The Sea Peoples(49)
“I could get used to this!” he said.
Swimming pools were luxuries for the very wealthy in some places; feudal ones like the Association, or rich city-states like Corvallis. The US of Boise had its share of rich men, but it discouraged ostentation and display, usually with swingeing taxation, on the theory that if you could waste money that way you should be paying more.
There were plenty of towels for drying off afterwards. He’d brought along a set of his dress greens, so he had a uniform that didn’t look too out of place even after he’d settled his beret on his head. Boise was a conservative sort of place, so they weren’t much different from what the old Republic’s soldiers had worn on formal occasions, except that they had a Mandarin collar rather than the open one with shirt and necktie and boots rather than shoes.
He did tuck a napkin into the collar while they all took a brief breakfast from a table, especially since a lot of it was fruit helpfully cut up—though he was glad of that, because many of the types were delicious but so unfamiliar he wasn’t sure how to eat them. He’d never seen a banana until the day before yesterday, for example, and he’d assumed from the few pictures in yellowing heirloom books and magazines that you just bit into them like an apple.
Heuradys d’Ath was doing the same, though she was in an Associate’s getup of hose, shoes with turned-up toes and points at the ankles, jerkin, loose-sleeved shirt and—across a chair for the moment—houppelande coat with great dagged sleeves and roll-edged chaperon hat with a dangling tail and heraldic livery badge over the brow. By Associate standards it was fairly restrained; the hose wasn’t particolored, there weren’t little golden bells on the toes of the shoes, and the houppelande was a subdued maroon with only a little gold embroidery around the cuffs and buttonholes.
Of course, Boiseans had always mocked the PPA’s selective medieval revivals, though he supposed when you thought about it following 20th-century Pre-Change official fashions was only slightly stranger than using 15th-century ones. He suspected that part of it was that the Portland Protective Association had been too strong for even Lawrence Thurston to feel like tackling back in the old days, though both parties had spent twenty years preparing for the final confrontation that never happened. Satire had been a harmless outlet for the tension.
“At least you’re wearing something even more uncomfortable than I am, Herry,” he said.
She winked at him. “No I’m not, gorgeous,” she said. “This is a special outfit I had done up in a hurry before we headed out, all cotton and linen and silk. That’s official-issue-as-specified-in-field-regulations linsey-woolsey you’re wearing, isn’t it?”
He grinned back, though he was also feeling slightly uneasy. If things had worked out just a little differently when he and his retainers showed up at one of the d’Ath manors on their way to Portland—she and órlaith had been quasi-exiled there while the High Queen was angry—he might have ended up with her, at least for a while.
Instead of just for one night, and then I threw myself in front of that tiger—which I swear I didn’t think about, I just did it when the damned things came jumping out of the brush—and Orrey and I sort of collapsed into the sack and then I was sorry I’d been with Herry. But God, I’m twenty and healthy and I was unattached at the time—if a good-looking woman made it plain, what the hell was I supposed to do, say: Get your well-shaped ass out of here, and take that damn bottle of wine with you? Guys just don’t do that, we’re not made that way. At least I’m pretty sure by now she wasn’t checking me out for her liege, which is an icky thought. Associates are weird but I don’t think they’re that weird.
Though the total, cheerful absence of jealousy on the part of either of the young women was a bit . . .
Deflating, he thought. Not literally, though, thank God, and if I were getting swollen-headed over my looks—
He wasn’t vain but he’d had enough direct experience to know that he hit women fairly hard
—it would be an ego corrective that Herry thought once was enough.
He finished with a couple of rolls—spicy pork sausage in a crust made of some local tree-grown-thing that mimicked bread or potatoes quite closely—and fell in with the rest. He’d pitched in during the landing precisely so he’d have some leave time now, and nobody seemed to mind that he was tagging along.
The conference was outside under canvas, but considerably more serious than the luˉ?au in the same place had been last night; all the senior Montivallan military commanders were there, for starters, including his Uncle Fred, aka General-President Frederick Thurston, looking very serious.
They exchanged salutes after the elder Thurston had paid his respects to órlaith; nobody in the US of B was surprised that their head of state was personally leading the national contingent, since he’d commanded in the field with distinction during the Prophet’s War.
“Hello, Lieutenant,” the older man said, shaking his hand after the exchange of military courtesies. “You haven’t met Alice and Lawrence.”
He’d met his uncle Frederick Thurston five times, briefly and counting only the occasions where he’d been old enough to remember it as an adult. His mother had told him that his uncle and his father had resembled each other closely, down to the light-brown complexion and loosely-curled black hair worn short. His children were just old enough to be in uniform—as newly minted Second Lieutenants on their father’s staff—and looked a good deal like their cousin in turn. Each regarded the other curiously.