(Part #250.5)
Kailua, Kingdom of Gavaji (de jure)
March 1st 1900
Rangatira Wehihimana opened his eyes.
No, not just Rangatira. He was a king, an emperor, a man who possessed power for which the Mauré language had no word, only those imported from French. King Kalaninui, the man who had held such a title in his mind but had been a mere puppet of the distant Tsar, had been captured and bowed the knee to Wehihimana over a year now. The last Russians had fled or surrendered shortly afterwards. Though their advanced fleet was not vulnerable to Wehihimana’s more basic ships, he had correctly calculated that they could not remain on station indefinitely with the Gavajski islands—so, so isolated, even by the standards of the Pacific—firmly within Wehihimana’s hands. Engines must be fed eventually, and all the coaling stations on the islands had been seized by his men.
He had won. He had humbled one of the world’s largest and most powerful empires. He, a Mauré, a mere native, an object of contempt by the Europeans. He had learned to make them fear. More, he had raised himself up within his own people, so that his name would eclipse even those of his great forebears like Apehihmana. His would be the first name that Europeans and Novamundines thought of when they thought of the Mauré. It was an unmatched achievement. Everything that Admiral Hughes had promised him had come true, and more.
There was just one question Wehihimana had wished he had asked Hughes when he’d had the chance:
“And then what?”
Wehihimana didn’t realise he had said the words out loud till he felt the air of his breath on his cracked lips. He ran his tongue over them, sighed and glanced at the plate beside his bed. Skewers of pork and pineapple, picked clean. Gavaji had been agriculturally developed by both the natives and the Russians, so that it would be hard to starve here, providing the farmers could be kept in line: tropical fruit as a rival to the Meridian-owned Meridian Fruit Company, pig farming, fisheries, sweet potatoes. There were even a few sugarcane plantations, though the ambitious experiment of one Russian industrialist had ultimately failed to compete with the Batavian and Feng Chinese powerhouse producers of that crop.[18] All the same, Wehihimana had heard the European theories—and stories of his own people—about a limited diet lacking some vital principle that could lead to disease. Like the long-distance sailors living on salt pork and biscuit, who had suffered rickets due to, so the Europeans thought, lack of fruit. Well, Wehihimana had enough fruit, but there was a persistent empty feeling in him that told him not all was well.
Maybe that wasn’t anything to do with the food. Maybe it was just the sense of impending doom.
The door burst open and Wehihimana’s hand was immediately on his knife. He relaxed when the dim morning light illuminated the newcomer’s face: his lieutenant, Kauri. “What is it?” he asked sharply, knowing Kauri would not wake him for no reason.
Kauri licked his own lips: also cracked, Wehihimana noticed. “A steerable,” he reported, using the French word, dirigeable. Some purists hated all the French import words into the Mauré language and wanted to come up with proper native replacements, sometimes drawing upon the figures of ancient mythology. But to Wehihimana those had always sounded rather silly.
“A steerable,” he repeated, quickly dressing himself as he spoke. “The Russians? An advance scout?”
Kauri hesitated. “Probably not,” he said. “There wasn’t enough light to be sure through the spyglass, but they are approaching from the south.”
The south. Well, well. “I always suspected this day would come,” Wehihimana muttered and, far more than the sense of an approaching Russian fleet from the north had, he found this meant he was suddenly aware of his own mortality. That would be hard to explain to a non-Mauré.
His men, with help from those locals they trusted the most, had already raised the steerable mooring mast by the time he arrived at the flattened field outside the capital of Kailua. The Russians had only occasionally docked steerables here: it was a long flight for them to make from the nearest Russian possessions of Yapon or New Muscovy.[19] Big Kikawe passed Wehihimana the spyglass and the Rangatira frowned as he focused it. “French colours,” he said briefly, his tone showing no surprise. “Fleur-de-lys on the fins…and a white flag on either side. Parley. Neutral.”
“The French are here,” Kikawe repeated unnecessarily. The Mauré had a number of disparaging words for the French. Kikawe didn’t need to use any of them, with the venom he put into their true name.
“Let them dock,” Wehihimana decided, ignoring the imp of the perverse that suggested he should just shoot this ship down as well, might as well go to war with France while he was at it.
