The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (52 page)

Thoughtfully, Órlaith said: “Are either of you surprised we’re all so light-hearted?”

Luanne looked stricken as she wiped her hands. Heuradys put a hand on Órlaith’s shoulder. The Crown Princess shook her head and gave it a reassuring pat.

“No, not Da. He’d be the last to say that we should mope for a year and a day; don’t give grief less than its natural due, but no more either, was how he put it when my Nonni Sandra died. No, I was thinking . . . we’re heading towards
Los Angeles
—”

It was a name to wake terror, even among the few salvagers who’d made lightning raids for treasures whose location was precisely known. And before that . . . the year of the Change had been bad absolutely everywhere, but the stories out of southern California had been bad even by comparison to the tales her father and Uncle Ingolf and the other veterans of the Quest had told of the death zones of the far east coast. At least there most hadn’t lost their drinking water on the first day.

“—and we’re going right through it. Plus something like the CUT is involved. But I’d say we’re all . . . feeling more sunny about things than before we got away?”

Luanne shrugged. “I had to listen to stories about the Quest of the Sword all my life, since my aunts Mary and Ritva were
on
the Quest . . .”

Mary and Ritva had also met their men on the Quest, and eventually settled far south, not far from where the Montivallans had met the Japanese and their pursuers. Though they were Dúnedain, not Bearkillers.

“. . . well, you would have even more, Orrey . . . and then the Prophet’s War and my parents and
grandparents
, by the sword of St. Michael, doing the larger-than-life thing. And I’ve been thinking since I made the A-List, what was it all
for
? Thinking about an
entire life
spent on call-up drills and getting
everyone in the Strategic Hamlet to keep their pikes in proper dressing when they’re crossing an obstacle and deep conversations about whether the new mare is really sound breeding stock and whether the vineyards need Bordeaux mixture this year and the most exciting thing I do being hunt boar and breed and maybe visit Corvallis for the theater season. Not that I’ve got anything against hunting and sure, I want babies and a man of my own, but not
yet
, you know? When my mother was my age she was flying gliders against the Prophet and hanging upside down over grizzlies.”

“I was worried about you, Orrey, until we got started organizing this,” Heuradys said. “And, well . . . I mean, everything Luey just said, squared. By the Gray-Eyed,
cubed
! But I think something like this is what you need. Provided we don’t get killed and have our hearts cut out and eaten, but
you’re
not going to live a quiet, safe life anyway. It’s not in your blood. And . . . your father was my King, too. I’m a knight of the High Kingdom and the Household, I want to avenge him. I
need
to do it. Maybe not as much as you do, but . . . a lot.”

Órlaith sighed and nodded. “Thank you both. If I’m being stupid, at least it’s in good company. And to be sure, the Powers seem to be pointing in this direction. It’s never wise to ignore Them.”

Reiko finished her drill; for her that involved a looping gesture like flicking blood off the sword and wiping it as it was sheathed with a piece of paper carried tucked into her sash. Then she joined them, breathing deep and with sweat running down her face despite the sea-breeze.

“Day . . . the day does not feel light . . . right! Right, without doing
kata
,” she said.

“Me next!” Luanne said.

Her eagerness proved the point, and she bounced up into the space Reiko had vacated, bringing up her shield with the backsword reserved.

“I’d like to look at that sword,” Órlaith said to Reiko, in her language. “It’s lovely. May I?”

In Japanese, it was words that turned back into English would have been more on the order of:

Please excuse me, but may I ask that you do me the great favor of letting me look at your (prefix: beautiful/gracious/honorable) sword?

The Sword of the Lady gave her an instinctive command of any language she needed—she was being exactly as polite as she would have been in English—but she still
thought
about it occasionally as she spoke. When she did, it was a little like seeing a stereoscope image not quite properly aligned. A literal translation of the phrase that popped into her mind in English would have been
rude
, the sort of way you’d address a naughty child or possibly a prisoner. And if you translated the Japanese directly into English, it sounded silly. Yet the meanings were identical, native-speaker to native-speaker.

I don’t think it’s that the Sword gives me social skills, it’s that
some
such skills are built into the way a language is structured and just absorbed as you grow up,
she thought.
And I get that for free
.

She could tell by imagining it that she’d have used slightly different phrasing to a man, or if
she
were a man, or if they hadn’t been of virtually identical rank. Reiko had told her a couple of days ago that she had beautiful conversational manners
in the modern style
, which probably meant the way things had gone in her generation.

The Japanese woman hesitated only an instant before saying:
“Hai,”
and touching the sheathed weapon. “It should be cared for soon anyway, in this damp salt air. But better we look below. There’s too much spray here.”

They went down the hatchway and down what sailors insisted on calling a ladder, though
very steep staircase
would have been more accurate, stowed their weapons and gear and took turns with the tiny cold-salt-water shower where you pumped with one hand and tried to wash with the other at the same time—even on a shore-hugging voyage, fresh water was limited to a little for wiping down with a cloth afterwards to get the salt off. As they went down the passage she heard John playing his lute in the little cabin he was sharing with Aleaume, Droyn and Feldman’s first mate; this was probably the only time in the day when he had it to himself, and he was playing short fragments, stopping, playing again. Reiko looked a question at her.

“Composing,” Órlaith said. “Trying out bits and writing them down.”

Reiko nodded.
“Rippa na kodo,”
she said.

Which meant
worthy
or
commendable
, more or less—Órlaith had noticed the respect the Japanese party always seemed to pay to the arts, not to mention to disciplined effort in any field.

