The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  Thora kept hers up under her eyes and slanted, whirled the yard-long backsword up—you had to be cautious that you didn’t hit the ceiling when you did that indoors, but there was enough room here—and brought it down in a diagonal backhand left-to-right slash as she advanced a stamping step and twisted her torso to put more weight into the cut.

  The man couldn’t dodge backward, and had to block or have his bones broken even if the buff-leather jerkin he was wearing held out the edge, which it wouldn’t. Not having a shield, he used the two-foot blade in his right hand instead. The impact didn’t quite tear it out of his hand, but there was a crash and skirl of metal as the edge of the heavier weapon slid down to the simple cross guard of the shortsword. Her Bearkiller weapon had a much more complex basket-guard hilt.

  Which has a couple of uses besides protecting your fingers.

  The swords strained against each other, while the Valley militiaman tried to gouge out her eye with the thumb of his free hand until she raised the shield to block him. He had a cropped bristle of black hair and was short and scrawny, but nearly as strong in the arms as her. Which meant nothing if . . .

  She suddenly relaxed her sword-arm and let the combined blades snap down towards her shoulder. The edge of his sword struck the steel that joined her backplate and breastplate hard, which would give her a bruise even through the metal and padding. In the same instant she pivoted the blades around the point of contact and smashed the bronze bars of the basket hilt into the man’s heavy blue-stubbled jaw in a high right jab.

  That put her neck far closer to an enemy edge than she liked, but the militiaman was suddenly in no mood for cutting. His jawbone cracked in at least one place under the impact of the two-pound set of brass knuckles into which she’d converted her sword for an instant. He dropped his weapon and screamed, spraying bits of tooth as well as blood, and she gave him a knee where it would do the most good, throwing his spasming body away with a heave of her shield to give herself room for a finishing stab. The backsword’s thirty-six inches of blade could be awkward in a room full of furniture and walls.

  Movement out of the corner of her eye, and she spun into a stepping lunge more urgent than making sure of a disabled man who’d dropped his blade.

  “Hold!” Deor barked, and struck her sword up with his in a sharp hard clangor that vibrated into her wrist.

  The movement had been a woman a little younger than she in a shapeless dress darting out of a doorway, holding an infant in the crook of one arm and stretching a hand out to the militiaman with the other.

  I didn’t see anything but an outline and a target, she thought, taking a sharp breath. Freya! I might have skewered the kid!

  The target’s face was mostly hidden behind a fall of sun-faded yellow hair, but she didn’t draw back under the menace of the bright metal. Instead she ducked under it and grabbed the writhing man, seeming to try to guard him and child both by putting her body between them and looming armored death and squeezing her eyes shut.

  “Thanks!” Thora gasped to the scop.

  She wasn’t the sort who got the shakes or bad dreams after an ordinary fight. Warriors fought, killed and died; that was their wyrd, however grim. But there were memories you simply didn’t want in your head. There was enough there in hers already without another, and just by accident at that.

  Now she stuck her head through into the next room; it had been made by walling off part of a larger pre-Change one with adobe bricks, and the single window had strong iron bars across it to deter thieves. They were on the outside and for defense, but they’d work just as well to keep someone in. There was a tousled bed, a chest of drawers that must have been pre-Change, a cradle, and a lidded bucket that contained used diapers from the smell. A jug and basin and half a loaf of bread wrapped in a cloth rested on a plank shelf laid on pegs driven into the interior wall.

  “Go there!” she barked to the woman, then repeated it after she swatted her with the flat of her unbloodied sword to attract her attention.

  “Go there!”

  The civilian’s eyes flew open; Thora pointed with the blade.

  “In there, and stay there!”

  The young mother showed commendable presence of mind; she grabbed the wounded man by the back of his jerkin and dragged him into the room and pulled the door closed on her own. Thora swept the fallen shortsword over to it with her foot and drove it home point-first under the bottom of the door with three kicks of her bootheel, making a nice solid wedge that would take a long time to dislodge.

  The child was bawling before the third blow sounded, a high shrill sound that went into the ears like needles.

  Deor winced. She knew he liked children and could usually charm them effortlessly, but he liked them much better once they were old enough to walk and talk.

  “Are you sure you want years of that?” he said.

  “As opposed to the calm delights of what we’re doing right now?” she grinned, sheathing her unbloodied sword as they went out again.

  “All secure,” she said.

  She stepped over the staring-eyed body of the man who’d taken the lance-head in his throat, avoiding its pool of blood; someone led up her horse and she swung easily back into the saddle.

  Faramir nodded back to her. “Nobody made it out. We went a couple of hundred yards down that road—Morfind and Suzie are still there, behind some walls.”

  Which meant that anyone who came trotting up the road was going to get an unpleasant surprise. Someone might have been stationed nearby and quietly left when they saw the station overrun, but that was a little more sophisticated than she thought any of these yokels could manage. Even if they did, the news could travel only as fast as a man could run, or at a pinch a horse. It wouldn’t get where they were going much before they did.

