“Yes, dear.” He wiped a tear from his gray face. “That is enough for now, I think. You may go.”
Llesho bowed low to depart, but her ladyship detained him. “Meet me at the dinner hour, in the grove,” she said. “It is time you learned the art of archery.”
Llesho wondered if she meant before or after dinner; she seemed to read his expression if not his mind, because she smiled and added, “We will dine on peaches from the orchard.”
With a final obeisance, Llesho took his leave.
Chapter Fifteen
THE grove where Llesho met with the governor’s lady smelled of peaches and ripe plums in the late afternoon sun. Since he had neither bow nor arrows, he came with empty hands and waited, watching the golden coins of sunlight dapple the grass beneath the trees. He did not wait long, however, before the sound of chimes reached him, and the lady entered the grove carrying an empty bowl. One servant came ahead of her, ringing the bells that heralded her arrival, and four servants followed. Two carried bows as proudly unbent and almost as tall as the lady herself, and two bore elaborately embroidered quivers, each with twelve arrows in it. The lady set the bowl on the ground beneath a tree and smiled at him.
“We will work for our supper tonight,” she said with a smile. Then she motioned forward the servants. “You will learn the Way of the Goddess with the bow.”
Llesho blushed a deep crimson. The Way was sacred to his people, the path of the goddess known only to her handmaidens and her chosen consorts. As a prince of the sacred blood, his own life belonged to the goddess, who might accept or reject him as her consort during the vigil celebration of his sixteenth natal day. That day approached, but he had not yet offered his manhood as husband in heaven, nor did he know how he would do so when the time came.
As an unfledged prince, he had no right to anticipate the pleasure of his goddess by learning her Way, and it shocked him to find the secrets of his own culture in a Farshore orchard. “I did not know the people of Farshore followed the goddess.”
“My lord the governor allows me a small shrine at the back of his gardens, as he wishes in all things to please me.” Her ladyship spoke as if this will to her pleasure came as her due. Her explanation left more questions than answers between them, not the least of which was how one who knew the sacred Way of his culture could offer the knowledge to him as if it were no more than gladiator training for the arena. Therefore, he bowed his head very low, and his voice shook with terror when he objected, “If you worship the goddess, then you must know that what you suggest is improper for me to learn.”
“The Way belongs to all people who believe,” she chided him, “Don’t let the ignorance of priests who crave their own power blind you to the truth.” As a slave, her remote glance reminded him, he had no right to question his master’s wishes.
“As you wish.” He bowed to her again, in proper submission, and offered his silent repentance to the dead priests of the Temple of the Moon, and to the goddess whom they served.
Her ladyship returned his bow with a nod of acknowledgment, and began her instruction.
“The bow is like the will. The man who does not bend, who cannot yield, stands alone and apart from nature. He is powerful only when he bends his will to the string.”
She took the first bow in her hands and pulled a coil of twisted gut from a deep pocket in her outer coat. “Choose your bow as you would choose a warhorse,” she said. “It must be strong and sure, and yet, must bend to your will.”
She showed him how to string the bow she held and then handed him the second bow and a second coil of gut. “Likewise, the man must bend his will to the bow, become the yielding string that subdues the bow to its flexible strength.”
Llesho fumbled the task. No bolts of lightning descended from the blue sky to strike him dead, so he let himself relax into the bow, bending his own soul to the will of the goddess as the bow bent to the string.
Next, her ladyship took an arrow from the quiver offered by a waiting servant and held it out on her extended palm.
“The point, or head of the arrow,” she said, making a graceful gesture with her free hand to draw his attention to the stone chip affixed to one end of the arrow, “must be cunning and sharp. Making arrowheads requires rare skill. You may develop the knack, but it is better to acquire them from a maker than settle for second best, even if they are your own. The true archer never pollutes his arrow with spell or potion, but trusts to the well-cut stone, the clear eye, and the strong arm.
“The shaft—” She ran a finger along the wooden length of the arrow. “It must be perfectly straight. Learn to carve your own, for only then can you be certain that your arrow will follow the flight of your heart. Be careful what prayer you carve into its woody flesh; your heart should be as straight and uncompromising as the shaft of your arrow.
