Beneath an Opal Moon (23 page)

Her opponents, she saw now, were sturdy Tudescans, immensely powerful and disciplined. These two before her worked in perfect unison, timing their blows and movements as if both sword arms belonged to one body.

Chiisai was aware, after only a few moments, that Martyne had neither been lying nor exaggerating about the savagery of the Tudescans. These were animals in the guise of men, murderous fanatics, appallingly dangerous.

She began to feel fatigue for it was as if she battled an ungiving brick wall. Yes, she supposed she was quicker in her reflexes, but these warriors had only to move their huge weapons fractionally in order to block her thrusts. This, of course, was what they were counting on. Once she slowed down, even slightly, they would move in for the kill.

There was a strategy open to her. She could feign more fatigue than she actually felt, thus forcing them to commit themselves prematurely. But this, she felt certain, would fool but one of them. Still-She slowed down her defenses and, immediately, the Tudescan on the right attacked her with ferocious acumen. Chiisai cried out and, ducking beneath the murderous blow, swept her sword in on a horizontal strike, leaning into it with all her might. The man went down as if pole-axed.

Now she stepped back, hearing for the first time the sounds of battle behind her. Martyne.

She withdrew her shorter blade and now she stood, feet wide apart, doubly weaponed. She attacked, slashing high against one warrior, using
Kishsu-shi
in a horizontal strike across his chest. This he blocked effortlessly by bringing his own sword up obliquely. But Chiisai had already begun the inward movement of the shorter sword. He saw it at the last instant and all he could do was move his body. It was not nearly enough to save him. The blade's point punctured him on the left side but, as Chiisai compensated for his defensive motion, the sword slashed in toward his spine. His knees buckled and he knelt on the cobbles as if praying to his gods. Then he toppled over and lay still.

The fourth Tudescan moved in more cautiously. But she had made a mistake in watching his face and thus missed the blur of his sword-point. It had not been aimed directly at her so there was no reflex action on her part. But the warrior had contrived to slap her short sword a glancing blow. Still, the blade was so huge and the force behind it so awesome that the strike sent her short sword whirling out of her grasp, clattering across the cobbles.

She went low, then high, and he blocked them both. And all the while he was forcing her back, slashing at her again and again. She realized that she was expending energy more rapidly than she would want. She saw too that she was coming to an alley, which meant a more confined space. She would be at a distinct disadvantage wielding the long dai-katana. The only thing to do was to get rid of it.

Thus, in the entranceway to the alley, she allowed him to disarm her. Then she fell, rolling into him with enough force to bowl him over. As he went down, she withdrew her dirk and slashed out, stabbing.

He was now constrained to release his own sword for, at these close quarters, it was more of a hindrance than a help. But he got one hand up quickly enough to ward off her first blow, deflect the second, and then he was into a counterattack which almost undid her.

She panted and fought while he endeavored to get on top of her in order to use his superior weight to full advantage. She knew, however, that if she allowed this to happen, it would be the end for her and so she switched hands, driving the dirk's blade from the opposite side. He saw it only at the last moment and he tried to deflect it again. But this time he was unprepared for the angle and thus missed its coming in.

Nevertheless, it was not a killing blow, the blade passing through the fleshy area just above the pelvis on the right side. He gritted his teeth and tried once more for supremacy but Chiisai held on, twisting the blade, with a tenaciousness that balked him.

Then he threw her off and, gaining his feet, stumbled off down the alley, thinking only now of returning from whence he had come.

Chiisai, aware of his intent, was obliged to make another split-instant decision: to stay and help Martyne or to follow the Tudescan. In the end, it was not much of a decision because, realistically, the odds were piled on one side. And the odds said that if she were able to successfully follow this warrior without being detected, he would lead her to Hellsturm. Once his base was known, she would hopefully still have time to make the rendezvous with Moichi.

Sheathing her dai-katana and retrieving her short sword, she went carefully down the alley, following the Tudescan home.

