Prince of Outcasts (49 page)

The mounted heralds in tabards sounding their horns at intervals rode before them. The crowds thickened as the procession moved on into the more densely peopled sections, cheering wildly and calling blessings. Here the militia faced outward, with their polearms held horizontally to keep the crowds off the pavement.

Órlaith never felt entirely at home in cities, but this was also Montival—and a part of it that her blood had nurtured. Astoria had nearly twoscore thousand people now, and like its great rival Newport to the south the number was greater than it had been on the day of the
Change, and still growing. There was little farmland immediately around it except for some pasture and hay meadow, but railcars and barges and riverboats brought the Columbia's wealth downstream. Fishing-boats from dories to deep-sea schooners waged their grim immemorial struggle to harvest the ocean's riches, nearby wrecks provided abundant metal, water-power sawed and hammered and turned lathe and drill and helped skilled hands. Daring skippers carried the yield of its hinterlands to many lands, and also the products of its own craft guilds, and returned with wealth and a breath of strangeness. There were foreign ships as well, more every year. Folk from three continents walked these streets, bringing not only wealth but songs and tales, their legends and their Gods. Astoria had prospered under the Lord Protector and Lady Regent Sandra after him, and under the High King's long peace it had flourished.

That showed in streets lit by gas lamps in cast-iron stands, buildings as likely to be new as repurposed work of the ancients; tall houses of four or five stories, half-timbered frames and whitewashed brick noggin beneath steep shingle roofs, blazoned with the crests of magnates or guilds. City-folk crowded the sidewalks and clustered thickly in window and balcony, cheering and waving or holding up children who fluttered tiny flags on sticks.

Laborers in canvas smocks and baggy trousers and wooden clogs or long gowns and wimples, sailors in striped sweaters and shapeless caps, rowdy apprentices in blue jackets, leather-aproned journeymen, master-craftsmen in their Sunday best, merchants brightly clad in bag-sleeved houppelandes and hose and curl-toed shoes, Catholic religious in cassock and biretta or the robes and habits of their Orders, all bore themselves proudly.

City air makes you free,
as the saying went.

The shops and worksteads which occupied many ground-floors were shuttered for this day of her departure, but street-sellers circulated amid the dense crowds, with trays of sausages in buns and candied apples or cups of hot spiced cider or chips and batter-fried fish wrapped in sheets from old
issues of the
Astoria Intelligencer and Herald
. Others sold scarves printed with the faces of the Royal household. Mostly the cheering was a shapeless white roar of noise, but Órlaith could pick out her mother's name now and then, or her own, or her father's. Bells rang from the numerous churches and choirs sang; someone had gotten them all doing the same hymns, at least.

The docks were on the ball of the thumb. Slipways stretching eastward along the riverfront held the frames of a dozen ships, bare ribs or partly-planked hulls, and four more were in a fitting-out basin getting their masts and standing rigging. This part of town was equally crowded, though more of the spectators were troops waiting to board, and it was more purely workaday. Any home in the city might be a workplace too, but the blocks nearer the waterfront held the trades that needed more space or more elaborate facilities, vast warehouses and equally vast timber yards, machine-shops and foundries, fish-packing sheds and soap-boiling plants; there were tramway tracks set into the pavements, more for shifting heavy cargo than people. The usual city smells of horse and woodsmoke were supplemented by a strong waft of fish, and scorched metal and hot oil and burning charcoal. Here the work of the day went on without cease and the labor had gone on all through the night, for right now that task was stowing the last of the expeditionary force.

It was important to get the whole fleet over the tricky, dangerous mouth of the Columbia as fast as possible. As they went by netloads of bales and boxes—and once a blindfolded destrier with a sling-band under its belly—swung through the air as cranes pivoted to a whirring ratchet of hydraulic engines, and officers and dockmasters waved clipboards and shouted. Troops filed up gangplanks bent under their bundled gear; a band of Mackenzies did a sword-dance on one wharf as they waited their turn, whirling kilts and flashing steel and faces painted for war, the drone of bagpipes and a snatch of song:

“As the world turned dark, I lighted the log,

With Yule burning bright and piercing the fog.

