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ever saw.
    Ishikawa Goru was only ten years older than her, which made him the second-youngest present, and the sailor was also inclined to headlong brashness.
    “But their country seems to be very thinly populated, General-sama,” he said. “How many of them can there be?”
    They all looked at him, and he flushed and mumbled: “So sorry.”
    Reiko made a tapping gesture towards the naval captain with her closed
tessen
war-fan in mild reproof, making allowances for the way he’d kept them afloat through weeks of storms in the frozen wastes of water north of Hokkaido as they ran before the gales and the relentless pursuit of the
jinnikukaburi
squadron. And for the fact that the
Red Dragon
under his command had sunk several of the enemy ships in brilliant slash-and-run engagements without taking crippling damage or heavy casualties. Ifthose extra
jinnikukaburi
crews and marines had been on their tails when they came ashore here not one of the Japanese would have lived long enough to be rescued.
    “This is probably only a fringe territory, like our new settlements on the main islands,” she said gently. “The equipment, weapons and tools we have seen . . . there must be plenty of large workshops
somewhere
, with highly skilled specialists,
their
tools, and a labor force. Which means many farming villages like this one we have seen to support them. Hundreds, at the very least. Probably thousands.”
    Koyama nodded. “Yes, Majesty. I have definitely learned from maps they have shown me and what conversation we have been able to manage that this is the southernmost of their inhabited territories and far from the center.”
    There was an old map of western North America on the table, and he used a finger that had been broken long ago and healed slightly crooked to point:
    “From what I was able to learn, the heart of their realm lies here in the valley of this river to the north, the Columbia, and the other rivers flowing into it, from the coast far into the interior. This was where the largest number survived the Change. Rather as Sado-ga-shima or Hachijojima or Goto and Oki-shoto and the other islands of refuge are to us, but I suspect they have more people than we do. Possibly
many
more; that river and those seaports were the path by which huge quantities of grain were exported before the Change, and much would have been available in ships, storage elevators and trains. There were a few large cities which doubtless perished, but also very broad farmlands with few inhabitants. Very few, by our standards.”
    “Ah, yes,” Egawa said clinically. “With organization, that could have made quite a difference to the logistics.”
    His was not the only nod of agreement. Famine had been the greatest killer everywhere in the year after the Change, closely followed by the chaos and plague that inevitably came in famine’s wake and brought everything down in wreck. There had been a hundred and twenty million people in Japan in 1998; thirty-five million in Greater Tokyo alone. Shehad learned those numbers from her tutors, but it was difficult to think of them as anything real. Sado-ga-shima had been a rural backwater, and not many of the few surviving adults from the cities willingly spoke of that time. Or of the battles on the island’s shores to keep out starving refugees, fought by men weeping as they killed.
    All her people together were perhaps a third of a million now, and that was much more than it had been at the lowest point. When a city of thirty-five millions found itself with only a week’s food, and no light or clean water or sewage disposal or transport or ability to communicate faster than a man on foot . . . Tokyo and Osaka had burned for months. The skies had been dark that year, the elderly said when they spoke of it at all, and stank of smoke, and the cold rain left stains like liquid soot. Her father’s generation had been more haunted by it than hers, but it would be centuries before the memory of