The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (29 page)

Men were fighting; and a few women, though those were mostly younger ones learning unarmed combat, shooting crossbows on the
range, knife-fighting or working with glaives—bladed polearms not unlike the
naginata
, though the blade was shorter and straight, heavier, and had a hook at the rear. Here as in Japan all noblewomen learned self-defense but few made a career of the sword, though there were exceptions. Reiko suppressed a smile as a giggle rose behind them but did let her eyes narrow in amusement since her companion couldn’t see it: except for servants sweeping and cleaning, the
women
present wore clothes very closely resembling her kimono and
hakama
 . . . or her Imperial Guard commander’s uniform.

Egawa had seethed for hours when he found that he was, by local standards, wearing women’s dress, suitable for an elegant noble lady out to take the air. And while he found breeks ugly he thought actual tight hose, which was what Associates wore as the alternative, actively obscene; fortunately they usually went with something loose and concealing worn over it, down to thigh-length or the knees.

The men practiced with shield and sword and shield and spear, and men-at-arms with shields and swords or using a two-handed technique, or with various polearms; classes of beginners as young as six hacked at wooden pells or practiced
kata
. The combat in full armor had looked unsophisticated at first, but there was skill to it as well as straightforward battling, hard and quick and murderous. A couple of trials had shown that the big teardrop-shaped shields were both an effective protection and a menacing weapon that was irritatingly hard to deal with, though the Montivallan knights were also surprised with what a real expert could do with the katana. Shouts and clatter filled the air and then faded behind as they passed. There was an odor of clean sweat, cloth and greased metal and leather and weathered wood in sunlight, things half-familiar and half-strange.

She and Egawa walked through the corridors, nodding to bows, until they reached a large open-sided room whose floor was covered in straw mats over boards. Hooks showed where board panels could be put up between the thick wooden columns to make solid walls in winter. Racks around the pillars held weapons and gear, and there were full-length mirrors on the one solid inner wall. A dais at one end had chairs for
spectators; right now four of them were occupied, by Baroness d’Ath, Lady Delia and her youngest daughter Yolande. This household had a rather . . .

Unusual and distinctive set of domestic arrangements,
she thought; even more so for this part of Montival than they would be for Japan, she gathered.
But certain patterns seem to hold in all these
han
, these fiefs.

The fourth was a young man, younger than she but full-grown, in dark rich clothes though not black except for the mourning band. D’Ath rose and bowed. Both of the ladies curtsied to Reiko, the colorful skirts of their garments spreading like flowers, and she nodded in return, before she and Egawa racked their swords and she the polearm.

The young man made a bow too, but not as deep. Reiko blinked thoughtfully at him, memorizing the face, then put it out of her mind for the present. When you fought Egawa Noboru, even for sport and training, you did well to focus completely.

They took the practice weapons they would use in hand—he an oak
bokken
, a wooden katana, and she a
naginata
, a two-foot curved wooden sword mounted on a six-foot shaft—and she could feel his attitude changing. Long ago he had first told her that there was no rank in a dojo except that of student and teacher, and on a battlefield that of victor and vanquished. Then he had proceeded to run her ragged and on occasion administer fine sets of bruises.

They sank to their knees and sat back. Two figures in hose and black padded canvas doublets and wire masks attached to leather helmets much like the ones she and Egawa carried were facing each other in the center of the floor, with straight long swords and twelve-inch poniards in their gauntleted hands; the blades were edgeless and had rounded points. An instructor who worked here—an older man with a patchy white beard, a limp, and a scar on his face that crossed an empty eye-socket and took the tip off his nose—raised a white baton above his head.

“Ready!”

The masked figures raised their swords hilt-high before their faces in salute, the movements swift and smooth and definite.

“Position!”

That was left foot slightly forward and dagger advanced, knees a bit crooked, long sword held with the hilt high and point down. The white rod whipped groundward.

“Fight!”

