The Sea Peoples(18)
“Too right,” he grunted. “Want to see you settled for your mum’s sake, promised her and all.”
More softly: “And . . . straight-up, because I wouldn’t leave a bloody crocodile in the sort of place I think he may be stuck.”
? ? ?
“Hail!” Deor Godulfson cried. “Hail, Moishe! Over here!”
Moishe Feldman greeted them not far from the gates of the city of Baru Denpasar, almost unnoticed in the roaring crush of celebration as flowers flew in multicolored rain from either side onto the—now stalled—column of victorious troops, less the militiamen who’d peeled off to their villages on the way back. His left arm was still in a sling; he’d taken the wound in the sea-fight when the Tarshish Queen arrived in the harbor nearly sinking, and the Carcosans swarmed out to attack her.
Deor gripped his good hand wrist-to-wrist, glad to see that the olive-tanned face looked better than when they’d departed even if there was a sprinkling of new white hairs in the man’s close-cropped black beard. An arrow through the arm was no joke, even if it didn’t hit anything that wouldn’t heal eventually.
“Good to see you, old friend,” he said.
“And you and Thora, safe back from battle. Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam, hagomel lahayavim tovot, sheg’molani kol tov.”
They’d known each other off and on for more than half their lives, since Feldman’s father’s ship had found shelter in Albion Cove, the fishing village on the coast of the Barony of Mist Hills; shelter from a storm and from a three-thousand-mile running fight with a brace of Suluk corsairs who’d jumped the Ark off Hawai?i, the first outsiders to visit since the Change.
“The ship’s sound as new,” the Corvallan merchant said.
He meant that literally and knowledgeably; his firm sailed out of Newport, Corvallis’ window on the Pacific, and his family had hands-on investments in the shipyards there. He’d seen the Tarshish Queen grow from builder’s plans and fresh timber.
“Provided we can get our catapults back and keep the . . . steel ship . . . off somehow, we can head home,” he added.
The quick dark eyes grew thoughtful as Deor told him what happened, and the more so as he came to the two-wheeled carts that held John and their other wounded.
“I can’t help you with this,” Feldman said.
Deor nodded; the Law by which his friend’s people lived forbade them certain arts and knowledge; anything that smacked of seidh.
“What I can do is tie up the Raja’s people in negotiations,” he said briskly. “We need to keep this very quiet until the Prince is . . . better.”
“Too right,” Toa rumbled. “They think anyone who gets the Evil Eye put on ’em by you-know-who may be working for them on the quiet afterwards and the only sure way around it is to scrag ’em. Pip and I trust you can do the needful for Prince Johnnie, mate, but they wouldn’t.”
Pip nodded vigorously. “My ship?” she said.
“Ready to go,” Feldman said. “Down to fresh sails and cables in the lockers; and the Raja loaded that cargo he promised you—and my goodness but it’s tasty. My First Mate saw to it with your helmsman and had her towed to a berth next to ours.”
Pip nodded, which didn’t surprise Deor at all. First Mate Radavindraban of the Tarshish Queen was very competent.
“Your quartermaster Kombagle knows everything there was to be known about stowing a hold properly,” Feldman said. “Even if he looks a bit . . . alarming.”
Pip snorted. “You mean the asgras and boar’s-tusk through the nose?”
Deor frowned. “Isn’t that the way his people dress?”
“More of a caricature of a Papuan warrior,” Pip said.
“By way of a statement, you could say,” Toa rumbled. “You can square ol’ Dalem S?”
“For a monarch, the Raja is . . . relatively honest.”
“Do you think you can keep him from getting too inquisitive, Moishe?” she said.
“The Lord willing and nothing too drastic happens over . . .”
His head went eastward though you couldn’t see Carcosa’s ramparts from here.
“. . . there.”
Then he patted the well-worn hilt of the cutlass where it hung by the side of his brass-buttoned blue coat.
“I’ve dealt with pirates and with kings, I think I can keep him talking; and he’s not barefaced enough to steal our catapults after we just won the battle he hired them for. Just . . . get this finished as fast as you can.”
He looked down on John’s motionless face, put a hand to his own forehead, and recited softly:
“Mi Shebeirach avoteinu v’imoteinu, Avraham, Yitzchak v’Yaakov, Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel v’Lei-ah, hu y’vareich et hacholim John Arminger Mackenzie. Amen.”
The folk of Baru Denpasar lined the road to both sides, and Raja Dalem Seganing’s elephant glittered in its coat of jeweled mail, turning to a blaze in the sunlight on the carved gilding of the howdah. There were elephants in the expeditionary force’s train too, but they were at the rear . . . probably because Tuan Anak Agung, the commander of the little army, had originally been accompanied by what the locals called Pedanda, a High Priest and Priestess of their people’s Hindu faith. They’d ridden on one of the elephants . . . and they’d been killed by Iban mercenaries working for the enemy in a night raid.