Tekhip-tilla tugged at his gray-shot black beard; he was a Mitannian noble of the old school, not afraid to speak truth before his sovereign; few such had lived through the Assyrian occupation.
"Well enough," he said. "The omens were good and the smoke rose to heaven properly. Although the men might have felt better were it to a more familiar God, like Teshub of the Weather or the Ishtar of the Warriors."
Raupasha knew that, but her foster father had raised her in the most ancient traditions.
"Teshub and Indara are both among the Gods of our ancestors," she said. "Perhaps Indara is merely the older name for Teshub, since both command the storm and thunder. Yet when we worshiped Indara under that name, the kingdom was great."
"A good point, my princess," Tekhip-tilla said. "Let it be as you wish."
"To business," Kathryn Hollard said. She looked to the west. "You understand your mission?"
"Yes, Lady Kathryn." They'd gone over it exhaustively, but it was good to remind the squadron commanders. "We are to fight as the wolf does-slashing and then running swiftly."
"Good," Kathryn nodded. "Yours is not the least of tasks; the main force will be moving west behind you, and then making a fighting retreat back to the east. Eventually we'll have to make a stand. Whether or not the enemy is too strong for us at the final battle may well depend on forces like yours."
Raupasha nodded again, although she didn't altogether believe that; part of it was said to make her men's hearts strong, and to soothe their pride. These things were part of generalship and kingcraft, and she would learn all that the Hollards had to teach her. And…
The two women walked off a little. "Lady Kat'ryn…"
Kathryn laid a finger on her lips for an instant, and smiled. "Some things should not be asked. Not now," she said.
Whether King Kashtiliash will ever let Kenneth be my lord, Raupasha thought. "If not now, when?"
"Sometimes I have to make myself remember you're barely eighteen," she said, infuriatingly. "And other times it's obvious."
"I am old enough to command and rule, you thought. And in this war I may die," Raupasha said. "I feel Yama put his hand on my shoulder, and say 'make haste.''
"And I might die, or Kash… King Kashtiliash might die, or Ken might die. Or the horse may learn to sing."
That startled a giggle out of Raupasha, and Kathryn grinned back, making the years between them seem to vanish.
"But after the war," Kenneth's sister said. "Then we'll either be defeated, hence dead, or the King's heart may be changed. Who knows?"
"I know," Raupasha said vehemently. "I know that it will- King Kashtiliash will see the loyalty and courage of Mitanni's troops fighting beside the men of Kar-Duniash, and his heart will be softened toward me."
"I certainly hope so. Vaya con Dios." At Raupasha's curious look, she went on: "A saying. It means go with God."
"And may your God be with you, Lady Kathryn."
She turned and jumped into her chariot. Her driver Iridmi and Gunnery Sergeant Connor waited there. Connor handed her the rocket launcher, and she slung the blunt flare-ended tube over her shoulder-for show's sake, to hearten the others.
"Forward!" she shouted, and Iridmi flicked the reins.
"See you later, Councilor," Jared Cofflin concluded.
" 'day, Chief," Starbuck replied; he was already turning back to his work.
Cofflin gathered up hat and jacket and ambled through the bank, nodding greetings to the clerks settling in to their jobs- there was already a click of abacus beads, a rattle of adding machines, the tapping of a manual typewriter, a scritching of quill pens on coarse paper and an occasional muttered curse as they blotted. The latest steel nibs modeled on ones found in antique shops did better… slightly… but the government made do with what the birds gave for free.
Would the extra efficiency and saving some sheets of foolscap justify springing for better pens, or would the bureaucrats just have better weapons in their campaign to drown him in paper?
The thought went into the files, along with an infinity of others. Yesterday Doc Coleman had notified him that the last Islander with AIDS had died; they didn't have protease inhibitors to keep the virus in check here and now.
Poor bastard, he thought. Smallpox they had to worry about, evidently, but at least not HIV anymore. You could do something about smallpox…
If only we could spare the people to go looking for the source of that smallpox outbreak in Babylon. Damn the war!
He went out the doors and stood for a moment on the stone steps that led down to the cobbles of Main Street. They were densely crowded, but it wasn't very much like the mob scenes the Summer People had made, back before the Event.
For one thing, there are a hell of a lot more kids, he thought.
Better than half the people on-Island were under fourteen, the Census people told him. A population explosion, and set to get more so when the big post-Event generation, born and adopted, came adult and started having litters of their own. In the meantime…
Swarms of towheaded rugrats. That still stood out, even more so on a school holiday.
Although school holidays didn't mean playtime, nowadays; all the older kids were working. The board tables along the street were piled with boxes of radishes, turnips, sacks of potatoes, stacks of sweet corn, tomatoes glowing like piles of rubies, lettuce, cabbage, onions, cucumbers, melons, apples, peaches- the post-Event orchards were really starting to bear-and pies, jars of pickles and jam, cheeses, butter, homemade sausages and smoked hams, hen- and moa-eggs, baskets of live chickens or the plucked, gutted end product on ice.
The stalls stretched all the way down Main toward the harbor and into the covered market where the old A amp;P and its parking lot and the oil-storage tanks had once stood.
Good harvest this year. He'd read Angelica Brand's reports, but it was nice to see it firsthand as well as in the Councilor for Agriculture's antiseptic prose and columns of figures. Everyone was just a little paranoid about food supplies now.
And everything tastes so much better in season. No more wooden tomatoes bred tough for shipment. On the other hand, nothing's available except when it is in season.
The crowd was dense along the sidewalks, down to the big clot around the Hub halfway down Main; that had gone from being a news-and-magazine store to an information exchange with rows of slate-and-chalk notice boards, and from there to a hiring hall. The usual desperate harvest-season farmers were there, bargaining for extra hands. One finally reached an agreement with an immigrant family, mother and father and four working-age children, loaded them into his buckboard and flicked the ponies into motion; his wife stood swaying in the back hefting a shovel, glaring around at anyone thinking of poaching. Cofflin snorted, eyes crinkling with hidden laughter as they rattled up the cobbles of Main and disappeared, heading westward along Orange toward the Siaconset Road and the farming country there.
His own course went in the opposite direction, over a few blocks to the John Cofflin House-an inn that'd taken over the house of a collateral relative back (or ahead) in the 1840s.
Jared's lips tightened slightly. Ian's place was just across the street in back; he'd been staying in one of the outbuildings the night of the Event, and it had become the Foreign Affairs office as well as his residence by the usual sort of happenstance.
Damn, I'm worried about them, he thought, adding a short prayer to a God he didn't think should be bothered with unimportant things. Ian dead or in the hands of William Walker and his bitch, that was important.
Broad Street, which wasn't particularly broad, ran down from there to the old Steamship Wharf, between buildings in the soberly elegant Nantucket Federal style plus a few plain Puritan saltboxes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.