The Sea Peoples Read online

  “You did what you must,” Órlaith said. “The enemy were strong and had fell powers of their own to command, and the outcome of the battle was uncertain. Many who walk the ridge of Earth today would lie stark if you had not. John and myself, it might be, and you, and all the hopes of our peoples with us.”

  But I miss you, Johnnie, and I fear for you.

  She couldn’t let worry for him consume her day-to-day; that would be as much a breach of duty as running away in battle. She needed her unhindered wits about her, and that required a balance in the soul, not grieving memories of toddler-John stumping around chortling or crying over a broken toy or even being an annoying broody spotty-faced brat at thirteen, convinced he was a musical genius and that nobody understood him and (to his credit) wondering whether girls really liked him or just his rank.

  But sometimes the fear and sorrow returned, strong and harsh.

  How do you fare today, my little brother?

  CHAPTER THREE

  KERAJAAN OF BARU DENPASAR

  CERAM SEA

  NOVEMBER 15TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

  “Where is he?”

  Lady Philippa Balwyn-Abercrombie—Pip or Cap’n Pip to everyone here—kept the panic out of her voice with an effort of will that felt as if she was squeezing her own throat shut with both hands. Running around screeching would not help. Then she stood back and let the professionals dig for a moment. And Evrouin, John’s valet-bodyguard, who kept at it grimly, using his glaive as a lever to get debris out of the way.

  She was sweating in rivulets with the usual damp heat of Baru Denpasar added to tons of flaming hardwoods ignited by napalm shells, the salt stinging savagely in her cuts and scrapes and scorches and plastering strands of her tawny hair to her face and neck, turning her white shirt and shorts black as her boots and suspenders and steel-lined bowler hat and streaking the tawny light-gold tan of her naturally fair skin. Smoke made her cough, and turned the spittle black when she spat aside. Pip sucked eagerly at the canteen her second-in-command Toa handed her, the two-liter bottle looking tiny in the big Maori’s huge, tattooed brown hand, and wiped at the black mascara running down from the circle drawn around one eye.

  The burning central tower of the Carcosan fortress had collapsed in the moment of victory . . . but John couldn’t be just gone. Even if he’d been crushed and burned, a big young man in full plate armor couldn’t just disappear. . . .

  Could he? The things I’ve seen since I got here . . .

  Other bodies had been there, dead or wounded, and more over the rampart where the Baru Denpasaran forces had stormed the wall, and more still in the open ground below where catapults and arrows and then spear and parang had done their work. Enough to hide the ground in places for a dozen yards at a time. Stretcher-parties from the victors were bearing their wounded back to the field hospitals in the siege camp, while others gave the mercy-stroke to the enemy hurt.

  Neither side in this war took prisoners; not for any good purpose, at least.

  There was a thick stink lying over the whole bowl made by the earthwork walls of the Carcosan fort, of the bad-cooking smell of burning and burnt human flesh from the tower and a chemical taint from the rain of napalm that had set it alight, the coppery salt of blood like the time she’d visited the municipal slaughterhouse outside Townsville. And the shit stink from the thousands of bodies slashed open in the fight or smashed open by catapult bolts and prang-prang darts and great burning net bags of cantaloupe-sized rocks from the trebuchets that had burst in mid-air and come down like endless lethal hail on the heads of the enemy formations massing to resist the attack.

  And already a hint of corruption, the rot so quick in this hot jungle valley far from the sea-breezes, and a buzzing of innumerable flies.

  The humid, hazy air overhead was filling with red-winged, white-breasted kites and crows and birds of prey not too proud for pre-killed food, though they were going to be frustrated as the Baru Denpasarans were digging mass graves with their usual beaver-like energy. She wasn’t squeamish by nature and she’d been in fights before. But that had been mostly at sea where the clean ocean swallowed the results, and never on anything like this scale. Fortunately, she couldn’t take the time to pay attention to the full apocalyptic horror of it.

  Prince John had not only been beneath the fragments of the tower when it fell. He’d vanished.

