“Ahoy there!”
He recognized the musical tones in the voice as the big schooner came near despite the distortion of a speaking trumpet and water purling back from its sharp cutwater; that was First Mate Radavindraban, who’d been born a long, long way from Montival.
“Who comes?”
He’d asked the man why he’d left home, and he’d shrugged and answered: Most unreasonably angry bloody-minded bloody Raja, Your Highness.
“Prince John and party!”
The ship slowed in the simplest possible way, turning directly into the wind and letting itself be what sailors called taken aback. It stopped in its own length . . . if you didn’t count the violent pitching up and down, accompanied by sailorish cursing from the crew trying to deal with the effect of the drastic measure on the rigging. The shadow of the hull fell over them as they approached, and the crew threw a net over the side to lie flapping against the thin sheet metal anti-flame sheathing that covered the Douglas fir planks. The Queen was a big ship but not enormous, a three-masted topsail schooner of about four hundred and fifty tons displacement, and a bit over two hundred feet long from fantail to bowsprit. The rail was only a little more than a tall man’s height above the waves.
“Permission to come aboard!” John shouted.
“By all means, Your Highness,” the Captain called from near the wheel, a slight irony in the flat, neutral and rather old-fashioned Corvallan accent.
“Send ropes too!” he shouted to the deck crew; his parents had taught him never to take an avoidable risk. “Everybody use one and secure yourself first, that’s an order!”
The Bosun up above shouted her own commands, which boiled down to lines for the dimwit lubbers. Lines duly came whirring down, with loops on the ends. He took one gratefully and snugged it up under his armpits, slung his shield and jumped to the netting. One armored foot slipped, sending his stomach twisting and lurching even if the only real risk was getting his feet wet; a sabaton made your foot rather rigid, for all that it was articulated, and the motion of the ship slapped the net against the side at unpredictable intervals as he swarmed up hand-over-hand. One of the tests for knighthood—if you were knighted in peacetime, not on the battlefield with a bloodied sword slapping you on the shoulder—was hauling your armored self up a twenty-foot rope using only your arms. He’d probably gotten the opportunity to seek the golden spurs rather young because of his high birth, but nobody got to fudge the results, if only because it was all done in public.
John waved to the Captain, but turned immediately to make sure Sergeant Fayard and his guardsmen were coming up safely, lending a hand here and there. Ishikawa’s contingent came over the other side as if they were strolling up the path to their homes, and immediately headed for two of the portside catapults; the Tarshish Queen had eight a side plus her stern and bow-chasers and the Nihonjin sailors had trained on them coming south, getting used to the differences between these and the similar-but-not-identical models the Imperial Navy of Dai-Nippon used. The crews of those two nodded thanks, then split up to bring the others closer to full complements.
Thora and Deor waited a moment and then came in where John’s boat had come alongside. He took the loop of rope he’d used and tossed it accurately to her; she sent her saddle up on it first, then looped it under her arms as he had before she stood and leapt, and he pulled her up hand-over-hand while she held the line in an experienced rappeler’s grip and fended off the side with her booted feet.
“Thanks, lover,” she said as she turned and caught Deor’s wrist. “Up you go, brother.”
Thora and Deor weren’t actually related; their birthplaces were almost exactly half a thousand miles apart. They’d just been comrades and very close friends for half their lives, starting when they’d been younger than he was. They came at his heels as he trotted quickly up to the quarterdeck; the owner was rapping out a series of orders, and the ship heeled sharply as it fell off into the wind and the sails cracked taut. The pitching motion gave way to a long smooth rocking-horse gait.
“Mission accomplished, Captain Feldman,” he said. “Except for those Korean ships in our way. My sister says you should cooperate fully with the Stormrider and her Captain, and we’re here to reinforce you.”
“Captain Russ RMN commanding,” Feldman said, looking southward at the frigate. “We’ve been playing dodge-’em and I don’t think he’s very happy with me. He couldn’t shoot when we slipped away like a wet watermelon seed . . . but I think he very much wanted to.”
