Against the Tide of Years (23 page)

“We’ve a luncheon laid on,” the man—
Marvin Lockley,
he remembered—began.

“Later,” Alston snapped. “I think we need to have a discussion, Mr. Lockley.”

Not using his militia rank,
Ian noted.

She turned. “Colonel Hollard, Captain Nguyen, please see to disembarking the troops and passengers,” she went on in a flat, even tone that anyone who knew her recognized as the danger signal it was.

She turned on one heel and strode away, the luckless Lockley trailing in her wake. Ian followed, looking about. A cat lay in the shade of a thatched hut, nursing kittens. For a moment he accepted the sight, then grunted in shock.

That litter represents half a dozen feral cats in the making,
he thought.
Dane Sweet will
have
kittens himself.
The Councilor for Conservation had been nervous about colonizing the home of the dodo anyway, and he and his faction had insisted on safeguards. Which, evidently, Mr. Lockley had let slip. A pregnant Fiernan girl waved to them; she was wearing nothing but a palm-frond hat and driving a sow ahead of her with a stick.
Feral pigs, too.
They were supposed to be strictly penned. A man in ragged shorts sat propped against a wall, a jug beside him . . .

“I notice that the water-furrow and the sawmill are incomplete,” Alston said in a conversational tone.

“Ah . . . we’ve had some difficulties . . . hard to get parts . . .”

“I see. I think we should discuss this, Commandant.”

They turned into what was evidently the commandant’s quarters, a series of thatched rondavels. Swindapa halted outside and made a sign to Ian and Doreen; they did likewise and shushed their son. Voices came from within. He couldn’t follow them for the most part, not until near the end, when Alston’s voice rose to a quarterdeck bellow:

“
This may be an
island,
and it may be a
tropical
island, BUT IT ISN’T
GILLIGAN’S
GOD-DAMNED ISLAND—YOU HEAR ME, MISTER?
”

A moment later they came out. Lockley was gray-white under his tan, and shaking. Alston stood blinking in the sunlight for a second. The troops from the
Eagle
were filing ashore, then being dismissed; the civilian technicians and specialists and their families followed. Her eyes came to rest on Lucy and Heather, and a little of the stiffness went out of her shoulders.

“Mr. Nguyen,” she said.

The Vietnamese-American officer came to attention as the commodore went on: “Mr. Lockley has decided to resign his position here and ship out on the
Eagle
as a foremast hand. Rate him ‘seaman recruit’ and see that he’s assigned some fatigues.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ms. Stearns.”

The former commandant’s second-in-command swallowed and braced herself. “Ma’am?”

“In the light of Mr. Lockley’s resignation, I’m provisionally appointing you commandant of Mauritius Base. With the expeditionary force and the crews, we have more than a thousand pairs of hands here; we ought to be able to get things shipshape in fairly short order.” A pause. “Shouldn’t we?”

“Yes,
ma’am.
”

“Good.” She sighed. “Now, let’s see about that lunch.”

Doreen gave Ian a silent whistle behind the commodore’s back and waggled a hand. He nodded agreement. As they walked away, Swindapa dropped back beside them for a moment.

“Ian,” she said, frowning slightly, “who’s Gilligan?”

 

“Let go, and haul!”

A squared ebony log jerked up off the pier, then swung out over the deck of the
Eagle
as the yard acting as crane pivoted on the mast.

“Heave . . .
ho
! Heave . . .
ho
!”

“Handsomely there, handsomely!”

Captain Nguyen lowered his speaking-trumpet and turned to Marian Alston.

“That’s the last of them, Commodore,” he said with quiet pride. He bent a critical eye on his ship. “I’m glad we finally got around to installing a proper hold. She trims well, even so.”

“That she does, although I’d like to see her under way,” Alston said. “She’s a little by the stern.”

“Better that than dead-level. I’d been meaning to come at the ballast and shift it a bit anyway. Less likely to press her forefoot down under full sail that way.”

“She’s your baby,” Alston agreed, suppressing an inner pang.
Promoted away from ship command, goddammit,
she thought.

“That’s the last of the cargo loaded, and we’re wooded and watered,” Nguyen said. He nodded toward the other ships of the flotilla. “Ready to sail with the evening tide, ma’am.”

