The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  And softly though the silence beat the bells

  Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

  We travel not for trafficking alone:

  By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:

  For lust of knowing what should not be known

  We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand!”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ERYN MUIR

  (FORMERLY MUIR WOODS NATIONAL MONUMENT)

  CROWN PROVINCE OF WESTRIA

  (FORMERLY CALIFORNIA)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  JULY/FUMIZUKI/CERWETH 15TH

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

  One of the ironies of this strange place is meeting little bits of things that are familiar amid so much that is alien, Reiko thought as she yawned and slipped beneath the covers on her futon.

  Eryn Muir was crowded right now, and she and Órlaith and Heuradys were sharing a room as they had on the ship.

  Though with Lu-anne then too. Such a great pity that she fell . . .

  It had been an odd experience to simply be one of a group of young women on a journey rather than the axis on which everything turned. Odd and rather refreshing. The Bearkiller had been perfectly respectful, in a foreign way, yet also . . .

  How do they say here? Good company, yes, and fun. She died very well. And she was young, but the young are no more immortal than the old. Duty is heavier than mountains.

  It was easier to prepare herself for sleep because it turned out that the Dúnedain used very much the same type of bedding that her people did, the combination of shikibuton—flexible stuffed mattress—a kakebuton comforter, and a pillow stuffed with chaff, though they called it all a futon-set. It felt luxuriously warm as soon as her body-heat had been caught for a little while, and the linen covering was as crisp and smooth as the cotton she was more used to.

  Two of them were in Western-style bed frames hinged to the walls of this wedge-shaped room, one for her and the opposite for the Crown Princess, and one was set out on the floor for Órlaith’s inseparable liege knight. But they could all be rolled up for storage in the daytime in the way she was used to. Except for the patterns embroidered on the comforter and some differences in the texture of the fabric it might have come from home; it was exquisitely clean, and smelled very faintly of lavender, which must be included in the padding.

  There was a little stove built into the wall, but they hadn’t bothered with a fire though it was chilly and damp outside. The quilt with its linen cover was quite warm enough; in fact the contrast of cool air outside and warmth within was perfect for rest. Though it would have been perfect if they could have used it to brew some sencha—she missed the way tea helped you center yourself.

  The Rangers seemed to save their lavishness for public things and public occasions, and live rather plainly themselves; they reminded her of an order of warrior monks, save that they had families. From what she’d heard they did have warrior monks here, orders both Christian and Buddhist; there hadn’t been time to enquire more. That was an institution that had been tentatively revived in the homeland, on a small scale and only in the last few years.

  The walls even had racks for swords and stands for armor, bows and quivers, both in use now; this was a barracks, more or less. Her gear had been meticulously cleaned and repaired . . . and then General Egawa had gone over it carefully, testing the new lacing cords . . . and then she’d done the same herself. Someone had even found her replacement arrows of the right length, though they were crafted from the fine cedarwood favored here rather than bamboo.

  The inner wall—the wedge shape of the room was squared off where the point would have been—also had a shelf bearing a few books in a strange script, and a lantern turned down to its lowest, so that it was a very dim blue spot in the dense darkness. More light came through the windows to either side of the door, though it was slight and very diffuse.

  From the ceiling over her bunk hung a banner; she smiled drowsily at it as it stirred a little, pale in the darkness. She’d made it herself.

  Waiting for Órlaith to awaken had been hard. None of them had been sure what the deep sleep had meant. Nobody had dared to wake her when ordinary noise or the jolting of a horse-litter or having her armor removed didn’t.

  There was nothing to do until she woke, after seeing to their wounded and arranging proper cremation for their dead, and the possibility that Órlaith wouldn’t wake at all simply did not bear contemplation. To pass the time when she wasn’t sleeping herself Reiko had asked for cloth and ink and a brush and centered herself by making a banner in the ancient hata-jirushi style, a rectangle meant to be hung from a crossbar with the long side vertical. The device she’d chosen was five overlapping bamboo leaves point-down in a fan and three gentian flowers above, complex enough to be a bit of a challenge. The symbol was also ancient, the mon of the Minamoto clan, and mustering the calm needed to make the strokes smooth and sure had helped.

  She stilled her mind as she grew warm and comfortable and drowsy beneath the comforter; the wine she’d drunk made her more so, and the fact that you did not recover from exhaustion of the sort she’d known in the battle with one night’s sleep, even a long one.

  And remembering how she’d learned the brush had been soothing while she knelt poised with sleeve held back, ready to make a stroke. Recalling long afternoons with her mother and her sisters, with the shoji slid back to show the courtyard garden and give them light, and Mother’s smile when she achieved the poised relaxation needed for a perfect trace. And the memory of her little sister Yoko’s tongue peeping out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated fiercely on the first elementary practice moves . . .

  Then she was asleep. She could tell by the fact that the light was no brighter, but everything was perfectly visible as if by day, down to the way a ruffle of golden hair curled on Órlaith’s brow and how Heuradys’ hand rested lightly on the hilt of her sheathed dagger.

  Reiko was standing, and in her armor again; she turned and tucked her swords through the uwa-obi around her waist and took the banner down, rolling it up and tying the ends before looping it over a shoulder like a bandolier. Somehow she managed to do that without looking at the bed, for she was obscurely unwilling to see her own head upon the pillow.

  Or even worse, not to see it, she thought, in a way that seemed curiously detached from action.

  Órlaith’s great dog twitched and whined in its sleep by the door—it was a little disconcerting to have a dog in your bedchamber, but she had to admit that the huge beast was as formidable a guard as any, and utterly dependable. She paused for an instant and let it resume its slumber. Something told her that unlike a human being it would not be bound by the fact that she was asleep and dreaming, and might take exception.

  I have had these dreams before, she knew and thought. The desert and the castle in it, the creature with eight heads and the Grass-Cutting Sword. And I have seen Kusanagi in the hands of Takero Yamato . . . and for an instant, he saw me. Or my . . . our . . . Ancestress through me. What now?

  The door opened silently beneath her hand. That was more terrible than the dream itself, that her hand could feel the carved wood of the knob against her skin. The guards outside were alert, but neither the samurai nor the Dúnedain roquen stirred as she passed, though one did blink and frown and glance about. There was a lamp high above; experienced warriors wouldn’t have one close, for that would simply kill their night-vision without extending the range of sight.

  Everything was still perfectly clear to her.

  Is this how a cat sees? she thought. Is this how it feels to them, to move invisible through a night-world in which we are blind?

  A dove stood on the railing outside, cocking its head and staring at her. Beyond was blankness, thick fog hiding everything beyond arm’s reach and the canopy of the t
rees and a moonless sky; to her it was as if the world vanished into infinite caves of mist and smoke.

  There was a muffled silence, even the creak and rustle of the trees subdued in the windless stillness, and a low dripping sound as the saturated air condensed and fell, tiny drops touching the skin of her face like a mere memory of rain. The dove bobbed its head, and she realized it was a hato, a type familiar at home but one she’d never seen on these shores.

  Her breath caught as she remembered Who had doves for messengers, and then a warrior stepped from the mist onto the balustrade and down to the walkway. Reiko’s left thumb started to push on the guard of Kotegiri and her right hand move to the hilt. Then she froze, her lips slightly open in astonishment.

  The figure was Japanese—but not of the Japan she knew. Nobody had worn that o-yoroi style of armor, like colorful laced-together curtains of silk and steel hung from the shoulders and breastplate, for a very long time; she had never seen it except in books of history and old prints. Beside it, her own Môgami Dô, inspired by those worn late in the Sengoku, the Age of Battles that preceded the long peace of the Tokugawas, was a thing of yesterday. He—

  No, she, Reiko recognized. That is a woman samurai, an onna-bugeisha. That gear makes it a little harder to see.

