On the Oceans of Eternity

CHAPTER TEN

September, 10 A.E.-Troy

September, 10 A.E.-O'Rourke's Ford, east of Troy

October, 10 A.E.-Bay of Biscay

September, 10 A.E.-near Hattusas, Kingdom of Haiti-land

October, 10 A.E.-Bay of Biscay

September, 10 A.E.-Hattusas, Kingdom of Haiti-land

October, 10 A.E.-Off the coast of northwestern Iberia

In the long run, I think Mesopotamia may be our Japan," Ian Arnstein said into the microphone.

He was a very tall man, towering for this era: four inches over six feet, still lanky in late middle age, with a bushy beard turning gray among the original dark russet brown-one that he'd worn before the Event, when he was a professor of classical history from Southern California. What hair was left on the sides and rear of his head was the same color. By a sport of chromosomes, his face was of a type common in Anatolia even in the twentieth; beak-nosed, rather full in the lips, with large expressive dark eyes.

"Ian?" his wife said, through the earphones he was wearing, asking for clarification.

Doreen Arnstein was hundreds of miles away in the Hittite capital of Hattusas. Ian Arnstein listened to the boom of a cannon in the not-too-distant west, outside the walls of Troy, and thanked the notional Gods for that. Now, if only I was there in Hattusas, too. They'd about exhausted their official business, and it was a relief to talk of matters not immediately practical.

"I think I may have been too sanguine about the Babylonians," Ian said. "Yeah, it's going to handicap them not having much in the way of timber or minerals besides oil, but neither does Japan-and look how fast they picked up Western Civ's tricks. They've got a big population, a fairly sophisticated culture of their own, they're organized, and now they're run by a really smart, determined guy with a wife from Nantucket, whose kids are going to be educated in our schools. That means for the next two generations, they're going to make a really impassioned effort to catch up with us."

"We can worry about that after we've won this war," Doreen said. "They'll be aiming at a moving target anyway. How are things going?"

"Not so great," Ian said. "King Alaksandrus is holding steady-well, he doesn't really have much choice, now-but Major Chong isn't sure how much longer we can hold out."

"I told you you should have gotten out on the last flight, dammit, Ian!"

Ian sighed and shook his head. "Alaksandrus might have given up if I'd done that," he said. "Then Walker and his Ringapi would be whooping their way to Hattusas by now. You've done fine handling the Hittites." Who fortunately had institutions that didn't make dealing with a woman disgraceful. "Anyway, is David there?"

Their son was. When he had concluded the personal matters, the Republic's Councilor for Foreign Affairs sat back with a sigh.

"Bye," he said at last. "Stay well."

A hesitation at the other end of the circuit, and his wife's voice: "You too. The children need their father."

"I know-" he began; then his voice rose to a squeak. "Children? Plural?"

"If everything keeps on track… about nine months after that last evening before you got yourself trapped there in Troy VII. Serendipity."

"Why the hell didn't you tell me earlier?" he said, fighting down an irrational rush of anger.

"I didn't want to joggle your elbow with worries. Then. Now I don't want you feeling free to be a martyr."

He sighed. "Martyrhood doesn't attract me," he said. "Love you."

"You too, Ian. Come back to us."

I fully intend to do my best, he thought as he took off the earphones. Then:

"World's too damned big," he muttered to himself, pushing away personal considerations and looking at the map pinned to the wall beside the small square window. "And there's too damned few of us."

The square of heavy paper showed what would have been the Middle East and Balkans in the twentieth. Here it bore names that had once been familiar to him only from books. Most of central and eastern Anatolia was the Hittite Empire, and points west and south were vassal states linked to it by treaty. The domains of Pharaoh Ramses II sprawled up from Egypt through what he knew as Israel and southern Syria to meet those governed from Hattusas. To the southeast was Kar-Duniash-Babylonia, an Islander ally and now including Assyria, which meant northern Iraq and chunks of the adjacent mountain country. Babylonia's a firm ally, the Hittites a new one, Egypt's neutral… although there's that man of Walker's there. The problem lay to the west.

He scowled at the black-outlined splotch on the map labeled Meizon Akhaia. Greater Greece, roughly translated; or Great Achaea. It left a mental bad taste; something like Grossdeutschland.

That hadn't existed in any of the histories he'd studied. Ten years ago it had been simply Achaea, part of it a loose confederation of vassal realms reigned over lightly by the Kings of Men in Mycenae, the rest independent minikingdoms, tribes and whatnot. Walker had been at work there for a long time now, first as henchman and wizard-engineer to Agamemnon King of Men, then as puppetmaster, for the last few years as ruler himself. Now it was a tightly centralized despotism, tied together by armies and roads, telegraphs, bureaucrats armed with double-entry bookkeeping. It had grown, too. Besides the whole of Greece proper, Walker's satraps ruled most of the Balkans up to what would have become Bulgaria and Serbia, plus Sicily, Italy, the Aegean islands. The American renegade had built up a terrifying degree of modern industry, as "modern" went in the Year 10, and as long as his Tartessian ally held the Straits of Gibraltar, the Achaean navy dominated this end of the Mediterranean.

Of course, he thought, it's a spatchcocked modernization so far, mostly confined to a few centers. A thin film of literacy and machines pasted over a peasant mass dragooned into labors it doesn't understand by terror and the whip. Stalin's methods.

The problem was that, at this level of technology, those techniques worked.

The longer we leave Walker alone, the stronger he'll get.

"The world's far too big," he muttered to himself, tugging at his beard. "And everything takes so bloody long. Sailing ships and marching feet, over half the world."

The Republic of Nantucket was trying to conduct a struggle on a geographic scale about equal to World War I, but the forces involved were ludicrously tiny. Great Achaea probably had about a million people; Babylonia and the Hittites two or three times that each; the Republic was a couple of small towns and a fringe of farms haggled out of wilderness. Neither of the "advanced" powers could field more than a few thousand men with firearms, a few dozen cannon-armed ships, but those were the fulcrum the whole thing would turn on.

"Sure, we know the history," he mused. "Walker too- surprisingly well-read, for a complete swine. But there's nothing in the original history that jumbled up eras and technologies and methods like this."

He poked the headphones with a finger and sighed; they were an example. They had some pre-Event shortwave sets, all transistors and synthetics, none of which could be allowed anywhere as dangerous as Troy. What the Republic's engineers and artisans could make instead was this 1930's-style monstrosity-five times as big and with five times the power consumption and half the effectiveness of pre-Event electronics. But they could replace the handblown vacuum tubes, which they couldn't do with the modern equipment. Meanwhile, the electricity came from a windmill, or squads on bicycle generators during calms.

The sound of cannon came again, louder than before, a huge heavy dull sound, like an enormous door shutting in the far distance. He rose and hurried through the corridors of the palace. They'd been opulent not long ago, before the siege; smooth gypsum floors, walls painted in a fanciful half-naturalistic style, costly embroidered hangings. The building itself was made of timber and mud brick on stone foundations, flat-roofed, two-and three-story blocks built around courtyards, all rather like a Southwestern pueblo. Now it was crowded, like the whole of the small city inside Troy's walls; here it was mainly gentry from the countryside and their immediate retainers. Most were relatives of the King, bunking in rooms normally used for storage or weaving or kept empty for guests. They looked at him with an awe that hurt, the foreign magician who would save them from the Wolf Lord of the west; a granny hunched over a piece of sewing, girl-children playing a game remarkably like hopscotch and giggling as they skipped, a proud black-haired woman with a huge-eyed child on her lap, a tall cloaked man, white-bearded, who bowed gravely. The smell wasn't too bad overall; the Republic's military medics were enforcing sanitation with fanatical determination backed up by their reputation as wizards, but there was a sour undertone to it. Those sanitary regulations were the only thing that kept this whole city from going up in a pyre of epidemics; out in the lower town below the citadel the peasant refugees were crammed in like sardines, even many of the streets turned over to makeshift shacks.

There weren't many men of fighting age in the palace. They were on the walls, or working. Ian kept his face solemn, as local manners required, and returned the greetings. Inwardly he winced a bit. They would fight to the end, now. They didn't have much choice. The original terms for surrender Walker had offered had been relatively generous, and he'd probably have kept them.

But I convinced them to fight. That was certainly to the advantage of the Republic and its Hittite and Babylonian allies. It's only to Troy's advantage if the relief force gets here in time. If it didn't, this whole people would be blotted off the face of the earth.

A few minutes brought him to the place he sought, the main courtyard, which had been taken over by Major Chong of the Marine Corps for his weapons, a battery of heavy mortars. Their snouts showed above the lips of the berms below, each dug into a cell of earth; for a brief moment he felt an illogical sorrow for the gardens that had given air and sweetness to this section of the great building. Now that air was heavy with the stink of burned sulfur from the black-powder propellant. The loading teams sprawled, resting. Most of them were Trojans, in tunics and kilts much like their Achaean cousins. Over the weeks of the siege there had been time to train them for most of the work, each team under a Marine or two, while the rest of the crews acted as officers elsewhere.

Ian waved to them, and turned through what had once been the queen's audience chamber. The palace and the citadel around it were on the highest ground available, and Trojan architecture ran to exterior galleries on the higher stories. Chong was there, and King Alaksandrus of Wilusia-Ilios, Troy-in full fig of bronze armor, boar's-tooth helmet, horsehair plume, the rifle across his back looked a little incongruous. Ian exchanged solemn greetings.

It's a matter of morale, he thought, feeling a melancholy amusement at the Trojan's finery. Like a Victorian Englishman changing into formal wear for dinner in the middle of some godforsaken jungle or a residency besieged by mutinous sepoys. Stiff upper lip and all that.

"How's it going, Major?" he asked the Marine officer.

Chong's family had been Realtors on Nantucket, ethnic-Chinese refugees from Vietnam originally. There was a slight tinge of Yankee drawl to the man's vowels, and his handsome amber-hued face was drawn with fatigue as he shrugged.

"Exactly the way I anticipated," he said-in English, but Alaksandrus had grown resigned to his allies using their incomprehensible tongue when they wanted to leave him out of the conversation.

"That bad?"

"Take a look, Councilor."

He bent to the heavy tripod-mounted binocular telescope. The scene that jumped out at him was wearily familiar. The enemy vessels were further up the coast, just barely visible to the north, unloading new devilments; the bay that reached nearly to the wall was too close to Chong's mortars. Around Troy stretched a semicircle of siegeworks, trenches, and bunkers cut into the soft soil of the coastal flats and then over the rocky heights behind them. Beyond them stretched camps, orderly rows of tents for the Wolf Lord's men, a sprawling chaos of brushwood shelters and rammed-earth huts and leather lean-tos for his barbarian allies.

"The Ringapi don't look too happy," he said. Misery hung over those encampments as palpably as dust haze and smoke.

"Should they be?" Chong said.

"No," Ian said.

Prisoners had brought in tales of disease and hunger. He could fill in the rest for himself; the chieftains were probably wishing they'd never left the middle Danube. So far they'd gotten scant loot, and having plundered the countryside bare they were utterly dependent on Walker for their daily bread. Apparently he was doling it out in lots only slightly more generous than his allotments of second-rate firearms. You needed a long spoon to sup with that particular devil.

