The Reluctant Swordsman

“Put on the shoes now,” Janu said, and steadied Jja’s shoulder as she did so. Then Janu tapped on the door and led her in to her new master.

It had been a strange day. Jja’s head was throbbing. She was trying very hard not to tremble. Now she must also try not to break an ankle, for she had not worn shoes since she left Plo, and never shoes with heels like these. She remembered to swing her hips and smile out of the corner of her eyes as Janu had taught her. Lord Shonsu rose to welcome her.

Jja dropped the cloak and let Lord Shonsu see her dress. It was a very strange dress, all tassels and beads and nothing else. She was quite accustomed to being unclothed in front of men. That was her duty to the temple and the Goddess, and she did it every evening, but somehow she felt more naked than just naked in this dress. She had hoped that it would please Lord Shonsu, but she knew men well enough to see the shock and displeasure in his eyes. Her heart sank.

A very strange day—hot bath water and perfume and being rubbed with oil; the smell of her hair being curled with hot irons; the calluses being pared from her feet; her hands shaking as she was shown how to put the paint on her eyelids and lashes and face; the little sharp pains as they made holes in her earlobes to hang the glittery pendants . . .

The other slaves had told her that Lord Shonsu was going to be reeve and they had repeated all the stories about the last reeve and the horrible things he had done to slaves. But Jja knew most of those already. They had made jokes about how big Lord Shonsu was and how rough he would be, but she knew that he was not rough. They had told her that swordsmen beat slaves with the sides of their swords. She had tried to tell them of the promise Lord Shonsu had made to her about Vixi. They had laughed and said that a promise to a slave meant nothing.

“Thank you, Janu!” Lord Shonsu said. He closed the door loudly. There was a wonderful odor of food in that huge room, coming from under a white cloth laid over dishes on a table. But Jja did not feel hungry. She felt sick. She wanted to please her new master, and he did not like her dress. If she did not please him, he would beat her, or sell her.

Then he was holding her hands and looking at her. She felt her face turning red and she could not meet his eyes. He must be able to feel her shaking. She tried to smile as Janu had taught her to smile.

“Don’t do that!” he said gently. “Oh, my poor Jja! What have they done to you?”

Then he hugged her, and she began to sob. When at last she could stop weeping, he fetched the cloth from the table and wiped the rest of the paint off her face, and off his shoulder, too.

“What sort of dress would you like to be wearing?” he asked. “You describe it to me, and I’ll imagine it.”

Between sniffles she said, “Blue silk, master. A long gown. Cut low in the front.”

He smiled. “That was what I said in the cottage, wasn’t it? I’d forgotten. I said you would look like a goddess. What did Janu say to that?”

Janu had said that slaves did not wear silk, or blue, and that long dresses were not sexy.

“They can be!” her master said firmly. “We’ll show them! Now, take off those horrid things and put this on.” He gave her the white cloth from the table, then turned away while she removed all the tassels and beads and glitter and wrapped herself in it.

“That’s much better!” he said. “You are a gorgeously beautiful woman, Jja. The most beautiful and exciting woman I have ever met. You do not need vulgar clothes like that . . . that obscenity. Now, come and sit down.”

He gave her wine to drink, and then later he wanted her to sit with him at the table and eat. He would not let her serve him. She forced herself to eat, but she still felt sick and wondered if that was because her own body smelled so strongly of musk and flower petals. He asked questions. She tried to talk. The pilgrims had never wanted talk, and she was not good at it.

She told him about faraway Plo and how it was so cold there in the winter that even the children wore clothes. He seemed to believe her, although no one else in Hann did. She told him what little she could remember of her mother—she knew nothing about her father except that obviously he had been a slave also. She told him about the slave farm where she had been reared. She had to explain about slave farms buying baby slaves to train. Talking to him was very difficult, and she knew she was doing it very badly.

“And I was bought by a man from Fex,” she told him. “And when we went on the boat, we came to Hann, and the sailors said my master was a Jonah, but he said that I was the Jonah, because he’d been on boats before. He came to ask the Goddess to return him and he gave me to the temple as an offering.”

Lord Shonsu looked puzzled, although he was trying not to, and she knew that she was a terrible failure.

Then at last, to her great relief, Lord Shonsu asked her if she would like to go to bed. She could not please him with talk, or with her new dress, but she knew how to please men in bed.

Except that even that did not seem to work properly. He would not let her do some of the things she had thought he would enjoy, things that pilgrims had demanded. She tried as hard as she could. He reacted as men always did, but she had a strange feeling that it was only his body reacting, that he himself was not pleased, as though his joy did not go very deep. And the harder she tried, the worse it seemed to get.

In the morning, as she was putting the cloak around herself, he said, “Didn’t you tell me that sewing was one of the things you were taught in that slave farm?”

He climbed out of the great bed and came over to her. “If we bought some material, could you sew a dress?”

He had already spent so much money on her, and she had not pleased him . . . Without taking time to think she said, “I can try, master.”

He smiled. “Then why not try? Will the others help you if it is what I want?”

He grinned his little-boy grin and showed her—tight here and lifting her breasts like that and loose there and tight again down here and cut open all the way down here . . . “Why not a slit up here?” he suggested. “Closed when you stand, but when you walk it will show this beautiful thigh?” Suddenly she shivered all over at his touch and discovered that she was returning his smiles. He put his arms around her and kissed her gently. “Tonight we’ll try again,” he said. “No face paint and just a tiny drop of scent, all right? I’ll tell Janu that’s how I like my women served up—raw! I prefer you the way you are now, but any dress you make will be better than that thing.”

Just when Wallie thought he was starting to make progress, there on a bed in the outer room was Nnanji, with two black eyes, several loose teeth, and a wide selection of pains and bruises. His new yellow kilt lay rumpled and bloodstained on the floor.

“Stay right there!” Wallie ordered as his vassal attempted to rise. “Jja, go and ask Janu to send up a healer.” He pulled a stool over to the bed and sat down and glared at the wreck of Nnanji’s face. “Who did it?”

The culprits were Gorramini and Ghaniri, two of the three who had beaten up Wallie for Hardduju’s amusement. Wallie had thought them gone, but not so. Meliu had left after being snubbed, but the other two were still around, carefully staying out of the Seventh’s way. Nnanji had returned from his parents’ house and dropped in on the barracks saloon, probably to do a little flaunting and vaunting. Swords were prohibited in the saloon, but fist fights were not, and perhaps even encouraged as a safety valve.

“Well, that does it!” Wallie roared. “I owe them anyway, and now they have broken the laws of hospitality.”

“Challenge, hell!” his mentor said, almost ready to start grinding his teeth again. “That’s an abomination! I shall denounce them and cut off their thumbs . . . I assume that they threw the first punch?”

One of the things Wallie had learned in his disastrous night with Jja was that Shonsu’s vocabulary was greatly lacking in terms of endearment. He now discovered that it was rich in oaths, insults, obscenities, and vituperation. He told Nnanji what sort of idiot he was in sixteen carefully selected paraphrases, without repeating a word. Nnanji somehow managed to cringe while lying flat on his back.

“Well, two against one is still bad,” Wallie concluded, and then looked suspiciously at his battered liegeman. “It was two against one?”

Well, not exactly. Ghaniri had insulted Nnanji. Nnanji had punched him and then been well punished for it. Ghaniri was a powerful fighter, as Wallie already knew—shorter than Nnanji, but much wider and heavier, with the crumpled nose and puffed ears of a bruiser. Then, when Nnanji had managed to get back on his feet again, Gorramini had repeated the insult, and Nnanji had tried to swing at him—and suffered an even larger disaster.

Now Wallie was too furious and astounded even to swear. “So instead of denouncing them, I have to go downstairs and crawl on my belly and apologize to Tarru for you? But what in the World could they have said to you that would make you behave so stupidly?” he demanded. “What insult is worth two beatings in a row?”

Nnanji turned his head back and looked up, grief-stricken. Then he closed his right eye and pointed at his eyelid, repeated the gesture with his left eye, and after that just stared in total misery at Wallie, who did not understand at all.

For a moment he thought his vassal would refuse, but he swallowed hard, and then whispered, “My father is a rugmaker and my mother a silversmith.” He might have been confessing to incest or drug trafficking.

Fathermarks? Jja had mentioned fathermarks, and Wallie had not dared to ask her what they were. The god’s riddle: First your brother . . . Wallie was instantly frantic to run to the mirror and inspect his eyelids—who ever looks at his own eyelids?

“So?” Wallie said. “They are honest? Hard-working? Kind to their children?” Nnanji nodded. “Then honor them! What does it matter what craft your father belongs to, if he is a good man?” The culture gap was staggering. Wallie opened his mouth to say that his father had been a policeman—and stopped just in time. In his mind he heard the shrill laugh of the demigod when he had made that statement to him. That might mean that the god had foreseen this very conversation, for policeman would translate as swordsman, so Wallie must not tell Nnanji.

However, Wallie Smith’s father’s father had dabbled in a great many fields in the course of a dubious career, including a couple of years in a carpet factory.

“It’s an odd coincidence, though, Nnanji—my grandfather was a rugmaker, too.”

Nnanji gasped. If hero worship were measured on the Richter scale, then Wallie had just registered nine and a half or ten.

“What does it matter, though? It’s you who’s my vassal, not your father. He obviously does a good job of making sons. Except for brains, of course, you witless cretin!”

At that moment a healer came bustling in. While he was examining the patient, Wallie slipped back into the main guest room and hobbled as fast as he could across to the mirror. Both his eyelids were blank. So much for that idea.

As he walked back, he thought about Nnanji. This absurd sensitivity about his nonswordsman background would explain his exaggerated ideals of honor and courage; overcompensation, although there was no such term in the World. Obviously a little psychiatry was required. If a hundred-kilogram, smooth-faced hunk of muscle could manage to imitate a cultured, bearded, Viennese doctor, it was time for Sigmund Freud. So, once the healer had reassured the valorous lord that there was no serious damage to his protégé, had accepted his fee, and departed, Wallie told the victim to continue lying where he was and perched himself back on the stool by the bed.

“Let’s have a word about your fencing problem,” he said. “When did it start? Have you always had it?”

Certainly not, Nnanji said, staring at the ceiling and speaking with difficulty because of his swollen mouth. As a scratcher, Novice Nnanji of the First had been a model recruit. Briu had said that he was the best natural-born swordsman he had ever seen. Briu had said that no one learned sutras faster or more accurately. Briu had told him after two weeks that he was ready to try for promotion—except that the guard had a rule requiring Firsts to be Firsts for at least a year. So it was on the anniversary of his induction into the craft that Nnanji had proved his swordsmanship with two matches against Seconds . . . “Boy, did I make a mess of them!” he lamented nostalgically.

Then he had plunged ahead, hoping to make Third in record time, also—and disaster had struck. One morning he had found that he couldn’t connect with his foil against anyone, no matter what he did. And he had been that way ever since.

“Tell me,” he asked, “did anything else important happen about that same time?”

The unbruised corners of Nnanji’s face paled, his fists clenched, and his whole body went rigid. “I don’t remember!” he said.

Either he was lying, or the very act of trying to remember was enough to terrify him. No, he did not remember, he said, and he rolled over and buried his face in the pillow, and that was that.

Wallie was very sure that he could guess what had happened. The new Second had suddenly learned that the guard was not as pure and incorruptible as he had thought in his innocence. He was still idealistic and romantic—how much more so he must have been before that! How he had learned, whether or not he had been intimidated into silence, what he had been expected or forced to do . . . none of those things mattered. What did matter was that Wallie was no psychiatrist, that the language did not contain the right words, and that any attempt to explain all this to him would almost certainly make things worse instead of better.

“Right,” he said, rising. “I can’t denounce Gorramini and Ghaniri, and I shall have to crawl to Tarru. But I’m going to get even with them, anyway. With you.”

“You! In a week or so, I’m going to put you up against them in fencing as part of your promotion to Fourth, and you are going to trash them in public.”

Wallie roared. “Don’t you tell me what isn’t possible! I’m going to make a Fourth out of you if it kills you.”

Nnanji stared, decided that his mentor was serious, and closed his eyes in ecstasy. Nnanji of the Fourth?!

“Now,” Wallie said, “you have been incredibly stupid! You have embarrassed me and endangered my mission and delayed me. You are going to be punished.”

“You are to stay in that bed until noon—no food, flat on your back. It is the best treatment for your bruises, too. And while you’re there, you can try to remember what it was that happened just before you lost your lunge.”

Wallie turned and strode to the door, leaving his vassal openmouthed. Then he remembered Nnanji’s dogged willingness and fired a parting shot. “That doesn’t mean you have to pee in the bed,” he said, and left.

Breakfast was not a fun meal that morning. Tarru was waiting for him, holding court at a table in the center of the big hall with four Fifths flanking him, across from an empty space obviously reserved for Wallie. There were secret smiles all over the room as he entered—this was what happened to swordsmen who chose rugmakers’ sons as protégés.

