The Sea Peoples(2)
The crow was dead, with white bone showing through tattered feathers. So were the flies clustered around those eyes.
The pain hovered, always there, but John’s mind didn’t seem to be. A heavy scent filled the air, like roses and rot at the same time. The light was bright but directionless and he felt as if he were locked in a closet despite being able to see clearly.
They’d been winning, and then the flaming tower had broken apart and fallen towards him just as they came over the wall. He’d thought, I’m going to die, and . . . then there had been the ruined temple in the jungle and the . . . woman-thing called the Rangda and her horde of little men with huge eyes . . . and the temple had split and the Pallid Mask had taken him through . . . and . . .
Am I dead? Surely I haven’t been that bad . . . but I haven’t had a chance to make confession. . . .
Pain. There was always the pain; the pole thrust between his elbows behind his back dragging him along, and looking down and seeing the sweat and blood drop into the white dust of the road. The muscles in his shoulders and arms ached as if they might snap like rotten string, and his feet were swollen lumps of fire.
He’d seen the castle-city-whatever that its dwellers called Carcosa as the Tarshish Queen approached the harbor of Baru Denpasar. It looked weird enough, a fantastic concoction of walls and turrets, tall slim bulbous-tipped towers and domes, all made of coral rock that varied from cream to crimson. He hadn’t studied it much since; local belief was that if you looked at it too long, then . . . things . . . could happen to your mind.
Not that I have much choice now, he thought, and closed his eyes.
Instantly something slammed into his back. It felt like a whip of barbed steel.
“I could not bear to think you did not behold your new home,” that soft voice said.
Still in the Old French that only one trained to be a troubadour . . . and this, whatever it was . . . would know.
What he saw resembled that castle on the shore he’d seen a few days ago, but it was different as it loomed up to the south. The fields around it were a mixture; sometimes he was looking at rice paddies not much different from those around the city of Baru Denpasar, sometimes at something more like Montival or tales of Old Europe, with reaped sheaves and tattered-looking buildings of half-timbering and slate, and sometimes . . .
A child stood beside the road with a dog in its arms, watching the approaching cavalcade. As they drew closer, he could see that the dog had no legs, only seared stumps, and it cried endlessly and silently as the child reached down and tore off another mouthful with his pointed teeth, raising a bloodied smile as the Pallid Mask’s party rode by.
The impulse to close his eyes again was overwhelming, but he didn’t dare. Instead he started to pray silently:
Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio, contre nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto pr?sidium!
John blinked. For an instant, before it faded into a mist, he was looking at a ceiling. Why would he be looking at a ceiling? He wasn’t even in the world right now, as far as he could tell.
As if I were back home, with nothing to worry about but órlaith trying to make me do some work.
His mind was skipping again. This time it was filled with a familiar mix of love and fond exasperation.
She’s a devil for work, my big sister!
CHAPTER ONE
HILO
CAPITAL CITY, AUPUNI O HAWAI?I
(KINGDOM OF HAWAI?I)
NOVEMBER 26TH
CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD
Crown Princess órlaith Arminger Mackenzie looked south and shoreward towards the Hawaiian capital of Hilo, shading her eyes with a hand. The planks beneath her feet were the quarterdeck of the frigate RMN Sea-Leopard, pride of the Royal Montivallan Navy and new-built in the Astoria yards; eighteen hundred tons of Douglas fir and Garry oak and Sitka spruce, cordage and sailcloth and copper sheathing and brass and steel salvaged from the dead cities, at nearly three hundred feet from bowsprit to rudder the most powerful warship afloat in the Pacific.
It had also been packed to the gunwales with double its normal complement on the trip across from Montival, nearly seven hundred souls, since there weren’t enough transports to spare the warships. The Sea-Leopard wasn’t as busy or as crowded now: the sails on the three towering masts were furled as she lay at anchor, and all the extra personnel plus the liberty party were ashore. Most were members of the crowd whose surf-murmur carried over the thousand yards or so to the docks, apart from the ones whose main ambition on dry land was to find a bottle and go from upright and sober to horizontal and unconscious with the least possible interval in between.
After this trip I find that a wee bit attractive, órlaith thought dryly. Sure and it would be the more so if I’d been sleeping in a hammock in the hold with two inches’ space on either side and someone on a pallet on the deck below and nobody washing much for that there’s not enough fresh water for anything but drinking. Even the rats are probably swimming for it.
She’d been in a bunk in the Captain’s cabin, sharing the space with the Admiral and six others, and had gotten admiring looks for not taking the whole for herself. Now everything on board was squared away and shipshape, down to the neat coils of cable and hawser, and the pyramids of roundshot and racks of bolt next to the long rows of massive catapults on the gun-deck below. There had been a good deal of coming and going by everyone except órlaith herself; her setting foot on Hawaiian soil was a political matter, and had to be staged with due ceremony.