The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  McClintocks, that’s what they’re called.

  . . . were outside the line of street where guards paced back and forth, sheltering behind snags of cinderblock wall. One of the kilted northerners was on his . . . no, her knees, it was the woman named Gwri, the dark one with her hair in small tight braids tipped with silver balls—sensibly muffled with a kerchief under her helmet for this work. Her face had a sinuous design in dark-green and brown and burnt ochre drawn on it now; Mackenzies didn’t tattoo like their relatives, but they did paint their faces for war when they had time.

  She was kneeling up behind a fragment of wall, with her arms out to either side and palms up, swaying slowly to left and right, with an arrangement of rocks and scratches in the dirt before her and objects at the points of a pentagram inside a circle—a feather, a bone, things he couldn’t see clearly. And as she swayed she chanted or half-sang, very softly, words that trickled into your ears like warm honey, her eyes heavy-lidded. Like your mother singing to you in your cradle . . . and Connor’s mother had died in childbirth; he’d been raised by his father and a bunch of neighbors, he didn’t remember her at all.

  Except that somehow now he did, with an overwhelming sense of homecoming, like staring into the hearth as it flickered low while it rained outside.

  “Sleep of the Earth of the land of Faerie

  Deep is the lore of Cnuic na Sidhe

  Hail be to they of the Forest Gentry

  Pale, dark spirits, help us see—”

  Conan was on the other side of her. He was staring wide-eyed . . . and then his head turned very slowly. Connor rolled his eyes to follow his son’s gaze. The Valley sentries were walking in pairs, weapons on their shoulders . . . and one pair was passing by right now, a spearman with a shield and an archer, both wearing simple metal pots and leather jackets with rows of overlapping stainless-steel washers sewn on with wire. They stopped, and one brought the spear down with a thump and a weary sigh, and rubbed a hand over his face. The other yawned enormously. Neither seemed conscious of anything but boredom, silent darkness and fatigue.

  “Christ, what a waste of time!” the spearman with a blond queue tied back with a rag said in the middle of the yawn. “The freaks never come this far. And a whole day spent shoveling horseshit. I can do that at home. Well, shit from my ox and the milk-cow.”

  “This is bullshit too,” the bowman said sourly . . . and yawned as well, enough to make his jaw click audibly. “We don’t even get to keep the horseshit, I could use it for my new truck field. Easy to work but it keeps trying to turn back into sand if I don’t feed it right. Tomatoes like it sandy but not too sandy, and there’s fucking cutworm to think about. I’m wondering if trying tobacco on it next fall wouldn’t be a good idea. Finicky stuff to grow but there’s always a market for something that habit-forming.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t eat tobacco, so in a bad year the price of everything else goes up more. And I’m worried about Jenny myself; that damn boar hog just isn’t safe if I’m not there to check the pen, not when she has to look after little Bob too. Now that he’s running around like a puppy and getting into everything. I should be home, dammit.”

  “Well, me too, but what’re you going to do? Tell Mark Delgado sorry Mr. Big Chatsworth Boss on your high horse, you can’t have that war right now, I’m too busy? We get something off the taxes, at least. Maybe the boss will finish off the freaks and we won’t have to worry about shit like this anymore. That’ll make salt a lot cheaper too; I hear he’s going to build up the pans on the coast when we take ’em over. And we’ve got the new gear.”

  “That’s something else is bothering me. I don’t like those creepy foreigners who came with it. I swear they look at us the way I look at that damned pig. Christ, I’m tired, can’t stop yawning. Why couldn’t someone else draw middle watch three nights running?”

  “You and the dice, Bob, you and the dice.”

  Gwri reached into a pouch at her waist and dropped something into the palm of her left hand in an odd spiral-circular movement, then took up a little of it between thumb and two fingers, raising them to her lips:

  “White is the dust of the state of dreaming

  Light is the mixture to make one still

  Dark is the powder of Death’s redeeming

  Mark but that one pinch can kill—”

  Then she blew sharply across them. A dark glitter seemed to hang before her fingertips for an instant.

  “Sleep!

