The Paladin

by C. J. Cherryh

  He had been in worse situations, even granted they set the woods afire; but he had hard shift to remember any more embarrassing, trapped as he was by a sixteen-year-old farm-girl. While the sun came up he fought the urge to sleep, trying to think whether there was any possibility he had overlooked, anything an enemy might do; and what approaches bandit allies or Ghita's men might have used and where they might set an ambush.

  But at last, with the daylight enough to show the green in the trees and dispel the shadows around the stable, he got up, gave Jiro a bucket of grain and dipped up stale water from the rain barrel outside, with frequent glances toward the woods and the constant feeling that there might be another arrow aimed at him.

  Jiro wanted out of his stall, and kicked at the boards, impatient at being penned up on a fine clear morning.

  "I know," he said to the horse, and talked to him, reasonably, patting his neck. "Patience. Patience."

  None so easy, he thought to himself. He did not think that the girl had left. He felt exposed the whole while he walked up to the cabin, limping in the morning chill—walked, being a fool, because he had felt the fool all night long and he was not going to run now, reckoning by daylight that he knew the cast that bow could make: it was dangerous, but it lacked just a little of sufficient force at any range she could get from inside the forest. If there was anyone with her, they had made no move when they had had the best chance, in the dark, so he reckoned by now that it was not a case of bandits: waiting till daylight when they had had the dark was certainly not their preference; and it would not be the choice of Ghita's assassins, either.

  No, likely it was one girl, who was out there being a fool and who had given him a sore hip and an aching shoulder this morning.

  It was one girl who was perhaps crazed enough or mad enough to take chances; but with that bow she had to get closer.

  Unless she had gotten into the cabin.

  He walked up from the side of the porch, walked as far as the door and spun suddenly around the side of the door-frame and into the single room.

  Empty. Nothing seemed disturbed. He leaned against the wall and stood there taking account of things, whether anything was missing or in any way disturbed; and thought of poisons, and his foodstuffs on which he had once, years ago, kept protective seals; and he wondered what mischief a madwoman could bring in a basket that large.

  Damn, no. He was attributing to a sixteen-year-old girl the things that a cannier enemy might do. He was fighting himself, that was the ghost he had conjured up last night. He was fighting Saukendar, not a peasant girl with a pitiable mad notion of getting her way out of him.

  He stirred up the coals in the little cookpit, got a small fire going, between keeping an eye to the outside, and put a little rice and water in a pot. He had his breakfast sitting in the doorway where he could watch the whole clearing, particularly the stable, figuring that the smell of cooking-smoke and breakfast might bring the girl out into the open. He had a sincere hope that she might be more reasonable by daylight, when everything else was sane.

  But she did not come.

  He put away his bowl and thought then what he was to do, and where she might have spent the night and where she might be now. Watching from the edge of the woods, he thought, and for the first time in years he assembled his silk and steel armor from the oiled quilts where he kept it, put on the sleeves and his armor-robe and laced the body-armor about him.

  It settled to his frame with the assertion of old, unwelcome patterns, a ridiculous precaution, he told himself. The girl who was probably hiding in the brush in clear sight of the cabin, would laugh when she saw him, dammit, but he had no wish to die at the hands of a madwoman, or by some stupid girl's blind luck.

  He put on his sword; and walked outside, and sat down on the steps of the porch, dourly surveying his kingdom, the clear ground around about the cabin and the stable. For the first time since he had come to the mountain he found himself hampered and hemmed about by what someone else intended: he would have gone hunting; and he dared not leave the house and the stable unwatched; he would have gone out riding, but he would not expose Jiro to the girl's arrows. That left working the garden, in a stone-weight of armor; or sitting and mending his tack or doing leatherwork, the likelier.

  No, damn it, there was no way that could go on for days and weeks. She might not have moved last night, but he was sure that she was out there; and no child was long on patience. If she failed to have her way by any easy course, she only would make some further provocation, and something more and something more until she found a way to move him: and that childish game might get someone seriously hurt.

  So the thing to do, he thought, was to take up his own bow and his quiver and go off as if he was going hunting—let her guess what the game was—then simply sit and wait in concealment until she either tried to follow or tried the house.

  * * *

  There was a place in the brush just uphill that afforded a clear view of the house and the stable: and there was no sign when he had reached that little knoll, that the girl Taizu might have used it for a vantage. He crouched down in it, he put his bow beside him, he laid out an arrow in case he needed one—still remembering the possibility of bandits. Then he put his back against an accommodating tree trunk and settled in to wait.

  The sun rose higher, passed zenith, and the air warmed, the bushes hummed with insects and rustled with the light breeze. He nodded without meaning to, jerked his head up and fought the overwhelming urge to sleep while the cicadas and the sun conspired to numb the mind.

  He drowsed as he could, not truly asleep, but at least getting some rest, and watching, between nods of his head.

  And by afternoon he was hungry, thirsty, bitten by ants and not a damned thing had stirred but the birds, the insects, and Jiro, who had begun to attack the boards of the stall in a fit of temper.

  * * *

  "Easy, easy," he said, soothing Jiro with his hands, and the old warhorse cow-kicked the slats again for sheer frustration, not mollified by the grain, the water, or the other attentions. A good currying helped, but Jiro had his ears laid back and kept reaching around to nip him, not hard, just Jiro's little way of saying he was damned mad.

  Finally nothing would do but he should risk both their hides—put Jiro's halter on and climb up onto his bare back and ride him out into the pen and on into the pasture, back and forth, back and forth, all the while he kept thinking how large a target they both made, and he kept looking back over his shoulder toward the house and the stable whenever they were on the outward course—which he was sure the girl was watching, probably rolling in the bushes in laughter.

  Everything was out of joint. Jiro was confused, and he was worrying every time he took his eyes off the clearing, the stable, or the cabin, and thinking at every turn of a half a score of ways a determined enemy could get at him.

  Fighting himself again. It was the only standard he knew.

  And she was pushing him, not having done a thing. Minimal force. She was doing everything right.

  If she was even out there.

  Dammit, fighting himself again, and again, and again.

  * * *

  He worked Jiro into a sweat and brought him back to his stall in a better humor than he had left it, dried him, brushed him, all the while watching the edge of the woods and thinking that the one place he could not watch was the back of the cabin, where the woods came much closer; and thinking that it was possible, given the rain-barrel and the woodpile he had been lax enough to have up against the cabin's back wall, to climb up to the roof and get in through the thatch—

  If one were Saukendar,..

  He was afraid to work behind the house to move the things because if he was working there he could not see the other side: all an enemy needed was a free run at the stable, if she was willing to harm the horse....

  ... to get him agitated enough to come running down there, straight into ambush. She needed only watch his activities and see what he guard
ed to figure out what was valuable to him, and how to get him to react without thinking.

  Damn.

  * * *

  He cooked a plain supper, ate it sitting in the doorway of the cabin as the sun was going down. He wondered whether the girl had food in that basket, and how long she could hold out and whether she knew how to forage in these mountains.

  But a peasant would know the berries and the roots, the edibles and the dyes....

  And the poisons...

  The rice went a little strange on his tongue when he thought of that. He kept eating. There was nothing the matter with it. Nothing in the tea.

  In Chiyaden lady Bhosai had died, they said, of poison on the bottom of a tea-bowl.

  Damn, he was thinking back again, back to court, back to the whole damn mess.

  Back to his father's teachings, the midnight exercises, the traps his father set for him—

  —the things that had kept him alive when three others of the aging Emperor's friends had met with accidents. He had proved the case of lord Riga, but not the connection of the assassin with Ghita—

  He should have killed Ghita when he had the chance. But then Ghita had been one of many, and the old Emperor had forbidden—

  He set the rice-bowl aside and drank his tea, trying to push all the past away again, while the armor weighed heavy on his shoulders and bound about his ribs, and the sun sank toward twilight.

  Change on the mountain was like that, dawn to dark to dawn, winter to spring to winter again—and one day was like another day, one storm like another storm, one leaf like another leaf, from unfolding to fall. Nine years of cycles that, taken together, might be one day, one year, one lifetime all reduced to small patterns. Changing, nothing changed. Once one became a part of the patterns, one's changes became those changes, perfect equilibrium, as perfect as a man ever became.

  But it was all one day, all one year, no matter that the man got older, that he fell down someday and died on this mountain, and the grass grew up around his bones, and no one knew....

  Dammit, he had given over a night and most of a day to this interruption in his life. That was already too much to spend.

  Once he had had a lot of days to spend, before the days had become one day, every day. He saw that now, and was amazed to realize that he had not acquired patience, he had merely lost his flexibility. He could watch an ant crawl across the porch without a sense of guilt for time wasted. But he could not abide this change in the pattern of his life. That was like an old man. It was very much like an old man, a hermit, a crazed, solitary old man of almost-forty.

  That idea upset his stomach.

  * * *

  He spent the night in the stable again.

  Like a crazy man.

  He had his breakfast in the first light of a misty, dewy dawn, sitting in the doorway of his cabin, and thought about shouting out to the woods, to the girl—Come in, let's talk.

  But that notion stuck in his throat.

  Like two days of rice with no fish, no rabbit.

  He had very little smoked meat and no preserved fruits: those came in fall, and he stored them for the lean times, the winter months. In summer he trusted to nature and his garden.

  But if the situation dragged on—

  Gods, there was no damned sense in his patience. He had, he decided, to hunt the girl down and tie her hand and foot if need be, and carry her to Muigan.

  Let the nuns deal with her.

  If she had been about the edges of the clearing she had inevitably left sign; and once he started hunting her, then she would panic and make mistakes.

  If she was still out there at all.

