Prince of Outcasts (9 page)

“I danced at a Beltane with the pole standing tall,

And the ribbons flowing round the dancers all.

I danced in the sunlight at the Midsummer Feast

As the day dawned pink with the Sun Lord's heat!

Dance, dance, wherever you may be—”

Susan had a lot of Lakota tunes and brought out a few they hadn't heard before, including some Órlaith hadn't been exposed to on her visits
to the far eastern marches of the kingdom, doubtless because the grave elders of the
tunwan
didn't think them suitable for a young visiting princess.

Particularly the one about the adventures of the buffalo heifer!

Órlaith managed to doze for most of the night. As the light returned they drank cold herb tea, ate hard-boiled eggs and fruit and bread and looked out with interest at the varied lands as they passed and chatted about the details and the crops. They were all countryfolk in one way or another.

“Now, riddle me this,” Karl said after a while. “Is it more boring to do this trip afoot, or like this?”

“You've more time for it afoot,” Mathun said. “And sure, the country passes more slowly.”

“Aye,” Boudicca Lopez Mackenzie said from the rear of the car where she was drawing her bow and relaxing it over and over. “But sitting on your arse you notice it more!”

The argument grew lively, and was done entirely for its own sake. Órlaith leaned back and pulled her bonnet over her eyes.

Johnnie, I wish I was with you!

P
ACIFIC
O
CEAN

B
EARING
SOUTH
-
SOUTHWEST

S
EPTEMBER
/K
UGATSU
2
ND

C
HANGE
Y
EAR
46/S
HŌHEI
1/2044 AD

“H
unnhh!”

John grunted as he swayed up the companionway to the quarterdeck in the thick darkness. The wind hit him as he came over the break; so did the rain that hadn't stopped much since they'd left Topanga. The awkward weight of the forty-pound piece of steel in a rope sling over his back wasn't helping either, and of course the fact that the
Tarshish Queen
was at forty degrees going up and forty degrees going down as she surged over the waves.

At increasing speed as she emerged from each trough and the wind hit her, then hesitating for a long unpleasant moment on the crest with foam boiling around her, then nosing down for the long swoop with huge rooster-tails of spray to either side and rolling and pitching as she did, then slowing a bit at the bottom, then the whole thing over again . . .

Disassembling tons of catapult in darkness on a violently pitching deck with waves washing over the side at unpredictable intervals, when not one part down to the smallest screw could be lost, and then carrying the whole thing from the bow a hundred and fifty feet to the stern . . .

“Here we go, Your Highness,” Fayard said. “That's the right-hand mainspring anchor plate link panel.”

Two of the crossbowmen took the weight off his back and John stepped aside to get out of the way; all the Protector's Guard were cross-trained on catapults, enough to be useful in this immensely complex and demanding task. Captain Ishikawa was next, with a big chunk of steel gearing over
his
back.

“Crever, vell . . . ve
rr
y c
l
eve
r
,” he gasped as the men took it, almost giggling as he said it.

His grinning face was underlit by the small deadlight lantern hung beneath the tarpaulin that made a sort of improvised tent over the starboard part of the
Queen
's fantail aft of the wheel and binnacle. Feldman was crouched there with several of his sailors, mostly the crew-captains of the catapults. There was a low muttering among them, a clink of tools on metal that carried even over the moaning hum of the storm in the rigging and the white roar of water. Someone handed John a flask and he drank; it was spiced rum, and powerful. Sweet fire burned its way down to his belly, and pushed back the chill in his hands and the lingering pain of his bruises.

Feldman sank back. “There; just go over the bolts, feel for how tight they are,” he said to his crewmen. “We'll hook up the hydraulics at dawn, it won't take long. In the meantime, the rest of you report to the First Mate and help restowing stores. We'll need the trim right.”

Then to Ishikawa and John as he sank with his back against the machine:

“I got this idea from the way those Suluk corsairs dogged us back from Hawaii, on the old
Ark—
my first voyage far-foreign, as assistant supercargo to my father. I was interested even then.”

“You were?” Thora said. “I remember being terrified, mainly.”

She'd been on that voyage, shipping out as an adventurous youngster, and had met Deor at its end, when the crippled
Ark
limped into Albion Cove.

“That memory made me remember how much more time merchantmen spend running from pirates than vice versa. So when we built the
Queen
I had the armorers from Donaldson Foundry make the tracks for the stern chaser suitable for doubling-up. When you add in that it's so difficult to shoot right over the bows but not over the stern . . .”

