The Destiny of the Sword (16 page)

He had to wait for the sensation to die down.

“How large is a tower, Lord Boariyi? How thick are the walls, Lord Boariyi? How many doors, Lord Boariyi? How high are the first windows, Lord Boariyi? You don’t know, Lord Boariyi? But Novice Katanji does! He’s forgotten more about sorcerers than you’ll ever know, Lord Boariyi. And I say he’s better fitted to lead this tryst than you’ll ever be!”

“Stop!” Tivanixi came marching forward and stood between the two factions. “This is not a proper discussion to be held in public. Lord Zoariyi, Lord Boariyi, you will excuse us. Lord Shonsu, I wish a word with you in private!”

Whew! Saved!

Tivanixi herded Wallie and Katanji back to the others. “Master Nnanji, you need to see our facemarker. We have a tailor here who can provide you with the kilt you have so richly earned. Lord Shonsu, perhaps we could visit the museum together?”

Wallie nodded. “You will see that my friends are not harassed?”

Tivanixi frowned and snapped his fingers to bring a Sixth. He gave orders, then looked expectantly at Wallie. “Lead the way, Lord Shonsu.”

“After you Lord Tivanixi,” Wallie said politely.

tt t tt

Tivanixi headed toward the southwest corner, and a quick glance showed Wallie that there was a doorway in each comer of the great rectangle. From the shapes of the windows, he could guess that each opened into a stairwell. A nice, simple architectural plan, he mused cynically—not so complicated that swordsmen might get confused.

The stairs wound up and up, the treads of the lower flights dished by generations of swordsman boots. The lower floors of

the lodge were noisy and smelled of bodies, but as the two Sevenths climbed higher, the sounds died away, and the steps were less worn. The air grew cool and musty until finally the men reached the top, sneaking glances at each other to see which was puffing harder.

“Think we can manage the bar?” the castellan asked.

There was only one door, and the gigantic iron bar across it was fit with six handles, not four.

“I always did it one,handed,” Wallie said modestly, but it was a struggle for two men to lift the monster and set it down without crushing feet, or wrenching things necessary for swordwork. The floor there was scored and gouged and had been patched a few times, he noticed. It took three men or two strong ones to rob the museum. There were no locks in the World.

The massive door opened with a groan of pain. The swordsmen walked into a long gallery, smelling of mice and rot and sheer antiquity. Along one side were windows fogged over with dust; the opposite wall was paneled and hung with hundreds of rust,spotted swords. The floor was filthy with litter and crumbling rubbish, cluttered by a line of wormy tables bearing miscellaneous heaps of anonymous relics. Overhead, remnants of banners trailed down from the ceiling, webbed, shredded by insects, and faded to a uniform gray in the dim, cold light. Even tile air felt old. One of the windows rattled continuously in the wind.

Wallie shivered as he followed Tivanixi’s footsteps along that mournful room. The castellan stopped and lifted a fragment of a sword blade from the wall.

“The ruby,” he said. “The fifth. Or so it is said.” He swept the fragment across the top of the nearest table, showering garbage to the floor, raising a cloud of rancid dust. Then he laid it down, and Wallie placed the seventh sword beside it.

Tivanixi bent to compare mem. Waltie took a walk down to the end of the room and back. He had never seen a place that depressed him more; designed to honor the valor of young men whose names were forgotten, whose very descendants must have forgotten them... those who had survived to have descendants. The honored kilts in the courtyard would be brought here one day, with ceremony and pomp perhaps, and empty words. The

mice would rejoice, and within a generation the kilts would be a nameless heap of filth like the rest of this junk.

He turned to inspect the myraid blades on the wall, of every possible design and quality. Most were very long swords, he noticed. Perhaps the men of the People were getting smaller, but more likely the usable weapons had been quietly pilfered away.

