by Don McQuinn
The insult set off a rumble from Conway and Clas. Tate gestured them to be quiet.
“You said you’ve heard of me,” she answered. “Either you know exactly who and what I am, or you lie. I never heard of you, but I know the truth of you—a thing who owns a boy. No man at all.”
He answered her taunt by swinging the boy around in front of him. Muscles bunched and swelled in his arms. He lifted the scrawny child clear of the deck. Writhing, kicking, the boy clawed ineffectually at the ropelike fingers choking him. He opened his mouth, for complaint or mercy, no one could know; the only sound that escaped was a wheezing rasp.
Tate gathered herself to attack, then noted the forefingers moving up onto the boy’s jawbone, the thumbs braced against his skull just below the ears. If she moved, the man would merely twist his massive wrists and snap the boy’s neck like a chicken’s. In her heart, she understood he was teaching her her place. He expected her to beg, humble herself. Then he’d kill the child.
She bit her lip and waited, hoping her pretended callousness wouldn’t simply goad him.
Tiring of his failed game, the captain threw the boy aside. He landed in a heap, quickly struggling to a sitting position. His look at his master showed no sign of surrender. Rather, as he sucked in huge gulps of air and rubbed his neck, Tate saw the quick glow of hatred. Then he was expressionless again.
The captain said, “Still think I’m not a man? Stay the night with me. Tomorrow you can talk to the boy all you want. If you’re woman enough to satisfy me.”
Drawing herself to full height, she spat. Like a lazy silver coin in the sun, the gobbet arced to strike him full in the face. Stunned, he crossed his eyes comically to watch the frothy mess drip from his nose. Then he roared, scrubbing at his face as he charged onto the dock.
Tate skipped backward, and Conway was chilled to see she’d drawn her murdat, rather than her pistol. He practically screamed at her, “Shoot him! Shoot!”
She ignored him. “We fight for the boy,” she said to her foe.
“Agreed.” Wasting no time or words, he advanced.
Conway didn’t know what to do. Tate had deliberately provoked the fight and chosen a weapon that gave her opponent every advantage. He wondered if she’d surrendered to something like a death wish.
As she circled, the movement put her between himself and the ship. His gaze traveled beyond her, through a gap in the crowd of sailors leaping to the dock. The boy was still where he’d landed, but now his wiry body was coiled in a tight spring of excitement. Something flickered across the engrossed face. Swift, subtle, it wasn’t really an expression, but more like the revelation of a hidden thought. Whatever it was, Conway would have sworn that in some bizarre way, the boy was amused.
Conway had his pistol out and aimed at the captain even as the incident passed. Clas stepped in front of him, forcing the weapon downward. There was agony in his expression, but his voice was firm. “She exchanged blood with me, Matt Conway. Our honor is one. She challenged him. I can’t let you fight for her.”
A sense of danger warned the captain of the dialogue. He paused, his suspicious glances darting between Tate and her friends.
Conway struggled to break free. Clas said, “Don’t. You would shame her, me, my people. Her life would be without value. Let her fight honorably.”
For long moments they were static, Conway uselessly pressing against Clas’ great strength. Finally, Conway let his arm go limp.
He said, “Honor! If she dies, I’ll find a way to make you pay, you hear me?”
“I hear.” Sadness ached in the words. Clas released Conway’s weapon and turned away.
The captain leapt to the attack, pounding at Tate’s defense. She gave ground, bending away from the ringing blows.
A vicious cross-body swipe by the captain appeared certain to finish her. Somehow, she ducked under it. Then, with the swiftness of reflex, she slashed up. The captain yelled pain and surprise; the point of her murdat slit his left sleeve and the flesh under it from elbow to shoulder.
Conway cheered wildly. Clas said, “His wound looks far worse than it is. She must be very careful.”
Embarrassment and fury contorted the captain’s face. Inexorably, he drove Tate toward the shoreline. Conway, Clas, and Sylah had to retreat hurriedly to avoid her. Sailors bayed for a killing.