Egawa gave a happy sigh beside her, having found something which did indeed make him stop worrying for a while. She blinked; the movements had been very fast, a blurring flicker and a
ting-ting-ting
of metal on metal, feint-strike-parry-strike-strike-parry, a brief grapple and hard blows with knee and elbow and the pommels of the weapons, and then they were apart again. They began to circle, feet rutching with careful swiftness on the mats, balance transferred without ever being lost.

Ting-ting-ting-
crash. One of the contestants was thrown, but rolled head-over-heels and came back to her feet in guard position even as the other advanced with a series of stamping lunges.
Ting-ting-ting!

Very softly, and without taking her eyes from the contestants, she said: “Mostly with the point.”

“And cuts from the wrist,” Egawa said. “Straight cuts, not drawing ones such as we use. Intriguing.”

“But still, this is not altogether unlike Musashi’s two-sword style,” she observed.

Equally low, Egawa murmured: “And for comparable reasons, Majesty. This is their duelist’s style, designed for fighting a single unarmored opponent.”

She nodded. The great author of the
Book of Five Rings
had fought in some of the last engagements of the Age of Battles, but he had spent most of his martial career in the opening years of the long peace, when the samurai were warriors without wars to fight. For the conflict of one man against another in a duel or a scrambling affray in some feud he was unsurpassed, but he dealt less succinctly with the more linear and massive form of combat when organized groups collided.

Another exchange, a parry not quite complete, and a blunt-tipped sword flashed up under one figure’s ribs, producing an
ooof
of expelled breath.

“Kill!” the man with the baton said. “Match to Lady Heuradys. Set to Lady Heuradys, five-two.”

They saluted again, and Heuradys spoke while her liege-lady caught her breath:

“Thank you, Sir Bohort.”

“Skewered my liver again, Herry,” Órlaith wheezed, taking off her mask to show a face flushed and braided hair darkened with sweat and bowing slightly to the knight of the
salle
. “If I wasn’t wearing padding I’d be peeing red.”

“That’ll happen for real, Orrey, if you keep getting overextended on those lunges. Stay centered!”

“Next pair,” the one-eyed man said. “Lady Heuradys and Crown Princess Órlaith yield the floor
d’escrime
to Lord General Egawa and Her Majesty of Nippon.”

Reiko and her
bushi
knelt facing each other, donned their mask-helmets. Then . . . slowly . . . each came to one knee. She held her
naginata
grounded with the butt beside her right foot; the Imperial Guard commander’s right hand crossed to rest on the hilt of the wooden sword. She watched Egawa—not his eyes or hands or even the way his feet moved ever so slightly as his toes curled ready to grip, but all of them at the same time. The general was her height almost to a hair, considerably heavier, and much, much stronger. He wasn’t
quite
as fast, but he was still lethally quick.

Without thinking, the tiny signs flowed through her to produce action
without
thought, like a stone sinking into still water. Thought was far too slow to play with naked steel. Thought was death.

“Fight!”

Egawa came up off the mat as if invisible cords had jerked him forward, the
bokken
flashing out and up and then down in the overarm cut, the pear-splitter. Reiko blocked with the haft of the
naginata
held horizontally above her head and one leg back, and there was a hard
crack!
of impact as the tough wood flexed under the heavy blow. A battle weapon’s shaft would have had steel wire or strips to protect it. She grunted slightly as the force of it made her bent arms sink down like springs, absorbing some of the force with her knees, and swept the polearm in a blurring circle. Egawa blocked, struck, came at her in an appalling combination of speed and precision and hard power; she kept the shaft whirling . . .

The first bout ended with her knocked skidding on her back for half a dozen yards. The second left her dazed and blinking for a few moments after the
bokken
glanced off her helmet; the scar-faced supervising knight insisted on looking into her eyes before nodding and stepping back and making a sharp horizontal gesture with the wand to show that there was no concussion.