He grinned as he said it; he was a slender dark man in his mid-thirties, black-eyed and black-haired and with a single streak of white in his close-cropped beard over a scar, dressed with plain practicality in a peaked sailor’s hat over his kippah and brass-buttoned blue coat and pants and soft-soled boots. He stood for a moment with his thumbs in the belt that supported his cutlass, tapping his fingers on the walrus-hide. Then he turned to his signaler:
“Run up Prince aboard, Crown Princess ashore and will conform to your movements,” he said.
“Aye Aye, Cap’n.”
The signal hoist went up, worked by a sailor universally known as “Rat” McGuire, for his face and general attitude. Feldman turned his telescope on the frigate.
“Acknowledged,” he read. “Brief. My, my, Captain Russ is in a temper. He’s actually not a bad sailor . . . for an Astoria man.”
Astoria was the main port for the southern Association territories, just within the dangerous bar at the mouth of the Columbia; Newport was Corvallis’ sole seaport, linked to the inland capital of the city-state by a busy rail line. Their rivalry went back well before the High Kingdom.
Then he turned to John: “This situation is unstable, your Highness. May I ask why the Princess and the rest of your party didn’t accompany you?”
John hesitated, then told him. Feldman whistled slightly between his teeth before he spoke.
“Magic swords and wicked sorcerers. I don’t suppose they’re more dangerous than catapult shot or storms, but . . .”
“I grew up around a magic sword, Captain. This . . . What they brought back out of the desert . . . it’s most definitely the genuine article.”
“Like the Sword of the Lady?”
Feldman’s voice was dry. He acknowledged the force of the thing the Quest had brought back from haunted Nantucket; you couldn’t see it and not do so, especially if you were a Montivallan yourself. That didn’t mean he had to like the fact that in the modern age such things walked abroad in the light of common day.
“Not exactly. It’s more . . . more for battle. They have . . . other Sacred Treasures . . . for some of the things the Sword of the Lady does. Kusanagi is more purely a weapon. It’s a symbol of the ruler as Power. The power to protect and to punish; symbol of it, and the thing itself too. And it scares me silly.”
He shook himself and returned to things less mysterious, to their mutual relief:
“Who’ll win if it comes to a sea-fight?” John said.
“A close-run thing, given all those savages they’ve picked up.”
“They can’t storm the shore,” John said, and Feldman nodded.
“Right, we’d move in on them,” the Captain said.
“And the Crown Princess and the locals could just pull into the mouth of the canyon there. It’s fortified.”
“They must be planning something else,” Feldman said meditatively.
“Perhaps,” John said, and then smiled. “Or perhaps they’re not as clever as you, Captain. I’ve noticed that extremely smart people tend to assume that there’s a deep-laid plan when they may be facing blundering incompetence. My grandmother the Queen Mother Sandra said she had to watch that tendency in herself, and she only had to walk into any room on Earth to be the smartest person in it.”
Feldman chuckled, but grimly. “Ordinarily you might be right. But the things we’re fighting . .
. they’re not stupid, worse luck.”
“True, but a lot of their followers are dumb as a knapsack full of hammers,” John pointed out. “I think it goes with the territory. I’ll eat you last isn’t really a recruiting slogan to attract the intelligent.”
Feldman gave him a considering look, and then a respectful nod. John was flattered . . . and slightly annoyed. If you were a young, handsome prince with an eye for the ladies and artistic inclinations people tended to assume you were a lightweight, for some reason. Nobody ever thought that about Órlaith, she was always taken seriously . . . though to be fair, Órlaith had never underestimated him. She knew he was perfectly capable at anything he put his mind to; she just thought he was lazy, and was always shoving work onto his plate like a second helping of boiled broccoli.
