The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  “And sending Karl ashore with you is a reasonable precaution for us,” Órlaith said; the captain hadn’t wanted it. “Also he’s a friendly sort and folk like him, which might help.”

  “And I’ll take some men-at-arms ashore when Captain Feldman reports things ready, and then signal for you once we’ve secured a perimeter, Your Highness,” Sir Droyn said with implacable politeness.

  “Perhaps it would be best if I also followed with some of the Imperial guard before you landed, Majesty,” Egawa said, almost treading on the end of the knight’s sentence. “For the sake of symmetry.”

  The young Montivallan knight and the grizzled samurai looked at each other in momentary surprise; Droyn wouldn’t have followed the Japanese, but it was obvious they were saying the same thing for the same reason. The two young women glanced at each other with a shared smile; behind them Heuradys d’Ath looked at Droyn and nodded soberly.

  “The biter bit! You can only override your guardians every so often,” Órlaith said in resignation.

  Feldman was politely impassive as he called: “Mr. Radavindraban! You have the deck!” and turned to the boats on the davits, stepping in with casual agility.

  On shore they had been stirring and pointing as the newcomer dropped anchor. Órlaith looked at the higher ground inland and nodded to herself as she caught the winking of light off something polished—at a guess, it would be a telescope or pair of field glasses. Doubtless messengers were scurrying and Morse code was being flashed by mirrors. She hoped it wouldn’t take too long to locate what passed for authorities here, and waited quietly with a hunter’s patience while the two big longboats were crewed and lowered, pushed off from the side of the boat and rowed up to the sand.

  The warriors jumped free and deployed in a smooth disciplined movement that left them drawn up in ranks while the sailors made fast . . . though not pulling the boats up far enough that they couldn’t embark again quickly. They were double-ended whaleboats and could switch directions instantly, for precisely this sort of situation.

  The onlookers ashore had surged back at the show of martial force, then hesitated when everyone stopped. One of Karl’s archers walked forward with a white rag on the end of her unstrung bow, waving it back and forth and shouting encouragingly. The watchers were obviously just the inhabitants, none armed beyond the casual blade at belt or odd spear you’d expect anywhere strangers might arrive, but one—a youth, she thought—went inland with flying heels, and it wasn’t very long before a larger body came down to the water.

  Not in any precise order, but moving close together, and one carried a long metal pole with the same botanical flag.

  “I don’t think they’re of a very decisive type, here,” Órlaith sighed, as conversation began; not just between the newcomers and the locals but among the locals themselves, accompanied by frequent gestures.

  The bosun had let the bumboats approach after Feldman’s first mate looked them over with a pawky eye for possible treachery. Heuradys went to the side, flipped a coin down and came back with a stalk of six-inch yellow fruits that Órlaith recognized after a second as bananas. An instant later she realized that that was their name in Nihongo too . . . with an added hard-to-define feeling that the word wasn’t much used there in modern times. She’d eaten them only three times in all her years herself, but she remembered how to peel the brown-spotted yellow covering back. Reiko watched and copied her, and then her eyes went a little wider at the taste.

  “That is most excellent!” she said after a moment. “So smooth and sweet, like apples and plums together! I suppose it is too cold in Nihon to grow these. I have seen their pictures in books.”

  “Just barely warm enough here in a sheltered spot, Heika, and they must water them a great deal,” First Mate Radavindraban said with a bow. “They don’t ship well, alas.”

  He sighed, then smiled brilliantly when Heuradys handed him one. “My thanks, lady! Very common where I was born, yes indeed.”

  Órlaith tossed the skin into a basket; she thought they’d probably appeal to the horses. An occasional neigh came from below, now that they’d scented land and were making it very plain they wanted out of this cramped uncanny place where the ground moved. Heuradys had waited until her liege’s hands were free before having one herself, and she did it dexterously left-handed.

