The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (23 page)

The valley began where the mountains ended, and there they had passed the ruins of Eugene. That was nothing strange in itself; she had seen the dead cities on the main islands of her own country, suburbs overgrown with renascent forest and the huge scorched, rusting, canted remains of the old world’s buildings blanketing mile after mile at their centers.

But dangerous, and besides that haunted by the mad and savage offspring of those who survived the collapse by preying on their fellows.

They were few and lived on rabbits and birds and pine kernels now, but they were still ready to butcher and eat a salvager they caught alone. Her father’s soldiers rescued their children where they could, those young enough to forget, but for the rest . . . the sword was the only true mercy.

We don’t like to remember it, but they are just as Japanese as we in blood,
Reiko thought; it was something her father had told her to keep in mind, if privately.
To become
jinnikukaburi
, one does not need to have Korean grandparents. Misfortune will do.

No, what had been daunting about Eugene was the
scale
of the salvage work going on—long trains of railcars coming out, hundreds of tons stockpiled under unwalled sheds, from gearwork to be incorporated into modern machinery down to huge buckets of broken window fragments
to serve the furnaces of glassblowers, and bundled rebar with lumps of concrete still clinging to it, stock for the anvils of blacksmiths. With officials to tax the process and the only soldiers needed a small bored garrison who enforced the officials’ will and kept order between rival salvage groups. Eugene was dead, yes, but not the haunt of terror except in memory and dream. She did not think the workers there rested easy or would stay long by choice and they had to be careful where they put their feet or what might fall on their heads, but they were not in constant risk of attack.

“Do you notice that we haven’t seen a single automobile or truck wreck on the roads for hundreds of miles?” Egawa said, echoing the direction of her thought. “Since we left the mountains, and there weren’t many there. All hauled off to break up for useful parts long ago.”

They nodded, thinking of the rusting hulks that still sprawled by the millions on the roads of most of Japan. Traveling up the valley of the Willamette and crossing it several times by bridge to let each important community say they had seen their High King’s remains on their journey had been even stranger than Eugene. Corvallis was a
living
city, ten times larger within its wall than any of the castle-towns in modern Japan.

Fifty thousand people in one spot, in our world of today! And Portland and Boise are said to be even larger!

Corvallis was surrounded by manufacturing villages to take advantage of power from streams coming down from the mountains, as well as farms on the flats. A large part of the raw materials coming out of Eugene evidently went there, and the charcoal smoke of the forges and smelters and the ring of hammers and the hum of spinning machines had been noticeable.

And even with the vacant spots in this Willamette, gone back to swamp or forest, so much farmed land!
she thought.
The first true wealth of any nation, tilled ground and the men and women who tend it, and their children. From that all else springs.

The forms had varied—scattered farms of astounding individual size in the rural hinterland of Corvallis, each one with its house and barns in the center. Then clumped villages (called strategic hamlets, for some reason) in the area north of it inhabited by a group whose name seemed to
be the Killers of Bears, and cottages and farms like strips strung along the sides of the roads in the area under the protection of an order of Christian warrior monks. Fortified villages behind great log palisades, surrounded by smaller hedged fields, among the kilted Mackenzies. Villages again here, huddled around castles and manors, a weird combination of the familiar and alien to her.

And all that only a fraction of Montival,
she thought.
I hear of entire other domains, the United States of Boise and New Deseret and the Nakamtu and the San Luis and the Lakota Tunwan, weeks of travel away, and all part of the same kingdom. There is no inhabited area at home that cannot be crossed in a single day.
Now
the maps begin to seem real, and it is frightening.

Koyama and Egawa both looked frustrated; they didn’t have time to linger even if their hosts had allowed it, but they’d also wanted to spend time on their slightly different investigations.

“I was impressed by that regiment that lined the tracks in Corvallis,” Egawa said. “Perhaps that is why she was patient with the speechmakers.”