  I’ve got to stop thinking that. It’s getting repetitious and it doesn’t do a bloody thing.

  The pain of her own numerous but minor hurts was utterly distant. Pip felt her mind gibbering in shock, which was a rare experience for her so far in her twenty years on earth. Absolute self-confidence was her inheritance on both sides. From her mother’s distinguished, if also severely raffish and dodgy, English aristocratic blood; Mummy had been in Australia eluding the bailiffs because her father had gotten caught in some roguery or other shortly before the Blackout hit. And Pip’s own father was heir to the Colonelcy of Townsville, a King in all but name—and there were rumors he was planning to correct the name when her granddad finally released his iron grip on life and her father took over.

  She knew he’d had a crown designed and kept it in a safe and took it out and looked at it sometimes when he thought nobody was watching. That would have bothered her much less if she thought he thought she was capable of holding it on her own without some prestigious man about the place. Despite the fact that she seemed to have stumbled upon a very prestigious young man indeed . . .

  Two thoughts went through her mind:

  This is hitting me so hard because I’m more in love with Johnnie than I thought.

  She’d known she was falling for him as well as being instantly and seriously in lust, but she’d never thought of herself as a sentimental woman . . . even when she’d still been a girl. Mummy hadn’t encouraged it, and she had been about as sentimental as a cat herself. Granted that John was tall and handsome and had big soulful brown eyes and nice hair and plenty of musical talent and a nicely off-beat sense of humor and was not boring and was inventively unselfish in bed . . .

  Deep beneath that, in anger and rage and unacknowledged fear:

  Bugger this sodding nightmare of an island! I can’t say I wish I never came here, but it’s close. Maybe England wouldn’t have been that bad—it was the family home from 1066 on and all that.

  She’d left her family’s country estate . . . run away from Tanumgera Station in the dead of night with half a dozen of her father’s best racing camels and her late mother’s old retainer Toa and sundry other knickknacks including but not limited to her adventurer mother’s prized pair of kukri-knives . . . because her father was bound and determined to send her off to Court in Winchester, on the other side of the world in the capital of the Empire of Greater Britain to acquire some minor Windsor royal for stud purposes. The knickknacks had been fair and just recompense for . . .

  Daddy being such a fussbudget about winding up Mummy’s will early, as if twelve months on a calendar made a real difference when I’m obviously an adult now and should have the trust funds and the Darwin and East Indies Company stock.

  She’d gotten possession of the neat little armed schooner Silver Surfer in Darwin with some of those knickknacks, which had included the models and plans for rapid-fire Townsville Armory catapults that King Birmo of Capricornia had been very very tangibly and materially pleased to get. Plus a bit . . .

  Just a teensy bit . . .

  . . . of sort-of-nepotism from her mother’s old and now rich and respectable (or as respectable as anyone got in freewheeling Darwin) partners-in-crime from her days as a seagoing not-so-quasi buccaneer, salvager (royally licensed), explorer and trader-at-catapult-point. Uncle Pete and Aunt Fifi were always ready to help, and she suspected it was as much the fact that she reminded them of their younger selves as her mother’s memory.

  And she’d gained the respect of the
crew she’d recruited from the dockside dives by her own efforts, by showing she could do the job. And by personally and very publically whaling the stuffing out of a few convenient fools who thought they could treat the rich girl as a joke. Then it had been off to the romantic wilds of the Ceram Sea, to make a killing in quasi-legal high-risk and high-return frontier trade and do something herself, with the pitch of her own quarterdeck under her feet to fulfill a thousand childhood dreams born of her mother’s stories. And Aunt Fifi and Uncle Pete’s even more lurid versions, since they’d never been constrained by English understatement . . . and they’d probably been more accurate, too.

  So that Daddy would have to take me back on my terms, if I wanted to go back to Townsville at all. It is a stuffy sort of place.

  Such a promising start, before they’d been trapped here on Baru Denpasar until the Tarshish Queen sailed in with John aboard . . .