“You know, you look Daluzan.”

Her fine face was softened now by the loss of tension, streaked with a combination of saliva and sweat.

“That is why I did not believe your story.”

And Moichi thought, She looks almost as young as Aufeya now. Younger, in some sense. She possessed a kind of little-girl quality that was hard to describe. Soft and vulnerable yet without a trace of the weakness he despised in people.

“I am quite wealthy,” Senhora Seguillas y Oriwara said softly, “as you no doubt know. This makes me a target.” She was completely naked, lying beside him atop the coverlet of greens, her body magnificent in its dusky sensuality. Shadows pooling in the sweeping concavities lent her flesh a mysteriousness of aspect matching her spirit. “There are very few days that go by when someone or other is not seeking money.” She sighed softly, turning against him in the enormous bed. The darkness of the painting rising above their heads was subtly oppressive. “I rarely go out now because often—far too often—these people no longer ask but demand.” Her eyes stared into his. “Can you understand that position, being a man?”

He laughed, attempting to leach away some of her returned anxiety. It had leapt from her to him at first contact and had pursued him doggedly throughout their time of loving. “But with the
koppo
—”

She shook her head. “You see, you
don't
understand. Whether I am a warrior, whether I can defend myself in whatever manner I choose, has absolutely no bearing on this.” She put a hand on his chest, spread her fingers, caressing his skin. “Tell me, would a man, whether skilled or no as a warrior,
ever
find himself in such a position?”

He saw her point and shook his head. “No.” She relaxed somewhat.

“You mean that, don't you?”

“Yes, of course. I would not say it otherwise.”

“Not even to please me?”

“Do I not please you in ways that are more honest?”

For the first time since he had met her earlier that day, he saw her smile. “Yes. Yes. As I have pleased you?”

“As you have pleased me, yes.” He took her hand from his flesh, kissed it. “Do you not care about your daughter?”

She came onto her back, staring up at the domed vault of the cathedral ceiling. “A very long time ago,” she said in a quiet voice, wrapped in the veils of the past, “I was an independent woman. I sailed the seas on my own ship, battled, taking what I wanted, commanding a crew of thirty-seven, all fiercely loyal to me and me alone. Does that surprise you?” She looked over at him for a moment, just the flick of a glance.

“Not particularly. There is a storm inside of you. I felt it all the time we made love, a tidal wave of emotion. You are far too strong to be known as someone else's wife, no matter how influential or wealthy he might be.”

She made no comment to this, merely returned her gaze heavenward and continued. “I was happy, yet, at the same time, filled with an inexplicable sadness which would overwhelm me when I lay down to sleep. It got so that I began to dread, then hate, the night. I could not remain in my cabin, oppressed as I was by that nameless terror, so I would walk the decks, avoiding those on watch, save for the bos'un, who, the first night he saw me up and pacing, brought me a mug of hot grog. And every night after that.

“It helped somewhat, being alone in the night as if I could cleanse myself in the starlight and the moonlight. But all that ran through my head was the thought, It's not enough.

“But what was it I wanted?”

A nightingale, perched upon the branches of the spreading pine in the garden outside the opened windows, began to sing. Over its shoulder, he could see the thinnest slice of the new moon like a sliver of delicate melon served up at the end of a banquet. Above the treetop, the sluice of the stars, part of the River of Heaven, as sailors throughout the known world called it.

“Soon I became convinced that it was more money I craved. Thus, I assuaged my sadness and fear by falling in with someone I met in a far-off port by the shore of a river that has no name. We made a pact. I was given many—implements which would aid me, and within the space of a single season I had gathered in more money than I had in the previous eight or nine. I began to sleep at nights and I was certain that I had found my cure.

“My partner, of course, got half of all I took in, but that bothered me not at all for the ship was always riding low on the sea with the vast amounts of gold and silver and precious stones I had acquired.

