Arrows stood in the shield; they splintered on the surface of the body-armor as she watched. He moved as if the harness was no heavier than cloth, smacked the shield into a face with an impetus that knocked the victim backward like a rag doll, stabbed, chopped, a swift economical piston-like succession of moves.
“At ’em!” Pip shouted again, and pulled the cane into her right hand and a kukri into her left.
* * *
Now, there’s a girl of parts! John thought. Or at least, she leaves a trail of parts.
The view through the vision slit of his visor was necessarily limited to the barely necessary, and concentrating on the men trying to kill him was the first priority—a good suit of plate made that process very difficult but didn’t make him invulnerable, a fact teachers had made painfully clear to him years ago. But he could see the figure in the white shorts and shirt moving through the chaos of the deck-fight like a dancer who was never still for an instant; one of the more lively dances, a volta or a leaping and twisting galliard.
She sank nearly to a knee and smashed a foot with the knob on the end of her cane, blocked a downward cut with the odd back-curving knife in her other hand, flicked the cane straight up into the man’s chin, cut sideways and took off most of a hand, twirled in a three-quarter circle and smacked the end of the cane into the angle of a jaw in passing with a force that left a spray of blood and teeth in the air as the man fell backward.
The huge man beside her had more tattoos than a McClintock and was using his spear—enormous even for his size—as a combination stabbing and cutting and clubbing weapon, one with immense leverage at the end of his long thick arms and the long shaft.
John went forward, with Thora and Deor on one side of him and the Fayard and his surviving half-armored crossbowmen on the other with sword and buckler, and the point of Evrouin’s glaive poised at his liege’s sword-arm shoulder ready to stab and hook and cut. The slightly-built and lightly-armed locals were terribly vulnerable to that ironclad violence. And Ruan was barely a step behind the foremost trio, shooting with deadly skill so close to them that sometimes the fletching brushed his friends as the arrows went by—not one of the enemy archers managed to live long enough to raise a bow behind their own hand-to-hand fighters.
“Keep at ’em!” Thora wheezed past the three-bar visor of her Bearkiller helm. “They’re back on their heels, I can feel it. Don’t let ’em get set!”
She’s right, John thought, and cut a man across the neck and chest as he tried to dodge backward and couldn’t because his comrades were too close behind. They had their peckers up but the Aussie shocked ’em.
Thora went in under the point of a spear, levering it up with the edge of her shield as she slammed into the man bearing it body-to-body and then cracked the basket hilt of her backsword into his face in a quick hard jab while he was off-balance.
“By the Aesir, it’s nice to be bigger than average for a change,” she grunted as she recovered into guard.
Another tried to stab her in the side with a kris while her sword-hand was busy and had just enough time to see the point skid off the steel surface of her cuirass before Deor’s broadsword slammed down and cut three-quarters of the way through his arm.
“Woden! Ha, Woden!”
The enemy fighters surged back from the wedge of Montivallans, some trying to crowd back down the nearest boarding ramp; he realized he didn’t even know what to call them, apart from these-people-trying-to-kill-us. It was time to charge them, turn them into a mob trying to escape and too tightly packed to use their weapons or even run.
John tucked his armored shoulder into his shield and sprang . . .
. . . and bounced back from the tall figure that stood before the place where the ramp’s spikes had crunched deep into the Tarshish Queen’s bulwark. A white robe covered him from shoulders to feet, but there was armor underneath it, and a sword much like a Montivallan knight’s weapon in his gauntleted hand. A helm covered his head, but the front of it was a mask. John couldn’t tell exactly what it was made of; ceramic or ivory, at a guess. Certainly it was pale—not white, but some indefinable off-white color that gave the impression of being like flesh, but not living flesh. A three-armed sigil rested between the brows.
The features of a face were there in the mask, but smoothed and flattened, more suggested than shown. The eyes were empty sockets. . . .
And there aren’t any eyes behind there either. It’s just . . . yellow.
He couldn’t move his gaze from those golden pits. He was on the deck of the Queen, but he was also somewhere else, as if two places and times had merged. More there than here with every breath.
