Ptolemy looked at Eudemus. It was nearly a hundred miles from the gulf to the Mediterranean, most of it desert.
Quickly, Eudemus continued. “I’m not suggesting we try to duplicate their canal, but they had things called trains, planes and automobiles. Trains seemed to be a way of moving large loads over land. Planes…well, planes are just ridiculous. Automobiles are like trains, but don’t need a track.”
“What’s a track?”
“We don’t know yet. The prostitute who entertained Panos of Katsaros failed to ask him because he was ready to go again. Apparently, the whole thing came up in a discussion of plays and a comparison of Greek comedies with ship people plays that they call movies.” Eudemus shrugged. “We will have a great many questions for the ship people when they return.”
“If they return,” Ptolemy said. Though he thought they probably would, unless the gods decided to move their great ship to yet another world and time.
“Even if they don’t, just knowing that such things are possible is having an effect on the scholars at the library. One of our people put a lid on a pot with just a small controlled gap to direct the steam. He put a wooden copy of a propeller in front of the steam pipe and it moved. Not much, granted, but it moved.”
“Eudemus, what does this have to do with anything?”
“I’m sorry, Satrap. My point was, even without the ship people, the knowledge they brought us will change things. We will build steam engines. It might take a while, but we will. And we will figure out what tracks are. Or, in looking for them, we will find something else. And knowing that, we know that in some way that stretch of ground right there is the key to trade between the Mediterranean and India. So we must find a way to cross that ground.”
Studying the map, Ptolemy saw something else. The Red Sea, then around the Arabian Peninsula, put him on the other side of Alexander’s Empire. Also, the mouth of the Red Sea was narrow. A fort there and a small, well-armed fleet, and he would own the whole of the Red Sea. That, by itself, would be almost a doubling of his territory.
But for now at least, he would not declare Egypt independent. He wouldn’t declare himself traitor to Alexander’s memory, or to Alexander’s family. Not with Roxane and Alexander IV on the Queen of the Sea.
Royal Suite, Queen of the Sea, off Trinidad
January 20
Roxane lounged in the hot tub, glorying in the moving water. This was luxury. She drank a glass of wine. It was expensive now. There was very little of the ship’s wine stock left, and the wine from Egypt wasn’t nearly as good. At least, not as consistently good. Setting her wine down, she picked up a crab leg and used the tool to crack it open. She dipped the meat in butter sauce and ate it. Then the phone rang, proving that not everything the ship people brought was good.
She climbed from the tub and wrapped a terry cloth robe around herself, then went to the phone. “Yes?”
“The representative of the Tupky is here.” The words were in English, spoken by her concierge. Almost all of the Queen of the Sea’s hotel staff had gone to the new colony on the shore, but the Queen would be hosting quite a few guests on a permanent basis. The crew and workers in the new ship factories were also in need of the same services. So a core of the staff had stayed, and many of the natives had been hired to replace the ship people who had changed jobs. The Queen would now hold only two thousand passengers and five hundred crew. Even at that, for now the Queen was less than half full. The rest of the room was being put to use as factory floor space, where they were making everything from steel to bread.
Some industries, like papermaking, were going on to shore. They had a producing oil well. All of which was important, but what had brought Roxane out of her bath was the fact that she was the regent for the king of Alexander’s empire, and could make binding trade agreements with the locals for importing things like wheat, rye, and woad. At least in theory.
Roxane got dressed and went to meet the pot makers of Tupky.
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“Welcome,” she said in Greek and her phone app translated it to Tupky. The app for Tupky wasn’t as good or as complete as the Greek version. It often got words or syntax wrong, but it was being improved daily and was perfectly adequate for greetings. The Tupky were sort of like the Egyptians, in that they had made their royalty into divinities. Their kings, like Pharaoh, were considered the gods made manifest, or at least related to the gods. That was another of those confusing bits in the translations.
The representative said something and bowed deeply. The translator said, “Wife of the god of the eastern sea, we welcome you to the lands of the Tupky and wish only peaceful relations. But we do not give to you the land. Be satisfied with the island of Trinidad.” Yes, the translation program needed tweaking, or Lacula had been fudging again.
“You will need to speak to President Wiley about that,” Roxane said. There had been an election not long after they got to Trinidad and Congressman Wiley got about two-thirds of the vote. The other third was split between several people. Captain Floden, who had insisted all along that he wasn’t running, still pulled a solid ten percent of the vote. Rabbi Benyamin Abrahamson got eight percent. Marie Easley had six percent she didn’t want. A Baptist minister who wanted to pave the way for Jesus got four percent. And Roxane, who also hadn’t been running, got most of the rest, aside from people voting for personal friends and family. Meanwhile, Lacula seemed to be setting up for a run in four years, by which time the locals would be citizens. At least, some of them would. The congressmen and women, all thirty of them, were working out the rules for acquiring citizenship in the new nation.
More talking back and forth, then the spokesman who had the same shaved sides that Lacula did, and what looked to be dried blood under his fingernails, spoke again. “But he is not even a priest, just a drisket.” The word didn’t translate, but the tone was contemptuous.
