Prince of Outcasts (25 page)

His name had been Brian—John had recognized the twin-raven tattoo on his back—and he came from Boise, wandering westward to the coast because he wanted to see the world and because he was fourth child on a farm none too large, and he'd been saving to buy his own fishing smack and settle down. He had a fiancée in Newport, too.

Parts thumped down wetly. Other sailors grabbed the body . . . the main chunks . . . and pitched them over the side to clear a passage. More of them ran into the rigging with their knives in their teeth as shot whistled through and heavy rigging-lines parted with sounds like giant unturned lutes popping a string.

“One more broadside on the northernmost galley!” Feldman called, cutting through the clangor with his speaking-trumpet. “Then load canister!”

That meant tubes full of palm-length finned darts. The tube stopped at the end of the catapult's throwing-trough, and the darts went on like a spreading cloud of lethal wasps. It was a short-range weapon, just not quite as short-range as grapeshot. Feldman didn't think the catapults were going to stop all the galleys, and if they didn't they'd get boarders over the rail and stop the sailors tending the lines, and then the ship would stop. And the question would be if they sank first or were overrun.

Thora hadn't been looking at the approaching galleys or the praus behind them. She hissed, staring
northward
.

“That Aussie ship is close,” she said. “Very close, boring right in. They've got guts, by almighty Thor!”

John nodded, hopefully coolly, and looked that way himself, over the
Queen
's bow. The smaller ship was bowsprit-on to them, green water purling back around the shark-mouth painted at her waterline, as if the savage teeth had foam on them. There were a surprising number of warriors on board, mostly squatting with only their heads and the shafts of spears showing. There were weapons along the side too, catapults of some sort, light things about the size of a man lying down, set on pintle mounts, the sloped steel shields on either side of the throwing-trough concealing any details.

“Nice to know we won't die alone,” Thora said cheerfully, and Deor thumped her on the back of her lobster-tail helmet with the edge of his shield.

“When you get a dinner invitation from the High One, you say . . .”

“. . . perhaps another day?” Thora answered, and they both laughed.

John joined in the chuckle. He felt warmed by it and a little excluded at the same time.

“Your Highness!” Feldman's voice came, still brisk and taut. “You and your party to the bows, please. They'll be coming over the starboard foc'sle.”

In a slightly different tone: “And the hand of the Lord of Hosts be with you and shelter you, my Prince.”

John flushed again. Once past his first childhood, he'd spent a good deal of his life wondering about the motives of people who tried to be friendly, even though his parents were harsh on flatterers and would-be sycophants and had the Sword to read the truth of men's words. Now he was in a situation where he was
feeling
somehow genuinely flattered simply to receive respect.

They went forward in an almost-duckwalk to keep their heads below the bulwark. More roundshot went by overhead, or twice thumped into the thick wood with crunching sounds. Thora cast an experienced eye upward.

“They're shooting for our rigging and masts,” she said. “Trying to cripple us so they can board at leisure.”

Ruan joined them, longbow in hand, and snuck a glance over the bulwark. “Close enough for bow work soon,” he said, his voice tight.

Deor put a hand on his shoulder. “All men fear, in battle,” he said gently. “Even if Victory-Father lifts their hearts.”

“I'm not afraid!” the young man blurted. Then: “Well, yes, by the Threefold Morrigú, I am! But it's not that, mostly.”

A hesitation: “The last time I went into battle with a lover . . . I lost him.”

Deor hugged him for a moment and kissed him gently. “I've been in many a fight, dear heart. It's not my proper trade—”

Thora snorted and rolled her eyes.

“—but I've done it full often. It's part of life. And I'm not feasting with Woden yet! The more often you walk away from this table, the less likely you are to be carried off, like any other skill.”

Unspoken went the command:
so don't
you
die on me now!

Ruan's face went from pale to flushed to almost normal in a few heartbeats, as the hard clang of the bow-chaser overrode speech and thought for an instant. Thora took a more direct approach.

“Care to try a few shafts?” she said. “I'd like to see how this new bow does at real work.”

