The Sea Peoples

by S. M. Stirling

  “Alan first!” she called, going by their positions.

  The Boisean rolled over the gunwale and into the boat and scrambled on all fours towards the bows.

  “Now Deor . . . now John . . . Thora . . . Toa!”

  John was knee-deep in the water when she called his name, feeling it pouring into his greaves. He leapt and pushed, grunting against the weight of body and armor and wetness, rolling into the sopping bottom of the boat and shuddering-glad he hadn’t pushed the rail under the surface. Someone heavy landed on top of him, and he gave a protesting ooof!

  “Get for’ard and out oars. Move your arses, all of you!” Pip shouted.

  No, Captain Pip shouted that, his mind thought, as he scrambled to obey and a large foot landed in the small of his back.

  The oars were loose in the bottom of the craft. They all grabbed one and shoved it through the thwarts; John was the second-slowest, with Alan hanging back a fraction of a second to see what they did. He wasn’t a total novice at oars, though; Boise did have lakes, and a few big rivers, and presumably he’d gone fishing now and then.

  Though I wouldn’t want to eat anything caught in these waters.

  “Captain!” Deor called. “Take us downstream!”

  John could see back behind them; it was an advantage of running away while rowing. It was a big river, not on the scale of the Columbia but comparable to the lower Willamette, say a long bowshot and a half across. The thing—

  Wasn’t there anymore? They all rested on their oars for a moment.

  Or at least I can’t see it, John thought as the village faded into the darkness.

  He muttered a sincere prayer—the sincerity of his prayers in general was improving, though he thought the cost was a bit excessive—of thanks. The others did as well, in their varied fashions.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  BETWEEN WAKING WORLD AND SHADOW

  “Bloody glad to see the last of . . . whatever that was,” Pip said from the tiller of their hijacked boat.

  Gnomically, she added: “I’m never going to sneer at Uncle Pete’s taste in fiction again.”

  Deor was at the oar just sternward from John; he handled himself on boats and ships with the workmanlike competence he showed at most things besides music, where he shone to a degree that made John a little envious—though when you added in fifteen years more experience . . .

  “What was that thing? The . . . demon, I suppose it was?”

  Deor shrugged his shoulders, and his mail shirt rustled and clinked. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You’re an honest man, Deor Godulfson,” Pip called—she was less than ten feet away.

  Deor laughed, a little hoarsely. John realized he must have been shouting the commands to move back step by step, shouting against the muffling power that had nearly crushed them into paste.

  “I think,” he said, “that it is part of the . . . story, the story of the Yellow King. Perhaps an avatar or emissary of that Power, perhaps a great servant, like the Pallid Mask. What worries me is that it sensed us. Now the Power will seek to see.”

  “Speaking of which—” Alan said.

  A man was standing on the bank of the river, laughing, with his arms stretched over his head. As they passed they saw his empty, bleeding eye sockets and that each hand held an eyeball in its palms. They turned and followed the boat as it drifted past . . .

  “Enough jawing,” Pip said in that crisp tone of command that seemed to operate directly on your nerves. “If we need to get downstream, let’s go.”

  That’s not the way Father did it, or Mother does . . . but it works, John thought. She has what they had, the Baraka, the thing that rulers need.

  “Toa, give us the stroke,” Pip said. “This boat deserves a good one, it really flows with the water.”

  The Maori did, in his growling bass, and they all fell into the rhythm of it:

  “E pari ra koe te tai,

  Whakaki ana mai

  Nga ngutu-awa.

  Hui nga ope au

  Ki te tai uru.

  Aue! Tiaia!

  Aue! Koia hoki.

  Huˉkere, Waikato!

  Aue, ku-umea!

  Tuˉpara, Tuˉpara,

  Tuˉpara, Waikato!

  Toˉia, e!”

  John could feel the silken smoothness of the way the boat cut the low riffles of the river’s current, and leapt to the stroke of the oars. When Toa finished Pip took it up; he guessed it was the same chant in English, because it had the feel of something translated, an alien rhythm:

  “Flowing there is the ocean tide,

  Surging towards me,

  Filling up the mouth of the river.

  Gathering are the armies

  At the sea of the west.

  Now dip the paddles!

  That’s it! Come along!

  Harder, faster, O Waikato!

  Oh, a long, strong stroke!

  Now quickly, quickly!

  Quicker, Waikato!

  Pull away O!”

  Rowing in armor wasn’t as easy as in ordinary clothes, but wasn’t impossibly difficult either—you could do acrobatics in a good suit of plate if you were strong and experienced, and the set his mind had conjured was the same as he usually wore, one made of chrome-alloy steel by master-craftsmen. It felt the same, which meant he just clanked a bit as he swayed forward and back pulling on the oar.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The place we came in when we left . . . Baru Denpasar, the world, the real world,” Pip said. “Which only Deor can find, of course, so please don’t get eaten by any monsters, eh? The only thing I’ve found here I like are Johnnie and this boat.”

  “I will do my best, my lady Captain,” Deor said.