Then she gave a sudden shy grin: “But . . . drive you crazy, if you have to listen all the time in that little cabin.”

She mimed screaming and tearing out her hair, throttling someone and then whipping a dagger out of her sleeve and stabbing herself in the throat. Órlaith laughed aloud; for someone usually so solemn, Reiko could be extremely funny when she let go a little.

“Tell me!” she said. “When we were younger and he’d just started doing music seriously, a lot of the time we were on trains—my parents took us around with them as they toured the Realm, that they did; to see and be seen, they said. Otherwise we’d have been separated too much. And we’d be cooped up with John as he practiced, and eventually I’d start throwing things and he’d dodge and
go right on
, and if Herry was along she’d stick her thumbs in her ears and go
LALALALALALAL!
Until Da came back and roared at us all to shut up and let a man think, petitions and children’s choirs were bad enough . . .”

Reiko laughed herself, shedding years and layers of responsibility. “My father also traveled much by sea, to the other islands and the new outposts, and I with him after my brother . . . after I became the heir. Your brother is not . . . he is not that bad! Even composing.”

“No, but he
was
,” Órlaith said. “
De
-composing, I called it then. He’s quite good the now, but when he was twelve and always trying things just a bit beyond his level it grated, that it did, and I don’t have near as fine an ear as Herry does. . . .”

They went into the cabin. The roof overhead was the poop-deck, and the semicircle of inward-slanting windows at the rear was the stern of the ship. For shipboard it was spacious, although by any other standards it was the size of a modest bedroom, perhaps a hundred square feet, counting what was now taken by double bunks on either side, and the roof was just high enough that Órlaith didn’t have much problem suppressing the urge to duck. Most of the center was taken up by a table; when the
Tarshish Queen
wasn’t under charter like this the ship’s officers and the
supercargo would dine there and perhaps a paying passenger or two, and fold-up benches ran up either side of it. The light that poured in through the windows was reflected upwards from the sea below, and it made shifting patterns on the overhead beams.

Reiko fetched a small lacquered box colored a deep red-brown with the chrysanthemum
kamon
of her House on it and laid the sword down carefully on the table beside it. Then she spread a clean white cloth.

“This is a very . . .” Reiko paused and obviously thought for a moment. “Revered sword? Old, very old.”

Órlaith nodded with interest; some time ago she’d come to the conclusion that when Japanese said
very old
they meant either
very, very
old or
even older than that
.

“Before the Change, it was in a museum. But still a good sword for fighting. The leader of the Seventy Loyal Men, General Egawa’s father, brought it from Tokyo, and used it many times to preserve the life of my grandmother along the way. He presented it to my father when he came of age to need a sword.”

Órlaith had noticed that Reiko had two katana with her, but the other was securely wrapped in its gray linen bag in her chest, and in a special scabbard and hilt made for storage at that.

Reiko opened the lacquered box and brought out the contents, laying them out with an almost ritual neatness; there were a tiny bronze mallet, a ball of silk that she took out of a further cloth bag, a folder of wrinkled-looking rice paper, and a small vial of oil. The Japanese woman smiled, dropping back into her own birth-tongue:

“So sorry, I really need to speak Nihongo now. In the very old days, women weren’t even allowed to touch swords like this. Not with their bare hands, at least; they had to wrap the sleeves of their kimono around their fingers first.”

“Times have changed!” Órlaith said. “And I’m glad to see it.”

“And changed and changed again,” Reiko agreed. “Originally this was an
ôdachi
.”

The word meant great-sword, and in her mind it felt very much the
same as the equivalent in her native dialect of English. Something on the order of
unusually big
.

“The blade was three shaku two
sun
long . . . about—”

“Thirty-eight inches,” Órlaith said.

That was roughly as long as what a Montivallan would call a greatsword or
claidheamh mòr
, though curved and less massive.

Reiko nodded. “
Hai
, very close. It was shortened in . . . well, I will show you.”

Órlaith watched with interest, propping her chin on her fists, but to one side and not leaning too close—this was a very sharp edge by any standards other than the Sword of the Lady, and unlike that it would cut anyone without exception. She didn’t want to crowd.

Reiko drew the sword, set the
saya
-scabbard aside and laid the blade down with the cutting edge away from her. It gleamed in the subdued light of the cabin, flawless and beautiful, with the subtle waving line of the
hamon
running down behind the edge to show where it had been differentially tempered to an almost glasslike hardness at the cutting surface while staying soft and springy within. Órlaith had never seen a better creation of the bladesmith’s craft, though these days that was becoming a high art in Montival, no longer just a matter of filing and grinding old leaf springs.

For something made to kill, this was . . .

Almost indecently pretty,
she thought.
Nonni Sandra would have loved to have it in a glass case in her chambers.

“This is a
soshu kitae
, a sword made with seven laminations, which are harder or softer in different parts of the blade,” Reiko said absently as she worked. “That is done after the initial folding, which itself produces many layers . . . thirty thousand or so. It is what we call
jewel steel
.”

Next she took up the little mallet, unscrewed a small bronze pin from its handle, and used both to tap out the two
mekugi
-pegs in the hilt. She set those aside with the same neatness. Then she took the sword in her right hand, blade-up, and tapped on her wrist with the fist of her left hand, two light but sharp blows. The
tsuka
, the hilt of wood and sharkskin
and cord, came loose and she lifted it away, and then the
tsuba
, the round guard and spacers. Then she laid the naked blade carefully on the cloth without touching her fingers to the steel, putting the mountings to one side.

There was an inscription on the tang, above the two holes for the fastening pegs and on the same side as the edge: