The Sea Peoples

by S. M. Stirling

  “Guileless son,

  I’ll shape your belief

  And you’ll always know that your God is a thief

  And you won’t understand the cause of your grief

  But you’ll always follow the voices beneath—”

  The animal swayed, and the hanging man’s eyes followed it, brown-green and haunted, staring into the yellow ones:

  “Loyalty loyalty loyalty loyalty

  Loyalty loyalty loyalty only to me

  Guileless son,

  Your spirit will hate her

  The flower who married your father the traitor

  And you will bring them the only true savior . . .”

  Then he was . . . elsewhere.

  Ah. I recognize this, the city of New York more than a hundred years ago. No, Hildred Castaigne recognizes this; I dream him again. This is the armorer’s chambers he visits sometimes.

  He was looking at a young woman; a very pretty one, with light-brown hair piled in an elaborate halo-like manner framing delicate features.

  Constance Hawberk, he thought, not sure if the name came to Alan Thurston or the man he dreamed he was. To—

  Hildred Castaigne, Alan reminded himself: that thought at least he knew was his, because you didn’t think of your own name very often so he must be thinking it himself, against the other one.

  The man who will be Emperor of America as royal servant to the King in Yellow, who will rule even the unborn thoughts of men.

  Probably the girl’s name was in the dream-man’s mind, because the man was looking at her with concentrated dislike and no hint of desire. But it was an oddly abstract hatred, directed at her as an object rather than a person, as a bundle of potential problems. Less like that you felt towards a person who’d done you an injury, and more the way you cursed a landslip that blocked a droving-trail and thought about how many days of sweating work it would mean to get it shored up again. Though Alan hoped he’d never feel that spiteful simply because something or someone was in the way.

  I really don’t like Hildred Castaigne much, even if we’re related, Alan thought with the detachment of dream. And there’s something very strange about him.

  “Did you see the opening ceremonies at the Government Lethal Chamber, Mr. Castaigne?” Constance asked. “I was out on Broadway this morning and saw the cavalry passing, but I needed to get this banner finished for the Museum’s exhibit.”

  “You mean that I imposed on you, dear,” her father said, giving the greave a final buff of the chamois cloth.

  He was a thickset man with muscular shoulders, arms and hands but a bit of a belly on him and a brown beard that reached his chest. Every one of the tools his battered callused hands used was familiar, which itself was strange in this dream-place.

  “Helping you with your work with my needle is not an imposition, Father!” she said with a chuckle. “It’s not as if we were gentlefolk of leisure, with nothing better to do than stroll about and see the sights.”

  “I was there, yes. Rather boring speeches, though the Chamber is a nice piece of architecture,” Castaigne said. “Thank God this city has finally developed a sense of aesthetic decency.”

  Then she hesitated and looked at him and quickly away again, flushing: “Did you see your cousin, Lieutenant Castaigne, there?”

  “No,” dream-Castaigne said carelessly; inwardly he was snarling like a rabid wolf.

  That’s very odd. He’s almost ready to murder her because she loves his cousin, but there’s no . . . he doesn’t want her himself, but the thought enrages him utterly. What a strange man!

  He’d seen people willing to kill over jealousy, and ones who’d done it—Boise was a fairly law-abiding sort of place even in the rough remote parts he’d lived in, but people were people. This was different.

  “Louis’ regiment is maneuvering out in Westchester County,” Hildred said.

  Castaigne rose and picked up his hat and cane. There was a flash of disturbing images; holding Constance by the throat and smashing the silver hilt of the cane into her face again and again, blood spattering into his mouth and eyes as the fragile bones crunched and an eye popped out of its socket. . . .

  “Are you going upstairs to see the lunatic again?” Constance’s father said with a laugh.

  At the word lunatic a flash of white fire went through Alan’s mind, or rather that of the man whose body he shared. The thoughts that followed made his desire to beat the young woman’s face in look like a gentle caress, and they started with a red-hot knife-blade. Alan tried to pull away. He wasn’t a squeamish young man, and he’d grown up around the normal accidents of herding and logging and hunting dangerous beasts, with a couple of brief brushes with bandits. He hadn’t flinched when the only thing to do was give the mercy-stroke to a man who’d had a horse stumble and fall and catch his pelvis between the saddle and a boulder.

