The Paladin

Chapter Five

There's a boy coming," Taizu said, panting from the uphill dash, not panic, just news: they had both been looking for that visitor ever since the first red had touched the leaves.

"Get out of sight," Shoka said, which they had agreed on, too.

The village tends to gossip, he had said, when he explained the matter to her; and gossip gets down the roads as far as traders go, and it's far, far better if I do nothing at all out of the ordinary. Let the village think you've gone. Let them think I sent you off like the others. And he thought, in a sudden cold flash, remembering the bandits: For the gods' sake don't let them know I've got a girl up here....

Because of a sudden it had occurred to him that she was not the skinny waif who had come up the mountain—hair dusty and dull and bobbed, body bowed under that damn basket.

The girl he was looking at was clear-skinned and bright-eyed and better-fed, hair shining and shoulder-length, her every move balanced on hips that had nothing to do with the way a boy's were set.

Damn!

And he had thought, in that same visionary moment, that if the village sent up one of the boys who had been on the mountain before, there would still be gossip even if he never had eyes on Taizu.

Something's different, the boy would be saying directly as he got back to the village... because there was a more prosperous look to the clearing this year, in the way the garden thrived, with the beans staked up, the little plot of herbs in neat rows—he could not put exact words to it himself, except that Taizu had a way of putting things in their place, and keeping things orderly, and she hoed and she weeded and even attacked the vines that tried to creep into the clearing and wind around the fence-posts and overgrow the path to the spring: she put up pegs to hang things on; she racked the hoe and the rake like weapons; she hung up the onions in chains and the herbs and roots in bunches.

Not the same, he thought. Nothing was the same on the mountain. And he could not imagine how he had ever thought about turning the girl over to the nuns.

Now she slipped off around the side of the cabin to take herself, he imagined, to the vantage-point upon the knoll from which she would watch the trading. Being Taizu.

And he took his bundled furs, an uncommonly good lot of them, from the rafter where they hung, and brought them out to the porch as the boy from the village trudged up with his pack of rice and other goods.

"Master Saukendar," the boy said—Shoka did know him, but it struck him that he had never bothered to learn the boy's name, a stocky, broad-faced lad, who wiped the sweat from his brow and set the packs down.

"Boy." Shoka nodded courteously as the boy bowed; and found himself wondering about the youth—his family, who he was, why he was for the last several years the one the village chose to bring its gifts. But it seemed late to ask things like that and Shoka had no idea at all why it suddenly mattered, or why questions occurred to him that never had—

—except once upon a time Saukendar the Emperor's right arm had known everything in court, and kept an attentive eye on details; and nowadays Shoka the recluse had given up the court and all that went with it.

Damn the girl, anyway. It was more than the weeds she chopped away at.

So he kept his questions and his curiosity to himself. Questions from his side encouraged questions from the boy's side, and that was nothing he wanted. Questions about the world brought answers about the world, and he had stopped wanting to hear about it nine years ago.

So he brought out his furs, he cast them grandly in a pile on the porch and said modestly: "I'll want a few loads of straw, if you can. I've some patching to do."

The village never bargained. It got more in the way of furs than usual this year because he had had more time to hunt, and the good rains had meant an abundance of rabbits and foxes; if this year he wanted a load of straw, that should be no hardship, in the good harvest that it had been.

(Don't you let them tell you there's been bad harvest, Taizu had said fiercely. It's good this year, no way it's not. )

"Aye, lord," the boy said. "I tell 'em, m'lord. I bring it. Tomorrow, if you like."

"Good lad." So much for hard bargaining. He was grateful to the boy; and he saw the young face flush, the eyes dart toward his and lower again, shyly, as he began to unwrap the pack the boy had brought.

There was rice, there was salt, there were sausages, wonderful sausages, there were small pottery jars of preserves and other things lovingly made by the women of the village. He remembered other such gifts, small jars sitting on his shelves until the winter, when he allowed himself such luxuries. He knew this jar, for instance, that it was a ginger preserve: for years it had come in the same kind of small pot, with a wax seal; and it was as good as ever graced the Emperor's table. For years some woman had been sending him this, and he had never truly taken account of the gifts before, the fruit and ginger, the small pots of sauces and spices that relieved the sameness of his diet.

"This is very kind," he said, unaccountably moved. "This is wonderful. Tell them so."

"Yes, m'lord," the boy said.

Oh, gods, boy, he thought then, staring at the young face, I'm not a damn hero, I'm not worth all this, don't you see?

But that was not what the boy had come up the hill to find, so truth was not, finally, what he owed the boy.

