Sword-Breaker

by Jennifer Roberson

  Del stared pensively at the hard layer of packed sand full of glittering Punja crystals. “So we go elsewhere.”

  I nodded. “We’ll have to. For now, we’re all right… we can last until tonight, but we’ll need water before morning. Let’s see…” Into my head I called the map I’d carried for so many years. If you don’t learn the markers, if you don’t learn the wells, if you don’t learn the oases, you might as well be dead.

  And even if you learn them, you might die anyway.

  “So?” she asked finally.

  I squinted toward the east. “That way’s closest. If it’s still there. Sometimes, you can’t know… you just go, and take your chances.”

  Del, still mounted, hefted flaccid botas. Dwindling water sloshed. “Most for the stud,” she murmured.

  “Since he’s the one carrying double.” I moved toward his head. “Time for walking, bascha. We’ll give the old man a rest.”

  The sunset glowed lurid orange, glinting off horse brasses sewn the length of the stud’s headstall. Also off the bits and pieces of metal gear—and weapons—still a ways distant, but suddenly too near.

  “Uh-oh,” I murmured, reining the stud to a halt.

  Del, slouched behind, straightened into alertness. “What is it?”

  “Company at the oasis.”

  “Is that where we’re going? An oasis?” She leaned to one side to peer around my body. The stud spread his legs to adjust to the redistribution of weight. “Surely you don’t think everyone in the South is looking for us!”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” I scowled over a shoulder. “Sit straight, or get off altogether. The poor old man is tired.”

  Del slid off, unhooking legs from a tangle of pouch thongs and dangling botas, not to mention other gear. “He isn’t an old man, he’s a horse. He was bred to do such work. But the way you persist in talking to him—and about him—like a person, I’ll begin to believe you are sentimental.”

  “He wasn’t bred to haul around two giants like us. One is more than enough. One is what he’s used to.” I peered toward the oasis. A thin thread of smoke wafted on the air, swallowed by the sunset. Could be a cookfire; could be something else. “I can’t see well enough to count how many there are… or to see who they are. It could be a caravan, or a tribe—”

  “—or sword-dancers hired to kill us?” Del resettled her harness, yanking burnous folds into less binding positions. “And what do you mean, ‘giants like us’? In the North, you are not so very tall.”

  No, I hadn’t been. I’d been sort of average, which was quite a change for me, as well as a bit annoying. In the South I was a giant, standing a full head taller than most Southron men, while towering over the women. I’d grown used to ducking under low lintels, adept at avoiding drooping lath roofs. I’d also grown accustomed to using the advantage in the circle: I am tall, but well proportioned, with balanced arms and legs. My reach is greater than most, as is my stride. I am big, but I am quick; no lumbering behemoth, I. And many Southron men had learned it to their dismay.

  Then, of course, there was Del. Whose fair-haired, blue-eyed beauty set her apart from everyone else in a land of swart-skinned, black-haired peoples; whose lithe, long-limbed grace disguised nothing of her power, or the strength she would not hide no matter the proprieties of the South, which she found an abomination.

  Ah, yes: Delilah. Who had absolutely no idea what she could do to—or for—a man.

  I raked her with a glance. Then turned pointedly away. “If you like, bascha.”

  Which, of course, prompted the response I expected. “If I like? If I like what? What do you mean?”

  “If it pleases you to think of yourself as a delicate, feminine woman…” I let it trail off.

  “What? You won’t disabuse me of the notion?” Del strode past the stud to stand beside me. Flat-footed, in sandals, she was nearly as tall as me; I am a full four inches above six feet. “I have no desire to be a simpering, wilting female—”

  I grinned, breaking in. “Just as well, bascha. You don’t exactly have the talent.”

  “Nor do I want it.” Del’s turn to look me up and down. “But if we were to discuss softness—”

  I overrode her. “We’re here to discuss water, and whether we want to risk ourselves trying to get it.”

  She stared past me at the distant oasis, sheltered by fan-fronded palms. We could hear the sound of shouting, but could not distinguish words. It could be a celebration. It might be something else.

