Against the Tide of Years (47 page)

“Honored guest,” he said coldly when he had arisen. His eyes traveled to Azzu-ena beside him; she was still in Babylonian dress. “Although this is scarcely the place to bring a harlot.”

“This is my assistant,” Clemens said, his voice equally chill. It was a natural enough assumption for a local to make of a woman un-escorted in a war camp. Natural enough . . . once. “Azzu-ena daughter of Mutu-Hadki,
asu
of the king’s household. We have come to see the men I set aside yesterday. The prince comes with me.”

“I see.” The priest’s eyes were dark pools of bitterness. “It is not well that men should be denied care. But come; the king’s word cannot be denied.”

A dozen men had been laid off in one corner of the enclosure; Clemens had had a couple of Marines stationed there, along with the local orderlies he’d trained, to see that his instructions weren’t disregarded as soon as he was out of sight. There were ten sick men there now.

“The other two?”

“Dead,” the priest replied. “As might be expected, with the demons of their fevers allowed to rage unchecked.”

An orderly lifted one of the men with an arm under his shoulders, keeping a glass at his lips until he had swallowed all of its contents; then he made a check mark beside a name on a list and went on to the next.

Clemens nodded. “And the twelve treated according to your custom?” he asked.

The priest shrugged. “The demons are strong. Seven have died, and the others weaken.”

“Yes,” Clemens said. “Of the twelve treated according to our . . . rites . . . ten live. Of those treated by yours, five live. In another day, these ten will be alive. How many of yours?”

The priest made as if to spit on the ground. “That means nothing! The demons—”

“The fever demons seem to fear our rituals more than your gods,” Clemens said.

“Blasphemer!” the priest began.

Kashtiliash cut in: “Silence!”

The priest bowed his head. “I am more taken with deeds than words,” the heir said bluntly. “A man who shits himself to death is as much lost to my host as a man with a spear through his belly. If you will not listen, another will. Go, and think on this.”

To Clemens: “You spoke the truth, and you have shown it by your deeds. The decree shall be prepared.”

Clemens and Azzu-ena bowed as Kashtiliash and his guardsmen left. When they had gone, she spoke.

“What causes this disease?” she said. The corpsmen lifted another man off his fouled pallet and replaced it with a fresh stretch of woven straw, cleaning him gently. “More of the
bacteria
?”

“Yes,” he said. “But the actual cause of death is lack of water; too much runs out with the diarrhea and takes with it salts from the body.”

“As if a man were to sweat in the sun of summer and not drink,” Azzu-ena said thoughtfully. “Yes, that will bring on the fever and delirium, as well. Such a man will die.”

“Very good!” Clemens said.

“So,” she said, “the cure is to drink much water?”

“It isn’t a cure,” Clemens replied. “But it keeps him alive until his body can kill the agent of the disease naturally and then heal itself. It must be
pure
water—boiled or distilled—with salt and honey or
sugar
”—Akkadian had no word for that—“in certain exact proportions. These replace what the body has lost. We don’t have enough
antibiotics
to treat so many men, but this will work. Especially if the treatment begins before the disease takes strong hold.”

Azzu-ena nodded, her big-nosed face somber, hands folded in the sleeves of her robe. “From bad water?” she said softly. “That explains much; why you Nantukhtar so hate the touch of excrement. . . . It was so my father died.”

“Ah . . . I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “That does not matter. What matters is how we may treat these others.” A toss of her head indicated the field of groaning victims. “The priest of Innana will not aid you, even if the prince commands—not willingly, and not quickly, and he will injure you by stealth if he may. I see it in his eyes.”

“Right,” Clemens said, frustration in his tone. He ran a hand through his short brown hair. “I don’t know
what
the hell I’m going to do. There aren’t enough medics or corpsmen with the regiment, or with the whole expedition. And I can’t train them that fast . . .”

“You can train them for this one thing,” Azzu-ena said, nodding her head toward the fire, where a huge pot of water boiled. “You cannot train them to care for the sick as well as you—we—would, but that is not essential here, no?”

