Prince of Outcasts (18 page)

“It's a damn tough life full of toil and strife

We sailormen undergo—

And we don't give a damn when the gale is done

How hard the winds did blow—

We're homeward bound from the Arctic ground

With a good ship taut and free—

And we won't give a damn when we drink our dram

With the girls of Old Maui!”

The song came to an end and the labor did, after a remarkable catalogue of what the sailors intended to do with the alcohol, girls, boys and sheep of Maui. They all rested for an instant while the forward anchor was pinned home, and then the capstan bars seemed to vanish as if by magic—his slid through his hands almost quick enough to burn when someone snatched it away—and a volley of commands came from the quarterdeck:

“Loose heads'ls there! Hands aloft to loose tops'ls, on the fore, on the main! Lively, we haven't got all day!”

Some of the sailors running up the ratlines and making the rigging thrum like a guitar chuckled grimly at the graveyard humor—they wouldn't be
floating
at the end of the day, one way or another, and they all knew it. The staysails at the bow blossomed above their heads and brought the bows around eastward, parallel with the shore.

“Hard a'starboard the wheel! Let fall! Haul away and sheet her home!”

The big gaff mainsails ran up the masts as the windlasses whined, then
swung to starboard and cracked taut in long white curves. Now the
Tarshish Queen
heeled that way too, and the water began to chuckle at her prow as she gained way. The square sails caught with booming sounds and added a little more roll to the pitch.

“Thus, thus, very well, thus! Sheet her home, hands to braces!”

They were sailing at a bit less than right-angles to the wind, easy enough for a schooner, and with the advantage that it slowed the leak by leaning the ship over so that some of the damage was raised a bit above the surface of the waves. From the conversation that passed back and forth he gathered that the pumps were closer to keeping pace . . . but not gaining on the water. The break in the frames was working at the planks further and further from the original round-shot wound, made much worse by the elephantine bulk of the creature that had struck them.

They were a little closer to the shore now, though far enough out to avoid the patches of white where the waves caught on offshore rock or reef. Low combers were breaking in azure and cream on wide white sand beaches, but everything was intensely green beyond, coconut palms and trees he didn't recognize even from pictures, with patches of forest on higher land or abandoned fields starred with clumps of great vivid flowers, red or white or blue. Birds even gaudier flew upward now and then in clumps, strange creatures with huge beaks or trailing tailfeathers bright as a hummingbird's breast.

Beyond was a stretch of rice fields covering about half the flat ground, paddies separated into rectangles by the bunds that controlled the water and spotted with low bits in reeds and swampy bushes and higher areas covered with trees. The tall stalks of the rice were still vividly green, but here and there a tawny streak showed that the heads of grain would turn dry and golden soon. Now and then he saw a windmill, different in detail and made of laminated bamboo from the great feathery clumps that served for woodlots, but doing the same work he was accustomed to. He walked slowly back to the quarterdeck. Captain Feldman was examining the shore himself with his telescope, and speaking to Deor and Thora—who'd also sailed in these waters. Ruan was there, looking on with fascination.

“A lot of that land was abandoned, and then some of it's been reclaimed lately,” John said.

“You're right,” Feldman replied. A moment later: “More of it under the plow as we move east. That's where the resettlement started.”

“My great-grandfather's parents came from hereabouts,” Ruan said.

John looked at him with surprise. “I thought he was from China?”

“No and yes, so to say,” he said; his green-hazel eyes sparkled, and the sun had put reddish highlights in the long black hair that fell down his back in a queue bound with an old bowstring.

“You're a Mackenzie for certain!” Deor said. “Paradox on contradiction!” To the others: “Get him to explain.”

“That from a bard?” John said with a smile.

Ruan turned to John: “It's simple, so it is, Prince: my great-grandfather's
ancestors
were from China, and they always thought of themselves as Han, but their families had moved to these southern isles long ago. Then he and his wife fled some great upheaval or war here, a generation before the Change, and my grandfather was born near Astoria. When he was of a man's years he married a woman of the Gael, which displeased his kin, so my grandparents moved to Eugene, where my father was born, and his sisters. After the old world fell things went hard for all of them, but they joined the Clan the next year. There's not much else in my father's stories—his mother and father died in the second Change year, and he was fostered when he was only five. That story and our midname Chu was all of the tale we had.”

He turned eagerly to his lover. “Now you can show me the wonders you told of, and we can see them together!”

Deor smiled and put an arm around his shoulders. “See how the houses are mostly inside compounds?” he said, pointing. “And how the compounds all face the same direction? That's how the folk of Bali build their homes; they're called
karang
, and many generations of a family may have houses within.”

John focused his glasses. Apart from the smallest and simplest thatched huts the houses of the dwellers—presumably mostly peasants—were
indeed within walled enclosures, grouped into long rectangular villages, always with mixed orchards and leafy gardens around them. All were neatly aligned towards a mountain he could see very faintly on the horizon to the northeast.

“And those little buildings in front of the gateways?” Ruan asked, borrowing the glasses for a moment.

“Shrines, where offerings are made to the wights. The entrance is always narrow—it's called an
angkul-angku
. Within is a wall facing the gate, to bar hostile spirits.”

“Sure, and it would be useful for those of human kind entering with ill intent,” Ruan observed shrewdly. “Like a Dun in little.”

Thora laughed and clapped him on the back. “Wit as well as looks, youngster,” she said. “I thought exactly the same the first time I saw them. The compounds can be forts at need. Put a few score together and the whole village is a fort.”

“Indeed,” Deor said. “But to the dwellers they're the universe writ small, as the human body is. The head for goodness, the feet for evil, and the middle the mixed ream of human kind.”

