Prince of Outcasts (2 page)

Except that if you're born to our House, you never get to step away from the limelights and sit backstage laughing with a glass in your hand and a towel around your neck.

Now he saluted again and decided:

“Deor, Thora, Evrouin, you're with me. Sergeant Fayard, your squad. Captain Ishikawa. Thora, get mounted and scout ahead. Let's go!”

Deor was a valuable asset for a whole clutch of skills, and the scop's oath-sister Thora Garwood of the Bearkillers was a warrior's warrior who went where he did . . . and neither of them was part of a larger unit that
would be disrupted by tagging along with him, and besides, he liked them both.

Though not in the same way!

Evrouin, John's valet-bodyguard-minder, wasn't going to go more than arm's length from his charge anyway: they hadn't been able to shed him when they skipped out to begin all this, despite vigorous efforts. Before they'd gone more than a dozen paces someone else dashed up; it was one of the young Mackenzies who'd come on the journey with them, Ruan Chu Mackenzie of Dun Fairfax. He and Deor embraced fiercely for an instant, and they were both grinning as they caught up.

John's Catholic-reared mind disapproved, but that was a matter of dutiful conscious thought, not feeling. For one thing he'd spent a lot of time among Mackenzies, who had their own customs, and you were supposed to hate the sin and not the sinner, anyway, as St. Augustine had put it, and he just plain and simple liked Deor as a person and admired his talents.

And for another, his confessor had always told him that it was a good idea to concentrate your hatred for sin on the ones that you were vulnerable to yourself. Sloth tempted him, and women tempted him a
lot
, he even felt the tug of gluttony, occasionally, and he'd been known to envy a bit, and he couldn't even confess and be absolved for feeling wrath against those who'd killed his father because he had no intention of reforming on
that
one yet and you couldn't even ask forgiveness unless you sincerely intended to repent. But spending a lot of energy hating a sin that simply didn't attract you was entirely too easy.

To be real virtue had to be hard-won.

And Deor's a good solid fighting man as well as a poet and runemaster, and Ruan's a healer and a first-rate archer, and both are men to trust. Glad to have them along, if it comes to bad trouble. Worse trouble.

Thora had a horse at hand, and Bearkiller A-listers like her rode as soon as they walked, rather like knights but even more so. She swung into the saddle, pulled her recurve bow out of the scabbard and galloped ahead, then back to meet them.

“Four boats, big fishing boats by the look of it, and some smaller stuff,”
she said. “The hamlet's completely deserted, as far as I could see from the saddle.”

The dust of the path on her handsome bony face and reddish-brown hair made her look a bit older than her thirty-two years; she was wearing what her folk called cataphract armor, a bit lighter than an Association suit of plate, with the helm slung at her saddlebow.

“None of the fisherfolk there?” John said, and she gestured assent. “That's a relief.”

He'd leave some gold anyway, but they didn't need to waste time and trouble arguing with some screaming local determined to protect her family's main asset against armed strangers. John had seen that Topangans didn't react well to toploftiness.

“Whoever owned them just took off uphill when the enemy showed up, looks like. Didn't even take their gear.”

She fell in beside him, and he gratefully grasped her stirrup-leather as he jogged with a clang and clatter of plates, as much to even his pace as for actual support, and he forced himself to breathe deeply and hold it for an instant rather than the shallow inefficient panting that his lungs
wanted
to do. He was a big young man, broad-shouldered and long-legged and very strong, but this would be hard work for anyone.

“Don't worry, Johnnie. I'll protect you if they try anything with fishhooks,” she added, then grinned at his flush. “Sorry, sweetie. Couldn't resist.”

It wasn't the first time he'd been involved with a woman older than himself. It was the first time with anyone like the Bearkiller, who'd traveled literally around the world in the past six years with Deor. It made things . . . interesting.

And Thora doesn't want anything from me but my company for a while. Which is . . . refreshing. You can just take what's offered and ignore the unspoken hopes . . . but while God knows I'm a frail sinner and I like women, I'd have to be a worse man than I am to enjoy a woman under false pretenses.

