The Sea Peoples Read online

  Pip knelt beside the fallen man and as Deor held his head slowly, carefully dribbled a little water into his mouth; you had to be very cautious getting someone to drink when they were unconscious because it was so easy to get water into the lungs.

  “You’ve found him!” said a lilting voice full of relief. Then sharply: “Don’t move him! Let me past!”

  That was young Ruan Chu Mackenzie, one of John’s Montivallans from the Tarshish Queen—hence the joy—and Deor Godulfson’s boyfriend. He wore a kilt, had an accent that was almost a parody of Irish speech, and altogether seemed implausibly Celtic for someone from what had once been the United States and who obviously had at least one Chinese grandparent judging by his looks and the Chu part of his name. But Pip knew odder things had happened since the Blackout—what they called the Change where he came from.

  More important, he’d been trained as a medic, what his people called a healer, as well as an archer. He unslung the baldric that held his yew longbow and quiver and set them aside as he knelt at John’s side and gave him a quick, competent once-over that included taking his blood-pressure with a little kit from his haversack.

  That made Pip reassuringly confident of John’s physical presence again. He was her own age, just twenty, broad-shouldered and long-limbed, four or five inches taller than her five-six, with brown hair and green-brown hazel eyes that showed as Ruan’s thumb pushed back an eyelid. His pleasantly smooth features were just losing the last of the adolescent puppy fat.

  But she was also acutely aware of how the personhood was gone, that lively sense of humor and the ear for music and the ability to see the absurd that had delighted her and were somehow there in potentia even when he slept. Now even their shadows were gone from his face, and he hadn’t had enough years to groove them into skin and flesh.

  “Nothing! Pulse slow but normal, and the pupils contract, and that evenly. Sure, and it can’t be a concussion,” Ruan said. “His skull is sound as a bell, see?”

  “You’re right,” Deor said.

  “And head wounds bleed,” Ruan added.

  They all nodded without thinking, having plenty of experience. They did, like bastards, even if they weren’t serious at all. The skin under the scalp was full of blood vessels, and even without a cutting edge they broke easily if a blow hammered skin against bone.

  “I can’t feel any place where the bone’s depressed, either, and it’s not spinal damage,” Ruan said. “It’s not a healer of bodies he needs, but a bhuidseach.”

  Seeing Pip and Toa uncomprehending, he translated: “Bhuidseach. Spell-wreaker, one who walks with the Powers. Like Deor. This thing with the Prince is ill-wreaking, not the natural course of things on the ridge of the world as wounds and illness are, but a bending of the shape of things. Sent of a living will to harm.”

  Toa grunted thoughtfully; Pip swallowed. Her Uncle Pete had been fond of pre-Blackout adventure stories of a type she privately called Men with Swords and Things with Tentacles after something her mother had said. She’d read a few from his collection herself on visits to Darwin and found them amusing, though often wrong about how swords were actually used.

  She sincerely hoped they were as wrong about the Things and their appendages, but you could never tell.

  Then Ruan grabbed a pair of passing stretcher-bearers. They came willingly enough, since the foreign allies were popular. The whole Baru Denpasaran army knew that it was the catapults of the Tarshish Queen and the rapid-fire prang-prangs from the Silver Surfer and the knowledge of siegecraft that came with both that had made it possible for them to take this fort without crippling losses. And the fort squatted on the main water channels to the rice paddies of the western half of the island. It had been a hand around their throats.

  In the final assault, besides their Raja Dalem Seganing’s name, as a battle cry the locals had shouted: For the food our children eat! as they charged home through the killing ground and over the ramparts in an unstoppable wave of desperate and merciless ferocity.

  The agile and nearly-naked Baru Denpasarans with the stretcher negotiated the tumbled remains at the top of the fort’s outer wall nimbly, amid the shattered smoking timbers of the palisade and the churned-up earth. Then they brought their load down one of the heavy metal-shod siege ladders that had been flung up against the sloping surface of the earthwork, adroitly enough that the unconscious man’s body would have stayed on it even without the straps across chest and thighs. The surface was firm beneath their feet, since spade-like shoes on the bottom and long curved crowbeak spikes at the top nailed it to the surface of the earthwork where they’d first been flung against it.

