by Eric Flint
“What do the ship people say of Thrace?”
Seuthes felt his lips twist. “Stalemate between Lysimachus and me, but I am forced to yield over time as the rest of the Macedonians support him.” That wasn’t exactly how the ship people book had put it, but close enough.
Banyous looked at Seuthes carefully. “But you are not yielding. Do you think you can change even the broad outlines then?”
“They say that their very presence changes them. And I believe it. For in the history that was in their past Antipater lived and took both queens back to Macedonia. In this world, Roxane is on the ship people ship, and Eurydice is with Eumenes in Lydia.”
“That’s why you’re going, to make a deal with Eumenes and the girl,” Banyous said, and it wasn’t a question. “Our little boats won’t get you there, but I know a man in Perinthos, up the coast a way. They have a large boat. It won’t carry very many, but you and a few of your men…perhaps five.”
“That’s not a lot. I don’t want to appear weak.” Again, Seuthes was surprised by the level of understanding that the headman of a small fishing village had, once he got over his fright.
“Not weak, my king. Trusting, and therefore trustworthy.”
“Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps. Where is this village with the large boat?”
Perinthos was half a day by horse, and two days by the little round boats of the village. They rode.
Perinthos was also a hotbed of rebellion against the Macedonians, and so had a garrison of Lysimachus’ troops.
Small grove of olive trees, about a mile outside Perinthos
Banyous climbed—almost fell—off the small old mare that he had ridden. Rianus, one of Seuthes’ lieutenants, caught the fisherman before he landed on his arse. Which, Seuthes thought, was probably an especially good thing, considering the probable state of that portion of Banyous’ anatomy after the first ride of his life took them some twenty-five miles.
“How do you survive, my king?”
“You get used to it. Walk around a little.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. But since I am walking anyway, I might as well walk into town.”
They stopped outside the town because they didn’t want the garrison to see them. Seuthes looked down at the smallish man. He was bent over, with his hands on his knees, making him seem even smaller. But he was ready to serve the gods and Thrace, even if he could barely walk.
It made Seuthes almost ashamed. He was a big man who rarely missed meals. He was dressed in fine cloth decorated with fine needlework. He rode well and fought well. As priest king of Thrace, he was educated in the mysteries and had all the advantages that implied.
But Banyous had a kind of courage that he had rarely seen. It was the slow, steady courage that kept going through pain and privation.
Suddenly Seuthes decided. He got down from his horse and looked around. His men, they were all better dressed than the village headman. Still, Seluca was about Seuthes’ size and was in need of a new tunic. “Seluca. Trade tunics with me.”
“Sire?”
“I’ll be going with Banyous.”
“Not a good idea, Sire. You might be recognized.”
“No. I have an idea.” He reached into his saddlebag and pulled out a length of twine. Then he tied his beard into a tight bundle hanging from his chin.
“Sire, that looks ridiculous.”
“But does it look like me?”
“No, Sire, it doesn’t. Someone looks at you, all they are going to see is that silly knot of beard.”
Seuthes went to a nearby stream, collected some mud and rubbed it through his hair, not failing to dab a little on the side of his nose. “Now?”
“You look like a madman,” Banyous said. “Very clever. Who would ever expect King Seuthes to look so?”
“I certainly wouldn’t,” said Cotys, Seuthes’ son, who was sixteen and a good lad, if a little too impressed with their status as the true royal house of Thrace. Seuthes looked at his son’s expression and started laughing.
Cotys’ face got red, then he started laughing as well. Then they were all laughing, even Banyous.
“Well, Father, if you’re going to look like a madman, I can look like a peasant.” He looked at Banyous and gave a proper bow. One that as prince of Thrace he might give to another prince. “Headman Banyous, would you trade tunics with me?”
Cotys was quite attached to that tunic. Clothing, cloth of any sort, was exceedingly expensive, and the sort of fine cloth that was worn by princes was the labor of months to produce. And here he was, willing to give it up to go with his father into danger. Seuthes felt his chest swell with pride in his son.
Perinthos
Sunset, December 30, 320 BCE
Neales, captain of the fishing trawler Mermaid, heard a knock at his door and went to answer it. There, in his doorway, was Banyous, dressed in a muddy tunic. That was wrong. Banyous was a fastidious man in Neales’ experience. That thought caused him to look more closely at the muddy tunic, and two things became apparent. The tunic was of better quality than any Neales had ever owned, and the mud wasn’t the accidental acquisition of a careless man. It was intentionally applied. All this had taken Neales only a few moments to realize, but apparently it was more than Banyous was willing to wait.
“Are you going to let us in?”
“Us?” Neales looked past Banyous for the first time, to see four other men. A lad in what Neales recognized as Banyous’ tunic. A big man with his beard tied in a knot and his hair in muddy spikes, wearing a muddy tunic that was of too good a quality…
“Neales,” Banyous said again, with impatience clear in his voice.
“Come in then, all of you.” Neales said. It was a nice house by the standards of the time. It was one room, but a large one, with mudbrick walls and a roof held up by heavy wooden beams. There was a raised firepit in the center of the room and a hole in the roof for the smoke to escape. His wife was there, and his daughter, Persephe.
