Prince of Outcasts (17 page)

Read Prince of Outcasts Online

Authors: S. M. Stirling

“So we have it fairly often,” Heuradys said, smiling fondly as you did at a pleasant family memory. “And she takes this little tiny piece, looks at it, pats her waistline, and eats it one teensy particle at a time. The rest of us around the table, Mom Two and Lioncel and Diomede and me and Evil Small Sis would have big slices and be scarfing it down and she looks like she's going to cry, and Mom Two says she can always spend two or three hours a day running up and down stairs in armor or hunting boar and then Mom One just
glares
at us.”

Everyone laughed, though Sir Droyn looked as if he was feeling a little shocked too, or at least thought he should be.

“Your lady mother the Countess has a most uncommonly genteel figure,” he said. “Spectacular, even, for a lady of her years.”

“Sure she does, Droyn. She's as disciplined as a knight. But she has to work at it. And not in the way most people do.”

Which for the overwhelming majority meant long hours of sweating-hard labor nearly every day. For that matter, given what chocolate and sugar cost, nobody but a noble or a very wealthy merchant could afford
to have this sort of dish often enough to be a problem. That reminded Órlaith of an early memory.

“I remember something Grandmother Juniper said once, that half the people in her coven had
weight problems
before the Change—I think that's how they said
were fat
back then—but that none of the ones still alive did a year later. She said it was a case of
be as you wish to seem
.”

Somehow that led to talking about being and seeming and that to the theatre season in Portland, which Alan Thurston had heard of and was eager to hear compared to its competitors in Boise and Corvallis.

“I've only read plays, really,” he said wistfully. “Though I'd love to see professionals stage them.”

“You don't get strolling companies, or even tinerants?” Droyn asked; both were common in the Willamette and up the Columbia.

Alan's smile turned a little sour. “At our ranch, we visit neighbors maybe once a month, and we see real outsiders . . . oh, three times a year. One to buy our wool and steers, one to deliver a pack-train of what we need to buy, and once to collect the taxes. And we go to the county Ready Reserve militia musters, at the same time as the County Fair. Hali's . . . remote. Nobody had used that land since before the Change, and not much then.”

More cheerfully: “I used to go outside past the horse barn where nobody could hear and do the parts myself:

“Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink behind the lake,

The shadows lengthen in Carcosa—”

“Taking in some shows ought to be possible, even off-season. They say you can find anything in Portland,” Heuradys said.

Alan's smile turned slightly bitter again. “Then maybe I can find . . . someone who repairs reputations.”

He nodded upward at the captured banners; in the dark space beneath the rafters you could somehow sense the tatters and the old dark-brown
stains where warriors had fought over them savagely, hand-to-hand, and where the vanquished had fallen bleeding to death on the cloth at the last.

“God, how I hate those people . . . those
things
behind the people. They're the ones who
really
killed my father. He was an ambitious man and maybe a ruthless one, but he
was
a man, and a great one, before they got their hooks into him.”

Then he collected himself, rose and bowed. “Many thanks for your hospitality again, Lady Heuradys, and for a delightful evening, Your Highness.”

“The Steward can find you a room, Rancher Thurston,” Heuradys said. “We're not crowded!”

“I appreciate the offer, but it might be better if I don't sleep beneath your rooftree, my lady. Causing you trouble would be poor repayment for your generosity. I'll camp with my troop; if I'm to lead them in battle, I should share their hardships.”

That was, of course, unanswerable; even if sleeping in a hayloft on a summer night after a good dinner wasn't
much
of a hardship. When he had gone, Heuradys cocked an eyebrow and glanced after him and then at the Sword where it stood on the polished, carved ashwood of the rack behind them. She knew it and its powers and limitations as well as anyone outside the Royal kindred, and she knew that the truth-sensing remained when it wasn't underhand, fading and blurring with distance.

“He was certainly sincere about hating the CUT,” Órlaith said.

“Well, he'd be the heir of Boise, but for them,” Heuradys said.