Wallie apologized for his vassal’s behavior and assured his host that the man was being suitably punished. Tarru grudgingly accepted the apology and smiled. Why his smile always made Wallie think of sharks was a mystery, for the man’s teeth were not pointed. His eyes were embedded in wrinkles like an elephant’s, not glassy and smooth like a shark’s. Gray hair was not sharklike. Perhaps it was just the way he eyed the seventh sword, giving a mental image of circling and waiting.

“Of course, insulting and provoking a guest is not good behavior for hosts, either,” Wallie said as his bowl of stew was laid before him. “Perhaps I should have a word with those gentlemen’s mentors. Who are they?”

“Ah!” said the acting reeve, with a curiously unreadable expression on his face. “They are not hosts, my lord, but guests, like yourself. They were protégés of Lord Hardduju. They asked to stay on for a while, and I agreed.”

Clever! They had thought that Wallie would take Hardduju’s place. If they had sworn to a new mentor within the guard, they would have been vulnerable. So they had obtained privileged status as guests, just as Wallie had done. A guest must behave himself toward another guest, of course, but now the Shonsu emergency was over . . .

“They have not sworn the second oath to anyone,” Tarru agreed, face still blank.

Red flags were waving at the back of Wallie’s mind, but he did not have time to search them out, for Master Trasingji of the white eyebrows suddenly turned to Tarru and said, “How is the work on the jail progressing, mentor?” in a singsong voice, as though he had been rehearsed.

“Quite well,” Tarru replied. “It will go faster when we have more carpenters. Most of them are busy with the new work at the stables.”

“I didn’t know you had stables,” Wallie said. “Is there anything that the temple does not possess?” He wasn’t fooling anyone. Tarru had seen that escape hole and was plugging it, fortifying the stables and probably increasing the guard on them.

There was something wrong with the Fifths, too. Yesterday they had thawed out as soon as they learned that Shonsu was not going to replace Hardduju. This morning only Trasingji was meeting his eye.

Then Tarru rose, made his apologies, and departed. The four Fifths went with him like a bodyguard. So he had seen that way out, also—no blood oath was going to be imposed on him.

Wallie had been left alone in the middle of the hall. He sat and ate in solitary misery, feeling as though he were in a zoo, surrounded by secret grins. Ignorant iron-age barbarians! Bloodthirsty prehistoric thugs! He had promised the demigod that he would be a swordsman, but he had not said he would enjoy it. He despised this primitive, ignorant culture and its murderous hoodlums . . .

As soon as dignity allowed, he stalked from the hall and headed for the women’s quarters. There he summoned Janu and gave her money so that his slave could make a dress. Janu’s disapproving expression implied that he ought to make up his mind; did he want a whore or a seamstress?

Then he wandered out to the front steps and stood in black anger, glowering across the parade ground. Faint hammerings drifted over from the jail, and that was one small comfort. He was doing a small good there. But Nnanji was a hopeless psychiatric case, and his attempts to reward Jja were only loading her up with feelings of inadequacy and insecurity—perhaps she would have been happier left where she was, tending pilgrims, doing what she could manage. As for Tarru—if that small-time barbarian gang leader thought he was going to outwit Wallie Smith, then . . .

Injured feet forgotten, he rushed down the steps and hurried off to the temple in search of Honakura.

The heat was incredible. Every day seemed to be hotter than the last, and now invisible waves of fire lashed the grounds, seeming to sear Wallie’s flesh from his bones whenever his path led him into sunlight. At the temple he was escorted once more through the dim corridors and into the gloomy jungle courtyard, but even that felt like an airless oven. His harness straps were sticking to his skin. In a few minutes the tiny priest hurried in, and his blue gown was patched with sweat, as though to prove its occupant had not been totally mummified.

Today there were no polite pleasantries after the salutes. As the two men settled down on stool and wicker chair, Wallie blurted out, “I wish I had taken the job you offered, even if only temporarily.”

“It is too late,” Wallie said. “Tarru has forestalled me. He is swearing the guard to the blood oath.”

He explained what had suddenly become so obvious. Ghaniri and Gorramini had not sworn the second oath; they had sworn the third. Nnanji’s ordeal had been ordered by Tarru, as a punishment for being honest and winning a bet for his liege.

The attitude of the Fifths had changed because they also had been made into Tarru’s vassals, probably at swordpoint. They would resent it and feel guilty. That was why they had been unable to meet the eye of a man they might have to kill in dishonor.

Tarru had not merely seen all Wallie’s possible moves and countered them, he had made one of his own—a beauty. Unbeatable! He was probably even then working . . his way down through the ranks, and when he had sworn every man in the guard, then he would be ready to spring his trap. “If I make any move now,” Wallie concluded, “then he will promote a coup. How many of the guard he has already sworn I cannot tell, but I expect it would be enough. The rest would obey their mentors first. I would be a reeve with no swordsmen.”

He scowled. “I can’t even kill the bastard now. Vassals are pledged to vengeance. Damn, damn, damn!”

Honakura comprehended at once, as he always did. “He has moved efficiently in his new post, my lord. He is repairing the jail and the stables. He has increased the guard on the gate. I understand the stables, but I admit that the jail puzzles me.”

Wallie snorted and explained, although even the priest seemed surprised over his concern for mere prisoners. “So what do you do, my lord?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Wallie confessed. “Sit tight and wait for my feet to heal, I think. It is too late now to think of recruiting more followers. Even if I knew the good men, they may have been preempted by the blood oath and ordered to keep silent about it. The damned thing takes precedence over anything.”

“Ah!” Honakura said. “Then you will have to find followers who are not swordsmen. You must have six, you know.” He stopped as a junior priestess scampered in to place a tray on the table between them, then nervously fluttered away again between the trees like a white butterfly. “Tell me what you think of this wine, my lord—it is a trifle sweeter than the one we had yesterday.”

The goblets were silver instead of crystal, the little cakes even richer and creamier, clustered on a silver plate.

“Seven is the sacred number.” Honakura frowned at Wallie’s expression. “The god told you to trust me, you said? Then trust me—it must be seven.”

“Me and Nnanji and Jja and the baby . . . do you count babies? Do you count slaves?” Religions need not be logical.

The old man leaned back in his wicker cage and surveyed the airy canopy of branches above him for a few moments. “Normally I would not count slaves, but I think you do. So, yes, I think you could say that makes four.” He waved the flies off the cakes and offered the plate to Wallie, who declined.

“How is your protégé?” the priest asked. “You tested his swordsmanship?”

“He couldn’t fight his way across an empty courtyard!” Wallie sipped politely at wine he did not want. It tasted faintly like diesel oil. “Indeed Nnanji’s problem has me baffled, and I would have your advice as an expert on people.” Leaving out his theory that some traumatic experience had caused Nnanji’s paralysis, he tried to explain the earthly concept of a mental block, finding suitable words only with difficulty.

Honakura nodded. “I have no name for that, but I have met it. I had a protégé once who got similarly tied up in certain sutras. He wasn’t stupid, but on that one point he seemed to be totally obtuse.”

Wallie thought of the whipping post and shuddered. “Never! That is no way to make a swordsman.”

Conscious of those penetrating eyes upon him, Wallie smiled blandly. “She needs more practice, and I shall attend to the matter personally.”

As well try to smuggle a plump antelope through a cage of lions. The priest studied him thoughtfully and said, “She is only a slave, my lord.”

Wallie did not want to discuss his sex life, but he resented something there. “I intend to make her into a friend!”

“A slave? The gods have picked a man of ambition, I see.” Honakura sat back with his eyes closed for a while and then smiled. “Have you considered the possibility that this slave girl and this young swordsman have been given to you as a test, my lord?”

“I sacrificed my principles by buying a slave girl,” he said. “If the god was behind that, then he tricked me. But I am not going to flog Nnanji! Never, never, never!”

Honakura cackled. “You may be looking at it the wrong way. Perhaps it is a test to see if you are ruthless enough to have him flogged. Or perhaps it is a test to see if you are patient enough not to have him flogged?” Now he had made Wallie thoroughly confused and looked very pleased with himself.

Wallie changed the subject—there was so much to ask. “Tell me about fathermarks, my lord. I see that I have none.”

The priest smiled. “I had noticed. That is very unusual; I have never met it before. Right eye shows father’s craft and left eye the mother’s, of course. Were you not a swordsman, people would ask you about it.”

He smiled and let Wallie catch up with him. “But you met Shonsu that first day . . . ”

“And then your eyelids had parentmarks,” the priest agreed. “I don’t remember them, but their absence is so unusual that I am sure I should have noticed.”

Wallie sat and brooded on his problems for a while and inevitably came back to Tarru.

“The god warned me that I must learn to be more ruthless,” he said. “I should have killed him when he challenged me.” Shonsu would have done so, probably any Seventh.

“Then you failed,” Honakura remarked, “and have made you own job more difficult.” He did not seem very worried, but then it was not his blood that was going to wet the sand. “But some of your problems cancel out, my lord.”

The priest counted on his fingers. “You were worried about brigands, dishonorable swordsmen in general, and about Tarru. You should also add priests, I regret to say—some of my colleagues believe that the sword of the Goddess belongs here in the temple, if it is indeed Her sword. But if Honorable Tarru is after it, then he will not alert the brigands, nor cooperate with the priests. And he must have his own worries about swordsmen.”

That was true. The ungodly might well squabble among themselves over the loot. Unfortunately it was likely to happen after Wallie was dead.

“I suppose,” Wallie said thoughtfully, “that the Goddess will eventually provide a new and more suitable reeve for Her temple?”

Another Seventh? With another Seventh beside him, Shonsu could turn the whole guard into a plate of cutlets . . .

“Eventually,” Honakura echoed. “We may be wrong, of course, but if you are indeed being tested, my lord, then I should anticipate that the replacement will not arrive until . . . until you have resolved your problems by yourself.”

“Damn!” Wallie said. “I need time! Time to heal! Time to find some friends! I envision him working his way through the whole guard like a cancer, swearing them at swordpoint, one by one. When he has got them all, or nearly all, then he can strike—kill me, take the sword, and leave. If it is a fraction as valuable as you say, then he can throw away everything else and make a new life for himself somewhere. Or he can make himself master of the temple . . . ”

He stopped, following the thought through and then observing the priest’s quiet amusement.

“He wouldn’t need the sword, then? He could pillage the treasure in the temple itself!” Wallie said. “It has been done? In all those thousands of years some reeve must have tried it?”

The wrinkled old face broke into a broad smile. “At least five times, although not for many centuries now, so I suppose someone is about due to try again. Of course it does not work! First of all, your blood oath does not take precedence over everything, my lord. Your swordsman code puts the will of the Goddess ahead of the sutras, is that not so?”

“That is so, I’m afraid, but there is another protection—they must leave by boat.” The priest chuckled and refilled the silver goblets.

“So the boats don’t go!” Honakura retorted, surprised by his obtuseness. “The Goddess will not cooperate with those who despoil Her temple!”

No, said the priest, he did not mean a miracle, he meant the Hand of the Goddess. Boats went where She willed on the River, for the River was the Goddess . . .

“And the Goddess is the River,” Wallie finished, his deep growl drowning out the toothless mumble of the priest. “Perhaps you had better explain, my lord.”

It took a while, for Honakura could not comprehend how ignorant Wallie was of the ways of Rivers. There was only one River—it was everywhere in the World. No, it had no beginning and no end that he knew of. All towns and cities were on the River, like Hann. Usually Fon was downstream from Hann and Opo was upstream, but not always.

At last Wallie began to understand—the geography of the World was variable. Now Jja’s story made more sense, and he asked about Jonahs. A Jonah, he was told, was a person whom the Goddess wanted elsewhere. If he or she stepped on a boat, then the boat went to that place. If the Goddess wished you to stay where you were, then your boat would keep returning. No, that wasn’t a miracle, Honakura insisted. It happened all the time. Wallie’s sword, now, that was a miracle.

There were good Jonahs and bad Jonahs, but mostly they were good—which might be why the word translated fuzzily for Wallie. As soon as the Jonah was put ashore, then the boat was normally returned to its usual haunts and often granted good fortune.

The World sounded like a very interesting place. Obviously pillaging the temple treasury would not be a profitable operation, but the demigod had specifically warned Wallie that his sword could be stolen.

Honakura scowled at the paving stones. “I am ashamed to admit that some of the priesthood are displaying a lamentable lack of faith, my lord. There is a group that believes . . . the legend says that the sword was given to the Goddess. There are those who interpret that to mean that it was given as an offering here, in the temple, that it has been hidden here somewhere, all these centuries.” He looked up angrily. “I have been accused of giving it to you, Lord Shonsu!”

Honakura laughed uneasily and again offered the plate, although he had eaten most of the cakes already. “Have faith, my lord! The gods do not choose idiots. You will think of something. But now it is my turn! Tell me about your dream world.”

So, for the rest of the morning Wallie slouched limply on his stool in the hot courtyard and told Honakura what he wanted to know about the planet Earth—Jesus and Mohammed and Moses and Buddha, Zeus and Thor and Astarte and all the others. The little man drank it all in and loved it.

