She already wore her leather tunic. It bared most of long, muscled legs to go with long, muscled arms. “I had a thought.”
“Always a dangerous thing.”
She ignored my comment, which is about what it was worth. “Neesha’s been here two years. I thought maybe it we could go north and visit his mother. The horse farm is near the border.”
I followed her out of the house. The suggestion left me speechless. It had never crossed my mind. Visit Neesha’s mother? She was the first woman I’d had, on my first night of freedom, away from the Salset and no longer a slave. See her again? The idea made me uncomfortable. I was a long way from the boy she had met. I’d been considerably younger than Neesha then, all of seventeen. Twenty-five years had passed. And Neesha had left her and come to me.
Del’s sidelong glance told me my silence had piqued her concern. But my Northern sweetheart, my bascha, knew when to let me work through something in my head. She wouldn’t suggest it again. She wouldn’t even mention it until I’d sorted out my feelings. I’d learned to do it with her as well, though it went against my nature to keep my mouth shut.
“Which circle?” she asked, since there were several.
“Oh, grass I guess. I’ve danced on dirt twice in the last two days.” I unlaced each sandal one-handed, switching the sword from one to the other. “My feet will thank you. And so will you, when you land on your butt.” That would make twice in one day. I smiled at the idea. Though I admitted to myself that it would be considerably more difficult to dump Del.
It wasn’t a dance, exactly. We didn’t place the swords in the middle of the circle, we didn’t run on someone’s signal to snatch them up. It was sparring. We simply assumed a position opposite one another and began.
As always, it was a long session, with blades flashing in the sunlight, the clangor of metal on metal, the swing of a white-blonde braid, the dazzle of blue eyes utterly focused on me. Del was not distractible. Whomever she met in a circle, in any kind of fight, had her full attention always. Both of us sweated, both of us sucked air, both of us took turns coming out on top for the space of a second or so, before being back in the thick of the session.
I drove her nearly out of the circle. She returned the favor. Never had we settled the question of who was better. Abbu Bensir and I had finally arrived at a conclusion when I killed him, but Del and I just traded victories. The closest we’d come to the real thing was in the North, up with Del’s people; we had nearly killed one another. I bore the scar, the lumped tissue and cavity beneath my left-side ribs. Del claimed nearly the same scar on her own body, thanks to me.
My blade met hers. She shifted. For that instant, that tiny, unremarkable instant, I was just slightly off-balance. I moved a foot to recover it, came down with the ball of my foot on something hard that abruptly rolled sideways; I’d committed my body and went down, landing hard on my butt. The sword fell out of my hand.
Laughter. Loud laughter. The sound of applause. “Hah!” Neesha cried. “A-HAH! Didn’t inspect the circle, did you? Didn’t make sure nothing would hinder you. Didn’t do anything you should have done to prevent that, did you? Hah!”
I looked for it and found it. A stone, about a fourth the size of my fist. It had been hidden in the grass.
“You’re dead!” my son exulted. “You’re dead! The Sandtiger’s dead!”
I lofted the stone at him, which he promptly caught. “I’m so glad to provide entertainment for you.” I looked at Del, standing in the middle of the circle. Her expression was curiously blank. I’d seen that before. “Oh, go ahead and laugh, bascha. I know what it looked like.”
Del forbore to laugh, but she did grin. “And lo,” she said, “the Sandtiger is brought down by a stone. An inoffensive, innocent stone, just sunning itself in the grass. What a rude awakening for it, to be stepped on by the greatest sword-dancer in the South.”
I pressed myself to my feet, brushing grass from my dhoti. “I suppose this means I have cooking duty.”
Del smiled cheerfully “And clean-up duty.”
Swearing, I grabbed my sword out of the grass and marched myself toward the house. I overheard my son say, “That was beautiful.”
“That,” Del said, “was luck. But yes, luck can be beautiful when it tips in your direction.”
Later, after dinner, as twilight began its downward journey into the canyon, Del joined me outside on the bench beside our door. She handed me a mug.
It wasn’t ale. “You found the aqivi.”
