The Reluctant Swordsman (8 page)

The rutted road was foul with mule droppings and other filth—he was having trouble keeping his toes clean, and he eventually gave up and let the chips lie where they may. The boots pinched, and the boy was keeping up a fearsome pace, even for legs as long as Shonsu’s.

Then they reached level ground, and the boy had to walk on the road beside him, and they slowed. The town engulfed them at once in rank, narrow squalor between high wooden buildings that covered almost every level inch. Between them snaked mean little streets full of scrambling throngs of people, carrying bundles or pushing carts or just hurrying. Yet somehow there was always room for a swordsman of the Seventh, and he was not jostled, although the saluting became perfunctory. The smell was much worse than it had been on the hill.
 
“Browns are the commonest?” Wallie asked.

The boy was having to do more dodging to keep up with him, but Wallie kept moving—let him worry.

“Thirds. That’s craftsman level.” He disappeared around a hawker’s cart and rejoined Wallie at the other end. “Qualified artisan. Whites and yellows are apprentices. Above that you’re into postgraduate.” He grinned up briefly.
 
There were many stray curs grubbing around the refuse, and the high walls shut out the sun. The air was a garbage of insects and smells, human and animal and stale cooking and decay, except where a spice shop or a bakery wafted its fragrance into the street like an oasis.

Wallie had it worked out now: white, yellow, brown, orange, and red. Green and blue must be at the top, but he had seen none of those. Apparently purely arbitrary.

“Why that sequence?” he asked.

“This way,” the boy said, turning down another winding alley, which was just as foul and dark and crowded. “No reason. Because it’s always been done that way.
 
That’s the standard explanation for anything.”

Beggars wore black, usually just a grubby rag. Many of them had rags around their heads, too . . . to avoid disgrace to their crafts? He could guess at some of the facemarks. A loud clanging noise ahead proved to be a smithy, and of course the smith’s marks were horseshoes. A man pushing a cart of boots and shoes had three boot shapes. Many of them were ideograms, though, and he could not guess their significance: diamonds, semicircles, chevrons?
 
“They ought to bum this place down and start over,” Wallie grumbled.

“They do, every fifty years or so,” the boy said.
 
The ground floor of most buildings held a shop, with a sign above the door and sometimes a display table, carefully guarded, and those restricted the traffic even more. A few establishments, like the smithy, had people working in full view, weaving or sewing or turning pots. Jugs meant potter.
 
Wallie noted the signs of disease, too—blindness and emaciation and ugly rashes.
 
The poverty was overwhelming, old women bent beneath bundles of wood and children working just as hard as adults. He did not like it. He had seen poverty before—in Tijuana, for example—but Tijuana had the excuse of being new, temporary. This town seemed ancient, and permanent, and therefore somehow worse.
 
The boy was continually dodging up alleys, avoiding the main streets, although those were barely wider and perhaps more crowded because they carried more wagons and carts. “Are you trying to confuse me, or are we avoiding someone?” Wallie demanded.

“Yes,” the boy said.

It was a shantytown with a glandular condition; some of the buildings were four stories high. Now he noticed that many of what he had thought were stray dogs were lanky pigs, rooting for their living in the gutters. Pigs would eat anything, even feces, and their presence explained some of the smell.
 
“I suppose a river goddess wouldn’t approve of flush toilets?” Wallie asked.
 
The boy stopped and looked at him furiously. “You will not make jokes like that!”

Wallie clipped his ear—and missed. He could catch flies but this urchin could dodge him? “Not too real there,” Wallie said, and laughed.
 
They were standing in one of the alleys, pedestrians edging nervously around both sides of the dangerous swordsman.

“Come here!” The boy stepped over to a display in a narrow doorway, a vertical board with strings of beads hung on it. A wrinkled old crone in brown crouched on a stool at the side, holding her toes in. The boy reached up and pulled off a string of beads. The woman scrambled up in surprise to fawn at the noble lord and be ignored.

