The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  Maugis rose, tucked his helm under his arm and his gauntlets in it, clashed his right fist against his chest and bowed. Mathilda controlled herself until he’d gone; he was a devoted servant of the Crown and had been for two decades. The other two men were more than that, though they were that too; and they’d been on the Quest with her. Ignatius was her confessor and spiritual councilor as well.

  “How could Órlaith and John do this to me!” she cried. “And . . . Rudi . . .”

  Edain put an arm around her shoulders. “That’s why, lass. They both need to be doing, don’t you see? And that at once. Their grief will give them no rest, else. Vuissance and Faolán are still young enough to rest in your arms. Herself and Johnnie are too old for that, and too young to sit quiet on their own.”

  Ignatius nodded as he stamped his seal on the writ. “The young feel grief through their bodies, when they are freshly come to their full growth,” he said. “It demands action. They think that they can outrun sorrow, or sweat it out like a poison. We know that it will always catch you, but it’s not knowledge that can be transferred in words, even by a preacher with a tongue of fire. Which none of us here is. Only living long enough will do that.”

  Mathilda pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket, mopped her eyes and blew her nose.

  “Edain . . . this is important. Something is happening down there. Something terrible. I can feel it in my bones, in my blood, in the air I breathe. It’s . . . shadowed. As if I’m in a dream of darkness, with things moving I can’t see. I haven’t felt this way in a long time. Not since the war. Go save our children, old friend.”

  He nodded soberly. What they were doing was as much to protect her son and daughter as to bring them back for defying her.

  I cannot lose them too! her spirit wailed.

  Then her mind replied, the part that had been High Queen for a generation, and fought through the Prophet’s War and the Quest before that:

  The problem is that Ignatius is right. If you live long enough you learn things. And one thing I’ve learned is that you can lose everything.

  Unconsciously her hand touched her stomach. And this child . . . will never know her father. It’s already cost my child that!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DÙTHCHAS OF THE CLAN MCCLINTOCK

  (FORMERLY SOUTHERN OREGON/NORTHERN CALIFORNIA)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  JULY 9TH, CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

  Edain Aylward Mackenzie blinked and coughed in the late-morning sunlight and batted a hand at the flies crowding around his face.

  “Now we know why there was so much of a howling and growling in the distance among the beast-kind last night,” he said.

  He’d thought it might just be natural here, some quarrel over a predator’s kill; these southern fringes of the McClintock dùthchas weren’t like the Cascade forests he knew best. Though he’d been through them more than once, it being the only way to get down into the southernmost province if you didn’t take ship. It was just as steep, but drier, much of it dense woodland but more open in some spots on the south-facing slopes. They were well into what the old world had called California and the High Queen’s mother had renamed Westria after some tales she was fond of, and the forests even smelled different—spicier and harsher somehow, with less of the green mossy scent. Though right now . . .

  “If we’d camped any closer we’d have winded it sure. Well, well, well!”

  “Or if we’d been downwind. ’Tis the tale of the three wells, that it is,” his second-in-command agreed.

  Her name was Báirseach. She’d been just old enough to go to the Prophet’s War in the Mackenzie levy as an Eoghan, an apprentice-helper, and had joined the Archers in time to catch the final nasty toil of hunting down the last guerrilla bands in the Bitterroot country away east. She stripped off a handful of needles from the branch of a young pine, crushing them and holding the results under her nose against the powerful musky-sweet rankness of the stink from the bodies.

  Even standing carefully upwind it was strong enough to feel like rancid oil spread on the inside of your mouth and nose, and the buzzing of the flies was loud enough to seem like a great malignant cat purring at something vile. Several of the younger Archers were looking very pale, or green. There was nothing like a corpse lying unburied and unburnt for a while to remind even heedless youth that you were of the same very mortal flesh as any other animal.

  “They’re just somewhat over-ripe,” she said. “A week?”

