The Sea Peoples

by S. M. Stirling

  “Neither will I,” Pip said.

  He hadn’t thought of it in those terms, and felt another rush of relief before the fear, which was odd but seemed to make sense. His mother most assuredly was Catholic and was an Associate, and in her way notably pious. Bringing home a wellborn Anglican Rite bride like Pip was one thing, even if they’d had to find a priest on their own and arrived with wedding bands and a baby. A royal bastard on the other hand . . .

  Oh, God, the political complications! I hadn’t thought of that! Why does fun have to be so serious?

  Anonymous Nobleman X wouldn’t have to worry; a gift to the mother, possibly some patronage down the road, and that was it. The second in line to the High Kingdom and the heir to the Protectorate . . .

  Visions of court faction in his middle years sprang into his mind and made more sweat run into the lining of his helmet and his arming-doublet.

  “I warned her too, Your Highness,” Deor said.

  “It was an accident!” Thora said.

  Deor smiled at her, then sobered. “Best indeed if nobody beyond us four . . .”

  He looked at Alan and continued pointedly: “Us five ever knows. Men could die on bloody fields and houses burn otherwise.”

  The Boisean smiled crookedly. “I barely know my own name right now, sir,” he said. “And besides . . . if this is where you say it is, who would believe anything I said I’d learned here? For what my promise is worth, I’ll keep my peace . . . and even I don’t know what it’s worth.”

  Deor laughed. “You have a point, Alan of Thor’s Stone.”

  John flogged himself back to alertness; in a way it was almost fortunate he was in this place of peril and horror.

  Almost.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BETWEEN WAKING WORLD AND SHADOW

  After a while a horse-drawn cart approached them, growing from a dot in the dim distance until it was visibly a four-wheel vehicle. That was reassuringly familiar, though at home he’d have expected two horses, and it was making an odd whining noise, not what you got from ungreased wheels. The driver looked roly-poly; as they drew closer John realized that he was round except for the cloth-cased stick-limbs, and the same lemon-yellow color as the tunic and hood he wore. He looked at them and giggled as he drove by; once he was close you could see that the harness was sewn onto the beast, which wasn’t exactly a horse. But it wept blood and whimpered as it pulled.

  The rear of the cart was a cage of iron bars. John saw the faces of children behind them, and started forward with his hand on the hilt of his sword as they stared at him through the bars.

  “Wait, Prince!” Deor said. “Wait!”

  The scop’s hand closed on his shield-arm and dragged him backward. That jerked him back from the bars just as the boneless fingers reached for him and the angelic lips parted to show rows of needle-teeth.

  “Children!” the driver of the wagon chuckled, in a liquid burbling tone . . . and in an Old French that John alone of their party could speak. “Be good. Be gooooood!”

  And laughing like water gurgling in a sewer he lashed the not-horse into a shambling trot.

  “This way,” Deor said. And: “Appearances are dangerous here, as we go deeper. This is where all things collapse together, and that mixing is ill indeed.”

  They walked on, like walking in a dream . . . except that John knew it wasn’t his dream, or the dream of anything human. Though he had a disturbing sense that it might have been once, in some inconceivably ancient cycle of the cosmos. A file of figures appeared, human this time, and linked by a rope around their waists; they were chanting and flogging each other with barbed whips as they walked, the blood running down into the rag loincloths twisted around their waists. Every dozen paces the whips would change hands. None of them looked up as the five adventurers passed, and John could see that their eyes were sewn shut; the first in the line probed his way forward with a stick. Beyond them in the field a plow went by, pulled by men, or things more or less like men, and guided by a horse . . . or something more or less like a horse.

  Light showed ahead, brighter than the cindered sky yielded. The road made an abrupt left turn on the edge of a cliff, or a line of low steep hills. Thora whistled tunelessly as she looked down, and the rest of them came up.

