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

by S. M. Stirling

  In a way she almost missed the physical misery, because it preoccupied you and the spiritual effort of suppressing it smothered the pains of soul and heart.

  Father—

  “And they have provided excellent care for our wounded, treatment much like ours,” Egawa continued.

  “That is most fortunate,” she said, proud that her voice was steady.

  And she’d noticed the same thing when she visited their injured. It was a comfort that those who’d suffered wounds in the Throne’s service were being given the best possible care, though it was a pity that it was among strangers with whom they shared not a word. Still, the skill and sympathy of the healers and their assistants had been unmistakable. To a man in pain, no matter how brave, a smile and a gentle hand meant much.

  “Not one man can be spared if recovery is possible,” she said, with iron in her tones. “And we have no true healers left.”

  One of their doctors had intercepted a jinnikukaburi roundshot with her head in the Aleutians, and the other had been slashed to death in the brutal scrimmage around the ship trying to drag a wounded man back from the front line. Everyone learned field medicine, but that didn’t make you a real doctor.

  “We have thirty-two men of the Imperial Guard fit for duty, including some lightly wounded, and adequate gear for all though we are short of arrows,” Egawa continued. “Two more have died, and six are seriously injured. I regret to inform you, Majesty, that Watanabe Atsuko-gozen never recovered consciousness.”

  Reiko closed her eyes again for an instant. Lady Atsuko had been the last of her female attendants; there had been three originally, all well-born young women a little older than her and selected for their varied skills. She could see Atsuko driving the point of her naginata into the face of the Korean swordsman who’d been about to strike Reiko . . . and to do it, ignoring the scar-faced savage who brought a stone-headed club down two-handed to shatter the plates of her helmet. Reiko could remember her frowning over the go board, too, or gently, patiently mopping the face of her friend Haru by the flickering light of a single swaying lantern when she was prostrate with seasickness in the endless storms.

  “Duty, heavier than mountains,” she said quietly.

  They hadn’t been friends, not exactly—there were barriers—but they had all become close, in the confined quarters and constant shared peril and hardship.

  “Death, lighter than a feather,” another voice murmured, completing the formula. Then: “But now you will have no woman to attend you, Majesty.”

  “We will do as we must. Continue, General-san,” she said levelly, switching to the more courteous distant form of address with his title.

  “Our ship Red Dragon is a wreck and most of the crew perished in the rearguard action there.”

  Young Ishikawa Goru, who had been Kaigun Daisa—captain—of the Red Dragon—leaned forward slightly at his gesture and supplied the precise information. Her father had directly ordered him to join the retreat because they absolutely must have an experienced navigator, and there had been tears in his eyes as he obeyed.

  “The upperworks burned and there is structural damage to the scantlings, Your Majesty, from the fire, from the grounding, and from the storms—we were leaking like a ladle dipping noodles out of the pot for days before we sighted land.”

  “I remember the pumping,” she said; her hands had hard calluses from weapons practice, but that had worn them sore.

  He ducked his head. “Majesty. And the repairs we could make to strikes by roundshot and catapult bolts at sea were makeshift. So sorry, we would need a shipyard, timber and cordage and sailcloth, many skilled workers and even with all these things at least a month or so to make her seaworthy. Effectively, complete rebuilding. As it is, here in this wilderness the ship must be regarded as a total loss. To return to the homeland we will require a new ship, and at least some of the crew for it.”

  “The Montivallans have ships capable of the voyage. They trade regularly with Hawaii and even more distant lands,” Reiko said.

  “Mainly by the southern routes, Majesty,” Koyama confirmed. “To avoid the savages who helped the bakachon against us.”

  “This is why the Montivallans took our side, Lord Steward?” someone asked. “They couldn’t know what was going on. We were all warriors from nowhere, we and the bakachon and those savages they picked up.”

  Here Reiko could answer: “The savages fighting with our enemy, the ones whose ship kept us off the coast so long after we reached Alaska . . . they are called Haida. And evidently they are enemies of Montival—pirates, I think.”

  Ishikawa nodded thoughtfully. “Ah so desu ka. That would explain why the seas were so completely empty as we came across the Pacific from Hokkaido, though that is the best sailing route from Asia to this continent, Majesty,” he said. “It is not that there is no sea traffic at all, as we feared, but that it avoids that route despite the favorable winds.”

  Reiko gestured agreement with her fan. “That came out when they made sure of where we came from. We are not stranded.”

  Nobody moved, but she could feel their relief.

  “Continue, General Egawa.”

  He went on: “The ship is lost, but a good deal of the baggage and gear in the hold was salvaged by the Montivallans after they put out the fire, and promptly turned over to us, unopened. There is much goodwill on their part, I think, but communications are a problem; those of us who have some English have to use written messages. Thankfully they are all literate in the Latin alphabet and a number of us can use it, but it is still awkward.”

  Koyama said thoughtfully: “Their High King spoke perfect Japanese . . . Sado-ga-shima dialect, even . . . and apparently Korean as well. And now his daughter does. I still do not understand that. Certainly none of the others have any, Majesty.”

