But when she drew the feeling was . . .
Gentler, she thought.
Everyone around her still stiffened or gasped; the world flexed when the Sword of the Lady was unsheathed, as if beneath the weight of something that was too powerful for the fabric of reality—for the story of things that made up the world. Or almost too powerful. She reversed the grip with a quick snapping flex of the wrist, so that the blade lay along her forearm. It felt like a longsword to the hand, but a little lighter than a steel weapon of the same dimensions.
But when Da bore it, it was an inch longer in the blade and a quarter-pound heavier; I remember that, she thought with a slight shiver. Then it was as if it had been designed to his hand, now as if to mine. As if the world could be amended, quietly, so that we scarcely notice, like a letter re-drafted and stuck back in the file.
She held it very carefully as she lowered it to rest on Faramir’s body for a moment, with the pommel between his brows. The Sword wouldn’t cut her, or her near kin; in fact she could bounce it off her skin like the edge of a wooden ruler. To anyone else, someone not of House Artos, the edges were sharp enough to part a drifting hair . . . and they were indestructible, unlike steel. Órlaith had had to unlearn some of her long training in the arts of the blade, to use one that could not be damaged, was utterly rigid, and had so little friction that blood ran off it as if it were greased and left not even dampness.
The sensation that followed when the Sword touched Faramir was indescribable; the nearest she could come, even to herself, was like a bent muscle relaxing, or a blockage that flowed again as it should, the feeling you got when you drowsed into sleep after a long hard day and a bath and your body felt warm and contented under a duvet.
Faramir’s gray eyes fluttered open. “The hands of the King are the hands of a healer,” he said softly in the speech of his folk. “And so the rightful King shall be known.”
Órlaith smiled, lifted the blade, and sheathed it with a shing and click of metal on metal . . . or what sounded like that.
His eyes drifted closed again and he sighed and slept. “Is he healed?” Susan Mika said anxiously, and added: “Your Highness,” because others were present.
“No,” Órlaith said. “But he’s healing. I think . . . I strongly suspect . . . that something was preventing that. It’s been, ummm, removed. The enemy paid special attention to him. It’s an honor, of a sort.”
The looks on their faces made her slightly uncomfortable; so did those on those observing from a distance. She restrained an impulse to snarl. Reiko looked almost amused, as they walked away to have their armor off—you could do that yourself, but it was much easier with assistance—and said in Nihongo:
“I am sorry, my oath-sister, but to see you wince as another layer of myth and legend wraps around you . . . it amuses me.”
“I admit you’re worse off that way,” Órlaith said dryly.
“Órlaith, my friend, we have fought all day; we have wielded powers that are not of this earth. We have seen to our other duties and succored our people. Now I have another suggestion.”
“What’s that?”
Reiko smiled: in fact, she grinned and held up her tessen war-fan to mark off points.
“That we wash and dress in comfortable clothes and then have a dinner my cook prepares—he has been weeping with frustration that I have not allowed him to make a kaiseki-ryōri and Hawaiʻi has all the ingredients—and listen to my court ladies play, and drink sake, of which they have an excellent brand here, and recite sad poetry until we weep and witty poetry until we weep with laughter and get gloriously but not too drunk and watch the moon rise and then bid each other farewell and go off to our beds and sleep.”
Órlaith laughed. “Even better if there were a comely young man of a madly romantic variety waiting for each of us, but the food and poetry and drink and sleep sound more than good enough. Ikou! Let’s go!”
CHAPTER NINE
CHOSŎN MINJUJUŬI INMIN KONGHWAGUK
(KOREA)
NOVEMBER 15TH
CHANGE YEAR 47/2045 AD
I am never going to eat pork again, Dzhambul thought.
Which was a pity, because he was rather fond of the way the Han did it. Especially pork ribs with sweet and sour sauce the way it was served at a little place in Ulaanbaatar run by a man named Hua, in what was left of a pre-Change building mostly disassembled for its metal. They served good rice wine there too.
