“Morrigú!” her father’s voice shouted.
“Scathatch!” her own replied in a keening shriek as she hacked down to the right with the spike.
And that was most strange, some distant part of her mind noted. He had named the Crow Goddess, the aspect of Her that watched over warriors; for She was all things, the gentle Mother-of-All who gave life and the Red Hag who reaped men on a bloody field as well.
Órlaith had called instead on the Dark Mother in Her most terrible form: Scathatch.
The Devouring Shadow Beneath.
She Who Brings Fear.
For a moment there was nothing but chaos, the knights ramping through the mass like steel-clad tigers, sword and hammer and lashing hooves, the Archers running up and firing point-blank before throwing down their bows and wading in with buckler and short sword. A man leveled a crossbow at her, but an already-bloodied lancepoint tore into his throat with savage force and a deadly precision.
“Alale alala!” Heuradys screamed, tossing the lance aside and drawing her sword. “Alale alala!”
Then the beleaguered foreigners who’d been facing certain death before the Montivallans arrived rose from among the ruins and charged into the disordered mass. There were only thirty on their feet, many wounded, but they came in a disciplined armored mass of points and swords, a red-and-white banner fluttering in their midst and a harsh baying throat-tearing chorus sounding in time to the pounding of their boots:
“Tennoheika banzai! Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”
The newcomers fell upon their foemen with terrifying intensity and skilled fury, like a blizzard of dancing butcher knives. The enemy broke then, south and west, screaming in terror and throwing away their weapons to run the faster. Hellman’s light cavalry looped effortlessly around them and deployed, though there seemed to be two less of them. The ten drawn up in a semicircle with their stiff bows pulled to the ear were enough, though. The foemen stopped and milled about; one or two drove daggers into their own throats, or each other’s. Those were the surviving Haida—they seldom let themselves be taken alive, which saved the Montivallans the trouble of hanging them for piracy.
Órlaith turned Dancer and followed her father without conscious thought. For an instant her attention went to what clotted and dripped on the head of her war hammer; she gulped a little and dragged it through a bush as she passed.
“Odd,” her father said. “That war cry the enemy were using—it meant self-reliance, more or less. An admirable quality, but not what you’d expect on a battlefield.”
“What were the . . . well, the other lot of foreigners saying?”
“Mmmm . . . more or less literally . . . To the Heavenly Sovereign Majesty, ten thousand years! Or Long Live the Emperor for short; it’s a polished and compact phrase.”
He halted and spoke to the captives, in a language Órlaith didn’t even recognize. That was another gift of the Sword of the Lady; the bearer could speak the tongues that were needful to the High King’s work. The foreigners cast their weapons and helms away and knelt, their hands on their heads.
The Montivallan party were around them now, and she could see the first of Dun Barstow’s levy coming up, jumping off their bicycles and trotting forward with arrows on the string. One fresh-faced Archer of the guard younger than she spoke sotto voce to a veteran who had a scar like a thin white mustache crumpling the dark skin of his upper lip:
“Is it always that easy, so?” the youngster said, trying to be nonchalant and not quite suppressing a quaver; the freckles stood out against a face gone pale.
“It’s easy enough when you catch them with their kilts up and Little Jack in hand, laddie,” the older man said, a little indistinctly and making an illustrative pumping motion with his right. “And when the Morrigú doesn’t get up to any of Her little tricks. When they’re waiting for you, and things do go wrong . . . then it gets very hard. Enjoy this while you can, for you’ll not see the like often. The Ard Rí and our Old Wolf did a nice neat job o’ work, I’ll say that for any to hear.”
It hadn’t been easy for everyone; two of Hellman’s troopers were laying out a third. It was the one who’d brought the message, Noemi Hierro, lying still with an arrow sunk fletching-deep under her right armpit and an expression of surprise on her face beneath the blood and her twenty-first year never to be completed. Órlaith felt a little winded at the sight; that had been someone she knew, fairly well after weeks of travel together, and liked.
So sudden, she thought, a little dazed; the young man who’d closed her eyes looked even more stunned—not in an anguish of grief yet, just . . . disbelieving.
The healers were busy with several others, including some from both lots of foreigners—that was part of their oath to Brigit, to care for all Her children first and put everything else second when they saw the need. Though sometimes all that could be done was a massive dose of morphine.
The hale prisoners were all men, mostly youngish and stocky-muscular though not large. With their helmets off she could see that they were all of very much the same physical type, which itself was slightly odd to Montivallan eyes. Their skins were of a pale umber a little darker than hers when she had a summer tan, and they had sharply slanted dark eyes—shaped like Sir Aleaume’s, but more so—and short snub noses and close-cropped raven hair, faces high-cheeked and rather flat and sparse of beard where they had any. That combination of features was known in Montival though not common in pure form these days, and she knew that they stemmed originally from the other side of the Pacific.
Her father spoke again, then dropped back into English for her: “I’ve promised them their lives if they behave,” he said, pitching his voice to carry to his followers. “We’ll need to question them, of course.”
To her, more quietly: “But now let’s see to our friends . . . or at least, the enemies of our enemies.”
