Sword Born-Sword Dancer 5 (12 page)

"You know that, do you?"

"I am a very good judge of slaves--"

"I'm not--"

"--and you are no longer one in mind or body," she finished. "There is no need for you to lie."

It was time to take control of this discussion. "Then if you respect truth, let me offer you this." I paused, marking her calm expression and determining to alter it. "If you attempt to seduce Del, I'll take you apart. Woman or no."

Calmness indeed vanished, but was replaced by an open amusement I hadn't expected.

"Male," she said, and "Southron. So male, and so Southron!"

"I mean it, captain."

"I know you do. Honesty, if couched as a threat. Save I wonder which frightens you more: that I will attempt to seduce her--or that she might accept."

I shook my head. "She won't."

"And so I offer to you my own truth, Southroner: I will let the woman decide what she will and will not do. It should be her decision, yes? Because anything else is a slavery as soul-destroying as that which you experienced."

The Southroner in me hated to admit she was right. The man who had accompanied Del for the last three years, thereby learning truths he'd never imagined, did admit it--if privately--and could muster no additional argument that contained validity.

"Well," I said finally, "at least you've got to give me credit for threatening you the same as I would a man."

Prima Rhannet's generous mouth twitched, but she had the good grace not to laugh aloud.

It was midmorning as Del stood at the rail by the plank, waiting silently. I saw the stillness of her body, the posture of readiness despite that stillness, and knew she, as I, missed her sword badly.

Or even a sword. We'd both of us lost our true swords: I three years before, when Singlestroke had been broken; Del to the maelstrom of angry sorcerers who considered themselves gods. She had broken that sword, the jivatma named Boreal, to save my life, and nearly extinguished her own. Meanwhile, I had also lost the sword I'd made in Staal-Ysta. It was, in fact, buried in the rubble that covered Del's broken jivatma. We had purchased new swords, of course--only a fool goes weaponless--but neither of them had suited us beyond fulfilling a need. And now we had none at all, thanks to the renegadas.

Two of those renegadas waited just behind Del, as ready as she to move if necessary. I knew by the expression in her eyes that she would not make it necessary. Not yet. Not until after I was off the ship and on firm ground again, where no one could toss me into the water. She would permit me to risk myself in a true fight, but not to drowning.

Nihko came up behind me; behind him, his red-haired captain, glinting of gold in her ears and around her throat. I grimaced, thinking of the plan, our circumstances; shook my head slightly, then stepped forward to bend my head to Del's.

Instantly four renegadas surrounded both of us. Hands were on Del, hands were on me.

I was shoved down the plank toward the dock and nearly tripped, catching my balance awkwardly before I could tumble headfirst into the sea. By the time that was avoided I was halfway down the plank, and when I turned to look at Del they had taken her away.

So much for good bye, good luck, or even a murmured "Kill 'em when you get the chance."

Nihko prodded me into motion as the plank bowed under our weight. I moved, not liking the instability over so much water. He escorted me off the ship, off the dock, onto the quay, and to the bottom of the track slicing its way up the cliff. From here I could look straight up and see the cliffside dwellings looming over my head like white-painted, blue-doored doom. The back of my neck prickled; the haphazard manner of construction made it appear as though everything rimming the cliff might fall down upon my head at any given moment.

"One good shake," I muttered.

Nihko glanced at me. "And so there was."

"What?"

"The histories says once Skandi was whole, and round, not this crescent left behind."

I gazed at the cliff face of the crescent uneasily. "What happened to it?"

"This was a place built of smoke," Nihko began.

Having no patience with stories about gods, I interrupted rudely. "I know all about that.

Your captain already gave me the speech."

"Then you should understand that what the gods do, they can also undo." He gestured.

"What was smoke became smoke again."

Hoolies, but I hate cryptic commentary! With exaggerated patience I inquired, "And?"

He turned, gesturing into the harbor behind us. "Do you see that smoke? The small islands?"

I had marked them, yes. Two crumpled, blackened chunks of land that appeared uninhabitable, in the middle of the cauldron. Rather like burned-down coals after a light rain, exuding faint drifts of smoke into the morning air.

Nihko nodded. "They are the children of the Heart of the World."

"The--what?"

