He didn’t know precisely what to call it. From what the Majesty had said, it had been more than seeing, if not quite participating. Perhaps haunting would be closest, though the thought of the living haunting the dead was . . . disturbing.
“Hai,” Ishikawa said; he was usually cheerful and rather brash, but now he looked somber enough. “Dan-no-ura!”
“Hai,” Egawa said; there was a breadth of meaning in the simple word.
The last great battle of the Genpei War, a struggle whose name and outcome had echoed down the history of Nippon ever since. He could well remember how his father had told him and his brothers the story, in the long nights when winter storms threw chill rain and sleet against the walls of their house and they sat with little covered braziers beneath their robes.
Ishikawa hesitated, then blurted: “The Majesty seems . . . different, Lord Egawa. Since we departed southward from Newport.”
He fixed the younger man with a beady stare. “Different? How?”
Ishikawa ducked his head, drew in a breath and licked his lips before he continued: “The Majesty was always firm and decisive. But now . . . now it seems more . . . effortless, neh? As if the burden is less. She is . . . one feels as if one has caught fire in her presence. As if . . . as if one could do more, accomplish more—one’s own will tempered and wits made keener.”
Egawa’s face relaxed, or at least as much as it ever did. “Unquestionably true. The Heavenly Sovereign One is still very young for such responsibilities, which would bow the strongest shoulders. I was among those who saw to her education and I always saw the potential . . . but now we see the flowering of it.”
“Yes, unquestionably. Let those who thought a woman could not truly rule in her own right only look at the Majesty!”
Egawa grunted again; he preferred to think of her as an exception, made possible by the divine blood which flowed in her veins. To be Tenno was a thing utterly singular in any case. Ishikawa went on:
“How her example heartened all on the voyage here—who would dare complain when hunger and cold and thirst and danger were as nothing to her? Her conduct with the Montivallans has won us great advantage, and she was truly magnificent in the battle.”
A shadow passed over his face. “And . . . the visions both she and the former Majesty have had. I cannot believe that she is otherwise than the very voice and hand of the Great Kami, stretched out to counsel and protect Their people.”
“Extraordinary, neh?” Egawa said, with dry understatement.
Ishikawa brightened, taking his words more at face value than he had intended. “We live in extraordinary times, lord! A terrible, terrible loss that Saisei Tenno fell, of course; we will all mourn the Majesty for the rest of our lives. Yet when—”
His voice stumbled ever-so-slightly as he forced himself not to say if.
“—we return . . . with a strong alliance, and the great treasure we sought . . . and now that we know how completely true the former Majesty’s visions of its importance to our country were . . . well, our names will live as do those of the heroes of Dan-no-ura itself!”
“Hopefully, not the way the names of the Taira live,” Egawa said dryly, deflating the younger man’s enthusiasm a little.
To himself: Though that may be optimism in itself. If we fail, there will be nobody to read epics in Japanese. Still, better that I must work at restraining a noble stallion than prodding a reluctant ox.
Ishikawa laughed. Perhaps dutifully; a superior’s jest was always funny, and Egawa’s humor was rare enough anyway.
“I would very much like to see a squadron of those frigates crushing the enemy fleet,” he said. “Then we could land and sweep the whole realm of the akuma sorcerer kings with the sword and cleansing fire. Avenge our dead and rid us of those filth forever.”
Egawa nodded, his left hand clenching unconsciously on the scabbard of his sword and the thumb pressing ever so slightly on the guard as images of a sky ablaze from horizon to horizon lit his mind for an instant. His lips curled slightly back from his teeth.
“We would need troops as well as naval help for that, even if the enemy are engaged elsewhere at the same time.”
He forced himself to think dispassionately; it was hard, hard. Then he went on more slowly:
“Though I would be satisfied to see Korea made harmless to us,” he said. “I would not want to have to conquer it. And to rule it . . . still less.”
“Hai, lord Egawa.” Ishikawa ventured a small joke of his own. “It is full of chon cannibals, after all.”
