On the Oceans of Eternity Read online

  "That can't be a steam engine," O'Rourke said. It was too far away, and too big. His head turned toward the lookout post higher up the mountain slope to the south.

  "I don't think much of the soil here," Private Vaukel Telukuo said. He dug his bayonet into the turf beside him and ripped up a handful, looking critically at the dry reddish dirt that clung to its roots. "Too dry-not much weight to it, if you know what I mean."

  He was a tall sallow young man, dark of hair and eye, with a big nose and long bony jaw. His companion's name on the rolls was Johanna Gwenhaskieths. He doubted that was anything her parents had given her; gwenha simply meant "woman" in the tongue of the eastern tribes, and skieths was "shield." Shield-woman probably meant something like female warrior, which was odd when you considered that among the charioteers such weren't merely rare, as they were among the Earth Folk, but except in stories virtually unknown.

  Unknown until the Eagle People came, he corrected himself.

  Johanna was peering down the huge sweep of hillside below them, occasionally raising the field glasses they'd been issued when they were put on outpost duty; she was several inches shorter than he, her cropped hair so fair it was almost invisible, narrow eyes a cold gray.

  "Nothing so far," she said, and then dug a heel into the ground to reply to his first remark. "Not much like the fat black earth where I was born either… but you don't have to farm it, Vauk."

  "Ah, well, I thought I was tired of farming," he said mildly. "Boring I thought it was, you know? But this soldiering, it's boring too. And I miss my cattle."

  "I can stand boring," she said; where his voice gave English a singsong burbling lilt, hers was choppy and hard. "They were going to bury me facedown in a peat bog, with a forked hazel branch over my neck to keep my ghost from walking. So walk I did, by night, to the Cross-God mission station. The priestess there got me into the Corps." She crossed herself. "Honor to Him of the Cross, and His Father and Mother."

  "Now why would anyone do such a thing?" Vaukel said indignantly. "Drown you in a bog, that is."

  Johanna chuckled. "For spreading my thighs for a fine young warrior rather than a fat old man who had seven cows to give my father," she said. "And here I am, with all the fine young warriors I could want, being one myself, and nobody to send me to the bog… what's that?"

  They both frowned and looked westward. The sound was a deep rumbling beat, echoing off the hillsides and cliffs about them. "Sounds like…" Vaukel said slowly. "Sounds like a drum, doesn't it?"

  "The drum of a God," Johanna said. "Or one of those machines of steam." She brought the glasses up again, then blurted out a half sentence in her birth-tongue. In English: "Message to the base-When it was over and the reply came they snatched up their rifles, then the tripod with its tilt-mounted mirror that flashed coded sunlight. Vaukel put it over his shoulder, and they bounded and ran and tumbled down the steep slopes and then across the flat, running for the barley-sack ramparts of the little outpost.

  "What's up?" one of the pickets called to them.

  Vaukel pointed westward. "Here they come!" he yelled. "Spears like stars on water, and thicker than the grass!"

  * * *

  "I wish we could just elope," Justin Clemens said, dodging a rush of liquid garbage from a narrow second-story window.

  The movement was a little jerky with nervousness. He consciously controlled his breathing; meeting prospective in-laws was bad enough, worse when they were foreign, worse still when you knew they and your fiancee had been feuding for years.

  "Then we would not be married-not by the laws of the Land of Kar-Duniash," said Azzu-ena.

  He knew that brisk tone fairly well, by now. It was eighteen months since she'd talked him into taking her on as an apprentice, and two since he'd convinced her to marry him.

  And ten years going on eleven since the Event. Focus, you fool! he thought. She went on:

  "I will not let my uncle and his she-demon grasp everything that was my father's in their claws; their children I would not grudge it to, the little ones who love their cousin, but f will settle what they receive. And those two would neglect the funerary offerings for my father. Bad enough that he had no sons to make them. Come, betrothed, come."

  "Oh, all right," Clemens grumbled, wiping his face with his bandanna; weather on the banks of the Euphrates was not easy for a man inclined to plumpness, even getting on toward winter. This sun wasn't easy on the naturally pink, either; his floppy canvas campaign hat was welcome, and so was the shade of the blank-walled two-story buildings that lined the narrow twisting laneway. It didn't help that he'd had to leave off shaving for the last two weeks, but everyone told him that it would be impossible to go into a marriage-contract discussion looking like a smooth-cheeked eunuch. The resultant growth was a bit lighter than the cropped sun-streaked brown hair on his head, which made him even more conspicuous. Plus it itched and caught sweat.

