The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  The three riders spread out and the first sentries fell back to rejoin their comrades; with the extra height from horseback the mounted archers could cover the rim of the hill well enough to give warning of an attack without exposing themselves to be picked off, and further guard by keeping moving. Of course, if the Eaters came from all sides simultaneously . . .

  Morfind called over her shoulder:

  “I can see them moving in the trees down by the shore, about where we came through.”

  She unlimbered her binoculars. “Lots and lots of them, hundreds, it’s their main body. And I can see groups moving out to either side, I think they’re trying to surround the hill. More northward, they’re getting ready to scale the hill there and come straight at us over the saddle.”

  “Some over here!” Faramir called from fifty yards to her right. “Moving west, inland, from tree to tree, by ones and twos and small groups. Coming in a steady trickle moving from cover to cover—about forty or fifty so far. Not trying to climb up to the next hill, the one south of us; the crest there’s twice long bowshot.”

  So they could do little but make rude and antic gestures and slap their arses at us from there, Órlaith thought. Unless they had a scorpion or a twelve-pounder field catapult about them, the which I doubt.

  “None here yet,” Luanne called from her sector facing westwards, scanning methodically. “It’s pretty open here—grass for twice bowshot and then only a few oaks, brush in the lowest parts. There are a few rocks . . . maybe concrete . . . big enough to give cover but not within two hundred feet. Rolling ground rising as far as I can see, then it falls away to the north.”

  Then: “Wait . . . I thought I saw something twinkling . . . gone now.”

  The Montivallans and their allies spread out into formation. The men-at-arms unfolded the hinged bars that ran down the inside of their shields and propped them up across the narrow saddle on the north side of the hill, making a staggered four-foot wall.

  “One per file on overwatch,” Aleaume said.

  One man in five stood. A few went aside to relieve themselves; as her father had said to her once, great fear and a full bladder went ill together, and she made a note to find a spot herself before long. A few even managed to compose themselves as if to sleep, which surprised her a little and was either bravado or utter lack of nerves.

  Underofficers checked canteens and quivers and reported the totals, and the half-dozen wounded were brought into the shade of the oak where the medics could work on them. The Japanese were relying on the Protector’s Guard doctor, since they’d lost their last one when they landed in the spring.

  She could hear Egawa telling his archers not to waste a single shaft. That was good advice, though it would be a pity to have your throat cut with unused arrows still in the quiver.

  “Terric’s dead,” Droyn said quietly to Sir Aleaume; and, she thought, to her. “Took a spear right in the throat while we were in the woods. Hubreton got his crossbow and his bolts.”

  The two Associates both crossed themselves and invoked their Virgin to intervene for him.

  “He was dark with curly hair,” Órlaith said quietly. “From Molalla, originally. He joked about how he was going to get his fiancée a silk dress and his mother another milch cow and his father a new plow-team when he came back with booty.”

  Which had been funny, because if one thing was nearly certain about this faring it was an absence of loot.

  “I’ll see to that . . . assuming I can.”

  Both the noblemen looked at her for an instant, then nodded gravely. Her father had been famous for knowing the names and homes of nearly every warrior under his command, even when it was great armies in the war time. She didn’t think she’d needed the Sword to do the same here.

  “Blankwin got an arrow in the shin,” Droyn went on. “He says he can stand in line and shoot, as long as he doesn’t have to run very fast, and he doesn’t want enough painkiller to turn him muzzy.”

  A tight smile: “And he says he doesn’t intend to run away in any case.”

  “Let him try standing in the line,” Aleaume said. “At worst he can shoot sitting down. The rest?”

  “Fulk looks serious. Savaric will make it—”

  Assuming we aren’t all killed, Órlaith thought.

  “—but he can’t fight. Apart from that, superficial cuts and bruises.”

  Aleaume nodded and turned to her, taking his helm off for a moment to let more air into the neck-opening of his suit of plate.

  “Your Highness, one dead, three seriously wounded in the crossbow squad. The men-at-arms and spearmen have only minor wounds so far.”

