The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  “But they’re strong Christians in Portland mostly, and neither of us is a city dweller in our hearts. Perhaps some land, somewhere . . .”

  “With space for horses,” Thora said, picking up a handful of raisins and tossing a few into her mouth; her hazel eyes looked dreamy for an instant. “And a vineyard. And plenty of space for Deor to talk to the landwights. He’s the luckiest man that way I know, though they walk in his dreams more than I would like, by the Gods.”

  Deor’s gaze went distant, and his fingers moved as if he were playing the harp that the High King’s sister had given him, though Golden Singer was in his room in her case of oak and lacquered bison-hide. A dream had haunted his sleep, and they were meaningful to a scop—songsmith—and to a runemaster as well.

  “To walk off some of this fine food myself is what I need now . . .”

  He cast an apologetic look at his brother’s wife, who smiled. She did not quite know how to react to him, he could see; she never had, and the more so when he came home so changed. There was a mix of pride and bewilderment there.

  Thora’s raised eyebrow said, You’re in one of your moods. What now?

  “Do you want company?” she added aloud.

  He shook his head. “I’m just going up to the ridge—settle my head as well as my belly.”

  It’s not just the dream, Deor thought as he stepped out along the trail into the long shadows, absently settling the weight of his sword with a shrug of the hips.

  Hraefnbeorg had been built on the knob where a run of higher ground ended in a steep rocky spot. To the west, the trail dipped down and then up a slope and along the ridge. The trees within a quarter-mile of the berg had been cut back to provide a clear field of fire, though the chaparral that was growing up now would have to be cut soon if the goats couldn’t cope.

  Things have been too peaceful.

  He felt a sense of presence as he passed the graveyard, the weathered slabs that honored his kin from before the Change dominated by the mound they had raised for Godulf.

  “Are you pleased with me, Father?” he asked softly.

  He stopped for a moment before the stone set in the barrow’s side, carved with ravens and bearing the inscription:

  Baron Godric Godulfson raised this barrow for his father Godulf the Wise, who saved his folk and died for them, undaunted. Thunor hallow these runes.

  Then: “Are you surprised?” he whispered.

  He stopped, surprised himself to realize that he still harbored that uncertainty. He had wandered the world with the High King’s leave—almost a command, to bring him a word of all the lands and a sense of how the great globe fared now that two generations had passed since the old world’s fall and human kind had begun to find its balance once again. But right now he felt as if that voyage had been an escape from responsibility. Why had his wanderings led him home? And on this day?

  Overhead, a raven called and was answered by another. At sunset it was normal for mated pairs to check in as they winged home, but he shivered suddenly. Ravens warded his line, and their cries could bring warning, and sometimes, what looked like a pair of common ravens were something more. . . .

  Leaving the cleared slope he passed beneath the Western Maple and oak and fir trees that crowned the ridge and continued on. Below him the slopes fell away in golden grass mixed with the deep green of little shaws of trees; beyond lay the meadows and patchwork fields of the farms, punctuated by the curving lines of carefully pruned grapevines. Now that trade had been established, Mist Hills was exporting their white wines, and he could see that some of the abandoned fields had been put into production once more. Horses dozed, and a herd of dairy cows was heading back towards its barn in single-file, needing no direction.

  Beyond the river, the thickly forested southern hills rose in dark folds. For a moment the angle of one of the peaks reminded him of the shape of Mount Tamalpais, or Amon Tam, as they were calling it now, and suddenly an image from his dream leaped vividly into memory.

  He remembered how King Artos had once tried to describe the messages he got from the Sword of the Lady. It had sounded a lot like the frustrating confusion of images that came to Deor when he was gestating a new poem. He frowned, trying to move from the image of the Mountain to the rest of his dream. There had been boats, and fighting on the shore. The clang of metal and shouts and screams . . .

  Were these the first stirrings of a poem about the death of the High King? But that had happened at Beltane, when the hills would still have been green, whereas the slopes behind the battling warriors he saw had glowed with ripe Midsummer gold.