“Well, we’re not in
that
much of a hurry.” Theoretically, the stop-over on Mauritius was supposed to rest the expeditionary force’s people before the action at the end of it. Instead they’d spent an effortful week getting the base itself shipshape.

“Watch crews only,” she went on. “We’ll give everyone a day or two of leave, then get under way. Morning tide on Monday—oh-nine-hundred hours. Lieutenant Commander, pass the word.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Swindapa said, conscientiously marking it in the daybook to be issued as a general order.

Cheers and flung hats rose to the sky as Nguyen announced the leave and then exchanged salutes with the commodore. Alston removed her billed cap, sighed, and ran fingers over her damp forehead and close-cropped hair as they walked back up the single street of the little settlement.

“Looks better,” Swindapa said.

Alston nodded. It did; the major buildings were all completed, the sawmill in action, livestock neatly penned, and the hollow-log aqueduct had filled the casks and tanks of each ship in turn as they were warped in to the dock. Good spring water too, not likely to go bad out in the middle of nowhere. Hollard’s Marines were still putting the finishing touches on the fort, adding stone retaining walls below the earth ramparts. The colonel was lending a hand himself, stripped to the waist, sweat-shining skin rippling as he heaved an eighty-pound block into position. She caught Swindapa’s frank look of appreciation and mock-scowled.

“
Just
looking,” the Fiernan said. “I look at girls, too.”

“As long as it’s strictly a visual relationship,” Alston chuckled. She added, “He’s setting a good example for his troops.”

Alston’s expression softened into a smile as they came to the circle of children sitting under a tall, slender tree with a silvery-gray trunk—a tambalacoque. Doreen Arnstein was taking the class, pointing alternately to a live dodo in a wicker cage and a diagram on the portable blackboard. There were around three dozen youngsters, mostly children of the technicians attached to the expeditionary force. This was a long-term project, and you couldn’t expect people to leave their children behind for an indefinite stay.

They waited for a moment while the assistant councilor for foreign affairs finished her rundown on evolutionary biology and younger children continued practicing the alphabet on their slates.
Nantucket’s still small enough to be informal,
Alston thought.
I like that.
It was also small enough that Martha Cofflin had managed to thoroughly revamp the curriculum, and as a parent she liked that even better—they saw eye to eye on phonics and drill, and even Lisa Gerrard had come around on most of it.

Gerrard’s not a
bad
councilor,
Alston thought.
Just a bit stubborn.
She’d even shed most of her prejudices.
After nearly nine years of working with a real, live, breathing, capital-L Lesbian.

The class broke up. Heather and Lucy came running, and Alston crouched, grabbed the redhead under her arms and swung her up.

“Do Jesus, either you’re getting heavy or I’m getting older!” she said.

“Hey, Mom, did you know these gonzo birds could
fly
once but they got too lazy?” Heather said.

“No, it was their ’cestors who could fly,” Lucy said from Swindapa’s shoulders. “That’s why you get sunburnt and I don’t. ’cause of your ’cestors. It’s evolutionary adoption.”

“That’s adaptation,” Swindapa corrected.

“Like I said, Mom.”

Heather stuck out her tongue at her sister, and Alston felt her heart turn over inside her.
Nice to know what you’re fighting for.

 

 

“T
he King comes! Eat dirt before
shar kibrat ’arbaim,
the King of the Four Quarters of the Earth! King of Sumer and Akkad, King of Kar-Duniash, King of Babylon, Ensi of Marduk. . . .”

The great audience hall of Ur was tense, dense-packed with robed clerks, priests in old-style wraps that left one shoulder bare, and soldiers with their beards freshly oiled and curled. The hot still air smelled of that perfumed oil, sweat, and fear. Light from the small, high windows stabbed into the gloom hot and bright, breaking off the colors of tapestries and murals that showed the king’s ancestors at war, at the hunt, making sacrifice to the gods. Save for the ever-watchful royal guard, all went down on their bellies as the king entered.

“Shagarakti-Shuriash, son of Kudur-Enlil, son of Kadashman-Enlil, descendant of the kings who were before the kings, unto whom the Gods have given rule!
La sanan, sa mahira la isu!
The king who has no rival! O King, live forever!”

