Homecoming

 

The sun returned to the city of Sinasekan with summer fire after the afternoon rain faded away over the sea.  The streets were all but still, the harbor emptied of all ships that could flee before the coming onslaught.  The news had come across the waters, whispered in taverns and brothels by night, passed from slave to servant to laborer to sailor in low-pitched voices.  No one who had ears to hear did not know that the enemy was coming, that the demon queen who commanded a fleet of warships was coming with the evening tide.

Merchants had packed their wares and fled, travelers had climbed aboard anything that would float and set the city in their wake.  Smugglers, traders, explorers, seekers of fortune all knew what was on the way, and none wished to remain in the path of destruction.  Seabirds cried as they flew over the harbor, their shadows racing across the still blue water.  There was a beauty in the stillness, in the poised and expectant quiet.

The Viceroy, lord of this place, was not a fool.  He had gathered all he could to try and stave off the coming attack, though he doubted it would be enough.  The entrance to the harbor was blocked by ships, rafts, and boats his men had seized.  They were lashed and chained together to make a barrier no ship could pass without pausing to chop a path through, and his men were on the sea walls with crossbows and rifles and cannons to stop that from happening.  The streets behind the outer gates were barricaded, and he had to hope he could reinforce the men holding them when it came to that.  He was sure after their attack on the harbor was blocked, they would come to the city by land as they had when they tried to kill him.

The Viceroy, Lord Dasato, looked down from the high window of his rooms to the jewel blue of the harbor.  He had served here for six years, and it had made him wealthy and respected.  He had never intended to return home.  This place was too beautiful, too lush and ripe with pleasures and ease.  Why would he ever go back to the moody, cold forests of Achen?  No, he had planned to die here in this faraway country, and now it seemed he would.

He had sent word for help, knowing it would take months to come, if it came.  Pleading for more aid so soon after the first time and the loss of the treasure fleet would destroy his reputation.  There would be no honorable retirement for him now, only disgrace.  He would be fortunate to attain an ignominious life on a plantation here somewhere, even if he could escape the rebels.  Now it seemed less and less likely that he could.  Perhaps he should have left with his family while there was yet time.  He had rejected that choice as a further disgrace upon his name, casting aside all pretense at courage.  Now he could not be sure if he regretted it.

She was coming, and it was with a sense of fate that he looked east over the sea and saw the white specks of ships gathering on the horizon.  Survivors had already told the tale of Aurich’s fall.  The paladin was gone and could not save them.  She was coming.  Jaya.  That was her name.

They said she was the daughter of a sea-devil.  That she rode a dragon and conjured storms.  The stories said she took the heads of those she slew, and that much he believed.  She had come here once before to kill him, and only the presence of the paladin had stopped her, now there was no such protection.  He watched the ships draw closer in the steep afternoon light, and he took a long breath.  Tonight would come the decision, and whatever deliverance he might hope for.  He called for the signal fires to be lit, to summon every man to arms.  Battle was coming on the night wind.

o0o

Jaya led her fleet onward toward the deepening west, into the slanting sun toward the city of her ancestors, where once they had ruled the islands from an ivory throne.  Now nothing lay between her and the city, nothing to stop her.  The enemy had sent ships against her and she had burned and overtaken them.  Now she sailed at the head of twenty-six ships, crewed by her own people as well as Mordani – both those who served against their will and those who had sworn to her cause.  She had more than three thousand fighters at her call.  Enough to take the city from her enemies.

Skulls and severed heads hung from the bowsprits of her ships, luring the carrion birds of the sea to follow her in a cloud.  They knew there would be feasting in her wake.  Her spies had reported for days that the city was emptying, with all who could flee taking ship as far away as they could.  The merchants and fishermen would return once the fighting was over, as they always did.  Now remained only to wipe away the last hold of the invaders upon her land.