"Still, he's getting the work done," Chong said. "Herewith expert help, Ian could make out the zigzag covered ways thrust out from the encircling walls. Here and there, men toiled with pick and shovel and woven baskets full of earth to extend them, and others hauled timber and dirt forward to provide overhead cover. From two such bastions the slow bombardment came, heavy shells thudding home into the hastily heaped earth berm that the Islanders had shown the Trojans how to pile against their vulnerable stone curtain-wall.

"Dahlgren-type guns," Chong said. Ian licked dry lips and fought for a similar detachment. "Rifled pieces would be giving us more problems."

A subordinate called the Marine officer over to a map table; he looked at the results of the triangulation, nodded, spoke into a microphone. Less than thirty seconds later a massive whunk! sound came from the courtyard behind them, and a plume of smoke just visible over the rooftop. A falling shriek went northwestward, and a tall plume of dirt and debris gouted out of the plain of Troy like a momentary poplar tree. The thudump of the explosion came a measurable time later.

"Have to be dead lucky to get a direct hit on one of the guns," Chong explained. "Especially since we have to conserve ammunition…"

"We've only got the one dirigible," Ian pointed out. "And it can only carry a couple of tons at a time. If we lost it…"

Chong nodded. The Achaeans had light cannon in yoke mounts that could swing them quickly upward, big kites with burning rags attached, and a number of other antiairship weapons. None of them had worked so far, but they kept trying.

"I don't like the looks of those approach trenches they're digging either," Chong said. "I have a suspicion they're going to use them for another mass attack on the walls. We've got nearly a thousand rifles here now, but only a hundred and twenty rounds of ammunition for each."

"God," Ian said. When the wind shifted, you could still smell the bodies from the assault three weeks ago. "I was about to complain that war seems pretty damned boring."

"Worse when it isn't, though," Chong said. "They've got those two guns in range of the walls. They'll get more. Even with the earth berm outside and heavy backing, it's not going to hold."

Hurry up, Hollard, Ian thought. You too, Marian.

"Here they come!"

Patrick O'Rourke had been stripping and cleaning his Python revolver, as an aid to thought. At the cry his fingers automatically snapped it back together, checked that the cylinder was full, and clicked it home.

A man in a peaked bronze helmet with a gilded wheel on the top had been haranguing the enemy in the ravine three hundred yards to the northwest, never quite exposing himself enough for a sharpshooter to get him. The responses grew louder and louder, until all five hundred of them there were shouting. Voices rose in an ululating shriek… followed by a second of ominous silence.

Then they slammed their spears against their shields three times in unison. A final united hissing shriek of: SsssssSSSSAA! SA! SA! SsssssSSSSAA and the Ringapi surged up out of the ravine and charged, screaming. O'Rourke blinked, squinting into the setting sun; they weren't holding anything back, coming on at a flat-out sprint to get over the killing ground as fast as they could-but the rest of the barbarian host wasn't moving. Could they be trying something clever? Or was it just bare-arsed backwoods stupidity?

"Sir?" Barnes asked.

"By all means," he said.

"Volley fire-present!"

Along the wall rifles came to shoulders with a single smooth jerk, sunlight flashing off the blades of the bayonets. He could hear the sergeants and corporals repeating over and over: "Pick your man. Aim low. Pick your man. Aim low." Not to mention: "Eyes front!" on the other walls.

"Fire!"

BAAAAAMMMM. The north wall disappeared in an instant fogbank of dirty-gray smoke, stinking of rotten eggs and fireworks. O'Rourke blinked again as the spent shells tinkled to the ground and the smoke blew clear; hardly a bullet had missed-it was a clout shot, and you couldn't graduate Camp Grant without being able to hit a man-sized target at that range nine times out of ten. Some of the heavy Werder slugs had punched through a first man and killed the one behind him.

But they're not stopping for shit, as the Yankees say, he thought. Speeding up, if anything; the drumming of four-hundred-odd feet on dry hard earth was like distant thunder, or a racetrack when the crush was around the curve and coming up.

"SsssssSSSSAA! SA! SA! SsssssSSSSAA!"

"Volley fire-present!"

BAAAAAMMMM.

This time the charge wavered, ever so slightly. O'Rourke found his hand had been gripping the butt of his pistol hard enough to hurt, and he forced himself to relax it. Most of the Ringapi hadn't missed more than a step, and came right on into the muzzles of the rifles as they lifted for the third volley, leaping over their own dead.

"SsssssSSSSAA! SA! SA! SsssssSSSSAA!"

BAAAAAMMMM.

"Independent fire, rapid-fire!" Barnes said. Then, quietly: "By Jesus, I think they're going to make it to the wall."

"No," O'Rourke said judiciously, watching the fast steady crackle scythe into the thinning ranks of the attackers. "No, that last volley rocked them back on their heels, the saucy bastards."

Now the attack wavered, men bunching and hesitating. They were less than a hundred yards away now, close enough for him to imagine he could hear the flat smacking impact of bullets striking home, close enough to see men jerk and stumble and sprawl or a brazen helmet ring like a bell as it went spinning away from a shattered skull. They reached a low stone wall and began to climb over, until half a dozen were struck at the same instant and toppled backward. That sent them to earth, crouching behind the loose-piled stones of the field boundary.

All except a knot who came on at the same dead run, led by the chief with the gilt wheel on his helmet. A standard-bearer ran beside him, holding up a pole with a bronze boar on its top. Man after man fell, some in the sack-of-potatoes slump that meant instant death, more screaming or writhing on the ground. Bullets kicked up sudden puffs of dust around the chiefs feet, or sparked off rocks, but some freak of odds and ballistics spared him even when the standard-bearer fell and the curl-tusked boar tumbled in the dirt.

"Don't kill him!" someone shouted from the firing line. "Don't kill him, Goddammit!"

A dozen others took up the cry; Barnes looked at O'Rourke and raised an eyebrow as the firing crackled to a halt. Everyone could admire courage that absolute, even in an enemy.

"Let them have their gesture," he said, and checked his watch. "Good for morale. Five o'clock… it's going to be a long day and night, I think."

The Ringapi chief kept coming, teeth bared and spear raised. But the end of the slamming fusillade seemed to waken him from his trance of ferocity, as much as the shouts of Go back! and Look behind you! from the line of barley sacks ahead of him. He slowed, his moccasined feet gearing down from their pounding run to a walk. The shouts continued-some of them in the Sun People dialects of Alba, close enough to his own speech to be understood for short simple phrases. He did look around, and realized that he was alone; looked back, at the ruin of his clan's war band, bodies scattered all the way to the ravine they'd jumped off from. The exaltation of the spirit that had carried him so far ran away like water from a slit sack. He turned back to face his enemies and stood, slowly raising spear and shield until they made an X against the lowering sky.

His pale eyes traveled back and forth along the breastwork. With a convulsive gesture he slammed his spear into the ground and left it quivering upright like a seven-foot ashwood exclamation mark. Then he turned and began to walk back the way he'd come, striding along at a pace neither fast nor slow, pausing only to scoop up the boar standard, until he reached the stone wall where the remnant of his followers pulled him down into shelter.

"What," O'Rourke said thoughtfully, glancing up at the hillside where the enemy commander had his post, "was the point of all that, now?"

Hantilis answered: "I think they were counting your bows… your guns, I mean. Testing the strength of one wall." He pointed at the enemy command post. "With the far-seeing tube he could see how you moved your men about, and plan how to strike a stronger blow."

The Islander commanders nodded. Well, that's a cool one, then, O'Rourke thought. When he puts things together, look out for fair.

"Heads up!"

The cry came from sentries stationed on the flat roof of the hospital. They were pointing southward.

"Mind the store, macushla," O'Rourke said, and jumped down from the firing platform. He nodded in passing to Chaplain Smith, who was helping organize the stretcher-bearers.

"The hand of the Lord fell heavy on the enemy," Smith said. "But Colonel, I must protest that many of the troops are given to blasphemy in the heat of battle. No luck can come of taking the name of the Lord in vain, or that of His mother. I do not speak of naming heathen Gods," he added sourly, acknowledging the regulations about religious tolerance without approval. "Only of my own flock."

O'Rourke stared at him for a second, before he could force himself to believe the man was deadly serious. "Reverend Smith, you may tell your flock that I'm firmly opposed to blasphemy in all forms," he said finally.

The young ex-Irauna smiled and drew the sign of the cross.

"Bless you, my son."

The Islander colonel was shaking his head as he trotted on through the open space. Mary Mother of God, but sometimes I wonder if sending those missionaries to Alba isn't going to come back to haunt us, he thought to himself, and went up a rough pole ladder to the roof of the hospital. The lookout there pointed southward and a little west.

"They're moving there, Colonel," she said. "Fair number of 'em, but pretty scattered."

He trained his own binoculars and hissed. Yes, Ringapi for sure; moving by ones and threes and little groups, into the hills that made the southern wall of the valley and into the open forest above that. There they promptly disappeared into the shadowy bush, settling down behind trees or rocks. That was probably a hunting skill where they came from-mostly prairie and forest and wooded mountains, from the Intelligence reports-but useful here nonetheless. The first puff of smoke came as he watched. The crack of the rifle sounded a perceptible fraction of a second later; he couldn't see where the bullet landed. That was the signal for more; he scanned the mountainside, trying to count the guns as muzzle flashes winked at him out of the shadows. Now he could hear bullets going by, or going thock into the hard mud-brick walls of the hospital building, or making a peculiar crunching shrush into the sacks of barley.

"Lieutenant Hussey," he called, as he dropped down the ladder again.

"Sir?"

The boy was even more painfully young than his captain, thin and dark; O'Rourke decided that either he was getting old himself, or this one had lied about his age to enlist.

"Hussey, pull me out twelve Marines and a corporal-all of them good with a bayonet. Include- ' He named four from the escort that had ridden in with him. "Form them up by the wellhead over there. Take charge of them, and use 'em as a flying squad, to plug gaps. Oh, and marksmen on the south wall are to reply to those riflemen on the hill."

Barnes had come up while he was speaking, and raised an eyebrow. "They won't be able to see them, sir," she pointed out.

O'Rourke nodded. "But it will keep their heads down. They aren't what you'd call good shots-lousy, I'll wager, the lot of them-but there are a lot of them."

"And we're what you might call a large target," Barnes said grimly, tapping her fingers on her holstered pistol.

As if on cue, one of the Marines on the north-facing wall dropped back and cried out, clutching at his leg, and yelling: "Corpsman, corpsman!"

The stretcher-bearers trotted over and lifted him onto the stretcher, trotting off to the hospital building, ignoring the occasional bullet kicking up a pock of dust in the open space they had to cross.

"That we are, macushla," O'Rourke agreed, his voice equally ironic. He pointed westward, past the hospital building. "Droopy Gray Whiskers up there, his dispositions make sense now. He'll send his men in like this"-he clenched his fist, put the first two fingers out in a fork, and pushed them forward- "at the hospital; it's where we're weakest because the firing line is narrow, and the sun'll be directly in our eyes. Then the most of them will come around the north side, along the building's wall, and then the breastwork."

