The Reluctant Swordsman (10 page)

“That seems to have been the problem in the first place.” Wallie sighed, and explained. He was trying to remember the argument that had taken place after he had been dragged from the nave of the temple into a back room, with Hardduju claiming the imposter as a slave, Honakura insisting that he was a blasphemer, and others—priests, he thought—talking demons. He had gained the impression that there had been a power struggle going on over his gasping, retching self. He tried to explain that also.

The healer seized on this as an important piece of temple gossip. If the holy Honakura’s exorcism had failed, then the old man had been repudiated by the Goddess and had lost face. It might signify an important shift in influence, he said.

Great again.

“Well, at least they didn’t try to call in a healer,” Innulari said. “I know that I would not take your case, with respect, my lord.” “Why not?” Wallie asked, curious in spite of his pains.
 
“Because the prognosis is discouraging, of course.” He waved a plump hand at the skeleton roof above them and the slimy walls. “That was what brought me here: I refused a case, but the family had money and kept raising the offer. Finally I got greedy, may She forgive me!”

Gingerly Wallie turned his head. “You mean a healer who loses a patient goes to jail?”

“If the relatives have influence.” Innulari sighed. “I was avaricious. But it was my wife’s idea, so she must cope now as best she can.” “How long are you in for, then?”

The fat little man shivered in spite of the steamy heat. “Oh, I expect to go tomorrow. I’ve been here three days. The temple court usually decides faster than that.”

Go where? To the Judgment, of course. Wallie levered himself up once more and looked at the line of naked men. Not a beautiful virgin among them. Not human sacrifices, then, but executions. Those had been criminals he had seen thrown into the falls, had they? Mostly, the healer said. Or slaves no longer useful, of course. And sometimes citizens went voluntarily to the Goddess—the very sick or the old.

“How many return alive?” Wallie asked thoughtfully.
 
“About one in fifty, I suppose,” the healer said. “Once every two or three weeks. Most She chastises severely.”

Further questions established that the chastisement consisted of being battered and maimed on the rocks—it was very rare indeed for anyone to return unscathed.
 
Nevertheless, the healer seemed quite cheerful about his prospects, convinced that his lapse into avarice was a minor sin that his Goddess would forgive.
 
Wallie could not decide if the little man was putting up a brave front or really had such faith. It seemed like a very long shot to Wallie.
 
Later in the day, a young slave was brought in and pinned under the next slab.
 
He regarded Wallie’s facemarks with dread and would not speak. Wallie eventually decided that he was a congenital idiot.

The day dragged on in pain and heat and ever increasing stink, as the inmates fouled themselves and the sun turned the damp cell into a sauna. The pudgy Innulari chattered aimlessly, thrilled at meeting a Seventh, insistent on recounting his life story and describing his children. Eventually he returned to the subject of the temple court. The accused person did not appear before it—he thought that an extraordinary idea—and usually learned of the verdict only when he was taken away to execution. Acquittals did happen, he admitted.
 
“Of course you can hardly expect one in your case, my lord,” he said, “because several of the members of the court, like the most holy Honakura, were present to witness your crime.” He paused and then added thoughtfully, “It will be interesting to hear the decision, though: demon, imposter, or blasphemer?” “I can hardly wait,” Wallie said. Yet had he a choice, he would go for another exorcism—if they had exorcised him into this madhouse, perhaps they could exorcise him out. But a little later he learned from some remark of Innulari’s that a second exorcism was very unlikely. Obstinate demons were usually referred to the Goddess.

A woman was brought in by the guards. She stripped and sat down obediently, and was pinned in the stocks next to the slack-jawed slave boy. She was middle-aged, graying, flabby, and loose-skinned, but the boy twisted round to stare at her and remained in that position for the rest of the day.
 
That certainly was not Wallie’s problem—maybe never again. He pondered further about the sample of hell that the little boy had mentioned. Had that been a threat, a prophecy, or a lucky guess? If heaven was to be defined crudely as sexual ecstasy in a man’s groin, then his hell had started appropriately with unbearable agony in the same place.

First postulate: All this pain was real. Sex he might fantasize, but not this.

Corollary: This world was real.

There were, he concluded, three possible explanations. The first was Wallie Smith’s encephalitis, meaning that the World was all delirium. Somehow that was seeming less and less convincing as time went on.
 
A second was Shonsu’s head injury—he was Shonsu, and Wallie Smith was the illusion. He lay on the hard wet stone and pondered that idea for a long time, with his swollen eyes shut against the sun’s glare. He could not convince himself. Wallie Smith’s life was too detailed in his memory. He could remember thousands of technical terms, for example, although when he tried to pronounce them he produced nothing but grunts. He could remember his childhood and his friends and his education. Politics. Music. Sports. Earth refused to die for him.

That left the third explanation: both worlds were real—and he was in the wrong one.

Sunset arrived, and a sudden rattling noise from the grille at one end of the cell.

“Clean-out time!” Innulari announced, sounding pleased. “And that drink you wanted, my lord.”

Water began to flow along the cell, surging rapidly deeper. It had passed five men by the time it reached Wallie, and its filth made him retch—with agonizing consequences for his bruised abdominal muscles—but soon it ran deeper and relatively clean and gratifyingly cool. The inmates lay back in it and splashed and laughed . . . and drank. The twice daily clean-out was the only water he would get in the jail, Innulari assured him.

The court sentences you to a week’s amoebic dysentery and two weeks’ probationary septicemia. It will try your case shortly.
 
When the water had drained through the other grille, the evening meal was passed along in a basket—leftovers, mostly moldy fruit with a few stale crusts and scraps of meat that Wallie would not have touched even if his teeth had felt firm in his head. Anything better had gone before the basket reached him. A week in this cell would be a death sentence.

Then the sun vanished with tropical swiftness; the cello chorus of the flies yielded to massed violins from the mosquitoes. Innulari’s determined optimism seemed to fade also, and he began to brood. Wallie steered him around to the details of his faith and heard the same simple reincarnation belief that he had heard from the slave girl.

“Surely it is evident?” asked the healer, sounding as if he were trying to convince himself as much as Wallie. “The River is the Goddess. As the River flows from city to city, so our souls flow from life to life.” Wallie was skeptical. “You can’t remember previous lives, can you? What is a soul, then, if it is not your mind?”

“Quite different,” the little man insisted. “The cities are lives and the River is the soul. It is an allegory to guide us. Or like beads on a string.” “Oh, hell!” Wallie said quietly. He fell silent. You could not move a city on a river, but you could untie a string, move beads around, and then retie the string.

The light faded and the incredible beauty of the rings filled the sky above him, thin ribbons of silver that would make a mere moon seem as uninspiring as a light bulb. He thought of the glory of the waterfall they called the Judgment.
 
This was a very beautiful world.

Even without the pains of his injuries he could have slept little. Leg cramps were common to all the inmates; there were more groans than snores in the jail.
 
The ring system, which the slave woman had called the Dream God, made a good timepiece. The dark gap that marked the shadow of the planet rose in the east soon after sunset and moved across the sky. At midnight he saw it mark off two exactly equal arcs, and he saw it fade at dawn.
 
Another day came, and he had not yet awakened to reality.

††

Morning dawned fair, promising to be as hot as the day before. The healer Innulari seemed disappointed and eventually confessed that on very rainy days, when the Goddess could not see the Judgment, there were no executions.
 
Clean-out came and went. The inmates fretted in uneasy quiet, whispering nervously.

Then two priests, three swordsmen, four slaves came clattering down the stairs, pulling faces at the stench.

“Innulari, healer of the Fifth, for negligence . . . ”

“Kinaragu, carpenter of the Third, for theft . . . ”

“Narrin, slave, for recalcitrance.”

As a priest called each name, a swordsman pointed. Slaves levered up the block and pulled out the victim. Each screamed at the pain when his stiffened legs were bent, each in turn was dragged away. Thus Wallie’s immediate neighbors and another man farther along the line were taken away for execution, and the Death Squad departed. Then the fruit basket was passed again.
 
Wallie realized that he was going to miss the talkative Innulari. An hour or two later he heard the bell tolling. He wondered if he should say a prayer to the healer’s goddess for him, but he did not.

In the middle of the morning, another five men were brought in. Although there was space beyond for many more, the place seemed suddenly crowded. Wallie acquired two new neighbors, who were delighted to see a swordsman of the Seventh in jail. They jeered at him and replied with obscenities when he tried to make conversation. He was exhausted by pain and lack of sleep, but if he seemed to nod off they would reach over and punch him from spite.

There was a sudden quiet. Wallie had perhaps been dozing, for he looked up to see the reeve regarding him with satisfied contempt from the safe side of the wall of slabs. He was holding a bamboo rod in both hands, flexing it thoughtfully, and there was no doubt as to his intended victim. Wallie’s first decision was that he must show no fear. That would not be difficult, for his face was so swollen that probably no expression at all could show on it. Should he attempt to explain or should he remain silent? He was still debating that when the questioning began.

“What is the first sutra?” Hardduju demanded.

Before he could say more, the reeve slashed the bamboo across the sole of Wallie’s left foot. It was bad . . . the pain itself, as well as the reflex that jerked the top of his foot against the stone and skinned his ankle. Hardduju studied his reaction carefully and seemed to approve of it.
 
“What is the second sutra?” That was the right foot.
 
Back to the left foot for the third sutra. How many could there be? After the sixth sutra, though, the sadist stopped asking and just continued beating, watching Wallie’s agony with a growing smile and obvious excitement, his face becoming red and shiny. He switched from one foot to the other at random and sometimes faked a stroke to see the foot yank back against the stone in anticipation.

Wallie tried to explain and was given no hearing. He tried remaining silent until blood from his bitten tongue filled his mouth. He tried screaming. He tried begging. He wept.

He must have fainted, for he had no clear memory of the monster’s departure. He probably went into shock, too, because the rest of the day was a confusion—a long, shivery, disjointed hell. Perhaps it was good that he could not see his ruined feet lying in the furnace beyond the stone slab. The sun moved, the shadows of the lattice roof crawled over him, and the flies came to inspect his wounds. But his neighbors punched and jeered no more.

The evening basket had been passed down the line, and he had sent it on without eating or caring. The sun had set. The sky was rapidly growing dim when Wallie felt himself snap out of his shocked lethargy. He heaved himself up to a sitting position and glanced around. All the other inmates seemed to have become curiously listless and were lying down in silence. The slimy room was hushed, steaming from its latest inundation, shadowy in the fading light.
 
The little brown boy was leaning against the slab that held Wallie’s ankles, watching him. He was still naked, still as skinny as a bundle of sticks, still holding a leafy twig in one hand. His face was expressionless.
 
“Well, does it matter?” he asked.

“Yes, it does,” Wallie said. Those were the first words he had spoken since Hardduju departed. His feet were balls of screaming agony that drowned out all the other pains and bruises.

The little boy did not speak for a while, studying the prisoner, but eventually he said, “The temple court is in session, Mr. Smith, considering your case. What verdict will you have it reach?”

“Me?” Wallie said. “How can I influence its verdict?” He felt drained of all emotion, too battered even to feel resentment.

The boy raised an eyebrow. “All this is happening inside your head—it is all your illusion. You said so. Can’t you dictate the verdict?” “I don’t think that I can influence the temple court,” Wallie said, “ . . . but I think that you could.”