"My mother sent you a shirt," the boy said, unrolling it from the pack.

"It's very fine," he said, fingering the embroidery. "Tell her I thank her." And, a little embarrassed, weighing the rice and remembering that there were two to feed: "I wonder—I could use a bit more rice—"

"I can bring that, m'lord Saukendar."

"I'd be grateful."

There were three more fox skins and a great number of rabbits and squirrels in what he gave them. He did not feel it was unjust.

Taizu had said it was not unjust.

And as the boy left, he clapped the youth on the shoulder like a comrade in arms, which the boy took well to.

He had never understood why the village worshipped him. He had never asked for it. It frightened him. And he remembered that peasants had tried to trap him and many villages had joined his hunters in Chiyaden.

For the bounty on his head, he had thought.

But not these folk.

Taizu was no different than any pig-girl he had ever seen.

And at the same time she was very different.

(Lithe body whirling with a flash of cane in hand, flash of bare legs, bare slim midriff and white shirt flying.... )

He had never understood the countryfolk. He had never understood the minds of people who worked the land and herded pigs and provided the things that turned up on the tables and in the granaries. He knew the importance of them in war. He knew the importance of supply and he understood the logistics of moving forces among such people, what force a band of spear-wielding peasants could contribute and what they were worth in a fight, with the bows they were entitled to, and what the laws were (when there had been laws) about what an officer could do and demand of the villages. But he had no notion why these folk down in the village of Mon should be faithful to him, except that they might assume more of him than he was and more than he could do. Which made him angry.

No, it troubled his sense of honor, because he had known in his heart it was going on all these years, and he had never let himself wonder about it or worry about the cost.

So he sat and stared at the boy's departing back as the boy went back down the hill, taking to the road; and he had not moved when Taizu came back to the edge of the porch.

"What did he say, master?"

"Nothing," Shoka said. "He said nothing. Except he'll bring the straw and a little more rice. So we won't run short. And we can patch the roof."

Taizu looked at him strangely, squatting down on her haunches there in front of the porch where he sat; but he got up off the edge and said that he had work to do.

He did not, in fact, know what that was, but he took the bucket of scraps and went and walked up into the woods and over toward the shoulder of the hill, where the smaller meadow was, and the thicket, where they put the bits and ends of squash and bean-pods. It made for more rabbits next spring.

Even a man from the court had not needed a pig-girl to tell him that; or what became of the rabbits that got to depend on them.

And on the next day he went down the hill as far as the appointed place, a narrow track on which Jiro could not help him; but Taizu went along.

There was a pile of straw bales, which the village had left on the last level ground; and there was a small cairn of stones, which protected the basket of rice.

He gave her the rice basket to carry; and he gathered up one of the huge straw bales and sent her up the hill first, because his lame leg gave him trouble on a climb like this, and he had no desire to have her behind him, waiting on his clumsy shiftings of balance and telling him: You're off your center, master Saukendar.

He made up his mind not to carry the load that way, in his slow campaign to correct his balance: he shifted the stress on muscles until he could feel the pain, and he was sweating, out of breath and feeling the pull in the old scar when he dumped the first load at the very edge of the clearing. "You can get that up the rest of the way," he said, and turned and went back down the track.

That gave him some breathing room, while she had to take the basket of rice as far as the cabin and then come back downhill and move the straw. It let him take the downward trail slower, limping all he liked now that he was carrying nothing, and swearing with every aching step.

He was a fool. He should have had the boy bring help and carry the damned straw as far as the stable. The boy would have done that. The boy would have been delighted to do that for the great lord Saukendar, who was too crippled to climb the damn mountain.

He cursed the assassins who had done it to him. He saw the dark, the melee, remembered the blow like it was yesterday and, worse, had himself to blame, for letting anger cloud his judgement and for letting a man come at him from the side.

One mistake in a lifetime. One mistake because he was more intent on killing than on surviving, because he was thinking of Meiya and Heisu and thinking that he would as soon die and be out of his pain.

One mistake because he was a man and not the paragon the legends said he was. And the man limped for the rest of his life and hurt like hell and was short of wind because he had survived that ambush, he had made it beyond the borders of the Empire, he had decided to live and he could no longer do the things that kept him in form. A little exercise helped. But it did not cure the lameness, did not cure the weakness.

Nothing could bring back Saukendar the way he had been. Nothing could make the years flow backward, bring the dead to life and make the pain go away.

And Taizu, damn her, overtook him before he even got down the hill, scampering down the root-laddered slot like a goat, cheerful as an otter.

She grinned at him as she took up a man-sized bundle.