  Several hundred feet below was a vast panorama of land furrowed and fissured with what after a moment John recognized as field fortifications—the relatives of those he’d helped lay out for the siege of the Carcosan fort in Baru Denpasar. These snaked out as far as the eye could see, though, two opposing lines . . . or two opposing sets, for each was line after line of trench, connected with zigzagging communications trenches running vertically to the front. The whole was pockmarked with craters, some old and crumbling and flooded, others rawly new—and as he watched a spark light snapped and earth flew skyward, with a long rolling boom following close on its heels. Rusted barbed wire spread in coils and belts across the land between the trenches, and figures hung on it. For the closer ones you could see them twitch, and hear their thin hopeless mewling. Hints of movement beneath them showed where rats the size of cats scuttled and fed and dragged their full bellies through the muck.

  Wisps of green mist floated over the landscape, and a hint of it set them all coughing more than the stink of death had. Faint in the distance whistles sounded, and suddenly the empty-looking trenches threw up hordes of men in steel helmets and drab-colored uniforms, scrambling up assault ladders and running forward. He thought they carried rifles with long knives affixed, though it was hard to be sure; there was a faint tacka-tacka-tacka sound and windrows of them fell. More snaps of fire and fountains of dirt, and men and pieces of men were tossed up in the black poplar-shapes of dirt.

  Bugles sounded, thin and endless. When they ceased there was quiet again, save for the cries of the wounded. Two flags flapped not far apart, their staffs driven into the dirt by the hands of falling men. Both were featureless gray tatters.

  “I don’t think we want to go that way,” John said thoughtfully, keeping the shiver out of his voice. “I think that’s a battle, and that it’s been going on a long long time.”

  “Like the Einherjar, but without honor or joy or hope,” Thora said with a shiver.

  “And to think I ran away from home because I was bored,” Pip muttered. “I’ll write a book about it—Pregnant In Hell would be a good title.”

  Everyone chuckled, and they kept going. Now and then Deor would halt at a crossroads, chant and close his eyes and point one way or another. Once they had to cross a section of hard-paved road, twelve lanes wide and crowded with automobiles—looking very much like some sections of pre-Change highway he’d seen, except that they weren’t ruins and were all running. And totally motionless, bumper to bumper. The five companions all coughed and gagged at the acrid stench of the air they had to breathe. The jammed road extended out of sight in either direction, shimmering with heat, eternally motionless.

  One glimpse through a bloodied windscreen where hands beat and beat and beat was enough, and he kept his head down and hurried with the others.

  At last they came through the outskirts of a town, one that plucked at the strings of his memory. It was a quaint-looking place, with steep-pitched roofs and cobbled streets and overhanging balconies, and the odd elm and chestnut tree along its narrow ways. Folk in clothes a little like those of an Association town hurried past, wimpled housewives with baskets of loaves, besmocked artisans, a jongleur strumming on a lute . . .

  “Stop!” a voice cried shrilly from a window several stories above them. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  Each shout was accompanied by a thudding blow. At the fourth a naked woman with something dangling from her jaws ran out on the balcony, then leapt up and scaled the brick of the wall as agile as a monkey. She was laughing around whatever it was, and there were streaks of red down her chin and breasts.

  The mind
of the Yellow King, John thought.

  The really disturbing thing about it wasn’t that he was in the mind of a mad demon . . .

  No, that is disturbing, John thought. That is very disturbing.

  What was even more disturbing was that he wasn’t sure he was just seeing images, part of the Yellow King’s imaginings. He was pretty sure that the people in that strange version of New York had been just that, people. People who were somehow trapped here forever, or at least until the Day of Judgement. He didn’t know how the theology of it all worked, but he did know this was a fair working facsimile of damnation.

  At the center of the town was a lopsided square leading down to a river, with a tall building topped by a spire like a church, and on its top the three-armed Yellow Sign.

  “I don’t like this,” Deor began.

  John bit back a: No shit! I don’t either!

  Deor meant something specific. Light pulsed through the stained-glass windows of the not-church, along with chanting—a guttural chorus he couldn’t quite make out. Then the great carved doors swung open and he could:

  “Uoht! Uoht! Uoht!”