“So it went for many seasons, the ease of it at first astounding and then, in the course of time, taken for granted. But all too soon I found myself again not able to sleep at night as I lay awake, crying in my cabin. I had not, after all, found my cure.”

He watched the rhythmic rise and fall of her breasts as she spoke, the play of soft light and shadow over the features of her face.

“Now, my partner requested certain things of me—assignments, you might call them. Some I had no compunction against doing, others did not sit well with me. But when I balked, my partner insisted and I found myself, abruptly, in an untenable position. Thus I began to be manipulated as I was coerced. Now, this peculiar unformed terror seized me always until at last I could bear the pain in my mind no longer. I went to my partner and said that I had no stomach for the work. I was laughed at. She spat in my face and told me that, didn't I know? All who worked for her did so for the length of their own lives.

“I told her that I could not bear to work for her a moment longer and threw at her feet all the arcane implements she had given me. She was enraged. She shook her fist at me, saying that she could slay me now but would not, that one day I would remember that moment and wish she had destroyed me then.”

She turned her head and looked at him, the light turning her jade eyes black for a moment.

“But I had to leave, you see, for I had at last found out what it was that distressed me so. In the course of my travels I had met someone. I had left him, you see. Well, I had to; my work dictated that. Now I realized that he was what I missed so terribly that it was a scar upon my heart, throbbing every night. I never saw him again, of course. One never does in situations like that; the world is far too vast. And, in any event, too much time had passed to make such a search practicable.

“Thus, when I took leave of my partner, I went ashore in search of a man who would make me happy. In due time, I met Milhos Seguillas and never again have I been to sea.” She was silent for a moment and Moichi found himself wondering, despite his fascination with her story, just what all this had to do with Aufeya. “I do not want my daughter to repeat my mistakes,” she said at last.

“I am afraid there is not much one can do about such things. Life, it seems, is oftentimes the only valid teacher.”

“Yes, I have learned that. The hard way.”

“What do you mean?”

She sat up, as if some inner turmoil would not now let her rest.

“We have not been—on the best of terms, Aufeya and I. Not for a long time. And before she left—before she left, what little we did speak to each other was awful. We argued constantly.”

“About what?”

She turned her head away from him for a moment, her thick hair sliding across her shoulders. “Oh, well, the usual things between mother and daughter. Everything—everything was blown out of all proportion.”

“Why did she run away, then?”

She was silent, still turned away from him.

He reached out and touched her neck. “She
did
run away, didn't she?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

He could feel the tension singing in every muscle of her body. “Yes, you do,” he told her gently. “I think you want to talk about it very much.”

She moved back against him, a minute shift, but it conveyed so much. He felt the vibrations, realized belatedly that she was crying silently, perhaps ashamed that he should see her thus, more naked than ever she could be in purely physical terms.

Slowly he put his arms around her, holding her to him, feeling the weight of her breasts against his wrists. He rocked her gently, waiting for her to continue.

At length, she did. “I had only been in Corruña a very short time when I met Milhos, you see. Before that—directly before that I had been in Rhein Tudesca on the last of my business assignments for my partner. I had met a man there, a strange, magnetic, beautiful man and for the time I had been in port—well, I stayed with him. It was Hellsturm.”

Outside, the nightingale had ceased its song and now even the darkness itself seemed to be holding its breath. But the night seemed a million miles away to him, part of another universe where people loved and laughed, did mundane things such as have dinner, go out to a play or perhaps just stroll quietly down near the sea. Here, a kind of chilling numbness had entered the room at some time when he had been looking elsewhere. Now it seemed to enwrap them both even as the leathery wings of the gigantic man-bat sought to enfold the Daluzan family above their heads.

“Many seasons later, he came to Corruña for he had heard that was where I was bound when I left him. By that time, I was already married to Milhos and deeply in love. But none of that seemed to matter to him. He wanted me. He was persistent, but at last I prevailed upon him to leave me alone. I spent a night with him. Milhos knew none of this, then. I knew how he would take it. He was a man of great honor.