The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  Jared cleared his throat, and by unspoken mutual consent they moved on to more mundane things.

  “That Great Charter’s not bad when you read it, like we have to pay a share of taxes we impose on ourselves . . . but Topanga doesn’t have taxes so our share is zero.”

  “We actually get more power than a State did in the old days,” Kwame said. “People are free to leave anywhere they’re living—I like that, and the prohibition on slavery and debt-peonage is sorta reassuring—”

  “Christ, yes. I’ve been worrying about that coming back for years. Nice to see someone taking real precautions so that it doesn’t sneak up on us.”

  Kwame nodded. “Tell me. Remember the fight we had to go through to stop people putting the POWs to work in the salt pans after the last war? But we get to decide who can settle permanently here, which I also like. Not that people crowding in to take our goat cheese and rope sandals are going to be a big problem, but still.”

  “But how many countries in the old days had great constitutions on paper that were just so much hot air?”

  “Point,” Kwame said. “Even us, sometimes. But I’ve got two counterpoints.”

  At his enquiring look the old Marine went on, holding all the digits on his left hand, the index finger and thumb:

  “Mark Delgado. Winnie the Weasel. Their merry band of thugs.”

  “Point, dude. Like, three points.”

  “Two’s as many fingers as I’ve got on that hand,” Kwame said, blank-faced until he winked.

  They both looked at the Montivallans already here. Heuradys d’Ath and Droyn Jones de Molalla were facing off with Prince John watching.

  “Let’s warm up,” d’Ath said.

  All three were in what they apparently considered plain practical clothes in their part of Montival. That consisted of pants, boots, long sleeveless vest-like things they called jerkins made of soft leather lined with light mail secured by patterns of tarnished copper rivets, and loose-sleeved shirts closed at the wrists by studded leather bracers. All in shades of olive green and brown and gray respectively, with small heraldic shields embroidered over their hearts.

  They also all had a look that bothered him with a teasing half-familiarity until he thought way back. It wasn’t just that they’d all have been medium-tall or better even before the Change, which was unusual in Topanga now . . .

  Well-fed jocks, he thought suddenly. Gym rats.

  LA in the last decade of the twentieth century had been full of people who put a lot of time in at the gym or marathons or rock-climbing or whatever. The idea of deliberately lifting heavy weights or running to nowhere because you had too much food was sort of bitter irony now.

  They’re not skinny people who have to work hard all the time on just enough food. But no, not gym rats either, not quite. They don’t do it for the way they look.

  He snapped his fingers. “Pro athletes,” he said. “That’s what they look like.”

  “Right,” Kwame nodded; when you’d been around someone long enough you didn’t need to talk as much. “Gymnastics or pentathlon, maybe.”

  “Or martial arts, yeah.”

  Droyn took a golden ring off his finger and flipped it high up into the air with his thumb, like spinning a coin. D’Ath drew her longsword and struck, and the ring settled neatly over the sharp point and came to rest a few inches down, where the blade widened enough to stop it.

  “Those aren’t big chopper-style swords like the Lancers use,” he observed.

  Kwame nodded. “Cut-and-thrust bastard longswords, European fifteenth-century style, the great-granddaddies of the rapier. My classes in military history strike again. These people use plate armor, I’ve seen their suits—miles better than anything Chatsworth has, even better than the real medieval stuff too because the steel’s higher grade. You can’t cut that with an ordinary sword, you have to be able to stab through the weak points . . . and there aren’t many weak points.”

  Heuradys laughed and flicked the ring up again with a snap of the wrist, and Droyn did the same trick, dodging to the right to get under it like a big brown lynx leaping for a bird. The point of his sword ticked the rim of the ring; it circled for a moment and then settled down, and they repeated the process, moving like a game of tennis.

  Jared thought of some of the other northern weapons he’d seen. “Yeah, that’s why a lot of their stuff looks like giant can-openers on sticks. That’s what they are.”

