The Destiny of the Sword (9 page)

“What happened?” Wallie demanded, but he had already guessed. Of course the victims still wore their expensive boots

and kilts and harnesses, their silver hairclips. Polini had not taken Wallie’s advice, as Wallie had known he would not. The World was a place of poverty. Murder could be committed for much less tfapn fancy clothes. Now the fancy clothes were all soaked with blood.

“They took our silver,” the prince said. “We paid them.” Even his whispering had a singsong strangeness to it, “They came for us last night.” He gasped with sudden pain, and Nnanji took hold of his hand. “Master Polini held them off.”

All night and all through the day? Stalemate—the big swordsman had made his stand in the bow, holding back five men, defending his ward. One against five. The boy would have been no use.

Polini had cut the forestay, causing the foresail to collapse. That would have made the boat unmanageable. Perhaps he had hoped, too, that it would attract attention and bring help. All night and all through the day until, when he had been weakened by exhaustion, by lack of food and water, they had come for him again.

And the Goddess had moved the boat.

But not soon enough!

Wallie’s teeth ground like millstones. His fists trembled.

“I think I wounded one, adept.” Arganari was ignoring Wallie now. Nnanji was his hero, the young Fourth who had killed sorcerers at Ov. Perhaps only three years lay between them, Wallie thought with sudden wonder, five at the most.

“You’ve done very well,” Nnanji said. His voice was always soft, and now it was even softer, calm and level. “We’ll get a healer to you shortly.” He sounded totally under control. Wallie was beyond speech, his throat and eyes aching fiercely.

“Adept?”

“Yes, novice?” Nnanji said.

“You will take my hairclip.”

“Yes, all right,” Nnanji said. “I’ll take it and wear it against the sorcerers. I’ll wear it to Vul and when I get there, I’ll tell them that you sent me. ‘Novice Arganari sent me,’ I’ll say. ‘I tome in the name of Arganari.*”

There was no point in trying to move the boy. It would not be long. He gagged and then threw up more blood.

“Adept? Tell me about Ov.”

So Nnanji related the battle of Ov, his tones quiet and matter,of,fact. The anchor chain creaked slightly and there was a low mutter of voices from the stern.

Then Arganari interrupted. Probably he had not been understanding very much. He was obviously in agony, trying not to whimper. “Nnanji. It hurts. I’m going to die?”

“Yes, I think so,” Nnanji said. “Here, put your hand on your sword hilt. You promised to die holding it, remember?”
  
i “I wish it was my other sword.”

“I’ll tell the minstrels at Casr,” Nnanji said. “In the saga of the Tryst of Casr, your name and Master Polini’s will be first among the glorious.”

The boy seemed to smile. “I was trying to go home.” After a few minutes he said, “Nnanji. Return me?” “If you wish,” Nnanji replied calmly. “I think... I do. It hurts.” “Should I use the seventh sword?” Nnanji asked. There was no reply, but Nnanji rose and held out his hand to Wallie. Wallie stood also, passed over his sword, and turned away quickly. He could not do what Nnanji was now doing—not even if the boy was unconscious, not in a thousand centuries. Yet it would have been his swordsman obligation. Fervently he thanked the Goddess that it had been Nnanji who had been asked. He stared into the dark and tried not to listen. He heard nothing. Swordsmen must not weep.

“No point in wiping it yet, is there?” Nnanji said. Wallie turned round and accepted his sword back again, not looking down, not looking near his feet. “No. Not yet,” he said, and the two of them headed aft, side by side along the obscurity of the deck, until they stood behind the line of sailors fencing the captives.

“Do it!” Wallie snapped at Nnanji.

Now even Nnanji’s voice took on a harshness. “Lord Shonsu, I denounce these men for killing swordsmen.”

“Have you any defense?” Wallie asked. He was the judge and a witness and he would be executioner.

A trio of voices began shouting indignantly. They all sounded

quite young, but they all wore breechclouts and so were legally adults.

Then one voice drowned out the other two. “They took our stop at swordpoint, my lord! There were four of them. We got the others...”

Wallie let them rave on in the night for a while with their lies and slanders.

Then he shouted, “Quiet! I find you guilty.”

Then there was silence, except that one of the three was sobbing.

Wallie was about to move, but Nnanji put a hand on his shoulder. “Let me do it, brother?”

“No! This will be my pleasure!”

Perhaps Nnanji thought Wallie did not want to do it, or was not capable, but he was shaking with rage, gripping his sword with every ounce of strength, his limbs quivering as if with eagerness. Shonsu’s manic temper raged within him. Wallie Smith was just as insanely furious. He was brimming with hatred and contempt, and nausea also. He wanted to take these murderers by the throat, or tear them apart with his fingers.

No, Nnanji was begging. “Please, brother? As a wedding present?”

“Stand aside!” Wallie barked. He pushed between Tomiyano and Holiyi, stepped forward, and began to slash at three unarmed youths. They screamed a lot and tried to parry the seventh sword with bare hands. He could not see properly, so he hacked them to pieces to make sure. It was no pleasure, but he had no regrets.

He was senior. He spoke the words of farewell for Polini. At the end his voice cracked, and he asked Nnanji to perform the office for Arganari. As he listened his eyes began pouring tears, he trembled, he struggled desperately not to let the sounds of his sobbing escape into the night.

He watched the River boil and hiss as piranha consumed the bodies in instantaneous frenzy.

, They said no words over the assassins, but the River boiled as tad for them as it had for honest men.

Then Wallie clawed back to self,control. “What will you do with the boat?” he asked Tomiyano. “Leave it. Someone will find it.”

That seemed out of character, but Wallie knew that a sailing ship could not tow another vessel, and to put a prize crew on her would divide the family. So Sunflower would be left for the Goddess.

