Against the Tide of Years (74 page)

Raupasha was standing, lowering the Werder from her shoulder. Even in the darkness, he could see the smoke rising from the muzzle. Her dog crouched at her feet, growling.

“Ah . . . it seems you’ve paid off your debt, Princess,” he said slowly, waving away the concerned faces that turned toward him.

“No,” Raupasha said, her face pale and eyes wide. “I’ve just begun.”

 

“ Well, now that we’re here, we have a slight problem—how do we keep the locals from spearing us or running away before we can talk?” Doreen Arnstein said. “Sort of hard to get them into the Anti-Walker League if they stick sharp pointies into us first.”

The Anatolian plateau lay two thousand feet below them, dawn’s long shadows stretching across it, stretches of green cropland and dun pasture amid a rocky, rolling landscape with high forested mountains to the north. It was bleak enough, but less so than the arid barrens Ian remembered from visits to Turkey in the twentieth; the raw bones of the earth less exposed by millennia of plows and axes and hungry goats.

Ian shrugged against his heavy sheepskin jacket. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” he said.

The city of Hattusas, capital of the Hittite Empire, lay below. It was smaller than Babylon—he estimated its total area at around four hundred acres—and it lacked the gargantuan ziggurats that marked the cities of the Land Between the Rivers. Yet it had a brooding majesty of its own, surrounded by cyclopean walls of huge irregular blocks in the shape of a rough figure eight. On a rocky height at the eastern edge of the city was a great complex of palaces, some with ornamental gardens on the flat roofs and trees planted about them. Elsewhere were twisted streets of buildings; castlelike fortresses and temples, scores of them. The smoke of sacrifice rose up from them, and crowds were packed densely into the sacred precincts.

He suspected that they were packed everywhere in the city that had any associations of sacredness, with the
Emancipator
cruising overhead. They’d opened some of the slanting windows, and he could hear the turmoil as well as see it. The gates were open, and people on foot were streaming out of the city, followed by laden wagons and preceded by a few chariots whose owners lashed their teams to reckless speed.

“We don’t have time to be subtle,” he said. “What we’ve got to do is put a messenger in, someone they’ll listen to, and then open negotiations.”

Everyone on board turned to look at the Babylonian emissary, Ibi-Addad, who turned gray and began to raise protesting hands.

 

There was panic in the streets of Hattusas. Tudhaliyas, Great King of Hatti, Living Sun, stood on the battlements of his palace and listened to the screams and cries below. Sweat ran down his own long, swarthy face, running into his trimmed beard.

There was reason enough for fear; years of evil news, as if the gods had deserted the land of Hatti. Three years ago he’d suffered his great defeat at the hands of Tukulti-Ninurta of Assyria. Well before that, rumors of black sorcery and menace came from beyond the Western Ocean, among the Ahhiyawa. Then the rebellion of Kurunta, possibly in league with them; just a week before rumors had come of how an army sent to bring him to obedience had been annihilated by evil magic—and on its heels, news of a barbarian invasion in the northwest. But that was nothing beside this. The
thing
floated over the city of the king like some great fish of the air, needing not even wings to hold it up, though it was as long as a temple square—five hundred paces, at least. The rising sun shone on its gray covering, on the blood-red slash across it, on cryptic symbols that seemed to breath menace. A sound drifted down from it, a great buzzing as of a monstrous bee.

“ It is coming this way, My Sun,” one of the courtiers said. “ Perhaps you should . . .”

“ Flee in terror? ” Tudhaliyas said ironically.

He was a man of middle years, dressed now in garb for hunting or war—knee-length tunic covered by a cloak thrown over one shoulder, tall pointed hat, curl-toed boots, wool leggings, with a sword at his belt and the mace of sovereignty in his hands. His hair was long and black, his square, hard face shaven close and much tanned and weathered.

“ If this is evil spirits, then Teshub and the Sun Goddess Arinna and Hebat and the other gods and goddesses of the land will protect us,” the king said.

“Unless our sin is too heavy, unless we have incurred pollution,” someone whimpered.

