The Reluctant Swordsman

by David Duncan

  He started up the steps as fast as he could walk. The pilgrims were back on their knees and facing away from him. Soon he could see the roof of the temple, an incredible maze of fan vaulting. There were no interior pillars. It was a single span, which was structurally unbelievable and did much to confirm his disbelief. As he neared the top he saw the idol at the end. There was his destination, then! He would go and talk to this goddess about her world and arrange a few improvements.

  He stepped between the knots of kneeling pilgrims. Two brown-kilted swordsmen jerked to startled attention at the sight of him and pulled out their swords to salute. He ignored them, marching through the arch and into the nave, striding purposefully toward the idol at the far end, and marveling at the sheer enormity of the place. The great stained-glass windows were bright with complicated arabesques of flowers and plants and animals and birds and fish in vibrant reds and blues and greens. Take all the greatest churches and temples and mosques of earth and roll them into one...

  Sauntering priests and pilgrims stared in outrage at his progress as he swept by. The word would certainly be out, and he would see who answered it-little old Honakura or the dark presence of the ill-famed Hardduju.

  The size of the temple had been dictated by the size of the idol. But it wasn't an idol. It was a natural rock formation, a conical pillar of some sort of bluish rock, metamorphic he supposed, although he knew little more geology than botany. While it suggested a seated and robed woman, a blank face toward the falls, no human tools had shaped it. It lacked symmetry. So the sacrificial victims died to honor an outcrop, did they? Five per day-if today was typical and if the show was a daily event-times twenty-seven thousand years... he needed a pocket calculator... how many days in a year on this world?

  He reached the silver dais around the idol and stopped. Worshipers on their knees looked up uneasily at him and priests frowned. Wavy lines were the symbol for priests.

  The idol was an impressive lump of rock, but the dais was obscene. Around its edge were golden bowls holding coins-some gold or silver, but mainly copper-presumably offerings. Those he could understand and forgive, but behind the bowls was a heap of other treasures: goblets; jewelry, cauldrons, carvings, daggers, and even swords, all kinds of precious things, in a blaze of gleaming metal and shiny faceted gems, in ivory and leather, polished wood and bright fabrics. Back from the front they aged. First the copper and bronze turned green, then the silver black and the ivory yellow, until at the base of idol itself the cloths and leather and woods had rotted away, and even the gold and crystal were hidden in dust. The wealth of centuries was piled there like a heap of garbage.

  Wallie stared at this outrageous display in rank disbelief. All the riches of the pharaohs and the shahs and the rajahs and the sons of heaven could not have equaled this. Atahualpa's ransom was small change... First that orgy last night and now this immeasurable hoard! If you must hallucinate, hallucinate BIG!

  And he thought of the penury of the town, the hunger and suffering that could be alleviated by a tiny fraction of this...

  He must have stood there in shock for some time. When he glanced around he had been encapsulated, sealed off and quarantined by a semicircle of priests and priestesses, young and old, ranging from Thirds to Sevenths; silent, menacing, and resentful. Others were coming up behind to thicken the cordon, and there was not a friendly eye in the crowd. What was he going to do? Did it matter?

  Then the barricade opened to admit the tiny form of Honakura, out of breath and troubled, minuscule in his blue satin gown, his intricately wrinkled face contrasting with the smooth brown baldness above it. His eyes searched Wallie's, no doubt seeking to discover who had come: Shonsu or Walliesmith?

  "You must kneel, my lord," he said.

  That broke the spell.

  "Kneel?" Wallie roared. "I am not going to kneel to any lump of rock! I saw what was going on out by that waterfall. You are a murdering little monster, and your goddess is a fraud!"

  The crowd hissed like snakes and made waving hand gestures. Honakura recoiled with dismay in his face.

  Wallie opened his mouth to say something else and stopped. It wasn't going to work. Whatever he tried, he was not about to start a religious revolution, at least not here.

  Then the crowd parted once more, this time to admit the temple guard.