  Nantucketers were no longer so rare in the streets of Babylon that they attracted a crowd-small children following along, yes, and stares, pointed fingers, more than a few gestures to avert the Evil Eye and baleful magic, hands gripping amulets or small images of the gods. Clemens looked about as he walked; he was more familiar with the everyday city than most of the Islander expeditionary force, since he'd been in charge of stopping the smallpox epidemic. This was still very different from the palace quarter where he spent most of his time when not in the field or down at the Republic's outpost, Ur Base, near the mouth of the Euphrates. The street was narrow, twisting, deep in shadow and in dust at the tail end of summer, doubtless a quagmire of mud in the infrequent winter rains. An irregular trickle of sewage ran down the middle and insect-buzzing heaps of rubbish lay wherever a householder had dumped them.

  Skinny feral dogs wound among the crowds, and an occasional pig even more lean and savage rooted among the offal; most Semites of this era had no taboo on hog products-though considering what the beasts ate, the Nantucketer very much wished they did. Most houses had a drain through their front walls, adding their trickle to the mess; Clemens hopped or strode over the rivulets as he walked, brushing at the omnipresent flies. The stink he'd gotten used to, mostly, but his doctor's skin crawled at the thought of the germs swarming around him like a host of the invisible fever demons the locals believed in.

  Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good metaphor for the disease environment here, he thought. That was what happened when you crammed two hundred thousand people and a total ignorance of public hygiene together in a few hundred stagnant, blistering-hot acres.

  The smell wasn't as bad as the horror he felt every time they brushed past a water-seller, though, bulging goatskin slung over one shoulder, cups on a bandolier over the other, crying his wares in a nasal falsetto. That water came from the canals that bisected the city, drawn directly from the same river that eventually swallowed what was running down the center of the streets.

  Azzu-ena strode along nimbly beside him, one hand holding the hem of her robe up out of the road and the other pulling her shawl up beneath her chin; once she stopped to drop a packet of dried dates in the bowl of an emaciated blind beggar leaning against a wall-with no equivalent of small change, food was what you gave if you were feeling charitable. She smiled and nodded and answered greetings from passersby that were shy and awkward only because of the foreigner beside her. Her father had lived all his life in this neighborhood, the babtum-city-ward-of Mili-la-El, near the Eastern Gate of the great city. She'd earned most of her living in the palace, where her sex made her a favored medical attendant among the King's women, but she also tended to the needs of many of her neighbors, as her father had done before her. His ancient assistant tottered at her heels with the basket of healing tools.

  So respect for his bride helped to clear a path for Clemens, as much as his alien features and uniform and the dreaded fire-weapon at his belt. Everyone knew where they were bound and why; apart from the rumor telegraph, there weren't many other reasons for a man and woman
to head for the woman's relatives with a scribe in tow. Murmured good wishes followed them, and good-natured jibes at the scribe and the scribe's assistant; the portly man with the jointed waxed boards and bronze stylus of his craft nodded benignly. The skinny apprentice carrying the heavier clay just sweated.

  When a train of loaded donkeys came by, everyone had to crowd the walls; their panniers nearly brushed the buildings on either side. Swaggering thick-armed toughs with cudgels and jutting curled beards flanked the robed merchant, who rode with his feet nearly touching the ground at the head of the line. When the animals passed the jostling crowd returned-pushing, chaffering, shouting, here a snatch of nasal twanging song, there a storyteller squatting at an intersection reciting the deeds of Gilgamesh and pausing until the audience tossed bits of metal or beads or handfuls of dried fruit into his bowl; a public writer waving his reed stylus above a bucket of damp clay and shouting of his skill; a hideously deformed beggar showing his sores and whining for alms…

  Every few hundred yards the blank housefronts gave way to a clutch of tiny shops, their fronts spilling into the streets and long narrow rooms stretching back into mysterious gloom. Despite his jangling nerves, Clemens halted for a moment to watch a jeweler at work, hands tapping out a thing of beauty in gold leaf and carnelian amid trays that displayed silver cuff-bracelets, bangles, earrings, and necklaces. Terra-cotta figurines on either side of a doorway marked a chapel, where you could stop for a moment in the courtyard to pray and scatter a handful of flour for luck.

