The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  At least the sun’s not in our eyes, he thought.

  He took a deep breath, called on Tulkas the Strong—the Valar he felt the closest bond with—

  He was a little worried about Morfind, though.

  “Dago!” she muttered to herself. “Kill! Dago in yrch!”

  Luanne was quiet but ready; she was a bit older than he, though still short of twenty years. Faramir knew it was her first real fight, and he was full of admiration for how she was facing it.

  “At least there’s another Bearkiller here now,” she murmured, and stood a little in the stirrups. “I can’t see anyone between here and that wood we’re heading for.”

  “Good,” Faramir replied. “Let’s get right to the jump-off point. I don’t want to be exposed longer than I have to.”

  They all signaled their horses forward—there was nothing deliberate about it at their level, you just thought where you wanted your mount to go and it did . . . provided it was as well-schooled as a Ranger’s, or a Bearkiller A-lister’s. For these, reins were merely a training aid in colthood. Faramir clucked reassuringly to his as the horse tossed its head and snorted. It was in the nature of the beasts to be cautious of their legs; Suldal was brave, but he was also intelligent for a horse and knew perfectly well that they were approaching a slope far steeper than it would try on its own. He liked his horse and had raised it from a colt, but at seventh and last a Ranger’s horse was a weapon, as were the Rangers themselves, guarding the honor and homes and hearths of the kingdom.

  Another deep breath and they broke into a slow canter. Then over the edge—it felt a little like a game young Dúnedain here played, over at Wolf Hall where his uncle Hîr Ingolf dwelt, swinging back and forth on a rope over the hillside reservoir and then letting go to fall with a tremendous splash. Horses and riders both threw their balance back a little—the mounts were going down the slope half in a controlled fall and half by squatting back on their haunches in the very worst spots. He let his thighs do the work of steadying him and concentrated on looking ahead—and to either side, everywhere there might be an enemy.

  There.

  The slope ahead stayed steep until it leveled out into a brush-grown swale that gave into open forest. A group of Eaters was there, resting on their haunches and waiting to swarm up to the assault on the men-at-arms. They caught on when the horse-archers were halfway down the hundred yards of slope and the others were running full-tilt at their heels close behind. He drew the cord past his ear—the real trick was to do that without giving your horse misleading signals, which would kill them both right now—and loosed. Just a target, just a target, a boiled-leather outline stuck up on a spring-loaded stick.

  Don’t watch the arrow, it’s going to go where it’s going to go, snatch out another, draw, shoot.

  Time enough for three, the last into a man just left of him in the act of throwing a hatchet, and it whirled through the air to catch him a hard thump on the shoulder. Slap the bow back into the harp-shaped scabbard, hook the shield up in the same motion, right hand across and the sword is out and up and slash backhand down to the right, all done to the stopwatch a thousand times.

  Only this time he wasn’t aiming at a pumpkin or a gourd or even the pig’s or sheep’s head from the butcher’s shop that advanced students used.

  A hard jarring thump up through his wrist and arm and shoulder, and another spike of pain from the deep bruise. The snarling face fell away backward with the poised spear tumbling away. Brush clawed at his face, reaching for his eyes with iron-hard claws, and he ducked down along the horse’s neck. His sword held out beside it towards the next terrified and terrifying face.

  “Lacho Calad!”

  “Drego Morn!”

  “Hakkaa päälle!”

  • • •

  Órlaith went down the hill in a controlled fall-and-skid with her backside nearly touching the grass as her feet moved crook-kneed, and once on her back for a few heart-stopping seconds—without slowing in the least. A frantic dig with her heel at a mostly-buried rock and Heuradys’ shield levered against the backplate of her armor and her own momentum got her back on her feet and back into the sort of run where you couldn’t slow down unless you wanted to tumble arse-over-teakettle.

  At least I don’t have to worry about the edge of my own Sword, some distant part of her mind thought mordantly.

