On the Oceans of Eternity

by S. M. Stirling

  "Red rock?" Giernas asked.

  "Cinnabar," Jaditwara said, after searching her memory for a moment. "Mercury ore." She frowned. "The Tartessians had their own mine for that, we bought it from them before the war, but I think I heard it was damaged in a revolt just after they got it going-I know the price they asked for it went, how do you say, sky-high. The people who live near it are very fierce. The Inquirer amp; Mirror had an article about it. They thought Walker was also buying it from Isketerol."

  "What's mercury good for?"

  "Thermometers, barometers. Antifouling paint for the hulls of ships. Tanning furs. Medicines. For refining many ores, silver especially. Some chemical things I don't understand. And… explosives. Blasting caps, percussion caps for guns."

  "There's a deposit near… San Jose, I think was the name," Sue put in. "Just south of the big bay."

  Giernas grunted. Ok. That's why they came this far. And the gold. Lots of silver in Iberia, but not much gold. The chieftain waited out their interchange, and continued:

  "And now they have brought this sickness on us. They boast that only they can halt it, by a magic of their cows.'" He used the Tartessian word for the unfamiliar animal. "They say it shows their spirit-allies are stronger than ours, their-Gods is the word?"

  "Vaccination," Sue murmured.

  "And they say they will sweep aside any who will not be their dogs. Our people who go to the big houses to trade now are beaten sometimes, kicked aside like dirt. They give us the water-of-dreams, then laugh when we drink it and act foolishly, when we give all our trade goods for another flask. When they think we do not hear, the outlanders boast that one day they will sweep aside all the peoples of this land, take it for their own! And they have some magic, that their women bear many children and all live, so they grow fast even without new ones landing from their great canoes with clouds to push them." He shook his head. "I do not understand this magic. But I can see that soon they will be too strong for us, even if all the peoples united against them."

  Giernas nodded sympathetically. Hunter-gatherers like these usually had ways of keeping their birthrates low-low by the standards of the ancient world, of course. They had to, since a woman couldn't handle more than one child too young to walk; not when she had to hunt edible plants every day, and move camp, too, and carry gear besides. So they made sure she had three or four years between kids; via a low-fat diet that lowered fertility, prolonged breast-feeding that did the same, taboos on sex for nursing mothers, sometimes abortion or infanticide, or a lot of kids just plain died of one thing or another in the hungry parts of the year.

  The Tartessians had been peasant farmers for thousands of years. They bred a lot faster, since they lived in settled villages. Before the Event they'd also died a lot faster than hunters, particularly their children. Now they had lots of food, and pretty good preventative medicine, thanks to Isketerol and Queen Rosita, who'd been Registered Nurse Rosita Menendez before the Event. Not many of their women died of childbed fever any more, and ninety percent of their kids were going to live to have kids of their own. When the average woman had eight or nine, that added up pretty damned fast. The same thing was happening in Alba, and in the Republic. Even if they didn't get any more people from their homeland, the Tartessian settlement here in California could double in numbers every twenty years, while the locals declined.

  "Tell him again that we can do something about the smallpox," Giernas said.

  The chief grunted, thought for several minutes in stony silence, absently scratching at his head. Giernas sighed mentally; there would be another long siege against lice. What was the old joke? At least our fleas and nits will mourn the passing of the human race…

  "Will you fight for us?" the chief asked.

  "Pete, I don't think we've got any choice," Sue said. "Unless we're going to turn around and run like hell, right now."

  Giernas swallowed. Leaving most of the people in this part of the continent to die off, and a nest of Tartessians here where nobody suspects. We might not make it back to tell anyone, either. He looked over to where his wife and child sat.

  "Honey?" he said softly. "What do you want to do?"

  Spring Indigo gripped her son tightly, but her voice was steady. "The Tartessians are Eagle People enemies. How could I not stand beside my man, as my sister says?" A smile: "I know you will fight with a strong heart, Pete."

  Giernas nodded. A Cloud Shadow woman adopted her husband's feuds as her own; and Spring Indigo was just plain brave besides. Throw that into the scale, then. He just plain didn't want to look into those dark lioness eyes and say he was going to skedaddle.

