On the Oceans of Eternity Read online

  On the Oceans of Eternity

  S. M. Stirling

  In the bestselling Island in the Sea of Time, 20th-century Nantucket was inexplicably hurled back to the Bronze Age. In the sequel, Against the Tide of Years, the villainous renegade William Walker introduced muskets, cannon, and other deadly anachronisms to Odysseus's Greece, making himself king and positioning himself to overthrow the democratic Republic of Nantucket and destroy his archenemy, Commodore Marian Alston. Now, in the trilogy's rousing conclusion, On the Oceans of Eternity, Walker's powerful army conquers Troy and invades Babylon, Nantucket's last great ally, as Walker's blood brother, the king of Tartessos, blocks Commodore Alston's Nantucket navy at the straits of Gibraltar. If Nantucket's tiny forces cannot defeat Walker's army and allies, the world will be plunged into a Dark Age bleaker and more devastating than any known in our history.

  S. M. Stirling

  On the Oceans of Eternity

  PROLOGUE

  August, 1240 B.C.

  August, 10 A.E.- Neayoruk, Kingdom of Great Achaea

  "But Lord Cuddy, why does the interior of this furnace have to open out?" Augewas asked. "It made the construction much more complex than the earlier ones."

  William Jefferson Cuddy, onetime corporal in the United States Marine Corps, onetime machine-tool operator with Sea-haven Engineering, and currently ekwetos and Master of Engineers to the High King of Great Achaea, stopped his thoughtful pacing. Production scheduling for something as big as a steel mill was a nightmare, even for this miniaturized antique… especially when even the executives he had to rely on were mostly ex-peasants who could barely comprehend that "on time" didn't mean "in a while, maybe."

  Even if you explain twice about the big hand and the little hand, with diagrams and a boot up the ass, Cuddy thought. A simple technical question was a relief.

  "Ummmm," he said, racking his brain and looking up. The interior of the furnace was dimly lit by a shaft of light from above, more brightly by the kerosene lamp the slave behind them held. It smelled of rock and fresh brick and mortar, and the special firebrick and calcinated limestone that lined it.

  "Ah, stuff gets bigger when it gets hot, right?"

  The Achaean architect nodded.

  "So when we put the ore and flux and coal in at the top, they're pretty cold…"

  Behind Augewas Cuddy could see the Achaean's son and apprentice Philhippos rolling his eyes, left hand resting proudly on the cased slide rule at his belt, and fought down a grin. The younger Greek was at the stage where you just couldn't believe the ignorance of your old man… just about the age Cuddy had left home in Milwaukee to enlist in the Crotch with parental curses and a flung beer bottle following him.

  Of course, Philhippos had grown up in the new world Cuddy and the other Americans of William Walker's band were making of this Bronze Age kingdom. He really did know a lot more about this stuff than his dad. Hard to remember they'd been here most of a decade now.

  The young man spoke: "And this coal"-he used the English word, there being no equivalent in Mycenaean Greek-"is it better than charcoal because it burns hotter, or because it is a stonelike ore and can support more weight, or what?"

  However grimly the telestai might cling to old usage on their baronies, language had grown less formal among the new elite of Great Achaea under the influence of twentieth-century English. Philhippos's father disliked that particular trend; he raised a hand, and the boy added hastily: "Lord Cuddy."

  "Both, and because there's more of it," Cuddy said. "Now that we've got the mines up in Istria going, we can ship it down by sea cheaper than burning charcoal up in the hills; and besides, eventually we'd run out of trees."

  He whistled, and the workers at the top let down the inspection platform. The overlords stepped onto it, and it rose smoothly up to the summit and the heavy iron-coated collar of timbers around it. From there Cuddy could look down on the raw, brawling town of Neayoruk, down to the smoke and thronging masts of the harbor enclosed by a mole running out to an island half a mile from shore, and to the hammered-metal brightness of the Laconian Gulf beyond. Sweat sprang out on his forehead and he turned gratefully to a cooling wind from the water, bringing the tang of salt, coal smoke, the hot metal of the forges whose hearths sent trails of smoke up to the azure Mediterranean sky.

