“I know what it’s like to come in to camp after a long time lying out, ladies,” he said. “The imp of the wastelands at Shulamit’s heels is Aviva bat-Raanan, who will watch the child.”
“I had better wake Kiwako and tell her to mind Aviva,” Reiko said dubiously.
And did, which took a few minutes; the lost child was intelligent enough . . . except when she didn’t want to understand what you were saying.
Shulamit led them away after the introductions, almost skipping with eagerness, her complex earrings of silver strands flipping as she turned from one to the other.
“Are you really from the far north?” she said. “From Montival? Are you a princess?”
She spoke in good if strongly accented, old-fashioned and slightly formal English; it was obvious that she’d learned it as a second language and didn’t use it all that often. Mastering Órlaith had made her hesitate and shape the sound several times.
“I am Montivallan, and from the north, and yes, my father was High King and I am his heir,” Órlaith replied, treading delicately between rudeness and revealing too much. “This is . . . ah, my comrade is usually addressed as Heika, which is her title, and she’s from Japan. Japan is—”
“A country on islands across the ocean!” Shulamit said, almost bristling with excitement; Órlaith thought she would have clapped her hands if they weren’t full. “Oh, marvelous! We learned about it in the House of Books—”
School, Órlaith translated; the words were English but the phrasing was Ivrit.
“—but I never thought . . . Oh, nothing this wonderful has happened in . . . in . . . ever!”
Wistfully: “I’d like to see the ocean, sometime. It must be marvelous, even bigger than Lake Mead! And salty like Lake Owens—I saw that once when we were trading there, oh, what is the ocean like?”
Well, it’s nice to be welcome, even if it’s the way a caravan of tinerants with a fortuneteller and a juggler and a dancing dog is welcome in a village after a long dull winter, Órlaith thought, amused.
“This is an unfortunate diversion,” Reiko said . . . in Nihongo . . . after they’d tried to convey the sea to someone who knew it only as ancient pictures.
“Not necessarily,” Órlaith said in the same tongue, smiling like a cat. “Not necessarily at all.”
They got more glances as they walked through the camp, and some of her own age waved to Shulamit with every appearance of envy. Otherwise people were busy about finishing the work of the day, or winding it down as day merged into evening; some of the children were playing soccer, while others a bit older and on into adulthood were shooting the bow at marks or practicing a violently practical-looking style of unarmed combat or other martial skills, including hitting targets at alarming ranges with the sling—often while running forward or back or leaping side to side. Chess games seemed to be popular as well, often with onlookers, and there was a pleasant trickle of music—violin and mandolin, hand-drum and flute—from somewhere.
Cooking was in full swing, and there was a smell of grilling and stewing meat and things baking and one rotisserie held chickens roasting. For a moment she was puzzled by the lack of smoke, though fuel would be a severe problem in this land. Then she recognized the shining paraboloid shapes focusing on pots and stovetops, turned to take maximum advantage of the last rays of the sun. Solar cookers of that type were used as supplements in many of the drier parts of Montival, but they’d be more efficient still here in this land of constant sunshine. Since the alternatives were fires of the medicinal-smelling creosote bush and dried dung, she was thankful as well as impressed.
Reiko took a little longer to realize what she was seeing, being from a land of much cloud and heavy rain and dense forests providing plenty of firewood. Not very much longer, since she was both learned in the mechanical arts and very quick.
“How clever!” she said, delighted as she always was by a well-wrought contrivance. “This is very ingenious.”
Shulamit beamed with pride at the praise from the glamorous outsider, mentioned the mathematical formula used to calculate the curvature, and started explaining things as they passed.
Her people were obviously mainly herders, but Órlaith recognized a fair number of crafts as she walked down towards the baths, often with tools set up in a covered enclosure next to the family tent; there was a smithy that also had light machine tools including a treadle-worked lathe and drillpress and doubled as a carpenter’s shop, several leatherworkers, and most of the households seemed to have a light knock-down loom and a multi-spindle jenny to spin thread for it. One raised tent-flap showed a woman listening to a child’s chest with a stethoscope, the toddler’s mother helping to keep the thermometer in his mouth. Another had low tables and collapsible bookshelves that folded into boxes for carrying; a group of teenage boys and girls—sitting cross-legged, separately—were finishing up and comparing notes on slates as an older man closed a volume on a wire stand that she thought was titled Desert Ecologies of the Southwest.
Other trades could be deduced: she could hear the hum of a sewing machine from somewhere, the clothes needed vegetable dyes, there must be fletchers and bowyers. There was surely a press about the place; a small hand model could be kept in any of the wagons, and together with its type wouldn’t make more than one load for a camel. Doubtless cars and trucks and any number of abandoned towns provided raw salvage materials.
The flat roof of the adobe baths had a larger version of the solar heaters she’d seen cooking food and boiling water, involving black pipes and a system Órlaith recognized used convection to move the water through the heating cycle.
“This is just the ordinary baths,” Shulamit said. “That’s the mikvah, the ritual baths over there, but that’s just for, ah, us.”
