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

by S. M. Stirling

  Newport wasn’t particularly new, or very big, and it didn’t have a town wall. It had been founded around a century and a half before the Change, and on that March day in 1998 the city on the shore of Yaquina Bay had been home to about ten thousand people. Half a century after the old world crashed in ruin it had at least that many once more, which made it a step down from the really big centers like Portland or Astoria or Boise or Corvallis, but still very substantial. And none of the others had anything like the numbers they’d had back then or ever would, which put it a step up, if you looked at it right. John strongly suspected that was precisely how the locals looked at it, from the brisk steps and the prideful looks he got, inviting the rube to admire the sights.

  A scatter of new streets and rising frameworks of bright timber on the outskirts showed how it was growing, and the rhythmic bang . . . bang . . . of a pile-driver from the waterfront marked where new piers were being driven out into the bay. The works of human-kind still nearly disappeared against the great stretch of water and salt marsh and forest that made up the country around. The arches of the ancient steel bridge soaring high across the river mouth against the blue-gray Pacific were the only things of man that rivaled nature, they and the long breakwaters that extended the waterway out into the ocean. The city smells of woodsmoke and curing fish and sawdust and cooking and horses blended in the greater symphony of salt water and brackish marsh.

  Prince John looked around at the buildings with interest as he trod the plank sidewalk; some were white-painted wood, more left to the natural silvery-gray of timber after a few years in the damp salt air, and a few of brick or stone or half-timbering, though that wasn’t as common here as in the Association towns. Many of the roofs showed thick bright-green moss on their shingles, and the number of workers up there hammering on new straw-colored ones suggested patching was a continuous process. He couldn’t recall being here before, though he might have come with his parents as a child—it would be in the back issues of the Court Diary, but the important thing was that if he didn’t remember it, there were probably not many people who’d know him on sight, the way they would have his father or his elder sister. Montival wasn’t the sort of place that slathered pictures of the ruler’s family on every available space.

  They’d notice Orrey, though! She’s a lot more conspicuous than I am—a five-foot-eleven blond princess just stands out—and she spent half a year at the university in Corvallis town.

  Buoy-bells added a distant ringing from beyond the harbor, and a pre-Change lighthouse stood on a rise to the south. The wings and mewing cries of seagulls were thick overhead; from the harbor a deep chant and the rhythmic boom of a drum came as a tug pulled a three-masted ship out beyond the breakwaters where it could spread its white-canvas wings and fly. The twenty oars flashed into the gray water and came back up dripping in perfect unison with the tune, like a dance. Someone jostled him as he watched, and didn’t bother to apologize either.

  I like visiting cities. They perk you up and put you on your toes. But by God and His Mother, I wouldn’t want to live in one, even one you could walk out of in ten minutes. Wilderness I can handle for a while, too, but when you come right down to it I’m a castle-and-manor lad.

  Before the Change this had been a very minor port, important only for shipping out lumber and as a base for fishing boats. The harbor was too shallow for most of the monster ships the ancient world had used, ugly steel behemoths of thousands or even tens of thousands of tons, drawing scores of feet laden. You could still see their wrecks in some places along the coast, mostly sunken where they’d drifted ashore. Those ships had used ports like Astoria, or gone up the Columbia to Portland and Vancouver, or into Puget Sound to lost, dead Seattle.

  Here remoteness had protected them from the witless hordes streaming out of the doomed cities and the plagues that had broken loose from the refugee camps to scour the Willamette clear of human kind save where luck or ruthlessness or both had enforced quarantine. Frantic adaption of the fishing fleet to oars and sails on boats not intended for them had kept famine at bay for the first year. A little later smoked and salted fish had provided something to trade for grain and potatoes.

  Halfway through the first decade of the Change Year count Corvallis had extended its sway to the coast, sweetening the deal with the restoration of the railroad that wound through the lower passes of the Coast Range to the Willamette. That gave the ambitious city-state a shorter access to the Pacific . . . and just as important, one that was all their own without going through PPA-controlled ports on the Columbia and their jealous Guilds Merchant and the border tolls that had existed before the High Kingdom brought free trade throughout Montival.

