CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

November, 10 A.E.-West-central Anatolia

October, 10 A.E.-Cadiz Base, southern Iberia

November, 10 A.E.-Eurotas Valley, Kingdom of Great Achaea

October, 10 A.E.-Cadiz Base, southern Iberia

Raupasha daughter of Shuttarna tapped Iridmi on the shoulder. "Pull up here," she said.

The allied forces had been moving to an intricate dance since Troy fell and Walker sent Great Achaea's armies east into the Hittite lands. This Nantukhtar marching camp was on the edge of a small lake, set amid pinewoods. Mountains lay about, the broken northern edge of the Hittite lands, looming over the dry plains to the south. The cold air was full of a strong scent of pine and the smoke of fires; within was an orderly bustle, troops less clean and neat than they had been, but still showing that Islander air of purposefulness. And the weapons gleamed.

"Brigadier Hollard, ma'am?" the aide in the headquarters tent said. "He and the visiting VIPs are up at the springs… the hot springs, ma'am; you're the last. It's the first time in a while anyone's had a chance at a hot bath."

Raupasha flushed, conscious despite the chilly air that an odor of woodsmoke and old sweat hung about her. The Nantucketers thought the peoples of these lands repulsively filthy in their persons, she knew-if you understood their tongue, you overheard things you were not meant to. And it was important that her people be represented in such meetings, through her. And Kenn'et would be there…

"I have a gift," she said.

It was the loin of a forest pig wrapped in cloth, and one of her people had even found some wild garlic and herbs to rub it with. These hills were thick with game, and there had been a little time to hunt since they'd pulled back from the valley lands to the south.

"They'll be glad of it, ma'am," the aide said cheerfully. "Sort of a picnic dinner up there. Right that way; past the via princi-palis, and just up from the edge of the lake."

The Islanders had not been here long enough to fell much of the forest; it made the gridwork of streets and tents look a little odd, among the ancient pines. Wagons rolled and working parties marched, but most of the soldiers were sprawled by their tents, cooking, working on their gear, or just catching up on sleep after weeks of grinding forced marches.

The way was pointed by a series of rough-hewn arrows on trees. The springs turned out to be a set of pools, steaming in the cold air, with a strong mineral smell about them. Some had signs on pieces of split tree trunk posted next to them, with writing in red letters: WATER TOO HOT DANGER DO NOT BATHE with an odd symbol covering the last word, a circle with a slash across it. Some of those were full of uniforms, being stirred by workers with wooden poles. The safer pools were full of Islander troops, splashing about in horseplay, throwing handfuls of the hot mineral-rich water and ducking each other, or simply blissfully soaking away the grime and aches.

She found Kenneth Hollard where a hot spring welled up at the top of a tiny cliff and poured down a dozen feet into a rocky pool. The path of the miniature waterfall was marked by a slick white-gold coating on the rocks, where minerals in the water had dried and plated the native granite. Wisps of steam floated above the surface of the pool; a few feet away a fire crackled in a circle of rocks, giving off sharp pops and sparks, bright against the darkening sky in the east. He was there, looking relaxed despite the dark circles under his eyes; so were King Kashtiliash, Kathryn Hollard, Colonel O'Rourke with his unforgettable blazing red hair, freckled skin red, too, where the sun had struck it, milk-pale elsewhere; and one or two others. A small yellow model of a duck floated on the water.

Everyone smiled and called greetings. She hadn't quite expected…

I know the Nantukhtar women are not shamefast, she thought-you couldn't walk through one of their camps and not know it. And I know that any who presumes on it, regrets it.

According to the stories going around the allied armies, some men who had made incorrect assumptions would never be interested in women again, or at least not able to do anything about such an interest.

But can I act so, stripping off in sight of all?

Her own men had gone to great lengths to preserve her modesty, which was possible because she was the only woman, camp followers aside, with the Mitannians.

All that went through her mind in an instant. The answer came as quickly: Of course I can. To do otherwise would be to fall from the status of comrade to that of superstitious local in an instant. They would still be polite to her, but… And I will remind Kenn'et that I am no little girl.

She started to go to her knees before Kashtiliash as protocol demanded; the Babylonian monarch held up a hand. "No," he said, in his deep rumbling voice. "There is… how do you say, my brother?"

"No rank in the mess," Kenneth Hollard said, smiling.

"Mess?"

"Where the officers eat," Kathryn said. She stood and tossed something. "Careful, this end by the stream is hot, better to get in at the bottom."

Raupasha caught it reflexively, and gulped; it was a bar of the Islander cleaning fat-soap-wrapped in a rough cloth.

"Thank you, Ka-th-ryn," she said casually; that took a monumental effort of will. Then she bent to unlace her boots.

When her clothes steamed with the rest in a nearby superheated pool she slid in quickly, soaping and then wading to the head of the pool-just bearably short of boiling hot-to stand under the fall of water and scrub down with a sponge.

"Feels good, doesn't it?" Kathryn asked.

"Yes," Raupasha said, finding a convenient ledge of rock and sitting immersed to her neck.

Did I dream it, or did I see Kenn'et's eyes widen as he looked at me? I am skinny and boyish, I know… but the Islanders think a woman beautiful if she does not look plump and soft- very strange. And look at Lady Kathryn, who entranced the Great King, even though her body is that of a she-leopard.

And it did feel good to be clean again. She sudsed her long black hair once more and submerged, scrubbing at her scalp with her fingers.

"The Mitannians have been doing very well," Kenneth said, as she surfaced. "Especially the chariot raiding squadrons. Thank goodness the front's too big here for solid lines of men; they can get in the enemy's rear and work all sorts of lovely destruction."

"I have heard," Kashtiliash said; his English was strongly accented but fluent.

Kathryn moved behind him and began to work a comb through the sodden mass of wavy blue-black mane lying limp on his shoulders.

"Ai!" he cried, as she tugged at a knot and then used the pick on the other end of the comb. "Are you trying to scalp me bald, woman?"

"I keep telling you to cut it short like mine," she said, face intent on her work. Hers was at the regulation Marine field length, a quarter of an inch. "Then it wouldn't tangle like this, and it'd be easier to keep clean in the field."

"A King's hair and beard are his strength-my people would fear disaster, did I crop it. It is hard enough to make them see why I must travel with so little state; they complain that I move about like a bandit chief of Aramaeans."

"Well, next time you've got lice and I don't, I'm going to boot you out of my bed again."

Raupasha blinked as the King rumbled amusement, and everyone else joined in.

"Kat'ryn and I have been giving the Achaean's southern column much grief," Kashtiliash went on, with a wolf's grin. "There is only one way up the Meneander Valley."

"And their commander on the southern wing, his name's Guouwaxeus, has about as much imagination as an ox," Kathryn said. " 'Hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle' is his style. Kash and I mousetrapped the better part of a battalion last week, and got away clear before his reserves came up."

"It would have been better if my charioteers had the sense to see that they cannot mass against foot armed with the new weapons," Kashtiliash grumbled. "If they had swung around wide and then dismounted, as I instructed… well, that officer is dead."

He turned his leonine head to Raupasha and bowed it slightly. "You have instructed your followers better, I hear, Princess."

"The King is kind," Raupasha said, proud that her voice was steady.

This was more nerve-wracking than lying flat at the King's feet while he talked of taking her head. Of course, my breasts and thighs were not then bared for the world to see, she thought wryly, forcing herself not to cross her arms on her chest, and went on aloud:

"I think it may be that my charioteers had to practice in concealment if at all, while the Assyrians ruled Mitanni; they did not wish the old mariyannu families who survived to keep up their skills. So they are less set in their ways. Also, while the Nantukhtar are the allies of the men of Kar-Duniash, to us they are saviors, so we are more ready to listen."

Kashtiliash tugged at a mass of wet beard that bore little trace of the careful curling irons his barbers had plied in the Shining Residence. Raupasha wondered a little at his hardihood in these rough conditions, until she remembered tales of how he'd been fostered with his hill-tribe kinfolk and spent much time in the field as a soldier and hunter while his father was King.

Perhaps he finds it a relief, to be away from court, she thought. From things Kathryn had let drop, that might well be so.

And was Kenn'et looking at her with a new touch of respect?

"Hmmm," the Babylonian said at last. "I think that these are words of some worth. Men will remain with their accustomed ways of doing, so long as those are successful. They have spent much time and effort becoming good warriors in the old way; their pride is in it. Is defeat then a better teacher than victory, like a schoolmaster with a heavier switch to beat a boy's back?"

O'Rourke spoke: "Well, that would account for his lack of popularity-as the saying goes, victory has a thousand fathers, and defeat is an orphan."

Kashtiliash laughed, but went on: "And it would account for the cycles in the affairs of men; for a land raised up by fortune would grow complacent, and thus weak." He cocked an eyebrow at Kenneth. "Thus your land is in great danger, now," he concluded. "From pride and sloth."

"Nantucket's not in as much danger from pride as the land of the Hittites is in from Walker, thank God," Hollard said. "It all depends on whether we can stop them west of the Halys. Beyond that, they'd be into the Hittite heartlands."

"That is the question," Kashtiliash said. He lowered his voice a little: "And whether Tudhaliyas will remain loyal if they do push us beyond the great river. If not, we must retreat over the mountains in winter and Mitanni becomes our front line."

Raupasha winced inwardly. My poor bleeding country! It would take generations to recover from the Assyrian occupation, and if in the meantime they became the battleground of contending Great Powers…

Everyone nodded. "It's even money," O'Rourke said. "We've slowed them just a bit, we have."

"They're not sure where our separate forces are," Kenneth said. "Tudhaliyas is building up west of Hattusas; we sent him most of those Tartessian mercenaries we captured, and they're helping train his own men. Not much in the way of artillery or Gatlings, but enough Westley-Richards rifles and mortars, and now we've got the powder mill going there's plenty of ammunition. Basic stuff, but sound."

"Ah!" Raupasha said, visualizing one of the Islander maps. "And if he advances eastward to pass us, so as to strike at the Great King of Haiti, we can descend on his sides… I mean his flanks."

And yes, that was a considering look of respect. She made herself sit up, leaning back on the rocky edge of the pool with her arms out to either side, as Kathryn had, acutely conscious of how it made her breasts stand.

"I wonder that Walker has not concentrated and struck at one of our separated forces," Kashtiliash said.

Just then an orderly came up with a basket. The tantalizing smell of fresh bread came from it. "They got the earth ovens going, sir," she said proudly. "Real risen leavened bread."

"Thanks! I get so damned sick of pita," Kenneth said, rising. "Let's eat."

The air was cold; Raupasha gratefully wrapped one of the lengths of plundered-foraged, she reminded herself-cloth they were using as towels around herself, knotting it by one armpit so that it covered her from collarbone to knee. The fire hissed and sputtered as a rack of beef ribs and her gift were spitted on green sticks and suspended over the coals. The basket held cheese, raisins, olives and dried figs besides the loaves. O'Rourke showed her how to cut off a slab of the bread and toast it and some cheese over the fire while the meat cooked.

"Yeah," Kenneth Hollard said, leaning back on one elbow with a handful of olives. "It would be logical for Walker to try and destroy us piecemeal. But only if he could find us, and move fast enough on that information. He's got more troops than we do, and his weapons are just about as good… but we've got interior lines, and more important still we've got radios and aerial reconnaissance, and he doesn't."

O'Rourke nodded: "It's like fighting a big, strong fellah who's half-blind and half-deaf."

Kashtiliash shrugged: "His blows are still nothing to laugh at, when he finds a target."

"It's a matter of time," Kenneth Hollard said. "He's racing the clock. The further he advances, the less fertile the country and the more time we've had to strip it… and pretty soon, it's going to be full winter. Rain and mud down in the lowlands. Hard snow up on the plateau."

It had grown dark, only a pink glow left on the snow peaks to the north. The firelight played over the craggy planes of his face, the light dusting of golden hair over his body, the play of long smooth muscles on long limbs and the hard V-shape from broad shoulders to narrow waist. He didn't have the bulk of thew that gave Kashtiliash a Minotaur's presence, but he shone with youth and health, strength and a leopard's deadly speed. Scars only gave him the gravitas of experience.

Oh, Ishtar of the Lovers, but he is beautiful, Raupasha thought, trying to keep her thought from her face. And if some stranger were to come… even naked as we all are, and among so many proven fighting-men, still he would not have to ask who our leader is.

Marian Alston stifled a yawn with locked jaws and forced herself to listen alertly. The staff meeting was nearly finished; nobody had gotten much sleep last night, and they'd all been hard at work since before sunup. The steam ram had saved their bacon by smashing the Tartessian galleys into unthreatening splinters, but there was still plenty of damage to repair.

"Farraguts still afloat," Captain Trudeau said grimly, the ointment on his face glistening in the bright sunshine. Usually he was a humorous sort, but under the circumstances… "And that's all I can say."

The Republic's fleet lay in the shelter of… Cadiz, I suppose we can call it, Marian Alston-Kurlelo thought, with its masts and spars making a spiky leafless forest for the better part of a mile along the shore that sheltered it from the Atlantic swells. Most of them were several hundred yards offshore; they'd brought the steam ram closer in, so that it would have only a few feet to settle if it finally gave up the struggle for buoyancy.

The Farragut was looking a bit better than it had when they first arrived, mainly because the rails weren't quite so close to the water; none of the portholes were submerged anymore, either. A trickle of black smoke came from its funnel to show that the boilers were still hot; the coal smut flowed skyward through holes punched in the sheet steel by grapeshot. The reason for keeping steam up was clear enough, as long fountains of seawater poured from the vents of the ship's pumps. There were stretches of canvas and rope along the sides, where sails had been fothered under the keel to try and seal the leaking seams between the planks of her hull, and one paddle-housing was shattered and bent. A raft floated next to it, and the sound of sledgehammers and cutting chisels working on bent steel plates rang out like discordant bells. The scent of coal smoke drifted down to the watchers on shore, mingling with the brackish salt of the shoreside marshes.

"I want to get the boilers cool as soon as I can, so we can do some real work on them," Trudeau went on. His hands were bandaged, and his naturally rather dark high-cheeked face had a reddish flushed look, with his blue eyes peering out like turquoise set in copper.

"The boiler's frame seams parted during the blow-the supporting timbers flexed under the stress-and water started dripping down into the furnaces. It was wetting the coal, keeping the temperature down so we lost steam. God knows what happened when we started using the ram in the battle yesterday. Plus she spewed out most of her oakum."

"What did you do about the boilers?" Swindapa asked, moving her mouth carefully. The left side of her face was a rainbow of colors from the bruising impact of the rifle butt, and a couple of teeth were still a little loose. "With the furnace, I mean."

