The Destiny of the Sword (31 page)

“Untie him, please, Nnanji,” Wallie said. “We are having a celebration, my lord. Do sorcerers drink wine, or does it muddle their spells?”

The sorcerer straightened, striving for dignity. “I have nothing to celebrate.”

“But you do! Lord Boariyi is probably a fast man with pincers. You should celebrate the fact that I won.”

Rotanxi would never have been handsome, but he had probably always had presence, and in latter days power, even nobility of a sort. Now these were blurred, overlain by age, by defeat, and by bitterness. “For the sake of my craft, I wish that you had lost, Shonsu.”

Wallie nodded thoughtfully. To have captured a Seventh was outside rational expectations. He had been sent this devious old villain for some purpose. “Will you swear an oath with me?”

“What oath?” Rotanxi demanded, surprised and suspicious.

“Your parole, my lord. I promised you no torture and I repeat that. Common sense says that I should lock you up in a dungeon —I suppose the lodge has dungeons. I should prefer to keep you here. Your friends may well seek to silence you, and Sapphire will be safer than a dungeon. Mistress, will you allow Lord Rotanxi to remain as my guest, if he behaves?”

Brota scowled, but she nodded.

Nnanji growled: “Urgh!”

“The quarters are plain, but the food is superb,” Wallie said. “You will be well treated.” He offered a goblet of wine to the sorcerer, whose hands were now free. It was refused with a gesture. “But I need your oath. Swear that you will not leave this ship until I bid you leave, that you will not harm it or anyone aboard, and that you will not communicate with anyone ashore or in any other vessel.”

“For how long?” The tone was sharp, but the sorcerer was tempted.

“Sixty days should do it,” Wallie said. “At the end of that time, I shall return you unharmed to the left bank. Oh—and you must agree to wear a gown without a cowl.”

There was a pause while the sorcerer studied him and then glanced around the circle of sailors—men, women, children, all in turn studying him.

“What commitments afterward? What other conditions?”

“None,” Wallie said. “The war will be won or lost by then.”

The old man waved his hands helplessly. “I have no choice. I so swear, my lord.”

“Good! I shall swear by my sword, of course. You will not object to coming with me now to the galley, so that you may swear over fire?”

A flicker of hesitation, then Rotanxi said, “Of course not.”

He had not expected that, though.

“Excellent!” Wallie said cheerfully. “Then you are our guest, my lord! I shall present your hosts to you as soon as we return, but perhaps you would give Captain Tomiyano back his dagger now?”

In the ensuing chorus of oaths and exclamations, Tomiyano’s were the loudest and most lurid. The sorcerer sent Wallie a thin smile that might easily have congealed blood, but he stretched out a hand, and the dagger appeared in it.

“It was up his sleeve,” Wallie said resignedly, but he thought mat no one believed him, not even Nnanji.

ft

“.. .teak strakes but rarely in these parts,” Tivanixi was saying as Tomiyano ushered into the deckhouse, “but the masts are fir, are they not?”

Wallie suppressed a grin at the expression on the captain’s face—he abhorred swordsmen, but the personable castellan had already won him over. Then Tivanixi saw the sorcerer and froze.

“Good evening, vassal,” Wallie said quickly. He received a startled glance and a courtesy, fist,on,heart salute—they had been through the full formalities earlier that day. “Lord Rotanxi has given me his parole, so he is being treated as our guest. Allow me to present you.”

Grim,faced, the two Sevenths exchanged ritual greetings, mouthing the words as if they were acid. Nnanji began edging toward the door and Wallie stopped him with a headshake.

“And Mistress Brota, the swordsperson who held off the entire tryst of Casr.”

Tivanixi returned to charming. “Now I know where the beautiful Apprentice Thana gained her skill...” He melted Brota as rapidly as he had her son, but he had been disturbed by the presence of the sorcerer, his old suspicions twitching once more.

Then Nnanji—fist on heart again.

“I may swear the oath to you, now, my liege?” he inquired.

