Sword Dancer - Sword Sworn Part 33

No, they were not. Del's silence made that clear.

She changed the subject. "Did Alric say how Lena and the girls are?"

"Fine. Lena's expecting again." I made an indeterminate sound of derision. "You know, you'd think three daughters would be enough!"

Del settled down again. "Some men insist on sons, and their poor wives keep having babies until they get one. Even if it kills them."

"You've met Lena. You know she loves children. She likely wants a dozen."

"Well, yes," Del conceded.

"And it's Alric who'll have to support them. See, bascha? There are always two sides. The woman has them, which, mind you, I don't suggest is easy or without risk, but the man pays for them. That, too, isn't easy or without risk."

"Maybe."

"Fools," I muttered, trying to get comfortable against hard ground, "both of them."

"If it's what they want, then they aren't truly foolish."

"It's one thing if you're a farmer, bascha. Or a tradesman. But a sword-dancer? If something happens to Alric-and he's not exactly in a safe line of work-Lena's stuck with raising the children on her own." I shrugged. "Though she'd probably marry again as soon as possible."

"You mean, once she found a man to provide for her and the girls?"

"Well . . . yes." I was wary of where the conversation might be heading; you never know, with Del. "I mean, it is what many women do."

"It is what most women do," she said curtly. "They have no other choice."

Not being up for the verbal sword-dance, I kept my mouth shut.

"Or they could do what I did, and give their child away." After that comment, I wasn't going to sleep any time soon. I contemplated holding my silence in case that was what Del preferred, but I just couldn't let it go. "You mean Kalle."

"Of course I mean Kalle." Del sighed, staring up at the stars. "She has a good home. Better parents than I could ever be-or you."

The defense was automatic. "I might be a superb father, for all you know-I just don't particularly care to find out."

"You can't be a superb father if you have no children," Del declared. Then amended it almost immediately. "That is, if you know you have children and don't stay around to raise them. Otherwise you're not a father at all. Just the means for making them."

Did the same apply to a woman? I decided not to bring it up for fear it was a sore spot; pointed debate is one thing, but engaging in it to hurt someone is another thing altogether. I wondered how often Del's daughter crossed her mind. She never spoke about her. "You miss her, don't you?"

Del turned over, putting her back to me. "I don't even know her, Tiger."

"I mean, you miss what you might have had."

"I made my choice before Kalle was even born. There was nothing to miss."

And yet Del had once insisted on going North to see Kalle against my preferences, though I didn't know the girl existed then; she had been driven to see her daughter six years after her birth, as if it were some kind of geas. The journey had tested us both in many different ways, had taught us about strength of will, determination, the power of the binding between us; had nearly ended in both our deaths. Kalle was around eight now, I thought. Old enough to understand her mother had given her up in a quest to execute the men who'd robbed Del of a family. And Kalle as well.

"Maybe someday," I said, purposely not mentioning that Del, by breaking her vows, was exiled from the North and thus from her daughter.

"What?"

"Maybe someday you'll see her again."

The tone was frigid. "And how would that come to be, do you think?"

"If Kalle came looking for you."

Del's single burst of throttled laughter was bitter. "Oh yes, they would let her come searching for a woman who has no honor, a woman exiled from her homeland. And why would Kalle wish to? She has a mother and father."

"But they aren't her blood."

She was silent a moment, then turned over to face me. Her eyes, black in the glow of the moon, were steady. "Do you believe that matters? Blood? To children whose true mother and father have disavowed them?"

"You didn't disavow Kalle."

"They will have told her I did."

I scratched at the stubble I hadn't gotten the chance to shave. "I think blood matters, yes. I think a child might wish to search for her mother. Hoolies, I went all the way to Skandi, didn't I?".

"And repudiated your family."

"The metri wanted nothing to do with the son of a disobedient daughter who dishonored her exalted Family by daring to sleep with a man well below her cla.s.s."

"Your mother left Skandi to be with the man she loved, below her cla.s.s or no. Do you really believe she'd have disavowed you if she was willing to go that far?"

"Doesn't matter," I dismissed. "I ended up a chula with the Salset anyway. And how in hoolies did we get onto this subject? We were talking about Kalle."

"You say it matters to children that they know their own blood."

"I believe that, yes."

"Does it matter to men or women that they know their own children?"

"You're the one who dragged me all the way into the ice and snow so you could see Kalle again, bascha! I would say yes to that as well, based on your example."

Del did not answer. When I realized she didn't mean to, I shut my eyes and, when I could slow my thoughts, gave myself over to sleep.

TWENTY-SIX.

BREEZE becomes wind. Wind becomes gust. Gust becomes storm: simoom. The sky is heavy with sand, the sun eclipsed, occluded by curtains of it, pale as water, hard as ice. At the edges of the Punja it scours the earth of vegetation; in the Deep Desert, where the tribes take care to protect themselves, it stings but does not strip; to strangers, wholly innocent but thus sweeter victims, it is death. Clothing is torn away. Flesh abraded. Eventually flayed. In the end, long past death, the ivory bones are polished white. And buried, only freed again by yet another fickle, angry simoom, digging up the dead.

White bones in white sand. Fingerbones scattered, the vertebrae, the toes. The skull remains, but lower jaw is lost. Teeth gleam, that once were hidden by lips.

