Having settled that, and having both regents, Cleopatra, and Polyperchon all handy, they set out to draft a proposal for a constitutional convention to establish a constitution for Alexander the Great’s empire. Questions like who to invite, where to hold it, what would be required for it to be binding on the participants, whether it would be binding on parts of the empire that failed to participate. They determined that it would—or people would—avoid being bound by not attending. How many of the participants would have to agree for it to go into effect. Whether to require the presence of the actual satraps and kings or just their representatives. They decided that just the representatives would be enough, but the satraps would be welcome.
Meanwhile, Philip had fallen into the computers of the Queen of the Sea like Alice down the rabbit hole, and showed little desire to return to the real world. The scholars of Athens boarded the Queen and started their course work in everything from perspective drawing to electrical engineering. There was, in fact, a quite useful course in basket weaving.
Queen of the Sea, Athens Harbor at Piraeus
June 15
The cameras clicked as Roxane signed the document and three-year-old Alexander IV used his seal to squash the hot wax onto the proclamation. Then they clicked again as Eurydice signed. After that Philip signed, and like Alexander IV, stamped the wax with his seal. Both seals had been produced on the Queen in its machine shop, and each represented half of Alexander the Great’s signet. Which was why Alexander IV had been first to squash the wax. Philip could be trusted to put his seal in the right place. The three-year-old couldn’t.
It made an impressive ceremony, and Cleopatra got in on the act by signing as witness and adding her own seal to the proceeding. Then they had to go through it over a dozen times, for each satrap in the empire would receive his own individually signed proclamation.
By the time they were done both kings were feeling more than a little cranky. Alexander IV had decided to give his seal to his sometime-friend and sometime-antagonist Dorothy Miller. Serve the poopy head right if she had to do this too.
Having issued their decrees, the co-queens graciously said personal goodbyes to all the members of the conference, who went back to Athens.
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From Athens to Sicily, two stops on the island, one for the Greek part, one for the Carthaginian part. Then what would become Salerno, Naples, then Ostia, the port of Rome. In Ostia, they waited a day for the consuls, Papirius Cursor II and Q. Publilius Philo III, to agree on who to send to the ship. Apparently the consuls were not great friends.
They also picked up several more scholars. Rome in this time wasn’t the barbarian village the Greeks liked to think it was, but neither was it the Rome of Caesar and Marc Anthony. The Coliseum was four centuries away, and the senate of Rome was still mostly a city council, if of a good-sized city.
From Rome they went to Carthage and finally found something closer to civilization, at least the sort of civilization that the ship people were used to. Carthage was a city that included and even encouraged technological innovation, at least within limits. Making money was at the heart of Carthage’s culture.
At least, large parts of the culture of Carthage were focused on practical matters. But the religious practice of child sacrifice as an appeasement to the gods was not, it turned out, just a slander by the Greeks and Romans who didn’t like Carthage. It was an exaggeration and distortion. The Carthaginians believed that a family that lost a child was blessed by the gods in recompense. That belief had morphed into an actual trade, where the city or individuals would sacrifice a child in order to buy the favor of the gods.
“A bit like sending a big donation to a televangelist,” commented Jane Carruthers, but there was a lurking horror under the humor.
They took on passengers at every stop, and by the time they reached the Pillars of Hercules, the passenger section of the Queen of the Sea was at capacity. At its new, lesser, capacity anyway.
The extra time spent in Athens meant that the Reliance was farther ahead of the Queen than they had planned on. It would reach Trinidad two or three days ahead of the Queen.
CHAPTER 26
Reliance, Entering Boca Grande
July 2
“Skipper, we are getting something from Fort Plymouth.”
Adrian Scott swam out of sleep gradually, kicking and screaming, holding on to Morpheus. He had been up for the last twenty hours, managing the Reliance through the south edge of a hurricane, and he had just gotten to bed maybe three seconds ago. “What time is it?”
“It’s dawn, Skipper. You’ve had four hours and you need to get up. There’s trouble in Fort Plymouth.”
“What sort of trouble, Dan?”
Dan Neely was the Reliance’s radio man and chief electrician. And the truth was, he knew the Reliance a lot better than Adrian did. He had been the chief electrician under Captain Joe Kugan. He owned a pretty decent estate in the New U.S. too. He’d bought it with his money from the sale of the Reliance to the colony, and had a deal with the Banner family to run it for him for a share of the take. If he lived another ten years or so, Dan was going to be able to retire a wealthy man.
“Wild injuns, Skipper. Wild injuns.”
“Dan, I’m not in the mood.”
“Neither am I, Skipper. The bastards have my ranch and Brad may be dead.”
“What?” He was wide awake now. “Right. I’m up. What do they want us to do?”
“Mostly be warned. President Wiley had scouts out and word is he got most of our people into the fort.”
“What about Brad?”
“He was trying to get his herd of those over-sized turkeys in. At least that’s what the radio guy at Fort Plymouth said.”
☆ ☆ ☆
It took about fifteen minutes to get the rest of it, and to get some primitive cocoa into Adrian. It was a gritty drink, but it did the job.
