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

by S. M. Stirling

  Another exchange, a parry not quite complete, and a blunt-tipped sword flashed up under one figure’s ribs, producing an ooof of expelled breath.

  “Kill!” the man with the baton said. “Match to Lady Heuradys. Set to Lady Heuradys, five-two.”

  They saluted again, and Heuradys spoke while her liege-lady caught her breath:

  “Thank you, Sir Bohort.”

  “Skewered my liver again, Herry,” Órlaith wheezed, taking off her mask to show a face flushed and braided hair darkened with sweat and bowing slightly to the knight of the salle. “If I wasn’t wearing padding I’d be peeing red.”

  “That’ll happen for real, Orrey, if you keep getting overextended on those lunges. Stay centered!”

  “Next pair,” the one-eyed man said. “Lady Heuradys and Crown Princess Órlaith yield the floor d’escrime to Lord General Egawa and Her Majesty of Nippon.”

  Reiko and her bushi knelt facing each other, donned their mask-helmets. Then . . . slowly . . . each came to one knee. She held her naginata grounded with the butt beside her right foot; the Imperial Guard commander’s right hand crossed to rest on the hilt of the wooden sword. She watched Egawa—not his eyes or hands or even the way his feet moved ever so slightly as his toes curled ready to grip, but all of them at the same time. The general was her height almost to a hair, considerably heavier, and much, much stronger. He wasn’t quite as fast, but he was still lethally quick.

  Without thinking, the tiny signs flowed through her to produce action without thought, like a stone sinking into still water. Thought was far too slow to play with naked steel. Thought was death.

  “Fight!”

  Egawa came up off the mat as if invisible cords had jerked him forward, the bokken flashing out and up and then down in the overarm cut, the pear-splitter. Reiko blocked with the haft of the naginata held horizontally above her head and one leg back, and there was a hard crack! of impact as the tough wood flexed under the heavy blow. A battle weapon’s shaft would have had steel wire or strips to protect it. She grunted slightly as the force of it made her bent arms sink down like springs, absorbing some of the force with her knees, and swept the polearm in a blurring circle. Egawa blocked, struck, came at her in an appalling combination of speed and precision and hard power; she kept the shaft whirling . . .

  The first bout ended with her knocked skidding on her back for half a dozen yards. The second left her dazed and blinking for a few moments after the bokken glanced off her helmet; the scar-faced supervising knight insisted on looking into her eyes before nodding and stepping back and making a sharp horizontal gesture with the wand to show that there was no concussion.

  The third went into a continuous flurry of block-strike-block that lasted for a very long time for a fight—fully fifteen seconds or a little more, with Reiko holding her own though the continuous whirlwind battering forced her back a half-step at a time. Sometimes on a battlefield there was no space for fancy footwork; you didn’t want to train bad reflexes in. There were no focusing shouts, no kiai, after the first—every particle of breath was for use.

  They both stepped back from that one, conceding a draw. Only an effort of will kept her limbs from shaking and she ignored the spots before her eyes as they drifted and then faded away. Similar discipline kept her from panting, instead deliberately stretching her lungs to take in as much air as they could, holding it for an instant and then exhaling from the bottom of her rib cage.

  “This will be the last,” Sir Bohort said in his rasping damaged voice.

  They had both picked up enough of the local etiquette of the salle d’armes to know that the knight of the ring’s decision was final and beyond dispute, accepted instantly regardless of rank. Reiko didn’t regret it; she felt as if she’d been dropped into a barrel with a tiger and rolled down the side of a mountain. It was some consolation that Egawa wasn’t moving with quite the same deadly fluidity that he had been at first. He treated every single bout as if it was a duel to the death, pacing himself to the task at hand alone.

  Old man, this is my time, she thought.

  “Fight!”

  With the naginata you had the reach of a giant and the leverage multiplied impact almost as much. A few seconds later the ball at the end of the shaft—representing the sharp butt-spike of a real weapon—struck Egawa on the rear of his knee. She was whirling and driving the blade down even as he fell, and his block was only two-thirds complete when the curved edge lay along his neck.

