The Sea Peoples

by S. M. Stirling

  In the waking world he wondered without knowledge, and in dreams he knew without pondering. In an abstract way it was interesting, raising the question of whether there was an Alan Thurston, rather than fragments and masks that fooled even whatever it was that wore them.

  This wasn’t one of the really bad dreams, either. They came in series, like sets of linked tales, like those of the Knights of the Round Table or King Conan’s wanderings or the Quest of the Ring or the epic of Captain Call and Gus McRae from Texas to Montana.

  This particular set of dream-tales was perhaps the oddest of them all. He thought it was of an ancestor of his, another of the lost Imperial Dynasty of America; the man called himself Hildred Castaigne.

  Certainly it was from before the Change, since in it he saw machines that no longer functioned—steamships and locomotive engines and flying ships like giant observation balloons with engines that were a droning buzz in the sky. The bits and pieces were from different points in the dream-man’s life, in no particular order, sometimes new, sometimes maddeningly the same over and over, night after night, sometimes with a doubled view as if he were seeing what the man saw and also what was really there . . . if real had any meaning in a dream.

  It’s like talking to a lunatic in your own head, he thought. A lunatic who’s also a God.

  In the old days there had been special places for the insane, asylums. In the world the Change had made, few places or families had resources to spare for someone who couldn’t earn at least part of their keep, not if it went on for years. Functional madmen were tolerated, and the other types tended to have accidents or just quietly pass away unless some religious group took them in as an act of piety and sacrifice.

  Not that I’ve got all that much experience with lunatics, but it’s the way I’ve always imagined it.

  This time he/they looked out from a window over a city, many of the buildings newish and looking much like the Capitol buildings in Boise, all columns and domes and marble. Others reared grotesquely high, dozens of stories, but even the tallest weren’t glass-faced like the ones you still saw sometimes where they hadn’t been taken down for salvage. These were sheathed in more natural stone and brick but looking the odder for that, because he had enough engineering education to know that you couldn’t possibly build load-bearing walls that high.

  Castaigne—the man he dreamed of being—was sitting in a soft-padded chair in a book-lined study not altogether unlike the one in the ranch-house back home, reading a book between glances out the window. The slightly stuffy smell of velvet and leather-bound books contrasted with the fresher air through the open panes, but that had a tinge of metallic smokiness too as well as the concentrated town-smell of horses.

  The hands that held the book weren’t his own—thinner and paler, not the hands of a man who’d ridden as early as he could walk and handled bow and reins and saber, lariat and branding iron, or pitched in with the ranch-hands at roundups and the endless rounds of chores in the lonely estate on the shores of Lake Hali in the mountains of what had once been Idaho.

  These were a city man’s hands, and a scholar’s, he thought. The words on the page were familiar both to the man he was in the dream and to his waking self—it was the play he’d read so often, The King in Yellow. There was an eerie detachment to the scene; he knew the words, and the man he was in the dream knew the words, though he was more frightened of them than Alan. The thin fingers trembled as they traced the lines of text, and Alan could hear the way his mind spoke to itself and what it felt, like a faint echo in his own, a tale told so often that it had become part of him:

  I cannot forget Carcosa, where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.

  Castaigne slammed the book shut and sat shivering and sweating, tears trickling down his face as he laughed shrilly for a moment. The leather cover bore an embossed figure in gold, the outline of a tall man robed and hooded and masked in yellow with the shadow of ragged crimson wings behind him.

  A ghost of pain shot through the man whose shaking hands held the book, focused at the back of the neck; Alan recognized the sort of ache you felt from a bad thump on the head, the sort he’d had occasionally after a horse threw him or a sparring-match with wooden sabers got out of hand and someone bounced the ashwood blade off his helmet too hard.

  Then the dream-man rose and walked into a luxurious if fussily-ornamented bedroom, and then to a picture on the wall, an oil-painting of a woman in an elaborate uncomfortable-looking dress that left most of her upper body bare. It swung aside to reveal a safe with a combination lock of curious design. The thin fingers were deft on it, and Alan could feel the ridged metal beneath them.

  Dream-man waited for three minutes or so, his mind a golden reverie, an ecstasy of waiting, and in it Alan found his mind more and more one with the man he dreamed. It was hard to resist the feeling of exultation, of power beyond imagining in vistas of rule and glory. The safe clicked and chimed like a musical clock, and he swung back the solid steel doors when the safe opened . . .

  . . . and I lift, from its velvet crown, a diadem of purest gold, blazing with diamonds. I do this every day, and yet the joy of waiting and at last touching again the diadem, only seems to increase as the days pass. It is a diadem fit for a King among kings, an Emperor among emperors. The King in Yellow might scorn it, but it shall be worn by his royal servant.

  I held it in my arms until the alarm in the safe rang harshly, and then tenderly, proudly, I replaced it and shut the steel doors.

  The pleasure of the crown was infinite, but somehow also repellant; it blazed with life and power, but made him feel as if he’d stumbled into a tomb and found it on the head of a mummified corpse stretched out on a bier over which black beetles scuttled.