"Not the south at the same time?"

"Not in force; they'd get in the way of those gentlemen up there." He jerked a thumb at the snipers on the hillside above them. "If we last until dark, then yes."

"Pray for dark, then-except that then the rest will be able to get closer."

She looked southward, frowning slightly; he noticed how feathery-fine her eyebrows were, above the dark-blue eyes. "I'll take every second rifle off that wall when the attack comes in."

He nodded. "Until then, they're safer there. But a last thing… put your eye to one of those rifles up there, and tell me what you see."

Barnes did; her eyes went a little wider, and she looked down at her watch. "That's a damned fast rate of fire, if they're using the sort of muzzle-loading abortion Walker was supposed to be handing out. Westley-Richards model at least," she went on, naming the first flintlock breechloader Seahaven had turned out for the Republic's armed forces. "Or even Werders."

"I doubt Walker is handing out the latter; he doesn't have enough of the copies he's made to arm his own forces yet. So either he's giving the savages there first-rate… or at least second-rate… rifles, or they captured a good many recently."

Their eyes went down the road to Troy, until a voice called them back: "Here they come, the whole fucking lot of them!"

The flagship of the Islander fleet shipped a surge of black water across her starboard bow, shrugged it off, raised her long bowsprit into the storm.

"I don't like the look of this," Marian Alston-Kurlelo said, legs flexing to keep her upright as the stern of the ship went through its cycle of pitch… roll… rise… heel… fall.

"No, ma'am," Commander Jenkins said, voice pitched loud to carry through the rumble and hiss of the sea, the creak and groan of timbers working with the rushing speed of the ship. "Dirty weather, and a filthy night."

She was standing on the quarterdeck of the Chamberlain, not far from the ship's newly promoted captain. He had sailed on her as Alston's XO while the commodore was acting as captain-aboard as well as C-in-C, and was still a little nervous about the three broad gold stripes on the cuffs and epaulets of his blue jacket that marked his promotion to commander and captain of the frigate.

I have no intention of joggling your elbow, she thought but did not say. The OOD probably felt just as nervous having the godlike authority of a captain and commander on the same quarterdeck on her usually lonely vigil; it was just after two bells on the midwatch, one in the morning to civilians.

"I think it's coming on to a really stiff blow," she said thoughtfully, instead.

The sky was pitch-black and the sea reflected it, with the wind making out of the west and a nasty cross-chop, a chaotic surface of waves crashing into each other in bursts of off-white foam. Sheets of cold rain blew in with the wind mingled with spindrift whipped off the surface of the waves, making her want to hunch her right shoulder; she did nothing of the kind, of course, standing erect with her hands clasped behind her, letting the wind slap the oilskins and sou'wester against her. The only light was from the big stern-lanterns and what leaked from the portholes of the deckhouse behind her, and the riding lights at the mastheads; she could see others spaced out across the heaving waters to her west, the rest of the Republic's southbound fleet. There were four hands on the benchlike platforms on either side of the frigate's double wheels, wrestling with the tension that flowed up through the rudder cables and drum to the wooden spokes. Plenty of it, with this cross-sea and the heavy pitch it imposed.

They're probably thinking about their reliefs and a hammock, Alston mused. Although the crew's hammocks on the gun deck would be swaying like branches in a gale, and it would get worse-they'd have to fasten the restraining straps across themselves. I should go below, get some rest. If only we'd been able to get the politics finished and get away earlier in the season!

If there hadn't been so much riding on this fleet-if she'd been commanding a single ship, say-she might well have been enjoying herself. This was real sailing. The burden of worry made that impossible.

"There are times I badly miss satellite weather pictures," she said.

"Ma'am."

Jenkins nodded for politeness' sake; he was barely thirty, and they were a fading memory of the CNN National Forecast to him. They'd been an essential tool of the sailor's life to her, for better than a decade. You developed a sixth sense about weather, if you studied it carefully all your life, but it just wasn't the same as that godlike eye in the sky.

The Bay of Biscay was always risky, and the winter storms were coming on, raging down out of the North Atlantic and funneled into this giant cul-de-sac. She could feel it in her gut, the terrible ironbound coast of northwest Iberia lying off her lee, waiting there to port. Reefs growling in the surf like hidden tiger-fangs, sheer cliffs and giant waves breaking on them like the hammer of Ogun until mountains trembled, a graveyard of ships for millennia. And the Lord Jesus pity any fisherman out tonight in a Bronze Age coracle, or a boat of planks sewn together with willow withes.

The spray on her lips wasn't quite icy, but it was rawly cold, with the mealy smell of snow in it somehow. Anyone who went overside in this would be dead in half an hour, even if they didn't drown first. Looking up she could see the masts nearly bare, furled sails with doubled gaskets, the remaining sheets of canvas drum-taut and braced sharp as the Chamberlain heeled to the wind coming in on the starboard beam. Everything else was as secure as it could be, too; deadlights on the stern gallery, guns bowsed up tight, extra lashing on the boats. Glancing at Jenkins she could see his gray eyes slitted and peering upward, then reaching out to touch a stayline-feeling the forces acting on his ship, the messages in the heave and jolt as she cut into every wave and rose, paused, swooped downward.

Much heavier and we'll have to come about into the wind and heave to. Can't run before it, or even scud. Christ, no, she thought, as a wave came across the forward third of the ship's starboard side, swirled across the waist deck and poured out of the scuppers. Not nearly as much sea room as she'd like.

Another glance to starboard. Thirty ships, counting every transport. As many as Nantucket could spare, with a minimum to keep essential trade running and patrol the oceans near home-trying another invasion would be suicidal for the Tartessians, but you never knew what a desperate man would do.

It was far more than the Republic could afford to lose, that was for certain.

And then there was the Farragut. She thought again about the design of the steam ram's bows, a nagging concern. They'd had to mount the heavy steel plates before they left, with action in the offing on arrival at Tartessos. The steam ram was a bad enough seakeeper without them. With the added weight forward she sailed the way a whale swam-always rolling about and inclined to dive unexpectedly. Bad luck, to run into a storm with that bastard designer's compromise along…

At least she can claw off to windward under power, if need be, she thought.

In a sailing ship the only thing you could do with a lee shore was go aground on it, when you started to lose more in leeway than you made in headway won on each tack. And when a storm mounted past a certain force, even the most weatherly ship sagged more and more to leeward with each extra knot of wind speed. Her mind drew the parallelogram of forces for each ship in the fleet, varying with their depth of keel and their ability to point to windward, correlated it with their positions relative to the coast to the southeast and what she knew of the set of the oceans around here.

Safe enough, so long as it doesn't get much worse. Or if it waits more than six or eight hours to get worse. Otherwise, we've got a marginal situation here.

"Mr. Jenkins, I'm goin' below," she said. "Please have me woken if there's a substantial change in the wind, or any important messages from the fleet." At least every ship had a well-maintained pre-Event radio this time, and Guard or Marine techs to maintain it.

"Aye, aye, ma'am!"

She turned and rounded the low deckhouse, one hand lightly on the safety line strung beside it, water swirling calf high around her sea boots as the ship took a black wave edged in white froth. She waited until it had run free through the scuppers and then opened the hatch and went down the companion-way. The Chamberlain had forty-six feet of raised quarterdeck and this space beneath; the companionway ended in a bulkhead, with corridors to either side lined with the little cubicles of officers' quarters, the galley, and officers' mess. Right ahead was a tub made from a large barrel split lengthwise. It had a couple of inches of water sloshing around in it, and wet-weather gear hanging from pegs above. She added her own. In a gale, it mainly served to break the force of the wind; her uniform was sopping, and her skin crinkled beneath it.

Someday I'll be too old for this shit, she thought. It's the only good thing I can think of about getting old. Of course, I intend to get as much fun as I can out of being a crotchety old lady, and if I can think of some way to shock the grandchildren, so much the better.

Her own quarters were to the rear, the stern cabin of the ship-what would have been Jenkins's, if his frigate weren't also the flagship. She returned the salute of the Marine sentry, who looked sleepily alert, and went through into the darkness. The heavy plank deadlights were secured over the broad stretch of inward-sloping windows to the rear, and it was pitch-black. A heavy fluffy towel lay over the back of a chair whose legs were bolted to the deck at the central table; she smiled gratitude as she stripped and dried herself off. Her teeth were still nearly chattering in the raw chill of the cabin. Wooden ships and central heating didn't go together, nor could they ever be completely dry in heavy weather-oak beam and plank just weren't steel girders and welded plate.

The Chamberlain was a dry ship by those standards; there weren't any drips or spurts of water, just a pervasive dampness.

And I'm a tropical bird, she thought. Say what you like about South Carolina, it isn't usually like this.

That made the bed's dry warmth doubly delicious as she slipped under the covers. She carefully stayed on her side of it, though. Normally Swindapa didn't wake if Alston came to bed late, just rolled over and grappled in her sleep like a semiconscious octopus, but contact from an expanse of sea-chilled flesh…

Might as well drop ice cubes down her spine. Instead Alston pulled the covers to her chin and lay on her left side, with her knees braced against the padded six-inch board that rimmed the cabinward side of the bunk in rough weather.

The Farragut should be all right, ran obsessively through her mind. So, she doesn't have as much reserve buoyancy as I'd like, particularly with the armor and ram reinforcement fitted. She's still tight, and she can still maneuver under power. She will be all right. Go to sleep, Goddammit!

It wasn't only that there were a hundred-odd crewfolk aboard her, or that Trudeau was an officer she'd shaped and a friend besides. That all mattered, but Alston also had to fight when she got where she was going. Farragut was a boar-hog beside the deadly gracefulness of the clipper-frigates, and barely seaworthy in the deep oceans, but she was a good third of the fleet's fighting power. I need that ship, dammit. For Tartessos, and afterward. Of course, the Coast Guard fleet had superior guns, not to mention gunnery-the Tartessian vessels in the attack last spring had been carrying fairly crude stuff; cast-iron or bronze eighteen-pounders at most, the sort of thing Nantucket had been turning out in the Year 3, and it had cost them heavily against the poured-steel eight-inch Dahlgrens of the Islanders. Far heavier shot and greater range and accuracy, for about the same weight on the gun deck.

Now, will it be better to engage at a distance, try to keep them off and pound them? Then again, if we close we have the-

"You're freezing," a voice said in her ear. Warmth pressed against her, along back and legs, as her partner curled near spoon fashion. Arms wrapped around her, slender and strong, and she smelled the clean familiar scent of healthy skin and Nantucket Briar shampoo.

"Didn't want to wake you, sugar," she murmured in the darkness.

"I can feel your spirit," Swindapa said. "And the knots in your back. There's nothing you can do about the weather that you haven't done! Turn around so I can get at it, then let all the thoughts go, and sleep."