Heuradys wiped and sheathed her sword and passed a canteen to Órlaith; she sucked greedily at it, suddenly conscious of how her mouth was dusty-dry and gummy at once. The water was cut one-fifth with harsh red wine, and it tasted better than anything she’d ever drunk. The High King took two long swallows when she offered to him, and sighed.
“You forget what thirsty work this is, you do.”
The other group of strangers had halted when the Montivallans indicated they should—though there weren’t any living foemen behind them. She recognized the armor they wore now that they were close. It was more complex than that of the men they’d been fighting, built up from many enameled steel plates held together with silk cord, and helmets with broad flares and sometimes contorted masks over the face like visors. Several had banners flying from small poles fixed in holders on their backs.
“Nihon style,” Órlaith murmured, and one of them close enough to hear gave her a sharp look, plainly recognizing the word. “And we thought nobody survived there!”
“They speak Nihongo as well as wearing the gear; they’re Nihonjin, right enough. Japanese, the ancients would have said,” her father said.
The phalanx of . . . Japanese . . . murmured a little among themselves, evidently remarking on the fact that they’d been recognized. She and her father dismounted, removing their helmets; at his gesture the squires unfastened the King’s bevoir, the piece that protected throat and chin but made conversation with anyone unaccustomed to them a little difficult.
The strangers—could they really be from the fabled land of Japan?—removed their helms as well and bowed, a uniform formal-looking gesture held for a second before they came erect again; they were of the same race as the other party of strangers but looked very different, with their hair shaven in a broad strip up the center of the pate and then curled into a tight topknot behind. Some wore white headbands with a single red dot flanked by spiky script as well. Their faces were set, without any of the grins or whooping she’d have expected from a like number of Mackenzies. There were others in Montival who cultivated a similar stoic manner, of course; Bearkillers, for example.
Órlaith’s brows went up. The last of the Nihonjin had taken off his helmet. . . .
No, her helmet. A woman, and about my own age . . . somewhere between my age and Herry’s, maybe. The features were strong but delicate. Not wearing that strange hairdo, either, though she does have the headband.
She wore the same armor as the others, and she carried a naginata, a long curved blade on the end of an eight-foot bamboo shaft. There was blood on the tip, too. She began to speak slowly in what Órlaith recognized as an attempt at English . . . probably grammatically correct English, but with the sounds so badly rendered that it was incomprehensible except for the odd word.
“. . . senkkyu Beddi Mach,” she finished.
Was that “thank you very much”? Órlaith wondered.
Her father responded with a bow of his own and spoke Nihongo in a barking staccato manner, to the evident vast relief of the newcomers. They seemed astonished, too. They bowed again when he indicated himself and said something that ended with:
“. . . koutei Dai-Montival.”
Then the whole party turned with a clatter and a united gasp. Two more of the Nipponese were approaching, carrying the body of a third between them.
“Ouch,” Heuradys said softly just behind her ear. “No way he’s going to live with that just there.”
She nodded agreement. An arrow stood in his torso; her training calculated the position and put it down as far too near the big clutch of blood vessels above the heart.
You had only to nick something there and the body cavity would fill with blood in a minute or less. . . . The woman gave a small shocked cry as they laid the dead man down and called out what might be a name.
“That was their ruler, their Tenno,” her father murmured to her. “Heavenly Sovereign, their Emperor. And the father of that young woman.”
Órlaith made a small shocked sound of her own, throttled down out of consideration, not to intrude on grief.
Mother-of-All, be merciful to her! she thought. The poor lass, to come so close to safety and then lose her Da so! Hard, hard, very hard indeed.
“That’s not one of our arrows, praise and thanks to Lugh of the Long Hand,” her father said quietly. “Accidents of that sort can happen more often than is comfortable, in a scramblin’ fight like this.”
“No, it’s fletched with gull feathers and shafted with some sort of reed,” she agreed, wincing at the thought.
All the rest of the Nihonjin sank to their knees and then bowed forward towards the dead man, forehead to ground with their hands flat on the earth and fingertips touching. When they sat back on their heels their impassive countenances were like tragic masks. One of them nearest the young woman had a square scarred face that underneath the differences might have been Edain Aylward’s to the life, and a single tear trickled down his cheek. He slowly reached for the short curved sword at his right hip, twin to the longer blade tucked edge-up through the sash he wore, touching the clasps of his armor at with the other hand.
The young woman unfroze and made a sharp chopping gesture, and spoke in a commanding tone without a break in it, though her own eyes were glistening. The man said something in a pleading tone, and she repeated the order.
Her father leaned close to Órlaith and murmured. “She just denied him permission to kill himself in apology for failure. No, she said. I forbid it. I forbid you all. I will need your living swords, and you may not desert me or our people. Our need is too great.”
Órlaith nodded respectfully. The middle-aged Nihonjin looked at his ruler’s daughter for a long moment. He made the same gesture of obeisance to her that he had to the dead man; the others followed him. Then with hands upflung he barked out a short phrase; she thought it had a word something like jotei in it, used several times with another from the war cry as well. The others repeated it and took it up, chanting for a moment, ignoring the eyes of the Montivallans. Her father translated in the same low murmur:
“Hail to the Heavenly Sovereign Empress! Daughter of the Sun Goddess! To the Empress, Ten Thousand Years!”
