The Warrior's Path (1980) s-3

by Louis L'Amour

He was strong. I could feel it in his blade, and he had the delicate touch of the master. He lunged again, and a quick skip back was all that saved me. As it was, the point of his blade ripped my shirt. I heard a gasp from some onlooker, and someone else said, in the almost total silence, "Good, isn't he?"

  Aye, he was good. I discovered that quickly enough and was hard put to defend myself, having no need to feign awkwardness with the speed and skill of his attack. Had it not been for the few fights of the past days, I might have failed, but often it takes little time to recall old skills, and I had fenced hour upon hour with my teachers.

  The art of the sword had developed greatly in the past few years, but as in all such things, it had come to be highly stylized. The weapon was controlled largely with the fingers; the cuts were made with the first few inches of the blade. The endeavor was to make light, slicing cuts and not to overpower with great slashing cuts. He was swift, sure, and very strong. My own efforts were largely to stave off his attack, and somehow I managed it.

  Sweat began to bead on my brow, but as I warmed, I felt the old skills returning. He was better than Jeremy Ring, I thought, perhaps as good as Jublain, but not, I believed, as good as my father had been. Sakim? Ah, Sakim was another sort of man, and his style of fencing was much different.

  My style was not orthodox, and I could see that disturbed him while it gave him added confidence, for to him it meant only that I did not know what I was doing or knew it not well enough.

  The room was hot, the air close. He pressed me hard, striving to work me into a corner, which would impair my movements, for my speed afoot had surprised him. He thrust; I parried and slid my blade along his. He leaped back just in time, or I might have knicked his wrist. He shot me a sudden sharp glance and made a cut to my cheek that I parried with difficulty. He kicked a small bench toward my feet, and as I sprang out of the way, he lunged, his sword point tearing my shirt at the waist.

  We fought savagely then, all pretense thrown aside; it was thrust, parry, head and flank cuts, and he drew first blood with a sudden thrust to the head that opened a thin red cut on my cheek. An instant later, and his point found my ribs, just an inch below the heart but wide of it. He grinned wolfishly. "Soon!" he exclaimed. "Soon you shall be dead!"

  He pressed hard, and I fell back, working desperately to ward off his continual attacks. He dropped his blade a little, an invitation I declined to accept, but instantly he moved in with a dazzling series of movements that had the spectators cheering. A thrust followed by cuts to the arm, right cheek, head, and chest. How I parried them I will never know, but as he drew back, momentarily overextended, I thrust suddenly and sharply for his throat. The thrust was high and a hair wide of the mark. It ripped the ruffle at his collar but merely scratched his neck.

  He was dangerous, too dangerous. I was in serious trouble and knew it. The man was good, very good. He made a riposte to the head following a parry of my thrust. He was intent now, ready for the kill. Each fencer tends to favor certain moves, those that are easy for him, to the exclusion of others, and a skillful man with a blade will soon determine which of these his opponent is apt to use. Knowing this, I had deliberately been responding to certain moves of his with the accepted counter. Yet to continue to do so would be to let myself be killed, and the trap, if trap it was, could be used but once. His responses were quick and easy, and at any moment now, having learned what he believed I would do to each move of his, he must be ready.

  So far I had been lucky. My face was streaming with perspiration. Twice he glanced at my eyes. Was he trying to find fear there? Believe me, there was enough of that, for the man was good, and it had been long since I had fenced enough to matter.

  Around us men crowded, gold gleaming from their ears. One huge bearded man had a heavy gold necklace that must have come from looted Inca treasure. They watched, intent, and I was conscious of them only as a backdrop to what happened here. The gleaming blades, the movement in and out, the circling, the darting steel, as in some weird ballet of death where I was at once the participant and the observer. The tricks I knew seemed to find no place here, for the man left no chance. For all his strength, he moved lightly, easily, and with confidence. My arm would grow weary; my strength would go.

  He was smiling now, his eyes bright with purpose. He feinted a head cut and then thrust at my ribs. My parry was quick, but I was too far from him for a good thrust at the body, so with a flick of the wrist I cut him along the inner sword arm with the back of the blade.