They sailed closer on the long, slow swells, tacking into the wind.  The harbor entrance was narrow and guarded by towers and walls that came down to the water.  Now she saw what she had expected – that the enemy had drawn a barrier across the entrance.  A chain of ships was bound across the mouth of the harbor, lashed close together so not even a canoe could slip between them.  Above, on the walls, she saw watchfires burning, and she saw the muzzles of cannon ready to fire down on her ships.  The viceroy intended to make her fight for every bit of land and sea she took, and she was glad to oblige him.  She would spill the blood of her enemies until it stained the waters, she would make this city a place of terror for them, so that none would ever seek to come here again.

She tuned to Bastar where he held the wheel.  “We can force through.”

He shook his head.  “Not easily.  Those craft will be roped and chained together, and the line will give when pressed.  Usually such a barrier is mined with barrels of powder, so it can be set ablaze and the flames and explosions will damage attacking ships.  The men on the walls will fire down on us, and it will not be easy to respond.  It will cost ships and lives to breach the harbor.”  He squinted.  “They know we can force our way in, but now the tide is with us.  If they can hold us back until dark, then we will have lost a full day.  A day to make preparations is worth a ship-weight in gold at a time like this.”

Jaya looked at the walls above, the fires burning there, and she bared her teeth.  She would not be denied so close to her goal.  The dragon would come to her call, as would the men of the deep, but she wanted to hold them back for the chosen moment.  Once she was in the harbor, she would show her power so all would know the uselessness of trying to oppose her.  She would not have it said this day that magic took the city, she would have it said that she took it.

She shouted commands, and the ships turned into the wind, began to tack along the sea wall to gain sea-room upwind.  Men ran to their guns and began to brace them up to fire high.  There came the smell of burning iron as shot was heated in braziers.  Gunners lit matches and the men in the fighting tops loaded their rifles.  She tasted the salt of the air, and it was like the scent of blood.

o0o

Once they were upwind, Jaya’s warships turned north and caught the rising breeze, sails bellying out as they leaped ahead.  Lines and blocks pulled tight and sang as the ships cut across the waves and swept down toward the harbor entrance.  Jaya’s ship, the Dragon, was at the lead, heavy and deliberate with so many guns aboard and manned.  Bastar turned them beam-to in the waves so the roll lifted their port side high out of the water as they passed close to the walls.  She gave the command, and the firing started.

A first volley smashed against the white stone of the guard towers, blasting out pieces of masonry.  The gunners waited until the hull was rolled as high as it could before they touched their matches and sent their shots arcing high toward the tops of the walls and the towers.  The defender’s guns answered in gouts of black smoke and the smash of cannonballs striking the sea all around.  Once shot punched through the deck and left a smoking hole, but Jaya laughed and watched as the gunners emptied their ranks of cannon.

As her ship passed the harbor entrance, the next ship in line loosed, and then the third.  They all swept along the front, firing at the walls above, battering the parapets and the gun-ports on the stone towers.  The last ten ships were smaller, and they sailed in far closer, after the defenders had fired all their cannon, and they loosed their broadsides against the barrier that blocked the harbor, sending heated shot into the wooden floating barricade.

She saw wood splinters erupt, saw fires flicker and blaze up, and then the first explosion ripped through the afternoon air.  Another split the sea, and then a third.  Jaya looked and saw the fires raging, black smoke boiling up into the clear sky.

Bastar brought the Dragon about in a long loop to starboard, out to sea to come back facing south.  A pall of smoke lay over the sea, columns of it rearing up over the harbor mouth from the burning barricade.  She gave the order, and her ships all followed as they came about and tacked back in close to the entrance, shifting back and forth to steal the wind.  There was a long quiet as they came in closer, and then they came in range and the defense let loose with everything they had.  Cannons roared, gunners sheeted lead down into the oncoming ships.  Jaya heard the bullets buzz as they rained down all around her.

She drove her ships into the teeth of that onslaught, and her gunners blasted fort their own waves of destruction.  The sea churned with roundshot and was buried under a wave of smoke as they fired again and again at the walls, the towers, and the burning chain of wrecks that guarded the harbor.  Cannonfire sang past her, glanced from the deck and punched holes in her sails as they swept in close and then turned back out of range.

