The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (47 page)

The Japanese sailors and samurai—she knew enough to tell them apart at a glance now—stowed their gear under the direction of the ship’s crew and found where they’d sling their hammocks. When they came on deck again they lined up neatly facing the poop-deck, knelt and bowed their foreheads to the planks of the deck as Reiko stood above them. She was wearing her torso-armor of lacquered steel and silk cord, and the broad flared helmet with the chrysanthemum
mon
on its brow, looming above them like some
kami
of war.

The night was nearly over, with the cool slightly stale smell you got just before the eastern sky started to go pale, and the tide would be making soon. The stern lanterns cast unquiet yellow light on their faces, turning them into things of bronze in the night. Reiko stepped up to the rail and looked down at them, with her left hand on the hilt of her katana.

After a moment she spoke.

“We have come a very long way together, my warriors,” she said; it was a conversational tone, but it carried. “Come through storms and ice and battle, through suffering and thirst and hunger, wounds and death. We have lost dear comrades and friends. We lost . . .
Saisei Tenno
. But we have never turned back, and we have also found much. We have found strong allies against the enemy we have fought all our lives. Now they will help us find the thing that the
Saisei Tenno
sought, the great lost
treasure of our people. That the enemy has put forth all their strength to prevent us shows how right
Saisei Tenno
was to seek it, how important it is that it be in our hands.”

The bronze masks were immobile, but Órlaith could see a few eyes flicker in her direction. The wry smile was entirely in her mind, but it was definitely there behind her grave face.

Sure, and the words
magic sword
become more than a story once you’ve seen one!

Reiko went on, after she’d given them an instant to think of that:

“Please listen carefully. I know that every one of you is ready to die, for the Chrysanthemum Throne and for our homeland. I know that you of the Imperial Guard and the Imperial Navy feel a burning shame that my father fell and you survived him. Many of us already have died, half of those who began this journey with him. Their names will live forever just as those of the Seventy Loyal Men do, they who preserved the dynasty and the hope of our people . . .
provided we win
.”

A long silence; evidently that last phrase turned a platitude into something with impact. She continued.

“If we do not,
no
names will live. There will be no Obun festival at which to recite them or people who speak our tongue and follow our customs to burn incense and make offerings. It will be as if our ancestors died again, died without issue. All that we of Nihon have ever been, all that we might ever be, depend upon us now.”

The silence stretched again, echoing. “So remember this: the reason we fight is not to show our courage or to win honor. Nor may you seek an honorable death because you feel shame that you survived. Worthy as those things may be in ordinary times, even to think of them now is selfishness. We on this expedition fight for our people; we fight that there may be uncounted generations to come. That they may plant their rice and raise their children and sing their songs without dreading that a sail on the horizon may bring death and horror. To protect them against the terror from the sea, to give them a future, we must
win
.”

She let silence fall for a moment before she went on: “
This is our inescapable duty.
I will need more than your deaths; I need your swords and the
living hands that wield them; Japan will need them. They belong to me and through me to the nation, not to you, and you may not sacrifice them without dire need.”

A whipcrack:
“Is that clear!”

“Hai! Hai, Heika!”
came the chorus, in unison from the samurai and ragged but sincere from the sailors.

“Show the same loyalty and discipline now that you have in the past, and no hardship, no enemy, no desert, no fortress can stand against us!”

“Tennoheika banzai!”
crashed out from all of them as they flung their arms upward.
“Tennoheika banzai! Banzai! Banzai!
”

The Sword let Órlaith feel the wave of belief behind it, the bronze ring of truth.

“To the Heavenly Sovereign One, ten thousand years!
Banzai!
”

Captain Ishikawa came up to Reiko afterwards, along with Egawa, as the rank and file went below to the crowded hold.

“Majesty?” he said. “You summoned?”

“Captain, the Imperial Guard were helping a good deal with the
Red Dragon
, towards the end, weren’t they?”

“
Hai
, Majesty. Mostly hauling on ropes and similar basic tasks.”

