The Paladin

by C. J. Cherryh

  He praised the old judge's favorite. He said—the truth—that he had seen the Emperor's own farms and—a lie—there had been none better. But he had no more gold, just a pittance of silver that he needed to live on.

  They were down to bargaining for the tack.

  Finally he turned out his purse and spent everything.

  Thank the gods he had left a little reserve with Taizu.

  "That," the judge said, "is a very fine horse you have. I don't suppose you'd part with him?"

  * * *

  Eventually it was a three-year-old bay mare he rode back leading behind him, a creature with a white face, one hind foot white to the hock, one forefoot white to the knee, a broad, powerful rump and a good chest. Not precisely the most ordinary horse in the province. He would have preferred something less marked, but it was a good horse, the judge was anxious to sell her and he was anxious to get clear of the farm.

  And Taizu, who came out from her ditch and her bushes to meet him—looked by her stance exactly the way he had expected, worried witless by now and thinking the worst; but it was a different look when he came closer and she had a look at the horse he had brought her.

  "She's beautiful! But—"

  "She's loud as a riverman's whore," he admitted. It had come down to two, one unremarkable in all points, including her bones. "I did what I could. This one's sound, she's strong and she's trained for a soldier. I'd rather you had her under you in a pinch." He gave her the reins. "Climb up on her. Try her out."

  "Can we afford her?"

  "Jiro clinched the bargain."

  "Jiro! My gods—!"

  "All our gold and Jiro's best try at the judge's bay mare." He patted Jiro's neck. "Poor old lad. Gave everything he had. Didn't you, son?"

  Jiro was still unsettled. Jiro bounced and danced in place and worked to get the bit while Taizu made her acquaintance of the bow-nosed, white-legged mare. And the look in Taizu's eyes and the fever in her hands touched a horseman's heart.

  "Up!" he said. "It'd be like the old skinflint to change his mind and send his house guard after us! Let's be out of here."

  She put her foot in the stirrup, she got herself up, and the mare, skittish with Jiro and a strange rider, danced off sideways, but she steadied. Good hands. A good seat. Damn fine seat.

  "I thought you could handle her," Shoka said. "After Jiro." He rode close and passed her the paper he had. "Bill of sale. Hang onto that. If we get separated I don't want them calling you a horsethief."

  "Gods, she's beautiful."

  "Damn, girl, I never get these compliments." He let Jiro move, down the dike road, and the mare caught up and paced neatly beside, an energetic clip, with a good deal of neck-stretching and eye-rolling and side-stepping between the stud and the mare. "Watch it, there!"

  "Men," Taizu said. There was a tremor in her voice. A before-battle kind of shiver. Her eyes were bright. Her hands kept the reins under constant light tension, the mare trying every little shift, testing what was on her, flirting with the stud next to her, and finding out her rider was right with her every move.

  Jiro for his part was a very happy fellow.

  More than I can say, Shoka thought dourly, and thought back on the judge, damn him, who had flatly asked how he had turned to mercenary service, where he had served, whose hire he was in—

  Sengi, m'lord, no, but my father was from Tengu, well, we lost our land, m'lord. No prospects. I'll be riding back to Choedri, north, hoping for hire. Maybe there. Clear to Cheng'di if I have to. You don't know what my prospects are there?

  Damned spooky, he thought, damned spooky the way the old man kept looking at him, saying: I don't doubt you'd find employment there. Where are you coming from?

  Caravan guard, m'lord. But I've had a belly full of foreign places. I'm coming home. I don't suppose—there's much change in the last couple of years. . . .

  No. Again with that strange look. And: Let me show you a mare you haven't seen. . . .

  * * *

  Down the levies to the river again. The whole horse-bargaining had taken three times as much time as he had wanted and it was twilight by the time they came to the bridge. "I don't want to stop in Ygotai," Shoka had said before they had ever set about the matter of the horses, and now he cast a look over his shoulder, with more and more of a prickling at his nape. Thank gods, it was still clear back there.

  "What's wrong?"

  "A nosy old man."

  "The judge? You think he knew you?"

  "I don't know."

