It was the girl’s screaming that brought her back to herself. Her hand reached out to touch the point of . . .
That which I have found. That which is remade, as I am, as I have been on this voyage. Ame-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi, the Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven.
. . . to the chain that bound the child’s ankle. The metal dropped away, and she snatched the girl into the crook of her arm as she sheathed the Grasscutter Sword and snatched up the stolen blade that had nearly killed her.
Most terribly avenged, she thought.
As she turned and raced for the courtyard and the entrance to the castle of damnation, the girl buried her face in the fabric of her kimono, even as it smoked with the heat.
But your curse ends here, man of the Shrine. The Divine Flame burns it away, with all dross. There has been atonement. Let the child stand for rebirth.
She staggered past the burning timber of the courtyard gate, where the iron strapping turned red and then white. Órlaith waited for her, relief and joy flashing across her face as she extended an arm.
The other hand held the bared Sword of the Lady. Around them was a circle of points, and voices in a harsh unfamiliar language.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ERETZ BNEI YAAKOV
(MOJAVE DESERT)
CROWN PROVINCE OF WESTRIA
(FORMERLY CALIFORNIA)
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
AUGUST 16TH/HAOCHIZUKI 16TH/AV 23RD
CHANGE YEAR 46/SHOHEI 1/5084TH YEAR OF THE WORLD/2044 AD
Órlaith shivered a little as Reiko walked through the gate. Such a simple action . . .
“Oh, now this is hard,” she murmured to herself. “It’s easier to be brave than watch another who you care for be brave without you. Yet in all respect, I can do no other. For what are we, we two, if not our work?”
She set herself to wait. The feel of the Sword under her palm was strange . . . though that did not surprise her. It was as if she stood on the edge not of a building, but a hole in the fabric that was Montival. An absence of structure and connection. Not an empty hole; one that contained a bottomless whirl of energy. A maelstrom without a barrier now, threatening to spread . . . and she was what contained it; she and what she bore.
A jolt ran through the fabric of things, and her hand clenched on the hilt of the Sword as she gasped. Something was happening in there . . .
“And did I expect nothing to happen?” she said, and sought a spot of shade.
There she sat, and cradled the sheathed Sword of the Lady in her arms, sipping occasionally at the canteen; the desert’s arid death still hovered at the back of her mind. There was a rightness to the dry lands now, but it was not one which paid much heed to the wants and needs of human kind. There was little of the dance of hands and nature and Otherworld that you sensed in the Mackenzie dúthchas say, or a Protectorate manor. The aes dana here were hard and stark and . . .
Not hostile, but hard indeed, she thought.
They glowed like the merciless sun, blew like the scouring sand-laden wind, rustled like the dry brush in the night-winds. She sensed creatures of feather and scale and venom, pressing inward now as this place struggled to assume its shape again.
The day passed, and an odd contentment came with it. She ate of her iron rations and considered the odd bicycle contraptions that lay scattered about what had probably been what the ancients called a parking lot; they were really quite ingenious, the sort of thing someone good with his hands could do quickly with a hacksaw and hand-drill.
A little later she walked out to the edge of the pavement, watching the nearby hills for a while. A herd of a dozen antelope passed by, large tan-colored beasts with lighter patches on their rumps and long black tails and a black stripe along the junction of leg and body and white socks about their hooves. The big male looked at her with liquid dark eyes and tossed its long saber-shaped horns, and then they all moved off at a gliding trot, fading until they were simply a plume of light dust against the blue-brown hills.
Gemsbok, she thought.
There had been a herd of them down here in the desert lands even before the Change, farther east, and they’d spread explosively. They were African originally, from the Kalahari; they liked heat, they liked dry—they liked it so much they didn’t really have to drink water all their lives long, though they did when they got the opportunity—and probably, no, certainly, the lions liked them.
They don’t even feel foreign, she thought.