Suddenly, Tate whirled away from a long, spearing thrust. Coming full circle, she struck down across the captain’s front at the extended arm. Countering, he drove his left shoulder into her, destroying leverage and timing. Her blow, robbed of its power, hacked his right wrist. It was enough to make him drop his sword. He clubbed at her awkwardly with the bloodied left arm. Sheer strength sent her sprawling.
She scrambled to her feet as he reached for his weapon.
Exhaustion filled her lungs with fire. When she ran at him, the weight of her raised murdat threatened to topple her, and her aching, boneless knees buckled dangerously. Scalding tears tried to smear her vision; she blinked them back.
Bending, he cried, “Wait!” raising the slashed left arm in supplication. The single word sounded as if dragged from his guts.
Tate blinked surprised. He remained in his awkward attitude.
“Kill him.” Clas’ voice was a whipcrack. “Strike. Strike.”
Tate stopped less than a body length away. Her murdat sagged.
With a motion that was little more than a twitch, the captain threw his sword.
Tate had no chance to dodge. The heavy metal handle hit her across the eyes. Automatically, she raised her hands to them.
He drove a fist into her stomach, then a knee to her face when she doubled over. The mournful clang of her fallen murdat as it slipped between timbers drowned in the water below.
He slowed, watching, seeing that all her energy was necessary to keep upright. He picked up his sword at her feet almost lazily.
Once again, Clas locked Conway’s gun hand in his own.
The captain struck with the flat of the blade, the sound of it against her head an ugly thud. She groaned, staggering sideways. Repeating the blow on the backswing, he kept her from falling off the dock, hammering her back the way she’d come.
Again. Then again.
And she refused to fall.
Until he drove his right hand, still holding the sword handle, directly into her face. It spun her completely around, and she dropped facedown, her head hanging off the edge of the dock, arms extended, the submerged hands weirdly distorted by the shifting surface of the water. Small fish lanced hungrily through the swirled clouds formed by her blood. Finding nothing substantial, they nipped each other in frustration.
Waving his sword at his crew, the captain shouted over his shoulder. “Do I kill her now, or do you want her?”
Clas said, “You’ve beaten her. You’ll spare her or kill her. Nothing else.”
Flushed with victory, the captain faced him. “We’ll do what we want.”
Clas let go of Conway’s hand, saying, “This is not allowed. Conway, I’ve wanted to watch the lightning weapons up close for a long time. If this shamelessness continues, please kill him.”
The courtly formality brought hysterical laughter clawing up Conway’s throat. He nodded, not trusting his voice, not trusting his rage to betray him by making him shout his determination to kill the captain long before any more harm came to Tate.
Consciousness passed through Tate’s mind in short, bright surges, exactly like the small waves sliding past her blurred gaze. Pain accompanied each moment of awareness.
She didn’t want to die. Tomorrow—all the tomorrows—waited for her. It was wrong to lose them on a scabby dock.
Angrily, she tried to resume the fight. Her stomach rolled sickeningly, stole her strength.
She needed time. Just a little. A minute. That wasn’t so very much, not for a life. She listened to each beat of her heart. So precious.
Why didn’t he end it?
Movement. Under the water, just within the periphe
ral range of the eye that still functioned. Something deep, not in rhythm with the waves.
Coming toward her. At her.
Pale. Getting larger.
A face. A horror.
She tried to scream at the walling eyes, the bloated cheeks, the lank, streaming hair.
And then the boy was surfacing, directly under her, so close she could have kissed him, could see the fine black specks in his pale green irises. Shivering violently, he extended a hand to hers, under the water. It held her murdat. She had to concentrate to wrap her fingers around the grip.
He continued to stare into her eyes as he slowly sank out of sight into greenness. For the second time she felt him take hold of some buried, visceral part of her.
One of the sailors shouted, “Give her to us.”
The clack of a round being jacked into a pistol chamber was unknown to the captain, but there was a terminal authority to the sound that snapped his head around to Conway.
Tate gritted her teeth and rolled over, stabbing upward.
