The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  “You’ve got a point . . . ouch!” Heuradys yelped.

  She smiled and made her hands fall back into their rhythm. That first hunt had been when she was eighteen. Reeds moving against the wind, mud clutching at the soles of her boots, hand clenching on the riser of the bow hard enough to hurt. Her father loose-taut-alert like a cat himself, with the sun glittering on the broad base-winged blade of his great hunting-spear and Mother raising her crossbow in a smooth economical motion. The huntsman’s horn, the hysterical baying of the hounds and a moaning grunting snarl loud enough to make your guts shiver . . .

  “You tug, too,” she said aloud. “I just don’t moan about it. And you’ve got wiry hair, so hush a bit and keep still.”

  “It’s not wiry, it’s . . . it’s pre-Raphaelite.”

  “A pre-Raphaelite painting it is!” Órlaith agreed teasingly. “Couldn’t have found a better word myself!”

  Heuradys didn’t move her head, but she did roll her eyes around suspiciously.

  That school of painters had always been very influential in the north-realm, once folk had time again for art. The Crown Princess’ maternal grandmother Sandra had added dozens more of them to her collection not long before she died, part of a gift from the Bossman of Iowa on his accession. Though one of those paintings had been put on the gift list immediately, after a muttered oh, my and a pained expression on Sandra’s part . . .

  “La Bella Mano, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, to be specific about it, so,” Órlaith added, after just the right pause.

  Which had enough accuracy, mostly in the shade of the hair, to strike home. La Bella Mano wasn’t Rossetti’s best work; more of a self-caricature, in fact.

  “Now that’s just cruel,” Heuradys said with a chuckle. “I so do not have a neck like a camel and a little tiny head on the end of it.”

  Órlaith and her knight-to-be had been doing each other’s hair on journeys since they were little girls, and the princess found the small shared ritual rather soothing.

  They were both in half-armor for the landing, back-and-breast of overlapping riveted lames and vambraces on their forearms, partly as precaution, partly ceremony, and partly just because you had to wear armor frequently to keep accustomed to the weight and constriction. If you didn’t exhaustion could cripple you too soon when you really, really needed to be at your best. Órlaith’s suit of plate was in the standard form for a knight or man-at-arms, but made of the rare, costly and hard-to-work titanium alloy rather than common steel, lighter and stronger and immune to rust. She’d given Heuradys another as a Yule-present last year; it was literally a princessly gift, since only a monarch or their close kin could afford it. Even Órlaith herself hadn’t had one until she was sure she’d gotten her full growth, and her brother Prince John was a year or two away from being fitted.

  Normally Órlaith preferred the kilt and plaid of her father’s people, the Clan Mackenzie, for everyday wear, though she was in breeks today.

  Forbye, besides being Mackenzie fashion, long hair is just prettier, which is why Herry wears it so too, the dear girl being more than a bit of a fop, and I say it who loves her like a sister. Somehow the foppery isn’t nearly as irritating with her as it is with Johnnie, who I love because he is my brother but who is annoying and endearing in equal parts.

  Her fingers moved automatically as she thought. You could always say long hair made extra padding inside a helmet, to those who had no aesthetic sense; and in the Protectorate it was most definitely a woman’s style, which slightly lessened her offensiveness to the unfortunately still fairly common fanatical variety of Catholic up there in the north-realm.

  Twist, over under, tuck, plait . . . She stopped the train of political calculation and faction-balancing with an effort of will, a little appalled once she stopped to think about it:

  Sure and Herry’s right; I do always have to think about the politics, even of my hairstyles and what clothes I wear!

  And to think that there were people who truly, seriously believed that being a monarch or a high noble meant a life spent doing just as you pleased. . . .

  “Done,” she said, tucking the last strand away, doubling the braid twice and tying it with a thong in a neat bow knot. She returned the comb: “Let’s get back to the quarterdeck.”

  “This thing isn’t steered from the same end as a horse,” the knight agreed.

