Against the Tide of Years (36 page)

Clemens gently covered the girl, then checked pulse and temperature. “She may make it,” he said in slow wonder.

He went to the door. “Tell the king that his concubine lives and that he has a daughter,” he said. “She cannot be disturbed . . .
quiet, I tell you!
She hangs between life and death and cannot be disturbed and will be weak for some time; nor will she bear more children. Take my word to the king, and leave this place in peace! You, you, you—sit quietly over there, on that bench, and wait in case something is needed.”

The Islander doctor turned back in, pulled down his mask with a weary sigh. Azzu-ena was standing and drinking the water-and-supplements Smith had handed her, looking frail and out of place in the green surgical gown and cap. She put the glass down and faced him.

“What is your name,
asu
of the Eagle People?”

“Justin Clemens,” he said, and added with a wry smile, “Clemens son of Edgar.”

Suddenly the Babylonian woman’s reserve broke. Clemens blinked in astonishment as she fell to her knees at his feet.

“Teach me, Jus’hikin son of Eg-gar!” she said.

“What? ” he said, bemused.

“Teach me!”

Words poured out of her in a torrent, until he gestured and she slowed the stream down, pronouncing each word with desperate clarity so that the foreigner would understand.

“I am the daughter of an
asu,
and because he had no sons he taught me. Because I am a woman and raised in the palace, they give me some work here in the harem. My father was a wise man, a good man—and all he taught me is nothing, nothing. I have watched the sorcerors, and the spirits do not hear them, for those they treat live or die as they would if nothing was done.
Sometimes
I can help the sick, but so often I try and try and still they die, and I can do nothing but at least I
knew
I could do nothing and you
can
and I must know—”

She took a deep breath. “I own a small house in the
babtum,
the city-ward, of Mili-la-El, near the Eastern Gate. I will sell it and give you all I have.” She clutched at his trousers. “I have no parents, no brothers to object—I will be your slave, scrub and clean and weave, if only you will let me learn—if you will only let me
watch
what you do!”

Clemens opened his mouth on a refusal as kind as he could make it, and then closed it again, remembering.

He remembered the pain of it, the lost tools, the knowledge useless without technologies that Nantucket did not have, facing parents who had to be told that their child was gone, husbands, wives, brothers. It had been even worse for his teachers, Doctor Coleman and the others. They’d never despaired, never stopped teaching, never stopped
looking
for ways to make up their lacks.

“What? What do you say, lord?”

“The words of an oath,” he said in Akkadian. “Rise, Azzu-ena. If you would learn, I will teach you, as best I can.”

 

 

A
camel gave its burbling moan, and that set off the whole train of seven pair that were hauling the headquarters wagon.
God, but I hate those things,
Ian Arnstein thought. The Babylonians of this age knew little about camels and were convinced they were possessed by demons. He wasn’t altogether sure they were wrong. They stank, they bit, they spat green mucus at anyone who came near, and they complained every waking hour in voices like guttural damned souls. Their only merit was that they could carry or haul three times what a horse did, further and faster and on less water and rougher forage.

The army of King Shuriash of Babylon sprawled out over the dun-colored flatness of the landscape in clots and driblets and clusters, half lost in its own plumes of beige dust. The king’s paid men and the retinues of the nobles near the capital had been brave with banners and polished armor when they left Kar-Duniash, but now everything was the color of the grit kicked up by feet and hooves or the homespun of the tribal contingents and peasant levies hurrying to join them from every side.

Sometimes there was a hint of hills on the eastern horizon, the topmost peaks of the Zagros. Sometimes there was a hint of a breeze, like something out of the mouth of a smelting furnace but still welcome when it dried the sweat. Ian unhitched a canvas water bag from the big six-wheeled wagon’s bed and expertly directed a squirt into his mouth. It tasted of silt and the chlorine powder used to sterilize it, and it was no more than tepid from the evaporation. It was still utterly glorious, especially if you kept all memory of ice-cold beer firmly out of your mind.