His armored feet rang on flags as he walked between shuttered buildings of pastel-colored stone, beneath a pale sky and paler moon and black stars. A child looked at him between the convoluted bars of a balcony, a face elfin and huge-eyed framed in pale hair, then turned and flowed away like a snake on its belly. A tall structure like a church glowed from within like a furnace. Its stained-glass windows cast shadows that danced and capered across the square before it, making a play where stick-thin mantis figures whirled around another tied to a stake, one that burned and screamed silently.
Beyond the not-church, broad stairs led down to a blue-black lake, where waves like pale mist beat on the stone. A boat waited there, a slender double-ended thing with curling stem and sternposts and a hooded boatman holding a tall pole.
His shadow went before him, more terrible with every step as it showed the shape of his soul. Then it turned to look him in the eyes . . .
Thock.
Something hard struck the man in the mask on the side of his helm—a ball-bearing from a slingshot—and John was back on the deck of the Tarshish Queen. Evrouin lunged with the point of his glaive; the masked man swayed aside and seized it just below the head. The valet-bodyguard dropped it with a yell as his opponent yanked it forward, nearly throwing him off the deck. The longsword moved before Ruan loosed, and the bodkin point went ting off the watered steel and shattered. Then it went up with smooth menace.
“St. Michael with me! Holy Mary for Portland!” John bayed as his sword went up, his shield raised to just below his eyes.
A sword I can deal with.
He took a step forward, feeling a transport of anger born of fear. Thora and Deor were at his side, she calling on Almighty Thor, he on Victory-Father. The three swords cut air as the Pallid Mask leapt backward with tigerish agility, onto the boarding ramp and back down it. The boarding parties had fled behind him, all but the ones twitching on the deck as the sailors finished them or tipped their bodies overboard.
The young woman in white, now liberally splashed with sticky red, nodded to him when they finally stood separated only by a few feet of deck covered in bodies. She also wore an odd-looking round hat with a stiff brim, and knee and elbow pads, and a circle of some sort of black makeup around one pale gray eye. Wisps of tawny hair escaped from under the brim of her hat, sticking to the sweat-slick skin of her face and neck.
“Good show!” she said briskly, in a drawl that reminded him of how some Dúnedain in Mithrilwood spoke, taking after Hiril Loring’s dulcet tones. “Now let’s get this cleared up.”
Feldman was shouting orders from the quarterdeck through his speaking-trumpet; a quick glance showed John that the Captain was still on his feet, though his left arm was in a sling and a broken cutlass lay at his feet. Radavindraban led a party down the rail with come-alongs and pry bars and axes, loosening the grapnels and boarding ramps.
“Cover them!” John called to Fayard, and the crossbowmen sheathed their swords and unslung the weapons across their backs.
The woman in white turned and shouted orders herself to someone named Kombagle. The little barquentine cast free, turned, and crept alongside the Tarshish Queen. A cable was passed and rigged—Captain Ishikawa seemed to have taken charge of that—and the Queen t
urned her bow north again, and then further west of north as the thick rope came taut and rose out of the water, with spurting little jets of water as the ship’s hundreds of tons bore on it.
The Queen responded sluggishly. As it did praus and rowboats and things he couldn’t name except that they floated and had armed men on them and were coming from the western part of the bay streamed past them, falling on the drifting galleys. The flood of small boats streaming out from the pink whatever-it-was to the east moved forward likewise, and in a few moments they were exchanging flights of arrows and flung spears, then crashing together in knots of screaming hacking ferocity on the blood-tinged water.
John looked northward towards the shore. Troops were moving there from both sides, glittering blocks of spearheads and . . .
“Are those elephants?” he blurted.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
KERAJAAN OF BARU DENPASAR
CERAM SEA
OCTOBER 21ST
CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD
“Well, this is a pleasant contrast, what?” Pip said, beaming and lying back in the recliner.
She was enjoying feeling clean and the fresh clothes and the smell of dinner; also having all the leaders of the strangers here where she could appraise them and get a feeling for what was going on. They had been appropriately, though not effusively, grateful when the battle ended in the usual inconclusive withdrawal by both sides to lick wounds. Now there was time to talk.
The night was dark with a thick frosting of stars and a quarter-moon just risen, but the lamps on the poles above and the fire-pits and the bigger lanterns around the grounded Tarshish Queen a few hundred yards away gave plenty of light. Palms rustled overhead, and there was a heavy sweet scent from a nearby frangipani tree; she had some of the cream-and-gold blossoms tucked into her hair.
She lay back carefully, to avoid too much pressure on her bruises or the bandages covering a few cuts; fortunately the batik kain sarung and light lacy uden blouse she was wearing were very comfortable, as well as being extremely fetching in her opinion. None of the hurts were serious, and only one had required a couple of stitches.
She was feeling a bit of a glow of satisfaction too, one that had only a little to do with the tall glass of fruit-enhanced rum in her hand; it had a little pink paper umbrella in it, which seemed to be a Balinese tradition. Or at least to be what they assumed outsiders would like, for some reason. There was a platter of mango and pineapple cubes and bits of spicy grilled chicken on little bamboo skewers on the other arm of the lounger, by way of an appetizer. Fortunately nobody had managed to hit her in the face, so eating wasn’t uncomfortable.
Captain Feldman wasn’t as happy, which was understandable given the state of his ship. From this camp on the shore her sailors had set up—with spars and sails for shady pavilions—there was an excellent view of the Tarshish Queen. It was even dramatic, in the flickering light of the torches and lanterns, glints on metal and on the surface of the water, the masts looming up into the darkness, and beyond that the yellow lights of the city. She didn’t look east to Carcosa; you didn’t, unless it was really necessary. Looking too much seemed to give them a grip on you, with consequences that varied but were never good. And you could never tell how much was too much until it was too late.
The elephants had managed to get the Montivallan ship well above the low-tide mark when they took over the tow from her ship; it was amazing how much force a half-dozen of the big animals could exert. Then they’d brought up timbers in their trunks as the mahouts shouted and waved their goads so that the crew could prop her upright on her keel when the tide went out, and pump her dry. Tomorrow they could get her stores and catapults and ballast off, then float her farther in on the next tide, and do thorough repairs on the hull damage before running her over to the rather rudimentary Baru Denpasar docks for fitting out.
Speaking of which . . .
“What’s your ballast?” Pip asked Captain Feldman.
Even though she gathered he was on a government charter—they’d been a little evasive about that and she sensed dissension where they came from—the ballast was probably something he was planning to sell if he could. There was always rock to replace it. Sand would do at a pinch.
“Metals,” the merchant skipper from Newport said. “Mostly rebar in bundles wound with copper wire. Some brass or lead or PVC pipe, some aluminum sheet.”
He had a good poker face, but his ears were pricking up a bit in a reflex Pip was very familiar with, someone scenting an opportunity. She’d grown up around salvagers and merchant-adventurers and listening to their stories, the sort who’d follow the scent of a score across broken glass. And probably sell the glass, too, just for the giggles and the principle of the thing. She liked and admired them, or she wouldn’t have ended up on this harebrained venture; they were certainly more fun than the stodgy burghers and smug bankers . . .
Bankers! Avert the omen, she thought, and took another sip of the rum. Buccaneers, only with lower morals and less style.
. . . and pompous Stationmasters who were the other parts of the tip of the modern social pyramid in Australia’s fragments once you got above the level of—she shuddered—honest toil.
The bits lower down could be fun too, particularly if you avoided the solid, stolid yeomen and worthy artisans, but only to dip into occasionally. Her mother had been fond of saying that she’d known riches and poverty both, and riches were much, much better. Daddy, of course, had been born heir to the Colonelcy.
“Metals? Oh, jolly good,” she said. “Just between me and thee, Captain, bargain hard. They’re very short of steel here and they need every spearhead they can make. If it had been spring steel alloys you could write your own ticket, they want that very badly indeed.”
