"Three gets you two on the tiger," Cuddy said. "Hey, tell you what-I'll bet those litter-bearers you liked against… whatever-her-name-is there. That's four-to-one."
"Done," Alice replied, ignoring the sudden wild flare of hope in the toy's eyes. "She's sort of boring, anyway."
A clerk came through, with a murmur to the guard. He bowed and handed Walker a sealed message marked with the high-priority stamp and with Enkhelyawon's sigil in the red wax. Walker split the wax with a flick of his thumbnail and read quickly.
"Trouble?" Alice said.
"Intelligence report."
He snapped his fingers, and another servant glided forward with a silver tray and pen-and-ink set. She knelt to present the tray as a writing surface, holding it motionless as he scribbled, "Received. Well done." Definite news of the Nantucketers' arrival in Babylonia was worth interrupting him for. "We will meet in my sanctum to discuss this after dinner tonight." Then he would schedule a cabinet meeting for later in the week. The clerk bowed again and left, moving with the same unobtrusive swiftness.
Damn, the one drawback with being ruler of all I survey is that I spend so much of my time reading reports and holding meetings. Sort of like being a CEO. Of course, most corporate executives couldn't crucify the people who really annoyed them.
Walker stood again. "Let the games begin!" he called.
"You have not been idle," Kashtiliash said mildly. The sun of Shamash was declining toward the west as they approached the Nantukhtar base.
His face was impassive, and only the formal phrasing showed how startled he was. He'd heard reports that the Nantukhtar were building on the land his sire had bestowed; the kudurru exempting the grant from all tax and service stood in the courtyard of the great temple in Ur. He'd even heard that the foreigners had hired many peasants after the harvest, paying well and barging them downstream by the thousands.
But I expected an earthwork fort, not a small city! Walls defined a space the size of a minor nobleman's estate, several hundred acres; a broad road ran down through cultivated fields to the water's edge, where stood piers and slipways and a cluster of buildings.
The walls were like nothing he'd ever seen either. A low mound, a deep, broad moat, and then massive low-slung ramparts sunk behind the protection of the ditch. They formed a square, with triangular bastions at each corner and more before the gates. The surface…
"Is that all baked brick?" he asked, amazed.
Hollard nodded. "Look there, lord," he said, pointing. Down by the riverside was a series of low structures, shaped like long half-tubes.
"Kilns fired by… dis-till-ed black water? I did not know there was a spring of it here," Kashtiliash said. He would have known; the stuff had many uses, although it was costly.
"We drilled a well for it. That is what our steamboats burn here, too."
The prince nodded, hiding a shiver. He'd heard the Nantukhtar explanation, and it was true-a sealed vessel of water put on the fire did explode, so there was much force in the vapors of heated water. It was still eerie.
He glanced at the lavish, manyfold thousands of bricks. We should look into using the black water thus ourselves. Building was one of the primary duties of a king, and the better the buildings, the greater the mana.
"The residue is bitumen, also useful," Hollard went on.
"What is that other building, then, beside the kilns?"
"That is where we turn your reeds into… into a stuff like Egyptian papyrus. We call it paper, and it was our thought that your merchants could make it and then sell it to ours in return for our goods. We show them how, there."
"Excellent, Kenneth-Hollard," he said. The scribes sent to the Nantukhtar schools were sending good reports, but there was so much to learn here…
The roadway was thick with traffic; Nantukhtar wagons, one of them pulled by yet another steam engine, and men of Kar-Duniash as well. He looked keenly about at the land itself. New canals had been cut, and plants were growing whose like he did not know. Many peasants were at work, weeding and digging. None were occupied in lifting water with bucket and shadoof, though. Instead, skeletal structures of wood, with whirling vanes at their tops, stood at intervals, and from their bases water gushed as if by sorcery, running out into the furrows that laced the fields.
"Those are some new crops we thought would be useful here," Hollard said smoothly. "Sugarcane, cotton, citrus, rice, others. We can supply your farmers with seeds and slips from here."
Kashtiliash rolled the foreign names over in his mind. Well enough. In the end, all wealth came from the land.
They passed under the frowning gates, and under the muzzles of cannon. The Kassite prince looked at those with what he knew was an expression of pure lust. With cannon, a king need fear no rebel. They could pound down city walls like the bull-horn of Marduk-sieges would last only days instead of army-destroying months in camps where plague walked.
After a few hours' tour, his mind reeled.
Everything was alien, and much was so strange that he could stare at it and not see. Sometimes when he could see, the disorientation became worse-as when Hollard explained the lathes as being like a potter's wheel for the shaping of metal. When he heard those words there was a click somewhere behind his eyes, and suddenly he could see through the bristling foreignness of the machine to the principle behind it. Some things familiar were even more disturbing; to learn that pipes underlay the new streets and took away waste… It was not that he didn't know of sewers and baths. Such things were common enough in the greathouses of kings and city governors.
It is that such things may be given to common soldiers, to servants, and laborers, he thought. That awed him, in a way that even outright sorcery like the fire-boats did not.
And the Nantukhtar have come not for a day, or a year, but for a lifetime, he thought a little uneasily. Nobody would go to this much trouble otherwise. My father knew I would be dealing with the Eagle People all my days, he remembered. A wise man.
At last he seized on something his mind could grasp. "This is a school?" he said.
The two-story building had a bronze disk over its entrance, with a bas-relief of an eagle clutching a sheaf of arrows and a wreath of olive branches; he'd noticed that symbol before among the Nantukhtar, as the gilded figureheads of their ships and the smaller figures that topped their battle standards. The eagle must be their guardian god, then. The corridors within rang with chants. He smiled, remembering his own long tutelage in the House of Succession, with the sons of nobles and priests for company. How the rod had fallen on their backs!
How they had hated the scribes and scholars who beat a little wisdom into their hard heads!
"Yes, lord," Hollard said. "Many among us brought their families with them, and it is our law that all children receive such teaching."
Kashtiliash nodded, walking down the corridor that divided the building. Then he stopped. "Those are the women my father sent!" he said.
They were dressed in Nantukhtar clothing, mostly, but they recognized him and sprang up from the benches facing the chalkboard to prostrate themselves.
He signaled them up and turned to glance at Hollard. "My father was not well pleased to learn that you had spurned his gift, sending away the servants he bestowed," he said. "Now I see them here. What is this?"
The Nantukhtar inclined his head. "Lord Prince," he said, "there has been a misunderstanding-such is inevitable when tongues and customs are so different. No offense was meant, and we did not spurn your father's gift. We did manumit the slaves, for such is our law, but they labor here for us nonetheless, as you see. And we thank the king your father greatly."
"You teach servant women to read"!" said Kashtiliash.