He wasn’t an overly sensitive man—Mongols rarely were, and he’d ridden on his first raid and killed his first man when he was sixteen, and seen towns burn before he was twenty—but watching, and worse still smelling, what the Miqačin were doing around their fire . . .
The child can’t have been more than six, he thought.
Dzhambul closed his eyes for a moment and wished he was home; Hua’s place would do, carousing with some fellow-officers and joy girls, but even better his mother’s ger at one of the clan’s herding camps, waking and wolfing down a handful of dumplings before heading out on a hunt on a crisp fall day.
He couldn’t order an attack just because what he saw them doing disgusted him; rather, he could, but he couldn’t order it without having his command rightly lose all respect for him. Luckily, he had a perfectly good tactical reason for what he was about to do, which was a nice change from duty nagging him into something he disliked. He turned and crawled snake-fashion, pushing himself along on his belly down his own back trail with slow cautious movements, bringing each foot up, testing that the toehold was secure and wouldn’t produce a clattering of loose rock.
It wasn’t snowing anymore, and it was a little warmer—not so warm that ice melted, but warm enough that body heat or a fire melted it quickly. It was very dark indeed, though, with the moon down, and fortunately the cooked-meat smell faded quickly, leaving only the cold dirt and his own rankness, also controlled by the weather.
The loudest sounds were his own breathing, and the rustle and chink of his clothing and mail shirt. He crawled over a low crest and down the other side a little without running into the man-eater picket he was sure was out here somewhere.
Something hard and cold touched him behind the ear.
I must still be night-blinded from looking at the fire, he thought.
“Urt Khan Khutushü amidardag,” he said aloud—which meant Long Live Khan Qutughtu.
That was not only impeccably loyal, it was also full of sounds that the man-eaters found hard to pronounce, which was why it was the password for tonight.
“Advance, Noyon,” the darkness said softly.
In a woman’s voice, and showed itself as a blackness against blackness as the knife was withdrawn. He thought she bent and slid it into a boot top, but it was difficult to be sure. He was sure that there was another of the Hawks not far away, ready to slip away and raise the alarm if enemies took out one sentry. That was the way the Kha-Khan’s army worked, and the Hawks had learned from their fathers and brothers . . . and from Börte, who’d learned everywhere.
He rose and walked—very carefully—in her wake. They were in a region of bare ridges, with only an occasional pocket of flatter soil, running between steep mountains that horses couldn’t travel. Gansükh and Börte were waiting for him, shapes in darkness, crouching on their heels. One of them passed him a skin of airag, fermented mare’s milk, and he couldn’t even tell if it was his sister or not. He took a single mouthful and passed it back; they didn’t have much left.
The zuun commander had been there with the seven-man squad when the scouting force split apart to dodge the Miqačin pursuit, looking stubborn. It hadn’t been worth the trouble to argue, and he did have to go with someone; this was the largest single group of those that had made up Dzhambul’s command, since it included the Hawks. Gansükh’s stolid broad face had said as plainly as words that he wasn’t going to show up back with Noyon Toktamish’s army to fin
d that Prince Dzhambul had been among those who didn’t return alive.
Even if Toktamish would not be grieved. Especially if Toktamish would not be grieved; he would need a scapegoat, doubly so if he were under suspicion. Who better than Gansükh to take the blame and provide a severed head to point to? Which Gansükh knows full well, so I cannot even really blame him for sticking to me like a burr to a horse’s tail—this way he can at least die trying to see that I get back.
“There are thirty of them,” he said softly, as they leaned their heads together. “Infantry—no horses.”
He closed his eyes—it made little difference—and thought. Then he went on:
“This is probably part of a screening force strung across our path. There will be horsemen somewhere nearby to take up the pursuit if they give the alarm. There are just enough of them to be very risky for a single squad to tackle.”
Both the others grunted thoughtfully. Then Gansükh cursed quietly but eloquently, ending with:
“—jüjigchin khüü! We can’t get by them undetected unless we abandon the horses.”
