The Sea Peoples

by S. M. Stirling

  If I were no better liar than that I’d still be in a straitjacket! Hildred thought; then he chuckled.

  “But that’s enough of old, unhappy things,” he said. “Where are you going?”

  Louis looked after his brother officers who had now almost reached Broadway.

  “We had intended to sample a Brunswick cocktail, but to tell you the truth I was anxious for an excuse to go and see Hawberk instead. Come along, I’ll make you my excuse.”

  Hildred turned to follow his cousin’s eager step, striding out with his spurs jingling and his riding crop tapping at the top of his high polished black boots. A flash of tawny hair caught John’s attention, and frustration nearly drove him into mindless fury as nothing happened when he tried to jerk head and eyes around.

  Pip! he thought. Was that Pip? How could Pip and the others be in this place?

  The thought of her made his mind work a little better, less blurred and dull.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BETWEEN WAKING WORLD AND SHADOW

  “Here he comes,” Pip murmured.

  They spread out a little and trailed Hildred Castaigne and the man in uniform who could have been his brother and was almost certainly his cousin Louis. They walked directly to Hawberk’s shop, and the armorer was outside on the sidewalk, neatly attired in a fresh suit of pale linen sniffing the air.

  “I had just decided to take Constance for a little stroll before dinner,” he replied to the impetuous volley of questions from Louis. “We thought of walking on the park terrace along the North River.”

  He nodded to Hildred. “Did you meet the young lady from Australia?”

  Hildred looked puzzled. “No . . . from Australia, you say?”

  “Yes, she and her party; they said . . .”

  He broke off as his daughter emerged, opening her pale mauve parasol against the bright afternoon sun.

  “Oh, hello, my dear! Here are Louis and Hildred, by a happy chance.”

  Pip was watching them in the reflections they made in a shop-window, but even with dust and distortion it was plain how Constance grew pale and then flushed by turns as Louis bent over her small gloved fingers. That was the full I-kiss-your-hand treatment, evidently something special because Constance’s blush turned to absolute crimson for an instant.

  Good for you, my girl, Pip thought, briefly amused.

  Then she caught a glimpse of Hildred’s eyes, and felt herself recoil.

  And I don’t shock easily, she thought.

  “Do come with us!” Constance said. “It’s a lovely spring evening, just right for a stroll, and I’ve been shut up in the shop all day.”

  “I’m desolated, Miss Hawberk, but I was going to dine soon with some friends at my club . . .”

  “Nonsense, old man!” his cousin said. “You’re coming with us! I know those friends of yours—nothing but blather about revolting French novels. Fresh air will do you good, Hildred.”

  “Yes, do come, Mr. Castaigne,” Constance said.

  He hesitated; Pip saw his eyes dart towards his cousin and then back at Constance, and he smiled with a practiced expression, and they all set off.

  He wants to keep an eye on them, Pip guessed. He’s not interested in the girl himself, you can tell that by the way he looks at them and holds himself. But seeing them together makes him very, very bloody angry.

  That puzzled her, until she thought of some times she’d had with her disgustingly numerous and even more disgustingly ambitious cousins. Pip was an only child as her mother had been before her, but her paternal aunts and uncles had bred like rabbits . . . and once they weren’t children anymore, the offspring had quivered with anxiety and anger whenever it seemed that there was any possibility of her marrying.

  Because then Daddy would have an heir for his heir, and they’d be out of the line of succession. Particularly if he does modernize the terminology and make himself King of Townsville. Which makes sense if Mr. Hildred Castaigne intends to make himself a King here, though that seems rather mad. But then again, he is rather mad, what?

  Hildred looked jaunty with a flower in his buttonhole, whistling now and then and swinging his walking-stick. Pip envied it a little; it was more like what she usually carried than . . .

  This damned brolly, she thought, stopping to look in a shop-window for a moment. It’s useable, but it makes me nervous. You should be able to handle things by instinct in a dustup.