  Del’s mouth twisted. “The botas are nearly empty.”

  “Meaning it’s worth the risk.”

  “Everything’s worth the risk.” A twitch of shoulders tested the weight of Northern jivatma snugged diagonally across her back. “We are what we are, Tiger. One day we will die. It is my fervent hope a sword will be in my hands when I do.”

  “Really?” I grinned. “I’d always kind of hoped I’d die in bed with a hot little Southron bascha all a-pant in my arms, in the midst of ambitious physical labor…”

  “You would,” she muttered.

  “—or maybe a Northern bascha.”

  Del didn’t crack a smile; she’s very good at that. “Let’s go get the water.”

  Eight

  By the time we reached the oasis, all the shouting had died down. So had all the living.

  “Stupid,” I muttered tightly. “Stupid, foolish, ignorant idiots—”

  “Tiger.”

  “They never learn, these people… they just load everything up and go traipsing off into the middle of the desert without even thinking—”

  “Tiger.” Very soft, but steadfast.

  “—that valhail only knows awaits them! Don’t they ever learn? Don’t they ever stop and think—?”

  “Tiger.” Boreal was still unsheathed, though the threat was well past. “Let it go, Tiger. What they need now is a deathsong.”

  My face twisted. “You and your songs…” I waved a rigid hand. “Do what you want, bascha. If it makes you feel better.” I turned and strode away, slamming home the Northern jivatma. Walking until I stopped and stood stiff-spined with my back to the tiny oasis, hands clenching hips. I leaned, spat grit disgustedly, wanted nothing better than to wash the taste of anger and futility from my mouth. But nothing we had would do it: neither water, wine, nor aqivi. Nothing at all would do it.

  “Stupid fools,” I muttered. And felt no better for it.

  It wasn’t the bodies. It wasn’t even that one was male, one female, one the remains of an infant whose gender was now undetermined. What it was, was the waste. The incredible senselessness and stupidity—

  The familiar Southronness of it.

  Recognition was painful. It washed up out of nowhere and sank a fist into my belly, making me want to spew out anger and frustration and helplessness. What I said was true: they had been senseless and stupid, ignorant and foolish, because they had mistakenly believed they could cross the desert safely. That their homeland offered no threat.

  I knew they had been stupid. I could call them idiots and ignorant fools, because I knew why it was so senseless: no one, crossing the desert, was safe from anyone. It was the nature of the South. If the sun doesn’t get you; if the Punja doesn’t get you; if lack of water doesn’t get you; if the tribes don’t get you; if greedy tanzeers don’t get you; if the sandtigers don’t get you…

  Hoolies. The South. Harsh and cruel and deadly, and abruptly alien. Even to me.

  Especially to me: I began to wonder if I was a true son of the South, in spirit if not in flesh.

  It was my home. Known. Familiar. Comforting in its customs, in the cultures, in the harshness, because it was all I knew.

  But does knowing a deadly enemy make him easier to like? Harder to destroy?

  Behind me I heard the stud snuffling at the rock-rimmed, rune-carved basin, the need for water far greater than the fear of death. And I heard Del, very quietly, singing her Northern song.

  My jaws locked. Between my teeth, I muttered, �
��Stupid, ignorant fools—”

  Two adults, alone. And one tiny baby. Easy prey for borjuni.

  I swung. “If they’d only hired a sword-dancer…” But I let it trail off. Del knelt in the sand, sword sheathed, carefully wrapping the remains of the infant in her only spare burnous. Very softly, she sang.

  I thought at once of Kalle, the five-year-old girl Del had left on Staal-Ysta. She had borne the girl, then given her up, too obsessed with revenge to make time for a baby. Del was, I had learned, capable of anything in the patterns of her behavior. It was why she had offered me in trade for her daughter’s company for the space of one year. She knew it was all she could get. She knew I was all she had to offer in exchange, and counted it worth the cost.

  The cost had come high: we’d both nearly died.

  But obsession and compulsion didn’t strip her of guilt. Nor of a deep and abiding pain; I slept with the woman: I knew. We each, for different reasons, battled our demons in dreams.

