The Sea Peoples

by S. M. Stirling

  It would all have looked much more pleasing if several of the lamp-posts hadn’t had ropes flung over them and nooses holding bodies dangling and slowly turning as they hung swollen-faced and bulge-eyed. The pedestrians ignored them, faces tight with fear, or occasionally paused to spit and laugh.

  Toa’s head snapped up. “Something bad coming . . . hear those voices?”

  Deor listened. Savage shouting and pounding feet, but not those of battle. Pip turned an enquiring face to Toa, but the scop answered first, memories taking him back to a place of fear and flight, and whitewash peeling from blank walls along narrow streets. Thora pulling his arm across her shoulders as he staggered reeling with blood running down his face, the sword naked in her other hand, and their desperate panting breaths loud in the alien night.

  He answered: “That’s a mob, the snarl of a hunting mob, and it’s coming our way.”

  Thora nodded, her lips narrowed to bloodlessness at her own recollections. There were a fair number of people ahead of them, and they were turning to look at the noise as well. Most of them ignored it, walking quickly towards wherever they were going. A few pointed and called out, mostly wooping wordless cries. Others laughed and put hands beside their necks and jerked them upward, miming strangulation with heads to one side and lolling tongue and eyes.

  A figure burst through the spectators. It was a man with blood running down his bearded heavy-featured olive face, matting one of the long curls trained into his hair before his ears to the side of his face. He wore a version of the male costume that seemed to be standard here, but darker and with a longer coat.

  Despair flooded his face as he saw Deor and his party standing in his way. He tried to halt, windmilling his arms, and a broad-brimmed black hat fell off his head as he stumbled and began to fall. He spoke then, in a choked whisper, words Deor had heard before and understood:

  “Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Eh.ad!”

  Toa caught him easily, one huge fist knotting in the shabby black coat and whirling him around behind the Maori’s massive back. Deor caught what was almost a throw and found the man was lighter than he would have thought, skin and bone beneath the heavy cloth, smelling of blood and old sweat. What had looked like bulk of body was parcels beneath the coat, parcels wrapped in paper from the way they crackled.

  “Quiet!” the scop snapped. “Behind me!”

  He found the heavy pistol from the shoulder-holster was in his hand; it was the same impulse that would have drawn his sword, but transmuted.

  As our clothes were, Deor thought.

  And thought of One who was also patient and cunning and bided His time. He grinned, a fighting snarl.

  Thora had also drawn her pistol, and then hesitated and looked at it.

  “Oath-sister!” he said. “Don’t think about it, just use it as you would your blade.”

  Pip and Toa poised, cane and wrench ready in their hands.

  Other figures pushed through the crowd on the sidewalk. Some where men and women in ordinary street dress for this time and place, carrying baseball bats and a knotted hangman’s rope, and a can of liquid that smelled like the rock-oil they used for lanterns in some places. Leading them were two in yellow robes, with blank masks like a sketch of a face strapped across their visages. Another similarly masked was in front, but wore only a twist of yellow rags around his loins, and carried a seven-tailed whip whose strands were tipped with sharp-edged beads of pale gold. Blood dripped from them, and from his own back and sides where he’d lashed himself.

  Deor looked into the masked man’s eyes and decided. He leveled the weapon, felt his finger squeeze carefully on the trigger. There was a loud crack and the pistol bucked painfully against his hand, startling him with its suddenness and the brutal power. A jet of flame split the night from its muzzle, and a black spot appeared between the brows of the masked man with the whip. The back of his head exploded in a spray of brain and blood and bone splinters, spattering into the faces behind him. The impact jerked the man he’d killed like no bow he knew, as if he’d been kicked in the head by a horse or hit with a war-hammer.

  Reflexes he didn’t know he owned brought the pistol down again to aim, but Thora had her own pointed already. She fanned the spur of the hammer with the heel of her other hand, an astonishingly swift strobing crack-crack-crack-crack-crack and then click. Men twisted and fell under the brutal impact of the heavy bullets, and one struck the gallon can of rock-oil. It ignited in a gout of crimson flame that sprayed burning liquid across a dozen more.