  If she was out there she had had a worse night than he had, that was sure. The night air could turn cold in the mountains even in late summer; and when the dew settled like this, with the passing of rain just to the north, it meant damp blankets and damper clothes: boughs dumped water down one's neck and soaked one's sleeves and breeches and shoes in a few moments of walking.

  Good. He hoped for a nice few days of it, as long as the mist got no worse than it was—a light haze that still let one see the edges of the clearing. That was friendlier to him than it was to her.

  So long as it got no worse.

  He put up his rice bowl, stretched his shoulders against the weight of the shirt, and went back to the porch and around the side of the house, quickly, to get a few sticks from the woodpile.

  More than a few, he thought. The more wood he could carry at one time, the fewer times he had to do this and take his eye off things. He gathered up a quick armful and headed back around the corner of the house and up onto the porch.

  The unmistakable hiss of an arrow passed him at hip level.

  He dropped the wood, dived for the doorway and rolled inside, grabbing up his bow and quiver from where he had left then leaning against the doorframe.

  "Dammit," he yelled at the darkening woods, "you're asking for it, girl! That's enough. You listen to me! I don't want to hurt you. I've been patient, gods know. I've offered you a dowry. I offered you all the gold I've got, because I didn't want to see you come to harm. I think that deserves at least a little courtesy, don't you think?"

  Silence.

  "Look here, girl, I won't force you to anything. If you don't want to go to Muigan, that's your choice. If you don't want to stay in the village, that's your choice too. You can go back to Hua, you can go wherever you like. I promise you I won't lay a hand on you. Just come in and talk like a civilized person and stop this nonsense!"

  Silence.

  "Dammit, you're asking for trouble, girl! I'm not going to be a sitting target for a lunatic."

  Silence still.

  Should I really have said that last, he wondered uneasily, in dealing with a madwoman?

  * * *

  He had a good idea at least where she had been standing when she had taken that shot, and finding the arrow, he had a better one: a triple-split tree and a small thicket on the other side of the house.

  So he put on his leather breeches, which he generally used for hunting, but which were double-sewn with pieces of horn, particularly the front of the thighs, covering what the armor-coat did not. He left only the shin-guards, which were miserable for a long walk, and he took his canteen and his bow with him as he walked to the edge of the woods. It was the full light of dawn; but the dew was still on the leaves, and it was no difficult thing to see that she had been where he had thought—that, in fact, she had spent some little time there, and come and gone.

  And gone again.

  It had been a foolish time, he thought, for her to have taken that shot, when there was the dew to help him. She had made a mistake, a simple, beginner's mistake—a little overconfidence, a little desire to stir things up when they had been too quiet for her taste.

  That thought cheered him immensely.

  He smiled to himself as he saw the track plain as could be through the brush.

  Fighting himself, indeed. No girl, even if she knew the land, was going to pass through the woods without a trail on a morning like this, and by the state of the dew on the leaves he could judge well enough how long ago she had passed.

  The trail took him away from the house and deeper into the woods: he did not like that. She had enough time to double back if he did not move faster and, surer; and he ignored his aching leg and trotted along the clear spots. The rising sun was beginning to burn the mist away, the clouds were breaking; and the advantage a fugitive might have had in the hills was much less by daylight.

  It was no difficult thing once he saw the tracks, to sort out the pattern she had been following—he could see other evidences, a regular trail worn on a slope, the plants broken down, stones dislodged—clear as a highway in the brush once he was onto it.

  But it was not a place or a moment to be careless.

  "Master Saukendar!" a voice drifted down to him, from out of the hills. "You don't have to track me. I'll come down. All you have to do is promise to teach me. You do
n't have to worry about me."

  He was not fool enough to answer her.

  Let her worry now, he thought, and quickened his pace along the trail she had left, not cutting across toward the voice, even though it came from across a ravine and off another hill in a place where he could guess very likely where she might go. If she were clever she might do that to find out where he was, or to lure him off the trail and then, hiding hers very well, make him waste time retracing to find the track again.

  If she were skilled. Likely she was a very anxious girl just now; and there were trails around that hill: he had worn them and he knew them much better than she did. If he could find out which one she was on, then he could indeed take a short-cut.

  "Master Saukendar!" Very high up the mountain and far away now. "Haven't I proved myself? That's all I'm after. That's all I was ever after. I never meant to hit you. I could have. I'm not a bad shot with the bow."

  He kept going. He had an idea now that she knew where she was going. He found the same kind of trail, stones disturbed, plants flattened and some of the stems browned: not only this morning, her passage in this direction.

  Why?

  "Master Saukendar?"

  He did not answer. She was leading him off from home, he thought; then she would take the trail downhill and try to double back to the cabin ahead of him.

  But there was a way across and up to that trail she was on now.

  He took the downhill slope off the side of the trail, going from tree to tree to stop himself gathering too much momentum. The climb up the other side was a quick scramble up among the pines, because her trail descended to that point.

  Only one way down her side of the hill, unless she went down the slope or doubled back again; and if she did that, there was still another place he could catch her.