The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  “The fog was very heavy when my father . . . when we came in; and it was still nearly dark,” Reiko said softly; she must be feeling the pain of loss as well, but her face was quietly serene. “We saw the bridge only as a shadow and we were . . . preoccupied. This is indeed very fine! And the way it changes from moment to moment, each revealing a little more.”

  The wind was still from the northwest, and the Tarshish Queen stood in under plain sail—her gaff-rigged mainsails alone, sacrificing speed for quick reaction. There was a perceptible roll to the motion now, as they cut diagonally across the waves. Not far away to the north the huge rusted shape of an ancient ship slanted bow-upwards, water breaking white around it and spouting in foam through the gaps that time and Ocean had eaten. With the tide on the ebb you could see how thick the crust of barnacle and weed was on the remainder, life swarming about it in fish and seal and birds.

  “That wreck’s on the north bar, Your Highness,” Feldman said from beside the wheel.

  Then he jerked his head a little southward, without moving his eyes.

  “There’s another bar like it not far that way; sometimes bits are above the surface. The whole thing’s like a horseshoe with the arch pointing westward, and a hole in the center kept clear by the tidal scour. They’re both dangerous, not just shallow water but sudden waves that can come from nowhere and swamp you or pile you into something that’ll rip your hull open bow to stern. Starting with parts of wrecks. The ones you can see aren’t so bad, but there are a lot just beneath the surface, like rusty gutting knives. They shift around, too. Mainly after storms but sometimes for no reason anyone can tell.”

  Captain Ishikawa Goru was looking deeply unhappy at leaving his Empress’ safety to someone else, no matter how competent. He was also keeping very quiet. Feldman knew this harbor. Ishikawa had only sailed through here once, on a one-way journey in a burning ship, and he’d observed enough to develop a healthy respect for the Montivallan skipper’s seamanship and that of his crew. Órlaith caught the slight byplay as Reiko gave her naval officer a very tiny approving nod. Ishikawa was youngish for a senior command and a bit wild and brash by the standards of the Nihonjin party. Which meant he was only moderately buttoned-down by those of the more rule-bound parts of Montival.

  “And your captain was either skillful, lucky or both to make it in safely on his first try without a modern chart or an experienced pilot, Your Majesty,” Feldman added to Reiko.

  “Ryujin . . . sea-kami . . . help,” Ishikawa said, with a shrug.

  Ah, Feldman is clever; not least in using truth for praise. From what I’ve seen Japanese enjoy praise as much as anyone; when it’s well-earned and from someone who knows what they’re talking about, at least. But they’re very modest about it. Or at least this small bunch of them do and are; I don’t suppose they’re altogether typical.

  The ones here were all of the upper classes, as were the samurai of the Guard waiting belowdecks with her men-at-arms, and in the direct service of the Chrysanthemum Throne. The only commoners in their party were Ishikawa’s eight surviving sailors, with whom she’d had little contact except to note that they were much more carefree and less reserved with their local equivalents than their almost maniacally disciplined and studiously reserved overlords. At least when those overlords weren’t watching; they didn’t say a word if they were.

  I don’t know all that much about Japan, even as it was before the Change, apart from what happens when I think in their language.

  Sometimes that conveyed information simply because of the assumptions and penumbras inherent in the words. What the Sword did wasn’t like learning a second language; it was like acquiring the command you would have had if you’d grown up speaking it.

  And doubtless they’ve changed a great deal since the Change, just as we have. Possibly changed just as much, too. I know Reiko fairly well, I think—brief acquaintance but intense, these last few months.

  Like his sovereign the Nihonjin captain had known English—theoretically, in the written form—before his party landed here. Unlike her he hadn’t become fully fluent yet. The sounds of English were difficult for speakers of Nihongo, and vice-versa, and nobody who actually spoke the language as their birth-tongue had survived the Change there to teach anyone else, so it was rather impressive that they’d done as well as they had.

  Reiko still had a charming soft accent. Ishikawa’s was just thick.