  "We're on schedule," he said with relief, taking in the activity below with an experienced eye.

  "That is good," Augewas said. "The Wolf Lord will be pleased."

  "Yeah," Cuddy said, shivering slightly at the thought of William Walker, King of Men. "That's real good."

  CHAPTER ONE

  September, 10 A.E.-Babylon, Kingdom of Kar-Duniash

  October, 10 A.E.-Severn valley, Alba October, 10 A.E.-Walkeropohs, Kingdom of

  Great Achaea October, 10 A.E.-Irondale, Alba

  Dr. Justin Clemens-Captain, Republic of Nantucket Coast Guard (Medical Corps)-sipped at the thick sweet wine, mouth dry. It was never easy to tell someone about the Event. Much else about the Twentieth had faded, but that memory of terror remained far too fresh. He'd been a teenager then…

  His fiancee picked a date from the bowl on the low table that stood between her and the Islander medic. He went on:

  "… and then the glowing dome of light was gone, and our whole island of Nantucket was… here. Back in this age. More than three thousand years before our own time."

  The platform beneath them was the terraced rooftop of a section of The House That Was The Marvel of Mankind, The Center of the Land, The Shining Residence, The Dwelling of Majesty-in short, the palace of King Kashtiliash son of Shagarakti-Shuriash. It sprawled around them as a city within the greater city of Babylon; crenellated outer walls where sentries paced with the late-summer sun bright on their steel and bronze, whitewashed adobe and colored brick and tile, courtyards, gardens, audience halls, workshops, storerooms, hareem, barracks, shrines, and archives, faint sounds of chanting, talk, feet, wheels, hooves, a whiff of cooking and a stale draft of canal-water…

  The two doctors sat on cushions beneath an awning, amid potted plants and flowers and dwarf trees brought from all over these lands.

  Justin watched the woman as she frowned and thought, noticing again how her face turned beautiful with the mind within, despite thinness, big hooked nose, receding chin, and incipient mustache. The huge dark eyes had depths to them. It made him painfully aware of his own round-faced near-plumpness, kept under control only by the necessities of campaigning and twelve-hour workdays.

  Here's hoping she gets it, went through him. So many just can't grasp the concept. Plain bewildered, or lost in superstitious terror. But Azzu-ena was extremely bright, and practical, to boot. Her doctor-father had had no sons, and brought his daughter up to his trade, which was unusual but not completely outlandish in Babylon. These archaic-Semitic peoples weren't what you'd call feminists by a long shot, but they weren't as pathological about it as many of their descendants would… would have, in the original history… become.

  Well, there's the Assyrians, he reminded himself. They shut women up in purdah like Afghans in the twentieth. But they're just nasty in every conceivable way.

  Of course, asu was not a very prestigious occupation among the Babylonians regardless of whether the doctor was a man or a woman. Medicine and surgery were just treating symptoms, to their way of thinking; the ashipu, the sorcerer/witch doctor, had the real power.

  As one of the physicians on call for the King's women, Azzu-ena had been given the run of the Palace after her father died, including its huge library of clay tablets; she had talked much with foreigners, here where merchants and embassies from all the known world sought the court of the King; otherwise, she had been left mostly to herself and h
er thoughts.

  "I see," she said at last. "Everything you have shown and told me in this past year has been true, so this must be also. I knew when I saw you cut the child from the womb-and yet the mother lived!-that your arts must be beyond ours…"

  The doctor winced a little. Someone as intelligent as Azzu-ena would think about the implications of the Event:

  Your world is dead three thousand years. In most places that means that nothing, nothing of what you love and what makes up your inmost soul remains; your people, their poets and Kings, their Gods and their dreams, their hates and fears, the words your mother sang you to sleep with, all gone down into dust and shadow-

  A little more of Babylon would endure, which perhaps would be worse; to have those parched bones dug up and studied by an academic curiosity equally dry.

  "That's why we have arts that you don't," Justin went on aloud. "We have three thousand years more history… more time to learn things."

