The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (21 page)

Barony Ath, Tualatin Valley

(Formerly northwestern Oregon)

High Kingdom of Montival

(Formerly western North America)

May/Satsuki 25th,Change Year 46/2044 AD/Shohei 1

“T
hese are very handsome horses,” Reiko said, smoothing a hand down her mount’s neck.

“Hard on the arse as any,” Egawa said, obviously deep in thought. “Majesty,” he added hastily.

Reiko smiled slightly; she found she could do that naturally now, though the pain remained.

“I’ve heard the word before, General-san,” she said dryly, reproof and forgiveness in one.

Poor Egawa. Now he has to treat his lord’s daughter as his lord, and sometimes he slips while juggling the cups.

The pain was like a wound indeed, scabbing over very gradually, the scars themselves pulling unexpectedly on the inside when you moved. But she had been raised to control pain. Pain hurt, but that was no reason to let it affect your doing what was proper. You let the hurt
happen
, without concerning yourself too much with it, and trying to block it was paying attention. That was more difficult with a hurt to the soul, but the principle was the same.

The Japanese party were all mounted on animals that had been waiting at the train stop; a wagon bore what baggage they had brought on
the headlong trip northward. By their standards the horses were once again sleek muscular giants, all at the least a quarter again taller than the biggest she recalled ever having seen at home. She shuddered at what it must cost to feed them, having seen herself now that they ate grain that might have gone to humans, as well as grass and hay.

Japan had enough food now in years of good harvest, enough that nobody actually starved—not to death, at least—even in poor ones, but there was never much surplus and what there was had to be jealously guarded as a reserve against bad times or losses from enemy attack. Food was life and thrift was a necessity. Even at a feast for the wealthy and powerful there was more emphasis on quality and arrangement than lavish quantity.

The mounts—they were called
destriers
—ridden by their two-score armored escorts were larger still, though long-legged and deep-chested and surprisingly graceful for animals that weighed over a half-ton apiece, and wore armor themselves—articulated plates riveted to soft padded leather backing, protecting head and neck, shoulders and chest. Egawa had examined them with an attention that might as well have had a microscope involved, and she was interested herself; how far and how fast could even these great horses carry the weight of that protection and an armored rider?

But arrows are the weakness of cavalry, neh? Horses are such large targets. The armor will help.

Fast-moving horsemen were the standard response to a
jinnikukaburi
raid, but you had to be cautious lest you run into an ambush or a hail of archery. These looked like they could ride down any raider crew ever born. Though . . .

I doubt these are very agile, but with those long legs they might well work up a fair speed given a little while to run, and maintain it long enough for a charge. Certainly they came down on the
jinnikukaburi
like a hammer on an egg in our last fight, though I only saw that at a distance.

Her memories were blurred by the shock of her father’s death, but she
did
remember afterwards seeing the bodies of men lying skewered like pieces of grilled octopus on a splinter of bamboo, the lances driven right
through both sides of the tough Korean plate-and-mail shirts by the terrible impact. Or bodies trampled into half-recognizable bags of flesh inside their armor, or skulls crushed through the helmet by the serrated war-hammers the riders also carried.

There was a rattle and ring along with the massive hollow
clock
of their shod hooves on the smooth pounded crushed rock of the roadway as they paced along at a fast walk. This trip wouldn’t take long at all, from the description. The men-at-arms in their black harness rode with their visors up and their shields across their backs, blazoned identically with a
kamon
in the form of a flame-wreathed lidless eye, crimson and yellow on black. Twelve-foot lances with bowl-shaped metal hand-guards just ahead of the grip were their primary weapons, colorful pennants fluttering below the bright blades.

There was a fair bit of traffic on the road with them, riders on horseback, carts and wagons and carriages, bicycles and pedestrians, now and then a Christian monk or priest or nun in their long robes pacing along or praying at the little roadside shrines with their crucifixes and images of saints or the blue-robed Virgin.