  Bugger that. And bugger losing John! If he was dead, that would be one thing, but he’s not. I just got him and I’m not giving him up, not even to the refugees from a bloody bad horror novel running that pink-coral abomination they call Carcosa!

  She forced herself back to her feet as the rest of the Montivallans came up. Even if you were young and very fit, a day like this made you feel like a grandmother. The two she was interested in were nearby anyway, and had been dodging the chunks of falling tower along with the rest of them. Deor Godulfson was staring, his gray eyes looking . . . as if he was seeing things that might not be there.

  And perhaps he is.

  The wiry black-haired bard was wearing a blood-splashed mail shirt and carrying a red-dripping broadsword, but his primary occupation was what his eccentric little homeland in what had been called California called being a scop, musician and minstrel. She’d heard him perform fluently in any number of styles including ones she’d never heard of. He was very very good—as good as John but with a great deal more experience and single-mindedness. Among his people that also meant being some sort of medicine man, evidently; they took the Magic of Art thing rather seriously.

  His companion—they were the same age and sort of platonic life-partners and had been since their teens apparently, since she liked men and so did he—was Thora Garwood. She was a rangy handsome red-haired woman in her early thirties in a suit of plate armor subtly different from what John had been wearing, one with a face-on snarling bear’s head in dark reddish brown on the breastplate. She was also absently cleaning her long single-edged, basket-hilted sword with a cloth; fighting was her specialty, and she was terrifyingly good at it.

  Fortunately she hadn’t wanted to fight over John and they’d come to a mostly-unspoken understanding, though Pip still walked warily around her. In Pip’s already fairly wide experience absolutely nobody liked you for stealing their boyfriend, even if they’d been planning on parting ways soon.

  Deor frowned. “Why haven’t you taken Prince John up?” he said. “He’s injured!”

  “Because we can’t bloody find him!” Pip snapped. “Can you?”

  “But—”

  She’d meant the question rhetorically and sarcastically, yet Deor was staring at a spot where two of the huge smoldering timbers lay crossed, leaving a space between them. The clutch of armored Montivallan crossbowmen—from something called the Protector’s Guard back in their home—had already been through there with fanatical thoroughness, and were spreading out around into less and less likely spots, while their commander Sergeant Fayard sat with his splinted leg outstretched cursing them on and cursing the local doctor who was finishing up on it.

  “Oath-sister?” Deor said, in that rhythmic accent that made everyday speech sound a little like chanted poetry.

  “I can’t see a thing,” Thora said, sheathing her sword. “But you can?”

  He caught her right hand in his and—

  “There—” he dropped to one knee, fumbled at something on the ground.

  No, above it, as if someone was lying there, Pip thought with a chill mix of terror and hope.

  She felt her vision blur as she glimpsed a ghostly shape beneath his hands. A helm came suddenly into focus as he eased it upward and tossed it aside, a flare-necked Montivallan visored sallet with the stubs of ostrich plumes still in the holders at either side that she recognized instantly. It was chrome steel and had been burnished like a mirror only a few hours ago . . . and had been on John’s head as they went up the scaling ladder. An instant later his four-foot kite-shaped shield was there too, lying as if it had been lying across his . . .

  That’s John! He’s curled up under his shield!

  Chills ran up her spine despite the damp heat and the sticky sweat that never dried here.

  Something’s making me not see him. Bloody hell. It’s adventure if you’re reading about it back in Townsville. Here it’s . . . bloody hell.

  Carcosa’s evil name wasn’t just because they and Baru Denpasar fought over this island. The Balinese conquerors who’d founded Baru Denpasar in the first year after the Blackout had been desperate and ruthless themselves and like so many others they’d been self-exiled and looking for a new home to feed their families. The passengers and crew of the sail-powered cruise ship turned corsair vessel South Sea Adventure had been perfectly ready to help them fall on the locals here with fire and slaughter and take some of the spoils in return, rather than face a voyage back across the Pacific to a homeland in even worse condition because it had more big cities and fewer peasants who knew how to grow food without machines.

