Five Odd Honors (5 page)

Loyal Wind looked sharply at the older woman. It seemed to him that her words referred to something more than merely the exile of the Thirteen Orphans from the Lands Born from Smoke and Sacrifice. He considered asking, but, fearing that his own cowardly desire to avoid learning how his suicide had played a part in the corruption of Thundering Heaven was behind the thought, he did not.

That can wait
, he thought.
If we do not assemble the Twelve Exiles once more, we cannot take any step toward setting matters right.

Aloud, he said, “You brought up my actions in light of how they shaped Thundering Heaven. Come to the point. What I did was long ago, and is fixed in time.”

Nine Ducks agreed. “That is so. Thundering Heaven was the one who found your body. As he carried its broken length back to our camp so that the proper rites might be performed, I suspect he contemplated our changed situation.

“Here we were, but five years into our exile. Already one of our number was dead. Moreover, the one who had died was our war leader. Yet that war leader had not died in noble battle or leading the way in some perilous action. He had died foolishly, for no greater reason than to spite a woman—a woman, who if only he had considered the matter, was not worthy of such devotion.”

“Must you rub it in?” Loyal Wind said with what mildness he could manage. “I assure you, I have had many long years to contemplate the selfishness of my action.”

“I do not seek to renew your bitterness, Loyal Wind,” Nine Ducks said softly, yet without the least yielding. “I seek to show you how matters seemed to Thundering Heaven.”

“Quite bleak.”

“And all the bleaker because, although Thundering Heaven was young and of the age that, had his life taken a more usual course, his parents would have been urging him to wed a first wife, he had been seeking a perfect bride to bear the next Tiger. He had dismissed your casual getting of an heir and the methods adopted by some of the other older men as appropriate to your years. If you did not father your heir quickly, you might not live long enough to train him.”

“Ouch. Do you know this or are you guessing?”

“I lived for nearly forty years after the Exile,” Nine Ducks said, “and although Thundering Heaven and I were never heart’s companions, still we had a long association with each other. He did not tell me, but I think my guesses are accurate.”

“So I disappointed him twice—as a suicide and as a romantic. Anything else?”

“Yes. I believe that at the time of your death Thundering Heaven had begun to court a young lady of good breeding, if not of wealth. Had we stayed in that place, he might have won her, but your actions made it necessary for us to move on. Newly soured on romance, Thundering Heaven made no effort to convince his lady fair to accompany us. He left her, but I believe her image in his heart kept him from any serious romantic entanglement for many years to come.”

“Thundering Heaven did marry, though,” Loyal Wind protested. “Pearl is not some chance-gotten child.”

“Oh, Thundering Heaven did marry,” Nine Ducks agreed. “Twice. His first marriage was after we were all settled in the United States, after some of us had begun to give up our hopes of returning to the Lands. Tea Rose was Chinese, but born in the United States. I think Thundering Heaven loved her very much, but the marriage was without children.

“I have never been certain what happened to Tea Rose after Thundering Heaven divorced her. After that divorce, Thundering Heaven surprised us all by marrying a woman who was not Chinese. She was a Hungarian Jew named Edna . . . I forget her last name. His choice was very strange, but the marriage produced several children.”

“Why were you surprised when he married this Hungarian woman? By that time, others of the Exiles had married those of other races.”

“I suppose it was because Thundering Heaven had been among those who had not ventured much outside of the Chinese enclaves. He made a rather poor living for himself teaching various martial arts, learned both Cantonese and Mandarin well enough to pass as a native speaker, but never learned more English than he needed to get by.”

“I can see why you were surprised,” Loyal Wind said. “And Thundering Heaven finally fathered his heir on this woman?”

“Yes. Thundering Heaven was disappointed when his first child proved to be a girl. Initially, he was not concerned when auguries showed Pearl was to be his heir. He was confident that when he fathered a son, the Tiger would place his paw firmly on that son’s back.”

“But it didn’t happen.”

“No. To make matters worse, Pearl was truly an extraordinary child. Edna saw this and made sure that as soon as the little girl could walk she was tutored in song and dance. Pearl loved both the lessons and the attention. That joy lit her from within, and it was no wonder that—despite her obvious Oriental heritage—she began to win roles on stage and screen. The family prospered under Edna’s careful management of the extra income.”

“And Thundering Heaven had yet another reason to resent the child.”

“That is so. Thundering Heaven fathered two sons, but the Fourth Earthly Branch knew where its best interest lay, and the Tiger never shifted his earlier choice. Thundering Heaven tutored the girl, at first reluctantly, then with an almost ruthless intensity, as if seeking to prove she could not possibly perform as he demanded. He died when she was in her late teens, hoping, I firmly believe, to the very end that Pearl would not inherit.”

“You were dead by then,” Loyal Wind said with the callousness of one to whom death is not anything but a change of address.

“I was,” Nine Ducks agreed, “for many years, but my good Hua continued to make offerings to my spirit not only at the New Year and on Ching Ming, but weekly. I heard the family news in great detail until Hua’s death.”

Loyal Wind nodded. He knew the difficulties that had followed Hua, and the part her treatment had played in the dissolution of purpose among the Thirteen Orphans, but his thoughts were on present problems.

“So this bitter Tiger has decided to act against us,” he said. “I am glad I asked you what to expect. Despite my glimpse of Thundering Heaven when I was tracking the Monkey, I think I expected to meet with the young man I had known before my death.”

“But now you will not?”

“Now,” Loyal Wind said, thinking himself garbed in armor and with his favorite weapons near to hand, “I will go prepared to deal with an angry Tiger, one who would gladly eat even his own young.”

“And I will go with you,” Nine Ducks said, rising from her chair and shaking out the skirts of her golden-yellow robes. “I may be an old Ox, but my horns are still sharp, and I have not forgotten how to gore.”

When she came out of the office, Brenda heard the clash of sword against staff and knew Pearl and Riprap were still hard at practice.

Brenda knew she wasn’t much of a fighter. Her inclination was to believe physical violence should be a last resort, but recent events had told her the only thing likely to come from that attitude was her own injury or death—or worse, the injury or death of someone she failed to help in time.

I wonder if Des wants to practice?

Des Lee, however, had gone out on one of his mysterious errands. Nissa was available, and when she learned what Brenda intended she put down the book of Chinese mythology she’d been studying and sprang to her feet.

There were times Brenda tended to forget that Nissa Nita was only three or so years older than she was. Their lives had been so different, what with Nissa becoming pregnant when she was about Brenda’s age, that Brenda always thought of Nissa as a lot older.

Today, however, as Nissa almost ran to join her, Brenda realized that they could have been in the same college classes, if Nissa had maybe had some requirement to take or Brenda had been taking a higher-level elective.

“Where’s Lani?” Brenda asked automatically.

“With Des. He’s going to drop her at Joanne’s for a singing lesson, then pick her up on his way back. What kind of practice did you have in mind?”

“Well, I wasn’t completely happy with how I handled the bracelets there at the end of the Tiger’s Road,” Brenda said, referring to the conflict in which Pearl’s hand might not have been broken if Brenda had been better prepared.

“You did better than I did,” Nissa said. “I never even got into the fight. I wasn’t even there to help the wounded, like I was supposed to.”

“So we both could use some practice,” Brenda said. “I don’t think anyone would complain if we expended some bracelets. We could even practice with dummies, just to get the moves right.”

“I’m for it.” Nissa moved to a window. “Pearl and Riprap are slowing down. I bet they’ll be quitting soon. Why don’t we go out and use the patio?”

Ten minutes later found them out on the brick-surfaced patio beneath the shade of a ramada overgrown with grapevines heavy with several varieties of grapes.

Riprap was seated in one of the chairs in the shade, alternating between sipping from a tall tumbler of water and mopping sweat off his face.

“Pearl is in a mood,” he said. “Man, did she ever push—off-hand made no difference. If I’d closed my eyes, I would have thought I was fighting Flying Claw.”

Given that Flying Claw was in his early twenties and in perfect physical condition, this said a lot.

Nissa grinned. “If you’d closed your eyes while fighting either one of them, you’d have been flat on your butt, fellow. Now, Brenda and I came out here to practice. Are you going to let us get on with it?”

“I’ll just sit here in the shade, ma’am,” Riprap said, drawling his words like a cowboy in an old western, “and admire your technique.”

Brenda grimaced, but there was no sense in asking Riprap to leave. The man was not only their fellow student, but he had spent years as a coach. If he had anything to say about their technique, it would likely be useful. The two women ignored him, and took places across the patio from each other.

Brenda and Nissa had brought out an assortment of amulet bracelets. These resembled nothing so much as fourteen mah-jong tiles strung together with elastic into rather chunky bracelets.

Resemblance was deceptive. Unlike the jewelry they resembled, these tiles were made from polymer clay, each tile shaped by hand and carefully etched with the various symbols: bamboo, dots, characters, winds, and dragons. When created with appropriate concentration, the tiles stored within them a single spell that could be released upon the destruction of the bracelet.

There had been a time when Brenda, exhausted from the expenditure of both ch’i and concentration that went into each bracelet, had tried to envision willingly destroying her handiwork. That reluctance had vanished the first time one of those stored spells had intervened between her and danger. Now she broke the amulets willingly, and longed for the days when she could summon and direct ch’i without the need for an intermediary.

“Nissa,” Brenda began, “you said you wanted to work on getting your defenses up fast. Why don’t we start there?”

In reply, Nissa lightly touched her left wrist where an amulet bracelet rested.

“I’m waiting.”

Brenda reached behind her back and came out with a Japanese bokken, a sword-shaped piece of polished wood, that she had stuffed in her belt when Nissa wasn’t looking.

“You can’t wait,” Brenda said, drawing and coming at Nissa, the bokken upraised to strike.

Brenda had no skill with a sword, but the bokken was well balanced and felt natural in her hand. She’d had ample opportunity to watch real swordplay over the last couple of months, and came at Nissa as if she knew what she was doing.

Her act wouldn’t have fooled a real fencer, but it flustered Nissa. She fumbled at her wrist for the bracelet, but hadn’t slammed it down to summon the protective spell within before Brenda had brought the bokken against her waist.

Brenda pulled the stroke so that the polished wood only touched Nissa’s side.

“Damn!” Nissa swore softly. “That would have been right through me. Step back and come at me again.”

“Right.” Brenda skipped back several paces. Then, again without warning, she charged forward.

This time Nissa did much better. She hooked the amulet bracelet with the fingers of her right hand and threw it down hard against the bricks. The polymer clay tiles exploded into dust. Brenda felt the ch’i released into the surroundings. She didn’t pause, but continued her charge, bringing the “blade” of the bokken in at Nissa’s head.