The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (35 page)

The railway station was post-Change, a barn-like wooden structure with an overhang next to the tracks and a pavement of bricks salvaged here and there and brought in as ballast, which showed in the different shades of brown and red. His valet Evrouin slung his own smaller suitcase over his back and took his lord’s canvas-and-leather bag and cased lute from the overhead rack and followed him as he hopped down. The servant would make him a lot more plausible.

The other passengers hurried off, some whistling for porters. There had been a score or so of travelers in each of the passenger cars but he’d simply put Evrouin in the aisle seat, pulled his hat down over his eyes and dozed or pretended to. That discouraged conversation and everyone would just put it down to Associate snootiness, which people in this part of the High Kingdom were always ready to believe in anyway.

The return passengers were waiting for the cars to be swept and looking at watches if they had them or the station clock if they didn’t; stevedores were already slinging barrels and bundles and sacks and bales and boxes from the freight cars onto horse-drawn wagons and replacing them with
other
barrels and bundles and sacks and bales and boxes; clerks were ticking things off on clipboards; the chain team of twelve massive draught horses was being led away to the stables and paddocks and their replacements munched the feed in their nose-bags as they waited to be hitched to the other end of the train. This short workaday route that handled a lot of heavy freight usually didn’t rate a hippomotive and made do with horses on their own four feet.

Everyone was moving just a little faster than he was accustomed to, not because they were in any tearing rush but simply because that was their customary pace. Corvallans had a reputation for bustling along, and apparently it was well-justified. Since he didn’t have his head down and wasn’t charging for the door a small group of touts also headed his way, holding up signs with the names of the inns they fronted for.
That
was perfectly familiar from train stops everywhere; a combination of golden spurs on your heels and no cordon of flunkies drew them. He flung up his hand and then pointed.

One of the touts bore a sign with the name
Seagull’s Roost.
He had a stiff left arm and a rigid claw of shiny melted-seeming flesh at the end of it along with a few smaller spots of white-and-pink scar tissue on the left side of his face and scalp. That accounted for his occupation. Several of the others were also too disabled or young or too old for a full day’s work; this was a thriving town where a strong back and willing hands could always at least pick up enough day-labor for a bellyful of bread and fish stew, a doss and the odd mug of beer. The leaping horse badge on his jacket was something Corvallans only granted to wounded veterans of the Battle of the Horse Heaven Hills, along with a small pension if the wounds were crippling, which accounted for the injuries
and
the occupation.

John had grown up around veterans of the Prophet’s War, and the Horse Heaven Hills had been where it was won and lost, though the fighting had gone on for more than a year afterwards—years, if you counted chasing down the last bands of fanatics in the vast tumbled wilderness that made up much of Nakamtu Province. There had been a lot of catapults throwing glass balls full of napalm in the great battle, and footmen had had no option but to spit on their palms and brace the pike while they stood and took it. From the look of it one of the incendiary roundshot had split in midair, and he’d thrown up his hand at the last instant to protect his eyes from a spray of liquid fire.

He’d succeeded . . . mostly.

He also looked clean, neatly if cheaply dressed and not as if he escaped his fate daily at the bottom of a bottle or a pipe of maryjane as soon as he could scare up the price, though you couldn’t have blamed him if he did. John wouldn’t have picked that inn if he had, though.

“I’ve heard praise of your hostel, goodman,” John said with charitable untruth, and gave a respectful inclination of the head. “Evrouin, please accompany him and get us rooms; we’ll be staying for some time. I’ll take
Azalaïs
with me.”

That made the valet stir a little and shoot him a glance as he handed over the lute in its tooled-leather case. He was a dark hard-faced man in his late thirties, just barely old enough to have fought in the Prophet’s
War, and an Associate himself. Though of the lowest class within that order—from the sort of family who got a double-sized peasant holding, what was technically a fief-minor in sergeantry, and supplied crossbowmen and spearmen to the manor lord instead of paying rent and labor-service. He’d been chosen by the High Queen when John turned sixteen, and over the three years since had displayed a number of talents beyond laying out a suit of clothes. They got on reasonably well and Evrouin was always impeccably polite, but he had an uneasy feeling that the man regarded him more in the light of an idiot younger nephew who had to be protected from himself than anything else.

