Silence. The echoes of my accusation died away.
“I saw it.” Her voice was little more than a whisper, but I detected the faintest trace of despair. “I saw it. In that moment, when I turned away from Aladar, I saw the hatred in your eyes. For me.”
“No.” It was expelled all at once. “No, Del. I hated me. Myself. Because I’ve done it so often, and with less compunction—less reason—than you did.” I began to move, unable to stand still. I paced. Like a caged cat. “I saw myself when I watched you kill Aladar. And it’s never easy to look at yourself and acknowledge, at long last, exactly what you are.”
“Sword-dancer,” she said. “Both of us. We are neither of us better or worse than the other. We are what we have made of ourselves, because we had reason. Justification. Because of obsession.” She smiled a little. “Chula: freed by his own courage. Free to take up a sword. Woman: freed by rape and murder. Free to take up a sword.”
“Del—”
“You said once I wasn’t cold enough. That I lacked the edge.” She shook her head. The braid moved against her right shoulder. “You were wrong. I am cold, Tiger; too cold. My edge is honed too sharp.” She didn’t smile. “I’ve killed more men than I can count, and I will go on killing them when I have to—because of murdered kin … a stolen brother … violated virginity.” The moonlight set her pale hair shining. “Your dream was right, Tiger. I would kill a hundred Aladars … and never look back while the bodies fall.”
I looked at her. I looked at the proud sword-dancer who knelt on the hard wooden floor of a dingy Southron inn and knew I looked at someone worth all the sacrifice in the world because she had made and accepted her own.
“What have you done?” I asked hoarsely. “What have you done to yourself?”
Del looked up at me. “If I were a man, would you ask that?”
I stared at her. “What?”
“If I were a man, would you ask that?”
But she already knew the answer.
Twenty-Three
Del and I did not leave Julah immediately. For two reasons, actually: Aladar’s murderer was sought by palace guards, and I wasn’t in any shape to leave as yet. Three months in the mines had taken their toll. I needed food, rest, exercise. Mostly I needed time.
But time was a commodity we didn’t have. Now that we were so close to Jamail (both Del and I were pretty sure Aladar had told us the truth about giving Jamail as a gift), she was understandably anxious to track down the Vashni. But she waited. With more patience than I’ve ever seen in anyone, let alone myself.
We didn’t speak again about past experiences or reasons for what we had become. We spoke instead about plans for shaking Jamail loose from the Vashni. I’d never had much experience with the tribe, but I’d learned some over the years. Unlike the Hanjii, they weren’t overtly hostile to strangers. But they were dangerous. And so we had to plan accordingly.
“No more slave and slave trader scam,” I told Del on the third day of our freedom. “It got us into too much trouble the last time. If this Vashni chieftain has acquired a taste for Northern slaves, we don’t want to risk losing you as well.”
“I thought you might eventually come to that conclusion.” Del’s head was bent as she wiped the blade of her sword with soft chamois. “Do you have another idea?”
I squatted on the floor, hunched against the wall. The posture had become habitual, though now there were no chains. “Not really. Maybe it would be the best if we just rode in and checked out the lay of the land.”
“We’ll have to have something the chieftain wants,” Del reminded me. “Otherwise, what would tempt him to give up Jamail?”
I scratched at the scars on my face. “We’ve still got most of the money that was in Aladar’s pouch. And the pouch itself, which is worth a small fortune because of all the gems.” Absently, I shrugged my left shoulder. “When it comes right down to it, he may want to reward us for ridding him of Aladar. Seems to me it cancels the trade alliance.”
The Northern blade shone. Del glanced over at me. Unbound, her hair was like platinum silk in the saffron sunlight. “I hired you to guide me across the Punja, to Julah. I didn’t hire you to risk your life for my brother.”
“In other words, you don’t think I’m ready for sword-work—if it comes to that.”
“Are you?” she asked calmly.
We both knew the answer. Three days out of the mine; three months in. “I said I’d go.”
“Then we’ll go.” She put the tip of the sword against the lip of the leather sheath and slid the blade home. A sibilant song: steel against fleece-lined leather.
