“Talented, you’d say?”
“Yes, but that’s not the point. Talent is cheap, it’s application that makes a scop, or any other maker. He works at it, he doesn’t just make a toy of it. If he wasn’t born to be a ruler, he could be first-class.”
“Well, then, there you are. Nice to know we still have the same tastes in men!”
“But he’s a Prince of the House of Artos, oath-sister. The High King’s son.”
She grinned and raised a brow. “I wasn’t planning on asking him to pledge me handfasting,” she said.
“One poet about the place is more than enough?”
“Odhinn and Freya, yes! And I doubt the PPA wants a pagan warrior-woman fourteen years older than their next Lord Protector in their fine palaces. Can you imagine the Catholic clergy and the ladies in their spired headdresses fainting left and right, or leaping screaming and headlong from the windows of the castle solars? They’d be less horror-struck if he took up with you, brother, far less. I don’t want to fight that many duels!”
He joined in her chuckle at the thought, but shook his head.
“A tumble’s one thing—all you’ll get from me on that score is envy—but a Prince’s get are royal,” he said bluntly. “If begetting’s really what you had in mind, and not just fun.”
“Would it matter? We’re a long way from the Association lands.”
“Not nearly as far as it was in the old days,” he said, throwing her own point back at her. “Also Westria is part of the High Kingdom—and not just in theory anymore. In another twenty years . . . and this may be the heart of the realm, in the end.”
“He’s heir to the Association, not the High Kingdom.”
“Not heir, no . . . as long as his elder sister lives.”
Thora winced and drew the Hammer. “Victory and long life to her!”
“Victory and long life I say too, but neither of us is a Norn, and you’ve seen what a cautious guarded life she lives!”
“She’s a fighter born, that’s true,” Thora admitted with ungrudging admiration. “And a leader. She has the baraka, the shine, the magic that pulls you after her. She went down that hillside in full plate as if she were running towards a feast, not a fight, and we all followed like wedding guests. Agile as a cat, trained to a hair, and quick, quick . . . though her friend the knight is just as good at that part of it.”
“It’s not written in the Well of Wyrd . . . as far as we know . . . that she’ll have heirs of her body, either,” Deor pointed out. “Some don’t, no matter how healthy they are and no matter how hard they try, and nobody can tell why. If she doesn’t, his line inherits the Throne of Montival and the Sword.”
Thora shrugged and he plowed on: “And he’s also the descendant of the Mackenzie chieftains, the Lord Protector and the Spider . . . and your own folk’s first Bear Lord. Do you want to start pulling threads in a web that tangled?”
“Not much of a problem in Mist Hills, if we avoided politics . . . and neither of us ever wanted to play the game of thrones!”
“We don’t. A child of yours . . . and his . . . might, when she was a child no more and developed an itchy foot and a roving eye and felt cramped in the fields she’d known all her life. Oh, that could never happen, not with a child of yours.”
She winced a little at the sarcasm, and he went on: “Or a Court faction might come looking for someone with the right blood to be used as a front for their ambitions.”
“That doesn’t look likely.”
“Not now, but children are hostages to fortune and fate,” he said.
“That’s true whoever their parents are.”
“But more true of some. We’re speaking of a child blood-linked to one of the mightiest realms on earth; one likely to be mightier still in the future. That you or I wouldn’t cross a barnyard to pick a crown falling out of a manger and rolling past our feet doesn’t mean others think the same—you know they don’t.”
She raised the hand that had been resting on the basket hilt of her backsword.
“I hadn’t decided on it; just thinking,” she said. “And it’s not as if we had the leisure for it now anyway.”
He nodded and put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s your decision to make, oath-sister; and I’ll back any you do make, my life long. But think three times.”
“And three times more, and one more for seventh and last,” she said, completing the old Heathen saying, and looked about with a sigh as she squeezed his hand with hers. “It’s not the end of the world here anymore, is it?”
