Ice, Iron and Gold

by S. M. Stirling

  The barrage let up. He turned his head, and felt his liver freeze with fear. Sennedjem was lying limp and pale, his back covered in blood. Djehuty scrambled to him, ran hands across the blood-wet skin. Breath of life and pulse of blood, faint but still there. He prayed to the gods of healing and clamped down; there, something within the wound. A spike of metal, still painfully hot to the touch. He took it between thumb and forefinger, heedless of the sharp pain in his own flesh, and pulled. His other hand pressed across the wound while he roared for healers, bandages, wine and resin to wash out the hurt. When they came he rose, forcing himself to look away and think as his son was borne to the rear.

  "I don't like the smell of this," he muttered, and called for a runner. "Go to the commander of the northernmost brigade of Pharaoh's army," he said. "Find why they delay, and return quickly. Say that we are hard-pressed."

  "Back!" Djehuty snarled.

  He smashed the pommel of the sword into the fleeing spearman's face, feeling bone crunch. The witless howl of panic stopped as the man dropped boneless. Behind Djehuty, the men of his personal guard leveled their double-barreled shotguns, and the madness faded out of the faces of the soldiers who'd panicked. Those who still held their spears lowered them, and in the uncertain light of dawn he could see them shuffle their feet and drop their eyes.

  "If you run from death, it follows you—and death runs fast," Djehuty said, his voice firm but not angry. "Remember that it is ruin to run from a fight, for you cannot fight and flee, but the pursuer can still strike at your naked back as he chases you. Return to your positions."

  "Sir—" one said, desperate. "Lord, the thunderbolts strike us and we cannot strike back!"

  "I know," Djehuty said. The bandage on one forearm reminded them that he ran the same dangers. "But they cannot take our position unless they send men forward to claim it, and those men you can strike." Those of you still alive. "Return to your companies! Strike the foe!"

  He turned, stalking through rows of wounded men groaning on the rocky dirt, through shattered carts and dead horses—someone was skinning them for cooking, at least, and he must find who'd thought to organize parties to fill waterskins—and looked up the pass. Nobody, nobody but his reserves, and they were few enough.

  If Pharaoh does not come, we will die here, he thought. Unless he withdrew now, leaving a rearguard . . . No. We have lost too many of our draught beasts. I cannot save the cannon or the chariots. A grim satisfaction: I have done my part, and my men as well. If the plan fails, it is not our doing. Pharaoh's doing . . . he thrust the thought from him.

  Then there was something in the pass: a messenger. A mounted messenger, plunging recklessly down the steep rocky way, leaning back with feet braced in the stirrups as his horse slid the final dozen yards almost in a sitting position. It hung its lathered head as the messenger drummed heels on its ribs and came over to him, wheezing as its flanks heaved like a bronzesmith's bellows.

  The man looked nearly as done-in as his horse, his face a mask of dust. "Here," Djehuty said, passing over his waterskin.

  The man sucked at it eagerly; the water was cut with one-fifth part of sour wine.

  "Lord," he gasped after a moment. "From Pharaoh."

  He offered a scroll of papyrus; Djehuty touched it to his forehead in the gesture of respect and broke the seal to read eagerly, his eyes skipping easily over the cursive demotic script, so different from the formal hieroglyphs of sculpture and temple.

  Enemy ships with many guns at the Gateway of the North, he read, and grunted as if shot in the belly. That was the fortress of Gaza, the anchor of the Royal Road up the coast. Only if it was securely held could even a single man return to Khem across the deserts of Sinai. Troops armed with fire-weapons are landing and investing the fortress. Pharaoh marches to meet them. Hold your position at all hazards; you are the rear guard.

  Djehuty grunted again, as a man might when he had just been condemned to death. That was where the cream of the enemy forces had gone, right enough.

  "Sir!" Another messenger, one of his own men, and on foot. "Sir, the enemy attack!"

