The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  Which was more or less true, in some circumstances, but she had an ulterior motive here. She pulled the sheathed sword out of the frog at her belt and held it out over her forearm. The Delgados looked at each other and then touched the crystal pommel.

  Both started slightly as they did; Winifred’s eyes went very wide for an instant as if memories were suddenly flashing through her mind. Both then looked intensely thoughtful for a moment, and glanced at each other. You could see them both becoming more concerned, as if their sense of what had happened over the last few months suddenly clashed with their memories of it.

  Órlaith smiled grimly.

  “You may have gotten more than you bargained for when you dealt with the Koreans,” she said, and swallowed at the mercifully-fading memories of the kangshinmu as she put the Sword back in its sling on her arming belt. “That should clear things up a little.”

  Mark Delgado was going red and clenching his fists. “I kept thinking I was being too agreeable to the sons of—”

  His wife touched him on the sleeve. “Deep waters, mi corazón,” she said; people in Topanga and the Valley almost all spoke English, but they salted it heavily with Spanish loanwords and turns of phrase.

  Órlaith nodded. “Let’s go to the pavilion. We can talk out of the sun, at least. Sir Droyn, please see to Lord and Lady Delgado’s escorts. And have the troops stand easy. It’s a hot day, and it would be a pity did any keel over with sunstroke.”

  • • •

  The pavilion was actually sailcloth from the Tarshish Queen, strung on ropes the sailors had rigged up to the supports of the old freeway overpass. Beneath it was shade, and olive gloom, and a smell of hot canvas and dust. That put them very close to the watchtower the Topangans, with her help, had stormed the other night, which was by way of a hint.

  The furniture and rugs were another loan from the Esmeraldans, this time from Don Antonio’s cabin; she was running up a bit of a debt there, but it was the sort she could pay comfortably. Moishe Feldman’s new home in Newport was rich in a quiet, rather restrained fashion, but his cabin on the ship he used for his personal voyages was just plain and comfortable. The Esmeraldan’s gear would impress the people she needed to overawe just now. And lying between them was the sheathed form of the Sword of the Lady.

  Right now it could have been simply a very fine sword . . . save that it was never entirely that. The effect could be very subtle, but it was always there. Nor was the effect of a sword in itself without value. They were discussing politics and power, after all: and in a sense the sword was the power of which all others were shadows. The whole truth was more complex than that; but that was a truth.

  The wine that Evrouin poured for them all was Feldman’s too, from a selection he carried partly for cabin use and partly as samples for potential customers. The Valley’s rulers sipped dutifully as a gesture of accepting hospitality, then checked slightly and glanced at their glasses.

  “Is that salvage?” Winifred asked. “It’s in unusually good condition if it is—that sort of thing has been getting harder and harder to find in a state worth drinking.”

  “No, my lady, it’s from my family’s estates, a vintage laid down when I was about twelve,” Heuradys d’Ath said. “Montinore Manor, to be precise, on Barony Ath. Just a little west of Portland, in the Tualatin Valley. Feldman and Sons purchases from us in quantity for export to Hawaii, among other places.”

  It was a nice touch. The more intelligent of them here, a group among which the Delgado family were certainly numbered, must be uneasily conscious of how much they lived in and off the old world’s skeleton. Montival was building anew, and a small thing like a well-made pinot noir and a well-printed label and an elegantly blown glass bottle were effective symbols to add to the weaponry. Mark’s eyes flickered to his wife, and she nodded slightly.

  “Well, to business,” he said. “I’ve got to admit, ah, Princess . . .”

  “The usual style in which the Crown Princess is entitled is Your Highness,” Heuradys said gently. “My lord.”

  “Ummm, Your Highness, you hurt us a bit the other night. Still, the Valley’s standing. You didn’t crush us. You didn’t even weaken us much. We’ve got reserves and your new Topangan friends don’t.”

  “Ah, but your new allies?” Órlaith said.

  “Gone, as you must know,” Delgado said. “Except the dead ones.”