“No. And the sea isn’t the world’s end here either . . . not anymore.”
The ancient road running inland had been repaired and shored up until—unless the weather was very bad—you could drive an oxcart all the way to Hraefnbeorg, rather than the packhorses scrambling around gaps and through streams of his younger days. The sea-harvest went that way and Earth’s grain and fruit and meat the other, and things like barrels of Gowan’s applejack and his own family’s pinot grigio to wait aging in a cellar for the odd coasting merchantman who put in on a speculation. There was even a little open-sided temple now on the bluff above, where the folk met to make sacrifice and feast on the greater festivals, rather than just the altars in each house. Within stood images of Woden and Thunor, Frıg and Sib and some of the others; the carving and coloring were raw and crude, but powerful.
“More gulls than I remember,” he mused.
“More food for them, when the fishers here clean their catch. You can tell how rich a harbor is, by the gulls.”
He nodded. They’d both seen that the world around. There were plenty of the white-and-gray scavengers stalking along the beach with that air of bad-natured beady-eyed suspicion or going by overhead in raucous flocks.
“It’ll be like Portsmouth or Darwin next,” Thora said dryly.
Deor smiled a little sadly himself. The boy who still lived within him was astonished at the growth. The man who’d walked the streets of Portland and Corvallis, Darwin and Zanzibar and Sambalpur saw how it was almost lost in the wooded hills about, eucalyptus and patches of scrub and grass rearing higher inland amid oak and fir and young redwood. A harbor seal not far away gave them a mournful look from its huge liquid eyes and then undulated into the water, unafraid. More of them were sleeking through the shallows; the dwellers of Albion Cove took seal elsewhere in season, but spared them and the otters who frolicked in the kelp forests hereabouts. As an offering to Nerthus in Her aspect as Lady of the Sea, and to the sae-aelfen and the wights.
“It’s time,” he said with a sigh, feeling Thora’s sympathy; he was leaving home again, and earlier than he’d intended.
A chattering bunch of youngsters in kilts went past, the Mackenzies that Órlaith had called to her aid, and they followed them towards the pier. Deor smiled at the sight; he remembered his time in the dúthchas fondly, though Clansfolk on the cusp of adulthood always looked a little younger than their years to him. For all their bows and swords they might have been on their way to a Beltane festival with flowers in their hair and frolic on their minds. He’d done that himself, and enjoyed it.
But then, Lady Juniper seems like a girl sometimes, and she was only a little younger than I am now at the Change, he thought. They’re a more carefree folk than mine, though brave and hardy enough at need for anyone.
One of the Mackenzies looked graver than the rest, though no older; a handsome dark slightly-built young man with the sickle and flowering branch of Goddess Airmed, the Lady as Healer, embroidered on his haversack. That was a craft sign among the Clan as well as simply being the sigil for one of their Gods. Their eyes met for a second, and Deor inclined his head politely.
“Let’s be about it, then,” he said to Thora. “Didn’t think we’d be back aboard a ship so soon, eh?”
She slapped his back. “You left home on a Feldman ship going north with me an
d Moishe,” she said. “Now it’s another, going south. Who knows what we’ll find, eh?”
• • •
“How is the ship, Captain?” Egawa Noboru asked.
He absently ran his hand over the freshly-shaven pate of his head, back towards the topknot, and blinked out at the sea where the last stars were fading in the west as the dawn cast long shadows before them. There was a twinge, but the wound he had taken to keep the knife from his Tenno was paining him less and less. It had been functional for some time, which was the crucial thing. Battle scars were a mark of honor, but that one more than most.
I failed in my most basic duty that day, when Saisei Tenno died; though it was at his express order that I stayed by his daughter’s side and not his. This wound shows that I also succeeded. This pain bears witness. And she is his true and worthy heir. When Prince Yoshihito’s ship was lost many despaired; but I never did. Not for a moment.