“No,” Clemens said. “What we need to do is stop this epidemic before it melts the army of Kar-Duniash like snow in Babylon.”

“Then make up the medicine-water before, and have them boil it. Boiling water is not difficult. For the rest, nursing is what is required, no? Washing the men, keeping away flies . . .” She frowned. “For that, I think you should recruit among the women who follow the camp. They do much of the washing and repairing of clothing already.”

Bright lady,
Clemens thought.
Very bright.

There were those, back on the Island, who said that it would have been better for the locals if Nantucket had stayed isolated, that every action would change the people whose lives they touched, and in ways beyond prediction or control.

“Yes, it will,” Clemens murmured. “And I don’t mind that at all.”

 

Ranger Peter Girenas watched the sky, folding his arms behind his head and smiling at the clouds. The expedition was in what the maps said was central Missouri, but this place had never been mapped. He rested his head on a natural pillow of dropseed, the clump-grass that grows in the middle of the long swales of the tallgrass country. The grasses rustled and closed over his head, and he might have been alone save for Sue Chau sitting at his feet—looking, he thought, as pretty as the wildflowers as she sat in only her deerskin breechclout, combing her long black hair and chewing on a straw.

The dropseed beneath him was springy and firm, the intervals between the hassocks heavily matted with dried grass to make a perfect hammock. The soil beneath that was prairie loam that was like nothing he’d ever seen before—no clods or sticks or stones at all. He slitted his eyes and enjoyed the feel of the wind caressing his sweaty skin. A day like this, you could remember the crossing of the Ohio—the horse screaming as the raft overset, and the white water trying to topple it—without fear. Or the time they’d nearly lost Eddie to a cottonmouth bite, his body swelling, his mind raving, the two-week hiatus when they stopped to nurse him.

Long ago, now; it seemed long ago and far away.
Now
he could smell elk strips smoking over a slow green fire and the liver roasting for dinner. He saw dragonflies darting off below to the slough, a squadron of monarch butterflies flitting above the tall grass; he could hear a bobolink’s bubbling song as it hung in the air twenty feet up, until that red-winged hawk silenced it by floating past far overhead. But the hawk was too high to be hunting, and too late to be migrating.

“Soaring just for the hell of it,” Pete said. “He doesn’t fool me. He looks busy, but he’s loafing today, just like us.”

High above the hawk were steady ranks of clouds, coasting on the westerly winds, dragging a shadow across the earth every now and then. He stood, only his head and shoulders above the grass, and watched the shadow cross the huge, rolling landscape, the grass rippling beneath it like waves on the sea.

Even more than the sea,
he thought. It took some wind to move the sea, but the tall grasses bowed and moved to the slightest breath of it, out to the edge of sight. They were on a slight rise, well into the lowlands that stretched out to the line of cottonwoods and poplar along the levees of the Missouri River. From here he could see half a dozen other hawks, and a herd of buffalo along the edge of the woods, birds misting up from the water far away like black smoke . . .

I love the forest,
he thought. He did—the endless silences of it, the multitudinous life from rotting log to forest crown.
But this, it feels like there’s no end to the world.

The others were not far away, lying around a tree—a fire-gnarled oak—that had rooted itself where the ground rose a little more steeply. That had provided the firewood they needed to smoke the elk meat and cook dinner—elk-hump steaks, liver, kidneys, marrow and wild greens. Henry Morris had had to bully some of the others to eat enough organ meat, saying it was the only way to get all their vitamins when there was little green food.

The fire was built on pieces of overturned knife-cut sod; the rest of their gear rested under groundsheets or was stacked against the tree. Hobbled, the horses drifted and grazed—this was certainly horse heaven, although now and then one of their three stallions would throw up its head and snort, at one of its own kind or at a scent of predator drifting down the wind. Mostly they hung around with their own group of packhorse mares, most of which were pregnant by now—Alban ponies were tough enough to take that sort of treatment. Perks lay growling softly in pleasure as he gnawed at a gristly lump of elk shoulder, while the expedition’s other dogs kept a decent, deferential distance.