His
grin looked positively demonic in the night, underlit beneath his trimmed black beard.

John looked through a gap in the canvas, northeast towards blackness and a heaving chaos that was visible in glimpses only because the lines of foam caught light from the sterncastle lanterns. They couldn't see the leading Korean in the dark—there had been only a few glimpses of another, or possibly two—but he'd be there when the sun came up behind them. That had happened often enough that they'd taken to using the stern-lanterns again. Dousing them just made life harder for the crew and didn't help shake the pursuit at all.

“Isn't there a risk of being trapped into a broadside action?” he said; someday he'd need to understand war at sea by instinct. “If we take damage that slows us?”

Feldman's chuckle was harsh. “In this storm? The only thing we can do is run with the wind hard on the starboard quarter. If we try to turn . . . or if we lost steering . . . or lost a major sail . . . we'd broach to. In an instant. Same for them.”

“Broach?” John said; the word was only vaguely familiar.

“Turn right into the wind and lay over, so we'd be hit broadside on by the next wave and capsize,” Feldman said, and Ishikawa nodded vigorously. “And be smashed to kindling and sent to Sheol when the crest fell on us. Carrying this much canvas in seas and winds like this means we're on the edge of it every instant, anyway.”

Oh, thank you, Captain. I suspected something like that, but it's
so
nice to have the details!

Feldman shrugged, his usual broad gesture less visible in the dim light of the lamp and under the foul-weather gear.

“These stern chases can go on forever, across half the world if you're unlucky, or until you run into something solid. This damned wind is pushing us right across the Pacific; I haven't had a good observation for days, but dead reckoning is enough for that.”

“They're running us towards Asia and away from Montival,” John said.

Ishikawa bowed, his face invisible in the dark beneath the funnel brim of his sou'wester.

“Asia very big pr . . . place, Prince,” he said, and John thought he detected irony there—even through the barriers of accent and storm-roar.

Feldman nodded. “It is! Going back, that's another question. This ship is damaged and it's getting worse. Much longer and we couldn't turn back, we'd have to make shore and beach her for repairs or sink. It's worth the risk to break the stalemate.”

John swallowed and nodded, looking at the ugly, bulky, angular shape of levers and springs and hydraulic cylinders that crouched before them. The
Queen
had a complete double horseshoe of steel track set into the fantail of the quarterdeck, level with the surface like those of the tramways in a city street; the eighteen-pounder chaser could turn a full hundred and eighty degrees along it.

It also had room for two catapults to sit side-by-side, and they'd spent the night disassembling the big weapon in the bows and carrying it here to put together again beside its sister. Between that and pumping against the growing leak forward nobody had gotten much sleep.

John didn't intend to try now; he just huddled together with Thora and Deor and Ruan, crouching silently amid the roar and wet streaming off—and sometimes under—their oilskins and sou'westers. After a while Rat McGuire, who doubled as the Captain's Steward, brought up a basket of sandwiches; pancake-like flatbread rolled around fried salt beef and hot peppers and onions and potatoes and some of the black pickled olives Feldman had taken on at Topanga, with flasks of hot herbal tea. They followed it with thick wedges of duff, which would have been far worse without the figs and raisins also picked up in Montival's new southernmost realm.

Given how hungry they were it tasted good, and objectively it wasn't nearly as nasty as some of the stories Thora and Deor had told him about shipboard rations they'd had on their travels. He said so, and they both laughed agreement, and added a new one where someone had whiled
away the boredom by carving buttons out of the salt meat and passing them off as some rare wood at the next port.

Sometimes I envy the . . . the
easiness
they have,
John thought.
It's like what Dad and Edain had—friends so close they might as well be closest kin. I've always been easy with people, but true friends of that sort . . . well, give me time, I suppose!

“Dawn soon,” Deor said, gently shaking Ruan awake where he'd dozed with his head against the scop's shoulder.

Softly he half-sang as they stood and stretched:

“Morning red, morning red;

Will you shine upon me dead?

Soon the trumpets will be blowing

Then must I to war be going

I and many faithful friends!”