That's too much for you, he started to say, because it was not the weight, it was the way the bundle caught on the trees along the trail and forced shifts in balance in the narrow track there was to walk on. It did that to him. It brought stabs of pain through his leg and a sick feeling when he took up the weight of another bale. Damn stubborn girl. Let her find out for herself. Do her good.

But she took out on the trail ahead of him, and widened the gap between them, so that he struggled to keep up with her, struggled and sweated until, at the top, the air he breathed seemed tainted with metal and the clearing swam in a film of sweat and pain.

Which he did not admit. He dumped his load just after her and said, grandly: "You seem to enjoy it. You go down and bring the rest."

He picked up the bales by the ropes, one in either hand, and carried them without a limp toward the stable, with the cabin and the trees and the stable swimming like a vision under water.

He dumped the load just inside the doorway, out of her sight, and sat down on it and held his leg and just ached in peace a moment, until Jiro came wandering in to investigate and nuzzled his shoulder.

He patted the offered cheek and got himself up on his feet.

He wished they had killed him, that was what. He had never done so before, but he wished it now, that he saw his youth was past, his future was here, and that future was less and less every year.

That was what the girl had taught him to do, to count time again, and to reckon the seasons, and to see the changes time had made in him, was making, until this year he failed to keep up with a sixteen-year-old girl.

He threw the bales of straw into the fenced end of the stable, out of Jiro's reach, then walked back down toward the trail and was part way down the hill when Taizu came struggling up with a load.

She was sweating now, at least, and panting with the climb; so he felt halfway chivalrous in saying: "I'll take it. How many more?"

"Two more."

"Go on back down," he said.

He took the load up, dumped the bale at the clearing edge and went down the trail again, to meet her struggling up again, but far, far down.

She stopped when he met her. She gave him her load and she started down after the last.

"No," he said, half-turning with the load, "that's too much for a girl. Go on up the hill."

"I can do it," she said, and with a sweat-drowned glance and a gasp after wind, got her balance on the slot of a trail and plunged back down the way she had come.

He stared after her, hard-breathing and exhausted, and with a bitter-coppery taste in his mouth. He stared for a long moment, then took up the bale and slogged up the trail, fighting the clinging branches until he faced the last slope, clearer there. He had gotten his wind again, and he was doing well enough, finally, except the hurt in the leg.

He shifted the ropes on his shoulders, sucked in a deep breath and took the last climb at a run.

He made it to the top, fell to one knee as the bale snagged on a branch, and for one pain-blinded moment had no strength to get the damn thing free.

He got up again with a furious shove.

Something ripped in the great muscle above his knee, and the bale shoved with his shoulder against a tree was all that kept him from falling down again under the pain. His mouth watered; his vision went hazy; when he came to himself he was still standing there braced against the tree and ropes about the bale were cutting into his shoulders. He did not know how he was going to move without falling down; but he knew that the girl would be coming up the trail soon and damned if he would let her see him like this.

So he got his balance again, pushing himself away from the tree, and he climbed the last little distance by pulling himself from branch to branch with his hands, until he reached the flat of the clearing and he faced the distant cabin on shaking legs, not sure the right knee was going to bear his weight at all in the next step.

It would, if gingerly. He walked—realized in his pain that the stable was closer, and he might take the straw there, but he wanted to sit down on the porch, that was all he could think of, and straight ahead was something he could manage: turning on that leg was like to pitch him helpless in the dirt, and he was not going to drop the bale and admit he had had to.

He got to the porch somehow. He threw the bale down. He sat down on the edge of the porch and felt the cold of the wind on his sweat-soaked clothes.

The girl was going to come up the hill and find him sitting here helpless: for the moment he could not even climb the steps to get into the cabin and take to his mat; and he had no intention of crawling up the steps and being caught at it.

Tomorrow—he thought—tomorrow the whole leg would stiffen. Tomorrow he would be crippled; and he contemplated the humiliation of his situation with the urge to go off into the forest, let the girl worry, simply hide himself away until the stiffness had left and then come back, claiming that he had been hunting—None of your business, girl; I hunt when I feel like it—

Like a fool, I do.

Like a fool I can hide the truth from you. What's the matter, master Saukendar? So he sat there to take what he had coming; and when he saw her come trudging up the rise into the clearing, a bale of straw first, and then a staggering small figure in a white shirt, he waited, rubbing the pain in his leg while she came closer, and finally said matter of factly as she threw her bale down by his:

"I've pulled a muscle. Boil up the rags, will you?"

She did not look at him then the way he had imagined, with amusement or with mockery, just with a little worry, a line between her brows. She was white and sweating. Her hair was stuck to her brow and cheeks. She looked as if she would like to sit down where she was.

