The Given Sacrifice (42 page)

She blocked a spearhead with the point of her shield and lashed down with the war
hammer on the top of the man’s helmet: metal dented and bone cracked beneath, the
feeling vibrating up the shaft and into her hand.

“Morrigú!”
her father’s voice shouted.

“Scathatch!”
her own replied in a keening shriek as she hacked down to the right with the spike.

And that was most strange, some distant part of her mind noted. He had named the Crow
Goddess, the aspect of Her that watched over warriors; for She was all things, the
gentle Mother-of-All who gave life and the Red Hag who reaped men on a bloody field
as well.

Órlaith had called instead on the Dark Mother in Her most terrible form: Scathatch.

The Devouring Shadow Beneath.

She Who Brings Fear.

For a moment there was nothing but chaos, the knights ramping through the mass like
steel-clad tigers, sword and hammer and lashing hooves, the Archers running up and
firing point-blank before throwing down their bows and wading in with buckler and
short sword. A man leveled a crossbow at her, but an already-bloodied lancepoint tore
into his throat with savage force and a deadly precision.

“Alale alala!”
Heuradys screamed, tossing the lance aside and drawing her sword.
“Alale alala!”

Then the beleaguered foreigners who’d been facing certain death before the Montivallans
arrived rose from among the ruins and charged into the disordered mass. There were
only thirty on their feet, many wounded, but they came in a disciplined armored mass
of points and swords, a red-and-white banner fluttering in their midst and a harsh
baying throat-tearing chorus sounding in time to the pounding of their boots:

“Tennoheika banzai! Banzai! Banzai!
Banzai!”

The newcomers fell upon their foemen with terrifying intensity and skilled fury, like
a blizzard of dancing butcher knives. The enemy broke then, south and west, screaming
in terror and throwing away their weapons to run the faster. Hellman’s light cavalry
looped effortlessly around them and deployed, though there seemed to be two less of
them. The ten drawn up in a semicircle with their stiff bows pulled to the ear were
enough, though. The foemen stopped and milled about; one or two drove daggers into
their own throats, or each other’s. Those were the surviving Haida—they seldom let
themselves be taken alive, which saved the Montivallans the trouble of hanging them
for piracy.

Órlaith turned Dancer and followed her father without conscious thought. For an instant
her attention went to what clotted and dripped on the head of her war hammer; she
gulped a little and dragged it through a bush as she passed.

“Odd,” her father said. “That war cry the enemy were using—it meant
self-reliance
, more or less. An admirable quality, but not what you’d expect on a battlefield.”

“What were the . . . well, the other lot of foreigners saying?”

“Mmmm . . . more or less literally . . .
To the Heavenly Sovereign Majesty, ten thousand years!
Or
Long Live the Emperor
for short; it’s a polished and compact phrase.”

He halted and spoke to the captives, in a language Órlaith didn’t even recognize.
That was another gift of the Sword of the Lady; the bearer could speak the tongues
that were needful to the High King’s work. The foreigners cast their weapons and helms
away and knelt, their hands on their heads.

The Montivallan party were around them now, and she could see the first of Dun Barstow’s
levy coming up, jumping off their bicycles and trotting forward with arrows on the
string. One fresh-faced Archer of the guard younger than she spoke
sotto voce
to a veteran who had a scar like a thin white mustache crumpling the dark skin of
his upper lip:

“Is it always that easy, so?” the youngster said, trying to be nonchalant and not
quite suppressing a quaver; the freckles stood out against a face gone pale.

“It’s easy enough when you catch them with their kilts up and Little Jack in hand,
laddie,” the older man said, a little indistinctly and making an illustrative pumping
motion with his right. “And when the Morrigú doesn’t get up to any of Her little tricks.
When they’re waiting for you, and things do go wrong . . . then it gets very hard.
Enjoy this while you can, for you’ll not see the like often. The
Ard Rí
and our Old Wolf did a nice neat job o’ work, I’ll say that for any to hear.”