  Such were rare but not unknown in her people’s history; several had been very famous.

  —She had a naginata in her hand, a bow and quiver over her back, and a narrow-bladed sharp-curved tachi slung by two ahsi hangers edge-down from her belt in the ancient manner. Her long hair fell past her shoulders, confined by a tenkan with a triangular fretwork ornament over the brows and two red tassels at the sides. The weapons and gear were rich, fine steel and elegant lacquer, and there was the figure of a small silver tiger at the end of the tsuka hilt of the sword gripping with claws and teeth, but it all had the look of well-kept equipment that had seen long hard use.

  The stranger went to her knees with a supple catlike grace and bowed her head to the floor; but to the dove first, and only then turning to make obeisance to Reiko. For a moment the long black fall of her hair swirled about her face.

  Reiko’s eyes went to the bird, but it bobbed again and took wing, circling above the stranger’s head and then vanishing into the mist.

  Perhaps to Hachiman!

  She made the small gesture to the warrior that meant you may rise. Like many minor things of custom that was extremely ancient, and she was obeyed at once. The other was startlingly real when they stood face-to-face, with the onna-bugeisha’s eyes politely lowered and her head a few inches lower than Reiko’s. Perhaps thirty years, perhaps forty, a striking face with the weathered look that came of a life lived mostly out-of-doors. There was a small white slanting scar along her left cheekbone just below the eye, the mark of an unsuccessful yokomen uchi strike where only the very tip of an enemy’s sword had split the skin. Probably that had been the last mistake the wielder ever made. Her hands on the polearm looked narrow and strong and rather battered by time and training and battle. Beads of moisture starred the armor and the other woman’s long hair, just as Reiko felt them settling on herself.

  Perhaps even eerier was the scent. It was clean but strong, the smell of a body that exercised hard and washed often, but long before her people borrowed the use of soap from the Westerners. And wearing armor whose backing and cords no amount of care could entirely free of the faint tang of blood and sweat. That was the way warriors smelled when they set out on campaign—one of her earliest memories was of her father in his armor lifting her for a moment as he left the palace with the horses of the Imperial Guard stamping in the background. He had had that scent as she threw chubby infant arms around his neck, before he handed her back to the nurse and her mother gently chided her as she wiped away the tears.

  Do ghosts have a scent? Reiko thought, with some part of her consciousness that observed from a distance. Am I a ghost here, or is she?

  The stranger’s face had a well-ordered calm; beneath that, Reiko thought, a deep sorrow; and stronger than anything a hard purpose. It was a face she had seen before on those entrusted with a task that must be done even though the doer hated it. She touched her own lips as if to say please do not speak and then turned and leapt back to the balustrade. Then she extended a hand to Reiko.

  It was firm and hard, callused and dry beneath hers; entirely a physical thing.

  A flash of alarm went through her as they stepped off over a gulf of space. Existence whirled, and a cold wind blew. The air grew clear as they descended in a turning, swooping movement like a dream of being a bird—

  That is the southern point of Honshu! she thought in amazement; the view was like one from the fabled aircraft of old, far higher than a tethered balloon. Kanmon-kaikyo, the Straits of Shimonoseki. But where is the bridge? Where are the ruins? This is the land as if it were stripped of the work of human hands.

  There had been cities on both sides before the Change, huge factory works all up the coast of the island along the Inland Sea, and it had been joined to Kyushu by a double-towered bridge over two thousand shaku long, still standing though canted by earthquakes. And an unmistakable black tower to the north itself nearly five hundred shaku tall, topped with a glass globe.

  And the passage is wider, the shores steeper. As if there had been less silting.

  They stooped lower. She had dreamed before of the Brave of Yamato, in the fight where the Grass-Cutting Sword had acquired its name. That was a time so ancient that her vision of it had had the very taste of the immemorial, a time before history and chronicles, the time of legends. Like the smell of green bronze, but completely present, completely concrete.

