Against the Tide of Years (60 page)

The girl considered, then nodded.

“Give me the date,” she said.

“Here. But don’t eat it yet.”

This time the thermometer stayed in. Clemens got out his stethoscope and the blood-pressure apparatus and began his examination, throwing comments over his shoulder to Azzu-ena as she handed him the equipment he required.

Hmmm. A hundred and one degrees—no wonder she’s cranky and off her feed,
he thought.
Let’s see
. . . There were so many diseases here, and many of them were just that—diseases, with no names in the books he’d studied.

Azzu-ena was craning over his shoulder. “That looks like a rash,” she said. “Reddish patch.”

“Mmmm-hmmmm.” He pulled up the girl’s shift; she pulled it down again and slapped his hand. Clemens sighed. “ I am a physician. Eat your date.”

More of the red patches, with little flecks of dried blood, as from a fleabite . . .

Clemens felt the color leave his face; for a moment the room swam, and he made a choked noise. Azzu-enu stepped forward, alarmed.

“No!” he said, his voice crisp. “Get back—don’t touch me, don’t touch her. Get into the other room.” She hesitated, looking at him with astonishment.
“Go!”
She fled.

“You,” he said to the usher. “Fetch soldiers. Have this part of the palace sealed—completely sealed, no one to enter or leave. Go, do it, then come back here.” The usher drew himself up, tapping his staff.

Clemens caught his eye and spoke, his words slow and cold. “ I am the one who saved the king’s favorite. If you do not obey me in every particular, man of Kar-Duniash, the king will have you impaled. Do you understand me? For I speak the truth and I do not lie.”

The usher’s olive face went pasty; he backed away, bowing, hand before his mouth in the gesture of submission.

“ What is it? ” Azzu-ena called sharply through the door of the room that held the autoclave.

“ Possibly the end of the world,” Clemens said, his mind racing.
The dirigible’s at Ur Base,
he thought.
They can get here by tomorrow morning. All right, that’s five hundred doses. Maybe, oh, God, maybe—

He turned to the woman, kept his voice gentle as he looked into the enormous dark pools of fear that were her eyes. “ Who is your man? ” he said quietly. “How many other children do you have, and where do they dwell? ”

 

“Ahhhh,” Kathryn Hollard said, sinking into the tub until only her nose was above water, scratching vigorously at her scalp and the short-cropped sandy hair, reveling in the animal comfort.

Her quarters in the section of the palace turned over to the Americans weren’t large, but they did run to the Babylonian equivalent of a bathroom; a big ceramic tub, with a drainpipe and a brazier in a corner to heat water. Sin-ina-mati had managed to wangle an appointment as her batman and had the whole thing ready for her, for which she was profoundly grateful. It was amazing how you could soak up dirt and dust and sand, and even if you kept your scalp stubbled and shaved everything else, the war against lice and fleas was never completely won. Still, she moved the gently exploring hand aside.

“ Not now, Mattie,” she said. “ Not in the mood.”

Sin-ina-mati pouted slightly and then grinned and tossed her the sponge.

“Ah, the handsome Prince Kashtiliash fills your thoughts,” she said. “And you wish he would fill your—
ai!
”

Laughing, Kathryn held up her hand, ready to scoop more of the water at her. “Common knowledge now, is it?” she said, as Sin-ina-mati pretended to cower, laughing herself. “Hell, you can still scrub my back, Mattie.”

“ Not very common, but there’s little secret here in the palace,” the Babylonian woman said, bringing up a stool and sitting on it to use the sponge. “And I hear everything there is to hear.”

“Happy to be back?” Kathryn said, taking the sponge before slipping down to soak again. She dropped back into English for an instant:
“Christ on a crutch, this country is parasite heaven.”

“I am happy to be back as a free woman, with silver of my own,” Sin-ina-mati said. Serious for a moment: “I have paid my family’s debts, and soon they will buy back their land that now they rent. Several families have asked me to tutor their children in the Nantukhtar letters, with generous fees. Thank you.”

Kathryn nodded, slightly embarrassed. That was how the girl had ended up as a palace slave in the first place. Her peasant family had sold her off as the only alternative to starving for the whole bunch, from grandmother to nursing infants. That could happen here, if you were up against it, borrowed against the next harvest, and got seriously unlucky.

The gratitude made her uneasy, though. Sin-ina-mati’s new status wasn’t
her
doing; it was the Republic’s policy. On the other hand, she’d learned firsthand that Babylonians didn’t think that way. Everything was personal obligation or enmity to them, not personified abstractions like nations or governments. And she
had
gotten her a better job than carrying bedpans.

On still another hand, I’m also grateful that Mattie didn’t get too . . . attached.
She sighed.
It’s certainly fun, once you get over the oh-ick-yuk-that’s-strange bit, but now that I’ve tried it I can definitely say that it isn’t
It,
for me. Beats the hell out of solitary vice, but no capital
P
Passion.

It was always valuable to make a discovery about yourself, but this one was a pity, in a way. There would have been some advantages if it
had
been It, if she wanted to be career military, and so far she hadn’t found anything that better suited her talents.
Although I like building things, too.

She wiped soapy water out of her eyes and groped for her watch on the wicker table beside the bath. “Oh, hell,” she said. “Got to get going—there’s that thing over at the temple. Hand me that towel, would you? ”

The occasion was full-dress. Luckily that wasn’t very fancy for the Island military. The polished calf-boots, tailored khaki pants and jacket, scarf, and beret with the Republic’s eagle-and-shield badge all looked fairly sharp without being too elaborate or labor-intensive. She buffed the badge until the gold of the arrows and olive wreath shone against the silver eagle, adjusted it, took a quick look in the mirror and buckled on her Sam Browne.