“And sincere in general. But . . . unspoken reservations.”

Her knight nodded. “Well, who doesn't have those? Do you think your mother will let him fight? He
has
gone around his uncle President Fred. Gone over his head, in a sense. If he does well in the field it'll be impossible to keep him out watching the grass grow and the cows shit for the rest of his life.”

“Possibly he's gone around Fred by prior arrangement with people in Boise. Probably Fred himself, even if nobody spelled it out.”

“Hints and machinations,” Heuradys agreed.

“He's his father's son, but he's Fred's nephew, and Fred's the sort of man who'll remember that. Doing it under the table, maybe? So Victoria won't know until it's too late.”

Heuradys shuddered slightly. Victoria Thurston was a Rancher's daughter from the Powder River south and east of the old Montana border. The CUT had killed her father and run her off her family's land during the war, which was how she'd met the Questers, and she had a ferociously straightforward view of what was best done with enemies . . . or their heirs.

“You saw Alan's retainers?” Órlaith went on.

“I did, briefly, and they were doing a little target practice to keep their hands in. Quite good of their kind for cow-country horse archers, from what I could see, and well mounted and armed. Maybe I'll go take a closer look after dinner.”

“Then I think Mother will let him. Another troop of good light cavalry is always welcome. She'll hope he gets heroically and conveniently killed down fighting the Eaters in Westria or across the sea, but she won't put him in the way of it. Fighting's a dangerous occupation all on its own, without any of that . . . what's that story the Christians tell? From the Jewish part of their Bible?”

“Uriah the Hittite,” Heuradys supplied.

“Just so, without any funny business of that not-very-funny kind, so to say. And that may occur to Victoria too, after a while, that it might. She's a bit bloodthirsty, but no fool. Sharp as Fred, sharper possibly.”

Heuradys yawned. “We should turn in. We need to make an early start on doing nothing tomorrow. We could take some falcons out, for example. Or see if there's a polo match going . . . No, not until the autumn maneuvers are over. Maybe hunt some antelope?”

“It's a hard job but, sure, someone must slog through, and it's up to us,” Órlaith paused. “I wonder what in Anwyn's name
Johnnie's
up to?”

“And with who?” Heuradys said, watching as Faramir and Suzie and Morfind sauntered off, hand in hand, and the Mackenzies and the house retainers and the Boisean horse-soldiers started to sing.

“Let's just hope it involves more fornication than decapitation,” Órlaith said. “We'll be feeling the consequences fairly soon, I think.”

“See you later, then,” Heuradys said.

*   *   *

I'm awake,
she thought, several hours later.

Heuradys had shown up a while ago smiling a revoltingly smug smile and with bits of hay in her hair. She was snoring slightly in the other bed, sleeping turned on her left side with one hand under the pillow, resting on the hilt of her knife. Órlaith swung her feet to the floor, feeling oddly reluctant to look back, and walked over to the French doors on tile that felt cool to her feet. They'd been left slightly ajar for the night breezes, and she walked out onto the balcony. Nobody was about in the courtyard below, though there would be two of her party on guard at the foot of the stairs under the arcade below. Moonlight played on the water splashing from a fountain in the middle of the long narrow pool that ran down the center of the rectangular space.

She looked up. The black of the stars moved against the sky, in patterns obscurely meaningful. A tower rose in a field of dark flowers, and huge blurred columnar shapes with the heads of bats or twisted dogs floated around it, slowly turning so that their blank yellow eyes glared in her direction. They started to drift towards her. The moon was huge and full beyond the wall southward, and
behind
it were the spires of a city. . . .

“Whoa!” she said.

She jerked upright in bed and pressed her hands to the sides of her head. Macmac whimpered and twitched in his basket by the door.

“Wazzat?” Heuradys said, opening her eyes without moving her head.

“Nothing, just a dream . . . Can't even remember the details.”

She sank back and closed her eyes. Soft music fell down the stairs of sleep with her, past long terraces of pink stone to a cerulean sea where Johnnie's ship ghosted along with all sails set.