Órlaith nodded in understanding. The girl went on: “This is so exciting—we have other guests here now too, that’s why we’re at this camp so early, and have all of this company together this time of year. Guests from the Friends, but that happens four times every year at least.”
“Friends? And they would be?”
“The Pipa Aha Macav,” she said, after a bewildered pause. “Our Friends.”
The word for friends she used was in her tongue, and could have meant allies as well. Except that was a little too detached; it had moral overtones, something like righteous foreign people.
And she’s lively and intelligent enough I forgot she’s a backcountry dweller, unused to those who don’t know what’s common knowledge to her, as a fish doesn’t see water. The which is why your stomach drops when someone in the outlands gives you directions and then says you can’t miss it, for you can and you likely will.
The name of the Friends was simply sounds for a moment, and then there was a sensation of expansion. Her step checked a little; learning a language in a moment was still not something she was entirely easy with. Then she knew that that Pipa Aha Macav meant People By the River, the river being the Colorado; what others called the Mojave tribe, who had dwelt in these lands when the first of the incomers had set foot here, the Españoles riding up from the south in the long ago. She supposed that they were where these folk got their grain and their cotton, which she’d noticed was surprisingly common—the cotton underdrawers and knit bra she’d been given would be a luxury in the north. She made a mental note to drop a suggestion to Moishe Feldman when time and circumstance allowed that there was probably a market for the sort of colorful, well-woven work she’d seen here. Probably the rugs too, and possibly much else.
The hot water in the baths was plentiful and truly hot; Órlaith would have enjoyed washing even more if her skin hadn’t been rasped by sun and sand in sensitive places, but she did enjoy it, and the local girl provided sympathy and an herbal cream that soothed the injuries. That was based on jojoba oil, a local plant that apparently also provided the base of the soap and was used in lamps.
The clot
hes were comfortable for this climate and what Shulamit called active, meaning that they included pants and the overrobe rather than a dress; she showed them how to wrap the snood-things, which they called something that translated as veil of glory. Evidently it mattered to some taboo that the clothes were somewhat different in cut from the ones men wore, mostly a matter of fastenings and where the buttons went and the robe being a little longer, but nothing that an outsider would have noticed. They weren’t new, but they were sound and both sets fit well. Which couldn’t have been easy when Órlaith was taller than most of the men she’d seen here, and had several inches on every woman she’d seen closely enough to notice; there were signs of hasty alterations.
And they were very clean. In fact, they were so clean that Shulamit wrinkled her nose a bit and looked dubiously at the clothes Órlaith and Reiko handed over for washing in what sounded like an interesting wind-powered system. Then she examined them more carefully.
“They really need the laundry but this is beautiful work,” she enthused over Reiko’s kimono and hakama. “What is this material?”
“Silk, for that part,” Reiko said. “The rest is cotton.”
“Ah, I’ve read of silk but only seen scraps. So pretty! It would make lovely embroidery thread.” A slight tug. “Strong, too.”
Then she frowned a little at the kilt and plaid, dropping back into Ivrit. “This is well-woven wool and the dyes are bright and fast, but does it contain linen?”
Órlaith blinked—linsey-woolsey was far and away the commonest single type of cloth in Montival—but while her line might be High Kings, local custom was everywhere king in its own house, after all.
“No. Most Mackenzie kilts do, at least linen for the thread, but as it happens that one is pure wool sewn with cotton. The lèine . . . the shirt . . . is linen with cotton sewing thread. Both gifts from my grandmother Juniper’s loom, made and sewn with her own hands.”
“That is good. And she is a very fine weaver, as good as my own mother! Separate garments of linen and wool are permitted to us, but the Law says that we may not mix them in the same one.”
Órlaith judged that Shulamit was bright and no bumpkin—she read two languages in different scripts fluently, for starters, and seemed well-educated generally—but she was a chatterbox and entranced with the exotic visitors. Órlaith had no doubt that if she’d been point-blank asked for things like numbers of warriors she’d have shut up, but the same innocent underlying assumption that everyone knew what everyone knew . . . what everyone she knew had in their general background . . . made her perfectly ready to let drop things which enabled the Montivallan to make some estimates.
There are about as many of them as there are of the Topangans, the Princess thought. Perhaps a bit more, say three thousand or so.
Apparently this was one of about ten groups called companies who followed the same customs and faith and acknowledged her father as their Shofet. They were scattered over a vast range, at least thousands of square miles and possibly tens of thousands, usually in multiple camps smaller than this, and came together at various festivals or for annual assemblies that doubled as fairs and markets or when emergencies like war or other disasters required it.
And they’re better organized and armed than the Topangans and I think better-off. And more important for our purposes . . .
“What do you think they can do for us?” Reiko asked, as they walked back.
“Reiko-chan, we need to get back to our ship as fast as possible. With a little luck we can sail straight back north, confront my mother with a fait accompli . . . success has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan . . . and get on with the war. Which means we must cross the desert quickly. These people are experts at crossing deserts, and sure, it’s crossing a desert we need to do.”
“It is extraordinary, but they are truly at home here.”
“As we are not,” Órlaith said. “We’re hardy enough, you and I, and I’ve seen deserts before, but traveling here, and in high summer . . .”