  “Kill!” the referee said. “Match to Her Majesty. Set to Lord Egawa, two-one-one.”

  Egawa was struggling to suppress a grin as he came—cautiously—to his feet again. The first time she had ever managed to beat him, a little over a year ago, her instructor had bowed expressionlessly before he limped away.

  And then, she heard later, ended the night celebrating at his favorite izakaya with a few old cronies, drinking and singing and roaring for more sake and plates of pickles and yakitori until the town watch had to fetch his two eldest sons to carry him home. Where no doubt their mother had had something interesting to say about the matter in tones of exquisite restraint that cut like shards of broken glass. Possibly without even using words at all.

  The next bout he had pushed her twice as hard. By now she was winning about one time in four or five. With the naginata, of course; with swords, it was still an uninterrupted series of defeats, her only consolation being that some of them were now fairly narrow defeats.

  “Your knee?” she asked.

  “It will be all right in a day,” he said now. Then he bowed deeply: “Majesty!”

  She inclined her head slightly. “General Egawa. Also, how is your hand?”

  He flexed his left. “The wound was very narrow, and struck nothing important, no bones or severed tendons. It is healing well, though my grip has not yet recovered all its strength. Using it helps prevent adhesions within and loss of flexibility. It will serve, Majesty.”

  There would be pain, of course, though both of them ignored that.

  She caught his eye for a moment in emphasis. “It has already served me,” she said. “I had an excellent view of the narrow point after you put that hand between the knife and my face—it was exactly on course for my left eye.”

  He bowed again and limped away once more towards the baths. Órlaith and her hatamoto fell in with Reiko after she had racked her naginata and practice armor.

  “In your average Protectorate salle our part of the baths are an afterthought tucked away behind something,” Heuradys said with a smile. “Not here, though. Three guesses why?”

  “Ah . . . I think I can guess, yes,” Reiko said.

  She was getting to the point where she could catch humor in English, but not with absolute certainty, and sometimes that spoiled it even when you did realize the meaning.

  “You have separate for men and women, yes?” she said.

  She thought that was what Heuradys had just said, but best to check. When Órlaith wasn’t using her uncanny command of Nihongo everything was frustratingly difficult.

  “Yes, we do,” Heuradys said.

  “What’s this we, northerner?” Órlaith said lightly.

  “We do, at least, we Associates. The Mackenzies don’t, except for guests who prefer it that way, but then they’re barbarians from the backwoods—unless you count McClintocks. You have separate facilities in Japan?”

  She nodded: on their journey northward she’d always had a bathhouse to herself for a while, with guards outside, when it wasn’t a private stretch of cold river, and of course the one in her suite here was hers exclusively.

  “For peasants, no, everyone same time. Village is like . . . family, neh? But for shi, gentlefolk, and in towns, yes, that is the custom. Usually women and small children in the morning, men in the afternoon.”

  “Your English pronunciation has gotten a lot better,” Órlaith observed.

  Reiko returned her smile, feeling more pleased than she would have expected. The more so when Heura
dys said:

  “The Heika works at it hard enough to leave me feeling exhausted. You can hear the difference from one day to the next, and my attempts to pick up Japanese . . . leave a lot to be desired.”

  Like every substantial bathhouse she had yet seen in Montival, this reminded her strongly of its equivalents in the homeland, though this one was very comely in a subdued way involving broad planks and slightly rough stone pavers; the equivalent in the guest suite up in the manor was much smaller but more lavishly decorated. There was a changing room, faucets to provide hot water, and then large tubs sunken in a tiled floor; you scrubbed down thoroughly with soap first, rinsed off and then soaked, then got out and rinsed again and used a hemp-pad scrubber, and soaked once more. There was a steam room here too, which was rarer, though the Imperial Palace at home had one.

  A gaggle of chattering teenage girls passed on their way to take advantage of the room with the heated rocks; they were what they called maids-in-waiting, from lesser Associate families serving in the manor as part of their education. They curtsied, which looked rather odd in the nude. She was beginning to see that there was a code of manners and hierarchy here as elaborate as the one she’d grown up with; it just used different symbols, like a similar message written in a different script.

