The Sea Peoples

by S. M. Stirling

  “I’ll be stuffed,” she said reverently. “I was right not to touch the bloody thing.”

  “I think you were indeed,” Órlaith said.

  Then Órlaith sighed. “It appears my brother Prince John has fallen into a conflict in your part of the world, one no less serious for good and ill than this,” she said. “And considering how the Tarshish Queen and Stormrider ended up in the Ceram, I refuse to think it an accident. Our guardians are also taking a hand here, and giving us a warning.”

  Reiko looked stricken beneath an iron calm. The alliance with Montival was formally one of equals, but in cold hard fact it was a lifeline that her folk needed if they were not to be gradually ground to powder by superior numbers. If Órlaith decided to change the priorities to put rescuing her brother first rather than fighting the dark Power that ruled what had once been Korea, there was little Reiko could do about it, the more so as there were now strong arguments for it.

  Órlaith’s hand gripped the hilt of the Sword until her fingers whitened. When she spoke again her normally even contralto voice had gone flat and harsh, with a note of iron:

  “But one war at a time. Who tries to be strong everywhere at all times is weak everywhere all the time—”

  The senior war-leaders all nodded, as if an unseen hand had moved their heads. That was something they all agreed with down in their souls.

  “—and the High Kingdom keeps its oaths. Captain Russ and Stormrider and its contingent of the Protector’s Guard are a considerable force in their own right, and they can stay in the area and continue the search for the Prince and his companions. We’ll deal with the matter before us, and if the situation in the south hasn’t resolved itself by then, we’ll deal with that in turn.”

  Órlaith took a deep breath. She was holding the image of a drop of water falling into a pond and the ripples fading. It was a technique she had learned as a method of centering in a visit to Chenrezi Monastery in the Valley of the Sun:

  “My brother Prince John is a tried fighting man—”

  Of good but not absolutely exceptional quality, she thought.

  “—and he’s with a shipload of able comrades, and an MRN frigate is looking for him.”

  And Deor Godulfson is there, which means there’s one who knows of the world beyond the light of common day, she thought but again did not say; those around her would be uneasy enough.

  “That will have to do for now.”

  Egawa Noboru rose for a moment, bowed to her, and sat again.

  And I feel a little flattered, Órlaith thought, giving a brief nod in return.

  The man was not really likeable if you weren’t of his own folk and kin, but you had to respect him, and hence his respect was worth having. The more so for knowing he wouldn’t readily give it to an outsider unless his own sense of honor forced him to it.

  King Kalaˉkaua frowned. “I see your point, Your Highness,” he said. “But we of Hawaiʻi have had good relations with Capricornia for many years. If King John is worried, we should be too. He is a very shrewd man.”

  “Fair dinkum, Your Majesty,” Wooton observed; she’d evidently been here before as her monarch’s emissary. “There’s no flies on King Birmo. Except when there are, if you know what I mean.”

  Lord Maugis de Grimmond cleared his throat. “If we could return to the matter the Crown Princess has said is the first priority, I would think a month’s rest for the force before moving out would be best.”

  Admiral Naysmith frowned. “It’s not time-critical from a naval point of view. The weather’s going to be bad in northeast Asia anyway until well beyond that.”

  One of Reiko’s naval advisors began to reply when a drum throbbed. Everyone looked up; a pair of Hawaiian guardsmen came trotting through escorting a courtier, the same polished young man who’d conducted the Montivallan and Nihonjin parties to their quarters in the palace district. He looked much less relaxed now.

  Uh-oh, Órlaith thought, and heard Heuradys say the same thing softly behind her. It’s never good news when someone runs in like that and interrupts his king at council.

  “Your Majesty,” he said slightly breathlessly, going to one knee before Kalaˉkaua and pressing his right palm to his heart as he bowed. “A guardship has arrived from Oahu. The Koreans have attacked Pearl Harbor! Attacked in great strength!”

