The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  “They smell wonderful! We’ll mull cider with them this winter, and they’ll be fine indeed with the Yule hams. There’s an old recipe my mother had from her mother, and I’ve never been able to use it before. Is the scent as good where they grow?”

  “It is when they pick the flower-buds and dry them on mats across the orchards, and that’s the season we arrived,” Deor said and smiled reminiscently. “You can smell that scent miles offshore there, making the sea-breeze a wave of perfume as you approach. Then the surf, cream-white on the silver sand, with the long trunks and rustling leaves of the coconut palms swaying above, and the whitewashed buildings and minarets. They carve their doors from this hard dark wood as beautiful as jet, too, with worked silver studs. I wish I could have brought you one of those.”

  Thora grinned. “And they make this stuff from palm sap there . . . what did they call it . . .”

  “Chang’aa,” Deor said; he had a musician and poet’s ear for words.

  “White and sweet and strong!” she said, smacking her lips and taking a pull at her beer. “It’s against their religion, but that doesn’t keep them from drinking it, by the ale of Aegir!”

  “The word means kill-me-quick,” Deor added.

  Everyone chuckled, and his sister Gytha touched the broad bracelet of worked gold coiled thrice high up on Deor’s left arm.

  Widowed sister, he reminded himself with another shock.

  Like running down stairs in the dark and thinking there was one more when there wasn’t. Her man had gone out in the middle of the night to check on why his dogs were going loudly mad and found it was a lion trying to kill his best Angus bull in the paddock. He’d had a spear with him, of course, and the lion hadn’t survived the encounter, but neither had he in the end—lion-claws and fangs were filthy and the wounds they made always grew infected. That had happened three years ago, and the grass already grew thick and long on his barrow, dense with goldenrod and aster.

  A place doesn’t stop in time when you leave, he thought ruefully.

  His arm-ring showed clearly. He was in a short-sleeved tunic of fine cotton dyed deep blue and embroidered at hem and neck, and green breeks cross-gartered below the knee. There were silver-and-turquoise plaques on the belt that held his seax—long weapons were hung on the wall—and a silver-and-gold valknut on a chain around his neck, showing his allegiance to Woden who sent the mead of poetry to men. A scop, a wandering bard of the sort who sang praise-songs for kings and drighten chiefs, wore the rewards of his craft as a badge of honor. He admitted to himself that besides custom, it was a pleasure to peacock a bit before his family.

  “And where did this come from?” she asked. “Those are runes”—she did healing work, which needed runecraft as well as herblore and anatomy—“but not quite like ours.”

  “Ah, that was from King Bjarni in Norrheim,” Deor said; the ancient world had called the heart of that realm northern Maine. “For the song I made and sang in his hall, and bearing him a word from our High King, his blood-brother and battle comrade.”

  For a moment it was as if a cloud had dimmed the sun.

  “May he feast in Woden’s hall!” murmured Godric, and raised his horn in salute.

  Then he shook his head and looked at his brother again, smiling. Their folk held there was no better way for a man to die than for land and kin, and so their lord Artos had fallen, blade in hand and face to the foe. They would show courage in the face of grief, as he had in the face of peril, and go on about the lives his sacrifice had helped buy for them. His voice was steady as he went on:

  “You traveled to Norrheim twice? Even our High King only went once! How do they fare?”

  The Norrheimers were heathen like most of the folk of Mist Hills, though they used the Norski names for the old Gods, not the Saxon ones Deor’s people followed. So did a fair number of the Bearkillers, Thora’s folk, up in the Willamette; and in Boise many had followed the lead of the ruler’s family, the Thurstons, who now offered to the Aesir. Which was natural enough, since the very name of their House meant Stone of Thunor.

  It gave them all something in common. Followers of the White Christ weren’t nearly as dominant on this continent as they’d been in the ancient days, but pagans were still a minority, albeit a considerable one. Heathen were a minority among pagans in turn. They tended to follow each other’s fortunes with interest.