Roxane realized something. Macedonians weren’t deeply enamored of the Athenian democracy, or even the Rhodian’s representative system, but they did listen to the people. That was why they had gotten so angry when Alexander started requiring the Persian-style bowing. These people were more like the Egyptians. “God” and “the boss” were the same, and the people did pretty much what they were told or bad things happened to them.
All right, she thought, I can deal that way too. “Be very careful here, gentlemen. If your godking disrespects our president, the queen of the eastern sea will be very angry. All sorts of bad things could happen then. Hurricanes, avalanches, floods.”
After that, they got down to business. Gold and silver were available from upriver. So were things like corn, latex from rubber trees, cocoa beans, and other goods. Roxane was finding that she had more of a job now than she’d had when Alexander was alive. She was also finding that she liked it. She had always understood politics. She’d grown up with it in her father’s court, and life in Alexander’s court was what Marie Easley would call a graduate course. But, while Alexander had been willing to listen to her and consider her advice, this was the first time she was in a position to make real policy decisions. And it was fun.
Fort Plymouth, Trinidad
January 21
President Allen Wiley looked out the window. There was no glass, but there was a fine-mesh screen. It was made of black-dyed thread and it was tight enough to block flying insects. Malaria might or might not be a consideration, but why take chances? And who knew what kind of other insect-borne diseases there might be in this era? The good news for the natives was that the ship people hadn’t brought smallpox or the other plagues that the Conquistadores had. Wiley hated the name “ship people.” It reminded him too much of the Vietnamese boat people from when he was a kid. But like it or not, it seemed to be sticking.
The door opened and Amanda came in. “Mr. President, Queen Roxane is here.”
“How is the queen mum?” Al asked.
“The queen mum is fine, Mr. President, but you’re not going to be,” Roxane said as s
he entered behind Amanda. The Bactrian woman’s English was becoming very good, to the point of being fluent and often idiomatic. But her accent was still quite pronounced.
“Surely you’re not taking offense…”
“What? Oh, I have learned to ignore your plebeian silliness, Mr. President,” Roxane said. “No, what is likely to cause you problems is what I suspect was under the fingernails of the delegation from Tupky yesterday.”
“I’ve never been one to condemn a man for having a little dirt under his nails, Your Highness?”
“What about blood?” Roxane asked. “And I’m guessing human blood.”
Allen Wiley was a pretty hard-bitten politician, and had done some pretty iffy things in order to garner support in his political career before The Event. Even after The Event, his hands had not been entirely clean, in that he had been pushing for this office since less than a week after it happened. And he had skirted awfully near mutiny on the high seas to get it. But now he was feeling the blood drain from his face. He had known that the pyramid cultures from the Aztecs on back had often engaged in human sacrifice to appease their false gods. He had learned since The Event that the Carthaginians did, on certain religious occasions, practice child sacrifice. In at least one version of the Jewish Torah that was still in use at this time, Abraham had not been stopped from sacrificing his child to God. He knew and understood that these were barbaric times. But to sit down across the table from someone who had removed a human heart in a religious ceremony…
He couldn’t do that. Nor could he send in the 82nd Airborne Division to put an end to the vile practice, because he didn’t have the eighty deuce. He had a bunch of Greek hoplites equipped with crossbows and a total of ten modern pistols. There was a gunsmith—actually a retired pipefitter off an oil rig—who was using the induction-melted crucible steel to make single-shot pistols, but he’d only made one of them, and they were still working on the primers.
What it all came down to was that as much as he would like to, he didn’t have the power to stop human sacrifice, either here in the new world or in the old. No more could he end slavery, save on this island, and only part of that.
“Very well, Your Highness. I have myself under control. I will not order out the army and march them upriver.”
“For now at least, Mr. President, it’s going to be worse than that,” Roxane said.
“What do you mean?”
“We are going to have to deal with them,” Amanda chimed in. “They are our only source of latex. With latex and the chemistry we can do on the ship, we have rubber. There are literally hundreds of goods like that. Queen Roxane gave me a list.”
“So the Queen of the Sea will return to Europe with tons of goods.” Allen nodded sadly. For this he was going to need a long spoon indeed.
“Not for months yet. The oil well, singular so far, is producing. But it’s going to take quite a while for it to produce enough to fill Barge 14.”
“Speaking of that, how is the harbor work going?” At the moment there wasn’t a nearby harbor that was deep enough for the Queen or even the Reliance to dock. Both of them were anchored out at least a quarter mile from shore. The Reliance was acting as the muscle for the construction of a harbor deep enough to let at least the fuel barge dock, because without that it was going to be like filling a swimming pool with buckets. Doable, but a whole lot of work.
“It may be ready before the Reliance is filled by barrel load, but I wouldn’t count on it,” Amanda said. “And that will probably be after the Queen is on her way back to Europe.”
“What do you think is happening there?” Wiley asked Roxane.
“I wish I knew, Mr. President. I wish I knew.”
Approaching Mugla
February 5
Eurydice looked out at the village. She didn’t know its name. It wasn’t much of a place, mostly a fishing village, but also a stop on the coastal trade route between Idrias and Idyma. They could find a ship here to send a message to Rhodes. And Antigonus needed allies, a state of affairs that didn’t bode well for her and her husband Philip.
