I answered with a shoulder feint and pass that had nearly cost me my life to learn, and did cost me four years to learn right. He seemed hardly to notice it, but drifted after me, all amiable amusement. “To be fair, he didn’t see me soon enough. It might have taken longer if he had. Still, I must say that I’d expected something rather more from a man who eluded us for almost eleven years. The record will never be equaled, I am sure of it. Ah, you see it now, the fire.”

I did what he wanted. I looked past him, over his shoulder, only for an instant, one instinct already wrenching my head back as the other turned it toward the river. I saw no floating fire, not until he hit me. The left side it was, and why it cracked no more than one rib I do not know. There was no pain, not then; there was no feeling at all in half my chest. Somehow I kept hold of my sword-cane, even while I was tumbling clear across the quarter-moon shore to bring up hard against a fallen log. He was on me before my vision had fully returned, but I kicked out and stabbed and rolled all at once, and that time he did not touch me. In the reeds, the skim gave the bubbling little murmur which means that it has taken prey.

I came up spitting and sneering, because that is what you do, even when there isn’t enough air in your body to make the contempt entirely convincing. “That was your death-blow? That was it?” But another such would have killed me, and he knew. He did not laugh, but that purring sound deepened and took on new colors, and he came lazily on, saying, “Oh, you really are so good, you are unbelievable.” The words and the voice were those of a lover, and I think that was the worst thing of all.

For a time, little or long, I did nothing but fight to get my lungs working again, and to keep him a sword’s length away from me. My side was beginning to hurt very badly, which did not trouble me in itself—I have been taught to set pain aside, to be dealt with later, as some put off doing the household accounts—but I knew that it must slow me down, and I knew certainly now that nothing but speed could save me. I spun, sprang, twisted and flipped in midair, somersaulted away when he tried to pin me against a tree or a boulder; cracked him with a knee, an elbow—once even the top of my head—when I missed with the swordcane, which was always. Nyateneri’s dagger at least marked his two accomplices here and there, before Rosseth’s wit blinded them; all I could have claimed as my proper signature would be a bruise or two in fairly pointless places. But I stayed alive.

The long dusk was fading at last—perhaps to my natural advantage, perhaps not, since the moonlight flattened out the sheltering shadows. He halted abruptly, deliberately allowing me an instant to stand still myself and breathe, and understand how badly I was injured. He said, “Swordcane Lal, you make me regret that I will never have children and grandchildren to tell of you. I can only promise that the eternal annals of my strange home, where nothing is forgotten, will forever be telling more great ones than you know how valiantly you died.” He sighed elaborately, blinked away a single real tear, and added, “That lovely weapon of yours will never be soiled—I’ll snatch it from the air before you hit the ground. You have my word on that.”

It pleases me to remember that I was at him before he had finished speaking. Back down the shore we went, and this time he was the one doing the dancing, having to leap this way and that, to duck and roll and spring away out of corner after corner. No, I touched him no more than I had; but for all that, I heard his breath mewing thinly in his chest this time, and in those white eyes at last I saw the same distant curiosity that he must have seen in mine. Is it you, really? Is it to be you? I do like to remember that.

But by then it was over. Not because of the rib—I have been worse hurt, far worse, and fought better—nor because I was past my best, although I had known that for some while. Younger, I would have struck four times, not three, when he was praising me, and missed as surely then as now. My friend was right: a master knows his master very quickly indeed, and this one would have been my master on the finest day I ever knew. I still had to kill him.

“The raft is burning,” he purred, over and over. “The raft is burning, you can see the flames in the water.” But I never took my eyes from his again—what use to Nyateneri in that?—and the result, inevitably, was that a piece of driftwood turned under my heel and I fell. I was up on the instant, scrambling away in the direction he least expected, but he caught me with both bare feet, high on the right thigh and again on the right shoulder. I went down.

Sometimes, in the sea, when a great wave smashes over you, you can find yourself swimming down, into the cold blackness, too dazed to realize that life is the other way. It was so now with me. When I clawed myself up to one knee, he was standing calmly, arms folded, marveling at me all over again. “And even so, even fallen witless, yet you brandish that swordcane high and clear. Your heart may touch the common earth, but not that blade. Truly it must have a mighty meaning for you, O Lal of the legends.”

At the time I took it for a cruel taunt; today I know that he meant to be complimentary. What mattered was that one word, legend, recalling me to a breeding and a heritage beside which all this nonsense with swords became less than children’s stick-battles. I said, “The same meaning it has had for many before me. It was forged in my country five hundred and ninety years ago for the poet ak’Shaban-dariyal. I am his descendant.”

Eternal annals, was it? Nyateneri had once implied that these folk were, in their way, as much in bondage to memory as my own, who would interrupt a wedding, abandon a harvest, or simply forget to die in order to hear another tale about something that once happened to somebody when. My man, at least, with every opportunity to finish me off, had dallied on the casual chance that there might be a story to my swordcane. I could barely stand erect to face him, and my body was ice on the right side and howling mush on the left, but there would certainly be a story.

“Father to son, son to daughter, and so on,” he said, politely enough. “The same everywhere. A pity such an inheritance must end here.” I did not dare so much as a step back now, but bent all my remaining strength to keeping his eyes on my eyes, hoping always to read the next few seconds there and praying that he could not do the same. Then I took a long breath and handed my swordcane to him.

“Actually, the custom is a bit different in my family,” I said. “The sword is not handed on, generation to generation—it must be stolen. Look at the blade.”

He lifted it between us, squinting in the moonlight at the engraved words few had ever had the time even to notice. His hands, as well as his eyes, seemed occupied then, but I knew enough to let the opportunity pass. “Steal me, marry me,” he read aloud. “A curious warning. If it is a warning.”

I laughed, although it hurt my chest. “You could say so. That swordcane has been a thieves’ magnet since the day it was made. Why, the smith himself tried to steal it back from my ancestor within a week of presenting it to him, and from then on the poor poet never slept a night through for the constant racket of burglars falling off his roof, digging under his house, fighting and yowling when they bumped into each other in his closet. Old and young, man, woman, and little scoundrelly children, they came from every corner of the country to try their slyness at relieving him of that same sword you hold now. Even his closest friends were not to be trusted—let alone his gentle, doddering old parents. It all became quite wearying. Soon enough, my ancestor was ready to hand the swordcane personally to the very next housebreaker he found hiding in his pantry, or the next bandit who tried to lure him down an alley behind the marketplace. I assure you, it’s the truth.”