Lace and Blade 2

by Deborah J. Ross

  By the end of that first week, Shu still didn’t have a rank, a position to put to the boy or what he did, that curious mixture of the most intimate services and the most practical. “He is my servant,” he would grunt, knowing how inadequate that was, so general it seemed both meaningless and untrue, both at once. And a betrayal, that too.

  ~o0o~

  The first time he heard someone else’s appraisal, it was one guard speaking to another: “Where’s he off to, then?”

  “Who—oh, the general’s pillow-boy?”

  “Who else?”

  “Looking for a duck, he said. For the big man’s supper. Promised me the wings if I can find him fresh mushrooms for tomorrow. Not sure I trust him, but...”

  But Shu knew for certain sure what he could expect for supper, tonight and tomorrow. And he understood a little more about his boy’s systems of supply and barter, and was impressed by how swiftly those systems had been set in place, knowing as he did a little about the subject. And he knew a lot more about how his boy was seen and spoken of.

  He wanted to be angry, but that was difficult. Shen was more, so much more than a bed-warmer—but even to Shu, what counted for more? What did he treasure more than the nights, the long slow sleepless nights? The rest of it anyone could achieve, anyone trained to cook and run errands and care for a man’s small comforts on the road. The nights, though—well, no one else could suffice for that, because no one ever had.

  Even so, Shu resented the phrase and would not countenance it. The first time one of his brother generals used it to his face, he was angry almost to the point of indiscretion. Only a lifetime’s training held his temper, schooled his face to its common neutrality, let the moment pass.

  Shen himself cared not a whit what they called him. “Body-servant,” he said, rubbing oil lingeringly over that great edifice that was Shu’s body, “pillow-boy,” adjusting the pillow beneath Shu’s head, “catamite,” dipping his head just briefly to kiss Shu’s straining cock, “what difference? They are not here, they don’t know what I am to you, or you to me. They can call me what they like.”

  “And me?” Shu managed, struggling a little for the air. “How should I call you, then?”

  A bright smile, and, “You should call me Shen. And you should call me when you want me. I am here.”

  It was inevitable, of course, that all the army knew he kept a boy. It was inevitable too—because he did not like it—that all the army would come to call Shen his pillow boy. He learned to live with it, as he learned to live with the boy: day by day, moment by raw new moment. When Shen’s physical presence was no longer startling to him, when indeed he took it almost—almost!—for granted, he could still be startled by something inside himself, an abstract of Shen, how the boy lay curled within his thoughts and deeper yet, in heart and head together.

  Day by day, the boy made his life so much easier. So many little things he no longer had to think about or order: his clothes were washed and mended; whenever he was hungry, there was food; a hundred errands a week, he only had to ask and Shen would run them. A hundred more, he didn’t have to ask. The boy anticipated with all the discreet grace of a spirit servitor, sworn and bound.

  In all the stories Shu had ever heard, true or otherwise, there was a price to be paid for such service. He had paid his own price for his demon hauliers; sometimes in the darkest reaches of the night, he would dread the day this new price fell due. And reach a heavy arm across the boy in hopes of protecting him, at least, when that day came. Hell is inexorable and debts are not forgiven, but it should not be the innocent who pay.

  ~o0o~

  Here was a message for General Ho, where he should billet tonight, where his supply-wagons would be looking for him.

  Here was a message for Captain Hao Cho, here one for Captain Lin, one for the quartermaster on the wagon-train.

  There could be a dozen such at every stop, and the boy was illiterate. But he only needed telling once, which paper was to go to whom. He would roll them into their bamboo sleeves and seal them and hand them out to the waiting messengers with never a mistake. Shu didn’t trouble to check him any more. Perfect trust: it was a rare and a wonderful gift.

  And, he was sure, must be paid for.

  Sometimes he roused in the darkness and found himself alone, which was unexpected now, new now, terrifying, wrong.

