Captain Feldman stood by the wheel in his brass-buttoned blue coat and, appropriately, sailor’s cap, his arms crossed. Ishikawa Goru and one of his men were spelling the usual watch on the wheel, his eyes darting occasionally to the sails, the waves and the compass card in the binnacle before the helm.
The regular pair who’d have taken the wheel this watch otherwise—one hand stood on either side of the big spoked wooden circle—were watching them, and so was the captain-owner. Feldman caught her eye and gave a slight nod, but Órlaith wasn’t surprised. The Japanese naval officer wasn’t moving much, but he and his countryman still gave the impression of men dancing . . . or doing any complex physical task once it was so intimately familiar that it was graven into nerve and muscle.
And Goru looks happy, too, she thought. There are few pleasures greater than practicing a useful skill you love and do well. And he doesn’t have the sort of stone face that Egawa has, or even Reiko a lot of the time.
Flags streamed from each mast, blowing off to . . . port; the ship was going faster than the waves but more slowly than the wind that propelled it. The house flag of Feldman And Sons streamed from the mainmast, a stylized ship rendered in a few black strokes on pale blue, headed up into the sky; the blue-white-green Crowned Mountain and Sword national ensign of Montival flew from the place of honor at the mizzen; the orange-on-brown anthropomorphic beaver’s head of Corvallis from the foremast.
Luanne Salander grinned at it. “My granddad Eric always said ol’ Benny the Beaver looks dorky beyond words. Apparently before the Change it was a bit of a joke.”
Heuradys spoke softly: “Right now it’s a bit of a joke too, but tact, girl, tact. People have died for that flag. And my parents were among those who killed a fair number of them, something I’d rather not bring to the minds of the crew of this ship while I’m on it. Your people never fought Corvallis, but please remember mine did.”
Bearkillers and Corvallans had been allies for a long time—since the wars against the Association began, not long after the Change, in fact. In all that time the Bearkillers hadn’t stopped saying that the Corvallans were prone to showing up a day late and a rose noble short in anything serious and being greedy, conceited and sneaky to boot. The Corvallans hadn’t stopped thinking, and sometimes speaking, of Bearkillers as arrogant, brutish killer rubes, either.
Both sides had a distinct point. It hadn’t helped that the Outfit’s territories had been between the city-state’s anvil and the hammer of the Protectorate in the old days, either. All that passed for ancient history now, but it was living history as well.
And making cracks about how stupid someone’s flag looks is not tact, Herry’s right about that. Especially when you’re on their ship. Benny the Beaver goes a lot of rough places these days. Am I only three years older than Luanne? Or . . . well, I remember thinking that I don’t have a heimat back when we were at Diarmuid’s. There are advantages as well as drawbacks. You get more perspective, that you do.
“That quick-draw thing is interesting,” Luanne went on . . . more tactfully . . . nodding towards Reiko. “I’m not absolutely sure how useful it’d be most of the time unless you were planning on suddenly topping someone’s head at a dinner party, but it sure is pretty.”
Reiko was in the ready position again, kneeling with her left hand on the scabbard of her katana where it was thrust through her sash edge-up.
She drew with that hand this time, and thrust straight backward in the same motion. Then the blade flicked back as she rose with a smoothness that looked as if invisible cords were pulling her erect, up into the two-hand overhead position, down with a stamp and an isa! of controlled effort . . .
“Not too academic,” Órlaith said critically. “I’d always thought of iaijutsu as something in a book, but that’s the real thing. You can tell, under all the differences of detail.”
“Right,” Heuradys said. “Sort of like the difference between Society training before the Change and the way we do it now.”
Luanne snorted. “The way my grandfather tells it, the Outfit picked up their basic style from the ARMA—the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts, my great-aunt Pam was a member, the first Bear Lord found her up in Idaho of all places and she established the sword training program. And they were way more realistic to start with than the Society. Less dancing and prancing, more slashing and stabbing.”
