The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  Mathilda searched her memory again. Then she stopped and snapped her fingers. A young Lakota named Susan Mika had enlisted in the Crown Courier Corps less than two years ago. Rick Three Bears was her uncle, and a friend of Rudi and Mathilda’s from the Quest a generation ago, as well as important in the government of the Lakota tunwan that formed the Kingdom’s eastern frontier. He’d sent a note explaining she’d gotten into bad trouble at home and asking them to find her a job. She’d done well in the Couriers, in fact . . .

  Ignatius slapped his palm on the table, his face showing the pleasure of solving a mental puzzle: “Yes, she was the Rider I sent south with the dispatches from you for Princess Órlaith.”

  “Aye,” Edain nodded. “And she met us at Diarmuid Tennart McClintock’s steading.”

  Mathilda winced again. Órlaith was of the Old Faith, her father’s religion, and like most maidens of that belief in the clans she’d lost her virginity at a Beltane festival in her teens, about three years after her first menses. To one Diarmuid Tennart McClintock . . . Mathilda’s Catholic side had been angered; she’d been a virgin on her wedding night, not without considerable effort and inner struggle. And her political antennae had quivered too—lover to the next High Queen was a political position whether the parties wanted it to be or not.

  “Diarmuid’s handfasted to another now,” Edain put in. “Just as we showed up out of the wilderness on our way north. But forbye they’re still friends. She’s probably called on him for aid, and some blades who’ll follow him. Say another dozen, to match those my sons Karl and Mathun managed to persuade into it, they’ll not want a great host.”

  To the others, which meant mainly Maugis: “Diarmuid’s a feartaic down there, something of a minor chief, what they call a tacksman, like his father and grandfather before him.”

  The Mackenzies and McClintocks had always had fairly close relations, but a north-realm noble whose business was mostly within the Protectorate wouldn’t know as much about the more southerly of the great pagan Clans. Mackenzies didn’t have tacksmen, but then they hadn’t been founded by someone as utterly obsessed with his somewhat deranged vision of the Highland past as the first McClintock. Juniper Mackenzie and her followers had just been improvising in a world gone mad.

  “This Rider . . . she had speech with the Princess, more than once,” Edain went on. “And our Golden Princess has all her father’s golden charm. Charm that could bring the birds from the trees, Matti.”

  “I know that, Edain,” she said shortly.

  He shook his head. “Not the way someone who didn’t nurse her or wipe her wee arse does. A mother is a different thing, blessed be.”

  He touched the back of his right hand to his forehead, a gesture of the Clan’s version of the Old Faith to a hearthmistress—half reverence to the Goddess who was Mother-of-all and half ironic reminder to the High Queen. She was uneasily aware that the pagan part of Montival saw her as the Mother’s surrogate for the High Kingdom, as they’d seen Rudi walking in the power of the Lord who was Her consort. It was politically convenient . . . but religiously it made her itch. Catholics . . . well, many Catholics . . . had stopped interpreting the Lord and Lady as demons and deceivers and moved on to just misunderstood aspects of the Truth; she wished the Old Faith would stop plastering the interpretatio paganensis on her theology.

  But as the good Father told me long ago, debating doctrine with a witch is like trying to carve fog with a sword.

  Ignatius stroked his close-cropped beard. “An ideal way to communicate in confidence. Nobody questions a rider of the Crown Courier Corps. She’s been carrying regular dispatches down to Castle Rutherford and Stath Ingolf since. A few more in the pouch, or simply verbal messages . . .”

  “There was the Yurok shaman we met at Diarmuid’s steading,” Edain said thoughtfully. “She said that there was something that Reiko, their Empress, must recover. Something to the south.”

  Ignatius nodded. “It definitely looks like a rendezvous inside the Golden Gate. Whatever mission our mysterious Japanese friends are on, it’s south of there.”

  “Has this Grand Steward Koyama Akira said anything about that?” Mathilda asked. “We still haven’t any real idea of what they’re trying to do.”

