The figures below shrank to the size of dolls, then ants. It's like riding a bicycle, Ian thought. You don't forget. At the same time it wasn't like taking off in an airliner, either. There was a surging lightness to it, sort of like riding Pegasus-if you could imagine Pegasus as one of the Clydesdales that pulled the Budweiser wagon.

"Neutral buoyancy at twenty-two hundred feet," the second-in-command of the Emancipator reported. "Wind is from the north-northwest at three miles per hour."

"Engines at zero inclination," Lieutenant Cofflin commanded. The wheels spun, and Ian could feel the airship move forward more rapidly as the propellers came level with the keel.

"All ahead three-quarters." Vicki glanced down at the instruments. "Airspeed is sixty-seven miles per hour."

Wow! Ian thought, half ironically. Fast! Considerably faster than he'd traveled since the Event, at least. He translated for Shuriash and saw the king's well-hidden amazement.

"Navigator, lay me a course for Asshur," Vicki went on.

King Shuriash was looking down in fascination as the city of Ur slid beneath them, the great ziggurat reduced to model size. The rising sun silvered it, and for a moment canals great and small flashed metallic.

"I see now the excellence of your Nantukhtar maps," the Babylonian ruler murmured. "Strange to see the lands so… there are no boundaries to mark the realm of one king from the next."

His glance sharpened on Arnstein, and his smile grew sharkish. "Not that there would be, now, between Kar-Duniash and the lands of Asshur."

Ian nodded. "Together, our armies have been victorious," he said piously.

To himself: Meaning, we shot the Assyrians up until they ran, and then your boy Kashtiliash chased them until his troops got tired.

Of course, from what Hollard and Hollard said, it worked both ways. The Islanders could shatter the Assyrian armies in pitched battle, but there weren't enough of them to hold ground-without Babylonian manpower, they wouldn't have controlled more than the land they stood on. Less at night.

"Yes," Shuriash said. "And I admit it, we could not have conquered without you Nantukhtar. Certainly not without paying more in blood and treasure. We are much in your debt, and the debt shall be repaid. For now I rule from the northern mountains to the Sea-Land, and the way is clear to the Hittite country."

"Indeed, all these lands are now yours to rule as you would," Arnstein said.

The Babylonian looked up from beneath shaggy brows. "When a man says that, he is about to tell me how I should rule as he would have me do," he said sardonically.

Ian spread his hands. "I would offer advice. Whether the king hearkens to it shall be as the king thinks best." Shuriash nodded, and the Islander went on: "It is one thing to conquer a land, and another to hold it."

Shuriash nodded again. "True. Hammurabi ruled widely, but his sons soon found their thrones rocking beneath them-and if the stories are true, the same held for Gilgamesh! What is your thought, councilor of my brother Jaered-Cofflin?"

"First, O King, that your enemies are the king and nobles of Assyria, not the people of the land, or their gods."

That was enough to bring Samsu-Indash out of his stupor. "As the men of Asshur bow to our King, so must their gods to ours-to Marduk, King of the Universe!"

Ian made a soothing gesture. "Oh, none could doubt it. Yet the great gods of the land bow to Marduk in their own temples, where their own priests serve them, as men were created to serve the gods."

"Ah, I see," Shuriash said. "You think that the temples of Asshur should remain unplundered, and we should not carry off the images to Babylon."

"Unplundered, but subject to the control of the king," Ian confirmed.

That meant a 20 percent tax on temple revenues, and the temples were the largest landowners and bankers in any Mesopotamian kingdom.

Shuriash had been polite but wary at the start, then increasingly ready to consider his allies' suggestions… and since Dr. Clemens saved his favorite, downright friendly. Mind you, he's still damned shrewd and nobody's fool. Leaving the conquered temples standing is in his own interests, even in the short term. The Babylonians might not know the negative elenchos, but they were fully aware that you couldn't skin the cow and milk it too.

"So the hearts of the people will not be filled with hatred against the king of Kar-Duniash," Arnstein finished. "Likewise, if the land is not laid waste, it will pay much more in taxes than it would if it were plundered."

"True-although to tell soldiers not to plunder is to offend against the nature of men. You have other such advice?"

"Yes, Oh King. I think that it would be very useful to you if you were to summon the men of Asshur's lands and make known to them the laws by which you will govern them."

Shuriash frowned. "How might that be? Proclamations in each city?"

"Better than that. Let a royal decree be sent forth, that in every district all the heads of households-all the men of consequence- should gather together and select one to be their delegate. Let these delegates come before the throne, to hear the word of the king and take it back to their homes. You could do that at regular intervals, so that all the land would know the decrees of the king and hear of his deeds."

"Hmmmm." A tug at the grizzled beard. "Much as the puhrum- the assembly of a city-does. Hmmmm, that might well be useful… useful enough that I might summon these delegates also from my own ancestral lands. And if such men. were gathered before me, I could consult with one here, another there-learn the mind of the land and what could be safely demanded of it."

He clapped a hand on Arnstein's shoulder. "You are a councilor indeed, and my brother Jaered-Cofflin is fortunate to have your wisdom!"

Well, the British history course had something to do with it, Arnstein thought as he inclined his head. The English parliament had started that way, with magnates called together to hear what the king had in mind. Arnstein smiled to himself.

Eventually, though, it started working the other way 'round.

The camel complained, a groan tapering off into a moaning sigh.

That's what they're best at, Kenneth Hollard thought, and pulled on the rein. Complaining. I'm getting used to the way they smell, though, and that worries me.

The rein was fastened to a bronze ring in the beast's nose, and it turned with a fair show of obedience. Hollard wiped a forearm across his face to get rid of some of the grit-laden sweat and stood in the stirrups to take a slow scan from east to west. Hmmm. Something there.

It was getting on toward noon, anyway, bleaching the landscape to shades of fierce white and umber. In this land you stopped for at least four hours in the heat of day and then traveled on into the night.

Not quite desert, he thought; it sort of reminded him of parts of northern New Mexico he'd seen on vacations with his family, back before the Event. Hotter, though-there was a sparse covering of grass, an occasional thicket of low, waxy-green tamarisk in an arroyo, the odd water hole. The vegetation had been getting thicker as they came closer to the jagged blue line of the Jebel Sinjar on the northern horizon, too. Beyond them was the heart of the old kingdom of Mitanni, the district the Semites called Naharim, "the Rivers," in the plain between the Taurus range and the Jebel. An Assyrian province now, although they'd received vague reports that it was rising in revolt. Or, from the sound of things, just dissolving into a chaotic war of all against all.

Three thousand years in a future that had bred him and wasn't going to happen-he tried to avoid thinking about that; it made his head hurt-these steppes would be part of the northern borderland between Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Right now it was called, variously, Mitanni, Hanigalibat, the River Country, and God-knew-what, and it had been a marchland between Assyria and the Hittite Empire. Mostly it seemed to be empty except for wandering bands of sheep-herding nomads. Hollard smiled grimly to himself. Empty except for the remnants of the fleeing Assyrian army, the part that wasn't holed up in Asshur over to the east on the Tigris. The camel-mounted recon company had been traveling through the detritus for days; dead men and donkeys, their corpses seething with maggots, foundered horses, broken chariots, bits of gear-everything from bedrolls to weapons and armor.