The Sea Peoples

by S. M. Stirling

  The official and even more the unofficial briefings they’d gotten before landing had repeatedly made it crystal clear that anyone in the USB Army who let the locals see that sort of dismissive attitude was going to be very, very sorry, and so were the NCO’s and officers who allowed it. He supposed that the other contingents of the Montivallan expeditionary force had received the same message, in appropriate ways; some of them came from places where heads will roll wasn’t necessarily a metaphor.

  Alan dove into the sun-filtered water himself. It was a big enough pool that there was still plenty of room even with several of Órlaith’s Household making determined attempts to drown each other in it. One end was around four feet deep, and the other twelve, and it was all just deliciously, comfortably cool given the warmth of the local climate.

  He came to the surface and shook back his head, the honey-brown of his curls darkened by the water. The contrast with diving into a mountain lake fed by glacial runoff was startling. The closest he could think of was a stock-watering pond in summer, without its disadvantages, starting with what cattle and horses and sheep did whenever and wherever they felt like it.

  “I could get used to this!” he said.

  Swimming pools were luxuries for the very wealthy in some places; feudal ones like the Association, or rich city-states like Corvallis. The US of Boise had its share of rich men, but it discouraged ostentation and display, usually with swingeing taxation, on the theory that if you could waste money that way you should be paying more.

  There were plenty of towels for drying off afterwards. He’d brought along a set of his dress greens, so he had a uniform that didn’t look too out of place even after he’d settled his beret on his head. Boise was a conservative sort of place, so they weren’t much different from what the old Republic’s soldiers had worn on formal occasions, except that they had a Mandarin collar rather than the open one with shirt and necktie and boots rather than shoes.

  He did tuck a napkin into the collar while they all took a brief breakfast from a table, especially since a lot of it was fruit helpfully cut up—though he was glad of that, because many of the types were delicious but so unfamiliar he wasn’t sure how to eat them. He’d never seen a banana until the day before yesterday, for example, and he’d assumed from the few pictures in yellowing heirloom books and magazines that you just bit into them like an apple.

  Heuradys d’Ath was doing the same, though she was in an Associate’s getup of hose, shoes with turned-up toes and points at the ankles, jerkin, loose-sleeved shirt and—across a chair for the moment—houppelande coat with great dagged sleeves and roll-edged chaperon hat with a dangling tail and heraldic livery badge over the brow. By Associate standards it was fairly restrained; the hose wasn’t particolored, there weren’t little golden bells on the toes of the shoes, and the houppelande was a subdued maroon with only a little gold embroidery around the cuffs and buttonholes.

  Of course, Boiseans had always mocked the PPA’s selective medieval revivals, though he supposed when you thought about it following 20th-century Pre-Change official fashions was only slightly stranger than using 15th-century ones. He suspected that part of it was that the Portland Protective Association had been too strong for even Lawrence Thurston to feel like tackling back in the old days, though both parties had spent twenty years preparing for the final confrontation that never happened. Satire had been a harmless outlet for the tension.

  “At least you’re wearing something even more uncomfortable than I am, Herry,” he said.

  She winked at him. “No I’m not, gorgeous,” she said. “This is a special outfit I had done up in a hurry before we headed out, all cotton and linen and silk. That’s official-issue-as-specified-in-field-regulations linsey-woolsey you’re wearing, isn’t it?”

  He grinned back, though he was also feeling slightly uneasy. If things had worked out just a little differently when he and his retainers showed up at one of the d’Ath manors on their way to Portland—she and Órlaith had been quasi-exiled there while the High Queen was angry—he might have ended up with her, at least for a while.

