The Sea Peoples Read online

  Hilo was a very substantial if not huge city of more than twenty thousand souls, low-built and spread out amid trees and greenery and gardens ornamental or practical or both. White walls and roofs of tile or palm-thatch showed through the greenery and even at this distance you could see the purple and blue and crimson of banks of flowers and blossoming trees, citrus and tropical fruits, jacarandas and flamboyants and flame trees.

  Southward loomed the peaks of massive mountains, not steep but very high; snow glittered from the tops of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. The sight made the hair prickle on the back of her neck, and she felt a return of that sense . . . a feeling of chambers within her mind opening . . . that she’d felt when she first took up the Sword of the Lady after her father’s death. Her hand went to the crystal pommel at her side, the symbol of the High Kingship that Rudi Mackenzie—not yet Artos the First, High King of Montival—had won on the Quest of the Sunrise Lands. In form it was a knight’s longsword, save that the guard was shaped like a crescent moon rather than a cross, and the pommel at the end of the double-lobed horn-and-silver hilt was moon-colored crystal cradled in a stag’s antlers rather than a metal ball.

  Beneath that seeming . . . it could be and do many things, and you could never entirely disregard the sheer presence of it even when it was quiescent. She’d often thought that it wasn’t really a thing of matter as most understood such things, but a thought in the mind of the Goddess made manifest in the world of common day.

  Now it let her sense . . .

  That’s sacredness, she thought.

  She inclined her head towards the peaks of the volcanoes and made the Old Faith’s gesture of reverence with the back of her hand to her forehead.

  As she did, images flashed through her mind: a great canoe’s prow grinding ashore on a beach of blinding white sand, its grotesquely carved figurehead alive somehow; a giant figure roaring in mirth as he wrestled with a huge eight-eyed bat; a man of stern kingly majesty raising a carved staff as his black hair blew around a tattooed face and the sea broke at his feet in a storm of terrible power; a woman of unbearable beauty whose eyes were the fires at the core of Earth, walking atop the surface of a river that ran with molten stone . . .

  But a sacredness that is not mine. Not hostile and not bad, but Powers fierce and wild and strong and . . . foreign. Stories I haven’t heard, walking the ridge of the world once more. The Change opened many doors, and the world is very wide.

  The warm moist air from the shore fluttered her long hair beneath its plumed Scots bonnet, locks yellow-gold with a slight hint of copper. It bore scents from the land, some homely enough from cooking and people, others spicy and sweet and wild, welcome amid the usual war-fleet smells of tar and smoke, bilgewater and imperfectly clean sailors and troops packed in too tightly and rancid canola-oil smeared on armor and blades against the corrosive salt of the sea-spray.

  And the overpowering stink of the horse-transports, which was like a badly-kept stable on a huge scale no matter how many times the bilges were flooded and the animals were put to work on treadmills pumping them out. Rank gave her a bubble of space on the warship to enjoy the contrast.

  Some of Hilo’s buildings were from before the Change, though none of the really tall ones you still saw now and then on the mainland, even in living cities like Boise or Portland. Those had probably been dismantled for their metal and glass, since without artificial ventilation and cooling they’d be even less practical in this climate than at home. More were new, and the great stepped stone platform in the middle distance was just finished, judging by the remains of bamboo scaffolding and hoisting cranes still being taken down. That was a heiau, a temple to the Gods who were worshipped here once more.

  Unlike all of the cities and many of the duns and towns and steadings she knew at home there was no encompassing defensive wall to make a sharp distinction between dense-built settlement and open countryside, despite the obvious technical capacity to build one. The plots around buildings just got bigger, until you could say they were small farms and country villas rather than houses with gardens, and they started to include pastures for cattle and horses and runs for swine.

  Which means they haven’t had war here lately, probably not since right after the Change; not great wars with massed armies and strong siege-trains, at least, Órlaith thought. Lucky them!

