“Do something!” he said desperately to himself.
He could see the weird little child too now, scampering along with her shift fluttering around her calves. Shulamit was gaining rapidly on the girl, even an active two-year-old just didn’t have the length of leg to run very quickly, but the child could creep about like a cat, soundlessly and low to the ground. She’d managed to get a good head-start before Shulamit noticed, and they were only a thousand yards or so from the shore to begin with. He didn’t bother to call after his sister the way she was yelling herself. The probability of her just coming back and leaving the child to her fate was about as great as the chance of him giving up and letting her run into whatever deadly peril was shaping down by the sea.
Meshek pulled the bola from his waist, the three round stone weights and their connecting cords of thin supple braided camel-hide. His thick wrist flicked them into motion about his head, and they whirred through the air like the blades of an ancient helicopter. It was a dangerous weapon, and using it was a desperation move . . .
But I’m desperate.
• • •
“Watakushi no imouto,” Yoshihito said, smiling in a way that made her want to weep. “My sister. Make obeisance to your sovereign.”
Reiko stood, with her hand on the scabbard, looking at him as the sand rutched under her sandals. His eyes were familiar . . . save that they drew you inward. There was a feeling there, a lassitude beyond mere weariness as the thirst she had felt in the desert of the Valley of Death was beyond being a little ready for a draught of water. A craving for death stronger than the heartbeat, controlled only by a fear unnamed. Then because that hurt too much she looked at the enemy ships. They swarmed with the Eater horde, and jinnikukaburi officers were marshaling them, shoving them down ropes into waiting boats. She made a wordless prayer, closed her eyes for a heartbeat, then opened them.
And . . .
“This is the sword of the Tenno,” she said steadily. “Bestowed by Amaterasu-omikami, our Ancestress.”
Reiko went to her knees. Droplets of seawater blew off the waves that hissed up the beach behind the other party’s heels, and gulls screeched with hurtful obliviousness. Egawa gave a shocked gasp. She pulled the scabbarded blade from her sash and held it in the posture of presentation, across her raised palms with her head bowed.
“Take it, and draw it, my brother,” she said. “You are of the Imperial House, eldest child of the Emperor of Rebirth, heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne.”
The smile grew harder to bear; she had to suppress an impulse to take handfuls of sand and grind them into her eyes. But somewhere, there was her brother.
Perhaps it could purify him, she thought desperately. Oh, perhaps!
He reached out and took the sword. Warrior’s reflex deeper than thought settled his hand on the hilt, and began to slide the not-steel out. Suddenly the kangshinmu screamed in rough pidgin Nihongo:
“No! Slave-dog-fool, do not draw it! Hold only!”
“Egawa, kill him,” she shouted, pointing to the magus.
Her eyes remained on her brother. Sweat beaded on his brow; as he frowned she could see the lines beside his eyes, lines of long torment. Steel clashed, but it seemed incredibly distant, a tale told in another age.
A child’s treble sounded from behind her, piercing the noise of battle and the shouts of the warriors as no common sound could:
“Bad auntie! Bad auntie!”
Reiko spun in place as she rose. Her hand plucked her tessen from her sash and snapped it open as she moved, fluid and sure, every part of her body following paths as prescribed and inevitable as geometry. It was not necessary to see, but she did. The kangshinmu moved through the sudden battle like a man moving at normal speed among those for whom the air had turned to amber honey. Egawa was falling, blood spouting from the stump of his left wrist. And the razor edge of the war-fan moved as she whirled, in and under the sorcerer’s rising sword. It struck below his ear, into the flesh, across and down in a diagonal drawing slash that ended below the Adam’s apple. Blood spouted as steel parted the carotid, and the depthless eyes grew wide. Knees buckled and the sword wavered, but she continued her whirl without slowing.
That had spurred her brother. The flash of steel, and the feel of a sword-hilt in his hand; and instinct fostered since their father placed the first small bokken in his chubby child’s paws so long ago. Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi swept free, the scabbard dropping as he raised the blade two-handed in the pear-splitter, aiming for the crown of her helmeted head.
Yoshihito’s eyes flew wide. For an instant there was only wonder in them, and his lips moved, forming words:
“Namu . . . Amida . . . Butsu . . .”
Then he screamed, a sound that echoed in her mind as if it would never leave. And he burned. As fire had threaded through the steel of the katana, now it wound through his flesh. It did not sizzle or stink; the process was far too swift for that. The sword of the Sun tumbled free through a fall of black ash that scattered on the wind. Some of it blew onto her lips, bitter and salt. The hilt slapped into her hand, with a feeling as if continents were colliding.
And they are, here, she knew with a sudden certainty, feeling the colossal masses striving beneath her feet. And I could break them!
On the hillside above her, Órlaith knelt and thrust the Sword of the Lady into the earth. Something crystalline, something not of matter, spread out. Like a protective shell forged in the heart of an ancient star, shielding the soil of Montival. But that was good, was right. The power of the thing in her hands was of the sky, of air and winds and fire and a dance of particles between the stars. . . .
She stood with her arms outstretched, a fixed point about which worlds turned. She could feel the negation that drove the kangshinmu’s body on past the point where the natural fire within faltered and ceased, as there was not enough blood to sustain it or movement of the lungs to drive the elements of breath into the fluid. It reached for her, dropping its blade, beyond such things, grinning with wet teeth and eyes vanished in pools of tar. One arm batted Kiwako aside with a squeal of pain.