With a stark inner grin he reflected on how much faster the hand would have healed when he was the Majesty’s age. Now it would probably give him a little trouble for the rest of his life, when the hand was cold or he was very tired. The various aches of battle, minor wounds, and fast travel by horse were more painful than they would have been back then too, of course. It did not matter; his body would serve his will, and his will would serve the Heavenly Sovereign Majesty and the Land of the Gods as long as necessary.
“The vessel is fully serviceable, Egawa-sama,” Ishikawa Goru said.
He preferred Lord Egawa to General, coming from the naval service as he did. Both were equally respectful, though Egawa sometimes thought that interservice rivalry in a military as small as the modern Empire’s was more trouble than the gain in esprit was worth.
“The pumps appear to be active,” Egawa said.
He indicated the Tarshish Queen with a slight jerk of his chin, where it was moored to the little jetty; twin pulsing jets of water arched out into the calm surface of the small bay on the seaward side.
“They are pumping out the drinking water, Lord General, and replacing it with fresh; there is a hose and piping from a spring on that hill running out to the dock. Very good spring water from the bare rock, and it takes little time or labor, so one might as well replace old with new.”
Egawa grunted, hiding his approval. It was the sort of meticulous precaution that appealed to him; so was the attention to detail on Ishikawa’s part that had made him check things like the quality of the local water supply even though they’d arrived fairly late yesterday.
“Good to be back within sight of the sea!” Ishikawa went on, taking a deep breath.
Egawa nodded; he’d spent more time away from the smell of salt-water since arriving on these shores than he had in the whole of his life before, and the iodine tang and the familiar smell of drying fish from the racks around the little fishing village were reassuringly homelike. Though every detail was different, from the construction of the houses to the names they gave their local kami to the boney horse-like faces of the people, if you stepped back and let your eyes slide out of focus a little it was not so very different from a fishing village at home.
He longed for Japan, but this place made him less conscious of it than he had been in the eerie settlement in the air among the giant trees. Though his youngest child, his daughter Emiko, would have been entranced; she loved stories of the spirits, and was never happier than when she was allowed to help in offering flowers and water to the mirror on the family’s kamidana altar with her parents on either hand to guide her small chubby hands.
The Tarshish Queen looked to be in good order as it floated at anchor here in what the gaijin of Montival called Albion Cove, in the lee of a little island a hundred yards from the shore. But though Egawa was familiar enough with ships and their ways—you couldn’t be a soldier in Japan nowadays without spending a good deal of time at sea—he wasn’t the expert that Captain Ishikawa Goru was. The Imperial Navy officer was young, just thirty, but the former Majesty had picked well when he chose him. Also he’d gone over the Tarshish Queen from keel to maintop in Newport, making a most meticulous inspection before they sailed.
“Battle damage?” Egawa said.
He could see patches in the antiflame sheathing and newish-looking bits of wood here and there, and he’d caught glimpses of the naval action in the Bay during their hilltop battle ashore with all the ships battering at one another. Including, happily, the ultimate sight of the bakachon vessel disintegrating into burning splinters under a hail of heavy round shot and flame-shells.
Ishikawa’s handsome young face smiled slightly as he bowed. He was probably thinking of the same sweet sight.
“Some damage, yes, Egawa-sama,” he said cheerfully and pointed to her bows.
“But mostly minor, only one serious strike. They took a nasty hit at the starboard bow towards the waterline; they tell me it was from the stern-chaser of one of the pirates. That stove some planking and cracked a rib, but it has been repaired well. Very well, for temporary work done at sea. It would hold even in a bad storm, I think, much less for the short voyage we face, though of course shipyard repairs will be necessary eventually, scarfing in a new timber. And I think replacing one hanging knee. A sound ship. I look forward to commanding her sister, though I miss the Red Dragon—she and I knew each other’s ways. Well, she died valiantly, and what more can one hope for, neh?”
