And still she makes no sound. All I can hear is Blue Eyes and Half-Mouth’s soft, joyous giggling; all I can see is the aching happiness in their faces as they rush past my spy-hole, closing on Nyateneri. Then nothing. Nothing for how long? Five seconds? ten? half a minute? I have turned from the wall, my eyes closed, too numb for grief—like Tikat, perhaps—vaguely conscious that I should run, run, get to the inn, the stable, anywhere, before those two come out and find me. But I cannot move, not to help Nyateneri then, not to save myself now—and it has been like this before. Fire, blood, laughing men, and me aware, aware but unable: lost and alone and terrified past thought, past breath. It has been like this before. There was a huge man who smelled like bread and milk.
No sense in any of that for you, is there? No. I only opened my eyes when I heard Half-Mouth’s snarl of incredulous outrage, for all the world like a shukri who has suddenly discovered that mice can fly. How she had saved herself from the burning stones, I have no idea to this day, but as I stooped to the spy-hole again, Nyateneri backflipped across my sight and stood there for a moment, the dagger in her right hand now, and the left hanging oddly crooked. Oh, but I do remember her—as I shouldn’t, for any number of reasons—with her ragged, graying hair sticking out on all sides, her mouth glorious with mockery and her body wearing blood-flecked sweat as a queen wears velvet. Want her? Did I still want her? I wanted to be her, with all my soul, do you understand me? Do you understand?
It was the end, you see, and even I knew it. When she challenged them once more in their own tongue, there was a shadowy wheeze in her voice; when she crouched, arms open, coaxing them into her embrace, one knee trembled—only a very little, but if I noticed it, you can imagine what Blue Eyes and Half-Mouth saw. Her left hand was plainly useless, and she kept shaking her head slightly, as though to clear it of doubt or a lingering dream. There was no fear in her, and no resignation either. Blue Eyes moved into view, smiling, touching his brow with a forefinger in a way that was no salute this time but a farewell. Nyateneri laughed at him.
And suddenly I was there. No, I don’t mean to brag that at last I sprang into decisive, heroic action, for I don’t believe that I could have looked a second time into those two men’s faces for anyone’s sake. I mean only that I knew I was Rosseth, which was, for good or ill, something more than a pair of eyes peering through a crack in a wall. I could think again, and I could move, and feel anger as well as terror and dull loss; and what else I could do was what I had come there to do in the first place. I lifted the bucket that I had absurdly never set down, bent, and carefully poured the water into the channel at the base of the wall.
You have to do it slowly; it always takes less water than you think to fill the bathhouse with steam. I heard one of them shout, then another, and then a wild surge of laughter from Nyateneri which—I will swear—made the log wall pulse like warm, living flesh against my cheek I emptied the bucket, straightened, and set my eye to the crack in time to see Half-Mouth backing toward me, seemingly setting himself to chop billowing nothingness to pieces with his deadly hands and feet. Nyateneri’s dagger, glinting demurely, slipped through the steam as gently as it did through the skin just below his ribs. The first thrust probably killed him, though I think there was another. He folded silently forward into clouds.
I dropped the bucket and crept to the door. Blue Eyes had to be stopped there if he tried to flee, somehow impeded long enough for Nyateneri to catch up with him. I had no plans: I knew that whatever I did might likely mean my death, and I was frightened but not paralyzed, no more of that. I have done a great many foolish things in all the years between that night and this, but never, never again through inaction, and I never will until I do die. Nyateneri taught me.
Crouching by the door, I cursed myself for abandoning the bucket; perhaps I could have hit Blue Eyes with it, or thrown it in his way when he bolted from the bathhouse. It didn’t cross my mind for a minute that he might not bolt, but he might still be more than a match on his own for an exhausted Nyateneri. There was no sound from beyond the door. I imagined Blue Eyes and Nyateneri circling invisibly in the steam, all bearings lost except for the sense of the enemy inches away: reaching for each other with their skins and their hair. Something cracked against the logs from inside—a solid, unyielding thud that could easily have been a skull—and I promptly began my new life of active stupidity by pushing the door open.
What happened next happened so quickly that it isn’t clear to me even now. There was the steam, of course, blinding me immediately—then a body banged into me, hard, utterly shocking, as though I had blundered straight into a wall. I went down flat on my back. The body came down with me, because our legs were tangled up together. Something hot and silent clawed at me, and I kicked out in wild panic, trying to free my legs. One foot found softness; there was a gasping whistle, and then another weight crushed the air out of my lungs in turn. Blue Eyes and Nyateneri were raging over me like storm winds, pinning me to earth, battering me so that I struggled in a helpless fury of my own, wanting in that moment to kill them both because they were hurting me. Somebody’s elbow caught my nose, and I thought it was broken.
Then it all stopped. I heard—I felt—a dry little sound, like someone unobtrusively clearing his throat. A body slid slowly off me when I pushed at it; a head wobbled in the dirt next to mine. Nyateneri’s quiet, tired voice said, “Thank you, Rosseth.”
I couldn’t stand up at first; she had to help me, which she did quite gently and carefully, even with one hand as limp as Blue Eyes’ neck. He lay so still, half-curled on his side, looking small and surprised. The blood from my nose was dripping all over him. I asked Nyateneri, “Is he dead?”
“If he isn’t, we are,” Nyateneri said. “You only get one chance at people like those.” Then she laughed very softly and added, “As a rule.” She reached inside the door to pick up her dagger where it lay, turning it a bit awkwardly in her right hand. “I have never been able to throw a knife properly,” she said, almost to herself, “not once. I don’t know what possessed me to try it this time. Until you opened that door, I was finished. Thank you.”
The pain in my nose made me feel sick, and the blood wouldn’t stop coming. Nyateneri had me lie down again, my head in her lap, while she held my nose with a soaked cloth in a particularly unpleasant way. When I honked, “Who were those men?” she pretended to mishear me, replying, “I know, we’ll have to tell Karsh—I don’t see any way out of it. I am just too weary to bury anybody right now.” She stroked my hair absently, and I gave myself up to the smell of her quieting body and my first understanding that nothing ever happens the way you imagined it. Here I was at last, lying with Nyateneri’s damp skin under my cheek, the breasts I had so earnestly spied on sighing in and out above me as she breathed, and all I had strength or ambition to do was wait for my nose to stop bleeding. Yes, you can laugh, it’s all right. I thought it was funny even then.
After a time, I was able to sit up, and Nyateneri went back into the bathhouse to find her robe. I said through the doorway, “They came looking for you, they meant to kill you. Why? What had you ever done to them?”
She did not answer until she came out again. I sat there in the calm dark, with a dead man at my feet, and liri-lith—what you’d call a nightcryer—already mourning for him away down in the orchard. I don’t understand how they can know death so instantly, but they always do; at least, that’s what I grew up believing in that country. Nyateneri leaned in the doorway, gingerly trying her left hand with her right. She asked me, abruptly but without expression, “How did you happen to be bringing the water and not Marinesha? I had asked for her.”