The third went into a continuous flurry of block-strike-block that lasted for a very long time for a fight—fully fifteen seconds or a little more, with Reiko holding her own though the continuous whirlwind battering forced her back a half-step at a time. Sometimes on a battlefield there was no space for fancy footwork; you didn’t want to train bad reflexes in. There were no focusing shouts, no
kiai
, after the first—every particle of breath was for use.

They both stepped back from that one, conceding a draw. Only an effort of will kept her limbs from shaking and she ignored the spots before her eyes as they drifted and then faded away. Similar discipline kept her from panting, instead deliberately stretching her lungs to take in as much air as they could, holding it for an instant and then exhaling from the bottom of her rib cage.

“This will be the last,” Sir Bohort said in his rasping damaged voice.

They had both picked up enough of the local etiquette of the
salle d’armes
to know that the knight of the ring’s decision was final and beyond dispute, accepted instantly regardless of rank. Reiko didn’t regret it; she felt as if she’d been dropped into a barrel with a tiger and rolled down the side of a mountain. It was some consolation that Egawa wasn’t moving with
quite
the same deadly fluidity that he had been at first. He treated every single bout as if it was a duel to the death, pacing himself to the task at hand alone.

Old man, this is my time,
she thought.

“Fight!”

With the
naginata
you had the reach of a giant and the leverage multiplied impact almost as much. A few seconds later the ball at the end of the shaft—representing the sharp butt-spike of a real weapon—struck Egawa on the rear of his knee. She was whirling and driving the blade
down even as he fell, and his block was only two-thirds complete when the curved edge lay along his neck.

“Kill!” the referee said. “Match to Her Majesty. Set to Lord Egawa, two-one-one.”

Egawa was struggling to suppress a grin as he came—cautiously—to his feet again. The first time she had ever managed to beat him, a little over a year ago, her instructor had bowed expressionlessly before he limped away.

And then, she heard later, ended the night celebrating at his favorite
izakaya
with a few old cronies, drinking and singing and roaring for more sake and plates of pickles and
yakitori
until the town watch had to fetch his two eldest sons to carry him home. Where no doubt their mother had had something interesting to say about the matter in tones of exquisite restraint that cut like shards of broken glass. Possibly without even using words at all.

The next bout he had pushed her twice as hard. By now she was winning about one time in four or five. With the
naginata
, of course; with swords, it was still an uninterrupted series of defeats, her only consolation being that some of them were now fairly
narrow
defeats.

“Your knee?” she asked.

“It will be all right in a day,” he said now. Then he bowed deeply: “Majesty!”

She inclined her head slightly. “General Egawa. Also, how is your hand?”

He flexed his left. “The wound was very narrow, and struck nothing important, no bones or severed tendons. It is healing well, though my grip has not yet recovered all its strength. Using it helps prevent adhesions within and loss of flexibility. It will serve, Majesty.”

There would be pain, of course, though both of them ignored that.

She caught his eye for a moment in emphasis. “It has already served
me
,” she said. “I had an excellent view of the narrow point after you put that hand between the knife and my face—it was exactly on course for my left eye.”

He bowed again and limped away once more towards the baths.
Órlaith and her
hatamoto
fell in with Reiko after she had racked her
naginata
and practice armor.

“In your average Protectorate
salle
our part of the baths are an afterthought tucked away behind something,” Heuradys said with a smile. “Not here, though. Three guesses why?”

“Ah . . . I think I can guess, yes,” Reiko said.

She was getting to the point where she could catch humor in English, but not with absolute certainty, and sometimes that spoiled it even when you
did
realize the meaning.

“You have separate for men and women, yes?” she said.

She
thought
that was what Heuradys had just said, but best to check. When Órlaith wasn’t using her uncanny command of Nihongo everything was frustratingly difficult.

“Yes, we do,” Heuradys said.

“What’s this
we
, northerner?” Órlaith said lightly.

“
We
do, at least, we Associates. The Mackenzies don’t, except for guests who prefer it that way, but then they’re barbarians from the backwoods—unless you count McClintocks. You have separate facilities in Japan?”