  The concept of development through time puzzled her at first; Babylonians thought of history as decline from a previous Golden Age, not of progress. They did know that there had been a time before metal or agriculture, though; he reminded her of that, and went on:

  "And it's why we command so few of the arts we had before the Event."

  Her eyes went wide. "I… don't understand. You have thunderbolts to knock down city walls, you can fly, your ships of the ocean sail about the earth as if it were a pond, you really know what causes diseases and how to cure them…"

  "What we've shown is just the shadow of what we had. Think of it this way. If this palace-the palace and its dwellers alone- were to be thrown back to the time before men knew how to cultivate the earth or make bronze or write on clay, what would happen?"

  Her brows knitted in thought. "The palace artisans-there would be none to bring them food, without peasants to grow the barley. So they would have to go into the fields with plow and hoe and sickle themselves… and there would be no traders to bring tin and copper and hard woods when those in the storerooms were used up… and no work for all the scribes, without a kingdom to administer… too many priests… they would all have to go to the fields or make bricks."

  Smart girl! Clemens thought admiringly. It was a long time before Adam Smith's observations on the division of labor, but she'd grasped the principle that specialists depended on a big population.

  "Exactly," he said aloud. "We were faced with starvation, because almost none of us were farmers or fishermen; and very few were even artisans, because Nantucket had few… places-of-making, workshops." That was as close as he could get to factory in this language; they were speaking Akkadian, to improve his command of it.

  "We had-have-the knowledge to make, oh, carts that run without horses or oxen, or flying ships much larger and faster than what you've seen, or- " He shrugged. "But not the skilled workers and special machines, or the machines that made the machines, or the smelters and forges to make the metal, or to find and refine the fuel, or the farmers to grow the food and the roads to bring it to us. What we were able to make and maintain was only a shadow of what our whole realm, the United States, was able to do."

  A buzz of voices rose from city and palace, a snarling roar echoed from the sky, and a long teardrop shadow fell over them. They looked up, leaning out from beneath the awning and shading their eyes with a hand. The orca shape of the Republic of Nantucket Air Service's Emancipator was passing over Babylon. Five hundred feet of canvas, birch plywood, and goldbeater's skin, the dirigible droned along with six ex-Cessna engines pushing it through the warm Mesopotamian air, the Stars and Stripes on its cruciform tailfins and the Coast Guard's red slash and anchor on its flank.

  Azzu-ena shuddered. "That is but a shadow of your arts?" she said.

  "A faint shadow," Clemens said. "We have to hope it's enough. It's more than the rebel Walker has."

  To himself he added: We think. So far.

  "Then how can he hope to stand before you?"

  "He'll be fighting close to the lands he's made his own, near to Ahhiyawa, Greece. The lands of our strength are far, far away from here."

  "On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;

  His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;

  The gale, it plies the saplings double,

  And thick on Severn snow the leaves."

  "That's Wenlock Edge," Commodore Marian Alston-Kurlelo went on, pointing to a looming darkness in the south, an escarpment beyond the river they sought. Her hand swung westward toward a conical shape. "And we're on the slopes of Wrekin hill. An English poet named Housman wrote that, a little before my time."

  Adventure, bah, humbug, she thought. A Shropshire Lad I could read back home in front of the fire, with a cup of hot cocoa.

  She gripped the hairy warmth of her horse more tightly with her thighs, as rain hissed down through the tossing branches above. It ran around the edges of her sou'wester and rain slicker into the sodden blue wool of her uniform, leaching her body's warmth. If you absolutely had to be out in weather like this, nine hundred pounds of hay-fueled heater were a comfort.

  Marian Alston had joined the Coast Guard at eighteen, a gawky bookish tomboy furiously determined to escape her beginnings on a hardscrabble farm in the tidewater country of South Carolina. She was in her forties now, a tall slender ebony-black woman going a little gray at the temples of her close-cropped wiry hair, with a face that might have come from a Benin bronze in its high-cheeked, broad-nosed comeliness.

  They paused at a slight rise, where a fold in the ridge gave them a view over swaying forest and the country that fell away before them. She went on:

  'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger

  When Uricon the city stood:

  'Tis the old wind in the old anger,

  But then it threshed another wood

  "It's a good poem," the younger woman riding beside her said.