Coming up in the world,
she thought, snapping out the cylinder of the new Python revolver that had come in with the Werders.
And not only better equipment.
A smile moved her lips as she flicked a fingernail at the silver lieutenant colonel’s oak leaves on the collar of her uniform jacket.

 

“What is this?” Azzu-ena asked steadily. He could see the fear in her eyes, though; it was but a reflection of his own.

“ Life,” Justin Clemens said.

He swabbed the skin of her shoulder with alcohol, wiped it dry with the gauze, roughened it with the instrument and applied the vaccine, then taped another piece of gauze across it. When it was done he slumped in relief. The luckless laborers who’d been trapped in the waiting room were next, all six of them.

“Why have you isolated the mother along with the child?” Azzu-ena asked as he stood in thought.

“ Because she’s almost certainly infected by now—prolonged body contact,” he said.

“ What is the treatment for this disease? ”

“ There is no treatment.”

“ Not even the . . . penicillin? ”

“That’s useless against this. The vaccine prevents infection, but once the disease is established . . . among people like yours, who’ve never been exposed, as many as nine in every ten may die.”

According to his medical history texts, Mexico had gone from twenty million people to one and a half million within a couple of generations after Cortez’s men had arrived, bringing smallpox along with them. After what he’d seen on the post-Event mainland with influenza, mumps, and chicken pox, he believed every word of it. “Virgin field epidemic” had gone from a historical curiosity to a recipe for naked horror.

The woman’s eyes went wide; these cities might not have known smallpox before, but they did have epidemics to give a basis for imagination.

“Is there nothing that can be done? ”

“ I don’t have much of the vaccine, and I can’t make any more here, and you don’t—”
How do I explain about cowpox?
Which Babylonian cows did not have; he’d checked when he first arrived.
No time.
“ I don’t have the things I’d need. Nantucket is two months’ sailing from here, and they could only send me a few thousand doses.”

“ You know this disease well? ”

“ From books. We wiped it out in our own land by vaccination.”

“Nine in ten! Gods of plague have mercy!” She suddenly looked down at her arm. “ This preserves, you say? ”

“ Yes, unless you’re already infected, and I very much doubt it.”

“Then why me?” Her gaze sharpened on him. “Will you not wish to preserve the king and his household? ”

“ I suppose we’ll have to,” he said wearily. “Since we can’t preserve everybody. But I’ll be
damned
if it’s all going to go out for political reasons.”

Suddenly she smiled and rested a hand on his shoulder for a moment. “You are a great healer,” she said. “You will find something you can do.”

He nodded wearily. “Apart from praying that we can isolate all the cases in time, there’s only one thing I can do. It’s far better than nothing, but I don’t think it’s going to go over very well.”

“Lady Kat’ryn-Hollard,” Kashtiliash said. “You have been promoted—finding favor with you own ruler, as well as ours! That is very well.”

Kathryn felt herself flushing. He’d learned Islander military insignia, and he noticed.
For a big bad Bronze Age type, Kash
is
a sweetie,
she thought.

They turned casually down a side corridor, out onto a section of flat roof that turned into a balcony. From there they could see night descending on Babylon, a huge serried darkness against the horizon. The stars were still bright above; she knew that the streets down there—except for a very few broad, straight ones such as the Processional Way—would be canyons of blackness where nobody ventured without a light.

Kashtiliash was looking up at the stars. “ I am thinking,” he said after a moment, “of what you told me, of your island’s voyage through the tide of years to this time, and how the very stars were different.” He shook his head. “Yet always I had thought of my life as the
now,
from which all the future flowed. It makes the liver curl, to think of it instead as dry tablets tumbled in a ruin mound, a . . . fable.”

She moved closer, and they laid arms around waist and shoulder; she was only an inch or so shorter than he, towering by this age’s standards.

“ We have a saying on Nantucket,” she said.
“Don’t think about the Event too much; it’s bad enough without insanity stirred in.”

“Yet in the House of Succession I read the tablets of the ancients, the Sumerians . . . and they also saw stars different from these we see. It is curious, to think of the depths of time—curious and dizzying.”

Kathryn nodded.
Not just a handsome face,
she thought, acutely conscious of the scent of him, a strong masculine musk.

“And I was thinking of you, my Kat’ryn-Hollard, and whether you have laid a witch’s spell on me.” He laughed softly. “ You are nothing of what we think a woman should be, yet you are ever in my thoughts. My father thinks you the diversion of an hour; I dread his wrath if I tell him differently, yet I must—I have no choice.”

“And everyone of
my
people thinks you’re a disaster for me,” she replied. They turned to each other and suddenly they were kissing hungrily.

“I strive to stay away, and I cannot stay away,” he groaned after a long moment.

“What, all the women of your harem cannot console you?” she said.

“ No more than the little servant maid can you,” he said and laughed at the slight jerk of surprise. “Do you think I would not seek to know everything about you, Kat’ryn-Hollard? ”

“No,” she said—she’d rummaged shamelessly through the Arnsteins’ files on
him,
certainly.

They kissed again, and he chuckled into her ear. “And I was raised in a harem, Kat’ryn—a hundred women to one man may flatter the vanity of a king and uphold his reputation, but . . .”

There was a long silence. “This is dangerous,” she said, holding back for a second and looking into his eyes.

“I know,” Kashtiliash said, nodding. “I could not be elsewhere. Could you? ”

She felt her throat tighten as she shook her head. The room they entered was probably a clerk’s in the daylight hours; there were baskets of clay tablets and waxed boards, and a table.

Her whole body tightened; her skin felt as if it were a size too small and was being pricked all over with miniature pins. When his hands closed on her shoulders and slid down to cup her breasts, there was a jolt beneath her diaphragm, almost like a blow, and she sagged strengthless against the table.