"Hmmm… I think the laddie with the bandaged arm beside him is the gentleman with the spear I had a bit of a brush with yesterday," O'Rourke said lightly.
The chief with the spyglass took it down from his eye and waved. Spears repeated the gesture down the hillslope, and a band of warriors five hundred strong rose and moved forward. They weren't moving in ranks, but there was an unpleasant steadiness to the way they came forward, flowing into dead ground, the shelter of groves or walls, up a long gully that sheltered everything but the tips of their spears.
"This bunch won't be spooked the first time they see guns go off," Barnes said thoughtfully. "Mother."
"This won't be the first time," O'Rourke said. "We managed to get a fair number of firearms into Troy, one way and another, and these lads have been on the receiving end."
Hantilis nodded. "I, too, was put in fear, the first time I saw the fire-weapons work their slaying," he said. "After that, I saw also that the men they killed were no more dead than those fallen to a bow or spear. Guns are better than any spear or bow, yes. They kill further, faster, more surely, yes. Still, these guns are not the thunder-club borne by Teshub of the Weather. They are only weapons. And a man with a knife or even a rock from the fields may slay a man with sword, spear, and armor, if he be brave and very lucky. A score of men with knives or rocks against one with a sword…"
Barnes and O'Rourke glanced at each other and nodded very slightly. You didn't have to have a modern education to be able to put two and two together, if the native cleverness was there.
The Hittite confirmed their thought a moment later: "That little ravine-it is a highway toward us. Only a little more than long bowshot, and the… Gatling… does not bear on it…"
Damn, I do wish we had a mortar, O'Rourke thought. Dropping shells right into dead ground like that was what they were made for. Then: If wishes were horses, we wouldn't need the Town Meeting to produce horseshit, would we, then?
"Here they come!" someone shouted from the walls.
"People can get used to anything," Kathryn Hollard said, looking down from one of the slanting windows in the airship's passenger compartment.
They'd come down the Euphrates, endless miles of irrigation canals lined with date palms, long narrow fields-about half of them flooded to soften the earth for the fall plowing, half fallow-and villages of dun mud-brick shacks. Now the shadow of the Emancipator passed over Babylon, slipping over square miles of flat roofs and courtyards and narrow twisty streets, cut here and there by the broader processional ways.
The sight of the dirigible overhead no longer made men scream in Babylon, or women cast themselves down in prayer. Even the donkeys had stopped bolting. Usually the craft came into a field by the river outside the northern wall; the engineers of the expeditionary force had put in basic support facilities, tanks of fuel-the engines burned a mixture of kerosene and hydrogen from the gasbag-a small steam-powered generator to crack lifting gas from water, stores of spare parts. Today the airship was coming into land at the square that surrounded the great ziggurat Etemenanki, the House That Is the Foundation of Heaven and Earth, near the northern gate of the city. That was the only open space in Babylon that could accommodate the Emancipator's more than five hundred feet of length; it was also convenient to the main palace-administrative complex just inside the Ishtar Gate.
"Kash is not happy at all, and this is one way of showing it," Kathryn went on.
"I'm not happy either," her brother replied. "To put it mildly."
"I'm not happy-the thermals here are a stone bitch," Vicki Cofflin said.
They all glared for a second at the Princess Raupasha. That young woman folded her arms and glared back. Seventeen going on eighteen, she was tall by contemporary standards, which made her average among Americans born in the twentieth; the Marine khakis she wore showed smooth curves. Fine raven-dark hair fell to her shoulders, framing an oval straight-nosed face and dark gray eyes rimmed with green; her skin was a natural pale olive tanned to honey-brown. It wasn't quite the physical type common in Kar-Duniash, but she had been born further north, under the Taurus range, in what would be Kurdish country in the twentieth. Some of her ancestors had come from much further than that, outflung spindrift of a migration that had begun in the foothills of the Ural Mountains a thousand years before. The main stream of it had driven their chariots and horse-herds over the Hindu Kush and down into the Land of Five Rivers, where her distant Aryan cousins were compiling the Rig-Veda in these very decades. Raupasha's ancestors had drifted westward, to become kings at the headwaters of the Khabur and lose themselves among their Human subjects.
"I did wrong," she said, in English thickly accented with the clotted sounds of her Hurrian mother tongue. "It- ' For a moment a flicker of uncertainty made her seem her age. "It seemed like a good idea at the time. You had told me, Lord Kenn'et, that in your country women often take the lead in such things…"
"Not without warning, not in public, not in front of an army, not in a language the man doesn't speak so it looks like he's agreeing with it, and not when it buggers up years of work!" Kenneth Hollard barked.
My, what an interesting shade of red you turn when you're angry, big brother, Kathryn thought irreverently. She and her brother both tanned fairly well for blonds, but she could see the dark blood rising over his collar.
"I did wrong," Raupasha said again, quietly. Tears welled in the great gray eyes, but she blinked them away. "I have wronged you, to whom I owe so much. Let King Kashtiliash have my head, then, to appease the anger of his heart and bring his favor back to you."
Kenneth Hollard sighed in exasperation. His sister answered for him: "No, we won't do that. You're under the Republic's protection, and we don't withdraw that. But that's protection for you, as an individual, not for your people or their former kingdom. You may have to leave these lands altogether."
"And we all have to strap in," Vicki Cofflin said. "Sir, ma'am, we're coming in for a landing."
Everyone sat, in a stony silence. Kathryn Hollard swallowed a bubble of anxiety. God, I want to see Hash again. God, I'm nervous.
Neither of them was exactly afraid of the other but they'd both found occasion enough for irritation, differences of custom and outlook and belief that made a word or action sweet reasonableness to one and intolerable to the other. And neither of them was meek by nature.
I suppose we'd both find sweetness-and-light boring; that's probably one reason why Kash fell for me in the first place, the change from all these I-am-your-handmaiden-great-lord-please-wipe-your-feet-on-me local bimbos. This time he's got every reason to be furious with the lot of us, though.
The marriage contract specified she could leave anytime she wanted to. The problem is, I don't want to.
"Prepare for landing," Vicki Cofflin said. "Alex, I'm going to take her in heavy, on prop-lift. Landing crew ready on the ground?"
The XO was peering through heavy pintle-mounted binoculars. "Looks like it, Skipper… there's the signal."
"Helm, right thirty. Engines, all ahead one quarter."
The long orca shape of the Emancipator turned into the wind blowing out of the deserts to the west. "Altitude one thousand thirty. Off superheat!"