And now they were approaching a belt of intense green, where the Diyala River spilled its moisture onto the plain. That made the air very slightly muggy, hence even more intolerable, and there would be bugs.
Oh, will there ever be bugs,
Ian thought.

“Could be worse,” Doreen said. Like him, she was wearing khaki shorts and shirt. Beads of sweat ran down the open neck and made the cotton fabric cling to her in ways that would have been more interesting if it wasn’t so hot. “We could be marching and carrying packs.”

Ian nodded. The Marines’ khaki uniforms were wet with sweat and stained where multiple layers had soaked in and then dried to leave a rime of salt. The faces under the broad-brimmed hats were set, remote, fixed in a mask of endurance. Now and then one would hawk and spit, the saliva colored like the earth that lay thick and gritty on everyone’s teeth; every hour they broke for a ten-minute rest, and the noncoms would check to see everyone was taking their salt tablets and enough water. Once every day or so someone would keel over, swaying or staggering or just falling limp as a sack of rice; the more extreme cases ended up on the wagons with a saline drip in their arm.

“Hup! Hup!”

Colonel Hollard came riding across the plain on his camel, the beasts’s long, swarming pace spooking the horses drawing a Babylonian noble’s chariot into a blue-eyed, flat-eared bolt even in the heat.
Or maybe it’s their smell. Probably their smell.
Another camel paced beside him, carrying a short, swarthy man with a wide white grin and streaks of gray in his beard; Hassan el-Durabi, an ex-Kuwaiti whose wealthy family had raised racing camels and who’d been vacationing on the Island when the Event came.

The two men pulled up their mounts beside the headquarters wagon, saluting.

“Good beasts, Councilor,” Hassan said, stroking his camel’s neck and then giving it a flick on the nose with his quirt when it tried to turn its long, snaky neck and bit him on the kneecap. “Those Aramaean pigs we bought them from know nothing of handling them, nothing.”

Ian nodded, smiling pleasantly; the Kuwaiti had been gleefully pleased to end up making war in Iraq, with the king of Assyria standing in well for Saddam Hussein—they
did
seem to have a good deal in common, methods-wise.

The nomads to the southwest had taken to using camels recently, but they were still trying to ride them sitting on the rump rather than on a proper saddle over the hump itself, and their pack-loading arrangements weren’t much better. Most of the Aramaeans herded sheep on foot, with their gear on the backs of their donkeys and women. The Arabs’ turn wouldn’t come until long after the end of the Bronze Age.

Or would have come, if we hadn’t showed up,
he thought.

“What’s the word?” Ian asked the Marine colonel.

“The Assyrians were supposed to be massing their forces on the middle Tigris,” Hollard said, pointing north and westward with his quirt. “We’re coming in this way to threaten Asshur from the rear. Prince Kashtiliash thought they’d be unlikely to guard it because it’s considered too hard to cross these rivers. However, from the latest reports they
are
there in some force. The usual thing—enemy not cooperating with our battle plan.”

“I presume we can cross the river?” Doreen said.

“Oh, yes,” Hollard said simply. “A matter of firearms and combat engineering, really.”

 

The game path was narrow, where it led down from the ridge above the bay of Port Luthuli. Marian smiled to herself as she looked around; in the twentieth century she’d been born in, this had been a very exclusive—and very
white
—suburb of Durban, South Africa. Her party was strung out along the slope on a dense-packed trackway of sandy earth, with trees towering a hundred feet and more on either side. The ground was thick with brush, including a particularly nasty type with hooked thorns that made it impossible to move off the trail; one of the Alban Marines had named it the wait-a-bit bush, for what you had to do whenever it snagged your clothing.

She shifted the rifle sling a little with her thumb and looked backward. Swindapa was next in line behind her, then a Marine who’d stripped to the waist in the humid heat; behind him were the ones toting the kills of the hunt, carrying the gutted carcasses on poles that were thrust under their bound feet. Marian smiled again, letting it grow into a rare public grin.

Damn, but it
does
look a lot like a Tarzan-movie safari,
she thought.

Except, of course, that the one in the lead with the rifle and khakis and floppy hat was black as coal, and the native bearers were white. Nordics at that . . .