  He touched his hand to his forehead. “Something damned odd was going on there . . . but that doesn’t alter the basic balance.”

  Órlaith inclined her head slightly; he believed what he’d just said, more or less, though he was putting a bold face on it.

  “You’re certainly not beaten to your knees,” she said, in what was not quite agreement. “That’s often the best time to make a deal, don’t you think? While you still have bargaining stakes.”

  Winifred’s face was entirely expressionless; she would be formidable at poker. Except that her pupils expanded a little, and Órlaith wasn’t entirely sure she’d have caught that without the Sword. The woman certainly thought she had a point. Órlaith sipped from her glass and let Heuradys take up the tale, as she laid aside her helm, bevor and gauntlets.

  “Lord Mark, let me summarize. Without those catapults the Koreans leant you . . . for purposes of their own, as should now be obvious . . .”

  He gave a chuckle. “Like I ever thought otherwise. But there they were.”

  “And now they’re not. And without them you have no prospect of taking the Canyon—which is now part of Montival and a signatory of the Great Charter.”

  Órlaith touched a finger to a copy of it lying at her elbow, the size of a slim book in a tooled-leather cover of deep brown stamped with gold lettering.

  Heuradys went on: “Topanga is therefore under the Crown’s protection. From now on, if you attack the Canyon, you attack Montival; we gave you a sample of what that means.”

  His face flushed slightly, and his hands clenched. That’s his tell, Órlaith thought. A choleric man, and a masterful one, who doesn’t like being thwarted. Not the first I’ve met. . . .

  “What’s more, with our assistance and the catapults we have, your opponents can go down Topanga Canyon Boulevard all the way north to the mountains and break anything you try to put in our way. Especially since you don’t hold the Ventura Freeway anymore. You can’t stop us if you don’t bunch up, and if you bunch up the catapults will smash you.”

  The weapons were right at their backs this moment, emphasizing the point.

  “If we’re dumb enough to try to fight on your terms,” Delgado said stoutly. “There are more ways of killing a cat than choking it to death with butter. You don’t have enough troops to hold the Valley if we harass you and refuse the type of battle you want to fight. There’s a lot of scrub and wreckage down here. Good luck and a happy time to you combing us out of it.”

  Órlaith smiled. “Very true. If the Valley were strongly united behind your House, breaking them would take far too much time and too many troops. However, my intelligence is that your hegemony over the Valley is recent in parts and none too popular anywhere. Spare me the formal denials.”

  The implication of that hung unspoken between them: if he couldn’t hold his border, chunks of his lands would break away or join any invader who offered good terms. Possibly some of his own Chatsworth Lancers, if that invader menaced their homes, fields and herds and offered a settlement that guaranteed them. It took a very loyal populace indeed to watch their own homes burn and bleed for strategic purposes; that or an enemy thought to be wholly merciless anyway.

  Delgado was a fighter, whatever else you might say about him. He snarled; you might almost say he growled. Órlaith held up a placating hand:

  “Let’s not let emotions get in the way, Lord Mark, Lady Winifred. These are matters of State and too important for feelings of injured pride, or arrogance. On either of
our parts.”

  Winifred’s eyes fixed on her for a moment, and she leaned in to whisper urgently in her husband’s ear. Órlaith ostentatiously looked aside for a moment, until he cleared his throat and went on roughly:

  “You think you can beat your way through the shell to get at the meat inside? Ah, Your Majesty . . . Highness.”

  “Lord Mark, I know I can; and you’re no fool, so you at least strongly suspect it as well. As those catapults—just what one ordinary warship carries—should show you, the art of war as the Changed world allows it has advanced elsewhere in ways completely beyond your capacity to match here. Needs must when the devil drives, and we’ve been driven hard in ways you have not, and learned painful lessons.”

