The Alexander Inheritance
Lacula stood on the beach about a hundred yards in front of his palm leaf shack and waited for the future to arrive.
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Dag grinned at the nervous Amanda Miller. The congressman’s aide had insisted on coming. Or, to be more accurate, the congressman had insisted on Amanda coming. Something that hadn’t pleased Roxane at all. Roxane was used to being the prettiest girl in the area, and in Dag’s opinion she still was. But the competition was a lot closer. Most of the women on the Queen of the Sea had straight white teeth, clear eyes, and unblemished skin. Amanda, even with the darker roots showing in her hair, was very attractive, well built, and had a wardrobe to envy.
Amanda grinned back, though it was a little forced. Dag knew that Congressman Wiley had wanted to go himself, but he couldn’t, for the same reason that Captain Floden couldn’t. For right now, his place was on the ship, not trying to buy the land for a colony.
And buy it they would. That much had been agreed. They would found a new nation here, and that new nation would no doubt have to fight wars. But it wouldn’t be founded on theft, not of land, not of anything. Dag found himself in agreement with the congressman on that, though Roxane and the Silver Shields thought Wiley was being an idiot.
The boat beached when they were still fifty feet from the shore and the front opened up. Dag climbed out, then jumped down into the surf and waded to shore. He was followed by half a dozen Silver Shields, each carrying a crossbow and a short sword.
The presence of the Silver Shields in spite of Tyrimmas’ treachery was political, and Dag’s decision. It was proof of trust. And, perhaps oddly, Dag did trust them. He was certain that the Silver Shields left on the ship after the mutineers had been disembarked on Guadaloupe no longer entertained any notions of rebellion. Partly, that was because—once again—the seemingly soft ship people had proven to be much more dangerous than anyone had thought they’d be. Partly, it was because Roxane’s reimbursement of the losses they’d suffered from having their slaves freed had removed their chief source of complaint. And, partly—not such a small part, either—he thought they had come to have real confidence in Dag himself.
He was more worried about an accidental discharge than about one of the Shields intentionally shooting him in the back. Dag needed the Silver Shields to know that he trusted them and didn’t hold a grudge. He wasn’t going to be able to do what Antigonus did in that other history, and cut them up into penny packets and use them up on dangerous missions. They were too necessary to the survival of the colony for that. They might not be all that familiar with crossbows. Almost no one was. But the Shields were very, very, very familiar with war. Far more familiar, he was sure, than the natives of any island in the Caribbean. The Silver Shields were the veterans of decades of war in Eurasia against the toughest opponents in the world—who were usually other Macedonians like themselves.
Dag looked over his shoulder as a Shield reached up and helped Amanda down. Then he faced front at the tall, brown man with the sides of his head shaved and a slicked down black lock on the top of his head. He was also painted in patterns of white and red, diamonds and cross hatches. That was easy to see because, aside from a loincloth, he wasn’t wearing anything. And considering the temperature, he probably had a point.
As Dag reached the shore, the man held up a hand palm out, like a cop telling you to stop, and said something. Dag was already recording, using his new phone. He stopped, held out his own hand and said, “Hello.” Then he pointed at his chest and said, “Dag Jakobsen.” Then he pointed at Sideburns.
Sideburns pointed at himself and said, “Lacula.” And they were off and running. They named everyone in the party, then they named body parts. Hands, fingers, head, feet, legs. Lacula lifted up his loincloth and named those bits as well.
He laughed when Amanda blushed, then he pointed at her chest, and said in passable English, “What called?”
Gamely, Amanda said, “Breasts,” and Lacula pointed at Amanda’s crotch.
Blushing more, Amanda said, “Genitals.”
Dag probably should have kept his mouth shut at that point, but he didn’t. “I think he means the specific for females, Amanda. Genitals refers to both men’s and women’s bits.”
Yep. From Amanda’s look, Dag certainly should have kept his mouth shut.