Screaming, leaping clumsily, the captain bent to clutch at his crotch. He turned with pained, dainty steps, keening eerily, and only then could Conway see the upraised murdat in Tate’s hand, and the thick, viscous stain expanding from his groin. It appeared he might straighten, but he only managed a last, agonized bellow before he collapsed.
Conway and Clas reached Tate simultaneously, each scooping a hand under an arm. They hurried away while the shocked crew milled about, leaderless. Shouts from up the hill announced the fight had been observed and a rush of help was on the way. The sailors leapt to the mooring lines and rigging. One vaulted the crawling captain, then, after coolly appraising the distance the descending crowd had to cover, grabbed a beseeching arm and dragged him to the ship.
By then the foursome was off the dock and onto the road, Sylah’s gentle hands and practiced eye examining. She had Conway take Tate’s feet while Clas held her at the shoulders to carry her, saying, “I think nothing’s broken. She’ll heal.”
They moved rapidly up the hill, watching over their shoulders as the ship made sail. The crowd slowed its hurry toward them.
Clas said, “It’s good you didn’t have to use the weapon.”
Conway said, “I would have. I see no sense in anyone dying just for honor.”
“No?” Clas seemed as sad as surprised. “Everyone dies, Matt Conway. To die for your honor, or that of your tribe or family or friends, is to use death; it assures that a man wins at least part of his last fight. There’s a good memory in it, so it’s not necessary for those left behind to hate. Any other end is just an end, unless there’s dishonor. To die dishonored is tragedy. That’s our view. I never knew before today that your code demands the death of whoever kills a friend, even at risk of your own life. Your customs are fiercer than I thought.” His sudden laughter was harsh. “We’re all prisoners, aren’t we?”
Briskly, Sylah interrupted. “Enough. Tate may wake, and I want her hearing no foolishness of war or fighting. Especially not this mad thing of yours, this honor, with its hundred faces, that lives only for dying.”
Like chastened boys, they hung their heads and marched on in silence. Sylah bent over Tate, fussing with her injuries, the better to hide un-Healerlike tears.
The crowd greeted them as heroes. So preoccupied, no one saw a sodden figure slip out of the water where the dock joined the shore. Doubled over, all joints and angles, the ship’s boy was across the sand in a whirling flurry, diving into the protective brush at the high water mark. Never visible for longer than the blink of an eye, he darted from cover to cover in their wake up the hill. He shook uncontrollably. His lips were drawn back from bone-white, chattering teeth.
The expression was certainly a function of the cold. Yet he could have been smiling. Either way, it was a visage as malevolent as the snarl of a cat.
Chapter 5
Shadows and spears of light played across the neatly tended ground beneath the trees. The tiny woman walking there was oblivious to the beauty of the constantly changing patterns.
Her Church robe featured an embroidered purple and white violet at her left shoulder. It gleamed with the luster of new acquisition. Shyly, almost disbelievingly, she raised a hand to trace its stitched edges.
A pair of squabbling robins swooped wildly across her path, so close she felt their passage. Startled, she stopped abruptly, trying to follow the headlong flight. The thick trunks of the trees defeated her. They were very old, planted in strict lines, gnarled by time and weather. Each was sawn off at the general height of a tall man’s head, leaving only a few heavy branches spanning horizontally toward the other trees in the grove. A thicket of green shoots rose from each branch, creating a thick, swaying canopy. Some of the withes bore long white stripes where bark had been carefully peeled.
The willows were a sacred grove. Rigorously pruned, the ancient trunks faithfully produced new growth every year, and it was from that that Church manufactured one of is most efficacious medicines. Extract of willow bark had wondrous pain-relieving qualities, either taken orally or mixed with soothing oil and applied directly to burns or wounds.
