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

by S. M. Stirling

  “Hey, hey, laddy-o

  Nock a shaft and string the bow:

  Jeweled belt and golden rowel

  Flinch at the sound of the Clan’s wolf-howl!

  Fie what their lords bestow;

  They’ll be gettin’ their reward

  From sword and bow!”

  The kilted guards at the gate laughed as they leaned on spears and Lochaber axes and their unstrung bowstaves, being of course Sutterdown householders themselves taking a turn at this duty. A few of them might have been on the wall back then, or for more their parents or grandparents or for some of the youngest great-grandparents. The High Kingdom was united and at peace now, but that didn’t mean the Clan had forgotten the wars against the Association.

  Then back on the bicycles and over the slow-moving lily-grown green waters of the river-moat and through the gate. The guards gave them a cursory glance and waved them on, since they were obviously Mackenzies and several were known to them by sight. They pedaled past antique frame buildings and modern half-timbered ones with plastered brick nogging, dodging carts and wagons and carriages and wheelbarrows until it was easier to hop down and push instead.

  “Heel!” Karl said sharply, and the dogs obeyed, even when their town counterparts barked challenge at the intruders.

  They came to a rambling building with a sign hanging from an iron bracket, a wheat-sheaf and sickle carved and painted gold against the brown oak. The Sheaf and Sickle inn had songs about it too—Lady Juniper had made one before the Change, even, in honor of Brannigan’s Special Ale. They stowed their cycles in the stands outside the big rambling building—it had grown by incorporating the structures to either side and adding second stories of half-timbering to some, and within it was a warren of steps up and down and odd dogleg corridors. Their dogs drank from the trough at the edge of the street, then flopped down by the bicycle rack at a command of:

  “Stay! Guard!”

  He didn’t worry about their gear; Sutterdown was not quite as absolutely safe for loose property as a Dun where anonymity was impossible, but there was nearly a quarter of a ton of hound waiting, heads on paws but teeth ready and eyes peeled. He recognized some of the other cycles, at that, and he knew their guardians as well. A few doggy grins and flopping tails greeted him, but they stayed close to their charges and alert lest he treacherously try to make off with a cycle. His father had once told him he’d known a lot of soldiers worse at their trade than a well-trained Mackenzie greathound.

  The main taproom was clear enough, though the floor was on two levels. All the windows were open on this warm summer’s day and bees buzzed in the petunias and impatiens in the windowboxes outside, along with less welcome flies. They hung up their brigantines and bows and sword-belts on oak racks polished by long use, just inside the doors and under a fresh Jack-in-the-Green mask, and called greetings. From the number of bows and quivers custom was good, though there were fewer jacks—clansfolk carried bows and swords whenever they went far from home, but in these days of peace and prosperity armor was for war-practice or foreign travel.

  The middle-aged granddaughter of the original owner who stood behind the brass-railed bar was named Bébhion Brannigan Mackenzie, and ran the place now with her kin. And the brewery and vineyard that were part of the property; the Brannigans were a family as prominent as any in Sutterdown, and usually contributed the senior High Priestess and High Priest of the town’s clutch of covens as well.

  “Merry meet, you bunch of young hooligans,” she said, but smiled with it. “You’re expected. The rest of your pack of redcaps and gossoons are over there, just got in.”

  She paused in polishing a glass mug to jerk a thumb towards the dimmer back part of the room.

  “My thanks, fair lady Mayor,” Karl said.

  He touched the back of his right hand to his brow in the salute a polite male made to a hearthmistress, and got a snort; she was the mayor of Sutterdown, and fair lady was what her name meant in the old tongue.

  Seven other young Mackenzies were waiting for them. There was a babble of greetings and hand-to-wrist handshakes and hugs and friendly-playful cuffs, but Karl spoke first to Gwri Beauregard Mackenzie, a woman of a few years more than his own age. Her name meant golden hair in the old tongue and was a bit of an odd choice, since hers was black and worn in a multitude of tight braids tipped with silver balls, which he thought went toothsomely well with smooth skin the color of pale cinnamon.

