The Sea Peoples(5)
“Seawater warm enough to swim in! Athana witness, that’s just not right, proper or natural.”
“You just want some company for your ironclad misery, Herry,” the Crown Princess said with a smile.
Though to be fair most of Montival’s coasts did have an Arctic current running down them from Alaska; you had to go down near the ruins of Los Angeles before you could swim in it without a wet suit, and even there it wasn’t like Hawai?i.
“That shirtsleeves remark was a blazon, so.”
Heuradys was five-ten to her liege’s five-eleven, with tightly braided red-brown hair of the shade usually called auburn and catlike amber eyes, slightly older in her mid-twenties but with much the same leopardess build. She was also wearing full knight’s harness of white plate armor—hers was a titanium-alloy suit that had been a royal gift when she turned twenty-one and gained the golden spurs four years ago—with her visored sallet helm in the crook of her left arm and her teardrop-shaped kite shield slung over her back.
“Oh, rub it in, Your Highness-ness, rub it in,” she said.
In a staccato north-realm accent much like High Queen Mathilda; órlaith had picked up the Mackenzie lilt from her father.
Salt rivulets ran down Heuradys’ high-cheeked face, one with an underlying hardness but comely in a way blunter than her liege’s sharp-cut good looks. It wasn’t so very hot, no more than a warm summer’s day in much of Montival, but it was unrelenting and the air was very humid. This was the sort of weather that was pure comfort if you were lying naked save for a flower wreath in the shade of a palm tree and watching the surf. . . .
While sucking a rum drink out of a coconut through a straw and thinking about a swim and then dinner, órlaith thought.
In armor . . . you sweated whenever you wore plate. Not so much from the weight, which was only about fifty or sixty pounds and less with one of these titanium-alloy marvels that only monarchs and great nobles could afford, and well-distributed over your whole body. But it and the padded doublet underneath cut your skin off from the air and trapped the body’s heat very effectively. You could manage to work up plenty of perspiration even in cold weather, and there were good reasons it wasn’t a very common style of protection in areas that grew sugarcane and breadfruit, starting with the risk of heat exhaustion. órlaith had suffered enough in plate herself—she wasn’t a north-realm Associate like Heuradys but she was a knight and entitled to the golden spurs—to be glad it wasn’t necessary today.
Besides her own bonnet with its silver clasp and the Golden Eagle feather that marked the totem of her sept, the Crown Princess wore a sleeveless shirt of saffron-dyed linen embroidered in green and blue at the hems, chased gold bands pushed up each arm, a pleated knee-length kilt and a fringed plaid pinned at the shoulder with a broach of swirling knotwork in silver and gold and niello and hanging behind nearly to the ground, both in the Mackenzie tartan, knit knee-hose, and silver-buckled shoes.
The gear was not particularly martial and certainly not aristocratic. In fact, it was simply what Mackenzie clansfolk wore back in Montival, albeit of the sort you saw brought out on the festival days of the Wheel of the Year, not the set kept for mucking out a pigsty. Or the plaid you wore wrapped tight over a jacket to keep warm in the Black Months while you stood under a rain-dripping tree leaning on a shepherd’s crook and staring at sheep who were even more miserable than you were.
But with the Sword of the Lady at your side, you never lacked for majesty; there was no need to stick a thumb in any Hawaiian eye by way of toploftiness to make them take notice.
“I’d be saying it’s just pleasantly warm,” órlaith grinned. “And by the Powers, doesn’t everyone know that a knight of the Association laughs at hardship as they do at danger?”
Her friend made a slight sound that would have been a loud raspberry in less public circumstances; they’d always teased each other.
Heuradys was properly respectful of the Sword, but not in the least intimidated by its presence, having grown up as much at Court as in her own family’s manors and castles. Her father Lord Rigobert was Count of Campscapell and her birth-mother Countess Delia was a leader of fashion in the Association territories. Her other mother Lady Tiphaine d’Ath was Baroness of Ath in her own right, and a commander of note who’d been Grand Constable of the Association for years and Marshal-Commander of Montival for even longer.
“Ah, and here we go,” Heuradys said, watching the Hawaiian dock. “At last! I’ve already got the impression that driving, compulsive urgency is not the local vice of choice.”
“Boiseans and Corvallans say that sort of thing about Associates, you’ll remember.”
“Yes, but they’re just being prejudiced and tight-arsed; when we say it, it’s true.”
A pair of stately barges rowed out from the largest Hawaiian wharf, the one reserved for their King’s vessels; they were decorated lavishly with flowers in colors ranging from brilliant white to a red so deep it was almost black. The one heading for her had the Montivallan and Hawaiian flags prominently displayed. The crew of the Sea-Leopard poured on deck and lined the rails to the commands of the petty officers.
“To Her Highness . . . general . . . salute!” a bosun barked and then trilled out a call on his pipe.
Hands snapped to brows, the old-style gesture that the RMN used. órlaith returned Admiral Naysmith’s salute—and the crew’s through her—then put fist to her heart towards the national flag at the mizzen-gaff. A pair of trumpeters sounded a peal as she walked to the gangway—an extensible stairway with a rope rail that could be lowered down from quarterdeck to the waterline.