The Sea Peoples(10)
He called out:
“I ku mau mau!”
The Sword gave her command of all tongues as she needed it, a skill most useful to monarchs. Words and the intricacies of their patterns poured into her mind. That meant:
“Stand together!”
The crew replied in a roar as they poised their oars: “I ku wa!”
Stand and shout, with action suited to the words.
The leader cried out again:
“I ku mau mau—
I ku huluhulu—
I ka lanawao—”
She knew: Stand together—haul with mighty strength—under the great trees!
The barge surged under her feet as the oars bit, but the acceleration was smooth and even, the work of hands that knew their task intimately. Admiral Naysmith would be coming ashore later, and so would Edain Aylward Mackenzie, her chief of staff and Bow-Captain of the High King’s Archers. Her commander of ground forces Lord Maugis de Grimmond was already there, overseeing the encampments in the places the Hawaiians had staked out and keeping the touchy pride of contingents from all over the High Kingdom’s wildly varied member-realms in check.
She was keeping her . . .
Grim, middle-aged and formidable.
. . . military commanders out of the picture right now, for diplomatic reasons, the same ones that meant no complete regiment or battery of field artillery had gone ashore formed and armed, and the broadsides of the frigates were aimed anywhere but at a potential target.
For that they have faces like clenched fists when they’re at their jobs. A face like a fist is entirely right and proper, when you need a fist. Which we will, but not here and not now.
It was all a matter of which face you wanted to be seen.
Montival was much, much bigger and much more populous and, when it cared to be, much stronger in arms than Hawai?i. As far as she knew they were stronger than anyone this side of Hinduraj over in the Bay of Bengal, or possibly some of the larger kingdoms among the fragments that made up the wreckage of China, currently occupied fighting one another and Mongol and Tibetan and even Amur-Russian invaders pouring into the shattered chaos of flood and famine that still reigned there.
There was no need to be rude about flaunting the fact. She was here to woo and not threaten; if any intimidation was necessary at all it could be accomplished by inference rather than action. The Hawaiians weren’t fools, to need an obvious fact shoved up their noses on the point of a blade.
She wanted Hawai?i as an ally, but “friendly quasi-neutral” allowing her forces to base themselves here would do. Hostility would ruin everything. Not even Montival could fight a war across the Pacific from its own ports.
There was a sufficient entourage with her to keep a minimum of state, a minimum which had the added advantage of not overshadowing Reiko; she’d managed to convince the stewards and house-mistresses at home that she should have only what was called a riding household, one stripped down for war. Sometimes her mother, who was an Associate, forgot to remember that órlaith wasn’t . . . and that North-realm ideas of what was due a person of consequence sometimes grated on other parts of Montival where rank and title didn’t count for quite so much and where folk remembered the old wars of her grandparents’ day and resented the fact that the Portland Protective Association was the largest single member-realm of the High Kingdom.
Fortunately High Queen Mathilda was also a knight, and had been on the Quest of the Sunrise Lands in her youth and knew in her bones you couldn’t always lug crates of cotte-hardies and a twitter of dressers along to make you look like the Princesses of ancient storytellers like Malory or Froissart or Disney.
There were Heuradys and Sir Droyn Jones de Molalla, also a North-realm knight of the Association and also of her personal household, in charge of the dozen men-at-arms from the Protector’s Guard; Karl Aylward Mackenzie and a half-score of longbowmen from the Clan Mackenzie dúthchas; the young Dúnedain Rangers Faramir and Morfind, who were the son and daughter of her father’s twin half-sisters; and Susan Mika of the Lakota tunwan and until recently of the Crown Courier Corps. Diarmuid Tennart McClintock was there too, with a like number of his tattooed caterans from the wild hill lands south of Eugene and the valley of the Rogaire, draped in their baggy Great Kilts and assorted ironmongery. All had accompanied her and Reiko on the journey to the Valley of Death.
And they’re my sworn followers, not just under my orders by Mother’s command as Queen-Regent, she thought.
She loved her mother Mathilda dearly, but they had had their quarrels, and órlaith would not be High Queen in her own right until she turned twenty-six, which was still several years away. Until then the High Queen-Regent’s word was final, which was fair enough. . . .
When she’s there to give it. I spent half the last year carefully not being there when someone showed up waving a Crown Writ I knew I didn’t want to read, even if it meant hiding in a cave with the bears or lying underwater and breathing through a hollow reed. It’s something I should remember when I take the Throne, if I get delusions of omnipotence. As an added boon, they’re all about my age, give or take.
órlaith looked over to the Ar?ˉ no Okurimono, which was her friend Reiko’s ship . . . and more importantly in this context, the ship of her friend’s other hat: as Shoˉhei Tennoˉ, the Empress of Dai-Nippon, Sovereign Majesty of Victorious Peace. Haring off into the wilderness with a band of young scapegraces to help Reiko recover the Grass-Cutting Sword had been the occasion of one of those quarrels with her mother, and the worst of them.