The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  A savage was heading towards her at a dead run, threads of spittle hanging from his open gap-toothed mouth, nostrils splayed open by what had to be deliberate cutting, and an ancient baseball bat spinning in his hand, with a knife hammered through the thick end. She stepped forward with the rest at the last instant, tucking her shield into her shoulder and keeping her head a little lowered.

  Thump.

  The Eater rammed into her shield and the bat came down, glancing off the curve of her helm and then into the shoulder-piece of her armor. The impact was wrenchingly hard, and she let her knees flex and then drove them forward again to tumble him backward. The Sword lashed down in an overarm cut, and there was a tug at her hand as it slammed into his shoulder and chopped through muscle and bone, from the angle of the neck down through the joint. The limb and a chunk of shoulder fell free, leaving a cut that took a fractional second to begin bleeding—so sharp that the veins and arteries were shocked into clamping down for an instant.

  Even in the focus of battle something in her mind blinked astonishment. Like an obsidian razor. And nothing harms it or dulls it. Nothing.

  On her left John took a step back, grunting, as a club made from a cut-down sledgehammer smashed into his shield. He stabbed over the edge, a little clumsily because the blow had thrown him off-balance, then cursed frantically and tugged as the point lodged in the bone of the Eater’s face and wouldn’t come clear. The man’s body followed, jerking the point from side to side as he thrashed and dropped his weapon and clutched at the shield in reflex. Spearpoints turned towards him to take advantage. Evrouin had his glaive stuck in a man’s rib cage; his dark eyes went wide as he prepared to throw his body in the way.

  Órlaith stepped in and struck with her own shield, knocking the wounded Eater off her brother’s point; in the same instant she cut upwards with the Sword to block a machete. Only the retraining she’d made herself go through let her parry with the edge like that.

  Ting!

  Her eyes went wide behind the visor, as the top half of the ancient garden tool pinwheeled upwards. There had been a hard tug on her wrist this time too, but little more than she’d have felt at lopping through a wet straw mat on a practice field with an ordinary weapon. Heuradys stepped in and blocked a spear aimed at her liege, took a thrust to the shoulder from another that screeched off her armor and cut the man’s leg out from under him—being merely a very good sword skillfully wielded it went halfway through the knee-joint and had to be tugged out and he flew backward when she punched a polyene-covered knee upwards into his descending face.

  For long moments the three of them were fighting in unison like a dance or three bodies with one will, a continuous block-strike-block seasoned with blows from armored elbows and knees. The whole line took a lurching step back; the knights were like steel towers, but the brabbling weight of the savages threatened to overwhelm them, every instant one misstep from utter disaster for them all if the line broke. Out of the corner of her eye Órlaith saw one of the crossbowmen sling his weapon, draw his sword and take the little round buckler slung on the scabbard in his left fist, preparing to step in when the men-at-arms were forced back from the narrow stretch they could still cover nearly shield-to-shield.

  Órlaith knew she was fighting well, but she was at ten-tenths of capacity, and everyone in the shield-line was performing to their limit. Each enemy who came within reach of the Sword’s edge died, but it was impossible to keep stopping men forever if they had no fear of death at all . . .

  Knowledge crystallized. The Eaters were being flung at her, as much a weapon in someone’s hand as enemies in their own right. They too were part of Montival, a part that was like an illness, a grating wrongness . . . but she could feel how their savagery was used and twisted.

  “Cover me!” she shouted through the snarl of voices and bang and clatter and rasp and the loud hiss of her own panting in the closed helm.

  She took a step back as John and Heuradys stepped in, her brother’s sword looping in a figure-eight and her liege knight moving in an astonishing blur of speed.

  A moment’s thought, and she knocked her visor up, reversed the Sword of the Lady, holding it up with the pommel to the sky. The sun caught in the antler-cradled crystal like white fire.

  “Free!” she shouted, and went to one knee as she thrust it downward.

  Into the soil of the kingdom it had been forged in the World beyond the World to embody, into the land and air that linked every living thing.