“ If our sin is heavy, if we have incurred pollution, then running will not help us,” he said. “If this is a miracle of the gods, running may bring their anger. Stand fast!”

Most did, his guards among them, even when the
thing
came closer and closer still amid a great hissing and buzzing. His sweat turned cold as the monster shape cut off the sun, and his eyes blurred with fear. Then they sharpened. Were those the shapes of
men
behind windows like those of a house? He’d assumed that whatever it was, it was alive—did anything else besides living things move with intelligent direction, of its own accord?

Yes,
he thought.
A ship, a cart, a chariot—all these move. But . . .

A voice bellowed out, making him take a step backward.

“WE COME IN PEACE! HAVE NO FEAR! WE COME IN PEACE!”

“ The gods have condemned us!” someone screamed, groveling and beating his head on the flagstones. The bronze-scale armor of the warriors rattled, eyes rolled, tongues moistened lips. Tudhaliyas raised his voice in cold command:

“The gods do not speak our Nesite tongue with a Babylonian accent,” the king said. “ I am the One Sun, and I will answer.”

He stepped forward, parting the ranks of his guards until he stood alone in an open stretch of rooftop; that would have been impossible, were they not so shaken. There he had to grab at his hat; a great wind was coming downward from the
thing,
as if a mighty storm blew. Closer, he could see that below the sleek gray shape was another, this shaped like a boat with windows cut into its hull . . . and it was made of wicker. That reassured him, despite the alienness of every detail.

He cupped his hands and shouted upward: “If you come in peace, from whom do you come?” He spoke Akkadian, which all educated men learned.

“WE SEND AN EMISSARY! GREET HIM IN PEACE, ACCORDING TO THE LAWS OF GODS AND MEN!”

Another door opened in the boatlike structure, this one in the bottom, and he could see the shapes of men there. Suddenly the
thing
snapped into perspective. A man came
out
of the hole, dangling in a canvas chair at the end of a rope; another rope uncoiled beneath it, striking the pavement near the king.

“PLEASE TAKE THE ROPE AND STEADY IT!”

The bellowing made it hard to distinguish voices, but if that was a man’s voice, it was another man than the first. And it spoke Akkadian. He looked behind him and signaled two guardsmen forward. They laid down their spears and shields gingerly and came forward to take the rope. It was perfectly ordinary cord, thumb-thick, woven of fiber; perhaps that reassured them. They grasped it firmly and pulled in lengths hand over hand as the man in the canvas seat was lowered down.

Ah,
thought Tudhaliyas dazedly.
That is to prevent him swaying back and forth like a plumb bob.

The canvas seat came within a few feet of the rooftop, and Tudhaliyas saw a man like other men—he felt disconcerted and obscurely angry, a part of his fear flowing away. The man hopped out, and the two guardsmen released the rope with a yell as it burned through their fingers. Looking up, the king saw that the
thing
had bounced upward a little, bobbing in the air like a feather.

The man was of medium height, dressed in a ceremonial robe and hat of the type men wore in Kar-Duniash or Assyria. His accent was of Babylon, though, as he advanced two steps and went down in a smooth prostration.

“O King, My Sun, live forever!” he cried.

Tudhaliyas’ eyebrows shot up of their own accord. That was the accent of the God-voice that had bellowed down over the city.

“Who
are
you?” he blurted. “You may rise,” he added automatically.

“O Great King, your slave is Ibi-Addad, son of Lakti-Marduk, a servant of your brother Great King Kashtiliash of Kar-Duniash, King of Sumer and Akkad, King of the Universe, to whom there is no rival.”

This is madness,
thought Tudhaliyas. Nothing so . . . so
real
could have come out of that
thing
. And . . .

“King Kashtiliash?” he blurted. “What of his father, Shagarakti-Shuriash? ”

“Alas, O King, the father of King Kashtiliash has been gathered to his fathers.”

The sun fell across their faces. The
thing
was soaring upward once again, turning and droning away to the south. Tudhaliyas felt some self-possession return as it departed.

“You will explain this to me, servant of the king my brother,” he said sharply.

Ibi-Addad sighed. “O King, may the gods make your days many,
that
is going to be a difficult task.”