Egawa shrugged with a clatter of armor. “Even if we beat them in the field and pursued a Three All policy to its conclusion—
Which meant a policy of burn all, kill all, destroy all; it was an old saying.
“—then we would have to garrison the empty land or the Han or the Mongols would take it without even a native population to give them problems, and be on our doorstep. Which would be a great improvement over what we have at present, but still a problem in the long term. And there are rumors of a Russki kingdom in the Amur valley; we know far too little of that.”
“We might settle the land ourselves,” Ishikawa said, though there was doubt in his voice.
“No. Too many angry ghosts; more, if we laid it waste. Conquests on the mainland have never gone well for us, not in the long run—despite the fact that we tried even before Heian. The islands south of Japan, I think that is where we may look for gains after the bakachon have been thrown down. We are not a people suited to continents. Islands are our karma. Islands, and the sea.”
“Yes, this is wisdom, lord Egawa,” Ishikawa said respectfully, bowing. “Turning their backs on the sea is the great mistake the Tokugawa made, when all the Asian oceans could have been ours, Taiwan, Hainan, Luzon. You may know I myself was second-in-command of the survey mission to Taiwan several years ago? Virtually empty in the western plain, and much good rice land. Less of the farmland is ruined by ancient buildings and roads and other works than is the case with Honshu or the other Home Islands except for Hokkaido where the climate is so cold. It would be a valuable addition if we managed to take and settle it before the Shina return.”
“Just so, and it is an old possession of ours from before the great war of the last century, rightly part of Dai-Nippon. Well, enough daydreaming of the fruits of victory before we have cut our foes down. Let us be about the work of the day, Captain. The prize is before us, and the enemy will not be idle.”
The captain bowed again. They walked towards the pier and the Imperial Guard and the sailors fell in behind them. Obviously dreams of glory were still in the forefront of Ishikawa’s mind, though; perhaps he saw himself as a viceroy, ruling han fiefs of his own from a castle-town, perhaps as an admiral of fleets sweeping southward. Egawa was inclined to be tolerant there. That was appropriate for a young warrior. His older sons were the same, under the stern self-discipline he had passed down from his own father, eager for accomplishment and distinction in the Tenno Heika’s service.
Only someone who knew the Imperial Guard commander well would have known that he was smiling.
At the thought of two broad-shouldered young men named Takayoshi and Kogoro, and a stripling of promise called Ryoma. Of an infant resting in a daughter-in-law’s arms. And at the memory of a formidable tart-tongued middle-aged woman named Haruko, smiling herself, as she showed a little girl how to loft an eagle-shaped kite on a windy hillside.
With the last cherry blossoms blowing down the slope and settling like pink jewels in the blackness of their mingled hair.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY OF TOPANGA
(FORMERLY TOPANGA CANYON)
CROWN PROVINCE OF WESTRIA
(FORMERLY CALIFORNIA)
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
JULY/FUMIZUKI/CERWETH 24TH
“This is my first visit here too, Reiko-chan,” Órlaith said. “We’re just now making even the Bay area really part of the Realm, and it’s a process far from finished.”
“As we found, Órlaith-chan. Some of the people we met objected to the process of integration.” Reiko said dryly, her face calm. “Strenuously objected. Forcefully, even.”
Then both of them chuckled, and Órlaith went on:
“Hai, honto desu ne! Here we of House Artos haven’t even really started.”
The Santa Monica Mountains stood blue and beautiful to their north as they approached; the coastline of Westria turned east-west here for a stretch, before resuming its southward slant. There were ruins in sight as well, but mostly small and much worn by time and often covered by the rampant plantings that had once surrounded them. In a new place you saw the old world’s leavings more, with less of the filter that mentally removed or diminished them on your own home ground. There was very little low land; a bluff stood inland from the beach, and beyond that the ground rose steeply into tumbled vastness.
Less comely was the long form of a rusted hulk, a monster ship of the ancient world that had come ashore long ago, probably not long after the Change itself, just a little westward of where the old Topanga Canyon Boulevard intersected the Coast Road.