  “Not a word. He is angered, but singularly close-mouthed with outsiders and foreigners. As I would be in his position,” Ignatius said. “A formidably disciplined man, impeccably courteous and utterly unyielding. I think his command of English is better than he would have us think, which helps him be . . . skillfully unhelpful. We are still trying to find a Japanese-speaking interpreter who knows enough to be useful; there may be one in Boise, and there’s a family of landholding knights in the Skagit baronies who may have kept it up as family tradition, but either will take time to arrive. And I would guess at a certain satisfaction on Lord Koyama’s part that we are as . . . thunderstruck as he, and for similar reasons.”

  “I’d be thinking gobsmacked is the word you’re looking for, Ignatius,” Edain observed dryly.

  Maugis nodded. “Stormrider might overtake her—she has more hull speed than the Tarshish Queen when she’s clean, but she was due to have her coppering renewed in the next year.”

  “I doubt Moishe Feldman would shoot at a ship of the High Kingdom’s fleet,” Ignatius said thoughtfully. “Even if the Princess told him to, which she would not.”

  “She wouldn’t tell him to,” Mathilda said flatly.

  She was quite sure of that, at least.

  “But he would certainly run away from one if she tells him to do that, and we can’t start flinging round shot or napalm shells at my daughter and my son! Bolts from a naval catapult are no respecters of persons.”

  “No indeed,” Ignatius said. Thoughtfully: “Nor at the Empress of Japan, for that matter. We have enough enemies across the Pacific, it appears, without adding another!”

  Mathilda gave a single sharp if unwilling nod to acknowledge the point. “My lord de Grimmond, put . . . sixty or seventy men on her, from the Protector’s Guard. Select a commander immune to Órlaith’s charm! Instructions are to secure the person of the Crown Princess and Prince John, but without using lethal force against anyone aboard that ship. Including the Japanese.”

  “Your Majesty, I’m not in the naval chain of command.”

  “Well, I’m not going to tell Tiph to do it, under the circumstances! Ignatius, do up the necessary documentation to regularize things. The High Queen is in the chain—holding the upper end. And jerking it hard right now.”

  Maugis stirred again; he knew he was being ordered to tell his men to make bricks without straw. She held up her hand. The impulse to protect his troops from impractical political demands was perfectly natural—essential—but sometimes you had to override things like that. Fighting was always at most a means, never an end, though those born to the sword tended to forget it sometimes. The purpose of having armed force was to use it to get people to do what you wanted, or resist their attempts to do that to you. Anything in the way of actual fighting was a regrettable by-product, like dirty water from a dye-works.

  “I’m aware that it’s an impossible thing to task them with, but it has to be done that way,” she said firmly.

  “Your Majesty,” Maugis said, tucking his head in acknowledgment. His face grew grimmer. “My son Aleaume—let his person answer for his actions as it pleases you.”

  “My lord, Sir Aleaume’s oath was to the dynasty, not me personally, and he did not violate any direct orders. And according to witnesses, he probably did swear personal fealty to my daughter . . . which is most irregular, but not strictly speaking illegal since she is the dynasty’s heir, and once done carries an obligation of strict obedience as long as her orders are not direct treason. To be absolutely frank, if my daughter is running off hare-brained, I’m glad he’s there to guard her person. He may have committed a serious error, he may have lost my favor—�
�

  Implying that he was very unlikely to have lost Órlaith’s, who would be High Queen in five years.

  “—but I’m quite sure nobody will get to her except through him. Not as long as he can breathe and hold a sword.”

  Maugis swallowed and ducked his head again, radiating a mixture of anger at his eldest son . . . and beneath it, deep pride. Mathilda acknowledged both with a gesture.

  “We’ll suspend his post in the Guard and rusticate him out at St. Grimmond-on-the-Wold for a year or two with orders not to leave the boundaries of your estates while he contemplates the meaning of discipline and watches the grass grow and the sheep eat it. Then I’ll find him some post on the frontiers for further reflection, somewhere uncomfortable and strenuous. The same for young Droyn, though his father my lord Count Chaka may add to it.”

  Maugis had been ready to hear the words dungeon or even high treason; his relief didn’t show, but it was there.

  And there are certainly enough people who don’t like the Association watching me like a hawk from the outside for off-with-their-heads impulses now that Rudi’s . . . gone. Now all Montival is ruled by an Associate.

