On the Oceans of Eternity

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

April, 11 A.E.-Meggido, Kingdom of Egypt

May, 11 A.E.-Walkeropolis, Kingdom of Great Achaea

April, 11 A.E.-Meggido, Kingdom of Egypt

"Back!" Djehuty snarled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pharaoh's doing… he thrust the thought from him.

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

"Here," Djehuty said, passing over his waterskin.

The man sucked at it eagerly; the water was cut with one-fifth part of sour wine. "Lord," he gasped after a moment. "From Pharaoh."

He offered a scroll of papyrus; Djehuty touched it to his forehead in the gesture of respect and broke the seal to read eagerly; his eyes skipping easily over the cursive demotic script.

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

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

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

Helmut Mittler felt himself sweat as he walked through the palace. There was panic in the streets of Walkeropolis, a few fires… not much, though.

My Security Battalions were ready, he thought with some satisfaction. And had Walker really believed he wouldn't find a way to monitor his correspondence?

The Americans had triumphed back home in the future, but it wasn't because they were better at espionage or covert operations or dezinformatzia. Even the stupid Russians had been better at that.

Now…

He took a deep breath. "Eumenes, Taltos, I'll go on alone from here."

The guards stationed down the long corridor bore the shoulder flashes of the regent's personal regiment, recruited from his ancestral estates in Ithaka. They stood like statues against the iridescent mosaics of the walls, no doubt ready to put down any challenge to their master's power.

Any challenge that can be met with brute force, Mittler thought. Not that brute force is to be despised, but I think I've just demonstrated its limitations. Odikweos would need him… and there would come a time when he didn't need Odikweos.

A last pair of guards firmly but courteously relieved him of his weapons and opened the tall doors with their wolfshead handles. The study within was one Walker had been fond of, with French doors overlooking a terrace, the gardens and the city he'd founded. I will keep the name, Mittler decided.

The… well, not exactly the regent anymore… was seated behind the desk. Two steel longswords rested on the subtly beautiful inlay; Mittler's brows rose, but he supposed there was some superstitious reason. At this stage of historical evolution such things were to be expected-the dialectic predicted them.

"My lord Regent," Mittler said. "I regret to report that rioters-doubtless in the pay of the conspirators-have eliminated the remaining family of our beloved fallen lord."

Some of the children had had to be dragged out of closets and from under beds. Regrettable, but given the dynastic beliefs of these people, necessary.

The Achaean nodded, his craggy features set and somber in the light of the single lamp. "Everything you say, my friend, is to the point," he said. "You are a man of swift wit, Lord Mittler. But you have never been a sailor."

"A sailor, my lord?"

"If you had, you would know that a rope is no stronger than its weakest part. So with a braided rope of thoughts. If the first strand is weak, all the others fail, be they braided with ever so much skill."

The French doors opened, and a tall man stepped in. He was in Achaean dress, but height and the glasses on his beak nose and the whole way he held himself shouted of the twentieth century.

"You," Mittler whispered.

"Me," Ian Arnstein said. He smiled unpleasantly. "The Jew-boy. We do meet again, Herr Mittler. I understand that you enjoy chess… and so do I. Check, and mate."

Mittler felt blood running to his face, and rage made the collar of his uniform tunic too tight, "you," he said. "I should have known-

Odikweos lifted one of the swords and rapped it on the table. "You should not have assumed that because a man was born in this time, he was a fool. The King of Men, for all his cunning, also thought so," he said gently. "I have never made that mistake, even with women, slaves, or barbarians. A man who underestimates a foe is a fool indeed."

"You were in this with the Jew!"

The Achaean shook his head. "By no means. I was angry with my lord, and so I told this man. I told him also what I would do were my lord to fall; but I did not raise my hand against him. Nor did he slay my lord. You did, Lord Mittler. Thus when you die, my lord is avenged… and I am free of obligation, in the eyes of Gods and men. And Walker's hand-fast men are free to follow me, since their lord's sons died with him."

The noise from the city beyond was swelling. The crackle of small arms came loud, and the flat boom of cannon, and the screaming of many voices.

"That is the attack on the headquarters of your ministry," Odikweos said.

"You- ' Mittler forced his anger down. "I will serve you well," he said. "You need me."

Odikweos laughed; it was a sound no man of the twentieth could have made, and entirely amused. "Serve me as you served the lord you betrayed?" he said. "No, Lord Mittler, I do not need you. I am not a foreigner who must rule the telestai of the Achaeans by putting them in constant fear. I am of the blood of Zeus; I am a man they can obey without cost to their honor. They have been at war and in a storm of change for near ten years. They will welcome one of their own-who holds the capital and the armies-and they will welcome a time of rest."

Arnstein crossed his arms and smiled again; Mittler wondered why he had ever thought the other man soft. The Achaean lord put the point of his sword under the blade of the other, near the hilt. With an expert flip of his thick wrist he flicked it up, to land at the German's feet. The steel sang with a discordant harmonic.

"Pick it up," Odikweos said, coming around the desk. He moved lightly despite the solid strength of his shoulders. "The talons of the Kindly Ones are on your neck, Mittler. My lord

Walker's ghost waits for your blood to be spilled in offering before he crosses Lethe."

Mittler picked up the sword. It felt heavy and awkward in his hand; for a brief instant he wondered how the same weight could be so graceful in Odikweos's grip.

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

His last thought was that the earth tasted of salt from the blood that soaked it.

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

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

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

She spoke, and the Sudunu interpreter relayed the words:

"You and your men fought very well."

Djehuty blinked, then nodded. "You deceived us very well. Ransom?" he went on without much hope.

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

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

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

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

"Your whole nation?" he said in bafflement.

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

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

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

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

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

"I do not understand."

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

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

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

"Wait," he said. "One thing-what name will this battle be given? Surely it is a greater one than Kadesh, even."

Let the chronicles remember it, and with it the name of Djehuty. Chronicles that do not lie, like the ones that called Kadesh a victory for Ramses.

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