Prince of Outcasts

by S. M. Stirling

  “Baruch ata Adonai, Elohanu Melech Haolam she kocho u-gevurato maleh olam,” Feldman said, and John recognized it as a prayer even before he repeated it in Montival’s common tongue:

  “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, whose power and might fill the world.”

  “Amen,” John said wholeheartedly. I feel like an ant on a pavement!

  Then the Captain went on softly: “It’s like a typhoon over in Asia. I’ve seen them coming on, but . . . not like this. Never like this.”

  He turned his head and snapped: “That sea-anchor! Lively!”

  The Bosun went by with a party of sailors, an apparatus of canvas and chains in their arms, their eyes wide and flickering up to the mass of cloud.

  “Just reeving the cable to the anchor bitts, Cap’n!” she called, her voice carefully controlled.

  “Good,” Feldman said. “At the wheel there, port your helm.”

  The ship heeled and turned a smooth steady arc, until the bowsprit pointed nearly southward.

  “Thus, thus, very well, thus. Steady as she goes. We’ll head away from that”—he jerked a thumb at the gathering clouds—“for now.”

  As the ship’s bow turned they had a good view of the frigate; it seemed to be in a similar state of upheaval, but a bit behind, and of course it was a more complex task on a much bigger ship. Evrouin came up, knelt, and began stripping off John’s suit of plate, fingers quick and deft on the buckles and snaps. John gave a start, and then began to work himself on the pieces around his shoulders and arms and the bevor around his neck, the ones you could come at yourself. The peril driving down on them wasn’t one steel armor could protect him from. His valet-cum-bodyguard dropped the pieces into a canvas sack—for once not wrapping them carefully and individually—put John’s thick supple swordbelt back around his waist, cinched it tight and tied some of the points from his arming doublet through the metal-rimmed eyelets in the leather, snapped a line onto a loop and ran it to one of the manropes.

  Then donned his own just before the prince could open his mouth to order him to do it.

  “Devoted to duty, Your Highness, but not suicidal,” he said.

  There was a shiver in the air. John looked shoreward again, finding himself curiously reluctant—it reminded him uncomfortably of the way he’d felt as a child when he’d convinced himself something ugly was hiding under the bed and he tried to make himself look because he thought he was too old to cry for his parents or the nanny, but oh how he wanted to do just that. When he did look the breath hissed between his teeth and he crossed himself reflexively and murmured a brief prayer to invoke the aid and intercession of St. Francis, who’d been a musician too. The thunderheads were piled mountain-high now, and they covered everything he could see left and right. Already the mountain peaks had disappeared in a silvery-gray mass that must be scourging rain. The chaparral on the stark hillsides bent before the wind like the fur of some great mangy beast, and then a line rippled across the water that churned it into white foam, swifter than a galloping horse.

  John ducked his head instinctively and threw up an arm as it struck and staggered him, as much by its own force as the way it made the ship buck. The staysail cracked taut like a catapult releasing, and the ship heeled sharply and seemed to jerk forward. The leading edge of the wind had grit and twigs in it, whipped up off the dry scrubby hills to the north, and he slitted his eyes and threw up his hand. Then it was full of flying salt-spume. Rain followed hard on its heels, cold and stinging, soaking his arming-doublet and hose instantly. The note of the wind in the rigging deepened to what his musician’s ear recognized as bass for a moment, then tore up into a shriek.

  “There’s an old saying,” Feldman shouted with a grim smile, holding to a stay. “We beat Pharaoh, we’ll get through this. I thought this expedition would be interesting and my judgment was sound!”

  The wind built from second to second. John squinted through the stinging wet, then shouted himself:

  “One of the Korean ships just capsized!”

  It had been a glimpse, the masts crackling and toppling, sails and ropes flailing through the air, the hull heeling farther and farther and then suddenly pitching over in a flash and the weed-grown keel showing for an instant before a wave hid it and threw bits of wood and he thought people up into the driving darkness. He couldn’t see the others at all, and then for an instant he could, one of them was heading towards him on the crest of a wave with its bow headed nearly straight down. They must have cut their anchors and were trying to run before the storm.