“I did.” She sat close beside me, thigh against thigh, arm against arm. She’d never been fond of aqivi, saying it made me foolish. But now she said, “It has medicinal qualities.”
I grinned and drank.
“So, Umir wants you to open the book.”
I swallowed aqivi. I was accustomed to it again; and no, it did not make me foolish. Well, maybe too much of it, but I didn’t do that anymore. I mean, the last time, in the cantina, I went to bed, which is never foolish. Especially when you don’t take a wine-girl to that bed. That would be foolish, with Del at home. Also unnecessary. Maybe worse than foolish, in fact. Possibly dangerous where my head was concerned.
“Umir wants me to open the book.”
“But you used magic to lock it. To make it so he couldn’t open it, couldn’t use it.”
I sighed deeply. “So I did. At the time I considered it a very clever idea.”
“It was. But…”
“But?”
“You don’t have magic in you anymore, thank all the gods. Can you open it?”
“No.” I’d poured into my sword all the magic ioSkandi—with its stone spires and collection of lunatic mages—had awakened in my bones, and then I broke it. Left it. Far as I knew, Del’s sword and my sword both lay inside a collapsed chimney-like rock formation outside the first canyon where Mehmet and his aketni lived. I was empty of magic. Being so was what I very much preferred; it freed me to live many more years than ten. IoSkandic magic and madness killed a man too soon.
The first stars crept out of the deepening twilight. A glow on the high rim of the canyon promised moonrise. Before us, in the fire ring, embers glowed. The scent of roasted venison drifted into the air as the spit dripped leavings. I had never in my life known such peace as I did in this canyon, at our Beit al’Shahar. Once, I’d have denied any suggestion that I would settle, raise a family, stay put in one place. The long view I’d held promised me only sword-dancing interspersed with occasional caravan guarding, other temporary employment. I’d expected to die in the circle one day. It was what all of us did, eventually. Or got hurt badly enough that we had to stop dancing, a death in itself. Few of us died in bed.
“You’re of no use to Umir if you can’t open the book,” Del said quietly.
Dryly, I observed, “Well, that presupposes he manages to catch me first and learn that. I, of course, am counting on you to help prevent my capture.”
“I’m your bodyguard.”
“So you are.”
Del’s voice hardened. “He needs to be dead.”
I sighed, peering into my mug to see if an insect had drowned itself in the contents. I tipped the mug toward the firelight to capture some light. “You and Neesha. I have somehow surrounded myself with bloodthirsty people.”
“He keeps capturing you.”
“I’m not the only one,” I said, aggrieved. “He captured you, he captured Neesha.”
“Yes. And to prevent any more capturing, he needs to be dead.”
This was aggravating. “As I told Neesha, I am not going to just ride in there and lop off his head. He’s too well-guarded. I’d have to make my way through an army of sword-dancers to get anywhere near him. Head-lopping would be difficult. Hoolies, I might even get my head lopped off.”
Del said with some asperity, “Well, I’m not suggesting you do the head-lopping by yourself. There’s me. There’s Neesha. We could probably even borrow Alric.”
“For head-lopping?” I shook my head.
“Lena would never let him go. And he listens to her.”
“More than you listen to me,” she observed. “But then, he’s a Northerner. Northern men are more respectful of women. They listen to their women.”
I ignored the provocation. I’d learned I could never win those debates. “Alric’s got to stay here to help Lena. They’ll have our daughter, remember.”
“Well, yes.” Del thought things over for a moment. “All right. Three of us. We’d have two who claim to be the greatest sword-dancer in the South, and—”
I interrupted. “Two? Who’s the one besides me? Abbu’s dead.”
“Me. I may be a Northerner, but I live in the South. And there’s Neesha. He’s doing well, Tiger. Someday he’ll be the greatest sword-dancer in the South.”
“Well, not yet!”
“I said ‘someday,’ did I not? But in the meantime, one of us should really kill Umir. He’s a thorn in our ointment.”
I laughed. “Such a kind, gentle woman, my bascha.”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Tiger. That would be very boring.”