She obeyed, sighing slightly as slender fingers kneaded her neck and shoulders and down along her spine, then up to massage her scalp through the inch-long cap of tight wiry curls. When they had finished she felt as if her head was floating on the pillow, instead of being tied to her shoulders with heated iron rods.

"Sleep, bin'HOtse-khwon," her partner's voice murmured in the darkness. The lack of light was like black velvet pressing against her eyes now, and the other's breath went warm across her cheek. "Sleep now."

Damn, Alston thought, on the soft creamy edge of unconsciousness. But it's nice to be… settled. Gives a center to your life. And you can feel really close snugglin'.

Baaamm.

Princess Raupasha of Mitanni swayed backward slightly as the shotgun punched at her shoulder. The sharp thudump of the second barrel's buckshot was nearly lost in the hammering of hooves, the crunching whir of the tires over sandy dirt, the creak of wood and leather and wicker.

"Aika-wartanna!" she cried. One turn.

Her driver pulled the horses into a turn so tight that the right wheel came off the ground. The whole crew leaned in that direction, to put their weight against the force trying to overturn the war-cart. The wheel thumped back down and she snatched out the next weapon from the leather bucket fastened to the chariot's side and turned to keep the target in view. It was straw lashed to a pole amid a forest of others, each shaped roughly like a man and each with clay jugs of water inside. That leaked out where the lead balls had scourged the straw, making a dramatic stain on the dried grain-stalks.

Thudump.

"Tera-wartanna!" Three turns. Thudump.

Straw and pottery and water flew out. She handed the shotgun off to her loader with a show of nonchalance. Inwardly she exulted as the driver pulled the team aside, slowing them from the pounding gallop to a trot and then to a walk, soothing them as he reined in.

As I dreamed, Raupasha thought, looking behind her at the watching teams of her squadron. As I dreamed, but never hoped…

Her foster father Tushratta had hoped the child beneath the heart of King Shuttarna's wife would be a son, to avenge his lord; that was why he'd smuggled her out, rather than dying by Shuttarna's side in battle with the Assyrians. Instead the royal woman had borne a daughter and died herself. In the lonely desert manor to which he'd fled he had raised Raupasha much as he would have that longed-for son, and her bedtime stories had been of Mitanni's ancient glories. How often in the chariot beside him, hunting gazelle or lion in the wastelands, had she dreamed herself as a great King like Shaushtar or Parsatatar in the epics! Bending the bow and scattering the enemies of her people like the lightning bolts of Indara Thunderer.

I do not have the strength of arm to bend the bow of a mariyannu warrior, she thought. But I can pull the trigger of this gun as well as any. True lightning, as I dreamed.

The other chariots gathered around at her gesture. She looked at them with pride. Such a little while ago her Mitannians had come to war in creaking chariots with warped wheels, relics hidden for a generation from the Assyrian overlords. The hand of Asshur had lain heavy on the Hurrian folk, and still heavier on their onetime lords. The artificers and silver of the Eagle People had given her two hundred sound chariots-with iron-rimmed wheels, and collar harnesses and iron shoes for the horses themselves. Each war-cart held three, Hittite-fashion; a driver, a warrior, and a loader for the firearms that replaced the horn-backed bows of old. The foot soldiers now had rifles, and drilled under the critical eye of Marine noncoms.

"You see," she said, when they were gathered around. "The shotguns and the rifles hit further and harder than bow or javelin."

Just then a young spotted hound leaped into her chariot; she ruffled its ears absently, and it put its paws on the railing, waiting eagerly for a run to drive the wind into its nose.

"Down, Sabala," she said sharply.

The dog let his ears droop and curled up out of sight on the wicker-and-lath floor of the chariot with a deep sigh.

A warrior spoke; a lord named Tekhip-tilla who had much gray in his black beard, a man who had fought in the last wars of the old kingdom. "Princess, they do." He looked at the fire-weapons racked snugly in leather scabbards on the rail of his chariot. "But I have already seen that this means a man on foot with a rifle is a much smaller target than a chariot… and he can shoot more steadily. Can chariots go near such, and live?"

Raupasha nodded. "But most of the enemy host will not have rifles," she said. "Only the…" She thought, searching for a Hurrian phrase that would match the English concept of a standing army. "Only the… household troops of the Wolf Lord. His barbarian allies, the Ringapi, they will fight mostly with spear and sword and bow, in chariots and afoot. Them we will strike. Also, there are other weapons that our allies the Eagle People will give us-stronger weapons."

A murmur of awe at that; everyone here had seen the Nantukhtar ship of the air and their other wonders.

"Here is a handfast man of the Nantukhtar lord Kenn'et. He will tell you of the mortars and rocket launchers…"

When explanation was finished and the cheering had died down, Raupasha flung up her arms. "Yes, we shall have weapons of great power-like the Maruts of Indara Thunderer-or the sons of Teshub," she added, switching the metaphor to a God more familiar to ordinary folk. "But no weapon is mighty without the skill and courage of the warrior who wields it! Are your hands skilled to war, your hearts full of Agni's fire?"

"Yes!" they roared.

"Good, for this is not a war of a day, of a week, or a season. This is a war where only men fit to bestride the universe may hope to conquer. Our allies-those who freed us from the yoke of Asshur-fight across the wide world and call us to fight at their side. Shall they call in vain?"

"No! No!"

When they left the practice field for camp, it was as a proud column of twos, stretching back in a plume of dust and a proud glitter of arms. Sabala stood proudly, too, basking in her reflected glory, paws on the forward railing of the chariot and ears flapping as arrogantly as the banner above her.

Now, if only you were Kenn'et, she thought a little desolately, resting her hand on the hound's skull and looking northward; it would be weeks before she could rejoin the Nantukhtar lord. His tail beat happily against her leg and the side of the chariot. Never would she forget the sight of Kenn'et, bending above her; when she'd lost consciousness dangling by her thumbs with her feet six inches over the Assyrian preparations for a hot low fire.

I did not know, then, she thought. Then she had only thought him handsome, and brave, and a warrior-wizard. But now I know. Whatever King Kashtiliash thinks, you are my lord. And I will have you for my man as well, though I die for it.

Something woke the commodore. Not the pendulum-bob way she and Swindapa were sliding back and forth in the bunk; they were thoroughly used to that. Perhaps a different note in the scream of the wind in the rigging, or in the endless groaning complaint of the ship's fabric. Her first thought was:

Blowing harder. Goddammit, wish I'd been wrong.

She disentangled herself from arms and legs and sat up. Swindapa could blink alert in a second, when she had to. When she didn't she preferred to come awake slowly, drifting up from the depths. Marian put one hand on a grip-loop bolted to the bulkhead and worked the sparker on the gimbaled lantern by the bunk with the other. The sparks cascaded like miniature lightning inside the thick wire-braced glass of the chimney, and then the cotton wick caught. She turned it up, and the yellow kerosene light ran off the polished curly maple and black walnut of the commander's cabin, and the gray steel of the two stern-chasers lashed down near either rear corner. Otherwise, it was austere enough, a couple of chests and cupboards, family pictures, a shelf of books secured with hinged straps above her desk and the rack for her sextant, the semicircle of seats below the shuttered stern windows and the big central table with the map still fastened down in its holder, and Swindapa's desk on the other side. That was flanked by filing cabinets; even a Kurlelo Grandmother's art of memory was stretched when it came to the logistics of a force this size, and Lieutenant Commander Swindapa Kurlelo-Alston handled most of those details.

Thank you for Swindapa, Lord Jesus. Or Moon Woman, or fate, Alston thought, not for the first time. But usually it isn't her genius for paperwork that I'm thinkin' of.

The cabin also had a chronometer and barometer set into the wall. She looked at those and raised her eyebrows. Three hours' sleep, and after all that time the glass was still falling. This was going to be a bad one. Then she looked up at the repeater-compass that showed as a dial above the bunk, slaved to the main instrument in the binnacle at the wheels. Uh-oh.

Swindapa was yawning and stretching behind her as she pulled on wool longjohns and a fresh uniform. It was a cold-weather pattern, the wool unfulled. That made the dye a little patchy, but it also shed rain almost as well as oilcloth. She was nearly dressed when the knock came at the door.

"Commodore! Message from the Farragut!

"Thank you, yeoman," she said to the signals tech, opening the door and taking the transcript.

Shipping heavy water, violent roll, engines stressing hull frames but pumps keeping pace. Alston winced. Boilers were heavy. She read the rest: Striking all sail and heaving to under paddles alone. Captain Trudeau.

"A reply, ma'am?"

"Acknowledge, luck be with you, and hourly updates," she said.

"And ma'am, the captain sends his compliments, and he's bringing her around into the wind. The storm's strengthening."

"Tell Commander Jenkins that I'll be on deck presently."

Swindapa clubbed her long yellow hair into a fighting braid at her nape and shrugged into her uniform. Alone, they gave a moment to a fierce hug and then put on their official faces, plus their oilskins and sou'westers, tying the cords under their chins as they went up the companionway to the fantail deck. Water crashed into their faces as they came on deck, flying in hard sheets over the port bow of the ship and tearing down the two hundred feet to the quarterdeck through pitch-dark chaos. Each of them put an elbow about the starboard safety line as they ran forward in bursts to the wheel and binnacle, struggling to keep their feet as the wind tried to fling them backward like scraps of paper in a storm. The gale from the north was cutting across the long Atlantic westward swell, creating a chaos of waves that had the bowsprit following a cork-screw pattern, heaving the ship in what seemed like three directions at once.

Lower topsails, she noted, looking up into the rigging for what the ship's commander had set. And foretopsail staysail.

Good. The Chamberlain's bows were pointing northwest now, up into the wind. Theoretically they were tacking, but there was no chance of making any real forward way in weather like this. You didn't want to; the object was to keep the ship moving as slowly as possible and still have steerageway, so that she rode the incoming waves rather than cutting into them. They were probably drifting a little to leeward, overall-the mass of ocean beneath her was too-but Chamberlain should come through all right if nothing important gave way.

There was a group around the wheels; Commander Jenkins, his XO, and the officer of the deck as well, with a couple of ensigns and middies looking on anxiously.

"You have the wheel lashed, I see, Captain," she said to Jenkins.

He nodded, exaggerating the gesture to be seen in the chaotic darkness. "Foretopsail's braced sharp and staysail's sheeted flat!" he yelled, his face indistinct under the flapping brow of his sou'wester except for a white flash of teeth. "You showed us that trick on Eagle, Commodore!"

Braced like that, the square sail slowly forced the Chamberlain's bow up into the wind, until it started to luff; then she fell away to the east pushed by the staysail and helped by the pounding waves crashing on her port bow, until the topsail filled again and the cycle repeated. Everything would be fine if they stayed far enough away from the cliffs somewhere behind them, unseen in the night. They were moving forward a bit, but the ship slid a little more sideways and to the rear every time, and the whole mass of water it sat in was making a couple of knots eastward.

"Lieutenant Commander!" Marian said. "Order to the fleet, Heave to and Report status."

"Aye, aye, ma'am!" Swindapa replied, before she turned and made her way to the deckhouse that contained the radio.

