Against the Tide of Years (56 page)

The high king of Mycenae had turned at bay against a vertical rise of rock that broke out of the steep slope. To either side it gave to almost-vertical cliffs where a few straggly pines found root. He straightened as his breath came back to him, tears running down his cheeks into his white-shot gray beard.

“My son,” he whispered, looking at the body before him. A sword lay not far from the dead man’s hand; his face was young, beard a mere black down on his cheeks. “My son.”

“I wanted that one alive!” Walker snarled to the guardsmen, and they paled.

“ Lord, he attacked us,” one of them said.

“Shut
up
. He was a stripling, and I
needed
him.”

Damn. I could have married him off to one of my daughters, and that would have been perfect. I wish Odikweos hadn’t been here and come along.
The Ithakan was pale and silent in the rear ranks, a cluster of his own men around him.

“Lord King,” Walker said, forcing unction into his voice. “It’s a great pity your son was killed by accident—doubtless the gods required the sacrifice.”

Agamemnon squared his shoulders, and suddenly he was no longer a fat old man weeping before a triumphant enemy. “ Better he should die in battle than live as your slave, outlander.”

“My father-in-law is distraught in his grief,” Walker said loudly.
My father-in-law was making a break for it to raise a revolt against his
lawagetas, he thought, but the dynastic reminder would make the Achaeans happier.

He saw a few nods at that; Walker’s infant son by Iphigenia would have as good a claim to the throne as anyone, now. He went on:

“Or he would not speak so of the father of his grandson. Come, my lord—we must return to Mycenae and arrange the funeral games.”

“The gods’ curse is upon the land,” Agamemnon said hoarsely. “That I listened to you and brought evil witchcraft within the kingdom.”

“ Lord King—”

The older man ignored him. He reached up and touched his forehead, where a graze was bleeding. “ This is the blood that is shed for the land,” he said, holding the hand out for all to see. “The blood of Zeus the Father, the blood of Poseidaion, the blood of the kings. The gods know the value of the given sacrifice.”

Walker knew suddenly what the older man intended. “Grab him! Now!”

A half-dozen men lunged forward, Ohotolarix first among them. Agamemnon took two steps to his right, spreading his arms to the sun.

“ It is accomplished!”
he shouted and leaped.

“God damn it to
hell
!” William Walker raved as the body struck, then bounced limp further down.
Got to make the best of it,
he told himself, taking control by sheer force of will. He walked three steps forward and turned, hand on sword hilt, eyes raking the score or so of men who stood before him.

“Now I come into my own,” he said. “Who stands against me, dies.” Everyone’s eyes flicked to the body of Agamemnon, lying caught on the bushes a hundred feet down, and his heir, broken on the stone.

“ Who is with me? Who?
Who?
”

A dynastic coup was nothing very new in Mycenae, and most of these men owed everything to him. One stepped forward, blade aloft: “Hail Walker, King of Men!”

The crowd took it up:
“Hail! Hail! Hail!”

 

“ Wonderful,” King Shuriash said sincerely.

He beamed at the canal. It was a major one, or had been before it started to silt irrevocably, making its name of Libil-Higalla—“May It Bring Abundance”—a bitter jest.

In a few more years the banks would enclose only a stretch of shallow reed-grown water, and then the dry walls would join the hundreds of others that ran in futility across the flat plain of the Land. The villages on its banks were dying too. When a canal reached this state, there was no option but to abandon it and dig another. The fields would go back to desert—or, without a fresh washing and plowing every year, salt up, which was worse—and there would be hunger for the peasants until they were safely relocated. Hunger for them, lost rents for their landlords, lost revenue and strength for the king. And losing a canal was a bad omen.

Now two . . .
“machines,” that was the word
. . . were chewing their way down the canal. On each barge was one of the Nantukhtar
steam engines,
with its tall iron stack puffing smoke, its mysterious wheels and belts driving an endless chain of saw-edged buckets. They splashed down into the water and gouged into the soft silt below, came up running with dark-brown mud, clanked and rattled back to dump their loads onto an endless belt that threw it to the side—left for the first dredge, right for the second. Waiting crews of peasants shoveled the rich muck into baskets and oxcarts, to spread on their fields before the fall sowing.

