Where we’re going to fight, John thought. Unless they run away . . . no, that’s wishful thinking. Don’t worry about it, John: that doesn’t help. Particularly don’t think about the Pallid Mask . . .
He really didn’t want to think about those lambent yellow eyes, and the place they’d taken him.
Near the city were orchards and patches of things like spices and breadfruit-trees, and the type of sugarcane they chewed raw like candy here. He looked at those with interest. Breakfast had been one of the globular breadfruits, cored and stuffed with sweetened pineapple and banana and durian chunks and shaved coconut and spices, then covered and baked and presented to be eaten with a spoon, still steaming and about the consistency of a moist fruity brioche.
Wish I’d been in better shape to appreciate it, he thought.
Beyond was the open countryside, the peasant’s world of rice-paddies each with a little pyramidal shrine at one corner, much like the calvaires you found in Catholic areas back home. The villages were long irregular rectangles of joined compounds, embowered with fruit and banana and coconut trees and clumps of carefully managed bamboo. Each had three substantial public temples—one at the northern entrance where an S-curve in the road foiled evil spirits, one in an open square in the middle and another at the southern end with the cemetery.
“What are those?” he asked Pip, pointing to fields that weren’t in the waving knee-high green of rice.
She gave the fields a flick of the eye. “Plantains . . . manioc . . . those are sarda melons, we grow them at home . . . those leafy things are loba, they make a mordant for dyeing cloth that works better than alum, I wish I could get a cargo of it . . . that strip is cardamom, and those are cinnamon bushes, and the one beyond is indigo,” she said. “The row of little trees with the multiple stems is nutmeg.”
Then she gave him a glance. “You’ve never seen those before, have you?”
He shook his head; the list of names just meant green, bushy or leafy as far as he could see. “They don’t go with having a winter. Live and learn!”
It all smelled green, in a rank way unfamiliar to him, a hot scent of growth and mud and rot and an underlying tang of compost and manure from the paddies.
And it all looks like gardens as much as farms, he thought.
There were colorful flowers in plenty too, on tree and vine and even moving towards the city by the cartload along with baskets of grain and fruit and heaps of nameless roots and trussed chickens and pigs and bundled firewood.
My God, how they must work to keep all this up!
A throbbing drum-like sound echoed from each village, one after another taking it up, running on ahead of them.
“What’s that?” he said, cocking an ear at the low percussive beat; each would be audible for miles, and together they made a sound like the heartbeat of the Earth.
“Kulkul,” Deor said; he’d been getting more communicative again, apparently taking his cue from Thora, and John was glad of it.
Though it makes me feel guilty. But then, right now what doesn’t make me feel guilty? I’m not exactly looking forward to a fight, but I am going to welcome the distraction of it.
“Sort of a hollow-log drum with a slit in the side, and they’ve got one in every village, in a little tower arrangement they call the Bale Kulkul.”
“Don’t tell me, that means drum tower. Sort of like a church bell-tower in a Christian country?”
Deor smiled. “Right you are, Your Highness. There are different beats for each occasion, weddings, funerals, ceremonies, assemblies.”
Grimly: “That’s the call to arms. I can feel . . . see . . . no, not really either. There’s a feeling . . . as if the drums were the rumble of feet and the crackle of lightning . . . and a warrior riding an elephant taller than the sky, a warrior king with a blue face and a spear in his hand that is the lightning . . . no, that’s not it . . . an army of the air with the heads of beasts . . .”
He took a deep breath and shrugged. “Just say that it’s also a summoning beyond the world we know. And if they are going to war, they do not go alone.”
Then he frowned, and Thora touched the silver Hammer she wore around her neck the way a Christian did a cross.
“And there’s the oddest sense of very distant kinship, too,” he said.
And there was war in Heaven, John thought with a shiver. It’s the same one here—against Principalities and Powers.