  The others followed her lead; none of them had been specifically trained in how to track someone in a city, but they were all natural hunters and very experienced and none of them was stupid. The rather shabby neighborhood where Hawberk’s shop was located—and that of the mysterious Repairer of Reputations—gave way to more prosperous-looking streets, though still insanely crowded by her standards.

  Still, that makes it easier to do the tail.

  Instants after that, the four they were following got on a large boxy vehicle that slid along the street on rails set into the pavement. For a moment Pip simply stared; then she remembered the similar system they had in Darwin—albeit pulled by horses, not pushed by the legendary force of electricity, which must be what those sparking poles on top running up to the wires slung overhead were for.

  Bless a classical education! she thought. I shall never mock Miss Blandish’s Pre-Blackout Sciences class again!

  The driver clucked at them and pointed at a box for fares. Thora reached into her handbag and pulled out a handful of the local currency and offered it; that had apparently been supplied, as their imaginary swords had been changed for equally imaginary—but also legendary—guns.

  “Cantcha’ read, lady?” the man said in an adenoidal accent, pointing to the exact change only stenciled on the glass fare-box.

  Then he saw Toa. “And none of his . . .”

  His voice trailed off as the big Maori scowled at him, and vanished entirely as Thora flipped him a gold coin. Instead of further argument he cleared his throat and announced to the world:

  “Silver Street line—da North River Terrace!”

  Pip took a seat where she could see out the large front windows of the vehicle, and keep in view the vehicle Castaigne and his party were on. Theirs lurched into motion with a clatter and an odd whining sound and a smell of ozone, accelerating faster than anything she’d ever been on except a funfair ride where you were pushed up to the top of a slope and then ran down under gravity. Then the speed settled down to something only moderately alarming, about what a good horse could manage for a few miles at a hand-gallop on easy ground, but it went on and on.

  “This is like sailing broad reach with a strong steady wind on the starboard quarter,” she said.

  Deor and Thora were behind her, and Toa was leaning on his shovel, treating swaying effortlessly with the motion of the vehicle. It was nothing much, when you’d ridden out hurricanes in the Timor Sea.

  “That’s the only thing I can compare it to. Now some of the things Mummy said about life before the Blackout make more sense.”

  “Yes,” Deor said. “Except that you can’t count on a favorable wind whenever you want it. That’s how they could have cities like this; unfailing machines to deliver the food for all these millions, from many miles away. A delay in getting silk or spices or dyestuff doesn’t matter that much except to the pockets of a few, but you have to bake bread every day.”

  Pip shivered a little. “I’ve seen the ruins of Sydney,” she said. “With the drifts of bones still in the buildings. Everything failed them, in the end.”

  Seeing a living city like those of the ancient world drove it home.

  “Pretty,” Thora said, craning her neck to look ahead. “You only see this sort of thing in cities without walls around them.”

  The car came to a halt with a screech of steel on steel and they disembarked at a little station that was, indeed, pretty; a broad river str
etched northward, and there was a pleasantly cool breeze off it. The water was a bright blue riffled with white. Ships whose rigs she knew—brigs, schooners, yachts—shared the water with steam-propelled craft like something out of an ancient book, clumsy ferryboats, their decks swarming with people, railroad transports carrying lines of brown, blue and white freight cars, big liners and tramps, dredgers, scows, and everywhere little tugs puffing and whistling.

  “My goodness but it would be convenient to have those things to tow you out of harbor,” she said. “The times I’ve been stuck waiting for a favorable wind in a narrow estuary . . . and that’s how we ended up stranded in Baru Denpasar.”

  Deor chuckled. “The times Thora and I have waited eating up our travel money while captains made excuses for not rowing us out,” he said.

  “Sitting in port eats money a good deal worse for the one paying the wages and harbor fees,” she said, with the iron assurance of someone who’d grown up around merchant skippers, and had briefly been one herself. “But trying to beat up without enough room and getting caught on a lee shore are worse. Now let’s find Castaigne.”