“Maybe to start with, but that’s ancient history,” Heuradys said. “I don’t think there’s anyone anywhere on earth more . . . realistic . . . about fighting than Auntie Tiph.”
“Well, yeah. Point. I’ve only met her a couple of times and she’s scary.”
Most people who’d spent a lot of time in a salle had tried their hand a little at the nihon style. As the texts described it, at least, but it wasn’t a living tradition here except in a few out-of-the-way places. Seeing it used by people who actually knew it well was fascinating.
Heuradys nodded at Reiko. “Yes, you can see she’s used it for real. More battle experience than us, I’d say.”
“That wouldn’t be difficult, Herry,” Órlaith said dryly. “We’ve had one real fight between us, and that lasted about ten minutes.”
I can mention it now without wanting to fall into a puddle and greep, she thought somberly. Though it’s there, back in my head. If I keep running fast enough, I’ll stay ahead of it.
Luanne Salander was the youngest of the four of them. “And I’m a combat virgin,” she sighed.
“It’s a lot less fun to lose than the other kind,” Heuradys said soberly.
“Speak for yourself, you never slept with Edgar I’m-in-a-hurry Cumbreson,” the Bearkiller said dryly, and they all chuckled. “Or at least I hope you haven’t, for your sake.”
“I thought you Catholic girls didn’t?” Heuradys said.
“Oh, we do, we’re just supposed to feel guilty about it afterwards. And let’s put it this way: the penance my confessor set me was more fun than sex with Eddie. Saints, but my repentance was sincere!”
“Ouch, ouch,” Heuradys said.
“That too.”
“Ouch. Well, you’ll have Prince John along on this trip.”
“Dreamy, I will admit.”
Órlaith shuddered. “Oh, euw.”
The others jeered at her. Heuradys went on: “Unless he’d deteriorated since he was sixteen, no complaints there.”
Luanne laughed. “You didn’t.”
“Oh, yes, I did. No penance was more fun than him, I assure you. Poor boy, I was the only eligible female he knew who wanted to jump his bones and who he was sure didn’t have ulterior motives.”
“A sixteen-year-old virgin boy and he cared about that? I may have to take another look.”
“He’s sensitive, yes. Sings well, too.”
Órlaith made a retching sound. “Might you be after switching the subject from the largely imaginary charms of my little brother?”
“In hose you can see he’s got a really nice tight pair of . . . oh, all right, Orrey,” Heuradys said, chuckling.
Then she sobered and watched narrow-eyed as Reiko went through a turn-cut-cut-block-turn-strike flurry.
“She’s quick. I couldn’t say if she’s as quick as you or I, Herry,” Órlaith said, “since she’s not pushing it, but she’s very definitely fast and smooth.”
She’d been taught by those who knew from experience that a real expert—someone with first-class gear and lifelong first-class training—could drive down most battlefields killing at every second step, because most of what they’d be meeting was levied farmers blundering through half-remembered drills.
Until you run into another expert, of course. Or just run out of luck with the crossbow bolts and arrows. Or some prisoner has a holdout knife . . . oh, Da!
A long breath and a resolute focus kept the sudden wave of emotion at bay.
Luanne was going over her backsword. Órlaith thought she’d been surprised at how fast things rusted in salt air; few Bearkillers went t
o sea. She finished wiping the slightly oily cloth down the blade, checked the edge—you didn’t want to hone it unless it was necessary, oversharpening was always a temptation—and slid it home. A-listers used a more complex blade than the Associate longsword, basket-hilted and with an edge along one side and about a third of the reverse as well.
Thoughtfully, Órlaith said: “Are either of you surprised we’re all so light-hearted?”
Luanne looked stricken as she wiped her hands. Heuradys put a hand on Órlaith’s shoulder. The Crown Princess shook her head and gave it a reassuring pat.