Feldman turned his telescope towards the shore again. Time stretched. He’d noticed that happened when things got tense. A while ago, in fact—the same thing happened at tournaments, or before a performance, but never quite like this. Some of the younger sailors—younger than him—were looking a bit anxious, peering shoreward. Some of the others were relaxed enough that there was a quiet game of skat going on behind one catapult, though he’d have bet himself that the grinning woman who was raking in the pot had been the one who started it.
One of the bits of barracks wisdom Evrouin had taught him was that you generally did a lot better at cards if you were focused and the other players weren’t.
“Hello,” Feldman said. “Something’s going on there. Boat going ashore from the Korean flagship—just one. White parley flag . . . no, and that’s a Japanese flag it’s flying too.”
John’s eyebrows shot up. Reiko and her followers had made very clear that Dai-Nippon and the realm that called itself Chosŏn Minjujŭi Inmin Konghwaguk were deadly enemies. Chosŏn was ruled by the descendants of the man who’d run the northern part of that country before the Change. He’d been a spectacularly bad ruler then by all accounts, managing to starve his people even in the abundance of the ancient world, and he’d brought himself and his immediate followers through the chaotic aftermath of the Change by eating their enemies—not to mention many of their subjects. That had opened the way for certain things from beyond the world of common day; extreme evil often did, and his descendants had become far worse as they spiraled down that trap. They’d been raiding Japan’s less numerous survivors ever since, too. He had a strong impression that the grimly warlike cast of the Nihonjin was a result of that long merciless struggle.
John stretched out a hand. Evrouin put his binoculars in it, and he leveled them. It was surprisingly difficult to keep them trained on the shore from a moving ship, and the way the picture swayed and pitched made his stomach swoop in sympathy for a moment before excitement drove it out of his awareness.
“Reiko’s coming down the road to meet the ones under the Japanese flag. . . . Two of them are in Nihonjin armor, whoever they are,” John said. “She’s got Egawa and six of her samurai with her. Mother of God, but I wish I could hear what’s being said. . . . Wait a minute. . . . That weird little kid she picked up at the castle in the desert is there . . . The Koreans are attacking! They’re fighting!”
He opened his mouth to say something more, then gave a quick gasping grunt. Something had punched him in an entirely non-physical way that still felt like a paralyzing blow to the pit of the stomach. The Sword of the Lady had been bared, and then thrust into the living flesh of Montival, the land it had been created to embody and protect. John could feel that protection spreading, like a skin of invisible steel rooted deep in the bones of Earth.
What came next was a hurricane wash of flame. For a moment he drew breath to scream as his skin was flayed off, then realized that there was no pain and no heat. Feldman and a few of the sailors were looking at him oddly. Deor wasn’t; he’d stumbled to his knees, and Thora was beside him with an arm around his shoulders and stark concern on her face.
“Kusanagi has been drawn in anger,” he said, or Something spoke through him. “Amaterasu-ōmikami’s daughter takes the Grasscutter Sword to war.”
Feldman was frowning slightly, but no more than that. As if he was mildly frustrated that things were happening which might involve him in a deadly fight at any moment. There were things that being of the High King’s line gave you; he wasn’t at all sure that they were advantages, though.
“Captain, something very bad is going to happen,” John said tightly.
He hadn’t known exactly what he was going to say until he’d said it, but when he had it rang with the brazen inevitability of utter truth.
Feldman nodded cautiously. “With those mamzrim”—he inclined his head towards the Korean warships—“I’m not surprised.”
John swallowed. A good deal depended on his being very clear. Including my life, he thought.
And while he was good with words, he usually wasn’t talking for his life. Fortunately he wasn’t the only man of words on the ship.
“He’s right, Moishe,” Deor said; he and the Captain had first met when they were both in their teens and were good if not exactly close friends. “The Prince doesn’t mean bad as in evil. Just . . . terrible. Something terrible is about to happen, not wicked, but powerful and very dangerous to anyone who gets caught in it. Like an earthquake or a storm.”