Marian looked out into the blackness, where only the white tops of the great waves heading toward them were visible before they broke in frothing chaos across the forecastle and waist of the ship, feeling the vessel come surging up again each time to shrug the tons of water overside. And if I'm any judge of weather, it's going to get worse, she thought grimly.

It did; the next few hours brought what was technically dawn, but without any lightening that she could see. Breakfast was flasks of coffee brought up by the wardroom steward, hard-boiled eggs, and sandwiches made of pitalike flatbread wrapped around cold corned beef. By that time they had to duck their heads to breathe, or turn around for an instant; there were more dimly seen oilskinned shapes on the quarterdeck, as officers relieved by the next watch stayed to keep their eye on the ship's death struggle with the sea. There wasn't much point in going below, to pitch about wakeful in their bunks. There wasn't much conversation either, when you had to scream into someone's ear with hands cupped around your mouth to be heard at all.

The radio shack abaft the wheels was a little better, since it rated some of the precious electric lights, running from the same bank of batteries and wind-charger that powered the communications gear and the shut-down computer and inkjet printer. When Marian pulled herself through its hatch the ensign on watch threw his weight beside hers to close the oak portal; most of the spray had been caught by a blanket-curtain hung before it for that purpose. The absence of the full shrieking roar outside made it seem quiet, until she had to talk.

"Let me see the latest reports from the fleet," she said to the technician on radio watch.

Quickly she ruffled through the sheaf of papers. The tone of a few was increasingly panic-stricken, but nobody had actually started to founder, or lost masts or major spars yet. She frowned over one from the Merrimac; the ship was riding far too low and rolling sluggishly. Captain Clammp to flag: I suspect cargo is shifting on its pallets and increasing the working of the seams. All pumps manned continuously. Heavy rolling threatening masts and standing rigging. Am attempting to rig preventer-backstays.

Marian Alston shaped a silent whistle. Putting crews into the tops in weather like this to rerig meant Clammp was really worried. And if the rolling was that bad, he was right to worry; losing a sail in weather like this could be catastrophic. Losing a mast didn't bear thinking about.

"Ma'am, message coming through from the Farragut."

There was a spare headset. She put it on, and immediately winced at the blasts of lightning-static that cut across it. The voice blurred behind it, every second or third word coming loud and clear. Masts… boiler… buckle… hatchway… port paddle… repairs.

"Farragut, this is Commodore Alston. Repeat, please. I say again, repeat!"

Nothing but more static. God-damn. If she had a hatchway staved, got cold water pouring in and dousing her boiler, losing power in this…

"Inform me if there's anything more from either Farragut or Merrimac, please, Ensign."

"Aye, aye, ma'am!"

Back out into the darkness, but just as she left there were a series of lightning flashes that cast the whole ship into stark black-and-white. There were four crewfolk standing by the wheel, with safety lines rigged from their waists; most of the rest of the deck watch were huddled under the break of the quarterdeck. Those around the wheel were catching the full fury, and it struck her breathless; either it had worsened in the last ten minutes, or she'd been unable to remember just how bad it was. On the transports, with hundreds of panic-stricken, seasick landsmen belowdecks, things must be indescribable. She was profoundly glad she'd had at least a couple of platoons of the Marine regiment shipped on every keel that carried Alban volunteer auxiliaries.

She rejoined Swindapa and opened her mouth to speak. Then her head whipped up, alerted by some subliminal clue, a hint her conscious mind couldn't have named. Several others did the same; and without the slightest warning the wind backed and turned ninety degrees. The lunging twist of the ship turned into a heel that had crew clutching for the safety lines or rigging or the circle of belaying pins around the masts.

With a screech the lines holding the staysail gave way, and it bellied out and filled to splitting. That pulled the ship's head violently around dead into the wind and jerked her forward into the oncoming wave, accelerating fast enough to be felt as a surge. Alston's eyes went wide as she watched the frigate's knife bows ram into the oncoming wave, not rising to it at all, no time to ride up the cliff-steep face of the wild water. She clenched her hands into the brass rail around the binnacle and watched the whole forecastle go under, as if the Chamberlain were running downward on rails. The wave broke across the waist of the ship, struck the break of the quarterdeck, and surged across it even as the whole hull tilted to the right until the starboard rail was under.

As the surge knocked her feet from under her, she could see the faces of the hands at the wheel, shocked and pale in the binnacle lights, sharing her own certainty that the ship would never come up again, that the monstrous weight of seawater would crush her like a barrel in the grip of a giant. There was something like a pause, and then she saw the forward end of the ship coming up, rising like a broaching whale from the depths.

"Mind your helm!" Jenkins roared in a fine sea-bellow, cutting away the lashings on the wheel; blood from his nose ran down his face, whipping away in the blasting spray. He sprang to the steering platform, and the others heaved with him to spill wind from the sail. "Keep her so! Mr. Oxton, turn out the watch below-all hands! Ms. Tauranasson-"

A quick glance around showed her Swindapa on the starboard line. Tauranasson was hanging limp from her safety line, probably slammed headfirst into something, and in no condition to do anything much. A middy and hand were hauling themselves toward her to take her below to the sickbay.

"Clew up the topsail-man the fore clew-garnets! Take the way off her!" He fumbled for the speaking-trumpet slung over his shoulder.

Not even a powered megaphone would do any good at present, much less an ordinary speaking-trumpet, and it had to be done now. "I'll see to it!" Alston shouted into his ear, then turned and plunged forward.

Another surge took her as she grabbed for the railing of the companionway that led down from the quarterdeck to the waist. Her feet went out from under her again, the base of her spine struck something hard, and sensation vanished in a wash of white-hot ice from stomach to feet. Then Swindapa was hauling her upright; she forced paralyzed lungs to work, saw the watch still clinging to the safety lines, moved forward.

"The fore clew-garnets!" she shouted into a CPO's ear, grabbing him by the shoulder. "Come on."

They fought their way forward, gathering up a few more dazed crewfolk. By the time they reached the foremast the petty officer had his teams moving like sentient beings and not stunned oxen. Wet hemp rasped her palms as everyone tailed on to the line, coughed sea wrack out of their lungs, scrabbled for footing on the wet, slick deck…

"Heave-" A trained scream that cut through the wind for a few yards at least.

"Ho!"

Alston waited until the work was well in hand before dropping out of the line team; she could feel the way coming off the ship, the bow once more rising lightly to the oncoming waves. More hands were pouring topside; few had been asleep anyway, and one of the advantages of a ship with a full fighting crew-far larger than necessary for mere sailing-was that there were always plenty of hands and strong backs around in an emergency.

Now, she thought. We actually may live out the night.

There was something to be said for a direct, physical risk. It took your mind off things you couldn't do anything about. Like the rest of the fleet; or the rest of the war, for that matter.

I always feel ridiculous riding in a chariot, Doreen Arnstein thought. "At least this one has springs and seats," the Assistant Councilor for Foreign Affairs murmured to herself. "And a sunshade. With gold tassels, yet."

The springs were from a Honda Accord, the tires solid rubber on steel, the body was wood inlay with a gilded brass rail 'round about to hang on to. It was more of a two-wheeled wagon than a copy of the war-carts the Nantucketers had encountered in the Bronze Age world. They'd run it up for purposes of swank-or public relations, if you wanted to get formal; there was plenty of room for her, the driver, and Brigadier Hollard. The horses pulling it were two precious Morgans shipped in from Nantucket, sleek black giants by local standards, drawing gasps and stares on their own. A leather-lunged Hittite herald went ahead:

"Make way! Make way for the honored guests of the One Sun, the Great King of Haiti! Make way for the honored emissaries of his brother, Great King Yhared-Koffin! Make way!"

Some of the crowd made way for the herald's voice, some for the ram's-horn trumpets blown by the two men behind him, still more for the reversed spears of the troop of Royal Guards. A guard of Marines rode behind, the butts of their rifles resting on their thighs; their saddles and stirrups still drew pointed fingers and murmurs of amazement.

Doreen fanned herself; it was a fairly warm day for late autumn, and still more so in the ceremonial robe she was wearing, fairly crusted with gold and silver thread and gems until she blazed and glittered when a ray of the bright upland sun struck her, the more so from her diadem and earrings.

Wearing this sort of thing makes me feel like I'm acting in a bad historical drama, she thought. Glittering jeweled robes looked perfectly natural on, say, Princess Raupasha. On herself they just… well, I'm no princess. Not even a JAP. I'm a thirty something, former astronomy major from Hoboken, New Jersey.

And the roundish, curve-nosed, full-lipped face with the dark eyes and curly coarse dark hair that looked out of her mirror really didn't go with this getup.

"But it impresses the yokels no end," Kenneth Hollard said, looking indecently comfortable in his Marine khakis.

"That's why we're taking the long way in," Doreen replied. "It impresses the nobility, too." And when the cold weather hits, pretty soon, it's going to be worse than the heat. Oh, well. "They're even more status-conscious here than they are down in Babylonia."

"That's saying something," Hollard muttered.

He had a look she recognized-extreme frustration. Getting anything done in these ancient Oriental kingdoms was difficult-to-impossible. Getting it done quickly… Oi. But fretting about it just gives you heartburn.

"And the people are spooked by what they've heard about Walker and the Ringapi," she said. "Letting them know they've got wizard allies of their own bucks them up."

She shoved the constant nagging worry about the situation in general and Ian in particular and took in the scene about her. Even after weeks in Hattusas, the capital of the Hittite Empire could still thrill her. It wasn't as big as the largest Babylonian cities, and there was nothing as hulkingly massive as their ziggurats. Cruder and rawer; cyclopean stone walls outside, shaped beside the gates into figures of brooding warrior-Gods and pug-faced lions. The Islander party had been directed through the Gate of the Sphinxes, on the southern edge of the city. A massive rampart a hundred and fifty feet thick and twenty high supported the city wall, its earthen surface paved to make a smooth glacis. The ramp led upward past a man-high outer wall, then straight to the foot of the main ramparts; those were of huge stone blocks longer than she was tall, rough-fitted together without mortar and smoothed on the outside, thirty feet high and nearly as thick. Towers studded it at intervals of a half-bowshot, squally massive; the crenellations on top were like teeth bared at heaven. Metal gleamed on spearheads and helmets on the walls, blinking back blinding bright in the morning sun.

"Impressive," she said to Kenneth Hollard.

"I'll say," he replied; but he was weighing them with a slightly different eye. "Still, that's really two walls with cross-bracing and the cells filled with rubble. You could knock it down into a ramp with some of our five-inch rifles. Take a while, though. A lot longer than with a brick wall and mud-brick core, the way the cities down in the Land Between the Rivers have. They really know how to use rock here, and they've got a lot of it. It'd take forever to force a breach if they had concrete to use to consolidate the rubble fill…"

"Ken," she said, a slight scolding tone in her voice, "it's not really polite to speculate in public on how you'd destroy the capital of an allied power."

He grinned; it turned his naturally stern face into something charmingly boyish. "Professional reflex. Madam Councilor," he said.

"I was thinking of how much work it must have taken," she replied.

The ramp came to the rampart and made a sharp turn to the left, throwing them into the shadow of the city wall.