It hadn’t been easy for everyone; two of Hellman’s troopers were laying out a third.
It was the one who’d brought the message, Noemi Hierro, lying still with an arrow
sunk fletching-deep under her right armpit and an expression of surprise on her face
beneath the blood and her twenty-first year never to be completed. Órlaith felt a
little winded at the sight; that had been someone she knew, fairly well after weeks
of travel together, and liked.

So sudden,
she thought, a little dazed; the young man who’d closed her eyes looked even more
stunned—not in an anguish of grief yet, just . . . disbelieving.

The healers were busy with several others, including some from both lots of foreigners—that
was part of their oath to Brigit, to care for all Her children first and put everything
else second when they saw the need. Though sometimes all that could be done was a
massive dose of morphine.

The hale prisoners were all men, mostly youngish and stocky-muscular though not large.
With their helmets off she could see that they were all of very much the same physical
type, which itself was slightly odd to Montivallan eyes. Their skins were of a pale
umber a little darker than hers when she had a summer tan, and they had sharply slanted
dark eyes—shaped like Sir Aleaume’s, but more so—and short snub noses and close-cropped
raven hair, faces high-cheeked and rather flat and sparse of beard where they had
any. That combination of features was known in Montival though not common in pure
form these days, and she knew that they stemmed originally from the other side of
the Pacific.

Her father spoke again, then dropped back into English for her: “I’ve promised them
their lives if they behave,” he said, pitching his voice to carry to his followers.
“We’ll need to question them, of course.”

To her, more quietly: “But now let’s see to our friends . . . or at least, the enemies
of our enemies.”

Heuradys wiped and sheathed her sword and passed a canteen to Órlaith; she sucked
greedily at it, suddenly conscious of how her mouth was dusty-dry and gummy at once.
The water was cut one-fifth with harsh red wine, and it tasted better than anything
she’d ever drunk. The High King took two long swallows when she offered to him, and
sighed.

“You forget what thirsty work this is, you do.”

The other group of strangers had halted when the Montivallans indicated they should—though
there weren’t any living foemen behind them. She recognized the armor they wore now
that they were close. It was more complex than that of the men they’d been fighting,
built up from many enameled steel plates held together with silk cord, and helmets
with broad flares and sometimes contorted masks over the face like visors. Several
had banners flying from small poles fixed in holders on their backs.

“
Nihon
style,” Órlaith murmured, and one of them close enough to hear gave her a sharp look,
plainly recognizing the word. “And we thought nobody survived there!”

“They speak
Nihongo
as well as wearing the gear; they’re
Nihonjin
, right enough. Japanese, the ancients would have said,” her father said.

The phalanx of . . . Japanese . . . murmured a little among themselves, evidently
remarking on the fact that they’d been recognized. She and her father dismounted,
removing their helmets; at his gesture the squires unfastened the King’s
bevoir
, the piece that protected throat and chin but made conversation with anyone unaccustomed
to them a little difficult.

The strangers—could they really be from the fabled land of Japan?—removed their helms
as well and bowed, a uniform formal-looking gesture held for a second before they
came erect again; they were of the same race as the other party of strangers but looked
very different, with their hair shaven in a broad strip up the center of the pate
and then curled into a tight topknot behind. Some wore white headbands with a single
red dot flanked by spiky script as well. Their faces were set, without any of the
grins or whooping she’d have expected from a like number of Mackenzies. There were
others in Montival who cultivated a similar stoic manner, of course; Bearkillers,
for example.

Órlaith’s brows went up. The last of the Nihonjin had taken off his helmet. . . .

No
, her
helmet. A woman, and about my own age . . . somewhere between my age and Herry’s,
maybe
. The features were strong but delicate.
Not wearing that strange hairdo, either, though she does have the headband.

She wore the same armor as the others, and she carried a naginata, a long curved blade
on the end of an eight-foot bamboo shaft. There was blood on the tip, too. She began
to speak slowly in what Órlaith recognized as an attempt at English . . . probably
grammatically correct English, but with the sounds so badly rendered that it was incomprehensible
except for the odd word.