  After a moment Prince John made a motion to the short Hispanic-looking man who seemed to be some sort of bodyguard-cum-personal-assistant, and whose jeweled dagger was a mark of status in the Association territories, a sign that you belonged to the warrior caste. The man opened a handsome-looking leather case and handed him a lute, a beautiful piece of work in some rich dark reddish-brown wood, the surface of the neck inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

  “If knights will dance, they should have music,” John said while he tuned it.

  He began to strum a tinkling tune. The movements of the game turned to a leaping galliard, without slowing at all.

  “Jesus,” Jared said quietly, trying to imagine how long you’d need to learn that trick. “You’re not going to pick that up in the intervals between milking the goats. Useful, though.”

  “You said it. They can put those points just where they want them.” Kwame smiled grimly. “You know why Delgado’s Lancers . . . the actual Lancers, not the militia . . . are better than anything we have, man for man?”

  “They’re on the top of the heap down there; better gear, more time to practice. But these people make them look like cheap imitations.”

  “That’s because they are cheap imitations. Without even knowing it. These people, their granddaddies may have been King Arthur weeaboos who got to live the LARP after the Change, but they aren’t. That isn’t costume they’re wearing, those are just their clothes, if you know what I mean. They may not be much like any knights that ever lived before the Change, but whatever they are, it’s the real thing now.”

  The Japanese contingent arrived. Instead of their colorful kimonos and hakama, or even more colorful armor of lacquered steel and silk cord, they were in tighter-fitting garb of dark matte cloth, stuff that would be nearly invisible after sundown and left them bleakly impersonal now. The jackets had hoods with face-masks that left only a strip over the eyes visible. They carried their two swords—the scabbards were black anyway—and some had those super-long bows and quivers. Others were fiddling with . . .

  Shuriken, throwing stars, by God, Jared thought. Yup, climbing ropes, climbing claws, grapnels, all the good stuff, they said getting down the steep parts wouldn’t be a problem.

  “Instant awesome, just add ninja,” he muttered . . . but softly. “What do you think of our new Japanese allies? I don’t think I met more than a couple before the Change—Japanese-Americans don’t count. Though they’re probably why we eat sashimi. And I read a lot of manga, but these dudes strike me as seriously strange.”

  Equally sotto voce Kwame replied: “I was through Japan a couple of times in the Corps, mostly on leave. They were strange . . . you haven’t lived until you’ve been nearly trampled by a horde of schoolgirls dressed as Chip ’n’ Dale trying to beat the opening lines at Tokyo Disneyland . . . But they weren’t particularly scary and they weren’t much like outtakes from Seven Samurai.”

  “But these guys are scary and they are like refugees from chambara-land.”

  “I think I know what happened.”

  “What?”

  “Someone over there, maybe someones plural, who was very tough and very smart and very lucky and very, very crazy and obsessed realized the Change had knocked everything loose. He saw a chance to start partying like it was 1941 again, which he’d wanted to do for years, and took over whatever was left of the place.”

  Jared watched one of the dark-clad men draw his sword in a blur
of speed, strike through a thumb-thick branch in the same motion, cut twice more in the time it took to breathe in once, and then wipe and sheathe the savagely sharp blade without looking down. The severed top of the sapling hit the ground just after the blade slid home. All of the black-clad figures went to their knees then, sitting motionless with their hands on their thighs.

  “Probably convincing anyone dubious about the Ways of Our Forefathers to repent the same way Toshiro Mifune there just convinced that now headless and limbless scrub oak,” Kwame added.

  “Or maybe he wanted to party like it was fifteen-forty-one,” Jared said.

  “Or like 1998’s idea of 1941’s idea of 1541,” Kwame said. “And everyone else got to live out his fantasy, and by now they think it’s perfectly natural and was probably always that way.”

  “Whatever,” Jared said; it was hard to get concerned about something so distant in time and space.

