The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  “Are you looking for something in particular?” Heuradys said, quietly.

  Órlaith touched her lower lip meditatively with her right thumb. “No . . . but . . .”

  Then: “I heard Da talking to Grandmother Juniper once about how the Sword gave him feelings at times. She called it his spider-sense for some reason.”

  Heuradys’ brows went up. “What did she mean by that? I didn’t think spiders had particularly sensitive senses except through their webs . . . though . . .” She frowned. “Wasn’t there a legendary hero who had a Spider totem? But your father’s was Raven. Of course, if she said there was something to it . . .”

  Juniper Mackenzie was not only the founder of the Clan Mackenzie and its Chief until she retired in favor of her daughter Maude; she was Goddess-on-Earth and among the reasons the Old Faith was prominent in Montival. You didn’t treat her word lightly on such matters. Or any others, if you were wise.

  “Da didn’t understand it either, and she wouldn’t tell me—said it would spoil the jest,” Órlaith said. “Sure, and she can be as mischievous as a girl of six, not a great-grandmother of six-and-seventy years. But she was serious enough about the thing itself, to be sure.”

  She laid her open left palm on the moon-crystal pommel of the Sword. It was the gesture her father had used, and now she could feel why.

  “Da spoke sometimes . . . Mother less often, but once or twice . . . of how after the Kingmaking they felt as if they were the land of Montival, and not just as a manner of speaking. Da said he could feel it, almost like his own body in a way.”

  “Can you?” Reiko said.

  She was listening with closest attention, as she always did when the Sword came up; being on a quest for a fabled blade of her own made that natural. She made a gesture with her tessen—a steel war-fan—and Egawa moved aside, as if casually stepping to the rail. The others did as well, granting the leaders as much privacy as was possible on board ship. Not that any of them would much want to hear these particular matters spoken of. The folk of Montival revered the Sword of the Lady and understood it according to their various faiths, but there was fear in that awe as well. It wasn’t something that any sane mortal felt easy with.

  “Mmmmm . . . a bit?” Órlaith said. “For a moment when I took it from the flames of the pyre. It’s . . . muffled, somehow. I think perhaps nobody can bear its fullness all the time, and also because I haven’t gone to Lost Lake yet; there’s a rite there that only the Royal kin know of, a binding. Yet there’s an itch as it were. Something not quite right. But I can’t tell what. And to be sure, something will be wrong somewhere always, in a land as wide and varied as ours!”

  She looked around at the disheveled loveliness of the ruined Bay. “This—there’s a wrongness to it. The weight of steel and stone upon the land, it still . . . It feels out of balance. Like an ill note in a song, or one of those dreams where one leg is longer than the other.”

  “And the rightness?” her liege knight asked.

  “There should be a city of human-kind here. With the harbor and the fine land and timber and the rivers running into it from the valleys all about, and a clime so mild and fine and the place itself with a beauty that sings to the soul, how not? Buildings and farms and workshops, yes, towers and walls and gardens and sails upon the water and a coming and going of ships. We have our rightful place in the great dance too.”

  “Like the beautiful bridge,” Reiko said softly. “It is our nature to build, so the kami made us. We may do it well, or badly, but we will do it. We cannot do otherwise.”

  Órlaith nodded vigorous agreement. “But to take it all and cover it with the makings of our hands, no, that is an offense to the Powers and the aes dana.”

  Aes dana was how a Montivallan of the Old Faith—and some Christians, for that matter—would usually name the spirits of place, the mostly-unseen beings not as men were but lesser than the great Gods. Heathen might say wight or alfar or aelfen. Kami meant very much the same thing. Though strict Catholics usually referred to the patron Saints they believed watched over particular places or occupations, in her opinion it all came down to very much the same thing in the end.

  She went on:

  “The land will forgive as it heals. That’s not altogether what I’m worried by, though. It’s something more specific . . . but vague to the point of driving me mad, so.”

  Heuradys grinned. “I think I remember the High King saying that he didn’t get actionable intelligence from it very often.”