  Usually there was a real risk to running in the rough with something sharp and pointy in your hand, but the Sword of the Lady wouldn’t cut her, or anyone of the blood of House Artos. Reiko was running beside her, the naginata spinning above her head as if it were a stabilizing gyroscope, a wordless focusing scream ululating as she charged. Egawa was nearly as agile on his sovereign’s other side: his war-cry was banzai! but Órlaith supposed it would be rather strange for the Nihonjin ruler to shout what would effectively be long live me!

  The horses rammed through the Eaters’ wavering rank and into the dappled gloom beyond and the fighters on foot crashed into the scattered mass right on their heels. One horse was rearing in front of her—not mere reflex, but striking out with both hooves at once, and a body flew backward. Reiko cut a man’s feet out from under him—literally—with a double-handed sweep that let the full length of the naginata swing out to give the cut immense leverage. Órlaith lunged with the flat parallel to the ground and the Sword slotted in between an Eater woman’s ribs even as a blade made from half a pair of garden shears grated along the lames of Órlaith’s breastplate. The savage’s experience-born instincts had betrayed her; against someone who wasn’t wearing armor that would have been a deadly blow.

  “Alale alala!” Heuradys shouted, the cry the worshippers of the Olympians took to war.

  She ducked under the swing of an axe, broke the man’s bare foot with the point of her shield, punched him under the jaw with the upper curve and cut into the wrist of another trying for the weaker armor at the crotch by stooping low and stabbing upward; the savage lurched off clutching her half-severed limb.

  “To the right, to the right, he’s moving!” Deor called from behind Órlaith, and she swerved in that direction.

  There was a clash of metal and thumping back there, and John’s breathy shout: “Haro!” Evrouin’s voice snarled curses in English and vile Spanish.

  In the medicinal-smelling dimness under the eucalyptus the Sword of the Lady burned like a crystal flame. Bands of Eaters were skulking closer.

  “He’s trying to get back to the water,” Órlaith called, her voice like a silver trumpet as she leveled the blade. “Hold him! Don’t let them slow us down!”

  The three riders put their horses forward as the rest of the party followed, ducking and weaving in the saddle with reckless abandon through the brush and wood with their swords bright in their hands.

  They moved forward in a rough wedge through the brush with Órlaith at the point, all of them stabbing and cutting and smashing with shields at the figures that rose up ahead or darted in; after a moment Thora and John turned and guarded the rear, taking the insanely dangerous role of walking backward, with Deor in the center of their formation adding his shield wherever needed. She could hear the scop chanting as he fought, not loud but using the hard alliterative rhythm to pace his efforts:

  “Swa stemnetton, stiðhicgende

  hysas æt hilde, hogodon georne

  hwa þær mid orde ærost mihte

  on fægean men feorh gewinnan—”

  Using the Sword as a brush-clearing tool felt very strange, but a four-inch trunk of scrub oak toppled sideways when she hacked at it, leaving a slanted disk of pale wood smooth as a cabinetmaker’s plane could have produced. She hurdled the stump and dodged the branches whipping at her as the trunk fell and pinned several Eaters to the ground, putting her shield up as she thrust through with a gasping grunt of effort and another slash that scattered twigs and branches in a spray.

  The
Eaters were more and more reluctant to approach the glittering deadliness in her hand, shaking their heads and whining and breaking to either side as she approached. Their numbers were still growing, though. It was like breasting an ever-growing tide.

  He’s calling them back against us. We have to do this now or we die.

  “Now!”

  She plunged through, slashing the Sword left and right, feeling muscle and bone part under the edge. Through the screen of Eaters, and all three of the mounted fighters were around a single figure, striking at him in a flicker of steel glinting through the sun-shot dimness.

  He was no scrawny-wiry Eater stunted by disease and malnutrition and naked save for a breechclout. Instead he was about six feet, and well-built in a lean muscular way, like a well-fed man active all his life. He wore a blackened steel helm shaped like the upper half of a raven’s head with the bill as a visor, and a spray of feathers across the crown. The countenance beneath the bill was square, the sparse beard the same dark-brown color as the twisted queue of hair that fell past his shoulder, and the face was somewhere between ruddy and olive in color.

  First-Folk and incomer mixed, she thought.

  Like herself or Diarmuid, but with more of the first and less of the latter.

  His clothes were well-tanned breeches and boots of sealskin, a wool shirt dyed green with nettle and a leather tunic sewn with small iron rings like miniature bracelets linked together by pivots; the sword-scabbard at his side was splints of whalebone bound with sinew. Around his throat was a necklace of bear and beaver teeth. His left hand held a short carved staff shaped like an oddly elongated double-ended paddle with puffin beaks strung to it; the main shape was two orcas eating a seal, the bodies of the great sea-predators in turn carved with ravens and eagles. Something similar was painted on the leather surface of a small round hand-drum hanging at his side over the scabbard of his sword.

  The three young warriors were spinning their mounts with immense skill, leaning over in the saddle to slash at their foeman . . . and he was calmly twisting and ducking, as if he started each dodging movement before the blow was started and he was doing a slow stately dance through the thicket of swift edged metal. Both the practical-looking cutlass-sword in his right hand and the wand in the other moved. There was an occasional ting of steel on steel, a tock as the wand slapped against the flats of the blades.

  Luanne crowded her horse in close and leaned over to thrust with the backsword. The enemy—the skaga—turned his body out of the way. Then he stepped forward and thrust his sword a foot deep into the horse’s breast. There was a scream, like a human hurt but enormously louder, and the beast reared and toppled backward. Eaters rushed in, chittering, and the two Dúnedain turned their horses into their flood. The mounts danced in place, lashing out with hooves and teeth as the riders slashed frantically.

  The skaga came out of his fighting crouch as Órlaith drew near. Until now his expression had been merely serious and abstracted. Something flickered in it as he looked at her. She’d hear how the magi of the CUT had been like something hollowed out from the inside. This was different. There was a man there, a human being. But also something . . . else.

  “Kíl ‘láa,” he said.

  Which meant hello, she suddenly knew. And he knew she knew. From the reports—scouts, spies and escaped slaves, mostly—she knew the modern Haida spoke English among themselves for the most part. Their upper class of warrior captains and clan chiefs and shamans kept the ancestral language alive, and used it as a badge of rank and for ceremony. Roughly the way Associates did Old French, though more often.

  And for lore and magic, she thought, they use it for that too.

  “This plan may be bungled into wreck by fools,” the shaman said, in that clicking tongue full of stops and breathings. “But there will be another. You will not ruin my folk again. We are strong now, with powerful allies . . . in this world and the Other Place.”

  “We’d be a deal less set on ruinin’ you if you’d stop raiding our villages and killing and robbing and carrying off our folk for slaves,” she pointed out as she came forward.

  Her mouth and tongue and throat felt strange, as the new knowledge used them in ways they’d never been stretched before. This was a speech even less like that which she’d been born to than Nihongo was.

  Unexpectedly, fury blazed at her. “I have seen—from the lives before! I have seen the Xaayda—”

  Which was what his folk called themselves, and outsiders had pronounced as Haida; like many such names it simply meant The People.

  “—lying dead by their thousands, untended, none to put them in their box and mount them on the sacred poles. Their skins rotting and brains cooked with fever, their villages deserted, the few alive left selling their sacred things for whiskey to kill their grief! We will never let you gather the strength to break us again!”

  She felt his utter sincerity. He had certainly seen what he claimed; and it might well be from his previous lives. The High King had seen visions of the chain of ancestry through the very Sword she carried, down through uncounted generations.

  That didn’t mean the way this man had let those visions shape his life was wise. Her father had used the Sword to show even bitter enemies their ultimate kinship. For that matter, the chronicles told that the skaga’s folk had been raiders and reavers long before the incomers from the Old World sailed to these lands to shatter and to build. They’d carved memorials of stark magnificent beauty to their dead chiefs . . . and thrown the bodies of dead slaves, of which they’d had a multitude then too, into the sea for the fish. If it hadn’t been in the middle of a battle and deadly peril, Órlaith would have sighed, or perhaps groaned.