“Look, now!” The boy waved the string of beads on one finger—green clay beads on a thread without a clasp. “Every one is the same yet slightly different; it has no beginning and no end; it runs the same in both directions; and the string goes all the way through. Okay? Let’s go!”

He started to walk. Wallie grabbed his shoulder and this time connected. “Those aren’t yours, Shorty!”

“Does it matter?” the boy asked, showing his tooth gap.
 
“Yes, it does. Worlds may differ, or minds may get sick, but morals don’t change.” Wallie glared down at him, holding the puny shoulder firmly in his big hand. The old woman fretted and chewed her knuckles and was silent.
 
“That’s something else you will have to unlearn, then,” the boy said. “But understand the beads and you’ll be getting close, Wallie Smith. Here, grandmother.”

He pulled the string through his other hand and then tossed it to her, but somehow the beads had subtly changed. They gleamed and they certainly were no longer clay. “Let’s go!” he snapped, and plunged off along the alley with Wallie striding behind him, trying to remember just what had been done to those beads and how the boy had escaped from his grip, and trying to understand what all the blarney had meant.

They crossed another street and entered another alley, squeezed past a parked wagon, then huddled into a doorway as an oxcart went by, pulled by something that looked more believable than the camel-faced, long-bodied horses.
 
Finally they emerged at the edge of an open space, wide enough to admit the sunlight. The boy stopped.

“Ah! Fresh air!” Wallie said. “Comparatively.”

The boy was studying the far side of the court, a wall like a cliff. Two enormous gates made of timbers thicker than a man hung crookedly on massive iron hinges, flanking an arched entrance. But the gates were spread wide and looked as though they could not be closed without falling apart. On either side of them, buildings huddled right up to the wall. Beyond the arch, sunlight shone on bright green grass and tall trees. Small groups of people were walking across the square from the various alleys that emptied into it and passing through the gates.

“The way into the temple?” Wallie asked.

The boy nodded. “The guards will not notice you.” Wallie had not noticed the guards. There were two of them on each side, young swordsmen, three yellows and an orange. Two were leaning against the wall and the other two slouched with thumbs in their harnesses—a very unimpressive display of military style. They were eyeing the pilgrims in a bored fashion, periodically making comments, usually about the women.
 
The boy glanced disapprovingly at Wallie. “Your sword is crooked!” he snapped.

“It’s top-heavy,” Wallie complained, adjusting it back to vertical.
 
“Yes, but there’s a knack for keeping it right. Only Firsts go around straightening all the time.” He sounded annoyed.
 
“Well, I’m only a beginner!”

The boy stamped his foot. “You don’t need to look it.” Wallie had not asked to go mad. “Let’s cancel the whole planet, and I’ll go back to chemistry.”

The boy shook his head. “You can live here or die here. The sooner you accept that, the better. Well, follow the next group of pilgrims in, and the guards won’t see you.”

That was absurd, for the groups seldom numbered more than a dozen and Wallie had seen no one as tall as himself. “The hell they won’t,” he said.
 
“Does it matter?” the boy asked triumphantly.

Wallie glared at him. Did it? For a delusion, this world was incredibly detailed, from the cold filth coating his toes up to the insects that buzzed around his head.

And the sunlight reflected most realistically off the hilts of the swords on the guards’ backs.

“It wouldn’t matter anyway,” the boy said. “They would salute you. When you didn’t return the salute, they ought to challenge—but they wouldn’t dare. Not a Seventh.”

“Four of them wouldn’t dare?”

“But which one goes first?” The boy chuckled. “Come on! Let’s go.” Wallie stepped in behind a group of eight pilgrims, six men and two women—one Fifth, four Fourths, and three Thirds. They ambled across the square, while he watched the guards carefully out of the corners of his eyes and tried to ignore prickles of apprehension. As they reached the arch the guards looked over the pilgrims and one made a vulgar comment about one of the women being pregnant; but their eyes never seemed to touch Wallie, and he walked unchallenged into the temple grounds.

