The Sky-Blue Wolves

by S. M. Stirling

  “My apologies for my humiliating lack of manners, Heika,” he said in a voice like a bucketful of gravel being stirred with a spear-butt. “I will try to be more self-controlled.”

  “You owe the apology to our honored ally, King Kalākaua, my bushi,” she said with iron in her voice, and he made a bow to the Hawaiian.

  “Very sorry,” he said.

  Then she continued in slow careful English, a language Egawa understood reasonably well but couldn’t speak beyond curses and mangled clichés.

  “If . . . when . . . they had disposed of us, they would next have come for you, Your Majesty. We have protected the outside world from this evil with my people’s blood and their lives for two generations; not by our choice, but that is what we have done. And they are not an enemy who are merely greedy for land or plunder or dominion. What kingdom, what people, has not tried to seize what they could at some time? Certainly, we Nihonjin have, now and then. But the bakachon, they are wicked and the tools of wickedness, the enemies of all humanity. Ultimately their masters seek not to rule or even to plunder, but to destroy for its own sake.”

  Kalākaua looked at the smoke of his devastated land, visibly thought of the reports he’d received of how the invaders had acted, which he hadn’t wanted to believe until the Nihonjin had confirmed them, sighed and nodded.

  “We had peace and I wanted more, there’s so much to do,” he said. “But I won’t let the wish father the thought; it takes two to make peace, but only one to make war. You’re right, Your Majesty. This was a fight that was coming anyway, and it could have come in a way that was far worse. We’ll eat you last isn’t a very convincing argument for staying out of it.”

  Órlaith looked at the map and listened to the thoughts that were not hers, but flowed into her mind as if they were. Decision firmed.

  “They’re swinging back on our right like a door on a pivot”—her hand traced a line on the map—“and then they’re going to hit us here when we reinforce success on the other side.”

  Her gauntleted finger moved back over to the closer, left-hand side of the line of little metal markers placed on the paper.

  Thurston frowned. “That’s not a winning gambit,” he said. “Not if they have any idea of our capacities and not unless I . . . we . . . were idiots. If they had more cavalry, maybe, but they can’t pull it off; I’d just refuse the flank and commit some of my reserve . . . even if you hadn’t told me they were going to do it. I wish we had more cavalry, come to that, but we do have some and it gives us superior tactical mobility.”

  “They do not think in such a way, General,” Reiko put in. “We have noticed many times, the jinnikukaburi are . . . are crev . . . clever . . . but in a way that is”—

  she appealed to Órlaith, who supplied the words

  —“is abstract and alien.”

  Órlaith nodded. “And remember, General, that to the enemy’s leaders human beings are vermin, their own troops included. They genuinely don’t care about losses in the way we do.”

  Thurston’s mouth twisted wryly. “Yes, I noticed that in the Prophet’s War.”

  “They’re trying to bleed us to weaken us for the future, rather than beat us here,” Órlaith said. “If they can, they’ll try and make us kill every one of their soldiers, so they can hurt us as badly as they can in the process.”

  “It’s a butcher’s way to operate, but I see your point,” Thurston said.

  Órlaith noticed the Nihonjin blinking as they tried to follow the argument; their own tradition was that fighting to the death was the only honorable path for a warrior, and it hadn’t occurred to them that there was anything odd about it. That attitude had probably been heavily reinforced by two generations when their only enemy would simply torture, kill and eat you . . . not necessarily in that order . . . if you fell into their hands.

  Órlaith looked at the map again. “We’re going to need a bigger army, for the rest of this war. It’s going to take longer and cost more than we thought.”

  She thought she caught a virtually subliminal murmur from Heuradys: Astonishing! That’s never happened before!

  “Probably, Your Highness, but today we fight with what we have. What do you recommend?”

  “I’m not going to second-guess your strictly military judgment, General, but there’s something . . . else involved here. The enemy’s leaders—”

  “The kangshinmu, the sorcerer-lords,” Reiko put in.