  There had been little peace in what was Montival-to-be until her parents and their comrades had brought the High Kingdom’s order with the Sword of the Lady. She had grown up among the veterans who’d fought the long grim death-grapple of the Prophet’s War across half a continent, starting with her parents, and there had been the wars against the Association before that in the time of her great, wicked maternal grandfather. Her generation had lived in a spreading peace, but the memories remained.

  The most familiar single sight was a massive modern fort on the peninsula to the westward where the maps of the ancient world showed a golf course, not much different save in details and decoration from the castles in the northern parts of Montival. An orca-shaped observation balloon hung high in the air above it, tethered by a long curve of cable.

  Form follows function, she thought. Everyone makes their wheels round and everyone puts a pointy stabby thing on the end of a spear.

  The towers there flew the bright striped flag of the Aupuni Moˉʻıˉ o Hawaiʻi, and as a courtesy the green-silver-gold banner of the High Kingdom of Montival and the Hinomaru of Japan.

  Órlaith knew that the kingdoms of Hawaiʻi and Montival had been friendly as long as they’d been aware of each other’s existence. Since not long before her father Rudi Mackenzie’s accession—as Artos the First—in the year of her birth, in fact. There had been a king again in Hawaiʻi well before that; since right after the Change, as folk turned to ancient things as an anchor in a world gone mad. Their current ruler, Kalaˉkaua II, was his grandson and only a few years older than Órlaith.

  But that friendliness had been confined to good wishes, resident merchants who doubled as ambassadors, growing trade and a little cooperation against the pirates and raiders who grew right along with the traffic they preyed on. Just exchanging messages at this distance was hard and slow, despite a more or less common language, and the chances of misunderstanding vast.

  It was a good sign that the vanguard of the fleet and army of Montival—frigates, smaller warships, scores of merchantmen turned troop-transports—had been welcomed within the long curving breakwater that guarded Hilo’s harbor. Many were already tied up at the wharfs, and boats and barges plied busily back and forth to the others. And there was other shipping here too, dozens of hulls and a forest of masts, the Royal Navy of Hawaiʻi and traders from here and around the world and others down to little fishing boats and outrigger canoes, all amid the raucous swarm of gulls and seabirds that marked a rich port.

  “I wish we had more troops ashore,” her liege knight—and aide-de-camp and Head of Household and childhood friend—Heuradys d’Ath grumbled beside her.

  Heuradys was trying to look everywhere at once without being obvious about it and preparing to be even more overburdened ashore, with the mixture of irritation and slightly self-mocking amusement of a hyper-competent person in a position where they knew full well no amount of competence could ever be enough. In a sense it was easier for Órlaith to ignore the prospect of assassins popping up with daggers in their teeth—or waiting with concealed crossbows and poison darts—than it was for those around her. All she had to fear was death; they had the much stronger terror of living long enough to know they’d failed in their duty.

  After all, the Crone comes for us all, soon or late, she thought. I don’t expect to make old bones myself, even if the Powers haven’t warned me about it the way they did Da. Either I’ll have children by then to take up the Sword, or one of the sibs will.

  Then she went on aloud: “We’ve got thousands of troops ashore,” she pointed out cheerfully. �
�And glad to be out of the transports they are. The horses especially, poor things. We’d have lost half or better if we couldn’t stop here to let them pasture and run, and the survivors would have been useless for weeks on the other side.”

  Heuradys snorted. “To clarify: more troops besides the ones in their shirtsleeves seeing the sights . . . and chatting up the better-looking locals . . . and trying to eat bananas without knowing how to peel them . . . and sucking rum out of coconuts in the shade of the palms . . . and frolicking on the beaches.”

  “The beaches are wonderful here. And the oceans. The levies deserve some time off after the voyage. Fair winds and a quick passage, but it was hard sailing at times. Four hundred cases of seasickness at the same time . . .”

  “Seawater warm enough to swim in! Athana witness, that’s just not right, proper or natural.”

  “You just want some company for your ironclad misery, Herry,” the Crown Princess said with a smile.

  Though to be fair most of Montival’s coasts did have an Arctic current running down them from Alaska; you had to go down near the ruins of Los Angeles before you could swim in it without a wet suit, and even there it wasn’t like Hawaiʻi.