  “Plus there’s the matter of scale,” Heuradys pointed out, turning her wineglass between her fingers. “You’re used to thinking of armies numbering hundreds. The High Queen disposes of dozens of ships and thousands of troops even just counting the Navy and the guard regiments we maintain in peacetime. We can mobilize tens of thousands fairly easily, and hundreds of thousands at a pinch. What we have here . . . what gave you that unpleasant sucker punch . . . is simply an escort, what the heir takes along on a trip.”

  He grunted; the escort was about a quarter as large as his whole elite force.

  “You’ve been left to fight your own quarrels here because nobody cared. Now we do, thanks to your letting those Koreans meddle. We have a grudge against them, and grudges are like the flu, catching if you aren’t careful. They’ve left you in the lurch, haven’t they? And Korea is a very long way away. The Columbia Valley is much closer. A week’s sailing . . . and a ship can carry a great deal.”

  A great deal of troops, weapons and supplies went unspoken.

  “What are you proposing?” he growled, looking back at the Crown Princess.

  Órlaith nodded; that cut to the heart of the matter. “Topanga has signed the Charter, which guarantees their borders. If you sign as well, that guarantees yours. You get very nearly complete internal autonomy—at this distance from the Willamette, even more than the usual. It also guarantees the peaceful succession of your heirs.”

  Unlike his deceased brother, Mark Delgado had four living children.

  Órlaith smiled slightly. “I’ll throw in the Simi Valley; you’ve as much claim there as anyone. And your southeastern frontier with the LA Basin is of course as of now undefined. That’s potentially a rich salvage trade you’ve got there when it’s developed, and you get to keep most of it.”

  “I need access to the sea!” Delgado growled. “We’ve needed it for years . . .”

  “You’ll have it,” Órlaith soothed. “That comes under the free trade and free passage provisions . . .”

  Then the dickering began. Fortunately it was morning, and she had that copy of the Great Charter at hand; it had been originally drawn up to be as soothing as possible to a dozen different varieties of bloody-minded localism, including some far stranger and stronger than this pair’s little second-generation warlord’s domain. John’s man Evrouin came in with a light lunch about noon, and the bargaining continued.

  Even more fortunately, apparently Winifred Delgado had been collecting information about the north for years, just on general principles, and had a reasonably accurate idea of how far above their weight the Chatsworth Lancers would be punching if they tried to fight, and she had filled in her spouse. Neither of them looked very happy a few hours later, but they’d just lost a war, and they’d still managed to get up with their table stakes untouched.

  Also I think the Koreans frightened them. There are sharks in the pond at the bottom of what they thought was their home pasture and now they’ve seen the fins. Seen things happen in their own heads.

  The main difference between them was that Winifred looked as if this was something she’d expected sooner or later, and just regretted not being able to grab off more before it did.

  When they’d both placed their hands with hers in gingerly fashion on the Sword and sworn—honestly for the moment, but with hidden reservations that didn’t surprise her at all—she nodded. Both broke out in a bit of a sweat as they withdrew their hands from the staghorn hilt.

  “Now, you two remind me of my mother’s parents, just a bit, and not in a good way. So I’m not going to give you a lecture on good lordship,” she said. “For that I have an aversion to wasting my breath, and within very broad limits how you run your own lands is as much your own business inside the Kingdom as out of it. That’s how Montival works.”

  The two hard wary faces across from her nodded almost simultaneously; they’d grasped that that was the practice as well as the theory, and it was the main reason they’d agreed.

  That and the catapults, she thought, and went on:

  “Instead I’ll say a few words on the subject of wealth and power.”

  She pulled a Montivallan rose noble out of her pouch and spun it on the table; after an instant it fell over and she rested a fingertip on it, pushing it to the middle of the table. This was from the Crown mint in Portland, and bore a rose on one side and the Virgin on the obverse, with a clean milled edge and Latin motto. The simple fact of being able to coin to that standard made Winifred thoughtful, she could see.

  “Wealth and power being the two faces of the same coin. What is power, Lord Mark?”

  His hand dropped unconsciously to where his sword-hilt would have been. She shook her head.

