The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  The noise was deafening this time. She raised a hand, until it gradually died.

  “The High Kingship is not simply a matter of politics, though, of making laws and leading in war,” she said. “My father did not take up the Crown because he desired it, for he did not; he carried it as a burden that he bore for others, and in the end it killed him far too young. Nor did he do it simply because it was necessary to put down war and disorder, that ordinary folk might live as they pleased and each reap what they sowed with none to put them in fear, precious and good though that is.”

  She laid her hand on the hilt of the Sword of the Lady, and took a deep breath.

  “The Powers—however you see and name Them—set my father’s steps on the path that led to the Crown of Montival, and hard was that testing, that took him from the Mother Ocean to the Sunrise Lands and back. As a symbol and embodied power, they gave him this: the Sword of the Lady, forged for the hands of House Artos in the world beyond the world. Together he and my mother mingled their blood on the point of it and drove it into the living rock of Montival on the sacred shores of Lost Lake, and so bound themselves and the line of their descent to the land for all time past and time to come. I draw it now, not in threat, but to show you that I speak truth.”

  She drew the Sword into a breathless hush; there were gasps even then, as the more sensitive felt the world shudder. For a moment it was only glinting steel to the eye. Then she raised it high, so that it caught the rays of the sinking sun.

  It caught that light, drank it, and gave it back. Brighter and brighter, like a shape of white-glowing diamond. A light that should have seared her eyes but did not, though others threw up their hands against it; a light that drew you in, to depths beyond depths.

  With that light went a . . . not quite a sound. A humming note, a crystal chime that rang to the confines of her mind in a torrent of image and sensation.

  It was her mother lifting her high while she kicked and gurgled before the windows of a castle solar, and John’s chubby toddler hand in hers and her father turning and winking at her during a solemn procession. It was a crisp apple plucked from a roadside tree exploding in her mouth with savor, and it was the face of a friend by a campfire’s yellow light laughing and passing the leather bota of rough red wine while the venison grilled, and it was the taste of a first kiss in the cool scented dimness of a Beltane bower. The redwoods of Eryn Muir in the warm evening light; snow blowing in trails of white feathers off the peak of Mt. Hood; a desert shining in stillness beneath furnace heat; the feel of a golden sheaf on the end of her pitchfork as she lifted it to the cart in the Mackenzie dúthchas.

  It was . . . home.

  And it would be different for each who beheld the Sword, as each one of them knew home to be, down in their heartstrings.

  “For the lord and the land and the folk are one; so you are my folk of blood and bone, a common past and a common fate; your land is my dear homeland also; and I am yours.”

  She lowered the blade and sheathed it. There were no voices now, though she heard the raw sobs of those moved to tears by sudden overwhelming emotion.

  “You are a free folk, people of Topanga. Make the decision that seems best to you.”

  The silence grew as she strode down the stairway and out of the amphitheater.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY OF TOPANGA

  (FORMERLY TOPANGA CANYON)

  CROWN PROVINCE OF WESTRIA

  (FORMERLY CALIFORNIA)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  JULY/FUMIZUKI 26TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/SHOHEI 1/2044 AD

  Reiko dreamed, and knew again that what she dreamed was real.

  In that dream she walked amid the smell of burning, the dry unclean scent of things not meant to burn, with an undertone of scorched and rotting flesh rising to a cloudy sky.

  People of her own folk wandered the streets of a great city, seeming to be almost as much ghosts as she. They were aimless for all their urgency. Their language was only a little strange to her, but their speech was disconnected, and mainly about food. Many were hollow-eyed, hangdog men in the worn remains of yellow-brown uniforms and peaked caps. Others wore shabby Western clothes, or mixtures of those and wakufu, Nihonjin clothing, with here and there a kimono—almost always on a woman. Ash drifted on the air. More of the space between the grid of streets was vacant than not, showing only the stubs and scorched rubble of buildings, or marks where the wreckage had been shoveled and pushed back out of the way.

  The wreck of a castle stood out among the ruin of buildings modern as the first half of the last century had reckoned such things, with a thin bitter haze of smoke drifting in threads from part of it where the keep had risen, the sort of subterranean fire that could smolder on for months after a structure fell. Most of the people were on foot, and all of them looked thin, thin with the pinched faces that came of years of ever-worsening hunger. Now and then a bicycle or a rickshaw pushed through; her eyes widened as she saw a motor vehicle actually moving, though it did not look much like the many wrecks she had seen, being black and higher-set and boxy.

  Once a woman with a bandaged face suddenly threw herself off the road and into the remains of a building, screaming a child’s name as she knelt and scrabbled in the burned dirt. After a few moments several others moved to pull her back with rough kindness. She fought against them with hands marked by savage festering burns days old, twisting, sobbing:

  “Please! I know she is here, I hear her calling mama! mama! to me. Please let me go to her, she is so small, she is frightened of the fires and noise!”

  Folk looked at Reiko, but without seeing; brushed past her, touching in a way that was terrible in its lack of connection. The gap of time was less than it had been for Yamato Takeru’s age of legend, or the days of the first Kamakura shogun, but something else separated them, something that resisted her presence. Something that tried to make it never have been, a fantasy that drifted away like mist.

