by John Norman
“How then will the feast be served?” inquired Tajima.
“By women,” said Lord Nishida. “What else are they good for?”
“Pleasure,” I suggested.
“Yes,” said Lord Nishida, “that, too, is a purpose of women.”
“By slaves, of course,” I said.
“Alas, yes,” said Lord Nishida. “We must make do with slaves. To be sure, we might free them all, have them serve, as free women, and then recollar them.”
“I think slaves will do,” I said.
“Yes,” said Lord Nishida. “Why should a slave be granted even a moment of freedom?”
I include, in passing, for those who might find it of interest, the following brief, ritual dialogue, in the form of a simple question and answer, which, in certain cities, is not unusual between a master and his slave.
“What are you for?”
“To serve you, and give you pleasure, Master.”
This exchange usually takes place in the morning, when the girl first kneels before the master.
In a sense, it begins her day. Too, of course, it may be required at any time, say before meals, before serving wine, before bedding her, putting her to use, and so on.
I supposed Tajima had been interested in whether or not Sumomo might serve at such a feast.
She would not.
She was a contract woman, and above such vulgar applications.
Then, far off, several hundred yards away, we heard the bellowing of tharlarion.
The men of Lord Nishida had been methodically examining each structure in both the housing area and those surrounding the Plaza of Training.
“It seems urts have been discovered in the stable,” said Tajima.
“They are trying to cover their flight by stampeding tharlarion!” said Pertinax.
From where we stood we could see the lumbering bulks of crowded tharlarion, buffeting one another, moving from the stable. We saw Ashigaru in the vicinity with glaives. Another figure or two, also, was seen, mixed in with the tharlarion. One, I thought, fell, and was trampled.
“Margaret! Margaret!” cried Pertinax, wildly, and, turning about, ran toward the stable.
“With your permission?” I asked Lord Nishida.
“Certainly,” he said.
Tajima and I then, following Pertinax, hurried toward the stable. We were followed by some mercenaries, and glaive-bearing Ashigaru.
Chapter Nineteen
at the stable
“Wait!” I called to Pertinax, who would have rushed headlong into the confines of the stable.
He drew up short, sword drawn.
“Do not frame yourself in the threshold,” I said.
Lord Nishida had remained in the centrality of Tarncamp, directing officers and men. He spoke directly to Pani. He communicated with mercenaries through their officers.
There was much dust about, like gray clouds, settling slowly, from the movements of the tharlarion.
The stable had its strong, distinctive odor.
Men coughed.
Pertinax wiped his eyes.
Darkness would fall within the Ahn.
There were grooms about, and one of the Pani, a subaltern, set them to recover, as they could, frightened, confused tharlarion. Ashigaru accompanied them, lest fugitives be encountered. Some had surely escaped. To be sure, I was confident the last thing such fugitives would desire would be to encounter Lord Nishida’s Ashigaru. They would be more likely to dare the forests, and hungering beasts. Few, I suspected, would find their way back to their Home Stones, if Home Stones they had. Fortunately the gigantic draft beasts, disoriented, snorting and lumbering, had not been loosed amongst buildings, or much of the camp, where it was intact, might have been reduced to shambles. I had no doubt hundreds of the wands would now be uprooted. I trusted this would not result in an eventual, casual intrusion of larls into formerly secure areas. A small building of wood, as were most of the camp structures, would not fare well against the bulk and momentum of a distressed, uncontrolled, rapidly moving tharlarion. Indeed, the beast might scarcely notice the obstacle, almost ignoring it, thrusting through it as it might through brush or picketing. The inertia of a tharlarion is formidable. It cannot be turned and halted with the same ease as might, say, a kaiila, or horse, which may be instantly turned or halted, pulled up short, and so on. When the tharlarion has its own head it is difficult to control. Consider the difficulties of trying to communicate with, or control, a boulder tumbling down a mountainside. Draft tharlarion, of which variety these were, are normally driven slowly, and with care. War tharlarion, often larger than draft tharlarion, can be, and are, used in charges. There is little defense against them if encountered on unprepared, level ground. Open formations will try to let them pass, and attack them from behind. Closed formations seek uneven ground, use ditches, diagonally anchored, sharpened stakes, and such. If they become slowed, or are milling, they can be attacked by special troops, with broad-bladed axes, designed to disable or sever a leg. I have never much favored tharlarion in combat, as, if they are confused, or wounded, they become uncontrollable, and are as likely to turn about and plunge into their own troops as those of the enemy, thereby, indiscriminately, wherever they trod or roll, whether amongst friends or foes, spreading disorder and death. Some kaiila, incidentally, become hard to handle in the presence of tharlarion, if they are unfamiliar with them. The issue of more than one battle had turned on this seeming oddity. For this reason, the Tuchuks, and others of the Wagon Peoples, and, I suppose, others, accustom their kaiila to the sight and smell of tharlarion. In the case of the Wagon Peoples, these are usually taken from raided caravans.