In the morning, we went.
We rode into the foothills of the Southron Mountains on yet another pair of horses. Del’s was a white gelding generously speckled with black from nose to rump. He had odd, watchful eyes, almost human, and a frazzled motley mane and tail. My own mount was also a gelding, but less colorful than Del’s; he was a plain, unremarkable brown horse. Not bay, not like my old stud; he lacked black points, black mane and tail. Just—brown. Like his personality.
We rode out of sand into the saltpan hardpack of the border between desert and foothills. With each step the earth changed, chameleonlike; first sand, then hummocky patches of dry, wispy grass, then footing akin to something more like a natural topsoil.
I watched Del’s gelding. He had a funny way of stepping out. He appeared almost to mince, womanlike; I’d have mentioned it to Del, except I couldn’t think of any time at all when she had minced.
At any rate, the speckled gelding was full of something. He minced, sashayed, whiffled through flaring nostrils, slanting my gelding coy glances out of eerily human eyes.
“I think I know why he was gelded,” I said finally. “As a stallion, I think he’d be a washout.”
Del’s brows shot up. “Why? He’s a perfectly good horse. A little skittish, maybe—but there’s nothing wrong with him.”
“It,” I reminded her. “There isn’t any him left in him. But I’m willing to bet there wasn’t any him in him when he was whole.”
Del chose not to answer my charge. Well, he—it—was her horse. Maybe she felt some loyalty.
We left behind the saltpan, the dry, hummocky grass, the webbing of healthier growth. Horseshoes clinked against slate-colored shale, gray-green granite. We climbed, though the elevation was debatable; the Southron Mountains, even at their summit, are not tremendously tall. From the sloping shoulders, spotted with scrubby trees and catclawed brush, steel-blue shalefalls dribbled toward the desert.
Del was shaking her head. “Not like the North. Not like the North at all.”
I leaned forward, half-standing in my stirrups as the brown gelding negotiated a jagged shale escarpment. “No snow.”
“Not just that.” Del tapped her speckled horse with sandaled heels, urging him to follow me. “The trees, the rocks, the soil … even the smell is different.”
“Should be,” I agreed, “seeing as it’s Vashni you’re smelling, not mountains.”
I stopped my horse. The warrior sat on his own sorrel mount about twenty paces away. Around his bare brown neck hung an ivory necklace of human finger bones.
Del stopped next to me. “So it is.”
We waited. So did the warrior.
He was young. Probably about seventeen. But the first thing a Vashni male knows in this life is a sword; a Vashni woman, giving birth, cuts the cord with her husband’s sword. And then the male child is circumcised with it.
No, you don’t underestimate a Vashni warrior. Not even the young ones.
This one was mostly naked, clad only in leather kilt and belt. Even his feet were bare. His bronzed flesh was oiled to a feral sleekness. He wore his black hair long, longer than Del’s; like her, he braided it. But the single braid was wrapped in furred hide. From his ears depended earrings of carved bone. What part of the human body they came from, I couldn’t say.
He made certain he had our full attention. Then he turned an
d headed south. Across his back, naked except for the thin harness, was strapped a traditional Vashni sword. Unsheathed, the wickedly curved blade gleamed. The hilt was a human thighbone.
“Come on,” I told Del. “I think we’re expected.”
The young warrior led us into the Vashni encampment: a clustering of striped hyorts staked out almost cheek-by-jowl against the sloping mountainsides. We rode through a tribal reception party: two parallel lines of Vashni, winding like a serpent through the encampment. Warriors, women, children. All were silent. All watched. And all wore as finery the bone remains of men, women, children.
“They’re worse than the Hanjii,” Del breathed to me.
“Not really. The Vashni don’t believe in live sacrifice, like the Hanjii. The trophies you see are honorable ones, won in honorable battle.” I paused. “Taken from dead people.”
Our guide escorted us to the largest hyort, dropped off his horse and gestured us to dismount as well. Then he signaled me forward. But as Del stepped forward also, he shook his head sharply.
