The Sea Peoples

by S. M. Stirling

  “That is in our style!” she said, pulling her folded tessen from her obi and making a sweeping gesture with the steel war-fan.

  The polished-looking Hawaiian guiding them—a brown, bronzed young man who showed that you could look immensely aristocratic wearing nothing but sandals, a brightly printed sarong-like wraparound they called a kikepa here, a ten-inch knife through your belt and flowers in your raven hair—smiled and bowed slightly.

  “These are the Gardens of Queen Liliʻuokalani, Majesty,” he said; he had less of the strong local accent in his English than most of the people they’d met, too, just enough to give it a pleasant soft tinge.

  He made a graceful gesture. “She was our last great Queen before the Change, but this park was laid out by Nihonjin gardeners; there is a teahouse in the fashion of your people also, Majesty, and we have equipped this mansion with tatami and fittings you will hopefully find familiar. The island to the west along the black-sand beach has a temple of healing, but for the duration of your visit we are keeping the common people out. We hope that all is satisfactory, and as we indicated His Majesty of Hawaiʻi bids both of you—”

  He managed to bow politely to both the foreign royals in the same gesture.

  “—to a feast an hour after sunset.”

  His gesture was almost as tactful as the fact that the rambling structures that would house the Montivallan and Nihonjin parties were almost identical. Reiko bowed politely to Órlaith, who matched the gesture with a slightly deeper one—her friend was a reigning monarch, while she was only an heir-apparent.

  “Until sunset, Orrey-chan,” Reiko said.

  That was startlingly informal, enough that several of her more recently-arrived courtiers showed that absolute absence of expression by which Nihonjin shi—gentlefolk—conveyed disapproval of a superior.

  “Until then, Reiko-chan,” Órlaith said, matching it.

  The two ladies-in-waiting opened the door, another made a just-barely successful snatch at the young girl she’d been escorting as she tried to make a break for the gardens.

  “Come, Kiwako,” Reiko called to her in Nihongo, taking her by the hand and then laughing and sweeping her up on her right hip, across from the two swords. “Time for your nap!”

  Her samurai stepped out of their sandals—and discarded the fragrant flower leis that they had tolerated only with a massive effort of self-control—and fanned out inside and around the edges of the house. The women sank to their knees and bowed their heads almost to the floor as Reiko shed her footwear, set Kiwako down to do the same and entered with Kiwako’s hand in hers. Órlaith thought she sensed the very faintest of sighs, as Reiko vanished once more into a world of ceremony and protocol far more ancient and rigid than that which often carked the heir to Montival.

  Heuradys and Droyn and Karl Aylward Mackenzie and their followers—including Karl’s greathounds Fenris and Ulf—did a sweep before she got past the front door of the house they’d been assigned, and then Morfind and Faramir and Susie Mika did it again, while Diarmuid Tennart McClintock spoke to his caterans:

  “Scit th’ groonds. An aye be cannie aboot it.”

  She didn’t think that the handsome young McClintock tacksman was more conscientious because they’d been lovers once, briefly and long ago; he’d been her first man, at a Beltane festival in the usual way among those of their branch of the Old Faith. He was a settled man now, with a handfasted wife and a newborn babe down south in his clan’s dúthchas where he was a minor chief. He’d come along to the Valley of Death for friendship’s sake, and because he agreed it was the will of the Powers that it was very needful. But it probably made him feel the responsibility more intensely, and his followers might well be more enthusiastic because they knew it and considered it an honor done their folk.

  The McClintocks fanned out through the nearby groves and flower beds, sometimes visible only by the flapping of their bunched-up Great Kilts. Órlaith winced a little at their trampling. And at the way one swordsman with sinuous blue tattoos on this face, arms and legs, and a beard like a burst pillow stuffed with ginger-colored straw drew the four-foot claidheamh-mòr slung across his back and used it to poke into hidden spots in the shrubbery.

  You just couldn’t convince a McClintock cateran that anyone else knew how to find things amid vegetation, even if it was vegetation they’d never seen before and a very, very long way from the forests where they hunted deer.