"Well laid out, too. Spear side," Hollard said, and continued at her raised eyebrows: "With the ramp this way, your right side-spear side-is to the wall and you can't use your shield to stop the sharp pointies they're raining down from up there."

He tossed his helmeted head to the right. Doreen looked up, and tried to imagine a roaring crush of men where she was, wrestling with battering rams as arrows slammed down in sleeting clouds like hard, hard rain… There were scorch marks on the massive stones going by at arm's length from her. She knew from chronicles in the twentieth confirmed here that Hattusas had fallen at least once about a century before, sacked and burned by the Kaska mountain tribes from the country just to the north.

"Determined bastards, they must have been," Kenneth Hollard said, reading her thought. "You'd pay a real butcher's bill taking this with scaling ladders and handheld log battering rams, against any sort of opposition."

That was one way to put it. Her mind shied away from giving her a picture of what the words meant; she'd gotten case-hardened, somewhat, since coming here, but there were limits she didn't want to cross. Even more, she didn't want to imagine what was happening under the walls of Troy right now, or inside them.

"And look at the pavement," he went on.

She did. It was made of the heavy flat rocks as well, and some of them were scorched, too.

"How?" she said.

"Olive oil," he said. "Possibly naphtha, but probably olive oil, heated-great big boiling tubs of it, maybe mixed with tallow or lard. Wait until the attackers are really packed in here"-he looked up and down the long ramp, estimating the space-"say fifteen hundred of them. Pour the mixture down from the wall along here, and it'd run all down this ramp and onto the glacis, under the feet of the men packed in shoulder to shoulder and nose to tail, spattering on the clothes and faces of a lot of 'em, or running under their armor-make the road surface damned slippery, too. They'd be immobilized. Then toss down a torch."

God, she thought, fighting down queasiness. Crisco Extra-Virgin Instant Hell. There were times-watching the Emancipator bombing the Assyrian cities, for instance-when she'd felt a little guilty about helping to introduce modern weapons here. Then again, when you saw what human ingenuity could manage with low tech, did it matter? When people want to be atrocious, they'll find a way, even if it's labor-intensive.

Sphinxes flanked the gate, carved into enormous masonry blocks that ran all the way from the entrance back through the thickness of the wall. The man-headed lions had little of the Egyptian grace, but plenty of power. The crowds thinned out here, no room for them, but a line of Royal Guards lined the tunnel-like way between the inner and outer gates. Those were bronze-faced wood, under arched gateways straddled by great square towers. The pointed arches themselves were something to see, each half-carved out of a block of granite that must have weighed thirty or forty tons-they didn't know how to build arches or domes here out of blocks, but this served the same purpose.

As they moved into the streets the crowds were dense once more, and she put the scented feathers of the fan to her nose again; the stench wasn't quite as overpowering as, say, Babylon in August, since Hattusas was both smaller and at the moment cooler, but it was bad enough-sewage, animal droppings, garbage, and old sweat soaked into wool, all activated by the fresh sweat of crowding and excitement. She swallowed; her stomach had gotten a lot more vulnerable to this sort of thing since she'd gotten pregnant. That had happened the first time, too, but she'd been back in safe, comfortable, clean Nantucket then.

The thought made her snort a little with laughter. Anyone fresh from the twentieth would find Nantucket odorous enough and to spare, these days; land tons of fish and shellfish every day, and no matter how the gulls scavenge and how zealous the recycling collectors are about potential fertilizer, the air will take on a distinct tang. Rendered whale blubber didn't help either, or factories driven by wood-fired steam engines, or…

It still smelled a lot better than this. There weren't as many flies, either. She waved some of the flies away, swallowed again, and to take her mind off her stomach admired-rather dutifully-a blocky temple of dark-gray limestone. Unlike the Babylonian kind, this had big rectangular windows in the outer wall, reaching nearly to the ground. Through them she could catch a bright sideways glimpse of the Holy of Holies, where a burnished man-high silver statue of the God flashed and glittered on a pillar that rested on a golden lion. The figure was shown with shield, club, and helmet… That's Zababa, she reminded herself. I think. The Hittites had so many damned Gods, and most of them had at least two names-here they threw every pantheon they came in contact with together, in a mispocha of celestial miscegenation and cheerfully incoherent syncretism.

The road inside the city was paved, which was something of a relief even if the pavement was lumpy and uneven; they worked their way up toward the stark citadel that crowned the eastern lobe of Hattusas's figure-eight layout. They passed more temples, dozens of them; hundreds upon hundreds of blocky stone-and-timber houses and others of unplastered mud brick or combinations; carved slabs graven with rows of scimitar-wielding Gods; crowds staring or cheering or making gestures of aversion; one bunch cut the throat of a lamb over an improvised altar as the Islanders passed, and Doreen had a horrible intuition that it was to her…

The King's residence was a fortress in its own right, even more impressive than the southern wall when you factored in the steep rocky scarps below. There was another ramp for the horses to climb, more ceremonial to go through before and after they passed through the gates; there were two great Kings present and the representatives of a third, Jared Cofflin being granted that status since nobody in the ancient East knew what the hell to make of an elected head of state. Plus vassal Princess Raupasha, now that her little faux pas was forgiven if not forgotten. Doreen sighed as she tucked her attache case under her arm and Hollard offered her an arm down from the chariot. Even in the Bronze Age, you couldn't escape going to meetings…

Quiet fell once they were within the throne chamber; it was big and dim, with spears of light coming from windows and openings in the flat roof above. Other pillars of vividly painted wood upheld the high ceiling; Royal Guards around the edges of the room stood motionless as the idols in their wall niches and the painted figures of dead Kings making offerings. The soldiers' weapons and bronze-scale armor glittered, and so did the images, their eyes seeming to move and follow her with a glisten of onyx and lapis lazuli. Tudhaliyas sat motionless on his throne, with Tawannannas Zuduhepa beside him.

Doreen sent up a silent prayer of thanks that Hittites had that institution. Zuduhepa was queen in her own right; if she outlived her husband, she'd carry the title and very real power that went with it into the reign of her son until her own death. That made them more accustomed than most peoples in this era to taking a woman seriously. Her predecessor, Tudhaliyas's mother, had been a holy terror all her long life, and had hand-picked her successor; that young woman had even taken Zuduhepa as a throne-name on her accession.

Of course, local custom was getting a bit bent out of shape, just lately. Kathryn Hollard was there, too, beside King Kashtiliash, and in Marine khakis that clashed horribly with the Oriental-rococo splendor of the chair; by the terms of her marriage contract she was commander in chief of the New Troops of Kar-Duniash.

And she's looking disgustingly sleek and satisfied, Doreen thought with friendly amusement. I guess the Bull of Marduk lives up to expectations. She couldn't imagine sharing a husband with the hareem as local custom required, or for that matter marrying a local at all, but those two were apparently happy enough with the relationship. Princess Raupasha sat to one side on a lower, slightly plainer throne; she was wearing trousers and boots, set off by a gold-washed tunic of chain mail.

Must have had some local artisans do that, Doreen thought. The polished Fritz helmet with the gold diadem around the brows and the purple-dyed ostrich plumes was rather striking, too. Say what you like, that kid has style.

The two Islanders drew near to the throne, saluted and bowed respectively, and repeated the gesture to the other monarchs. God, I'm getting good control of my facial muscles, she thought, fighting down a giggle. Court dress for a Hittite King looked very much like a gaudily embroidered mid-Victorian dress with a flounced skirt, combined with a skullcap… Like everything else here, the greetings involved endless ritual, mostly religious. Hierophants set out tables before each of the participants in the conference, with dishes covered in embroidered linen cloths. Doreen's nose twitched-it was lunchtime, by her clock-but she waited patiently.

Musicians in ragged motley came in. They carried instruments; arkanmmi, huhupal and galgaturi, none of which could be described in terms of Western analogues, except that they involved blowing, plucking, and percussion. The thump-tweedle-plink sounded low and not unpleasant. Other ragged men danced in, holding their hands above their heads and twirling gently in circles until the skirts of their robes flared out and clinking finger-cymbals sounded. Doreen's eyes went wider; evidently the tradition of the whirling dervish was a lot older in this part of the world than anyone had suspected.

At last the various rituals were completed (the dish turned out to be strips of beef with onions in a garlic sauce) and the Kings and principals were seated around a table in a smaller room. Doreen recognized it with a twinge of nostalgia; it was where Ian and she had had their first audience with the Hittite rulers… God, only a few months ago. Ian…

"I and the Seg Kallui have brought forward as many of our troops as we can," Kashtiliash said at last. "More await the command in Babylon. Lord Kenn'et, when do we strike the Ahhiyawa!"

"We don't," Kenneth Hollard said. "We wait for them to strike us."

Kashtiliash looked unhappy, or possibly angry. "You did not wait for the Assyrians to strike," he pointed out. "We advanced together and crushed them, thus."

He was speaking Akkadian; everyone in the room understood it, more or less. Absolutely everyone understood the gripping, mangling gesture of his great scarred hands.

"That was in Kar-Duniash," Kenneth said. "In Kar-Duniash, we had the Land of the Two Rivers to draw on for food-land more fertile than any other in this part of the world except for Egypt. And we had the Two Rivers themselves, and the canals, and our steamboats. Rarely did we operate more than a week's travel from water transport."

He went over to a map drawn on a whitewashed wall; a light well in the ceiling above made it seem to glow.

"Here, we are six hundred miles as the bird flies from the head of navigation on the Euphrates. More than a thousand as the roads go, and they're very bad roads over mountains. On good roads with our wagons, the practical limit on hauling food by animal traction is about one hundred and twenty miles. On these roads, with your wagons, it's sixty miles. After that, the wagoneers and their animals have eaten all the cargo. All our transport capacity has to go to weapons and supplies, because we haven't had time to teach the Hittite-Nesite-folk how to make anything we need. It's been hard getting in enough rifles and ammunition to reequip your Royal Guards."

Tudhaliyas nodded somberly, rubbing his fingers over the arms of his chair. He was an able man, in Doreen's opinion, but something of a worrywart. He'd also insisted on getting at least a few thousand rifles and some cannon as a condition of the alliance; which made sense, when you looked at it from his point of view, but was an infernal nuisance.

"I can summon a hundred thousand men to my banner," he said. "If I call in all my garrisons, all my own troops, all those of my nobles and Royal Kin and holders-of-land-on-service, and the contingents of my vassal rulers. But if I call them all to the same place, they will starve to death in short order."

Kashtiliash looked at him somberly, tugging at his curled beard. "Surely you have royal storehouses in each region," he said. "Surely your city-governors and provincial overlords and the nobles of the lands each have their own reserves of food. In my land, there is never less than three years' supplies for court, armies, and cities in storage, at least of grain and dates, onions and salt fish."