  He looked at the scrub oak. The tough wood had been sliced so neatly that not even a single splinter marred the smooth slanted surface of the cuts.

  The Brain took another pull on the pipe. “But I’m glad they’re on our side.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY OF TOPANGA

  (FORMERLY TOPANGA CANYON)

  CROWN PROVINCE OF WESTRIA

  (FORMERLY CALIFORNIA)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  JULY/FUMIZUKI 28TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/SHOHEI 1/2044 AD

  The smell of alien cooking drifting through the soft darkness of late twilight made Reiko’s nostrils twitch behind the black fabric of her mask; some sort of stew of beans and meat and tomatoes with hot peppers. She brought the monocular night-glass to her eye, movements glacially slow and careful, and focused as she peered through the branches of the spicy-smelling sagebrush towards the target several hundred yards away.

  Six catapults rested on the rough cracked surface of the ancient pavement, all under a tent-style roof of netting studded with pieces of vegetation strung between street-light posts dead since the Change; right now they were rigged to throw four-kilo round shot, though they could propel finned darts considerably farther. Unmistakably of bakachon manufacture though copied from a decades-old Nihonjin design, with that ugly squared-off look that came of cutting corners on production for the sake of speed. The two-wheeled, split-trail carriages were the type kept knocked down in the hold of a raider ship, ready to be assembled on the beach.

  The Japanese had copied those.

  Good. They have brought them together to guard them. And to guard them they have deployed . . .

  Most of the figures around the campfires that bloomed through the twilight ahead looked like crudely armed militia. Which meant gaijin peasants, different from the ones in northern Montival only in that they were dressed more poorly, smelled as if they bathed less often, and looked less well-fed. Disturbingly hairy peasants, not least because many wore hair and beard in shaggy profusion. They were dressed in sandals or bare feet and rather unkempt pants and tunic-shirts of wool and linen and leather, and were mostly round-eyed and beaky-faced and a little paler than a Japanese with an equivalent amount of exposure to the sun, though some were much darker.

  Those odd hair colors look natural on Órlaith and Heuradys by now, she thought.

  The thought ran through some corner of her mind, as her training automatically noted numbers—around fifty militiamen in all—and weapons—mostly made by the peasants themselves, or salvage—and dispositions and state of alertness—which was low, but the pairs of sentries farther out made up for it.

  But mostly it still appears like a costume, somehow, as if it were a badly-made coarse wig. This is probably simply unfamiliarity. If I had lived here for years instead of months, it would cease to be distractingly strange.

  A dozen men sitting apart looked quite different, neatly barbered with clipped beards and shoulder-length hair combed out and sometimes caught back in silver ties, dressed in tight trousers and tooled boots with higher heels made for stirrups. Taller and more muscular, too; obviously better-fed for most of their lives, and though mostly young they had plenty of scars. They sat on folding chairs around their fire instead of squatting on their hams or resting on the ground, and ate from plates brought by deferential servants rather than dipping spoons into a common pot.

  On stands nearby was armor that would cover chest and back, shoulders and thighs, arms and shins, and helms with wire mesh face-protectors. It all had the dimpled look of steel cold-worked by hammering over a wooden form, and the metal shapes were fastened to soft deerhide backing by copper or aluminum rivets. Tall lances—often with aluminum shafts—rested in portable wooden racks, but the men kept their long straight swords by their sides, matched by daggers at the other hip. A line of horses were tethered behind the tents, one for each; those would be the ready mounts. A soft nickering from a field another few hundred yards northward, and an earthy, grassy scent on the warm breeze showed where the main mass of horses were waiting.

  Her lips curled back from her teeth a little at the sight of the half-dozen men who stood by the catapults themselves, in coats of small steel plates linked with mail, flared shoulder-pieces and spiked helmets, dao-style swords at their waists.

  The enemy.

