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"The fore clew-garnets!" she shouted into a CPO's ear, grabbing him by the shoulder. "Come on."
They fought their way forward, gathering up a few more dazed crewfolk. By the time they reached the foremast the petty officer had his teams moving like sentient beings and not stu
"Heave-" A trained scream that cut through the wind for a few yards at least.
"Ho!"
Alston waited until the work was well in hand before dropping out of the line team; she could feel the way coming off the ship, the bow once more rising lightly to the oncoming waves. More hands were pouring topside; few had been asleep anyway, and one of the advantages of a ship with a full fighting crew-far larger than necessary for mere sailing-was that there were always plenty of hands and strong backs around in an emergency.
Now, she thought. We actually may live out the night.
There was something to be said for a direct, physical risk. It took your mind off things you couldn't do anything about. Like the rest of the fleet; or the rest of the war, for that matter.
I always feel ridiculous riding in a chariot, Doreen Arnstein thought. "At least this one has springs and seats," the Assistant Councilor for Foreign Affairs murmured to herself. "And a sunshade. With gold tassels, yet."
The springs were from a Honda Accord, the tires solid rubber on steel, the body was wood inlay with a gilded brass rail 'round about to hang on to. It was more of a two-wheeled wagon than a copy of the war-carts the Nantucketers had encountered in the Bronze Age world. They'd run it up for purposes of swank-or public relations, if you wanted to get formal; there was plenty of room for her, the driver, and Brigadier Hollard. The horses pulling it were two precious Morgans shipped in from Nantucket, sleek black giants by local standards, drawing gasps and stares on their own. A leather-lunged Hittite herald went ahead:
"Make way! Make way for the honored guests of the One Sun, the Great King of Haiti! Make way for the honored emissaries of his brother, Great King Yhared-Koffin! Make way!"
Some of the crowd made way for the herald's voice, some for the ram's-horn trumpets blown by the two men behind him, still more for the reversed spears of the troop of Royal Guards. A guard of Marines rode behind, the butts of their rifles resting on their thighs; their saddles and stirrups still drew pointed fingers and murmurs of amazement.
Doreen fa
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," Ke
"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 Ke
"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 gri
"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," Ke
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.