"We had to wrap some people up in water-soaked rags and send them in to slap clay putty on the worst leaks," Trudeau said. "Nobody died, but a couple collapsed… that slowed us up, had to go in twice…"

"People went in while the furnaces were hot?" Victor Ortiz asked incredulously. "Inside the furnaces?"

Trudeau nodded. "Had to, Vic-tabernac, if we hadn't, we'd have lost power completely and been driven onto the cliffs. The masts had already gone by the board, and besides that her seams were working so badly we'd have sunk without power to the pumps, it was like trying to go to sea in a sieve. As it was we were down to six knots and barely made it here in time."

Alston spoke: "I think that was more a matter of leading the working party in than sending it, wasn't it, Commander Trudeau?"

Trudeau had been a cadet when Eagle was caught in the Event. He still looked much younger than the twenty-nine he was when he blushed and shrugged. "Someone had to do it," he said.

"But you did it," she said, nodding and marking it down for later reference. Ortiz was grinning through his bandage. "I take it that the Farragut isn't fit for duty anytime soon?"

"No, ma'am."

"Well, she did well enough yesterday, Gary. The account's in the black for a good long while."

The circle of officers nodded, silent for a second. Marian felt her soul wince slightly, remembering the rowers screaming as the steel-plated bows of the steam ram crashed into the side of a galley and rode it under in a single wallowing rush. The severed halves had each risen like broken pencils sticking out of the ocean for a moment before they plunged, and in the same instant the ram caught another of the lightly built craft with charges of canister, leaving her riddled and sinking in water that turned red…

If it hadn't been for one making a suicide run to fire its Dahlgrens into the port paddle wheels, not a single Tartessian galley would have escaped. She also remembered the sheer enormous feeling of relief as a tactical draw and strategic defeat turned into an unambiguous victory.

Mmm-hmmm, she mused. As it is, they got most of their galleys back, and four of their sail warcraft. Must have lost better than fifteen hundred men killed and wounded, though, and we took a thousand prisoners. That's got to hurt.

The Islander losses had been a little over a tenth of that number, and they certainly hurt… And we took all those cannon.

"Well, there's no reason for the enemy to know that Farraguts out of commission for a while," she said meditatively. "We'll set up manual pumps… no, by God, what we'll do is put one of the stationary engines on a raft and float it out. Ms. Kurlelo-Alston, see to it." Swindapa nodded and made a note on her clipboard.

"The engines are coming ashore later today. Commodore," the blond officer said, using the clipboard to point eastward. "Captain Trudeau, I'll have to borrow your chief engineer?"

"Gladly, Ms. Kurlelo-Alston," he said.

The five surviving frigates were anchored as well; working parties were swarming over them, setting up masts and rigging from the stores-ships, repairing the upperworks, pumping hard; they'd haul them ashore one at a time to do permanent patches on the holes below the waterline, and in a week or so they'd be good as new. There were five schooners as well, but two of them would need extensive overhauls out of the water.

"Captain Galen, you'll take Sherman up to La Coruna and escort the Merrimac and the collier south," she said, picking the commander of the least damaged large warship. "On the next tide; transfer powder and shot from the other frigates' magazines to save time, and enough people to bring you up to full complement. We can keep a schooner on picket duty off Tartessos, and ultralights of course. Mr. Haddon."

The commander of the transports stepped forward and saluted, looking a little self-conscious. He was a reservist, a stocky man in his mid-forties with a gray-shot beard, a yachtsman before the Event and a merchant skipper on the Baltic run in peacetime. He'd brought his ship in to relieve the Chamberlain without a moment's hesitation, though.

"Ma'am?"

She returned the gesture. "Mr. Haddon, as soon as the troops and stores are disembarked, I want the troop-transports to make sail for home; except for four-all over two hundred and fifty tons-who'll be dispatched to Westhaven for another supply run. How soon?"

"Ah… two days, ma'am. We're really very well found now, for the most part. Four ships… that's more than enough."

The old custom of Marque and Reprisal had been revived with a vengeance for this war, and wherever Islander merchantmen met Tartessian, they fought. There weren't any major enemy warships abroad, though, so four big Nantucketer ships ought to be fairly safe.

"Good." She tapped two fingers on her chin; putting hands behind her back hurt, given the wounds she'd picked up. Let's see…

In her birth-century and for a millennia and more before that, Cadiz was a peninsula on the southern coast of Spain, just southeast of the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. Here it was a narrow scrub-covered offshore island nearly eight miles long, just southeast of a vast shallow bay that reached inland nearly to the site of Seville-that-wasn't. The landward side was a narrow channel a mile or two across at its northern end, with salt marsh and pinewoods on the mainland giving way to low rolling hills of oak-savanna and grass, both turning green with the autumn rains, and a few villages of fishers and farmers. The island itself was a sandbank rising to a central spine of low hills-not unlike Nantucket, some of the wags had noted-with a few smaller ones not far away. The only stone was on the western verge, where a few shallow reefs ran up out of the Atlantic swells; doubtless they were what had caught the sand drifting with the longshore current in the first place.

