by Eric Flint
“Yes.” The messenger didn’t sound pleased or the least bit respectful. Which irritated Cassander, but not much, considering how good the news was. “It’s not my fault you chose to follow a carter’s son and a mental defective,” he said, sneeringly.
The messenger started to respond, but Cassander waved him silent. “Whatever the ship people choose to call him. Nor do I doubt his numbers. But that is the core of his defect, don’t you see? He knows the numbers, but has no sense of which numbers count. And even less which people count. A carter’s son is your strategos, Melanthios. Of course he wants to protect the lesser people. He’s one of them. And Alexander’s doxy Roxane is no better. She never had the guts for necessary action. The only one in the whole bunch with any worth at all is Eurydice, and now that she’s getting fucked she’s gone soft. They lack the stomach for war.”
He looked at the man and could see the words behind his eyes. “Where is your boar, Cassander?” But the messenger didn’t say them, so he let it pass. My boar was Alexander the Great. But that could never be said aloud and was dangerous even to think.
Once the messenger was gone, Cassander called together his commanders, and explained to them that this was a gift from the gods, that Eumenes’ weakness gave them the time they needed to regroup. His commanders were less pleased than he expected.
* * *
Walking out of the tent, Giorgos, a commander of cavalry, turned to his brother, Arsenios. “I don’t like it. That clever carter’s son has a plan. This is a trick of some sort.”
“Maybe, but we have word from father. The war and the weather combined to cut this year’s wheat crop in half. We are going to need that grain if we are to feed our people this winter.”
“What? You think that Eumenes actually cares about our people?”
“Maybe. Or maybe Philip does.”
“You’re not saying we should be on Eumenes’ side?”
“No, I guess not.” But Arsenios sounded doubtful, and Giorgos realized the carter’s plan. Eumenes was making himself and the queens look like they cared for the people of the empire—even the ones in rebellion. They were doing it to gain support. He didn’t see a counter for it, though.
Alexandria, Egypt, Royal Palace
August 20, 319 BCE
“I will be happy to pay this year’s taxes in grain,” Ptolemy told his daughter Eirene. “And we will ship the grain to them in steam-powered ships.”
“And what is that going to do to the price of grain in Egypt?” Thaïs asked.
Ptolemy stopped gloating, but it was still a good plan. For the next two months Ptolemy shipped grain to Amphipolis and Abdera, where it was divided into smaller loads and shipped to towns and estates throughout Macedonia and Thrace. Egypt didn’t have enough on its own, so the massive farms on Sicily were also brought into play, which almost—but not quite—started the third Greco-Punic war.
Olympia, Greece
October 16, 319 BCE
Nike stood behind and to the left of Eurydice as they stood on the platform while athletes—not just from Greece, but from the rest of Alexander’s empire and even Carthage and the Italian states—paraded before them. It was a marvelous spectacle and she didn’t even mind that Cassander was on his own dais a few yards away with his wife, Thessalonike. These games would put all the others to shame. There were gymnastic competitions and pole vaulting, as well as the foot races, boxing, wrestling, and chariot races. The gymnastic competition had a women’s section, as did the music and dance competitions.
Just offshore, the Queen of the Sea and the Reliance rode at anchor, and passengers from as far away as New America crowded the stands.
* * *
For all of ten days, the expanded games were played. And politics were played as well. The imported food was making a difference, but it wasn’t an unmixed blessing. The line between gratitude and resentment is both narrow and blurry. Philip got a lot of thank-yous, but not a lot of oaths of loyalty.
But the fact was that that wasn’t why Philip did it. He did it because even with the advanced technology that the Queen brought, they would be a mostly handmade culture for decades to come. And that took hands. Hands connected to full bellies, for best results and greatest productivity.
214–216 12th Street, Fort Plymouth, Trinidad
October 18, 319 BCE
The big-screen TV in the community center started its life in a sports bar on the Queen of the Sea. Now it was, in a way, back to its old function. Though Stella didn’t imagine that a chariot race taped by a bunch of cellphone cameras and edited with the Queen of the Sea’s video-editing suite was what ESPN had in mind back in the world.
It was moderately exciting, but she felt no need to jump up and down the way Carthalo and half the men in the audience were doing.
She shook her head, grabbed a slice of super turkey burger pizza and her beer, and waited for the race to end and them to get to the good stuff. The good stuff was the men’s wrestling, done in the traditional Greek style, the wrestlers oiled up and naked.
The race ended with the favorite winning and the side of the screen showed the odds and the payout, and a number of the audience took their tickets to the window to collect on the bets. Carthalo tore his ticket into little bits and tossed it in the air like confetti. He wasn’t the only one. The Carthaginian charioteer he’d bet on wasn’t dead last, but that was only because the Etruscan charioteer took that “honor.”
The commercials came on. There were commercials for beer, for brown potatoes, for corn fritters, for bottled “tabasco” sauce. Anything and everything. And not just from here. There was an ad from Carthage for cotton tunics, and one from Thrace for scented bath soap.
Then the wrestling came on and Stella found herself distracted for a while.