I lay with my lady in the dark of the year,

And I'll be reborn when Spring draws near!”

A chanting rose as an oar-tug pulled a transport away from the dock, the towing cable rising and spritzing water as its fibers tightened.

Órlaith would be crossing in the Royal Montivallan Navy frigate
Sea-Leopard
, and the big warship was just completing its stores as they passed; caterpillars of sailors were trotting up its gangplanks with massive sausages of rolled canvas and bundles of tarred cable. Reiko's smaller
Ari no Okurimono
was tied up on the other side of the pier, with the crew on their knees and bowing their heads as she approached. From here the estuary mouth northwards was a mass of hulls and sails and swarming small craft tending to them.

“To hold such power in your hands!” she heard Egawa Noboru say beneath his breath.

Admiral Naysmith was not far away, conferring with some of her captains and the Columbia pilots in their gold-worked blue jackets, a short thickset woman of about forty. She'd punctiliously offered Órlaith the captain's cabin at the stern for herself, and smiled when the Crown Princess snorted and told her to be serious. Eight of them would be bunking in it, and Macmac curled up in a corner. The rest of the ship would be packed as tight as Astoria sardines in oil, despite the fact that
Sea-Leopard
was just finished her shakedown cruise and big, seventeen hundred and fifty tons and two hundred eighty-five feet from stem to the tip of her bowsprit.

Órlaith nodded to Naysmith as they passed and received a salute and a doffing of the fore-and-aft hat; the Bearkiller admiral had pleaded press of business to avoid the ceremony up on Astoria Column Hill. That made her unusual, but people expected an almost-rude bluntness from her folk.

Everyone else is going to get as close as they can!
Órlaith thought as they turned up the curving road and the city unfolded like a map beneath her, streets and roofs and church-spires.

Her mother awaited her under the awning of a great open-sided pavilion in the robes of State and bearing the silver lacework of the crown on her
gray-shot brown hair, her care-worn face still the center of all eyes among the pomp of delegates and great lords, steel and silk and jewels. Órlaith swung down and took a knee briefly, bringing her fist to her chest and bowing her head, then striding forward as Mathilda made the slight palm-up, crooked-finger gesture that meant
rise and approach
. They kept their faces grave, but there was greeting in their gaze as their eyes met. Reiko halted beside her with the slight mutual inclination of the head that signaled a meeting of equals; then they pivoted to flank Órlaith's mother.

“Folk of Montival!” the High Queen Mathilda called. “Our lord the High King Artos was slain by foreign men from across the western sea, men who landed unheralded on our own soil with weapons in their hands to shed his sacred blood. For this and for their many other crimes I and the Council of Realms have called with one voice for war against the evil sorcerers who rule and oppress the realm of
Chosŏn
, who our ancestors fought even before the Change. It is Our intent that they be cast down and utterly destroyed, and their slaves freed from misrule and set at liberty to choose their own fates. What is your will?”

“War!” half a dozen voices shouted among the crowd on the rain-drenched hilltop.

Blades were drawn and brandished beyond the silent files of the green-clad High King's Archers, the grounded glaives of the black-armored Protector's Guard and the long spears and
naginatas
of the Nihonjin samurai. The short speech had been repeated down the road to the city, and all the way to the docks, by nomenclators with printed copies. More and more took up the cry, down the twisting road and into the streets packed with knight and burgher, lord and dame, with townsfolk and with soldiers from every member-realm of the High Kingdom. Even the newest; there were a few Topangans and Chatsworth men and riders of the
bnei Yaakov
already on the ships.

The cry spread farther. “War . . . War . . .
War!
”

Órlaith felt a shiver as the thing turned from human voices into an elemental roar like storm-surf beating on cliffs, as if Earth and Sea and Sky themselves cried out for vengeance against her father's killers. It
vibrated through the titanium-alloy plates of her armor into her very bones.

“WAR . . . WAR . . .”

Mathilda raised her hands, the ermine cloak falling back from her shoulders as she did. The sound died down gradually, falling away to a grumbling murmur in an outward wave of quieting.