  More to the point, she was daughter to the fiosaiche—seeress—Meadhbh Beauregard Mackenzie of Dun Tàirneanach, and had a reputation as a promising acolyte in that art. As long as she could handle herself well in other respects too, which Gwri could, he wanted someone with those talents on this faring.

  Since it has more than a touch of the uncanny. Though to be sure, we’ll have the Sword of the Lady along. Still, you put a dirk on the same belt as your long blade, and you tuck the sgian dubh into your sock-hose too.

  When the noise had died down a little he caught her eye.

  “No problems?” he said.

  “None to speak of, we slipped away as planned,” she replied; for a Mackenzie, she was short-spoken. “You?”

  “None to speak of,” he replied, and thought she caught the thought behind the words:

  Or that I wish to speak of, to be sure.

  One of the Brannigans came and took their orders; he chose a slice of the ground-mutton-and-onion pie and home-fries, and others called for cheeseburgers and souvlaki and catfish fritters and fried chicken and submarine sandwiches and the seasonal treat of a big bowl of salad to pass around. Once the beer came and while they were waiting for the food, he raised his stein:

  “To the venture!”

  Everyone lifted mugs to that; he sipped the cool hoppy bitterness of Brannigan’s Special, and reflected that this was a brew to treat with respect, like the small barrel of Old Thumper his father kept for special occasions. No more than one pint with a long day’s work ahead, any more would be weakness not strength for all that he’d be sweating it out again. With a bit of a push on a bicycle you could cover a hundred miles or better a day on reasonable roads, which they had . . . as far as Ashland, after which they’d have rutted dusty hill-tracks, if they were lucky, and deer-trails often enough, and they’d be using the bicycles as a handy way to carry gear more often than riding them, until they reached the point where their own feet would do all the work.

  By then they’d have to be truly cautious about their surroundings, too. He wouldn’t have felt easy about taking the whole trip down into Westria without at least a dozen good bows along, and more if possible. Those weren’t lands under law, not yet, not even by McClintock standards. At best they were just thinly speckled with it, like the dust of a seeded and rolled field in the first light rain of autumn.

  “Right, then,” he said, when he’d set aside his empty plate and wiped his mouth with the brown linen napkin. “Now, we’re off. First, one thing: a warband without a captain is meat for the wolves and ravens. Forbye my Sept totem is Wolf, yet I’m not anxious to feed His four-foot children just yet.”

  “And to willfully defy a bow-captain in the field is geasa,” Gwri added. Pointedly: “Under a curse of death not long delayed, mind.”

  Karl slapped the table. “So I’m bow-captain of the Clan’s archers on this faring, and Gwri is my second. Once we join up with the others, we’re under Princess Órlaith’s orders . . . which will come through me. Any questions?”

  “You’re to be bow-captain because your da is the Archer?” one of the crowd said, a hint of challenge in his voice. “There are more folk of Dun Tàirneanach here than of Dun Fairfax.”

  Gwri started to turn and scowl at the tall youth who’d spoken; his name was Tair Strum Mackenzie.

  “Dun Tàirneanach, indeed?” a burly redhead said. “I and my sister here are from Dun Laurel, fairest of all Duns and most favored of the Lady, and I’ll have you remember it, Tair Taylon’s son!”

  Karl put up a hand to sta
y him with a broad friendly smile; the last thing they needed was an inter-Dun pissing match. Nobody who’d decided to come with him was likely to be the shy or retiring sort. He spoke genially:

  “No Tair, not because of that. Me da may well be after us hotfoot and in a rage, to try and drag us back by the ear like naughty toddlers. No, I’m to be bow-captain because the Princess asked me to form this party. Also because I can and will whale the living snot from you if needful, Tair-me-lad, the which I can do now if you like. You’ll have to keep up afterwards, mind, bruises and bloody nose or no.”

  There were four women in the dozen of them; without taking his eyes off Tair he decided that they all caught each other’s gaze and rolled their eyes slightly. He thought that a bit unfair. From what he’d seen of life so far women were at least as concerned about status as men, and about as likely to make trouble over it. They were just . . .

  A bit less straightforward about it when they have a choice. Usually.

