Time Twisters Page 3

  “What?” Antenor had been about to light a cigarette. He looked annoyed at getting interrupted.

  “You were good in school. What was the name of that guy Lord Goliath knocked off?”

  “Oh. Him.” Antenor frowned, trying to remember. After a moment, he did—he had been good in school. “Tabitas, that’s what. Tabitas of the Evraioi.”

  “That’s right!” Pheidas nodded. He couldn’t have come up with it himself, but he knew it as soon as he heard it. “Crazy, isn’t it? Here we are all these years later, going off to do the same cursed job all over again.”

  “Miserable mountain rats don’t go away,” Sergeant Dryops said. “They want to make us go away, but that ain’t gonna happen, either.” He paused. “Is it?”

  “No, Sergeant!” This time, all the troopers in the APC sang out as loud as they could. Once bitten, twice raucous. Dryops not only nodded, he even smiled a little. Pheidas wondered if the world would end. It didn’t. The world was a tough old place.

  As he peered out from time to time through the firing port by his head, Pheidas watched it get tougher, too. The people of the hills and the people of the coast had been enemies since the days of Goliath and Tabitas, maybe longer. Sometimes it seemed the landscapes were enemies, too.

  Things went from green to brown as soon as the land started climbing and getting rougher—as soon as it went from a place where more Philistinians lived to one were there were more Moabites. Chickens and goats and skinny stray dogs roamed the streets of Moabite villages. The houses and shops looked a million years old despite their rust-streaked corrugated iron roofs. Pheidas wouldn’t have wanted to drive any of the ancient, beat-up cars. The sun blasted everything with the force of a tactical nuke.

  Spray-painted squiggles in the pothook Moabite script marred whitewashed walls. Pheidas could read it. Learning enough Moabite to get by was part of basic training. PHILS OUT! was the most common graffiti. Pheidas didn’t mind that one so much. He didn’t like the Moabites any better than they liked his people. He would have been happy to stay out if his commanders hadn’t told him to go in.

  But then he saw one that said CHEMOSH CUTS OFF DAGON’S SCALY TAIL! Chemosh was the Moabites’ favorite god. For lots of them, he was the only tribal god. A few even said he was the only god, period. You really had to watch out for fanatics like that. They were the kind who turned terrorist.

  The scrawl that really raised his hackles, though, was THE SWORD BUDDHA AND THE FOUR WITH CHEMOSH! The Turks of Babylon were newcomers to these parts; they’d brought the Sword Buddha down off the steppe hardly more than a thousand years ago. But Aluzza, Allat, Manah, and Hubal had been worshiped in Arabia for a very long time. And Babylon and Arabia were both swimming in oil, which these days counted for even more than the strength of their gods.

  Sergeant Dryops saw that one, too. He muttered into his gray-streaked red mustache. Pheidas couldn’t make out all of what he said. From what he could understand, he was surprised the steel by Dryops’ head didn’t melt.

  “We’ve got friends, too,” the veteran noncom said when his language grew a little less incandescent. “The Ellenes in Syria don’t like the Moabites any better than we do. And they really don’t like the Turks.”

  That made Pheidas feel a little better—until Antenor went and spoiled it by saying: “They don’t have much oil, though.”

  Dryops looked at him as if he’d found him on the sole of his marching boot. “Blood’s thicker than oil, by the gods,” he growled.

  Antenor didn’t say anything at all. His silence seemed more devastating than speech. There were ties between Philistinians and Ellenes, yes. But they were ancient. Some of the Philistinians’ ancestors had come from Crete before settling on the mainland here. But the languages now were as different as Galatian and Irish—more different, maybe, because they’d been separate longer. And Babylon outweighed Syria about three to one.

  A couple of Moabite men in headcloths and white cotton robes—good cover against the sun—scowled at the armored column as it clattered past. Scowls were basically honest. As long as nobody did anything more than scowl . . . Pheidas could look out through the firing port instead of shooting through it. That suited him fine.

