The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (36 page)

He thought the rugged-looking couple in luridly colorful print tunics were probably Hawaiian, remembering what diplomats from that polyglot kingdom had worn. And the man with the black goatee and curled mustachios with a rapier at his side was probably from one of the Spanish kingdoms of the far south, Arica or Puerto Montt or Esmereldas. But where did the dark man in the baggy pantaloons and long silk tunic embroidered with crossed triple-bladed daggers and the enormous plumed, jeweled turban come from? Or the one shivering in a batik sarong and an incongruous-looking sweater, with an odd but extremely businesslike wave-bladed knife through his belt? Or the big blond woman with the broad-brimmed hat that had a tiger-skin band and a dozen corks on strings dangling from its edges?

Or that one?
John asked himself.

That one
was a tall, very black man of about John’s own years in a
splendid flowing robe of striped cotton under a rain cape, and a curved sword at his waist with a jeweled guard and hilt. His face was marked with chevrons of scars that were too regular to be anything but deliberate; he had a tuft of wiry chin-beard but a shaven head, covered by a broad beaded skull cap, and he strode along like a lord.

Which is probably what he is, at home, wherever that is.

Another black-skinned man in similar but plainer dress followed him, carrying various burdens on his back. He tugged at his master’s sleeve and spoke in a throaty language.

The tall man stopped and glanced at his wrist; it bore the luxury of a watch. John had one too, right now stowed in the pouch at his belt to avoid the attention drawn by a display of wealth. The man in the robe nodded. He and his follower looked about, unrolled a pair of small carpets from the servant’s backpack on the covered verandah of a shop that had a
closed for inventory
sign in the window, washed their hands and faces from a canteen and knelt facing westward, bowing their foreheads to the ground and murmuring prayers in a guttural tongue different from the one they’d spoken before. John didn’t understand either one, but his musician’s ear caught the rhythms of both.

Ah,
John thought, with delighted surprise.
Now
that
I haven’t seen before. They’re Saracens! Moors, Muslims.

There hadn’t been many of that faith in Montival-to-be before the Change, and those mainly recent arrivals in the big cities where famine and plague struck first and hardest. His maternal grandfather Norman Arminger had given Protestants and outright unbelievers in the lands the Portland Protective Association seized a choice of exile—which meant almost certain death then—or conversion to his version of Catholicism; in the first ten years after the Change nobody here had known whether there even
was
a universal Church still functioning. He had grudgingly tolerated Jews provided they stayed discreet and paid his taxes, because even his chosen schismatic antipope Leo had argued that they had to endure until the end of the world and Christ’s return.

Saracens the Lord Protector had simply and pitilessly put to the sword
wherever he or his men found them, without regard to age or sex, to the old Crusader war-cry of
Deus lo Vult
, which meant
God wills it
.

John crossed himself. He didn’t think God had willed
that
, and it was one of any number of reasons he prayed for his grandfather’s soul quite regularly.

In that year of the great dying nobody had much marked a few more deaths amid so many. These days the Holy Father off in the Umbrian hill town where the Church now centered had sternly set his face against persecution of non-Catholics in any of the many lands where the children of Mother Church held power; for that matter, so had his two post-Change predecessors, though nobody here had heard from any Pope until about a decade after the old world fell. But that was rather late as far as this part of the world was concerned.

John knew Saracens mostly as figures in the romaunts and chansons like
The
Song of Roland
or the
Song of the Lionheart
or his favorite,
El Cantar de Mío Cid
.

He suppressed his curiosity; the world was too wide and various to satisfy that itch anyway. Instead he watched the Moor walk away, and did not even ask the brown man in the gaudy turban why he glared hatred after him and put a hand longingly to the hilt of
his
peacebonded sword, muttering what were obviously curses in a liquid singsong language.

Instead he flipped a coin—a groat to his PPA sensibilities, known as a nickel here even though it was of silver—to a grinning tow-haired urchin who snatched it out of the air like a trout rising to a fly.

“What’s the Sir Knight need?” the boy said.