He shook his head, and continued almost as softly: “And here I thought we’d achieved a nice, boring, uneventful life!”
The High King and his daughter waited courteously until the ritual ran its course, then stepped forward. Artos spoke again when the . . .
“Well, I suppose she’s an empress now, though of what we don’t know,” Órlaith murmured.
“Maybe a country, maybe of one village and a pet ox,” Heuradys replied almost inaudibly sotto voce.
News travelled across the great ocean, but slowly and fitfully and mostly from the southern parts of Asia whence came a trickle of trade. Everyone had just assumed Japan was a total wreck, like most of Europe or the coastal parts of China. Too many big cities too close together.
. . . the empress rose and faced him.
Movement, and a shout. Órlaith spun on one heel and froze for an instant. One of the kneeling prisoners was grinning at her, and his eyes . . . were solid black, emptiness with only a rim of white around the outside. She’d heard of the like, but never thought to see it herself.
“I . . . see . . . you . . .” he said, in a voice from the surface of a dead star.
Existence itself wavered. She looked into those eyes, and through them into a universe where matter itself perished with a whimpering squeal, absolute cold, utter black forever and everywhere, where nothing happened and nothing ever would. She could not move, for nothing did. . . .
The prisoner’s hands went down from his bristle-shaven head to the back of his collar. A bodkin-headed arrow plowed into his forehead and sank inches deep with a wet splintering crack of bone, and Edain was cursing as he reached for another with blurring speed and half a dozen of the Archers shot too and men-at-arms were charging with their swords raised, but the dead man’s hands flashed forward. Two streaks of silver went through the air.
Time slowed, like a spoon through honey. The thickset man beside the foreign empress flung a hand out in a desperate reach like a baseball outfielder. It went between his charge and the weapon, and suddenly a small slim blade was standing out of his palm. Her father grabbed at Órlaith, throwing her backward with huge and desperate strength as he dove between her and the threat and Heuradys’ shield came around before her.
And she knew he’d started to move an instant before the attacker.
As he did he jerked his own right arm up, the shield-bearing arm that reflex would put in the way of a threat. The flash of silver went over it by the merest fraction, and then he was falling backward beside her, his hand clasped to his throat and the dimpled bone hilt of the throwing-knife standing between the fingers. Blood welled out over the hand and from his mouth. Time unfroze, and she checked her lunge forward. The angle meant that anything she did would make things worse.
A few seconds ticked by like years. Faces gathered about where she knelt by her father, but they were more distant than the Moon. He reached with his other hand, fumbling, and she saw what he was doing and helped, bringing the Sword up until it lay on his breast, with her hand over his on the hilt. Light flared in the crystal pommel. For a moment she hoped wildly and then—
• • •
“Hello, my darling girl, my heart, my treasure,” he said gently.
They were standing in the trampled meadow, but the grass nodded undisturbed instead of lying flat, and there were neither men nor weapons nor blood. Her father was in a simple kilt and shirt, smiling at her as the wind ruffled his bright hair.
That expression turned rueful as he looked down at his right hand, flexing the arm and opening and closing the long shapely fingers.
“I was told at the time that Cutter arrow in my right shoulder would be the death of me. And so it was, with a twenty-year stay of execution. Just a fraction of a second too slow for me to make old bones. Well, I had it on the best of authorities I’d not see my beard go gray . . . and I noticed the first gray hair six months ago.”
“Da!”
His arms went about her, comforting and strong as she wept. “Ah, lass, it’s sorry I am to leave you. So, so. Grieve, but not too long; it’s the way of nature for a child to bury her parents.”
A thought penetrated even her sorrow. “Oh, Goddess, I’ll have to tell Mother!”
She could feel his head shake. “No. She is High Queen. We were linked to the land, and to each other. She’ll have known.
“Tell your mother that I will wait for her, in the world beyond the world.”
He held her at arm’s length with his hands on her shoulders. “You and I will meet once more, my heart, in this cycle of the world; long ago for me, not too long in the future for you. By Lost Lake.”
A thread of eeriness penetrated her misery. That was where the Kingmaking took place. Nobody went there but a new made High King . . . or High Queen.
• • •
Then the world crashed in on her once more. Her father lay with his eyes closed, comely even with the blood bright on this throat and lips, years vanished from his face. She stood, slowly, the Sword of the Lady in her hand. Always before it had seemed a little heavy, a little large, as a blade sized for her father would.
Now it was perfect, alive in her grip at the exact weight her wrist and arm could wield, and her fingers closed around it as if it had been fashioned for her at the place where the world began. Somehow that made the moment real, as even her father’s face relaxed in death could not.
Slowly she raised the Sword on high. Heuradys fell to her knees, head bowed, and the others did in a ripple outward like the fall of petals from flowers.
“I am my father’s heir,” she called, her voice strange and harsh in her ears. “And for him and for Montival, for the land that he has watered with his blood . . . I swear vengeance on those who did this deed!”
The Given Sacrifice Page 40