  The steel kopesh was lead-heavy in Djehuty's hand as he retreated another step; the ring of Egyptians grew smaller as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder around the standard. For Khem, he thought, and slashed backhand. The edge thudded into the rim of an Aramanaean's shield, and the leather-covered wicker squeezed shut on the blade. The nomad shrieked glee and wrenched, trying to tear the weapon from the Egyptian's hand. Djehuty's lips bared dry teeth as he smashed the boss of his own into the man's face, then braced a foot on his body to wrench the sickle-sword free. For Sennedjem! he thought, swinging it down. Distracted, he did not see the spearhead that punched into his side just below the short ribs. Bent over, wheezing, he saw the spearman staring incredulously at the way the bronze point had bent over double against the iron scales of his armor, then scream frustration and club the spear to use the shaft as a bludgeon. Exhaustion weighed down his limbs as he struggled to turn, to bring up shield and blade. Something struck him again, he couldn't tell where, and the world went gray. His last thought was that the earth tasted of salt with blood.

  Bits of the formulae for addressing the Judge of the Dead flitted through Djehuty's head along with blinding pain as his eyelids fluttered open. But it was not jackal-headed Anubis who bent over him, but a foreigner with a cup of water. The Egyptian sucked it down gratefully before he thought to wonder at it.

  Prisoner, he thought. I must be a prisoner. But he was not bound, and beneath him lay a folding cot with a canvas bead, not the hard ground. He turned his head carefully. He was under a great awning, amid rows of others. Sennedjem! His son lay not far away. Djehuty gasped relief to see his chest rising under a mummy's swath of bandages. But what was held in the clear glass bottle that was connected to his arm by a flexible tube?

  Djehuty's eyes went wide when he realized that the same piece of sorcerer's apparatus drained into his own arm. Gradually the fear died, and the pain in his head became less. When the foreigner's black commander came, he was able to stare back with something approaching dignity as she sat on a folding stool beside his cot.

  She spoke, and the Sudunu interpreter relayed the words:

  "You and your men fought very well."

  Djehuty blinked, then nodded. Nevertheless, the scales had swung against him. "You deceived us very well. Ransom?" he went on without much hope.

  She shook her head. "When the war is over, we will release all our prisoners."

  Djehuty blinked again, this time in surprise, caught between relief and doubt. It would take a strong commander to deny victorious troops the plunder of victory, and the sale of prisoners was an important part of that. Even Pharaoh, the living God, might have difficulties. With an effort, he fought down bitterness against Ramses; what the Pharaoh decreed, must be done . . . even if it destroyed the Brigade of Seth at the word of the foreigner Mek-andrus.

  "Your king must be a ruler of great power," he said.

  "We have no king," she said, and smiled slightly at his bafflement. "We come from . . . very far away," she said. "In distance and years. You might call us exiles."

  "Your whole nation?" he said in bafflement, as the explanation went on. Powerful sorcery.

  "No," she went on. "Just one small island of us, and a ship. So we were stranded here and now."

  "Ah," Djehuty said bitterly. "And with arts of war like none we know, you seek to carve out a great empire."

  Long black fingers knotted into a fist on a trousered knee. "No. Some of us saw that they might become kings here, with what they knew. The rest of us . . . must fight to enforce our law upon them."

  "No king . . ." Djehuty frowned. "I find that hard to believe. Only a powerful king can make a people strong in war."

  She shook her head. "That is not so, Djehuty of the Brigade of Seth. We have arts that your people do not, is that not so?" He nodded, reluctantly. "Well," she went on, "not all those arts are arts of war. We have found that
one man's wisdom is not enough to steer a great nation, and how to . . . to melt together the wisdom of many."

  "I do not understand."

  "Let me tell you," she said, "of a thing we call a Constitution, which is a government of laws and not of men . . ."

  When she rose with a promise to return and speak more, his head was whirling as badly as it had when the spearshaft clubbed him. He heard words in the foreign commander's language:

  "And that'll cause a lot more trouble than gunpowder, in the long run."

  "Wait," he said. "One thing—what name will this battle be given? Surely it is a greater one than Kadesh, even." Let the chronicles remember it, and with it the name of Djehuty. Chronicles that did not lie, like the ones that called Kadesh a victory for Ramses.

  She turned, smiling wryly. "We will name it from the hill that overlooks the battlefield," she said. "Har-Megiddo. Armagedon , in our tongue."

  Three Walls-32nd Campaign

  "Sir," Gnaeus Clodius Afer said. "Exactly which bunch of these fucking wogs are we supposed to be fighting, anyway?"

