The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  “Certainly.”

  She seated herself on the bed—it was low, about the height of a general’s folding camp stool—and drew her fan, composing herself when she found her pulse quickening and mouth dry. Breath in, breath out . . . Not so much the prospect of telling what she must, but at reliving it in her mind.

  “Majesty,” Egawa said, going to one knee and giving her the abbreviated field bow. “All is in readiness.”

  “Sit, General,” she said.

  One who knew him as well as she did could see his mild surprise as he sank back on his heels and bowed. As he did, he saw the vacant space above the bed.

  “You have conferred great honor with your gift, Majesty,” he said.

  In their own terms he was right; calligraphy from a member of the Imperial family did convey honor. Especially from the Tenno Heika’s own hand. Japan was less ceremonious than it had been in former times, if only because her people were so few, but that remained true.

  She took a deep breath, watching how the bright beams through the windows lit the bare little room and cast craggy shadows across Egawa’s face.

  “A man dreamed of being a butterfly,” she said. “He woke . . . but perhaps then he was a butterfly that dreamed it was a man.”

  The general’s eyes narrowed; it was a well-known parable and paradox. “Another vision, Majesty?” he said.

  She gestured assent, keeping her gaze straight in front of her. “In a dream, I bestowed a banner. In a dream, a dolphin bore the Grass-Cutting Sword to Ise at my command, lest it be lost. In a dream, an onna-bugeisha was compelled by duty to aid me and through me to aid the man who slew her lord . . . who was his kinsman.”

  Egawa was no fool, and quite knowledgeable. His eyes went back to the bare wall where the banner had been, and his lips moved in a name. She nodded, once, very slightly.

  “I have told you this, General, and I shall tell Captain Ishikawa, because I may not return alive.”

  She made a gesture with her fan before he could speak. “My sisters will continue the line if I do not return. You may not; Captain Ishikawa may not. One of us must. With Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, and with what I have seen.”

  After he had left, she gathered herself, conscious of an incongruous longing for a cup of hot tea.

  “And are we a dream our grandparents dreamed? Or their dream of their ancestors come again?”

  “No.” She tucked her fan back into her sash. “The past makes us, but we are entirely ourselves.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ALBION COVE, BARONY OF MIST HILLS

  (FORMERLY MENDOCINO COUNTY)

  CROWN PROVINCE OF WESTRIA

  (FORMERLY CALIFORNIA)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  JULY/MÆDMONAÞ 20TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

  Deor Godulfson stood and watched his brother ride for home, his huscarles at his back. The lord of Mist Hills turned and waved once more in the saddle, and then there was only the twinkle of the dawn-light on the spearheads as the horses wound up the track eastward into the densely forested hills and disappeared amid green trees and gray-white patches of fog speared by sunlight. There was much to do for Godric Godulfson at home, with war begun, and he hadn’t lingered past breakfast and farewells. From what they’d heard the first troops from the north would be arriving within a month.

  As they turned to look out over the ocean the light of the rising sun just clearing the Coast Range peaks behind them glinted off it, like hammered silver sequins sprinkled over blue-green waves of the cove and the Pacific beyond. Little waves hissed up the sand, and small spindly-legged birds skittered over it amid the litter of wrack and kelp-strands. There was no driftwood; the thrifty folk of the hamlet gathered it all for their fires. He felt a sense of welcoming and farewell, the woven life of the land and people and the wights that watched over rock and hearth.

  Hraefnbeorg and all the farms around it would be a bustle of preparations and mustering and going-over of gear and rolling-out of supplies and twice-baking of biscuit; it was a good thing the harvest was over and the grain stacked. Deor had privately taken his elder brother aside and warned that this was the first move in a very long game, and to pace himself and their folk’s efforts to the long haul. After the last two weeks, and most particularly since he’d roused the Hraefnbeorg men to a peril he alone had seen, he found his brother took his warnings with complete seriousness.

  Which is a little strange in itself. I’m a man grown at last, it seems, and one whose word is a thing of weight.

