by David Duncan
He stopped and pointed at the lodge entrance ahead. A woman in blue was coming down the steps with a small, naked boy at her side.
Wallie looked twice and then again at his companion.
"That's you, isn't it?" he said.
"Of course! Could I ever get all my work done if I were only in one place at a time? And the lady with me, the seamstress of the Seventh?"
Wallie's eyes misted over, and he could not see.
"Some swordsman you are!" The boy chuckled. "Shonsu, the gods are grateful! Your rewards will be wonderful: long life and happiness, power, and accomplishments." He snickered. "And loving, of course! You will rule when Nnanji is absent. You will plot the atlas of the World and watch the circles close. You will force justice on Katanji, reason on Thana, and mercy on Nnanji. You will travel the World as his ambassador and ride at his side when he returns to Hann to thank the Goddess and visit his parents.
"The others will have the honor and fame, but you get the love of the People. And when at last you die, with your grandchildren's children beside you and a multitude in vigil at the gates, then a World will weep. Until then, Jja's love is yours and her beauty unfading. She minded little being a slave, but you minded, so she and Vixini have been freed. No one but you and she will even notice the change-it is a retroactive miracle, and the last. I have just explained to her."
Wallie rubbed his watering eyes angrily. The little boy had run off to meet the other little boy, and then they were running side by side, except there was only one of him, and then he had vanished altogether in the darkness between the dancers and the bonfires...
And Lady Jja was standing at the bottom of the steps, smiling and waiting for her swordsman.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave Duncan was born in Scotland in 1933 and educated at Dundee High School and the University of St. Andrews. He moved to Canada in 1955 and has lived in Calgary ever since. He is married and has three grown-up children.
Unlike most writers, he did not experiment beforehand with a wide variety of careers. Apart from a brief entrepreneurial digression into founding-and then quickly selling-a computerized data-sorting business, he spent thirty years as a petroleum geologist. His recreational interests, however, have included at one time or another astronomy, acting, statistics, history, painting, hiking, model ship building, photography, parakeet breeding, carpentry, tropical plants, classical music, computer programming, chess, genealogy, and stock market speculation.
An attempt to add writing to this list backfired-he met with enough encouragement that he took up writing full time. Now his hobby is geology.