But: "Yes, master Saukendar," she said, and went inside to see to things.

Damn, he did not want a girl's pity either, or her sympathy, and certainly not her feminine heroics. He hauled himself with a grip on the post by the steps and hobbled up the steps to the porch. But at that point the pain blurred his vision and the sweat stood cold on his skin, so that he just hung there awhile trying to breathe, until she came out again and he was caught in that condition.

She stared, a hazy image in his vision.

"The old wound tore," he said. "It's done this before."

Not in nine years, he thought to himself, and thought that he might have crippled himself for good and all with his stupid stubbornness. But he did not say that.

"I'll go boil up some water too," she said, and went back inside. "You could use a bath, "

"I don't need your help, girl. I'll take care of the damn rags. Just let me alone!"

There was not a sound from inside. She did not come out, either.

"Do you hear me, girl?"

Not a sound. He recalled he had been through this game with her. And she had won it. It outraged him. He had crippled himself trying to take her advice and immediately as the little bitch saw him helpless she ignored his orders and did as she damned well pleased.

"See here, girl, if you want me teaching you, you damned well do what I tell you and leave me to myself!"

She appeared in the doorway. "All right, master Saukendar. If you insist. But the rags are heating. Do you want me to bring it out here or do you want it by your mat?"

"By the damn mat," he muttered, and judiciously let go the post and hobbled across the porch, about as much as he could do. She made to help him; he shoved her out of his way and with his hand on the wall limped over to his mat and fell down on his rump, the only sitting-down he could manage. The pain running from his thigh and his knee nearly put him out; and he thought of breaking the girl's neck.

But she brought him the greasy rags, and he bestirred himself to unlace his boot and work that off, and to pull his loose breeches up above the knee: then somewhere in the accounting she ended up squatting down to arrange a reed mat under his leg to absorb the oil from the rags. She fussed with the steaming cloths, rearranged what he did, since it did not meet her approval, and finally she stuffed a wad of quilts between his back and the wall, so he could sit in peace awhile and catch his breath between the more and the less of pain.

He was filthy and stinking with dried sweat and pain, the straw-prickles were all through his clothing, and he wanted at this point just to have his cabin to himself and his misery to himself, with maybe a jar of water by him and a few cold cakes or whatever there was, for whatever number of days it took to get over this.

But he admitted to himself that he was glad that she was there, and that he did not have to drag himself about to get the necessities, that the rags would get reheated as often as they cooled and that supper would arrive and there was someone to see Jiro got water. The last time he had been sick—

—gods, he had no idea how he had gotten water up the hill then: he never had remembered half those days, except finding himself on his face in the dirt, by the downed rails, down at the stable where he had decided to knock the fence down so Jiro could come and go where he pleased, and water himself from the rain-barrel or the spring.

And run free if his master died there.

He shut his eyes and rested in the coming and going of the pain. The next time he was aware of Taizu by him she had brought a pan of warm water and clean rags to wash his face, but he ordered her off and did it himself, stripping off his shirt and at least washing off the prickles that were driving him mad.

She renewed the hot compresses on his leg, and took the rags away to heat again.

It felt ineffably better after that second warmth had sunk in. He leaned back against the wad of quilts and rested half-aware until he smelled rice boiling and looked up and saw Taizu, in a clean shirt, cooking dinner.

He moved the leg tentatively. Mistake.

But he moved it again, and again, because he had nothing else to do, no other necessity weighing on him, and nothing to save his strength for. Taizu was there to water the horse; Taizu was there to cook his supper; Taizu was there to boil up the compresses, leaving him to tend his own hurt, and to keep it from stiffening.

He gritted his teeth and kept at it the next day, and sat on the edge of the porch and worked the leg with slow patience, thinking—

While Taizu was down at the spring fetching up water—

That he was fortunate at least that it was not worse, and most of all that he was not alone, because he knew that he would have limped about and protected the leg as best he could, protected it the way he had favored it before....

You're off your center, master Saukendar.

He had done it to himself once, because he had had no choice. He had had to walk and carry and work, or starve; and Jiro had needed care for his own wound. He did not intend to repeat the mistake.

So he lay about with a woman to wait on him, he rested on his back on the porch and drew the leg up and drew it up a little more to the limit he could do it without pain. Then finally, hurting and out of patience and determined to see how far it would bend, he wrapped his arms about his knee and hugged it to him, hard and hard and harder, until he got another pain out of it that half-blinded him.

But it was bending, he thought, more than he had thought it would.