Folk gathered in clumps, bowing and pointing, chattering and waving their conical straw hats to the colorful cavalcade as it passed by in a glitter of plumes and steel and gold, or stopped their work in the fields to do likewise. The big black water-buffalos they used for draught stopped too and stared, their ears twitching and huge liquid eyes mildly curious. He thought he heard their ruler’s name in the shouts, and they had the feel of loyal cries, something he’d heard all his life. It was difficult to fake.
“So, Raja Dalem is popular?” he said quietly.
Toa was trudging along beside Pip’s horse with his huge spear over his shoulder, sweat shining on his tattooed skin but no sign of strain on his heavy-featured face. The local horses were well-made, with a strong trace of Arab ancestry, but fairly small. John felt as if he was back on the pony he’d had when he was ten, and for the big man it would be like trying to ride a very large dog. An elephant would have done much better for someone his size.
“Pretty much,” he said. “They got good reason to like him, see? Or cling to him like a fucking life preserver. For starters, the Carcosans are sodding maniacs when they aren’t worse.”
John made a wordless sound of agreement and pushed the memory of being somewhere else out of his mind. It tended to fade like a dream anyway, but now and then it came flooding back.
Toa went on: “And everyone else on this island hates the Balinese like poison, so if the Raja loses—”
He drew an eloquent thumb across his neck and made a horribly realistic gargling sound, very much like a man drowning in his own blood. John nodded, and winced inwardly as sounds very much like that came back into his memory with an unpleasant, full-sensory vividness. You were supposed to get used to such things, but so far he hadn’t and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He’d met plenty of people for whom killing was just hard disagreeable work, like shearing a struggling sheep or mucking out stables, and there was something at least slightly wrong with them.
Besides the village fanes and little shrines there were some substantial temples by themselves a little distance aside. The latest one by the irrigation canal had a red-plastered wall around it, a tall pillared gate split in the middle and flanked by guardian fanged raksasa figures holding their clubs, and a triangular capstone carved with what might be worshipers, gods, demons or some combination. Within rose the tall pagoda-like arrangement of multiple roofs of decreasing size one after another on a tall narrow building. It looked strange to Montivallan eyes, like square mushrooms on a skewer of shish kebab, but it was impressive in its way.
A group of warriors were waiting by the temple gate, squatting on their hams or sitting cross-legged. As the column passed the spearmen and archers trotted out and fell in with the Raja’s infantry. By their looks they were peasants most of the time and only a few had so much as a helmet, though there were plenty of straw hats or head-cloths tied at the front; skinny-wiry-muscular men with bare or sandaled feet, bare brown chests, sarongs drawn up between the legs and tucked into broad sashes in a way that made them look like baggy shorts. Their weapons were simple, rattan shields covered in hide, seven-foot bamboo spears with steel heads, bamboo bows and quivers of long steel-tipped arrows slung at the waist, the inevitable keris and parang, but they looked tough and determined as well. Many had healed scars that didn’t look like the result of agricultural accidents.
“What’s that?” he said, nodding towards the temple; as they passed he could see it was new, probably no older
than he was, though parts of the foundations were older.
“Sumbak Temple,” Pip said; she rode with the same easy lifelong skill as he did, but in a rather different style, with more bend to the knees. “Water temple.”
Her shirt and shorts were khaki today, but she still wore the suspenders and the odd hat she called a bowler. Evidently that was how she dressed for active work.
His mind supplied other references to Pip and active, and he shifted in his saddle and forced himself back to business.
“Every dozen or so of these little villages belong to a Sumbak, and come together to do rites in the temple . . . and also to manage the water distribution system, planting and harvesting times, that sort of thing. The farmers meet with the Sumbak priest presiding and vote on how to keep the system up and fine anyone who doesn’t do his share. Then a couple of dozen Sumbaks join around a larger temple and so on to manage canals and dams. They use it to organize a lot of other things as well as watering the fields. It’s all a bit . . . fractal?”
John made a gesture with his left hand to indicate he’d understood the reference.
