Against the Tide of Years (46 page)

Ian looked out the turned-back flaps of the tent, past the sentries and the ordered buff-colored tent town of the Marine camp. The
Emancipator
was circling over the city of Asshur, looking fairly large even at this distance. As he watched, a string of black dots tumbled away beneath it and the dirigible bounced upward as the weight left it. The bombs fell on their long, arching trajectories, and columns of black gouted upward. He could smell the smoke of burning from here; the gunboats on the Tigris were keeping the defenders limited to what water they could draw from wells and cisterns inside the battered walls, leaving little for fighting the blazes.

“King Shuriash has a whole bunch of delegations from the principal cities and tribes and whatnot of Assyria here under safe conduct,” he said, changing the subject slightly. “We’re running a bluff. If we can convince them that they
have
to give up, they will . . . and that’ll get us out of a very deep hole. If anyone can pull it off here, Shuriash can.”

“If,” Doreen said. “The Assyrians are pigs, but they’re stubborn, too.”

“Speak of the devil,” Hollard said, as trumpets sounded from the direction of the camp gate.

“Oh, he’s not a bad sort . . . of cunning old devil,” Doreen said. “I’m going to go interview our Flower of the Desert, okay?”

“Bless you, Doreen,” Ian said. “Get me as complete a report as you can, soonest.”

The huge-voiced herald began bellowing Shagarakti-Shuriash’s titles as the chariots approached. The king sprang to the ground, waved a fly whisk in answer to the sentries’ present-arms, and came grinning into the main chamber in a blaze of embroidery, civet-cat musk, and glittering gold appliqué. Prince Kashtiliash followed him, looking as subdued as his eagle features were capable of, and a trail of generals, priests, and officials followed. A brace of Assyrians came after them, richly dressed in long gowns and tasseled wraparound upper garments, but with rope halters around their necks in symbol of submission.

The Islander officers rose and saluted smartly; Ian came to his feet and bowed.

“Marduk and Ninurta and the great gods my masters have blessed our arms,” Shuriash said, grinning like a wolf. “The great men of Asshur—the
turtanu,
the
rab shaqe,
the
nagir ekalli,
even the
sukallu dannu—
have come to see that the gods have given victory to the men of Kar-Duniash.”

Commander in chief, chief cupbearer, palace herald, and great chancellor,
Ian thought, impressed behind an impassive face.

“I have brought them here that you, our ally, may take their surrender as well—”

“Your pardon, O King,” Ian said. “Your city of Asshur is getting damaged unnecessarily, then.” He ducked through to the communications room. “Call off the bombing!”

 

“Strange,” Raupasha said.

She put the cup of date wine before Doreen before she went to stand in the doorway of her tent and look down on the smoldering city of Asshur. The Mitannian’s eyes were red, as if she had wept privately, but she kept an iron calm before the stranger.

“What is strange?” Doreen replied slowly; they were speaking Akkadian—not the native language of either—and having a little mutual trouble with each other’s accents.

“That all my life I have dreamed of seeing Asshur laid waste . . . and now that I see it, it brings me less joy than I had awaited.”

Growing up,
Doreen thought.

From what she’d been able to gather, Raupasha had been raised in a little out-of-the-way hamlet, on tales of vanished glory from her foster parents. Well educated, by local standards; she could read and write in the cuneiform system, and spoke four languages—her native Hurrian, Akkadian, Hittite, Ugaritic—and a bit of what seemed to be a very archaic form of Sanskrit. Ian’s scholarly ears had pricked up at that. He was working on a history of the Indo-European languages in his spare time. He would be working even harder on it if there were some way of publishing in the vanished world uptime. Not many people on the Island were interested.

“Of course, I never dreamed that wizard-folk from beyond the world would bring Asshur to its knees,” Raupasha said. “I am forever grateful to you People of the Eagle, and to the hero-warrior Kenneth-Hollard—until I saw his face, I expected to die for killing the Assyrian pig. I was willing, yes; I had made my peace with it. But it is hard to die and know that your family’s blood dies with you.”

“I hope you’ve been treated well,” Doreen said cautiously.
Golly, you’ve got to be careful with locals.
Especially an unfamiliar breed.
Got to remember they’re as different from each other as they are from us.

Raupasha crossed to a canvas folding chair, walking with a dancer’s stride as the hem of the long embroidered robe someone had dug up for her flared around her ankles. She sat, cat-graceful, and curled her feet up beneath her.

“Very well, thank you,” she replied. “Lord Kenn’et treated me as his own kinswoman—not what I expected, traveling alone among foreign soldiers. They brought as much as possible from my home, so I have some little store of goods here.”

She gestured toward a bowl on a table, an elegant burnished shape of black ceramic, and her full red lips moved in a wry grimace.

Good thing Ken’s a gentleman,
Doreen thought.
That’s quite a mantrap. Reminds me of Madonna, after she got the personal trainer.

Raupasha went on: “So I have a dowry, of sorts. I may marry some tradesman of Kar-Duniash, I suppose, since I am still virgin . . . although I have no living kin.”

Poor kid,
Doreen thought.
Doing the stiff-upper-lip bit, but she’s hurting.
The local value system meant she had to want to avenge her blood first and foremost, but the foster parents were the ones who’d raised her, and
they’d
been killed in front of her eyes. At some level she had to blame herself for that, fair or not.