The Sword gave her a grasp of things like that. Tumbleweeds did feel foreign, and buffelgrass; as if they were still settling in, a slow vegetable wrestling with the bunchgrasses and sage and greasewood and mesquite. The antelope . . . and the lions . . . felt more like an absence removed, a hole gaping empty being filled. Long, long ago there had been lions here, and antelope of a dozen kinds, and swarms of other beasts. That had been in an age so distant that the first of human kind were just entering, her own first ancestors in this continent.
The land remembered, and it grieved for the plenitude and magnificence it had once born. Sometimes she dreamed of it, of coach-sized beaver, of hairy elephants, of great cats with scimitar fangs and sloths the size of a small building cropping the tops of trees. Once or twice of her remote ancestors hunting them, and the beasts waiting uncomprehending for the stone-tipped spears, their eyes holding only a mild dim wonder.
She went back to the shade. Nothing much moved after that, but the feeling of things happening grew too, thought for once it wasn’t her responsibility. Her task was to be here, and to stand between her land and something that had been eating away at it since long before she was born.
The final jolt came not long before the late summer sunset. The sun painted the bleak hills around with implausible crimsons and pinks and turned the western horizon into a band of molten copper. The burst of something from within rolled over her and brought her upright from a half-doze, her eyes wide, feeling as if her hair was bristling like a horse’s mane. As she watched the building began to smoke, as if it were heated from within throughout its whole substance. And then flame burst from every window, from the timbers of the gate, seemingly from the stone itself. She threw up a hand in shock as the unnatural swiftness of the blaze towered upward. Órlaith had seen prairie fires in the far eastern borderlands moving faster than a galloping horse, but that was quietude itself compared to this.
Reiko staggered through the gate, dodging the flames, a small skinny naked child clasped against her chest. The fabric of her kimono and hakama seemed to smoke with the radiated heat of the conflagration, and though the sword in her hand was steel, sheathed at her waist was the very spirit of fire. Órlaith flung out an arm to support her.
And as she did she heard a multiple thudding at her back and spun around, the Sword leaping into her hand. The sound had been the feet of animals; not the hard clopping of horses, but soft tough pads striking the pavement and the sand and dirt drifted over it. A dozen camels approached in a closing semi-circle, single-humped Arabian dromedaries rather than the two-humped Bactrian breed you saw occasionally in the northeastern borderlands. They bore riders, robed figures silhouetted against the dying light. Some had long slender lances in their hands, the honed metal of the heads glinting as they swung down to the level; several held recurved antelope-horn bows with arrows on their strings, and all had shamshir-sabers and daggers at their waists. It wasn’t an attack, but it was a very pointed warning.
“To‘eba!” one of them said, loathing in the tone. That meant abomination in a language she suddenly spoke.
“To‘eba . . . to‘eba . . .”
Abomination, abomination, in a rising whisper. She decided a stop had to be put to that; it wasn’t something you wanted people thinking as they pointed edged metal at you. She raised the Sword of the Lady and it caught the sunset, light breaking off t
he edge. Silence rammed down for a moment.
“HaRosh Mistovev,” one muttered, and she knew what that meant too: My head is spinning!
“Who are you?” demanded a man’s voice in the same choppy guttural tongue. “What do you do here? We saw your tracks heading in. This is a forbidden place!”
Meaning cascaded through her; a language whose words glowed like compacted nuggets, ready to spring into mutating forms while always remaining themselves. There was a rugged straightforwardness to it. And it was a splendid tool in her mind for fine shades of meaning, for poetry and prophecy and perhaps for inspired madness. Not born of this land, but it fit the place well.
Reiko was coughing in the curve of her arm; the child she carried seemed unharmed—if uncommonly filthy—but had her eyes squeezed shut as she trembled in a paralysis of terror. Órlaith forced her wits into operation, stood erect, sheathed the Sword and held up a hand in greeting as the man began to repeat his words in English.
“Ani medaberet Ivrit,” she said: “I speak Hebrew. Peace be upon you, warriors.”
“B’emet?” another asked, a woman’s voice this time, shocked surprise in her tone. “In truth?”