Now it was an instant town of thousands, streets of tents and open squares piled high with supplies. Some of the tents were huge-the field hospital had gone up first, complete with pre-fabricated board floors. Thousands labored, digging ditches and pit-latrines, throwing up the ramparts of earth-and-timber forts, and a steep berm and ditch around the whole camp. Others were setting up the drill that would punch deep tube wells as soon as the engine came ashore. A pontoon wharf extending out into the harbor was nearly ready, and when it was the freighters could unload directly onto handcarts and wagons; the first heavy cargo to come ashore would be steam-haulers. Off to the west she could hear the dull heavy thudump! of a blasting charge, shattering rock to be used to gravel the roadways, and out on the narrow channel oars flashed as boats towed rafts of oak and umbrella pine cut near the shore. A fort was going up there, too, on a point of hard land rising out of green marsh, cutting off any entry.

Alston turned her gaze to the captured Tartessian ships. Two of them were beached, drawn up ashore on the sandy mud to keep them from sinking. The others were serving as floating POW pens, their own surviving crews repairing superficial damage and working the pumps under guard until something more regular could be arranged.

"What's the status on those?" she asked.

Swindapa flipped two pages on her clipboard, but she was speaking before her eyes hit the print. "The two we ran ashore are… shattered was the word CPO Zelukelo used. The others are essentially sound, but they'll all need to be hauled up for work on their hulls before they're fully functional again."

She looked up. "Really very good ships-well built, fine seasoned wood. Composite masts, though-bound with heat-shrunk iron hoops."

The Republic used single trunks for masts, but it had access to the white pine of New England. Swindapa went on:

"We have forty-eight Dahlgrens from them, cold-core cast steel work. The armory marks read Walkeropolis and Neayoruk, which fits with the Foreign Affairs reports, and Cuddyston, which doesn't but I think it's up in, what's the name, Istria, where we heard they were opening coal mines. The guns are about ten percent heavier than ours, and the machining cruder-particularly on the exteriors. But they'll throw a ball nearly as far and hard as ours, and nearly as accurately."

"Too fucking right, they will," one of the XOs muttered. "Sorry, ma'am," he went on at the Commodore's quelling look.

"Then we'll break up the two on the beach for timber," Alston went on. "That'll give us eight-hundred-odd tons of seasoned plank and beam, more than enough for our repairs and useful for construction, too. Brigadier McClintock, I want to get an accelerated training program for the auxiliaries going, starting tomorrow. We'll-

"Is that a railroad?" Ian Arnstein asked incredulously.

It certainly looked like one, snaking north up the valley of the Eurotas, parallel to the two-lane asphalt road from Neayoruk. Wooden crossties in a bed of gravel, and rails on them, shining in the sun that had emerged from the clouds at last.

Wait a minute, he thought. Those rails were wood, too, with a thin strap of iron nailed on top. Then his eyes went wide again; a train of wagon-cars came rumbling around a low hill, pulled by…

Elephants? he thought, feeling his mind boggle; it was an interesting sensation, a little like how your knees got after one too many.

"From Pharaoh," Odikweos said. "A man of the King's left his service some time ago, and found shelter at Ramses's court. We trade with him, and the King bought these creatures. Many men died learning the trick of taming them, but they haul like the Titans of old."

He waved a hand at the… Elephant-way? Elephant-road? Whatever, Ian thought.

"There is talk of extending it north to Mycenae, and then to Athens and beyond, as we did the road, years ago. All the changes come first to this part of the kingdom. Now, about Nantucket-

Feeling his way, Arnstein said: "I thought I wasn't to be interrogated."

The Greek smiled. "No, only not tortured," he said.

Arnstein's eyes narrowed. Few of the Ithakan's questions had been specifically military; most of them had been about Nantucket generally, about laws and customs and governance. Comparing my story to what he's had from Walker and his cronies, Ian decided. Now that's smart. Of course, if this was who he thought it was, his cleverness had become a legend that lasted three thousand years…

He looked around at the vale of Sparta as he spoke, "hollow Lakonia" as it had been called. I can see what he meant about the changes starting here, it being Walker's HQ. Still, they've done an awful lot in less than ten years.

The road was crowded, troops or slave coffles or local villagers traveling on the graveled verges; trains of big Conestogas and smaller vehicles pulled by oxen or mules on the pavement, sometimes a rich man's chariot, a fair number of riders in modern saddles. Pine trunks rose beside the road at intervals, with a single strand of wire looping along; agents and merchants had confirmed that Walker was using telegraphs. Once there was a body hanging upside down from a pole as well, with a sign reading "wire cutter" spiked to it.