  A row of granite-paved, treelined squares and small parks ran along the riverfront, with landings for ferries and yachts; evidently the business side of sea-trade for this New York was conducted elsewhere, though there were plenty of sailors among the crowds of ordinary city-folk taking the air and enjoying themselves. The merchant crews were unmistakable to anyone who’d ever traveled with the breed, and the military ones all seemed to be in white bell-bottoms for some reason.

  Cafés and open-air restaurants were scattered among the trees, and a military band in bright uniforms and plumed headgear was playing from a kiosk on the parapets, the oompah-oompah of a brisk march cutting through the murmur of the crowd.

  Pip scanned, working backward methodically from the water and the range of low hills across it. It was Toa who spotted them, but then he had a higher vantage point.

  “Over there, by the statue of the Paˉkehaˉ with the mean mouth and the nasty eyes riding around with a sword,” he rumbled quietly, not looking that way and not pointing; people noticed when you did that.

  “Let’s split up into pairs and meet there,” Pip said. “Toa, you trail me and we’ll come in from behind—you’re the most conspicuous.”

  “Like a whore at the vicar’s tea-party,” he said cheerfully, and drifted back.

  In an inspired bit of business he occasionally prodded with his shovel at the dirt around trees and in the planters full of bright flowers, as if he were a gardener’s helper or something of the sort.

  A few of the sailors, mostly the ones most obviously reeling from John Barleycorn or with companions of negotiable affection hanging on their arms or both, gave him hostile glances. Men, especially those who’d had a few drinks, often thought getting beaten bloody in some pointless quarrel would make them more desirable; she’d never quite understood why, since she felt the only reason for fighting was to kill or maim the other party as quickly as possible. None of these was quite drunk enough to pick a fight with a man of Toa’s size equipped with a shovel . . . particularly after they’d looked into his eyes for an instant, and got a gut-instinct revelation that he operated in exactly the same way.

  Pip tucked her hair up under the bell-shaped hat that had come with the rest of her gear and strolled up behind the statue. It was on a granite base with planters holding rosebushes around it, and benches beyond those, with a bronze plaque set into its side: General Philip Henry Sheridan 1831–1888, showing a grim-faced man with a narrow mustache gesturing with a saber. The name teased vaguely at her, something she’d read in a book once, but she couldn’t place it.

  This side of the statue was in deep shadow, and a little chilly. She sat at one end of the bench that ran around all four sides of it and let her head fall back as if weary, the brim of her hat shading her eyes and the rosebushes leaving a double screen between her and the other side. That not only made her even less visible, it gave her a better chance of hearing what was going on.

  Louis Castaigne and Constance were just murmuring sweet nothings as they leaned together under her light sun-parasol, and rather boring sweet nothings at that; he was telling her what a lovely place San Francisco was, and how he’d enjoyed being stationed there, and he made a painfully obvious joke about it being a splendid town for a honeymoon, at which she positively simpered.

  If a man said that to me in that you’re-my-helpless-little-kitten tone, I’d hit him, she thought. Rather hard. I suppose these are the Good People, but Christ, I’m almost tempted to rejoice they’re in a world that’s apparently just been taken over by demons.

  Pip’s position put her halfway between the courting couple and Hawberk and Hildred Castaigne, both sitting in the sunshine while the older man smoked a cigar.

  Disgusting habit, she thought. One of the few things I didn’t like about Darwin was that so many people there smoke. I suppose because they’ve got more contact with the islands and the North generally.

  More than half the men she saw were lighting up something or other, mostly pipes and cigarettes, though far fewer of the women. It was worse than Darwin, much worse than Townsville, and infinitely worse than parts of Oz further south, where the habit had largely died out since the Blackout. In one of the few decent things he’d done while she was shadowing him, Hildred Castaigne declined the offer of a cigar from Hawberk. Deor arrived and stood apparently admiring the river from beyond conversational distance, but Pip knew he read lips very well. Thora sat under a flowering tree of some sort, repelling sailors tempted to try joining her with a quelling glare, like Toa not part of the surveillance operation but ready to explode into lethal violence the minute her friend called.

