The Sea Peoples(17)
In the final assault, besides their Raja Dalem Seganing’s name, as a battle cry the locals had shouted: For the food our children eat! as they charged home through the killing ground and over the ramparts in an unstoppable wave of desperate and merciless ferocity.
The agile and nearly-naked Baru Denpasarans with the stretcher negotiated the tumbled remains at the top of the fort’s outer wall nimbly, amid the shattered smoking timbers of the palisade and the churned-up earth. Then they brought their load down one of the heavy metal-shod siege ladders that had been flung up against the sloping surface of the earthwork, adroitly enough that the unconscious man’s body would have stayed on it even without the straps across chest and thighs. The surface was firm beneath their feet, since spade-like shoes on the bottom and long curved crowbeak spikes at the top nailed it to the surface of the earthwork where they’d first been flung against it.
“And you—” Thora gripped Deor’s arm and hauled him upright to help him along. “You aren’t much better.”
Deor shook his head. “Wherever the Prince went, it . . . draws. Draws strongly.”
“Drink this!”
She handed him her canteen of sweet tea and he gulped at it, coughed, drank again. Pip took something from Toa and nearly choked as it turned out to be a flask of arrak this time rather than water, distilled from the sap of borassus-palm flowers. Aged in halmilla-wood casks for years it could develop subtle flavors; Uncle Pete and Aunt Fifi’s Darwin and East Indies Trading Company had a warehouse full of it that they called Mendis Brandy and shipped all over Oz with profit for them and delight for the purchasers.
Nobody had bothered with aging this very recent batch of the local white lightning, and it was ninety proof. It didn’t taste of anything in particular except vaguely turpentinish and it hit her empty stomach like a napalm shell, and went from there out through her veins. For a moment she could feel those veins, as if her body were outlined in a threadwork of fire.
“Did I ever tell you how I met your mum?” Toa rumbled quietly under the cover of her coughs. “And Pete and Fifi?”
“Not the details,” Pip said.
She knew it had been on the North Island of New Zealand, on a salvage trip to the ruins of Auckland in one of the last runs the three of them had made together on the old Diamantina. After that the Darwin and East Indies Trading Company had become a major player and they’d been reduced, against their wills, to mostly directing other people’s voyages.
The South Island of New Zealand had come through the Blackout years rather well, being mostly rural and not having any cities bigger than modestly-sized Christchurch. The northern half of the island nation had held Auckland, the biggest city, on the northernmost peninsula and the old capital of Wellington at the southern end. Between them they’d taken down most of the rest, and grim things had happened there until the southerners finally got around to taking the place in hand and resettling it. Not as bad as around, say, Sydney—not nearly as bad as near London or Tokyo—but bad enough to finish off most of the people near the cities or the roads between them, and if you died the disaster was personally fairly total.
She took another swallow, a modest nip this time, and handed it back. The Maori tilted it back and let his Adam’s apple flutter before he screwed the cap back on and tucked it into the pouch on the elaborate woven belt-and-loincloth arrangement that was all he wore besides a cloak of feathers on a linen backing. He had the mass to soak it up easily, being six-foot-six, a brown block of three hundred pounds of solid muscle covered in writhing tattoos from head to foot, interrupted by plentiful dusty-white scars, his stiff graying black hair drawn back in a bun through a carved bone ring at the back of his head.
His gargoyle face frowned and he used the heavy Macassar-ebony shaft of his eight-foot spear like a walking staff as they followed the stretcher-bearers; the long palm-broad steel head had already been scrubbed clean and tended with file and hone. Toa was fairly casual about most things; she’ll be right was a saying he’d taken to heart. But weapons and gear weren’t among them and he could move with a speed and grace astonishing in so huge a man.
“Well, let’s just say your mum and Pete and Fifi didn’t just save me life. There was something like this—”
He nodded forward at where Prince John’s form was being manhandled down the slope.
“—that was part of it. Proper mess, and I don’t remember all the details . . . never did. But enough, enough. That’s why I never wanted to head back to ol’ NZ. Well, that and those bleedin’ Paˉkehaˉ from Christchurch running all over it trying to civilize us years and years after we could have used some real help. Civilize us again.”
Below, John’s soldiers—the dozen crossbowmen of the Protector’s Guard in their battered half-armor—were forming up around the stretcher, their faces anxious under a stiff discipline. As Pip understood it, John stood to inherit the position of Lord Protector of the PPA through his mother, while his eldest sister órlaith took the Throne of the High Kingdom as a whole; and they were specifically his guards, part of an elite unit with all the usual sworn-to-the-death oaths and so forth.
“Let’s get him back to town,” Pip said. “And then we’ll see what Deor can do. I’m not letting this one go, Toa, old boy, not if I have to sacrifice goats to the Great JuJu and dance naked by the light of the New Moon to get him back I’m not.”