The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  Da had carried him there for this in his arms, at her asking, and a shovel he’d matter-of-factly had her bring leaned against the gnarled bark; she’d been still young enough that it was fitting for him to help.

  Maccon had whimpered and feebly licked her as she stroked his ears and ruff, seeking to comfort the grief that he sensed in her even then, heedless of its cause. Da had smiled sadly at the sight, and said:

  Of all the Kindreds, only we of the human-kind see time as a thing apart from us. And in it see always our own mortality, walking a step towards us with every dawn. That is our special burden, to live with the shadow of the Crow Goddess’ wings always before our eyes. Maccon is spared that. Just a little sting, and he will sleep without fear or hurt.

  Will we meet again, Da? she’d asked, as she obeyed through her tears.

  She took the dirk in her right hand while she cradled the big dog’s gruesome graying muzzle against her with her left. Her father’s voice had been warmly kind, but implacable:

  Of course, pulse of my heart: we pass through the Western Gate, and rest in the Land of Summer once again with those dear to us, before the forgetting and the return. But dying still hurts, and grief is hard for those left behind. Maccon doesn’t know that an ending and a parting comes now. Just that you who are his friend and his lord are with him, as you have been since the both of you were pups. Let that be his last memory here. He will roam those blessed hills where no sorrow comes in gladness, and greet you once more.

  Why does he have to die? she’d said, choking back a shout that might have frightened the ailing beast. Why does anyone have to die?

  That we don’t know, darling girl, any more than Maccon knows why you cannot heal his hurt. As the Lord and the Lady are to us, so are you to him, and we can no more know the mind of the Goddess in its fullness than he can yours. But we do know that the Powers mean us to know of joy and loyalty and love: and the dog-kind they gave into our hands to show us how to take and give those precious things without stinting, in wholeness of heart.

  She blinked at the light on the waves, in two times at once. “And how to bear grief, Da,” she whispered. “That too.”

  A gentle kiss on the forehead, and: Now a swift end to pain is the last gift you can give Maccon for his long loving service, mo chroí, until we all meet again. Place the point so. Now, call upon the Mother and bid him farewell.

  “Bear it, and do what must be done.”

  His big battered long-fingered hand had closed around hers on the bone hilt of the razor-edged knife with a terrifying restrained strength, and then—

  The ship heeled until the deck slanted like a shallow roof, and she blinked, feeling him gone once more. Water purled and chuckled in twin curves, throwing rooster-tails of spray as the bowsprit dipped and rose, the sharp prow digging rhythmically into the blue swell and leaving a taste of salt on her lips as the cool droplets struck, like the taste of tears. It was only a few hours past the early summer dawn, and the light on the water was bright as they turned towards the rising sun, shining over and through the fogbanks ahead. Strands of her long yellow hair wavered across her face, blown forward by the steady breeze from the northeast and following the white curve of the sails like golden serpents.

  From the quarterdeck the captain spoke crisply:

  “Mr. Mate, stand by to strike sail, topsails only, on the fore, on the main.”

  “Aye aye, Cap’n.”

  “Then make it so, Mr. Mate.”

  The first mate’s voice boomed out through a speaking-trumpet in a volley of musically accented nauticalese ending with:

  “Lay aloft and furl!”

  The ratlines thrummed as sailors ran up them to the spars of the square topsails on the fore and main and out along the manropes, fisting the canvas up and tying it off with the gaskets sewn into the sails as the deck crew hauled on the buntlines to help them. For the work ahead, precision was more important than speed. The shanty rang out as the teams on the ropes gripped and bent and threw their weight back in rhythmic unison:

  “O wake her, O shake her,

  O shake that girl

  With—her—blue—pants—on!

  O Johnny come to Hilo;

  Poor—old—man!”