  She had faced many enemies here in Montival, sword in hand. But this was the enemy, the ones who had killed her father and tormented her people since before her birth or his. The sun was setting, but the moon had risen. She crawled backward with a soft, smooth motion, one sun at a time. When she flowed over the low wall of tumbled, fire-cracked cinderblock overgrown with some prickly vine only a few crackles sounded, lost in the greater buzzing and chirping of insects in the night.

  Egawa was waiting, and the two Topangans were back, the father Connor with his blowgun ready and the Conan son with the bow, the elder in dark clothing and the younger with his bare torso and face streaked with an effective camouflage of stripes made of soot and greasepaint. Connor put his head close to her ear.

  “That’s the main horse-herd back there, right where we thought. We can’t get at it unless the guards pull out, but there are fifty head at least.”

  Reiko nodded. “Go. Be ready when you hear.”

  They moved off, noisier than her samurai trained in Silent Movement . . . but probably quiet enough.

  Egawa quickly sketched the distribution of the guard posts for her—there were four, plus walking sentries closer in. She looked, nodded, and tapped each with her fan. Pairs of her men slithered off. They had hours to reach their targets, and they would use them to move inch by inch.

  A samurai in black produced the signaling device the Protector’s Guard men had brought with them; a hemisphere of mirror, a tube lined with more mirrors, a stick of lime and burning compounds mounted in a screw-set holder before it, and a little piston bellows arrangement at the end of a rubber hose to make it burn bright. Reiko set up the tripod herself, her fingers sure and deft; though it was a Montivallan design, she had used similar ones often enough before.

  The signal fire on Top of Topanga was clearly visible through the telescopic sight mounted in a bracket to the side. She looked through the sights, adjusted the screws until the crosshairs were centered on the white-painted stake planted beside the fire, then lit the light and shut the cover while Egawa pumped at the bellows. Within the container the lime would be burning with incandescent brightness, but no light escaped.

  After a few moments a man walked before the mountaintop fire and then back again, the agreed-upon sign for waiting on your signal. The watcher with the telescope would be a little distance apart.

  The crafting of the joints was very tight; when she put her thumb on the lever and pushed it the light was a complete surprise. Her approval was less a thought than an emotion, the respect she had been raised to feel for all those who pai
d meticulous attention to detail.

  Clack, muffled and soft as the metal parts struck rubber buffers, and then clack-clack, barely enough to hear with her head next to it.

  She paused, with her thumb still on the spring-loaded shutter control. This time two men walked before the fire—and back again, and then repeated it. They had seen her light.

  Clack . . . clack-clack.

  Egawa stopped pumping the bellows at her nod, and she turned the valve that closed the combustion chamber. The flame died—she could tell eventually because the heat radiating against the gloves she wore was less, lost in the warm summer night. She’d sent the target is here code and it had been received. The telescope up there was very powerful and showed much detail, but the camouflage had been well done, and only a ground survey could be sure.

  It cools down more after dark here than it does at home, she thought, turning back to watch the target directly. Perhaps because the air is so much drier.

  It grew cooler still, though still warm. Most of the Valley militiamen ahead lay down and wrapped themselves in thin blankets patched together out of scraps, or simply wadded their jackets under their heads as pillows. The elite retired to tents that servants had erected for them and laid themselves down on cots, most of them removing their boots. Though one of them always remained awake, no doubt to command. The bakachon detail guarding the catapults was replaced with another; every so often the picket posts in the scrub around the catapults were relieved. It was all military routine, dull and necessary and reasonably competently done.

  Reiko looked at the stars and the moon. It would be quite some time and there was no point in burning energy she would need later. She laid her head down on her arm and almost instantly dozed off into a state halfway between real sleep and meditation.

  • • •

  And was elsewhere.

  At first the experience was so alien that nothing would focus at all—save that centrifugal force made her body lurch back and then to one side, and that trees and rocks and darkness flashed by outside through windows of clear glass.