The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  On the other hand, it was well-known that on the stricken field of Hastings the Norman warlord William the Bastard—their maternal grandfather’s idol, and according to wishful legend his ancestor—had listened while his knight-minstrel Taillefer sang the Chanson de Roland. Sang it on horseback as he rode towards the English ranks in challenge, throwing his sword into the air and catching it as he chanted the same verses that John did now:

  “Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes

  Set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne:

  Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne.

  N’i ad castel ki devant lui remaigne . . .”

  The ancient words rang out in a clangorous Old French where the Latin bones still showed plain, the song behind which the chivalry of the Duchy had charged and charged again and won the victory and a kingdom on that long bloody day. Órlaith leaned over and whispered to Reiko:

  “Charles the King, our Emperor Sovereign,

  Full seven years hath sojourned in Spain,

  Conquered the land, and won the western main,

  Now no fortress against him doth remain,

  No city walls are left for him to gain . . .”

  • • •

  Reiko used a twist of dried grass and then a pinch of dust to be sure she’d gotten the last of the sticky honey off her fingers. After Órlaith’s low-voiced account, she turned to her own followers and said—as if speaking casually to Egawa, but pitched to carry to them all:

  “He sings of the deeds in war of their ancestors,” she said. “From Europe. An ancient tale of a hero’s last stand in a mountain pass, where he fell with honor by guarding the retreat of his kotei.”

  She used the Nihongo word for foreign Emperors; Tenno was restricted to those of her line.

  “It is part of a larger cycle of stories, like the Heike Monogatari, of the heroes who attended this ruler. An old story even as we would see it, from a time before the Genpei War.”

  Egawa’s eyes lit a little: he was a devotee of the classic story of the struggle between the Taira and Minamoto clans for control of Japan, and had actually memorized thousands of lines, not just the most famous passages. Warriors spent a great part of their lives waiting or traveling or sailing from here to there, and even Egawa Noboru couldn’t drill all the time, or leaf through heirloom manga.

  Not even the priceless complete set of his beloved Lone Wolf and Cub, which was an inheritance from his father and his most treasured possession after his Mitsutada sword.

  “A good gesture, Majesty,” he said. “Though it still seems a little odd for a noble to sing in public. Given the difference in custom, they have some idea of how to lead, then, our hosts.”

  Reiko gave a very small snort—a sort of hmmmmm with a guttural edge—and used her fan to indicate their surroundings. Not the isolated hill in this alien but beautiful stretch of wilderness, with the pillar of smoke bending southeast and tinging the air with harshness. The great realm of Montival, the High Kingdom that stretched distances unimaginable to them, and had twelve times Nihon’s people—four times that of even the much more numerous bakachon.

  “Some idea of leadership, yes,” she said dryly.

  He didn’t argue. Instead he leaned a little closer and spoke under his breath:

  “This hill . . . the perimeter is too big to be held against any attack in force by the numbers we have, even if the enemy are naked savages,” he said. “The best available, but not good.”

  Reiko made a gesture of agreement with her tessen. “There is none better within reach, I think.” Egawa nodded. “And that saddle to the north, that is a very defensible chokepoint.”

  “Yes.” With grim straight-faced humor: “Perhaps it is also like the stockyard and large abattoir we were shown.”

  She’d probably eaten more beef and pork in the last few months here than in any single year of her life in Japan; even commoners got a fair amount. Japan had nothing like that place on Barony Ath where cattle and pigs were driven by the hundreds at a time, because at home they simply did not slaughter large animals very often. When they did the business was handled by traveling butchers—that was a low-status occupation among their people, considered faintly unclean.

  The system on the manor had been illuminating, and almost industrial. The whole process had been arranged as a climb in the darkness, leading to a spot with a moveable fence that clamped them immobile from both sides while a spring-loaded bolt gun smacked into their brain. Then a system that strung the carcass up to drain and be skinned and cut up as they moved by gravity along an overhead chain-belt past workers with knives and cleavers and saws and back down to ground level, where the end result went into wooden crates in a room kept just above freezing by ice and ingenious ventilation. It had even been thrifty, not usually a Montivallan virtue, with every part used down to the blood and hooves.