  The slant of the deck eased slightly as pressure came off the top of the masts, and the wind seemed to pick up as the ship slowed. That cool moving air smelled only of a third of a planet of clean ocean behind them, crisp enough even in high summer and even this far south to make the padded arming doublet of fleece-stuffed canvas she wore under the back-and-breast welcome, but somehow she thought she could detect the brackish scent of the Bay ahead and the huge tidal flats and wetlands about it. Off to the south the ruined towers of lost San Francisco reared on their hills, rust-red and stained-concrete brown above the mass of honeysuckle and scrub and renascent forest between and around them, or the stark white where the sand-dunes had emerged once more from under the works and plantings of human-kind.

  Her liege knight Heuradys d’Ath came up behind her, walking so lightly that the sound of her rubber-tread boots on the deck was lost in the rattle and snap, creak and thutter and groan of a ship under sail, a symphony of wood and cordage and canvas dancing with the vast forces of the winds and the Mother Ocean.

  No cheap commonplace hobnails for milady d’Ath! Órlaith thought. A relief for the bosun. She grinds her teeth every time some man-at-arms puts gouges in her deck planking.

  “That hair looks untidy in this breeze, Orrey,” the knight said, the staccato accents of the north in her voice.

  Órlaith smiled affectionately. She knew Heuradys had given her a space to be alone, which was a difficult thing to find on a crowded ship where even the leaders were bunking four to a cabin, and would be even harder after today when they picked up the rest of their party who’d come overland to join them here. Then with beautiful timing she’d come up to the bow to keep her liege from turning her alone time into another inward replay of her father’s death. The enemy ships had come along this very path, chasing Reiko’s party on the end of a pursuit that had begun in the Sea of Japan, to meet what had been a routine, enjoyable progress by the High King and his heir through the new settlements on this southern frontier.

  Her tone was deliberately light when she replied in the soft Mackenzie lilt; if a close friend was going to take the trouble to cheer you up, you should at least try to help.

  “Oh, sure and I was just giving Johnnie a nice romantic image, the princess with her golden hair floatin’ about her face as she stands in the bow, brooding deep and melancholy.”

  “Yet stern and noble as well. So put a foot up on the rail too, for Apollon’s sake! Head up . . . left hand on the hilt of the Sword . . . do it right! Your little brother needs you to fulfill his artistic destiny, woman!”

  Órlaith did as she bid for a moment, chuckling. “I think he’s already working on a chanson about this whole thing—the “Song of Órlaith,” maybe? Though really it should be “The Song of Reiko,” since it’s her ancestral sword we’re after seeking, the wonder and amazement of the world. Fair breaking out all over, it is!”

  She laid her palm on the moon-crystal hilt of the Sword of the Lady where it rode in the buckled blade-sling of her arming belt.

  “Though I haven’t heard if they’ve found Excalibur off in Greater Britain,” she added sardonically. “Or if they have, the King-Emperor in Winchester is keeping it secret the now.”

  Heuradys grinned. “Arthur chucked his sacred snickersnee back to the watery tart when he went to snooze in Avalon against the hour of Britain’s need. . . .”

  “And he didn’t wake up at the Change? Deep sleeper,” Órlaith said.

  “Well, maybe it disabled his alarm clock’s bell. Or maybe he was the one inspiring Mad King Charles?” Heuradys said.

  “They could have done much worse. Most did, in that part of the wo
rld.”

  “And we can let the Japanese equivalent of the troubadours take care of Reiko’s epic.”

  “Biwa hoshi would be the closest they have, which is not very close to either troubadours or bards to our way of thinking. Hoshi being sort of a . . . hmmm, wandering priest-performer? And they do their epics in prose, though they recite them to music, so, their poetry mostly being short and . . . punchy,” Órlaith said absently.

  “Biwa?”

  “Biwa . . . is something like a lute.”

  “Johnnie will do yours in classic chantaire style, don’t worry. But is a line in one of his poems worth the tangles and snarls?”

  “Poetry lasts longer than bad hair days, that it does.”