“Mound of Venus and vagina. And you can ask someone else to display which is which. Maybe the little queen you’re so hot for.”
Yes, I certainly should have kept my mouth shut, Dag thought as his face turned red.
Lacula wasn’t following all of this, but he was clearly aware that something was going on and probably was making some shrewd guesses about what it might be.
It was about then that a new figure came out of the trees near the shore. The trees were mostly palms, but there was also heavy underbrush. Out of that underbrush came a man also wearing nothing but a loincloth. He wasn’t painted like Lacula and didn’t have the sides of his head shaved. He didn’t have a beard, but Dag figured that was natural for him. He was also a leaner sort. Lacula was a stocky man, with a bit of a paunch. This guy looked like he could use some more calories in his diet. No, Dag thought, he’s just thin.
He was also carrying a spear about six feet tall with a bone blade. The blade had a hook in it and Dag was sure its primary purpose was for spearing fish. “Stand down, guys,” Dag said in his limited Greek. “That’s for fish.”
The bows went back down, but not all the way. Now they had four languages going, English, Greek, Lacula’s and this new fellow, whose name turned out to be Bueli.
Bueli was local, they figured out after a few minutes. Lacula was, they now discovered, a trader from across the ocean. Dag guessed the mainland of South America, probably what would become Venezuela in that other history.
The attentive, almost relaxed attitude of the two natives no longer surprised Dag. Whatever notions he might have once had that “primitive people” would be so awestruck by the Queen of the Sea that they would be reduced to gibbering or complete silence had long since vanished under the impact of experience. Human beings in the year 321 BCE were certainly ignorant in many ways, but they were not stupid—and they certainly weren’t bashful.
Dag invited them to come aboard the Queen, but they declined politely. As the sun set, Dag and the party got back in the boat and headed back to the Queen.
The Queen was anchored almost half a mile offshore, and if the sonar on the boat was any guide, the Reliance and Barge 14 weren’t going to get in much closer until a channel was cut. And that was a problem. Refilling Barge 14 a bucket or a barrel at a time wasn’t going to be an easy job, even after they got a working oil well.
While they had been on shore, the phones—Dag’s and Amanda’s—had been sending the new words back to the ship, and the programmers were busy encoding the sounds of the words spoken and starting the lexicons of the new languages. Once they got back, they were questioned about what other meaning the words might have. It was still by guess and by golly, and would be for a while, but they were trying.
Lacula’s Trading Post, Trinidad
November 30
The locals and the Queen’s colonists managed to get enough of a common language so that, with the help of maps and showing people around and marking bounds, they bought a chunk of Trinidad that was almost twenty-five square miles of the Kaluga hunting ground. The Kaluga tribe claimed the southern tip of Trinidad around where Siparia would be back in the world the Queen came from, all the way to the southwest tip of the island. It wasn’t that the Queen’s colonists were asking the tribe to move out, not quite. But they had explained—or tried to—that they would be planting crops, raising livestock, and that hunting and gathering in their fields and among their herds would be frowned upon.
The colonists also learned enough to know that the land on Trinidad was in constant dispute and almost every square foot of the island was claimed by at least two tribes, and often by three or all of them. They had made their deal
with the Kaluga, but the Kapoi were not likely to respect it.
Based on that agreement, the colonists started building beachfront homes on the island, and started the process of finding the oil well. They knew that the first successful well was dug at Aripero and they knew the coordinates of Aripero. But they didn’t know exactly where. So far they had drilled two hundred-yard-deep dry holes and were getting ready to try a third.
Reliance, Gulf of Paria
November 30
Adrian watched as the fishing net poured out of the rack rigged on the Reliance, and the floats made a circle around the school of tuna. It was a big school and they were some big tuna. This project was a joint venture between the Reliance and the Kapoi. The Kapoi would receive half the catch and would respect the borders of the ship people. It wasn’t exactly extortion. The Kapoi provided most of the fishing crew, and they had a fleet of canoes coming out to gather up the catch and take it in to shore and back to the Queen where it would be processed into tuna steaks and flash frozen. Some of the Kapoi’s share would be frozen too, but much of it would be taken into shore and smoked or dried.