  Órlaith nodded. “The Lady Herself isn’t that much concerned with the ordinary affairs of our kind, the intrigues of power and the contentions of tribes and rulers and such. That’s . . . you might say it’s like the scurrying of ants, or those macaques they have about here leaping and chattering in a tree; important to the ants and the apes, but otherwise, not so much of a much. The Sword is . . . it’s Her gift, but it’s more particular. Tied to this land, and the human folk and the other Kindreds that dwell here; and it’s linked to my family’s bloodline. What Da said it gave was a sense of what could be,” she agreed.

  “He was not more definite?” Reiko said, and sighed.

  “No. Forbye, he would say that it couldn’t be described in human words spoken in the light of common day. Sometimes it prompted him, in peace often when it was a matter of the way we of human kind dealt with the other Kindreds and the land; or he would know the likely outcome of actions more clearly because of it. During the Prophet’s War it was a matter of not needing maps, never being lost or forgetting the needful, knowing what the land could and should do; and who its folk were, and how best to bring them together to the Kingdom’s need. A strengthening of what were already his strengths. And a knowledge of a new wrongness, when it arose. The Prophet, he was like a tooth being drilled, Da said; though he and the other magi of the CUT could cast shadow over what they did, and where.”

  Quietly she added: “And . . . remember what Diarmuid’s mother said, when we guested at his steading on the way north?”

  Heuradys tossed her head slightly in agreement. Gormall Tennart McClintock was a priestess of the triple cords, High Priestess on her family’s land and lady of its nemed, its sacred wood. The knight quoted her words softly:

  “The Earth’s very self wept and keened him, when his blood lay upon it. It weeps yet, and rages, that the sacred King was slain untimely by the weapons of foreign men.”

  “Aye. I can feel that, more now that I’m near where it happened again. That will echo down the years, forward and back. Yet I’m not sure if that is all. I wish I could—”

  A line of smoke suddenly rose from the hills behind the shore ahead. One long puff, then a pause, then another—what you got when you burned green boughs on a fire first made intensely hot, and then used a wet blanket to interrupt the smoke.

  Órlaith watched the signal with satisfaction. One long . . . one long . . . three short, repeated and one very long to end.

  That’s it, by the Powers.

  “You can put in, Captain,” she said. “That’s my Courier’s code for all present and accounted for at this location.”

  “Someone could have got it out of her, I suppose,” Heuradys said.

  At Órlaith’s exasperated look: “I know, Orrey, but I’m your household knight. It’s my duty to be paranoid about anything that could threaten you. You said yourself something was bothering you.”

  “Even if someone overran the whole of Stath Ingolf and took her prisoner, all she’d have to do is lie,” Órlaith pointed out. “We arranged the code verbally, nothing written down, and it’s a one-off.”

  “Good practice, my liege,” Sir Aleaume said respectfully; he hadn’t been a member of the . . .

  Conspiracy, Órlaith thought. Other people have to be honest around me, why shouldn’t I follow suit? At least with myself!

  . . . conspiracy when Susan Mika, one of the Crown C
ourier Corps, joined it; her name meant Clever Raccoon in the tongue of the Lakota folk. Beside him, Droyn Jones de Molalla blinked, obviously making a mental note; he was a younger man, about John’s age, tall and rangy and with the dark skin and curled hair of House Jones, the Counts of Molalla. Egawa grunted and nodded, understanding well enough. Then he said in Japanese:

  “At home, perhaps not. The jinnikukaburi can twist men’s minds, sometimes. But in ordinary terms, yes.”

  “Right, Your Highness,” Feldman said, and relaxed a little as they turned and sailed close-hauled to the north with the wind broad on the starboard bow.

  A channel was marked with buoys here, where the Dúnedain of Stath Ingolf maintained a landing at what had once been China Camp State Park. A quick check of the Castle Todenangst reference libraries via the heliograph net back at Montinore Manor on Barony Ath had shown that China Camp had been called that because Han fishermen had dwelt there for a while. The Dúnedain, more particularly her aunts Mary and Ritva, had renamed it Círbann Rómenadrim, which meant Haven of the Easterners in the secret language of that folk.