  As long as the Eaters came straight in here they’d be almost as helpless. Both were impressively efficient arrangements for killing en masse.

  “The Montivallan knights are good,” Egawa admitted. “And that position gives them much advantage. For the rest . . . eventually the savages—”

  In modern Nihonjin it seemed natural to apply jinnikukaburi to any of those who ate men; they used it for the little bands that haunted the ruins of the great cities on the main islands too.

  His gauntleted hand moved around the three-quarters of the hilltop the Japanese would have to cover.

  “—the jinnikukaburi will rush a part of the perimeter before we can get there, and we will have to retreat until we are back-to-back with the Montivallans. And unless these reinforcements the Princess spoke of arrive, there we will die one by one.”

  He snorted, an amused aside. “And yes, that will be before water becomes a problem, Majesty.”

  Reiko looked eastward. The pillar of smoke rose into the aching blue of the sky, and it would be visible for at least ten ri by now, a little more than twenty miles.

  Órlaith and I have become close friends, she thought, smiling to herself as she thought the words in English and then repeated it mentally in her own tongue: Shin’yuu.

  She hadn’t had many friends, not in all her life; her position made it difficult. It would be an irony if I make a friend only to die with her so soon after.

  “The Montivallan reinforcements will probably come,” she said.

  Then she shrugged ruefully. “Whether in time for us or not . . . perhaps there is a red cord around our little fingers, perhaps not, neh?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  APPROACHING CÍRBANN RÓMENADRIM

  (FORMERLY CHINA CAMP)

  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

  Karl Aylward Mackenzie pumped at the pedals of the bicycle and gritted his teeth as brush flashed by on either side and the uneven surface of the ancient road hammered through the solid wheels. It wasn’t the effort that bothered him, though it made him pant and sent sweat streaming all over his body and actually squelching in the padding under his brigandine. They’d all had a full day of rest and good eating at the Finney farm.

  What bothered him was the fact that he was barreling down a southbound road towards an enemy as if it was a race at the Lughnasadh Games. If there were any onlookers, it wouldn’t be roses or daisies they’d be throwing.

  We were lucky with those bandits in the hills. But luck isn’t a plan.

  He’d been prepared for danger and hardship leading this venture; what was turning out to be worse was the feeling of always trying to do three things at once, each one of them needing all his attention. They couldn’t even rely on the dogs to sense enemy presence, because the poor beasts were fallin
g behind.

  Sure, and didn’t Da say that being led by the nose was for pigs at slaughter-time, not the human kind?

  Their only scout was Susan Mika, up there on her wiry little quarter horse; at least she could ride with her reins knotted on its neck and an arrow to the string.

  They should be getting very close now. He could see the Lakota begin to stiffen in the saddle, then duck and twist as something flashed by her—

  “Off! Down!”

  Karl shouted it as she drew, shot, and legged her horse up to a gallop in the same motion. A short scarred man with his hair worked into mud-covered spikes and naked except for a ragged loinclout fell out of the scrub a few yards from the road, writhing and screeching and pulling at a shaft sunk into the bone of his pelvis. A clutch of short javelins clattered down from his hands on the hard ground and rolled onto the faded white-gray of the asphalt.

  As Karl spoke he jumped off the bicycle, let it fall and grabbed for the longbow in its loops beside his quiver. The others did the same in a crash of falling machinery.

  Then he took a single instant to point and shout: “Hounds! Mharú air! Kill!”

  The greathounds had been lagging and looking sore-footed despite the day’s rest at Finney’s farm. You wouldn’t know it now. The big beasts bristled and launched themselves into the mass of brush and dry long grass to the east of the road like hairy bolts shot from field-catapults, mouths open, black lips curled back to show their fangs in saw-edge gapes and growling like a machine cutting rock.