  Ashore, the talking was going on. Órlaith sighed, and looked over her shoulder. The green-blue waters of the Mother Ocean were empty except for a few little fishing craft with single lugsails. Nothing else . . . for example, no sign of the tall masts of RMN Stormrider beating down hell-bent to enforce the will of the High Queen.

  Not yet, she thought, and then aloud: “Not decisive at all.”

  “You want me to get ashore and goose them?” Heuradys asked, her voice carefully neutral.

  Reiko raised a brow. “I think I have finally mastered English,” she said. “That is a ‘don’t tell me to do that’ question that is not a question, is it not, Heuradys-gozen?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of telling my liege that,” Heuradys said, then felt at her nose as if it had grown.

  Reiko didn’t see the reference to the classic children’s story, though she chuckled when the knight explained it. Órlaith sighed again; Herry had never been shy about telling her when she was screwing up, though she was more tactful about it in public than she had been when they were little girls together.

  “No, I’ve told my people what to do. They’re out there getting things ready for us. We’ll let them go and do it.”

  • • •

  The crew lofted and racked their oars and leapt out of the longboat as soon as the keel grated on sand, pushing it a little farther while they stood knee-deep. Not as far as they might, though: he’d warned them to keep it ready to float quickly, just in case.

  Moishe Feldman waited until the probably-unnecessary and possibly-unwelcome archers deployed and then stepped ashore, up to the gunwale and then off the prow and down on sand that was only damp rather than washed by the low combers that hissed across behind him, as suited a captain’s dignity. He smiled to himself as he did; there was always a little bit of a thrill to that, a hint of new things and a wider world as his boots hit the shore.

  The tide was on its way out, and there was the usual litter of wrack—strands of seaweed, bits and pieces of shellfish, here and there some driftwood, with the odd pair of gulls quarreling over a titbit. Small fishing boats were drawn up higher, often chained to posts driven deep, and mostly pre-Change hulls of aluminum and fiberglass; this area was seriously short of timber for anything more modern. Nets dried on stakes, some with plastic-jug floats still attached, and several score people were about their business. There was a strong smell of fish—fish drying, fish smoking, fish and offal just plain decaying amid a pile of empty shells that buzzed with flies. Skinny-looking mongrels danced and barked, baring their teeth at the Mackenzie greathounds until various owners arrived and dragged them away by their collars and ruffs. The unclaimed ones decided discretion was the better part of valor when someone shied a pebble that thumped into a narrow rump.

  “By God I’m glad I sail out of Newport!” someone in the boat’s crew muttered; Feldman didn’t rebuke them.

  Mainly because nobody local was close enough to hear, but also because he thoroughly agreed. Newport was Corvallis’ window on the Pacific, with a rail link to the city-state’s territories in the Willamette, a thriving and growing little city in its own right, a place of traders, deep-sea fishers, seafarers, shipyards and all their ancillary crafts. A place that regularly saw craft from all over the Pacific basin and as far away as Europe and Africa. This sleepy little sandspit . . .

  Though I’ve seen far, far worse.

  The old coast road, roughly patched here and there, ran along the base of the bluffs inland; a new-made branch in plain rutted sandy dirt with some gravel thrown on top ran to the wharf in t
he lee of the ancient wreck, and a pair of oxcarts were moving along it in opposite directions but similarly piled high with barrels, bundles and crates, two-wheeled things made from the axle of an ancient car with a wooden superstructure and larger wooden wheels on the old hubs. Each pair of oxen trudged stolidly with the driver walking beside, leaning into the yokes.

  He was the business of the party who marched towards him with armed youths at their backs after one of the pagan archers went forward and waved a handkerchief on the end of her bow.

  “Top of the mornin’ to ye, yer honors!” she called cheerfully. “And would you be coming to parlay, the now? A hundred thousand welcomes!”

  Moishe had backing too—the two Dúnedain, Susan Mika, the Mackenzie contingent and six sailors with cutlass and crossbow. All trying their best to look tough—which they were and which they appeared—and friendly and unmenacing at the same time. Unlike many places where he’d leapt from the longboat to the shore he was fairly sure nobody here intended violence, which as a man of peace and trade he thoroughly approved.