“No, not Da. He’d be the last to say that we should mope for a year and a day; don’t give grief less than its natural due, but no more either, was how he put it when my Nonni Sandra died. No, I was thinking . . . we’re heading towards Los Angeles—”
It was a name to wake terror, even among the few salvagers who’d made lightning raids for treasures whose location was precisely known. And before that . . . the year of the Change had been bad absolutely everywhere, but the stories out of southern California had been bad even by comparison to the tales her father and Uncle Ingolf and the other veterans of the Quest had told of the death zones of the far east coast. At least there most hadn’t lost their drinking water on the first day.
“—and we’re going right through it. Plus something like the CUT is involved. But I’d say we’re all . . . feeling more sunny about things than before we got away?”
Luanne shrugged. “I had to listen to stories about the Quest of the Sword all my life, since my aunts Mary and Ritva were on the Quest . . .”
Mary and Ritva had also met their men on the Quest, and eventually settled far south, not far from where the Montivallans had met the Japanese and their pursuers. Though they were Dúnedain, not Bearkillers.
“. . . well, you would have even more, Orrey . . . and then the Prophet’s War and my parents and grandparents, by the sword of St. Michael, doing the larger-than-life thing. And I’ve been thinking since I made the A-List, what was it all for? Thinking about an entire life spent on call-up drills and getting everyone in the Strategic Hamlet to keep their pikes in proper dressing when they’re crossing an obstacle and deep conversations about whether the new mare is really sound breeding stock and whether the vineyards need Bordeaux mixture this year and the most exciting thing I do being hunt boar and breed and maybe visit Corvallis for the theater season. Not that I’ve got anything against hunting and sure, I want babies and a man of my own, but not yet, you know? When my mother was my age she was flying gliders against the Prophet and hanging upside down over grizzlies.”
“I was worried about you, Orrey, until we got started organizing this,” Heuradys said. “And, well . . . I mean, everything Luey just said, squared. By the Gray-Eyed, cubed! But I think something like this is what you need. Provided we don’t get killed and have our hearts cut out and eaten, but you’re not going to live a quiet, safe life anyway. It’s not in your blood. And . . . your father was my King, too. I’m a knight of the High Kingdom and the Household, I want to avenge him. I need to do it. Maybe not as much as you do, but . . . a lot.”
Órlaith sighed and nodded. “Thank you both. If I’m being stupid, at least it’s in good company. And to be sure, the Powers seem to be pointing in this direction. It’s never wise to ignore Them.”
Reiko finished her drill; for her that involved a looping gesture like flicking blood off the sword and wiping it as it was sheathed with a piece of paper carried tucked into her sash. Then she joined them, breathing deep and with sweat running down her face despite the sea-breeze.
“Day . . . the day does not feel light . . . right! Right, without doing kata,” she said.
“Me next!” Luanne said.
Her eagerness proved the point, and she bounced up into the space Reiko had vacated, bringing up her shield with the backsword reserved.
“I’d like to look at that sword,” Órlaith said to Reiko, in her language. “It’s lovely. May I?”
In Japanese, it was words that turned back into English would have been more on the order of:
Please excuse me, but may I ask that you do me the great favor of letting me look at your (prefix: beautiful/gracious/honorable) sword?
The Sword of the Lady gave her an instinctive command of any language she needed—she was being exactly as polite as she would have been in English—but she still thought about it occasionally as she spoke. When she did, it was a little like seeing a stereoscope image not quite properly aligned. A literal translation of the phrase that popped into her mind in English would have been rude, the sort of way you’d address a naughty child or possibly a prisoner. And if you translated the Japanese directly into English, it sounded silly. Yet the meanings were identical, native-speaker to native-speaker.
I don’t think it’s that the Sword gives me social skills, it’s that some such skills are built into the way a language is structured and just absorbed as you grow up, she thought. And I get that for free.
She could tell by imagining it that she’d have used slightly different phrasing to a man, or if she were a man, or if they hadn’t been of virtually identical rank. Reiko had told her a couple of days ago that she had beautiful conversational manners in the modern style, which probably meant the way things had gone in her generation.
The Japanese woman hesitated only an instant before saying: “Hai,” and touching the sheathed weapon. “It should be cared for soon anyway, in this damp salt air. But better we look below. There’s too much spray here.”
