The Reluctant Swordsman

by David Duncan

  Fencing it was, then. Masks came out of the chest, and Wallie selected the shortest foil he could find.

  The swordsmen used no protective garments except masks with neck guards, and therefore all lunges and cuts must be carefully pulled to avoid injury. Of course that habit then tended to carry over into real swordwork-and so reduced what would otherwise have been a monstrous mortality rate in the craft. Vulnerable spots, such as collarbones and armpits, were strictly out of bounds. Any swordsman who injured a fencing partner became known as a butcher and soon found himself blacklisted.

  "Now," Wallie said. "I shall try to fight like a Second-a real Second, not a temple Second."

  He discarded most of his bag of tricks and slowed down to snail pace. He was still too good for Nnanji to hit, but he wasn't hitting, either. "Your defense is great," he announced approvingly. "Wrist! Foot! Damn! If you could only put on an attack to match... watch that thumb!"

  He tried everything he could think of, and nothing helped. The killer earthworm was still there. If his patience was being tested, he was about to fail. Nnanji grew madder and madder with himself until he threw down his sword, ripped off his mask, and swore a bucketful of obscenities.

  "I'm no damn good!" he shouted. "Why don't you just take me down to the whipping post and beat me?"

  Wallie sighed. The man needed a year's psychoanalysis, and there was no time. He had only one idea left to try.

  "Would that make you feel better?" he asked.

  Nnanji looked surprised, concluded that his courage was being questioned, and defiantly said, "Yes!"

  "I don't want you to feel better," Wallie said. "I want you to feel like the useless dumb brat you really are. Now put on that mask."

  Nnanji guarded and got a stab in the ribs from the button of Wallie's foil. It raised a red welt.

  "Ouch!" he said accusingly.

  "I think you're scared to hit me..." Wallie struck him brutally across the chest.

  "Devilspit!" Nnanji staggered with the force of the blow.

  "Because I'm a swordsman..." Wallie banged his foil on Nnanji's mask. "And you're only rugmakers' trash!" Then Wallie hit him insultingly on the seat of his kilt.

  It could easily have failed. With his self-respect in ribbons, now rejected by his hero, Nnanji might readily have collapsed like a wrecked tent and gone back to herding pilgrims for the rest of his life. But the gods did not put red hair on a man as a warning of nothing. His temper exploded again, and this time it was directed outward, at his tormentor. Perhaps it was even Wallie's own rugmaking grandfather who determined that. He screamed in fury at the insult, and the fight was on.

  Wallie butchered. He slashed at Nnanji with the foil, he jabbed him with the button end, and he kept up a stream of all the abuse he could think of-show-off brat, brothel hog, pilgrim pusher, throwing his money around in bars, not a friend who would stand up for him... Every time he got another bruise Nnanji said devilspit! But he kept coming, and his attack grew wilder and wilder.

  "Cripple! You couldn't hit the side of the temple if you had your nose on it!"

  Wallie jeered and called him a weakling, a pretty-boy gelding, an impotent pansy, and a carpet beater. Nnanji's face was invisible, but his oaths grew louder, and even his chest was turning red. His ponytail whirled like a flame. It was hard work for Wallie, for he had to hold himself back to a low standard, avoid doing serious hurt, evaluate Nnanji's moves almost before he made them, and keep up his insults, all at the same time.

  "I don't want a half-baked First. I need a fighter. I'd give you back to Briu, except he wouldn't take you."

  Nnanji was screeching incoherently through his mask. Failing to connect, he unthinkingly started to experiment, and at last he achieved a lunge that was much better than anything he had done before. Wallie let it through. He staggered under the impact and wondered if it had broken a rib.

  "Lucky one!" He sneered. The comment was fair, but it did not sound fair. The next lunge was about the same, so he parried it to a near miss. Then came a wickedly straight cut. That had to be allowed to pass, and then Wallie was bleeding also. He started to ease up on his hits, but now Nnanji was howling like a pack of hyenas and trying everything possible. The bad ones failed, but each time Wallie detected an improvement he let the blow come, and soon he was hurting almost as much as his victim. They battered and yelled and cursed like maniacs.