Wallie climbed miserably into the dinghy for the return. A foggy spark of light showed where Sopp/wre waited.

The sailors rowed in silence, and slowly.

Wallie sat with his face in his hands and let the tears flow again.

It was all his fault.

He had not heard the message... No, he could not have stopped Polini leaving. He could not have kept the Fifth on board Sapphire without a challenge and almost certainly a fight. Polini would not have made obeisance. He would have accepted an impossible match against a Seventh, would perhaps have refused to yield even after Wallie had wounded him. Then Wallie would have had no choice but to kill him.

He could not have stopped Polini leaving.

But he could perhaps have changed the man’s mulish, pigheaded mind about something else, had he insisted.

Then the deaths would not have been necessary.

He had not seen why that meeting had been ordained. He had failed. Six men and a boy had died, so that Nnanji could have a hairclip.

Why, O merciful Goddess—why?

A hairclip?

ttt t tn

Brota was holding a lantern. Wallie had not known that there was such a thing on the ship. One by one the would,be rescuers stepped to the deck and were greeted by the ring of solemn faces, shining gold around the circle of light. The story was told, briefly and in hushed phrases. There was no comment. The World was a

bleak place—sudden, senseless death was no stranger to Sapphire, but it would never be a familiar friend.

Wallie laid a hand on Nnanji’s shoulder. “I’ll take your watch tonight,” he said. An hour ago that would have been cause for ribaldry. Now Nnanji merely nodded and put an arm around Thana to lead her away.

Some wedding night, Wallie thought bitterly.

His kilt was damp against his thighs. He was drenched in blood, a figure of horror. He was perversely proud of it, hating it and yet determined not to wash it off until morning. Childish, of course: See what you have done, Goddess?

He walked up to the poop, alone. Behind him, the lantern was extinguished.

How could he serve such gods? Where was faith now? Before him in the darkness the face of that solemn, dutiful boy hung like a blazon of shame. The tuneless adolescent voice echoed still in Wallie’s ears.

Why? Why? How could I have known what You wanted of me?

Loyalty to the gods—loyalty to anything... The sorcerers were killers, also.

But were the swordsmen very much better?

Whose side was he on?

There was the big one, the greatest of his worries. If he could have leadership of the tryst for the asking, did he even want it?

The last part of the god’s riddle:

Finally return that sword, And to its destiny accord.

He would return the sword to the Goddess at Her temple in Casr, and its destiny could be to lead the tryst. Let some other butchering swordsman win the leadership and have it—Shonsu would stay with Sapphire and be a water rat.

Yet even as he made the resolve, he knew that he was deceiving himself. Bearing the seventh sword was like owning the Mona Lisa or the Taj Mahal. He would never be able to part with it, not if the Goddess Herself were to rise from Her River and Remand it back. He could go to the temple, but he would still be

carrying the sword when he left. When he had lain wounded on the ship, Nnanji had guarded it for him—and would have died to save it, had that been required of him. Given such an opportunity, almost any other swordsman in the World would have vanished at once, taking the sword with him. Nnanji, of course, would not even have been tempted.

So Wallie would die holding it, as he had promised. In a few years, when his speed began to fail, then the challenges would start. The ambitious and the greedy... they would come forward, and one day one of them would succeed.

Jja emerged from the darkness, holding a cape. He muttered thanks and slung it over his shoulders to keep out the dank chill of the fog. It was growing thicker. That made his watch easier, for even pirates could not find their way through such a murk.

“You will come below later?” Jja whispered.

“No,” he said. “I’ll bunk down in the deckhouse. You go to bed now.”

“Yes, master.” But she did not move.

He had told her never to call him that... but he had also vowed never to give her another order.

He kissed her forehead. “Please go to bed now.”

He turned away. He did not realize she was still there until she spoke again.

He spun around and gripped her shoulders. “Are you sure?”

“I saw a midwife in Tau.”

Then they were embracing and did not stop until he discovered that she was weeping.

“Why?” he said. “Aren’t you happy?”

“Oh, yes!” She sniffed and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “Too happy! I so want to give you sons, my darling master, and nothing seemed to be happening. So happy... and

they will be free?”

“How could you even ask?” he said. “And daughters will be

welcomed, also.”

So then he promised that he would come down to the cabin when his relief came and he persuaded her to go to bed.

And was alone with his thoughts once more.

A child? Biologically Shonsu’s, of course, not Wallie Smith’s. Yet that would not worry him. Vixini called him Daddy, and he loved the little tyke. Any child of Jja’s would be dear to him. But what sort of world would these children inherit?

Technology—it would tear the World apart. The sorcerers woe a thousand years ahead of the rest of the culture. So far they had done a good job of keeping then* secrete, but it could not last—not now they had emerged from their remote refuges. Firearms and distillation, even writing itself... those would escape. Change would explode upon a world that did not know how to handle change. Chaos and upheaval, then war, then famine... Surely this was the danger that the Goddess foresaw, mat She wanted Wallie Smith to prevent. The demigod, Her messenger, had said it was important. Wallie had not men dreamed how important.

And yet...

And yet the sorcerers were not so very far behind the Earth he had known, a few centuries at most. There was the temptation, for if they had such trivia as gunpowder, then they could not be far from anesthetics to relieve suffering, and antibiotics to succor sick babies, and steam power to supplant slavery. Even a simple written register of ship ownership could stamp out the piracy that plagued the River. Three hundred years, or four... The sorcerers hekt so much promise! They were even trying to foster trade in their cities—an idea that the swordsmen would treat with contempt, but one to appeal to a Wallie Smith, erstwhile citizen of a mercantile culture.