"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."
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
May, 11 A.E.-Hattusas, Kingdom of Haiti-land
June, 11 A.E.-Babylon, Kingdom of Kar-Duniash
December, 10 A.E.-Tarim Basin, Central Asia
September, 11 A.E.-Nantucket Town, Republic of Nantucket
June, 11 A.E.-Ural River, Central Asia
September, 11 A.E.-Nantucket Town, Republic of Nantucket
Battalus Interruptus, Kenneth Hollard thought, dazed. Here I've spent the last three years of my life getting ready to defeat Walker, and they just up and kill the bastard!
He felt a surge of irritation, which died of shame when images from the last field hospital visit went through his head. Outside the command pavilion the sounds of the greatest block party of all time filtered in through the warm spring air. So did the smell of roasting meat; no more need to conserve every beast.
"No," Odikweos, King of Men, was saying.
"Excuse me?" Doreen Arnstein said sharply.
Her expression was sharp, but she hadn't let go of Ian Arnstein's hand since they sat down side by side at the head of the big table. He still looked a little stunned, after his first glimpse of his daughter.
"I said, no" Odikweos repeated, flashing a white smile through his grizzled beard. "Is this not your English word?" He tossed his head.
"No, I will not give up all the Wolf Lords… that is, the eqwetai of my former liege-lord. Those who needed slaying have been slain. The others are too useful to me; I shall confirm them in the most of their estates and titles, and their sons shall be Achaeans and serve my son. Nor will you attempt to slay them by stealth if you value my friendship. I will withdraw my troops from the Hittite lands; and since you hold it already, I will agree to make no moves against Sicily. Beyond that, I rule Great Achaea, and I shall make such changes there as seem good to me. We are not defeated suppliants in this war; we have decided to end it at our pleasure, for our own reasons."
Oh, please God, don't order me to invade Greece, Hollard thought.
Scratchy through the speaker, Jared Cofflin's dry Yankee voice spoke:
"Something there. Let's thrash this out."
King Kashtiliash pulled at his curled beard. "I came here because of my treaty with you, to put down the threat of Walker," he said. "Now that threat is gone. I wish to go home, and settle my realm." A broad carnivore grin. "Since my realm now includes Canaan, the Egyptians having withdrawn from it."
Tudhaliyas stirred unhappily. Kashtiliash raised a soothing hand: "And my brother the One Sun of Haiti-land will doubtless have much to do. Now that he is the only monarch with the new weapons in these lands, who may easily sweep to the Achaean sea, put down the Kaska mountain tribes, and push his frontiers far to the north and east in the Caucasus and around Lake Van."
Tudhaliyas's long dark clean-shaven face began to smile; it looked a little unnatural on his gloomy countenance. "Oh, indeed," he said, rubbing his hands. Then he cocked a sharp eye at the other Great King: "Provided nobody encroaches on my domains of Karkemish and Ugarit."
"But of course," Kashtiliash purred, a rumble in his deep chest. "Although we should consult about these horse-tamer tribes they say are advancing against us through northern Elam, the…"
"Medes and Persians," Kathryn Hollard said. "And Saka and Scythians and whatnot."
"Yes, those. Perhaps we should divide those lands between us."
"Perhaps we should," Tudhaliyas said thoughtfully.
"Perhaps we should indeed," the Seg Kallui of Kar-Duniash said. "First thing I'm going to do, though, is visit Dr. Clemens and get the IUD removed. Please hold any wars for about ten months."
Everyone chuckled. Well, nearly everyone; Marian Alston just smiled slightly. "You're making a good start on getting back to managing your own affairs," she said. "Still, I think a general treaty all 'round would be a good idea-trade, that sort of thing."
"Ayup," Cofflin's voice said. They could hear a murmur in the background, as of someone speaking softly in his ear. "I've got some ideas on that…"
King Kashtiliash crouched to look down one of the avenues of the great model city atop the table. Justin Clemens and his wife Azzu-ena waited uncertainly amid a bustle of scribes, clerks, engineers Babylonian and Nantucketer, officers, and attendants. Outside the tent, the great sprawling construction camp on the west bank of the Euphrates was in full swing. Most of the streets and broad avenues were still only pegs and string, but thousands of laborers were already trenching the lines for sewers and water systems.
From the corner of his eye he could see a first section of sewer actually being built, an egg-shaped tunnel of fired brick set in asphalt mortar. Not far away rested lengths of ceramic water pipe, tubes ten feet long and a yard across, with walls four inches thick. The great petroleum-fired kilns added another tang to the air, under the massed stink of Babylon across the river.
"Ah, Justin Clemens son of Edgar!" the King said. Clemens bowed. "How goes your work?"
"Faster than I thought it could, King of the Four Quarters," Clemens said.
He walked to the edge of the model; it was twenty feet on a side, resting on thick planks and those on trestles. The city of dreams it showed was definitely Babylonian-marked with the terraced pyramids of ziggurats, the blocky shapes of palace and temple. The layout wasn't, though; a gridwork of avenue and street, with broad radial ways driving through from the center. Along the water side was a great brick wall and highway to contain floods, and three long-arch bridges crossed the broad Euphrates. There was no city wall; instead a quartet of low-slung forts bristling with cannon covered the landward approaches and commanded the river passage. Blue-painted canals brought water to parks and gardens as well.