Everything Under the Heavens (Silk and Song) (11 page)

His hands stilled on the bridle. “Yes. Why?”

“All the Greeks I’ve met are dark,” she said. “Was your father fair-haired, as you are?”

He nodded, still working on the bridle. “He said that where he came from, some island to the west, many people have fair hair.”

“It is very beautiful.”

He grinned, and two deep dimples creased his cheeks. “So all the ladies tell me.” She threw a handful of straw at him and he ducked, laughing. “Why so many questions today? You know all you need to know about me.”

The full lips curved slightly. “Perhaps.”

He resumed work on the bridle. “So. When do we go?”

“Three days from now.”

“After the ceremonies for Wu Li.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“We could go first to Khuree,” she said tentatively, as if she already knew it was a bad idea.

Jaufre shook his head. “That’s the last place we want to go. You are the granddaughter of Marco Polo, Johanna. If the Khan learns that we are traveling west he will turn us into official envoys.”

“But he might give us a paiza, as he did my grandfather and his father and uncle. We would have safe conduct anywhere in the world.”

“Yes, he might, in fact he probably would, and then we would be bound to his service. He would load us down with missives to the Christian Pope and to all the kings in the West. There would be no time for our own business in the middle of all that tedious diplomacy.” He made a disgusted sound. “You’ve seen them at court, all twittering out of the sides of their mouths, no one meaning a word they say. No, I thank you.”

She hid a smile.

“And then we would have to return.” He looked at her. “We’re not coming back, are we?”

“No,” Johanna said. “No, we are not.”

“So. Does the widow know we are leaving?”

“No,” Johanna said.

He looked at her. “You can hate her, if you want to, Johanna. She deserves your hatred.”

“There is something else,” she said, missing the grim certainty of his last words.

Before she could tell him what, there was movement at the stable door, and they looked up to see Gokudo watching them, one hand tucked into the wide sash he wore around his waist. It was as black as his topknot of hair, as black as the padded armor he wore at all times, as black as the ebony shaft of the tall spear he invariably carried. The curved point of the steel blade set into the top of the spear reflected the sunlight in a blaze that could hurt the eyes, did one look at it too closely.

Johanna found herself on her feet, Jaufre at her side. A distant part of her mind noticed that they had all three assumed the same stance, shoulders braced, body weight over spread feet, knees slightly bent. Jaufre’s hand settled on the hilt of the dagger at his waist. Her own hands hung loosely at her sides, ready for the knives strapped to her forearms to drop into her hands.

Tension sang in the air, until a horse whinnied loudly and thumped his stall.

Gokudo laughed suddenly, a deep, rolling belly laugh that filled the room. “Ha, my young friends,” he said in his heavily accented Mandarin. “You are alert. That speaks well for the security of the honorable House of Wu.”

Jaufre gave a curt nod. “Did you wish for a horse, Gokudo?”

“I did not, young Jaufre, not at present.” The guard gave an airy wave. “Just out for a stroll about the premises.” He smiled. He had very white, very even teeth. “All must be in order for the festivities.”

Jaufre felt Johanna tense next to him and said smoothly, “Surely you meant the ceremonies, Gokudo.”

Gokudo’s smile faded. “Surely, I did,” he said gently. “Anything else would have been an insult to the memory of the Honorable Wu Li, and an affront to his descendants.”

His gaze lingered on Johanna’s artificially still face, before it slid slowly and deliberately down the length of her body. He held his gaze for just long enough to offend but not quite long enough to incite, before stepping past them to enter Jaufre’s room without invitation. It was small and spare, a cot, a table, an oil lamp, a small chest for clothes. The only decoration was a large sword hanging from the wall, its encrusted hilt older than the leather scabbard it was encased in.

Again without invitation, Gokudo took down the sword and pulled it free. “Eh, Damascus steel.” He looked down the blade, first one side and then the other. He pulled back a sleeve, licked his arm and ran the edge of the sword down his skin. “A fine edge, too,” he said, inspecting the fine black hairs on the blade and the smooth, unblemished patch of skin it had left behind. “However did you come by such a thing, young Jaufre?”

Ignoring the implied insult, Jaufre said evenly, “It was my father’s.”

