But Shoka had heard the news too late for any such chances. In the years since her betrothal to the young Emperor, he and Meiya had grown apart, so that, far from thinking first of her when he had heard about her passing among the other deaths that terrible day, Meiya had seemed less in importance than Heisu and her father.
Later he had realized where his grief was. The soldiers like Heisu, the scholars like Baundi, the loyal guard and the retainers—they had run risks and most of them had had weapons and at least a chance to defend themselves. For Meiya of Kiang, immured in the palace, trusting to her wits, so gentle in her upbringing she could not have lifted a hand in her defense, there had been only the cup—a recourse delayed to the last moment that she had any choice.
It was that gesture that haunted his nights, the suspicion that, lacking any reasonable prospect of mercy from her husband, she had still hoped in someone; that, and the fact that he had not even thought of her first among the dead. Lady Meiya had sat with the deadly cup in hand, watching by the garden window that looked out on the southern road; and hoped to the last for a lover she had given up fifteen years before.
They had put lord Heisu on trial for adultery in the same hour they had invaded his apartments and dragged him out; and Ghita's hand-picked judges had found Heisu guilty on the evidence of lady Meiya's suicide. That was the shape of justice in the new court, with the old Emperor's ashes not yet cold. They had struck off Heisu's head and mounted it at the north gate of Cheng'di, the gate that looked toward Heisu's province of Ayendan.
Shoka had known when he had heard the news, that returning to the capital was hopeless, that there were no allies to draw on: the plot was too thorough, the Guard and the army itself subverted with gold and promises: the order was out for his arrest as well, as Heisu's accomplice in treason in plotting to seize the throne. So the rot he had seen in the court had festered and burst, and there was no rising of indignation among the lords or the people, just a general scramble to find a safe position in the regime-to-come.
That was why he had run for the border. That was why he had saved his own life, after he had so badly misjudged how for the young Emperor would go: the young fool Beijun had quitted the court in a fit of anger and run to Ghita for shelter from him. The young Emperor had sought shelter from him, that was the fact, and that Beijun was Chosen of Heaven and anointed by the priests put a sanctity about him that, even in that hour, Shoka had respected all too much.
Fool, he thought now. But when he considered who else might have sat the throne, or who would have had the force to hold it—there was no one... not after the brutal example of lord Heisu; and not in the opposition of the priests, the hired ones and the simple-minded ones who simply, doggedly, upheld the Chosen of Heaven, even when he was a fool. It was the will of the gods that the Empire was to suffer. It was the will of the gods that murder was done. Was not the Emperor the arbiter of right, the interpreter of the divine, the Bridge to Heaven?
As the priests went, so went the people, who hoped in the gods, and mostly hoped to be let alone: least of all would they fight against the priests. Shoka had understood that the first time a band of peasants tried to collect the reward on his head. He had spent his life thinking first of his obligations and his Emperor; he had defended the law; he had given up everything for the sake of Chiyaden and the Emperor in Cheng'di; and Chiyaden, in the end, had betrayed him.
So what do I have to teach you, girl? Wisdom? I've found none here either.
I had a dozen lovers. There was one love. I gave that up. I honored my father, she honored hers, we were fifteen: what do children know?
He could not forget the cup, lady Meiya, and the window, the way the stories told it—that solitary perfect image, as if he had been there, in that room, in that moment that she gave up hope—even though their converse in later years had all been plotting how to extricate the heir from his wild-living friends, how to circumvent lord Ghita and his cronies, how to persuade the dying Emperor to take at least some action to protect himself against assassination....
If she had been his wife—
But Meiya had chosen duty too.
So she was dead and he was in lifelong exile, plagued now by a young fool of a peasant girl who thought that she could right the wrongs her family had suffered, that blood would account for her people's blood, or that the ghosts would not cease then to trouble her sleep.
One could not advise fools. Fools, old master Yenan had been wont to say, have to mend their foolishness before they can listen. They have to know what truth is.
So that was the first thing—for a girl who did not want to be a girl, for a fool who wanted revenge that would profit her nothing.
That was the first thing that had to change.
Gods, he wanted to hit her. And he could not understand the why of that either, except that she was a fool.
That he wanted to sleep with her—with a scar-faced pig-girl—seemed like an exorcism, a coupling with a creature as rough and ungentle as he could imagine. Shoka's choice, not Saukendar's. Shoka's consolation. Not the woman he could have had.
Damn, better a woman who could take care of herself in the place he was condemned to live in, better a woman as real as the dirt and the summer heat.
Meiya was—what, twenty-two years ago?—when he had been young and whole, when he had believed there was right in the world.
This girl—Taizu—came to him like a second chance.
Teach her the sword.
Gods!
* * *
"Heel thus," he said to her, tapping the ground with the stick. "Toe." He pushed her foot into line, and walked around her, tapping an elbow, a knee, surveying her from all sides.
"Break," he said then. "Relax." And when she had drawn the first breath. "Resume your guard."
She looked at him, betrayed, and he thwacked her on the back of the calves.
"Resume your guard."
She wobbled desperately into position.