John suspected he’d been gaping around like a hayseed from the Peace River baronies on his first trip to Portland. The urchin was about eight or nine, and the words were much more respectful than the tone and accompanied by a cheeky grin; Corvallis was one of those places that made a point of being elaborately unimpressed with noble blood. It also had free and compulsory schools of which its citizens were immensely proud, but those were out for the summer and most children did whatever they could to help the family budget or pay for minor treats.

“I need to find the merchant and shipmaster Moishe Feldman, lad,” John said. “Can you direct me?”

The boy squinted at a church tower not far away with a clock set in its side. “Noon an’ a bit. You’ll find Cap’n Feldman at the Mermaid right now, Sir Knight, regular as clockwork when he’s in port. It’s halfway between his offices and the docks, and his fancy new house is out o’ town a bit, too far to walk for lunch. Here, follow me.”

He did, past a largish three-story building with
Feldman And Sons, Merchant Venturers est. CY 11
painted above the main doors and the house sigil of a stylized ship heading upward into the sky. It was better if he met the man he sought outside it to start with. There might well be well-traveled people in there who
would
recognize him at a glance, and as yet they had no reason not to point and loudly exclaim something on the lines of:

My goodness, what’s Prince John doing in Newport with false arms on his jerkin?

The Mermaid turned out to be a restaurant-cum-tavern, of a sort common in this town full of transients and sailors, with a large and gaudy carving of the mythical creature above the door. Despite her scaly tail, the lady was definitely a mammal. The boy ducked his head inside, nodded, turned and said as he jerked a thumb over his shoulder:

“That’s him sitting beside the hearth—reading a newspaper.”

John flipped him another groat, and got a brisk: “Thanks!”

The boy scampered off, dodging by a two-wheeled cart heaped high with dripping wicker baskets of weird-looking writhing crabs, things like armored spiders. John suppressed the thought that they were glaring at him through the walls of their woven prisons as if they foresaw the boiling water and drawn butter and blamed it all on him, and went in himself. A smell of roasting, frying and stewing met him, along with the smells of wine and beer, and of more tobacco than was common in most parts of Montival; exotic habits like that were more likely and easier to keep up in a port. From their looks this was a haunt for skippers and ship’s officers and businessfolk and the like who could afford such indulgences.

The plank walls were decorated with souvenirs; from floats and nets to odd-looking weapons, the skull of a saltwater crocodile nearly as tall as a man, a cloak that seemed to be woven from colorful feathers, and
masks made of painted coconut hulls and seashells. The weather was coolish under the gray sky outside, but body heat and what escaped from the kitchens kept the big rectangular room comfortable without a fire in the hearth, or in the tile heating stove set into the wall beside it. It didn’t occur to him to wonder what his great-grandparents would have thought of a standard of
comfortable
that considered it perfectly normal to wear a sweater or coat indoors.

He made his way between the tables and through the fug of smoke and noise. Feldman was where the urchin had said; he was a lean, rather dark man of medium height, in his thirties and dressed in plain good clothes, with a close-cropped black beard that showed a white streak along one jaw that probably marked a scar, and bold boney features. There was nothing unusual in his outfit except for a kippah—a small round skull cap—on the back of his head. His back was to the wall beside the empty fireplace, and his cutlass rested on the bench beside him. It was peacebonded too, hilt and scabbard joined by thin lead wire crimped with a seal, as the law required for blades longer than six inches within the walls of Corvallis and inside the other towns of the city-state’s territory.

You could jerk the wire loose quickly enough with a strong pull, but you had better have a very good reason to give the constables. At that, far more people carried blades here in Newport than in Corvallis town itself, a walled and tightly-policed city in the now-peaceful Willamette. Haida reavers had struck this far south within the last decade, and once you were out of sight of land, pirates were as real a threat as bad weather, if usually less common.

“Professor Feldman?” John said, extending a hand. “I’d like to speak with you, if you have the time.”

The merchant snorted and folded his copy of the
Newport Commercial Bulletin
, with its subtitle of
Salve Lucrum.
He’d been doing the crossword puzzle.