  A couple of the young girls stared rudely, but those slightly older administered admonishing taps—or flicks with a wet towel, which produced a yelp and more giggles. She had to keep reminding herself that people didn’t mean to be aggressive here when they made eye contact for long periods; it was just a difference in custom.

  When she remarked on the similarity of the bathhouse to the sento she was used to, the Montivallans laughed.

  “Sure, and that’s because we copied them from you,” Órlaith said. “After the Change, when getting hot water became so much more difficult and single families couldn’t do it each for themselves. I think the Mackenzies started it, but it spread fast. Nearly everywhere people didn’t stop washing, that is—and since the Prophet’s War, they’ve mostly gotten the message of cleanliness even out on the Hi-Line. There’s no wood there, but they started digging a little coal again instead, once we got rid of the Prophet and his crew, who despised human bodies too much to bother washing them.”

  “Ah,” Reiko said. “I’d heard of sitting and washing in the tub.”

  She shuddered delicately as she untied her sash in the changing room. As she was used to, the attendant was a middle-aged woman who accepted the clothes, folded them to be sent to the laundry, and handed robes and washcloths to the bathers. Strictly speaking she’d transferred the washcloths from an oven-like arrangement to a basket with wooden tongs, then handed them the covered basket: the cloths were hot and damp and smelled slightly and deliciously of lavender, which was a nice touch.

  “Yes, I think that used to be the way it was done. Although they had showers, too, of course. Washing in a bathtub? Repulsive, that it is, and for the reasons you said,” Órlaith said. “Much better this way. As my grandmother Juniper says, when you steal, steal the best!”

  “I think we Nihonjin did not use the sento so . . . so only?”

  “Exclusively,” Heuradys said helpfully, peeling herself out of her hose, which required some indelicate contortions to get the skintight knit fabric off.

  “Excrusivery, no, exclusively. Yes!”

  Her ear was finally starting to pick up the difference between the sounds represented by r and l; she’d decided that the nearest Nihongo equivalent was about halfway between them. It was even harder when the two were in the middle of a word, but she was getting closer. English was an odd language in other ways—speaking it made it very hard to generalize with any subtlety, for instance, or to discuss something without backing other people into corners.

  The very structure of its grammar was faintly . . . rude. On the other hand, it was a good verbal hammer to hit things as if they were nails.

  “So exclusively before the Change. But for us also there was trouble finding the water, and the fuel to heat it. Terrible trouble with everything at first, of course, but so necessary to be clean to avoid sickness. And to keep up spirits, morale.”

  Reiko did find herself glancing out of the corner of her eye as they scrubbed and then doused themselves down in the cleaning room with its slatted floor and stools.

  “See something unusual?” Órlaith asked, catching the glance and widened eyes.

  “Well . . . so sorry, but you’re both so . . . so very, very pink,” Reiko said.

  Órlaith grinned. “And hairy, I suppose.”

  “Ah . . . not excessively,” Reiko said, turning her eyes aside.

  That was true, though it was also obvious they didn’t depilate except under the arms. From what she’d seen, the men here were often like monkeys, or the fabled Ainu of legend. There were some Japanese as hirsute, but not many.

  But the colors! she thought to herself. The same as on their heads . . . I should have expected that, but I didn’t!

  “Do your back?” Órlaith offered.

  “Thank you.”

  The soaking tubs were like sections of great barrels set in the floor, which turned out to be exactly what they were, old wine-barrels rubbed smooth and fitted with round bench-like seats at different heights inside so that you could get neck-deep. There was a slight herbal fragrance to the steaming-hot water, and it worked its familiar magic on stressed muscles and the odd bruise. There were even wooden dippers to pour over your head. They sat in silence for a while, and she admired the interlocking beams of the ceiling. Then she asked.

  “The young man with you, he is?”

  “My brother John,” Órlaith said. “Prince John, technically. John-denka. He’ll be joining us for lunch.”

