by Peter David
“What the hell are you talking about?”
It was not, in retrospect, the brightest way I could have handled the moment. Certainly I won no major points for subtlety. The woman was clearly a loon, and I might have learned more had I simply lain there and let her babble. But I could feel my brain beginning to dissolve within my skull just from thirty seconds of listening to her. If she’d gone on much longer, my gray matter would have begun leaking out my ears.
Curiously, she didn’t seem to care that I’d just revealed that I was awake, or that I’d had an impatient outburst thanks to her blather. Instead she shoved me onto my back, straddled me, and began running her hands under my shirt. One would have thought I was still sporting the magic ring upon my member that had given me unparalleled control over the libidos of all females.
“He speaks to me, his words like great waves crashing against the oozing sandiness of my shores. I feel in my breasts the current of liquid fire…”
“Right! That’s enough of that!” I snapped, having no desire whatsoever to have her breasts oozing anything on me, much less liquid fire. I shoved her off me as hard as I could, knocking her knife away. She landed on her back and then, to my amazement, scissored her legs about in a rapid circular motion that brought her immediately to her feet. I never even saw her hand move, but suddenly she was holding the sword she had pulled from the scabbard on her back.
“Now… hold on,” I said, regretting I hadn’t kept my big mouth shut and just let her have her way with me. I had gotten to my feet, favoring my right leg as always. I had my sword in a defensive posture, but I didn’t fancy going up against the whip-fast blade she was holding. “This isn’t really necessary. I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding…”
“His voice sings to me like a heavenly choir as my heart thuds, fair to bursting against the milky softness of my skin,” she said. Even as she spoke, she brought her sword slicing back and forth in the air in front of me. “I hear him and the death of my beloved goldfish no longer tortures me. To the birds! To the birds!”
Well, that more or less settled it: She was completely demented. Unfortunately, she was a demented woman with a blade, and she charged at me with the grace of a shadow. The speed of her sword made it so impossible to follow that I did the only thing I could: I threw myself backward, hitting the ground flat on my back as her sword hissed through the air where I’d just been standing.
I remembered the lessons of Chinpan Ali at that moment, grabbed up a handful of dirt from the floor, and threw it as hard as I could.
Fortune was with me. The dirt took her square in the eyes just as she leaned in toward me to try and cut my throat. She staggered back and I was on my feet, bringing my sword about.
How in the world she parried my thrusts, I hadn’t the faintest idea. She was blinded, desperately trying to get the dirt out of her eyes, and yet no matter how quickly I tried to strike home with my sword, she deflected it.
Quickly I backed up. As I did so I bent and scooped up my staff. She was blinking furiously, still trying to clear her eyes, still unable to see a damned thing, and I threw my sword against the bamboo wall. It clattered against it and the sound was enough to distract her. She turned, sweeping her sword around, cutting at where she imagined I was, and I lunged forward with my staff even as she turned away from me. The sound of the blade sniking out from the carved dragon head snapped her attention back, but even she wasn’t able to calculate quickly enough what angle I was coming in at, or what the sound portended. So it was that even as she brought her sword up high, I thrust my walking staff from a safe distance and slashed across her torso.
She let out an alarmed shriek and reflexively bent over to clutch at the blood welling from around her shoulder, and I swung the staff around again. It cut high across her face, barely missing the skin but shredding some of the cloth on her mask, and she stumbled back. Even as she did so, more insanely poetic words about passion, lust, throbbing bosoms, and heaving sighs of glorious ecstasy spilled from her lips, splashing about like loose stool. None of it made any sense. One moment she was talking about her emotions, the next she was painting grand pictures of nature and stars and skies and internal organs and penetrating gazes and gazing penetrations. It was madness, like the rantings of an overheated madwoman who hadn’t had sexual congress in decades.
“My love, my hate, my sexual mate of fiery passion and passionate fire, I shall remember you even as I forget you!” she called out, grabbed up her knife, and turned and crashed through the door, silence apparently a thing of the past. I was about to follow her, and suddenly realized that probably wouldn’t be the brightest idea. She had friends with her. But then I just as quickly realized that she might well come back with them to finish me off. If I stayed where I was, I was in danger, and if I left, I was in danger.
Better to be a running chicken than a sitting duck.
I shoved my sword into my scabbard and strapped it across my back. Holding on to my walking staff, I slid sideways out the door and into the rain. The ground was thick with mud, the rain still coming down. Immediately I lay flat on the muddy ground and rolled about in it as quietly as I could. It took almost no time at all for me to be covered head to toe in mud. I even smeared my face with the stuff. Then, keeping flat to the ground, I flattened myself against the ground on the far side of my hut, keeping a view as to what this lunatic woman and her associates were up to.
There was no movement. Nothing. All was silent. Silent as death.
Then I heard the sounds. An outcry, something breaking, a struggle, all coming from Chinpan Ali’s hut.
My master, my teacher, the man who had befriended me and tried to bring me a measure of inner peace—even if he had chosen to do so in a rather bizarre manner—was in trouble. These black-clad women had singled him out. They were attacking him.