He thwacked her again, rapidly, on a misaligned toe, a knee, an elbow. Limbs jerked nervously into a half-remembered line.
He put her carefully back into position.
"Stand there a while," he said. "Until your body remembers."
And he went to sit in the shade and enjoy a cup of tea.
* * *
"Turn! Turn! Turn!" Shoka yelled, and the girl spun into guard position and spun and spun again, perfect in her alignment. She landed on guard and he brought his stick whistling around at her shins. She jumped over it and landed again on soft-shod feet, immaculate in her posture.
He took a tentative swipe at the backs of her knees.
She jumped, wrong move for that attack. The staff clipped her legs. She still recovered and landed.
"No," he said, and leaned on his staff with both hands, considering her, her reach, her balance.
There was only one student he had had—and Beijun had dodged out on his practices, whined when he took a fall, lamented the sweat and the exertion.
A line of sweat trickled down Taizu's face. She did not move from her guard. She waited.
"There's no more you can learn without the sword," he said. "There is a counter for that move. The sword is part of it. The sword makes the difference in your balance."
He walked up to the house without a word then, took the rag-wrapped sword from its place in the corner and brought it out where she stood waiting, in front of the porch.
He drew it and threw the sheath onto the porch. "Break," he said.
She came off-guard, wisely, warily.
"It's all right," he said, and held out the sword to her hilt-first. "Resume guard. Take it gently, gently as you can. I'll let you have the weight little at a time. Light with the fingers, understand?"
She nodded, came on guard with her face quite set and eager, but there was no grabbing at it: she took it exactly the comfortable way.
"That's right. That's one-handed. Second hand, now."
There was only one comfortable way, i
n that position. She found it.
"Exactly right," he said, with a sense of satisfaction the young Emperor had never given him, a feeling all but sensual. "Flawless."
She heard. She gave the tiniest of nods. But the muscles never varied.
"This is the weight. This is all the weight. Don't be aware of the sword. The sword is your right arm. Keep the body in position. Think of that position. Don't feel the sword. Feel your centering. When you feel it perfectly, go through your moves." He stepped clear. "Not until you're ready. Begin like the beginning: slowly."
She stood still for several breaths. The movement when it came was as perfectly centered as the resting-posture. Each step in the advance and turn was exact.
"Stop," he said, and she stopped in mid-turn, in a position she could hold for a very long while. He lifted his hand to a point in the air. "Bring your point to my fingers."
The steel touched.
"Now complete your move slowly and keep the point always in contact with my fingers."
He walked the half-circle with her turn, until her feet were in base position. "Again," he said, and walked it again. He did it seven times more, slow, stopping from time to time, at which she would stop, and her eyes never left his eyes, the way he had taught her.
Graceful, he thought. Beautiful. Not the face, but the perfection of the balance, the attention of the eyes—absolute attention.
"When you're ready," he said. "There should be no strain."
He drew back his hand, stepped back and watched her, amazed at the pig-girl who moved like a figure in a drifting dream.
His teaching, he thought. He was capable of creating something like this.
He felt the impulses in his own muscles, the remembrance what that movement felt like, rightly done. He had moved like that once.
But he could not do it now. He would never do it again. He had constantly to recall that too.
* * *
"Again!" he said, and sat and watched while the girl went through the pattern, sweating profusely now in the late summer heat. He watched, and finally, having made up his mind, got up and walked to where she stood, panting, having finished the exercise.
He took hilt and fist in his hand and stretched her arm outward. "Hold that," he said, and walked back again to sit and work at the scraping of a rabbit-skin. He stank of rabbit. She stank of sweat. It was one of those sticky, awful days when the rains flirted with the hills and left the air thick and still.
He watched her arm droop, watched her struggle with the pose, and hold it.
But after a little the whole arm began to tremble. He watched her closely now, the clamping of the lips, the fight to hold the arm with the shoulder muscles and finally with the back and the chest.
"Break," he said, and she hove her whole body into an effort to let that arm down with control.
"Resume."
She tried, and got the arm up. It began to sink immediately.
So he got up off the porch and held her hand, felt her forearm and the elbow and the upper arm, and said: "That's not enough. Find me two hand-sized stones."
"Yes, master," she said, and went and sheathed the sword and went looking.
She still ran the hill. She weeded and washed and carried water. But the strength of the underarm and ribs did not keep pace with the legs and the back, that was the difficulty.
So she brought him the stones, and he had found himself two slender sticks of wood from the woodpile at the back of the cabin.
"Let me show you something," he said.
"Master," she said earnestly; and he gave her one of the sticks.
"Come on guard," he said. He had never yet fenced with her. It was all exercises until now.
He moved very slowly, touched her elbow with the stick he held while she looked at him as if she was not certain whether she ought to do something.
"Up," he said, and put her arm in its worst and weakest position. "I'm going to hit you. Hold onto the stick."
He cut upward, wood cracked on wood, and hers went flying.
She clapped a hand to her arm.
"Numb?"
"Yes, master Saukendar."
He threw the stick away. "Give me the rocks now," he said, and showed her with one of them how to move her arm. "Do that," he said, "often."