  With infinite local variations, things like that had happened all over the world in those years of chaos and blood, as nations died and new ones rose from the ruins and adventurers carved themselves kingdoms at the sword’s edge. The consequences were still echoing down the generations.

  What had happened when the captain of the Adventure stumbled across . . . something . . . in the interior years later had been very different, by all accounts. He’d come back to his little pirate sub-kingdom as something very much other, and soon his followers were too. The Baru Denpasarans were much more numerous, but that . . . otherness . . . had more than compensated.

  Back in Oz this sort of thing was rumors, mysterious happenings in mysterious places, people in the far Outback wandering into the Dreamtime, or exotic islands or some underground temple or the usual unverifiable miracles people had always talked about. I had to go and find out for myself, didn’t I just!

  They called the former Captain the Yellow Raja now, from the color of the rags that always encased him in public. Nobody saw his face, or had for decades, if it was the same man . . . or, according to some speculations, if he still had a face. His chief henchman was called the Pallid Mask, from what he wore. They’d renamed their ship the Hastur and their stronghold as Carcosa. Things had gotten worse from there.

  Deor eased back on his heels, stripped off the glove from his left hand and held it, palm down, a foot or so above the ground, then began to move it back and forth. As he shaped John’s invisible form, it began to solidify. Deor grasped Thora’s hand, pressed it downward.

  “His skin is clammy,” she murmured, experienced fingers searching for wounds with her eyes slitted, almost closed. “But the pulse is there.”

  “Bloody hell!” exclaimed Pip, crouching opposite him. “When you touch him, I can see, but before . . . I saw rubble, and my eyes . . . just slid away. I can feel them trying to slide away now. It’s as if someone was saying nothing here, don’t look at the back of my mind.”

  “A seeming, and a wicked one,” Deor said, sliding back into a sitting position and cradling his head in his hands. “Wicked and strong. Woden, lend me wisdom!”

  Pip set her hands on either side of John’s face, smoothed back the sweat-soaked hair.

  “He’s solid enough, but so cold!” Her fingers went to the throat under the jaw. “And his pulse is steady, but slow.”

  “He’s not
bleeding that I can tell,” murmured Thora. “Maybe a blow to the head?”

  The sallet helm bore several dents and dings that had not been there before.

  “A coma?” Thora went on. “I’ve seen them, from head injuries.”

  “He breathes, but he doesn’t feel unconscious,” said Pip. “Even when he’s asleep, you can feel that he’s there.”

  For a moment the two women’s eyes met, and Pip felt the sudden vibration of shared awareness between them.

  Thora was frowning. “Is the armor shielding . . .”

  “No,” said Deor. “You know how a dead body feels—an empty sack of meat in the shape of a man. This is something like that, not quite as bad, but nearly. John’s body is breathing, but—”

  Deor put his hand to John’s forehead again: “His spirit is not there, the thing that makes us what we are. Not asleep, not even the deep sleep that comes of a blow on the head. It’s gone, gone elsewhere. There’s a link, but it’s faint. And—”

  He jerked the hand back and seemed to slump, taking a shuddering breath.

  “—and it has gone to no good place. We may have his body, but the enemy has still taken him prisoner. This is less of a victory than we thought.”

  Thora took a deep breath of her own and got to her feet, looking around her.

  “Well, wherever his soul is wandering, we need to get his body out of here.”

  Evrouin’s swarthy face had gone grayish-pale as he stared at the Prince’s suddenly visible body and murmured a Latin prayer; then he crossed himself, shook his shoulders like a dog coming out of the water, and helped them strip off John’s armor and clothing. In the background Fayard was yelling at his crossbowmen, who scrambled back to glare in bewilderment at the man lying where they knew nobody was, then faced outward in a defensive circle. Most of them crossed themselves first, amid a mutter of Catholic prayers in Latin—she was Anglican Rite herself, and used to hearing them in her own language.