They had stood close by the passing train that held their High King’s ashes and his heir, immobile as neatly ranked statues in a light rain, their weapons reversed and colors lowered. She had been close enough to see through the streaked window that many wept as they remained in their motionless brace. A group of middle-aged veterans, many with missing limbs or hideous scars, had grouped together under a unit banner that had obviously been sewn back together from tatters, bearing a slogan:
We Stood!

Egawa had saluted, when he heard the story of how they’d earned it. His voice was musing as he went on:

“Those long pikes . . . the crossbow companies . . . and the field artillery. Not much use against small groups of
jinnikukaburi
raiding from single ships, but in a massed action . . . and the Bearkiller cavalry, also.”

“And the production of food and goods that makes it possible, such as we see around us now,” Koyama said. “I confess to bitter envy, Majesty. If we had such numbers, such power, we could crush the
jinnikukaburi
in a year or two at most, not fight all our lives to hold them off while trying to clear fields in the intervals between raids.”

“And if it were not all six thousand miles away from Dai-Nippon, Lord Grand Steward,” Egawa reminded them sardonically.

Reiko quoted an old saying: “
Fukoku kyohei
. Rich country, strong army, neh? We are few and poor compared to these Montivallans now, but Japan has suffered disasters before, and by hard work and discipline has recovered. This part of old America has recovered so, from the Change and the wars that followed it, though much altered and diminished. That shows that they may be strong friends. We need such.”

Then, firmly: “But someday we too will be a great and numerous and prosperous people again, strong and respected, a nation whose friendship is worth cultivating and whose anger is to be feared.”

“Yes, Majesty,” Egawa said. With a thin smile: “Good to have powerful friends. Even better to
be
a powerful friend, neh?”

“
Hai
, General Egawa, truly it is as you say. Until then, we will do as we must and as we can.”

A thought formed, and she proceeded slowly: “And . . . even so we may be very fortunate right now. These people had a war against
jinnikukaburi
of their own. Not cannibals, but otherwise just as wicked, inspired by similar evil
akuma
. Princess Órlaith and I spoke a little of it.”

“Yes, and they won,” Egawa said rather sourly; he had spent his life in a perpetual holding action, like a farmer walking on the treadles of a pump against a rising flood, with decisive victory a wistful dream. “That’s
very
fortunate, Majesty. For them.”

Koyama looked at her with real respect. “No, I think I see what the Majesty means. What if they had
lost
, General Egawa? What if they had lost? What would that have meant for us—and for Japan—if we had come here and found a
jinnikukaburi
kingdom with the size and strength we have seen, ready to make alliance
against
us and
with
the
bakachon
?”

Egawa’s face blanched slightly, though only one who knew him well would be aware of how much that meant.

“Chikuso!”
he blurted. “Damn! That would have been a total disaster! Enemies on both sides of us, ready to grind us into paste like soybeans for miso!”

He fell silent as Heuradys d’Ath dropped back beside them.

“We should be at Montinore village and manor within a few minutes. Welcome to my family’s fief, Your Majesty, you and your retainers. Our house is your house; enter and use all as you would your own.”

Reiko inclined her head slightly. “Thank you, Heuradys-
gozen
. Lady Heuradys, I should say?”

“I thought -
sama
meant that?”

“
-sama
means that if . . .” Reiko frowned in thought. “If said from low person to high? It says also of the ranks of the one speaking and the one spoken of? -
gozen
, means
Lady
if from other person of high rank.
-dono
, also that, but it is . . . out of fashion. You do not have this difference?”

“Not really, or at least not formally.
Lady
is sort of ambiguous.
Sir
and the name is the title for a knight, but most Associate knights are men . . . a knight’s wife or daughters would be called
Lady
or
my Lady
, or Lady and the first name, by almost anyone except close friends and family. And a noblewoman’s daughters are called Lady unless you’re using a specific title; since my mothers are a Countess and a Baroness I would be called
Lady Heuradys
. Or sometimes Lady Heuradys d’Ath, but that would only be in an official document or at court. That would be my title by birth, but in my own right I’m just a household knight and an Associate. It’s a little complicated in my case because I was adopted by a woman, so I don’t lose the honorifics due because my father is a Count.”

