Not back home. This was home now. Had been for the longest time.
Sir Peter jerked his head up in the bamboo lounger and closed his mouth, reaching for the tall cool glass of Saltie Bites Lager at his elbow.
“Not sleeping. Just thinking,” he said, but his voice was thick with the granddad nap she’d caught him at. “Worried about Pip. She’s all we have left of Jules now.”
“You were on the nod, Pete. Don’t shit a shitter,” she said, conscious that her own worry was making her snap.
Lady Fiona—universally known as Fifi, though only the favored few called her that to her face—was in her sixties, with just a few streaks of golden corn-silk color left in her shoulder-length white hair. Her figure, still very trim for her age, worked well in the national dress of Capricornia—khaki shorts, slip-on leather sandals and the blue sleeveless vest favored by the kingdom’s iconic sheep shearers. Her face had the leathery reddish tan of a blonde who’d spent much of her life on the tropical oceans and her hands were covered in thick calluses that would never go away. Neither she nor her husband favored the broad-brimmed hats with dangling corks you saw everywhere on the streets of the capital. Instead they made do with the Capricornian Salute, a hand waved in front of the face to move the flies along. An act performed so often it became as natural as breathing.
Her husband was at least a decade older, with thick white chest-hair showing over the top of his vest. More hair than he could boast of up top. Pete had gone egg-bald some time ago, a hard thing for a man as quietly vain as him. He had so enjoyed his earlier, virile legend as Cap’n Pete, greatest of all the mighty Salvagers. Fifi knew he was “at least” a decade older, but other than that, Pete could not say. He’d always been vague about exactly when he’d been born. Not that he was reluctant to specify, but the years were never the same twice. He was adamant though that he was a born and bred Tasmanian, which made of him a natural republican. He was forever teasing the King about it.
“Hmmmph,” Fifi said, and took another pull at her gin-and-tonic.
The umbrella-set rooftop terrace was part of the city palace of the Birmingham dynasty of the Kings of Darwin; currently the residence of the first of that name, generally known as JB to the peasantry, whose interests he routinely favored over those of the gentry. At least according to the gentry. JB was pretty much their friend, certainly their patron in the older, wilder days, and definitely an ally now. He was also older and balder and even more wrinkly than Pete. In Fifi’s opinion that was all just camouflage, though. She had never met a man who put her more in mind of a crocodile drifting along with only the eyes and nostrils showing. Not that she took Pete’s act too seriously either. He might present these days as a harmless-granddad-sitting-in-the-shade, but together he and his old mate the King were the richest, most powerful old bastards in this part of the world. They were far from fucking harmless.
Nor was she.
Fifi freshened up her drink from the fixings on a small occasional table next to her lounger. The ice was fresh, as it always was at the City Palace and she wondered, as she always did, what mad bastard adventurer had been dispatched to some snow-capped mountain far, far away to retrieve it for her drinking pleasure. She walked to the balustrade, resisting the urge to ask Pete if she thought Pip would be okay. Despite his protests he really was half asleep in the late afternoon heat and, besides, she knew she would just be flapping her gums to stop her fears and her guilt running wild off her tongue. After all, were it not for “Aunt” Fifi, Lady Pip would be ensconced at the Court of St. James under the wing of the current King-Emperor. In Winchester, on that cold rainy patch on the other side of the planet, safely bored out of her pretty head, not tear-assing around the islands east of Java and north of Lombok.
At least Fifi hoped she was still tear-assing around the . . .
“She’ll be fine, darlin’. She is her mother’s daughter.”
Pete had come up behind her, surprising her when he put his hands around her waist. He had always been able to do that—sneak up on her. There was a reason he had been the designated back tracker when they’d run salvage under the Royal Warrant. She placed her free hand over his and squeezed, sipping at the drink again. Not trusting herself to speak.
From here you could look out over Stokes Hill wharf and the busy port, a forest of masts from fishing smacks to the tall spars of warships and oceangoing merchantmen, stacked with their bowsprits stretching in over the pavement and the inset tracks of the freight trams.