"Heart of the World. It lies now beneath the sea. But the children have risen to see whether this place is worthy of their presence once again."

I gazed at him steadily. "You do realize none of this makes any sense at all."

He grinned cheerfully, unoffended. "It will."

"Meanwhile?"

"Meanwhile, the island was turned into smoke again. The land bled. Burned. Became ash. The island shook and was split asunder. You see what remains."

Not much, if what he said was true. But it seemed unlikely that such a calamity could really happen. I mean, land bleeding? Turning to ash and smoke? Shaking itself apart?

More than unlikely: impossible.

Of course, I'd said a lot of things were impossible--and then witnessed them myself.

"We have maps," he said quietly, seeing my skepticism. "Old maps, and charts, and drawings. Histories. This island was once far more than it is."

Rather like Nihko himself, if what Prima had said of his castration was true. I stared at the cliff again. "I suppose we're going up that poor excuse for a trail?"

"But on four feet," he replied.

"You want me to ride one of those?" "Those" being the danjaclike beasties that rather resembled something crossed with a small horse and a very large dog.

"It will save time," the first mate explained, "and keep our feet clean. Otherwise we will slip and slide in molah muck all the way up, like the lesser folk." A tilt of his shaven head indicated men and women on foot toiling up and down the cliff.

"Molah muck?"

"They are molahs." He waved at a string of the creatures waiting patiently at the bottom of the track. "And they can carry four times their weight without complaint."

"I'd just as soon carry my own weight, thanks. I'm kind of used to it."

"Molah," he said gently, and I thought again about how his grip had made my wrist weep, and my throat flesh burn. "And if you are presenting yourself to the wealthiest metri on the island as a man who may be her heir, you shall ride."

"Fine," I said glumly, surveying the drooping animals tied to a rope beside the trail, "we ride. But it looks to me like we'll be dragging our feet in the muck anyhow, all the way up."

NINE

DID not actually drag our feet in molah muck all the way up, though it was a close call.

Initially I yearned for stirrups, since dangling long legs athwart a narrow, bony back only barely padded by a thin blanket was not particularly comfortable, but I realized soon enough that stirrups would have made it worse. Riding with legs doubled up beneath my chin isn't a favored position for a man with recalcitrant knees.

For a sailor, Nihko Blue-head rode his molah with a grace I didn't expect; but I reflected that balancing atop the beastie wasn't so much different from maintaining balance aboard a wallowing ship, and therefore he had an advantage. I was more accustomed than he to riding an animal, perhaps, but horses and molahs have vastly different ways of going. Horses basically stride, planting large hooves squarely on the ground.

Molahs--mince. On something that feels disturbingly like tiptoes. Very rapidly, so that one ascends at a pace that can only be called a jiggle.

I reflected that perhaps Nihko had no testicles because he'd ridden a molah up this cliff once too often.

As we climbed, tippytoeing our way around people on foot, I cast glances back the way we'd come. From increasing height it became very clear just how round the island had once been. Despite all of this silly talk about gods and smoke turning into stone (and back again), there was no question that once there had been more to the island. And it struck me as oddly familiar to Southron-raised eyes: what Nihko and I climbed was the vertical rim of a circle. The interior below, a brilliant greenish blue, was where two men would meet in the center for a sword-dance.

If they could walk on water.

Me, I couldn't, any more than I could magic weapons out of the air. What I could do was change the sand to grass.

Or so the legend went that others in the South viewed as prophecy. Of course, I put no stock in such nonsense. Even when a handful of deep Desert dwellers, led by a holy man who claimed he could see the future, claimed I was the jhihadi of the prophecy, the man meant to save the South from the devouring sands.

Horse piss, if you ask me.

And that's precisely what gave me the idea to dig channels in the desert and bring water from where it was to places it was not. Horse piss. Thanks to the stud.

Who would have been a lot more comfortable to ride up this gods-cursed track than a stumpy-legged, bony-backed, mincing little molah.

Hoolies, I wouldn't even mind getting bucked off if I only had the stud!

Then I shot a quick glance down the cliff. Well, maybe not.

