'Yes and no.'
She frowned. 'Why do you say that?'
'He isn't a sword-dancer. Just a kid trying to make a reputation.'
'How do you know?'
'He invited me to dance. A sword-dancer won't. They all know what elaii-ali-ma means: that there is no dance, no circle, merely a fight to the death. There's a huge difference.'
'And every sword-dancer in the South will know this?'
'Everyone sworn to the honor codes, yes.'
'But he recognized you.'
'That,' I said, 'is likely more a result of the swordsmith spreading gossip.'
'You think he recognized you?'
'Probably not. As I said, Haziz isn't a place many sword-dances go, unless specifically hired. But as you pointed out before, we don't exactly fit in with the rest of the crowd. All it would take is a description, and anyone who'd seen or heard about us would know.'
'So. It begins.'
'It begins.' I glanced sideways at the long equine face with its black-painted eye circles, the wine girl's dangling golden fringe—I wondered briefly if Del had told her what she intended to do with it—and mournful blue eyes. 'That horse is a disgrace to his kind.'
Del put up her brows. 'Just because your horse is afraid of him is no cause to insult him.'
'He looks ridiculous!'
'No more than yours did when he stood rooted to the ground, trembling like a leaf.'
Probably not. Scowling, I said, 'Let's go, bascha. It's a long ride to Julah—'
'—and we're burning daylight.'
Well. We were.
Del and I stopped burning daylight when the sun went down. Then it lost itself in its own conflagration, a panoply of color so vivid as to nearly blind you. Desert orange, blazing red, yellow, vermillion, raisin purple, lavender, the faint burnished shadow of blue fading to silver-gilt. Out here twilight dies gently, shading slowly into darkness.
We were beyond the last oasis between Haziz and Julah, so there was no place in particular we wanted to bed down. We ended up settling for a series of conjoined hummocks carpeted in a fibrous, red-throated groundcover bearing tiny white blossoms, and the threadbare shelter of a thin grove of low, scrubby trees boasting a bouquet of woody limbs bearing dusty green leaves. Within weeks the leaves would dry out, curl up, and drop off, when summer seared them to death, but for now there was yet enough moisture in the mornings for the leaves to remain turgid. Mixed in with the groundcover were taller-growing desert grasses with frizzy, curled topknots.
'This'll do,' I said, reining in even as Del dismounted.
Since the stud was not always trustworthy when picketed close to other horses, I led him to a tree eight paces away and had a brief discussion about staying put as I hobbled him. Del and I busied ourselves with untacking and grooming both mounts, swapping out bridles and bits for halters, pouring water into the squashable, flat-bottomed oiled canvas bags doubling as buckets, and offering them grain as a complement to the grasses. It wasn't particularly good grazing, but it would do; and the next night we'd be in Julah where they'd eat well.
Our dinner consisted of dried cumfa meat, purple-skinned tubers, and flat, tough-crusted journey-bread. Del drank water, I had a few mouthfuls of aqivi from the goatskin bota. Sated, we sprawled loose-limbed on our bedrolls and digested, blinking sleepily up into the deeping sky as the first stars kindled to life.
'That,' Del observed after amoment, 'was one huge sigh.'
I hadn't noticed.
'Of contentment,' she added.
I considered it. Maybe so. For all there were risks attendant to returning South, it was home. I'd been North with Del once, learning what real forests were, and true mountains, and even snow; had sailed to Skandi and met my grandmother on a wind-bathed, temperate island in the midst of brilliant azure seas, but it was here I was most at ease. Out in the desert beneath the open skies with nothing on the horizon but more horizon. Where a man owed nothing to no one, unless he wished to owe it.
Unless he was a slave.
Del lay very close. She set her head and one shoulder against mine, hooking ankle over ankle. And I recalled that I was man, not child; free, not slave. That'd I'd been neither child nor chula for years.
I remembered once telling Del, as we prepared to take ship out of Haziz, that there was nothing left for me in the South. In some ways, that was truth. In others, falsehood. There were things about the South I didn't care for, things I might not be cognizant of had Del not come along, but there were other things that meant more than I expected. Maybe it was merely a matter of being familiar with such things, of finding ease in dealing with what I knew rather than challenging the unexpected; or maybe it was that I'd met and overcome the challenges I'd faced and did not wish to relegate them to insignificance.
Then again, maybe it was merely relief that I was alive to return home, after nearly dying in a foreign land.
I grinned abruptly. 'You know, there is one thing I really miss about Skandi.'
Del sounded drowsy. 'Hmmmm?'
'The metri's tiled bathing pool. And what we did in it.'
'We can do that without the metri's bathing pool. In fact, I think we have.'
'Not like we did there.'
'Is that all you think about?'
I yawned. 'No. Just most of the time.'
After a moment she said reflectively, 'It would be nice to have a bathing pool like that.'
'Umm-hmm.'
'Maybe you can build one at Alimat.'
'I think I have to rebuild Alimat itself before building a bathing pool.'
'In the meantime . . .' But her voice trailed off.
'In the meantime?'
'You'll have to make do with this.' Whereupon she squirted the contents of a bota all over me.
The resultant activity was not even remotely similar to what we'd experienced mostly submerged in the metri's big, warm bathing pool. But it sufficed.
Oh, indeed.
FOUR
THE BALANCE of the journey to Julah was uneventful, save for the occasional uncharacteristic display of uncertainty by the stud when the white gelding looked at him. Del's mount was a quiet, stolid kind of horse, content to plod along endlessly with his head bobbing hypnotically on the end of a lowered neck—though Del claimed he didn't plod at all, but was the smoothest horse she'd ever ridden. I wasn't certain I knew what that was anymore, since the stud had forgotten every gait except a sucked-up walk that put me in mind of a man with the runs, trying to hold it in until he found a latrine. When this gait resulted in him falling behind Del's gelding, which happened frequently, he then broke into a jog to catch up and reassert his superiority. The gelding was unimpressed. So was I.
Julah was the typical desert town of flat-roofed, squared-off adobe buildings, deep-cut windows, tattered canvas awnings, and narrow, dusty streets. But there was water here in plenty, so Julah thrived. Opting to cool off before taking the risk of meeting other sword-dancers, we stopped at a well on the outskirts of town, discounting to winch up buckets. We filled the horse troughs, permitted our mounts to drink, then quenched our own thirst and refilled botas. It was early enough in the season that the heat wasn't unbearable; but then, we hadn't reached the
