The armor would have to be cached soon anyway. It would be an elaborate form of suicide where they were headed, inland into some of the hottest, driest desert on earth.
“Only here three times?” Órlaith asked the merchant captain. “What do they have to trade?”
Feldman’s eyes narrowed, as if he was opening and leafing through a filing cabinet in his mind, sorting and cataloguing.
“Not much, and that’s the problem. Some good white sea-salt,” he said without hesitation, and pointed with his telescope. “They send most of it inland, though. It might justify someone on a regular run if they had, say, a few hundred tons per year available consistently, but they don’t.”
There was a stretch of drying pans along the shore just westward of the wrecked ship, and the skeletal metal shapes of wind-driven pumps. It looked like a smallish facility and rather haphazardly laid out.
Though probably a basically efficient one, Órlaith thought. For that the sun’s brighter here and it doesn’t rain as much.
“Apart from that, little bits of this and that . . . olives, olive oil, oranges, lemons, dried figs, some fruits like pomegranates that ship well,” he said. “A little merino wool and angora goat-hair. Maryjane and tobacco—both of good quality, according to appraisers I trust; I don’t smoke myself.”
Órlaith made a slight moue. Tobacco was simply filthy, in her opinion, and not many people in Montival used it, which made it expensive and hard to come by. Some did, though, especially in the port cities. She’d tried maryjane, which had a certain following in Corvallis among students and the mildly raffish elsewhere, and just didn’t like the way it made her feel slow and stupid.
“Good-quality raw opium, and there’s always a market for that,” he went on.
Everyone nodded. That was the base for morphine, the main painkiller available in the advanced parts of the modern world, save for ether.
“There’s wine and brandy, but . . .”
He made a grimace; it must be truly dreadful.
“And salvage goods; watchmaker’s tools, convertible machine tools, bicycles, mimeograph machines, manual typewriters, sewing machines, rubber still in the original packaging, optics; occasionally something startling in the way of artwork or gold and silver. But not much of anything at any one time. You’d be surprised how fast a ship can swallow profits if it has to sit at anchor waiting. We leave it to the smaller coasting outfits, and even they don’t touch here very often. I did Crown charters for the relief effort four years back, though. My father sent me, he was already ill then. It just barely paid expenses, and that’s not counting the capital cost of tying the ships up when they could have been doing something more profitable, but—”
He shrugged expressively and raised his hands. “We picked up what we could for the return trip, even salvage brick and marble and roofing tile, just to avoid going back in ballast, and I ended up letting it sit in a vacant lot until I built my new house. We’ve still got some on our hands, even with the way Newport is growing and donating part of it to the Newport Town Hall and the synagogue. The trip was basically a mitzvah, your Highness.”
Mitzvah meant a good deed that pleased God, more or less. Órlaith snapped her fingers as the memory came clear.
“Ah, they had a drought and a bad fire here, and my parents scraped up some relief aid by shamin’ folk into it, I remember hearing of that, though I was out east in the Valley of the Sun just then. At Chenrezi monastery, for the new Abbot’s elevation. Food, cloth, medicines and tools. The good monks and the folk they lead wanted to contribute, but it was too far for provisions so they sent money, of which they are usually short.”
Karl Aylward Mackenzie was standing not far away, leaning on a longbow tucked into a greased-linen bag and looking eagerly towards the shore as the breeze ruffled his flaxen hair on his brow. His long queue swung down his brigandine as he turned his head to speak.
“Aye, Highness. I remember, that I do. Herself went about saying we should remember that the Mother loved all Her children, so do dig deep, lads and lasses, and please Her while you earn threefold return. Lady Maude didn’t exactly make it geasa as Chief and Goddess-on-Earth, but then again, she didn’t exactly not, either, you might say.”
Sir Droyn nodded. “Bishop Anastasius preached a sermon on it in Molalla,” he said, and crossed himself: “I remember it well, because it was at my last Mass at home before I went to court as a squire. He took the lesson from Corinthians: And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could move mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.”
Karl tossed his head in agreement. “Dun Fairfax sent some wheat and barley and bolts of linen from our joint store; to be honest, ’twas the oldest of what we had, though still sound. I helped with the wagons to get it to Sutterdown.”
Órlaith nodded, and thought of the question that would tell them the most of their landfall. “What do they buy, Captain? What is it that they need and desire?”
“Pretty well everything, but they can’t afford much. Tools and instructional books lately, I’ve heard. Must have decided that if they want modern goods they’ll have to make as much as they can themselves. Which is sensible. The coast south of here is an utter wreck or complete desert for a long, long way, and this area just has too much land covered in concrete to amount to much. Pity, because you can see that if it wasn’t covered up some of it would have been very good land indeed.”
Reiko had been looking very still, which with her was a sign she was remembering and organizing her thoughts.
“This Los An-ge-les was a very large city, neh?” she said. “Half the size of Tokyo. Yet some survived, and remained civilized? How?”
Chancellor Ignatius had assembled at least skeletal files on every part of Montival, even the parts that didn’t know they were in the kingdom yet, using everything from explorer’s diaries to merchants to agents in place to tapping into his Church’s parallel network. Órlaith had read them all as part of her education, and gone over the updated ones dealing with the far south of Westria again once she and Reiko determined where they were heading and began to assemble their party.
