“So sorry, I really need to speak Nihongo now. In the very old days, women weren’t even allowed to touch swords like this. Not with their bare hands, at least; they had to wrap the sleeves of their kimono around their fingers first.”
“Times have changed!” Órlaith said. “And I’m glad to see it.”
“And changed and changed again,” Reiko agreed. “Originally this was an ôdachi.”
The word meant great-sword, and in her mind it felt very much the same as the equivalent in her native dialect of English. Something on the order of unusually big.
“The blade was three shaku two sun long . . . about—”
“Thirty-eight inches,” Órlaith said.
That was roughly as long as what a Montivallan would call a greatsword or claidheamh mòr, though curved and less massive.
Reiko nodded. “Hai, very close. It was shortened in . . . well, I will show you.”
Órlaith watched with interest, propping her chin on her fists, but to one side and not leaning too close—this was a very sharp edge by any standards other than the Sword of the Lady, and unlike that it would cut anyone without exception. She didn’t want to crowd.
Reiko drew the sword, set the saya-scabbard aside and laid the blade down with the cutting edge away from her. It gleamed in the subdued light of the cabin, flawless and beautiful, with the subtle waving line of the hamon running down behind the edge to show where it had been differentially tempered to an almost glasslike hardness at the cutting surface while staying soft and springy within. Órlaith had never seen a better creation of the bladesmith’s craft, though these days that was becoming a high art in Montival, no longer just a matter of filing and grinding old leaf springs.
For something made to kill, this was . . .
Almost indecently pretty, she thought. Nonni Sandra would have loved to have it in a glass case in her chambers.
“This is a soshu kitae, a sword made with seven laminations, which are harder or softer in different parts of the blade,” Reiko said absently as she worked. “That is done after the initial folding, which itself produces many layers . . . thirty thousand or so. It is what we call jewel steel.”
Next she took up the little mallet, unscrewed a small bronze pin from its handle, and used both to tap out the two mekugi-pegs in the hilt. She set those aside with the same neatness. Then she took the sword in her right hand, blade-up, and tapped on her wrist with the fist of her left hand, two light but sharp blows. The tsuka, the hilt of wood and sharkskin and cord, came loose and she lifted it away, and then the tsuba, the round guard and spacers. Then she laid the naked blade carefully on the cloth without touching her fingers to the steel, putting the mountings to one side.
There was an inscription on the tang, above the two holes for the fastening pegs and on the same side as the edge:
Reiko pointed it out. “In our script, this is—”
Órlaith held up her hand, surprised and delighted: “Well, and Da didn’t mention that! I can read the language too, whether or not it’s in the Latin alphabet! Asakura Kotegiri-tachi nari-Tenshô sannen jûnigatsu-Ubakka suriage-Ôtsu Denjûrô hairyô.”
Reiko’s brows went up, and she smiled slightly. “This is a very old-fashioned version of our writing, and I think you even caught the original pronunciation!” she said. “Let me try and render it in English . . .”
Slowly and carefully she spoke: “This Kotegiri-tachi from the Asakura was shortened by . . . it says Ubakka, but that is a title not a name, a title of Oda Nobunaga, who was a great warlord of the Age of Battles . . . in the twelfth month of Tenshô 3, and presented to Ôtsu Denjûrô.”
At Órlaith’s enquiring look, she amplified: “Tenshô 3 . . . that would be in your calendar, 1575.”
“Four hundred and twenty-three years before the Change; four hundred and sixty-nine years ago,” Órlaith said, and whistled softly in respect.
She would have expected something that old to be a fragile mass of corrosion, especially as that was long before the art of making rustproof alloys. This looked . . .
Not new, no, but absolutely sound. It looks like a well-used but well-kept blade handed down from parent to child for a couple of generations. What a beautiful curve, shallow and clean! And . . . the internal structure must be as complex as a snowflake. Perfect form, perfect function.
“Four hundred and sixty-nine years!” she said again in amazement. “Half a millennium, and it is still battle-worthy. Now that is a wonder and the wonder of the world, sure and it is.”
Reiko chuckled and shook her head. “No, much older than that. Tenshô 3 was when it was shortened, very long swords were going out of style then, I think because methods of fighting had changed, that was towards the end of the Sengoku Jidai, the Age of Battles. Just before the triumph of the Tokugawa and the long peace that ended with Meiji. It’s right for me now as a katana since I’m so tall . . . well, tall back in Nihon, not here in the Land of Storks.”
Her finger traced a line in the air over the curve of the blade.