Shulamit tore the sling loose from her snood as she ran, dropped a two-ounce lead egg into the pouch, whirled the camel-hide thong once around her head and cast with a snapping flex of the whole body and a hawk-shriek of:
“Mi chamocha ba’elim haShem!”
The shot whirred through the air too fast to really see, a blur as it traveled seventy yards downslope, and the back of the kangshinmu’s head burst with a crack and a spray of blood and bone-splinters and gray-pink tissue . . . and through it writhed a net of black thread, infinitely fine, as threads of light and fire did through the steel of Kusanagi. And still he walked. Meshek’s bola struck the dead thing’s thighs and instantly wound itself around them a dozen times, the stone weights thudding into the obscenely moving flesh. Then the kangshinmu fell at last, bloody teeth snapping at the sand before he went limp.
Reiko moved beyond him in a wheeling movement, slow and stately. It was not necessary to see more of him, or of Shulamit tenderly raising Kiwako and checking for injuries, or the last of the Korean swordsmen falling to the skilled fury of her samurai.
I thought this could move mountains. Mountains of air! some part of her mind that was still her realized.
The mountains of air were there, sliding currents smoother than glass, huge masses always hanging above her. Light and fire streamed down upon them, drew the tears of Ocean upward, slid around the whirling surface of the globe. And when she called, they answered: answered her, answered the great glowing figure that she could sense danced above her. Reiko danced now too, a thing of swift steps and slow, stately and serene. Clouds gathered above, unfolding with a majesty that only seemed deliberate.
Ame-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi.
That had been the first name of what had become the Grass-Cutting Sword, in a time more ancient than
legend. The Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven.
Air fell down the mountains of rock behind her. Air struck the water. Storm hissed and blossomed and grew, and the sky darkened in a turning gyre of black cloud laced with the actinic white of lightning-bolts. Órlaith still knelt, her hands clenched around the long hilt of something that Reiko now realized was a symbol that could be touched, face blank with concentration as it bowed over the crystal pommel. The wind still scourged the shore and made the people above cover their eyes and crouch, but the most of it slid over that protection. Over it, down, gathering strength and weight and speed, and . . .
Her dance turned quicker, building, raising, holding the titanic forces in check as they grew and grew and strained. Fire raced through her, consuming and welcome. Then she turned and Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi slashed outward. Struck as Yamato Takeru had used it in the age of legends, in his own time of desperate need, as a whip of fire and air.
The winds raced out, and lashed the ocean to froth before them. The edge of the waters receded a dozen yards in a rush and boiled as gravity warred with the spirits of air. The enemy ships beyond heeled far over. One swung around its anchor and capsized, the terrified shrieks of its crew mere shapes of open mouths lost in the elemental roar that blew past Reiko. The others desperately cut their anchors and skidded through seas grown heaving and mountainous and meeting in chaotic collisions, their voice a tiger’s snarl larger than worlds. The two Montivallan ships ran ahead of them.
A voice in her own language was shouting as well, triumphantly: “God-Storm! Divine wind!”
The dance ended in a long slow motion of dismissal. The mountains of air collapsed away, the strong subtle patterns of the natural world taking control of them once more. Reiko felt her being collapsing inward as well, falling back into her very self; and at the edge of awareness there was a smile like her mother’s.
Daughter of the Empire, it whispered, warm with love and pride. Daughter of the Sun. My beloved child.
She staggered, panting; none of the samurai dared do other than kneel and press their foreheads to the ground. She found the scabbard and sheathed the Grass-Cutting Sword, and the click as the tsuba met the koiguchi shattered the last of the protection around her. Her whole being quivered as she took one deep breath, retained it, exhaled, another. Each seemed to make her more herself, but that self was not what she had been.
Reiko knelt by Egawa’s side. The tourniquet around his left wrist was crude, a lacing cord from his armor twisted with the hilt of his tanto-dagger, but it would serve for now; his eyelids fluttered, but he was conscious.
“You are . . . the Immortal One Shining in Heaven,” he said, his voice a thread.
“No, Egawa Noboru,” she said. “But for a moment I was. And in that moment, Her blood was renewed in my line.”
Kiwako crept up and pressed against her side, shivering. An arm went around the thin shoulders.
Poor little fox, she thought. The world is so wide and so terrible.
“In our line,” she said, smiling down at the man who had been her second father. It took a moment for that to bring his brows up.
“Your son Ryoma is a young man of good character and much promise,” she said. “And eventually I will need a consort. The grandchildren of your grandchildren may rule a Dai-Nippon once more great and at peace. To build that day, you need only serve me as you have before.”
His injured arm stirred. “I will serve my Tenno as well as a one-handed swordsman may.”
Reiko made a tsk sound.
“You will serve me with what is here . . .”
Her fan moved to touch his right hand.
“. . . and what is here . . .”
Then it rested on his brow for a moment.
“. . . and most of all, with what is here,” and the fan touched over his heart.
“I . . .” his voice grew slower. “I do not know what I would do with myself in a time of peace, but it is a worthy dream, Majesty. And until then . . .”
She looked up. The clouds were long white streamers now. Her retainers were tending to their wounded, and behind them Órlaith and her band were picking their way down a slope where much had been uprooted or washed away. Westward her homeland waited, still unknowing.
“Until then? Deeds like skies full of storm, my bushi. Like skies full of storm.”
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The Desert and the Blade Page 69