The crawl space beneath the Pavilion of War had only just been wide enough to allow Jun to squeeze inside. It was a long corridor an arm’s length high and wide that stretched under the full span of the Pavilion. He had worked his way into the space backward—there was no room to turn around—and pulled a rice-straw basket in front of him to block the entrance. He shoved a hank of his sarong into his mouth to stifle his sobbing, and closed his eyes tight against the darkness.
Behind him somewhere he could hear the scurry of rats. In other circumstances their rustling might have made him nervous but, when compared with the sounds he could hear from outside the crawl space . . . Screams, awful gurgling screams, the sounds of men and women dying hard. The crackle of flames; the thump and crash of the stone statues being knocked from pedestals, the ripping of fabric and paper screens, the tinkling smash of crystal, the angry shouts of warriors. He heard the voice of the tall, gray-cloaked demon—for what else could he be?—issuing orders to the men. He knew it was his voice because it was like chilled flint and seemed drenched in evil. He could barely make out the words over the tumult but one name was repeated several times and when he finally allowed himself to understand it, his soul shriveled up as tight as his ball sack: Arjun Wukarta—his own name, and the demon was urging his brutal men to seek him out.
He knew he should not be in there, hiding like a mouse, as the invaders ransacked his father’s house, and pillaged his family’s most treasured possessions, but he could not see the point of emerging into the bloody chaos, where he would immediately be seized and slaughtered—or worse. The image of the Son of Heaven being smothered by the swarm was in the forefront of his mind. The topless head of War-Master Hardan, too: what would that veteran have to say about Jun’s cowering in a rathole? He did not care: Hardan was dead. If Jun emerged from his rathole, he too would die. It was true—it meant certain death for Jun to leave that cramped space. He knew it as well as he knew anything but it did not make him feel any better.
Eventually, after what seemed an eternity, the noise began to abate; the screaming stopped, the voices faded. Even the rats had departed. Jun was left in his stuffy black space listening to silence. It could be a trap, Jun thought. They could be waiting, swords raised, smirks on their ugly faces, ready to slice him apart when he emerged. So he waited, waited a little more—then, to his surprise, he fell asleep.
* * *
• • •
He awoke to the gray light of dawn and a voice calling his name from outside the crawl space. “Jun, where are you, my prince?”
It did not sound like one of the marauders. He thought the voice sounded familiar, one of the servants, perhaps. And his muscles were cramped from the night on the dusty stone floor and his bladder was full. Cautiously, he slid the rice-straw basket from the mouth of the crawl space and peered out. He saw a very old man, fat in the belly but of dwarfish proportions, wrapped in a raggedy gray sarong, leaning on a thick wooden staff and smiling amiably down at him.
As he crawled stiffly out of his hole and stood, the little old man said, “Are you hurt, my prince? Have you suffered a wound?”
Jun shook his head. He was fairly sure that this was the ancient who had served him his wine the evening before. “You are . . . you are . . .” he said, once again struck by the absurdity of the fact that he did not know the fellow’s name.
“I am Semar, my prince,” said the old man, beaming. “I have had the great honor of serving your family for many years now.”
“Of course you are Semar, of course. Forgive me, Semar, my wits are disordered.”
Jun scrubbed his dust-covered face and looked about him for the first time. He was appalled by what he saw. Ruin on all sides. The pavilions had mostly been burned to their bases—all except the Pavilion of War. But that was sagging at one side where a pillar had been tumbled into rubble. Mounds of gray ash with a few upright, blackened stumps poking through marked the groves of palm trees. The surfaces of the square pools were covered in a thick lather of ash and grime. There were bodies everywhere, lying singly and in little heaps. Hundreds of dead. Jun looked over to where his father had been killed and saw the form of the man he had loved most lying on the stone beside the Moon Pool covered in gray snow.
“What happened?” he asked the old man. And realized the stupidity of his question.
“They came from the sea—these pirate scum—and they came in numbers. Two hundred fighting men, maybe more, in a single ship. They killed and burned everything. And took the Kris of Wukarta Khodam with them. It seems that is what they came for.”
