I am a good runner. There are many faster, but not so many for whom it has been as necessary to learn to become nothing but flight. Even with boots and saddlebags bouncing heavily over my shoulders, I covered the same ground in less time than I had on horseback with two other horses to mind. No other sound but my breath and the river, much louder now in the evening stillness: a blue-black carpet with its nap ruffled the wrong way to show the pink and pale gold beneath. Sometimes I walked over rough ground, and twice waded carefully through shallow streams with soft, hungry beds. But for the most of it I became my own running; and had I thought of anything at all, it might have been of another woman on another night path, and of what was behind her then. But running cannot think.
Running cannot think. It was plain chance that I recognized the sharp bend in the shoreline beyond which I had left Nyateneri. I stopped and waited for a few moments, letting myself return a little slowly to myself and listening for any least noise from that quarter-moon of stones and swordgrass. But I heard only the creaky piping of a long-legged skim stalking through the reeds. I shrugged my burdens silently to the ground, and I put my boots on and went forward.
No one was there. The late moon was rising, almost full, too full to hide from. I walked down to the water’s edge and squatted on my heels to read what I could. Most of the driftwood and all the heaps of dead-man’s-ringlets were gone—so Nyateneri had managed to build his mock-raft—and a few scrapes in the pebbly mud indicated that he must actually have launched it, though I saw no darkness of the right size or shape anywhere on the river. But the moonlight did show me two men’s jumbled footprints, one set booted, Nyateneri’s; the others those of a smaller man, barefoot. The prints skidded across each other, trampled and blurred each others’ outlines. I found no dried blood, no sure sign of a leg crippled or a body dragged. There was nothing to tell Lal the Great Tracker how it had been when Nyateneri turned in the twilight to meet the man coming out of the trees.
I stood up slowly, with no idea of where to turn myself—not even which way to look, let alone what to hope for, what to do next. The skim kept calling, and the moon grew smaller and colder as I watched, and so did I. My stomach hurt with my fear for Nyateneri; and then I grew furious at him for being someone I was frightened for, and for having the bloody nerve to be lost and dead in the night. It did not once occur to me to be angry with his killer until the little river wind shifted and I smelled him.
The two men in the bathhouse had smelled only of sudden death, which wipes out the natural odor instantly and forever. This was a nearly familiar smell, too sharp to be sweet, but not at all acrid; not the scent of a wild hunter, but of wild weather coming. My sword was already clear, though I did not remember having drawn it. I never do. I said, “I see you. I see you there.”
The chuckle just behind me was pleasant kin to the smell: warm, sleepy lightning, stirring in its nest. “Do you so?” I was facing him before the last word was out, but I should have been dead by then. In a way I did die, right there, all that time ago, and this is a ghost who has been telling you stories and drinking your wine. You don’t understand. Never mind.
He was small, like the other two, smaller than I—a long-faced, crook-necked, thin-built man in loose dark clothing, strolling toward me out of a particular clump of reeds where there had been no one when I scanned it a minute before. I stepped backward, with the sword steady on his heart. “Stand, ” I said. “Stand. I don’t want to kill you yet. Stand.”
He kept walking, more slowly now. In the last of the twilight his eyes were so pale as to be almost white, and the teeth in his long wry mouth were the color of the river where it broke over a hidden snag. His hair was very short, hardly more than a shadow on his skull. Holding up his empty hands, he said pleasantly, “Well, of course you don’t want to kill me, Lal-after-dark. You don’t even want to be under the same moon with me.”
Rosseth had told me that the men Nyateneri fought had questioned him in strange voices, both having a cold, questioning lift to every phrase. This one spoke with the flat accent of this mountain country, touched only slightly by the sideways glide of the south—more than a bit like Nyateneri’s voice, in fact. He said now, “For myself, I’ve no quarrel at all with you. My work is completed. Let me pass.”
My stomach stopped hurting, strangely or not, and both fear and anger went from me. I answered him, “Not until you say what you have done with my companion, and likely not then. Stand.”
He smiled. I backed and backed again, making certain that I stayed on open ground and requesting of gods whose names I had nearly forgotten that I not stumble. He walked patiently after me, barely beyond the sword’s point, thin hands swinging loose at the ends of his thin arms. “He’s dead as dinner,” he said, “and well you know it. Unless you suppose that he fled me one more time, and what indeed would I be doing here in that case? Down sword, colleague, and let me by.”
“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?”