“So this is your mother the Baroness’ land?” Egawa asked, and Reiko translated it.

“Oh, we’ve been on her fief for an hour now. This estate stretches from the railroad to the crest of those mountains ahead, we call them the Coast Range,” Heuradys answered cheerfully. “It was established early, long before the High Kingdom came to be, as Crown demesne . . . that is, land held directly by the Lord Protector of the Portland Protective Association. Then it was granted as a fief . . .
han
, is that the word? . . . to my adoptive mother, Baroness Tiphaine d’Ath, about a decade after the Change, and added to afterwards, for services to the Crown.”

Egawa blinked as he worked out the amount; an ability to make quick estimates of area and distance was an essential skill for a warrior. That was more land than any individual family in Japan possessed by a
considerable margin, even counting lords with colonizing grants on the main islands that were still mostly empty. Whereas most of this seemed to be tilled land or carefully managed forest.

“A family of very wealthy and powerful
daimyo
, then, Majesty,” he said calmly to Reiko. “Perhaps no insult is meant by not immediately lodging you in their equivalent of the Imperial Palace.”

“They have their reasons,” Reiko said. “If the circumstances were reversed, we would want time for ceremony and consultation among ourselves as well.”

And besides,
our
Imperial Palace these days is just the old Shogunate provincial governor’s house on Sado-ga-shima, which was a museum for a while, with a few modest extensions. We will be great again, my faithful
bushi
, but that time is not yet. You and I will not live to see it ourselves, but we will build the foundations and our descendants will raise the towers upon them.

She went on: “And we need a breathing space too, General Egawa. There is absolutely no point in worrying about home until we can do something about it. Focus, neh?”

They crossed a small river flanked by a strip of thick forest, on a bridge whose timbers boomed beneath the hooves. The road rose again; the mountains of the Coast Range were much closer now, and the ground grew a little hilly. They went past a mill with an overshot wheel twenty feet high and entered a largish village of several hundred people, with streets paved in patched and remelted asphalt bordered with trees. Cottages lined them behind fences, each at the head of a long strip of land ending in farm buildings, with a stretch of vegetable garden between; they were of different sizes and construction, with half-timbering and brick most common. There was a broad paved central square faced with a Christian church and what looked like other public buildings—she recognized the bathhouse and a tavern, and the workshops of blacksmiths and carpenters, potters and leatherworkers were obvious, just as they would have been in a castle-town at home.

People lined the streets, including many children; they waved little flags on sticks, the Crowned Mountain and Sword of Montival alternating with the Hinomaru of her Empire of
Dai Nippon
—the white flag with
the red sun-disk in its center symbolizing her ancestress the Sun Goddess. Reiko felt her eyes prickling a little at the sight.

“Sa . . .
Th
ank you very much,” she said to Lady Heuradys.

“Your Majesty, I’m as surprised as you. That would be my mother, Lady Delia.”

“She is . . . Countess, yes?”

“Well . . . ah, yes, as wife of my lord my father, Lord Rigobert, Count Campscapell. But she, mmm, lives here as Châtelaine to my adoptive mother Baroness d’Ath. And on Barony Harfang, our other estate, for part of the year.”

“Châtelaine is?”

“Sort of a manager—one who directs the estate officials, sees to the household and to hospitality; usually a lord’s wife, or a mother or other female relative if he’s a widower or single.”

Reiko nodded; that was very much what a lord’s wife did in Japan, an
okugatasama.
Plus defending the home, when the lord was away.

“My lady my mother has been Baroness d’Ath’s Châtelaine for a long time. Thirty-six years. My eldest brother Lioncel and my younger sister Yolande bear the name of de Stafford; I and my brother Diomede are adoptive children of the Baroness as well.”

“Ah so desu ka,”
Reiko said politely; that was all plain enough, without being rudely blunt. “It is . . . very nice . . . gesture, you say? The flags.”