  Shock rippled through her, and her skin roughed as if she had been plunged into cold water. There was a sense of severing, as if invisible cords had been cut and recoiled like giant whips, and the assault hung in the balance. A new note entered the Eaters’ shrieks and chitterings and squeals, an almost pitiful tone of bewildered doubt. Somewhere a man knelt screaming, with blood flowing from eyes and nose and ears and lips.

  And beyond the enemy, a sound from the northward: horns, ox-horn war trumpets sounding a long resonant hurrr-hurrr-hurrr.

  • • •

  “Hraefnbeorg!” Deor shouted again as swine-array trampled over the bodies of the first band of Eaters to shatter on their shieldwall, like a pot thrown at the side of a house.

  They toiled uphill under the banner of the ravens; the grade was slight, but now he could feel it again in his thighs. Arrows were whipping towards the Mist Hills fyrd, not many yet nor very hard driven, but each one was potentially a death and when you heard the whhhpt sound past your ear something inside you knew it. There was a grunt and cry of pain from behind him, and a man stumbled out of the array. The ranks moved to close up, and the battle-boar went its many-legged way forward.

  Deor’s shield went up a little. It was one taken from those hung in his brother’s hall—good swords might be passed down from sire to son, but a good shield was lucky to survive one afternoon of strong warriors and heavy blows. This was the type their father had made from the pattern of the ancient Angles and Saxons: three feet across, a convex form like a huge dish with a single handgrip in the center behind the steel boss, the raven painted across its surface in black on red below a coat of varnish. He crouched a little as he jogged and held it up and forward. An instant later an arrow hit it at an angle and snapped, the hard twist of impact a surprise as it always was.

  “I’ve seen a lot better shooting than that,” Thora said contemptuously beside him, doing likewise with hers—made by craftsmen in New Singapore out of lacquered bamboo and elephant hide, and held by a forearm loop and grip Bearkiller-fashion. “I’ve done a lot better than that.”

  He opened his mouth to pant out a reply, and—

  Shock.

  Something seemed to run through earth and sky, blood and bone, up from the hard soil beneath his feet. For an instant that lasted perhaps half a heartbeat he was aware of himself as he had rarely been before; seeing his life as a complex web of choice and circumstance, each step turning his feet to a new pattern that in turn became his fate. And he knew the things that had bound him, constrained him, limited him with a stark clarity. The moment passed, but left him feeling a little different within—light, clean, and somehow more purely himself. He felt free.

  “Something happened,” he panted.

  “No shit!” Thora said.

  The clumps and clots of Eaters who’d been rushing toward the fyrd slowed and wavered. Deor saw one man among them with a double-bitted axe stop and shake his head again and again, clasping his hands to his head, the gesture clear even across a hundred yards of distance. Then he stopped and looked at the force approaching, looked back over his shoulder. He ran out in front of his fellows, bellowing; between distance and the thick clotted dialect Deor couldn’t understand a word, but he could feel the rage and fear in it. Muscle ran thick over the man’s arms and shoulders, in contrast to the knotted sinewy scrawniness of most of his fellows.

  “Upuzzi yuh fukk’mup!” he screamed.


  Pointing the weapon at the shieldwall he loped forward; after a moment more and more followed him, until it was a mass several times the fyrd’s numbers. The savage chief was not without wit, either; he was aiming a little to one side of the boar’s head . . . right at Deor, in fact, and looping in so that the westering sun was behind him. It wasn’t the handicap it would have been later in the day, but it didn’t help, or hurt the savages to have the sun at their backs. Six paces to his left Godric Godulfson snarled a grin in his gray-shot beard and held his sword aloft, then chopped it down and to the right as he turned in that direction. His sons followed with the banner and the whole blunt wedge swung to follow, the adjustment as automatic as the spacing of a yard to either side everyone kept, fruit of many days practice in the fyrd-muster in the slack seasons of the farming year.

  “Woden loves brave men!” Godric roared. “Charge! Woden!”