He rejoined Tivanixi, who was cleaning off a spot on the fragment with his whetstone so that he could study the damask. There was no hilt. It was just as Wallie had remembered it—long ago, it seemed now—in the only glimpse he had ever been given of Shonsu’s personal memories: half a sword, with no hilt and no point. No point at all... just like this whole depressing junk room.

Hie chasing on the two blades was similar. Swordsmen battled mythical monsters on one side, maidens played with the same monsters on the other. The order was different and no pose was repeated exactly, but the superlative artistry was unmistakably the same.

“I am convinced,” Tivanixi said, still studying.

Then he lifted the seventh and tested its balance and flexibility before handing it back to Wallie with a penetrating stare.

“It is too long for me,” he said.

“But not for our skinny friend.”

Tivanixi shook his head, leaned back against the table, and folded his arms across his cobalt harness.

“You did not know the way to this room, my lord.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did not know Doa.”

“Who?”

The castellan shrugged. “A minstrel... Shonsu should know Doa.”

Wallie made his decision—but perhaps he had made it earlier. “I am Shonsu—and I am not Shonsu,” he said. “I shall tell you, but you will have to decide for yourself whether I am sent by the Goddess, or by the sorcerers.”

Tivanixi nodded. He was a brave man to come alone to this place with someone who might be a sorcerer, and the strain was showing in his eyes.

Wallie began, and he told the whole story of Wallie Smith and

Shonsu, and it took a long, long time. The castellan listened in silence, watching his face. Wallie, in turn, studied his reaction. Yes, this was an unusually intelligent swordsman—not a blustering bully, a cold,blooded killer as Shonsu must have been, not an unpractical idealist like Nnanji had been once, not even a pigheaded showboat like Polini. With this man mere might be hope of rational response... but could he believe?

When he finished, Tivanixi said, “And the only evidence is that sword?”

“There is a priest,” Wallie said. “A Seventh from Hann.”

Even in a World where few people knew the name of the next city—and mat might change anyway—everyone had heard of Hann. Hann was Rome, Mecca, Jerusalem.

“And my parentmarks. I don’t know what Shonsu’s were, but not these, I am sure.”

The castellan reached up, removed his hairclip, and looked expectantly at Wallie, who puzzled down into Shonsu’s swordsman memories, for obviously this was a ritual. Then he reeled between two mental worlds. He was letting his hair down! The expression translated word for word and the absurdity of that equivalence collided with the paradox of Tivanixi’s appearance in terrestrial terms: a handsome man in a skirt and leather harness, with wavy gold,brown hair streaming down around his shoulders. Yet mis was the epitome of macho in tile World, the role model for every red,blooded boy, the ultimate male sex symbol. If Wallie had allowed his lips to twitch he would have exploded into giggles. Letting his hair down! It did not mean quite the same, though. Here it meant: “I shall speak frankly,” but it also meant “I shall not challenge; I waive the dictates of honor.”

Keeping his face rigid, Wallie undipped his sapphire and released his own black mane.

“As it happens I do know Shonsu’s parentmarks,” Tivanixi said. “You... he... left a few juniors here, Firsts and a couple of Seconds. One of them offered you foils today and you did not know hun, either.” He hesitated. “But there was a joke—both Shonsu’s parentmarks were swords. It was said that both his parents were men.”

Wallie guffawed. “Said behind his back?”

The castellan smiled. “A long way behind, I fancy.”

It had been a test—this was not Shonsu.

“I accept that your sword is the seventh sword of Chioxin, my lord, but it does not show the wear of seven hundred years. No one knows where it has been. No royal family could have kept it secret mis long... but a temple could. He gave it to the Goddess...”

“Say it!”

“You could have stolen it from the temple at Hann.”

“I didn’t. Talk to the priest.”

Tivanixi began to pace, his boots echoing and sending up puffs of dust, scattering the mouse droppings.

