The Paladin

Chapter Eighteen

Shoka applied the point of the dagger to the back of his hand, then quickly, as blood spurted, applied the result to the bandages that crossed Taizu's cheek and jaw.

"Ugh," she said as the blood soaked through. The eyes made a grimace. The mouth was hidden. And the bandages took on a convincingly gruesome blood-soaking.

"You got an arrow through the face," he said, "knocked out a couple of teeth, messed up your mouth, you can't talk, just grunt. We'll soak that bandage once a day. It'll look fine after a couple more." He wrapped a cloth around his own left hand and let one of Reidi's men tie it. A stain spread through that too.

The men Reidi had lent were a lord's retainers, stiff-backed and proper—in a gentleman's presence. He explained things in terms of slovenly discipline and debauchery, he taught them yes and no in the border patois, and the men he had picked were southern in the first place, with the country Hoishi dialect, which was as far toward the outside westward as Taizu's was east and, at its thickest, obscure to another Chiya, let alone a foreigner—Speak country, he had told them, thick as you can. The Fittha will think you're Oghin and the Oghin will blame you on the Fittha— —The last in a passably outlandish northwestern brogue, that got a look from Taizu. Keep them confused.

There were valuable things they had come by—among the spoils of the mercenaries at Ygotai and northward. One was an ivory plaque, a courier chit. From Aghi's company, it said.

And there were names. Taizu knew—They raided us often enough, she had said. We got to know who was who with Gitu's lot. I can't say who's alive now and who isn't, but they're real names.

Taizu sat now on a rock with a bloody bandage covering half her face, drinking a little tea, which stained the bandage, so much the better.

"Here," she said, through the bandages, offering him the cup, and he took it, grateful for the warmth after the bleeding. His hand was shaking. He should, he thought, have used one of the horses. But they needed their strength: he was sitting, at least for the next day or so; and a human hand was easiest to get the blood where it was needed, soaking already-wrapped bandages in a credible pattern. A ghastly wound. Well enough to account for silence from the wild-looking youth in the sheepskin—and to cover a very smooth chin.

Full daylight and no sign yet of anyone on the back-roads. A little stop for hot tea and last night's cold rice, and to horse again. The men looked sober by sunlight, haggard, unshaven, possibly now realizing that they had ridden off to a different kind of danger than that their fellows faced who had stayed with Reidi and Kegi in the south, the kind that required less immediate courage, but steadier nerves in a crisis.

Possibly, Shoka thought, the men were amazed that Taizu sat there to be made up in bloody bandages, instead of shape-shifting herself; but no one asked—which just meant, he reckoned, that they made up their own reasons, which he had rather not ask, or even imagine.

Damn, the capacity of people to believe when they had to—when otherwise they had to know it was just themselves and no one god-blessed or special who had to ride into Anogi and romance their way past the Regent's hire-ons.

He had rather have had a demon or two, himself, given a choice.

But for a second choice, in a crisis where wit counted, he had as soon have Taizu.

It was a tired handful of mercenaries who rode down among the scatter of brown board buildings and fisher-shacks below Anogi southtown—that was what Shoka hoped the town saw, eleven men in motley armor plastered with yellow dust, and horses whose color had started bay and gone to ghost-yellow like their riders; one rider with a bandaged face, the cloth crusted with dirt and old blood and new, and that rider slumping wearily in the saddle among the rest, some of whom had lesser wounds. Not a prosperous group—and all the attention the town of Anogi paid to them as they rode was a surly glance and, continually down the street, the quiet latching of shutters and doors.

Click. Thump.

Through the town and down among the mercenaries on guard by the river—a slovenly camp, gear scattered around an evening-fire of boards, outside the ferryman's hut—

"It's hell back there," Shoka said, squatting there with a bored mercenary squad leader while his men waited on the ferry to come, doing a little trading for rice and a little dried fish—"Listen, don't be robbing us. That's a lousy piece." He indicated the thin one, and the man threw a broken bit of fish onto the dirty sacking, looked up at him with a that's-the-limit kind of scowl. "I'll tell you," Shoka said conversationally, "I'm from Bagoi, myself, and I'd just as soon be back there. Nothing but damn lies. They won't fight, the captain says. Hell. They cut us up. They fair cut us up down south."

