Nantucket #02 - Against the Tide of Years by S. M. Stirling

Author:S. M. Stirling [Stirling, S. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-06-30T16:47:43+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

September-December, Year 9 A.E.

“My lord king Agamemnon!” William Walker said, his voice loud and full of concern. “I will offer a hectacomb of white oxen to Zeus the Father in thanks that you live!”

The throne room of Mycenae was less bright than usual, despite the mirrors and lamps that Walker had installed for his hegemon years ago. Many had been shattered by the same grenade fragments that had flecked the walls. Blasts had scaled off a lot of the painted plaster, and blood was splashed across much of what was left of the magnificent murals of lions and griffons and Minoan-style sea creatures that sprawled in multicolored splendor around the great room.

The smell of burnt pork came not from a feast but from the body of the guardsman who’d fallen backward into the great circular marble-rimmed hearth, half-drowning the fire with his blood. Parties of Walker’s guard regiment were at work carting out the bodies. He gestured to make sure one got the corpse in the hearth before the fire there went out—that would be extremely bad mojo, to the wogs’ way of thinking. The hearthfire was the luck of the house and kin.

Not that I have to pay as much attention to that now, he thought. Still, no reason not to when it didn’t cost anything.

“But the traitors around you have been found out and defeated,” Walker went on, still in a loud public voice. “What a loss for all the lands of the Achaeans if you had been killed in the fighting!”

What a monumental pain in the ass for me, he added to himself. Right now he could enforce a claim to being the power behind the throne and make it stick at gunpoint, but he couldn’t sit on the sacred seat himself. Not yet. Too many of the Achaean nobles would fight to the death if an outlander’s low-bred fundament actually touched it. He needed them.

For now.

Agamemnon’s face was still sagging with shock. A lot grayer than when I arrived here, Walker thought. Lot fatter, too. It made him pleasantly conscious of his own trim physique. The suit of articulated plate made for him back on Nantucket a few months after the Event still fit. So did the belt he’d won at eighteen in the Colorado state rodeo.

He looked up. Every Mycenaean palace—except his—had a four-pillar arrangement around the central hearth, with a gallery where the second story could look down into the great hall. Alice Hong was there, in Mycenaean robes but still looking as alien as the Beretta in her hand. She gave him the high sign and pulled a younger woman away, leading her by the hand.

“How . . .” Agamemnon began, then cleared his throat. His glance took in the ranks of musketeers along the walls, their bayonets bright—or in some cases, still sticky-red. “How did you know?”

“How did I know that evil councilors—surely men in the pay of the Hittites!—had attempted to turn your mind against me, King of Men? Had tried to persuade you to turn on me? Ah.

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