Everything Under the Heavens (Silk and Song) (20 page)

“I’m not a warrior, Firas,” Jaufre said by way of explanation for the ignorance and ineptitude he was about to display. “I’m a trader.”

“You carry a sword,” the havildar said, unsurprised at this unsolicited confidence. “Sooner or later, someone will force you to use it.” He hesitated, and then said, very gently, “You could lay it aside, young sir.”

Jaufre had unbuckled the scabbard from about his chest and now he frowned down at it and the sword it sheathed. He looked up to meet Johanna’s eyes. She said nothing, only waited for him to choose.

He drew his father’s sword, handed her belt and scabbard, and turned. He thought he saw a trace of approval in the havildar’s eyes, but later he would be equally certain he had imagined it. The havildar’s approval was not so easily won.

“Yours is a weapon of the West,” Firas pacing around him, hands clasped behind his back. “The Western warrior prefers a straight blade for hacking through heavy armor, wielded from horseback.” He stopped to draw his own weapon. “My scimitar is of the East, also meant to be used from horseback, but shorter and used against a lightly-armored opponent, usually after the opponent’s line has been weakened by archers.”

He tossed Jaufre his scimitar. Jaufre caught it, just, in his left hand. “You will notice the difference in weight.”

Jaufre tested both swords, and his eyebrows went up.

Firas nodded. “One on one, your sword will have the advantage.”

“Until I meet someone with a longer sword,” Jaufre said.

“Until then.” Firas held up an admonitory finger. “You will have the advantage, that is, once you learn to use it properly. An untrained soldier is more of a hazard to himself than he is to anyone else.”

After Jaufre had nearly cut off his own hand and had gashed his own cheek, he took the havildar’s warning more seriously.

But that would be in the future. This morning Firas had caused a thick post to be buried deep in the sand, and had Jaufre hack at it with a wooden practice sword, forehand and backhand, over and over, again and again, until Jaufre’s arms felt as if they would fall off. “This post is buried behind the cook tents at each of our camps,” the havildar said. “Half of each practice session will be spent at it.”

Jaufre, sweat rolling down his face, the muscles in his arms burning, gasped out something that passed for, “Yes, havildar.”

Firas then had Jaufre switch to his own sword and walk through a series of different movements, cut, thrust, parry, and right, left and overhead variations. There wasn’t much finesse to it, as Jaufre soon came to realize. A sword was essentially a club with an edge.

Firas walked through each movement slowly, standing next to Jaufre and commanding him to mirror his own movements. Then he stepped opposite Jaufre and repeated those movements, meeting them with his own in mirror image.

After the work with the post, it was all Jaufre could do to get his sword to shoulder height, and Firas took advantage of every gap in his defenses, usually with a hard rap with the side of his blade on whatever portion of Jaufre’s anatomy was convenient. There were many such gaps.

At some point during the following year, Firas stepped back and dropped his sword. “Enough for your first lesson, I think.”

Jaufre blinked the sweat from his eyes and looked around to find that many of Uncle Cheng’s guard had assembled in a circle. There were smiles hidden and smiles not and much nudging of elbows. Johanna, standing a little apart with her hands clasped over the sword’s sheath as if she were praying, watched them with a face wiped unusually clean of expression.

“Tomorrow at the same time, young sir?” Firas said, producing a length of cloth and wiping his blade.

Jaufre took a deep breath and with trembling arms brought up his father’s sword and wiped it on the edge of his tunic. He made a silent vow to acquire a clean cloth for cleansing his blade before their next practice. “Tomorrow,” he said. It was all he could manage.

Firas inclined his head, a ghost of a smile on his face. “Until then.”

Johanna, mercifully, waited until they were well away from the practice yard. “Where does it hurt?”

“Everywhere,” he said. He’d meant it to be a shout but it came out as more of a groan.

She nodded, her suspicion confirmed. “Perhaps another visit to the baths.”

It was good advice, despite its source, and he took it. He was marginally mobile when he awoke that evening, only to be nearly incapable of helping strike their yurt afterward. Johanna and Shasha broke their camp without comment, although there were meaningful looks. The night that followed, spent on camelback, was sheer agony.