  The roar of noise held few wheels or hooves in these narrow ways. Most of it was human voices, breaking into arm-waving, shouting argument and dying away into equally quick laughter, calling for alms, screaming out the virtues and incredibly low cost of their wares; near-naked laborers grunting for passage as they bent double under huge burdens of cloth or flour or cakes of dried dates, or a barefoot slave with his hair in the distinctive topknot required by law asking his way with a strong foreign accent. A drunk reeled by making attempts at song that would have been hideous even if Babylonian music didn't sound like a cat in a washing machine, priests in tassled cloaks chanted, housewives balanced the day's shopping or a water jug on their heads, scarcely a one not chattering and gesturing as she walked, squealing children ran in packs…

  Dress for both sexes was a short-sleeved wool tunic, anything from knee to ankle length for men but always long for women. Working men wore theirs just above the knee, girded about with a beltlike sash; the odd man of wealth went robed to his sandals, with a fringed cloak wrapped about his upper body, the length of cloth and the embroidery and fringe of tassels being a mark of rank. Women always covered their legs, and the more respectable their heads as well, usually with a long cloak or shawl that might be drawn across the face. Most cloth was faded, muted grays and browns, but the exceptions were gaudily flamboyant in blue, crimson, yellow, stripes and dots and bands; jewelry was frequent, a family's store of wealth as well as display; hardly a free woman went without a clutch of lucky silver bracelets in groups of six.

  And not a street sign or house number, Clemens thought, thoroughly lost. f suppose you have to be born here to really know it. An eeriness went beneath everything; he was watching-walking through-scenes dead and dust three thousand years and more when he was born. And without us, it would have gone on like this for thousands of years to come. Now in a century or two, who knows?

  "This is my uncle's house," Azzu-ena said. Eyes peered at them over the high blank wall, then vanished hurriedly.

  "Go, go, knock and require them to open," Azzu-ena went on with a shooing motion, smiling indulgently at him.

  He smiled back. God, you could drown in those eyes, he thought.

  "Go, knock," she said again, starting him out of a happy daze.

  She's all ears when I'm teaching, Clemens thought ruefully. But a lot of the rest of the time, you'd think I wasn't fit to be let out without a keeper. Of course, he wasn't, when it came to the intricacies of law and custom among a people wholly foreign.

  A Babylonian would have used his walking stick to knock. Clemens rapped with his knuckles on the plain rough poplar wood of the doorway, swallowing through a throat gone dry.

  "Hi, I'm-

  "This is the servant of the doorway," Azzu-ena hissed in her thickly accented English. "Remember!"

  "Oh, yeah," Clemens muttered.

  The doorway gave into a small vestibule, cool and dim; it was a relief when the doors swung shut behind them, closing out the noise and much of the stink of the city streets. The servant-a slave, actually, from his topknot-knelt and removed the sandals of the guests, bathing their feet in a clay basin and wiping them clean before fitting straw slippers. That was a luxury, but guests got the best any household had.

  Clemens's issue boots stopped him cold, and the boy gave a shy smile when the Islander demonstrated how to undo the lacings. The socks beneath caused exclamations of wonder; he had to admit that the cool water felt good on his feet after the walk. Then the boy bowed them through another door, into the central courtyard of the house.

  Hmmm. Not bad.

  Uncle Tab-sa-Dayyan was a wholesale dealer in copper and other goods, who also owned houses in the city and land outside it-upper middle class, by local standards, much more respectable than his scapegrace brother the doctor had been. Asu-physician-wasn't a particularly exalted trade among Akkadians, although it did require literacy and hence wasn't common labor.

  The house had a first story of baked brick set in asphalt mortar, and a second of adobe laid in clay; both were plastered and whitewashed. More brick paved the courtyard around the central drain. Around the walls ran a yard-wide gallery on wooden pillars, date-palm wood from the look of it. The family's chambers were on the second floor; this ground level held utility and servants' quarters, together with the little family shrine at the back-he was uneasily aware that the family's dead would be buried beneath that-and the diwan where guests would be entertained and spend the night, and the ablution room. These Babylonians weren't a dirty people, really. Everything was swept and tidy.