The barrier across the entrance was afire, holes torn in it, and yet it did not move.  Bastar saw it as well and he nodded.  “They anchored it.  Every piece made fast to the bottom so none of it will drift.  Have to let it burn to the waterline and then we can force through.”

Jaya spat into the bitter wind that stank of hot steel, and she closed her hands around the haft of her spear, feeling the thrum of the deep beneath her keel, so close it was like her own blood flowing.  Enough of this.  She would show the viceroy the power that was hers.  “South away from the walls, come about and hold.  I will show them the teeth of the sea.  I will show them the power of the gods.”

o0o

The sun was burning down to the horizon on the far side of the island, the light turning the towers and walls of Sinasekan to brass as it slanted through flaming clouds.  Jaya looked at the city, at the burning gateway to the harbor, and the deep blue waters of the sea all around her.  If fire and steel would not force the path, then the sea would stretch forth its hand.

She stood on the prow of her ship, and all eyes looked to her as she stretched to her full height, clenched her spear in her hands, and dove over the side.  She lanced down and split the water clean as a dagger-blade.  She plunged deep, then hung there beneath the waves in the swelling silence of the sea.  She felt the waters surge, and she looked down to see the black-armored bulk of the sea-dragon rising up beneath her.  Its eyes glowed as it lifted its head beneath her, and she caught the jagged spines and braced her feet on the scales as it breached the surface, lifting her up into the light.

The beast roared, and she felt the shuddering vibrations through her feet, coursing through her bones.  She touched his neck with the haft of her spear and he surged forward, driving a wave before him.  His tail lashed the water behind, slicing through the blue waves.  Jaya gripped the spear tightly in her hand and closed her eyes.  The sea lay all around her, a force and strength that seemed all but endless, and yet it shifted uneasily, pushing against itself, waves coiling and overlapping and working against each other.  She plunged her mind in deeply and felt the seabed below, the drag of sand and rocks and corals, the flickering lives of fish in the clasp of the deep.  She reached out, she reached out and pulled, calling the power of all the unending waves to move in a single direction, only for a moment.

A sound like thunder roared from over the eastern horizon, shivering through the waves, and Jaya looked that way, where night was beginning to gather, and she saw clouds scatter across the sky like ripples in a pool.  Wind blew past her, sudden and cold, and she felt a pang of fear in her belly for what she had done and could not undo.

There was a rushing sound, like leaves in wind, and for a long moment she thought nothing had changed.  She watched the place where the sea met the sky, and only after a long breath did she see that the sea there was rising, a dark wave that reached up, higher, impossible to judge with distance and the haze of it.  The dragon roared again and surged toward the city, and Jaya felt fear in her heart, because she could not turn aside now.  In this moment she was trapped, and all roads had led her to this single instant, all eyes watching her.

The sea began to rise up and up, obscuring the horizon, and she saw rills of white foam rushing down the forward slope of the great wave like cascades on a mountainside.  The wind grew to a gale, and Jaya’s hair was whipped across her face, beads clicking as they rattled together.  The sea dragon turned and swam into the face of the oncoming wave, and Jaya’s stomach dropped inside her as she looked up at the rising wall of water.  Shadows moved in the body of that immense wave, living things like gods that swam in deep places suddenly raised into the sun.  She thought she saw the long shape of a shark, the coiling of tendrils and a flare of violet light, and then her steed was caught up in the sweep of the wave, and she was rushing over the sea.

Looking down, she saw the water drawing away from the shore, revealing the barnacle-armored rocks below the towers, the wrecks sunken in the shallows, buried in white sand with only their ribs jutting upward.  The burning barricade sank down, stranded, anchors bared to the sun.  She saw fish leaping in the pools left in the harbor, bones bleached there in the muck beneath the dock pilings.

The wave rushed in, breathing like a giant, and she saw men on the walls leap from the high places in desperate terror, heard screams torn away by the bellowing wind, and then the first edge of the wave came ashore, burying pilings and foundations and then shoaling up against the roots of the towers.  The dragon rose up on the face of the wave, higher, until it swam in the combing at the very top.  Jaya felt the onward rush slow, and then the entire mass of it teeter before it began to collapse forward onto the land itself.