  Harken in your dreams

  Sleep and do not wake

  Nothing’s as it seems

  Iron bonds will break—”

  Conan’s eyes were bulging even more. Connor’s did too, when the first Valley sentry just sat down and leaned against a stump of concrete and let his head fall back. The hands holding Connor relaxed as he did, and he settled down on his belly to watch. He did not understand what was going on.

  Bruce Delgado would have hung a sentry who decided he wanted a nap more than doing his job, hung him from a lamppost and left the body for the birds as a hint to anyone else who felt sleepy on picket duty at three in the morning. His brother Mark had men like that flogged to death with wire whips or dragged with a rope around their ankles and the other end fastened to the saddle horn of a galloping horse. The sentry’s partner bent to touch his shoulder, yawning again. The singsong chant continued:

  “Hearts will be set free

  Wrongs will be made right

  Sleep and dreams will be

  Justice in the night

  Dreams will be

  Justice in the night—”

  The song died away, and the second sentry lay down in the dust of the highway. Both of them were asleep; uneasy sleep, by the way they twitched, but deep and slack-mouthed. Connor felt sweat break out over his whole body, running clammy down his flanks. Two of the northerners—McClintocks with the tattoos and the baggy kilts—started forward with their long dirks drawn and the honed edges catching the moonlight in little icy glints. Silent hairy deadliness like wolves with steel for fangs.

  “Nay! Don’t kill them, Diarmuid,” Gwri said quietly, and the two caterans halted and looked over their shoulders at their feartaic. “Ill-luck, to misuse a gift of the Mother so without strong need. There are Powers in contention here, and the ones who favor us wouldn’t like it.”

  “Aye,” the McClintock leader said softly; he had a torc of twisted gold around his neck, covered now with dark rags to keep it from glinting. “Seònaidh, ye’ve the lighter hand, ye tap them a lullaby. Tak care, ’tis geasan work here, nae sich sport as a feud in the hills.”

  A redhead with a blue design of feathers tattooed over her face and neck slid over the wall; she still had her dirk in her hand, but she struck with the ball pommel of the weapon rather than point or edge. And carefully, adjusting the angle of the heads to rap them behind the ear. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t hurt when they woke up . . . or even that they absolutely, certainly would wake up at all. Being knocked out was never a joke, though this was a lot less risky than getting hammered at random while they were resisting.

  Then she dragged them both back into the shadow of the wall by the collars of their jackets. With a grin she used the dirk to snip two roses from the feral bush by the wall, then sheathed it and arranged the two militiamen on their backs with their hands crossed on their chests and the flowers tucked into their fingers. A silent snicker ran through the clansfolk. Connor supposed he’d have found it funny himself, if he hadn’t been trying so hard to avoid a bring me my brown pants moment.

  Diarmuid turned to Connor and spoke near his ear: “Gwri’s a bana-bhuidseach, ye ken.” At his incomprehension: “Witch. Spellweaver, like me ain mother. But I’d no thought she was powerful enough tae lay that on ’em. Few are, gae few. Most times a spell is a chancy thing, that might be doing aught and might be just wind and wishes. This is . . .”

/>   Connor felt his eyes grow wider still. I’ve got a lucky rabbit’s foot, he thought. Don’t think that’s in the same league, no indeedy.

  “I’m not so strong, most times. I had . . . help,” Gwri said bluntly. “My mother told me of such things from the wartime.”

  She nodded towards the road and the paddocks. “They may not be asleep there, the rest of them, but they’ll not be spry. Sluggish, rather. And the ones who sleep on their own will sleep deep and dream hard.”

  Diarmuid pulled a watch out of his sporran and checked it. “Time. Let’s be aboot it, then.”

  He smiled, a remarkably carnivorous expression in the darkness. “Ahhh, reiving horses by moonlight. Taks me back tae happy days, that it does!”

  • • •

  “Now!” Reiko said.

