The Reluctant Swordsman (26 page)

The afternoon wore on. He had hot water brought and took a bath, but this time without assistance. He kept an eye on Nnanji as he lunged and lunged and lunged.
 
He worked his vassal to exhaustion and made no progress at all. Finally, as the sun grew low, Wallie called a halt. Nnanji was ready to weep as he drooped on to a stool like a discarded shirt.

“You have a family in the town?” Wallie asked.

Nnanji colored and straightened up, taut and defensive. “Yes, my liege,” he said, almost snapping the words.

Now what had Wallie said? “I wondered if you might want to go and visit them this evening. I shall be busy demonstrating swordsmanship to my slave and I don’t need your help for that.”

“Thank you, my liege!” Nnanji was clearly astonished at such consideration.

“You’ll have a few things to tell them, I expect,” Wallie said and got a grin.

“And you’d better warn them that you’re leaving soon.”

But when? And how?

†

“Put on the shoes now,” Janu said, and steadied Jja’s shoulder as she did so.

Then Janu tapped on the door and led her in to her new master.
 
It had been a strange day. Jja’s head was throbbing. She was trying very hard not to tremble. Now she must also try not to break an ankle, for she had not worn shoes since she left Plo, and never shoes with heels like these. She remembered to swing her hips and smile out of the corner of her eyes as Janu had taught her. Lord Shonsu rose to welcome her.

“The cloak!” Janu said.

Jja dropped the cloak and let Lord Shonsu see her dress. It was a very strange dress, all tassels and beads and nothing else. She was quite accustomed to being unclothed in front of men. That was her duty to the temple and the Goddess, and she did it every evening, but somehow she felt more naked than just naked in this dress. She had hoped that it would please Lord Shonsu, but she knew men well enough to see the shock and displeasure in his eyes. Her heart sank.
 
A very strange day—hot bath water and perfume and being rubbed with oil; the smell of her hair being curled with hot irons; the calluses being pared from her feet; her hands shaking as she was shown how to put the paint on her eyelids and lashes and face; the little sharp pains as they made holes in her earlobes to hang the glittery pendants . . .

The other slaves had told her that Lord Shonsu was going to be reeve and they had repeated all the stories about the last reeve and the horrible things he had done to slaves. But Jja knew most of those already. They had made jokes about how big Lord Shonsu was and how rough he would be, but she knew that he was not rough. They had told her that swordsmen beat slaves with the sides of their swords. She had tried to tell them of the promise Lord Shonsu had made to her about Vixi. They had laughed and said that a promise to a slave meant nothing.
 
“Thank you, Janu!” Lord Shonsu said. He closed the door loudly. There was a wonderful odor of food in that huge room, coming from under a white cloth laid over dishes on a table. But Jja did not feel hungry. She felt sick. She wanted to please her new master, and he did not like her dress. If she did not please him, he would beat her, or sell her.

Then he was holding her hands and looking at her. She felt her face turning red and she could not meet his eyes. He must be able to feel her shaking. She tried to smile as Janu had taught her to smile.

“Don’t do that!” he said gently. “Oh, my poor Jja! What have they done to you?” Then he hugged her, and she began to sob. When at last she could stop weeping, he fetched the cloth from the table and wiped the rest of the paint off her face, and off his shoulder, too.

“Did you choose that dress?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“What sort of dress would you like to be wearing?” he asked. “You describe it to me, and I’ll imagine it.”

Between sniffles she said, “Blue silk, master. A long gown. Cut low in the front.”

He smiled. “That was what I said in the cottage, wasn’t it? I’d forgotten. I said you would look like a goddess. What did Janu say to that?” Janu had said that slaves did not wear silk, or blue, and that long dresses were not sexy.

“They can be!” her master said firmly. “We’ll show them! Now, take off those horrid things and put this on.” He gave her the white cloth from the table, then turned away while she removed all the tassels and beads and glitter and wrapped herself in it.

