Wearing this sort of thing makes me feel like I'm acting in a bad historical drama, she thought. Glittering jeweled robes looked perfectly natural on, say, Princess Raupasha. On herself they just… well, I'm no princess. Not even a JAP. I'm a thirty something, former astronomy major from Hoboken, New Jersey.
And the roundish, curve-nosed, full-lipped face with the dark eyes and curly coarse dark hair that looked out of her mirror really didn't go with this getup.
"But it impresses the yokels no end," Kenneth Hollard said, looking indecently comfortable in his Marine khakis.
"That's why we're taking the long way in," Doreen replied. "It impresses the nobility, too." And when the cold weather hits, pretty soon, it's going to be worse than the heat. Oh, well. "They're even more status-conscious here than they are down in Babylonia."
"That's saying something," Hollard muttered.
He had a look she recognized-extreme frustration. Getting anything done in these ancient Oriental kingdoms was difficult-to-impossible. Getting it done quickly… Oi. But fretting about it just gives you heartburn.
"And the people are spooked by what they've heard about Walker and the Ringapi," she said. "Letting them know they've got wizard allies of their own bucks them up."
She shoved the constant nagging worry about the situation in general and Ian in particular and took in the scene about her. Even after weeks in Hattusas, the capital of the Hittite Empire could still thrill her. It wasn't as big as the largest Babylonian cities, and there was nothing as hulkingly massive as their ziggurats. Cruder and rawer; cyclopean stone walls outside, shaped beside the gates into figures of brooding warrior-Gods and pug-faced lions. The Islander party had been directed through the Gate of the Sphinxes, on the southern edge of the city. A massive rampart a hundred and fifty feet thick and twenty high supported the city wall, its earthen surface paved to make a smooth glacis. The ramp led upward past a man-high outer wall, then straight to the foot of the main ramparts; those were of huge stone blocks longer than she was tall, rough-fitted together without mortar and smoothed on the outside, thirty feet high and nearly as thick. Towers studded it at intervals of a half-bowshot, squally massive; the crenellations on top were like teeth bared at heaven. Metal gleamed on spearheads and helmets on the walls, blinking back blinding bright in the morning sun.
"Impressive," she said to Kenneth Hollard.
"I'll say," he replied; but he was weighing them with a slightly different eye. "Still, that's really two walls with cross-bracing and the cells filled with rubble. You could knock it down into a ramp with some of our five-inch rifles. Take a while, though. A lot longer than with a brick wall and mud-brick core, the way the cities down in the Land Between the Rivers have. They really know how to use rock here, and they've got a lot of it. It'd take forever to force a breach if they had concrete to use to consolidate the rubble fill…"
"Ken," she said, a slight scolding tone in her voice, "it's not really polite to speculate in public on how you'd destroy the capital of an allied power."
He grinned; it turned his naturally stern face into something charmingly boyish. "Professional reflex. Madam Councilor," he said.
"I was thinking of how much work it must have taken," she replied.
The ramp came to the rampart and made a sharp turn to the left, throwing them into the shadow of the city wall.
"Well laid out, too. Spear side," Hollard said, and continued at her raised eyebrows: "With the ramp this way, your right side-spear side-is to the wall and you can't use your shield to stop the sharp pointies they're raining down from up there."
He tossed his helmeted head to the right. Doreen looked up, and tried to imagine a roaring crush of men where she was, wrestling with battering rams as arrows slammed down in sleeting clouds like hard, hard rain… There were scorch marks on the massive stones going by at arm's length from her. She knew from chronicles in the twentieth confirmed here that Hattusas had fallen at least once about a century before, sacked and burned by the Kaska mountain tribes from the country just to the north.
"Determined bastards, they must have been," Kenneth Hollard said, reading her thought. "You'd pay a real butcher's bill taking this with scaling ladders and handheld log battering rams, against any sort of opposition."
That was one way to put it. Her mind shied away from giving her a picture of what the words meant; she'd gotten case-hardened, somewhat, since coming here, but there were limits she didn't want to cross. Even more, she didn't want to imagine what was happening under the walls of Troy right now, or inside them.
"And look at the pavement," he went on.
She did. It was made of the heavy flat rocks as well, and some of them were scorched, too.
"How?" she said.
"Olive oil," he said. "Possibly naphtha, but probably olive oil, heated-great big boiling tubs of it, maybe mixed with tallow or lard. Wait until the attackers are really packed in here"-he looked up and down the long ramp, estimating the space-"say fifteen hundred of them. Pour the mixture down from the wall along here, and it'd run all down this ramp and onto the glacis, under the feet of the men packed in shoulder to shoulder and nose to tail, spattering on the clothes and faces of a lot of 'em, or running under their armor-make the road surface damned slippery, too. They'd be immobilized. Then toss down a torch."
God, she thought, fighting down queasiness. Crisco Extra-Virgin Instant Hell. There were times-watching the Emancipator bombing the Assyrian cities, for instance-when she'd felt a little guilty about helping to introduce modern weapons here. Then again, when you saw what human ingenuity could manage with low tech, did it matter? When people want to be atrocious, they'll find a way, even if it's labor-intensive.
Sphinxes flanked the gate, carved into enormous masonry blocks that ran all the way from the entrance back through the thickness of the wall. The man-headed lions had little of the Egyptian grace, but plenty of power. The crowds thinned out here, no room for them, but a line of Royal Guards lined the tunnel-like way between the inner and outer gates. Those were bronze-faced wood, under arched gateways straddled by great square towers. The pointed arches themselves were something to see, each half-carved out of a block of granite that must have weighed thirty or forty tons-they didn't know how to build arches or domes here out of blocks, but this served the same purpose.
As they moved into the streets the crowds were dense once more, and she put the scented feathers of the fan to her nose again; the stench wasn't quite as overpowering as, say, Babylon in August, since Hattusas was both smaller and at the moment cooler, but it was bad enough-sewage, animal droppings, garbage, and old sweat soaked into wool, all activated by the fresh sweat of crowding and excitement. She swallowed; her stomach had gotten a lot more vulnerable to this sort of thing since she'd gotten pregnant. That had happened the first time, too, but she'd been back in safe, comfortable, clean Nantucket then.
The thought made her snort a little with laughter. Anyone fresh from the twentieth would find Nantucket odorous enough and to spare, these days; land tons of fish and shellfish every day, and no matter how the gulls scavenge and how zealous the recycling collectors are about potential fertilizer, the air will take on a distinct tang. Rendered whale blubber didn't help either, or factories driven by wood-fired steam engines, or…
It still smelled a lot better than this. There weren't as many flies, either. She waved some of the flies away, swallowed again, and to take her mind off her stomach admired-rather dutifully-a blocky temple of dark-gray limestone. Unlike the Babylonian kind, this had big rectangular windows in the outer wall, reaching nearly to the ground. Through them she could catch a bright sideways glimpse of the Holy of Holies, where a burnished man-high silver statue of the God flashed and glittered on a pillar that rested on a golden lion. The figure was shown with shield, club, and helmet… That's Zababa, she reminded herself. I think. The Hittites had so many damned Gods, and most of them had at least two names-here they threw every pantheon they came in contact with together, in a mispocha of celestial miscegenation and cheerfully incoherent syncretism.