Sword-Singer Page 25

  “What about us?” Massou asked, staring steadfastly at Del.

  She, in turn, looked straight at Adara. “Your mother should have told you. Your mother should have made it clear. You three are bound for Kisiri. Tiger and I are not.”

  “But you can’t leave us!” That from Cipriana. “How can you leave us? How can you desert us? What are we to do?”

  This was not the girl who had proved such a staunch foe against the loki. This was an entirely different girl. I didn’t like this one.

  “You’ll do what you intended to do even after you buried your father,” I said firmly. “You’ll go on.”

  “Alone!” Tears glittered in her eyes. “Two women and a boy, without a wagon, without a horse…without even supplies!”

  “Del and I will talk with the Cantéada. They may know a solution.” I turned toward the tunnel, thrusting out a delaying hand. “We’ll go talk to them now. You stay here.”

  I ducked out before Cipriana could raise another objection. I felt Del coming behind me, locked in silence. It wasn’t until we were completely out of the tunnels that I felt free again, sucking in lungfuls of cool, damp air. The day hadn’t known much sun, but it was setting nonetheless. Shadows were deepening.

  “She’s frightened,” Del said simply.

  I grunted. “She’s a pain in the rump.”

  “They’re all frightened, Tiger. Even little Massou.”

  “’Little Massou,’ as you say, is as bad as his sister. In her own way, so is Adara.” I scratched at stubbled scars. “I’ll be glad to be rid of them.”

  “It’s so easy for you, then? To turn your back on responsibility?”

  I stared. “Hoolies, bascha, it’s for your sake we have to leave them. Time is running out.”

  She turned away, waving a hand. “Never mind. Never mind. I shouldn’t have said it. I’m just—oh, hoolies, I don’t know. I’m just all twisted up.” She leaned back against the canyon wall, next to the tunnel entrance.

  I’d grinned as she used the Southron term. But it faded when I thought about Garrod’s words. Warped, he’d said. Twisted and misshapen. And a canker eating her soul.

  “Del—”

  “Listen,” she whispered. “Hear it?”

  I blinked, cut off in mid-stride. Shut my mouth and listened. Frowned a little, then laughed. “It’s Garrod,” I said. “He’s muttering to the stud.”

  “No, no—not Garrod. Listen to the song.”

  Song. All I heard was the same little humming melody Del had labeled a wardsong sung to keep the hounds away. “I don’t hear—”

  “Listen, Tiger! Can’t you hear anything?”

  I sighed. “I’ve told you before, it’s all noise to me. Yes, I hear something. Someone’s out there tootling on a pipe. Maybe two pipes. Maybe ten. What does it matter, Del?”

  Del lifted both hands and pressed the heels against her eyes, threading rigid fingers into hair. “I despair of you, Tiger! Gods, how I despair. What am I going to do? How can you be what you must? How can I go before the voca confident they’ll accept my blood-gift?” She drew in a noisy breath, let it out; half sigh, half groan. “What am I going to do?”

  Hoolies. I’d never heard her like this.

  “Del. Bascha.” I reached out to pull away her hands. “What are you talking about?”

  Her fingers were limp in mine. Strain carved lines in her face. “I can’t tell you.”

  “If you don’t—”

  “I can’t.”

  “Del—”

  “I can’t.”

  It took all I had to stop asking. Instead, I turned the topic. “We could just light out of here on the stud come morning and head back down South. We could just forget all about this voca-thing and this blood-debt and blood-gift and all those other things that are driving you half loki.” I smiled, liking the phrase, although all Del did was scowl. “We could just go back to being sword-dancers, knowing the freedom of the circle.”

  Del took her hands out of mine. “There is no freedom now. There are things I have to do.”