  "Well, what did he do?"

  "Questions. Too damn many questions. How are you doing? Can we keep going?"

  "I can ride all night if we have to, it's not my legs. —What kind of questions?"

  "Who I am, where from. My name is Sengi. I'm a caravan guard. A captain of caravan guards. I used to be a gentleman, you're my wife, the bill of sale is valid. We stay by that story."

  "I told you we shouldn't deal with a judge! They always ask questions! He could have recognized you!"

  "Village judges don't get to court. I never met this man!"

  "Maybe he wasn't always a village judge."

  "Maybe he wasn't."

  "—Or, maybe—" The mare went dancing a few steps sideways and Taizu brought her back. "Maybe they've been watching for you to leave your mountain."

  "All these years? That's crazy." He looked over his shoulder again, more and more regretting the strongly marked horse. "I'm a fool. I shouldn't have taken that damn horse."

  Badly marked, the old man had said. But look at her lines, not the markings. I can't sell her for the price she ought to bring. No gentleman like yourself would ride a horse so—irregular, and I don't want those markings passed down. . . . But for your purposes ... to see her go to a gentleman's retainer. . .

  "Don't get attached to that mare. We can trade her off up the road. In the meantime we use those good legs of hers to put distance behind us."

  "All right," she said, looking back herself. "She's in no trouble. It's Jiro I worry for—"

  "We old men can manage, girl." He touched Jiro with his heels and Jiro had no trouble deciding he was going if the mare was. And vice versa.

  * * *

  There was a twisting way around Ygotai, by levies and dike-roads, among a few shabby buildings on Ygotai's outer edge—a town of some ten thousand souls, as Shoka recalled it from the Emperor's census; but the extent of the ramshackle buildings that he did not recall seeing, and the poverty—disturbed his sense of what should be. "These people weren't here," he said to Taizu as they rode, two mercenaries through the town slums; and people huddled under woven-work porches around their cooking fires—stopped their suppers and stared with bleak, worried eyes. Children did not chase them, there were no children, except those sitting close and inconspicuous by their elders. There was only a single impudent pack of dogs, and those were starved-looking, yapping and chasing the horses, but not far.

  Mostly the people looked beaten and afraid.

  "They're scared of us," Taizu said in a quiet tone. "We look like soldiers."

  The houses were so temporary a strong wind would demolish them. The street was rutted, dried mud in some places, a stinking morass in others where gods-knew-what habitually ran. And always the stares, the desperate, mistrusting stares.

  What's wrong in this place? Where did these people come from?

  What's happened here?

  We look like soldiers. What in hell does that mean?

  * * *

  "There's not much place for a camp," he said, looking over the land of dikes and rice-fields beyond the town. Easy for a supposed boy afoot—all too conspicuous for a gentleman, his retainer, and two horses.

  "We'd scare farmers," Taizu said, "Mercenaries."

  "Like we scared the townsmen," Shoka said as they crossed another bridge in the dusk. "I'd as lief be through this, far out into the country again."

  "The road's safer. Stay out of the dikes on a horse, if we're thinking about stopping.
"

  Dead ends. A maze of dead end paths. The farmer did not have to tell the soldier that fact.

  So it was a grove of mulberries well after dark, where an orchard road gave them a little recess off the highway; and a bed under the trees, where no one might notice. The sky had turned nasty toward dark, a leaden gray that killed even the sun-colors, down to a pewter twilight and a starless dark.

  And with the prospect of a drenching they shared a cold supper of rice-balls and sausage and a little tea, with a quick, small fire of stolen mulberry leaves and twigs.

  "Why were they afraid?" Shoka asked then, in the dim light of that fire.

  "Of soldiers," Taizu said, as if it were simple sanity, and he were very dense.

  "Soldiers."

  "Of the Emperor."

  He shook his head. "You're dealing with a man who was past twenty when you were born, girl. Who was in exile when you were scarcely aware of the world. In my time soldiers weren't to fear. Not—at least—within the towns and villages, no credit to a little rowdiness about the camps—that's always been. But this was fear."