  “King Bjarni is older, of course, but still strong in might and main. His eldest son Eric is a likely lad . . . young man! . . . of twenty-four, a wide-faring sailor and already his father’s right hand with a son of his own; everyone says the Althing will hail him with no dispute. Norrheim grows in numbers and wealth and arts every year; their lands stretch north to the Royal Mountain now, and westward they’re probing into the Great Lakes country. Rich soil waiting for the plow, the dead cities for mining, woods and rivers beyond end thick with timber and game and fish. And they’re subduing the wild men, bringing them back to the world of human kind and building their own strength by it.”

  “We climbed the Sea-End Tower in the lost city of Toronto as the High King and his comrades did on the Quest. It’s still standing, our lake-boat touched there on our way east,” Thora said. “There’s a little trade on the Lakes now, mostly Norrheimers, and they have an outpost near there.”

  Deor nodded. “Two thousand feet into the sky, step by step! Then to Eriksgarth where King Bjarni dwells when he’s not visiting his jarls and outposts, and then we took ship over the eastern sea.”

  “With Ketil Ormsson, a Norrheimer merchant out of Kalksthorpe who trades grain and timber and metals to Iceland for their salt fish and fine wool cloaks,” Thora said.

  Everyone was rapt at the word; Iceland figured much in the old stories. Deor’s eyes went distant, remembering the fuming smoke of the hot-springs as they stood into the bay and the ruins of Reykjavik stretched along the shore, and the flowering turf-roofs of the low-built modern longhouses in contrast.

  “Most of those who lived in Iceland moved to England in the five years after the Change and became part of that folk. Not enough food at home, they were just about to starve, and the English needed hands and had good land to offer as they resettled from their refuges. But the ones who stayed are increasing once more, and they offer to the old Gods too nowadays. Some of their young folk leave for Norrheim each year. They’ve fine poets and scops . . . skálds they call them . . . but by the Gods, it’s bleak there! Beautiful in a grand bare way, but . . .”

  “Like Jotunheim in the old stories,” Thora said, and drank with a shudder and smiled at the awestruck girl who refilled her horn. “Driftwood is a treasure and their sheep are thin because they have to travel at a run from one blade of grass to the next, or they’d starve to death between.”

  Everyone chuckled, and Thora went on:

  “We didn’t want to stay the winter, for all their poetry.”

  Godric raised brows gone a little shaggy. “That doesn’t sound like Deor.”

  Deor laughed, and Thora jerked a thumb at him: “He didn’t want to stay either, not after we tasted what they consider a fine delicacy—rotten shark buried underground and then hung in the wind for months!”

  There were groans of incredulity, but Deor nodded with a wince. Thora pulled out the silver hammer that hung around her neck and touched it to her lips.

  “No,” she said. “I swear it by almighty Thor! It smells worse than it tastes, and it tastes worse than anything I’ve ever willingly put in my mouth . . . and I’ve eaten ship’s biscuit that crawled away if you put it down.”

  “That’s why they serve it with Brennivín—” Deor put in as she banished the memory with cider and a bite of herbed roast pork. “A kind of vodka. Enough of that and you no longer care about the taste.”

  She cocked an eye at him and winked. “I got it down and kept it, just barely. You ran outside with a hand clapped over your mouth.”<
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  “We took a Norrlander ship from there to the Trondheimsfjord,” he said, ignoring her loftily. “Norrland is a strong kingdom now, if loose-knit, and there are folk along the fjord, prosperous enough now though the city died. We spent the winter there, traveling by ski and hunting bear and moose.”

  “Though they call them elk—they don’t have what we call elk, though they have red deer,” Thora said.

  “Do they offer to the Aesir too?” someone asked.

  “Some do; more are Christians; and they’re not what you’d call a pious folk in general,” Deor said. “We had good guesting at the yeomen’s steadings for song and tales—they were eager to show hospitality and hear our news of foreign lands; this part of the world is just fable to them now. In the spring we set out to England. Well, the Empire of Greater Britain, but England’s still the heart of it.”

  “How do they fare?” Godric asked eagerly.