“Ah.” Gokudo contemplated the blade, and its scabbard. “You don’t use it.”

“No.”

“A pity.” He walked past them into the yard, there to toss the sword into the air and catch it by the hilt as it fell again. “What balance,” he said, admiring. “Obviously created by the hand of a master smith.” He tossed it into the air again.

Jaufre stepped in front of it to catch it this time. The smack of hilt into hand shouted “Mine!” to anyone within earshot.

When he turned Gokudo was watching him with an assessing eye. “I, too, own a sword, young Jaufre. Perhaps they should meet.” He smiled again. He smiled a lot. “In practice, of course.”

“Of course,” Jaufre said.

Gokudo saluted him, tucked his hands back into his sash, and walked to the house with his usual jaunty step.

Jaufre watched him go, his eyes narrowed. “I wonder how much he heard.”

“Nothing,” Johanna said. “We were almost whispering.”

He looked at her. “He was marking territory, Johanna.”

“I noticed,” Johanna said with mild sarcasm. “You can’t fight him, Jaufre.”

He doesn’t want to fight me, Jaufre thought. He wants to kill me. “I know,” he said. And he thought he knew why.

“Buy time,” she said. “It’s only three days.”

“How?”

“Ask him for lessons with the sword,” she said.

“Not from him,” Jaufre said. “Never from him. He wears the black armor.”

She shrugged. “All Cipangu mercenaries wear black armor.”

He looked down at her, a faint smile lightening his expression. “And all Cipangu mercenaries are samurai. Which means they are very, very good at their craft.”

“You’re afraid of him,” she said, not quite a question.

He gave her an incredulous look. “You aren’t?” She raised an eyebrow. “Johanna, they say he can take two heads at once with that spear of his.”

“They don’t say it, he does,” she said. “A tale told to frighten children.”

“And I’m one of the children?”

She almost apologized before she saw the raised eyebrow, and laughed. “Stop trying to pick a fight.”

His own smile faded. “Don’t ever turn your back on Gokudo. He could kill us both without a thought and go in to enjoy his breakfast afterward. And he is the widow’s creature, through and through.”

“Her lover, too,” she said, her voice flat.

He turned, surprised. “I didn’t know you knew.”

“The only person in this house who didn’t know was my father,” she said.

“If you kill her, we won’t live to leave Everything Under the Heavens.”

“It is the only reason she is still living,” Johanna said, her expression bleak.

He was relieved to hear it, but there was no harm in driving the lesson home. “Well, that, and the fact that her personal guard is an ex-samurai.”

She shrugged. “A thug, merely.”

“For someone who has spent so much time in Cipangu, you are remarkably ignorant of its culture,” Jaufre said with a deadly calm that finally pierced her insouciance. “Samurai are highly trained warriors, educated not just in personal arms but in strategy and tactics as well. This is a man who could not only take off our heads with one swipe of that pig-sticker of his, he could also organize the invasion of Kinsai.”

“If he’s so great, what is he doing a thousand leagues from home?”

“I don’t know,” Jaufre said. “He could have offended one of the shogun. He could have been on the losing side of a war.” He shrugged. “He could be a spy, sent to Cambaluc to send home information on the stability of the Khan’s court. Although I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Spies, good spies, fade into the background. Gokudo? Likes to put on a show.”

She watched Gokudo as he moved across the courtyard. Gokudo, who strutted rather than walked everywhere he went. He held his naginata, sharp, polished, as a badge of office. As a deadly threat.

She looked at the sword Jaufre held. “Maybe you should get in a few lessons with that thing. We should be ready to fight.”

“Only if we can’t run,” he said. “And you know I prefer the bow.”

Gokudo reached the front door of the house and went inside, the shadowed interior seeming to swallow his black figure whole.

“Jaufre?”

“What?” he said, going back inside to resheathe and rehang his father’s sword on the wall of his room.

“Edyk has offered for me, something my father’s widow undoubtedly refers to as a miracle sent from the Son of Heaven himself, as she is now busily planning my marriage.”

His hands stilled on the sword but he didn’t look around. “He loves you.”

“He thinks he does.”

“He loves you,” Jaufre repeated.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It wouldn’t work. He wouldn’t be happy.” She paused. “I wouldn’t be happy, to stay here in Cambaluc.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said firmly, and the hard, painful knot in his gut that had been twisting steadily tighter relaxed a little, not much, but enough to let him turn and face her, mask in place. “Besides,” she added, with her sudden smile, “we have places to go, you and I and Shasha.”

“Money?”

“We have enough. More than enough. Father made sure of that. Shasha will show you. And we can always earn our way. You’re a soldier and a caravan master. Shasha’s a cook and a healer. And you said yourself I’m as good a horseman and falconer as any you’ve ever seen, and if worst comes to worst, we can always sing for our suppers.” She grinned. “And I know I’m a better diver, even if you won’t admit it.”

“Cipangu again,” he said, a reminiscent smile pulling up one corner of his mouth.

“I brought back more of the rose pearls than you did,” she said, with an impish, sidelong glance.

“Only because the fish charmer failed to keep a shark from the diving ground and the rest of us had brains enough to get out of the water,” he replied promptly.

“Until you dived in to pull me out. I think you were more afraid of my bringing back more pearls than you had, than you were afraid that I might be eaten by the shark.”

He remembered that Gokudo was from Cipangu, and good memories were swamped by a return flood of recent events. He stooped to pick up the bridle he had been working on before Gokudo had come in on them. “And Edyk?”

Her smile vanished as quickly as it had come. “I’m going to see him now. To say goodbye.”

He heard the thud of his blood in his ears. The knot in his gut was back, tied more tightly than it had ever been before. His eyes cleared and he saw that the bridle had snapped in two in his hands.

“Jaufre?” she said. “Is something wrong?”

He stood up abruptly and tossed the pieces of bridle into the scrap barrel. When he turned to where she could see his face again it had resumed its usual genial mask. “I’ll saddle the Shrimp.”

And he did, and he tossed her into the saddle, and he waved her off with a smile, although it was more of a rictus. Shu Shao came out to stand beside him as Johanna kicked the sedate Shrimp into a jolting trot and passed through the wooden gates. “She’s off to see Edyk, then?”

He nodded, not trusting his voice to speech.

She nodded. “I’m to show you something.”

He followed her into the house, where she produced the rubies of Mien from her sewing basket. “We are to sew these into the hems of our clothes.”

“As Shu Ming said her father did,” he said.

She nodded. They were both speaking in whispers, and Shasha had left the door wide open so that they might hear if anyone approached. He leaned in and said, “Shasha, do you know?”

She looked wary. “Know what?”

He took a deep breath. “How Wu Li truly died?”

She cast a quick glance through the door. “Which time?” she said.

He was startled into normal speech, quickly shushed by a gesture. “He didn’t fall from his horse, Shasha,” he said, his voice low again. “His cinch was cut nearly through.”

She was silent for a long moment. “A pity the fall didn’t kill him,” she said at last.

“Shasha!”

She looked at him, her expression heavy with the burden of knowledge. “A pity the fall didn’t kill him,” she repeated.

“Why?” But he was afraid he already knew.

“Because,” she said, “then the widow would not have dispatched Gokudo to finish the job with Wu Li’s own pillow.”

He went white. “Shasha. Are you sure?”

“He fought,” she said distantly. “I saw blood beneath his fingernails. Before she had me removed from his room, of course.”

Following his accident Wu Li had been left without the use of his legs, and there were other, internal injuries at which the learned doctors summoned from the city could only speculate. Now he wondered just how learned those doctors were, and how much the widow Wu had paid them to say what she wanted Wu’s household to hear. “Is there no one we can tell? No one to whom we can appeal for justice?”

“Who?” Shasha said simply.

Jaufre cast around for a name. “Ogodei?” he said. “He’s a baron of a hundred thousand now. He was a friend to Wu Li.”

“And with his promotion he was posted to the west,” she said. “He was the first person I thought of. No, Jaufre. There is no one else that I can think of. Wu Li spent just enough time and money at court to keep his business free of their interference. He did not cultivate the kind of friendships we would need to make an accusation against the widow.”

They stood in miserable silence before sounds came from the kitchen of the beginnings of dinner.

Shasha gave him a little push toward the door.

“Johanna can’t know, Shasha,” he heard himself say.