That afternoon Wallie made a reconnaissance. Accompanied by an equally shaky Nnanji—the two of them looking like disaster survivors—he made a complete circuit of the temple grounds.

The River might just be fordable in a few places, and the cliff might be climbable in a few others, but nowhere could he find both together. There were bad rapids downstream, so he need not dream of boats or rafts.

Now he knew that the canyon had been designed by the Goddess to protect Her treasures, so he was not surprised.

Both ends of the great wall stood, as Nnanji had said, in the water and in fast, deep, swirling water. There was no way around.

Wallie stood near the gate for a while and watched the pilgrims coming and going, plus a steady stream of artisans and tradesmen, slaves and carts. It was a busy place, the temple entrance, but now there were eight men on the gate, three of them Fourths. Once he had entered there unseen, but miracles were never produced upon demand.

The new work at the stables consisted of massive doors with wickets for the identification of visitors. A Sixth was required to know almost all the sutras, and Tarru was obviously familiar with those concerning fortifications.

The temple enclosure was a very comfortable place. But now, for Lord Shonsu, it was a very comfortable prison. How long would Tarru allow him to enjoy it? How long until he sent his army?

At sundown Nnanji seemed much better. He had even recovered most of his normal high spirits. Wallie informed him that this evening he was to be social secretary and protocol attaché—although in translation all that came out was “herald”—and they went off to the women’s quarters to collect Jja.

She paused shyly in the doorway to let him admire her gown. That was not hard for Wallie to do. It would not have passed in Paris and it was still a shamefully sexist way to clothe a woman, but bare chests and harnesses and swords had their own sexual overtones, so perhaps they were evenly matched. She had chosen a pale aquamarine silk, so sheer that it seemed ready to blow away like smoke, and she had made a tight and simple sheath that displayed every detail of her gorgeous figure. The neckline plunged to her waist, her nipples glowed through the filmy material, and Wallie found that effect enormously more exciting than the previous night’s tassels and purple paint.

When she started to walk forward, the slit he had suggested opened to reveal the smooth perfection of her leg. Nnanji gasped in astonishment and uttered a low growling sound, probably the local equivalent of a wolf whistle. Then he looked nervously at his liege.

Wallie grinned sideways at him, without being able to take his eyes off his slave as she approached. “As long as you only look,” he said, “I will refrain from disemboweling you.”

He thought Jja had worked her own private miracle. He kissed her fondly and told her so, and she shone with pleasure at having pleased her master.

Nnanji led the way to the place he called the saloon, the evening social center for the barracks. In the vestibule, an ancient one-armed attendant guarded a rack of swords. Nnanji dutifully drew his and handed it over. Wallie merely raised an eyebrow, not wishing to give Tarru his prize without at least some sort of struggle. The attendant smiled politely and bowed him through.

It was like no saloon that Wallie had ever seen, but there were hints of a bar, a ballroom, a restaurant, a club, a society salon, and a brothel. Most of it lay outdoors, on a rooftop terrace dotted with tables and illuminated by flaming torches along the balustrades. A group of musicians wailed in a strange seven-tone scale while young people pounded and cavorted on a dance floor. Bachelors leaned against a rail, drinking and commenting, laughing and quarreling.

For a society so formal and hierarchal, the nightlife was astonishingly relaxed. True, an upper balcony was reserved for highranks and their guests—Nnanji qualified, being with Wallie—but that seemed to be about the only restriction. The men mixed freely, accompanied by their wives or their slaves or the communal barracks girls, and they ate and drank and talked and danced. Swordsmen, valuing footwork, were keen dancers and mostly good ones. The food and the drinks and the girls had to be paid for, probably to restrict consumption by high-spirited juniors, but Wallie was politely informed by the waiter that all services were free to guests. He chose a table on the upper level, sat with his left shoulder to the rail, observed the social life, and for quite a while was able to forget his worries.

Of course the highranks had to bring their wives to meet the Seventh, so he was constantly rising and sitting down again. Of course his slave must rise when he did. He noticed with amusement the careful study being given to Jja’s dress and the subtle movements she made to display its properties. Long dresses were not sexy, apparently that had been the local creed, for almost all the women wore extremely short and gaudy garments much bedecked with sequins and tassels. Some wore only the tassels, as Jja had. The color coding of ranks seemed to be forgotten for recreational wear, at least here in the barracks, but her long dress was a surprise, and the men’s expressions showed that the creed was due to be reconsidered.

After a while Nnanji asked to be excused and trotted down to the lower level. He was visible for a few minutes in a wild dance with one of the scantily dressed girls. Then he vanished. He returned in an astonishingly short while and drained an entire tankard of ale. He repeated the performance three times while they were eating dinner. Wallie decided privately that he must be indulging in inter-course intercourse, but unfortunately the pun would not translate.

The meal was almost over when a disturbance broke out at the far end of the balcony. Wallie came alert at once. Then the cause appeared out of the shadows, and he laid down his goblet to stare in astonishment. She was very large and very hideous, a female version of a sumo wrestler, her near-naked body trimmed with tassels and sparkles that emphasized more than concealed a bloated ugliness. Layers of paint on her face hid neither the wrinkles nor the badly broken and misshapen nose. She was old and scarred, wearing a spangled patch over her left eye. Rolls of fat and varicose veins and . . . “boobs like meal sacks,” Nnanji had said. Obviously this must be Wild Ani.

Her arrival was causing consternation. It was a fair guess that a slave was not supposed to be there. Shonsu instincts: when there is a disturbance check around in case it is a diversion. At once Wallie saw the group of Seconds on the lower terrace, grinning and watching. He swung his eyes back to Wild Ani, and she was heading toward him, rolling her way through the tables. That sway came from more than obesity.

“Shonsu!” she cried, spreading her arms and staggering slightly. Then the Fifths reached her and grabbed, determined that the noble guest not be insulted.

Obviously the juniors had liquored up the old woman and sicked her on to Shonsu for sport. A slave might well get beaten for that.

“Ani!” he boomed in his thunderous voice. He jumped up and held out his arms, while Nnanji gulped in horror. “Ani, my love!”

The Fifths released her and turned round to stare incredulously. Ani blinked, then straightened up with intoxicated concentration. She resumed her progress, weaving between the outraged diners all around the balcony until she reached Wallie, peered curiously with her single bloodshot eye, and repeated, “Shonsu?”

“Ani!” he said, still holding out his arms. She was huge—almost as tall as he, and half as heavy again. She simpered to show brown stumps of teeth, then embraced him fervently. It was like being attacked by a waterbed.

Now Nnanji had seen the plot. Grinning in great delight, he rose to offer his chair. Ani collapsed on it and eyed the noble lord suspiciously. “I don’t know you!” she said.

“Of course not,” Wallie said. “But we can correct that. Waiter—a flagon of your best for the lady.”

The waiter rolled his eyes in horror. Jja was being totally inscrutable, perhaps not understanding. Nnanji was turning purple, suppressing giggles. The highranks and their wives were not sure whether to be disgusted or respectfully tolerant. Down below, the young blades had their mouths open.

Ani was trying to understand. “Do I know you?” she asked in a slurred voice. Then she accepted a large goblet of wine, drained it at a gulp, and belched. She went back to studying Wallie. “No, I don’t,” she said. “You’re not a scratcher, are you? Pity.” She held out the goblet for a refill and noticed Nnanji. “Hi, Rusty,” she said. “Want your usual later?”

After the third glass she seemed to sober up for a moment and visibly counted Wallie’s facemarks. “I’m sorry, my lord,” she muttered. She attempted to rise, but failed.

“It’s a right, Ani,” Wallie said. “The Seconds put you up to this, didn’t they?”

She nodded again, then brightened, and emptied the goblet once more. “Tomorrow!”

Wallie looked at Nnanji. “If I went off with Ani to wherever you go to, then she wouldn’t be in trouble, would she?”

Nnanji agreed, looking outraged, astonished, and intensely amused, all at the same time. “There are more beds through that door, my liege.”

“Right!” Wallie said. “Stay and look after Jja for a minute.” This would be hard on his feet, but Ani was probably no longer capable of leaving under her own power.

He crouched, slid his arms under her, and—after a suspenseful moment when the issue hung in the balance—lifted her up. He carried her out, and perhaps even Shonsu himself had never worked those muscles harder.

Nnanji had been correct. The door led to a big, dim room with six beds in it. One in the far corner was creaking mightily, but the rest were empty and the light was dim, a single lantern. Wallie deposited his burden as gently as he could and ruefully rubbed his back.

Ani lay and stared up at him, her one eye wide. She was not too drunk to see his fingers slip into his money pouch. “No need, my lord. I’m one of the free ones.”

“I’m not buying tonight, Ani,” he whispered, “but don’t tell the others. Here.” He gave her a gold, which vanished instantly into a garment that did not seem capable of hiding anything.

She lay and looked up at him blearily for a while and then, understanding at last, said, “Thank you, my lord.”

He sat down on the bed and grinned at her. She smiled back uncertainly. Someone departed from the far corner, boots clacking on the floor. In a few minutes Ani was snoring.

Wallie waited a reasonable time and then went back to the table. He smiled reassuringly at Jja and said, “I didn’t.”

“I think I put my back out before I got there.” Wallie reached for the wine bottle. He was not entirely joking.

They did not linger long after that. He led his slave across the floor with every eye on them, and slaves bore flames before them to the royal suite.

“Of course, master! But Apprentice Nnanji would not. It is difficult to take off.”

But none of it was fun for Jja. She was as diligent and hard-working and frantically eager to please as she had been the previous night. The purely physical part of him, the Shonsu part, took its animal pleasure as before, but the Wallie Smith part suffered more agonies of postcoital depression. It was not her fault—he was too ravaged by guilt at being a slave owner to enjoy anything.

In the pilgrim cottage she had offered comfort. In the royal suite she was doing her duty. And that was not the same thing at all.

The next day Jja found the courage to suggest—very tentatively—that her gown might be improved by a little embroidery. She wanted to copy the griffon from the sword. Of course Wallie enthused, so the middle of the morning found Jja sitting in a corner of the great guest chamber sewing, with the seventh sword before her.

Despite his shattered appearance, Nnanji insisted that he was well enough for fencing. In fact, Wallie could now see that his injuries were superficial, as the healer had said. Undoubtedly, then, the real culprit was Tarru. Gorramini and Ghaniri had been obeying orders, but reluctantly. They had concentrated on appearances and avoided doing any real damage at all. And that, in turn, was a lesson in the difference between obedience and loyalty.

Fencing it was, then. Masks came out of the chest, and Wallie selected the shortest foil he could find.

The swordsmen used no protective garments except masks with neck guards, and therefore all lunges and cuts must be carefully pulled to avoid injury. Of course that habit then tended to carry over into real swordwork—and so reduced what would otherwise have been a monstrous mortality rate in the craft. Vulnerable spots, such as collarbones and armpits, were strictly out of bounds. Any swordsman who injured a fencing partner became known as a butcher and soon found himself blacklisted.

“Now,” Wallie said. “I shall try to fight like a Second—a real Second, not a temple Second.”

He discarded most of his bag of tricks and slowed down to snail pace. He was still too good for Nnanji to hit, but he wasn’t hitting, either. “Your defense is great,” he announced approvingly. “Wrist! Foot! Damn! If you could only put on an attack to match . . . watch that thumb!”

He tried everything he could think of, and nothing helped. The killer earthworm was still there. If his patience was being tested, he was about to fail. Nnanji grew madder and madder with himself until he threw down his sword, ripped off his mask, and swore a bucketful of obscenities.

“I’m no damn good!” he shouted. “Why don’t you just take me down to the whipping post and beat me?”

Wallie sighed. The man needed a year’s psychoanalysis, and there was no time. He had only one idea left to try.

Nnanji looked surprised, concluded that his courage was being questioned, and defiantly said, “Yes!”

“I don’t want you to feel better,” Wallie said. “I want you to feel like the useless dumb brat you really are. Now put on that mask.”

Nnanji guarded and got a stab in the ribs from the button of Wallie’s foil. It raised a red welt.

“I think you’re scared to hit me . . . ” Wallie struck him brutally across the chest.

“Because I’m a swordsman . . . ” Wallie banged his foil on Nnanji’s mask. “And you’re only rugmakers’ trash!” Then Wallie hit him insultingly on the seat of his kilt.

It could easily have failed. With his self-respect in ribbons, now rejected by his hero, Nnanji might readily have collapsed like a wrecked tent and gone back to herding pilgrims for the rest of his life. But the gods did not put red hair on a man as a warning of nothing. His temper exploded again, and this time it was directed outward, at his tormentor. Perhaps it was even Wallie’s own rugmaking grandfather who determined that. He screamed in fury at the insult, and the fight was on.

Wallie butchered. He slashed at Nnanji with the foil, he jabbed him with the button end, and he kept up a stream of all the abuse he could think of—show-off brat, brothel hog, pilgrim pusher, throwing his money around in bars, not a friend who would stand up for him . . . Every time he got another bruise Nnanji said devilspit! But he kept coming, and his attack grew wilder and wilder.

