The Sea Peoples(14)
She knew he’d had a crown designed and kept it in a safe and took it out and looked at it sometimes when he thought nobody was watching. That would have bothered her much less if she thought he thought she was capable of holding it on her own without some prestigious man about the place. Despite the fact that she seemed to have stumbled upon a very prestigious young man indeed . . .
Two thoughts went through her mind:
This is hitting me so hard because I’m more in love with Johnnie than I thought.
She’d known she was falling for him as well as being instantly and seriously in lust, but she’d never thought of herself as a sentimental woman . . . even when she’d still been a girl. Mummy hadn’t encouraged it, and she had been about as sentimental as a cat herself. Granted that John was tall and handsome and had big soulful brown eyes and nice hair and plenty of musical talent and a nicely off-beat sense of humor and was not boring and was inventively unselfish in bed . . .
Deep beneath that, in anger and rage and unacknowledged fear:
Bugger this sodding nightmare of an island! I can’t say I wish I never came here, but it’s close. Maybe England wouldn’t have been that bad—it was the family home from 1066 on and all that.
She’d left her family’s country estate . . . run away from Tanumgera Station in the dead of night with half a dozen of her father’s best racing camels and her late mother’s old retainer Toa and sundry other knickknacks including but not limited to her adventurer mother’s prized pair of kukri-knives . . . because her father was bound and determined to send her off to Court in Winchester, on the other side of the world in the capital of the Empire of Greater Britain to acquire some minor Windsor royal for stud purposes. The knickknacks had been fair and just recompense for . . .
Daddy being such a fussbudget about winding up Mummy’s will early, as if twelve months on a calendar made a real difference when I’m obviously an adult now and should have the trust funds and the Darwin and East Indies Company stock.
She’d gotten possession of the neat little armed schooner Silver Surfer in Darwin with some of those knickknacks, which had included the models and plans for rapid-fire Townsville Armory catapults that King Birmo of Capricornia had been very very tangibly and materially pleased to get. Plus a bit . . .
Just a teensy bit . . .
. . . of sort-of-nepotism from her mother’s old and now rich and respectable (or as respectable as anyone got in freewheeling Darwin) partners-in-crime from her days as a seagoing not-so-quasi buccaneer, salvager (royally licensed), explorer and trader-at-catapult-point. Uncle Pete and Aunt Fifi were always ready to help, and she suspected it was as much the fact that she reminded them of their younger selves as her mother’s memory.
And she’d gained the respect of the crew she’d recruited from the dockside dives by her own efforts, by showing she could do the job. And by personally and very publically whaling the stuffing out of a few convenient fools who thought they could treat the rich girl as a joke. Then it had been off to the romantic wilds of the Ceram Sea, to make a killing in quasi-legal high-risk and high-return frontier trade and do something herself, with the pitch of her own quarterdeck under her feet to fulfill a thousand childhood dreams born of her mother’s stories. And Aunt Fifi and Uncle Pete’s even more lurid versions, since they’d never been constrained by English understatement . . . and they’d probably been more accurate, too.
So that Daddy would have to take me back on my terms, if I wanted to go back to Townsville at all. It is a stuffy sort of place.
Such a promising start, before they’d been trapped here on Baru Denpasar until the Tarshish Queen sailed in with John aboard . . .
Bugger that. And bugger losing John! If he was dead, that would be one thing, but he’s not. I just got him and I’m not giving him up, not even to the refugees from a bloody bad horror novel running that pink-coral abomination they call Carcosa!
She forced herself back to her feet as the rest of the Montivallans came up. Even if you were young and very fit, a day like this made you feel like a grandmother. The two she was interested in were nearby anyway, and had been dodging the chunks of falling tower along with the rest of them. Deor Godulfson was staring, his gray eyes looking . . . as if he was seeing things that might not be there.
And perhaps he is.
The wiry black-haired bard was wearing a blood-splashed mail shirt and carrying a red-dripping broadsword, but his primary occupation was what his eccentric little homeland in what had been called California called being a scop, musician and minstrel. She’d heard him perform fluently in any number of styles including ones she’d never heard of. He was very very good—as good as John but with a great deal more experience and single-mindedness. Among his people that also meant being some sort of medicine man, evidently; they took the Magic of Art thing rather seriously.
His companion—they were the same age and sort of platonic life-partners and had been since their teens apparently, since she liked men and so did he—was Thora Garwood. She was a rangy handsome red-haired woman in her early thirties in a suit of plate armor subtly different from what John had been wearing, one with a face-on snarling bear’s head in dark reddish brown on the breastplate. She was also absently cleaning her long single-edged, basket-hilted sword with a cloth; fighting was her specialty, and she was terrifyingly good at it.
Fortunately she hadn’t wanted to fight over John and they’d come to a mostly-unspoken understanding, though Pip still walked warily around her. In Pip’s already fairly wide experience absolutely nobody liked you for stealing their boyfriend, even if they’d been planning on parting ways soon.