I looked at Del and saw the conflict in her face. She wanted so much to argue with the warrior; she knew better, and didn’t. Instead, she moved back to her speckled horse. But not before I saw the desperation in her eyes.
“Do you speak Vashni?” she asked.
“A couple of words. But they speak Desert. Most people in the South do. Bascha—” I didn’t touch her, though I wanted to. “—Del, I’ll be careful what I say. I know what this means to you.”
She let out a ragged breath. “I know. I—know. But—” She shook her head. “I guess I’m just afraid he won’t be here after all. That he’ll have been traded or sold off to someone else, and we’ll have to search some more.”
There was nothing more I could say. So I left her with the horses, as most would do with a woman. I turned my back on her and stepped inside the chieftain’s hyort, and I came face to face with her brother.
I stopped short. The flap fell down behind my back; Del would not be able to see in. She wouldn’t be able to see her brother as I saw him: braided, like a Vashni. Kilted, like a Vashni. Mostly naked, like a Vashni. But blond. Blue-eyed. Fair-skinned. Like Del. And lacking sword and fingerbone necklet.
Which meant he wasn’t—quite—a Vashni.
He was nearly Del’s height. But not quite. He was nearly Del’s weight. But not quite. And never would be. Because I knew, looking at him, that his physical growth had been impaired by castration.
I’ve seen it before. It’s in the eyes, if nowhere else. Not all of them grow fat, like Sabo. Not all of them grow effeminate. Not all of them look that much different from a normal male.
Except in the eyes. Except in the odd, almost eerie physical immaturity. A permanent immaturity.
In no way did I betray I knew who he was. In no way did I betray I knew what he was. I simply stood there silently, waiting, and trying to deal, in my own way, with the horror and shock and grief.
For Del’s sake, because she would need me to be strong.
Jamail stepped aside; I saw the old man seated on a rug on the floor of the hyort. The chieftain of all the fierce Vashni: white-haired, wrinkled, palsied. And half-blind; his right eye was filmed completely over. His left showed signs of the same disability, although not as advanced. And yet he sat rigidly upright on his rug and waited for Jamail to return to his side.
When the boy did, the old man took hold of a soft, fair-skinned arm and did not let it go again.
Hoolies. How in the name of valhail do I deal with this?
But I knew. And when the old chieftain asked me my business with the Vashni, no doubt expecting a wish for trade expressed, I told him. Everything. And I told him the absolute truth.
When I was done, I looked at Jamail. He looked back out of Del’s blue eyes. Not once had he said a word or made a sound of disbelief, grief, relief. Another man might have said the boy was afraid to indicate his feelings, out of fear for retribution. But I knew better. I saw how the old man clung to his Northern eunuch; how the old man depended on his Northern eunuch, and knew the Vashni chieftain would never hurt him. He wouldn’t so much as speak a harsh word to him.
But he spoke to me. In Desert, the old man gave me Jamail’s side of the story; as much as he knew of it. It was true Aladar had offered a Northern slave-boy as part of a trade treaty. It was true Jamail had been accepted as chattel. But it was not true he had remained such. It was not true he had been treated as chula. It was not true the Vashni had castrated him. It was not true the Vashni had cut out his tongue.
And so I knew why Jamail said nothing. Mute, he couldn’t. Castrated, he might not want to.
“Aladar,” I said only.
The old man nodded once. I saw the trembling in his chin. The tears forming in his failing eyes. The brittle strength in his palsied hands as he held Jamail’s arm. His mouth twitched as he formed the words of his question: “Will the Northern woman want a man who is not a man?”
I looked at Jamail. Trapped forever in physical immaturity, he looked more like Del than he should. But I knew better than to think for one moment that what her brother had suffered would alter her intentions.
Still, I couldn’t speak for her. “I think the woman will have to say.”
After a moment, the old man nodded again. He gestured permission; I rose, gathered what courage I could muster, and went out to tell Jamail’s sister.
Del listened in rigid silence. She said nothing when I finished speaking. She went in.
It wasn’t my place to follow. But Del didn’t speak Desert, and Jamail couldn’t translate her words to the chieftain. So I ducked back into the hyort.