  “Woden!” the whole small host bellowed, as the horns sounded again and again.

  The Hraefnbeorg fyrd broke into a bellowing charge behind their lord, not a dash but a hard swift pounding lope, every left boot coming down in unison to a massive chant:

  “Wo-den! Wo-den! Wo-den!”

  The loose mass of the Eaters came closer and closer. Deor could see mouths gaping and eyes going wide and glancing from side to side among them, and the crowd—it would be too much to call it a formation—rippled like tall wheat in a breeze as the wedge of red-and-black shields came closer, the boar-crested helm of Godric at the head and the serried ranks of spearheads and raised swords and axes behind him. There was no crash of impact or transmitted shock; instead the savages rippled back like the rings of water when a stone dropped into a pond. Here and there an Eater dashed forward to thrust or strike; then two or three of the Hraefnbeorg men could hit at the same time from as many angles. Already at an advantage with their shields and helms and metal byrnies, their order and impetus carried them through the enemy in a single headlong rush.

  The last gave way before them; not running so much as recoiling. Deor sucked in a breath despite his panting as he saw how few the line of tall shields ahead were. Princess Órlaith snapped up the visor of her helm and called out.

  • • •

  Órlaith looked to either side as she rose. The solid mass of the Hraefnbeorg men was plainly visible now. The Eaters weren’t pressing in with the same mindless fury, but they weren’t running away either—or at least most of them weren’t, and they were still very many despite the trickle running westward for the woods and the Bay. A glance over her shoulder showed the Japanese retreating from the hill’s southern edge towards the tree, holding their formation but moving back to keep the mass of Eaters who’d finally surged up onto the hilltop from lapping around their flanks.

  “Sir Aleaume—” she said, then realized he wasn’t on his feet. “Droyn!” she called instead. “Take over here! They’ll rally in a moment. Collect bolts, get ready!”

  The squire nodded curtly, blood spattered red against his brown face. The knights straightened as the Eaters recoiled from the advancing Hraefnbeorg formation, then swung back like an opening door. The Mist Hills levy came through it, their banner flaunting proudly and the Saxon broadswords and heavy spearheads running red. A few of the faces showed wounds, a few limped, but the thick carpet of dead beneath their boots was the main hindrance. Their leader grinned at her, a middle-aged man with a graying beard and a helm with a rampant gilded boar on its crest, swinging his sword up in salute.

  “Many thanks, my lord,” she said, crisp despite the desert dryness of her mouth. “Now follow me!”

  There was an odd feeling in her hand where she held the Sword of the Lady. It was unmarked; blood seemed to flow off it, as if a million tiny invisible jets of cleansing water . . . or light . . . were scouring it ever clean. And now there was a tightness to it, a feeling of vast forces holding each other in check, or nearly. As if she had cloven some substance thick and yielding and gelid, that would close in behind the stroke rather than trying to openly oppose a greater power. The chittering squeals and weird shrieking of the Eaters had died away. Now it began again, rising to an ululating chorus. John and Heuradys flanked her, and the Saxons parted to give them a place. The world narrowed again as she knocked her visor back into place; it took a little more effort, since the right hinge had been bent a bit when it shed a thrust that almost went into the eyeslit.

  The Nihonjin had held when their leaders saw that help was coming. Now the Saxon wedge formation swept in around their left into the Eater mass, and Órlaith raised the Sword as she ran at their head. The savage in front of her threw himself back in a near-summersault as it came near, dropping the hatchets he held in either hand; there was an odd expression in his eyes and slack face, as if something lifted from his mind as the Sword approached.

  He trembled for a moment and then bolted to the rear and leapt down the hillside, tumbling and rolling in his eagerness and coming back to his feet running. Another was pushed towards her by the press at his back, and she struck grimly—a figure-eight, slicing through the shaft of his spear and then back to take a neat disk off the side of his skull.

