The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series)

by S. M. Stirling

  Segep’s sister was quite a bit younger and somewhat less stocky than he was, and had a hard face that Órlaith would normally have called clever. Right now she looked . . .

  Alarmed, like me, Órlaith thought.

  “I had a dream, Sun Hair Tall,” the Yurok woman said, in the old tongue of her people. “I went into the mountains, up the Stair, and I danced, I took pain, I sang.”

  She came forward, but when she spoke it was to Reiko, and in English . . . mostly. “You from across the western sea,” she said. “Uema’ah are after you, they track you, they seek you.”

  “Devils,” Órlaith whispered to her, and her face changed; it wasn’t a word the Yurok used lightly. “She says devils are after you.”

  The shaman continued: “They run through the night, they make black flame, they seek to shoot you with the obsidian arrows of death. You need a . . . a great thing to defeat them. Like the war-club of a hero, like Puelekuekwar, Downriver Peg. It rests here in this land, the thing you need, somewhere, somewhere south, through the lost City of Sky Spirits, towards the Valley of Death. It shouldn’t be here; it should be yours in your own country. A good thing can become a bad thing in the wrong place, and my . . . helpers . . . can see it because they are altogether of this land, they know what fits and what doesn’t. You have to go and get it and take it home to its proper place—but you will need the help of everything that does belong here.”

  Then something seemed to go out of her, and she licked her lips and spoke in a more normal voice.

  “And don’t ask me what that means, because I don’t want to think about it again. Once was enough. And damn, but I need a drink.”

  Reiko had been straining to make sense of the unfamiliar language.

  “I am . . . I am afraid I do know what it means,” she said, when Órlaith had explained a few things she had missed.

  The shaman and her brother returned to their places at table, where she did begin to punish the plum brandy, to nobody’s surprise. Another buzz of conversation arose among the McClintocks. Órlaith pointedly did not listen to the jotei’s conversation with her countrymen, whose eyes were widening as she explained.

  Diarmuid stood after a moment. “This is a serious matter, and aa’ o’ we should take the words of these oor Yurok kinsmen and friends seriously,” he said, as complete silence fell. “Sae heed the wisewoman’s foresecht.”

  His mother the High Priestess nodded vigorously, and her son went on.

  “We’re at feud for certain, blood feud, and soon at war, like enough. Don’t chatter like magpies, or foemen may hear an’ tak advantage.”

  “Aye, or things worse than foemen,” his mother said bluntly. “I know you’re aa’, each and every one, clapperdins who love tae chew the claik better than meat, and spilling secrets better than suppin’ whiskey, but you’ll keep yer mouths shut aboot this.”

  Diarmuid glared to make sure everyone had taken his message and his mother’s, then turned to two of the young men sitting down towards the end of the table on his left. They might well be relatives and were certainly retainers, probably living with him and helping with the family’s work for a few years to get a little polish and see a bit of the world beyond their parents’ crofts up in the hills.

  “Dòmhnall na Cluaise”—this Donald was indeed missing an ear, from the looks via an encounter with something’s, or possibly someone’s, teeth—“and Ìomhair a’ Bhogha Mhaide”—Ivor who might well be a bowman, from his shoulders—“get tae it.”

  The household men sprang up and pulled a blanket from a shape in the middle of the room; it was a harp, the tall triangular Clàrsach, strung with metal and with its long sound box hewn from a single trunk of willow.

  The smooth curves of polished wood glittered, wrought with knotwork patterns, and a sigh went through the room as the tension flowed away. Diarmuid’s mother went to take the stool before it, and his sister stood beside. The brilliant notes of the harp rang out as the older woman’s hands moved, and Órlaith recognized the slow tune.