  It sliced, and deep. I saw him wince, saw him start to step back, and attacked instantly. His parry was slow.

  There was blood on his sleeve now. Somebody gasped and pointed. There was a splash of blood on the floor. I feinted for the head; he tried to parry, and I thrust hard for the ribs. He stepped back quickly, and I moved in.

  He was a swordsman. Even now, his arm badly cut, he fought beautifully. Yet there was death in his face. I could see it, and he knew it. I feinted, held my thrust, then, on the instant, followed through. His parry was started too soon; my point slipped past it, and his recovery was slow. The blade slid ever so neatly along his ribs, through the hide and between the bones, and withdrew almost as if there had been nothing but a shadow there.

  Bogardus missed a step, his whole side now stained with blood, red blood in a widening blotch on the side of his shirt.

  My point lowered a little. "I have no wish to kill you."

  "I am dead. Finish what you have begun."

  "Have done. You have chosen a poor profession. If you live, choose another."

  "I took money to kill you."

  "Keep the money. You tried."

  Taking up my coat with my left hand, I turned my back on him and went into the crowd, and with my naked blade still in my hand it opened before me.

  When I was on the street again, I looked carefully about. This was no time to be careless, but of one thing I was sure. My sightseeing in Jamaica as well as my business were over.

  Tomorrow I would find John Tilly, and tomorrow I would take Diana Macklin home.

  Chapter XVIII

  Strong blew the wind, dark the angry clouds, vivid the lightning. Upon the deck, near the mainmast shrouds I stood, one hand upon them to steady me, my eyes out upon the sea, its dark, huge waves lifting like great upthrusts of black glass, ragged along the breaking edge. My father had gone to sea in his time, but I had no love for it. He had bred a landsman, whether he preferred it or not.

  There was a challenge in the storm, a magnificence in the power of the sea, and I rode the deck like a gull upon the wind and confessed inside me that while afraid, I was also drunk with it. Salt spray stung my face; my tongue licked it, tasted it, loved it. She put her bows down and took a great sea over them, and the water came thundering back, the decks awash, the scuppers sucking and gasping.

  John Tilly came down upon the deck and stood beside me. " 'Tis a raw night, lad, a raw night! We be sailing north with the coast out yonder, and many a proud ship gone down in weather no worse than this!"

  "I'll be glad when I'm ashore," I told him frankly. "I want my feet upon solid earth."

  "Aye!" he said grimly. "So think we all. We think ofttimes in the night that once the storm is over and the storm gone, we will go ashore and stay there. We'll tell ourselves that in the night watches, but when the day has come, and our money is spent ashore, then we go seeking a berth again, and off to sea it is."

  "I am a man of the hills and forest."

  "It may be so. Your father made a good seafaring man, though, and belike you could do the same, given time. You are a strong one and active, and you've a cool head about you. I saw that ashore there."

  "Ashore?"

  "In the fight with Bogardus. Ah, lad, I feared for you! I've seen him with a blade before, but you had him bested--"

  "My father taught me, and the others."

  "It showed. I could see your father's hand there, but you've the greater reach and height. He never beat a better man than B
ogardus. But you did not kill him."

  "I have no wish to kill. A man's life is a precious thing, though he waste it. A life is greater than gold and better than all else, so who am I to take it unless need be?"

  "He intended to take yours."

  "He has not my thoughts, nor my wishes nor my desires, and if he lives, life may bring him wisdom. Who knows? It is a good thing to live, to walk out upon such a deck as this and feel the wind, to walk in the forest on a moonlit night or out upon some great plateau and look westward--"

  "You, too?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Ah, you are your father's son! He looked to the westward, too! To his far blue mountains. But was it the mountains? Or was it that something beyond? We need such men, lad, men who can look to the beyond, to ever strive for something out there beyond the stars. It is man's destiny, I think, to go forward, ever forward. We are of the breed, you and I, the breed who venture always toward what lies out there--westward, onward, everward."

  We were silent then, riding the deck as it tipped and slanted. She was a good ship, even as she had been in my father's time, and she bore a good name.

  "I wonder if I shall ever see her again?"

  "Who, lad?"

  "My mother. She went to England, you know, so that Noelle would not grow up in the forest among wild men. My father sorely missed her."

  "Aye, he did that. But she was wise, lad, wiser than all, and you'll be proud of the lass when you see her. A fine lady she is, although but a girl yet, and Brian! What a gentleman! They tell me at the Inns of Court that he has a rare way with words."

  "It is the Welsh in him. When did they not?"

  "And Jeremy, lad? And Lila? Fare they well?"

  "How else? Athough it be months since I have seen them. When I go south again, I shall go calling. Jeremy is a fine woodsman now and an owner of wide lands, and Lila serves no longer but is mistress of her own estate."

  "What of the lass below there?" Tilly asked. "She has eyes for you, lad."

  I felt wary and uncomfortable. "It may be. We have talked a bit."

  "She's a fine lass, a brave, tall girl. You'd be wise to take her, lad, if that is the way you both feel. I deem there's been trouble behind you?"

  "She comes from Cape Ann ... on the coast of what they are calling New England. They thought her a witch there, and she was twice taken by slavers, the last time through sheer vengeance, dropping down of a sudden, knocking her father about and carrying her off. It was Pittingel. He wished me to see her with him, for to kill is not enough. He wanted me to suffer in my mind as well."

  "And now?"

  "To her father again if he lives. What else will come we shall talk of then, but if I take her home with me, it is a far travel for a lass, far through woods and the places where savages are."

  "She'll stand to it. There's a likely craft, lad, and one to sail any sea. You can see it in the clear eyes of her and the way she carries her head. Give me always a woman with pride, and pride of being a woman. She's such a one."

  We talked then of ships and the sea and of the old ways of men upon the water, of how men measured the altitude of a star by the span of a wrist or a hand outstretched before them and how they guided themselves by the flight of birds, the fish they saw, and the way water curls around an island or a cape and shows itself as a special current in the sea. "Ferns will fly far out to sea and rest upon the water when they wish, but the herring gulls never get more than seventy-five or eighty miles from land, and at eventide they fly toward shore to roost. When you see them winging all one way toward evening, there's land there, son, land. It has saved many a seafaring man, knowing that. Men steered by the flight of birds and found their way by the stars for these thousand years or more."

  At last I went to my bunk, but once stretched upon it, I lay long awake. Was Diana indeed the girl for me? Or was I, too, to have that westward feeling?

  Jubal Sackett had it. Where was he? How far westward had he gone? Did he live yet, that brother of mine? Or did his body lie in the rich black earth beneath the trees out there near the great river of which he spoke?

  We Sacketts wandered far upon the face of the world. Was there something in us truly that moved us ever westward? Did we fulfill some strange destiny? Some drive decreed by God, the wind or the tides that move across the world? Why Jubal, of us all? Why not Brian, who had gone again east? Yet I knew within me that Brian's way was westward, too. Knew? Was it the gift of which our father had spoken? The gift of second sight we sometimes had?

  My father lay buried in the hills that he sought, but he died bravely there and no doubt rested well. The red men who killed him knew where his body lay, and sometimes they came there and left gifts of meat upon the grave, offerings to a brave man gone, a man who fought well and died well.

  Where, in its time, would my body lie?

  Westward, a voice told me, off to the westward.

  So be it. Only that I lived well and strongly before that time came and left my sons to walk the trails my foot would never tread. For it is given that no man can do it all, that each must carry the future forward a few years and then pass the message on to him who follows.

  There must be fine strong boys and goodly women to do what remained to be done, and Diana? Who else to be the mother of them? And the woman to walk beside me on the hills where the rhododendron grew?

  Soon.