  “Dúnedain?” Reiko asked, when she said that aloud. “So sorry, is that English?”

  Her brother John pointed northwest, to the peninsula that closed that end of the bay. He was looking quite dashing in a prince-ish way with the golden spurs on the heels of his sabatons, his broad shoulders emphasized by a dark blue cloak of merino wool with a gold-embroidered hem, blowing in the sea breeze over his polished armor . . . and he was wearing a complete suit of white armor, burnished steel, kept bright by Evrouin’s dogged care. The helmet resting at his feet with his shield had a crest of ostrich feathers dyed gold and purple.

  And sure, when he’s in full sunlight you can’t look at him without getting spots before the eyes, which might actually be an advantage in a fight.

  Órlaith suspected it was all carefully calculated, down to the way the wind tousled his seal-brown hair, which he also wore a bit longer than the usual Associate knight’s bowl-cut. And the fact that the tooled leather of his sword-sheath contained, if you looked closely, something in musical notation.

  So did the markings on the lute-case slung over his valet’s back, and he’d named the instrument within. Azalaïs, after a famous female troubadour of ancient times, which she had to admit was a nice touch. Evrouin carefully kept it within reach for troubadourish moments of inspiration . . . except when they’d tied him up in a warehouse back in Newport, until he promised not to try to escape or report them to the High Queen.

  And she had to admit John’s manners had been perfect with Reiko, if also unaffectedly natural and friendly . . .

  Except that in the way of nature John can no more not try to charm a female than he can not breathe, she thought a little sourly. I love my brother, but sometimes I want to show it by clouting him upside the head, so I do, I do.

  He was using that charming smile as he spoke: “Dúnedain is what they call themselves, which means Folk of the West; or Rangers, in English.”

  “Aa, so desu ka,” Reiko said.

  Which meant more or less I see, and they’d all picked up at least that much Nihongo since it was a common conversational placeholder, rather like really? or is that so? in English.

  “A good place,” Reiko said. “We have lookouts like that around all our settlements, there is nowhere far from mountains.”

  “By the mark . . . three! Full fathom three!” the leadsman cried as their lines came fully vertical.

  “Mr. Radavindraban, do you make our mooring?” Feldman said, with his telescope trained to the left.

  Port, Órlaith reminded herself.

  From a cluster of low buildings on the shore there ahead a long pier ran out, much of it made of thick wooden posts that looked like old telephone poles and probably were. Two lines of them had been driven into the mud and secured by a lattice of more of the same, supporting a plank deck. A few single-masted fishing boats rode anchored to floats near it, but the portion farthest out that made the whole arrangement into a T about a hundred and fifty feet by fifty was a floating wharf, and vacant save for a pile of wooden barrels. Two figures stood on it, waving as they approached.

  “Aye aye, Captain.”

  “Bring us in, then.”

  “Aye aye!”

  “And we’ll take sail on the mains now,” Captain Feldman said. “Yarely, yarely.”

  The first mate nodded and brought his speaking-trumpet up again. The nauticalese included let go the aloft halyards and outhaul the clew. What it amounted to was letting the upper yards at the top of the sails down, and rows of sailors tying off the loose canvas at the bottom with the cords sewn into the surface of the sail. The ship came more upright, and then turned in towards the dock and leaned the other way.

  Then a lookout cried: “Sail! Sail ho! Three sail to sternward on the port . . . Christ, Haida! Orcas! Jesus Christ, four sail! Another one to the west, ship-rigged and a big’un!”

  Órlaith’s head whipped around; the shapes were clear now, but still tiny-distant; three sets of sails to the south, two of them very hard to see because they were a neutral blue-green color . . . which meant pirates for certain, and probably Haida ones. The islanders of the far north weren’t the only sea-thieves around, just the best organized and most effective, and their big low-slung sleek-hulled schooners didn’t miss a trick. She couldn’t see the fourth.

  Captain Feldman was already training his telescope in that direction, then turning more directly south.

