Prince of Outcasts (36 page)

He does know how to motivate a fellow. Except that he's also making me want to run away.

“Here, let's sling the helm to the saddlebow where you can get at it quickly. Wouldn't want one in the eye, either.”

“And something for the heatstroke I'll be collapsing with, I hope,” John grumbled.

“Ah, that reminds me!”

The valet-bodyguard crumbled some salt into one of the bamboo mugs the local women were handing around, and watched while John
drank it. The taste was fairly vile, not as bad as seawater but bad, and John breathed carefully for a moment to put down a brief spell of nausea. Evrouin tossed off his with irritating nonchalance.

“Wouldn't lemonade be better?” John said, and grinned.

“When you're in a hammock afterwards, Your Highness,” Evrouin said.

“Milady,” he added respectfully with a bow to Pip before dropping back behind them and swinging into his saddle with the butt of his glaive socketed in his stirrup-iron.

“Old retainer?” she said, as they walked over to the horse-lines and mounted their own. “I recognize that tone of smug bullying insolence they usually get.”

“I heard that!” Toa grinned as he went by. “Comes of having paddled your backside when you got into the Bundaberg and puked all over your dad's heirloom family etchings in the study and your mum was falling about laughing. Never could handle your rum.”

“For God's sake, I was six!”

“Still can't,” he said over his shoulder.

John coughed; so did Evrouin, though his might be cover for a snigger rather than a pause for thought. He waited until the valet-bodyguard was out of immediate earshot before he went on:

“Evrouin's sort of a retainer. Old retainer of the family, at least. And mine . . . sort of . . . for the last three years. As much of a minder as anything else.”

He quirked an eyebrow. “Though . . . well, I told you this voyage was more or less unauthorized? Let's say Evrouin was extremely surprised to end up sailing off from Newport.”

“It's creditable that he didn't stay behind.”

“No, he's brave and loyal to a fault . . . though if he'd stayed he'd have had to face
my
mother, of course.
God's
holy Mother, was that only a few months ago?”

Pip smiled too. “I feel the same way about my exit from Darwin—
probably Daddy's lawyer arrived panting on the quayside waving a writ just as our topsails disappeared beneath the horizon.”

The column reassembled itself without undue formality but commendable speed. John found his head swiveling to either side as the land grew rougher and steeper and the brush thicker, shading up into outright forest; and the roadside trees stopped, evidently a security measure. The villages grew fewer, too, clinging to the lower land along the watercourses, and here the space around the walls of the conjoined compounds was kept strictly clear even at the cost of fruit, convenience and shade. Less was cultivated, so that you could see what had been hidden on the coastal plain; nearly all this had been tilled before the Change, then recolonized by the Baru Denpasarans in ways that ignored the previous field-boundaries and layout save for the roads. At last there were signs of land that had been reclaimed and then abandoned once more when war and raid went through. Small groups of herders armed with bow and spear watched herds of horses and cattle, and pigs whose backs were nearly lost in waist-high vegetation. They were making use of what couldn't be farmed more intensively because field-workers weren't safe without implausible numbers of guards, but they looked thoroughly wary.

Then the column passed through a set of ruins, a town that might have held several thousands, but lacking the tall buildings or steel construction he was used to in works of the ancients. The wreck was old, broken walls and fragments of glass thickly overgrown with brush and tall trees here and there driving roots through shattered concrete and broken stone, but with the roadways in between still showing where sparse vegetation revealed ancient pavement.

In half a dozen places the rusted hulks of ancient vehicles and tumbled wreckage of other sorts had been pushed across the roadway to make barriers, and then a path cleared through them again—from the state of the vegetation, about the same time as the town burned. Mounds of white jasmine vines covered much of it, the cream-colored flowers filling the air with their incongruously sweet scent.

One larger stone building had been treated more savagely still, burned and smashed and then leveled with some effort, and the remains of a round tower lay across it.

