by Evan Winter
"Who started this?" Kellan asked.
The two unconscious Indlovu were in no condition to answer but the man Tau had slapped with his sword pointed.
"Your name, initiate?" Kellan asked Tau.
"Death," Tau said, moving to kill the man who had helped murder his father.
Kellan was surprised, Tau could see that, and it made the next breath even more astonishing. Kellan drew his sword and blocked Tau's first and second strike in less time than it took to blink. Tau pressed on, heard more swords come free of their scabbards and registered one of the Indlovu saying, "Hold. Let Kellan have him. It'll be over soon."
Tau let the full force of his fury loose, raging against Kellan, his dual blades whipping in and out like the skin-slicing sands of a desert whirlwind. He moved faster than the eye could track, every attack meant to wound, maim, or kill, but every attack met Kellan's sword.
From the corner of his eye, Tau saw Zuri, hand over her mouth, run from the circle. He had no time to see more for Kellan had dashed forward, engaging him.
Okar had no shield. It didn't matter. His sword played offense and defense both.
Tau took a cut to the arm that bled furiously. Kellan was not using a practice sword, and his blade slit flesh like it had been embraced by the rough grasp of a whetstone earlier that day. Tau increased his pace, eyes focused, teeth clenched, and Kellan met him, matched him, surpassed him, until, in awe, Tau realized that Kellan was better. Much better.
Tau tried to stay in each moment, living alongside the ebb and flow of the fight, but his doubts grew, pulling at him, dragging his mind out of the swordplay and worrying at him. They told him he would die here and that his father's murderers would live. His worries whispered that justice would not be done and it was because he was not good enough to take it.
Tau yelled in frustration. Kellan looked calm, fresh, as if he could do this at this impossible pace for an entire sun-span. Tau was already near his limit, past it, in fact. His arms were heavy, his footwork clumsy, and he could no longer keep track of Kellan's darting blade.
Tau skipped back, desperate for room, and a moment to breathe. He glanced around. The circle was filling up. There were Indlovu, the ones who had come with Kellan, and others. There were also the men from his Scale. Hadith had a sword in hand, so did Uduak. They looked like they wanted to help, but the Indlovu accompanying Kellan had their blades out as well, and the two groups were at a standoff. More to the point, all eyes were on the battle between him and Okar and Tau could see that his sword-brothers were losing hope.
Tau blocked three, then four, and five more attacks. He was a full step behind Kellan's pace now and had no chance for offense. It was a matter of time until Kellan pierced his lagging defense and killed him. Tau made space again, thought of calling for help, and rejected it. If he had to die, he'd do it like a man.
Then, he saw Zuri running back into the circle. She had Jayyed with her. Tau felt shame, deep shame, because he was so grateful Zuri had found and brought Jayyed. Maybe his Umqondisi could stop this before the Greater-Noble killed him. It wasn't Jayyed who saved him though.
"I said stop!" Zuri yelled, her hands aimed at Kellan. Tau saw her and leapt back, as she doused Okar with enervation. Kellan had enough time to see Zuri and gawped at her. He had that much time and then he was on his knees, caught in Isihogo, and defenseless.
This was not how Tau had wanted it, but he'd take it. He ran for Kellan and lifted his blade for a blow that would, dull or no, take Okar's head from his shoulders.
"No!" It was Zuri. She cut her enervating blast, Tau swung down, and, impossibly, Kellan had his sword up, blocking Tau's cut. The Indlovu in the circle erupted in outrage.
"He's trying to kill him!"
"The Lesser is insane!"
Hang him!"
The surrounding Indlovu closed in. Scale Jayyed came to his defense, and Jayyed was there too. He got to Tau first, took him by the neck and yanked him back and off his feet.
"Enough!" he roared. "Enough, damn you all. Enough!"
The Indlovu were howling for blood, their outrage mixed with disbelief. It shattered their worldview to think a Common would try to kill one of their own.
Tau struggled to get back to his feet. Jayyed held him down.
"I said enough." Jayyed squeezed Tau's neck. "Was this a challenge? Blood-duels are not permitted between initiates."
Kellan, was still on his knees, trying to shake off the vestiges of Isihogo. "Of course not," Kellan said. "I don't even know this man."