  Their father had raised them on tales of the Anglo-Saxons, whose ways and faith he’d practiced in the Society for Creative Anachronism because they spoke to his soul, and then in deadly earnest after the Change.

  “They fare well, though it’s much changed from the old days of the stories, of course—they’re Christians, to start with. Well, most of them. But rich, rich—well-tilled land, strong yeomen and wealthy thegns and eorls, knights and bowmen and castles, cities and trade, roads and railways and canals, ships . . . Full of ancient buildings, layer on layer whenever a man so much as digs a well, and many housing the living once more as their numbers grow and they clear the dead lands. We saw the White Horse of Uffington—”

  “Hengest’s banner!” someone murmured.

  “—and the King-Emperor’s court in Winchester—”

  “Uintancæstir,” Godric said, the same name in the old tongue from which the modern descended.

  “—and William the Bastard’s tower with its feet in the water in the ruins of London, all swamp and forest and monstrous overgrown works of the ancients. Nobody lives there save for a small garrison, but Winchester’s a city as great as Portland or Darwin now, or greater; seventy-five thousand folk, they said. Not counting us travelers!”

  There were murmurs of astonishment; it was a very large number, though he’d seen much bigger later in Asia. Sambalpur had five times that . . .

  “The King-Emperor rules all the west of Europe to the Rhine and the Middle Sea, and even beyond that, though most of it’s still empty from the Change and the great dying. Still, there are nearly two million in England now, and as many again in their other possessions. As many as in all Montival, or nearly.”

  Thora held up her left hand. If you looked closely, you could see that a divot was missing from the little finger at the tip.

  “Speaking of beyond, I got this—and Deor got one on his leg you’ll see in the bathhouse—off Agadir, in the southern province the English call Volublis.”

  “After a city the Rome-folk built there in their great days,” Deor said. “It’s much like our Westria, in parts. The English hold the lowlands, though very thinly—they’re empty from the Change. Wild folk lair in the mountains inland, and in the deserts to the south. There are raids and skirmishes every year.”

  Thora nodded. “The fight off Agadir wasn’t a brawl, it was proper sea-battle. Saloum rovers, Moorish corsairs from the Emirate of Dakar, attacking a British trade convoy we’d taken passage in. And we barely out of sight of the Union Jack flying from the fort’s battlements. One of them nipped in and tried to board our merchant ship while the others kept the escort in play.”

  She clenched the hand into a fist. “They fought well when they came over the rail. Not as well as us, though!”

  “Corsairs? Like the Haida here?” someone said.

  Deor shrugged. “No, not as bitter a blood-feud as that. Just the contentions of kings; they don’t like the Empire, there’s an old grudge. The emirs think they should have got Volublis because their kinsfolk once held it. They’re a hard folk and fierce, by what we heard, though that was from their foes. Sometimes they’re at war with the Empire, sometimes they trade. They make some lovely things, I saw that, and it’s a pity we couldn’t stop in Dakar, which I heard was a great city for arts and learning now and well worth seeing.”

  “You sighed and looked like a boy who’d been told no honey tart for you,” Thora said. “And that at being denied a stop in the place the people who tried to kill us came from.”

  Deor shrugged acknowledgment and turned to his kin: “Traveling to see new lands carries a deal of staring at the same old ship with it!”

  He drew the bulging coast of West Africa with a finger on the table, indicating where it turned east for a long way.

  “The convoy scattered not far from here. Our ship went south and east, a long green coast edged with surf, to the land of the Ashanti where the King’s Throne is a stool of pure gold and his courtiers cover their robes with gold beaten thin. They have their own tongue, but many of them speak English as well, at their port of Takoradi. We went inland from there through the jungle hills to the King’s court in Kumasi, where there are new splendors amid the old ruins.”

  “And they make chocolate.” Thora sighed. “Caught a nasty fever there that Deor nursed me through, but it was almost worth it.”