Then he got the notion that it might bend a little more. The drawing that had happened over the years was bad healing. Tear the damned thing. Give it more flex than it had. Make it do what it was supposed to do. So he pulled it harder, and harder, between bouts of gray and haze. He had seen a fox gnaw its own leg in a snare, to be free. He had not been sure whether it was stupidity or courage. He still was not. He worked until he was soaked in sweat, and wrapped himself in his blanket and lay still and played the invalid while Taizu was in sight; but when she was not he took the problem again and again, a little gain this day, a very little gain, but something: he was sure of it.

He made himself a stick to walk with. He was tolerably agile, once the leg was bound stiff, at getting up and down off the porch, getting to the latrine, getting to the rain-barrel to wash, getting about the cabin the little that he must.

For the rest he kept the leg unbound, and lay about the cabin or on the porch and worked it until the tears ran from the edges of his eyes—while a fool girl who was gifted by the unjust, priest-bribed gods with perfect balance and perfect health, stood out there in the yard whacking away at a damn tree.

"Don't you think you should be up and about, master Saukendar?" she chided him the fourth night. "Don't you think you should walk with it? You told me—"

"I'm working on it," he said shortly.

But the next day—all her suggestions came at times that if he did what he had intended to do in the first place it looked as if he was moved by her advice, and it maddened him—he took to walking without the bandage; and took to slow bending with the foot of his lame side on the first porch step and the sound one on the ground, time and time again, not caring now whether Taizu saw him about it, because he was used to the pain or the pain was less, he was not sure.

Knee straight over the foot while the leg bent, absolutely true. If the damned knee was going to stiffen, let it stiffen in the bad directions, not the good one, let it stiffen so it could no longer make the motion to the side that would tear the sinews and betray the balance. This time when it healed, let it not be on horseback, with the leg out of line; or swinging an axe to try to build the first shelter he had had up on the mountain; or simply curling up to last through the pain and the cold, finally, because he had come to the mountain in the rains, and sat under the scant cover he had been able to contrive and tried only to keep from freezing until he could limp about and put a little more solidity to his building.

Thanks to the village he had not died in those first days, thanks to the village who brought the supplies that time within sight of his shelter; and he had not even said a kind word to them for their trouble. He had waited till the boys had left and then crept out of his lean-to and carried them to cover little by little, in such a haze of pain and fever as made those days hard to recollect at all.

It was, perhaps, the only way the villagers of Mon had known that he had lived, when they had come with more food for him, that the food they brought was gone; and that the shelter was larger. It had been at least three visits they had made, laying their offerings of food at the edge of the clearing, before he had even come out to acknowledge them.

Damn, he had been crazed in those years. They looked at him like he was a holy man and he was nothing more than a rabbit content to burrow in and nibble the gifts they threw, surviving till the hunters came.

Even Ghita had decided finally he was not worth the effort. Just not worth the effort and the lives and the notoriety he might gain if they went on trying to kill him.

Maybe Ghita had known that sending assassins against him would have been a favor to him—to stir him up and make him move. Maybe it would have kept him going—longer—if there had been real enemies, instead of just the fear of them. He had taken care of a few of Ghita's men, early on. But his enemies could have taken him—if Ghita had really cared to do more than send a few assassins, he could have had him. And the village would have paid dearly for helping him; perhaps lord Reidi would pay—merely for tolerating him on his border.

Damn.

Patiently, bend after bend, the knee exactly in line, the foot on the second step this time. He bound the leg when he walked; he swallowed his pride and used a stick for balance, like an old man.

Taizu said not a thing more. He only noticed her looking at him once, when he had advanced his foot to the second step, and when he was bandaging his leg again and splinting the knee. She just stood there and stared, and never offered a word.

Not even when he began taking further chances, and doing the deep bends that he needed the stick to get up from.

But he could do them. It was more than he had done in nine years. It embarrassed hell out of him, to be doing simple exercises, with a stick for help, when the girl ran the hill like a deer, when she clambered up onto the rafters and onto the roof to patch the leaks, when she did his work and her own and took care of him, and still practiced her strokes, day after day, like a maddening, willful fool, accusing him daily without meaning to accuse, reminding him that with all his pain and all his effort, it was a peasant girl he had to surpass.

Damned if he would not.

He felt compelled to a kind of honor with her, that he had to do at least that much or there was no reasoning with her, no moral force to any argument he could use against her mad ideas.

Damned if he would ask her to stay with him out of his necessity.

Damned if he would ask a woman to live with him on his terms if he could not ask it like a man with a choice.

And however much the sight of her tempted the mind nowadays, the body hurt too much to make temptation more than theoretical.