  Finally he knew he had won. The strokes were coming hard and accurate, and so deadly that he was in danger of being maimed. "Hold it!" he yelled, but Nnanji either did not or could not stop now. Wallie cranked up to Seventh again, striking the foil right out of his hand. Then he grabbed him in a bear hug. Nnanji screamed and kicked, and went limp.

  "You did it!" Wallie said and let him go. He pulled off the masks. Nnanji's face was almost purple, and his lip was bleeding.

  "What?"

  Wallie dragged him over to the mirror and thrust his own foil into his hand. "Lunge!" he said.

  Angrily Nnanji lunged at the mirror. He did it again. Then he turned to Wallie, understanding at last. "I can do it!" With a banshee yell he started capering around the room, waving his arms in the air.

  Wallie felt like Professor Higgins-everyone into the Spanish dance routine. He slapped Nnanji on the back. He laughed and assured him that he had not meant any of those things he had said, and generally tried to calm him. Unbelieving, Nnanji just kept dancing back to lunge at the mirror, and then go whirling around once more. The block was gone.

  "I did it! I did it!" Then Nnanji looked at his wounds and at Wallie's, and his face fell. "You did it. Thank you, my liege! Thank you! Thank you!"

  Wallie rubbed an arm over his forehead. "You're welcome! Now-quick, before you stiffen up! Run down and do some cooling off exercises, then get in a hot tub. Scat!"

  Wallie slammed the door behind him, leaned against it, and closed his eyes. He needed the same treatment himself, but he also needed absolution. He felt soiled, foul, perverted. Who had been tested? Could it have been Nnanji? Or was it a test to see if Wallie could be bloody-minded? He had sworn not to beat the kid and then he had done just that. What price scruples now? He was worse than Hardduju.

  He opened his eyes and Jja was standing before him, studying him with those huge, dark, and inscrutable eyes. He had totally forgotten her in her comer. She had seen it a. What must she think of this sadistic horror who owned her?

  "Jja!" he said. "Don't be scared, please! I don't usually do that sort of thing."

  She took his hands. "I'm not scared, master. I know you don't."

  "I've mutilated him!" Wallie said miserably. "He'll ache for weeks. He'll have scars for life!"

  She put her arms around him and her head on his shoulder, wet and bloody as he was, but it wasn't sex she was offering-it was solace. He drank it like a man dying of thirst.

  "Apprentice Nnanji is a very tough young man," she said. "I think that lesson was a lot harder on Wallie than it was on Nnanji. He won't care."

  He grabbed at the thought. "He won't?"

  She chuckled into his ear. "They're only bruises, master. He'll wear them like jewels. You've given him back his pride!"

  "I have?" Wallie began to relax. "Yes, I have, haven't I?" The test had been passed. He had made his swordsman, and... "What did you call me?"

  She stiffened in sudden apprehension. "That was the name you used that first night, master. I am sorry."

  "Oh, don't be, Jja! You are welcome to call me that." He held her away from him to look at her. "What do you know of Wallie?"

  She stared up at him, puzzled and unsure of the words to express her thought. "I think he is hiding inside Lord Shonsu," she said shyly.

  He hugged her tight again. "You are so right, my sweet. He is lonely in there, and he needs you. You can call him out anytime you want."

  Although he was not to understand in full for some time, that moment was dawn. While Nnanji had been breaking down his mental block, Jja had been building one of her own-a strange discrimin
ation between her owner and her man. Somehow she had made a distinction between them, in a purely emotional way that could never have been put into words and would have driven Honakura mad. Different world or far country were of no interest to Jja. It might even be that this Wallie, being hidden inside her owner, was invisible, and hence had no facemarks. But it was doubtful that her thought process even went that far. It was a matter of feelings. She had seen him weep in the pilgrim hut. Now he was full of sorrow because he had hurt his friend. If he was troubled she could soothe, comfort, lend him her stoic slave's strength to accept what the gods decreed. He would react then as a man, not a master.

  And Wallie had found the friend he needed, another lonely soul hidden from the World, biding inside his slave. The analysis came later, although he would never dare to question very deeply, lest he break the spell by reducing it to logic.