  “The place with the Hell Horse,” Pip added. “Which we evaded by running as fast as we could.”

  John half missed a stroke. “Are . . . you sure that’s what it was?” he said.

  Pip grinned at him. “No, lover; it just fit the way you described it. But if I was sure, I’d have seen it, and then I’d be dead, now wouldn’t I?”

  More soberly: “Though that seems to be a bit less . . . definite, around here.”

  • • •

  “Here, I think,” Deor said, looking over his shoulder. “Where that road meets the water, by the dead oak.”

  Pip leaned on the tiller, and they all stroked their oars more slowly. An instant, and the keel of the boat grated on gravel and mud. John brought his oar in with the others—you had to be careful or you could clout someone in the head doing that—and leapt over the side, his feet in the water once again. All of them put their shoulders to the hull and ran the boat up on the shore, more out of reflex than anything else.

  Deor stopped as the others spread out on the dirt road that wound uphill from the river’s edge. John looked back as he slung his shield over his back. The front of the boat was intricately carved, in a way that he avoided looking at too closely, but set into the worked wood was the grinning skull of a cat, old bone bleached until there was only a hint of ivory in the white. Green stones had been inset in the eye sockets.

  Deor touched it and went silent for a moment. “It spoke to me,” he said.

  Pip snorted. “What did it say? Meow?”

  Deor looked at her. “No, my lady. In speech without words, said without ceasing . . . Hurts, hurts, make it stop, I am a good cat, hurts, mother, mother, hurts make it stop. There is a spirit trapped in this vessel, and it has been for a very long time.”

  Pip glanced away, scowling and swallowing. John put his hand to his sword, but before he could draw Toa lashed out with the steel-shod butt of his spear, quick as the flick of a frog’s tongue after a darting fly, hunting from its lily pad on a summer’s day. The bone exploded into dust. John put his hand to the weathered boards of the boat
’s hull. Did it feel different, or was that his imagination?

  Well, it’ll feel different when I compose the chanson, he thought.

  And then noticed the gaps in the planks. And had they been so frayed and proud-grained before? He put his shoulder to it on impulse, and it felt lighter as it slid out onto the dark river and settled almost immediately, listing as the water gurgled through the gaps in the long low hull.

  Up from the river, and then they walked on a featureless dirt road through scrubby countryside; when they had come a little way it was as if the road extended forever in each direction, but now there was a hint of warmth to the air, a rankness of scent.

  “It feels like a borderland here,” John said, turning his head but finding nothing to prompt the thought.

  “Yes. I see it now,” Deor said. “A silver thread, running with light. We are close, close.”

  They walked and walked, or the landscape flowed backward around them. John could sense something himself, a pulling. At times he was walking down a darkened road, with the familiar weight of a sword at his side and his shield upon his back. Then it was more as if he were flying in a dream beside a meadowlark whose song wove around his, and his feathers were black and his heavy beak keen and dark eyes, over a road where a great she-bear shambled and a golden lioness walked and a bush rat skittered through the scrub, all aggression and stretched senses. Then he stumbled, and was on foot again.

  “Make yourself feel and walk like a man,” Deor said, staggering himself. “There is always the risk of losing yourself, in this place, I think. It eats at the boundaries of things; between life and death, good and evil, this world and others. And we are sought, sought.”

  “Bloody good thing we’re almost home, then,” Pip said.

  Thora and Toa laughed, at the same moment and almost in the same tone, though one was a rumbling bass and the other an alto.

  “That’s the time you have to be most careful,” Thora said.

  “Too right,” Toa agreed. “Let’s push the pace a bit. Walk-trot-walk . . . if you gents weighed down with all the ironmongery can keep up?”

  Mist gathered. On a hill in the middle distance a tall fire burned, and figures whirled around it.

  “I recognize that,” Pip said. “Oh, and I wish I didn’t.”

  “They’re dancing,” John said. “That’s odd music—bagpipes and drums of some sort . . .”

  “No!” Deor said sharply. “Don’t listen! And don’t watch that dance; you don’t want to know the meaning of it!”

  It was hard to tear his eyes away. The dancers were so tall and the twisting of their twig-like fingers traced such patterns . . . and the other figures bound in the heart of the fire, their cries were—

  Alan Thurston grabbed him by the edge of his pauldron and shook him sharply.

  “You were starting to leave the road,” he said.

  “Thanks!” John said, taking off his helmet to wipe the palm of a gauntlet over his face. “I think you did me a good turn there.”

  Alan shrugged, his haunted eyes dark. “You were the first thing I’d seen in a really long time that I didn’t immediately not want to see, Prince,” he said. “I figure I owe you a debt.”

  They struggled on. A ruined church . . . possibly a church . . . stood not far from the road, with tumbled gravestones about it. The mist cleared and gave them a better view. Deor grimaced.

  “Those are not names on the stones,” he said, jerking his head towards the cemetery. “Those are runes, though not mine. Glyphs of binding and confinement. And that is not a place for the bodies of the dead . . . not as we understand death.”