The Hittite nodded. "Oh, yes; we too take precautions. But remember, every iku of my lands yields perhaps half of what yours does, my brother, yet takes as much labor of men and oxen to cultivate. And I cannot ship the grain of that iku of land from place to place by barge, as you do; our rivers are rivers of rock and spray, not broad paths. If I call too many beasts and carts and men from the fields, the harvest will fail and we will all starve. Then most of the soldiers must be home for planting, and still more for the harvest. Our harvests have been poor for four years, as well-not enough rain in most of Hattiland. Stores are low."

Kashtiliash tugged at his beard again. "How is Walker better-suited than we?" he asked the Islander commander.

"He can bring in his supplies by water, as you can in your land, my kinsman," Kenneth said, moving his hand down the western coast of Anatolia. "Water transport is quick and cheap. And he can draw on the whole of Great Achaea's surpluses, which are greater than Haiti-land's, because he has had years to spread new methods and crops and tools, and to build roads and grain stores."

"But he cannot sail his ships inland… ah, my kinsman, I see," Kashtiliash said, grinning in his blue-black beard. "That is what you mean."

"Yeah," Kenneth said, nodding. "We've got to get him away from his base of supply and closer to ours." A grim smile. "Let's call it the Attaturk Plan. We've been stockpiling food and fodder in selected locations since the harvest"-he tapped points marked on the routes inland from the coast toward Hattusas-"and we've got to be prepared to deny him local replenishment."

"You mean we must be prepared to burn my own lands and turn my own people out onto the roads of the winter," Tudhaliyas said. "Lest Walker feed from their storehouses and flocks."

"Yes, Your Majesty," Kathryn Hollard said gently. "Or they will be Walker's lands and Walker's people-his slaves, rather."

Kashtiliash gave her a fond glance and went on: "What I can do for you after this war, my brother, I will do. As my allies say, we cannot move grain enough to feed many from Kar-Duniash to Haiti-land, but silver, plow oxen, seed-grain, cloth, these I will send."

"The Republic will help all it can as well for rebuilding after the war," Doreen said. "We can ship in, and show you how to make, new tools for farming-how to build better roads to spread harvests around, and how to preserve food better. We can show your healers how to stop epidemics. If we can get command of the sea, we can help feed the coastal zones, as well."

Tudhaliyas nodded, looking as if his stomach pained him. "Silver and cloth are well, but we cannot eat them, and if we eat the seed corn now and do not get more…" A deep sigh. "Let it be so. You have given me the head of the rebel Kurunta, and Walker was behind him. More, the Wolf Lord is all that you say in the way of greed and evil, from what the refugees tell."

Doreen put her hand on her stomach. They were talking about deliberately creating famine.

She shivered. A hell of a lot of people were going to die because of what was decided in this room, without ever knowing why. An anvil from orbit falling and shattering their lives without purpose or cause they could see.

No, she scolded herself. A hell of a lot of people are going to die because of what Walker decided to do. He's responsible, nobody else. Self-defense is self-defense, even if it means… drastic measures.

"Perhaps only troops equipped with the fire-weapons should be called up," Tudhaliyas said. "That would help in the matter of supplies."

Kathryn shook her head. "O One Sun, we need troops of the old kind as well. They can checkmate Walker's savage allies, and they can harass his men when they spread out to forage. And the chariots can also be useful, if they are used in, a new way with new weapons."

She looked at Princess Raupasha. The Mitannian girl began to speak, growing enthusiastic, her hands tracing accompaniment through the air. Tudhaliyas grew thoughtful.

"That would please my nobles," he said at the end. "They have seen the power of the new weapons, but a landed man grows with his feet in a chariot; it is not meet or seemly for him to go to war like a peasant spearman."

Kenneth Hollard gave a grim smile. "In the Republic, we have a saying: 'The flies have conquered the honey.' We want Walker's conquests to be like that." His hand moved west. "Our fleet is moving to the Pillars, here, as well. If they can break the Tartessian hold on the straits, they can move into the Middle Sea. Much of Walker's supplies come from Sicily, this large island here. Denying it to him will strike him a heavy blow."

"If is a word like a pig covered in olive oil, tasty if you can pin it down and set it on fire," Zuduhepa said, tilting her elaborate, golden-bedecked headdress as she turned to watch Kenneth Hollard. "Let us speak further of that which your fleet can do."

"Here, ma'am," the steward said. "Galley stove's working again."

Marian Alston-Kurlelo took the cup and sipped cautiously through the drinking hole in the cover. The storm was over, technically, although the sky above was covered in scudding gray tendrils and the light of noon was a muted glow, like being inside a giant frosted-glass globe. The wind was strong out of the northwest, but no longer a gale; still cold and raw, though, and she was grateful as she felt the aching need for rest being driven back by the strong harsh coffee, and a welcome warmth spreading in her stomach.

"Thank you, Seaman Puarkelo," she said, and the boy blushed. Alston gave an inward sigh. Commander Jenkins was forward, surveying the damage. There was a fair amount of it, the bowsprit rolling loose, foretopsail yard carried away, dangling ends of broken rigging, but none of it was fundamental.

One of the ships scudding along southward in company had lost her foremast just above the tops, and Alston's eyes narrowed as she saw the busy chaos on her foredeck. Then it settled down, and a long spar began to rise needlelike through the rigging- a jury-rig, but a sound one. Jenkins was deep in conversation with his XO and the ship's carpenter as he came back to the wheels, sounding remarkably cheerful.

Well, he didn't lose any of his people, she thought. Do Jesus, it would be nice to have only one ship to worry about again.

"Ma'am," he said, saluting. She returned the gesture. "There's nothing up ahead that we can't have fixed in a day or two."

"Very satisfactory, Captain," she said. Raising her voice slightly: "A very satisfactory piece of seamanship last night, in fact, Mr. Jenkins. The Chamberlain showed very well indeed. Well done."

The exhausted, red-eyed face flushed with pleasure. Then he grew grave: "Anything from the rest of the fleet, ma'am?"

"I was just expecting-ah." Swindapa came up; she looked wearied as well, with a bandage across her forehead where a flailing line had lashed her. "Any news?"

"Total casualties are twenty-seven dead, confirmed," she said.

Damn it to hell. To be expected, in a blow that violent, in a fleet that included thousands of troops packed in like sardines. Light casualties, really. And I hate losing every God-damned one.

"Two hundred seven seriously wounded, mostly broken bones and concussions," the Fiernan went on seriously. "Not counting walking wounded fit for duty." She looked up, the cerulean-blue eyes sad. "That's from ships in contact. All ships have reported except for the Farragut, the Severna Park, and the Merrimac," she said.

Alston's belly clenched. The steam ram, a collier, and their secret weapon… and nearly two hundred souls.

Swindapa went on: "We're still trying for-

A rating from the radio shack ran up. "Ma'am!" he said, thrusting a paper at her. "Ma'am!"

"Report from the Merrimac!" Swindapa said.

A sound something like a cheer went up from some of the middies and hands on the quarterdeck, and the officers smiled. Alston allowed herself a slight curve of the lips as well, as she took the transcript.

It didn't quite die as she read it. Nearly doomed wasn't as bad as actually dead. Or so she thought until they came in sight of the stricken vessel…

"Damn," she said mildly, lowering the binoculars.

"Right on the mark," Jenkins said, impressed. "Where you said the winds and current would throw them."

The maintop was a little crowded, with captain, commodore, and a couple of other officers standing on the little triangular railed platform; the usual lookout was out on the yard.

"From the description, it could only be these shores," Alston said absently. "They certainly didn't have much idea where they were. The only good thing about it is that we're here now-and that there's deep water all the way to the cliffs."

She raised the binoculars again. The storm had died down, there were streaks of blue overhead, but the enormous swells still came pounding in from the west, out of the deep reaches of the Atlantic that ran landless from here to the Carolinas. There was already white on the tops of some of the mountains landward; down from there the land ran steep, densely green forest below the moors, then dropped sheer into the sea battering it from the northwest. No sign of human habitation, although she'd give odds that eyes were fixed on her ships from somewhere up there. The wind had shifted to a steady westerly, strong enough to make the rigging drone a steady bass note, and to send the Chamberlain slanting southeast with her port rail nearly under, white foam breaking from her bows. The mast swayed out, over the rushing gray water, back over the narrow oval of deck, out again in a wide warped circle. She ignored it as she focused on the wounded ship to leeward.

"Merrimac, all right," she said. "Badly beat up."

Nearly destroyed might have been a better way of putting it. All three masts were gone by the board, the foremast nearly at deck level, the main about twenty feet up; the mizzen was still there about to the mizzentops. Standing rigging hung in great swaths and tangles; the deck looked as if there was scarcely a foothold free of fallen cordage and spars and sails. The pumps were going, a steady stream of water over both rails, and a set of pathetic jury-rigged sails were up, triangular swatches that looked as if a bunch of small sailboats were sitting on the big Down Easter's decks.

"I wonder Clammp hasn't got his boats out towing," Jenkins said.

"Take a look at her stern davits," Marian said grimly. A boat was dangling there, or at least the rear third of one. "Ms.

Kurlelo-Alston, what boats do we have with the frigates still sound? Six-oared or be:ter."

"Eight, ma'am," Swindapa said instantly. "Three more under repair and ready within a few hours."

"Good… all right. Those boats to the Merrimac. Ship's doctor from the Chamberlain, medical supplies, stretchers, cordage. Portable pumps, four of 'em. She'll need hands… besides the boat crews, fifteen hands and a middie, ensign, or lieutenant from each-good riggers, sailmakers. And ship's carpenters with their mates and kit from, hmmm-mmm, Lincoln and Sheridan."

"Yes, ma'am." Swindapa repeated the order and leaned out, grabbed a backstay, and slid the hundred feet to the quarterdeck with her feet braced against the hard ribbing of the hemp cable to control her speed.

"A tow. Commodore?" Jenkins asked quietly.

Marian Alston looked beyond the laboring hulk of the Merrimac. Close, far too close, the great swells surged and roared against sheer rock, throwing foam mast high. Even across several miles of sea she could hear the sound, and through the binoculars see the grinding snarl where the huge mass of water pushed eastward by the long storm met the immovable object of the Cantabrian Mountains, where the Pyrenees slid down into the Atlantic. There was clear water beyond that last finger of granite reaching out to sea…

… and the Merrimac wasn't going to make it, not under that miserable jury-rig; if she was doing two knots, it was a miracle. The swell and drift eastward would cut her off long before; she was making a yard eastward for every one she made south. Close, but no cigar. Anything that hitched on would be dragged to leeward as well by fourteen hundred tons of dead-in-the-water inertia.

"No, Commander Jenkins. I'm going to save that cargo if I can, but I'm not going to lose any more people for it. Rig for a tow, by all means, ready when and if we can get her far enough out. I'm going over to supervise recovery operations myself."

The deck had already been busy, repairs still going forward on the rigging; now it was doubly so, with lashings being untied and davits swung out. More than a few of the crew exchanged glances; launching a boat in seas this rough was gambling with a dunking at the very least, or possibly with injury and death if something went wrong halfway down. There was a scramble of orders and bosun's whistles, and deck crews formed on the lines. Jenkins murmured to his sailing master, and the voice rang out:

"Clew up!"