  Though he had become at least understandable, unlike the Imperial Guard commander; perhaps it was because he was younger. The grizzled soldier was in his mid-forties, and Órlaith suspected . . .

  Knew, she thought.

  . . . that behind a stony calm Egawa fiercely resented needing foreign help in recovering one of his people’s great treasures. Doubtless that tied in to memories of Japan’s defeat by the ancient Americans in the great war of the last century; his Empress had let drop that his grandfather had died in that struggle, a hero who perished deliberately diving his flying machine into one of the invaders’ warships. Apparently that man’s son had grown up hero-worshipping the memory of the father he’d barely known, and his son had kept up the tradition.

  Reiko didn’t think that way. She was alarmingly intelligent, fanatically determined about anything she considered important or a matter of giri, of duty, and ruthlessly pragmatic to boot, focused on what she could do to bend the future to her will. That made her capable of grinding out astonishing results by sheer willpower.

  Ishikawa indicated the course the Red Dragon had followed.

  “Your Haida pilate . . . pirate and bakachon ship close behind—”

  Órlaith winced slightly without showing it as the Sword-gained command of the language cataracted through her. Sometimes that was like having her mind split in two, and she had to pause and consciously unpack things.

  Baka meant idiot, and chon was a contemptuous diminutive of what the folk of Korea had called their own land, Choson; the other term the Nihonjin employed for their foes was jinnikukaburi, a new coinage that meant human flesh cockroach. To her Sword-trained ear it carried a freight of dread and loathing and sheer murderous hatred like a boiling cauldron in the minds of the users, a flame that could only be quenched in blood. If the chance for wholesale revenge ever came, she didn’t think her new allies would be inclined to mercy.

  Granted that from what she’d been able to learn Korea was currently ruled by a mad cult of diabolist cannibals who’d taken it over just after the Change and who were even worse than the Church Universal and Triumphant that her parents had fought. And they had been raiding and tormenting Nippon’s survivors for more than forty years in an utterly grisly fashion.

  Yet it is still a bit of a . . . rude . . . way to look at an entire realm and folk, even if one of them killed my father. I doubt the most of them chose to live so. Still, the folk of Choson haven’t injured my whole people as they have the Japanese, or threatened our very existence. And didn’t Da say himself that you should keep in mind that fighting against Evil mostly means killing farmers that Evil has levied from the plow at spearpoint?

  Ishikawa continued, and her thought was a flicker beneath her attention to his words:

  “Bakachon shooting firebolts and shells, gaining on us as we shipped water through very many leak and around plugs in holes below waterline, our stern catapults dismounted, sails ripped, fires starting already in rigging, many men killed trying to carry hoses aloft. Only chance of death from underwater wrecks, very sure death if we don’t go through, no doubt on best odds. I think then enemy lose one ship on approach—four when we pass through, three land after us very close. But your reports say one wrecked to north later, perhaps turn back with bad hull damage.”

  “How many initially?” Feldman said, then repeated it more slowly: “How many enemy ships in pursuit of you at the beginning, back in Asia?”

  “Twelve,” the Japanese sailor said. “We sink five—burn
with firebolt or napalm shell, dismast with round shot so they swamp and blake up in storm, one we turn on when it get ahead of others, that one we board short time and Imperial Guard samurai jump down hatch.”

  “Jump, Captain?” Sir Aleaume de Grimmond said.

  The commander of her men-at-arms was red-haired, handsome except for his jug ears and rather melancholy by inclination.

  Egawa Noboru spoke softly in his own language, and Reiko translated for the others:

  “They cried Tenno Heika Banzai! And jumped with incendiaries in their arms. So that the fire would be sheltered from the rain and sleet and take hold quickly, and so they could fight off the bakachon damage-control parties until it was too late, while our ship broke away.”

  The Montivallans blinked, then bowed their heads for an instant to honor the memory of warriors so brave and so true to their oaths; the Catholics among them crossed themselves.

  “Duty, heavier than mountains,” Órlaith said, in Nihongo.

  “Death, lighter than a feather,” Reiko said, completing the proverb.

