Prince of Outcasts (32 page)

Countess de Stafford would be entranced,
John thought.

It gave him a momentary glow of nostalgia. Delia de Stafford had been by way of an unofficial tutor for him in Associate court etiquette
and ceremony and fashion. He still remembered her endless kindness when he was petrified that others were laughing at the pimply fourteen-year-old Prince. Not openly, but behind his back, which would have been worse, and it wasn't something you could discuss with your parents—the very thought of doing
that
made him cringe, even in retrospect.

John felt slightly more at ease as the Raja made a minimal gesture that Pip's nudge indicated was a summons. The faces around the Raja weren't nearly as alien as the gamelan music or the dance. Not nearly as beautiful or interesting either, to be sure, but he recognized bureaucrats and generals and the sort of senior clerics who were involved with Court business when he saw them, whatever sort of clothes they were wearing.

The Raja gave a very slight smile as John made a Court bow—the precise inclination and sweep of the hand that went from
non-inheriting child of a monarch
to
foreign ruler sovereign in his own right while meeting in his kingdom
. The detail of the movement wouldn't matter here and had been completely useless even at home until recently, but that he was obviously taking care probably would.

“As son to High King Artos and High Queen Mathilda, I greet Your Majesty with gratitude for Your hospitality and succor. House Artos and the High Kingdom of Montival are in Your Majesty's debt, nor will the debt be forgotten.”

“You are welcome, and you have already fought our enemies, Your Highness. And . . . so interesting, so unexpected,” the Raja said, in rusty but fluent English. “This modern world of ours is full of surprises, but how America has turned out is not the least of them.”

He smiled, obviously seeing how startled John was at his command of the language:

“My mother the late Queen was an official of the Bali Tourism Association before the Wrath of Indera . . . the Change, you call it. And it was useful in dealing with the
South Sea Adventure
people before they . . . became what they are. I hope Your Highness was pleased with our small entertainment?”

John made a graceful gesture. “Your Majesty is most gracious. The
music and dancing were surpassingly lovely. My only regret is that I am too ignorant of the . . . background and conventions . . . of this form of art to fully understand it. I wish that I could take the time necessary to appreciate it as it deserves.”

It was pleasant when complete honesty was the best policy; John thought of it as storing up credit for times when it was necessary to be more . . .

Creative,
he thought.

There was a murmur as someone else who spoke English translated for the nobles, and they probably heard the sincerity in the tone. The suspicious looks faded a little. It was a little disturbing; being a patron of the arts was all very well, but these people evidently took it
very
seriously.

“Tomorrow we will consult further,” the Raja said, and added something in his own language.

“That went very well,” Pip said, when they were alone again. “He used the . . . well, he addressed you as an almost-equal, I'm pretty sure. It's that sort of language, it's easy to be unintentionally rude because everything changes according to the relative status of who's talking to whom. Not just the titles or pronouns, the vocabulary too. I get by because nobody expects a foreigner to know the subtle
parts.”

K
ERAJAAN
OF
B
ARU
D
ENPASAR

C
ERAM
S
EA

O
CTOBER
26
TH

C
HANGE
Y
EAR
46/2044 AD

“B
akayaro!”

“Naskleng Japon!”

Captain Ishikawa and the chief artificer of the Raja's armory were yelling at each other again; the local was much louder as he grew more frustrated, and probably also somewhat deaf from years of exposure to the clangor of his trade. John could hear them over the wall that enclosed the buildings, warehouses and workshops despite the smithy-loud background and from somewhere the howling whine as someone put hard timber to a power-driven band saw.

The only thing he learned from the exchange was confirmation that Nihongo cursing sounded explosive and ripping and the Balinese equivalent shrill and high-pitched.

“
Oh,
God,” Pip said, as the mechanical scream died down and the human equivalent continued. “Experts at war, at war.”

John hesitated for a moment, then laughed; he liked her talent for wordplay, almost as much as her sense of humor, wits and looks. In fact he liked her more than any girl he'd ever been involved with, despite or possibly because she scared him a little in several different ways. Or was it that she tempted him severely? Or possibly she tempted
and
scared him
and the fright was part of the allure. Some Associate noblemen preferred demure and deferential females, or at least ones who acted that way, but he'd always thought that would be too much like making love to a cow. Also he'd noticed that men like that ended up being led around by the nose a lot of the time, or by some other part of their anatomy, and not even realizing it was happening.

The problem is that I'm not sure I
should
like Pip as much as I do,
he thought.
Someone might have designed her to tempt me. And the problem with temptations like that is that they're so bloody hard to resist.

“I don't
think
they'll kill each other,” he agreed aloud, as they stopped under the shade of a jacaranda tree dropping its purple flowers in a carpet on the brick sidewalk not far from the gate. Then he took a deep breath before going in.