  “Something like,” Edain said. “Hot days, but this high up nights are cool, even in summer and this far south. Yet we’re gaining on them, and that steadily.”

  “Now, I’d be thinking these dead spalpeens were bandits,” Báirseach said, her red brows rising in a pale boney weathered face as she looked again and tried to reconstruct the scene.

  “Aye, by their gear. Varied, and not much of it, and not well kept up,” Edain agreed.

  His second’s blue eyes went around the site of the little battle . . . or possibly brisk little massacre would be a better term. Down to the little tarn where water pooled and then chuckled over smooth brown stones, then around the slope that led up from it under the tall sugar pines that turned the sunlight into a shifting dappled carpet. The coyotes and other scavengers had run or slunk or flown off when the High King’s Archers had followed their noses here, and by the marks a tiger and a grizzly bear had taken turns running each out of the location some time ago when the meal was fresher. Few predators turned such down when one came along. Some of the flesh had been reduced to dried tatters, others slumped into liquid, the maggots had hatched some time ago, and the tufts of hair looked the more grotesque for it.

  She went a little closer, picked up an arrowhead with a stub of broken shaft, examined it and then flipped it to him as she retreated. Edain caught it carefully by the wooden bit—all things considered, he didn’t want to slice himself open to what was caked on it—and turned the metal triangle to catch a ray of sunlight.

  “Broadhead, red-cedar shaft,” she said helpfully. “One of ours. Clan make, hand-forged, not from a hydraulic trip-hammer in a Royal armory or a factory.”

  “Dun Fairfax smith-mark in Ogham, right enough, it’s my idiot sons and their friends, who are half-wits whose vanity aspires to the lofty status of idiots, so,” he agreed; she was Sutterdown-born, from the closest thing the Clan had to a city. “Went through a body and broke off on a rock, most like. Easier to let it lie, when they were in a hurry. And a bit spooked at what they’d done. Training will take you through your first fight . . .”

  “. . . But seeing the results is a wee shock, to be sure. I don’t remember the two days after the battle, back in the wartime.”

  When someone of roughly their age said the battle, there was only one they could mean. He nodded, having been there and in the thick of things. She went on:

  “And I was just scurryin’ about with bundles of arrows and helping the wounded back during the fight, when I wasn’t crying or puking me guts out or both at the same time. So they might well have skimped on things like the policing up of the field.”

  Mackenzies kept a number of spare arrowheads in a pouch on the war-quivers they took into the field, along with uncut flight-feathers from geese, and anyone could trim out and fletch a shaft at need. The razor-edged shapes like the one he held were cut and hammered out of a stainless-steel coffee spoon, with the stub of the handle wound around a mandrel, then heated and hammer-forged to make a tube that would fit the tip of a shaft. The spoons were one of the staples of the salvage trade though they were worth only pennies each, being so durable and to be had anywhere the ancients had dwelt—they were still used as spoons, for that matter.

  This one had a tiny sigil tapped into the socket with a metalworker’s punch, a straight line with two branches to the left and another with three to th
e right—“d” and “f” in the script of the old Gael. Mackenzie smiths made and stored the like by the thousands, working whenever there wasn’t anything more pressing to do. They went to the Chief’s Portion, or were bartered to hunters for meat and leather, horn and bone.

  “But how . . . by Nuada of the Silver Hand, how did our youngsters get them to stand in a bunch like that, and them so agreeable about being shot at?” she said. “Look, there’s some hit running away—out in a fan, you see? As if they’d been taken under an arrowstorm sudden-like from the very ground they stood on, somehow.”

  “And then fled in a panic; the which is more likely to get you killed than standing your ground,” Edain observed.

  “Aye. Most often if you run, you find you’ve run towards the Shadow Queen’s scythe without knowing it. But those last”—she pointed with her bowstave—“were shot running upslope, which is towards the only cover about the place, and away from which they’d have been dashing if they’d been ambushed. Then it looks as a few were cut down with the sword close to the brush. It’s impossible. Unless our youngsters had the féth fíada of Aengus Óg to render them invisible, the which I doubt, even if that McClintock with them is named Diarmuid.”

