The Sea Peoples(6)
“For Her Highness and Montival—three cheers!” the Admiral called, raising her fore-and-aft hat.
The ship’s officers on the quarterdeck did likewise, and the crewfolk standing in rigid lines along the bulwarks lifted their plain round caps.
“Hip-hip—”
“Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!”
órlaith gave a cheerful wave and took the first step. Her dog Macmac had been stretched out in the shade of a bulwark. He rose and padded over panting slightly as he fell in at heel—he was a typical Mackenzie greathound, forty shaggy inches at the shoulder and weighing more than she did, with a head like a furry barrel full of fangs and bright brown eyes. Macmac was too disciplined to frolic in public like this, but he was even more eager to get ashore than she. The close quarters were hard on an active beast his size, even with a run on the treadmill daily.
In his way, he was a bodyguard as effective as Heuradys and didn’t have any other duties to distract him.
“And sure, it would be beneath my dignity to climb down a ladder like common mortals,” órlaith murmured.
When you lived your life in public, which she mostly had since babyhood, doing and saying things because they had to be said and done, you learned how to talk so that you weren’t overheard. All the kin of House Artos had to be ready to die for the land and the folk to whom they were bound, in battle or at the hand of Fate when the Powers judged it was time that the King’s blood must be shed to renew the land.
You also had to be ready to dance this dance of symbols and gestures, like it or not, and whenever she grew impatient with it she made herself think of all the other callings. A farmer didn’t necessarily think spending a day pulling and topping turnips in the cold mud and week-long drizzles of a Willamette November was better than mulled cider and apple-cakes with cream in front of the hearth, but it was necessary if humankind was to eat.
órlaith knew; she’d done it now and then. King’s work was just as necessary, so that farmers could sit safe by their hearths and reap what they’d sown in due season.
“A ladder . . . That would be interesting for anyone who wanted to look up your princessly kilt, too,” Heuradys said dryly from behind her; she was, of course, wearing hose beneath the armor.
“My underwear’s clean just this morning,” órlaith replied in a tone equally pawky, and they both suppressed grins. “And my princessly arse is in very viewable condition, mark you. Nicely trim.”
The Hawaiian crew of the barge were tall stalwart muscular young men, clad in loincloths and with the wraparound skirts that seemed to be the other main part of the local garb laid aside and folded as padding on their benches. Flowers glowed in their long hair and sweat sheened on the taut curves of their bodies; órlaith and her knight both cast sidelong appreciative looks without being too obvious about it.
And you have a lover the now who’s better-looking than any of them, and a man of wit and grace forbye, órlaith reminded herself happily.
Though she hadn’t seen Alan Thurston since they left Astoria, since he’d made the crossing on one of the troop-transports with his cavalry troop, and frankly missed his company.
Soon, Alan, soon!
? ? ?
Am I mad? Alan Thurston thought.
It was a thought that he often had during the dreams, and that flitted away like a dream when he woke, leaving only a shadow of unexplained fear to haunt his darker waking moments. He could remember that, with an odd detachment, remember so much more than he did when he was awake though he couldn’t, didn’t think about it . . . the knowledge was simply there.
In the waking world he wondered without knowledge, and in dreams he knew without pondering. In an abstract way it was interesting, raising the question of whether there was an Alan Thurston, rather than fragments and masks that fooled even whatever it was that wore them.
This wasn’t one of the really bad dreams, either. They came in series, like sets of linked tales, like those of the Knights of the Round Table or King Conan’s wanderings or the Quest of the Ring or the epic of Captain Call and Gus McRae from Texas to Montana.
This particular set of dream-tales was perhaps the oddest of them all. He thought it was of an ancestor of his, another of the lost Imperial Dynasty of America; the man called himself Hildred Castaigne.
Certainly it was from before the Change, since in it he saw machines that no longer functioned—steamships and locomotive engines and flying ships like giant observation balloons with engines that were a droning buzz in the sky. The bits and pieces were from different points in the dream-man’s life, in no particular order, sometimes new, sometimes maddeningly the same over and over, night after night, sometimes with a doubled view as if he were seeing what the man saw and also what was really there . . . if real had any meaning in a dream.
It’s like talking to a lunatic in your own head, he thought. A lunatic who’s also a God.
In the old days there had been special places for the insane, asylums. In the world the Change had made, few places or families had resources to spare for someone who couldn’t earn at least part of their keep, not if it went on for years. Functional madmen were tolerated, and the other types tended to have accidents or just quietly pass away unless some religious group took them in as an act of piety and sacrifice.
Not that I’ve got all that much experience with lunatics, but it’s the way I’ve always imagined it.