“Cripple! You couldn’t hit the side of the temple if you had your nose on it!”

Wallie jeered and called him a weakling, a pretty-boy gelding, an impotent pansy, and a carpet beater. Nnanji’s face was invisible, but his oaths grew louder, and even his chest was turning red. His ponytail whirled like a flame. It was hard work for Wallie, for he had to hold himself back to a low standard, avoid doing serious hurt, evaluate Nnanji’s moves almost before he made them, and keep up his insults, all at the same time.

“I don’t want a half-baked First. I need a fighter. I’d give you back to Briu, except he wouldn’t take you.”

Nnanji was screeching incoherently through his mask. Failing to connect, he unthinkingly started to experiment, and at last he achieved a lunge that was much better than anything he had done before. Wallie let it through. He staggered under the impact and wondered if it had broken a rib.

“Lucky one!” He sneered. The comment was fair, but it did not sound fair. The next lunge was about the same, so he parried it to a near miss. Then came a wickedly straight cut. That had to be allowed to pass, and then Wallie was bleeding also. He started to ease up on his hits, but now Nnanji was howling like a pack of hyenas and trying everything possible. The bad ones failed, but each time Wallie detected an improvement he let the blow come, and soon he was hurting almost as much as his victim. They battered and yelled and cursed like maniacs.

Finally he knew he had won. The strokes were coming hard and accurate, and so deadly that he was in danger of being maimed. “Hold it!” he yelled, but Nnanji either did not or could not stop now. Wallie cranked up to Seventh again, striking the foil right out of his hand. Then he grabbed him in a bear hug. Nnanji screamed and kicked, and went limp.

“You did it!” Wallie said and let him go. He pulled off the masks. Nnanji’s face was almost purple, and his lip was bleeding.

Wallie dragged him over to the mirror and thrust his own foil into his hand. “Lunge!” he said.

Angrily Nnanji lunged at the mirror. He did it again. Then he turned to Wallie, understanding at last. “I can do it!” With a banshee yell he started capering around the room, waving his arms in the air.

Wallie felt like Professor Higgins—everyone into the Spanish dance routine. He slapped Nnanji on the back. He laughed and assured him that he had not meant any of those things he had said, and generally tried to calm him. Unbelieving, Nnanji just kept dancing back to lunge at the mirror, and then go whirling around once more. The block was gone.

“I did it! I did it!” Then Nnanji looked at his wounds and at Wallie’s, and his face fell. “You did it. Thank you, my liege! Thank you! Thank you!”

Wallie rubbed an arm over his forehead. “You’re welcome! Now—quick, before you stiffen up! Run down and do some cooling off exercises, then get in a hot tub. Scat!”

Wallie slammed the door behind him, leaned against it, and closed his eyes. He needed the same treatment himself, but he also needed absolution. He felt soiled, foul, perverted. Who had been tested? Could it have been Nnanji? Or was it a test to see if Wallie could be bloody-minded? He had sworn not to beat the kid and then he had done just that. What price scruples now? He was worse than Hardduju.

He opened his eyes and Jja was standing before him, studying him with those huge, dark, and inscrutable eyes. He had totally forgotten her in her corner. She had seen it a. What must she think of this sadistic horror who owned her?

“Jja!” he said. “Don’t be scared, please! I don’t usually do that sort of thing.”

“I’ve mutilated him!” Wallie said miserably. “He’ll ache for weeks. He’ll have scars for life!”

She put her arms around him and her head on his shoulder, wet and bloody as he was, but it wasn’t sex she was offering—it was solace. He drank it like a man dying of thirst.

“Apprentice Nnanji is a very tough young man,” she said. “I think that lesson was a lot harder on Wallie than it was on Nnanji. He won’t care.”

She chuckled into his ear. “They’re only bruises, master. He’ll wear them like jewels. You’ve given him back his pride!”

“I have?” Wallie began to relax. “Yes, I have, haven’t I?” The test had been passed. He had made his swordsman, and . . . “What did you call me?”

She stiffened in sudden apprehension. “That was the name you used that first night, master. I am sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be, Jja! You are welcome to call me that.” He held her away from him to look at her. “What do you know of Wallie?”

She stared up at him, puzzled and unsure of the words to express her thought. “I think he is hiding inside Lord Shonsu,” she said shyly.

He hugged her tight again. “You are so right, my sweet. He is lonely in there, and he needs you. You can call him out anytime you want.”

Although he was not to understand in full for some time, that moment was dawn. While Nnanji had been breaking down his mental block, Jja had been building one of her own—a strange discrimination between her owner and her man. Somehow she had made a distinction between them, in a purely emotional way that could never have been put into words and would have driven Honakura mad. Different world or far country were of no interest to Jja. It might even be that this Wallie, being hidden inside her owner, was invisible, and hence had no facemarks. But it was doubtful that her thought process even went that far. It was a matter of feelings. She had seen him weep in the pilgrim hut. Now he was full of sorrow because he had hurt his friend. If he was troubled she could soothe, comfort, lend him her stoic slave’s strength to accept what the gods decreed. He would react then as a man, not a master.

And Wallie had found the friend he needed, another lonely soul hidden from the World, biding inside his slave. The analysis came later, although he would never dare to question very deeply, lest he break the spell by reducing it to logic.

“Wallie?” she said shyly to his shoulder strap, trying the word. “Wallie!” She said it four or five times, each time with a meaning subtly changed. Then she held up her face to be kissed, and the kiss said more than words ever could. She led him over to the bed and showed him again how the smallest god could drive away the god of sorrows.

Wallie jerked his head up and reached for his sword as the door flew open, but it was only Nnanji returning. He had done as he had been told and had now came back to mount a ferocious attack on the mirror, although many of his cuts were still dribbling blood down to his kilt, and any sensible man would have gone in search of a healer. He barely glanced at the two limp, sweat-drenched figures on the bed. The People saw no great significance in nudity, and sex to Nnanji was merely another enjoyable bodily function, like eating. He would have been very surprised had his mentor complained at having his privacy disturbed. Indeed probably Nnanji’s only thought on the matter was to hope that Shonsu would hurry up and recover so that they could get back to important work like fencing.

Wallie sank back into the downy softness and studied Jja’s face for a moment. A stripe ran down the middle and a tiny vertical bar on each eyelid . . . slave and child of slaves. Her eyes opened, and she smiled at him in drowsy contentment.

His doubts of the previous day had fled. He had been right to take her away from Kikarani. They could make each other happy, be lovers, and even friends.

Now it was she who studied him. Then she said, “Honorable Tarru is swearing the swordsmen against you?”

She guessed his thoughts. “The slaves know everything, master. They told me.”

He felt a surge of excitement. Friend! He had been committing the very crime he had denounced in the People, thinking of a woman as a possession, a mere source of physical pleasure.

She seemed surprised that he would ask. “I will do anything. The others will help, also. Because of Ani.”

She nodded solemnly, her face so close to his that it was hard to focus. “Ani would have been beaten, master, had you not accepted her.”

So that trivial half kindness, half joke had earned him the friendship of the slaves, had it? There were many slaves around the barracks, he now realized. He had barely registered them. Probably nobody else noticed them at all. They must be privy to all the secrets. Of course his actions with Ani would be known. Ani was a slave herself. Likely there had been another in the corner bed.

He was still pondering the implications of a slave army when Jja said, “If you try to leave with the sword, he will stop you, master? That is what they told me.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so. The swordsmen know you—you would not even get down the stairs, Jja. You would be stopped if you were carrying a long bundle, a roll, a . . . ”

At once Nnanji stopped his lunging and swung round: “My liege?” He was grinning insanely. He, too, would do anything—he would eat hot coals if his mentor asked him.

Looking surprised, Nnanji walked over, sheathing his sword “Katanji, my liege.”

Momentarily nonplussed, Wallie raised a hand to his own smooth chin. Then he realized that Nnanji was not thinking of chins—Nnanji meant that his brother ought to be wearing a loincloth. Poor families had trouble finding crafts for their children. Payment to admit Nnanji to the swordsmen had been a bribe, but artisan mentors demanded initiation dues quite openly.

Nnanji frowned. “He is a hellion, my liege, but he always seems to talk his way out of trouble.”

“Right,” Wallie said—he had no choice that he could see. “Jja will go and find him. I have a job for him. If he performs it faithfully, then he can have any reward that it is in my power to give.”

“You would take a scratcher as a protégé?” exclaimed the vassal who had been little more use than a scratcher himself an hour before.

“If that’s what he wants.” Wallie smiled. “But you’re going to be a Fourth next week, remember? We can make you a Third today if you keep lunging the way you were just now. He can swear to you or me, I don’t care.”

Nnanji’s battered appearance at lunch provoked much silent hilarity—the Seventh had obviously lost his temper with his notoriously inept protégé. Only the perceptive might have noted that Lord Shonsu had acquired more bruises and cuts himself, or wondered why the apparent victim was grinning so idiotically.

That afternoon Lord Shonsu proved to be a demanding guest. He sent for the tailor again, and the cobbler. Healer Dinartura arrived and saw the need to call in second, third, and fourth opinions on the noble lord’s feet; he also carried away a secret message to his uncle. The barracks masseur was summoned. Priests began to call, bearing mysterious packages. Lord Shonsu decided to buy a saddle and sent for the saddler. He demanded music, so musicians came and went all afternoon. He wanted his slave to sew more gowns, and drapers attended with their rolls of silk. Bath water was required—not once, but twice, because of the unrelenting heat. Finally, toward sunset, even Lord Athinalani came from his armory, accompanied by two juniors bearing carrying cases full of swords. If Tarru was keeping himself informed about all this meaningless activity, the identity of that last visitor might have warned him what was happening. But by then it had already happened.

Just before sunset the heat broke in a spectacular thunderstorm. Rain dropped in layers from a sky of coal. Thickets of lavender lightning jigged above the temple spires. The gold plating would make those spires good lightning rods, and some other divinely inspired accident of design had obviously made them well grounded.

To Wallie and Nnanji, watching from their palace suite, the thunderclaps hit like blows to the head, leaving their ears ringing.

The social hour started later than usual, after the rain, but the night was wonderfully cool, and the torches hissed and steamed around the terrace, reflecting up from the wet flagstones. As the noble guest paraded his tiny entourage across the floor, all eyes turned to watch. With carefully concealed amusement Wallie registered the puzzled glances as the swordsmen tried to work out what was different, the dropped jaws and exclamations when they succeeded.

It was not the battered condition of his protégé that elicited surprise, nor the lithe figure of his slave in her blue gown decorated with a silver griffon on the left breast—half the women in the place were this evening wearing similar gowns, now known as “shonsues.” No, the attention was directed toward the valorous lord himself, and his empty scabbard.

Tarru was not present, but three Fifths attempted an inconspicuous stampede out to the vestibule. There the ancient, one-armed retainer exhibited for them the sword that the noble lord had left with them. They probably recognized it—a travesty of a weapon, pig iron, not fit to stop a charging rabbit.

Honakura’s spy network had been operating efficiently, as usual, and he greeted Wallie and his brand-new sword the next morning with much toothless chuckling and delighted wringing of hands. The shady courtyard was cool and damp, the bougainvillaea sprinkled with diamond dust. The air was fragrant.

“I told you that you should not underestimate the Goddess’ champion!” he said, producing an extremely dusty clay bottle. “This, my lord, is the last bottle of a famous vintage, the Plon eighty-nine. I open it in honor of your victory!”

“It’s no victory!” Wallie protested, settling once more on the familiar stool. “But I have won the time I wanted.”

“A hit, but not yet the match?” Honakura asked with another chuckle. “Do I have that right?” He put the bottle on the little table and stood over it, fussing with a knife to remove the wax seal. “You greatly frightened my nephew—he was convinced that the demon had returned. You also worried me, my lord. When Dinartura told me that you wanted to be visited by priests bearing long packages, I thought you were going to pass the sword to me. I was much exercised to think of a safe hiding place. Then all the packages returned unopened . . . ” He laughed again, spraying spit. “There!” He poured the wine.

Wallie sniffed the wine in its crystal chalice, sipped, and paid compliments. It wasn’t bad at all, not unlike a fair Muscatel.

“At least four times, from the look of the place,” Wallie replied. “I sent for Coningu and raised a typhoon of complaint. The bed was half shredded! There were feathers everywhere.”

The old priest almost choked on his drink. “What did Master Coningu have to say?”

“He dropped a broad hint that the culprit was beyond his jurisdiction,” Wallie said. The old commissary obviously disapproved of Tarru and might be a valuable ally. “So now the treasure hunt is on, but I had many visitors yesterday. He can’t know which one took it.”

Honakura nodded with glee. “And who can he trust to search? The honest men, who disapprove, will doubtless be perfunctory in their efforts; the dishonest would move it to another hiding place. He cannot search everywhere himself.”

He sipped his wine in silence, savoring Tarru’s untenable dilemma, then raised a nonexistent eyebrow. “Would you tell me in general how you did it?”