  Egawa nodded crisply, but looked a little surprised that she’d known it. Órlaith crooked one blond brow a very little as she caught his eye for an instant. Ishikawa went on:

  “Many bakachon . . . disappear along way. Much bad gales, much iceberg, many long-range actions in bad visibirity. Hard to tell what to them all happen.”

  Brrrr! Órlaith thought. And all Reiko said was that it was difficult and troublesome!

  Then everything else was lost as the fog dwindled again and sank towards the sea and streamed away in tatters, and the long curves spanning the open water became fully visible, their deep orange glowing against blue and white and green. Reiko gave a little involuntary gasp beside her, and Egawa grunted, a small guttural sound. Órlaith stopped herself from whistling with a slight effort of will; it seemed insufficiently reverent, and she drew the Invoking pentagram instead.

  Sir Aleaume and Droyn Jones de Molalla crossed themselves; so did her brother John and Luanne. Even John’s valet-bodyguard Evrouin did it, where he stood inconspicuously behind the Prince’s shoulder. All of them were accustomed to seeing the huge structures of the ancients occasionally; enough so that they usually mentally edited them out of the landscape as irrelevant to modern life, unless you were looking for raw materials or needed a lookout post.

  This was different.

  It took a few moments for the sheer scale of the twin towers to north and south to fully sink in, soaring most of a thousand feet into the sky. But these were as cleanly delicate as spears, without the stark brutality of so many ancient structures. She could see Reiko’s hand trace the curve of her sword, a lovely and deadly masterpiece crafted seven centuries ago by the legendary Masamune, as her eyes followed the long swoop of the suspension cables between, and the way they nestled into the hills that anchored them at either end.

  “Ahhh,” she said, her voice almost a crooning sigh. “Your ancestors built very well. And your father was right that those who conceived it deserved honor.”

  Órlaith nodded. “I’ve seen his face carved into a mountain in the eastern stretches of the realm with some of his kin, and Da said it was fitting for him to have that everlasting glory, for he had many great works to his credit. In peace as much as in war, helping his folk in times of dearth and drought. But this is the most beautiful of them.”

  The Japanese present made little bows in the direction of the bridge. Everyone except the sailors at work tilted their heads up as they passed beneath; Órlaith felt tiny for an instant, as if she’d walked out the front gate and found that she’d been living in a child’s dollhouse and the furnishings of giants stood around her.

  “And this time, they gave something godlike to the Gods, enhancing what They gave us,” Heuradys agreed, with a sigh and a murmur and a look over her shoulder as they passed. “Apollon must have inspired them, He who loves beauty and due proportion in all things, in humans and their realms and the work of their hands. Hard to believe anything so big could be so beautiful. Like Mt. Hood or Ranier, or those waterfalls on the cliffs of the Columbia gorge.”

  Ashore in the wreck of San Francisco most of the great towers of the ancient world still stood, though some were twisted shapes of girder and some slumped against each other, tilted from the force of earthquakes and gnawing rust.

  The bats and nesting birds must love them, Órlaith thought. Their lower levels were green-shaggy with vines, the upper dull rusted metal and sandblasted glass, with only a few shards glinting here and there in one great triangular mass. Birds soared about their nesting-sites like a shimmer in the sun, and you wouldn’t think from looking in the bright light of day that the ruins were the haunt of terror. A thin thread of smoke from farther down the peninsula was the sole sign of the bands who prowled them.

  Feldman nodded. “I’ve been here half a dozen times, and it’s always impressive. The channel in the middle is usually pretty safe, the tidal scour keeps it thirty feet deep or better. Though the Bay is full of wrecks too, and not all of them are visible. Enjoy the sights—and now this is going to take concentration, I haven’t been here for a couple of years and things shift. Mr. Radavindraban, leadsmen to the bows, if you please.”

  The ruins of San Francisco spread out on the hilly peninsula behind them as they turned north—

  It’s astern, Órlaith reminded herself with an inner chuckle. At sea, behind is astern.