  She knew that she herself descended from half a dozen tribes who had well-founded grudges against each other, or outright killing feuds; not to mention that her grandfathers had fought each other for a decade and then personally met before their assembled armies in a personal combat neither had survived. The blood of all mingled in her veins and helped make her what she was.

  And I none the worse for it. For I am the land, and through me the braided past and its future yet to be, as Montival is meant to be.

  She’d also learned that there was simply no point in talking to a mind so focused inward and pastward. And as her parents said, at the point where talking was futile you had to start hitting if you didn’t want to get hit yourself.

  “Herry, help John and the others keep them off. I’ll handle this—”

  “And I,” Reiko said. “Egawa-san, guard our backs.”

  With gentle smoothness, Órlaith raised the Sword of the Lady. From the corner of her eye she saw Reiko bring her blade Kotegiri up into the two-handed ready posture. When she moved forward, there was a sense of pressure, behind her and before. As if it took a very long time to take each step at normal speed. The world outside her and the shaman slowed to a background thrum and burr; Reiko beside her as well, though not so much. Her face was set in the shadow of the glade, but her red-lacquered armor seemed to shine with extra luster, as if a beam of sunlight were following it like a cupping, shielding hand.

  The carved wood of the shaman’s wand moved and the sense of pressure increased. Gasping, she raised the sword and it faded back.

  “You cannot stand against what is locked in this,” she said.

  “Please don’t tell me that the dark fire will not avail me now,” the skaga said sardonically; in English for that moment.

  “Some of my relatives are Dúnedain, but I’m not,” she grated, and struck.

  It was a hard twisting backhand slash; that at least seemed to be proceeding in normal time, and sparks flared where he parried. The blade in his hand sprang back notched, and he lurched and then twisted hard to avoid Reiko’s overarm cut. Órlaith could see how he did that now. She was connected to that other place to which he stepped aside. Reiko was not, not quite; the fire that flicke
red about her bent the boundaries of it with astonishing raw strength, but lacked the sharpness of focus the Sword gave her ally.

  He gestured again with the thing of power in his left hand, and cold poured over Órlaith; the cold of northern seas. Something moved beneath that non-sea, something black and sleek and powerful, deadliness in its icy intelligence and the mouthful of teeth shaped to rend and tear. Thoughts vast beyond human ken gripped and twisted at the fabric of things as fins and flukes bent the sea.

  “Morrigú!” she called, and raised the blade her father had brought from the Otherworld.

  White light seemed to blind her for an instant, and great black wings enfolded her and bore her up in a way that was more real than the world of waking day where she stood with her boots on the leaf-mold. The hostile presence faded—twisting away, as if it were swimming through oceans of space and time trailing blood amid stars like grains of sand. She had not killed It—she didn’t think anything could. But she had hurt It. Or the Sword had, through her.

  The shaman staggered and gasped. “That thing is not for humans to use! What can wound the Sgaana xaaydagaay, who give me power over the huxwhukw, Those Who Eat Men? Do you know what it is you grasp? Better you had pushed your hand into a fire or a bear’s mouth!”

  “’Tis unfair that I keep a magic sword about the place?” she panted.

  Steadying herself was an effort that felt like hoisting a boulder overhead. There was still a taut smile on her lips as she mocked:

  “This from the man who just tried to feed me to a salt-water bogle, and would that by chance be a magic wand you’re after doing it with? Grimy arse, said the kettle to the pot!”

  She lunged, and there was another grating of steel on not-steel, sparks and a ragged cut in his sword and an impalpable blow from the carved wood that was far heavier; this time like a flint-hard beak that would have split her very mind if it had struck her fairly. Crows and ravens tumbled in not-space and not-time, slashing at each other with beaks and claws.