A fair share of the hulls worked for their Darwin & East Indies Trading Company, sailing from Hobart to Patagonia, Hainan to Zanzibar. Trading in wheat and wool and wine, sandalwood and copra, salvage steel and fresh-cut teak, rubber and gear-trains and swords and rice and rum, coffee and tea, hides and . . .
And once we shipped a dozen baby elephants to the Raja of Bali, and we had to catch them first. And then the fucking ship just disappeared and we had to do it all over again!
It was sundown, and just slightly cooler; they’d had a thunderstorm earlier, washing the air, the sign that the Wet was coming soon. Lightning flickered in the black clouds on the horizon, over the azure surface of the Arafura Sea. There was still a clamor of voices and a ratcheting of cranes and more and more bright lanterns, and a distance-softened surf-roar of voices and wheels from the streets beyond where late didn’t begin until well after midnight.
The silty wet smell, sometimes fetid with fish-guts or perfumed with spices and always seasoned with eucalyptus woodsmoke, made her think of voyages gone by. Back when it had been just her and Pete and Jules on the old Diamantina, the most successful salvagers and smugglers and all-around fortune-and-glory rogues afloat in the chaos of the years after the Blackout. Back then, this time of day, they’d have been down in the dockside pubs, the sort of place where you sat on your sheathed knife with the hilt coming out from under your right butt-cheek. So you wouldn’t forget it was there and could draw without bringing your hand across to your belt. Sitting amid caterwauling music and a fug of smoke that just started with tobacco, knocking it back and pretending to play cards and sniffing after the scent of an opportunity like sharks in waters full of tempting, juicy, bleeding toes paddling temptingly into range.
She’d seen this city recover from the terrible years, seen it change and grow and flourish like some brawling, bawdy child; a mutant mix of old and new, and she’d been part of that. Her children and grandchildren had grown up in and with it, grown into its bone and blood. The kids were even respectable, in a raffish here’s-the-deal-and-here’s-my-catapult sort of way.
But there are times I miss the old days. Even if there was a lot less lounging on teak decks surrounded by potted palms and bougainvillea. Though Jules did always love a G&T with ice when she could get it; I wouldn’t ever have drunk one except for her.
“Nostalgia’s a bitch, isn’t it?” Pete said.
She sipped at her drink, but couldn’t keep back a grin. It would have been surprising if they didn’t know each other well after forty-six years in each other’s pockets, plus Pete had always been smart. And one of those rare men who really knew how women thought, too, without letting his own—enormous—macho legend get in the way.
“I miss Jules,” she said. “And I worry is all. I promised her, Pete. I said we’d look out for Pip.”
“And we did. That’s why her father won’t talk to us anymore.”
Fifi sighed. The Colonel-designate of Townsville Armory had a serious pickle up the ass, but he had a point too. . . .
“Did I do the wrong thing?”
He tugged gently on her elbow, turned her around. She was struck again by how much she was still attracted to him. After all of those years. And wrinkles. He was still such a good-looking man, as he never tired of reminding her. In his younger days he’d looked a bit like his fellow-Tasmanian Errol Flynn, though an increasingly scarred and battered version as time went on. Flynn m
ight have played piratical swashbuckling adventurers in the old movies. But Pete had done it for real, starting well before the Change too, and those days had left their marks.
He grinned.
“You know who I miss?”
“Your younger, prettier self?”
She pronounced it “purdier”—exaggerating her accent, as she did when they were playing.
“No. I’m still pretty. But no, I kinda miss Shoeless Dan.”
Fifi snorted a mouthful of gin and tonic through her nose.
“Yeah, right. That’s why you let the sharks have him.”
“No, no. I let the sharks have him because the treacherous bastard tried to arsefuck us on that Sydney run for JB. That was just business. He fed us to the Biters, I returned the favor.”
“And? Now you miss him?”
“I miss the fun we had because of him. In spite of him. The man was a perfidious arseclown, but he did put us onto some of our best scores.”
“So he could rip us off . . .”
“So he could try. And fail. He always failed. Because we were better than him. You, me and Julesy. Especially Jules. Remember when he thought he finally had us? And she just carved through his boys with those choppers of hers?”
