Prince of Outcasts (3 page)

Ishikawa waved back, and his boat moved into the lead. John grinned wryly as he passed; even with unfamiliar equipment, the Japanese commander and his little crew—all the survivors of his lost
Red Dragon
—were demonstrating the difference between
passable
and
expert
. Very much like what happened when someone who carried a sword for self-defense against ruffians and practiced a bit ran up against a knight. He took up counting the stroke again, and the crossbowmen-turned-oarsmen worked doggedly. He also followed just as closely in Ishikawa's wake as he could.

Then the sleek shape of the
Tarshish Queen
turned sharply, more sail blossoming in off-white curves as she heeled to the northwest wind. They must have seen the boats from the masthead lookouts, up there nearly a hundred feet above the surface. He could also see the bow-chaser catapult moving, the eighteen-pounder rumbling along metal tracks laid into the deck until the throwing trough jutting from a slot in the middle of the sloped steel shield pointed straight at them.

The
Queen
was a merchantman, not a warship, and flew the beaver-head flag of the city-state of Corvallis as well as the High Kingdom's crowned mountain and sword. But Feldman & Sons of Newport—Corvallis' window on the Pacific—traded in the sort of places where a respectable broadside and a fast pair of heels were costs of doing business. Or of living to see home again, for that matter. That and an old link between House Artos and the Feldmans, dating back to their grandparents' time, was why Órlaith had sent John to talk her owner into providing the ship. It hadn't been hard. . . .

“Ahoy there!”

He recognized the musical tones in the voice as the big schooner came near despite the distortion of a speaking trumpet and water purling
back from its sharp cutwater; that was First Mate Radavindraban, who'd been born a long, long way from Montival.

“Who comes?”

He'd asked the man why he'd left home, and he'd shrugged and answered:
Most unreasonably angry bloody-minded bloody Raja, Your Highness.

“Prince John and party!”

The ship slowed in the simplest possible way, turning directly into the wind and letting itself be what sailors called
taken aback.
It stopped in its own length . . . if you didn't count the violent pitching up and down, accompanied by sailorish cursing from the crew trying to deal with the effect of the drastic measure on the rigging. The shadow of the hull fell over them as they approached, and the crew threw a net over the side to lie flapping against the thin sheet metal anti-flame sheathing that covered the Douglas fir planks. The
Queen
was a big ship but not enormous, a three-masted topsail schooner of about four hundred and fifty tons displacement, and a bit over two hundred feet long from fantail to bowsprit. The rail was only a little more than a tall man's height above the waves.

“Permission to come aboard!” John shouted.

“By all means, Your Highness,” the Captain called from near the wheel, a slight irony in the flat, neutral and rather old-fashioned Corvallan accent.

“Send ropes too!” he shouted to the deck crew; his parents had taught him never to take an avoidable risk. “Everybody use one and secure yourself first, that's an order!”

The Bosun up above shouted her own commands, which boiled down to
lines for the dimwit lubbers
. Lines duly came whirring down, with loops on the ends. He took one gratefully and snugged it up under his armpits, slung his shield and jumped to the netting. One armored foot slipped, sending his stomach twisting and lurching even if the only real risk was getting his feet wet; a sabaton made your foot rather rigid, for all that it was articulated, and the motion of the ship slapped the net against the side at unpredictable intervals as he swarmed up hand-over-hand. One of the tests for knighthood—if you were knighted in peacetime, not on the
battlefield with a bloodied sword slapping you on the shoulder—was hauling your armored self up a twenty-foot rope using only your arms. He'd probably gotten the
opportunity
to seek the golden spurs rather young because of his high birth, but nobody got to fudge the
results
, if only because it was all done in public.

John waved to the Captain, but turned immediately to make sure Sergeant Fayard and his guardsmen were coming up safely, lending a hand here and there. Ishikawa's contingent came over the other side as if they were strolling up the path to their homes, and immediately headed for two of the portside catapults; the
Tarshish Queen
had eight a side plus her stern and bow-chasers and the Nihonjin sailors had trained on them coming south, getting used to the differences between these and the similar-but-not-identical models the Imperial Navy of Dai-Nippon used. The crews of those two nodded thanks, then split up to bring the others closer to full complements.