  “Yes, I recall, and I was astonished at his fluency even then,” she said. “The difficulty in speaking with them is very awkward; we cannot expect a ruler to act as our interpreter whenever it would be convenient. We must master their language as rapidly as possible, and that applies to you all, and to your subordinates.”

  Her mouth twisted a little wryly. Her tutors had been convinced that she could already speak fluent English. She had studied dutifully, even though it had seemed a useless accomplishment to her.

  They were very wrong, and so was I!

  It would have been extremely useful to speak English now, but though she could handle the written language easily enough, several embarrassing attempts at the spoken tongue had proved incomprehensible to the locals. Nor could she follow more than a word or two per sentence when they spoke. The sounds that English-speakers actually used were excruciatingly difficult—many of them were identical to her ear but were distinct and crucial to meaning—and the spelling in the supposedly phonetic Latin alphabet was bizarrely useless as a guide. Why did night have a g and an h and no e on the end?

  And while she was not sure, she suspected that at least two very different dialects of English were involved here.

  The Kami know it’s hard enough to understand someone from Hachijo, the way they mumble everything as if their mouths were full and call a field a mountain or say garbage for firewood. It might be something like that. And I don’t even know which dialect is more important! But the important thing here is—

  “It is the sword he carried, and that his daughter now bears, that did these things,” Reiko said flatly. “It is . . . shintai.”

  She turned slightly and bowed to the urn. Everyone followed suit; it wasn’t necessary to speak. Shintai was a word with many implications: literally it meant something that served as the dwelling of a kami.

  Most commonly it was at the center of a shrine, and it could be a rock, a tree, a waterfall . . . or an object like a sword. Some considered the relationship merely symbolic, but the ancient tales could make the power embodied in a shintai sound quite bluntly literal. Her father’s quest involved taking the stories very seriously indeed, and they now h
ad direct proof in the light of day that he had been absolutely right.

  Koyama went on slowly: “These people . . . they are not at all as I would have imagined Americans, from the records and stories. Even two generations after the Change. Though they recognized us immediately, what we were and where we came from. Even using our own terms; I heard their ruler’s daughter say Nihon as soon as she saw us closely. Curious.”

  “As far as custom and appearance go, I suspect that we too might be surprising to someone who had no knowledge of Japan since Heisei 10,” she said; that spring was when the machines had stopped. “Since we have returned to many of the older ways.”

  She reminded herself to think of the Western calendar as well, though it wasn’t much used in everyday speech anymore: Heisei 10 was 1998 AD.

  “And just as surprising to someone brought forward in time from before Meiji, Majesty,” Koyama said, surprising her a little. “Though they might take a little longer to realize it. History cannot be completely undone, even by the Change, nor can the past be truly brought back even if you wear its clothes.”

  True enough, she thought. I am not about to shave my eyebrows off or blacken my teeth or apologize for existing every time I speak to a man.

  “My father once said he felt as if he had awoken in a Kurosawa epic and could not escape,” Koyama added.

  They all ignored the mysterious last sentence; the Grand Steward was given to gnomic references nobody else could understand.

  Egawa’s second-in-command Nakamura Ichiro spoke; his left arm was bandaged and in a sling.

  “These gaijin look so strange, though. More so than the pictures prepared me for. Hardly like human beings at all. More like characters in an ancient manga!”

  Reiko tapped her fan on her chin; that had struck her too. Nobody born in Japan since the Change had seen a living gaijin, of course. When nine hundred and ninety-nine in every thousand perished, it wasn’t to be expected that any of a tiny group of foreigners centered in the cities where devastation was worst would survive. For her generation, their parents hadn’t seen one either, though there were surviving photographs.

  A representation was one thing, the living reality another. The fantastic hair and eye colors were like something from a dream, and the odd angular features, even the way they differed so strongly one from another in things like the tint of their skin—she had seen everything from the commonest odd-looking pink shade through normal tan to a very dark brown almost the color of an aubergine. It all made it a little difficult to see most of them as individuals, though she supposed she’d grow accustomed to it.

  And frankly, most of them are repulsively ugly. So hairy! Almost like oni. Though this Princess Órlaith is striking, in a deeply strange way—hard to realize that the yellow hair and blue eyes are real. And her face is like a blade.

  “They seem civilized enough in some respects,” she said thoughtfully. “Not too smelly, at least.”

  Everyone nodded. The communal bathhouse in the little village looked as if it had been among the very first things built there when the settlement was established a few years ago, and it had been almost exactly like the sento, the equivalents back in the homeland. Almost as if it had been modeled on them, with provision for scrubbing down first and then soaking in a large tub of hot water. Hers were a fastidious people, when they could be, and it had been a deep relief to be properly clean again after so long. Though it had been a little strange and sad to be rattling around in it by herself.

  “General Egawa, your military evaluation of our . . . hosts,” Reiko said.

  She wanted everyone to have the facts, and she was also interested to see if his judgment would match hers.

  And the battle was so . . . chaotic. Despair, and then it was arrows and lances in the enemy’s back. I could easily have missed something crucial. I am the descendant of the Sun Goddess, not Herself. And even the Great Kami are not omniscient.

  “Majesty.”