  “Get that—” Feldman shouted.

  There was a sensation underfoot, as if the ship had jerked somehow, but soft and elongated, as if the jerk had been through a cushion. John felt his feet skidding across the wet-slick deck, and then Evrouin had him by one upper arm and Deor by the other, with Thora gripping his belt and the back of his doublet.

  “Got it!” he said.

  And he did; he clamped his hand on one of the manropes and used it to haul himself back to near the helm. Feldman hadn’t even staggered, and he shouted again.

  “That was the sea-anchor taking hold. It’ll keep our stern to the wind!”

  He had to do it louder this time; the gale had risen until the sound in the rigging was a roar and a shriek in one, and the masts were bending visibly. Then there was a huge series of popping cracks from the bow, like a whip miles long snapping. They all looked that way, and John saw Feldman’s lips shape the word shit! Perhaps he’d said it; ordinary speech would be inaudible right now. The jib and the other forestaysails had blown out of their boltropes and were flogging themselves into scraps of pale canvas, just visible across the hundred and fifty feet of heaving deck, with banks of half-solid spray rolling across it in between. The ship gave another jolt, then settled into the same heaving roll.

  Feldman glanced back over his shoulder. His eyes went wide, and his mouth shaped shit! again. Then something else, which John suspected was:

  Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!

  That was the prayer Jews spoke in the face of imminent death. On its heel came a shout of:

  “Lash the wheel, now, now!”

  Unwillingly, forcing his head to turn, John looked in the same direction as the sailors frantically hooked the loops of cable around the spokes to keep it steady if their hands came off.

  There was a wave behind them. Towering, a wall of water rising nearly like a cliff. A moving cliff topped with a line of white, visible in the stark flicker of the lightning bolts.

  “No!” the prince shouted into the wind that tore the words from his mouth. “I haven’t finished making the song yet!”

  And the world fell.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CASTLE TODENANGST, CROWN DEMESNE

  PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

  (FORMERLY NORTHERN OREGON)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  SEPTEMBER 15TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

  “Johnnie’s alive, Mother,” Órlaith said softly.

  She’d gone to her knees as the High Queen—Mathilda Arminger Mackenzie—entered and now she stripped the sheathed Sword of the Lady from the leather-and-brass sling that kept it angled back from her belt and held it up on her open palms. Her blue eyes met her mother’s hazel-brown, and she saw a slight thawing in the cold anger there as the older woman put her hand on the black staghorn and silver inlay of the hilt.

  She knew much of the anger had been born of fear for her and her brother, not just that a masterful will had been successfully defied. And it was natural enough to fear, when they put themselves at risk so soon after her father’s death. That didn’t make the anger any less real, and perilous. It was even a bit justified, if you looked at it from her perspective.

  She’d have been mad at Johnnie too, if he was h
ere. He’s not, he’s still in danger, and I’m safe to take both our shares out on.

  Their faces both went blank as the Sword linked them to things beyond the world of common day, and to each other. There was a moment of communion on a level Órlaith found impossible to describe even to herself. She felt a single word, as if it hummed in her mother’s mind and echoed across miles and years:

  Rudi.

  A ghost of her father’s presence, faded but still there in the Sword and the land it embodied, the land he had died for and blessed with the sacred King’s own blood, as the very Lord in whose power he had walked died each year for the ripened corn that fed human-kind. An echo that would live forever. Beneath it were the linked lines of blood that connected her parents to her and to her siblings—even to the unnamed babe that her mother bore, stirring now with six months’ growth.

  “Yes, we’d know if John was . . . if he wasn’t,” the High Queen said. “But he’s . . . far away. I can tell that much. Beyond Montival. And that’s all we know. The western Pacific is . . . very large.”

  She released the hilt, implicitly not demanding that the sacred blade be turned over to her. Who had the better right was moot, and her daughter was the High King’s heir.