The shoulders of the wave smashed against the sides of the harbor entrance, and the seemingly impregnable white towers blasted apart as though made from sand.  The wave rushed over the headlands and flattened the walls so quickly there was no time for sound at all, and the stone vanished in silence.  Jaya held on for her life as the wave reached the narrow neck of the entrance and came thundering through.  The barricade was ripped up and carried away, and Jaya saw smoking wreckage swept up the face of the wave and then hurled inland, smoking missiles raining down on the city in a hail of hissing powder and red-hot nails.

The wave smashed through the harbor, ripped up the docks, and then it breached against the shore and rushed up the narrow streets in foaming rivers.  The dragon came ashore with it, swimming through the avenue cut through the heart of the city.  Its tail threshed side to side, driving it through the floodwaters, and Jaya howled her battle-cry as the incarnation of her wrath tore through buildings and barricades, soldiers fleeing from their makeshift defenses before they were devoured by the water, and then howling in terror as they fell beneath the black shadow of the dragon.

o0o

Jaya’s fleet sailed into the harbor as the day died, and there was no sound of war, no gunfire and no shouts of battle.  The defenders had all fled, their barricades destroyed, their courage broken.  The people of the city hid within their houses, fearing to show themselves.  Jaya stood alone upon the stone quay and waited while her warriors came ashore, swarming into canoes that carried them to land.  Torches flared in the dark, and her spear gleamed like witchfire.

Hundreds came, and then thousands, until her forces covered the waterfront.  Jaya moved at the head of a column of warriors, and they marched in her wake.  The streets were still wet from the wave, water streaming back toward the sea, walls glistening and draped with seaweed.  As she passed the fronds came alight with a pale blue glow, and the vines that clung to the stone walls bloomed with crimson flowers.

“Come forth!” Jaya called in the silent streets and hidden courtyards.  “Come forth!  There will be no sack nor rapine, no plunder of this.  I am your queen come to rule again, and the rule of the Morda will be cast down and driven out, to be no more.  Once again this shall be our land and our city.  I come not as a new enslaver, but to liberate you!”  She called in the tongue of her ancestors, the language of the people of the islands.  She called on them to hear.

She saw faces appear at windows and from over the edge of rooftops, eyes glittering in the dark, pale and afraid.  They saw her there as a figure out of legend.  She walked barefoot upon the wet stone, wearing only the thin cloth bound about her hips, bearing only the spear out of the deeps.  Her hair was caught in braids, her face and breasts painted white.  She did not ride a beast of burden, she did not wear steel armor or a long sword.  She was the image of the old Tau’ta lords come again, flowers blooming in her wake, the sea at her command.

The road led up the hill, through the darkened city, through the six ancient archways carved with the creatures of the sea, now covered with plaster forms of the Mordani heroes and saints.  Jaya struck them with her spear and they shattered apart to reveal the forms of the old gods, and the green glow of the deep crawled over them like smoke.

People began to come from the shadows.  The slaves and servants the foreigners had made of her race come to see her conquer their city.  They watched her, watched her warriors pass by, and then they followed in her wake.  Maids and manservants, body slaves and laborers, men and women and children all – the small, dark people of the Utani, so long held in bondage, and now feeling themselves set free.

So her army grew as she ascended through the tiers of Sinasekan until she reached the massive shape of the palace, the gates closed and barred, the walls manned by desperate soldiers who stared out at the oncoming crowd and knew that no volley of shots would disperse this uprising.  It was not only the number of them, it was the fear that no longer held fast to the hearts of the Utani, the fear that now had turned upon the men who had called themselves the masters of these islands.  They had seen the wave come up from the sea, had seen the dragon.  They were afraid now as they had never been.

Jaya stepped out into the open, her shadow cast long and flickering by torchlight.  She held up her spear and then planted the haft against the ground so all could feel the power shiver beneath them.  “Open the gates and let your master come forth, else I will burn this palace free of life and leave nothing but skulls to remember who stood against me.  Open!”

