The Paladin Part 11

"I made a simple promise! It doesn't count, to a madwoman!" "No, you said you swore. And so did I, master Saukendar. I swore an oath too. And you'll teach me."

He gnawed his lip, glaring at her. "You're a d.a.m.ned hard-headed b.i.t.c.h."

"Iswore. And I'll do it. And you will. You'll teach me the right way. You won't cheat."

"I didn't cheat!"

"What else is it, if you held back on me?"

"d.a.m.n you for a fool! You want your bones broken?"

"I want justice, master Saukendar. I want you to do what you promised. If you can't teach me any better than that, it's your fault, isn't it, master Saukendar?"

"Fool, I say! It happens. It happens to men and the best of them. What chance do you think you have?

You get tired, girl, you get tired and you make a mistake, you get hot in the d.a.m.n armor, you can't pick your footing, some d.a.m.n footsoldier guts your horse-what inh.e.l.l do you think you're going to do then?"

"You can teach me that. The way you promised."

"Fool," he muttered, and said nothing else for a long while. Finally he pa.s.sed out of the mood to say anything, and went over to his mat and undressed, not caring about her sensibilities, deliberately defying her presence, and walked over to the hearth to pour a little rice wine and to heat it.

"Want any?" he asked brusquely, looking her direction. But she had gathered up the dishes and she was putting herself to bed, clothes and all.

"No," she said without looking at him, tucked under the quilts with her back to him and pulled them over head.

"It's going to be a long winter, girl. Drink some wine with me. We'll talk about the court. Talk about whatever you like."

"No." From under the quilts.

He stood there thinking ungentlemanly thoughts a good long moment, while the wine heated. Then he took the wine-pot and blew out the light.

"I'm going to my own mat," he said in the dark.

No answer from the other side of the room.

So he sat down in the dark and drank the wine down to the bottom, and tried not to think about her, the sword that had nearly crippled her, or Chiyaden and ambushes of ungrateful peasants.

He kept seeing that moment behind his eyelids. He saw the first man he had ever killed. He saw a score more after that, and the wreckage a sword could leave of a man. Good men. Maimed and screaming in the dirt.

He had himself another woman and he was as helpless to reason with this one as with the first. He should have slept with Meiya, he told himself, the first time the idea had ever crossed his mind. There would have been scandal. A quick marriage. And Meiya, no longer virgin, before the Emperor had ever taken the notion to claim her for his murdering fool of a son, would have been safe from everything that had happened to her at the hands of her husband.

He should listen to no nonsense now, should take the direct course with Taizu, go over there and show her what a man's strength was worth against her prudery: she would warm after a night or two, would come to sense, would find a gentleman's ways different than the men she had known- It all seemed very reasonable. Until he thought about Taizu.

Until he remembered what she would say to him at the critical moment: You gave your word, master Saukendar.

"How's the arm?" he asked her at breakfast.

"It's fine, master Saukendar."

He ate a few more bites.

"I can do my lesson today," she said.

He said nothing.

"I'm not stiff, master Saukendar. There's nothing wrong with me. You mostly missed me."

"I pulled it, dammit. I laid myself wide open pulling it, I riskedmy neck stopping, let's get the thing right, shall we?"

"I wouldn't have hit you-"

"Thenwhat in h.e.l.l do you think you're holding a sword for?"

Taizu had her mouth open. She shut it, fast.

"All right," he said, glaring at her. "You want me to teach you like a man, you've asked for it."

The skirts of the armor came to her knees. "It'sheavy ," she said, swaying as he cinched it in with ropes about her waist, crossed around her chest, because it had to overlap to fit; and he had padded up her arms and her legs with leather wrappings and old rags, because the armor-sleeves and the shin-guards were impossible.

"You want me to teach you," he said.

"What are you going to wear?"

"I'm not worried," he said. "You're the one apt to lose a hand." He stood back, took up his sword andpointed at hers. "There you are. On your guard."

She staggered a little in the moves. But she steadied.

