The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

Or overreacting, to be sure.

  Or for that matter, how the other effects were rippling out, and what the enemy was doing in response—it wouldn’t do to forget that. When you cast words out into the world, you could neither recall them nor predict exactly where they would land. Rather like an arrow, except that words multiplied with compound interest.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CASTLE TODENANGST, CROWN DEMESNE

  PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

  (FORMERLY NORTHERN OREGON)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  JULY 7TH, CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

  The High Queen sighed and made a gesture of acknowledgement behind her back as she looked out the window, still collecting herself before she resumed the conference.

  “That’s a point, Father. You have a damnable habit of being reasonable and making me be reasonable when I don’t want to be, you know that?”

  “We all have our cross to bear, my daughter. I am part of yours, it seems.”

  And you are the crossbeam of mine. She felt her lips quirk unwillingly as she turned back.

  The décor here was antique in the literal sense; the desks and tables and chairs were heavy dark carved Victorian neo-Gothic from some mansion or museum, salvaged not long after the Change by her mother’s teams and stored until the castle needed them. There was a scent of wax and polish about them, and of upholstery covered in red doeskin, probably not changed much since her father’s time—the Onyx Tower had been his particular lair, which accounted for much of its ill reputation.

  Lord Chancellor Ignatius—brother of the Order of the Shield of St. Benedict, and priest as well—could have offices here without unpleasant political consequences; his Order had been among the leaders of the resistance against the Association in the old days. Though Ignatius had been a child then—he was less than a decade older than Mathilda, who had been conceived and born in the first Change Year.

  Then Ignatius chuckled; his hair and beard were more than half white, but even as it deepened the lines at the corners of his eyes the expression made him look much younger. Though his baptismal name had been Karl Bergfried, his eyes were slanted and of a blue so midnight-dark it could easily be taken for black. That shape was the legacy of a Vietnamese grandmother, a bride brought back from some long-forgotten war of the ancient world. The old Americans had gotten around and about, on a scale inconceivable in modern times.

  “Perhaps we should just devise a code, Your Majesty, with letters to fill in conversations we’ve had so often before? You say ‘A,’ I reply with ‘X,’ and we both save time and effort.”

  Maugis looked very slightly shocked again, and the Mackenzie was amused as he ran a hand over his oak-brown curls. This time Mathilda had to work at little harder at keeping the smile away. She and Ignatius . . . and Rudi . . . had worked together for a very long time. She knew the Chancellor had often longed to return to the peace and beauty of his warrior order’s mother-house at Mt. Angel and its ancient round of toil and prayer. He never had, except for the odd retreat to refresh his soul. As he’d put it once, the Shield of St. Benedict weren’t the Cistercians and he’d known that when he took his first vows as a novice.

  God gave you a cross to carry—the weight precisely tailored to your capacity if you called on Him in your heart—and told you to drag it up to Heaven’s gate. Ignatius had never faltered.

  “Sure, and I think better of Christians in general when I hear you say something of that order, Father,” he chuckled.

  She stopped for a moment, pressing the palms of her hands together and touching the fingers to her chin. “And we’re exhibiting our internal divisions before these . . . Japanese.”

  And without them, Rudi would still be alive! her heart cried.

  She took a moment to force the thought away. Grief was natural, and it paid no account to fairness. She couldn’t control what her heart felt, but she could control what she said and did. The thoughts came unbidden; that didn’t mean she had to welcome them in and give them a home.

  I’m an Arminger. That doesn’t mean I have to . . . That is, the honor of House Artos is in my hands.

  She was Lady Protector in her own right, and High Queen Regnant of all Montival until Órlaith came of age. She couldn’t afford to act on resentment or angry impulse, not when she had to account for her actions to her conscience, her people, and to God and the Virgin who was her particular patron. Too much depended on a calm mind and considered decisions.

  I saw Her at the Kingmaking, bringing mercy to Father in Purgatory. Remember those eyes, that voice. Holy Mary pierced with sorrows, intercede for a mother now!