The men trooped in, and the lad was looking at Persephe with a look that, as her father, Neales wasn’t any too fond of. But Persephe was looking at him the way she might look at a dead mouse in her shoe.
“All right, my friend, what’s this all about? Why have you brought a troop of madmen to my house and where did you get that tunic and cloak?”
“Did I not tell you, my king?”
“You did.” The madman grinned, and Neales looked again. No! It can’t be!
“We need to rent your boat.”
Pendik, Lydia
January 1, 319 BCE
King Seuthes walked down the gangplank at dawn on the first day of the year 319 BCE by the ship people’s measure. At least, he thought it was January 1 as they counted things. He wasn’t entirely sure, not because he was unsure of the date, but because he was unsure of how the dates matched up. He thought it might be a good omen if it was. Starting a new life on the first day of a new year. He was washed and his beard was again a beard rather than a tied-up mass, but he was still wearing the lesser tunic of his guard. And if the mud had been rinsed off, it was still a very dirty tunic. But he walked down the gangplank as a king, not hiding his presence in any way. He had talked it over with Banyous and his son Cotys, and decided that as a show of good faith he should not sneak now that he was in Lydia. A man in armor was walking down the quay. Seuthes turned to face him.
“Who are you?” the soldier asked. “And what are you doing at this dock? This is a military—”
“I am King Seuthes III of Thrace, here to see Strategos Eumenes and Queen Regent Eurydice.”
The man stopped, looked, and looked again. His face got a little pale, then he turned without a word and shouted back down the pier. “Sergeant of the guard! Sergeant of the guard!”
Seuthes turned back to Banyous and Neales. “Thank you, my friends, for your aid.” He gave them each a small gold ring and added, “There will be a new government, I think, one way or the other. And I hope you will find it good.”
C
HAPTER 4
Building the Tools
Queen of the Sea, Hoi Polloi Lounge
January 2, 319 BCE
Travis Siegel leaned over the table and whispered in his horribly accented Greek. “It’s the piss of a redheaded boy.” No one was listening, but it added to the feeling of secrecy and secret knowledge. Travis sat back and looked at the Macedonian’s face. Calix didn’t seem to be convinced, so Travis explained. “It’s not the way we do it because we have spectrographs that let us determine the amount of carbon in the steel by color. But it was used successfully for centuries in places like Damascus. It’s genetics. Pheomelanin, the same chemical that makes redheads’ hair red, acts as an additional flux in the making of steel.”
Travis didn’t laugh. The reason he was on the Queen was because of the poker games in the casino. He could do a poker face.
“And that’s all it is?” Calix asked.
“No, of course not. I’ll write you up a full report on the history and techniques involved once your check clears.” He leaned back in his chair and grinned. Hey, the techniques won’t actually hurt the steel. He excused his actions. The carbon content will be unaffected and the temperature drop between piss and any warm water won’t change at all. Besides, these fucks have been conning people with their phony baloney cults for centuries.
Lydia
January 3, 319 BCE
Eumenes watched the still rather dirty “king” of Thrace come into the tent.
Eurydice nodded regally. “Welcome, King Seuthes.” Philip sat beside her, but he was not looking at Seuthes. His eyes were focused on a spider spinning its web in the corner of the tent.
The king bowed a real bow, inferior to superior, which took Eumenes by surprise. He was expecting more haggling. Actually, he was expecting a lot more haggling before Seuthes bowed, and he wasn’t at all sure that the haggling would come to an acceptable conclusion. He shifted his eyes over to Eurydice and she was looking surprised and pleased. There was a short pause, then Eurydice said, “Bring a chair for the king of Thrace. Now is not a time to stand on ceremony.”
“Probabilities shift,” Philip III said. Which made no sense to Eumenes, but much of what Philip said made no sense.
Seuthes looked at the king, who was still watching the spider, then looked back. “The curse of Olympias still troubles him?”
“It’s not a curse,” Eurydice said with surprising heat. “He has a spectrum disorder.”
The words were Greek, but it was clear that they made no sense to Seuthes. They didn’t make that much sense to Eumenes either, but by now they made some. He looked at Eurydice.
It was Philip who said, “Spectrum disorder is a grab-bag term for people who think in different ways. We see things others don’t and miss things others see.”
“Just as you say, Your Majesty,” said Seuthes, and Philip nodded once, sharply, and went back to watching the spider. Actually, he had never stopped watching the spider, even while he was speaking.
Then they got down to business. It was surprisingly cordial. Seuthes was willing enough to see to elections in Thrace, as long as his status and those of his nobles were respected. He would give aid to Eumenes as the strategos of the empire, but he wanted to make sure that Eumenes would remove Lysimachus and his army from Thrace. More, he needed to be sure that they really meant it when he was promised local autonomy. They went over the constitution, then started talking about the crossing of the Bosphorus, where and when.
“It can’t be soon. We don’t have the pontoons.”
“Air weighs .0807 pounds per square foot, water weighs 62.426 pounds per square foot. It will take 3.6 square feet of displacement to lift one average man,” Philip said.
Seuthes looked at Philip, then said, “Those are heavy men.”