"Heave… hoi" The rhythmic chorus rang out, and the square sails spilled wind as the lines hauled them up like a theater curtain. The ship slowed almost instantly, swaying more toward the upright. Also rolling more, but you couldn't have everything.

The bosun's mate in charge of the boats wasn't hesitating. "Boat crew of the day to the commodore's barge! Falls tenders! Trapping line tenders!"

The commands ran on smoothly. Swindapa came up beside her. "Anything else?" she said softly, trying not to disrupt Alston's train of thought.

"Yes," she replied. "Have Captain Jenkins and… who's got the most left in the way of large spars?"

"Of the frigates, Sheridan," Swindapa said. The stores-ships were too far out to be useful just now. "Full set-didn't lose anything."

She wouldn't, with Tom Hitler as her skipper, Alston thought. He'd been sailing master of the Eagle and taught Alston herself most of what she knew of handling big square-riggers. Aloud:

"… and the Sheridan make a bundle of some spare spars-main and foresail-and get ready to put them overside rigged for tow." Luckily the spars were buoyant, being varnished white pine.

Fatigue and anxiety had vanished. She had a job to do; it might well be an impossible one, but all she could do was make the best possible decisions. Focus left her coldly alert, impersonal, and intensely alive.

The bosun's mate had the line team ready, and he scrambled up on the davits to give it a final visual check. A sailor brought her a life jacket; she strapped in absently, eyes still narrowed and gazing at the Merrimac. Swindapa came up beside her, and they both settled their billed Coast Guard caps more firmly on their heads-as usual, a few wispy strands of fine blond hair were floating free from their braid, like streamers to windward since they were both facing the port rail. Alston blinked, felt a fleeting, familiar moment of absurdly intense tenderness, a desire to smooth the strands back. Their eyes met, and spoke later without word or expression.

"Denniston, lay into the boat," the bosun's mate barked. A sailor climbed into it, undoing more lashings, running a final check, then gave a thumbs-up. "Cast off the gripe… cast off the preventers…" A clank as the sailor in the boat tripped the pelican hooks. "Boat crew lay into the boat!"

This time ten sailors climbed into the boat-technically the commodore's barge-in careful pairs. Two picked up oars and made ready to fend the boat off from the side of the ship; the rest of them and Denniston the coxswain grabbed the manropes that dangled from above, taking as much of their weight as possible off the tackle that held the boat.

Denniston looked over to the bosun's mate. "Ready in the boat."

The bosun's mate turned. "Ready on deck, ma'am," he said to the OOD, and received a nod. Then he went on: "On the falls!" The teams on deck took up the lines that ran to both ends of the boat, ready to control the descent. The bosun's mate took position near the rail, hands outstretched to either side. "Ready forward and aft?"

"Ready aye ready!"

"Lower away together!" A clink, and the boat sank with smooth speed. "Lively aft-easy forward-easy forward, handsomely there, God-damn you-

The Chamberlain heeled a little more and the swell rose to meet her. The boat touched, skipped, began to throw a bow wave of its own.

"Let fall!" the bosun's mate said, stepping back; the coxswain in the boat was in charge now. From below came her call:

"Unhook aft-passengers to the line!"

Alston came to with an inward start. There was something hypnotically soothing about a well-executed maneuver like this, and the Chamberlains were a well worked-up lot; the flagship naturally stayed in full commission more than the other Guard frigates, spent less time shuttling cargo to new or remote bases, and hence less time cut back to a sailing rather than a full fighting crew. A hand was holding the line for her, and as she came up she could see one of the boat's crew below doing the same. She leaned out, took a bight of the line around her right forearm, gripped it lower between crossed feet, and slid down at just short of rope-burn speed. Two of the sailors caught her and she stepped forward to a place in the bows of the boat, grabbing a thwart.

Seen from the surface the swell was like the surge of a giant's muscle beneath them, infinite power enclosed in a silk-smooth skin, dangerous and beautiful. The bitter kiss of foam blew onto her face, and she could feel the living heave of the ocean through the thin inch of oak that made up the cutter's planks.

Swindapa came down the line next, then the rest of the hands being sent across, while the tools and cordage and sailcloth came down on whiplines.

"Let go forward!" Denniston said.

The coxswain was a short woman, thickset and muscular, with cropped black hair and bright green eyes, in her early twenties. Alban, from an eastern tribe, but she'd taken an Immigration Office name. Some of the Sun People tribes had sent in fairly bitter complaints about girls running off for this reason or that-being married to suitors they didn't like was the most common-and their fathers having to repay the bridewealth and swallow public shame.

If they don't like it, they can change their God-damned customs.

"Fend off," the coxswain said. Oars pushed the longboat away from the heaving wooden cliff of the Chamberlain's side; other boats were being lowered even as they moved. "Out oars and stroke… stroke… stroke…"

That was awkward in the crowded barge; it was even more so when they stopped to raise the mast, step, and brace it. That gave her something to do; she shifted over to the windward rail, along with everyone else except the coxswain at the tiller, sitting on it to fight the heel and make the boat stiffer as it raced across the wind toward the stricken Merrimac.

Under the urgent focus on the task ahead ran the sheer exuberant satisfaction of the cutter's racing speed, the sea hissing past six inches away-less when they crested one of the huge waves and white water burst around them. She fought down an urge to whoop and grin as the bow went up… up… up; then the great jerk of acceleration on the crest as the sail caught the full force of the stiff wind and cracked taut. And the long roller-coaster swoop down the skin of the gray-blue swell, with goose-wings of spray flying higher than her head from the boat's bows and the curving wake racing aft.

For a moment she was a skinny black girl in faded cutoffs and a T-shirt again, dancing with excitement in a little dinghy as it tossed in a yachtsman's wake off Prince Island.

Swindapa did whoop, and the coxswain gave an exultant tribal screech, half-standing at the crest to get another sight of the Merrimac's sails, leaning expertly into the tiller and calling directions to the hands at the lines. Soon enough they could see the mountain peaks ahead to the southeast, and then the stumpy tops of the ship's mutilated masts.

"Ready to let go!" Denniston called. The hull came up be-side them, looming a dozen feet overhead. There were plenty of ropes overside, and a few of the Merrimac's hands waving and calling. "Ready to fend… let go the sail!"

The cutter turned up alongside the ship, and the sail rattled down. Alston moved to take one of the ropes and secure the bows with a running bowline knot. "Denniston, I'm going to rig for tow," she said crisply. "When I do, tail on to the line and haul away; I want her head about five points up and as much way as you can."

"Yes, ma'am." A hesitation. "Ma'am, we're not going to tow this bitch free-not even with all the boats."

"I'm aware of that, Petty Officer Denniston," Alston said. "Every bit helps, though."

"Ma'am. Aye, aye, ma'am!"

She nodded, gripped the rope, braced her feet against the slick heaving planks of the ship's side, and swarmed up hand over hand. The others followed, and the gear; she was looking about, taking in the details. Not much was recognizable of the trim, neat new ship she'd boarded in Westhaven. Hmmm. Wheel's still functional.

"Where's Captain Clammp?" she said, striding over to a young man she recognized as one of his officers. "I need a report on the status of the ship."

Red-rimmed eyes blinked at her from behind thick spectacles. "Thank God you're here, ma'am," the young man said. His face worked for an instant, as if he was about to burst into tears, then stiffened. "Ma'am, Captain Clammp was injured when the foremast gave way-knocked down-when the wind shifted. He's been unconscious ever since. We… ah, we lost five hands, including Lieutenant Stendins." Which had left this teenager in command, probably on his first voyage out of home waters. "Several more were injured. We…" he made a helpless gesture toward the chaos of the ship.

Marian Alston put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. "Son, you kept the ship afloat through as bad a blow as I've seen," she said. "Now help's on the way. I need to know everything."

While he told her, Swindapa was directing the unloading of the boats arriving from the frigates. The Merrimacs staggered away from the pumps, and fresh hands began plunging the levers up and down; a tow cable with an empty hogshead on the end for a buoy went overside and the boats made fast, strung out and began to pull the Merrimac's prows to the west of south. Captain Clammp came by, bandaged like a mummy and lashed to a stretcher, to go overside into boats and be rowed out to the warships.

"You've done a fine job," Marian said to young Clammp. "Now rest."

He staggered off. The new hands at the pumps were swinging the levers vigorously, and there was a perceptible increase in the jets of water going overside. One of them started a chanty, and the others took it up:

"They say life has its ups and downs;

That really now, is quite profound!

I'd like to push the captsan 'round,

But it's pump her mates, before we drown!"

More men and women came running to gather around her as she made a high beckoning gesture with the fingers of both hands; the motion of the ship changed beneath her feet as the added thrust of sixty or seventy strong backs swinging ashwood oars came on to the towline. She looked around at the circle of faces; a couple of ensigns, a lieutenant, and half a dozen experienced petty officers and chiefs-ship's carpenters, rigging specialists.

"Pump me mates Pump her dry;

Down to hell, up to the sky-

Bend your backs and break your bones

We're just a thousand miles from home!"

"All right, people, we need to lighten this ship and get some sail on her," Alston said briskly. "Guns overside. Get the auxiliary pumps started; once you've made some headway in the hold, start her fresh water overside as well-stores, this clutter on deck, everything that can be heaved to the rail except her main cargo." Most of which was far too bulky and heavy to move anyway. "Chips?"

The Lincoln's master carpenter jerked a thumb westward to where two more boats were towing bundles of white pine spars, seventy feet long and a foot and a half thick in the middle.

"With those spars, ma'am, we can do jury masts on the main and fore-scarf and wold 'em. That'll give you something. It'll take a while."

"Sometimes when I am in me bed

And thinkin' of the day ahead;

I wish that I could wake up dead-

But pumpin's all I get instead!"

"Get it done in the next fifty minutes or there's no point," she said over the sound of the chanty. "I want the rigging ready to go up and the sails, too." She pointed ahead, to where the breakers made a white line to their south and east. "The swell, tide, and wind are all shoving us toward that. We need to bring her head around five points, and get some real way on her- five knots, more would be better-and the wind's not favorable." Not dead in their teeth, but coming in over the starboard quarter.

She tapped a fist into a pink palm. "We need what's on board to win this war; to keep it, we have to save this ship, so that's exactly what we're going to do, people. Let's do it; let's go."

They gave a short, sharp cheer and scattered to their work at a run. Alston watched them go, fighting down a ferocious impatience. Who knew what devilments Isketerol might be up to, might get up to in the future, if they gave him time?

Swindapa came up and handed her a piece of hardtack. She looked down at the hard gray-brown crackerlike rectangle, puzzled for an instant, then ahead at the cliffs they'd be passing- hopefully passing, and not running into-in an hour or two.

"If Jack Aubrey could get close enough to those rocks to hit 'em with a ship's biscuit, why not me?" she said, matching Swindapa's grin for a brief instant. It was good to remember that there was more to the world than their present trouble.

The chanty went on, pounding to the rumble and splash of the pumps:

"Yes how I wish that I could die,

The swine who built this tub to find;

I'd drag him back from where he fries,

To pump until the bitch is dry!"