The Sea Peoples

by S. M. Stirling

  Her eyes went to the date-stamp.

  “Goddess gentle and strong, they made a fast passage! And they have news of the Tarshish Queen, hence of John. No direct contact, but strong circumstantial evidence that she was afloat recently, and where that was. The Korean warships chasing them have definitely all been destroyed, apparently by the Tarshish Queen’s catapults and by . . . chance circumstances, about which they’ve sent evidence. They and a supply ship from Darwin are heading for the area to search further.”

  Reiko’s face was impassive as she nodded and smiled slightly. Nevertheless her polite:

  “Very good news, Orrey-chan,” was entirely sincere; and it held an element of relief.

  Órlaith thought hard. “We’ll hold a conference tomorrow,” she said. “Time’s short, but not so short we won’t do better after a good night’s sleep.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BETWEEN WAKING WORLD AND SHADOW

  Pip looked around the chamber where she and Toa emerged, poised for threats and then feeling a rush of relief when it proved empty. That didn’t make the environment actually as unthreatening as it looked—she’d absorbed that lesson quite literally at her mother’s knee, listening to her stories—but it was nice for a start. Thora boiled up out of the trapdoor on Toa’s heels, pulling Deor who followed and promptly collapsed into a sprawl, panting, with Thora beside him putting a steadying hand on his shoulder.

  Presumably this is harder on him, since he’s the one who knows about this and has to pay attention to the bits behind the scenery, Pip thought. Amazing how real this all feels . . . right down to the splinter in my thumb. Except the parts where I sort of see a lioness in the background, or feel as if I am one. Best not to think about that. God knows what Mummy would have said about her daughter turning into a large beast of prey. Of course, metaphorically speaking Mummy was a large and very successful beast of prey herself, but I think literalizing the metaphor would have offended her sense of the fitness of things.

  She dug the splinter out with her teeth as she took in their surroundings. It was daylight, at least, bright beams through shuttered windows and around the edges of the door. That didn’t mean the situation was any better than in the doomed and nighted city of madness and hatred they’d left, but it made her feel a bit more cheerful, and she’d take any sort of cheerfulness going. It was also distinctly cool, as cool as she could ever recall being except for a trip to Tasmania once where there had actually been frost, but fresh and comfortable enough with the long-sleeved dress.

  She prodded at the wall with her . . .

  “It’s an umbrella now?” she asked—rhetorically, but with genuine anger in her voice. “I liked that cane! I had it made specially and developed my own techniques for whacking at people with it!”

  I got my own ship so I could be in command, she thought. Now I can’t even control what I’m wearing. And I’m preggers . . . always thought I would, someday, but not unexpectedly! Think of the trouble it’s going to take to find a decent nanny God-knows-where!

  Then with an effort of will:

  Now, don’t let that make you testy, Miss Philippa. Manners Mayketh Woman.

  The last part of the thought had the tone of one of her teachers at Rockhampton Girls Grammar School, a place which was supposed to give you polish and where she’d undoubtedly learned a good deal, not all of it on the official curriculum.

  I never liked Miss Gresham. Rather a sour old bitch, as I recall.

  Closer examination showed that the umbrella was still a stout stick of Makassar ebony with a heavy ridged knob on one end, and that the ferrule of the brolly was a triangular steel spike; she could use this if she had to, either for hitting or like a fencing épée. Looking down she saw that the dress was much the same as it had been in the first vision of New York, except that there was a petticoat beneath it, the skirt was a bit longer, and the buckles on the shoes weren’t silver skulls but just silver buckles.

  Which is all to the good. I’ve no objection to skulls as a fashion statement, but I suspect they were more in the nature of a mark of your religious commitment back there.

  Toa went straight to the door; he was still in dungarees, but this time his spear was more or less a long-handled navvy’s shovel . . . which would do nicely for gutting and cutting if needs must, almost as much as the original. The more so as the edge bore the telltale waving line that revealed it had been carefully sharpened.