  But now that he was remembering, what he felt was not grief or rage, but urgency. He had to know more. A little ways ahead, he remembered, was an ancient live-oak with a hollowed base that had cradled him through many dreaming hours. It was time to try utiseta, the old Norse practice of sitting out that he had learned in Norrheim. With no folk to distract him, perhaps he could untangle his dream.

  Deor unrolled his cloak and slung it around his shoulders, for the cold sea-wind had sprung up with the setting of the sun, leaching the last of the day’s heat—they were closer to the coast than you’d think here. In the east the moon was rising but the coastal hills were already wreathed with fog. Sweeping the hollow clear of debris, he settled himself against the trunk. With a sigh he let out his breath, allowing his awareness to flow with it, joining with that of the tree.

  Ac-faeder, Oak-father, hail, he sent a silent message. Since I last sat here I have seen many lands and many trees, but none so noble as thee . . .

  He smiled a little as a whisper of welcome passed through the prickle-edged leaves. Guard me, old friend, for I have a journey to go . . .

  He adjusted his folded legs a little more comfortably, then closed his eyes, counting ever more slowly as he drew breath and let it out again. Awareness arrowed inward, then expanded, noting the rich earthy scent of the leaf mold, the small scufflings as ground squirrels sought shelter. A branch cracked as a doe led her half-grown fawn from cover. Farther still, a gray fox began his evening hunt. The raven called to his mate again, and was answered from the forest down the hill.

  He took a deeper breath, and sent a greeting to the crusty old wight who ruled the ridge. He could sense the curiosity of other spirits as a feather-touch against his inner senses, and oddly, the same mix of excitement and security he had always felt in the presence of the High King. But this time it was mingled with the urgency that had throbbed in his dream. King Artos’ blood had blessed the land, his land, this land of valleys and mountains north of the Bay. That sacrifice made it truly part of Montival. It was no surprise if the High King’s spirit had joined the gathering of power he was feeling now. But what did Artos want him to do?

  Then a two-note whistle and warble pierced his awareness as Meadowlark, his gold breast marked with black like the Hraefnbeorg banner, swooped and landed on his shoulder.

  “Láwerce . . .” he breathed. “Will you show me the meaning of my dream?”

  “Rad . . .” came his ally’s answer, and the rune for riding shaped itself in his mind. “Fly with me . . .”

  With a dizzying lurch his spirit slipped free.

  Vision reoriented to a bird’s view as they flew through the night. Looking down he saw dark shapes moving along the pale line of the old highway that ran north and south through the coastal lands. But something was different—the moon, which had been nearly full, was beginning to wane.

  “It is the future, then, that you are showing me?”

  Deor dipped lower to inspect the riders and recognized the Saxon helmets of Hraefnbeorg men. Each rider trailed a remount behind him. As he watched they jolted into a canter once more, and there was a cold glitter on the edges of their spears and in their set eyes and stern faces.

  He followed Láwerce southward as the rising sun flamed on the great bay. In moments it was full day,
and they were dropping downward past the remains of San Rafael, swooping toward the water’s edge where a receding tide left mudflats shining in the sun. He recognized the odd tufted island just offshore; they must be nearing Círbann Rómenadrim, the ancient fishing village that the Dúnedain had restored as a way-station for scavenging forays.

  Nearer still, he saw a ship he recognized—Moishe Feldman’s Tarshish Queen—and an RMN frigate fighting off two Haida orcas and another that reminded him of a captured Korean warship he had seen in Capricornia. Bolts and round shot and flaming shells arced between them, and the sails bent as the ships made their deadly, stately wheeling dance.

  But it was the activity on shore that caught his eye. On the slope between the village and the road Montivallan knights and a group that looked for all the world like warriors of Nihon battled an Eater horde. Individually, the savages were outmatched, but there were so many! Smoke rose into the sky, half-obscuring the vision.

