Prince of Outcasts (34 page)

Fayard and the Guard crossbowmen looked hot in their armor too, and glad that they were riding to the fight instead of marching; everyone in the Protector's Guard had to be a good horseman even if they went into action on foot. There were parties from the crews of both the
Silver Surfer
and the
Tarshish Queen
to handle the catapults and prang-prangs and Captain Ishikawa's half-dozen sailors marched behind his horse, striding along in a rolling toes-out pace with their
naginatas
and bows over their shoulders.

All the commoners were also looking a bit crapulous and worse for wear to start with if you paid close attention; the lower-class feast laid on to send the troops and sailors on their way had been a lot less decorous than the court version for the officers, and that had been lively enough. The sun was coming up eastward, but he spared only a single glance at the way it turned the coral limestone of Carcosa a deeper, more bloody red. He suspected few people contemplated the beauty of sunrise here.

“Who are those?” he asked quietly, nodding to the seventh elephant riding near the head of the procession.

That one had a howdah framed in intricately carved and inlaid teak and ebony, shaped like a small one-room cottage. The sides were curtains of gauzy cloth, but he could see the pair within—a man and a woman, both aged and distinguishable mostly by the man's thin white beard, both wearing fantastic jewelry over shimmering pale clothing and drum-like hats covered in wrought-gold plaques.

The commander of the lancers was in overall charge of the
expedition, but he'd been very deferential indeed to that pair. Anak Agung was a blunt-featured man in his thirties with a wispy close-cut beard and mustache, universally addressed as
Tuan
, lord. He'd lost the tip of his nose sometime in the past, and his hand rested on the use-smoothed ivory and gold hilt of the parang slung horizontally across his armored stomach as if that was the only place for it; his bare arms were corded with muscle and showed thin scars. When he drew the weapon to gesture his troops forward the blade had a swirling pattern in the steel, layer-forged and then acid-etched. It was as fine an example of the bladesmith's art as John had ever seen, but you could see where nicks had been filed out of the edge.

Highborn warrior in his prime,
he thought.
Knows his work, tough, experienced, intelligent; his weakness would be arrogance. If he's that elaborately polite to the old lord and lady, they're movers and shakers of some sort.

“A Pedanda,” Pip said in answer to his question. “A High Priest of the local faith. And his consort, the High Priestess. Very high-powered, by local lights; too holy to speak much to foreigners like us. They take their religion seriously in Baru Denpasar, which with some the things going on here . . . well, I don't blame them. I've been praying more lately myself.”

John crossed himself in agreement. And they were trapped here, unless they could help the Baru Denpasarans. The
Tarshish Queen
needed repairs, and both it and the
Silver Surfer
needed their full help to make it out of the harbor. Quite understandably, they wouldn't do that without receiving help in return. The Raja had to think of his own people first.

Outside the palace district the city was neatly laid out on a gridwork of streets roughly north-south and east-west, with an occasional irregular opening for public use and frequent temples of all sizes, a couple as large as cathedrals and a riot of painted sculpture. From the smell, or comparative lack of it, there was a good sewage and water system.

The encircling wall was quite respectable as a piece of military engineering, large blocks of cut limestone on the inner and outer face and a core of pounded rubble and mortar, with octagonal towers spaced along it. The gates weren't metal-faced in the way he was used to, save for
savage-looking triangular spikes, but they were made of thick baulks of dense tropical hardwoods, and there were portcullis and murder-holes in the covered gateways between the inner and outer portals. Heavy walled platforms towards the harbor southward held trebuchets on turntables. The counterweight-lever machines were less flexible that torsion catapults but simple to make and good for covering a known range of targets from a fixed position.

It was the decoration of the wall that made him give a low whistle. The stone arches and surrounds about the gates were carved in low relief and painted or picked out in stones of different colors, a luxuriant visual explosion of foliage and figures human and divine and—he hoped—imaginary, demons and dragons with bulging eyes and curling fangs and long claws, acting out stories whose meanings he did not know. Some of the stretches still blank were covered in bamboo scaffolding, with artisans arriving and setting up for the day's work. Nothing about it interfered with the function of the fortifications, but the impact was overwhelming, like walking into the pages of an extravagantly illustrated book.

Pity,
he thought with an admiring look.
I can appreciate the workmanship, but I'd have to know the context for the full effect. It's a song in a language I don't speak.

He voiced the thought aloud, and Deor snorted. “Thora and I journeyed the world around, and that was my greatest grief amid the joy of it,” he said. “I'm a man who makes words and music—and words vary so much. Music too, more than you might think. You have to learn a new way of listening for that, too.”

Thora patted the hilt of her sword. “Universal,” she said dryly.

Deor grinned at her. “Yes, and your sword has sung me many a gallant song, but you can only have one conversation that way,” he said.

As they left the city's outskirts everyone got out of the way of the Raja's men with deferential speed, something else perfectly familiar to an Associate. The roadway leading north was about thirty feet across and from the fragments of asphalt had been paved once; now it was graded
dirt and gravel, but well-kept, and lined by ditches and then biggish straight-trunked trees that cast welcome shade.

John looked at them with an approving nod. There were dozens of ways of ordering a realm, and he knew most of them by personal acquaintance. Montival had nearly every one you could think of in one spot or another, from the Association's ordinary feudalism to New Deseret's exotic democratic theocracy. All of them could work well, or badly. The best rule-of-thumb signs for which of those was happening in any given time or place was whether the common people had enough to eat and whether there were bandits, but how competently things like roads were managed came a close third.

Here near the coast the land was flat and largely open, though mountains reared blue-green in the distance all along the northern horizon, and the highest was directly ahead.

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.