He went back to his rabbit-skins, and the stink and the mess. She might have done the scraping for him; but most of the extraordinary work was done, meals happened, and he refused to abdicate Jiro's care to the girl—the horse was getting too damned friendly with her.
And Taizu did not shirk any part of the day: she was working or she was practicing or he was actively teaching her, and he found it easy as not to teach her while he was doing something else.
They hunted from time to time—hence the rabbit-skins and the opossum. They had tracked wild pigs and had a good notion how to come by pork for sausages, with colder weather.
The cabin had never been so comfortable, the garden benefited, and there was a kind of tranquility between them.
Not that he stopped thinking about her across the cabin at night. Not that the urges went away.
But things had settled to a kind of truce, in which watching her had its own rewards, in which he saw a slow settling in the girl's mind, a calmness beginning that he had no wish to disrupt. That was very much on his side.
* * *
A second time the stick went flying.
He dropped his arm and stood there a moment, then took her arm and felt of the muscle underneath, where there was more strength than there had been, but not enough.
He had thought there was.
"Go bundle straw," he said to her, measuring with his hands, "a mat this thick, tall as I am, half again as wide. And make five times that much strong cord to tie it. Bring it up the hill."
She looked puzzled, but he did not answer questions about such things. She went down toward the barn.
He took a stick of seasoned wood and his hand-axe and began to trim it.
When she came up from the stable, she carried a huge mat rolled on her shoulder, and she had straw stuck in the weave of her shirt and straw in her hair and mud on her knees.
He had a pile of shavings and a well-trimmed foil.
He pointed it toward the youngish tree that stood, first of the forest, within view of the porch.
"Wrap the mat around its trunk and tie it fast, top, middle, and bottom," he said, and went on with his plane, smoothing the grip on it. He wrapped the grip about with leather and cord.
And when she had finished he walked out to the tree and took the guard position, making three passes, left and right and left, against the mat that padded the trunk, before he stood up and handed the foil to her.
"On your guard. Left, right, left."
She struck as he had told her.
"Again," he said. And: "Again."
* * *
The cabin reeked with the scent of boiling herbs and grease, and Shoka wrinkled his nose at the stink and lifted rag after rag out of the mixture with a stick, dropping it into a pan.
Taizu wrinkled her nose too when he brought the pan over to her, where she sat on the mat, but it was only half-hearted resistance. "Off with the shirt," he said; and when she looked at him with profound offense: "No silliness, girl. Off with it! I've no damn interest in your body at the moment. I'm treating you exactly like you asked me to, and I've no patience with squeamishness."
She carefully turned her back and tried, wincing, to pull the loose shirt up and over her head. Her arms could not even manage that much.
He set the pan down, pushed the shirt up over her shoulders and shoved her face down on the mat, then took one steaming rag and laid it over her back.
"Ai," she yelled.
"Hot?"
She made a muffled sound.
He took the rest of the mess rag by rag and, starting with her shoulders, wrapped the greasy cloth around her joints, and around her neck and her hands; and flung dry rags on top, and finally a blanket
, to keep the heat.
"I've made a pot of the stuff," he said. "You might as well just toss the rags in it in the morning. We'll be boiling them tomorrow night." He patted her on her well-padded, quilt-covered backside. "And don't worry about your virtue. That salve would kill a goat's appetite."
* * *
Chips flew, the axe-blows echoed off the fire-leafed mountains. Time to make sure the woodpile was ready for colder weather. Shoka felled two trees and sectioned them, Jiro dragged the logs out of the wood, and thereafter, Shoka had said, handing the girl the axe, "As well this as the foil. Excellent for the shoulders."
She never objected to the work he gave her. She attacked the logs the way she attacked the exercise, the way she attacked the hill. Her hair had grown to her shoulders now. It shone with health. The scar was bright only when she sweated; and he watched her now, with the sun on her and the autumn colors starting in the brush—thinking how the abundance of food and the sun and the healthful work had put a glow about her face, fleshed out her bony limbs, put strength into the way she moved, the habit of graceful action.
If she would only smile, he thought, if he could only get laughter out of her, or even anger, or a little less skittish modesty.
But: "All right," she would say, no matter how outrageous his demand, as long as he kept his distance from her.
Except she had looked at him strangely when he had been felling the second of those trees, and when he had asked why:
"Nothing, master Saukendar."
It was entirely unlike her, not like her usual inward-turned reticence, but an outward-focused one, one in which he was the matter in her thoughts.
For the first time in weeks he remembered his old suspicions about her, and thought how comfortable he had grown with her, how very casual he had gotten about trusting her at his back.
Measuring him. That was the look. And he caught her at it several times that day.
And that evening, when he sat down on the porch with his bowl of rice:
"What in hell are you looking at?" he asked her.
"Master?"
"Just then. What were you looking at?"
"Nothing, master Saukendar."
He scowled at her and jabbed the chopsticks her direction. "Don't give me that kind of answer. Nothing, master Saukendar. Your eyes were open. You were awake. What in hell were you looking at?"
The Paladin Page 7