"Where are they setting up?"

"No damn place, no damn place, that's what's going on down there! Whole place is coming loose around the edges. I don't like it. Me and mine, we'd like to cut out down by Mandi, get the hell out of here, but we ain't got paid, that's what, and it's going to be a hell of a long winter—"

"This Saukendar—this warlord that's supposed to've come in. You seen anything of that?"

"I dunno. I dunno what went through us. We ain't seen nothing except where we was supposed to find ours, there was theirs, and all I know, the captain's dead, there ain't no pay and I said to mine, We're going north, that's what—north, over-river, go up, get clear and get somewheres we get paid, damn right—Get enough money ahead we can get back home if this goes bad—"

"You think it's going that way?"

"Hell, I dunno, I dunno." He saw with relief the ferry pulling in toward shore. He folded up the sacking scrap around the fish, stuffed it in his bag and got up. "I tell you this—it ain't a bad thing to know where the road out is right now. We ain't spending from now on. That's how I think it is."

The mercenary gave him a worried look.

"They're headed up straight north," Shoka said. "Lungan, that's what I think; that's where they're coming across, coming right for the capital, and then watch the whole damn place come apart. I'd rather face regular soldiers than any damn farmers picking at you from hedges, I'll tell you that. But it ain't like you'll see any action here . . . not much chance. ..."

As the ferry pulled in.

Eleven riders and horses: there might have been townsmen and farmers with notions of using the ferry this morning, but no one came up to share the space. The horses went anxiously down the small board pier to the loading area, had to be tightly held when they felt the heave of the water (Jiro would have walked on in grand disdain, even after all these years) and one thanked the gods there were three stout-railed stalls on the deck, or one of the horses at least would have drowned itself, most likely the black-stockinged bay with the scarred chest. (Good riddance, Shoka thought of that horse, considering matters all along the trail. But it settled, with its head firmly lashed to the high rail.)

The real town of Anogi inched closer as the ferrymen plied the big oars—a free-moving ferry, this, the Hisei being too big and too trafficked to be crossed with ropes—a kind of barge that described a crescent-shaped course from shore to shore, a compromise with the current, while larger and smaller craft bound downriver went straight courses past, fishing boats and cargo boats and such. Business had not stopped at least: there was that much normalcy about the river, as if there were nothing at all going on to the south—but then, people who lived by trade, had to trade, and soldiers ate rice and used cloth and iron. And fishermen had to fish: the world might be askew and disaster threatening, but those boats had to go out so long as the weather permitted.

"You shouldn't talk to them," Taizu muttered, as they held close to the stall rails, keeping the horses calm while the ferry pitched in the wake of a passing barge. "You took a chance. You always said, don't take—"

"I bargained us another half a fish," Shoka said. "I thought that was damned sharp of me."

"Don't joke! There's too many of them!"

"We're fine. Don't look worried."

"Don't look worried! What else—"

A riverman came past, running toward the bow, and Taizu swallowed it down fast. They were coming in at Anogi proper, which loomed up in tiers above the riverside, the two halves of the city somewhat skewed from each other across the Hisei—but that was the way the current brought the ferry ashore, and that was the way the two halves had grown.

"Poor boy," Shoka said. "Don't try to talk. You'll open that up again."

Taizu glared at him.

"Trust me," Shoka said, and rested a hand on her shoulder. "We're doing just fine. Aren't we?"

"Not if you go talking to soldiers!"

"But I was one," Shoka said. "Don't worry about that part. Where are the damn levies from Choedri, that's what I'd give a lot to know. Maybe off at Anogi garrison. Maybe in Lungan or beyond it. It's not something I can ask without telling too much. But I used to have resources in Lungan. We'll see if anyone's left."