“Perhaps their skills and their beasts are enough to more than make up for going out of our way with them?”
“I think so, if we can persuade them. It’s not just getting back to our main party—and remember how much joy we had of the trip from the last camp to the castle?”
Reiko shuddered very slightly, and nodded. “Without the kami of this place against us . . . with only . . . how do you say it . . . things in the light of common day to deal with it would not have been as difficult, but you are right, I was not looking forward to it. Especially weakened as we were, and with no supplies. It would be a cruel irony to come so far and then die with . . .”
She didn’t speak Kusanagi’s name, but they both knew what she meant when she touched the hilt.
“Ironic, yes,” Órlaith said. “Also fatal.”
Reiko nodded and chuckled. “And when we reach the others, we will still be far from where we wish to be; and as to supplies, we were over-optimistic in our planning. Though it was important not to carry too much weight.”
“We need to get them back across the desert too, as quickly as we can. I’m not comfortable with what may be happening in our absence.”
Reiko nodded gravely, then smiled a little. “Egawa will be frantic. Though he will show nothing, of course.”
“Not to mention Herry and John and others.” She smiled wryly. “Even nearly dying, it was a bit of a relief to be away on our own, wasn’t it? Nobody to be responsible for.”
“For a while,” Reiko said with a sigh, and a glance back at the tent that held the child she’d named Kiwako. “For a little while.”
“And . . . I have a feeling our return may not be as simple a thing as we wish. My skin prickles at the thought.”
Reiko nodded. “I too.” She smiled. “When has anything gone smoothly on this questing? It never does, in the epics . . . save when the heroes are being lulled and a disaster is about to happen!”
Órlaith snorted. “Well, be glad the epic hasn’t been written yet, and we may have boring peacefulness all the way back to Portland! Then the bards can throw in a disaster or too, spicing the stew so to say.”
• • •
The tent of the Shofet was the largest in the encampment, more like three rectangular tents defining a courtyard that could be covered by a moveable awning; it probably did duty as courthouse and meeting-place and for other public purposes as well as a family home, and two warriors with shield and lance stood guard outside. One of them was a woman, Órlaith noted, and neither of them were Dov or Meshek ben-Raanan. Having the Shofet’s sons guarding her tent earlier now looked rather significant, as a gesture to her.
They didn’t keep up the custom of standing to attention, though, she thought; both of these looked alert, but they didn’t bother not looking bored as well. Probably they don’t have guards here when there are no outsiders about; everyone who can be here is a warrior at need, as among Mackenzies, but no standing force. This too is for ceremony.
There was a rack for shoes and a brace for pulling off riding-boots at the threshold, and an assortment of sandals—made from the fibers of the Joshua tree like much else here—for guests to slip on. It was an arrangement Órlaith heartily approved of, since this was a camp of herdsmen and their animals. Reiko accepted it as a lifelong habit; she didn’t say anything, but where such wasn’t the custom she found people walking into dwelling-places in their street shoes repulsively uncouth.
Raanan ben-Yaakov met them at the entrance; she noticed again that the handshake had evidently fallen out of use here. He was a balding man in his forties, hard and strong but a little more heavy-set than most of his people, with a bold nose, thick bushy eyebrows and gray streaks in the original black of his full, curly beard. A dark robe with embroidery down the front panels and around the collar looked quietly sumptuous, and the loose sleeves slid back occasionally to reveal tanned
forearms covered in corded muscle and seamed with scars. An elaborately tooled and studded belt bore a sharp-curved saber whose sweat-stained leather grip had seen a lot of use. Evidently local etiquette was for men to take off their headcoverings inside a tent, except for the kippah skullcap, but for women to keep theirs on.
“You are most welcome . . . Crown Princess,” he said in a deep gravelly voice, bowing and making that graceful gesture of touching brow, lips and heart; the title was in English. “Peace be upon you, Your Highness.”
“And upon you peace, Raanan ben-Yaakov, Judge of the Children of Yaakov,” Órlaith said in Ivrit, and then thought very formal greeting. Words came to her: “Peace and the blessings of haShem upon all the tents of your people, their children and lands and their flocks and herds.”
To Reiko he added, switching back to English with another courtly bow: “And you are most welcome as well, Your Majesty.”
He spoke with only a trace of the harsh guttural accent his children bore more strongly. He ushered them into a chamber with a lamp hanging from the center pole, casting a fine steady yellow light and burning with an unfamiliar fruity scent; Órlaith hesitated slightly and then racked the Sword of the Lady at the entrance along with everyone else’s long weapons, and after a slightly longer hesitation Reiko did likewise with Kusanagi. Neither would be very far away. Everyone sat cross-legged on flattish cushions, with a section of low folding table before them; Shulamit and a boy who looked like her sister Aviva’s twin brother, and probably was, bore an ewer and basin and towels around so that everyone could wash their hands. A murmur went with them:
“Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with Thy commandments and has commanded us concerning the washing of the hands,” and then the one she was familiar with from the Tarshish Queen, much the same start but ending who brings forth bread from the earth instead.
The Desert and the Blade Page 65