  “And you—” Thora gripped Deor’s arm and hauled him upright to help him along. “You aren’t much better.”

  Deor shook his head. “Wherever the Prince went, it . . . draws. Draws strongly.”

  “Drink this!”

  She handed him her canteen of sweet tea and he gulped at it, coughed, drank again. Pip took something from Toa and nearly choked as it turned out to be a flask of arrak this time rather than water, distilled from the sap of borassus-palm flowers. Aged in halmilla-wood casks for years it could develop subtle flavors; Uncle Pete and Aunt Fifi’s Darwin and East Indies Trading Company had a warehouse full of it that they called Mendis Brandy and shipped all over Oz with profit for them and delight for the purchasers.

  Nobody had bothered with aging this very recent batch of the local white lightning, and it was ninety proof. It didn’t taste of anything in particular except vaguely turpentinish and it hit her empty stomach like a napalm shell, and went from there out through her veins. For a moment she could feel those veins, as if her body were outlined in a threadwork of fire.

  “Did I ever tell you how I met your mum?” Toa rumbled quietly under the cover of her coughs. “And Pete and Fifi?”

  “Not the details,” Pip said.

  She knew it had been on the North Island of New Zealand, on a salvage trip to the ruins of Auckland in one of the last runs the three of them had made together on the old Diamantina. After that the Darwin and East Indies Trading Company had become a major player and they’d been reduced, against their wills, to mostly directing other people’s voyages.

  The South Island of New Zealand had come through the Blackout years rather well, being mostly rural and not having any cities bigger than modestly-sized Christchurch. The northern half of the island nation had held Auckland, the biggest city, on the northernmost peninsula and the old capital of Wellington at the southern end. Between them they’d taken down most of the rest, and grim things had happened there until the southerners finally got around to taking the place in hand and resettling it. Not as bad as around, say, Sydney—not nearly as bad as near London or Tokyo—but bad enough to finish off most of the people near the cities or the roads between them, and if you died the disaster was personally fairly total.

  She took another swallow, a modest nip this time, and handed it back. The Maori tilted it back and let his Adam’s apple flutter before he screwed the cap back on and tucked it into the pouch on the elaborate woven belt-and-loincloth arrangement that was all he wore besides a cloak of feathers on a linen backing. He had the mass to soak it up easily, being six-foot-six, a brown block of three hundred pounds of solid muscle covered in writhing tattoos from head to foot, interrupted by plentiful dusty-white scars, his stiff graying black hair drawn back in a bun through a carved bone ring at the back of his head.

  His gargoyle face frowned and he used the heavy Macassar-ebony shaft of his eight-foot spear like a walking staff as they followed the stretcher-bearers; the long palm-broad steel head had already been scrubbed clean and tended with file and hone. Toa was fairly casual about most things; she’ll be right was a saying he’d taken to heart. But weapons and gear weren’t among them and he could move with a speed and grace astonishing in so huge a man.

  “Well, let’s just say your mum a
nd Pete and Fifi didn’t just save me life. There was something like this—”

  He nodded forward at where Prince John’s form was being manhandled down the slope.

  “—that was part of it. Proper mess, and I don’t remember all the details . . . never did. But enough, enough. That’s why I never wanted to head back to ol’ NZ. Well, that and those bleedin’ Paˉkehaˉ from Christchurch running all over it trying to civilize us years and years after we could have used some real help. Civilize us again.”

  Below, John’s soldiers—the dozen crossbowmen of the Protector’s Guard in their battered half-armor—were forming up around the stretcher, their faces anxious under a stiff discipline. As Pip understood it, John stood to inherit the position of Lord Protector of the PPA through his mother, while his eldest sister Órlaith took the Throne of the High Kingdom as a whole; and they were specifically his guards, part of an elite unit with all the usual sworn-to-the-death oaths and so forth.

  “Let’s get him back to town,” Pip said. “And then we’ll see what Deor can do. I’m not letting this one go, Toa, old boy, not if I have to sacrifice goats to the Great JuJu and dance naked by the light of the New Moon to get him back I’m not.”

  “Too right,” he grunted. “Want to see you settled for your mum’s sake, promised her and all.”

  More softly: “And . . . straight-up, because I wouldn’t leave a bloody crocodile in the sort of place I think he may be stuck.”

  • • •

  “Hail!” Deor Godulfson cried. “Hail, Moishe! Over here!”

  Moishe Feldman greeted them not far from the gates of the city of Baru Denpasar, almost unnoticed in the roaring crush of celebration as flowers flew in multicolored rain from either side onto the—now stalled—column of victorious troops, less the militiamen who’d peeled off to their villages on the way back. His left arm was still in a sling; he’d taken the wound in the sea-fight when the Tarshish Queen arrived in the harbor nearly sinking, and the Carcosans swarmed out to attack her.

  Deor gripped his good hand wrist-to-wrist, glad to see that the olive-tanned face looked better than when they’d departed even if there was a sprinkling of new white hairs in the man’s close-cropped black beard. An arrow through the arm was no joke, even if it didn’t hit anything that wouldn’t heal eventually.

  “Good to see you, old friend,” he said.

  “And you and Thora, safe back from battle. Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam, hagomel lahayavim tovot, sheg’molani kol tov.”

  They’d known each other off and on for more than half their lives, since Feldman’s father’s ship had found shelter in Albion Cove, the fishing village on the coast of the Barony of Mist Hills; shelter from a storm and from a three-thousand-mile running fight with a brace of Suluk corsairs who’d jumped the Ark off Hawaiʻi, the first outsiders to visit since the Change.

  “The ship’s sound as new,” the Corvallan merchant said.

  He meant that literally and knowledgeably; his firm sailed out of Newport, Corvallis’ window on the Pacific, and his family had hands-on investments in the shipyards there. He’d seen the Tarshish Queen grow from builder’s plans and fresh timber.

  “Provided we can get our catapults back and keep the . . . steel ship . . . off somehow, we can head home,” he added.

  The quick dark eyes grew thoughtful as Deor told him what happened, and the more so as he came to the two-wheeled carts that held John and their other wounded.

  “I can’t help you with this,” Feldman said.

  Deor nodded; the Law by which his friend’s people lived forbade them certain arts and knowledge; anything that smacked of seidh.

  “What I can do is tie up the Raja’s people in negotiations,” he said briskly. “We need to keep this very quiet until the Prince is . . . better.”

  “Too right,” Toa rumbled. “They think anyone who gets the Evil Eye put on ’em by you-know-who may be working for them on the quiet afterwards and the only sure way around it is to scrag ’em. Pip and I trust you can do the needful for Prince Johnnie, mate, but they wouldn’t.”

  Pip nodded vigorously. “My ship?” she said.

  “Ready to go,” Feldman said. “Down to fresh sails and cables in the lockers; and the Raja loaded that cargo he promised you—and my goodness but it’s tasty. My First Mate saw to it with your helmsman and had her towed to a berth next to ours.”

  Pip nodded, which didn’t surprise Deor at all. First Mate Radavindraban of the Tarshish Queen was very competent.

  “Your quartermaster Kombagle knows everything there was to be known about stowing a hold properly,” Feldman said. “Even if he looks a bit . . . alarming.”

  Pip snorted. “You mean the asgras and boar’s-tusk through the nose?”

  Deor frowned. “Isn’t that the way his people dress?”

  “More of a caricature of a Papuan warrior,” Pip said.

  “By way of a statement, you could say,” Toa rumbled. “You can square ol’ Dalem S?”

  “For a monarch, the Raja is . . . relatively honest.”

  “Do you think you can keep him from getting too inquisitive, Moishe?” she said.

  “The Lord willing and nothing too drastic happens over . . .”

  His head went eastward though you couldn’t see Carcosa’s ramparts from here.

  “. . . there.”

  Then he patted the well-worn hilt of the cutlass where it hung by the side of his brass-buttoned blue coat.

