Now bestselling SF and fantasy author Harry Turtledove, a noted expert on the ancient world, teams up with author and Egyptologist Noreen Doyle to present fourteen new tales of the real Bronze Age from some of the best writers in SF.

 Before leaving my own period, I resolved to keep a diary; and indeed I told several others I would, and promised to let them see it upon my return. Yesterday I arrived, captured no Pukz and compiled no text. No more inauspicious beginning could be imagined.

 I had never beheld such a miserable wretch.  My master Chu gulped. The prisoner was bone-thin, the weeping sores easily visible through his rags. His dirty bare feet left red smears on the tile floor. "The carpet," old Lord Yang murmured, and servants carried the priceless textile aside. We ourselves had not dared to walk on it, and had stepped around.

 Enmerkar the king stood on the walls of Uruk. The hordes from the desert had withdrawn at last. In their wake they had left devastation: fields and orchards stripped of their harvest, villages burned, cattle slaughtered or stolen, and an echo of laughter as they marched away with their spoils.

 I knew, the last time we fought the sphinxes, this dearth of tin would trouble us. I knew, and I was right, and I had the privilege--if that is what you want to call it--of saying as much beforehand, so that a good many of the hes in the warband heard me being clever. And much grief and labor and danger and fear my cleverness won for me, too, though I could not know that ahead of time.

 Hupasiya stepped out of his farmhouse, then stopped dead, grabbing for his old woolen mantle and hastily wrapping it around himself. Gods, it was cold out here!
  He still looked very much like the true Hittite warrior he'd been just a few short years ago, burly and muscular, black curly hair and beard, with a narrow scar like a white blaze of lightning seaming his face. His bronze sword hung on a wall inside, and he still kept it polished an oiled as befitted a good blade. But the battles he fought these days were only with the fields and the harvests, and no regrets about it.

 His name was Kreuha Wolkwos--Blood Wolf, in the tongue of the Keruthini folk--and he was the greatest of all the warriors of his people, although still unwedded and barely old enough to raise a thick yellow down on his cheeks. Even before that fuzz sprouted he had been called a man in the korios, the warband of the youths who spent the summer living like a wolf-pack in the woods off what they could hunt and steal. Now even householders and the clan chiefs called him a man, for six heads of his taking--the oldest weathered down to a skull, the newest still ripe--were spiked to the lintel above his father's house-door.

Yet he is not an old man. He can hold his back straight. He does not lean so very much upon his long staff. The two loaves of khenmet-bread and the foreleg of a calf he carries in a finely woven basket do not cramp his arms. It is, he supposes, the wounds of campaigns festering beneath his skin. They have violated his body, pierced his shadow, created windows through which his ba-soul would fly, as he has defended his King. Or perhaps it is the scarcity of bread, the thinness of cattle and fowl, the filth in the water. In time, he allows his fluttering ba.  Not yet. It is dawn, not dusk.

 On her hands and knees the old woman scrubs the wood floor of the shrine. She dips her wad of linen rags into the leather bucket of water, then scours each plank in turn. Her back aches, her calloused knees burn with pain, but if she omitted this daily ritual, her dreams would torment her with work left undone. Sunlight streams in through the western window and falls across her back, the touch of the god Dian, easing her pain.
  "I'm gray and wrinkled and twisted in the bone," Watis says aloud, "but you love me still."

 The icy waters of the Willkamayu closed over Orqo as he fell. He still gagged from the blow to his throat, and when the freezing current flooded his mouth and nostrils, he thought himself dead. Then rage filled him, pouring a last, desperate strength into his arms and legs. He clutched his heavy mace and lunged for the surface. Damn you, Kusi, he thought. You haven't won. Not yet.

The plague came out of nowhere. No one knew
What god or goddess sent it, and the signs,
When not ambiguous, were all too few:
The oak leaves still, the livers whole and fine,
From left and right the birds flew in straight lines,
      And worst of all, the tea leaves all refused
      To form a pattern readers could have used.

 Trent's pleasure in being asked to ßeta-test Ziggurat deeply annoyed Leslie, who watched without comment as he slid in the CD but left when summer-movie music began to vibrate from the speakers as cuneiform characters appeared on the screen and slowly turned into the company's name. She was in the kitchen when he called her to come see something, and had nearly finished preparing lunch when he appeared at the door. "No, I'm not interested," she answered, ignoring his crestfallen expression. "Go role-play as Sargon, but don't tell me it's history. And that anachronistic Greek letter is pretty dumb."

 Dett stood on Western Isle's cliff, ignoring the thousands of birds wheeling and shrieking above him, even when some spattered his deerskin cloak with their droppings. He studied the sky as the sun dipped down towards the horizon, as he had done these past few months whenever the clouds lifted enough to see the sunset. That wasn't often; the Islands usually spent the summer months wrapped in fog, and this particular summer had been especially cold. What he saw unnerved him. Those colors are wrong, he thought. Too red, too orange, too yellow--like fire. I have never seen sunsets like this before, yet ever since the Day of Darkness in late spring, they have all looked this way. Why have the sunsets changed? It must mean something. But what?

 So now I am to be a spy.
  Well, I have been many things besides a scribe in the service of the Great King Tudhaliya, ruler of the Land of Hatti, and his father before him. I have travelled to many foreign lands to set down the terms of the treaties made by his ambassadors. I have gone with him to his wars, writing accounts of his battles and victories for the palace archives.
  Now the king of Wilusa has written to plead for aid against the sea-raiders from Ahhiya.

 For a moment I hesitated, suddenly half afraid. Sunlight played in the crowns of trees along this quiet residential street and spilled warmth across me. A neighboring lawn lay newly mown, not yet raked, and a breeze bore me the scent. In a few hours Jane would be through work and bring Myrtis home with her from day care. Next month we'd vacation by the sea. Just planning it was joyous. Did I really want to risk any of that?
  I'd been warned, I'd signed the waiver, but it was still possible to turn away.
  No, I straightened my shoulders, strode up the walk to the porch of the big old house, mounted the steps, and rang the bell.

Best SF and Fatnasy Books of 2004: Editors' Choice
    8. The First Heroes : New Tales of the Bronze Age by Harry Turtledove, Noreen Doyle