If a king’s dignity had not forbidden it, Shuriash would have shouted his glee aloud and clapped hands. As it was, he grinned broadly and looked over at the Nantukhtar emissaries.

“You were right,” he said to Councilor Arnstein. “With machines like this, I have no need to confiscate estates in Assyria, beyond what falls to me as king there.”

With machines like this, he could reclaim land by the thousands of
iku
—tens of thousands, hundreds even. He was almost dizzy at the thought; his own engineers were dusting off tablets with plans stretching back centuries, even for the great Tigris-Euphrates canal that king after king had rejected as far too expensive.

Land was a king’s strength, not only for what it yielded him in rents but as wealth to hand out to favored supporters and servants. Sometimes you almost wished for revolt, so that the estates of traitors could be escheated to the king. Reclaiming land was best of all; it could be granted without harm to any vested interest—that always produced anger—and by turning wilderness to productive fields the king showed that the great gods of the land favored his reign.

The royal party and its allies drew off into the shade of a grove—a grove that would live, now—and servants spread the meal. The king was merry today, and his attendants with him. From the Nantukhtar party came a new food; the
Nantukhtar paspasu,
the fowl of the Island country—
chicken,
in their tongue.
I must secure some for the royal gardens.
He could give out the live eggs to men he wished to favor, to enrich their estates.

The king washed the food down with cool wine and wiped his mouth on a cloth, belching his contentment.

“Come,” he said to his son. “ Walk with me.”

They walked together under the rustling leaves of the date palms. The guardsmen hung back, close enough to dash forward if anything should happen, but too far to hear a low-voiced conversation.

“It is a good thing, my father,” Kashtiliash said, nodding to the puffing, clanking dredge in the distance. “And the price is reasonable.”

“A tenth of the harvest of the fields watered for ten years? That is not reasonable, that is a token,” Shuriash said genially. “The Nantukhtar will seek their advantage from this elsewhere. Mainly, they will call in the debt when it comes time to fight in the Hittite country, next spring after the harvest. Although first we must settle the matter of Hangilibat.”

“That is no more than they asked.” The king nodded, and his son went on, “And this winter we will train the first five hundred men with
rifles
.”

“Yes,” Shuriash said, nodding judiciously. “So far the Nantukhtar have fulfilled all their promises.” He cocked an eye at his heir. “ That does not mean that our interest and theirs will
always
run like a well-matched chariot team.” A jerk of his chin toward the canal. “ Wonderful, but we cannot make its like; and if we come to depend on the makers, if we cannot so much as water our fields without their machines, we
need
them.”

Kashtiliash nodded unwillingly. “We cannot make its like,
yet,
” he said.

“A point, and a sharp one,” Shuriash said. “Fear not, my son; I will not tear you from the arms of your warrior maid in anger at the Nantukhtar.”

He bellowed laughter at the prince’s stumble and flush. “Are you so besotted? ” he asked. “Did you think I would not know? The eyes and ears of the king miss nothing, my son. Especially where the heir of the House of Succession is concerned.”

“ We . . . we did not want to set tongues wagging.”

The king laughed again, a bantering note in it, but also a male companionship. “Except each other’s, no? I’ll not ask you if the rumors are true.”

“She is . . .” Kashtiliash flushed still more darkly. “I thank you, Father.”

“ Indeed . . . as a second of third wife, she would be a good choice, to bind the alliance. And the sister of a man of high rank . . . Even if she’s not a virgin; well, customs differ, and I suppose you could keep her in line, eh? And she looks able to bear strong sons.”

Kashtiliash looked as if he had been chewing a bitter quince. “ Father and lord, I do not think it would be that simple. Best think of other matters.”

“Such as the rumblings among the priesthoods, eh?” Shuriash shrugged. “ I am pleased that you are not so preoccupied with writing poems and eating lettuce”—he laughed again; old tales said that strengthened a man’s member—“that you haven’t noticed they call me blasphemer, and the Nantukhtar they call wizards who summon demons.”

