There were times when the absence of cherry blossoms was as potent as their presence.
Beyond was a broad avenue and then the meeting-hall of the Congress of Realms, which was a rather odd-looking rectangular structure sheathed in marble and topped by a high and broad fluted cylinder like a giant drum, in turn supporting a column topped by a great bronze statue covered in gold leaf, like the building, a work of the ancient world skillfully transformed after the Change.
Whatever the statue had been before the Change, it now showed Rudi Mackenzie—High King Artos—dressed in kilt and plaid and holding the Sword of the Lady. For a moment she closed her eyes, taking a deep breath.
Reiko had seen the High King alive only for moments before he died on that terrible day when her father fell, but she thought the statue did in fact resemble him. Of course, that might be because it had always been a statue of a handsome, athletic gaijin man with a short beard. Even now the odd beaky faces here tended to blur into one another, unless she knew the individual well.
Dún na Síochána meant Citadel of Peace when translated into English; Reiko’s command of Montival’s common tongue was quite good now, and she had no intention of wasting time on Gaelic, since virtually nobody here spoke it as opposed to the way some were always mining it, plucking names like umeboshi from the center of a rice ball. She caught herself before she sneered at that, even in the privacy of her own mind.
After all, do we Nihonjin not also mine our history for things useful in the modern world? Picking and choosing from every era—and from every era’s myths of every other era besides its own. Here an institution, there a tool or a way of doing or dressing or speaking, mixing them as they were never mixed before. Until the return of the old becomes something very new, though most of us do not know it. Nor is this time after the Change the first occasion when we have looked to our past, or to dreams of it, in that fashion. Not the first, not the tenth! We have such a great deal of past to use!
On her quest for the Grasscutter Sword she had been granted visions—perhaps dreams, but she thought perhaps much more than that—of her people’s long, long history. Of herself, a presence in times when the intertwined destinies of her dynasty and the Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven had touched turning-points of fate for the entire Yamato folk, from the days of the legends to her own great-grandmother’s lifetime. It had given her a new appreciation of the depths of the ages involved.
In the street beyond a carriage went by behind six glossy black horses, their hides catching gleams from the streetlamps and the vehicle’s own lights. There was a coat of arms on the door, the odd complex busy-looking local equivalent of the spare elegant Nihonjin mon; perhaps a northern noble, perhaps the blazon of some merchant prince from one of Montival’s city-states. A streetcar rumbled by on its tracks, also drawn by horses, but the huge platter-hoofed beasts seemed almost of a different species.
“Their heavy cavalry is fearsome, but they make such wide use of horses for other purposes here, Majesty,” Egawa said.
“They can afford it,” she said ruefully, without looking around.
Envy tinged her voice. Nihon was sparsely populated now, very sparsely if you thought in terms of the home islands as a whole, but the long war with the raiders from over the Sea of Japan had kept them tightly packed for survival’s sake. There were some horses for military use and oxen for plowing but apart from that little land to spare for pasture, little that could be used for anything but growing food that humans could eat, and sometimes just barely enough of that. Which meant that work which did not come from wind or water mostly had to be done by human muscle. It would be a great thing to lift some of that burden from the shoulders of the common people.
And also the burden of war, this eternal war into which Father was born and I after him. We must turn so much of what we make and grow to supporting warriors and war machines! Shōhei is the era-name I chose, Victorious Peace, and so much more would be possible if we had that!
She smiled slightly at the vision that suggested. The ancient fields on the main islands cleared and cultivated once more, of course, generation by generation, and the great ancestral shrines restored. Mountain streams channeled for workshops and mills; the huge blight of the pre-Change ruins mined for their metals and to free the land they so wastefully covered; carefully tended mountain forests yielding timber for ships to carry goods around the world and bring back more.
And what that would mean, she thought.
Scenes drifted through her mind, bright with longing; a cheerful crowd at a festival dancing around an image carried down a street; friends laughing as they drank sake and ate yakitori and sang in a little cookshop; poets in a pavilion topping each other in a line-finishing competition as they looked out on an autumn landscape of water and reeds and trees slowly dropping their leaves; men stripped to their fundoshi and headbands chanting together as they hauled on the ropes and the beams of a temple rose; a mother in a small neat peasant house proudly serving her family white rice and tsukemono and tonkatsu; a brush leaving a spare curve on white paper; deft hands making a spray of yellow flowers on blue silk.
We will always be warriors and farmers, and that is good, she thought. But there should be more in life than toil and discipline, duty and the sword. We should be playwrights and painters and explorers and scholars too, and dancers and clowns and storytellers and young lovers lost in each other beneath the cherry-trees as petals drift like snowflakes on the wind. It is for this I fight, and that I stand for my people before my kinsfolk the Great Kami.
She shook herself mentally, back to the present and the alien winter’s night.