Uncle Cheng at first skirted the Taklamakan Desert to the north, stopping at oasis towns and trading as they went. Shasha purchased cakes of indigo dye which she said would profit them well in Antioch and Acre, where they could buy kermes or carmine dye for trading farther west. Johanna found a merchant who specialized in antiquities and acquired a dozen flying horses made of bronze, all small, exquisitely made and of a portable size.

“Those aren’t Han,” Jaufre said.

“Who west of Kashgar will know that?” Johanna said. Her fingers caressed the mane of one of the horses. “And they are lovely little pieces in their own right. Who wouldn’t pay a handsome sum to display one of these in their public rooms, to the envy of their neighbors and friends?” Her eyes took on a faraway look. “Perhaps I should find a marble carver. We could double the price if each one included its own pedestal.”

“And it would be no strain at all on our pack animals to ask them to carry marble pedestals in addition to the solid bronze statues,” Jaufre said cordially.

Shasha watched Johanna flounce off. Jaufre flapped a hand at Shasha’s raised eyebrow and hobbled off in the opposite direction.

The feelings generated by discovery of the contents of Johanna’s purse were prone to display themselves at odd moments. Shasha sighed and kept her inevitable thoughts to herself.

Jaufre’s weapons training continued apace. The first morning he was able to block all of the havildar’s blows, Firas introduced him to the shield, and then the mace, and then the flail, and then the axe, and then the lance. New muscles he didn’t even know he had set up their individual protests. At which point Firas, obviously close kin to Father John’s Christian devil, set the better swordsmen among the guards to attack Jaufre without warning, so that Jaufre found himself on alert at every moment of the night or day. Before long he was able to come out of a sound sleep, on his feet with his father’s sword in his hand, and beat off an attack in the blazing sun of midday.

Johanna and Shasha, woken during the same attack, knew enough not to waste their breath in complaints, and perfected a quick roll to the wall of the yurt, beneath it and out, while the battle raged within.

None of the surprise attacks were half-hearted. One evening, as the caravan was being loaded and the camels were coming reluctantly to their feet, Jaufre blocked one of the havildar’s thrusts and pushed through to touch the point of his blade to the havildar’s tunic. He dropped his sword and stood back.

Firas, to Jaufre’s infinite and inarticulate pride, saluted Jaufre with his scimitar. “You improve, young sir. You improve.”

Félicien wrote a song about it and sang it at the campfire that night to loud acclaim. Jaufre’s aches and pains lessened. When they were near a city he sought out the hot baths. When they camped in caravansaries or on the trail Shasha rubbed him down with oil, strong fingers kneading at the hard knots of muscles bunched beneath his skin. After a while he had to find a seamstress to let out the shoulders and sleeves of his tunics.

One morning he was already laying face down on his bed, shirtless, his head pillowed in his arms, half asleep. He heard the flap of the yurt rustle and said sleepily, “Shasha?”

She didn’t answer, and there was a long silence. Then her knees dropped next to him and he heard her rub oil into her hands. She laid those hands on his back and he knew instantly that they did not belong to the wise woman. They were strong, vigorous hands that kneaded the tension from his muscles every bit as capably as Shasha’s would have, but instead of a massage this felt like a caress, like a prelude to love. He shifted when his body reacted, but he was anything but uncomfortable. He had wanted her for so long now, and for so long she had been unable to see anything but a brother when she looked at him.

He rolled to his back and looked up at her. Her hands had dropped to her thighs and her eyes were wide, tracing the curve of muscle and bone from his shoulder to his chest. His eyes followed the trail of golden down over his abdomen, and widened. She looked up at his face, startled. He made no attempt to hide what he was feeling.

Her lips parted and she leaned a little forward, and Shasha came into the yurt, oblivious to the tension, or making a good show of it. “Ah, good, Johanna, I see you’ve eased the pain of our wounded warrior.”

Not quite, Jaufre thought.