John supposed the sun
was
rising as normal, up above the low racing grayness of the clouds. From what he'd seen flying gliders and from balloons, it was bright and glistening up there; though that was hard to remember now. Instead the dark simply grew gradually less dark over an hour or so, without any moment you could say fiat lux. He'd been expecting the hail from the masthead—

Now, there's a job I don't envy!
he thought; they rotated it every two hours, and the one coming down always looked half-dead.

“
Sail ho!
Sail ho, two points to starboard on the stern! It's her, skipper!”

Feldman nodded and started to call a volley of nautical orders, supplemented by details from the First Mate. John gathered it all came to
adjust the sails so we slow down just a little without looking like we're doing it deliberately.

Despite the stinging high-speed drizzle and spray, many of the sailors were grinning as they went about their work. The Bosun was downright snickering. John wasn't the only one who'd come to resent the way the enemy was hanging on to their tails. Feldman had been getting ready for
a voyage very far-foreign indeed when John came to Newport with his sister's offer. To Dhamra, the main port of the great and fabled realm of Hinduraj; on the Bay of Bengal, where no Montivallan ship had ever gone before and few individuals either, though Thora and Deor had. The crew had all been expecting six months away from home, and danger, but this was another matter. They'd been attacked in their own waters and
chased
away from home.

The
Queen
was three quarters of the way up the face of the wave when the Korean appeared cutting the crest opposite, looking chip-tiny and blurred in the darkness and the rain. Radavindraban raised a device to his eyes, a coincidence range finder; it was like a telescope, save that the tube was uniform and the eyepiece was in the middle of one side, with lenses at either end. They were expensive and unusual on a private ship. . . .

But as Captain Feldman remarked, dying is even more costly.

“Four thousand yards!” he said loudly.

“She'll be in range in the next trough, or the one after,” Feldman called. “Captain Ishikawa, are you ready?”

Ishikawa made a bow. “
Hai!
This is enemy we fight all our lives, enemy of our people, killers of our families and our
Tennō
.”

His eight men listened as he spoke briefly in their tongue, then thrust their arms into the air with a barking scream of:

“Tennō Heika banzai!
Banzai!
Banzai!”

That translated as:
To the Heavenly Sovereign Majesty, Ten thousand years!

Then they moved with smooth precision to take stations at the starboard catapult. They were professionals, full-time fighting men and an elite at that; they'd been part of the crew of the
Red Dragon
, which their Emperor had chosen to bear him and his heir across the Pacific. The weapons the Imperial Japanese Navy used were basically very similar, and they'd worked hard to familiarize themselves with the Montivallan equivalent. Feldman's crew were tough and well-trained, but a merchant ship fought when it had to, not as their regular trade.

Ishikawa swung into the bicycle-seat-like gunner's position on the left of the weapon and pulled down the sighting frame until it clicked into
position in front of his face. One handwheel moved the whole piece in traverse to left or right by trundling it along the steel tracks. The other governed elevation, and a bar under the right foot was the loosing trigger. The members of the crew placed the ammunition in the throwing trough, or adjusted it for the type of projectile, bolt or ball, or manned the hydraulic pump. A slanted steel shield covered the front part of the catapult, with a hole for the trough and another for the sights. The springs were salvage from before the Change or closely modeled on them—great built-up things that had originally been part of leviathan mining trucks in the ancient world, vehicles that weighed as much as a small ship themselves.

Feldman swung into the gunner's saddle of the portside weapon. “Rig for bolt!” he said. “Load cutters!”

The rest of the crew sprang forward; one turned a lever that narrowed the rests in the trough, and the other slapped home a cutter-bolt, a four-foot arrow of forged steel with brass fins and a broad shovel-like head designed to slice through the thick tough rigging of a ship, or wound masts and spars. What it would do to human flesh and bone . . . well, battle wasn't a safe occupation.

The part that concerned John just now was the pump behind the catapult proper, which was a simple enough unskilled-labor job that he could do as well as any of the sailors, which would spare the experts for more difficult work. All the task needed was a strong back and arms and steadiness. There was a rocking beam like the one used to drive inspection cars on the railways, with bars for two workers on either side to grasp. The arched steel beam drove plungers that pressurized water; hoses ran to the two multiton-load bottle jacks built into either side of the frames. Those pushed the throwing arms back and compressed the springs until the locking mechanism caught it.

The whole weapon was a simple enough thing in concept, but only the most skilled engineers and artificers could make one of this size that wouldn't destroy itself when the vast forces within were unleashed. They needed to be precisely balanced and constrained.