  Screams and blood and fire in the night, and one woman tossing aside the noose she’d been waving aloft and running away beating at hair like a flaming torch itself.

  “Come!”

  It was the dark-clad man they’d rescued. He plucked at Deor’s jacket. “In His name, come with me now or you die! Don’t run, but walk quickly.”

  Deor did, and the others followed; the man guiding them sank back behind the scop, looking at them in bewilderment then shaking his head as if putting something aside in a greater urgency. Deor found that he’d thrust the weapon back into its holster.

  “Grab me by the collar,” the stranger hissed, when they were among crowds who had only heard the brief fight in the distance. “As if you dragged me along. Now, or someone will suspect!”

  Quick-witted, Deor thought, as he obeyed.

  The man led them away from the brightly lit thoroughfare, randomly at first to throw off any pursuit. Their path ran through streets like the first they’d found; the buildings grew taller and shabbier and the ways between them narrower as they went on. At last he turned down an alleyway where sagging iron stairs zigzagged up the sides of the buildings between blank windows, and thumped at a metal door in what Deor’s musician’s ear recognized as a complex rhythm.

  It opened. A man’s face showed in a dim blue light, with the same strange hairstyle and a family resemblance to their guide, though his locks were a frizzy reddish-brown.

  “These are Righteous Ones, Jacob,” the man said. “They saved me from the servants of the faceless.”

  “Praise Him, Moses.”

  Jacob’s hand came out from under his coat and he stood back. They all hurried down the stairs within into a damp cellar. A lamp was lit as soon as the door was shut and bolted behind them, honest flame rather than the eerie legendary brightness of electricity. Faces peered up at them from pallets on the floor, divided by blankets hung from cords. There was a heavy smell of wet brick and misery. A child began to cry, and was quickly hushed. The man his friend had named Moses unbuttoned his coat and handed out the parcels underneath, which turned out to be loaves of heavy dark bread and blocks of some pungent-smelling cheese.

  The faces that had looked at Deor and his companions with fear now focused on the food with an intensity he recognized, that of folk very hungry indeed. Moses looked at him, weighing a chunk of the rye bread, and Deor shook his head.

  “Thank you, but we have no need and you do.”

  There were murmured blessings, and the food was divided with haste but scrupulous care. The children began to eat as their mothers handed out portions.

  “What can we do to repay you, then?” Moses asked. “You’re welcome to share what refuge we have.”

  “Guide us,” Deor said, trusting instinct. “Help us to escape.”

  The man’s full-lipped mouth quirked. “Where is escape, in the world as it is? But I will do what I can, if you want to get out of the city before the end. Our little ones will have food today, at least.”

  He turned to his companion. “Get them all down to the sub-basement, Jacob.”

  “We shouldn’t wait for the warning sirens?”

  Moses shook his head. “That might be too late. It can’t be long now. Make sure of the water, and the tools for digging out.”

  He turned to the strangers. “Come, follow me.”

&n
bsp; Lantern light showed a stairway; they went down, and through a series of doors. From the way the levels varied and the look of the walls of narrow parts, they were being taken through a maze made by digging passages between the cellars of buildings. Once from the stink and the round shape, through a disused sewer.

  Moses frowned. “Odd. There’s fog . . . well, the ladder and cover are just ahead. May the blessings of the Lord, King of the Universe, go with you.”

  “And with you, my friend,” Deor said, and waved the others forward.

  Their guide turned and disappeared around a corner, the light bobbing and fading. Near-total blackness fell.

  “Link hands?” Pip suggested. “And let me go first. I’ve got good night vision.”

  “Sees like a cat,” Toa agreed.

  They did; Deor felt one hand vanish in the Maori’s huge paw, and the other grip Thora’s familiar long-fingered callused strength. Occasionally he could hear the chink of Pip’s cane against a wall, then a more metallic sound.