"And if they're scared enough of Ghita—"

"There's that risk. There's always that risk. People change. Loyalties do. Don't think I haven't thought about that."

"Who are you going to talk to?" she hissed; and choked off whatever came next: the riverman was coming back past, headed astern in the general commotion of putting in at the landing.

"Old acquaintances," Shoka said under his breath, and looked out over the bow of the ferry aimed toward Anogi north.

He thought of the old man and Lungan in about the same breath. He wondered was Jojin still alive—whether an aged grammarian had been too political to survive; or whether Jojin's priestly connections had saved his neck.

Two days on the road and he had gotten nothing from the ferry-guard, back there on the Tengu shore, of anything he did not know or could not have guessed. The general situation was all too old to gossip about, the present details too intricate to navigate in blind questions with a man who could raise a general alarm—that was what he had sensed when he had abandoned his attempt to get news and skirted around the edges of matters.

So he had gotten back to the matter of the fish, very quickly, and tried to answer nothing and gather what he could by implication.

About Saukendar: yes, the mercenaries north of the river knew he was abroad.

About trouble, even a collapse of the south into chaos: that certainly worried them but they had no trouble believing it.

About a mercenary unit coming northward bereft of its captain: everything he had claimed to have done, escaping a night attack, coming north to report, had seemed reasonable to them. Thank the gods.

Two days of their seven were gone. And he was not as far along toward Lungan as he would have wished.

Nothing was as far along as he would have wished. He had wanted one of the birds to take along. If there had been a reason he could have thought, to justify a band of common soldiers having a pigeon-cage strapped to some horse's rump, he would have done it. But there was too much that could go wrong, a bird like that escaping or being let fly with a false message—was too dangerous. Hence the simple pact with Reidi, and a schedule that had to be kept.

Don't go charging blind into Lungan, he had said. Be ready to improvise. Don't follow instructions over the edge of a cliff.

He trusted that the man who had set up so much of this over the years had the wit to improvise in a crisis: he trusted the old man desperately, he hoped that Reidi's physical strength would suffice under the strain, he hoped that Reidi would have the moral force to prevail over fools like Kegi and Maijun. It was a great deal to hope of an old and hitherto sedentary gentleman, and for a dizzy, foolish moment of his own he had even wondered if Taizu would be capable of that kind of judgement in command—he was that short of talent, and she had it, he thought, she had the imagination and the sense that could make a correct decision in any situation except battlefield tactics, if she had had the simple years of living to let her understand cowardice and greed and glory-grabbing on her own side.

She was learning. He had seen the flicker of her eyes, he had seen her listening in councils, clench-jawed and silent, he had seen the little tensions that came and went when in their own small company, someone suggested something he himself had to refuse—she understood.

Damn fine, girl. Damned fine all the way we've come together.

I should let her go now.

Then he knew that he was thinking about dying.

Plan your retreat, master Shoka. . . .

He felt the pain in his leg, old ache, never quite absent in this long riding. He remembered cutting wood, and the frown on Taizu's face. He remembered that frown when the ferry bumped against the shore and the officer of the guard on that side of the river came up asking for names and business.

A quickening of the pulse then; and he put his mind into the essence of one Sengi, mercenary, late of Aghi's company, who carried an ivory courier chit and who had made fast time ahead of trouble. "They said report in," he said to the guard captain; and then, taking a deliberate chance: "They said higher-ups better talk with us, if we know anything they'll want to know. Where do we go?"

"Everything's at Lungan," the guard captain said. "Everything's out of there."

"Same place they're headed," Shoka muttered, slipping the chit back into his belt-pouch. "Fast. They're coming right north, they've picked up forces out of the west. Some of that lot. Probably been in it from the start, and there's too damn many of them, hitting all over. The rumors are wild down there—there's supposed to be a dragon down in Taiyi. A demon with Saukendar's army. I tell you it's crazy."

"Anyone see it?" The captain looked Fittha. His armor was hung with amulets and his wrists had braided horsehair charms against spells. "What kind of demon?"