  Órlaith blinked. Her briefings kicked in; Pearl Harbor was on Oahu, the island most heavily populated in ancient days and hence worst hit by the Change. The Hawaiians had been resettling it over the last generation, and Pearl Harbor was a center of industry—the ships and buildings of the old American navy there provided a bottomless source of steel, aluminum, brass, glass and other materials, and there were foundries and machine shops.

  It also included their Royal catapult works, a top-priority military target in any war.

  “They attacked without even making demands of us!” Kalaˉkaua exclaimed, clenching a large fist. “They’ll regret this! No doubts now—the Aupuni o Hawaiʻi is in this war, to the death!”

  Reiko put her hand to her sword-hilt. “And Dai-Nippon fights with you against this treacherous sneak attack!”

  “And so does Montival,” Órlaith echoed. “We will avenge this infamy.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  BETWEEN WAKING WORLD AND SHADOW

  The crooning of the cat ceased. John felt an overwhelming impulse to gasp, as if a smothering weight had been taken off his chest. Then the pain returned, and he dabbed his feet down towards the dusty floor.

  Where am I? he thought. It’s like . . . just a room.

  Plaster over thin laths in a style he recognized; you could see how horsehair had been mixed with the plaster as a binder. Wooden boards on the floor, and a window with tattered, yellowed curtains.

  He was uneasily aware, even through the pain as he tugged at the bar running behind his neck, that this was a technique his mother’s father had used to break men down. A voice like that of his confessor scolded him to save guilt for his own, reasonably abundant, sins. Wallowing in vicarious offenses was a form of laziness and spiritual pride.

  —and why . . . how . . . didn’t the others keep the enemy from carrying me off? I’m certainly here, wherever here is. Pip wasn’t far away when the tower fell . . . I hope she’s all right. . . .

  He tried to pray again, but there was a clank of fetters. The young man chained to the wall across from him looked to be about his own age, a few years on either side of twenty—you looked older when you’d been beaten and chained up—and likewise with a swordsman’s build. Brown hair but a bit lighter than John’s, and a strikingly regular face with a slight exotic cast.

  John tried to speak, and found that his mouth and throat worked . . . more or less. Unfortunately that also made him conscious of how ragingly thirsty he was.

  “Who . . . are you?” he croaked. “Where is this place?”

  It took a moment for the man’s eyes to focus on John. They were green, with a darker green rim around the outside of the pupils.

  “I’m . . . not sure who I am.”

  John had a musician’s ear for language, aided and abetted by a life spent traveling all over Montival with his parents when they were on Progress. It didn’t take conscious analysis to spot the dialect:

  Boise. Some rural part northeast of Boise City at that. An educated man but not one who’s spent much time in town.

  The voice went on, a monotone of bewilderment and pain: “Part of me is here. Part of me is there. Part of me is . . . everywhere. Alan. Am I Alan? Or am I just pretending? Or is he pretending? Could I know if I was pretending to be me? Everything’s mixed up here. Good and bad. Alive and dead. Me and you and him. And Him. And Him!”

  Crazy, poor fellow, John thought. Then: Of course, enough of this, whatever this is, would drive anyone crazy. St. Michael, aid me—and while you’re at it, this man too. Aid us again
st the snares of the Adversary, you who cast Lucifer down from the ramparts of heaven.

  He could think, but not well or quickly; it was like having a loud buzzing noise in the innermost ear of his mind, making concentration exhausting. Simply thinking that through brought extra sweat to his face, dripping down onto the worn boards of the floor around his bleeding toes.

  “My ancestor,” the man who might be called Alan said. “My ancestor is here. My ancestor is near.”

  The green eyes met John’s brown. Suddenly they seemed deeper, whirlpools spiraling into nothingness. He began to thrash, and there was a smell of dry dust as it stirred and made motes of light in the beams that came through the rents in the curtains. . . .

  It smelled dusty—

  Then there was a memory. It came suddenly and it was overwhelmingly strong, and it took John instants to realize it wasn’t his memory. Riding down into a dry valley somewhere ringed by mountains, sagebrush country, he recognized the general type from his travels with his parents and then on his own, but not the specific place. It could have been anywhere inland of the Coast Range. He was a child, eleven or twelve, riding a quarter horse with a couple of dogs at heel and a broad-brimmed hat on his head, and a light bow across the horn of his silver-studded saddle.