How long ago that was showed in the bulk of sand on its northwestern side as well as the gaping rust-holes and the massive white streaks of guano from nesting seabirds. Together they made a new spit extending hundreds of yards out into the ocean in a curve of white where the longshore drift and winter storms had piled it. Cargo containers that had once turned the ship into a hill of goods had been pushed off to make an interlocking tangle in the sandspit and catch still more of the drift in a way that absorbed the blows of winter storms.
“Those are interesting hills inland,” Reiko said, shading her eyes with her tessen. “More . . . wholly unfamiliar to me than those in the north, or even where we fought the battle. We have left the lands of . . . of green mountains with tall trees behind, neh? I must readjust my expectations. That a landscape does not deliver what my eyes expect does not make it hideous, simply . . . different.”
It’s a smart girl you are, Reiko-chan, Órlaith thought affectionately, and raised her binoculars. I have to trot to keep up with you betimes.
A few slender trails of smoke rose from the narrow strip of ruins and flat ground along the shore, and a few more inland—perhaps hearths or forges, perhaps small wildfires in this dry summer season. Winter was the wettest time all along the coast of Montival, but summer drought became more and more pronounced as you went south and by the time you got hereabouts it was near-absolute.
Closer and you could see how narrow canyon-valleys ate their way backward into the low bulk of the mountains, and the olive-gray-green of the tough twisted chaparral which covered much of them. Taller trees—slim spearpoint cypress, blue-tinted eucalyptus, stone and umbrella pine, smallish oaks—stood out where something caught a little more water and soil. Here and there were rows of silvery-green olives snaking across the slopes, or a patch of vineyard or small grove of figs.
“Reminds me of pictures of Greece,” Heuradys said thoughtfully. “Mom Two . . . Lady d’Ath . . . got a lot of them, after she decided to follow Athana, and I always liked them. Maybe that was one reason why She ended up as my patron too. The Gods know what Greece looks like now, of course.”
“God and the Chancellor,” Órlaith said. “He gets the Badia reports.”
Badia was an old monastery in the hills of Umbria where the Catholic Church was now headquartered; that was what the word meant, in fact. The Vatican was tumbled ruins in the larger ruins of Rome.
“Ah, but that’s political stuff, Orrey. It’s interesting to know that Rhodes threw out the Venetians and joined the Hellenic League, but that doesn’t say how it looks. Which I’d like to know, being sort of an honorary Hellene.”
“You are?” Reiko asked, raising her brows.
“Well, since I worship the Olympians and they come from that part of the world. Though they’re Christians there now as far as I know. Still, I was rooting for the League.”
John grinned at Feldman. “Were you for the Venetians, Captain?” he said. “Corvallis being our foremost mercantile city-state.”
He snorted. “Some of the history department are, but no, Your Highness, I wasn’t. Renaissance Italy was an interesting period but not what you’d call a Golden Age for Jews.”
Reiko sighed. “We know so little of the outside world in Japan!”
“Well, we’ll change that after the war . . . granted, that will take quite some time, I’d say. The more I learn, the bigger the job looks, so to say. But then Montival and Dai-Nippon will hold the North Pacific as allies, each powerful in its sphere. There’s no reason Japan shouldn’t become a great naval and trading nation again, in touch with all the world.”
The Japanese all nodded, polite small gestures with a fierce eager agreement within that Órlaith could see . . . or perhaps that the Sword of the Lady conveyed.
Near the shore a tall flagpost bore a banner with some sort of botanical theme; Órlaith turned her field glasses and made out a fan-shaped spray of five saw-edged leaves, pointed ovals in dark green on a yellow field edged with black. A familiar bright blink about its base must be spearheads.
“That banner is a little like the house kamon of the Minamoto,” Reiko said. “Though without the three flowers above, and I do not think those are bamboo leaves. Odd.”