  Edain had been grim enough. Now he grinned, despite the gruesomeness of the scene. He’d seen far worse, in one place or another. If you took up the spear of your own wish you made your life’s blood a free-will offering to the Dark Mother. By preference he’d die at home in the bed he’d been born in, with grandchildren about him ready to keen him to the pyre and then knock the bung out of the barrel at the wake. But he didn’t expect it, and hadn’t for a long time. Kings weren’t the only people who knew they were walking towards the scythe.

  “Earth must be fed,” he murmured, then more briskly: “Take a look at the angles the shafts went in. Not the ones scattered up the hill. The most of them, right under the trees, where they were caught unawares and in a clump.”

  “The bodies’ve been dragged about and broken up too much by the beast-kind to . . . wait, look at that one! He must have been on his hands and knees, that shaft went in his neck and near-enough came out where his arsehole used to be . . .”

  Edain’s smile turned to a chuckle. He’d been leaning on his longbow, and he now shifted it to point upwards.

  “How they got them to stand together so at the first, ignoring all else like youths watching the maidens dance skyclad about a Beltane pole, I do not know and cannot guess,” he said, chuckling. “But if you were to climb those trees, and them so straight and thick and fine though less so than our Douglas firs, and look carefully . . .”

  “Aililiú,” she blurted, then shook her head admiringly. “Hunting blinds in the trees!”

  “There’s one among them with a pleasingly and usefully wicked habit of mind.”

  “Karl’s work, or forbye Mathun’s, but Karl would be my guess. He’s a clever young bastard, when he’s not thinking with his fists or his balls, that he is.”

  “When he’s not being young, you mean,” she said, then added: “Young and male, that is. Why’s he not in the Archers, then? From the look of things we could use him.”

  “He’s not overfond of being under my eye all the time,” Edain said. “I don’t altogether blame him for it, for all that he’s still not fit to be let out without a keeper. As this whole matter shows.”

  “Oh, aye, plenty of the High King’s Archers enlist to get away from home. By the Daga’s dick, I did! Having your da as your commander too, that would be . . . a bit of another matter, so to say.”

  Edain chuckled. “For this I’m almost inclined to forgive him for making me miss going home for the harvest, forbye it’s been too long since I tossed a sheaf.”

  The words were harsh enough, but he could feel the pride leaking out in the tone. Edain raised his voice:

  “Scouts out, and the rest of us follow in skirmish column. Pursuit pace, wolf-trot—move!”

  There were a few groans; he felt like groaning himself, after day upon day of relentless work. Not long after coming this way traveling northward, though that hadn’t been as brutal. He was forty-two years old come this Samhain and a bit, and the oldest of the band he was chasing was twenty-six. He had a decade or more on most of his own command too. It told. Sweat soaked the padding of his brigandine, his thighs ached, and there were raw chafe-marks in places he’d thought callused beyond that long years ago. But he wasn’t going to let them see it.

  Them or my sons, he thought, as they fell into the wolf-lope again.

  The seed doesn’t fall far from the tree, though, does it now? However you managed it, Karl-me-lad, I’m something impressed. How old Sam would smile . . . Perhaps I’ll kick your arse one time less if you tell me how! We’ll catch you at White Mountain, or close thereafter, I think. There will come a day when you’re better at this than your da, but not yet. Not quite yet.

  • • •

  The Dun Fairfax band and their McClintock allies came out of the shaggy wilderness, the trees and rampant feral grapevines and the odd patch of straw-colored savannah that stretched north of the salt marshes where it wasn’t scrub forest over ruins. Karl Aylward Mackenzie had expected something of civilization soon, since there had been the odd lump of horse-dung and someone had been making a start on the road for the last few miles. Hauling away the rusted remains of automobiles and trucks, cutting back the larger bushes that had sprouted in the cracked asphalt and filling in potholes and digging away dirt where blocked culverts had flooded in the winter rains. And the scent on the breeze from the west was subtly different—tilled ground smelled a bit hotter and dustier.