  Others pushed in as he fell; she kept her shield up and struck with economical thrusts and short, controlled chops, even then on some level horrified by the results. Heuradys and John were slowing, slightly but noticeably, and she felt a twinge of eeriness at how she wasn’t. Part of that was the lighter weight, even more the lack of friction—nothing caught or held the blade’s infinite smoothness when it struck. Part of it was something sensed, as if she knew that there would be a price later.

  I’m sending the weariness down the road, she thought. I’ll pay the price for it then. If the Mist Hills levy hadn’t come we’d all have been dead in fifteen minutes more, so we would and certain sure, but they aren’t enough to do more than delay things!

  Still, she had to do what she could.

  “My lord!” she called to Godric. “You have three-score?”

  Godric whipped his shield’s leading edge forward to punch an Eater in the face, with the flat laid along his arm, using it like a twenty-pound set of brass knuckles. The savage fell, and the huscarle beside the baron brought his four-foot axe down on another with a shout. The broad blade of the weapon chopped three-quarters of the way through the Eater’s neck, leaving it lolling on a scrap of muscle and skin and white sinew. The Saxon chief jerked his head aside to dodge the flow of blood, and it went down the front of his mail byrnie instead of—possibly fatally—into his face to blind him.

  “Yes, sixty-two with my brother Deor and his oath-sister,” he said, side-stepping closer until he was shield-to-shield with her brother John and close enough to talk.

  You could do that while fighting, if you had to. It usually wasn’t a good idea but needs must.

  “Send a score or so back to the men-at-arms, they’re nearly worn out.”

  Godric wasted no time; she felt an inner relief that he wasn’t the sort of man who needed a long explanation when there was no space for it.

  “Leofric,” he barked to the young man on his left; there was a strong family look to him, though the hair of his beard was much lighter. “Take Beorn and Paega and Hengest and their households and bolster the north-realm men behind us. Go!”

  Leofric stepped back and turned without a word and moved through the formation grabbing men by the shoulder. Meanwhile the Hraefnbeorg force spread out, turning from a wedge to a wall three deep bristling with point and edge. The Eaters broke back from it like surf on rock and drew off again, glaring and mouthing and gathering their scattered gangs. Órlaith looked to the Japanese; their faces were iron, but the strain was showing.

  “Reinforcements!” Reiko called, raising her sword in salute; the tone was almost lighthearted. “Most welcome! More soon, I hope!”

  Godric looked at the Crown Princess, and she nodded as she spoke.

 
; “Another two-score, or a bit more. Mackenzies and McClintocks. I’m told they should be here any moment. And hopefully the Dúnedain will show up, what with the smoke. Though they may send scouts first to see what’s happening.”

  He grunted and looked about. The Associate men-at-arms were leaning on their shields and panting, as his son led eighteen of the Mist Hills fighters to shore up their line at the narrow place that joined this hill to the one northwards. That more than doubled their numbers, and at least it let the more lightly armed crossbowmen who’d been filling the gaps to step back to the flanks . . . those of them left on their feet. The rest of the Montivallan position was a semicircle facing southward, and most of that was the newcomers. The Eaters eddied in chaos beyond them, and more were pouring up over the lip of the hill. Órlaith answered his unspoken question as Reiko and Egawa trotted over; the Heika murmured a translation for her commander as Órlaith went on:

  “Our ship hit them with darts and case-shot while they were on the water, and we’ve been killing since we came ashore, and they must have lost every third blade they started with, counting the hundred or so that burned when we fired the wharf under them.”

  “That was you, Highness? Ah, clever! They’ve been fighting you on your terms, and they’ve neither the gear nor the training nor the order for it,” the man said. “Thunor with me, I’ve never dreamed of so many bodies on a single field!”

  Órlaith had; she’d grown up on tales of the Prophet’s War where this would have been a moderate-sized skirmish, with armies numbering tens of thousands and whole cities and castles and provinces changing hands more than once. But Mist Hills had been out of touch with the wider world until well after that. The real point was . . .

  “We’ve hurt them very badly, but they’re not running,” she said grimly.