He put her on Jiro's back on the next day and let her have the feel of riding in that weight of metal, when before, she had only sat Jiro bareback when he was lazing about the pasture. She did not fall off. But Jiro was on good behavior.

"If you're going to be a gentleman," he taunted her, "you should know how to ride."

Andhe swung up in her place, took up the reins and said: "Pa.s.s me up my spear. You have a lot to learn, girl. We'll see how well you handle a rider."

It was more boiled rags that night.

"Do you want to quit?" he asked her.

She turned a dark and accusing eye on him, face down on her mat while he was putting compresses on the backs of her knees. "No," she said.

And he: "It only gets heavier with the wearing."

The arrow flew, the deer started at the sound of Shoka's bowstring and the arrow led the stag truly, arced straight for the heart-not hunting for sport, but meat for their winter, and they took no chances.

The stag lunged at the impact, ran a few steps and went crashing down in a snowy thicket.

He cut its throat for good measure, and Taizu looped a rawhide rope around its feet and flung the other end over a branch.

Venison for the whole winter season. Hide and horn and bone for a fine pair of breeches and a knife-hilt and whatever else winter evenings could devise.

"I never had venison," Taizu had confided to him.

In truth, he replied, it was usually wild pigs. But there were two of them to feed this year, the stag offered itself, and between the two of them they could get their victim home again.

They smoked a great deal of the venison, made sausages, cured the hide, and hung the rest, frozen, from the cabin porch.

And on winter evenings, with the snow outside and Jiro snug in his stable, Shoka taught the making of arrows, the shaping of a bow-men's work; but it was what he knew, and it made the evenings pa.s.s and it pleased the girl and made the time pleasant.

Her eyes followed every move of his fingers; and his followed the light in her eyes and the little curve of a smile he could get from her nowadays.

And his thoughts followed her night by night. He tried her resolve from time to time, a little compliment, a brush of his hand while she was working. She flinched and said, in one variation or the other:No .

So that was the way the winter went-from snowy day to snowy day, when they stayed snug indoors except the needful ch.o.r.es, like carrying water to Jiro and combing and currying him and letting him out for exercise and seeing him snug in his stable at night.

He showed her the way to spin out a bowstring, and how to tie it. He told her why certain arrows had certain fletchings and certain points, and how to choose the feathers and how to set them. He showed her-with the cabin's dirt floor padded with straw mats-a few of the elementary arts master Yenan had taught him, the turning of a blow with the fingers, the use of a bit of wood or the bare hand or foot to numb a limb or dissuade anyone who would lay hands on her.

Such things the nuns would have taught her. He reminded her of that; and she said: "I wouldn't have stayed there long enough."

"Where would you have gone?" he asked her.

"I don't know," she said, evading the question. She would not look him in the eyes when she answered, so he made up his own: that she would have gone on the road and been a morsel for the stronger and the quicker, which he did not like to imagine.

He told her stories, and she told him, what the court was like, what Hua was like. They amazed each other, he thought; at least her eyes grew wide when he talked about the court and the Emperor's table where dishes came dressed in peac.o.c.k feathers and roast pigs had sugar castles on their backs, wings of swan feathers and real rubies for eyes.

"We ate all right," she recollected, talking of Hua, and the things she said told him of a prosperous farm, a large family-my brothers, she said, and sometimes in her stories named names, like Jei and Mani. She talked about a deer lord Kaijeng's daughter had had for a pet until lord Kaijeng's hunters killed it by mistake, and then (there was none of Taizu's stories but had a sad ending,) she said that the lady and her husband were dead, that the lady had committed suicide and her husband had been killed in the fighting for the castle. She shed no tears for any of it. She only grew melancholy; and he thought about Meiya's death and was melancholy himself.

But he never talked to her about Meiya. She was a child. He was not, and he could not bring himself to confide those complex and painful memories to her, not even when he was a little drunk. He only brooded, and the silence was heavy for a while.