  “What can we do?” Órlaith asked.

  The Pacific was indeed very large, and sending the whole Navy haring off into the beyond would be like looking for a particular grain of sand on a beach. It was hard enough to keep the piracy problem down, and they knew that started in the northern isles. Even sending a second warship down to Topanga had stretched things, though it had given them a quick safe journey home.

  “For now, you’ve done more than enough, Órlaith; you’ve lost your brother, lost the Tarshish Queen, and lost the Stormrider. Rise,” she said.

  She made a palms-up gesture as she did and sank back onto the throne of wrought and inlaid teakwood that stood on a low dais beneath an embroidered canopy. The strong worn hands gripped the carved lions’ heads of the armrests. Everyone rose, save the black-armored guards who stood motionless before the tapestries, the honed steel edges on the blades of their glaives catching the beams of light from the high round rosette windows.

  It glittered too on the carved wood and gold leaf of the coffered ceiling—one of her grandmother Sandra’s salvage expeditions had brought it back with much else from a palace on the coast of Westria, California-that-was, built for some forgotten prince of the old Americans generations prior to the Change. Moorish craftsmen had first wrought it for Spanish lords half a thousand years before that, across the eastern sea in Andalusia. Órlaith was suddenly conscious of it; what dramas had it seen in its journey across seas and centuries? What might it behold between now and the time of her grandchildren’s grandchildren?

  Everyone had knelt save the guards. Except of course Reiko and her followers; she was a reigning monarch in her own right, not a subject of the High Kingdom, and had remained standing after a respectful inclination of the head. Her followers had bowed deeply instead. Her dark kimono with a subtle black-on-black pattern and gray-striped hakama and dark gray five-kamon haori jacket were crisply perfect but gave a note of sober formality to the occasion—for starters, it was men’s formal dress where she came from, apart from the high belting of the hakama. It stood out vividly amid the multicolored and wildly-varied splendor of lords and delegates from all of Montival’s member-realms. There was even a party of Lakota from the easternmost border marches, in the fringed and beaded leather and the eagle-feather bonnets they kept for special occasions and impressing outsiders.

  Todenangst was familiar home ground to Órlaith, but she could tell the Japanese had been impressed by the sheer alien bulk of the great fortress-palace-town, and positively shaken beneath their impassive politesse when they realized it had been built right after the Change when their grandparents had been scrambling for bare survival. What castles they had in Japan now were either refurbished survivors from very ancient times or much smaller modern copies.

  Of course, Grandfather Norman built this to impress people . . . to intimidate people . . . well, to crush them, really. Nonna Sandra said he’d been drawing plans for it even before the Change. Nobody’s ever even tried to besiege it.

  The engineers he’d rounded up in his initial coup had picked a suitable hill with a nearby stream, then set to work with girders, rebar, concrete, Fresno scrapers and thousands upon thousands of steel cargo containers brought in over the railway, often by gangs of laborers hauling on ropes. Sometimes she felt a little uneasy remembering the hosts who’d died building the great pile and his other works. There was no getting around the fact that her mother’s father had been something close to the Platonic ideal of merciless tyrant and possibly . . . almost certainly . . . more than a little mad, in a functional sort of way. And yet nearly all of those people would have died anyway. Hundreds of thousands who would have died otherwise had lived because of his ruthless vision.

  Reiko had the two swords thrust through her sash and the steel tessen-war fan in her hand, and more than one eye among the ranks of watchers turned to the old gold-colored silk cords and sharkskin of Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi’s hilt. An ancient monk, shaven-headed and saffron-robed among the emissaries of the Monastery of Chenrezi far off eastward across the mountains in the Valley of the Sun took a sharp breath and made a gesture of reverence with his palms pressed together before his face.