"Hell if I know. If it was there I didn't see it, but I don't want to either. They have to get the priests busy, that's what. They'd better do something, damn, they better get those prayer-sticks lit, I ain't going to go have a look for it, not me, no."

The captain scratched and rubbed at one of his charms. "So what are the companies south doing?"

Shoka shrugged. "I dunno. I don't know who's moving out there, I didn't see anything. What hit us was in the dark and fast, and we got out alive, that's all. Except we know Hoishi's gone. We got reports up from there; Hoishi's one of the ringleaders, and we saw banners from out west. So what I know, I don't know who knows, but I figure somebody should, fast, before it gets across the Hisei. So I'd better get on the road and move."

"That one won't make it there," the guard captain said, with a nod toward Taizu, who had her horse ashore and who mounted up with every indication of exhaustion, the horse shying off and circling—My gods, from behind!—until Taizu hopped around in a drunken stagger and clawed her way up with the horse between her feminine backside and the captain's stare. "Better leave that one to hospital."

"My cousin," Shoka said. "I told him. He won't. Afraid of us getting separated. And I promised his father I'd get him home." Shoka climbed up to the saddle and reined back. "Lungan. We'll make it. Wish I was staying. Here's a hell of a lot safer...."

The horse wanted to move. He gave it a touch of his heels and the rest followed, clattering up the stone landing and onto the streets of Anogi.

Everything concentrated at Lungan.

Ghita too?

Where in hell is the Emperor right now?

Or that damn pigeon.

Taizu pulled, up beside him. She said nothing. His heart had nearly stopped when she had to climb up on the horse again with the captain watching. "That coat's not long enough," Shoka said. "Be aware when a man's behind you."

"I saw it," she said between her teeth. "You think he saw?"

"You covered up. I hope." Anogi streets unwound around them, riverside market, a road that lay toward town-edge, and they picked up the pace a little, bunching together, stringing out to pass a cart, together again as they headed up the river front, past docked barges and small vendor boats.

All the while he kept thinking it was not going to work, that the guards were going to start thinking about Taizu's mannerisms or recall something in his accent and start wondering. He kept expecting pursuit, as nervous as the men with them, and not daring to look over his shoulder more than a man might, who was trying to keep a small band together on a city street.

But there was the city gate ahead—a mere landmark, Anogi long ago having sprawled beyond its old limits, so that the wall was built up in houses and shops and the gate had become nothing but an arch to shelter beggars.

An ungodly number of beggars, the halt and the maimed, some of whom, doubtless, had been soldiers.

Or farmers.

He felt anger at that thought. He saw the numbers—he saw the wounds, the kind of wounds that swords made, he saw the hate directed at them in that ride through shadow—

—for foreigners, for hired soldiers, for ten years of oppressors.

He thought of Taizu, glaring up at him as he stood on his porch.

Justice, master Saukendar.

And he thought, hurting this time, Young fool, I can't help you....

But they were not far from Lungan; or the Regent. And he was angry in that moment, with a sense of outrage Taizu had stirred in him, but no one else, for years.

Shadow to sunlight, and the last sprawl of the town in front of them, people going about their business, just dodging the mercenaries in the street, that was the way people lived—except for the scarcity of young men on the streets.

There had been young men among the beggars, there were a number of young men in the yellow robes of monks—

But not otherwise. And the women swathed themselves in scarves and shapeless coats, tired-looking, worn and cheerless, even the young ones.

The ghosts of laughing girls flitted across his memory, bright colors, flirting eyes, steps that danced. . . .

The women of Chiyaden, the young women, going stoop-shouldered and fearfully about the riverside—

Taizu, in front of him at the porch steps: Teach me, master Saukendar. .., .

Taizu, in the rain, flailing away at the tree, Taizu lying in the mud, under the lightning-flashes—

—Taizu with that demon's look on her face, white and wet and terrible—

—Riding beside him, absolute in her intentions as he had never known how to be: Justice, master Saukendar . . .