  Something welled up inside me, of realization and frustration, then abruptly burst free. “I think Garrod’s right! I think Garrod understands you perfectly, maybe better than I do.” I glared. “Hoolies. Del—do you ever stop to think about anything else? Anyone else? Do you ever stop to think there are other things in the world besides revenge and retribution?” Her face was still and white. “Do you even know what you’re going to do once this voca-thing is over? Have you thought past anything but the trial?” I shook my head. “No. You’re so locked into your course you give yourself no freedom to even think about anything else. You’re like a horse who’s been reined in so tightly all his life that even once he’s given his head, he keeps his neck bowed snug. Partly because he’s scared. But mostly because he can’t make himself relax and become a horse again.”

  I have never seen such a mixture of emotions in a woman’s face and eyes. Hoolies, even in a man’s. There was shock, pain and anger, disbelief, resentment, realization, and an odd, renewed resolve. I saw Delilah build a wall right in front of me, brick by brick by brick. Then she slapped the mortar in the cracks to make sure nothing could get through.

  Once the wall was built, she reached for her deadliest weapon. “You love me,” she said.

  For a moment the words meant nothing. All I heard was the tone, made up of strange and confusing subtleties. She was angry, was Delilah, but it was a deadly, calm anger shaped of ice instead of heat, and an odd accusation.

  I felt a little sick. Deep-in-the-gut sick.

  Is this how it ends?

  I drew in a slow, deep breath. “I ask you why—now, at this point, having done so much to make yourself a person instead of a woman—do you turn to a woman’s weapon?”

  It cracked the ice a little. Clearly I’d surprised her. “Weapon—”

  “Weapon,” I said firmly. “Now that it’s out in the open, am I supposed to tuck my tail between my legs? Am I supposed to roll over in submission and bare my belly to you? Or is it meant mostly to castrate me, so I’ll still be occasionally useful?”

  Even her lips were bloodless. “Is that what you think it means?”

  “I think that’s what you think it means.”

  Del’s breath was ragged. She covered her mouth with one hand. The other clutched the front of her wool tunic. “Tiger—” she said “—help me—”

  Slowly I shook my head. “If you want me to hold you now, as if nothing has happened—no. Because something has happened. If you want me to reassure you and tell you everything’s fine, everything’s forgotten—no. Because everything is not fine. You have to learn that not everyone can afford to be as single-minded as you. Not everyone can hack off bits of himself because it makes the life he chose easier.” I wanted to touch her; didn’t. “Not everyone,” I said quietly, “can force herself to be someone she isn’t, even when her conscience tells her not to.”

  “Conscience—?”

  “I’ve seen you with Massou. I’ve seen you with other children. Only with him and only with them have I seen the other Del.”

  “Other Del,” she said bitterly. “That soft, kind-hearted fool…the sweet, gentle soul so many men desire their women to be.”

  “Some, yes. Maybe a lot. Down South, yes. And there are times when I wonder what life would be like if you were another kind of woman.” I shrugged. “But I don’t want to change you, Del. Not completely. Maybe just a little…maybe just enough so that horse can unbow his neck and be a horse again.” Now I did touch her. I reached out and put a hand on her right shoulder, closing my fingers on the too-rigid tendons beneath her clothes. “I don’t want you soft. But I don’t want you this hard. It’s tearing you apart.”

  Del was shaking, a little. “You don’t know—you don’t understand—you can’t know what it’s like—” She checked, shut her eyes a moment, dismissed the incoherence. “No man, especially a Southroner, can know how hard it is.”

  “No.” />
  “No man can understand what it is to be a woman who doesn’t belong because of her sex, and yet belongs because of her skill.”

  “No, bascha. He can’t.”

  “No man can know what it’s like to watch mother, father, uncles, aunts, sisters and brothers killed…and then be raped and humiliated, made to feel like a thing, stripped of name, of soul, of self—” She checked again, still shaking. “You don’t understand what it is,” she said, “to know almost every man who sees you wants you—not you, not really you, just that body, because it pleases him…you don’t know, Tiger, what it is to have men rape you with their eyes when they can’t do it with their bodies…and then you go away and vomit.”

  It took all I had to speak. “No,” I said, “I can’t. But what I do know is that if you carry that guilt and grief forever, it’ll make you into a monster. It’ll strip you of humanity. You’ll become Ajani’s triumph.”

