Stupid, he chided himself.
Or he was wondering why he had ended up giving in to every demand she made.
Twice stupid.
He could not remember what he had sworn to her, that was the truth of it. He grew confused about what he had said.
One hardly knew what to do with such a woman. Beat sense into her, perhaps. One wanted to. But dealing with her was like trying to hold water in one's fist: the open hand, he told himself, was the only way.
So one kept the hand open. That was all. One took seriously the idea that she might go, in some fit of temper, and one hoped to teach her enough to save herself.
One hoped to teach her to rethink her notions and give up her idea of a personal revenge.
One had to maintain one's own sense of balance, and not relive those days. There was too much anger there, and too much pain; and it disturbed him that he had disposed of less of it than he had thought.
He had gone completely confused when she had come at him, that was what had happened. Her anger had been thoroughly imposing, and he was so very long from having used any of his other skills that he had instinctively, faced with a girl he had no desire to harm, realized that he was not in control of those skills and refused to use them. That was the truth he came to, in the dark, in long hours.
He had lost command of his art. That was the other part of the truth. The skills were there, but something essential was gone, whatever had ruled them and made them whole.
That was not her doing. It had been gone, he thought, from the time he had known there was nothing to be done. After that he had had confidence in nothing, and believed in no divine order, only chaos. If there were demons, and he believed even in them only by dark, the demons ruled the world, and always had.
So even having discovered the flaw in himself, he could not mend it.—
Hell with it.
He should have slept with Meiya; he should have supported Riga in his bid to unseat the young Emperor; he should have taken every opposite course to the paths he had taken for honor's sake.
Teaching the girl, he took another—for honor's sake—if that was even what he had sworn in the first place.
Damn, they were all the only choices he had known how to make. If he had always been a fool he had had no choice about it, being a fool to start with; and if he had forgotten himself so far as to lay himself open to a girl with a stick, perhaps he had come down to a general disgust with living.
He had not felt that since the first years, not since that long night in the first winter, when cold and exhaustion and solitude had had the knife in his hands and gods and devils knew what had kept him from using it then.
He had been to the brink a few times since, but never at all in recent years. Not in this one, in this strange, different year when he had found himself taking a sudden interest in the world, when he had found the walls going down all around him, past and present and future. He had known the danger he was slipping toward, that he was laying himself open to more than sticks and a girl's temper.
Strange that a man could become so fragile. It was good that he could see it at least, and build back the walls and recover the skills he had let fall. That was the compensation she gave him. A man would be a fool indeed to let the chance pass, a little good time was worth the pain. And nothing he could win of her by force was worth shortening the time she might stay, or breaking the peace between them.
So he could recover his life if she left. When she left. It was a romantic fool who thought otherwise. He could buy some girl-servant from the village. There were always too many daughters. A village girl would fall down on her face and thank him for the honor of being concubine to a lord of Chiyaden. Hell with Taizu. Anyway. He could always find another pig-girl to teach. Maybe buy a pig or two to go with her.
Maybe, he thought on the contrary, the spring planting would rouse something domestic in his farmer-girl. Maybe he could buy a few pigs for her. Help her with the gardening. Maybe all his notion of making her quit had only made life here seem too hard.
Maybe he should take more of a hand with things and be gentler with her.
It was worth trying.
"I don't want any pigs," she said to his suggestion. "I'd rather hunt them."
So much, he thought, for that. But he took up the hoe and he went out to chop furrows in the garden, himself: Jiro had not lived this long to pull a plow—moving the occasional dead tree was enough for an old war-horse; and Jiro grazed placidly on the brown grass while humans sweated.
"You're putting those rows too close," she said, coming up from the stable.
He blinked sweat, wiped it off his face. "You could have said," he said with, he thought, remarkable self-control, "seeing I'm half done."
"You ought to be this far over." She measured with her hands.
"All right." His leg hurt. The hoeing was never his best job. And he had worked damned hard this year to get the rows straight.
"You're limping," she said.
"It's soft ground," he said. And swore to himself and started over.
The sword slid past her. "Turn," he said. "Give me your point. Now."
Her sword came around to his fingers. He led it. And stopped. "Stand," he muttered; and stood holding his sword and meditating the lines of her stance, and the likely response to a move like that.
She remembered the moves he guided her to. She could repeat them. He shifted an elbow, improved a line like a sculptor in clay.
A smaller man, a lighter man, could turn a more powerful blow if the blade were angled just so, if the force slid along the steel; a swordsman of excellent balance could follow the force and slip under it.
It was not the way his father had taught. It was the art of master Yenan.
Forgive me, he thought to his ghosts. It was not pure form. It was a constant compromise, it demanded agility and the excellence of balance that, thank the gods, the girl had in unusual measure.
It took perfection of style and turned it askew, to do things more common to the inns than to the teaching-masters.
What has philosophy to do with pigs?
Or what abstract does she understand, except revenge?
"Again." He took up his guard. He followed the perfect, the schooled line, the natural course for the blade.
He brought the sword down solidly. It slid.
"Again."
Harder this time.
"Again."
With real force, his heart in his throat.
Steel grated and flashed around toward him and up again, in the wheeling stroke he had taught her.
It was, he congratulated himself, a move of some subtlety.
Her eyes shone.
With hope that turned his stomach.
Chapter Nine
The arrows thumped into the target one after the other, six, seven, eight. The archer stood, bow bent, feeling out the gusts of wind that skirled up the pasture slope under summer sun, and a seventh followed.
Center of the target, every one.
Small woman with an uncommonly powerful bow, one she had made herself, under his close direction.
Shoka stood leaning on his own and watching the concentration on the eighth shot, then quickly nocked an arrow on the carrying gusts and fired as she was about to loose the ninth.
She fired all the same, and as the two arrows hit side by side, turned an amused look on him.
"Damned good," he said, leaning again on his bow. "You don't spook."
"I know it's you," she said.
"Good. How do you know?"
She pointed off across the field where Jiro grazed placidly on the slope, "He knows."