  He took off the armored gauntlet and laid down the knife they’d seized from the madman in the ancient city. Alan Thurston stepped forward and took both.

  “Figure this will work better than my saber,” he said.

  Deor nodded. “Though be careful of it, my friend.”

  Then he produced a drum . . .

  Where from? John thought. Then: Probably better not to ask.

  . . . and began to tap on it. As he did, John heard something beneath that rhythmic throbbing; hooves on stone. Slow, and dragging and irregular; a counter-music to the pattern and purpose of the drum. Deor’s face went pale beneath his weathered tan and the not-light of the cindered black stars above them.

  “The Hell Horse,” Pip said, her face whey-white under the sun-kissed gold.

  Deor drummed and chanted, thick drops of sweat rolling down his face. After a moment he paused:

  “I must go first, to bring the rest of you through, as I came here first,” he said.

  A meadowlark flitted past and was gone, but the thutter of the drum persisted . . . or was that only the beat of his heart.

  John stiffened and raised his shield. “That’s right,” he said. “Then Pip and Thora, then Toa, then—”

  “Then you, and then me,” Alan Thurston said.

  Pip looked mutinous for a second, but Thora nodded.

  “He’s right, sister,” she said. “It’s got to be that way.”

  She looked at him. “You’re a brave man, John. May your White Christ be with you.”

  “But—” Pip began.

  “No time to argue. Go!” John said.

  No! No! Get me out of this awful place! he gibbered inwardly.

  “Johnnie—” Pip began, and the lioness snarled and took a soaring leap and was gone.

  The she-bear roared, and was gone.

  “Look after Pip,” John said tightly. “She’s tough as nails herself, but she’s going to need help with the baby.”

  Toa nodded soberly. “Promised her mum I would, long ago,” he said. “Don’t like scarpering on you, mate, but—”

  “A man lives by his oaths,” John said. “You . . .”

  The big man was gone. John looked at Alan. “Well, it’s just the two of us again,” he said; they shook hands. “Bare is brotherless back, as your uncle is fond of saying.”

  The other man’s handsome face split in a smile. “It’s a good saying. Would I like him, my uncle?”

  John nodded. “He’s . . . solid. My father said that about him—that his oath was his bond, and you couldn’t want a better comrade or better friend.”

  He grinned. “Including a better friend when you’re trying to keep a fire going in a blizzard and down to your last stick of jerky—they went through some rough times together, when they were our age and on their Quest.”

  “Rough as this?” Alan said, trying to see through the gathering trails of mist.

  “I don’t think so.”

  The thought was oddly cheering. He’d grown up in that towering shadow, and this last little time lived with the grief of its massive absence.

  “I think he’d be proud of you,” John added. Softly: “And Father would be of me. Yes, I think he would.”

  It didn’t make him less afraid, but it did make it easier to control that twisting feeling under his breastbone. The clopping sounded louder, even as the pulse of the drum continued. He crossed himself, kissed his crucifix and spoke softly:

  “O God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell; but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace . . . Lady pierced with sorrows . . . intercede for me, Lady, now and at the hour of my death. And as You are also a mother, intercede for Thora and Pip. Throw Your mantle about them and the innocent lives they bear.”

  The slow, dragging beat of the hooves came closer and closer, thudding on dirt, clattering hard on stone among the graves. Alan whipped the glyph-graven knife through the air, wrist-loosening circles until the cloven air hissed.

 
“Come on, you ambling glue pot!” he shouted. “This’ll work on you!”

  Then, sotto voice: “Come on, Deor, get us out!”

  The brush between them and the graveyard rustled.

  “Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!” John said, bringing his cross-blazoned shield up just under his eyes and his sword overhead hilt-forward.

  Something came out of the brush towards them. John thought it was a horse—but it was accompanied by a wave of feeling. A sick tiredness, a weariness that made his very bones ache and seem as if they were about to crumble. He might have lain down, if it had been worth the trouble, but it wasn’t. Nothing was.

  The blunt point at the bottom of his teardrop-shaped shield thumped into the dried mud of the roadway. He couldn’t be bothered to bring it up. Why? It didn’t matter. Nothing did, in a life that was just a futile struggle against the day when—

  Alan clanged the steel rim of his shield into John’s shoulder.

  “Not today!” John snarled, pulling his own shield back up again. “Thanks, buddy!”

  “Just thought you were getting tired of holding up that piece of a barn door,” Alan said.

  The weariness drew back a little. Then it fell on him like an avalanche coming down Mount Hood—he’d been in one of those once, on a skiing holiday when he was in his teens, and he’d been buried for half an hour until his father and mother led the party that dug him out. Even that icy, battering, smothering darkness that choked and moved without giving anything to push against hadn’t been as bad as this.

  He found himself on one knee and jerked the shield up; in that position it could cover you right over your head.

  “Hail . . . Mary . . .” he choked out as Alan gave a wordless shout and cut with the knife.

  John’s shield blazed, the cross overwhelmingly bright. And that light was blue, the blue of a summer’s sky, the blue of a mother’s eyes, the blue of sunlit sea.