The men seemed to follow. “Yes,” said Yeh-son. “Very many flour. And other foods. Everything for man eat.”
Food for two hundred men for seven years! thought Aziz. It was an incredible amount. Aziz did not possess such an inventory himself, of course, but acting as a middleman and taking a small cut of the profits, he could make enough to set up a trading house of his own.
“And make farm,” Yeh-son added.
“Make farm?” asked Aziz. “You want farming supplies as well?”
“Farming supplies,” said Yeh-son, nodding. “Seeds for grow foods. And chickens. And sheep.”
“You want food for seven years, to last you while you set up your own farm?”
The men conferred briefly again. “Yes!” said Yeh-son, seeming pleased that Aziz had understood.
Aziz, however, had begun to grow suspicious. Someone, probably that bastard Gunura, was playing a trick on him. No one had ever made a sale this big in the history of the market of Damascus. The quantities these men were talking about were purchased by the stewards of princes and legions, directly from the big merchant houses, not at the street market. And no one bought large quantities of food and supplies to start a farm. It made no sense. And yet, that fabric! Aziz was no expert, but he knew those robes were made of no fabric ever seen in this area. Tightly and flawlessly woven and composed of at least three different fibers, its sheen, softness and elasticity were unparalleled. Someone had distressed the fabric in an attempt to make it appear aged and worn, but there was no mistaking the underlying quality. This might be a ruse, but not one dreamed up by Gunura.
“You have money?” he asked, trying to remain nonchalant.
Yeh-son nodded, producing a pouch from his robe. He untied it and dumped the contents on the rug: seven silver ingots, each weighing several ounces. Aziz picked up one of the ingots and examined it. It was the purest silver Aziz had ever seen. Assuming it wasn’t just a veneer over a core of iron or lead, each ingot was worth a hundred sacks of flour. The Roman authorities frowned on transactions not conducted in the official currency of the Empire, but there wouldn’t be any stationarii out in this heat.
“I will have to check it,” he said, tapping the ingot with his finger. Yeh-son nodded. Aziz would have the silver smith melt a few of the ingots down to determine that they were genuine. “You have more?”
Yeh-son nodded again. “Yes. Many more. Silver. Gold.” He said another word, which was strange to Aziz. It was similar to the word for iron, and Aziz thought perhaps that was what Yeh-son meant. It would be unusual to offer to pay in iron, though. Because of its tendency to corrode and low value relative to its weight, iron was generally not used as currency.
“You pay in iron?” Aziz asked.
Another conference followed. There seemed to be some disagreement among the men, but the specific points of contention were a mystery to Aziz. At last Yeh-son said something that silenced the other two. He turned to Aziz and said, “Very good iron. Hard. No rust.” He reached into his robe and produced a knife, which he handed to Aziz. Aziz marveled at it. It was the finest piece of workmanship he had ever seen. The iron was spotless, yes, but the handle was equally remarkable. It was made of something like ivory, wrapped with a soft, spongy black fabric that cushioned the grip and seemed to adhere slightly to one’s palm. Fantastic.
But would it really not rust? That was a bit much for Aziz to swallow. Still, if the iron was of high quality and they had enough of it, it might suffice. The price of iron had tripled in the past few years as the Jewish rebellion in Judaea grew. The offer to pay in iron also eased another concern of Aziz’s: it had occurred to him that these strangers might be Jews from some distant kingdom that had decided to throw its support behind Simon ben Kosevah’s rebellion.
Attitudes in Syria regarding the Jewish rebellion were mixed: the Jews, of course, were largely in favor, and in fact many had left Syria to join the fighting. Syrians who followed the ancient gods were ambivalent; the Romans were tolerant of the worship of other deities as long as Caesar’s divinity was recognized, and the Syrians appreciated the stability Roman rule had brought. The Christians—a small, but rapidly growing minority—chafed under the Roman yoke, but had grown tepid in their support of the Jews since news had begun to arrive of Simon ben Kosevah executing Christians who refused to join his revolt.