  Reiko frowned. “Please, you have a brother and are . . . the heir?”

  Órlaith nodded. “I’m heir to the High King because I’m the first child born to him and the High Queen Mathilda. The Great Charter says the eldest child inherits that title, and I’ll be crowned when I turn twenty-six.”

  “It’s technically called cognatic primogeniture,” Heuradys said, and Reiko moved her lips to memorize the term.

  “My brother is—is going to be—heir to the Protectorate, because Mother holds that title in her own right as the only child of her mother and father. PPA law says that the eldest son inherits that, and daughters only if there’s no male heir.”

  “Classic primogeniture,” Heuradys said helpfully.

  “So the order there after my mother passes would be John, my brother Faolán, then me, then my sister Vuissance. Silly in itself, if you ask me, but there it is. I certainly don’t want to be Lady Protector, and it would be politically . . . difficult.”

  “No dispute on the dumbness,” Heuradys said. “Mind you, I wouldn’t be seigneur of Ath for a bet, poor Diomede has to handle that, and as for being Countess-regnant in Campscapell . . .” she shuddered. “How my lord my father manages it without starting to run around screeching off with their heads is beyond me. Lioncel would be more than welcome to it as far as I’m concerned, even if he weren’t older.”

  “Ah,” Reiko said. “We have not settled the law of succession in Japan, yet, whether to keep the old system or make a new as some wish, or even to return to the law as it was before Meiji. There was my grandmother, and she had only a single son, no daughters. And my brother Yoshihito . . . was lost, not yet married, still very young, six years ago. So there is now only myself and my four sisters. So the law does not matter very much yet, neh? The issue does not . . . go up?”

  “Arise,” Órlaith said. “Or come up.”

  “Al . . . Arise. There is much . . . debate over it.”

  “Sometimes I forget it’s been only two generations since the Change,” Órlaith said, and poured another dipper over her head.

  The pale yellow of her hair turned much darker when it was wet, the color of old gold with the hint of red more pronounced. Then she twisted it into a rope and wrung it before she
went on:

  “As it turns out, it’s extremely politically convenient that John stands to inherit the position of Lord Protector. He’s a man, he’s Catholic—you know that House Ath aren’t exactly typical Associates.”

  Heuradys laughed and stretched. “Oh, by the Gray-Eyed, it would be impossible for us to be less typical! Although my brothers are Catholics, and they inherit, so the next generation won’t get so many odd looks or whispers.”

  “What we need to know, Heika,” Órlaith said, “is why your father . . . and his heir . . . came here. We know it wasn’t to meet Montival; you didn’t know we existed. What was it, precisely? This is a time for truth. There are decisions that must be made.”

  Reiko had heard that the Sword of the Lady could detect falsehood. She believed it. And the sacred weapon wasn’t here right now, which was a gesture of trust. The two pairs of eyes looked at her through the steam, amber and blue, like cats on a ledge seen while the sea-fog rolled in.

  She sighed. You think, consider and ponder. Then you act or do not act; there is no point in dithering.

  “I can only say the truth, even if it is . . . extremely odd. I owe you my life. There is in Japan . . . or should be . . . three things which are the Sacred Regalia of the Imperial line. Great treasures, very sacred and very old. So old that even duplicates made long ago for safety are also sacred.”

  “The mirror, the jewel, and the sword,” Órlaith said, surprising her. A shrug of the strong sloping shoulders. “I’ve been doing a little reading up.”

  “Hai. Yes. The jewel, Yasakani no Magatama, the mirror, Yata no Kagami . . . and the sword. Kusanagi no Tsurugi. For abundance, for wisdom . . . and the sword for strength, valor.”

  “Uh-oh,” Órlaith said, obviously seeing the pattern. “The Yurok mahrávaan and her vision. One of these treasures is here?”

  “For some general value of here,” Heuradys said. “On this side of the ocean at least.”

  Reiko licked her lips, tasting salt, uncertain whether it was sweat or tears. “Kusanagi. The Grass-Cutting Sword.”