  But there were things you didn’t want to know human beings were capable of, even in imagination. The dream held him, in bonds that were no less unpleasant for being imperceptible. Hildred Castaigne didn’t just want to kill, he wanted screams and begging and pleading and to gloat over despair. The agonies of a continent wouldn’t satisfy his lust for revenge.

  “I think I shall drop in and see Mr. Wilde for a moment or two,” Castaigne said quietly.

  How can they not know? Alan thought. How can they listen to him and not know what he is?

  “Poor fellow,” Constance said compassionately, with a shake of the head. “It must be hard to live alone year after year. Poor, crippled and almost demented. It is very good of you, Mr. Castaigne, to visit him as often as you do.”

  “I think he is vicious,” her father said, beginning again with his hammer.

  “No, he is not vicious,” Castaigne said. “Nor is he in the least demented. No more than I.”

  Alan’s dream-mind laughed aloud. That was rare enough in these dreams that he enjoyed the moment threefold, because Castaigne was demented; like a large barrel full of starving coyotes fed on locoweed and kicked downhill.

  And vicious didn’t begin to cover it.

  Hildred went on: “His mind is a wonder chamber, from which he can extract treasures that you and I would give years of our life to acquire.”

  Hawberk laughed, and Alan felt a kinship with the bluff Englishman. Hildred amplified:

  “He knows history as no one else could know it. Nothing, however trivial, escapes his search, and his memory is so absolute, so precise in details, that were it known in New York that such a man existed, the people could not honor him enough.”

  “Nonsense,” muttered Hawberk, searching on the floor for a fallen rivet.

  Where Alan came from the word would have been bullshit with an added horse-laugh.

  “Is it nonsense,” Hildred said, suppressing another vivid image of the heel of his shoe crushing Hawberk’s jaw so that he choked to death on his own blood: “Is it nonsense when he says that the tassets and cuissardes of the enameled suit of armor commonly known as the Prince’s Emblazoned can be found among a mass of rusty theatrical properties, broken stoves and ragpicker’s refuse in a garret in Pell Street?”

  That hit, Alan thought, watching the shock on the middle-aged man’s face. That really hit.

  “How . . . how did you know? Know that they were missing?”

  “I did not know until Mr. Wilde mentioned it to me the other day. He said they were in the garret of 998 Pell Street.”

  “Nonsense,” Hawberk said again, but his hands trembled under the leather artisan’s apron.

  “Is this nonsense too?” Castaigne said, with a smile that felt as if it could cut like a razor. “Is it nonsense when Mr. Wilde continually speaks of you as the Marquis of Avonshire, and of Miss Constance as . . .”

  Constance leapt up, her face gone pale and sweating; the embroidery fallen unheeded to the floor.
Hawberk smoothed his leathern apron; Alan saw his face settle into the mask of a brave man facing danger.

  “That is impossible,” he said quietly. “Mr. Wilde may know a great many things—”

  “About armor, for instance, and the Prince’s Emblazoned,” Castaigne said, grinning.

  “Yes,” Hawberk continued, slowly. “About armor also, maybe. But he is wrong in regard to the Marquis of Avonshire, who, as you know, killed his wife’s traducer years ago, and went to Australia where he did not long survive his wife.”

  “Mr. Wilde is wrong,” murmured Constance.

  Her lips were pale and her fingers clenched, but her voice was sweet and calm.

  There’s a girl with nerve and grit, Alan thought admiringly. And we have something in common—she and her father are political exiles too. Maybe she’s an ancestor as well?

  “Let us agree, if you please, that in this one circumstance Mr. Wilde is wrong,” Castaigne said.

  Inwardly, Castaigne was laughing. Cackling, rather, and reciting to himself:

  When from Carcosa, the Hyades, Hastur, and Aldebaran . . . and through a long line of names, too: the Last King . . . Hildred de Calvados, only son of Hildred Castaigne and Edythe Landes Castaigne, first in succession . . .”