Olympias had always hated Philip. Eurydice’s guards were just as nervous as she was. And feeling like they had backed the wrong queen into the bargain.
She looked over at Trajan. The old man was watching her and not happily. She wondered if she could trust him. The gold Roxane had given her was still hidden away, and Antigonus and Cassander were paying her guards, just as Attalus had been paying Evgenij and Roxane’s guards.
Cassander was looking even more ragged than the rest of them. Perhaps a hundred men escaped from the infantry forces, all of them mounted, so all of them officers. At that, most of the officers, including Cassander’s brother, died or were captured. The baggage train was captured, so much of Cassander’s wealth was gone. At least the cash on hand. He was still heir to his father’s estates back in Macedonia, assuming Olympias didn’t seize them.
Antigonus was in better shape. They’d been traveling through land that was his satrapy before Roxane’s proclamation, and he had authority to collect taxes, or at least he had a solid claim that he did. He’d been collecting those taxes with fire and sword all the way from Sardis.
Eumenes was going to have a mess to clean up and Antigonus was well supplied with silver.
She looked over at Trajan again. “Can I trust you, Trajan?”
Trajan looked back at her. Trajan didn’t shave. Instead he trimmed his beard short. It was gray now, shading to white, as was his hair. The lines on his face were deeply etched. It was a hard face, like worn away iron. “No.”
Then he smiled, and it was like fifty years had fallen away. “Not unless you have a good plan.” Now the hard old man was a youth, a sneak thief ready to try, but only if he thought he could get away with it.
“What would be a good plan, Trajan?”
“Not stealing a ship,” Trajan said. “Not unless you know some place it can take us.”
And that was the rub. Where was a safe place for her and Philip? Eumenes was loyal to the dynasty, but Roxane made him strategos for the entire empire, and he only needed one of the kings. She would like to think that she could trust him, but could she?
Olympias wanted her dead. That was a given. In the world of the butterfly book, she’d had Philip killed and forced Eurydice to commit suicide.
Then there was Cleopatra, Alexander the Great’s only full sibling. Eurydice and she had never been close but Cleopatra didn’t hate Philip the way Olympias did. Cleopatra had doted on her dashing little brother, Alexander, and Alexander had liked Philip.
Also, Cleopatra had never thought Roxane was good enough for Alexander, which might incline her to Eurydice’s side. On the other hand, little Alexander was her nephew and Roxane was little Alexander’s mother. Cleopatra was possible, but risky. Especially since Eurydice hadn’t been in touch with her at all since the Queen of the Sea arrived in the world.
Ptolemy? Maybe. He was satrap of Egypt, and he didn’t have the endorsement of either her or Roxane, not as anything more than satrap. The question was, did he want anything more? Ptolemy was good at the friendly public face, but underneath he was a cold man. So Eurydice’s mother had told her. Careful and cautious, as quick to retreat as to advance. And the butterfly book seemed to support that contention. He occupied and retreated from Syria four times. His caution might make Alexandria a safe harbor. Or maybe not.
But the truth was Eurydice didn’t want a safe harbor. She wanted her own army. She wanted to contend with Antigonus on the field of battle. She wondered how she could get Ptolemy to give her an army. What about Attalus? She had worked with him before and with Seleucus and Peithon dead, he might be more reasonable. But no. He was probably going to die from the belly wound. At least, that’s what she heard.
Sardis
February 10
Euphemios of Athens felt Attalus’ forehead and called for damp cloths. He had read the butterfly book, combined that with his knowledge, and done everything right
. Yet still the wound had become infected. Attalus burned with fever. They must have left something out. Euphemios resented that. He resented it mightily, even though he knew that the resentment was unfair.
The Queen of the Sea had only been in Alexandria for a month, Rhodes for a week, and Tyre for a few days. The book was apparently completed while they were still in Alexandria, which was an amazing thing in itself. He knew that the appendix on medicine was just that, an appendix. Only a few pages added to the back of the book at the insistence of their chief doctor, but he had seen half a hundred men die of infected wounds since the battle. And if that number was less than half of what he would have expected without the boiled bandages, the sulfur and wine washes, and the stitching up, it was still too many.
His eyes fell on the slave, Hermes, grinding sulfur into a paste using a splash of wine. The book said that wine and beer contained something called alcohol that killed the germs as well as boiling, but it didn’t explain how to extract the alcohol. Sighing, he got up and went to the door. “Paint the wound with the paste again, Hermes. I will be talking to Cleopatra.” Then he left.
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Hermes watched him go with a troubled heart. Hermes had been sold into slavery for nonpayment of debts when he was little more than a child and had spent his life as one of Euphemios’ slaves and attendants. He made the medicines, emptied the chamber pots, and did all manner of other jobs. He hadn’t had access to the book. There was only the one copy here in Sardis and it was reserved for Cleopatra and important courtiers like Euphemios. But there was, according to rumor, a section in it on the rights of people that condemned the practice of slavery. He looked around the room with its polished floors and beautiful hand-crafted wall hangings, then at the not-quite-rags he wore and wondered.