Tajima looked at me.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Very well, Tarl Cabot, tarnsman,” he said.
The enemy which stampeded the tharlarion would have realized the value, if danger, of such a cover. I recognized their cunning, and understood their desperation. It was an excellent strategy. I could think of only one better, and it would have required the execution of the first.
“Do not enter the stable,” I warned Pertinax.
“What of Miss Wentworth?” he demanded.
“Saru!” I snapped. “The needful slave.”
“‘Needful’?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, irritably. He did not realize what had been done to the female, how she was now different, how she was now a slave.
“Surely it is safe,” said Pertinax. “The enemy has fled!”
“No,” I said.
“How so?” said he.
“Some flee,” I said. “One might suppose all have fled. Some remain, clever ones, in hiding, their presence unsuspected, to escape in the darkness.”
“Why do you think this?” asked Pertinax.
“Put yourself in the place of the most astute, the shrewdest, of your enemies,” I said. “What might you do, if you were they? Too, Saru is presumably within the stable, and, I am confident, alive, as she is a slave. One would no more kill her than any other domestic animal. But she has not called out to us. I infer she is being kept silent. If this is the case, one or more enemies are within.”
“I think that is true,” said a quiet, even voice, behind me. I knew the voice was Pani, but I could not place it.
I heard men gasp, and sensed them drawing back.
This was, I took it, a reverenced personage, one of whom lesser men stood in awe.
Who could this be?
I turned about.
I then saw before me one of the Pani, but one such as I had not seen before. Had a larl by some incantation taken the form of a man, I thought it might be such a man. He was not large, but I felt a largeness somehow within him. Although of the Pani his visage was bearded, thinly, roughly, uncut, save perhaps by the sword, and his hair was long, and unkempt. His clothing was soiled, and uncared for. He was barefoot. In his belt, blades uppermost, were the two swords, the companion sword and the longer blade. There was blood on his loose, short-armed ro
be. Some of it was spattered, and, in other places, he had apparently drawn his blades against the cloth, to clean the blade. I was startled to look upon him, for he seemed so different from the other Pani. He might, I supposed, be a hermit, or a recluse, one who lived by himself, with his thoughts. Perhaps he was a madman. That seemed to me possible, but then it seemed to me, rather, that there was a solidity about him, and a finely tempered, perhaps dangerous, rationality about him. I thought surely he was an unusual man, and one of perhaps a ferocious singleness of interest and purpose. I would learn later, however, that he carved wood, and composed small poems on bark. I had the sense he was without companion or slave, and by choice. Perhaps such might have distracted him from some more remote purpose, or goal, or ideal. He seemed to me a man driven, like a thing of nature, but from what or to what I did not know.
“Master,” said Tajima, bowing deeply, which greeting was politely returned.
“Master,” said Pertinax, putting down his head.
“It is he,” said one of the Ashigaru.
“He has come from the forest,” said another.
“He came to the sound of striking steel,” said another.
“He took seven heads,” whispered a man.
I bowed then, for I knew in whose presence I stood.
“I am Nodachi,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
“It will be dark soon,” said one of the Ashigaru.
“May I speak to the men?” I inquired of Nodachi.
Whereas he held no office to my knowledge, nor any instituted authority, as far as I knew, I felt the inquiry, the question, was appropriate.
I sensed that those others in the vicinity, too, felt a deference, a respect, a recognition, a salute, a propriety of some such sort was in order.
His consent or approval seemed important to me, somehow, and to the others.
Some men are not officers, or daimyos, or shoguns, but are such that officers, daimyos, shoguns, or such, in their presence, would not hesitate to be the first to bow.
I sensed the awe in which this man was held, an awe to which I, not even of the Pani, was acutely sensitive. It seemed an awe as palpable as an atmosphere. Doubtless this was in part due to many things, perhaps to his unusual, imposing, even wretched, appearance, and in part to his reputation, an understanding of who this was, and what he had done, and what he could do, and perhaps, in part, too, to that sense of being in the presence of one who lives alone, undeviating and undistracted, one who is absorbed in, and centered upon, a quest, one not altogether clear to other men, a journey as much within as without. Some men are alone, essentially solitary, their lives given over unswervingly to an ideal, or dream, the search for a fact, the discovery of a cause, or planet, the unraveling of a mystery, the creation of a perfect poem. I thought of Andreas of Tor, and his longing for a song that might be sung for a thousand years, of Tersites, of Port Kar, and his plans for a mighty ship, finer than all others. This man was such a man, I suspected, a seeker, a traveler on uncharted, even invisible, roads, roads thusly undiscerned by others. The perfection he sought, I gathered, was a simple one, one sought by many, and found by few, one which I, even of the Warriors, and others of my brethren in arms, would find harrowing, and almost incomprehensible, and to which we surely dared not aspire, a perfection of heart, eye, mind, and body, to undergo a lifetime of meditation, sacrifice, and discipline, to understand and become one with, as it was said, the soul of the sword.