“Like those militiamen,” he said. “Well organized!”
“They do organization a treat here,” Toa observed. “You might not think it the way they dress fancy and they’re always beating gamelans and dancing about and processing back and forth to some temple or another and go into fits if someone uses the wrong inflection talking to them, but give the word and my oath! They swarm out like bloody army ants.”
He looked over at the First Mate of the Tarshish Queen, who was along to ride herd on the catapults and their crews.
“Is that some sort of Hindu thing, mate?”
Radavindraban shrugged. “It depends on which Hindus, yes indeed, and even now there are very many of us turning up like a penny wherever you go and in many varieties and types and kinds. These are not much like my people. Or those bloody maniacs in Sambalpur who treat everyone else like a dalit, even good Nagarathar like myself.”
At their incomprehension he filled in, tapping himself on the chest: “Merchant caste, very respectable.”
Deor nodded. “These folk seem more . . . they’re harder than those I met on Bali itself. Not braver, but . . . harder.”
Thora snorted. “They’ve had to become so, brother. If they weren’t hard, they’d be dead.”
More groups of warrior-peasant militia joined them as the day went on until there was a fair little army on the road, with scouts riding or loping along to either side in the middle distance. There was more brush, and the land began to rumple a bit as the mountains grew closer, fingers of forested higher land extending into the plain. The crosshatch of bunds between the rice fields became shallow stepped terraces as the terrain acquired more of a roll.
Thora was right, John thought. These people’s parents or grandparents fought their way ashore, desperate and hungry, and their children look ready to fight just as hard now for their homes and families.
About an hour after noon they stopped by yet another temple; the troops simply squatted by the roadside, or dismounted and saw to their horses. The mahouts had the elephants kneel, which was a fascinating process in itself, before their burdens were removed. Besides more militia this temple had a field kitchen set up and ready, forewarned by the Raja’s messengers and the drumbeats and manned—or rather largely womanned and childed—by the local folk. They served bowls of rice, and of a spicy, garlicky soup called soto bali thick with pork, vermicelli, peppers, mung beans and sprouts, and bore off a special tray of vegetable dishes for the priest and priestess with much humble bowing as it was handed through the gauze curtains that surrounded them. They were too holy to be exposed to common view, or to eat flesh.
The chance to take off his breast-and-back and arming doublet was inexpressible relief. After a moment to cool he found himself sharp-set for his rice and soup, though he was starting to get nostalgic at the thought of a good wheat loaf . . .
With a crackling-crisp crust, warm from the oven and slathered with sweet fresh butter and eaten with a hunk of sharp cheese, he thought.
More villagers brought fodder and grain to the horses and oxen, and heaps of grass and sugarcane and melons to the elephants, who stuffed it all into their mouths with their trunks and ate with noisy crunching dribbling enthusiasm before ambling over to the canal to drink hugely and blow water on each other with their trunks and be scrubbed down with coarse-bristled brushes on long sticks by the mahouts. That seemed to be something they enjoyed as much as eating and drinking, though sometimes they showed it by playfully shooting a trunkful of water over their attendants.
Tuan Anak Agung, the commander of the lancers and the expedition as a whole, came over to John as he sat finishing his soup; they hadn’t had much chance to talk yet. The cheek-flaps of his pointed helmet were pushed up, and he handed his bowl back to an aide as he halted with a slight scowl on his scarred face.
Ishikawa calmly kept moving rice and pieces of meat and vegetable into his mouth with his chopsticks, handling them with a finicky delicacy; the locals used forks and spoons and their fingers. He and the Baru Denpasaran officer exchanged cool appraising glances and small polite bows. They had common enemies; that didn’t necessarily make them friends.
Anak pointed north, to a very faint thread of smoke above the mountains, and addressed John:
“Very dangerous from too soon now,” he said in passable but thickly accented English.
“Carcosans?”
“Yes, at fort, maybe also in jungle. Smoke, that is dirty forest savage dog-people. Burn trees for fields. That makes ponds and . . . cuts for water . . .”
