Sword Sworn ss-6

by Jennifer Roberson

  "What, you want to try and wear down the old man? Make him yield on the basis of sheer exhaustion?"

  "You never yield to exhaustion," she pointed out, "in anything you do."

  "I yielded to your point of view about women having worth in other areas besides bed."

  "Because I was right."

  As usual, with us, the banter covered more intense emotions. I didn’t really blame Del for being concerned. Here we were on our way back to the South, where I had been born and lost; where I had been raised a slave; where I had eventually found my calling as a sword-dancer, hired to fight battles for other men as a means of settling disputes — but also where I had eventually voluntarily cut myself off from all the rites, rituals, and honor of the Alimat-trained sword-dancer’s closely prescribed system.

  I had done it in a way some might describe as cowardly, but at the time it was the right choice. The only choice. I’d made it without thinking twice about it, because I didn’t have to; I knew very well what the cost would be. I was an outcast now, a blade without a name. I had declared elaii-ali-ma, rejecting my status as a seventh-level sword-dancer, which meant I was fair game to any honor-bound sword-dancer who wanted to challenge me.

  Of course, that challenge wouldn’t necessarily come in a circle, where victory is not achieved by killing your opponent — well, usually; there are always exceptions — but by simply winning. By being better.

  For years I had been better than everyone else in the South, though a few held out for Abbu Bensir (including Abbu Bensir), but I couldn’t claim that any longer. I wasn’t a sword-dancer. I was just a man a lot of other men wanted to kill.

  And Del figured it would be a whole lot easier to kill me now than before.

  She was probably right, too.

  So here I was aboard a ship bound for the South, going home, Accompanied by a stubborn stud-horse and an equally stubborn woman, sailing toward what more romantic types, privy to my dream, might describe as my destiny. Me, I just knew it was time, dream or no dream. We’d gone off chasing some cockamamie idea of me being Skandic, a child of an island two week’s sail from the South, but that was done now. I was, by all appearances — literally as well as figuratively — Skandic, a child of that island, but things hadn’t worked out. Sure, it was the stuff of fantasy to discover I was the long-lost grandson of the island’s wealthiest, most powerful matriarch, but this fantasy didn’t have a happy ending. It had cost me two fingers, for starters. And nearly erased altogether the man known as the Sandtiger without even killing him.

  Meteiera. The Stone Forest. Where Skandic men with a surfeit of magics so vast that much was mostly undiscovered, cloistered themselves upon tall stone spires ostensibly to serve the gods but also, they claimed, to protect their loved ones by turning away from them. Because the magic that made them powerful also made them mad.

  Now, anyone who knows me will say I don’t — or didn’t — think much of magic. In fact, I don’t — didn’t — really believe in it. But I’ll admit something strange was going on in Meteiera, because I had cause to know. I can’t swear the priest-mages worked magic on me, as Del suggested, but once there I wasn’t precisely me anymore. And I witnessed too many strange things.

  Hoolies, I did strange things.

  I shied away from that like a spooked horse. But the knowledge, the awareness, crept back. Despite all the outward physical changes, there were plenty of interior ones as well. A comprehension of power, something like the first faint pang of hunger, or the initial itch of desire. In fact, it was very like desire — because that power wanted desperately to be wielded.

  I shivered. If Del had asked what the problem was, I’d have told her it was a bit chill in the morning, and after all I was wearing only a leather dhoti for ease of movement as I went through the repetitive rituals that honed the body and mind. But it wasn’t the chill of morning that kindled the response. It was the awareness again of the battle I faced. Or, more accurately, battles.

  And none of them had anything to do with sword-dancing, or even sword fighting. Only with refusing to become what I’d been told, on Meteiera, I must become: a mage.

  Actually, they’d said I was to become a priest-mage, but I’m even less inclined to put faith in, well, faith, than in the existence of magic.

  And, of course, it was becoming harder to deny the existence of magic since I had managed to work some. And even harder to deny my own willingness to work it; I had tried to work it. Purposely. I had a vague recollection that those first days after escaping the Stone Forest were filled with desperation, and a desperate man undertakes many strange things to achieve certain goals. My goal had been vital: to get back to Skandi and find Del, and to settle things permanently with the metri, my grandmother.