  And there are my prospective in-laws. He swallowed again. Come on, Justin, you're marrying her, not all of them. Buck up, man. Show some backbone.

  Tab-sa-Dayyan himself was a man of fifty or so, plumply healthy and looking to have most of his teeth, in flowerpot hat and densely embroidered robe, his sandals studded with bronze, his curled hair and beard mostly gray. On a family matter such as this his wife stood beside him. Her robe was even more elaborate, and she wore a heavy broad necklace and a headdress of silver and faience on her grizzled black mane; she was mostly toothless, and her lips worked over the gums as she glared at him out of beady black eyes. Beside them stood their children, from the eldest son-a solid family man himself- down to a six-year-old peeking out shyly from behind an elder sibling. Four living, which probably meant the wife had born eight or ten; infant mortality here was dreadful. Azzu-ena was the only surviving child of four herself.

  "Come, be a guest beneath my roof," Tab-sa-Dayyan said, after they had invoked the gods and inquired as to each other's health, the health of their relatives, and the other matters the manners of the ancient East required; the tone was much less friendly than the words. "You will eat bread and drink beer with me, and we will speak."

  The guest room was about ten feet by fifteen, undoubtedly the largest in the house; the furniture consisted of low built-in benches against the walls covered with rugs, cushions, and a low table of inlaid wood; it looked almost as pretty as the ones in the palace, except that a corner had been broken off and patched back on. A middle-aged woman brought in jugs of beer, straws to drink it with, rounds of flat barley bread like a coarse pita and bowls of oddments. Clemens found the sour coolness of the beer welcome and the fermentation ought to take care of the bacteria in the water, at that. Azzu-ena broke off a piece of bread, scooped up a paste of ground chick-peas, sesame oil, and garlic, and handed him some.

  He nibbled. Now I'm offic
ially a guest. That ensured at least a certain degree of courtesy.

  Tab-sa-Dayyan rested his hands on the knees of his crossed legs. "So I had not expected to see this day." He shook his head; he also spoke slowly and a little loudly, evidently making allowances for the barbarian wizard's limited Akkadian. Clemens shoved down a slight irritation; he'd spent endless months drilling, and Azzu-ena told him that he was fully fluent, if weirdly and thickly accented. At least the Babylonian wasn't making protective signs.

  "Irregular, most irregular. Mutu-Hadki my brother was not a wise man," the merchant said. "He should have arranged the matter of my niece's marriage and dowry before his death- she was already of marriageable age," he added sourly. A glint of hope: "You do know, honored Clemens son of Edgar, that Azzu-ena is well beyond the usual age of a bride? Most of her best childbearing time is past. She has twenty-six years-nearly twenty-seven…"

  "Yes, I am aware of that," Clemens said dryly.

  Azzu-ena tugged at his sleeve, and he cleared his throat and turned to the scribe who sat silent, smiling faintly. Scribe didn't mean just clerk; the scribal schools taught law, literature, architecture, and mathematics as well. A scribe was also the closest thing the kingdom of Kar-Duniash had to a notary public.

  "Yes," the scribe said, and held out a hand without looking around. His assistant-apprentice stopped wolfing the refreshments and fumbled in his basket, handing a clay tablet six inches by four to his master. The older man took it and scanned the chicken-track rows of cuneiform, holding the tablet at a slant so that the light from the door would hit the edges of the wedge-shaped marks.

  "Yes," he said again, then cleared his throat and read in a singsong, listing the regnal year at the top of the document- the second year of Shagarakti-Shuriash-and continuing:

  "one sar sixteen gin of built house, in the Street of the Diviners near the temple of Lugalbanda and between the houses of Igmilum the silversmith and Sallurum the leather-worker; one sar waste ground, one cow called Taribatum, if surviving; one chest of healer's tools, marked with the sign of Ninurta, one chest seven jars of herbs, labeled; three bushels of dry bitumen; one wooden door, of cedarwood; one wicker door; three bolts cloth