  Any more than you can convince them stealing the neighbor’s coo-beasties or wooly ship isn’t harmless rough fun or that they shouldn’t drop by a little past midnight to burn down the barn of someone who punched out their second cousin in a drunken brawl at the Samhain games and lift his horses while they’re at it, she thought resignedly. Grandmother Juniper says we should blame all those Highland adventure novels old Chief Hamish liked so much before the Change, but are tales really that influential?

  She snorted to herself: Of course they are.

  From the briefing packets that High Marshal d’Ath’s office had prepared for the expedition, mostly culled from interviewing merchants who made this run, Órlaith suspected that the guesthouses were usually kept for visiting aliʻi, the subordinate nobles who ruled various parts of the seven major islands that made up the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. As such they had to be big enough to accommodate their staffs and guards, which was convenient. Two statues stood on plinths beside the main doors, at first grotesque to Montivallan eyes and then showing their own beauty, snarling protective kiʻi of the sort she’d seen at the heiau temple earlier in the day.

  “First watch,” Heuradys said to Sir Droyn, who nodded and set his men-at-arms in their places at the door and around the edge of the big rambling structure.

  The construction was set around several courts and struck her as ingenious on several accounts; crushed coral rag mixed with a little cement and water and mineral pigments and pounded in frames, then left until it dried into shapes like monolithic blocks of coarse rock run through with pleasing patterns of waving horizontal lines. The walls were thick but only navel-high, with pillars of the same material carrying the high ceilings that showed rafters of Douglas fir imported from Montival, and the underside of the steep palm-thatch roofs above. Between the rooflines and the low walls were moveable curtains and screens of woven bamboo dyed in colorful patterns, and more of the same made up the interior partitions. Marble that had probably come from salvage expeditions to dead Honolulu on Oahu covered the floors, and brick from the same source was laid as pathways in the courtyards.

  The party went in, and by the time Órlaith reached the main common-room a swift efficient unpacking had begun, with a little quiet push-and-shove about who got barracked where. Heuradys settled that and the guard register with brisk authority—it was part of her job as Head of Household to see that Órlaith didn’t have to worry about details—and picked a room beside the master-suite Órlaith would be using, which had a small private garden and fountain of its own.

  “Nice,” Órlaith said judiciously as Macmacon lapped noisily from one of the pools, jumped up on a cushioned chair and circled until he was a ball of fur and dozed.

  She looked around the central lounging room’s cool airy spaciousness, with walls open on the shaded verandah and an interior court fragrant with jasmine and frangipani and drooping blue sprays of Queen’s Wreath, the splashing of a fountain in a pool big enough to swim in sounding pleasantly in the background. The sound made her want to strip off her clothes and jump in, which she intended to do just as soon as possible.

  Hilo had plenty of rainwater from cisterns and more still piped in from the slopes of the mountains southward, for drinking and sanitation and to power the machinery she’d sometimes heard whining and thumping while the parade went through the streets. The mansion’s layout was also cunningly sited and planned to catch every possible breeze by moving the screens and partitions. They weren’t backwoodsmen here, and from
the looks of things must have good engineers on call.

  The furniture was comely but functional, mostly of laminated bamboo and white cotton, some of polished stone tops or hard attractive woods she didn’t recognize. Susan Mika flopped down on a sofa and tossed a few fried poi chips from a bowl into her mouth after dipping them into a spicy red sauce. Like a lot of short, thin wiry energetic people she had a bottomless capacity for food when it was available.

  “Nice? You can say that again, Orrey,” the Lakota girl said. “Of course, back home on the makol they think it’s not really a home unless you can put wheels on it and haul it around with you while you shear sheep and punch cows and steal horses—that part’s fun, I gotta admit—and harvest tatanka.”

  Makol was what the Lakota—the people outsiders often called Sioux—named their own territory on the high bleak prairies beyond the Rockies on the realm’s eastern borders. It was part of the High Kingdom and the realm bore the title of Guardian of the Eastern Gate, but sheer distance from anywhere else meant it was even more autonomous than most of Montival’s members.