  —astern, edged with a thick fringe of intensely green salt marsh through which an occasional stub of stone or concrete or steel poked. Every possible spot, the islands the maps called Alcatraz and Angel Island and Yerba Buena and the decks of sunken ships, and little bits of higher land among the longshore marshes, was alive with fur-seals and harbor-seals, sea-lions and shorebirds. Sleek shapes slid into the water when the ship passed too close, and a score of brown wide-eyed heads lifted from a raft of sea-otters to stare curiously at the unusual sight of human-kind passing by.

  Sir Aleaume passed her a pair of binoculars and she used them to scan about after a word of thanks to the knight; she wasn’t a sailor and couldn’t interpret the signs well enough to be useful looking for wrecks lurking beneath the blue. The others were doing likewise, equally interested in this southernmost outpost of civilization and symbol of the old world’s fall. There were ruins everywhere—there would be for centuries, some would last for millennia like those statues in the Black Hills—but the ones where most of them lived had been worked by the survivors and showed it. Here the landscape of cataclysm was mostly as time and nature had left it.

  The huge fringe of wooden houses around the adamantine towers had burned away long ago, mostly in the unimaginable violence of the firestorms that had run all around the Bay in the summer of the first Change Year. And up into the foothills where the ancients had let masses of fuel accumulate in the woods by suppressing the fire cycle. Sand-dunes laced with salt grass and dune weeds covered much of the northern tip of the peninsula that she could see, and elsewhere tawny grassland rolled amid ruin.

  Farther south the hills were blue-green with renascent forest. More forest covered the East Bay across from them with the stubs of larger buildings or snags of wall rising like green-covered markers. Where reservoirs had burst the hills were gashed by long tongues of silt and gravel and rubble overgrown with shrub and vine, stretching out into the water.

  There was a deep silence, save for the creak of wood and cordage, the lapping of water, the thrum of wind; by now, after most of a week at sea, those were pure background. The occasional sharp command echoed the louder, and the slap of feet on the deck as the crew on duty raced to obey, tweaking the sails or moving the wheels in precise increments.

  They passed another bridge—one very long, but mostly tangled wreckage in the water save for the single middle span. There the towers leaned drunkenly apart, trailing girders like writhing windblown branches frozen in moti
on. Time and sea air had obviously eaten deep, and everyone looked up a bit apprehensively. Eventually the rest would topple; it was just a question of when.

  “Soundings, Mr. Radavindraban,” Feldman said as the schooner passed through on its journey northward.

  The leadsmen began whirling their cords with the teardrop-shaped lead weights and casting them out before the schooner’s bows, the ropes dropping down into the water while the sailors drew them in until they stood vertically as the ship passed over them.

  “By the mark . . . eight! Eight fathoms even!”

  “Thus, thus; very well, thus,” Feldman said. “Steady as she goes.”

  “By the mark . . . five! Five fathoms even!”

  “Port your helm, two points to port.”

  “By the mark . . . five! Full fathom five!”

  “Port your helm, three points to port. Steady, steady as she goes. Very well, thus.”

  “By the mark . . . four! Full fathom four!”

  She had grown to adulthood in a world where the sky was usually thick with wings, more so every year, but even to one of her generation the noise of the flocks here was stunning. Seagulls in snowy drifts, duck and Canuck Geese, herons and snowy egrets and uncounted others, and the osprey and bald eagles and hawks that preyed on them and the fish. A big pod of dolphins slipped by not far away, the school of white sturgeon they were chasing thrashing the surface into foam as a dozen of the sea-mammals leapt and dove, the lighter stripes on their sides flashing. The fishing must be fabulous here. . . .

  Hmmmm, she thought, as she saw a patch where the water was reddish and nothing grew, and another of a strange metallic green.

  Then again, perhaps I’d be a little reluctant to eat any fish that lived here year-round. Perhaps my grandchildren can.

  “By the mark—four! Full fathom four!”

  She completed her circuit and looked northwards again. Mountains ran like a ridge against the sea to the west, then fell away eastward in hills that were a mixture of forest and scrub and yellow-brown grassland, down towards the lowlands.