The Reluctant Swordsman (36 page)

“So?” Briu demanded. “If you had done something and called for help, do you think the rest of us would have stood idly by? We wanted leadership! We wanted our honor back! None of us was perfect, but . . . ” He paused, and then looked down at the table. “There was one. If the rest of us had been half as honorable as he, we would have mutinied years ago.”

Wallie’s excuse would never pass a swordsman—he had been trying to prevent bloodshed. He had spared Tarru, one man. When Nnanji had mentioned the stables, he had recoiled from the thought of killing three men. Yet every delay had raised the price. If somehow he could escape now, then the cost in lives must be much higher.

Before he could speak, Briu looked up again, redfaced and glaring. “Even this morning! Gorramini was betrayed! Yet you did nothing!” “I am doing something now,” Wallie said firmly.

Briu looked again at the slave costume and spat.
 
Shonsu’s temper flamed. Wallie suppressed it with difficulty. “You have a priest here, and I am going to take him. Then I am leaving.” How? “The Goddess will attend to the honor of Her guard. It was not the task She gave me.” Briu shrugged and went back to brooding over his hands on the table.

“Why did you swear the third oath to Tarru?” Nnanji asked again.
 
“My wife had just given birth to twin sons, adept,” Briu said. “She needs to eat, and so do they. When you are older, you will understand.” Swordsmen were addicted to fearsome oaths, but they were human.
 
“Briu,” Wallie said, “my story is too long to explain here. But I admit my error. If I get a chance to correct it, then I shall. I do have a task for the Goddess. I need honest men to help. Is your wife well enough to travel?” Shonsu, Nnanji, Katanji, plus Briu and his family . . . seven, if one did not count slaves.

“No, my lord. And neither am I.”

Wallie told Katanji to take the men’s swords.

The new roof made the jail hotter than ever, and smellier. His head swam as soon as he went in, and he wondered how long a frail old man like Honakura could survive in it. There were four prisoners there, all tethered by one ankle only, but Wallie was too bitter now to feel satisfaction at that small improvement. He headed over to one tiny, shriveled form.

Honakura cackled with amusement when he saw his rescuer. Then he slipped his tiny foot out of the stocks and accepted assistance to stand up.
 
Wallie pulled a black cloth from his padded bosom.
 
“You will be a Nameless One, my lord. There is a headband in the pocket. Better dress upstairs, it is cooler.”

Still chuckling, Honakura tottered toward the steps. Wallie made the slaves pin the swordsmen in the stocks, and then pinned the slaves as well.
 
“Good-bye, adept,” he said to Briu. “We are none of us perfect.”

Briu sighed. “No. And I suppose we must keep trying to do better.” Wallie held out a hand. After a pause, Briu took it. “I do hope some man tries to rape you on your journey, my lord.”

Still laughing at that unexpected humor, Wallie went back up to the guard room.
 
He handed Katanji back his sword and then had to help him put it in his scabbard. Honakura had dressed himself in the black garment, and Nnanji was tying the headband on for him.

“We are in serious trouble, my . . . old man,” Wallie said. “How we are going to get out of it, I don’t know. But we had better get back to the barracks as soon as we can.”

“The barracks?” Honakura said innocently. “Why not out into the town?” “And how do you propose . . . ” Wallie began, then glared at him. “Hell’s knuckles! There is a back door, I suppose?”

“Of course,” Honakura said. “Did you think the priests would not have a back door? You never asked me.”

He cackled in shrill glee.

††

Once away from the jail they rearranged themselves, putting the two swordsmen in front and the two black robes behind. Honakura stumbled along, holding up his too-long gown and hurrying as much as he could. Wallie was not much more agile himself, his half-healed feet starting to chafe at the slave sandals he wore.
 
And a slow pace was advisable anyway; it was too hot to rush. The few people they passed paid no attention to them.

The old man directed Nnanji in asthmatic gasps. They traveled downstream almost to the end of the grounds, then along a wooded trail close to the great wail.
 