  Heuradys raised a brow as she shed her armor with Órlaith’s help, a groan of relief and a strong smell of sweat.

  “You don’t agree, Susie?” the knight asked. “Do I detect a note of skepticism?”

  “I left, you may notice. Glad I did, too, even if I miss my family. All that nomad virtue and hardiness and buffalo pemmican and ancestral chants around the fires in our freezing fucking winters . . . bo-ring! Not to mention we copied the gurs we actually live in from that Mongol friend of my granddad, so much for ancient tradition. Yeah, they’ve got tipis beat all to hell, especially in cold weather with a nice airtight stove, but you know what I mean.”

  One thing the Sword of the Lady did was tell you whether someone was speaking truth, or more precisely whether they thought what they were saying was the truth. Outright lying with intent tasted like metal foil clenched between your back teeth. In this case the answer was yes . . . and no; a sensation like what you felt waiting for someone to complete a sentence when they paused, only much stronger.

  That response was one reason Órlaith thought there had been some sort of scandal involved in the wiry little easterner’s departure from the high plains of the realm’s borderlands too—they were a straight-laced lot there—but had never pushed for the details. You had to be careful when you carried the Sword. Her father had said that if you weren’t you’d become impossible for ordinary people to be around without hatred.

  “Lila washté!” Susie exclaimed, going down the corridor and sticking her head into a room, her broad-cheeked brown face splitting in a grin. “Totally excellent! Nice big bed, and it’s perfectly positioned for guarding Her Immense Importantness. Dibs on the right-hand side.”

  “Left-hand for me,” Faramir Kovalevsky said quickly, grinning and running a hand through his pale-gold curls as he shed his helmet with a sigh of relief.

  “Amarth faeg!” his cousin Morfind Vogeler said as she did likewise, which was a complaint about the woes of one’s fate in Sindarin, then added: “Uff da!”

  Rangers from Stath Ingolf insisted that that was Sindarin too; if pressed they’d admit it was from the Wisconsin Kickapoo Valley sub-dialect of Elvish, which was where Ingolf Vogeler had originally come from.

  Her hair was straight and black; she was a handsome young woman of his own twenty years, a little taller than the blond Ranger, with a bad ax-scar down one side of her face that was only a year old and still purple-colored.

  “Why do I always get the middle spot?” she went on; Órlaith was glad to hear the teasing in her voice, since she tended to be quiet and brood.

  “Because he and I both get up to pee more often than you do, my beautiful Ranger lady of the capacious bladder,” Susie said. “I’m just minimizing the waking-you-up-by-climbing-over-you-in-the-dark stuff.”

  They shouldered their duffels and weapons and went inside the room to unpack, bickering amiably as they went. Órlaith reflected that they made her feel very adult sometimes, and she wouldn’t reach the quarter-century mark for another eighteen months. The relationship they’d settled into seemed to suit them. Though it would be at least mildly frowned on by Ranger custom, Faramir and Morfind being first cousins.

  “In bed two is glad company, three is choreography and boring,” Heuradys said ironically . . . and softly.

  “I heard that! You’re simply jealous!” Susie called, sticking her head out again for an instant.

  “It’s not natural the way she picks things up,” Heuradys grumbled.

  “Makes her a good scout.” Órlaith grinned and shook her shoulders back, thumbs in her swordbelt. “Settle in and familiarize yourself, everyone; then a swim for those who want it, your best clothes, and dinner.”

  That raised a cheer. They were here on serious business, but Heuradys was the oldest of them in her mid-twenties, and they were perfectly ready to have some fun along the way.

  The which behavior is a good model for life, not so?

  CHAPTER SIX

  BETWEEN WAKING WORLD AND SHADOW

  Deor spoke crisply: “Run!”

  “Run away from a horse?” Thora said.

  “It’s a crippled horse,” Deor said. “And it isn’t going to trample us. From what Pip says, we have to see it first before it can wreak harm!”

  “Which way?” she asked.