She was a little drunk that night, too, with the storm howling round. She gathered up her good humor and showed him a game they had played in Hua, when the snows came, but it was a game he knew, one they played at court. So that turned out to be something they both shared.

He remembered one world while he played with their makeshift counters, where he had played with ivory and jade pieces for high wagers, while she remembered her home, perhaps, and stone counters and a host of brothers and her parents. But they played for such things as Who Carries the Bucket and Who Makes Breakfast.

He suggested other stakes, but she glowered at him, and he a.s.sured her he was only joking. "All right," he said, "if you lose you keep me warm tonight. Nothing else. No hands."

"I won't," she said, firmly. "You might cheat."

"At what? Besides, a gentleman doesn't cheat."

"Huh," she said shortly, arms on her knees.

"What does that mean?"

"I know what you want. And you won't get it. I won't let you break your word. So there."

"You're the loser," he said. "It's a cold night."

She shook her head. "You want to play?" she said. "Tomorrow's dishes against I curry down your horse."

"You do that anyway. That's no bet."

"Against who brings in the firewood next."

"All right," he said.

So they played that night while the snow fell on this coldest night of the year, and they drank a little more.

"Come on," he said, when she was staggering to her mat, and he was sitting on his, more than a little drunk. He patted the place beside him. "It's bitter cold. There's no sense being uncomfortable. I promise you, it's only comfort I'm thinking of. I won't do anything you don't want me to do."

"No," she was sober enough to say, and took to her mat alone, huddled up in a knot under the quilts in all her clothes.

Chapter Seven.

The icicle at the corner of the porch grew spectacularly and fell finally with a considerable crash one afternoon, leaving a crystal wreckage in a remaining drift, under a warming sun.

There was mud everywhere, but the winds had shifted, burning off the snow at an amazing rate, and Jiro kicked up his heels like a colt, flagging his tail and cavorting around the pasture in a shameless display.

Hoping for mares, Shoka thought forlornly, considering the horse and the girl who tended him-her forfeit, carrying the bucket up the muddy trail from the spring, and currying the mud off Jiro, who would surely roll in it.

Hard winter, worse spring. He sat on the porch sc.r.a.ping the stubble off his chin, dipping his razor in a pan of hot water and sourly contemplating the warming weather that would have the whole hillside in a mating frenzy, the buds bursting, nature run amok to procreate and perpetuate. Shoka sighed, looked from under a brow and a s.h.a.ggy fall of hair at the slim, far figure, and thought he had missed his best chance when they were both drunk at midwinter.

Sorry, girl, I didn't know what I was doing.

He imagined a morning after that event in which the girl would change all her opinions, all her intentions, give up her mad notions and devote herself to him completely.

Crash! went another icicle.

He did not, in fact, know what she would do if he laid a hand on her, but he did not, in broad daylight, think it particularly likely that she would immediately change her att.i.tudes. He had never tried to think like a pig-farmer who had sworn to kill a lord of Chiyaden. But he tried a great deal lately to think like Taizu, and getting a few smiles and a laugh or two out of her was hard enough. Taizu- -He could not think what she would do. But he doubted it would be peacefulor pleasant.

d.a.m.ned fool girl. d.a.m.ned fool girl who was a comfort he had gotten used to. And after nine years of celibacy- Another sigh.

A man would want to say that getting a girl to bed was the most important thing. But that was a lie. The likelihood that she would be straightway down the hill and away from him-that was the thing he had thought about all the winter, that looking down that hill now, for instance, and not having the sight of her, ever; and having his supper of evenings in perpetual silence-was unendurable.

The longer she stayed the more accustomed she grew to him. The more she grew accustomed to him- The ladies of Chiyaden had accounted him very handsome. And he tried, G.o.ds witness, to treat the little b.i.t.c.h with every grace he could make her understand.

Look at her-slogging along in the mud in one of the shirts they traded back and forth, barefoot and filthy to the knees, barefoot: it was the G.o.ds' own wonder she did not get frostbite. Butshe had walked barefoot from Hua, and likely the boots he had made her were the first gentle care her feet had ever had.