  “There’s an iron ladder set into the wall here,” she said softly.

  Deor opened his mouth to reply—to urge caution—when an eerie screech sounded, muffled by the stone and brick around them but still shatteringly loud. For a moment he thought it was some huge beast screaming in rage and fear, and then he knew it was a machine, probably the warning sirens Moses had mentioned. The city above was about to meet its fate. Their only hope was that the trapdoor above led somewhere else.

  “Up!” he shouted through it. “Now, now, now!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HILO

  CAPITAL CITY, AUPUNI O HAWAIʻI

  (KINGDOM OF HAWAIʻI)

  NOVEMBER 26TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

  Órlaith had heard the far-faring merchant skipper Moishe Feldman of Newport describe Hawaiian feasts, and had prudently eaten nothing but a few ship’s biscuits and some local fruit bought from the bumboats that clustered around the fleet that morning . . . though it had been hard to stop with one when she tasted her first mango.

  Restraint was advisable, but those smells are making me dribble, the which would not be dignified!

  The luˉʻau was held outdoors, though she noticed that there were big pavilion-style tents ready to be deployed in an instant. Hilo had a wet climate, even by the standards of Montival’s own coast where it went stretching up through rain forest miles into Alaska. Tonight the sky was clear and the stars were many and bright; torches and baskets of burning wood on poles cast a flickering light, beneath the more prosaic glow of incandescent-mantle pressure lamps.

  The tables were low and flanked by cushioned wicker benches that were only about six inches above the short-cropped green grass and the woven-leaf mats that covered it; fragrant mounds of sweet-smelling pink and blue frangipani and almost overpoweringly sweet night-blooming jasmine and musky guava blossoms competed with the smells of food. Palm trees rustled overhead, and there was a chattering that died away as a herald entered and boomed in Hawaiian and English:

  “The King comes! The Chief!”

  Musicians struck up, and the crowd went to one knee briefly before they rose and sang. Órlaith’s Sword-trained ear translated:

  Hawaiʻi ponoʻ ıˉ,

  Hawaiʻi’s own true sons,

  Naˉnaˉ i kou moˉ ʻ ıˉ,

  Be loyal to your king,

  Kalani aliʻi,

  Your country’s liege and lord

  Ke aliʻi!

  The chief!

  Makua lani eˉ,

  Father above us all,

  Na kaua e pale,

  Who guarded in the war,

  Me ka ihe!

  With his spear!

  The band then politely added the themes from Nihon’s “Kimigayo” and Montival’s “Voices Speak of Home,” which latter meant they’d really been paying attention since it had been adopted very recently.

  One song that was first heard in Japan when Charlemagne was King of the Franks, one that was made in Queen Victoria’s time, and one that was written by my aunt Fiorbhinn last year, Órlaith thought. The which is the respective antiquity of our three dynasties and kingdoms, too. Ah, well, all traditions are new when they start and they all start somewhere.

  Kalaˉkaua II’s entourage entered between the lines of cloaked and ceremonially bare-chested spearmen; their working dress that afternoon had included light torso-armor of leather and steel, practical domed helmets and stout round shields. A tall noblewoman reverently bore the folded yellow cloak that was too precious to risk by actually wearing very often since it was fashioned from the feathers of the long-extinct mamo bird, and another had the golden ring of state on a cushion. Men carried the dove-headed staff that symbolized the royal line, and the two tabu-staffs crowned with black and white cloth that showed his sacred link to the Gods of the land.

  Kalaˉkaua himself was dressed in a kikepa of shimmering blue and gold silk knotted over one shoulder and leaving the other bare. He was a good-looking man in a leonine fashion, though she thought he’d be thickset in later life unless he worked very hard at it. Both he and Queen Haukea wore flowers in their locks, apparently a sign of informality and festival here.

  They also both wore niho palaoa around their necks, hooked ivory ornaments made from sperm whale teeth strung on human hair, a symbol of noble blood like an Associate’s woven-wire ring or jeweled dagger.