  That brought a snort and a roll of the eyes. Órlaith knew her friend liked her younger brother a good deal—John and she had been lovers once, briefly—but they were too much alike to be entirely compatible. They’d both had a Protectorate noble’s training, martial and otherwise, in which music was just as essential a social skill as heraldry and falconry. But while Heuradys sang very well and was outright beautiful with a lute, Prince John had perfect pitch, played half a dozen instruments with casual skill and was genuinely talented at composition as well. Which the princess suspected made her knight slightly jealous.

  On the other hand, she’s better with the sword, so it balances; that’s where Johnnie’s just very good.

  “I admit Johnnie will probably do a good job,” Heuradys said grudgingly. “Flowing golden locks and all. He may even find a way to make Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi scan in English.”

  “My golden locks are indeed golden . . . just a very slight tinge of copper . . . and they do flow, when loose,” she said aloud. “And get in my eyes and mouth and even up my nose sometimes, Brigit the Bright witness.”

  “It looks like it’s dry by now. Want me to braid it?” Heuradys asked.

  That was like putting on plate armor, you really couldn’t do it well by yourself.

  “Thanks, Herry. Clubbed fighting braid . . . Do it Dúnedain-style, why don’t you? Then I’ll do yours in the same. That’s . . . tactful since we’re landing in County Ithilien and meeting my Ranger cousins.”

  “You mean the Dúnedain will be flattered that you agree they’re the only people who know how to do things with style.”

  “It’s powerfully set on style and grace the Rangers are, for all that they’re bonny fighters and fine wilderness scouts.”

  “You’re being diplomatic again, Orrey.”

  “It’s a habit, so.”

  “Thank the Grey-Eyed I wasn’t born to be a politician,” the noblewoman said cheerfully.

  They were both tall long-limbed young women with the cat-grace that came of training to the war-arts and the dancing floor from childhood. And considerably heavier than their lean athletic builds suggested at first glance, simply because their bone and muscle were so dense. Heuradys was two years older and an inch shorter than her liege’s five-eleven, with amber eyes and dark-auburn hair and comely regular features a little blunter than the chiseled looks the Crown Princess had inherited from Rudi Mackenzie and by repute from his father. Herry’s sire, Rigobert de Stafford, Count of Campscapell and Baron Forest Grove, was a big blue-eyed ruggedly handsome man who’d been blond before he went gray; Delia de Stafford was still a dark-haired beauty in her fifties. Heuradys and the other three children they’d had via a pre-Change kitchen appliance had all inherited their looks in varying degree.

  Her liege knight went on: “I can piss people off if I want to, and the only worry I have is that they’ll try to kill me. Which is fair enough when you think about it. Sit.”

  Órlaith sank back against the slanted steel shield of the bow-chaser catapult, more leaning than sitting, as the sailors tied off aloft and slid down the shrouds to the deck behind them with soft barefoot thumps. Heuradys stood behind her, partially blocking the breeze, and began to do her hair in what the ancient world would have called a four-strand Dutch braid, her fingers very deft with the complex weave. Playing stringed instruments kept your hands and fingers nimble and supple and precise.

  “You’re well-mannered enough, I’d have thought,” Órlaith said. “More courtly than I, at seventh and last. I’ve a hot temper betimes, I know, but you smiled and bowed just before you belted Sir Ymbolet across the chops with your gauntlet that time.”

  The suppleness and delicacy of touch was fortunate for her hair, because year after year of constant sparring in armor with longsword and kite-shield also made you very strong; and it made your hands strong in a way that surprised even peasants or sailors and shocked most others. It was why both of them had forearms that flowed smoothly into their hands without more than a slight dimpling at the wrist. Knights had a reputation for carelessness with fragile objects, but part of that was that many of them just broke things without meaning to.

  “I didn’t kill him, either,” Heuradys replied.

  “That too. And you sent him flowers in the infirmary. It was remarked on as an example of courtesie throughout the Association, so.”

  The comb Heuradys used and her sword-callused fingers tugged at knots occasionally nevertheless, but Órlaith ignored the slight stabs of pain. The wind and the long rolling pitch of the deck made that inevitable anyway. As her hand rested on the crystal pommel of the Sword of the Lady at her side she felt an indefinable tension. As if a voice were speaking urgently, but far away and blurred and vanishing when she turned her mind inward on it like the memory of a dream after waking.

  The knight went on: “Courteous and courtly? Well, of course! But that’s my general shining wonderfulness and near-goddesslike perfection, not politics.”

  She touched a forefinger to the back of Órlaith’s skull: “Tilt your head forward.”

  I haven’t been to the Kingmaking at Lost Lake yet, the princess thought as she did; that probably wouldn’t happen until she came of Crown age, in five years. I can bear Da’s sword, but I don’t get the full effect until then, the link to all the land of Montival.

  Since she had nothing serious to say beyond I’m nervous but can’t say why or I just miss Da something fierce she spoke lightly instead:

  “Herry, your father’s Count of Campscapell, your birth mother’s a Countess and Châtelaine of Ath and your second mother’s a former Grand Constable, she’s Baroness of Ath in her own right, and she’s been High Marshal of Montival since you were ten, to boot. If that isn’t being born to politics, I’d be curious what is!”

  Heuradys mumbled a little around the horn-and-silver comb she was holding in her teeth as she spoke and made the final tucks:

  “But I’m not the heir to anything the way you are, thank the Olympians each and every one. And the Fates.”

  “You’ve manors of your own you’ll inherit out east.”

  Heuradys finished with the braid, and doubled it twice to club it tight at the nape of Órlaith’s neck where it would be out of the way under the flare of a helm and nearly un-grabbable even without.

  “Doesn’t count compared to being a baron . . . or even more, to a Count,” she said. “Diomede and Lioncel have to wear those hats, and very welcome my beloved brothers are to it. Here I am, off on an adventure with my liege-lady while they’re under the Argus eyes of our parents, sitting in the Court Baron listening to endless variations on who stole who’s pig, and trying to find the money to fix bridges and smiling and nodding while red-faced country knights punish the punchbowl at after-tournament buffets and detail every point of every ancestor of their favorite destrier since the Change. Poor babies.”

  “That doesn’t sound so very bad,” Órlaith laughed. “And they’re staid settled married men in their thirties the now, with offspring so numerous . . .”

  “. . . that they swarm like vermin upon the earth,” said Heuradys.

  Who in fact delighted in being an aunt and was hero-worshipped
in turn when she swept in bearing presents and glamour and stories from Court. She went on:

  “Bor-ing! And I don’t have to consider the political impact of how I do my hair, either.”

  That bit a little too close to the bone. Órlaith had absorbed the skills and necessities of kingcraft from her parents through her pores all her twenty-one years as well as from formal instruction, and had seen how it consumed their lives. Sometimes when you stepped back a little it was daunting to think of living that way until you died in harness . . . though of course most people did take up their parents’ trade, willy-nilly.

  And I’m slightly guilty at how much of a relief it is to run off like this. Ah, well, guilt . . . the Catholic half of the family can carry the burden for all of us.

  “Adventure? Isn’t that someone else, neck-deep in the shit with no shovel, and that far away from me?” she replied, and felt the new braid to make sure it was firm. “Your turn.”

  Heuradys handed her the comb and they traded positions. The knight’s thick locks fell well past her armored shoulders, and were naturally wavy-to-curly as opposed to her liege’s dense straight mane. They’d been rinsing in salt-water on shipboard, too, which made it harder to bring them to order. She started with the ends, teasing them out a handful at a time.

  “People are always saying that to sound cynical and worldly-wise, but it doesn’t mean they don’t have adventures—witness us!” Heuradys said.

  “Well, yes,” Órlaith admitted.

  This was, without dispute, an adventure of the most adventurous sort. It was an actual capital-Q Quest, like something out of what the Dúnedain called their Histories, or the ancient chansons. Or what her father had done. Slightly defensive, she went on:

  “But we’re not doing it just to be doing it, it isn’t hunting tigers . . . and even that needs to be done, they being given to snacking on livestock and the farmers too.”

  I remember that first time I was allowed on a tiger hunt. . . .