Prince of Outcasts (35 page)

A group of warriors were waiting by the temple gate, squatting on their hams or sitting cross-legged. As the column passed the spearmen
and archers trotted out and fell in with the Raja's infantry. By their looks they were peasants most of the time and only a few had so much as a helmet, though there were plenty of straw hats or head-cloths tied at the front; skinny-wiry-muscular men with bare or sandaled feet, bare brown chests, sarongs drawn up between the legs and tucked into broad sashes in a way that made them look like baggy shorts. Their weapons were simple, rattan shields covered in hide, seven-foot bamboo spears with steel heads, bamboo bows and quivers of long steel-tipped arrows slung at the waist, the inevitable keris and parang, but they looked tough and determined as well. Many had healed scars that
didn't
look like the result of agricultural accidents.

“What's that?” he said, nodding towards the temple; as they passed he could see it was new, probably no older than he was, though parts of the foundations were older.

“Sumbak Temple,” Pip said; she rode with the same easy lifelong skill as he did, but in a rather different style, with more bend to the knees. “Water temple.”

Her shirt and shorts were khaki today, but she still wore the suspenders and the odd hat she called a bowler. Evidently that was how she dressed for active work.

His mind supplied other references to
Pip
and
active
, and he shifted in his saddle and forced himself back to business.

“Every dozen or so of these little villages belong to a Sumbak, and come together to do rites in the temple . . . and also to manage the water distribution system, planting and harvesting times, that sort of thing. The farmers meet with the Sumbak priest presiding and vote on how to keep the system up and fine anyone who doesn't do his share. Then a couple of dozen Sumbaks join around a larger temple and so on to manage canals and dams. They use it to organize a lot of other things as well as watering the fields. It's all a bit . . . fractal?”

John made a gesture with his left hand to indicate he'd understood the reference.

“Like those militiamen,” he said. “Well organized!”

“They do organization a treat here,” Toa observed. “You might not think it the way they dress fancy and they're always beating gamelans and dancing about and processing back and forth to some temple or another and go into fits if someone uses the wrong inflection talking to them, but give the word and my oath! They swarm out like bloody army ants.”

He looked over at the First Mate of the
Tarshish Queen
, who was along to ride herd on the catapults and their crews.

“Is that some sort of Hindu thing, mate?”

Radavindraban shrugged. “It depends on which Hindus, yes indeed, and even now there are very many of us turning up like a penny wherever you go and in many varieties and types and kinds. These are not much like my people. Or those bloody maniacs in Sambalpur who treat everyone else like a dalit, even good Nagarathar like myself.”

At their incomprehension he filled in, tapping himself on the chest: “Merchant caste, very respectable.”

Deor nodded. “These folk seem more . . . they're harder than those I met on Bali itself. Not braver, but . . . harder.”

Thora snorted. “They've had to become so, brother. If they weren't hard, they'd be dead.”

More groups of warrior-peasant militia joined them as the day went on until there was a fair little army on the road, with scouts riding or loping along to either side in the middle distance. There was more brush, and the land began to rumple a bit as the mountains grew closer, fingers of forested higher land extending into the plain. The crosshatch of bunds between the rice fields became shallow stepped terraces as the terrain acquired more of a roll.

Thora was right,
John thought.
These people's parents or grandparents fought their way ashore, desperate and hungry, and their children look ready to fight just as hard now for their homes and families.

About an hour after noon they stopped by yet another temple; the troops simply squatted by the roadside, or dismounted and saw to their horses. The mahouts had the elephants kneel, which was a fascinating process in itself, before their burdens were removed. Besides more militia
this temple had a field kitchen set up and ready, forewarned by the Raja's messengers and the drumbeats and manned—or rather largely womanned and childed—by the local folk. They served bowls of rice, and of a spicy, garlicky soup called
soto bali
thick with pork, vermicelli, peppers, mung beans and sprouts, and bore off a special tray of vegetable dishes for the priest and priestess with much humble bowing as it was handed through the gauze curtains that surrounded them. They were too holy to be exposed to common view, or to eat flesh.