  "Wallie?" she said shyly to his shoulder strap, trying the word. "Wallie!" She said it four or five times, each time with a meaning subtly changed. Then she held up her face to be kissed, and the kiss said more than words ever could. She led him over to the bed and showed him again how the smallest god could drive away the god of sorrows.

  * * *

  Wallie jerked his head up and reached for his sword as the door flew open, but it was only Nnanji returning. He had done as he had been told and had now came back to mount a ferocious attack on the mirror, although many of his cuts were still dribbling blood down to his kilt, and any sensible man would have gone in search of a healer. He barely glanced at the two limp, sweat-drenched figures on the bed. The People saw no great significance in nudity, and sex to Nnanji was merely another enjoyable bodily function, like eating. He would have been very surprised had his mentor complained at having his privacy disturbed. Indeed probably Nnanji's only thought on the matter was to hope that Shonsu would hurry up and recover so that they could get back to important work like fencing.

  Wallie sank back into the downy softness and studied Jja's face for a moment. A stripe ran down the middle and a tiny vertical bar on each eyelid... slave and child of slaves. Her eyes opened, and she smiled at him in drowsy contentment.

  His doubts of the previous day had fled. He had been right to take her away from Kikarani. They could make each other happy, be lovers, and even friends.

  If Tarru let them...

  "The god of sorrows has returned, master?" she whispered. "So soon?"

  He nodded.

  Now it was she who studied him. Then she said, "Honorable Tarru is swearing the swordsmen against you?"

  Surprised, he nodded once more.

  She guessed his thoughts. "The slaves know everything, master. They told me."

  He felt a surge of excitement. Friend! He had been committing the very crime he had denounced in the People, thinking of a woman as a possession, a mere source of physical pleasure.

  "Would they help?" he asked. "Would you?"

  She seemed surprised that he would ask. "I will do anything. The others will help, also. Because of Ani."

  "Ani?"

  She nodded solemnly, her face so close to his that it was hard to focus. "Ani would have been beaten, master, had you not accepted her."

  So that trivial half kindness, half joke had earned him the friendship of the slaves, had it? There were many slaves around the barracks, he now realized. He had barely registered them. Probably nobody else noticed them at all. They must be privy to all the secrets. Of course his actions with Ani would be known. Ani was a slave herself. Likely there had been another in the corner bed.

  He was still pondering the implications of a slave army when Jja said, "If you try to leave with the sword, he will stop you, master? That is what they told me."

  "Yes."

  "If I carried it out for you?"

  He started to smile as the ideas began to flow together.

  "No," he said. "I don't think so. The swordsmen know you-you would not even get down the stairs, Jja. You would be stopped if you were carrying a long bundle, a roll, a..."

  He sat up and yelled, "Nnanji!"

  At once Nnanji stopped his lunging and swung round: "My liege?" He was grinning insanely. He, too, would do anything-he would eat hot coals if his mentor asked him.

  "You told me you had a brother?" Wallie asked.

  Looking surprised, Nnanji walked over, sheathing his sword "Katanji, my liege."

  "How old is he?"

  Nnanji turned pink. "He is old enough to shave," he confessed.

  Momentarily nonplussed, Wallie raised a hand to his own smooth chin. Then he realized that Nnanji was not thinking of chins-Nnanji meant that his brother ought to be wearing a loincloth. Poor families had trouble finding crafts for their children. Payment to admit Nnanji to the swordsmen had been a bribe, but artisan mentors demanded initiation dues quite openly.

  "Is he trustworthy, really trustworthy?" Wallie asked.

  Nnanji frowned. "He is a hellion, my liege, but he always seems to talk his way out of trouble."

  "Is he loyal to you, then? Would you trust him with your life?"

  Now Nnanji was truly astonished, but he nodded.

  "And he wants to be a swordsman?"

  "Of course, my liege!" Nnanji could not imagine a higher ambition.

  "Right," Wallie said-he had no choice that he could see. "Jja will go and find him. I have a job for him. If he performs it faithfully, then he can have any reward that it is in my power to give."

  "You would take a scratcher as a protégé?" exclaimed the vassal who had been little more use than a scratcher himself an hour before.