“Are you concerned? ”

“ Not greatly. We have made alliance with the Nantukhtar, and the great gods of the land have smiled on us—have we not humbled Asshur, do the Elamites not tremble in fear, offering tribute and their king’s daughter for my bed? What none of the kings my fathers could do, I have done, with the help of our allies. And there has been neither famine nor plague to mark the gods’ anger. So long as it is so, we need not fear the temples. They are jealous because they no longer hold the only wisdom in the realm.”

He clapped a hand on the shoulder of his tall son. “And you learn what the Nantukhtar have to teach, and mix it with our own wisdom,” he said. “I am greatly pleased with your campaign in the north, my son. Soon it will be time for me to take the hand of Marduk at the New Year festival once more. Let the colleges of the temples concern themselves with that, and leave public matters to the king.”

 

“I
knew
those would be worthwhile,” Ian Arnstein said, tossing aside a well-gnawed drumstick. “Mmmm. Damned sight better than Colonel Sanders ever made.”

Kathryn Hollard looked out at the dredgers. “They’re a modification of the type Leaton designed for harbor work back in Nantucket Town,” she said. “Kash was all over ’em while we were setting up—I think he really
understood
the principle.”

Ian nodded. There were things that a very intelligent local could pick up on; steam engines, for instance, or even the internal combustion type. It was other things, like disease theory or anything involving electricity, that pushed their this-is-magic buttons.

“You know,” Kathryn went on, “Kash really
is
smart. I’m pretty surprised the Assyrians beat him, in the first history.”

Ian leaned back on a cushion, feeling benevolently full. “ I’m not,” he said. “ What would you say is his strong point? ”

“He’s mentally flexible,” Kathryn said immediately. “Good at grasping new concepts. Positively enthusiastic about them, in fact.”

Ian nodded. “ But this isn’t an environment where that’s much of an advantage, before we came,” he pointed out gently. “ In fact, it might be a
disadvantage
. In a really stable society like this, conservatism often works very well. All the best ways to use the things that they have have already been tried.”

Colonel Hollard paused with a glass of pomegranate juice halfway to his lips. “ You know, that’s actually . . . rather brilliant, Councilor,” he said slowly.

Doreen hit him with a pillow. “Don’t inflate the Arnstein skull more than necessary, would you? It is a good point though. I’ve notice they’re generally better at recording and systematizing than at innovation.”

Kathryn tapped a thoughtful thumb on her chin. “Applies to military matters too, I suppose,” she said. “The last big innovation here was when Raupasha’s ancestors invented the war chariot, and that was, when . . . a thousand years ago? ”

Arnstein nodded. “More or less. Not many big changes, and they have generations, centuries, to adapt to each one.”

The two Hollards looked out at the dredge. “And now we’re dumping the whole three millennia of changes on their heads all at once,” Kenneth said. “ Poor bastards.”

“Anyone want the rest of these dried figs?” Doreen said. “No? You’re right, Ken. The thing is, it’s not even like the last couple of centuries in our history, the eighteenth and nineteenth and twentieth.”

“ Well, faster,” Kathryn said.

“No, not just that. The locals are getting them without the long lead-in that Western civilization had; everything from the Greeks and then Christianity and Aquinian philosophy on through the Renaissance.”

Kathryn narrowed her eyes in puzzlement. “ What’s religion got to do with it? ”

Young, and a pragmatist, and a specialist, too,
Ian Arnstein thought. He went on, “Quite a lot, actually. Judaism and its Christian heresy were important in implanting the idea that the universe was an orderly place, obedient to a single omnipresent, omnipotent system of laws with no exceptions—it leached the sacred out of the world, putting all the supernatural in one remote place. Call it preparation for the scientific worldview.”

Doreen nodded and began repacking the picnic hamper, ignoring the scandalized looks of the royal servants. Their eyes grew even wider as the others pitched in to help.

“That’s going to be more explosive here than just learning techniques, in the long run,” she said. “ I’ve been talking with their scholars a lot, and with some of them it’s like watching a lightbulb go on inside when you give ’em the define-your-terms and why-does-that-follow routines.”