  And the visitors’ Emperor had died only moments before Montival’s High King, and left his daughter and heir in charge of their party. Apparently this Reiko and Órlaith had become partners in crime, or close friends, or both.

  Órlaith . . . Órlaith is like her father that way. People—most people—like her. They trust her. They look into her eyes and see her smile and . . . something happens. Some people like me, but it isn’t the same. I have to work at things.

  “And they show their disputes before us,” Ignatius said thoughtfully. At her expression of surprise:

  “Your Majesty, the senior man left at Montinore manor on Barony Ath was Koyama Akira, the Grand Steward of the Imperial Household. Roughly comparable to my office, I gather. Marshal d’Ath thinks, and from my own flying visit I concur, that he was utterly flabbergasted when he woke and found his Empress and her escort gone and only he, a few of his staff members, and several other officials left. Astonished and, under a very tight control, furious with an anger born of fear for her as he read her note to him. Which indicates why their Empress acted as she did. She is young, very much Órlaith’s age, her succession irregular and recent, and her authority possibly precarious.”

  “She took her guard commander and his samurai, plus her ship captain and his remaining sailors. You think the others aren’t loyal?”

  “Not necessarily, but in the Grand Steward’s case there is the perhaps natural feeling of men long experienced in government that they know better than a young woman recently bereaved of her father. It was all very quietly managed.”

  “Just how deeply is Marshal d’Ath implicated in all this?” Maugis said, the lines deepening in his face.

  Technically she was his superior; he was Grand Constable of the Association, but the Baroness of Ath was Marshal of the High King’s Host, supreme commander of all Montival’s soldiery under the Crown. In point of fact the High King had very little in the way of troops under arms in peacetime, apart from the guard regiments. Most of what force the High Kingdom did keep was off patrolling distant wilderness or afloat against the menace of Haida pirates from the far north. The Navy rarely came south of Puget Sound and very rarely south of Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia.

  The Portland Protective Association’s sheer size and feudal structure meant that it could muster more strength and do it much more quickly than any other part of Montival save perhaps Boise, and Boise was far away over the mountains. The sword had been in the sheath since her early adulthood, but neither her mother nor she herself nor the servants they had chosen had let it rust there.

  Any display of Associate might had to be done very carefully, to avoid arousing old fears and feuds. The Prophet’s War and the founding of the High Kingdom had brought them all together, in theory. Keeping it that way in fact took kingcraft. It would be harder now, just when they needed unity more than they had since the dark days of the kingdom’s birth.

  Ignatius shrugged. “My lord, the Marshal issued that do-what-the-bearer-orders order, but if the Crown Princess requested it, it’s only a venial sin for Lady d’Ath to sign it without prior reference to Todenangst. She did submit a duplicate in the usual report through the usual channels. . . .”

  “Without flaggin
g it for attention,” Maugis said dryly. “So that it disappeared into the routine to-be-read stack in your office, my Lord Chancellor.”

  “Yes, and I have been paying less attention to my routine correspondence than I should. Her communication indicates that she did not ask what the prerogative mandamus was for . . . Granted, probably she deliberately did not ask.”

  “My mother was fond of those,” Mathilda said. “She used to call them a get out of jail free card, for some reason. Like a lettre de cachet.”

  Ignatius nodded; neither of them mentioned that a lettre de cachet from the first Lord Protector or his wife and successor Sandra Arminger had been mostly used when someone—someone like Tiphaine d’Ath in her dreadful deadly prime, for example—was sent out to make a third party disappear, visibly or otherwise, disappear into death or a dungeon or just nonexistence.

  Most of those had read: The bearer has done what has been done by my authority, and for the good of the State.

  “A pre-Change reference of some sort,” he said.

  And went on in an utterly neutral tone: “Your Majesty may of course dismiss Baroness d’Ath, since High Marshal is an office held at the Crown’s pleasure.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mathilda said . . . feeling her own reluctance at the words.

  She forced detachment and suppressed the feeling of betrayal and went on judiciously: “D’Ath has built up quite a fund of credit with the Crown, dating back to my parents’ time.”