Feldman ordered sail struck and they ghosted in on the mizzen gaff and forestaysail alone; the wind was from the north, carrying the drier dustier land-smell, and the deck heeled like a shallow roof as the Tarshish Queen sailed reach across it. The morning was almost painfully bright, the sun beating down from a cloudless sky, and little whitecaps topped the waves as they cut across them with a corkscrew motion that had a few of the landsmen hanging over the leeward rail giving their breakfast back. Spray burst backward along the deck like jewels.
“It’s my third trip here, Majesty, Your Highness,” Feldman said. “It’s not a major port, to put it mildly. Barely even a minor one, though the approach is straightforward. If it weren’t for the way that wreck protects a bit of the shore in its lee you couldn’t put in here at all, you’d have to anchor in an open roadway and barge things back and forth and pray for good weather . . . well, harder than sailors always do.”
“I wonder what was in it?” Órlaith asked, looking at the huge wreck; the idea of something like that floating seemed absurd, though she knew it had.
If it was clothes or tools, it would be a treasure-house.
Feldman grinned sourly. “I asked, your Highness. Television sets, radios, some things called CD players, and electronic clocks. From Korea, oddly enough.”
Reiko frowned slightly; she was in traveling garb today, the pleated divided skirt or very loose trousers that her folk called hakama, belted on over a short hakama-shita kimono, both of a medium grayish blue; garb worn by men in modern Japan, or by women when they did something more than ordinarily active, but upper-class women’s riding dress in the Association lands.
The which gave us both a quiet joke when her samurai discovered they all looked like cross-dressers imitating noblewomen out for a ride. Mind, for those who like to wear the other sex’s clothes, the PPA is paradise, the garb being so different for men and women.
She’d never seen the point, herself; she just wore what she liked or what was convenient or bowed to local custom out of courtesy or political calculation. Heuradys did the same, only with an elevated finger to custom. But the Goddess made individuals each in their own way.
In the Mackenzie dúthchas, they’re out of luck—a kilt is a kilt! And men and women even wear their hair much the same way. Ah, well, Montival is a broad land, and varied. There’s always s
omeplace to suit any taste.
Reiko’s swords were thrust through her sash; she wore socks that divided to make a separate pocket for the big toe, and stout sandals with soles cut from tires, a marker of high status in Nippon as it was here. Pre-Change rubber that had not grown brittle and cracked grew scarcer every year. A curious straw hat like the gently curved top of a mushroom sheltered her face, secured with broad soft silk cords tied about the chin in a complex knot.
Órlaith was in civil garb as well, kilt and sock-hose and ankle-boots, loose saffron-dyed lèine shirt gathered with drawstrings at the wrists, plaid pinned at the shoulder with a knotwork broach of silver and turquoise, and Scots bonnet with a spray of Golden Eagle feathers in the badge of House Artos.
John was peacocking in his polished suit of chrome-steel plate and plumed helm, and Heuradys and Droyn and the men-at-arms were in full harness as well with their shields across their backs; Egawa and his samurai were in full fig too, down to the banners in holders on their backs. Egawa looked just as unhappy as Droyn about their lieges’ choice not to don armor, though Heuradys had simply sighed and given her a speaking look.
Órlaith was fairly sure the reasoning was sound, though; they wanted to look impressive without looking like a storming party coming ashore ready to sack and burn. That was also why she’d made sure that the portlids of the Tarshish Queen’s broadside would stay closed, and the bow and stern-chasers would remain pointed fore-and-aft. Though both sets would be loaded and cocked.
Without false modesty she knew she was fairly striking . . . and she bore the Sword of the Lady.
These lands were part of Montival . . . in theory. The theory was much more tenuously connected to reality here than it was farther north. Civil garb would also probably be much more comfortable, though that mattered little if she was making a mistake, of course; arrows and sword-cuts were very uncomfortable indeed. Still, though the sea-breeze was no more than pleasantly summery, the feel of the sun on her hands and face hinted that it would get very warm indeed once they were far enough inland to block it. This was a long way south of the Willamette.
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