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

by S. M. Stirling

  “Now we have a chance to begin to avenge him,” she said. “And as well to deal a heavy blow to the whole realm that sent the men who killed him.”

  A low grim mutter ran through them. She nodded. “Yes, comrades, I know exactly how you feel. We’re going through the greatest and least known of the dead cities, and then into the wild lands. Those who fall will win honor, and I will not forget them or their kin. Those who return with me . . .”

  A smile: “I’m assuming that I will return, of course; maybe that’s unreasonable optimism.”

  That was a joke between warriors. The tension broke a little in a chuckle, and she went on:

  “Those who return with me will stand with pride before the whole of the north-realm. And the whole of the High Kingdom of Montival. This enterprise is of high importance, and of great peril. I will share its hardships and dangers with you, for you are men I trust with my life.”

  Another growl, and then a barking cheer: “Órlaith! Órlaith! Órlaith and Montival!”

  She raised her hand in salute, but swallowed and blinked as she turned away, thanking the darkness. The shout had always been Artos and Montival . . . until now.

  The Japanese came aboard in the predawn hush, their weapons and gear in shapeless bundles on their backs. Órlaith had spaced out the movements from the Feldman and Sons warehouse; she wasn’t exactly trying to be completely secret. . . .

  But then, I’m not trying not to be, either, she thought, standing on the poop deck and watching them come up the gangplank. I would really prefer that some curious, officious twit not burn up the signal net with reports heading for Mom until we’re safely on our way. Better to seek forgiveness . . .

  The Japanese sailors and samurai—she knew enough to tell them apart at a glance now—stowed their gear under the direction of the ship’s crew and found where they’d sling their hammocks. When they came on deck again they lined up neatly facing the poop-deck, knelt and bowed their foreheads to the planks of the deck as Reiko stood above them. She was wearing her torso-armor of lacquered steel and silk cord, and the broad flared helmet with the chrysanthemum mon on its brow, looming above them like some kami of war.

  The night was nearly over, with the cool slightly stale smell you got just before the eastern sky started to go pale, and the tide would be making soon. The stern lanterns cast unquiet yellow light on their faces, turning them into things of bronze in the night. Reiko stepped up to the rail and looked down at them, with her left hand on the hilt of her katana.

  After a moment she spoke.

  “We have come a very long way together, my warriors,” she said; it was a conversational tone, but it carried. “Come through storms and ice and battle, through suffering and thirst and hunger, wounds and death. We have lost dear comrades and friends. We lost . . . Saisei Tenno. But we have never turned back, and we have also found much. We have found strong allies against the enemy we have fought all our lives. Now they will help us find the thing that the Saisei Tenno sought, the great lost treasure of our people. That the enemy has put forth all their strength to prevent us shows how right Saisei Tenno was to seek it, how important it is that it be in our hands.”

  The bronze masks were immobile, but Órlaith could see a few eyes flicker in her direction. The wry smile was entirely in her mind, but it was definitely there behind her grave face.

  Sure, and the words magic sword become more than a story once you’ve seen one!

  Reiko went on, after she’d given them an instant to think of that:

  “Please listen carefully. I know that every one of you is ready to die, for the Chrysanthemum Throne and for our homeland. I know that you of the Imperial Guard and the Imperial Navy feel a burning shame that my father fell and you survived him. Many of us already have died, half of those who began this journey with him. Their names will live forever just as those of the Seventy Loyal Men do, they who preserved the dynasty and the hope of our people . . . provided we win.”

  A long silence; evidently that last phrase turned a platitude into something with impact. She continued.

  “If we do not, no names will live. There will be no Obun festival at which to recite them or people who speak our tongue and follow our customs to burn incense and make offerings. It will be as if our ancestors died again, died without issue. All that we of Nihon have ever been, all that we might ever be, depend upon us now.”

  The silence stretched again, echoing. “So remember this: the reason we fight is not to show our courage or to win honor. Nor may you seek an honorable death because you feel shame that you survived. Worthy as those things may be in ordinary times, even to think of them now is selfishness. We on this expedition fight for our people; we fight that there may be uncounted generations to come. That they may plant their rice and raise their children and sing their songs without dreading that a sail on the horizon may bring death and horror. To protect them against the terror from the sea, to give them a future, we must win.”