  "Eddie?" he asked; no doubt there.

  "I say fight, if there's anything we can do." A shrug and a grin: "They've got to have more gold in that fort than we can carry. You're the boss here, though."

  Hmmm. Eddie's shed a lot of that bull-at-a-gate berserker stuff. Prudence rubbed off, evidently.

  "Jaddi?"

  The Fiernan-born girl nodded crisply. "Fight," she said. "It is evil, what they do here. I don't want Moon Woman to turn away from me when I ride the Swan."

  Giernas sighed. "Okay, let's see what we can do. For starters, we have to make Spring Indigo and young Jared safe." As safe as we can, gnawed at him.

  The chief spoke. Sue and Jaditwara and Tidtaway consulted.

  "He says the Tartessians come to collect their tribute soon, so we have to make up our minds, or some tribes at least will be their dogs for the sake of the cow-medicine they bring with them."

  Giernas started to nod, then froze. A thought struck him, like the sun rising early over the low distant line of the Sierras to the east. Slowly, he began to grin.

  CHAPTER TEN

  September, 10 A.E.-Troy

  September, 10 A.E.-O'Rourke's Ford, east of Troy

  October, 10 A.E.-Bay of Biscay

  September, 10 A.E.-near Hattusas, Kingdom of Haiti-land

  October, 10 A.E.-Bay of Biscay

  September, 10 A.E.-Hattusas, Kingdom of Haiti-land

  October, 10 A.E.-Off the coast of northwestern Iberia

  In the long run, I think Mesopotamia may be our Japan," Ian Arnstein said into the microphone.

  He was a very tall man, towering for this era: four inches over six feet, still lanky in late middle age, with a bushy beard turning gray among the original dark russet brown-one that he'd worn before the Event, when he was a professor of classical history from Southern California. What hair was left on the sides and rear of his head was the same color. By a sport of chromosomes, his face was of a type common in Anatolia even in the twentieth; beak-nosed, rather full in the lips, with large expressive dark eyes.

  "Ian?" his wife said, through the earphones he was wearing, asking for clarification.

  Doreen Arnstein was hundreds of miles away in the Hittite capital of Hattusas. Ian Arnstein listened to the boom of a cannon in the not-too-distant west, outside the walls of Troy, and thanked the notional Gods for that. Now, if only I was there in Hattusas, too. They'd about exhausted their official business, and it was a relief to talk of matters not immediately practical.

  "I think I may have been too sanguine about the Babylonians," Ian said. "Yeah, it's going to handicap them not having much in the way of timber or minerals besides oil, but neither does Japan-and look how fast they picked up Western Civ's tricks. They've got a big population, a fairly sophisticated culture of their own, they're organized, and now they're run by a really smart, determined guy with a wife from Nantucket, whose kids are going to be educated in our schools. That means for the next two generations, they're going to make a really impassioned effort to catch up with us."

  "We can worry about that after we've won this war," Doreen said. "They'll be aiming at a moving target anyway. How are things going?"

  "Not so great," Ian said. "King Alaksandrus is holding steady-well, he doesn't really have much choice, now-but Major Chong isn't sure how much longer we can hold out."

  "I told you you s
hould have gotten out on the last flight, dammit, Ian!"

  Ian sighed and shook his head. "Alaksandrus might have given up if I'd done that," he said. "Then Walker and his Ringapi would be whooping their way to Hattusas by now. You've done fine handling the Hittites." Who fortunately had institutions that didn't make dealing with a woman disgraceful. "Anyway, is David there?"

  Their son was. When he had concluded the personal matters, the Republic's Councilor for Foreign Affairs sat back with a sigh.

  "Bye," he said at last. "Stay well."

  A hesitation at the other end of the circuit, and his wife's voice: "You too. The children need their father."

  "I know-" he began; then his voice rose to a squeak. "Children? Plural?"

  "If everything keeps on track… about nine months after that last evening before you got yourself trapped there in Troy VII. Serendipity."

  "Why the hell didn't you tell me earlier?" he said, fighting down an irrational rush of anger.