Despite the circumstances of a long crossing, a rarely-used mast and an inexperienced makeshift ground crew, the docking went without a hitch. Maybe at least one of those factors was wrong, Wehihimana thought as he stared at the bulbous shape of the steerable and its red-outlined fins. It was always hard to judge the size of anything in the air, but…Kauri echoed his thoughts: “That steerable looks too small to have flown here from the Great Sunset Land,” he said. “Less than a hundred toises long, I’d say.”[20]
“Agreed,” Wehihimana says. “So either it flew from the deck of a ship…” There were some steerables like that, he knew, but conversely it tooked too big for that.
His thoughts were interrupted as a rope ladder was dropped from the now-docked steerable, the weights on the end almost knocking Kikawe out as they fell. A single figure in a blue uniform emerged and, nonchalantly, clambered down the ladder despite the alarming swaying motions of steerable, mast and ladder itself. A cool customer.
The man in blue dropped the last half-toise or so from the ladder, bending his knees to take the impact. He had dark hair, a little longer than was usual in the French Army, grey eyes, no moustache, and a blank, unreadable expression. “Kia ora, Rangatira Wehihimana,” he said, pronouncing the name quite well: clearly a Frenchman long experienced in Pacific colonial service.
“Bonjour, mon Capitaine…” Wehihimana replied, pausing politely.
“D’Août,” the captain said briefly. “And I may say I am glad,” he continued in the same anodyne voice, pointing at the white flags trailing from his steerable, “that you at least chose to obey one of the strictures of the Ratisbon Convention.”[21]
Wehihimana stiffened and Kauri’s hand was on his knife; Kikawe, whose thoughts ran more slowly, took longer to figure out that this was an insult. “To what do you refer, sir?” Wehihimana asked coldly in French.
Captain D’Août stretched his arms and Wehihimana heard the pops and cracks as he released the tensions built up crammed into a steerable gondola seat for a long flight. “I am afraid, Rangatira, the state of the camps in which you keep your Russian prisoners of war has become globally notorious.” There was something insolent about the bland, emotionless tone, as though this man was reading from a library book, imparting inarguable information.
“The Russians were offered a prisoner exchange many times,” Wehihimana said bluntly. Of course, towards the end it could not be like-for-like, as the Russians had no Mauré prisoners, and perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the Tsar hadn’t looked on his alternative requests with fondness, but—
“Nonetheless,” D’Août said. “Doubtless you will say that the stories are exaggerated, mere propaganda—but they are believed.”
“You kéroi would tell any lies of us to confirm your own prejudices,” Kauri snorted, then fell silent when Wehihimana gave him a look.[22]
D’Août shrugged. “I am not here to tour your camps. I mention this only for context: a warning that the world watches, and the public opinion of that world is not on your side.” He blinked once, slowly. “There is a Russian fleet approaching. It will arrive in two days’ time, or so we estimate.”
That keyed with Wehihimana’s own guess, based on the early reports from Nikau in Yapon before he had fallen silent. But, of course, there was a lot of guesswork involved; since the cutting of the Lectel cables, only a few boats carried news across the Pacific, and that always out of date and of questionable veracity. He doubted D’Août had any newer information than him. “Unsurprising,” he said. “And now, I understand, the Tsar has no more foes but me. I am the last to keep fighting,” he said, and spoke the words as a boast to D’Août, yet found himself oddly affected by them as he said them.
“And the last to be defeated,” D’Août said bluntly. “For you will be. You cannot stand up to a major Russian fleet and soldiers now freed from their war with the Americans.”
“I wonder what Admiral Hughes is doing now,” Wehihimana said, as much to buy time with an unexpected twist to the conversation while he guessed at D’Août’s motives.
D’Août raised an eyebrow. “Yes, you met with him, didn’t you?” He shook his head. “Admiral Hughes won a significant victory for the Americans at Tehuantipec some months ago. However, since Britain rose in revolt against America, he has since been imprisoned due to concerns about his loyalty.”
Wehihimana actually smiled. “So his homeland was freed in the end. He has that, at least, no matter what happens to him.”
D’Août raised an eyebrow. “Of what significance does this have to our discussion?” he asked, sounding honestly puzzled.
Wehihimana slowly walked around D’Août, giving him a measuring glance. Overhead, the steerable’s engines continued to thutter, meaning that his faux-confidential whisper became a shout by necessity. “Let me save us some time and your vessel some fuel, Captain. One, you were sent here to inform me that the Hira Hui has finished agonising and has voted to condemn my invasion, that it was nothing to do with them, and that all the brave young men who flowed here to help me were acting of their own accord.” He theatrically counted on his fingers. “Two, fearful of a Russian revenge attack and Autiaraux finally falling into the Tsar’s sphere of influence as some of the Orthodox Kéroi-Mauré have always wanted, they have run to France for help—and fallen into your trap.” He stared deeply into D’Août’s grey eyes. “Thirdly, you might be able to keep Gavaji under our control and dissuade the Russians from attacking—if I go along with your plan.”
