The Desert and the Blade Read online

  “So little time since we were here last, and so much has happened,” she said softly in her own language.

  Guard commander Egawa Noboru ducked his head wordlessly at her side. His face showed little expression at the best of times. At the reminder that his Emperor had died while he lived it became more a thing of stone and silence than ever.

  Since then I have put the Water of the Last Moment on my father’s lips and filled his funeral urn.

  She let the raw pain of loss flow through her without holding on to it with the fingers of attention. Pain hurt, grief perhaps worst of all, but it wasn’t important. Her father had told her and shown her by example that the key to sanity in their position was to keep in mind that the role and the human being, the mask and the face beneath, were both real, but not to confuse the two. Her role was important, critically so; that was giri, duty and obligation. The person inside it and the emotions that person felt, the yearnings and desires and sufferings, the ninjo, not so very much. Not compared to persistence and doing what was necessary. You went on as long as you could and then a little more, that was all.

  Instead of tears, she continued steadily: “The world has Changed yet again. Or perhaps that started when my father first saw the Grass-Cutting Sword in his dreams.”

  “Majesty, many apologies, I am ashamed to admit that I did not truly grasp Saisei Tenno’s great visions,” the commander of the Imperial Guard said. “I beg the Heavenly Sovereign Majesty’s pardon for my stupidity, my inexcusable blindness.”

  The general bowed as he spoke, his full set of armor creaking and clattering a little, and he used her father’s posthumous era-name: Emperor of Rebirth. He was in his forties, more than two decades older than she. Older than her father had been as well, a short thick man built like something carved out of seasoned kuri wood, his weathered face and hands seamed with scars. The one that pierced his left hand from palm to back was the freshest, where he’d moved with desperate speed to put his own flesh between her and one of a pair of throwing-knives a bakachon prisoner had hidden just long enough. The other blade had been aimed at Princess Órlaith, and killed her father when he thrust her behind him.

  “Yet you followed, and you were the key to putting aside those who opposed or obeyed unwillingly,” she said gently. “Without your service, we would not be here now.”

  And I would be dead, she thought but did not say.

  That was something that only had to be brought up once.

  Egawa Noboru fulfilled his duty, and nobody who knows him would be surprised.

  “I followed because he was our Tenno. I knew that without discipline and unity we would be truly and utterly lost, Majesty. And—so sorry—because Saisei Tenno had been right so often before. And because nothing more . . . more ordinary . . . had any real prospect of long-term success, only of slower defeat. Now . . .”

  “None of us truly grasped his vision, General,” she said, making a gesture of pardon with her folded steel tessen war-fan.

  Nor do you now, she thought. Though you are my most loyal retainer.

  All of them were loyal in an abstract sense, to the concept of the Chrysanthemum Throne, to the dynasty and the nation it embodied and symbolized. But Egawa was loyal to her. He’d overseen the martial part of her education, administering painful and stressful parts of it personally. And he respected her as an individual in a way that the peculiar distant closeness of teacher and disciple made possible, for in the dojo you learned another to the core, without many words being necessary. That was why he was here, and why Grand Steward Koyama Akira had been left behind at Montinore Manor, with only a letter to tell him what she had chosen when he awoke that morning.

  Koyama had been born a little before the Change, and he had a tendency to think of her as still a wayward, headstrong child to be guided and restrained . . . albeit a clever, promising child to be restrained with exquisite deferential courtesy. The quiet but real rivalry between the two men hadn’t hurt in bringing Egawa into the plot, either, of course.

  And your father led the Seventy Loyal Men who saved my grandmother’s life at the cost of so many of their own. Loyalty beyond all powers of human endurance, beyond all mere human reason, runs in your blood. No, you do not grasp, my bushi, but now you truly believe, at least. As your father and his men did not flinch from the wrath of the Great Kami in a world become fire and death, so you will not turn back from this.

