Prince of Outcasts (44 page)

“When we were both very young . . . I remember he would ask for them and pout a little when he couldn't have them all the time.”

“Why not?” Órlaith asked.

“They cause convulsions,” Reiko said, then smiled with a flash of amusement as Heuradys stopped with one halfway to her lips. “Only if you eat them all the time and while you are young,” she added.

She finished the motion and ate it, but Reiko thought her enthusiasm had diminished, and suppressed an impulse to giggle.

The
futamoto
course in its elegantly simple lidded stoneware bowls was soup made from
suppon
, what the Montivallans called snapping turtle, which turned out to be very common here. The broth was gelatinous and silky, and viscous enough for the little bits of sweet corn, winter melon,
snap peas, scallops and tiger prawns to appear suspended in time and place.

“Now that's a winter soup,” Órlaith said appreciatively.

They chatted through the other courses; the real meat of the meeting had been Órlaith's appointment, conveyed to Reiko first by her own words as a mark of regard. It came to Reiko with a shock that she was going to miss Órlaith very badly when the war was over. And Heuradys and the others as well.

Or perhaps really the freedom of action I had here.

“It was a feast,” the two Montivallans said as the last trays were removed, which was both polite and in this case literally true, and prepared to make their good-byes.

Then there was a brief scuffle at the door.

“Kiwako!” a young woman called in Nihongo. “Kiwako, you wicked little
gaki
, come back—oh,
masaka
! No, not there!”

A child just past the toddler stage ran through, with a maid in close pursuit. The little girl in her colorful double kimono over a shift plumped herself down in
seiza
and made a fair approximation of an obeisance, then gave a brilliant gap-toothed grin. She was shooting up, already taller and a little plumper than the skinny feral thing Reiko had found chained by an ankle amid the cyst-like horrors of the castle in the Valley of Death.

“Majesty! So sorry!” the maid said. “She scampers about like . . . like . . .”

“Like a scampering child,” Reiko said indulgently. “I seem to remember one named . . . oh, I think her given name was Misako . . . who was prone to that. Even to climbing through windows from trees. Scandalous!”

The maid of honor, who was twelve and who of course had been that girl a few years ago, sighed almost inaudibly and waited with patience. Most Nihonjin were mild with young children, however stern life became later, and the Heavenly Sovereign Majesty favored the
Gaijin
infant.

Kiwako—Reiko had given her the name, for she had had none in that place of abominations—was still slender, but longer-faced and bigger-nosed
than a Japanese infant, pale and ginger-haired and green-eyed. To modern Nihonjin eyes she looked like a fox, or the fox spirits who went by the same name, which was why Reiko had carefully avoided calling her
Kitsune
, except sometimes as a joke between them in private. The name she had bestowed meant
One Born on a Border,
among other things, and was entirely fitting. She had been born in a shadowy place between worlds.

Kiwako had just called herself
th'kid
, and had not even imagined other children.

“Heika!”
she said; that was the polite informal form of address, but Reiko rather thought Kiwako used the title as she would have a given name. “I had dinner! There was noodles and miso and piece fish and pickles!”

Precisely what
I
was hoping for,
Reiko thought fondly, as she absently corrected the child's grammar.

Food was still a wonder to Kiwako; as the youngest and last descendant of the little clan who'd been trapped in the lost castle—descendants and slayers of the man who'd stolen the Grasscutter Sword from Nihon after the Pacific War—she'd grown up eating insects and vermin and possibly other things. She was already forgetting and the nightmares growing less, but nourishment fit for a human being still delighted her. So did clothes, bathing, and language—she'd had a little slurred English to begin with, but in the months since she had absorbed Nihongo like a sponge soaking up water.

The child shuffled sideways on her knees and leaned into Reiko, a small solid weight, her hair bound back and smelling of herbal wash. The contrast with the filthy feral creature she'd met was utter . . . but it had been that creature who warned her in time to turn a descending blade. She put an arm around the girl's shoulders. Versions of that crucial aid had also passed to the newcomers from home, and everyone had seen how the
Tennō
helped the girl make offerings to Inari Okami. Who was patroness of rice and swordsmiths . . . and served by white foxes who were Her messengers and agents.

Little Fox, your life will not always be easy in Dai-Nippon, however much I protect
you. We of the Land of the Gods have never been a folk easy with outsiders, and now less so than ever. But with Inari as your guardian, it will be easier than it might. And many fear my namesake the Ghost Fox.

Heuradys and Órlaith grinned at the girl, who hid herself for a moment behind a fold of Reiko's kimono sleeve before she peeked out again. The two Montivallans each extended a hand to cover the other's eyes, and they played at peeking at Kiwako, repeating the little game until all four of them dissolved in laughter.

“Kagome kagome!”
Kiwako pleaded.

“No, little one,” Reiko said firmly.

That was a children's game that required multiple partners; Reiko had played it with her sisters when she was small. She and several of the entourage had played it with Kiwako, and she'd become entranced with it. Unfortunately there weren't any other children here for her to do it with as often as she wished.

“Here, play with this.”

She pulled a
kendama
out of her sleeve; Egawa had whittled it for her in his spare time, as he had for his own children back in the homeland when they were of an age for such things. There was a flared handle ending in a wooden spike, and a ball on a string with a hole in the center. You tossed the ball up, and then caught it either on the spike, or on one of the two cups that flanked it.

Reiko demonstrated, carefully keeping it slow and using the cups on the sides first, which was easier, and then the spike. Besides being amusing for small children it was good for training their hands and eyes to work together smoothly and swiftly. Kiwako took it eagerly, and tried the toss with her tongue protruding slightly between teeth clenched in concentration. The ball ticked off the edge of the cup, and Reiko showed her how to damp the swing before she tried again.

In a few moments the child was lost in the toy, eventually giving a squeal of delight when the ball caught in the cup, which showed commendable persistence.

“Ganbaru!”
Reiko said, her voice warm with praise, and was rewarded with another brilliant smile. “See, little one, if you keep trying and do not give up you will learn! This is true of many things. Always try hard!”

“I'll get one of those for Vuissance,” Órlaith said, naming her youngest sibling, or at least the youngest until the upcoming birth.

“I'll get a couple made for my nieces and nephews. I've got four about the right age,” Heuradys said, her usually cool catlike amber eyes warm and fond.

“My sisters and I would sit about playing with them, seeing if we could catch the ball at the same time,” Reiko sighed.

The adults made their farewells. “
Ittekimasu
, Reiko-chan,” Órlaith said, which would have been very casual from anyone but a monarch or their heir; it meant
I'm off
, more or less.

Heuradys bowed.
“Shitsurei shimasu,”
she said, more formally, and with slow care for the sounds.

K
ERAJAAN
OF
B
ARU
D
ENPASAR

C
ERAM
S
EA

N
OVEMBER
6
TH

C
HANGE
Y
EAR
46/2044 AD

J
ohn woke with a convulsive reach for his sword. Six inches of steel hissed free of the scabbard in the beginning of a draw-and-strike.

“Sorry, Sire,” Evrouin said.

He'd tapped his booted toe against his liege's foot. That had brought John up convinced for a second or two someone was about to kill him, with his heart pounding and mouth dry. The gathering noise of the camp would have awakened him eventually anyway. But he
had
said to get him up just before the sun edged up over the horizon, and it meant Evrouin had to get up earlier himself, and that foot-tap was the safest way to wake someone so to be fair . . .

“No problem,” John said tightly, and the guard rang against the mouth of the scabbard as he pushed the blade back.

The man didn't
look
sorry; he looked as if he'd be grinning if he could. He also had a large steaming mug in his hand, which made up for a great deal. John threw off the dew-sodden horse-blanket and pulled on his boots after a quick check for scorpions and centipedes, and took the tea. The medley of buzzing, tweeting and clicking sounds from the forest was picking up as the pre-dawn hush ended, and the murmur and clatter of human waking joined it.

“Thank you,” he said, and blew on the surface, sipping as fast as the hot liquid allowed, and running his free hand over his chin, which rasped. “Another, please, and I'll shave today.”

“Sire.”

He knelt as he handed the man his empty cup to take to the nearest kettle, kissed his crucifix and held it between his clasped hands as he bowed his head. Remembering last night, after his usual morning Paternoster he added softly:

“St. Michael the Archangel, defend us Christians and our allies in battle. Be our strong shield against the wickedness and snares of the Adversary; and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, cast down into hell Satan and the other evil spirits who prowl about the world for the ruin of our souls. Amen.”

“Amen, Sire,” Evrouin said as he came up with the cup and handed it to him, crossing himself with his free hand as well. “Amen with all my heart.”

He fetched water for a splash and brushing teeth as well; John was glad of that, because his mouth felt as if a small rodent with bowel-control problems had crawled in there and died of scabies some time ago, and there was dried blood on his hands and face, still faintly sticky in this damp climate. He'd been too tired to do anything much about it last night.

More tea helped as well. The acrid liquid was heavy-sweet with sugar this morning, and had some sort of spice in it too. Though the locals didn't use milk, which had Radavindraban complaining worse than the sting of the stitches in his forehead even as he gulped his and asked for more. Captain Ishikawa was quietly appalled at the thought of putting milk in tea—or anywhere but the mouths of calves, for that matter—and regarded other additives as foul desecration as well, but he drank nonetheless. John found the sugar and the caffeine helped him get his eyes open and the sand out of the edges of his mind; he felt a moment's smugness at how much faster that was for him than for some of the older members of the party.

Toa gave him a jaundiced look as he emptied powdered willowbark extract from Ruan's healer's chest into
his
tea and drank it. He grimaced as well, always spectacular with his rough features and tattoos; the swelling bruise on the left side of his head added to the gargoyle effect.

“Enjoy bouncing back like a fucking rubber ball while it lasts, mate,” he said in John's general direction. “Because it doesn't last and I'm here to tell you. You and the bloody blooming frangipani-flower of Tanumgera Station here.”

Pip looked at him fondly. “You can still do anything you could when I turned ten, you old fraud,” she said. “Whether you're just up or not.”

“Too right I can!” he said. Then, quickly: “But it hurts more every year.”

“And speaking of hitting the Bundy, I remember you got chockers at my tenth birthday party and punched a camel unconscious when it spat on me. Shocked and scarred my tender young mind, rather.”

“It would have bitten you if I hadn't. Likely I'd have to use an axe nowadays.”

John did come fully alert quickly; unfortunately that made him more aware of how he felt, and even at a few months short of twenty you didn't wake refreshed after blowguns and blades in the dark hours of early morning. It wasn't just the loss of sleep, or even the way hard effort wrung you out. There was a peculiar set of sensations that came in the aftermath of fear and rage and tearing effort, like some sort of toxin in the blood and muscles.

The tense feel of louring, sullen anger that drifted through the camp along with the woodsmoke and cooking odors didn't help. He found that when he thought about last night he felt a little that way himself, and even more as if he were looking at the world through a sheet of glass and not quite through his own eyes.

Better to put that aside for now.

“Ah, darling, was your beauty-sleep interrupted by those rude naughty men?” Pip said as he stretched and something cracked in his neck.

A wink took the sting out of it, and they both yawned hugely, though he thought she was looking offensively chipper even for someone their age. He'd never been one of those people who leapt out of bed unless there was something specific he was looking forward to eagerly that day, and besieging a fortress didn't count the way a dance or concert did.

And lying on the ground with a horseblanket and a saddle doesn't really count as
bed,
either. Should I start including more of this in the epics I keep meaning to get around to composing, or not? Hmmmm. I could write Father's . . . but the frightening thing about
that
is, am I worthy of doing that?

Sleeping on the ground here also exposed you to a lot of mosquitoes, which this island seemed to have in abundance once you weren't on the beach with the sea-breeze in your face. They were not nearly as pretty as the equally ubiquitous butterflies, and in his admittedly jaundiced opinion nearly as large. One of the
Silver Surfer
crew who came from Papua—where the bugs were evidently even worse—handed around an herbal-smelling ointment that helped with the itches, a little. Evrouin appeared with a basin of hot water, and John lathered up and snapped open his straight razor; it wasn't the first time he'd shaved sitting on a saddle with the water between his feet, and it had become a lot less painful since he stopped getting pimples.

The thought brought a little reminiscent amusement tinged with sadness. The first time had been on a hunting trip when he was fifteen, in the high forest country on Mount Hood around the Royal preserve of Timberline Lodge. And now John could see with the eye of hindsight that his father had carefully hid his smile at John's insistence on scraping off the light dusting of peach-fuzz, though that was less time ago than he liked to remember.

I miss you, Father. If you'd lived . . . we'd just be getting to the stage when we could be men together, and friends, as well as father and son. You would have been my captain and my King, as well as Dad.

These days he really did need to shave at least four or five times a week if he didn't want to have patches of bristles over his cheeks and chin, the more conspicuous because it was two shades lighter than the dark-brown hair on his head and with a disconcerting orange undertone. There was something oddly soothing about the warm wet feel of the suds, the smell—he was still using the last of the lavender shaving soap from the
Tarshish Queen
's stores—the familiar feel of the horsehair brush and the slide of the keen-honed steel over his face. Many of the other males in the Montivallan party were doing likewise, possibly on the
theory that you should meet death looking your best, or because it raised morale, or just because the sticky heat here made facial hair unpleasant. It was a sign of Divine planning that the locals had so little of it.

“Have you ever tried a beard?” Pip said. “You'd look good with a nice thick short-cropped one. Spade-shaped.”

John finished shaving the delicate bit under his nose before he answered, then spoke as he wiped his face on the towel and carefully cleaned and stowed his razor.

“Maybe when I'm thirty. Right now it would be sort of . . . tufty,” he said.

A grin. “Prince Tufty? Well, I see the problem.”

“My father said he tried twice and gave up in despair before he got one worth having, at about that age. You women don't appreciate the drawbacks of growing whiskers on the face.”

“If you've forgotten that
I
shave, you shall be pummeled mercilessly,” she said with mock ferocity.

Several women nearby stuck fists into the air with thumbs upraised. One muttered something on the order of
tell him, sister
, and John winced at the snickers.

Pip went on thoughtfully: “Your father . . . do you take after him? I rather resemble Daddy, with different plumbing, of course, and I'm tall like him; mentally I'm more like Mummy.”

Mummy must have been half shark,
John thought. That was admiration . . . mostly.
I think Grandmother Sandra would have liked her, which is an ambivalent compliment.

He remembered Queen Mother Sandra as a kindly old lady devoted to her grandchildren and a font of shrewd cool advice, usually with a cat in her lap and a scent of lavender and peppermints. She'd been a notable and highly intelligent patron of all the arts, too, and it had been a high compliment to his very embryonic talents when she had given him his lute Azalaïs just before she died and he was barely eleven.

On the other hand, he was now uneasily aware she'd been at least half the partnership with his grandfather Norman Arminger, who'd been a model for bloodthirsty tyrants. There was a joke older folk in the Association told, of
Sandra being bitten by a rattlesnake once: the punch-line was that then the
snake
died. They'd called her the Spider, then: the Spider of the Silver Tower. In whispers.

I think she'd have liked Pip, too. That would have been an interesting meeting to see!

He shook his head; there was no need to show off all the family linen right away.

“No, Father was taller than I am; about six-two. And fair—blond hair with a touch of red, and light eyes like yours—well, blue and green as well as gray, it depended on the light. I look more like my mother's side of the family, her father Norman Arminger and her mother Sandra—née Whittle. The Armingers and the Whittles both tended to be brown-haired and have hazel eyes, with the odd towhead, judging from the old family scrapbooks I've seen. I think in terms of character I'm more like Grandmother Juniper—we're both musicians, at least, and one of her daughters is too.”

“Arminger? Whittle? Those sound like English names,” she said.

“They are, far back. Quite far back, for the Armingers; the first one arrived in North America about four hundred years ago. It's Anglo-Norman, originally; the word means armor-bearer, squire . . . or someone with a coat of arms.”

Pip laughed. “I know, darling. Balwyn comes from the same stable—one of the leaders of the First Crusade carried it. It means
Noble Leader
, and not
Baldy With A Wart
, as you might think. We converted it to a surname around eight hundred years ago.”

He laughed as well. It was pleasant to have this sort of link with a girl he was . . .

All right, admit it. You're falling in love with Pip.

He was falling in love with a girl his mother couldn't object to, as well: daughter of a ruler and of impeccable background—it would give the Arminger line more prestige in Associate eyes. They'd been rather envious of the way the Lorings had married into the ruling lines of the Mackenzies and Dúnedain.

There! Falling in love, thinking of taking her to meet Mother. You said it, at least to yourself.

It was also pleasant to have this sort of distracting chitchat when someone, several someones he'd never met and who had nothing personal against him, had tried to kill him last night. And when he'd be riding all morning to give someone else a crack at it. Popular legend said young men his age were supposed to think that they were immortal. If he ever had, it was wearing very thin indeed—and had been since he saw that monster wave coming at the
Tarshish Queen
back in South Westria.

Knights were supposed to know that they'd die by the sword, and to despise death despite that.

And I do despise it, how I do. Just not in quite that way. Life's too much fun and there's too much I haven't done yet. And nobody in their right mind is eager to face Judgment. That's why smart people ask God for mercy, not justice.

John went on aloud: “And the Whittles were descended from an English sailor who settled in Portland in the eighteen-sixties; he married a local girl who was the daughter of a Québécois trapper for the Hudson Bay Company who'd settled down to farm in the Willamette with a Niimíipu woman . . . Nez Perce, the tribe's called by outsiders. On my father's side . . . his mother Lady Juniper was Gael from Ireland and Scotland, mostly, some English, a little Cherokee. My father's father was Mike Havel, the first lord of the Bearkillers . . . he was half Suomi and the rest Svenska and Anishinaabe in about equal measure.”

“I thought you said your grandmother married an Englishman, Sir Nigel Loring? Daddy's people, the Abercrombies, were Scots before they left for Oz about two hundred years ago, of course. But the Balwyns are related to the Lorings, if I remember Mummy's tales. It would be difficult for two families who'd come over in the Conqueror's train
not
to be related, after all this time.”