Swindapa caught her eye and looked a question. Marian replied with a gesture that meant “later” between them; the Fiernan found uptime racial divisions hilarious.

The answering smile died away to a frown, and Swindapa looked back over her shoulder. Marian threw up a hand, for a halt and silence. She couldn’t hear anything, but Swindapa’s ears were younger, and better trained.

“Pass,” she said, waving a hand; the party filed by her. “What do you think it is, ’dapa?”

“I don’t know,” the blond woman said. She took off her hat and threw herself down on the ground, pressing an ear to it. “Whatever it is, it’s heavy and coming this way.” The frown grew deeper. “But those . . . those are footfalls, I think. People.”

“Uh-oh,” Marian said, unslinging her rifle and scanning the brush.

Nothing, except the insects and swarming colorful birds, and grunts and whistles and screeches crashing off in the bush.

The Fiernan came upright, checking the priming on her rifle. Marian raised her voice: “Corporal, you and the party with the game continue.” It was only about a mile and half to base by the water’s edge. “Miller, Llancraxsson, get your weapons ready, but do
not
fire without orders.” The path was far too narrow for that; Swindapa’s shoulder was nearly touching hers. “Be ready to pass your rifles forward, in fact.”

Now she could hear the thudding too, or feel it through the soles of her feet. Salt sweat ran down onto her lips, and she licked it away. The sight of two small human figures a hundred yards away was almost painfully anticlimactic. A little closer and she recognized them, the race if not the individuals; San, the little yellow-brown hunters Europeans had—would have—met at the Cape twenty-five hundred years from now. Here and now they were the only inhabitants of southern and eastern Africa; Islander ships had met them all the way from what would have been Angola around up to Somalia-that-wasn’t. They varied a lot from place to place, but they weren’t usually hostile if you didn’t give them reason to be; the ones near Mandela Base traded eagerly with the Nantucketers.

“That can’t be all . . .” Swindapa began.

One of the San hunters was helping the other along; a sprained or broken ankle, from the look of it. They were looking back over their shoulders, too; so intently that they weren’t aware of the Islanders until they were barely fifty yards away. Then the hale one looked up, saw the strangers, gave a cry of despair, and launched himself at a tree by the side of the trail. Agile as a sailor in the rigging, he disappeared up it in a single swarming burst of speed.

“Maybe they had a bad experience with the Tartessians,” Marian murmured. She let the rifle fall back on her shoulder, turning the muzzle away from the San hunter, and held up her left hand.

“Peace,” she said, and used the equivalent in the tongue of his Cape relatives, or as close as a tongue reared on English could.

He probably can’t understand it,
she thought. It
was
two thousand miles away, after all, and her accent was probably terrible.
But the sound will be more like what he’s used to than English.

The small man looked at her, then over his shoulder, then he hobbled toward the Islander party, using his bow as a crutch. As he came he was shouting something in his silibant clicking tongue, pointing behind him. When he fell nearly at Alston’s feet he squeezed his eyes shut and put his hands over his head.

“Uh . . . ma’am?” one of the ratings behind her said. “Maybe if something’s chasing him, we ought to move?”

“I’d rather see it coming, Miller,” she said. “Quiet now.”

A noise came echoing down the trail, a long shrill sound like . . .
like a trumpet. Trumpeting . . . what sort of an animal trumpets . . . oh
, shit.

Marian and her partner were experienced hunters. The problem was that neither of them had hunted elephant.

Clairton
, she remembered, at Mandela Base.
Of course, Clairton said that the best way was to get behind them and brain-shoot them just behind the ear. That’s a really
big
help right now
. . .

The ground-shaking thudding grew louder, and the shrill, enraged squealing sounded again, ear-hurting loud.
Can’t run
, she thought. Elephants were a
lot
faster than people, and they could trample through thick brush that would stop a human cold. Swindapa was chanting under her breath, a song of the Spear Mark, asking the spirits of her kills to witness that she’d never hunted without need or failed to sing home the ghost of the dead beast.