  The old ranch-house was hidden under the edge of a caprock ridge. It had been well-built once, adobe walls and framed windows, and dead trees showed where there had been a garden, now gone to tumbleweed and thorn and bunchgrass. The boy felt curiosity—the more so as by some freak of preservation the glass windows hadn’t been broken, and there were even pre-Change machines, a car on the rims of wheels sunk in the dirt with dust mounded up one side, and a rusted tractor by the charcoal stubs of a barn that had burned at some time.

  The boy realized that it might well have stood here since the Change, though he wondered why it had been abandoned—there was good water nearby, enough to be brought by a furrow to irrigate likely-looking land, and plenty of grazing, and firewood not too far away. There was even the remains of a wind-pump by the barn, though it looked decrepit enough to have been abandoned long before the Change. Two or three wooden poles that had brought the wires of the ancient world to this place still stood; one of them had three Harris’ hawks “stacked” on its crosspiece, perching on each other’s backs in that way those flying pack-hunters used to spot game.

  The dogs whined and hung back as he dismounted, dropping the reins to signal the horse to stand. He put an arrow to the bow and made sure his bowie knife was ready to hand as he walked up the steps to the porch and threw his weight against the door. If the place hadn’t been salvaged since the Change any number of treasures might be inside.

  The smell hit him as he opened the door, ancient and dry but tightly contained in the nearly sealed space, the smell of ancient rot. The boy stared for a moment at the mummified corpses scattered about what had once been a living room, his mind stuttering as he realized what the marks and the bonds and the positions meant. He backed up, swallowing and spitting as cold gummy saliva flooded his mouth, and cold sweat broke out on his forehead. . . .

  I have enough bad memories of my own! Why am I remembering someone else’s? How did I get chained up like this—

  • • •

  He climbed the three dilapidated flights of stairs, which he had so often climbed before. . . .

  Wait a minute. Who am I? John thought, as he felt his feet on the worn wooden risers. Is this a hallucination, or a dream, or what? Where am I really? What am I really?

  The thought was very much like teetering over a canyon, or hang-gliding at Hood River on the Columbia, but without the fun. His parents had once heard of a man who’d gone on a long journey to find himself, and had laughed uproariously together and said that if he couldn’t find himself at home, he wasn’t likely to do it by taking a caravan over the mountains. He hadn’t always been satisfied with who and what he was, but it had never been a matter of doubt.

  Dreaming. You often think you’re someone else in dreams.

  The thought calmed him; somewhere he could feel his heart slowing and frantic panting turning to deep breaths.

  The man he dreamed . . .

  And I’m dreaming I’m someone else dreaming I’m this man too. Someone else is dreaming he’s Hildred Castaigne.

  . . . knocked at a small door at the end of the corridor.

  It opened, pulled so by a mutilated dwarf barely four feet high, and he had only the stumps of ears. They were badly covered by two grotesquely perfect wax prosthetics, strung from a silver wire and painted a blushing pink in total contrast to the jaundice-yellow and fishbelly pallor of the man’s face. His eyes were the pale color of frosted lead cast too hot and let cool, but they smoldered. Fresh deep scratches scored the skin of his face, and others in successive stages of healing or infection; all the fingers were missing from his left hand, leaving only stubs that had healed to ragged lumps.

  It wasn’t the injuries that made John’s mind recoil. He knew folk as ugly whose selves made their looks irrelevant. One of his instructors in the lute had been a knight who’d taken a spray of napalm across the eyes from an airburst flame-shell at the battle of the Horse Heaven Hills, and they’d been excellent friends from the first lesson. The thought of the man’s face still brought an immediate association of warmth and shared accomplishment even now, though strangers often gave involuntary gasps the first time they saw it.

  It wasn’t even the odd shape of his totally bald head, lumpy and flattened and drawn almost to a point at the rear.