  Swindapa, Dhinwarn's daughter, of the Kurlelo lineage, lifted her billed Coast Guard cap and shook her head. Droplets flew off the clubbed pigtail that held long wheat-blond hair in check, save for a few damp strands that clung to her oval, straight-nosed face. Her smile showed white even teeth, and her English-rose complexion was tanned by a decade of sun reflected off the ocean.

  She went on: "But why are so many Eagle People poems sad? Don't you ever make poems about beer? Or roast venison and playing with babies and making love in new-mown hay on warm summer afternoons?"

  One of the Marines riding behind them chuckled, barely audible under the hiss of rain, the soughing and wind-creak of branches, and the slow clop-plock of hooves in wet earth. Alston smiled herself, a slight curve of her full lips.

  "I've got gloomy tastes," she said. "If we're benighted out here and we can find anything that'll burn, we can at least arrange the venison." An extremely unlucky deer was slung gralloched across one of their packhorses. "Still, he catches the area, doesn't he?" she went on, waving.

  She'd visited here as a tourist before the Event-even now her mind gave a slight hitch; English tenses were not suited to time travel-and the bones of the land were the same.

  And the weather's just as lousy, she thought, sneezing.

  But there were no lush hedge-bordered fields here, no half-timbered farmhouses or little villages with pubs where you sat with the ghosts of cavaliers and highwaymen, no ruined castles and Norman churches, no shards of Roman Viroconium-Uri-con, in Shropshire legend. No Iron Age hill forts, either, on the "blue remembered hills." Not yet, and now not ever, here. Sometimes back on Nantucket among the buildings and artifacts of that future you could forget, or your gut could forget. Forget that an entire history-three millennia of people, being born and living, fighting and building and bearing children and dying-had… vanished… when the Event happened.

  The little party rode their horses down narrow rutted trails made by deer and wild boar and aurochs as much as men and men's herds, beneath towering oaks and beeches, ash and chestnut and lime, tangled thorny underbrush to either
side. Wind whipped through leaves turning sere and yellow with early autumn, scattering them downward with a steady drip and drizzle following behind. The air above was thick with wings, many on their way southward for the year, and their cries drifted down with the rain: redpolls and siskins chattered anger at the humans from the boughs. The trail veered down from a ridgeback, through a marsh-bordered stream edged with alders; water lapped her stirrup-irons and mud spattered on her boots and trouser legs with a cold yeasty smell. The storm mounted, moaning through the branches and ruffling the surface of the puddles. It was good to speak into the teeth of the whetted wind:

  Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman

  At yonder heaving hill would stare:

  The blood that warms an English yeoman,

  The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

  "Roman?" Swindapa asked.

  In the decade they'd been together the young woman of the Fiernan Bohulugi had acquired a fair modern education to add to the lore of an astronomer-priestess of Moon Woman and hunter of the Spear Mark, but not much of it concerned the details of a history that would never happen.

  "A people that invaded… would have invaded Alba a long time from now. About…" Let's see, this is year 10 A.E., which makes it 1240 B.C., Claudius invaded Britain in the 40s A.D., so… "Call it thirteen hundred years from now. They would have built a city thereabouts." She nodded off to the northwest, to where Wroxeter stood in her birth-century.

  "Like the Sun People," Swindapa said with a slight shiver.

  Alston leaned over and squeezed her shoulder for an instant. The Event had dumped her command-the Coast Guard training windjammer Eagle-into the early spring of 1250 B.C., along with the island of Nantucket. The first thing they'd done besides catching a few whales was make a voyage to Britain, to barter steel tools and trinkets for desperately needed food and seed corn and livestock; they'd ended up making their first landing among the Irauna tribe, the latest of many teuatha of the Sun People to invade the White Isle. Among the gifts those proto-demi-Celts had given Alston was a girl they'd taken prisoner from the Earth Folk, the Fiernan Bohulugi, the megalith-building natives of Alba. Swindapa, who still sometimes woke screaming from nightmares of that captivity.