The walls and the sides of the buildings within were of some thick-looking substance brightly whitewashed; possibly plastered mud-brick, or rammed earth, or compacted coral rag limestone, topped with curved tile. Each compound had a single gateway flanked by pillars, its ornament and size varying with those of the compound as a whole. The roofs that showed over the walls were steep-pitched in their upper sections and then hipped out below, sometimes of clay tile, sometimes of golden thatch or a darker coarse-looking material. It was just too far away to see details of the people except for the odd fisherman casting nets at the water's edge, though there were plenty about, and now and then an outrigger canoe or double-hulled vessel with an inverted pyramid for a sail kept its distance.

“They know we're here,” John said.

He thought some of the horsemen on the road were cantering along and matching the ship's passage, and doubtless others had galloped ahead to bear the news. When they got a bit closer he could see that many
other folk were stopping and pointing. Here and there a spearhead twinkled.

“It has a Balinese look, right enough,” the Captain said. “I've done good business in Bali, though they're not the most welcoming of folk until you've proven yourself honest.”

John frowned. He'd studied the geography of this part of the world, albeit briefly.

“We're a long way from Bali, aren't we?” he asked.

“About a thousand miles, but that's not all that far in sailing terms. Four to twelve days, with reasonable winds,” Feldman said. “Plenty of places to stop for water along the way, too.”

“Even so, what would they be doing here?”

The three experienced voyagers in their thirties looked at each other. Deor was the one who spoke; he was the maker of tales, after all, the wordsmith.

“There was war in Bali after the Change.”

John shrugged mentally; there had been war nearly everywhere, after the Change. Ranging from minor, structured conflicts more like rough peace-officer work to frenzied mass many-million-fold struggles of all against all as the doomed death-zones perished in fire and blood, famine and plague.

And everything in between.

It was a time of legends to him, of villains and heroes and giants, the saviors of peoples and the builders of nations. And of fell, stark warlords carving out realms at the edge of the sword. Who was which often depended on where the question was asked, or in his case how they felt about his respective grandfathers.

Deor went on: “First there was war against the . . . outsiders there. The Javanese, mostly—Java was the ruling part of a great empire of these islands then, its people the masters overall, and some of them had settled on Bali to enforce their rule; about one in ten of the total or a little more. The Javanese had different Gods and customs, and neither much liked the other. Also, to Balinese good comes from inland—from the heights,
from
Gunung Agung
, the mountain that is the abode of their Gods and to them the navel of the world. Kaja, goodness and fertility and right order, flows down with the water. Evil comes from below, from the sea—
kelod
, chaos and destruction and demons. The Javanese came from oversea and were mostly city-dwellers on Bali, so . . .”

Thora was blunter, as usual. “So, this,” she said, and made a slicing gesture across her throat with one thumb.

John wasn't surprised at that either. If there just wasn't enough to go around, you'd naturally see that what there was went to your own folk, those you were bound to by belief and blood, and you'd drive out strangers who added more mouths. Kill them like rats if you had to, when it was a choice of their children starving or yours. That was how human beings were made; like wolves they were creatures of the tribe, of the pack. They could be more than that, but that was the foundation without which nothing could be built.

From the tone of Deor's words, he suspected that the
scop
had fond memories of his time there, and wanted to think well of the folk.

“They didn't kill all of the other outsiders,” he added a little defensively. “The ones who were few and not a threat or great burden, or had useful knowledge.”

Feldman smiled with a wry twist of the mouth, as if mentally thinking back through the long history of his people. He spoke matter-of-factly:

“There were also about three million people on Bali in the year of the Change, and it's half the size of the Willamette Valley. And it's pretty hilly. Fertile, rich soil and well watered, they have terraces going up the mountains like green staircases, but even with the
outsiders
gone there just wasn't enough.”

“Three million in a place that size?” John blurted, and Ruan whistled.

Usually the numbers of the ancient world were just that, meaninglessly huge strings of numerals, but sometimes they hit home. “And they weren't ruined completely? The whole of Montival has, what, five million people?”

Deor sighed. “The Balinese are true landsmen, skilled and hardy for
toil and very good at working together, and quick to come to a good understanding with the wights.”

“The
aes dana
,” Ruan said, using the Mackenzie term for the spirits of place.

“And they had many fine makers, craftsmen and not machine-tenders, back before the Change, smiths and potters and weavers. But even so, there was cruel hunger, and death stalked the villages.”

“Exactly,” Feldman said, his voice coolly unsentimental. “They had a strong king right from the start, one who seized power almost at once by whipping folk up against the outsiders, and
he
was no fool and saw the implications.”

John nodded again.
That
was thoroughly familiar too. Besides luck and strong will and wits, a willingness to see and accept what the Change would bring had been a common trait of many who'd risen to power then. All four of his grandparents, for starters.

“It's a small enough place that men on foot or on bicycles could keep them acting together when the ancients' machines for talking at a distance failed. Most of the other islands around
were
ruined utterly, with fighting and chaos so bad they kept the next crop from being planted or harvested.”

“Ah,” John said. “So the Balinese were very hungry by then, but not quite so bad that they couldn't do anything but claw at each other and perish. A borderline case where what the leaders did was crucial. I've studied such.”

He carefully didn't mention that his grandfather Norman Arminger had
been
one such leader, and the choices
he'd
made. Most of them had involved killing people in very large numbers. People who'd have died anyway, but . . .

Feldman nodded: “So by the second year they set out to conquer more land and settle colonists there, the people they couldn't feed at home.”

Deor nodded soberly as well. “That's hard for Balinese, to uproot themselves. They sink deep roots in a place, and the family shrines where
they worship their ancestors are dear to them. They drew lots to see who must go, I was told; two families in three, over the next few years. They've made poems of the bitterness of it.”