  Human screams followed almost instantly, and a thrashing and crackling among the brush. Another near-naked figure appeared, running up the sloping trunk of a small live oak with astonishing agility for a man who had a hundred and thirty pounds of war-dog hanging from one buttock by its fangs, and flailing wildly behind him with his bow to try and make it let go.

  A moment later the dog ripped loose, fell a dozen feet into a crouch on the ground, whirled and eeled back into the brush, bleeding from a cut on the shoulder but not one whit daunted. The savage was a brave man; he raised his own odd-looking bow even though blood was pouring down his left leg in a dark glistening sheet.

  Karl nocked, drew and shot in a motion as familiar as breathing, without even being conscious of making a decision. The range was short, only twenty-odd yards, and he was using a war-bow whose hundred and twenty-seven pounds of pull was designed to drive a bodkin through armor at three hundred paces. The path of the shaft hardly rose at all, and when it struck with a hard wet thunk sound it went completely through his target’s body, breaking bone coming and going and arching off into the distance. There was a double splash of blood, a small blossom where the point struck and a longer trail behind, and the man fell out of the tree.

  By then all the clansfolk were on the west side of the road, arrows half-drawn. A half-dozen of their foemen erupted into the open in flight from the dogs, and paid the price of panic as the Mackenzie longbows snapped. There was an excited belling from the greathounds; they were acting as if this was a hunt and they were driving dangerous game like boar towards the shooters.

  Diarmuid’s McClintocks were close behind. He took in the situation at a glance as he hopped off the bicycle—his Clan were feudists, ambush wasn’t in the least strange to them, and there had been Eaters filtering up from the south less than a generation ago in their dùthchas. He screamed:

  “McClintock abu!”

  And ripped out his claymore in his right fist, snatched his dirk into his left so that it projected downward beneath the nail-studded targe-shield strapped to that forearm, and charged. His followers went after him, in no particular order but instinctively at double arm’s length from each other, close enough to support and with enough space to work. An arrow whickered past Karl’s face and another banged into his belly and bounced off, feeling like a hard punch through the leather of his brigandine and the small metal plates riveted between the two layers. One of his own followers was down with a shaft in the thigh, but then the McClintocks were at close quarters with the Eaters.

  “Watch . . .” Karl wheezed, then forced himself to take a deep breath and shout loud enough for folk to hear through the flush of alarm. “Watch out for Diarmuid’s folk! Close up!”

  There was no point in spraying arrows blindly anyway, not with no clear target and a mere dozen archers—eleven now with the wounded man down. They advanced across the road in a few swift strides, and Karl felt as if he were trying to listen with his skin as well as the ears that heard grunts and cries and crackling brush and the brief tooth-grating clash of steel.

  The McClintock tartan—mostly different shades of green and blue, with thin stripes of dark red—blended well with the vegetation, but they could see naked skin moving in there as the wild men turned to face Diarmuid’s followers. He drew, shot—there was a wet cracking thump and a shriek—drew again . . .

  Boudicca spoke to Gwri: “Back me.”

  The young seeress nodded and slung her bow, then caught the polearm Boudicca tossed to her. She poised it, brown full-lipped face intent as the huntress stepped closer still to the brush.

  The cry of McClintock abu!—which meant up the McClintocks!—was sounding out now, then raw screams and an eerie up-and-down shrieking squeal that must be the enemy’s battle call, like the call of man-sized rats.

  Boudicca Lopez Mackenzie sank to a crouch with her black eyes as fixed and singular in their focus as a stalking cat, then to one knee, then drew and shot quick as a striking ferret with the bow slanted wide. There was a scream and thrashing from the brush as the arrow punched through below the fallen tree-trunk the savage was using as cover, and he collapsed over it and rolled forward halfway into view, thrashing with a shaft right through one kneecap and out the rear.

