And on yet another hand, I can’t imagine Thora screaming and crying. Bashing and beating, yes, screaming and crying . . . no.
He wrenched his mind back to what Pip was saying. Evidently Australia was even more of a mess than his home continent with introduced animals spreading chaotically. Eventually things would balance out, God willing.
“JB gave them some help because he was looking into taming them too and wanted to be good mates with Bali. To hear Mummy and Auntie Fifi describe it, catching them was an epic and getting a ship rigged to carry them was even worse . . . And then it just disappeared off the face of the sea and they had to do the whole thing again to meet the contract, which ate the profit to the last penny.”
“The beasts ended up here?” John said. “That’s where the ship went?”
Pip nodded. “So they tell me. The South Sea Adventure caught them and brought them here, and then handed them over to His Majesty’s dad because they couldn’t figure out anything else to do with them except eat them. They made that sort of goodwill gesture occasionally before they . . . altered. And the climate here suited them.”
John chuckled, but he was more interested in the weapons laid out in the open workspace. Six of them were from the Tarshish Queen, the bow and stern chasers and a half broadside, and six were prang-prangs from Pip’s Silver Surfer. Ishikawa stamped over for one more inspection of the field carriages whose construction he’d supervised.
He’d been put in charge of that project on John’s recommendation, since the Imperial Japanese Navy designed their shipboard weapons so that they could be transferred to knockdown field carriages in a few minutes. And he was an engineer with experience in the construction of war machines of all sorts and field entrenchments and sieges, all things Japan did to a high standard and the Kerajaan—that meant roughly “kingdom”—of Baru Denpasar did not.
John had done his best to get Ishikawa to be tactful. Apart from suspecting outsiders in general, the locals retained specific, lively and unpleasant memories of campaigns the Empire of Dai-Nippon had waged in this neighborhood about a century ago, two generations back before the Change. There had been fingering of keris knives amid mutters that included the words Orang Japon and spitting on the ground.
Even without knowing a word of the local language he was pretty sure that absolutely nothing in those comments was a compliment or an expression of comradeship. He’d talked a little with Reiko and her countrymen about the history while they were traveling together back in Montival, and their version of that period was that Japan had been attempting to bring peace and prosperity to Asia as an act of selfless generosity when jealous, malicious outsiders viciously attacked them. They’d been tactful enough to say outsiders rather than just Americans.
All depends on your perspective, I suppose, he thought. It’s history, emphasis very much on story part.
“These dancing barbarian monkeys!” the Japanese officer said as he walked up beside John with his left hand on his katana.
He was rather obviously doing a breathing routine to control his temper. Ishikawa was sort of spontaneous compared to his compatriots John had met, and he was still self-disciplined enough to make the Montivallan prince feel like an impulse-ridden slob.
“Your Highness, I would not trust them to build a treadle pump. Or dig a privy properly!”
I’m glad he said it softly. I don’t think the Raja is the only one here who speaks English. And it’s interesting the way we’ve been promoted from barbarian monkey status in Captain Ishikawa’s eyes. Not that the Nihonjin ever came right out and said it to our faces in our own language, but you could tell back in the beginning that they were surprised we took baths and didn’t fart and scratch our backsides at the dinner table or smash our faces down into the food like dogs. I like them, but they’re a bit . . . insular. Maybe because they haven’t seen or dealt with foreigners except at the sword’s edge for generations, and at home all their people do things pretty much the same way.
Feldman was looking at his catapults impassively. As he did he worked the fingers in his injured arm in a set of exercises Ruan and the healer on the Queen had agreed would help the return of strength and flexibility.
“Full recompense for any combat damage, Captain, and repairs for the Queen at the locals’ expense, as well as a full cargo for your metals,” John said. “The Raja agreed.”
The merchant smiled and shrugged, carefully because his left arm was still in its sling. There didn’t seem to be much damage to nerves or tendons or any infection, but you didn’t recover from an arrow through a limb in a week, or two.
“Thank you, Your Highness. Though even if there’s no financial risk I don’t really like loaning weapons in a longshore quarrel. Fully justified in this case . . . but I don’t like it. I’m not a man of war by natural inclination. Trade benefits all parties; politics, not so much.”
“I don’t like what they may do with ’em, skipper,” his Bosun said. “To ’em, more like. They need tending, these beauties. They’re more delicate than they look.”
She was in a wheelchair, with her bandaged thigh propped up on a folding rest, and her rather lumpy weather-reddened face was wrinkled in a knot of worry.
And maybe when we’re gone they can get her to stay in the hospital, he thought.
Ruan was pushing the wheelchair; he looked up at John and he knew the young Mackenzie shared the thought. They had quite a good house of healing here. This wasn’t a backward country.
The Captain of the Tarshish Queen sighed and spoke: “It’s makeshift, but it’ll do.”
Ishikawa sucked air between his teeth. “Captain-san, your weapons are excellent. But these carriages . . . there is too much wood and not enough high-quality steel, just this hand-shaped rebar. They weigh twice what ours do and are much less strong.”
“The trial firing went well enough,” Feldman said.
Ishikawa shook his head. “For a few rounds, yes. But hard use could shake them to pieces in the field.”
