The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  For a long moment the Sword was held in the X made by wand and blade, and then he was twisting against that holding force as Reiko struck down at his legs with her katana. Slowly to his eyes, or to Órlaith’s now, but with a furious purity of intent that was beautiful even then. The not-place they inhabited twisted as the skaga began a motion that would have leapt over the Nihonjin blade and thrown himself back from the Sword of the Lady—

  Tung!

  The crossbow bolt was still fast, though not the blurring flash it should have been. She could see the carbon-fiber shaft turn and the four-bladed point glitter along its razor-honed edges, but at the same time there was the faintest hint of something else. White wings, gray eyes sharp as diamond, a crested helm and monster-painted shield and a bitter spear.

  The northern shaman could deal with two deadly threats, but not three. Movement seemed to snap back to the world of common day, and he was staggering, dropping wand and blade, grabbing at the black shaft that transfixed his face from his cheek to where the point rammed out of the back of his neck in a shower of blood. Then he dropped, twitched, tried to speak, and went still.

  Órlaith felt herself start to buckle at the knees and fall, reached out and grabbed blindly and found herself leaning against Reiko’s armored form; even on the verge of collapse they were careful of the blades they carried. Another body staggered into them; it was Heuradys, half giving support and half taking it. The pre-Change crossbow clattered against them as it swung on its sling.

  “Saw you had him pinned . . . took a chance,” the knight of Ath wheezed, her hands shaking. “Athana strengthened me, but it was like aiming in a hurricane. Wish I could get that feeling out of my head.”

  “He was strong indeed, by all the Gods of my people,” Órlaith agreed, controlling her breathing.

  The Sword flicked out and cracked the orca-graven wand in half. Something jolted up her hand and arm as it did, and squeezed at her chest beneath her armor; only the other two held her upright.

  “Good to have a magic sword on your side!” Heuradys said, and the Nihonjin nodded with a slight breathy chuckle as she said:

  “Very good.”

  “Good to have friends,” Órlaith said. Her hand thumped feebly at Reiko’s shoulder. “Good to have true friends!”

  The three young women hung for a moment with their helmeted heads together, trying to embrace with arms gone feeble, then started to straighten and smile at each other. There was noise enough around them—screams and weapons clashing—to remind them that things were far from settled, and much more worldly dangers could kill you just as finally.

  Then the dead man’s eyes opened. They were black as tar, a blackness that shone and somehow drew, soft with an infinite malice.

  “Haides Ruler of Many!” Heuradys yelped.

  She sprang back convulsively, as someone might from a spider on their pillow, as the hands and feet began to scrabble clumsily at the earth. Reiko’s blade went up and her lips set; she was obviously planning to deal with the revenant in the traditional way—by taking its head. The Crown Princess recalled that she’d mentioned seeing similar things in her homeland when the enemy attacked, and her own parents had told her of the like in the Prophet’s War. Things that had once been men killing until they were hacked apart and burned; things whose very blood and spittle bore a spirit-taint.

  Órlaith looked into the eyes, into a whirling circle of dissolution that was eternally motionless, a nothing that thought it was everything, a futility that believed it was perfection. Where there were no lies because there was no truth, only an endless chewing of stale memory into smaller and smaller bits beneath the gaze of the Solipsist.

  “No,” she said. “I will not leave even a bitter enemy so. Find freedom, man of the People. Find truth.”

  She stepped forward and thrust. For an instant bewildered pain and hatred ran through her in a shuddering wave. Then it was as if a door opened—not for her, though she was enough of it to see and stand on the threshold for a moment.

  The skaga took his hand from the dorsal fin of the great creature that bore him on a journey, one she sensed had been far longer for him than her. He made a gesture of thanks as it turned and dove into water like froth-tipped icy jade; his eyes caught hers for seconds, and he nodded, then turned to those who waited for him.