  There would be lamplight, though, beyond the bedroom screens. He would call softly, and Shen would come at once, with apologies. He had been sleepless, bitten by the night mare or roused by the wagons passing. Better to find something to do when he was wakeful, he would say, than to lie restless in the bed and risk waking his master. He had been grinding inkstone for the morning, perhaps; he was sorry if the noise of it had woken his lord, but he knew a way to make him sleep again....

  Perfect trust.

  ~o0o~

  General Ho broke the seal, unrolled the paper, read it and grunted discontentedly. He hated to lose even a day in this endless chase. Shu was right, though, Shu was always right: he was short on supplies, and the men would benefit from a rest. And be hotter on the trail thereafter, knowing that the emperor had gained a little, not enough....

  He gave his orders, then, or Shu’s orders, rather:

  “There is a dry river-bed ahead. We will drop down into that, and make our way along it to a certain point, described on this map here,” an enclosure in the bamboo. “Camp there, where the wagon-train will look to find us in the morning.”

  And meantime the troops could sleep late, comfortable on soft dry silt; and if the emperor’s rear guard had left any spies behind, the chasing army would seem to have vanished from view. They would have no idea where the rebels were, or in what numbers, or where they might reappear....

  ~o0o~

  Captain Hao Cho, Captain Lin: their orders had them marching their squads through the night, to meet up before dawn at a lakeside rendezvous.

  This lake was artificial, made by the damming of a river long ago. It supplied the headwaters for a canal now, long and straight, navigable for a hundred miles, more.

  The emperor had loaded all his supplies onto barges, Shu’s message said; these convenient waters were saving him days, saving his army the work of carrying and hauling.

  Only break the dam, the orders said, and the lake will drain itself dry. The canal will have no water, and all the emperor’s goods will be stranded in a muddy bottom, all but inaccessible, irrecoverable. Men might work for days to break it, but each captain had a magician in his train. Those two together, working with the men, they should suffice....

  ~o0o~

  The quartermaster’s orders also had him hurrying all night. Nothing unusual in that, except that the hurry was more pronounced. A hundred of his demon-cattle were needed urgently, as draft animals to clear a calamitous rockfall where the emperor’s retreating army had sabotaged the road.

  His quickest way to deliver them would be to feed them into a certain dry riverbed here—the point marked on the map enclosed—and have men drive them hard with firewhips, stampede them up. The banks were too steep to climb; the animals would have nowhere to go but exactly where they were needed, faster than they could possibly be herded....

  ~o0o~

  It was in the morning, then, when General Ho was looking out for his supplies, that instead he heard first the confused cries of his men and then a dull and rising roar.

  When he saw it, dark and thunderous, it was hard to understand: a wall that moved so fast, that engulfed so much, whatever it met it seized.

  Men tried to scramble up the banks, and fell back as the soft soil crumbled beneath their weight, and were swept up in the flood of filthy brutal water. Nothing could stem it, nothing avoid it.

  A few, a hopeful few leapt onto horses and tried to outrace it. The general was among them, for certainly he should survive this, he who had survived wars and revolutions, a dynasty and its fall.

  They might, perhaps, have been lucky, but they met another wall com
ing the other way: a wall of smoke and fire and hoof and hide, strange flesh, a black stampede.

  And hauled their horses cruelly to a halt, and turned to face the flood; and saw hopelessness and death, and turned again. And tried to charge the bank, tried to mount it by sheer force of will and spurs and fury, terror too.

  And failed, and fell back, and were consumed.

  ~o0o~

  Shu heard the news perhaps even sooner than the generalissimo himself. People needed to be told what to do and they were accustomed to have Shu tell them.

  Also, therefore, he heard the reasons for the catastrophe and deduced the causes, more or less.

  And closed his carriage door, and sat down with the boy Shen face to face, with a blade between them as the price that must be paid; and said, “It will come back to me, you know. Of course it will.” In all its ugliness and confusion, with a slow and brutal death to follow.

  “No, lord. The writing of the orders is...conspicuously not yours.”

  “To you, then. It will come back to you,” in much the same tone of voice, all doom.

  Shen was almost smiling as he shook his head. “You had a fall in the carriage here, my poor fat lord, and hurt your hand,” and the bewitching boy’s fingers took Shu’s hand and laid it out flat and open on the low table, parallel to that lethal knife; and he set his own hand on Shu’s forearm so that they sat slender wrist to fat wrist, pulse to pulse, “and all the world knows I am illiterate, no use to you at all in your work. It was a scribe wrote those orders for you, and not at all what you told him to write; he was a wicked man, suborned by a captain with a grudge. They should both have died for it, by now. Orders have been sent. Conspicuously your own orders, justice in due measure.”

  Shu shivered a little at the meticulous care of his planning, but it could still not be careful enough. “The generalissimo will have his magicians test this, they will ask questions in hell—”

  “And will learn nothing to the contrary. I have a promise. And have paid for it.”

  There was a bandage, a clotted wound on his arm. Shu said, “You told me your knife slipped, slicing bitter melons.”

  “Yes, lord. Forgive me, I lied to you.”

  Now, at last, he might allow himself the callous rush of relief, that it must be someone else and not himself—or Shen!—on the cruel scaffold. And then, overwhelmed, appalled, “What are you, boy?” Ghost, devil, what...?

  “I was,” Shen said, still careful, measuring his words, “I was my father’s youngest son.”

  And suddenly—after all these days, all these long miles of looking at him—Shu could see the widow’s lineaments picked out in his face, and knew then who his father was and how thorough this deception, how entire this revenge.

  And there was a pot of tea on the table, which the boy had freshly made; and Shu gazed at it and said, “Do I need to be careful what I drink, from your hands?”

  “No, lord. Never.”

  He believed him, immediately and completely. But one thought leads to another, one new image to one that came before. Shu said, “You had us all in the one place, around one table, on that day. You served us all. You could have killed us all.”

  “Yes, lord, but I had no poison for the tea. And you were there,” added gallantly, and perhaps a fraction late.

  “Gods,” with a shudder. And then, again, “What are you?”

  And here after all was the price to be paid, and not after all Shu who had to pay it. The boy lifted those glorious eyes and looked at him, while his slim hand stayed clamped lightly around Shu’s arm; and he said, “I am Shen, the pillow boy of my lord the general Shu. That is all I am, and all I will ever be.”

  Miss Austen’s Castle Tour

  by Sherwood Smith

  Sherwood Smith’s literary accomplishments span the galaxy of imagination from Young Adult fantasy (her Wren and Crown Duel series) to adult fantasy (most recently, her Inda series from DAW) to space opera (the Exordium series with Dave Trowbridge), science fiction (collaborations with the late Andre Norton) and media tie-in novels. Sherwood’s latest short story was “Court Ship,” published in Firebirds Rising from Penguin, and her most recent books are Treason’s Shore (DAW), A Stranger to Command (Norilana), and Trouble with Kings (Samhain).

  In between writing and teaching, Sherwood participates in the SFWA Musketeers, enjoys watching The Three Stooges, and reads the letters of Jane Austen.

  The generally accepted definition for ‘genius’ is an extraordinary intellectual power especially as manifested in creative endeavor. A simpler definition might be, one who recreates. In its turn, ‘recreation’ has its own polysemy. The irony is ingenious, I find.

  Much has been written about the mysterious gap in Jane Austen’s letters between 26-7 May, 1801, and 14 September 1804. Evidence indicates she had suffered a disappointment in love, but to protect Jane’s privacy after the latter’s death, her sister Cassandra burned all Jane’s letters during that period.

  The determined scholar glimpses her through mention in family letters beginning that autumn, and thenceforward until she reappears again in 1804. What happened during those four months? Jane’s movements are detailed in a travel diary, which Cassandra never saw.

  Here is the opening:

  As you can see, I obtained this little travel book, with the intention of writing you an extended letter. I dare not claim the vaunted pinnacle of Volumes of Travel Reminiscence. My purpose is humble. Where would I post my letters? We are not so grand as to expect a convenient diplomatic pouch, or even some lieutenant carrying dispatches, as Charles had so confidently predicted. Naval lieutenants are not to be met with everywhere—especially as we plan to travel farther in from the sea.