Where snags of wall still stood you could see the scorch marks, particularly around the gaping holes that had once been doors and windows. A few skulls peeked out of the underbrush with grinning mockery, or lay in fragments and clumps where bodies had been dragged and heaped, though time and insects had long ago reclaimed bones less obdurate in this climate. They showed the marks of cutting and smashing, which wasn't surprising. In any battle or large-scale killing most died from blows to the head, usually given while they were lying wounded on the ground; he'd heard that often from veterans of the Prophet's War while he was growing up and seen it himself since.

This all happened at about the same time, he thought.

It reminded him of Topanga and the lands near it. Not because of any similarity of climate or terrain, but because there also were places where the bones struck the eye; more of them, in fact, because southern Westria was so dry and had been so very heavily peopled before the Change. In the settled parts of Montival where he'd spent most of his childhood such things had long since been tidied up or reclaimed by nature—Christian clerics and pious layfolk buried them as an act of devotion, and pagans collected them for burning to give the ashes to Earth and lay unquiet spirits they thought might walk.

Anywhere remote, though, a cave or still-standing structure from before the cataclysm or hollow tree or beside some unused ancient road through the ranch-country you came across the skulls now and then, where those fleeing death in the terrible years had met it unawares. Or at least the teeth—those lasted like stone.

Pip was looking around with her slingshot in her left hand and the arm-brace unfolded. “I've seen places like this in Oz, abandoned since the Change. They always gave me the willies.”

“Not long after the Change, yes. But not because of famine or rioting. It's too . . . systematic,” Thora said quietly, and turned her eyes to where Tuan Anak Agung rode for a moment.

“Hai,” Ishikawa said, giving her a slight bow in the saddle. “Battle here, strong . . . no, fierce battle.”

“How can you tell?” Pip said curiously.

The Bearkiller nodded: “This was a sack, done with intent to utterly destroy, destroy the place and its folk both, by someone who knew their work.”

Pip and Thora hadn't spoken much to each other beyond essentials. John was glad to see that stop . . . but what the Bearkiller woman said was entirely too plausible. Despite the muggy heat and the flies buzzing about his head he felt an inner chill, as if some echo of that old savagery lingered, desperate valor and bloodlust equally driven by desperate necessity.

Thora pointed to the southern end of the ruins, then traced a line to the north with her forefinger.

“See where the bodies lay?”

“How . . .” Pip began, then nodded as Ishikawa made a sort of affirmative drawn-out grunting
hnnnnnn
sound his people used.

“Oh, the skulls,” she said. “They last longest.”

“You can tell the first attack came in from the south, from the direction we came, and probably at night,” Thora said.

“Or just rittle . . . little . . . before dawn, Thora-
gozen
,” the Japanese officer said. “For raid, best time. Watchers relax, think they are safe. Sleep is deep for others.”

“Or around dawn,” she agreed. “The town's fighters met it, to give the rest cover to run for the woods. And fought a delaying action from house to house, and one barricade to the next, they must have been expecting it for a day at least, enough to block the streets a little.”

John frowned. “Doesn't look like many got away.”

“Right, Johnnie,” Thora said. “Because whoever was doing the attacking sent another group in beforehand, swinging wide and through the jungle to come in from the north and then hiding and waiting.”

“Like huntsmen waiting for game driven on by the beaters,” he said with a shiver.

“Right, they were there to kill, not just take the town. And they came
out to catch the fugitives running from the fighting . . . probably the town was burning by then too, because the first attack used fire-arrows and lots of shouting and noise to spread panic.”

“Force from jungle come out in—” Ishikawa made an embracing gesture with both arms, indicating a formation like a deep semicircle. “Catch, kill all, then pile the bodies. You say in Engrish . . . clean sweep.”

John looked; the signs were obvious once they'd been pointed out. His storyteller's mind filled in the details: darkness, shrieks and war-cries, flame arcing through the night, the able and the brave snatching up weapons and dashing towards the sound of battle where the first screaming onset struck the sleepy guards. Mothers and the sick and old and the plain fear-struck grabbing children out of bed and running in the other direction and then rows of silent blades rising out of the bush . . .