  The sun hung low above the woods on an island in the river, and the bay was dyed with golden hues reflected from the sun-warmed sails of the shipping in the harbor. A silent fleet of white-painted warships lay motionless in midstream, recognizable because of the turreted cannon with which they bristled.

  Constance turned away from her companion and laughed, a pleasant enough tinkling sound but one Pip found affected. Apparently that was the way women were supposed to do it here; probably they thought an outright guffaw uncouth.

  “What are you staring at?” she inquired.

  “Nothing—the fleet,” Louis Castaigne said with a smile; the sound of his voice was low and pleasant, but Pip felt as if nails had screeched on a chalkboard.

  Then Louis began explaining what the vessels were, pointing out each by its relative position to a red fort on a small island in the river. Pip recognized his tone; some men thought displays of expertise were a mate-attractant, like a peacock’s tail or starting brawls. She supposed it must work sometimes, or those genes would have been eliminated. Constance hung on his words, and on his arm:

  “That little cigar shaped thing is a torpedo boat,” he explained.

  Torpedo . . . Pip thought. Then: Ah, those things that ran underwater and exploded against ships. Nasty! Though no more so than a napalm shell from a catapult, I suppose.

  “. . . there are four more lying close together. They are the Tarpon, the Falcon, the Sea Fox, and the Octopus. The gunboats just above are the Princeton, the Champlain, the Still Water and the Erie. Next to them lie the cruisers Farragut and Los Angeles, and above them the battleships California, and Dakota, and the Washington which is the flagship. Those two squatty looking chunks of metal which are anchored there off Castle William are the double turreted monitors Terrible and Magnificent; behind them lies the ram, Osceola.”

  Constance looked at him with deep approval in her beautiful eyes.

  Laying it on a bit thick, dearie? Pip thought. Is he looking for a wife, or a ewe? Does he know the difference? Are you a ewe or is this some sort of bestiality kinky thing?

  “What loads of things you know about ships . . . for a soldier,” she said.


  Well, that’s a little better.

  And they all joined in the laugh which followed.

  Presently Louis rose with a nod and offered his arm to Constance, and they strolled away along the river wall. Hawberk watched them for a moment and then turned to Hildred:

  “Mr. Wilde was right,” he said. “I have found the missing tassets and left cuissard of the Prince’s Emblazoned, in a vile old junk garret in Pell Street.”

  “Nine ninety-eight?” Hildred said; Pip could feel the unpleasant smile in his voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Wilde is a very intelligent man,” Hildred said.

  “I want to give him the credit of this most important discovery,” continued Hawberk. “And I intend it shall be known that he is entitled to the fame of it.”

  “He won’t thank you for that,” Hildred said sharply. “Please say nothing about it.”

  “Do you know what it is worth?” said Hawberk.

  “No . . . fifty dollars, perhaps?”

  “It is valued at five hundred, but the owner of the Prince’s Emblazoned will give two thousand dollars to the person who completes his suit; that reward also belongs to Mr. Wilde.”

  “He doesn’t want it! He refuses it!” Hildred answered angrily.

  Well, not surprising, if he’s gambling for an empire, Pip thought; her mother had always said you should keep lots of liquid, easily portable assets and a trove stashed here or there, just in case, as she’d put it. Though you’re being very principled with someone else’s money, my bucko.

  Hildred’s voice rose a little from that carefully calculated calm: “What do you know about Mr. Wilde? He doesn’t need the money. He is rich—or will be—richer than any living man except myself. What will we care for money then—what will we care, he and I, when—when—”

  “When what?” demanded Hawberk, sharp fear in his voice as Hildred’s grew more shrill.