  • • •

  “Wakey-wakey, sweetie.”

  Alan started up. For a moment he had no idea where he was; someone had flicked him on the backside with a towel. Memories fled through his mind as he grasped at them, like eels slithering between his hands. He shook his head, rolling over and sitting up.

  He felt tired, which turned out to be as much a feature of a field soldier’s life as it did of a working rancher’s except that it was less seasonal. This time he had no objection, because it hadn’t been a case of staying up late to make sure the tents were pitched and the horse corrals in the right place and the chow line would be ready for breakfast.

  Órlaith stood grinning at him, as nude as he, his own height of blond comeliness and reminding him of a cougar he’d seen running up a rocky slope once, moving like falling water from boulder to boulder with casual ease. Though she also reminded him of a Golden Eagle swooping down a valley.

  Good God, what a woman! he thought; his dreams might be troubled and vague, but he remembered the waking part of last night vividly. I wasn’t a virgin, but I might as well have been.

  And that has nothing to do with who her parents are. Well, she takes after the High King’s looks, I’ll admit.

  He’d been about eight when Artos the First had visited their ranch; it had been very much High King Artos, and not Rudi Mackenzie. Brief and formal and the High Queen hadn’t been with him, but it had been intended to show that his mother was fully forgiven as far as Court was concerned, and it had. And he’d never forgotten the meeting, or the moment of unaffected kindness to the small boy he’d been.

  And it’s not just his height and complexion she’s inherited. He was . . . very alive, and she’s the same way.

  “Time for a swim,” she said.

  “It’s dawn,” he said blurrily, peering at the morning sunlight falling in narrow slits through the woven bamboo walls of the room.

  “That’s why it’s time for a swim,” she said. “I’ve got to be at the conference very soon. As my father said to me, on campaign always take an opportunity; it may be your last chance.”

  She winked. “And he said you’ll be short of sleep anyway, but you can sleep in the Summerlands.”

  He smiled back; Summerlands was what Órlaith’s version of the Old Faith called the afterlife. Even if there weren’t many witches in Latah County, everyone knew a little of the stories behind the High King’s religion. Then the smile faded slightly for an instant. . . .

  Is she testing me by mentioning him? he thought. Her father killed mine, after all, even if I was still in the womb at the time. No, probably not.

  Everyone in Montival who listened to the epics, and more particularly every educated person whose family was involved in the politics of the High Kingdom, knew the history of House Artos and House Arminger back in the War of the Eye—the Protector’s War, people from the Association called it. And how the son of the Bear Lord and Lady Juniper had ended up marrying the only child of Norman and Sandra Arminger.

  And from the stories, the High King did my father a favor, there at the end. Even Mother thinks so, though she’s just said it was very bad after he came under the Prophet’s control and that he wasn’t himself anymore. But he tried to kill her when she defected, after all, and in front of hundreds of witnesses, and while she was pregnant at that. If that crossbow bolt had hit it would have been a short and unmerry life for me. I think Orrey just doesn’t hold him against me, which I like. Very much.

  He laughed and stretched. “I was just thinking, one generation with a history of getting together after mutual homicide by their parents could be happenstance, but twice . . . that’s a pattern there.”

  She grinned back at him, tossed him one of the towels she was carrying and led the way out to the villa’s courtyard pool. Several of her close household were already splashing around, or watching and letting the mild warmth dry them off. And none of them thought wearing clothes to swim in was a good idea.

  He wasn’t shocked, though he’d been raised in a conservative part of a conservative part of Montival. Most of the people he’d grown up around were old-fashioned Protestant Christians, with a scattering of Mormons. The ruling Boise City branch of the Thurstons were of the Old Faith—Asatru heathen specifically, not Wiccans like the Mackenzies or McClintocks. His uncle Frederick had taken to it on his trip to the Sunrise Lands with the High King, and his mother and sister had followed when he came back. It had spread widely through Boise’s territories in the generation since because of the prestige of that association with the victorious General-President, but not yet to many in the remote backlands of Latah County.

  You got over being body-conscious in field service, though. The heavy infantry brigades of the US of Boise Army were all-male, but the support echelons and the light cavalry weren’t.