She was wearing a quiver slung over her armored back, and the
scabbard designed for a saddlebow and usually buckled before a rider's right knee. She pulled the weapon out as she spoke. Most of the short, powerful killing tools used from horseback were built up of layers of horn, sinew and wood glued together and then lacquered and varnished against the wet, but this was one she'd acquired recently.

The
bnei Yaakov
of the Mojave Desert they'd met and allied with on their way to the cursed castle in the Valley of Death had a different solution to the same technical challenge of making a bow with a long powerful draw short enough to use mounted. They took the great scimitar-shaped horns of the dryland antelope known as
gemsbok
, trimmed them, softened them by steam, then put them in a set of sinuous clamps in the hard dry heat of the desert to set in the double-curve shape. The riser joining them was carved from mesquite root, immensely hard and durable, and the whole was just about as waterproof as simple staves of varnished yew. Ruan looked at it with interest. The Clan Mackenzie were a people of the bow, whatever else they did.

“What's the draw?” he asked.

“Eight-five,” she said, waggling a thumb to show she hadn't had the time to put it on a tillering frame to check, and meant more-or-less. “Yours?”

“A hundred and three,” Ruan said; he was a slender young man, but had the broad shoulders, thick wrists and corded arms that came of training to the longbow all your life. “Broadheads?”

“Didn't see much armor,” Thora agreed. “Just some helmets and shields. Let's take the catapult crew on the nearest galley . . . you left, me right.”

They pulled shafts from their quivers and set them through the centerline cutouts in the risers of their bows and the nocks to the string. The triangular heads glittered a little ruddy along their razor-honed edges, with the lowering sunlight from the west catching on metal from salvaged stainless-steel spoons hammered and cut to a vicious point.

“On the count,” Thora said; they'd both pop up at the same time to spread the risk. “One . . . two . . .
three
!”

They both came smoothly to their feet, drew, shot upward at forty
degrees and crouched again in a single movement without pausing to aim; aiming was for beginners and amateurs. Ruan was a little grim but steady; Thora was grinning broadly.

She doesn't enjoy killing,
John thought.
But she does enjoy fighting and the killing doesn't bother her much as long as it's armed fighters trying to kill her. Which is a sensible attitude but it isn't the way it hits me. Or Deor, come to that.

Shrieks of rage came from the galley, faint but audible even over the two-hundred-odd yards of distance and through the clamor of battle.

“In the eye?” she chaffed. “Showing away, Ruan! That's a field-day shot at this distance, and it can jam in the bone with a broadhead. For the center of the chest, that's the mark when you're doing real work.”

He shook his head, relaxing a little. “I
was
trying for his chest,” he said. “The eye was what I
hit
when he looked up at the sound.
You
hit exactly what you wanted.”

“That's a Mackenzie for you, acting thunderstruck when someone else knows how to shoot,” she said easily. “Let's displace and try again.”

They duckwalked a few feet and popped up again. John turned to Fayard. The underofficer nodded, signed to his men, and they rose kneeling above the bulwark, leveled their crossbows, shot and ducked down to pump the levers in the forestock, came back up, shot. . . .

John chanced a look himself. The remaining galleys were shockingly close now, only a little over two hundred yards. Several of them looked battered and one was listing, but they were still coming. Men were raising tall bows from their decks, unencumbered by masts or rigging, and the first flight of arrows fell only a few yards short of the
Tarshish Queen
, dimpling the water like a sudden flurry of very hard rain. It went on for quite some time because the four remaining galleys were still twenty yards or so apart and the shooting wasn't quite in unison. But there were a lot of arrows, and that meant—

“Down!” he shouted.

Everyone who could ducked or rolled into the shadow of the slight inward tumblehome of the bulwarks, or both; Thora and Deor put their round shields up over Ruan where the three knelt together, and John
raised his kite-shield and put his shoulder under the curve, knocking his visor down as he did. That left nothing but the vision-slit vulnerable, which meant that only sheer bad luck could kill him. He didn't think any local archers were a menace to one of the finest suits of plate in Montival, and they certainly weren't going to get through the shield.