He was Nodachi.
“I am near the camp, but I am not of the camp,” he said. “I am one who is outside.”
I thought he was, indeed, in many ways, one who was outside.
I gathered from his remark that he eschewed an engagement in our work, that he chose not to concern himself with it.
This was his decision.
I bowed.
“Master,” said Tajima, bowing.
“Master,” said Pertinax, bowing.
These deferences were accepted by the strange figure who then turned about, and withdrew.
“It was Nodachi,” said a man.
“I have only now seen him, but I knew him,” said another.
“Who would not know him?” asked another.
“He is more than a man,” said one of the Ashigaru.
“He would deny that,” said another.
“I think he is less than a man,” said another. “He is part of a man.”
“Men are various,” said another. “He is one thing a man can be.”
“A single, terrible thing,” said another.
“Within him resides a demon,” said another.
“And a holiness,” said another.
“Or an evil,” said another.
“He is a monster,” said another.
“He is the blade’s brother,” whispered another.
“He listens to the sword,” said another. “It speaks to him.”
“The sharpness of his blade, unmoving in the water, can divide a floating blossom,” said a man.
I had seen that sort of thing, and did not doubt it.
It was not unusual for silk to fall, parted, from a shaken blade.
“His stroke can descend like lightning, cutting in two a grain of sa-tarna placed on the forehead of a man, without creasing the skin,” said another.
This was possible, I supposed, but I would not have cared to be the fellow involved in the demonstration.
“One stroke can cut through seven bodies,” claimed another.
If we were talking of the bodies of men this was unlikely. The force required would surpass the violence of a hurricane.
“He can strike out in eight directions at once,” claimed another.
Some of these things seemed to me obviously impossible, and were clearly the fruits of imagination, and myth, but it is common to suppose that at the foot of legends, in the lost soil of the remote past, there is a seed from which such legends sprang, and I had little doubt, in any event, that the mysterious fellow who had just appeared, and then departed, was both unusual and remarkable.
He himself, I was sure, was not the source of such conjectures. Indeed, I suspected they were legends founded on another individual altogether, legends to which he found himself, however reluctantly and unwillingly, an heir. Such legends tend to blossom and enlarge long after their alleged source has vanished, and is no longer about to contradict them. Humans are so fond of wonders that it seems almost churlish to call them into question. To be sure, such legends, in their way, betray and belittle he whose origin they might have been. Hercules and Perseus, and so on, if they existed, were doubtless remarkable enough in themselves, and might have found the wonders attributed to them embarrassing, at the least. Nodachi, I was sure, was a dedicated, great, and charismatic teacher and swordsman, in his own right, and did not require, and doubtless would not appreciate, the mantles of myth, woven for others, and misplaced upon him, mantles which might be cast upon him by smaller men, needful of marvels.
“Why did he come here?” asked one of the Ashigaru, uncertainly.
“We do not know,” said a man.
“He took seven heads,” said another.
He left them at the feet of Lord Nishida,” said another.
“Now he is gone,” said another.
I could see the trees through which he had disappeared. I wondered what his relationship, if any, might be to Lord Nishida, and his mysterious project. If he had put the seven heads before Lord Nishida, that suggested that Lord Nishida was his daimyo. To be sure, it seemed he had asked nothing of Lord Nishida. Was the presentation rather, then, in the nature of an assertion, a token, or even a defiance, or insult? Nodachi was clearly Pani, and yet seemed other than the Pani. He must be here for some reason, in the forest, I supposed, but for what reason?
I would learn more of Nodachi later.
I recalled that Lord Nishida, after the attack, had said that his plans would be advanced.
Nodachi, I did not doubt, figured in these plans
.
“It is growing dark,” said one of the Ashigaru. “Shall we enter the stable?”
I had little interest in risking men, and I had no way of knowing how many foes, if, indeed, any foes, were concealed in the stable. Too, I wished, to the extent possible, to protect Saru, assuming she was within. I doubted that she would be in danger, as she was a slave, any more than a verr or kaiila, but it is hard to anticipate the actions of frightened, desperate men. The situation would have been much different, of course, if she were a free woman. A free woman would constitute an excellent hostage. To be sure slaves, too, have their value. For example, they can be sold.