  It wasn’t far from Gaza to Hierosolyma, not as the crow flew. But a crow didn’t fly back through the years, and Pheidas felt he’d fallen into a different century when his convoy rolled into the hill town. Gaza was a city of steel and glass and reinforced concrete, a city that looked across the Inner Sea to the whole wide world. Hierosolyma, hidden in the hills, was built of golden limestone and wood and brick, and looked as if it had been there forever. Had it seemed very different when the Turks sacked it, when the Romans wrecked it, when Philip of Macedon besieged the Persian garrison there, or when Lord Goliath took it away from the Evraioi? Pheidas had his doubts.

  Men in robes and women in long, baggy dresses only made the impression of age stronger. Some of the men did wear modern shirts and trousers, but none of the women—none—chose the skimpy, clinging styles that were all the rage down by the sea. As far as girl-watching went, it would be a barren time.

  But it wouldn’t be dull. Graffiti on whitewashed walls was thicker and fiercer here than it had been in the villages to the southwest. Philistinian soldiers with assault rifles patrolled the narrow, twisting streets. They never traveled in parties smaller than four; the Moabites had assault rifles, too, and other, nastier, toys, and used them whenever they figured they could get away with it.

  The APC rattled past a couple of firebombed buildings. A wine bottle full of gasoline with a cloth wick was a low-tech weapon, which didn’t mean it wasn’t effective. Then Pheidas stopped worrying about gasoline bombs, because something a demon of a lot bigger went off much too close. The APC swayed and shook and almost flipped over. Then it stopped so suddenly, it pitched all the soldiers in the fighting compartment into a heap.

  “Get off me, Dagon damn you!” Sergeant Dryops shouted. “Open the doors and pile out. Somebody’s gonna need help.”

  As usual, a man with a loud voice and a clear notion of what he wanted stood a good chance of getting it. The soldiers unscrambled themselves. Antenor opened the doors at the back of the carrier. The men jumped out, weapons at the ready.

  “Gods!” Pheidas exclaimed. He ran forward, boots thudding on cobblestones that might have known the scritch of hobnailed Roman marching sandals.

  Someone had driven a car into the Philistinian column—a car with a bomb inside. Then he’d set it off. The car was nothing but twisted steel and flames, with thick black smoke rising from it. Mixed with the chemical stinks was one that held a certain ghastly appeal—it smelled like burnt roast pork. Pheidas’ stomach did a slow lurch: that wasn’t pork burning.

  The murder bomber hadn’t just blown himself up. That would have been too much to hope for. He’d wrecked a Philistinian command car almost as thoroughly as the one that carried the bomb. Pheidas didn’t think anybody in there could be alive. And the blast had overturned an APC and set it on fire. Burned and wounded Philistinian soldiers came stumbling out of it.

  “Anybody left inside?” Pheidas shouted. He wouldn’t have left a Moabite to cook in there. . . . Well, right this minute, maybe he would.

  “Did the driver get away?” asked a soldier bleeding from a cut on the forehead.

  “We’ll find out.” Pheidas and Antenor both dashed around the burning chassis to see. The driver’s compartment was separate from the one where the soldiers sat, and had its own escape hatches.

  If the driver hadn’t got out—and it didn’t look as if he had—he never would now. The APC’s front end had taken the brunt of the blast. With the best will in the world, try to force your way through those flames and you’d end up like one of the babies the Phoenicians up the coast fed to the fires in the old days—and, some people whispered, even now.

  A shriek behind Pheidas made him whirl, rifle at the ready. A Moabite woman lay on the ground, blood pouring from a gash in her t
high. Part of Pheidas hoped she would just bleed out. But that wasn’t how he’d been trained. He ran over and yanked up her dress so he could bandage the gash.

  “What are you doing to her?” The question came in harsh, guttural Moabite. “Why are you putting hands on her?”

  Pheidas glanced up. The Moabite standing over him couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than he was. The fellow had a gash under one eye, but he didn’t know or care. He seemed to think Pheidas would drop his pants and start humping the wounded woman any second now.

  “I’m going to fix her leg if I can,” Pheidas answered, using Moabite herself. Speaking the language always made him feel he had a mouth full of rocks. “If you know first aid, you do it instead.”

  “Not me. Not me, by Chemosh’s white beard!” The young Moabite backed away. “You better not do anything dirty to her, that’s all.”