  The fat man in the front with the rubies and fancy blue kilt had to be Hardduju. His coarse, dissipated face was regarding Wallie with amused and satisfied contempt. Behind him came three brawny Fourths in orange, smiling grimly. The priests backed away, widening the cordon, while the reeve smirked and waited expectantly. Evidently it was Wallie's obligation to speak first.

  He did not know what to say, so he said nothing.

  His sword hilt had slid to somewhere behind his left shoulder.

  Hardduju's satisfaction increased. Then he flashed out his sword with impressive speed and dexterously zipped it around in a complicated routine.

  "I am Hardduju, swordsman of the seventh rank, reeve of the temple of the Goddess at Hann, and I give thanks to the Most High for granting me this opportunity to assure your beneficence that your prosperity and happiness will always be my desire and the subject of my prayers."

  He shot the sword back into its scabbard and waited.

  Before Wallie could think of anything to reply, little Honakura stepped forward and pointed a frail arm at him. "My lord reeve!" he snapped. "Remove this blasphemer!"

  Hardduju glanced down at Honakura and laughed gloatingly. "I shall do better, holy one." He waved his men forward. "I denounce this man as an imposter. Arrest him."

  Wallie backed up to put the dais behind him, knowing it was no real protection. The three young toughs grinned in anticipation, and then advanced warily, spreading out to come at him from different angles. Probably none was any younger or tougher than he was, but they could count.

  If he drew his sword he was dead, he was sure, and it seemed that they were not going to draw unless he did. They wanted him alive so perhaps dead would be better.

  He fumbled for his sword, and they pounced, simultaneously and irresistibly.

  He parried one blow with his left hand, felt his right arm grabbed in two hands, took a savage punch to the side of his head, and then the infallible, age-old clincher of a boot in the groin.

  And that did matter. It mattered very much.

  BOOK TWO:

  HOW THE SWORDSMAN

  RECEIVED THE SWORD

  †

  The temple jail was long, narrow, and very, very damp. It seemed to Wallie, once he had recovered his wits enough to study it, like a cross between an open sewer and an empty swimming pool. The timber roof had mostly rotted away, leaving a furry trellis from which long strands of moss hung dark against the blue brightness. The stones of both floor and walls were covered with brown and yellow-green slime. There were rusty grilles at both ends, but the stairs were unbarred. An agile man could have clambered out through the roof.

  He did not comprehend much of his own arrival, but he watched the procedure when others were brought in later. If the prisoner was neither unconscious nor sufficiently docile, he was adjusted to one state or the other, then stripped and laid on the floor. A large stone slab was then stood on edge across his legs, pinning his ankles within notches cut in its base.

  And that was that.

  * * *

  It took him some hours to recover sufficiently to sit up, bruised, swollen, and aching all over, coated with vomit and dried blood both inside and out. He would have exchanged all the treasure in the temple for a glass of water and he thought he was going to lose about six teeth. Through half-closed eyes, he peered groggily at the line of sitting men, all rooted to the low wall of slabs that ran down the middle of the room. There were five of them, apart from himself, and he was at the end of the line.

  His neighbor smiled at him nervously and then attempted the greeting to a superior as well as he could in a sitting position, naming himself as Innulari,
healer of the Fifth.

  Wallie took a few minutes to gather his thoughts. "I am Shonsu, swordsman of the Seventh, my lord," he said. "I regret that I cannot give you a formal reply, but I am so confused that I do not recall the words."

  The healer was a short and pudgy man, his flabbiness displayed by his nudity. He had limp, almost feminine, breasts and a globular belly. The top of his head was bald and the hair at the sides was plastered in all directions. He looked disgusting, but then they all did, and Wallie perhaps worst of all.

  The healer simpered. "Oh, you must not address me as 'lord,' my lord. 'Master' is the correct address to a Fifth."

  Five teeth for certain, Wallie concluded glumly. "My apologies, Master Innulari. I wish I could engage your professional services, but I regret that I seem to be out of funds at the moment."