It struck me then, as we climbed, that this was what I had come for. To see Skandi, this place I might be from, if indirectly; I'd been born in the South, but bred of bones shaped in a different land. Here? Possibly. As Del had remarked, as Prima Rhannet, as even I had noticed, Nihko and I were indeed similar in the ways our bodies were built, even in coloring, which seemed typical for Skandi.

And yet not everyone toiling up and down the track had green eyes and bronze-brown hair--or shaven heads decorated by blue tattoos, come to that. It was obvious, in fact, that not everyone walking the track was even Skandic, if Nihko and I were the prevailing body type; many were shorter, slighter, or tall and quite thin, with a wide variety in hair color and flesh tones. I'd grown accustomed to certain physical similarities in the South, where folk are predominantly shorter, slighter, darker, and in the North, where folk are as predictably taller, bigger, fairer. But here upon the cliff face walked a rainbow of living flesh.

And then I recalled that Skandi's economy depended on slave labor, from the sound of it, and I realized why the variety in size and coloring was so immense.

A chill tickled my spine. Here I'd come to a place that could well have bred my parents, and yet it was peopled as well by those unfortunates who had no choice but to service others who had the wealth, the power, the willingness to own men and women.

I'd been owned twice already. Once for all of my childhood and youth among the Salset, then again in the mines of the tanzeer Aladar, whom Del had killed to free me.

The South is a harsh and frequently cruel land. But it was what I knew. Skandi was nothing but a name to me--and now a rim of rock afloat in the ocean--and I realized with startling and unsettling clarity that I had, with indisputably childish hope, dreamed of a place that was perfection in all things. So that I would be born of a land and people far better to its children than the South had been to me.

A sobering realization, once I got beyond the initial pinch of self-castigation for succumbing to such morbid recollection. I knew better. Dreams never come true.

I shut my eyes at that. My dream had come true. The one I'd harbored in my soul for as long as I could recall: to be a free man. And I had won that freedom at last, had dreamed it out of despair and desperation into truth, at the cost of Salset children.

Guilt stirred, and unease. And then I thought again what I might have been had I remained with the Salset, and what I had become since earning my freedom.

As for what I was now--well, who knows? Sword-dancer, once. Now borjuni to some people. And, others would say; others had said: messiah.

Who was, just at this moment, captive to a man wearing a vast complement of rings in his eyebrows.

Eventually we reached the top of the cliff. Gratefully I began to hoist a leg across the molah's round little rump, but Nihko fixed me with a quelling look and told me to wait.

If he thought I was preparing to leap off the molah and sprint for freedom, he was wrong. I just wanted to stand on my own two feet again--and to be certain I hadn't permanently squashed my gehetties on the way up. I contemplated dismounting anyway--it was a breath-taking drop of three whole inches--but took a look around and decided I'd better not. I was barefoot, after all, and we had just arrived in a clifftop area full of molahs (and their muck), throngs of people, yelping dogs (and their muck), a handful of chickens, and a dozen or so curly-coated goats. And their muck.

All of whom saw Nihko aboard his molah and abruptly melted away.

Well, the people did; the chickens, goats, and dogs remained pretty much as they were.

They were also a lot louder, now that every person within earshot had fallen utterly silent.

I saw widened eyes, surprise-slackened mouths, and a flurry of hand gestures. About the time I opened my mouth to ask Nihko what in hoolies was going on, he spoke. A single word only, very crisp and clipped, in a language I didn't know; I assumed it was Skandic. When a stirring ran through the crowd, he repeated it, then followed up the word with a brief sentence. Quick, furtive glances were exchanged, different hand gestures were now made close to the body so they weren't as obvious. But no one spoke. That is, except for one hoarse shout issued by someone I couldn't see.

A path was instantly cleared through the crowd. A man in a thin-woven, sun-bleached tunic came toward us. He carried a stamped metal basin in both hands. Lengths of embroidered cloth were draped across his arms, and strung over his shoulders was a wax-plugged, rope-netted clay bottle glazed blue around the lip. Puzzled, I watched as he knelt there in the dirt and muck and carefully set down the basin. He unhooked the bottle, unstoppered it, poured water into the basin, murmured something that sounded like an invocation, then dipped the cloth in, meticulously careful that no portion of the fabric slipped over the side of the basin into the dirt.