“We will fight this war with all our strength; and our allies will add their strength to ours. The Empire of Dai-Nippon has suffered many wrongs from the same enemy. As their enemy is ours, so our cause will be theirs!”

Reiko stepped forward. She was in the black-and-scarlet lacquered armor her people wore, with the chrysanthemum
mon
on her helmet and a bearer to either side with the Hinomaru flag and the
Tennō
's personal banner. She and Órlaith faced each other and bowed gravely. Then they turned westward and put their hands to the weapons at their sides. Slowly they drew them, and raised them skyward.

Shock
.

There was always a feeling of flexure when she drew the Sword of the Lady, even for practice. As if the substance of the world could not quite contain it and bent beneath the strain. Today it struck through her like a wash of cool fire, a taste like the granite bones of the earth beneath her, a strength like the rumble of avalanche in the mountains and sun baking black rock in a desert and the roaring wrath of the great bears on the ice-flows of the north. She wasn't sure if there was physical light, but everything seemed to sing for a moment. And with it another light, more golden, from the Grasscutter; a hot wrath that could send worlds down in slow flame. The light drizzle stopped. Then above them the clouds parted, and the rising sun behind them painted the world in shades of green and gray.

The High Queen flung her arms upward. “However you may call on Him and by whatever names,
God wills it!
Through all toil, all terror, all grief,
to victory!
”

Total silence reigned for a long moment until they sheathed the swords; then the sound washed over them, stunning even in that vast
landscape of mountain and river, sea and sky. When it had died down a little Órlaith knelt before her mother and extended her hands with the palms pressed together. The High Queen took them between her own; the winter sun glinted coolly on the gold and jewels of the crown and the embroidery of her cotte-hardie.

“As High Queen of Montival and all its peoples, I put the fate of our warriors in your hands, Crown Princess Órlaith of House Artos,” she said, in a clear carrying tone. “Treasure their blood and their lives, for each is precious to Us and to their kin. Yet they have sworn those lives to the service of the High Kingdom and to our just cause in this war our enemies have forced upon us. When you must strike, do not hesitate! Strike like a hammer and hold nothing back.”

The pavilion was open to the sides and they were holding the ceremony atop the Astoria Column Hill so that they could plead necessity to keep the numbers and problems of precedent from ballooning completely out of control. The hundred-and-sixty-foot height of the column stretched upward behind them, with scenes from the ancient history of the region spiraling upward around its surface and a cast-iron staircase within; the lookouts on the platform at the top would have been within the clouds until a few moments ago. Their view would be even more breathtaking than hers, the Coast Range eastward rising green-gray and streaked with fog and cloud above its forests, the great bridge swooping northward over the Columbia, and the infinite white-streaked gray of the waters, the tumbled roofs of shingle or tile sloping down to the docks, the white sails dancing with wind and sea beyond.

“I will take up this charge, my Queen,” Órlaith replied. “For it is the duty laid on my blood by the Powers. And that blood I stand ready to spill when the need of my people calls. It binds me to this soil and this folk through all their time past and to come, wherever I go. So I swear to fight with all my strength of body, soul and mind; never relenting until the day is won, be the cost what it may. Unless the sea rise and drown us, or the sky fall and crush us, or the world end.”

There was a short cheer as she stood and embraced her mother,
careful of her still-healing body beneath the robes of State. The infinitely familiar voice whispered in her ear, the mother now and not the ruler:

“And come back to me, my golden girl. You remind me of him so. Come back to me.”

The various dignitaries were present in their carefully calculated proportions and places from all over the High Kingdom, down to the city's Lord Mayor and the Bishop of Astoria and the heads of the various confraternities and guilds, and they all moved to fall into line in their places behind the Royal coach as the stewards directed. The air was cold; not freezing, but full of a penetrating damp chill. You could go months without seeing the sun here in this time of short days, and it made the light that was blossoming with the offshore breeze more welcome. It smelled of wet earth and horses and wet wool and a hint of the incense in the censers of the Catholic clerics and, strongly, of tree and rock behind them.