  Worshippers came out in a boiling mob; or at least he thought it was a mob, until he realized that they were dancing, a jerking chaotic mass that moved to the drone of pipes and the maddeningly irregular pulse of a drum. The dancers were naked save for bestial masks, all distorted; a raven with a curved beak, a bull’s-head with antlers, a rabbit that wept tears of red. They lashed each other as the flagellants on the road had, and their screams melded into the music.

  “Uoht! Uoht! Uoht!”

  After the dancers came more naked figures chained to a wheeled platform with barbed links, their faces painted white on one side and black on the other, scrambling forward on their hands and knees. A tall black pillar sat in the middle of the platform, and its head had been carved into . . .

  It’s not really like a dog, John thought.

  He liked dogs, and found their faces appealing in a dopey, enthusiastic, childlike fashion. Dogs were more honest than men, too. They didn’t pretend to like you if you treated them well, they actually did, and would treat you as if you were their blood kin and liege lord rolled into one.

  It looks more like a bat. There’s a reason the old painters used bat-faces for demons. This looks like the Adversary trying to copy a dog.

  Whoever had carved it knew their work. The needle teeth weren’t too regular, and they had stains the way a working carnivore’s did. The broad ribbed ears and the flared convoluted nostrils were delicately pink veined in crimson and black, and the black bristly hairs of the muzzle seemed to almost bristle. . . .

  They did. The eyes opened, and they were as black as the bristling fur. The pupils were like . . . No, they were the three-limbed Yellow Sign, but they were alive, and full of wicked intelligence and a living will to harm that struck like a hammer of hot wind. The columnar . . . body? Was it bending, mistlike?

  “Uoht! Uoht! Uoht!”

  The votaries screamed the name. John realized his mouth was open and he was making small mewing noises, rather like this grandmother’s Persian cats when they were unhappy with a thunderstorm or catapult-practice in Castle Todenangst. The difference was that he knew that running back and forth moaning wouldn’t do him any good at all. But it was so tempting!

  “Now that we’ve been formally introduced to Mr. Uoht, let’s run like buggery!” Pip said crisply, her melodically accented soprano steady. Then she muttered: “At least there aren’t tentacles.”

  Whatever that means, John thought. Well, it’s nice to know the mother of my children—even then the words brought an odd mixture of pride and something quite like fear—has plenty of courage to pass on. At least as much as I!

  “Fuckin’ second the motion,” Toa rasped; he had his spear up and was backing away step by step. “Bad doggie!”

  “Down to the water,” Deor said. “Toa, Thora and Pip, you lead and get us a boat ready. Prince John, Alan, with me.”

  That was sensible; Pip was a highly competent ship’s captain, Toa was her second in command, and Thora had spent a lot of time on boats. She was also a ferociously able fighter—not that Pip wasn’t formidable too, but Thora was equipped and trained for a straight-on slugging match in a way she wasn’t. One look at Toa was usually enough to intimidate, though you couldn’t be sure here, and he was also one of the strongest men John had ever met and like an otter in the water.

  But I really wish it wasn’t so sensible for me to hold the rearguard. Roland won immortal fame at Roncevalles and died there . . . on the other hand he’d be dead now anyway, wouldn’t he? Buck up, John. This part will sound good in the chanson. It’s good I’ve been sharing my musical plans with Deor—he could make it if . . . if necessary.

  The votaries were more or less ignoring the five of them, as most of the people . . . sort of people . . . here had. The dog-bat-thing wasn’t. It seemed to have a little trouble finding them, for which John thanked God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost; also the Virgin and the whole bright company of the Saints—literally, and wished he could work the rosary that lay against his skin under the arming doublet.

  And maybe that’s why it can’t find us easily, John thought. God’s hand is over us. I’m not worthy . . . but who is? Praise God for His infinite mercy!

  He tried not to think of Who else might be involved; he didn’t . . . or wasn’t supposed to . . . believe the Aesir did things like that, and he didn’t even know what Powers Alan Thurston called on, and he had probably never even heard of those Toa’s people followed if they weren’t Christians.

  The three formed up shield-to-shield; John was in the center, as the man with the heaviest armor and biggest shield.

  An honor I could do without, he thought.