  Watching her tend the body, I wondered if she, too, thought of Kalle. If she wished the exile ended, her future secure in the North with a blue-eyed, fair-haired daughter very much like the mother who had given her up; who had been forced to give her up, to satisfy a compulsion far greater than was normal.

  Now Ajani was dead. So was the compulsion, leaving her with—what?

  Del looked up at me, cradling the bloody burnous. “Could you dig her a grave, Tiger?”

  Her. I wondered how Del could tell.

  Futility nearly choked me. I wanted to tell her this wasn’t the South, not really the South. That it had changed since we’d gone up into the North. That something terrible had happened.

  But it wasn’t true. It would be a lie. The South hadn’t changed. The South was exactly the same.

  I stared hard at the bundle Del cradled in her arms. We didn’t have a shovel. But hanging from the ends of my arms was a pair of perfectly good, strong hands with nothing else to do, since there were no borjuni present for me to decapitate.

  At dawn, they came back. It wasn’t typical—borjuni generally strike quickly and ride on after other prey—but who cares about typical when you’re outnumbered eight to two?

  Del and I heard them come without much trouble just at dawn, since we’d slept very lightly in view of the circumstances, and we had more than enough time to unsheathe blades from harnesses kept close at hand, and move to the ready. Now we stood facing them, perfectly prepared, backs to the screen of palm tree trunks huddling vertically near the rock basin.

  “I thought you said something about those runes protecting the traveler,” Del murmured. “So much for desert courtesy.”

  “Against tribes, yes. Not much of anything protects anybody against scavengers like borjuni—unless you want to count on a sword.” I stared at the eight gathered men mounted on stocky Punja-bred horses. They were all typically Southron: black-haired, dark-eyed, swart-skinned, robed against the rising sun, aglitter with knives and stickers and swords. “A camp,” I muttered thoughtfully. “There must be a camp nearby.…”

  Del, from beside me, “Do you want to pay a visit?”

  I grinned. “Maybe later. After we’re done with these.”

  It was said for their benefit in clear, precise Desert, though Del’s was accented. Not that it mattered: language skill was the last thing the eight mounted borjuni considered while staring down at the Northern woman so different from their own.

  Which really was all right, when you looked at the scheme of things. It meant they didn’t notice—or didn’t care—that a sword was in her hands.

  More likely, didn’t care. It’s hard not to notice Boreal.

  Deep inside, I laughed. I had a jivatma, too.

  “Well?” I invited.

  One of the men stirred. His dark face was pocked by childhood disease. Long hair, greased back, glistened with too much oil. The curling ends stained grimy gray-brown the shoulders of his dusty cream-colored burnous. He challenged me with a stare. “Sword-dancer?” he asked.

  I altered the tilt of my blade minutely, just enough to catch the newborn sunlight and throw it back into his eyes. Answer enough, I thought; you don’t mess around with borjuni, or consider subtleties of feelings. You go straight to the point; in this case, it was my point, blackened by Chosa Dei.

  The borjuni swore, squinted, thrust up a forearm to ward away the light. Behind him, his men muttered, but a single sibilant word held them in their places. He brought down his arm, settled a hand on his knife-hilt, glared down the length of his pocked, bony nose. He didn’t look at Del. But then, he didn’t need to. He’d seen all he needed to see, to know how much he wanted.

  The other hand he took from the reins and waved in a fluid gesture of encompassing possession: seven mounted men, all dangerously ruthless. Their worth was already proven, if you counted the bodies we’d buried.

  The hand settled once more. He waited expectantly.

  “I’m not impressed,” I told him.

  Dark eyes narrowed. He flicked a glance at Del, eyed the bared blade a moment, then looked back at me. “The woman,” he growled, “and you go free.”

  A bargain, yet. Very unlike a borjuni. Being a sword-dancer has its uses—except in this case I wasn’t so sure of things. Eight to two were not good odds, even if the borjuni, in their ignorance, believed it eight to one. I am big, yes, and quick, and I’ve cultivated a tough appearance, but I’m not that big or quick or mean.