He was joking about the Japanese and the locals coming to blows, but not altogether. That was why he crossed himself and murmured:

“O Blessed Archangel Gabriel, who stood by Michael's side when the hosts of Heaven cast down Lucifer, you who brought the Good News to the Blessed Virgin Mary and are patron of all who must persuade and bring men to agreement, I beseech thee, do thou intercede for me, a miserable sinner, at the throne of divine Mercy, that I may fulfill my duties and do battle with these my friends and followers against our enemy and the enemy of the Most High. Amen.”

Gabriel was God's messenger, and the Saint who watched over diplomats.

“Amen,” Pip echoed. “We're going to need all the help we can get . . .”

“. . . to keep this bunch together,” John said.

Nihonjin samurai had a low tolerance for disrespect from those they considered inferiors; among their own people an elaborate code of ritualized deference controlled everything. It wasn't altogether different from the way Protectorate knights and nobles behaved back in the PPA territories, but the edge of danger was stronger—rather the way it had been at home in John's grandfather's day, he suspected. Ishikawa was easy-going and even a little democratic by those standards, but only by those standards.

And the locals were also a very polite people . . . until something snapped. That was when the word
amok
came into play. They could induce the state deliberately and en masse; he'd seen that in the battle on the harbor. From what Pip and Toa said and from a little he'd seen, it could also simply seize on individuals or small groups who'd been pushed too far by others or by circumstance.

I think that's a major
reason
they're so polite most of the time. They don't dare
not
be polite if the person they disrespect may start screaming and frothing and hacking.

He relaxed as the voices died down. “Ishikawa's quite in love with your prang-prangs,” he said. “
Very clever
, was what he called them, and it's a term of art he doesn't use lightly. I think he's been working on some engineering drawings to take home.”

Pip preened a little. “Townsville Armory is second to none,” she said. “They're the very latest thing in conclusive argumentation.”

“I wonder why nobody else has come up with the idea?” he said.

“Well . . . they're about as hard to make and only a bit smaller and lighter than the usual catapults and just as easy to spot and target. And while they're bloody wonderful little devices for mowing down a pack of screaming gits with cutty-choppy-throwy things from farther out than their bows and blowguns and spears and cleavers can reach . . . if the gits have conventional field catapults, which alas the Carcosans
do
have, they'll pound you to scrap from out of range. Which is why we haven't tried this expedition against the fortress before you got here. Despite our hosts being so desperate.”

“I don't blame them,” John said. “Seizing their water supply by building a fort on it . . . well, the Yellow Raja has his hand around a sensitive spot, right?”

“No fear!” she said, which was apparently Townsvillian for
damned
right. “The next rice harvest is in about a month. They let the fields lie fallow and dry for a month after that to keep blights and bugs down, and then it's back to plowing and flooding and transplanting; it hardly ever stops, really. Two rice crops a year and veggies in between and they use the paddies for fish, too. But it all needs a lot of water and that fort the
Carcosans have built means the Baru Denpasarans would lose a third of their acreage.”

“Starvation?” John said; nobody in the Changed world took that lightly.

“Disaster, at least. They keep a year's famine reserve but there are limits.”

“I
thought
that was what the Raja said,” he said; the court language had been notably opaque.

“Well, to be fair, no monarch I've met would be happy about publicly singing that song.”

At his enquiring look she trilled:
“The bastards have us/By the bloody throat today
/Tra-la, tra-la
.”

“Ah,” he replied; there was a lot of truth in that.

She shrugged. “When the authorities say
the situation is grave but don't panic,
it means
everyone, panic right now!”

He hesitated and then spoke: “How did you get your hands on the prang-prangs, Pip? I gather you and your father didn't part on the best of terms. I sympathize given that I had to run out on Mother, but . . .”

“Well, ummmm . . .”

Her eyes went up slightly and she pursed her lips. When she'd arranged her thoughts she continued in a tone of innocent sweetness several years too young for her . . . and she was young anyway, at least in years:

“Well, actually, one reason for my abrupt departure on the racing camel was that a few forms and invoices and tiresome clerkish things like that may have gone missing from Daddy's study, you see, before the prang-prangs were crated up and shipped out . . . on one of Aunt Fifi and Uncle Pete's ships . . . because he was being an absolute
beast
about my plans and his absurd scheme to send me to court off in Winchester.”

“Why Winchester?” John asked.

Granted that the King-Emperors of Greater Britain were the senior monarchs of Christendom, not least in their own estimation, it was still the other side of the world.
That meant months of sailing either way even on a fast ship making a direct passage, and leaving aside storms still not a very safe journey unless you did it on a warship.

“The Windsors have been breeding like rabbits and I think Daddy wanted me to nab some minor Royal, one looking for a soft job as an antipodean consort and stud-bull among the koalas and kookaburras. To give Townsville's new little hereditary Colonelcy even more genetic polish than Mummy did and trump his ghastly set of nephews, eh? What a fate! So really, I didn't have any alternative. Tempting to do it just to dish my cousins, but . . . no.”

