"Fourteen," Yuchai replied in nearly unaccented Trade-tongue, feeling worried. "Am I—am I learning too slowly?" He clutched his Ancas primer so hard his knuckles were white. Trade-tongue was very like the speech of Ancas, and he was making—he thought—reasonable progress in learning that language. But this business of equating sounds with marks on a page was very new to him. The idea that words could be saved, forever and ever, unchanged, had excited him so much he resented every moment not spent in learning how to decipher those marks.
"Gods above and below," Kasha laughed, her eyes crinkling at the corners. "Too slowly? Anything but that! You're learning as quickly as a very young child—and that's supposed to be impossible for a boy your age. You already speak Trade-tongue as well as I do, and you're learning Ancas as fast as I can pour it into you."
Yuchai relaxed, and sagged back into the pillows that had been piled behind him so that he could sit up. "It is that I have very little else to do except learn, gadjeia Kasha," he said. "And I—have pleasure in this learning. Besides, I certainly cannot practice the warrior arts from a bed."
Kasha snorted and made a sour face. "If I have my way you won't be practicing the 'warrior arts' at all, young man. You've too good a mind. I'd cripple you myself before I'd see you die by the hand of some stupid ox who happens to outweigh you by three times."
Yuchai felt a strange apprehension at her words. For so long he had wanted to be a great warrior like Jegrai—and yet the great warrior he admired would have been happier if he'd never touched a weapon. And now this fighting-woman who said the same thing; she was very good—he'd watched her at practice from his huge window, for besides the mountains you could look right down into the courtyard of the Sword-folk, if you stood—or in his case, sat—close to the edge. Would she do such a thing? To keep him a scholar—scholars were forbidden weapons. Was that her purpose, to see that he did not violate that law? He licked his dry lips. "That—that is similar to what Khene Jegrai tells me," he ventured. "But, forgive me, honored teacher, but Vredai needs warriors. Vredai does not need a man who is neither feeble nor crippled, yet who cannot raise a blade in his own defense—"
"Yuchai, do you really enjoy fighting?" she asked, her face gone quiet and very serious.
"I—I—the moving, like dancing, doing it well—I like that," he temporized.
"I'm not talking about that," she said, frowning. "I'm talking about fighting. Killing, trying not to be killed. Do you find that . . . attractive? Some do; acts on them like wine. Nothing sinful about that, nothing wrong, just the way some people are made."
"No—I—I haven't seen much of fighting, but—they always set me to guarding the Clan heart, the children, you know? The fighting got that far, once or twice. I—the closer it got, the sicker I got." He hung his head, admitting his shame, the weakness he had confessed to no one but Shaman Northwind. "When I closed, the moment before, you know, I almost couldn't hold my sword for wanting to throw up. But—Vredai has a Singer. They don't need another fool that can't even defend himself."
He colored as he realized that he had just slandered his own father.
"Did I say you shouldn't know how to defend yourself?" Kasha demanded. "Have you ever once heard me say anything like that? I'm no fool, Yuchai—your people are warriors by their nature. Wherever you go, there's likely to be fighting. There's no harm in knowing weaponry—every member of the Order knows bow, at least. I'm just saying you don't belong on a battlefield, except in a case of last resort."
"Everyone—in the Order—knows weaponry?" Yuchai's thoughts went whirling as if they'd been caught in a dust-demon. "But—except for those of the Sword, are you all not as Singers? Is it not forbidden among you for Singers to touch a weapon?"
Kasha's mouth twisted as she labored to disentangle that last sentence. "No, it's not forbidden!" she exclaimed when she had the sense of it. "Great good gods, we'd have been slaughtered a dozen times over if we held that rule! If a novice from one of the other chapters wants to spend his free time learning Swordways, that's his business. We've actually had one or two Masters that could have been both Sword and either Book or Tower by earned skill-level if they'd chosen to ask for the Sword badge as well as their own."
"You—have?" He felt rather as if he'd fallen on his head again.
"I take it that it's very much forbidden among your people."