“They’ll do for the one mission,” John said. “It’s not as if this were the Prophet’s War.”
At Ishikawa’s slight look of enquiry he specified: “It’s not as if we were going to haul them a thousand miles from Portland to Corwin and gallop them cross-country in battles and fight for years at a time.”
Instead of saying: You, my friend, are a perfectionist, but The Best can be the enemy of Good Enough. This is what we’ve got, and the Raja is contributing the best he has.
Ishikawa was a perfectionist, a hard intelligent man of unbending duty. Feldman was knowledgeable and decisive and deeply thoughtful; Pip was ruthlessly opportunistic and fearless; Thora had a natural aptitude for the details of war honed by experience all over the world starting when his voice hadn’t begun to break; Deor was good at understanding and communicating and could do . . . things. All of that was actually very reassuring.
Because he suddenly seemed to be in charge of all the outsider contingent, due to his birth and local expectations about it. It was deeply comforting that there were people he could consult who actually knew what they were doing.
Remember, John—project confidence. Even if you don’t feel it. Especially if you don’t.
* * *
They set out at dawn of the next day when there was still a faint breath of coolness, though he was sweating heavily in his half-armor already and as always here the sweat just stayed there, marinating. There were crowds, cheering and making bowing gestures with their palms together and throwing flowers behind rows of the Raja’s soldiers acting as crowd-control with their spears held horizontally, and he waved back.
An enemy they fear and hate with very good reason has taken something they need for their very lives, and we’re going out to get it back. No wonder they’re cheering! Though I suspect they’re cheering their own people more than us. Which is entirely natural; you love your own more than even the friendliest st
rangers, that stands to reason, there would be something wrong with anyone who didn’t.
There were fifty mounted lancers with helmets and round shields and light torso armor of small plates and mail in their party, and several times that number of footmen with spears and bows marching in good order, everyone who could be spared from keeping watch on . . .
You-know-what, John thought uneasily, carefully not looking eastward.
. . . across the bay; the plan was that the reserves here would march out and keep the Carcosans from sending reinforcements inland.
All had their keris knives, and a slightly curved hook-hilted sword-like chopping thing with a broad blade about thirty inches long called a parang, worn in a horizontal sling. There were also six elephants with huge pack-saddles and nets of cargo in boxes and bales, each with a mahout astride its neck. The great gray beasts loomed over the cavalcade, all at least ten or eleven feet at the shoulder, and the ground shook a little as each immense padded round foot came down with five or so carefully placed tons behind it.
And that crocodile was about the same weight. This is a very pretty part of the world but it’s too interesting for comfort! I prefer it where there are only tigers and grizzly bears to worry about.
Various servants, laborers, ox-carts and hangers-on ate the dust behind, but not too many given the size of the operation. Beneath infinite differences of detail, it wasn’t altogether unlike a similar movement in Montival.
Pip handed him her canteen, which was ancient aluminum covered in modern cuirboilli worked in odd angular animal-shapes and full of well-water cut with lemon and lime juice. He drank deeply, savoring the way the slightly acid bite cut through the feeling of gummy thickness in his mouth and throat even when it was lukewarm.
I’m not exactly hungover, but then, I’m not exactly not hungover, either. And she and I didn’t get much sleep last night, even after the feast ended. My God, how does Pip do it? She looks as fresh as a . . . well, not a daisy. Hibiscus, maybe, she grew up in tropical Townsville. I wonder how she’d like the Black Months back home? Maybe I can arrange it so we get there in spring. April and May in the Willamette are lovely, and it’s blossom season in the Duchy then.
“You’re going to have to watch that you drink enough water, darling,” she said solicitously. “You look quite yummy when your skin’s wet with sweat, but it’s really pouring off you already in those steel-crawfish togs.”
John nodded, thankful he was on horseback—though he’d spent hours getting acquainted with the little horse he’d been given, which was used to different signals.
“Unless you’re standing still in the shade you get hot and tired quickly in plate. Even if you’re very fit,” he said. “You can get actual deaths from heatstroke if you’re not careful. And it’s a lot worse here than anywhere I’ve ever been before.”
“That’s probably why we don’t go in for it in this part of the world,” she said. “Mind you, it was extremely Lancelot-ish back in the battle in the harbor. Very impressive!”
He grinned. “You were even more so, given that you weren’t wearing anything but street clothes and other people’s blood.”
“These aren’t just my clothes. This is a costume. It’s a statement, rather! Very Old Country, very droogish, you know.”
A chuckle, and she looked at him with a charming sidelong glance. “I got the look from an ancient magazine that Mummy had in her collection. About a . . . film? Movie? Whatever they called them.”
Fayard and the Guard crossbowmen looked hot in their armor too, and glad that they were riding to the fight instead of marching; everyone in the Protector’s Guard had to be a good horseman even if they went into action on foot. There were parties from the crews of both the Silver Surfer and the Tarshish Queen to handle the catapults and prang-prangs and Captain Ishikawa’s half-dozen sailors marched behind his horse, striding along in a rolling toes-out pace with their naginatas and bows over their shoulders.
