The Sea Peoples(35)
Then she made an appreciative sound at the rich almost-meaty taste, and the second journey of Reiko’s chopsticks was much more enthusiastic than the first. At the table just beyond her Nihonjin followers were showing—if you could pick up on very subtle expressions and then dawning smiles—profound relief at being served something edible and not having to pretend to enjoy some loathsome barbarian swill.
Reiko’s more flexible, but I’ve rarely run across a group more conservative about things like food than the Nihonjin, órlaith thought.
Once they’d gotten back from the Valley of Death and the first exchange of boats had brought a Nihonjin chef for Reiko she’d thoroughly enjoyed the products of his art, the skill of which was the more remarkable for its disciplined restraint. The world was very wide and varied; even Montival alone was, and she’d traveled over most of it with her parents, enjoying the local dishes all her life, from buffalo-hump steak to the complex fantasies of Associate court cuisine.
And they’re very relieved there’s rice—to them that is food, and everything else a garnish. And there were plenty of Nihonjin here in the ancient days; this dish is probably partly the legacy of their foodways.
The alternatives were the same dish with octopus, which was equally popular; there was also fruit-juice, beer, sake, various rum-and-fruit concoctions, a brandy distilled from pineapple that was a truly vile waste of a delicious fruit, and wine. Heuradys grinned and leaned in to turn one of the wine bottles in their coolers towards órlaith; the label read Chateau d’Ath and it was the ’40 Pinot Noir red.
“If your un-esteemed maternal grandfather had known how valuable those Montinore vineyards were going to be, he’d never have enfeoffed that estate to Mom Two,” she murmured.
“Ah, well, that was Lady D’Ath’s reward for kidnapping my father,” órlaith replied, also sotto voce.
“Turn about is fair play,” Heuradys said. “It was also her reward from rescuing your lady mother.”
Which was true; Mackenzie raiders under Grandmother Juniper’s personal command had captured órlaith’s mother Mathilda, first, and Lady d’Ath had led the party which got her back and took Rudi Mackenzie in turn . . . thus introducing the future High King and High Queen to each other as children, despite their parents’ bitter enmity.
The memory heartened her. The old wars against the Association had been desperate enough in their day, but now she united their blood and Montival dwelt at peace with itself, and Heuradys was her boon companion and good right arm.
The red wine went well with the succulently rich, herb-infused, melting-tender pit-roasted whole pig that was the main course, served steaming on the leaves that had wrapped it in the imu, the underground oven. Many other dishes accompanied it or followed.
When everyone was nibbling bits of sweet fresh pineapple and banana on slivers of bamboo and sampling little bowls of mango custard, Kalaˉkaua moved on from the generalities.
“We’ve had a fairly sheltered life here in the islands since the Change,” he said.
Queen Haukea snorted. “If you don’t count Oahu,” she said, and explained to órlaith and Reiko: “My grandparents made it out . . . just before the rest of the islands sealed it off.”
“It was . . . necessary,” Kalaˉkaua said.
“It also meant driving a million people back to die,” she said. “You know what they found in Oahu afterwards.”
órlaith nodded; allowing for local details it was a conversation she’d heard before, though more among her grandparents’ generation than her own. Oahu and its great city of Honolulu had held most of the dwellers in these isles before the Change, utterly dependent on food shipped in from the rest of the world. The result had been what folk in Montival called a Death Zone, where there were few survivors except some who’d hidden very well, and others who’d lived by hunting and eating their fellows when everything else findable or catchable had been devoured. Most of human-kind had died in the twelve months after the Change, of violence and above all of hunger and thirst and the plagues they bred, and more than half of the remainder in the next few years. In some places it had been worse; the main islands of Japan, for example.
Reiko made a sign of affirmation with her fan: “We also on Sado-ga-shima, and the other islands of refuge,” she said. “The times were very hard, and called for very hard measures everywhere.”
Reiko turned the fan towards her Guard commander. “General Egawa-san’s father, Egawa Katashi, brought my grandmother across Honshu from Tokyo, a month after the Change. He and the Seventy Loyal Men; and so the Yamato dynasty was preserved and our Empire founded anew. But they fought with the others to turn back the starving who followed. Else those fleeing death would have carried it with them, and brought everything down in wreck.”
The Hawaiian monarch sighed, looking troubled. “It could have been worse. From what we’re hearing about Korea, it was worse there.”
órlaith nodded. “When we were in South Westria . . . southern California, on the old maps . . . I watched one of the Korean warships through a telescope.”
She was silent for a moment before she described the officer on the enemy warship’s deck looking back at her through a pair of binoculars . . . and chewing idly on a smoked hand, spitting out the little finger-bones now and then.