Like all sacred herb gardens and groves, this one was far removed from human habitation. Sometimes Healers needed great distance from those they served. Whenever War Healers discussed their Healer sisters, anyone acknowledged the superhuman courage the latter exhibited in the face of disease. That was an outgrowth of the virulent plagues that swept all populations from time to time. Any sickness, no matter how mild, was treated as deadly. Only Healers stood firm to face it, conducting their healing houses with a serenity that dumbfounded anyone who watched. Nevertheless, in confidence, War Healers questioned their sisters’ almost sacrilegious willingness to experiment with such unproven nostrums as willowbark extract to prevent failure of the heart. No one confronted them, however. After all, one might fall ill, and goodwill should not be needlessly tested.
Looking about her, Lanta was reminded that her visit to the grove had its own secretive need. She smiled wryly at the thought. Newly declared Violet Priestess Lanta—proud, humble, joyous, frightened—had sought the grove for its nonmedical healing properties: its soft silence, its rich smells of earth and growth and renewal. She felt the ponderous tree trunks excluding the world. She touched the new violet again, setting off delicious memories of the moment Gan Moondark told the Violet Abbess that Priestess Lanta had earned the gratitude of the Murdat, Ruler of the Three Territories. He requested her promotion.
She unconsciously dropped her head as she peered around, afraid someone might be watching, and no observer would fail to see her shameless pleasure.
She sought one of the wooden chairs provided for just the sort of contemplative solitude she needed. The seat was large for a normal person. For Lanta it was a retreat. Snuggled against the high back, she pulled her feet up under her and seemed to blend into the thick cedar slabs.
Not even the delight in her new rank could wholly dispel the purposelessness that had seized her in recent weeks. The onset of spring had filled her with a dissatisfaction that refused to be identified. Alternately listless or driven to frenetic activity, she irritated those around her and embarrassed herself.
Until now, she had resisted the urge to use the trance of concentration. All Priestesses were taught the technique of chant, of inward withdrawal. The resulting calm peacefulness was so pleasant that Church warned against the technique. There were sinister rumors that many Priestesses had become enslaved by their ability to lose themselves in self-induced bliss.
She had particular reason to dread the trance as a treacherous friend.
She was a Seer, and sometimes when she willed herself to complete relaxation, the wondrous, terrible thing that enabled her to see beyond the veil of time penetrated her ease. Then came messages, sometimes bright joy, sometimes counterbalancing tragedy.
Some called her blessed. Her Abbess called her “our gift,” and battled fiercely to keep her in the local abbey, rej
ecting all offers by Church Home to call her to them. Sometimes Lanta wondered if the Land Under held any curse worse than being secretly feared by all.
Now she had to make a choice. To use the trance was to risk violation. Yet she could think of no other way to probe for an answer to her persistent restlessness.
It took several adjustments for her to find a proper position on the chair. Finally, hands decorously clasped in her lap, tiny feet dangling, she sealed her senses against the outside world and drifted on the tides of her body. Her features softened by imperceptible degrees until they were utterly slack. Oddly, the expression wasn’t neutral. A watcher would have said she hadn’t withdrawn from the world, but disdained it. Pulses trembled softly at her temples and throat. There was an aura of hidden alertness in her repose, as a small bird drowses, ever poised for flight.
A hand fell away to her side. It lay palm up, fingers curled inward like the petals of a thirsting flower.
Her mind refused her. It bolted from image to image, settling on nothing, giving her no chance at isolation.
Someone else was in the grove.
Troubled like herself. The air vibrated with their mingled tensions.
She opened her eyes. For a heartbeat, they were out of focus, so that her first impression was of an out-of-place green that had nothing to do with the verdant grove. As her vision cleared, she recognized the cloak lining of the approaching Violet Abbess. With a man, a stranger.
Measured steps precise, bony back stiff as any hop pole, the older woman advanced with her mouth bent in the smile that always made Lanta think of a painted shield. Behind her, rain clouds streamed across the sky framed by a natural break in the willows. The scene reminded Lanta of the tapestry in the abbey. The Abbess liked to stand in front of it when she had a disciplinary matter to discuss. The pictures were drawn from the Apocalypse Testament, the passage that declared, “Life is the flame that consumes us all, and by flame we are cleansed and released to renewal. Whatsoever may be most foul, so fire shall cleanse and free its spirit.”