“I think I’ll be safe enough in Newport, Evrouin. I’ll see you this evening.”

“Yes, y . . . Sir Guilliame.”

John was hiding
who
he was, but he had decided it was probably better not to try and hide
what
he was, which was essentially an Associate noble. Hopefully people would see that and not look further, and if he tried to be anything else his own clumsiness might attract unwelcome attention. You could put him in a kilt and he’d look like an Associate in a kilt, not a Mackenzie.

Hence his long hooded cloak, calf-boots, breeks, jerkin and light houppelande coat with long dagged sleeves and chaperon hat and liripipe, and the small golden spurs on his heels; also the long sword and poniard on his belt, crimped with the lead-wire peacebonding local law required. He had a mourning band on his arm, but then so did more than half the adults he saw—the tout for the
Seagull’s Roost
had, for instance.

PPA gentry traveling outside the Protectorate on business or pleasure were plentiful enough in other parts of western Montival that seeing one didn’t automatically make your mind run on royalty, and there were any number of reasons one might be here—selling the wool clip or brandy from his father’s demesne to a shipper, for instance, or looking for a better deal on farm machinery or a hydraulic ram than he could get from Protectorate workshops. He’d picked solid sad colors of brown and gray, with just enough color—a little gold thread at the collar of his jerkin, a ring or two, and a jeweled buckle—to be credible. The arms of an
uprooted tree, argent on gules, in the shield on his jerkin were mythical, but skill at heraldry was rare here in the south-country.

The rain gave a perfect excuse to swing on his cloak and pull up the full hood as well as he walked out of the front gate of the railway station and looked around the main street running down to the docks, leaving his face in deep shadow. The air above was loud with the harsh cries of seagulls even in bad weather, and more stood about looking cross and giving way reluctantly as people crowded them. Now and then someone would kick at one, and it would half-open its wings and give the avian equivalent of a curse.

The same misty drizzle that ran in little drops off the wool—woven undyed in the grease—made the wooded hills on three sides disappear into trailers of green and gray as the fog wound through them.

Newport wasn’t particularly new, or very big, and it didn’t have a town wall. It had been founded around a century and a half before the Change, and on that March day in 1998 the city on the shore of Yaquina Bay had been home to about ten thousand people. Half a century after the old world crashed in ruin it had at least that many once more, which made it a step down from the really big centers like Portland or Astoria or Boise or Corvallis, but still very substantial. And none of the others had anything like the numbers they’d had back then or ever would, which put it a step
up
, if you looked at it right. John strongly suspected that was precisely how the locals looked at it, from the brisk steps and the prideful looks he got, inviting the rube to admire the sights.

A scatter of new streets and rising frameworks of bright timber on the outskirts showed how it was growing, and the rhythmic
bang . . . bang . . .
of a pile-driver from the waterfront marked where new piers were being driven out into the bay. The works of human-kind still nearly disappeared against the great stretch of water and salt marsh and forest that made up the country around. The arches of the ancient steel bridge soaring high across the river mouth against the blue-gray Pacific were the only things of man that rivaled nature, they and the long breakwaters that extended the waterway out into the ocean. The city smells of woodsmoke and
curing fish and sawdust and cooking and horses blended in the greater symphony of salt water and brackish marsh.

Prince John looked around at the buildings with interest as he trod the plank sidewalk; some were white-painted wood, more left to the natural silvery-gray of timber after a few years in the damp salt air, and a few of brick or stone or half-timbering, though that wasn’t as common here as in the Association towns. Many of the roofs showed thick bright-green moss on their shingles, and the number of workers up there hammering on new straw-colored ones suggested patching was a continuous process. He couldn’t recall being here before, though he might have come with his parents as a child—it would be in the back issues of the Court Diary, but the important thing was that if he didn’t remember it, there were probably not many people who’d know him on sight, the way they would have his father or his elder sister. Montival wasn’t the sort of place that slathered pictures of the ruler’s family on every available space.