  They turned and walked down the length of the schooner towards the stern, ducking occasional parties of sailors moving around doing sailorish things. The two young women exchanged a glance as they saw the crew begin to strip the protective tarpaulins from the catapults that crouched eight to a side and knock the locking-pins out of the ports in the four-foot bulwark through which they shot.

  Órlaith’s highly-unofficial expedition had hired the ship from Feldman & Sons—paying in promises, implicit promises as much of future Royal obligations as of money—but the merchant had made plain right at the beginning that she didn’t command his ship or people. She could tell Captain Feldman the destination, but he, he, would give the orders that took them there.

  Sailors unfolded and extended the pump levers behind the machines and worked them up and down to a brisk shanty; this one had a chorus about screwing cotton every day in a moveable bay, which probably wasn’t as bizarre as it seemed at first hearing.

  “Those always sound better in a dockside tavern,” she said.

  Heuradys nodded with a very slight wince; she had a much better ear than her liege, or was considerably more finicky, or both.

  “That’s because in a sailor’s tavern they’re usually just drunk when they sing, not grunting like pigs at the end of every line.”

  Beneath the voices ran the bang-crink-bang-crink-bang-crink sound of the hydraulic bottle jacks bending the throwing arms that jutted out to either side of each machine back against springs that had been part of the suspensions of mining trucks before the Change. Then the very final-sounding chink-chack of the locking mechanisms engaging. Chests were thrown open to reveal eight-pound cast round shot, sinister-looking tubular canister rounds bristling with finger-length darts of forged steel or half-inch shot for close work, glass napalm shells and four-foot finned javelins with points like chisels or cutting sickles or the menacing containers for thermite incendiary warheads. The crew-captains worked the elevating and traversing screws to check that the motion was smooth.

  There was no fuss or angry shouting and few first-voyage chawbacons being shoved and cursed into unfamiliar tasks; they might not have the snap of a naval crew but they were at least as quick and skilled and showing no more nerves. Feldman & Sons went on long risky voyages to dangerous places, but they also paid first-rate wages and had a profit-sharing arrangement and the big crew meant the watch below could get a solid night’s sleep instead of doing four hours on and four off every day.

  The merchantman’s First Mate caught their glance; this was supposed to be a peaceful meeting halfway along their journey to the mega-necropolis of Los Angeles, picking up a few more friends to accompany them from the southernmost outposts of living Montival. His grin was white against his thin dark-brown face as he opened the arms-locker and the bosun and her mates began handing out cutlasses and boarding-axes, crossbows and knock-down pikes to be racked where they could be seized instantly. Sailors were shrugging into jerkins of thick but supple oil-tanned walrus hide and fastening their quick-release clips when they had a moment to spare. Plain bowl helmets and light bucklers hung by rings next to the weapons.

  “Cap’n Feldman doesn’t believe in taking chances, Your Highness,” he said.

  With a musical singsong accent to his version of Montival’s common English, and a way of stressing the syllables that showed his native tongue was something else altogether; she gathered he came from some place one of Feldman’s ships had touched far abroad.

  “Glad to see it, Mr. Radavindraban,” Órlaith said gravely.<
br />
  Because I am feeling nervous about something. I think. And I didn’t like that report from the Dúnedain. A Haida shaman and these Koreans and Eaters all working together . . . that’s not like anything that’s happened before.

  She murmured that to Heuradys. Her knight raised an auburn brow. “Very true. On the other hand, we hadn’t worked with the Japanese before . . . and they are . . .”

  She paused, obviously searching for the right words. “I’m glad they’re with us, not against us. There may not be all that many of them, but they are serious people.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  GOLDEN GATE/GLORANNON

  (FORMERLY SAN FRANCISCO BAY)

  CROWN PROVINCE OF WESTRIA

  (FORMERLY CALIFORNIA)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  JULY/FUMIZUKI/CERWETH 14TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/FIFTH AGE 46/SHOHEI 1/2044 AD

  The Tenno Heika—Heavenly Sovereign Majesty—of Japan stood by the stern-chaser catapult of the Tarshish Queen and composed herself against the memories that flooded in as the ship approached the Golden Gate. Her left hand rested on the scabbard of the katana thrust through her sash with the thumb against the guard in a gesture as automatic as the movements of walking.