  At the Kingmaking she had seen her father in Purgatory. Heaven’s mercy was infinite . . . but human beings, alas, were sparks of the Divine, not the thing itself.

  And I’m the daughter and heir of the first Lord Protector, at that. Until Órlaith comes of age. Rudi, my love, you built well, but the realm is still new and young. Well, I have experience with young wild things, at that!

  Maugis allowed himself a craggy smile. “Here is the first use Her Highness found for the writ from the Marshal.”

  Mathilda read the paper he slid across. It was a carbon copy of a standard typewritten logistics requisition on the armed forces of the Republic of Corvallis in the High Kingdom’s name, for everything from spare bowstrings and underwear to tinned sardines and jam and pelletized alfalfa-fodder to boot-grease, to be delivered to a warehouse in Newport. Maugis had probably had to jar several clerks out of their comfortable routine to get it out of the continual flow of paperwork even a very modest army generated. Her brows rose. She’d been, effectively, Rudi’s Chief of Staff during the Prophet’s War, and she had logistics in her bones.

  “At least Órlaith isn’t being incompetent even if she’s doing something deeply stupid,” the High Queen said.

  “Edain?” she went on.

  “I can send a party of the High King’s Archers after that pack of gossoons my sons took off into the wilderness.”

  “Cavalry would be useless, even light horse,” Ignatius agreed, and Maugis nodded. “Too steep, too roadless, too forested. And little forage.”

  Edain made a gesture of acknowledgement. “Forbye warriors in good hard condition can leave foundered horses dead in their wake over a long run; I’ve done it. There’s a question of law, there, I’m afraid, as well, Matti. It’s not illegal for a dozen youngsters of the Clan to take their bows and blades and go on a bit of a trip to hunt and admire scenery and chase the pretty butterflies and listen to the wee birdies sing praise to the Lady of the Flowers, now is it?”

  She snorted, but he was an old friend and had his full share of Mackenzie irreverence anyway.

  “How many?” she said.

  “The bigger the party the less ground you cover in a day, since you’re bound by the slowest. Two-score, I’d say that will be the best balance.”

  There were about seven hundred bows in the High King’s Archers at any one time; a little over half were Mackenzies. Any Montivallan could join if they met the tests . . . which started with a thirty-mile forced march in armor, before you got to the marksmanship part. The pay was quite reasonable, skilled-craftsman level, and there was the chance to strut about with the pride of an elite, but you earned all of it and more.

  “I’ll hand-pick them from those with the reconnaissance badge and take them out myself,” Edain said.

  Mathilda winced; Edain was rock-steady and a pillar of the Throne . . . and someone to whom she was Matti first, a lifelong friend to both her and Rudi. She had many loyal, able subordinates, but that was inexpressibly comforting.

  “It’s a lieutenant’s command,” she said.

  He shrugged. “With another, Karl might do something . . . rash. Whereas meself meself . . . He’s a man grown, but only just. Enough of the boy remains that he may not defy his father face-to-face, so. If only I can catch him to put my face in his face, as it were.”

  “Point,” she said. “This is a political operation, not really a tactical one.”

  “Aye, Matti. And Diarmuid Tennart McClintock is a proud and hot-tempered young man, he might fight me personally in a challenge circle, but he’ll not outright offer battle to the High King’s Archers. Most especially if they outnumber him and are led by me, that being by way of precaution, you understand. So two-score is best all around, and it needs my aging carcass in person.”

  She raised a brow in question, and he grinned ruefully: “I’m not looking forward to it, mind, but though it’ll hurt me more than it once would I won’t slow them, not yet.”

  “Do it,” she said. “Requisition what you need.”

  “No guarantees, Matti, not with my boys and their accomplices having so to say a long start,” he warned. “We’ll make up some by taking a hippomotive to the end of rail, and more by not going over to the Tennart’s. Forbye they’ve been going hither and yon picking up people. With a Crown priority we can be at the railhead near Klamath six hours after we load. Good thing we pushed it that far last year.”

  She called up maps in her mind, and felt for the link to the land that had been there since the Kingmaking by Lost Lake. It gave her an intuitive feel for the possible, as if all Montival was a set of muscles she could sense the limits of.