  Gaius Vibulenus squeezed his hand on the mail-clad shoulder of the man who commanded the Tenth Cohort. Clodius Afer wore a red transverse crest across his helmet; he carried a staff of hard twisted wood rather than the two javelins the enlisted men bore, and his short stabbing sword was slung on the right from a baldric rather than the left side of his military belt: a centurion's gear. Gaius Vibulenus's Attic helmet had a white plume, and he wore a back-and-breast armor of cast bronze hinged at the shoulders. The Hellenic-style outfit marked him as an officer, a military tribune.

  At least, it had when the legion sailed out of Brundisium to join Crassus's glorious conquest of Parthia. He'd been able to wear it because his family were wealthy landowners in Campania and politically well-connected; one more gentry sprig gaining a little military experience to help him with the cursus honorum to office, and hopefully a share of the plunder. Militarily he'd been a joke. The actual work of the unit was done by men like Clodius Afer. Since then, things had changed.

  Hercules, but they've changed, Gaius Vibulenus thought, looking down the hillside where the Romans stood at ease and waited for the aliens who'd bought them from their Parthian captors to decide what they were going to do.

  I'd like to know in more detail too. Usually they just march us out of the ship, we kick arse, and then we march back. He didn't like it when things got more complicated than that. The last time they'd gotten really complex . . . that had been the siege. The siege had been very bad . . . .

  To blank out the memory of ton-weights of stone grinding through his body Gaius Vibulenus looked over his shoulder, towards the group who would send the legion into action. The hulking presence of the Guild Commander was half a hundred paces away, surrounded by his monstrous toadlike guards mounted on their giant hyena-like mounts. The seven-foot spiked maces the guards bore glinted in the light of a sun paler than that the Roman had been born under, with a pinkish tinge to its yellow. The banded iron armor they wore creaked on its leather backing, and the scale-sewn blankets that protected their mounts rustled and clicked. The Commander—this Commander, there had been a dozen of as many different types—was himself as large as his hideous bodyguards, and dressed in the inevitable blue jumpsuit with the shimmer of a force-screen before his face. His hands dangled nearly to his back-acting knees, and when he was nervous claws like so many straight razors unfolded from the insides of his fingers. They were thin and translucent and looked sharp enough to cut the air.

  Compared to him, the natives of this low-technology world were positively homelike, much more so than most the legion had fought in the service of the . . . creatures . . . who'd bought them. The group around the Commander were fairly typical. Almost homelike . . . if you ignored the fact that they had greenish feather fronds instead of hair, and huge eyes of a deep purple without whites, and thumbs on either side of their three-fingered hands. About half the delegation arguing with the Commander were females, their breasts left bare by the linen kilts that were their only garments—four breasts each.

  One of the guard detail standing easy behind the tribute pursed his lips. "You know, some of them wog bitches, they're not bad looking," he murmured. "Wonder what they're shaped like under those kilts?" A couple of the naked attendants with collars around their necks, probably slaves, were male and equipped the same way as someone from Campania.

  "Silence in the ranks!" Afer barked. In a conversational voice: "Sir?"

  "It's a little more complex than usual, Centurion," Vibulenus said. "The . . . Guild—" he'd always wondered if that Latin word was precisely what the creatures who'd brought them meant "—is supporting the rulers of a kingdom southeast of here. They're in the process of conquering this area we're in, and they're facing a rebellion that they can't put down."

  If the Guild used its lasers and flying boats, putting an end to the uprising would take about thirty minutes. For some reason Vibulenus had never even begun to understand, the Federation the trading guild served forbade the use of weapons more advanced than those of the locals of any given area. If the natives used hand-weapons of iron, the slave-mercenaries of the Guild had to do likewise. That was why they'd bought the Romans; the legion was very, very skilled with those tools, and had the discipline to slaughter many times their number of those who were less so.

  "And we're supposed to pull it out of the pot for them, right?" Afer said. "Well, that's familiar enough." His eyes lifted over the ranks of the Roman legionaries, appraising the local help they'd be working with. "That'll be their lot, eh?"