Aziz, a Christian himself (he had been baptized to please Istir’s parents), possessed a degree of sympathy toward the rebels, but not so much that he was willing to be put to death for giving them aid. With the Romans controlling the roads and seaports, the Jews were having a hard time getting enough food, so it was not unreasonable to think these men might be trying to acquire food to smuggle to the Jews. But the rebels needed weapons and armor even more than they needed food; supporters of the rebellion would not be offering to sell large quantities of high-quality iron.
Still, it would be hard to unload a lot of iron without provoking some difficult-to-answer questions from the authorities. They would want to know where the iron came from and how they could get more of it. Such a conversation could only end with Aziz being cut out of the deal entirely. The Romans would want to negotiate directly with the foreigners, and Aziz would be back where he had started. High quality cloth, however, could be easily transported and sold without raising any eyebrows.
Aziz reached out his hand, and Yeh-son held out his own, as if to seal the bargain. But Aziz’s hand slipped past Yeh-son’s, his fingers closing on the foreigner’s sleeve. Surprise came over Yeh-son’s face as Aziz rubbed the fabric between his fingers.
“Cloth?” Aziz asked. He reluctantly pulled his hand away. The feel of the fabric was astounding, seeming to incorporate the softness of cotton, the strength of linen, and the fineness of silk at once.
Yeh-son again conferred with the others, more briefly this time. “Yes,” he said. “Cloth. Not many.”
“Good,” said Aziz, pleased. It was just as well not to receive too much of any one good as payment. Unloading large quantities of fabric or iron would saturate the market, causing prices to drop. This would cut into his profits as well as anger the other merchants. It would be better to have a warehouse full of various goods that he could sell as he saw fit, to maximize his profits while avoiding undue attention. He smiled at the thought. This morning he was not certain he would be able to buy flour for supper, and now he was thinking of leasing a warehouse for all his goods!
The men had nearly emptied the water jug again, and Aziz could see that they were exhausted and uncomfortable in the heat. They had done enough business for the moment. “Come,” he said, getting to his feet. “You will stay at my house tonight.” The three men got slowly to their feet, regarding him uncertainly. “Eat,” he said, hefting the sack of flour onto his shoulder and then gesturing toward his mouth. He pointed at the jug. “Drink.” He closed his eyes and let his head fall to the side. “Sleep. Yes?”
“Yes,” said Yeh-son, without waiting to confer with the others.
“Please,” said Aziz, gesturing toward the jug. Yeh-son picked it up, and the three men looked at him expectantly.
Aziz looked around at the open tent and tables full of dates and coconuts. He should really pack things up, but he didn’t want to make the foreigners wait. “Let us go,” he said, and began walking away. He would return when the sun was lower and put everything away then. Or perhaps he would not. Who cared about a few coconuts when he stood to make the sale of a lifetime?
He returned home through the streets of Damascus, followed by the three men from an unknown land.
Chapter Forty-one
“What do you make of our merchant friend?” Jason asked the others. The three of them sat on cushions on the floor of the main room of Aziz’s house, their robes wrapped around their waists. It was still almost unbearably hot, but Aziz had left them with a wash basin and rags to clean up and cool off a bit.
“Seems like a decent fellow,” said Devin Olson. “Looking to make a profit, of course,
but that’s to be expected. His wife sure doesn’t like us though.” The woman, Istir, was in the next room, muttering to herself and kneading dough she had made with the flour Aziz had brought.
“Don’t take it personally,” said Josh Creed. “I get the impression she doesn’t like a lot of people.”
“As long as she doesn’t rat us out to the authorities.”
“They stand to make a tidy profit on us,” said Jason. “You saw the way he looked at our clothes. We can probably buy a year’s worth of food with just the extra clothing we have on board.”
“Should we be offering them technology they don’t have?” asked Creed.
“It’s not like they’re going to figure out how to produce synthetic fibers eighteen hundred years early by examining our clothing,” Olson said.
“I’m more concerned about the steel,” said Jason. “Historical records indicate steel was unknown in this area until the Middle Ages.”
