The Sea Peoples

by S. M. Stirling

  More and more of them cluttered the way ahead, a sight familiar enough to anyone who’d seen the lands around the dead cities of the ancient world. Hand-bones gripped a wheel seen dimly through dirty, impact-starred glass. Wisps of hair clung to the skull between them, and something seen dimly retracted itself into a gaping eye socket. An ancient tang of rust and decay long contained in sealed places crept under the scent of acrid dust.

  Ragged thornbrush crowded close to the sides of the road, a wall the height of a man laced together with oddly swollen, lumpy vines with thorns like bone claws; dead trees reared above the thickets. Tendrils of fog crept through the brush, and they had to slow to weave their way through more piled wrecks, sometimes clambering cautiously—there was nothing like rusty iron to give you lockjaw if you cut yourself on it.

  Something else crawled through the brush, many things, with a faint rustling and chittering. If you looked closer you saw that wrecked automobiles were scattered through the undergrowth as well to either side, as if they’d swung wide to try and dodge the pileup themselves. The charred trunk of a great tree lay across the crushed remains of one, where the impact had brought the oak down and they had burned together. The trunk of the car had burst open, revealing many small bones.

  Ahead Toa swung up a clenched left fist like a small beer keg, and they all stopped. Fog hung over the path before them too, like a sluggishly moving gray wall pouring over the dead machines. The Maori went to one knee, peering about.

  “Stuff moving in the bush,” he said. “Around those busted cars.”

  “Toa, did you notice the cars are all pointed in one direction?” Pip said. “As if they were all trying to get away from something up ahead of us.”

  “Right,” Toa said. “Didn’t work, though.”

  “And they look burned,” Thora said. “Half melted, some of them.”

  Deor blinked and looked more closely, narrowing his focus for a moment from the wide-spread alertness you used in hostile country. Usually you didn’t notice wreckage of the ancient world much, not enough to see detail unless there was some reason to, when you were looking for valuable salvage or for something hidden among it.

  The young woman from Townsville was right: they were all headed in the same direction, on both sides of the road, though he knew it had been the custom for streets this narrow to have two lanes moving traffic in opposite directions, keeping to the left or right—living cities used the same pattern where traffic was dense enough.

  Thora is right too.

  The rear ends of the cars were scorched and buckled and sometimes steel and glass had run, as if some flash of fire brighter than a thousand suns had hammered them all in an instant. Others were tumbled and crumpled by some great storm-wind that had accompanied the light. The ground crunched beneath their feet, as if littered with something thin and fragile. Looking down he saw that it was, but irregular and sometimes in the shape of the road’s ruts, earth itself seared to brittle glass.

  “Odd-looking autos, too,” Pip observed. “Not like any wrecks I’ve seen. More like really old pictures or paintings of autos, from well before the Change.”

  They didn’t look much like those he’d seen in his home in Westria or around the world amid the wreckage of the old world. In dry areas some were still unworn enough that you could get a good sense of how they’d appeared. These were boxier, more angular, and the wheels were narrower and higher—the way two different schools of craft might make the same thing, say a wagon or ship, the variance of tradition and place always there within the boundaries imposed by function.

  “They didn’t just stop, either, I think,” Deor said thoughtfully.

  That was why the roads of the world he’d grown up in were still littered with such; on that day nearly half a century before they’d simply ceased to function as the Change flickered around the globe in an invisible wave of alteration. Plenty had crashed as their controls and engines died, and burned then or later; then time and rust had had its way with them, or human hands looking for spring steel for blades, or mechanisms to be incorporated into a watermill, or glass to be melted down and blown into bottle and plate and sheet metal to be beaten into shield-covers. In lands still peopled they’d long since at least been pushed aside to free the roadways for the modern world’s animal-drawn vehicles, and most salvaged down to the scraps.

  But these looked as if they’d been undisturbed since they were caught moving and beaten with a lash of fire. Or a wave of it. The word wave sparked a comparison in his mind.