He was not sure what justice existed in the court at Cheng'di, but he had a notion what justice he would take from the fools who marched the youth of Chiyaden off to border wars and plundered their own land and maintained their power with hired soldiers—

Who used the young men of the provinces as coin to buy alliances, supporting one barbarian king, fighting another—and called it affairs of state—

Cut off the head of this monster and that was only half the battle: the rest of its coils were threaded through every province of Chiyaden, and apt to die hard, working destruction as far as mercenary bands could reach.

But no worse than he saw around him.

There was no way to extricate that beast from the land; and gods help the people when they struck the blow.

Gods help the people if they did not.

That was the way he kept thinking, with every stride the horses took. Five more days beyond this one, and Reidi was going to put his neck out and with him every hope of opposing Ghita's regime.

Five days beyond this one and that bridge at Lungan had damned well better be open. He knew no way, this side of the river, to get one of the men back to Reidi in time to say otherwise, and he wished to hell he could, now, strongly suspecting, by everything he had heard from the Fittha, that Ghita was well warned and prepared to draw a battle-line at the bridge at Lungan.

That said something about the north, that Ghita reckoned the Imperial Province well in hand, so that he could hold at Lungan, without worrying about anything coming at his back. So much for the hope that the Imperial troops in the province might mutiny, that some wave of rebellion might come in from the borders, at least sufficient uncertainty to make a difference: in that case Ghita would pull back behind Cheng'di and across the Chaighin, to his own land in Kenji and Angen, where he could virtually section off Ayenden, Shangei, P'eng and Yijang, where the mercenary forces were thickest and where his supporters held lordships—a slow, nasty kind of war, but better than fighting it out in the heart of Chiyaden.

But Imperial troops had evidently not defected, the Hisei and not the Chaighin was the line of defense Ghita chose, and the Emperor and the capital were firmly in Ghita's hands.

Decidedly not what he had hoped for.

The sparse traffic on the Lungan road had a desperate look, a few traders, anxious gentry in fancy, flower-painted carriages and countryfolk in plain farm carts, or just poor townsmen walking with baskets and bundles. When they saw soldiers they pulled over to the edge of the road and inched along, or stopped altogether and made respectful bows from which they did not look up at all. Taizu just rode coldly past them, watching, watching all the while, wary as he had taught her to be, sharp eyes above the mask of filthy bandage, while the men, some of them, rode silent and avoided looking at the people: ashamed, Shoka thought; or feeling too much.

Himself—he tried to figure out what he felt, who—he could not shake the feeling—might have come earlier, might have planned better, and, by the gods, on his side, might have had a damn lot more help from these same people—if any number of them had been willing to take matters in their own hands. He was not sure whether he loved them in the aggregate or wanted to do them violence; or wanted simply to ride off and let them talk their way out of their disaster, the way they had talked the emperor to the throne and Ghita into power and himself out of favor and then turned around and deified him right into the mess he was in, his whole life carried one direction and another on the breath of the people; and all the virtue he had went to refraining from what they deserved—

—except Taizu was one of their number. And he could not forget that, whenever he saw some poor soul struggling along with a basket or bundle, all that was valuable, all that was possible to save out of a lifetime. The lords fought, the banners flew, and the gray lines of desperate people trekked the roads, with their meager world on their backs.

Taizu believed less in gods after knowing him. She began to know what the people's heroes were made of—exaggeration, desperate wishes and superstition—and still stayed with him, caught in the same nets, while at the bottom of his heart he was terrified that she would get up sane one morning and see an ordinary, lame, forty-year-old man with a nasty disposition and too little patience with people.

He hated power over people. He truly hated it. And sometimes he hated them, that was what he was profoundly ashamed of, hated them because they thrust off all the virtues they admired on some poor idol, and stopped expecting them in themselves.

He wished he did have a visible god or two to shove matters off on—but if the gods were accessible, it seemed only fair not to do to them what he complained about in others: as well, then, to shut up and carry matters on his own as far as he could. Then the gods might be happier about coming through in a pinch. That was the sum of his religion, and he was thinking earnestly about it this afternoon, on the way to getting all of them killed.

