The Coming Of Wisdom (24 page)

Wallie stopped striking and continued to parry.

“I said to drop that sword!”

Still Tomiyano was trying to kill his opponent. Their mad progression around the deck had ended, and his strokes were slower and shaky, but he was not going to quit.

Wallie would have to break his collarbone. “Last chance, sailor!”

Suddenly the captain switched to a two-handed grip and made a hard, long, slow downward cut like a scythe stroke or a golf swing. Wallie made an easy parry and the sword cut through his foil and his kilt, and severed his femoral artery.
Impact
!

He lay on his back, staring up at two triumphant, pain-maddened eyes behind a blade drawn back for the
coup de grâce
, stark against a whirling brightness of sails and sky, and he heard only the thunder of his own heart as it sprayed his life out in a scarlet fountain. Time was frozen into eternity. No one breathed. Then the sailor cursed and turned away, removing the sword.

Wallie tried to sit up, and someone turned out all the lights.

†

Nnanji was reviewing the sutra “On Staunching Blood” as he jumped forward, but a sailor was there before him, with his thumbs already pressed in Shonsu’s groin. Thana arrived with a bucket of water—obviously the riverfolk knew what to do when there were no healers around. And one did not package fish food.

So he let them tend the wounded swordsman and contented himself with pulling Jja out of the way. She was accomplishing nothing except getting herself covered with blood. Brota’s shadow fell over Shonsu as she knelt down to take charge, and she seemed to be capable.

“He’ll need a warm bed,” he told Jja as he led her back toward the deckhouse. “There are blankets in those chests.”

They reached the doorway and were met by a strange wailing noise. It was coming from Cowie, who must have emerged to watch the fight. She had done this howling before, he remembered angrily—what an error she had turned out to be! He slapped her face. She reverted at once to her normal silent blankness. Jja pushed past her.

The priest was still sitting on the steps, looking a thousand years old, totally shocked.

“You all right, old man?” Nnanji demanded. Honakura nodded and then took hold of himself and smiled.

Katanji . . . 

“Catching flies, novice?”

“Er, no!”

“No,
what
?”

“No, mentor.”

“Then close your mouth and stand up straight.”

Responsibility
, Shonsu had said.

Brota’s voice came from inside the huddle: “He’s coming round. Put that hilt between his teeth . . . needlecase . . . ” Yes, she knew what she was doing.

Nnanji took a deep breath and glanced around. The mood had changed. Even river riffraff must appreciate the show of swordsmanship they had just seen—incredible! They couldn’t feed a champion like that to the fish, and now it seemed like they didn’t want to. So he could relax a little, wait for Shonsu to come round. But he needed his sword; he headed forward again in search of the captain.

Tomiyano was leaning against the rail, barely able to stand from the look of him. An elderly woman was fussing beside him, trying to dab at him with a towel. He was resisting her attentions, holding a rag to his bleeding nose with one hand and clutching Nnanji’s sword in the other. His eyes were bleary with pain and he was still choking for breath, one big mess of bruises and welts and scrapes, from sweat-matted hair to feet soaked in Shonsu’s blood.

For a civilian, he’d put up quite a fight, perhaps the best fight Nnanji had ever seen. Even if Shonsu had pulped him, the sailor had managed to parry many of the strokes, and even one would have been a feat against Shonsu. He’d stayed upright, which spoke in trumpets for his toughness. Considering the punishment he had taken, it was amazing he was still on his feet now. He forced his eyes back into focus when he saw Nnanji, and the woman retreated apprehensively.

Nnanji held out a hand. “May I have my sword back please, captain?”

Tomiyano took the rag away from his face and raised the sword so that the point was almost touching Nnanji’s navel. The sailor’s arm was shaking, which was hardly surprising, and the needle point wavered before its target. “What will you do with it, sonny?”

“Sheath it, sailor.”

They continued to glare at each other for several minutes. Blood trickled from the captain’s battered nose and oozed from his scrapes. If the sailors were pirates and planning to feed Shonsu to the piranha, then now was the moment, and Nnanji would be getting his sword back point first. But it was not the first time he had been threatened with a sword, and there was nothing else to do but wait and see, so he waited. His hand was steady—it was the captain who was shaking. Other sailors were watching. This was important.