The chance to take off his breast-and-back and arming doublet was inexpressible relief. After a moment to cool he found himself sharp-set for his rice and soup, though he was starting to get nostalgic at the thought of a good wheat loaf . . .

With a crackling-crisp crust, warm from the oven and slathered with sweet fresh butter and eaten with a hunk of sharp cheese,
he thought.

More villagers brought fodder and grain to the horses and oxen, and heaps of grass and sugarcane and melons to the elephants, who stuffed it all into their mouths with their trunks and ate with noisy crunching dribbling enthusiasm before ambling over to the canal to drink hugely and blow water on each other with their trunks and be scrubbed down with coarse-bristled brushes on long sticks by the mahouts. That seemed to be something they enjoyed as much as eating and drinking, though sometimes they showed it by playfully shooting a trunkful of water over their attendants.

Tuan
Anak Agung, the commander of the lancers and the expedition as a whole, came over to John as he sat finishing his soup; they hadn't had much chance to talk yet. The cheek-flaps of his pointed helmet were pushed up, and he handed his bowl back to an aide as he halted with a slight scowl on his scarred face.

Ishikawa calmly kept moving rice and pieces of meat and vegetable into his mouth with his chopsticks, handling them with a finicky delicacy; the locals used forks and spoons and their fingers. He and the Baru Denpasaran officer exchanged cool appraising glances and small polite bows. They had common enemies; that didn't necessarily make them friends.

Anak pointed north, to a very faint thread of smoke above the mountains, and addressed John:

“Very dangerous from too soon now,” he said in passable but thickly accented English.

“Carcosans?”

“Yes, at fort, maybe also in jungle. Smoke, that is dirty forest savage dog-people. Burn trees for fields. That makes ponds and . . . cuts for water . . .”

“Canals,” John said.

“Yes, canals full with soil. Lazy, murdering, ignorant stinking sister-fucking filth-pigs.”

Don't be shy, tell me what you
really
think of them,
John thought, his face impassive; it wasn't his place to tell the locals how to deal with each other, but he could have an opinion.

Aloud: “Are they”—he paused briefly while he sought a tactful term—“the previous inhabitants?”

“Some,” Anak said. “The ones in hills fight for Carcosa, most often. Some
Orang Iban.
Push in from north coast, over mountains. Steep there,” he added, making a gesture to indicate land falling vertically into the sea. “Not good land for rice.”

“Iban?” John asked.

He'd picked up the word
orang
, which meant
man
. Used collectively the translation was
tribe
or
folk
or
nation
depending on context. Thora and Deor had come up quietly, with Ruan behind them carrying his strung longbow.

“Iban, the Sea Dyaks,” the poet-adventurer said.

Thora added: “From Borneo, but they get around these days.”

John wasn't surprised. Folk-migrations had happened all over the world where people survived at all, and it seemed the ocean made it easier here in this world of archipelagos. There was a good road to everywhere if you could sail, and the distances were short enough for even outrigger canoes to go anywhere along the island chains.

Deor went on: “We had a . . . bit of a meeting with some of them
when we came through the islands a year and a half ago. That was before we sailed from Bali to Hawaii, but I didn't know they'd gotten this far.”

“Great sailors and traders, but also pirates often enough, and dangerous,” Thora said, and shrugged cheerfully. “Mind you, I've been called dangerous myself, Johnnie.”

Anak eyed her carefully, as with some wild and perilous thing he didn't quite believe he was seeing and didn't understand except that it
was
perilous. A fighting-man of his experience would know that, at least; would absorb the knowledge from the other's gestalt in a process as unconscious as it was certain. She'd left off her armor for now, though she was belted with backsword and pukko-knife, and wore simply trousers and what Bearkillers called a
sports bra
for some reason. It showed her tigress build, and a fair collection of scars, mostly on the left flank and right arm; cavalry scars. Of course, she was also missing a bit of the little finger on her left hand.