The reports on this part of the world had made grim reading, even more so than most. And since she bore the Sword she found that facts and figures were more real to her, as if the part of her mind that dealt with them had been given a goose in a sensitive spot, or developed an extra muscle that enabled her to translate them into flesh and blood.
“Water,” she said, and swept her arm from northeast to due south. “Fourteen millions there, and there was another great city about a hundred miles south, millions more, and millions more than that just barely south of there in the realm that was called Mexico. It’s not exactly a desert, not this side of the inner mountains, but then again it’s not very wet either, and the Change came just at the start of the dry season here. All but a little of the water the cities used came in aqueducts from hundreds of miles away, and most of the rest from deep pumped wells. And the day of the Change, it stopped flowing. Or within a day or two at most.”
She’d been speaking Nihongo, since Reiko and her compatriots were the ones least familiar with the story. Reiko winced, and Egawa grunted thoughtfully while she repeated it in English for the rest.
“You can do without food ten or even fourteen days before your body fails, if you must, Lady,” he said then; he’d been easier with her since the fight at Círbann Rómenadrim. “Months, with only a little food now and then; I did that myself once, on a long mission behind enemy lines. But water . . .”
They all nodded when Órlaith translated that too. Water was an entirely different thing; and the symptoms of the lack showed up within a few days at most, less if you were working hard. First raging thirst and a swollen tongue making breathing hard, then savage headaches and cramps and weakness, then raving delirium and h
allucinations, then unconsciousness and death; and you weakened fast enough that moving to find the water became impossible fairly soon.
“So most perished . . . very quickly. The ones moving about were the first to go,” she went on. “What little water there was in pools and such quickly became filthy—the clouds of flies hid the sun, the reports say. So many died so quickly that places on the fringe that did have water could survive, if they also were able to defend themselves for a little while, or even just hide.”
“A little like the Willamette,” Karl said, surprising her; she hadn’t though he was interested in history. “Save that there it was plague in the camps around Salem that was, the folk the first Lord Protector drove out of Portland.”
Órlaith nodded; sometimes the worse was the better. “Topanga was one such refuge, it’s a narrow canyon with year-round springs and streams most years, not too many folk even then, and easily blocked off.”
Everyone was somber and silent for a little while. Most of the time you could think of the time before the Change as something far distant. Seen between the covers of a book, like the German Wars of the last century or the terrible plagues that had swept the Western Hemisphere when outsiders first came, or the Iron Limper’s huge pyramids of heads before that, to be dealt with on the surface of your mind, the part that analyzed and used numbers to make a model of the world.
But now and then it came home to you that an entire world of human-kind had perished in bewildered agony within living memory, hitting you in the guts and the blood. Few of those who’d lived through that time spoke of it much; the ones who babbled obsessively of horrors or hid bread in corners and wept inconsolably when it went moldy mostly hadn’t lived this long, though from what the oldsters said there had been many such in the early years, driven mad or nearly. Not all the damage had been physical.
And the ones who did live through the terrible time didn’t really live it, not the way most did, Órlaith suddenly realized. For the tales are all of how the tale-tellers survived, but the true story of the first Change Years is one of death, not survival. Our parents’ parents were like someone who falls off a sheer cliff a hundred feet high only to hit pine-boughs covered in snow and lives to walk away. Does that not once, but over and over again, all the way down the mountainside to the flats below. So their stories are true . . . but so exceptional they’re misleading, as that lucky plunger would be to the next thousand people who went off the same cliffs, so. It couldn’t be otherwise, for the dead died with their stories untold and unknown, vanishing like mist in the sun.
She shivered a little and rested her palm on the hilt of the Sword, closing her eyes and opening her mind.
There was a singing when she did that, a vast crystalline humming, a sense of lofty unused chambers in her mind, clean and swept and ready for habitation. It made her feel her father’s presence too, somehow: nothing definite, more like a scent or a taste, but unquestionably there. That temptation was one reason she didn’t do it too often. And when she pushed at it as she did now there was a sense of where she was in Montival.
Less knowledge of the sort a map or book might give than a feeling when she asked for it. Oddly, as she moved away from the lands she knew it was stronger, less overlaid with her personal experiences. Here along the coast it was like the scent of sage and fennel, and a feeling of . . . infancy, of people and land not yet fitting together but taking tentative steps. Like a child seeing a dance and moving through a few of the steps.
The dead city inland and southward was a wound, deep and painful but dry and cauterized, an itching keloid scar that only epochs of time could remove. Yet even there sun shone, water fell and trickled, life gnawed, roots burrowed and bit, the very air bound materials a molecule at a time. Like the plates of Earth grinding deep beneath in a world of heat and stress; mills grinding slow, but exceeding fine.
The mountains and desert beyond were more as they should be. Lizards basked, insects scuttled, animals and plants and birds native and not grazed and hunted and bred and sought their own dynamic in a universe of alkali and drought where day was a sword and night was a shield. All like a huge balance swinging, wildly at first as a monstrous pressure was removed, and then more and more gently. Human kind was part of that spare clean hugeness, as wholly as coyote and sidewinder, and with all of it the spirits of place were woven through the world of tangible things and utterly at one with it, matter and otherworld part of a greater pattern that rose up into complexities that even the Sword could only suggest.