  "I didn't want to joggle your elbow with worries. Then. Now I don't want you feeling free to be a martyr."

  He sighed. "Martyrhood doesn't attract me," he said. "Love you."

  "You too, Ian. Come back to us."

  I fully intend to do my best, he thought as he took off the earphones. Then:

  "World's too damned big," he muttered to himself, pushing away personal considerations and looking at the map pinned to the wall beside the small square window. "And there's too damned few of us."

  The square of heavy paper showed what would have been the Middle East and Balkans in the twentieth. Here it bore names that had once been familiar to him only from books. Most of central and eastern Anatolia was the Hittite Empire, and points west and south were vassal states linked to it by treaty. The domains of Pharaoh Ramses II sprawled up from Egypt through what he knew as Israel and southern Syria to meet those governed from Hattusas. To the southeast was Kar-Duniash-Babylonia, an Islander ally and now including Assyria, which meant northern Iraq and chunks of the adjacent mountain country. Babylonia's a firm ally, the Hittites a new one, Egypt's neutral… although there's that man of Walker's there. The problem lay to the west.

  He scowled at the black-outlined splotch on the map labeled Meizon Akhaia. Greater Greece, roughly translated; or Great Achaea. It left a mental bad taste; something like Grossdeutschland.

  That hadn't existed in any of the histories he'd studied. Ten years ago it had been simply Achaea, part of it a loose confederation of vassal realms reigned over lightly by the Kings of Men in Mycenae, the rest independent minikingdoms, tribes and whatnot. Walker had been at work there for a long time now, first as henchman and wizard-engineer to Agamemnon King of Men, then as puppetmaster, for the last few years as ruler himself. Now it was a tightly centralized despotism, tied together by armies and roads, telegraphs, bureaucrats armed with double-entry bookkeeping. It had grown, too. Besides the whole of Greece proper, Walker's satraps ruled most of the Balkans up to what would have become Bulgaria and Serbia, plus Sicily, Italy, the Aegean islands. The American renegade had built up a terrifying degree of modern industry, as "modern" went in the Year 10, and as long as his Tartessian ally held the Straits of Gibraltar, the Achaean navy dominated this end of the Mediterranean.

  Of course, he thought, it's a spatchcocked modernization so far, mostly confined to a few centers. A thin film of literacy and machines pasted over a peasant mass dragooned into labors it doesn't understand by terror and the whip. Stalin's methods.

  The problem was that, at this level of technology, those techniques worked.

  The longer we leave Walker alone, the stronger he'll get.

  "The world's far too big," he muttered to himself, tugging at his beard. "And everything takes so bloody long. Sailing ships and marching feet, over half the world."

  The Republic of Nantucket was trying to conduct a struggle on a geographic scale about equal to World War I, but the forces involved were ludicrously tiny. Great Achaea probably had about a million people; Babylonia and the Hittites two or three times that each; the Republic was a couple of small towns and a fringe of farms haggled out of wilderness. Neither of the "advanced" powers could field more than a few thousand men with firearms, a few dozen cannon-armed ships, but those were the fulcrum the whole thing would turn on.

  "Sure, we know the history," he mused. "Walker too- surprisingly well-read, for a complete swine. But there's nothing in the original history that jumbled up eras and technologies and methods like this."

  He poked the headphones with a finger and sighed; they were an example. They had some pre-Event shortwave sets, all transistors and synthetics, none of which could be allowed anywhere as dangerous as Troy. What the Republic's engineers and artisans could make instead was this 1930's-style monstrosity-five times as big and with five times the power consumption and half the effectiveness of pre-Event electronics. But they could replace the handblown vacuum tubes, which they couldn't do with the modern equipment. Meanwhile, the electricity came from a windmill, or squads on bicycle generators during calms.