“Fletching—” She held up the arrow between two fingers and directed his attention to the feathers at the nether end. “It stabilizes the arrow and gives it flight. Learn the language that the fletching speaks: hawk feathers for war; dove for peace. Fletching of swan’s feathers swear the true love of the archer.
“Think of the completed arrow as an egg. All that the bird will become in flight is contained in its birth. If the wings are unformed, the bird will not fly. If it is too easily buffeted by the wind and turned off its course, it will never reach its destination. If its beak does not harden, it cannot crack open seeds, and it will die. So you must ensure that each arrow is perfect, like the egg, so that the arrow’s flight will be perfect, like the bird’s.”
She did not demand that he learn to construct arrows on the spot, fortunately, but moved on to the next step. Putting the strung bow in his right hand and an arrow in Llesho’s left hand, she stood at his back and wrapped her arms around his arms, her hands around his hands, so that they clasped the curved wood before them with their entwined fingers. “You can fight the bow,” she said, “or you can be the bow,” And she fitted the arrow to the notch of the string and pulled.
“You can let the arrow go, or you can release your heart with the arrow, and be its flight—” He could feel her smile skim his ear as she let the arrow fly into the tree beneath which her bowl was positioned. And into the bowl fell a peach, freed by the arrow. “Try it.”
Llesho took his own bow in his hand, and set an arrow, pulling back on the string. He felt as if he were pulling against his own weight in the bow; it did not yield.
“You are trying to force the bow,” her ladyship corrected him. “You must caress it, not overpower it. Become the bow and find it in your will to want to bend. . . .”
She did not touch him, but her voice caressed him like fingers on his spine. Llesho took a deep breath, let it out again, and let the feel of smooth wood bow and taut gut string sink into his being. “Like the willow,” he thought, “bending before the storm, enfolding the stream—” and as he thought, he drew back on the string until the arrow poised on a line with his eye, and he felt the goal in his nerves and his being, the stem of a ripe peach high in the lady’s tree. Fly, he thought, and felt his spirit fly, spin unerringly out into the universe, twanging by the stem of the peach which fell as he passed it, reaching out to the top of his flight, and curving back to earth.
When he returned to himself, the bowl held a second peach, and the governor’s lady had fixed a sharp but approving eye on him. “Can you tell me where the arrow fell?” she asked.
Llesho nodded and closed his eyes. “There,” he said, and pointed to the place where the arrow had plunged to earth, its head buried in the ground, its fletching upright like a banner.
“Again?” she asked, and he nodded, unable to form thoughts into sentences while he lived the graceful curve of wood and the teasing tension of the string. Carefully he set the arrow, and studied the tree. Then he closed his eyes, pulled back on the string with two fingers bracketing his arrow—his heart—and let himself fly. His body did not relax back into itself until the peach hit the bowl with
a soft thunk, and the lady at his side laughed.
“Tomorrow, on horseback,” she said. Llesho could not tell her that he had never ridden a warhorse, but only the shaggy, ill-tempered Thebin pony that had hated its caparisons as much as Llesho had hated the thin beaten plates of his child’s armor. They had been but poor reminders of an ancient time when the Harn would not have dared to cross the Thebin border.
He’d cross that bridge tomorrow—an apt metaphor, he realized, given the number of bridges scattered about the governor’s compound. Her ladyship walked over to the peach tree and sat beside her bowl of peaches.
“Tell me about Pearl Island,” she said, holding a peach out to him. He sat beside her, his legs crossed in front of him, thinking he might be falling under a spell she cast over the orchard. Then he remembered the cold, sharp expression she had worn when Master Jaks had tested him on the Thebin knife. He took the peach, therefore, but decided to remember that she was, after all, the governor’s lady, and a dangerous person by any lights.
“What do you want to know?” He bit into the peach, so sweet and ripe that the juices spurted on his chin, and he ducked his head and wiped his face with his sleeve.
She spoke casually when she answered, as if she hadn’t seen the sticky juice decorating his chin.
