be a
joke,
Vauk, you great Fiernan gowk,” Johanna Gwenhaskieths growled.

When she glanced aside and saw his grin she gave him a halfhearted elbow in the ribs.

“Could be worse,” he said. “Could be raining.”

“It
was
raining half the morning,” she replied.

That was obvious enough; the track they followed to the southeast was deep in mud. That clung to boots, adding a half pound to every step, and a constant squelching undertone. Her company was near the end of the front section, two hundred and fifty helmeted heads ahead of her, then the baggage and sick-carts, then about as many more behind that. It looked a formidable host to her eyes; ten times as many fighting men as her clan had, about as many as her whole
teuatha.

Former tribe,
she reminded herself. Some might go back to iAlba after their hitch, but she certainly couldn’t.
The Corps is my clan and the Republic my tribe now. And this is a piss-poor excuse for a road.

Especially compared to the watertight ones in Nantucket. It was pretty obvious that someone had driven a big herd of cattle this way not long ago; Johanna looked at the cowpats and hoofprints with envy. Driving off cattle was
fun;
besides, it meant beef.

Somebody ahead stumbled, and she cursed as she checked and nearly stumbled herself in the slippery mud. She cursed again, silently, as she tried to get her legs back into the automatic rhythm that would carry her along without much thinking on how they hurt. It was well past the stop for the noon meal, but not nearly time to break off the day’s march and make camp.

Helmet, rifle, bayonet, entrenching tool, two grenades, canteen, a hundred rounds in her bandolier and another hundred in the haversack, four pounds of dog biscuit and jerky with a couple of onions and some salt, bedroll, her share of her eight-Marine section’s unit equipment, starting with a section of canvas boiled in linseed oil ... At the beginning of a day, it didn’t seem like much. When you’d been marching or fighting or both every day for a week, it began to feel like you were carrying a chiefs chariot on your back.

“What I don’t understand,” she said, scratching, “is why we keep retreating. We beat the Ringapi at O’Rourke’s Ford, we handled Walker’s handfast men pretty rough seven days later at Fork Mountain—and every time, as soon as they break off we back off. All we’ve really done is burn farms and forage. What’s the point?”