The Sea Peoples(11)
Not dying, success, not dying, and picking up a few new signatories to the Great Charter of the High Kingdom along the way down in South Westria while not dying counted for much, as did not dying . . . but Mathilda hadn’t forgotten that her daughter defied her either, even if she’d avoided violating the letter of the law. Or that her brother Prince John had been along and was still missing.
Da’s loss has made her . . . grasp at known things and fear change, órlaith thought. Nor can she altogether forget that if the Japanese had quietly sunk in a storm up in the Aleutians or arrived two days earlier and been killed in Westria by the Koreans chasing them before we turned up, Da would still be alive. She doesn’t let it affect her actions much, but it’s there. I saw Reiko lose her father at the same time as Da, and that . . . makes a difference. And I knew he was fated, had for years. . . . Mother’s a Christian and they think differently about things like that.
órlaith had given Reiko the ship, which was a three-masted topsail schooner much the same size and armament as the one which had originally borne her from Japan to Montival . . . and her father to his death there, where órlaith’s own sire had died at the hands of the same foe in the same fight. Three Nihonjin warcraft of similar size from the Dai-Nippon Teikoku Kaigun—the Imperial Japanese Navy—had joined them here in Hawai?i.
The schooner was the product of a private yard in Newport, and had been built for Feldman & Sons, who were willing to take órlaith’s word that they wouldn’t lose by the transaction in the long run. That was why it was called Gift of the Ally.
I miss you so, Da. And your advice . . . that too. I knew you were a very wise man, but I’m only realizing how wise now that it’s not there for me to lean on. The foe took you from us, and not the least of it that they robbed us of the wisdom of your deep age. The responsibility is something I have to bear now, will I or nill I. Nobody else can do it, so the Powers have decreed, but it’s fair frightening.
Reiko’s barge was setting off for shore at exactly the same moment, with a united barking scream of:
“Tennoˉ Heika banzai! Banzai! Banzai!” from the crew of her ship and its consorts.
To the Heavenly Sovereign Majesty, ten thousand years!
órlaith couldn’t give her a ship the size of the Sea-Leopard—the Crown Princess wasn’t in a position to dispose of a frigate, didn’t want to since even mighty Montival couldn’t spare them, and the Imperial Japanese Navy couldn’t easily spare the massive crew needed for one anyway—but strict formal equality had to be observed.
Not that either of them cared that much personally, though Reiko was more easily shocked by breaches in decorum than she. But the modern Nihonjin were a proud and touchy people, fiercely warlike and suspicious of outsiders, and that pride centered in the person of their Tennoˉ. The more so as their country had been hit so hard and fallen so far in the time of the Change, and had had so little contact with outsiders until recently, except their Korean enemies. In Reiko’s life, even more than in her own, you were rarely just yourself, personally.
You savor such moments, then put them away and get on with the day’s work of being what your people needed you to be.
The pier where they disembarked was solid and built of dark stone. The barges came in to either side and the crews latched on; Heuradys and Droyn helmed themselves and flicked the visors of their sallets down, going from human beings to metal figures covered from head to toe in smooth curves of shining metal, like the fabled robot-men of the ancients with only the dark cavity of the thin horizontal vision-slit across the visors to mar it.
They went up the stair ahead of her with a rattle and clank of plate and steel sabatons on stone, moving with catlike ease in the war-harness weight of metal and leather and wood. They took stance to either side, sliding their big kite-shields onto their arms and drawing their longswords to lay over their shoulders. Then they stood motionless in a glitter of steel and plumes and colorful heraldry, family arms on their shields quartered with the Royal crest marked by a baton of cadency.
órlaith followed. Reiko was just stepping onto the stones opposite her, close enough for them to exchange a look—not a smile, their faces both stayed grave, but it was there beneath. She had friends, some close as her heartbeat, but she and the young Nihonjin woman shared things besides the bonds of battle and shared peril, beyond even the pleasures of conversation and simple company. Things that only the heir to a throne that had come to them with the death of their fathers could.
They were equals, in a life where both had known only their sovereign parents on one hand and vassals, however beloved, on the other.
Two of the Nihonjin samurai preceded Reiko, carrying naginatas with the shafts tucked under one arm and the blades pointed down; both were in that bright lacquered armor of silk cords and lames of lacquered steel whose blacks and crimsons and yellows looked almost liquid. Grimacing black-and-silver metal masks adorned with fierce horsehair mustaches covered their faces below the broad helmets, and staffs in holders on their backplates held small banners aloft marked in the angular characters of kanji script.
Reiko was in a short dark kimono with a subtle black-on-black pattern, her hair pinned up beneath a woven straw hat shaped like the top of a mushroom, held under her chin by a complex knot of soft silk cords. It and the gray-striped hakama that covered her legs and the dark gray haori jacket were crisply perfect but gave a note of sober formality to the occasion, along with the five kamon that showed the stylized chrysanthemum mon of the Yamato dynasty. She moved with a quiet dignity so graceful that it took a moment to realize that she was as tall as most of the Nihonjin men around her, and that the quietness was complicit of a promise of savage speed at need.