  “Yes, the kanghsinmu will be concentrated here, where they try to drive in our flank. If we can remove those, the ordinary soldiers may not fight to the death. Though they’ve probably been taught we’d treat them the way they would us if they won.”

  Thurston nodded. “What do you suggest, Your Highness?”

  Órlaith glanced at Reiko and got a nod. “We have certain assets we need to apply,” she began.

  An instant’s ringing silence fell. Everyone knew what she bore, and stories had circulated widely about the Grasscutter, growing in the telling. But stories were one thing, and the living reality another. It made most people profoundly uncomfortable, which was an attitude she sympathized with.

  “Her Majesty of Dai-Nippon and I will lead a reinforcement there.”

  She tapped her finger on the left end of the allied line.

  “Her Imperial Guard, the High King’s . . . Queen’s Archers and the Protector’s Guard, the Association men-at-arms, and . . . some light horse as well. I think the Lakota contingent would do nicely.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

  (FORMERLY NORTHERN OREGON)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  DECEMBER 20TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

  “It’s absolutely bloody freezing out there! And it’s still raining!” Philippa Arminger Mackenzie—née Balwyn-Abercrombie—said.

  In fact, Pip almost snarled.

  This was the sort of weather her ancestors had known and loathed and through the centuries had conquered colonies to avoid . . . or before that, gone on Crusades; a Balwyn had gone over the walls of Jerusalem in 1099 behind Godfrey de Bouillon, wading ankle-deep in blood on his way to the loot with the Pope’s blessing on it all.

  She herself had grown up in Townsville, where sugarcane grew in the steam-press heat, and gigantic saltwater crocs occasionally ambled out of the marshes on the edge of town looking for something tasty to eat. She hadn’t quite believed her mother’s stories about the sustained dreariness of which England was capable. Though she had been willing to abscond from Townsville and go adventuring on her own ship northward to frustrate her father’s plans to send her to Winchester in the hopes of picking up a Windsor sprig to decorate the bloodline of the newly and recently hereditary Colonels of Townsville.

  And I ended up snagging a Prince on my own, somewhere with weather just like England! God’s sense of the ironic . . . Granted, Johnnie makes up for a lot, but . . .

  “Bugger me, Johnnie, is the cold always so murderous? I can see now why there’s no brass monkeys on your family crest. Is it always like this here? I haven’t seen the sun for five minutes since we docked, and then it looked embarrassed, as if you’d walked in on it while it was bathing.”

  Prince John Arminger Mackenzie, heir to the Lord Protectorship of the PPA, next heir to the High Kingdom of Montival after his elder sister Órlaith, listened to her and winced slightly. He sat across from her as he sipped at his hot tea and tuned his lute. This car in the Royal train was comprised of sets of chairs set opposite each other in groups, across a low table that held a tea service and cups. The railcar was heated by a little airtight metal stove with a glass window that let you see the cheery flicker of the burning apple-wood that scented the air, there were some quite splendid rugs on the floor, and the walls and ceiling were carved and inlaid woods, some of which m
ust have been imported from her part of the world.

  My previous, decently warm part of the world.

  “Well, this is winter,” John said. “And it’s fairly typical for this time of year. We call it the Black Months. At least it’s typical this far north, and west of the Cascades. It’s drier and sunnier here than it is on the coast.”

  “Ha!”

  He continued doggedly. “And drier still east of the mountains. And warmer farther south, of course. Summer is sunny and warm here and it doesn’t rain much. In South Westria it’s as hot as the islands of the Ceram Sea. In the Mojave Desert for example, I went there recently—”

  With the Empress of Japan, of all people, she thought. Though from the description that hadn’t been an affair with a starring role for John and she got the impression that this Reiko had frankly terrified him.

  “—but that’s hot and dry.”

  He didn’t laugh at her reaction to the weather—which was wisdom—but Deor Godulfson and Thora Garwood, who were sharing his side of the railway coach, did. And still worse, they did it indulgently.

  “Be happy, Princess Pip of the Flowering Frangipani. It’s not snowing, not yet,” Deor said.