“Tell me about your life. How you came to be in training as a gladiator.” She did not ask him about Thebin, and Llesho was grateful for that. The governor’s questions had felt like poking at unhealed wounds, and he wanted to think of anything but the bloody body of his dead father, his sister bleeding out her life on a pile of refuse.
“I don’t know.” Llesho shrugged his shoulders, almost as embarrassed at the question as at the mess he was making of the peach. “At first, I lived in the longhouse with Lling and Hmishi, and the others who worked in the pearl beds. We aren’t from the same part of Thebin, but we got along once Hmishi and I fought over who would be leader.”
“Who won?”
“Lling, of course.” He laughed. “She is smarter than both of us, and she fights dirty. And winning really mattered to her; she wouldn’t give up until we admitted she had won.”
“Good for Lling,” her ladyship said softly, but with real admiration in her voice. “What happened to the pearl beds?”
Llesho shrugged, but he felt his entire body grow cold. “I don’t know,” he said, “I was gone by then, into the training compound to be a gladiator. Sometimes, when a diver stays below too long, he begins seeing visions, If he survives the first time, he is likely to do it again, and again, trying to get the visions back, until he drowns—”
“And you saw visions?”
He nodded.
“And were they the figments of an oxygen-deprived mind?” she asked him, and he stared at her, afraid to answer the question. She would think he was mad, or a witch, if he gave her the truth, and know he was lying if he didn’t. While admitting to being a witch didn’t seem as deadly in the governor’s compound as it would on Pearl Island, he was no Habiba, and didn’t want her getting funny ideas about him. She honored his privacy, or accepted his silence for her own reasons, and brought him back to the original question: “Even in the training compound, you must have heard rumors about the pearl beds.”
When she looked into his eyes, Llesho remembered what she had said about the feathers on the arrow: her glance pierced him, like a hawk, and he wondered what war he had stumbled into.
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Lord Chin-shi, they said, was afraid of witches. Master Markko, the overseer, convinced his lordship that our healer, Kwan-ti, was a witch, but she disappeared before he could gather evidence to prove any crime. Soon after that the Blood Tide came and killed everything in the surrounding sea. Master Markko declared that Kwan-ti had created the Blood Tide to punish Lord Chin-shi for his actions against her.”
“Kwan-ti disappeared before the Blood Tide?” Llesho nodded. “The Blood Tide came soon after. But I never saw her commit an evil act. I don’t think she was able to do evil, even to save herself.”
“I think you are right. But if not Kwan-ti, who ruined Lord Chin-shi with the deadly tide?”
“Did it have to be a person?” he asked in return, “Might it not have been a freak of the sea itself?”
“No, Llesho,” she answered carefully, and he wondered if she thought the truth would frighten him or turn him against her. “The sea behaves in certain ways, according to its nature and the seasons. To create the Blood Tide, someone had to change the nature of the very sea—to poison it with devouring life that does not occur naturally in these waters—where it touched upon Pearl Island. Who do you think would have wanted to do something like that?”
Llesho remembered Lord Chin-shi’s chambers, his lordship’s pressing questions and his own regret that he had no answers to give. He had fallen asleep while Lord Chin-shi struggled through the night to find an antidote for the poisoned bay. Lord Chin-shi had failed, losing everything, and had died by his own hand. Llesho could not help feeling that the failure was somehow his own. “I think Lord Chin-shi believed I might be a witch, or that if Kwan-ti was truly a witch, she had taught me her spells, and that perhaps I could stop the Blood Tide,” he said. “But I’m not, and I couldn’t.”
“You could have, Llesho,” she said, and touched a tentative hand to his cheek. “You are the favored of the goddess, had you but known to entreat her.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, denying it to himself as much as correcting her ladyship’s misunderstanding. “My only talent seems to be surviving disasters; I can’t do a thing to prevent them, and for all I know, something about me calls disasters down on my head. But I don’t have anything to do with it. It just happens.”
“Surviving is perhaps the greatest talent of all, child. But if not Kwan-ti, who killed Chin-shi’s pearl beds?”