Shagarakti-Shuriash seated himself and made a sign. The crowd rose, standing with folded hands and downcast eyes, as was seemly.

“Let the king’s servant Kidin-Ninurta approach! Let the king’s servant Arad-Samas approach!”

Kidin-Ninurta cast a single burning glance at his rival as they prostrated themselves before the throne. When they rose, he found himself under the king’s gaze.

Shagarakti-Shuriash was a man in his early middle years, with gray in his curled beard; he was perhaps a little lighter of skin and more hawkish of feature than his average subject, legacy of the Kassite hillmen and Mitannian princesses among his ancestors. His body was stocky and thick with muscle, beginning to grow at the waist but at ease in the gorgeous embroidered linen of his robe. Gray-streaked black hair was clubbed at the base of his head with gold wire and confined around his brows with a circlet of gold shaped like a city wall.

“I have come a long way from Babylon,” he said.
This had better be worth my time,
came unspoken afterward.

The brown eyes were hard and weary; he had been on the throne for only three years in his own right, but much of the toil of kingship had been his during the long reigns of his father and grandfather, campaigning in the north and east.

“Let the king’s overseer of trade with Dilmun and Meluhha speak.”

“O King, my lord, your servant Kidin-Ninurta prays that the gods grant you long life and health! Your servant has met with the strangers from the south. Your servant has spoken with the strangers from the south. They approach from the south, in great ships; from the lands of Dilmun and Meluhha they approach. From the days of the kings your fathers all such affairs have been the province of my office; so decreed the kings who were before the king.”

Arad-Samas was swelling like a frog with the need to speak. When the king granted permission, he burst out:

“O King, my lord, may the gods, the great gods, the mighty gods make your days many in the land! From the time of the kings your fathers, diplomatic correspondence has gone through
my
office. Letters with the kings your brothers of Assyria, of Hatti-land, of Egypt, of Elam, have passed through my office. It is my task for the king to—”

“The strangers appear from the south, in the direction of Dilmun and Meluhha! Precedent—”

“They are not of Dilmun! The are not of Meluhha! My office—”

“Silence!”

The bureaucrats bent their heads and folded hands; the king made a quick quirk of the hand toward his personal secretary. There was a swift juggling of tablets, and the man read:

“From the king’s servant Arad-Samas to the king’s servant Kidin-Ninurta; health, prosperity, life. You write once more of rumors of foreigners in great ships at Dilmun. What is this to me? The Assyrians have broken the Mitanni and prowl the northern borders like wolves about a sheep pen; Egypt and Hatti-land have made a peace and speak not of Asshur’s deeds. The Elamites are hungrier than the jackal and more cunning than the serpent. I have greater concerns than the ships of merchants in the Southern Sea.”

Kidin-Ninurta smiled within himself and bowed his head.
There are some things that should not be written down on the clay.
His father had taught him that. It made it so difficult to switch positions later. He thought fondly of the ingot of pure silver that rested in the strong room of his house, the gift of the strangers. The strangers who had come to the Land and shown that they
were
of consequence, as he had said and Arad-Samas had denied in writing . . .

“Let Kidin-Ninurta speak,” the king went on. “Let others withdraw.”

Amid considerable rustling and clanking, most of the crowd filed out the exits; except for the guard, of course, and some of the king’s advisers and wisemen, and the king’s heir from the House of Succession, his son Kashtiliash.

“O King, your servant speaks. For five years merchants returning from Dilmun have spoken of strange ships.”

“How, strange?”

“Huge, O King. Larger than any ship seen before, and laden with goods so fine that they might have been made by magic and the arts of demons. I thought these tales to be wild—does not every sailor returning from Dilmun speak of wonders? Yet the tales are true; the truth is wilder than the tales!”

Shuriash nodded thoughtfully. He had seen some of those goods. Glass clearer than water, or in colors impossibly vivid; small mirrors better than burnished bronze or silver; most of all, knives and tools of the northern metal,
iron.
Better iron than any he had ever been able to get from his “brother” Tudhaliya in Hattusas; a knife of it was at his waist now, with the plain bone hilt replaced with gold wire. Small things, but beyond price.