“Is everybody dead?” Jun whispered.
“There’s you and there’s me—and I suspect some of the sea villagers may have survived,” said Semar cheerfully.
Jun looked over at the huge double doors that made up the gateway of the Watergarden. They had been ripped off their iron hinges and partially burned. Through them Jun saw that the devastation was equally bad beyond the walls and as far as he could see. His stomach rumbled, incongruously, telling him that it was time for breakfast.
“What do we do now?” he said, looking down at the smiling old servant.
“What would you do, my prince, if you could do anything in the world?”
Jun looked about him; he looked at his father’s body, the other piled corpses, the mounds of ash, the shattered buildings—and for the first time anger glowed in his bowels.
“I would punish those who did this,” he said. He felt the rage grow, warming his whole body. “I would punish those who slew my father and take back the Khodam.”
“And how would you do this?”
“I would take men, armed men, trained warriors, and go after these pirates—”
Jun stopped. His shoulders dropped. There were no armed men left. War-Master Hardan was dead and the tiny royal guard had been annihilated before his eyes.
“Your cousin has soldiers in the city of Sukatan; as you know, he rules much of eastern Yawa and has grown rich on the fruits of the Konda Pali mine there. He may help you, if you ask him,” Semar said. Then the old man said something quietly, so quietly that Jun felt he was speaking inside his head. “You cannot stay here, my prince. Not now. We must go after them. There’s nothing here for you now.”
* * *
• • •
The fishing boat was narrow and uncomfortable. Not much more than a long tube with a thin wooden outrider on each side and a single grubby triangular canvas sail stretched between the mast and the boom. Its owner, a scrawny slip of a girl named Ketut, was only just past puberty but already she had grown into one of the most unpleasant people that Jun had ever had the misfortune to encounter. She was a tangle-haired, flat-chested thing, with skin burned dark brown by the sun, and blazing black eyes and a quick, harsh tongue that she wielded with no thought given to courtesy, decency or Jun’s exalted rank.
A mile out to sea and Jun was seriously thinking about slipping over the side and trying to swim back to the shore.
“Get your head down, richboy, we’re going about,” shouted Ketut, and Jun immediately did as he was ordered. He had learned the hard way that when she put the tiller over and the boat suddenly changed direction, the heavy wooden boom would come swinging across onto the other side of the boat and was likely to crack his skull if he didn’t hurriedly duck. He had little idea why she kept changing the boat’s direction of travel like this, only that it had something to do with the wind. And they had traveled in a series of zigzags to get out beyond the reef before settling on a course northwest, with the jungly coast of Taman on their left-hand side and in the far distance on the right, no more than a dark shadow, the neighboring Island of Molok. That island had also once been ruled by a prince of the Wukarta, but he had been a cruel man and arrogant, and more than ten years ago the peasants had risen up in anger and briskly put him and his entire family to death. A Taman princeling would find scant help there today.
>
Jun looked left over the whitecapped waves at his homeland. It was beautiful, the jungle green and glossy, the sand here a pristine white, the sea that lapped it a brilliant aquamarine. He wondered if he’d ever see his beloved island again.
He still wasn’t quite sure how he had been persuaded by Semar to come on this mad voyage. It had made sense at the time, for sure. He had been angry at the death of his father and the destruction of his home but he had agreed to everything that Semar had suggested—the hiring of the boat to take them to Sukatan, the packing of a few possessions, the gathering of food and drink—with a meekness that now seemed almost dreamlike.
The old man’s singsong voice had been soothing and oddly compelling, too. He had even abandoned his father’s corpse and the cleanup of the Watergarden to the few servants and villagers who had escaped the massacre. Semar had assured him that his father would be cremated with all the proper rituals and that all that could be, would be salvaged from the wreckage of the Watergarden, when news reached Basar, the administrative capital in the south of Taman, and the courtiers of the Son of Heaven came north to gather up his bones.
