“We are the point—
We are the edge—
We are the wolves that Hecate fed!
We are the bow—
We are the shaft—
We are the darts that Hecate cast!”
The clansfolk chanted as they drew their great yellow yew bows, aiming upward at the enemy snipers in their posts high above their decks. Men fell shrieking or quiet, or dropped and hung from the rope-slings they’d secured themselves with. The catapult crews were pouring up the companionways from the gun-deck beneath, their personal weapons in their hands, rushing with the Marine contingent to the bulwarks. Boarding ladders were raised high on the enemy ships and toppled forward, thudding down with the thick slightly curved spikes—at home in Montival they called them raven-beaks—on their undersides striking into the bulwarks to hold them.
“Juche! Juche! Juche!”
The Korean war-shout burst from a thousand throats in barking unison; the Sword told her it meant something like by our own efforts or on our own, but with a dark overtone of we alone are fit to live that felt a little . . . green, as if it were a new shoot of meaning from an older word.
And a snarling brabble of: “Jug-ida! Jug-ida!” which hardly needed translation: Kill! Kill!
The first wave reached the tops of the boarding ramps where they ran up from the lower decks of the smaller Korean ships. Before her Karl Aylward Mackenzie barked:
“On me! The boarders to the left!”
Longbow shafts flicked out, barely visible over the short distances, over the heads of the two ranks of Protector’s Guard men-at-arms before them; the first were kneeling, the second in a low wide-legged stance, both with their big kite shields up in an overlapping fortress. Sir Droyn Jones de Molalla stood on their right flank, his sword out and motionless hilt-forward over his plumed helmet.
Morfind and Faramir and Suzie Mika were using their short recurve saddlebows on the same targets. Through the vision slit of her sallet’s visor she saw a man at the front of the nearest boarding ramp take an arrow in one eye and pitch forward bonelessly. Half a dozen others fell in the same moment, bodkin-point arrows smashing into faces and through the light chain or studded-leather armor most of the enemy wore. One sank only a handspan as it met the tougher lamellar cuirass of an officer, but he staggered as it sprouted from his chest and didn’t notice the boarding pike that slammed seven inches of sharpened metal through his throat . . . or at least didn’t notice it until far too late.
As he fell, the hundreds of crewfolk crouching under the bulwards rose and leveled their crossbows and fired. At close range the brutal power behind the pile-shaped heads of the bolts would send them even through a knight’s armor. Against the more lightly-clad Koreans they were like spikes bashed through softwood, and some of them went right through bodies and limbs and into the man behind. The other half of the sailors struck with glaives and half-pikes, stabbing or trying to knock the boarders off the narrow planks and into the water.
Órlaith could feel the attack waver, that impalpable balance when blind determination to rush forward or die began to be poisoned by doubt springing from warrior to warrior. Then another figure came aboard at the bows—not in the spiked, flared lobster-tail helmets of the Korean elite warriors, but in a tattered motley of strings and tufts of cloth, with a three-pronged gold headdress on this head and cords masking his face.
A hand-drum thuttered in his hand as he wailed and chanted. Órlaith could feel the dark threads that connected the magus to the enemy host, and the impact of the snarled command that sent them forward. More ran up the boarding-ramps, throwing themselves bodily on the waiting points to clear the way for those behind.
“Kangshinmu!” Reiko barked.
That was the enemy’s own term for their adepts, the instruments of the Power that ruled and drove them.
Their eyes met. Then they faced the enemy and put their hands to their blades and drew.
Shock.
The world flexed as the Sword of the Lady gathered the light and shone like crystal and silver.
“Órlaith and Montival!” rang out.
“Tennoˉ Heika banzai!” from Reiko’s followers. “Banzai! Banzai!”
To the eye, the Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven was steel lightly chiseled and inlaid with gold. Part of it was steel shaped by human hands and had a human history, albeit one that stretched back into quasi-legend. The gold . . . wasn’t.
It was the Sun itself; it was Amaterasu-oˉmikami’s being stretching into the world of human kind. Faintly, Órlaith’s ears heard a roar as of inconceivable fires as the Grasscutter was drawn for war. Existence stretched, as if the weapon was too real for the story that contained it. Was that Reiko, or a nine-tailed fox that reared back with its fur bristling and white teeth barred, the Ghost Fox that shared her name?
The cold black hatred from the kangshinmu struck the light of the twin Swords; nothing physical happened, in a way, but the enemy rushed forward in a wave that matched their master’s thought. The Montivallans and their enemies met them, and Órlaith felt as if her feet were dancing with the spirits of Air as the Lady’s Sword rose to defend Her people. . . .
• • •
Órlaith staggered as the world became hard and firm once more. Black threads seemed to writhe in the kangshinmu’s shattered skull, and then the Grasscutter finished what the Sword of the Lady had begun.
Reiko went to one knee, the Grasscutter outstretched in the classic follow-through to the ten-uchi strike. Where a man had been, there was only floating ash, dust that vanished with a sigh of wind. Silence fell like a ripple spreading out from them, the roaring crush of battle fading. The enemy shrank back, blinking as if they were men waking from a dream, and weapons clattered to the deck.
“Accept surrenders!” Órlaith shouted. “I’ll have the heads of anyone who kills those who’ve thrown down!”
She switched to Choso˘n-o˘. “Throw down your weapons and you will be spared! We have no desire for your blood.”
The need to do that brought her fully back to the world of common day, to the slaughterhouse stinks of blood and dung. She heard Reiko echoing the command in Nihongo, and Kalaˉ kaua doing likewise. There were plenty of all three folk within hearing, since the Sea-Leopard now lay at the center of a drifting mass of ships, Korean and Montivallan and Hawaiian and Japanese lashed together into one raft of death.
Órlaith felt her hand shaking slightly as she sheathed the Sword. A stagger brought Heuradys’ arm beneath hers, supporting. She turned, her mind stuttering with the struggle between exhaustion and the things that needed to be done, dully wondering where the blood that coated the whole right side of her armored body came from.
Then the world brightened. Alan Thurston was near behind her, along with many more from the transports who’d come over the quarterdeck and plunged into the melee. His mail shirt was red-daubed too, and he had a rather odd-looking fighting knife in one hand . . . a hand in an armored gauntlet like a knight’s, not the leather glove Boisean cavalry favored.
Their eyes locked as the blade was raised. Dimly, somewhere, she heard Heuradys’ shout of alarm and the beginning of the blurring speed of a draw-and-strike, hampered by the press of bodies and Órlaith’s own body. Then his eyes changed.
“No,” he said clearly. “Prince John freed me, and not for this. I choose otherwise. I shall do as I choose, not you, King of Nothingness. For the first time in my life I am one and whole, and that one knows what he must do.”
The knife seemed to fight him as he turned it and drove it up under his own ribs. He fell just beyond her reaching fingers and lay; she knelt beside him and bent low as he struggled to speak.
“Light . . .” he said. “I wish . . .” and died.
Distantly, she heard a voice: “Where’s the knife?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
KERAJAAN OF BARU DENPASAR
CERAM SEA
NOVEMBER 25TH
CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD
“Don’t stop! Don’t you dare stop!” Philippa Balwyn-Abercrombie said.
Deor’s hands moved on the drum, despite the sweat and exhaustion and stubble on his face. A light breeze off the sea moved the gauze of the curtains, but brought little relief from the hot night. Moths with gaudy wings fluttered around the single lamp that cast a slight pale-yellow light from the top of the dresser, giving off the hot fruity smell of burning palm oil. It was the dark of darkest night, about two hours before dawn, and the others looked nearly as ghastly; she felt ghastly. . . .
And John just lay there, his breathing as regular as the shsssshhshs of the surf on the beach not far away. Ruan Chu Mackenzie wiped his face and dribbled a little water between his lips, then went and did the same for Deor without interrupting his movements. The skill of his hands was the same with both men—the young Mackenzie took his duties as a healer very seriously; they were part of his religion, from what she’d gathered. If there was an extra tenderness and anxiety in his smile for the scop, who could blame him?
Not me, thought Pip. I’m just now realizing how much I . . . well, yes, it’s bloody well love . . . how much I love John.
She’d been waiting for anything else so long that it took her a double heartbeat before she realized that John’s eyes were open. The wax-mask immobility of his face, so much worse than mere sleep or even unconsciousness, turned back to life. Confused bewildered life, eyes darting around the room and obviously wondering where he was, but life.
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
There was a saying to that effect, or it might be a song. That was even more true when you thought something was gone and then you got it back. She lunged forward, but Toa stepped in and plucked her into the air with one huge arm that pinned hers to her waist as well.
“Wait a bit, Cap’n,” he said. “Make sure, like, after all the shite we saw in that . . . other place.”
Deor dropped the drum and staggered. Then he stepped forward and gripped John’s head between his hands, looking deeply into his eyes.
“Yes,” he said after a minute, walking backward and half-falling into a rattan chair that creaked under his lean weight. “Yes, that’s him.”
Thora knelt beside the chair and put her arm over his shoulders. “Well done, old friend,” she said gently. “Well done and very well done, oath-brother.”
Ruan knelt at his other side, offering a mug of water; Deor seized it and drank, coughed, drank again with a long sigh.
Toa released her, and Pip scrambled to John’s side, cradling his head. His hazel eyes sought hers.
“It was . . . so bright,” he murmured, still distant. “So bright . . . so kind . . .”
Then they snapped into focus on her. “Thank you, Pip. Thank you. You came for me in that awful place.”
“I need you, damn you,” she said, and kissed him. “You’re the only man I’ve ever met who doesn’t bore me!”
“Let me get up,” John said, and she helped him.
He staggered a little and felt . . .
“I’m hungry,” he said. “I could use a steak.”
They all laughed . . . but Ruan suddenly stopped. “What’s this?” he said.
“No!” Deor barked. Then: “I’m sorry, my heart, but that is a thing of peril. And it should not be here.”
A knife was suddenly lying on the floor. A rune-graven blade that the four of them all remembered. They looked at each other in silence, until John spoke:
“Shit,” he said crisply.
There was a growing clamor outside, voices raised in shouts. A man in the glittering dress and cloth-of-gold sarong of Baru Denpasar’s royal court burst through.
“A ship has come, a great warship!”
John forced himself upright, and hobbled out to fling the slatted shutters wide despite the aches and twinges of a body long disused, as if age had struck him before his time. A ship was standing in towards the entrance to Baru Denpasar’s harbor, a three-master with the Crowned Mountain and Sword of the High Kingdom of Montival fluttering from the mizzen. A frigate he recognized . . .
“Stormrider!” he shouted.
EPILOGUE
YALU RIVER
NORTH BANK
The shaman put down her rattle and took a long swig of arkhi, the potent clear spirit distilled from fermented mare’s milk. Snatching up the knife whose blade had been heating in the fire she spat some of the liquid on the red-glowing steel, and it hissed like a dragon. Then she licked it twice and held the knife as she danced.
The drums thuttered and boomed as she did, and her helpers chanted. Her feet moved in the slow shuffling movements, and the fringes and beads that covered her long deerskin robe fluttered in the cold wind. A headdress covered the front of her face, a tall screen of feathers from the Golden Eagle—the bird of noyons and warrior khans—and a leather band with the stylized shape of a horse burned into it, and below a fringe of tassels that hid her face to the chin.
When she had danced three times around the bonfire she stopped, hands raised to the sky. An eagle hung there, and its harsh cry echoed on the chilly breeze.
She opened her eyes, panting harshly—the sheer effort involved in the rituals was like pushing a balky colt away from its mother so you could milk the mare again and again, and she was old now. Before her the ordu stretched around, covering the bare ground with horses and warriors. Those nearest were nobles in silk and mail and spired steel helmets, their bow-cases and quivers of leather tooled and inlaid with gold; beyond were the dun-colored masses of the tribal levies in leather and felt, the fighters of the herding clans on their stocky hairy ponies. Silence fell save for the whistle of the wind, full of ice and the green earthy smell of horses and their dung, the sweat-soaked leather and wool of the warriors.
Toktamish—brother of the Kha-Khan, Commander of Fifty Thousand—sat cross-legged on a priceless carpet, his armor glinting even in the wan winter’s sun. His narrow hazel eyes looked impassively, waiting a moment before he leaned forward with his hands on his knees and barked:
“Yuu süns gej khelekh ve?”
What do the spirits say?
The idugan drew breath, knowing how she must reply. The words were ancient prophecy, but the horde waited breathlessly.
“Köke Möngke Tngri speaks! The Eternal Blue Heaven speaks; Qormusta Tengri the King of Heaven speaks! The thirty-three great Gods and the ninety-nine tngri of earth and sky, lightning and thunder and rain, speak, the spirits of land and beast and bird speak!”
She pointed southward where the wrecked bridge of the ancients still spanned half the Yalu.
“The spirits say that the black evil beyond the Yalu has been weakened. Your lances, your arrows, your swords may strike!”
She raised both hands higher. “Hear! When that which is harder than rock and stronger than the storm wind shall fail, the empires of the North Court and the South shall cease to be. When the White Tsar is no more, and the Son of Heaven has vanished, then the campfires of Genghis Khan will be seen again, and his empire will stretch over the earth.”
Weapons rose across acres of ground, and two-score thousand throats shouted:
“Uukhai! Uukhai! UUKHAI!”
Author photo by Anton Brkic
S. M. Stirling is the New York Times bestselling author of many science fiction and fantasy novels. A former lawyer and an amateur historian, he lives in the Southwest with his wife, Jan.
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S. M. Stirling, The Sea Peoples
The Sea Peoples Page 33