  He passed his bandaged hand over the shaven strip on his head, back towards the topknot, and frowned for a moment as he organized his thoughts.

  “Their High King’s personal troops dealt with the jinnikukaburi who were about to wipe us out very well. From what I observed their individual weapons-handling with sword and lance was reasonable, allowing for different weapons and styles. The archers were truly excellent, as good as our shashu, and the heavy cavalry charge was fearsome, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Or those horses!”

  “Huge but graceful,” Reiko agreed.

  “Feeding them might be a problem, though—I’ve seen that they eat grain, General-sama,” his second-in-command said thoughtfully.

  Egawa nodded; it was a valid point. In Japan, animals ate only what humans couldn’t, apart from the odd handful of barley to keep chickens tame enough to be easy to catch. The Imperial Guard commander went on:

  “Coordination between arms was nearly perfect. Beautiful timing, which requires not only a commander with good judgment but a force with maneuver discipline. And the way they deployed indicates to me that they scouted carefully with those lightly armed horse-archers without either we or the enemy noticing them before they struck. The jinnikukaburi were taken entirely by surprise.”

  “Their High King assumed that any friend of the Haida was an enemy of his, and any enemy of an enemy was a friend,” Reiko said. “Logical, but it is not easy to be completely logical in a situation like that, with so much unknown and so much at stake.”

  Egawa nodded. “Hai, Majesty, that was sound thinking, when he had so little time to consider and no precise information. Swift! Decisive! He saw the situation and struck precisely with all his force, and without a moment of the hesitation that might have let the enemy recover their balance. A great pity he was killed.”

  Silence fell for a moment as they thought of their own loss, until Grand Steward Koyama nodded.

  “Very fortunate thinking for us,” he said dryly. Then: “And perhaps not so much of a pity that their High King was killed.”

  “Explain,” Reiko said sharply.

  “Majesty, even without understanding the language well, it is obvious that the Montivallans are stricken with sorrow. And beneath their sorrow, a deep anger, hot but lasting; both as great as ours at the loss of our Emperor. The jinnikukaburi have killed a man, but they may well have awoken an entire nation. And filled it with a terrible resolve.”

  “That is a point,” Reiko said thoughtfully. “Yes . . . yes, considering what I have seen, you may well be correct. Continue, General. You spoke of the household troops of the Montivallan ruler, who are presumably their best men. What about the rest?”

  Egawa went on: “The militia from the village are good archers, and well equipped for light troops. I cannot say more without seeing them in action, but my impression is favorable. They resemble our kosakunin-ashigaru, our farmer-infantry.”

  More nods. Every household in the homeland kept weapons ready to hand, trained to arms in what spare time they had, and every fit man and every woman not pregnant or recovering from childbirth was ready to turn out with bow and naginata when the alarm-drum boomed out. Full-time samurai were a handful, their numbers set by what the land and the peasants and craftsmen who worked it could produce, but the raiders from across the Sea of Japan did not find an easy meal anywhere.

  Her commander went on: “The reinforcements they’ve received since then look generally similar to the regular troops we saw fight, well equipped, well-fed and strong, with good march and camp discipline as well. They hold themselves with pride, care for their gear without being driven, obey orders promptly, work hard, and set alert watches.”

  Everyone nodded; those were good rule-of-thumb indicators of quality if you couldn’t actually see men fight. Egawa continued in a slightly lighter tone.

  “Some of the older troops have seen much action, judging from their smooth skins and beautiful looks.”

  There were a few smiles as he touched one of the scars that seamed his
square pug face before he went on:

  “Apparently they also have heliographs, gliders and observation balloons. And catapults. Probably fortifications, castles, too. The crossbows some of the reinforcements carry have a very ingenious rapid cocking mechanism, and I noticed a number of other good tricks that might be worth copying. Unless there were implausible stockpiles before the Change, most of what they use is of modern make, done to a very high standard.”

  “So your appraisal is on the whole positive?”

  Egawa nodded. “Hai, Majesty, very much so. They would make formidable allies, if we can persuade them. If I could combine our own total forces with an equal number of troops of the quality I have seen here, and the necessary ships, I would pledge to lay all Korea at your Majesty’s feet in two campaigning seasons.”

  At the thought his expression changed slightly. To something you might glimpse on the face of the very last tiger you ever saw.

  Ishikawa Goru was only ten years older than her, which made him the second-youngest present, and the sailor was also inclined to headlong brashness.

  “But their country seems to be very thinly populated, General-sama,” he said. “How many of them can there be?”

  They all looked at him, and he flushed and mumbled: “So sorry.”

  Reiko made a tapping gesture towards the naval captain with her closed tessen war-fan in mild reproof, making allowances for the way he’d kept them afloat through weeks of storms in the frozen wastes of water north of Hokkaido as they ran before the gales and the relentless pursuit of the jinnikukaburi squadron. And for the fact that the Red Dragon under his command had sunk several of the enemy ships in brilliant slash-and-run engagements without taking crippling damage or heavy casualties. If those extra jinnikukaburi crews and marines had been on their tails when they came ashore here not one of the Japanese would have lived long enough to be rescued.