Still pacing, he said, “I was about to denounce you. Your fencing made me hesitate, for if the sorcerers can create a swordsman like you, men we are all dead men. The sword confused me completely. Your tales of the sorcerers have made it worse, and yet if you have truly been scouting on the left bank, I am ashamed, for I called the tryst without knowing what I was calling it against. We need your counsel!”

“Leave the question open, then,” Wallie said, “for the moment. You have another problem. Even assuming that I was sent by the gods, am I a man of honor? I have screwed things up mightily a couple of times. Especially at Aus. I went ashore—idiocy! Without my sword—more idiocy! I was captured and given the choice of dying on the spot or crawling back to my ship. I was on the docks. I could have jumped. Instead I crawled. Perhaps it was the wrong decision.”

An odd expression came over Tivanixi’s face. He went to stand at one of the windows, as if he could see out through the golden glare of the grime. “Very few swordsmen have not eaten dirt at one time or another,” be said, very quietly.

That was news to Wallie. Shonsu’s history was a blank to him; the only swordsman he knew well was Nnanji. He could not imagine Nnanji performing the ritual of abasement—but Nnanji was not cut from ordinary cloth.

“When I was a Second,” Tivanixi said. “I was challenged. I had talked my way into the wrong bed.” He had tried to make that sound humorous, but every muscle in his back had gone taut and his voice was barely audible. “He was two ranks above me and his eyes were red. He made the sign. I rolled over. He de,

manded the abasement. He even made me go and bring my friends to watch—and / did it! All the time I was telling myself that afterward I would go and wash my sword.”

Wallie was fascinated... and stayed silent.

“I went down to the River,” the castellan whispered to the window. “I stood on the edge of the water for an hour and my feet would not move. Then I went home and grew my hair back...

“I have never told anyone that before, my lord.”

“I shall not repeat it,” Wallie promised. “But you waded into the River when you called the tryst.” Which was why Tivanixi could tell the story now, he thought.

The castellan laughed and turned around. “Oh—that was different. I had not just told myself I was going to do it, I had told everyone. There was a crowd! It was a ceremony. We had the remains of forty,nine bullocks still dying in front of us.” He shivered. “But a very strange feeling!

“What I mean is,” he continued, “that most of us have made obeisance at some time to swordsmen. You did it to sorcerers, that is all. If I had that on my conscience, I would not expect to have it thrown back in my face, except by someone who wanted to start a fight, and there are always ways of starting fights. But I don’t know that I would try to become leader of a tryst, my lord.”

Quite! “Ov was different. I make no apologies for Ov. I made the right decision.”

Tivanixi nodded approvingly. “I think you did. You had no army, only an ad hoc rabble of swordsmen, no plan, no chain of command—you could not have even given orders, for you did not know their names. You were right—but only highranks know the sutras on strategy. The cubs will howl.”

“Tell me what happens now,” Wallie said.

The castellan shrugged and leaned back against the table again. “The ancient stories are not quite clear, but it seems that we must wait for seven Sevenths. When the last appears, then I proclaim the tryst and call for challenge.”

He stared glumly down at his boots. “I hope he is not too rough.”

loose window. Wallie said, “I see that calling trysts is no task for small men, my lord. What if two challenge?”

“I fight the first and the surviv—the winner calls for challenges and then fights the next. When no one responds, that is the leader.”

“Then tell me what happens if I challenge and win. Supposing I can beat Boariyi? Will they swear to me?”

He had to wait a long time for a reply, while Tivanixi studied his expensive boots and fingered his hair. At last he said, “I don’t think so. Not to Shonsu. I think they would flee, or riot. But it will never come to that. Boariyi will denounce you. Zoariyi was improvising today—now he will have time to prepare a case, with witnesses who saw you in Aus. He may have men down at the docks already; they have plenty of men.”

Wallie nodded glumly. “And Shonsu lost an army, or sold it. Now he has come back to sell another.. .The god gave me a hard task, Lord Tivanixi, even without my own follies.”