He recalled making some kind of wild, impassioned speech to the survivors in the ruins of the Watergarden: something about avenging his father and returning with the Khodam, but grief and shock seemed to have clouded his mind and he could not remember the exact words he had said.
Jun knew that he was not a man of iron will but his own docility and obedience to Semar’s gentle stream of suggestions surprised him. If they were to catch up with the sea raiders, if they wished to regain the Khodam, they must leave today, Semar had said—otherwise the pirates would disappear into the vastness of the Laut Besar never to be seen again. To Sukatan, then, to his cousin the Raja. There to raise fighting men and confront these sea scum. To punish them, and bring home the Khodam in triumph. It would make a story worthy of a hero: and Jun would be that hero. That thought lifted his gloom a little. They would make songs and stories about him. No one would mention that he had hidden in a dusty mousehole when enemies attacked his home. They would call him Arjun Pahlawan, Jun the Hero. But could this old servant be trusted to keep his mouth shut about the truth?
The servant himself was now sitting at the pointy front end, the prow he had heard Ketut call it, and gripping his long wooden staff between his knees as the sea wind whipped his unbound gray hair around his face. He seemed to be in a state of extreme joy, as if he were embarking on a carefree jaunt, rather than fleeing—for that is what they were doing, Jun realized with a jolt—fleeing a catastrophe.
“You look very pleased with yourself,” Jun said sourly. His head was aching, the effects of the terrible night before and the brazen sun, a golden hammer that mercilessly beat down upon his head in the open boat.
Semar beamed at him. “I love the sea,” he said. “It has no past, no future. It just is. It is wet and wide and it is bearing us that way”—he pointed ahead with his staff—“and there is nothing that we can do but submit, and allow ourselves to be carried along by its vastness to whatever we shall find at journey’s end.”
“Nothing you can do? I don’t think so, old man,” said Ketut from the tiller. “There are lines, hooks and bait in the locker by your feet—you and the rich boy can start by catching us some supper.”
“My name is Prince Arjun Wukarta—my father was the Son of Heaven.” Jun felt his cheeks grow red. “That is my kingdom,” he said, throwing out an arm to indicate the green mass of Taman. “You will address me in the future as ‘Prince’—or if you prefer, ‘my lord.’ You will not call me ‘rich boy’ again.”
“Do you know who I am?” Ketut spat back at him. “Do you know what I am?”
Jun did not deign to reply.
“I am the fourth daughter of a whore. My older siblings all died before they were fully grown, mostly from diseases brought on by years of hunger. I have no idea who my father was—but I was told he was an idle rich fellow just like you, who used my mother for his pleasure then paid her off when the relationship became inconvenient. I . . . am . . . Dewa!”
Jun gave a sharp intake of breath. He had never been so close to a Dewa before. Never spoken to one. These people were the lowest form of mankind, the slaughter men, the tanners, the whores, the buriers of the dead, the cleaners of latrines. The Dewa were said to be the descendants of the Ebu people, the short, dark-skinned, curly-haired tribes that had occupied all the islands of the Laut Besar before the coming of the Harvester folk, Jun’s own people, more than two thousand years ago. The skin on his arms and back began to crawl, as if Ketut’s invisible contamination had already begun to affect him.
“This is my kingdom.” Ketut gave the side of the boat a resounding slap. “You are in it. And in my kingdom I will call you whatever I like—richboy.”
“There’s a storm coming,” said Semar. “A huge one. Praise the Gods, I think the winter rains have finally arrived.”
* * *
• • •
They ran for the shore. A wall of purplish-gray cloud rushed toward them, barrelling in from the east, seeming to chase them. The waves became huge, towering blocks of water, which came in rank after rank, lifted the fragile boat and hurled it over the line of the reef with a man’s height to spare. It was calmer inside the line, but not much. The waves chopped and twisted the craft, throwing Jun to the deck, Semar laughing maniacally and clinging to a mast rope with both hands as they were swept along at a fine, hectic speed.
