The Desert and the Blade Read online

  ALSO BY S. M. STIRLING

  NOVELS OF THE CHANGE

  ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME

  AGAINST THE TIDE OF YEARS

  ON THE OCEANS OF ETERNITY

  DIES THE FIRE

  THE PROTECTOR’S WAR

  A MEETING AT CORVALLIS

  THE SUNRISE LANDS

  THE SCOURGE OF GOD

  THE SWORD OF THE LADY

  THE HIGH KING OF MONTIVAL

  THE TEARS OF THE SUN

  LORD OF MOUNTAINS

  THE GIVEN SACRIFICE

  THE GOLDEN PRINCESS

  NOVELS OF THE SHADOWSPAWN

  A TAINT IN THE BLOOD

  THE COUNCIL OF SHADOWS

  SHADOWS OF FALLING NIGHT

  OTHER NOVELS BY S. M. STIRLING

  THE PESHAWAR LANCERS

  CONQUISTADOR

  ROC

  Published by New American Library,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of New American Library.

  Copyright © S. M. Stirling, 2015

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  Roc and the Roc colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information about Penguin Random House, visit penguin.com.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Stirling, S. M.

  The desert and the blade: a novel of the Change / S. M. Stirling.

  pages cm.—(Change series)

  ISBN 978-1-101-60338-3

  1. Regression (Civilization)—Fiction. 2. Quests (Expeditions)—Fiction. 3. Princesses—Fiction. 4. Swords—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.T543D47 2015

  813'.54—dc23 2015013752

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Also by S. M. Stirling

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Map

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  To Jan, forever

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Harry Turtledove, for the loan of Topanga and the Chatsworth Lancers, with which he did things so intriguing I had to play with his toys. And very useful they turned out to be!

  Thanks to Kier Salmon, unindicted co-conspirator, who has been my advisor and helper on the Change since the first. This was a big complex book and she helped immensely.

  To Gina Tacconi-Moore, my niece, flower-girl at my wedding twenty-seven years ago, Queen of Physical Fitness and owner of CrossFit Lowell, who gave me some precise data on what a really fit young woman, such as herself, could do.

  To Steve Brady, native guide to Alba, for assistance with dialects and British background, and also natural history of all sorts.

  Pete Sartucci, knowledgeable in many aspects of Western geography and ecology, including the Mojave and Topanga, and convincing me that one scene went on too long and pointing out an embarrassingly large distance I hadn’t noticed.

  To Miho Lipton and Chris Hinkle, for help with Japanese idiom; and to Stuart Drucker, for assistance with Hebrew.

  Diana L. Paxson, for help and advice, and for writing the beautiful Westria books, among many others. If you liked the Change novels, you’ll probably enjoy the hell out of the Westria books—I certainly did, and they were one of the inspirations for this series; and her “Essential Asatru” and recommendation of “Our Troth” were extremely helpful . . . and fascinating reading. The appearance of the name Westria in the book is no coincidence whatsoever. And many thanks for the loan of Deor Wide-Faring and Thora Garwood.

  To Dale Price, help with Catholic organization, theology and praxis.

  To John Birmingham, aka that silver-tongued old rogue, King Birmo of Capricornia, most republican of monarchs.

  To Cara Shulz, for help with Hellenic bits, including stuff I could not have found on my own.

  To: Walter Jon Williams, John Miller, Vic Milan, Jan Stirling, Matt Reiten, Lauren Teffeau, and Shirl Sayzinski of Critical Mass, for constant help and advice as the book was under construction.

  Thanks to John Miller, good friend, writer and scholar, for many useful discussions, for lending me some great books, and for some really, really cool old movies.

  Special thanks to Heather Alexander, bard and balladeer, for permission to use the lyrics from her beautiful songs which can be—and should be!—ordered at http://faerietaleminstrel.com/inside. Run, do not walk, to do so.

  To Alexander James Adams, http://faerietaleminstrel.com/inside, for cool music, likewise.

  Thanks again to William Pint and Felicia Dale, for permission to use their music, which can be found at www.pintndale.com and should be, for anyone with an ear and salt-water in their veins.

  And to Three Weird Sisters—Gwen Knighton, Mary Crowell, Brenda Sutton, and Teresa Powell—whose alternately funny and beautiful music can be found at http://www.threeweirdsisters.com.

  And to Heather Dale for permission to quote the lyrics of her songs, whose beautiful (and strangely appropriate!) music can be found at www.HeatherDale.com, and is highly recommended. The lyrics are wonderful and the tunes make it even better.

  To S.J. Tucker for permission to use the lyrics of her beautiful songs, which can be found at http://sjtucker.com, and should be.