"One must choose," he replied carefully. "The Singer must never touch a weapon; the Wind Lords favor the wise, but—you know that among us the wise one is almost sacred? It is a terrible thing for a man to raise his hand against a scholar; the Wind Lords will surely curse him for it. So—for a wise one to bear a weapon, to fight with a weapon—that is taking dishonorable advantage."
It didn't take his tutor long to fathom the meaning of that. "Uh-huh," Kasha said, nodding. "Yes, I see what you mean. It's like a whole man taking on one with no legs. The opponent of a scholar in a fight has a choice between being dead and being cursed."
"Exactly so," Yuchai said with a sigh.
"Well, we don't have that particular restriction, and it doesn't look like the Wind Lords have cursed us yet." Kasha settled back in her bedside chair and put her hands behind her head. "My friend, if you want to go trade bruises with me or anyone else in Sword and you happen to have landed in Tower or Book, feel free to come to us in your spare time. We're always looking for new sparring partners, and I'll wager you could show us a few things new to us. And if you don't happen to tell the Wind Lords—" she grinned "—neither will I."
Yuchai felt his breath stick somewhere in his throat. It took him a moment to get it moving again. "I may?" he asked.
"You may. But not at the moment." Kasha pulled one hand out and wagged an admonishing finger at him. "At the moment you can barely hold up that book, and it takes Zorsha to get you to the privy."
He felt a blush crawling up his face.
"So at the moment, my friend, you'd best keep your attentions on that primer."
He gladly buried his nose in the book, hoping Kasha hadn't noticed his blushing.
* * *
"So, if the world is round, like a ball, why don't we fall off of it?" the boy asked. "And if it's spinning, why aren't we flung off of it?"
Zorsha grinned. At first he'd thought this notion of Felaras's—to teach a wild nomad boy—was going to be sheer torture for both of them.
It was turning out to be sheer pleasure. The boy drank in everything Zorsha could teach as thirsty ground drank spring rains. There was such a need in him to know—sometimes Zorsha could almost see him physically beating against the walls of his limitations of language and understanding. And every day those walls crumbled a little more; one day there would be nothing to stop him.
"Because," he said, answering the question with an example, "we think, Yuchai, that when something gets big enough, it attracts smaller things to it—the way this bit of amber picks up a feather after I rub it with the silk."
Zorsha took an amber bead from the box of oddments he'd brought with him, and rubbed it vigorously with a scrap of silk cloth. He put a feather on the comforter, and brought the bead close to it. The boy watched, his eyes bright with intense fascination, as the feather leapt to cling to the bead.
The boy reached out and pulled the feather away, then let it go, and watched it return to the bead.
"We think," Zorsha said, "that the force I generated in the amber and the force that holds us on the world are similar, though not the same. We call the first 'electricity' and the second 'gravity.'"
The boy's lips moved a little as he committed the words to his memory. "But—why don't you think they're the same if they both make things stick to other things?"
Zorsha chuckled, put the feather away, and rubbed the amber again, briskly. "I'll show you—hold out your finger."
Yuchai did, and Zorsha brought the amber in close enough to the boy's fingertip that a spark leapt from the bead to the outstretched finger. The boy yelped in surprise and jerked his hand back.
Yuchai cocked his head to one side and stared over Zorsha's shoulder, out the window at the mountains. The Hand had noticed that Yuchai always stared at the mountains when he was thinking. His brow was creased—but not in puzzlement. "That . . . spark . . . that was like a tiny piece of lightning," he said after a moment, making it a statement and not a question.
"Very like," Zorsha agreed.
"Is the spark you made the same stuff as lightning—only small?"
"We think so."
"There's always a lot of lightning in the mountains," Yuchai mused. "Could . . . lightning happen because—because clouds rub against the ground, the way you rubbed the silk on the amber?"
Zorsha felt his eyes widening in surprise. I hadn't expected that jump of reasoning! Good for him!
"That's one idea," he agreed. "There are lots of possible explanations, and that's one of them."