The sea finally thrust them up onto the beach, a forbidding strand of black, volcanic sand, the dark land suddenly crunching below the keel. Jun, dazed by the swiftness of the transformation from placid, blue-water sailing, stepped shakily out of the boat and stood, hands by his sides as Semar and Ketut began to haul the vessel up the beach. That was when the rains hit: with a gigantic crackle of thunder and a sheet of white lightning, the big, heavy drops began to hammer down as if a dozen waterfalls had opened above their heads.
“Don’t just stand there like a dumb ox, richboy, lend us a hand!”
Jun found himself gripping the curve of the outrigger and heaving, straining with the weight of the boat, forcing it up the steep, black-sand ridge and feeling his soft palms smear against the hard wood. The rain slashed down, drenching them all, making it all but impossible to see—but between them they got the craft up and under the palm trees, the prow lashed to the nearest trunk. Jun sat down under the half shelter of the tree. He found himself staring at the huge painted eye of the fishing boat, concentric circles of bright red and black, beside the long snout, which was painted with huge, curled teeth and what appeared to be shooting jets of flame.
Ketut was dragging out strips of tarred canvas from one of the lockers; she passed one to Jun, who seized it and cowered under its meager protection at the base of a coconut tree as the wind screamed, the rains pounded the canvas and the fronds of the tree lashed the sodden air around his head. Water seemed to fill the air—it was even difficult to breathe, each gasp having to be sipped through the fingers of a hand covering the mouth. This is it, Jun thought. I’m going to drown on land. Some hero.
The storm, for all its savagery, lasted no more than an hour. And, as if it had never happened, the rain clouds vanished from overhead, the wind dropped and the sun shone placidly once more. Jun looked up at the clear blue sky. It was late afternoon. A beautiful day. He stood up, shaking off the tarred-canvas strip, and looking around.
Ketut was already bailing out the boat with an old coconut shell, her torso bent over the side, rhythmically tossing showers of gray bilge out behind her.
But Semar was nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER 6
The same storm exhilarated Farhan. Five hundred leagues to the northwest of Taman, and an hour or two later, he stood at the prow of the Mongoose wearing nothing but a sarong and let the warm rain lash his back and wash the filth of the city from his body. The Mongoose was on
e day out from Singarasam, standing west for Istana Kush, with the Lion Standard of the Lord of the Islands limp but visible through the murk of flying water at the masthead.
Farhan felt a spasm of contentedness ripple through his body: he had Ongkara’s letter of marque safely in the drawer of his desk in his cabin; in a morning of very hard labor, he had overseen the dumping of the tangled mountain of old iron that had been rusting in the hold; he had a well-trained crew of Buginese sailormen about him who had willingly helped with the iron-dump and who were now efficiently shepherding the ship through this delightful tempest; and most of joyous all, he had, for the moment, escaped the clutches of his creditors—most notably that monster Xi Gung—and he was free and clear on the high seas and ready to undertake another daring mission for his Amrit Shakti masters. If he succeeded, all would be well now and forever: there would be money, a great deal of money, more than enough to pay his debts, easily enough to retire on, too. He was tired of this rackety life: the danger, the deceit, the endless running from one thing or another. He might buy himself a governorship of one of the prettier obat islands in the Laut Besar, which would mean a generous income for life from his cut of the trade . . .
There had been a sticky hour on the evening before the Mongoose had set sail from Singarasam Harbor, when he had been obliged to hide in one of the special compartments in the side of the hold while Captain Lodi denied all knowledge of him to a gang of Xi Gung’s thugs, who thumped around the ship muttering threats. But that unpleasantness had soon passed: the off-duty Buginese sailors had congregated at the hatchways, more than a score of them, ostentatiously sharpening their long, steel parangs, as they idled, watching the Xi bullyboys with eyes of jet. There was no love lost between Han and Buginese—they’d been enemies for centuries, ever since the Han had first built their vast obat plantations on the Island of Sumbu, and had co-opted local Buginese farmers into their brutal labor battalions. The Buginese called them Squinters for the narrow shape of their eyes. The Han looked on the Buginese as little better than talking monkeys.
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