  A flare of light caught his eye and he focused on a tall knight who fought with a flowing grace. Deor had only once seen the Sword of the Lady unsheathed, but as the great blade rose and fell he felt a shock of recognition like a trumpet call, like a hot clean wind through the soul. But it was impossible! The High King’s last fight had been in Napa, to the east, not here in San Pablo Bay.

  The Eaters retreated, leaving the ground between them and the Montival band littered with the dying and the dead. He could half-see, half-sense presences, vast shadowy Powers at work . . . A robed figure swirling in rays of blinding light and heat before the entrance to a cave, her sleeves making giant arcs of flame larger than the sky as she danced love and danger and defiance. Another surrounded by a whirling raven-feathered cloud, at one moment a fair maiden with a bow, then a wrathful dark-haired warrior queen with sword in hand, next a grim sooty crone wielding a great scythe, all beautiful and all terrible beyond imagining.

  And over the enemy, a flat darkness that loured and drew and drank . . .

  Deor dropped closer as the knight eased off his, no, her helm, he realized as he saw the woman’s fighting braid.

  Órlaith! The Princess!

  It was years since he had seen her, but all the strength and beauty that had been just showing like new leaves in spring was there now, honed by grief and a grim fury. The warrior behind her spoke, and with a quick glance at her foes she jammed the helmet on again.

  The Eaters were gathering for another charge, dancing, screaming, pounding their bare feet on the ground until it shuddered, shaking bows and spears and notched blades in the air. Arrows began to whistle and hum.

  “No!” shouted Deor. “Not her, not again!” But what came out was a bird’s cry.

  “Fly!” shrilled the Meadowlark. “Fly home, and sing the men of Hraefnbeorg a battle song!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  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

  When they’d walked a little farther down the hundred-and-sixty-foot length of the deck, Heuradys added sotto voce:

  “He doesn’t believe in taking risks? But your brother signed Captain Feldman up to take us on this crazed escapade, didn’t he?” she murmured. “Either Prince John’s grown inhumanly persuasive—”

  “I’ve been told he is very persuasive,” Órlaith said, cocking an ironic eye at her knight.

  “Feldman isn’t a girl he’s charmed onto her back and besides I was the one who put the make on him, though granted a teenage boy doesn’t need much persuasion. Still, listening to John’s sales pitch shows our good Captain does take chances.”

  “But not careless chances. There are things his father did for Grandmother Juniper, during the Protector’s War, I don’t know the details, and vice versa. Though it should be safe enough here in the Bay,” Órlaith answered. “It’s later on things will be getting a bit hairy, probably.”

  “Oh, not the Eaters and Haida and Koreans; though some of all three were operating here after we left this spring.”

  Órlaith nodded. “That’s how my cousin Malfind of the Rangers died. I haven’t forgotten. Still, that was a skirmish with a small group.”

  “Yes, but what I was thinking of was your mother, or more precisely our sovereign lady the High Queen, now sole ruler, and what she might do to Feldman,” Heuradys said. “She’s not going to be pleased with anyone who helped us, you know that as well as I do. Better, probably.”

  Órlaith gave a slight mental wince. John and she had promised Feldman their protection, for him and his. That might require something drastic if their mother was stubborn enough to press a treason charge. The Great Charter specified that the Crown wouldn’t pass to her as heir until she was twenty-six, which was still years away. Until then her mother was monarch of all Montival, as well as Lady Protector of the Association in her own right; the Protectorate would pass to John when she died. Órlaith’s would be the first hereditary succession to the High Kingdom, and much of the great law of State was still unsettled; the Kingdom was very young as yet.

  About a year older than I am, as something proclaimed abroad and seen like a banner against the sky to draw the dreams and hearts of our folk. Younger, as a thing my mother and father and their comrades built with sweat and their heart’s blood.