  Deor felt inwardly for a direction; as far as his eyes . . . you could call them eyes . . . could see they were on a featureless dirt road through scrubby countryside extending in both directions. But there was something like a silver thread running with light in his mind, or at least that was how his consciousness interpreted it.

  “This way,” he said crisply, pointing down the roadway. “The Prince lies in that direction.”

  It was the logic of a dream, or a nightmare, but that suited the place they were. Thora trotted off in the direction of his finger even as she complained; they’d been together a very long time, and she trusted his judgment in these matters as he trusted hers when it came to fighting.

  “Watch where we’re going,” Deor said as the four of them moved off. “We’ll have to retrace our steps to return to the world of common day.”

  It was like running in a dream, too. There were moments when he felt as if he were flying, not running; as if he were Láwerce hovering above a great yellow cat and the shambling sleek menace of the cinnamon-colored bear, and the cunning silent beady-eyed menace of the bush rat. Instead he forced himself to travel as a man, booted feet on the dirt of the road and sword slapping against his thigh.

  The road stretched ahead through mist, and when the mist cleared the scenes to either side were never the same twice—nor were they ever something you wanted to see—but there was little sense of motion. It was as if they trotted on a strip that moved beneath them.

  Toa lengthened his pace effortlessly, the huge muscles rolling like pythons beneath his tattooed skin as he moved ahead but his feet making little sound on the rutted mud. He held the great spear underarm, moving with his trot and ready to flash out in a gutting stroke like a frog’s tongue.

  “If this isn’t the real world, why do we have to run?” Pip said, her pale eyes turning angry yellow for a moment. “Why can’t we just imagine bicycles or a nice well-sprung four-horse carriage with a cooler full of Saltie Bites Lager like King Birmo’s?”

  Thora chuckled, and Deor grinned at Pip’s indignation. Her face had a certain rigid quality that showed how she was holding it thus by main force, but he liked the guts she was showing.

  “That’s why we have clothes and weapons . . . and bodies . . . here,” he said. “But ours aren’t the only will and mind involved. Think of it . . . think of it as walking in someone else’s dream, one that only becomes fixed as we see it. Or the world of someone else’s mind . . . and that one, or Ones, are not of human kind. Not now, not for
a very long time if ever. I wouldn’t recommend climbing into any carriage we found here.”

  “Because we might not like where it went or what was pulling it. This is Someone’s dream that has that Hell Horse in it,” Thora supplied. “Hi-ho, we’re off to meet them, too. Johnnie’s keeping bad company.”

  “And do not take food or drink that any we meet offer as a gift,” Deor added.

  Pip nodded. “I’ve heard those stories too. Oh, what fun. Some things are better kept in books.”

  “Or sagas,” Deor agreed. “But we live in a world where such things walk. Perhaps our grandparents did also, though they denied it.”

  The air around them grew darker as they wolf-trotted—jog a hundred paces, walk a hundred, repeating over and over again, the pace that humans could use to run to death any other beast on the earth. Then the mists parted for a moment. Black cindered stars moved through the sky above, slowly, in chaotic patterns pregnant with meanings that plucked at the edges of his mind.

  On a hill in the middle distance a tall fire burned, and stick-thin figures like a cross between human form and that of a praying mantis danced around it, heads thrown back in ecstasy as they pranced and whirled. Limbs raised on high moved twig-like fingers in unison, drawing patterns in lines of dark intensity. Within that white-crimson heat was a pillar, and other figures chained to it writhed against the bonds, shrieking ceaselessly in a high shrill note that scraped at his ears. A wild discordant music of flutes and drums and something that sounded like a steel barrel being pounded by a hundred tiny hammers wove through and around the screams of pain, and the dance went on without end.

  Fit for the halls of Surt, Deor thought, as the mist mercifully closed in again.

  But he knew some corner of his self was storing images for the song he’d make of this one day. He shook his head as he dodged around the rusty wreck of an automobile lying canted in the roadway, at the foot of a heroically nude statue, headless and holding aloft the stump of a broken sword.