The Reluctant Swordsman (6 page)

She must not let her disappointment show.

He was looking down at the candle again. “And it isn’t because I know that you have to do it with a lot of men. I can guess that that’s what happens, isn’t it?”

Perhaps he had sworn an oath? “Yes, my lord . . . Wallie. If they pay my mistress.”

He bared his teeth at the candle. “So you have no choice, and therefore I do not think less of you because of it. So it isn’t that, either, you see . . . This may be hard for you to understand. Where I come from we despise people who own slaves. If I said lie down, you would have to lie down, and that isn’t the way it should be. A man and a woman should do that thing because they love each other and they both want to do it. So I’m not going to.” “I do want to, my lord!” Oh, no! Where had she found the courage to say that?

But of course, this was only a dream.

“Because it is your duty! No, Jja.”

It must be the wine . . . she had to fight down a desire to explain how she fetched the highest price, how Kikarani therefore saved her for the older men, the ones most likely to have the most money, how it was the older, uglier women who got the young men. Could he not guess why she had thought to hide him from the spying priestess in the way she had? Or even guess that she had wanted to weep with frustration because he was not able to respond, while at the same time she had been terrified that he might wake up and find a slave lying on top of him?

She said, “My lord,” bowing her head.

“You sleep on that side of the bed, then.” He rose, not looking at her. “And I’ll sleep this side. Now, where do I go to . . . ” “Outside, my lord,” she said in surprise.

He grinned around at her—that strangely boyish grin that came and went very suddenly, making him look very young and happy. “I wasn’t planning to do it inside! Anywhere’s okay, huh?”

He stepped out through the curtain into the warm tropic night. She tidied the table. There was plenty of food to be saved for tomorrow, so she fished out a few moths that had fallen in, covered the dishes, wrapped them again, and packed the hamper. Finally she pinched out the candle and the cottage was dark, only a trace of a silver glimmer from the Dream God glistening through the window.
 
Then she heard him, and went out to see.

He was leaning against the wall by the door, his head on his arms. His whole body was shaking with sobs. A swordsman weeping? That seemed very strange, but already she knew that this was no ordinary swordsman.
 
Again, it must have been the wine that gave her the courage to put an arm around him, to lead him inside and over to the bed. He said nothing. The bed creaked loudly as he lay down. He buried his face and continued to sob. She took off her wrap and went around to lie on the other side of the bed as she had been told.
 
She waited.

Finally he choked off his sobs and said in a whisper, “That light in the sky?

What is it?”

“It is the Dream God, my lord.” He did not reply. She waited, but she knew he was not asleep.

It was the wine . . . “The god of sorrows and the god of joy are brothers, my lord.”

So she told him, as she had been told once, long ago, by another slave, a young man she would never see again. “The god of sorrows and the god of joy are brothers. At the time of the unrolling of the World, they both courted the goddess of youth. It was the god of joy she chose, and they loved greatly. In time she bore him a son, the most beautiful baby that even the gods had ever seen, and the father delivered the baby himself and held him up for his mother and the gods to look at.

“But the god of sorrows was jealous and greatly enraged at the sight of the child—and he hurled his wrath and killed him.

“Then the god of sorrows was terrified at what he had done and fled away, but all the other gods wept. They went to the Goddess Herself and besought justice.
 
And so She decreed that ever after the god of joy might deliver from the goddess of youth the most beautiful of the gods, but he would always be a baby, and he would only live a few moments. But although he would be only a baby, he would be stronger than his father, and the god of sorrows, the most terrible of the gods, would not stand against him and would flee from him always. That is why only this smallest god, of all the gods, can put to flight the god of sorrows.” “And what is the name of this smallest god?” asked the man in the darkness.

“He is the god of ecstasy, my lord,” she said.

He turned to her and took her in his arms. “Then let us seek this little god of yours together,” he said.

She had thought a swordsman might be brutal, but he was the most gentle of men.
 
He was patient and strong and untiring and considerate in a way no man had ever been to her. Together they summoned the little god many times, and the god of sorrows was driven away.