CHAPTER NINE

A
BOARD
THE
T
ARSHISH
Q
UEEN

C
ERAM
S
EA

O
CTOBER
21
ST

C
HANGE
Y
EAR
46/2044 AD

J
ohn's fingers moved on the lute as he sang softly in the darkness, leaning against one of the catapults; Thora was lying on the deck nearby, fingers laced behind her head. Deor had his harp Golden Singer out, and Ruan his flute, and they were letting the tune wander between them as they worked their hands supple again after a spell on the pumps.

Night and mist enclosed the
Tarshish Queen
, lit only by gleams from the stern lanterns that sparkled on the drops hanging from the star-tracery of rope and rigging, amid quiet creaks and a faint chuckle from beneath the bows and a gentle whisper of the wind. The words shaped themselves to the sounds:

“Willows whiten, aspens quiver,

Little breezes dusk and shiver

Through the wave that runs forever

By the island in the river,

Down to towered Todenangst.

Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,

An abbot on an ambling pad,

Sometimes a laughing shepherd-lad,

Or long-haired page in crimson clad,

Goes by to towered Todenangst;

And sometimes by the river blue

The knights come riding, two and two . . .”

“Ah, now that is music,” Deor said, when they'd stopped, and Thora sighed wordlessly. “That's your grandparents' dream turned to air and song.”

“Not my lyrics, mostly,” John said. “An old poet of the ancients, singing of King Arthur's court. I just reshaped it a bit. And I had a hint on the tune; my aunt Fiorbhinn said someone had sung a bit of it from memory—badly—when she was a child, and she'd always wanted to make something of it but never had the time. She gave me the little fragment she had.”

“All honor to her as a maker, and she taught me much. But by Woden who sends the mead of poetry to men, you made
this
,” Deor said.

Ruan spoke up unexpectedly. “It's the Prince's grandparents' dream—his mother's parents. But it's the best of it. The beauty and the gallantry beneath. And that's why they built better than they knew with their waking minds, or even intended. That's what has lasted when the rest was burned away by time and war.”

Deor nodded soberly and carefully wiped down the harp with a special cloth before he snapped it into its padded leather case. John did the same before he put Azalaïs into the case Evrouin held out. He'd let the valet handle it a few times, which he'd done quite competently, but found himself reluctant to do that when Deor was around.

He sets a high standard, as a troubadour,
John thought whimsically.
And when you're around a man like that, you . . . just don't want to let the side down.

The First Mate went by, pulling on his long shirt as he did, his feet still wet from the hold. They all glanced at each other and waited in silence; they were just under the break of the quarterdeck, and they could hear a conversation by the wheel.

“She's gained another foot overnight, Cap'n,” Radavindraban said. “The pumps are indeed going flat-out, but they cannot keep pace.”

John rose, as if casually, and went up the quarterdeck ladder himself; he had that privilege, as Prince or perhaps just as the one who'd chartered the ship, as long as he kept out of the way. Thora and Deor did too, as very old friends of the Captain.

Feldman gave them a glance and then nodded to his first officer.

“Then we're beaching her today, like it or not,” he said. A grim smile. “On the bottom, if nowhere else.”

There was a thick mist, curling around the
Tarshish Queen
like darker tendrils in the gray light of predawn, and John was glad of his arming doublet. There was a damp chill to the air now, despite the tropic heat he knew was coming. The ship was silent save for its eternal creak and groan, and the rhythmic thumping of the pumps and the splash of water jetting overside. The motion beneath their feet was perceptibly different from the big schooner's usual light dance with the waters, a sluggish check to the roll as the liquid weight surged through the hold and ran inches deep on its planking. It would have been worse if the ship had been carrying cargo there as usual, rather than just people and their supplies.

“I'd really rather not go for a swim around here, Captain,” John said lightly. “Considering the sort of thing they have in the water.”