Dzhambul and his sister both snorted. They might as well take turns slitting one another’s throats as do that, with the unlucky last one to kill himself.
Or herself, he thought mordantly.
Gansükh continued. “And if we fight them, we have to kill them all and do it quickly and without much noise. Even so it will not be long until the rest knew we have passed.”
That made thirty against nineteen; man-eater infantry were fairly well equipped, but the enemy’s cavalry were their elite. In a Mongol army, of course, everyone except some specialists was mounted, and even the siege engineers and such rode to where they did their jobs. It was still long odds, except for the advantage of surprise.
Börte said it for him. “We can’t just fight and beat them—that’ll have their reaction force on our track before sunrise. We have to eliminate them.”
Dzhambul grunted agreement, and thought again, calling up the ground in his mind. Always the ground, for a start. Neither of the others wasted any more words while he did.
“We’ll do it this way,” he began.
* * *
• • •
Mongols were tough and hardy, and many of them were willing to tell anyone willing to listen all about just how hardy and tough they were. Dzhambul had heard a tümen-commander boasting (or possibly complaining) about how being a Mongol made you too mean and tough and hardy to even get drunk, while he slurped down bowls of mao-tai in a tavern south of the Gobi near the ruins of Hohhot. That had trailed off into mumbles just before he passed out with his face in a puddle of his own sour vomit and started to snore.
Dzhambul himself had been raised mostly on the steppe, in a ger winter and summer, and often enough sleeping out under the Eternal Blue Sky, learning to ride and shoot, herd and hunt and fight as his ancestors had, though more bookish schooling hadn’t been neglected either. The Khan didn’t believe in coddling his offspring and possible successor, though that wasn’t certain. Anyone descended from Dzhambul’s great-grandfather, Kha-Khan Tömörbaatar the Unifier, could be elected by the kurultai of notables . . . and between youth, vigor, multiple wives and plentiful concubines, his great-grandfather had left a lot of descendants.
But hardy and tough or not, Dzhambul was tired of being cold and hungry, and it was a very cold midnight right now.
He was also tired of crawling through the dark with Miqačin around, trying not to clatter as he carried his weight on toes and knees and elbows, ignoring the way it made muscles stiff with cold ache and crack. The arrows in his belt-quiver were muffled by rags, and his bow and saber were slung across his back, but moving silently in armor was just hard. Even in a chain shirt, more flexible and less likely to clank than lamellae on a leather backing. He was also cold in a bone-chilled way that made you tired and restless at the same time, and hungry in a way that eating mostly dried lean horsemeat for a week turned into an almost insane longing for something like tsötsgii—separated cream—poured over fried millet.
Something with fat, eaten in a nice warm ger with double-felt walls and a glowing fire under the smoke hole. And plenty of airag, and a big bowl of boiled mutton, and some meat dumplings fried in fat too, and everyone chatting and laughing and children chasing each other around. . . .
He pushed the thought out of his mind. Not being tortured and eaten and killed was very good motivation to remember practice and hunts and previous scouting and raiding expeditions, but he’d had too much of it lately. He was doing it well—at least as well as the others, Gansükh and his seven men who were moving forward on his flanks—but it had a nasty feeling of conscious effort, not the mindless ease that let you focus on something else.
There.
There was someone ahead. He might not be able to see it beyond a suggestion, but he was sure that someone had stood and turned around, facing him.
The glow of the man-eater campfire was in that direction, though they’d at least had the wit to put it in a hollow, rather than setting up a beacon that could be seen for miles. But even with the wind from the south at his back he could smell something warm and close. Man-stink, but subtly different from his own. People smelled differently depending on their diet; grain-fed Han had a milder smell than Mongols who lived on meat and dairy, for instance, more acrid, sharper but less rank.
I hoped they wouldn’t have sentries out but I didn’t expect it, he thought. But I could be pretty sure they wouldn’t have as many as we would.