The Eurotas ran to their right, brown and muddy and swift over a gravel bed, lined with oleander, plane trees, and dwarf palms. The valley bottom went from flattish to rolling and back, broken here and there by escarpments and gullies thick with evergreens and aromatic shrubs. To their left the afternoon sun turned the snowcapped peaks and fingers of Taygetos to flame, casting shadows down the dark fir-forested slopes; the range loomed over the valley below like a wall, rising almost vertically. More forests clothed the gentler foothills of Mount Par-non to the east, pines standing tall in a dense blue-green bristle on the upper slopes, with traces of autumn yellow on the hardwoods mantling the lower. This was not the Greece he knew.

The valley itself was full of groves, young fruit trees, citrus- Isketerol had ordered thousands of grafted seedlings from Brandt Farms before the war, and evidently passed a lot of them on. Disc plows turned up the rich red earth in fields edged by cypresses, and gangs set out new plantings or dropped quartered seed-potatoes into the furrows. Many new olive plantings mantled slopes green and purple with lupines and vetch. Around the older olive trees workers moved, shaking the branches with long poles and throwing the fruit into baskets. Other laborers pruned and bound vines; there were many irrigated fields, watered from small dams and channels and wind-powered pumps. Most of them grew bright-green alfalfa, or vegetables, or what looked the stalks of cotton.

Mounted overseers watched them work, and there had been half a dozen armed patrols. Ian put that together with reports, glimpses of tumbledown abandoned villages, new pitched tile roofs on larger manors, rows of new-built adobe cottages looking like they'd been stamped out with a cookie cutter… or run up by construction gangs to an identical plan.

"Let me guess, lord wannax," he said to Odikweos. "A lot of the peasant tenant farmers who used to live here don't anymore."

"Yes," the Greek said, looking slightly surprised. "Many have moved to Walkeropolis or Neayoruk, many have gone into the Army, many as colonists to conquered lands."

"And to replace them. Walker… your King of Men, I mean… supplied slaves to the… telestai, isn't that the word?"

"Barons, yes."

"And so now instead of tenants they could call out to fight for them, the barons have slave gangs who'd run off or revolt without Wai… without the King of Men's armies and police?"

Odikweos's eyes narrowed. "Yes," he said in a neutral tone. "Some do run off, to the mountain forests, and live as skulking bandits until they're hunted down and crucified."

"Uh-huh," Arnstein said. "And I'll bet that instead of every estate being self-sufficient except for luxuries, now they couldn't survive without trade?"

"Hmmmm," Odikweos said, tugging at his beard. "Yes. Grain from Thessaly and Sicily and Macedonia; also tools and cloth from the factories the King of Men established." He dropped the English word into his Achaean without noticing it.

They came to the outskirts of Walkeropolis only two hours travel from Neayoruk; sixteen miles or so as the road wound- though Arnstein noted that the journey-stones beside the road were in kilometers. The small forest of crosses on the outskirts were about what he'd expected. Despite that he closed his eyes and gagged helplessly. The ravens and vultures ignored the passersby as they squabbled over tidbits, jumping back a little and waiting when a man pinned to the wood beat his head back and forth and croaked as he tried to scream past a dry swollen tongue.

Put it out of your mind, Arnstein, he thought with grim intensity. You're trying to save your life, and maybe more. Ignore it!

The city proper lay beyond, a mushroom growth with twice the population of Nantucket Town. His eyes went wide in surprise; the reports hadn't prepared him for how alien it looked, neither Mycenaean or modern or anything else he could quite classify. Aqueducts and smokestacks marked a considerable factory district; the buildings there were the same sort of utilitarian adobe-functional he'd noted before, but mostly whitewashed.

The layout was a grid, modified to fit the hilly terrain, with young plane trees lining the streets. Other hillsides were green with gardens and ornamental groves, red and umber tile and shining marble and neat ashlar blocks showing through, mansions and public buildings. Atop one hillside nearby was…

He shook his head. The Mycenaean Greeks worshiped more or less the same pantheon of Gods that their Classical descendants would… would have. But they did it in small shrines, or at hilltop altars, or in groves or caves. They didn't build what he saw there, fluted marble columns around a rectangle with a pitched roof, the stereotypical form of a Greek temple (or English bank) shining in white stone, with a big altar before it and a huge cult-statue glimpsed through bronze screenwork inside the pillars.

The sun caught out points of brightness, gilded Corinthian capitals on the columns, colored terra-cotta on the bas-reliefs of the pediments and metopes, the cartoon-panel-like decorations under the eves and on the triangular spaces at the front above the pillars. A complex of lesser buildings occupied the slopes below. Several other temples were under construction nearby, with a litter of blocks and concrete-mixing troughs and great timber cranes for erecting monolithic pillars.

"Let me guess," Arnstein said again. "The King of Men has set up an organization"-that word had also been borrowed into the Achaean of the Year Ten-"of full-time paid priests-

"The Sacred Collegium, yes."

"-with regional over-priests in the rest of the country all reporting back to someone appointed by him."

"Yes," Odikweos said, shrugging and smiling slightly. "Many have praised his piety in bestowing these beautiful God-houses on the realm, and skilled servants to attend them. Is it any wonder that the Gods have favored him so?"

