Moonrise

'Yes, I am.'

'Perfect,' Patience said, and drew the scimitar resting across her lap as she leaped and lunged long to slice him lightly just below the knee as he rolled back and away with yelp of startlement, then pain.

He came to his feet, hopping backward into the trees, his rapier drawn as she came to him, saying in a conversational way, 'Edge only. Three cuts wins.' And demonstrated in shadowing firelight by feinting, then striking him backhand along his left side, slicing his buckskin jerkin over a rib.

Nancy shouted, 'Don't!'

Baj parried the next two slashes, but by very little. Patience, fighting sometimes two-handed now, gave him little room to fence. '… The time for spruce-branch fighting is over, my dear.'

In the midst of surprise, sudden speed, and effort – still careful to deny his rapier's point in the ringing clash of steel – Baj, though already cut twice, found himself satisfied. As clearly as if truly seen, he saw King Sam before him in the salle, delivering that lesson of fighting over fencing-in-duels.

He kicked Patience in the belly to force her back for room, struck her swinging blade a fast hard parry to knock its line aside, and drew his left-hand dagger. Feeling her slight difficulty still in using the left hand, even to assist, he cut her lightly at the hip, withdrawing from a lunge. Then parried a cut to his head, held her steel sliding with the rapier, stepped in and struck her tender shoulder with the butt of his dagger… As she received that pain, he drove her back against the fire – Richard rolling aside, Nancy calling again, 'Don't!'

Patience, coat smoking, tried to wrench away from the flames. Baj let his rapier-edge meet her in a minor stop-thrust cut across her trousered thigh – and as, too late, she beat that blade aside, he struck lightly through her coat's sleeve with the left-hand dagger's edge… felt the give-and-part of cloth and skin beneath the blade. Third cut.

He stepped back to drop his weapons, stepped forward again to haul her free of the fire… and pat out flame runners along her coat-tails.

Patience was laughing, breathless. 'Oh, very well done! Done very well – though, it's true, against only a small older lady, still fighting mainly wrong-handed.' She wiped her blade on her coat's cloth, slid it into its sheath. 'Your two fathers came to fight with you, isn't that so?'

'Perhaps.' The cut beneath his knee was stinging worse than the other. Blood on his buckskins there.

'No 'perhaps' about it. Your Second-father, for workmanlike common sense; your First-father, for no mercy shown. My shoulder hurts…'

'You are both fools!' Nancy stood glaring at them,

'Of course,' Patience said, shrugged off her greatcoat, and examined it, '- as are we all. Who but fools would be here, and for our reasons?… My poor coat.'

'Come here.' Nancy tugged Baj into firelight. 'Where are you hurt?'

'Only little cuts.'

'Nothing worth sewing up, I'd say.' Richard smiled his toothy smile. 'Good fight.' Errol, sitting close to him for warmth, a little piece of mutton-fat stuck to his cheek, tongue-clicked in apparent agreement.

'And you're a fool, too,' Nancy said, '- with a fool beside you. Can't we wait for Shrikes or the Guard to chop us? So stupid.' She turned Baj this way and that with calloused narrow hands. 'Your side…'

'Nothing much, either of them.' He wiped a red drop from his dagger's blade, found none spotting the sword, and sheathed both.

'Too bad,' Nancy said. 'A real wound would have been a lesson.' She turned to Patience. 'And you – he hurt you three times.'

'Hurt me lightly, dear,' Patience said. 'Kitchen cuts, and will clot – though I know a real wound would have been a lesson.'

'Ha ha,' Nancy said, a very old Warm-time ironism. Baj had read it in copybooks of course, but couldn't recall hearing it used. 'And you,' she said to him, '- the next time we practice, I'll use Janice.' And she walked off into the evergreens.

'Janice…?'

Richard, who'd been smiling, stopped, and spoke softly. 'So you don't ask her, Baj… She names her sword in revenge-reminder for her mother. A Thrush, and very young. – After the Faculty had made Nancy in her belly? The next time, they made an occa. Her mind fled away and never came back, and she died.'

Baj sat by the fire, his leg stinging where Patience had touched him. His side hardly hurt at all. 'What a pleasure it will be – a duty and a pleasure to ruin that city.'

'Difficult duty,' Patience said. 'And time for us to sleep.' She shrugged her singed coat on, and lay down beneath her hemlock. 'Though they say sleep cannot be stored – still, weariness can be.'

'No truer words…' Richard lay down, settling by the fire, drawing his blanket over as Errol came to cuddle beside him.

'I take first watch, apparently,' Baj said, and went down through the evergreens to pee… Finished, he laced his buckskins, and was wending back up through foliage to the fire, when he saw Nancy standing in a little space, looking out to the north through a break in the trees.

He stepped beside her, looked out… out past a mountain's low shoulder, and saw in the distance the faintest fine horizontal line, a spider-web thread, shining white under the moon.

'The Wall. And still must be a hundred WT miles away.'

Nancy turned, narrow face moon-shadowed and forbidding. 'More. – And why are you always… present?' she said. 'Isn't it possible for me to be alone?'

'Of course. I don't -'

'So fucking stupid,' she lisped the s. 'Your 'three cuts' nonsense with that crazy woman.'

'Nancy, she – it was a lesson.'

'You're always glancing little looks at me, too.'

'That's not true.'

'It is true, and I'm tired of it.'

'I don't -'

'Yes, you do, liar. Always little looks… staring at someone who's so strange – who's so much an animal.' She put out a hand and shoved him. 'From now on, stay away from me!' She shoved him again, harder, teeth showing in moonlight – Baj took her wrists, and it became a wrestle. Then a fight.

She wrenched a hand free, hit him hard in the face, then came at him biting – a snarling quick snap of white teeth – and Baj, not wanting to hit her, grappled her close, lifted her off her feet, and fell rolling amid evergreen branches as she kicked and struck at him, wiry strong.

Frightened she'd draw her knife or try for her sword, he hugged to pin her arms, saying, 'Sorry… I'm sorry,' though for what he wasn't certain. She tried to knee him, and he thought of calling to Patience for help, but that seemed so embarrassing…

Then, though she'd fought so fiercely, suddenly she lay still beneath him, so he thought he'd hurt her.

'Nancy, I didn't mean to…'

A cold look from moon-shadowed yellow eyes. 'Get off me, Sunriser. – And keep away.'

'I can't,' Baj said, surprised that was what he couldn't do… And having said it, for no real reason he bent and kissed her. Felt her mouth, the slender bones of her long jaw as she turned her head aside, but he didn't care… felt against his lips a canine's needle point, and didn't care. He kissed her as he'd kissed no girl in his life; there was nothing left of him but kissing… She lay still, but it made no difference to him. He hugged and gripped her as if he might squeeze all pleasure, all sweetness, all good news from her. He wrestled her softly and sliding, licked her throat, found her little ear in the thick soft crest of her hair. 'Love,' he whispered to her. 'And has been love…'

Then, after what seemed a wait of years, a slim arm – as if reluctant – rose to circle and hold him.

'Forgive me,' Baj whispered, '- for not saying so sooner.'

'You are a fool,' Nancy said. 'A fool…' She lay back under moon-shadow, unbuttoned her wool shirt, and drew the cloth aside to show six little tender-nippled breasts in two rows of three down her chest. 'Look,' she said. 'Look.'

And he kissed them up and down.

When their clothes were off, strewn in evergreens – all but the moccasins, which were too much trouble – he