The Coming Of Wisdom (21 page)

Hope! Hope like a small flame rising in dead embers. Wallie Smith would rather crawl than die any day. “And then I and the ship may leave safely? You will give me your oath?”

Even that tiny show of resistance was almost enough to change the sorcerer’s mind. “You are in no position to bargain!” he squeaked. Then the junior prompted him again. “Good idea! Know, swordsman, that we of the sorcerers’ craft swear by fire. Take off that sack and throw it over.”

Wallie hesitated for a fraction of a second as realization of what was coming began to dawn. Then he reached down to rip off his loincloth. He wadded it and threw it over the plank toward the sorcerers. As long as they played with him, he was still alive. He glanced ruefully at Tomiyano, watching in angry and surprised silence. He did not look at the crowd.

The Third glided forward and picked up the burlap, carried it back and dropped it in front of his superior, who held out a hand and mumbled something over it. It began to smoke, then burst into flames. Both men looked at Wallie to see if he was impressed, so he looked impressed.

“I so swear,” the Fourth said. “Now—over there and lie down.” He pointed at the bottom of the plank.

Again Wallie was momentarily tempted to refuse. The Shonsu part of him was rebelling violently at the thought of a swordsman humiliated. Naked except for the tie around his ponytail, feeling mortally ashamed and vulnerable, he walked to the place indicated, knelt, and then lay down, head raised to watch them.

The sorcerer stared at him for a minute, apparently surprised. “Well! Start crawling! If you stop, then you will die.”

Wallie looked to his companion and even he was astonished. “I have a hot-blooded junior on board,” he said. “Captain, please go back to the ship and warn them. Nail Nnanji to the mast if you have to. I want no more trouble.”

“But tell him to watch,” the junior sorcerer said. He laughed, and the captain jumped over some pots and ran.

“Crawl, swordsman!”

Wallie rose to his hands and knees.

“On your belly, I said!”

Wallie lowered himself flat and began to drag himself along the cold, lumpy, and incredibly foul road. They used a lot of horses on that road. He passed the litter of copperware and the end of the wagon, and the crowd parted for him.

He had only five ship-lengths to go.

It took about ten years.

“Keep your head up, swordsman!”

The sorcerers followed behind him, shouting to the crowd to make way for a swordsman. A corridor opened in front of him, a corridor lined with surprised, mocking faces and loud with ribald comment. He detoured around the piles of goods on the dock. He passed by the wheels of the hawkers’ carts and the legs of the display tables. He told himself to be pragmatic—humiliation was greatly preferable to death.

The laughter started before he reached the end of the first ship. Then the throwing: filth and rotted fish and a few harder things.

“Keep your head up, swordsman!”

He saw bare feet and boots and sandals and then gowns that reached to the ground, so he knew that more sorcerers had arrived. The crowd told him to move faster and to be careful not to scrape anything off. The children started building an obstacle course with bales and boxes, so that he had to drag himself around them.

“Keep your head up, swordsman,” said that high-pitched voice behind him. He had been mocked by a crowd before, when he was on his way to the Judgment of the Goddess, but then he had been Wallie Smith, a confused Wallie Smith and in pain. Now he was a swordsman of the Seventh and already accustomed to thinking of himself as such. Now the scorn cut deeper.

“Make way for a swordsman!”

The corridor of people and boxes twisted around until it led to a wagon, and he obediently crawled through underneath and was cheered when he emerged. He wondered what he was crawling away from—music? A white bird or a burning cloth? Perhaps the sorcerers had been bluffing all the time. Yet Kandoru had died. The garrison in Ov had died, and probably the garrison of Aus. The fat sailor had run up his gangplank.

He might not have made it at all had he not suddenly thought of Nnanji. Nnanji had denounced him to Imperkanni for using a disguise. Disguise was not honorable, but this—Nnanji could never forgive this. And Wallie had made the kid swear the fourth oath, Your honor is my honor. So he had destroyed Nnanji’s honor as well as his own. Nnanji would kill him, strike him down unarmed as a reprobate, without as much as a warning . . . except that Nnanji in his own eyes would be a reprobate also and hence not have the right. Perhaps Nnanji was more likely to kill himself, proper behavior in a shame culture. Frantically Wallie scanned sutras. What was the World’s equivalent of the Roman falling on his sword, or the Prussian officer cleaning his pistol? He could find nothing in the sutras to show that the Goddess expected
seppuku
. Swordsman slang, then: “He washed his sword.” Of course.

Now he saw the full extent of his stupidity. Shonsu or Nnanji would never have gone ashore unarmed, but had either somehow been trapped as Wallie had been trapped, then he would have jumped from the dock. That had been what the sorcerers expected; probably what the gods expected, too. He should have had more faith. He had tailed not once, but twice.

Nnanji valued his honor above all else in the World, and Wallie was literally dragging it in the dirt. There could be no forgiveness, no forgetting, no understanding. The fourth oath was irrevocable. He could not have been more cruel had he planned it, and it was entirely possible that he would arrive back at
Sapphire
to find Nnanji already dead. He was still frantically hunting for a solution when he realized that he had reached almost to the end of his torment and in worrying about his protégé he had been crawling automatically and had forgotten to listen to the jeering around him.

Sapphire
’s gangplank was in view: an oasis, the Holy Grail. He finished the distance and dragged himself onto the plank. He rose to his knees and then to his feet, waiting for some final treachery, but all he got was a derisive cheer from the onlookers.

He was filthy beyond words, scraped and shaking. He turned and looked at the sorcerers. He thought they were watching him with satisfied amusement, but it was hard to tell under the cowls. He nodded his head in a hint of a bow, then he spun round and walked up the plank.

One: Sorcerer sees swordsman. Two: Swordsman crawls.

But not end of story.

At the top of the plank a very pale Jja handed him a cloth, and he wrapped it around himself. They stared at each other in silence for a moment, and then he glanced around the deck. There were sailors there, and Brota and Thana, but there were no faces. No one was looking at him. He was invisible.

Except to Jja. Slaves were supposed to keep their eyes lowered. Jja never looked him in the face unless they were alone together.

“Only you!” he whispered. “Only you do not care about honor?”

“Honor? Honor to a slave?” She grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the fo’c’sle. Astounded, he let himself be led through the door and into a cramped shower cubicle, dark and smelling of mold. She pulled the wrap away from him and worked the pump handle, getting almost as wet as he did as he rubbed away the filth.

“Jja . . . I’m sorry,” he said.

“Sorry? I told you!”

She was furious with him, terror turned to rage, and the transformation in a meek and obedient slave was more unexpected than all the sorceries he had witnessed.

“Where is Nnanji?” he asked.

“I have no idea!”

Clean at last, he clutched her and kissed her, and she tried to struggle against his vastly greater strength—and that was another sorcery—but he forced his kiss on her until she acquiesced and returned it. When they parted she stared at him again for a moment in the gloom and men burst into tears. He held her tightly, both of them soaking wet.

“You did tell me, my love, and I should have listened. I am very sorry,”

She leaned her head against his chest and whispered, “No, it is I who must be sorry, master, for speaking to you so.”

“You will never call me ‘master’ again! Never!”

“But . . . ” She looked up in dismay. “What can I call you?”

“Call me ‘lover’ when I deserve it,” he said, “and ‘idiot’ the rest of the time—and that is positively the last order I shall ever give you. Oh, Jja, you are the only sane person in the World, and I love you madly. Come. Let’s go and see what we can rescue from this mess I’ve made.”

She handed him his kilt and his boots. He ran a comb hastily through his hair and then braced himself to go out on deck once more in the stark, pitiless sunshine. Brota, Thana, Tomiyano, other sailors . . . still none of them was acknowledging his presence, the invisible swordsman. His appearance provoked a cheer from the dock. He did not look that way.

His hairclip and sword were in the deckhouse. He marched across. As he rounded the aft hatch cover, the door opened, and Honakura came out, very wearily, reminding Wallie of the stereotype of the kindly old country doctor leaving the sickroom.
You may go in now
. The old priest walked forward and tried to go by Wallie, who moved to block him.

“Well, old man?”

He looked up, his face giving nothing away. “That young man has a head like a coconut. I have never met a harder. But he understands now.”

“I am very grateful, holy one.”