  "If that's what he wants." Wallie smiled. "But you're going to be a Fourth next week, remember? We can make you a Third today if you keep lunging the way you were just now. He can swear to you or me, I don't care."

  If either of them survived, of course.

  * * *

  Nnanji's battered appearance at lunch provoked much silent hilarity-the Seventh had obviously lost his temper with his notoriously inept protégé. Only the perceptive might have noted that Lord Shonsu had acquired more bruises and cuts himself, or wondered why the apparent victim was grinning so idiotically.

  That afternoon Lord Shonsu proved to be a demanding guest. He sent for the tailor again, and the cobbler. Healer Dinartura arrived and saw the need to call in second, third, and fourth opinions on the noble lord's feet; he also carried away a secret message to his uncle. The barracks masseur was summoned. Priests began to call, bearing mysterious packages. Lord Shonsu decided to buy a saddle and sent for the saddler. He demanded music, so musicians came and went all afternoon. He wanted his slave to sew more gowns, and drapers attended with their rolls of silk. Bath water was required-not once, but twice, because of the unrelenting heat. Finally, toward sunset, even Lord Athinalani came from his armory, accompanied by two juniors bearing carrying cases full of swords. If Tarru was keeping himself informed about all this meaningless activity, the identity of that last visitor might have warned him what was happening. But by then it had already happened.

  Just before sunset the heat broke in a spectacular thunderstorm. Rain dropped in layers from a sky of coal. Thickets of lavender lightning jigged above the temple spires. The gold plating would make those spires good lightning rods, and some other divinely inspired accident of design had obviously made them well grounded.

  To Wallie and Nnanji, watching from their palace suite, the thunderclaps hit like blows to the head, leaving their ears ringing.

  "The gods are angry, my liege," Nnanji said uneasily.

  "I don't think so. I think they are laughing their heads off."

  The social hour started later than usual, after the rain, but the night was wonderfully cool, and the torches hissed and steamed around the terrace, reflecting up from the wet flagstones. As the noble guest paraded his tiny entourage across the floor, all eyes turned to watch. With carefully concealed amusement Wallie registered the puzzled glances as the swordsmen tried to work out what was different, the dropped jaws and e
xclamations when they succeeded.

  It was not the battered condition of his protégé that elicited surprise, nor the lithe figure of his slave in her blue gown decorated with a silver griffon on the left breast-half the women in the place were this evening wearing similar gowns, now known as "shonsues." No, the attention was directed toward the valorous lord himself, and his empty scabbard.

  Lord Shonsu had checked his sword at the door.

  Tarru was not present, but three Fifths attempted an inconspicuous stampede out to the vestibule. There the ancient, one-armed retainer exhibited for them the sword that the noble lord had left with them. They probably recognized it-a travesty of a weapon, pig iron, not fit to stop a charging rabbit.

  The sword had been checked.

  So had the swordsmen.

  Your move, Honorable Tarru.

  ††††

  Honakura's spy network had been operating efficiently, as usual, and he greeted Wallie and his brand-new sword the next morning with much toothless chuckling and delighted wringing of hands. The shady courtyard was cool and damp, the bougainvillaea sprinkled with diamond dust. The air was fragrant.

  "I told you that you should not underestimate the Goddess' champion!" he said, producing an extremely dusty clay bottle. "This, my lord, is the last bottle of a famous vintage, the Plon eighty-nine. I open it in honor of your victory!"

  "It's no victory!" Wallie protested, settling once more on the familiar stool. "But I have won the time I wanted."

  "A hit, but not yet the match?" Honakura asked with another chuckle. "Do I have that right?" He put the bottle on the little table and stood over it, fussing with a knife to remove the wax seal. "You greatly frightened my nephew-he was convinced that the demon had returned. You also worried me, my lord. When Dinartura told me that you wanted to be visited by priests bearing long packages, I thought you were going to pass the sword to me. I was much exercised to think of a safe hiding place. Then all the packages returned unopened..." He laughed again, spraying spit. "There!" He poured the wine.

  Wallie sniffed the wine in its crystal chalice, sipped, and paid compliments. It wasn't bad at all, not unlike a fair Muscatel.