“Two shaku two sun, six bu, five ri. Twenty-seven inches. It was already a famous sword when it was shortened, though. In Bunna 4 . . . 1355 AD . . . Asakura Ujikage fought with it in a battle in Kyoto, and cut through the steel archer’s guard on an enemy’s wrist. Steel-cutter, the sword was called after that. It was made earlier still, perhaps one generation or two, either by the great master-swordsmith Masamune, or by his student Sadamune.”
Sure, and I’d feel paralyzed carrying anything that old into a fight! Órlaith thought.
Then she looked at the Sword of the Lady where it lay on her bunk, the belt wrapped around the scabbard and the whole tucked beneath the tight-made sheets and blanket.
Though to be sure, give that seven hundred years . . . but the Sword of the Lady came from the hand of the Goddess Herself, forged in the world beyond the world, while this is a weapon made of earthly steel by a human smith. I am impressed, so!
She sat in silence and watched as Reiko cared for the weapon; gently wiping it with the rubbed paper, tapping it with the ball of silk up one side and down the other—it held a mixture of a special clay and powdered deer horn—wiping it again, then applying a very little of the choji oil on still another paper before reassembling the hilt and resheathing it.
“Our master-smiths make good swords now, better every year,” she said. “But . . . not like this.”
Suddenly there was a tenseness in her silence. Órlaith looked up and realized with a shock that Reiko was weeping, slow tears dropping down an immobile face.
Uh-oh. I have absolutely no idea what’s appropriate here, that I do not, she thought; dismay was like a cold knot in her stomach. The Sword can tell me how to say things, but I don’t even know whether I should say anything.
Órlaith settled for gently touching the back of Reiko’s hand for an instant. After a few minutes the Japanese woman spoke, her voice slightly choked:
“This was my father’s personal sword since he was old enough. He often said he wanted me to bear it after him. My mother and my sisters will be waiting for the sails of his ship, hoping as we all hoped after my brother was lost, not knowing he is dead too. And I am here, all alone with his ashes and his sword.”
“You’re not alone, Reiko,” Órlaith said. “I will be your friend, if you want.”
“I have no friends.”
“Well, you do now. Shin’yuu. Best friends.”
EPILOGUE/PROLOGUE
Tarshish Queen, Pacific Ocean
Territorial waters, High Kingdom of Montival
July 8/Fumizuki 8th, Change Year 46/2044 AD/Shohei 1
Reiko knew she was dreaming. It was nothing like the previous dreams, with their terror and burning heat, yet there was some of the same enormous clarity, pressing on her like a falling mountain. Here she was an observer, not the center of the vision.
Though an observer fully present, as if the warm sun beat down on her own shoulders and she smelled earth and dust and growth and, som
ewhere, smoke amid the homelike humid silkiness of the air. Emotion was muffled, mainly a cool curiosity. What she beheld was extremely clear but distant, as if seen through lenses of inconceivable fineness that brought close that which was infinitely removed. Yet she was there, as if she walked through an unfamiliar landscape.
Time, she realized. I am seeing through a vast reach of years, eons; the remote past or the distant future.
A man was struggling through rank grass taller than he was, sweat sheening on a face twisted with effort and marked by a bar of tattoo below the lower lip and wedges on the sparsely bearded cheeks; behind him lay a horse bristling with arrows, flies already landing on the bloody wounds. It had been ridden with ruthless determination until it dropped dead in its tracks. Insects buzzed and glittered through the air.
He was Japanese, she thought—certainly of the same race as she—though oddly dressed, in a crude belted poncho of woven hemp and trousers of the same material. And straw sandals of a type she’d seen peasants wear. Long hair was in plaits held in bone rings on either side of his face, and escaped strands stuck to his cheeks and neck. A sword was in his hand, a straight single-edged blade with a ring pommel—it looked nothing like a nihonto, more Chinese if anything. The blood that ran like liquid red enamel along it was entirely familiar, and the coppery-metallic smell of it.
Voices rang in the distance, shouting back and forth, and the man started and darted a glance behind him. Reiko could hear the words, and they sounded a little as if they were in her language, but there was only a haunting pseudo-intelligibility, traces of the familiar in a harsh multi-syllabic strangeness.
The tone was clear and one she knew well, though; there was a deadly baying eagerness in it. That was men primed to kill. The savage call of a pack that had winded the prey as it ran along the blood-trail.