“Ah,” he said; that seemed to happen a lot when he was talking to Pip. “Well, lucky for me you did, right? The prang-prangs certainly came in handy in that fight.”

“Righty-O. I knew it would all work out for the best! And the Darwin and East Indies Trading Company
paid
for them, all very regular, but what with the confused paperwork the initial
sale
may not have been quite quite-quite, if you know what I mean, and then it turned out JB in Darwin—King Birmo of Capricornia—had gotten one long enough for his own military to take apart and do a complete set of drawings so they could copy it later. Spot of bother, that, but fortunately I'd left by the time the details came out. It'll all blow over eventually; Townsville and Darwin
are
friends and allies after all. Usually.”

“Have they ever fought?”

“Not
fought
, not really, just a few scuffles over absurd old lines on the ground in the outback where only lizards live. Capricornia is the shield of Oz, as JB is very, very fond of saying. And JB's people would have duplicated the prang-prangs anyway once they knew about them, there's nothing mysterious about the concept, I just saved them a little time and removed a cause of Capricornian-Townsvillian friction . . . rather altruistic of me in fact, if you look at it properly. Blessed are the peacemakers, what?”

“Ah,” John said expressionlessly as they passed a two-wheeled oxcart bearing a load of rusty steel bars he recognized as part of Captain Feldman's ballast.

Then: “You like to travel, Pip. What do you say to taking a trip to Montival after this is all over? Assuming we're not killed or possessed by demons or whatever.”

“Smashing idea!” she said, with a brilliant smile, squeezing his arm. “For all sorts of reasons.”

There were guards by the heavy timber gate; it was plain massive wood and steel strapping, unusual among this decoration-happy folk. They didn't do snapping to attention here, but the local equivalent involved a bow and calling them
Putra
and
Putri
, which were both personal names and titles roughly meaning
of royal rank.
He suspected that years of study would be required to really understand the system of honorifics, and Pip had casually remarked that she had only the basics
and
they also used titles borrowed from Malay in some contexts . . .

By the time they walked through the gate, Ishikawa and the Raja's engineer were bowing—in rather different ways—and smiling at each other with patent insincerity.

Thora and Deor were there, probably to help with the translation; it would be from Ishikawa's uncertain newly-learned English to Deor's uncertain, rusty and limited Balinese eked out with some Malay, which in turn was a second language the chief artificer had a little of; it was related to his native Balinese tongue but not mutually comprehensible with it.

He strongly suspected they'd also probably kept things from escalating dangerously by shading the
ignorant savage
and
arrogant young pup of a foreigner
bits out of the exchange.

The Raja's man was about sixty, hair untypically cut to a gray bristle and hands and arms scarred from burns and sparks and dealing with sharp moving metal and heavy weights.

Both the Montivallans nodded to John politely, and he smiled back and winced inwardly as he stepped closer with Pip at his side. Another thing he hadn't thought of was that he was going to have to go right on working with Thora after shifting to Pip . . . although he hadn't been thinking much at the time at all.

This section of the complex was a big walled compound, part of it covered by a tiled roof supported on tall wooden pillars in turn supporting cranes and lifting devices, part open, and all paved in flagstones. Heat rippled from half a dozen charcoal hearths of various sizes and shapes. Even in simple hose and shirt, the way it combined with the walls cutting off any breath of air and the natural muggy warmth to make him envy the local workers stripped to their loincloths and some protective gear. Though in Portland or Walla Walla the metalworker's guild councils would have hit the roof screaming at how skimpy that gear was.

Some held metal on the various anvils with tongs and pounded on it themselves or angled it while others hammered it, or put it back in the hearths to heat again or plunged it dragon-hissing into the quenching baths of water or oil. More were laboring with file and peening hammer and other tools at long benches. The familiar rasp of files and
tinka-tinka-tinka
of metalworkers' hammers and
punk-punk-punk
of punches and occasional scream of a grinding wheel sounded amid the hard stink of hot metal and hot oil and fire.

Things more advanced than tongs and sledges included a number of lathes and drill-presses, hydraulic hammers and heavier machine-tools, all pre-Change salvage converted to modern power sources but well-maintained and capable of making all their own replacement parts, and it was reassuring to see a set of neatly-kept gauges and measuring instruments hung from a pegboard against one wall. In fact, judging by the gearwork and hydraulic cylinders being crated up, and even if this was the only such facility in Baru Denpasar . . .

“You know,” John said to Pip, “it strikes me as odd that they can't make their own field and naval catapults. Something along those lines, at least, now that they've seen modern examples. They've got the foundry equipment and machine-tools and skilled labor they need, I'd say.”