  The fat little man was regarding him with interest. "Do this," he said, moving an arm. "Now this..."

  Wallie obeyed, moving as much of himself as he could with his legs pinned to the ground, and every twitch hurt.

  "A few broken ribs, perhaps," the healer decided with satisfaction. "You didn't pass much blood, so the internal damage may not be too severe. Obviously the work of experts, for when I saw you I expected worse."

  Wallie thought back to Hardduju's instructions to his goons before the punishment had started. "They were told not to reduce my value too much," he explained. "The reeve expects to get five golds for me."

  "A denunciation?" Innulari asked, shocked. "Oh, I beg pardon, my lord; none of my business."

  Wearily Wallie explained, as well as he could, that he had received a blow on the head the previous day and had lost his memory. He had, therefore, failed to return the correct reply to the reeve's greeting.

  "So he thought you were an imposter!" The little man looked shocked and sympathetic. Apparently he was so honored to be sitting next to a Seventh that he was reluctant to make the same assumption. "That is a serious abomination, of course. As he was the one to denounce you, then he gets the slave, you understand."

  Wallie nodded and then wished he hadn't. "What do they do about my facemarks?"

  "Branding iron," Innulari explained cheerfully. "They'll probably use it to add your slavestripe, too, and save the cost of having it done professionally."

  Great.

  At that moment the two men next in line to Innulari started to fight, flailing sideways and one-handed at each other, yelling obscenities. After a few minutes a boyish looking swordsman of the Second came trotting down the stairs. He walked along the other side of the slabs to them. The men screamed, one after the other, and fell silent. The swordsman walked briskly out again.

  "How did he do that?" Wallie asked in surprise.

  "Kicked their feet. It's very effective." Innulari glanced around the jail with approval. "The whole system is most efficient. Don't try to move the slab. You can probably push it over, but then it will fall on your feet and crush them."

  Wallie lay down again, the only other position available to him, and wondered why the floor was so very wet. The smell was even worse than the stink of the town. He thought of the mysterious Shorty and his remark about a sample of hell... In some ways the little boy had seemed to make more sense than anyone or anything else in this insanity, but in other ways he had been even less believable. That trick with the beads, now...

  The healer lay down also. He was obviously a natural chatterbox, Wallie concluded, and therefore one more pain to add to the others, but he might also be a valuable source of information.

  "Your blow to the head is very interesting, my lord. I have never met the symptoms before, but they are mentioned in one of our sutras." He frowned disapprovingly. "I am surprised that they did not allow the priests to attempt an exorcism, for that is the treatment of choice. Clearly a demon has gained admittance."

  "That seems to have been the problem in the first place." Wallie sighed, and explained. He was trying to remember the argument that had taken place after he had been dragged from the nave of the temple into a back room, with Hardduju claiming the imposter as a slave, Honakura insisting that he was a blasphemer, and others-priests, he thought-talking demons. He had gained the impression that there had been a power struggle going on over his gasping, retching self. He tried to explain that also.

  The healer seized on this as an important piece of temple gossip. If the holy Honakura's exorcism had failed, then the old man had been repudiated by the Goddess and had lost face. It might signify an important shift in influence, he said.

  Great again.

  "Well, at least they didn't try to call in a healer," Innulari said. "I know that I would not take your case with respect, my lord."

  "Why not?" Wallie asked, curious in spite of his pains.

  "Because the prognosis is discouraging, of course." He waved a plump hand at the skeleton roof above them and the slimy walls. "That was what brought me here: I refused a case, but the family had money and kept raising the offer. Finally I got greedy, may She forgive me!"

  Gingerly Wallie turned his head. "You mean a healer who loses a patient goes to jail?"

  "If the relatives have influence." Innulari sighed. "I was avaricious. But it was my wife's idea, so she must cope now as best she can."

  "How long are you in for, then?"

  The fat little man shivered in spite of the steamy heat. "Oh, I expect to go tomorrow. I've been here three days. The temple court usually decides faster than that."

