That was about a third of what an unskilled worker made back on Nantucket, but extremely generous by the standards of anywhere else.
"Not the singers or dancers or most of the… ah… entertainers," Kathryn went on. "But the cooks and housemaids, it wouldn't be a big change for them."
"That would be more than I need," Clemens said, alarmed.
"It'd be part-time," Kathryn said. "They could do the language and literacy classes say, two days a week, and work four."
Hollard nodded. "Good idea, Kat, and it'll free up our own people. All right with you, Lieutenant?"
"Ah… yes," Clemens said. "It'll pay off in the long run. I'll keep an eye out and have the brighter ones taught real nursing when we get some time."
"Good idea," Doreen Arnstein said. "If-forbid it, God-we've got a really big war on our hands, that could be crucial." She smiled, a hard expression. "And it'll give us an advantage over Walker. I doubt he wastes his precious time on clean water."
Ian Arnstein shook his head. "I only wish that were so, Doreen. More's the pity, I think he's too smart not to. And he has Alice Hong."
"She's a monster."
Clemens cut in: "Doctor Coleman says she was a monster, all right-but a pretty good physician for all that. She'll be able to give him good advice, if he takes it."
"With our luck, he probably will," Kathryn said mournfully. The pitcher made a gurgling sound as she sucked on the straw. "Pah! That last mouthful was solid ground barley. Well, Jus, let's go-you can look over the dancing girls and make a selection, like a sultan!"
Clemens cursed the blush that rose to his cheeks. At least the sunburn hides it, he thought. Small compensation for increased likelihood of melanoma, but you had to count your blessings in this post-Event world.
And at least I don't have to see Ellen every day.
"So, we have to ask ourselves, before we can become virtuous, what is virtue?" Doreen said, nibbling a pistachio.
The priest of Ninurta began to answer, then stopped, suspicious. He was an old man, his beard white and his olive face deeply seamed; the years had left him sunken and scrawny in his flounced, fringed robe, but his eyes were snapping with intelligent anger.
"Virtue is the knowledge of what the great gods our masters require of us!" The priest thumped the inlaid sissu- wood of the table for emphasis.
"Ah, thank you," Doreen said politely. "Then knowledge is something that can be taught?"
"Of course, woman!"
"Then from whom should we learn it?"
"From the priests of the gods, the great gods our masters-they who know the wisdom of old, that which is written on the clay, that which is difficult to learn."
"The high en priest of Marduk, here in Dur-Kurigalzu, he would be a very wise and virtuous man?"
The priest permitted himself a dry, wintry smile. "Of course. Although he is not of my temple, his piety and learning are well known; all this city knows of it." He was also a collateral relative of the king, which made the priest's words wise in themselves.
"Thank you again, O priest of Ninurta," Doreen said. She paused for a moment, then went on, "I suppose priests would strive to teach virtue to their sons, then?"
The priest settled back on his stool, arranging his robe. "Surely."
"Then, for example, Yasim-Sumu, the high priest's son, should be a man of exceptional virtue?"
The priest opened his mouth, closed it again, and flushed darkly. But he was an honest man, in his way. "No," he bit out.
Doreen smiled politely and inclined her head. I'll say. The relatives of several ex-maidens had come looking for Yasim-Sumu with pruning hooks; his relatives would probably be able to buy them off, but the sons of a nobleman he'd killed in a drunken brawl might be less forgiving.
"Then apparently virtue is not something that can be taught, O en priest of Ninurta?"
The Babylonian stabbed his bronze stylus into a fresh clay tablet. "Well, what in Nergal's name is virtue, then, woman?"
"Oh, I don't know either," Doreen said cheerfully. "It seems we're both equally ignorant!"
A few seconds later, Ian Arnstein stuck his head through the door and caught her still giggling.
"What had him storming out so fast?"
"Oh, I used the First Sophistic on him," Doreen said, taking another nut out of the bowl. "The negative elenchos. Have a pistachio."
Ian accepted, groaned, and sank down on a stool beside the table. The room was dim but quietly sumptuous; light came from an opening in the ceiling, that could be closed at need with a mushroomlike cap of baked clay.
"Doreen, you've got to watch that. Remember what it got Socrates?"
"Well, yes, but he didn't have diplomatic immunity, did he?"
"Jesus, Doreen, we're supposed to be making an alliance here! These people believe in omens the way Americans believe-believed- would have believed-in vitamins. If we get the priesthoods against us. how do you think every divination will turn out? And no, we can't bribe them all. For one thing, some of them are honest."
Doreen hung her head slightly. "Sorry… but old Samsu-Indash is such a doddering reactionary twit! I'm supposed to be teaching him our math, and he's utterly incapable of believing I can add up to twenty without looking at my feet, for God's sake."
"Yeah, but he's a Babylonian, you can't expect him not to be a sexist pig," Ian said. "Anyway, there's news."
She sat up at his expression, alarm chilling her despite the hard, dry warmth of the air.
"From the fleet. The broadcast was incomplete, but they've run into some really bad weather."
"I want everyone on a line," Marian Alston said grimly. "Storm canvas, and do it now. Signal to the flotilla."
The swell had been increasing for hours, and the light had taken on a weird, sulfur-tinged quality. To the north was only blackness, towering up to swallow the late-afternoon sky. And heading our way very fast. She set her teeth and looked around, trained her binoculars on the other ships of the flotilla-four of them, since they'd left the schooner Frederick Douglass at Mauritius. They all looked as ready as possible.
Her skin was prickling all over. This is bad. This is very bad.
She waited impatiently until the last work aloft was done and ran her eyes over every inch of it, sails on top of the yards and lashed with double gaskets; the forward staysails, the gaff and two close-reefed topsails still up, to keep way on her once the hurricane hit. A ship without sails couldn't be steered, and that meant death. There was an ominous, naked angularity to the masts with only those scraps of storm canvas up.
"Commodore," a petty officer panted, "the kids are strapped into their bunks, and Martinelli's with them."
"Thank you, Seaman Telnatarno," Alston said. That was all they could do. Now she had a ship to sail, and that would require all her attention.
Something was racing toward them across the sea from the north, a mile or more before the darkness. A line of white, as if the sea were being churned by an invisible laser.
"It's coming across the swell," she said mildly. "Damn."
Jenkins shouted a warning through his speaking-trumpet, and those on deck braced themselves, clutching at rigging and rail.
The air went… limp, she decided. Just for a moment the single close-reefed topsail sagged flat, all the roundness out of it. Then the wind struck, and tore the tough storm canvas out of its bolt-tops with a single shrieking burst, turning it to vanishing scraps and tatters that snapped like whipcracks. She could feel the whole thousand-ton weight of the Chamberlain heeling as the wall of air and water hit- over, further, further under the fury of the blow, and she watched the port rail go under with fascinated horror. Above her a line snapped with a crack like cannonshot, and something whirred by her. The scream from the wheels would have been deafening normally; she could barely hear it, or see through the froth of seawater that filled the space between. She leaped for the circles of wood, staggered as a body slammed into her, then fell to the deck clutching at its ribs.