Red and unhappy, Nnanji looked a plea toward Wallie.

“Vassal,” Wallie said, “the oath of brotherhood that Master Nnanji and I have sworn has produced a strange complication. It would indeed appear that he, also, is your liege. As we all know that you are thus pledged to him automatically, we do not feel that a formal public affirmation is required.”

Wallie had expected relief, but Tivanixi squared his shoulders and frowned. “With all respect, my liege, as I am bound, I should prefer to make open acknowledgment.”

“Very well. Shall we withdraw to a more private place?”

Not that, either, apparently. “It is a matter of honor, my liege, not of shame.”

So the unhappy Nnanji had to stand for a Seventh prostrating himself on the floor, swearing unquestioning obedience to the death, and kissing his boot. The sailors watched open,mouthed. The sorcerer sneered. Wallie decided he would never understand swordsmen. The demigod had warned him that they were addicted to fearsome oaths, but why this unnecessary humiliation?

He could well remember a day in early summer when Apprentice Nnanji of the Second had sworn that oath to him on the shingle by the temple. How very much younger he had seemed then! And who could have foreseen that before winter Nnanji himself would accept that oath from a Seventh? Miracle!

He looked up in time to see a tigerish joy in Thana’s eye.

Eventually all the formalities were cleared away, and then the castellan produced the blacksmith and saddler whom Wallie had ordered. Both Fourths, stolid artisans, they stood in the doorway, biting lips and shuffling feet at being in the presence of three Sevenths.

“How many complete sets of tack could we locate in the lodge, do you suppose?” Wallie inquired of the castellan.

Tivanixi had foreseen the question. “I located a dozen, my liege. There are undoubtedly more somewhere, but most will be as old as the sutras and probably rife with rats.”

“Twelve will do to start with.” Wallie produced a piece of wood, one of those he had spent so many hours whittling—a loop, flattened on one side. He began to explain to the smith.

“My liege!” Tivanixi was shocked. “There are civilians—“

“You mean there is a sorcerer present?” Wallie smiled. “What I am about to show you, lord vassal, is a World,shaking device, one of those inventions that are absurdly hard to make and yet seem ridiculously simple and obvious afterward. But it will be absolutely impossible to keep it a secret. So let him listen! Adept, can you make me twenty,four of these by morning?”

He explained it. He described the leathers he would need, and how they must be attached to the saddles. The two men nodded, although they had probably never in their lives made anything without a guiding sutra. Then he promised them a gold apiece and sent them off to the waiting boat. He must just hope for the best. He must also hope that the gods would permit this innovation. The stirrup would turn the World on its ear. If the Roman Empire had known of the stirrup, and used it, it need never have fallen to the barbarians.

The sailors were starting to sit down, which was a signal that the evening meal was on its way. Wallie invited Tivanixi to join them and offered him some wine. An air of puzzled frustration remained in the deckhouse—Nnanji put it into words.

“That thing will help fight sorcerers, brother?”

Wallie nodded, amused. He turned to Tivanixi. “A horse is a good way to get to a battle, of course. But did you ever try to wield your sword while on horseback, vassal?”

“Only once! When I was a First.” He chuckled.

“What happened?”

“I fell off and almost ruined my evenings ever after.”

“With those you would not have fallen off,” Wallie assured him. “We are going to create a cavalry, and I hereby put you in charge. You will need practice, of course, but with stirrups a man can strike at an enemy, wheel his horse, shoot a bow—all those things and more without falling off. Man and horse together become a six,limbed fighting animal.”

Tivanixi pondered for a moment, and then his eyes began to gleam. Rotanxi frowned; he was not stupid, either. Nnanji wrinkled his nose in disgust—not a proper swordsman way to fight.

Now the food was being brought in by some of the youngsters—sturgeon in batter, steaming haunch of auroch that filled the room with its savory scent, foamy fresh bread, and bright,hued, high,piled vegetables. How old Una produced such daily

marvels from her tiny galley was a miracle to baffle the gods.