  Go where? To the Judgment, of course. Wallie levered himself up once more and looked at the line of naked men. Not a beautiful virgin among them. Not human sacrifices, then, but executions. Those had been criminals he had seen thrown into the falls, had they? Mostly, the healer said. Or slaves no longer useful, of course. And sometimes citizens went voluntarily to the Goddess-the very sick or the old.

  "How many return alive?" Wallie asked thoughtfully.

  "About one in fifty, I suppose," the healer said. "Once every two or three weeks. Most She chastises severely."

  Further questions established that the chastisement consisted of being battered and maimed on the rocks-it was very rare indeed for anyone to return unscathed. Nevertheless, the healer seemed quite cheerful about his prospects, convinced that his lapse into avarice was a minor sin that his Goddess would forgive. Wallie could not decide if the little man was putting up a brave front or really had such faith. It seemed like a very long shot to Wallie.

  Later in the day, a young slave was brought in and pinned under the next slab. He regarded Wallie's facemarks with dread and would not speak. Wallie eventually decided that he was a congenital idiot.

  The day dragged on in pain and heat and ever increasing stink, as the inmates fouled themselves and the sun turned the damp cell into a sauna. The pudgy Innulari chattered aimlessly, thrilled at meeting a Seventh, insistent on recounting his life story and describing his children. Eventually he returned to the subject of the temple court. The accused person did not appear before it-he thought that an extraordinary idea-and usually learned of the verdict only when he was taken away to execution. Acquittals did happen, he admitted.

  "Of course you can hardly expect one in your case, my lord," he said, "because several of the members of the court, like the most holy Honakura, were present to witness your crime." He paused and then added thoughtfully, "It will be interesting to hear the decision, though: demon, imposter, or blasphemer?"

  "I can hardly wait," Wallie said. Yet had he a choice, he would go for another exorcism-if they had exorcised him into this madhouse, perhaps they could exorcise him out. But a little later he learned from some remark of Innulari's that a second exorcism was very unlikely. Obstinate demons were usually referred to the Goddess.

  A woman was brought in by the guards. She stripped and sat down obediently, and was pinned in the stocks next to the slack-jawed slave boy. She was middle-aged, graying, flabby, and loose-skinned, but the boy twisted round to stare at her and remained in that position for the rest of the day.


  That certainly was not Wallie's problem-maybe never again. He pondered further about the sample of hell that the little boy had mentioned. Had that been a threat, a prophecy, or a lucky guess? If heaven was to be defined crudely as sexual ecstasy in a man's groin, then his hell had started appropriately with unbearable agony in the same place.

  First postulate: All this pain was real. Sex he might fantasize, but not this.

  Corollary: This world was real.

  There were, he concluded, three possible explanations. The first was Wallie Smith's encephalitis, meaning that the World was all delirium. Somehow that was seeming less and less convincing as time went on.

  A second was Shonsu's head injury-he was Shonsu, and Wallie Smith was the illusion. He lay on the hard wet stone and pondered that idea for a long time, with his swollen eyes shut against the sun's glare. He could not convince himself. Wallie Smith's life was too detailed in his memory. He could remember thousands of technical terms, for example, although when he tried to pronounce them he produced nothing but grunts. He could remember his childhood and his friends and his education. Politics. Music. Sports. Earth refused to die for him.

  That left the third explanation: both worlds were real-and he was in the wrong one.

  Sunset arrived, and a sudden rattling noise from the grille at one end of the cell.

  "Clean-out time!" Innulari announced, sounding pleased. "And that drink you wanted, my lord."

  Water began to flow along the cell, surging rapidly deeper. It had passed five men by the time it reached Wallie, and its filth made him retch-with agonizing consequences for his bruised abdominal muscles-but soon it ran deeper and relatively clean and gratifyingly cool. The inmates lay back in it and splashed and laughed... and drank. The twice daily clean-out was the only water he would get in the jail, Innulari assured him.