Prince of Outcasts

by S. M. Stirling

  The staff took the remains out, and everyone sat. Fifi hid a smile at the Montivallans who very obviously looked to her and Pete to give them the lead. They’d probably been briefed on the unusually relaxed protocols in Capricornia but it was still doubtless a little unsettling to see the King grab a platter of barbecued Bangkok chicken thighs from a serving girl with a wink and start handing them around himself.

  At that point Sir Boleslav took off his coat and tossed it to the staffer who already held his sword-belt and a severely plain sheathed hand-and-a-half longsword whose guard had the battering and filed-out nicks of serious use. Then he undid the ties at the neck of his shirt, letting it fall open to reveal more of the corded muscle there and a scar that looked as if someone had tried to slit his throat and come remarkably close to success.

  “Da,” he said, in English that had a slight guttural accent. “In County Chehalis, we have a saying: among friends, wear the collar open, drink deep and speak truth.”

  “In this climate, you don’t need a collar at all,” JB said genially. “Get on the end of these bad boys. You got me this recipe book, didn’t you, Pete? From that joint I used to like back on the old Sunshine Coast.”

  Pete smiled and held up the back of hand to show off a thin, white scar; she wondered if he’d be pulling up his vest to show the one below his belly-button next.

  “Got you the recipe book, samples from the herb garden, and sixteen stitches for my trouble when we ran into a scavenger band on the Noosa River coming out.”

  “Pfft,” scoffed Fifi, snagging one of the bright yellow nubbins of meat. It was crisscrossed by caramelized scorch marks from the grill and dripping with sweet chili sauce. “It was barely six stitches and Julesy grabbed the herb samples because Pete’s botanically illiterate. He watered a plastic fern on our boat for three months before we told him what he was doing. If you’d trusted him to salvage your barbecue herbs he’d probably have brought you back a toilet deodorizer shaped like a plastic pinecone. We have to keep him off that Station we bought because the grass goes brown if he steps on the place.”

  Captain Russ and Commander Chong shared a brief uncertain exchange of glances until both Pete and JB roared with laughter; Sir Boleslav joined in, booming as if his usual venue was under a bridge waiting for billy-goats Gruff.

  “That fucking plastic fern.” Her husband chuckled. “Man, I was so proud when that thing didn’t die.”

  The King used a linen napkin to wipe grease from his fingers and most of the smile from his face. Only a trace remained, but it did linger for a while.

  “I reckon Julianne told me that story half a dozen times, and we laughed longer and louder with each telling,” he said, sighing out the last few words.

  “To absent friends,” Captain Russ said, raising his glass.

  “Absent friends,” they all replied.

  Pete and JB clinked their enormous beer bottles lightly together. Boleslav killed his and reached for another from the bucket of ice; it nearly disappeared in his spade-shaped paw.

  “So,” Fifi said, pointing her fork at the label—it showed a crudely-drawn saltie biting a fishing smack in half. “Does this have anything to do with that monster? And anything to do with Pip?”

  More staff, who were never referred to as servants in this most unusual of Realms, arrived with the main course. Silver platters—salvaged from the reliquary of Melbourne Library, again by the crew of Diamantina—were piled high with seafood. Enormous, bright orange lobsters, freshly shucked oysters as big as your fist (which, frankly, made Fifi want to gag), sashimi-grade tuna, beer-battered reef fish, garlic prawns, spicy mussels, long golden chains of flash-fried octopus rings and—wonder of wonders—salt and pepper Dungeness crab; this last, a small miracle performed entirely for the benefit of their visitors.

  Captain Russ blinked at the crab, deftly winkled some of the meat out and ate it.

  “Wonderful,” he said. “My mother used to make it like this.”

  The Montivallan knight was digging in with a blissful expression, casually cracking lobster-claws in his fist.

  “Like a feast on my family’s estates on Vashon Island, Your Majesty!” he said to JB. “Only with new types of fish.”

  Fifi had no idea how the Royal kitchens had sourced the Dungeness crab. They sure as shit hadn’t Fedexed an aquarium overnight from the Pacific Northwest.