“. . . 
senkkyu Beddi Mach,
” she finished.

Was that
“thank you very much”?
Órlaith wondered.

Her father responded with a bow of his own and spoke Nihongo in a barking staccato
manner, to the evident vast relief of the newcomers. They seemed astonished, too.
They bowed again when he indicated himself and said something that ended with:

“. . . 
koutei
Dai-Montival.”

Then the whole party turned with a clatter and a united gasp. Two more of the Nipponese
were approaching, carrying the body of a third between them.

“Ouch,” Heuradys said softly just behind her ear. “No way he’s going to live with
that just there.”

She nodded agreement. An arrow stood in his torso; her training calculated the position
and put it down as far too near the big clutch of blood vessels above the heart.

You had only to nick something there and the body cavity would fill with blood in
a minute or less. . . . The woman gave a small shocked cry as they laid the dead man
down and called out what might be a name.

“That was their ruler, their
Tenno
,” her father murmured to her. “Heavenly Sovereign, their Emperor. And the father
of that young woman.”

Órlaith made a small shocked sound of her own, throttled down out of consideration,
not to intrude on grief.

Mother-of-All, be merciful to her!
she thought.
The poor lass, to come so close to safety and then lose her Da so! Hard, hard, very
hard indeed.

“That’s not one of our arrows, praise and thanks to Lugh of the Long Hand,” her father
said quietly. “Accidents of that sort can happen more often than is comfortable, in
a scramblin’ fight like this.”

“No, it’s fletched with gull feathers and shafted with some sort of reed,” she agreed,
wincing at the thought.

All the rest of the Nihonjin sank to their knees and then bowed forward towards the
dead man, forehead to ground with their hands flat on the earth and fingertips touching.
When they sat back on their heels their impassive countenances were like tragic masks.
One of them nearest the young woman had a square scarred face that underneath the
differences might have been Edain Aylward’s to the life, and a single tear trickled
down his cheek. He slowly reached for the short curved sword at his right hip, twin
to the longer blade tucked edge-up through the sash he wore, touching the clasps of
his armor at with the other hand.

The young woman unfroze and made a sharp chopping gesture, and spoke in a commanding
tone without a break in it, though her own eyes were glistening. The man said something
in a pleading tone, and she repeated the order.

Her father leaned close to Órlaith and murmured. “She just denied him permission to
kill himself in apology for failure.
No
, she said.
I forbid it. I forbid you all. I will need your living swords, and you may not desert
me or our people. Our need is too great.
”

Órlaith nodded respectfully. The middle-aged Nihonjin looked at his ruler’s daughter
for a long moment. He made the same gesture of obeisance to her that he had to the
dead man; the others followed him. Then with hands upflung he barked out a short phrase;
she thought it had a word something like
jotei
in it, used several times with another from the war cry as well. The others repeated
it and took it up, chanting for a moment, ignoring the eyes of the Montivallans. Her
father translated in the same low murmur:

“Hail to the Heavenly Sovereign Empress! Daughter of the Sun Goddess! To the Empress,
Ten Thousand Years!”

He shook his head, and continued almost as softly: “And here I thought we’d achieved
a nice, boring, uneventful life!”

The High King and his daughter waited courteously until the ritual ran its course,
then stepped forward. Artos spoke again when the . . .

“Well, I suppose she’s an empress now, though of what we don’t know,” Órlaith murmured.

“Maybe a country, maybe of one village and a pet ox,” Heuradys replied almost inaudibly
sotto voce.

News travelled across the great ocean, but slowly and fitfully and mostly from the
southern parts of Asia whence came a trickle of trade. Everyone had just assumed Japan
was a total wreck, like most of Europe or the coastal parts of China. Too many big
cities too close together.

. . . the empress rose and faced him.

Movement, and a shout. Órlaith spun on one heel and froze for an instant. One of the
kneeling prisoners was
grinning
at her, and his eyes . . . were solid black, emptiness with only a rim of white around
the outside. She’d heard of the like, but never thought to see it herself.