The Sea Peoples(13)
órlaith’s eyes flicked to the Grasscutter.
No, she thought, her mind turning to its older, original name. That’s Ama-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi, the Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven. The blade that commands the spirits of fire, of sky and storm and air, when the Tennoˉ wields it and the folk of Nihon are threatened.
“You did what you must,” órlaith said. “The enemy were strong and had fell powers of their own to command, and the outcome of the battle was uncertain. Many who walk the ridge of Earth today would lie stark if you had not. John and myself, it might be, and you, and all the hopes of our peoples with us.”
But I miss you, Johnnie, and I fear for you.
She couldn’t let worry for him consume her day-to-day; that would be as much a breach of duty as running away in battle. She needed her unhindered wits about her, and that required a balance in the soul, not grieving memories of toddler-John stumping around chortling or crying over a broken toy or even being an annoying broody spotty-faced brat at thirteen, convinced he was a musical genius and that nobody understood him and (to his credit) wondering whether girls really liked him or just his rank.
But sometimes the fear and sorrow returned, strong and harsh.
How do you fare today, my little brother?
CHAPTER THREE
KERAJAAN OF BARU DENPASAR
CERAM SEA
NOVEMBER 15TH
CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD
“Where is he?”
Lady Philippa Balwyn-Abercrombie—Pip or Cap’n Pip to everyone here—kept the panic out of her voice with an effort of will that felt as if she was squeezing her own throat shut with both hands. Running around screeching would not help. Then she stood back and let the professionals dig for a moment. And Evrouin, John’s valet-bodyguard, who kept at it grimly, using his glaive as a lever to get debris out of the way.
She was sweating in rivulets with the usual damp heat of Baru Denpasar added to tons of flaming hardwoods ignited by napalm shells, the salt stinging savagely in her cuts and scrapes and scorches and plastering strands of her tawny hair to her face and neck, turning her white shirt and shorts black as her boots and suspenders and steel-lined bowler hat and streaking the tawny light-gold tan of her naturally fair skin. Smoke made her cough, and turned the spittle black when she spat aside. Pip sucked eagerly at the canteen her second-in-command Toa handed her, the two-liter bottle looking tiny in the big Maori’s huge, tattooed brown hand, and wiped at the black mascara running down from the circle drawn around one eye.
The burning central tower of the Carcosan fortress had collapsed in the moment of victory . . . but John couldn’t be just gone. Even if he’d been crushed and burned, a big young man in full plate armor couldn’t just disappear. . . .
Could he? The things I’ve seen since I got here . . .
Other bodies had been there, dead or wounded, and more over the rampart where the Baru Denpasaran forces had stormed the wall, and more still in the open ground below where catapults and arrows and then spear and parang had done their work. Enough to hide the ground in places for a dozen yards at a time. Stretcher-parties from the victors were bearing their wounded back to the field hospitals in the siege camp, while others gave the mercy-stroke to the enemy hurt.
Neither side in this war took prisoners; not for any good purpose, at least.
There was a thick stink lying over the whole bowl made by the earthwork walls of the Carcosan fort, of the bad-cooking smell of burning and burnt human flesh from the tower and a chemical taint from the rain of napalm that had set it alight, the coppery salt of blood like the time she’d visited the municipal slaughterhouse outside Townsville. And the shit stink from the thousands of bodies slashed open in the fight or smashed open by catapult bolts and prang-prang darts and great burning net bags of cantaloupe-sized rocks from the trebuchets that had burst in mid-air and come down like endless lethal hail on the heads of the enemy formations massing to resist the attack.
And already a hint of corruption, the rot so quick in this hot jungle valley far from the sea-breezes, and a buzzing of innumerable flies.
The humid, hazy air overhead was filling with red-winged, white-breasted kites and crows and birds of prey not too proud for pre-killed food, though they were going to be frustrated as the Baru Denpasarans were digging mass graves with their usual beaver-like energy. She wasn’t squeamish by nature and she’d been in fights before. But that had been mostly at sea where the clean ocean swallowed the results, and never on anything like this scale. Fortunately, she couldn’t take the time to pay attention to the full apocalyptic horror of it.
Prince John had not only been beneath the fragments of the tower when it fell. He’d vanished.
I’ve got to stop thinking that. It’s getting repetitious and it doesn’t do a bloody thing.
The pain of her own numerous but minor hurts was utterly distant. Pip felt her mind gibbering in shock, which was a rare experience for her so far in her twenty years on earth. Absolute self-confidence was her inheritance on both sides. From her mother’s distinguished, if also severely raffish and dodgy, English aristocratic blood; Mummy had been in Australia eluding the bailiffs because her father had gotten caught in some roguery or other shortly before the Blackout hit. And Pip’s own father was heir to the Colonelcy of Townsville, a King in all but name—and there were rumors he was planning to correct the name when her granddad finally released his iron grip on life and her father took over.