On still another hand, I'm also grateful that Mattie didn't get too… attached. She sighed. It's certainly fun, once you get over the oh-ick-yuk-that's-strange bit, but now that I've tried it I can definitely say that it isn't It, for me. Beats the hell out of solitary vice, but no capital P Passion.

It was always valuable to make a discovery about yourself, but this one was a pity, in a way. There would have been some advantages if it had been It, if she wanted to be career military, and so far she hadn't found anything that better suited her talents. Although I like building things, too.

She wiped soapy water out of her eyes and groped for her watch on the wicker table beside the bath. "Oh, hell," she said. "Got to get going-there's that thing over at the temple. Hand me that towel, would you?"

The occasion was full-dress. Luckily that wasn't very fancy for the Island military. The polished calf-boots, tailored khaki pants and jacket, scarf, and beret with the Republic's eagle-and-shield badge all looked fairly sharp without being too elaborate or labor-intensive. She buffed the badge until the gold of the arrows and olive wreath shone against the silver eagle, adjusted it, took a quick look in the mirror and buckled on her Sam Browne.

Coming up in the world, she thought, snapping out the cylinder of the new Python revolver that had come in with the Werders. And not only better equipment. A smile moved her lips as she flicked a fingernail at the silver lieutenant colonel's oak leaves on the collar of her uniform jacket.

"What is this?" Azzu-ena asked steadily. He could see the fear in her eyes, though; it was but a reflection of his own.

"Life," Justin Clemens said.

He swabbed the skin of her shoulder with alcohol, wiped it dry with the gauze, roughened it with the instrument and applied the vaccine, then taped another piece of gauze across it. When it was done he slumped in relief. The luckless laborers who'd been trapped in the waiting room were next, all six of them.

"Why have you isolated the mother along with the child?" Azzu-ena asked as he stood in thought.

"Because she's almost certainly infected by now-prolonged body contact," he said.

"What is the treatment for this disease?"

"There is no treatment."

"Not even the… penicillin?"

"That's useless against this. The vaccine prevents infection, but once the disease is established… among people like yours, who've never been exposed, as many as nine in every ten may die."

According to his medical history texts, Mexico had gone from twenty million people to one and a half million within a couple of generations after Cortez's men had arrived, bringing smallpox along with them. After what he'd seen on the post-Event mainland with influenza, mumps, and chicken pox, he believed every word of it. "Virgin field epidemic" had gone from a historical curiosity to a recipe for naked horror.

The woman's eyes went wide; these cities might not have known smallpox before, but they did have epidemics to give a basis for imagination.

"Is there nothing that can be done?"

"I don't have much of the vaccine, and I can't make any more here, and you don't-" How do I explain about cowpox? Which Babylonian cows did not have; he'd checked when he first arrived. No time. "I don't have the things I'd need. Nantucket is two months' sailing from here, and they could only send me a few thousand doses."

"You know this disease well?"

"From books. We wiped it out in our own land by vaccination."

"Nine in ten! Gods of plague have mercy!" She suddenly looked down at her arm. "This preserves, you say?"

"Yes, unless you're already infected, and I very much doubt it."

"Then why me?" Her gaze sharpened on him. "Will you not wish to preserve the king and his household?"

"I suppose we'll have to," he said wearily. "Since we can't preserve everybody. But I'll be damned if it's all going to go out for political reasons."

Suddenly she smiled and rested a hand on his shoulder for a moment. "You are a great healer," she said. "You will find something you can do."

He nodded wearily. "Apart from praying that we can isolate all the cases in time, there's only one thing I can do. It's far better than nothing, but I don't think it's going to go over very well."

"Lady Kat'ryn-Hollard," Kashtiliash said. "You have been promoted-finding favor with you own ruler, as well as ours! That is very well."

Kathryn felt herself flushing. He'd learned Islander military insignia, and he noticed. For a big bad Bronze Age type, Kash is a sweetie, she thought.

They turned casually down a side corridor, out onto a section of flat roof that turned into a balcony. From there they could see night descending on Babylon, a huge serried darkness against the horizon. The stars were still bright above; she knew that the streets down there-except for a very few broad, straight ones such as the Processional Way-would be canyons of blackness where nobody ventured without a light.

Kashtiliash was looking up at the stars. "I am thinking," he said after a moment, "of what you told me, of your island's voyage through the tide of years to this time, and how the very stars were different." He shook his head. "Yet always I had thought of my life as the now, from which all the future flowed. It makes the liver curl, to think of it instead as dry tablets tumbled in a ruin mound, a… fable."

She moved closer, and they laid arms around waist and shoulder; she was only an inch or so shorter than he, towering by this age's standards.

"We have a saying on Nantucket," she said. "Don't think about the Event too much; it's bad enough without insanity stirred in. "

"Yet in the House of Succession I read the tablets of the ancients, the Sumerians… and they also saw stars different from these we see. It is curious, to think of the depths of time-curious and dizzying."

Kathryn nodded. Not just a handsome face, she thought, acutely conscious of the scent of him, a strong masculine musk.

"And I was thinking of you, my Kat'ryn-Hollard, and whether you have laid a witch's spell on me." He laughed softly. "You are nothing of what we think a woman should be, yet you are ever in my thoughts. My father thinks you the diversion of an hour; I dread his wrath if I tell him differently, yet I must-I have no choice."

"And everyone of my people thinks you're a disaster for me," she replied. They turned to each other and suddenly they were kissing hungrily.

"I strive to stay away, and I cannot stay away," he groaned after a long moment.

"What, all the women of your harem cannot console you?" she said.

"No more than the little servant maid can you," he said and laughed at the slight jerk of surprise. "Do you think I would not seek to know everything about you, Kat'ryn-Hollard?"

"No," she said-she'd rummaged shamelessly through the Arnsteins' files on him, certainly.

They kissed again, and he chuckled into her ear. "And I was raised in a harem, Kat'ryn-a hundred women to one man may flatter the vanity of a king and uphold his reputation, but…"

There was a long silence. "This is dangerous," she said, holding back for a second and looking into his eyes.

"I know," Kashtiliash said, nodding. "I could not be elsewhere. Could you?"

She felt her throat tighten as she shook her head. The room they entered was probably a clerk's in the daylight hours; there were baskets of clay tablets and waxed boards, and a table.

Her whole body tightened; her skin felt as if it were a size too small and was being pricked all over with miniature pins. When his hands closed on her shoulders and slid down to cup her breasts, there was a jolt beneath her diaphragm, almost like a blow, and she sagged strengthless against the table.