The Sea Peoples(12)
Behind her two bannermen carried poles with the white-and-red Hinomaru flag of Dai-Nippon—the Rising Sun sigil of the reborn Empire of Great Japan—and the red banner with a sixteen-petal golden chrysanthemum in its center, the personal standard of the Tennoˉ. Beside her and a little to the rear was Imperial Guard commander Noboru Egawa, a man in his forties with a brutal-looking scarred thick-featured face and fireplug build and missing left hand. His gray-shot hair was shaven back in a strip across the pate to the complex topknot at the rear, the mark of the warrior caste in Japan once more.
Behind him came a brace of ladies-in-waiting in dark kuro-tomesode kimonos embroidered with a pattern of cranes and a double file of more samurai bearing naginatas or long asymmetric higoyumi bows, their faces bare but as immobile as their brothers’ steel masks beneath their helmet-brims.
At the rear was another lady-in-waiting, leading a small child by the hand—in Nihonjin clothing, but with a pale freckled round face and reddish hair, looking around her with solemnity that occasionally broke into the delighted gap-toothed grin of a brave, bright child who loved new sights and had just been presented with an infinity of them. Reiko had rescued her from the lost castle in the Valley of Death when she found the Grasscutter, and it appeared that had been early enough to spare the child lifelong damage from its horrors.
Most of the Japanese carried the two swords thrust through their belt-sashes, long katana and the shorter close-quarter wakizashi. In modern times that was the other Nipponese mark of one whose trade was war, rather like a knight’s spurs. Egawa’s katana was an ancient masterpiece from the smithy of the legendary Masamune, the Honjo sword that they had recovered in the Valley of Death. Reiko had gifted him with it as a mark of great honor. The Grasscutter that was one-third of the ancient Imperial Regalia had been there too, in fragments born within living bodies. Those had been absorbed somehow as she fought her way through that place of horrors and the union of them with the Kotegiri Masamune blade she used was . . .
The Grasscutter reborn, órlaith thought with an awe that never faded, looking at the sheath of black lacquer in which golden flecks moved very slowly, with an illusion . . . perhaps an illusion . . . of stars in an endless black depth that you noticed only if you stared.
The gift of the Sun Goddess to Her descendant and chosen daughter.
In Nihon they’d long had a story that the Yamato dynasty were Her descendants. Apparently in a way that mere human minds could not fathom that was literally true, not just a metaphor for how the ruler stood for the folk before the Powers that warded land and dwellers, and at times embodied them.
Perhaps I alone of human kind besides Reiko can sense that blade’s true might, since I bear its equal. And that gives me new ground to stand on to understand what it is that I bear. This war is not just a contention of kings, or even against the tyranny of evil rulers, though the Goddess knows it is both those. More is at stake, much more.
She and Reiko fell in beside each other, each with their two armsmen ahead and the rest of their retinue behind.
“John?” Reiko said softly.
órlaith shook her head, her lips thinning as her hand rested on the pommel of the Sword. It linked all of her line, the descendants of her father and mother who’d mingled their blood on its point and driven it into the living rock of Montival at the first King-Making. Unfortunately that usually just gave you flashes, not . . .
Actionable intelligence, she thought, and went on aloud:
“Nothing since we left Astoria. Just that he’s alive and in peril, and to the south and west of here,” órlaith said.
She spoke Japanese as they usually did together; Reiko’s English was now passable but no more. The sounds were difficult for someone who’d grown up speaking nothing but Nihongo.
Reiko sighed slightly, and her steel tessen war-fan made a graceful gesture. The Sword had given órlaith a native-born speaker’s command of her language, and also of those things its speakers did that conveyed meaning without words.
I am so very sorry.
Reiko’s face was calm, but her eyes conveyed her trouble; it was sincerely meant, too . . . and with the Sword, órlaith didn’t have to guess at that, as all others did. Her father had warned her that could cut her off from human-kind if she weren’t careful, and it had been one reason he didn’t carry the Sword unless he must.
“Not your fault,” órlaith said.
Which is . . . true. Yet and perhaps not altogether so.
Reiko hadn’t meant any harm to órlaith’s brother. She’d met her own brother there on that beach, heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne and long thought dead, revealed as a prisoner and puppet of the enemy. She’d turned the Grasscutter over to him, and when he’d drawn it the gift of the Sun Goddess had burned him to a drift of fine ash in an instant. The Immortal One Shining in Heaven had shown who was truly Her child.
Then Reiko had taken it up and danced by the sea’s edge, a dance of anger and summoning . . . and become one with her Ancestress for an unimaginable instant as that strong and ancient Power reached from the world beyond the world into the land of common day. órlaith had used the Sword of the Lady to shield Montival from it, but the grief and burning wrath of Amaterasu-oˉmikami had fallen on the sea with a terrifying might, like an avalanche falling down from forever.
“Yet I unleashed the forces which drove his ship so far from your shore,” Reiko said.