“With pleasure.” Wallie had been waiting for the question. “The trickiest part was smuggling it downstairs and out of the building, for there were watchers, and I am followed wherever I go. The sword would certainly have been noticed. What I did not know was whether Nnanji was also being followed . . . ”

So, while Jja had gone in search of Nnanji’s brother, Wallie had instructed Nnanji in how to detect a follower. Nnanji had been disappointed to learn that this was not a sutra, but Wallie had merely been quoting the standard practice set forth in spy stories—dodge into doorways, backtrack without warning, and so on. He had even given some advice on losing a tail, although the temple grounds lacked the taxicabs and hotel lobbies recommended by the spy-story writers. Accepting this as a game, Nnanji had headed for the gate to let himself be seen by his brother, Katanji. And Katanji, as instructed, had followed him at a distance back to the barracks.

“Yes,” Wallie said. “I couldn’t have risked it if . . . How did you know that?”

Wallie frowned, then continued. “Of course the guards on the gate paid no attention to a naked boy bringing in a rug. He followed Nnanji, and they both slipped into the bushes below the balcony. And I dropped the sword to them.”

Honakura was aghast—he knew the height of the barracks. “You dropped it? It wasn’t smashed?”

Wallie explained parachutes. He had attached a pillowcase to the hilt with four lengths of Jja’s thread. It had not been enough to slow the sword’s fall very much, but it had made that superbly balanced weapon drop point downward, and Chioxin would have designed it to take impact from that direction. Only a buried rock could have caused damage, and that he had had to chance.

As things had turned out, what the seventh sword had encountered had been a buried tree root. That had proved to be a problem. Katanji had heaved and strained without success—the sword had remained firmly planted, while Wallie had held his breath on the balcony above. It had made him think, in a mildly hysterical way, of Mallory’s tale of the boy Arthur: Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise King born of all England. In this case the boy Arthur’s lanky older brother had been standing by in the undergrowth and had emerged to try. But Chioxin would not have foreseen tensional stress, and Wallie had been suffering nightmare visions of the hilt coming loose from the tang. In the event it had been the blade that came free from the root, and Sir Kay—Nnanji had fallen flat on his back, while the boy Arthur collapsed in a fit of nervous giggles.

“Of course,” Wallie said, “the guards should have investigated a boy carrying a rug out of the grounds, but it was so hot yesterday . . . and he has a rugmaker’s fathermark, so a story about repairs would have been believed. Jja was watching. She says he walked through without being questioned at all.”

The old priest frowned. “That priceless sword is now in the home of a rugmaker?”

He sipped wine, enjoying the expression on Honakura’s face—had anyone ever before had cause to tell Honakura that he was being too obvious? Then he continued.

“At breakfast this morning—and, by the way, you could tell who was on my side from the grins when I came in . . . not that I can trust even those men any more. Where was I? Yes, Tarru was not there, but Trasingji was . . . ”

Wallie and his protégé had finished breakfast in their usual seats. Then their way out had taken them past Trasingji, sitting with two other Fifths. Wallie had stopped to accept their salutes. Only a slight lowering of the feathery white eyebrows had hinted at Trasingji’s thoughts, but his companions had been grinning openly at the Seventh.

“Tell your friend this,” Wallie had said. “I do not know where it is. Nnanji does not know where it is. Nor do his parents; it is not at their house. In fact it is not in the town at all. All this I swear by my sword. The Goddess be with you, master.” And he had stalked out, feeling very pleased with himself. There was nothing more holy to a swordsman than the oath of his craft, so he would probably be believed.

“I see,” Honakura said. “I think. So he knows that it is still within the grounds?” The priest was peeved at being mystified by a mere swordsman. He knew that Wallie knew that.

Wallie nodded. “He may well assume that you have it, holy one. I should have excluded you also; you may be in danger.”

“Bah!” Honakura frowned darkly. “I still think you have removed it from the temple altogether. But you would not perjure yourself . . . ”

“And Tarru has extra guards on the gate. They will all swear that neither Nnanji nor I went out. They don’t know Katanji. They may have seen Jja come and go, for they watch the women, but she was carrying nothing.” He sipped his wine and added casually, “Except a blanket, when she returned.”

Wallie took pity on him. “Her baby misses his blanket. I gave her a copper to buy it from Kikarani. Having smelled it, I can tell how he recognizes it, but not why he would want it.”

Now the old man understood and he shook his head in wonder. “So you trusted the sword to a slave and a boy you have never met?”

Wallie nodded, well pleased. If the devious Honakura, who knew that Jja was no ordinary slave, had found his actions incredible, then Tarru would never get close. Tarru was covetous and a gambler, but not a trusting man. Tarru would not even have trusted Nnanji the swordsman with a jewel.

“Katanji carried it up the road in the rug, with Jja following to watch. Then she slipped into an empty cottage and hid it in the thatch. But I do not know which cottage, so I do not know where it is.”

“So the blanket was her excuse to be there and absent from the barracks,” the priest concluded, smiling and nodding. “And the sword has not only left the temple but is even beyond the town. Oh, yes! You are a most subtle swordsman, my lord!” He could probably pay no higher compliment.

Wallie accepted a cake and more wine. He could admit the cause for celebration. He provoked more mirth by telling how he had checked in Nnanji’s old sword the previous evening.

“How is his fencing, then?” Honakura asked. “I heard that you had treated him severely.”

Wallie confessed that he had been forced to beat Nnanji, although not in conventional fashion. “His swordsmanship is astonishing. His defense was fine before, and now he has an attack to match. He tried to butcher me this morning, but he will grow out of that.”

Nnanji would be an easy Third by temple standards, even by Shonsu’s. Almost it seemed as though those years of frustrated practice had been locked up in storage and were now released. Wallie had offered to arrange promotion that very day. Nnanji had turned coy, and asked if there was any rule against jumping two ranks at once. There wasn’t, so Wallie had agreed to let him wait until he was ready to try for Fourth. Nnanji was now his secret weapon.

Honakura huddled back in his wicker chair and twinkled at his guest. “And the slave?”

Unconsciously Wallie yawned. He was not sure whether he had slept at all in the night. He wished that Honakura was literate, to appreciate a joke about a World book of records. But he wasn’t, so Wallie merely remarked that there had been a lot more feathers on the floor again in the morning. Shonsu was a tireless performer when encouraged; Jja an enthusiastic partner. Together they had scaled heights of rapture that he would have thought quite unattainable had he not experienced them.

“Now I have time,” Wallie said. “Time to heal, to train Nnanji, to learn about the World from you . . . time to think! Honorable Tarru can carry on taking the temple complex apart, but now he must be seriously considering the possibility of failure, so I think he will be circumspect.”

“Ah,” Wallie said. “I have not met him, but I think he must be the fifth. Two more to go.”

Wallie could not afford to relax, but he no longer felt death stalking closely at his back. Days crept by, and his feet healed with a rapidity that astonished Dinartura, yet the bandages stayed on. Wallie spent most of his time in the guest room—exercising, chanting sutras and fencing with Nnanji, playing with Vixini, making love with Jja. Any time he went out he was certain that he was being followed, and he suspected that the same was now true of Nnanji.

Shonsu was a brilliant instructor, Nnanji an incredible pupil. Shown a knack, trick, or skill, he never forgot it. His swordsmanship grew like a thunderhead on a summer’s afternoon, as Wallie could see from the level at which he had to fence to equal him. He should have had more than one partner, but they were both taking pleasure in keeping his progress secret.

One evening, when teacher and pupil had finished bathing and were both feeling the weary contentment that comes from long and hard exertion, Nnanji confessed to feeling frustrated.

“You are a much better instructor than anyone in the guard, my liege,” he said. “You show me all this wonderful technique, but I don’t seem to be improving very much at all, not since the first day.” He threw down his towel angrily.

They stood on the little platform together and watched the action. At that time of day there were only a half-dozen couples fencing, some supervised and others merely practicing. Nnanji stared for a while, then turned to his mentor with an astonished grin.

Wallie nodded. “You can’t expect to be hit by lightning every day,” he said. “It comes gradually. But you are a hundred times better than you were.”

Then one of the pairs finished their practice. They pulled off their masks and were revealed as Gorramini and Ghaniri. Nnanji yelped, his eyes flashing with delight. “I could beat them, my liege!”

“Possibly,” said Wallie, who privately agreed. “Let’s give it a few more days, though.”

Each morning he visited Honakura in his little courtyard and learned more of the World. He also asked about Shonsu and was distressed to discover how little the priest knew about him. He had come a long way, but that did not mean a long journey. The Hand of the Goddess would have brought him, Honakura insisted, and similarly Wallie could be transported to wherever She wished him to be. So all he needed to do was board a boat in Hann, and he might find his task—or his mysterious brother—in the next port.

“There is one thing you should know, my lord,” the little man said. He seemed reluctant to continue. “Obviously the demon had been sent by the Goddess, as our exorcism was a failure.”

Wallie found this subject confusing, having been the demon in question, and it always reminded him of the demigod’s hints of Someone Having Made a Bad Lead. “So?” he asked.

“Your previous occupant . . . ” Honakura said. “That is . . . the original Lord Shonsu . . . he thought that the demon had been sent by sorcerers.”

“Sorcerers!” Wallie exclaimed in dismay. “I didn’t know you had sorcerers in the World.”

“Neither did I,” the priest replied, surprisingly. “There are old legends of them, but I have never heard them mentioned by any pilgrim. They were supposedly associated with the priests once.”

Wallie did not enjoy the idea of sorcerers. How could a swordsman fight sorcerers? But a world of gods and miracles could presumably be a world of magic, also.

“It figures,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Where there are swordsmen there would have to be sorcerers, wouldn’t there?”

“I don’t see why.” Honakura sniffed. “But I can’t advise you about them. They were supposed to worship the Fire God. Their facemarks are feathers.”

Why feathers? No one knew, and Wallie discovered that no one else knew much about sorcerers either. Nnanji just scowled and complained that there would be no honor in fighting sorcerers. Nnanji’s ideals ran to heroic single combat and epics. He probably dreamed of a great epic: How Nnanji Slew Goliath.

One day a junior priest, carefully selected by Honakura, carried a message to Nnanji’s brother. Next morning the boy knelt at the temple arches with the pilgrims. A youth not apprenticed to a craft was of little interest to the priests, but this one was approached after a very short while and led in to pray . . . and then spirited out through the back. He sat on a stool in Honakura’s courtyard with that gentleman and Wallie and ate all the cakes.

He was very unlike Nnanji: short and dark, with curly black hair, and sharp, restless eyes, plus a bubbling impudence that seemed little impressed by the august company of two Sevenths. He did not look much like swordsman material to Wallie, but Wallie had accepted Honakura’s belief that the gods were recruiting on his behalf, and if Nnanji wanted his brother as his first protégé, then that was how it would be.

Katanji solemnly swore that he had told no one of his exploit with the sword. He was reminded how important that was to Nnanji, for if Tarru laid hands on the sword, he must then kill Wallie in self-defense, or from spite. Then he would have to plan on killing Nnanji, also.

Before Katanji left, he was awarded a contract for repairs to the rugs in one of the priests’ dormitories. If he was needed for any more conspiring, then he would be informed when he made the deliveries. Honakura seemed perturbed by the price that the lad demanded. He glanced in rueful surprise at Wallie, but agreed that it would be paid. Katanji was skipping as he departed.

Wallie had made no progress in planning his escape. Tarru had searched the whole barracks and failed to find the sword. He could hardly rummage the entire temple grounds, so he must wait until Wallie tried to leave. He had many guards on the gate. He had placed a roadblock at the foot of the hill and greatly increased the detachment at the ferry port.

All this Wallie learned from the slaves. His intelligence sources were now better even than Honakura’s. The slaves knew everything, but normally they formed a self-contained society. They had no interest in, and played no part in, the affairs of the free. For Lord Shonsu they made exception, and Jja was given all the news to pass on to him.

Tarru was stalemated, but he was continuing to swear swordsmen by the blood oath. Unfortunately this was not done in the presence of slaves, and Wallie could not determine who might still be trustworthy—probably not even lowranks now. There must have been some resistance, for three times slaves had been called in to clean up bloodstains. The guard was so large that the absences were not noticeable, and they were not discussed.

Wallie felt horrified and guilty at these needless deaths. Even Nnanji looked bleak when he heard, but he had to assume that the proprieties of challenge had been observed. Such ritual murder was not an abomination, merely an occupational hazard of being an honorable swordsman. Even the retired swordsmen of the barracks staff seemed to have been infected. The old commissary, Coningu, suddenly became bitter, snappish, and uncooperative. Wallie assumed that the old man was hinting that he was now unreliable, but could not openly say so.

So the slaves provided information on the present situation. For long-term strategy Wallie cross-examined Honakura. What happened if you sailed down the River forever’? The priest had never thought of that and assumed that you would never stop—how could there be an end to a River? Where would the water go? What happened if you walked away from the River? You would come back to it, for it was everywhere. The only qualification was that there were mountains, and here his knowledge was scanty. There might be other peoples, other customs, other gods, in the mountains.