The bleary old eyes seemed suddenly to flash. “I did not do it for you. You are a contemptible lunatic.” The old man walked away.

Wallie went in and pulled the door closed.

Cowie was sitting on one of the chests at the far side, staring blankly into space. Nnanji stood in the middle of the floor, very pale . . . young and hurt and vulnerable. He was still holding the seventh sword in its scabbard, the straps and buckles of the harness dangling. Wallie walked over to him. He should have prepared something to say, but for a moment he could only stare at the strangely bruised look in Nnanji’s colorless eyes.

“The gods are cruel, my lord brother.”

“Nnanji . . . ”

“I could not have done it.”

That was absurd.
I could not have displayed such cowardice, and therefore you have more courage than I have
? Some of Honakura’s contorted logic, no doubt.

“Nnanji, I am sorry.”

Nnanji shook his head sadly. “The gods are cruel. ‘When the mighty has been spurned’? The old man explained that you had to suffer that, brother . . . but I could not have done it. Not even for the Goddess Herself.” He looked as if he wanted to comfort Wallie with a hug.

“Oh . . . Oh, hell!” That cute little solecism might excuse Wallie’s behavior to Nnanji, but it was a lie. He could not hide behind such deception, no matter how hateful the truth. “I did not think of the riddle. It never entered my mind. I crawled because I did not want to die.”

Nnanji closed his eyes and shivered.

“It was the way of honor in my other world.” There was no way Wallie could ever reconcile a shame culture and a guilt culture. The ways of thinking were too unlike. But he had to try—try to show Nnanji that what he had done was not such an atrocity to him. “I had broken a law. I paid the penalty. It hurt no one but me, you see. It was better than dying, I thought. I told you I was doing my best in this world . . . but I warned you. I said that I was not really a swordsman.”

“Uh!” Nnanji shook his head as if to clear it and turned away to hide his face. “But the gods must have known that you would do that thing.”

“I suppose so. Perhaps I should have jumped. Perhaps She would have let me . . . return safely.” There was no easy word for swimming.

Moments crawled by. Crowd noises drifted in from the dock.

“I did warn you, Nnanji. That first day, when we sat on the wall in the temple gardens . . . ”

“ ‘I am not one of those heroes you find in epics.’ I remember.”

“I can’t release you from the fourth oath. It is irrevocable. But the second has lapsed, if that is what you want. We remain oath brothers, but we need never meet again. At the next port you can leave.”

After another moment, Nnanji turned around and straightened his bony shoulders. “No. I also have a part to play. The old man still thinks so. I will stay.” He held out Wallie’s hairclip.

Surprised and gratified, Wallie took it and scooped his hair back to fasten. “It may not be for very long. The little god warned me—punishment for failure is death, or worse. Honakura may be mistaken about the riddle. I may have screwed everything up. So it may not be for very long.”

Nnanji swallowed hard. “Worse? You have been punished already, then. Maybe not . . . And it was my fault, too, brother!”

“Never! What do you mean?”

“You told me to warn you when you were making a mistake. Taking off your sword—”

“You did warn me. I ignored you.”

Nnanji drew the seventh sword.

Wallie’s heart skipped a beat and then began working a little harder than usual. He was unarmed. Nnanji with a naked sword in his hand was a matter to consider very carefully.

“I could have stopped you, brother,” he said softly.

Wallie said nothing. In the dimness of the deckhouse, light flashed from the deadly blade as Nnanji twisted it to and fro, looking down at it pensively. “I should have stopped you. But you were Her champion.”

Were
? One thing certainly had died this day—Nnanji had been brutally cured of his hero worship.

Then he looked up at Wallie and forced a thin smile—as insubstantial as dust, a smile that registered much more wry than joyous.

“Are,” he said. “Her champion, I mean.” He held out the scabbard and harness. He retained the sword.

Very uneasy now, Wallie took the harness and began buckling it on, wondering what was happening under that red hair.

“I hope I still am. But I don’t feel like a champion today.”

Again Nnanji looked down at the sword in his hand, watching the play of light on the sapphire, the silver, and the razor steel. “Do you remember the last thing Briu said, my lord brother?”

“No.”

“The last-but-one thing. He said, ‘I suppose we must keep trying to do better.’ ”