She bit her lip and said nothing.
"I don't like secrets, girl. Did I talk to you about honesty? You said teach you the sword. Let me tell you there's more to it than chopping wood or necks. Let me tell you there's an obligation to honorable behavior. About time I taught it to you. Do you want to answer my question?"
"I was noticing—you go off your center when you don't have to, master Saukendar."
"What about my center?" He stared at her in vexation, thinking first she had taken leave of her senses, and then that she was deliberately insulting him.
"When you were using the axe. You were off your center."
"Damned right I go off my center. Has it taken you this long to notice the limp?"
"I didn't mean that."
"What do you mean?"
She looked at him, swallowed hard and said: "When you use the axe. You do it on a lot of things. You're turning your knee and your foot. You don't have to."
Damned impudent brat, was behind his teeth; but his own speech about honesty stuck in his throat. He was outraged. He wondered, mad as it made him, about that nagging stiffness in his back that had begun to trouble him in the last year or so.
Is it age? he wondered, over a mouthful of rice.
Is she right?
"I don't mean to speak out of turn, master Saukendar."
He simply glared at her. She ducked her head and ate her dinner.
But when he got up from the porch he wondered, when he walked inside he wondered: he tried to feel the extent of stretch in his legs and the line of his back and could not decide.
He wondered the next day too, went back to the back and split some logs himself, and damn, he was doing it, curling the toes on his lame side, turning the knee inward to save the leg not from pain but from the memory of pain. That was the stupid truth.
He took a deliberate swing at the log with the leg straight and felt not the pain, but the strain of weakened muscles.
He looked up then at a movement by the front corner of the cabin, and saw Taizu looking at him.
Damn you, he thought, and knew beyond a doubt she understood why he had taken a sudden notion to chop the wood himself this morning.
Especially since she ducked guiltily back around the corner, as if she had not known what he was about back behind the house.
He thought about it every time he did something familiar—when he carried buckets, climbed the porch steps, when he stood up or sat down. He made himself use both legs equally, and he knew, dammit, he knew that she was able to see that he was walking straighter and damned well sure why.
So one was honest. So one was a gentleman. One did not beat the pig-girl for telling the truth she was able to see. One was even grateful.
One wanted to go hunting, say, for three and four days and not have her dour, calculating stare shot his way when he limped and when he did not. But he would have to come back then, either limping or not, either having begun to do something about his habit or not, and in either case to have the damned girl staring at him and knowing she was right.
So one just tried not to favor the leg, that was all; one refused to limp even on a cool morning when the old wound ached. One went down to the stable where the girl could not see, and practiced the exercises he had not done in years, until the leg ached enough to set his teeth on edge, and his back hurt, and he earnestly wished that he could make up an excuse to use the hot compresses himself; but that also admitted that she was right.
And he refused to do that.
Chapter Five
There's a boy coming," Taizu said, panting from the uphill dash, not panic, just news: they had both been looking for that visitor ever since the first red had touched the leaves.
"Get out of sight," Shoka said, which they had agreed on, too.
The village tends to gossip, he had said, when he explained the matter to her; and gossip gets down the roads as far as traders go, and it's far, far better if I do nothing at all out of the ordinary. Let the village think you've gone. Let them think I sent you off like the others. And he thought, in a sudden cold flash, remembering the bandits: For the gods' sake don't let them know I've got a girl up here....
Because of a sudden it had occurred to him that she was not the skinny waif who had come up the mountain—hair dusty and dull and bobbed, body bowed under that damn basket.
The girl he was looking at was clear-skinned and bright-eyed and better-fed, hair shining and shoulder-length, her every move balanced on hips that had nothing to do with the way a boy's were set.
Damn!
And he had thought, in that same visionary moment, that if the village sent up one of the boys who had been on the mountain before, there would still be gossip even if he never had eyes on Taizu.
Something's different, the boy would be saying directly as he got back to the village... because there was a more prosperous look to the clearing this year, in the way the garden thrived, with the beans staked up, the little plot of herbs in neat rows—he could not put exact words to it himself, except that Taizu had a way of putting things in their place, and keeping things orderly, and she hoed and she weeded and even attacked the vines that tried to creep into the clearing and wind around the fence-posts and overgrow the path to the spring: she put up pegs to hang things on; she racked the hoe and the rake like weapons; she hung up the onions in chains and the herbs and roots in bunches.
Not the same, he thought. Nothing was the same on the mountain. And he could not imagine how he had ever thought about turning the girl over to the nuns.
Now she slipped off around the side of the cabin to take herself, he imagined, to the vantage-point upon the knoll from which she would watch the trading. Being Taizu.
And he took his bundled furs, an uncommonly good lot of them, from the rafter where they hung, and brought them out to the porch as the boy from the village trudged up with his pack of rice and other goods.
"Master Saukendar," the boy said—Shoka did know him, but it struck him that he had never bothered to learn the boy's name, a stocky, broad-faced lad, who wiped the sweat from his brow and set the packs down.