  She let silence fall for a moment before she went on: “This is our inescapable duty. I will need more than your deaths; I need your swords and the living hands that wield them; Japan will need them. They belong to me and through me to the nation, not to you, and you may not sacrifice them without dire need.”

  A whipcrack: “Is that clear!”

  “Hai! Hai, Heika!” came the chorus, in unison from the samurai and ragged but sincere from the sailors.

  “Show the same loyalty and discipline now that you have in the past, and no hardship, no enemy, no desert, no fortress can stand against us!”

  “Tennoheika banzai!” crashed out from all of them as they flung their arms upward. “Tennoheika banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”

  The Sword let Órlaith feel the wave of belief behind it, the bronze ring of truth.

  “To the Heavenly Sovereign One, ten thousand years! Banzai!”

  Captain Ishikawa came up to Reiko afterwards, along with Egawa, as the rank and file went below to the crowded hold.

  “Majesty?” he said. “You summoned?”

  “Captain, the Imperial Guard were helping a good deal with the Red Dragon, towards the end, weren’t they?”

  “Hai, Majesty. Mostly hauling on ropes and similar basic tasks.”

  “Our voyage south should take between one and two weeks. During that time, I want you to have both your sailors and the Guard helping with the work—familiarizing themselves with this ship and drilling on her armament as much as they possibly can without interfering badly. This is to be your primary task until we make landfall. General Egawa, see that your men cooperate fully. Captain Ishikawa, arrange the details with Captain Feldman on my authority.”

  Egawa ducked his head. “My men were already cross-trained on catapults, Majesty, but these are an unfamiliar model. They will learn them quickly, I will see to that.”

  She nodded. “Captain, you will have heard that we may be getting another ship, one very much like this?”

  “Hai, Majesty!” the seaman said enthusiastically. “I would rather have the Red Dragon back in good condition, but if I cannot, that would be a very acceptable substitute. And once we get her back to the yards on Sado, there are a number of features we can study to see if they are suitable and practical for adoption, given our available materials.”

  Egawa looked less happy, but resigned. “A foreign ship is better than no ship, Majesty, and if Captain Ishikawa says it is suitable, I accept his judgment.”

  “Then training the Guardsmen to help sail this ship will be essential if we are to use that one.”

  Then Ishikawa cleared his throat: “So sorry, Majesty, but while General Egawa’s men are strong and I am sure willing enough—”

  “They had better be,” Egawa said flatly.

  “Ah so, gozaimasu-ka,” Ishikawa said politely, obviously pitying any Guardsman who didn’t show willing. “But that is a very short time to learn anything useful.”

  “They can learn routine tasks,” Reiko said. Dryly, flexing her hands: “Be
sides pumping.”

  They had all pumped, the last two weeks before they made landfall; pumped day and night until they staggered away numb with fatigue and hunger to shiver themselves to sleep in bedding that was never dry or warm.

  “And so free really skilled men,” she went on. “There are not enough of your sailors left to manage a ship of this size on their own on the journey home, are there?”

  “Not with any safety and not on such a long voyage, no, Majesty. With the assistance of the Guardsmen, we should be able to sail home, and even fight the ship, after a fashion, and of course they will improve with experience. I will split my sailors so that each watch would be commanded by a fully trained man . . . the Guardsmen will have to be ready to obey common sailors, of course.”

  “Then see to it,” she said; Egawa’s slight grim nod said there would be no discipline problems.

  For a moment the Crown Princess and the Jotei were alone on the poop-deck, standing somber and silent; Órlaith thought they both felt the weight of the expectations on their shoulders.

  Then the ship’s captain came out on the pier; he shook hands with some sort of municipal port official, handed over a sheaf of papers, and came up the gangplank. Feldman was in a brass-buttoned jacket of dark blue and a nautical cap, with his cutlass on his belt; he gave the streaming colors at the jack a salute, and then another to Órlaith and Reiko as he came up to the poop-deck. They both nodded to him without speaking, knowing better than to interrupt a professional in the middle of a task.