  He was a wiry black-haired, gray-eyed man with a musician’s long supple fingers, a scop as his people called it, a wandering bard. Pip gave the minstrel and the swordswoman a look of loathing, wondering why she’d never realized how much they resembled a pair of laughing hyenas before; though objectively, they looked like the two battered thirty-something adventurers she’d known, and liked, and fought and fared widely beside for months now.

  Deor and John had been playing a round of improvised tunes—jamming was the technical name for it—on John’s mandolin and Deor’s harp, a pleasant tinkling buzz that occasionally gave way to what she recognized as jazz. Uncle Pete liked that sound.

  “You could be first rate, if only you didn’t waste time on being a Prince,” Deor said.

  John snorted. “And why don’t you stay home and make music then, my friend, rather than roaming the whole wide world?”

  “I needed things to make songs about. And now and then I must make seidh, to rescue Princes from ill-wreaking trolls, or swing a sword. Our time on Baru Denpasar certainly gave me materials I’ll be years working up!”

  I’m extremely nervous about meeting the Queen Mum and it’s making me irritable, so maybe I’d better shut my cakehole, she thought. Let’s not take it out on the other kiddies, Pip, old girl. Buck up! You’ve fought pirates and storms and kept a crew of pretty rugged desperados well in line, and then dealt with what looked like bloody evil magic . . . well, no, what actually was bloody evil magic in Baru Denpasar. I don’t know what else to call it, even if it is too much like those pre-Blackout books Uncle Pete used to love so much, with barbarian swordsmen and busty wenches and such. And, well, being a little bit preggers is upsetting the balance of my . . . what did they call them before the Blackout . . . humors? No, hormones.

  Another reason for her envy? Thora’s impressive and lanky height was tricked out in Bearkiller formal garb, which started with that little blue mark between the brows that was some sort of warrior-caste thing. But the clothes were a very sensible combination of knee boots, loose pants of dark maroon wool, linen shirt and fur-lined leather jacket of soft brown doeskin with a bear’s-head badge on it; all super premium quality, with touches like gold buttons on the coat and a silver Thor’s-Hammer pendant, and she carried her sword—a basket-hilted backsword—resting easily between her knees.

  It all made Pip feel like a very gaudy Christmas-tree decoration in her new Associate court garb, overdressed and under-armed. You had to adjust your whole way of moving, and Pip wasn’t used to feeling gauche. Or adjusting anything she did for anyone.

  That’s Princess Philippa Arminger Mackenzie, now, she reminded herself. Daddy will love it, almost as much as if I had gone to Winchester and snagged the giggling chinless third cousin of the King-Emperor. Mummy would have laughed herself silly over a gin and tonic and said I was a true Balwyn and always landed on my feet . . . in stolen shoes. Uncle Pete and Auntie Fifi will laugh themselves silly when they read the letters I sent back with the Silver Surfer, and so will King Birmo . . . and then he’ll wring everything he can out of the connection for Darwin and Capricornia, the evil old scrote.

  The outfit she wore (and several others in the helpfully-provided luggage) had been scrounged from the very accommodating Mayor and Corporation of the Free and Loyal Chartered City of Astoria and cut and sewn and refitted by frantic day-and-night relays from the Seamstress’ Guild, which she’d endured with as much good humor as she could; at least it was partly made out of the gorgeous fabrics the suitably grateful Raja of Baru Denpasar had pressed on her. They called them cotte-hardies. They had full skirts and fitted bodices and they were surprisingly comfortable.

  Astoria had been impressive. As big as Darwin, if colder, a gray city massively fortified against a hilly forested shore green and gray, and a gray sea and river bustling with shipping from all around the world, and riverboat and barge and rail traffic from the Columbia Valley and ringing with workshops and small factories, sawmills and shipyards and ropeworks—though also quaint, with all the half-timbered new buildings, which she supposed were practical in this climate. And the medieval-ish clothes, which ditto. Crowds had turned out to cheer John as soon as word got out that the lost Prince was back from heroics to rival his father’s and safe on the frigate Stormrider, almost as soon as the families of the crew had arrived on the quay amid laughter and tears.