  Just the King of Darwin working his mojo, isn’t it? she thought. Keeping the world guessing.

  “It may have something to do with your young protégé,” Russ said to Fifi and Pete. “It certainly has a lot to do with that . . . crocodile thing.” He looked at the crab again. “Extraordinary.”

  Oh, you hazarded the cruel seas and high adventure for six months to join us? Here, have a little reminder of home.

  If there was one thing that you could rely on at the Palace here in Darwin, it was a good meal and a gentle reminder that they were walking with the King.

  His Majesty started in directly as he tore open a crab claw and worked out the meat, stuffing it into a freshly baked baguette slathered with avocado butter:

  “Captain Russ got the saltie up in the Ceram Sea,” he said. “He was following a Montivallan ship, the Tarshish Queen, Moishe Feldman’s boat. Feldman was being naughty.”

  Fifi and Pete looked at each other. The Ceram Sea was where Pip had been heading, and had vanished off the face of the earth a length of time ago that was making them both profoundly nervous.

  “We’ve dealt with him, and his dad too. Feldman senior was the first American . . . pardon me, Montivallan . . . in here since the Blackout. Moishe’s a chip off the old block; hard enough to crack fleas on and the devil’s own bargainer, but honest,” Pete said cautiously. “Likes seeing somewhere new as much as he likes a profit, and he really likes a profit. Bit of a blood desperado, when you come right down to it.”

  JB laughed raspingly, almost coughing up a chunk of crab meat. “Takes one, eh, Pete?”

  The Montivallan naval officer blinked at the exchange and went on: “We were actually chasing the two Korean warships. Who were chasing Captain Feldman,” he said. “He hadn’t actually done anything illegal. Not technically illegal.”

  “We are bloody experts on being not technically illegal,” Pete said; which was true and a good placeholder too. “Koreans, eh?”

  The Holders exchanged another look and JB nodded soberly to it. The gaslight danced on his liver-spotted pate, which was shining with sweat in the humidity. Post-Blackout Korea was a black hole; nothing that went in came out, and sometimes it stuck out a pseudopod and absorbed passers-by. That was a major reason nobody much went that far north, not even when tempted by the prospect of salvage in Tokyo.

  Also while the surviving Japanese weren’t exactly utterly hostile—ships of the Darwin & East Indies Trading Company had touched there briefly a couple of times—the locals certainly didn’t like gaijin making free with their ruins, and they and the Koreans were mixing it in all the time. The three of them had discussed a salvage run amongst themselves more than once in the old days, and always managed to talk each other out of it. Their eyes went wider as Captain Russ explained what had been happening in Montival and how the Koreans had been involved.

  “Montival isn’t going to let the killing of our High King go unpunished,” Russ said. “And we’ll have allies.”

  “Kim Il Fuckwit is certainly getting big eyes, not just raiding the Japanese and the Chinese coasts anymore,” Prince Thomas said. “We got complaints about that from the Luzon people at the Regional Security Conference. And more and more ships are going missing up in the Ceram Sea, beyond what the Suluk were always up to. The Timorese were on about it; we thought it was just their old blood-feud talking, but . . . I don’t know if there’s a connection but I don’t like coincidences.”

  His father nodded vigorously and swallowed an oyster with a squeeze of li
me, looking at the Montivallans as Russ went on:

  “We’d found a couple of empty barrels floating with the Feldman & Sons mark and thought we were close on their track, just between North Sulawesi and Malaku,” Russ said. “Then we saw a little smoke. It was one of the Korean ships, burned to the waterline and breaking up. Firebolt, I’d say; the Queen has eighteen-pounder bow and stern chasers, and an eight-catapult broadside of nine-pounders and knows how to use it.”

  The Holders both nodded, knowing what thermite could do to wood if you placed it well and the receiving ship’s damage-control wasn’t on their toes.

  “The other one had foundered and turned turtle, but it was still floating even though the keel was awash.”

  Wooden ships were extremely hard to really sink, as long as any air remained trapped in them at all. The material they were made of was inherently buoyant, after all. It took a full hold of water to pull them down.