"Boy." Shoka nodded courteously as the boy bowed; and found himself wondering about the youth—his family, who he was, why he was for the last several years the one the village chose to bring its gifts. But it seemed late to ask things like that and Shoka had no idea at all why it suddenly mattered, or why questions occurred to him that never had—
—except once upon a time Saukendar the Emperor's right arm had known everything in court, and kept an attentive eye on details; and nowadays Shoka the recluse had given up the court and all that went with it.
Damn the girl, anyway. It was more than the weeds she chopped away at.
So he kept his questions and his curiosity to himself. Questions from his side encouraged questions from the boy's side, and that was nothing he wanted. Questions about the world brought answers about the world, and he had stopped wanting to hear about it nine years ago.
So he brought out his furs, he cast them grandly in a pile on the porch and said modestly: "I'll want a few loads of straw, if you can. I've some patching to do."
The village never bargained. It got more in the way of furs than usual this year because he had had more time to hunt, and the good rains had meant an abundance of rabbits and foxes; if this year he wanted a load of straw, that should be no hardship, in the good harvest that it had been.
(Don't you let them tell you there's been bad harvest, Taizu had said fiercely. It's good this year, no way it's not. )
"Aye, lord," the boy said. "I tell 'em, m'lord. I bring it. Tomorrow, if you like."
"Good lad." So much for hard bargaining. He was grateful to the boy; and he saw the young face flush, the eyes dart toward his and lower again, shyly, as he began to unwrap the pack the boy had brought.
There was rice, there was salt, there were sausages, wonderful sausages, there were small pottery jars of preserves and other things lovingly made by the women of t
he village. He remembered other such gifts, small jars sitting on his shelves until the winter, when he allowed himself such luxuries. He knew this jar, for instance, that it was a ginger preserve: for years it had come in the same kind of small pot, with a wax seal; and it was as good as ever graced the Emperor's table. For years some woman had been sending him this, and he had never truly taken account of the gifts before, the fruit and ginger, the small pots of sauces and spices that relieved the sameness of his diet.
"This is very kind," he said, unaccountably moved. "This is wonderful. Tell them so."
"Yes, m'lord," the boy said.
Oh, gods, boy, he thought then, staring at the young face, I'm not a damn hero, I'm not worth all this, don't you see?
But that was not what the boy had come up the hill to find, so truth was not, finally, what he owed the boy.
"My mother sent you a shirt," the boy said, unrolling it from the pack.
"It's very fine," he said, fingering the embroidery. "Tell her I thank her." And, a little embarrassed, weighing the rice and remembering that there were two to feed: "I wonder—I could use a bit more rice—"
"I can bring that, m'lord Saukendar."
"I'd be grateful."
There were three more fox skins and a great number of rabbits and squirrels in what he gave them. He did not feel it was unjust.
Taizu had said it was not unjust.
And as the boy left, he clapped the youth on the shoulder like a comrade in arms, which the boy took well to.
He had never understood why the village worshipped him. He had never asked for it. It frightened him. And he remembered that peasants had tried to trap him and many villages had joined his hunters in Chiyaden.
For the bounty on his head, he had thought.
But not these folk.
Taizu was no different than any pig-girl he had ever seen.
And at the same time she was very different.
(Lithe body whirling with a flash of cane in hand, flash of bare legs, bare slim midriff and white shirt flying.... )
He had never understood the countryfolk. He had never understood the minds of people who worked the land and herded pigs and provided the things that turned up on the tables and in the granaries. He knew the importance of them in war. He knew the importance of supply and he understood the logistics of moving forces among such people, what force a band of spear-wielding peasants could contribute and what they were worth in a fight, with the bows they were entitled to, and what the laws were (when there had been laws) about what an officer could do and demand of the villages. But he had no notion why these folk down in the village of Mon should be faithful to him, except that they might assume more of him than he was and more than he could do. Which made him angry.
No, it troubled his sense of honor, because he had known in his heart it was going on all these years, and he had never let himself wonder about it or worry about the cost.
So he sat and stared at the boy's departing back as the boy went back down the hill, taking to the road; and he had not moved when Taizu came back to the edge of the porch.
"What did he say, master?"
"Nothing," Shoka said. "He said nothing. Except he'll bring the straw and a little more rice. So we won't run short. And we can patch the roof."
Taizu looked at him strangely, squatting down on her haunches there in front of the porch where he sat; but he got up off the edge and said that he had work to do.
He did not, in fact, know what that was, but he took the bucket of scraps and went and walked up into the woods and over toward the shoulder of the hill, where the smaller meadow was, and the thicket, where they put the bits and ends of squash and bean-pods. It made for more rabbits next spring.
Even a man from the court had not needed a pig-girl to tell him that; or what became of the rabbits that got to depend on them.
* * *
And on the next day he went down the hill as far as the appointed place, a narrow track on which Jiro could not help him; but Taizu went along.