  Dream-self walked slowly back into the study, and leaned on a window sill that overlooked a great square. The afternoon sun poured into the windows, and a gentle breeze stirred the branches of the elms and maples in the park; from the buds and tender new leaves it was spring, wherever this was. A flock of pigeons circled about the tower of a Christian church, swirls of them alighting on the purple tiled roof or wheeling downward to a bronze fountain cast in the semblance of a lotus blossom in front of a marble triumphal arch. Gardeners were busy with the flower beds around the fountain, and the freshly turned earth smelled sweet and spicy. A familiar style of lawn mower drawn by a fat white horse clinked across the dense velvety green, and watering carts poured showers of spray over the roads about.

  Children in odd clothing—miniature suits shaped like the uniforms sailors wore, or flared gauzy skirts for the girls—ran and played in the spring sunshine amid the banks of bright flowers, and young women in modest long-skirted costumes that reminded him of what the more conservative Mormon ladies wore back home wheeled elaborate baby carriages. They chose paths that let them exchange flirtatious glances with men lolling on the benches; from their boots and spurs and sabers they were horse-soldiers, though the uniforms of gold-slashed blue jackets and tight scarlet pants and polished tasseled boots were far more colorful than most he knew. Only Associates among the peoples he knew were such peacocks at war, and the cut was different from theirs.

  Through the trees, the triumphal arch of the monument at the park’s heart glistened like silver in the sunshine. On the other side of the square were handsome-looking barracks and stables of white stone, three stories of regular windows above pillars and arches, enough for several regiments and alive with color and motion. It all seemed like a vision of a land strong, contented and at peace as its folk went about the business of their everyday lives, earning
their bread and raising their children.

  Yet he felt—unsure if it was himself or dream-self—an irresistible impulse to lean out and scream warnings of what crawled hungrily beneath the surface and waited to emerge.

  Warnings or threats? Of the doom that falls from the darkening sky?

  “Cassilda’s fate shall be yours! You cannot escape! None of you can escape! None of us can escape!”

  Alan Thurston woke gasping. His troop-sergeant lifted a hand from his shoulder.

  “That must have been a doozy, sir!” he said. “It’s all these heathen fruit you ate giving you collywobbles—not a decent apple in the place.”

  Alan sat upright on his cot, head nearly brushing the hot canvas of the tent and smelling the stuffy scent; it had cleared up outside, only a few piled white clouds in a dome of blue sky broken by the white tips of the volcanoes. The sides of the tent were rolled up to show that, and the vivid green of the grass that the encampment of the 1st Latah Volunteer Cavalry (Army of the United States of Boise) was busily treading into mud. Memory tattered away like wisps of yellow thread, sliding through the fingers of his attention, and he shrugged his bare shoulders.

  Instead he remembered what day it was, and a long slow smile lit his face.

  Órlaith! he thought, conscious of a tightness in his throat. And we actually should have some time for each other.

  Sergeant Creveld was a weathered man in his thirties with several scars on his tanned face and close-cropped sandy hair; he looked at Alan with avuncular fondness beneath the disciplined respect. Order was strict in all the Boisean forces, but the cavalry were less formal about it than the heavy infantry . . . and this was a volunteer unit anyway, raised for the campaign to avenge the High King’s death. Creveld was a Regular, though, one of the cadre transferred to see that the reservists who made up the rest of the force came up to scratch. Everyone in Boise did his three years in the service and drilled regularly for the next twenty, of course, but cavalry came from ranching areas where folk were born and raised in the saddle.

  And it took a lot more than three years to make a first class horse-archer; you had to be practically born at it.

  “You wanted a bath, sir? Don’t blame you after wiping down with salt water for weeks. And since you’ve got a date with the local bigwigs and you-know-who . . .”

  He grinned, a friendly male expression that knew no rank and grew wider as Alan flushed and cleared his throat.

  Alan had worked hard helping get the unit settled in, and everyone was proud that their commander was dating the Crown Princess, who had neither shouted it to the skies nor made any attempt to conceal it. They were more or less proud that the President’s nephew was their commander, too, especially since Frederick Thurston was leading the Boisean contingent personally and had made it plain he wasn’t holding Alan’s father against him. Quite a few of the troopers were his neighbors or retainers or neighbors’ retainers back home, which helped since they’d been used to seeing him at county fairs and barbeques and round-ups and militia musters all their lives.

  Most of the time he and his mother were just well-to-do neighbors, not internal political exiles, the more so as memories of the Prophet’s War faded and a new generation grew up very tired of hearing their parents’ stories.

  Everyone was glad the First Lady was back in Boise watching the store, too. Virginia Thurston had never forgotten or forgiven anything about anyone, as far as anyone knew, and it was widely thought that included anyone descended from her husband’s dead traitor of a brother. She’d have been far more unpopular if it wasn’t equally true that she never forgot a friend or supporter or hesitated to help them when they needed it.

  Well, Mother’s more or less the same way—maybe it’s something women with blue eyes have in common, he thought.