Politics, it seemed, was rudimentary, each city ruling itself. Wallie had great trouble explaining warfare to the priest, for it was almost unknown. A city that wished to oppress a neighbor would have to hire swordsmen, because only swordsmen might use violence. But then the neighbor would also hire swordsmen, and why should swordsmen hurt or kill members of their own craft for others’ benefit? Surely one side must be in the right, and one in the wrong? And honorable swordsmen would not fight for the wrong. It sounded too good to be true, and Nnanji told contrary stories with good guys and bad guys, but clearly the World was a more peaceful place than certain other planets.

Jja’s skill with a needle flourished as fast as Nnanji’s with a sword, although there Shonsu’s expertise was of no help. She had been taught to sew in her childhood, but had never had a chance to use what she had learned. Now she could discover the joy of doing something purely for its own sake. She was astonished at the idea that she could have more than one garment, and even more than one evening gown, but she produced a second in white, and a third in cobalt, and each was better made and more cunningly provoking than the last. She embroidered a white griffon on the hem of Wallie’s kilt—and then on Nnanji’s, to his great delight.

Now that the sword had been “mislaid,” as Wallie put it, he need no longer fear assassination by dagger or poison, and some evenings he ate in private with his slave in the royal suite. On other nights they displayed her gowns in the saloon.

On one such occasion there was entertainment from a wandering minstrel, who sang an epic about the massacre of seven brigands by three valorous free swords. The swordsmen listened more or less politely. At the end they applauded and awarded the minstrel two barracks girls for the night—three was regarded as top dollar.

A tale such as this fell in the shadowy borderlands of Wallie’s dual memories. As Shonsu he could regard it as something of interest, not to be taken too seriously, swordsman sports news. As Wallie he found it a worrisome piece of job description, wondering if one day he, also, would find a Homer to record whatever feat he was expected to accomplish for the Goddess.

He had assumed that the event was recent, but next day Nnanji informed him that the same story had come around two years before, and that the first version had been much better told. He demonstrated by reciting verbatim about a hundred lines of the earlier work. To avoid argument, Wallie agreed with this assessment; he could not have quoted one couplet of the poem he had heard the previous night.

So the days went, but the deeper conflict remained unresolved. Sooner or later Wallie must move and he could not see how. Swordsmen’s Day was approaching, with Wallie scheduled to play a major part in the observance. How could he do that without the celebrated sword?

Nnanji seemed to have caught up with himself in fencing. He was still progressing, but at a more normal rate.

The Shonsu part of Wallie was feeling guilty about Nnanji, for now he was a sleeper, a man with ability above his rank. Sleepers were regarded with disfavor, and to create one was a sneaky trick.

Nnanji agreed. He would be happy to make his try for promotion. “I am a Fourth, now, my liege?”

“You’re a Fourth by my standards,” Wallie said. “And that means a Fifth by the guard’s. Honorable Tarru could peel and core you, but anyone else I’ve seen, you could serve up as cat food.”

Wallie wore his boots for the first time in public the next morning, in honor of the expected promotion. Yet, as he sat at breakfast with his back to the wall as usual, he looked around the hall uneasily. He had watched almost all the Fifths fence at one time or another, and not one of them was any better than Nnanji was now. Tarru was going to receive a considerable shock when he realized that he was opposing not only the best swordsman in the valley, but also possibly the third best. That realization might spur him to some dangerous rashness. Wallie was having second thoughts about pulling the covers off his sleeper.

“I am Janghiuki, swordsman of the third rank . . . ” said the caller across the table. He was a young Third, a contemporary of Nnanji’s, short and skinny and eager, but nervous at introducing himself to a Seventh.

“I am Shonsu, swordsman . . . ” The formalities were a nuisance in that Wallie never seemed to be able to stay seated for very long in public, but the guard did not use them among themselves, so they were also an important reminder that he was a guest, and hence sacrosanct.

“May I have the honor . . . ” Janghiuki said, and presented his companion, a First by the official name of Ephorinzu. Wallie had noticed him before. Nnanji referred to him as Ears, for two obvious reasons, and so, probably, did everyone else. He was a large, resentful looking man, absurdly old to be a First, probably older than Shonsu, and certainly older than his fresh-faced mentor.

“And may I have the honor . . . ” Now Wallie had to present Nnanji to Janghiuki, who had known him for years.

“My Lord,” the Third said, getting down to business, “my protégé is a candidate for promotion to the rank of Second and he has expressed a wish that Apprentice Nnanji might consent to be one of those who examine him in swordsmanship.”

Wallie had already guessed. The swordsmen talked fencing like bankers talk money, and Nnanji’s secret progress must be a great source of curiosity to them. He knew that Nnanji got asked, and made noncommittal replies, but Nnanji’s face was as transparent as air.

“Sit down a moment, Swordsman Janghiuki,” he said, and seated himself. “Now, I have some advice. If you are truly anxious to see your protégé promoted, then ask elsewhere. It so happens that Apprentice Nnanji is planning to seek advancement himself this morning. If, on the other hand, you have been instructed to seek this match so that his abilities can be assessed by certain other people, then I am sure that he will be happy to oblige Novice Ephorinzu. But I warn you, Nnanji will shred him.”

The unfortunate Janghiuki turned crimson and squirmed and did not know what to say. “My protégé is well above average in fencing for his rank, my lord,” he managed at last.

If Wallie had still had any doubts that most of the guard was now bound by the third oath, then this incident would have removed them. The kid had his orders. He was being forced to sacrifice his protégé’s best interests and he was unhappy about the implications for his own honor.

So Wallie agreed that he would instruct his vassal to meet with the novice after breakfast and sadly watched the two men depart. He turned to the amused Nnanji, who was busy again with his stewed horsemeat and black bread.

“On bad days he can’t remember his name, either,” Nnanji said scornfully, chewing. “He’s about a Third with metal, though.” He frowned. “This is his ninth attempt, I think, but his last one was on Fletchers’ Day last year, so he’s not due to try again yet.” The famous memory at work.

“No, this is a put-up,” Wallie said. “Tarru will be watching, never fear. You’ve got him worried, vassal!”

Wallie shook his head. “You wouldn’t fool Tarru. Better to be as quick as you can and not give him time to judge you; a fast win can always be mere luck. But we were going to promote you, too, so it doesn’t matter now anyway. Who do you fancy in the duckpond?”

“Them!” Nnanji said firmly, nodding at Gorramini and Ghaniri across the room.

“I don’t think you can have them, I’m afraid,” Wallie said. “They have no mentors—I should have to ask them personally and I’m damned if I will. They would only refuse. And as a guest you can’t challenge another guest. Sorry, Nnanji, but you’ll have to pick two other victims.”

Grumpily Nnanji suggested two Fourths, then admitted that they were probably the best two of their rank. Most candidates naturally chose easy marks.

“Let’s leave it for the moment,” Wallie said, having had an idea. “Box Ears as fast as you can, then maybe I can talk Tarru into something for you.” Nnanji was not the only one with a score to settle.

Promotions were matters of great interest, and all the swordsmen not on duty had gathered in the fencing area. Mostly they stood in a circle around the match, but some were on the platform, and a couple of Firsts had climbed onto the whipping post. At the far side of the parade ground the morning sacrifices were emerging from the jail, and Wallie hastily turned his back on that activity. The new roof was completed and resplendent, and the victims no longer need be dragged out screaming, crippled by complete immobility, but he still hated the thought of that jail and the primitive culture it represented.

In the center of the ring of swordsmen stood Ears and a very young and worried Second, presumably the worst fencer of his rank. It was almost an insult to be asked to examine, which was why requests were made to mentors whenever possible. This one’s ordeal did not last long. Ears won the best of three in two very fast points. The junior slunk away, scalded by hisses from the crowd.

Wallie stayed back, watching easily over the circle of onlookers. Tarru and Trasingji were the judges and now they called for the second examiner. A slim, tall Second stepped forward, foil in hand, a red ponytail waving behind his mask. Tarru’s eyes sought out Wallie briefly and then looked away.

“Hit!” Nnanji said again, and turned on his heel. Wallie could not have won faster himself.

Roaring in fury, Ears flung his foil to the ground—another year to wait before he could try again, and he had lost in the fencing, which he must have expected to win, not in the sutra tests that he found difficult.

There were no cheers, no boos. The swordsmen knew how Nnanji of the Second had fenced two weeks ago. They turned to stare at the Seventh who had worked this miracle. Wallie stalked forward, enjoying the sensation he had caused.

“While we are here, Honorable Tarru,” he said, “I have a protégé, Apprentice Nnanji, who would also like to try for promotion. He has expressed a choice, but I need an interpretation from you.”

Tarru frowned. The onlookers registered surprise, for there was nothing ambiguous about the rules for promotion.

“But you are host,” Wallie said innocently, “and this concerns a matter between guests.” All eyes swung to Ghaniri and Gorramini, standing nearby. “Would you take it as a breach of the rules of hospitality if he were to make the minor challenge to other guests?”

Suspicion floated around Tarru like a swarm of gnats. “Promotions do not need challenges, my lord!”

Wallie smiled disarmingly—he had been practicing with Shonsu’s face before a mirror. “No, but he will be jumping two ranks, which is unusual, and he is reluctant to ask the men in question. There is wood on the hearth, you understand.”

Tarru understood very well. He seemed to look for a trap and not find one. If he had set up Ears in order to evaluate Nnanji, then here was the opportunity he wanted. He shrugged. “As the minor challenge allows the choice of foils, I do not think that it violates hospitality,” he agreed. A jubilant Nnanji marched over to Ghaniri, who happened to be closest.

Gnaniri’s bruiser face darkened with anger—a Second challenging a Fourth was asking for as much trouble as the Fourth could deliver. Tarru and Trasingji graciously consented to be judges again.

The two men faced off, then took each other’s foils cautiously upon the signal. They lunged and parried a couple of times. Then Ghaniri tried a cut to the head, Nnanji parried, and landed a superb riposte on his opponent’s ribs.

Now even Tarru sent Wallie a glance that conceded the swordsmanship. Nnanji was making Ghaniri look as easy as Ears.

The second point took much longer, but Wallie saw right away that Nnanji was holding back. Tarru could possibly tell, although he did not know Nnanji’s style, but most of the other onlookers were probably deceived. Nnanji, having satisfied himself that he was the better man, was perhaps worried that he might somehow be cheated out of his second victim if he beat the first too easily. Or perhaps he was just enjoying himself. Then, after a few minutes of stamping and clashing metal and sweating and panting, he moved in again.

It was a flagrant miscall; Ghaniri’s fingers were already rubbing the point of impact. Nnanji’s face was invisible behind the mask, but he directed it rigidly toward Tarru as though sending him a fierce glare.

Nnanji streaked. His foil struck the metal rim of Ghaniri’s mask with a loud crack. “Hit this time?” he shouted, and even Tarru could not deny that crack.

The spectators broke into loud whoops of applause, which Wallie suspected would be a unique experience for Nnanji and might make him overconfident. He pulled off his mask to wipe his forehead and turned to grin at his mentor.

“You’re keeping your guard too high!” Wallie snapped. Nnanji was forgetting that other swordsmen were not as tall as his mentor. He acknowledged the error with a nod and accepted a beaker of water from a considerate First.

But the short break had allowed Tarru to beckon Gorramini over and whisper to him. Wallie noticed and felt a twinge of unease. Then a chant spread around the circle: “Next! Next”’ This was a swordsmen gala day.

Grinning happily, Nnanji waved his foil in acceptance and strode over to challenge Gorramini. Gorramini was a tall, well-built, and athletic man, with an arrogant air that suggested he was aware of his appearance and expected admiration for it. He folded his arms and stared contemptuously back at Nnanji for a moment. Then he said: “Swords!”

So many of the spectators drew breath simultaneously that the sound came out as a collective hiss.

“Hold it!” Wallie boomed. He turned to Tarru. “I don’t think swords should be allowed between guests, your honor.”

“Ah!” Tarru said. Shark! “That is a problem, isn’t it? But you must remember, my lord, that juniors are always looking for good practice. The minor challenge allows the choice of blades for just that reason. You yourself, as the best swordsman in the valley, would constantly be receiving the minor challenge if you did not have that protection.”

You sneaky damn smart-aleck! Wallie thought bitterly. One thing about Tarru—he was no fool. If Wallie insisted on his own interpretation, then Tarru would be free to drive him out of the barracks with an endless string of challenges.

“I think Adept Gorramini should reconsider,” Wallie said loudly. “I am sure that he has no lethal intent, but he must remember that Apprentice Nnanji is my liegeman.”

And almost certainly Gorramini was Tarru’s. If either man died in the bout, then his liege would have to avenge him. Suddenly the possibility of a massacre was hanging over the fencing ground. Wallie gave Tarru what he hoped was a meaningful and threatening stare.

“Then let us agree that it is a naked match,” Tarru said at once. That did not mean undressed, it meant that onus of vengeance had been waived. But the curious choice of words—let us agree—was an implicit acknowledgment that Gorramini had sworn the blood oath, also. Gorramini was now wearing a startled expression, as though he had not expected things to go that far.

