The Sea Peoples(40)
“No, that’s working clothes,” Pip said lightly, touching her hair, which was worn rather long and piled up in an elaborate do under a broad-brimmed hat this time. “I’ve won fights on land and sea wearing it, haven’t I? It’s nicely terrifying. Well, I’m terrifying when out on a bovver but it helps.”
“Makes the opposition fall about laughing. That helps when you put the toe cap into their ghoolies.”
She’d been surveying the room while he kept his eye to the shutters and watched the outside. They were definitely in a workman’s storehouse of some sort, bare brick walls with racks and shelves, half-empty sacks of plaster with labels in English, buckets of paint, boxes of nails, and sundry brushes and trowels and boards and other tools, along with folding ladders, giving the air around the supplies an atmosphere turpentinish and medicinal. And another earthy one beneath it, the scent of setting mortar. Someone had been building. The smell was familiar since, like any substantial station, Tanumgera had carpenters and masons working on something at any given time.
A grimy newspaper lay on one of the shelves. She looked at it; the New York Herald again, but the date was in early April of 1920. Reading it without conspicuously marking what she was wearing required holding it out at arm’s length since it was very dusty and spattered with dried daubs of paint.
Though the headlines were less apocalyptic they were still very strange. History hadn’t been her favorite subject, particularly not the deeply boring history of the last pre-Blackout century or so, but she knew that her version of 1920 hadn’t seen a Russian invasion of Sweden, or a civil war in Austria-Hungary, or anything meriting a Communards Storm Paris, Louvre in Flames leader. Nor had there been a President Winthrop in the United States.
She was pretty sure he’d been named Wilson; either that, or Williams.
Still, this feels less . . . less as if the tentacles are showing. It’s more like what led to me. I think something terrible happened here, something to throw the world on the path to . . . what we saw in the last place.
Deor still looked fairly rocky as he knelt on the round metal trapdoor, and Thora had stayed beside him as he recovered from his last glimpse of the place they’d escaped.
“Fire,” he whispered. “A world of poisoned fire. The powers of Gods, in the hands of men less than beasts, worse than eoten.”
Well, that’s very poet-y and Northern and doomy, Pip thought; she’d read Beowulf and the Prose Edda . . . in translation. I’ll just say that place gave me the galloping creeps, nearly as much as the one with all the wrecked autos.
“Like the sword of Sutr, carried burning to Vígríer plain on the last morning of the world,” Thora said quietly.
Then Deor shook himself and smiled crookedly. “No point in grieving for something that never happened . . . not in our cycle of the worlds,” he said.
He was wearing a suit that differed only in details from the one he’d been in before; if anything the collar looked even more uncomfortable, which was revenge for the corset. From the way Thora had started twisting and running a hand inside her dress to find out what was strapped around her, she’d never worn one even to play Distressed Victorian Maiden in Lecherous Hands, though compared to armor it couldn’t be too bad.
“This is still New Nightmare City, pardon me, New York,” Pip said holding up the newspaper. “The same one, I think, but a lot earlier.”
Deor grinned at her a bit crookedly. “And for the question in your mind, Captain Pip: why are we being led through the ages here, as well as across continents and seas, as we journey towards the Prince? I don’t know. Let’s just say that paths in the Otherworld don’t follow the rules of those in the world of common day. There are more purposes than ours at work here, and they may be very subtle.”
“I’ll keep thinking about that for consolation as we’re devoured by monsters,” Pip said, and smiled back at him.
“Looks like we could get out of here without anyone much noticing,” Toa said. “Crowd looks safe enough if you don’t mind they’re all Paˉkehaˉ.”
“You’re very tolerant that way,” Pip observed ironically.
“Too right, I never even mention the Paˉkehaˉ smell or the bad teeth or the no-chins bit or the way they’re mostly hunchbacked midgets. They’re all looking at some bloody parade or other out there right now.”
Pip gave the room one last glance-over. “Why don’t you carry that package?” she said, pointing to a large one wrapped up with string. “It’ll make you less conspicuous.”
The Maori grinned, an alarming expression. “You mean they might not notice the Taˉ moko?” he said, flicking a sausage-like thumb at the swirling patterns on his face, as individual as a fingerprint. “I’ll blend right in.”
He lolled his tongue and made his eyes bulge for a moment, like the beginning of a war-haka. Then he hefted the parcel, which clinked dully, and hoisted it on one shoulder and put the shovel over the other. That did make it necessary to really peer closely before you caught the full effect of features, tattoos and scars.
“Ready?” Pip said.
I hope this works. No matter what his mother’s mother was, nobody’s going to mistake Toa for a Paˉkehaˉ. The people we meet seem real, but are they? And if they are, are they really seeing us, or are we part of a backdrop to them?