  I got back to Skandi by boat, which is certainly not a remarkable thing when attempting to reach an island. Except the boat hadn’t existed before I made it exist, conjured of seawrack and something more I’d learned on Meteiera.

  Discipline.

  Magic is merely the tool. Discipline is the power.

  Now I stood at the rail staring across the ocean, knowing that everything I’d ever been in my life was turned inside out. Upside down. Every which way you can think of.

  Take up the sword.

  I lived with and for the sword. I didn’t understand why I needed to be told. No; commanded.

  "You’re still you," Del said, with such explicit firmness that I realized she was worried that I was worried, not knowing my thoughts had gone elsewhere.

  I smiled out at the seaspray.

  "You are." She came up beside me. She had washed her hair in the small amount of fresh water the captain allowed for such ablutions, and now the breeze dried it. The mix of salt, spray, and sun had bleached her blonder. Strands were lifted away from her face, streaming back across her shoulders.

  I have been less in my life, dependent on circumstances. But now, indisputably, I was more.

  I was, I had been told, messiah. Now mage. I had believed neither, claiming — and knowing — I was merely a man. It was enough. It was all I had wanted to be, in the years of slavery when I was chula, not boy. Slave, not human.

  I glanced at Del, still smiling. "Keep saying that, bascha."

  "You are."

  "No," I said, "I’m not. And you know it as well as I do."

  Her face went blank.

  "Nice try," I told her, "but I read you too well, now."

  Del look straight at me, shirking nothing. "And I, now, can read nothing at all of you."

  There. It was said. Admitted aloud, one to the other.

  "Still me," I said, "but different."

  Del was never coquettish or coy. Nor was she now. She put her hand on my arm. "Then come below," she said simply, "and show me how different."

  Ah, yes. That was still the same.

  Grinning, I went.

  When we finally disembarked in Haziz, I did not kiss the ground. That would have entailed my kneeling down in the midst of a typically busy day on the choked docks, risking being flattened by a dray-cart, wagon, or someone hauling bales and none too happy to find a large, kneeling man in his way, and coming into some’ what intimate contact with the liquid, lumpy, squishy, and aromatic effluvia of a complement of species and varieties of animals so vast I did not care to count.

  Suffice it to say I was relieved to once more plant both sandaled feet upon the Southron ground, even though that ground felt more like ship than earth. The adjustment from flirtatious deck to solidity always took me a day or two.

  Just as it would take me time to sort out the commingled aromas I found so disconcertingly evident after months away. Whew!

  "They don’t need to challenge you," Del observed from beside me with delicate distaste. "They could just leave you here and let the stench kill you."

  With haughty asperity, I said, "You are speaking about my homeland."

  "And now that we are back here among people who would as soon kill you as give you greeting
," she continued, "what is our next move?"

  It was considerably warmer here than on Skandi, though it lacked the searing heat of high summer. I glanced briefly at the sun, sliding downward from its zenith. "The essentials," I replied. "A drink. Food. A place to stay the night. A horse for you." The stud would be off-loaded and taken to a livery I trusted, where he could get his earth-legs back. I’d paid well for the service, though the sailhand likely wouldn’t think it enough once the stud tried to kick his head off. Another reason to let the first temper tantrum involve someone other than me. "Swords —"

  "Good," Del said firmly.

  "And tomorrow we’ll head out for Julah."

  "Julah? Why? That’s where Sabra nearly had the killing of us both." Unspoken was the knowledge that not far from Julah, at the palace inherited from her father, Sabra had forced me to declare myself an outcast from my trade. To reject the honor codes of an Alimat-trained seventh-level sword-dancer.

  "Because," I explained. "I’d like to have a brief discussion with my old friend Fouad."

  " ’Discussion,’ " she echoed, and I knew it was a question.

  "With words, not blades."

  "Fouad’s the one who betrayed you to Sabra and nearly got you killed."

  "Which calls for at least a few friendly words, don’t you think?"

