Against the Tide of Years (14 page)

“Leaving the realm weaker if outsiders attack, as I said.”

Ah. A real thought.
“I know of none such who threaten the Achaean lands,” Odikweos said. “Although the Narrow Sea north of my holdings swarms with pirates these days. Many more than in my grand-sire’s time; of course, we do more trade there, too.”

“And the savages hear of the wealth of the Achaeans,” Walker pointed out. He yawned, then winced. “It’s time for sleep.”

“It is good to yield to drowsy night,” Odikweos agreed.

The housekeeper showed Odikweos to a room, offering to have a bath drawn first if he wished.

“Tomorrow,” he said, looking instead at the lamp she carried.

It lit the dark corridor off the megaron well; a tall wax candle in a bronze holder with a handle, with another bulb of the beautiful crystallike substance around it.
The bulb keeps a draught from making the flame flicker or blowing it out,
he thought. Clever, very clever.

“What is that called, that crystal?” he asked.

“It is called
glass,
lord,” she said, looking surprised at his curiosity. “I know little of these things, but I heard the master say it was made from sand, in fire.”

This man must be beloved of Hephaistos,
the Achaean thought. He’d seen beads of glass, from the eastern lands, but nothing like this.
Nor is he shunned by Ares Enuwarios, either.
An odd combination, the gods of craftsmen and of war.

They came to a bedchamber; unusually, it had a door of wood rather than an embroidered curtain. Another candle on a table beside the bed gave light. The girl waiting within turned down the blankets . . .
another new thing,
Odikweos thought. Over the mattress was a sheath of linen fine enough for a lady’s undergown, and another atop it, beneath the blankets and sheepskins.

The mixer and wine cup beside the bed were usual enough. He filled the cup as he stripped and sat on the bedside. The girl unbuttoned the shoulders of her gown, stepped out of it, and waited with her hands clasped and eyes cast down; young and comely, with good breasts and hips. He patted the bedside, and instead of mounting her at once gave her unwatered wine.

“Tell me your name, little dove,” he said.

She gave him a grateful smile and sipped. He smiled back at her. Odikweos son of Laertes was a man of medium height, his hair black with reddish glints and his eyes hazel, his face still unlined despite a weathered bronze tan.

“I am called Alexandra, master,” she said shyly. With an accent, so that was probably not the name she’d been born with.

“I don’t think you are a repeller of men, though,” he said, punning on her name, for that was its strict meaning. The male form, Alexandros, made more sense.

She laughed, and he spent some time soothing her before he put his hands to her waist and urged her back, which made her ready to welcome him. Afterward they talked more, and it was easy to lead her mind.

Many men forgot that women and servants had ears, and tongues to talk with. Such men were fools. You could learn invaluable things from underlings, and he intended to learn all he could of this strange house. The gods had given him rocky islands on the edge of the world for his demesne. That wasn’t to say that they meant him to spend all his life as a poor underking.

He didn’t think this foreigner chief was a fool of the more obvious kind, either. Something could come of that.

“It seems Moon Woman has sent stars to guide my feet on the path of war,” Swindapa said, with a sigh.

After most of a decade, Marian’s mind translated automatically; the words were English, but the thought was Fiernan. An American would have said:
No getting around it.
Swindapa’s birth-folk were a fatalistic lot.

“We’ve spent more time exploring and building ships than fighting,” she pointed out gently.

“Truth,” the blonde said with another sigh and reached over to squeeze the other woman’s hand. “Moon Woman turned the years themselves in their tracks to give us that.”

Alston laughed. “You know, that’s about as good an explanation as I’ve ever heard,” she said.

Swindapa stroked a hand down the neck of her mount. “The ships are wonderful,” she said. “And horses are almost as much fun as babies.”