  “We took a prisoner, one of the Eaters they’d picked up in the ruins of Los Angeles, who was lying on the keel. He was the last one, and he’d gnawed most of the meat off his left forearm.”

  Fifi thought for a moment before remembering the term Eater; in Australia they were usually called zed or Biters.

  “He was mad . . . well, probably mad even before what happened, and dying. We gave him a little water and asked him some questions . . . they speak English, of a sort. All we could get was teeth, teeth, teeth in water. I thought he was talking about the sharks at first, there were plenty of those about.”

  Chong, his second-in-command, spoke: “I was looking at the hulk, trying to see what had taken her out. There was a chunk on the starboard bow that looked as if it had been ripped loose, deck stringers snapped and pulled out from the ribs and hanging knees. Not round-shot damage, I know what that looks like. This wasn’t anything I’d seen before. And we found this stuck in the wood.”

  She drew a curved tooth out of a pocket; it was thick as paired thumbs at the base, and as long as her palm was broad. Fifi had no doubt at all it would fit right into the gap in the big skull’s grin.

  “From the look of it, that damned animal bit a great big chunk out of the ship. Probably tried to get aboard—”

  Fifi thought about the image that put in her mind and her eyes went still for a moment. Adventure was all very well, but . . .

  “They can jump half their length out of the water like someone shot them out with springs,” she said softly. “Half of thirty-six feet . . . that would be enough to get right on the deck. And five fucking tons dropping on it wouldn’t help at all. Like a randy elephant trying to mate with the bows. They’d be fucked for sure.”

  Pete waved a bottle of the beer. “This label’s based on something that really happened, too. Those jaws can shear wood like a hydraulic saw.”

  The Montivallan nodded. “Then the weight on the deck forced it down enough that the water flooded her forward, maybe her ballast shifted and then she capsized. It wasn’t a very well-built ship and it had probably taken storm damage before then.”

  Her Captain took up the tale. “So that was when we decided to investigate the place all the gulls were circling. The crocodile . . . saltie, you say . . . was floating belly-up, bloated with gas. We were lucky, a few hours more and it would probably have sunk for good, the sharks were at it. We weighed it when we winched it up on a boom; just under five tons.”

  Boleslav laughed harshly. “The ancient stories say knights slew dragons with sword and lance. That one, even if I were a bogatyr of old like Dobrynya Nikitich, I would be glad to use a catapult. From a castle tower, hey?”

  Pete closed his eyes; for a moment she was worried the dinner and the wine had sent him off to sleep again. Then he frowned in a way she recognized; he’d been watching a movie of alternatives behind his eyelids.

  “The Koreans were chasing them; Moishe wouldn’t have run if he thought he had a chance in a sea-fight,” he said. “So something happened to change the odds.”

  “The saltie happened, to one of the Koreans at least,” Fifi added.

  “Right. So Moishe whipped around fast and gave the other one a broadside, maybe it was damaged already too, and set it afire. It’s what I would have done in his shoes. Then he shot the saltie and ran for it, which he could do on a different course since they weren’t bracketing him anymore. Which was why you lost him, Captain. He’s a tricky bastard, and he couldn’t be sure that the two after him were the only problem. Lot of places to hide, up in the Ceram.”

  Captain Russ spread his hands. “We hope that’s what happened. I would really rather not have to go home and tell the High Queen that her eldest son was eaten by a giant crocodile eight thousand miles from home.”

  “While we were cruising about nearby,” Chong added.

  “Giant accursed crocodile,” Captain Russ qualified.

  “Accursed?” Pete asked. “You getting technical there?”

  Fifi tensed. Over the years, they’d both met things that couldn’t be explained by the pre-Blackout logic they’d grown up with. JB snapped his fingers, and called out over his shoulder:

  “Hey, bring in those bolts, wouldja? And the bracelet.”