  She glanced forward. Órlaith and her hatamoto Heuradys d’Ath were walking back towards the quarterdeck as the crew prepared; she suppressed an impulse to smile and wave. The occasion was too public and too grave. There were many differences of detail, but the essential form was still quite like that of an Imperial Navy ship preparing for battle. Not that they expected a fight, not yet, but . . .

  “Good to be prepared for the unexpected, Majesty,” Egawa said.

  A grudging approval was in his hoarse gravelly voice, and a bit of surprise that a mere gaijin merchant captain had earned it.

  “Our men are ready to come on deck at a moment’s notice,” he added in the clipped impersonal tones of a report. “Their state of readiness is high and morale is excellent.”

  “And the Montivallans seem reasonably alert as well,” Egawa added.

  The rest of the Imperial Guard samurai were below with Órlaith’s men-at-arms. Though communication was very limited, mostly by written message, both groups had achieved a certain wary mutual respect since the High King’s party rescued the Nihonjin from the overwhelmingly superior force of bakachon marines and Haida pirates. It helped very much that they had a common enemy, and that of all Montivallans the member-realm called the Portland Protective Association seemed paradoxically closest to her own Empire in its approach to life. And . . .

  She looked at the Sword of the Lady by Órlaith’s side. Much of the time it seemed only a sword, recognizably of superlative quality despite being of the alien Western form, straight and double-edged with a curved bar guard and moonstone-crystal pommel clutched in antlers.

  Reiko’s fingers stroked the black lacquered scabbard of the weapon thrust through her own sash, an ancient masterwork of the legendary swordsmith Masamune, a shoshu kitai of seven laminations. It even had a name of its own: Kotegiri, steel-cutter, from a famous incident of battle in the Genko War more than seven centuries ago. Great warriors, daimyo and rulers had borne this sword, and handed it down through the generations by inheritance or as spoils of war or as a treasured gift meant to bestow great honor, until it had passed into the collection of her five-times-grandfather Meiji Tenno in the twelfth year of his reign.

  The leader of the Seventy Loyal Men had taken it from its display-case to carve a path to survival for her grandmother and rally the tattered remnants of the nation. Then he had presented it to her father when he came of age. It had been the sword of the Saisei Tenno—Emperor of Rebirth—in a dozen desperate fights against the jinnikukaburi enemy, until he fell three months ago with this very katana in his hands and an arrow in his breast . . .

  And now to me.

  When you drew this creation of jewel steel and subtle human art and deep time . . . felt its balance in your grasp as sweetly sure and true as the flight of a hawk down the slope of Ojisan . . . then all the long, long history of her people became a living presence. A tale written in beauty and blood, glory and tears.

  The tranquility of rice bowing before the sickle, she thought. And deeds like skies full of storm.

  The Sword of the Lady was something else entirely. No mortal smith had ever smelted its metal from the bones of earth or laid it across his anvil beneath the hammer. Órlaith had said she thought it might not be matter at all, as humans defined the term, but instead a thought in the mind of her Goddess embodied in the world of human kind without being wholly of it. Certainly it had taken no hurt from resting on the High King’s breast when he was on his funeral pyre . . . and she had seen it standing h
ilt-upright when the towering flames subsided, enclosed for a moment in sparks like moving coils of golden light.

  When you came closer the eye was drawn, inward and inward, into depths beyond depths until you had to wrench your gaze away. Despite her burning curiosity she had never felt the slightest impulse to touch it, though. Something prevented her; not hostility, but a feeling of friendly apartness like a cat looking at you and then glancing away, or a glimpse into another’s home in the evening dusk as a sliding door was opened and shut and spilled lamplight for an instant. There was a welcome there, but not for you.

  Which is entirely fitting. As Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi is ours, so this is theirs. To each land and people their own spirits and the mysteries woven into the fabric of their being. To be sure that blade is a very young mystery, but every story must have a beginning . . . and Father once said that the Change did more than end the era of the machines. It reopened a doorway in the world. One that had slowly closed over many thousands of years, a passage to the time of legends, so that they walk among us once more. And there is no doubting that it is a powerful mystery, a true shintai, the dwelling-place of kami.