†††††

A fly buzzed in his ear, waking him. He opened his eyes and then closed them again quickly. Thatch?

It had not gone away.

There had been hospital, with its grave-faced doctors in white coats and tired-looking nurses with needles . . . familiar faces faking cheerfulness . . .
 
flowers sent by the staff at the plant . . . smells of disinfectant and the sound of floor-polishers . . . IV bottles . . . pain and confusion and the damp heat of fever.

There had been dreams and delirium . . . fog and a giant of a man with brown skin and long black hair and a brutal face—a wide face, high cheekbones, broad jaw; barbarian tattoos on his forehead. He had seen that monstrous naked figure shouting at him, threatening.

He had seen that face again last night in the mirror.
 
Under the damp sheet he felt one arm with the hand of another. That body was still there. Wallie Smith had never had arms like that.
 
So it had not disappeared as he had hoped it would.
 
A bird was calling an idiotic two-note refrain not far away, and he could hear voices, more distant, and a rooster, ever hopeful.
 
“Ferry mule train!” That must be from near the bottom of the hill. Then a very faint bugle . . . and under it all was the deep rumble from the waterfall, most distant of all. The sound of hooves echoed into the little room. “Ferry mule train!” He wondered if mules looked like that absurd horse he had seen, camel face and basset-hound body.

It had not gone away. Encephalitis often produced strange mental effects, they had said. He had thought the delirium was over, the strange visions and the pain and confusion. Now it had become more real, more terrifying.
 
It did not feel like delirium.

He must remember that it was all hallucination. They would cure him, somehow, and drag him back to the real world, the world of hospital sounds and hospital smells; away from this madness of stink and mule hooves and roosters.
 
Reluctantly he opened his eyes again and sat up. Only the woman had gone. Now if she had been real . . .

She had felt real, deliciously, wonderfully real. Of course sexual hallucinations would be the most vivid, wouldn’t they? That would make sense.
 
Nothing else did. What sort of Oedipal garbage was he fantasizing with this super-jock body he had conjured up? And what subconscious nastiness was he revealing when his delusions invented slave girls? A little insecure, are we, Wallie-boy? Ugh!

He rose and stretched. He felt good, enormously good. He strode over to the mirror and studied that cruel, barbaric face with its tattoos of the seven swords. Was this how he fantasized himself, his subconscious desires exposed by delirium? Did he see himself as an inadequate wimp and want to be a big, strong, fantasy hero?

The foreskin bothered him more than anything else. If he pinched it, it hurt.

How could he feel pain in something that had been cut off when he was a baby?
 
There was no trace of his appendectomy, but he did have a red birthmark on his left knee and a conspicuous scar on his right shoulder and some faint little marks on his ribs, mostly on the right side. So he wasn’t quite a perfect specimen, and somehow that was odd.

The mule train clattered closer and then stopped nearby. Again he heard the skinner make his call. He went over to the window and peered out, keeping back from sight. Two men were paying the skinner and climbing on mules, and there were half a dozen people mounted already. The mules were even more grotesque than the horse—long ears and camel faces. Then he remembered the rings he had seen in the night sky. It had been the rings that had finally cracked his precarious self-control. It was not only an imaginary country he was conjuring up in his madness; it was a whole imaginary world, a ringed planet.
 
And the people surprised him a bit—smallish, although that might be just because he seemed to be much larger than average. They had brown skins, all of them, with hair of light or dark brown. One of the women on the mules showed a reddish tinge, perhaps dyed. A neat, compact people, mostly slim and agile, they seemed to laugh and chatter a lot . . . features vaguely Amerindian to Caucasian. They might have stepped out of a documentary on the South American jungles, or perhaps southeast Asia. Beardless—he rubbed his chin and there was no trace of stubble, no hair on his chest or legs.