  “A sword means nothing without an arm to wield it; and the arm is attached to a body, which has a head, the which can think. You can control what you think . . . unless you run into nasty people of the sort I’ve just removed . . . but one sword isn’t much in the usual run of things.”

  Mark Delgado grunted. “I know enough to keep my Lancers behind me,” he said.

  A stark grin showed he had his own subtlety, and he put in before she spoke. “That’s a balancing act. You need to be tough, but not unpredictable. Fear and respect are sort of kissing cousins, but they’re not exactly the same thing.”

  She nodded. “I thought you a hard man, and a clever one,” she said. “So a ruler must be. Goodness is a nice dressing on the salad, but a good weak ruler is worse than a right bastard of a man who knows what he’s doing and does it. Strength comes first, for without it you can’t do anything, good or bad or indifferent.”

  Delgado gave her a thoughtful nod with genuine respect in it, and she looked at Winifred.

  “And you, my lady, I think know that swords in loyal hands can do many things . . . but they cannot plow, or reap, or weave. Or make a sword, come to that. You’re thinking that the Great Charter says any of your subjects who wish to can leave, but that it’s a long way to anywhere else, travel isn’t free and it is risky, it’s more risky still with children and old folk, and people can’t take their farms upon their backs. Or their milch cows or their anvils or much of anything else. And nobody is going to give them a house or blankets or a working farm or livestock or an established craft trade somewhere else.”

  Winifred nodded cautiously. “Yes, Your Highness. That had, ah, occurred to me. Sweat equity of that kind is sort of immobile. Territory’s just . . . just dirt, on its own, without people. But people need dirt, and they accumulate stuff attached to the dirt.”

  Apparently the implications hadn’t struck Mark Delgado quite the same way. He frowned uncertainly.

  Heuradys chuckled dryly. “That’s true. But as many Associate nobles—”

  She touched the jeweled dagger at her belt, and the two local rulers nodded to show they understood what it meant.

  “—found when we introduced that rule up north after the Protector’s War, it’s only true to a certain point, and that point depends on many things. A lord can do useful services for a peasant and provide things he needs or at least wants besides the land itself, things the peasant is usually willing to pay for, the more so as you throw
in inertia; but peasants are absolutely essential to lords. And water tends to seek its own level, sooner or later.”

  Órlaith nodded. “There are many lords . . . and many free cities . . . and for that matter many clans and autonomous villages and tribes and whatnot . . . who’ll welcome any pair of willing hands attached to a strong back, albeit that means starting at the bottom and staying there for a good long while. But there’s excellent land going begging and not used for anything but rough grazing or hunting in many a place not two days travel from cities like Portland or Corvallis. Flat, fat well-watered land without pavement on it. And skills . . . a competent blacksmith or carpenter or leatherworker will never lack for work. If not in one place, then another.”

  Mark Delgado was looking a little alarmed. Winifred’s eyes narrowed before she spoke.

  “It is a long way to the north. Knowledge about that will spread slowly; it’ll take longer still for it to become real to people.”

  Órlaith nodded again. “That will give you time. I suggest—for it’s up to you—that you use it wisely, for your own children’s sake. Get ahead of the curve, so to say. You have to make your folk want to dwell here, so you can benefit from their labor. For as to wealth and power . . . they are the source of it; the work of their hands, the craft of their minds seeking their own advantage, which is yours too; and their children. You’ve the makings of a rich lordship here, but it will take many years of hard work; and it’s better to have a smaller share of much more rather than a bigger share of much less.”

  “Something to that,” Mark said, neutrally.

  “Now, those children of yours . . . the oldest are?”

  “Jack’s eleven,” Mark Delgado said suspiciously. “Ellen’s eight.”

  Órlaith smiled. “Just a suggestion,” she said. “But in a year or two . . . depending on how things go . . . you might want to pay a visit to the north, and have them with you. You might want to foster them at court for a few years, even, when they’re a bit older and after you’ve seen for yourself how such things are managed there. By way of education, and the making of contacts and friendships, you see? Entirely up to you, but you might want to think about it.”