The solitary man ran faster, his dirt-stained hand clenched on the odd-looking sword. Then he slashed at the grass in two places as if forcing a passage, stopped, ran backward a dozen paces and jinked abruptly to his left, twisting and turning to avoid disturbing the grass more than he had to, and leaving little track on ground that looked as if it were hard dried mud. After a few dozen yards he went down on one knee, the knuckles of his left hand resting on the dirt, the sword held out to one side in a position she knew kept it ready to strike upward—he must expect horsemen to come after him.
This one is a warrior, she knew. And a good one.
That was plain from the cat-like ease of his stance, blinding speed held in check with trained reflex, ready to explode off the ground in an instant. His breath came deeply but controlled, no wild shallow panting but a disciplined drawing in of every possible atom of air and a slight pause to let the lungs suck what they could from it. On the run and alone, horse lost, comrades lost, enemies hunting him through this wilderness of grass, still there was no panic in his fine-drawn tension or the snarling grin on his lips. He was older than she but not by many years, and in his prime, slender but broad-shouldered and very strong; the muscle on his bare forearms was corded in ways that said he used a sword every day, and bore the dusty-white lines of scars against the pale golden-ivory skin. The man knew how to hide, too; keep low, keep motionless, wait out the pursuers. A fly crawled over his face and he ignored it.
I would not like to be the enemy who found this man, she thought. He may die, but he will not go alone. That is what he hopes for now, not for life but for a chance to strike back.
The voices didn’t come any closer, but he looked up and she did too. Arrows whispered by overhead, dozens, long black-fletched shafts of bamboo. They trailed smoke as they flew, from tufts of burning fiber bound round them near the head. The rustling forest of grass was nearly tinder-dry. It caught with a roar, plumes of dirty-white smoke rising with flames licking a dozen feet into the air. They spread faster than a man running, left and right and ahead, closing in towards him with a blast of heat that dried the sweat on his face. The only clear direction was back towards the pursuers.
For a moment there was fear on the man’s features. Then rage overcame it. He leapt to his feet and took the sword in both hands, slashing at the grass around him in a frenzy. Then he stopped. Fear and anger both left his face, astonishment filling it.
For the grass bowed away from him, rippling before the sweep of the steel.
The first time might have been illusion, a swaying in the fierce gusts of the building fire heading inward towards him. Then he swung the sword about his head again, and the air was a blast that bent the tall tough grass down as if it bowed in homage in a circle about him. Instantly he ran forward, the sword flashing back and forth, glittering where the dried blood did not hide the metal. The fire roared higher as the blast struck it, but now it was running before the man.
He laughed as he ran. In instants he was on charred stubble, coughing as he held a fold of the coarse fabric of his garment over his mouth. Smoke hid him; above the cloth she could see his narrow, intensely black eyes intent with thought.
He could escape now, she thought. He could follow the fire—drive it before him and be concealed by the smoke.
When he moved it was not away from his foemen, though. He looped out in front of a patch of flames and swung the sword again. Wind blasted, fanning the blaze. . . .
Driving them before him, she thought. Using it like a whip of fire!
Wordless before, now he shouted, his voice exultant over the roar of the flames:
“Swora yu to ki-nu yo!”
That had no meaning either, until suddenly she remembered leafing through an old history of Nihongo one of her elderly tutors had kept, intrigued at the way it claimed to be able to trace a language back through time. Even through the distant calm that possessed her, a prickle went down her spine as she recognized:
“I come, as if from the sky!”
In word-forms that had faded away centuries before the Genji Monogatari was written.
And in that instant the feeling of distance thinned, attenuating for a moment until it was less than the most translucent oiled rice-paper. The man turned and locked eyes with her, and she saw his expand in astonishment. He gasped and threw up a hand as if against an enormous light, the brilliance of the Sun Herself. That light shone from behind her, and through her, and for one eternal instant was her.
I am become kamigakari! Reiko knew.
She flung out an arm towards the man’s enemies, and his awe turned to a redoubled fury . . .
. . . and she woke with a cry she stifled even as it passed her lips.
The cabin of the Tarshish Queen was dark, with only the swaying night-lantern casting dim blue shadow, less bright than reflected moonlight off the wake coming through the curved stern windows. The long slow rise and fall of the ship rocked her, and the hiss of water past its flanks. A tousled fair head rose from the pillow on the bunk above hers and peered down over the edge.
“Reiko?” the sleepy voice said.
“I have seen . . .” she said softly.
Then realization firmed in her mind: that had been the Grass-Cutting Sword, in the hands of Yamato Takeru himself, or at least he to whom that name had been given in legend.
“I have seen a myth being born,” she said.
The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) Page 47