  And I don’t want to look like a bumpkin from the back of beyond, anyway. Even if I am a bumpkin from the back of beyond, for now. I’ve got a brother to take over the ranch, and Tom never wanted to leave.

  They all nodded to him as he followed Órlaith out, most of them smiling. One medium-sized man with long brown hair and mustache gave him a considering look, walking a few paces to take in all of him. He had a wildcat build, a thin torc of twisted gold around his neck and tattoos all over his otherwise naked body; apparently what they said about McClintocks was true, though Alan had never met any before he came east for the war. Latah County in the US of B and the hill lands south of the Willamette down by the old Californian border where the Clan McClintock laired were both mountain-and-valley, but apart from that they were about as far apart as possible in every imaginable way.

  Diarmuid’s his name, Alan reminded himself.

  He’d been working on learning who was who in the Household.

  Diarmuid Tennart McClintock. Personal name, family name, clan, like the Mackenzies. He’s a tacksman, sort of like a rancher or squire, and in his mid-twenties, oldest man here.

  Diarmuid gave Alan a final close examination and spoke to the big blond young Mackenzie, Karl Aylward:

  “Nae scrat up. Ye owe tha’ price ay a scuttle sheeps,” he said cheerfully; his accent was thick even compared to the way Mackenzies spoke, and much rougher. “Ah tauld ye she wasnae given tae claws.”

  Two women—the short slight Sioux girl and the tall black-haired Ranger with the scar—quietly stepped up behind the McClintock. Each planted a foot against her side of his bare butt and shoved in neat unison, and he went windmilling forward to land in the water with a shout cut short in a gurgle and a huge splash.

  Karl Aylward Mackenzie apparently thought that was hilarious, wh
ich was the sort of rural sense of humor Alan was familiar with. Heuradys d’Ath grabbed Karl’s arm while he was standing helpless with bellowing laughter, put it in a lock and spun him neatly into the water after the southern clansman with a move Alan recognized but thought he might have had trouble countering. Diarmuid promptly tried to hold his head underwater.

  Alan had never swum in anything but rivers and ponds in his home-range, though in plenty of those; they were handy and fun, especially if you didn’t mind sharing the water with beavers, trout and the occasional muskrat.

  This pool was an oval of marble occupying most of a courtyard, with water running into it from a wall-fountain shaped like a bronze lion’s mouth; like the marble, it was probably salvage. The fancy villa was the best the locals had and they’d quite rightly provided it for the Crown Princess’ party. He’d thought the expeditionary force was being more deferential to local sensibilities than was strictly necessary, considering that the fleet and the army it escorted numbered rather more than the entire population of the island’s capital city.

  I have trouble taking Hawaiʻi all that seriously, he thought, watching with appreciation as Órlaith dove in with scarcely a splash and began doing an underwater lap. Maybe I should try harder.

  In the days of his grandfather Lawrence Thurston the United States of Boise—back then, they’d just called it the United States of America because they hadn’t cared how it read with the neighbors—had aspired to recreate the United States from sea to sea. That hadn’t worked out despite President-General Lawrence Thurston’s fanatical dedication—he’d been a soldier of the old Republic and took it very seriously—but Montival incorporated the western third of what had been the United States and what had been British Columbia as well, which had made Boise’s membership go down a lot easier. It was a reunification of sorts, even if not the one their first General-President had had in mind.

  Granted that large parts of Montival’s vast expanse were empty, or empty of anything but a few neo-savages living on deer and collecting their enemies’ heads, or had scattered hamlets and herding camps whose contact with the High Kingdom were entirely theoretical, but it was still hard for him to take this little miniature toy of a kingdom in mid-Pacific very seriously. You could drop it into Boise alone a dozen times over without making much of a splash. And while the USB was probably the second most populous part of Montival—the other possibility was Boise’s neighbor New Deseret—it wasn’t the biggest in area by a long shot. He’d known Montival was huge before he left home, and after traveling overland on horseback and by rail and barge all the way to the coast he appreciated it down in his gut in a way that only watching countryside crawl by for weeks could bring.