Instead of replying aloud Órlaith reached into her sporran, and pulled out the token Moishe Feldman had given her. It glittered on her palm in the dying sunlight and rising firelight, and there was a hiss of indrawn breath; she could feel the savage rising heat of the fire on her back, and one of the camels tossed its head and uttered a groaning, blubbering moan of complaint as it tried to retreat. All of them backed and shifted a little, wanting no part of the blaze.
“I am Crown Princess Órlaith Arminger Mackenzie, of House Artos and the High Kingdom of Montival. This is Her Majesty of Japan. Are we welcome?” she asked.
There was a ringing pause; someone started to speak and another said silence in a furious hiss; the crackle of the building behind them was the loudest sound, and something crashed down to send a shower of sparks skyward.
The voice spoke again; a man let fall the tail of the headdress he had drawn across his hard bearded face. He looked to be thirty, or perhaps a few years less in this land of scourging sun and wind.
“Yes, for now you are welcome. And my name is Meshek ben-Raanan, seren of this company. We wish you no harm.”
Truth, rang through her; he meant what he said, and she relaxed slightly. Seren meant captain, or commander more generally.
“We will take you to my father the Judge; what has happened here is a thing of importance. Too many have died in this spot over the years.”
The lances swung upright and their lower thirds were dropped into tubular scabbards attached to the right rear of the big complex saddles; the bows pointed down, which was not as good as having the arrows back in the quivers, but better than nothing.
“Can you ride a camel?” the man named Meshek asked.
“Do I have a choice?” Órlaith replied dryly, and the man chuckled.
“No, nisicah,” he said; the term meant woman of high rank. “No choice at all, unless you are a very good runner.”
Two riderless but saddled camels were brought up. One of the warriors leaned over and tapped them lightly on the forward elbow-joints with a long thin stick he carried and said sharply:
“Ai, hoosh-hoosh-hoosh!”
Órlaith blinked a little even then at the way they folded down from the front, like some sort of jointed ladder. The first one cocked its head at Órlaith as she came forward a little dubiously; she’d never ridden one before, or even seen one of this variety. The Sword had some lesser benefits. She guessed from the grumbling moan it was thinking of spitting at her as it writhed its lips amid a flow of gummy green saliva.
“Not even in your dreams, camel,” she said firmly.
One of the riders chuckled, a welcome break in the tension. “Ben Zona there earns his name.”
It wasn’t particularly reassuring that they’d given her a mount named Son of a Whore, but she wasn’t in a position to be picky.
She straddled the saddle of wood and aluminum tubing and stuffed leather cushions. It was deep before and behind, cradling her thighs and backside, and it put you just ahead of the hump, with a pack arrangement for cargo to the rear. Part of that cargo was leather waterskins that gurgled reassuringly as the animal rose, hindquarters lurching up first and forcing her to an undignified grab for the frame. Reiko followed suit on the other animal, settling the child before her after she squeaked in alarm; one of the riders frowned and handed her a shawl to wrap around the girl’s nakedness. Warriors snapped long leading reins to the beasts they rode, and there were burbling, gurgling sounds as the whole party turned and padded away at a rapid swinging trot to cries of hut-hut-hut.
For a moment the differences from riding a horse froze her, and then she struck the rhythm with the beast, smoother than what she was used to and with a more undulating motion. Stars were appearing overhead, and the desert night cooled quickly.
• • •
Camels could cover ground; the pace was never faster than a horse, but the course they set would have been hard tasking for a Lakota or a Crown Courier with a string of remounts, and that in somewhere less hot and dry. When they reached the encampment halfway through the next afternoon Órlaith estimated that they had traveled fifty miles at least, eating cheese and flatbread and dried dates and figs and raisins in the saddle and passing around waterskins, halting only three times for calls of nature, and speaking very little. She also felt as if she’d been beaten with clubs and fell onto the mattress in the tent as if struck behind the ear as soon as she’d drunk some water. Noise awoke her, voices and the clatter and thump of people going about their lives.
“Ohayou, Orrey-chan!”