  Del’s smile returned. “But I won’t,” she said in amusement. “I won’t carry it forever. Only until I kill him. Until Ajani’s dead.”

  In silence, not daring to speak, I stroked back a strand of pale hair. Thinking to myself: Oh, my poor Delilah…you have so much to learn.

  Twenty-eight

  I heard Garrod before I saw him because his braid beads rattled as he approached. I turned from Del, frowned a little, saw his expression matched mine.

  “Your horse is upset,” Garrod said.

  I scratched stubble. “He told you that, I suppose.”

  “Not in so many words, no.” Garrod was unamused, distracted by something else. “But he is bothered by something here.”

  Del shook her head. “Tiger’s stud is always bothered. It’s part of his—” she paused, “—charm.”

  Garrod shrugged. “I can’t say what he’s like the rest of the time, but something has made him uneasy for now. He wants to leave this place.”

  “Oh, I see.” I nodded sagely. “What I don’t understand is, if he tells you this much, why doesn’t he tell you why?”

  The horse-speaker sighed. “It would be easier if you respected my profession as much as I respect yours.”

  “Horse stealing is not necessarily the sort of profession anyone respects,” I retorted.

  “I’m not a—”

  “Are you not?” Del interrupted. “No, perhaps not—you only accept the horses other people steal.”

  Garrod answered her in a dialect I didn’t know at all. But whatever he said went home, because I saw Del’s color go bad again. She answered sharply, and her fingers twitched as if she meant to draw her sword.

  “Now, wait—” I began, and then suddenly the others were among us.

  Adara’s green eyes glinted. “Are they going to fight?”

  “No,” I told her flatly.

  “Are you going to fight?”

  “None of us is going to fight, and I thought I told all of you to wait in the cave while Del and I talk to the Cantéada.”

  Cipriana shrugged ingenuously. “We heard you arguing.”

  Massou’s blue eyes were wide beneath a shock of ragged blond hair. “We had to come out,” he said.

  Del’s patience quite clearly was at an end. “This is private,” she snapped. “This is private, and requires none of your attention. Has no one taught you manners? Has no one taught you respect?”

  Massou’s fingers plucked at her arm. “Are you going to invite the horse-speaker into a circle?”

  Bloodthirsty little brat. “No,” I said, “she’s not. But even if she were, it’s none of your concern.”

  Massou glared at me. “I was asking her.”

  Rude little brat, too. “I think it would be best—”

  In the distance, the stud nickered uneasily.

  “See?” Garrod asked.

  Massou gazed at Del. “I think you should fight him.”

  “I don’t.” Her tone was very clipped. “I think we should recall where we are. I think we should mend our manners. I think—” She broke it off. “It doesn’t matter what I think.” Abruptly, she turned and left.

  “Angry,” Adara said.

  Cipriana nodded. “Lately, Del is always angry. Angry deep inside.”

  “And frightened,” agreed Massou. “I can feel her fear.”

  It was, I thought, an altogether unnecessary conversation, and quickly going nowhere. “What Del is, is tired of playing herd dog to your flock of sheep,” I told them bluntly. “We have business of our own, serious business, and you’ve slowed us down. We’re running out of time; Del has that to think of.”

  “What about us?” Massou demanded. “Are you just going to leave us here?”

  “No.” I gritted it out between my teeth. “I wouldn’t do that to the Cantéada.”

  Garrod laughed softly, said something in uplander, then bent down and entered the tunnel. Leaving us to our argument.

  I tried to step around them all, but Cipriana was in the way. “Are you going after her?”

  “Cip—”

  “Are you?” She moved closer. “Do you always trail after her like a dog who’s been abused, but comes back begging for more?” Closer yet. “You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t. You don’t need her, Tiger. You don’t need a woman like that; a woman hard and harsh and unfeeling, who’d just as soon stick you with her sword as give you a kind word. You don’t need—”

  “What I need is some time to myself,” I told her, setting her firmly out of the way. “What I need is a little peace of mind, so I have a chance to think.”