Her explanation of the tide had shed a different light on Lord Chin-shi’s fall. If fate and the sea had set the plague on the oyster beds, the worst any of them had done was let it happen. He knew that Kwan-ti had not seeded the plague when she left, but she might have been healing the bay, holding off disaster until staying even a day longer meant her death. Freed of her restraining touch, the poison had quickly taken hold. And Llesho knew about poisons.
“Master Markko,” he said. “His workroom smelled of poisons and rot, and dead things.” He truly didn’t want to think about Markko, or the workroom where the overseer had chained him to the floor. He didn’t want to see Lord Chin-shi dead in the sand of the arena, either, but that had happened, too.
“I think Lord Chin-shi was himself a witch,” Llesho ventured, “but he couldn’t find the cure for the pearl beds.”
“Not a witch,” the lady corrected him, “but certainly an alchemist, which is much the same thing and probably what your Kwan-ti was, more or less.” She stood up then, and handed the peach bowl to a servant while Llesho jumped to his feet.
“Master Markko has passed to Lord Yueh, who held many of Lord Chin-shi’s debts,” she added.
It made sense, all except for why she was telling him, which he asked her pointedly.
“Because you need to know,” she answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, though he couldn’t imagine why. “I hope we are not already too late.”
She left him there with one of the bows, and a quiver of arrows. He watched her go, unable to drive from his mind either their conversation or the fear that seemed to grip her at the last. Too late for what?
In the weeks that followed, the novices trained together in weapons and in unarmed combat. Her ladyship herself led them in archery on many days, and Llesho found that he excelled at the weapon. As he grew in skill he found his thoughts moving more deeply and more slowly, whereas his reflexes reacted like lightning. Kaydu taught a sharper, faster, dirtier form of hand-to-hand than Master Den had done, and she included deadly moves that grew out of forms that assumed a larger opponent with intent to kill.
Master Jaks took up the tea
ching of armed combat without the rules of engagement that governed the arena, but that was suited to working in pairs and groups to attain one goal. Extraction and infiltration became a part of the training, skills that no gladiator would need, but that turned them into soldiers capable of moving at the forefront of a massed troop, or running and fighting in small bursts of guerrilla action. Or working as assassins in the enemy camp.
It seemed natural that the novices should train together. They soon learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and forged a purpose with Llesho at its center. Kaydu joined them when she could free herself from her own teaching duties, acting as student and as teacher under Master Jaks’ instruction. Llesho grew confident in wielding his small cadre as a force, sending Bixei to the front with a glance when strength and intimidation might avoid bloodshed, unleashing Kaydu for stealth attacks; she could move soundlessly through dry reeds, and her combat skills fit her like her skin. Lling he begged with his eyes to talk them out of trouble, or to hold ground if talk did not work.
Hmishi, it turned out, was the fiercest fighter of them all, but only if the life of a companion was at risk. In practice his moves were hesitant and laden with apologies and the wounded pain of doing harm to others. When, in exasperation, Master Jaks pulled him in front of the troops at practice and told him to fight or die, Hmishi had stumbled and mumbled, absorbing the jeers of the guards and the curses of his teacher. Then a knife caught him in a deep downward slash across the cheek, and he realized that Master Jaks had meant every word. They weren’t playing at tridents with their muck rakes anymore, and Master Jaks would kill him dead where he stood rather than let him be a burden on his team.
Kaydu said later that Hmishi would probably have died rather than hurt his teacher in that artificial setting of make-believe combat, but Llesho had refused, utterly, to lose a friend to that sort of game. He would not let them make enemies of each other, and he knew he could never trust Master Jaks again if Hmishi died at his hand. So he lunged at the master, latching on to his knife arm, and clinging to it while he shouted to Hmishi to run, to get away. Master Jaks had shaken Llesho loose and turned on him, a dreadful light in his eyes. Growling deep in his throat, Hmishi had attacked with a savagery that almost took the master down before he tumbled out of the way and set himself for defense. They battled then in earnest, Master Jaks’ years of experience and cunning matched against the force of Hmishi’s will focused on the death of his opponent. Master Jaks would have died in that battle if three hefty guards had not risked Hmishi’s blade to knock him down and hold him while a fourth disarmed him.
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