The Sea Peoples(24)
There were nods of approval from the elders . . . and from the tall figure of King Kalaˉkaua II she thought a slight nod of craftsman’s acknowledgment. From one performer to another, as a murmur of astonishment and pleasure ran through the watching crowd, the news traveling from mouth to ear beyond the reach of her own voice.
“That was well-done, Your Highness,” he said after the greetings, as they exchanged bows and shook hands.
“It costs nothing to be polite, Your Majesty,” órlaith said cheerfully.
Heuradys coughed; that had been a favorite saying of Sandra Arminger, órlaith’s maternal grandmother and Lady Regent of the Association for a long time before the High Kingdom.
The full form she’d generally used was: Even when you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
“We’ve a good deal to talk about,” Kalaˉkaua said. “Hawai?i’s suffered from piracy . . . based in Korea and elsewhere . . . but we haven’t been able to do much about it. Now maybe we can.”
“Indeed,” Reiko said. “And relations between Hawai?i and Dai-Nippon could be fruitful for us both. Soon we will be in a position to break the Korean blockade of our homeland permanently, and we have very rich sources of salvage material.”
Which is a polite way of saying a lot of Japan is covered in ruins, órlaith thought.
The Hawaiian monarchs nodded; their land depended on trade to a degree unusual in the modern world. The islands were self-sufficient in essentials—anyone who’d survived the Change was—but they needed outsiders for the rest and had lively entrep?t dealings as well.
“But first I suppose your people have to get a good look at us,” órlaith said. “What was that thing the ancients had for exotic animals . . . a zoo?”
Queen Haukea grinned, which evidently alarmed some of the Royal advisors. “Or a museum of curiosities.”
órlaith chuckled, which lack of offense relieved them in turn. From their point of view she was a curiosity . . . and a dangerous foreign beast . . . and they had to be torn between the twin perils of looking weak and giving offense.
The rest of the afternoon was about what she had expected. A ride through the streets of Hilo in open carriages with cheering crowds on every side, including plenty of her own forces on shore leave and countryfolk in from round about. The locals kept surging against the barrier of spears and bamboo-laminate longbows held horizontally in the hands of their king’s armsmen, trying to throw her flower wreaths to add to those already piled around her neck officially, and dancers and musicians performed at street corners.
Once beyond the inevitable tangle of warehouses and forges and shipyards at the docks, the buildings were the usual city-mix of places to live, places to make things and places to sell things you’d made or brought from somewhere else or combinations of the three, combined with taverns and service trades, but all in a style of big arched windows and courtyards and high-pitched roofs obviously intended to shed rain but catch every available breeze. The roads were well-kept, the buildings in good repair, the folk looked well-fed, and you couldn’t mistake the genuine enthusiasm they showed their King, the smiles on the shouting faces and the rain of flowers before the hooves of his carriage-horses.
Not the sort you get when someone’s metaphorically standing in the background with a spear directed at the crowd’s livers, which is unmistakable too. No doubt there’s the usual share of human misery and wrong-headedness, but it’s a happy enough little kingdom in the main, well recovered from the Change. ’Tis pity I come as the herald of war.
She remembered looking into the eyes of the enemy kangshinmu in south Westria, that whirl of dissolution . . . war was needful. Not just for Montival’s sake, either, or for revenge for her father’s death at the hands of foreign men who’d come onto the High Kingdom’s land uninvited with weapons in hand, though that would be ample cause for war in the normal course of things.
Something had gone very wrong in Korea in the aftermath of the Change, something as bad as the Prophet her parents had put down in Montival’s far interior, and the people there didn’t deserve it any more than the hapless inhabitants of Montana-that-was had. Much good had come through the doors the Change opened, and much evil had also been set free to walk the ridge of the world . . . and the world hadn’t yet seen the whole of either.
After the procession, there was a religious service with much blowing of conch-shell trumpets and drumming and more dancing, this a lot more decorous than the impromptu versions on the street corners; the local priesthood seemed to be willing to let her have the benefit of the doubt, and she hoped the Powers they followed did too.
Hawai?i had religious toleration, and she’d seen various flavors of Christian and Buddhist and Shinto shrines in the city. The reports said there were a couple of covensteads and Asatruar hofs for visitors from Montival, too. Most folk seemed to follow the traditional pantheon, though, and they were rather touchy of the dignity of their Gods and of the servants of the divine.
And especially touchy about the mainland, as they call us, she thought.
That wasn’t surprising; Hawai?i had been part of the United States so recently that a few living oldsters remembered it from their youths, and Montival was the giant among the multitude of successor-states on the old Republic’s territory and occupied the whole of the western front of North America above Baja. From what she’d read of the history the American annexation here a century before the Change hadn’t been universally popular, especially among the descendants of the folk who’d originally settled the islands.