  A column of Topangans on bicycles was coming down the old Boulevard; at her wave they kept straight on, pedaling briskly. She and Deor and the Dúnedain legged their horses up into a loping canter—a little risky in the dark, but acceptable on a road with no wrecks on it.

  Now they had to get past the lookouts along the line of the old Ventura Freeway, but earthquakes had savaged it, and she’d picked out a spot with local advice and a long look through a telescope. By then detection would be less crucial anyway. This plan didn’t depend on everything going right . . . not entirely, at least.

  And damned if I can see anything else that would have a chance of decisive results, she thought. She’s right about that. It’s the win big or plant your face into the dungheap type of scheme sure enough, though. Either we all die or we bring it off and live . . . most of us, at least.

  Her head went up and she looked at the sugar-frosting sky. “What do the wights say?” she asked Deor.

  He grimaced a little. “There’s a babble. Too many hungry, angry ghosts here; too many evil deaths, too much pain too close in time. I’m glad we didn’t go farther south, through the bones of the old city. The shadow of horrors will lie there for a long time.”

  Then he frowned, looking northward. “And there’s another darkness there. As with the skaga back at the bay, but . . . thicker. Less of a good thing twisted, more of an . . . otherness.”

  “A shadow of evil?”

  “Not . . . not in any sense we can know. As if the thing itself were nothing we have words for, but the shadow it casts here in the world of things is evil indeed.”

  Thora shivered and shrugged. “Well, let’s get on with our part. It may be risky, but it needs doing.”

  Deor surprised her by nodding vigorously. “This isn’t just a contention of kings. More is at stake.”

  “And this wasn’t the riskiest part of the job by any manner of means,” she said, looking up again.

  “Didn’t Mike Havel do something like this, back in the early days?” Deor asked.

  “Yup. The Bear Lord’s Flight,” she said.

&nbs
p; “Ah, yes, I know that song,” he said.

  “And there’s a tactical analysis, too,” she said, as she signaled her horse into motion. “That one says he was lucky, but crazy.”

  Both were taught in every A-Lister steading and Strategic Hamlet in the Outfit’s territory. She supposed the descendants of the first Bear Lord living elsewhere were equally aware of it.

  “Like granddaddy, like granddaughter, eh?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  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

  “People up north still do this for fun?” Jared Tillman said.

  “It is fun,” Órlaith said, with a reckless fighting grin that was . . . mostly . . . perfectly genuine.

  Although we don’t do it in the dark, aiming for a target we’ve never seen except through a telescope with murderous enemies at the other end. Not for fun, at least! Though . . . these are the people who killed Da. That needs doing.

  “And there are military uses for them. Not many that gliders don’t do better, granted, but occasionally for special-operations work. My grandfather Mike Havel used some to land an assault force on a castle by night, only a little while after the Change. One built by my other grandfather’s troops.”

  “Castle, right,” Kwame said; the word seemed to bother him.

  “Motte-and-Bailey. More of a timber and sheet-metal prefab fort on an earth mound, actually, but the Association always called them castles. As an aspiration, I’m thinking.”

  Kwame looked at her and she spoke, thankful for the distraction. “My mother’s father was . . . a man of dreams, in his way; and in those dreams he was lord of many castles. Which, by the time he died, he was in truth. Though he never got to build a real one in that spot. As a matter of fact, the Clan Mackenzie built a fort there a generation later, to hold against the Prophet’s men—the old Highway 20 pass over the Cascades. That was before I was born, of course.”

  Heuradys was at the edge of the Top of Topanga’s steep drop-off. She had a length of silk thread on a stick and was watching it as she held it out over the edge. There was plenty of light from the bonfire in the iron hearth, though you had to be careful not to blind yourself by looking directly at it.

  “Still a consistent updraft,” she said. “A bit slower, but not much.”

  Órlaith could see the light Reiko’s beacon gave with the naked eye, now that she knew exactly where it was. She’d also lined it up with three much larger landmarks that were visible by moonlight, so she couldn’t go far wrong even if she lost it, and she’d checked that the others had done the same.

  “Check,” she said.

  She and Heuradys went over each other’s machines one last time and hugged briefly but fiercely before they took up their hang gliders and let assistants strap them in. The harness that held you dangling beneath the framework that supported the wing was like a padded trough from chin to knees, fastened at the back. She reached around to make sure that the snap-clips were easily accessible; she’d need to get out of the cumbersome thing quickly. Then she bent down, grabbed the bar, and carefully lifted the whole ensemble. It wasn’t all that heavy, and two locals were assisting by holding the tips of the blunt triangular wing.

  Assembling and testing the hang gliders farther back in the canyon had been simple enough; unlike most things made post-Change, the fabrics and wires and frame of synthetics and light metal alloys just didn’t decay much, not on the scale of decades, though you could build something workable if not as good out of laminated bamboo and piano-wire and silk.

  There were six of them ready to take off; herself, her liege knight Heuradys, John, his armsman-valet Evrouin who’d mastered the art when he did to keep up with him, Sir Droyn and one of the men-at-arms named Engherrand, who came from a family affluent enough to indulge in such a risky, fashionable sport. A few rich men elsewhere also used them, but odds were that anyone who’d had the resources and leisure to become familiar with the flying wings were north-realm gentry.