  Instead of just for one night, and then I threw myself in front of that tiger—which I swear I didn’t think about, I just did it when the damned things came jumping out of the brush—and Orrey and I sort of collapsed into the sack and then I was sorry I’d been with Herry. But God, I’m twenty and healthy and I was unattached at the time—if a good-looking woman made it plain, what the hell was I supposed to do, say: Get your well-shaped ass out of here, and take that damn bottle of wine with you? Guys just don’t do that, we’re not made that way. At least I’m pretty sure by now she wasn’t checking me out for her liege, which is an icky thought. Associates are weird but I don’t think they’re that weird.

  Though the total, cheerful absence of jealousy on the part of either of the young women was a bit . . .

  Deflating, he thought. Not literally, though, thank God, and if I were getting swollen-headed over my looks—

  He wasn’t vain but he’d had enough direct experience to know that he hit women fairly hard

  —it would be an ego corrective that Herry thought once was enough.

  He finished with a couple of rolls—spicy pork sausage in a crust made of some local tree-grown-thing that mimicked bread or potatoes quite closely—and fell in with the rest. He’d pitched in during the landing precisely so he’d have some leave time now, and nobody seemed to mind that he was tagging along.

  The conference was outside under canvas, but considerably more serious than the luˉʻau in the same place had been last night; all the senior Montivallan military commanders were there, for starters, including his Uncle Fred, aka General-President Frederick Thurston, looking very serious.

  They exchanged salutes after the elder Thurston had paid his respects to Órlaith; nobody in the US of B was surprised that their head of state was personally leading the national contingent, since he’d commanded in the field with distinction during the Prophet’s War.

  “Hello, Lieutenant,” the older man said, shaking his hand after the exchange of military courtesies. “You haven’t met Alice and Lawrence.”

  He’d met his uncle Frederick Thurston five times, briefly and counting only the occasions where he’d been old enough to remember it as an adult. His mother had told him that his uncle and his father had resembled each other closely, down to the light-brown complexion and loosely-curled black hair worn short. His children were just old enough to be in uniform—as newly minted Second Lieutenants on their father’s staff—and looked a good deal like their cousin in turn. Each regarded the other curiously.

  Except that they look more earnest and serious than I usually do, and that one of them will probably be General-President, Alan thought. And I won’t.

  The current incumbent wasn’t quite a king and the position wasn’t theoretically hereditary. Boise had free and open elections for President every seven years, and had since the New Constitution was adapted right after the Prophet’s War and the founding of the High Kingdom.

  On the other hand, nobody not named Thurston had ever ruled in Boise since the Change, and in the last election the second-highest total of votes had gone to someone who ran as the official Presidential candidate of the Gibbering Lunatic Party, on a platform that included making transport cheaper by having all roads run downhill both ways and replacing all taxes with royalties from the Big Rock Candy Mountain. That candidate had worn a large red artificial nose, floppy shoes, and a buttonhole carnation that shot water, too, and had been given to shouting:

  I’m the most serious alternative you’ve got!

  “You’re moving in more exalted circles than ours, I hear, cousin,” Alice Thurston said, with a slight smile and a raised brow.

  Alan shrugged and grinned. “An army’s pretty gossipy.”

  His uncle laughed as well. “Oh, yeah. Worse than the tavern crowd at a crossroads village.
”

  “I’m a lucky man,” Alan said. “It sort of just . . . happened.”

  “I heard something about a tiger,” Lawrence said. “Two tigers, actually.”

  Alan’s smile was a bit tight, remembering the great striped shape rising up before him and the impact of the paw against his spear, like a blurring-fast trip-hammer flipping him through the air, the carrion smell of its breath. And the voice at the back of his mind, the monkey part of his brain yammering:

  This thing eats men!

  “I didn’t actually kill either of them,” he said. “I sort of delayed one after Órlaith’s horse threw her. Then the Crown Princess . . . stepped in with the Sword and . . . that was sort of alarming, really, in a way that was different from the way the tigers were. And Lady d’Ath—I swear to God she was as fast as the cat, and then everyone piled in.”