Tau growled at that and Jayyed squeezed his neck tighter.
"Do you wish to press charges for the attack?" Jayyed asked Kellan.
Zuri gasped and the Nobles, who were close enough to hear, raised their voices in a chorus of assent.
"What?" asked Kellan.
"Will you lay charges, Nkosi?" repeated Jayyed.
"Don't. Don't do this." Zuri was facing Kellan.
Kellan looked at her like she was mad, but schooled his features to neutrality. "Are you ordering me to forfeit justice, Lady Gifted? How have I given such great offense that you would attack me and deprive me of my natural rights to restitution? Whatever it is I have done, tell me how I may make amends?"
"Don't do this," Zuri said, imploring Kellan more than instructing him.
"Remind me, Umqondisi," Kellan said to Jayyed. "What is justice in this case?"
Jayyed answered in a perfect monotone. "The offending Lesser will be hung, Nkosi."
"I see," said Kellan, looking at Zuri the whole time. "You deal with him as you see fit, Umqondisi. I've had enough madness for one day." The Indlovu with Kellan protested, but he raised a hand, silencing them. "Are we done here?" Kellan asked.
Jayyed bobbed his head. "I believe we are, Nkosi."
Kellan gave Tau a strange look, turned, and bowed to Zuri. "I beg forgiveness for any offense I have given you, Lady Gifted." That done, he left the circle, his back straight, with all but one of his Indlovu entourage following.
The one who stayed behind spat in the dirt beside Tau. "Death? Death?" the Noble said, throwing Tau's words back at him. "Nceku, stay in the dirt where your kind belong."
Tau tried to go for him but Jayyed wrenched him back in place.
"If you please, Nkosi." Jayyed said, his words respectful, his tone anything but.
The Indlovu smirked and left.
Jayyed turned to Zuri. "My thanks, Lady Gifted. We all thank you. Our thanks." He dragged Tau to his feet and pulled him from the circle, shouting for the rest of the Scale to follow. When they turned the first corner Jayyed picked up the pace, almost running. "Scale Jayyed, we are leaving, now!"
JAYYED AYIM
"Don't look back, don't slow down," Jayyed told his men. Jayyed didn't want to admit it, even to himself, but he was scared. He forced his voice to sound neutral, like he was mentioning the heat. "Tau, if the Isazi hear about the duel before we get out of the city, I won't be able to save you."
"I don't need saving," the scarred young man said, trying to be tough, but sounding petulant.
Jayyed clamped tighter on his neck. It had to hurt but the initiate bore it, walking tall and refusing to bend. Jayyed wanted to squeeze harder, force Tau to bend. "You are a fool," he told him. "A damned, cursed, dim-witted fool!"
Jayyed had rushed to the circle when word came that a fight had broken out between Lessers and Nobles. Tensions were high, after Oyibo's death, but he hadn't expected things to go so far. He should have known better. He'd ignored the signs because he'd been as upset as his men. He'd come into the city, with them, burning for a fight, and that was madness. He should have known better!
On his way to the circle he'd almost run over a Gifted initiate. She'd come looking for Lessers and, finding Jayyed, she'd told him to follow her.
"You have no idea how close to death you came," Jayyed told Tau, struggling to keep his voice calm, a man commenting on the heat. "Dueling an Indlovu? Attacking a Greater-Noble!"
And the G
ifted had blasted Okar with enervation. Jayyed hadn't believed his eyes, and that was before Tau tried to kill the man.
"If it had been anyone but him you'd already be strung up," Jayyed said. "Then they'd hunt down every member of your family, eviscerate them, and toss their unburnt corpses into the Curse."
"I will kill that man."
"That man? Do you know—"
"You don't know—"
"I do!" he screamed at Tau, losing patience and having to wrestle it back. "I know exactly what Okar did and I know what he didn't." Jayyed could feel the vein in his neck throbbing and Tau shook himself free from his pinching fingers.
"My father—"
"Kellan Okar didn't kill you father!"
"He attacked—"
"Under orders. Under direct orders by the chairman of the Guardian Council and perfectly in his right to kill him. It was expected. Intended. Okar did everything he could to follow orders and still spare him."