The arrows sleeted down, mostly standing quivering in the deck or impaling ropes. Some struck flesh.

He looked back at the quarterdeck, and his blood froze for a moment until he saw Captain Feldman stand again; he had an arrow through the fleshy part of his left arm, but he was still shouting orders briskly. The ship's healer dashed up, examined it, snipped the shaft across with a pair of odd-looking clippers evidently intended for just that, pulled the stub through, slapped on a dressing and jumped back to his station on the main deck in a single flurry of movement. One of the crossbowmen pitched backward with an arrow sunk through the bridge of his nose, thrashing like a pithed frog until he went limp, and John felt a brief flash of guilt that he couldn't remember his name until he imagined the written roster and
Bors
came to his mind.

“Fire canister!”

The sound of the catapults discharging had a whining bee-like undertone now. John raised his head to look, the narrow slit in his visor focusing his gaze. An arrow shattered as it struck the brow of his helmet, knocking his head backward like a punch with a grunt of shock and pain. He still saw the massed darts sweep across the decks, hundreds of them, and wished he hadn't. You couldn't really
see
them, not moving so fast that they were barely streaks, but you could see where they hit—red splashed, and the sheer impact of a tenth of a pound of steel traveling at hundreds of feet per second made men flex like whips when they struck. Some killed three men in a row.

The sound of them striking the decks and hulls was like hail on a shake roof. Except that the roofs didn't scream.

“Load grapeshot!” Feldman shouted. Then as he swept out his cutlass: “Lash the wheel!
Here they come!
”

The last of the sailors aloft thumped down on deck, wounded or filling in the gaps in the catapult crews. Save for a brace at the maintops with telescope-sighted crossbows, who were carefully and methodically targeting anyone who looked like an officer.

The killing machines shot one last time, and the crews snatched up boarding axes and half-pikes and cutlasses. The sound was different, a great
shrrrusshh
as the steel ball-bearings cut the air and then almost immediately a hail-patter as they struck. Or a sound very much like a ball-peen hammer in the hand of a maniac hitting a dead chicken.

Fayard and his remaining men were shooting stolidly at the Guard's steady bolt every six seconds.

“Into the brown!” the underofficer yelled as he worked his own weapon. “You can't miss, just fucking
shoot
and shoot fast!”

Ruan and Thora where drawing and loosing continuously now. The darts and grapeshot sweeping the enemy decks had broken their massed volleys of arrows, but the long bamboo shafts were coming over in a sustained flicker. Two hit the Montivallan archers in the chest almost simultaneously; they both took a step back and grunted. The one striking Thora's articulated breastplate shattered; the other hung for a second in young Ruan's brigandine, stopped by the little steel plates riveted between the twin thicknesses of leather.

John could see the young man—he was a little older but John
felt
more mature—turn red and gulp for wind. Then he forced himself back into action by sheer willpower, doubtless feeling as if he'd been punched in the gut.

Time,
the Prince of Montival thought, and surged erect with his shield up. His sword flared free, up in the knight's position, hilt-forward above his head. It was simple steel, and he was simply a man, one who would have been a musician first if his fate had been otherwise. But he would
do
what he could.

“Haro, Portland!” he shouted, his voice hollow from within the helm and visor and bevor.
“Holy Mary for Portland!”

H
ARBOR
OF
B
ARU
D
ENPASAR

C
ERAM
S
EA

O
CTOBER
21
ST

C
HANGE
Y
EAR
46/2044 AD

“S
hoot!” Pip called.

They'd crossed the bow of the new ship and lay broadside-on to the galleys attacking under the banner of the Pallid Mask.

She grimaced a little. Nobody knew exactly what the Pallid Mask was, except that he, or possibly
it
, worked for the Yellow Raja—prisoners from the Carcosan side of the harbor had called him the
fore-bringer
or the
emissary
. Sometimes before biting their own tongues off and inhaling the blood. There were also rumors that the Mask actually
was
the Yellow King, somehow.

But he's not invincible. Here's evidence of that!