Was there a slight astringent edge to the Achaean's voice? I hope so, but then I'm listening for my life as well as talking for it. And he wasn't in the backwoods here. This might not be Egypt or Babylon, but it was an old and sophisticated civilization in its way.

Vulnerable, though. Writing had been a rare thing here until Walker came, used only for accounting and administration. From the number of street signs and quasi billboards, he'd put a lot of ooomph into teaching the three R's-and didn't this archaic Greek look odd written in the Latin alphabet! The first generation of literates in any culture tended to be pretty gullible about print. They also didn't have a word for "religion," or a concept of it as something separate from everyday life, that could be manipulated as an entity.

I'll give you any odds that Walker's got his tame priesthood working on some sort of Holy Scripture, too-a pagan Koran or Book of Oracles or something with the King of Men as the Numero Uno favored of Zeus Pater. I wonder what Odikweos would make of that?

There was no need to ask about the structure like a football stadium built into the side of a hill, with a mule-drawn trolley line running out to it. The reports had gone into revolting detail about Walker's revival… or premature invention… of the Roman munera. A crowd was pouring out of it as he watched, animated and brisk, many of them leading or carrying their children, and he could hear the ooompa-ooompa of a band that included a big water organ.

Nor much doubt about the smaller temple of gray-and-red stone on a nearby height. Instead of an exterior altar in front of the building, that had a ten-foot-high double-headed cobra making a circle in gilded cast bronze. It enclosed a sun and moon-black sun, black moon, under the flared fanged heads with their ivory teeth and ruby eyes. A party of women in rich clothing and delicately beautiful masks of black leather and silver led a man with his head covered in a sack up to it. The women stopped and bowed, then made a gesture with both fists clenched before the face, imitating the serpents, before they passed on into the temple proper.

"A few years ago it was just another snake cult," he quoted to himself in a low mutter. "And where's Conan when you need him?"

Behind the snake-sun-moon sigil was another bronze, a statue of a woman with three faces pointing in different directions-the Triple Hekate of the Crossroads. The rest of the figure wasn't at all Greek; more like Kali, multiple arms holding scalpels, bowls, knives, whips, fetters, human hearts-rendered quite accurately-and dancing in a hip-shot posture.

A tablet at the beginning of the road leading up to the building read:

Cold be hand, and heart, and bone;

And cold be sleep, under stone…

Ian Arnstein's lips quirked upward as he read; Tolkien translated quite well into Greek.

Then the ironic humor washed out of him like a candle guttering in a high wind as a long, high scream came down the hill, and he realized the man must have had the bag removed and seen his fate. The scream continued, with chanting running under it like a counterpoint. The skulls all around the temple's metope weren't sculpted replicas. They were the real thing, human bone mounted on polished metal disks, hundreds of them, and as many again on a pyramidal skull rack outside.

That wasn't Greek in inspiration either. Aztec, the way they'd displayed the results of their massacre-sacrifices.

It's like a theme park for demons. Walker and sado-bitch and the others have turned this place into their own multicultural sociopath's Disneyland. Except these are real people they're playing with.

He turned his eyes from Hong's temple and wished he could shut it out of his mind as well. Evil sweltered out of the very stones, like some vile metaphysical ooze that made his soul feel polluted, echoing with the agony within. He'd felt the same before, on a trip to Europe before the Event… at the gate of Dachau.

"This gift from your Island… some of us do not appreciate it here," Odikweos said softly.

"That is not something you can blame on us" Arnstein said. "Hong is an outlaw; were she back on Nantucket, we'd hang her."

He thought of trying to say she was crazy, but the closest you could come to saying that in this language meant literally possessed by spirits. The last thing he wanted to do was back up her claim to divine inspiration.

"Of course you would; she and the King are rebels against your ruler."

"No. We'd hang her for what she's done here."

The Achaean gave a noncommittal toss of his head. It was nearly dark now, the sun sinking crimson on the high peak to the westward; a steam whistle hooted mournfully somewhere.

More people were spilling onto the street, but the crowds parted before the chariot and mounted guards, some murmuring or pointing after a ripple of bows and salutes. Most of the streets were lined with colonnades, with shops behind those and living quarters above; either Walker was a genuine enthusiast for the column-and-marble bit, or all this neo-Classicism was another one of his ghastly mocking jokes.

Or maybe he just read Howard Fast's Spartacus at an impressionable age.

There were statues here and there; they looked more Egyptian, with stiff forward-facing stances and hands clenched at their sides; probably because that was where Walker could get sculptors used to working in hard stone. There were fountains at the intersections, with women drawing water, and from the relative lack of smell there must be fairly good sewers as well.

No defenses ringed the city, but there was a wall topped with iron spikes and an openwork bronze gate between the common streets and the palace district. A huge rambling complex covered most of a large hill, terraces and columns, towers and bright tile and colored marble showing through gardens still fantastically lovely. His captor's guards and chariot turned aside, toward a mansion that was merely large.

"We will talk, after you have bathed and eaten," Odikweos said under the pillars of the entrance way. "There is much I have wished to learn."