  The feeling here of a barrier between what she saw and what she was grew lesser, as if the distance she covered was smaller than it had been. The view added to it, familiar and distorted at the same time. If anything it made the blow to heart and mind harder this time. She had stepped into history as well as legend.

  With a chill Reiko saw the tall forest to north and south, and the little villages of thatched wooden houses and their fields that were all that marked the narrowest spot of the sinuous passage. But there were human beings in plenty to be seen as they descended, and ships. Hundreds of them, but tiny, even by the standards of the modern age, much less the era of wonders just before the Change.

  They spiraled through a low-lying cloud, and she grabbed reflexively at the banner slung across her chest as it started to come free of its knot. The fine white fabric blew across her vision, and when it streamed behind her as she held it spread with both hands they were much closer to the surface, descending now as if down a steep stair with something beneath her feet. The air was cool with spring, and full of the salt smell of the sea. And a tinge of smoke; several of the ships were aflame.

  She could see the vessels more clearly now. Small wooden things with square platforms at the bows, and most of them had only one mast, now taken down and bound the length of the vessels. Crude hut-like wooden structures rose at their sterns, and long oars drove them. Closer to the shore were a few larger ships, still modest and with a Chinese look to their lines in her eyes.

  And all were here to make war. Arrows flew in clouds between them; some wallowed in pools of dispersing red, their rowers and warriors bristling with the blizzards of shafts that had swept them. As she watched one ship whose oars beat the water to froth crashed into another, and warriors swarmed across in a storm of shouts and flashing steel. Reiko could hear their voices, the crash of metal, the screams of the wounded, see bodies by the hundreds bobbing in the water amid arrows and oars and broken spear-shafts. The sun was well past noon, and the battle hung in the balance. It had been a long and bloody day, and both sides seemed grimly intent on a fight to the finish.

  Her heart hammered; she knew exactly where and when she was, now, and that she was watching the deeds which had broken the old order of things in Japan and ushered in a new. It w
as the twenty-fourth day of the third month of Genryaku 2, the day that the last dying echo of the Heian age had ended, and the rule of the first of the Barbarian-Subduing Generalissimos had begun. The day that the curtain-walls of the bakufu had first enclosed her people.

  I know this battle!

  One fleet flew a white banner, the other a red. Most of the fighters wore versions of the archaic armor the onna-bugeisha bore, though usually less of it and simpler; many of the rowers had nothing but a fundoshi around their loins and a headband as they heaved at the looms of their oars. Bizarrely, a great pod of dolphins swam through the carnage, until it dived and disappeared beneath the red-bannered fleet. Eyes were turned up to them now, more and more as shouts and pointing spread the news and men tore themselves away from matters of life and death. . . .

  No. Their eyes go to the banner. I do not think they can see me or . . . who I suspect this is, who held my hand. Not clearly at least. The sun would dazzle them too much at this angle.

  The white flag blazoned with the bamboo leaves and gentian flowers billowed again. More hands were raised to point; combat died down as they approached one of the square-bowed ships a little larger than the others. Those about it bore the white banner, but apparently its own had fallen. A few bows aimed hesitantly upward by a warrior’s reflex to strike at anything unfamiliar, but other hands knocked them down. More and more fighters doffed their helmets and dropped to their knees, making obeisance. Shouts rose; some mere incoherent noise, some words.

  The language was Nihongo, not utterly strange like that of Yamato Takeru’s day, but so different from the speech she had been raised with that only parts of it could be grasped amid distance and excitement.

  Hundreds showed raw terror, but that did not include the two at the stern; there was wonder on their faces, but no fear. One was in armor as colorful and elaborate as the warrior-woman; a young man, of her own years or a little more. In his right hand was a gunbai ichiwa, a commander’s solid signal-fan. His helmet was off, and his topknot held his hair clear of his face; this was before the age of the chonmage and the shaved pate.