Wallie was annoyed to notice Rotanxi and Tivanixi drifting away in opposite directions. One was a prisoner of war and the other sworn to unlimited obedience. He decided to impose his authority, set them against each other, and see what resulted. It might be entertaining, even informative. Thus he carefully summoned the sorcerer to his left and the swordsman to his right, placing himself in a comer so that their backs were against different walls and they could not ignore each other completely. Rotanxi seated himself with the calculated movements of age. The graceful castellan settled like a snowflake, although he had to make the additional maneuver of drawing his sword, no easy task under the low ceiling. Jja, interpreting her master’s wink correctly, became waitress for the evening.

While the rest of the company gathered around the food there was tense silence in the corner. Wallie pointed at Tivanixi’s bandage, matching his own. “Lord Boariyi favors shoulder cuts, I see.”

The swordsman looked abashed. “This rag is not really necessary, I confess! The combat for leadership, round one—but he was very gentle, hardly enough blood for the crowd to see. Yet I thought we had put on a good show, my liege, until I saw round two! I shall tell my grandsons about that!”

Rotanxi snorted. The castellan scowled. “You will instruct us tomorrow how to kill off the sorcerer vermin, my liege?”

“I will,” Wallie said. “Sorcerers themselves are no great problem, as we showed at Ov, but their towers will be harder.”

“Much harder!” the sorcerer commented.

Jja appeared with two platters, one in each hand. She tactfully offered them simultaneously, giving precedence to neither guest. Wallie smiled his approval.

“Still, we have odds of fifty to one.”

“That would be about a fair match, I should think,” Rotanxi said.

He had the advantage, for Tivanixi was fighting in the dark, so Wallie decided to throw his weight in. He could feel the antipathy around him like static. Earth had its ancient enmities— Christian versus Jew, Catholic versus Protestant—but none was a fraction as old as this hatred between sorcerer and swordsman.

“It might be fair under the old rules, my lord sorcerer. Of course I intend to instruct the swordsmen in some new techniques.”

By tradition. Sapphire’s crew sat around the walls when eating in the deckhouse, with the food on one chest and Brota on the other. Nnanji, however, now chose to sit directly in front of Wal,iie and be pait of the discussion. His plate was piled obscenely high, as always. In a moment Thana came to sit at his side.

“What techniques are those, my lord?” Rotanxi inquired.

“The horses, of course,” Wallie said, ignoring a warning grunt from his vassal. “Bows and arrows—which are probably deadlier than your thunderbolts. And catapults, to knock down the walls.”

Tivanixi grinned so widely mat he could hardly bite on his next mouthful.

The sorcerer raised a snowy eyebrow. “Indeed? It will take some time to train cavalry and build catapults, will it not?”

“It will,” Wallie agreed.

Silence fell for a moment. Then Wallie kicked the ball the other way. “Lord Rotanxi informed me that the tryst’s funds are low, my lord vassal.”

Tivanixi scowled. “His information is correct, my liege.”

“How bad?”

With great reluctance the castellan said, “We have about twenty golds left. Of course we had laid in a good supply of food for... we have a good supply of food.”

“For your canceled voyage,” Rotanxi agreed drily. “A week’s supply, I should guess? You will train cavalry in a week? And you must buy horses and lumber, not to mention bows and hay and saddles...”

“Leather?” Nnanji whispered, and Thana smiled and glanced over at her mother. Everyone was eating now, but everyone was also listening.

“Leather for saddles and also for the catapults,” Wallie agreed. “And pitch.”

“Pitch?” Nnanji asked, disapproving on principle although he could have no idea what the pitch would be for.

“We shall hurl flaming pitch at the towers. The results may be spectacular, may they not, Lord Rotanxi? Especially if we can

put a shot tijrough the third window up, extreme south on the east side?”

That was the room where Katanji had seen sacks being stored in die Sen tower. Katanji insisted mat all towers were identical. Wallie had assumed that the sacks included the gunpowder supply, and Rotanxi’s sudden pallor confirmed his guess. Point to Wallie.