  Suddenly the whiskey was no protection at all, and she bent her head as the young girl’s sweet pure voice rose in ancient unbearable lament:

  “The Flowers of the Forest,

  that foucht aye the foremost,

  The prime o’ our land

  are cauld in the clay . . .”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ithilien/Moon County, Crown Province of Westria

  (Formerly Marin, California)

  High Kingdom of Montival

  (Formerly western North America)

  May 10th (Lothron 9th), Change Year (Fifth Age) 46/2044 AD

  It was the smell that alerted Faramir Kovalevsky and made him suddenly fling up his clenched right fist, open the hand and swing it down. All three of them went to ground within a stride, and he chose the moss-grown trunk of a Douglas fir that had been as thick through as his body before it fell. His cloak spread out over him as he did a controlled fall, which it was designed and cut and weighted to do. The loose hood wasn’t so different from the color of the dead tree that it would betray him as he raised his head just high enough for his eyes to clear it, and it broke the distinctive outline of a human head.

  Nothing to see.

  Nothing except the trees, a mixture of goldcup oak and fir and pine and eucalyptus, green and silent with long slanting rays of sunlight breaking through and painting spots in shivering gold. Bright yellow broom edged them where the light penetrated.

  They’d been heading southeast along the tracks of the yrch bands, downslope and into thicker woods again. That had taken them almost to the Estolad Rhudaur, an ancient campground as the name—Eastwood Camp—implied. It was more a thinning of trees than an actual clearing now, but there were ancient water taps that had been repaired, with tables and firepits and an open-sided roofed structure to keep firewood dry and shelter travelers in the rainy season. Which gave him an idea, if they could reach the spot. The outer layer of that wood would still be damp.

  Beyond this stretch the land flattened out into the valley-bottoms of southern Ithilien, much of which had been built up before the Change, though not with large structures for the most part; it was still an unbelievably perverse way to treat such good farmland. The wooden buildings had all burned to the ground in the summer of the first Change Year, and much of the forest immediately around them. Then they’d been overgrown with brush and scrub, but the woods were reclaiming them fast. Not least because the runoff from bits of old roadway and foundation pads concentrated enough water for large trees to grow quickly, and their roots in turn ground the stony parts of the ruins to rubble and then slowly to dust and shaded out competitors.

  Those trees included species from all over the world, descendants of those in parks and lawns, but the undergrowth was still thick and spiny beneath the canopy in many spots, or wound into tangles by masses of feral grape and multiflora rose that only boar could penetrate. Right beyond that were vast swampy tidal longshore marshes scattered with small creeks and inlets and overgrown spots of firm land where it would be easy to hide small boats . . . or in spots, even large ones. They were also favored dwellings for boar and Tule elk and the tiger who fed on them, but that just meant you had to be careful.

  While his mind reviewed the terrain his eyes were still busy, and his nose. The scent came to him again faintly on a sough of wind, hard and dry, a combination of never-washed bodies and badly-cured hides and an undertone of rot. The wind was from the east, giving him an advantage. And precisely because of times like this Stath Ingolf’s Rangers always washed themselves and their clothes with soap that included essences taken from a dozen types of local vegetation. Except at point-blank range, they smelled like forest and grassland or even the mass of matted vegetation that covered much of the dead cities. Or just vaguely green.

  More silence. Then, off to his right—southward of due west, three o’clock in the system his people used—a flock of birds broke out of some brush. More and more of them, spiraling upward
like smoke amid a clamor of harsh screaming cries.

  Bornaew, he thought.

  They were medium-sized iridescent long-tailed green birds with fiery red heads and heavy hooked beaks, common all over this area except in deep closed-canopy forest, and they swarmed in the ruins. This flock was medium-sized, five hundred or so; he’d seen thousands together in late summer, and farmers and gardeners cursed the sight of them. And they were quite sensitive to certain types of disturbance by mankind. Dúnedain didn’t eat them, but yrch did, along with anything else they could catch, something at which they were actually fairly good.

  They didn’t need to eat men anymore. It was more in the nature of a tradition, and possibly a sport.

  He lowered his head, smoothly and neither too quickly or too slowly. His hands moved, and both Morfind and Malfind were close enough to see if he exaggerated the movements a little.

  Did you notice the bornaew?