All the commoners were also looking a bit crapulous and worse for wear to start with if you paid close attention; the lower-class feast laid on to send the troops and sailors on their way had been a lot less decorous than the court version for the officers, and that had been lively enough. The sun was coming up eastward, but he spared only a single glance at the way it turned the coral limestone of Carcosa a deeper, more bloody red. He suspected few people contemplated the beauty of sunrise here.
“Who are those?” he asked quietly, nodding to the seventh elephant riding near the head of the procession.
That one had a howdah framed in intricately carved and inlaid teak and ebony, shaped like a small one-room cottage. The sides were curtains of gauzy cloth, but he could see the pair within—a man and a woman, both aged and distinguishable mostly by the man’s thin white beard, both wearing fantastic jewelry over shimmering pale clothing and drum-like hats covered in wrought-gold plaques.
The commander of the lancers was in overall charge of the expedition, but he’d been very deferential indeed to that pair. Anak Agung was a blunt-featured man in his thirties with a wispy close-cut beard and mustache, universally addressed as Tuan, lord. He’d lost the tip of his nose sometime in the past, and his hand rested on the use-smoothed ivory and gold hilt of the parang slung horizontally across his armored stomach as if that was the only place for it; his bare arms were corded with muscle and showed thin scars. When he drew the weapon to gesture his troops forward the blade had a swirling pattern in the steel, layer-forged and then acid-etched. It was as fine an example of the bladesmith’s art as John had ever seen, but you could see where nicks had been filed out of the edge.
Highborn warrior in his prime, he thought. Knows his work, tough, experienced, intelligent; his weakness would be arrogance. If he’s that elaborately polite to the old lord and lady, they’re movers and shakers of some sort.
“A Pedanda,” Pip said in answer to his question. “A High Priest of the local faith. And his consort, the High Priestess. Very high-powered, by local lights; too holy to speak much to foreigners like us. They take their religion seriously in Baru Denpasar, which with some the things going on here . . . well, I don’t blame them. I’ve been praying more lately myself.”
John crossed himself in agreement. And they were trapped here, unless they could help the Baru Denpasarans. The Tarshish Queen needed repairs, and both it and the Silver Surfer needed their full help to make it out of the harbor. Quite understandably, they wouldn’t do that without receiving help in return. The Raja had to think of his own people first.
Outside the palace district the city was neatly laid out on a gridwork of streets roughly north-south and east-west, with an occasional irregular opening for public use and frequent temples of all sizes, a couple as large as cathedrals and a riot of painted sculpture. From the smell, or comparative lack of it, there was a good sewage and water system.
The encircling wall was quite respectable as a piece of military engineering, large blocks of cut limestone on the inner and outer face and a core of pounded rubble and mortar, with octagonal towers spaced along it. The gates weren’t metal-faced in the way he was used to, save for savage-looking triangular spikes, but they were made of thick baulks of dense tropical hardwoods, and there were portcullis and murder-holes in the covered gateways between the inner and outer portals. Heavy walled platforms towards the harbor southward held trebuchets on turntables. The counterweight-lever machines were less flexible that torsion catapults but simple to make and good for covering a known range of targets from a fixed position.
It was the decoration of the wall that made him give a low whistle. The stone arches and surrounds about the gates were carved in low relief and painted or picked out in stones of different colors, a luxuriant visual explosion of foliage and figures human and divine and—he hoped—imaginary, demons and dragons with bulging eyes and curling fangs and long claws, acting out stories whose meanings he did not know. Some o
f the stretches still blank were covered in bamboo scaffolding, with artisans arriving and setting up for the day’s work. Nothing about it interfered with the function of the fortifications, but the impact was overwhelming, like walking into the pages of an extravagantly illustrated book.
Pity, he thought with an admiring look. I can appreciate the workmanship, but I’d have to know the context for the full effect. It’s a song in a language I don’t speak.
He voiced the thought aloud, and Deor snorted. “Thora and I journeyed the world around, and that was my greatest grief amid the joy of it,” he said. “I’m a man who makes words and music—and words vary so much. Music too, more than you might think. You have to learn a new way of listening for that, too.”
Thora patted the hilt of her sword. “Universal,” she said dryly.
Deor grinned at her. “Yes, and your sword has sung me many a gallant song, but you can only have one conversation that way,” he said.
As they left the city’s outskirts everyone got out of the way of the Raja’s men with deferential speed, something else perfectly familiar to an Associate. The roadway leading north was about thirty feet across and from the fragments of asphalt had been paved once; now it was graded dirt and gravel, but well-kept, and lined by ditches and then biggish straight-trunked trees that cast welcome shade.
John looked at them with an approving nod. There were dozens of ways of ordering a realm, and he knew most of them by personal acquaintance. Montival had nearly every one you could think of in one spot or another, from the Association’s ordinary feudalism to New Deseret’s exotic democratic theocracy. All of them could work well, or badly. The best rule-of-thumb signs for which of those was happening in any given time or place was whether the common people had enough to eat and whether there were bandits, but how competently things like roads were managed came a close third.
Here near the coast the land was flat and largely open, though mountains reared blue-green in the distance all along the northern horizon, and the highest was directly ahead.
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