Well, Celestial Lord, I'm not sure this mess is solvable. Ghita's invited the foreigners into the heart of the Empire. He's a fool. Of course the foreign kings are helping him, while Chiyaden's army fights their wars. But there are far too many of them, aren't there, Ghita's gotten himself into a trap he has to understand by now—too much unrest to trust the army home, so much he needs the foreigners to keep order, and he has to know if they find a leader of their own, it won't be a border war any longer. So he has to keep the border war going not only to keep the army officers busy, but keep things stirred up so his foreign allies need Chiyaden's army. He can only do that so long, before the whole stack of bricks falls down.

Chiyaden will pay for what he's done, down the years. We've shown the barbarians too much about us. They know our foolishness. Mend that, Celestial Lord, and save us from our own short-sightedness: that's what we can't do ourselves.

It was the only conversation he had had with the gods in ten years; but this afternoon he was down to that. He had no notion yet what to do, what they were going into, what their enemy's preparations had been—

And all along the road they were passing people who might have that information, who had come out of Lungan or its surrounds. The refugees, he thought, the people who shied off from them on the road—knew things that were life and death to them; and might, if he told them the simple truth, carry that rumor back to mercenary units on the road behind them.

He watched one cart on its way to disaster, a girl with a baby, a young boy, an old man—the cartwheels squealing under the misaligned load of household goods and the old horse working hard to make headway.

On impulse he blocked the dray's path with his own, and, seeing the fugitives panic, bowed in the saddle, courteous and not crowding them himself, but his anxious company drew close on the side and behind him.

"It's all right," he said in soldier patois, and held both hands in plain sight. "We just have a question or two about the road ahead. Come all the way from Lungan?"

Heads nodded.

"Is the Regent at Lungan?"

Terrified stares.

"Where's lord Ghita?"

The eyes hardly blinked. Only the old horse moved, restless under the stressed shafts.

"Dammit, answer me!"

"Lungan, lord. In Lungan." From the grandfather, who looked fit to collapse. "All the soldiers are there."

"Fortified?"

"Yes, lord, fortified."

"Where?"

"The camp, lord. Around the camp."

Too much fear. Too little knowledge. Anything they said might be a lie, they would agree to anything he suggested, whatever would please him. "Go on," he said, and reined out of their way. He added, sorry for them: "I'd go wide of Anogi if I was you and I'd spread that word up and down the road. There's a garrison there. I just wouldn't be in that town, if things get bad. The mercenaries are apt to loot and run straight down to Mandi. Pass the word. Go north of Anogi, keep to the country roads. You'll be a damn sight safer."

Still the huge-eyed stares. The baby cried and the girl put her hand over its mouth, hugged it against her.

"Go on," he said.

They started the horse up. The cart rolled past.

"And throw a third of that damn junk off," he yelled over the squealing of the wheels. "You may need that horse."

There was no likelihood they would take either piece of advice. He staring past his shoulder at tragedy on an unstoppable course.

"Can't depend on anything they say," Taizu said, walking her horse up beside him. "They're too scared. They'll never talk to a soldier."

"Damn fools."

He knew better than what he had just done. He felt angry with himself, angry with them, for reasons varied and too scattered to make sense of.

If you were there, Taizu had said to him a long time ago, you'd set things right.

Of course I would.

Like climbing a cliff. It was the looks down that took a man's stomach, the occasional realization where he was and what he was doing and what he had to work with.

A while more down the road, thinking and thinking, watching the people they passed for any sight of weapons. But there was no threat in the wagons and the carriages, in the people who ran from the trouble they foresaw, who drew aside in terror from a company they took for Oghin mercenaries. Very few young men, very few; exempt as some lord's servant, some lord's tenant farmer, a widow's son, all the various reasons a household could give for exempting a boy from conscription. And from those very few, nothing but bowed heads, averting of the eyes, as if they were terrified every moment a soldier's eye was on them that they might have that exemption revoked.