* * *
“You want another beer?” Carthalo asked. Stella nodded vaguely and Carthalo grinned to himself. It was good to see Stella interested in something other than the books and how broke they were. He took the mug and went to the counter to get more of the corn beer that was on tap.
Besides, they weren’t that broke, not anymore. They were producing glass at a good rate and selling it as fast as they could get it made. They’d just gotten a new contract yesterday, to provide the glass for windows on one of the ships they were building next to the harbor. They were going to have to hire more workers. He put that thought away. He used a printed bill to pay for the beer. Carthalo didn’t have one of the ship people cards like Stella had. They couldn’t make those in the here and now.
He took the beers back and set Stella’s in front of her. He wasn’t interested in the wrestling. He was neither Greek nor female. But Stella was, and that was something that Carthalo wanted to encourage. After all, they were on the other side of the world and he was right here.
CHAPTER 22
Stuck in the Mud
Katerini, Macedonia
October 28, 319 BCE
Daniel Lang escorted Thessalonike and Cassander off the Reliance. The Queen was officially neutral ground, but Cassander didn’t trust that neutrality, not when it had, at the moment, both queens Roxane and Eurydice, and both emperors Philip and toddler Alexander IV, on board. Not to mention Eumenes and Olympias.
Daniel couldn’t really blame him for that, but the truth was that the greatest danger—by far—was from Olympias. As to the Reliance, Katerini was as close as it was willing to get to Pella. The inlet that connected the sea to the city was too narrow and shallow for Commodore Adrian Scott to trust. Also, Daniel suspected that Adrian didn’t trust Cassander’s promise of free passage. For which Daniel didn’t blame him a bit.
Once in town, they called for a steam barge. Steam engines and, more importantly, their boilers, were still very expensive and the best ones came from the Queen of the Sea. But Cassander now had three of them, one for a factory in Pella, one for the royal barge that went from Pella to Katerini, and one that Cassander was being very tight-lipped about.
* * *
The trip to Pella was quite comfortable, at least for Daniel. He wasn’t the slave feeding coal into the boiler. He was seated on the deck, watching the birds and smelling the salt air, while he drank a cup of watered wine. Not great wine, but watered wine was the custom, in response to bad water. Nowadays, distillation was becoming available and the amount of alcohol put in water was much more controllable, so you could purify your water without the sour taste if you wanted to. Daniel sipped and grimaced. They didn’t want to.
The cheese was good, though. And the scenery was nice, in a not quite tropical way. He slapped his arm as a mosquito decided it was time to dine, then went into the cabin and closed the screen door. The screen was cheesecloth, not wire, but it worked and let some air through.
The door opened and Cassander came in with Thessalonike and one of his younger brothers—this one named Phillip, but called Lípos. He was a beefy young man. Daniel guessed he was in his mid-twenties. He had crooked teeth, but big shoulders. He was wearing a fancy bronze breastplate over a short-sleeved linen shirt and ship people jeans. His were green, not quite olive drab.
Daniel stood and waited while Cassander and Thessalonike took seats and Lípos took station by the door.
Thessalonike waved Daniel to a chair, getting a sharp look from Cassander, who, after a moment, said, “Sit, sit.”
Daniel sat.
Cassander looked at Daniel and began to speak. “We are here to discuss your duties. We wish you to act not only as the…what is the phrase…‘boss of police’?”
Daniel nodded. It was close enough. The Greek word Archigós meant chief, and Afentikó meant boss, so it was an easy slip.
“We also wish you to set up a school to teach our police to use ship people law enforcement techniques.” The word Cassander used was Oi nkárntens, which meant guardsman, but that was about as close as local Greek came to cop.
Daniel nodded again. This was expected. “What sort of authority am I going to have in regard to hiring and firing?”
They talked for about an hour and Daniel noticed early that when Cassander said “we” he was using the royal we, not including Thessalonike or Lípos in the discussion. Also that Thessalonike wasn’t happy about that, but was not making an issue of it. Lípos, still standing by the door, didn’t seem to care.
More to the point, Cassander made it clear that Daniel was pretty limited in his hiring and firing practices. Among other things, he was getting a title, but unlike most of the titled nobility in Macedonia, Thrace, and the other Greek states, his didn’t come with family to avenge him.
“If you were to kill Metró Archelaus, his family would come to me to punish you. And if that didn’t work, they might take action on their own. So it behooves you to be careful using that ship people gun of yours.”
The gun in question, a six-shot black powder cap-and-ball revolver made on the Queen of the Sea, was even now openly displayed on his belt. Daniel had over a thousand caps and a mold for making lead bullets in his bags. He noticed that Lípos was grinning. “I will be careful, Your Majesty. However, if push comes to shove, you are going to lose some of your nobles.”
“Good!” Cassander nodded. “They need to learn to respect you.”
Lípos was still smiling.
Pella, Macedonia
November 1, 319 BCE
The police headquarters office was located in the same building that housed the radio. Partly, that was because Daniel didn’t have his own computer and would be sharing theirs. Malcolm Tanada and Rico Gica were the only ship people here and he knew that Rico was the “chief of station,” the ship people chief spy in Pella, which just meant he was the computer geek while Malcolm was the effective ambassador from the ship people to Cassander. Daniel would not need to set up his own spy network, which wasn’t anything new for a cop. Police work was all about informants, whatever shows like CSI made it look like.
