The Sea Peoples(26)
“These are the Gardens of Queen Lili?uokalani, Majesty,” he said; he had less of the strong local accent in his English than most of the people they’d met, too, just enough to give it a pleasant soft tinge.
He made a graceful gesture. “She was our last great Queen before the Change, but this park was laid out by Nihonjin gardeners; there is a teahouse in the fashion of your people also, Majesty, and we have equipped this mansion with tatami and fittings you will hopefully find familiar. The island to the west along the black-sand beach has a temple of healing, but for the duration of your visit we are keeping the common people out. We hope that all is satisfactory, and as we indicated His Majesty of Hawai?i bids both of you—”
He managed to bow politely to both the foreign royals in the same gesture.
“—to a feast an hour after sunset.”
His gesture was almost as tactful as the fact that the rambling structures that would house the Montivallan and Nihonjin parties were almost identical. Reiko bowed politely to órlaith, who matched the gesture with a slightly deeper one—her friend was a reigning monarch, while she was only an heir-apparent.
“Until sunset, Orrey-chan,” Reiko said.
That was startlingly informal, enough that several of her more recently-arrived courtiers showed that absolute absence of expression by which Nihonjin shi—gentlefolk—conveyed disapproval of a superior.
“Until then, Reiko-chan,” órlaith said, matching it.
The two ladies-in-waiting opened the door, another made a just-barely successful snatch at the young girl she’d been escorting as she tried to make a break for the gardens.
“Come, Kiwako,” Reiko called to her in Nihongo, taking her by the hand and then laughing and sweeping her up on her right hip, across from the two swords. “Time for your nap!”
Her samurai stepped out of their sandals—and discarded the fragrant flower leis that they had tolerated only with a massive effort of self-control—and fanned out inside and around the edges of the house. The women sank to their knees and bowed their heads almost to the floor as Reiko shed her footwear, set Kiwako down to do the same and entered with Kiwako’s hand in hers. órlaith thought she sensed the very faintest of sighs, as Reiko vanished once more into a world of ceremony and protocol far more ancient and rigid than that which often carked the heir to Montival.
Heuradys and Droyn and Karl Aylward Mackenzie and their followers—including Karl’s greathounds Fenris and Ulf—did a sweep before she got past the front door of the house they’d been assigned, and then Morfind and Faramir and Susie Mika did it again, while Diarmuid Tennart McClintock spoke to his caterans:
“Scit th’ groonds. An aye be cannie aboot it.”
She didn’t think that the handsome young McClintock tacksman was more conscientious because they’d been lovers once, briefly and long ago; he’d been her first man, at a Beltane festival in the usual way among those of their branch of the Old Faith. He was a settled man now, with a handfasted wife and a newborn babe down south in his clan’s dúthchas where he was a minor chief. He’d come along to the Valley of Death for friendship’s sake, and because he agreed it was the will of the Powers that it was very needful. But it probably made him feel the responsibility more intensely, and his followers might well be more enthusiastic because they knew it and considered it an honor done their folk.
The McClintocks fanned out through the nearby groves and flower beds, sometimes visible only by the flapping of their bunched-up Great Kilts. órlaith winced a little at their trampling. And at the way one swordsman with sinuous blue tattoos on this face, arms and legs, and a beard like a burst pillow stuffed with ginger-colored straw drew the four-foot claidheamh-mòr slung across his back and used it to poke into hidden spots in the shrubbery.
You just couldn’t convince a McClintock cateran that anyone else knew how to find things amid vegetation, even if it was vegetation they’d never seen before and a very, very long way from the forests where they hunted deer.
Any more than you can convince them stealing the neighbor’s coo-beasties or wooly ship isn’t harmless rough fun or that they shouldn’t drop by a little past midnight to burn down the barn of someone who punched out their second cousin in a drunken brawl at the Samhain games and lift his horses while they’re at it, she thought resignedly. Grandmother Juniper says we should blame all those Highland adventure novels old Chief Hamish liked so much before the Change, but are tales really that influential?
She snorted to herself: Of course they are.
From the briefing packets that High Marshal d’Ath’s office had prepared for the expedition, mostly culled from interviewing merchants who made this run, órlaith suspected that the guesthouses were usually kept for visiting ali?i, the subordinate nobles who ruled various parts of the seven major islands that made up the Kingdom of Hawai?i. As such they had to be big enough to accommodate their staffs and guards, which was convenient. Two statues stood on plinths beside the main doors, at first grotesque to Montivallan eyes and then showing their own beauty, snarling protective ki?i of the sort she’d seen at the heiau temple earlier in the day.
“First watch,” Heuradys said to Sir Droyn, who nodded and set his men-at-arms in their places at the door and around the edge of the big rambling structure.
The construction was set around several courts and struck her as ingenious on several accounts; crushed coral rag mixed with a little cement and water and mineral pigments and pounded in frames, then left until it dried into shapes like monolithic blocks of coarse rock run through with pleasing patterns of waving horizontal lines. The walls were thick but only navel-high, with pillars of the same material carrying the high ceilings that showed rafters of Douglas fir imported from Montival, and the underside of the steep palm-thatch roofs above. Between the rooflines and the low walls were moveable curtains and screens of woven bamboo dyed in colorful patterns, and more of the same made up the interior partitions. Marble that had probably come from salvage expeditions to dead Honolulu on Oahu covered the floors, and brick from the same source was laid as pathways in the courtyards.