  Pip knew ships and cargo; she had successfully captained a trading schooner herself. Her father was heir to a realm whose capital was a busy seaport second only to Darwin and Hobart, and her mother had been a seaborne merchant-adventurer. She was the friend of King Birmo of Darwin and the unofficial niece of her mother’s friends Pete and Fifi Holder . . . who were currently heads of the Darwin and East Indies Trading Company, having worked their way up with her mother as very successful salvagers-cum-buccaneers.

  They’d cheered her as well, since apparently the rumors about the exotic foreign bride were considered romantic in the extreme—the seamstresses had been very competent, but inclined to twitter and gush and sigh over John’s dreaminess, since the Troubadour Prince was a major heartthrob here, with girls putting his lithographed picture cut out of magazines with names like Tournaments Illuminated on bedroom walls and mooning over him.

  John playing and singing at some lady’s knee in a castle solar dressed in slightly disheveled finery, John alone under a tree in loose shirt and tight hose dreaming and composing, John in armor at tournaments with some lady’s favor tucked into his breastplate, John kneeling before an altar and looking soulful . . .

  All rather amusing . . . in a way, though in another way one is inclined to roll one’s eyes and possibly chunder up lunch. Which I couldn’t eat anyway because my stomach was clenched too tight and now I’m starving.

  The two bureaucrats from the Lord Chancellor’s office had been oddly dressed—rather like a subdued form of the clothes you saw on playing cards, with a robed and tonsured monk as number three—but they’d also been as workmanlike in their way as the seamstresses in kirtles and wimples had been in theirs, and had extracted everything in jig time.

  The news that she was expecting had produced a mild panic combined with exultation, whereupon they’d brought in a nun-doctor who had confirmed that yes, she had a bun in the oven though it was early days yet and everything was going fine, if God and His Mother were kind. Thora had privately snagged the medical sister on the way out, but nobody else had noticed since they were focused on her and John and apparently the local medical profession was very strong on patient confidentiality, possibly as a sort of penumbral spillover from attitudes towards the confessional.

  Sometimes the report-takers had been inclined to choke on the exotic details of what had happened
in Baru Denpasar off in the Ceram Sea, where the good . . . or rather bad . . . ship Hastur docked with the Pallid Mask as captain, and Carcosa rose in pink-and-white abomination on the shore like a tumor with the brooding presence of the King in Yellow looming above it trying to shape the world according to hellish dreams older than time. But Deor and Thora and John had backed her up on that from their varying perspectives, and unlike her they had plenty of local credibility.

  And anyway, here in Montival they seemed to have more experience with evil sorcerer-lords and malignant otherworldliness than was common in Oz, where it was mostly rumors about foreign lands or things the Aborigines got up to in the lands they’d taken back. It did produce a temptation to run for some remote outback station and never ever ever leave again, but with her current run of luck she’d get sidetracked into the Dreamtime and have to live on witchetty grubs and honey ants for the rest of eternity, squatting over a fire on her hams while the grubs roasted on twigs.

  You could tell from the questions that they already knew a good deal about Oz here, more than she’d known about Montival. There was a trickle of trade and apparently John’s maternal grandmamma had had a thing about collecting intelligence and it had stuck, locally, and the ones taking her story down were specialists.

  The density of traffic on the Columbia and the way the network of heliograph stations had flashed the news before them had been even more impressive. Mirrors and sunlight were used back home too, but they had a backup system here of limelight—quicklime burning in a hydrogen-oxygen flame—for when it was dim or dark . . . which seemed to be a lot of the time.

  The railways here were well kept up and equipped with things like the hippomotive—eight big horses on treadmills driving geared wheels—pulling this Royal train, which with relays kept them going at over twenty miles an hour. That was very fast indeed for overland travel; the only other way to do it was along a route with relays of riding horses at the stops.