The Sea Peoples(101)
“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.
He was falling, into something infinite and soft and full of comfort.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
OFF PEARL HARBOR
AUPUNI O HAWAI?I
(KINGDOM OF HAWAI?I)
NOVEMBER 29TH
CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD
King Kalaˉkaua looked on soberly as the first flat thudding crack of a ship’s catapult sounded to the north, shading his eyes with a broad hand against the bright morning sunlight.
It was too far to see the blur of a bolt or roundshot, though the flaming cover of a napalm shell would have been visible. órlaith reflected that he’d probably been on ships of his own navy that saw action against corsairs and pirates; she’d been on Feldman’s Tarshish Queen when it shot its way out of San Francisco Bay a few months ago, against Haida raiders and Korean warships just like these.
“This is . . . a lesson,” the Hawaiian monarch said, adjusting to the gentle pitch and roll of the Sea-Leopard’s quarterdeck with the ease of a lifetime’s practice. “We could not have fought off this attack by ourselves.”
One of his commanders stirred, and he looked at the man. “Yes, General Alika, perhaps if we had not welcomed the Montivallans and Japanese the Koreans would not have attacked us. But perhaps they would—this fleet, this army, came in the same week that the others arrived. It must have been in preparation for months, traveling towards us for a long time.”
He shrugged his broad taut-muscled shoulders, most of which showed beyond the straps of his light cuirass.
“And if we let fear of attack stop us from making friendships as we please, are we a sovereign kingdom, a free people, or the slaves of those who master us with threats?”
“I am sorry, Your Majesty,” the scar-faced older man said. “It is just . . .”
He nodded towards the pillars of smoke coming from Oahu to the north. There was a faint reek of it now, a somehow sour scent of fires burning things not meant for the flames.
“Yes, much wealth won by sweat and work has been lost and will have to be rebuilt. And the blood of our people—I hope most were able to escape to the mountains, but every hour we wait more will be killed or worse.”
órlaith gave him a sympathetic nod. She knew that Montivallan soldiers and sailors would die in the coming fight, or be maimed and go halt or blind or handless all their lives afterwards, and it hurt. Yet they were all here carrying blades, herself with them and sharing their peril. They were here because they wished it—for honor’s sake, or for their given oaths; for a lord they loved or comrades dearer than life who they would not see go into danger alone, or an abstract sense of duty, or any number of causes down to simple callow boredom with endless days spent staring up a plow-horse’s arse or hauling nets.
When you took up the spear you gave yourself up to the sacrifice, as one who went to the Dark Mother consenting and with open eyes. She herself made that choice every day.
But Kalaˉkaua knew that his folk were meeting death and fire in their own homes, and that his land lay waste beneath an invader’s heel. That had to be hard, hard. The lord and the land and the folk were one, and the lord of the land was bound to the spirits who embodied both. In a very real sense, for a true ruler harm to the people or land was like a blade in your own flesh; even the thought of it made her skin crawl. She exchanged a glance with Reiko and thought she saw the same knowledge in her dark eyes. They inclined their heads to each other, in a communion no others they knew could share outside the closest of their own blood kin.
Her left hand gripped the hilt of the Sword of the Lady. That sense of communion with her followers was there, the knowing that felt as every one of them was a presence, and the calculus of force and speed and wind and wave that moved them. And she could sense what Reiko bore—a storm of fire and air locked in steel by a will beyond that of humankind.
More faintly, more diffuse . . .
Wrath, she thought, glancing at Kalaˉkaua again.
Power and wrath, an anger that could grind the bones of earth to dust and raise the sea to moving walls. He was a kindly man, she judged, but his were a folk as wild in war as they were easygoing in everyday life, a people whose ancestors had hunted shark for sport, diving naked in the waters with only spears for weapons, and sailed the breadth of the Mother Ocean in their canoes undaunted by typhoon and raw solitary distance. The Powers that shaped and guarded them were likewise strong and wild.
Kaˉne and Pele and mighty Kuˉ of the Battles walk today.
And over the enemy, a flat black louring, like a window into . . . not blackness, not as night or even the interior of an unlighted cave was black. A doorway into nothing, into a world at the end of all things that could drink the death of a universe and spend eternities chewing the stale tag ends of thought about . . . nothing but itself. Her father had described that to her in his tales of the Prophet’s War, but the words . . . didn’t have the metallic taste of it, the sense of utter motionless cold and a nullity that lived and hated and hungered.