  The Change, she thought.

  The thought itself rang like a bronze bell struck with a log hammer. Rang with truth.

  I can feel it. It approaches, only a few generations away now, and all of time and space and possibility is compressed before it. Like a monstrous wave rippling down from eternity through the very substance of things, a standing wave across the years of mankind. Existence grows thick with it, thick and slow and heavy and . . . fixed in place by its weight. Until the tension breaks in a flash of light and pain, and the great wild magic at the heart of things is loosed upon the world once more.

  At last she came to an open space of gardens and trees and pavilions. The buildings within were wooden and in the ancient style, low with roofs whose ends swept up. Several of them had burned as well, and the others showed scorch-marks where utter effort by desperate men had saved them; some of the trees had the yellowing leaves that meant they had been killed by the blazes.

  As she entered the gates a little motor vehicle sped by on its way out; it was like a small box on four wheels, painted olive green with a white star on its sides and hood. A gaijin in an American military uniform sat at the wheel, round-faced and ginger-haired and grinning, with a rifle of some sort in a scabbard beside him. The small rear seat was crowded with cloth-wrapped bundles and a dozen swords—nihonto of several different styles thrown carelessly together like sticks of firewood despite their classic lines.

  Her feet moved through the landscape of death.

  I know this time, she thought.

  With sorrow and bitter pride:

  Just one century ago. Our armies broken; garrison after island garrison dying where they stood in storms of fire and blood, or left bypassed to starve; our fleets crushed wreckage upon the sea-bottom from here to Guadalcanal and beyond. The cities are ashes and the people starve. Showa Tenno my grandmother�
��s grandfather has surrendered to save the nation from absolute destruction. Egawa Noboru’s father lies in his mother’s womb, and his father is dead after he crashed his flying machine into a battleship, trying to hold back the invaders off the shores of Okinawa.

  And I know this place; it is the Atsuta Shrine, where my father sought the Grass-Cutting Sword . . . and found it gone, long gone.

  She walked up to the entrance of a building where a sliding door lay battered aside; it was only then she noticed that she was in a kimono, and wearing wooden sandals that she stepped out of in lifelong reflex before she placed her feet on the raised floor. Within and down a corridor, she followed the sound of weeping.

  In a spare small room a man dressed in a bedraggled white robe and purple hakama knelt, the tears running down through blood on his face—blood still liquid, dripping from a wound dealt by a heavy blow. He was old, and the lines of age and those of grief mingled to make a countenance like the Ishio-jo mask of a Noh drama.

  “Curse him, curse the foreigner, curse all his thieving generations!” he mumbled over and over again.

  A shortsword lay bare near him on the tatami, an antique wakizashi. As he struggled for self-control he reached out to it with one hand, while the other began to pull at his suikan robe and the kimono beneath.

  This time when she opened herself the light that filled her was warm as the memory of her mother’s arms, the terrible majesty muted by a compassion fully as infinite. Reiko knelt and touched his hand before she sank down opposite him. The old man jerked convulsively and looked around. He saw nothing, but he felt.

  He gathered himself, breath slowing, tears dropping more slowly and then ceasing. When he was calm, his hand went towards the blade again.

  No, Reiko said/thought.

  Her breath was in her throat and her lips moved, but no sound came from them. The thought itself darted between mind and mind. She was herself . . . and something greater, something beyond humanity.

  The man jerked again, but when he spoke it was to himself, as if taking both sides of an argument.

  “No? Yes! I must make apology. I have failed in my duty to the Tenno, to the nation, to all my ancestors who were priests here for fifty generations, to the Great Kami themselves. The Treasure that She gave us is lost!”

  Yet at Dan-no-ura it was cast into the sea, Reiko thought to him, remembering that very moment. And it was returned by no human hand, to the hands of the one who brought it here. Amaterasu-omikami guards Her own, though the will of the kami may be accomplished in ways and times mortals cannot understand. Have faith!

  “The gaijin thief will take it over the sea to his own country!”

  Yes, he will; it is the nature of warriors to plunder the defeated. And for three generations of men it will be lost to us, though all will believe it still kept here—even the very Emperors who receive the semblance of it at their ascensions. Yet what is lost can be found.

  “Three generations?” he whispered.

  In that third generation, warriors of our people will sail the eastern sea to reclaim it. With their swords in their hands and unbroken steel in their souls, and the cry of Tenno Heika banzai upon their lips. This I promise you.

  Something relaxed in his face. His eyes still lingered on the pure curve of the ancient weapon, marred only by the very faint blood-etching of use.

  “But it will not be restored in my lifetime. I am an old man, my sons are dead in battle. Why should I remain here to eat shame?”

  It is your giri, and your fate. Our people are adrift, cut off from all that they believed, doubting everything because what they were told by faithless men of power was false. They have suffered for putting their trust in lies. Shall you now use your death to tell them a truth that would be a whip of fire on their bleeding souls, the last cut that severs them from what they are?