  The sound of cannon came again, louder than before, a huge heavy dull sound, like an enormous door shutting in the far distance. He rose and hurried through the corridors of the palace. They'd been opulent not long ago, before the siege; smooth gypsum floors, walls painted in a fanciful half-naturalistic style, costly embroidered hangings. The building itself was made of timber and mud brick on stone foundations, flat-roofed, two-and three-story blocks built around courtyards, all rather like a Southwestern pueblo. Now it was crowded, like the whole of the small city inside Troy's walls; here it was mainly gentry from the countryside and their immediate retainers. Most were relatives of the King, bunking in rooms normally used for storage or weaving or kept empty for guests. They looked at him with an awe that hurt, the foreign magician who would save them from the Wolf Lord of the west; a granny hunched over a piece of sewing, girl-children playing a game remarkably like hopscotch and giggling as they skipped, a proud black-haired woman with a huge-eyed child on her lap, a tall cloaked man, white-bearded, who bowed gravely. The smell wasn't too bad overall; the Republic's military medics were enforcing sanitation with fanatical determination backed up by their reputation as wizards, but there was a sour undertone to it. Those sanitary regulations were the only thing that kept this whole city from going up in a pyre of epidemics; out in the lower town below the citadel the peasant refugees were crammed in like sardines, even many of the streets turned over to makeshift shacks.

  There weren't many men of fighting age in the palace. They were on the walls, or working. Ian kept his face solemn, as local manners required, and returned the greetings. Inwardly he winced a bit. They would fight to the end, now. They didn't have much choice. The original terms for surrender Walker had offered had been relatively generous, and he'd probably have kept them.

  But I convinced them to fight. That was certainly to the advantage of the Republic and its Hittite and Babylonian allies. It's only to Troy's advantage if the relief force gets here in time. If it didn't, this whole people would be blotted off the face of the earth.

  A few minutes brought him to the place he sought, the main courtyard, which had been taken over by Major Chong of the Marine Corps for his weapons, a battery of heavy mortars. Their snouts showed above the lips of the berms below, each dug into a cell of earth; for a brief moment he felt an illogical sorrow for the gardens that had given air and sweetness to this section of the great building. Now that air was heavy with the stink of burned sulfur from the black-powder propellant. The loading teams sprawled, resting. Most of them were Trojans, in tunics and kilts much like their Achaean cousins. Over the weeks of the siege there had been time to train them for most of the work, each team under a Marine or two, while the rest of the crews acted as officers elsewhere.

  Ian waved to them, and turned through what had once been the queen's audience chamber. The palace and the citadel around it were on the highest ground available, and Trojan architecture ran to exteri
or galleries on the higher stories. Chong was there, and King Alaksandrus of Wilusia-Ilios, Troy-in full fig of bronze armor, boar's-tooth helmet, horsehair plume, the rifle across his back looked a little incongruous. Ian exchanged solemn greetings.

  It's a matter of morale, he thought, feeling a melancholy amusement at the Trojan's finery. Like a Victorian Englishman changing into formal wear for dinner in the middle of some godforsaken jungle or a residency besieged by mutinous sepoys. Stiff upper lip and all that.

  "How's it going, Major?" he asked the Marine officer.

  Chong's family had been Realtors on Nantucket, ethnic-Chinese refugees from Vietnam originally. There was a slight tinge of Yankee drawl to the man's vowels, and his handsome amber-hued face was drawn with fatigue as he shrugged.

  "Exactly the way I anticipated," he said-in English, but Alaksandrus had grown resigned to his allies using their incomprehensible tongue when they wanted to leave him out of the conversation.

  "That bad?"

  "Take a look, Councilor."

  He bent to the heavy tripod-mounted binocular telescope. The scene that jumped out at him was wearily familiar. The enemy vessels were further up the coast, just barely visible to the north, unloading new devilments; the bay that reached nearly to the wall was too close to Chong's mortars. Around Troy stretched a semicircle of siegeworks, trenches, and bunkers cut into the soft soil of the coastal flats and then over the rocky heights behind them. Beyond them stretched camps, orderly rows of tents for the Wolf Lord's men, a sprawling chaos of brushwood shelters and rammed-earth huts and leather lean-tos for his barbarian allies.

  "The Ringapi don't look too happy," he said. Misery hung over those encampments as palpably as dust haze and smoke.

  "Should they be?" Chong said.

  "No," Ian said.