  “Are you crazy?” Pheidas said, and then he forgot about the kid. He had to tie off a bleeder. He’d learned how to do that, but he’d never actually done it before. He thanked Dagon that he didn’t lose his lunch. He pinned the wound closed, gave the woman a pain shot, and put a bandage around everything. When he finished, his hands were covered with blood. He wiped them on her dress. It was already so bloody, a little more gore wouldn’t matter.

  Only then did he look up and see that the young Moabite was still watching him. “You did what you said,” the fellow admitted.

  Wearily, Pheidas pointed to the burning wreck of the car the murder bomber had driven. “A Philistinian didn’t do that to her,” he said. “A Moabite did. One of your people, not one of mine.”

  “If you weren’t occupying us, we wouldn’t have to do things like that,” the Moabite answered.

  “If we weren’t occupying you, you’d throw us into the sea,” Pheidas said.

  “You deserve it. You came from the sea. You should go back into it,” the Moabite said. “If Dagon is so wonderful, he can take care of you there.”

  Pheidas swung his assault rifle so it almost bore on the young man. He wasn’t especially devout—most Philistinians weren’t these days—but he wasn’t about to let this fellow mock him. “I didn’t say anything about your god,” he growled, sounding as much like Sergeant Dryops as he could. “Keep your mouth shut about mine.”

  “You can’t say anything bad about Chemosh,” the young man said. “Chemosh is a true god. Chemosh is the true god.”

  Fanaticism rang in his voice, though he would probably just have called it pride. Pheidas gestured with the rifle. “Get lost, punk, or you’ll be sorry.”

  “Ha! You fear the glory of Chemosh! You know Dagon is nothing but a dead statue!” But the Moabite backed off. Unlike the murder bomber, he didn’t have the stuff of martyrs in him—right this minute, anyhow.

  Another Moabite came up to Pheidas. This one wore somber business clothes under a headscarf. “I am a physician,” he said in accented but understandable Philistinian. “I will care for the woman now. Thank you for what you did.”

  “You’re welcome,” Pheidas said. “Help the soldiers, too, please. Some of them need it more than she does.”

  The Moabite doctor hesitated. “I would rather not,” he said at last. “Nothing personal, but I could find myself in a dangerous position if it were discovered that I had done such a thing.”

  “Your own people would kill you, you mean,” Pheidas said.

  “Yes.” The physician nodded. “Unfortunately, that is exactly what I mean.”

  Pheidas felt like pounding his head on the slates of the sidewalk in despair. “How are we both supposed to live on this land when you feel that way?”

  “When one of us is gone, the other will live on this land,” the Moabite replied. Pheidas knew exactly what he meant. When you Philistinians are gone, we will live on it.

  Sandbagged machinegun nests, barbed wire, and concrete barriers to thwart murder bombers in cars surrounded the Philistinian barracks in Hierosolyma. Pheidas didn’t feel particularly safe even after he dumped his pack by a cot. Too easy to set up a mortar on a roof or in the courtyard of a house and lob a few bombs this way. You could disassemble the thing and hide it long before anybody found you.

  “All the comforts of home,” Antenor said, looking around at the dismal place.

  “Sure, if you live in a jail,” Pheidas said.

  Antenor laughed, for all the world as if he were kidding. “This whole country’s a jail,” he said. “We’re stuck in it, and so are the cursed Moabites.”

  “We’re occupying this part of it,” Pheidas said. “If the Moabites ever get the upper hand, they’ll massacre us.”

  “They say their god says we deserve it.” Antenor’s raised eyebrow told what he thought of that.

  “Chemosh is king!” Pheidas said in Moabite—a phrase any Philistinian had heard often enough to understand, regardless of whether he knew another word of the language. He returned to his own tongue for a two-word editorial: “Stinking fanatics.”

  “They are,” Antenor agreed glumly. “It gives them an advantage. They really believe in the fight while we . . . just kind of go on.”

  As usual, Sergeant Dryops heard everything that mattered. “I’ll tell you what I believe in,” he rasped. “I believe in not letting one of those ragheads dry-gulch me on account of I got careless—or on account of I got too trusting. Some dogs shouldn’t get even one bite.”