  Her title was Empress in English, though in Nihongo the word for a ruler as opposed to that for a consort had no gender. Ruling empresses were nonetheless very rare. Her grandmother had been the first in more than two hundred years, for all her brief life—the last survivor of the dynasty, brought by the Seventy Loyal Men across the firestorm chaos of Change-stricken Honshu to the offshore refuge of Sado-ga-shima, that the line of Amaterasu-omikami be preserved. It had been, in the son she had born too young and died of bearing, and through him to her and her sisters.

  The cool damp sea-wind cuffed at her tightly braided hair as she stood and remembered the last time she had passed here, on the Red Dragon. Brief months ago, with her father alive and the enemy close behind, that final battle on the shore only hours ahead. It had been . . .

  A blur. Glimpses. Blood running from under someone’s fingernails as they heaved at the pumps and the water jetted overboard. Atsuko sharpening a nick out of her naginata with the shaft braced across her knee. Captain Ishikawa showing his teeth as he took the wheel in his own hands and called out to his ship as if it were a lover. Father holding a dying man’s hand for a moment.

  Thirst, hunger, fear, weariness worse than all. The consciousness of hideous death or worse close at hand, close as the shriek of catapult bolts overhead, the sluggish heaving movement of the leaking waterlogged ship, the crackle of gathering flame in the rigging. Playing out what she must do at the last to avoid capture in her mind over and over, to settle her spirit to it: the dagger in her hand, point towards her throat, and . . .

  She shook herself mentally, coming back to the moment, to the present, to loss and to hope and to giri. Her given name was Reiko, which had a number of meanings of which Courteous Lady was the most common nowadays. Members of the Imperial House of the Yamato Dynasty had no family name in the usual sense, and with them the use of the personal name was still more restricted than with most of her folk. Even as a small child few but her siblings and parents had ever called her Reiko, and now that her father was dead she would seldom hear it again at home unless from her mother and sisters in strict privacy. For the rest of her life to others she would be Tenno Heika, or in informal circumstances simply Heika, Majesty. When she died, she would be known as Shohei Tenno after the era-name she had chosen on the day of her father’s cremation: Empress of Victorious Peace.

  Perhaps that is why it is so . . . comforting . . . to be on . . . what do they call it here . . . first-name terms with Órlaith and her brother. They are my peers in a way nobody in Dai-Nippon can be. And are also outside our system altogether, neh? Nobody at home will know as yet what has happened. We were the first ship to reach this continent from the homeland since the Change. They do not expect us back for many months, at the very least. To them, Father is still alive, still our Tenno Heika and I his heir. I will have to take the news to Mother and Setsuko and Toshi and Yoko, and present the urn.

  Her younger sisters had called her Stork Girl sometimes when they played together. She was five foot six inches: or five shaku five sen, in the terms her people now used once again, carrying herself with easy grace on the swaying deck. That made her a very tall young woman for a Nihonjin of her generation, the first born to those themselves born after the Change; as tall as most samurai men and taller than all but a few commoners. The Imperial family of course fed as well as anyone did, but in modern Nihon even the wealthy and powerful ate a spare lean diet of rice and soy and vegetables supplemented by fish and a little chicken, with red meat—the odd tonkatsu, sliced batter-crusted pork cutlet, or the like—as a treat on special occasions. To rise from a meal ever so slightly hungry was good manners.

  In years that were very bad many peasants thought rice a treat, and had porridge of boiled millet stretched with wild greens for their staple.