Several of the ship people, especially Gerlinde Kettl and Torger Sundal, were lobbying to get the Queen to go around the horn to Ethiopia and acquire coffee, and Ptolemy had already sent an expedition up the Red Sea to the same end. Partly that was because Ptolemy had quickly developed a taste for coffee when he was introduced to cappuccinos. But mostly it was because he was looking for anything he could find to get and keep the ship people on his side. Meanwhile they had unsweetened cocoa, and Adrian had discovered that cocoa was as bitter as the worst Joe that ever melted a spoon.
“What have you got, Dan?” Adrian asked as he sipped and grimaced.
“They are warning us to stay out at sea and keep watch.”
“Got that part. What’s going on though?”
“Couple of things. The Tupky and the other tribes on the river are slavers. Word about slavery being illegal in the New U.S. got out before we even headed back to Europe.”
Adrian nodded. There had been a few runaways in Fort Plymouth.
“Well, put that together with all the stuff we can make and the river tribes were getting pissed and greedy all at once. After we left, they figured that this was their chance and decided to put a stop to the abolitionists and get a bunch of useful slaves at the same time. Then they figured on retreating upriver out of reach of the Queen.”
“How do you know all that.”
“Lacula.” Dan Neely shrugged. “Maybe we just got lucky. Or maybe Lacula was on the island because he wasn’t happy with the folks back home in the first place. But he is more ship people than the ship people nowadays. He’s converted. He’s a Mormon now.”
Adrian laughed. “I wonder how Wiley is taking that?”
Fort Plymouth, Trinidad
Allen Wiley had rather more important things to worry about than Lacula’s religious conversion. He ducked as a flight of arrows was fired from the edge of the jungle. Fort Plymouth was away from the beach and though it had a cleared space around it, the river people had better bows than they were expecting. He was having to deal with iron arrowheads. The Venezuelan river tribes already had
limited copper smelting capability, but didn’t have a fully developed smelting industry especially on this side of the Andes. That left copper as rare—or almost as rare—as gold or silver.
The addition of the ship people and knowledge of ores and how to recognize them had blown the already cracked door to metals wide open. And the river tribes, already familiar with kilns for vitrifying clay, had the infrastructure to step through the opening. They also had a religious conviction that possession of iron arrowheads would allow them to defeat the ship people.
Retired Master Sergeant Leo Holland, Jr.—now Colonel Leo Holland of the New America Army—ducked down beside the President.
“Damn it, Leo, when are you going to do something about this?”
“As soon as you get me some more gunpowder, Mister President.” The production of black powder was not amazingly complicated, but it was time and labor intensive. It was also not something you wanted to do in town. So the powder mill had been located well outside of Fort Plymouth. Also, the government had other priorities, roads through the jungle, plows, wagons, and wagon wheels, all the things that you just had to have to build a relatively advanced culture in the wilderness.
“I have already admitted that we should have given the military a higher priority, but do you want to do without the hospital or the computer center?”
“No, sir. But we don’t have enough powder to shoot randomly into the jungle every time a bunch of them shoots arrows at us.”
“It’s been weeks!”
“Yes. Weeks where something like fifteen thousand river people have failed to take a city of less than six thousand, including our natives. We’re doing well, Mr. President. It may not seem that way, but we are.”
Allen knew he was right. The river people were more hierarchical than the island tribes. They had a priest class, and a royal class. They had armies and ranks, but they weren’t set up for sieges. They didn’t have much in the way of a logistics system and most of their battles were open field engagements or jungle hunts.
“What about the Reliance?” Leo asked. News of the arrival of the supply ship had hit the radio room shortly before dawn.
“I’ve ordered them to stay out. They don’t have the height of the Queen and their steam cannons are considerably less powerful.”
Leo snorted, but Allen wasn’t in any hurry to risk the Reliance somewhere it could be swarmed over. “Look, I know that they would be a great help. But the Reliance has a draft of less than fifteen feet. The Queen has a forty-foot draft. The Reliance can go up the Orinoco River a ways, but the Queen can’t follow it.”
“It could, since this is the rainy season.”
“And that’s what I want the Reliance for, Colonel. Once this fight is over, we are going to have to send a punishment expedition up the Orinoco or this is going to happen every time the ships leave. We have to make it clear to the locals that attacking us is a bad idea.”
“Floden isn’t going to like that.”
“You might be surprised. He may be a European liberal, but he’s not blind. And he does understand that you have to defend yourself.”
Leo shrugged doubtfully. “So what are you having the Reliance do?”
“Disrupt their supply train,” Allen said with a grin.
Reliance, Gulf of Paria
July 3
“I see one, Skipper,” Frederick Napier said.
“Well, sink it, Fred,” Adrian said.
There were a mass of double canoes in the Gulf of Paria, but they were spread out. The Reliance had spent the last several hours going back and forth in the gulf, looking. They were long canoes, in the forty-feet range, and they were carrying supplies to the attacking river people. Mostly corn and yams of one sort or another.