Except there, she thought, shuddering. Except there!
When she opened her eyes, Heuradys had moved unobtrusively to shield her in a way that give her as much privacy as was possible on the quarterdeck. Reiko leaned close.
“The shintai?” she murmured; that meant dwelling-place-of-a-spirit, which was as good a description of the Sword of the Lady as any Órlaith had heard. “It spoke?”
“Yes,” Órlaith said equally softly. “You remember what the Yurok shaman said? At Diarmuid’s steading?”
“A good thing in its own place can become bad in the wrong place?” Reiko said; one of the things they had in common was a good memory.
“Oh, yes, very bad indeed. Wild and strong and . . . lost. Trying to shape things as it knows they should be, lost in memories, as if it had dug a hole and jumped in and pulled it after itself. And waiting for us, Reiko-chan. Waiting.”
Then she shook her head and spoke something closer to the truth she had felt:
“No. Waiting for you, Tenno Heika of Dai-Nippon. Waiting for you.”
• • •
“That’s a coaster out of Astoria, I think,” Feldman said thoughtfully, as he belted on his cutlass and settled his round peaked cap prior to going ashore. “Ah, yes, the St. Sebastian the Martyr. One of Andre Langlois’ ships; they’re in the coasting trade. They must have pushed their round this far south, maybe on a speculation. An honest firm but not what you’d call adventurous.”
The leadsman in the bows called out sharply: “By the mark, three! Full fathom three!”
A pause as he hauled up his weight and examined it where beeswax lifted a sample from the bottom.
“Bottom is clear sand and shell!”
“Strike all sail,” Feldman went on in his captain’s voice, brisk and crisp. “Mr. Mate, stand by to drop anchor, bow and stern. This is good holding ground.”
“Aye aye, Cap’n,” the officer replied.
The little harbor had only two real seagoing vessels, besides quite a few fishing boats from single-man rowboats to fair-sized smacks; they were tied up to a rickety-looking wharf built along the inside of the wrecked giant. And looked comically small there, like a child’s toys floating in a bath. Boats piled high with fresh vegetables and produce were putting out even as she watched, and the bosun and a pair of crew with boarding pikes moved to keep them at a distance until they were given permission.
The ship the merchant had pointed out first was a two-masted schooner about half the Tarshish Queen’s size. Feldman tapped his telescope towards another, somewhat larger and a three-master like their own ship.
“That one I don’t know, your Highness, but from her lines . . . see the raised fo’c’s’le? She’s southern, one of the Hispano realms. Brigantine rig, about our displacement but a shorter hull and a broader beam. Two catapults a side and a stern-chaser.”
Órlaith focused her binoculars on the name written in letters of weathered, flaking gold paint around the stern of the three-master.
“Virgen de las Esmeraldas,” she read in español; there was a blue-mantled figure drawn below it with a child in her arms. “Virgin of Esmeraldas, in English.”
“Right. The king there has been encouraging trade lately, mostly by burning out the pirate nests in the Galapagos and not stealing too much himself,” Feldman confirmed. “Palm oil and soap, abaca hemp rope and canvas, cocoa, coffee, raw rubbe
r, cotton cloth and prints, that sort of thing; they’re mostly interested in metals, and in luxury goods they can’t produce like wine and brandy, and in a few things like chronometers. And they build pretty fair ships. Hmmm. From her looks, she took damage, storm or battle. Probably stopped here for water and to refit before heading farther north.”
Órlaith touched the hilt of the Sword again. “Aye, Esmeraldas. Their ruler . . . Rei Hernán I . . . has exchanged letters and envoys with us of late, if not ambassadors.”
Reiko sighed softly and spoke in her own language: “The world is so wide.”
The last of the sails came down; the ship coasted forward another hundred yards in water gone pond-quiet in the lee of the wreck-sandspit. At a sharp command the anchors went down with a rumble and splash, at the head first and then the stern as it swung around. The schooner came to a halt with her side facing the beach after a single sway and bob as the cables went taut. The peaceful-looking bulwark was well within catapult distance of the beach and the straggle of houses and sheds that made a not-quite-town up above the high-tide mark amid the larger crumbled, brush-grown ruins of the ancient world.
None of those was very large, and the newer houses had all been built from their materials. The largest had stucco walls, the smaller were frankly cinderblock or walled with rammed-together rubble bound with clay or simple adobe. She thought the faded red tiles that were the commonest roofing were probably salvage too, but many of the dwellings had colorful flowers about them or growing up the walls in blossoming vine as well as truck-gardens and pens for goats. Several small windmills spoke of tube wells.
“I’ll signal when it’s time for the main party to come ashore,” Feldman said. “Incidentally, there are trebuchets covering most of the harbor—high-angle weapons on turntables. They’re over behind that earth berm planted in scrub—but that’s just a reasonable precaution by the Topangans.”
The Desert and the Blade Page 43