  Dogs barked and raced about as they came into the cleared stretch, a biggish square field in the faded but glittery brown-blond of wheat stubble. Shoots of green burr-medic clover pushed up between the ankle-high stalks the cutting bar of the horse-drawn reaper left. The clearing was edged with young dark-green cypress trees like man-high pencils. He blinked and shaded his eyes with a hand.

  “Follow at heel, Fenris, Ulf, Macmaccon, Buagh, Dwyer, Uaid,” he said sharply.

  The greathounds were too disciplined and too tired to do more than pad along with their tongues out, which was fortunate for the nondescript farm mongrels doing the challenge. Mackenzies bred them for hunting game like boar and tiger, or for war, and the great rangy beasts averaged about the weight of a smallish man, with fangs to match and jaws that could crack a bull elk’s thighbone.

  A half-score of landworkers were at their tasks in the field, from a man with gray in his beard down to children as young as six or so scaring away birds and bringing dippers of water to their elders. The folk were carting the last of their wheat. It was earlier than that would be done in the Mackenzie lands, since summer came sooner and much hotter here. Otherwise much the same: pitching the stooked sheaves into a cart pulled by two big platter-hoofed horses and packing them on the high teetering precarious-looking golden heap. Gear lay piled under the shade of a big oak, under the guard of a woman nursing a babe.

  Karl flung up a fist to halt his column, put a foot down to the left of his bicycle and took a swig from his water-bottle of salvaged aluminum encased in modern boiled leather. He was a young man not long past twenty, a year older than his brother Mathun and of a similar long-limbed build he’d gotten from his mother, along with hair much the same color as the reaped grain, and blue eyes. Their square cleft-chinned knobby faces were much like their father’s, and the broad bowman’s shoulders they shared, though both were still lanky with youth.

  He corked the canteen, waved and called:

  “Fair harvest, friends! Corn Mother and Harvest Lord be with you!”

  They were far enough away they probably couldn’t catch the words, but close enough the tone and gesture should travel. And he’d used the general terms rather than a specific deity’s name, which was a witch’s way of being nondenominational. From their dre
ss—loose shirts left in the natural pale gray of linsey-woolsey, pants tighter and dyed blue with the odd copper rivet, laced boots and round floppy straw hats—they were probably Corvallan countryfolk by origin. The weapons they’d grabbed for when they saw two-score of armed strangers, crossbows and the odd eight-foot half-pike, argued likewise.

  He was glad of it. Corvallis folk had a reputation for keeping themselves to themselves; minding their own business and not sticking their noses in yours, they called it, or cold standoffishness as others might put the matter. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t pry now and gossip later, but they’d be slower and less insistent about it, and easier to shake off without giving real offense.

  They relaxed as they saw the kilts of the Mackenzies and McClintocks, waved back at him, called greetings blurred with distance, and got back to work. That wasn’t surprising either; even in a place like this with reliably dry summers you never really felt secure until the sheaves were carted and in a nice well-thatched stack in the yard. If nothing else, birds were always too glad to take a share, whether it had fallen out of the ear to make fair gleaning or not. And then you itched to get it threshed and the grain in the sacks lest a careless spark send a year’s work and the flour for a winter’s loaves up in a whoosh.

  After the threshing you worried about rats in the granary . . .

  He’d missed the harvest back home because of this venture, and it felt a little unnatural. He could still remember his pride the first summer he was allowed to drive the reaper and take his turn binding sheaves and stooking. And watching his da carrying the Queen Sheaf for the High Priestess to weave into a woman’s shape so She could preside over the harvest-home feast. And the dancing afterwards. It was a fine time to be a young man in Dun Fairfax, even if everyone was a little tired. Babes conceived in harvest-time were thought lucky.