  And to Lael Whitehead of Jaiya, http://www.broadjam.com/jaiya, for permission to quote the lyrics of her beautiful songs.

  Thanks again to Russell Galen, my agent, who has been an invaluable help, advisor and friend for more than a decade now, and never more than in these difficult times.

  All mistakes, infelicities and errors are of course my own.

  PROLOGUE

  David the Gutter—in the dialect of the Cut-Nose tribe of
Loz’altos it sounded more like Daf’teh-Gutrr—wasn’t insane, strictly speaking; not in the common run of things, that was. But right now his thoughts weren’t as clear as usual while he stared at the bottom of the canoe and waited for the time to attack. He listened to the buzz of insects and the breathing of so many fighters, smelling their stink and the heavy silt-and-decay scent of the salt marsh.

  His parents and grandparents had been mad, until his father met a Mud Hair band who flayed and ate him over days, and his mother stepped out from the fifteenth story of the ruined Palo Alto Office Tower because she heard voices telling her to. Daf’ had taken Mud Hair heads to stand on spears and watch his father’s funeral feast, though their meat had been rather stringy, even baked underground in a pit full of embers and heated stones and lavishly dressed with one of the last precious sealed jars of scavenged BBQ spice rub. Apart from the bloodpower, he actually preferred venison or wild pig. He had buried his mother’s body by collapsing a leaning wall over a hole in the cracked concrete, and squatted brooding for hours, inchoate thoughts for which he had no words trickling through his mind. He’d gripped the haft of his axe hard enough to make his fingers ache, wishing there was an enemy he could smash down, and then he’d howled and slashed the air until the feral macaques had fled chittering up the vine-grown ruins.

  The squat, heavily-muscled Cut-Nose was at home in the world the Change had left him, and he’d never believed much of the stories of the Old Time. Partly that was the fact that the thick gobbling variety of English he’d grown up with had a severely limited vocabulary; the founders of his folk had deliberately avoided thought as much as they could, to keep despair and self-loathing at bay. Mostly it was because his world was the overgrown ruins of what had once been Palo Alto and its neighbors, the little clans of the Cut-Noses, and the endless game of stalking and feasting that gave their lives meaning.

  He was the most feared of all the chiefs, the one who’d extended the sway of those who bore the three horizontal scars on their noses over all the southeastern part of the peninsula. It was he who’d seen that the new enemies north of the Bridge, the ones with the stars and tree on their frighteningly subtle gear and the dirt-pushers they guarded, were not just a new tribe. They were a threat to all the tribes. It was he—puzzling endlessly over a captured Ranger bow—who’d whittled out a duplicate from lumps of wood and the tips of skis. His people valued him so highly they’d nursed him through the injuries he’d sustained when he avenged his father, tempting him with morsels of grilled Mud Hair liver during his illness.

  As he waited bent over in the ancient aluminum canoe he was still puzzling over why he’d listened to the talks-in-head Meat who’d led them here; his dialect also used the same word for outsider and food. He was silent and still; all his folk could be silent and still, or they would have died young. Even children who cried out of season had to be killed, despite the constant, desperate need for more fighters and mothers. It was not good to talk much.

  It had just seemed . . . good to do what the Meat who could walk in your head told them to do. The way it felt good to rut and eat and kill and sleep and wake. The way things should be, always would be. But when he tried to think why it was good his mind stuttered, like his step did now in cold weather, or when he was very tired.

  One reason he’d stayed a chief was that he could think himself inside the heads of others, imagine how they spoke to themselves in the place behind the eyes where they lived. He could remember when he was a Little how he’d started to do that, and the realization that most couldn’t, that they were slow and stupid and like dandelion fuzz inside their heads, while he was sharp like the edge of a carefully honed knife.

  Now he felt that way himself when he tried to think about why he obeyed the Meat.

  Feel . . . dumb, he thought.

  Almost he whimpered, there in the dappled shade of the tall reeds. A flush of fear-sweat trickled down his flanks. He was the most feared of the Cut-Noses, but a half-dozen blades would have pierced his hide if he’d lost control on an ambush.

  A ripple broke the surface of the water in the little inlet. Not a Fur, not the big flipper-foot kinds or the fine meat kind or any of the others. Heads turned towards it, eyes glaring in utter quiet. It was one of the Sharp Teeth. The man raised his face a little out of the water and spoke in their nasty hissing way, tongue flickering between the blackened filed points:

  “They come,” he said, and swam away again through the dozen or so canoes in this inlet to the next, where more waited.

  Daf’ raised his eyes. Not long after sunup. Hideously exposed if they attacked now; fighting was for the dark, or where there was dense cover. But they must.