  Two more Eaters leapt out, throwing themselves headlong forward. One had a short broad-bladed spear and small round shield; the other a hatchet in one hand and a long knife in the other. Boudicca nocked, drew and shot the man with the tomahawk at arm’s length, so quickly that it seemed as if they were dancing to separate tunes with different tempos, and at so close a range that the feathers just had room to clear the arrow-rest before the point struck. It went into his throat, angling up between the arch of his jaw, and the broadhead erupted out his neck with half the clothyard shaft behind it.

  The spearman was upon her then, and her right hand dropped from her quiver and darted towards the hilt of her shortsword. It would have been too late, betrayed by archer’s reflex, save that Gwri thrust two-handed with the glaive from just behind her. The point struck the Eater’s shield with a bang. The shrunk-on rawhide over the ancient trashcan lid turned the sharp steel spike, but the impact knocked him staggering back, and then she turned it and pulled with the hook on the other side to wrench him off-balance.

  Karl exhaled and the string dropped off his fingers and the shaft whipped past Boudicca’s shoulder and through the Eater spearman’s body. The man spun away spraying blood from his nose and mouth and took three steps before he collapsed. Mathun shot beside him, face clenched in a rictus that nobody who’d known his lazy good-nature would have expected. The arrows were going out slowly, carefully aimed, none of the mad ripple that made an arrowstorm. The McClintocks were there, after all . . . but because they were there, the savages didn’t have the leisure to shoot or throw javelins. The sound died down . . .

  “We’re aye comin’!” a voice called. “Hae a care, now, norrrthrons!”

  “Heads up!” Karl called sharply.

  With Mackenzies that wasn’t a general alert. It meant arrowheads up and was an urgent warning against friendly fire—which his father had defined as friendliness of a most unfriendly sort.

  The McClintocks came out onto the old roadway, looking variously exultant, shocked in the case of several with dripping wounds including a slash right across an eye, or grim: particularly the two who were carrying a limp body, a young man with
old scars on the stump of one ear and the skull dished in above it and leaking slow blood around bone fragments sticking through the skin. Karl winced slightly at the sight, even more than the hand clapped across a bleeding eyesocket, and was glad of the light archer’s sallet he wore. He’d been present as a child when the legendary Dun Juniper healer Judy Barstow Mackenzie said tartly to an injured hurly player that a man should bear in mind that a human head was like a china teapot full of jelly, and would react similarly if whacked.

  “Aye, Dòmhnall na Cluaise is sped, may the Mother and the Horned One greet him beyond the Western Gate, and he feast with his kin before the forgettin’ and the return,” Diarmuid said heavily. “Forbye he was a good man, but he wuld drop his targe when he should hae been guardin’ his left. The enemy is fled, those that live.”

  Karl looked around at a stifled keening sound. Ruan Chu Mackenzie was kneeling by the form of another of the little band from Dun Fairfax; his lover Feidlimid Benton Mackenzie, the young man’s round fair face fixed in an expression of mild surprise. The arrow in his thigh had severed the big artery there clean across, the one that ran up into your groin and was as thick as your index finger. The great pool of blood around him showed the result, where his body had pumped out pints of it in seconds. Even on a healer’s operating table with transfusions at hand that would most likely have been fatal.

  Karl felt something run through him halfway between a grunt and a wince. He’d known Feidlimid all his life, since they were both running around underfoot like pups and in and out of each other’s houses, as was the Clan’s way with children. They’d been part of a clutch that usually sat on the same bench in Moon School, and they’d been made Initiates in the same year. He’d known some would likely die on this faring, but it was so real now.

  Ruan’s narrow dark face was set as he closed Feidlimid’s eyes and bent to kiss him gently and straighten his limbs, though tears ran down his cheeks. Then he touched his fingers to the blood and marked his forehead with a single savage gesture before rising with the dead man’s quiver in his hand. It held the full forty-eight shafts less the one on the fallen man’s bowstring; he’d gone down before he could shoot even once.