A shot rang out, and Jaya felt something clip past her cheek, felt the hot blood run down, and she put her hand to it, held it up black in the firelight.  “Blood,” she said.  “Then blood it will be!”

She hammered her spear-haft upon the stone and the earth shook.  The men on the walls were hurled to the ground as the walls shuddered and the gate cracked open, dust and broken stone raining down.  She pointed at the gates and loosed her wordless war-scream, and her warriors surged forward to the broken gates and tore them apart, threw them down and trod upon them as they flooded into the palace court beyond.

Now screams and gunfire rent the dark as the last battle was joined, and Jaya’s army swarmed inside and began the killing.  Smoke filled the dark, the smell of powder and burned flesh.  Men screamed for mercy before they were cut down and their heads taken, and blood ran down stone steps and dripped down the white walls.

Jaya walked with her acolytes through the chaos, leaving red prints made in blood as she passed within and mounted the stairs, then down the long hall to the end where the throne room stood, lit by the moon through the opening above, ringed with golden light from lanterns reflecting on the gilded stone.  The tiles beneath her feet were laced with gold and silver skeins, and they gleamed as she approached the throne.  The ivory pillars made from whale tusks still stood there behind it, but the ancient stone seat had been taken away and remade into a huge chair of wood covered in hammered gold and inset jewels.

The man who stood beside it was not old, but he had gray in his beard and lines on his face.  He had a thin nose and narrow, watchful eyes.  He stood before the throne with his sword bared in his hand, steel armor gleaming on his chest.  To either side waited a dozen armored men, and Jaya could smell the fear on them.

“You cannot prevent me,” she said to him in the ugly speech of the giants.

“I cannot give way,” he said.  “Only by death can you take this throne from me.”

Jaya nodded, pleased that there would be no groveling to mar this legend.  “Then let there be death.”

They came together in a flurry of steel in the flame-lit dark.  Jaya’s disciples moved like shadows, darting in among the soldiers, striking at exposed flesh where they found it.  Jaya whirled and struck with her spear, the bright steel sparking where it cut a notch in the viceroy’s sword.  He countered and she flicked it aside, stabbed for his head and he flinched away as it scored along his cheek.

Blood painted the walls as the soldiers were cut down.  The sounds of slaughter and death rang through from outside the throne room, echoing through the halls of the palace.  The viceroy fell back against the throne and slashed at her legs, forcing her to jump away.  He lunged after her and she knocked aside his thrust, slammed the haft of her weapon into his breastplate, denting the enameled metal.

He gasped, his face paling, and she realized he was not a great fighter, but a man who was doing his utmost to stand against her with the honor he could summon.  She flicked his sword aside and stabbed him in the thigh, drawing her spear back bloody, and he went to one knee with a cry.

Jaya gave him no honor.  She dashed the sword from his hand and then rammed her spearpoint into his armored chest, the enchanted steel splitting the plate and drawing out a gush of blood.  He made a long, gasping, breathless sound, and when she drew her spear out a torrent of black heart-blood followed it.  She put her foot on him and forced him back against the seat of the throne, and then she drove her spear through his throat until it bit into the gilded wood.  She levered the blade downward and cut through his bone-locks and his body dropped to the stone floor, leaving his head on the throne like an offering.  His eyes flicked to her for a last look, and then he was dead.

The hall was silent now, the stones littered with the slain.  Voices came from the halls and she turned as her men and women came flooding in, bearing the heads they had taken from those who resisted them.  Bastar was there, two heads hanging from his fist, and he bowed his head when she looked at him.

She turned and lifted the head of the viceroy by the hair and held it up, and a shout lifted up to the roof-beams, shaking the very walls.  Jaya put her foot on the body of her enemy and turned to face her army.  With the head as her trophy and her spear in her hand, she looked at the firelit, bloodstained hall, and then slowly, with majesty, she seated herself upon the throne of her ancestors.  Thus did the line of the Tau’ta return to their place of power.  Thus was the first verse of an epic that would carry the daughter of kings to dominion of half the world written in words of blood.