  “I’ve dealt with pirates and with kings, I think I can keep him talking; and he’s not barefaced enough to steal our catapults after we just won the battle he hired them for. Just . . . get this finished as fast as you can.”

  He looked down on John’s motionless face, put a hand to his own forehead, and recited softly:

  “Mi Shebeirach avoteinu v’imoteinu, Avraham, Yitzchak v’Yaakov, Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel v’Lei-ah, hu y’vareich et hacholim John Arminger Mackenzie. Amen.”

  The folk of Baru Denpasar lined the road to both sides, and Raja Dalem Seganing’s elephant glittered in its coat of jeweled mail, turning to a blaze in the sunlight on the carved gilding of the howdah. There were elephants in the expeditionary force’s train too, but they were at the rear . . . probably because Tuan Anak Agung, the commander of the little army, had originally been accompanied by what the locals called Pedanda, a High Priest and Priestess of their people’s Hindu faith. They’d ridden on one of the elephants . . . and they’d been killed by Iban mercenaries working for the enemy in a night raid.

  And I think that may have been to clear the decks for this . . . abduction of Prince John, Deor thought.

  Deor also thought that Anak was a competent man of war, but that he was very, very worried about how his ruler would balance the loss of his holy man against the admittedly crucial victory.

  The Tuan dismounted from his horse and knelt in the dust of the road, bowing his head before the elephant and the figure in the howdah and holding his ivory-hilted parang-sword across the palms of his hands. The elephant trumpeted again, and the mahout tapped it with the goad. It sank down into a kneeling position—rather imposing since the beast was of an African breed and twelve feet at the shoulder—and Raja Dalem walked down a sort of extensible ladder-stair that let down from it.

  “Courtesy of Uncle Pete and Aunt Fifi and Mum,” Pip whispered. “They shipped the elephants of Oz—feral zoo stock. Twice.”

  Deor nodded, knowing the story. That had been necessary because the original shipment to Bali had mysteriously disappeared . . . courtesy of the South Sea Adventure, back when its owners had still been fully human and merely piratical.

  The Raja was a slight-built man in his sixties, but the human being nearly disappeared behind a towering crown of gold fretwork and golden leaves, a jacket of black silk riotously embroidered in threads of precious metal and jewels, gold-and-emerald earrings, a
nd a sarong of shimmering batik. Guardsmen only slightly less gorgeous shaped up around him; Tuan Anak looked dusty and plain beside them.

  The Raja took the parang from Anak’s hands, and the crowd’s noise died away in a ripple as those who could see passed on the news, as if they were holding their collective breaths. Then he reached behind him and took another weapon, similar but with a blade of watermarked steel and a hilt fancy even by the standards of what he was wearing, and presented it to the warrior.

  The crowd’s roar rose again, louder than ever, and Tuan Anak rose and bowed deeply as he tucked the mark of favor into his sash.

  Kings will forgive a good deal, for victory, Deor thought.

  “And that’s my cue,” Feldman said. “I’ll handle the Raja. Now get him to the villa and get him back for us!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  KERAJAAN OF BARU DENPASAR

  CERAM SEA

  NOVEMBER 20TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

  Deor sighed, looking down at the body on the snowy cotton sheeting of the carved teakwood bed, stripped and washed and dressed in a light cotton robe.

  “Not injured at all,” Pip muttered. “But . . .”

  No one was counting the chafing and scrapes and bruises that mottled the fair skin. That was just the cost of doing business when you fought in full plate, and better than the alternative.

  They’d politely rejected the offer of Raja Dalem Seganing’s personal physician; luckily victory had the Baru Denpasaran court preoccupied enough that they weren’t suspicious and Feldman had stepped in smoothly. Even giving the servants here leave to go join their families for the ceremonies of thanks and the riotous celebrations you could just hear in the distance over the whisper of the palms shouldn’t arouse too much comment. The folk of Baru Denpasar hadn’t seen any outsiders save enemies in two generations now; few remembered the world before the Change. Perhaps the foreigners were kind, perhaps too grief-stricken that their Prince was badly injured, perhaps both and who could say?