A few within hearing smiled, but only Thora Garwood's chuckle was heartfelt. There hadn't been any sign of the monster saltie, but none of them had forgotten it. In a few months it would be a valuable prop in tales told in longshore bars provided that they ever saw one again, but right now the memory was entirely too fresh. Deor was at least as courageous, but he'd obviously sensed something about the animal that wasn't of the world of common day. So had John, but he didn't want to think about it. It was hard not to, drifting over a dark ghost sea through the mist, as if they were on some voyage in Limbo that would never end. In fact they had less time than that; the sail they'd fothered over the leak was pressed away from the hull whenever they made any progress forward. The winds had been faint and
irregular, but a flat calm wouldn't save them, just make sinking slower. Those triangular fins were still out there.

“There's land nearby,” Feldman said. “I can smell it, even if we're not sure on the charts.”

John breathed in deeply. There were the usual smells of wood and tarred cordage and the breakfast hash frying, crumbled ship's biscuit and salt beef, and the slightly stale brine of the bilges—much cleaner because of the flow-through between leak and pumps. Perhaps there
was
a hint of something else, something between rotting fish and hot sand and compost, but it was nothing like the cool fir-sap scent you mostly got off Montival's coasts, or the dry rock and fennel of the far southern reaches they'd left. Or it could be his imagination.

“Aye, Cap'n, maybe,” Radavindraban said doubtfully. “The islands don't move, but the shoals do, and the reefs grow fast this past while. Bad sightings these last few days, too.”

“That's why we'll have soundings, Mr. Mate.”

Silence fell again, broken every few minutes by the cry of the leadsman in the bows: “No bottom! No bottom at forty fathom!”

Then another cry came from the lookout at the masthead. “Light! A light!”

John's breath caught. That brought every head up, and the Captain's speaking-trumpet. “What light, and where away?”

“Burning yellow, skipper! Hard on the port beam. A fixed light!”

“Mr. Mate, come about, thus,” Feldman said, and pointed. “We'll close her. Keep the soundings coming. And have the crew stand to; it might be wreckers.”

The watch below had come on deck at the call, their feet wet from the water sloshing beneath their hammocks, and there was a little crowding and the sound of the Bosun's voice cursing and the thump of a bare foot on a backside as the lines were trimmed and the ship's head came slowly about to the northeast.

“Bottom!” the leadsman cried, her voice cracking. “Bottom at thirty fathom!”

“What bottom?” Feldman called, and there was a delay as the sailor examined the soft tallow on the bottom of the cone-shaped lead by the light of a shuttered lamp.

“Shell and coral sand, skipper!”

Another spell of silence, and then a gust of wind and they all saw the light, a low yellow flicker ahead. Feldman looked up at the sails, where they disappeared into the darkness and the fog.

“Wind's quickening,” he said, as if speaking to himself. “And it's on the port quarter; morning wind, from the land. It'll shift this fog soon enough and the sun will burn off what's left.”

“By the mark . . . twenty-six! Twenty-six fathom even!”

Then they all saw it, a steady yellow spot on the horizon. The mist closed in again, parted again, as they crept forward. Their progress was a faint chuckle of bow-wave under the schooner's sharp prow.

“By the mark . . . ten fathoms! By the mark . . . eight! Shelving!”

“What bottom?”

“Sharp sand and coral rag, skipper!”

“Back topsails,” Feldman said. “Starboard your helm. Mr. Mate, anchor when she's stopped. We'll wait for dawn. The reefs
do
grow fast around here.”

The
Tarshish Queen
's head came into the gentle wind from the northeast and she slowed to a halt. The forward anchor went in with a rumble and splash.

“She holds, skipper!”

“Strike all sail,” Feldman said. “Now we'll wait.”

They did, and the world turned from shades of black and gray to pale gray and white; then the mist began to lift in earnest.

“Mr. Mate, tell the hands off for breakfast,” Feldman said; unspoken was the thought that it might well be their last meal if they didn't find a good place to careen. “And then double the stays, preventers fore and aft. We may be trying the masts hard soon, and the mizzen's already wounded. Pull them taut, if you will.”