“Weight of pontoons included.” Philip still stared at the spider.
“Oh,” Seuthes said, staring at Philip. Then he looked at Eumenes.
“I have known Emperor Philip III since we were both children. I have never known him to be wrong in any calculation.”
Seuthes nodded.
“The point is, it’s going to take us some time to make the pontoons and the rest of the bridges. We don’t have that many ships,” Eurydice said. “Also, we want to assemble the bridge in sections on this side of the Bosphorus, as quickly as we can assemble them. But we are going to need a force to keep Lysimachus from attacking us while we are on the bridge.”
“How long to make the pontoons?”
“Less time than you probably fear,” Eumenes said. “We will use tarred cloth for the skin of the pontoons.” Eumenes winced even as he said it. That much cloth was the total output of some of the states of the empire for a year. That was changing as the new spinning wheels, carding machines, and automated looms of the ship people came into use.
Even now the ship people machines made cloth much faster. Still, the price of that much cloth soaked in tar and olive oil made Eumenes a bit queasy. And from Seuthes’ expression, it shocked him.
The truth was that the cloth design for the pontoons weighed less than wooden boat hulls would, so would hold up more weight for the same amount of displacement. Erica Mirzadeh and Philip III had worked it out together.
The discussion of tactics continued as Eumenes wondered how things were going on the Reliance.
Reliance, Mid-Atlantic
January 4, 319 BCE
Captain Adrian Scott looked out at the wooden warehouses that were now sitting on the deck of his ship with a mixture of pride and annoyance. The Reliance was a fuel barge, or at least it had been before The Event shifted them all back in time. Now, well, it was still a fuel barge. As could be told by how low they were in the water. They had a full load of oil from the oilfields of Trinidad. They also had fourteen tons of cloth, twenty-four tons of processed cassava root and lots of other goods, including sixty-four super turkey eggs in an incubator. The super turkeys had red meat and were about twice the size of a normal turkey, and there were several people in Alexandria who wanted to start flocks. According to Bob Jones, they ought to hatch about the time he got to Alexandria.
“Well, Skipper,” said Dan Neely, “at least we got to spend Christmas at home.”
Adrian looked over at his radio man and lifted an eyebrow.
“Well, it is. At least now. Fort Plymouth, New America, is our home. I have my ranch there and now Lasli.” Lasli was Dan’s pronunciation of his new girlfriend/mistress/wife’s name. She was a native and by now was mostly running his ranch when he was on the Reliance, which was most of the time.
“Frankly, Dan, it’s not home to me, at least not yet. Home to me is still back in twenty-first-century Bristol. Or maybe on the Queen.” Adrian shrugged. “Hell, maybe it’s here on this overloaded steel barge.”
“We’re not that overloaded, Skipper,” Dan said, which was just plain crazy. The Reliance was an oil tanker with a full load of oil. And that was all it ought to be carrying. If they hit heavy weather on this trip, they were liable to turn submarine. They probably wouldn’t sink because the sealed tanks were lighter than the surrounding water, but they could go under long enough to lose all the goods stacked on the hull. Not to mention drowning the crew.
“Get on the horn, Dan. I want to know what the Queen is seeing, weather-wise.”
Dan rolled his eyes, but got on the horn.
Queen of the Sea, approaching Gibraltar
“The Reliance is wondering about the weather again, Skipper,” Doug Warren said, a grin on his chubby face.
“Well, tell them.” Lars Floden leaned forward in the captain’s chair. He understood Doug’s amusement, but he didn’t share it. “Mr. Warren, the Reliance is overloaded and Captain Scott is right to be concerned,” he said as severely as he could manage.
“Yes, sir,” Doug said, and proceeded crisply to give the Reliance another weather report. The Queen had weather radar as well as the standard weather stations that were now dotted around the Mediterranean with every radio. I
t also had the computing power to coordinate all those data points into something approaching a real weather map. Outside the large windows of the Queen’s bridge, there was nothing but ocean in any direction. It was only the navigation computers that told him they were just over the horizon from Europe.
Lars’ phone rang and it was Jane Carruthers on the line. “What’s the problem, Jane?”
“It’s not exactly a problem, Captain, but Menelaus wonders if he might join you for dinner?”
In spite of the fact that the Queen of the Sea was no longer exactly a cruise ship, dinner at the captain’s table was still a matter of status. In a way, now more than it had been. Half the passengers on the ship were nobles or representatives of heads of state. Discussion at this captain’s table had, on more than one occasion, changed the status of a nation.
“What does Her Nibs say?” Lars asked, referring to Roxane, the widow of Alexander the Great and quite possibly the highest-ranking noblewoman in the world at this time.
“It was her request.”
“What’s she playing at?”
“Trade concessions, Captain. Specifically, getting Ptolemy to take a caravan of fuel oil to Suez on the Red Sea.”
“Well, in that case, certainly.” There was no Suez Canal, of course, but Ptolemy was building a road from Pelusium to Suez. It was a straight road for the terrain, and was being built using wheeled wagons with roller bearings for the wheels and camels pulling the wagons, and being built from both ends. It was part road and part a series of way stations that should provide shelter in the event of sandstorms.