  Even the largest of today’s ships were tiny by comparison to those of the ancients, sleek graceful dancers with wind and water, and Newport was quite deep enough for them. The place fairly bustled about him this working Friday in June, with traffic thick and hooves and wheels loud on patched asphalt and cobblestone streets; wagons and drays, bicycles and riders and pedestrians and steaming carts selling roast potatoes and fish sandwiches and sausages the contents of which John wouldn’t have cared to guess.

  Mother likes to say that sausage is a lot like politics that way.

  There were scores of masts at the docks, from little fishing smacks and dories to the schooners that harvested the sea as far away as the Mendocino coast and Alaska, and the bigger ships that went far-foreign for cargo.

  The ribs of more rose on half a dozen slipways, amid a continuous hammering and sawing, a clamor of smithy-work and a pungent smell of hot tar and oakum. Tall cranes hoisted thick curved shapes of wood and bundles of long planks from horse-drawn wagons. The mountains hereabout were thick with magnificent timber for beam and spar and mast, and their rivers gave abundant power for sawmills.

  New-built warehouses and ship’s chandleries and dosshouses and stores full of the sort of things sailors bought lined the streets near the docks; as he watched a wagon was loaded with barrels of sharp-smelling pitch out of a shop that distilled it from scrap timber, laborers rolling them up two planks to the accompaniment of blasphemy and scatology before they were tied down and the team leaned into the traces. A huge sausage of sailcloth was handed from a second-story loft, down to fifteen waiting shoulders, and then went at a trot towards the yards.

  The folk were mostly locals, and those mostly ruddy-faced and fair, often with the rolling walk of people who spent a lot of time on moving decks, dressed as often as not in oilskins and sou’westers over thick sweaters on this damp cool day. Men and women alike generally wore loose pants and boots and brimmed caps, often with a bell-guard cutlass hanging from a broad belt. But there were plenty from other parts of Montival, and outright foreigners were common.

  He thought the rugged-looking couple in luridly colorful print tunics were probably Hawaiian, remembering what diplomats from that polyglot kingdom had worn. And the man with the black goatee and curled mustachios with a rapier at his side was probably from one of the Spanish kingdoms of the far south, Arica or Puerto Montt or Esmereldas. But where did the dark man in the baggy pantaloons and long silk tunic embroidered with crossed triple-bladed daggers and the enormous plumed, jeweled turban come from? Or the one shivering in a batik sarong and an incongruous-looking sweater, with an odd but extremely businesslike wave-bladed knife through his belt? Or the big blond woman with the broad-brimmed hat that had a tiger-skin band and a dozen corks on strings dangling from its edges?

  Or that one? John asked himself.

  That one was a tall, very black man of about John’s own years in a splendid flowing robe of striped cotton under a rain cape, and a curved sword at his waist with a jeweled guard and hilt. His face was marked with chevrons of scars that were too regular to be anything but deliberate; he had a tuft of wiry chin-beard but a shaven head, covered by a broad beaded skull cap, and he strode along like a lord.

  Which is probably what he is, at home, wherever that is.

  Anoth
er black-skinned man in similar but plainer dress followed him, carrying various burdens on his back. He tugged at his master’s sleeve and spoke in a throaty language.

  The tall man stopped and glanced at his wrist; it bore the luxury of a watch. John had one too, right now stowed in the pouch at his belt to avoid the attention drawn by a display of wealth. The man in the robe nodded. He and his follower looked about, unrolled a pair of small carpets from the servant’s backpack on the covered verandah of a shop that had a closed for inventory sign in the window, washed their hands and faces from a canteen and knelt facing westward, bowing their foreheads to the ground and murmuring prayers in a guttural tongue different from the one they’d spoken before. John didn’t understand either one, but his musician’s ear caught the rhythms of both.

  Ah, John thought, with delighted surprise. Now that I haven’t seen before. They’re Saracens! Moors, Muslims.

  There hadn’t been many of that faith in Montival-to-be before the Change, and those mainly recent arrivals in the big cities where famine and plague struck first and hardest. His maternal grandfather Norman Arminger had given Protestants and outright unbelievers in the lands the Portland Protective Association seized a choice of exile—which meant almost certain death then—or conversion to his version of Catholicism; in the first ten years after the Change nobody here had known whether there even was a universal Church still functioning. He had grudgingly tolerated Jews provided they stayed discreet and paid his taxes, because even his chosen schismatic antipope Leo had argued that they had to endure until the end of the world and Christ’s return.

  Saracens the Lord Protector had simply and pitilessly put to the sword wherever he or his men found them, without regard to age or sex, to the old Crusader war-cry of Deus lo Vult, which meant God wills it.

  John crossed himself. He didn’t think God had willed that, and it was one of any number of reasons he prayed for his grandfather’s soul quite regularly.

  In that year of the great dying nobody had much marked a few more deaths amid so many. These days the Holy Father off in the Umbrian hill town where the Church now centered had sternly set his face against persecution of non-Catholics in any of the many lands where the children of Mother Church held power; for that matter, so had his two post-Change predecessors, though nobody here had heard from any Pope until about a decade after the old world fell. But that was rather late as far as this part of the world was concerned.

  John knew Saracens mostly as figures in the romaunts and chansons like The Song of Roland or the Song of the Lionheart or his favorite, El Cantar de Mío Cid.

  He suppressed his curiosity; the world was too wide and various to satisfy that itch anyway. Instead he watched the Moor walk away, and did not even ask the brown man in the gaudy turban why he glared hatred after him and put a hand longingly to the hilt of his peacebonded sword, muttering what were obviously curses in a liquid singsong language.

  Instead he flipped a coin—a groat to his PPA sensibilities, known as a nickel here even though it was of silver—to a grinning tow-haired urchin who snatched it out of the air like a trout rising to a fly.

  “What’s the Sir Knight need?” the boy said.

  John suspected he’d been gaping around like a hayseed from the Peace River baronies on his first trip to Portland. The urchin was about eight or nine, and the words were much more respectful than the tone and accompanied by a cheeky grin; Corvallis was one of those places that made a point of being elaborately unimpressed with noble blood. It also had free and compulsory schools of which its citizens were immensely proud, but those were out for the summer and most children did whatever they could to help the family budget or pay for minor treats.

  “I need to find the merchant and shipmaster Moishe Feldman, lad,” John said. “Can you direct me?”

  The boy squinted at a church tower not far away with a clock set in its side. “Noon an’ a bit. You’ll find Cap’n Feldman at the Mermaid right now, Sir Knight, regular as clockwork when he’s in port. It’s halfway between his offices and the docks, and his fancy new house is out o’ town a bit, too far to walk for lunch. Here, follow me.”

  He did, past a largish three-story building with Feldman And Sons, Merchant Venturers est. CY 11 painted above the main doors and the house sigil of a stylized ship heading upward into the sky. It was better if he met the man he sought outside it to start with. There might well be well-traveled people in there who would recognize him at a glance, and as yet they had no reason not to point and loudly exclaim something on the lines of:

  My goodness, what’s Prince John doing in Newport with false arms on his jerkin?

  The Mermaid turned out to be a restaurant-cum-tavern, of a sort common in this town full of transients and sailors, with a large and gaudy carving of the mythical creature above the door. Despite her scaly tail, the lady was definitely a mammal. The boy ducked his head inside, nodded, turned and said as he jerked a thumb over his shoulder:

  “That’s him sitting beside the hearth—reading a newspaper.”

  John flipped him another groat, and got a brisk: “Thanks!”

  The boy scampered off, dodging by a two-wheeled cart heaped high with dripping wicker baskets of weird-looking writhing crabs, things like armored spiders. John suppressed the thought that they were glaring at him through the walls of their woven prisons as if they foresaw the boiling water and drawn butter and blamed it all on him, and went in himself. A smell of roasting, frying and stewing met him, along with the smells of wine and beer, and of more tobacco than was common in most parts of Montival; exotic habits like that were more likely and easier to keep up in a port. From their looks this was a haunt for skippers and ship’s officers and businessfolk and the like who could afford such indulgences.