They rode side by side, in the shade of the trees left uncut on either side of what was becoming known as the Great West Road down Long Island’s north fork. Leaves fluttered down to meet those already in swales by the ditches and thick on the gravel, drifts of old gold and dark crimson. To their right were patches of wood, of salt marsh noisy with wildfowl, and glimpses of the sound. She reined in for a second to watch a schooner beating eastward, its sails white curves of a purity that made her throat ache for a second.

The other side of the road was a mixture of forest and plowland set out in big square fields—the Meeting had handed out square-mile farms to homesteaders, leaving half the land in forest preserve. Corn-stalks rustled sere and dry in stooked pyramids amid thick-scattered orange pumpkins, next to the almost shocking green of alfalfa; where it had been mown for hay the scent was as sweet as candy. Wheat and barley stubble was dun-yellow and thick with the clover that grazed herds of crossbred sheep. Where teams of oxen or horses pulled disc plows the turned earth was a rich, moist reddish brown, swarming with raucous gulls squabbling over the grubs exposed by the turning steel.

The riders waved to the workers digging potatoes, to shepherds and their barking dogs, to passersby—farm wagons drawn by calm-eyed oxen, the odd rider, and now and then a lone pedestrian.

Alston smiled at the miles of post-and-board edging the fields, remembering the experiment with splitting black walnut for Virginia-style rail fences. Theoretically that should have been cheaper, but it turned out that the use of wedge and maul was something Abe Lincoln must have learned at his father’s knee.

Sure as shit nobody on Nantucket could do it!
she chuckled to herself. Anybody could nail boards, though, and one of Leaton’s people had come up with a simple pile driver to set the posts.

The road dipped into a belt of trees along a creek; planks boomed beneath the hooves of their mounts. Alston felt her horse take a sudden sideways skitter as something squealed angrily. A sounder of pigs erupted from the mud beneath the pilings, scattering into the trees in a twinkle of hooves and brass nose rings. The air was full of a cool, damp, musty smell, leaf mold and turned earth.,

“Gone wild,” Swindapa said. Her eyes raked the woods by the side of the road; they were closing in, as the riders reached beyond the settled zone. “Like that . . . and that.’

Deer Dancer had the Spear Mark tattooed between her breasts, the sign of a hunter among the Fiernan Bohulugi, and Alston was still surprised sometimes at how sharp her eyes were. She pointed around; at a patch of plantain, dandelions, dock, nettles, a honeybee buzzing between the flowers of white clover, a starling flitting between branches.

All things from Nantucket that sailed upstream against the tide of years,
Alston thought. “Like me, sugar,” she went on aloud. “Worse things than being a weed. Means you’re hardy and difficult to get rid of.”

Their laughter echoed in the cathedral stillness of the forest, and they kneed their horses into a canter. Traffic would be thin until they reached the training ground where the republic prepared an answer to Walker’s ambitions.

 

“Rejoice, Oh King,” Walker said, bowing low.

“Rejoice,
ekwetos
Walkeearh,” Agamemnon said, nodding regal benevolence as he stepped down from his chariot.

The wind was blowing across the Lakonian Gulf, cutting the summer heat where the Eurotas River met the sea. All was bustle in the cove sheltered by the rocky headland; workmen, women with jars on their heads, slaves moving loads of all types, wagons full of grain or timber. Rows of mud-brick huts had been built a little inland, and a tall structure with long, armlike sails going around and around. Curious, he walked toward it and through the broad doorway at its base.

“Ah, another of your
mills,
Walkeearh,” he said.

They were no longer so strange that they shed his eyes in bafflement, although this was different from the ones moved by falling water and the interior was dim and dusty, full of loud creaks and grinding stone. Up above, a long pole turned with the sails outside . . .
driven by the wind,
Agamemnon thought.
Clever.
As if the circle of sails was the wheel of a chariot and that pole the axle. That turned a toothed wheel, which turned another wheel on a vertical shaft, and that ran down to ground level. More wheels drove a giant round quern taller than a man, shaped in profile like an old figure-eight shield. Peasants walked up a ramp and tipped jugs of grain into the top. Below, flour poured out of a spout into still larger
pithoi,
storage jugs as tall as a man’s chest. Slaves dragged them across the stone platform and into waiting oxcarts, some of them the big four-wheeled type that Walkeearh had made.