D’Août opened and closed his mouth, very quickly, very subtly. He recovered well, but Wehihimana had clearly surprised him. “Well—yes, aside from your third point being rather optimistic. The Tsar would not accept you continuing to lord it over the Gavajskis after the prisoner camps outrage—” D’Août raised his hand to forestall Kauri’s heated objection, “—as it is seen.” He scratched his hair under his cap. “All that our Foreign Minister was able to extract was a faint hope that Gavaji might be allowed to become a neutral, third-party kingdom in truth, with equal influence of France and Russia.” He looked at Wehihimana with a penetrating gaze. “If you support us. The Mauré have always had a special relationship with France. This is an opportunity for you to—“
“Allow me to forestall you there,” Wehihimana said, his voice low and dangerous. “Am I correct in saying that, thanks to the Hira Hui resolution you implicitly confirmed, any action I take will not be taken as the act of the Federation of Autiaraux?”
D’Août frowned. “Well, I suppose, no—”
Wehihimana slapped him hard across the face.
The shock on Kauri’s and Kikawe’s faces formed a tryptich with the sudden, incongruous red anger on D’Août’s as he recovered himself. “Rangatira, if this is all you have to say—”
“It is,” Wehihimana said. “Please do not take this as a slight against yourself, but against your nation and its Government.” He spread his hands. “Ever since La Pérouse arrived on our shores, we have always known that France wanted to dominate the Mauré people and take away our freedom. We resisted, for a century and more, but you have finally seized your opportunity.”
He shook his head angrily. “I do not blame you. You are only fulfilling your kéroi nature, your guiding imperative, to destroy, to conquer. I blame the weak Rangatiras in name only who have sold our freedom because they are afraid of the Tsar. We deserve this fate for elevating such cowards.”
Kauri’s hand was on his arm. “Not all. There is one Rangatira who stands. You.”
Wehihimana nodded. “Quite so.” He glanced around the watching Mauré on the field, who had collectively paused in their tasks to look at him. He raised his voice. “If there is any of my Mauré who wishes to throw in with the French, probably to sell me out and give the Tsar my head so that you may live—you may do so.” Before they could cry a negative, he quickly added: “Or if you wish to hide your tattooes and pretend to be ‘loyal Gavajski peasants’ and bow and scrape to the Tsar for the rest of your life—you may do that, too.” He paused. “It is the same thing.”
Now came the roar of denial. He turned back to D’Août, the red handprint still showing on his pale skin. “Do you have any other questions?”
D’Août gave him a long, hard look. “It is easy to be bold when the Russians are still beyond the horizon,” he said, as softly as he could over the engine sounds. “Will you say the same when they are not?”
Wehihimana reached out, grabbed the rope ladder, and passed it to D’Août. “If I cannot be a king, Captain, I will at least be a legend. A story. An inspiration, fifty or a hundred years from now, to encourage my people to rise up and throw off you oppressors, you vultures who will not fight yourself but only loot the corpses of the brave.” Acid came into his tongue. “Your forebears who served Lisieux—at least they knew how to fight.”
D’Août’s hand was on his sword, his eyes burning. “May you all perish at the Tsar’s hand,” he bit out.
Wehihimana smiled. “Better to die on our feet than live on our knees.”
[18] In contrast to OTL, where the sugarcane industry dominated Hawaii for a while.
[19] In OTL the first major transoceanic flight by an airship was the crossing of the Atlantic by the British airship R34 in 1919. In TTL, due to the earlier advancement of balloon aeronautics, this was achieved in 1886 and is considered a possible, and not surprising, but also not trivial or common occurrence at the turn of the twenty-first century.
[20] OTL: about two hundred metres.
[21] Anachronism by the author: though there were existing internationally recognised laws of war and some even signed in Bavaria, the ‘Ratisbon Convention’ was not signed until after the end of the Pandoric War.
[22] This sequence is the author’s reference to a later Heritage Point of Controversy over the Mauré’s treatment of Russian POWs during the Gavaji occupation, with some arguing the reports of brutality were exaggerated by the Russians after the fact.