  A samurai handed her the higoyumi. Another flicked a lighter and she touched the bulbous tip of the arrow to it; it lit brightly, and she squinted to keep it from entirely killing her night-vision as the naphtha-soaked fiber within flared up. She had memorized the direction and distance anyway, and so closed her eyes to let that knowledge flow out through hands and arms. Over her head, center the chi, draw as the bow came down, hold the gloved hand back . . .

  The arrow arched away into blackness. So did a dozen more; she opened her eyes to see them tracing yellow arcs through the night, as pure as any she’d ever made on graph paper in her trigonometry studies. A growing brabble of alarm rose. And in half a dozen places in the brush around the enemy encampment, sentries started up. So did the Japanese warriors who’d crawled close, inch by patient inch over the hours of darkness.

  They struck, but not silently—not after the blade or the metal batten of the nunchaku struck or the wire had settled round a throat.

  “Tenno Heika banzai! Banzai!”

  Light flared up from the direction of the artillery park; someone there had dumped the spare fuel onto the fire . . . which was exactly what she’d hoped would happen. That would blind those near it, and it would add to the beacon effect of the fire-arrows. Dark-clad figures came hurdling back over the wall ahead of them, grabbing for the longer weapons they’d discarded for their patient stalks. Her heart swelled with pride. This wasn’t the ground they’d trained on, but her samurai were adapting very well . . .

  The commander of the Imperial Guard leapt to the top of the wall ahead, standing with his feet braced.

  “Bakachon!” he shouted. “Hear me!”

  His sword was drawn, and held over his head. They would see the glitter there, at least. And if they saw the black night-fighting costume, so much the better. The enemy knew of the School of the Hidden Door, and they feared its adepts. Reiko spoke a fair amount of Korean, learned for military purposes, and she thought she detected that barking tongue in the confusion around the fire. An arrow flickered in their direction, a fluting whisper through the darkness.

  There was nothing hidden about what Egawa shouted. They wanted the enemy to attack them . . . be entirely focused on them, in fact. Then they wanted them running back and forth between threats and unable to deal with any of them well; that was the plan, at least.

  “I am General Egawa Noboru, Commander of the Imperial Guard of the Sovereign Majesty of Victorious Peace, victor in seven pitched battles, thirty-seven skirmishes and ship actions, and four duels! My father was Egawa Katashi, leader of the Seventy Loyal Men, who saved the dynasty and our nation! His father was Egawa Osamu, who dove his aircraft into a Beijin battleship! His father was Egawa Takeo, who lost his right arm leading his men in the storming of Mukden! For uncounted generations, the Egawa line has served their Emperors and Dai-Nippon! Tenno Heika banzai!”

  Then in their own language just before he jumped down: “Come to us and die, filth!”

  This time she could definitely hear shrieks of: “Waegu! Waegu!”

  That was what the enemy called her people, and there was fear in the sound. Time to take advantage of that, to keep them off-balance. As in sword-work, where a series of blows ultimately left the opponent with no counter.

  She drew another arrow from her quiver, raised the bow, lowered it and drew. This time she used a needle point, and the billowing flames illuminated the targets from her position even as they blinded those beside them. One of the men in Korean armor staggered, turned, grabbed at a catapult and slowly crumpled to the ground.

  Loose.

  It would probably take the enemy about five minutes to organize a counterattack.

  Loose.

  And about twice that long to kill her and every one of her party, if anything serious went wrong. Órlaith had promised that she’d find the Grass-Cutting Sword and send it back to Japan if Reiko fell, but while Reiko didn’t doubt her she hadn’t come here to let new-found friends do her duties for her. Not to mention friends just now in even more peril than she was.

  Loose.

  • • •

  The fires rushed up towards her as she sent the hang glider down steeply. Distance was hard to estimate at night, even with fires billowing up—the last fire-arrows streaking in from the Japanese positions a little eastward, a bonfire blazing. She let the night flow into her . . .

  Now.

  She suddenly pushed on the bar with all her strength. The nose went up and the wing staggered in the air as its surface turned nearly horizontal to the direction she’d been moving, transformed from a wing to a giant brake. Motion ceased for a moment. . . .