"But clouds are only air and water," Yuchai said, turning puzzled eyes on his teacher. "How could they rub against the ground when there's nothing there to rub with?"
"Are you sure that air is nothing?" Zorsha countered.
"Yes!—No." The boy looked back over the mountains. "No, it can't be nothing, not when I've been in winds so strong they knocked me over, and wind is just air moving the way the Wind Lords tell it to. And when the wind blows like that, in a khemaseen or a syechali, it can pick up enough sand to strip the flesh from your bones, which means that it's holding the sand up. So air is something. Is—is air like water, only very, very thin?"
"We don't know," Zorsha admitted. "We used to think that all things were made of four elements—air, water, earth, and fire. Now we know they aren't: we know that what we call 'earth' is made of a great many things. We call those things elements now, because they are 'elementary,' which means they can't be broken down into anything smaller. We think water is made of several elements, but we can't tell what they are. We don't know about fire. Or air. Or light, like from the sun. Those might be what we call 'energies,' or we might be able to break them down into other things some day—or they may be elements."
"There's a lot you don't know," Yuchai observed, with a stare that had mischief lurking at the bottom of it.
Gods above and below—if I should have a son one day, grant me one like this!
"Oh, yes," Zorsha admitted cheerfully, "there's a great deal we don't know. That just makes a great deal for someone to find out. Maybe you. Hm?"
The boy returned his gaze to the clouds moving above the mountains.
"It might be. . . ." he whispered. "It might be me. . . ."
* * *
The Khene's tent was very crowded. Of all his advisors, only the Shaman sat beside him to hear what the most senior riders of the Clan had to say about the wizards—and the truce. Jegrai wished with one half of his mind that he had the others with him.
But the more reasoning half of his mind told him that this must be dealt with—and he alone must deal with it. Else the Clan might begin to wonder who was Khene—Jegrai, or Jegrai's advisors.
So he kept his face impassive and listened with patience that was mostly feigned to the arguments and threats of his most argumentative people.
"I tell you, we have them at our mercy!" shouted a stocky, round-faced rider with a strong and authoritative voice, a voice that almost forced one to listen to it. This was the Clan Singer, Yuchai's father, Jegrai's uncle Gortan. "These fools leave their gates open to us by day or night—there are not so many of them that a war party could not steal in under the cover of the darkness and force them to give us the secret of the lightning!"
"Pah! The secret of the lightning!" spat Jegrai's half-brother Iridai, a man so like Gortan that they could have been -brothers, save that Iridai did not have Gortan's power to ensorcel with his voice. "That is only too likely a secret the Wind Lords would curse us for having! If they did not curse us for taking it by force from these wizards! I would remind you all, these folk are too like the Holy Vedani for my comfort. I would be away from them, before we lose ourselves to them! Jegrai, we have the water-pledge, we have the truce—send back the envoys, take back our people, and let us be away from here! Their land-folk are creeping out of hiding, and there can be none who could hold us less than honorable if we moved on to other pickings. The old ways are the best ways—"
"Iridai, my brother," Jegrai said softly, but with veiled menace, "the old ways would have let Yuchai die, or left him a cripple. The old ways would reduce us to thieving swords of steel instead of honorably forging our own. Is that what you want?"
Iridai gaped at him in surprise; Jegrai was quite well aware that his brother had claimed one of the first new swords with the glee of a child claiming a honeycomb.
"And uncle," he continued, turning to face Gortan before he lost his advantage, his menace no longer veiled, "would you have us break water-pledge? Would you have us less in honor than the Talchai, cursed be their name and Clan?"
Gortan shrank visibly.
"You are Clan Singer—would you record treachery such as not even Khene Sen dared in the songs of Vredai?"
"No." Gortan shook his head. "Khene, it maddens me, this waiting at their table for crumbs—and their choice of what we shall have, and what we shall not have. They treat us as children, as fools."