  “The one coming in from the southwest is an RMN frigate, by the Lord of Hosts!” he said. “They must have run the Gate not long behind us . . . Stormrider, from the cut of her gaff. I thought she was in drydock in Victoria!”

  Mother! Órlaith thought. I should have known she’d act without hesitating!

  He turned the instrument. “The other three were hiding behind a wreck, that flat-topped one, a tanker they called them. Must have had a lookout up atop the hulk’s funnel, that’s taller than a masthead. Two of them are Haida—orcas right enough, big ones, three-masters, three to four hundred tons I’d guess. And that third one, I don’t recognize her lines at all. The sails have slats and the bow is squared off above the cutwater. It’s bigger than the Tarshish Queen, smaller than the frigate.”

  “Bakachon!” Ishikawa burst out. He used his own telescope: “The squadron flagship!”

  Feldman looked at her. “I can evade the frigate, or the Haida and the Korean, but evading one means running into the other, Your Highness. I won’t fight the Navy and I can’t fight three ships the size of those with no maneuver room. If they can lay alongside or rake us from astern and bow-on we’re all dead. I know a spot where I may be able to get out through the ruined bridge if they all start pitching in to the frigate, which they probably will, but I’ve got to start right now. Your decision—do we turn back?”

  Órlaith took a deep breath, making her thoughts stop jabbering and dancing by an effort of will; from an expected meeting with friends to battle in the blink of an eye.

  “Can you put us ashore?” she said. “There.”

  She pointed to the T-wharf; the figures there were close enough to be individuals now, and they’d noticed the other ships too now. One of them took off running, leapt to the back of a horse and heeled it into a flat-out gallop. Otherwise the long timber rectangle was empty except for the stack of big wooden barrels, hogsheads of some type.

  “If we’re ashore, the Navy has no reason to stop you. Nor a legal right, really.”

  “We can get you ashore if we use the longboats, and if we do it right now,” Feldman said. “But I can’t pick you up again. Not here. Getting out of the Bay is going to be damn tricky at best and Captain Russ of the Stormrider might arrest me now and argue about legal rights in an Admiralty court later.”

  “Then meet us at Albion Cove,” she said. “If you can. If not . . . we
walk, and fare you well. I have no complaints about how you kept up your end of the bargain.”

  He nodded and then bowed briefly and formally; there was a quiet approval in it as well as agreement.

  “Your Highness.”

  “Right, everyone—let’s go! Sir Aleaume! Load everyone, and fast, just grab the bugout bags. Shields up and eyes open, this may be a hostile landing. Those ships could have put landing parties ashore.”

  And what in the name of Anwyn’s Hounds has been happening? she wondered, as the rush began to strip the covers off the longboats and swing out the davits; Reiko nodded to her guard-commander and Egawa barked his own orders.

  The enemy . . . but the frigate? Mother must have been busy!

  CHAPTER TEN

  GOLDEN GATE/GLORANNON

  (FORMERLY SAN FRANCISCO BAY)

  CROWN PROVINCE OF WESTRIA

  (FORMERLY CALIFORNIA)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  JULY/FUMIZUKI/CERWETH 14TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/FIFTH AGE 46/SHOHEI 1/2044 AD

  Captain Richard Russ, Royal Montivallan Navy, loved his trade and his ship Stormrider, and never more than on days like this—bright and sunny, just enough wind to blow spindrift from the waves, and a bit of tricky sailing in hand. The RMN’s frigates were based on what the pre-Change world had called a medium clipper plan, and that meant speed and grace and handiness from the sharp bow to the elegant cruiser stern. As lieutenant, lieutenant-commander and captain he’d been through a great many storms, other perils, and chased pirates aboard her with only brief spells of duty ashore or on other vessels.

  At home he was known as a solid quiet sort, a good Churchman devoted to his wife and three children and given to puttering around the rose-bushes in his garden, fighting nothing but the slugs among the cabbages and cucumbers and regularly attending the Astoria Chamber Music Society soirees where he played bass viol and his wife the violin.