  Protocol governed the almost-identically-equal bows the Hawaiian monarchs exchanged with her and Reiko. Apparently that ended the formalities, for then the local overlords sat with her and Reiko to either side, and much more lively music started. The dancers that swept in between the tables certainly looked festive, with a style that switched between a fast rhythm based on swift stamping and hip-movements that made their grass skirts quiver and a slow languorous one with swaying and hand-and-arm gestures that probably meant something complex. It was certainly pretty even if you didn’t know the conventions.

  “We’re about as private here as possible,” Kalaˉkaua said as the first course was served. “And it doesn’t draw the eye like closing a door.”

  The starter was bowls of poke, very fresh cubes of raw ahi tuna tossed with soy sauce, sesame oil, a touch of honey and chopped sweet onion, garnished with dried green seaweed and scallions. Órlaith signed hers with the Pentagram, murmured the blessing that ended:

  “. . . and blessed be those who toiled with You

  Their hands helping Earth to bring forth life.”

  Then she made an appreciative sound at the rich almost-meaty taste, and the second journey of Reiko’s chopsticks was much more enthusiastic than the first. At the table just beyond her Nihonjin followers were showing—if you could pick up on very subtle expressions and then dawning smiles—profound relief at being served something edible and not having to pretend to enjoy some loathsome barbarian swill.

  Reiko’s more flexible, but I’ve rarely run across a group more conservative about things like food than the Nihonjin, Órlaith thought.

  Once they’d gotten back from the Valley of Death and the first exchange of boats had brought a Nihonjin chef for Reiko she’d thoroughly enjoyed the products of his art, the skill of which was the more remarkable for its disciplined restraint. The world was very wide and varied; even Montival alone was, and she’d traveled over most of it with her parents, enjoying the local dishes all her life, from buffalo-hump steak to the complex fantasies of Associate court cuisine.

  And they’re very relieved there’s rice—to them that is food, and everything else a garnish. And there were plenty of Nihonjin here in the ancient days; this dish is probably partly the legacy of their foodways.

  The alternatives were the same dish with octopus, which was equally popular; there was also fruit-juice, beer, sake, various rum-and-fruit concoctions, a brandy distilled from pineapple that was a truly vile waste of a delicious fruit,
and wine. Heuradys grinned and leaned in to turn one of the wine bottles in their coolers towards Órlaith; the label read Chateau d’Ath and it was the ’40 Pinot Noir red.

  “If your un-esteemed maternal grandfather had known how valuable those Montinore vineyards were going to be, he’d never have enfeoffed that estate to Mom Two,” she murmured.

  “Ah, well, that was Lady D’Ath’s reward for kidnapping my father,” Órlaith replied, also sotto voce.

  “Turn about is fair play,” Heuradys said. “It was also her reward from rescuing your lady mother.”

  Which was true; Mackenzie raiders under Grandmother Juniper’s personal command had captured Órlaith’s mother Mathilda, first, and Lady d’Ath had led the party which got her back and took Rudi Mackenzie in turn . . . thus introducing the future High King and High Queen to each other as children, despite their parents’ bitter enmity.

  The memory heartened her. The old wars against the Association had been desperate enough in their day, but now she united their blood and Montival dwelt at peace with itself, and Heuradys was her boon companion and good right arm.

  The red wine went well with the succulently rich, herb-infused, melting-tender pit-roasted whole pig that was the main course, served steaming on the leaves that had wrapped it in the imu, the underground oven. Many other dishes accompanied it or followed.

  When everyone was nibbling bits of sweet fresh pineapple and banana on slivers of bamboo and sampling little bowls of mango custard, Kalaˉkaua moved on from the generalities.

  “We’ve had a fairly sheltered life here in the islands since the Change,” he said.

  Queen Haukea snorted. “If you don’t count Oahu,” she said, and explained to Órlaith and Reiko: “My grandparents made it out . . . just before the rest of the islands sealed it off.”