  “Good of him to offer us land,” he said.

  Thora snorted. “Thanks to us, he got a chance to save the heir to the High Kingdom. He did save her, and right under her eye and her brother’s, too. Oh, and he saved her brother, did I mention that? The heir to the Association, which happens to be the biggest single chunk of the High Kingdom?”

  “Undying fame,” Deor agreed. “He earned that. Lady Fiorbhinn’s Song of Bear and Raven will live forever . . . but I think the Chrysanthemum and the Rose may rival it. That’s the title I picked.”

  “Undying fame my rosy pink undying arse,” Thora said with that Bearkiller bluntness she’d never lost. “Mind, your brother is a brave man and a man of honor and acted like it, even when it meant locking shields and walking towards a line of spears. But he wouldn’t be human now if he didn’t realize that the Princess and the Prince are honorable too . . . which means after this is all over, they’ll think of gifts and rewards.”

  “My brother wouldn’t ask for a return for doing his sworn duty,” Deor protested. “I know he took the death of the High King hard.”

  Though . . .

  Thora put his thought into words: “He won’t have to ask. They understand good lordship, that pair. They’ll just see to it anyway.”

  Deor shrugged and smiled, adjusting the harp-case slung over his back. That was part of good lordship, the quality that made followers eager to serve and stay loyal when it meant going to a hard place. It wasn’t so much that vassals were greedy for reward, as that they wanted to serve those who acknowledged their worth. Sometimes that meant praise, or standing by a subordinate in a lawsuit or quarrel, or something as simple as remembering a birthday; sometimes it meant gold, rank and land, publicly bestowed to confer honor as well.

  “True enough. Still, it was generous of him to make the offer. It’s a lot easier to give land out than to get it back and as the saying goes, the Gods aren’t making any more of it.”

  “Maybe we should take him up on it, when we get back,” Thora said. “I’d like to settle among heathen folk, and that stretch he showed us is good land, the only wealth that’s really real. The brush needs thinning and the vines have to be cut back to the stumps and regrafted and the orchards likewise, but work never bothered me. Good pasture, at least, and Morfind says she can get me the services of stallions from her parents’ stud over at Wolf Hall; they know horses, those two. We could start small with ordinary grade mares, hire a few helpers on shares . . .”

  “A quiet life?” he teased. “For Thora Swiftsword, famed in song?”

  “Famed in your songs, maybe,” she said, and gave him an affectionate punch on the shoulder.

  Then she shrugged, a little defensively. “Mist Hills isn’t as much out of the way as it was that day we first met. We could visit the north every year; in the summer, say. It’s only a few days on a good ship to Newport, and they have a rail connection. And we could travel to the new settlements down on the Bay . . . pardon me, the Côf . . . or over in Napa . . . more often. They’re growing.”

  “There’s good music to be had here now, that’s true,” he said. “Besides mine, that is.”

  He exchanged a glance with her and smiled as they looked out over the bay. They’d met here—on that beach less than a long bowshot to the west, where the boats fr
om the fishing hamlet had put out to take the crew of the battered Ark ashore, just sixteen years ago come this October. And where the Tarshish Queen—her successor as the pride of Feldman & Son’s fleet—was tied up at the new pier today, looking considerably more trim. Of course, the Ark had just survived several thousand miles of a stern-chase with Suluk corsairs who’d been after her all the way from Hawaii, shooting bolts and round shot as they went.

  “Full circle,” he said, all that was needed.

  Until that hour he hadn’t been sure that anything but cannibal savages and raiders nearly as cruel survived anywhere on the earth outside the little land of his birth. And she and her shipmates hadn’t known there were anything but murderous wild-men here, for that matter.

  “The storm was getting worse, and it was cold,” Thora said, her voice a little wistful for that first and freshest venture of an adventurous lifetime. “Damn wet, too.”