  He’d been sleeping naked under a light blanket, all you needed here in the heat that also explained why the sides of the tent were rolled up under the eaves—though you did need a roof, since it had rained hard twice in the twenty-six hours they’d been ashore. He ducked out with a towel around his waist—that hid the unmistakable physical evidence that he was thinking about the date too, since he didn’t want to give more help than he had to to the cavalry’s bawdy sense of humor—and found a folding canvas bath steaming and ready, and slipped gratefully into the hot warmth. Working through most of the night had made the afternoon nap just enough, even for someone only twenty-two and in hard good shape. It was nothing he couldn’t handle, as he’d handled spending twenty hours in the saddle on a roundup.

  “We’ve got a good spot for drawing water, too, sir. Upstream of that mob from the CORA,” Creveld said.

  Alan snorted and nodded agreement. The levy from the Central Oregon Ranchers Association were individually tough plainsmen and mountaineers, hunters and herders who were good riders and handy with blade and their saddlebows; they even had some coordination, at a friends-and-neighbors level. At anything beyond that they were all anarchists by Boisean standards, and while he didn’t really think they pissed in the same places they drew drinking water he wasn’t altogether sure that the company sergeant was just being prejudiced, either.

  A freckle-faced HQ clerk with red braids who doubled as an orderly brought him a cup of coffee, and he thanked her absently. Since they grew it here it was the real thing, too, not the mixture of chicory and toasted grain that went by that name in most of Montival unless you lived near navigable water or a railroad or were very wealthy or both; he’d only tasted it two or three times a year before he left home. He could feel it making his heart beat faster, unless that was just anticipation. He certainly felt alert enough by the time he’d drained the last of the sweet black liquid.

  He sipped and watched the business of the camp, though he could have followed most of it with his eyes closed—the thudding of hooves as a troop galloped past the targets, the snap of bowstrings and whistle of shafts and thud of points hitting piled-earth targets, the clatter of wooden practice blades against each other or on the pell-posts hammered into the ground or the flatter crack on the varnished bullhide of a shield. Fainter and farther he could hear iron on iron from the blacksmith-farrier.

  Getting the unit settled in hadn’t been a problem, just familiar hard work, since competitive pitching and breaking camp was a popular youngster’s school sport in Boise and second nature to anyone grown. Neat rows of tents along regular laneways marked the streets of the camp; coils of barbed wire on slanted, sharpened steel stakes marked the perimeter; the center held the larger tents that held HQ, infirmary, armory and portable forge. Off to one side were the wagon park and rope corrals for the regiment’s horses, which had taken far more shipping space than those who rode them. A crew was working on a disassembled catapult, the sort of light scorpion that galloped along with horse-soldiers.

  If you knew horses, which he did, you could tell that the mounts were still very happy to be ashore, though not quite as hysterically glad as they had been yesterday. The campsite a few miles outside Hilo was only gently sloping, but it was thin-soiled and rocky and had been used as cattle-pasture; everything more fertile was densely cultivated with fields and groves of crops he only knew from books, like oranges and limes, or didn’t know at all like breadfruit and cassava and taro. The Montivallan expeditionary force was paying the owner generous rental fees, fertilizing his grass, and had paid premium prices in cash for most of his herd except the picked breeding stock to boot.

  Several of them were roasting over fires somewhere within smelling distance right now, and the scent of meat basted with barbeque sauce made his mouth water after a long time on ship’s biscuit and salt meat and canned goods. Everyone craved greens even more.

  As of the morning’s roll call, the regiment had had four troops plus the HQ company, with five hundred and ninety-six effectives—one luckless individual had fallen overboard in the middle of the night four days out from Astoria, unless he�
��d been carried off by a very large seagoing owl, and six were currently on sick report. Several hundred were on leave with thousands from the other contingents, wandering around Hilo and seeing the sights and just stretching their legs.

  The rest were mostly working; grooming the horses, going over their tack, or drilling with weapons and practicing moving mounted in groups to the commands, by word or bugle. The tink-tink of the farrier sounded in the background, the panting wheeze of the bellows, and the screech as someone sharpened a saber on the pedal-powered grindstone.

  When the water had cooled a little—and he had too, which made standing up a bit less embarrassing—he dressed in field uniform: riding boots made so they’d be fairly comfortable for work on foot too, baggy linsey-woolsey trousers of light summer weight, pullover short-sleeved shirt of knit linen, and four-pocket uniform jacket. He’d left off the mail shirt and the steel helmet modeled after the one the old American forces had used, but buckled on the belt with bowie knife and curved stirrup-hilted sword as automatically as he put on his hat or boots; he’d have done that at home, too. You didn’t go beyond the front verandah unarmed once you were an adult, unless you were of the small minority who lived in big cities. That was true most places he knew about, not just Boise.

  At least it’s a better uniform than one with crimson tights, he thought, then wondered for an instant why he’d had the thought before it slipped away.

  The only people he knew who did wear crimson tights were from the Portland Protective Association, and they didn’t do it in the field, just when they were peacocking around their castles and manors and at court.

  “I’m going to practice a little more, sergeant,” Alan said.

  The sergeant’s eyebrows quirked. “That crazy Mackenzie dancing?” he said. “And you’ll wear a kilt?”