  The plank walls were decorated with souvenirs; from floats and nets to odd-looking weapons, the skull of a saltwater crocodile nearly as tall as a man, a cloak that seemed to be woven from colorful feathers, and masks made of painted coconut hulls and seashells. The weather was coolish under the gray sky outside, but body heat and what escaped from the kitchens kept the big rectangular room comfortable without a fire in the hearth, or in the tile heating stove set into the wall beside it. It didn’t occur to him to wonder what his great-grandparents would have thought of a standard of comfortable that considered it perfectly normal to wear a sweater or coat indoors.

  He made his way between the tables and through the fug of smoke and noise. Feldman was where the urchin had said; he was a lean, rather dark man of medium height, in his thirties and dressed in plain good clothes, with a close-cropped black beard that showed a white streak along one jaw that probably marked a scar, and bold boney features. There was nothing unusual in his outfit except for a kippah—a small round skull cap—on the back of his head. His back was to the wall beside the empty fireplace, and his cutlass rested on the bench beside him. It was peacebonded too, hilt and scabbard joined by thin lead wire crimped with a seal, as the law required for blades longer than six inches within the walls of Corvallis and inside the other towns of the city-state’s territory.

  You could jerk the wire loose quickly enough with a strong pull, but you had better have a very good reason to give the constables. At that, far more people carried blades here in Newport than in Corvallis town itself, a walled and tightly-policed city in the now-peaceful Willamette. Haida reavers had struck this far south within the last decade, and once you were out of sight of land, pirates were as real a threat as bad weather, if usually less common.

  “Professor Feldman?” John said, extending a hand. “I’d like to speak with you, if you have the time.”

  The merchant snorted and folded his copy of the Newport Commercial Bulletin, with its subtitle of Salve Lucrum. He’d been doing the crossword puzzle.

  “Save that Professor nonsense for Corvallis town,” he said, giving a brief firm shake. “Mister will do, or Captain if you have to have something fancy, Sir Knight.”

  Feldman was a little war
y in a hard, ready-to-respond way; some Catholics from the Protectorate had no use for Jews and didn’t mind showing it. His hand was dry and very callused, from ropes as well as his cutlass-hilt. Technically a prosperous merchant in the territory owing allegiance to the People and Faculty Senate of Corvallis would be a tenured professor of the Economics Faculty of OSU; it was equivalent to being a member of the Guild Merchant in a chartered town up north or of the Chamber of Commerce in Boise or New Deseret. It didn’t always involve giving formal classes, though they were expected to take on apprentices, for some reason called adjuncts.

  Evidently Feldman didn’t take it all as seriously as some.

  “Sit, Sir Knight, if you’ve business to do—though this is my lunch hour,” he added, as a hint not to waste time.

  John bowed a polite acknowledgment and removed his cloak, doubling it and setting it on the seat of a spare chair before unbuckling his sword-belt. Then he removed his hat and set it and the slung lute case on the cloak. The older man’s expression changed as John sat and his face was fully visible, turning fluid with astonishment for a brief flash and then setting into immobility again. He hadn’t expected to fool Feldman, or wanted to.

  “I’m called Sir Guilliame de Forreste,” John said, and thought:

  I’m glad I don’t play poker with this one. He took a big shock with only a flicker. But then again, maybe I will, if this comes off.

  “I’ll bet you are,” Feldman said, and John nodded confirmation. “Why, exactly, wasn’t I told to expect you?”

  “Pro . . . Mr. Feldman, this has to be strictly confidential. Confidential from everyone. If that’s a problem, I can leave right now.”

  Feldman locked eyes with him for about twenty seconds, then slowly nodded. “I have obligations to your family. Your grandfather . . . on your father’s side . . . helped my grandfather get out of Portland when the Lord Protector’s men were after him.”

  A grin. “Granted the Lord Protector was also your grandfather, on your mother’s side, but the principle holds.”