  “Still in town,” he said.

  There was disapproval in his gravelly Ocker-accented voice; he disliked cities, having grown up where the only ones around were ruined and deserted. Cities made it too easy to sneak up on you, though he did approve of the broader variety of pubs.

  “Cities have their points—bloody hell, I’m wearing a corset!” Pip said; a quick investigation with a finger revealed that it was a light cloth one.

  But still! This is ridiculous.

  “You’ve got a corset at home,” Toa pointed out. “Saw it on that stand once when you came back from that school. All frilly grundies, with ribbons and those little chiming bells.”

  “That was a theatrical costume,” Pip said loftily. “And for needlework practice.”

  In fact you might say it had been sporting goods, since she and a friend had taken turns wearing it at Rockhampton in amateur theatricals of their own devising. The boarding school had been rather isolated out in the sleepy countryside, and you had to make your own entertainment after classes. She’d enjoyed chess and open-air perspective drawing and the Mathematics Club, but it didn’t do to be completely cerebral and you could only steeplechase or play Extreme Field Hockey or haunt the salle d’armes so many times a week.

  “So’s that droog thing with the suspenders and bowler hat a costume,” Toa said, keeping his eye to the slightly open door.

  “No, that’s working clothes,” Pip said lightly, touching her hair, which was worn rather long and piled up in an elaborate do under a broad-brimmed hat this time. “I’ve won fights on land and sea wearing it, haven’t I? It’s nicely terrifying. Well, I’m terrifying when out on a bovver but it helps.”

  “Makes the opposition fall about laughing. That helps when you put the toe cap into their ghoolies.”

  She’d been surveying the room while he kept his eye to the shutters and watched the outside. They were definitely in a workman’s storehouse of some sort, bare brick walls with racks and shelves, half-empty sacks of plaster with labels in English, buckets of paint, boxes of nails, and sundry brushes and trowels and boards and other tools, along with folding ladders, giving the air around the supplies an atmosphere turpentinish and medicinal. And another earthy one beneath it, the scent of setting mortar. Someone had been building. The smell was familiar since, like any substantial station, Tanumgera had carpenters and masons working on something at any given time.

  A grimy newspaper lay on one of the shelves. She looked at it; the New York Herald again, but the date was in early April of 1920. Reading it without conspicuously marking what she was wearing required holding it out at arm’s length since it was very dusty and spattered with dried daubs of paint.

  Though the headlines were less apocalyptic they were still very strange. History hadn’t been her favorite subject, particularly not the deeply boring history of the last pre-Blackout century or so, but she knew that her version of 1920 hadn’t seen a Russian invasion of Sweden, or a civil war in Austria-Hungary, or anything meriting a Communards Storm Paris, Louvre in Flames leader. Nor had there been a President Winthrop in the United States.

  She was pretty sure he’d been named Wilson; either that, or Williams.

  Still, this feels less . . . less as if the tentacles are showing. It’s more like what led to me. I think something terrible happened here, something to throw the world on the path to . . . what we saw in the last place.

  Deor still looked fairly rocky as he knelt on the round metal
trapdoor, and Thora had stayed beside him as he recovered from his last glimpse of the place they’d escaped.

  “Fire,” he whispered. “A world of poisoned fire. The powers of Gods, in the hands of men less than beasts, worse than eoten.”

  Well, that’s very poet-y and Northern and doomy, Pip thought; she’d read Beowulf and the Prose Edda . . . in translation. I’ll just say that place gave me the galloping creeps, nearly as much as the one with all the wrecked autos.

  “Like the sword of Sutr, carried burning to Vígríðr plain on the last morning of the world,” Thora said quietly.

  Then Deor shook himself and smiled crookedly. “No point in grieving for something that never happened . . . not in our cycle of the worlds,” he said.