Even then she blinked in astonishment at the sheer amount of damage the Montivallan broadsides had wrought, ships sinking or turning turtle, bodies thick in water turned red, glutted sharks striking over and over again in a frenzy. The three survivors were boring in though, the long boarding gangways rising up and ready to topple over on the foreign ship and their oars backing water to avoid a hull-crushing impact.

And all I wanted to do was make a really smashing deal in nutmeg and mordant and show Daddy I wasn't born to be a deb in Winchester. And live up to Mummy's legend,
she thought.
Well, I may manage
that
, perhaps! Because here I'm marooned
on an island that has a genuine Eldritch Horror running half of it and turning people into . . . things that aren't really people.

Then aloud, loud but carefully not screeching:

“Maximum fire!”

Her prang-prangs opened up. They were basically huge crossbows with a set of leaf-springs at the front like a massive bowstave, but the devil was in the details and the engineers of Townsville Armory had come up with something quite devilish. Each had a simple hydraulic cocking mechanism that pulled a traveler back against the half-ton resistance of the springs and then released it if the triggers were held down. A hopper above fed six-inch steel darts machine-cut from rebar, given a crude point and spiral grooving to make it spin and provide some stability, letting one drop into the slot each time the traveler came back.

The power was provided by pairs of men sitting on the deck to either side of the weapon below the level of the bulwark, the soles of their feet against each other and their hands on the bars of a rocking pump as they surged back and forth. Prang-prangs didn't have the range or ship-killing battering power of conventional catapults. What they did have was speed.

Prang. Prang. Prang—

The whole cycle took about as long as it took to say
one hundred and one
. Sixty darts a minute or a little better, and there were four of the prang-prangs able to bear, each with two men slapping new bundles of darts into the hoppers.

A ripple of pointed steel rods sprayed towards the Yellow Raja's ships . . . and his men . . . at the rate of four or five a second, into the boarding parties packed ready to swarm forward. Most of them were naked except for loincloths or sarongs. A few carried hide shields and rather more wore helmets; even fewer had torso armor of steel plates joined together by patches of chain mail. None of that had the slightest effect when the darts struck except to produce a spark and
ping
sound on impact, and the
Silver Surfer
's weapons were aimed across the front of the formation, if you could call the three crowded mob-blobs that. Military
types called it defilade fire; basically it meant targets in depth, so that if a bolt missed one man it was much more likely to hit another.

The wind was pushing them towards their enemies broadside-on, as the boarding ramps fell and locked the whole mass together in the shark-swarming sea. When her ship touched, the fight would be at knife-length.

Toa jumped down from the quarterdeck and gave a huge guttural cry as the deck boomed beneath his weight:

“Ke ma-te! Ke ma-te!

It is death! It is death!

Ka-ora! Ka-ora!

I may live! I may live!”

He danced as he sang, astonishingly agile on the crowded deck—not simply agile for a man of his size, but moving through the packed space like a ghost, the huge muscles rippling beneath his tattoos like mating pythons in a jungle. Stamping straddle-legged, kneeling, springing back into the air, his tattooed face a horror of lolling tongue and glaring rolling eyes as he whirled the great spear about himself or held it out rigid and trembling as he slapped chest and thighs and belly and screamed rhythmically in the tongue of his ancestors:

“This is the hairy man

Who brought the sun and made it shine!

It is death! It is death!”

The crew of the
Silver Surfer
looked at him with a mixture of fear and respect—not much of a difference, with most of the sort willing to ship on a venture like this. The Raja's soldiers had no idea what was going on, but they knew Toa wasn't in the least afraid of the Pallid Mask—you'd have to be a lizard or dead not to hear the brutal strength and arrogant menace in the war-haka.

Certainly when Toa does it. Mummy said she nearly wet herself, that time they first heard it outside the ruins of Auckland.

Pip looked quickly westward. The wind was from the south, favoring neither side, and the Raja's boats were straggling towards her in no particular order. That would get
some
of them here before the more disciplined Carcosans arrived en masse. It would be very close. . . .

“Ready, all!” she called.

Prang-prang-prang . . .