But that was upstairs. Here and now, Daniel was standing in a room roughly ten feet by fifteen, with no furniture and no door in the doorway or windows in the window frames. He would need to order glass from Carthage. Carthage had a glassmaking industry before the Queen arrived. Now it had a clear glassmaking industry, and if the glass was only flat on one side, it still let in the light while keeping out the cold. He looked over at Zoilo, the Greek slave whom Cassander had assigned to him.
“So, it looks like we are starting from scratch,” Daniel said in his Macedonian-accented Greek. He’d picked up his Greek from Silver Shields and from the computer translation programs that got most of its pronunciations from the Macedonians.
Zoilo nodded, but didn’t speak. Not all that surprising. During the trip to Pella, Zoilo didn’t use two words if he could get away with one. Daniel didn’t know whether that was just with him or with everyone.
“We’re going to need a door with a lock,” Daniel said.
Zoilo pulled a waxed slate out and started writing.
Pella, Office of the Police
November 2, 319 BCE
Thessalonike walked into the office, looked around, and sniffed. Well, waddled into the office. She was six months pregnant and her movement was affected.
Daniel didn’t blame her for the sniff. There was still no door, and not even shutters in the window frames. No furniture but a single couch that was doubling as Daniel’s bed. Zoilo was sleeping on a pallet on the floor, and that was rolled up in the corner. She looked at Zoilo and he got up and left.
Then she walked over and sat on the couch. “Olympias says I can trust you.”
“Within limits.” Daniel stayed standing. “Olympias and I have an agreement concerning you.” Daniel wished he still had his phone with its translation app, but it was owned by the Queen and he was watching his expenses.
They talked in fits and starts, and mistranslations and careful rephrasing about the political situation and what Daniel might be able to do to keep her safe if things went to hell.
“Philip Lípos is leaving to take command of the army tomorrow. The army will be heading into Thrace to defeat Seuthes.”
Daniel nodded, trying to keep his expression bland.
“You doubt Lípos’ ability?”
Daniel shook his head. Then looked at the young woman and decided that his best course was honesty. “I don’t know enough about Lípos to have an opinion of his ability as a general. I do know that he will be going up against a general who history counts as only slightly less capable than Alexander the Great himself, and one—maybe the only one—who gets the twentieth-century military axiom ‘amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics.’” He shrugged. “That’s not why I’m here. I’m here to make a professional police force and to make the streets of Pella as safe as the corridors of the Queen of the Sea.”
“Can you really do that?”
“Not a chance. But I’ll get as close to it as I can.” He smiled, and she smiled back. She had dimples and a little gap between her two front teeth.
There was a cough from outside. Daniel looked at the door to see two young men, teenagers really, walk into the room. They were wearing the nippled bronze breastplates that were so popular with the Macedonian nobility.
They were laughing until they saw Thessalonike. Then they stopped, and gave her a bow. One of them said, “You should be in the palace. Not out among peasants without even your ladies.”
Daniel looked at them, then at Thessalonike. He wasn’t sure of the status here. She was the queen, but she was female, and women weren’t supposed to act on their own. That was most of the reason that the Macedonian nobility was outraged by the queens regent. Especially Eurydice. And Daniel wasn’t sure how the dynamic fit in this situation.
Thessalonike stood up, sniffed, and gave the boys a look that would freeze half a lake. “I am your queen. You will not speak to me in that fashion.”
The boys stiffened, and one of them started to advance on her. That was enough for Daniel. His hand dropped to the pistol on his belt, and the second youngster grabbed the f
irst’s arm.
Suddenly Daniel had a thought. “Queen Thessalonike,” he said, “the king said that if I killed any nobles I would have to deal with their families mostly on my own. What families am I going to have to deal with after I kill these fellows?”
It was partly his horrible accent, and partly the way he was using the Greek words that made both young men and Thessalonike look confused as they worked out what he was saying. But it was his hand resting on the butt of his pistol that made the point when they finally worked out the words.
After she parsed his sentence, she pointed. “That is Bastian of the house of Papados. The other is his cousin Demos.”
The boys were looking at the pistol and it was clear that they were familiar with them. Not really surprising. Malcolm had one just like it, and shot at a small pistol range he’d built next to the radio shack. “And what brings Bastian and Demos to police headquarters?” Daniel asked.
“I believe they are two of your police captains,” Thessalonike said.
Daniel looked at her, then back at the boys. They had dark curly hair and—not following Alexander’s example—they were letting their whiskers grow, but neither had much in the way of beards. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen,” Bastian said.
“Sixteen,” Demos added.
“Oh, my God,” Daniel muttered. Then he took a breath. “Gentlemen, run up to the radio shack and ask Rico Gica for a copy of the Greek translation of the police manual. Then find a place to sit and read the first chapter while I discuss the organization of our police force with the queen.”