“Well, you’re under the Republic’s protection,” Doreen said.
Ian might not have wanted Ken to offer it, but it’s irrevocable.
“We could find you something different.”

“Perhaps carrying one of your . . . rifles, are they called?” A chuckle. “My people are warriors, but that is something I hadn’t considered.”

Her eyes went unfocused for a moment and she chanted softly. It was definitely poetry, not rhyming but alliterative. Doreen’s ears pricked up; her mother had been Lithuanian, and she’d found that extremely conservative Baltic tongue helpful in learning the languages of the Iraiina and the other charioteer tribes in Alba in this millennium. This language had a haunting familiarity from both.

“ ‘Our . . . family of warriors’?” she said.

Raupasha’s head came up. “In Akkadian it would be . . .” She paused for a second, her lips moving silently. “As nearly as I can put it—”

She shrugged. “That is in the old tongue, though, the
ariamannu.
Even in the great days of Mitanni few spoke it. My foster father . . .” Her voice choked off for an instant, and she drew a deep breath. “My foster father brought a few things written in it from Washshukanni, our capital.”

Ian will be in historian’s seventh heaven, until we get him back to practical matters,
Doreen thought. Perhaps someday he’d have the opportunity to trace the migrations that brought Raupasha’s ancestors from the steppes of Kazakhstan to be kings among the Hurrians at the headwaters of the Khabur. Speaking of which . . .

“We’re actually rather concerned about the Rivers district,” Doreen said.

“Now it is free of the yoke of Asshur,” Raupasha said, nodding toward the flap of the tent with grim pleasure.

“Well, yes, but Chaos is king there right now. And we need the area secured. Has anyone told you about William Walker?”

“The rebel against your ruler? Yes, a little. He seems a dangerous man.”

“That’s far too mild. He makes the Assyrians look like . . . like little lambs. He’s not all that far away, either.”

The Mitannian nodded. “On the other side of the Hittite realm, yes,” she said. “Lord Kenn’et told me. And his way will be made easier, now that the Hittites are at war among themselves.”

She rang a small bell, and a maidservant—probably hired locally from among the Assyrian refugees—brought in a tray with bread, cheese, and dried fruits, and the local grape wine plus a carafe of water. Raupasha poured and mixed herself, before she noticed Doreen’s wide eyes.

“You did not know?” she said. “Ah, well, in the northwest we had more traffic from Hatti-land. Yes, the lord Kurunta of Tarhuntassa has thrown off allegiance to Great King Tudhaliya in Hattusas.”

Oh, Jesus,
Doreen thought. She frantically skimmed through the reference material in her mind.

“Oh,
shit,
” she muttered.

They’d known that eventually events here would stop following the history books. Not only deliberate interventions, but butterfly-wing chaotic stuff; a glass jug would get traded hand to hand from Denmark to Poland and someone wouldn’t be born because Dad was swilling mead out of his new possession instead of doing the reproductive thing at the precise scheduled moment. It looked like that had happened here even if Walker hadn’t deliberately set out to split the Hittite realm. So now they’d lost another edge—the books were vague and full of gaps this far back, and sometimes just plain wrong, but they’d been a great help nonetheless.

With a wrenching effort she pulled her mind back to the matters at hand.
I’ll tell Ian when he’s through with King Shuriash for today, and we’ll go over it. Meanwhile, the northwest is more important than ever.

“Thank you,” she went on. “That’s very important news. And we’d like your opinions on what to do about your homeland.”

“Mitanni?” Raupasha said. “Will the king of Kar-Duniash, your ally, not add it to his domains along with the rest of Asshur’s realm?”

“Well, yes, but it’s a matter of
how.
Garrisoning Assyria will be hard enough, even with our help. The Naharim, the Rivers, it’s further away but right on the road to the Hittites. We need to get it pacified, and ideally we’d like it to contribute troops and supplies for the war against Walker . . .”

Raupasha brightened. “You ask me, a girl?” she said.

“Raupasha, in case you hadn’t noticed,
I’m
a girl,” Doreen said. “ We . . . People of the Eagle don’t think that a woman is necessarily less than a man. And you are of the old Mitannian royal family.”

“A fallen house, and myself a fugitive in hiding all my life.”

“But you must have had contacts—men who visited your foster father.”

A long silence. Then: “I owe you a great debt. What I know, I will tell. Some did visit; not every
mariannu
family was slain or deported by the Assyrians—and of those who were led away captive to Asshur, some will wish to return.”

“Good,” Doreen said. “We have a saying: ‘Knowledge is power.’ ”

 

The voice of the priest rose in a chant, as the
ashipu
prepared his powders and bits of bone. Clemens found himself translating automatically:

The Islander doctor grimaced at the thick smell of the Babylonian equivalent of hospital tents, the stink of the liquid feces that soaked the ground under most of the men lying in rows in the scanty shade. Flies buzzed, clustering thickly on the filth, and on eyes and mouths.
And carrying the bacteria, whatever it is, to the food and water of everyone else.
Stretcher bearers carried bodies away, ragged men willing to incur the pollution of touching a corpse for the sake of a bowl of barley gruel. The priest continued his chant:

Then he broke off, seeing the American watching him; then his eyes went wide at the sight of Prince Kashtiliash, and he made a prostration. His duck of the head to Clemens after he rose was no more than barely polite.