  The High Queen wore a cotte-hardie in deep forest green that showed her six months’ pregnancy rather obviously, and she looked exhausted beneath an iron resolution, her face framed by a pinned-back mourning veil of black gauze held by a silver-and-gold band and a chain of office around her neck, plaques alternating the Lidless Eye of the Armingers and the spread-winged Raven of House Artos. Órlaith was in a kilt of the Mackenzie green-brown-orange tartan, with the plaid pinned back so that the fringe fell nearly to her knees behind; because she preferred that, and because it emphasized that she might be her mother’s daughter but she wasn’t an Associate. She was also wearing a tight green Montrose jacket with its double row of silver buttons and lace at the throat and cuffs, and a flat Scots bonnet with a spray of Golden Eagle feathers in the clasp—the Eagle was her totem, the creature that had come to her in dreams.

  The High Queen’s eyes also rested on the hilt of the Grass-Cutting Sword at Reiko’s waist for a moment. Órlaith knew her mother felt the reality of flaming power held in check by an intricate pattern of control, as she did; it seemed like called to like. Reiko had told her privately that she could sense the Sword of the Lady likewise, now that she bore the Grasscutter.

  “The Tennō Heika of Dai-Nippon is most welcome at Our court,” Mathilda went on, a cool graciousness in her tone. “Our realms share a common enemy and will seek a common retribution for the wrongs done our peoples and the death of our High King and your Emperor. It is a pity that this consultation has been delayed, but We recognize the urgency of the . . . project . . . with respect to Your Majesty’s Sacred Treasure.”

  Reiko’s face was unreadable as she made the slightest inclination of her head. Then she blinked as Mathilda repeated it in accentless Japanese, and in the formal, deliberately archaic dialect used by the court on Sado-ga-shima at that.

  Well, I should have expected that, Órlaith thought. Mother never liked using the Sword of the Lady . . . nor did Da, really, and I can understand why now. She’s always disliked it more . . . but they mingled their blood on its point at the Kingmaking, and it is linked to her as well. And to me through her as well as through Da.

  Reiko’s followers were a little shocked at her fluency as well. But Egawa Noboru, the Imperial Guard commander who’d been with her on the journey south to the desert and the lost castle, and her Grand Steward Koyama Akira—who’d been left to wake up to a brief letter explaining why she was gone—both showed well-concealed delight. That statement was a promise of alliance, an alliance that Nippon still desperately needed a
nd that Órlaith simply did not yet have the power to grant.

  The Grass-Cutting Sword was a thing of terrible power, and enough to assure that even mighty Montival took Japan seriously. But war still needed fleets and armies, and they were heavily outnumbered. It had always been very likely indeed, virtually certain, that Montival would retaliate for the slaying of the High King, but this made it formal. There was a murmur of agreement from the crowd, and one Powder River rancher even let loose with a kiy-yip! of enthusiasm. Sometimes Órlaith thought that the wildly various realms of the High Kingdom were held together by eternal repetitive arguments as much as anything else, but her father’s death had brought a wave of unified fury. Sacred blood had been shed, and her folk wanted blood in turn; preferably whole rivers of it.

  That happened when you desecrated a people’s symbols, unless there was something badly wrong with the people concerned.

  “We will confer on these issues, Your Majesty,” Mathilda said. “With your advisors and mine. Fortunately the meeting of the Congress of Realms means the whole kingdom can be consulted and informed swiftly.”

  “This is very good, Your Majesty,” Reiko said, her voice soft but carrying clearly. “Yet it is also necessary to inform my homeland of what has occurred.”

  Mathilda nodded. “As soon as we have the outline of an agreement, I will dispatch a fast frigate to Dai-Nippon, with whoever you wish to bear the news, carrying such instructions as you think best. That will take—”

  She turned her head to a square-built woman in a blue uniform and fore-and-aft cocked hat standing not far from the Throne, and they murmured for a moment.

  “Sixty-five to ninety days sailing round-trip, depending on the winds,” she said when she turned back to Reiko. “Continuous passage and not counting any time spent at the other end.”

  “I will emphasize the need for haste,” Reiko said, and the two monarchs shared a smile as dry as her tone.