And reached up to take the hilt of the slender, slightly curved Uyghur knife he’d been holding in his teeth while he brought a foot forward and braced it solidly. The metallic taste was strong in his mouth, and the buttery tang of stale lanolin from the swatch of raw sheepskin he used to keep his weapons rust-free. Now he could hear breathing . . . steady normal breathing, not the slow cautious way he was letting his breath in and out through an open mouth.
The man ahead stirred, and a rock clicked against a rock. A few seconds later Dzhambul was close and his outstretched hand closed on a boot; a crude moccasin-like boot, at that.
That told him where the man’s head would be. He grabbed hard, jerked the foot out from under the man-eater and lunged up, and by luck his left hand closed on a man’s neck just below the angle of the jaw as he toppled. It was an awkward place to grab a man, but there was frantic strength in his grip, and his spring had all his weight behind it, over a hundred and ninety pounds with all his gear. The man-eater went over backward, trying to shout, but it came out as a gurgle, more like a strangled yelp than anything but with words in it.
They grappled in the dark, and the Miqačin was strong and knew what he was doing and fought like a python with hands, even though Dzhambul sank his knee into the man’s belly. That hurt his knee too, because his enemy was wearing a stiffened leather breastplate studded with steel nailheads, but it knocked some of the breath out of the man beneath him in a puff of rotten-meat stink.
His hands clamped at Dzhambul’s face, thumbs groping for his eyes, while he tucked his chin into his chest. As he did the Mongol bit down savagely on one hand and stabbed hard and fast. The first was turned on the man’s metal-studded leather cuirass and nearly gashed his own left hand, the second struck a spark on a stone, but the third rammed home into the armpit of the arm that ended in the thumb trying to gouge out his eye, and coming far too close to succeeding.
He shoved to drive the point in with all the power of his thick shoulder and arm, felt it stop as the point skidded on bone and then suddenly jam in blade-deep, and jerked the hilt back and forth. Blood coughed out, thick on the hand he had on the man’s throat, a spray on his face that made him spit. It was unpleasantly like cutting the throat of a wounded deer, a parody of the act.
We are herders, we are hunters, went through some distant corner of his mind as the death-stink told him his enemy was gone; so
did the limpness. Why do we fight to rebuild the empire of a man eight hundred years dead?
“Kyung-joon?” a voice called from ahead, as he blinked away stinging pain and the eye throbbed.
Put such thoughts aside. Evil spirits ride the night here. Do not give them entry. If we weren’t fighting here, we’d be stealing each other’s horses and sheep and fighting over that instead back home.
He thought that Kyung-joon was a name, but that was about the limit of his Korean; there wasn’t even the usual soldier’s incentive to learn surrender or hands up, since they generally didn’t surrender and couldn’t be trusted if they did. He had to improvise now, but the time was about right and a plan with no allowance for mishap wasn’t a plan at all, it was a suicide pact.
He filled his chest and belly and made a sound; it was a low deep warbling that was something like a night bird, though not one from this country . . . if there were any here. It had three advantages: it carried very well, it wasn’t easy to mistake for anything else, if you knew it, and it was extremely difficult to place, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. Then he crawled past the body, and up onto the low ridge overlooking the enemy outpost.
“Kyung-joon, neo mwohaneungeoya, babo ya?” a voice said from those grouped around the fire, in a sharp commanding tone with a question in it.
With his eyes just above the crest line Dzhambul could see a helmeted figure standing before the low red glow, looking up towards him—but standing next to a fire and looking into darkness was a fool’s game, you might as well have your eyes closed.
But he’ll think of that—the sentry was well away from the fire, and looking away from it, he thought. Except that now there’s no time for him to come to his senses.
An earsplitting scream came from beyond the higher ground on the other, northern side of the man-eater camp. It was precisely the sound a sentry might make if someone rammed a thin blade into their kidney from behind, almost certainly because that was precisely what had happened.
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