Night had fallen by the time Marian Alston-Kurlelo had finished her rounds of the wounded. That was almost as hard as the battle itself.

The hospital smelled of antisepsis and pain, with an overtone of broth from the soup kettles being wheeled through for those who could use them. The first rush of emergency surgery was over, and most of the patients were lying quiet, but the lanterns in the operating theater were still burning bright. Nurses and doctors bustled by, sometimes stepping aside for a gurney with a prone patient, bags of saline drip suspended on poles.

One ward was much quieter, most of the patients there slipping quietly into the waiting darkness with their pain muffled by morphia. A priestess of the Ecumenical Church knelt murmuring beside a cot; she was just kissing the stola before lifting it over her head, and an open box beside her held a vial and wafers. Several Marines were kneeling there, too, some of them bandaged, heads bowed over clasped hands that held crucifix and rosary.

Price of doing business, Marian Alston-Kurlelo forced herself to think. It wasn't as if they'd introduced war here, and a bronze-tipped spear in the guts killed you just as painfully and just as dead as grapeshot. At least this is about something more than a cattle raid. Swindapa was weeping, a quiet trickle of tears from the cerulean-blue eyes, undramatic and matter-of-fact. Wish I could do that. Wouldn't do, though. The Midnight Mare's got to keep up the image for the crews.

Commander Arthur Jenkins was sitting propped up in bed; his left forearm ended in a mass of bandage three inches below the elbow, and other straps immobilized it. A tray was across his lap, fixed to rails on either side of the collapsible hospital cot, with a bowl of beef broth made from concentrate-what the rank and file called "Gomez soup" after the Prelate of the Ecumenical Church, because it proved the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Flesh-and the remains of a small loaf of bread. He put down the spoon as they approached and smiled.

A cheerful expression that squeezed at Alston's chest below the breastbone.

"Commodore," he said. The smile went wider. "I'll have to change my name, if I'm ever promoted." At her raised eyebrows he moved the left arm slightly. "Captain Hook, what else?"

Alston found herself unable to stop a small snort of laughter. "I hope you don't think I'm going to let you off with a soft job because of this, Arthur."

"Ma'am, I'm sure there will be something useful to the Republic I can do," he said, keeping the smile on his face.

"Certainly there will," Marian said. "Commanding the Chamberlain, if I don't manage to get her sunk in the interim- the doctors tell me you'll be on your feet in about a month."

He looked up at her, startled hope in his eyes. She leaned forward, smiling herself, a rare flash of white teeth against her coal-black face, and laid a long-fingered hand gently on his shoulder.

"Arthur, the Republic pays you a munificent six dollars fifty cents a day-less income tax and witholding tax-to be an officer and a fighting sailor, not to play the piano, although I know you're going to miss that. And I set policy on disabilities, so-called. If Nelson could command an entire fleet at Trafalgar with one arm, I think you can run one ship with one-and-a-half."

"Violin, ma'am," he said, grinning as if it hurt his face less now. "I play, played, the fiddle. And hell, I can still do 'Chopsticks.''

Swindapa leaned forward from the other side and kissed him softly on the forehead. "You are very brave," she said simply.

Alston cleared her throat. "Anyway, your family've been informed that you're alive and recovering," she said. "Standard thirty-word radiophone message back from your wife, but I thought it wouldn't hurt if I jumped the queue and brought it to you myself." He took it up eagerly. "Good luck, and listen to the doctors. I'll be in to see you now and then."

Swindapa leaned over to whisper in her ear as they left: "I don't think he was listening to that last bit," she chuckled.

They walked out the front door flap of the field hospital, their boots noiseless on the soft sand of the street outside; it would be a few days before the road team was ready to gravel it. The Marine sentries on either side slapped hands to rifles, and the officers returned the gesture of respect.

"Well, neither would I, if I was in his shoes," Alston said.

Lord, but I hate doing this, she thought, looking over her shoulder for a second at the backlit canvas of the hospital-tent complex. Duty. "His wife's with Brandt Farms, isn't she?"

"Plant-breeding program," Swindapa agreed. Her eyes grew a little abstracted, and her Fiernan accent went from a trace to noticeable. It always did, when she opened the doors of that memory-palace within that her training at the Great Wisdom had built. "Three children… she's expecting a fourth… they have an application in for an adoption. You know," she went on in a conversational voice, "my… mmm, cousin… at the Old Circle has a mother's-sister's-daughter, niece, who died giving birth to twins this summer, a boy and a girl. They'd be glad to put them with a good family on the Island."

"See about that," Marian said, smiling within. Her face went colder. "Now we have to do the funerals."

Most of the Guard's dead from the sea fight had gone over the side at once in the heat of action; there would be a common ceremony for them. Some had died since and would be buried ashore, and there were more from the Marines and the auxiliaries. Cremation was one of the few things the Sun People and Fiernan Bohulugi had in common, and the Ecumenical Church had no objection to it; that was a lot more practical than sending home bodies. At least they had plenty of firewood…