  No surprise there; a big part of what made plate-armored fighters so dangerous was the protection that let them take chances others could not. They had their vulnerable spots, but a naked man was a vulnerable spot from crown to toes. Men died because they’d been stabbed through something vital now and then, but the vast majority just bled out, and you could bleed from anywhere.

  “And the Japanese are down three, two killed outright and one won’t recover consciousness. As many more too seriously wounded to fight; one broken hand, a couple of leg wounds. Including one who actually had an Eater’s tooth break off in his leg, that was nasty.”

  “Very good, Sir Aleaume. We’ll let the enemy come to us. The longer they take, the better. Carry on.”

  Órlaith spoke to all the hurt men, which only took a few steps aside. Just a word of thanks and a nod to the Nihonjin, who weren’t her subjects. They were showing an iron-faced stoicism, though none of them actually turned down the morphine. The Montivallans were cheerful or trying to seem so in a way that made her feel obscurely bad though she grinned back; except for Fulk, who was the blond youngster with a bad wound in his left arm, and he was unconscious.

  They’d stopped the bleeding, disinfected and stitched the ugly stab-cut and got his cuirass off and elevated his feet on it. As she watched, the doctor finished inserting a needle and tube while his assistant attached the bottle of Ringer’s Lactate they’d made up from powder and water.

  Fulk still looked very pale under his weathered tan. Órlaith put a hand on his forehead, feeling clammy sweat, conscious of the rapid thready beat of his heart. The priest-medic looked at the Princess and spread his hands. They were covered in blood, and his assistant took the chance to seize them and begin wiping them off with a towel wetted in antiseptic. The fruity scent of medicinal alcohol mixed with the metallic, spoiled-seawater tang of the blood.

  “Your Highness, I can’t do a whole-blood transfusion now, which is what I’d like to, all our universal donors are in the shield line and we haven’t got plasma either, just the lactate. I think he may be taking the morphine hard, some do. I’m afraid it’s shock, and shock can kill in ways we don’t understand. All I can do now is pray.”

  The clerical physician crossed himself and kissed his crucifix; he was dressed with rough practicality for the field, but had the white collar-tab of a Roman priest. The others had come for oaths of allegiance, or even for adventure. He had come because the care of these bodies and souls was the task entrusted to him by his God and His blue-mantled mother; and he’d been almost inhumanly self-effacing on the journey, keeping to his canvas cubicle in the forepeak and praying when he wasn’t working at his task or hearing confessions. She’d noticed he made John wait his turn without even discussing the matter.

  Rudi Mackenzie had once remarked to her that genuine humility was the most formidable weapon the Church had in its arsenal.

  “Padre,” she said, and nodded respectfully to him as she knelt. “Praying can’t hurt and may well help.”

  Silently she made the Invoking sign and called on the Lady in Her form as the Healer of Hurts:

  Airmed, Goddess gentle and strong, from whose salt tears healing herbs arose, have pity and help this man: for he too is the Mother’s child,
however he calls on You.

  Aloud to the unconscious man: “Don’t you die on me, there, Associate,” and bent to kiss his brow.

  She wasn’t sure if the Sword had anything to do with it, but a few seconds later he was breathing easier, and his color was a little better. The others looked at her as if she was responsible, though.

  When everything was seen to she and Reiko sat; from the look of things they had another ten to twenty minutes before the Eaters finished massing their scattered gangs and came at them.

  Heuradys offered her canteen. It was water—mostly, a little wine by the tang—and warm and stale and tasted like the sacred fountain of youth and joy that Arianrhod dispensed in Caer Rigor. They both took a ration bar wrapped in a dried cornhusk from a sack one of the crossbowmen was passing around, and Órlaith offered one to Reiko. It was a type used all over Montival with local variations; rolled oats and walnuts and hazelnuts and bits of dried fruit went into it, held together with a dollop of honey and baked into a rectangle. She hadn’t felt hungry, but the first taste made her ravenous in a way she recognized from tourney and practice. Reiko bit into hers with a stoic expression and then looked down in surprise.