  “They fled from Death with all the speed they had, and Death followed them still faster,” he said. “Not just foemen, but something terrible beyond common thought. Remember the beach at Topanga?”

  They glanced at each other, remembering. Remembering the storm clouds gathering in a clear sky like a churning funnel as lightning slashed through it in an endless flicker. Then it toppling towards them . . . not only the cloud, but the scourging wind, and the water towering higher and higher and crashing down as the ship’s stern rose and rose in a world gone black and actinic blue and the Korean warships tumbled and smashed like toys beneath a boot. . . .

  Deor remembered more; he had had the Sight to see what lay behind the physical things, and it had been like staring into the Sun, blinding the eyes of the spirit.

  Vaster than worlds, he thought, and recalled tension like a steel band around his head until it snapped and left him feeling like a dust-mote tumbling in a hurricane. The wrath of a Goddess.

  “I think . . .” he said. “I think we walk among memories as well as dream. Memories of what was, or what might have been . . . perhaps what might be, also.”

  Pip’s head came up, and then Thora’s and Toa’s. Deor heard it too.

  Clip-clop, clip . . . clip clop, slow and maddeningly irregular. Toa’s thick lips curled back from his teeth, and he glanced towards the brush and then back over his shoulder.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Neighborhood’s getting too soddin’ crowded for comfort, straight up, and it’s not the types who show up for a vicar’s bunfight.”

  Pip opened her mouth and then hesitated. A sound came from nearby, a metallic clunking chunk accompanied by a groan.

  “What was that?” Thora exclaimed.

  Pip spoke, slowly and her voice very flat. “That sounded very much like an automobile door opening and closing again. One of my granddad’s cronies kept an old Jag from before the Change in mint condition on his Station and had it pulled around by horses now and then while he tooled behind the wheel. It sounded just like that when he got out. Except not so rusty.”

  “But there’s nothing in those cars except—”

  The same sound was repeated, this time with a loud screech as of rust-bound metal breaking free into movement. And again, and again. The stink of ancient decay grew suddenly stronger.

  “—nothing in them but the long dead,” Pip finished. “Let’s bloody go, shall we?”

  “Too right!” Toa said, and trotted into the fog.

  Deor took a long breath and plunged into the mist behind him. It seemed to press into his mouth and nostrils, choking; then there was an instant of unbearable heat and they were through it, skin still tingling from what wasn’t—quite—scorching damage. The heat had been full of screaming, too, as if from multimillionfold deaths that never died.

  The others exclaimed—or in Toa’s case, grunted and cursed in his own language—as they felt pavement beneath their feet, and an unfamiliar brilliant cool light leaking into the narrow dark place they stood. They were in a city, a living one from the lights and murmur of voices and wheels amid less familiar noises; in an alleyway smelling of uncollected trash in sheet-metal bins. He looked around; small red eyes looked back and then scrambled away. Scrawled on one surface of sooty brick in tall reddish-brown letters barely legible because of smearing and long dribbling trails was:

  NOT UPON
US, O KING! NOT UPON US!

  Then they all exclaimed again, and louder, as they realized their clothes had changed as well. Deor felt something choking him and his hand flew up to it. Some very conservative parts of Montival still sent emissaries to the High King’s court in what the ancient world had called a suit and tie, and this was like that, only worse—the collar was starched and dug into his neck, and he had on a wool jacket and waistcoat too, and a hat much like the one Pip had called a bowler when she wore one. A quick look showed that Toa was wearing blue denim, a suit of loose pants with a bib-like extension that covered his chest over a collarless gray shirt and rough shoes and a flat floppy cloth cap with a bill over the eyes; he’d seen something very similar worn by farmers in New Deseret. The two women were in dresses that extended a little below the knee, light colorful fabrics and impractical-looking shoes with buckled straps bearing distorted skulls, and hats like bells made out of cloth with wool pom-poms on top.

  “Where’s my damned sword?” Thora snarled. “I thought we could call weapons to us!”