  “Gegown,” he said softly, and dipped his paddle. “Mowv.”

  All around him the warriors of the Eater tribes of the Bay followed suit.

  CHAPTER ONE

  GOLDEN GATE/GLORANNON

  (FORMERLY SAN FRANCISCO BAY)

  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

  Crown Princess Órlaith Arminger Mackenzie put her right hand to a stay and shaded her eyes with her left, looking landward as the fog-shrouded Golden Gate loomed before the Tarshish Queen’s bow. Behind her the booms of the big merchant schooner’s three gaff mainsails swung out to starboard, with a thump and twang she could feel as a shiver through her feet as well as her fingers when the travelers reached the end of their play and the foot of the forestaysail swept by overhead. They were beating back and forth until the fogbank lifted enough for the tricky passage into the Bay.

  Her father had died there beyond the bridge, on the northern shore of the great inland water, at the hands of men who’d come this very path not three months gone.

  Don’t remember his death every moment, she told herself.

  Which was wise, but hard, hard to do. Grandmother Juniper had once said to her that if wisdom was easy any fool would be able to do it. Then she’d thumped down the beater on her big loom with fingers age-gnarled but still deft and Órlaith had pinched out the lamp-wicks and both of them laughed. They’d been laughing still as they went down the stairs to sit by the hearth in the hall below, to watch winter cider simmering on the hob and listen to Aunt Fiorbhinn patiently leading her latest apprentice through a piece on the harp and breathe in the strong fir-sap scent of the Yule Tree.

  It wasn’t as funny now, though she probably understood it a lot better than she had at seventeen. Perhaps when she too was past seventy she’d be able to laugh at the thought again.

  Though I’m not likely to see threescore and ten either. The ending completes our lives, it doesn’t undo them, whenever it comes. Da died as he lived, as a warrior and a father and a King. As an enemy of the enemies of human kind.

  He’d died because he put himself between her and a blade, a sneak attack by a prisoner with a pair of holdout throwing knives. After the battle was supposedly over, no time for anything but pure action without thought of consequence . . . She didn’t feel guilty about it, or doubt for an instant that he’d have done exactly the same thing with a week to ponder it. Rudi Mackenzie would have been the first to say that it was the way of nature for a parent to fall defending his child—and then he’d have laughed and advised her to leave guilt to the Christians.

  No, what she felt was loss, sorrow sharp as steel biting her flesh. Not just at his death, the ache that would have followed whenever he went to the Guardians of the Western Gate, but at the time and manner of it. A gripping bitterness that she’d never see him as an old man sitting in the sun and watching children play with a mug near his elbow and a cat curled in his lap and a smile on his face. That he would never spin tales of his wars and his wanderings and the wonders he’d seen and done with he
r children around him before the hearth with their faces rapt, or have them there to close his eyes and keen him to the pyre. Tired and ready for his rest, this life drained to the dregs and welcoming the shadow of the raven wings like cooling shade.

  And she felt rage at those who had denied him that. Rage enough to boil the blood, rage that came back to choke her when she was halfway through a swallow of food or admiring a spray of flowers against a whitewashed wall or letting her eyelids drift downward after a hard day’s ride.

  Revenge you will take, but don’t brood on it; that’s a sharp knife you have to grasp by the blade—the tales are full of it warping even heroes. Da walked to the Dark Mother smiling, with open eyes, meeting the King’s fate unflinching. Your fate too, one day. For the lord and the land and the folk are one, and we of the Royal kin are the sacrifice that gives itself, dying that our people may live. Even when you were a little lass, he never hid from you that death comes for us all. Think of his life instead.

  She remembered when her first dog Maccon had been very old and the great shaggy beast had taken his last sickness, growing gaunt and thin and trembling, groaning sometimes in his basket at the foot of her bed. Until the healers shook their heads at her demands, Princess or no, and told her that things could only grow worse, and that quickly. Soon the pain would be more than the drugs could keep at bay.

  Hold his head in your lap, so he can’t see the knife, Rudi Mackenzie had said gently. Maccon cannot know the why of things, but he knows the what well enough.

  The shade of the tree fell across them both and the bees hummed in the blossoms, that week after Beltane and the season of beginnings. This cherry tree had been the spot she and her dog had liked best to halt when they rambled through the woods about Dun Juniper in the summer season. She would lie and doze and dream with her head on his flank as she watched the west wind move across the valley below, cloud shadow across the rippling fields of gold like a tale told from far away. Until Maccon absently reached around and began to groom her head and she laughed and a single summer stretched out forever alike for both of them. . . .