“You will not reconsider, adept?” Wallie asked, addressing him for the first time.

Gorramini glanced momentarily at Tarru, licked his lips, and then said, “No!” firmly.

Everyone waited for Wallie’s decision. As a Seventh he could issue a veto, but he knew that it was too late. Nnanji’s eyes were staring at him, silently pleading like a spaniel’s. He had been sheltered from Briu by his mentor. It would be shameful to be saved that way again, and on his own challenge. Gorramini had his orders and could not disobey. Tarru had worked it very well—he was probably going to lose a follower, for Nnanji had been fighting like a champion, but Tarru could afford a loss. Wallie could not. Many men who were good with foils were paralyzed when faced with an edge and a point. Nnanji would have to prove himself indeed.

Nnanji yelped with delight and hurled his mask in the air. Perhaps it was bravado, perhaps he really felt that way. No one in the crowd spoke, but the faces radiated anger and disapproval.

There was a necessary delay while a First was sent running to bring a healer. Then the two returned together, and the duel could begin.

Now there were no masks, no judges, merely razor steel against flesh. Ghaniri stepped forward to be his friend’s second. Wallie likewise moved to Nnanji’s left. The two principals faced each other, both grinning confidently. Nnanji sent Wallie a wink.

“Now!” said Gorramini. The two swords hissed from their scabbards and met with a clang. Clang. Clang. Clang . . . They were toe to toe and whirling their blades, neither willing to back off. Wallie felt sweat prickle on his forehead. Both men were fighting well up in Fourth rank, perhaps inspiring each other. Clang-clang-clang . . . someone had to give, and it was Gorramini. He began to recover, and then Nnanji drove him without respite, effortlessly flickering his sword, advancing behind that murderous silver fog, while onlookers scampered back out of the way. There was no doubt now who was the better. All that was needed was some trivial nick to show blood, then Ghaniri could call for a draw. Wallie had his acceptance poised on his tongue. Thrust-parry-riposte-parry-cut-parry . . . Gorramini screamed and fell, clutching his belly—sudden silence.

“Healer!” yelled the crowd, milling in around the fallen man. Wallie lurched forward, hurling two men out of the way when they tried to move in front of him. Ghaniri knelt down to help, but Gorramini had been disemboweled and was about to die.

The healer did not even stoop to examine the injury. “I do not accept this case!” he announced.

“TARRU!” Wallie’s roar came echoing back across the parade ground like thunder. For a moment the wounded man was forgotten. The spectators looked nervously at Wallie and then at Tarru, who spun around to glare, and snap, “Yes?”

“You will now examine my protégé in the sutras required for Fourth rank!” Wallie was seething with fury at the unnecessary death, teeth grinding, fists clenched. This was Wallie Smith’s anger, not Shonsu’s. Tarru hesitated, looking equally murderous—and rebellious.

The spirits of death leaned very close now, waiting for Gorramini, and waiting to see who else might need their services . . .

“I waive the examination.”’ Tarru growled. “If you have taught him . . . We all know of your vassal’s memory, my lord.” He peered around to locate the face marker who had been optimistically summoned for Ears’ attempt at promotion. “I certify for Adept Nnanji!” Then he looked back narrowly at Wallie. “Anything else?”

Wallie shook his head—secret challenge withdrawn. Tarru turned away once more.

The spectators were fading like smoke. Trasingji nodded his consent to the facemarker and followed them. The courtyard was empty, except for Gorramini whimpering out his last breaths, writhing in a sea of his own blood and spilled bowels, Ghaniri kneeling beside him weeping, and Nnanji standing with his sword still in his hand, seeming unperturbed and satisfied. The facemarker hovered nervously nearby. The healer departed quickly, stiff-backed.

“Congratulations, adept.” Wallie could not keep the bitterness out of his voice.

Nnanji beamed. “Thank you, my liege. You do not cut notches in your shoulder strap?”

“Then I shall not.” Nnanji was waiting for his victim to die, so that he could claim his sword.

One lonely figure stepped forward to shake the victor’s hand. Nnanji grinned with pleasure and accepted Briu’s congratulations. Briu glanced impassively at Wallie, made the fist-on-heart salute, and walked away. Everything Wallie did seemed to diminish Briu, even this dramatic transformation of a pupil who had baffled him for years.

The dying man’s ordeal came to an end. Ghaniri closed his friend’s eyes. As he rose, Nnanji stepped by him to wipe his sword on the body—Lord Shonsu had done that to Hardduju. Then he turned expectantly to his second. Unhappily Wallie bent to pick up Gorramini’s blade. He knelt and proffered it to the victor.

Nnanji took it and looked it over approvingly. “Nice bit of metal,” he said.

Apprentice Nnanji, having received two more facemarks, plus instruction from Wallie in the secret signals of the third and fourth ranks, had now become Adept Nnanji, swordsman of the Fourth. He must therefore dress the part.

The tailor’s shop was a dingy, cluttered room at the far end of the barracks. There he purchased an orange kilt and a hairclip with an orange stone. His hero wore a stone, so it was the right thing to do. Orange did not suit his red hair, but the combination made him seem like a young fire god, glowing with immense satisfaction. He stood and preened before a mirror, his bruises and scars still obvious, but in his own eyes a gorgeous Fourth. He had not mentioned Gorramini, even yet.

Wallie regarded him with sadness and doubt. Clad in middlerank garb and filled with a new confidence, Nnanji seemed years older than he had done that first day, on the beach. He even looked bigger and he held himself with assurance. No longer did Wallie think of him as being ungainly. Possibly that illusion had come from his very large hands and feet. When he broadened out, in a few years, Nnanji was going to be big. The awkward adolescent had suddenly become a very dangerous young man.

He finished his admiration session before the mirror and swung around to Wallie.

Apparently a tailor’s shop was a suitable location for oath-taking—at once Nnanji pulled out his sword, dropped to his knees, and became again protégé to Lord Shonsu. His grin was so persistent that he had trouble removing it for even that solemn act.

“Now,” he said, as he rose, “you will be visiting with the holy one, my liege?”

Most days Wallie did call on Honakura. at about this time, and today the need was urgent. Somehow he must come up with a plan, and Honakura was the only person who might help. “What do you have in mind?” he asked cautiously.

“I have a sword to sell. The armorer has the rest of my money ready. I want to give it to my parents before we leave.” He assumed an expression of great virtue and innocence.

Swordsmen, being athletes, gained rank much faster than other crafts. Most of Nnanji’s childhood friends would still be only Seconds, or even Firsts. A swordsman of the Fourth was an important and powerful citizen. His father, as Wallie had learned from some chance remark, was a Third. There were several younger brothers and sisters to impress, also.

“Two hours!” Wallie said and was at once alone, feeling as though that Cheshire-cat grin was still hanging there before him, left behind in the rush.

Fighting a steadily rising apprehension, Wallie took a walk in his unfamiliar boots. He inspected the great wall again, looking for trees that might overhang it, but none was close enough or tall enough. There were a few crumbling old buildings against the wall, but again none was high enough to allow escape without a ladder. He was being followed, he knew, and ladders would not be permitted.

Bitterly he regretted uncovering his sleeper. That had been an error, and it had led Tarru into a worse one. The blood oath was not totally one-sided, for a vassal was owed protection by his liege. Tarru had callously thrown away Gorramini. He must have had morale problems before, and now they would be much worse. He might well be forced into some desperate act.

The only fragment of a plan that Wallie could find was to sneak out the temple gate in disguise. It was a very leaky boat of a plan. Nnanji would be appalled by the dishonor, and it meant going unarmed. It was horribly risky—Shonsu’s body was so damned large and conspicuous—but there seemed to be no other solution. Even the suppliers’ wagons were searched as they departed, or so the slaves said. And he would still be a long way from the ferry.

And what disguise? A swordsman’s ponytail was distinctive and inviolable. The facemarks of the People were sacred. To tamper with them was a major crime. Reluctantly Wallie had concluded that Shonsu of the Seventh would have to become a woman, using his long hair to cover his forehead. The only concealed foreheads he had seen belonged to female slaves and probably were permitted in their case only because the slavestripes ran all the way down their faces.

Beginning to swelter as the sun grew more cruel, still brooding, he headed back toward the barracks. On this side the shrubbery grew right up to the building, and his way led along a paved path that wound and twisted between high bushes, almost a jungle. Frequent crosspaths and branches formed a maze. He was unfamiliar with this area, although he could hardly get seriously lost. For some time he wandered aimlessly, partly mulling over his problems, and partly—as he suddenly realized with amusement— instinctively making himself familiar with the terrain . . . sutra seven seventy-two . . .

He had drawn very close to the rear wall of the barracks, when something came thrashing through the bushes toward him. Wallie stopped, and a slave emerged onto the path ahead. He was a large and blubbery youth, dirty, and wearing only a black cloth. He stood and panted for a moment, staring at Wallie, still clutching a trowel in his hand. That, and his coating of mud, showed that he was one of the gardeners.

Slaves did not accost Sevenths—trickles of apprehension ran over Wallie. “Yes?”

The youth licked his lips, apparently not sure what to say next. He was either overcome by nervousness, or else merely stupid. Or both. “My lord,” he repeated. Then, “Was told to look for you.”

Wallie tried to smile encouragingly, as though dealing with a child, but he had never been at ease when dealing with the disabled. He recalled Narrin, the idiot slave in the jail, and wondered if slavery itself produced mental deficiency, or if impaired children were callously sold to the traders. Of course the World had no institutions where they could be conveniently shut up and forgotten.

The slave nodded. “Yes, my lord.” He turned and started to walk along the path. Wallie followed.

Obviously this was trouble, but at once Wallie registered more trouble—a quiet tap of boots behind him. Then a pause . . . then more taps. Of course he was being followed, and of course a tail must stay close in a maze such as this. Had the conversation been overheard? Should he pull off into the shrubbery with Anasi, and let his follower go by?

Before he could decide, the path came to an end. Straight ahead was the wall of the barracks and a small doorway. The public entrances were huge and imposing, so this one was likely for slaves’ use. Damn! There were no more side branches to the path. If Wallie vanished now, his follower must surely guess that the slaves were involved.

Anasi thought that over, nodded, and disappeared through the door. As quietly as he could manage, Wallie hurried back to the last corner and stepped aside into the bushes.

He had been very stupid. He had allowed Nnanji to leave, dividing his forces. Without Nnanji, he was ten times as vulnerable. And now he might have betrayed his secret relationship with the slave population—Tarru was smart enough to work that out from very few clues. Shonsu was not much help in cloak-and-dagger work of this nature, but Wallie Smith should have known better—much better. Idiot! He cursed himself for incompetence and he could feel his Shonsu self raging at the need for concealment and stealth.

A swordsman of the Third passed by, a short and skinny man. He stopped in surprise when he saw the end of the path and the doorway. Wallie stepped out behind him and joyfully swung a fist hard against the place where neck joined shoulder, crumpling his victim to the ground. With a quiet clatter of sword hilt against paving stone, the man rolled over and lay still.

That had felt good! Wallie rubbed his hand and pondered what to do next. The doorway was too close. No matter where the victim woke up, he would remember that slaves’ entrance just ahead of him. He would have to be tied up and held prisoner.

Knocking men out and tying them up was good spy story behavior, but forbidden behavior for a swordsman. And trickier than it sounded, especially for a man who had recently acquired a new body and did not know his own strength. He had broken Janghiuki’s neck. The kid was dead.

#7 ON DUELS BETWEEN SWORDSMEN

The Epitome

The abominations are seven:
To attack without warning,
To attack an unarmed man,
Two against one,
Any weapon but a sword,
Anything that is thrown,
Anything that throws,
Armor or shield.

The Episode

Fifty-two came against Langaunimi and
twenty-five he slew.
Great is the name of Langaunimi.
Who were the fifty-two?

The Epigram

A kill without honor destroys two swordsmen.

Anasi returned, accompanied not by his mother but by another male slave, one previously unknown to Wallie. He had many more wits about him than Anasi. The noble lord was in danger, he said. Honorable Tarru had set up an ambush in the guest suite, men with clubs and nets. Lord Shonsu must not return to his room.

Then Nnanji must be sent for, Wallie replied, and he needed a place of concealment.

They led him down to the cellars, and anywhere less like his own quarters he could never have imagined.

The roof was so low that he could not stand erect, even between the massive beams that supported the ceiling. It would be a fiendishly impossible place for him to fight. It was low and very long, like a tunnel. Small barred openings dropped puddles of reluctant light on piles of dirty straw, on cobwebs and filth, and on variegated patches of fungus in the corners, on scraps of broken furniture long since discarded by rightful owners. Precious hoarded rags dangled from pegs. A couple of ramshackle partitions had been constructed to make a pretense of small private areas, but they only made the whole place darker. It was the male slaves’ dormitory, a human stable reeking of centuries of unwashed bodies.

The wonder was not that old slaves were sent to the Judgment when no longer useful, the wonder was that any of them lived that long.