  Neither of them thought the brisk wind off the ocean this summer’s day anything but pleasant, though he’d thrown a corner of his cloak over his shoulder, and his dark curls tumbled a little in it. The coast of what had been Mendocino was never actually hot, and right at the water’s edge it made you glad of a jacket and wool wrap many days even in July. No matter how the sun shone and the blue-green waves sparkled, that water out there was cold with the northern current. Rich in life, but not for humans to frolic in. That had been one of the pleasures of the tropic lands for them both, tumbling in the waves like seals.

  Then she chuckled, probably thinking along the same lines: “I’ve never been so bloody glad to set foot on land and eat fish stew, after seriously wondering whether I was going to be drinking Lord Aegir’s salt ale and having dinner in Valhöll or Fólkvangr. Which I hope to do . . . someday . . . a day not very soon.”

  Captain Moishe Feldman caught the last of that as he strode up briskly. “Old friends, I was very sure my father would find some way out of it, even before we saw Deor’s signal fire and thanked Him who spared Jonah. Or at least I was telling myself that I did, and doing so very hard.”

  They both shook the captain’s hand, and the three clapped each other on the shoulder as well. They and the Corvallan skipper were old friends, even if they hadn’t seen each other often enough to be close ones, and they were all much of an age. Deor thought that Feldman also felt a little wistful envy that he would never speak of, for a man who could travel simply for the sake of seeing new things, without the burdens of family and dependents.

  The merchant captain looked around.

  “And hasn’t this changed, and for the better?” Feldman said. “I’d hardly recognize it, if I hadn’t seen it since that day.”

  “Save for the bones of Earth, yes,” Deor said, not without pride at what his folk had wrought.

  The piers of the old-world bridge at their backs across the mouth of the Albion River still reared in a high tangle of rusty steel, though he thought bits and pieces had been cut clear for salvage since then, re-forged for knives and nails and spades and whatever else was needed. There had only been a few lonely fisher-families here sixteen years ago, in the little hamlet on the patch of flats just inland of the bridge. They’d dwelt in cobbled-together shacks that saw outsiders from the rest of Mist Hills perhaps ten times a year, and nothing to the seaward at all. All of it teetering one minor disaster away from collapse, one boat lost to a storm or a bad hearth-fire getting loose.

  Now there were a dozen households; those who plowed the sea, and a smithy of their own and a little boatyard. The houses were comfortable modern ones, fieldstone foundations below and squared logs above, steep turf roofs with chimneys of salvage brick trailing white plumes. The whole was defensible, at least against a casual raid; stout shutters and fences meant the houses could be held in a pinch, hinged slits meant they could support each other against attackers, and there were bows and spears and swords, simple helms and sealskin jacks with metal scales racked inside every door.

  There were also long sheds where fish drying over slow smoky fires added a rich salty-smoky pungency to the salt freshness of the air, and gardens in raised beds fertilized with offal and ash and seaweed, and barns for a few milch-cows and horses who added the usual tang. Big sailcloth tents on spars had sheltered most of their party last night, but the travelers who’d slept in them had taken them down as a courtesy.

  Folk were busy about the work of boats and gardens; even the ten-years-wonder of a visit from the Princess, their own lord, a merchant ship and exotic foreigners all in a few days space didn’t mean idleness for long. Work didn’t wait; it never did. The place was prosperous now in the terms Deor had grown up with, meaning that with a great deal of hard skillful labor and a modicum of luck common folk could have full bellies for their families every day, dry warm beds and enough clothes for their backs that there was one set to wear and one to wash and one carefully kept packed away for festivals, weddings, funerals and holy days.

  “I’ve seen . . . we’ve all seen . . . much worse,” Feldman said, echoing his thought. “Most of the human race lives in places like this, after all. If they’re lucky.”

  He made a waggling gesture with one hand. “Allowing for local details.”

  Chickens and ducks pecked for bugs and slugs amid the rows of mulched beans and tomatoes, lettuce and cabbage and chard. Figures in shapeless stained sea-garb and oilskin hats were calling back and forth as they walked towards their drawn-up boats, carrying long oars over their shoulders and sacks with bread and cheese and cold meat and flasks of beer for their lunches out on the water. By evening they’d be back, with sardines and jack mackerel and Chinook and albacore, and baskets full of spot prawns. As far as seafood went, much of the time they could eat like kings here . . . though even in the usually calm summer season he noticed the long considering looks they gave sea and sky.