  There were other sighs at that; he’d brought a little chocolate as gifts too, and a bit trickled in as trade now and then, just enough to tantalize. The tale went on, lubricated by more of the cider—a catalogue of wonders, around the tip of Africa, Madagascar, the troubled stay in Zanzibar and then on to Sri Lanka and the splendors of Hinduraj on the Bay of Bengal—until at last he said:

  “And from there to Darwin in Capricornia, in the north of what the old maps call Australia—the King there is a wonderful old rogue with a silver tongue for a tale himself, and has some strange and powerful musicians at his court.”

  “But by Surt and all the fire giants, it’s hot there!” Thora put in. “Hot all the time, day and night, and wet as a sauna half the year including the time we were there. The cloth rots off your back and the boots off your feet and the roaches are the size of mice and hiss at you, and I’m not drawing the long bow there either.”

  “Half the world trades there, though. From Darwin we took ship to Bali, which is beautiful as a dream and has the finest dancers I’ve ever seen, and from there to Hawaii, and from there back to Montival on a ship stopping in the Bay to pick up salvage . . . and some of our good Mist Hills cider and applejack, to be sure . . . and so here we are.”

  That was where they’d had the news about the High King. He was still mentally stuttering at it. It was like coming home and finding a mountain peak missing.

  Instead of dwelling on that he scooped the last of the blueberries, blackberries and sliced peaches and nuts out of the bowl before him and drank the fruit-steeped cream.

  “And though we traveled the world around, we never found fruit better than this. The taste makes me feel like a boy again.”

  “Around the world,” Gytha whispered. “Around the world! My brother!”

  Deor opened his mouth, then closed it again, looking around at the eyes staring at him. It struck him with a sudden shock that probably nobody here but she and his brother and their escort had even gone as far as Portland. Most would never leave this valley and the hills and woods about it, a day’s journey on foot from the farmhouses where they’d been born.

  Thora’s hazel eyes were laughing, as if to say:

  Well, what did you expect, with your head full of dreams again? That’s why the world keeps surprising you!

  He’d been years on ships and in the parts of port-cities full of rootless travelers, all strangers to each other, and it had come to seem as natural a way of life as any other. These people were flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, this earth had borne and fed him, here his father and grandfather and kin from back even before the
Change were laid in their graves . . . but looking at their glances now, for a moment he felt a whirling disorientation that made them as alien as any foreigner he’d met.

  The silence echoed for a minute, and then his brother cleared his throat:

  “We’ll hear more of this!” he said. “What do you plan next?”

  Thora was pouring more cream from a brown clay jug over another bowl of berries. “These are very fine. Mind, the Willamette’s are as good, but these are fine indeed . . . well, we were thinking of settling down. If not right away, then soon.”

  There was sharp surprise in the glances his family gave him.

  “When you’ve chased the rising sun until it sets, what more is there to do?” he said, spreading his long-fingered musician’s hands. “There’s a time to stop cutting timber and start building your house.”

  I’ve seen the sea turn silver and flash with winged fish leaping into a dawn like dancing fire, and beheld the ruins of London and Roma-beorg and Florence, and watched the white bears wrestle on glaciers. I’ve heard Niagara pour in torrents that sound like Thunor’s hammer with the spray on my face. I’ve smelled the cloves off the coast of Zanzibar, and had a turbaned king throw me sapphires for my songs in the jungle hills of Taprobane, and stood by the roadside while elephants clothed in jeweled mail bore a Maharaja through the streets of Sambalpur, past temples like carved mountains. But I have no home. I’ve made songs that will live, but I need more time to compose, or so much of this will be lost when I die. Lost like tears in rain.

  “And children need a home,” Thora said.

  At looks of blank surprise, she leaned across the table and prodded a finger into Deor’s shoulder.

  “He’d make a fine man to help raise ’em, even if he doesn’t like the making part. I can handle that, though. With a little temporary help from some long lad.”

  That brought a startled laugh. “We’ve a good house in Portland, the High King’s gift,” he said. “And gold enough.”

  In fact mostly jewels, which they’d sent on to Corvallis to be converted into arcane entries in the ledgers of the First National Bank. Something else that would have been a fable from a tale when he was a boy . . .