“Save that Professor nonsense for Corvallis town,” he said, giving a brief firm shake. “Mister will do, or Captain if you have to have something fancy, Sir Knight.”

Feldman was a little wary in a hard, ready-to-respond way; some Catholics from the Protectorate had no use for Jews and didn’t mind showing it. His hand was dry and very callused, from ropes as well as his cutlass-hilt. Technically a prosperous merchant in the territory owing allegiance to the People and Faculty Senate of Corvallis would be a tenured professor of the Economics Faculty of OSU; it was equivalent to being a member of the Guild Merchant in a chartered town up north or of the Chamber of Commerce in Boise or New Deseret. It didn’t always involve giving formal classes, though they were expected to take on apprentices, for some reason called adjuncts.

Evidently Feldman didn’t take it all as seriously as some.

“Sit, Sir Knight, if you’ve business to do—though this is my lunch hour,” he added, as a hint not to waste time.

John bowed a polite acknowledgment and removed his cloak, doubling it and setting it on the seat of a spare chair before unbuckling his sword-belt. Then he removed his hat and set it and the slung lute case on the cloak. The older man’s expression changed as John sat and his face was fully visible, turning fluid with astonishment for a brief flash and then setting into immobility again. He hadn’t expected to fool Feldman, or wanted to.

“I’m called Sir Guilliame de Forreste,” John said, and thought:

I’m glad I don’t play poker with this one. He took a big shock with only a flicker. But then again, maybe I will, if this comes off.

“I’ll bet you are,” Feldman said, and John nodded confirmation. “Why, exactly, wasn’t I told to expect you?”

“Pro . . . Mr. Feldman, this has to be strictly confidential. Confidential from
everyone.
If that’s a problem, I can leave right now.”

Feldman locked eyes with him for about twenty seconds, then slowly nodded. “I have obligations to your family. Your grandfather . . . on your father’s side . . . helped
my
grandfather get out of Portland when the Lord Protector’s men were after him.”

A grin. “Granted the Lord Protector was
also
your grandfather, on your mother’s side, but the principle holds.”

John nodded. It wasn’t everyone who could say that their paternal and
maternal grandfathers had killed each other in a spectacular single combat between their assembled armies. That fight on the Field of the Cloth of Gold between Norman Arminger and Mike Havel was legend in the Protectorate—and among the Bearkillers, his father’s father’s people, and famous throughout Montival. He’d toyed with doing a chanson on the subject himself, but it might be a bit tactless. Feldman went on:

“And there have been favors on both sides since. Discretion and an ear I owe you. Anything else . . . we’ll see.”

A waitress came up. “The Tuna special, Cap’n Feldman?” she said. He nodded.

“That’ll do fine, Julie.”

She turned to John with an expectant air. He smiled at her, and got one in return. She was very nice-looking in a mature way, about thirty, and he liked the alert expression in her blue eyes, not the glazed boredom you saw so often with people in her line of work. He’d lately come to the conclusion that attitude was more important than sheer looks.

Of course, this place was likely to be more
lively
than most; you could probably pick up materials for epics just listening to the table conversations.

She also had no wedding band or mark where one had been taken off, and he filed that away in the just-in-case section. Fornication was a sin for which he’d tried to repent; however, even St. Augustine had prayed
Lord, give me chastity . . . but not yet.
Adultery was
really
a sin and while he knew he was a weak and fallible man, not to mention a
young, vigorous
man, he’d never committed that one.

“The Tuna special is something special, mistress?” he asked.

“The best,” she said. “Our meat and poultry dishes are fine, but the fish here is even better, Sir Knight. My sister Kate uses her special marinade. And the albacore, that’s fresh as fresh—off my cousin’s boat this morning and caught last night. Only the people who catch it get it fresher. Packed in ice or no, you won’t get anything as good in an inland town, not if you pay its weight in gold you won’t. So unless you’re from Astoria or Victoria or Tillamook or someplace like that . . .”

“I’m not, so I’ll have that too then, please. I can’t resist so eloquent a persuasion.”