Shasha, meantime, had her own agenda. The following morning after they pitched the yurt she drew the younger woman to one side. “Do you remember the herbs I gave you before you went to Edyk?”

Johanna colored. “Yes.”

“You took them?”

“I did. Steeped in hot water every morning, as you instructed. They tasted terrible.”

“Most effective medicines do, unfortunately. Edyk didn’t object?”

“Edyk didn’t know.” Johanna looked away. “I made sure he was deep asleep each time.”

“Good.” Shasha nodded. “Good. You are pleased to be without child?”

Johanna was silent. Traveling the Road, having adventures, seeing all that there was to see, finding her grandfather, these were the things she was looking forward to.

Still, to have had Edyk’s child…would have been most inconvenient. She didn’t need a child to remember him by. Perhaps she would marry and have children one day, although that day was visible only through a rosy cloud in the distant future, with the father of said children an even less distinct figure. “Yes,” she said firmly. “I didn’t thank you, Shasha. I am very grateful.”

“Good,” Shasha said briskly, “then you will not object to learning to make your own.” She led the way to a blanket she had spread behind their yurt, her herbs set out in small neat bags made of muslin, each marked with a Mandarin character. She sat down tailor fashion and motioned Johanna to join her. “This is pennyroyal,” she said. “Take a pinch. Smell it. Taste it, a very little. When I find some of it growing I’ll show you.”

Dutifully Johanna pinched, smelled, tasted.

“This is mugwort,” Shasha said, offering another muslin bag. She waited as Johanna went through the ritual. “Take either one dram of the pennyroyal, or one dram of the mugwort, but never both.” She shook out a portion of the pennyroyal into her palm, demonstrating the amount. “Add one teaspoon of blue cohash. Infuse the herbs in one cup of boiling water and drink. Twice a day for six days, no more.”

“And this will—”

The two women looked at one another, united in the eternal female conspiracy against the burden placed on them by nature. “Will bring on a delayed menstruation,” Shasha said, without expression. “You must pay attention, Johanna. If you are a week or less late, take the potion as prescribed. If it does not bring on your menses, Johanna, if it does not—” she emphasized those last words “—you must not repeat the dosage, do you understand? You must not. It could lead to uncontrolled bleeding. You could bleed to death.”

Johanna took a deep breath. “I understand. But why tell me now? Edyk is five hundred leagues behind us.”

Shasha was packing up her herbs. “There are other men in the world, Johanna.” Her hands stilled and she looked up. “One in our own yurt.”

Johanna went instantly scarlet, leapt to her feet and marched off.

FIRAS’ CHIEF ASSET
for the job of havildar, so far as Jaufre could see, was the ability to instill fear into his subordinates. “Why do they fear?” Johanna said, sensibly, and Jaufre spent a few evenings loitering around the guards’ campfire, participating in soft boxing competitions and wrestling matches and archery contests and taking care not to win all the time. “He’s a Nazari Ismaili,” he reported back.

Johanna and Shasha looked blank.

“From Alamut,” Jaufre said.

Recognition dawned. “He’s an Assassin?” Johanna said, thrilled. “Really? I’ve never met an Assassin before.”

“Yes, well, try not to sound so delighted,” Jaufre said dryly. “You may not have met one now. That sect died out over a hundred years ago. Or was wiped out, more like.”

Johanna’s brow puckered. “But Father said that Grandfather visited the Mountain, and might even have met the Old Man.”

“Your grandfather wasn’t always the most reliable source, as the honorable Wu Li himself admitted,” Shasha said.

After that Johanna made a point of watching Firas at work when she could. She detected no outward menace in his demeanor, but he did have an indefinable presence that inspired respect, if not, as Jaufre claimed, fear in his subordinates. When he issued an order, it was followed, promptly and without question, and without his ever having to lay a hand on the hilt of the curved sword he wore at his side, much less drawing it from its sturdy leather scabbard.

“What were you hoping for,” Jaufre said one evening, “that he’d kill someone right in front of you so you could see the gold dagger of the Assassin in action?”

Johanna put up her nose at his and Shasha’s laughter.