  Aloud he said quietly: “Friends, I always hated the training in walking backward in armor. The sergeants-at-arms laughed at the squires every time we tripped and fell, and that hurt worse than the bruises. Perhaps I was a little hasty. It teaches you to be graceful about your exits; as a musician, that’s a valuable skill. And I’d really like to get off the stage here before they start booing and throwing things.”

  “You dance well, too,” Deor said with a chuckle. “What a shame your tastes are so conventional otherwise, my liege.”

  “Let’s do this,” Alan said.

  John knocked down his visor and raised the shield. Back a step, and a step. Uoht’s yellow gaze moved as the column of mist slid forward, pivoting, and the force of it was like a hot blow, like being trapped in your coffin and smelling your own body rotting. He hunched his shoulder into the shield, the way you did when weapons beat on it. The feel of comrades to either side of him kept him steady; he could feel his father’s hand on his shoulder, too, his mother’s eyes full of love and pride at his knighting, as he came out of the chapel after the vigil.

  “Back a step,” Deor said. “And back . . . and back . . .”

  Something was keeping those eyes from really seeing them, but that only enraged the . . . whatever Uoht was. Slaver drooled in long threads from the fangs, and the thin lips moved—he had a horrible suspicion that it was shaping words.

  Then he grunted, and heard Deor and Alan make almost the same sound. Something had hit him, impalpable but strong, and his mind vanished in a blaze of pain for an instant. His next step backward was involuntary, and he braced himself as if leaning into a storm-wind, a blizzard in the Cascades. The pillar drifted towards him. As it did the world dimmed and thinned. As if it were a screen, and behind the screen . . .

  A tower on a hill, amid a wasteland of tumbled mud and beneath a cindered moon and behind that the spires of a city. More dog-headed pillars, all of them turning to look at him . . .

  John pushed with his mind, as if he were back on the squire’s training-field, ramming his shield against a pole set on a weighted skid, trying to budge it
with his legs churning.

  “Back,” Deor said again, more hoarsely this time. “Back a step . . .”

  The deep nostrils flared, hunting for a scent. A sound came from between its jaws, a deep humming sound. It grew louder and louder, jarring, and suddenly the teeth in his jaws hurt. A warm trickle started from his nose, running salt over his lips—the distinctive metallic tang of blood. Blood was running down the faces of the worshippers too, as they capered and shrieked:

  “Uoht! Uoht! Uoht!”

  The note grew deeper, and the hilt of his sword was growing hot in his hand, beneath the leather palm of his armored gauntlet and the wrapping of bison rawhide and silver wire on the weapon. He wasn’t sure if a material weapon could cut Uoht anyway . . . except that Deor had explained convincingly that this wasn’t actually a material place, despite the irritating itch that he couldn’t scratch in a delicate place. His very material self was sleeping in a bed in a beach-house in Baru Denpasar with Pip and Thora beside him.

  He pushed away that distracting thought. The pressure against his shield was building, building. The same sense of weight seemed to be squeezing at his temples, constricting like a knotted cord until he felt his eyeballs start to bulge. They retreated step after step, his sabatons skidding on the smooth granite cobbles of the street. The smell of mud and water grew stronger. . . .

  “Got the boat!” Pip called.

  “Run!” Deor wheezed, like a man throwing down an impossible weight. “Run!”

  John wheeled, and almost fell to his knees as the pressure increased. But now he wasn’t trying to resist it, and his feet seemed to fly over the stones. Ahead the road sloped into the water, and a boat was waiting—with Toa throwing the mooring-post it had been chained to into it, having apparently torn it out of the ground by main force. Pip was aboard, shipping a steering oar, and Thora helped the big Maori as he fell to pushing it forward.

  The union of their straining effort started the twenty-foot, double-ended hull moving just as the three men arrived. John managed to sheath his sword as he ran—fortunately it was hard to stab yourself in the hip or groin in full armor—and pitched the shield ahead of him to fall with a hard clatter in the bottom of the boat. His hands clamped on the gunwale, and he joined the others in running it down the slope and into the water.