“Not going to be this nice come winter,” Sue said behind him.

He chuckled. “Well, we’re making reasonable time,” he said. “It isn’t a race. If we have to find a place to winter over, we will.”

Dekkomosu came in out of the grasses, hand in hand with Jaditwara the Fiernan. He was grinned broadly at Pete and began to say something—he’d gotten more cheerful as they got further from home—when his face went quiet.

“What’s that?” he said, pointing.

Damn good eyes,
Girenas thought, unslinging his binoculars from the stub branch where the case hung on. It was just townie myth that Indians had better vision; they did tend to notice more of what they saw than a townie, but then, living in town you had to pull in your senses or go nuts.

“Damn,” he said softly. Everyone was up now, looking along with him. “Well, I guess we know where those bodies were coming from.”

The last two weeks, they’d seen five—hard to be absolutely sure, since the parts were so scattered. In the binoculars he saw the end of a chase that had probably started a good long time ago. A group of women and children, thirty or so, broke out of a line of trees and ran upward into the grass. Behind them were men, ten or so if you counted teenagers. They wore leggings and tunics; he could see quill decorations, and bones and feathers woven into long braids. They carried spears, or darts set into atlatls, and they walked backward in a wide arc between their women and children and whatever was pursuing them.

Then a dart arced out toward them, and faint and far came a yelping like wolves. The men who boiled out of the riverside thickets in pursuit were thirty or more, all in their prime. Their naked torsos were painted with bars and circles of yellow and red, their hair drawn up in topknots through hide rings, their faces covered with more slashes of color.

The Islanders looked at each other. “We’d better decide pretty quick,” Girenas said.

“Hell, doesn’t look like a fair fight,” Eddie said.

Morris hesitated. “We don’t know the rights or wrongs of it,” he said.

“I know the wrongs of doing what they did to that kid we found,” Sue said. “He couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, and he probably lived for days after they left him like that.”

Good point, Sue,
Pete Girenas thought and nodded. “If it happens, it happens,” he said. “If it happens where I can do something about it, it’s my business. I say we go run those guys off. Any objections?”

Dekkomosu shrugged. “Shouldn’t be too hard,” he said.

“Mount up, then.”

Their riding horses were well enough trained to come to the call by now. Girenas paused long enough to tie his hair back and pull on buckskin trousers, as well as snatch up his rifle, powder horn, and a bandolier.

“Jaditwara, you look after the camp,” he said, and then vaulted into the saddle. “The rest of you, spread out and look lively.”

The five of them went down the slope at a canter; he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Morris had snatched up bow and quiver instead of his rifle.
God damn,
he thought. Granted, Morris was actually pretty good with the thing, but it still wasn’t a Westley-Richards.
No time for arguments now.

The deadly game below had come near to its end; the hunters stalked through the high grass in bands, the better to swarm over a single enemy. The screaming alerted the Nantucketers to one such; two of the painted men with topknots were holding down a third of the braids-and-feathers people, sawing at bits of him with flint knives.

“Dekkomosu,” Girenas said. “You and me.”

The two victors heard that and the thud of hooves; they wheeled around. One snatched for the stone-headed hatchet in his belt and nearly had it out before the bullet punched into his chest. He went back on his heels and fell beside his victim, their blood mingling on the thick sod. The other turned and ran; Dekkomosu thumped heels against his horse, riding close before he dropped reins on its neck, sighted carefully, and fired.

Crack.
The tall grass swayed back and mercifully hid what fell to the ground.

“Let’s go!” Girenas heeled his mount; the Islanders galloped upslope, where the last few of the braids-and-feathers men had been desperately fighting off their attackers.

Everyone froze at the crack of the rifles, and faces went slack with fear at the sight of creatures like giant deer, with humans growing out of their backs. Girenas pushed his horse forward, separating the combatants, then wheeled to face the topknot-and-paint men. They gave back before the line of five horses, snarling. One suddenly pointed and spoke in some fast-rising, slow-falling language while the two Islanders loaded and primed and pulled back the hammers of their rifles.