Of course conscript the young men out of the central provinces, especially from regions around the capital, especially from the towns and cities, where discontent fomented and young men gathered in taverns and tea-shops.

And damned if those that were left were going to risk their precious exemptions. So they would do nothing, dare nothing; but one could panic, accosted by soldiers, one could turn out to have a weapon.

So it was one of the women he rode down on of a sudden, when they next came on a knot of refugees—the hindmost, who struggled along under a bundle too large for her, and who had no hope of running. She looked up when he reined across her path. It was a tolerably pretty face. Or at least it might have been, except the dirt and the sweat and the fear. "Girl," he said, holding his fretting horse still, and saw out of the tail of his eye that the next to last straggler of the little group had delayed, an old man with the cart who looked as if he wanted desperately to do something—and was not sure how much a moral act was worth.

"Girl, just a few questions." In a cultured accent this time, pure courtly language. "I won't delay you, I won't hurt you. Who commands in Lungan?"

"Lord Ghita," she stammered.

"Is he there, personally?"

A definitive nod. Fear in the eyes, but a re-estimation, too. Who are you? that look said, scared, but with perhaps the sudden notion that she was not talking to a mercenary.

"Who's attacking him?"

"Lord?"

"Who's attacking Lungan?"

A hesitation. The horse pulled at the bit, and he held it hard, waiting for his answer.

"They say the lords south."

"Who's leading them?"

"They say lord Saukendar. They say there's demons. They say—"

"What, girl?"

"He's come with their help." A quick swallow, as if too many words had gotten out. Her mouth trembled and she clamped it hard, her face quite pale.

"Where's the Emperor right now, do you know?"

A desperate move of her head. No. She looked at him, at his hands, at his face again.

And the old man still lingered, at the edge of his vision.

"That old man yonder looks like he'd like to help you. Do you know him?"

A frantic glance. "No. No. I don't."

"I'd travel with him if I were you. He's worth something."

"Lord?"

But he let the horse go then, and it walked on, his waiting company closing around him at that pace, a long day, tired horses.

"Ghita's in Lungan," he said, "and they know I'm involved in the south. The rumors have gotten north."

"M'lord," the squad leader said. Which was about all the conversation he usually had of the men. But they were steady and none of them were slow-witted. Not one of them made a suggestion. They talked, when they rode close to each other or when they stopped for a rest, in quiet voices, sometimes with looks his way or Taizu's. Sometimes they looked a great deal worried. They did now.

Wondering what we're doing? Shoka thought. Wondering how we're going to get into Lungan and what we're going to do and what they're along for?

So am I, man. I'm working this out as I go. Or maybe I have an affinity for women with baskets.

There was a wall and a hedge for shelter in the last of the dusk, an old shrine, which the men thought lucky: they made sacrifice of a little rice, a little wine, and paid their respect to the gods and their ancestors with more fervency, a couple of them, than might be likely in foreigners.

Asking the gods for help, maybe. Or for the welfare of wives and parents they might not see again.

But no one was there to see: the refugees had thinned out to a very few after dusk, and no one stayed near them. No refugees and no sign of other units, which was the thing he had worried most about—running into some other squad, real mercenaries inbound or outbound from Lungan. None so far, and either they had hit the pace that might keep them isolated on the road, or inbound troops were getting very few now and no one was coming out again.

So it was a plain, decent supper, a camp with a little leisure to sit and catch breath instead of falling straightway to sleep. "We could gain a little time," Shoka had told them when they stopped, "but I know this road we're on and I know Lungan, gods know I know it. We can stop now, get some sleep and get there by noon tomorrow, and if there's any traffic coming in at all, that can help us. I'd just rather not answer close questions if we can avoid it; and if we have to, better we do it on a good sleep. Take a little wine. Whatever lets you rest. All right?"

"Yes, m'lord," the squad leader said. His name was Chun.

"I don't think I've ever served with better," Shoka said after a moment; and the men looked shocked for a moment, then, with Chun, made deep bows, murmuring, "my lord," one and all of them.