  And she began to fall, her hand going back to scrabble the first buckle of the harness loose. Her body swung down; light webbing struck the soles of her calf-boots an instant later, slowing the fall as her weight punched through. The broad surface of the wing struck the surface of the camouflage netting an instant later. That jerked her to a brief stop and made her teeth click together and she grunted as the harness squeezed at her chest. She hit the second catch, dropped three more inches to the ancient pavement and ripped the Sword of the Lady from its sheath while her left hand undid the thong that bound its sheath to her leg.

  Shock.

  Suddenly the flame-shot darkness around her was brighter; not with more light, but as if her eyes were making better, no, making fullest use of what was reaching them. The world became as much pale as dark, washed-out and flat, like a cloudy morning in the Dark Months rather than deep night. Strain and fear, even fear for her followers and friends, was suddenly as faint and ghostly as the light itself. Instead she felt light and strong, both angry and . . . lucid. Not quite as she’d felt in the fight by Círbann Rómenadrim—less of fury in it, more of thought.

  Because that’s what I need, she knew.

  Everyone seemed to have dashed off from this exact location—precisely the point of the plan. A dead man lay on his side by a catapult with an arrow driven through his throat; she recognized it as one of Reiko’s from the fletching. Another in the odd Korean armor trotted up, but apparently didn’t see her immediately; instead he turned in the direction the fire-arrows had come and raised his own bow. It was a recurve, a composite of horn and wood and sinew, much narrower than the Montivallan equivalents and with rounded instead of flat limbs. But from the way it flexed as he drew, fully as powerful.

  Not wanting to feel quite so much like an assassin, Órlaith spoke:

  “Drop that bow, soldier.”

  The words were in his own language, and he did—but only because he was going for his sword in panic reflex as he spun on one heel towards her, his narrow dark eyes flaring wide in alarm. The sword was a dao-saber in the old Han style, not unlike the horseman’s shete common over the Rockies, and with what looked like a cavalryman’s reflex he whirled it up over his left shoulder for a backhand slash. Órlaith lunged instead with the right-foot-forward duellist’s stroke, long arm and long blade and long lunge aiming at a point behind the man’s back, wrist and arm braced for impact and long training making her keep the flat of the blade h
orizontal so that the edges wouldn’t stick on a rib.

  The point broke the mail links between the steel rectangles of the Korean’s coat-of-plates with a distinct, almost musical ching sound. Not as easily as it would have cut so much string, but not as hard as it would have been if steel were meeting steel—nothing as sharp as the Sword could stay that sharp for more than an instant if slammed into hard metal. An edge that thin would break or curl . . . and the Sword’s edge just faded into air like the thinnest fraction of an obsidian shard. But nothing on Earth could harm it, nothing at all.

  There was an expression of terrible surprise on the Korean’s face as he staggered backward, surprise and a dawning revulsion—as there might be on any man’s with twenty inches of razor rammed through his lungs. But Órlaith had an uneasy sensation that the surprise had begun before that. The Korean warrior had looked normal enough, just one more hard-faced man of war. Yet something had changed as the Sword touched him, as if the veil of many years had been stripped away from his eyes and left the absolute truth of his own existence there instead.

  That was what was supposed to happen when you made accounting to the Guardians of the Western Gate, before you entered the Summerlands. Her variety of the Old Faith had never made much of punishment in the Afterlife, except that singular self-inflicted one of knowing fully the cause and consequence of everything you’d been and done without possibility of untruth even to yourself.

  Right now she was realizing that that might be just as serious as the Christians’ hellfire.

  She thought of what Reiko and the others had told her of what Korea was like under its sorcerer-kings, who ruled as living Gods. Or demon-lords exulting in a universe of pain and horror, the sort of place where family quarrels were settled by roasting and eating the loser’s infants before their eyes and then lowering them into pits full of starving dogs or flesh-eating insects an inch at a time. It had all been sincere, but she’d assumed at least some part of it was the natural fruit of long enmity. Now she didn’t anymore. Her father had told her more than once that you had to fight Evil, but what that mostly meant was killing Evil’s conscripted farmers. This one, she suspected, had been rather more than that, however his life began.