The two of them seemed to stand there for a long time, while the sailor’s breathing gradually slowed, but eventually Nnanji felt the challenge reverse itself—instead of the sailor inquiring whether he was afraid of the sword at his belly, he himself was inquiring whether the sailor was afraid to return it. Finally Tomiyano lowered it, wiped the blade with the cloth, and held it out hilt first.

Nnanji took it, sheathed it, and said, “Thank you.”

He walked away.

That had gone rather well.

The huddle around the wounded man was still there, so he headed for the deckhouse to see if the slave had got the bed ready . . . and by the door he came face to face with Honakura again. The old relic had apparently recovered from his shock—he was smiling in an irritating manner.

“Well, old man? Have you an explanation for this also?”

“Explanation is like wine, adept,” the priest said. “Too much of it in one day can be harmful.”

Damned slippery priest-talk! “It can also be like my mother’s homemade bread: very good when new, but harder to swallow as it gets older.”

The old man just shook his head, and Nnanji blurted, “Why didn’t She save him?”

“She did.”

He glanced at the watchers grouped around Brota and the stricken swordsman. “That’s saving? I saw no miracle.”

Honakura chuckled drily. “I saw two! Could you take that sort of a beating and then not finish the job?”

Nnanji thought about that. “Perhaps not. And he’d been totally humiliated in front of his crew.”

“That made it easier, though.”

“Why? Never mind. What was the second miracle, then?”

The old man cackled in his infuriating way. “I’ll let you work that out for yourself, adept.”

“I haven’t got time to play games,” Nnanji snapped. “I’ve got responsibilities.”

He marched into the deckhouse, feeling strangely annoyed by the old man’s stupid grin.

Shonsu had been bandaged and now was carried into the deckhouse and laid on a blue cotton pallet. Brota looked him over, glanced at Nnanji without speaking, then waddled out. The rest of the crew followed her.

Jja began washing blood off her master. He was unconscious and pale as . . . very pale. Nnanji took his hairclip, his harness and sword. He went over to sit on one of the chests and checked the pockets. Shonsu had told him of the sapphires, but he whistled at the sight of them and hurriedly put them in his own pouch before anyone else saw. Then he counted all his mentor’s money.
My goods are your goods
, but he was going to keep them separate. He laid his own coins on the chest for now. There was a cool breeze blowing in from the window beside him, waving his pony tail.

He removed his scabbard and replaced it with Shonsu’s and then he sat and studied the seventh sword for a while before sheathing it on his back. He wished he had a mirror—certainly no Fourth had ever worn a sword like that. Reluctantly he put the hairclip in his pouch, also.

Katanji peered in, still pale. Nnanji beckoned him over.

“How much money have you got, protégé?”

Katanji looked surprised. “Five gold, two silver, three tin, and fourteen copper, mentor.”

Where had the little scoundrel gotten that much?

“Okay. Count mine for me, will you?”

Katanji blinked, but he knelt down by the chest and counted without having to use his fingers. “Forty-three gold, nineteen silver, one tin, and six copper.”

Right. “Then take it and look after it for me,” Nnanji said.

His brother obeyed, stuffing the coins into his pouch. “They’re not going to put us ashore,” he said. “The others wanted to and Brota refused—for now. The captain’s been taken below. Is . . . is he going to live?”

“Shonsu? Of course.”

Katanji looked over doubtfully at the wounded man, then he put on what their mother called his soft-boiled look. “Nanj? They won’t speak to me when I’m wearing this sword.”

Nnanji opened his mouth to impart some truths about proper swordsman behavior . . . and remembered. “Take it off, then.”

The expression on the nipper’s face was almost laughable. So was the speed with which he wrapped himself in that stupid breechclout—as if Nnanji would change his mind. Then he tied on his money pouch and ran. But there would be time enough to turn him into a swordsman when they all got off this rotten floating barnyard.

