The Sea Peoples(50)
Except that they look more earnest and serious than I usually do, and that one of them will probably be General-President, Alan thought. And I won’t.
The current incumbent wasn’t quite a king and the position wasn’t theoretically hereditary. Boise had free and open elections for President every seven years, and had since the New Constitution was adapted right after the Prophet’s War and the founding of the High Kingdom.
On the other hand, nobody not named Thurston had ever ruled in Boise since the Change, and in the last election the second-highest total of votes had gone to someone who ran as the official Presidential candidate of the Gibbering Lunatic Party, on a platform that included making transport cheaper by having all roads run downhill both ways and replacing all taxes with royalties from the Big Rock Candy Mountain. That candidate had worn a large red artificial nose, floppy shoes, and a buttonhole carnation that shot water, too, and had been given to shouting:
I’m the most serious alternative you’ve got!
“You’re moving in more exalted circles than ours, I hear, cousin,” Alice Thurston said, with a slight smile and a raised brow.
Alan shrugged and grinned. “An army’s pretty gossipy.”
His uncle laughed as well. “Oh, yeah. Worse than the tavern crowd at a crossroads village.”
“I’m a lucky man,” Alan said. “It sort of just . . . happened.”
“I heard something about a tiger,” Lawrence said. “Two tigers, actually.”
Alan’s smile was a bit tight, remembering the great striped shape rising up before him and the impact of the paw against his spear, like a blurring-fast trip-hammer flipping him through the air, the carrion smell of its breath. And the voice at the back of his mind, the monkey part of his brain yammering:
This thing eats men!
“I didn’t actually kill either of them,” he said. “I sort of delayed one after órlaith’s horse threw her. Then the Crown Princess . . . stepped in with the Sword and . . . that was sort of alarming, really, in a way that was different from the way the tigers were. And Lady d’Ath—I swear to God she was as fast as the cat, and then everyone piled in.”
Frederick Thurston nodded, his eyes distant for a moment. “I remember seeing Rudi . . . the High King . . . use the Sword of the Lady. That first time in Norrheim, on the Sunrise Sea. He was . . . terrifying when he fought with his own hands even before that. And the Sword was—”
The General-President stopped for a moment, and when he continued his voice was soft: “Like something out of the Sagas. Like Tyrfing come again. When it’s drawn in anger the world shakes, it flexes, as though the whole fabric of things stretched. You can feel it might just rip at any instant.”
Alan looked at Reiko, where she stood among her advisors and guards, and what she carried by her side. The hair on the back of his neck bristled a little if he got any closer than this, and he’d heard the stories the others told about what happened when she drew it and called on the great Power of the Otherworld she claimed as her Ancestress.
All the Thurstons nodded soberly as they followed his glance. They lived in a world where such things were; as their grandparents had endured the Change, so they must accept it for good or ill.
“And now, duty calls,” his uncle said.
? ? ?
órlaith looked at the Capricornian envoys and the evidence they’d laid out on the table before the monarchs and their closest advisors. The giant skull of the seagoing crocodile grinned at her with a faint waft of corruption, and some of her followers made protective signs against evil, including crossing themselves among the Christians.
“Forty feet, you say?” she said to the head of the delegation, trying to imagine the live animal coming at her out of the water.
The Capricornian king’s envoy was a woman named Darla Wooton, dressed in what was evidently the national costume, khaki shorts, sandals and a sleeveless blue vest-like garment. A broad-brimmed hat bore corks on dangling strings, from which órlaith deduced that flies were a real problem at home.
“Too right,” she said. “Thirty-six, to be exact. Your ship fished the beastie out and kept the skin and the skull, and they thought it weighed about four tons before the sharks and gulls went to work on it. They get big, the open-ocean salties, and they’ve been getting bigger since the Blackout—”
Which was apparently what they called the Change in her part of the world.
“—since nobody’s shooting them with guns, but that’s bloody ridiculous.”
She was around thirty—possibly a little less, given the scourging tropical sun—with sun-streaked brown hair, a wiry build and a face like a very intelligent rat, with a beak of a nose and receding chin. The two guards behind her were much bigger, tall rangy-muscular men carrying broad-bladed spears with round shields slung over their backs blazoned with a five-petaled rose-like flower, and short heavy chopping swords at their belts; one was very black-skinned, the other a deeply tanned blond, but they could have been brothers otherwise.
“Frightening bugger, isn’t it?” Wooton said, jerking a thumb at it; apparently the Court of Darwin wasn’t long on formality. “From what your Captain Russ said of the way he reconstructed the wreckage, the Koreans chased Moishe’s ship—the Tarshish Queen—all the way to the Ceram Sea.”
There was a map on the table, and she showed a location about a thousand miles north of Australia, a sea of myriad islands from tiny to huge.