“Our voyage south should take between one and two weeks. During that time, I want you to have both your sailors and the Guard helping with the work—familiarizing themselves with this ship and drilling on her armament as much as they possibly can without interfering badly. This is to be your primary task until we make landfall. General Egawa, see that your men cooperate fully. Captain Ishikawa, arrange the details with Captain Feldman on my authority.”

Egawa ducked his head. “My men were already cross-trained on catapults, Majesty, but these are an unfamiliar model. They will learn them quickly, I will see to that.”

She nodded. “Captain, you will have heard that we may be getting another ship, one very much like this?”

“
Hai
, Majesty!” the seaman said enthusiastically. “I would rather have the
Red Dragon
back in good condition, but if I cannot, that would be a
very acceptable substitute. And once we get her back to the yards on Sado, there are a number of features we can study to see if they are suitable and practical for adoption, given our available materials.”

Egawa looked less happy, but resigned. “A foreign ship is better than no ship, Majesty, and if Captain Ishikawa says it is suitable, I accept his judgment.”

“Then training the Guardsmen to help sail
this
ship will be essential if we are to use
that
one.”

Then Ishikawa cleared his throat: “So sorry, Majesty, but while General Egawa’s men are strong and I am sure willing enough—”

“They had better be,” Egawa said flatly.

“Ah so, gozaimasu-ka,”
Ishikawa said politely, obviously pitying any Guardsman who
didn’t
show willing. “But that is a very short time to learn anything useful.”

“They can learn routine tasks,” Reiko said. Dryly, flexing her hands: “Besides pumping.”

They had all pumped, the last two weeks before they made landfall; pumped day and night until they staggered away numb with fatigue and hunger to shiver themselves to sleep in bedding that was never dry or warm.

“And so free really skilled men,” she went on. “There are not enough of your sailors left to manage a ship of this size on their own on the journey home, are there?”

“Not with any safety and not on such a long voyage, no, Majesty. With the assistance of the Guardsmen, we should be able to sail home, and even fight the ship, after a fashion, and of course they will improve with experience. I will split my sailors so that each watch would be commanded by a fully trained man . . . the Guardsmen will have to be ready to obey common sailors, of course.”

“Then see to it,” she said; Egawa’s slight grim nod said there would be no discipline problems.

For a moment the Crown Princess and the
Jotei
were alone on the poop-deck, standing somber and silent; Órlaith thought they both felt the weight of the expectations on their shoulders.

Then the ship’s captain came out on the pier; he shook hands with
some sort of municipal port official, handed over a sheaf of papers, and came up the gangplank. Feldman was in a brass-buttoned jacket of dark blue and a nautical cap, with his cutlass on his belt; he gave the streaming colors at the jack a salute, and then another to Órlaith and Reiko as he came up to the poop-deck. They both nodded to him without speaking, knowing better than to interrupt a professional in the middle of a task.

The port official on the pier spoke sharply, and his workers went to the two bollards that held the
Tarshish Queen
’s hawsers. Several sailors came padding up to take their place at the wheel, standing on the benches to either side of it and undoing the rope loops that held it. There was a quiet bustle on the deck—a few brisk orders, but everyone seemed to know where to go.

Glancing shoreward you could see Newport’s streetlights going out one by one as the lamp-man made his rounds, and the yellow of flame coming on in windows as folk rose for the early tasks. Dark shapes moved in the streets, with here and there a bullseye lantern’s spark as groups walked to work. The sky to the eastward had been paling for a while; now the stars vanished one by one, and the clouds there were tinged with red. Darkness faded, and suddenly you could see pale shadows, and wisps of fog out on the harbor that turned a glowing milk-white as the first low rays struck them. They weren’t quite the first to put out; fishing boats were already out on the water, and flat-bottomed barges set their stubby sails as they worked across the broad bay.

“Mr. Mate! How does she trim?” Feldman called briskly, and followed it with a volley of nautical technicalities.

