The Prince of Shadow (21 page)

Chapter Twelve

HABIBA summoned the litter bearers and instructed them to take Bixei to the infirmary. As they left the overseer's office with their burden of objecting gladiator-in-training, a young woman with dirt streaking her nose and sweat beading at her temples squeezed past them in the doorway and bowed carelessly. Then she wrapped her arms around Habiba's neck for a quick hug. Presently she released his neck, but held onto his arm while she gave Llesho a swift glance that inventoried him down to his toes

“So you found him,” she said, and grinned.

Llesho stared at her like she'd sprouted a second head, while the color rose in his face.

“Let me introduce my daughter,” Habiba said, “Kaydu, Master Jaks. I believe you have already met our young friend.”

“Yes, indeed,” she said. “I'd put my money on his skill in a blooding fight, but in a fight to the death, I would bet on his opponent even if it was my great aunt Silla.”

As a slave, Llesho realized he shouldn't have been surprised that what seemed to be a courtesy introduction quickly turned into an analysis of his potential in the ring, but it rankled. He straightened his spine with a bit of the regal tilt to his chin he reserved for humiliating situations. Master Jaks shot him a warning glance, though, and he lowered his eyes, chastised. Until he decided for himself whether he was among friends or foes, he knew it wasn't safe to give the sharp-eyed witch and his daughter any more to study about him than they already had. But Master Jaks rolled his eyes with a slight shake of the head. Too late, then. Habiba had already seen, and had already drawn his own silent conclusions behind sharp, hooded eyes.

“You think he won't kill?” the witch asked his daughter, as if Llesho weren't even in the room.

“I can hear, and speak,” Llesho reminded them. “If you want to know something, ask me.”

“Llesho—” Jaks began with a stern frown. Habiba raised a hand to stop the teacher, and turned the blazing intensity of his scrutiny upon Llesho for a moment before the naked calculation disappeared behind a blandly polite facade. He tsked a reprimand, but did ask, “Have you ever killed a man, Llesho?”

“No, but—”

“Then you don't know how you will react when the time comes.”

“Neither does she—”

At Habiba's silent command Master Jaks had stood a little apart from the verbal skirmish, his arms crossed over his chest as if to hold in check his own worried response to the questioning, but he spoke up now. “Kaydu is right, of course. At least, he would not kill in the games—I am sure of it.”

“We don't train gladiators here, as you well know, Jaks. We need to know if he could kill in battle, or to save his life, or the life of his charge against assassins.”

Llesho would have objected again that they were still talking about him as if he weren't there, but Habiba's words robbed him of anything to say. Assassins?

“I don't think he would kill at all, for any reason, now,” Kaydu continued her assessment. “Certainly not to save his own life—he's been taught he's worthless for more than half of it. Maybe, though, to save someone else, but it might destroy him if he had to do it.”

“You haven't seen him work with a knife,” Jaks said. “He only knows one way to handle the traditional Thebin blade; I suspect he was lethal even at seven. And I'm not sure he hasn't killed before, though he certainly hasn't since he came to Pearl Island.”

“If he has, the memory is buried deep,” Kaydu said. “I saw no evidence of the knowledge of death by his hand when we fought.”

Without warning, Master Jaks reached back with his right hand and slipped a Thebin blade from a sheath at the back of his neck. He threw, his aim perfect and centered on Llesho's heart. Instinctively, Llesho adjusted his stance, and when the knife approached, he had turned his side to it and stepped out of its way. In the same motion, he plucked the knife out of the air and sent it spinning back at the thrower. Jaks was prepared for the move, but still the blade nicked him midway up his bicep before embedding itself in a wooden beam in the wall. If Jaks had not moved when he had, the knife would have pierced his heart, the same target he had aimed at himself.

He clenched the fingers of his left hand over the wound in his right arm. “Den's been working with him,” he said, “But he came to us with that and other equally deadly moves for close work in his bag of tricks. As far as I can tell, with a knife he knows
only
how to kill.”