Topanga's harbor was an accident of the Change; the coast ran east-west here without any natural protection against wind or surf, rising
immediately into canyon-fissured hills or low mountains. In the first winter after the old world fell one of its vessels had come ashore in a storm here, what they'd called a
container ship
. It was a monstrosity, at nearly a thousand feet long and a hundred wide, and the rust-eaten hulk lay canted with its deck inclining westward, looming more like a geological freak than a human artifact to eyes born generations later. It had settled to the bottom with its bow to the eastward, making a sheltered V-shape in its lee.

And it's ugly. It would have been ugly when it was floating and moving around. Odd. Oceangoing ships are beautiful, among the most beautiful things humans make; I'd have thought they
had
to be, to work at all.

The longshore current had piled sand against it almost to the rail, and storms and human hands had tumbled the steel freight containers overboard to mingle with the sand and break the waves. The rickety dock—empty now that the few foreign merchantmen had fled a conflict they didn't see as theirs—was on the inner, eastern side. Ships stopped here now and then, more lately as trade picked up.

West of it was a rather crude set of stepped evaporating pans built of salvaged concrete rubble, with the skeletal windmills for pumping brine inactive now. Tools lay scattered about, and sacks and barrels where the laborers had been shoveling the beds of glittering white crystals stood half-empty, abandoned when the alarm went out. Shacks of reused cinderblock for the workers stood in a clump, with incongruously pretty roofs of red tile from some ancient mansion, and at a little distance more for the fishers. An abandoned mongrel dog barked at them, and then ran off, and a cat raised its head and looked with cool insolence from the fish-drying racks. Gulls were swarming on the rest.

War was waste. His parents had told him that more than once, and now he was seeing it with his own eyes.

Thora slid down as they halted, unbuckling her saddle and throwing it over her shoulder before she left the borrowed beast loosely tethered. A baby carriage lay tumbled on its side near one of the huts, with an arm protruding from it. He took a horrified step towards it, then saw it was a doll; a thing of the ancients, of that smooth ivory-like substance they called
plastic, but painstakingly dressed by the hands of love in miniature modern clothes. He flushed, hesitated for a moment, then stepped over and set the toy carriage upright and pushed it into the little cottage and pulled the door closed so that the latch fell.

As he looked up a couple of the others were glancing at him; Thora met his eyes and nodded soberly. He felt obscurely cheered, for no reason he could think of. The brief incident made him remember his father somehow—well, so many things did, nowadays.

Rudi Mackenzie, High King Artos, had been a mild-tempered and gentle man for the most part; it often surprised folk who met him for the first time in person, after hearing of his deeds on the Quest, and in the storm and thunder of the Prophet's War. One of the High King's prerogatives under the Great Charter was to review death sentences where a petition for clemency was made, and it was one he'd taken very seriously, enough to risk the touchy care for their autonomy of Montival's many member-realms. He'd commuted about one in ten to exile or hard labor or some other lesser penalty, and pardoned about one in twenty altogether.

Don't be over-quick to deal out death in judgment,
he'd said to John once, two years ago, after explaining a case to him and patiently taking him through the testimony, showing how the bone and muscle of fact could be traced beneath the fatty tissue of interpretation.

But one thing that had turned his father savage had been harm to children; he still checked the facts of the matter carefully, but in those cases he'd almost always written:

Let it be so, and let him make accounting to the Guardians of the Western Gate. Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. Artos, Ard Rí in Montival and first of that name
at the bottom.

And stamped his seal into the wax more forcefully than usual, too.

“Let's go,” John said sharply, shaking off the memory.

It was only a few steps to the high-tide mark. There were four of the boats, long double-ended things of sheet aluminum hand-riveted to metal frames and waterproofed with heated plastic, honestly made but crude to his eyes.

“We'll take those three,” John said calmly, indicating the closest; there didn't seem to be much difference between them.