He shifted in his rattan recliner, winced as it put stress on his wounded left arm in its sling, and sipped again at his drink.
“The Raja is honest?” he said. “He wouldn’t just take it? Monarchs tend to do that, in time of war.”
“He’s reasonably honest. I’d worry if you announced you were planning on sailing off with that load, since he needs it badly, but if you’re willing to sell, he’ll pay.”
“So he’ll be as honest as his sense of duty lets him?” Feldman asked, with a crook of one eyebrow.
Pip crooked one eyebrow back at him, and they smiled in mutual recognition.
Really, no flies on this one at all! Remember that being bright doesn’t mean you’re always the smartest person in the room, as Mummy said.
“That’s a very good way to put it, Captain,” she said with respect.
Besides the arrow wound Feldman had a couple of bandaged cuts and stabs, nothing serious either but enough to hurt. Pip suspected that he was also restless because he couldn’t be up and about supervising the stripping-down of his ship, though his First Mate seemed entirely competent and they’d shut down for the night anyway. He’d commendably seen to the arrangements for the wounded; there was an infirmary tent, and his physician had confirmed that the local doctors knew their business before pitching in to help them.
Feldman said something in a language she recognized as ancient Greek, but didn’t speak herself despite the best efforts of Rockhampton Girls Grammar School, though she could puzzle out a written sentence if she had to and handle Latin rather better.
Though I managed to score top marks in surreptitious drinking and covert shagging, she thought mordantly.
At her look he quoted in English:
“‘So I will never waste my lifespan on the vain unprofitable search for a perfect man; if you find him, send me word. But that one I will love and honor who does nothing base from free will. Against Necessity, even Gods do not fight.’ A poet named Simonides of Keos said that, very long ago. But some things do not change, even after the Change.”
Prince John frowned.
Which doesn’t make him look any l
ess ducky, she thought.
In fact he looked the way a Prince should, rather than like a harassed bureaucrat, cunning politician or chinless wastrel, which in her experience were more typical of the breed. And he’d been strumming that lute-thing quite skillfully as background music. She had a weakness for handsome, square-chinned, broad-shouldered, long-limbed young men with nice hair who could play the guitar and had big soulful greenish-brown eyes. His charms were showing to advantage, since he’d switched to a sarong too; athletic, but not blocky, and not too much body hair.
Wouldn’t be like wrestling with a sheepskin. Some is good, too much is a bother.
If they could use a sword with dashing authority, so much the better. And he had an intriguing accent, almost French; she knew what that sounded like, because her nanny had been from the Republic of Noumea, over on New Caledonia, a refugee from one of the incessant kanak-colon fights there.
The frown gave way to a charming smile directed at her; she hadn’t been wrong about feeling his interest.
“I thought that there’s been an awful lot of building here, if they’re short of tools,” he said. “But perhaps they used up their reserves, Lady Balwyn-Abercrombie?”
“He’s not just a pretty face,” Thora Garwood said, smiling a little wryly at her. “Lady Balwyn-Abercrombie.”
“Oh, do call me Pip, all of you,” she said, smiling back. “Everyone does.”
Now that’s complex, Pip thought.
She mentally shifted her gaze between Thora and John; she prided herself on being able to read body language.
They are so getting it off together, but if it weren’t for that I’d have sworn she was with that other musician, Deor . . . except that he’s queer as a two-headed calf. Pity, and even more about his boyfriend; he’s quite ducky in a sensitive, earnest youngish way. Nice backside, too.
She stuck to business, something that was becoming dismally familiar. Socializing on shipboard had been very limited, because she was in more or less a lion-tamer’s position, and whatever you did with lions if you had any sense you didn’t take them to bed. Which was all very well for the month or two she’d anticipated this trip taking, or even three or four months, but it was going on six months now, which was ridiculous for a red-blooded Townsville lass. Landing here hadn’t made much difference; she didn’t dare let any of the courtiers get too close, or show what local custom would see as vulnerability. And an adolescence spent largely at Rockhampton Girls Grammar School had taught her that while girls could be a lot of fun and often had fewer complications, she basically preferred men.
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