And I lay there. Unmoving. Unwilling to push my luck against the women. I kept telling myself that my master did not need my help. He had, after all, disposed of the brigands handily enough. These women, silent and deadly as they were, certainly could not prove a real threat against…
“Where is it?” I heard a female voice call from within his hut, and more crashing, and suddenly the sound of a sword yanked from a scabbard, and a slash of metal cutting through air, and a noise of finality that I’d come to know all too well. The sound of a death rattle. “Where is the tachi?”
“What is happening?!” I heard a voice call. It sounded like that of Cleft Chin, and he emerged from his hut, and shouted out, “What is going on out here?”
I took the chance. From my place of concealment, I cried out as loudly as I could, “Chinpan Ali is under attack!”
This immediately caused all manner of ruckus as more voices called out from other huts, and within moments the entire village was roused. The black-clad women did not wait about to be discovered, however. They quickly emerged, a half-dozen of them it seemed, although it was hard to be certain. They were looking about, clearly trying to figure out from which direction had come the shouted alarm that they were in Ali’s hut. One of them, it seemed, looked directly at me. I didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Flat in the muck as I was, I was not easily discernible under the best of circumstances, and these were certainly not those.
Then they obviously decided that they had stayed as long as they dared. The problem was that these black-clad bitches would have no trouble laying waste to the entire population of the village if they were so inclined. But luckily for all concerned, they didn’t have the stomach for it. They melted away into the shadows, although one of them was clutching her shoulder. I knew she was the one whom I had stabbed, and she was the last one to disappear into the darkness. She stared hard right in my direction, and I was certain she had spotted me. She made no motion of discovery, however, and within moments she, too, was gone as if never there.
People were emerging from their huts and heading straight toward Ali’s. With the attacking women departed, there was no reason for me to continue to hid
e other than my own natural cowardice… a strong incentive, I’ll grant you, but moot by that point. I got to my feet, slipped once, righted myself, and moved toward Ali’s hut with the rest of them.
I heard cries and wails of lamentation and knew even before I got there what I was going to see. Villagers gave me confused glances, not recognizing me at first. I must have looked like a monster of muck having risen from the grave.
The body of my mentor, my teacher… my friend… lay prostrate on the dirt floor that I had so meticulously sanded weeks earlier. His eyes were staring at nothing.
I should have known.
I should have been used to it.
I should have expected it. I did expect it.
It may sound like the height of selfishness that I looked upon the death of another and could only dwell upon how it affected me. Then again, I never claimed to be anything other than a selfish bastard, so what other reaction could reasonably be anticipated from me?
The burning rage did not consume me immediately. It flared into existence deep in the pit of my stomach, but it did not come to instant, full fruition. Instead it nestled there, eating at me, stoking the already burning fires of my discontent.
“Everyone get back,” I said, my voice choked. “Get back.”
“Now, see here!” Take On Chin said, choosing that moment to act his most belligerent. “As leader of this—”
I whirled on him, my temper flaring, and with a look that could have incinerated him where he stood, I snapped, “I said get back! I’m paying respects, dammit!”
They got back.
I was alone in the hut. Well, alone except for a corpse.
I simply stared at him for a good long time, wondering what it would be like to be able to bring him back to life through force of will. Then I noticed that his left hand was outstretched, as if he was reaching for something. Mentally I followed the path from the tip of his hand toward where it was pointing.
It seemed as if he’d been reaching for his trunk.
The problem was, if there was something within he sought, it was pointless to have tried to obtain it, for the trunk was empty. The women in black had been thorough about that. Various of Ali’s personal effects were scattered throughout the hut, and the trunk he was reaching toward with his dying grasp had been gone over more meticulously than just about anything else there. The contents were strewn all over. But the valuables tossed about weren’t all that valuable. Old clothes, scrolls with writing upon them I couldn’t begin to decipher, for though I had learned to speak their language well enough, I had not had the opportunity to learn how to write it. The alphabet was completely different from my own, and to add confusion, they wrote vertically instead of horizontally. I’d picked up a few letters, a word here and there, but that was pretty much it.
Nothing else of value seemed to be anywhere about.
Then I realized what was missing: The sword. That strange, bird-headed sword he’d used. The one that he’d employed so handily to dispatch the thugs a seeming eternity ago. There was no sign of it. Was it possible the women had taken it with them? But I hadn’t spotted it. They’d seemed empty-handed when they’d left.
I called out to Double Chin, and he stuck his head in tentatively, as if afraid this was some sort of trick and I was about to decapitate him because he had not left me in solitude. I was remembering a word one of the women had said. “What is a ‘tachi’?” I asked.
“It is a type of koshirae,” Double Chin said promptly. “A blade. About this big, generally,” and he displayed his hands in a way that indicated a blade about the length of the one I’d seen Ali use, a little over two feet in length. “Single-edged. Very sharp. Very deadly, when wielded properly. Usually associated with high-ranking warriors and officials…”
“Fine, thank you. That’s all I need to know.” I gestured for him to depart, and he promptly did so. That was definitely the word I’d heard the women bandying about: “Tachi.” “Where is the tachi?” they had demanded. They’d been looking for the sword, and Ali had died rather than give it over. Or perhaps had died while trying to get to it.