Wallie sat slumped on a wooden chair that had lost its back and he brooded. Jja had been informed. Anasi had returned to his gardening duties. Janghiuki had been left under a bush and was doubtless already attracting attention from insects.

Murder! What he had done would be first-degree murder on Earth and it was murder in the World. He could have killed Janghiuki quite legally had he wished. Challenge, draw, lunge, wipe sword—five seconds’ work for Shonsu, and no one would have raised an eyebrow. But he had tried to be merciful and now he was a murderer.

Janghiuki of the Third . . . he had done no wrong. He had been obeying orders—follow Shonsu. Spying on a guest was not in itself a breach of hospitality, although poor manners. The lad’s only error had been to swear the blood oath without due cause being shown, and undoubtedly Tarru or Trasingji or one of the other highranks had been standing by, with sword already drawn. The kid would have had no real choice. Probably Tarru had given him a plausible excuse anyway: “Lord Shonsu has purloined the Goddess’ sword, and we must retrieve it.” Believable enough, when disagreement meant death.

Sooner or later, Tarru was going to realize that Shonsu was not returning to his room. The hunt would begin. Janghiuki’s body would be found. Then Tarru’s morale problems would be solved at once. Then the hounds would bay.

Slave owning, idol worship, capital punishment, flogging . . . all were things that would have filled the old Wallie Smith with horror. Now he had added murder. Morals don’t change, he had told the little boy that first morning. The demigod had said that was something else he must unlearn. But he couldn’t.

Shonsu would have killed Janghiuki without scruple, doing it by the sutra and feeling no guilt afterward. He would have dismissed the hospitality problem by quoting some sutra or other, and no one could have questioned his interpretation. Wallie Smith could never learn to think that way. He had promised to try to be a swordsman, but he was not going to succeed.

Something rustled in the straw behind him. He jumped, but whatever it was, it was not human.

He wondered if Honakura had ever seen slave quarters like these, and what he would say to them. Probably he would only gabble about slavery being punishment for misdeeds in a previous life. Tough to be punished for something you could not recall doing! But Wallie had promised not to tell the Goddess how to run Her World.

There were hundreds of slaves. There were hundreds of swords in the armory. As he had done several times before, Wallie toyed with the thought of a slave army. He rejected it as he always did. The sutras allowed a swordsman to arm civilians in an emergency, but the wording specifically excluded slaves. That would be both crime and abomination. More important to Wallie, though, was the certainty that it would be a massacre. Swordsmen would be infinitely more deadly, no matter what the odds, and he would not save himself at the cost of innocent lives. Furthermore, he was certain that the slaves’ friendship would not go so far. They would understandably fear retribution. No slave-owning culture could ever tolerate a slave revolt, no matter who organized it. If Shonsu tried to be Spartacus, he would unite the rest of the World against him.

What to do? Wallie struggled to unravel Tarru’s thinking. He must be feeling pressured. Forcing men to swear to him for a dishonorable cause was an abomination. Ordering them to keep the third oath secret was another. There were limits to how long he could hope to keep his illicit army together, and how far he could even trust it. So Tarru had felt his hand being forced. He must find the sword soon and depart. His only lead to it was Shonsu, who, even if he truly did not know where it was, must know who did. Nets were an obvious tactic if a Seventh was to be taken alive.

The penalty for failure, the demigod had said, was death . . . or worse. Tarru was planning torture.

The door creaked and Jja slipped in, with Vixini on her back. Wallie rose, unable to straighten, and kissed her, then pulled over another broken chair so that they could sit close.

Wallie was astonished at how relieved he was to see her. By not taking Jja hostage, Tarru had overlooked a winning strategy. But no normal swordsman would mortgage his heart to a slave as Wallie had done, so Tarru could not have known.

He tried to explain that to her, and she seemed as surprised as Tarru would have been.

She studied him for a while. Was his guilt so obvious? Did he now have Murderer written on his brow?

But no. What she said at last was, “Do you know what the gods want of you, master?”

He nodded. “I do know. And I don’t want to do it. You are right, my love. I must learn obedience.” He went back to staring at the floor.

“Ani is coming, master. Honorable Tarru and his men are still waiting in the room. Kio has gone to find Adept Nnanji.”

Jja’s white teeth showed in the gloom. “His favorite. He could not afford her before, until you gave him so much money. She has taken half the sword already, the women say.”

Wallie smiled and was silent. It was hard on Nnanji to drag him back into the shark pool, but that was his duty. In any case, he must be warned, and danger to his liege would surely bring Nnanji running anyway.

Vixini began fussing. Jja untied him and put him down. He set off on a voyage of exploration like an eager brown bug.

The door creaked again, and this time it was Ani, huge in a black muumuu. Only her big ugly face was truly visible, floating just below the ceiling, with the black patch over her left eye like a hole in it. Her hair was pulled back in a bun, and a thin line of silver framed her face, undyed roots from ear to ear. She bobbed respectfully to Wallie, yet she was trying to hide a smirk at the absurdity of a lord of the Seventh cowering in a slaves’ cellar. Her son might have little more intelligence than the plants he tended, but Ani had cultivated men. She had a primitive native shrewdness and also a strange aura of authority, as though she were Queen of the Slaves.

“And I to you, my lord. You were kind to a fat old woman that evening. Few would not have taken offense.”

“I have been drunk myself,” he said. “But I may never get another chance, I fear. What word of Tarru?”

With a sideways twitch of her head she spat on the floor. “He has ordered a search, my lord. He will not look here. If he does, we can move you around these cellars. You are safe here.”

That would not be true if Tarru ever suspected that the slaves were fighting against him. The damning corpse lay close to a slave entrance, and Tarru was no fool. Slaves could move the body elsewhere, of course, but only at great risk to themselves. Wallie decided not to mention Janghiuki.

“I need to get word to Lord Honakura,” he said. “He is the only one who can help me, I think.”

Of course. No slave could just walk up to a man like Honakura and start a conversation—not without starting a riot. Wallie reached in his money pouch. “Would this help?”

Wallie handed over coins and dictated a brief message. Ani parroted it back at him in preliterate fashion, then rolled away to see what could be done.

He sat down and sighed. The cellar was hot and fetid and hateful. “Being my slave gives you plenty of variety, Jja, does it not? The royal guest suite . . . and now this?”

She smiled obediently. “The women’s quarters are a little cleaner, master, but much the same.”

He thought of the women’s quarters and was puzzled. They were not ostentatious, like his own accommodation, but they were airy and comfortable . . .

“What do you mean?” he demanded. “Not the rooms upstairs, where Janu . . . ”

She meant slave women’s quarters, of course. He had been thoughtless. “You mean that when you weren’t with me, you were down in some hole like this?”

She started to say that it did not matter, and he cut her off. “Yes, it does! Jja, if we get out of this mess, I shall keep you by me always. We may find nothing better than this, but we’ll find it together.” She dropped her eyes before his gaze. “Jja . . . I love you.”

He thought she colored, but the light was too dim to be sure. What could such a statement mean, when made to a slave? “I would marry you if I could, Jja.”

“I would give you anything, do anything for you,” he said. “I told you that you would make joy with no other men and now I promise you that I . . . “

She hesitated, reluctant as always to put her thoughts into words. “Wallie is sure. Lord Shonsu will not let him keep such a promise.”

He started to protest. and again she stopped him. Then she shivered. “Do anything for me, master?”

It was a tempting prospect—it might be his last chance, ever. “Just being with you is comfort enough, my love. You don’t have to drag me into bed to please me. You’re much more to me than just that sort of partner.”

Was she being honest? He never could read her thoughts. It did not matter. Two weeks before, she would not have said even that much. Such progress should be rewarded.

“There will be bedbugs,” he warned. But she smiled happily and raised her lips to his, and he quickly decided to risk the bedbugs.

The god of sorrows was unusually obstinate. He was driven away several times, and each time he returned in haste. He won by sheer persistence. When Nnanji appeared at last, the two fugitives were clothed once more and slouched limply on the wobbly wrecks of chairs, hot and weary in the smelly heat.

Nnanji ducked in under the rafters, looked around with a scowl, and then beamed at Wallie.

“My liege, may I have the honor of presenting my protégé, Novice Katanji?”

Courage, Wallie recalled, had been defined as grace under stress. He rose to accept Katanji’s salute, using hand gestures because of the lack of headroom. The boy wore a bloody facemark, a brilliant white kilt, and a surprised expression. Nnanji’s old hairclip clung grimly in his short black curls, unable to make a ponytail no matter how hard it tried. He looked absurdly young.

He ought not to be there, of course. Wallie should have guessed what Nnanji had been plotting, but it was too late now to stop the oath.

Novice Katanji? Perhaps he was a sign from the gods, that the expedition was still going ahead. Number five had just boarded.

“I bought him a new sword instead of my old one,” Nnanji announced, producing the weapon.

“If you don’t mind kneeling to a First . . . ” Nnanji muttered, meaning: Yes, very much.

“I shall be honored,” Wallie said. “I’ll still be taller than him, anyway.”

Novice Katanji grinned at that. His mentor scowled at him and told him to remember what he had been told and not to cut off Lord Shonsu’s thumbs.

Wallie knelt to offer the sword with the appropriate words. Katanji took it carefully and made the reply, but he did not look nearly as solemn or impressed as Nnanji did. There was a cynical glint in those dark young eyes.

“Nnanji, you were not followed here—you are certain?” Wallie asked, easing back to his chair.

“In fact,” Nnanji said, “Popoluini and Faraskansi were on the gate. They tried to warn me not to come back in.” He frowned. “I said it was a matter of honor. Then they promised not to have me followed.”

Wallie tried to imagine that conversation and gave up. But it confirmed his belief that the swordsmen were reluctant opponents. They would obey Tarru’s orders to the letter and do no more.

Then he noticed a third person, standing in the background. He had assumed that it was Kio, the favorite barracks girl, but it was no woman he had ever seen before. Nnanji grinned and beckoned her forward into the light.

“I bought this, too,” he said proudly. “We have all those things to carry—foils and spare clothes—and Jja has the baby . . . ”

Wallie was emotionally jangled and physically satiated, yet he felt himself react. She was voluptuous, clad only in a sort of lace wisp to emphasize her attractions, and they were emphatic enough in themselves. On Earth he would have assumed that such stupendous breasts were the work of an unethical plastic surgeon. In the World only a miracle could be holding them up like that. Her bare arms and legs were sensational. Cascades of light-brown wavy hair framed a perfect face—perfectly blank—with rosebud lips locked in a meaningless smile, big eyes dull as pebbles. A moron.

Oh, hell! In the excitement of being promoted, Nnanji had run amok. First his brother, and now this. She was incredibly exciting and incredibly wrong, for he would tire of such an imbecile in a couple of days. She belonged in some pampered corner of a rich old man’s mansion, not in a swordsman’s wandering life. This could never be the preordained sixth member of the team! Never!

“I suppose I should have asked, my liege . . . ” Nnanji had noticed the reaction.

“Yes, you should!” Wallie snapped. He sank back on to his chair in black depression. Everything was coming unraveled. As soon as he thought he had hit bottom, he found another layer. “What did you call her?”

He seemed irritated that Lord Shonsu should find that name so inexplicably funny.

Time dragged along. Nnanji wanted to take his new toy off to a convenient pile of straw and play; Wallie spitefully forbade it. He explained about Tarru and his nets, then reluctantly mentioned that he had killed Janghiuki, but without saying how. Nnanji went as black as the cellar itself and hunched on a stool, scowling. Vixini awoke fretting, hungry and bored. Katanji sat on the straw and stared, probably wondering if this was what a swordsman’s life ought to be, perhaps scared of this murdering Seventh. Cowie just sat.

How to escape from the barracks, from the temple grounds, from the town, from the island?

Wallie wanted to stand up and pace, but in that squalid hole he could only crouch, so pacing was impossible. He was cornered. Tarru had driven him by inches, like a gangster assimilating a neighborhood, or a Hitler swallowing a continent, relentlessly taking advantage of a peace-lover’s reluctance to resort to force.

Shonsu had known what was happening. So had Wallie Smith and he had let it happen. He had told himself he was playing for time, when time had been helping his opponent more than him. His mind squirmed and twitched in its predicament as he tried to think of an escape. He could not find one, except the slim hope that Honakura might yet have some cards in hand.

Nnanji seemed to grow grimmer and grimmer. He might be blaming Tarru for corrupting the guard, or he might be reconsidering the man who had said he did not kill unless he must. A guest slaying one of his hosts? Who had started the abominations? Was preparing a trap an abomination, or did the abomination come only when the trap was sprung? Was following a guest around permissible behavior?

Wallie noted his poisonous expression and wondered if the killer earthworm might now return. Nnanji must be feeling betrayed a second time—first by the guard and now by Shonsu. Tarru was not the only one with morale problems.

At last the door creaked, and Ani’s vast shapelessness floated in. She came to a stop in front of Wallie and shook her head sadly.

“Lord Honakura?” the swordsman demanded, but he could tell from her expression that he had fallen to a lower level yet.

BOOK FOUR:

HOW THE SWORDSMAN WAS ENSNARED