  When it was unsheathed, even for practice, the world flexed, as if the very underlying fabric of reality was like the skin of a great o-daiko drum struck by the player’s club.

  Once you have seen an actual magic sword, searching for one of your own becomes more credible! Even if you have not seen what Father saw. What I have now seen myself. And more.

  “General . . .” she said quietly. “You know that I have seen what my father saw in my own dreams; the desert, the castle, the eight heads; but his vision was . . . abstract. He saw these things. I see myself amid these things, as does our ally.”

  She moved her eyes towards Órlaith for an instant. Egawa nodded, a little grudgingly. He would have very much preferred that they handle this business altogether by themselves. But he was pragmatist enough to see that they had no choice, and Órlaith’s dogged, courteous insistence that she was merely helping the Nihonjin party on its mission soothed his honor.

  She continued: “And on the voyage south, I saw something else. I saw the Grass-Cutting Sword itself.”

  He nodded stolidly; if they were to follow visions seen in dreams, he would use them as he would a scout’s report.

  “In the place we seek it, Majesty? That is good to hear. Intelligence is always helpful.”

  She shook her head, very slightly, and made a small curve through the air with her fan. “No. Nothing so . . . reassuring. I saw it in the hands of Yamato Takeru himself, as he fought his battle in the sea of grass. Wielding it like a whip of fire and air.”

  Egawa blinked. Even by Japanese standards that was extremely long ago. The Brave of Yamato had lived in the reign of his father the twelfth Tenno, according to records indistinguishable from legend, first written down in times much later but themselves very ancient. She was the one hundred and twenty-eighth ruler of the same dynasty.

  “And no. I did not merely dream, even a true dream. I was . . . I was there. And he saw me also. Saw me as the Sun Goddess Herself. For a light shone through me like none other than Hers, and it filled him with fire, made him certain of victory. I saw a myth being born from the womb of time, General: and I was part of it, for a moment a kamigakari, the vessel of She who is my ancestress and his. The years coiled on themselves like a serpent, from today to our beginnings and back.”

  His face changed slightly. It was an expression she’d never seen, not even when they made their last stand in the ruins on the north of this bay expecting utter and final defeat. It took a moment to recognize fear. Or perhaps an awe deep enough to daunt even his rock-strong spirit.

  She smiled with a small quirk of the lips. “This is very disturbing, my faithful bushi. To me, particularly! But it is in no way misfortune. We know that wicked akuma fight for the enemy, neh?”

  “Yes, Majesty,” he replied.

  Of that there was no doubt whatsoever. The bakachon were led and ruled, or more accurately tormented and driven, by the descendants of the man who had ruled part of Korea before the Change. In its aftermath he had claimed to be a kangshinmu, a sorcerer-prophet empowered by superior beings to make cattle of all who were not pure followers of his doctrine. And more than claimed; he and his elite votaries could do things no normal man could. The one who had tried to kill her and the Montivallan princess had done so, surviving wounds that should have left him instantly dead. Surviving just long enough, and his eyes like pools of tar, windows into a nonexistence very far indeed from the mu of the Buddha.

  Some thing had burrowed through the soul of the man that had once been, like a wasp larva inside a grub, leaving a gateway into a nothingness that hated, negation as an active principle.

  Active. And hungry. Hungry for all that is.

  Firmly but calmly she went on: “Should we not then be glad that the kami fight for us? Is ours not the Land of the Gods, and we their descendants?”

  She saw his face settle again, into the familiar grim mask that might have served for an image of a kami itself: if there was a spirit that embodied ganbaru, the quality of absolute determination to overcome and accomplish whether it was possible or not, it would look much like that. It felt a little odd to hearten him, since he did that for her every time she looked at him.

  “What then, Majesty?” he asked.

  Her smile grew a little broader, and she touched the war-fan to his armored shoulder for an instant.