Jamail was crying. So was Del. So was the old man. But all of them did it in silence.
Del didn’t look at me. “Ask the chieftain if he will let Jamail go.”
I asked. The old man, crying, said yes.
She swallowed. “Ask Jamail if he will come.”
I asked. Jamail, at length, nodded. Once. But I saw a fair-skinned hand creep out to touch the old man’s liver-spotted one and cling in a dependence all too evident.
Del was dry-eyed now. “Tiger—will you tell the chieftain thank you? Tell him—sulhaya.”
I told him. And then Jamail, because the chieftain told him to, got up to go out of the tent with his sister.
Del stopped him with a hand pressed lightly against his chest. She spoke in soft Northern, with tears in her eyes, and when she was done speaking, she hugged the brother she had sought for five long years and gave up her claim on him.
After a moment, I followed her out of the tent.
Twenty-Four
Stark-faced, Del had said nothing on the journey from the foothills to the oasis on the border of the Punja. And now, as she sat in the muted shade of six palms with her back against the cistern’s rock wall, I saw the beginnings of shocked comprehension coming into her eyes.
A goal achieved often brings no joy. Only a fleeting sense of satisfaction in the knowledge that the thing is done, but also the first taste of anti-climax. In this case, that taste was fouled by the additional knowledge that what she had done was for nothing.
Well, not entirely for nothing. But it seemed that way to her.
“They were kind to him,” I told her. “For two years he lived in hoolies with Aladar. The Vashni gave him welcome. They gave him dignity.”
“I’m empty,” was all she said.
I heard the anguish in her tone as I sat down next to her. She’d built a little fire near one of the palms as the sun went down, using the kindling we carried in our pouches as well as a couple of dead palm fronds. We’d sat on spread rugs, chewed dinner, drunk wine, thought silent, private thoughts, and watched the sun go down across the desert. Now, except for the wind-whipped fire and snorts from hobbled horses, there was no noise at all.
Del turned her face to me and I saw the pain in every line. “Why am I so empty?”
“Because what you wanted most has been taken from you b
y circumstances you can’t begin to change.” I smiled a little. “There’s no circle for this, bascha. No dance. No kaidin or an-kaidin to show you how to overcome it with skill and training. Not even a magicked sword can help, Northern- or Southron-forged.”
“It hurts,” she said. “It hurts so much.”
“For a long time to come.”
We sat shoulder to shoulder against the cistern wall. I could feel the warmth of her skin through the thin silk of my burnous; the thin silk of her own. Neither of us were in harness, having shed our swords not long after dismounting. But both weapons lay in easy reach; neither of us is a fool.
I thought of how maybe once I might have asserted a certain degree of somewhat forceful masculine interest in the woman at my side. How maybe once I might have pressed physical attentions when she wasn’t desirous of them, knowing so many women wanted to be teased and hugged and kissed into capitulation. But Del was not most women. Del was Del, sword-dancer first, and I respected her for that.
But not to the extent that I could ignore the fact I wanted her more than ever.
It became apparent her thoughts were much the same as mine. I saw the softening of her mouth; a slight smile widening slowly. Her glance was sidelong. Eloquent in its directness. “There was a deal, sword-dancer,” she said. “A bargain we struck, because you wouldn’t enter the circle with me otherwise. Payment for a sword-dancer’s services, because I had no other coin.”
I shrugged my left shoulder, naked of Singlestroke’s weight. “We split Aladar’s purse. Payment enough, bascha.”
“Is that a no?” she asked in astonishment. Amusement, as well; she was not affronted by the idea I might not want her after all. But neither did she seem particularly relieved. “After waiting so patiently?”
I smiled. “Patience is as it must be, or some such thing. No, bascha, it isn’t exactly a no. Just—an equivocal yes.” I reached out and tucked a sunbleached strand of hair behind her ear. “I don’t want you on the basis of a bargain. I don’t want you if you feel it’s obligatory. Or even a form of thanks.” The calluses on my fingers caught and snagged the silk of her burnous. “Neither do I want it if you’re simply feeling lonely and unfulfilled because your search is at an end.”
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