“Right, Skipper.” Fred swung the barrel of the steam cannon around and pulled the trigger.
The one-pound lead rounds went out and ripped through the crew of the supply boat, and Adrian felt a little sick. More than a little, actually, but he knew it had to be done. If Fort Plymouth was to be relieved, then the supply lines from the river people had to be cut. One of the canoes started sinking and the rowers were dumped into the water.
“Put out the ropes,” Adrian said. They already had a collection of damp river people locked up between containers.
“I hope the Queen gets here soon,” said Dan Neely.
“I hope the river people get the message,” Adrian said.
Trinidad, four miles from Fort Plymouth
July 3
Jokalsa heard the report and knew that his world was ending. The ship people had strong magic. They had known that almost from the beginning.
But the ship people also denied the gods their due. It was suitable to feed slaves to the gods, but whether they were fed slaves or kings—the gods had to be fed. If the gods were not fed, the world would end. The gods would take back their life, all of it. So the tribes of the river had known for centuries.
Then the ship people came and upset the order of the world. The slaves had started running away to the coast and to the island they now called Trinidad. And the new tools had also offered great wealth. It had been too tempting.
So an alliance had been formed, an unheard of alliance of all five of the main river tribes. A plan was made and spies were sent out. The plan was good. Attack while the great ships were away and capture the ship people. Then, take them upriver and use the flood season to move them away from the body of the river. When the ships returned, their colony would be gone and the ships would not know where. Meanwhile, the five tribes would gather all the slaves and sacrifices they needed and the knowledge of the ship people as well.
It had started well enough. The tribes had captured a few of the ship people and a lot of the islanders. But then everything had stopped at the mud walls of Fort Plymouth. They had those crossbows and the cannon. A mass charge ended as soon as the cannons fired. And now the ships were back and it was still the flood season. The river was high and the ship people were in their fort, ready to tell the god-queen’s ship where they were. Then the people of the river would die and the gods would not be fed and the world would end.
There was no point in fighting anymore. Nor was there any point in running away.
Jokalsa nodded slowly, a tear running down his cheek. Then he gave orders. First, there would be a royal sacrifice. “Tell the priests they will take my heart to appease the gods. And when that is done, the army will attack Fort Plymouth. Everyone.”
It took several hours to prepare, but Jokalsa was ready by midnight. He drank the drugged drink and lay back on the makeshift altar with great and royal dignity.
Fort Plymouth
July 4
The sun was just coming up when the natives charged. All of them, it seemed like. All along the jungle edge, they came pouring out, wearing feathered headdresses and gold medallions, and not much else. With iron-pointed spears and painted faces and bodies, they came.
It was a general attack and all you could hear was the native screams and the cannons firing. The cannons ripped holes in the attackers’ ranks, but they came on.
It was crazy. Every canister of grape shot was killing dozens.
But they came on.
Leo had been in the first Iraq war, and he had seen overwhelming force. What he had never seen were people attacking overwhelming force, madly, without any regard for their own lives. He was now deeply thankful that he had persuaded Wiley and Captain Floden to let him make breech-loading cannons. If they’d been using muzzle-loaders, he wasn’t sure they’d have had a good enough rate of fire to withstand an insane charge like this.
In spite of the cannons and the crossbows, the attackers got to the walls, anyway. But that was it. The walls of Fort Plymouth were eighteen feet tall, and made of adobe and wood. The attackers couldn’t pass them by standing on someone’s shoulders. That needed a ladder, and the natives didn’t have enough ladders. Not nearly enough. The defenders pushed the ladders away, or just shot the attackers as t
hey climbed.
It was over an hour later when the attackers finally broke. They had taken horrible casualties. Though no one would ever know for sure how many had participated in the attack, there were almost three thousand native corpses when they got around to counting them and several hundred more who would die soon from their injuries.
Queen of the Sea, Trinidad
July 8
“Why?” Captain Floden asked yet again.
This was a meeting on the Queen of the Sea with all the interested parties. President Allen Wiley, Congresswoman Anna Vignola, Congressman Lacula, Queen Roxane, Queen Eurydice, Philip III, Cleopatra, Captain Floden, Captain Adrian Scott, and Marie Easley. Dag was there as one of Alexander IV’s bodyguards, a title and rank that meant something very different in the third century BCE than it had in the twenty-first century. Alexander the Great’s bodyguards—and Philip II’s—had been effectively the king’s privy council. Ministers without portfolio, or often enough, ministers with portfolio. Dag hadn’t realized that when Roxane appointed him. Realization happened gradually over the ensuing months. He had also come to realize that it was an astute political move. Roxane had tied the ship people to her son, by the standards of the Macedonians. Dag looked around the Royal Lounge, at the assembled notables, and realized this was the ship people council, the ones who would decide if the ship people were to go to war and against whom.
“Because they were dead anyway,” Lacula said.
“But…”
“They knew they were dead if the gods were not fed. Knew it. Not believed it. Knew it the same way you know the sun is going to come up tomorrow. And if they didn’t win, their wives and children were dead with them. What did they have to lose?”