  A white-bearded elder who was probably the last here who remembered the world before the Change sat on an upturned barrel and worked on the part of a big net draped across his lap with a coil of hemp cord, a boat-shaped little net shuttle of oak polished smooth as silk by use, gnarled fingers and infinite patience. Toddlers played around his feet with his equally creaky dog helping to keep watch, and a cat stalked by with regal arrogance. Deor could hear the thump of looms and the wet sloshing rhythm of a churn working from the settlement and someone singing to pace their work:

  “Churn churn churn

  This is churning day!

  Til the golden butter comes

  My dasher will not stay.

  Pat pat pat,

  Make it smooth and round,

  Now the golden butter’s done

  Won’t you take a pound—”

  An irregular clanging came from the smith’s forge and then a brief howl from a grindstone, some tool being made or refurbished; he knew how crucial that was, not having to let tasks hang fire while you sent repairs elsewhere.

  A girl not far from womanhood but still barefoot and dressed in a child’s simple calf-length shift herded a clutch of honking geese past them with a wide-eyed glance, then used her switch to keep her charges moving. She blushed and scampered faster when Deor gave her a grin and a deep Court bow, her brown hair fluttering at her shoulders beneath her kerchief and her seax thumping against her thigh. There was a willow-wood flute thrust through her cloth belt, and a wicker basket over her back for the wild onion and sorrel and sea rocket and field mustard she’d pick during the day.

  “That bow from you is something she’ll boast of the rest of her days,” Thora laughed. “After that duet last night.”

  “When I’m given hospitality, I sing,” he said, leaving unspoken that he did it with the same skill whether the hospitality was in a palace or a fisher’s cot. “And she’s actually not bad on that flute, she must have a good ear.”

  “So does he,” she said with a sly grin.

  She nodded to the spot not far away where Pr
ince John waited and spoke with his sister and Reiko, with his left hand on his sword-hilt and the lute-case across his back and his crimson cloak blowing in the wind.

  “A likely lad. And not too young for me,” she said.

  Deor nodded, then raised his brows when she added: “Good breeding stock there.”

  Feldman coughed delicately and looked up at the sky. “Well, I’d better be getting aboard. I’ll see your gear’s stowed; close quarters, I’m afraid, with the horses.”

  “Not the first time I’ve slept in stable-straw, Moishe,” Thora said. “And it’s not for long. I did it all winter once, and it was a cold land.”

  Feldman shook his head. “I told them that there are horses to be had in Topanga,” he said. “They all looked at me as if I’d suggested something very nasty. What do their precious nags have that the ones we could buy there don’t? Besides the ability to take up space and foul the bilges? A horse is a horse.”

  Deor wasn’t sure he was entirely serious. He had yet to meet a Feldman who couldn’t put on bland convincingness at will when they were saying something outrageous. As a guest in Moishe’s home he’d seen the whole family down to the twelve-year-olds do it as a game around the dinner table with the prize going to the last one who started to twitch helplessly.

  Thora laughed and shook her head; she’d bound on a folded kerchief to control her wiry dark-red curls, and a broad-brimmed leather hat hung down her back by its cord.

  “A horse is a horse . . . said the sailor! Packhorses, maybe, but these are steeds for our scouts and mounted archers. You need a teammate and a comrade for that, not a servant. Would any woman do, if it was troublesome to pack your wife along?”

  “No,” Feldman said, grinning back. “Though some sailors think so. But then, I never felt inclined to marry a horse.”

  When they’d laughed and he’d left Deor glanced at the royal party and went on:

  “John is a likely lad, Thora. Handsome, quick and steady with the sword, keen-eyed, no fool—a bit full of himself, but he’s young—and an even better poet and singer than he is a warrior.”