  The dark shore lay off there, somewhere beyond the black wings of night; it lay there, that long white beach upon which I played as a boy. And somewhere, not far from here, was that place of which I had heard, that place upon the open sea where may lie the gates to another world. My father in his time had seen them, or was it a trick of the sun upon the sea? A mirage, perhaps? Who could know. For now we sailed off the Carolina coast. Bermuda lay off to the northeast.

  When my eyes opened again, there was a shaft of sunlight falling across the deck, a shaft of sunlight that moved slowly and easily with a gentle roll of the ship. The storm had gone.

  Rising from my bed, I looked out--a fair day and a fine breeze blowing.

  John Tilly was on the quarterdeck when I went out to get a smell of the wind. He seemed preoccupied, so I asked no questions. Several times he glanced aloft as if expecting some signal from the lookout at the masthead.

  A cabin boy came up the ladder to the quarterdeck. "The lady, maister," he said, "she asks if you would break fast wi' her?"

  "I will be along at once." I turned to Tilly. "Captain? Will you join us?"

  He threw me a quick, impatient glance. "No, eat without me. I shall be busy here."

  Diana was at the table when I came into the cabin, and I had never seen her look more lovely. John Tilly had gone into his stores and found some captured clothing taken in one of the constant sea battles. Attacked by pirates, they had proved too stiff a foe and had taken the pirate ship as prize.

  There was sunlight through the stern light, and we sat long over our food, talking of many things. The cabin boy served us chocolate, the drink from Mexico of which we had heard much. Yet even as we talked, I was disturbed by Tilly's manner. Usually the most gracious of men, he had been abrupt and obviously worried.

  The weather was fine. Did he sense a change? And the lookout aloft? What would he--

  An enemy ship? Pirates?

  Joseph Pittingel had ships, several of them. And we had evidence enough of his hatred. Had that lookout seen something? Or had John Tilly himself?

  When our meal was finished, I got up. "Diana, change into something--anything--I do not think our troubles are over."

  She wasted no time asking for explanations. Too often in emergencies had I seen people who took the time to ask "Why" not live long enough to receive an answer.

  As for myself, I went to my chest and took my two pistols and charged them anew. Then I laid out my sword and thrust a knife into my waistband. What was happening I knew not, but it was best to be prepared, to stand ready for whatever.

  Off to the westward
would be the Virginia or Maryland coast, how far I did not know and had best learn. Ours was a good vessel, manned by sturdy men, but the best vessel and the best men can meet their match.

  When I appeared on deck, the lookout was talking to Captain Tilly. Avoiding them, I walked to the rail and looked all about. I was perfectly aware that the distance one can see from a ship's deck was limited indeed, not nearly so far as one would believe. At fifteen feet above the water I could see perhaps four and a half miles, and the lookout from the topmast could see no more than ten.

  John Tilly left the lookout to return aloft and walked across the deck to me. He noted the arms. "You do well to go armed," he said quietly. "I believe we shall have trouble."

  "The lookout has seen a ship?"

  "No, and that worries me, for there was one close to us in the night."

  "You are sure? What could have become of him?"

  "Ah, that is what bothers me, Master Kin. What, indeed? And why? It lacked but an hour or so of dawn when I was awakened. I came on deck, and Tom Carboy--he is my mate--pointed out to me a black shadow of something against the sea. It was some distance off, and by the time I reached the deck, indistinct. I could not make her out, only that there was something.

  "Carboy is a good, steady man. He had been watching ahead, for the gale was still blowing, although it had begun to ease somewhat, and some bad cross-seas were running. This is the devil's own stretch of water, you know, and there are currents that create a very mixed-up sea in some storms. He was alert to what happened, to see her ease into those big seas and not take them on the beam.

  "He had his eyes glued to those big ones, and his helmsman was ready to meet them across the bow when he happened to turn around and look astern. It seemed it had been only minutes since he had done so, but there was a ship coming up, overhauling him rapidly, a ship without lights.

  "He called me, but something must have alarmed the dark vessel because it seemed to fall back, and by the time I reached the deck, it could not be identified."

  "I do not believe in ghost ships," I said, "although in these waters--"