  Her left hand clapped against her hip on that side, groping for a scabbard where there was nothing but a narrow belt of cloth instead of the frog for her backsword. But there was a large embroidered handbag over her arm, and it clinked metallically. The red-haired Bearkiller froze, and then reached within it. They all recognized what she pulled out; it was a revolver, a massive thing with an eight-inch barrel.

  What they’d never seen was one that would work as the old tales described, of course.

  “Be careful where you point that, here, oath-sister,” Deor said, and she tilted it up. “Think of it as a loaded crossbow.”

  Toa had something in his hand too, a wrench a yard in length ending in a knob crusted with stains they all recognized as well, and from their own experience. Pip was still carrying something very like her double-headed cane, and she looked inside a haversack-like thing slung over one shoulder.

  “Mummy’s kukri-knives are in here,” she said.

  Deor felt a catch under his left shoulder. He reached beneath the woolen jacket, and felt the butt of a weapon like the one Thora had just tucked away again in a complex holster arrangement designed to make it easy to draw but well-concealed.

  “I think we have equivalents,” he said. “Ones that . . . fit . . . with wherever we are.”

  Pip looked rebellious. “How did we imagine things we’d never imagined?” she said.

  Deor was tempted to brush the question aside, but she might . . . would . . . need to make decisions in split seconds. A mind in turmoil was less likely to make the right ones.

  “The High King, High King Artos, once told me that he’d been told by those who knew that time isn’t an arrow. Time is a serpent. Our world is one of many through the cycles of the universe. Many . . . many iterations. Some very different, some much the same, some just different enough to be like an image seen in a distorted mirror. Deeds and persons and places echo from one to the other; sometimes what is dreams or tales in one is sober truth in the next. And within each . . . iteration . . . more Powers than one, or more powers than two, many more, push to bring the cycle of things more to their liking.”

  “That’s bloody indefinite!”

  “That’s as definite as I can be; he said that the Ones he spoke with more or less told him that was all he could understand, and Artos thought it was for the same reason you can’t explain arithmetic to a dog, that the reality is simply beyond what we can grasp. But we’re not alone here, let’s say, and we’re not entirely alone with the One whose place this is.”

  Thora stepped forward and ducked her head outside the entrance to the alleyway for a quick glimpse either way.

  “Those are streetlights,” she said, her voice soft with wonder for a moment. “Electric streetlights.”

  They all stared at that light, so unlike the flicker of flame or even the glow of gas mantles. It was like stepping through into an ancient tale of wonders.

  Deor closed his eyes and felt for the thread of connection that had tugged at him from the Prince’s side.

  “I think we should keep moving,” he said.

  Pip nodded and took a deep breath. “Look as if you own the place,” she said crisply, in that drawling accent. “Best rule in a strange town.”

  “Yes, it is,” Thora replied dryly.

  She’d seen full many of them, as she voyaged the world around in Deor’s company, and had fifteen years on the tawny-haired youngster.

  Was I ever that heedlessly arrogant? he thought. I hope not . . . but then, after I left Mist Hills for the broader world, I wasn’t the Baron’s son anymore—not even his odd younger son who liked boys. I was the bumpkin, the yokel, the hayseed from the place in the wilderness nobody had ever heard of; I had to earn every grain of respect I ever tasted.

  The street outside was fairly broad, running between brick-faced buildings four or five stories high, floridly decorated in terra-cotta moldings, many with wrought-iron balconies. Cars—moving autos—dashed by, and crowds dressed much as they were moved thick on the pavements beneath light-stands shaped like vultures holding globes of light in their beaks. The folk moved quickly, faces down and closed, avoiding one another’s eyes, and if you looked closely most of the autos, heavily laden, were heading in one direction.

  The air had an odd chemical smell, like some laboratories he’d been in here and there, and an acrid burnt tint a little like forges or smelters. There was none of the usual urban scent of horse manure and stale horse-piss.

  And fear, I know that smell. It smells of fear.