The word the scop used tripped something, and suddenly John was very certain. “Storm! There’s going to be a storm!”
Feldman looked at him, waiting. He swallowed again, conscious that his life, all their lives, might depend on what he said next.
“Kusanagi . . . the Grass-Cutting Sword was named after a battle where a Japanese prince used it to turn a blaze back on its makers. It commands the spirits of Fire and Air . . . what they called it before then was Ama-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi. The Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven! A fragment of the sun embodied in the world of men. Like . . . like a flail of flame and wind. And the Sun drives the Earth’s tempests; even the ancients knew that much.”
Feldman met his eyes for a long moment, glanced at Deor’s face gone pale under its weathered tan, then nodded slightly, a single quick jerk of the chin. Then he turned to his First Mate:
“Mr. Radavindraban, strike all sail. Storm canvas only. Batten down around, and have a sea anchor ready to go over the stern. Lively, if you please. McGuire, signal make storm preparations to the RMN ship.”
The deck officer called out instructions through his speaking-trumpet. Sailors exploded into motion. The catapults were uncocked and doubled tarpaulins lashed over them. The sails came down at a run, all but the narrow triangular staysails that ran from the foremast to the bowsprit, and the crew lashed the furled canvas round and round with lengths of rope tied with complex knots. The hatches were battened, which turned out to mean putting heavy tarpaulins over them too and hammering home hardwood rods in grooves to keep them there. Everyone else went below, except Deor and Thora; both of them had years at sea, if not exactly as sailors, and they’d shown on the voyage down from the Bay that they knew enough to be useful and not get in the way. Thora murmured as she worked:
“Fair-footed father of Freyr and Freya,
Wave-rider, winning us wealth from the sea,
Shielder of ships, send us good fortune,
Hear us and help us to prosperous harbor,
Bring us a blessing, oh brother of Nerthus,
Pledge of the Vanir, by our prayers be pleased
In Noatun, Oh Njordr, Know Now Our Need.”
John knew he and Evrouin were on the quarterdeck because of his rank, not for anything he could do except take up room and pray, which he was doing silently.
But I gave the warning. That was something worthwhile.
“And rig manropes—everyone on a line,” Feldman went on. “Everyone but the deck watch below, but warn them to be ready to hook on when or if they’re called up. The Lord alone knows if Captain R
uss will pay attention, but we tried.”
Radavindraban looked up at a sky still calm, at the masts, then at his employer. “Double the backstays, Captain? Preventers?”
It took a moment before John realized he meant putting extra ropes between the masts up at the top; he knew that was a major job. Feldman was looking at him again . . . and the feeling of pressure was building, building. Whatever was going to happen would be soon, very soon. He shook his head.
I’m sort of the hero if I was right. If I’m imagining things, I’m the goat.
“No, Mr. Mate,” Feldman said. “Yes if we had time, but we don’t. Proceed with orders.”
The whole process of readying the ship took mere moments. John watched with fascination; he was used to masses of people moving in quick unison—everything from the Guard on drill to dances—but this had a grimly utilitarian flavor. Everyone was acting as if their lives depended on doing the right thing quickly, which it very probably did, and they trusted their skipper’s alarm even if they didn’t know why he was giving the orders.
A quick inhalation of breath brought his head up. The sky had been blue and streaked with a little high white cloud. John blinked, uncertain for a moment of what he was seeing. Then the Captain’s incredulous grunt told him that it wasn’t an illusion; the clouds were thickening as he watched, the skies darkening. Streamers of wolf-gray appeared, turning, curving as if an invisible giant spoon was stirring. . . .
Suddenly the sky northward was covered, bulging downward in a blackened rush like a huge hand rising over the Santa Monicas. Rising like an avalanche of flaying wind. Lightning crackled within the clouds and between cloud and earth, its actinic blue-white suddenly very bright in the darkening day. Each stroke seemed closer, and he could feel the small hairs on the back of his neck trying to stand erect.
Prince of Outcasts Page 3