  What has happened, you ask? Permit me to retrace.

  In the two days after I last wrote, the Endymion arrived at Portsmouth, and Charles having got leave, posted to us at once. I can say ‘at once’ because it so occurred: it seems that the vessel carried passengers from Calais, among whom were a clergyman and his sister, Dr. and Miss Crawfurd. They offered a place in their Carriage to Charles, posting all the way to Bath, which demonstrates their good nature.

  At first Jane did not write what happened to spark that friendship, because she felt ambivalent about the cause.

  The Channel crossing was made difficult by stormy, contrary winds, which confined the passengers to the officers’ cramped wardroom. Charles Austen, one of Jane’s many brothers, happened to be off-duty. He chuckled as he read from a packet of papers; on being encouraged by one of his fellow officers to read aloud to the company, he obliged. The text was Lady Susan, and when his audience lauded the story as not only funny but quite unlike anything they had ever heard, Charles admitted with scarcely concealed pride that it had been written by his sister. The packet, containing close-written sheets of Lady Susan, First Impressions, and Elinor and Marianne, was passed among the sea-faring Austen brothers to enjoy during their off-duty moments.

  After the passengers had all disembarked and the officers were granted leave, Charles encountered the Crawfurds just as he was about to purchase a mail coach ticket. When it was discovered that they all had the same destination, the Crawfurds insisted he accompany them. No sooner had they rolled out of the inn yard than Miss Crawfurd begged Charles to while away the tedium of travel by reading more of his sister’s tales, and so he took out Jane’s most recent effort, Elinor and Marianne.

  Amid much laughter over the Dashwood family, the blue gazes of brother and sister met in triumph. Charles kept reading.

  ~o0o~

  Last night, Charles brought his Benefactors to meet us. The Crawfurds began with “genius” and “extraordinary”—all the loud compliments I hate most, because, whether it’s true or not, there is nothing one can gracefully say before strangers. But once they saw my discomfiture was real, and no fine lady bridling, they left off the Subject. That enabled me to enjoy the “We laughed out loud all the way” and “There was never a coach ride so short.”

>   The delicacy the brother and sister displayed thus had more appeal than the exaggerations about Genius. He is a gentleman-like man of stylish appearance, and his sister young and while you know I would as soon fling my pen out the window than say “as beautiful as an angel,” in this case it is very nearly true.

  Jane Austen’s code for “handsome and attractive” was “gentleman-like.” She had never been effusive. Her earliest writings made fun of gushing language. Since Tom Lefroy had so recently gone back to Ireland, leaving her waiting for the proposal that both families expected, she had become more than ordinarily cautious.

  When the Evelyns called—bringing Mr. Thomas Evelyn, who shares with his Uncle the all-consuming Love of Horses— glad was the outcry at their unexpected Encounter with the Crawfurds, which three or four years of perfect indifference had delayed from the last. Once the usual nothings were said, the Crawfurds were so witty and full of engaging conversation, we were all soon talking and laughing, even Mr. Evelyn, who on rare occasion can be transformed from a Yahoo about Horses. We discovered similar Tastes in books—Evelina delightful— Arthur Fitz-Albini dreadful—Madame de Genlis fashionable— Smollett at his best when satirizing the Great but in execrable taste—so comfortable when everyone is in agreement without expectation.

  We went from Hesperus to the continent. Miss Crawfurd, as both visitor and the prettiest woman in the room, was acknowledged the principal talker. She expressed a Desire to travel upon the Continent, to visit castles and places of antiquity. As soon as she uttered the words, the gentlemen all caught her idea.

  We were assured that everywhere there is peace, and everyone smiles: the Treaty of Luneville during winter appears to have given the Prussians Cause to put away their swords, and the negotiations beginning in London intimate that the French will trouble us no more. Charles insists that after their naval defeat at the Nile and their recent losses in Egypt, their adventures have ended.