“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.
“I. . see. . you. .” he said, in a voice from the surface of a dead star.
Existence itself wavered. She looked into those eyes, and through them into a universe where matter itself perished with a whimpering squeal, absolute cold, utter black forever and everywhere, where nothing happened and nothing ever would. She could not move, for nothing did. .
The prisoner’s hands went down from his bristle-shaven head to the back of his collar. A bodkin-headed arrow plowed into his forehead and sank inches deep with a wet splintering crack of bone, and Edain was cursing as he reached for another with blurring speed and half a dozen of the Archers shot too and men-at-arms were charging with their swords raised, but the dead man’s hands flashed forward. Two streaks of silver went through the air.
Time slowed, like a spoon through honey. The thickset man beside the foreign empress flung a hand out in a desperate reach like a baseball outfielder. It went between his charge and the weapon, and suddenly a small slim blade was standing out of his palm. Her father grabbed at Órlaith, throwing her backward with huge and desperate strength as he dove between her and the threat and Heuradys’ shield came around before her.