The circle was complete and the winch went to work tightening the net. The tuna could, if they realized it, swim down below the net and escape, but tuna were not really bright. Most fish weren’t. Instead, they crowded together and the net tightened until there was a boiling mass of silver next to the Reliance.
The Kapoi fishermen were dancing around like loons. Then the killing started. They used long, weighted poles with heavy hooks on the ends and pulled the fish out of the water. It generally took two or three men to pull a fish from the water, and it wasn’t unusual for one of the tuna to be eight feet long.
The canoes of the Kapoi were surrounding the net and pulling in tuna too. One or two tuna, then the boat would have to head to shore. The canoes didn’t have room for more. But as soon as they got to shore, they unloaded and came back, leaving the women to do the butchering and cutting.
Meanwhile, the Reliance was covered in fish and made its own trip to the Queen to unload, and the lifeboats were also being pressed into service. They kept at it through the night and through most of December first. By the time it was over, they had more fish than they had smoking racks. The Kapoi were forced to trade some of their share of the catch to the Kaluga, who piled in with a will once the deal was made. They didn’t have winter in the tropics, but having a nice reserve of smoked or dried tuna was going to make life a lot easier for both tribes.
The farmers who were preparing the land for the first crop grabbed up the fish offal and fish bones, those that the natives would give up, and ground it up for fertilizer. And the Queen ended up with almost ten tons of frozen tuna steaks.
Fort Plymouth, Trinidad
December 5
Even December is way too hot to be pulling a plow by hand, Bob Jones thought, as he placed his right foot down on the grass covering the sandy soil and leaned forward. Latisha mirrored his movements and the plow moved forward, the blades cutting the soil and the roots of the grass. The ship bought cattle and pigs in Alexandria, then they butchered said cattle and pigs and froze the meat. In all of that, no one had thought to buy a mule or an ox and keep it alive to pull the plows.
Someone should have. Someone most certainly should have. Perhaps a high school principal turned agronomist. Bob straightened and placed his left foot forward. Especially since that agronomist had a great-grandfather who had been born a slave and died a sharecropper in Georgia. A man who had listened to stories from his grandparents about how they had pulled the plow by hand after they lost their mule. Bob wasn’t the only one who failed to think about the need for working animals. No one was expecting to do any large scale farming at this time. There were, as it happened, a grand total of two farmers on the Queen of the Sea when The Event happened. And they had grown cotton, not wheat.
This wasn’t a real farm. It was an experimental ten-acre plot designed to study seed to yield ratios, local insect predation of imported wheat plants, and a host of other things to start the process of breeding better wheat plants, and setting up an agricultural industry.
“I quit,” Latisha complained though she still pulled. “I am not a slave.”
Fort Plymouth, Trinidad
December 5
“You need slaves,” Roxane told Amanda Miller. They were sitting in the royal embassy, a compromise between Wiley and Roxane that had been worked out by Dag and Marie Easley. Roxane, partly at the urging of her Silver Shields, had wanted a Macedonian, or perhaps an Alexandrian, colony here in Trinidad. Wiley had invoked the Monroe Doctrine. Then someone pointed out that an embassy had its own laws and slavery was legal back in Europe. Wiley had gotten on his high horse—Roxane loved that expression—and proclaimed that the newly founded nation on Trinidad would not grant embassy status unless Roxane agreed to forgo slavery. Which she couldn’t do as a matter of law, even in theory, because Eurydice was her co-regent. But she had reluctantly agreed to the ban for the royal embassy. The natives, especially the Kaluga, were taking to the notion of money fairly well and the paper currency issued by the ship was accepted by them readily enough. That had helped with the labor shortage, but the tendency was for them to work just long enough to get the money to buy what they wanted, be it a knife, a bottle, or a blanket, then go back to their hunting and gathering.
“We need engines,” Amanda said, and Roxane threw up her hands. Yes, the magical engines that moved the Queen of the Sea and the Reliance through the water were amazing things, but they had a very limited number of them. One hundred and three, to be precise. The engines on the Queen, the engines on the Reliance, the engines in each of the lifeboats—both the big fiberglass ones and the little inflatable ones—three internal combustion-powered air compressors for scuba diving. And one motorcycle engine that a member of the crew had smuggled on board to fix, then hadn’t had time to work on. The rest of the magic motive power on the ship was done with electric motors—everything from blenders at the bars to winches was electric. Dag had explained it to her. The electricity was there and keeping the mechanical generation of power concentrated made sense both in terms of efficiency and control.
“We need Zeus to come down from Olympus, turn himself into a bull, and pull the plows,” Roxane complained. “That’s going to happen before you get your steam engines to work.”
“Then he’d better get down here, because Paul Howard is getting pretty darn close.”
“No doubt. But you’re missing the point. Right now, today…and tomorrow and next year, if we are honest about it…we don’t have the engines to power tractors, bulldozers, cars, airplanes or—most important of all—factories.”
“The Queen…”
“The Queen is leaving! Granted not this month and probably not next month, but certainly soon. And when it goes, so does ninety percent of your industry. And your high-minded ideals will not plow a field or power a grinding wheel when the crops come in. Greeks, Egyptians, and certainly Persians, know about work, but not these Indians.” Roxane used the ship people term for the hunter gatherers of the island with a certain degree of relish.
“Locals” and “natives” had become the general term for people from this time, just as “ship people” had come to mean all the people from that future world who had arrived on the ships Queen of the Sea and Reliance. A term to distinguish the natives of Trinidad from the Macedonians had become necessary. The ship people, much to Marie Easley’s annoyance, had fallen back on the mistake of Christopher Columbus—whoever that was—and called them Indians. It was shorter than calling them Trinidadians, after all.
Not that Roxane had any intentions of staying in Trinidad, but she was going to be leaving some of the wives and kids and thirty of her Silver Shields here. Thirty of the oldest and most worn, as a retirement post. She had even bought a few hundred acres to support them. She was concerned with the colony for the same reason that Dag and Captain Floden were—because it was going to supply the ship with bot
h fuel and cargos to sell in Europe.
And with the amount of time they had already spent here, and the still more time they were going to have to spend here to make sure the colony stayed viable while they were back in Europe, she was starting to wonder what she would find when she finally got back.
CHAPTER 16
Tyre
December 7
Boom!
Nedelko looked up from the crossbow drill he was supervising in the courtyard of the palace. The crossbows were something that the survivors from Rhodes had seen and not suffered from. But they were something that once seen, could be reproduced.
For the moment, Nedelko was less interested in that than in the mushroom-shaped cloud he could see in the town.
“Follow me!” Nedelko shouted and ran. By the time he got to the powder mill, it was ash and pot shards, and the two buildings next to it were mostly flattened too. Tyre, the city, was a warren of narrow streets and two-story buildings, but now there was a good-sized hole in the center of it.
Dareios survived, but he was bleeding from both ears and had a broken arm and two broken ribs. He would be dead if he hadn’t been behind a large stack of urns when the explosion happened. The buckets of water of the fire brigade were way too little and way too late, at least for the powder mill. They weren’t even trying. They were throwing water on the buildings that were knocked down.
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Two days later, Dareios, still deaf, stood in the throne room, insisting they rebuild the powder mill. And all the merchants in Tyre were right there, insisting that the powder mill not be rebuilt anywhere near them.
The world of Alexander’s empire had just learned the first lesson of gunpowder production: put it out in the country, away from fragile things like buildings. And people.