  She winced inwardly; it was only a decade later that she’d realized those services included saving Rudi’s life on her mother’s orders . . . when her father had tried to have him killed. It wasn’t something they publicized, even now.

  Which meant . . .

  “And this doesn’t exhaust it, not yet, not unless it turns to a complete disaster, however annoyed I am with Tiph for abetting this nonsense. And she’s due to retire in a few years anyway. Plus . . . she’s close to Órlaith, she tutored her a great deal, as she did me when I was a girl.”

  “Lady Heuradys d’Ath seems to have been deeply involved,” Ignatius said.

  Mathilda shrugged and flipped a hand in a dismissive gesture; that was precisely what she’d have expected of the Marshal’s adopted daughter. She’d known the girl . . .

  Don’t get too middle-aged, Mathilda, she scolded herself. Heuradys d’Ath’s twenty-three and a belted knight and about as dangerous as Tiphaine was at the same age. Not as cold and not nearly as angry at the world as Tiph was when she was Mom’s living stiletto, but . . . Heuradys is certainly not that wide-eyed page of ten you used to sneak treats to or find giggling in corners with your daughter. Not anymore.

  . . . known the young woman since she’d been born, and had nearly as much to do with her as her own mothers for the last decade and more.

  “She’s been Órlaith’s best friend since they were little girls, and she’s her sworn liege knight,” she said. “It’s not even technically illegal for her under Association law, she’s an officer of Orrey’s household, not mine or of the Crown.”

  And even if I wanted to punish her, every Associate noble would be up in arms, possibly quite literally, if I did that to a vassal for obeying her oath of fealty.

  “And Prince John apparently arranged the charter of the ship in Newport,” Ignatius said. “My informants—”

  He ran the High Kingdom’s intelligence network, among other duties.

  “—say that a knight matching the Prince’s description, but bearing arms that aren’t in the College of Herald’s records, was closeted with the head of Feldman & Sons several times. Then he wasn’t seen again until the ship left.”

  “I thought his valet was supposed to keep an eye on him?” she said sharply.

  “Goodman Evrouin is supposed to keep him safe,” the cleric said. “Your Majesty, he couldn’t do that effectively if he was simply a spy fastened on your son against his will. As it is, at least he’s with him. Prince John is no fool, and not easily overborne, for all that he’s only nineteen. Consider his parentage!”

  Mathilda slumped into a chair and put a hand to her forehead. “I never thought I’d feel so sympathetic to the way Mother reacted when I went off to join Rudi on the Quest. Still, we can’t let this go on. Lord Maugis, Edain, what are our options?”

  “Your Majesty, Feldman’s Tarshish Queen is a fast ship, the Navy people tell me—it’s on the auxiliary reserve list, of course—and this merchant Moishe Feldman a good sailor with a crack crew, one of the best in Newport,” Maugis de Grimmond said. “He’s also a Corvallan naval reservist, rank of Commander. Few civilian ships in all Montival are faster, in fact, save for some rich men’s racing yachts, and they are not seaworthy.”

  Ignatius nodded. “Feldman is noted for going into peril,” he said. “He’s fought pirates abroad more than once. His ship is designed for that sort of work, high risk and high reward.”

  Shrewd, shrewd choice, my golden girl, she thought. Feldman’s family have obligations to House Artos . . . and originally the obligation was for protection against House Arminger, back in Father’s time. He’d be more likely to dare my anger for your sake than anyone else you could have picked—certainly more than anyone who had to be simply outright bribed into it. And Corvallis . . . they’ve never much liked any Associate. They only joined the High Kingdom because there really wasn’t any alternative when all their neighbors did unless they wanted their trade choked off. Fighting the Prophet’s War with the rest of us helped, but factions there are still unhappy about it.

  “What do we have that could catch her?” Mathilda said.

  “Nothing apart from one frigate in Astoria, the Stormrider, refitting after taking her latest anti-pirate patrol out of Victoria,” Maugis said, touching a file-folder without looking at its contents. “The Royal Montivallan Navy base there is overburdened with more serious work and they sent her south on contract to a civilian yard.”

  “Stormrider . . . twelve hundred tons, complement of two hundred and fifteen, thirty marines, twenty-eight eighteen-pounder catapults and two twenty-four-pounder track-mounted chasers fore and aft, Captain Russ commanding,” Mathilda said absently.

  “Yes, Your Majesty; they’re ten short of complement, losses in dead and seriously injured from a cutting-out expedition that was ambushed ashore.”

  Mathilda nodded, the anger she would usually feel at that distant and muffled. She would never have been surprised, though. It wasn’t enough to look at maps. To truly grasp how big the northern sea-land country was you had to see with your own eyes the endless chains of islands from county-sized to bare rocks, and the fjord-riven coasts that ran up into Alaska—which she had. Big and steep, densely forested with enormous trees that came right down to the stony beaches and up to the glaciers, cut by rivers that made overland travel a nightmare, icy seas fog-bound and lashed by huge storms much of the year and full of reefs and rocks. With icebergs as common as driftwood.

  That daunting inhuman scale was among the reasons the High Kingdom had never been able to do more than keep the Haida menace from getting completely out of hand. In theory the Crown of Montival claimed everything from Baja up to the Bering Strait; in practice only about a quarter of that vast stretch was remotely under law. Much of it wasn’t even regularly visited, much less ruled.

  Maugis went on: “Assuming the Tarshish Queen intends to make a stop in San Francisco Bay . . .”

  “They will, my lord,” Edain said. “The news from home . . . from my home in Dun Fairfax . . . is that my son and his friends planned a long overland journey. And they were not present in Newport when the Tarshish Queen weighed anchor. My guess would be that they’re after heading for the Bay; for the Dúnedain holding there, Stath Ingolf. Wherever they intend to go in the end, they’ll stop there.”

  Mathilda’s mind clicked through a mixture of reports, maps, her own travels, the links of friendship and vassalage and
kinship, and ran them all through the focusing mechanism of a lifetime’s political experience. Rudi’s twin half-sisters Mary and Ritva and their men had founded that Stath of the Rangers, in what had been rechristened Ithilien County in accordance with the Dúnedain . . .

  Obsessions, she thought. Or founding myth, if I was feeling charitable, which I am very much not just now.

  Just a little while ago the news had come that one Korean ship had been cast ashore north of the Bay, and the Dúnedain had had a clash with its survivors—acting together with a Haida skaga, a shaman of those piratical tribesfolk, and the cannibal Eaters who haunted the ruins of the lost cities. Mary’s eldest son Malfind had died in that skirmish and her daughter Morfind had been wounded, as had Ritva’s son Faramir Kovalevsky. Mathilda felt a slight twinge of guilt that she hadn’t paid more attention to Mary’s loss. Grief made you selfish. In practical terms, though—

  “She’s going to meet the Mackenzies she’s suborned to this lunacy there,” Mathilda said flatly. “And probably pick up a few younger Dúnedain too. And . . . how did they coordinate this? Without getting into the message files or alerting anyone? Órlaith has been at Montinore Manor almost since she got back, when she wasn’t here. So has Lady Heuradys. And there’s nothing definite in the logs of the Castle Ath heliograph station. Very little but routine traffic.”

  “There I can speak,” Edain said. “Susan Mika—Susan Clever Raccoon. I met her in the McClintock dùthchas, nobbut a few months ago, when she bore your messages to the little Princess.”

  “Little!” Órlaith’s mother snorted.

  Her daughter had inherited Rudi’s looks, and was only an inch below six feet, built like a long-limbed blond leopardess; she could have posed for the warrior-woman on the cover of one of the pre-Change tales of chivalry and adventure her grandmother had liked, though the so-called armor on those usually looked as if they’d been designed for the eyes of thirteen-year-old boys rather than for combat.

  Edain probably remembered helping her onto her first pony and tumbling about with her puppy; men were . . . rather soppy that way.