  “This is quite good,” she said. “Good enough for a treat . . . is there enough for all?”

  Órlaith smiled. Most field rations would gag a rat—it had to last like iron just for starters, which usually meant desiccated and very salty.

  “Enough for this morning, Reiko-chan, and one way or another we’ll not be needing more,” she said.

  Reiko frowned slightly as she made that out, then gave a slight smile. If help didn’t come soon they’d be too dead to eat, of course.

  “This is standard issue throughout the realm, or something like it,” Órlaith said. “Mind, it’s supposed to be for times when every ounce counts. Regular rations aren’t as . . . pleasant, so.”

  Anyone who’d eaten the twice-baked hardtack or regular smoked sausage or salt pork and badly-soaked dried beans and tooth-challenging cheese knew there was truth to that. It was tradition—established by her father—that when the High King or Queen led in the field, they ate what the common soldiers did. That shamed other leaders into following their example. . . .

  Which Da said did wonders to keep the quartermasters on their toes!

  “What do you use in your homeland?” Órlaith asked. “For warriors to carry with them, for the times they can’t forage or have supplies sent up.”

  “Onigiri,” she said. “Cooked rice balls with salt, wrapped in bamboo leaves . . . with pickled plums, if they can be had, or dried mackerel flakes. And a flask of miso. And tea.”

  She sighed; tea was a rare luxury in Montival, grown on a few experimental farms or imported from Asia. When you had grown up drinking it several times every day, doing without was a real hardship.

  “You can march and fight on that for a long time. And ramen, that is what we call pre-cooked noodles with dried soup powder.”

  “We call it ramen too,” Heuradys said with a flash of a smile in the shadow of her raised visor. “Though you should see the faces Orrey makes if she has to eat it.”

  “You do not like ramen?” Reiko asked curiously.

  Órlaith chuckled reminiscently. “Once when we were ten . . . well, I was eight and Herry was about ten . . . she and I decided to run away and go on a Quest of our own; to find the Solitary Fortress of Ice where the Super Man lives.”

  “Athana alone knows what we were supposed to do if we did find it or him. You were never very clear on that, Orrey.”

  “I was eight! It’s supposed to be somewhere north of Drumheller, which is where we headed.”

  The two young women laughed; it was entirely genuine, though of course it did the warriors good to see the leaders carefree in their shared peril. The Nihonjin chuckled as well. Órlaith thought she heard something wistful in it. Reiko had loved her father, but as much in the way a devoted subject did a monarch as a child did a parent. She’d spoken of a mother gentle and kind and learned, an artist of verse and brush, and her father’s close, shrewd advisor and helper—and who was also evidently half a decade older than her husband.

  But Órlaith also had a strong impression of a life so dominated by duty that there was little room in it for fancy, or any but the most decorous play.

  “I thought it was a bad idea from the beginning, once you went from talking to planning,” Heuradys said. “We were further apart in age then, you know.”

  “True enough,” she said to Heuradys.

  To Reiko: “But even then, I thought to pack a big sack full of ramen packets to eat upon the way; we started before dawn and made about four hours’ trot on our ponies. Da said at least the importance of logistics had gotten home—he was grinning, though he was angry too, since we’d made it almost far enough for people not to know who we were at a glance. And Mother was just angry—it was her idea to make me have the ramen and nothing else for dinner until the sack was all gone. I’ve never willingly eaten the stuff since.”

  “She watched me like a hawk, too,” Heuradys grumbled, and explained to Reiko: “I was a page then—it’s what you do before you become a squire and then a knight. Pages serve at table for their patrons as one of their duties, it’s supposed to teach you humility. Mostly you take things from the kitchen staff and carry them to the high table. Humility for the page, colder food for the nobility.”

  Órlaith remembered the beginnings of stealthy movement with a pastry or a slice of brandy-glazed ham or lamb kebab while she sat glumly contemplating her fifteenth-plus bowl of Guard-issue field ration ramen and trying to decide whether it was worth going to bed hungry rather than put the horrible stuff in her mouth one more time. And her mother’s steely brown eye and the slight clearing of the High Queen’s throat to warn Heuradys off.