 

The cannon still reeked a little of sulfur and death. Kathryn Hollard stood by it with one hand on a barrel, the metal still warm from discharge, watching as the long line of captives shuffled out of the area beyond the barricade. She felt sandy-eyed and exhausted after the night’s fighting, but still far too keyed up to think of food or sleep. Columns of smoke still rose, but they were under control now, and none were too near. The reek of burning lay across the city, mingling with the usual stench.

She did take a swig from her canteen and handed it to Prince . . .

No,
she thought.
He’s the king now.

. . . King Kashtiliash where he stood at her side. A few of his entourage were shocked at the informality; she could hear them gasp.

She would have laughed, if it hadn’t been for the endless chain of civilians shuffling forward to surrender. Each one passed through a corridor of spearmen, stopping at the end to bare an arm for the inoculation—this station was manned by one of Clemens’s retrained dancing girls—many moaning or sobbing as they did so, still convinced that it was a device of demons. Others came from the riot-torn districts on stretchers, the pox pustules clear on their faces.

Kathryn swallowed slightly; she’d gotten used to the butcher-shop horrors of the battlefield, somewhat, but this was something completely different.

Kashtiliash caught her look and walked a little aside, signaling her to follow with a slight movement of his head.

“You did very good work last night,” he said. “If I had had to use only my own forces, many more would have died.”

She shrugged, with a weary smile. “ The First Kar-Duniash
is
your own, Lord King,” she said.

“ They are as you made them, and they did well,” Kashtiliash said, sighing and rubbing his fingers across his brow. “ Would that this had not been necessary.”

“Amen,” she said.

“ It is strange,” he said meditatively. “ If I thought of it at all, before you—your people—came to the Land, I thought of Kar-Duniash as the center of the world.”

“Everyone does that,” Kathryn Hollard said.

Kashtiliash shook his head. “ No, but we had reason. No realm we knew was more ancient than the land of Sumer and Akkad, or richer, or more learned, or more skilled in all the arts and knowledge. Oh, perhaps Egypt, yes . . . Mitanni was a thing of a day, the Hittites rude hillmen who learned from us, the Assyrians our onetime vassals. Of the world we knew, we were the center.”

He sighed. “And now I must see us as you Nantukhtar see us—poor, ignorant, dirty, diseased. I have more of the English than you might think, and I have heard your brother and the
asu
Klemn’s speak, and heard reports of what your soldiers and wisemen say.
Locals,
is that not the word? As we might term a hill-tribe, or a band of the truffle-eating Aramaeans.”

“ Lord Prince . . . Kash . . .”

“ No, my Kat’ryn, I do not say
you
regard
me
so—although they say that Ishtar gives blindness along with love. But it is not only that you Nantukhtar think of us so, but that it
is
so, which karks me. I have listened; your physicians can cure so many illnesses that we suffer; in your land no man goes hungry, and even peasants live like nobles; you have arts that make ours look like some child’s fumbling, when he pinches out a little clay ox from the dirt of the fields; and you command a power that can kick apart our proudest cities like a hut of reeds.”

“Kash . . . we just have a longer history. If we see further, it’s because we stand on the shoulders of giants—your peoples’ not least among them.”

The Babylonian was silent for a long moment, then he nodded. “I have thought this also; it keeps my heart from bitterness.”

“And we grow and beget and suffer and die too,” she said.

“ That also.” His hand clenched on the hilt of his sword. “ I swear by my father, and by the gods of the land, that I will not leave my kingdom and people poor and ignorant and powerless, not while there is strength in my hands.”

Kathryn Hollard felt a sudden cold chill. It was only a little way from that oath to resentful hatred for the Republic and all its works . . .

“ I’ll help,” she heard herself say. “All that I can.”

He smiled. “That is very good. And now that I am king . . . many things may be arranged more as we desire them.”

 

 

“Y
es, sir. We’re ready to move out from the bridgeheads on the upper Euphrates. Once Hangalibat is secured—it’s still pretty chaotic up here, Chief—we can get in direct contact with the Hittites. From what Councilor Arnstein’s saying, things are going pretty well there.”