  Mist hung in tendrils from the great Sitka spruces and red cedars and Douglas fir about the cove. Long canoes hewn from just such trunks were drawn up on the shingle, their forepeaks carved with images of that Power which had borne him here, and beyond them countless red-draped racks of drying salmon scented the air. Huge longhouses of mossy plank were scattered about, their beams fantastically carved and smoke lifting from holes in their high-peaked roofs. Even more elaborate were the great sculpted and colored poles of clan-crests that rose before each one, and innumerable others that stood about; a new one was making on a frame that held it until it could be erected. Each told a story . . .

  No, a thousand thousand stories, she thought.

  At first glance she thought the figures who danced towards the shaman were monsters. Then she saw that they were humans in mask and costume, and that the work was beautiful, though wholly strange to her—faces elongated and crested and fringed, some of them as large as the bearer entire, stylized yet vividly true to what they depicted. Presences floated invisibly above them; Orca, yes, and Raven and Beaver and Wolf and Bear. Welcome flowed out, and a sense of homecoming, but not for her.

  The sight faded, and the body before them was limp in the ordinary messiness of human death.

  “Bunch up,” Órlaith said. “No sense trying to move—we’ll make a stand here.”

  The savage chief she’d seen before, the squat one with the cut-marks on his nose and the double-bitted axe, was half a hundred yards away, peering out from beyond a tree, then turning and gesturing to followers she could barely see at all. There was blood on his body from half a dozen minor wounds, but blood on his axe too. She recognized grim purpose in the way he rallied a band, pointing towards them and screaming at the savages. That one knew he could yet carry the day and avenge his folk if he killed her.

  • • •

  “That’s the Sword, by Brigid the Bright!” Gwiri Beauregard Mackenzie said.

  She was nearly gray under her natural brown, and not just from the sounds ahead—crack and thud and hard unmusical clangor, shouts and screams of uttermost agony. It was still blurred with distance, but unmistakable. Like an open fanged maw waiting to greet them.

  “I can feel it!” the young priestess went on. “Can’t you? The Powers are in contention here, and the world’s self screams at the weight of it. Aye, it tears the cloth the world is woven from back to the threads that made it!”

  “Where?” Karl shouted.

  “There! There!”

  She pointed frantically. Diarmuid and Karl looked at each other; there was a stretch of scattered woods just south of them, at the base of the hill where the wink of steel showed the fighting. He could see figures moving there, but the line of brush and tall grass at the edge of the trees blocked close sight. It was double bowshot anyway, six hundred paces.

  “Anwyn take it—” Karl began.

  Then there was a shout of alarm from Boudicca at their rear, and faint with distance a well-known roaring:

  “Hold there, ye little iijits!”

  The voice was all too familiar, from their earliest days. Karl looked at his brother this time. As one, he and Mathun bounded forward, and the whole band followed. They ran through the line of scrub with woodsman’s skill and scarcely a moment’s check; once they were under the canopy of the trees the brush was lighter.

  “There!” Gwri shouted—screamed, rather, the whites showing all around her eyes.

  There were times Karl was profoundly grateful he had no trace of the Sight, and could simply give the Powers their due witho
ut the Otherworld creeping in at the corners of his eyes. This was one of them, because there was a sense of something wrong. The hair crept at the back of his neck under the rear pad and strap of his helm, and he did not want to even imagine what it must be for Gwri.

  Suddenly an Eater was running at him . . . and the skinny savage looked near as frightened as Karl felt, under the soot that coated his face save for a band across the eyes. There was nothing wrong with his reflexes, though: he whipped up the knife in his hand. The Mackenzie smacked the bow in his hand down on the man’s wrist, and the tough yew cracked bone. The Eater wailed and stumbled; Karl seized his neck and threw him face-forward into the trunk of a tall bluegum three feet away with a hysterical strength that astonished even a young man proud of his muscle. There was a crunching sound, but he was bounding past before the body hit the earth.

  “Forward!” he shouted.

  They dashed into a more open stretch, sun slanting in from the westward, failing at last even this long summer’s day. Incongruously pretty butterflies burst upwards as Karl skidded to a halt. He recognized the Princess as the figure in the middle distance—how not, in that silvery suit of plate with the Golden Eagle feathers of her sept framing the helm? She and her friend Heuradys and someone in foreign armor were standing over a body, holding each other as if for support. Others were behind her: he thought he recognized Prince John, from the rather flashy polished harness, now sadly battered, and a shorter man who was his follower whirling a glaive over his head and spraying red from both ends of it.

  The ill sight was the band of Eaters a little to the westward. There were gathering for a charge, with a leader leaping and screaming and whirling a long double-bitted axe around his head, pointing and calling his gang forward. He looked notably strong, much thicker-set than most of his scrawny scavenger band.

  A hundred paces, he thought. Not point-blank, but not far either.

  There were other savages closer, and turning to look at them, but that was the threat to Órlaith. He yelled to Diarmuid:

  “Keep them off us while we shoot, man!” and put an arrow to his bow even as he knew that eleven bows weren’t enough, not even eleven Mackenzie longbows. There must be near five-score grouping ready to rush, and the shooting was bad—trees and patches of cover, and they were close enough to get to handstrokes in a few seconds at a run.

  Then behind him that same familiar rough voice: “Arra, ye gombeens—”

  Then an instant’s silence as his father took in the situation with the swiftness of a lifetime as a warrior, and much louder with a hard edge of command:

  “Ah, shite! Deploy to me right, double-line harrow, deploy. Action front, target yon loathly grugach and his band. And you young bastards, with us the now, together with us, so!”

  He didn’t need to turn his head to know that the High King’s Archers were falling in to his right, westward. He heard the infinitely familiar chant next, like a cold cloth to the face, steadying and taking the glaze of horror off things:

  “We are the point—”

  • • •

  Then Órlaith’s head whipped around as she heard voices from the north, equally distant from her little band and the gathering Eater mob:

  “We are the point—

  We are the edge—

  We are the wolves that Hecate fed!”

  The arrows came right on the heels of the chant, a hard blurring ripple through the brushwood. A man beside the savage chief pitched backward with a gray-fletched clothyard shaft through his throat and smashed through his neckbone too. Another plowed through his own upper arm and more into the band around him. They dodged, scattering as the next volley snapped in, and the next. The kilted archers in their green jacks were running forward, coming in from the north and halting every ten paces in a pattern she remembered seeing from earliest childhood, moving easily through the trees and brush. The voice that directed them was familiar too, and not Karl’s or Diarmuid’s:

  “Wholly together—draw—loose! Forward—halt—wholly together—draw—loose!”

  Karl and Mathun, she thought. But there are too many for just them. That’s two or three-score longbows. Is that their da, by Lugh of the Long Hand?

  A rider on a quarter horse was with them, shooting too, and raising a shout:

  “Hokahe!”

  That was the Lakota war-cry, and it meant up and at ’em, pretty much.

  And a tearing scream:

  “McClintock abu!”

  Swordsmen with claymores and claidheamh mòr and gruesome Lochaber axes loped forward in a unison more like a wolfpack than a regiment. The wounded chief with the axe hesitated as the band bore down on him, then screamed frustration for an instant before his face calmed:

  “Ufukkinrun!” he barked, and turned and dove into the brush. The rest followed him.

  “They’re running!” Deor yelled. “They’re all running!”

  His oath-sister beat one back with her shield, but he’d simply been rammed into it by the press behind him; his bad luck as he fell flat and she stamped accurately with a bootheel. More and more came dodging through the woods. The band who’d been about to overrun Órlaith and her friends before the archers struck had been in some sort of order as they retreated. Order as Eaters understood such things, but what she saw now was blind panic.

  Perhaps literally so. “Pan has their souls! Panikon deima!” Heuradys shouted exultantly.

  Above on the hill horns were sounding; the deep sonorous burring snarl of the Hraefnbeorg fyrd, and others that were higher, lighter, several notes together in a haunting chorus, and voices like hawks at war.