"You think I'll accept that?"
"You fought Okar today. Don't you think that, if he'd wanted to kill your father, your father would have died by his hand."
Tau was silent. Jayyed knew why. He may not want to face the truth about Kellan but Tau couldn't pretend he wasn't already a better swordsman than his father had ever been.
Tau's efforts, without benefit of birth or natural talent, had allowed him to surpass the skills of his peers and many of his betters. Still, there were limits. Tau could not have held Okar for much longer, and his father could not have held Okar at all.
Tau simmered like a pot ready to boil over and the roll of emotions on the young man's face reminded Jayyed of the moment he'd recognized him at the testing. At the time, it had only been a few days since he'd watched Dejen Olujimi ram a blade through Tau's father's chest. Only a few days and Tau had changed.
The boy, with his angry and weeping wound, had looked like a savage in the fighting circle against Uduak. Jayyed had wondered how Tau managed to get cut so badly. He remembered thinking the wound would fester. It could kill the boy and, as the match began, he remembered thinking that, when Uduak was through with him, the scratch would be the least of Tau's worries.
Jayyed had heard about Uduak half a cycle before the testing. He'd had him watched and, as expected, Uduak was what Jayyed thought he was. Jayyed found more like him, but Uduak was the first choice for his new Scale and, at the testing, the brute did not disappoint. He had smashed his way through everyone he faced, and then he faced Tau.
The boy was small, even for a Lesser. It should have been a slaughter but Tau fought Uduak for the full two-hundred count, threatening to invalidate everything Jayyed was doing. Yet, it had given him hope.
Jayyed had gone to the other Umqondisi. He'd argued for Tau. He'd burned important favors to have the match declared a tie, to get Tau into the Isikolo. And, when it was all done, wondering if he'd become a fool, Jayyed went to see the boy.
He'd spoken with him, sensing the young man's doubts. They echoed his own. Hiding those reservations, Jayyed had chosen to be encouraging. He wanted Tau, the boy who had achieved the impossible because he could not see how impossible it was, to continue to believe in himself, to know that Jayyed believed in him. He wanted to see if Tau could continue to defy the odds.
The Chosen needed that almost as much as they needed a better breed of fighter. They had, if what Jayyed had learned was true, little else to rely on. So, he gave Tau a chance. He would see how far the scarred young man could go. He would let the Lesser runt play with giants.
Tau, bolstered by superior training, but more through inhuman effort, had become the thing Jayyed had hoped to make, and feared to create. Like Dragons, like Gifted, like Ingonyama, Tau, a Lesser, had become a living weapon.
"You stubborn intulo!" Jayyed railed at him as they rushed for the city gates, fleeing like criminals. "Think! Think for a breath. Kellan didn't even remember you from the day of your father's death. You were nothing more than a crazed Lesser and he still didn't want you to die. Can't you see? He's not the bloodthirsty villain you'd like him to be. If he were, he would have killed you long before I arrived."
Tau said nothing.
"Yes," Jayyed said, hammering the point home. "You're not too stupid to see that." Jayyed aimed for a nerve. "I've watched Kellan Okar fight for the last two cycles. Almost without doubt, he'll win a Guardian Sword when he graduates. He will, without doubt, become an Ingonyama. He is the best Indlovu the Citadel has seen in twenty or thirty cycles!"
Tau turned his scarred face away. "You told us training would outdo talent," the boy said to him. "You worked us half to death with promises that we could be like them."
"What?" Jayyed countered. "You think Kellan Okar doesn't train? You think he wakes at midday, gorges himself, poles Noble women in the ass, and then, when occasion merits, happens to fight like that?"
Themba, marching behind them, spluttered, trying to hold back a laugh.
"Move off!" Jayyed hollered.
Themba ducked his head. The chastisement chasing him and the other men away.
"I do nothing but train," said Tau. "I give my life to the sword. That's what you asked. It's what I've done. You told me I would be their equal. You told me—"
"Tau," Jayyed said, afraid to admit what he must. "Kellan is ... Listen, I'm not sure there are enough spans in the day for you to out train that one. In ways, he's like you." Jayyed let his eyes roam Tau's face. He needed to get through to the boy. Some men you have to bend slowly. "You've heard the story of his father?" he asked.