  “What can I do, one helpless old priest?”

  The men of war have failed in their duty; let them make apology with their lives to the Emperor, and to his people who they have delivered to disaster.

  “And I?”

  Now be the priest you are pledged to be! Our people need the idea of the Grass-Cutting Sword more than the thing itself . . . for now. And that now is your inescapable duty. You must bear that which cannot be born, for their sake, as the Tenno has accepted the unbearable shame of defeat that our generations may live. Follow him! Let the suffering you cannot show and the truth you cannot speak be your atonement.

  The man bowed his head. When he raised it again doubt and wonder were in his eyes. Now he knew . . . or suspected . . .

  “I am not alone, am I?” he whispered. “I am not speaking to the figments of my mind.”

  No. You are never alone, man of the Shrine, not while you serve Me and I protect the Land of the Gods. As you failed to guard the Treasure, now you must guard this secret. Treasure it, and pass it on as you would the other.

  Slowly he bowed forward on his widespread hands, until his forehead nearly touched the mat.

  “I hear and obey, Great Lady, Immortal One Shining in Heaven,” he said.

  She began to rise, to feel herself fading back to the waking world and the present. Then suddenly she knew there was one last thing she must tell.

  And another thing is promised you. Your curse . . . know that made here, in this time and place and for this sin . . . that curse will strike home more surely than any weapon made by human hands. Like a tiger stalking through a maze of years and darkness, it will bring his line to its end in utter ruin. You will be avenged, kannushi of Atsuta. Most terribly avenged.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY OF TOPANGA

  (FORMERLY TOPANGA CANYON)

  CROWN PROVINCE OF WESTRIA

  (FORMERLY CALIFORNIA)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  JULY/FUMIZUKI 27TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/SHOHEI 1/2044 AD

  Connor Tillman grunted resentfully as he pedaled westward down the broken roadway behind his son and the stranger in the kilt, sweat running down his face and knees braced as cracks and holes hammered at him.

  “Are there Eaters in this Malibu place, then?” Karl asked.

  “Dude, it’s like, nobody really knows, not really,” Conan replied. “People disappear there, that’s for sure. If you’re dumb enough to go there without some company. Or stay too long, or all go to sleep at the same time. Other times everything’s fine, but, like, it’s fine when there are a bunch of you and you keep your eyes open and you go in and get what you want and get out, you grok it?”

  “We’d say ken, but yes,” Karl said with a smile. “So the answer is most likely yes, but on the other hand, perhaps not.”

  So they talk funny. Big shit, Connor thought.

  Now and then the surface went soft but difficult where sand had drifted across it. He was in good shape; he was also many years older than his son, and most of the strangers didn’t look a hell of a lot older than Conan. Lately everyone that age tended to look younger and younger to him, too.

  I’m turning into my dad. And that doesn’t even seem as bad as it would have once. Bummer, man.

  Once they were a few miles west of the junction of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the Coastal Highway they all had to weave around the rusted hulks of cars and trucks as well, though some of them had been worked over for salvage; leaf and coil springs in particular were highly prized.

  There had been a lot of traffic on this stretch of the coastal highway between LA and Malibu at six fifteen in the evening of that March day forty-six years ago. You could see skeletons in some of the cars where they’d crashed into one another, grinning out through the dusty grimy windscreens, a few with scraps of skin and hair still dangling.

  More bones lay thick in the brush and scrub by the road, though those had been scattered by coyotes
and feral dogs and carrion birds long ago, and cleaned up to white by the ants and such and by decades of bleaching sunlight. A lot of shopping carts and dollies and such lay there too, used by the refugees to try and haul supplies.

  The skulls lasted longest, and there were a few of those in sight every couple of feet. Sometimes a gold tooth gleamed. The bones didn’t particularly disturb him. The Canyon’s dead had been decently buried even when things had been worst from the older folks’ accounts, if necessary in communal graves. But bones were there anywhere you went on a salvage expedition, which he’d done since before he was as old as Conan was now. It had freaked him out the first couple of times, yes, but that was a long time ago and everything actually looked less gruesome these days.

  What bothered him now was the Montivallan bicycles.

  Damn, why didn’t we think of this? he thought . . . as he pedaled.

  There were plenty of bicycles in Topanga; from what his dad said, it had been the sort of place where a lot of people used bicycles even back before the Change when cars worked. Every household had at least a couple now, and there were enough spare parts to maintain them.

  But most of the machines spent most of their time in storage sheds or under tarps, more so every year, because the supply of tires had run out long ago. They got used again when a new set showed up found still in its packaging in a ruined store or garage, and that was among the most prized of salvage goods.

  The young archer from the north swung a fist up and they all stopped for a moment, swigging from their canteens and letting the cool sea breeze dry their sweat. That let the horse-drawn wagon catch up to them too. The four mounted scouts fanned out ahead of them, sitting their horses with arrows on the strings of their short recurve bows and scanning the ruins to the south and hills to the north with methodical care. None of the Montivallans seemed to think it was anything special that three of them were women; in Topanga women usually only fought if the fight came to them, though there were exceptions.