“Aye aye, Cap'n.”

Thump . . . thump . . . thump
went the pumps, and the water jetted. Gangs
of sailors went aloft with heavy cables over their shoulders, like the legs of a long narrow climbing centipede. John split his attention between them—it was always fascinating watching experts do something difficult—and the sights to northward as the mist burned away and the sun came up.

The eastern horizon flashed green as the burning arch cleared the horizon, with crimson the color of molten copper on the fringe of clouds. The stars showed as the mist cleared and then were gone in the greater light, fading away to a few scattered in the midnight blue of the western horizon for a moment. Ruan's young voice rose from the bows as he greeted the sun with the Dawn Chant.

Even after weeks in these waters, John was still rapt for a moment.

“Dawns like thunder,” Feldman said softly, with the air of a man quoting.

Deor smiled and spoke:

“Between the pedestals of Night and Morning

Between red Death, and radiant Desire

With not one sound of triumph or of warning

Stands the great sentry on the Bridge of Fire . . .”

The Captain nodded and they shared a smile, as old friends do over a common memory.

“I loaned you that volume, a long time ago,” he said, and turned his telescope northward. “While you and Thora were staying in Newport that first time, at my father's house.

“There's the light,” he went on to John. “See, on the headland of that sandspit?”

John used his own binoculars. The light was on a small platform atop a tall rickety-looking triangular framework of poles—Deor supplied the word
mangroves
when he asked what the material was; in Montival the equivalent would probably have been made from two-by-fours of milled timber. As he watched a bucket swung down at the end of a lever and a cap smothered the flame in its glass enclosure.

“Clever,” Feldman said. “A water-clock arrangement. Probably palm-oil
for the light, and someone comes by to reset things every evening. All you'd need to do is pour the water in at the top again and fill up the lamp now and then.”

The last of the fog cleared with a rush, and heads all over the ship turned towards the land that was revealed. They were anchored off the western end of it, with a long slope of mountainous forested interior fading off to the eastward in rippled blue-green reaches. Closer to the shore was a white road, running through groves of coconut and other palms, stirring in the breeze coming down from the mountains. John turned his binoculars to the east, and saw the green of tilled fields and what looked like thatched roofs and walls. There was a slight sighing, as the crew knew they weren't in danger of being cast adrift in small craft far from land. They could reach that shore easily in the ship's boats. Of course, what lay on it might be just as dangerous as the sea and its dwellers.

“Mr. Mate, we'll raise the anchor, if you please, and keep course at this distance from the surf-line,” Feldman said. “I don't like the look of it right inshore. And regular soundings.”

A volley of orders followed, and the long capstan bars were fitted into the drum on the forecastle. John trotted forward and joined them; there weren't many things he could usefully do on a ship, but pushing hard on a stick was one. Just to add joy to the occasion, the Bosun was looking over the side to see how raising the anchor affected the makeshift sail patch over their leak, which hadn't been helped
at all
by the encounter with the giant crocodile.

John braced his palms against the smooth ash surface of the capstan bar; he was barefoot, and he crooked his knees and worked his toes on the holystoned fir planks of the deck to get a firm grip.

“Annnnnnnd . . .
heave
!” a bosun's mate cried. “Break her loose, buckos!”

They heaved, putting their weight into it, faces growing contorted and red as they groaned. There was a long moment of strain as the leverage of bars and gears fought against the anchor's weight and the catch of the wedge-shaped flukes on the rocky sand below. The ship heeled slightly, and pivoted slowly around the rigid bar of the chain. Then it
came free and they all lurched forward a step. The mechanism belowdecks gave a single sharp metallic
clunk!
as the ratchet caught the pawl that prevented it running backward.


Heave
and go!
Stamp
and go! Heave her 'round and make her
go
!”

It was still hard work, but not quite such a strain. Thora was beside him, and Ruan, but Deor had hopped up on the drum of the capstan and held a long note before plunging into a song with a strong steady beat, stamping to emphasize it, and those at the capstan with enough breath took it up too:

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