The half-built capital of the High Kingdom was part construction site, part the ruin of the pre-Change settlement; that was familiar enough from her own life back in Nihon. Right now it was crowded with the influx for the Congress of Realms. She could see that in the wildly varied passers-by; Christian clerics, including a warrior monk with tonsure and dark robe, telling his rosary in his right hand with the left resting on the hilt of his longsword; a saffron-robed bonze in an odd crested hat spinning a prayer wheel; the brass studs and blue denim and broad white Stetsons of those from the Free Cities League of the Yakima; archaic suits and ties marking the self-proclaimed heirs of the ancient Americans from Boise, though to her they looked like the salarymen of legend; and more, and more. Including a minor constellation of what they called the First People here, autonomous tribes ranging from tiny hamlets to the mighty tunwan of the Seven Council Fires. A Lakota chief and his followers rode by as if they had grown in the saddle, eagle-feather bonnets sweeping down the backs of fringed war-shirts of bleached elk-hide.
And more important for her purposes and the Empire’s, there were troops, too, the growing muster of the High Kingdom gathered over distances she found almost inconceivable, in a range utterly alien to the small, tightly organized and quite uniform population of her own country. Armored knights and men-at-arms, light cavalry in mail shirts with bow and saber, field catapults rumbling by on their way to a camp outside the little city, kilted archers in green brigandines, once the serried swaying points of a pike-phalanx marching by beneath the banner of a golden honeybee on black and singing in a deep male chorus:
“Awake, ye Saints of God, awake!
Tho’ Zion’s foes have counseled deep,
Although they bind with fetters strong,
The God of Jacob does not sleep;
His vengeance will not slumber long!”
Then a company of Boiseans behind a wreathed standard topped by an upraised golden hand, with hobnail boots slamming down on the pavement in earthquake unison to the rattle of a kettle-drum and brassy scream of a trumpet and a harsh cry of:
“Make way, make way!” from their officer with the transverse red crest on his helm and vine-root swagger stick in his hand.
“We have accomplished much, Majesty,” Egawa said. “We hav
e set all this in motion, and turned it to our purposes.”
The commander was an inch or so less than her own five foot six in the local system—medium height for a man in Nihon, short here—but broad-built and squat, in plain dark black-and-gray hakama and kimono and five-kamon haori jacket, fan and the two swords through his sash. He had grown a little gaunt since he had lost his left hand on the beach at Topanga; Montival had fine doctors, as good as any in Nihon, but that was a grave injury and more so for a man in middle age.
Yet despite the fresh lines in his square, rather brutal face and the extra gray in his hair where the topknot stood up above the shaved strip, there was less hidden tension in the set of his stance. He still looked ready to draw and strike instantly, but less as if he wished something would give him the opportunity.
Every now and then his eye would stray to the sword tucked through the moderate-width modern-style sash she wore around her own kimono. Yellow gleams seemed to move in the black depths of what was no longer a simple sheath of lacquer and wood. Just as the blade beneath was no longer simply steel, not even simply a marvel of seven laminations from the hand of the ancient master-smith Masamune.
He looked aside, cleared his throat, and made a slight show of glancing over the railing of the verandah at the samurai who stood motionless as statues at the street gate, water beading on the lacquered lames of their armor and the plates of their broad-tailed helmets, the dim light glittering on the long heads of their tall su yari spears. Two flags flew there; one the Tennō’s personal banner, red with the sixteen-petal stylized chrysanthemum mon of her House in gold, the other the Hinomaru, the red sun-disk on a white ground. More guardsmen stood beneath the balcony, almost invisible against the dark red brick with its coat of ivy, save for the wet gleam on the blades of their naginatas.
“Yes,” Reiko answered. “It is for that that my father sacrificed himself. So that the generations of our people might live. For that, and this.”
Her hand rested on the hilt of the transformed sword for a moment before she went on; they both inclined their heads.
“That we of the Dynasty may have the power to guard them through all time to come. There is much yet to be done, but we have made a good beginning . . . to be sure, with the help of our enemies! They will long regret killing the Montivallan High King when they slew our Saisei Tennō.”
“Hopefully they will not regret it so very long, Heika,” her officer said with grim humor, and she nodded acknowledgment before she said:
“Come, let us examine the circumstances.”
The sliding doors behind them were of glass and metal, salvage of the ancient world rather than modern paper and lath, but the principle was the same. Egawa worked them, then preceded her and bowed her into the room. She stepped out of her zōri sandals and across the mats to a low table that held several maps and stacked reports, along with ink-blocks and brushes and a lever-worked mechanical calculator.
The Montivallan ship that had borne her Grand Steward to the homeland had returned recently with a suitable retinue for her—the bare bones of one, at least. As she and Egawa sank back on their knees and heels on the mats in seiza and set their katanas by their right sides the inner door slid open and lady-in-waiting Egawa Chiyo appeared—a stern-faced woman of about thirty, the guard-commander’s sister and named for the poet. She directed two maids, young cousins of hers in their early teens, and also related to Reiko as grandchildren of her grandfather’s sisters; personal service to the Empress was a post of much honor, eagerly sought among women of high birth. Chiyo wore a rather plain iro-tomesode, and the youngsters the more colorful furisode suitable for young maidens.
All three had wakizashi shortswords thrust through their modest-width modern obi, steel tessen folding fans tucked away inconspicuously, tantō-daggers, and lead weights sewn into the bottom hems of their long hanging sleeves, which could be grasped and instantly swung as deadly flails. Their brothers and uncles and male cousins served in the Guard, but like them the attendants were expected to instantly throw themselves between she whom they served and any danger, if necessary with bare hands or the long pointed pins that secured their piled hair.