“We shall need a shovel, I suspect,” he wheezed at one point, and the gods directed them past a deserted wheelbarrow of tools. Wallie had only to take two steps out of his way to collect a shovel. Then the priest said, “Is it all clear?” and they turned into the bushes.

Well hidden in the undergrowth, an ancient and weathered dovecote stood hard against the perimeter wall, its stones lichen-coated and half-rotted with age.
 
The door was small and decrepit. It yielded easily to Wallie’s shoulder, and a great explosion of wings sounded inside.

The interior was gloomy and dark, rank and filthy. Thick piles of guano on the floor crawled with beetles. Curtains of spiderwebs shone in the light filtering through a hole in the roof. Surprised white birds peered down from the pigeonholes that lined the upper walls.

“Unless we were seen,” Wallie said, “we are safe here. Obviously no one has been in here for years.”

“For generations!” Honakura retorted. “I only hope that the route is still open.

It probably has not been used for centuries. Perhaps never before.” He sneezed.

“The other end may be bricked up.”

“Cheerful!” Wallie said. “I think Katanji should go for the others, don’t you, Nnanji?”

Nnanji, still gloomy, nodded.

“We need someone to close up behind us,” said the priest.
 
“Then bring Jja, Cowie, and Ani,” Wallie ordered. The boy grinned and headed for the door. “Walk slowly! If anyone asks, you’re Adept Briu’s new protégé, on an errand for him . . . you can refuse to discuss what it is. And bring my boots!” Katanji departed.

Honakura chuckled. “And who might Cowie be?”

“I suppose she’s number six,” Wallie said in a growl, looking around the fetid obscenity of the dovecote. “Nnanji bought a slave.” “And I make seven.”

Wallie turned to him in disbelief. “You? With respect, holy one, it will kill you!”

“I expect so,” Honakura said calmly, “if by that you mean that I shall never return. It may also kill you, young man, and you have a great deal more to lose than I have. Moreover, you have a good chance of returning.” “What do you mean?”

“You have to return the sword, remember? I don’t know what that means any more than you do. But it could mean that you have to bring it back to where you got it.”

The doves purred disapprovingly while Wallie pondered the idea of a man of incredible age, accustomed to luxury and easy living, setting out on an unknown mission of hardship and danger. “I don’t want to take you.” The priest snorted and then sneezed several times again. “Ever since you gave me the god’s message, I knew I would be coming. Don’t you think I shall be useful?” There was no answer to that. “I still think that you should stay,” Wallie said, as gently as he could. He had grown to like the old man and wanted to spare him.
 
“If I don’t come then I shall be sent to the Judgment! Of course I am coming.
 
Seven it is! Now, the exit was said to be in the corner farthest from the temple, so I suppose that one.”

Wallie scowled at the heaps of guano and handed the shovel to Nnanji. Nnanji had recovered slightly from his sulks, becoming interested in the adventure side of secret passages. He, also, pouted at the filth for a moment. Then he removed his new orange kilt and handed it to Wallie. He started to dig, immediately raising foul clouds of putrid dust. Wallie and the priest beat a cowardly retreat out to the fresh air. They stood in the bushes, talking in whispers.
 
“How many priests are aware of this?” Wallie asked.
 
Honakura shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “There are chains. I was told many, many years ago. When my informant died, I told another. But the first man I approached already knew.”

Simple, but it had worked for unknown centuries. Wallie should have guessed that the priests would have an escape route unknown to the swordsmen. There might even be more than one.

Then he asked why the old man had been thrown in jail. The answer confirmed what the demigod had told him—he could not understand temple politics. Part of the problem seemed to be that Honakura, planning to depart with Wallie, had surrendered too much power too quickly. There had also been much conspiring about the Swordsmen’s Day festival. Honakura had been trying to introduce an affirmation that Wallie’s task was the will of the Goddess, thereby ensnaring all the swordsmen present into accepting that. As the will of the Goddess was paramount, in effect he would have negated Tarru’s third oath. Nice try, Wallie thought, but he doubted that swordsmen would have taken such direction from mere priests. Whether Tarru had been involved in his downfall, Honakura did not know.
 
He did not say so, but Wallie wondered if he himself might have been partly to blame. In the Byzantine power dealings of the priesthood, Honakura must have gambled a large part of his influence and reputation on this cryptic swordsman, who had then neglected to clean up the temple guard. Wallie had failed his supporters among the priests as well as the honest swordsmen.
 
Where was Katanji? Wallie began to fret as time crawled by. He was putting incredible responsibility on an untested boy.

Stooping through the doorway came Nnanji like the Spirit of Plague, thickly coated in gray dust, striped with brown sweat streaks. His eyes were red and streaming. “Trapdoor,” he said between coughs. “Can’t move it.” Wallie went in and climbed over the heaps of filth to the clearing Nnanji had made. He found a stone manhole cover with a bronze ring, badly corroded by the nitrates in the guano. He took a firm grip and heaved until his joints creaked.
 
For a moment he thought that even he would not be able to move it, but then it crunched loose and tilted up quite easily on a pivot. He scowled down into darkness, wishing he had told Katanji to bring a light. He went back out into daylight to give time for any bad gases down there to dissipate.
 
The three men sat on the ground in worried silence. Katanji was quite credible unless he ran into Tarru himself, or unless Briu had been discovered and had told his tale. A new First was believable, Wallie told himself firmly, and then wished that he had warned Katanji to keep his eyes open. Two rugmakers’ sons would certainly be too many.

“If there is another trapdoor at the other end, then there may be a house on it by now,” Nnanji suggested gloomily.

“We shall find a staircase within the wall leading upward to a dead end,” Wallie said, “with another trap in the floor, down to an alcove on the outside.” The priest peered at him. “How do you know?”

Wallie smiled smugly. “I shall tell you that if you tell me how you knew Katanji had black hair.” He got no reply. He was guessing, analyzing the design problem.
 
This was a one-way escape route. Traps were the most secure and reliable seals.
 
The demigod had told him that the town burned down every fifty years or so, and he had seen how the buildings went right up to the walls. An alcove would be a useful closet space, and so would be incorporated into each reconstruction.
 
Anything else might end behind a wall or under a floor.
 
A party of gardener slaves sauntered along the path, and the watchers stayed silent. Then a meditating priest went by, mumbling sutras to himself.
 
At last Katanji and the others arrived, and Wallie realized just how tense he had become. He welcomed Jja and Vixini with a hug. Cowie looked bewildered when Nnanji put an arm around her. Obviously she was not quite sure who he was. Did not her new owner have red hair?

Ani chuckled as she reported that Honorable Tarru was ready to die of apoplexy, so incensed was he by the disappearance of the fugitives and the lackadaisical performance of his vassals. He had scoured the whole barracks and the main public buildings, and was now about to begin a search of the grounds.
 
Janghiuki’s body would turn up soon, then. And then the guard would be after Wallie in earnest, screaming for vengeance on the recreant.
 
Ani had brought flint, steel, and tapers.

“What made you do that?” Wallie demanded, delighted.

“The scratcher said to, my lord.”

Wallie looked at Katanji’s twinkling eyes in astonishment and congratulated him, admitting to himself that the Goddess had chosen his companions better than he could have done.

With Nnanji left outside as guard, the others crept into the dovecote and inspected the passage. The taper burned confidently when Wallie lowered it into the hole, so the air was fresh. Katanji was hopping up and down with excitement and he had earned the reward—Wallie sent him in to explore.
 
He returned in about five minutes.

“There is a staircase, my lord . . . ”

Wallie returned Honakura’s admiring gaze with much satisfaction.
 
The passage was very cramped for Wallie. Centuries of ants and other insects had fouled it horribly; fortunately there seemed to be no scorpions.
 
At the top of the steps was the tiny chamber he had predicted. He could not stand up straight in it, but again his strength was needed to lift the trap in the floor. He had counted the steps and could guess that the underlying alcove must be very low, probably about the size of a dog kennel. He hoped it was not being used for that purpose. Awkwardly, bumping against the walls, he gripped the bronze ring and heaved. Dim light flooded up around him.
 
He dropped to his knees to put his head through the hole and see where he was.