  A man in a brass-buttoned blue uniform stood on the corner, with a pistol at his side and a yard of truncheon in his hand, a curious helmet like a cloth-covered fireplug on his head. Occasionally he would trot over when the autos got themselves into a snarl blowing a whistle and waving; once hauling a man out from behind the wheel and beating him bloody before throwing him back in. The passengers pulled the unfortunate man into the backseat, and one of them moved up to take control.

  There was a stand nearby, much like those used in some cities he’d seen to sell newspapers. Posters plastered the sides of it. One bore large letters:

  NEW YORK HERALD

  “New York!” Pip murmured.

  They all glanced at one another; that fallen city was a name of terror, at the heart of one of the greatest and worst of the Death Zones created when the world-machine stopped.

  “Is this New York before the Change?” she said. “It’s not much like anything I’ve seen or read about it. Not in the details, at least—no hundreds of giant glass-walled buildings for starters.”

  Toa was looking upward. “Take a dekko,” he said, his bass voice rumbling softly.

  Not far from them—though perhaps farther than it appeared—was a towering structure like an elongated pyramid, stepped in at intervals and glowing with innumerable windows, and topped with a yellow-lit spiky three-armed sigil. Beams of light like gigantic spears picked out something at its peak just below the Yellow Sign, like a huge finned whale-shape floating in the air. As they watched, it cast off and turned away with a purposeful motion unlike any balloon, a buzzing coming from it that still cut through the throb of street-noise.

  “Anything about those in that fancy school, Cap’n?” he asked.

  “That they weren’t around in 1998,” Pip said, but gave it only a glance.

  She fished in the bag at her side and tossed a coin to the attendant in the booth, who sat in a wheeled chair behind the counter. He grabbed it and yammered; Deor saw the stub of a tongue in his mouth, and a line ran from a collar at his neck to a staple in an iron post at the back.

  The captain of the Silver Surfer scanned the paper in her hands; it had more pages than any Deor was familiar with, even in Portland or Winchester or Sambalpur, a fantastic extravagance given what paper cost in most places.

  “March
17th, 1998,” she said.

  “The day of the Change!” Deor exclaimed.

  They crowded around her to read the headlines.

  CZAR’S BOMBARDMENT SUBMERSIBLES OFF THE COAST! ONE EXCLAIMED. WAR AT ANY MOMENT! UPRISING IN SUANEE, SPECIAL ACTION GROUPS SENT IN!

  Pip began to read the print below in a murmur: “From our correspondent in the Capitol . . . which is apparently Yhtril, DC . . . District of Carcosa . . . Eternal Emperor Castaigne proclaims that in this time of crisis, all loyal subjects must come together and make sacrifices for the nation.”

  She stopped, and her brows went up, and he could see her throat work as she swallowed and continued:

  “He proclaims that one’s own children are the most desirable sacrificial burnt offering, though self-immolation in the Lethal Torment Chambers is acceptable. All patriotic Americans must kneel in servile adoration and worship before Divine Uoht and glut His hunger, that He may intercede for us with the King in Yellow and send the Pallid Mask against our enemies as He has before.”

  They paused. “I really don’t think we want to stop here,” she said. “As you said . . . not a good place, eh, what?”

  “I never thought we’d agree on so much, girl,” Thora said with a taut grin.

  “Deor?”

  “This is a past. Not ours, I think. Or the image of a past that might have been, or in some cycle of the greater worlds once was. The ideal to which that which rules here aspires, or something close to it. And for which it needs Prince John.”

  “So, which way, oath-brother?” Thora said, and the others nodded.

  He closed his eyes for a moment.

  “This way,” he said. “The feeling of the Prince is stronger here.”

  So is the fear, he did not add aloud. We’re growing closer to whatever it is that creates and sustains this place.

  They walked down the street, and turned onto another. That was a much broader highway, at least a hundred paces across. The sidewalks were broad too, laid in patterns of colored brick, with a double row of trees clipped into rectangular shapes on each. The buildings were all seven stories and faced with faded white stone, with a common cornice line but a pleasing variety of form and detail. Most of the ground floors were broad brightly-lit shop windows.