  “Heh.” Pheidas knew his laugh sounded nervous. Like Arabs and Aramaeans and Phoenicians, Moabites had little use for dogs. Call one of them a son of a bitch and you made an enemy—quite possibly a murderous enemy—for life.

  Dryops understood why Pheidas was jumpy. “None of those mangy hounds in here,” he said. “Cursed well better not be, anyhow.” He laughed.

  “The way those people—all those peoples—feel about dogs is enough to make you anti-Semitic,” Antenor said. After three thousand years on the Middle Eastern mainland, Philistinians had a good deal of Semitic blood in them, too. Pheidas found himself nodding all the same.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass how they feel about dogs,” Sergeant Dryops said. “But when they want to murder me . . . that, I don’t like.”

  He didn’t need to feel sure he had Dagon’s power behind him. His boundless scorn for the Moabites was plenty to keep him going.

  Along with half his squad, Pheidas tramped the narrow, winding streets of Hierosolyma. His eyes went this way, that way, every which way. He registered all the windows, all the balconies, all the rooftops. Every time a Moabite drew near, he tensed. Did the man have a murder belt full of explosives and nails laced around his middle? Was the woman carrying grenades?

  Moabite men called names, in their language and in Philistinian. Some of what they said made dog and son of a bitch seem like endearments. In civilian life, Pheidas might have tried to kill someone for insults like that. As a soldier, he had to keep his finger off the trigger. Even sticks and stones weren’t reason enough to open up. So the high command insisted, anyhow.

  But the high command wasn’t out there. Soldiers—ordinary human beings—were. Somebody a couple of blocks from Pheidas got hit by a rock and an insult at the same time. He did what he would have done if he were still a civilian. A few seconds later, a young Moabite writhed in the street, blood pouring from his head and his chest.

  When Pheidas heard the burst of automatic-weapon fire, the muzzle of his own rifle automatically swung toward the sound. But the screams and shouts and curses that followed weren’t close enough to give him any targets. They got louder instead of softer, though. “That’s trouble,” he said.

  “Better believe it,” Antenor said.

  Then there were more bangs. These came from the Novgorodian assault rifles terrorists used all over the world. More Philistinian guns barked in reply.

  Pheidas had heard plenty. “Come on!” he shouted, and ran toward the sound of the firing. His squad-mates pounded after him.

  “Maybe . . . we can keep . . . the riot . . . f
rom starting,” Antenor panted as he ran.

  It was already too late. “Death to the Philistinians!” somebody yelled from a second-story window. A wine bottle with a flaming wick flew out and smashed on the cobbles in the street. Flame splashed out in a five-cubit circle. Pheidas sidestepped like a dancer. Behind him, one of the other Philistinian soldiers chucked a grenade through the window from which the incendiary had come. A shriek rang out hard on the heels of the boom. The soldier nodded in grim satisfaction and ran on.

  A couple of Philistinians were down. So were more than a couple of Moabites. Pheidas smelled blood and fear. Some of the fear was bound to be his own. Two bullets snapped past his head. He dove into the nearest doorway. When he saw somebody in a headscarf, he fired at him.

  The man went down, clutching at his side. “Mesha! My Mesha!” a woman screeched, and then: “Murder!”

  More and more Moabites converged on the flashpoint. So many of them carried weapons, Pheidas wondered if they weren’t waiting for a moment like this. Philistinian soldiers ran toward trouble, too, as they’d been trained. When rocks and firebombs and gunfire met them, they answered with gunfire of their own.

  An APC awkwardly turned a tight corner. Its heavy machine gun and bulletproof sides let it dominate the field—or would have, if a Moabite hadn’t set it on fire with another bottle full of gasoline. Some of the Philistinians inside managed to get out. Pheidas didn’t think all of them did.

  “Chemosh is king!” The cry rose again and again, ever louder. So did another one: “Death to Dagon!”

  Pheidas peered out from the doorway. Somebody in a dun-colored uniform like his was down. A Moabite with a Novgorodian rifle drew a bead on the wounded Philistinian from no more than three cubits away. Pheidas shot the Moabite in the back. He threw out his arms as he toppled, the rifle flying from his hands. Pheidas ran to his countryman. The Philistinian had a big chunk blown out of one calf. “Hurts,” he said as Pheidas dragged him back to cover.