They went down the hatchway and down what sailors insisted on calling a ladder, though very steep staircase would have been more accurate, stowed their weapons and gear and took turns with the tiny cold-salt-water shower where you pumped with one hand and tried to wash with the other at the same time—even on a shore-hugging voyage, fresh water was limited to a little for wiping down with a cloth afterwards to get the salt off. As they went down the passage she heard John playing his lute in the little cabin he was sharing with Aleaume, Droyn and Feldman’s first mate; this was probably the only time in the day when he had it to himself, and he was playing short fragments, stopping, playing again. Reiko looked a question at her.
“Composing,” Órlaith said. “Trying out bits and writing them down.”
Reiko nodded. “Rippa na kodo,” she said.
Which meant worthy or commendable, more or less—Órlaith had noticed the respect the Japanese party always seemed to pay to the arts, not to mention to disciplined effort in any field.
Then she gave a sudden shy grin: “But . . . drive you crazy, if you have to listen all the time in that little cabin.”
She mimed screaming and tearing out her hair, throttling someone and then whipping a dagger out of her sleeve and stabbing herself in the throat. Órlaith laughed aloud; for someone usually so solemn, Reiko could be extremely funny when she let go a little.
“Tell me!” she said. “When we were younger and he’d just started doing music seriously, a lot of the time we were on trains—my parents took us around with them as they toured the Realm, that they did; to see and be seen, they said. Otherwise we’d have been separated too much. And we’d be cooped up with John as he practiced, and eventually I’d start throwing things and he’d dodge and go right on, and if Herry was along she’d stick her thumbs in her ears and go LALALALALALAL! Until Da came back and roared at us all to shut up and let a man think, petitions and children’s choirs were bad enough . . .”
Reiko laughed herself, shedding years and layers of responsibility. “My father also traveled much by sea, to the other islands and the new outposts, and I with him after my brother . . . after I became the heir. Your brother is not . . . he is not that bad! Even composing.”
“No, but he was,” Órlaith said. “De-composing, I called it then. He’s quite good the now, but when he was twelve and always trying things just a bit beyond his level it grated, that it did, and I don’t have near as fine an ear as Herry does. . . .”
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br /> They went into the cabin. The roof overhead was the poop-deck, and the semicircle of inward-slanting windows at the rear was the stern of the ship. For shipboard it was spacious, although by any other standards it was the size of a modest bedroom, perhaps a hundred square feet, counting what was now taken by double bunks on either side, and the roof was just high enough that Órlaith didn’t have much problem suppressing the urge to duck. Most of the center was taken up by a table; when the Tarshish Queen wasn’t under charter like this the ship’s officers and the supercargo would dine there and perhaps a paying passenger or two, and fold-up benches ran up either side of it. The light that poured in through the windows was reflected upwards from the sea below, and it made shifting patterns on the overhead beams.
Reiko fetched a small lacquered box colored a deep red-brown with the chrysanthemum kamon of her House on it and laid the sword down carefully on the table beside it. Then she spread a clean white cloth.
“This is a very . . .” Reiko paused and obviously thought for a moment. “Revered sword? Old, very old.”
Órlaith nodded with interest; some time ago she’d come to the conclusion that when Japanese said very old they meant either very, very old or even older than that.
“Before the Change, it was in a museum. But still a good sword for fighting. The leader of the Seventy Loyal Men, General Egawa’s father, brought it from Tokyo, and used it many times to preserve the life of my grandmother along the way. He presented it to my father when he came of age to need a sword.”
Órlaith had noticed that Reiko had two katana with her, but the other was securely wrapped in its gray linen bag in her chest, and in a special scabbard and hilt made for storage at that.
Reiko opened the lacquered box and brought out the contents, laying them out with an almost ritual neatness; there were a tiny bronze mallet, a ball of silk that she took out of a further cloth bag, a folder of wrinkled-looking rice paper, and a small vial of oil. The Japanese woman smiled, dropping back into her own birth-tongue:
The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) Page 46