  He was wearing a suit that differed only in details from the one he’d been in before; if anything the collar looked even more uncomfortable, which was revenge for the corset. From the way Thora had started twisting and running a hand inside her dress to find out what was strapped around her, she’d never worn one even to play Distressed Victorian Maiden in Lecherous Hands, though compared to armor it couldn’t be too bad.

  “This is still New Nightmare City, pardon me, New York,” Pip said holding up the newspaper. “The same one, I think, but a lot earlier.”

  Deor grinned at her a bit crookedly. “And for the question in your mind, Captain Pip: why are we being led through the ages here, as well as across continents and seas, as we journey towards the Prince? I don’t know. Let’s just say that paths in the Otherworld don’t follow the rules of those in the world of common day. There are more purposes than ours at work here, and they may be very subtle.”

  “I’ll keep thinking about that for consolation as we’re devoured by monsters,” Pip said, and smiled back at him.

  “Looks like we could get out of here without anyone much noticing,” Toa said. “Crowd looks safe enough if you don’t mind they’re all Paˉkehaˉ.”

  “You’re very tolerant that way,” Pip observed ironically.

  “Too right, I never even mention the Paˉkehaˉ smell or the bad teeth or the no-chins bit or the way they’re mostly hunchbacked midgets. They’re all looking at some bloody parade or other out there right now.”

  Pip gave the room one last glance-over. “Why don’t you carry that package?” she said, pointing to a large one wrapped up with string. “It’ll make you less conspicuous.”

  The Maori grinned, an alarming expression. “You mean they might not notice the Taˉ moko?” he said, flicking a sausage-like thumb at the swirling patterns on his face, as individual as a fingerprint. “I’ll blend right in.”

  He lolled his tongue and made his eyes bulge for a moment, like the beginning of a war-haka. Then he hefted the parcel, which clinked dully, and hoisted it on one shoulder and put the shovel over the other. That did make it necessary to really peer closely before you caught the full effect of features, tattoos and scars.

  “Ready?” Pip said.

  I hope this works. No matter what his mother’s mother was, nobody’s going to mistake Toa for a Paˉkehaˉ. The people we meet seem real, but are they? And if they are, are they really seeing us, or are we part of a backdrop to them?

  Deor nodded, settling the bowler on his head; it really didn’t look right for someone named Deor Godulfson. Toa swung the door open and Deor led them out; Pip followed, with Toa bringing up the rear. She approved of that. He had a sense for when he was being followed, and it had saved both their lives more than once.

  Outside the sky was clear, and the little building they’d been in was shown to be a simple brick rectangle with a slate roof and Parks and Maintenance Department, Municipal Government of Greater New York in cast-iron letters above the door. It was mid-morning and they were on the south side of a broad treelined street, with a park to its north; over the tops of the elms there she could see a great triumphal arch. The city-rumble was there in the background, the familiar modern sounds of horses and wagons and carriages, thickly interspersed with the growling of motor vehicles like something out of an old storybook.

  The traffic’s been blocked out of these streets, though, Pip thought.

  She recognized the signs from occasions in Townsville City with her parents or grandfather, though this metropolis was vastly larger.

  Parade or something else official.

  The southern side where they stood was also a park, but you could tell that it was a newer one, and from the look of the rest of the neighborhood she suspected that buildings had been torn down to make room for it—the layout was a regular north-south grid, and the architecture of the blocks she could see was a curious mixture of busy-looking and sooty brick and newer, lighter-colored structures in a much more uniform neo- Classical style.

  The flower-banks of the new park were very pretty—a blaze of forsythia and crocus and yellow daffodils, and the fountains raised skyward in graceful arcs, but the trees were new and smallish, the pathways still pristine, each of the blue and red bricks beneath their feet sharp-edged. A fairly dense crowd was scattered through the park, but they were obeying signs that read:

  It Is Forbidden To Walk On The Grass.