  “That shirtsleeves remark was a blazon, so.”

  Heuradys was five-ten to her liege’s five-eleven, with tightly braided red-brown hair of the shade usually called auburn and catlike amber eyes, slightly older in her mid-twenties but with much the same leopardess build. She was also wearing full knight’s harness of white plate armor—hers was a titanium-alloy suit that had been a royal gift when she turned twenty-one and gained the golden spurs four years ago—with her visored sallet helm in the crook of her left arm and her teardrop-shaped kite shield slung over her back.

  “Oh, rub it in, Your Highness-ness, rub it in,” she said.

  In a staccato north-realm accent much like High Queen Mathilda; Órlaith had picked up the Mackenzie lilt from her father.

  Salt rivulets ran down Heuradys’ high-cheeked face, one with an underlying hardness but comely in a way blunter than her liege’s sharp-cut good looks. It wasn’t so very hot, no more than a warm summer’s day in much of Montival, but it was unrelenting and the air was very humid. This was the sort of weather that was pure comfort if you were lying naked save for a flower wreath in the shade of a palm tree and watching the surf. . . .

  While sucking a rum drink out of a coconut through a straw and thinking about a swim and then dinner, Órlaith thought.

  In armor . . . you sweated whenever you wore plate. Not so much from the weight, which was only about fifty or sixty pounds and less with one of these titanium-alloy marvels that only monarchs and great nobles could afford, and well-distributed over your whole body. But it and the padded doublet underneath cut your skin off from the air and trapped the body’s heat very effectively. You could manage to work up plenty of perspiration even in cold weather, and there were good reasons it wasn’t a very common style of protection in areas that grew sugarcane and breadfruit, starting with the risk of heat exhaustion. Órlaith had suffered enough in plate herself—she wasn’t a north-realm Associate like Heuradys but she was a knight and entitled to the golden spurs—to be glad it wasn’t necessary today.

  Besides her own bonnet with its silver clasp and the Golden Eagle feather that marked the totem of her sept, the Crown Princess wore a sleeveless shirt of saffron-dyed linen embroidered in green and blue at the hems, chased gold bands pushed up each arm, a pleated knee-length kilt and a fringed plaid pinned at the shoulder with a broach of swirling knotwork in silver and gold and niello and hanging behind nearly to the ground, both in the Mackenzie tartan, knit knee-hose, and silver-buckled shoes.

  The gear was not particularly martial and certainly not aristocratic. In fact, it was simply what Mackenzie clansfolk wore back in Montival, albeit of the sort you saw brought out on the festival days of the Wheel of the Year, not the set kept for mucking out a pigsty. Or the plaid you wore wrapped tight over a jacket to keep warm in the Black Months while you stood under a rain-dripping tree leaning on a shepherd’s crook and staring at sheep who were even more miserable than you were.

  But with the Sword of the Lady at your side, you never lacked for majesty; there was no need to stick a thumb in any Hawaiian eye by way of toploftiness to make them take notice.

  “I’d be saying it’s just pleasantly warm,” Órlaith grinned. “And by the Powers, doesn’t everyone know that a knight of the Association laughs at hardship as they do at danger?”

  Her friend made a slight sound that would have been a loud raspberry in less public circumstances; they’d always teased each other.

  Heuradys was properly respectful of the Sword, but not in the least intimidated by its presence, having grown up as much at Court as in her own family’s manors and castles. Her father Lord Rigobert was Count of Campscapell and her birth-mother Countess Delia was a leader of fashion in the Association territories. Her other mother Lady Tiphaine d’Ath was Baroness of Ath in her own right, and a commander of note who’d been Grand Constable of the Association for years and Marshal-Commander of Montival for even longer.

  “Ah, and here we go,” Heuradys said, watching the Hawaiian dock. “At last! I’ve already got the impression that driving, compulsive urgency is not the local vice of choice.”

  “Boiseans and Corvallans say that sort of thing about Associates, you’ll remember.”