  “Why, then we will go forward, General, I the foremost and you at my right hand. If men oppose us, we will cut them down; if evil spirits assail us, we will call on our guardian kami and defy them; if deserts and mountains and hardship lie in our path we will endure and overcome them. I will take up the sword my divine Ancestress gave us and the Brave of Yamato wielded, and with that and our allies and our own good steel and warrior hearts we will free our people of the terror from the sea and reclaim our homeland. We will have . . . victorious peace.”

  Egawa’s face worked slightly, and for a moment she thought he would drop to his knees and bend his forehead to the deck. Instead he saved them both embarrassment by going to one knee only and bowing at a slight incline with his sword-hand fist to the ground—the warrior’s gesture to his lord on the field of battle.

  No words were necessary.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HRAEFNBEORG, BARONY OF MIST HILLS

  (FORMERLY MENDOCINO COUNTY)

  CROWN PROVINCE OF WESTRIA

  (FORMERLY CALIFORNIA)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  JULY/MÆDMONAÞ 7TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

  Deor Wid-ferende—which meant Wide-farer in the old tongue, the language his folk used for matters of name and lore and ritual—was glad to be home for a visit, sitting on the dais in the middle of his long-dead father’s hall as the long summer day fell towards evening. Here, though, he was Deor Godulfson, son to the first Baron and brother to Lord Godric, the current holder of the title. It had been five years since he had seen his kin.

  More or less glad, anyway, he thought, remembering his father, and the mother who hadn’t long outlived him. I’d forgotten quite how . . . rustic . . . Mist Hills is. Well, most places are; but most of them aren’t places you nearly spent your entire life in. Back then we didn’t know there was anything else but ruins and bones and savages.

  He was a lean man of medium height with pale gray eyes and a harpist’s long deft hands, dark hair gathered in a queue at the back of his neck through a worked silver tie, wiry and fit in his thirty-second summer, his skin tanned and weathered by strange strong suns.

  It was hard to remember being that desperately earnest, naive boy yearning for a world beyond the hills he knew; desperate for knowledge, for beauty, for music . . . full of longings that hadn’t had names.

 
Longing to see the things I’ve seen, he thought. Courts and kings and castles, beaches fringed with palms and the sun making the ocean a lake of crimson as it sank in the southern seas . . . and home again, to wonder if home is still a word you can speak. Are all journeys a circle, like Time itself? Didn’t Woden Himself say something like that to High King in a dream? But you couldn’t really come home again, because by the time you did, both you and home would have changed.

  That must be why he felt as if he were not quite at home in his skin, despite his pleasure in the sharp, sweet bite of Gowan’s cider that filled his mug, and a belly still stretched by the feast his sister-in-law had put together the day of his return—a runner had taken the message to her as soon as a longboat from the ship had put them ashore.

  Thora Garwood leaned towards him from her seat to the left and said softly:

  “Is it all smaller than you remembered?”

  They were of an age, and about the same in height, though his oath-sister was a little thicker-built than he, sprawling at her ease in the carved redwood chair, like a good-natured lynx. She had a graze across the knuckles of her left hand, and a slight mouse under one hazel eye. It had been just long enough since their last visit here for a new crop of eager young idiots to grow up discounting tales of the Bearkiller war-skills marked by the A-list brand between her brows, not to mention her own personal reputation. Eager to make a name for themselves by taking her genial offer of an all-in wrestle, and a little friendly bet on the side. They hadn’t realized what the grins of their older relatives meant until too late, until they were sorry and sore and somewhat lighter of purse. Thora took what he considered a slightly childish glee in winning a bet, just for the sake of the thing and regardless of the stakes.

  “No, not really,” Deor said.

  Up north in the Association lands this barony his father had built from the wreck of a world would be accounted a rather modest knight’s fee bearing a too-grand title. But he’d built it with his own hands, and the willing help of those he’d saved when all else failed them, even the very fabric of things itself.