  And all focused on the ceremony going on in the center of the open space. The whole city block was enclosed by an ornate gilded iron railing about head-high on her, with a line of outward-leaning points in the shape of leaves and vines at the top, and broad paths met in the center of it like a Greek cross. Where they joined stood a small circular building of glistening white marble, topped by a shallow copper dome and surrounded by thickets of flowers. It stood on a six-foot circular platform of the same stone, worked in shallow relief with figures of robed and hooded women with their arms before their faces in a gesture of mourning. In front of the stairs was a sculptural group, three female figures in ancient Greek robes: one spinning out a thread, the second measuring it, and a third about to make a cut.

  The Fates, she thought; even tense and looking for threats she could see it was fine work if you liked a naturalistic style.

  Either the Fates, or the Sixth Form prefects at work.

  Six Ionic columns supported the roof, and the single door was a tall sheet of worked bronze at the top of a graceful semicircular staircase. Each half of the door held a design of a pomegranate tree. A temporary speaker’s platform draped in the flags of the old . . .

  Well, not so old in 1920, she thought.

  . . . American republic stood behind the statues, with a group of dignitaries on it; all men of middle age or more, some in archaic-looking rigs of black cutaway coats and waistcoats and top-hats, some in elaborate military uniforms, both types she recognized from history books.

  A regiment’s worth of cavalry was drawn up in a hollow square around the building, sitting their mounts silently with the sun bright on the pennants and the blades of their lances, which might account for the extremely orderly, not to mention silent, disposition of the crowd. None of them wore armor except for rather odd-looking brass helmets, polished and with horsehair crests, and they all had revolvers at their belts as well.

  Their uniforms were blue with gold piping, elaborate with corded decoration, and their jackboots polished to a mirror sheen. Those were as nothing compared to the smaller group of cavalry around the speaker’s platform itself; hussars in tight red breeches that fastened up the outside seam with jet buttons, boots with gold tassels, short fur-edged midnight-blue jackets worn slung over one shoulder in the style of a cape, clasped with a woven-silver cord adorned with gold and silver braiding and several rows of multiple buttons. Under that was a dolman also decorated in braid, on their heads were tall fur busbies, and their embroidered saddlecloths had four long points. It all made the pictures she’d seen of the King-Emperor’s court in far Winchester look drab, or even the Pope’s in Badia.

  Well-mounted, though, she thought.

  The horses were long-legged hunter types,
their coats gleaming with health and good grooming, the leather of saddles and tack as immaculate as the uniforms of the troopers. It was undoubtedly a ceremonial occasion, but the lancers and hussars looked as if they knew how to ride, at least. Being the granddaughter of Townsville’s Colonel meant she’d grown up around horse-soldiers. All the successor-states in Oz had plenty of empty country covered in grass.

  But why lances and sabers, if they have working firearms here?

  One thing that was familiar was the sonorous politician’s blather of the speechmaker delivered by one of the top-hatted dignitaries, at least in tone if not content.

  “The laws prohibiting suicide and providing punishment for any attempt at self-destruction have been repealed. The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through physical suffering or mental despair. It is believed that the community will be benefited by the removal of such people from their midst. Since the passage of this law, the number of suicides in the United States has not increased. Now the Government has determined to establish a Lethal Chamber in every city, town and village in the country. It remains to be seen whether or not that class of human creatures from whose desponding ranks new victims of self-destruction fall daily will accept the relief thus provided.”

  “Well, if someone wants to do away with themselves . . .” Pip murmured dubiously.

  “There is ill-wreaking here,” Deor said. “This thing . . . somehow it’s tied to Prince John’s loss. How, I do not yet know, but it is.”

  The politician paused, and half-turned to indicate the round columned building behind him. The crowd had been quiet; now the silence in the street was absolute.

  “There a painless death awaits him who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life. If death is welcome let him seek it there.”

  Aha, she thought. Painless death . . . but in that later New York, the Eternal Emperor said Lethal Torment Chambers. I suppose this is what they mean by a slippery slope, what?