  “Yes, but they’re just being prejudiced and tight-arsed; when we say it, it’s true.”

  A pair of stately barges rowed out from the largest Hawaiian wharf, the one reserved for their King’s vessels; they were decorated lavishly with flowers in colors ranging from brilliant white to a red so deep it was almost black. The one heading for her had the Montivallan and Hawaiian flags prominently displayed. The crew of the Sea-Leopard poured on deck and lined the rails to the commands of the petty officers.

  “To Her Highness . . . general . . . salute!” a bosun barked and then trilled out a call on his pipe.

  Hands snapped to brows, the old-style gesture that the RMN used. Órlaith returned Admiral Naysmith’s salute—and the crew’s through her—then put fist to her heart towards the national flag at the mizzen-gaff. A pair of trumpeters sounded a peal as she walked to the gangway—an extensible stairway with a rope rail that could be lowered down from quarterdeck to the waterline.

  “For Her Highness and Montival—three cheers!” the Admiral called, raising her fore-and-aft hat.

  The ship’s officers on the quarterdeck did likewise, and the crewfolk standing in rigid lines along the bulwarks lifted their plain round caps.

  “Hip-hip—”

  “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!”

  Órlaith gave a cheerful wave and took the first step. Her dog Macmac had been stretched out in the shade of a bulwark. He rose and padded over panting slightly as he fell in at heel—he was a typical Mackenzie greathound, forty shaggy inches at the shoulder and weighing more than she did, with a head like a furry barrel full of fangs and bright brown eyes. Macmac was too disciplined to frolic in public like this, but he was even more eager to get ashore than she. The close quarters were hard on an active beast his size, even with a run on the treadmill daily.

  In his way, he was a bodyguard as effective as Heuradys and didn’t have any other duties to distract him.

  “And sure, it would be beneath my dignity to climb down a ladder like common mortals,” Órlaith murmured.

  When you lived your life in public, which she mostly had since babyhood, doing and saying things because they had to be said and done, you learned how to talk so that you weren’t overheard. All the kin of House Artos had to be ready to die for the land and the folk to whom they were bound, in battle or at the hand of Fate when the Powers judged it was time that the King’s blood must be shed to renew the land.

  You also had to be ready to dance this dance of symbols and gestures, like it o
r not, and whenever she grew impatient with it she made herself think of all the other callings. A farmer didn’t necessarily think spending a day pulling and topping turnips in the cold mud and week-long drizzles of a Willamette November was better than mulled cider and apple-cakes with cream in front of the hearth, but it was necessary if humankind was to eat.

  Órlaith knew; she’d done it now and then. King’s work was just as necessary, so that farmers could sit safe by their hearths and reap what they’d sown in due season.

  “A ladder . . . That would be interesting for anyone who wanted to look up your princessly kilt, too,” Heuradys said dryly from behind her; she was, of course, wearing hose beneath the armor.

  “My underwear’s clean just this morning,” Órlaith replied in a tone equally pawky, and they both suppressed grins. “And my princessly arse is in very viewable condition, mark you. Nicely trim.”

  The Hawaiian crew of the barge were tall stalwart muscular young men, clad in loincloths and with the wraparound skirts that seemed to be the other main part of the local garb laid aside and folded as padding on their benches. Flowers glowed in their long hair and sweat sheened on the taut curves of their bodies; Órlaith and her knight both cast sidelong appreciative looks without being too obvious about it.

  And you have a lover the now who’s better-looking than any of them, and a man of wit and grace forbye, Órlaith reminded herself happily.

  Though she hadn’t seen Alan Thurston since they left Astoria, since he’d made the crossing on one of the troop-transports with his cavalry troop, and frankly missed his company.

  Soon, Alan, soon!

  • • •

  Am I mad? Alan Thurston thought.

  It was a thought that he often had during the dreams, and that flitted away like a dream when he woke, leaving only a shadow of unexplained fear to haunt his darker waking moments. He could remember that, with an odd detachment, remember so much more than he did when he was awake though he couldn’t, didn’t think about it . . . the knowledge was simply there.