There was a pile of straw bales, which the village had left on the last level ground; and there was a small cairn of stones, which protected the basket of rice.
He gave her the rice basket to carry; and he gathered up one of the huge straw bales and sent her up the hill first, because his lame leg gave him trouble on a climb like this, and he had no desire to have her behind him, waiting on his clumsy shiftings of balance and telling him: You're off your center, master Saukendar.
He made up his mind not to carry the load that way, in his slow campaign to correct his balance: he shifted the stress on muscles until he could feel the pain, and he was sweating, out of breath and feeling the pull in the old scar when he dumped the first load at the very edge of the clearing. "You can get that up the rest of the way," he said, and turned and went back down the track.
That gave him some breathing room, while she had to take the basket of rice as far as the cabin and then come back downhill and move the straw. It let him take the downward trail slower, limping all he liked now that he was carrying nothing, and swearing with every aching step.
He was a fool. He should have had the boy bring help and carry the damned straw as far as the stable. The boy would have done that. The boy would have been delighted to do that for the great lord Saukendar, who was too crippled to climb the damn mountain.
He cursed the assassins who had done it to him. He saw the dark, the melee, remembered the blow like it was yesterday and, worse, had himself to blame, for letting anger cloud his judgement and for letting a man come at him from the side.
One mistake in a lifetime. One mistake because he was more intent on killing than on surviving, because he was thinking of Meiya and Heisu and thinking that he would as soon die and be out of his pain.
One mistake because he was a man and not the paragon the legends said he was. And the man limped for the rest of his life and hurt like hell and was short of wind because he had survived that ambush, he had made it beyond the borders of the Empire, he had decided to live and he could no longer do the things that kept him in form. A little exercise helped. But it did not cure the lameness, did not cure the weakness.
Nothing could bring back Saukendar the way he had been. Nothing could make the years flow backward, bring the dead to life and make the pain go away.
And Taizu, damn her, overtook him before he even got down the hill, scampering down the root-laddered slot like a goat, cheerful as an otter.
She grinned at him as she took up a man-sized bundle.
That's too much for you, he started to say, because it was not the weight, it was the way the bundle caught on the trees along the trail and forced shifts in balance in the narrow track there was to walk on. It did that to him. It brought stabs of pain through his leg and a sick feeling when he took up the weight of another bale. Damn stubborn girl. Let her find out for herself. Do her good.
But she took out on the trail ahead of him, and widened the gap between them, so that he struggled to keep up with her, struggled and sweated until, at the top, the air he breathed seemed tainted with metal and the clearing swam in a film of sweat and pain.
Which he did not admit. He dumped his load just after her and said, grandly: "You seem to enjoy it. You go down and bring the rest."
He picked up the bales by the ropes, one in either hand, and carried them without a limp toward the stable, with the cabin and the trees and the stable swimming like a vision under water.
He dumped the load just inside the doorway, out of her sight, and sat down on it and held his leg and just ached in peace a moment, until Jiro came wandering in to investigate and nuzzled his shoulder.
He patted the offered cheek and got himself up on his feet.
He wished they had killed him, that was what. He had never done so before, but he wished it now, that he saw his youth was past, his future was here, and that future was less and less every year.
That was what the girl had taught him to do, to count time again, and
to reckon the seasons, and to see the changes time had made in him, was making, until this year he failed to keep up with a sixteen-year-old girl.
He threw the bales of straw into the fenced end of the stable, out of Jiro's reach, then walked back down toward the trail and was part way down the hill when Taizu came struggling up with a load.
She was sweating now, at least, and panting with the climb; so he felt halfway chivalrous in saying: "I'll take it. How many more?"
"Two more."
"Go on back down," he said.
He took the load up, dumped the bale at the clearing edge and went down the trail again, to meet her struggling up again, but far, far down.
She stopped when he met her. She gave him her load and she started down after the last.
"No," he said, half-turning with the load, "that's too much for a girl. Go on up the hill."
"I can do it," she said, and with a sweat-drowned glance and a gasp after wind, got her balance on the slot of a trail and plunged back down the way she had come.
He stared after her, hard-breathing and exhausted, and with a bitter-coppery taste in his mouth. He stared for a long moment, then took up the bale and slogged up the trail, fighting the clinging branches until he faced the last slope, clearer there. He had gotten his wind again, and he was doing well enough, finally, except the hurt in the leg.
He shifted the ropes on his shoulders, sucked in a deep breath and took the last climb at a run.
He made it to the top, fell to one knee as the bale snagged on a branch, and for one pain-blinded moment had no strength to get the damn thing free.
He got up again with a furious shove.
Something ripped in the great muscle above his knee, and the bale shoved with his shoulder against a tree was all that kept him from falling down again under the pain. His mouth watered; his vision went hazy; when he came to himself he was still standing there braced against the tree and ropes about the bale were cutting into his shoulders. He did not know how he was going to move without falling down; but he knew that the girl would be coming up the trail soon and damned if he would let her see him like this.
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