O'Rourke was already wheeling his horse, slapping the pistol back into its holster and his heels into Fancy's flanks. No time to reload, he thought, as the stallion sprang forward again, glad to be allowed to gallop at last. He was familiar with the rubber duration of combat-it felt like twenty minutes or so since the Ringapi sprang their ambush, but it was probably less than five by the clock. And if they'd waited just a bit and hit us all together I'd have been dead the first minute, he thought, leaning forward into the speed of the horse's rush.
He'd moved fast enough to distract the barbarians. The Gatling crew were safely past them, bouncing back up the dusty, rutted track toward the Nantucketer outpost. Most of the enemy were behind him, too, but there was one standing in the roadway between him and safety-or at least between him and such safety as the improvised base-cum-field-hospital promised. A quick glance right and left showed that all that solitary Ringapi had to do was delay him a few moments and he'd be swarmed under.
The man ahead looked a little out of the ordinary run of savage. He wore a bowl-shaped rimmed helmet of polished bronze with a tall scarlet-dyed horsehair plume and hinged cheek-guards; there were crossed gilt thunderbolts on the face of his black round-cornered rectangular shield, and gold rings around his arms and his neck. The chain-mail shirt above his flapping checked trousers was from a workshop in Meizon Akhaia, and so was the bright silver-glittering steel of the long spearhead. He held the shield up and slammed the butt of his spear into the ground, bracing his right foot against it for further strength and slanting the point forward-probably his folk's way for a man on foot to face a chariot.
"Damn," O'Rourke muttered. This lad's been to school, he has. A slinger and archer were running flat out to join him, too, and they'd be there far too soon.
The Nantucketer reached back over his left shoulder and drew the katana as the rocking speed of the gallop increased.
The sharkskin wrapping of the hilt was rough against his hand as he raised the sword; he'd likely get one and only one chance at this, and the enemy was also likely to be far more experienced with cold steel-well, with edged metal-than he was. Suddenly he didn't much care.
"Lamh Laidir Abu!" he shrieked, and braced his feet in the stirrups, rising slightly.
He could see the Ringapi chiefs bared teeth now, and the spearpoint pivoted to follow him-it would be in his side, or Fancy's, if he turned wide; or if he turned further than that, it would put him in range of the men running through the fields on either side, clambering over fieldstone walls-it wasn't the ones yelling he was worried about, it was the grimly intent, running as hard as they could. A few premature slingstones and arrows came his way, and the odd bullet.
Everything fell away, except the spearpoint and the fearless blue eyes behind the helmet brim. Now, he's used to chariots, which can't shift all that fast, so-
A press of his right leg, and Fancy crawfished at the last instant. The steel head of the spear flashed by, close enough to strike the stirrup-iron that held O'Rourke's right boot with a tooth-grating skrrrunng. The katana came down, and he felt the edge jar into meat. He ripped it upward with a banshee shriek, upward like a polo mallet and into the jaw of the slinger taking aim five yards behind the fallen chief. The man beyond him was drawing a long yew bow, but wasn't quite fast enough. He threw himself down with a yell, and Fancy gathered himself and took to the air in a soaring leap that would have cleared a six-bar fence.
O'Rourke whooped as he came up the slight slope to the base, drops of blood flinging back from the sword as he pulled the horse back to a canter and then to a walk. The Marines stationed on the wall cheered and waved their rifles in the air, the ones who weren't taking long-range shots at any Ringapi unwise enough to show himself. He was still grinning as Captain Barnes came up and snapped a salute.
"Sir, that was the most amazing thing I've ever seen!"
"Ah, wasn't it, though?" O'Rourke said with a laugh, returning the gesture.
"And it was about the dumbest thing I've ever seen, too- sir."
"No, no, just Irish," he chuckled, then nodded to the man beside her as he cleaned and sheathed the sword.
Hantilis son of Tiwataparas was a Hittite; his title translated roughly as Overseer of One Thousand, or Colonel, in English; a short heavy-boned muscular man, big-nosed and hairy and stocky and swarthy, with dark eyes under heavy eyebrows. The short sword at his side was steel, a diplomatic gift, as was the razor that kept the blue-black stubble on his chin closer than bronze had ever done; most Hittites of the upper classes were clean-shaven, in vivid contrast to Babylonia. He wore a bronze helmet with a crest that trailed down his back like a pigtail, a belted tunic, and a kilt, with calf-boots that had upturned toes, standard military dress for his people.
"Bravely done," he said, in slow accented English; King Tudhaliyas had set a number of his officer-nobility to learning the Nantucketer language, as well as a corps of scribes. "Like… how say, old stories."
He mimed plucking a stringed instrument, the sort of thing a bard would accompany an epic with. O'Rourke nodded a little smugly; it had been a little like something out of the Cattle Raid of Cooley. He smiled to himself: as far as Nantucket's little band of scholars could tell, the Ringapi were some sort of proto-Celt themselves, or else close cousins to the earliest Celts, if distinctions like that had any meaning this far back. They came from what would have become Hungary and Austria in the original history, lured by Walker's promises of southland loot and help against predatory neighbors; warriors and women and children and household goods in wagons and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all. Volkerwanderung like that were common enough, and getting more so; this was an age of chaos and wars and wanderings, even before the Event.
"What is… Irish?" the Hittite went on
"Ah…" Christ, how to answer that in words of one syllable. "A different… tribe," he said. "Not important."
The Hittite scowled and glanced eastward, where the mercenaries he'd been commanding had gone.
"Kaska dogs-they run like coward sheep," he said.
He dropped into Akkadian to do it, which he spoke far better than he did English; O'Rourke had a fair grasp on that ancient Semitic language as well, from the year he'd spent in Babylonia. It was the universal second language of the educated here and of diplomacy as well, like Latin in medieval Europe, and so doubly useful.
"I bow in apology," the Hittite went on, and did so.
O'Rourke shrugged; they'd have fought well enough, against the weapons they understood.
He looked around the enclosure. Walls were being built up to six feet with sacks and baskets of barley, with a lighting platform on the inside for the troops to stand on.
"How many effectives?" he asked.
"Sir," Brand said. "Lieutenant Hussey and eighty-seven enlisted personnel in my engineering company; another ten from the clinic personnel. About thirty-five sick and wounded from various units that've been operating around here; mostly they're down with the squirts of one sort or another. Plus the sixteen rifles you brought."