Chapter 6
NOT LONG AFTER DAWN, as morning mist lifted, I carried the littlest of us out of the house. Del and I had let Sula sleep in our bed with us for a bit, the night before. She was still sleepy, with mussed hair and a crease-line running down the right side of her face. I held her against my chest, and she set her head on my shoulder as I walked toward Alric’s and Lena’s.
“Will you be good?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“You have to be good,” I told her. “You’ll be a guest of the house. Guests must have manners.”
She lifted her head, rubbed the side of it with a fist, and met my eyes with her mother’s eyes, though blurry with sleep. Then she said something that was totally incomprehensible and laid her head back down against my shoulder. I just grinned and carried her onward.
Del walked up from the creek, carrying freshly filled botas. She placed them on a bench, by a door very like our own, and put out her arms. I passed to her the dead weight of our daughter, a dead weight that weighed hardly anything. You could blow her away like a dandelion.
In a low voice Del spoke to Sula in Northern, her lips very close to the tangled hair. She was clearly torn by the prospect of going back out into the world we’d known for so long, and leaving her daughter behind. But there was no place for Sula in this. We weren’t caravaners. We were sword-dancers and ran the risk, all three of us, at any time, of being killed.
Lena was in the doorway, smiling as Del wished her daughter good health—and good manners—while we were gone. In Southron, now, she explained to our drowsy offspring that we would come back to her, back to the life we had built within the confines of a beautiful canyon. Back to our home.
It was Lena’s turn to take her. Sula did not object to being passed from one to another to another. It was true she looked on Lena and Alric as parents almost as much as she did us, to the point of making a wobbly break for next door if Del and I found it necessary to discipline her. She was certain Alric and Lena would rescue her, though they never did. She was ours to chastise. Ours to love.
Del cupped Sula’s head in her hands and gave her a kiss on her forehead. Then she gathered up the botas, slung them over her shoulder, and strode back to our house. I smiled crookedly at Lena, whose expression told me she knew all too well what Del was feeling.
“Go on,” she said. “Sula will be well. Del won’t be for the first couple of days. But it will lessen a little as she’s distracted.” Lena smiled crookedly. “Some of the time.”
I nodded, leaned close to give Sula a quick kiss, then turned my back on them both. I felt a twinge of regret myself and a faint undertone of anxiety. There was so much to live for now. So much more to live for. More than I had ever expected to reside in my heart, my soul.
Then I told myself to get to work. We were burning daylight.
Well, to be completely accurate, we were burning dawn.
Del, Neesha, and I haltered our horses and led them out of the pole corral. Del still had her white horse, but no longer did he wear a wine-girl’s scarlet tassels to shield pale blue eyes against the sun. She had made a headpiece out of soft indigo-dyed leather strips, quite fine and narrow, almost like long fringe. It also served to keep the flies away from his eyes.
My horse needed no such thing. My horse sported a rather luxuriant black forelock to do that work. He was dun with a dark line running down his back from withers to rump. At the end of that line over his rump was a coarse black tail that just at this moment was being whipped back and forth with some force. The stud, as always, had an opinion. Especially in the mornings.
Blanket, saddle, saddle pouches packed with supplies—he bore all these without complaint as, one by one, I attached them to him. He made no complaint when I swapped out halter for headstall, bit, and reins. Then the halter on top, customary for journeys. One might be glad of his quiet acquiescence, except I knew it did not bode well.
Neesha was already aboard his dark bay horse. He was grinning in anticipation. I shot him a scowl and was rewarded by a wider grin. In fact, he swung his right leg over the saddle pommel in front of him and took his ease, arms crossed, knowing his own exceptionally well-trained horse wouldn’t do anything except stand there quietly, waiting for directions from its human.
Sighing, I led the stud out, away from the house and corral. I swung the left rein up over his neck and stuck a foot into the stirrup then pulled myself up and over, reins gathered short, and steeled myself.
The stud didn’t do anything.
“Oh no,” I said. “You’re not going to lull me into a false sense of security.”