  Del had attempted to fall in beside me as I wended my way through narrow, dust-floured streets clogged with vendors hawking cheap wares to new arrivals and washing hung out to dry from the upper storeys of close-built, mudbrick dwellings stacked one upon the other in slumping disarray, boasting sun-faded, once-brilliant awnings; but as she didn’t know Haziz at all, it was difficult for her to stay there when I followed a route unfamiliar to her. She settled for being one step behind my left shoulder, trying to anticipate my direction. "Words? That’s all?"

  "It’s a starting point." I scooped up a melon from the top of a piled display. The melon-seller’s aggrieved shout followed us. I grinned, hearing familiar Southron oaths — from a mouth other than my own — for the first time in months.

  Del picked her way over a prodigious pile of danjac manure, lightly seasoned with urine. "Are you going to pay for that?"

  Around the first juicy, delicious mouthful I shaped, "Welcome-home present." And tried not to dribble down the front of my Skandic silks. Still noticeably crimson, unfortunately.

  "And I’ve been thinking…"

  Hoolies, I’d been dreaming.

  And I regretted bringing it up.

  "Yes?" she prompted.

  "Maybe…"

  "Yes?"

  The words came into my mouth, surprising me as well as her. "Maybe we’ll go get my true sword."

  "True sword?"

  I twisted adroitly as a gang of shrieking children ran by, raising a dun-tinted wake of acrid dust. "You know. Out there. In the desert. Under a pile of rocks."

  Del stopped dead. "That sword? You mean to go get that sword?"

  I turned, paused, and gravely offered her the remains of the melon, creamy green in the dying sun. I could not think of a way to explain about the dream. "It seems — appropriate."

  She was not interested in the melon. " ’Appropriate’?" Del shook her head. "Only you would want to go dig up a sword buried under tons of rock, when there are undoubtedly plenty of them here in this city. Un buried."

  Again the answer was in my mouth. "But I didn’t make those swords."

  Which conjured between us the memories of the North, and Staal-Ysta, and the dance that had nearly killed us. Not to mention a small matter of Del breaking, in my name, for my life, the sword that she had made while singing songs of vengeance. Boreal was dead, in the way of broken jivatmas and their ended songs. Samiel was not.

  And something in me wanted him. Needed him.

  Del said nothing. Nothing at all. But she didn’t have to. In her stunned silence was a multitude of words.

  I tossed the melon toward a wall. It splatted, dappled outer skin breaking, then slid down to crown a malodorous trash heap tumbling halfway into the street. "We’ll stay the night, buy some serviceable swords and harness, then go to Julah, to Fouad’s." I said quietly. "A small matter of a debt between friends."

  And the much larger matter of survival.

  TWO

  Del was a little leery about the two of us striding around Haziz, instantly recognizable to any sword-dancers who’d seen us before. I tried explaining that Haziz wasn’t all that popular with sword-dancers, who generally kept themselves to the interior, and that I didn’t precisely look the way I used to, thanks to my sojurn at Meteiera, but Del observed that even with short hair, earrings, the tracery of tattoos at my hairline, and no sandtiger necklet, I was still a good head taller than most Southron men, decidedly bigger and heavier, still had the clawmarks in my face — and who else traveled with a Northern sword-singer? A female Northern sword-singer?

  Whereupon I pointed out we could split up while in Haziz.

  Del, tying on her high-laced sandals as she perched on the edge of the bed — we’d spent the night in a somewhat squalid dockside inn, albeit in the largest room — lifted dubious brows. "And who then would protect you?"

  "Protect me against what?"

  "Sword-dancers."

  "I already told you there’s not likely to be any here."

  "We’re here."

  "Well, yes, but —"

  "And you already admitted you needed my protection."

  I was astounded. "When was that?"

  "On the island." Now she slipped on the other sandal. "Don’t you remember? You were talking about starting a new school at Alimat. I was talking about Abbu."

  Come to think if it, I did vaguely recall some casual comment.

  "Oh. That."

  "Yes. That." She laced on the sandal, tied it off, stood.

  "Well?"

  "That was pillow talk, bascha."

  "We didn’t have any pillows. We had sand."