  Now it was a flood and crackle and crazed screeching as hundreds of the Eaters went by, wholly taken by the terror at their heels, ignoring even the arrows that scourged them from the newly-arrived Mackenzies as they threw their weapons aside and ran heedless. They parted about Órlaith’s little band where they stood shield to shield, like water around a rock in a swift stream. Behind them came the reason; mounted fighters, score after score of them on white and dappled-gray horses, in spired helms and round shields graven with the silver Tree and Stars and Crown, wearing the light breast-and-back of jointed plates, mail sleeves and arm-guards the Dúnedain bore when they rode to open war.

  “Lacho Calad! Drego morn!”

  Most of them passed by, shooting and slashing with their long-hilted curved swords. Órlaith would have expected Faramir and Morfind to follow, but instead they were kneeling by the fallen horse. She sighed heavily and sheathed the Sword, walking over to them.

  Luck doesn’t go on forever, she thought.

  It had run out altogether for Luanne Salander of Larsdalen and the Bearkiller Outfit. From the look of it the horse had landed heavily on her legs and pelvis and rolled over her before it died; her lower limbs pointed in directions that made Órlaith wince just to contemplate. There was a fair amount of blood, and more was leaking out of the corners of her mouth. The two Rangers each held a hand, and they were gripped with a white-knuckled clench despite the two empty morphine syringes lying beside her. Sometimes that could only help with the pain, not stop it. You didn’t have to cut loose the sodden clothing to know a wounding that could only end in death, over hours of soul-crushing agony until you died like a beast. Anyone would know, who’d seen battlefields, or even been around horses and knew what happened when a thousand pounds of bone and muscle crushed a human body against the unyielding ground.

  Deor’s friend Thora Garwood stepped forward and drew her dagger.

  “I am a Bearkiller, of this woman’s folk, and a Sister of the A-List as is she. It is my duty by the oaths of the Brotherhood we both swore to do her the final service.”

  She touched the small blue burn-mark between her brows as she spoke with a somber formality.

  “Are any here of this warrior’s blood-kin?”

  “We are,” Faramir sai
d. “Our mothers are aunts to Luanne’s mother. And we are her friends and comrades-in-arms.”

  “I am her kinswoman,” Órlaith said; they’d both always acknowledged the link, at least. “And her friend and comrade-in-arms and her sworn lord by right of blood and oath.”

  “And I,” John said, with a slight catch in his voice. “And I am of her faith. I will have masses said for the peace of her soul, I swear it.”

  It was obvious by the Thor’s Hammer at her neck that Thora wasn’t Christian. Luanne’s eyes tracked to him and she nodded as he knelt beside her and held up his crucifix. She couldn’t really speak, but her lips moved a little as he said the words:

  “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you. I detest my own sins and faults because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell, but, most of all, because they offend You, my God, Who are all Good and deserving of all of my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Your grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin, Amen.”

  He touched the silver figure of the Man of Sorrows to her lips and added:

  “Sáncta María, Máter Déi, óra pro nóbis peccatóribus, nunc et in hóra mórtis nóstrae. Ámen.”

  Thora looked around and met their eyes. They all nodded agreement to it; it was something that was necessary, and they were all profoundly glad there was someone else who could be trusted to do it. She knelt swiftly as John rose and held the weapon before Luanne’s eyes. The younger woman nodded sharply, consenting, and freed one of her hands to grip Thora’s convulsively for an instant. A small sound echoed in her throat, choked off hastily. Thora put her left hand over Luanne’s eyes and turned her head, placed the point behind the ear and did what was needful with a single hard skilled motion. There was a heavy twitch, and merciful stillness.

  Then she closed the eyes, stood, threw the knife to sink point-first in a tree and quiver like a giant bee before she stalked off into the woods to stand with her back to them, hands clutching her elbows across her body. Deor went to her side and stood silently, not speaking or touching her but shielding them both with his presence.