  "The troops do what they want. The mercenaries do. They have papers from the Emperor. They're the law. ..."

  "The law my rear. The courts are the law, girl. . . . The Emperor doesn't hire mercenaries...."

  "The lords are the law."

  "On their land, yes. Town taxes go to the Emperor, town problems go to the—"

  "—Emperor's judges. But if you haven't got money you can't pay the fines and they take your pigs; or your house; or maybe the Emperor's soldiers just feel like a joke so they flatten your house and kill you. There's nobody going to tell who they were, nobody'll care to find out who did it if you don't belong to some lord—he'll get mad and go to the courts, but you don't go to the court if you haven't got money—"

  He listened. What she was describing was not the country he had left. But it was plausible, if an Emperor were a damnable fool.

  "—because that judge back there, either he's crooked and he's taking money, or he knows what could happen to his farm if he got afoul of the soldiers. That's the way it is, out here in the country. That's the way the law is. And if you're a peasant and you've got somebody like lord Kaijeng, they tax him till he and his lady could hardly keep the place up and they raid his farms, and they march all his men away to the border wars, and finally they just come in and kill him, and you don't expect the Emperor did anything about it."

  "Does the Emperor really do anything?"

  "I don't know," she admitted. "They say the Emperor does this and the Emperor does that, but other people say he just puts his name on things and he spends all his time with his concubines and his birds."

  "Birds." Cages . . . cages of exotic birds, an immense garden where birds flew free, and fine mesh nets secured them from the sky. Plants and birds imported from nameless places, at risk of lives. The boy had spent a lot of childhood hours there, dodging out on his weapons-drill and his court duties. Not an evil boy. A spoiled, self-centered, soft-minded boy, feckless as the sparrows.

  Who murdered. Who cold-bloodedly schemed with Ghita to be rid of his wife, his advisors, his tutor—

  Because he was a damned fool, whose wishes and whose desire not to think were more real to him than the bloody result of his scheming—

  Damn him! Damn him for it!

  Taizu had worked herself into a rage. He had, even thinking about it, for different reasons. So it was a long while before he said:

  "Is that the reputation he has?"

  "Everybody says he's a fool. Spends all his time with his birds. Lords give them to him, if they want anything. There was one bird cost this lord thousands. And it died inside a week and after that the other birds in the garden got sick and a lot of them died. The Emperor said it was poisoned and it put a spell on the rest. Ghita had that man arrested and they took his lands—Tenei was his name, lord Tenei, up north—I think it was P'eng."

  "That damn dog—"

  "They came in to arrest him and his wife committed suicide, but he hadn't the nerve so his friend killed him and killed himself."

  "Who else are the lords? Can you name them off to me?"

  She leaned back against a mulberry tree, a shadow in the dark, and ticked them off on her fingers.

  "I don't know who's in Hua, if it isn't Gitu. He's also got Angen, of course. Shangei, that's lord Mendi. ..."

  "My gods."

  "I don't know anything about him. Except it was lord Heisu's place."

  "Mendi's a dithering fool. Go on."

  "Yiungei—" There was a little tremor of anxiety in her voice out of the dark. "That's lord Baigi."

  "Ghita's lapdog. I knew that."

  "Mengan district, in Yiungei, that's—"

  "Jeidi?" It was his own district she spoke of, his own lands.

  She shook her head. "Jeidi's dead. Peiyan."

  "Not all the bandits are in Hoisan. Who in Taiyi?"

  "It used to be Riyen. He died. It's some cousin—"

  "Kegi."

  "That was it."

  "Just a name to me. Who are the best lords?"

  "I don't know. Lord Mura. He was a friend of our lord. His name is Meigin. And lord Agin of Yijang, he was all right for a neighbor."

  Two still alive. "Tengu?"

  "I'm not sure. I didn't—care much then. I didn't care about lords. —I know Kenji: that's Mida."

  Another one he knew, not a forceful man, a scholar.

  "Hoishi is lord Reidi," he said, "last I heard. Much that you ever hear of him. I can't say I can complain of him as a neighbor, but I never crossed his borders. Now I have." He shook his head, feeling the same sense of desperation that had been with him down this road, too like—all too like—what he had felt ten years ago. "If Jiro could stand it, I'd say we should keep moving, but I won't break him down running, damned if I will."

  "I wish you'd gone back!"

  "It's too late now. There's no safety there—not for me, not for anyone with me. Not for the village if I go back there. This way it's on my head, and that's all they notice. Listen to me. I want you to listen to me very sensibly, Taizu: if soldiers do come on us, if there's no way to run, you leave me and you ride till that mare drops and you get off and walk—"

  "No."

  "Listen to what I'm saying, dammit! If they should call out the soldiers on us, I'm not saying it will happen—but if it does, it's because they've recognized me, not a kid from Hua—and there's no way in hell I can do anything at that point but make trouble for them. Most would stay with me—one or two might chase after you—you can outride them, you're lighter and that's a damn good horse, that's why I wanted her, other considerations aside. You can get clear. I haven't got a hope of it. So let's be sensible. They don't know you, they don't know what you intend. If I'm back in the Empire, they'll make only one supposition, and your only danger is getting caught in my company. Now, that's sense. If something happens to me, things are going to be stirred up for a while. You get out, get to the south, hide out till it's quiet—"

  "You're making all this up, it's not doing any good, because I'm not going to do it. I'm not leaving you!"

  He sat there quiet a moment, thinking: I wanted loyalty.

  Damn her, does she ever do anything but when you don't want it?

  He was scared, more scared than he had been since he could remember. He had known the first caravan to go behind them from Mon to Ygotai would carry the news of his having crossed the border: he had planned for that, planned to stay ahead of that rumor, even to use it: they would expect Saukendar to go due north to Cheng'di or into Yiungei, not to Hua. But what had seemed possible in Mon seemed less so in Ygotai, and the desperate look of the people and the evidence of profound changes in the land—made it all seem more desperate and more difficult.

  And there was, since Mon, since he had breached the peace, no safety in return.

  "You think the judge might call the soldiers," Taizu said, "and have them look out for my horse?"r />
  "For your horse, for Jiro—a big red horse with a man of my description. I'm not much less conspicuous, and the Emperor's birds are more than show. A message can fly from here to Cheng'di—damn fast."

  "So. So—we just go fast, that's all."

  "Where's the judge tonight? Where have his messengers gone? Where are the nearest soldiers and how fresh are their horses, against Jiro?"

  "Do you know that?"

  "So we hide! We hide until they think the judge is crazy."

  "Where?"

  "I'll find a place. There's hedges. There's thickets."

  "We're dealing with two horses, for the gods' sake. You said yourself, if we get into the paddies, there's no way—"

  "You listen to me, master Saukendar, you from the Heavenly City: I got out all right, didn't I? This is the country. You see this orchard. You see that road? It's not fast. We'll have to wade. But I'll bet the soldiers won't do it. We get back among the paddies and back into Taiyi province—"

  "There's a river. Jiro's carrying armor."

  "Well, if we cross by dark and we split up his tack and let my horse carry half—"

  He sat there thinking about his reputation, about a single, sharp fight on the road, a way for a man to go out with some credit and some satisfaction on his enemies—

  And thinking with a little rise in his spirits—what Shoka-the-fool would have done in his youth, and risked everything for—having no hero's reputation to lose. Right through the rice-paddies, the fox's way—if he had a guide who was more than wishful thinking—

  "You think you can find a way through to Taiyi?"

  "I know I can."

  "They'll track us. Horses don't come and go down the paddy roads."

  "That's fine. Water covers a lot. Horses can wade the same as we can."

  "Then let's do it by dark. Before the rain starts."

  There was a moment of silence as he got up. A pitiful small grunt as Taizu gathered herself up.

  There was more than that from Jiro, who stamped and shied around at being saddled up—and at being loaded this time not with a rider, but with the armor and the packs.

  * * *

  Shoka carried the armor when it came to climbing the main dike. He handed it up to Taizu, who set it on the ground, and he climbed the bank himself and pulled on Jiro's reins. After which Jiro came up in a rush and knocked him flat.