  Still, I was willing to play up the chance.

  I displayed a cheerful, toothy grin. “I go free anyway, Do you think you can take the Sandtiger?”

  Del, trained according to the exquisite honor codes of Staal-Ysta, no doubt considered it unnecessary braggadocio, but it’s the way things are in the South. With borjuni, you need every edge. If they were at all concerned about me and the dangers of trying my skill, all the better. It could tip the balance in our favor.

  Black eyes flickered. The borjuni leader tried a different approach. “Why has the woman a sword?”

  “Because she, too, is a sword-dancer.” I didn’t see the sense in lying; besides, he wouldn’t believe me. “And she has magic,” I added casually. “Powerful Northern magic.”

  He squinted, assessing Del. Looking for magic, no doubt. Except he wouldn’t see any, not so obviously, other than the magic of a leggy Northern beauty with a thick plait of white-blonde silk falling over one muscled shoulder bared by the almost sleeveless leather tunic. It didn’t occur to him to consider the sword seriously, or what it was capable of.

  Then again, who would? Boreal is very good at keeping secrets. Almost as good as Del.

  A subtle flick of fingers. The seven men behind him began to spread apart. Del and I, without speaking, shifted stance at once, moving to stand back-to-back. I balanced very precisely, feeling familiar tension in thighs and calves, the tightening of abdomen. Behind me, Del hummed. Prelude to the song. Prologue to the dance.

  The leader did not move. “Sandtiger,” he said, as if to be very sure.

  It occurred to me then, and only then, that even borjuni might find it opportune to listen to the rumors. Maybe I hadn’t been so smart in giving him my name. Maybe I’d been downright stupid, handing him the truth to lend credence to the tales. If what Rhashad had said were true—and I had no reason to doubt him—gold had been set on our heads.

  Very softly, I swore.

  Del’s song gained in volume just as the borjuni charged.

  Nine

  One of the easiest—and most violent—ways of taking out a mounted enemy is by cutting down his horse. It isn’t clean, it isn’t nice; what it is, is quick. It also has the occasional benefit of doing the whole job for you; I have known opponents killed by falling horses, or by the fall alone. It saves time and energy. And while you can’t always hope for that, you do hope for the shock alone to drop the mounted man into your path. Then you finish the work.

  When I fight, whether within the confines of the circle or outside in the codele
ss world, I experience an odd sort of slowing in time. While nothing is really still, it is nonetheless slowed so that my vision is unobscured by motion too fast to follow.

  Once I’d thought it was the way everyone viewed fight or dance, until I’d mentioned it in passing to my shodo. The next day he had kicked me up a training level and handed me over to a well-known, established sword-dancer by the name of Abbu Bensir in order to test my claim. Whom I had not only beaten, but had also marked for life by nearly crushing his throat.

  I’d explained to my shodo, once I’d gotten over the shock of actually winning the sparring dance, that Abbu’s patterns had been relatively easy to block, because he’d been lazy and complacent, but mostly because I’d seen the path-within-the-path: the angles and sweeps and snaps before Abbu carried through. It was simply a matter of seeing the possibilities, probabilities, and alternatives, and selecting the action judged by my opponent as most likely to succeed. It required snap judgments of his technique, a rapid assessment of his style, and an immediate counter move.

  I thought everybody did it. How else is the dance won?

  Eventually I was told no, that not everyone had the ability to see motion before it happened, or to select the likeliest course for the opponent to follow, and then fashion a counter measure before the action occurred. Such anticipation and countering ability was, my shodo explained, the truest gift a sword-dancer could ever hope for. And that I, more gifted than most, would reap the reward for a very long time, years, even—if I didn’t throw the gift away by growing lazy, or too complacent.

  Arrogant, always. Robustly confident. But never, ever complacent.

  The mounted borjuni came on. Everything dutifully slowed, so I could see all the possibilities, and the path-within-the-path. Patiently I waited, sword at the ready, and watched him come riding at me, keening a promise of death.

  Oh, it was promised, all right. But it wasn’t my death.

  I cut the horse out from under him, then spitted him on the way down.