“Thank you, not I,” I said, and went on retreating. “Where is the body, then? We buried your two consorts, but that’s not your way, is it? What have you done with Nyateneri’s body?”
He did stand still for that moment, and had I chosen, I almost think I might have had him, though perhaps not. Perhaps not. He waited, eyes moon-white in the moon; not the first man who ever savored his power over me. He said lightly, “Why, I bundled it aboard that poor pile of sticks, and set all adrift and alight. And a fitting end, surely, for such a one, wouldn’t you say? As much of a Goro as he was.”
The Goro are a brave and cunning people, once cousins to my folk, who live on a double handful of islands in the low Q’nrak Seas. They raid their neighbors and one another; they sail everywhere in the world, fearing nothing in it; and when one of them dies, the body—or what is left of it, following certain rituals—is placed on a richly draped barge and sent out with the tide, after being set afire. I said, speaking very carefully, “I think there is no raft out there on the river. I know there is no funeral pyre.”
Oh, how he clapped his hands at that! And, oh, how he laughed, like carrion birds mating, bent almost double with his hands on his thighs and went on laughing himself to soundless wheezing because I could not strike, did not dare to chance his lie. In time he managed a cackling whisper: “Ah, you don’t know our way nearly so thoroughly, after all. Watch a bit with me, I beg you, watch but a little, little more—” he was dissolving into merriment again “—and see what it is to be on good terms with fire.”
I did strike then, a thrust you would not have seen. That is a fact, nothing more. Wrist and forearm only, no lunge, no wasted motion—which means no thought—then clear and away while Uncle Death is yet groping for his bedside slippers. But the small man with the moon-white eyes was not there. He was almost there, mind you—the point scored his tunic—but not quite, and not quite laughing anymore, either, but making a sort of purring, private sound. “Oh, well done. They spoke truly of Swordcane Lal. This will be an honor for me.”
Listen now. In the moment it took him to speak those few words, I had struck at him three more times. I tell you this not out of vanity, but to make you see what he was. Not even Nyateneri knows that I not only missed with each blow, but missed badly, never even grazing him again. The best I can say for myself is that his counterstroke—which I never saw—came when I was extended and off-balance, and I was still able to leap aside and slip his second stroke as I landed. Then I backed out of range as fast as I could, while he followed, purring. “This is nice, this is very nice. Your friend now, he turned out a bit of a disappointment. I hope it doesn’t offend you, my saying that?”
I answered with a shoulder feint and pass that had nearly cost me my life to learn, and did cost me four years to learn right. He seemed hardly to notice it, but drifted after me, all amiable amusement. “To be fair, he didn’t see me soon enough. It might have taken longer if he had. Still, I must say that I’d expected something rather more from a man who eluded us for almost eleven years. The record will never be equaled, I am sure of it. Ah, you see it now, the fire.”
I did what he wanted. I looked past him, over his shoulder, only for an instant, one instinct already wrenching my head back as the other turned it toward the river. I saw no floating fire, not until he hit me. The left side it was, and why it cracked no more than one rib I do not know. There was no pain, not then; there was no feeling at all in half my chest. Somehow I kept hold of my sword-cane, even while I was tumbling clear across the quarter-moon shore to bring up hard against a fallen log. He was on me before my vision had fully returned, but I kicked out and stabbed and rolled all at once, and that time he did not touch me. In the reeds, the skim gave the bubbling little murmur which means that it has taken prey.
I came up spitting and sneering, because that is what you do, even when there isn’t enough air in your body to make the contempt entirely convincing. “That was your death-blow? That was it?” But another such would have killed me, and he knew. He did not laugh, but that purring sound deepened and took on new colors, and he came lazily on, saying, “Oh, you really are so good, you are unbelievable.” The words and the voice were those of a lover, and I think that was the worst thing of all.
For a time, little or long, I did nothing but fight to get my lungs working again, and to keep him a sword’s length away from me. My side was beginning to hurt very badly, which did not trouble me in itself—I have been taught to set pain aside, to be dealt with later, as some put off doing the household accounts—but I knew that it must slow me down, and I knew certainly now that nothing but speed could save me. I spun, sprang, twisted and flipped in midair, somersaulted away when he tried to pin me against a tree or a boulder; cracked him with a knee, an elbow—once even the top of my head—when I missed with the swordcane, which was always. Nyateneri’s dagger at least marked his two accomplices here and there, before Rosseth’s wit blinded them; all I could have claimed as my proper signature would be a bruise or two in fairly pointless places. But I stayed alive.
The long dusk was fading at last—perhaps to my natural advantage, perhaps not, since the moonlight flattened out the sheltering shadows. He halted abruptly, deliberately allowing me an instant to stand still myself and breathe, and understand how badly I was injured. He said, “Swordcane Lal, you make me regret that I will never have children and grandchildren to tell of you. I can only promise that the eternal annals of my strange home, where nothing is forgotten, will forever be telling more great ones than you know how valiantly you died.” He sighed elaborately, blinked away a single real tear, and added, “That lovely weapon of yours will never be soiled—I’ll snatch it from the air before you hit the ground. You have my word on that.”
It pleases me to remember that I was at him before he had finished speaking. Back down the shore we went, and this time he was the one doing the dancing, having to leap this way and that, to duck and roll and spring away out of corner after corner. No, I touched him no more than I had; but for all that, I heard his breath mewing thinly in his chest this time, and in those white eyes at last I saw the same distant curiosity that he must have seen in mine. Is it you, really? Is it to be you? I do like to remember that.
But by then it was over. Not because of the rib—I have been worse hurt, far worse, and fought better—nor because I was past my best, although I had known that for some while. Younger, I would have struck four times, not three, when he was praising me, and missed as surely then as now. My friend was right: a master knows his master very quickly indeed, and this one would have been my master on the finest day I ever knew. I still had to kill him.
“The raft is burning,” he purred, over and over. “The raft is burning, you can see the flames in the water.” But I never took my eyes from his again—what use to Nyateneri in that?—and the result, inevitably, was that a piece of driftwood turned under my heel and I fell. I was up on the instant, scrambling away in the direction he least expected, but he caught me with both bare feet, high on the right thigh and again on the right shoulder. I went down.
Sometimes, in the sea, when a great wave smashes over you, you can find yourself swimming down, into the cold blackness, too dazed to realize that life is the other way. It was so now with me. When I clawed myself up to one knee, he was standing calmly, arms folded, marveling at me all over again. “And even so, even fallen witless, yet you brandish that swordcane high and clear. Your heart may touch the common earth, but not that blade. Truly it must have a mighty meaning for you, O Lal of the legends.”