"It is accomplished!" he shouted and leaped.

"God damn it to hell'." William Walker raved as the body struck, then bounced limp further down. Got to make the best of it, he told himself, taking control by sheer force of will. He walked three steps forward and turned, hand on sword hilt, eyes raking the score or so of men who stood before him.

"Now I come into my own," he said. "Who stands against me, dies." Everyone's eyes flicked to the body of Agamemnon, lying caught on the bushes a hundred feet down, and his heir, broken on the stone.

"Who is with me? Who? Who?"

A dynastic coup was nothing very new in Mycenae, and most of these men owed everything to him. One stepped forward, blade aloft: "Hail Walker, King of Men!"

The crowd took it up: "Hail! Hail! Hail! "

"Wonderful," King Shuriash said sincerely.

He beamed at the canal. It was a major one, or had been before it started to silt irrevocably, making its name of Libil-Higalla-"May It Bring Abundance"-a bitter jest.

In a few more years the banks would enclose only a stretch of shallow reed-grown water, and then the dry walls would join the hundreds of others that ran in futility across the flat plain of the Land. The villages on its banks were dying too. When a canal reached this state, there was no option but to abandon it and dig another. The fields would go back to desert-or, without a fresh washing and plowing every year, salt up, which was worse-and there would be hunger for the peasants until they were safely relocated. Hunger for them, lost rents for their landlords, lost revenue and strength for the king. And losing a canal was a bad omen.

Now two… "machines," that was the word… were chewing their way down the canal. On each barge was one of the Nantukhtar steam engines, with its tall iron stack puffing smoke, its mysterious wheels and belts driving an endless chain of saw-edged buckets. They splashed down into the water and gouged into the soft silt below, came up running with dark-brown mud, clanked and rattled back to dump their loads onto an endless belt that threw it to the side-left for the first dredge, right for the second. Waiting crews of peasants shoveled the rich muck into baskets and oxcarts, to spread on their fields before the fall sowing.

If a king's dignity had not forbidden it, Shuriash would have shouted his glee aloud and clapped hands. As it was, he grinned broadly and looked over at the Nantukhtar emissaries.

"You were right," he said to Councilor Arnstein. "With machines like this, I have no need to confiscate estates in Assyria, beyond what falls to me as king there."

With machines like this, he could reclaim land by the thousands of iku-tens of thousands, hundreds even. He was almost dizzy at the thought; his own engineers were dusting off tablets with plans stretching back centuries, even for the great Tigris-Euphrates canal that king after king had rejected as far too expensive.

Land was a king's strength, not only for what it yielded him in rents but as wealth to hand out to favored supporters and servants. Sometimes you almost wished for revolt, so that the estates of traitors could be escheated to the king. Reclaiming land was best of all; it could be granted without harm to any vested interest-that always produced anger-and by turning wilderness to productive fields the king showed that the great gods of the land favored his reign.

The royal party and its allies drew off into the shade of a grove-a grove that would live, now-and servants spread the meal. The king was merry today, and his attendants with him. From the Nantukhtar party came a new food; the Nantukhtar paspasu, the fowl of the Island country-chicken, in their tongue. I must secure some for the royal gardens. He could give out the live eggs to men he wished to favor, to enrich their estates.

The king washed the food down with cool wine and wiped his mouth on a cloth, belching his contentment.

"Come," he said to his son. "Walk with me."

They walked together under the rustling leaves of the date palms. The guardsmen hung back, close enough to dash forward if anything should happen, but too far to hear a low-voiced conversation.

"It is a good thing, my father," Kashtiliash said, nodding to the puffing, clanking dredge in the distance. "And the price is reasonable."

"A tenth of the harvest of the fields watered for ten years? That is not reasonable, that is a token," Shuriash said genially. "The Nantukhtar will seek their advantage from this elsewhere. Mainly, they will call in the debt when it comes time to fight in the Hittite country, next spring after the harvest. Although first we must settle the matter of Hangilibat."

"That is no more than they asked." The king nodded, and his son went on, "And this winter we will train the first five hundred men with rifles."

"Yes," Shuriash said, nodding judiciously. "So far the Nantukhtar have fulfilled all their promises." He cocked an eye at his heir. "That does not mean that our interest and theirs will always run like a well-matched chariot team." A jerk of his chin toward the canal. "Wonderful, but we cannot make its like; and if we come to depend on the makers, if we cannot so much as water our fields without their machines, we need them."

Kashtiliash nodded unwillingly. "We cannot make its like, yet," he said.

"A point, and a sharp one," Shuriash said. "Fear not, my son; I will not tear you from the arms of your warrior maid in anger at the Nantukhtar."

He bellowed laughter at the prince's stumble and flush. "Are you so besotted?" he asked. "Did you think I would not know? The eyes and ears of the king miss nothing, my son. Especially where the heir of the House of Succession is concerned."

"We… we did not want to set tongues wagging."

The king laughed again, a bantering note in it, but also a male companionship. "Except each other's, no? I'll not ask you if the rumors are true."

"She is…" Kashtiliash flushed still more darkly. "I thank you, Father."

"Indeed… as a second or third wife, she would be a good choice, to bind the alliance. And the sister of a man of high rank… Even if she's not a virgin; well, customs differ, and I suppose you could keep her in line, eh? And she looks able to bear strong sons."

Kashtiliash looked as if he had been chewing a bitter quince. "Father and lord, I do not think it would be that simple. Best think of other matters."

"Such as the rumblings among the priesthoods, eh?" Shuriash shrugged. "I am pleased that you are not so preoccupied with writing poems and eating lettuce"-he laughed again; old tales said that strengthened a man's member-"that you haven't noticed they call me blasphemer, and the Nantukhtar they call wizards who summon demons."

"Are you concerned?"

"Not greatly. We have made alliance with the Nantukhtar, and the great gods of the land have smiled on us-have we not humbled Asshur, do the Elamites not tremble in fear, offering tribute and their king's daughter for my bed? What none of the kings my fathers could do, I have done, with the help of our allies. And there has been neither famine nor plague to mark the gods' anger. So long as it is so, we need not fear the temples. They are jealous because they no longer hold the only wisdom in the realm."

He clapped a hand on the shoulder of his tall son. "And you learn what the Nantukhtar have to teach, and mix it with our own wisdom," he said. "I am greatly pleased with your campaign in the north, my son. Soon it will be time for me to take the hand of Marduk at the New Year festival once more. Let the colleges of the temples concern themselves with that, and leave public matters to the king."

"I knew those would be worthwhile," Ian Arnstein said, tossing aside a well-gnawed drumstick. "Mmmm. Damned sight better than Colonel Sanders ever made."

Kathryn Hollard looked out at the dredgers. "They're a modification of the type Leaton designed for harbor work back in Nantucket Town," she said. "Kash was all over 'em while we were setting up-I think he really understood the principle."