Reiko felt a little irritation at the naked stares she and her followers attracted.

Though I must admit, if as many Montivallans were riding through Sado-ga-shima, with our samurai escorting them, the peasants would stare and point as well. The
shi
would have better manners, I hope.

Their party didn’t slow for any of it; a single scream from a trumpet and a harsh bark of
Make way! Way, in the Crown’s name!
and everyone pulled to the side of the road, bowing to a degree that varied with their rank as the riders went by. That much was homelike in general outline, if not the details.

She could smell dust ground out of the pavement by steel-shod hooves and steel-rimmed wheels but little of it rose, because the season of rains was just tapering off. Low mountains rose in the west, forested and green-blue, just on the edge of vision though rising a little with every pace; higher ones stood even farther behind them to the east and fell away as gradually, including peaks with snow on them and one tiny white cone as perfect as Fuji, called Mt. Hood.

This is a beautiful country, even just the bones of it,
she thought.
I wish I could see more of it, but I have no time to spare.

Here in the valley the land was for the most part flat or only gently rolling; the road swerved several times to keep the gradient low and avoid hills or ridges covered in oaks, firs, maples and trees she did not recognize. But those were exceptions, as were the odd clumps of trees and bushes growing over the site of a pre-Change building whose foundations were too tough to be removed without excessive trouble. The occasional creek was always followed by a strip of forest on both banks, fenced against livestock with poles and rails, or quickset hedges of hawthorn starred with pink-and-white flowers in this season.

They hadn’t seen any fields abandoned since the Change today, though those had been common enough farther south in the Willamette; now one cultivated stretch succeeded another as they did on Sado’s central plain, but for far longer. Beech trees stood beside the highway beyond the verge-side ditches, planted in neatly spaced staggered rows on either side; the road was lavishly wide for one through arable land, thirty feet including the shoulders. The trees had leaves of a striking purplish-bronze color, sometimes meeting overhead and turning the long road into a tunnel of shade and flickering brightness. From the countryside to north and south of the roadway came a smell intensely green and fresh, a scent of vigorous growth and damp soil. It was stronger than the familiar odor of horse and leather, and occasionally livened with the pungent scents of manure or a deep flowery sweetness.

What she saw was wholly different from the rural parts of her own country beyond the most basic elements of forested hill and river and cleared cultivated soil in areas that were not too steep, but she recognized the slightly metallic green with hints of blue, wheat or barley rippling around knee-high, and some of the other crops—potatoes and turnips, flax and beets and more, though it was odd not to see any rice or millet or soybeans. Where the worked soil showed it was a very dark brown, deep and stoneless, moist but not wet, looking as rich as the sweet adzuki bean paste filling in the buns on a street-vendor’s cart.

No terraces here, either,
she thought.

Parts of Sado were staircases of green up the hillsides.

They don’t need to use every inch, you can see they farm carefully but it’s all so . . . lavish. Lucky! If we could just get free of the
jinnikukaburi
long enough to really resettle the main islands we might have more good land than we needed too.

What caught her eye was the sheer size, fields that were regular squares that must cover hundreds of acres, each bordered by hedges and trees. That was bizarrely huge compared to the paddies of Japanese farms. By cocking her head and looking closely she could see that though each big field was planted to the same sort of crop they were subdivided by ankle-high ridges within into a patchwork of rectangular strips each of seven or so acres.

Which is still larger than the whole of a good-sized peasant’s farm back home.

Peasants were at work among the crops, quite a few though never as densely as she was used to, cultivating with some very ingenious-looking horse-drawn machines as well as long-handled hoes or just stooping and pulling up weeds. They stopped to remove familiar-looking conical straw hats and bow deeply as the mounted party passed, with the hats held in their hands; Heuradys d’Ath waved back at them with her riding crop, and a few of them replied with waves of their hands and called her name.

The men among the landworkers wore a long belted tunic that came to their knees and loose trousers beneath, of a cloth that mixed linen and wool, with wood-and-leather shoes on their feet. Women wore the same tunic over another that reached to the ankles, and the older ones had kerchiefs around their heads beneath the hats. Some of the children were barefoot, and most wore only the short tunic. From what she could see all the peasants were as roughened by work and weather as any countryfolk, but big and well-fed as well.

The strips that divided the fields showed very slight differences in the precise texture of what grew, like a larger blanket composed of pieces that didn’t exactly match. About two of every five of the large fields held a mixture of grass and clover, thick with crimson blossom now in late spring that turned them into sheets of an almost lurid red.

Sometimes the bees working among them were numerous enough to make the horses shy a little as they crossed the road bearing pollen and
nectar back to their hives. Cattle with hides of black or creamy yellow or red bodies and white faces grazed the fields, or sheep looking comically naked after their shearing in others, and now and then they saw sounders of pigs or herds of horses. Calves and lambs and colts born that spring played, kicking up their heels and butting at the udders of their dams, a sight that made her smile a little.

The sweet smell became overpowering when the field to their left was being mown for hay. Reiko looked closely; that wasn’t much of a part of the farming she knew, since the limited number of oxen and horses her people kept were fed from verges and roadsides or with the by-products of crops meant for humans, while pigs ate scraps or foraged in the woods and chickens pecked for bugs and the odd spilled grain.

Here a staggered row of a half-dozen machines each pulled by two horses mowed broad swathes and left the cut grass behind to the accompaniment of a whirring, clacking sound. More horses pulled complex devices of wire and wood that raked the hay into swathes and left it to dry.

“This is wealth,” she said quietly to Koyama. “They can afford to use nearly half of their land to grow food for animals! No wonder they use so many horse-powered machines.”

He nodded agreement as he looked around at the countryside. “The more so as the Montivallans are not showing us this to impress us, I think. This estate is just the most convenient place to put us, nothing extraordinary.”

“Wealth and
power
, Majesty,” Egawa added. “I can see why they have much cavalry, too. Good country for it, difficult to find terrain features to anchor a flank, and lots of fodder.”

Farther away in the same field workers with long-tined forks on six-foot handles were pitching the dried hay cut on earlier days onto carts with high latticework sides, these pulled by oxen.

Egawa grunted again. “And now we know how they can bind their bowels with all that meat they eat.”

Koyama snorted, and Reiko ignored the byplay as she studied the scene. You could see the smaller strips were there too amid the hay once
it was cut, and she thought she could see two groups—families, she supposed, they were each of men and women and children—arguing with each other as they pitched the fodder onto their respective carts. The dispute grew more heated, then stopped abruptly as the train of mounted warriors went by.

Heuradys d’Ath rode off the road and into the field, spoke briefly to the peasants, shaking the riding crop like an admonishing finger. There were more bows, but when she turned her horse back again one of the peasant men raised his hand to the other group with the fist clenched and middle finger extended, and got a clod of soil kicked back at him by a man who then spat on the dirt and ground his clog on it as if he wished it were an enemy’s face.

Heuradys dropped back to ride beside the Japanese leaders when she returned to the road. Reiko was glad of it, though she missed Órlaith. Partly because of the simple ease of conversation, and partly because . . .

Because we share a loss and a burden no others do. We may become friends, I think, or as close as those in ruling families may be.

But Órlaith’s retainer was able.

And someone to respect.

She also seemed to be someone very close to the Crown Princess; not a lover, Reiko judged, despite their sharing a tent and the obvious affection, but a confidant-friend-right-hand, truly a
hatamoto
, one who stood at the base of the lord’s banner.

I have nobody that close,
she thought a little sadly.
I have many loyal retainers, but few friends at all
.

“Your Majesty,” Heuradys said politely, bowing in the saddle.

“Heuradys-
gozen
,” she said. “Lady Heuradys . . . those strips in the big fields . . . they are what, please?”