Thora and Deor waited a moment and then came in where John's boat had come alongside. He took the loop of rope he'd used and tossed it accurately to her; she sent her saddle up on it first, then looped it under her arms as he had before she stood and leapt, and he pulled her up hand-over-hand while she held the line in an experienced rappeler's grip and fended off the side with her booted feet.

“Thanks, lover,” she said as she turned and caught Deor's wrist. “
Up
you go, brother.”

Thora and Deor weren't actually related; their birthplaces were almost exactly half a thousand miles apart. They'd just been comrades and very close friends for half their lives, starting when they'd been younger than he was. They came at his heels as he trotted quickly up to the quarterdeck; the owner was rapping out a series of orders, and the ship heeled sharply as it fell off into the wind and the sails cracked taut. The pitching motion gave way to a long smooth rocking-horse gait.

“Mission accomplished, Captain Feldman,” he said. “Except for those Korean ships in our way. My sister says you should cooperate fully with the
Stormrider
and her Captain, and we're here to reinforce you.”

“Captain Russ RMN commanding,” Feldman said, looking southward at the frigate. “We've been playing dodge-'em and I don't think he's very happy with me. He couldn't shoot when we slipped away like a wet watermelon seed . . . but I think he very much wanted to.”

He grinned as he said it; he was a slender dark man in his mid-thirties, black-eyed and black-haired and with a single streak of white in his close-cropped beard over a scar, dressed with plain practicality in a peaked sailor's hat over his kippah and brass-buttoned blue coat and pants and soft-soled boots. He stood for a moment with his thumbs in the belt that supported his cutlass, tapping his fingers on the walrus-hide. Then he turned to his signaler:

“Run up
Prince aboard, Crown Princess ashore
and
will conform to your movements
,” he said.

“Aye Aye, Cap'n.”

The signal hoist went up, worked by a sailor universally known as “Rat” McGuire, for his face and general attitude. Feldman turned his telescope on the frigate.

“Acknowledged,”
he read. “Brief. My, my, Captain Russ
is
in a temper. He's actually not a bad sailor . . . for an Astoria man.”

Astoria was the main port for the southern Association territories, just within the dangerous bar at the mouth of the Columbia; Newport was Corvallis' sole seaport, linked to the inland capital of the city-state by a busy rail line. Their rivalry went back well before the High Kingdom.

Then he turned to John: “This situation is unstable, your Highness. May I ask why the Princess and the rest of your party didn't accompany you?”

John hesitated, then told him. Feldman whistled slightly between his teeth before he spoke.

“Magic swords and wicked sorcerers. I don't suppose they're more dangerous than catapult shot or storms, but . . .”

“I grew up around a magic sword, Captain. This . . . What they brought back out of the desert . . . it's most definitely the genuine article.”

“Like the Sword of the Lady?”

Feldman's voice was dry. He acknowledged the force of the thing the Quest had brought back from haunted Nantucket; you couldn't see it and not do so, especially if you were a Montivallan yourself. That didn't mean he had to like the fact that in the modern age such things walked abroad in the light of common day.

“Not exactly. It's more . . . more for battle. They have . . . other Sacred Treasures . . . for some of the things the Sword of the Lady does.
Kusanagi
is more purely a weapon. It's a symbol of the ruler as Power. The power to protect and to punish; symbol of it, and the thing itself too. And it scares me silly.”

He shook himself and returned to things less mysterious, to their mutual relief:

“Who'll win if it comes to a sea-fight?” John said.

“A close-run thing, given all those savages they've picked up.”

“They can't storm the shore,” John said, and Feldman nodded.

“Right, we'd move in on them,” the Captain said.

“And the Crown Princess and the locals could just pull into the mouth of the canyon there. It's fortified.”

“They must be planning something else,” Feldman said meditatively.

