Sword Born

PROLOGUE

Sword pierced flesh, broke bone. I felt it go in, felt the give, the tension in my wrists as steel cut into body. Heard my own hoarse shout as I denied again that this was what I wanted, what I meant —

— and awoke with an awkward upward lunge that smashed the back of my skull into wood.

One way to stop a dream, I guess: knock it clean out of your head.

Driven flat by the force of the collision, I lay belly-down on the threadbare blanket and scrunched my face against pain and shock, locking teeth together. I couldn’t manage a word, just swore a lot in silence inside my rattled skull.

From above, warily, "Tiger?"

I didn’t answer. I was too busy gripping the back of my abused skull, trying to keep it whole.

"Are you all right?"

No, I wasn’t all right, thank you very much; I’d just come close to splattering my brains all over the tiny cabin we shared aboard a ship I’d learned to hate the day we sailed. But to say I wasn’t all right?

I turned my head, carefully, into a slotted streak of brassy sunlight skulking fitfully through creaking boards bleeding dribbles of sticky pitch. "— fine." From between gritted teeth.

Movement overhead. A moment later a wealth of fan-hair barely visible in fog-tendriled morning light spilled over the side of the narrow bunk looming low above me, which was precisely what I’d cracked my head against. (The bunk, that is, not the hair.) Then the face appeared. Upside down.

Del is beautiful from any direction, in any position, wearing any expression. But just now I was in no shape to appreciate that beauty. "Was that your head?"

I undamped my jaws a bit and removed my cheek from the lump of mildewed material that served inadequately as a pillow. It stank of salt and fish and, well, me. "I suppose I could point out that sleeping apart for months on end in bunks barely big enough for a dog makes it hard for a man to, um, demonstrate his admiration and affection —"

"Lust," she put in, stripping away euphemism neatly. "And it’s only been two weeks. Besides, we had the floor." She paused, correcting her terminology. "The deck. Which we’ve used. Several times. Or have you forgotten already?"

Not to be thwarted by an annoying and convoluted interruption intended solely to sidetrack me into defensiveness, I continued with laborious dignity. "— and therefore I could claim it was something else entirely that smacked the underside of your bed with such force as to make the earth move —"

"Embroidering the legend of the jhihadi, are we?"

"— but considering that I’m always an honest messiah, er, man —"

"When it suits you."

"— I’ll admit that, yes, that was my head." I moved my fingers gingerly through wiry hair. "I think it’s still in one piece."

"Well, if it isn’t, it matches the rest of you. Age does that to a man." And she withdrew her head — and the hair — so I had nothing to glare at.

"Your fault," I muttered.

She swung down from her bunk over mine. Short, narrow bunks, too small for either of us together or apart; Del is a tall woman. She landed lightly, bracing herself against the ship’s uneasy wallowing with a hand on the salt-crusted, battered bunk frame. "My fault? That you’re feeling your age? Really, Tiger — you’d think it was always my idea that we, as you put it, ’demonstrate admiration and affection.’ "

"Hoolies," I muttered, "but I’ll be glad when we’re on land again. Room to move on land."

Del sat down on the edge of my bunk. It wasn’t a comfortable position because she had to lean forward and hunch over so she wouldn’t bash her head against the underside of her bunk. I rearranged bent legs, allowing her as much room as I could; I wasn’t about to sit up and risk my skull again. "Any blood?" she asked matter-of-factly, sounding more like man than woman preparing to blithely dismiss an injury as utterly insignificant unless a limb was chopped off.

Someone once asked me what it meant if Del was ever kind. I answered — seriously — that likely she was sick. Or worried about me, but that wouldn’t do to say. For one, I hated fuss; for another, well, Del’s kind of worrying doesn’t make for comfort. A smack on the butt is more her style of encouragement, much like you’d slap a horse as you sent it out to pasture.

I inspected my skull again with tentative fingers, digging through salt-crusted hair. No blood. Just a knot coming up. And itching. But too far from my heart to kill me.

Then I dismissed head and irony altogether. I reached out and clasped her arm, closing the wrist bones inside my hand. Not a small woman, Del, in substance or height (or in skill and spirit); but then, neither am I a small man. The wrist fit nicely. "I dreamed about you," I said. "And the dance. On Staal-Ysta."

Del went very still. Then, eloquently, she took my hand and carried it to her ribs, where she opened it and flattened the palm against the thin leather of her tunic. "I’m whole," she said. "Alive."

I shivered. Felt older still than thirty-eight years. Or possibly thirty-nine. "You don’t know what it was like. You were dead, bascha —"

"No. Nearly so. But not dead, Tiger. You stopped the blow in time. Remember?"

I hadn’t stopped the blow in time. I managed only to slow it, to keep myself — barely — from shearing her into two pieces.

"I remember being helpless. I remember not wanting to dance with you in the first place, and that cursed magicked sword making me fight you anyway. And I remember cutting you." Beneath my palm I felt the warmth of flesh, the steady beating of her heart. And the corroded crust of scar tissue mounded permanently in the skin beneath her left breast. "I remember leaving — no, running — because I thought you would die. I was sure of it… and I couldn’t bear to see it, to watch it —" I levered myself up on one elbow, reached out, and slid my free hand to the back of her skull, urging her down with me. "Oh, bascha, you don’t know what it felt like, that morning on the cliff as I rode away from the island. From you." But not from guilt and self-recrimination; I was sure she had only hours. While I’d have years to remember, to wish myself dead.

I shifted again as she settled; it was too small, too cramped, for anything more than the knotting of bodies one upon the other. "And then when you found me later, me with that thrice-cursed sword —"

"It’s over," she said; and so it was, by nearly two years. "All of it is over. I’m alive and so are you. And neither of us has a sword that is anything but a sword." She paused. "Now."

Now. Boreal, Del’s jivatma, she had broken to free me from ensorcellment. My own sword, the one I myself had forged, folded, blooded, and named on the icy island called Staal-Ysta, lay buried beneath tons of fallen rock. We were nothing but people again: the sword-singer from the North, and the sword-dancer from the South.

I flinched as she put her hand to the scar I bore in my own flesh, as gnarled and angry as hers over ribs now healed. She’d nearly killed me in that same circle. But it wasn’t her touch that provoked the visceral response. The truth of it was, I wasn’t even a sword-dancer any more, not a proper one. The Sandtiger was now borjuni, a "sword without a name." And no more proud — and proudly defended — title won in apprenticeship and mastery through the system that ruled the ritualized combat of the South, the oaths and honor codes of men who danced with swords within the circle and settled the wars of the tanzeers, princes of the Punja, the South’s merciless desert.

Deserted at birth, then taken in as a slave; freed of that by oaths sworn to the man, the shodo, who taught me how to fight, to dance according to the codes; and now deserted by others who swore the same oaths and thus had to kill me, because I’d broken those codes.

Yet despite the price it had been easy to break them, because it was for Delilah. For her oaths and honor.

And so in the South, my homeland, I was prey to be hunted by any sword-dancer alive, to be killed without honor outside of the circle because I wasn’t part of it any more. In the North, Del’s homeland, I was a man who had turned his back on the glory of Staal-Ysta, the Place of Swords, and the sword-singers who danced in the circle with enchanted blades.

But here, now, with her, I was just me. Sometimes, that’s enough.