She blinked and groaned a little as she rose, touching the hilt of the Sword where it lay by her side. Reiko was sitting cross-legged on a low bedroll not far away; they were in a tent of some size made of beige camel-hair fabric, its floor covered with bright soft mohair rugs woven in vivid geometric patterns and furnished with cushions, chests and folding tables and stands of laminated wood for gear, or leather in a dozen forms, or light skillfully-worked metal. At second glance she thought this was probably someone’s family dwelling hastily pressed into service for guests; the belongings included a chess set beautifully carved from reddish-brown mesquite and some pale smooth stone, and several musical instruments including a good pre-Change violin.
The interior was mostly dim; there were gauze windows, but the flaps over them were down, and what light there was leaked through the curtain covering the entrance; from the angle it was about two hours to sunset. Besides sun-heated cloth and leather and not-quite-familiar livestock, there was a strong smell of cooking in the air that made her stomach grumble. Meat grilling, and the even more intoxicating scent of bread baking, and scents of herbs and spices.
The child Reiko had carried out of the burning castle was sitting nearby. Someone had cropped her hair close and wrapped a cloth about her head, and dressed her in a loose shift; they seemed to have cleaned her up a good deal at the same time, which would have been quite a task. She was quite a pretty toddler if rather underfed and huge-eyed, and her face looked lively now that she wasn’t utterly terrified. As Órlaith glanced her way she started to pull up the shift and rise to a squat. Reiko caught the movement, pointed and said imperiously in Nihonjin:
“Not there! Where I took you before!”
The little one looked abashed as she stood and jigged from foot to foot, darting glances out of the tent and making urgent beckoning gestures with one hand. Reiko sighed and led the girl off with the hand in hers; Órlaith used the time to drink several cupfuls of water from a goatskin bag with a tap instead of a stopper, then pour some into a basin and splash her face. By Reiko’s bedroll was the blade of a naked katana, disassembled for maintenance, and gleaming with a very light coat of choji oil; a water stone
lay beside it, the type used for sharpening and polishing. For a moment Órlaith thought it was Kotegiri, but there were slight differences—it showed harder use, for one thing.
But from the same hand, she thought; for a moment she was content to enjoy the sheer artistry of the thing, the equal of any painting or porcelain or sculpture in her grandmother Sandra’s collection.
When the pair returned the child curled up and went to sleep with the limp animal finality of a puppy or kitten.
“She was raised in an entirely uncivilized fashion,” the Nihonjin said. “I had to ask for a bucket of water and a brush and clippers when we got here, and you would think I was skinning her rather than washing her, from the struggle.”
I’ll have to find out more about that later, Órlaith thought.
“Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi?” she asked aloud in Nihongo, nodding towards the sword thrust through Reiko’s sash. “I thought so, but . . .”
There hadn’t been much opportunity for private speech on the headlong trip here; even their escort . . . or possibly very courteous captors . . . had spoken only for essentials. Reiko nodded, smiling slightly but with joy dancing in her eyes. She pulled the sheathed katana from her sash and laid it down, looking at it with a wondering delight, as if she still had some difficulty believing what lay beneath her hand.
“Yes,” she said. “But not as it was lost. Remade from fragments as I recovered it, reforged. Given to us again, as it first was from my Ancestress so very long ago.”
A finger traced the air above the other sword Órlaith had noted. “This is . . . I think it was stolen at the same time as Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, and by the same man. One who knew at least that our ancient blades were things of great value. It is the Honjo Masamune, a very famous sword, and I know on whom I will bestow it. But this, this—”
She stilled herself, laid her hand on the hilt of the sheathed blade, and then slowly drew it and laid it on the rugs that made the floor of the tent. Órlaith inhaled sharply at the sight. The contrast with the blade that was merely steel was vivid, more so than if she had seen it by itself. The sensation was less primal than that when the Sword of the Lady was unsheathed, perhaps because this was Montival and not Nihon, but she could sense the might locked within. The hairs on her forearms prickled at it, like the feeling of lightning close-by.
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