“Perhaps,” John said, and then smiled. “Or perhaps they're not as clever as you, Captain. I've noticed that extremely smart people tend to assume that there's a deep-laid plan when they may be facing blundering incompetence. My grandmother the Queen Mother Sandra said
she
had to watch that tendency in herself, and she only had to walk into any room on Earth to be the smartest person in it.”

Feldman chuckled, but grimly. “Ordinarily you might be right. But the things we're fighting . . . they're not stupid, worse luck.”

“True, but a lot of their followers are dumb as a knapsack full of hammers,” John pointed out. “I think it goes with the territory.
I'll eat you last
isn't really a recruiting slogan to attract the intelligent.”

Feldman gave him a considering look, and then a respectful nod. John was flattered . . . and slightly annoyed. If you were a young, handsome prince with an eye for the ladies and artistic inclinations people tended to
assume you were a lightweight, for some reason. Nobody ever thought that about Órlaith, she was always taken seriously . . . though to be fair,
Órlaith
had never underestimated him. She knew he was perfectly
capable
at anything he put his mind to; she just thought he was lazy, and was always shoving work onto his plate like a second helping of boiled broccoli.

Feldman turned his telescope towards the shore again. Time stretched. He'd noticed that happened when things got tense. A while ago, in fact—the same thing happened at tournaments, or before a performance, but never quite like
this.
Some of the younger sailors—younger than him—were looking a bit anxious, peering shoreward. Some of the others were relaxed enough that there was a quiet game of skat going on behind one catapult, though he'd have bet himself that the grinning woman who was raking in the pot had been the one who started it.

One of the bits of barracks wisdom Evrouin had taught him was that you generally did a lot better at cards if you were focused and the other players weren't.

“
Hel
lo,” Feldman said. “Something's going on there. Boat going ashore from the Korean flagship—just one. White parley flag . . . no, and that's a Japanese flag it's flying too.”

John's eyebrows shot up. Reiko and her followers had made very clear that Dai-Nippon and the realm that called itself
Chosŏn Minjujŭi Inmin Konghwaguk
were deadly enemies.
Chosŏn
was ruled by the descendants of the man who'd run the northern part of that country before the Change. He'd been a spectacularly bad ruler then by all accounts, managing to starve his people even in the abundance of the ancient world, and he'd brought himself and his immediate followers through the chaotic aftermath of the Change by
eating
their enemies—not to mention many of their subjects. That had opened the way for certain
things
from beyond the world of common day; extreme evil often did, and his descendants had become far worse as they spiraled down that trap. They'd been raiding Japan's less numerous survivors ever since, too. He had a strong impression that the grimly warlike cast of the Nihonjin was a result of that long merciless struggle.

John stretched out a hand. Evrouin put his binoculars in it, and he leveled them. It was surprisingly difficult to keep them trained on the shore from a moving ship, and the way the picture swayed and pitched made his stomach swoop in sympathy for a moment before excitement drove it out of his awareness.

“Reiko's coming down the road to meet the ones under the Japanese flag. . . . Two of them are in Nihonjin armor, whoever they are,” John said. “She's got Egawa and six of her samurai with her. Mother of God, but I wish I could hear what's being said. . . . Wait a minute. . . . That weird little kid she picked up at the castle in the desert is there . . . The Koreans are attacking! They're fighting!”

He opened his mouth to say something more, then gave a quick gasping grunt.
Something
had punched him in an entirely non-physical way that still felt like a paralyzing blow to the pit of the stomach. The Sword of the Lady had been bared, and then thrust into the living flesh of Montival, the land it had been created to embody and protect. John could
feel
that protection spreading, like a skin of invisible steel rooted deep in the bones of Earth.

What came next was a hurricane wash of flame. For a moment he drew breath to scream as his skin was flayed off, then realized that there was no pain and no heat. Feldman and a few of the sailors were looking at him oddly. Deor wasn't; he'd stumbled to his knees, and Thora was beside him with an arm around his shoulders and stark concern on her face.