I walk there, find them: pearls of the desert. Out of boredom, I begin to gather them, to arrange them against the flat sand. Not many left. The skull, lacking half its jaw; upper arm, forearm; the ladder of ribs. The k.n.o.bby-ended thigh. I rea.s.semble the pieces and stare at the puzzle, wondering who and what it might have been, when it wore flesh.

I sit back, studying the forgotten remnants of a living being. Then pick up the curving, fragile short rib. Close my hand upon it.

Over the skull, as I watch, flesh grows. Hollows are filled, angles coated, like moss on a rock. A face stares up at me, though it lacks a lower jaw. Even without eyes, I know her.

"Time runs away," she says. "You must be faster, if you choose to catch it."

Her words are clear despite deformation. "And if I don't?" I ask.

"It is best to be the hunter, not the prey. The prey perishes."

"Unless it escapes."

"But you will not."

Sobering p.r.o.nouncement, especially from a woman dead a month, a year, a decade. "If I'm to find you," I say, "how about a hint?"

"The answer is in your bones."

I hold up the rib. "Yours are more accessible."

The upper lip, lacking a lower, achieves only half a smile. "Your bones know where to find mine."

I replace the rib in the collection on the sand. "And if I am to sacrifice flesh in order to hear them? To become like you?" I hold up mutilated hands. "Why would I wish to? I have already donated two fingers."

"Count mine," the woman says, who lacks even hands.

I smile wryly. "Point taken."

"The bones know. Listen. Then come and find me."

And the flesh retreats, and the woman says no more. "The bones know," I echoed.

"What?" Del asked.

I blinked into chilly dawn. "What?"

"What did you mean? The bones know what?"

"What bones?"

She sat up, folding back blankets. "The bones you were talking about." Del picked a stray hair out of pale eyelashes. "I hope you aren't referring to the fingerbone necklet Oziri gave you.

Because if you are, it means I'm going to have to kill you."

I grunted, scrubbing at an itchy, sleep-creased face. The sun was barely up, peering over the blade of the horizon.

"Find me" she had said once. Or twice. Maybe thrice. "And take up the sword."

"The bones know," I declared, though mostly it was distorted by a tremendous yawn.

"Mine, though, not those." Awareness coalesced. "Oh, hoolies, not that thrice-cursed dream again!"

Del crawled out of her bedroll, untangling twisted burnous from around her hips. "If we didn't have so much to do today, I'd tell you to go back to sleep. Maybe next time you woke up you'd make more sense."

I frowned. "What do we have to do today?"

Del laced up sandals. "Rescue Nayyib."

I watched her walk off, hunting privacy. I grumbled a protest, yawned widely again, contemplated going back to sleep. My bones ached.

My eyes flew open. "Bones." I sat up, threw back covers. All I wore was my dhoti, since I'd neglected to grab my burnous back at the bathhouse. That left me with an expanse of flesh tanned a deep coppery-brown, with the fine hairs bleached bronze-gold. I couldn't see any bones. Not naked ones. Just the lines and angles covered by muscle and flesh. I knocked on a kneecap, then inspected an elbow, since they were closer to the surface. "Is there anything any of you have to tell me? Like, how it is I'm supposed to find this woman?" Or whatever she was, buried in the sand.

For all they supposedly knew the answer, my bones remained stubbornly silent. Muttering, I pulled on my own sandals, cross-gartered them up my calves, then got up and limped off to make my own morning donation even as Del returned from hers.

"Don't take long," she called. "I want to get started."

Not something a man wants to hear first thing in the morning when he's only barely awake.

"It'll take as long as it takes," I muttered, scowling at the sunrise.

Del had everything packed and the horses loaded by the time I returned, reins in her hands; and no, I had not taken that long. She was clearly impatient to get going.

"Hold your horses," I said, wondering if she'd get the joke.

She didn't. "According to you, we could reach Umir's today if we leave early enough."

"And we will reach Umir's today, even if we leave after we eat."

"We can eat on the way." She had packed my things, leaving behind only my harness, sword, and knife. Ready to go.

I wasn't. I picked up the knife, went over to a spike-fronded plant, cut off a flat, wide, thorn-tipped leaf. "You weren't in this much of a hurry last night."

"Last night we couldn't do anything but sleep. This morning we can . . . Tiger, what are you doing?"

Methodically I trimmed the sharp tip from the leaf, then carefully slipped the knife blade into the plump edge and slit the leaf from top to bottom, peeling them apart. I now had two halves, turgid with pale green sap. I turned over one half of the leaf and began to smear the greasy sap over my shoulder. Once worked into skin, it was colorless.

'Tiger-"

"If you want to save time," I interrupted, "you might cut off some leaves and give me a hand."

"What is it, and why are you doing that?"

"Alia oil," I explained. "The same stuff you put on your gelding's pink skin, remember? It protects it from sunburn."

Del, who had only seen alia oil mixed with a paste in cork- or wax-stoppered pots, not in its pure form, was surprised. "Oh. But why are you putting it on?"

"Because I'm fresh out of burnouses, and the last time I made this trek to Umir's, I arrived with at least one layer of skin peeling off. I'd just as soon skip the experience this time." I dropped the depleted half of leaf, began to work with the other. "Gee, bascha, I can think of a lot of women who'd just love to spread oil all over me. Have you grown immune to my charms?