The memory was both horrific and satisfying. Fifi shuddered and smiled, faintly.
“Well, as good as Julesy was, she raised Pip, and Pip is better. A natural. She’d have died a thousand fucking deaths at Court back in the Old Country, Fifi. But out there”—he waved at the slate gray sea under the dark wall of thunderheads—“you just know she won’t even get a scratch.”
Two burly guards in helmets and water-buffalo-hide cuirasses with the white-gray-orange Desert Rose of seven petals on their chests lounged outside the notional door to the dining room, with heavy Golok-knife choppers at their waists and the handles of asymmetrical war-boomerangs showing over their shoulders. They had identically tall rangy muscled builds and might have been brothers except that one was blue-eyed and weathered red and the other extremely black; both had their round shields hanging from the shoulder-straps and leaned casually on broad-bladed spears—the Capricornian military didn’t go in for standing to attention—but their eyes never stopped roving. They had the knack of good Palace guards though—making Fifi feel as though they purposely did not see her, which was good, given the enthusiastic groping she was receiving from her husband.
The door to the room was open wrought iron, and the whole space was really just a tall louvered roof supported on drum-shaped pillars of the same blocks of compressed and stabilized laterite that made up the palace. Bamboo screens between the pillars were overgrown with floribunda vines whose clusters of white flowers scented the air passing through.
One of the palace staff leaned her head out the doorway and jerked a thumb over a bare tattooed shoulder.
“Come on, your feed’s ready!” she announced cheerfully. “Better get a move on before JB scoffs the lot.”
Pete gave Fifi a pat on the ass to get her moving towards the chamber every crony of JB knew well; it held a long table suitable for dinner for twelve guests but it was set for seven tonight, wicker chairs, and a slow-moving overhead fan driven from a windmill on the roof. When the breeze failed, wallah-boys were sent up to pedal stationary bikes hooked into the drive train. Globes of frosted glass lit by gaslights were suspended from the center-beam of the exposed roof trusses. The floor was the same openwork teak as the deck, and there was a mill-and-swill area fronting a fully stocked bar. A normal visitor would have marveled at the genuine antique bottles of wine and spirits on display. Fifi did not. She had salvaged at least half of them from the dead cities.
The open space in front of the bar was occupied now by sawhorses, and on them was . . .
“Fuck me purple,” Pete said reverently, and fished his bent spectacles out of a pocket in his shorts, putting them on and peering intently.
“Holy shit,” Fifi said, almost in the same breath.
The skull of the saltie was clean but still raw, smelling very faintly of seawater and decay. They both recognized it instantly—anyone who spent much time at sea in this part of the world would—also anyone who hung around the banks of the big tidal rivers, where the saltwater crocodiles were wont to lurk, erupting out to grab anything even vaguely edible . . . and it wasn’t uncommon for them drag full-grown water buffalo back in for a snack. The biggest ones had been getting bigger all her lifetime since the Blackout because it was so damned difficult to kill them nowadays. She’d seen one hung up in Port Moresby about ten years ago that was twenty-four feet long, and it had weighed nearly three tons. This one though . . .
Fifi had gotten very good at estimating sizes in a long career both larcenous and commercial. This skull was about four feet, maybe four feet and a hair. Nine times that to get the total length. The hide was draped over another set of sawhorses, and it was looking a bit moth-eaten. Shark-eaten might be a better way to put it, big semicircular bites taken out of the thinner belly-skin and almost certainly done postmortem, but the overall length bore out her estimate: more than thirty-five feet, less than thirty-six.
“Glad I didn’t meet this one before someone turned him into handbag meat,” Pete said, awed delight in his tone; he’d always loved marvels, the stranger and more dangerous the better.
More than ten feet longer than the one we saw in New Guinea, and the mass goes up as the cube of the increase in length, so—
“It must have weighed . . .” she said, hesitating because the deduction was perfectly logical but made the thing the same bulk as a fair-sized elephant.
“About five tons, Lady Fiona,” another voice said.