  “She did not make you also eat the ramen, Heuradys-gozen?” Reiko asked.

  “No, she said Órlaith was the Crown Princess and I was her page and she had to take my blame and punishment, too, because I’d followed and obeyed her; the liege is responsible for the vassal’s acts when they’re done in obedience. It made me feel awful.”

  She smiled reminiscently herself. “When I told my mother that . . . my mother Delia . . . she said that was the point. Orrey got her punishment, and I got mine, with the added knowledge that I was supposed to protect her against herself, at need, as well as enemies.”

  “And I knew you felt awful about it, and that made me feel bad,” Órlaith said. “Which to be sure was also part of the point. My mother is . . . subtle.”

  Reiko nodded seriously. “That is good discipline, Orrey-chan,” she said.

  Órlaith raised a brow mentally. It had only been a month since she invited Reiko to use the familiar diminutive of her name, which was pronounced Oorlai anyway; Gaelic spelling being nearly as eccentric as English in relation to how words were actually pronounced. Tacking on chan meant more or less the same thing in Nihongo. It wasn’t that Reiko wasn’t friendly; in a shy way she was eagerly so. But “reserved” didn’t begin to describe her.

  “This is a way to make things real to a child,” the Nihonjin woman said. “Physical correction is not enough, not when you are training character and mind as well.”

  “And in case it was all too subtle, also she tanned my backside for me until I howled right after they got us back,” Órlaith added, and Reiko covered her mouth and laughed. “Mackenzies don’t do that so much, but Associates are of another mind altogether on the matter.”

  Heuradys looked up at the clouds. “Auntie Tiph said I was getting too old for spanking when I got back home for Lammas, so she gave me some extra training sessions. She could really make you suffer with a practice sword . . . but at least I escaped the ramen, my liege.”

  Órlaith went on to Reiko: “So ramen’s as common as dirt here. For soldiers, for travelers, for students, for anyone who needs
something that that can be cooked as it is without much in the way of a kitchen.”

  “Ah so desu ka!” Reiko said. “I wondered why General Egawa was able to get it so easily for us. Even so, he thought ramen every day would make the troops soft unless he worked them harder,” she added.

  She sounded entirely serious. Rice-balls and pickled plums sounded like the equivalent of living on hardtack, dried beans and jerky, which could be done at need but wasn’t pleasant. Though if you were hungry enough, you’d do so and give thanks.

  They do love to live on willpower, our new friends, the Crown Princess thought. On the other hand, willpower is the one resource they seem to have in abundance in Nihon nowadays, so to say. And if that’s what you have, why not take pride in it? For it’s a good thing to have in the toolbox as you might say, ready to come out when needed.

  John had been uncharacteristically silent while the women chatted. Now he carefully wiped his fingers, first on grass, and then wetted them with a few drops from his canteen and wiped them again on a cloth in the lute-case when he opened it. Then he tuned the instrument and strolled out in front of the ranks of men-at-arms, leaving his helm where he’d been sitting with his gauntlets in the bowl.

  “Fellow Associates!” he called lightly, his fingers moving on the strings.

  They looked up respectfully; he was a prince of House Artos, and a belted knight. And for that matter he was an Associate, with the jeweled dagger of that order on his belt, unlike his sister.

  “I know how bored we all are waiting for the tournament to begin, without even jongleurs and dancing dogs to keep the folk in the gallery content while the bookies calculate the odds and the hawkers sell their popcorn and sausages in buns and small beer,” he said, and got a laugh.

  He struck a troubadour’s pose: “Therefore I will improve the time! I give you . . . the ‘Song of the Deeds of Sieur Roland’!”

  Órlaith’s brows rose as his fingers struck the strings of the lute, and Heuradys crooked one of hers. That was a bit of a daring choice; nobody had survived Roland’s last stand at Roncesvalles.