  That didn’t make it absolutely certain there wouldn’t be any, of course; there had been places where peace and trade required thumping. And from the number of spears, something had the locals more nervous than ever. He could see a few patched minor injuries, too. There had been fighting here, and recently.

  “Jared!” he called, as the Topangan party came closer.

  We’re in luck, he thought. Some of the Brains are here already.

  For some reason lost in the years of chaos right after the Change the Topangans called the members of their five-member sort-of-governing council the Brains. They elected a new one when a predecessor died, grew feeble or just didn’t want to do the work anymore; it was rewarded solely in prestige and a little extra neighborly help. He’d never been able to tell if the title was official, or even if “official” meant anything at all here. The ones Feldman had met were quite intelligent, if a bit parochial. They also deliberated slowly in his experience, and everything important had to be put to a general meeting of adults for a vote as well, often several times.

  Then people decided if they wanted to pay any attention to the result. Topanga made Corvallis look as tight-arsed and over-regulated as Boise. It was all rather like dealing with a Mackenzie Dun’s Óenach, only more quarrelsome and with less religion folded in, and far more people entitled to attend and speak . . . and speak . . . and speak . . . at length . . . than any single Clan village.

  “Good to see you again!” he said.

  He waited until they were close enough to speak normally. Shouting always sounded angry, the more so when comparative strangers were involved. It wouldn’t do to just assume they remembered him, either. They probably did, but you never knew. His smile was perfectly genuine; he liked most of the people he met, apart from the stubbornly stupid, the vicious and the dishonest. He’d known merchants who were sourly convinced that the bulk of humanity fell into those categories, and he’d always wondered why they had picked a line of work where you had to spend so much time dealing with human beings who weren’t neighbors or relations.

  “Moishe Feldman here, of Feldman and Sons, captain aboard the Tarshish Queen; I was here with that grain shipment four years back, and you were kind enough to invite me to stay at your house.”

  Jared Tillman led the Topangan greeting party; he was a man in his sixties, quite tall but a bit stooped now, with a shaggy mop of white hair and a closer-cropped beard of the same, though he had most of his teeth. He peered at Feldman, pulled a pair of glasses with incongruous upswept pink plastic frames studded with costume gems out of a pocket and looked through them, then relaxed slightly. The glasses seemed to help, though they’d do nothing for the cataract growing in his left eye.

  “Hey there, Moishe,” he said, shaking hands with a grip still strong. “Good to see you again too.”

  His son Connor was behind him, shorter but with the same lean build and long face, about forty and still clean-shaven. Moishe thought the youngster behind him was Jared’s oldest grandson, in his teens now and looking much more sullen than the happy-go-lucky boy on the edge of puberty the merchant remembered from four years ago. There was a strong family resemblance.

  He was also rather dramatically dressed, in leather pants fastened with copper studs, strapped moccasin-like boots, and a chest bare except for a flamboyant cloak made from the hide of a full-grown male cougar with the head at his shoulder, all fasted with a jeweled golden brooch that must be salvage work and garnished with a ferocious-looking necklace of fangs and claws. Variations seemed to be fashionable among his peers. Besides that he had a bow, quiver, shortsword and dagger. His leanly muscular chest and shoulders were tanned brown, and there were lighter summer streaks in his shaggy dark-brown hair.

  “And Kwame,” Feldman added. “Good to see you again too. Hope things are going well.”

  Kwame Curtis was a bit older than Jared’s sixty-odd, stocky and missing several fingers on his left hand and clean-shaven and very erect in bearing, wearing an antique Fritz helmet of the old Americans and a back-and-breast cut and hammered from salvage metal. Feldman hadn’t gotten to know him as well, but he was fairly sure two of the youngsters were his children, from the cast of their features.