“That’s much better!” he said. “You are a gorgeously beautiful woman, Jja. The most beautiful and exciting woman I have ever met. You do not need vulgar clothes like that . . . that obscenity. Now, come and sit down.” He gave her wine to drink, and then later he wanted her to sit with him at the table and eat. He would not let her serve him. She forced herself to eat, but she still felt sick and wondered if that was because her own body smelled so strongly of musk and flower petals. He asked questions. She tried to talk. The pilgrims had never wanted talk, and she was not good at it.
 
She told him about faraway Plo and how it was so cold there in the winter that even the children wore clothes. He seemed to believe her, although no one else in Hann did. She told him what little she could remember of her mother—she knew nothing about her father except that obviously he had been a slave also. She told him about the slave farm where she had been reared. She had to explain about slave farms buying baby slaves to train. Talking to him was very difficult, and she knew she was doing it very badly.
 
“And I was bought by a man from Fex,” she told him. “And when we went on the boat, we came to Hann, and the sailors said my master was a Jonah, but he said that I was the Jonah, because he’d been on boats before. He came to ask the Goddess to return him and he gave me to the temple as an offering.” Lord Shonsu looked puzzled, although he was trying not to, and she knew that she was a terrible failure.

Then at last, to her great relief, Lord Shonsu asked her if she would like to go to bed. She could not please him with talk, or with her new dress, but she knew how to please men in bed.

Except that even that did not seem to work properly. He would not let her do some of the things she had thought he would enjoy, things that pilgrims had demanded. She tried as hard as she could. He reacted as men always did, but she had a strange feeling that it was only his body reacting, that he himself was not pleased, as though his joy did not go very deep. And the harder she tried, the worse it seemed to get.

In the morning, as she was putting the cloak around herself, he said, “Didn’t you tell me that sewing was one of the things you were taught in that slave farm?”

She nodded. “Yes, master.”

He climbed out of the great bed and came over to her. “If we bought some material, could you sew a dress?”

He had already spent so much money on her, and she had not pleased him . . .

Without taking time to think she said, “I can try, master.”

He smiled. “Then why not try? Will the others help you if it is what I want?”

“I think so.” She dropped the cloak. “Show me,” she said bravely.
 
He grinned his little-boy grin and showed her—tight here and lifting her breasts like that and loose there and tight again down here and cut open all the way down here . . . “Why not a slit up here?” he suggested. “Closed when you stand, but when you walk it will show this beautiful thigh?” Suddenly she shivered all over at his touch and discovered that she was returning his smiles. He put his arms around her and kissed her gently. “Tonight we’ll try again,” he said. “No face paint and just a tiny drop of scent, all right? I’ll tell Janu that’s how I like my women served up—raw! I prefer you the way you are now, but any dress you make will be better than that thing.”

Just when Wallie thought he was starting to make progress, there on a bed in the outer room was Nnanji, with two black eyes, several loose teeth, and a wide selection of pains and bruises. His new yellow kilt lay rumpled and bloodstained on the floor.

“Stay right there!” Wallie ordered as his vassal attempted to rise. “Jja, go and ask Janu to send up a healer.” He pulled a stool over to the bed and sat down and glared at the wreck of Nnanji’s face. “Who did it?” The culprits were Gorramini and Ghaniri, two of the three who had beaten up Wallie for Hardduju’s amusement. Wallie had thought them gone, but not so. Meliu had left after being snubbed, but the other two were still around, carefully staying out of the Seventh’s way. Nnanji had returned from his parents’ house and dropped in on the barracks saloon, probably to do a little flaunting and vaunting. Swords were prohibited in the saloon, but fist fights were not, and perhaps even encouraged as a safety valve.

“Well, that does it!” Wallie roared. “I owe them anyway, and now they have broken the laws of hospitality.”

“You will challenge?” Nnanji asked nervously, licking his swollen lips.
 
“Challenge, hell!” his mentor said, almost ready to start grinding his teeth again. “That’s an abomination! I shall denounce them and cut off their thumbs .
 
. . I assume that they threw the first punch?”

Well, no . . . Nnanji had thrown the first punch.
 
One of the things Wallie had learned in his disastrous night with Jja was that Shonsu’s vocabulary was greatly lacking in terms of endearment. He now discovered that it was rich in oaths, insults, obscenities, and vituperation. He told Nnanji what sort of idiot he was in sixteen carefully selected paraphrases, without repeating a word. Nnanji somehow managed to cringe while lying flat on his back.

“Well, two against one is still bad,” Wallie concluded, and then looked suspiciously at his battered liegeman. “It was two against one?” Well, not exactly. Ghaniri had insulted Nnanji. Nnanji had punched him and then been well punished for it. Ghaniri was a powerful fighter, as Wallie already knew—shorter than Nnanji, but much wider and heavier, with the crumpled nose and puffed ears of a bruiser. Then, when Nnanji had managed to get back on his feet again, Gorramini had repeated the insult, and Nnanji had tried to swing at him—and suffered an even larger disaster.

Now Wallie was too furious and astounded even to swear. “So instead of denouncing them, I have to go downstairs and crawl on my belly and apologize to Tarru for you? But what in the World could they have said to you that would make you behave so stupidly?” he demanded. “What insult is worth two beatings in a row?”

Nnanji turned his face away.

“Tell me, vassal. I order it!” Wallie snapped, suddenly very intrigued.
 
Nnanji turned his head back and looked up, grief-stricken. Then he closed his right eye and pointed at his eyelid, repeated the gesture with his left eye, and after that just stared in total misery at Wallie, who did not understand at all.
 
“I said ‘tell me!’ In words!” he said.

For a moment he thought his vassal would refuse, but he swallowed hard, and then whispered, “My father is a rugmaker and my mother a silversmith.” He might have been confessing to incest or drug trafficking.

Fathermarks? Jja had mentioned fathermarks, and Wallie had not dared to ask her what they were. The god’s riddle: First your brother . . . Wallie was instantly frantic to run to the mirror and inspect his eyelids—who ever looks at his own eyelids?

“So?” Wallie said. “They are honest? Hard-working? Kind to their children?” Nnanji nodded. “Then honor them! What does it matter what craft your father belongs to, if he is a good man?” The culture gap was staggering. Wallie opened his mouth to say that his father had been a policeman—and stopped just in time.
 
In his mind he heard the shrill laugh of the demigod when he had made that statement to him. That might mean that the god had foreseen this very conversation, for policeman would translate as swordsman, so Wallie must not tell Nnanji.

However, Wallie Smith’s father’s father had dabbled in a great many fields in the course of a dubious career, including a couple of years in a carpet factory.
 
“It’s an odd coincidence, though, Nnanji—my grandfather was a rugmaker, too.” Nnanji gasped. If hero worship were measured on the Richter scale, then Wallie had just registered nine and a half or ten.

“What does it matter, though? It’s you who’s my vassal, not your father. He obviously does a good job of making sons. Except for brains, of course, you witless cretin!”

At that moment a healer came bustling in. While he was examining the patient, Wallie slipped back into the main guest room and hobbled as fast as he could across to the mirror. Both his eyelids were blank. So much for that idea.
 
As he walked back, he thought about Nnanji. This absurd sensitivity about his nonswordsman background would explain his exaggerated ideals of honor and courage; overcompensation, although there was no such term in the World.
 
Obviously a little psychiatry was required. If a hundred-kilogram, smooth-faced hunk of muscle could manage to imitate a cultured, bearded, Viennese doctor, it was time for Sigmund Freud. So, once the healer had reassured the valorous lord that there was no serious damage to his protégé, had accepted his fee, and departed, Wallie told the victim to continue lying where he was and perched himself back on the stool by the bed.

“Let’s have a word about your fencing problem,” he said. “When did it start?

Have you always had it?”