Aghast, Llesho stared at the blood dripping from his teacher's arm. Never, in all the weeks of Den's instructions, had he ever drawn blood with the blade. He had become so secure in practice that he had stopped thinking of it as weapons training at all; he had worked the knife as a pure form, like prayer, to be perfected for its own sake. Killing was the part of being a gladiator that he hadn't taken into consideration when he'd decided to follow this course to freedom. And Master Jaks could have paid with his life for the oversight. Llesho's mind rejected the nagging insistence that Master Jaks' thrown blade might have killed him instead. The teacher had known what would happen, and still, he had put his life in Llesho's hands. And Llesho had almost taken it from him.

“I'm sorry,” he stammered, and clamped his hand over his mouth. “I am going to be sick.”

“Don't!” Kaydu took his arm and ran with him out of the overseer's office, to a corner of the house crowded with green growing things. “Now, you can go ahead—no one will see you, and you won't be the first to honor these bushes. You don't ever defile his house, though. It would take weeks to purify it again, and the time could cost us dearly.”

She spoke to him more as an equal now, and he wondered if he'd somehow won her respect under false pretenses. He hadn't killed, and even the thought of doing so left him squatting in the bushes bringing up his tonsils like a baby. But she crouched beside him and shook his arm to get his attention.

“It's nothing to be ashamed about,” she gestured with a shift of her shoulder at the bushes he had poured his graces out on, “I won't fight with a man who could come that close to killing a friend and remain unmoved.”

Llesho supposed that she meant to comfort him, but her words had the opposite effect. He had come within inches of killing Master Jaks; only the fact that the teacher
knew
he would react with a deadly counterattack had kept Jaks alive. Llesho started to shake. His teeth clicked with the spasmodic clenching of his jaw that caught his tongue and bit to the quick.

“No,” he said, rocking himself to ease the trembling while his arms wrapped his belly, which threatened to turn itself inside out again. “No, no, no, no, no.”

“Shock,” Kaydu informed him, and dragged him to his feet. He managed to follow her, putting one foot in front of the other even though he couldn't feel his arms or legs anymore. She led him to the door of the overseer's office again, but did not go in.

“He needs something hot to drink, and about ten hours of sleep,” she informed the two men inside.

“Take him, by all means, and get him settled,” Habiba said. “I'll explain his absence from the formal audience with the governor somehow.”

Master Jaks said nothing, but he lowered his eyes when Llesho caught his glance. Before he'd hidden his feelings Llesho caught regret but not apology in the teacher's eyes. From somewhere in the terrified fragments of his past, a Thebin teaching surfaced in his mind. “You can't force self-knowledge. You can only make an opportunity for the seeker to find himself.” Was that what Master Jaks had been doing with that little trick? Making an opportunity for Llesho to know himself as a killer, trained to be so from the cradle—the murderer of a friend? He did not want this knowledge, refused to embrace it as part of himself. He did not, would not, kill. Kaydu had said it, and Habiba had agreed with his daughter. Only his teacher marked him as a taker of life. Only the man who had trained him, and watched him, and knew him.

If the pond beneath the bridge they crossed had been deep enough, he would have thrown himself in and drowned. The water was shallow and reed-clogged, however; he would only succeed in humiliating himself and ruining the only clothing he had. So he followed Kaydu to a low house on short stilts with a green curled roof and paper windows propped open to the fading light. The house had one room and little furnishing: four narrow beds, four chairs, a small cooking hearth gone cold in the afternoon, and an assortment of hanging baskets with the various linens and supplies of the household.

Two of the chairs were occupied when Llesho came in. Their occupants looked up from what appeared to be a cheerful argument over mending, and let out twin squeals of surprise and joy. “Llesho!”

Lling was the first to jump up and come to him, giving him a hug before wrinkling her nose. “You need a bath.”

Hmishi followed her to crowd around him. “They said in the cookhouse today that you bested Kaydu with the trident!” he said, and Kaydu cuffed him in the head. “Because I let him,” she answered back with a laugh.

“No, she didn't.” Llesho managed a smile. “I taught her a thing or two of my own devising, and we called it a draw.”

“Actually, he won,” Kaydu contradicted, “But a little thing like victory shouldn't impress you. It was a lucky break.”

Llesho knew she was teasing, that she meant his friends to know that he had conducted himself well in the arena, but he was too tired to trade banter, and the part of his mind that was processing the afternoon in the overseer's office was demanding greater and greater amounts of his attention.

“I have to lie down,” he said. “Which beds are taken?”

“You are to have that one,” Kaydu said, and pointed to the bed farthest from the door and set away from the wall.

He nodded and shambled over to it, unbuckled his belt, and pulled his leather tunic over his head. Since he didn't know where to stow his gear yet, he dropped it on the foot of the bed and followed after it, pitching into a darkness thicker than tree sap.

 

 

When he awoke again, the light had a sweeter taste to it. Morning filtered through the fall of weeping willow branches swaying in the breeze outside the window and painted dappled shadows on the walls. Even the air smelled of renewal. And soap. Someone had washed him while he slept, and covered him with a soft blanket. Off in the center of the room he heard the shuffle of sandaled feet, and the clink of crockery, the sound of water pouring, and then the pungent vapors of tea rising on the sunlight. When he pushed himself up on his elbows, Lling was squatting next to his bed with a worried frown crinkling her brow.

“He's awake,” she called to her companion, and when Llesho croaked, “Tea, please,” she smiled and amended her news to, “and alive.”

“We wondered if you were ever going to wake up.” Hmishi handed him a steaming cup of tea, then steadied it with a supporting hand when it trembled in Llesho's fingers. He waited until Llesho had drunk, then answered the curious frown with a relieved smile. “You've slept the day around, and another night. You didn't even wake up when Habiba washed you. He's the healer around here, as well as the overseer. He told us to let you sleep, that you needed to heal, though neither Lling nor I could see anything wrong with you on the outside.”

“I figured it must be something like enchantment of the deep,” Lling said. “It takes a healer to see it because the wound is so deep that it's hidden on the inside. Habiba's been in to check on you a dozen times at least, and Kaydu, his daughter, almost as often.” Lling's voice seemed to etch the name of her rival in acid on the air.

Hmishi interrupted her then with a warning glance, and Llesho wondered if they had been told not to trouble the patient. “A man who said his name was Jaks spent a long time watching you from the corner of the room. He didn't move much or say anything once he'd introduced himself, but he waited through most of the day, and a good part of the night before he finally left.”

“I don't think he would have left at all,” Lling added, “except that we made it clear we were watching him as long as he watched you. When the moon had nearly set, he gave a funny little sigh—”

“He laughed at us!” Hmishi interrupted, remembering the indignity.

“—and he told us to get some sleep. Then he left.” Lling finished on a yawn.

“I expect he won't be gone long,” Hmishi added. “If you want to get dressed, visit the outhouse before he gets here—”

“Tell us who he is—”

“I'll help you up—”

Llesho realized that he was naked, and flinched when Hmishi reached to lift his blanket. “Lling, perhaps I could eat a fresh bun from the cookhouse.” He gave her a wan smile, and she was up, bouncing on the balls of her feet, almost before the words were out.

“I'll leave you two to make Llesho decent,” she agreed, and Llesho knew he'd hidden none of his embarrassment from her. “But first, I want to know if we have a problem with that man Jaks.”

“He's my teacher.”

Lling accepted that, though only Llesho knew how little that explanation answered her question. Jaks had his own agenda for Llesho, as, apparently, did the governor's lady and his witch. How closely that tied into Llesho's own task set for him by the ghost of his father's minister, he did not yet know.

“First, clothes.” Hmishi brought his mind back to the present, holding out a pair of loose trousers. “We each have an extra set here. These are mine, but you can borrow them until they've fitted you out. The shirt is Lling's; we thought it would fit, but your shoulders are bigger than they used to be. It looks like you'll have to settle for the trousers.”