  Or as a woman would generally put it, they dealt with it more as humankind would, and less like a boar hog who’d been bitten on the scrotum by a horsefly.

  He continued to the other young man: “Fair warning, but we’d best get it out of the way now if you insist, for there will be no time or place for such later.”

  He smiled while he said it and held out his hand. The other looked into his eyes for a moment, then laughed and shook; it turned into a bit of a squeezing contest, but both were reasonably satisfied.

  “Any others?”

  Heads shook. Gwri looked around. “Geasa, remember, and you consent to it if you stay. Last chance to walk away!”

  Nobody moved, though faces sobered. Karl nodded and put his fist out above the table. One by one the others tapped theirs on it and murmured:

  “So sworn. And so witness Badb, Nemain and Macha, who love a warrior’s faithfulness; and by Lug of the Oaths.”

  “Well, we’ll be off and on our way, then. We’re to meet feartaic Diarmuid of the McClintocks in five days. Let’s show the wild southern hillfolk who think they’re so tough what Mackenzies can do, eh?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Newport

  Territory of the Free City of Corvallis

  (Formerly western Oregon)

  High Kingdom of Montival

  (Formerly western North America)

  July/Fumizuki 6th, Change Year 46/2044 AD/Shohei 1

  “This way,” Moishe Feldman said to Captain Ishikawa, on a bright brisk afternoon.

  The Imperial Navy officer walked up the gangplank behind the merchant, dodging a string of stevedores running up it with bundles on their heads. The ship moved slightly at her moorings with all the coming and going, though the netful of cargo swinging by and down through an open deck-hatch probably had more to do with it, as the team on the rope chanted: “She was makin’ for the trades on the outside, And the downhill run to Papeete . . .”

  As he did the hull ground against the new hemp-rope bumpers of the dock, or the last tattered salvage tires doing that duty as well. He saw that the outside surface of the ship’s side from the gunwales to at least the waterline had been covered in thin sheet metal secured to the planking with bronze nails. It wasn’t armor, except possibly against shipworms; enough steel to stop a roundshot or bolt from a heavy naval catapult would make the vessel impossibly sluggish. But this would make it much harder to set the ship aflame with incendiary shot. Japanese shipwrights used the same trick, for vessels that expected to go in harm’s way.

  Ishikawa came up the narrow gangway with familiar ease, just lightly touching the manrope along the side. He didn’t feel too conspicuous as he followed, even on this cloudless summer’s day. Not in local dress for this Newport place, and with a knit cap pulled over his distinctive haircut with its topknot and shaved strip up the pate. The strange clothes didn’t bother him very much; loose pants and hakama did roughly the same thing, as did a jacket and haori. He didn’t feel more than half-naked without his swords either, as most samurai would, since you couldn’t wear a katana all the time on shipboard anyway. Or just leave it thrust through a sash if you didn’t want it lost overside. The tanto on his belt wasn’t all that much different from the utility knife any seaman might wear, at least while it was in its sheath and you couldn’t see the shape or the quality of the steel.

  It’s good to hear gulls and smell saltwater again, too, he thought. And to feel the wind on my face and a deck beneath my feet.

  His mind skipped a little as he remembered the ice blowing into his eyes in the seas north of Hokkaido, the curling foam on the tops of the mountain-high waves ripped free and freezing as it came at him like catapult bolts until there was thick ice all over his oilskins.

  Well, on a pleasant day like this, it is very good. Clear sky, a few clouds, a fresh offshore breeze . . . what more could a seaman ask of the kami of wind and tide?

  His looks weren’t impossibly unusual either. Most of the people native to this town were big, hairy, round-eyed and fair, but by no means all. He’d seen a couple who could have been Nihonjin in local clothes themselves . . . if they kept their mouths shut and didn’t move, so that you couldn’t see how their very stance and stride were different. Though if you looked closely . . . perhaps the language shaped the face as much as the blood did, or the genes to use the old-fashioned term.

  And there were others from all over the world. Which I envy.