Olson frowned. “I don’t think you can’t reverse engineer steel by examining it or melting it down. A few tons of steel by itself isn’t going to cause a history-breaking paradox.”
“Isn’t the fate of the Roman Empire being decided about three hundred klicks south of here?” Creed asked. “It seems like a few tons of steel could definitely change history.”
“History is resilient,” Jason said. “If we could land a hundred-thousand-ton spaceship a few klicks from here without breaking history, I think history can absorb a few tons of steel. Maybe it was melted into weapons for a Roman legion.”
“Who are going to win anyway,” Olson added.
“Most of the steel we can spare is stainless,” Jason said. “Good for knives, but too brittle for swords. If we give them—if we gave them stainless steel, they probably melted it down and combined it with iron to give it some flexibility. The result would be steel with slightly better corrosion resistance and hardness than pig iron. Hardly revolutionary, and it’s unlikely any of it would have lasted until the twentieth century, when it could have been chemically analyzed. Even stainless steel with a high chromium content will corrode over a few centuries if it isn’t carefully preserved.”
“Damascus was famous for its steel in the Middle Ages,” Olson said. “Maybe this is where they got it from!” They had all been doing a lot of research on Earth in the second century.
“We’re too early,” Jason said. “In any case, the term Damascus steel refers to a particular kind of steel with a characteristic pattern on the surface. It was made from ingots imported from India, not stainless steel, or stainless steel mixed with pig iron.”
“But maybe this is where they got the idea!” Olson persisted. “If smiths in Damascus started making steel sword blades, they would become known for it. The supply would eventually run out, and they would start looking around for a similar kind of steel. Eventually they’d settle on the steel from India. The infrastructure would already be set up; they’d just have to start buying shipments of ingots.”
“It’s an interesting theory,” Jason said, “but it’s academic at this point. We have no idea if that’s what happened, and it doesn’t really matter for our purposes.”
“But it does demonstrate what you were saying, Captain,” Creed said. “That history is resilient. It will incorporate anything we throw at it.”
“That isn’t what I was saying,” Jason said. “History is resilient to a point, but we don’t know where that point is. If we push it too far, we run the risk of a creating a paradox, and we don’t want to find out what happens then. Ideas are like viruses. Can history absorb ten tons of stainless steel? Probably. But can it absorb the idea of steel? That’s a much more difficult question. This merchant, Aziz, he’s a sharp one. Some people would look at our clothes and think, ‘I wish I had clothes like that.’ Aziz thinks, ‘I wish I knew where that fabric came from.’ That’s dangerous thinking.”
“I’m confused,” said Creed. “Are we giving Aziz cloth or not?”
“We’re going to have to pay in steel and fabric because we just don’t have enough silver and gold,” Jason said, “but we’ve got to be clear that we are selling only the goods themselves. We’re not going to give Aziz the secret to making nylon or rayon or whatever synthetic fibers are in our clothes. There will be no mention of sewing machines, or robotic looms…”
“Or chromium or vanadium or blast furnaces…” Olson continued.
“Right. As far as Aziz is concerned, these goods were hand-delivered ex nihilo by the gods themselves. No explanations. As far as possible, there will be no transmission of ideas from the twenty-third century.”
Olson sighed, clearly disappointed.
“There will be no changing history, Olson,” Jason said.
Olson looked to Creed, but the communications officer just shrugged.
“You guys are no fun at all,” Olson said.
*****
Over the next five days, the three spacemen stayed at Aziz’s house while Aziz negotiated the details of their purchase. They had given him all the silver and gold they’d brought as a down payment; Aziz told them it would cover a fourth of the total amount, which seemed reasonable to them. They were more concerned about the amount of time it was going to take to acquire the goods, but Aziz insisted he could not possibly do it any faster without attracting the attention of the Roman authorities. As it was, he was having to hire his cousins and nephews to handle some of the negotiations to keep the other merchants from looking into why Aziz was suddenly buying food in such quantities.