  “Tiger—”

  I looked over the daughter’s head to the mother. “Isn’t it time you took a hand in this? Your daughter has been running after me like a bitch in heat. You’re her mother—do something!”

  Adara’s ruddy hair still lay tangled on her shoulders. “What am I to do? She is grown, she is a woman; it’s her choice to make.”

  “Just as you made yours—and Kesar’s for him.” I nodded. “Well, then, perhaps you should both know that I’m not about to give up sword-dancing just for the sake of a woman. Not for any woman.”

  Massou’s eyes were oddly bright. “Not even for Del?” he asked.

  Hoolies, spare me the questions of little boys…and the attentions of sisters and mothers.

  “I’m going to speak to the Cantéada,” I said firmly. “Stay here. Stay here. Do you understand?”

  Cipriana folded her arms. “There you go, chasing…but it’s all right when you do it.”

  “That all depends,” I said, “on whether the other person desires your company.”

  Adara’s tone was quiet. “Is that why Del won’t share your bed?”

  Oh, hoolies—

  I turned and stalked away.

  Del stood in the shadows with the little Cantéada, the one she’d called a songmaster. I marveled all over again at the pale, translucent skin, the feathery cap of down with its eloquently mobile crest, the fragile limbs and heavy chest. His throat, at rest, appeared normal, but when speaking—no, singing—it blew in and out like a frog’s.

  Her face was very solemn. “They are concerned,” she told me. “He says there is discord here, grave discord, and it’s affecting the lifesong.”

  “The what?”

  “Lifesong,” she repeated. “The way they conduct their lives.”

  I sighed wearily. “Song this, song that…” I saw her face. “All right, Del, no more jokes. Does he say why there is discord?”

  She looked troubled. “We are alien to them, like dissonance in pure melody. We kill living beings. It causes disharmony.”

  I smiled. “One way of putting it. But the only thing we’ve killed lately are those hounds.”

  She shook her head, shaking loose hair as well; it had dried in waves. “Doesn’t matter. To the Cantéada, all living things are deserving of honor and respect. All living things, Tiger. It’s why they only eat what they grow, not kill, or what the land provides. It’s the lifesong, Tiger…an endless cycle of living in harmony with the world.�
�

  “They never kill?” It seemed impossible to imagine. “They go through their entire lives without killing anything?”

  Del nodded. “Cantéada have great reverence for life. Any life. Even that of a biting gnat.”

  “Those hounds aren’t exactly gnats—”

  “No. And the songmaster understands that, which is why he shaped the wardsong and gave it to others to sing. But he insists that while we remain here, we kill or injure nothing.”

  “Not even a gnat.”

  “Not even a gnat.”

  “What about a—”

  “Nothing at all, Tiger.”

  I grunted. “What if we were attacked? We’d have to defend ourselves.”

  Del smiled. “Nothing will harm us here. This is a place of peace.”

  “Peace, schmeace,” I said. “I respect their customs, but I don’t believe in all this wardsong stuff. If any of those hounds come down from the trees, I’ll be doing my best to stop them.”

  “This is also a place of power,” she warned. “Don’t discount these people.”

  I was tired. “No. All right. I won’t. Now can we get a little rest? Maybe something to eat?”

  Del bowed to the little man. “Sulhaya, songmaster. We accept your hospitality.”

  His throat inflated. *Dreamsong offers rest/Healsong offers renewal.*

  I looked at Del. “What?”

  “They’ll sing you to sleep, Tiger. They’ll sing us all to sleep.” Del touched my arm. “Come on, let’s go back. We all need food and rest.”

  We turned even as the little Cantéada melted away, but I was brought up short. I’d expected the canyon to be little more than a pocket of darkness now that the sun was gone, but I’d reckoned without the efficiency of the people who lived in it. Every entrance, chimney, crack and airhole was bright with candlelight, which lent the canyon a smoky, muted luminescence. Stone walls glowed like a Southron funeral circle, where sword-dancers with candles gather to give the greatest of the shodos passage to valhail.