  "I’m fitter than I’ve been in months. Leaner. Quicker. You’ve sparred with me. You know."

  Del cocked her head assessingly, pointedly not observing that I also lacked two fingers. "Yes."

  "So, you don’t need to protect me."

  "Are you prepared to meet Abbu Bensir?"

  "Here? Now?"

  "What if he is here? Now?"

  I gifted her with my finest, fiercest sandtiger’s glare. "So, you want me to hide up here in this pisshole while you go hunting a swordsmith in a town you don’t know?"

  She was not impressed by the glare. "You don’t know it much better. And I can ask directions."

  "A lone woman? In the South? Looking for a swordsmith?"

  Del opened her mouth, then closed it.

  "Yes," I said. "We’re in the South again." Which was very different from the North, where women had more freedom, and very much different from Skandi, where women ran things altogether.

  ’I could," she said, but there wasn’t much challenge in it. Del was stubborn, but she understood reality. Even when it wasn’t fair.

  (Once upon a time she ignored reality, but time — and, dare I admit it, my influence — had changed her.)

  ’Tell you what, bascha. I’ll compromise."

  With excess drama, "You?"

  I ignored that. "We’ll send a boy out to the best swordsmith in Haziz and have him come here."

  Del considered. "Fair enough."

  "And after that," I said, wincing, "I’ll have to pay a visit to the stud."

  "Ah, yes," she agreed, nodding. "Maybe he’ll save the sword-dancers some trouble and kill you himself."

  "Well, since you’re so all-fired ready to protect me, why don’t you ride him first?"

  Del scowled. Grinning, I exited the room to scare up a likely boy to run the message summoning a swordsmith.

  The swordsmith’s two servants delivered several bulky wrapped bundles to our room as well as a selection of harnesses, swordbelts, and sheaths. Then they bowed themselves out to permit their employer
to conduct business. That employer was an older man in black robes and turban, gray of hair and beard but hardly frail because of it. Anyone who spends years pounding metal to fold it multitudinous times trains his body into fitness. A different kind from mine, perhaps, because of different needs, but age had not weakened him. Nor his assessment of customers.

  After formal pleasantries that included small cups of astringent tea, he had me stand before him, then looked at me and saw everything Del had described earlier, cataloging details. All of them mattered in such things as selecting a weapon. Most tall men had long legs but short to medium torsos; shorter men gained what height they had in a long torso. I, on the other hand, was balanced. My height came from neither, but from both. I had discovered that in Skandi mine was the normal build. Here in the South, it was not. Southroners were shorter, more slender but wiry, very quick, and markedly agile.

  Fortunately, I had been gifted with speed despite my size, and superior strength. Both had served me well.

  Now the old man examined me to see what kind of sword would serve me well.

  After a moment he smiled. He lacked two teeth. Without a word he turned, knelt, and set aside four of the bundles. He pulled out a fifth bundle I hadn’t noticed, much narrower than the others and more tightly wrapped, and began to undo knots.

  Del seated on the bed, exchanged a glance with me, eyebrows raised. I shrugged, as baffled.

  The swordsmith glanced up, saw it as he began to unwrap the bundle. A spark of amusement leaped in dark eyes. In a Southron dialect I hadn’t heard in well over a year, he said, "It is a waste of time to display my best to undiscerning customers. Then, I begin with the lesser weapons."

  "And I’m a discerning one?"

  Tufted brows jerked upward into the shadow of the turban. "With a body so carved and cut by blades? Yet still breathing?" He grinned again. "Oh, yes." He opened wrappings reverently, folding back the fabric with great care. Steel glinted like ivory ice in meager, sallow sunlight slanting through narrow windows chopped into mudbrick. He rose and gestured. "Do me the favor of showing me your hands."

  Mutely, I put them out. Saw the abrupt widening of his eyes, the startled glance into my face. That he wanted to speak of such things as missing fingers was obvious; that to do so would offend a discerning customer was equally obvious and went against his training as tradesman as well as artisan. After a moment he took my hands into his and began to inspect them, measuring breadth of palm, length of fingers, feeling calluses. He took great care not to so much as brush the stubs.