Thora nodded judiciously: “Neat professional job, though, coordinating two concentric attacks like that. Much easier to plan on a nice clear map than actually do through brush and darkness and not just get fucking lost and start going in circles or blundering into each other and fighting your own until the sun comes up and you go
wooopsie-oooopsie
! Careful timing, and a force that could keep very good noise discipline.”

“Like Rangers?” John asked; the Dúnedain were very good at moving quietly and undetected.

“You'd need some scouts to lead, but patience and obedience would do for the rest.”

She took another long look. “You can see the place has never been reclaimed or mined for salvage and building material since, just the road cleared and the rest left to lie from that day to this,” she finished. “Forty-five years or so, I'd say, give or take . . . the first Change Year.”

“Yeah, she's right, Pip,” Toa said; he pronounced it more like
shay's roy-eiyt
. “Seen a lot places in ol' N-Zed when I was a youngster that had this look. Lot of fighting there after the Change. In North Island where everything went to shit.”

He pronounced
shit
more like
shut
.

With a touch of bitterness: “Down in South Island they were eating
spuds and fat mutton and shaking their heads and sighing and doing sod-all and telling each other how hard they had it.”

John looked around at the haunted ruin and crossed himself; Thora and Deor made the sign of the Hammer, and they passed on. The scop murmured as he did, lyrics from some tune the prince had never heard:

“Flames lick the corners

Of each hungry horseman's smile;

For they have locusts in their scabbards,

And deserts in their eyes.”

The road north beyond the ruins was still well-made, obviously kept up until recently.

The column slowed, and the war-elephants moved back and out to the sides beyond the roadside verge, each with one rider standing upright for a better view as the forest closed in around them. It had been cut well back sometime in the last year, but the trees beyond that strip grew taller and taller as the land rose, more bound together with lianas and creepers, trees that had been growing long before the Change. Orchids and flowers he couldn't name were thick, and bright-plumaged birds flew chattering and fluting. There were gray-furred manlike things flitting through the branches that he realized with a start were monkeys.

It was all beautiful . . . but John found the hot green heaviness oppressive, more so than the thickest woods in Montival, even the rain-forests of Olympus where everything had moss inches deep. The Baru Denpasarans had scouts out there, but he still felt nervous. He shifted his balance to send his horse forward, and drew rein beside Anak.

“
Tuan
Anak, the enemy fortress interdicting . . . stopping . . . your water supply is about another . . . two hours march?” he said.

The Baru Denpasaran nodded. “Two if go fast-fast, Prince. Three better, need to make sure no ambush.”

“Shouldn't we camp, if we want a day's fighting time when we get there?” John replied. “It's not as if they aren't going to be expecting us.”

“Yes, good, Prince sees clear,” Anak said, eyeing him with genuine respect. “So do soon, before sundown, time to make strong camp before sun falls.”

“Why not here?” John said, pointing back to the ancient wreck. “There's more open ground and the old buildings would give cover.”

Anak looked over his shoulder at the ruins, a brief glance and then away. “No. Not there.
Leyak
there.”

“Leyak?” John asked.

“Hungry, angry ghost, bad spirit. Very evil, curse there, curse on Bone Place. We go on till out of sight.”

John was tempted to argue, until he remembered the fight in the harbor and the figure they called the Pallid Mask. And the crocodile with the sigil-band on its forelimb.

After that, I'll believe
anything
might happen. We in Montival have our mysteries, and I suppose that's true everywhere. Let leyak remain a mystery to me! And it's his command and his land; I'm a stranger here.

When the sun approached the western horizon and shadows fell heavy on the jungle hills around them, Anak called the halt. They were in a stretch where the forest pulled back a little and was lower where it did grow, evidently rock fairly close beneath the soil, and a small swift stream ran across the sloping ground to provide plenty of water. The Baru Denpasarans set to, with a good deal of shouting and arm-waving but not much real fuss or confusion. Nobody bothered with tents except for the High Priest and Priestess. It was more than warm enough to sleep wrapped in a cloak or blanket, and evidently if it rained you just got wet until you dried out again.