  He loved the sea and ships, that feeling that anything might lie over the horizon, but all his sailing before the last voyage of the Red Dragon had been around home waters, keeping the scattered islands and new outposts together and intercepting jinnikukaburi raiders. Or once or twice striking back at their homeland, landing troops and burning coastal forts and shipyards. It was vital, necessary duty and ships simply could not be spared for anything else. . . .

  But I have had my dreams. That is why I was so eager to volunteer for the Tenno’s plan.

  “I’ll show you around,” Feldman said slowly and distinctly.

  Ishikawa followed that; he’d studied English for the professional literature in engineering and shipbuilding written in it, and since they got here he’d been trying hard to master the spoken form.

  At least this man doesn’t speak some eccentric dialect!

  It hadn’t occurred to him that English would have dialects like Japanese. He supposed it should have—the three written forms of his own language were much more uniform than what actually came out of people’s mouths on different islands, and he’d visited every single one of those that still had more than a family or two. By now he could follow some of what he heard here, though he wasn’t nearly as fluent as the Heika yet; he admired the way she’d mastered the spoken language by sheer applied willpower. Understanding was easier than speaking, and he could follow speech, if it was slow. Mostly.

  She could even talk poetry with the locals by now.

  What a woman the Majesty is, even so young! he thought. What a ruler she will make! Fearless but not reckless, tireless, both intelligent and clever, and so good at getting people moving as one. With a will like the steel of a Masamune sword, supple and strong and hard at the same time. And now to work. General Egawa was most particular about my thoroughly surveying any foreign ship which will carry the jotei. Not to mention the rest of us.

  He found himself fascinated by both the similarities and the differences between this Tarshish Queen and his lost, beloved Red Dragon. The size was roughly similar, he thought twenty-five or perhaps fifty tons more than the four hundred he’d commanded, depending on the depth to keel.

  He wrote displacement? four hundred ton, more a bit? on his slate and held it up.

  “Four hundred and sixty tons displacement,” Feldman said, confirming his estimate.

  Dimension? he wrote.

  “Two hundred twenty feet from bowsprit to rudder, thirty-five-foot beam, twelve-foot depth of hold.”

  The Japanese sailor easily converted feet to metric measurements, or to the more
natural shaku, which were replacing them again in general use. A shaku was almost exactly the same as a foot anyway, smaller by well under a single percentage point.

  “She’s shallow draught, for inshore work, and for dog-hole ports,” Feldman went on.

  “Dog-hole?” Ishikawa asked.

  “Places so narrow a dog couldn’t turn around in them.”

  “Hai, understand,” Ishikawa said, suppressing a chuckle; he’d gotten ships in and out of places like that often enough. “Back, forward, around, anchor and rine . . . line . . . and pull, much swear and yell.”

  “I’ve been there,” Feldman said, and this time Ishikawa grinned at the idiom once he’d examined it in his head.

  They had dedicated warships here, he knew from his dips into the library at Montinore, built for nothing but fighting other ships, though not many. A publication called the Illustrated Naval Gazette had been fascinating. Japan couldn’t afford anything like that right now; her navy was of vessels designed for roughly the same purposes as this fast armed merchantman, carting cargo and people quickly into dangerous places, dealing with reefs and sandbanks and shoals, and fighting at sea or carrying troops onto hostile shores when necessary. The hull was moderately shallow, and he wondered how much leeway she’d make tacking. A deeper hull lost less distance that way, but of course it needed more water under the keel. . . .

  There were three masts, each of them a single varnished trunk up to the topmast—he regarded them with soul-deep envy as he traced the standing rigging with his eyes. There would be trees like that somewhere in Japan’s mountainous interior, but nowhere close enough in practice to today’s shipyards, and his people used composite masts bound with shrunk-on steel hoops. These were better; and more beautiful.

  They went below, dodging the net-loads of provisions and supplies swung down through the hatches and into the hold by the dockside cranes, and the laborers stowing it under the supervision of deck officers loudly concerned with the ship’s trim. From the smell, only faintly stale, the bilges had been deliberately flooded with clean seawater and thoroughly pumped out recently or the ship was fairly new, or both. He approved; it was most literally a pain in the back, but worth it.