Even taking into account the gold and silver ingots still aboard Freedom, the spacemen didn’t have enough precious metals to pay for everything; the balance would be made up with clothing, steel, and several hundred kilos of copper wire. As much as possible Aziz persuaded sellers to accept a partial payment up front, with the balance to be paid in a week or a month. The sellers demanded higher prices in exchange, but the advantage to Aziz was that it would allow him to gradually unload his inventory of iron, copper and cloth in order to pay the suppliers in silver. Even so, Aziz was out of money by the second day of trading; the spacemen awakened early the morning of their third day in Damascus to return to Freedom for more silver and gold.
Their journey back to the ship was uneventful, and all was calm aboard Freedom. They brought with them as much food as they could carry, to give some relief to the colonists, who were still on half rations. Mika Schwartz reported that the previous evening, a group of men had come upon the ship and spent an hour walking around it and banging on the hull. Finding no way in, the men had departed. Undoubtedly a larger group would eventually return, and eventually some tribal chieftain or Roman official would be informed. Jason could only hope they would be gone before that happened.
Jason, Olson and Creed cleaned up and spent the afternoon in the luxuriously climate-controlled spaceship before reluctantly packing up the rest of the gold and silver and starting the journey back across the desert. They waited as long as they dared, wanting to avoid the worst of the heat but hoping not to have to traverse the streets of Damascus at night while carrying a fortune in silver and gold.
They were still two klicks outside of the city when the sun dipped behind the hills ahead of them. Creed, complaining of a stitch in his side, was slowing them down. Jason turned to exhort him to suck it up and get moving when he saw movement just over Creed’s shoulder. “Creed, down!” Jason barked, slipping his hand into his robe to grab the pistol he carried in a shoulder holster.
Creed, about ten meters back, took a moment to react. By the time he belatedly ducked, the assailant was on him. Bearded and wearing ragged, dirty clothing, the man swung at Creed with a wooden club. The blow glanced off the back of Creed’s skull, and Creed fell to the ground.
Jason pulled the pistol from its holster, but it caught on his robe. The assailant lunged at Creed, who lay on the ground, holding his head and moaning. More men streamed down from the hills on either side of the road: there had to be at least twenty of them.
“Captain!” Olson shouted, drawing his knife. Jason was the only member of the team with a gun.
“I see them,” said Jason, extracting his pistol from the fabric of the robe. He took aim, but Creed had begun to fight back, trying to grab the wrist of the man holding the club, and he was blocking Jason’s shot. The bandits closed on the three spacemen.
Jason raised the gun in the air and fired three quick shots. The report echoed through the hills like thunder. The bandits, now only a few paces away, hesitated only a moment before continuing their advance.
“Help Creed!” shouted Jason, and Olson nodded, slipping past Jason toward Creed. When Olson was in the clear, Jason leveled his gun at the nearest bandit. The man, drawing back a heavy wooden staff to swing at Jason, was less than a meter away when Jason fired. The bandit jerked wildly, a stunned look on his face. Blood gushed from a hole in his chest, drenching his filthy robe. He dropped the staff and fell face down, clutching at Jason’s robe as he fell. Then his grip went slack and he lay still.
Already two other men were almost on him. He fired quickly, hitting one man in the shoulder and grazing the other’s ear. Neither wound was serious, but the ferocity of Jason’s counterattack was enough to give the other men pause. Their momentum halted, the bandits stood for a moment regarding their intended prey. If they had pressed the attack, they could easily have overwhelmed him, but no one seemed to want to volunteer to take the next bullet. The bandits turned and ran, disappearing back into the hills.
Turning, Jason saw Olson pulling his knife from the throat of the man who had attacked Creed. The man produced a gurgling sigh and then expired. Creed was on his hands and knees nearby, groaning softly.
“Everyone all right?” Jason asked.
“Y-yeah,” said Olson after a moment. “I mean aye, sir.” His voice quavered and his hand shook. A trail of blood and mucus ran down the knife to the dead man’s throat.
The Legacy of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic Page 27