They’d notice Orrey, though! She’s a lot more conspicuous than I am—a five-foot-eleven blond princess just stands out—and she spent half a year at the university in Corvallis town.

Buoy-bells added a distant ringing from beyond the harbor, and a pre-Change lighthouse stood on a rise to the south. The wings and mewing cries of seagulls were thick overhead; from the harbor a deep chant and the rhythmic boom of a drum came as a tug pulled a three-masted ship out beyond the breakwaters where it could spread its white-canvas wings and fly. The twenty oars flashed into the gray water and came back up dripping in perfect unison with the tune, like a dance. Someone jostled him as he watched, and didn’t bother to apologize either.

I like
visiting
cities. They perk you up and put you on your toes. But by God and His Mother, I wouldn’t want to
live
in one, even one you could walk out of in ten minutes. Wilderness I can handle for a while, too, but when you come right down to it I’m a castle-and-manor lad.

Before the Change this had been a very minor port, important only for shipping out lumber and as a base for fishing boats. The harbor was too shallow for most of the monster ships the ancient world had used,
ugly steel behemoths of thousands or even
tens
of thousands of tons, drawing scores of feet laden. You could still see their wrecks in some places along the coast, mostly sunken where they’d drifted ashore. Those ships had used ports like Astoria, or gone up the Columbia to Portland and Vancouver, or into Puget Sound to lost, dead Seattle.

Here remoteness had protected them from the witless hordes streaming out of the doomed cities and the plagues that had broken loose from the refugee camps to scour the Willamette clear of human kind save where luck or ruthlessness or both had enforced quarantine. Frantic adaption of the fishing fleet to oars and sails on boats not intended for them had kept famine at bay for the first year. A little later smoked and salted fish had provided something to trade for grain and potatoes.

Halfway through the first decade of the Change Year count Corvallis had extended its sway to the coast, sweetening the deal with the restoration of the railroad that wound through the lower passes of the Coast Range to the Willamette. That gave the ambitious city-state a shorter access to the Pacific . . . and just as important, one that was all their own without going through PPA-controlled ports on the Columbia and their jealous Guilds Merchant and the border tolls that had existed before the High Kingdom brought free trade throughout Montival.

Even the largest of today’s ships were tiny by comparison to those of the ancients, sleek graceful dancers with wind and water, and Newport was quite deep enough for
them
. The place fairly bustled about him this working Friday in June, with traffic thick and hooves and wheels loud on patched asphalt and cobblestone streets; wagons and drays, bicycles and riders and pedestrians and steaming carts selling roast potatoes and fish sandwiches and sausages the contents of which John wouldn’t have cared to guess.

Mother likes to say that sausage is a lot like politics that way.

There were scores of masts at the docks, from little fishing smacks and dories to the schooners that harvested the sea as far away as the Mendocino coast and Alaska, and the bigger ships that went far-foreign for cargo.

The ribs of more rose on half a dozen slipways, amid a continuous
hammering and sawing, a clamor of smithy-work and a pungent smell of hot tar and oakum. Tall cranes hoisted thick curved shapes of wood and bundles of long planks from horse-drawn wagons. The mountains hereabout were thick with magnificent timber for beam and spar and mast, and their rivers gave abundant power for sawmills.

New-built warehouses and ship’s chandleries and dosshouses and stores full of the sort of things sailors bought lined the streets near the docks; as he watched a wagon was loaded with barrels of sharp-smelling pitch out of a shop that distilled it from scrap timber, laborers rolling them up two planks to the accompaniment of blasphemy and scatology before they were tied down and the team leaned into the traces. A huge sausage of sailcloth was handed from a second-story loft, down to fifteen waiting shoulders, and then went at a trot towards the yards.

The folk were mostly locals, and those mostly ruddy-faced and fair, often with the rolling walk of people who spent a lot of time on moving decks, dressed as often as not in oilskins and sou’westers over thick sweaters on this damp cool day. Men and women alike generally wore loose pants and boots and brimmed caps, often with a bell-guard cutlass hanging from a broad belt. But there were plenty from other parts of Montival, and outright foreigners were common.