  Right now she was reluctant to use it.

  I shrink from it, she conceded to herself.

  And forced herself not to remember the scream that had echoed from the very earth and air and water as well as from her when Rudi fell. Her throat was still a little raw with it.

  But I will do it. When I fought by your side on the Quest and in the war, Rudi, I bore wounds from edged steel. I went willingly under the shadow of Azrael’s wings to bear our children in pain and love and blood. I will do this to keep them safe, my darling, and for what we built together.

  “Don’t try to follow them, except as far as you’re heading for the same place,” she said after a moment, her voice steady. “My guess is that they’ll head for Stath Ingolf; it’s close to the Bay and Órlaith has friends there.”

  “Ingolf the Wanderer himself among them, and her aunts Mary and Ritva, and Ian Kovalevsky,” Edain warned. “They being the lords thereabouts.”

  Mathilda nodded. They’d been on the Quest together, fought together, shared hardship and danger and saved each other’s lives. Together they’d been the first to hail Rudi—Artos—High King, far off in the eastern lands. Except for Ian, who’d fallen in with them on the way back west, in Drumheller, and he was a Quester by courtesy not least because he’d wed Ritva.

  Edain was reminding her that they all thought of her as a friend first, and their monarch second and in a rather theoretical way. Off on their own in Westria with a message a month if that, they were the Kingdom, pretty much and for all practical local purposes. The High King and Queen traveled a good deal around Montival precisely to demonstrate that the monarchy actually existed; that was why Rudi had been down there. Plus . . .

  “It’s their children who are Órlaith’s friend-friends, not Ingolf and the others,” she said. “Go directly to Stath Ingolf . . . to the Eryn Muir, that’s where they’ll meet, there or somewhere close to it . . . and cut them off from the Bay. I’ll give you an authorizing writ for Hîr Ingolf, putting him under your orders for the nonce. That’s Crownland in a Crown province and they hold direct from the High Kingdom; I wa
nt him to have to think about disobeying a direct order, not just my theoretical opinions weeks after it’s all a fait accompli.”

  Her head turned smoothly, rather like a catapult on its turntable. “My lord Maugis, please report after you’ve contacted Astoria about the Stormrider and checked on her readiness to sail immediately. They can send workmen along to complete repairs while under way, if necessary.”

  “Shall I accompany—”

  “No, my lord, you may not take personal command. Do it by heliograph. If Edain’s to be away, and I agree he must, I will need you here.”

  Plus the Navy belongs to all Montival, not the Protectorate, and your office is an Associate one. It’s one thing to have some of the Protector’s Guard along under naval command, but having you on board and in charge would be provocative.

  She decided to sugarcoat it a little. With honesty, which was the best way:

  “We’re probably facing war . . . when we know more about what’s going on. It’s been twenty years since we called out the ban of the Association, much less the arrière-ban; you’ll have more than enough to do. Chancellor Ignatius, please order a meeting of the Congress of Realms in . . . mmmmm, Dún na Síochána.”

  Ignatius nodded, thought for an instant, and began to write. “I will begin laying the political groundwork immediately. The quarters are incomplete and will be uncomfortable for the delegates, which may be for the best in encouraging them to be brief,” he said.

  Dún na Síochána was the new capital they’d been building for the High Kingdom; it meant Citadel of Peace, and it was on the site of the ruined pre-Change city known as Salem . . . which meant about the same thing, only in Hebrew rather than Gaelic.

  “And draw up orders to Marshal d’Ath for the implementation of . . . Plan Baywatch, that was the one for pacifying the dead cities around the Bay. With the Eaters cooperating with a foreign enemy, they’ve moved themselves up the priority list. That will mean levies, we’re going to need six or seven thousand troops for that, and their supplies. Infantry, mostly, and engineers. Mackenzies and Bearkillers and Corvallans, of course, but include a note that I want a field brigade of Boiseans as well, and at least a battalion from New Deseret. Yes,” she went on to raised brows. “It’s a long way but it’ll help remind people we’re all part of the High Kingdom. Instruct her to send the details to Fred . . . to President Thurston in Boise and to First Elder Mattheson in Logan. If she’s going to stay High Marshal . . . she’ll do the work, by God.”