  Vibulenus nodded; the remark had been a conversational placeholder. The legion often had to work with local auxiliaries and it usually wasn't any pleasure . . . but it was as necessary here as it had been back in the lands around the Middle Sea, since Rome produced little in the way of cavalry or light missile-infantry. For instance, under Crassus they'd depended on Celtic auxiliary cavalry from Gaul to keep the Parthians away while they marched through the desert of Ctesiphon.

  "And that didn't work all that well, the gods know," he murmured.

  Afer nodded, understanding him without need for further words. They both remembered it more vividly than most things since: the dust and the thirst, the glitter of the mail and lances of the Parthian cataphracts whose presence forced them into tight formation . . . and the horse-archers darting in, loosing their clouds of shafts. Shafts thrown by their horse-and-sinew composite bows with enough force to slam the point right through the leather and plywood of a shield, forcing you back a pace with the whipcrack impact and leaving the triangular head of the arrow on the inside of your shield. If you were lucky; right through your mail-coat if you weren't, and your body lay with all its blood running out on the alkaline clay of Mesopotamia . . . .

  Vibulenus shrugged off the memory and looked at the locals. Many of them drove chariots, not much different from the ones immortal Homer had described, except that the pair of beasts which drew them had feathers rather than fur, and blunt omnivore fangs instead of a horse's grass-cropping equipment. They looked like big dogs or slim bears with the skins of pigeons, or at least that was as close as you could come to describing them in Latin. Each cart carried three of the beasts, a driver in a kilt, a spearman in a long coat of iron or bronze scales and carrying a big rectangular shield, and an archer. There were more feathery plumes on the helmets of all three. Their infantry . . .

  Well, that's what we're here for, he thought. The infantry were a rabble, some of their spears only fire-hardened wood at the business end, none of them with much in the way of armor. The slingers and archers might be of some use.

  "Gaius Vibulenus Caper," the Commander called.

  Vibulenus sighed and adjusted his helmet. "Time to get the word," he said, and strode towards the toad-guards.

  "Hasn't it ever occurred to these dickheads to ride the bloody things?" someone snarled.

  Apparently not, Vibulenus thought.

  The enem
y were a huge shambling clot pouring out of the distant woods and across the lowlands. Their crest was cavalry—a line of chariots, not much different from the ones the Romans'—the trading guild's—allies used.

  Gaudy, though, Vibulenus thought critically, looking at the enemy vehicles. Two of them collided as they swept in one-wheel-down circuits that were probably designed to show off the driver's skill. And I've seen better coordination in a tavern brawl.

  The allied war-carts sweeping in from the flanks to meet the enemy were fairly uniform, and they moved in squadrons of four and larger units to horn and flag signals. Those of the enemy were decorated with feathers and paint, plumes and gilded bronze and silver, whatever their owners fancied or could afford—and the skulls of enemies past nailed to their railings. The skulls looked less human than the faces of the locals did alive.

  Arrows flickered out. Vibulenus's eyebrows rose. A good two or three hundred yards, and they hit hard when they landed—that was almost as good as the Parthians. Chariots tumbled into splintered wreck, their passengers flying out like rag dolls with their limbs flapping until the bone-crunching impact. Others careened away driverless, or stopped as their beasts were injured—unlike horses, the local draft animals seemed inclined to fight when they were hurt, not run away. It was all as distant and safe as matched pairs in an arena in Capua; a few of the troops were even calling out hoc habet and making gestures with their thumbs.

  "Looks like our wogs are thrashing their wogs, sir," Afer said after a moment. "Leastways with the chariots."

  Vibulenus nodded. But that isn't going to be what settles this fight, he thought. The enemy infantry was still spilling out of the woods, and while the allied chariots were getting the better of the melee they still weren't free to range up and down shooting them to pieces. Not many missile infantry, he noted. Spearmen with seven-foot stabbing weapons and shields, and swordsmen with long leaf-shaped slashing weapons, the few slingers and archers were to the rear where they couldn't do much good. The local wogs were bigger than the Guild's allies, and their feathery head-tufts had a reddish or yellow tinge to the green. They painted their naked bodies in patterns as gaudy as the chariots of their lords; some of them wore strings of hands or disconcertingly humanlike genitalia around their necks, while others had torques of pure soft gold.