  The port official on the pier spoke sharply, and his workers went to the two bollards that held the Tarshish Queen’s hawsers. Several sailors came padding up to take their place at the wheel, standing on the benches to either side of it and undoing the rope loops that held it. There was a quiet bustle on the deck—a few brisk orders, but everyone seemed to know where to go.

  Glancing shoreward you could see Newport’s streetlights going out one by one as the lamp-man made his rounds, and the yellow of flame coming on in windows as folk rose for the early tasks. Dark shapes moved in the streets, with here and there a bullseye lantern’s spark as groups walked to work. The sky to the eastward had been paling for a while; now the stars vanished one by one, and the clouds there were tinged with red. Darkness faded, and suddenly you could see pale shadows, and wisps of fog out on the harbor that turned a glowing milk-white as the first low rays struck them. They weren’t quite the first to put out; fishing boats were already out on the water, and flat-bottomed barges set their stubby sails as they worked across the broad bay.

  “Mr. Mate! How does she trim?” Feldman called briskly, and followed it with a volley of nautical technicalities.

  “Aye, Cap’n, well enough,” the weathered dark man standing by the mainmast replied, and added details in the same jargon. He finished with: “Water’s on the ebb, skipper, down half a foot.”

  “Then make her ready, Mr. Mate. Prepare to loose all.”

  The harbor tug came alongside the bows, there was a flurry of movement as the tow-rope was passed across and made fast, and Feldman took a speaking trumpet from its rack near the wheel.

  “Cast off, bows!” he thundered through it. “Cast off, astern!”

  The harbormaster’s men thumped their mallets on the cross-rods of the bollards, then lifted the heavy loops of the hawsers free. Deckhands pulled in the thick cables and coiled them. The ship’s motion changed a very little as she was no longer tied to the land and rubbing against the wharf’s bumpers. Then the tug’s oars all came out at once, like a centipede stiffening, poised, stroked the water, and the deck surged beneath their feet. The towing cable broke the surface in a smooth taut curve, jets squirting out of the hemp as the tension of the ship’s hundreds of tons of deadweight came on it. The water of the harbor was quite still for a few moments as the tug took them down the channel; Órlaith could hear the call of stroke . . . stroke . . . stroke . . . in time to the hollow boom of the hortator’s drum. Then a ripple flickered across the green water as the breeze freshened.

  Feldman nodded and looked up at the pennants at the mastheads as they passed underneath the great arches of the steel bridge across the river’s mouth; there was a sudden scent of hot tar from the maintenance crews up there, heating the preservative for another day in their ceaseless work. Waves surged white on the breakwaters to either side, and then the ship began a long porpoise-like heave and roll as they passed out into the waters of the larger ocean. The waves shaded from blue-green to deepest blue beneath them, streaked with lines of foam.

  “Prepare to cast off the tow . . . cast off!”

  The cable slithered forward through the hawseholes and splashed into water turning a lighter blue as the dawn broke. Little whitecaps marched towards them from a horizon still dark and lost in haze; the tugboat turned sharply northward and circled, returning to the harbor.

  Always starting a journey and never completing it, Órlaith thought in a moment’s whimsy. Must be frustrating!

  “Hard a’port the wheel!”

  The hands standing to either side spun it, and the nose of the ship turned southward as it coasted on the last of the momentum from the tug, the long slender reach of the bowsprit bisecting the view.

  “Hands to winches, hands to heads’l sheets!”

  The winches whined as the crew whirled their handles round, and the upper booms of the gaff sails rose like blinds being drawn. Canvas thuttered and cracked, and the ship heeled sharply as the wind snapped them out into smooth curves and the booms paid out to the limit of the sheet-ropes and travelers. There was a surge as way came on the ship, and the tossing turned to a purposeful lunge. Droplets of spray came sparkling down the deck like a handful of diamonds as the bow dug into a curve and broke free, like a spirited horse lunging as a journey began.