  Nods, and he went on: The yrch are circling to our flank, that’s what spooked the birds, I think they know we’re coming but aren’t sure of our exact location or our numbers.

  Dúnedain didn’t travel alone around here, but a pair would be common enough or the standard three for a patrol.

  I’m good here, but, Malfind, shift so you’re covered from that direction. Morfind, up and snipe on your judgment or when you hear me call. And for later . . . do you have an incendiary in your quiver?

  She nodded. Two.

  Both of you, rally point is Eastwood Camp if we get separated. Fire the woodpile if you can, they’ll see that at home. Go!

  Malfind found a section of concrete, broken long ago and sticking up from the earth like a tilted slab and overgrown with creeping fig like fur on a really shaggy dog. His sister slung her bow, leapt, caught the lowest branch of a live oak and swarmed upward at the same speed as a brisk walk on the ground; she didn’t need to extend the climbing spurs built into Dúnedain elf-boots or slip her hands into the similarly-equipped gloves they all carried. In instants she disappeared behind the rustling leaves.

  Malfind was almost as invisible burrowed into the glossy mass of the creeping fig, his mottled cloak nearly disappearing even to Faramir, who knew where he was and wasn’t more than twenty paces off either. Usually that plant was an absolute tree-killing nuisance, but he blessed the Lord of Woods for letting it grow there now. The other Ranger put his spear down just to hand, but with the head concealed under more of the vine. Then he put his shield leaning beside him with the grip-side out and made his bow ready.

  Everything depends on how many there are, Faramir thought, easing his own shield off likewise.

  He took three arrows out of his quiver and put them in his left hand, held against the wood of his bow’s riser by his index finger, an old speed-shooting trick.

  They wouldn’t have left too many behind . . . I hope. Not when they have to pick them up again when they hit the water and their boats. Assuming they are heading for the water and boats, but it doesn’t make sense to try getting all the way around the Bay on foot.

  His mouth was dry enough to make him think of his canteen with longing, and he was suddenly glad he’d stopped to water a tree not long ago.

  Tulkas the Strong, You who laughed as You wrestled with Morgoth Bauglir, lend me from Your strength and courage, he thought.

  Slowly he raised his head again, just enough to bring his eyes over the log, and brought out a pre-Change relic from a pouch at his belt. It was a treasure his mother had given him last Midwinter Feast, a little metal tube known as a Vanguard monocular. Through it the distant became close. Hiding was important, but if you didn’t keep the approach to your hiding-place under observation the first hint that the enemy had found you would be a blade through the kidney.

  That gave him a good view as the first Eater eeled past the screen of madrone about five-score paces away. The Ranger was slightly shocked he hadn’t seen him before, since that was no more than easy bowshot. The foliage barely moved more than the wind would have done and the man’s bare feet touched down without so much as a twig crackling.

  The Eater was short and wiry, his muscles not huge but knotted and moving taut under his skin as he stepped with the loose-tight care of a cat on a stalk; to Ranger eyes he looked to be thirty at least and was probably no more than two or three years older than Faramir. The monocular let the Ranger see his eyes flicker, bright blue and tracking back and forth.

  Not all the scars were from battle or accident. Three parallel ones marked his nose like the rungs of a ladder, and there was a bone—almost certainly a human finger-bone—through the septum, and two more through his earlobes. His skull was crudely shaven except for a lock at the back, and he wore a twisted loincloth made of a wisp of ragged pre-Change cloth, a more intact-looking belt, and a whole deerskin worn as a cloak and tied around his neck by the forelimbs.

  A Cut-Nose, Faramir thought.

  Their usual territory was far south around the southwestern corner of the Bay and down into Imrath Ivor, the Valley of Crystal: they called themselves the Altos, from a pre-Change place-name. They were a biggish group by Eater standards, and they’d been pushing north lately against the many small Peninsula bands weakened by the long struggle with the Montivallans.

  More worrisome was the rest of his gear. The Eater bands had taken to imitating Ranger bows lately, as best they could. They didn’t have anything like the craftsmanship needed to make composite bows from scratch . . . but they had access to a lot of salvage. Some cannibal genius with a vocabulary of a few hundred words had decided that the top couple of feet of two skis could be cut off to make good limbs for a bow, proving his Uncle Ingolf right when he pointed out that you shouldn’t confuse education with native wit. All the Eaters had to do was carve a piece of hard wood into a riser-grip like those of the Dúnedain weapons and carefully peg the curved fiberglass shapes to it.

  That was within their skill-set and required no toolcraft more sophisticated than a knife, a hammer and an experienced eye. The result wasn’t nearly as good as what Montivallan bowyers turned out and the draw-weights were modest, but it was also very much better than the nothing the Eaters had had before. Faramir’s father had once told him that if you played chess with good players long enough, you got good. That axiom was from his far-northern homeland in the Peace River country where there wasn’t much else to do over the long dark winters, but as a metaphor it was proving to be dismally true here in sunny Ithilien too.

  It was two generations since the Change. The stranded urbanites so helpless without their machines that they were unable to catch anything but other humans as ignorant as themselves had become fairly effective savages. And apparently the inhabitants of pre-Change San Francisco and environs had been mad for skiing, despite having to travel all the way to the Sierras to do it, judging by the abundance of raw material resting in ancient buildings.

  This orch had a perfectly workable if odd-looking recurve made in that fashion, with bits of leaf and straw stuck to the limbs to disguise it, and a bark quiver full of shafts fletched with gull-feathers at his hip. He also had a long knife and a machete, modern rawhide grips on pre-Change steel, and a hatchet with a yard-long lemonwood handle much like the Dúnedain tomahawks if less graceful and well-balanced.

  The Eater padded forward. Faramir didn’t move; the monocular was well under the shadow of his hood, which would disguise the regularity of the outline as well as the distinctive curve of a human head. If he stayed immobile, at a hundred yards the orch would almost certainly miss seeing him despite being alert and good at the work. Miss him long enough to think the coast was clear at least.

  There’s going to be a fight, the Ranger knew. At least it’s not them ambushing us from close range.

  That would have been a very short fight.

  The teeth of the Cut-Nose were yellow, except where broken ones had turned black. They all showed in snarling rictus of rage and fear. The Eater knew that he’d been sent forward as an animated target to draw fire, a
provocation to a keyed-up hidden enemy to reveal themselves with a couple of well-placed broadheads. A watching eye and a prepared mind could trace the first arrow’s flight back to the bow without even really thinking about it. It must have taken some powerful compulsion or persuasion to shove him into the open like that.

  Minutes passed. The Cut-Nose relaxed fractionally and stood more erect. Faramir remained just as motionless; if anything, the man’s peripheral vision was probably better now. His instructors had taught him that most people’s sight closed in like a tunnel when they were in fear of sudden death. The effort required for relaxed stillness helped the Ranger keep his breathing and heartbeat under control too, which improved his ability to see and sense.

  The orch scout made a chittering noise and four more Eaters came forward out of the undergrowth, all Cut-Noses. One didn’t have a nose and there were other things wrong with her as well, though they didn’t seem to affect movement or senses. The Eaters were notably careless about eating fish and seals and birds from the Bay.

  The life there was swarmingly abundant now, probably more than it had been for hundreds if not thousands of years, but there were still some spots livid green and iridescent blue and blood-crimson from leaking poisons that concentrated worse and worse as they went up the food-chain, and others more dangerous still because they were invisible. Stath Ingolf kept continuously updated maps based on careful tests and mostly confined their fishing to migratory species like salmon anyway, but the savages just ate anything that didn’t look or smell too wrong.

  Two of the gang had bows like the first, and another carried an axe, an old woodchopper, which made it too heavy for a good battle tool even in a very strong man’s hands. The third had a spear whose head was a butcher-knife ground to a point, and a shield made from an old trash-can lid, hammered out until it was a shallow bowl around the handle and then covered in wet hide that turned iron-hard when it dried.