He’d been reaching for the trunk. Certainly the women must have seen it. Which was why they concentrated so heavily upon the trunk in their search. A search that had been aborted thanks to the awakening of the village and the assortment of witnesses they obviously desired to avoid.
But the trunk was empty.
I went to it, studied it carefully. Yes. Definitely an empty trunk. I felt around the bottom, hoping to discover some sort of place of concealment. Perhaps a false bottom, something along those lines. Still nothing.
Then I remembered that, when I’d been sanding the floor, Ali had told me to steer clear of the trunk. Not just the trunk itself, but the general area of the trunk.
I stepped back, yanked hard on the trunk, and pulled it away from the floor where it had rested. At first all I saw was more dirt, but there seemed to be a variance in coverage… and then I noticed what appeared to be a piece of bamboo stuck in the ground.
I knelt, brushed it away, and quickly uncovered exactly what I thought I was going to find: a small trapdoor. Years ago, I had kept prized possessions of mine beneath the ground, underneath floorboards in an old barn. In the end, it had done me little good: a traitorous woman had robbed me of it all anyway. But the idea of burying one’s valuables was certainly nothing new to me, and for some reason it even made me feel a little proud that my teacher adopted some of the same habits that I possessed.
I lifted the bamboo trapdoor aside and instantly saw, there beneath the ground, a bundle wrapped in oilcloth. I reached down, gripped it firmly, and extracted it. I knew the moment I saw it that it was the tachi sword. Delicately, almost reverently, I unwound the cloth until the blade was revealed. The sheath was next to it, both of them protected by the careful wrapping. I saw there was something else down in the small hole as well, and pulled it out. It was tethers to attach the scabbard to a belt.
It was certainly a different manner of scabbard than I was accustomed to. Where I came from, the typical blade hung straight down at one’s hip (if not being sported on the back). In this case, it was obvious that the sword was designed to hang in a horizontal manner. I saw the superiority in terms of style. It meant one could instantly pull out the sword in a sweeping, sideways motion that was an offensive and defensive maneuver combined with the mere act of unsheathing the blade. As opposed to pulling out a broadsword, in which you were leaving yourself fully exposed and vulnerable for a direct-on attack while you were still getting ready to bring your weapon into play. In such instances, you counted on your opponent’s fundamentally chivalrous nature to allow you to prepare your weapon. In other words, you lived in a fool’s paradise until such time as someone killed you for doing so.
I held up the sword, snapped it through the air. It had a wonderful heft to it. So much lighter than my own sword. My bastard sword was designed to be utilized with one hand or two, but the one-hand approach was still a bit of a challenge just because of the sword’s weight. The tachi, by contrast, was so relatively weightless that it felt less like a weapon than it did a long, sharp extension of my own arm.
“Po!” called Take On Chin, and I realized my time was minimal. I slid the sword into the sheath, rewrapped the entire thing in the oilcloth, and then shoved the bundle under my loose-robed shirt. I managed to obscure most of it from direct view. Then I bent over and made my way out of the hut into the rain as the others looked upon me in various forms of bewilderment. What a sight I must have seemed to them, covered with mud and muck and doubled over as I staggered from the hut that had, until recently, housed my teacher.
I returned to my own hut, pulled off my mud-covered clothes, laid the sword flat near the far edge of the hut, and tossed the filthy vestments atop them to obscure them from casual view. I’m not entirely certain why I took such pains to hide the sword from the villagers. I suppose, in my perpetual feeling of suspicion, I was concerned that the villager
s would want to take it from me. That they would feel it should be given to someone worthier than myself, or of greater importance. I did not want to let that happen. I didn’t know why; all I knew was that I wanted the blade. I wanted it to be mine, so I could feel a continued connection to Ali. So I could wield a blade that was capable of cutting down several men where they stood. Besides, those black-clad hell bitches had wanted it. Had been willing to kill for it. That alone was enough for me to want to possess it.
Which, when one thinks upon it in the cold light of years later, was a demented attitude for me to have. If something was that dangerous, traditionally I would want to separate myself from it. Put as much distance—preferably the width of a continent—between myself and something so desirable that there were those eager to kill the one who had it.
But I was not thinking clearly at the time, for the aforementioned burning anger was beginning to swell ever hotter.
I took a deep breath, let it out, and steadied myself. Minutes later, with water gathered from the rain, I had washed myself off as best I could and was seated in clean clothes, cross-legged upon the floor. I had a small fire burning in the dug-hole fireplace in the middle of the hut, and was warming my hands in front of it. My thoughts were spinning.
There came a gentle tap at my door. “Yes, what?” I said brusquely.
Double Chin entered, Lun Chin beside him. Both were soaked from the rain, but neither seemed to notice or care. They bowed upon entering. From where I was seated, I gave a halfhearted bow in return. They settled to their knees opposite me. Nothing was said at first.
“Ali would have wanted you to celebrate his life,” Double Chin ventured finally, “rather than to mourn his passing.”