Jegrai chose to keep silence upon that point, for it sometimes galled him as well. And it is well that Gortan does not know this. My friend Teo knows—but can do nothing. He is at the orders of his Khene, Master Felaras. And Master Felaras does things for reasons only she knows.
Shaman Northwind spoke up at this point. "Gortan," he said pleasantly, "if you were to train a child to wield a sword, would you place your brother's sharp new steel blade in his hands?"
The Clan Singer snorted. "Of course not! I would give him a weighted practice blade of wood suited to his age, and . . . ah. I think I see where your words take you, Northwind. You are -saying that these wizards teach us things that are like to a wooden practice blade."
"I am," the old man said, his eyes twinkling. "And it is a very humbling experience for a man of my years to find himself less in knowledge than the youngest novice in their Fortress. But a child must learn to walk ere he can run—and even I, perforce, must learn with the children before I can understand some of their mysteries." He sighed heavily. "Though it chafes at me, I have not the tools of understanding to compass much of what I have seen in their place of stone. I must wait to have those tools before I can understand what they do, and not simply mimic it."
Gortan mumbled something, still plainly unhappy.
But the Shaman continued, and his voice held a power no less persuasive than the Singer's. "We must work with these wizards of the Order, Gortan. There are many, many things they wish to learn of us, as well. You all know that I have spoken with Master Felaras at great length. I think, although I do not know, that she has some distant plan, a plan that involves both our peoples—but as allies, Gortan, as equals. And equality implies that we will have the secret of the lightnings, and certainly have it before the passing of too many seasons. I advise patience; and I shall take care to follow my own advice, hard though it may be."
Grumbling, Gortan, Iridai, and the others gathered to speak with their Khene agreed—
Or seemed to.
* * *
The tent was pitched on the edge of the camp, and with the edges raised for ventilation there was no chance anyone could overhear Halun's conversation without being seen. Halun sighed, and spread his hands helplessly. "I feared that would be the way of things when you told me of this meeting," he told Gortan. "Your Khene is a young man, and the young are easily influenced by flattery and won by promises. Master Felaras can be most persuasive when she chooses."
Persuasive. Gods above and below, how she would howl to hear me describe her as "persuasive"! Bul
lying yes, and outright threatening, but persuasive? Ha. But this Gortan doesn't know that, and it's not likely he'll get close enough to her to find out.
"So you think that your Khene Felaras has no intention of giving us the secret of the lightning?" Gortan asked, his usually impassive face reflecting strong emotion of some kind, though Halun was unable to tell what.
"Why should she? While she holds it, you fear to leave, for you fear she may strike you with it on your leaving—and you think that she may yet give it to you if you are patient and good, like obedient children, so you wait to see if it is yet forthcoming. As for the Master, well! While she has you at the foot of her mountain, she can use your warriors as an unspoken threat, a blade at the throats of the dukes of Ancas and the princes of Yazkirn."
"Ha!" the Singer barked in obvious satisfaction. "I wondered what her purpose was!"
"And I wonder somewhat at yours, Clan Singer," Halun replied, bending closer with a wince for his tender knees. After several weeks down here, he still wasn't used to sitting cross-legged on the ground. "Why is it that you wish the lightning so very much?"
The Singer stared at him for a moment, broodingly. "It is no secret that we have enemies," he stated.
"Indeed," Halun agreed.
"We have something of a blood-debt to pay those enemies. A great blood-debt. I wish to live to see the lightning pay that debt in the space of a single battle. I wish to see the Clan of Talchai without a single warrior left whole."
Halun gazed into those cold yet passionate eyes, and shuddered. This man was not mad, or even half-mad. He was terribly, terribly sane. But so single of purpose that Halun would far rather flee to the ends of the earth than stand between him and his goal.
It would be safer.
"I cannot tell you if you will live to see that come to pass, Singer Gortan," Halun said truthfully. "But my experience of Felaras . . ."
Again, he spread his hands, thinking, And the best lie is to tell the truth.
The stocky nomad grunted. "So you have said. I thank you, scholar. By your leave, I must go to tend my duties."
Reap the Whirlwind Page 14