  The eyes, it’s something about the eyes.

  They gave him an unhinged feeling, as if just looking into them knocked the whole world askew, distorting the angles of things. The second sense of self within him—the man who dreamed he was Hildred Castaigne—felt a fascination mixed with dread. Castaigne himself . . . if that muffled wave of sensation was his . . . watched the dwarf with something not far short of love, seasoned with an odd mix of resignation and terror.

  The room Castaigne entered was shabby in a dusty, neglected way that was somehow dirty without looking or smelling particularly filthy, things neatly placed in ways that made you confused just looking at them. It smelled of dust, old paper, ink, stale laundry and a not very well cleaned catbox.

  Wilde, John thought, one of the bits that floated through the triply shared consciousness he unwillingly inhabited. The dwarf’s name is Wilde.

  Wilde double-locked the door and pushed a heavy chest against it, then came and sat down in a chair with extra-long legs, while peering up into John’s face. A black cat retreated under a couch and growled faintly.

  He’d handled the furniture effortlessly; he might be small but his shoulders were broad, his chest deep, and his legs stumpy but powerful. After an unnerving silent interval he picked up a massive leather-bound ledger, handling it effortlessly with his right and the fingerless stump of the left. Another stale gust hit John/Alan/Hildred’s face as it opened, and John would have sworn there was something like old fear-sweat as well, the sort of waft you got from an arming-doublet sometimes.

  “Henry B. Matthews,” Wilde read. “Bookkeeper with Whysot Whysot and Company, dealers in church ornaments. Called April 3rd. Reputation damaged on the race-track. Known as a welsher. Reputation to be repaired by August 1st. Retainer Five Dollars.”

  He turned the page and ran his fingerless knuckles down the closely-written columns.

  “P. Greene Dusenberry, Minister of the Gospel, Fairbeach, New Jersey. Reputation damaged in the Bowery. To be repaired as soon as possible. Retainer $100.”

  He coughed and added: “Called, April 6th.”

  The dwarf coughed again and went on: “Listen. Mrs. C. Hamilton Chester, of Chester Park, New York City. Called April 7th. Reputation damaged at Dieppe, France. To be repaired by October 1st Retainer $500. Note.—C. Hamilton Chester, Captain U.S.S. Avalanche, ordered home from So
uth Sea Squadron October 1st.”

  “Then you are not in need of money, Mr. Wilde,” Hildred Castaigne said. “The profession of a Repairer of Reputations is lucrative!”

  That’s a lot of money, John felt/knew, as his mind seemed to translate it into terms of rose nobles. Sort of middling-merchant guildsman money.

  The colorless eyes looked up at him impassively. “I only wanted to demonstrate that I was correct. You said it was impossible to succeed as a Repairer of Reputations; that even if I did succeed in certain cases it would cost me more than I would gain by it. Today I have five hundred men in my employ, who are poorly paid, but who pursue the work with an enthusiasm which possibly may be born of fear. These men enter every shade and grade of society; some even are pillars of the most exclusive social temples; others are the prop and pride of the financial world; still others, hold undisputed sway among the ‘Fancy and the Talent.’ I choose them at my leisure from those who reply to my advertisements. It is easy enough, they are all cowards. I could treble the number in twenty days if I wished. So you see, those who have in their keeping the reputations of their fellow-citizens, I have in my pay.”

  “They may turn on you,” Hildred suggested.

  Wilde rubbed his thumb over his cropped ears, and adjusted the wax substitutes.

  “I think not,” he murmured thoughtfully. “I seldom have to apply, and then only once. Besides they like their wages.”

  “How do you apply the whip?” Hildred demanded.

  Wilde’s eyes dwindled to a pair of green sparks. John felt his mind recoil, and even Hildred Castaigne blanched a little inwardly.

  “I invite them to come and have a little chat with me,” Wilde said in a soft voice.

  A knock at the door interrupted him, and his face resumed its amiable expression.

  “Who is it?” he inquired.

  “Mr. Steylette,” was the answer.

  “Come tomorrow,” replied Mr. Wilde.