Fifi wheeled at the thump of spearbutts on wood, and JB was there by the inner doors, grinning like an ancient baboon. He wasn’t the one who’d spoken, however. That was a stranger in an unfamiliar white linen uniform with a sort of naval look to it; tanned and fit, thirtyish, brown-haired and sharp-faced and unremarkable . . . except that his English was unmistakably North American, which you didn’t hear every day even now with trade picking up again.
So that’s who the visiting frigate was, she thought.
It had vanished into the Capricornian naval docks when it arrived two days ago, and the security had clamped down harder than she’d ever seen before.
“Captain Richard Russ, Royal Montivallan Navy, officer commanding Her Majesty’s frigate Stormrider, my lady,” he said, with a slight bow and another to Pete. “Sir Peter.”
“Her Majesty?” Pete said sharply.
Russ looked grim. “The High King was killed this spring. High Queen Mathilda is Queen-Regent until the heir comes of age.”
He indicated the woman beside him, who wore the same getup down to the fore-and-aft cocked hat under one arm. “My executive officer, Lieutenant-Commander Annette Chong.”
She looked a bit younger, also clever and tautly fit, and as if at least one of her grandparents had been Chinese despite her blue eyes—very much like the eldest of Fifi’s daughters-in-law, in fact. They were accompanied by another man, a bit younger and built like a really dangerous rugby forward. She felt her brows go up at the way he was dressed.
Like a playing card, she thought.
Tight sienna-colored pants almost like panty hose, tooled ankle boots with upturned toes and golden prick spurs, a loose blue coat whose open dagged sleeves dangled past his waist, a black jerkin of suede leather with a heraldic device of a burning phoenix-like bird, and what she thought of as a pirate shirt all white billowy sleeves and fastened at cuffs and neck with black silk ties. When he swept off his hat as part of a formal-looking bow—the hat was a round blue silk cowflop with a rolled circle around the edges and a dangling tail—she saw that his head was shaved except for a long black scalplock over his right ear, bound with golden rings.
“And Sir Boleslav Pavlovitch Kedov de Vashon, of the Protec
tor’s Guard.”
She stuck out her hand. The two naval types shook it; Sir Boleslav bowed and kissed it with an authority which suggested he was used to doing it. That was an interesting experience, the more so as he took a quick look at her cleavage in passing—discreetly, but you could always tell.
Beside them JB looked like an old, disreputable devil; he’d been a heavy-boned muscular man, and now the bones were plain behind his spotted, parchment-thin skin and the scars that knotted it. Beside him stood Prince Thomas, very obviously his son and in his fifties, with his usual colored bandana around his rather long graying blond hair. He gave the Holders a careful nod; he’d known them all his life, of course, but now that he was grown he was a little cautious of the sort of buccaneering reprobate his father had always swum with. And he’d realized most of the stories they’d told him as a kid were true.
“Let’s get the roadkill out before it spoils dinner,” JB said cheerfully; he’d always liked a feed, even before the Blackout reputedly.
Living through that nightmare had made a lot of folks who’d managed it crazy where food was concerned, especially the ones who’d escaped the cities on foot during the collapse. Come Blackout Day not everyone was lucky enough to find themselves working on a survivalist super nerd billionaire’s yacht in San Francisco Bay as a sous-chef (as she had), or safely out at sea on an old wooden sailboat beating south towards Sydney (as Pete had, on the Diamantina). And those who’d been in the air—well they were pretty much fucked, weren’t they? Except for her friend, her comrade, her murderous soul sister Lady Julianne Balwyn, who’d survived when her flying boat came down hard on the Great Barrier Reef and crawled out on the beach already looking ahead and planning survival with style.
For that matter, making himself king and founding Capricornia wasn’t much more amazing than JB’s feat in simply getting himself and his young family out of Brisbane alive. There had been two million people in the city in nineteen ninety-eight, almost as many as there were on this whole continent now, and damned few had managed it. Much less getting to the seething chaos of Darwin within a year, seeing what the place needed and providing it. Hordes of suburban refugees ended up as indentured laborers on some outback station all over the shattered continent, knuckling their foreheads to the stationmasters. Only one got to be King.
Prince of Outcasts Page 19