Tau turned to Jayyed. He knew the story, Jayyed could see that. He also saw that Tau was curious. He wanted to know how Jayyed would tell it.
"Kellan's father," Jayyed began, "was branded a coward and executed by royal decree. It shamed the family. Kellan Okar is a Greater-Noble by blood but the rest treat him.... Tau, he lives his life as if it must prove that he is more than his father's son. He's in the Citadel practice yards for as long as you are in ours. You have to understand, his existence is a rebuke to his father's legacy. He wants to erase his father's shame from history. He is..." Jayyed trailed off.
"Bigger, stronger, faster," Tau said, finishing Jayyed's unspoken thought. "He is Noble. He is too much to overcome."
Jayyed hesitated. Sometimes too much hope leads men to bad ends. "He is too much to overcome," Jayyed conceded.
"That's it then? I'm a Lesser and the best I can do, after giving my life to the sword, is to match their weak?"
"They think we can't even do that," Jayyed told him.
"And for you, that's enough? How can you tell me that, when you led a Scale of Lessers to the Queen's Melee, to fight against the Nobles' best? How can you tell me there are heights to which I cannot climb, when you were the one who forged the paths?"
"I am not like you," Jayyed said, the words frightening him as he spoke them. "I am not like you."
"You work harder than I do? Smarter?"
There was no one close enough to hear their conversation, but what Jayyed was about to say he had told no one else. It was a risk, but Tau had already gone further than Jayyed could have dreamed. It was time for him to understand that some things were impossible. The only way he'd survive the world was if he saw it for what it was, not what he wished it to be.
Tau needed to know some of the truth. It was the right thing. It didn't make the words easier. "My father was a Greater-Noble," he told Tau.
Tau jerked as if he'd been whipped. "What?"
"Before I was born, my village was attacked in a raid. The Indlovu came but the Xiddeen had already razed most of it. They were retreating and my mother's parents were murdered. They were among the last to die and my mother was to be next. Three savages came for her. A Greater-Noble got there first. He killed them. He saved her. He felt he was owed. My mother was not yet a woman. He thought it safe to use her."
"He did that? Your mother?" Tau shook his head as if the words he'd heard made no sense. "No... Noble-Lesser crossbreeds are not perm
itted... the babies are stillborn."
"Not all," Jayyed said. "When my mother learned she was pregnant she told the other villagers that she'd lain with one of the Lessers who died in the raid. I was born later that cycle, alive."
Tau didn't say a word. He was staring at Jayyed. He was taking quick, shallow breaths.
"I've spent my life looking for ways to improve the Omehi's chances of survival. I love my people and will do anything to save them. Cycles ago, I learned how to spot many of the characteristics of a Lesser-Noble cross."
"What? Why?"
"Because we need stronger fighters," Jayyed said. "I filled my Scale with as many crosses as I could find. I need proof that I can show to the Isikolo and the Citadels that cross-Caste offspring are warriors superior to the standard Lesser.
"Tau, The Omehi are too few to win the war. The Nobles help but there aren't enough of them. We need many more soldiers with that blood in their veins."
"Uduak?"
Jayyed nodded, staring at Tau, considering the young man. "I had thought that he would be my greatest find." Jayyed paused, breathing deep. "I won't order you to keep this—"
"I'll tell no one," Tau said.
They walked in grim silence. The weight of the confession heavy between them until, as they marched out of the city's gates, Tau spoke. "You raised me up with bold words and ideals that you don't believe," he said.
"You've done the impossible and you should be proud, but there are limits. We are all limited by our—"
"Fight me, tomorrow. Come to the practice yards before dawn. You think birthright determines destiny. You're wrong."
Some men break before they bend. For some, the most dangerous, the world becomes nothing but blades and blood. "I'll meet you, Tau Solarin," Jayyed said, "and we shall see who is wrong."
PYRRHIC
Tau slept for three spans and was drilling in the practice yards when Jayyed found him. The sun had yet to rise.
There were bags under the older man's eyes. "Morning, Tau. Care to spar?"