  “Hands aloft to loose tops’ls!”

  The rigging thrummed like plucked strings under the rush of feet, and the sailors edged out along the manropes of the yards that held the square topsails. Another billow and crack as they fell down and filled, and the ship bent further before the wind; on deck crews hauled to set them at just the right angle. Captain Feldman looked at the binnacle and gave a quiet command to the helmsmen, ending with:

  “Thus, thus: very well, thus. Mr. Radavindraban, you have the deck. Keep this heading.”

  “Aye aye, skipper,” the first mate said. “Steady as she goes.”

  Then the merchant-captain surprised her; he’d seemed almost alarmingly businesslike so far, even single-minded. Now he grinned, took a deep breath, looked about at sea and ship and sky, at the crimson and gold over the mountains in the east.

  Then he recited softly, beneath the thrum of wind in the rigging, the gathering hiss of water along the sides, and the creaking groan of a wooden ship working:

  “Thy dawn, O Master of the World, thy dawn!

  The hour the lilies open on the lawn;

  The hour the gray wings pass beyond the mountains,

  The hour of silence, when we hear the fountains,

  The hour that dreams are brighter, and winds colder,

  The hour that young love wakes on a white shoulder,

  That hour, O Master, shall be bright for thee;

  Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea!”

  Feldman turned to them again. “Your Highness, Your Majesty . . . we’re under way.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Dùthchas of the Clan McClintock

  (Formerly northern California and southern Oregon)

  High Kingdom of Montival

  (Formerly western North America)

  June 24th, Change Year 46/2044 AD

  The McClintocks were singing as they trotted along:

  “I met a man in tartan trews

  I spiered him wha’ was the news—”

  It was their turn, so Karl didn’t try to start up a Mackenzie tune. He was feeling a little tired, too, but . . .

  But I will bear the teeth of Anwyn’s Hounds before I admit it, he t
hought. And forbye, this Diarmuid is probably walking in the same schoon just now. Also it would be the whipped cream on the pie if me da were to catch us and beat me about the head and shoulders with my own bonnet before them all, and I’ve an uneasy feeling that’s who’ll come after us. Old as he is, set him on a trail and he does . . . not . . . stop.

  So he would not be the first one to suggest they stop for the night, though there was a good stretch of not-too-steep meadow just ahead and the sun was touching the peaks to the westward. There were a dozen men in the feartaic’s party . . . eight men and four women, rather, the same balance as in his, typical for a faring like this in either Clan.

  They’d left the bicycles at Diarmuid’s steading, heading south on foot with six pack-mules to carry the essentials. That didn’t include tents; it was high summer, after all. Pressing hard, ten hours a day or so at wolf-pace, alternately jogging slow and walking fast with a break every hour, you could cover a lot of ground even in the mountains. It might kill the mules eventually, tough though the beasts were. No other creature could rival humankind for work of this sort, not when you kept it up for many days.

  Gwri of Dun Tàirneanach dropped back beside him. Her dark eyes scanned the woods around.

  “I’ve an ill feeling,” she said quietly. “But these are not our home ranges. It’s . . . uncertain. Perhaps it’s just the strangeness, feeling out of my proper place, but . . .”

  “But it’d be a foolish thing to ask you along for your counsel and then scorn it,” Karl said.

  Also, second sight aside you’re one who sees well and thinks hard, and no mistake.

  As they’d come south the land had changed, gradually and day-by-day, until they were in country utterly unlike the mosaic of river, swamp, groves of fir and oak amid prairie meadows, overgrown ruins and patches of farmland that made up the Willamette, and more subtly different from the wet rugged forests of the Cascades where they’d all hunted and trapped. And more varied than their own mountains as well, according to aspect and history; these woods burned more often than the rainforests farther north, and you went from dense shade to open land to dappled savannas of grass and oak within a few miles. Just here on a north-facing slope the land was in tall widely-spaced sugar pines, old-growth trees mostly a hundred fifty feet or better with cones as long as a man’s forearm. Sharp-leafed tan oak and silvery-barked madrone were thick in the understory and the edges of places too rocky to support the great conifers.