Don't shout unless you have to and if you have to shout bark it out and don't let your voice wobble. Don't hesitate. A perfect decision made too late is worse than a second-best one in good time. And don't look worried,
he could remember his father saying.
It's part of what you owe them. Nothing disheartens like seeing a leader doubt himself.

Then a grin.
You
will
doubt yourself, lad, and that often, or at least I did, but keep it private.

“Fayard, you and half your men with me. Thora, you take Deor and Ruan and the other half of the squad, you're in charge. Captain Ishikawa, you're in the third. Let's go!”

The boats were chained to posts and the chains fastened with twists of wire designed to hold against sudden squalls, but the rusted metal gave way easily to a few blows with the steel-shod butts of a
naginata
or crossbow. He tossed his shield into the first boat with a clatter and helped in the brief labor of throwing out the coils of net and boxes of very smelly bait and lines and old plastic tubs and bottles reused as floats. The Guard men weren't expert boatmen, but they could all pull an oar, more or less. And the Royal family had enjoyed sailing and fishing.

He dropped a purse of rose nobles on top of the heap of discarded gear, and put his shoulder to the hull with the others, staggering a little as the boat hissed down the wet sand into the waves and began to pitch. As the cold Pacific swirled round his feet he rolled into the boat cautiously—there was a layer of tattered ancient plywood at the bottom but he suspected if he was wasn't careful he could punch his armored foot right through the hull. Then he pulled the lashings on the tiller free, holding the end of it down so the rudder wouldn't scrape on the sand.

Evrouin grinned at him as he swung in with John's lute-case and his glaive both held carefully high, stowed them and took an oar. He was a stocky, muscular man in his early thirties, black-haired and olive-skinned. The jewel-hilted, foot-long dagger at his belt proclaimed him an Associate, but he was of the lowest rank in the ruling order the Portland
Protective Association had established after the Change. Until recently John had strongly suspected that the man regarded him as something like an absentminded, dim-witted younger brother, behind a façade of imperturbable good manners and due deference to his birth. Since the battle in the Bay he'd been promoted. To
promising
younger brother.

The rest of the scratch crew came over the side as they ran the boat out deeper, seizing the oars and running them out through the rowing locks with thunks and clanking sounds as they slipped the retaining pins home. The underofficer Fayard used an oar to hold the boat against the sand and keep it from being shoved backward onto the beach by the incoming tide.

“On the mark . . .” John said.

The men bent forward, the oars rising on both sides.

“Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!” he called, letting the rudder drop down into its working position.

The blades of the oars dipped and bit and threw spray back at him. He felt his heart lighten; it was a bright day and he was young and healthy and a prince and the tiller was coming alive under his palm as it bit into the moving water. . . . Life could be worse.

He risked a quick glance behind him. The other boats were following to either side, spread out in a shallow V. Thora and Deor had traveled the world around, mostly in ships, and knew boat-handling a lot better than he did. Captain Ishikawa and his men were professionals who slipped into a boat and put the boat into the sea like otters off a rock, and could have overtaken the others without raising much more of a sweat. Ishikawa was what the Nihonjin called a samurai—roughly like a knight—as well as a naval officer. His men weren't, but John suspected they'd all been born in fishing villages and had grown up as amphibious as seals.

He steered as close as was safe to the wreck and the sandbar that had piled up against it, for concealment and because it damped down the waves, and in places that meant the ancient ship hung over them and cast a shadow like a steep hillside. It was noisier than he'd have expected, sighing and soughing where the water ran in and out of jagged holes in
the time-eaten steel, and loose cables and fittings went
bang . . . bang . . . bang
hollowly like drums beaten by skeletons.

The choppy slap of the waves when they rounded the canted bows of the wreck came as a surprise, and the cold spray struck his face. The surface of the harbor proper had looked as smooth as a manor millpond, but they were seaward of that now, and he could barely see the mast-tops of the
Tarshish Queen
at all. He thought for a moment, then turned and pointed.