“You were right, Shorty,” he said. Then he looked around in surprise. The boy had vanished. He was on his own.

†††††††

Wallie followed the pilgrims’ leisurely stroll along a smoothly paved road. He marveled at the change from the squalid huddle of the town to a parkland of velvet lawns and precise beds of flowers, under high, soothing shade trees.
 
Like the horses, the vegetation seemed almost Earthlike but not quite. He was no botanist and could not find the exact wrongness in anything. Bushes of bougainvillea flamed in orange and purple next to scarlet hibiscus. Palms like pillars soared to fondle the indigo sky. There were formidable buildings hidden in the distance behind acacias and eucalyptus trees; a couple of them looked like dormitories, but some were marble-faced houses. Here were the elite of the temple, flaunting their power next to the town’s poverty, and cosseted by their slaves, for he could see many little brown men in black breechclouts grubbing at the roots of things, scything grass, and carrying bundles. He was nauseated at the injustice, finding that he was having more and more trouble remembering that this was all a figment of his own subconscious.
 
Two elderly women in blue silk gowns were standing in conversation and they looked up in surprise at the sight of him. He placed his fist on his heart as he went by, but that seemed only to increase their surprise. Almost certainly they would be priestesses, and he was obviously not invisible to them. The word would be out, then, that a swordsman of the Seventh had arrived. Does it matter?
 
Uneasily he was reacting as though it did. He speeded up and went striding forward to overtake the pilgrims, hearing them exclaim in alarm as he went by.
 
His road was clear, winding ahead through the trees and around buildings and across lawns; the intersecting roads were obviously minor, and there were blobs of pilgrims strung out in front of him. The temple grounds were much larger than the town, the noise of the falls louder.

Then the road turned a corner, and he had arrived.
 
Ahead was a great courtyard like an airport runway. To his right it was flanked by a few trees and a wide, still pool, almost a small lake. On his left was the temple. His head went back as he looked up at it, and it was breathtaking. A high flight of steps ran the full width of the front, topped by seven huge arches, and above that were gold spires. He thought it was probably bigger than any church or cathedral on Earth, a set of seven blimp hangars side by side. The pilgrims ahead were wending their way up the steps, spreading out along the top like bubbles rising in a glass.

He marched straight ahead along the courtyard until he was level with the center arch, then he swung around and started up the steps, not sure if he was doing this because he was a Seventh and that felt right for a Seventh, or because this was his personal illusion and therefore he should exert his uniqueness.
 
As he climbed, he noticed that the huddled pilgrims at the top were all kneeling, facing into the temple. He decided that he was not going to kneel, but he was not sure what he was going to do. Grab a priest and ask to speak to Mr.
 
Honakura, perhaps. Then what? The little boy had warned him that he was going into a trap. Yet he certainly ought to be safe from sudden death within the temple itself, oughtn’t he?

He was almost at the top when a bell began to toll, deep and menacing and louder than the rumble of the falls. The pilgrims rose at once and turned around. More people came drifting out of the temple to stand beside them. At first he thought they were all looking at him, and that was comforting because it was the sort of impossible thing that happened in dreams, but soon he saw that he was not the attraction—arms were pointing.

He stopped and turned around also. The view was spectacular: the court, the lake, and straight up the canyon to the white wall of the falls, framed in rainbow. He thought momentarily how thrilled Neddy would be to see that—Neddy liked waterfalls.

He wished that he had a camera. All his life Wallie Smith had worn glasses, but now he could see every detail of this view. That also was typical of dreams.
 
What was the big excitement about, though? Was someone going over the falls in a barrel, perhaps?

Not quite.

Halfway up the face of the falls a lip of rock protruded from the face of the cliff to make a green-coated shelf, and his startlingly sharp vision could see people on it. As he watched, one of them floated out into space; at first slowly, then gradually gathering speed until it vanished into the spray below.
 
Human sacrifice?