Egawa grunted thoughtfully. A ship built to the same drawings as this one had been just down the ways and ready to fit out as they left Newport. It was about the same size as their lost Red Dragon, about ten parts in a hundred larger, and under differences of detail about as well-armed. The Montivallan princess had negotiated with the merchant house who owned both and secured her for the Tenno; she ought to be fully equipped when they needed her, and with Ishikawa’s sailors and the Guard samurai to help under their direction they could return to Japan . . . if their casualties weren’t too high before then and they didn’t have to fight seriously at sea.
All depends on circumstances. Still, I would prefer a larger crew even if we must ship foreigners. And an escort would be welcome. What we bear is precious, even apart from the treasure we seek. I was right when I thought that the seeds of greatness were in the heir; now they have begun to flower.
A little grudgingly he admitted: “That ship will be a generous gift, if we live to receive it. Even allowing for how large this gaijin kingdom is.”
The Imperial Navy struggled to keep up the number of its keels, between the constant grind of operations and shortages of everything starting with labor. War used things up and wore them out; that was its nature. The new ship would prevent a hole opening up that would be difficult to plug.
“Hai, honto desu, Egawa-sama,” Ishikawa said. “Very true, Lord Egawa.”
Then he sighed a little. “Though greedy as it seems, I would rather have that frigate! Magnificent! Like a great tiger gone to sea. A perfect ship . . . if only she were flying the Hinomaru.”
“So would I, if we had the men to sail her, Captain,” Egawa agreed.
This time his tone was one of suppressed envy, at the thought of a fleet of such craft bearing the red-rayed sun on white. Japan didn’t have specialist warships yet; the IJN was made up of armed transports able to carry cargo, or troops into an assault, or to fight at sea. The biggest were closely equivalent to this trading vessel. Which was equipped to trade through pirate-infested seas, and in lands where the inhabitants killed and robbed by preference and traded when they were looking down the business end of a catapult and the point of a boarding pike.
The bakachon had nothing better; not as good, in fact, though more numerous. Numbers were Japan’s great problem; the enemy outnumbered them three or four to one, and past a certain point quantity had a quality all its own.
If the jinnikukaburi were not always fighting the Mongols in Manchuria as well as us, things would be . . . very
difficult, he thought.
He didn’t want to say hopeless even in the privacy of his own mind.
We need peace! Several generations of it, at least. More people, more rice land, more of everything. Then we would be on a sound footing. In numbers is survival. As it is, our Tenno has put it very well: the existence of our people balances on the edge of a blade—a blade we here hold in our hands. An honor, yes, but a terrifying one.
He looked north. “That jinnikukaburi ship they told us of came ashore not far from here,” he said thoughtfully.
“Yes, lord General. I rose early and borrowed a horse and guide. Definitely one of theirs; it grounded and broke its back. The enemy thoroughly stripped it before they left overland, though. The scale of this country is daunting—you would discover outsiders only by accident or if they were very careless.”
“How many enemy ships does that leave?” Egawa asked.
“There were a dozen in the flotilla that pursued us from the homeland,” Ishikawa said.
They shared a glance. It had been highly suspicious that such a strong squadron—twelve ships was a substantial portion of the enemy’s navy—would have been waiting to intercept them as they made the passage up the west coast of Honshu. They’d had to run all the way north of Hokkaido before they could turn east across the Pacific, up to the latitudes of ice and fog and endless storm in the cold Kamchatka seas and then down the Aleutian chain. Though Ishikawa had insisted that was the best tactical choice anyway, given that their ship was better-found than the enemy vessels.
The sailor went on:
“So sorry, Lord Egawa, but it is impossible to say precisely. Counting the one that burned in the great bay south of here while we fought, we know that seven are definitely sunk. I am morally certain that at least two more foundered in the storms. Perhaps all of them—but . . .”
“But it would not do to be over-optimistic,” Egawa agreed. Then, slowly: “The Heavenly Sovereign Majesty informed you of her . . . her vision?”
The Desert and the Blade Page 41