“Canals,” John said.
“Yes, canals full with soil. Lazy, murdering, ignorant stinking sister-fucking filth-pigs.”
Don’t be shy, tell me what you really think of them, John thought, his face impassive; it wasn’t his place to tell the locals how to deal with each other, but he could have an opinion.
Aloud: “Are they”—he paused briefly while he sought a tactful term—“the previous inhabitants?”
“Some,” Anak said. “The ones in hills fight for Carcosa, most often. Some Orang Iban. Push in from north coast, over mountains. Steep there,” he added, making a gesture to indicate land falling vertically into the sea. “Not good land for rice.”
“Iban?” John asked.
He’d picked up the word orang, which meant man. Used collectively the translation was tribe or folk or nation depending on context. Thora and Deor had come up quietly, with Ruan behind them carrying his strung longbow.
“Iban, the Sea Dyaks,” the poet-adventurer said.
Thora added: “From Borneo, but they get around these days.”
John wasn’t surprised. Folk-migrations had happened all over the world where people survived at all, and it seemed the ocean made it easier here in this world of archipelagos. There was a good road to everywhere if you could sail, and the distances were short enough for even outrigger canoes to go anywhere along the island chains.
Deor went on: “We had a . . . bit of a meeting with some of them when we came through the islands a year and a half ago. That was before we sailed from Bali to Hawaii, but I didn’t know they’d gotten this far.”
“Great sailors and traders, but also pirates often enough, and dangerous,” Thora said, and shrugged cheerfully. “Mind you, I’ve been called dangerous myself, Johnnie.”
Anak eyed her carefully, as with some wild and perilous thing he didn’t quite believe he was seeing and didn’t understand except that it was perilous. A fighting-man of his experience would know that, at least; would absorb the knowledge from the other’s gestalt in a process as unconscious as it was certain. She’d left off her armor for now, though she was belted with backsword and pukko-knife, and wore simply trousers and what Bearkillers called a sports bra for some reason. It showed her tigress bui
ld, and a fair collection of scars, mostly on the left flank and right arm; cavalry scars. Of course, she was also missing a bit of the little finger on her left hand.
Marks like that on someone of their quite similar ages meant you’d stayed alive in an environment involving homicidal strangers bearing edged metal, and done it for a decade or more. Which meant a fair number of others hadn’t survived you. The way she held herself and moved would reinforce the lesson.
“Yes, Iban dangerous, wanita ningrat is wise,” he said, using a respectful honorific for her.
Which is wise, John thought.
“Users of sumpitan, takers of tops.”
The Raja’s officer mimed lifting off his head and then squeezed as if to shrink it. John frowned in puzzlement, and Deor exchanged a few words with Anak in either Malay or Balinese; they didn’t sound different enough for the Montivallan to tell them apart.
“Sumpitan, blowguns,” Deor said. “Poisoned darts in the blowguns. And they take their enemies’ heads and preserve them as trophies.”
Toa snorted. “Not that they know how to do it right,” he said. “Secret’s getting the brain and eyes out and then steaming the head and using shark oil and smoking at a low heat before you sun dry the bloody things, see? That’s how you make a real mokomokai. Last forever, straight up.”
Everyone looked at him for a moment and he grinned and lolled his tongue, a gargoyle figure with his scars and tattoos, leaning on his great spear.
“Iban hunters of heads, yes,” Anak said, clearing his throat and visibly deciding to ignore him.
“They are allies of the Carcosans?” John said.
“Allies of selfs. Fight us, fight them, fight before-people, fight each other, fight for pay.”
He scowled, his brown face flushing ruddy with anger as his hand clenched on the worn ivory and gold of his parang-hilt.
“Come here when our great hero fathers did, take advantage steal part of this our beautiful island. Thieves!”
I wonder what irony is in Balinese? John thought.
Prince of Outcasts Page 31