There was fervency in the look they gave him, in the dark, in the light of their little fire. He usually hated looks like that. But not at the moment. It came from both sides, he thought. That was the difference. Chun. Eigi. Jian. Panji and Nui, cousins. Liang and Waichen, Yandai and Wengadi. They did not, thank gods, look to him for miracles, just sane orders. And they tried, they kept trying—maybe because there was a woman in their midst, even if she was a demon.

"Um," he said after a moment, clearing his throat, and got up and walked away, wishing then he had not said anything. It was a trap. They had no reason to be impressed with him. He had no right to use them. He forgot, forgot, dammit, the sense he had gotten to, to keep himself away from people, not to attract their attention, not—with the little virtue he had attained—to make them into instruments. Not to be used, himself; and not to use others. And not to make them love him.

Dammit.

Why can't I learn? What makes me do such things?

Taizu stood by him. Taizu touched his sleeve. "Master Shoka."

It stung. He took his arm away.

"Master Shoka." Again the touch at his arm, urging him toward the shadows of the hedge.

He drifted that way with her, into the dark, and stopped there, with no present inclination to talk, even to look at her. But he put his hand on hers where it touched his arm.

"Is everything all right?"

"Of course it's all right." He kept his voice down. I have no idea what I'm doing. I have no plan. I have no idea where our enemy is. I've led you all into a damn mess I can't see out of. Of course things are fine. But that would scare Taizu, and scared, she might make a mistake, and making a mistake, die for it. There was no sanity anywhere.

She put her arm around his. She rested her head against his shoulder. That was all. And he thought about the bridge, sorting through images and memories, every crossing he had made of the Lungan bridge, every detail he could recall of its construction, whether Ghita would go so far as to dismantle it—at least the center. Or how many Imperial troops Ghita had at his disposal, and how far down the ranks he had replaced officers with his own men. . . .

"Can we sleep together?" she asked.

He drew a ragged breath, thinking about the men back there, about people too close to him, people tearing him apart. Taizu hugged his arm.

Never since the willows. Not a single chance. They had been sleeping together, right enough—stinking of blood and dirt and horse and smoke, so exhausted they fell unconscious two breaths after they lay down and waked stiff with whatever position they had fallen into; and he had felt apt to the same kind of collapse tonight, until she said it and he reacted—to a woman muffled to the nose in blood-caked bandages and sweaty armor.

He hugged her against him, same as hugging a rock. And said, fingering dust-rough, tangled hair and a bandaged cheek—"We can't unwrap this. We'd never get the dirt back right."

"Just let's do it."

"Scared?"

"No." Short and sharp. She shivered in his arms. Hard. "Dammit."

He knew that reaction. He held her a moment. He walked her along by the hedge, into the deeper shadow of a mulberry and the old wall. He set her down and they started undoing ties. "We can't undo all of it."

"That's all right," she said; and: "Oh, damn," she said, when sleeves and armor got in the way.

"Simple tactical problem. Patience. Patience always wins, that's what my master used to tell me. ..."

There was no finesse in either of them: short, fast; and afterward, he felt his heart fluttering, the whisper of the leaves a thin, surreal sound over Taizu's hard breathing. He felt her touch on his cheek.

In case there was no more time. Because it warmed the body, occupied the mind, blotted everything out. And she was too smart to cozen with assurances. Or to come to him with any. She was just there, and he could think again, if he were not too far gone with exhaustion.

He shut his eyes. He was home again. The leaves whispered overhead like rain on the cabin roof. "Remember the winter," he murmured into her ear. "The monkey and the daughter."

"I remember." Muffled through the bandages and thick with sleep.

"I wish I could tell you I've got a plan. I haven't. We're going in to figure one out. That's what you're along for."

She said nothing for a while. Then: "We can get Ghita."

Straight and simple, putting it together the same way he had. Nine men whose lives were expendable—hands and backs and swords when they were needed. Themselves—minimal force, straight to the balance-point.

That was granting they got through the gates.