  They were also about the same wheat-toast-brown shade of skin as Sir Droyn, while Kwame was considerably darker. The Corvallan merchant knew that the color of one’s skin had sometimes been considered important before the Change. Important in the way people nowadays thought of your tribe or clan or realm, what religion you followed, what your home city was or which lord held your oath. It seemed odd, but then much about the pre-Change world was deeply strange, even for one like him who was well-read in the ancient histories. And human beings were tribal by nature; if they couldn’t pick sides about one thing, they’d do it about another, down to which end of the boiled egg they opened at breakfast. Jews had millennia of experience with the phenomenon, from both sides.

  The two older Topangans looked at each other. “Hey there, Moishe,” Jared said again. “Long time.”

  His son Connor added: “Those goods you brought in after the fire did help.”

  The youngster behind Connor spoke up: “Kept a lot of us from starving to death, you mean, don’t you, Dad?”

  “This would be a really good time to shut the hell up, Conan,” Connor said tightly.

  “Fine, OK, we weren’t hungry and we fed all that wheat to our pigs and goats,” the young man said, and stalked away.

  Jared and Connor exchanged a glance. Feldman could interpret it quite precisely. Connor was saying Was I really that much of an asshole at his age? And Jared was replying: Every bit as bad, and I’m enjoying the hell out of this. It was a dialogue as old as fathers, sons and grandfathers.

  Kwame was looking at the Mackenzie archers and the trio right behind him.

  “You’re not exactly hauling wheat and dried beans this time, are you, Captain Feldman? Because those look like soldiers to me—soldiers who’re trying to look relaxed because someone told them to.”

  At that point Karl Aylward Mackenzie waved and shouted cheerfully: “And the top of the mornin’ to you, your honor!”

  Feldman shook his head. “No, not wheat, but it’s an official—”

  Quasi-official, sort of, kinda.

  “—charter from the Crown this time too. What I’ve mostly got is passengers, including some very high-ranking ones, and naturally they have an escort. They need to use Topanga Canyon to get inland, then through the Valley likewise. Is that a problem?”

  “High-ranking?” Jared asked sharply, and his son fairly bristled. “Look, I know you guys up north claim we’re part of the, umm, High Kingdom—”

  Feldman held up his hands. “On oath, they’re not here to collect taxes or make you sign the Great Charter if you don’t want to,” he said. “Honestly, the Crown Princess—”


  “A Princess?” Jared asked. “Christ, and I thought Disney was dead.”

  That reference went over the merchant skipper’s head, but he’d been born only a decade after the Change, and he’d grown up hearing things he didn’t understand from those who were adults before the old world fell. It made for a gap between generations greater than anything since, and, he suspected, greater than any before back to Noah and the Flood. In this specific instance he winced slightly and spoke earnestly:

  “The heir to Montival, Jared; Crown Princess Órlaith Arminger Mackenzie, of the House of Artos. And her brother, Prince John Arminger Mackenzie. Anyway, they have other things on their mind and you’re just topography they have to cross.”

  “Running around without her father . . . No, the ship from Astoria said he was dead? They hadn’t heard the details when they left.”

  “Murdered by foreigners . . . agents of the ruler of Korea . . . it’s a long story.”

  “So she’s High Queen or whatever?”

  “No, not until she’s twenty-six. Until then her mother’s High Queen Regnant . . . ruling monarch. But . . . ah . . . she’s got these Mackenzies along, and McClintocks, and some Associates . . . ah, knights and men-at-arms, and they all take monarchy pretty seriously. A word to the wise: you should too while they’re here. It’s the wave of the future, and right now a wave is landing on your beach with . . .”

  He combed his memory for a local metaphor.

  “. . . some royal surfboards riding it.”

  He turned his head; Morfind and Faramir were in Ranger working garb selected for the dry lands, mottled muted light brown, rock-gray and olive green with the Stars, Tree and Crown on their mail-lined leather jerkins, and long hooded cloaks hanging from their shoulders. Susan Mika was in brown Crown Courier leathers with some Lakota additions in the way of beadwork and fringes; fortunately she didn’t have scalps down the seams of her leggings, which he thought might have added to the stress factor.