  All the humor went out of Heuradys’ voice. “Orrey, she’s your mother, she’s always been good to me too and she’s my High Queen . . . and she’s a good one, she always thinks of the realm, but she is an Arminger. Now that you’re not her little towhaired moppet anymore you need to start remembering that side of your heritage. Not just about the way your axe-crazy granddad used to have heads off right in the Throne room and you can still see the stains on the floor forty years later when the light’s just right. My second mother spent decades working for your grandmother Sandra, and . . . well.”

  Órlaith nodded. Lady Tiphaine d’Ath had fourteen silver-filled notches in the dimpled black bone of her sword-hilt. That was just the formal death-duels, most of them in the Crown’s interest. It didn’t count the ones she simply made disappear, and spec-ops work in wartime. There was a reason her title had been pronounced Lady Death long before her second career as a field commander.

  “And that was all the Queen Mother, your Nonni. My mother was just the dagger in her hand.”

  Órlaith nodded again. Baroness d’Ath had handled a good deal of her own martial education, and she’d taught the High King much a generation before that, so that what his daughter got from him was partly her doing. Lady Death was what Nonni Sandra had summoned experts to forge, from a Change-scarred youngster with potentials only the woman who would later be called the Spider of the Silver Tower had seen. You could feel the hand of the maker in the cool perfection of the instrument, all the more remarkable when you considered that Sandra had never been any sort of warrior herself. Fortunately Lady Death was sixty and retired from hands-on wetwork . . .

  “So you may really need to protect Feldman,” Heuradys warned; she was as careful of her liege’s honor as of her person. “Even if it means things getting bruising and damage being done.”

  Órlaith nodded a third time, more slowly and reluctantly.

  Though Mother won’t . . . I greatly hope. It would create too much of a problem with Corvallis.

  Captain Moishe Feldman was a prominent and wealthy citizen of that wealthy and powerful city-state, sailing out of Newport, its window on the Pacific. He and his firm were rising powers in the Economics Faculty of the University—which was what Corvallans called their Guild Merchant, in their eccentric and old-fashioned way.

  Corvallis is as tender about its autonomy as any of the other realms of the High
Kingdom, or a bit more so.

  She’d experienced that first-hand, studying there.

  Surely mother wouldn’t . . .

  With a sudden chill, she realized she wasn’t absolutely sure, only . . .

  Surely she wouldn’t, unless I’m killed. Then . . . I’m not sure what she’d do. I should have thought that through better . . . maybe I didn’t want to think about it? But I have to make sure the Feldmans come through unscathed even if I do die on this.

  “I will if I have to. But Herry, mother ran off with Da on the Quest when she was our age,” Órlaith said stoutly, hiding her sudden disquiet—which was with herself, mostly. “And she’s . . . well, much more moderate in her angers than Nonni Sandra was.”

  “No,” Heuradys said flatly. “That’s not the right way to think of it. Queen Mother Sandra didn’t get angry, not so you’d notice. Certainly not the way her husband did before his . . . early death. Even her loves and hates were . . . cool.”

  “Well, there you are then,” Órlaith said.

  Her maternal grandfather Norman Arminger, the first Lord Protector, had died when Órlaith’s mother Mathilda was ten, long before her own birth. Killed by her father’s father Mike Havel, the first Bear Lord, in a fight in which both died: the family history got complex about then.

  “But people were just as afraid of Sandra as they were of him while he was alive. And more so, sometimes, after he was out of the way. You know what they called her.”

  The Spider of the Silver Tower, whose invisible webs ran throughout the Protectorate and beyond. Binding men of the sword in nets of intrigue and obligation and fear they couldn’t cut with steel.

  Heuradys was just a bit older, enough to have known Nonni Sandra from something less like a child’s perspective. Not to mention that she wasn’t an adored granddaughter. And Sandra Arminger had been political patron to all three of Heuradys’ parents, so a lot of dirty linen must have come up around the dinner table. There was knowledgeable conviction in her voice when she went on: