The chief spoke. Sue and Jaditwara and Tidtaway consulted.
"He says the Tartessians come to collect their tribute soon, so we have to make up our minds, or some tribes at least will be their dogs for the sake of the cow-medicine they bring with them."
Giernas started to nod, then froze. A thought struck him, like the sun rising early over the low distant line of the Sierras to the east. Slowly, he began to grin.
CHAPTER TEN
September, 10 A.E.-Troy
September, 10 A.E.-O'Rourke's Ford, east of Troy
October, 10 A.E.-Bay of Biscay
September, 10 A.E.-near Hattusas, Kingdom of Haiti-land
October, 10 A.E.-Bay of Biscay
September, 10 A.E.-Hattusas, Kingdom of Haiti-land
October, 10 A.E.-Off the coast of northwestern Iberia
In the long run, I think Mesopotamia may be our Japan," Ian Arnstein said into the microphone.
He was a very tall man, towering for this era: four inches over six feet, still lanky in late middle age, with a bushy beard turning gray among the original dark russet brown-one that he'd worn before the Event, when he was a professor of classical history from Southern California. What hair was left on the sides and rear of his head was the same color. By a sport of chromosomes, his face was of a type common in Anatolia even in the twentieth; beak-nosed, rather full in the lips, with large expressive dark eyes.
"Ian?" his wife said, through the earphones he was wearing, asking for clarification.
Doreen Arnstein was hundreds of miles away in the Hittite capital of Hattusas. Ian Arnstein listened to the boom of a cannon in the not-too-distant west, outside the walls of Troy, and thanked the notional Gods for that. Now, if only I was there in Hattusas, too. They'd about exhausted their official business, and it was a relief to talk of matters not immediately practical.
"I think I may have been too sanguine about the Babylonians," Ian said. "Yeah, it's going to handicap them not having much in the way of timber or minerals besides oil, but neither does Japan-and look how fast they picked up Western Civ's tricks. They've got a big population, a fairly sophisticated culture of their own, they're organized, and now they're run by a really smart, determined guy with a wife from Nantucket, whose kids are going to be educated in our schools. That means for the next two generations, they're going to make a really impassioned effort to catch up with us."
"We can worry about that after we've won this war," Doreen said. "They'll be aiming at a moving target anyway. How are things going?"
"Not so great," Ian said. "King Alaksandrus is holding steady-well, he doesn't really have much choice, now-but Major Chong isn't sure how much longer we can hold out."
"I told you you should have gotten out on the last flight, dammit, Ian!"
Ian sighed and shook his head. "Alaksandrus might have given up if I'd done that," he said. "Then Walker and his Ringapi would be whooping their way to Hattusas by now. You've done fine handling the Hittites." Who fortunately had institutions that didn't make dealing with a woman disgraceful. "Anyway, is David there?"
Their son was. When he had concluded the personal matters, the Republic's Councilor for Foreign Affairs sat back with a sigh.
"Bye," he said at last. "Stay well."
A hesitation at the other end of the circuit, and his wife's voice: "You too. The children need their father."
"I know-" he began; then his voice rose to a squeak. "Children? Plural?"
"If everything keeps on track… about nine months after that last evening before you got yourself trapped there in Troy VII. Serendipity."
"Why the hell didn't you tell me earlier?" he said, fighting down an irrational rush of anger.
"I didn't want to joggle your elbow with worries. Then. Now I don't want you feeling free to be a martyr."
He sighed. "Martyrhood doesn't attract me," he said. "Love you."
"You too, Ian. Come back to us."
I fully intend to do my best, he thought as he took off the earphones. Then:
"World's too damned big," he muttered to himself, pushing away personal considerations and looking at the map pinned to the wall beside the small square window. "And there's too damned few of us."
The square of heavy paper showed what would have been the Middle East and Balkans in the twentieth. Here it bore names that had once been familiar to him only from books. Most of central and eastern Anatolia was the Hittite Empire, and points west and south were vassal states linked to it by treaty. The domains of Pharaoh Ramses II sprawled up from Egypt through what he knew as Israel and southern Syria to meet those governed from Hattusas. To the southeast was Kar-Duniash-Babylonia, an Islander ally and now including Assyria, which meant northern Iraq and chunks of the adjacent mountain country. Babylonia's a firm ally, the Hittites a new one, Egypt's neutral… although there's that man of Walker's there. The problem lay to the west.
He scowled at the black-outlined splotch on the map labeled Meizon Akhaia. Greater Greece, roughly translated; or Great Achaea. It left a mental bad taste; something like Grossdeutschland.
That hadn't existed in any of the histories he'd studied. Ten years ago it had been simply Achaea, part of it a loose confederation of vassal realms reigned over lightly by the Kings of Men in Mycenae, the rest independent minikingdoms, tribes and whatnot. Walker had been at work there for a long time now, first as henchman and wizard-engineer to Agamemnon King of Men, then as puppetmaster, for the last few years as ruler himself. Now it was a tightly centralized despotism, tied together by armies and roads, telegraphs, bureaucrats armed with double-entry bookkeeping. It had grown, too. Besides the whole of Greece proper, Walker's satraps ruled most of the Balkans up to what would have become Bulgaria and Serbia, plus Sicily, Italy, the Aegean islands. The American renegade had built up a terrifying degree of modern industry, as "modern" went in the Year 10, and as long as his Tartessian ally held the Straits of Gibraltar, the Achaean navy dominated this end of the Mediterranean.
Of course, he thought, it's a spatchcocked modernization so far, mostly confined to a few centers. A thin film of literacy and machines pasted over a peasant mass dragooned into labors it doesn't understand by terror and the whip. Stalin's methods.
The problem was that, at this level of technology, those techniques worked.
The longer we leave Walker alone, the stronger he'll get.
"The world's far too big," he muttered to himself, tugging at his beard. "And everything takes so bloody long. Sailing ships and marching feet, over half the world."
The Republic of Nantucket was trying to conduct a struggle on a geographic scale about equal to World War I, but the forces involved were ludicrously tiny. Great Achaea probably had about a million people; Babylonia and the Hittites two or three times that each; the Republic was a couple of small towns and a fringe of farms haggled out of wilderness. Neither of the "advanced" powers could field more than a few thousand men with firearms, a few dozen cannon-armed ships, but those were the fulcrum the whole thing would turn on.
"Sure, we know the history," he mused. "Walker too- surprisingly well-read, for a complete swine. But there's nothing in the original history that jumbled up eras and technologies and methods like this."