  She gave it one more check herself. She was wearing a mail-lined jerkin and her helmet and arm-guards, and apart from that the usual tough clothing you wore in the field—and no kilt tonight, just good strong deerskin breeches and knee-pads. The others were in the same. Every ounce counted in flight. The Sword of the Lady was at her waist, but she’d secured the scabbard to her thigh with an extra length of buckskin thong just above that knee; it was a little awkward, but it would keep the length from flapping about and it would be only the work of an instant to tug the bow knot free. Her wing had a big white stripe of reflective paint from one tip of the triangular top surface to the other, too; they all did. That would give each following flier something to watch for ahead and below.

  “Morrigú, Crow Goddess, You who are terrible in majesty amid the shattering of spears, be with me now,” she said quietly, with her mind focused within. “I fight according to my oaths for my folk and Earth that feeds them as they toil with Her, for their hearths and hopes and children. Badb-Macha-Nemain, Lady of the Final Mysteries, know that if this is the day of my people’s need, I go to You consenting, with open eyes.”

  The brief prayer helped. So did the feeling from the Sword, a building fury like ocean waves growling deep as they broke on fanged rocks, cold and powerful. The others formed up behind her, staggering themselves to right and left so that she had enough room for her takeoff run. She’d broken her left arm in two places once, falling out of a tree when she was nine. It had hurt for quite some time, though she remembered mostly being angry at the way the cast and the nurse kept her from doing the things she wanted to. Falling several hundred feet onto rock if something went wrong . . . well, at least it would probably be quick.

  One deep breath, another . . . this was paradoxically so much easier when people were looking at you . . . how much of life was playing a role?

  For me, a whacking great lot of it, from birth.

  “And here I thought go jump off a cliff was a metaphor, so I did!” she said softly. “All those invitations I’ve received, and only now am I taking them up!”

  “On three, Orrey, and I’ll meet you there,” Heuradys said, her voice crisp. “One . . .

  John was murmuring to himself, with Droyn and the other Catholics: “Sáncta María, Máter Déi, óra pro nóbis peccatóribus, nunc et in hóra mórtis nóstrae. Ámen.”

  “Two . . .

  “Three!”

  She sprang forward—previously she’d paced it out, and found the run to be fifteen strides and a leap. Over the edge this time instead of stopping, and push back with her right foot against the parapet of the lookout’s edge. Throwing herself forward, and the harness held her cradled in its trough, horizontal in the same plane as the wing.

  There was a whump as the fabric struck the air, and a dip as she pulled the bar back to turn the nose down a little and gain airspeed . . .

  The slopes along the front of the Santa Monicas made an invisible ladder in the sky as the Valley gave up the heat of the day. The hang glider still sank—one foot down for every seventeen or so forward—but the column of air that enfolded her was rising faster than that. The moon-washed ruins and scrub beneath her hardly approached at all for the first few miles. Even then, on her way to edged metal and anger, there was some of the joy of flying so; this was as close to a bird’s dance with the spirits of Air as human beings could come.

  Then the long straight glide, like tipping over the edge of a hill as they left the band of rising air. Just because it was straight didn’t make it easy; Air was a living thing, and a playful inconstant Power. You steered by shifting your balance, forward and back and to either
side. Like swimming . . . a bit like making love, too, though with a cool ghostly lover. It wasn’t calm here, either. The air looked clear, but every patch of ground below sent its own gusts upward. Once she ran into a pocket that seemed to drop her a dozen feet in a heartbeat, as if she’d run into a vacuum. Her teeth clicked together hard, but then the wing bit again.

  The dot of light was brighter and closer. Soon, soon . . .

  Soon we’ll all be down. If the others are still behind me!

  It was something new to worry about, at least.

  • • •

  Connor Tillman was horrified when he realized one of the Mackenzies was making a noise, actually talking, with the God-damned Chatsworth pukes only a couple of dozen yards away through a night that would have been perfectly still if it weren’t for the insects and some night-birds and a coyote howling in the middle distance. Talking when it was just about time for things to start. He didn’t particularly like them, but he’d thought they knew better than that, and so did the other bunch in rather different kilts.

  The Topangan crawled in the direction of the noise to shut the crazed northerner up . . . until hands seized him out of the darkness; he remained in control enough not to use his knife in the instant before his arms were pinned. At least three someones—strong someones—had grabbed him, including one pair of hands over his eyes and mouth.

  The hand came off his eyes, though the other across his lips remained clamped hard.

  “Wheesht!” a voice hissed in his ear.

  Which obviously meant quiet; it was reinforced by the prick of a blade behind the ear, just a single touch and then withdrawn.

  The paddock where the Lancers were holding their horses ready to deploy was a small park and several lawns and what had been a parking lot until the asphalt was broken up and carted away a generation ago. The mounts crowded it, restless and nickering and shifting now and then, the more so because in a display of insane machismo a lot of the Chatsworth types used entire stallions as their warhorses, what Connor thought of as trying to prove you were hung like a pony. The Topangans and one of the Mackenzies and a bunch of the . . .