  With an unexpectedly delicate courtesy the family of nobles where the Nihonjin party had been quartered near Portland, at Montinore on the Barony of Ath, had tried to supply them with familiar provisions, and had found cooks who could turn out dishes often fairly similar to what she’d grown up with. But it had been like one elaborate feast after another rather than the sort of food you actually ate day to day even in the Palace. They’d had to gently hint that plain noodles and pickled vegetables and a bit of fish would be a relief. One of the shocking things about Montival had been the sheer, almost gross, abundance of food. They’d had only the pre-Change books about ancient America to prepare them for what they found here, and that was just about the only thing in them that was still true.

  Her five-foot-six height was lean whipcord, and she stood with a stillness that was always ready to explode into deadly movement. Everyone in Japan these days trained to arms to some extent, the upper classes more so, and since her brother Yoshihito’s ship had been lost six years ago . . .

  Grief made you more vulnerable to grief; for a moment the pain she’d felt during the long months of waiting and growing despair returned. She banished it with an effort of will, and instead thought of his last smile when he’d promised to bring her a saru monkey home from his expedition to Kyushu.

  Since then she’d received a prince’s education herself. Some had accounted that at least a little scandalous. Some had even whispered that her father was driven to distraction by the loss of his only son and eldest child. But he had insisted, which settled the matter.

  Settled it in these times, at least, Reiko thought.

  She knew that for much of her nation’s history Emperors had been cloistered symbols rather than rulers, recluses whose role was mainly to exist as a link between the world and the spirits. Revered, godlike, theoretically omnipotent but practically powerless, seldom glimpsed by ordinary folk. And very separate from the aristocracy of the sword, the bushi whose warlord masters had held the powers of State in their iron fists. Sometimes peacefully for a while, sometimes rending each other in civil wars that passed over the land like burning tsunamis of destruction.

  This was not such a time; her father had ruled the much-diminished realm that called itself Dai-Nippon Teikoku—the Empire of Great Japan—as a matter of aspiration. Egawa Katashi, leader of the Seventy Loyal Men, had been utterly honorable about that, despite his enormous prestige and years of exercising near-absolute power in the name of the child-Empress and then the young Tenno: his slogan had been Revere the Emperor, Reclaim the Homeland, and he’d punctiliously stepped aside to become an advisor and elder statesman as soon as her father had come to what the modern era considered an adult’s years. She remembered that grim cold-eyed old man slightly, though he’d died when she was only six; he’d also been the sort who could utterly dominate a room without moving
or speaking a word, though his—rare—angers had also been legendary.

  And I too will rule, and we will restore our country. We will make that hope of greatness real. But what we in truth govern from the Imperial Palace on Sado-ga-shima now is merely . . .

  When the Change flashed around the world in the spring of Heisei 10 and the machines went still there had been a hundred and twenty-five million human beings in Japan, numbers vast beyond all comprehension—the Montivallans thought that probably the whole planet didn’t have more than four times that now. A year later somewhere around one in a thousand of those hundred and twenty-five million was still among the living, give or take. As far as the officials had been able to reconstruct; nobody had been keeping precise accounts just then. In the forty-five years since the number had grown, just a little. Only a little, to less than a third of a million at the last count, despite enough food in most years, if only just, and four or five or six children now being a normal family once more.

  The war accounted for that.

  Less than a decade after the Change the jinnikukaburi raids from across the Sea of Japan had begun, sometimes a single ship, sometimes small fleets, leaving nothing behind but burnt bone split for the marrow when they caught the dwellers unaware or won the fight that followed. Reiko had been born into the second generation of that merciless grinding conflict; had grown to adulthood with its inexorable demands.

  Her battle garb of hitatare jacket and hakama were covered by a Môgami Dô armor, red-lacquered steel lames laced together with blue silk cord, save for the leg protection; her head bore a white headband with a single scarlet circle over the brows. The broad-tailed twelve-plate kabuto helmet under one arm had the stylized chrysanthemum kamon of her House on its brow. Two samurai of the Imperial Guard stood behind her, motionless but alert as tigers, their right hands on the hilts of their swords and their eyes never still. One had her bow over his back, a seven-foot higoyumi, ready to hand it to her on command, and the other her naginata.