The pleasantly spare room was large and comfortable, softly lit by biogas lamp fixtures overhead. It had bookshelves, map-stands, a few flowers, armor-stand and racks for naginatas near the inner door, and an alcove where she had hung a scroll she had made herself; she had always found calligraphy an aid to a tranquil mind. The other side bore a kamidana where she could make offerings, at the proper above-eye-level height with a circular mirror in front of a stylized miniature shrine and the other necessary objects. The mirror was customary . . . but for one of her birth, it had a special significance.
Reiko sighed inwardly as the maids laid a kakeban serving table by each of them, very much like a lacquered tray with four legs and stretchers. She knew all the women who served at Court by name and had grown up among them, and she felt the gentle, invisible, unspoken and irresistible pressure of their presence and their gaze shoving her back into her own appointed role as firmly as they performed theirs.
Both tables came from Japan originally, but had been in a museum here before their allies supplied them, and she felt slightly guilty as the heated sake flasks were placed on them and poured with due ceremony into shallow sakazuki cups.
They are so very old, and so very beautiful.
Abstractly she knew that she was much less enmeshed in ceremony and ritual than most of her ancestors. It had been two thousand years, perhaps three, since so few people dwelt in the Land of the Gods. The modern court reflected that, that and the ceaseless pressure of the jinnikukaburi raiders and their sorcerer lords. The very knowledge of some of the more arcane rites had been lost, because only Reiko’s grandmother and her nurse and one or two others had survived from the Imperial household; others were well-recorded in writing but impossible because their sites were haunted ruins that would not be reclaimed for generations at best.
But even so, in many ways my time here was like . . . what is the ancient word . . . a vacation, despite hardship and peril. Odd to be alone among strangers, even when some became friends. Yet, also so oddly liberating for a time.
“Kanpai, Majesty!” Egawa said, lifting the cup formally, then pausing for an instant as if he’d been caught in some solecism he couldn’t name or define.
Poor Egawa, she thought, as she shook back her sleeve and drank delicately, one hand cupped around the other. I am his superior officer, but also his Tennō, and I am a woman, yet also a student of the arts of war who he knew and trained as a child. And he has seen me be the vessel of my Ancestress, a living God for a moment. He is a most intelligent man, but he is not particularly subtle or at ease with contradictions, with ambiguities. Like a cat, he prefers things to be . . . tidy.
She sighed again; she missed her cat, but it would have been cruel to have subjected Aiko to the sea voyage that had brought the reinforcements. Cats loved people, but they loved their homes as much. And to be sure, now there was Kiwako—more rewarding than any pet, a whole personality blossoming like a flower. It was well to have something in your life besides the grim necessities of power.
The papers on the table occupied them for some time; occasionally she reached out and adjusted one of the supplemental stands nearby, each holding an alcohol pressure-lamp before a movable curved mirror. Ruling, even ruling less than four hundred thousand people, involved a great deal of dealing with numbers and reports and maps. She had been raised to that even before her brother was lost and she received a prince’s education as heir to the throne; women of the upper classes did much of the routine administration at home these days to spare men for battle, and they set policy more often than the men liked to acknowledge.
When war was involved, it generated still more paper. At least these reports indicated fewer raids than usual back home since she and her father left on their mission. Perhaps t
he enemy was occupied elsewhere, since Japan was far from their only foe. Or drawing back their strength to strike later, or for once preoccupied with defense rather than attack.
Or a dozen other explanations. Do not speculate beyond the evidence. Good advice . . . but it is like saying that you should not scratch a mosquito bite. True, yet so much easier to give than take! But already some of our people live who would have died or worse if we had not made this voyage.
When you put war and ruling together, there was no end to the administrative trivia, and it was a constant struggle to remember that each figure in the columns represented a person, a bundle of loves and hates and longings connected to so many others.
At times you must disregard that, for the greater good; that is giri. But ninjo, feelings and compassion . . . that must have its place too, or you become an empty suit of armor that walks and kills, and then a blight upon the world.
“At least now we are no longer perpetually trying to make one tatami cover a whole tsubo by shifting it around very quickly,” she observed.
“Hai, Heika!” Egawa said cheerfully. “Don’t the gaijin have a saying about robbing one to pay another. . . .”
“Robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she supplied, dropping the English names into the Nihongo smoothly.
“Yes, exactly. We have been robbing Ichirō to pay Jirō all our lives.”
“And Jirō to pay Ichirō,” she said.
“Now, we may bestow gifts lavishly on both sons!”
She made a single swift nod and indicated the papers: “This all seems quite satisfactory. Not perfect, given the transportation difficulties and how long it takes to build a ship, but satisfactory. Especially if we can hire vessels from Hawaii, and that looks to be possible even if their king Kalākaua does not enter the war—and eventually, it seems likely he will. From the reports he is an intelligent, farsighted man, and many of his people are partly of our blood. They are Hawaiian now, but they remember.”
Prince of Outcasts Page 34