There were two or three hours of daylight left; Nnanji decided to stay where he was. It was the best defensive position he could have found, and he could keep an eye on Shonsu. The wounded man was neither conscious nor unconscious. When spoken to he would open his eyes and seem to understand, but mostly he just lay and thrashed around restlessly, often asking for drinks, which Jja gave him through a reed. Then he would lay his head back again and close his eyes. He shivered sometimes and sweated. She did not leave him. She had laid a rolled pallet across the door to keep Vixini from straying, but the baby was behaving himself for once.

Nnanji played with Vixini a little and talked to the slave woman a little, but mostly he thought swordsmanship. This shipboard technique was very interesting: very little footwork, and then only short steps. Tremendous armwork; point, not edge. He wouldn’t give Tomiyano a fair match, even on land, but he would certainly beat Thana there—she’d never get near him. Yet obviously on the ship he was a scratcher again. A good swordsman ought to know both ways, and clearly Shonsu did.

How good was Tomiyano? Two or three ranks below Shonsu. But he had been fighting with a longer sword than he was used to. Give him a half rank for that and take one off for being on his own deck, and at least two for wielding sword against foil. The trouble was knowing how to grade Shonsu. There was no measuring Sevenths. “To be a Seventh,” Briu had liked to say, “is simply to be unbeatable.” Shonsu was the best in the World, maybe a ten?

He finally judged that Tomiyano was a high Fifth or low Sixth. And a sailor! Where had he got his practice? Perhaps from that dead brother that Thana had mentioned. If not him, then there must be others around almost as good, for it was very hard to be greatly better than one’s fencing partners.

Yes, he would learn this new way of fighting. As a start, he reviewed his match with Thana, and then Shonsu’s, carefully going over every step and every stroke.

The morning sun climbed very slowly; it seemed uncannily slow to a woman who had lived all her life in the tropics. Fair wind, and the River wide and bright. It was a fine day, she could admit; this was a better climate for one of her size. The word in Aus had been that there were no dangers in this direction, no shallows or unexpected bars. Traffic was light. Wisely, the crew were staying away from her while she ground away at her decision, so she sat alone at the tiller with no distractions.

She had slept badly and awakened no closer to a solution, although she usually found that sleeping on problems was the best way to straighten them out. The only progress her dreaming mind had made was that it had seen what was missing. It would come, she was sure, so she was just going to wait for it—for him. A good trader knew when to be patient, so she would let him make the first move.

The swordsman was still alive, and somehow she had known he would be. He seemed to understand when he was spoken to, but he would answer in grunts and nods. She had never seen so much blood come out of one body before. Even at Yok, her deck had not looked so like a slaughterhouse.

Tom’o was still sedated, and she was going to keep him that way for a while. If he had offended the gods, then he had most surely paid for it. No bones broken, thanks to the Most High, but a terrible beating. It might make him a little easier to handle for a while. He had been getting fractious, even before this torment began, and so had Thana. In fact, Thana had been growing into quite a problem. After Yok they had seemed to settle back into much the same steady, routine life as before, except that they stayed down from Hoof and never gone near Yok or Joof; those had been once-a-year destinations, anyway, for the spring crops. But no, it had not been the same. Change had been in the wind, although she had been refusing to admit it. Now they all had much more change than they could ever have wanted.

Something was going on . . . people beginning to crowd out on the main deck. She watched warily, out of the corner of her eye, not showing that she was paying attention. Then she saw the tiny figure come into view, painfully climbing the starboard steps. Here he was. This was what had been missing.

He advanced slowly, puffing a little, and smiled at her. He made no greeting and he sat himself beside her on the bench without waiting for an invitation. Only his toes touched the deck.

She glared down at the shiny skin on the top of his head. “You’ll have to move off there when I tack,” she growled—he had trapped her into speaking first.

“I shan’t be long. Have you made a decision, mistress?”

“I’ve decided I like beggars on my ship as little as swordsmen.”

His eyes were surprisingly bright for his obvious great age. “I outrank you.”

Lina had been right—he was a priest. She could tell by the way be spoke. A Sixth? For a moment she thought of telling him to prove it, then changed her mind quickly. The mood the crew was in, they’d all fall flat on their faces before him if he really was a priest of the Sixth. He would be giving the orders, instead of her.