He pulled against gathered rein, stuck his head down, and shook it. Then he shook everything else, including me. I hated that. It hurt to have my head, spine, and neck snapped inside out.
He stood still. I waited. Finally I ventured a question “Are you done?”
Of course not.
He stuck his head up in the air, dropped it, bent his spine upward, tail slashing back and forth, and proceeded to back up rather swiftly. Which was not the direction in which I wished to go. “Quit,” I said. I glanced over my shoulder to see if we were approaching anything, person, or horse—possibly even a house and furniture—that might trip us up. “Quit.”
So he stopped backing up and moved forward, stomping as he went, trying to yank the reins out of my hand. Horses are powerful, and stallions more powerful yet. It was always a fight to control a snuffy stud-horse. Especially this one.
Eventually, as I applied pressure to the bit, he hopped up and down. Stiff-legged. Which caused me to swear most vehemently.
Then Neesha appeared. He leaned down from his saddle, caught one of the stud’s reins to control his head, and quietly asked, “Is this any way for a well-mannered horse to act?”
Well-mannered, my ass.
“We discussed this,” Neesha continued. “This is not the way to treat the man who feeds you. And his bones are old. They’ll break.”
I gritted my teeth. But Neesha had grown up on a horse farm, and he’d conquered the stud the first day he met him. He conquered him now. The stud blew out one tremendous, breathy, damp snort, and settled. All the protest died out of him. I could feel it go.
“My old bones still have a lot of life left in them,” I muttered, “and I had him under control, thank you very much.”
“I know that. He doesn’t.” Neesha released the rein and sat upright in his saddle again. “So, where are we going?”
“This was your idea,” I reminded him sharply, still disgruntled. “Don’t you have a place in mind?”
“Well, no. I didn’t think you’d agree to go.”
I glanced at Del, who’d finger-painted black circles around her horse’s eyes to cut down on the sun glare. Now she was in the saddle, blacking pot tucked away, saying nothing. Her face was expressionless. She just waited to see if I’d settled on her suggestion or igno
red it utterly.
I looked back at Neesha. “Let’s go north. Let’s go visit your mother.”
His mouth fell open. “My mother?”
I used Del’s argument. “It’s been two years.”
“Yes, but…” He trailed off and ruminated a moment, frowning faintly, eyes gone blank. Finally he came back to himself and met my eyes. “All right.”
A sudden thought struck me. “She wouldn’t try to beat me up with a shovel, would she? Or hit me over the head with a stool?”
“No.” He was utterly baffled. “Why would she do either of those things?”
“Well, I slept with her one night, then left the next morning. And she’d never been with any man before. I’m sure she had better dreams than that for her first time.”
Neesha made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, no, she understood. She told me about that. She didn’t expect you to stay. Admittedly, she didn’t expect to conceive, but she did, and she said I was worth it.” He paused. “I am.”
“That’s humble,” I said, echoing something he’d said the day before.
Neesha laughed. “Oh, but the Sandtiger’s cub is never humble.”
Del observed, “If we stay here any longer, we may as well go back to bed.”
I made an expansive gesture. “Lead on.”
She rode by me on her white, blue-eyed gelding. The stud reached out to bite him. I smacked him on top of his head. “Don’t be rude.”
The big oasis was a popular stopping place for folk of all kinds, from single families to caravans hauling goods and people, nomadic tribes, merchants, any number of others on business of their own, guides hoping to be hired, and sword-dancers also looking for work as caravan outriders or settlers of disputes. Tanzeers knew to send servants here to find such sword-dancers. It was a place of palm trees weighted with heavy ribbed fronds, dripping dates in season; trees with frothy limbs, wide canopies, thorns, spiked bark; succulent ground vegetation, such as alla plants, growing in the shade; catclaw, creosote, cactus; even tough, webby grasses rooted so deeply that sand didn’t block their growth. Shade was sought and treasured, but the most significant attraction was water. Here, an underground stream bubbled up between a drift of half-buried stone, surrounded by a short man-made wall built of rocks and mudbrick.
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