  Frederick Thurston nodded, his eyes distant for a moment. “I remember seeing Rudi . . . the High King . . . use the Sword of the Lady. That first time in Norrheim, on the Sunrise Sea. He was . . . terrifying when he fought with his own hands even before that. And the Sword was—”

  The General-President stopped for a moment, and when he continued his voice was soft: “Like something out of the Sagas. Like Tyrfing come again. When it’s drawn in anger the world shakes, it flexes, as though the whole fabric of things stretched. You can feel it might just rip at any instant.”

  Alan looked at Reiko, where she stood among her advisors and guards, and what she carried by her side. The hair on the back of his neck bristled a little if he got any closer than this, and he’d heard the stories the others told about what happened when she drew it and called on the great Power of the Otherworld she claimed as her Ancestress.

  All the Thurstons nodded soberly as they followed his glance. They lived in a world where such things were; as their grandparents had endured the Change, so they must accept it for good or ill.

  “And now, duty calls,” his uncle said.

  • • •

  Órlaith looked at the Capricornian envoys and the evidence they’d laid out on the table before the monarchs and their closest advisors. The giant skull of the seagoing crocodile grinned at her with a faint waft of corruption, and some of her followers made protective signs against evil, including crossing themselves among the Christians.

  “Forty feet, you say?” she said to the head of the delegation, trying to imagine the live animal coming at her out of the water.

  The Capricornian king’s envoy was a woman named Darla Wooton, dressed in what was evidently the national costume, khaki shorts, sandals and a sleeveless blue vest-like garment. A broad-brimmed hat bore corks on dangling strings, from which Órlaith deduced that flies were a real problem at home.

  “Too right,” she said. “Thirty-six, to be exact. Your ship fished the beastie out and kept the skin and the skull, and they thought it weighed about four tons before the sharks and gulls went to work on it. They get big, the open-ocean salties, and they’ve been getting bigger since the Blackout—”

  Which was apparently what they called the Change in her part of the world.

  “—since nobody’s shooting them with guns, but that’s bloody ridiculous.”

  She was around thirty—possibly a little less, given the scourging tropical sun—with sun-streaked brown hair, a wiry build and a face like a very intelligent rat, with a beak of a nose and receding chin. The two guards behind her were much bigger, tall rangy-muscular men carrying broad-bladed spears with round shields slung over their backs blazoned with a five-petaled rose-like flower, and short heavy chopping swords at their belts; one was very black-skinned, the other a deeply tanned blond, but they could have been brothers otherwise.

  “Frightening bugger, isn’t it?” Wooton said, jerking a thumb at it; apparently the Court of Darwin wasn’t long on formality. “From what your Captain Russ said of the way he reconstructed the wreckage, the Koreans chased Moishe’s ship—the Tarshish Queen—all the way to the Ceram Sea.”

  There was a map on the table, and she showed a location about a thousand miles north of Australia, a sea of myriad islands from tiny to huge.

  “Then they all ran into the lizard with the grin. Your Captain Moishe turned on the Koreans while they were fighting it, and finished off the saltie with a solid bolt. And the last Korean too, burned her to the waterline with napalm shell or firebolt. Your frigate Stormrider came across the wreckage a day or two later, the dead saltie floating belly-up and one survivor on the keel of a capsized Korean ship. Gibbering mad, apparently.”

  “They could talk with him?” Órlaith said, surprised.

  Wooton shook her head. “He was a Biter . . . what you lot call Eaters . . . from Los Angeles.”

  Well, now I know that Johnnie was alive then, Órlaith thought. The problem is I don’t know what sort of trouble he’s in now, and that’s more worrying than it was before. As if hope activates fear.

  The envoy from Darwin gestured to the two catapult bolts lying beside the skull; one was unmistakably the product of Donaldson Foundry & Machine, a well-known Corvallis firm and the supplier Feldman & Sons Merchant Venturers used. The other was cruder, a steel head heat-shrunk on a broken-off wooden shaft.

  “Definitely jinnikukaburi work, Heika,” Egawa Noboru grunted, leaning over to examine it.

  And using an extremely insulting nickname the Nihonjin used for their enemies from across the Sea of Japan; it meant roughly cockroach crawling in human flesh.

  “So,” Reiko said. “The last of the chon ships which pursued us to Montival are destroyed. My revenge for my father’s death continues.”

  “That was very well done,” Egawa conceded. “But our Captain Ishikawa was with them on the merchant’s ship, of course.”

  “Of course, Egawa-san,” Órlaith said, hiding her smile.

  There’s arrogance so sublime it’s an odd sort of innocence, Órlaith thought. And Egawa is a very good fighting man and utterly loyal to his Tennoˉ. And if he’s ruthless . . . well, he’s fought all his life against an enemy who would eat the flesh from his children’s bones, and that’s the cold and literal truth.

  “What’s really got King Birmo’s knickers in a twist is this,” Wooton said, pulling aside a cloth that covered a small object beside the catapult-bolts and the man-sized skull. “The saltie was wearing this, on its forearm, forelimb, whatever the fuck you want to call it.”

  It was an armband composed of ruddy metal, probably aluminum-bronze. On it was a broad circle of some glossy black material, and inlaid on that was a three-armed triskele of gold, with curved writhing arms coming from a central knot.

  She heard Alan hiss from the group standing behind her. Órlaith nodded in sympathy; there was a sense of revulsion to that thing, one that made her feel as if her bones had suddenly been filled with ice water pouring off a glacier in the spring.

  But not in that good-clean-painful way.

  One of Karl’s Mackenzies, the young fioasache—seeress—Gwri Beauregard Mackenzie gave a pained grunt too. Reiko’s hand dropped to the hilt of the Grasscutter. One of the kahunas beside King Kalaˉkaua raised his tabu-staff and began a chant of pule mahiki, a prayer to cast out evil spirits.

  “Gives me the willies,” Wooton said, then stopped and looked from face to face. “Not the only one, eh?”

  Órlaith nodded grimly. “That beast didn’t attack by accident, I think.”

  “Fuck me, weaponized salties?” Wooton blurted. “Look, mates, there’s something bloody dodgy going on up there in the Ceram. For a long time it was just ships disappearing now and then and we reckoned, what the hell, fuckin’ pirates, right? But it’s more than that.”

  “It is,” Reiko said in her slow, clear but accented English. “But this is not the same evil akuma who works through the kangshinmu of our enemies. It sent the beast against the chon ships, not to help them.”

  Órlai
th nodded. “Or the Power that was behind the Prophet and the CUT in Montival,” she said. “That feels like your enemies, Heika. This does not. Well, the Powers that are our guardians are many; we shouldn’t be surprised that those who wish us ill are as well. Or that they fall out among themselves.”

  She put her hand to the long double-lobed hilt of the Sword of the Lady.

  “You powerful God, you Goddess gentle and strong, be with me now,” she whispered, and drew it slowly. “Threefold Morrigú, Crow of Battle, patron and guardian of my House, spread Your wings about me.”

  Shock.

  The world seemed to halt for an instant. Seeing with the eyes that drank the light of common day, you saw only a yard of marvelously shaped steel . . . but it was never only that. The steel and crystal caught the sunlight and refracted it, and there was a glow, something you couldn’t be sure you were seeing or only somehow sensing.

  Órlaith raised it high, then gently lowered the point to the sigil.

  Shock.

  This time the feeling was sharper, more like the way the Sword felt when she drew it in hot blood for war. There was an intense internal feeling of stress and release like the snap of breaking wire as the point touched the yellow sign. A sigh went through the watchers as she sheathed the Lady’s gift.

  Like a pain you didn’t know was there until it’s gone, she thought.

  Wooton blinked and rubbed her eyes, as if suddenly realizing she hadn’t been completely awake.