There were other people walking up and down the roadway—men in loincloths, and women in simple wraps that tied under their arms and hung to their knees, like bath towels. Jja’s had been shorter, but then she was a whore. The muleskinner wore leather breeches. The old man had worn a robe that covered all of him except his head and hands. Then he saw a middle-aged couple going over to the mule train, and they were wearing robes, but sleeveless, so the amount of cover must be related to age. Not a bad idea; show off the good-looking youngsters and hide the old. Some of the men and women in his world could learn a thing or two here.

Wallie reminded himself sternly that this was an illusion.
 
Yet he felt so good! And curious! He wanted to explore this fantasy world . . .
 
but he had no clothes. Could that be his subconscious mind telling him to stay in his hospital room?

He had nothing at all—he could not even see the wrap he had used the previous evening. Newborn naked! He had never been a great collector of possessions, for he had been too much of a wanderer. His childhood had been a continual bouncing from parent to parent, from aunt to uncle; then college; then a succession of jobs. Roots were something he had never had, and worldly goods likewise. But to have nothing but a bed sheet to cover himself . . .
 
Illusion! Delirium!

The mule train moved off. He watched the pedestrians for a while and then turned away. He thought of a test, and began by feeling his pulse carefully. It was slow, of course, an athlete’s heartbeat, although he could not clock it. He dropped to the grubby, smelly flagstones and did fifty fast push-ups. Kneeling, he tried his pulse again. It seemed very little faster. Wallie Smith might have managed ten or fifteen, never fifty, and his heart would have gone into fits.
 
That did not prove much.

A fly buzzed at him, and he snatched it out of the air to see if he really could. He could, but that proved nothing, either.
 
A small boy walked in through the bead curtain and grinned at him. He was naked, nut brown, and skinny. He had curly brown hair and an impish face and a tooth missing. He looked about eight or nine and he was carrying a leafy green twig.
 
“Good morning, Mr. Smith!” His grin grew wider.
 
Wallie felt a twinge of relief—no more “my lord” stuff! He stayed on his knees, because that made their eyes more or less level.
 
“Good morning. Who are you?”

“I’m a messenger.”

“Oh? To me you look like a small, naked boy. What should you look like?” The boy laughed. “A small, naked boy.” He pushed himself up on one of the chairs.

“I was hoping that you might be a doctor.” But Wallie was unhappily aware of the dirt, the insects, the smells. Hospital?

The boy shook his head. “No more doctors. They call them healers here, and you’re wise to stay away from them.”

Wallie sat down and crossed his legs. The stone was cold and gritty on his buttocks. “Well, you did call me ‘mister,’ so maybe I’m starting to come out of it a little bit.”

The boy shook his head. “Last night you were speaking the language of the People. You had Shonsu’s vocabulary, which is why you couldn’t say some words that you wanted to. He was a fine swordsman, but no intellectual.” Wallie’s heart sank. “If you were really a small, naked boy you wouldn’t know these things, nor talk like that.”

The boy grinned again. He started swinging his legs, leaning forward on his hands and hunching tiny shoulders. “I did not say that that was what I was. I said that was what I was supposed to look like! I need to convince you that this is a real world and that you were brought here for a purpose.” His grin was infectious. Wallie found himself returning it. “You’re not doing very well so far.”

The boy raised a mischievous eyebrow. “The woman did not convince you? I should have thought that she was very convincing.”

Peeping Tom? Wallie pushed down a surge of anger. This boy was merely one more figment of his deranged mind, so of course he knew what had happened in the night. “That was the most unreal of all,” he said. “Every man has ambitions, sonny, but there are practical limitations. That was much too good to be true.” The boy sighed. “The men of the World are even lustier than the men of Earth, Mr. Smith, hard as that may be to believe. Walter Smith is dead. Encephalitis, meningitis . . . they’re only names. There is no going back, Mr. Smith.” They all wanted to convince him that he was dead! And if he were? Who would care? No one special, he had told Jja, and that was a depressing thought. He had no roots, anywhere. No loved ones left except a sister he had not seen in ten years. If he were indeed dead, it would hardly matter to anyone. The plant would run as well without him—he had built a good team there, able to operate with no supervision. Harry would move into the corner office, and business would go on as before.