“Aye, Cap’n, well enough,” the weathered dark man standing by the mainmast replied, and added details in the same jargon. He finished with: “Water’s on the ebb, skipper, down half a foot.”

“Then make her ready, Mr. Mate. Prepare to loose all.”

The harbor tug came alongside the bows, there was a flurry of movement as the tow-rope was passed across and made fast, and Feldman took a speaking trumpet from its rack near the wheel.

“Cast off, bows!”
he thundered through it.
“Cast off, astern!”

The harbormaster’s men thumped their mallets on the cross-rods of the
bollards, then lifted the heavy loops of the hawsers free. Deckhands pulled in the thick cables and coiled them. The ship’s motion changed a very little as she was no longer tied to the land and rubbing against the wharf’s bumpers. Then the tug’s oars all came out at once, like a centipede stiffening, poised, stroked the water, and the deck surged beneath their feet. The towing cable broke the surface in a smooth taut curve, jets squirting out of the hemp as the tension of the ship’s hundreds of tons of deadweight came on it. The water of the harbor was quite still for a few moments as the tug took them down the channel; Órlaith could hear the call of
stroke . . . stroke . . . stroke . . .
in time to the hollow boom of the hortator’s drum. Then a ripple flickered across the green water as the breeze freshened.

Feldman nodded and looked up at the pennants at the mastheads as they passed underneath the great arches of the steel bridge across the river’s mouth; there was a sudden scent of hot tar from the maintenance crews up there, heating the preservative for another day in their ceaseless work. Waves surged white on the breakwaters to either side, and then the ship began a long porpoise-like heave and roll as they passed out into the waters of the larger ocean. The waves shaded from blue-green to deepest blue beneath them, streaked with lines of foam.

“Prepare to cast off the tow . . .
cast off!
”

The cable slithered forward through the hawseholes and splashed into water turning a lighter blue as the dawn broke. Little whitecaps marched towards them from a horizon still dark and lost in haze; the tugboat turned sharply northward and circled, returning to the harbor.

Always starting a journey and never completing it,
Órlaith thought in a moment’s whimsy.
Must be frustrating!

“Hard a’port the wheel!”

The hands standing to either side spun it, and the nose of the ship turned southward as it coasted on the last of the momentum from the tug, the long slender reach of the bowsprit bisecting the view.

“Hands to winches, hands to heads’l sheets!”

The winches whined as the crew whirled their handles round, and the upper booms of the gaff sails rose like blinds being drawn. Canvas thuttered and cracked, and the ship heeled sharply as the wind snapped them
out into smooth curves and the booms paid out to the limit of the sheet-ropes and travelers. There was a surge as way came on the ship, and the tossing turned to a purposeful lunge. Droplets of spray came sparkling down the deck like a handful of diamonds as the bow dug into a curve and broke free, like a spirited horse lunging as a journey began.

“Hands aloft to loose tops’ls!”

The rigging thrummed like plucked strings under the rush of feet, and the sailors edged out along the manropes of the yards that held the square topsails. Another billow and crack as they fell down and filled, and the ship bent further before the wind; on deck crews hauled to set them at just the right angle. Captain Feldman looked at the binnacle and gave a quiet command to the helmsmen, ending with:

“Thus, thus: very well, thus. Mr. Radavindraban, you have the deck. Keep this heading.”

“Aye aye, skipper,” the first mate said. “Steady as she goes.”

Then the merchant-captain surprised her; he’d seemed almost alarmingly businesslike so far, even single-minded. Now he grinned, took a deep breath, looked about at sea and ship and sky, at the crimson and gold over the mountains in the east.

Then he recited softly, beneath the thrum of wind in the rigging, the gathering hiss of water along the sides, and the creaking groan of a wooden ship working:

“Thy dawn, O Master of the World, thy dawn!

The hour the lilies open on the lawn;

The hour the gray wings pass beyond the mountains,

The hour of silence, when we hear the fountains,

The hour that dreams are brighter, and winds colder,

The hour that young love wakes on a white shoulder,

That hour, O Master, shall be bright for thee;