“Swift,” Agamemnon said. “But surely you don’t let your slave women sit in idleness? They can’t earn
all
their keep lying on their backs.”

The outlander laughed politely at his overlord’s jest, along with a couple of the courtiers who’d driven down from Mycenae with the high king. Walkeearh bowed his head again.

“True, lord; this
wind-mill
does the work of five hundred women grinding grain. The women do other chores—work in the fields, or make cloth.”

Agamemnon grunted and scratched his beard.
That sounds . . . sensible,
he thought dubiously. Just as the women in the palace at Mycenae could make more cloth and better, with the new looms and spinners that Walkeearh’s wife the wisewoman (his mind carefully avoided the word “sorceress”) had shown them. Many of the slaves the outlander was using in his
mills
and mines had been bought with that cloth—still more with the silver from new deep shafts in Attica that he’d shown the High King’s men how to make.

And didn’t Wannax Lakedwos of Athens bawl like a newborn calf when I took those for my own,
the Achaean ruler thought with an inward chuckle.

Much of the metal was being stamped into little disks with Agamemnon’s face and titles on them; convenient, since you didn’t have to weigh the silver, and it spread his fame widely. A year ago he wouldn’t have dared to seize the mines, but with cannon and mortars vassal kings suddenly felt far less secure. He chuckled, imagining Nestor in Pylos or Lakedwos in Athens sitting at meat and looking up now and then, expecting a bursting shell to crash through their roof-trees.

Still, there was something about all this that made him uneasy, something of the feeling of a chariot whose team had run wild, or even of an earthquake. He quickly made a sign of the horns with his left hand and spat to avert the omen.

“Show me the ships you are building,” he said, as they came back into the sunlight and slapped flour dust off their tunics.

“This way, my king.”

There was one floating at a pier with men swarming over it, and another half built in a timber cradle at the shore. Agamemnon bit his lip in puzzlement at that one. The way the carpenters worked on it was very strange; instead of mortising the planks together with tongue-and-groove joints and then putting in ribs to strengthen the shell, they were putting up thick ribs and crossbeams and then nailing a shell of planks to them. Several forges stood around it, red-glowing iron hissing as it was quenched in vats of oil or water.

“Doesn’t that take much metal?” he asked, pointing to the crews nailing the long oak planks to the frame.

“My lord sees as clearly as Horus, the Falcon of Egypt,” Walkeearh said. “But now we
have
much metal. And building a ship in this way is so much quicker than the old manner. Less skill is needed, and it’s stronger as well.”

Agamemnon almost rubbed his hands. All tin and most copper for the making of bronze had to be imported, and it was so expensive, especially the tin. Iron came from within his kingdom, and it grew cheaper by the day. Cheap for
him,
at least. The mines and smelters were a royal monopoly, by Walkeearh’s suggestion and his decree—under Walkeearh’s exclusive management, and Walkeearh could not be a menace, an outlander who owed everything to the King of Men’s favor.

That gave him a hand on every vassal’s throat. Gunpowder and cannon gave him a spearpoint held to their eyes.

“Show me the finished one,” he said.

“This way. It’s called a
gullet,
Lord King.”

Footsteps boomed out along the wharf. He looked keenly at the ship; unlike any he’d ever seen before, it was fully decked, a smooth sweep of planking from pointed prow to rounded stern. Two masts stood tall, whole pine trees smoothed down and glossy as a table, with furled sails. On either side six small cannon waited, on stubby oak carriages with four little wheels. Crewmen scattered from the king’s path as he came up the gangplank—and from the ready spearpoints of his guards, glittering steel-bright in the noonday sun.