Marks like that on someone of their quite similar ages meant you'd stayed alive in an environment involving homicidal strangers bearing edged metal, and done it for a decade or more. Which meant a fair number of others hadn't survived
you
. The way she held herself and moved would reinforce the lesson.

“Yes, Iban dangerous,
wanita ningrat
is wise,” he said, using a respectful honorific for her.

Which is wise,
John thought.

“Users of
sumpitan
, takers of tops.”

The Raja's officer mimed lifting off his head and then squeezed as if to shrink it. John frowned in puzzlement, and Deor exchanged a few words with Anak in either Malay or Balinese; they didn't sound different enough for the Montivallan to tell them apart.

“
Sumpitan,
blowguns,” Deor said. “Poisoned darts in the blowguns. And they take their enemies' heads and preserve them as trophies.”

Toa snorted. “Not that they know how to do it right,” he said. “Secret's getting the brain and eyes out and then steaming the head and using shark oil and smoking at a low heat before you sun dry the bloody things, see? That's how you make a real
mokomokai
. Last forever, straight up.”

Everyone looked at him for a moment and he grinned and lolled his tongue, a gargoyle figure with his scars and tattoos, leaning on his great spear.

“Iban hunters of heads, yes,” Anak said, clearing his throat and visibly deciding to ignore him.

“They are allies of the Carcosans?” John said.

“Allies of selfs. Fight us, fight them, fight before-people, fight each other, fight for pay.”

He scowled, his brown face flushing ruddy with anger as his hand clenched on the worn ivory and gold of his parang-hilt.

“Come here when our great hero fathers did, take advantage steal part of this our beautiful island. Thieves!”

I wonder what
irony
is in Balinese?
John thought.

Deor's gray eyes flicked to his, and they shared a brief . . . and ironic . . . smile.

“We must careful very scout, now,” Anak said. “Fight anytime after next while.”

He signaled to his underofficer, who blew on a whistle, and the column went to work. The elephants' burdens had included their own bundled war-gear as well as rice, pickled vegetables and salt fish and spare arrows. Great blanket-like coats of metal rings fastened to leather backing and spiked plates for their foreheads armored the beasts. Their tusks had been cut off at about three-quarters of their length and tipped with brass balls; now those were unscrewed, and vicious-looking curved blades like great scythes edged on both sides substituted, and a man with a sharpening-stick went from beast to beast touching them up while he hummed a cheerful song. Knock-down howdahs were assembled and went on their backs, and four archers and a pikeman with a sixteen-foot spear climbed into each, hanging extra quivers over the sides.

Much of the elephant's gear had been silver-washed, or even studded with semiprecious stones, and the rest trimmed in bright colors and plumes. The mahouts shouted and tapped the beasts with their goads,
and the elephants lurched upright, glittering like living tapestries; one curled its trunk up and trumpeted deafeningly, a huge hoarse sound. The others shifted from foot to foot, grumbling low in their massive chests. John had heard legends about the wisdom of elephants . . .

And these are at least smart enough to know what having armor and weapons strapped on means. Of course, so are horses.

“Sigh,” John said as Evrouin helped him back into the half-armor.

The valet snorted unsympathetically; his olive face was running with sweat too, and he was encased in similar gear.

“Shield over the back, please, Your Highness,” he said, the words absolutely respectful and the tone fairly close to a file-closer's admonition to a recruit. “I'll be standing by with the rest if it's needed.”

“Not while I'm mounted. The only people on this island that I don't have two-score pounds on are a few made of blubber.”

Toa cocked an eye on him; he had at least eighty pounds more than John, and not an ounce of it was fat.

“Anyone born on this island, that is,” John clarified. “Throw in another forty of extra armor and this poor little thing will drop dead underneath me.”

“It's no destrier, but better it drop dead than you do with an arrow through the groin, Sire,” said Evrouin.

John winced and kept his hands from cupping protectively over his crotch by an effort of will.