  Two of the staff came in. One held a pair of catapult bolts, and the other a covered tray. Fifi looked at the bolts with interest and Pete put his glasses back on. Both were the sort launched by a medium-weight military or shipboard catapult; one was broken off, and had a thick hardwood shaft with a hand-forged head, a three-sided pyramidal one heat-shrunk onto the oak. The other was solid forged steel, swelling to a four-sided point and with three brass fins brazed on the base and subtly curved to spin the projectile in flight. She’d killed a Biter in Sydney with a bolt like that once. Literally blew him to pieces.

  Yeah, good times.

  “The steel one is Montivallan made to our Navy specifications, and we think it was what killed the beast eventually. Manufactured in Corvallis, Donaldson Foundry and Machine marks. Almost certainly from the Tarshish Queen; Feldman and Sons buy from them exclusively. The other’s unfamiliar but we assume it’s Korean.”

  He licked his lips, obviously reluctant. “And this was around the crocodile’s . . . arm. Forelimb. Whatever. Very close to where the Korean catapult bolt hit, it may have struck it in passing.”

  The cloth was drawn aside, and instead of the macadamia and chocolate tarts they’d been promised for dessert, it held what was obviously an armband.

  “Our chaplain advised us not to touch it if we could avoid it, Sir Peter,” Russ said quietly.

  He crossed himself; so did Sir Boleslav, though from right to left rather than vice versa; Lieutenant-Commander Chong touched a small amulet, nephrite jade carved into a mandala. JB rolled his eyes; he was an old-fashioned atheist. But nor did he reach for the thing, Fifi noted. She had an aversion to the tub-thumping Christianity that had afflicted her childhood, but apart from that had never wasted much time worrying on such things. She had a child’s faith in the Lord, and a lifelong conviction that He didn’t bother meddling in the business of anyone so far beneath Him as her.

  The Royal family—and the rest of the Holders—were Buddhists, which was common enough in Darwin, if not the rest of Capricornia. And Pete had always declared himself a Buddhist so lazy that he intended to pursue enlightenment when he got around to it in the next life . . . or three.

  “I have to assume . . . very reluctantly . . . that the crocodile attacking the ships wasn’t an accident,” the Montivallan said gravely. “I have tried to think of some normal explanation for a five-ton carnivorous reptile engaging in a fight to the death with three armed ships. I cannot. Can anyone here?”

  None of them spoke, or moved to touch the armband, and she noted the servant—sorry, the staffer—wore thick leather gloves entirely inappropriate for the local climate. The band seemed composed of some ruddy metal, probably aluminum-bronze cast from salvage. On it was a
broad circle of some glossy black material, and inlaid on that was a three-armed triskele, with curved writhing arms coming from a central knot. The material was almost certainly fairly high-carat gold, but she thought she wouldn’t have tried to pry it out even when she’d been working salvage herself, rather than running the largest salvage company with Warrants to the dead cities of the Australian coast. The impact of the bolt had scored right across it, for which she was obscurely glad.

  “There’s one good thing,” Prince Thomas said thoughtfully. Everyone looked at him, and he went on: “It attacked the Korean ships. Which means our enchanted saltie isn’t enchanted with Kim Il.”

  “A point, Your Highness,” Russ said. “We also spoke with some local small craft, those long double-hulled things with the odd sail plan. . . .”

  “Prau,” Pete replied automatically. “Or proas.”

  “They hadn’t seen the Tarshish Queen, or at least couldn’t describe her—I was surprised that any of them spoke English at all.”

  The Capricornians all chuckled. “Lot of traffic through here,” JB said. “We’re the big entrepôt now. And our ships get all over. There’s ships from the rest of Oz too, come to that, and the Kiwis. From New Singapore too, and they speak English . . . well, Singlish.”

  Russ nodded. “Ah, a lingua franca. They did say several ships of conventional pattern had passed through within the last few months; one of them was a three-master with a shark-mouth painted on the waterline—”

  “Holy shit!” Fifi blurted; that was the Silver Surfer, Pip’s ship.

  “They were quite cooperative . . . well, they were looking at our broadside . . . until we showed them the crocodile’s skull and the armband. Then they screamed—quite literally—something like Pulau Bintang Hitam!”